Artist and Professor John Stewart

I am lucky to be a student in John Stewart's Figure Drawing class this quarter. I am also lucky that he allowed me and fellow classmate Kelsey to interview him today. He has lots of interesting stories.

John Stewart, artist and professor

He's been a member of UC's faculty since "a week before they discovered dirt," in other words, almost 38 years. He's a world traveler, spending much of his childhood in military bases in Japan and Germany. He backpacked through Europe when he was young. Shortly after arriving in Paris, he was walking through a museum when he saw The Lacemaker by Vermeer.

Tiny, perfect: The Lacemaker by Vermeer

He says he got goosebumps and chills when he saw it, and it still does to this day (he showed me the goosebumps on his arm as proof!). Up until that moment, he had been a printmaker and sculptor and was not all that impressed with painting. Vermeer changed his mind. He spent the rest of his European vacation tracking down as many Vermeer originals as he could, and saw nearly all of them.

When I asked him if he had any other major influences in his work as an artist, he didn't hesitate for a second to mention Caroll Spinney, puppeteer and creator of Oscar the Grouch (my favorite!) and Big Bird. Before his Sesame Street days, Spinney worked as a cartoonist for a paper on the military base where Stewart lived as a teenager in Germany. He made a huge impression because he was having fun at his job, which was, needless to say, RARE on a military base in Germany. John says he ways always fascinated with the visual world and artistically inclined, but it took the creator of Big Bird to make him realize that being an artist was a possibility.

Carroll Spinney with his most famous creations

Today John Stewart teaches life drawing and painting at the University of Cincinnati. His own current work features oil paintings of landscapes and the human figure.