Charles Sommer
Matthew Shelley: Where are you from?
Charles Sommer: I grew up mostly in New Jersey and on the shore, probably 30 minutes south of Asbury Park. When I was 15 or 16 I moved to Florida and I lived there through college. After I graduate I ended up in Brooklyn for graduate school and have been in Brooklyn ever since. In the Northeast for most of my life, with an 8 or 9 year stint in Florida.
MS: I forget where you went to grad school?
CS: Brooklyn College.
MS: Where is your studio now?
CS: I keep a studio in my apartment which is in east Williamsburg.
MS: One of the things that I am always really curious about, with any artist that I am interested in is their general studio arrangement. You work at home. I keep a studio at home as well. Ever since I moved my studio to my house I have never missed keeping an outside studio. Do you like keeping your studio at home? Has that been a good shift?
CS: I love it. I have worked at home for probably 6 years now. First of all, it saves a lot of money. Working a full time job I work when I get home, or after dinner, or while I’m watching T.V. When I had a studio outside of my apartment I still had the same distractions. Eventually I got rid of the old studio and moved my work to my apartment.
Every once in a while I think about maybe getting an outside studio again. I wonder if it would get me to work a little more, but I think that’s just a fantasy. I think working from home really works well for me. It makes studio visits kind of interesting having people over to my home.
MS: If you keep a studio at home and live in the suburbs like we do, studio visits are a big ask. Not only do people have to come to our house, but they also have to ride the train 45 minutes out of the city to get here.
CS: You’re in Connecticut still right?
MS: Yeah. Moving out here has been good. I think that for more people than not, it impedes their work to have an outside studio. It can easily hold people back from making work when they have to travel to an outside studio after working a day job. I find that I work with way more frequency when my work is close at hand. I don’t have to pack up and go anywhere. When I kept an outside studio, I always forgot something at home, or I would need to get food, there were still distractions. By the time that I would hit a decent stride in the studio it had taken hours to set up.
CS: Yeah.
MS: In terms of your actual set up, you work in drawing which is an easy material to manage and maintain.
CS: Yeah.
MS: When I made the shift to drawing that was one of my motivations. The material doesn’t require a bunch of tedious stuff to manage.
CS: Yeah. I can do it sitting on my couch if I want, which I often do. The way I have my studio set up is that I have my flat files, and then there is a drawing large board and cutting mat that sits on top of those files which I slide towards me when I work. Thats where I do all my work. If the drawing doesn’t fit on my drawing board then I won’t make it. My flat files kind of determine the maximum size of my work. They are big flat files, so It still allows me to make big drawings, which I like to do.
MS: I see over here there’s a 40” x 30” drawing.
CS: Yeah, I did that on a residency back in 2018. I used to paint a lot, but there’s something about drawing and the ease of it. If I feel like making a very small drawing, I can do that anywhere. That’s probably 80% of why I chose drawing. I don’t want to worry about anything other than the image. Studio time is so important to me that I just want to be able to take my pencil and go. So much of the work is repetitive.
MS: I don’t know if this was your experience with painting, but mine was filled with indecision and stress. I will still dip into painting every now and then. I came to realize after close to a decade working with paint that I was always fighting the material. It wasn’t until I started to move toward drawing that I was able to let the work just unfold. I wasn’t struggling with the painting materials the whole time. Drawing was something that I knew, and knew well, and the materials were limited. I think some of it was about working a passage of the drawing and then knowing that it was complete. That passage could be done. I think one of my problems with painting is that I always felt like I had to revisit areas. Nothing on a painting could ever be done. That has to do with my training as a painter. One pass is never enough with painting. With drawing, there was an understanding that I could work an area, and then call it finished. If it achieved what I wanted it to achieve there was no need to revisit it.
CS: Right - the mark is the mark. It’s done. I had a similar relationship to paining. I know you work in collage a lot.
MS: Yes.
CS: The first studio visit that we did I was working a lot with collage. Prior to collage and painting I was doing a lot of animation too. That all came out of my indecisiveness. When it comes to drawing, being able to have one thing that I’m doing, makes it much easier for me.
In general, I am all over the place. I want to do everything all at once. I have a really hard time making decisions. When it comes to paint or collage I would just sit there for hours. I would just move parts around forever. Because I was constantly moving things around I thought that I should try animation. Then there was a whole other world of decision making. Then I thought, maybe I need to make paintings? With paintings I ran into the same problems.
It started with drawing, went through that whole journey, and then came back to drawing, which is where I’ve been for the last 5 or 6 years. I don’t have any real interest in anything else. I like looking at other people’s paintings and collage and stuff like that, but for me I need to just have the line of graphite and that’s it. I realize that graphite is not indelible, but it is for the most part.
MS: What is your studio routine like? I’m always interested in learning about people’s studio habits. As we talked about before, we both keep studios at home. For me, studio work is a nightly routine. I start studio work around 6pm and work until about 1am. I was curious about your routines? Do you work on a nightly basis, or do you tend to save your work for days off when you can work for 8 hour stretches?
