{"id":9417,"date":"2020-04-10T21:19:58","date_gmt":"2020-04-11T04:19:58","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.marshallart.com\/HOME\/about\/interviews\/mt-sac-interview\/"},"modified":"2020-05-17T17:21:59","modified_gmt":"2020-05-18T00:21:59","slug":"mt-sac-interview","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/www.marshallart.com\/HOME\/about\/interviews\/mt-sac-interview\/","title":{"rendered":"Mt. SAC Interview"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

A Conversation with\u00a0Marshall Vandruff<\/h2>\n

by Fatemeh Burnes,<\/em>
\nMt. San Antonio College Art Gallery Director and Curator<\/em><\/p>\n

The genesis of this exhibition was my introduction to Marshall Vandruff in the 1980s by my colleague, Don Hendricks, while we were both teaching at Fullerton College. At that time, Marshall was already establishing a reputation for being an accomplished artist. It felt as though everywhere I went, I would run into someone who knew Marshall and would speak of his work and teachings with superlatives, such as \u201camazing\u201d, \u201cmasterful\u201d, and \u201cincredible\u201d.<\/p>\n

As Marshall honed his artistic skills at Fullerton College and amassed a collection of work, I became more curious about his techniques and processes. I remember being mesmerized by the incredibly minute and infinite details of his sketches and his ability to artfully weave those details into fantastic characters. Playing the secret critic, I would sometimes attempt to challenge a work selected at random by putting a particularly heavily \u2014 sketched portion of one of his characters under close scrutiny. Each time, Marshall (and his character) defeated the critic in me so that when I stepped back and viewed the work in its totality, I would have an added measure of appreciation for its creativity, detail, and vitality. It was as if the character subjected to my critique retorted: \u201cSee! I am real.\u201d<\/p>\n

It has been almost 30 years since my introduction to Marshall. In that time, I have discovered that he has a passion about his art and his teaching. When given the opportunity to have a solo exhibition with just his work he immediately began naming students and colleagues who along the way had inspired and challenged him as an artist. He wanted to share the stage with these people, creating a link and visual dialogue of the mutual influence they have had on one another. The result of that beneficence is that the exhibition features an exhilarating display of 14 artists. I hope their work instills you with the same sense of appreciation of their talent and creativity that I have.<\/p>\n

Fatemeh Burnes:<\/strong> You started drawing in sketchbooks in 1997. Why?<\/p>\n

Marshall Vandruff:<\/strong> To loosen up. My drawing style had become so tight that it choked off my ability to draw freely and easily, so I set out to fill a sketchbook with lots of messy drawings to get beyond finickiness. I never gave a thought to displaying them. They began as exercises, and they evolved into my visual journal. And I appreciate you recognizing them before I’m dead.<\/p>\n

FB:<\/strong> How much do you credit your work to natural talent or is it solely hard work?<\/p>\n

MV:<\/strong> It’s both. I work hard to make up for where I lack talent, and I work hard to make the most of the talent I have.<\/p>\n

FB:<\/strong> You believe in talent?<\/p>\n

MV:<\/strong> I’ve been teaching in college for longer than most of my students have been alive, and they’ve proven to me that talent is real. Some students can barely “get it” no matter how hard they try, and others run with it quickly. There’s an advantage to not believing in talent \u2014 it can prompt us to work hard for our mastery rather than relying on a gift, but I\u2019ve seen such varying ability to draw and paint that all doubt about the existence of talent is erased forever in my mind.<\/p>\n

I\u2019ll give an example from my own experience. I found I had a talent for making gradations with graphite. I was eighteen years old when my teacher Don Hendricks showed me how he used graphite pencil to make these beautiful smooth gradations \u2014 I had never seen anything like them \u2014 they looked like airbrush \u2014 and within a few months of practice, my graphite pencil technique came up to a level of mastery that never needed to improve. But I’ve seen students who just can’t make smooth gradations. At the same time I have struggled with color, even though I’ve done a lot of color work for thirty years. I even teach color. But some students whom I’ve taught color theory have surpassed me quickly because they are talented colorists with a knack for making good choices. As much as I believe in putting ten thousand hours into developing raw material, some raw material is better than others.<\/p>\n

