“When They Were Kids: Artists Talk About Their Childhoods” resumes this fall with an interview with the prolific Washington, DC artist Matt Sesow. Almost anyone who makes art in the DC area knows Matt for his ability to produce insane amounts of art which he successfully markets locally and around the world. So where does someone get this kind of drive? Was Matt Sesow an art kid like Studio Neptune’s sixteen other previous interviews? Actually, he wasn’t that at all. Growing up in a rural area of Lincoln, Nebraska, Matt’s childhood was filled with sports, a great family, plenty of friends and a fascination with computers. In the early 1980’s he taught himself programming language and eventually those childhood skills developed and led him straight into the corporate world of Internet technology. No one in Matt’s family had a career in the arts, no family friends had art studios to visit. Drawing and playing with creative toys were minimal. Visits to art museums were rare. It became clear in our interview that one significant incident became the catalyst for Matt’s artistic expression.

Growing up in Nebraska, our rural home was situated across the street (gravel road) from a small airfield with a grassy runway. Small propeller airplanes would take off and land almost daily. In 1975, at the age of eight, while playing a game of “SPUD” with the other neighborhood kids, I was struck by the propeller of a landing airplane that hit my upper arm. The accident resulted in the amputation of my left (dominant) hand at the hospital due to gangrene. Thankfully the doctors, one just back from the Vietnam war, were able to re-attach my arm saving the elbow.

My family was super supportive. They are the reason I was able to get through this whole trauma. I was in and out of hospitals for about two years. It almost became like “oh, of course this is normal, getting hit by an airplane.” But I still played sports and everything. I even tripped once and broke my left arm again. It wasn’t this thing of slowing down – you had to be tough. I guess that’s a natural attitude growing up in Nebraska – part of that mid west pioneering spirit.

I hadn’t talked about the accident or had any real therapy about it – I don’t feel I dealt with it at all until I started painting. In the beginning, around 1994, I was trying to impress a girl who lived in a group house in Mt. Pleasant. There were painters there and I saw their work and thought “Oh – I could do that too” but I was really seeing it more as a joke, it was not serious for me yet. Before that I had entered some short videos into the Psychotronic Film Contest in 1993. I did a film about my arm “A Short” but I didn’t really know that it was about that. Years later I looked at it and thought “Oh god – this is totally a self portrait.”

Francis Bacon, Study for the Head of  a Screaming Pope, 1952

I experimented a lot. I didn’t follow any rules. I used the museums to help me understand how to paint. Looking at paintings by Francis Bacon and Willem deKooning – those were my favorites. I took the whole idea of Do It Yourself into my painting and business model – the whole punk scene influenced me.

There were both East Coast – West Coast musical influences. I saw a lot of really good bands growing up and that was a huge, huge influence on me. I think of it as inspiring my style of painting more than anything else. That was my artist connection.

Now I start with some photos, maybe I see something I like, and it becomes the composition but then of course it becomes my own painting. You wouldn’t even recognize the original image, whether it was male or female. Things like that, everything morphs during the process of painting for me. Once a painting is done, it’s not for decoration, it’s something to get out into the world. I don’t really have a favorite painting. I don’t have an attachment to them anymore.

Painting is such a solitary experience, unlike the sports activities that were so prevalent in your life as a child. There are always teammates to interact with who are integral to the outcome of the game. Kids often turn towards art making because it is their own little world they can retreat to and feel safe within. Did making art provide you with something you had not really experienced before?

I taught myself Pascal, Basic, and some assembler language programming when I was in kid in the early 80′s. Since our house was in a rural area of Nebraska, I didn’t have friends nearby or in my neighborhood. Oftentimes I would spend entire days messing around on my Apple2 computer. My parents originally let me have the computer in my bedroom, but later made me move it into the living room. I was spending too much time by myself on the computer in my bedroom.

I enjoy social interaction and the benefits of working on a team; however, I am able to spend copious amounts of time by myself without human interaction. I think the time on my first computer was a way for me to create my own world.