CS: It really depends. If I have a drawing that is all mapped out, where the drawing is there and all I have to do is render it. Then I will just do an hour here and there throughout the week. But if I am trying to figure something out, then I need some uninterrupted time. I have a pretty regular 9 to 5 schedule. The weekends are the only full days that I have. It depends on where I am at. I used to be a real nighttime person. I would work through the night. At the time I had a schedule that would allow for that. I don’t know if that worked well for me. Sometimes after long sessions I would have trouble. I would rip the paper, or I would get a little sloppy because I would be so intensely focused that I wouldn’t see problems coming. I think that short bursts of studio time works really well for me. Hyper focused drawing in short sessions.
MS: That’s another reason that I love working from home. I tend to work in short bursts as well. I will start turning my thoughts toward studio work when I get home from teaching. All the studio lights will come on and I’ll be at my desk, but my studio nights are not just sustained drawing. I will be talking with Lily throughout, or playing chess, or partially involved in something else besides studio work. It’s one of the other reasons that I think drawing works really well for me. I don’t have to prepare a pallet, allow time for cleaning brushes, or other clean up. I usually don’t touch studio work unless I have a solid hour, because there is a certain amount of focus that I need.
I was curious if there were any studio routines that you rely on?
CS: I work best when I have focus and that’s all I am doing. When I was fortunate enough to do residencies that was really fruitful because that was all I was doing. That kind of making is good. I don’t know if I have any particular studio routines other than what we mentioned. When I’m doing the labor of drawing I can do almost anything along side of that. It just takes time. When I am mapping it out and gridding it out that’s when I need complete focus.
I ave finally wised up enough to keep a sketchbook. I never used to keep a sketchbook. I just had all of these loose pieces of paper floating around and if I liked the drawing I would blow up the sketch and work on it.
In the past, I would always go into the drawing with a grid, and I would intend for it to be a complete thing. There were no preliminary drawings or anything like that. Because I only have so much time to work now, I tend to plan the drawings a lot more. I’ll watch T.V. and plan a drawing for a long time before actually starting on it. I need the noise of the T.V. but I’m not actually paying attention to it.
MS: I get that. There were years when I would listen to baseball while I worked. Now it’s audiobooks. Partially just to time myself. I would make agreements with myself to work until the game was over, or for one more chapter of this book.
What about influences? What artists have had a major impact on you?
CS: One artist that I’ve loved since I saw her drawings in undergrad is Robin O’Niel. Those landscape drawings of hers were important to me. The way she only works in drawing. She’s been a huge influence on my work forever.
I have artists that I admire, but what actually influences my work is sometimes different. I work in the design world, with interiors and stuff, and that probably influences my work the most. I am so exposed to it outside of my studio. It’s something I really love. Architecture is an influence. Really just spaces. Things I see. Sometimes it’s in person and sometimes it’s publications that I see through my job. It’s something that I love in an abstract way. Surrealism has always been important to me. Artists like Yves Tanguy and Kay Sage
MS: That totally makes sense. I have gone through times where I am influenced by other artists, and I have gone through times where my influences are more connected to the everyday world.
CS: Yeah, I also love Ed Paschke. There are many artists that have influenced my work, but visually very different from my work.
MS: Absolutely. There are many artists that I admire based on how different their work is from mine. Maybe they do something that I can’t and that influences my thinking.
Moving along, I’m wondering what kind of things you do on a technical level, and on a material level to get a drawing ready.
CS: I’ll leave the technical stuff alone because I can really go off the rails there.
MS: We’re talking one drawer to another, so I get that. Could you also talk about what kinds of ides you're juggling when you’re in studio?
CS: When I’m thinking about the actual images that I’m trying to make, I there will always be a certain feeling that I want to evoke. Sometimes it’s a kind of nostalgic thing. I used to really avoid that word because I always felt like it was a bad thing. Recently, I’ve just embraced it. Not necessarily evoke a certain time, but to make it look a little bit familiar. That helps me make sense of it and maybe helps someone else relate to it. It brings in a emotional and personal side to the work.
We talked about this in our last studio visit, but I have a set of rules that I use with every drawing. The rules are loose, but I have only a few techniques that I use for rendering something. I have only a few different surface treatments that I’m going to put into any drawings. Each one of those surface treatments are intended to convey not only some kind of spatial feeling, but they also remind me of emotionally charged things. Like if it evokes a screen, or if it feels sharp. It can be quite clear really. A lot of the work that I was making was very sharp and felt quite violent. That had a lot to do with where I was in my life and in my relationships, and things like that. Maybe I’m just thinking about those things while I’m making drawings, but it has a quality that I was looking for.
Sometimes I look back on artwork and see these emotional qualities that reflect certain times in my life. The feelings are inherently kind of there. It’s like building a space with that set of tools. There’s a vocabulary there. Maybe it’s the arches which is a softer architecture, and that means something to me. It’s a design essentially a vocabulary. I’ve been trying to think about that and be aware of that, while relating it to my life somehow.
