New Traditions: Robin Venter on emerging Queer Aesthetics in Academic Art

Yeah.

Alright, Robin, welcome to the show.

Glad to be here, thank you.

How would you describe your artistic style?

Um, I consider my work to be part of the representational figurative tradition. Um, that to me means staying faithful to the likeness of the subject that I'm trying to depict, with, of course, some room for artistic liberty. And then my subjects are usually figurative meaning the human form.

How did you progress towards this style?

When I was younger, a lot of feeling of accomplishment came from accurately depicting what I was looking at, so you mean like as a elementary school or middle schooler. That comes from like drawing portraits of like characters or celebrities. So a lot of it was based in copying a photo as truthfully as I could and that brought me a lot of joy and I sort of just kept sticking with it. So I was just growing towards mastering a craft I had a natural inclination towards.

What is your art process now?

My art process now is I use a bunch of different tools, so it moved away from just working from photos and copying exactly what I saw. Now it involves a sketch beforehand, so a thumbnail sketch, and then I go out and take photos that will closely approximate the sketch that I have and the idea in my head. And then after that I do a lot of photo bashing. So you know, if I can't capture everything in one shot, then I will, you know, try and match the lighting as best I can like, match the angle of the camera, the height of the camera to try and get things into perspective, because I still do want to maintain an air of you could be seeing this in front of you. And then after that I'll do a color study and then I'll transfer the drawing and paint pretty much directly onto a white canvas with just the lines from that drawing transferred on, and with my color study I sort of just go like bit by bit. So that's where I've progressed and now that's how I work.

How did art school affect your practice?

How did art school affect your practice? This is there's a lot of ways that I can name how it affected it. So, sort of start with the technical side of it, I credit art school for giving me a majority of the skill that I have now. It affected my practice by just giving me the confidence to paint what I paint without fear of like I don't think I can do it, like I'll have to gain this and this knowledge to be able to pull this off. So it's, it's just opened the doors, really. And it also gave me my art history education, which its influence makes its way into my practice constantly, which its influence makes its way into my practice constantly.

I took a class called the voyeuristic gaze in my junior year, so that was a really pivotal moment in the conceptual side of my work. I mean, we read Laura Mulvey's the Male Gaze, I reread John Berger's W of seeing, and I learned about all the ways that heteronormativity and patriarchy dictated the Western art world. And at the same time I was coming to terms with my own identity, like I realized huh, I'm not cis, I'm not. I knew that I wasn't straight for a long time, but it was the sort of like cracking away at the shell of, like you know, taking this class really makes me think about myself and how I fit in this weird sort of messed up Western idea of gender and how it relates to art history so kind of a double whammy of an art course.

And then on top of that I had been painting model after model in all of my four years of school and I started to tell which models like teachers preferred over others. I noticed how bodies were being talked about. There was like gender language towards the models which you know to a cis straight audience feels normal, but to me it was like now in the forefront of my brain, and I was also noticing that like cis men were posed in very like stoic, heroic poses. And then the cis women that were models at our school were very like demure and dainty and like had these very pretty poses and I just got very sick of it. I got very tired of that being the default didn't happen every time, but enough to where for our outside assignments I would paint my queer friends in poses that were kind of against the default poses that my school was presenting, and after that I never really looked back after painting all my queer friends and our non-conforming selves.

What were some of the best lessons that you learned from art school?

learned from art school. The fact that I received so many different lessons was an invaluable part of art school. You spend six hours a week with someone who's an expert of what they do. They'll unload all their knowledge onto you and you have the choice whether or not to apply it to your own work. You can assemble your own practice to serve your own wants. That's kind of how I work now. Like I got my color studies from one professor, I got my drawing skills from another, I got my method of oil transferring from a third. So that's what I really love about it. And I can paint so many different things. I can do a la prima paintings, I can do indirect paintings, I can do portraits, still lives, landscapes, anything really that's based in representation. And you know, I even had a class that touched on bringing abstract concepts into figurative work. So just the amount of lessons that were given to me were the best ones.

I'm interested in what draws you to figuration, what draws you to the body as your primary means of expression.

