Trenton ReynoldsThis is Dabalon. My name is Trent Reynolds and in this podcast I have conversations with artists about materials. If you are enjoying this podcast and want it to continue, please subscribe or make a one-time contribution at dabalon.com/podcast. That's spelled D-A-B-B-L-E-O-N dot com forward slash podcast. You can also leave me a five-star rating on iTunes and tell all your friends. The longevity of this program very much depends on your support, and I thank you. In this episode, I am talking with one of my studio mates, David Lloyd. David. For the first few episodes, I felt like I didn't dig deep enough into materials. So for this conversation, we jumped right into it. If you want to know more biographical information about David and see his work, which I highly recommend you do, You can find all of this at his website, thehouseoflloyd.com, or you can find him on Instagram at david underscore Lloyd. And here's my conversation with artist David Lloyd.
David LloydAre we starting? Yeah, we've already started. We've already started. This is all material. We're done. Gold.
Trenton ReynoldsGold. Material gold. Audio gold.
David LloydEternal flame. Eternal flame.
Trenton ReynoldsSo back when I first met you, we were over at the other studio space. That was before we were in this studio space. Yeah. I primarily only knew you to be a painter. Yes. Right? And that continued into this space. Yes. You know, where you're doing primarily shaped paintings. Yeah.
Yeah.
Trenton ReynoldsI guess I did, I was kind of aware that you were including collage in there as well. Yeah. Like, you know, photographs that you tore from books and stuff like that, and bits of paper, bits of fabric, you know, a little bit of everything. So I guess I was aware that you're, you know, kind of mixed media in your approach. But then more recently, and this is kind of what I wanted to dig into a bit, is you I guess it's been a couple years probably now, you started picking up these, the clay ceramics.
David LloydYeah and it's, I always was making objects. I've never considered myself to be a painter with a capital P. It's more like I'm an artist who happens to make paintings. So a lot of the shape... Why is that distinction important? Because it frees you up. I mean, I know painters that are like, you know, I use this kind of oil paint and I always paint on a rectangle and I prime my canvases this way and it's just never... My brain doesn't work that way. It works... I think of materials as just... any material could create anything. So painting could be made out of things that aren't paint.
Trenton ReynoldsIs that how you always thought about it? Like back when you were a kid or whenever it started? Certainly at art school.
David LloydAt art school, I was sawn into wood and pouring car paint on it, automotive paint, and using... bits of steel and all sorts of shit. Yeah, I was very, I was always working on very, very mixed media approach to making art. And my painter friends who are real serious painters, and there's nothing wrong with it, they make great work, but You know, it's oil on canvas. Right. And it's just not how I see art. I just see art as this highly flexible thing that can be a whole bunch of different things. And that's why ceramics for me wasn't that big a leap. Because ceramic play is just one more material among a million others.
Trenton ReynoldsHad you ever worked with ceramic at all?
David LloydA little bit. I mean I think that not much. You know, just fooling around with little things. But I never really could do much. I know that I took a couple classes in hand building to learn a few things about how to put stuff together, but very little instruction. It's very expensive to take classes, and then the kiln takes forever. And once we had a kiln here, that was it. See, it opened me up because I could just. play around and fire things kind of at will and that was the turning point with ceramics because I kind of always wanted to do them and ceramics are very hip right now and I want to say that I always wanted to do ceramics for the last 15 years but it doesn't count for much I liked it before it was cool I really did but I didn't act on it so I can't call it just like every other dopey artist who wants to be a ceramicist now But the kiln made all the difference because I did do a few things and threw some commercial places and I waited two months to have something fired and I thought, "To hell with this. This doesn't work."
