November 2005

Dear Friends,

For our artist profile this month, we corresponded with Daniel Heyman.   He is an artist, teacher, and author currently teaching at both the Rhode Island School of Design and the Tyler School of Art in Philadelphia.  He has exhibited prints and paintings extensively on the east coast of the US and abroad.  In September, he served on a panel of Moku Hanga Printmakers at the Impact/Kontakt International Printmaking Conference in Berlin, Germany and Poznan, Poland.

McClain's:  How were you introduced to Moku Hanga (Japanese style printmaking)?

Daniel Heyman:  I wanted to go to Japan to learn about Japanese printmaking. I didn't know what Moku Hanga was and was really quite ignorant about the technique. I was simply in love with Japanese aesthetics -- the prints of course, but also the handmade papers. I was accepted as a resident artist at the Nagasawa Art Park Printmaking Program on Awajishima Island for the fall of 2002. Nagasawa is a program that invites mid-career artists who do not know Moku Hanga techniques to study with Japanese master carvers, printers, artists, and paper makers. I studied at Nagasawa for 9 weeks, and was in Japan a total of 4 months.

McClain's:  Tell us a little bit about your experience as a panelist at the Impact/Kontakt Conference in Germany and Poland. What was going on there?

Daniel Heyman:  I was on a panel of artists all of whom had been to the Nagasawa program.  Rebecca Salter gave a talk about traditional printed signatures left at temples, which was very very interesting.  Each artist then spoke of their own work, and how their time in Japan and the techniques they learned there influenced their work when they returned to their home country. Several of the artists consider themselves printmakers, and then there were several, like myself, who love making prints, but know that printmaking, and being a master printer is not what they are. It was very interesting. Afterwards, we were able to show our printed work in a portfolio review session.

What made the conference so exciting for me, is that as a group, the Nagasawa artists come from many different countries, and it was exciting to connect with these artists and have a real exchange of ideas and inspiration.
 
One other high point was a lecture given by Thomas Kilpper, a German artist, who has used wooden floors of abandoned buildings as his matrixes, and has carved and printed these floors into immense woodblock prints. This for me was a revelation.

McClain's:  Do you encourage your students to think politically? What do you show them for inspiration?
 
Daniel Heyman:  I try not to push my students in terms of what the content of their art should be. Art making is a very personal affair, and the reasons one needs to make art are as various as there are artists. I do push my students to try to be aware of the world around them, and encourage them to read, go to films, see as many exhibitions as possible and to think about where their art might fit in to a larger context than simply themselves. As for inspiration? Another good question.... I always talk a lot about movie directors Almodovar, Kieslovsky, Kurosowa, among others. For printmakers I always talk about Munakata Shiko, Xu Bing, Nancy Spero, Chuck Close, David Hockney. Thomas Kilpper... then more generally, Kiki Smith for sure, Matisse, Picasso, Rothenberg, Wojnarowicz, Bourgeois... it is difficult to say because I try to encourage students to look at artists whose work they personally might find inspiring. As such, I sometimes suggest artists whose work I personally don't like but who I think might help a student's development.

McClain's: Your recent work is very politically motivated. When did politics start to influence your work and why?
 
Daniel Heyman: Politics have always been part of my work. Politics have always been part of my family, as I have older brothers who in various ways have been active in political causes since my childhood. For me, in the past I was more involved in the politics of personal identity, and gay and lesbian politics. Since the US government began its "all war all the time" policies after 9/11, I began to think that I had to do something more public, that private issues were no longer as important as speaking out about public atrocities that I feel were being swept under the communal carpet. After seeing the photos of prison abuse from Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq in the spring of 2004, I was outraged, and continue to be. It is impossible for me to accept that American soldiers can use mental and physical torture for any reason. 
 
McClain's:  How is your political work received? Is it reaching the intended audience?
 
Daniel Heyman:   I have had a wonderful response to this new work. People feel that it is not didactic, that it poses questions rather than declaring positions. I showed this work in a public venue in Philadelphia last spring and had both a tremendous turn out and an ongoing discussion on some local websites and blogs. Who is the intended audience? Good question. Unfortunately, the people involved in making policy at this level will probably never see my work. However, the work is really directed to anyone actively thinking about our culture at large. It represents one individual's attempt to understand who we are as a people right now, and I think there are many people who are concerned about this discussion. Through my two solo exhibitions and a variety of group shows last year I would estimate that 700-1000 people saw this work, and for me that is a tremendous success. 

