We recently connected with F. Scott Hess and have shared our conversation below.
F. Scott, looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. We’d love to hear the backstory behind a risk you’ve taken – whether big or small, walk us through what it was like and how it ultimately turned out.
I grew up in a small town in Wisconsin. Nearing the end of high school, I was advised by counselors, teachers, and even my parents, not to go into art but to choose something I could make a living at. Do art as a hobby, they said. I went off to a liberal arts college, Lawrence University, as an Anthropology Major, a choice not any more realistic than art, but what did I know. I was blessed with a first semester of horrible Anthropology professors, one teaching things I already knew, and the other with a monotone speaking style that left half the class biting their knuckles to stay awake. The following semester I switched to art, where I belonged, and transferred to the bigger art department at the University of Wisconsin-Madison for my final two years.
I should mention at that time I was making erotic art, exclusively, in every class, and I was an excellent draftsman. My work turned a lot of people off due to subject matter, but it was very well done. It was hard to ignore, but my professors didn’t see how I could make a career with this subject matter. I applied to drawing shows and competiitions across the country, and got rejected from all of them, and didn’t even get into the UW’s student exhibitions during the two years I was enrolled in Madison.
After graduation I worked for a year as a short-order cook, saving money because I had a dream of going to Vienna, Austria, and being an artist. I studied German for a semester, and learned about Viennese art. I’d never been to Europe, had only been out of the country once on a fifty-mile drive into Canada. People thought I was crazy and very brave to go off into a world I didn’t know, but I had this dream and nothing was going to get in the way.
In Vienna I set up a studio, and accidentally ended up enrolled in the Hausner Meisterschule of the Academy of Fine Art. Within a year I had my first solo-exhibition of erotic art, nearly sold it out, and got a ton of press. I was twenty-four years old. The rest of my life I made a living through art, mostly through sales, but also did some teaching in colleges and art schools. The initial risks taken are what made the art career possible, but at the time I saw the risks only as the thing I had to do, not as something risky that might be a detriment to my career or my life.
Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers.
I was always good at drawing, and from the age of seven made a lot of it. I learned to paint at the Academy of Fine Art in Vienna, and made a living from it from age twenty-three. My work tends toward dark subject matter, so it does not appeal to a wide audience, but I always found collectors who shared that sensibility, who wanted work that piqued their interest and drove intellectual conversations. My works are always the most talked about on their walls.
I learned the necessary skills for my craft, both technical and intellectual, and produce work that captures the attention of my audience. There are painters who are technically more skilled than I am, but few who can combine figural action, narrative intrigue, layers of content, and a monumentality that confers authority to the artist’s statement.
In 1984, when I moved to Los Angeles from Vienna, there was very little figurative realism in the galleries. I made huge paintings, combining Austria’s sex and death themes with Disney Technicolor. Nobody had seen anything like it in California, and my career took off. There have been ups and downs in my art business, but I survived fifty years as a working artist. I’m still kicking the creative stuff out of my brain at a rapid pace.
We’d love to hear a story of resilience from your journey.
A story? Here is a memoir excerpt!; The Professor’s door behind the model stage swung open, its expected, inevitable occurrence still sending a jolt across my shoulders, down my spine. My heart thumped, off a few beats, my muscles tensed. A glance at my watch, five-thirty-five. Over an hour and a half of “free” drawing time, gone already… better than most sessions in this drawing room. A greasy yellow light silhouetted the stout figure of Professor Mikl as he emerged, approaching the benches. His calf-length brown apron splattered with crimson paint, his nearly shaved head, pale marbleized flesh… if not for his enormous tortoise-shell spectacles he’d pass as the Naschmarkt horse butcher who’d sold me a steak Sunday. And the white socks. Always a fresh clean pair of white socks riding up the gap to his pants.
He spoke quietly to the three naked Viennese beauties arranged on the model stand, “Ein neues Tableau, bitte.” They shifted their pose, aligning magically, three graces under strong hot lamps. “Mache all zehn Minuten einen neuen.”
Okay, I thought. Ten minutes. Speed it up. Longer poses, at least half an hour, allowed for the development of anatomy, but Mikl’s timing remained unpredictable. Rumor labeled him a drunk, and he acted the part, belligerent at times, short tempered. He meandered to the other side of the hall and I breathed a little sigh of relief. He’d be paring and slicing many student egos before he got to mine.
Egon Schiele drew in this spectacular amphitheater, antique curved benches stepping upwards in five levels. Every day I chose a new spot, attending the late afternoon three-hour lifedrawing sessions fanatically. By now I’d sketched where Egon drew at least once. Vienna’s cruel light entered through huge windows on two sides, illuminating the middling efforts of sixty students bent over their drawing boards, all awaiting Mikl’s input with practiced indifference.
This marginally well-known Austrian artist, strangely awarded the Akademie’s professorship for Life Drawing, worked in a primarily abstract style. Mu fellow student Loraine said, “Yeah, it’s really weird, but it’s the zeitgeist. Hausner and Lehmden are seen as old-fashioned. Realists. The other profs would like them out. Abstraction rules.”