Trenton ReynoldsSo, yeah. You know, that brings up something interesting. I've noticed so often that people create... I guess it's an obvious statement. The accessibility of materials dictate how people create. The artwork that they make, not only that, it dictates what they think art is. Does that make sense? Oh, yeah. Like... you know, if you don't have access to a kiln, you know, that's, it's just harder to make. It's like it's as if it weren't even there for you, right? Like it wasn't even an option and maybe it's not. It wasn't an option. Whereas sometimes in classes, if I just bring a new material and they just have to pick it up, right? Like just the removing the friction. Absolutely. All of a sudden it's like the light goes on. It's like, oh, I,
David Lloyddidn't know this was even an option. Every, yeah, I knew a woman back who went to Cal Arts and became a, you know, in the 80s became a somewhat well-known artist and she would use wood, but she would cut out pieces of sandpaper and piece them together and use them as sort of geometric collage to create these figurative things. And they were amazing and they were just store-bought sandpaper, nothing about them, but when you saw them up on the wall, on a work of art they were as worked as well as oil paint you know they did what they did and and I don't think people think of materials that way they think people literally I say what do you do well mostly painting they go oil or acrylic and it's like wait I don't know that and 10,000 other things right and encaustic and encaustic and you know all these fiberglass and resin and Everything. I mean right now I'm mostly using just acrylic because it's fitting my needs as far as painting goes but the certainly paint works well for certain things. I mean if you want to make a realist painting, nothing's better than oil paint. It just works and that's why people used it all these hundreds of years but you know art now there's no sort of limits on that stuff.
Trenton ReynoldsSo how do you think you arrived there? How do you think that you ultimately gave yourself permission or that your mind was even aware of, you know, that there really is not, those distinctions between art materials and non-art materials are a fiction, right? They're not real.
David LloydI think it was a little bit of, like, almost like an ADD, and a stubbornness about kind of like, who says I have to use that? Like a weird kind of rebelliousness, even though it's not particularly rebellious because almost before I was born, Robert Rauschenberg was already doing a lot of this stuff. It's not like I was breaking some new ground, but the point was is that I like the idea that I could go in and get an effect from house paint and surfboard resin that I might not get from oil paint or it might take me two years of fussing that I could get in ten minutes some other way. of just speeding things up.
Trenton ReynoldsSo that's interesting. So it was more of a practicality that drove your interest in other materials. A practicality and a... Well, that implies, of course, that you had a vision, right? Like you had stuff that you wanted to get done and you didn't really care where the tool came from.
David LloydYeah, but I've always been super willing to have an idea of how it looks. and then when it looks completely different be okay with that. I'm always, one of the things when I've taught is you know they call the happy accident. Well I would say so much of my practice has been letting things letting accidents happen and then riffing off them. Wow, that cracked. It wasn't supposed to, but what does that, now what possibilities does it give us? Instead of going back to the drawing board endlessly and saying, I have to make this perfect thing that will never crack. If it cracks over and over again, then I say, okay, it's meant to crack. Now where do I go with it? That's just me. Some people can't work that way. They find it... too open-ended, but to me it's what makes art so fun because it's a it's sort of a nonlinear process where you you go one way and you hit like a roadblock and then you go down another road you hit a cul-de-sac and turn around and come back and you keep finding it's like a maze and then you find all these things and then people will say to me Oh my god, how did you get that effect? And it's like trial and error. I just tried stuff. And for every one I get, I get a bunch that don't work. But I've said this before, is that in the studio, make a lot of stuff, and if you're lucky enough to be a showing artist, you don't have to show everything. You can edit out the good stuff and leave the bad stuff, but don't edit too much in the creation process when you're making it. That's how I think.
Trenton ReynoldsYeah, but I think it's also the case that there's so much editing that happens before you even start, right? Right, everybody edits. Everybody has their biases. And that's a problem, right? I think that mentality of,
David Lloydand a piece of attire, this and that, but it feels like that guy was doing it at a time when it really wasn't, it was really unknown territory, and that's what's so amazing about something like that. But we, as modern contemporary artists, have access to other materials. CNC machines and plastics and different kinds of resins and computers and video cameras and you name it. So we have a whole bunch of, but the idea of the painter, you know, There's, I love Picasso and all that stuff, but the idea of the painter, Picasso, the man with the big brush, right, and all that stuff, that's not interesting to me. I mean, a lot of my favorite artists have just been kind of weird outliers. They paint, but they... They just make stuff. They're makers. They make things.
