(Image: "La Cote Rose Brittany" by Henry Isaacs)

Henry Isaacs has earned degrees in printmaking from the Slade School and in painting from the Rhode Island School of Design, and has received numerous honors for his bold, impressionistic works, including honors from the Pollock-Krasner Foundation, The Boston Globe Foundation, Hitachi Foundation and the Royal Academy of Arts in London. Over the last thirty- plus years the natural and inhabited landscape have evolved as the consistant subject for Henry Isaacs' pictures. From gestural abstractions to more realistically defined images, these have clear origins from his many years of observational, anatomical and studio work. He has curated and coordinated many special arts projects and has many paintings in various collections throughout the country.

When did you first realize that you were going to be an artist and when did you first start making art?
I started calling myself an artist in high school; art school in the late sixties was a continuation of the same romance. Six years later I realized that I couldn’t draw to save myself, and went to graduate school. It was in the UK, after grad school, and I had begun teaching in various art schools, that I realized the enormity of the vocation and passion that I had chosen. My students became my most influential teachers.

A great friend of mine is fond of quoting Hokusai’s last words at age one hundred, “If only I had another ten years, I could have become a real artist.”

Who or what inspires you?
I love the puzzle of working from observation, the fun of interpreting a three-dimensional world to two dimensions. Lately landscape holds my attention, but anything really: still life, figures, it’s all the same business.

Many people, artists and non-artists inspire me. My children's care for a global community inspires me. My wife, Donna, employs extraordinary skills and magic to our Island’s two-room school. There are so many citizens of this tiny town who give so unselfishly to the welfare of us all living on these couple of islands. If I need to pick an artist, than that would be Ashley Bryan, my long time neighbor and friend on Little Cranberry Island. For over eighty years, Ashley combines his painting of an observed natural world, to a narrative one to describe and interpret the essential spirit of his Afro-Caribbean and African American traditions.

Is (was) anyone else in your family in the arts?
Both of my parents were painters; my late wife, Lisa, was a graphic designer.

Are you self-trained or did you go to art school?
I went to the Rhode Island School of Design as an undergraduate. I received a graduate degree from the Slade School of Fine Art, University College London.

(Image: "Off Isleford" by Henry Isaacs)

Is the process of creating your art long or short?
It can be either. It can be easy, painful, and completely exasperating. I might finish a picture in a day, or I can discover a canvas from twenty years ago and rework it into life or death. Increasingly I encounter my pictures in homes or public settings, and I become either horrified that I let the thing out of my studio, or astonished that the piece worked out so well.

Tell us something about your work.
I paint from both location and from my memory of place. I use observation very carefully to construct my images. I never take photographs. All of my canvasses are started on site, and none of them are ever finished out in the landscape anymore. There’s something that happens in the studio that allows me to complete the thought more completely than the strict observational approach that I once followed. In the studio I can recognize the job again, and understand that I am creating a unique two-dimensional reality. It’s the picture that counts, the paint, brush, canvas and frame. I often balk at the description of my work as ‘plein-aire’. While I use the natural world to conceive a picture, I often limit my work outside to unfinished notes. In this way I allow myself room to invent and to employ emotion and experience to complete the project.

Do you have a subject matter that defines you as an artist?
For the last twenty-five years it is certainly the landscape. I have been fortunate to be sent to some of the world’s most beautiful places to paint. Prior to that it was the figure almost exclusively.

What makes you stay with a particular subject matter? Why are you drawn to it?
Well the first truth, is that, on returning to the States in the mid eighties, I quickly found that there was no market for figurative work. At least there wasn’t enough of one to sustain my young family. In the UK and Italy it had been the figure that collectors seemed to respond to. I simply enjoy painting, and if the marketplace was constructed differently, I might just as happily paint in and about an entirely different menu of subjects. However, I have lived in rural, isolated settings for most of my life. The natural world is the setting for my life every day.

How do you stay motivated?
I’m not sure I ever consider motivation. I paint every day. Days that I don’t work, feel somehow incomplete. The question for me is how to deal with the rare times that other obligations require me to be away from the studio.

What have you been working on lately? Are you experimenting with anything new?
Some generous collectors and clients have given me the chance to work quite large scale. I am continuing some commissions that range up to ten by twelve feet. As much as possible I somehow drag these canvasses out to the site and start them outside. The very largest I must work from half sale or smaller studies. I somehow have become known for a very pungent palette, lately I’m trying to cool these colors and play with closer values.

Has your medium changed from when you first started out?
When I was an undergraduate Painting Major, I did Printmaking almost exclusively. While I was earning my graduate degree in Printmaking at The Slade, I worked mostly in pencil and slavishly paint from the figure.

