ARTISTS BIOGRAPHICAL STATEMENT

Philip Slagter.
Corvallis, Montana.
November 1, 2005

In the 1950s, as a small child, I started painting. At the time my teacher/mentor was my
grandfather, Philip J. Fitzgibbon, whom I was named after. He was an amateur
wildlife painter and an avid hunter and fisherman. He taught me about the
woods, hunting, fishing and about nature and how it applied to life in general. I
loved him then and miss him now.
He taught me to paint birds mostly. To pay attention to anatomy, attitude, color,
balance, accuracy, shapes and believability. Even though Gramps hated the
modern artists of the 50s he inadvertently taught me everything that later on
became all the formal aspects of art. Composition, color, line, form. All the tools
that I used to produce the abstract art that he couldnt accept.
He also taught me to sit quietly while deer and other animals would pass inches
from us and how to control my breathing so as not to move and scare the animal.
When hunting he taught me to never kill for killings sake. Rather, he taught me
to be respectful of death and never kill something I wouldnt eat. I later learned
he had inadvertently taught me to see beauty in everything, meditate and be
respectful of all living creatures, including the most difficult of all, humans.
He taught me to read a river; to look at the surface to understand what was
beneath; to understand the patterns of fish, birds and animals. I see now he had
knowingly opened the doors I would use the entire rest of my life to survive as
an artist and a human. Thanks Gramps.
I went to college and ignored everything he had taught me. All the art I had
never been exposed to transfixed me. Art history became my history. I wanted to
live the life of all the great artists before me. I was to young, idealistic and nave
to recognize that was an impossible goal. To young to see my own life was the
only valid approach. I finished college and spent a few years in New York in
commercial art, publishing and advertising. Disillusioned with the lack of
freedom and individual expression in the world of commercial art I quit a
growing career as an illustrator and moved to rural northeastern Connecticut.
I dedicated my life to painting. That unbending dedication cost me many
moments of heartbreak and sorrow along with soaring heights of joy and peace.
I still relish the moments of joy and peace and have learned to be patient with the
pain and disappointments. Pain and sorrow always, with time, patience and
acceptance, change into joy and happiness. And vise-a-versa.
Painting became the all consuming, most important thing in my life. While that

attracted people to me it also pushed them away. I remember telling my second

wife that I could live without you, but never without art. Foolish and selfish
youth. Art is an amazing interwoven contradiction of selfishness and selflessness.
If you feel this statement seems to dwell too much on life rather than
art then you fail to see they are one and the same. Interwoven, intertwined and
inescapable.
So I started to paint. Constantly. Never stopping. Ignoring everything. Reading
about artists and looking at their work. Sometimes mimicking, sometimes
naively trying to extend an artists life works but never hesitating. My work
started with real objects but they seemed to take on expressionistic
imagery. I was repainting the history of art, as I knew it, but painting it my way.
I wasnt trying to reproduce what they did but rather retell it. My new mentors
were Pollack, Van Gogh, Giotto, Bruegle, Bosch, Da Vinci, Michelangelo,
deKooning, the fauves, art of the insane, the Blue Rider, art brute, prehistoric art,
the list changed daily. There seemed to be no end.
Something none of my heroes had encountered was the media of the 20th century.
There was a glut of information available. I found new artists and new directions
daily. I never realized exhibiting is the natural progression to painting. I was to
wrapped up in painting and discovering art. I never bothered. I was always
fortunate that my work sold. Sometimes for dinner, sometimes for rent and
sometimes for excess. Andrew Crispo, a New York up-town gallery owner was
vaguely following my work. I learned later he was more likely following me. He
suggested that I limit my palette to the primaries, I chose Sienna, Ultramarine
Blue and Yellow Ochre. Red, Blue and Yellow. This produced contrived artworld
colors yet I learned to understand mixing and relationships. He was right.
I met the sculptor George Segal and he also was encouraging. He told me to
ignore the art propaganda and realize I was entitled to a life as well as art. It
took me years to understand much less be able to put his advice to use.
I moved to New Mexico into a village where my wife Marta and I where the only
gringos in the village. People painted their trucks 20 different bright colors.
They helped me free myself from those art colors of New York. They taught me
to enjoy color without fear. In New Mexico my work opened up into more
expressions of my surroundings.
After several years in New Mexico during which time I had exhibited at
Adrienne Simard Gallery in downtown LA. I moved into the art colony The
Brewery in Los Angeles, California. With the cacophony of information in Los
Angeles I continued to explore the abstraction that had started to develop in my
work towards the end of my stay in New Mexico. The graffiti in the streets and
the overload of media combined with my constant study of the inner being
contributed to the hard form of abstraction that I explored in my Los Angeles
years.

