Photography provided by Bravo
Fashionistas know Tim Gunn as the elegant and urbane design mentor from Bravo’s Project Runway. What many people don’t realize is that Gunn, former dean of Parson’s School of Design in New York, is also an artist and an art collector. A graduate of Yale University and the Corcoran College of Art + Design in Washington, D.C., Gunn spent many years as a sculptor. Despite his peripatetic schedule, the gracious and charming Gunn found time to chat with Artful Living about Anne Truitt, one of his favorite artists, and how she inspired him to live authentically.
What led you to become a sculptor?
Oh my, the circuitous and serendipitous path of my life. I have always been creative and growing up, I was a Lego addict. In my day, Lego was not a prescription, the way I believe it is now, where you get a box and it shows you want to make and the contents are in the box. In my day, Legos were generic blocks. You bought a bag of white bricks, a bag of red bricks and you bought a platform for building a house. They were these parts that you had to bring a tremendous amount of thinking to. I was a very solitary kid. I didn’t want to be on a baseball field. I wanted to be in my room, constructing these structures, taking them apart and building something else.
The stirrings of an architect?
Well, I thought I wanted to be an architect, but I also studied the piano very seriously for twelve years and I loved creative writing. But I wasn’t a child prodigy, so writing won out and I studied literature at Yale. But, at the back of my whole being was this desire to pursue art. Up until my senior year, I had been prohibited from taking a course in the art and architecture department, as I wasn’t an architecture major. When I was finally permitted to take a class, it was the most liberating, fantastic experience of my life, let alone my pretty extensive education.
Why was that?
Because the answer wasn’t in the back of the book. You didn’t feel as though you were striving to find the broomstick for a the wicked witch of the west. There wasn’t a broomstick unless you made it up, and you wanted to go and retrieve it. It was all about what’s in you. It was an entirely new approach for learning things and experiencing things around me. And I was totally enraptured. I took a drawing course with a visiting artist named Anne Truitt.
The author of Daybook.
Exactly! That woman became a very serious mentor for me. She was an incredible, incredible person. When I met her at Yale, she was teaching at the Corcoran, which was a museum school, coincidently in my hometown of Washington D.C. I applied to their masters’ program and literally followed her.
Another step in the serendipitous path of your life.
I have to say, I had the most supportive parents anyone could have had. They put me through private school education, then college, and then the Corcoran, which was an entirely difference experience. Even now, my mother continues to say, “I paid for 200 graduate degrees.”
So then what?
I actually didn’t study with Anne for two more years, but I studied with remarkable artists in Washington and I really came into my own as a person. Those were the most important years in terms of forming me for how to navigate life. They were the most important years I’ve ever had.
What happened when you finally studied with Anne?
When I finally had Anne regularly as an instructor, I had matured as an artist. Only to a degree, but much more than the green little novice I was when I first took her course and didn’t’ understand the vocabulary or materials. By then, I had two years of full-time study behind me, and I believed I knew the direction I wanted to go in.
What’s your favorite memory of working with Anne?
What I remember most profoundly was that I was so eager to learn about color from her. I had studied color, and the Washington Color School surrounded me, but I really wanted to learn from the guru, because Anne’s work was really all about color. We had a very small class, with no more than seven or eight of us. She looked at me and said, “I would no more dream of sharing my views of color with you than jettison to the moon.” I was just devastated, because this guru held all this information that I valued, and I really felt that I had offended her in some way.
Ouch.
What I came to realize is that with Anne, you couldn’t even flirt with the notion of being inauthentic. You had to be you, which meant forming your own ideas of color. I love and adore her. I miss her terribly and wish she were still with us. But, if anyone has an afterlife, she certainly does.
Do you own any pieces of Anne’s work?
Now here’s an interesting synchronicity. About 30 years ago, I bought one of Anne’s drawings. It was my first real piece of art and it was an investment. It was a gouache and pencil and it was thrilling beyond words to have purchased it. Now fast forward to last fall. I was at the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington and saw Olga Viso, who then the director. As we talked, she mentioned she was doing a retrospective of Anne Truitt’s work in 2009. I didn’t say anything, but I followed up with an e-mail in which I said that I had a work of Anne’s that I really treasure and would be happy to loan it to the retrospective. Olga came up to New York to see the drawing and I decided to gift it to the Hirshhorn, so it’s now part of their collection.
How extraordinarily generous of you.
Well, the drawing was very meaningful to me and I felt that it needed to be responsibly taken care of. I’m just someone who cares that we navigate this world with responsibility, and give back when we can. People ask if I regret giving up the drawing, but I don’t — I’m absolutely exhilarated by it. It was all meant to be. I didn’t have moment’s hesitation about where my Anne Truitt drawing needed to go. It needed to go there.
Perhaps Anne orchestrated the whole thing.
She very may well have been! And think about this: Olga Viso is now the director of the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis.
It’s a complete circle.
Who’d have thunk it?
Back to you again. Between your two TV shows and teaching, do you still find time to sculpt?
I put sculpting on the shelves when I began teaching it. It doesn’t mean that I have any less interest in art, but I find that I’m so creatively purged by working with my students that I don’t feel a need to do it right now.
I understand.
I remember having dinner with Anne. She was a serious vegetarian and we only ate at her house. I said, “I have something to confide in you. There are too many times that I force myself to go to my studio.” She looked at me and said, “Tim, I force myself to go to my studio, if only for 15 minutes. It’s nothing for which you should apologize. It is physically, emotionally and spiritually exhausted, and you will spend a lifetime forcing yourself to do it.” Later, when I began teaching, I went to her and told her about the toll that it was taking on my sculpting. She said, “You may not be physically constructing the work, but you’re still a sculptor. No one can take this away from you.”
How lovely — and how liberating.
Anne had a hugely impactful influence on me that was only the most positive. She taught me that even if we don’t have time for everything, we’re storing it up and it will come out eventually, as long as you’re true to yourself and don’t harbor delusions. That’s why she wouldn’t share her views of colors with me. You have to listen to your own voice.
