David Driskell, artist

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

My next guest is one of Maine Magazine's 50 Mainers. This is David Driscoll, who is an artist, curator, educator and scholar who specializes in African American art. He has contributed significantly to art history scholarship by examining the role of the black artist in American society. It's really great to have you here.

David Driskell:

Thank you. Good to be here.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

We're lucky to have you here in Maine. And I know you have a studio in Falmouth because you're really kind of a world traveler. You've been a lot of places.

David Driskell:

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I've been very fortunate to had a chance to travel pretty much all over the world, specifically in Africa. I was recounting and trying to remember. I know I've been in and out of the continent more than 10 times different, at least 10 countries. South Africa, Nigeria, Senegal, etc. And as far east as China and Japan. And of course, I had interest in the African diaspora as it related to South America and Central America. So I've been in those parts of the world as well. So a lot moving around.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

You originally came to Maine actually as part of your education, from what I understand, 1953 or thereabouts.

David Driskell:

1953, that's correct. Came to the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, really, in Madison, but it's Skowhegan as a scholarship student from Howard University. The school was about six years old when I came and now it's in, what, its 64th year or something like that. And I've been pretty much connected to Skowhegan over the years, I made friendship with the Cummings family. Bill Cummings was one of the founders of the school and was actually on his farm land that the school was founded 1946. And so even before I became fairly closely connected to the school as a teacher, trustee, governor, what have you, I would go to visit the Cummings family. And we became very good friends. As a matter of fact, I was saying to someone the other day, they were asking, how did I get involved in collecting antiques and specialty things about Maine? And I said, well, the credit goes to Bill Cummings, because he was the one who took me out and said, this is very special to Maine. These jars won't be around much longer. 19th century glazed ceramic jars. If you can afford one, buy it now because it's going to be expensive. So it's that kind of information that the shake of chairs and things which I didn't know anything about until I was exposed like that. And so there's been a richness in our lives by having come to Maine the last 56 years, summering here and being able to add so much of what Maine has that's special. And I don't think people always understand that there's something very special about Maine, especially for artists. So that's a dimension in my life that I think has been very, very important.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

Why is it that you don't think, why don't people understand how special Maine is?

David Driskell:

Well, I guess a part of it is my own artistic overview of believing, first of all, that art is very special and that Maine has been an especially welcoming place for artists. Beginning in the 19th century, when artists wanted to escape from New York and Boston and places like that, they come to Maine, they were well received. They were let alone. Nobody called them in and say, you got to get off this property or anything like that. Monhegan and Dear Isle and places like that, they were welcome. And so I'm not sure that it's the duty of the locals to fully understand how important this place is. I think somebody has to come from outside to inform them and say, you know, this place is very special. You can come here and be on your own, do what you want to do, and not only will Maine hear about it, but maybe the world will hear about it. So I think a part of that is that sense of independence that Maine has always had. From the time it broke away from Massachusetts to proclaiming its own place in global affairs.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

We interviewed Ashley Bryant in his home on Cranberry island, and he also came to Maine through the Skowhegan School.

David Driskell:

That's right.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

He's older than you. He came through a few years before he did.

David Driskell:

He's 94, so he's, what, at least 12 years old.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

And I think that he came through right after the war. He must have been in one of the earlier years of the Skowhegan School that you.

David Driskell:

It was. I think he came the very first year in 1946, or very close thereafter. Yeah. And he, you know, he left an indelible impression at Skalhean because he was one of the artists chosen to do a mural at the South Solon Meeting house in the 1950s, early 60s, which is, I guess, one of the closest things that we have to the notion of how churches are decorated in the European style, the frescoes. The entire church is a small church, of course, and you'd have to know where you're going to get there. But it's outside of Skowhegan in South Solon, the South Solon Meeting House. So he was one of the artists who was chosen to be a muralist for that project, to create frescoes. And I thought it was important. It was important to me because this was a national competition, and he was a young African American artist who was chosen, which, of course, I think says something very, very special about me.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

It's amazing, if you dig a little bit, to know the people really of international status who have chosen to make their homes here, make their art here, and for such a small and rural state.