MS: It sounds to me like you kind of establish a visual vocabulary, and they may have loose connections to feelings that you want to generate, and that’s all in this deck of design cards that you’re going to use. Then you those combinations of things together. Sometimes it sounds intuitive, and at other times a little more structured. As if this particular form could be a stand in for a feeling, but maybe it’s not important that the viewer always interprets it exactly. It’s still open ended. Is that a way of putting it?
CS: Yeah, I think I’m talking about it in this very abstract way.
MS: I think I understand it. One of my favorite things to teach is visual foundations. This semester we spent a lot of class time talking about visual elements and principles. Our class focus is really how visual elements combine with one another to generate visual principles. There are always things that are on my mind when I am in studio. Small things that I’m curious about, but basic visual design dictates the bulk of my decisions. The conversations that I have with my drawing, color theory, and foundations students directs a lot of my work. I definitely take those conversations into the studio with me.
You mentioned having a set of rule that you use when drawing. That’s something that I have always found interesting. I know a lot of artists that have creative rules or parameters that they stay within. I know a lot of people actually find a freedom in having routine and rules that outline their practice. I was curious if that is your experience as well?
CS: It defiantly is. I could go into a little more detail about what those rules are.
It’s always on a grid.
It always has a horizon line. That’s always the second step. The ground to sky relationship.
it always has some sort of symmetry, and then I throw that symmetry usually.
The surface treatments are always in the set of rules. The same highly polished graphite areas.
Then I’ll always include a freeform shape. I used to look at a lot of UFO photography from WWII pilots who were observing these weird things. So I would include these small glowing orbs and flying around the space. Putting these orbs and dots in at the very end of the drawing became a regular thing. It had humor in it. So when I was making these sharp and violent drawings, adding these little bits of light became a sigh of relief. Adding that kind of balance is important. That’s a final step that I have to have there.
MS: In terms of this set of rules, would a part of that include picking out certain shapes, like an arch, and then choosing a surface treatment, like a crosshatching pattern, then executing that area, and treating each area like a self contained thing?
CS: I use powdered graphite for the atmosphere, and then for the more solid shapes I do a certain type of rendering. I don't necessarily have to include all of the treatments. Sometimes I try to limit them very intentionally.
For example in the drawing behind me, I used only lines that converged at a certain angle to suggest perspective, and outside of that I used graphite powder, and that was it. But with each new drawing, I would gradually start to add new elements. Elements like stacked straight lines, or this checkerboard pattern.
MS: I saw that. I like that pattern a lot.
CS: Thanks. Vey slowly over the last couple of years I’ve added new things. It’s a pretty tight set of rules. I’d like to think I’m a little more free with the shapes, but the rendering is pretty strict.
MS: I find a lot of freedom in it because it gives me the ability to keep reinventing over and over again. You can shuffle the rules and start a new drawing. Having set elements to work with is like an idea generator.
CS: Yeah.
MS: The parameters are like their own kind of freedom. You don’t have to agonize over every decision.
CS: Exactly. There’s also a lot of importance on the subtle differences between each piece that way. I like making the same thing over and over again and watching it slowly develop. It’s not like trying to prefect something, because I’m not interested in that. I like what I like, and if I want to make 50 versions of that, then fine. At the end of the day I want to enjoy what I’m doing. I don’t really care about anything else. The rules that I have aren’t something that I think about too much. I just want to see these images, and it is what it is. I love science fiction because it doesn’t have to make sense. I love surrealism for the same reason.
The subtle evolution of every drawing that I’ve ever made is important to me. They’re all from the same exact place. The only way I can connect with that is to be repetitive.
MS: I like how on a long enough timeline that stuff shifts little by little over time. That all makes complete sense to me.
One of my favorite things about your work is that I’m never 100% sure of what I’m looking at. I think that’s true of most of my favorite artists. When as a viewer you’re caught in this limbo of almost being able to name what something is, but then you can’t at the same time. In looking at your recent work I really appreciate the way that it registers at architecture for a second, but then there’s all the reasons that it seems to cancel itself out. It could be outdoors or indoors. The scale could be almost anything. I really like the balance in your work of it feeling familiar and unfamiliar at the exact same time. Are those feelings that you actively pursue?
CS: I think because I’m always thinking about landscape. It might change as the drawing develops, maybe the space becomes interior, but you always have that horizon line. I think that grounds things a little. It has a gravity and a sky and a land. But then I start to have fun with it and let it develop on its own. Maybe it's an architectural object, or an abstract object, or both.
My recent work is more like interior spaces. I’m very intentional about what’s being suggested with the shapes that I use and the reference they make to the outside world. As soon as it becomes too legible as something real that’s when I cut it off. As soon as it looks too much like a hose o whatever that’s when I scrap a drawing. I don’t want to give too much, but I want to hint at certain things.
Artist Information:
Website: charlessommerart.com
IG: @mrcharlessss