But what is the point of trying to discern what part is talent, what part is training, what part is luck, and what part is discipline and determination? We can\u2019t know our talent until we work hard to bring it out.<\/p>\n

FB:<\/strong> You definitely glorify the past and Masters. Also, you are so connected to the industry, here and now, working with technology. How do you keep the values from the past, yet be open-minded to changes?<\/p>\n

MV:<\/strong> By building on the past. We have a rich heritage, but we’re surrounded by plastic trinkets that displace the gold and silver of past masters. Trinkets are easy, treasure takes work.<\/p>\n

That’s how I help students \u2014 I unearth lessons from the past to apply to the present, and in a specific niche \u2014 the popular and entertainment arts. My students design animation, film and game worlds. They make up environments from their imaginations, they light them to create a mood, they design creatures and characters. These artists need to know anatomy and perspective and light on form and how to invoke a mood with color and light \u2014 those are all old skills, even if they’re using new media.<\/p>\n

We’re assuming that these pictures are going to be somewhat realistic \u2014 they may be cartoon pictures, or children\u2019s books, stylized or simple, but they are representational. You enter a world, whether it is a Dr. Seuss world or a Bernie Wrightson world and you believe that it\u2019s real. That\u2019s where my love has always been \u2014 illustration, stories, comics. That\u2019s where my love still is. Those are the people I teach. The new old masters.<\/p>\n

FB:<\/strong> Where do you think the art is going?<\/p>\n

MV:<\/strong> I don\u2019t know. I leave that to the cultural observers and theorists, many of whom dismiss entertainment and the popular arts. Much of what I champion is low brow, but I’m not too concerned about that. I do care about what you mentioned earlier. That we learn from the past, but we don\u2019t repeat the past.<\/p>\n

FB:<\/strong> I have been teaching drawing for twenty plus years, and in the fine arts, essentially everything we teach students is perceptual \u2014 looking at things, drawing what you see, and learning how to see. When the students come in, they want to draw what they think, and it\u2019s fascinating when the two come together. You learn what to see and then where do you take it? How you can bring your subconscious to deliver that visual poetry?<\/p>\n

MV:<\/strong> We always balance what we see with what we want to see. We look around us and choose our inspirations, which can be familiar. I\u2019ve always lived in the suburbs. I was born in Anaheim and lived in Orange County my whole life, I never knew any different and I always thought I should go to some other world, the desert or Europe or Hawaii or some exotic other place to find inspiration, but in fact the suburbs are a strange and marvelous resource that I didn’t appreciate until I noticed, while watching a Steven Spielberg movie, that suburbs are this fascinating world of people who live in neighborhoods with cars and driveways and sidewalks and lawns and bushes and sprinklers. The first part of Edward Scissorhands<\/em> also gave me that insight \u2014 what a strange world I lived in. But any world can inspire. I have a friend who was raised in trailer parks that inspire him. Beatrix Potter was an English girl with countryside surroundings and she used those in her stories. Mark Twain and Garrison Keillor use small-town middle America. Woody Allen uses New York.<\/p>\n

But we aren’t limited to the familiar. We can seek out the new and exotic. For me, that happens in museums. I’m a museum junkie. Even though I’m not a sculptor, sculpture thrills me and prompts me to draw. Old bones do the same. Old machinery. The Natural History Museum is my treasure chest of inspiration.<\/p>\n

I\u2019m also really big on dreams because that’s where the most personal imagery seems to emerge. Most of the creative people I know are vivid dreamers \u2014 they generate pictures whether they’re awake or asleep. Imagery that comes up from within is a rich resource that affects style and content, and that’s a reason to keep dream journals, which my sketchbooks are to some extent.<\/p>\n

FB:<\/strong> That’s the creative part \u2014 having images in mind \u2014 but then there must be the ability to represent those images.<\/p>\n

