What’s your basic position, as a man and as an artist?
To the best of my honest knowledge, this one life is all we get. And for me, that’s exactly right. So I’m not going to waste any of it. That means, I’m going to pay attention. To everything. Especially, I’m going to pay attention to what moves me. I’m going to pay attention to things that happen when I’m drawing, things that send the electricity up my arm, right into my chest. For a lot of artists, what moves them is the landscape. For some, it’s flowers, or animals, or the pulse of the city. For others, it’s some kind of cerebral concoction that I don’t get. For me, it’s the figure. The gestures of hands, the lines of graceful movement in a dancer, the ripple of muscle in a strong young man, the textures of hair, the shadows on a cheek, are things I can never get my fill of studying, trying to understand, trying to render on paper or canvas. We are beautiful. And when I paint or draw the figure, it’s always the figure in nature, as a part of it, at home in it, dancing with it, giving it meaning in an infinite variety of ways. That’s because the Earth, nature, is where we are living this one life. And there you have it.

Where do you get your ideas?
This question always reminds me of a story I heard once about some artist back East, whose answer to the question, “Where do you get your ideas?” was, “Schenectady.” But I’ll try. I don’t know how it is for other artists, but for me, it’s like this. Through the years, I’ve gathered a collection, in my mind, of images that move me, in a deep way. For instance — the human figure, in graceful or powerful motion. That goes back to Spider-man comics when I was a kid, but the thing that grabs me in the gut goes way deeper than comic books. An artist develops a kind of private visual language, with images that can take different forms, and can go together in different ways to make a picture, the way words can go together in different ways to make a sentence. So then, if the artist just starts the pencil moving, his imagination, speaking to him in that private language, will often begin to show him something taking shape on the paper. And the artist will go with it. Me, I’ll start doing some lines that go the way I like lines to go, with lots of curves and loops and intricate interweaving, and before long, I’m seeing how the face might go here, the hair might flow thataway, the leg might come down here. The figure, which these days is always that of a woman, has to be in there. Why a woman? Well, believe it or not, that form has come to embody for me most of what I hold sacred. There’s actually a very long artistic tradition behind that.

Do you use models for your figures?
No. I need the freedom of working from my imagination, but I’ve had to earn that freedom, by schooling my imagination severely, for many years. The books of George Bridgman have been very important. But probably the main thing has been practice, years and years of practice.

Are you trying to revive Art Nouveau?
Who, me? Like I could. No, if I’m connecting myself in some way right now to Art Nouveau, Alphonse Mucha, and the rest, it’s merely part of a cunning marketing strategy, an SEO gambit, to steer traffic to my website and blog and so on. I very much like Mucha’s stuff — for one thing, he knew how to draw a woman — a rare and precious skill in these our Progressive and Enlightened Times — but the art I do is my own. I do it the way I do it because it gives me joy to do it that way, much like the joy I got from downhill skiing, back when I was any good at it.

I look at your recent stuff, and it’s women, women, women. What’s the deal?
The short answer is, I love ‘em. The long answer, right now, is a lot of lofty but confused stuff about beauty and life and truth and what makes life worth living, and when I get it worked into some kind of coherent form, I’ll put it on my blog, and here.

And what’s the story with all the hair in these new pieces?!?
That’s a tough one. The first piece I did with a woman and a lot of hair, I did when I was about sixteen. Where that came from, I have no clue. I still have that piece. It’s awful. But I still like the idea. Maybe a great flowing expanse of hair, rippling in the breeze, conveys to me a sense of wildness and freedom. I don’t know. For years and years, I didn’t do anything like that, and then all of a sudden this year, forty years later, I’m doing babes with preposterous amounts of hair again (except I hope I’m doing them with more skill). The mind is a weird and wonderful thing. I have also found great satisfaction, in pieces like the ones in my Four Seasons series, in working out the flow and interweaving of all those strands of hair. I think that comes from the same place, or gives the same pleasure, as Celtic knots, or Moorish script, or other kinds of art and decoration in which we see things intricately interwoven.

Where did you study?
I have a Bachelor’s degree in art from Oregon State. The most useful thing about that, for me, was the opportunity to take a lot of life drawing classes. Those classes, and sculpture classes, were most of my studio credits. The great thing about life drawing classes is that it’s just you and the model. All the intellectual paraphernalia of twentieth century art — Modernism and Post-Modernism, the agendas and manifestos and programs and ideologies — kind of gets left at the door of the life-drawing studio. This allows some actual learning of an actual skill to happen. You learn quickly that anyone can look at a model, but it’s a whole other, larger, and more difficult job to see the model. Very valuable experience. Very humbling. As far as oil-painting, watercolors, relief printmaking, etching, and the rest, are concerned, I’m self-taught. Not that there’s anything special about that. I think most artists, in the long run, are self-taught.

