Interview With 1stAngel

RB Fine Art
Robert Bean
Welcome to the Artists Blog !!

1stAngel: When did you first become interested in art?
Robert: I’ve always been interested in art in some form or fashion. For as long as I can remember I’ve been scrawling away, using whatever I had at hand. I always liked Crayola crayons, but they would frustrate me a lot because of their inability to layer (even at a young age materials could drive me up the wall). I was never big on three-dimensional projects though; it was always the magic of creating a living, breathing world on a piece of paper that invigorated me.

I have an aunt that was a huge influence on me when I was child. My sister and I stayed with my aunt and uncle often when we were kids and we always had a great time at their house. They lived in a small town in Arkansas, right on the edge of a highway, and I always found their house to be so different and wonderful. It wasn’t like the suburban neighborhood where I was growing up with house after house lining up next to each other up and down the street. The house was brown, earthy, and always had what seemed like hundreds of different kinds plants growing around it, giving it a living quality that I didn’t have at home. There was an outbuilding in the back that we weren’t allowed to explore because of snakes, so it felt kind of dangerous too. And there was warmth to the house that made me feel comfortable. So my imagination was already kicked into high gear just from staying with them, but my aunt also painted. She had a small room where she would sew, and had a fold out table that she used to paint on. I would spend time in there working on a paint-by-numbers (I absolutely loved them) or just drawing whatever I wanted to. She was the first one to really introduce me to paint and what it could do, because I could play with paint and at the same time see the small paintings that she was creating. It was kind of revelatory, a “hey, this stuff I’m squishing around, it can be made to look like that.”

But what made me come to realize that making a drawing or painting could be so much more were comic books. I was always trying to create my own little worlds on paper, and now, here, in these yellowing pages I found what I had been trying to do, just on a much more impressive scale. And not only were there drawings, and lots of them, but there were characters, and most importantly, a story . I wanted the good guys to win. I wanted the action and the excitement. I wanted to know what happened next. I was hooked. Reading comic books led to me drawing even more than I already was – I wanted to be able to do what the guys making the comics could do. I started copying what I saw in the pages, taking the time to learn to draw the characters, and as a result, learning how to draw the human form. And one of the really wonderful things about them were that there were so many different artists that worked in the comic book field, so I had what seemed like a never ending stream of new art styles to try and ape. It was wonderful.

1stAngel: What style of art do you concentrate on?
Robert: It’s not a single style, or method, that I’ve found and decided, “hey, this is it for me, I got it now”. In fact, I would express it more as an evolution, or growth – something born out of all the different influences I’ve come across over the years. I believe that the idea – the image – really is king, and that the artist has to bend to the will of that image. I guess that’s something of the illustrator’s background in me. Whatever the image needs, especially in terms of techniques and materials, the image gets. I have preferences for what I like to work with, lately that being pastels or acrylics, but I won’t try and force an idea into one of those two mediums. If it needs to be built out of wood, or stacked rocks, or painted on a brick wall, I’ll do what I need to do to help the image come to life.

1stAngel: Has your style changed from when you first began as an artist?
Robert: Absolutely. I think most artists go through many changes over the course of their careers, some more subtle than others. Even if you take out my growth artistically from a child to a young adult, my work has changed many times. I went from being incredibly illustrative to something more gestural, which eventually became flat out abstract. And then back to more gestural, something close to a figurative abstract approach, and then a style like I have now – something that combines and uses most of what I developed throughout all those changes.

Comic books really influenced me heavily, so much so that when I first entered into a university program I was actually having to work at lessening the grip that comic book stylization had on my own work. I also began playing role-playing games as a teenager and reading a lot of science fiction and fantasy novels, and as a result developed a taste for the illustration that accompanied all that material. In high school the closest I got to really learning about the traditions of art were the few artists that some of my comic book artist heroes had touted – guys like Michelangelo and Leonardo DaVinci –some of the Renaissance artists and their drive to perfect the human form (it wasn’t until my university years that I realized the Greeks had done it all first). I also discovered the Surrealists near the end of my high school years. Needless to say, my early university work was strange. Over the years I started to discover other artists, artists that I was drawn to for one reason or another. I’ve always like Henri Toulouse-Lautrec’s work, and the work of Otto Dix. I also got into Degas, and O’Keefe, Alfred Stieglitz, Will Barnett, Gustav Klimt, and Alphonse Mucha. Mucha has had a great influence on my work, making me strive to create strong lines and clean images. I’ve always liked that about his work and was privileged enough to see an exhibition of his work in Memphis, Tennessee several years ago.