MV:<\/strong> Yes \u2014 that’s the balance. Art education has two sides; one is the technical aspect \u2014 skills like the ability to draw realistically without having to copy, skills like anatomy and form and control of the medium, skills that the old masters took for granted. Once we get anywhere near their level, we then want to do something that they never dreamed of. We do that by following our instincts. That\u2019s the other side of educating an artist \u2014 not just to produce technically slick work, but to create work that is unique and fresh. I think a lot of that comes out of the subconscious, through insights, hunches and impulses, even through moods \u2014 mischief or depression, anger or glee. And it has a lot to do with what images we feed ourselves.<\/p>\n

FB:<\/strong> With your delicate beautiful sketches and your sketchbooks, do you ever project them in your mind or have the urge to see them differently, going out of your comfort zone?<\/p>\n

MV:<\/strong> How do you mean specifically? As finished pieces?<\/p>\n

FB:<\/strong> I\u2019m not calling them unfinished pieces. What I\u2019m asking is, have you ever looked at your pieces on a larger scale, projected or painted? You teach the Masters and you know all their different approaches, does this have any practical aspect?<\/p>\n

MV:<\/strong> Yes. I have turned some of those sketches into color pieces \u2014 into posters. Not paintings so much as colorized drawings.<\/p>\n

FB:<\/strong> Have you ever thought about painting them, totally changing your medium? For example you were saying you have never been a colorist… so challenging yourself?<\/p>\n

MV:<\/strong> I have tried, but I\u2019m in better territory drawing than painting. I painted realistic airbrush illustrations for ad agencies for twenty years. I\u2019m proud of some of that work but I got tired of the rendered realism, and more expressive painting doesn’t feel fit for me.<\/p>\n

Let me make an analogy. A musician may love to compose at the piano. Mussorgsky never meant for Pictures at an Exhibition<\/em> to be orchestrated \u2014 he composed it for the piano, and that was enough. After he died, Ravel orchestrated it, which meant turning the left and right hand notes of the piano into different instruments and making all sorts of decisions about whether these high notes are going to be piccolos, violins or whatever they are going to be. That was Ravel’s gift and his love. I\u2019ve found that I am much more like a pianist with my graphite pencil and paper. My next love will be pen and ink, which I haven’t mastered.<\/p>\n

FB:<\/strong> So you are challenging yourself.<\/p>\n

MV:<\/strong> I\u2019m challenging myself with pen and ink, but pen and ink is a single instrument. It’s not like an orchestra, which is how a painting feels to me. It gets out of my range. I do it enough to remind myself why I respect painters \u2014 I know what their job is like, but it’s not where I can do my best work. I\u2019d rather draw.<\/p>\n

FB:<\/strong> The quality of what you are working with is so important. In order for you to be free and to express yourself you need to depend on your ability to deliver that quality. You won\u2019t sacrifice that.<\/p>\n

MV:<\/strong> I\u2019d rather speak in a voice that feels comfortable, rather than in a voice that doesn’t. At least most of the time.<\/p>\n

