'Artists can slow down time. Artists can remind people to take a deep breath and appreciate something lovingly crafted by someone who cared enough about an idea to put it out into the world.'
Tyler Streeter is an American figurative artist. He has always been drawn to depictions of people, and portraits. Tyler often chooses to represent his subjects as fighters, using this as a dynamic visual metaphor for a wide range of human emotions.
Do you prefer to work in silence or does certain music inspire you?
I rarely paint in silence. Music is a huge influence, but I typically listen to podcasts about art or historical figures when I paint. If not a podcast, I'll put on music.....I like everything, but usually something fairly chill when I paint like Sufjan Stevens, Joni Mitchell or anything from Justin Vernon. I'll even put on a movie to listen to if I've seen it before.
Describe a moment you had an epiphany concerning your creative life.
I remember drawing a still life setup in my 7th grade art class and getting so focused on it that I didn't notice a group of classmates crowded around me watching me draw. It was an amazing feeling of validation, but more importantly, I realized at that moment that art can inspire people. I knew right then that I wanted to create art for the rest of my life.
How has your style evolved and what contributed to the changes?
Quite a few years ago, I started letting some of the original cross hatch marks in a drawing or painting stay visible as part of the finished piece. It evolved slowly, but I really like how the finished piece can reveal some of the early mark making decisions and can create more variation in the work. I tend to switch back and forth from drawing to painting a lot to keep things interesting. It also helps me take what I've learned with each new piece and explore it in the other medium. I really love drawing. Over time, my paintings have started to look more and more like my drawings and vice versa. Both mediums have contributed to the development of the other and have continually pushed closer to each other to the point where I've recently started drawing directly on to primed wood panels in lieu of paper. The next step might be to start adding oils directly to the finished drawing, but who really knows? That's why we're artists I think....to keep learning and experimenting.
Nature versus nurture: do you believe you have inherited abilities from creative parents, do you have creative siblings? Can you identify environmental factors or influences which led to your choices or directions?
It's definitely nurture for me. I had a great grandmother that was a pretty good painter and my dad could draw architectural plans, but for the most part, I wasn't born with any extraordinary talents or genetics to create art. I really just enjoyed drawing so often that I had no other choice but to get better at it. I also had an older brother that could draw really well and I was always striving to be as good as him.
What do you hope to convey through your work?
The overarching theme in most of my work is that life is a fight and no matter what our struggles are, we must always pick ourselves up off the floor and keep moving forward. I use boxing themes as a metaphor to convey this in my art. At the end of the day though, I really just hope people can be inspired by the work in some way. I hope that a young girl can look at one of my female fighter pieces and know that she can accomplish anything in life. I have two young daughters that constantly inspire me to shine a light on the inequality that women experience. If I can help this cause in any way, then I've done my job. A nice lady once described my art as capturing a sense of dignity in each of the subjects. This was one of the best compliments I've ever received and makes all of the struggles and failures worth it. Follow Tyler!
@tylerstreeterart