I worked at IBM, AOL, Netscape, I’ve lived in the corporate world, going through performance appraisals, I was programming since the age of fourteen, working in software development. I always knew to just bust ass no matter what I do. Not be a weeny, don’t be a wimp. Playing football as a kid, I knew that you would break bones, get hit, get hit in every single place, but you have to realize that you can take a hit, you can come back. You have to have a hunger, a drive, perseverance, lift weights. It’s that whole package. One of the greatest things about football was thinking about what the other guy that I will be playing against was doing. Is he lifting weights or just sitting back being lazy? So I would take that to the art world too: what am I doing today? Am I painting or am I sitting in a coffee shop talking about painting? Once I decided to paint, it was “OK, this is 110%”. You’ve got to give it your all. It’s in your heart – you just know it.

The art of Matt Sesow can be discovered at www.sesow.com.

For the past two summers, students at Studio Neptune were treated to episodes of Fractured Fairy Tales. Fifty years later and these cartoons haven’t lost any of their off-kilter attraction.

Here is the second video in our series of interviews with artists, produced by the talented team at KS12.

Here is another amazing shot taken this past Wednesday during the day by Stacie Kirby from Reston, Virginia:

Have you taken any inspired pictures of the PeriPoint? Let us know! Send your image to info@studioneptune.com.

I spent a lot of time alone, just drawing. All my life I have made art, the mediums changed from drawing to painting to photography. I was born in Australia and went to school there. I went to art school there too. I went to public school and when I was in 8th grade I went to private school. My parents thought I would get a better education in private school. It was a really nice school but I didn’t like it. It was really uptight and strict. The kids I went to school with (and I’m generalizing) were rich and snotty.

I loved cartoon characters and also trying to draw trees. One very specific memory I have is of a very old tree we had. Our veranda went all around the front of the house and I’d sit out there and look at these huge, old pine trees. I was trying to draw the whole tree, but twig by twig. I didn’t realize that I should have first tried to get a general impression to suggest the tree. I sat there and thought “Why does this look so weird and fragmented and disjointed?” And its because I tried drawing every twig in the tree but it didn’t fit in the whole tree properly. I wanted to get it perfect and kept rubbing it out and trying again. But today I love the happy accident and try to entertain a bit of chaos or something that’s sloppy in my work. I actually like when something isn’t quite right. Sometimes it shows me something different. I try to not fight my fussiness but incorporate the changes.

I was a weird kid who would make things from plasticine. I was obsessed with Smurfs and Playmobil. I’d make these tableaux, these scenes. The whole periphery of my room would have these little worlds. I had a balcony and I’d use that as well.

The living room was really reflective of my dad’s sensibility and aesthetic taste. It was all from his parent’s house in Switzerland. Gorgeous Persian rugs, unbelievable. Chairs and sofas that were striped, dull golden velveteen with tight stitching, lots of details. Wall hangings with thin sabers, hand guards. Spear like medieval swords with elaborate medieval tapestries and dangling bits, gold fringing. This was something my dad collected. I loved it. I associated it so heavily with my dad, both fearful of it and something reverential about. Like make sure you don’t touch that, make sure you don’t bump that or break it. The table in there was made of marble and it was very old and beautiful. The rest of the house was all my mom’s taste – a 70’s kitchen with this bright orange curtain around the windows. Everything else was very English and tasteful, neutral, cream colored. There was the pale blue Wedgwood china with pastoral scenes. But around the kitchen table were these ORANGE cushions! I hate orange.

Any well known artists I came across were usually dead and in books. It was really frustrating when I would see something and didn’t know who did it. When I went to art school I finally learned about movements like the Pre-Raphaelites.

I also loved Anime. I wanted to live in a Japanese cartoon. I had such a crush on Astro Boy.

I love books and I love the smell of books. I’m still a big book sniffer. I would stick my nose inside the book and huff it. There was this book about a bumblebee that smelled so good, it never lost it’s smell.

Our conversation ended with some thoughts about growing out of childhood and what remains.

I would get one pair of new trousers a year. I would wear my brother’s hand me down stuff. So I tried to be as invisible as I could. When I was about twelve, I went shopping in thrift stores. I was turning into a rebellious teenager.

