Kirk Lybecker:  A Life Not Spent In Service to an Indifferent Master

Kirk Lybecker paints from an aerie perched atop one of Portland’s old warehouse buildings in the Water neighborhood surrounded by an extraordinary amount of golf balls, a huge rubber plant, and a piano.  Though his spacious aerie has a bank of windows facing south, Kirk’s easel is secluded in an interior studio bathed in radiant, artificial light.  He makes a mean cup of coffee and says with an ironic/philosophical laugh, and a satiric nod to Thomas Kinkade, “I paint urban blight.”  Kirk warns me artists tend to rationalize things and he teaches me the word, Pleonasm. 
  
pleonasm |ˈplēəˌnazəm| |ˌpliəˈnøzəm| |ˌpliːə(ʊ)ˈnaz(ə)m|noun
the use of more words than are necessary to convey meaning (e.g., see with one's eyes), either as a fault of style or for emphasis. 

Though he might protest if you say it:  Kirk is a deep thinker and he uses words well.  He is not a pleonast.  In Kirk’s own words, “This is the age that I live in and it is difficult not to have some thoughts about it.”  Here are some of those thoughts. 

Kirk was born in Tacoma Washington but grew up in Kansas.
“I did very poorly in high school but well, they had to take me into college because I graduated from a Kansas high school.  I did much better in college.  I did much better in physics and chemistry and biology and poorly in English (laughs with irony) much to my bridled embarrassment.  

On Drawing and Painting.
“Drawing was always easy because you always have a pencil and some paper, you always have some bored teacher, you know, that’s trying to drive you into sleep.  A pencil, paper, drawing paper is always convenient:  it is always there.” 

“I’ve always painted.  I’ve always done something in art; watercolors or something like that in the third or fourth grade.  I know that I was always doing some oil painting, probably in the seventh or eighth grade.” 

“Draw I did, through junior high school and high school, doing little art projects, odds and ends, a little painting, a little colored pencil, by the time that I got into college in Topeka Kansas in the 70’s.  One of my teachers was Ed Navone, a very good teacher.  His milieu was drawing and I gravitated to drawing trying to acquire a visual literacy; sort of like syntax to a writer I suppose.” 

On Being a Bad Sculptor
“I don’t actually have a degree in painting.  I graduated with a Bachelor’s in Fine Arts in Sculpture.  Upon graduating with, well, with pretty decent grades in sculpture, I came to the startling and unavoidable conclusion that I just wasn’t very good at it.  All the sculpture that I did didn’t have any sense of presence.  It didn‘t have any depth to it, and I was heading for graduate school, and all of the graduate schools that I applied to in sculpture quite rightly turned me down.  They said,  “Thank you very much, but no thank you.” I went to the University of Idaho, who said ‘we like what you’ve been doing but we’d like you to enroll as a graduate student in painting and drawing rather than in sculpture.’” 

Have You Made Your Living as an Artist Your Entire Life?
“Yes and no.  I started doing odd jobs.  I taught at Portland Community College for about six years and started teaching at Clark College in Vancouver in 1989.  I’ve had other things, but for the most part it is the art which has been paying the bills, which is surprising the hell out of me.”  

“There was one time in the early eighties I was thinking about doing something like selling insurance, but then somebody bought an $8000 watercolor.  You know, that goes a long way to making you feel like some of the stuff is worth something.”    

On Light, and Creating Art in the Time You are Born.
“Light defines.  To give a painting dimension you have to have a real respect for light.  This is where abstract expressionism and a lot of painting digressed from paintings of the 19^th century; the Winslow Homers and stuff like that.  After World War 1 a lot of that light and dark, the heavy chiaroscuro really lost a lot of favor simply because it kind of got washed away with the post WW1 sense of aesthetics.  You live in the time you live, and if I had endured WW1 and the trenches, the flu {Spanish Flu} outbreak, I would be pretty dissatisfied in society, or life, or the universe in general, and I certainly wouldn’t be looking back to the art of the old days.” 

“Art is really of its time.  You can’t really be a painter of Impressionist paintings in this day and age:  it just doesn’t work.  I very much enjoy abstract paintings.  I know what and why it is but I ‘m not an abstract painter because I don’t have the talent or the gift.  One of the great ironies of our time is that it probably takes far more skill and far more luck to make an abstract painting that is going to engage you for as much time as a painting of a flower is going to engage you.”   

“I think a lot about the dimensionality of things and light defines dimension.  You can’t really define a sense of place, a sense of how you feel about something, the sadness or the happiness of it, without first taking into effect the light.  Then you can take into account the structure, composition, color, and what details you’re going to put in.  Lights the one.” 

