Artist Story: Philip Hartigan

Philip Hartigan, Be groovy to each other, 2007, mixed media installation

I think that many organizations have helped my career as an artist. Before I went to college, I thought that making art was about working on one's own. Someone would come to your studio, take the work away to sell it and then leave you alone in the studio again to just keep producing the work. Going to college was the first time that I realized, because so much of our time as artists is spent on our own, the importance of organizations to provide contact and opportunities, both for career development and for our mental health.

At college (Winchester School of Art in the UK) I was fortunate enough to meet brilliant visiting artists, among them conceptual artists Christian Boltanski and Richard Wentworth, and the painter John Walker. I also studied with an extremely talented group of peers. Each of these contacts opened up new ways of thinking and working for me.

Similarly after graduation, when I moved to London, SPACE studios (co-founded by Bridget Riley in the 1970s) provided me with cheap studio space in the East End. Converted from an old tanning factory, Martello Street Studios housed about thirty-five artists, ranging from recent art school graduates like me, to 'old timers' who had been there for more than twenty years. We had open studios twice a year, and this provided a vital opportunity to exhibit, make contacts with the public and other artists, and to sell work.

Since coming to North America, I have attended three residencies, at the Vermont Studio Center, the Glen Arbor Arts Association in Michigan, and the Pouch Cove Foundation in Newfoundland, Canada. Each in their way was helpful in providing blocks of time where one did nothing but one’s own work, and a different context to make the work. The Vermont Studio Center almost works like an intense college semester, with studio visits available if you want them from well-known artists. The atmosphere is communal, with resident artists and visiting artists all acting like colleagues and friends, rather than ‘successful’ and ‘emerging’ artists. I went there six years ago, and made many friends with whom I am still in contact.

In Chicago, two organizations in particular have helped me develop my career. The first is the Chicago Printmakers’ Collaborative, where I worked for three years, making prints side by side with printmakers working in every conceivable medium. I learned new techniques, made new friendships, and this all led to my building a substantial body of work which in turn led to a whole series of group shows, at the CPC, the Chicago Cultural Center, the ARC gallery, and in places across the USA. Work that I developed at the CPC was also recently exhibited in a solo show at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and will be shown again in late 2007 at the University of Illinois-Springfield.

The second is the Fiction Writing Department of Columbia College Chicago, where I have been a part-time teacher for the last two years. They run a summer program for fiction writing students in Prague, in the Czech Republic, and my wife (the writer Patricia Ann McNair) and I have taught a class there called Journal and Sketchbook: Ways of Seeing. It is designed for writing students, so the emphasis is on finding parallels between journaling and sketching as a way of visualizing written scenes in a different way. We have found that it does work, and that the students think about stories in a new light when they use drawing as well as writing to consider them. And as a visual artist, I also found myself thinking about my own work in a completely new way. In fact, in doing for myself some of the joint writing/drawing exercises that we set for the students, I developed ideas that led to a complete change in direction. Where before my work was more formal and drawn from the external world, it is now drawn from memories of my childhood, and incorporates narrative elements that I had avoided in the past, and techniques such as film and sculpture that I haven’t used before. I don’t know whether my recent run of shows is due intrinsically to the nature of the work, or whether it is a combination of the subject matter and the way it was made; but I know that if I hadn’t taught at Columbia College, I might not have discovered this new territory in the first place.

In conclusion, I think that there are many sorts of organizations, from colleges, to artists organizations, to residencies, to newsletters and websites, that have helped me not just in terms of my ‘career’, as measured by shows and sales, but in more important ways: meeting other artists, learning new ways of seeing, new ways of making, measuring what I do against what others do, having the comfort of knowing that there are others who are treading similar paths and experiencing the same difficulties and the same joys.

Philip Hartigan is an English artist who has lived in Dusseldorf, London, Paris, Barcelona and Madrid, before coming to Chicago in 2002. He has taken part in 25 group and solo shows in Spain, the UK and across the USA. Honors include: prize-winner in a UK print competition; work in the Ray Bradbury Archive, the John Denton collection, and various government and private collections in the UK. His short film, 1969 – West Allotment was screened in September 2006 at the A+D Museum in Los Angeles. His work was selected for the Curator’s Choice show at the 2007 Around the Coyote Winter Festival (Matthew Teti, curator). He currently has two solo shows scheduled for 2007: at Art in Armitage (May) and the University of Illinois-Springfield (November)