We were lucky to catch up with Alan Stewart recently and have shared our conversation below.
Alright, Alan thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. 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.
That’s a really tricky question, there’s an element to making art I’ve always just understood. The intuitive sense of what feels right… the way color combinations evoke an emotional response and the realization that those emotional responses are a language that can be spoken successfully. I think that’s the part you learn sort of by accident, you do something that makes you feel a certain way, then when someone else speaks about their impression of your work, you find out it translated for them on an emotional level. The first time that happened was the moment I got hooked, that’s when I wanted to be an artist.
I think formal education for artists is a double edged sword if you have that intuitive approach. On one hand there’s so much you don’t know about materials, composition, technical understanding of perspective and shading… then you learn those things intellectually and awkwardly put them into practice until you can actually digest them. Until those things become automatic for you, they ruin your work and you don’t understand why it’s happening.
At least for me, I did have an intuitive grasp of a lot of the things I was learning and there were small bits of information that refined that understanding, the rest was just an exhausting internal dialogue of doubting that understanding. I really wish someone could have explained some fundamental things about the education process to me while I was involved in it, I think I would have been less conflicted about it. These fundamentals of art have to be absorbed by making art, lots of making followed by a lot more making until what you make reflects the understanding. The only real way to accelerate that is to keep working and be engaged with your work, I found the the way to slow it down, by endlessly questioning myself at every turn and trying to rationally correct the course… hoping to recapture that effortless communication that I had fallen in love with early on.
Going back to the materials aspect of things though, I find it endlessly fascinating! I love to experiment with the physics of art, the physical properties and the behaviors of the interactions… I love knowing that the binder in watercolor is gum arabic… I love knowing that oil paint doesn’t dry by evaporation, it absorbs oxygen and goes through a chemical change called oxidation. I get giddy when I can exploit the behavior of a material in a new way.
I minored in printmaking in college, it made sense for me because I had been a graphic designer and a screen printer commercially prior to going, Taking that modern industrial knowledge into stone lithography was really interesting and I think it led me to be a little more playful about it. Gum Arabic is painted onto the stone where you don’t want it to absorb ink and it resist the acid used to etch the areas where you do, the acid is water based. My professor warned me not to let the acid sit too long because it would slowly dissolve the gum arabic and create a pattern. “a pattern?” I said, he said “yeah, a reticulation pattern.”, it’s essentially a series of organic lines along the edge of the water that have a higher concentration of pigment as the water evaporates. It looks a little like the deposits of sand that are a little thicker at the edge of a wave as the tide goes out on the beach. I got obsessed with making a composition that incorporated the reticulation patterns. The result was a field of black and white daisies with a strange waterlogged effect, interesting but ultimately just too strange to be satisfying. Some experiments dead end that way, The curiosity is satisfied even if the art isn’t successful.
The same professor explained why lithography works in simplest terms… oil and water don’t mix. If you alternate oil based materials and water based materials, you are able to create a negative image on a permanent surface that produces a positive image as a series of prints. I was fascinated with what happens WHILE oil and water isn’t mixing, if you paint a thin glaze of color in oil then apply water you get displacement…a thin bit of the oil glaze clings to the primed panel and most of the oil wants to rise to the surface of the water and float. The effect is that you leave a mark in the shape of the water droplets with a slightly darker edge around the borders. If you’re careful in your timing, you can blot the water drop and remove the line. I made hundreds of oil paintings with that effect and the results were eventually almost atmospheric, if the glaze color and the water pattern is right, it feels like rain drifting through an atmosphere. The results are like the first time I communicated a feeling with a color combination.
Learning to make your art is finding a way to stay engaged with your work while not interfering in what comes naturally from your experiences, I think. There is no way to speed that up. Curiosity is the seed of learning.
As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?