Trenton ReynoldsI wonder if Rauschenberg, just hearing you talk, and this is probably something somebody's already said, and I read it somewhere, stealing stuff, but I think a lot of non-artists look at him, and probably a lot of the interest in his work came from this incense experience. people being feeling incensed right about like that's not art that's the oh I can only imagine
David Lloydwhen he first put like the goat with the goat with the tire on or something people were like what in the hell does this who does this guy think he did but you know they thought that about but I wonder though like Monet they thought he was blind or something he couldn't see what he painting so you know this is this is the history of art right there right yeah God if we could make something that people would say what the hell is that you know you're on to something right it's hard harder to do than it looks
Trenton Reynoldsyou're challenging assumptions you're kind of broadening the scope of what's possible and what's available yep but I wonder like Rauschenberg maybe his greatest contribution is not necessarily to this narrative of art history but to like opening our eyes, the artist's eyes. Like he was an artist that gave artists permission.
David LloydHe gave artists permission. And you know, Duchamp kind of did it, but Duchamp was more of a, I feel like Duchamp was more of a social commentary or kind of trickster. It's Dada, which is another thing which has influenced contemporary conceptual art. But I feel like Rauschenberg was this less, just like an inventor, like an innovator, like somebody just burrowing down into what's possible.
Trenton ReynoldsAnd I get the, I've always got the sense that he really loves the materials.
David LloydHe loved the materials. He loved to see where they go.
Trenton ReynoldsLike Duchamp, you don't get the sense that he has special feelings about a urinal or glass or anything.
David LloydNo, that is just a piece of, that urinal is there to make you, not to contemplate urinals, but to contemplate the idea of that as a work of art, I think. It's clever.
Trenton ReynoldsIt's a middle finger. It's a lot of things.
David LloydI'll tell you something funny, though. What's that? I said to myself, if I ever meet Rauschenberg, I'm going to say, fill in the blank, and I met him at a party, and I just stood there like an idiot. And I said, well, you've sure been a big influence on me.
Trenton ReynoldsOh, man. And I was like, what do you say?
David LloydWell, he was introduced to me as my friend Bob. And I was like, okay, Bob, man. Hey, Bob. And I was like, Whoa, no, that's Bob Rauschenberg.
Right.
David LloydThat's a special Bob. Pretty cool, though. It was cool, but I kind of blew it. I look like an idiot, but that's okay. I think that's pretty... That's all right.
So...
Trenton ReynoldsSo back to ceramics though, you had kind of been thinking about ceramics but there's this barrier of cost and accessibility and kiln. Cost, accessibility, and the kiln fixed that. So what was it all along in those years that you had kind of had this curiosity in the back of your mind? What did ceramics offer you that you weren't able to find or what problem did it solve that you weren't able to solve elsewhere?
David LloydI think that the idea of, ultimately the first idea was the idea of the alchemy of ceramics. It's the idea of taking some sort of dirt and building something and then firing at these insane people. temperatures and creating things that way. So the whole alchemy, and that's the same alchemy as if you take oil paint and water-based paint and surfboard resin and duck feathers and put it together, something's gonna happen, good or bad, right? It's the same thing with ceramics. That's sort of what, what, What got me interested in it was the unpredictability of it. But that also was a frustration that you, with glaze, you... you put something down that is supposed to be a beautiful sort of teal green and it ends up being kind of a poopy brown and it could be a number of reasons that happens but it does happen all the time things like that and that leads me to the second part of this my ceramic journey right is I thought I'm coming to ceramics trying to be a ceramicist and I decided I have to come to ceramics from and materials. Completely different.
Trenton ReynoldsSo... And traditionally, like a ceramicist, they have a... I don't know. There's different kinds of artists in every medium, but there is definitely a vein of ceramics that's very purist, right? Oh, they're purist as can be. You do not want to... You cannot taint... your ceramic object with something that's not
David Lloydexactly and that is something right and if I had sort of endless money just collect there are ceramicists that are the purest of pure who make just unbelievable things you know these vessels that are paper thin and they use these incredible glazes and they're sort of magicians with this stuff Very disciplined, very, it's a different thing. That's not me. I was not trying to do that, but I was really trying to follow all these ceramics rules, and it was screwing me all up. And I thought to myself, well, in the art world, this isn't really a ceramics world as much, but in the art world, the most famous... The only ceramicist I ever met or heard of growing up being in LA was Kenny Price. Ken Price was a guy that was in the Venice art scene and was friends with all the Venice guys and everything. He came up as a ceramicist and he made drawings and things. But his most famous work is acrylic on stoneware. And I thought to myself, well, the most well-known, one of the most well-known ceramicists in LA, you know, there's other people, Peter Volkos, people like that, but the most, I thought, well, hell, if he can do it, I can do it. And then I thought, well, what about, what else can you use on clay, you know, when you, after you've fired it? So I've been experimenting with... paint, various kinds of paints and coatings and enamels and epoxies as well as glazes, like cone 5/6 glazes, commercial glazes. and just coming up trying to get that that kind of alchemy in a different way
Trenton Reynoldsand it's been really once you go with anything it's other than a glaze like if you went to some kind of painter epoxy or other thing you wouldn't then put it back in the kiln.
