Danny Gregory

As readers of this site probably know by now, Richard Bell is an extraordinary nature illustrator who, despite the many miles and water between us, is one of my very best pals and a major influence and teacher.
When I spent several days with Richard and Barbara in their Yorkshire cottage, I go them to haul out all of his sketchbooks and made a pile that was taller than Richard at six foot something (there’s a picture of the stack in The Creative License). He has books that go back to when he was a boy; one done when he was less than ten, had an epic book plotted out that seemed to encompass the history of the entire universe. We poured over books he kept in university when he was in a department of one, the only person studying both nature and drawing. A compulsive sketcher, he has his whole life documented; we even found drawings he did at a party decades ago and we recognized that one of the guests was Barbara, a drawing done before they’d ever even spoken.
We talked about how he has made a living all these years. Barbara is a librarian and Richard has brought in his fair share entirely through drawing. His first books were published by others and he did illustrations for other writers, but ultimately he decided to take matters into his own hands and be his own press and now he has brought out many different kinds of books: a long line of field guides, tours of various parts of Yorkshire, and a lovely series of spontaneous little 32-page sketchbooks called the ‘sushi series’ for the freshness of the product. Most recently he created the enchanting Rough Patch. His work has changed in the past year or two, becoming more personal, less didactic, charting the course of his days and subjective impressions about life and nature and feeling less obliged to be all scientifically accurate. He has always seen his work, including his online journal, not as an exhibition of his art but as a way to share his scientific observations about the nature of his environment. It’s a personal diary but he still sees it as data.
Richard’s self-sufficiency is very inspiring to me; I can’t imagine any thing more perfect than wandering around observing, drawing, a painting and then printing your work and offering it to a growing public. Being so entrepreneurial is a constant evolution for Richard and he is always thinking of new and different ways to produce and market his work.
We talked about all this and more while I let the tape recorder run.
Image

RICHARD: “I’m probably one of these Victorian naturalists that kept visual diaries. I always say I’m not an artist. I’m a nature illustrator. A friend of mine always said that we illustrators are failed writers, not fine artists. Even after I went to art college, I thought I should get a degree in zoology or ecology to improve my illustrations. I got an A on my Geology A level and then I taught it for a while. It goes back to my interest in dinosaurs, a study of time; it runs through my work back to when I was seven.
It was part of my upbringing that you didn’t just do things because you wanted to, it had to have some aspect of improving one, some utility. My mum was a school teacher and she always had us doing interesting crafts and thing and she encouraged that, but my dad said you should study English and mathematics and then when you get to college you can do you art. There was never any sense of ‘go and have fun, enjoy it’. I can’t really do the whole idea of art as improvisation, free. It always ends up trying to demonstrate, explain, teach something.
There’s a tension in me between what I should drawn and what I want to draw.
I can’t walk into a landscape without thinking of it through time. I can’t just be a camera, I bring along my knowledge of the history, the formation of the land. I like faces that have responded naturally to what’s happened to them. It’s hard to draw good-looking children. You can look at a face and see the history of its people, of the effect of the landscape, of the impact of time.
I see a 200 million year old magnesium limestone from an extinct sea that once stretched from here to Poland and is now fashioned into this column on this cathedral and I think about who carved it and how he was a local craftsman who could just walk down the road and see it and then what’s happening to it because of the environment’s eroding effects and the symbolism of vines and serpents and how medieval vineyards probably grew right outside the cathedral, it’s all in there in the back of my mind, layer upon layer. But it seems too self conscious and new-age-y to write all that down so I just hope that it all gets into the drawings and then I just give it a simple caption, like: “Column, 13 century”.
Image

