"Talk at Ten" with Tom Michael
Marfa Public Radio - 1000-1030, 31st August 2006Click here to listen to the large 15mb file or read the transcript below.
Talk at Ten Transcription
Originally broadcast 10am, Thursday 31st August 2006TOM MICHAEL - This is talk at ten, our morning news and information show and I’m your host today Tom Michael. I’m here with Avram Dumitrescu and he’s an Irish artist living in Fort Davis who has a show this weekend in Alpine. Welcome to the program!
AVRAM DUMITRESCU - Thanks for having me Tom, much appreciated.
TOM - Now Avram, you grew up in Belfast, Ireland, actually you were born in the Channel Islands, right?
AVRAM - Yes, I was born back in 1976, when disco was still hip and my parents met there a couple of years before that. I came over to Northern Ireland when I was three weeks old and I was raised in Belfast.
TOM – You were born in the channel Islands – does that make you a British citizen?
AVRAM – Yes. I have a British passport and [over here] it’s easier to explain that I’m Irish, especially raised in Belfast where nationality is such a loaded topic.
TOM – Avram has a show at the Rinconada Gallery this weekend. It’s open through mid-October and you’re showing drawings you’ve done out here and elsewhere, correct?
AVRAM – Yes. My wife Megan and I came out here at the end of May and after a little bit of time getting settled I, like so many other people, had such a strong reaction to the landscape. It’s such a beautiful, beautiful area. It’s unspoilt – the fact that the biggest chain is hundreds of miles away. My reaction was to capture it, get it in some way so I’ve been going out as much as I can, working on mountains, architecture, trying to get a feel for the place.
TOM – So what is your medium? You work in acrylic and watercolour?
AVRAM – I can work pretty small, say a 10 by 10 inch canvas and go up to, say, a 30 by 40 inch canvas. I’ll work with acrylic, I’ll do watercolor, do a little bit of print-making. [When I go out painting] I’ll have a selection of materials with me as it depends on how you feel that day, what you’re trying to capture. So maybe a delicate watercolor would work one day or a much bolder acrylic would work another day.
One of the things I’ve noticed through doing my artwork out here is that there’s so much to the land. My first month I barely had to leave our porch to get drawing material, there was so much in the way of plants, rocks etc. A lot of the work in the show is based on the drive between Fort Davis and Alpine. I’ve almost caused the car to crash several times when I’ve been staring out at the mountains. It’s pretty breathtaking scenery. I would go out in the morning, as early as I could, just before the sun had come up, and with my materials just start sketching whatever appealed to me that day.
TOM – We’re speaking with Irish artist Avram Dumitrescu who is currently residing in Fort Davis. He has a show this weekend at the Rinconada Gallery in Alpine, which is near Baeza’s Grocery store and the True Value. It opens on September 2nd – there’s an opening from 5-8pm and it’ll run through mid-October.
An adobe building, a broken down truck, a hillside, you’ve certainly incorporated a lot of the local area into your work. Do you do a lot of figurative work?
AVRAM – That’s something I really should do more of. What I’ve found myself drawn to more is inanimate subjects-
TOM – What do you mean ‘you really should do’?
AVRAM – I’ve always found that, and I’ve read so many times is that the most difficult thing to do as an artist is to capture the human form. I prefer mechanical things, architectural things, but at the same time I’ll try to give [the subject matter] more life. I always try to introduce movement, which sounds like a silly concept but over the weekend I had been at the Sul Ross library, looking for a couple of books, when I came across a section on Art Deco, that highly stylized artwork from the 30s and 40s. It was a revelation – when I was looking at the photographs and designs of trains and automobiles from back then I compared to a series I had done last year and I thought wow, there was quite a similarity. I think I was picking up on Art Deco’s fascination with the shapes, the lines and the movement.
TOM – Where did you attend college?
AVRAM – The University of Ulster at Belfast, and they had a great library, and when I wasn’t working on assignments I’d try to immerse myself there. I’d pick books at random and try to take in as much from fashion, from sculpture to painting, drawing, print-making, anything at all. I think the wider range of influences you take in the better it is for what you produce and what you create.