I think it's because it's capable of so much empathy. You know, like the human form, we can all relate to a body and that's not to say that we can't relate to objects and you can't, you know, use an object as an allegory for an experience. But I feel like there's something so powerful in seeing the human figure and finding a way to connect to it. Not everything's going to resonate with you, but I feel like the human form allows you to connect a little bit more than other subjects.

Yeah, Could you expand a bit more on the use of allegory in your work? So like the classical motifs within your work. What does that mean for you to use that in your work.

Yeah, allegory is an interesting one because it's it's almost the objectification of of a figure to serve a narrative purpose, um, and I talk about it, um, almost as a bad thing sometimes because because oftentimes it objectifies female forms, and so for a while I didn't really like using the word allegory for my pieces because I feel like I've attached a very negative connotation to it. But I guess, like some of my figures are allegorical, you know, like this, the piece of the reclining nude, you know somebody could see it as an allegory for, like the ambiguity of body, hair, turn anything that I make into a pillar that represents something that you can relate to. So I get like I haven't really thought about my work as an allegory, but definitely that one. I think, like I did a leg hair painting that was sort of the precursor to this one Truly forgot what I named it, but that one also it's like an allegory of, you know, body, hair and the attraction to it, like I I find them to be and they're ambiguous, like there's no face to it.

So there are abstract concepts of desire towards something that you know I find desirable and I want to like, prove, is it desirable, trait. So that was an interesting one. I hadn't really thought about that.

Yeah, as someone who also loves body hair, a big fan of that. So thank you.

Thank you Doing, doing good work.

Yeah, yeah, and I think that is so important. When we think about just art in general, it's so infrequent that you even see body hair, just art in general. It's so infrequent that you even see body hair. So, putting that in as just like something that is innate to humans, whether we want to acknowledge it or not is fantastic, yeah, and figurative.

You know, like painting is ye olde. In photoshop you know you can omit or add as much things as you want. And to paint figures hairless, cause you don't have to be a hundred percent faithful to what you're seeing. And that's used very frequently. So you know, to remove body hair from a figure and you know like I'm talking about, I use I use the term woman because you know that's the sort of historical construct. But you see woman painted without body hair in historical paintings all the time and it's not like they had razors to shave every inch of their body. There was grooming, of course, but you know it's a deliberate choice to not include body hair and a lot of those paintings of women historically.

What artists inspire your work?

I've got a mix of historical and contemporary artists that influenced my work. So historical artists, very first, one that I remember like falling in love with Caravaggio. Current favorite is John Singer, sargent love him. Um, bouguereau to an extent, uh, I used to really love him, sort of. You know, I like Sargent a little bit more at this time in my career. Um, thomas Akins uh, he's sort of got this like gritty realism that I like. Um, there's an artist named gluck. I'm thinking a quote in their biography, like no prefixes, suffixes or whatever, so like the term like miss gluck, like literally the artist yelled at the person who called them that and like stormed out of the room, and that's a really interesting one because it's, you know, in the biography. It there's, she, her pronouns um, and I want to be faithful to that because the artist, you know we don't have the same language that we used to have and vice versa, and so there's, you know you run into the struggle of retroactively assigning somebody an identity that you know, it's, it's anachronistic.

So I really love her as a painter and there's a part of me that relates to her and her experience like dressing in all men's clothes and you knowixes, suffixes, etc. Um, but yeah, she's really cool, uh. And then romaine brooks, which was a contemporary of gluck, um, so yeah, all of those are historical artists off the top of my head. Then contemporaries are um, I really love Kehinde Wiley because he does a similar thing where he's taking motifs from art history and is injecting his own personal experiences into them. Suzanne Shifflett, who I took a class I like snuck into an MFA class at my school that she taught she's part of the Tom of Finland Foundation. She taught. Um, she's part of the tom of finland foundation. Uh, very awesome.

