Interview with artist Daniel Coston
Daniel Coston grew up in rural Arkansas, where his surroundings and life experiences there continue to shape his work. His paintings are technical and engrossing. He has the ability to raise scenes of what perhaps would be mundane to non-Arkansans, to fine art appreciated and collected everywhere. Daniel lives and works in Fayetteville, Arkansas. His painting can be viewed at Cantrell Gallery in Little Rock and at his website costonart.com.
AAS: Daniel, would you talk about your background? You are originally from Monticello, Arkansas?
DC: My father grew up over near Camden in Locust Bayou, Arkansas. My mom grew up in Green Hill about six or seven miles west of Monticello…which became the most important location for my work. I always think of it as the Haney place (my grandparents’ farm), the farm where my mom grew up. My dad attended Arkansas A&M College [now UA at Monticello] when he couldn’t get in the navy…met my mom, fell in love, and also, fell in love with Monticello.
There was no art in the local schools at that time, but my mom, who did a little drawing/cartooning herself in high school, knew how much I drew and had me take art lessons from Mr. Borchardt, for a short period. I was never out of Monticello for any length of time until I went to Harding College. I was going to study Math and Science but I was only average in science. My roommate knew I drew all the time and suggested I try Art. Duh! So I did and was accepted in the “program” on the strength of my Bible and English notebooks…which had more drawings than notes. I do know I felt at home in the Art Department. I skipped the introductory drawing classes and started in on the design classes. Design was where I felt at home. At the same time, I was finishing up my calculus classes. To this day I still enjoy math and science but design to me was visual science. I was the outstanding art student when I was a senior and came back the next year to finish up a few classes including the practice teaching semester to obtain a BA degree with a major in Art and minor in Math in in 1968.
Meantime I had been hired to teach high school art at Harding Academy. For me teaching was natural. I had watched my father teach and he was a really good teacher. He taught Algebra and Geometry and I was able to apply his techniques to teaching art.
Different Stages, 16” x 20”, acrylic on Masonite
Later, my first wife and I moved to southern Delaware to teach in the public schools in Sussex County. I enjoyed teaching at Sussex Central Jr. High and had a very good experience there. During that decade, I also worked at night and on weekends giving private art lessons. I also hooked up with a guy who owned the local paper in Georgetown, DE and we did several books together starting with one for the Bi-Centennial. The book we were most known for was The Craft of Dismantling a Crab. In order to do that one we had to take photos of all the steps and then I drew them. And we got to eat the leftovers – could not have been any better than that!
My first wife and I separated in 1980 and I came back and got a job teaching high school art in Dermott, Arkansas. I felt I was back home, but really, southern Delaware and the Arkansas Delta are somewhat similar…both are flat as a ping pong table. I began to do paintings for people, primarily from Drew County, of their old home places. So, for many years I could justify my odd hobby in just that way. I think it made my mom happy; she was sort of my art agent.
“I have a semi-clear memory of being restless in church and my Mother drawing on the back of a Juicy Fruit wrapper some small cartoon to keep me occupied. She did not know what she was starting.”
AAS: When did you first discover your love of painting?
DC: I have a semi-clear memory of being restless in church and my Mother drawing on the back of a Juicy Fruit wrapper some small cartoon to keep me occupied. Maybe this was pre-school or maybe it was early elementary school. She did not know what she was starting. As the years went by, I drew more and more…and it never stopped. Except for the oil painting lessons with Mr. Bochardt, the only art I did was drawing.
Just after I had switched to art at Harding, 1965, I believe, Life Magazine published an article on Andrew Wyeth. He was not especially well known at that time. I actually bought the magazine because someone in the Art Department told me about it. I was blown away. I generally knew about classical art and I had devoured magazine illustration for years. I figured that was why you got your hair cut – so you could look at magazine illustrations. And, my parents had a subscription to Saturday Evening Post, which for me was an Art textbook. Anyway, Wyeth was the first guy I knew about that painted things I experienced from roaming around the Haney Place. Funny thing is I didn’t immediately see the relationship; it took me years to understand the ramifications. By that I mean in the last ten years or so.
AAS: Your paintings have wonderfully rendered detail but are not photographic or literal. Some have an almost surreal quality.
Golden Dragon, 18” x 24”, acrylic on Masonite
DC: Thank you. I like to draw…first and foremost. Drawing is what I do. It’s another reason I gravitate to Wyeth. He loved to build up textures and I feel the same way. I will spend an inordinate amount of time building up a surface and sand it back down a bit and go back to building it up. I love to “throw” a wash across an area or the whole painting and start “again”.
