Today we’d like to introduce you to Spark Boon.
Hi Spark, please kick things off for us with an introduction to yourself and your story.
When I was an undergraduate at CalArts, the atmosphere was volatile, stressful, and incredibly stimulating. I felt like I was tossed into a cauldron of unrestrained experimentation. The clarion call of contemporary discourse ruled the day. The work that was done by my colleagues was unclassifiable. My professors challenged us relentlessly. We had to be able to defend our ideas cogently and coherently. It was truly a terrific education. After graduation, I moved to New York and started working as a freelance critic. I was living in a 150-square-foot studio apartment in Greenpoint, and I was out every night going to openings, poetry readings, independent film screenings, and countless other venues of madcap creativity. It was great, and it was dizzying. I soon fell into a deep and mysterious depression. I began to question the value of all this art. Though I wrote about it for a living, increasingly, I lost my facility for qualitative judgement. After a while, everything seemed liked self-indulgent bloviations designed to obfuscate legibility. All this incoherence seemed like a mechanism by which artists sought to inoculate themselves against critical analysis.
Obviously, for a critic, this was bad for business. As my depression got deeper, I became more and more desperate. One day, on a whim, I dropped by the Art Students League and sat in on a life drawing class. After four years at a major art college, I had yet to ever attempt to draw the figure. It seems like a miracle, but as soon as my charcoal began making its awkward way around my coarse newsprint pad, I experienced an elation that was utterly new to me. I’ve been drawing naked people ever since.
I’m sure it wasn’t obstacle-free, but would you say the journey has been fairly smooth so far?
Well, aside from the depression that I just mentioned, and as a consequence of my desperate mental state, I developed a wicked addition to heroin. Being a junkie in New York City has a glorious and romantic history. I can assure you, the experience was neither glorious nor romantic. It was pathetic from day one.
Thanks for sharing that. So, maybe next you can tell us a bit more about your work?
I love drawing the nude. I love everything about it. I love the tradition, I love the difficulty, I love the anatomy, and I love the erotic nature of the subject matter. I know I’m not supposed to describe life drawing as erotic. I know that it is a time-honored rite of passage for any serious art student.I know that one is supposed to detach. Its obvious subject matter from its formal crucibles. I know that it is wrong to sexualize the art models in a classroom setting. I know the protocols very well. However, if it looks like a duck and walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, chances are it’s a duck. Drawing naked people is about sex – full stop.
What sort of changes are you expecting over the next 5-10 years?
With advent of artificial intelligence and capitalism’s penchant for ruining everything that comes into its path, I think the artisanal nature of traditional drawing will become devalued. But if the question was framed within a timespan of 5 to 25 years, I’m sure the pendulum will swing back. Nothing beats making something with your own hands.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://sparkboondrawings.blogspot.com
- Instagram: @sparkboon
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100065002899324
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/search/results/all/?fetchDeterministicClustersOnly=true&heroEntityKey=urn%3Ali%3Afsd_profile%3AACoAACCgpo8B_pgFSCmPZJ4k_c7GgrJDx5Nru2Y&keywords=spark%20boon&origin=RICH_QUERY_SUGGESTION&position=0&searchId=90ee4837-18dd-4510-83ec-46629d446a21&sid=Ed_&spellCorrectionEnabled=false
- Twitter: @SparkBoon