McClain's:  Is it important for every artist to travel internationally?

Daniel Heyman:   I think it is important for artists to be aware of things going on in the world. But many artists have made wonderful work and never left their home town. Did Stanley Spencer ever travel much beyond Cookham? Traveling has been tremendously important for me as a way to replenish the well of inspiration that can run dry from time to time.

McClain's:   How has printmaking affected your painting and vice versa? 

Daniel Heyman:   Printmaking has had a profound effect on my painting. I cannot over state it. I am not sure that painting has had the same effect on my printmaking, but it's possible. I think of making prints as an ongoing sketchbook of sorts, a place where I work out ideas, try out new combinations of images, and in general place less emphasis on the final project than the process. At times I have had to push my paintings to keep up with my prints. I started using chine colle consistently with my etchings a couple of years ago, and that led to painting on Mylar and tracing patterns from Japanese papers into my painted images, which led to incorporating all sorts of images in the paintings. I also am open to aggressively using a pair of scissors and a Xerox machine to work out compositions both for paintings and for prints. It goes back and forth. Currently I am making a series of serigraphs that are completely indebted to both my paintings and my Moku Hanga prints, it is hard to tell where they come from.

McClain's:  Why did you make the switch from Gouache paintings to ink and oil on Mylar?

Daniel Heyman:   As I alluded to above, I switched to oil and ink on Mylar as a way of incorporating more and more images into a single work. Making prints challenged me to think of repetition as an art making tool that I could use in my paintings. If I could encourage relief students to think of stamp making as a legitimate art form, why not use the repetition of images, even painted ones, to inform a painting. I was already drawing from very disparate sources and copying images onto paper before painting them. At some point I simply had too many images all demanding to be included at once; Images from the war, patterns from katazome paper, old print designs. The fastest and easiest way to incorporate all that information was to have a way to trace some of it directly from its source even if that source was a Xerox of a collage of a print.

The gouache paintings were too slow, not in the painting of them, but in the amount of information they could contain and transmit. Painting is such a still medium, compared to television or film, or even paper journalism in that every day there is more and more information and images that an overwhelmed public is trying to contend with. How I created my paintings needed to become compatible with the urgency I felt with getting the images out for public discussion.
 
McClain's:   What inks or pigments do you prefer to use when printing in the Japanese style?
 
Daniel Heyman:   I use water based gouache paints mixed with rice paste, and for blacks I use sumi ink with rice paste. On rare occasions I use water colors with rice paste.
 
McClain's:   If you hadn't become an artist, what do you think you might have done? 
 
Daniel Heyman:   I cannot imagine what else I could have done. I thought for a long time about being an architect, but was never comfortable with the idea that I would have always had to work to build consensus in any project. I could have been very happy as an architect, still today, but I could never have been happy working with patrons of that scale, or negotiating my ideas with developers or politicians.
 
McClain's:   Are you exhibiting in any current or upcoming exhibits?

Daniel Heyman:   Yes, thank God. When I have no definite plans for exhibitions I am at a loss, and feel relatively worthless. I have an exhibition coming up in a church in Devon, PA for January.  I am also showing prints with the Philadelphia Print Collaborative both in Philly (November, Silicon Gallery) and New York (January 31- February 25, 2006, 55 Mercer Gallery) The big news, hopefully, is an installation of digital screen prints and sculptures at Eastern State Penitentiary, an abandoned prison in Philadelphia, set for next summer.   This project is still pending approval by Eastern State, but has already received financial support from the Independence Foundation, and the 5 County Arts Fund. This will be my first installation, and its subject will be prisoner abuse in Iraq. I have been invited to participate in interviewing some of these torture victims (all of whom were released without ever being charged!) in Amman, Jordan later this year. This is unbelievably exciting for me, and will surely have an effect on my future work.

Finally, I am organizing a Moku Hanga exhibition to be presented at the Pont Aven School of Contemporary Art in Brittany, France for this coming March or April, where I will be teaching spring term