The First Artist I Ever Met
Loathing, Fear, and Fred
The first visual artist (it always kind of pisses me off I have to add visual—because everyone is an ‘artist’….I know —deal with it.) I ever met was at my applicant interview for OCA (Ontario College of Art) in the Spring of 1979. I had completed a Summer Program at the AGO (Art Gallery of Ontario) the Summer before, so my portfolio was better than my high school art class projects. But, and I have no idea why I thought this was a good idea…I had on a three piece suit.
The interview was a disaster. The interviewers were a quiet senior student and a gruff old bearded Professor with powerful hands that were missing the ends of some of the fingers, it contributed to his fearsomeness. He seemed to take an instant dislike to me and let me know I wouldn’t survive in an Art College. The student seemed uncomfortable and smiled weakly at me. He then talked about the joys of shitting and that’s when I had enough. I told him that he could go fuck himself and I think I added some other similar suggestions and I left. I had driven the nearly 4 hours to attend the interview with a friend and he had to drive the 4 hours back because I was shaking too much.
I decided to forget that day forever when about a month later I received an acceptance letter from OCA. At the Orientation in September there were photos of all the faculty and there he was, Fred Hagan. I had no idea then that he would become the most important teacher/mentor in my life.
Fred Hagan was loved or loathed, nobody was lukewarm about Hagan. He taught lithography in the Printmaking department which was ruled by an equally terrifying technologist. When you are in a studio and have the potential of melting your hands off with acid, maybe it’s just good practice to have someone who focuses your attention. In my 3rd year I was really dissatisfied with Fine Arts and decided to take an etching class. I got to see Hagan in action with other students and his crits were always blistering and dead on. I was exhausted by the ‘I like the colours’ crits and wanted to be challenged. It also dawned on me that my profane outburst at my interview was exactly what Hagan wanted to hear. He was testing me and I had passed.
In my final year of College I knew what I wanted, to spend as much time working with Fred as I could. I negotiated with my other Profs to submit prints for all my projects and I pretty much lived in the print studio. In our first class In Lithography, Fred came into the studio and began to talk to the group and then stopped talking and went to a large litho-stone on a cart by the window and began drawing feverishly across it’s surface. No explanation, he came back and started class.
Later in the year I was invited to dinner at Fred’s house and he showed me why he had attacked the stone in our first class. He was working on a project that involved light falling across door and window screens, and the morning he walked into class the light and shadow falling across the stone offered an answer and he had to capture it. In his studio in his home he pulled countless prints from his flat files that he had been working on. He lived and breathed making art, it was how he existed in the world.
I was working on a 5 panel, 10’ wide print in Fred’s class, called the Bench. It was a series based on sketches of people that I had seen on the streetcar or along the route from my apartment to school. One of the characters was a burly man who got on the streetcar at 2am and ofcourse sat beside me. He decided to tell me how to fight with a crowbar. “You gotta snap it, buddy, that will break bones, but if ya swing through with it, ya will kill da guy.” I have never had to test his theory.
I brought in my sketch of this guy on the bench and an elderly woman seated beside him to show Fred. Typically, he’ll point to a small part of the drawing and say, “that is the only honest thing you did, the rest is bullshitting us!” But this time I wasn’t prepared for him jumping up and coming at me. He grabbed me by my shirt collar and pushed me up against the wall, nearly lifting me off my feet. He yelled at me, “How do you feel?” Honestly, I felt like I was about to fight a 65 year old crazy man. He let go of my shirt and pointed at the drawing of the elderly woman. ‘How does she feel? She’s seated beside him and you just overlap them?”
It’s not everyday that you are physically assaulted to teach you a lesson about overlap….but he was right. I was treating the woman as if she was a flowerpot. The entire idea behind the Bench was to fight this objectification and marginalization. I know his approach wasn’t for everyone, but it was exactly what I needed. Facility in drawing can be a trap and much of my drawing in school was focused on skills and polishing the surface of my work. Fred questioned every decision or lack of one in a piece. He challenged me to see the meaning in materials and I know that the work that defined my Illustration career returned to those lessons from Fred. It took 10 years of wandering through an arid style desert before I aligned material, meaning, and making into an expression that was mine.
I sometimes wonder what might have happened if I had just kept my mouth shut when Fred had tested me in my interview, I’m sure no letter would have arrived. I’m lucky that the first artist I ever met was also the most important artist I ever met.
Your account of Hagan reads like the Winter Sorbeck character in Chip Kidd's The Cheese Monkeys. I feel lucky to have been informed and challenged by similarly firey (maybe less physical) artists in my life. A fantastic drawing instructor (called 'Arty', really!) once all but destroyed a life drawing I'd been studiously working on, because I wasn't being brave enough. I stormed out, returned, ripped the drawing from the board and then re-stormed out (with admittedly diminished impact).
I thought I was screwed. I was later told that Arty was delighted with my response, because I cared. I still have the drawing and I was never fully able to erase his intervention. Thankfully.
BTW, I think these pieces are stunning and have left me fired up and brimming with ideas for my own work.
Courage + Purpose are words bandied about as if found on aging bubblegum wrapper-
but here it seems the legend and young protege formed a visceral arena to search for both.
Thanks for sharing.