An interview by and
, curator curator
Hello Allan and welcome to ART Habens. Before starting to elaborate about your artistic production we would start this interview with a couple of questions about your background. You attended the School of Visual Arts in New York City, however, you are basically a self-taught oil painter: are there any experiences that did particularly influence your evolution as an artist? In particular, how does your cultural substratum due to your previous career direct the trajectory of your current artistic research? Hello, and thanks again for inviting me to ART Habens. By way of background, in the 1970s and 80s I worked as a creative at a large NYC advertising agency and had a part-time adjunct job at SVA teaching advertising concepts. A benefit to the instructors was that you could take free courses, and I studied film making and black and white photography. My wife suggested that I take a painting class. Ack!!!?? I had never painted in my life! But I agreed to try it and enrolled in a Saturday morning introduction to oil painting. One day, I saw a black and white movie still that I thought might make a nice painting. It depicted four men in front of a swimming pool flexing their muscles. One of the men was holding a can of beer (made me smile). That became my first finished painting. I wanted to do more and started rummaging through my old family photos for reference material and did paintings of my dad, my brothers, mom and her sister, etc. I would make large photostats of the images and then work out the colors on tracing paper as a guide. I developed a nice style, and the paintings looked like handtinted black and white photos. I painted that way for three or four years, often doing commissions for others.
and design company and decided to put all my energies into that. My job involved solving communications problems. It was more creative, more fun, and paid a lot more, so I stopped painting. But, every so often the lure of making my own art - just for me - would come back to haunt me.
In the interim, we moved to a new house, had a new baby boy, and bills. I also started my own ad
Finally, in 2008, after staying away for 25 years, I picked up the brushes again and haven’t looked
Allan Gorman
4 04
Special Issue