My mother was the first one to recognize my artistic ability... or at least my interest in Art. She encouraged me with all sorts of drawing and painting and crafts materials from the earliest that I can remember.
I first seriously considered the possibility of being an Artist in response to the comic books that I collected and read so avidly. I remember telling a guidance counselor early on that my goal was to be a comic book illustrator.
Admittedly, it was through comic books that I first developed a love of drawing the human figure... initially the male figure... superheroes like Batman, Spiderman, Iron Man, the Hulk, etc... It was also through comics that I developed a love of saturated color and graphic line. The art and fantastic narratives of comics still fuel my Art... sometimes to an obvious extent... more often not.
There is no way I can downplay the impact of books and literature on my artistic development. I was obsessively reading since my first years in grade school. The first books I recall falling in love with were Richard Scarry's.
I would obsessively look over all the details in his illustrated books for hours. In a way, I suspect they prepared me for the equally excessively detailed paintings of Bosch and Brueghel as well as Van Eyck.
As a reader, I couldn't get enough of fantastic narratives such as
Alice in Wonderland,
The Wizard of Oz,
The Arabian Nights... and eventually those of Edgar Allen Poe, Theophile Gautier, and J.L. Borges which all fueled my feverish imagination. Baudelaire's
Les Fleurs du mal had a huge impact leading to not only my appreciation of poetry... but also my approach to painting. I began to think of painting as a poetic endeavor in the sense of paying an obsessive or even compulsive degree of attention to each and every element... each and every line... searching for the "perfect" color... just as the lyric poet weighed each and every word.
As an unabashed bibliophile, it should come as no surprise that there were many illustrators who have been and/or remain influential.
Among these, I would cite Arthur Rackham...
Gustave Dore, Edmund Dulac, Maurice Sendak, Richard Gorey...
... Asaf Hanuka, Claude Mirande, Gennady Spirin, Echo Chernik, Jean-Pierre Gibrat, Aubrey Beardsley, Marcos Chin, Tomer Hanuka, Victo Ngai, Andrew Tarusov, Leonard Baskin, M.C. Escher, Harry Clark, and Kelly Beeman.
It wasn't until my late teens that I began collecting books on "serious" artists... engaging in a self-directed study of art history. The first artist whose work I purchased in a big "coffee table book" was Salvador Dali... but shortly after, I became fixated on artists of the Northern Renaissance: Albrecht Dürer, Van Eyck, Van der Weyden, Bosch & Breughel, etc...
When I started Art School I was required to take 2 years of in-depth study of World Art History. I became fascinated with architecture and medieval art... I absolutely loved the illuminated manuscripts which undoubtedly influenced my passion for patterns. As we began to explore the art of the Italian Renaissance and the Baroque I could not help but recognize a similarity between the Superhuman Greco-Roman gods and goddesses portrayed in dynamic poses wearing brilliantly colored draperies, and the superheroes of the comic books... also seen in dramatic poses wearing brilliantly colored costumes. At this time... coming upon Titian and Rubens... as well as several artists whose work I stumbled upon myself (Mucha, Klimt, Schiele, Rodin, etc...) I began drawing the female nude far more often. This came at the same time that I was exposed to the female nude frequently in life drawing courses.
Along with Mucha, Schiele, Klimt, and Rodin there were several other artists whose work I discovered on my own including Edvard Munch, Paul Klee, Pierre Bonnard, Max Beckmann, and many Japanese and Persian/Islamic artists... all of whom have remained among the most influential upon my work. For years, I carried books on their work around with me everywhere. I still have large volumes of their work sitting on my computer desk or rolling workbench... right next to my work area.
And then there's Degas. If forced to name a single Modern artist whose work I most admire... and that has had the largest impact on my work... I'd probably be torn between naming Bonnard or Beckmann... but I can't forget Degas. On the most obvious level, he was the artist who gave me permission to abandon oil paint on canvas and focus on pastels on paper. Before Degas, artists such as Etienne Liotard, Rosalba Carriera, Jean Siméon Chardin , and François Boucher...
... simply approached pastels as a new and more rapid media for painting. "Pastel Paintings" were blended to create the illusion of form with soft edges. They were frequently no less detailed than oil paintings and seldom showed the artist's touch in terms of gestural lines and marks. For this, you had to look to pastel and chalk drawings:
Degas opened up a whole new approach to pastel. He spoke of how the media married the speed and the mark-making of drawing with the color of painting... and this showed in his work...
Degas freely combined multiple media in his paintings... using both tempera or gouache along with pastel...
... Beyond these approaches to "painting", Degas inspired me with his use of colored underpainting or priming. While the other Impressionists all worked on canvases primed with white, Degas cited the Venetian painters such as Titian and Veronese who often worked on canvases primed with red or green. This technique allowed the pastel colors to "jump" but also unified the painting as a whole as little areas of this underpainting showed through across the whole of the surface.
Finally, I was truly inspired by the rough... almost "weathered" surfaces of Degas' late pastels that recalled (to my mind) the surfaces of old frescoes.
Munch, Bonnard, Beckmann, Klee, Klimt, Schiele, Kirchner. Joseph Cornell (!), George Tooker, Matisse, and many other Modernists were quite inspirational to me.
I absolutely love the weathered and fresco-like surfaces of many of Balthus' paintings...
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