“The prime times for really getting good light tend to be early morning or afternoon because it is refracting through more atmosphere.  There’s more color, but you also get better shadows because that’s the doppelganger, when you can see the two together:  that’s what you’re looking for.  I’m always fascinated by summer, if there’s a big storm that blows through with clouds on the east side of where you are and the sun coming through with a little angle:  it electrifies the trees; neon electrified.” 

On Paying Attention to the Dark Areas, and Complexity.
 “One of the things that I’m really fond of is the attention you can pay to the things that are in the darker areas of paintings, because that’s not what someone is going to see right off the bat.  Like a well-written novel, you {need to} keep coming back to it and there are different things there every time you look at it.” 

“I like complicated art.  I like a story that you can read again and again and again and get different things out of it, different meanings.”   

“I do not need to rail against he age in which I live, but a lot of contemporary music isn’t as much fun as seventeenth century or eighteenth century music:  you can’t get it by just appreciating the back-beat.  And painting is like that, although, unfortunately I don’t feel it is well appreciated in this particular day and age, you know complicated paintings.  Maybe it has fallen out of fashion just as complicated music is not much in favor.  That’s just the way it is.  You live in the age in which you live and sometimes you rail against the teenagers and their loud music, but I’m sure my parents railed against the teenagers, and the people in the fourteenth century railed against all those extra notes that were in that music, so what can I say?” 

On Modern Art, Quantum Mechanics, and Explaining the Inexplicable.
“I have a very good friend, he’s retired from NASA and Cal. Tech.  I believe he was nominated for a Nobel Prize because he figured out the density at which a star will collapse.   He and I go back and forth about the nature of our two different worlds.  His is quantum mechanics and mine is art and he’s gone through some experiments about why polarity works and doesn’t work.  How can a photon go through one polarity filter but not through two polarity filters, but if you have three it goes through all three.  My turn on that is, art simply defies any logical explanation similarly to {those photons} and quantum mechanics.  You can only describe what you see.  The context of art is at least as irrational as quantum mechanics.  And you know we, unfortunately don’t have the math to back up the way things are.  Art is weird, as weird as life.” 

“I would not think of myself as being partly philosophical because most of the things I talk about seem self evident, such as that modern art is difficult, alienating, hard to comprehend, hard to see as anything but for ridicule.”  

“Modern art is really a reaction to the kind of alienation that society has built.  It is very difficult for people to understand what art is, so there’s a high demand for artists to explain the inexplicable -- why are you doing this, what are your influences?  Artists do have a problem, in that you are required to say something about art in a literary fashion that doesn’t necessarily speak to the fact that this isn’t necessarily a literary approach to things.”   

On Wealth and Pricing His Work. 
“If your paintings are not selling that means you’re not charging enough for them, because art is worth exactly what you pay for it.  If you paid more for a painting it is worth more than if you paid less for it.  Of course the corollary for that is, that if your paintings are selling, you’re not charging enough for them. 

“Our society is really oriented to success, achievement, and money.  Maybe, the best description for me is a skeptic.   It is my perception that personal prestige, money, and that sort of things isn’t all that solid; it isn’t something that you should base your life on.” 

“The world is really a supremely capitalist proposition, that everything that is worth having is going to cost you something.  The pursuit of money, of art, is all going to cost you something.  The problem is you’re never going to know what the price actually is.  You can never know what the price of anything is.    How much of your soul are you going to have to give up to become a millionaire?”  

“So I’m skeptical of wealth (laughs) though I’d certainly love to try it out, and I buy lottery tickets, because I believe I am of sufficient maturity that if I don’t like it I could drop it like any other drug habit (big laugh).”   

On Van Gogh’s, Cats, Fire, and Skepticism
 “I respect artists and art, but I’m skeptical and I’m not ready to say my life is devoted to art or anything inane like that.” 

“Life is a big advertising proposition.  People get fooled all the time.  Is art; is a Van Gogh more valuable than a cat?  I rather like both of them and I would hate to be in the situation where I had to choose one or the other.” 

JEB:  “In a fire I suspect you would choose the cat over the Van Gogh?” 

“You’re probably wrong about that.  I have strong respect for cat’s abilities to take care of themselves. A dog on the other hand . . .” 

On a Life spent as an Artist
“What do you do when you get to the end of your life?  Do you look back at your life with pride that you’ve spent thirty years of your life settling insurance claims?  Would the money that you earned, the stuff that you got working a regular job be enough to say that you’ve spent a life in the proper pursuit of what you should be doing?” 

“This is probably what artists have in the back of their mind -- what are you doing, is this what you should be doing?  You may have a life in heaven, but I’d sure hate to count on it, you know, having spent my time doing a lot of trivial things because it seemed like a good idea at the time, when you were making money having spent your life in the service of an indifferent master.” 

©Joey Emil Blum, 2006.