Like lesbian artist, very unapologetic about you know the art that she's making her identity. You know she's got a self-portrait, um, with her big tattoo across her stomach. This is butch. I love her. She's great. Um ian stone he's a canadian artist. I don't know if you've heard of him. Um, um, ian Stone, he's a Canadian artist. I don't know if you've heard of him. Um, yeah, he does a lot of also like queer portraiture. He's done a few paintings of um, like shockingly similar to what I'm doing, which is awesome. Like you know, I only sort of bumped into him halfway through my thesis.

I do know.

Ian Stone, he's awesome, he's rad. Yeah, will St John, who I have complicated relationship with. With Will St John he he did a small series last year where he painted sort of the New York elite and a lot of his subject matters were like he painted a trans actress. He painted like a lot of queer imagery, without really like discussing queerness and the sort of issues around it, but he is a phenomenal, phenomenal painter and I really love his imagery. There's just like I can appreciate. We'll still. We'll still like taking it with a grain of salt um. Philip Gladstone, who does a lot of the same sort of like, pulling from art history and making contemporary images. Uh, jenna Gribben, an amazing lesbian painter. She's got these like huge scale paintings, um, and all of her female figures have like electric hot pink nipples and it's just fabulous, it's so good. Uh, felix dion, um, who's more of an illustrator. And then salman tor again touches on a lot of like art historical motifs, injects his own experience into them.

So yeah, Just to pause here for a second. Can I put you on to someone?

Yes.

Do you know who Ken Monkman is? I do.

Yes, yes, ken Monkman.

Yeah, they do the huge like right but they like he does these like huge historical reinterpretations of uh canadian and north american history and has like an alter ego called mischief eagle testicle, who's a two-spirit, like time traveler. Um, yeah, like, look into his work. He is insane and from Winnipeg.

Oh, how cool. I think I do follow him now that you brought up like the sort of re-imagining of historical events, like really, I've seen, I've definitely seen his work. It's super powerful, yeah, and like so bright and colorful Like it's, it's really good.

Yeah, also, I'm so jealous that you got to go to a class with Suzanne Shiflett.

I love her work so much she's so cool, she is walking distance from my place oh my god, I need to go to LA.

She is living my leather dyke fantasy. I fucking love her. Yeah, she's. She's incredible. Okay, well, we'll go back. I'm gonna take that part out all good we'll. We'll touch it after the yeah, yeah, we'll, we'll get back into it. Um so for your thesis work at Laguna, you upended traditional heteronormative visual traditions like the reclining nude. Can you tell me a bit more how your reclining nude differs to what the viewer may have expected when looking at a reclining nude work and why you decided to make these changes?

Yeah, well, there are many famous reclining nudes throughout art history. Recognizable ones. Recognizable ones, uh, would are, um, you know, the Venus of Urbino by Titian and the Birth of Venus by Capanel. Um, you know countless others, but these are the two that that were in my mind as I was sort of drafting up this painting. Um, and reclining nudes are dominated by female figures serving as objects of sexual desire or objectified allegorical figures. You know, touching back onto the allegory and my sometimes negative connotations with it, and gender expectations apply to these figures, they have long hair on their heads but no body, body hair, which again is a very deliberate choice. Um, they have, like, pronounced breasts. They tick off a lot of expectations. You know there's a lot of eroticism in these nudes, but also a sort of. You know, they're like I'm in a sexy pose, but I'm being politely modest about it, and you know, it's not the figure's fault, it's the painter's fault. So it's very, it's very loaded in its how the painters choose to paint these figures, but anyways, at the end of the day they're very socially acceptable women. My reclining nude, in comparison, doesn't live up to the same expectations of the nudes that I've mentioned. There's very deliberate gender ambiguity. There's body hair that's been emphasized through composition. They're breast depicted, but they're much more subtle and the pose is feminine and alluring in nature. But it's not attempting to be a typical classical reclining nude For added effect in the background. Classical reclining nude For added effect in the background. There's two illustrations that I pulled from ancient Greek pottery vases. So there's two erotic scenes, one's between two women, one's between two men. And I didn't even know that there were gay sex vases between women. I only thought there were male gay sex v faces. So that was a really cool discovery that I learned. Lesbians stay winning. But yeah, there's erotic things in the background too, which further push this idea of like. You know it's not supposed to be a typical reclining nude and like compared to art history, but it can still be sexy, you know, it's still. There's like desire within it, um, so that's what I wanted to still attach like. It's still supposed to be a desirable image, maybe not for everyone, but, um, it is allowed to exist in that space. Yeah, let me see, I think I wrote something out as well. But yeah, how do my other works challenge heteronormativity in the art canon?