I think when you turn twelve or thirteen you begin to define yourself for yourself. You want to be something you feel you should be intuitively. You feel that need to break out, explore your world more. What is interesting about our chat is that I really sense the Victoria you are now, was waiting to be that as a child. Something has been waiting to bloom. As a kid you were well cared for but there was just this moment when a natural aspect of who you are rose up. I feel that your vibe, your voice, the way you are speaking, is probably very, very much who you were as a kid. I can feel that. A very gentle, sweet, good natured person. I think it is wonderful that you are living and breathing what you really need to be, right now, as this type of artistic person. It’s a wonderful, eclectic mix.

Do you find that with other artists? That they have that progression where they stay who they were as a kid?

Absolutely. As the British director Michael Apted, who made The Up Series proved – it is absolutely that way. We are very much who we are going to be by the time we are seven years old. That’s what makes this project even more interesting for me.

in her world

in her drawing book

she recreates the massive tree

only to find that lines escape the paper

art is so big, art is so necessary

which way will this enigma walk?

into a stew of mangled messy magic

into the place where she greeted original thirst

the early days are like a dance with strange and friendly fairies

who have lifted her onto their scaly backs for a ride into the future extreme

www.victoriafgaitan.com

My brother, the second oldest, had an attraction to art so he received all the art supplies. When I came along and wanted to draw too my parents would say, “Well you can used his dried up ink set or paints, just use that” because they weren’t going to buy any more art supplies. But the drive to make art was right there, so it didn’t matter. One of my earliest memories was when I was about three, my brothers would go off to school and I would spend the day saying “I’m going to do drawings for cards”. So I would make my Mother’s Day card, my Father’s Day card and I would think that any word ending in “er” would have a card made for it. So I would make a Brother’s Day card too and that way I could be drawing all the time. I remember going to the Chicago Art Institute and seeing the Robert Rauschenberg exhibit of the goat and the tire.

It was so unusual to say “Why is there a goat in the middle of the gallery floor? There was another installation of modern art where the tiles of the floor were actually the artwork. So you’d be standing on it and then realize you were standing right on the artwork. You’d step off, but then wait – it’s on the floor and you SHOULD walk onto it. That whole quandary of theoretical art, what it means and how bizarre that is to a young child.

I always liked buildings. In second grade I made my own slide show by taking two paper towel tubes and attaching them to a roll of white paper. I drew the individual slides which were buildings in downtown Chicago. I did the Shedd Aquarium that showed all the fish in the tank, the Art Institute where I showed the lion statues outside and I drew the tall Prudential Plaza.

I was an “art kid” at school and I would be pulled out of class to do posters for the school and I thought it was the greatest thing. I saw it as a lot of fun – I would be having fun with other kids and the teacher would come out to the hallway where we were working and say “What’s going on here!” Obviously I was too loud, having too much fun, so I’d get yanked off more than one project. Instead of playing during recess we’d have art competitions. Who could draw the globe the best way? All the kids would choose the winner. These memories are of using art as a way to distinguish yourself. That hyper realistic desire to draw accurately stayed with me all the way through college. I liked that kind of Richard Estes imagery more so than abstraction.

My strongest memory about toys I had was when I was about five years old, I got a GI Joe Doll. I was so excited that I just ran through the house saying I got this doll, even into the basement where there was no one there! I looked at this doll as a model that you could study. I wanted to know what a body would look like if you threw it out the window, how would it look when it landed. So I would throw it constantly out the window and say “This is what a body would look like if it fell on the concrete.” Eventually its clothes wore off, because I’m throwing it and abusing it in every way possible and I started using paper towels and napkins to hide his shame, but it was also a way to see how the clothes would look on a body! You know “This is how a toga would look like on a body!” I’d also take my matchbox cars and say “This is what a car would look like if you threw it out a window! Except that the strength of the steel in the small cars didn’t crash like a regular car so I would take a hammer and say “This is what it REALLY would look like!”

