ABOUT THE ARTIST

I started my art career at age fifty-nine, when I could see my business career coming to an end. I’ve been always been a doodler and a drawer of funny faces, but the last art instruction I’d had to that point was a drawing class at Wesleyan, and that was so, so many years ago. In 2003 I reasoned that I should learn to be an oil painter. I knew it was something I could enjoy and get gradually better at for the rest of my life. If I could figure out to pay my living expenses and still have enough time each day to paint, I imagined I could get good enough to have a “name” some day, be known as a better-than-average, or maybe even a good, painter.

The School of Visual Arts is in my neighborhood, so I signed up there in the fall of 2003 for a life drawing class. I had heard and read that drawing is the key to good painting, not only for getting forms correctly shaded and shaped but also for the perhaps more important step of composing the picture, arranging the forms, before applying any paint. My original goal for what I wanted to paint was the classic odalisque, reclining naked women showing all their curves and crevices, only these would be odalisques with their back to the camera, their faces hidden. I still believe that there are vain, and wealthy, women out there who would like to preserve a painting of their bodies at prime and who would hold the “anonymous odalisque” pose for me and still pay me handsomely in actual cash for the finished work. Reality for now has gotten the better of me, however, and I mostly just paint cityscapes, landscapes and the occasional “other interest” painting that may or may not be an odalisque.

Joe Millar, an old school chum and published poet, had the following to say about my first water tank paintings:

“These paintings are kind of strangely silent and portentous-seeming, maybe because of the potential implied by the huge masses of water held aloft, maybe they’re an urban vision of the Aquarian age, maybe because one usually associates such tanks with rural settings where’s there’s only one, or maybe because of the cone-shaped tops which look like a Sufi headdress. I like ‘em, and I like the light you painted.”

Please contact me at gconger26@gmail.com or garyconger@theviewoutmywindow.com if you want to discuss any of this.