I just got tired of like painting bodies that didn't, that I didn't connect with and that have been painted for hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of years, and I knew that there was a gap that existed within academic leaning art. So I wanted to carry it to a bunch of my pieces. So another one of my pieces that kind of gets flipped in that way is the portrait of the artist historian Gray. So I looked at a lot of John Singer Sargent's portraits of aristocratic men. There's a certain flamboyancy that I connected to in those paintings and I almost adopted a sort of drag persona within the painting.

And then with the title I tied it in with controversial gay icon Oscar Wilde, who was actually friends with Sargent at the time. There's actually like debate whether or not Wilde based Basil Hallward off of Sargent to be debated, but I think that was like a really interesting tidbit. And then in the lower left corner of the portrait of the artist is Dorian Gray. You see a sprig of lavender, which is, you know, flower imagery heavily associated with queerness. And I'm like bouncing because these are both self-portraits, you know. So bouncing between imagery in traditions that favor male models versus female models. I've kind of been bouncing back and forth, which is a really incredible opportunity that I have because I don't fit into either. So that was something that I sort of realized not too long ago. So very cool, very affirming too, yeah.

Amazing. So what is a queer aesthetic?

Yeah, an almost impossible definition. I can only say what it means to me and what I've touched on in my work. So, within a heteronormative society, there are expectations for how to live, how to look, how to be. To me, a queer aesthetic is a collection of conscious decisions to combat those expectations Long hair when it's supposed to be short, short hair when it's supposed to be long. There are certain body font modifications that are associated with queerness.

You know tattoos, piercings, hair dye, exaggerated makeup, a lot of things associated with queerness are also associated with counterculture movements, which makes sense. As you know, queerness itself is counter to culture and you know, queer aesthetic to me is a highly curated presentation in order to express the truest version of oneself. And you know, of course, as a disclaimer, these aesthetics change over time and nobody is obligated to adopt them in order to prove their queerness. Um, it comes from within, not from. You know things that you can point and say like that's, that's gay. You know, like doesn't have to be an iced oat latte and cuffed jeans and and a septum ring. You know, like those are, those are, those are just archetypes we pull upon to to signal to other people, but you never have to sort of adopt it to know who you are really.

Yeah, I think that's a great point, just as as an aside again won't put this in the episode but I have been chatting with my like queer friends about this a lot recently because I've been getting a lot of like. But you don't look like a lesbian, like you don't, right. I'm like what the fuck does that mean? First of all, if you knew anything about gay history, you would know that I look like a lesbian um because I really much kind of inhabit that like high femme area, like very much.

Do you know Brassai, you know, do you know the work of Brassai?

No.

Okay, homework. You're going to have a lot of fun with this one.

Incredible.

Brassai was this photographer working in like 1930s Paris and he would take he would go to these like underbelly parts of the city and take these like very dark photos. But his most, or some of his most famous ones were the ones that he took at this lesbian bar called Le Monacle and um the.

Monacle yes, yes, I know the photos, but please tell me, but no that's.

That's like my. That's my vibe. That's who I date. That's my vibe. So the fact that I can't like love that you're like OK, oat milk, lattes and cuff jeans, but like we need. We need to like circle back and be like you know, femme butch, that also inhabits that sort of space. It's not just like waif white people.

Yes, exactly Exactly. White people yes, exactly, exactly, yeah. Uh, if, if women start wearing like three-piece suits and monocles and, um, like walking sticks again, I like I would head over heels every time. I'd go insane bring it back yeah, we do.

Hmm, plots for the future anyway, yeah, so to jump back into the episode, so your work is very academic and kind of operating in that like academic meets a queer context. What works do you think within the canon belong to a queer art history?