After college I wanted to reproducing things I saw so, I naturally gravitated toward realism but I like all kinds of art styles….cubism, impressionism, abstract. I love it all, but I see through realism. But more and more I look for things inside the scene or thing. An example would be Golden Dragon. A hike just outside Golden, Colorado brought me to this excellent cedar stump (I took about 40 photos.). After getting home I also noticed that one limb vaguely looked like a dragon’s head and then it was easy to see the stump as a dragon curled up on top of a rock. We have a lot of interesting cedars here in Northwest Arkansas. There’s one down at Devil’s Den I call “God’s Tree”. Dead as a doornail but really beautiful.
I would be disappointed if my paintings look photographic. But I do want them to appear to be real. I generally will not paint something if I don’t understand the object. I could paint a decent painting of “purple mountain majesties” but I don’t know much about that, so I prefer to stick to Devil’s Den bluffs, which I have climbed all over.
“I generally will not paint something if I don’t understand the object.”
AAS: You paint in acrylic and on Masonite rather than canvas? Why that combination?
Rusty Carpet, 16” x 20”, acrylic on Masonite
DC: At Harding I first I worked in oils, but after I saw what Wyeth did, I wanted to try egg tempera. So, my professor said OK. We knew Wyeth worked on Masonite panels covered with gesso. So that’s what I did. What we didn’t know is that we should have used distilled water….and all that work flaked off. So, I went back to oils but never seemed to care for that medium. Then I tried acrylics, but they did not really suit me either. Around that time, I got involved in pen and ink…probably because I was teaching a lot of Jr. High boys in south Delaware who were very interested in comic illustration. You know…Conan and Swamp Thing and THE X-MEN! That led me to a more interesting area…pen and ink illustration from 20 years before the 20th Century to 20 years into the last century. That period is where you find Howard Pyle who taught NC Wyeth – who taught Andrew.
I continued to try to use Andrew’s techniques but apply them to acrylics. I cut my own panels by hand and I sand them and use a very thick gesso (Utretcht) but thinned and sanded to suit me. I don’t always paint on a smooth surface. Sometimes I like to use the oil technique of scumbling and allowing the lower coats of paint to show through. More than half of the time I try to paint in egg tempera but using acrylics. I had a brief conversation with the late Charles Banks Wilson, and he mentioned that if he were going to do an egg tempera now (and he did many) he would just as soon do it in acrylics and lay a yellowish glaze or wash on it to simulate the egg yolk. I think that makes sense with the improvement in acrylic paint over the recent years. I don’t worry about the yellowish tone.
A Theological Conversation in Concrete, 20” x 28.5”, acrylic on Masonite
AAS: The first time I saw A Theological Conversation in Concrete I was almost hypnotized. The composition and palette –the splash of color– are so effective. Was that scene imagined or somewhere you photographed?
DC: I’m glad that you enjoyed that particular painting because I don’t get a chance to talk about it much! We were at a graveside funeral service and as there were room only for close family members there, I was wandering among the tombstones. It seems to me that this graveyard had an unusual number of figures for a rural Arky cemetery and this grouping of Jesus and an angel was just as you see it in the painting. What made it even better is that the angel’s wings had fallen off. They were leaning up against the angel’s base. I just cannot pass up things like that. For me this is a visual “conversation” between the idea of Jesus and the idea of angels. Note that Jesus is fading away…or, at least, getting fuzzy while the idea of angels is nice and sharp and appears to have been cleaned a bit. Protestant Christianity of the rural sort is very critical of Catholics using images of saints and angels, but the folks in the pews seem to like the idea of angels. I recently did a painting of a cedar tree sitting on a bluff above Lee Creek in Devil’s Den. The cedar was vaguely cruciform in shape and I think most people would see that I’m reworking the crucifixion. I don’t intend any heavy evangelization for Christianity; it’s more saying, ‘look, this is interesting.’ To me the ideas behind the work adds depth to the ideas I’m trying to get across.
AAS: You have done some amazing rural scenes. Pink and Yellow is one of my favorite works along with In the Corner of the Curve. Would you talk about those pieces and what drives you to capture those types of scenes?
