Francesco Agresti is an abstract painter, teacher of fine arts and a generous donor to my Kickstarter campaign in the fall. I recently sat down with him to discuss his work and his life.

Filmmakers can learn from the experience of artists in other fields. We all go through the same difficulties and resistance. My favorite quote from our interview reflects this: at one point he referenced an old italian saying:

“An artist will never see money and will lose their sight.”

Francesco is one of many who overcame personal and financial obstacles in the daily pursuit of his craft.

Jason Kohl (JK): I was hoping you could start by telling me a bit about your childhood, where you grew up, what your parents did.

Francesco Agresti (FA): I was born and grew up in Itri, Italy and my father owned an olive grove which he took care of and my mother was a seamstress.  Then we immigrated to the Bronx in 1956.  I had just finished 2nd grade.

JK: How did you adapt to your new world?

FA: Well, actually my brother and i were pretty excited although we didn’t speak the language.  We started out by playing in the street with other kids who lured us out.  we were hiding behind the storm door but the kids coaxed us out to play.  the streets became important right away.

JK: When did you decide you wanted to become a painter? Did you draw as a child?

FA: Yes, I drew all the time as a child to the point that i got into trouble in grammar school because I was drawing in the margins of my books.  We had an older lady, Miss Dunn, about 80 who every Friday afternoon would come into the school to give us a drawing lesson.  She would give us beautiful classical art  postcards with Vermeer and other artists work on them.  And then, when the Beatles came out I started doing their portraits in my notebook and the girls all loved that.  Then I started doing tatoos on the boy’s arms (in grammar school).  Always pen, paper, crayons but then other people started to get interested in what I was drawing.

JK: Did you know at that point that you wanted to be an artist? Did you know that there were careers like that?

FA: No. absolutely not.  I just did it for me, I enjoyed it.  Then I stumbled into the art section of the local library and found all these books about the artists on the postcards and got real excited about that.  So I went to the 5 and 10 store and found a water color set and paper and I made a painting for my mother.  She still has it.  It has red sky, blue deer and a black and white horse.  Rather modern in some way.  I was about 15 or 16 at the time.

JK: What did you think you were going to do?

FA: I knew I was going to go to college, the first one in my family.  It was a public university and was free so I could afford to go.  The first two years I majored in literature and then I met a friend in the library with an art book.  Up to that point I didn’t know you could study art and drawing at this level.  What got me was she was taking classes in this with grades and professors.

She told me about the art department and I walked over there that day and there was a lot of activity, painters, etc.  I found the head of the department and that summer I took 3 classes.  My parents were thinking I would study something worthwhile like medicine or engineering.  They just shrugged when they found out I wanted to study art. They were afraid – there is a saying in Italy that says “An artist will never see money and will lose their sight.”

JK: Did that dissuade you for a while?

FA: No.  I remember getting a copy of a Vermeer painting.  I took it to where I painted in the basement.  My next door neighbor happened to see it.  My parents never paid much attention to what I was doing.  The neighbor said “That’s a nice painting” and my mother said to her, You like it, you take it.”  I was shocked she would give it away but what could I do.  Later the neighbor brought back $20 for me and I though that was pretty cool.  Then when I started going to museums like the MET I saw a painting I had copied hanging there and I couldn’t believe how different it was from the ones I saw in books.  I saw how thick the paint was, the accumulated paint.  I thought, now this I can do!  That book stuff I couldn’t do.  The surface has always been important to me.

JK: What did you do after you graduated?

FA: I got my bachelor in FIne Arts and my Masters in Fine Arts.  The Chairman of the Art Department liked my stuff.  He said now Francesco you can teach for us.  This sort of terrified me, I ran away from it and couldn’t imagine I could stand in front of all those people and teach.  I didn’t come around to teaching until much later.

I went back to Italy after two nervous breakdowns.  I had lost my relationships, there was no one in the united States who could help me and I had no family support.  I just wanted to die.  So then, back in Italy I wanted to learn the language so I started teaching myself [Italian].  I started working in the olive grove and slowly started getting sane again.  I met an American soldier,  the sixth fleet was stationed in Gaeta.  And he said the Americans go to this place to learn English so why don’t you go there to learn Italian so I went to school to learn Italian.  I drew a lot, and one day my book fell from my hands when I was walking with a friend and all these drawing fell out.

She was shocked, she didn’t know I could draw, let alone that I had my Masters in Fine Arts.  She said, You have your Masters, then you can teach for us!  She represented LaVerne University in Naples and so I was interviewed by an American girl who went to Fordham U in the Bronx and she hired me and I started teaching in Naples.  That is how I got back to a normal member of society and I was getting paid for it.