There’s something about oil paint that I find compelling. I never tire of its goo, it’s drips, the extraordinary brush marks that can be left on the paint surface.

What advice would you give to an artist just starting out?
Be careful what you wish for. I have been extraordinarily lucky.

I often tell parents who boast of their child's prodigious talent, “Don’t let your children grow up to be artists.”

It’s a hard life. Emotionally, economically, socially, it’s all quite isolating

It’s also a gift of a candy shop for which we need to be humble.

When given the opportunity to chat with a younger artist, I suggest that they learn the world. They must learn to read, to write, to understand other cultures, work to help others who have fewer choices in life.

Then and only then, be an artist if you must if you can find no way out of it…only if you cannot do anything else each day.

What kind of comment do you despise the most when overheard at one of your openings?
I actually enjoy almost any conversations or reactions to my pictures. There are no wrong comments about art. I am grateful to people who speak up and let me know their reactions good, bad or unclear. Every work of art is a communication; if I do not have the opportunity to hear from others, how can I judge the success of my attempts?

What kind of comment pleases you the most when overheard at one of your openings?
That my paintings demonstrate and offer optimism and joy.

(Image: "Evening on Alagash" by Henry Isaacs)

How have you handled the business side of being an artist?
Usually not well. I always have wished that I had more of a business or marketing background. I’ve lobbied for the inclusion of these kinds of courses in the art colleges where I’ve taught. There are such taboos about an artist talking of the monetary worth of a picture!

There are very few artists or gallery directors that enter the field with either interest or ability in business. I used to be the strongest supporter of the gallery ‘system’. Now in this most current recession, I feel that there needs to be a fundamental change. Perhaps there needs to evolve a new kind of gallery whose purpose is to enable more direct personal access between client and artist. We currently use a nineteenth century business model in a twenty first century world. None of us can afford it.

Do you have any outside interests other than art?
I try to help the communities in which I live and paint. I try to find ways that I can contribute in the fields of health and human rights, in this country and in the developing world. Usually this only amounts only to giving away dozens of pictures each year for them to be used in fund raising efforts. I’d like to find a more activist role in these arenas.

Are you disciplined about your creative process (in other words, do you treat the process like a job, where you keep particular hours in the studio), or are you more spontaneous?
Art is my only job. Outside of my family, it is also where I derive the most pleasure and satisfaction. My problem is how to cope with time that I must spend away from the studio.

How would your life change if you were no longer allowed to create art?
An astonishing question. However I do appreciate the privilege of being an artist, and I m conscious that there are many other ways that society needs its individuals to contribute. Lecturing in Cuba in the early ‘80’s, I was once asked, “Professor, How does your art help your people?” I have never been able to answer that question.

What is the best part of being a full time, working artist?
Well I’ve not really been much of anything else. I don’t think that I know how to fairly compare my passions, my life to others'.

What's the worst part of being a full time, working artist?
I get lonely. I frequently run out of money.

Do you have any upcoming shows?
No. However my involvement with the new Islesford Dock Gallery, on Little Cranberry Island, seems to keep me busy with commissions and group exhibitions.

Where can we find your work?
The location with the greatest range of my work is at The Islesford Dock Gallery. Additionally, you might look at Gallery One in Nashville, Tennessee.

For more information on Henry Isaacs and to see more of his work, please visit www.henryisaacs.com.

- Brenda Bonneville, editor

---

Add this page to your favorite Social Bookmarking websites

Comments

Add New RSS

artist Michael D. Stevens 2010-06-22 19:30:14 That's me ! Thank you for the adjustment. I'm a big fan Of Henry Isaacs! "Spike" aka Michael D. Stevens

henry isaacs murray ngoima 2009-11-13 07:52:59 this is a fine interview! so true to henry, i can hear his voice and see his face, watch his movements, as i read it. i appreciate especially everything he says about painting. thank you!

Right bar issue (text cut) with Safari - FIXED! Hi Spike 2009-11-11 11:38:28 Thank you spike for letting us know about this issue (text cut in Safari). We fixed it. Best regards, Thierry (media director)

spike 2009-11-10 18:45:00 Is it possible to see all of the interview with Henry Isaacs? The right sidebar covers some of it. Thank you.

Write comment
Name:
Email:	do not notifynotify
Title:
UBBCode:	-color-aquablackbluefuchsiagraygreenlimemaroonnavyolivepurpleredsilvertealwhiteyellow -size-tinysmallmediumlargehuge

3.26 Copyright (C) 2008 Compojoom.com / Copyright (C) 2007 Alain Georgette / Copyright (C) 2006 Frantisek Hliva. All rights reserved."