TOM – Your work is realistic although you describe it as exaggerated. For example, you might see a building front or a cityscape where the lines are cartoonish or exploded but it’s easily recognizable and it’s very colorful too. There seems to be an immediacy in your work and a lot of color and movement – is that what you’re comparing to the Art Deco movement?
I think so. My problem is that when I sit down and try to think about what I do is when I start confusing and contradicting myself. But that seems to be the essence of it, when I sit down to create a piece of artwork what I’m doing is bringing attention to something you might easily overlook. I remember there were certain ugly buildings in Belfast that generally weren’t liked but I’d sit down with a sketchbook or canvas and try pull out some beauty from it and some of the time it worked.
TOM – So you won’t necessarily be sketching the Courthouse in Fort Davis or the great landmarks, you’ve be looking for –
AVRAM - Not necessarily. In this exhibition there are landscapes, architecture from Fort Davis and Alpine and quite a large series on architecture in Marfa. I bumped up high-contrast shadows as you’ve got, not an austere look but Marfa does have very different feel from Fort Davis and Alpine. With Marfa you have very clean lines, stark shadows. I didn’t consciously think ‘right, this is what I’m going to do: I’m going to create an artwork to give this particular feeling’. That’s what just came out. A lot of it is subconscious.
TOM – We’re speaking with Irish artist Avram Dumitrescu and he has a show this weekend opening at Riconada Gallery. So you’re saying people will recognize, perhaps, some local places or geographic places?
AVRAM – If I’ve done my job correctly then yes, they should recognize the places. When I was doing my Masters at the University of Ulster I had gotten some work with a magazine called The Ulster Tatler. They would phone me on, say, a Monday evening and say, “Avram, we need for a feature on Friday –“ a city somewhere in Northern Ireland. The next morning, provided I didn’t have any classes, I’d take a bus up to this place and with watercolor and sketchbook I’d give myself that entire day to sketch, draw, photograph and make color notes. My aim for this with the article was not to get every building or get it completely accurate like a photograph but to get a feel. I tried to get what was important and that’s what I was trying to do with the Marfa series and this recent work at the Rinconada Gallery. Not make everything photographically realistic or get every single famous landmark – just get what makes these places.
TOM – Working for the Tatler, that periodical, did that increase the speed of your work or is that generally how you prefer to work.
AVRAM Yes, I –
TOM – Because you had to deal with journalistic deadlines.
AVRAM – That was definitely a wake-up call. It’s nice being in the insulated college where you might have – though my first tutor at art college was a shock. He’d give us two days to complete a design project. I think my work has always been quite immediate and fast. I have friends, like an artist in Austin called Nick Henning – he can spend months working on illustrations and paintings and I’ve admired him because I don’t have that patience. But I think that’s once facet of an artist – it just depends. I try to get an immediate…
TOM – You mentioned your tutor at Ulster. Were there certain people in your career who inspired you?
AVRAM – The people who have had most influence have been family, giving me unending encouragement, and Megan, she’s always encouraging me as well. Art college had some fantastic tutors. When I was doing my Masters I had a gentleman named Mike Catto – he was very tough on me and rightly so. By being hard on me he got some very good work and I had a lady who had just started, Christine Blaney. She had done some children’s books. She was very sweet but also pushed me as well. It was good to have the balance of scary and nice. What I liked at the Masters level was they gave me so much direction and that’s how I got to where I got. They’d prod me if I was going off on the wrong direction and they encouraged me to work. So far tutors have been a great influence on me, and family and friends.
TOM – I seemed to have read somewhere you mentioned the Northern Ireland Visual Arts Forum?
AVRAM – Yes.
TOM – Is that an arts council, like a regional arts council?
AVRAM – Yes. I want to say they were a registered charity, though I may be wrong. Once I’d finished my Masters, there were some people there, I’d walked up to them and asked for advice. They’d sat me down and showed me how to do a lot of the promotional side of it – press releases and how to sell myself as an artist. Because that’s a very essential part of – it’s one thing to be out in the fields creating things all day but you need to know how to deliver it, such as a website. You do have to sell your artwork and yourself.