Do you make your living as an artist?
Yes. Mainly, right now, as an illustrator. But I have established a presence on Etsy, and I look to enlarge it. Illustration work gives me a lot of valuable drawing practice, and the satisfaction of doing something well, and an income — not a small thing, these days — well, it is pretty small, actually. But it has the great flaw that you’re making pictures of someone else’s ideas. It so happens that I like my ideas better.

Fay and Jonathan

Bio

1954: Born in Salzburg, Austria — an Army brat
1955-1960: Travelled extensively in the continental United States.
New Mexico. Colorado. Georgia. California.
1960: Settled down in Juneau, Alaska.
Pretty much anything you imagine about growing up in Alaska is true.
1972-1979: Came to Oregon. Had embarassing adventures in Portland.
1979: Moved to Corvallis, Oregon, to attend Oregon State University.
1983: Earned B.S. in Art from OSU in 1983.
Did undergraduate work primarily with the sculptor Wayne Taysom.
1986-present: Exhibited in Corvallis, Oregon & its environs.
1972-2008: Employment: cannery worker, furniture-factory worker, baker, chicken-shit shoveller, Montessori School art instructor, elementary school-teacher, construction worker in Alaska, life-drawing model, sculptor’s assistant, cook, welder in a railroad boxcar assembly plant, physics research assistant, and other things I forget.
1989-2002: Employed in telecommunications industry.
1995: Earned B.S., Electrical Engineering, OSU.
1996: Married the ceramic artist Fay Jones Day.
1995-2002: Electrical design engineer. Designed low-noise amplifiers, splitters, receive-multicouplers.
2002-2008: Earned Ph.D. in physics (2008, OSU).
Ph.D. thesis: On The Photoresponse Of Several Novel Functionalized
Oligoacene and Anthradithiophene Derivatives.

Curriculum Vitae

Education
Bachelor of Science in Art, Oregon State University, 1983
Area of Specialisation: Sculpture
Bachelor of Science in Electrical Engineering, Oregon State University, 1995
Doctor of Philosophy, Physics, Oregon State University, 2008

Shows & Exhibitions
One-man Shows:
1983 Linn-Benton Community College, Albany, Oregon
1987 Oregon State University, Memorial Union Concourse Exhition
1995 New Morning Bakery, Corvallis, Oregon
1995 Moon Dance Art Company, Sweet Home, Oregon
1996 Pegasus Art Gallery, Corvallis, Oregon
1996 Kinetic Bagel Restaurant, Corvallis, Oregon
1996 Footwise Gallery, Corvallis, Oregon
1996 Unitarian Fellowship Hall, Corvallis, Oregon
1997 Footwise Gallery, Corvallis, Oregon
1997 Corvallis Library
1997 Good Samaritan Hospital, Corvallis, Oregon
1998 Radio Frequency Systems, Corvallis, Oregon

Group Shows:
1987 Corvallis Community Show.
1988 Corvallis Community Show.
2004 Projekt30 October online juried show.
2005 The Men / The Women, Pegasus Art Gallery, Corvallis, Oregon
2006 Annual Printmasters Exhibition, Pegasus Art Gallery, Corvallis, Oregon
2006 Emerald Art Center National Juried Exhibition, Springfield, Oregon

Awards
Best of Show, Corvallis Community Show, 1987
Merit Award, Emerald Art Center National Juried Exhibition, Springfield, Oregon, 2006
People’s Choice Award, Corvallis Community Show, 2008

Gallery Representation
Pegasus Frame Studio and Gallery, Corvallis, Oregon

Work as Illustrator
Linocut chapter illustrations, book cover, and frontispiece, for poetry anthology,
New Classic Poems, edited by Neil Harding McAlister, 2005
Linocut chapter illustrations, book cover and frontispiece etching, for poetry anthology,
Rhyme and Reason edited by Neil Harding McAlister, 2006
These two anthologies are still available online at Traveler’s Tales.

Book cover illustration and CD insert drawings for Audio Book:
Homer, The Iliad, translated and narrated by Stanley Lombardo,
with additional readings by Susan Sarandon, published by Parmenides Publishing, 2006

Book cover illustration and CD insert drawings for Audio Book:
Homer, The Odyssey, translated and narrated by Stanley Lombardo,
with additional readings by Susan Sarandon, published by Parmenides Publishing, 2006.
Available from Amazon.com

Horse Show Champion!, a Pick-Your-Own-Path book by Tammy Biondi, 2010.
Available from Amazon.com

Gulliver’s Travels, Lilliput, an iPhone and iPad app.
By Jonathan Swift, as retold for children by Jolanda Witvliet, 2010
Available from the App Store

Greek Myths, an iPhone and iPad app.
By Jonathan Swift, as retold for children by Jolanda Witvliet, 2011
Available from the App Store