David LloydYou do not put it back in the kiln. So all the firing and glazing and this and that, you do first. That's an important point because once you've put this other stuff on, that's kind of it. You don't go back.
Trenton ReynoldsAnd do you get to a point with the glazing where you're like, this isn't quite doing what I want it to do, so I'm going to go...
David LloydWell, that's how it started. I would get to the glazing, I wouldn't do what I wanted to do, then I would re-glaze and re-glaze and re-glaze, and every now and then it would be fantastic, and sometimes it wasn't, it didn't work at all. And so I started thinking, well, what if I glaze parts of it and paint parts, or do something, like I'm working on something right now that has a kind of, a crawl going on and a crawl is like a thing that kind of fractures but there's open areas that i'm going to use other surfaces and it's not going back in the kiln but i want to make things that are permanent so i'm using some materials that extremely tough and permanent so it's not like They're not really that they're not delicate, you know, like the surfaces aren't they don't because I want something that has a kind of permanence of a Mean pottery is it you drop it it breaks or cracks, but the surface of glaze is very tough. I It's hard.
Trenton ReynoldsWell, I can see how you'd want some kind of material consistency. You wouldn't want to pair it with something that was a thing.
David LloydNo, I'm not trying to. I mean, people do that. There's people who make things that have all different kinds of, the surfaces are all different and everything, but I want some kind of consistency. And I always want it to feel like a really out there glaze. When you look at them, most people think they're glazed. I don't hide the fact that it's not all glaze, I don't care, but they look like traditional ceramics but the surfaces if you look at them are pretty out there I think it'd be tough to get what I'm doing with glaze I don't know if you even could. I don't know if you could. Which is fine, I mean that's cool.
Trenton ReynoldsWell that's part of the advantage. That's part of the advantage.
David LloydYou come from painting, I know you come from painting, you know, that's what I know. I know materials in that way. I don't know glaze. Glaze is chemistry. You know, that was when I first tried something. I went to a place and learned. And what I did is I made some little bowl or something. And I took every glaze in there and just poured it over the top. And I thought, I'll show them. These people are uptight. They don't know what real art looks like. And it just looked like somebody barfed on it. And that was because chemically everything reacted to other things, but not in a good way. And I thought, oh, my God, this is going to be rough.
Trenton ReynoldsYou could spend your whole life becoming an expert on glazes and you could do amazing stuff. And people do, by the way. But the opportunity cost is that you don't get to explore other materials, right? And I kind of feel like there's an analogy here to be made with music. Like you could spend your whole life... digging into music theory, but then you're not making that really simple melody, you know, rock and roll song that affects, you know, a generation.
David LloydYou might become a master of your instrument. I don't know, when it comes, like I've played a little bit of music in my life, and what would interest me about music would be to shows how old I am, mentioned the Beatles, but they used horns and strings and funny noises and everything. A lot of musicians have done this. It's that same thing. How do you get to something? Does a can of Red Bull getting tapped on make as good a sound as a drum? I don't know. Probably not, but why not? It's the same thing. What can it be? And that doesn't mean that it's all... that you're talking about difficult experimental music. You're just talking about the materials. What can you do with sounds to create stuff? And that's always been interesting to me, this whole idea of the broadness of the world is how many ways you can do things. Right. But I don't particularly like experimental atonal music, oddly enough. It's not my thing.
Trenton ReynoldsBut, you know, just like we were saying, that experimentation gives permission for people to do further exploration. Yeah, people take it all different ways. But why I wonder about that, I think there are plenty of artists out there that are interested in locking in on a single material, they like that limitation, they like having those really strict parameters, and then they go for depth. You know, they just keep on pushing that craft and refining.
