FINDING MY VOICE
AN INTERVIEW WITH WILLIAM DONOVAN
BY BART DE KONING GANS
 

Bart de Koning Gans (BKG): I’ve seen the progress and growth of the direction of your work for more than eight years. Do you want to talk a bit about the background, where it all started?

William Donovan (WD): Well you know my work draws on personal experience, and growing up in a blue collar Irish Catholic environment provided a treasure trove of references and memories.
BKG: Yes, but when did it start finding its form as fine art? I know you had a creative background but when did fine art enter the picture?
WD: 1992. I started painting as a response to the AIDS crisis that was enveloping my life. I was a fashion illustrator, but I felt the need to give voice to those events. ACT UP opened my eyes to the genocide that two administrations allowed. My friends were dying, I tested positive, I was angry, scared and frustrated. A sense of futility and death hung over my head, and I needed to give voice to that—to that silent scream that was resonating inside. So I started painting.
BKG: So did you find your voice?
WD: I found an outlet, but something was missing. I made large diptychs, monochromatic homoerotic figures and flowers. David Salle meets 1-800-flowers, pretty, but empty. I just did not know how to get my voice into the work. So I decided to venture into the mysterious waters of fine art. I enrolled in a drawing class at School of Visual Arts (SVA) with Judy Mannarino. She gave us five-foot long bamboo sticks with charcoal attached and blindfolded us. She placed items in our hands and commanded, “Draw what you feel!” That moment broke down my preconceived notions of making work. I was hooked. That was the beginning of finding my voice.
BKG: So this was basically a control issue?
WD: In a sense, I had studied with some great instructors, who instilled a standard of integrity that I would not compromise, more about technique and approach than emotion. I was a devout apostle of those theories. Remember, I was an altar boy.
BKG: So how do you define integrity now?
WD: Less technique, more content.
BKG: Wasn’t content the motive that put you on this path?
WD: It was very cathartic to make work about those events and memories.
BKG: It was more therapy than art.
WD: Absolutely. I painted narratives, but I started to let go more and more of consciously making work about my personal life. Carlo’s death, Antoine’s suicide, I let go of that.
BKG: Homages so to speak, that’s a bit heavy, was it difficult for you to let go and move on?
WD: No, I wanted to move on and make work more universal in nature. This started around 1999 in the SVA studios.
BKG: So in the SVA studios, you found the room?
WD: Yes. Mentally and physically. I made a piece about the self, just not my self. I was curious about identity, absence, leaving marks and started researching forensics and fingerprints. I painted a fifteen-foot fingerprint in rubber on my wall and pulled it partly away from the wall to make a soft sculpture slash installation, called Marked Man. Even though the image was universal, the title and content still reflected my experience.
BKG: Funny, you’ve seemed to have struggled to detach your emotion at the same time shying away from your graphic style. It is always like you are removing something, first your graphic sensibility then your emotional experience.
WD: I am always struggling. I think it’s my responsibility not to get too comfortable. What shapes us will also shape the work to a point. You eventually allow an acceptability of who you are and what you do and intuitively allow those factors to filter through to the work rather than having the work consciously filter through ideas.
BKG: Let me say this. I agree to some extent but I believe you push yourself to create a language, and rather than eliminate, you accept the tools that you have acquired. At one time, you were insistent on separating your fine art from your fashion illustration/graphic sensibility, and especially with the rabbit series (Indexes of Suspicion) that sensibility is now present—whereas in the SVA studio work, it seemed intentionally dismissed.
WD: At SVA, I was in the late stages of my abstract expressionist period, loving Rothko, DeKooning, and then moving on to Susan Rothenberg, Clemente, Polke. I loved the sublime color fields and abstract lines of energy and also the rough raw surface and physicality of the paint, the expressiveness, the endless possibilities.
I still do.
BKG: But now, you are courting refinement.
WD: It took a while to understand that I didn’t have to invalidate the fashion illustration to make fine art. The issue was where is the core from which the work emerges. From my perspective, the personal work comes from my soul, whereas the illustration is from my skill. I’m not trying to idealize the personal work, but that is true for me. A lot of people have commented that my art has a quiet elegance. I like simplicity, and maybe that selectivity reflects upon my fashion background.
BKG: And medium? How does the use of the unorthodox mediums fit into the process?
WD: I may be courting refinement, but what I enjoy most is the process, and chance and accident are constant companions of that from start to finish. The mediums like reflective glass, flocking, polyurethane, aluminum, or rubber nurture that relationship; they force me to explore ways of interpreting the figure or unveiling content. I was pouring oil-based enamel to abstract the figure. It would puddle and create a surface like dried skin made of shiny beads. The enamel was a bit toxic, so I started incorporating black smalt as a substitute that resembled tar and shimmered in the light. I used it first in Marked Man Rosso and then the Strange Fruit series. Glitter and flocking referenced a Pop art kitsch backdrop for the Indexes of Suspicion series. By taking risks and exploring new methods, ideas and mediums, I found that, though initially they may not work out, eventually I would arrive at a place I never would have gotten to had I not taken the risk. The risk is part of the process and excitement of making the work.
BKG: Let’s talk about your use of the figure. What attracts me to your work is that you push the idea beyond the usual gender identities. The work transcends that and captures a universal sexuality as opposed to specific roles dictated by society—that we are all sexual beings. Is this done consciously?
WD: If what you mean is that there is a certain androgeony to the figures, that is deliberate. I don’t want to be another queer artist just drawing dicks. It’s a powerful symbol—tribal art documents that. I did not want that symbol to overwhelm the content. That being said I think there is an innate sexuality to gay art. Whether it is Félix González-Torres or Robert Gober, it’s there. We’re all sexual creatures; it’s a powerful drive and does fuel most work hetero or homo. I mean Richard Serras work pulsates with sexuality. Whoever thought you could find intimacy in a piece of steel?
BKG: Are you using the universality to relate to a broader audience and how do you do that?
WD: Loss, mortality, lust are universal; no one has exclusive rights to those experiences. I am not interested in romanticizing death. It just shows up and people relate. Sometimes they relate to issues not even considered, and that is another reason I don’t want to create too much of a narrative. The viewer’s perspective is more interesting, like in the Intrinsically Disordered series—even though its genesis was the Vatican’s edict on homosexuality, everyone has a
different take on the work. I’d rather the viewer draw their own conclu-sion and experience of the work. However, who we are comes through regardless. I’m at peace with that.
BKG: Yes, the work addresses or elicits emotions and that is what I enjoy about seeing your work. I think it is interesting how confident you have grown in developing and finding your language.
WD: You mean my voice.

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William Donovan has studied extensively at The Art Students League, The Philadelphia Institute of the Arts, and Parsons School of Art. He has a BFA from SVA and an AAS from FIT where he currently teaches drawing in the BFA program. He is writing a textbook on drawing for Lawrence King Ltd. U.K. and recently signed a contract with Harpers-Collins to illustrate a book on Edith Head. His work can be seen this month in Thoughts on the Meaning of Spring at the Pike Modern Gallery (Milford, PA) and he is holding open studios April 28–29 as part of TOAST.

Bart de Koning Gans is an artist and independent curator. His work, both curatorial and fine art, have been exhibited internationally. He most recently joined Christopher Henry Gallery as co-director.