I have been a professional artist for the past thirty-six years. During that time I have pursued an active painting career while also holding full-time teaching positions at four different schools; two large public universities, one small liberal arts college, and the University of Miami, a Research I university, where I am currently employed.

1972–1979
During my professional career I have witnessed wholesale changes in how art is defined, taught, and marketed. Although my undergraduate painting studies (1972–1976) took place when Pop Art, Minimalism, Conceptual Art, Feminism, and performance art were attracting attention in the major art centers and the first consumer computer, the Apple I was being released, the painting program at the state university I attended (UMass-Dartmouth) was dominated by Modernism’s orthodoxy of connoisseurship and the push/pull of Hans Hoffman. Despite the increasingly postmodern tenor of the mid-70’s and the Modernist character of the pedagogical environment where I studied I was, nevertheless, intuitively drawn to art based in observed optical phenomenon presented in rationally organized space.

While my undergraduate schooling offered little in the way of encouragement for perception-based painting and even less in terms of technical training I consider myself fortunate in that my art history studies regularly exposed me to representational images from a wide spectrum of human history; particularly ancient Egypt, ancient Greece, Rome, Renaissance Italy, as well as selections from the 19^th century French Academic and the Northern Romantic traditions. Whereas my commitment to figurative content was an anathema under Greenbergian formalism my art history studies provided a steady cavalcade of images that were infused with empathy. It was this direct, emotional encounter with the timeless effectiveness of representational painting that reinforced my intuitive need to pursue a personal ‘graphic necessity’ despite the fact that the path that I was choosing was neither fashionable nor popular. Because art history proved foundational to what I was attempting to achieve in the painting studio I found myself taking almost every art history course the program offered and, as a result, by the time I completed my undergraduate art program I had earned a BFA in painting and a BA in Art History.

Following my graduation from UMass-Dartmouth I enrolled in the MFA program at the University of Houston. Houston, in the late seventies, was an exciting place where the early stirrings of postmodernism in the guise of Feminist art, concept-driven practice, video, and performance art were being mixed together with a helping of down-home, good-old-boy, Texas ‘yee-haw’ funk. Houston was then being described in national media as the ‘third coast’ as a way of generously comparing Houston’s art scene energy to that of New York and LA. James Surls, John Alexander, Gayle Stack, and Richard Stout were on the faculty and were each having considerable success in NYC as well as well as serving as luminaries in the burgeoning Houston art scene. And the 80’s vunderkind, Julian Schnabel, had just graduated from UH with a BFA a month before I arrived and had left for New York loudly proclaiming with a surplus of Texas bravado that he was going to be famous. What I found particularly noteworthy was the fact that no one in Houston ever doubted he would succeed.

My time in Houston spanned three colorful years. A handful of major New York galleries opened in Houston and the exhibition previews at Houston’s Contemporary Art Museum were raucous, jam-packed, beer drenched, brawling, cutting-edge events that anticipated the ‘age of the spectacle’ in art. But as much fun as it was to be up close and personal with all of this frantic, colorful art activity my experiences in Houston paradoxically pushed me further in the direction of my intuitive conviction; that painting needed to be rooted in both a broader and more personal context. As a result, I emerged from graduate school rededicated to an approach to painting based in perception; a pursuit that has served as the bedrock of what has now been a thirty six-year studio art career.

For the greater portion of my career my imagery has evolved toward what I feel comfortable describing as an ambiguous symbolic narrative or implicit allegory (in as much as the veiled or plural meanings found in my images contrast with the clarity and specificity of traditional allegory). My images are intended to suggest more than they state and, as such, continue an approach introduced by the Symbolists and Northern Romantics in the late 19th century.

Despite the fact that my paintings integrate the classical motifs of chiaroscuro, highly organized, frontal, layered space, well-proportioned anatomy, and clear definition of form my narratives nonetheless parallel certain Modern themes in their lack of heroic, didactic, or historic narrative. Instead, my narratives explore the difficult, indistinct, transitional, tentative experience of figures caught during pauses in activity. This reintroduction of humanist content into high art is a reflection of my personal need to respect the fragility and profundity of human empathetic experience. In an age of constant war, mass migrations, threatened pandemics, and an impending environmental crisis I seek to revitalize life-affirming myths by constructing narratives that monumentalize the ordinary.

In my development as a narrative artist I have become acutely aware that representational art provides access to as rich a storehouse of forms, colors, and compositional dynamics as any the human imagination can provide and that traditional ideas about truth and beauty cannot be as easily dismissed or obliterated as postmodern taste and trends consistently propose. The traditional representational elements that are found in my art works are meant to provide stable pictorial platform as a contrast to contemporary emotional insecurities our time. In this context my figurative works can be said to be pursuing a reweaving of the ordered beauty and narrative clarity of Giotto with the contemporary cinematic search for the meaning as represented in the works of Kurosawa, Woody Allen, and Ingmar Bergman.