David LloydYes, and that is another way of making art which is equally as valid, equally as productive. You know, I'm reading, I just got this book about Philip Guston. You know, Guston painted on rectangles and he painted with oil paint. He didn't do any of the stuff, none of it. And I think the paintings are absolutely some of my favorite works of art ever made. And they're nothing... about them where he was saying, "Hey, I think I'll try this." But that's not the artist he was, you know. But that way of giving yourself parameters and seeing how far you can go within that, that has been the history of painting really, is a rectangle or a square. What can I do inside that? But, you know, the first time I saw a shape Frank Stella, I was like, wow. You know, I was a kid, but I was like, holy crap, this thing Is that a painting or what is it? Hey, maybe it's a sculpture. That's cool. I can be a painter and a sculptor, and I don't have to decide either.
Right.
David LloydYou know, so that, yeah.
Trenton ReynoldsDo you think, was Stella the first shaped paintings that you were exposed to that got you thinking about?
David LloydThat was the first sort of shaped stuff I looked at is... I had a Picasso book when I was a kid that my parents gave to my brother who had no interest in art. And I was the little brother and I got a hold of it. And this is like 1960. I was like five or six. And he would be painting, and there would be paintings all over the place, and he'd have a food and half-drink and wine bottle there. And I looked at it, and for some reason, I thought, this is the greatest thing ever. And that is a completely different... That's like the way to be an artist, is you just... It's freedom. It's freedom. It's all freedom. It's all about freedom.
Trenton ReynoldsYou also teach, right? Yeah. So would you say... I'm realizing now, just talking about this, like... There is something specific that I love about art and making art that I want other people to experience, right? And I guess maybe I've been a little bit narrow-minded in thinking that that is what art ought to be, right? Which is just as narrow-minded as, you know, somebody that paints their whole life, you know, portraits oil on linen, right? Yeah. and sees no other art as being valid, right? So I've got, I'm realizing that I'm kind of-- - Well, everybody's biased. - Right, right.
David Lloyd- There's no human that isn't biased about something, so we're all biased.
Trenton Reynolds- But I think that's kind of where perhaps we have similarities is like, Man, I just love materials. I love experimenting and seeing what materials can do. - And there's a poetry to materials.
David Lloyd- Right. - You know, materials have meaning. They don't, they're not, and one of my great peeves about a lot of art getting made, particularly right now, is that it's so specific that it's so specific it feels like it may not have a long shelf life. And I understand why artists want to do that. I mean, things happen in the world and you want to react to it. Everything. And it could be, it's not even a political thing. It could be you want to react to... something that's happened in your family or anything. But thing about art that's so interesting, an art that lasts has this sort of timeless quality. And that's something that I'm very interested in trying to get through objects. And maybe that's why I'm interested in abstraction, is some people might look at it, well, it's meaningless. You can add any meaning you want to it. Well, maybe so. Maybe you could say that. I hope that they have kind of an aura that lasts. The aura is the same now as it will be in 100 years. But if something is about... If you make a piece about global warming, say... Maybe it'll be relevant later when we're looking at global warming differently or if there's less of it or more of it or anything. Maybe it won't have any meaning at all. There's a lot of, I remember in the 80s people were always making these things showing Ronald Reagan with a, holding his finger on the button, they were all worried that Reagan was gonna up the world. Those things look as dated as a freaking, they look so out of date. And so getting back to the materials, sort of the poetry of a material doing something next to another material is almost like notes being a music, a bass, and a guitar, and a violin next to each other or something. They do something. And maybe they do something that has more lasting meaning than something else. But that's, again, I never, that's just how I think. It doesn't, I don't know if I'm right, that's brain works and so when I teach I sort of think in those terms. I'm not interested in literalness in art. It doesn't interest me. The world's so literal. Oh my god. You know the world we live in a world where with 24-hour news and everything else the world is very clear what's happening around us. There's doesn't this art's like the mystery. It's like, in a weird way, it's like religion. And I don't mean it's religious necessarily, but it's that it's mining the mystery. And there's so few places in the world that anybody does that. Who does that, you know what I mean? So that's what's interesting to me. in art making.
Trenton ReynoldsMaybe that ties into, though, seeing the potential of materials for what they can do in the context of art and not just locking in and isolating them to a function, right? Yeah. Like when you see asphalt, that could be used as an art material. Sure, if it's on the street,
David Lloydit's asphalt. If it's... If it's piled in a box in a gallery, it's something else.