Before I went to Italy I was picked up by a Gallery on Madison Ave and the curator liked my work. She bought one of my pieces and began to represent me.  I was sending her drawings from Italy so I still had some validation from the art world but I didn’t know what to do with it.  I had some shows in Italy and a gallery represent me and my art was changing.  Then I came back to the US and taught at the University in North Carolina.

JK: So rediscovering your roots made you able to face your calling.

FA:  Yes, rediscovering my roots was very interesting – it gave me answers.  It was something that had to be taken care of. Then I had to come back and take care of my life in America and was able to teach here.  But I always continued to read and to paint.  I went to Hunter College which is now the City University of New York and began to teach.

JK: How did you continue to pursue painting after you became a teacher?

FA: That was very difficult because I was teaching 4 classes and you never stop.  Lots of preparation.  I would take my students to all the museums.  I was holding on to only  2 to 3 paintings and I wasn’t selling, I didn’t have enough to sell and I didn’t have a gallery.  I started to do small works on paper like wash, water color, pencil.  Then I had a show with this gallery in Germany right outside of Kassel. I was always experimenting with paper because I could get my ideas down right away.

JK: Did you develop a schedule to allow you to fulfill both responsibilities?

FA: I paint full time now.  I only teach one class at the local art center to get out into the community.  I like to get up early in the morning and start about 7.30 am when it is quiet and the light is good.  I stay there till noon and then take a break, a nap (reposo in Italian) and then I go back into the studio till about 6 or so.  This is 7 days a week and it is not enough. I am physically painting a good amount of that time.

JK: What advice would you give to a young person who wants to become an artist?

FA: It was difficult for me but I would say “You have to be a fool for something or you are dead meat”.  I tell my students, paint anything and everything you can even if you don’t feel like it. Read lots of books, look at lots of paintings.  I would tell my students to go to school, even get a PHD if you can.  Try to hang out with people who have the same passion.  You do make yourself vulnerable when you say you are an artist.  You should be painting wherever you are.

JK: And if you could sum up what painting has taught you about life in one sentence?

FA: God have mercy.  To me, it is always about that maybe painting is a metaphor for life.  You take something physical – like paint – and turn it into something spiritual.  There is a fragility about things, because when you are painting you don’t know what it is you will end up with. Otherwise it is an illustration.  Maybe it is not knowing how it will turn out that makes it so elusive, like life.

April, 2011

I saw Trash Humpers by Hamony Korine on Friday in a packed, adoring theater at the Nuart. It is a film shot on VHS with no plot that involves, among other things, characters in old-people masks fellating trees and humping garbage cans. It was wonderful and completely esoteric film that most of the moviegoing public would hate. That public was not there.

Quality work will find an audience; that audience’s size will generally be determined by the universality and quality of the piece, as well as the volume and effectiveness of its marketing and distribution. Korine has a small but dedicated following; Spielberg’s audience is larger and less-dedicated. People make decisions on what to see based primarily on their own taste (and wallets), and the taste of those they trust in such matters, then the marketing.

Wanting to see Avatar instead of a ten hour polish movie doesn’t make you a bad person, it just makes you a different kind of person. Less people want to eat bull testicles than chicken; this doesn’t make chicken worse than testicles. Many people would question our choice of doctor, food or religion based on knowledge, values and specializations they have that we don’t.

What’s important is to do the work, then honestly evaluate that work’s quality and potential audience. There’s no conspiracy against art, we just happen to live in a country whose cinema depends on audiences buying tickets. Fortunately for Von Trier, Haneke and Korine, the economics of european cinema is based on taxpayers instead of moviegoers, most of whom seem to prefer Avatar to Antichrist.

Now I Lay Me Down To Sleep

Jason

He keeps the valley like this with his heart.

By paying attention, being capable, remembering.

Otherwise, there would be flies as big as dogs

in the vineyard, cows made entirely of maggots,

cruelty with machinery and canvas, sniggering

among the olive trees and the sea grossly cast.

He struggles to hold it right, the eight feet

of heaven by the well with geraniums and basil.

He will rejoice even if the shepherd girl

does not pass anymore at evening. And whether

or not she ate her lamb at Easter. He knows

that loneliness is our craft, that death

is God’s vigorish. He does not keep it fine

by innocence or leaving things out.

