Today we’d like to introduce you to Arthur Gonzalez.
Arthur, we appreciate you taking the time to share your story with us today. Where does your story begin?
I always wanted to be an artist for as long as I can remember. When I was a child, I drew on tablets of paper that my uncle would give me. He worked at the California State Printing Press and would give me boxes of bound tablets of paper that were rejected because they were flawed in some manor and didn’t pass muster. He scooped them up at work and gave them to me to fill up with my cartooned scribbles. This was all before I was six years old. When I was seven, my mother enrolled me in an oil painting class. It was a night class filled with adults, with my mother and me.
I was raised in rural North Sacramento, where our gravel street had no sidewalks, and my neighbors were semi trucks, cows, barking dogs, and also some people here and there. My father and mother were people of little means and worked very hard to put my sister and I through private high school. When I graduated, I wanted to go to art school, but my parents couldn’t afford it, In fact, they couldn’t afford any college. Fortunately, instate tuition gave me the possibility for a college education. I lived at home and paid my way through community and state colleges by working in canneries for seven summers. I had very good professors to teach me how to paint. However, I eventually realized that I had more original ideas as a sculptor than as a painter. In fact, I established a way of seeing sculpture with a painter’s mentality. It was this way of seeing that granted me graduate school in 1979 at the University of California at Davis under Robert Arneson, who was perhaps the most important figurative ceramic artist of his time. I also had Wayne Thiebaud and Manual Neri as professors as well. All for in-state tuition!
Upon graduation with an MFA in 1981, I spent a year as an artist-in-residence at the University of Georgia in Athens, where, through the Southern influence, my work was visually flavored by the drawl of the South as I understood how an art object can have a personality, transforming it to “a subject”; to a tangible something with consciousness. At this time in Athens, the college music scene of the early 1980s was exploding with college bands that self-generated in numbers as art students became musicians overnight with their Georgian take on the New Wave Movement. It was here that I learned about how to make inert sculptures that seemed to contradict staticity, as I witnessed the flailing cathartic bodies dancing to the music every night. I found that by using the wall as a proxy for deep space, I could hang my sculpture which was like hotwiring the work faster into a narrative mind that erased time. These were, in a way of thinking, dimensional paintings instead of wall statues. It was also a way of creating a dramatic stage where the whole point was to control the audience, 180 not 360.
In 1983, I then moved to New York and became part of the East Village Art Scene, where the whole Lower East Side, was buzzed with youthful creativity, making the older established New York art scene appear stuffy and boring. The streets were dirty and dangerous and the subway trains were traveling graffiti sculptures. The neighborhood was packed with hundreds of young artists under 3o years old, Keith Haring, Basquiat, Jeff Koons, and the rest of us. It was here that I had seven one-person shows. I lived off my art and established a degree of notoriety, creating a constant exhibition record as I traveled and met wonderful people through the work that preceded me.
In 1991, I moved to Oakland and got married. I started teaching at the California College of Arts and Crafts. They have since dropped the “Crafts” and moved to San Francisco. Now, we are CCA in SF. I have been teaching there for thirty-three years and most likely will teach another seven; the Bay Area is expensive and I also love to teach. I am extremely fortunate to have a virtual kaleidoscope of former students that are splashed across the country, experiencing life in art, all with their own color of success.
The work that I have created is multi-layered in meaning. It is always metaphorical with figures that activate personal symbols that are also social subjects that imply a poetic narrative. The meaning changes from one viewer to the next, because everyone has their own experience with what is “meaning”. I have enjoyed a career that most would envy. Although I am almost 70, I know that I have 20 more years. I run two miles a day, sometimes three. I take care of my body so that I can “rock on” in my studio every day making the best work that I can.
I’m sure it wasn’t obstacle-free, but would you say the journey has been fairly smooth so far?
In general, the road could have been a lot bumpier, but being someone who is so ambitious, it’s been a career of people saying “yes” and “no”, and the “no” was something that I needed to do something about.
My former professor, Robert Arneson, was famous for telling his students, “You have a problem? Something on your mind that’s bothering you? Make art about it!’
It was this way of thinking that made me understand that the best way an artist can deal with struggle was to make art about it. But not just make art “about” it, but to turn it into actual art.
In the life of an artist, one applies to graduate school for grants, residencies, commissions, gallery representation, and teaching jobs. Since I applied for a few hundred things in my life, the majority of these things ended up the same way, with a letter of rejection.