It was also a few years ago that I started trying to write creatively, short stories, that sort of thing. It was quite an eye opener for me. An absolute struggle to get my mind wrapped around a new way of creating, and it’s had a big impact on my work. As I said a little earlier, I had worked to move my artwork away from comic books, but writing brought it all back. So I’ve started to integrate the narrative into my images once more, and I like what’s happening. It made me realize the title is just as important as the image, at least to what I’m creating.

1stAngel: What medium do you use?
Robert: For me it depends a lot on what the image I’m trying to create is intended to express. If it needs to be clean and crisp, more than likely I’ll pull out my acrylic paints or use ink. If it needs a lot of movement, a lot of gesture, I’m probably working in pastels, charcoal, or graphite, or a combination of all of those. I’ll mix media as well. It wasn’t until recently that I started using photography more. I still like traditional 35mm film compared to digital, it just seems to get me better contrasts, which has become a very strong and integral part of my work. I’ve also started to learn the ins and outs of printmaking.

1stAngel: What made you choose that medium?
Robert: Whatever the current project was. That’s really how I’ve learned the different mediums I’ve used. I wanted to create an image, had an idea of how to do it, but a certain look or effect was beyond either my skill with the mediums I had, or just something that they weren’t capable of achieving. I learned a phototransfer technique in just this way.

1stAngel: Do your ideas come from life or imagination?
Robert: Both. Sometimes the storyteller in me will take the initiative and crank out a phrase, or a word, something that the image creation part of my brain can latch onto and get to work. Other times I see something while I’m out and about and make note of it, or sketch it or photograph it. I’ll return later with that image or idea and work through it in the studio.

My sketchbooks really reflect this change. I used to fill the pages with nothing but images, but lately there are more words on the page than there are images. My work has become less of an immediate response to what I see and more of a careful, thought out progression of ideas. Printmaking has really given me a better appreciation for process, and that, combined with my attempts at crafting a narrative structure like that found in a short story, have made me really think about how I’m presenting an image.

The initial idea may come from either my imagination or straight from life, but in either case it’s going to go through a heavy production process before it reaches it’s final expression.

1stAngel: How do you choose your images and colours?
Robert: The images come from the idea, whether or not that idea was taken from my imagination or from life. How that image is completed, with it’s color scheme and design, also depends heavily on the idea. It’s something I learned from trying to create a narrative.

When reading through a story, you often don’t realize just how important every single word is to what you are reading. The slightest change, even a tense change, can change the entire meaning, mood, or expression of the story. I’ve tried to incorporate that concept into my visual artwork, which, in a way, has brought me back full circle to my days trying to illustrate comic books. There is an economy of image within the pages of a comic book that a lot of fine art doesn’t have to contend with (which is something of a parallel between the short story writer and the writer of a novel). So when I’m creating an image, every part of it I scrutinize. I want to know what each part of the image is conveying to the viewer, even if that conveyance is quite ambiguous.

I’ve recently been treating color in the same way, but I haven’t always. I used to paint straight from the tube, without mixing colors. I didn’t use black or white, and when I need to combine colors into something different I did it with glazing techniques. I chose the colors with a sense of less importance – I had an overall color scheme I wanted to have at the forefront and, whatever connotations those colors had, I tended to disregard them. If I thought the image would look best with a lot of purple, I used a lot of purple. The design and line work in the piece took precedence over color for me. But I had an art instructor force me to paint using only Payne’s Gray, Mars Black, and Titanium White. It made me look at contrast again and at what made the image powerful or interesting in the first place. I started to see exactly how color could change the image as I worked them back into my palette. How exactly does blue make the image feel as opposed to green? Does it change the story being told? I started playing with mixing colors to see how different tints of a single color could change the feeling and meaning of a piece. I also began to realize the power of simply changing the chroma of color and how that could affect the overall image. I choose my colors very carefully now.