Vigorish

noun informal
1 [in sing. ] an excessive rate of interest on a loan, typically one from an illegal moneylender.
2 the percentage deducted from a gambler’s winnings by the organizers of a game.

Miller discusses two conflicting impulses in early colonial America, represented by the cities of Jamestown and Salem. He describes this difference in one of his brilliant asides in the play:

They (Salem) believed, in short, that they held in their steady hands the candle that would light the world. We have inherited this belief, and it has helped and hurt us. It helped them with the discipline it gave them. They were a dedicated folk, by and large, and they had to be to survive the life they had chosen or been born into in this country.

The proof of their belief’s calue to them may be taken from the opposite character of the first Jamestown settlement, farther south, in Virginia. The Englishmen who landed there were motivated mainly by a hunt for profit. They had to pick off the wealth of the new country and then return rich to England. They were a band of individualists, and a much more ingratiating group than the Massachusets men.

From Miller’s account of the colonial world we can trace two impulses throughout American history: the capitalistic, individualistic, at times rapacious Jamestown and the disciplined, religious, and stringent Salem.

Much of American history can be seen as the ebb and flow of one of these two impulses. Miller was writing in the time of McCarthyism, but consider Tammany Hall or the Bush Administration as times where the Jamestown ethic surged to the fore.

P.T. Anderson’s There Will Be Blood dramatizes this struggle. His main characters are a preacher and an oil man. In the end the oil man kills the preacher.

With the apparent omnipotence of corporate culture and politics in America, it would seem that the Jamestown mentality has triumphed. But in this economy, where people have to turn to something else than wealth, the face of Salem is always ready to resurface.

The sun is out today.

Sidelong shadows on

the frozen Spree.

Last week I didn’t get

the job, or the girl.

This week the river

is covered in children.

These things tend to balance out.

I have restructured the permalinks on my site to make them more user and search engine friendly. This may result (I have done some work to prevent this) in your search saying a post is not found. Things will redirect themselves soon, but until then please use the search bar that might appear if the post isn’t redirected. Sorry for the difficulties.

Jason

I was dating this drug dealer and after we broke up I took too much PCP and wandered around the city (New York) in a daze for a week and a half. After that I went to visit a friend in New York and we decided to go to Berlin.

They then proceeded to spill their marijuana and spend 45 minutes picking it out of the grass.

I thought of them yesterday while reading a Guardian article a friend had sent me. The article, titled “Make Yourself at Home in Berlin” and has some advice for tourists visitng the city;

Renting rooms, for short periods, is largely unheard of in the UK, outside the college campus circuit, and probably in most of Europe, too. In Germany, it is possible. In Berlin it’s encouraged. Berlin’s army of hard-up freelancers, artists and students rent rooms to strangers on a daily or weekly basis to claw cash back while they’re away from home, via sites and agencies such as exberliner, easywg.de, wg-gesucht.de, or studenten-wg.de.

I was in Berlin for a few weeks, and I wanted to live with real Berliners, see the real Berlin and experience the kiez (manor) – I didn’t want a hotel room (too expensive, too impersonal), nor a hostel (too young, too backpacker), or an apartment (too expensive for a week, and quite lonely).

While gentrification and tourism are inevitable in any major city, articles like this contribute to a growing phenomenon in Berlin.

Berlin has already been called the Mallorca of the East by Spiegel Online, a major German publication. Mallorca is the German equivalent of Tijuana Mexico or Panama City Florida in the United States, spring break capitals of drunken hedonism. The video in the article (which is in German) is in English and captures this mentality which is now sweeping parts of Berlin.

People ask me what I will miss in Europe. I have had too much to do recently to really reflect on the question. Berlin is still a wonderful city and I will especially miss my friends there, as well as living and working in a foreign language.

But yesterday I found something really exemplary of what I will miss.

I am in Klosterneuburg with my grandmother, outside of Vienna. A tradition here is to visit my grandfather’s grave in the 19th district. While we were at the cemetery my grandmother and I were talking. She mentioned Alma Mahler and also that her grave was in the same cematery. I asked her if Gustav Mahler was also buried there and she assented. A few hundred meters from my grandfather’s grave lay the great composer. I stood and paid my tribute, thankful for the happy European accident.

There was a lot of lederhosen (which I also wore), bavarian German which I can’t understand, and drinking from one-liter glasses of beer. It was an appropriately American goodbye to Germany. For a little while I thought she was holding a piece of chicken in her hand, which was also ubiquitous, but then I realized it was the ferris wheel. I’m in Vienna now for a few days until my return to America on Thursday.