Gary Stutler Two Windows, Two Mountains Oil on Linen 29 x 32 inches

Art Interview: What did your parents do for a living?

Gary Stutler: My father was the only attorney in town and my mother was a secretary for a national trucking company. She was a war bride from England. Her own parents immigrated to the United States not long after she arrived, and my grandmother looked after my brother and me.

Art Interview: So, you had an English upbringing in a small, slow-paced town in rural America?

Gary Stutler: I would say so, for better or worse.

Art Interview: Did your parents encourage you to become an artist?

Gary Stutler TV and Ivy Oil on Linen 24 x 20 inches

Art Interview: Did your father play a part in your artistic activities when you were a child?

Gary Stutler: He wasn’t comfortable with saying that much about art in general, or my efforts in particular, perhaps out of a reluctance to offend me. When he was asked to comment on my drawing and painting, he never discouraged me, but didn’t try to challenge me either. He was not really critically oriented that way. His legal world had more to do with words. My father was the one who taught me how to read properly, which I was rebelling against at the time, although I always loved looking at the alphabet. He would dutifully praise my pictures, but his eyes were not the ones that I felt most upon me.

Gary Stutler Winds Eye Oil on Linen 18 x 20 inches

Gary Stutler: Well, it was an activity that I had identified with all my life. It seemed to fulfil two very important things for me. It was something that I enjoyed very much and art was my one recognizable talent.

Art Interview: Did you have to work while you were a student?

Gary Stutler: I sang and played bass guitar for a number of years with a band that was formed when I was still in high school. I was also in what you could call a nightclub quartet. My high school band-director actually recruited me for that one. We played popular songs and ballads from the 1920s to the 1970s at weddings and parties. I also played in a country band later on, because that was the most popular music back then and the most reliable means of earning a wage.

Art Interview: I noticed that there is a 15-year gap between your Bachelor of Arts, Degree and your Master of Fine Arts, what was the reason for that?

During that period, I was interested in developing my private life and starting a relationship. Since I’d grown up in such a small-town world, and had never moved far away, I believed that the odds of my finding a good partner as a gay man were not great. When the opportunity arose, I concentrated on my relationship rather than running off to graduate school in New York. My partner had a doctorate in Comparative Literature. He could then find only one-year placements in that part of the country working at various colleges and universities. Nevertheless he fit the role of breadwinner better than a painter like myself did. A tenure-track position seemed a likelier prospect for him, than a dependably lucrative art career for me. It was necessary to move seven or eight times, but we stayed together and my paintings became documents of our lives.

Gary Stutler Day Street Oil on Canvas 21 x 32 inches Private collection

Gary Stutler: Five years after moving to California, part-time employment became full-time employment for my partner, and I finally made a big sale at a San Francisco gallery. We could now afford to buy a house. At last, all the relocating was over and it made sense to me to apply to graduate school. I entered the program at UC Davis in 1990.

Art Interview: Which professors most inspired you as a student?

Gary Stutler: A professor in my undergraduate degree by the name of Harlan Goudy inspired me the most. He made a lot of abstract prints earlier in his career, but by the time I was his student, he was making large 6 ft tall paintings on shaped canvases, of his wife and daughters against the backdrop of domestic interiors. Sometimes the interiors were uninhabited. I felt a tension in the paintings between the hyper-realistic style and the familial subject matter. I related to this tension, and to his restrained advice.

Jane Rosen, a sculptor from New York, was a visiting professor and taught one of my first-year upper-division classes in figure drawing. Being taught by her was like being struck by lightning. She was very much an inspiration to me. Even though I had been drawing for almost 20 years, I hadn’t really learned the magic of the gesture. After taking her class I could render a complete figure to my satisfaction in maybe 20 minutes. The old me would have fretted for days or even weeks.

Art Interview: Did you have any role models outside of your schooling?

Gary Stutler: I always related strongly to the works of Edward Hopper and also to Vermeer. Lucien Freud has inspired me too - especially his paintings of plants.

Art Interview: How have you been surviving financially since your graduation?

Gary Stutler: I have been teaching part time for the last 15 years at a community college in Napa.

Art Interview: How often do you work in the studio?

Gary Stutler: 5 days a week.

Gary Stutler Oscularia Oil on Linen 36 x 36 inches

Gary Stutler: They are difficult because I produce very slowly. I have a hard time feeling I’ve finished. I have always faced the challenge of producing quickly. The more I get into an image, the more I become obsessed with its particulars. A deadline for a show or having someone impatiently waiting for a specific painting, eventually becomes a blessing - a kind of a cure.

Art Interview: Do you ever question being an artist?

Gary Stutler: Oh, constantly. There is an absurdity to shutting myself up, and recreating my world the way I do. Some of the not-so-positive experiences I have had with galleries and dealers, made it seem too hard at times. The frustrations I have had with commissions make for second thoughts, too.

Art Interview: How do you cope with your low points?

Gary Stutler: I review my previous paintings and remember the relief that I experienced while I was doing them. I reclaim my old joys. On my website I say, “The most satisfying pieces are as inscrutable as the subjects that inspire them.” For me, that means my documentation of appearance transcends topography, or the how-to of painting it. For example, perhaps through a scientific investigation, you can identify the series of events that bring something into being, even to the point of cloning it, but that doesn’t address the why of its origination and pattern. I find this lingering inscrutability in the things I like to look at a reason to paint them. When a painting retains my appreciation of that, I’ve succeeded. Whether a subject attracts me, be it flesh, or places, or, lately, plants, the pattern is my starting point.

