Alright – so today we’ve got the honor of introducing you to Chris Fontaine. We think you’ll enjoy our conversation, we’ve shared it below.
Chris, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. Learning the craft is often a unique journey from every creative – we’d love to hear about your journey and if knowing what you know now, you would have done anything differently to speed up the learning process.
I learned to paint in the abstract expressionist style with palette knives through complete trial and error. When you use a painting knife the results of the intermixing of different colorful paints can provide and immediate and beautiful results even from a novice. When I first started I thought I was incredible because I was able to create some really beautiful gestural marks and create some colorful paintings. However, a colorful painting with some interesting marks doesn’t always make a good, great, or even decent painting and that is what took me the longest to learn.
To speed up my learning process, I wish I had started to study the masters of abstraction earlier and more intensely. With abstract art, the greatest thing you can do to get better in my opinion is not necessarily painting, its studying the originators of abstraction and learn all you can from them. I love starting with the first and second generation New York abstractors, anyone from the Black Mountain College, the facility at the Bauhaus. They went through so much struggle to create and develop the art of abstraction and failed (and succeeded) a lot at so many different aspects of the art creation process. Through studying them, you can save years and years of struggle and hardship by understanding how your process is standing on the foundation of their process.
Chris, 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’m Chris Fontaine, a abstract expressionist artist from San Diego, California. I got into art when I was 18 when I went to school for video game art and design. Eight years ago I went to a museum that was showing large scale abstract work and from that point on I knew it was the only thing in life that I wanted to pursue. I create large scale non-representational abstract artwork with a focus on color and intuitive mark making.
Through color and marks I create portals or mirrors for the viewer to use to look into themselves, or just enjoy and beautiful painting. I create very complex work with dozens or hundreds of layers of colors, knife strokes, drawings, and mixed media to enable the viewers brain to focus on the complexities of the work, allowing the sub-conscious to wander and ponder at its own pace. I believe this leads to great introspection and insight into ones own life. I try to find the balance between using high level art fundamentals, color theory, and intuitive mark making to create a beautiful image with the psychological aspects of helping people open up and heal trauma through artwork.
If I would want people who are reading this to know one things about my work is that I care very deeply about and engage with it earnestly from both an academic and spiritual standpoint. I study older artists (I find contemporary art in the vein of what I do to be distracting), I sketch constantly and make small studies, I take classes, read every book on color theory I can find, listen to lectures online, travel to view work, paint constantly, and pour my life’s energy into learning how to create beautiful, abstract, art. I also know that this one sided approach is a great way to make mediocre, soulless work. The “expressionist” in “abstract expressionist” means that when I stand into front of a canvas I’m going to have a spiritual/religious experience with my work and enter a meditative state where my subconscious takes over and that’s when I create
Putting in the countless hours of studying, sketching, and learning before trying to create a expression of the human condition allows for me to, when in a sedative creative state, to be able to create from the center of heart right where I want to create from. Art is like math, you have to be able to show your work. While guesswork, experimentation, and “just feeling it” are certainly all apart of my creative process they are built on a foundation of rigorous study.
In your view, what can society to do to best support artists, creatives and a thriving creative ecosystem?
The best way to support artists is to flat out, give them opportunities to make a living through their artwork. The greatest boost to the Arts in America was the Federals Arts Project that gave stipends of money to American artists as a part of the New Deal to employ them and support their work. The art that came out of that program defined American art and set the foundation for everything we love in the arts in America today. It is a case and point that Federal aid and taking a financial risk to stand with artists can create a creative eco system that we all as human beings gain infinitely from.
Too many artists I’ve met have stopped creating because it takes so much time to create, and learn, and pursue the business aspects of being a artist in modern times without an immediate financial payoff. For artists, it often takes years and thousands of hours of diligent practice, spending time alone, investing thousands of dollars, and working their hands to the bone to come to a point where they can create artwork that can even be considered good enough to show the public let alone sell.
Artists should always work day jobs until they don’t have to and can support themselves through selling their artwork, and many times they don’t get to that point. But subsidizing their income through grants, federal aid, and general community interest we can give artists the availability to grow and create great works. If we want the world around us to be beautiful and to for all of us to enjoy the gifts that the arts gives us as a society, we have to fund it.
What’s the most rewarding aspect of being a creative in your experience?
The most rewarding aspect of being am artist for me is when someones sees my work and their eyes light up very so slightly at the sight of my work. It’s not a look of love or admiration for my work, but its a pique in their curiosity towards art. Even if they look at my work with disgust and think its some contrived, banal attempt by an artist to fulfill some inner struggle that is adjacent to ego stroking, I’m happy. To be a small cog in the machine that is art and to be able to show it to people is such an incredible gift. Everyone in the world has art that will affect them, and as artists we get to find those people and unlock whatever it is that we are supposed to unlock inside of them. Whether its helping to heal trauma, give someone hope, show an injustice, or just look good behind a couch we get to be what raises the interest of the people around us and I couldn’t be happier to share in that.
Contact Info:
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chrisfontaineart/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/chrisfontaineart/