Trenton ReynoldsThat way of literalizing, right, a material saying, like, this is asphalt. Asphalt means road, right?
David LloydWhat if you make a figure out of asphalt? Okay, now it means road, but it means figure. Now what the hell is going on? All of a sudden you have something, you have a human made out of asphalt. Okay, that could mean two things, but it could mean a million other things too.
Right.
Trenton ReynoldsBut that kind of being willing to, it's a way of going through the world, right? That's kind of what you're talking about. I think just the way people think, politics, the way they approach any kind of subject is... susceptible to that same kind of worldview like literal thinking versus you know this kind of non-literal thinking or
David Lloydbinary thinking I mean I think that every I think that there is a we've become a moved into a state of very very binary thinking in the world There's good, bad, right, wrong, left, right. And human beings are much closer than they are apart, but nobody wants to think that way 'cause the world's become very binary and tribal. And that kind of thing drives me crazy too. And it is just me again. It's how I, and I remember at Cal Arts, I was sort of, Cal Arts was a great school and I learned a lot and there were a lot of great teachers and everything, but I, they were always trying to force meaning, literal meaning out of things that just drove me crazy. You know, it just was not, and somebody said, "Well, that's just art for art's sake." And I was like, "Oh man." it's got to do things. You know, everything has to have a function in this world. You know, everything has to be, have a purpose. We live in a, every, everything you do has a purpose and says who, who decided that? Right. You know, and yeah, you have to, there's purpose. I mean, you have to make a living and you have to, In fact, most of life is purpose-driven. But when an artist goes in the studio, my God, give them a break. Just make whatever.
Trenton ReynoldsThat phrase feels like people who don't understand what they're looking at desperately trying to categorize. Desperately trying to... figure out how they can understand that, you know, and if they can just dismiss it by saying, oh, that's just art for art's sake. Like, that means nothing. It doesn't mean anything. And
David Lloydwith abstraction, it's funny because I'm teaching, doing a lot of stuff with teaching with that kind of abstraction. And they say, I see a dog. I see a tree. I see a chicken. I see this. And I'm saying, okay, if we turn it upside down, now what do you see? Ah, I guess I see an upside down chicken, but also wait, I see a face. And it's so funny because it takes a long time to look at things and let them just be what they are, as opposed to not make a narrative. And I think it's because, and I don't know this because I'm not a... We talked about this. You see a bush and And if you can't decipher the lion Against that bush as a shape and make meaning out of it. You're screwed. So that's how the human mind works, right?
Trenton ReynoldsThere is this kind of existential panic people have sometimes when they look at it and they go
David LloydI don't know what I'm looking at. It's like, okay, that's okay. You don't have to know and
Trenton Reynoldswhat do you mean i don't have to know doesn't it mean no nothing's gonna leap out and bite you you
David Lloydknow if you don't understand this look at this painting here it's red and it's uh got a lot of
Trenton Reynoldsstuff on it wow what is it right panic how would you characterize how would you you describe what you are teaching people in your classes other than materials right because we've already talked about like the materials are means to an end, they're tools. What is it that you're teaching people?
David LloydI think it's very, very difficult to teach art. I think you can teach technique. You can say, you know, if you mix this color with that color, you get this color and if you have a light source or something, if you're doing something, a picture of something from here, you have a shadow over here. I mean, and it goes on from there. There's a lot of technical. But teaching, I think what I try to do is get people to, follow some thread that's interesting to them down the rabbit hole and see where it takes them. And generally I found that the, you know, I don't know what I'm doing. I don't know what is this good? Is this bad? If you can get them out of that kind of thinking. Don't think about good, don't think about bad, whether you like it, you don't like it. Just get in the process and follow things that you think are interesting and let that develop into a language or a some sort of way of making something that feels unique to you. And it's interesting because almost consistently when people are with the way I teach, it's not everybody. Some people start with very technical stuff, and they believe that first you learn all this technique, and then you can make whatever you want. But I found that if people become too technique-driven, they simply can't. That's like a trap. It's like a gilded cage they're stuck in. They can't get out of it. What I found is interesting is when people are working in the unknown, very uncomfortable, they don't know what they're doing, something shifts and all of a sudden there's something they like about it and they do something that's interesting. And then when you go over and make a suggestion, they go, "I don't want to do that."