Gary Stutler

Gary Stutler: My opinion is that anything and everything goes in the art world. That is simply the reality that we live in. I have no quarrel with that. The challenge is to avoid overload. I wonder how genuinely sincere some artists are about the work they produce.

Art Interview: What experiences did you have while approaching galleries?

Gary Stutler: Speaking of recent representation, from 1999 to 2001 I lived in Palm Springs, California. I went to openings and I looked around. In two separate instances I got involved with galleries. Unfortunately, the first gallery didn’t produce any sales for me. It turned out to be the owner’s last year in the business. That must have affected how much his heart was still in it, although I was not contractually allowed to show anywhere else. In the second instance, the gallery’s philosophy was to represent only local artists from Palm Springs, which meant I had to part ways with them after my relocation back to the San Francisco, Bay Area in 2001.

Art Interview: Do you have a gallery representing you at the moment?

Gary Stutler Ginko Oil on Linen 36 x 36 inches

I’m very fortunate that my partner has a legal background and is extremely computer literate. It’s because of his expertise that my work has been introduced to a wider audience, by means of a web site, and most recently, via a Second Life presence.

Art Interview: What are your current prices?

Gary Stutler: My paintings currently range from $1,500 to $6,000.

Art Interview: Have your prices changed over the years?

Gary Stutler: They have gone up and down. The first sale I ever made through a gallery was in 1987 in San Francisco - it was a gorgeous gallery that did not handle solely realist work. I felt that I’d made it in that context. They sold a piece right after the first week for $8,000. The director revealed later that the price was reduced $500 for the client. He was fair though: Because he hadn’t discussed the discount with me, I still received my original 50% of the $8,000. It took months to get my money though, because the gallery was dissolving. I’d heard there were too many people trying to run the place. The director himself was quite disillusioned by the owners. He and his wife moved all the way to the East Coast to run a non-profit arts organization.

Gary Stutler Moon Oil on Linen 48 x 72 inches

Gary Stutler: Everything is on disk; I think digital technology is wonderful.

Art Interview: Was it a struggle for you to develop your style and find an identity for your work?

One of my professors at UC Davis, Roland Peterson, gave me quite a technical challenge on his first private visit to my studio. “Your colors are boring” he said. I thought: “He’s been at this longer than I have!” so I set about studying his work. To me, his paintings were concerned with color above all else. Learning more about color for its own sake was very liberating for me.

Art Interview: Is that why some of your work is painted with overtly saturated color?

Gary Stutler: When I initially gave myself permission to use color arbitrarily, I revelled in it. I was like an inexperienced chef being exposed to a whole new world of spices: What comes out of the kitchen is more vibrant and exciting, but can ultimately wear out the palate, if it is not balanced with a more systematic or analytical approach. Also, in the more recent past, I’ve used saturated color to deliberately push for more theatricality. I really enjoy that and certainly haven’t given it up. Currently though, I am ranking color intensities to clarify spatial relationships.

Art Interview: The botanical paintings that you are making are very complicated, detailed and laborious, why did you choose to paint this way?

Gary Stutler Passion Fruit Oil on Linen 35 x 43 inches Private collection

One of the things that pulls me out of an overwhelmed sense of the complexity and possible arbitrariness of everything in sight, is the ability to identify patterns. These patterns repeat themselves and are consistent enough that we can, at least, relate things into groups. The kaleidoscopic patterns of a life-form can so arrest my attention, that I feel benignly hypnotized. Where there’s taxonomy, there’s hope, I guess. That’s what’s driving the botanicals at the moment.

Art Interview: Do you paint your subjects from life?

Gary Stutler Camellia's Doorway Oil on Linen 26 x 30 inches

Art Interview: Would you be able to give me a time-scale on how long each image takes to complete?

Gary Stutler: Between 6 and 10 weeks.

Art Interview: You have a huge selection of work on your website.

Gary Stutler: Oh yes, some of those pictures go back as far as 30 years.

Art Interview: Do you ever take a pre-meditated approach to painting?

Gary Stutler: Sometimes. But on other occasions I just go out and take a walk, and hope I see something that is curious enough for me to start the next painting with.

Art Interview: What are the average sizes of your paintings?

Gary Stutler: 36 by 36 inches.

Gary Stutler Wardrobe Oil on Linen 46 x 32 inches Private collection

Art Interview: Do you mix any type of medium into your oils when you use them?

Art Interview: Do you pay attention to art critics?

Gary Stutler: I do read some of the reviews in newspapers and magazines. The art world is yet another parallel universe, with its own agenda and will to survive. If you’re hungry enough for criticism, you’ll find it - if you’re not - you won’t hear it anyway. As individual artists we have responsibility to be aware of at least some of what’s said and goes on. You’re calling from Berlin and you are in one of the centres of art activity on the planet. You are in the midst of high concentrations of wealth and educated people. There is so much happening. Keeping track of that, is a profession in its own right.

This oral history transcript is the result of a digitally recorded interview with Gary Stutler on August 9, 2007. The interview took place over the telephone between Berlin, Germany and Vallejo, California, USA and was conducted by Brendan Davis for Art Interview Online Magazine.