1stAngel: Who is your favourite artist?
Robert: As far as the images of different artists, I don’t have a single artist whose images I prize over any other. There are artists whose work I may not like, but there aren’t any works that I elevate above others that I like. But as far as life stories, and histories, I think the artist that I’ve been the most drawn to is Henri Toulouse-Lautrec. I find his life story to be absolutely fascinating. I spent time working on a research paper about Toulouse-Lautrec and his work and haven’t stopped learning about him, even though the paper is finished and the presentation given long ago. I think that to understand Toulouse-Lautrec you have to understand the people he surrounded himself with, and the society of Paris at the time. If nothing else it makes for interesting reading.

1stAngel: What is your favourite piece of work by yourself?
Robert: I honestly don’t have a single piece of my own work that I hold up as a favorite. I can always find too many things wrong with the work I produce, but then I guess most artists can. It’s the perfectionist in me. But I do have pieces I consider to be “transition” pieces, and they tend to hold some kind of special power for me. They’re works that happen to be that breakthrough piece, where I’ve been striving to merge new ideas with both new and old techniques. They tend to be the pieces where I finally make the leap and connect ideas together and something good happens. I’ve got two images in my Imagekind galleries that are representative of this. The first one, Little Rusty is Loved , was one of the first pieces I completed after going back to using black, white, and Payne’s Gray. It was also one of the first pieces that incorporated a narrative element to both the image and the title. The second piece, Second Sunday , came about simply through me reviewing some of my reference images that I used in my drawing and painting. I came to realize some of the photographs I was shooting were strong images in their own right, before being put on canvas or paper. A little bit of tweaking in Photoshop and I had an image I was happy with, and one that made me consider my reference images in a whole new light.

Little Rusty is Loved

Second Sunday

1stAngel: Have you had exhibits in galleries?
Robert: I’ve had a few one person shows at this point in my career, as well as a two-person show and several group exhibitions. I’ve also had my work exhibited in juried competitives – the most recent being the 2006 MOAK at the Springfield Museum of Art in Springfield, Missouri, and the 20 th Annual Small Works on Paper , which is an annual traveling exhibition sponsored by the Arkansas Arts Council. It’s a really interesting show to be included in because it travels to towns all over the state.

1stAngel: Have you any exhibits in galleries planned for the future?
Robert: I’ll be exhibiting my work in a two-person show with Holly Moore this summer at Gallery 26 in Little Rock, Arkansas. Holly and I met through a class at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock and have had this show in the works for a couple of years. The people at Gallery 26 are fantastic and I think it’s going to be a good show. I’m looking forward to seeing the show up and finding out what people think about the new work. That’s always one of my favorite parts of being an artist – getting to hear what others think, and what they see, in the work that you produce. The show opens on July 19 th of this year.

http://www.gallery26.com/

1stAngel: What are your plans for the future?
Robert: I’ll be receiving my Bachelor of Arts with an emphasis in Drawing this fall. After that I hope to be able to spend some time in the classroom teaching others what I’ve spent a long time learning. I’ve also got several ideas for exhibitions that I plan to sit down and work out after the show this summer at Gallery 26. This past fall I started a relationship exhibiting my work at Inkspell Books in Half Moon Bay, California. The response has been positive so far, and I’m going to keep growing and developing that relationship and market for my work. I’ve recently found plans, or blueprints rather, of a homemade printing press I’d like to give a try at building. I think it would be great to be able to print handmade images on a handmade press.

But most importantly, I’ve got a girl I love dearly and plan to marry. There’s nothing better in the world than finding someone you can care about that deeply and who believes not only in you but also in what you want to do with your life.

Congratulations Robert! I wish you and your good lady every happiness Thank you for allowing me the interview.

You can view RB Fine Art’s gallery HERE
Journal: HERE
Main website: HERE