HoboEye Art:
Julia Carpenter, Bozeman, MT, USA

Interview with Brad Bunkers

Bunkers: As an artist focused primarily on portraiture, how has your work evolved? How did you arrive at your current approach?

Carpenter: What is my current approach I’m wondering? Lately I have been trying to include more of the person, their shoulders and torso and put them in some sort of scene. In the beginning I didn’t enjoy doing this as really my primary interest, obsession, love was with the human face.

When I began painting faces as an undergraduate at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, I kind of did it to teach myself how to paint. I mean there was no omnipotent painting professor with the answers to how to paint like the “masters” that I had been brought up with in the museums of Europe. It was all very laissez faire, and now that I have painted this long I kind of get it. Especially at the university level, the thinking is you have to do it to learn it; there are no magic steps to take. There are those realist academies, which I assume do that, but the paintings you see seem so formulaic and artificial, with no heart and soul of either the sitter or the artist. So now I see my lack of training as a sort of advantage when at the time I was quite angry about it.

So I began with paintings of my sister who was 16 and committing crimes in another state and I wanted to reflect on that issue and paint at the same time. So I painted her from photographs and tried to recreate skin tone and all that. It began there, and I realized that I loved faces and would ask total strangers to pose for me because I was literally “in love” with their faces. Then I would paint them over and over again.

My technique was bad, but I had high expectations of myself and I kept going back to Jan Van Eyck, Rembrandt, Lucien Freud to teach me how to paint the way I was satisfied with. That was 1997.

Over the years I have changed my answers to the question of why I paint what I paint, because I am still trying to figure out why, but one thing is clear. Once my sister died in 2005 something happened to the way I painted. I began to see the act of painting as a form of dialogue between the physical painting and me. Some days our “conversations “ would be pleasant, bland even but other days we would “fight” and I realized this was my sense of aesthetics coming to play weighing the emotional input and chaos with the controlled technical aspects. I began to realize that often the mistakes I made and then “corrected”, made the paintings better. A certain surrender of control had come over me and transformed the result into something more poetic, nuanced and surprising. I began to see clearly when formula crept into the work and I could take sometimes-radical steps to disallow it. So my work is now a beautiful chaos, which I can pour my soul into and still be proud of the result technically.

Bunkers: I've described the art of painting as "attacking the canvas." Not saying that I'm angrily shredding the canvas, but I'm consciously pouring emotion or energy into a painting. When you use terms like "dialogue" and "fight" I assume you're talking about the same thing—maybe on a much deeper level after the loss of your sister. Many of your portraits convey this rawness yet I see subtle variations and masterful finesse. Do you think your best work comes when you find that perfect equilibrium between fervent emotion and technical mastery?

Carpenter: Yes. I find if I am too concerned about technique I lose the rawness and if I am too emotional I lose technique. Often it is OK if when I start a painting I am in one state and then later I change to the other and achieve the balance that way.

Glazed Amy, to me is too technically oriented. I was really trying to do the glazed technique, on top of teere verte underpainting. I do like it, especially the eyes and the mouth up close but I was not as emotionally present because I was concerned with technique. Troubled Memory as well as Autopsy, both share the gestural quality of my drawings. I have done life drawing since I was 13 and gesture is key to me. These are two examples where I let loose and drew uninhibited with a fat brush before any other paint was applied. Troubled Memory is a painting of Amy's son, my nephew who suffered from many emotional issues from her influence as well as abandonment and I really wanted to capture that frenzy that went on in his head at the time.

Bunkers: Your work reminds me somewhat of George Bellows' lesser known paintings. Bellows once stated, "The ideal artist is he who knows everything, feels everything, experiences everything, and retains his experience in a spirit of wonder and feeds upon it with creative lust..." Do you agree with this sentiment? Do you find it more of a challenge to do commissioned work—a subject you don't know intimately—as opposed to close friends or family?

Carpenter: I like the Ashcan School painters a lot, and looking at some early Bellows (since I only know the boxing scenes) I think I can see the reason for your comparison. There is an aggressiveness of approach to the brushwork, a confidence that is apparent. I agree with the statement he made. One must keep oneself curious and interested in one's subject matter and approach each painting with the "sense of wonder". I definitely feed on my subject with creative lust that I am sometimes at a loss to explain. Why the obsession, why the focus? Something I have found is that one has to surrender oneself completely to the act of creation, remove oneself from the world mentally to be able to wallow, frolic in one's own head gathering and using all the scraps of thought, feeling, that have been disregarded in the "real world" and pull them out and throw them at the painting! You cannot paint by just "dipping your toe in" to that creativity, you must render yourself oblivious to all else. It can be daunting, and I often find myself putting it off for a long time, doing everything but painting. I don't know why...perhaps because it is hard.

In this regard it can be difficult to do commissioned work because it is not a subject that grabbed my attention, or incited an obsession in the first place. But because faces in generally are my obsession, I find I can find elements to lose myself in to keep it dynamic and expressive. There is more emphasis on physiological likeness that must be maintained in a commission, whereas with a subject of my choosing I can do with it what I will.

Bunkers: I'd like to dig deeper into process to better understand how you balance artistic inventiveness and technical control. Can you describe how you approach a painting from start to finish? Do you do a lot of, preliminary sketching? Do you plan out visual elements such as color and tone before you pick up the brush or is your process more exploratory?

Carpenter: Well, once I decide on a subject, I take a myriad of digital pictures, upload them, print them and then decide on the one that piques my interest the most. This is usually based on my mood at the time, or a pose that is particularly telling about the person. With commissions I do draw out the face a few times in my sketchbook to become familiar with the features and to try out different compositions. Non commissions I do not do a lot of preparatory work except to fold the picture , or rule out the edges so see how it will look on the canvas. I then prime the canvas and begin drawing with paint, sometimes with charcoal, if I am nervous about some features. I create a monochromatic painting with the ground color, and turpentine, sometimes with a little black. I let it dry (sometimes) and then just plunge right in. I let the painting emerge as I work on it. I do not like to plan and plan, as I have found it kills my instinct a bit. The most exciting discoveries happen on the canvas as I am working. As far as color goes, I often will decide if I want it to be more naturalistic or more Expressionistic, and then if I want it cooler (a more melancholy mood) or warmer and more natural. Then I will spend some time mixing a bunch of color before I paint so I can just dive right in and switch up color immediately as I work.

Bunkers: You've touched on some of your artistic influences. Beyond visual artists, where do you find inspiration?

Carpenter: Influences, eh? In the beginning the influences were clear, music, the weather, etc. But as corny as it sounds now I am inspired by everything. A movie, a storedisplay, my music, new music, a concert I attend, a conversation I had, observing social finches at the feeder. I used to thing that all I did had to be related to art, or it didn't count as an influence until I realized that I was drawing on and inspired by things that had happened so long ago, that at the time I just thought were a pleasant diversion or a vacuous glance. The truth is some things just stick with you, and often you will not realize the inspiration until way after it has happened. So, I no longer discount any experiences, it is all part of the soup that is an individual. One of my earliest influences was Jan Van Eyck' s Arnolfini and his Bride at the National Gallery in London. We weren't real well off growing up in London, so my mom took me to the museums because they were free. The saturated colors of that painting were burned in my brain at a tender age and to this day you will see brilliant reds and greens coexisting in a lasting tribute to that beauty that lodged in my soul. Now, my mom did not take me to the museum at 5 to shape my influences, it just happened, and I can't shake it. I love it though because it makes all experiences worthwhile in my eyes as potential fodder for my next painting!

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