Endless art: Artist John Van Hamersveld traces his aesthetic to South Bay surf and drug culture of the ‘50s and ‘60s
by Kevin Cody John Van Hamersveld taught a class called “Making Images” from 1975 to 1982 at the California Institute of the Arts. The class was broken up by semester into line drawing and painting. He quit, he wrote in the catalogue to his 2013 “Drawing Attention” exhibit at Cal State Northridge, “because the design department…shifted the program focus so it excluded drawing entirely. The idea was that…conceptualizing art as design, you would direct someone else to use their hands to create your work. The view of design…was that design was a service, not an art…So I quit.” His 2013 observation might have been a forewarning to today’s AI impact on art. But Van Hamersveld is not a traditionalist. In 2083, he was introduced to Steve Jobs and became an early adopter of digital design. His 75-foot-long, 19-foot tall “Great Wave” on the side of the Underground Pub and Grill in downtown Hermosa was designed digitally. Van Hamersveld began to draw at the family dinner table, where his artist mother and Northrop engineer dad often communicated by sketching on napkins. Drawing was a natural pursuit for their dyslexic child who, happily, was naturally gifted at it. That gift led him to…
Read this story on easyreadernews.com