William B. Hogan
William B. Hogan
Studio of Gustav Goldberg, Munich, Germany circa 1900.
Great Uncle of my Mother.
I first stepped into SVA for an interview with the Director/President Silas Rhodes when the gray 4 story building was on 2nd Ave and 23rd Street. Mr. Rhodes looked at my portfolio of charcoal life drawings that I had with me from the year I spent at the University of Maryland, and immediately accepted me. He took me and my Mom on a tour of the school and some of the classes. I was amazed at the talent I saw from the student work. I stayed 3 years and graduated with a certificate in illustration.
The first year I commuted every day by bus and subway from NorthJersey to 23rd, lugging homework and the like into the city. The second year, me, Bob Lindsay and Richmond Jones found an apartment on Tiemann Place way up on the west side at Broadway and 125th Street subway station. Why didn’t we find a place closer to SVA? Well, we didn’t. Stupid on our part.
We had a great time in that apartment, though. Three guys in three rooms, mine was the ‘living room’ with kitchenette where all the parties happened. One time, and one time only, there was a loud knock on the door and two big cops and a detective walked right in and intimidated the hell out of us telling us we were too loud, too many loud parties. They looked around, told us to shape up or jail time. We heeded their advice......for a bit. And the time a lost cigarette burned a hole in a mattress creating a hell of a lot of smoke. We poured water on it but it created more smoke. We were chocking on smoke so we decided to take it on to the roof. We looked like the tree stooges as we lugged that smoldering and bellowing mattress down the hall, up two flights of stairs to the roof where we eventually dumped so much water on it it went out.
NYC and SVA was the place to learn and discover. Fun times. Many a time Lindsay and I walked up Madison Ave and over to 57th Street visiting galleries along the way and up through Central Park to 125th street and our apartment on Tiemann Place.
I had some great instructors at SVA: Peter Heinemann (painting), Burne Hogarth and John Gabor (anatomy), Jack Pollock (drawing), Handelmann (printing) George Ortman (design), James Kearns (sculpture), John Gundelfinger, Robert Andrew Parker, David Levine, Thomas B Allen, Robert Weaver and Russell Hoban (illustration). Many are gone now, but they made a great impression on my future art work.
All my paintings border at the periphery of surrealism. The mages I use have changed from time to time, but the idea behind them remain the same, distorted perspectives, juxtaposed objects, ominous symbols and the absurdities in my environment. That blank canvas tacked to my easel is always a challenge, almost a fear of not capturing my soul and experiences on the surface fast enough.
Most times I work from sketches that I freely transfer to a canvas maintaining the composition and mood from my original concept. As in my Q paintings, without the use of a sketch I paint the canvas with colors and follow by drawing shapes, images, any thing that comes over the color with no thoughts of composition, design, perspective, space, those design elements so essential in a painting. Then I look to combine structure, design, composition, brush work and color rhythms.
Soon after graduating from SVA I was drafted in the US Army and sent to Ft. Sam Houston, San Antonio, Texas as an illustrator, making charts and graphs for the personnel section. With time off I drew and painted the local scene, won some local and state juried art awards plus a 1st place in mixed media in the All US Army Art Show. After my 2 year military service we ventured south to Mexico and the University of the Americas (an American University) in Mexico City. living in another country was a great experience. I graduated with an MFA (painting) and soon journeyed north to Santa Fe, NM, where I got a position teaching junior high arts & crafts in Espanola for a couple years. After a divorce I moved back east to work as an illustrator/cartoonist for the editorial sections of The Record newspaper in Hackensack, NJ. In 2001 after 26 years at The Record I took a buyout and moved south to Bucks County, PA., where Susan and I maintain our studios.