One day as I was cleaning my office and studio, I came across many rejection letters that were hiding in various stacks of old paperwork. Why do we save these? The interesting thing that was common with all these found rejection letters was that I had commented on the text with cathartic cartoons that illustrated my anger at the moment. Many were quite funny. I also noticed that various words were circled, words like “however”, “although”, and “sorry”. These were the words that sprang out when I quickly skimmed over the letter wondering if it was an acceptance of not. I realized that there were over thirty of these letters and that they would make an interesting exhibition. So I called my dealer, John Natsoulas, and told him the idea and he agreed to give me a show with these “commented upon” rejection letters. He had them framed, and the show was called “Sour Grapes”.
They sold well, and a catalog called “The Art of Rejection” was made. It’s now in its third edition and about 100 pages long. This is an example of creating art out of rejection. Earlier, I realized that if I just sold one for one penny, that I would have the last laugh. Hundreds of copies have been sold.
Thanks for sharing that. So, maybe next you can tell us a bit more about your work?
I am a visual artist. I usually start with ideas about personal symbols and then sketch ideas out with the understanding that I MUST be influenced by my environment. I sketch, sketch, and sketch. I then choose the orientation of the idea, the wall or in the round? Is it an oil painting, or is it a sculpture? The understanding that it’s a time to invent and not to regurgitate another thing that was digested yesterday.
What do you specialize in, what are you known for?
I believe that I am known for being a figurative ceramic sculptor. This is because it is where I was able to rise to the top of a smaller arena. My style is both realistic and animalistic, or figurative romanticism with abstracted metaphors. I am also known for using mixed media with ceramic as a dominant material. There has always been a kind of denial on my part in terms of labels. I am said to be a storyteller; however, I am not. I am someone who examines the power of composition which is a device that guides the eye of the beholder. Through composition, the movement of reading a sculpture or a painting creates a happening where there is a beginning, middle, and end to the path of the eye’s journey. As a consequence, a narrative is created. When in fact there is no story only the architecture of a story, by virtue of how it was built. These are more about personal symbols that are activated by the figure. This is my personal task, to discover new ways to have the eye travel, activating the symbols in new ways, I am not a narrative artist but a student of the NATURE of narrative. This is what sets me apart from others, yet still it is a difficult concept to verbally prove.
Do you have any memories from childhood that you can share with us?
In my first statement, I mentioned how my mother and I were in a night class together, where we learned how to oil paint.
The larger part of that story was how when I was a child, I just drew with a pencil and paper. My father, however was a weekend painter. He was the supervising custodian for an elementary school district during the day, but on the weekends, he would set up a canvas board and oil paints in the kitchen table. I remember him painting nature scenes from magazine photos he collected, or sunsets from a calendar. He also painted on black velvet! They were wonderful. I remember the smell of the oil filling my nose. I remember my father drawing animals from photos out of National Geographic Magazine. He painted and was self-taught. He was self-taught in many ways. He built the house that we grew up in, no one taught him how to build a house, he was self-taught. He grew exotic flowers, flowers that he never saw in Nebraska where he grew up. He had a part-time job at a nursery. He was self-taught.
But, my father in his youth was a seasonal field worker and the family would need to follow the crops as a consequence, my father was pulled out of school so much that he never finished third grade. This was a point of embarrassment for him. Although a natural for self-teaching, he always had an estranged relationship to formal education.
So when my mother (in the interest of doing a fun activity that would be also a good thing for her relationship with my father) enrolled herself and my father in a night class that was just next door from where we lived at the elementary school. My father however was reluctant because of his scarred history with school. He refused to go “back to school”, even though this was just a night class that met once a week. So, as a consequence, I took my father’s place. I didn’t know at the time that I was not the original partner for my mother. I was only seven years old.
I excelled in painting and enjoyed it, and as the years passed and I became a teenager, my father stopped painting. I later asked him why he stopped and he said that when he saw that I was becoming a better painter than he was, he felt like he was in competition with me and decided to stop. There are sad things that happen because of insecurities. It’s natural to not want to feel embarrassed. I wish that I could have had the power to tell him that we were not competing but that we were two creative spirits under the same roof.
Contact Info:
- Website: www.arthurgonzalez.net
- Instagram: arthur7582
- Facebook: Arthur Gonzalez
Image Credits
All photography was taken by me, Arthur Gonzalez
