 In March, I got my first tattoo. On the skin of my right wrist, it looks out alongside my camera as I create my art. The original creator of the drawing was my very first art teacher, Clint Hamilton.  "Clint Hamilton was born James Clinton Hamilton in Abilene, Texas in 1928. Hamilton showed early artistic talent and studied art at McMurry University while he attended high school. Upon graduation from Abilene High School in 1947, Hamilton moved to Dallas.  In 1951 Hamilton moved to New York City to pursue a career as a freelance artist. He established a successful career as a commercial artist and created window displays after being discovered by Gene Moore, Tiffany’s famous window designer. Window displays created by Hamilton for Bonwit Teller and Tiffany’s became known for their inclusion of art work by struggling up and coming artists who could not obtain gallery representation.  Hamilton’s art appeared in his display windows and he arranged for his friend and fellow struggling artist, Andy Warhol to have his first exhibit in one of Hamilton’s window designs for Bonwit Teller. Warhol, Hamilton and Nathan Gluck later exhibited their work at the avant-garde Loft Gallery in New York City. While in New York, Hamilton studied painting at the New School for Social Research.  As Pop Art emerged from Neo-Dada, Hamilton traveled and worked in art circles that included Andy Warhol, Max Ernst, Joan Miro, Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, Richard Avedon and other notable artists who were transforming the fine art world in the United States and abroad. The clash between fine art and popular culture continued as a major theme in the art and work of Clint Hamilton throughout his life.  In 1967, ill health brought Hamilton back to Abilene. Hamilton continued his art career with free lance work for Neiman Marcus in Dallas and creating notorious fantasy window displays for Grissoms department store in downtown Abilene. After a short return to New York in the 1970’s, Hamilton came back to Abilene to stay where he became the undisputed Archduke of Art for the City of Abilene and the surrounding area.  Hamilton’s legacy to Abilene includes the Center for Contemporary Arts, Museums of Abilene (now The Grace Museum), active participation in the Big Country Art Association, The Paramount Theater, Ballet Abilene...  Working with aspiring artists of all ages, abilities and backgrounds was an extension of his philosophy that art making is an inclusive process. His talent, wit and intelligence inspired countless artists, collectors and friends to see art as an active and vital extension of life. Hamilton was a prolific artist throughout his life creating drawings, prints, paintings, collage work, commercial art, assemblage constructions as well as installations."
My introduction to Clint came through my mother. She had known him in high school and college, and they maintained a close friendship later in life. Around age seven I began to express a greater interest in art, and my mother arranged for me to take lessons from Clint one to two mornings a week. When I first entered his house, my eyes nearly popped out of my head. Clint was a collector, and everything was material for creation to him. Thus his house was like a shrine to the curious and odd, as well as to the everyday. My first class consisted of him sitting me down in a room full of paraphernalia and stating merely, 'to make something', and then leaving the room. There were no rules to follow, no techniques or principles to pay attention to. Just creation. Later classes, he would focus on something more specific, but that very first class he taught me the most important and most basic lesson about art. Simply creating something from yourself. This idea of creating from a place of necessity, being driven by some internal, instinctive passion has carried with me into my own art to this day. The following is a piece I wrote about Clint my senior year of high school. |
My heart was a callow landscape; roughly-carved ranges between barren chasms, looking out to a pitiless coastline with darkness at both ends. The skin that encased and enshrouded it from the light of the physical world was fresh and youthful, tensed with the daily anticipation that accompanies growing up. I was naïve, I was ignorant, and my cheeks still grew pink in reply to the world around me. His entrance into my life was nowhere near as important as his exit. A seemingly normal relationship to any other eye but my instincts told me differently. He had the silent airs of a king who had outlived his kingdom, demanding attention and respect behind inveterate gray eyes. A quiet dependence crept into the mechanics of our relationship, a sense of understanding I craved to explore. He enlightened me to the truth of the human condition and constantly introduced me to shades of myself I had never been acquainted with. There were no masks, no false flattery. His views of me were as realistic as they were masochistic, and I constantly asked for more. The words that came from his mouth created earthquakes, landslides, and storms, altering and shifting the landscape within. The churning water crashed upon the shore, as the raw stone began to be shaped. It was in these transformative experiences that I began to evolve as an artist, an individual. No longer was I content with mere existence, but I began questioning my purposes, plans, and ideologies. My world was opening and unfolding about me like the unfurling of a tightly curled leaf. In the midst of my changing landscape, he also began to transform. Illness contorted him in all manner of ways, slowly, but gaining power over him as time passed. His age was catching up with him, walking side by side with him even in the form of a rolling oxygen tank. Soon not even that was enough, and hospitalization was a constant companion. He joked that he held the clinic’s record for catching pneumonia and was in the hospital more than anywhere else. Distracted by my own inventions, I barely took into account the possibilities that came along with this new variable. Not realizing what was to come next, I followed ignorantly and attended to him as much as I could. His mind was far above the contented doldrums of patient living, so we imagined ourselves elsewhere. We made leaves from tissue paper and hung them from the industrial ceiling tiles, our own little sanctuary. We had become each other’s refuge; I knew nowhere else to go. When I was told he had moved on to ‘a better place’ I didn’t know how to react. Of all the lessons he taught me, I didn’t think that death would be a subject. It wasn’t long before the leaves fell from the imaginary trees. Just as the failure of his lungs had sent him to that which comes after I questioned whether my own lungs would truly ever be filled again. My soul poured rain for days. But slowly the aching storms ceased and the world inside me shifted. The realization of being alone had taken root, but along with it came the comfort of coping, and eventually, acceptance. No longer crippled without him, I could move about freely in the captivating world he had helped to shape for me. New growth overtook the rocks and filled even the darkest recesses. The moments I spent with him were the catalysts that pushed towards becoming who I now am. I was curious, I was alive, and my eyes grew wide in response to the world awaiting me.
In 2001, I lost my first art teacher and very dear friend. He was the first person I watched die. The first to come with the knowledge of death's permanence, rather than the ambiguity of childhood sadness we experience up to that point. He was also the first person other than my mother that I knew personally as a 'real artist'. From that point on, the idea of becoming an artist and going away to New York City was forever sifting in my mind. As I awkwardly went through my middle school years, I was constantly drawing or painting on anything I could find, paper, napkins, even my own skin (much to my mother's horror). I took pottery lessons at a local college, signed up for improv and acting classes, and began eating books like candy. As an eighth grader, I left the homeschooling of my mother and enrolled at a local school to pursue art classes and participation in a theater program. When I realized my freshman year that there were no real photography classes at my current high school, I switched to the closest public school with advanced placement art courses. I left my comfortable friend group, and transferred to a school where I knew almost no one. From then on, my life revolved around my art. My senior year I applied to the School of Visual Arts as well as several Texas colleges. When I received my acceptance, that idea from so long ago of being an artist and going away to New York City became tangible. And now I'm here, walking the same streets that Hamilton and Warhol and every other artist that has come before me has walked, pursuing my own art full force.