David Driskell:

Yes. Yes. Yeah. That's one of the things that I think is so special about Maine. Once you come here and find out about the freedom of expression, the way people receive you, and the chance to work on your own, you kind of never forget it. You go out and talk about it. You tell other people about it. In 1972, the fall of 1972, I was guest curator for the Smithsonian Institution, Washington, at the South African National Gallery of Art in Cape Town, South Africa. Well, there were several strange contradictions there. First of all, it was apartheid, apartheid of the highest order. I had grown up in the south, in a segregated south part of the United States, and I could see the relationship between segregation and apartheid. And yet the director of the then National Collection of Fine Arts at the Smithsonian, Dr. Adeline Breeskins, she could have chosen 100 or more scholars, curators, somebody from the Metropolitan, from Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, to take this exhibition to the South African National Gallery of Art. But she insisted that I should take it. And I think she was trying to say something very special by Doing that, that I had a certain kind of understanding of what we were going into and that I had a sensibility about the art because it was the work of a black artist by the name of William H. Johnson. Now, as we look back in history, it's almost ironic that I would be taking the work of an African American artist, a black artist, to South Africa, apartheid South Africa, an artist who'd grown up in the segregated south, in Florence, South Carolina. I would be taking this artist's work to the South African National Gallery of Art to be shown to that public. But I think there was some political, let's say, some politicizing being done on both sides. United States saying, look, look who we are. We're democratic, we can democracy, blah, blah, blah. And South Africa was saying, well, we're not quite as bad as you think we are. And so even though the South African National Gallery of Art had been open to black citizens prior to that, and people of color, they didn't go because they didn't feel welcome. And of course, I can remember in this country when the same thing was evident. Growing up in the south, you didn't just go to a museum as a black person, you had to go on one day, and that was referred to as Negro Day. No whites there except the people who worked there. So I say all of that to say that art has been politicized a certain way to fit the norms of whatever the culture and the country is. But in the larger issue, art is the one thing that humanizes us to the extent that we become human and forget about all of these other political issues and things like that, and just say, this is really perhaps the greatest tool of communication we have music, art, dance, writing, etc, etc. And Maine has been so welcoming to all of these artists. You know, Longfellow, you know, the great tradition of writers who come to Maine as well. And so the artists, including Ashley Bryant, who is not only an artist, but a writer and a puppeteera, could have gone any place to make his home. He was chair of the art department of Dartmouth for many years, but he chose Little Cranberry island to be over there doing his work on his own. And I, you know, I looked around to see where I could settle. When I came to Maine, I knew I wanted to be near a city and I wanted to be. To have access, say, to Skowhegan and places like that. So it seems that Falmouth was the answer.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

Tell me about your own art and your own evolution as an artist.

David Driskell:

Well, I started out, like all artists Doing traditional academic work, trying to learn all the principles, to draw well, to see color in all of its magnificent ways, and to. From the very beginning, I thought that I could have my art be message oriented. By coming to Skowhegan in 1953 and working with Jack Levine, social commentary artist. It stamped my mind as though, oh, this is what I really want to do. I want to have my art say this. Change the world. Look at this. The way he was commenting on the way Congress acted, the MacArthur era, and so forth. And I wanted to say, now, let's make art that changes the world. Well, I did a few compositions that I would consider social commentary in nature. But it was a great lesson for me because that really was not what I ultimately wanted to do. I wanted to eventually give my expression of beauty in the world of beautiful things. Now, social issues can be beautiful, yes, but they can also be very trying. And the one painting that has stood out in my life more than any other, that attests to my interest in social commentary art was the work that I did in 1956, commenting on the death of Emmett Till, the murder in 1955 in Mississippi. And so I engaged in creating this composition. And it's now, you know, it's a celebrated work, if I can say that, at the National Museum of African American History and Culture at the Smithsonian. It was one of the works that they put up at the new opening. And to me, it was somewhat Catharic in that I got this out of my system, because I didn't. After that, I knew I didn't necessarily want to labor with that. I wanted to paint, go out and see nature, the beauty of the world in other ways. And so Maine offers a lot of that. However, in my teaching, I had to. And I taught for 44 years, college and university. I had to try and look out for the welfare of the students and really be counseling as well as advising in the sense that, you know, many students come in the first day they want to do an abstraction, and you have to either have the nerve or the guts or whatever it takes to say, well, you need to learn the principles first. What are you abstracting from? Abstraction is the essence of something, and it means that you've gone all the way to get there, and how far have you gone? So as a good teacher, you have to be able to bring all of that into focus and not be afraid to tell them, no, no, that's not the way today. Let's learn the principles, learn the fundamentals, and then after a period of time, we'll have some reason to talk about and look at abstraction now. If you're going to look at it just from the point of view of color, well, the world is full of beautiful color. You can do whatever you want with it. But don't try and solve problems with your art before you learn the art. That's what I lear that if you're going to engage in the notion of solving problems, make sure that you have the tools and the command of those tools with which to do it. And I think there are always other media that may be able to do it better. What about cinema? What about filmmaking and things like that? You can go back and recapture it over and over again. Once you put that paint on the canvas, it's there, it's not going to move. You can bring a different vision, but the visual vision is always the same. However, with other media, the writer, the dancer, you know, the motive aspect of it may never be the same. That's such a. One of the good things about forms of expression like writing and jazz. The improvisational quality that's there. So you can always be growing and learning. And I'm not saying you can't do that with painting. But painting is a stead and a steadfast medium. And you have to understand what it's doing in order to make it work at its best. So I had to go through all of those things in my life to try and come to the conclusion as to what it is that I want to do. So over the years, I think I have settled on the notion that what I consider to be beautiful is perhaps the most refreshing thing that I can bring to art. And I hope that's what my art does.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

It seems that if you're trying to create a piece of art that has a message attached to it, there's a very intellectual overlay on that. Whereas if you're trying to create a piece of art that is just relaying your feelings of beauty, then there's a very different sense around that.

