Imperfection, Humor, Memory and a Little Hope
AMERICAN ART
What Makes Folk Art So Appealing?
I've always been drawn to the imperfections in folk art.
Not despite them. Because of them.
That's where I think the personality comes from.
A perfectly rendered painting can be impressive. It can demonstrate an incredible amount of skill. But sometimes I find myself looking at a piece of folk art and wondering about the person who made it. You can feel the artist in it. You can see the decisions they made, the things they didn't quite get right, and sometimes the things they probably didn't care about getting right.
And somehow, those imperfections make the work feel more alive.
I think that's one of the things that separates folk art from more technically polished forms of art. Folk art can show you the artist.
The beauty of "good enough"
I definitely leave imperfections in my own work.
Sometimes it's intentional. Sometimes it's because I look at something and honestly think, Well, that's good enough.
And I mean that in the best possible way.
At some point, a painting has to stop being about fixing every little thing and start being about what the painting is trying to say. If I keep correcting everything until it's technically perfect, I might actually take some of the personality out of it.
I've come to appreciate the things that aren't quite perfect.
A crooked line.
An unusual shape.
A little exaggeration.
A color that probably shouldn't work—but somehow does.
Those things can become part of the story.
Maybe we need a little humor
There's another reason I'm drawn to whimsical and humorous art.
The world is hard.
It's harsh. It's serious. And sometimes it feels like we're surrounded by things that demand our attention, our outrage or our concern.
I think we need an outlet from that.
Maybe we need permission to be a little less serious for a few minutes.
That's one of the reasons I put animals into situations that might otherwise be considered serious.
A dog can get away with things a person can't.
A cat can make a statement without necessarily making a political statement.
Put an animal into a situation and suddenly there's a little distance between us and whatever we're looking at. We can laugh at it. Maybe we can even think about it differently.
That's important to me.
I don't want my paintings to tell people what they should think.
I'd rather give them something that makes them smile.
Where some of this came from
I grew up on a farm, and we didn't have a lot of money.
That probably influenced me more than I realized at the time.
When you don't have the money to run into town and buy a replacement, you figure out how to fix what you've got. You improvise. You make something work.
That mindset followed me into my artwork.
When I first started working seriously with soft pastels, I ran into a problem. I loved the newer sanded papers, but they were expensive. And when you're starting out, you don't necessarily know whether anyone is going to buy what you're making.
I couldn't justify spending fifteen dollars on a piece of paper and then hoping somebody would buy the finished artwork.
So I figured out how to make my own substrate.
I'd cut hardboard panels from a four-by-eight sheet and coat them with a medium that gave the surface the tooth I needed for the pastels.
It wasn't complicated.
It wasn't expensive.
It worked.
Looking back, that solution probably says something about me as much as the paintings do.
Old things have stories
I've always had a fascination with old objects.
I've built houses. I've worked with wood. I've restored antiques. I've worked with reclaimed and repurposed materials.
And I think there's something about an old object that makes you wonder.
Who owned this?
What did they use it for?
Where did it live?
What happened to it?
If something is a hundred or a hundred and fifty years old, chances are it didn't belong to just one person. It may have moved through a family. It may have gone from a house to a shed, from a shed to a garage, and eventually found its way back into someone's home.
Every scratch and worn spot becomes a little clue.
When I put old objects into some of my paintings, I'm sometimes recreating things I remember owning or working on myself.
It's almost like a memory test.
And I enjoy that.
A Morris chair and twenty dollars
I suppose I've been making things for most of my life.
When I was about fifteen, I found an old Morris chair in the abandoned house of an aunt and uncle who had died long before. It was one of the few pieces of furniture left in the house, and the chair was missing its back.
So I took it home and rebuilt the back out of old wood.
I was fifteen years old and didn't really know what I was doing.
Eventually, I took it to an antique shop.
The man who owned the shop ended up becoming a friend. He told me all the things I'd done wrong and what I could have done better.
I think he gave me twenty dollars for it.
Basically, gas money for my pickup.
But I remember it.
And I think those experiences matter.
Before I was making paintings, I was figuring out how to make things.