My life-long pursuit of a credible synthesis of modern uncertainties with the timelessness of the Classical figurative tradition results in an art that can't help but be self-conscious of its past. My images seek a plausible representation of the present while simultaneously alluding to previous worlds of painting and myth. My respect and appreciation for the past along with my sensitivity for the present fuel my desire to engage in an art that is broadly accessible and democratic and that engages and celebrates, through visual means, the pleasures of human existence.

1980–1985
Shortly after graduating from UH I accepted a position as an Assistant Professor at Hillsdale College, a small liberal arts college in south central Michigan. As is common at small colleges I taught all levels of painting, drawing, dark room photography, and all levels of Art History. During my first year at Hillsdale one of my works was purchased by the University of Michigan-Flint and put on permanent display in its Student Center. I chose to live seventy miles away in Ann Arbor to be closer to the active art community there. From the contacts I made I was invited to exhibit in numerous area exhibition that culminated in a solo exhibition of recent paintings in the Detroit Institute of Art Gallery in the spring of 1984. As a result of the success of the DIA show I was offered representation by multiple area galleries; in Birmingham (Robert Kidd), in Bloomfield Hills (Rubiner Gallery), in downtown Detroit (George N’namdi) and in Chicago (DeGraff Fine Art).

After having been at Hillsdale for three years I was offered and accepted a position as Visiting Assistant Professor at the University of Arkansas. I was attracted to the U of A in large measure because it offered me an opportunity to work with graduate painting students. During that year in Fayetteville I maintain a productive painting and exhibition schedule. Although I was invited to return to teach the following year I chose instead to accept an offer join the faculty at the University of Miami (FL) where both the city of Miami and the University have proven to be dynamic, energetic, and diverse environments that have offered a full range of personal and professional opportunities. It is also worth mentioning that the sunlight for which Miami is renowned is perfect for painters; Delacroix, Monet, and Matisse made their revolutionary color discoveries in North Africa at precisely the same latitude as Miami.

1985–1992
Benefiting from a generous studio space and the availability of competitive in-house research funding opportunities my seven-year probationary period became a busy and productive time. It included four solo gallery exhibitions, one two-person show in a museum, one two-person show in a cultural center, and one two-person show in a commercial gallery. I exhibited work in thirty-two invitational shows and in fifty-four juried competitions. I was invited to present three public lectures and participate on two museum panels. In that time period my work was awarded two juror’s best–in-show awards, seventeen merit awards, and one purchase award. I was appointed coordinator of a five-course foundations program as well as Freshman Advisor and chosen to serve as the departmental representative to the College Curriculum Committee and as the faculty representative to the Student Activities Board. In 1992 I was awarded the rank of Associate Professor with tenure at the University of Miami.

1993–2001
As an Associate Professor I have maintained an active painting career while committing considerable energy to a wide range of professional activities that have enhanced my studio capabilities while broadening the scope of my understanding of art. I have been gratified by the exposure my paintings have earned and accolades they have accumulated. As an educator I take considerable satisfaction in having designed a solid pedagogical model based in Gestalt principles and the pursuit of visual quality while simultaneously keeping conversant with the rapidly changing nature of my profession, especially in terms of postmodern aesthetic theory and digital technology.

The speed of change in how art was defined and how it was taught increased exponentially during the nineties. Postmodern theory began regularly infiltrating graduate critiques and computers became ubiquitous in the workplace. Initially, I had no direct contact with digital technology and sat mystified on the periphery of discussions when my digitally inclined colleagues began referencing bits, bytes, RAM, and HTML. However, that changed suddenly when a textbook publisher’s rep approached me and asked me to consider writing a drawing book. With the excitement that computers were generating in academia I was intrigued by the possibility of using a computer to write, design, layout, and illustrate the drawing book without having to depend on outsiders for the overall look and feel of the project. Painfully naïve and gullible are words that come to mind as explanations for this impulsive career altering decision especially when you consider that when I signed the contract I did not own a computer (had actually never turned one on), could not type, had no experience with book design, and had never written anything longer than a research paper. I started by buying a Power Mac 7100 with eight MB of RAM and set about purchasing, installing, and learning the necessary software (Quark Xpress, Microsoft Word, Adobe Photoshop), learning to type, learning to scan, choosing a layout, choosing fonts, creating technical illustrations, and, most importantly, figuring what it was that I had to say about observational drawing that hadn’t already been written about. Soon, my computer and me were up and running and progress was hard earned but steady.

