Meet Jerry Allison

We were lucky to catch up with Jerry Allison recently and have shared our conversation below.

Jerry, first a big thank you for taking the time to share your thoughts and insights with us today. I’m sure many of our readers will benefit from your wisdom, and one of the areas where we think your insight might be most helpful is related to imposter syndrome. Imposter syndrome is holding so many people back from reaching their true and highest potential and so we’d love to hear about your journey and how you overcame imposter syndrome.

I’m not sure anyone truely “overcomes” Imposter Syndrome”. Recognizing that it exists was the first step to managing and living with it for me. Let me explain.

I grew up in what might be described, not as a broken family, but a shattered one. I was raised in the South by my grandparents after the death of my single mother. For this I am forever grateful. But my homelife was chaotic, transient and mired in poverty. My grandparents struggled, unsuccesfully, to help my maternal aunt and uncle deal with their drug and alcohol addictions.Thus I grew up feeling always an outsider, always different. My intellect and artistic creativity were my salvation and ultimately helped me rise above this background.

I went to Graduate School (School of the Art Institute of Chicago, MFA, 1984) and one of my many outstanding faculty members recommended a book to me. “Strangers in Paradise: Academics from the Working Class” by J. Ryan and C. Sackney. Here I encountered for the first time the concept of “Imposter Syndrome” as well as the ideas of “Dual Estrangement” and “Internalized Class Conflict” These ideas were a revelation and explained much about myself to me. Now, having an MFA, an exhibition record and having shed my Southern Accent, I can move easily in academic-artistic-social realms that once would have seemed unapproachable. Yet my inner voice still sometimes whispers “no one here could imagine the things I have seen”.

Great, so let’s take a few minutes and cover your story. What should folks know about you and what you do?

For most of my artistic life I have been a painter (that’s my MFA) and maker of mixed-media work. I have an extensive resume of exhibitions of this work. A few years ago, I became a Fine Art Photographer (wholly self-taught). When I moved to Colorado from the East Coast, I became aware of all the ancient rock art and ruins that were here in the Southwest. I began to travel the mountain and desert West to document these amazing fragments of pre-history. Off-trail hiking and scrambling in search of undocumented sites, I began to find the bones of many wild animals. These bones spoke to me, called out to be seen, noticed, honored. From this beginning came the “NATURE MORTE” series. I regard these large scale photos of the arrangements of bones as my most innovative body of photographic work. I think they embody a complex set of ideas, of the passage of time, of life and death, survival and decay. At present there are more than eighty images in this ongoing series.

So, whats new? I try to always have more than one body of work in development. And my newest is in some ways my most “conventional” ever. In the past year I have had the opportunity to travel to both Rome, Italy and Kobe, Japan. So I became a travel photographer, but one who, I hope, brings a fresh and artistic eye to the subject. This experience with foreign cultures has enabled me to take a new look at the local scene. Structure, composition and genuine human emotion are always first in my work, and I try to always avoid sentimentality and cliche.

If you had to pick three qualities that are most important to develop, which three would you say matter most?

The quality I feel most important is innate curiousity. To be curious about all things, to be skeptical of all received wisdom, is the pathway to being an original thinker and to forge your own original work as an artist. I’m not sure this is a quality that can be learned or developed. It is either a part of your mental/emotional makeup, or it is not.

The skill I would most emphasize to anyone aiming to become a professional artist is to learn to draw. This is a foundational skill, whether you aspire to become a painter, a printmaker, a sculptor, a photographer or even a web designer or film maker. Since the Renaissance, artists have trained by drawing the nude. Nothing else can train eye-hand-brain coordination so quickly and provide the artist with a basis of skill for all disciplines.

The area of knowledge I consider the most important to all developing artists, and indeed to anyone who strives to become an educated person, is History.I believe in the simultaneous study of History and Art History. Together they illuminate how social, political, military, technological and cultural history have influenced each other and brought our world to where it is today.

Thanks so much for sharing all these insights with us today. Before we go, is there a book that’s played in important role in your development?

A difficult question. I have been a voracious reader all my life. A list of twenty would be easy. But after much thought, I have narrowed it down to one. “WAYS OF SEEING” by John Berger, 1977. Berger was a philosopher, a novelist, an art lover, critic, and an incredibly original thinker. This small book of illustrations from art history and contemporary advertising is punctuated with his own observations and the quotes of many other thinkers. Not easy to describe or characterize, I strongly recommend this to anyone who seeks to understand art, or who aspires to be an artist, not a decorator.
A quote: “Seeing comes before words. The child looks and recognizes before it can speak. But there is another sense in which seeing comes before words. It is seeing that establishes our place in the surrounding world; we explain that world with words, but words can never undo the fact that we are surrounded by it. The relation between what we see and what we know is never settled.”

Contact Info:

• Website: coyotesboneyard.com coyotesdream.com
• Facebook: Jerry Allison (Jerry Allison Artist Photographer)
• Other: voyagedenver.com-interview-conversations with jerry allison
  shoutoutcolorado.com-meet-jerry-allison-artist
  [email protected]

Image Credits

All images are my photos