3pm Talk TODAY (Go GATORS, Womp Tennessee!)
Doug Stuber
Overture for a Father, Poet, Artist, Musician,
Professor, Journalist,
Photographer,
In awe
Of
Michael Simnig, Mark Murdaugh, Robert Grotjean
3pm September 18, 2010 / GIC Gallery, Gwangju, South Korea
Poetry got me into Hollins University where it also propelled me to a master’s degree which allowed me to come to Gwangju as a professor. Imagine my dismay when along with my art and music, poetry became a part of my professional and human undoing. Art took away from the time I should have been spending perfecting another craft, that of professor. My music, though I haven’t played a single note and left my beloved guitar back home, also besmirched my reputation when I arrantly handed out a CD that arrogantly contained my own music, thereby offending the innocent ears of my department’s Membership Training enrollees of 2008. So this is my creative swan song in Gwangju.
Allow me three poems, two paintings and one song. They are presented in homage to the strength and good character of Michael Simnig, Mark Murdaugh and Robert Grotjean. The four of us fell in love with a Korean woman: one, with encouragement from daughter wife and a few others, fights off Leukemia as we speak; another was ground into plasma by what us westerners affectionately call the Gwangju Gossip Mill, but had the audacity to stay, albeit as a hermit, but a very kind, helpful best-friend of a hermit; one who came back to Gwangju thanks to his attachment, and me, lured here by the promise of a great job, and who, like Murdaugh has had a few slings and arrows cause black and blue marks, but never bled, no, indeed, who kept right on creating against all common sense.
I will now slink away to my office at “Chonndae” greeted heartily by peers and supervisors due to my newfound ability to express myself eloquently and engagingly so that the students of Chonnam Daehakyo can have a good, even great semester under my frail tutledge.
I am a poet, artist and musician. I fall in love, as the Korean poet Ko Eun has, with everyone I meet, male and female. I try to show people a better life by being a friend, entertainer, and someone who gets emotionally involved with every speck of nature, even the grotesque side of human nature, because I’m lucky enough to be able to have found multiple ways to express how I feel and what I see. So, as the bonus paintings flash by, let me thank you for your time, and you can find free catalogues on the back table that I will be happy to sign and give you as a souvenir of what is irrevocably my human heart. While it still beats no one can take away my creativity. Fear not, I shall continue to create, merely the audience has changed: the lucky students, who, through the magic of cosmic coincidence, signed up for my classes this fall.
Doug Stuber’s 2010 Artist Statement
My art attempts to reveal, unedited, the inner workings of my emotions expressively without forethought or thinking during the action painting. Many revelations, from the cosmos to insects, from Greek history to deep ocean plankton come to life freely in colors and shapes that have been refined through 32 years of practice. The motion is too quick to predict what will appear on the canvas, and the work is interpretable, which is why most pieces are numbered, not named.
The recent works have seen a resurgent female praying mantis, either playing a Haegum or in ecstasy after mating and eating the head of her partner.
At a time when conceptual art and art movies and documentaries dominate the art schools, I am content to work without a concept, and allow viewers to make their own subject out of my emotions. That makes me “old school,” but as I to try to take expressionism to places it has not been in the past, discovering new techniques born of ever-changing habitat remains a thrill I cannot give up.
--
J. Douglas Stuber
Visiting Professor of English
Chonnam National University
English Department
300 Yong-bong dong
Buk-Gu, Gwangju, 500-757
Republic of South Korea
+82-62-530-0566
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"The men we detest most violently are those who try to tell us the truth."
--H.L. Mencken