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Christopher St John | Episode 567
Christopher St John has been active as a professional artist for 18 years now. Most of Christopher’s career has been focused on painting, but in the past year Christopher has switched over to ceramics.
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You are using creatures in your artwork. Are you personifying them or are you just giving them personality?
Oh, I’m not giving them anything. I feel very strongly in this about that, they are arrivals and I am just a foster or a steward. So I am here, and yes, I sit down and I make the work, right, but I don’t make them, they come from some other place. I know that sounds woo woo woo.So I often feel that when you are working from a creative place we all have access to this depth of thing that is in us and we have this whole history and I always think of the shape of that in terms of form, right, so you lift this nebulous thing up and be present to that energy that comes out and the creative motion that you put into place. Whether it is through the clay that you are moving and listening to that material and moving that forward and trying to align that material with this thing that you are bringing forward. But there is something that happens in that motion of moving forward and bringing and expressing and where it meets that material and where those two places meet something happens, something mysterious that’s special about human consciousness. I don’t sit down and say, Okay, I am going to make a cat. You know, it’s something that I see and I can’t make something, otherwise it turns into crap. It has to speak to me in some way.
How does using themes help direct creativity?
So I have been showing with a small gallery in France for the last nine years. I have been very lucky to have developed a relationship with this gallery. It is called Biz’art Biz’art it is in a little village called Libagi in France. They typically show artists who are kind of in the more Art Brut line a lot more about feeling, a lot more about this idea of personal expressiveness, something so powerful that it needs a voice to express it. I think thematically it’s good to have things that align us on a track and give us a focus. During this period that I was showing in France, one thing that was really important to me was that I had an audience for the things I wanted to say, and I felt like I was able to develop things that I wanted to say a lot more freely than I was able to with American audiences. My ex-wife was deployed to Iraq twice and I had always been very strongly anti-war but those experiences with my story raising our son while she was deployed, her experience with PTSD, you know, the traumas that she suffered, you know, those are themes that I can use in my work but they are also really strong personal experiences that can devastate you if you don’t try and move those and tell those stories so that they are not eating you alive and that is what I was doing with that work. And it really shaped my work through that period. I can speak to these themes that were important to me and I had an audience that was receptive to that, not only in terms of wanting to see it but also wanting to purchase the work too. The patronage is an important part of that as well. Difficulty finding patronage for that work here in the states even though I knew those themes were powerful and they were true, was really frustrating and made me very angry for a long time, that it seemed people weren’t interested in hearing about those experiences and they weren’t interested in seeing work that had anti-war themes.
You have the theme and you have the arrival. How do those two come into play with each other to still have an arrival yet based upon a theme?
Sure, I would say that the theme is just the doorway and has a particular shape and you can frame that doorway however you want. Just like the water that comes through a hose you can channel that how ever you need to whether you want something that is really small or create something that is big and open and flowing. That’s the theme for me.
Do you employ emotion with your characters or try to capture emotion?
Sure, I definitely feel like I bring some emotions to the form, or they bring an emotion, I don’t know. Like these cats that I have been working on this morning, they are sort of sly and a little savage. It seemed like they wanted their eyes to be a little more closed and wanted their mouths to be a little more open and their teeth to be just a little more sharp. So like paying attention to those kinds of things can heighten that sense of emotion for the viewer. But it is also what the drawing seems to want and demand and where I am trying to make it via midwife to make it arrive, I don’t know.
Is it important to capture action with your work?
Yeah, that sense of movement for sure. I love using movement in my work and in my forms. The sculpture that I have been doing, you know, I twist the neck a certain way and kind of push the proportions in one way to create an overall sense of balance between tension and movement in the form. Clay is really great to be able to do that. A lot of the time when I am drawing I can only suggest that because it is flat and sometimes with ink drawings they are not wholly representational. They are suggestive of a kind of representation that I can exploit more with the clay and tweak that. So I love movement and i love being able to use movement in my work. When you have that movement people respond to that. They feel like they want to move with it and get engaged with it to. It’s that sense of being alive.
One of the things I noticed about your plates is that the drawings seem to belong there. But when you are creating a sculptural piece with out the “canvas” to live on, how do you give it a sense of belonging when it is a stand alone sculptural piece?
Well it has to occupy the same space around it as a negative space in a 2D drawing. There is no difference between the two. It’s just that the sculpture has that same relationship in three dimensions, you know, all the way around it. Like an edge will want a certain distance in relation to the form outside of it. Communicating that distance of the viewer, of the participant, it’s like how close are you bringing them in and how far do they need to be and an angle can do that. Just the same way that you do on a plate or on a piece of paper. That angle will define the shape of an edge of your paper. In a sculpture you are the edge, you are the participant so that angle can define the distance.
In a narrative there is a climax and a conclusion. Is it important to keep the climax to yourself and the conclusion to yourself when you are doing a single drawing or a single piece?
Do you know Kouros?
No, I am not familiar with them.
They are these archaic Greek statues, that just smile. They have this very suggestive Mona Lisa smile. They are some of my favorite works of art in all of art history. And I love them because they are just forever and I feel like that’s what art really does best., in that it just exists in this place. The climax is the end of anybody’s life. Whoever come back to that piece of work, like those Kouros, I always come back to them, I come back to that smile. And I know that that piece of work is going to be there for my son’s children and his children and it will exist in perpetuity so long as the marble doesn’t collapse and civilization doesn’t go kaput. That’s what I love about art and that is what I love about the privilege of making art is that you get to create something when it works it can just exist in this space that’s available to people for a really long time.
Book
Wonderful Life by Stephen Jay Gould
Contact
Instagram: @christopherst.john