When I completed the manuscript McGraw-Hill solicited peer reviews and the reviews that came back were enthusiastically positive. At that point I was offered a publishing contract. In 2001 Drawing from Observation was published and its sales have far exceeded McGraw-Hill’s initial market share expectations. It has been peer reviewed favorably four times - twice in educational journals and twice by on-line sites and has been adopted at over 250 universities, art schools, colleges, and advanced placement programs around the country as well as Singapore, South Africa, and Australia, selling more than 55,000 copies.

While I was engaged in this book project I bought heavily into digital technology and dedicated a large proportion of my creative energy working in front of the computer screen. Although my involvement with the computer revolved initially around my book project, my interest in things digital was constantly being reinforced by a flood of technological propaganda that declared that the future, in general, and of higher education, in particular, was inexorably intertwined with computers and to be competitive as an educator and an artist it was critical to become computer literate. By 1996 I had decided to go “all in” with the digital revolution and, as foundations coordinator, I personally spearheaded the development and implementation of a digital foundations course titled “Digital Imaging on the Mac.” Three years into my book project (1998), I let my digital addiction get the best of me and agreed to provide computer support for a colleague who was organizing a Southern Graphics Conference 2000 which we  erroneously thought was the taking place in the first year of the new millennium. She and I came up with a timely and catchy theme, Tradition and New Technology not thinking until after we had already announced the conference title that this theme required a departmental web presence if we were to avoid coming off as digital posers. As I was then the only planning committee member with a computer, the responsibility for building a departmental website fell to me and so I began learning website development software (Adobe GoLive). I did realize that developing computer literacy was taking away studio time I was still convinced that computers were the gateway to the future and I was determined not to be left behind. Two years and many hundreds of hours later not only had I created the majority of the printed promotional materials for the conference but had also built a fully functioning 500 page website that, in addition to promoting the conference, went on to serve as UM’s art department’s website through 2006.

Although I continued to make paintings during the time I have come to think of as my ‘book years’ my exhibition record slowed as I increasingly funneled my research energies onto my digital publishing efforts and peripheral digital projects. The one area of professional activity that substantially increased during these years was that of funded research; I was awarded nine research grants from my University in five years - all in support of developing my computer skills and for either purchasing digital equipment or for designing ways of integrating digital technology into my studio process or the undergraduate studio art curriculum. While I worked on my book and created the Departmental website I also exhibited in one solo museum show, eight invitational shows, two juried shows, presented five public lectures, recognized for quality teaching three times, served on twenty-four graduate thesis committees, and served on fifty-three service committees including the Faculty Senate (1996 – 1998), Faculty Senate’s representative to the Board of Trustees Facilities Planning Committee (1997 – 2000), designed template used by all areas of the department for recruitment brochures, coordinated Foundations Program (a seven course sequence), and served as Sophomore Advisor as well as serving on the Departmental Scheduling Committee.

My research interests somewhat unexpectedly expanded in 2001 when I was asked to address the role of perceptual drawing in higher education in the 21^st Century for a CAA panel. I found the process of preparing and presenting my ideas to be particularly satisfying as was the discovery that I had the ability to be an effective and engaging speaker in the conference setting. Delivering a paper to one’s professional peers is a challenge that I have found never gets stale given the range of topics to choose from in any given year.

2002–2008
In the seven years after my book was published my research interests continued to revolve heavily around applying digital technology to my studio and teaching careers. This was a direct outgrowth of the satisfaction I derived from creating over three hundred technical illustrations to complement the lessons in my textbook. I was determined to create a book that was equally effective in communicating through both its visual and textual components. Creating technical illustrations in Photoshop came naturally to me because of illustration’s affinity to drawing and painting. As my skill with Photoshop progressed I found I could create convincing illustrations of just about any image I could visualize in my minds-eye.