If you couldn't afford it, you built it.
If it was broken, you fixed it.
If you didn't know how to fix it, you figured it out.
Maybe that's still what I'm doing.
Why animals keep showing up
People sometimes ask why I paint so many animals.
Dogs. Cats. Cows. Birds. Foxes. All kinds of creatures.
I think part of the answer is that animals let me tell stories without making everything quite so serious.
If I paint a person doing something, people can sometimes assume I'm making a statement about politics or society or some particular group.
Put a dog in the same situation and suddenly it's different.
It's funny.
It's disarming.
And maybe the viewer can see the idea without feeling like they're being lectured.
That's exactly where I want to be.
I want the painting to make you smile
When somebody buys a painting, I don't think they're necessarily looking for technical perfection.
I think they're looking for something that's one of a kind.
Something personal.
Something that speaks to them.
And honestly, the compliment I'd rather receive isn't:
"That's technically impressive."
I'd much rather someone say:
"That painting makes me smile every time I walk past it."
That's the one.
And I've actually received emails from people that say almost exactly that.
Those emails mean a lot to me.
Because that's really what I'm hoping for.
I want someone to look at one of my paintings and feel happy. Maybe it reminds them of something. Maybe it brings back a memory. Maybe it makes them laugh.
Maybe it simply gives them a few seconds where the world doesn't feel quite so heavy.
The mailbox I'll probably never own
There's probably one person who had more influence on that idea than he ever realized.
His name was George Colin.
George was an outsider artist and a neighbor of mine. He created painted wooden pieces and colorful pastel artwork.
One of the pieces of George's work I remember most clearly wasn't a painting at all.
It was his mailbox.
Everybody else's mailbox was pretty much what you'd expect—a gray, galvanized mailbox, maybe a little rusty, sitting out by the road.
George's was completely different.
As I remember it, the base was white, and it was covered with flowers and little painted people. On both sides was his name:
COLIN
And there was a pop-up American flag.
It was beat up and colorful and completely unmistakable.
It wasn't just a mailbox.
It was George.
That's what I remember about his work. He could take something completely ordinary and make it into something that had personality. Something that made you stop and look.
Years later, I happened to see that mailbox for sale on eBay.
I wanted it badly.
But I couldn't afford it at the time.
So I watched it go to somebody else.
I've been fortunate enough to have several pieces of George's work, but I still wish I had that mailbox. It would have been a cherished piece.
Maybe because it was so ordinary.
And maybe because it wasn't ordinary at all.
The artist who made me feel that way
When I saw George's artwork, it made me feel happy.
That's a simple thing to say, but I think it's important.
Because I spent a lot of my early life feeling like I wasn't good enough. Life wasn't always easy. We were very poor, and I didn't always have the kind of relationship with my father that I would have wanted.
I've thought about that for years.
And I still don't completely know why I make the kind of artwork I do.
Why whimsical?
Why colorful?
Why happy?
Maybe I'm still trying to make the kind of thing that George's artwork made me feel.
Maybe that's part of it.
Maybe when you've experienced enough things that aren't particularly happy, you become determined to create a little happiness wherever you can.
I don't know if that's the whole answer.
But I think it's part of it.
If I could give somebody one thing
I like the smile.
I like the happiness.
I like the nostalgia—the feeling of remembering something from your own life.
But if I had to choose just one thing I would want my artwork to give somebody, I think it would be hope.
That's bigger than a smile.
A smile might last a few seconds.
A memory might last a lifetime.
But hope can change the direction you're going.
If somebody is having a really difficult day and one of my paintings gives them even a tiny reason to feel that tomorrow might be better, then that's worth something.
That would be the best thing my artwork could do.
And maybe that's the real reason I make these paintings.
I don't know.
But I think I'm getting closer to the answer.
And perhaps that's what I like most about folk art.
It doesn't have to pretend to be something it isn't.
It can be imperfect.
It can be funny.
It can be strange.
It can be colorful.
It can tell a story.
And most importantly, it can make somebody feel something.
For me, if that feeling is a smile—or better yet, a little bit of hope—then I've probably done what I set out to do.
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