TOM – In fact your degree was called Visual Communication?
AVRAM – Yes
TOM – So was it different requirements from say a Fine Arts degree?
AVRAM - It falls between design and fine-art, it would be a medium of both. I liked the degree because it gave me such a wide range, from print-making to drawing to design. When I went back a couple of years later to the same university I concentrated on illustration and saw myself going towards fine-art and that’s where I am at the moment.
TOM – You’re listening to Marfa Public Radio. This is Talk at Ten. Our guest today is Avram Dumitrescu and he is living in Fort Davis. He’s an Irish native and grew up in Belfast. How did you get to the States?
AVRAM – In the late 90s I wanted to, like so many people, wanted to work at Summer camp. I had done a little of that in Belfast. I applied, came out and had a blast of a time. It was great, met some good friends and –
TOM – Where were you?
AVRAM – It was Naples, Maine, way up north. I’d hear they’d get nasty ice-storms but during the summer it was – my last year there (I had done six summers up there) it was triple figures, we were in wooden cabins with the kids with no A.C. It was an endurance, especially for someone that grew up in Belfast where it rains 400 days a year.
I would generally travel afterwards and meet up with friends. A good friend of mine, John Stein, he had taken a year out and gone to a college down in Florida and that’s where Megan, she had been at Rice [University] –
TOM – Now, Megan Wilde is your wife?
AVRAM – Yes.
TOM – And in the spirit of full disclosure she was an intern here this summer at Marfa Public Radio. I was eyeing some of the sketches you did here in the studio.
AVRAM – Well, Megan had come in one Saturday to work on some stories and I didn’t want to leave her on her own as it was late and it would have been boring for her so I came in and was able to sketch.
TOM – I sidetracked you there so you met your wife Megan here in the States.
AVRAM – Yes, she was at the college. I was very interested in her but I was very slow and didn’t make any moves and I was about to go home, fly back to Ireland, and then 9/11 happened.
TOM – So you were stuck here in the States?
AVRAM – I was in Florida: every flight was grounded. I was meant to be flying up to New York, I think on the 11th of September, so I couldn’t do anything. I was there for another week and we kept in touch and when I came back the following summer we started dating. For the next three years we dated and it was wonderful but it was tough as well because it’s not exactly cheap as well flying back and forth. Whenever I had time at holiday times I’d fly over. We were eventually married at the start of 2005.
TOM – So where you living in Dallas or Austin?
AVRAM – We were in Austin and that was such an interesting city. It seems to be a very young city. And that’s where I started learning to drive. I glad I did that there – it was a little frightening at first and that’s another reason I like West Texas so much. It’s much easier and in our four months here I’ve yet to hear anyone use their horn in anger. In Austin I would see people drive backwards against the flow of traffic on a freeway. I saw some frightening things there. I’m so glad it’s much easier driving here.
TOM – We’re speaking to Avram Dumitrescu. He’s got a show this weekend in Alpine. He’s living in Fort Davis. He’s a native of Ireland. He moved to Texas early 2000 [actually late 2004]. And you said you learnt to drive in Austin. In fact that worked into some of your paintings. You were doing a series on car culture? Tell us about that.
AVRAM – It was a couple of years ago. I had just finished my degree, sorry, my Masters, and the Art College had this great self-promotional thing – the whole building was turned into a giant art gallery. It had this built-in thing of people who would come year after year. I had been offered a show through the work I had there. So when I returned in the Fall I had done summer camp – sorry, I had been with Megan so I think I did a large series of paintings of old classic cars and vehicles. If any of you have been to the UK you’ll notice the streets are much smaller, the vehicles are much smaller. Over here it’s as if vehicles are on steroids. They’ve got these giant bulges and they’re just large, large beasts. I was taken with this and – when someone asks me to describe a car, I’ll give you the color and don’t know the name of it. I think the truck I drive is a Chevrolet … I know it’s red. It’s definitely red.
TOM – And you attended you attended these things called, what, cruise nights?
