B: You started teaching in a tenure-track position soon after graduate school at an institution where the professional expectations surely affected your career projection. When you came to California you began teaching part-time at Cal State Northridge. How did that shift from TT to part-time affect your teaching? Do you recommend the experience to other post-TT professionals who may enjoy getting to teach unencumbered by service and research expectations? 


S: As Clemson aims to be a top tier research institution it is demanding on the faculty to be as professionally active as possible.  In my first year at Clemson (1981) I attended my first SGC meeting at a SECAC Conference in Oxford, MISS.  I met Boyd Saunders, Roger Steele, Bernie Solomon, Tom Dewey  and listened to a presentation on how to organize a Juried National Print Exhibition.  I returned to Clemson and met with, Tom Dimond, Director of the Rudoph Lee Gallery, who was enthusiastic about the idea.  The following year we hosted our first of many Clemson National Juried Print and Drawing Exhibitions.  That event instantly gave much needed visibility to the department and we started seeing the grad applications go up, across the board.  

From there, I continued to attend conferences, especially SGC or SGCI as it is known today.  I served as vice president then President in 2000.  Along the way in my career, I wrote grants, secured artist residencies, did research for panel presentations, continued my own technical research in lithography, and of course workshops.  As many professors today, I brought students to as many of these events, especially SGC, as I could.  In those days Clemson had a motor pool and I would reserve a van.  The students and I would load up and drive where ever the conference was, New Jersey, Texas, Ohio, Kentucky, or Florida—didn’t matter.  I believe that exposing the students to this larger family of artists and printmakers was critical to their education.  

In 2019 after settling in LA, I received a call from Cal State University, Northridge to come teach part time for a year.  It couldn’t have been more welcome, not that I didn’t cherish the free time of retirement but I missed the students and the way teaching nourishes a studio.   AND, of course, it was fantastic to teach unencumbered by committee or service work.  I could teach and spend as much time as the students needed me, come in to open the studio or spend more time grading, which for me, means writing feedback to each of my students.  It is luxurious.  I have taught a total of four semesters but I temporarily stepped away from teaching this Spring to help take care of family.    Through CSUN and the Printmaking Professor, Michelle Rozic, I have had the honor of teaching and working with a very diverse group of students, very different from Clemson University.  This diversity is a natural reflection of the local demographic.  CSUN is also mostly a commuter school with no institutional emphasis on a credentialed athletic team so there is a very different culture regarding mission and resources.    

B: There appears to be an aesthetic and thematic through line in recent work that is remarkably consistent with the work you’ve been making for some time. Ecological concerns, and the ways in which humans hold themselves apart from nature, are themes in your work that have often aligned and inspired my own. Your prints often feature the big conservation stars like polar bears, elephants, and rhinos. They’re like the sympathetic spoonful of sugar that helps the medicine of species extinction and climate change go down! Is there, perhaps, a similarity in the way you give viewers a friendly access point to your content and the way the public consumes art and/or media more broadly? 


S: I believe my work has evolved in many ways, technically and theoretically but the theme remains steady.  That is, I have a great concern about the value systems we operate from.  What are the hierarchies that shape our actions and choices?  More importantly, how does this context affect the way we regard the environment and the other inhabitants with which we share this planet? Climate change, pollution, endangered species, habitat loss are common buzz words, but I have been worrying on them since I was twelve years old.  My commitment to the subject has led me to Elizabeth Kolbert’s  book, “The Sixth Extinction”, which puts into focus how urgent and critical it is that we take action to at least begin to stabilize environmental conditions.  I have read this book twice and almost everything else she has written to stay informed on the science and practical actions we might take to delay the Anthropocene.

The human condition is integral to the conversation about the environment and the values we apply to action and inaction.  In some of my work I quote from commercial consumer imagery and combine that with, as you say, the obvious conservation players.  Luxury goods, interior design, and fashion manipulate and process nature to embellish and enhance our lives—even, entertain.   I am just as complicit in the desire to have nature be a beautiful presence in my life.  I am drawn, like others, to the slick posed images in advertising that make one attracted to what they are selling.  I see a parallel between those modes and my own desire to make work that is visually rich and alluring.   I use images of domesticated animals as well as those in the wild to point to the differences in how we value them.  Human figures play a role that represent the selfishness of human nature.   An animal skeleton or fossil of an extinct species may offer levity to the giddiness over a designer handbag. If it isn’t obvious enough I also include text.  Maybe it is the didactic impulse of a teacher that I can’t shake, but I am looking to be very deliberate in some of my messaging.   

In 2016 I had a one person exhibit at the Riverworks Gallery in Greenville, SC titled: “Perpetual Surrender”. The title refers to my need as an artist to perpetually pursue not only meaning with my work but the satisfaction I have in rendering and surrendering to the medium as to create work that, upon a second look, delivers more than was anticipated.   The title also refers to my tendency to Perpetually Surrender to the beauty of nature and the beauty of my processes.  

Recently, my work has been mostly stone lithography and woodcut.  I have the freedom of time to grain stones and do almost all of my image development on them.   There is nothing like drawing on a stone—its better than most paper.  The lithographs are a location for a dystopian view of an imagined condition stemming from my reading about climate change.  I see the woodcuts as a more graphic and direct representation of nature, sometimes interrupted by an arbitrary gesture as if to highlight how careless nature is regarded.   Employing wood seems an appropriate substrate as the grain and knots of the tree are included in the image development, driving home importance of nature as a source for materials and the very air we breathe. 

It seems to me that nature must make itself useful otherwise it’s not sustainable not profitable enough for saving.  Who cares about an obscure insect, frog, or a bat?  Hopefully by now we all realize that they are the canary in the mine, revealing to us our own vulnerabilities and insensitivity.  So, in my work, I wrestle with what are the best ways to employ technique and imagery in order to share my fear, my dread, my hope for what I love and think is important.  I think that is what most artists do no matter the subject.

Studio Visit

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B: Service to the printmaking community has been a constant in your career. Can you speak to why that has been a priority and how that service has benefited you in return? 


S: Service is important for the obvious reason of ‘giving back’ to the community.  It offers an engagement in a community that is rewarding to myself to see others receive benefits from what I do.  I also don’t view service as isolated from education.  You always learn something even if you are the one contributing service.  It is a good example to set for students as it reinforces the earnestness of what you are committed too, whether it is academic or professional.   In my case, professional and academic service were an expected component of annual performance at Clemson.   My final University committee was participating in a mapping out of a 2020 Campus Plan in which I was able to have included a dedicated Art building.