Vincent Desiderio: on painting, teaching, and the question that never closes

Vincent Desiderio is a painter, a professor at the New York Academy of Art, and one of the sharpest voices on what's broken in art education today. He shows at Marlborough Gallery in New York. His paintings — Sleep, Cockaigne, Pantocrator — are among the most ambitious narrative works produced in the last three decades. He was born in Philadelphia, trained at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, and has spent his career making large-scale figurative paintings while simultaneously dismantling the assumptions that most figurative painters were trained on.

This interview was recorded in Menorca during one of his visits. In it, he talks about things that most painting teachers won't say in front of their students — and probably should.

What you'll find in this conversation

On painting as a state of consciousness. Vincent describes the act of painting not as applying skills to a surface, but as reaching a cognitive state where certain thoughts become available that are simply not accessible outside the process. Not trance in the mystical sense. A specific, repeatable level of consciousness where the work thinks through you.

When we fall into the kind of trance of work, it's not as if we're shutting our brains off. I think we're reaching a different level of consciousness. And at that level, certain things are possible that are not available outside of the process.

On why skills don't make an artist

He's direct about this: the manual skills you spent years acquiring are necessary but not sufficient. Art schools are in crisis because they confuse one for the other. You can teach someone to draw a head in ten minutes and post it on the internet. You cannot teach them why it matters — or whether it should.

Skills do not make an artist. They're helpful, and we need lots of skills. But among the manual skills, we also need a mental dexterity — the ability to think critically, to analyse, and to make decisions about what is the proper way for me in particular to be working at any given time.

On the atelier trap

Vincent takes direct aim at the neo-classical atelier programmes that promise the skills of the Old Masters and deliver the skills of late 19th-century French academics. He explains why the system works as advertised — and why that's the problem: it produces artists who can execute anything and decide nothing.

The problem with learning to draw in this French academic way is that the tendency is to force every idea you will ever have into that system. Sometimes the system can't accommodate your idea — so you wind up sticking a round peg in a square hole until you've neutered your whole idea.

I think it's a prison, actually. More than an observatory.

On learning with a safety net

He talks about artists trained to always know they will succeed at what they do — and why that guarantee is a creative death sentence. The safety net that makes failure impossible also makes discovery impossible.

What they've learned is to draw with a safety net. To become an artist when you always know you will succeed at what you do. And then they'll paint those heads you see on the internet all the time — 'I just knocked this one off in ten minutes.' Enough. I don't want to see another head on the internet.

On the difference between skills and technique

This distinction might be the most useful thing in the entire interview. Skills can be taught. Technique cannot — because technique is the brain work of painting, the invention within painting, the thing that operates at the edge of collapse.

Great technique is about to collapse under the weight of its own aspiration. It's on a tightrope. It's working without a safety net and succeeding.

On painters vs. illustrators

Vincent draws a line that will either liberate you or make you deeply uncomfortable: the illustrator converges on a destination; the painter keeps the vectors from ever touching. The worst painters answer the questions. The best painters keep the question alive.

Painting is always a perpetual question and never an answer.

On planning and killing the idea

here are ways to prepare that nurture the impulse and ways that murder it. The difference is whether your planning brings the idea to a climax of expression or suffocates it under forethought.

There are ways to plan and kill the idea, and there are ways to plan to nurture the impulse, to tantalize it, to bring it to this overripe-ness so it reaches a climax of expression when you actually do the painting.

On turning your back on the times

Vincent paints with roofing tar, Rust-Oleum, shellac, and oil paint. He wants his paintings to have the material weight of a rock. In an age of digital slickness, he deliberately makes objects that could not exist on a screen — and he explains why that refusal is itself a statement.

As a painter in an age of high technology, I essentially turn my back on the times. I don't want my paintings to have the slick patternation of a computer screen. I want them to be heavy, laden with material, falling off the canvas.

On what he feels when the painting works

He admits to pacing his studio every morning, talking himself through self-doubt, through the conviction that his work is horrible, through the circles of hell — until something shifts and he's ready to paint. And when it works, the feeling is the same feeling he has holding his children.

I come down to the studio in the morning. The first thing I do is think: what am I doing here? Why did I ever choose to be a painter? My work is horrible. I pace back and forth until finally I talk myself into believing that it's possible.

Vincent Desiderio has been a guest artist at Quarantine and at Menorca Pulsar, the workshop programme that preceded it on Lazaretto Island.

→ Vincent Desiderio at Quarantine

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