Yeah. So for this question I'll touch a lot on pre-modern art, as it's not quite associated with queerness as much. So, to start off, I think Caravaggio's portraits of young androgynous boys definitely belong in there, like Bacchus. I did a whole painting that was Mimic the Pose. I did a whole painting that was mimic the pose and you know I brought in a friend who had just recently gotten top surgery and you know they are a very androgynous person and I was like, ah, perfect, like there's already art historical proof of androgynous figures in classical paintings.

John Singer Sargent belongs in there. He's got a whole portfolio of nude male drawings that were never shown publicly, you know, but there's a lot of like tenderness in the way that he's he's drawn them. I think about those drawings at least once a week. They're phenomenal. Also, you know, ancient Greek sculptures and vases that have a lot of that are very homoerotic, to say the least, very homoerotic. And you know it doesn't always have to be art that's created with the intent of being queer. A lot of the times we will look towards the past and sort of adopt things and be like I relate to this as a queer person, and that in itself can be considered queer art. That was also something that I was thinking about. Michelangelo belongs in this if his sculptures of women aren't proof enough in this, if his sculptures of women aren't proof enough Toulouse-Lautrec I think I'm pronouncing it right you know his paintings in the bed, which he's got a few of them.

It's a small series, but it's these two figures in a bed together and not a lot of people know that it's actually two women, because he spent a lot of time in these might be getting the story mixed up, but a lot of times in these, like brothels, and there was a lot of intimacy shared between woman that he he captured with his drawings. Um gustav corbett's the sleepers, also featuring two female figures in bed, but much more explicit this time around. Henry Scott Took is another artist that belongs there. He's got these idyllic paintings of, you know, unclothed men by the sea. There's Frida Kahlo's self-portrait with short hair. You know she's in a suit, diego suit and her hair's cropped.

Rosa Bonner, who was a oil painter. I think she said a quote along the lines of like "'The only males I paint are the bulls', because she painted a lot of horses and animals. Gluck, like I mentioned earlier, love her and honestly, the more you sort of like look through and sort of evaluate artworks with the queer lens. You don't really need proof that the that the artists themselves were queer, because it's it's during a time where that was punishable socially, legally, so people had to hide it. So a lot of the times you don't get the luxury of written proof if an artist was gay or not, but you can put on that lens and see what resonates with you and sometimes that's enough to call it queer art.

I love that. To pivot from that and talk a bit more about you and your career when did you know that you wanted to be an artist?

pursue art. It was a very early realization. I remember thinking I was like in a middle school art class, fully thinking to myself this is what I could do for the rest of my life and this is what I would like to do for the rest of my life. Very cliche, but very true. I don't think I ever made a plan B other than just doing what I'm doing now.

Amazing. Can you tell me a bit more about your path to getting where you are now?

Yeah, like I said, I had a pretty early start in elementary school. I took after school art lessons where I learned I learned drawing basics like how to handle vine charcoal, how to measure a composition like height versus width, and sticking my arm all the way out and doing very like academic things. As a eight year old, I took elective art classes throughout high school. I had a history teacher in my junior year that encouraged me to attend an artilier in Chicago. So, and that was the moment where I fell in love with oil paints, I sort of dabbled in it, but I hadn't. I didn't know what I was doing, so I was like it's smelly, I'm using turpentine, I don't like it, I um, but that actually it was like truly the pivotal point. I spent eight weeks painting in oils for my first live model. Um, the instructor was Melinda Whitmore at Vitruvian studio in Chicago. Um, you know she's still. She's still teaching with her and her husband. They're great.

They're very cool. After high school I attended the Maryland Institute College of Art, very quickly realized it wasn't giving me the technical foundation I craved. I attended outside workshops just to catch up to the education. I felt like I was missing A friend. I made Kyle and Ku told me about LCAD and said I should apply. And then for the next four years I went to LCAD Like truly, I don't know where I would have been without that recommendation. So very eternally grateful. So I spent four years there. After graduating I moved to Long Beach, california, juggled two different barista jobs, started teaching adult art classes, was unfortunately let go from teaching adult art classes, started a third barista job which is now my only job, thank goodness. And now I make my paintings in my spare time. I basically just have a day job, so I have enough time and energy to pursue what I care about. So my path has been a little messy and non-linear, but I'm getting there.