I’ve always thought that if one wanted to, it wouldn’t be a clever trick to go out and make a lot of money. So the question is, if I’ve been so hard up, why didn’t I take off a few months, go out and do that? Work at any old job, not art related, and just bring home the money? The closest I could do was to paint some plates.
Souvenir China plates can pay you 500 pounds. And really people are after cute dogs, so I went out to and painted some beagle in among some potted plants, one knocks them over, naughty puppies. But then I realize I can’t do cute, it’s just not in me.
I’ve never thought of getting a job outside of art, the closest I did was giving lectures at schools and talk about art, and about writing books. It was very encouraging for kids and it brought in more than a day illustrating. And yet I would go in to school to talk about being an illustrator and yet I wasn’t doing it because I was giving this same talk over and again to schools. If I’d put in the time in I talked about writing children’s books, I could have written a book. I’ve set up at street fairs and drawn portraits for money. I got quite good at catching the likenesses.
As for getting a job in a shop or an office, I’ve never really considered it. I couldn’t do waitressing, I can never remember what drinks people have ordered.
To me drawing is like sitting in comfy chair, relaxed yet supported, secure. You’re alert and yet reassured, you know what you’re doing. It is so natural, like eating or breathing, something I’ve always done. It’s hard for me to understand people who are so resistant. It’s hard for me to teach anybody who doesn’t already have that spark.
Image
When I was about 7, maybe 9, I wrote instructions on how to keep a nature diary. It was a real alternative to schoolwork, which was so rigid in those days. It was more visually exciting, more like comic strips than compositions. It wasn’t fantasy. Even when I wrote fiction, it was just storyboarding films I’d seen. I saw movies like ‘The Long Ships’ about the Vikings and then I came home and drew storyboards of the film. I kept the framing from the film and just remade it. I can’t really remember ever concocting stories, perhaps that’s a blind spot in what I do.
When I look at my early sketchbooks, it’s as if I was waiting for the Internet. Instead of them sitting in a box in the attic, that information, my observations could be useful to people. There’s such a multiplicity of ways that journals can be done and the Internet had also shown me all these different ways of doing it.
I think doing paintings and drawings to be framed is the kiss of death; too self-conscious, too cute. I’ve come to realize that life is a series of little incidents and my diary was missing the observer, so I started to add a record of my own life. I’m getting more at expressing a mood and experience these days, less about just recording the appearance of a church or a street scene.
I’m also beginning to question my obligation to be a teacher. I don’t want to step out of who I am but I am aware of the path I’m treading.”

Walton Ford and I met when we were both sixteen and at the Rhode Island School of Design summer program. He was one of those rare creatures who was born with phenomenal talent. The drawings he did at four and five would put most adult artists to shame. We eventually lost touch and only crossed each others’ paths decades later by which time he had emerged as one of the top painters in the NY fine art scene. He makes enormous (sometime twenty feet long) watercolors of animals. Each is life sized and breathtakingly accurate. They are clearly influenced by early naturalist/illustrators like John James Audubon and Carl Bagner and yet he has added political allegories to his work that make them very contemporary.
Of all of the people I know, Walton is the most “successful” as an artist. He is represented by one of Chelsea’s finest galleries, does a couple of shows a year, and will probably be able to spend the rest of his life living comfortably from his art. Though they have six-figure prices, his paintings are enormously marketable and every show is sold out before the opening. Despite all this success and talent, Walton still struggles with the politics of the art world and is fiercely competitive with those contemporary artists who are just ever so slightly better know than he is. He also resents the fact that his craftsmanship was slighted and ignored in the days when figurative painting was not what the market sought. As I talked to him I realized that the art world is basically just another industry, a bunch of stores selling stuff; dealers create and maintain the market and the artists themselves, regardless of their ability and vision, primarily luck into popularity.
I hung out with Walton at his upstate New York studio and we ran a tape recorder while he prepared a huge sheet of watercolor paper for an upcoming painting, turning the pristine paper into a mottled, browning relic that looked like it had fallen out of an 18th century folio of engravings.

Danny: So what role does journaling play in your work? I know you were very influenced by Audubon and by his work in the field. How does that sense of process and discovery go into your paintings?

Walton: I like to see Art as a tool. Audubon cut things out, pasting things together, scribbled notes to printer on it… The process of making was part of the work. The drawings weren’t the end result, the work was the final engravings so he allowed himself the freedom to be so cavalier with his work, not precious. I make my paintings look like they have that attitude, that feeling of unfinished ness, like it was done in the field. The writing focuses it, explains it.
I make 10-foot watercolors of tigers in which the stripes tell allegorical stories about Vietnam. Paintings so large they are experiential, like a diorama, filling your peripheral vision. I make them life size because, well, when you see a beaver, you think of it like the size of a woodchuck with a weird tail, then you see what it’s really like, it’s awesome, it’s totally startling, the size of a 50 gallon drum, it’s freaky and I like to that in my work, the fun of finding an animal that large and more grotesque than in your mind’s eye. When its life sized, when it’s extinct, it’s shocking. Flocks of millions of passenger pigeons that have never been painted before. It’s like a time machine too. To see things for real that can’t be seen anymore.

Danny: So what’s your attitude towards the fine art world? You have always made figurative paintings even when they were hardly in vogue. Isn’t it a little surprising that despite the accessibility of your work you have had such success?

