At what age did you decide to become an artist?
In high school, so around fifteen or sixteen years old. Drawing and painting became the only thing of interest to me, that seemed worthwhile, so after high school I went off to study seriously.
How did your parents react when you told them you wanted to be an artist?
They were always extremely supportive and encouraging.
Who are your favorite artists?
Michelangelo, Giotto, Pontormo, Correggio, Titian, Tintoretto, Rubens, Rembrandt, Vermeer, Velazquez, Degas, Kollwitz, Annigoni, and many others.
Who is your favorite artist whose work is unlike your own?
Francis Bacon.
Art book you cannot live without?
I have a lot of books.
What is the quality you most admire in an artist?
The need and ability to develop, born from dissatisfaction and determination. Painting is a humbling pursuit.
Do you keep a sketchbook?
Yes.
What’s your favorite museum in all the world?
What’s the best exhibition you have ever attended?
The ones that made the biggest impression were exhibitions I saw in my first year of study after high school. Seeing retrospectives on Gericault in Paris and Ribera in Naples made it impossible to take being a painter lightly.
If you were not an artist, what would you be?
I prefer not to think about that; I am not sure what I would have done with myself.
Did you have an artistic cohort that influenced your early creative development?
I shared a studio in my early twenties with two painters, Charles Weed and Frank Strazzulla, and being around similarly driven people within an atmosphere of mutual respect was fundamentally important to me. No politics, no competition, just the pursuit.
What is one thing you didn’t learn in art school that you wish you had?
I didn’t (and don’t) have a lot of common sense, so if I stayed too long or didn’t seek something out I needed, I prefer to fault myself rather than the schools.
What work of art have you looked at most and why?
Probably the Rembrandt self-portrait at the Met, it seems to be different somehow every time I look at it
What is your secret visual pleasure outside of art?
Architecture, though I suppose it is somewhat related to painting.
Do you listen to music in your studio?
Sometimes.
What is the last gallery you visited?
There were a few in Chelsea near my studio I visited. Finding really interesting exhibitions seems somewhat difficult.
Who is an underrated artist people should be looking at?
That would be a long list, probably as long as the list of overrated artists.
What art materials can you not live without?
Oil paints.
Do you paint/sculpt/create art every day?
When possible.
What is the longest time you went without creating art?
A month or two, usually when life events took over somehow.
What do you do when you are feeling uninspired?
Read or get junk done that needs to get done anyway, and try again to work the next day.
What are the questions that drive your work?
Why am I doing this in the first place?
What is the most important quality in an artist?
Introspection.
What is something you haven’t yet achieved in art?
A painting I like.
What is the best thing about art in the era of social media?
I would consider social media a good thing if it improved painting somehow—and that is yet to be known. To be honest, I am hard pressed to see it as a positive thing. Clearly more people can see what other people are doing, but the price for that has been a loss of privacy and time to develop, replaced by seemingly non-stop self-promotion.
BRANDON SOLOFF (@brandonsoloff) co-teaches a class on Figure Drawing at the Art Students League of New York.