How do you find success at this point in your career?

I'm still considered an emerging artist, so success is a lot of things for me right now. Um, I was accepted into a show back in October of last year and I'm working on pieces for an LGBTQ exhibit in June. Um, so hopefully my reclining nude will will make its way in there. My teaching job I saw as a success, even if it was short lived. Whenever I sell a painting or print, it feels like a huge success. I'm working on commissions at the moment. Another success and I try not to base it on the numbers on social media, but definitely just reading comments from people who tell me that they see themselves in my work. That, to me, is what I'm proudest of.

That's so lovely, so nice.

People are so nice and I like it's hard to take compliments sometimes, but it like truly is so meaningful compliments sometimes, but it it like truly is so meaningful?

yeah, and I think having visibly queer people in your work can mean so much, for you know an entire group of people who have been largely omitted. Uh, at least in a, you know, in a recognition sense. They're still there, but that queerness isn't always acknowledged. So to have someone so clearly queer in your work, I think, means a lot.

Yeah, so that's. That's been very, very heartwarming.

Where do you see your work going in the future?

I see myself continuing the concepts I laid the foundations for with my senior thesis. I can see my work getting larger, more ambitious, more conceptually involved. I actually have a roommate, a lesbian roommate. I love her dearly and I'm like I want to paint you and your friends as Sappho and her companions. So hopefully that's next on the roster after I get this commission done, next on the roster after I get this commission done, and then I hope to get my MFA within the next five years or so. But life is unpredictable and I haven't made a plan yet.

Yeah, what advice would you give someone looking to become a painter?

look for the education that will suit your needs and what you want to do best. I left my first college because it was too conceptual, but some people thrived in that environment. I loved my undergrad program because I knew it would teach me what I was interested in, but some of my peers thought it was too constricting. Find what makes you happiest to create and chase the tools that'll make it happen To be a painter. You don't even need to go to an accredited four-year college. There are actually these around the country that have a much more rigorous program than the one that I went to, and sometimes I get jealous that I didn't go, but realize it was probably for the best. But yeah, grand Central, artillery, Bay Area, classical Artillery, florence Academy of Art in Jersey, and you can even find like local artilleries like Palette and Chisels Chicago. It's not as big as either of those, but still get your foundations. Vitruvian studio there's online workshops. You can, you know, cobble together an education from workshops. Um, yeah, and then um.

To be a good point, it it might sound harsh, but to be an academically trained, representational painter, there is a certain amount of honesty you need to have with yourself.

There's no right way to make the art that you want to make, but there is a structure of capturing likeness to get the thing you're trying to paint look like a thing you're sitting in front of you.

Likeness to get the thing you're trying to paint look like the thing you're sitting in front of you. If truth is your pursuit in painting mine is to a certain extent you have to be okay with erasing the section of your drawing you spent 20 hours on, but you know you messed up the proportions and at the same time, still be kind to yourself in that process. You know you have to be honest with will this suit the final result the best? And editing as you're going, willing to let go of things that won't serve you but also not beating yourself up for not measuring right the first time it happens and you get your mileage in. Be proud of the things you can make at your current skill level and finish them to the best of your abilities. The only way forward is through. You got to make all those bad paintings to make a good one. Painting is a lifetime of learning and look forward to it.

That's great advice, thanks. Thanks so much for being on the show, robin.

Yeah, I really enjoyed it. I love talking about the process and the concept, so thank you for letting me share.

Yeah, where can people find your work?

You can find me on Instagram, robin Venter, r-o-b-i-n-v-e-n-t-e-r. From there you can get a link to my website, or it's just robinventorart. Those are the two places that you can find me and you know, if you're, if you resonate with my work, I've got prints for sale. And you know, if you're broke, just print out a copy of it. You know, I don't mind as long as you get to see yourself in a piece of art. It is what it is.

That's so awesome. All right, I'm going to stop the recording now. I think that's a good note to just end the show on.