Kenyon Cox and John Currin surprised me a little. As I delved further into who they are and why they paint what they do...I've realized they are just painting what they love more than anything, and that's the figure. I'm personally fascinated by the way they both staged their careers around their natural passion. It's inspiring and intriguing that they struggle through what our culture considers morally incorrect to depict just what comes natural to them. I've found John Currin quotes especially inspiring because he is a contemporary dealing with some serious cultural issues, yet just painting what he wants. I feel myself drawn to the figure more than anything through all my years of drawing and doing art, and interestingly, finding a specific context or issue that correlates to my subconscious sketches of the figure.
“Another big realization for me was: Just don’t do things that depress you. I realized if it depresses me, then I just don’t want to get close to it. If it brings me down, I just really can’t get into it. I think a big problem with art school is that it makes people feel like they have to be interested in everything that’s of high quality.”
“But I think there’s not enough time to be interested in those things. And there’s so much that doesn’t depress me. There are aspects of repetition that also depress me. Sterility depresses me. Performance depresses me. Lack of narrative depresses me. All those kinds of cool things bring me down. So that was an important development for me, just realizing that you need to follow your pleasure, at least as a painter. I think any kind of artist needs to, no matter what you’re doing.”
"One of the things I’ve come to accept, and now I see as a good thing, is that figural painting was never particularly progressive; it never had the weight of the more sever modernist movements which had to have this progressive, social message embedded in them. One of the joys of figurative painting is it’s kind of hopelessly retrograde and reactionary, and it can’t really carry a message about the future. One of the charming things about it is it doesn’t really speak to the future; it doesn’t really have that burden. It is something that people love to do, and for that I think it will never die. Just the thrill of making an illusion with colored pigments is too appealing for it to be completely supplanted by photography, videography, or holography. Its fun and it’s beautiful, and it’s hard to keep that down" - John Currin