Mikl’s voice rang out across the room, “Drawing is like driving… you have to react quickly or you’re dead!” He said it at least once every session as he corrected some hapless numbskull’s work. “The figure is like a bundle of carrots. Draw it like that.”
The very first day in class Mikl gave me shit. Seeing my attempt at an accurate realist rendition of the pose, he’d put his face close to mine, earnestly intoning, “Der Realismus ist tot.”
I explained in English I wanted to draw like Michelangelo. I wanted the anatomy to be correct, the shading to curve around the forms, build believable figures. Shaking his head at my idiocy he’d taken my pencils, banged the sharpened tips against the bench to create a dull implement, and ran back and forth over my nudes, turning them into a mass of dark directional lines. I wanted to grab his wrists, restrain him. My fingers trembled, held back. American professors gently corrected a line, but I’d never had one destroy my work.
I thought if I showed him my erotic drawings he’d better understand my goals, so fifteen minutes before the second class I’d presented my portfolio to him in his office adjacent to the life drawing amphitheater. As I turned through the sheets of Strathmore he showed some interest, myskill obvious. He leaned forward to inspect the curved line work, the layered darks. “Wer ist dein Professor?”
“My professor? Hausner.”
Mikl flashed his secretary a pained look, exhaled a poouah, mumbling something inaudible in Wiener dialect. After two more drawings he turned away, no comments, no dismissal. The audience over, I awkwardly zipped the portfolio shut and dragged it off the table. Mikl turned his back to me, picked up a broad brush, with a quick stroke smearing a blotch of vermilion pigment across his three meter square canvas. Rivulets dribbled down like blood from a cut. His secretary opened the door for me, whispering, “Sorry. He hates professor Hausner. It’s mutual.”
Mikl’s abstracted figures actually resembled bundles of carrots, a humorless dry Arcimboldo with a dearth of tricks to perform. One of those insecure professors who thought his students’ work should ape his, muscles or visible anatomy didn’t exist, only gestural direction, lights and darks.
The Herr Professor’s gravelly voice now harangued the student next to me. I readied myself for the onslaught. Not a class passed without it. “Ah, Mister Hausner student. Let’s see what you have today. Nein, nein!” With disgust he studied the three nude women on my paper, drawn as perfectly as I could represent them. “You should be making posters for that strip club in the first district! They like those sexy bodies and big breasts.” The room erupted in unison. My fellow students enjoyed his wit, my daily beat-down, reddened face. Countering his jokes, impossible with my deficient German, would have been a stupid play anyway. One didn’t trade quips with a Herr Professor.
“I draw what I see,” I said, gesturing toward Mikl’s class models, sexy women in their twenties. As I drew their curvilinear shapes they visually presented mere forms, objects expressed in lights and darks, but at each break, pencil paused, I became intensely aware of their sexual beauty as if a switch flipped. The three voluptuous Venuses didn’t look like bundled vegetables to me.
“Nein, you have it all wrong. You see nothing.” The isolated iris of his eyes, brittle shards of blue glass, tried hard to cut me, but his smile truly killed. The thin meatless lips extended up and out, blending imperceptibly under his weighty cheekbones so it appeared his grin crossed his entire face. “These angles are completely false.” Grabbing the conte pencil from my hand he scribbled crudely over my drawing to correct the lean of the figures, completely obliterating the carefully constructed musculature underneath. With a final satisfied glance from paper to models he stood, exclaiming to the class, “From now on we will only have two minute poses.” He assumed I couldn’t focus on individual muscles with only two minutes to draw.
As he left our row the kid next to me leaned over, whispering in English, “Some of us would love to draw like you, but we don’t dare!” The girl sitting beyond him nodded. At the end of the semester students dropped their Akademie grade books in a pile on the model stand for Professor Mikl to grade and return the following session. Without his signature I wouldn’t receive course credit for my life drawing hours, but I didn’t want to give him the pleasure of failing me. I left my studienbuch in my pocket.
Over the next two years I became Mikl’s most diligent student, attending every day, as devoted as a Trappist monk at evening prayer. He didn’t grasp my stubbornness in the face of a disapproving authority figure. I’d dealt with it through childhood, high school, college… a stoic fucking rock. As my figure drawing matured I became very accurate, very fast. Eventually Mikl stopped scribbling over my figures. He thought me hopeless. I’d also learned to triple check my angles, find the central axis, follow the counter balance of the body. Nothing leaned out of place.
At least I owe him that.
What’s the most rewarding aspect of being a creative in your experience?
I don’t expect to have fun while I work (though I sometimes do), and I don’t expect many people to like what I’ve done (a precious few will do), but when I finish a piece I want to step back and think I’ve done something worthwhile, something no one else would have done. In terms of career, I want to look back at the end of it all and say I did my utmost to make the best work I could, that I rarely gave in to the desires for more money or pandering to the expectations of the art world. Achieving what you yourself think is a body of great work is a rich reward.
Contact Info:
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- Twitter: https://twitter.com/fscotthess
Image Credits
F. Scott Hess, Self Portrait with Upturned Collar, 2011, oil on aluminum panel, 24 x 18 inches.