David Driskell:

Yes, of course. I think all art emanates from the same source, from the notion of creative ideas. That's true of music. You want to create a sound that maybe nobody's heard before. You want to imitate the sound that you heard from a bird that you never heard before, and so forth. With dance, you may want to imitate the motive aspect of a movement that you saw a gazelle take a leap or a deer or something like that. We are the observant creatures of the world. And somehow or another our art should be the sum total of what we experience. And we add new dimensions to the world by this kind of observation, be it visual, motive, auditory or whatever. And so I think that it all begins with the intellectual process, the idea. At least that's what Plato tells us. And so it is up to us individually as to how we carry it beyond the idea stage. We've got to know the rudiments of the trade that we're in. We've got to know the materials with which we work. And we should have good judgment enough to know when we have arrived at the conclusion of what it is that we say we are doing. It's great to have the critic there to reinforce that, but we should be the first critics ourselves. And that's one of the reasons why I'm always a little leery when I see somebody signs their name so and so and so, Master artist, you know, what else is there for you to learn if you're a master? You know, I was honored to be elected to the National Academy of Art. And I really feel a little strange at times putting NA behind my name. The academy likes for you to do that because it's good for them. But like, am I really at that stage where I can pat myself on the back and say, yes, I'm there. So the intellectual process is first and foremost in all of the arts. But the most important thing is to be able to develop the intellectual discourse which sends it out from you to somebody else. And then it has meaning, you know, concrete meaning.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

I'm interested in this idea of conclusion because when I spoke with Eric Hopkins and I went to his studio on another island in Maine, there were many pieces that to my admittedly untrained eye, seemed finished, but to his eye they weren't. How do you develop that understanding of completion?

David Driskell:

Oh, that's a good comprehensive question. I'll do my best at it. But I think that's where the whole concept of training is so important. Now, obviously we have the so called naive or the outsider artists and so forth and so on. I always say outside of what. Because the art to me is always emanating from that creative source that we all have the potential for having doesn't necessarily mean we all have it. And sometimes I think study and skill, of course, can bring it to a certain level. But by the same token, study and skill are two of the instruments by which we come to that stage whereby we know best what is and what isn't. Is it there or is it not? So study in the biblical sense, to show thyself approved. And also have the discipline to train your own eye, to train your ear, to train whatever there is for this instrument of contact, to look around in the world and see if you are in step with the order of what you're in. If you're not in step with it, why, if you're not in step with it, maybe you haven't finished the course. And so I think you have to be diligent about pursuing the rudiments of the trade to the extent that you know this piece lacks something and you're not ready to put it out there because your mind keeps telling you, no, no, no, not in the sense of perfection, but your mind keeps telling you there's another stage beyond this, and you have to be willing to go there. Now, if you're not willing to go there, that is perhaps the closest thing to a form of selfish indulgence that you can have. It's almost like nobody can tell you anything. You know you're there. That's not good. Philosophically, it's not good. Aesthetically, it's not good. And for your own personal growth, well being is not good. At 86, I'm still learning. I'm open to learning. I want to learn something every day, and I think that will prolong whatever creative longevity I have.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

Very interesting conversation. I have so many other questions that I could ask you for the purposes of the podcast. I'll finish by asking, what is it that you've been surprised by in your life the most?

David Driskell:

I think it's probably something that's still growing on me. Not something that came upon me all of a sudden, but something that I've grown into trying to understand is how this great gift of life that we all have that is so inviting and is so informing is so wonderful that we manage somehow to turn living into a problem amongst ourselves. Not just the color line, but class. In politics, however you mention, seems that with that free will to choose comes that other side to choose unwisely as well. And if ethics and morality, religion, spirituality, all those things that we think should be guiding forces based on our human history if they are to play any role at all in our lives, it seems to me that the guiding force would be do good, love one another, try and make the world a better place in which to live, instead of dividing it up into parcels and always looking at what is in front of us as a problem, can we at some times look at it as a challenge, a creative challenge, and perhaps help to remove some of the things that we. See before us that hinder beauty, truth and goodness.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

I've been speaking with David Driscoll, who is an artist, curator, educator and scholar who specializes in African and art and is also one of this year's 50 Mainers with Maine Magazine. It's really been my great pleasure to have you here today and I appreciate your coming in.

David Driskell:

Thank you for inviting me.