After 10 years in LA the private collection of Kathy Regis and Richard Carlson
purchased my entire body of work giving me an opportunity to break away from
the LA art scene and again begin to explore life. I sold everything I owned and
left for Southeast Asia, alone. I wanted to meet humanity that I had no cognizant
relationship to. I succeeded. East is East and West is West and never the twain
shall meet. No truer words have ever been spoken. We members of Occidental
culture can never understand Oriental culture. The great lesson we can learn in
our meeting is acceptance, not understanding.
A great similarity lies in what we call creativity. Creativity springs from
something that far to many of us try to explain but fortunately, none of us can.
Call it the muse, a higher power, the self, God; whatever you call it, you will
never succeed in explaining it, only accepting it, and if you are lucky, allowing
it to flow through yourself unrestricted, producing exquisite moments of
understanding alongside moments of absolute darkness and bewilderment.
Asia permitted me to break free of my perceived expectations of what I felt the
LA art world expected of me. I again sought life as a venue for creating
paintings. I explored my inner and outer beings in Asia through painting as I
have my entire life. Acceptance of my own misunderstanding of the human
condition through immersion in Thai culture produced a combination of my old
abstraction and a new abstract reality.
I met my current wife in Thailand and my daughter was born on the island of
Kho Samui. I finally learned there is something more important in life than art,
and that is life itself. Now my old words repeat themselves differently, I could
live without art but never without my daughter. This glorious human being
entrusted to my wife and I transcends all the painting in the world and becomes
art itself.
We returned to the USA and I realized the selfishness of painting was not
compatible with raising a child who would be confident and secure with herself.
Constantly telling a child to Get away, Daddys busy when a child is
developing would be devastating to her self confidence and destroy her
development during those first important years. So, I opened a mural company.
This gave me the opportunity to exploit the craftsmanship I had acquired during
all those years as a fine artist. Because murals are commercial art I could turn
off the work in the evenings and be a father, something more gratifying than
anything else in my entire life. I never have been able to turn off the painting
for one minute of a twenty-four hour period.
I recognize that murals can be fine art but this is not usually the case. As soon
as the concept is created by some other person or corporation and subject to their
approval then we are producing commercial art. Murals like the Sistine Chapel
ceiling then incorrectly fall into this category through hind site only. We have to

remember that the freedom of expression in art that we enjoy now didnt even to
begin to come into being until the middle nineteenth century with the beginning
of the Avant-Guard period in Europe. Prior to that, freedom of expression
didnt exist anywhere without some serious form of oppression being applied to
individuals rights. This still exists today on a very gross level throughout the
world and, unfortunately, even though a subtler level, here in our own country.
After 7 years of producing murals and carving extensively for the Las Vegas
Hotel/Casino industry we moved to Corvallis, Montana where I again started
painting. My work seems to have come full circle. My work has always been
influenced by my surroundings. Im very excited to be an observer of my own
work and see what my past experience, combined with my new environment
will produce. I learned through abstraction to try to step away from the painting
process and not direct my paintings but rather let them develop on their own.
Peace on this planet.