One might think being born in 1929 would create a sentimental bond with the economy, as we struggled to grow together through the depression and war toward prosperity. But in truth my father did the struggling, my brother went to war, and when I chose the life of an artist, the economy went its way, and I, another. I was attracted to the life of an artist to justify my obsession with drawing, but also because it seemed to extend one's adolescent license for freedom and irresponsibility –it promised there would be no need for dreary meetings with people bent on Accomplishing Things, and the dress code was much more in harmony with my studied carelessness. My father was far from happy with this decision, saying, "It's OK to be an artist, if you can paint like Rembrandt."
It has been a wonderful life, but I've strayed often from my personal vision of How an Artist Should Be, and my painting has taken some astonishing turns. I continue to be surprised that the inspiration for my work of the past quarter century has been, God help us, television. Or, more precisely, television and art history. This sounds so strange, even to me, I must flash back to puzzle out how it came to be.
Art school, Boston, late forties – the Massachusetts College of Art was largely devoted to preparing public school teachers. I studied every day a sort of sixth generation Impressionism, painting from the model, swept away by the heroism and romance of the artists' lives as told in John Rewald's new books on Impressionism and Post-Impressionism. My other principal reading seemed to be anything I could find by Robert Benchley, S.J. Perelman, James Thurber and P.G. Wodehouse.
Fifties – Japan, Korea, Yale. Navy Combat Art, Tokyo. Great freedom to send myself to Korea, get scared, send myself back to Tokyo, where I'd finish war scenes and admiral's portraits and ship them off to the Naval Archives, Then I would turn my time to courting a lovely Japanese lady who became my wife and the devoted mother of two fabulous children, Danny and Amy. I became an overnight abstract painter under the influence of a modern Japanese school of calligraphy, had my first show there, and applied to study with Josef Albers at Yale. "Connor, you're not Japanese", he'd say, but I loved him and his enormously influential course in the Interaction of Color.
Sixties - With the help of a friend at Air France, I got to paint in Paris for a year. When I came back I took a job at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. Researching and writing a script every week for my role as host of the WGBH program Museum Open House, a half-hour gallery talk broadcast weekly in Boston and New York and sent around the country for four years, nearly ended my life as a painter. But I discovered I was a ham, with astonishing freedom to write what I wanted to, an instant expert on the art of the world. As my own art declined, I became interested in TV’s possibilities as an art form.
Seventies - In my next job I organized the world's first museum exhibition of video art, Vision and Television, at Brandeis University's Rose Art Museum. The New York State Council on the Arts beckoned, I became their video art and TV grants man, and later in the decade I collaborated with Nam June Paik, William Wegman and Bill Viola.
The Eighties meant running the Education Dept. at the Whitney Museum of American Art. The fun part was to make award-winning films and videos of their collections and Biennials for public television. The most astonishing part was it energized me to get back into painting in a big way. I decided to mine those years I had spent in "popularizing" art, and to examine that muddled mental museum most of us carry around, full of reproductions on posters and tote bags. I borrowed a now familiar trick from video, called "chroma key" which allows one to switch backgrounds easily, to marry and intertwine masterpieces, revealing surprising new narratives. The critics call it "appropriation" I prefer piracy – creative piracy, that is. It's all done with love – it's an honor to spend hours trying to walk a few steps in the shoes of the great ones. In the future, my art may take a new turn ...
I hope it will surprise me.
I fell in love with writing when doing TV scripts, and in recent years that has meant plays, comic essays, light verse, and odd observations – all part of the package, and for whatever it's worth, I'm very pleased to share it with you. Thanks for joining me - I hope you enjoy it.
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