AVRAM – Yeah. I met a really interesting guy called Cliff and I was trying to find collections of classic cars. I think it was in Oakhill in Austin on a Saturday evening we’d go up and I’d have sketchbooks and I’d sketch the cars quickly, make color notes, and them paint them the following week. I managed to get an exhibition out of it. It goes back to some of the train work I was doing back for my degree. I didn’t try to make the work highly rendered or photorealistic or anything like that. It was more the essence of it. It was much looser than a lot of car art you’ll see.
TOM – There’s an immediacy to your work, you definitely work in some traditional realms and landscape, and you said figurative. You grew up in Belfast, Ireland, an incredibly political and decisive place during all the sectarian violence and your father fled the Ceausescu regime in Romania. He met your mother and married her, she was a Belfast native, an Irish native. You’re surrounded by all these politics yet you eschew that in your work. Is that purposeful, is that something you’re not drawn to, did you attend university where students were drawn to that?
AVRAM – I think it’s very easy to be sucked into that. It’s almost like an un-winnable argument. Both sides, Protestants and Catholics… it’s something I’ve never felt too qualified to speak about because I’ve never fully understood it. It’s… it’s just sad.
TOM – Certainly that was part of your growing up, you know, the violent situations throughout the city. But was it just so complicated and gargantuan that you didn’t feel-
AVRAM – Well, I think a lot of it was that my parents didn’t want to have anything to do with it. And you would see, almost every night on television someone had been shot, or somebody had put an explosive device into a shop, something like that. It did get bad, it did influence your life. I remember back in the late 90s, to get back up and down the town there were these black taxis. They were the London black cabs that were near the end of their life and they were brought over to Northern Ireland and you’d use these to travel. They’d go along pre-determined routes. It got to the stage where people would drive up and shoot into the vehicles and… it wasn’t fun. It’s gotten so much calmer now, so much better.
TOM – When did that break happen?
AVRAM – Again, it’s difficult to say because one of the reasons I haven’t been influenced is that I’ve done a lot of traveling, my summers were spent in America but… recently, I’d say recently.
TOM – You said you and your parents in some ways avoided it yet they were politicized in that they brought humanitarian aid back to Romania, your father’s homeland, correct?
AVRAM – This is a slightly involved story. My mother left Belfast when she was young and she had traveled over to Germany with her sister and some of their friends – they wanted to get some work there. This was in the early 70s and when they arrived in Germany the place they were going to start working - it was an electronics factory – they had been told the place had gone on strike for three weeks. They didn’t know what to do, they didn’t have too much money. At the hotel they were staying at somebody said ‘there’s plenty of work in Jersey’ which is one of the Channel Islands. They put all their money together and flew over there and did a whole series of jobs and that’s where my mother saw my father. His father was a big band player and he came from a pretty well-off family…
TOM – In Romania.
AVRAM – In Romania. He wanted to see the rest of the world and with it being under a Communist regime he couldn’t get away. So they did a lot of touring – my dad was in this Romania folk music band and he played the double-bass and traveled all over Europe. They came to Guernsey. They played at hotels and my dad was speaking to some Italians that had owned the place and he said look, is there any way you could help me get away – I just want to leave Romania. They said, we can’t do anything here but if you can get to the airport and get to Jersey… So, my dad waited until, I think it was the last night and, to give you an idea there were, I don’t know how many people in the band were secret police but they could shoot you.
TOM – Oh my gosh. So he had made the decision to defect. We’re talking about the 80s, right?
AVRAM – This would have been 72.. the early 70s.
TOM – So he had made the decision to defect but he couldn’t tell anybody in his band?
