GARY VAN DER STEUR

Artist Statement

I've always wanted a life in art, and I've always known that a large part of my artistic satisfaction derives from doing many different things. How terrible it would be producing the same thing day after day, using the same techniques, painting variations of the same cake. This I have always stated. But once, when I was feeling particularly self-satisfied, my psyche rose up to smack me as I realized there was a name for the kind of artist I was so pleased to be. Dilettante! I'm having t-shirts made.

I've been an illustrator, a graphic designer, an illustrator/designer, a design director for a newspaper, and a fine artist. I have built kinetic sculptures such as an obelisk that's a vertical marimba which plays automatic random patterns; a nine foot crucifix that enacts the stations of the cross (either terrifyingly or hilariously, depending on how you approach such things); an Arizona jumping cactus with a proximity sensor that causes it to react as you approach; and a gila monster pull toy, among others. I'm currently working on a series of small landscapes based on photographs taken from the hill above nearby Occidental College called The View from Fiji Hill. My hand workings on them attempt to warm and humanize the cold and clinical digital. I think of them as paintings.

But I've never worked as hard or as long on a project as I have on the musical work called Rock River Bridge, nor have I felt as much satisfaction. As a retelling of my great-grandfather's life story in program music, it covers his emigration from Moravia to his US life in the upper midwest, his marriage, their migration to a homestead in New Mexico, and his eventual long walk home in the dark of the moon, among the cotton fields of Chandler, AZ. This work began in 2002 and is ongoing, and here's the key: this work, like the kinetic sculptures and landscapes cited above, are meaningful to me.

I've made a few leaps in my life. As a graphic designer I successfully made the jump from old fashioned paste-up to computers sometime in the late 1980s. Almost fifty years later I try to stay abreast of the latest that Adobe jams down our collective throats. When Adobe doesn't cover it I’ll subscribe to something like Apple's creative suite, as I did last week. I gratefully shoot with digital camera, and am happy that the immense savings in film is almost offset with subscriptions to the creative clouds of the digital universe. It's a brave new world, yes, and a rich full life... and I wouldn't have it any other way. Where I once hired out to specialists like color separators and typesetters, I now do everything myself. A dilettante's dream!

For now I take pains that while the tools I use for fine art are largely digital, like photos and music, my sensibility stays firmly rooted in the analog.

No AI was used in this statement.