Énouement : A Reflection on Art School
Behind the Painting
In this post, you’ll hear directly from Brad about the inspiration behind Énouement, one of the paintings in his show “End of an Era” at Abend Gallery in Denver.
One of my favorite things about loving a painter is seeing an idea evolve—from a quiet conversation to lines in a sketchbook, to a wood panel being cut in our basement, the saw dust tracked up the stairs on Hopper’s paws, and finally to a painted surface. This painting holds so much from Brad’s experience in art school back before I knew him—memories, ambitions, inspiration—and so much that I’ve been privileged to walk through alongside him—grief, hope, and revelations.
Recently, Brad and I along with my dad and brother, visited my high school to present a scholarship in my mom’s memory. The experience was a milestone, a return to a place where I grew up, the same hallways where my mom spent her teenage years. It’s had Brad and I thinking about our younger selves and how much we’ve changed in the years since high school and college. We laugh to think about how much more energy we had back then—we were both so social! I wonder if its the artist’s journey to become more interior with age, to find refuge in solitude? Maybe it’s just the season we’re in. Doesn’t everything change? “Doesn't everything die at last, and too soon?” as Mary Oliver wrote. I think of the Maya Angelou quote: “I didn’t come here to stay…I’m in process.” So much of aging is learning to expect (and accept) change.
You’ve probably heard the Heidi Preibe quote, “To love someone long term is to attend a thousand funerals of the people they used to be.” I recently heard someone flip this on its head and say it is “to attend a thousand births of the person they’re becoming.” It’s a joy to watch those I love change and grow—to see my brother become a dad and my friends move to new places; it’s surprising, often delightful, and always mysterious. Brad and I feel so blessed to have art as an outlet to memorialize these changes—these deaths and births, as it were. Art makes space to share our stories and celebrate or mourn (often both) together.
Thank you so much for spending time with our work. It’s a joy to share with you!
-Alex
énouement Noun. the bitter-sweetness of having arrived in the future, seeing how things turn out, but not being able to tell your past self.
Upon graduating high school in 2012, I (Brad) enrolled at the Art Academy of Cincinnati where I studied painting until 2016. Those four formative years set in motion my career as a painter and my life as an artist. It was at the Art Academy where I met a handful of teachers that really encouraged me to pursue the path in painting that I believed in as opposed to that which was trending among many of the other faculty and students at the time. When I talk to people who didn’t go to art school about my experience studying as a realist painter, they’re always shocked to learn that realism is frequently discouraged and discounted as a “naive” approach to art making. Instead, students are directed to pursue abstraction, non-objective, or installation art. All of these avenues are potentially worthy if they emerge from a skilled artist seeking to synthesize their process down to the essentials. However, it rarely goes this way and students come to school without skill and spend their time philosophizing their way through the skill-void to the applause of their unskilled faculty.
Thankfully, my teacher Connie saw straight through this and stood as a beacon of hope to the few students each year who sought a more traditional approach to art making. Constance (Connie) McClure was an instructor of two classes when I arrived at the Art Academy of Cincinnati or “AAC” as we called it. She just taught two classes (Materials and Techniques, and Drawing) during my time at school but had been a full time professor of Drawing since the 70’s.
Although Connie had the full respect of her loyal students, she was somewhat dismissed by the rest of the school, and she was aware of this. In my first year, Connie went from teacher to mentor and showed me that there were other people in Cincinnati pursuing realism. She directed me to Richard Luschek, a Boston School painter who was working in a small studio on the east side of town. Richard graciously took me on as a private student on Fridays when I didn’t have class at the AAC.
That same year I also met Gary Gaffney who was another teacher near retirement there. Gary was an ex-mathematician-turned artist who taught a wide variety of philosophical/experimental classes such as “The Universe in One Thing” or “Sacred Geometry”. He was loved by all he encountered and took time to learn each student as an individual. My first Gary experience was walking into the school lobby one evening and seeing him dressed in a three piece suit holding a stack of cardboard scraps. He caught my eye, not really knowing who I was, and said “Take this sign and follow me.’ As I walked behind his billowing coat tails through the streets of Cincinnati, I read the cardboard sign in my hands. The words “I’M GREEDY” were scrawled in black Sharpie marker over the corrugated surface. We went as far as Fountain Square in the main Business District of town and then met up with several other students who he had already directed to be there holding other similar handmade signs. I then sat along a brick wall participating in my first ever performance piece, a commentary on Cincinnati’s perception of homelessness.
Gary and Connie shared an office with Christian Schmit on the top floor of our six floor building. Christian was my drawing teacher at the time and he was much younger than his other two colleagues, but significantly older than the students he taught. Christian instilled in all of his students the importance of work ethic. One of his assignments was to take an object from home and draw it 100 times in line; the real kicker was: it was due the next day. This became my first “all-nighter” as I frantically sketched an antique pesticide sprayer I scavenged from a flea market 100 times in the dark echoing silence of the empty 6th floor drawing studios.