AVRAM – He couldn’t tell anyone because another one of his friends had been.. they had run over him with a car. It was just dangerous. So what he ended up doing was, the last night my dad said he was going to do some laundry and he wasn’t feeling too well. So they were all out drinking and having a whale of a time. So he did his laundry and he had put on three shirts and two pairs of trousers or pants because he couldn’t carry anything and he just had 11 pounds twenty, which was just under $20. So that would have been the equivalent of $100 today – that’s all he had in his pocket and he still had to get a plane ticket to fly back to the other island. He waited until everyone was asleep – that was the benefit of alcohol, it had them all subdued. So he climbed out the window and it was 4 in the morning, pitch black, and he started running and walking but he realized he didn’t know what to do and every time a vehicle came by he hid. He was worried they had already detected what had happened. So he eventually saw – I don’t think I’ve seen them over here – they’re electric milk floats. The milk industry has these vehicles, they go maybe a top speed of 10 miles per hour but in England and Ireland-
TOM - So these are delivery vehicles, slow moving…
AVRAM Very slow because they’re carrying bottles of milk. So my dad saw the guy and pulled him over and said, I’m trying to get to the airport, but he didn’t have any English. So he was trying to explain and what he ended up doing was, put his arms out like that and was [makes airplane sound] making plane sounds.
TOM – So he was trying to commandeer a slow-moving electric milk truck?
AVRAM – Exactly, so the guy said, yeah come on, so he got my dad up the road a little and was able to stop a truck and the trucker was going that way, and got him off to the airport. So my dad got to the airport and he was starting to get a little apprehensive because the guy he was waiting on hadn’t turned up. But then I think he realized he needed to buy the ticket and get over there but he was still apprehensive in case the secret police came. And he noticed a policeman walking up and down and his thoughts were, well, he kept staring at the policeman and thought if these secret police come in I’ll go up and I’ll punch the policeman in the jaw and that way he’ll have to arrest me and I’ll claim political asylum. But the plane came in time and nobody chased after him so he was able to fly to the other island, he met up with the Italians and they took care of him, they brought him to London and he was able to get political asylum that way. His mother was still over there and I think they lived in a bigger house and she’d been forced into one of the small flats, the big tower blocks they have in Romania. My dad Costello and my mum Anne they were able to fly back – no, sorry, they drove out in the 90s after Ceausescu had been…
TOM – Deposed.
AVRAM - Yep. The new government had been put in with a change to democracy, so my dad was able to start bringing out humanitarian aid. He ended up, I don’t think they do it as much now, at the height of it they were helping forty different old-people’s homes and orphanages, there was a lot of need there.
TOM – We’re speaking with Irish artist Avram Dumitrescu and we’re talking about how his parents met. You said Anne and Costello is your father’s name? Maybe he was destined to arrive in Ireland with an Irish name.
Avram has a show this weekend at the Riconada Gallery in Alpine and he’s showing a lot of the work he did here in the region and a lot of times when people first arrive to the region they have such a fresh perspective on the buildings, on the landscapes. And I imagine there’ll be some freshness and immediacy and especially in the speed in which you work. You said you get out in the mornings and start working. Why is that? Is it just heat related?
AVRAM – Yeah. I fry in the heat. I am no good when it gets warm. Megan laughs when she sees what it does to me. I’ve been trying to get up as early as possible. I found out there’s a big balloon festival so I’m hoping to be there at seven tomorrow morning and I’ll be out sketching for a couple of hours before the sun heats up. It has gotten much more pleasant now but this last month was warm.
TOM - In Fort Davis you are in one of the coolest towns in Texas. I imagine working in Austin and in Dallas was an early morning venture as well.
AVRAM – Absolutely. I remember seeing close to the 4th of July the city had put up [a sign saying] it was the coolest 4th July in Texas and I could believe that. In Austin on Christmas day it was 80 degrees and I think the only other one in the family who would have had an experience like that would have been my brother. He was in Australia and he was doing a year working there and he couldn’t get over having a barbeque, a Christmas dinner on the beach.
TOM – What do your friends back in Ireland think, here you are in West Texas in the desert, sketching the desert, you’ve married a Texas woman, do you go back often?
AVRAM - I haven’t been able to get back recently but they have.. they saw it coming. I’ve had this fascination with America. It’s nice going to another country where it’s, I should learn Spanish, there hasn’t been the challenge to learn another language so that makes it easier, so yes, they’re pleased for me.
TOM – We’ve been speaking with Avram Dumitrescu. He has a show this weekend at the Riconada Gallery in Alpine. It’s playing through the middle of October. Thank-you so much for joining us.
AVRAM – Thanks very much, it’s been fun!