Duncan Simcoe Santa Ana CA Age 67
What keeps you excited in the studio? The term ‘excited’ isn’t part of my studio lexicon. I’m either satisfied with what’s happening, or frustrated. Over the years I’ve learned to not get upset about being frustrated anymore than you get upset about breathing; it just happens. I do feel something like happy when I get a clear indication of what to do for the next 2-3 pieces; that’s a very nice feeling.
Looking back at your trajectory as an artist, how would you say your work has developed? That’s a big question. For the first few decades of my career, I was working with conventional materials; oil on canvas, charcoal on paper etc..but .it always felt like I was working, at least partly, on someone else’s turf and that the subject matter was also somehow already built-in to that. No doubut that was because my my extensive education in art history, no criticism intended, but it did lock-in a set of expectations and models of successful image-making. Initially, this was a satisfactory arrangement. If you already know what success looks like, it’s not a big deal to emulate that, and feel good about yourself. Once I mistaked my way into tar paper though, when I was about 50, I found that I had been given the keys to a new kingdom. I could still work with familair tools (oil paint, and brushes) but another array of things became available; anything that I could scrape, buffet or incise with; a whole new physicality to me. Also, embedded in the material was this graphic language and vision that was there in fits and starts in previous work, way back to my undergrad days, but the substance and visual characteristic of this material focused this and talked back to me in ways that were very clarifying. It also gave me a whole new arena to work out my fundamentally process-driven manner of creating form and composition. So, looking back I’d say that shifting the material support for my work was a radical break, but one that ‘merely’ transformed tools and systems that I already possessed. I guess you could say that it fulfilled them.
What role do you think the artist has in today’s society? That’s another big question. Very broadly speaking, artists are un-authorized image makers. Authorized image makers are people cranking out illustrations or gaming imagery, animation etc…. these objectives are demanding in their own way regarding techniques and vision, but they are also beholden to massive industries and production chains that govern what is produced, and the results are always quantifiable in terms of bucks. Not that I’m against making money! But as things to be experienced, their related visual products are meant for fast assimilation, like drugs, and they dominantly feed or maintain a very familiar range of passions. On the other hand, I frame-up work by the contemporary artists I admire as an extension of the voice crying in the wilderness; some vision of what it is to be alive NOW rendered through a sensitivity not on the patroll of a corporation or government, acting on actual materials. I am a real champion of incarnational activity, whether on a personal level or artistic; where the artist is engaged with rendering the invisible into material forms or structures. You are getting something unavailable anywhere else; whether that is affirming the way that painting can be beautiful in and of itself (Marie Thibeault comes right to mind here as an LA based painter I admire) or engaged in some form of socailly dislocating critique, or an ambodiment of an interior narrative. As for some kind of measurable effect? (apart from giving a certain level of the collecting class more things to buy!), that’s harder to say. I recall something that William Kentridge said about his decsion to be an artist, he felt that, for himself, the outcome needed to be something more than ‘self therapy’. That clearly informed his willingness to engage with the social issues resident in his particular corner of the globe. Nobody thinks that his art ’caused’ the end of Apartheid; it seems more like a kind of witness to events, or that the will to have it end existed. But then, I wouldn’t knock self therapy as such. I think of art-making as an empowering/positive thing to do; something that irked the Dadaist, and that if it is helping to keep you sane, that sounds like a good outcome to me.
What’s the most important advice you could give to an aspiring artist? I remember a sort-of famous observation by the American Novelist, Kurt Vonnegut, that “the arts are a lousy way to make a living, but a great way to grow your soul”.
Does age matter in art? Why or why not? Yes, age matters. Young people (naturally) see the world like young peopple do, their nervous systems are bright and shiny. That peculiar vision and nervous system pwerfully combine to set-up desires and get you in motion. The kind of work this combustable fuel can make is wonderful. Age will slow you down. You learn to get out of your own way and realize that there isn’t a hell-of-a-lot of difference between success and failure. I recall reading an observation by a screen writer, who had gone through a couple of rounds of being a celebrated and laboring in relative obscurity: “the best thing about success and failure is that niether one of them lasts very long”. You only get there by having gone through it.
What can we look forward to from you next? I have a solo show at a museum in Santa Barbara next fall. I am in the process of re-working some existing things for that situation. It’s billed as a ‘ten-year survey’ of Black Drawings and is being curated by a long-time friend, Gordon Fuglie. Since I have just retired from my 25 year teaching gig, this show is a most-welcomed point for stepping off into the future.
Is there anything else you would like to share about being an artist later in life? Not so much. Being an artist at 67 is just being 67. It’s just life.
duncansimcoeart.com
Mythinburbia #20-detail, oil on tar paper, 2023. photo by Christopher Kern