We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Slate Quagmier. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Slate below.

Alright, Slate thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. Can you talk to us about how you learned to do what you do?

I took my first art class on a lark during my senior year of high school. I had an extra period in my schedule and needed to take something. Just a few months into the school year, I was hooked. I learned how to draw that year. I learned to paint years later. Again, I had some free time and took a painting course at community college while I was out of work. I was taught by a master, LA-based artist M.A. Peers. I took two semesters of her intensive courses. We started with the foundations using a modern, restrictive palette to get us focused on color mixing.

I was fumbling around for a few years knowing how to draw but not paint. I really wished I had taken the painting courses sooner, but maybe that struggle was exactly what I needed. When I took the first course, I was ready and knew what skills I was lacking.

In my current series of acrylic still life paintings about COVID-19, I draw off of a broad skill set. After years of being obsessed with color mixing, I’ve been more focused on composition. It’s been a rewarding experience working on this project. I get to indulge my simultaneous love for acrylic as a medium and Baroque art.

I’m my own biggest obstacle. When I get stuck I tend to bang my head against the wall and think my way through a solution, instead of putting it aside and working on another piece. It’s great for figuring out problems, but brutal when you’re trying to build a body of work. It’s a side effect of my training as a scientist. We tend to keep working on a project for years at a time until we get it right.

Slate, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?

I went to college in Rhode Island and earned my master’s degree from UCLA. I’ve always been a bit of a magpie with my education. I studied art, chemistry, physics, and computer science at five different schools. My science background doesn’t always show up in my art directly. I worked in a materials science lab for a few years making coatings and films. When I got serious about painting I approached it like it was a coating I was working on in the lab. Many of these films I made had optical properties; that’s what a painting is: a film with optical properties. It also really facilitated my love for acrylic painting in particular. Acrylic is a modern material made in a lab, an environment I’m familiar with. In most ways I think it’s superior to oil.

I was floundering for a while after college. I didn’t know what art I wanted to do. I read How to Get Hung by Molly Barnes. She highly recommended artists choose painting, unless they already specifically had another medium in mind they wanted to pursue. I took her advice, that’s how I ended up as a painter. It was only much later that I fell in love with it.

When COVID hit and we were sent home from work, I didn’t have a studio because I was in a temporary living situation. I grabbed some supplies that I had stashed in my office and painted in the hallway in my apartment. I decided to make a series of paintings about the pandemic and thought about what genre I wanted to use. I thought about it for maybe two seconds before I decided on still life-because I love it. I find it really beautiful all the ideas that are connected to the things we leave behind. So many stories can be told sometimes from just a single object.

Here in California, I started out in Los Angeles, lived for a while in the Bay Area, and just recently moved further north to Eureka. I’m slowly making my way up the coast.

What do you think is the goal or mission that drives your creative journey?

I actually have two! I want to learn as much as I can about Old Master painting, and I’m out to prove acrylic is every bit as good as oil paint. When people casually dismiss acrylic as a medium, comparing it unfavorably to oil, it really irks me. Acrylic has a steeper learning curve to get the paint to behave the way you want, but it also gives you more freedom. It comes in a wide variety of textures, there is no ordering of fat over lean, the paint dries quickly so it doesn’t bother me if I make a dozen layers on a section of a painting. Oil makes you wait a long time between layers. Acrylic paint tends to have a more matte finish when it’s dry. A topcoat of gloss medium or varnish will get it looking like an oil painting.

I geek out every time I’m in the museum looking at Old Master paintings, particularly if they are Baroque-my favorite era. The pieces are so cleverly constructed, like a well engineered machine. I’m constantly finding new things to learn and try out in my own work. For instance, a lot of Baroque paintings limit the amount of opaque paint in the background areas, and use an excess of it in areas meant to be brought forward. Rubens sometimes left just a transparent ground for shadows. There’s always something to learn, I’m sure I will find something new in a few months.

Are there any books, videos or other content that you feel have meaningfully impacted your thinking?

I was recently reading an old coffee table book biography of Fragonard. Reading what art historians had to say about his painting, as well as letters from his teachers, helped me see things I hadn’t noticed before. Also, it’s important for me to read about what people at different time periods thought about a work of art. It changes over time. I love to listen to audiobooks while I paint. I recently started Ken Follett’s Pillars of the Earth. That should keep me occupied for a while.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.slatequagmier.com/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/slatequagmier/?img_index=1
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/slate-quagmier-39bbb79b