David McPherson

When I thought about doing an art show, I was intrigued about the idea of presenting the backward way that it has revealed its riches to me.  I never took an art class in high school.  I remember sitting in the audience at the Governor’s School in Greenville as my sister was welcomed into their summer program.  The speaker was talking about how talented and wonderful all the students were.  In my mind as he was speaking, I felt myself putting myself into the “untalented” group.  I was thinking to myself that I must have blown my chance. 

            Three years later I was a freshman at Davidson and my advisor happened to be the Art Professor Herb Jackson.  I had to take an Art class.  He suggested I take a painting class.  I had always harbored a curiosity that had led me to visit museums and read books, and when he said the magic words “no experience necessary,” I was determined to do what you weren’t supposed to do.  I was going to be the most under-qualified and under-talented student to ever study Art at the undergraduate level.  I was lousy at first, but I was elaborately lousy.  I only had one thing going for me; I was periodically fearless when it came to making mistakes.  I made art out of the trash other students threw away.  I literally picked and pulled my own paintings apart to see what would happen.  I once made an installation piece by painting a case of empty beer bottles someone left in the closet of my studio.  As my experiments with art accumulated, I began to see a pattern to all my successes.  Every time I took a chance and did something I thought might be wrong at the time, I was rewarded.  Every time I tried to do everything just the right way, I began to feel stuck.  Sometimes the pay-off was immediate other times it was years later when I realized the rightness of the wrong thing.      

            Doing the wrong thing hasn’t only paid off in my art-making, but it has also paid off as a career and personal strategy.  In many cases, not getting what I wanted was just what I needed.  Adjusting to the unexpected has made me grow in unexpected ways.  The gifts of my life have come in this way.  I dedicate this show to the “untalented” student considering the creative act of potentially making a fool of themselves.

David J.  McPherson