Jessica Kloville: What is your birthday and where did you grow up?Steve Galloway: I was born in Los Angeles on March 10, 1952.
I grew up in New York with the majority of time spent in the greater Los Angeles area, mostly in the San Fernando Valley.
What first drew you to art? Was it a natural inclination beginning in childhood?
I loved to draw and can remember back for most of my life that I did so. I am not sure where, or why, this desire to draw comes from, however, in my case, it might just be some kind of escape mechanism. And maybe, a way to rearrange the world as I see it. I was always interested in the peculiar and the distorted as a child, and still am, I guess. Little eccentricities and quirks are things that seem to find their way into what I do. The play of light also had a strong influence on what interests me and how it appears as imagery.
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Would you mind describing some of your experience at the California Institute of the Art in the 1970s?
When I entered Cal Arts back in 1970, I was fresh from high school and about as naive as one could be. I thought I wouldn't last a week. Everyone else was more experienced and older, or so I thought. I made it through that first week. I was a delusional kid, but it worked. The first day we had an orientation of the whole school and we chanted the aum. We joked about it a lot, but later on you learn to appreciate symbolic attempts like that. The school was definitely unorthodox and rough around the edges, and that made it a perfect fit for me as I moved along. The art school was a great laboratory of possibilities, if you were self-motivated. If you needed technical instruction, Cal Arts was the wrong place. It turned out to be the right fit for me. The amount of talent at the school when I was there was very energizing. The school was very much influenced by artists and teachers from New York, so there was a sense of dynamism and rigor that we might not have had otherwise. It was place of freedom and high expectations.
Found
What is your process or the stages of a painting?
When I want to start a new work, I usually build it up from ideas that are circulating in my head. A bit like daydreaming, I suppose. If the idea works well enough, I draw it out in thumbnail form and later turn it into a larger final piece. I edit things in or out as I see the piece take form.
Some ideas need a little trimming. In retrospect they can sometimes seem born of a drunk's folly. The rest of the work on a painting or drawing is fairly simple - fill it in without falling off. Maintaining balance along the way.
How long do you tend to work on any one thing? Is it one thing until its done or many things going at the same time?
The length of time any one piece takes depends on the complexity of imagery and the size of the work. Smaller pieces, drawings in particular, take much less time than do paintings. A painting can be frustratingly slow in the manner I work, but it is a choice. Some paintings take a month or two, and some drawings might only take a day or two. In the main, I work on an individual piece solely until it is finished.
I keep a better focus on the work than shifting gears and juggling several works at the same time.
Where do you get your inspiration?...epiphanies, dreams?
Inspirations for my work come from the daily bits and pieces of life. Visual ideas, nature, news events, cultural absurdities, humorous quirks, architecture, folk stories, etc. are some things that help to form ideas for me. I have never found sleeping dreams to be of any help for my work. My ideas are waking thoughts.
Are there themes that you slowly work through?
There are some themes that course their way through my work. Some that have continued for decades and others that have dropped by the wayside.
The challenge is trying to find something new I've not done before. However, as I have gone along, I have realized that one pilfers and adapts much of what one
has done before, while still attempting some new angle conceptually. You have to be a demanding critic of your own work while allowing for audacious possibilities. It is a constant process of breaking down and building up again.
Rebelliousness is good.
(click to enlarge) (click to enlarge) It seems like there is a personal narrative or mythology being played out. Who is B. Wilbur and what can you tell me about some other characters that appear in your work, as in Cave of 3 Bats?Buddy Wilbur, or B. Wilbur, is an alter ego. A swamp rat and a self-taught entrepreneur of the illogical and the absurd. He came about when I needed a name for a proprietor of a swamp museum set in a drawing I did a few years back. I mumbled this name and it stuck.
The Mystery of B. Wilbur and the Swamp Bottom
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In the Cave of 3 Bats I used a guy on a lighted-sign platform that represents a well known art patron, who, when I was introduced to him while I was really in a slack period career wise, said, "You're Hot!" Nothing at that moment seemed more preposterous and ironic. He was speaking of my current career as much as he knew, I think. I laugh when I think of it. So, I placed him in the painting. The 3 bats are Cliff Westermann, Otto Dix, and Pablo Picasso. Three artists I think of often for various reasons. They are fruit bats waiting on a painting of peaches.
Cave of 3 Bats
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Some pieces are more narrative than others in that they imply human interactions, while others are made to convey more reductive ideas.
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