I recently visited Dudley Zopp’s studio. Her work, creativity and energy lingered with me for several weeks. So, for my first interview for this blog series, “Why Create?” I chose Dudley, a painter. Her beautiful, well-organized studio is indicative of her productivity. And I love her work. I chose the following quote by Robert Henri, a painter and teacher at the turn of the 20th, as I thought it captured Dudley’s approach to art making.
“The object isn’t to make art, it’s to be in that wonderful state which makes art inevitable.” -Robert Henri, a painter and teacher at the turn of the 20th century
The following is Dudley’s expressive and eloquent response to “why did you become an artist?” and “why do you paint?"
“I can’t remember becoming an artist. Rather, I think I was just born that way. I’m sure you’ll hear other artists say the same that art is not a choice, but a condition we are born with, a pre-determined destiny. I knew from the time I could formulate the thought that I wanted to be an artist, and was lucky that I had a family and an art teacher from third grade through high school who encouraged me. The choice I was faced with in high school was whether I should make a career of being an artist, or should take the easy way out by majoring in languages and becoming a translator at the UN. In the end I did neither. Following college, I taught French for a year, got married and had two children. All during those years I continued to make art and explore everything from sewing to woven tapestry, which eventually led me back to school in 1986, to continue along the path I’d been on since day one.
Your question, why do you paint, is one I think about all the time, because I have made a choice to focus on painting as opposed to other visual arts disciplines. Painting allows me to touch what I see, to possess and understand the world around me. The drawings I did when I was around 6, carefully saved by my grandmother, were of things I experienced, trees, birds, a crucifix with a smiley-face Jesus. I’ve always been compelled to put my thoughts into physical form, and the less I can voice my thoughts the more compelling it is to work them out visually.
A painting gives presence to intangible things like reflections in a puddle of water on the blacktop driveway, or the movement of red maple branches and buds against an overcast sky. To look at a painting is to transcend time, To make a painting is to move differently through space. The artists I admire most are painters - Velazquez, Goya, Delacroix, Sargent. Reading about them, or in the case of Delacroix, reading his journals, is to be joined across time with kindred spirits. Seeing their paintings in person is to marvel at what the medium is capable of in the hands of a genius. ”