FB:<\/strong> Do you play any musical instruments?<\/p>\n

MV:<\/strong> Not at all.<\/p>\n

FB:<\/strong> But you love music?<\/p>\n

MV:<\/strong> I love music. I never played a musical instrument as a kid. I never took lessons. But when I first heard the Beatles as a kid, I went crazy for them and for rock ‘n’ roll in general. Then 70\u2019s rock came in and it was on my mind all the time \u2014 I was drunk on rock ‘n’ roll, it was just thrilling. Somewhere at about nineteen I started to feel like my head had been hammered so hard by heavy metal that I sought an alternative, but I didn\u2019t know what the alternatives were. I began checking out records from the library and found that certain composers, Bach, Handel, Mozart and Haydn, which I now know were Baroque and Classical, were easy to like. I also found that I had to listen to them over and over to “hear” them \u2014 I couldn\u2019t make a judgment on first listening, but if I listened to a piece between ten and twenty times I began to catch the complexity of those melodies enough to respond to them. I pursued it through several eras, from Baroque to Classical to Romantic \u2014 I fell in love with the romantics and then moved into the 20th century, and it wasn\u2019t until about six years ago, when my son was twelve or thirteen that we discovered vintage jazz. I\u2019d heard bits of jazz all my life, but didn\u2019t respond to it until I bought this little CD collection of 1930\u2019s and 1940\u2019s pianists like Fats Waller, Teddy Wilson, Earl Hines, Erroll Garner, Art Tatum, Oscar Peterson… just these wonderful, wonderful talents. We listened to those CD’s over and over for months and when we began to hear how great they were, we started collecting jazz CD\u2019s and I got drunk on vintage jazz and then later blues like I used to be drunk on rock ‘n’ roll and like I’ve been drunk for three decades on classical and still am. I listen to Beethoven and Schubert constantly \u2014 I’ve been living in Schubert every day for hours and it becomes unspeakably beautiful over time…. but I’m supposed to be talking about art, not music.<\/p>\n

I don\u2019t see these styles from a musician’s point of view because I\u2019m not a musician. I am purely a fan, and not just of music but of musicians who articulate their creative process. Listening to musicians talk about how they get their ideas, and their balance between technique and creativity, their inspirations and influences, all of that is perfectly analogous to training artists, and analogies make learning fun.<\/p>\n

We could make analogies between food and art. When teaching watercolor, cooking is a fit analogy because, like watercolor, it\u2019s about timing. You can\u2019t leave it in the oven too long or too short and it\u2019s got to be the right temperature. You arrange the meal as a composition and your ingredients are very important \u2014 this kind of paper doesn\u2019t work with this kind of pigment… all of that stuff. But I’m not a cook, and I know little about food and can’t pronounce the names of fine wines, so let’s move to another topic.<\/p>\n

FB:<\/strong> Tell us a little bit about Marshall, maybe your early life. Were there any influences in your early upbringing?<\/p>\n

MV:<\/strong> My first powerful artistic influences were children\u2019s books. I got my view of how a picture should look from Dr. Seuss. As I got a little older, it was 1960\u2019s television shows; Gilligan\u2019s Island<\/em>, Lost in Space<\/em>, Twilight Zone<\/em>… Mod Squad<\/em>, gosh \u2014 Mod Squad<\/em> was a huge influence on me, personally \u2014 I wanted to look like Peter, I wanted to act like Linc, and I was in love with Julie. They were bigger-than-life icons to me, but their influence was personal, not artistic. The paintings around our home, most of which were kitsch, influenced me badly. I drank them in on bored afternoons and I may never transcend their effect. But there were advantages. We had a friend, Faye Garriott, who made paintings out of bubble gum. She had the kids chew the gum, then she’d dye it and create serious scenes out of bubble gum \u2014 we had a couple of those in our home. That gave permission that it was okay to mess around with any medium, so things like that had an influence even on my commercial work \u2014 I wasn’t afraid to experiment with anything to get an effect. I tell watercolor students that you can make a great watercolor with coffee and berry stains. Not that you should, but that you could.<\/p>\n

Well somewhere in my early life I discovered influences that my parents disliked, and to this day I have regrets, but my older brother had those models designed by Big Daddy Ed Roth, who drew this character called Rat Fink<\/em> \u2014 a monster rat on a hot rod, and it so thrilled me in my boyhood that it forged my taste and I’ve hardly moved beyond that. Also, the MAD<\/em> comics from 1951-54 that were reprinted in books like The Mad Reader<\/em> and Bedside Mad<\/em> had these rather vulgar (though tame by today\u2019s standards) styles that I pored over. I wanted to draw like those artists \u2014 Bill Elder and Wally Wood and Jack Davis. Now this was in my pre-teen and early teen years where I began consciously aiming my attention and defining the kind of art I liked. At the age of eighteen, Don Hendricks introduced me to MC Escher\u2019s work and I went crazy for it \u2014 I thought it was the greatest thing that ever happened. Psychedelic 70’s rock album covers had a similar effect, especially the Hipgnosis team who designed Led Zeppelin and Pink Floyd covers. I sought out every Frank Zappa cover to study it, aching to do strange and funny work like that. And of course, Rick Griffin. Even now, I feel like I’m in the stylistic wake of Rick Griffin.<\/p>\n