Walton: I got a lot of very positive feedback on how I could draw and how I could see when I was young. I was a very precocious talent. My daughter, who’s a talented violinist won’t practice on that frantic, 18 hour a day level. It’s different in art than in music or sport. Art is a lot more forgiving you can be really good without working quite as hard. And there’s not that competitive thing battling for a small number of slots. But the drop out rate, the number of people who can’t handle, can’t go to the studio every day, is enormous. I was incredibly persistent and didn’t take no, I wasn’t terribly interested in being trendy. For many years it was not cool to do what I was doing. I had to not be discouraged by the fact that I was doing something that at the moment might not be hip. Now there’s a trend toward representational art, but so much of it strikes me as incredibly lazy and lacking in thought or depth. It’s just about irony and it’s hard to compare with the great portrait painters of the past, to Sergeant, for example. I feel like I don’t want to waste your time if you’re going to bother paying attention to what I’ve done, I want to at least have put in as much thought in doing it as the person looking at it. I didn’t want to stop even if others who I didn’t think were as capable were getting more success. And still something encouraging happened very year making it worth while if I looked as a long term thing.

I still have this feeling that I don’t quite belong. Those who get success much younger have a sense of entitlement I haven’t got. I have to try to develop that attitude and stop cringing, “Thank you for the attention.” My work is so accessible that for ages people made me think was stupid. I think it’s more important to make something that’s great art and is also popular, not just for other art professionals. It’s just a feeling that driven into you as soon as you come to New York, that being a populist isn’t interesting, creating narrative is stupid. Look at Goya, Daumier, Doré,etc.

People are very suspicious of craftsmanship. But Mathew Barney and John Curren are craftsman that are considered successful, intelligent artists so it’s good for me, that benefits all artists who care about carefully making beautiful pictures. There’s no meaningful distinction between art and craft. Once you’ve sussed out what the idea for a picture will be, it’s all craft, it’s all about making your picture. You need technique.

Danny: Is it terribly hard to be a fine artist? To make it in that world?

Walton: The hardest part of being an artist is not getting noticed. I worked very, very hard on a show about ten years ago and I thought it was a very good show. It went up came down and no one wrote about it, no one bought anything, and I felt like I had done all this work for no reason. Being able to get over that was very hard but kept me around for when people started to admire my work. You want people to admire what you do. I don’t care if it’s vanity or greed or what the motivation was when I looked at a work of art. The work redeems it.

Danny: Yeah, but practically…how did you survive until you made it?

Walton: I was able to survive for years as an artist, living on grants and selling a few paintings and then my big show was a flop and I had to go to work for the first time for years, doing restoration carpentry, wood refinishing, and some illustrations work, book covers and things. Making museum exhibits, building scale models of ships. It wasn’t what I wanted to be doing but it made ends meet.
I resigned myself to the idea that it wasn’t going to go as well as it ended up going. I always had some people who liked my work but it’s delusions of grandeur for an artist like me to think that there were people who didn’t like my work. It was more that nobody knew it, like a restaurant with no customers. Perfectly nice pizza pie but no one comes in. That humility helped me get by.

Danny: Is it important to be an artist?

Walton: At the end of the day, the only thing that human beings have to feel proud about is what sort of art did that culture leave behind, what sort of music, food, creativity, writing, the objects they made. That’s the value and legacy that will endure.

In traditional societies, the making of things was tied to the survival of the group. They didn’t worry about justifying their motivations. They all knew they were doing it for the interest of the group. The rugs on the floor, the paintings on the wall.

Danny: So what’s changed? It sure doesn’t feel that way today.

Walton: People nowadays are made to feel self conscious about drawings, about singing, about being different. And professionals are to blame for mystifying the role of the artist to the point that people feel stupid if they don’t understand things. And there is no attempt to educate people as to why the things that they may not understand right away are worth understanding. And then there’s this tortured pathetic version of an artist. Ed Harris showing Jackson Pollock as an inarticulate bastard, Kurt Cobain blows his brains out.
All this stuff adds up and people don’t want to be involved in this kind of thinking or being or making stuff. They’re interested instead in Hollywood people who aren’t that interesting but who corporations make money out of.

Danny:So is it worth it? Would your recommend that people try to make a living as an artist?

Walton:The advantage I have over people who don’t do this for a living is that I get to do it to think about it all day, every day. I get to wake up each day and just think about making some thing cool.

Danny: That does sound cool.

You can see some example of Walton’s paintings and video clips of an interview from PBS here.