For the next three years, these teachers had tremendous influence over my development as a painter and their example as educators would shape the way I’d later approach being a teacher myself. Their little 6th floor office became a well that I returned to daily to drink up what wisdom they had to offer. When I graduated and moved to Philadelphia for graduate school at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, I kept in touch with Connie and Gary, continuing to lean on their guidance. In 2018, I moved back to Cincinnati where I began teaching at the University of Cincinnati and in 2020, I started teaching at the AAC. Returning to my alma mater was a difficult experience because Connie had passed away earlier that year and Gary had retired. Christian had moved on to another school, and that 6th floor office, once alive with their voices, was now empty. Even worse was how empty the entire 6th floor was now that the school had all but cut their drawing program. I was offered a key to their old office so I could use it to meet with students, and I set up at Connie’s desk. Everything was there: sharpened pencils, drawing demonstrations, stacks of books on Michelangelo and Titian, with their many bookmarks just as she had left them. I didn’t move a thing. I returned to this office early each morning in the darkness, sometimes hours before my 8 A.M. class to sit with their empty presence and read through Connie’s books.
I taught “Drawing as Representation” for two years making every effort to show students that skills in observational drawing actually are possible to attain with hard work and the right direction. Some took to it, but most did not, and I soon realized that the change I made was minimal in the wake of a school that worked against my beliefs.
Three years after I’d left the AAC, I found myself sitting in my dining room writing down every note of wisdom I could on the back of a water bill as Gary talked weakly to me through the cold cell phone glass pressed against my ear. He had called to tell me about his terminal cancer diagnosis and the few months that the doctors had given him to live. We talked about the show that I was working on which I already knew would be built around the title “END OF AN ERA.” As we spoke of time, aging, and the meaningful life of artists, I thought of the office. Later that day in the studio, I dug through my drawings and photos from my time teaching at the AAC and began making sketches for a new painting. I decided I wanted to paint a piece that would embody the emptiness I felt in each of those teachers’ absence. The office always had a black circular table in the middle for one-on-one meetings with students, and as I studied it, I realized the potential for a deep void that this could create in the composition. From that point, the rest of the image was built around this central chasm.
The French impressionists developed the visual pun of a chair painted into the corner of an image for the viewer to “rest.” In my painting, I turned all the closest chairs away from the viewer, each of them symbolizing an absent professor and leaving a place to rest the eye. Behind the meeting table is the flat file that housed the heaps of drawing demonstrations, anatomical diagrams, and various grading rubrics that Connie and Gary had left behind. In a way, this odd metallic piece of furniture is like a burial crypt, containing the last remnants of their academic legacy. Sitting on top of this “crypt” is a plaster cast of a mountain lion devouring a hare and through the window behind is the sprawling nocturnal cityscape of the downtown area called Over the Rhine. I emphasized the intensely lit Old Saint Mary’s steeple and shifted its placement directly over the gruesome cast, symbolizing a heavenly pathway upward. The grid of this window was also something that became more meaningful as I painted—it seemed to turn this dark office into a prison cell or cage. Finally, on the far right side of this cage is my own reflection looking into the office from its open door. I kept this reflection subtle, in shape only, as I’ve been doing recently for paintings that feel like a psychological self portrait.
There’s something beautiful about the sound of your own footsteps resonating through an empty building, especially at a place like the Art Academy with its vast industrial hallways and tall ceilings. It always reminded me of the all-nighters I pulled when I was a student there. Being on the other side as a teacher, it didn’t feel right. In a way, this hollowness is how I imagine the last light of a life fully lived might be. Like going back to visit your hometown only to find that in your absence everyone you left there had also gone. Gary passed away before this painting was fully complete and Connie has been gone for five years now. But when I’m alone, standing before my easel in my quiet studio, their guiding voices are loud in my head.
To see more on this painting and others, check out END OF AN ERA at Abend Gallery and sign up for the collector’s preview!
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“I wonder if its the artist’s journey to become more interior with age, to find refuge in solitude?”
I love this thought. I have often felt like I’m failing somehow, that my tendency to withdraw from the world is a profound flaw. I like the thought that it’s a journey. A way to flip my thinking on its head.
I love this painting and its profound sense of inferiority. I also very much appreciate the accompanying essay. I don’t think I’d have noticed the table as void, the chair as resting place, the steeple leading up to heaven.
Or maybe I would if I sat with it long enough. But the essay is an invitation to linger, to look more closely, to ponder.
What a beautiful tribute it is to your teachers. But also to the art of teaching. And to the art of mentorship.
This is poignant. You can feel the void of the passage of time and the passing on of that mantle of teacher. I learn so much from your posts about different facets of art. The artwork is stunning as always and the writing moved me.