And you're like, "Bingo." Right.
David LloydRight? Right. Now you're on your way. You've made a decision that's yours, not mine. I'm not telling you what to do. and that's a point where I think people start developing their own vocabulary because I don't think you know good art gets made by people with good I've seen great art made by people with very little skill and I've seen really lousy art made by people with insane skills. So it's really, that's what's so hard about art. I think art schools have the problem is they have to kind of make meaning to kind of justify their existence in a way. Because once you give people certain tools and sort of cut them loose, what else are you going to do? I mean, you can say, well, you know, I mean, you can study art philosophy and all this stuff, but it doesn't necessarily make for better art. I think good art comes from going down the rabbit hole.
Trenton ReynoldsOkay, underrated art material.
David LloydOh wow. Well I would have said clay 10 years ago because nobody's using it. Now it's overrated art material. I would say anything at Home Depot that you really would never assume be an art material. If you're thinking about materials, go to a hardware store and walk the aisles and think, I can't imagine that a work of art, and then think about that.
Trenton ReynoldsUnderrated artist or artist that you're thinking about right now? Somebody that's caught your attention or you find?
David LloydGosh, there's a lot of art out there. I haven't really... I have a friend, Thad Strode, who I went to Cal Arts with, that I feel like L.A. has never really gotten. He's sort of an artist-artist, and he's shown a lot in Europe, but his paintings are just so out there. They're so strange, and they're so weird, and they're so hard to really define. that you just keep coming back to them over and over again. What's his name again? Thaddeus Strode.
Trenton ReynoldsS-T-R-O-D-E? Mm-hmm.
Okay.
David LloydAnd they're messy and kind of awkward and really sophisticated at the same time. I mean, they're just really interesting people. paintings and I keep coming back to his work as a kind of... And if I, you know, I'm on the spot now so I can't really think, but I'm sure later I'll come up with five other artists that I think are cool right now. No, that's great. Thaddeus Strode. But he's sort of off in the, he's in the weeds a little bit. He's not, he hasn't shown a lot in Los Angeles.
Trenton ReynoldsA book, art book, that's worth checking out.
David LloydI just read a this book, it's right there because Yumi's brought it, about Gauguin and Gauguin was controversial and kind of a crackpot and had some pretty obvious issues but just the paintings just blow my mind. They blow my mind seeing how he put these things together. And the time when, which was a completely colonialist idea of sort of the noble savage. Right. And which is controversial in itself, but the paintings that came out of this kind of twisted idea of getting back to a pure time, some idea these Europeans are going to go live in Tahiti or something and purify and the thing but what but the art that came out of it was so strange i mean to this day they still feel like like i was saying like really hard to categorize and his and that whole period the sort of period of um of the turn of century that's been talked about so much um in ceramics in furniture and objects and painting turn it turn of the century um France, which was a revolutionary time. You know, the whole world was looking at Paris and there was a lot of good things happening and bad things happening but it was fascinating because there was such strange stuff coming out of it. And in a way a more, you know, we think we live it was a more uptight world back then and we live in a freer world but that world was pretty out there. I mean it was just, you know, talk about
Trenton ReynoldsBohemian. Paul Gauguin, A Life by David Sweetman.
David LloydYeah, it's a good book. It's really what's good about it is the period. A period of reading like one of the great things is is Pissarro's wife saying, why the hell can't you be more like Renoir? He's out there selling, and you're off in the field painting these stupid things. It's so funny because it just sounds like, it could be anybody saying anything to anybody today. It's the same old stuff.
Trenton ReynoldsAll right, well, thank you so much for your time.
David LloydThis was great. Sure, over and out.
Trenton ReynoldsI feel very fortunate to be surrounded by great artists at my studio and I'm happy to share some of them with you all. Again, for more information about David, his website is thehouseoflloyd.com and he is @david_lloyd on Instagram. All of this information, some images and a brief biography are also available at the website for this podcast, which is dablon.com/podcast. And next week I will have another conversation for you, so come back. Also, rate me on iTunes, subscribe on the website, and tell friends and family. And I think the challenge this week is go into the studio, go into the closet, find an old work of art that you could never quite sort out, could never quite get to work, and tear it up. or cover it up or get rid of it somehow and open up some space for something new to happen.