I remember going into the subway and seeing the Juicy Fruit gum dispensers on the columns in the subway, how bizarre it tasted and the funny smells in the subway. When you take the trains in Chicago you go from the underground to above ground and just that whole process coming above ground from the darkness to the light and to go above traffic, it was such an unusual thing. The loop goes straight towards the buildings and at the last possible second you’d turn and be careening around it. You used to be able to sit right in the front. In creative writing in high school I’d use that “L” experience because I love that whole concept of shifting perspective.

The pulls on all our 1950’s era house cabinets were little highly polished convex circles. So if you look into it, your image was upside down, and I thought that was the coolest thing. I would just sit in front of the cabinet moving my head in and out so I could get this odd perspective. Because if you got right up on top of it you would turn right side up, but anywhere from an inch beyond you were upside down.

At age 14 my mother got me a job in a movie theater. It gave me access to film, imagery that I had never considered before because film was something you’d see on TV between commercials. Here I’m suddenly seeing it on the screen the way it should be, and I could keep seeing the same scene over and over, starting to appreciate nuances that I never knew existed.

In my work I don’t mind borrowing things from pop culture, in fact I source that. I never really gave it a lot of thought but cartoon images would have been my earliest cultural images. I do respond very strongly to Dada art and surrealism. It’s almost nonsensical but then you begin deriving some kind of connection between art from the 1920’s and cartoons that came later in the 50’s and 60’s. Those children looking at cartoons would say that’s part of their back ground, not even question that that’s the way it should be. You don’t think of it as nonsense, you think of it as part of the story.

It is true that I didn’t have a lot of luxury growing up so I learned early on that I wanted to look at things, I liked looking at things. So if it wasn’t on TV, or it wasn’t in a book, I would look at the ant hill in the back yard. I would find things that I could really study. Those experiences absolutely informed me as I got older, especially as an architect. I will look at things and say what’s the perspective from down, or up. Always looking for a different point of view.

We’re doing our thing every day as a kid, a lot of that means we’re playing. We’re playing. When you’re a kid you’re not sitting down and analyzing what you’re playing with, you’re just attracted to things naturally. And you’re deepening your own understanding by interacting with things. You know there’s pleasure that you’re deriving for whatever reason. So I think that the child who becomes the adult who has influence in the world benefits from as rich a creative climate as possible. The access we have as children to explore our imaginations, discover things and have support around us, all of that encourages us. You’re going to take all that information which you may not be aware of when you are six or seven years old and as you get older that same feeling of discovery will stay with you. As a result those creative experiences will be right there behind you and push you forward as you pursue whatever you do as you get older. Adults who have that kind of influence will affect their community with that very real and solid understanding of inventing and exploring. Like Michael Janis does.

See more of his work at www.michaeljanis.com.

My work in visual art education started many years ago when I was asked by a group of adult friends to create an art class for them. They knew my dedication to making art was so solid that whatever I came up with would be rewarding. I took on the challenge and we all had an unforgettable time with it. In fact, the experience revealed something unexpected; I saw what a natural role it was for me to inspire people to be creative. Soon after those first classes, I created an art program for children. Fast forward to today and Studio Neptune has had more than a thousand children pass through its program. An amazing fact due to an unexpected invitation.

Working with kids in a studio setting almost every week of the year is in a word, splendid. Splendid: Latin splendidus, from splendēre to shine. Art kids are great company. They are curious about materials, eager to draw whatever they are thinking about and often have a great sense of humor. It really is the most natural thing in the world for children to use art to say who they are and so I wanted to get to know the kid inside of artistic adults. I wanted to trace the patterns I saw in the art of adults back to their child-selves.

“When They Were Kids” has some interesting themes already. We like small worlds when we are little, a place to be in charge, to invent and tell stories. We like to stare at textured paint on ceilings, collect moss for mini carpeting, make full course dinners out of clay and use Fisher Price record players to scratch Rap music.

For the rest of this year I plan to continue making studio visits, adding to this project. And then it will be exciting to see if “When They Were Kids” grows into something bigger. If the posts ring a bell because of how you think or the work you do, let me know! I’d love to see this conversation stretch beyond the interviews.