With the expertise I gained with the technical illustrations it was only a matter of time before my experiments in Photoshop morphed into digital studies for my narrative paintings. I began these compositional studies by digitally combining photographic images in ways that allowed me to study how nuanced changes in figure spacing, gestural interaction, costuming, color relationships, and background settings affected the overall effectiveness of each of my narratives. Initially, I only intended my digital compositions to be studies for future paintings but two opportunities with short lead-times sprung up and I found myself agreeing to exhibit ink-jet-prints as stand-alone works of art in both venues. Even though the exhibitions of the digital prints were well received I was dissatisfied with the coldness of the mechanically generated surfaces that are produced by an inkjet printer when I hung them on wall. It was like going to the Louvre only to find that they had replaced the Mona Lisa with a digital reproduction of Duchamp’s L.H.O.O.Q. In other words, I felt as though something important had been lost in the process. Seeing my digital prints on gallery walls made me appreciate the nuanced surfaces of hand-made art and after the second showing of digital works I found I could not bring myself to promote this body of work and despite my continued comfort with the computer as a visualization tool in the studio I realized that I was no longer comfortable exhibiting ink jet as art. During this same period LCD projectors quickly became the instructional tool of choice for studio presentations and once the book was at the printers I began dedicating considerable time and energy to transferring all of my existing lecture materials to digital formats. Thus began the long and protracted process of creating over six thousand individual PowerPoint slides that I now make available to all instructors for all levels of drawing, painting, color, and composition.

Between 2002 and 2008 I presented five conference papers, chaired two national panels, delivered ten public lectures, conducted six extra-curricula workshops, participated in one two-person show, eleven invitationals, and five juried exhibitions. I also was awarded two research grants, four technology grants, a Sabbatical, two purchase awards, served on sixteen MFA thesis committees and was twice recognized for the quality of my teaching. In 2006 my drawing text was translated into Short-form Chinese and published by McGraw-Hill-Singapore.

2009–2015
In 2009 my publisher called me requesting that I provide McGraw-Hill with a production-ready manuscript for a second edition of my drawing text. After a year of intense work I submitted the manuscript in 2009 and it was published the following year. New to the second edition was a thorough and generously illustrated thirty-page chapter on Pictorial Composition of which I am especially satisfied. The second edition also contains 103 new student drawings, 96 new technical illustrations, 25 new master images, a completely reworked layout, and a new cover. Given the total control I had over the layout design, illustrations, and cover design of Drawing from Observation I actually have come to think of the final product as more of a studio project that draws heavily on multiple facets of my expertise as a visual artist. The fact that it also functions as a highly regarded teaching tool makes it all the more satisfying.

After the publication of the second edition of Drawing from Observation I made a conscious decision to narrow the focus of my creative energies to painting, conference presentations and teaching. As a result, in the past seven years I have installed my paintings in seven solo exhibitions, nine invitational exhibitions, five juried exhibitions, as well as having a painting purchased for an institutional collection and being awarded a merit citation of distinction from a SECAC Membership Exhibition. I have also I presented twelve conference papers, delivered five public lectures, was awarded a research leave by the Dean of my college, was appointed a Faculty fellow in an in-house Digital Learning Community, was invited to be a visiting artist at seven campuses across the country, conducted five extra-mural workshops, served on fourteen MFA Thesis committees, chaired three CAA Roundtables, served as a CAA portfolio reviewer for early career professionals, and was twice nominated for my outstanding teaching. Throughout this period I maintained an active record of departmental, college, and university service activities that included serving as the Director of Graduate Studio Programs, from 2006 through 2015, coordinating the undergraduate painting and drawing programs, serving on the College Council, serving on review committees for both the Arts Panel and the Humanities Panel of the Provost Research Awards, and serving on the Executive Committee of the Provost’s Research Council. In all I participated in 39 service activities during this time period.

2016–
This past February I attended the CAA in Washington D.C. where I again co-chaired a roundtable on the topic, Instructors and Adjuncts: Navigating Higher Education in a Busted Economy. Pending activity includes presenting a paper titled Critquing Shared Visual Experience: The Power of the Central Nervous System for session titled The Critique: What Makes for a Good Critique? at SECAC, Roanoke, Virginia, October 19-22, 2016 and lecturing and working with students at the University of North Texas November 14 - 15, 2016. Next spring I have been invited to deliver a FATE 2017 panel presentation titled Beauty, Quality, and the Good: Art as a Material Reflection of a Spiritual Reality for a session titled Spirituality in the Studio II, April 6 - 9, 2017, Kansas City, Missouri. I am also considering an invitation to return for a summer studio workshop at the Art Students League of New York.

I am also waiting for responses concerning the publication of my most recent paper, The Bicameral Brain and the Primacy of Perception in a book highlighting the outstanding papers from the 2015 TRAC conference.

Studio production continues on two large (40” x 60”) paintings and one medium (48” x 36”) painting that will be the final additions to my Stonehenge Series (making a total of fifty oil paintings) at which point I will be retruning to narrative figuration – three of which are already in progress.

I am profoundly appreciative of the many opportunities that my career has afforded me. I am proud of what I have achieved and I look forward to the challenges that are sure to reveal themselves as I move forward. 

Brian Curtis

August 2, 2016