A Quote by John Van Hamersveld

In 1970, I was turning 29 years old, just 4 years out of art school. I had created a black and white drawing style mascot portrait called 'Johnny.' I made a poster for it and sent it around the world to corporate art departments.
I was in art school since I was five years old. I've always been to art school. Everything that's happened to me, nothing's been planned. I've never had a business plan. I just kind of fell into it, and I liked it, and I took a chance. I took a lot of chances in my life.
I'm making some of the greatest art being made now. It'll take the art world ten years to get around to it.
I was in art school since I was five years old. I've always been to art school.
When I was at art school, a lot of art education is about art being a means of self-expression, and as an 18-year-old I didn't know if I had a huge amount I wanted to express. It was a big moment when I decided I wanted to shift the emphasis or the intention of my art from something I disgorged myself upon and something that actually fed me or made me see the world or understand the world.
The story wrote quickly. I called it 'Where You're From,' and I sent it out, as I had numerous other stories over the years. Except this time I got a letter back saying that it would be published. Someone out there had liked the story. I was thirty-one years old.
Football became my life at five or six. The earliest memory I have is of playing in my first boots, a pair of black and white Alan Balls. It was 1970, four years after the World Cup, and I scored three goals at school.
Now the culture is made of old things, it's a collage. Art made out of art is not art. You're supposed to make art out of life.
I myself saw the great works of Western civilization for the first time in my high school in Lithuania in bad black-and-white reproductions on miserable paper. That was, for many years, what art was for me. But from those miserable black-and-white reproductions, I got something, something unmistakable.
The poster art over the years, art with social critique in it, has always been trying to make that point - that we are larger than they are.
I prefer black and white and portrait photography. I like old, you know, interesting faces, so I think black and white brings out the contrast.
I was brought up on art. My father thought I had a great hand at art and sent me to art school. But he did not want me to become a photographer.
I can't turn around without hearing about some 'civil rights advance's White people seem to think the black man ought to be shouting 'hallelujah's Four hundred years the white man has had his foot-long knife in the black man's back — and now the white man starts to wiggle the knife out, maybe six inches! The black man's supposed to be grateful? Why, if the white man jerked the knife out, it's still going to leave a scar!
I got out of this school and went to Camberwell College of Arts, a terribly prestigious thing to do. I was there to be a painter. And I sketched so well that, a year later, I was sent to Slade School of Fine Art, one of the great art schools.
François Mitterrand was a student of architecture, he had done a lot of research before he called me. He said, "You did something special at the National Gallery of Art in Washington - you brought the new and the old together." But John Russell Pope finished the West Building in 1941, so when the East Building opened it was only about 40 years old. But the Louvre is 800 years old! A much bigger design challenge.
When I was at Disney and was a character art manager and handing out artwork that had to be inked we had a thing where if there was any lettering on it I'd hear, "I don't letter," and I said, "Look at it. It's drawing. Ink the drawing." I just learned from Mike Aarons how each letter was just part of the drawing.
In the early 1970s in Atlanta, I attended what had formerly been an all-white school but had become a black school after integration and white flight. Perhaps because of this, the teachers created a curriculum that included a focus on African American literature and history year-round, not just in February.
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