Those artists influenced not only my imagery, but my techniques and materials. Dr. Seuss used pen and ink and sometimes watercolor. Rick Griffin and the MAD<\/em> artists used pen and ink. With Escher, though it may have been lithograph crayon on stone, it was graphite pencil on kid-finish Bristol as far as I was concerned. Even his woodcuts and linoleum work looked, to me, like pen and ink. I chose those media for the same reasons a young musician who loves rock and roll chooses a guitar over a cello \u2014 they seemed fit for my tastes.<\/p>\n

Another influence was Durer \u2014 what a great draftsman and visionary! But there is something odd about his pen drawings and woodcuts \u2014 they’re awkward. I have a good deal of that awkwardness in my work and I wonder how much of it is because Durer was the first artist I copied. All those early favorite artists influenced me for better and worse, and I can\u2019t shake them any more than you can shake your family mannerisms when you\u2019ve spent so many years immersed in them.<\/p>\n

When I started teaching, I discovered artists like NC Wyeth, Winslow Homer, John Singer Sargent, Rembrandt, George Bridgman, Michelangelo, Heinrich Kley and others whose work I barely knew before teaching. They’ve hardly affected my style, but they are the richest resources I can offer students to nurture them with great work. They put feeling into form. They mastered their craft and let life flow through it.<\/p>\n

Let me use Van Gogh as an example, because even though I knew his work, I didn’t see what he had to offer until I was 29 years old. I was in Paris alone for five days in 1987 and I didn\u2019t speak French so I didn\u2019t talk to anybody for five days, which means that Marshall, who talks and talks, shut down that part of his brain that talks. All I did was look at art and read. After three days I went to the d\u2019Orsay, walked into a room where The Church at Arles<\/em> was on display, and it may have been that all the energy that I normally put into talking got transferred into perceiving, but that painting washed over me \u2014 this happened in a split second \u2014 my whole consciousness rocketed back to what it was like to be a baby, not a small child, but a pre-language baby looking out the window at the world from the car when my parents were driving us somewhere at night and seeing that the world was not things you could name like a church or a fire hydrant or a street corner or a tree or a window or a lamp because there were no words when I was a baby \u2014 there were only sensations of color and light and the rules of perspective didn’t mean anything \u2014 it was just this flurry of moving streaks of color and swimming shapes and bobbing lights that gave me magical feelings. The Church at Arles<\/em> sent me right back into that baby-state for maybe three or four heartbeats. It was an artistic epiphany. My work has never looked like Van Gogh, probably never will, but his painting came alive to me and gave me insight into what art is about \u2014 to see the world through an emotional lens and to get that vision into form so that another person looks at that piece and feels those feelings. Even an insensitive viewer may get a little bit of it. A sensitive viewer will get more. If, as artists, we can do that, our viewers will experience the world not through our eyes so much as through our emotional interpretations of it.<\/p>\n

\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A Conversation with\u00a0Marshall Vandruff by Fatemeh Burnes, Mt. San Antonio College Art Gallery Director and Curator The genesis of this exhibition was my introduction to Marshall Vandruff in the 1980s … <\/p>\n

Read more…<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":8,"featured_media":0,"parent":9406,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"generate_page_header":"","footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-9417","page","type-page","status-publish"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.marshallart.com\/HOME\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/9417","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.marshallart.com\/HOME\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.marshallart.com\/HOME\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.marshallart.com\/HOME\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/8"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.marshallart.com\/HOME\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9417"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.marshallart.com\/HOME\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/9417\/revisions"}],"up":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.marshallart.com\/HOME\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/9406"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.marshallart.com\/HOME\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9417"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}