I live in Raleigh, NC with my wife of 15 years and my father in law, my step daughter just moved here last year after college and some travelling, and we’re having the best time of our lives together. I’m so very proud of her, she’s got a few of my best traits and a few of her moms, the rest is better than both of us. I share a studio with my best friend and we’ve spent the better part of a year making it a great place to work. We sublease the front to a couple of really talented artists to make it all work, and financially it almost makes sense.
I still take commercial decorative painting jobs at this point, but really hope to wind that down over the next couple of years. I’ve carved out a niche business doing decorative finishes for bars and restaurants and use those funds to buy studio expenses as well as the time there. I think it’s important as an artist in the modern world to not force your art to turn a profit, it;s better to sell some of your skills than to allow your work to go in a commercial direction to suit your financial needs. My artistic evolution was always toward communication of experiences and feelings, which led me to abstract painting and sculptural installations. There’s no real harm in exercising the brushwork to turn a profit instead of just making pictures to pay for groceries.
I’m proud of that, I make work that stands on it’s own, representing my highest ideals and values. That didn’t happen until I was willing to finance its’ creation without relying on it to return on the investment.
I typically work in series with multiple paintings in progress at once. I use mostly oil paint, but also water-based materials, and I work on cradled panels hanging directly on walls. My palette is a glass-topped table, which rolls with me from canvas to canvas. Often, my finished work peers through layered glazes and velatura. In this way and within this environment, I am able to allow my ideas and intuitions to find form.
My latest work explores the interesting play of first introducing images and then, perhaps, denying them full form in my abstractions. This artistic dance allows for distinct spaces to emerge on the canvas, places that I hope find deeper connections with the viewer. Each time I enter the studio, I want to create art that imagines tunnels from reality to imagination, back and beyond. My paintings are abstractions hanging on the verge of a narrative, constantly plying a deep space in which archetypes seek form through shapes and lines. I bring myth to my canvases to explore our modern world.
My work continues to be seen in both group and solo shows, including at the Contemporary Art Museum in Raleigh. I’ve received grants and awards, including the United Arts Council Emerging Artist Grant. My paintings reflect my decades-long evolution from rural North Carolina to cities along the eastern seaboard. I studied at Lenoir Community College and the Savannah College of Art and Design and held studios in Georgia, Florida and now, at present, in Raleigh, North Carolina.
Can you tell us about a time you’ve had to pivot?
It was 2005 and I had a great relationship with a gallery in Raleigh that was opening a second in Atlanta. I was young and it seemed like a great idea at the time to move to south Florida to manage an art supply store. I met my wife there and we fell madly in love, 2008 rolled around and the economy crashed. Both galleries closed, we both lost our jobs and started to really struggle, I worked for a few galleries there hanging shows and shipping paintings, but they weren’t doing great either at the time, no one was… then I found a decorative painter that was doing traditional European techniques in a modern style for high end clients in Palm Beach. That clientele is recession proof. It helped for awhile but it was seasonal, the rest of the year I did graphic design and print brokering for screen printing shops. Businesses were struggling to stay open, much less produce merchandise. In 2015 I formulated a plan to move my family out of Florida. I found a screen printing job in Raleigh and called up friends. I had 4 that were willing to let me stay in their guestrooms for a week while I was working to pay bills in Florida. These beautiful people hosted me for one week a month in rotation and I clocked every hour I could to change our fate. It felt like a lifetime but we did it. Moving out of Florida was the biggest ordeals I’ve ever gone through, second only to trying to support a family in Florida. I screen printed for awhile, then did some decorative painting for a local guy before starting my own company. That was the longest period I had ever gone without making art and I think it was just short of a year.
Is there mission driving your creative journey?
My journey has always been about understanding life and it will continue to be that. It’s a really odd thing we’re all going through together, we all have these bits we inherited and we carry them around in our heads, letting those things influence our decisions and shape our lives. I think the mission is to become the best version of yourself you can imagine and for me that means becoming the finest artist I can be. Art for me is an expression of living and a record of my life.
Contact Info:
- Website: www.gastewart.com
- Instagram: @galanstewart
Image Credits
Brian Mullins Photography 2023