Dan Skaggs – Art and Cake

Dan Skaggs
Laguna Beach, CA
Age 77

What keeps you excited in the studio?
The excitement of creating a new artwork gets my juices flowing. I must admit, I like deadlines to keep me from drifting off to other activities or just wasting time, and at 77, It feels more urgent NOT to waste time.

Looking back at your trajectory as an artist, how would you say your work has developed?
Got my MA in Sculpture and that was my medium for over 30 years. The pieces got bigger and I got older. Finally had to reinvent myself to do a gentler type of Art. Took up painting a few years ago and have never looked back. I was never comfortable with painting’s traditional rectangular format; I finally began just painting on a silhouette cut flat artist panel of the “OBJEXS” I was interested in, with no background corners to deal with. Certainly something I never had to deal with in Sculpture.

What role do you think the artist has in today’s society?
To me, all forms of art just reinforce the better self of humanity, and that’s enough for me. I like to say that the artist begins the sentence, and the viewer completes it. I just don’t dwell on specifics in my art. Getting the viewer to behold the beauty of the human experience in any art form seems to be what the arts do best.

What’s the most important advice you could give to an aspiring artist?
There are so many paths that individual artist take that my short answer is no. A longer version would be to keep your mind open, be curious; relentlessly curious, and retain a childlike sense of wonder. For myself, I do my best art when I’m not satisfied with my best art.

Does age matter in art? Why or why not?
I think your art matters. If it’s good, hopefully , everything else will fall into place.

What can we look forward to from you next?
I feel blessed to have more ideas than time to execute them all. I’ve always zig zagged my way through life, soooooo….don’t know where I’m going and that’s the way I like it. As John Lennon once said…”Life is what happens to you while you’re making plans”.

Is there anything else you would like to share about being an artist later in life?
As you get older, your body loses its flexibility. This can also be true of your mind. I feel blessed to still being able to come up with new ideas. To me, keeping you glass half full and not half empty is a more of a must as we age. I am always impressed with your over 60 artist comments and that quality seems something all of us old geezers have in common.

artbydanskaggs.com
@dangoat64