Pink and Yellow, 18” x 24”, acrylic on Masonite
DC: Wyeth talked about seeing things out of the corner of his eye. When I’m riding in a car or on my bike, I glimpse things and think, “that’s interesting”. I think Wyeth was saying a lot the time it’s not the main thing, the obvious thing, that you should paint but the little thing that catches your eye. Pink and Yellow was from a photograph taken while on vacation in southern Delaware as we were headed to Rehoboth Beach. My wife Leslie took two or three shots and when I got back to Fayetteville, I knew it was near perfect. Those colors were perfect. I’m sure I had seen that place before and ignored it but not this time. This was a “glimpse shot” and it feels that way to me. That makes it all the more “fresh” and completely UN-posed.
I cannot even guess how many times I’ve been by that cotton gin in Ladd, Arkansas. For most of my life, if you were headed to or from Monticello and Pine Bluff, you went through Ladd. And, of course, we took photos all the time. Eventually, I noticed the wooden buildings out back were probably the old gin…or even, the original gin. I don’t know. At first, I did not intend to include the highway but when I “backed up mentally” to compose the scene, I felt like it worked compositionally. I loved the rust in particular. The wood buildings seemed to be melting in a strange fashion. I even liked the “modern” gin near the highway. I get excited looking at the way the highway loops around and leads the eye to the store and gin(s). This painting is about history and time…lots of time. I’m particularly proud of the title; that curve is kinda like a corner “in time”. Yeah, I know it doesn’t make sense…but it’s perfect.
In the Corner of the Curve, 24” x 48”, acrylic on Masonite
AAS: Would you talk about your technique? How do you achieve such fine detail and shading like in Golden Corn?
Golden Corn, 16” x 20”, acrylic on Masonite
DC: I do a preliminary drawing for every painting I do. Since I work from photos, I select areas of interest and crop as needed. Then, I photocopy the pen and ink drawings and rub the back of the copy with graphite and trace onto the gesso-covered Masonite. Then I usually start laying in the darker areas first. This is familiar to all painters with the exception of watercolorists…and, sometimes I start with lighter colors. But that would be an exception.
From there on it is a back-and-forth process of building up shapes in each area.Then maybe the overall painting will get “out of kilter” and I will lay a wash over one area or, even the whole painting. Yes, it is time consuming, but it is what I feel is needed. I don’t blend colors like oil painters, the layers blend. There is a slight blurring of the shapes and colors that keeps my paintings from being too realistic.
AAS: You must have a strong connection with nature.
DC: Mostly, my work is from a photograph…but I only paint what I know. I like being out in nature and I feel sure that is because when we went to the Haney place, my brother and I would head for the creek. Or we would “hunt” cottonmouth snakes with our Daisy BB rifles. I use photographs I’ve taken to simplify the composition process because I can crop and focus on what I think is important. The hours it takes for me to complete a painting keeps me tied to my table.
Hostas Doing Op Art, 14” x 14”, acrylic on Masonite
AAS: Is it safe to say you like to experiment with texture and pattern? I think Hostas is a beautifully executed example.
DC: Very much so. I am currently working on a painting of a tree down at the Den. I am spending a lot of time getting the bark just right. By just right, I mean so that it looks like the bark on THAT specific tree.
The leaves of plants and trees are great for patterns. I love leaves rotting on the ground or at the bottom of a creek. Again…textures and patterns. We have hostas and poke berry plants in our yard. Along the creek in our backyard are Japonica bushes. They will start blooming soon and the patterns of those pink flowers against the purple/blue of the creek bank really fire me up.
AAS: You live in Fayetteville, but you seem to have a special relationship with Cantrell Gallery in Little Rock. How would you compare the art scene in these two regions?
Abstract Beliefs, 24” x 12”, acrylic on Masonite
DC: Cantrell Gallery became aware of me when I was teaching at Dermott. They were VERY patient with me. They could see some good in my work even though it did not sell. Folks would rave on about how good my paintings were…but they didn’t sell…VERY disappointing, to say the least. Eventually, Norman [Norman Scott, husband of gallery founder Helen Scott] wrote me a letter saying I needed to concentrate on one or two things. I took his suggestion to heart and concentrated on Arkansas scenes for them. Norman, who has since passed on, basically saved my artistic life. Cantrell Gallery sells my work throughout the year and I really appreciate them. I have had a couple of shows at Local Color Studio Gallery in Fayetteville. Currently I’m included in a show there.
Fortunately, my work sells in both Little Rock and Fayetteville. But I certainly sell more paintings through Cantrell Gallery and I think it’s in part due to their long standing relationship with an established art community. I do many more styles than I ever show. I really get a kick out of doing various abstract paintings. This is work that I always do but no-one wants to know I do it. But I’m still going to do it. I just can’t stop drawing!
