0.28 Kermit oliver, b. 1943

From pen to brush

I thought I was good in literature, but a friend of my brother’s encouraged me to come to Texas Southern [University] and major in art. He took me to the mural in the administration building and we went over to the science building and I saw Dr. Biggers’ murals. It was a mural that convinced me that yes, I would become an art student.

[That was] the beginning of a long career of trying to graduate. I completed my first semester, but didn’t have the money for the second semester and Dr. Biggers got me a Jesse Jones scholarship. So that started the long travail of trying to graduate [while]having a family. I met Katie in the fall of ’61 and we were married in the fall of ’62, then I think it took me until 1967 to graduate.

Diverging influences

At Texas Southern we were there to expose ourselves to educated young black students because integration was not very extensive in Houston, so we were very isolated in that context. I did not have the associations with African culture [that Biggers and others had] so that put me at odds with the art environment there…almost to the point of being persona non grata because my work was not concentrated on the black American urban ethos. Then the civil rights movement and [later the]black power movement became more prominent, and so I was never considered “black enough” with the work I was doing or the motifs I was working with.

My high school teachers had always encouraged me to think of my art from a narrative standpoint. My second semester of college, I had been out and idle. I spent [that] semester in the library, going through all the encyclopedias on art and all the research books I could manage each day—and it gave me a sort of basis in art history and stimulated all the understandings that I had of myself and what I wanted to do with my art.

It was very difficult for me to distinguish between the two elements of visual expression and the narrative point of view. As part of my upbringing, we were rich in oral traditions and storytelling, but as I got into college a larger picture—that of man’s inhumanity to man or his relationships with his fellow man—was involved. Then I came across mythology. I guess [it was] in 1964 when I started concentrating on the idea of the parallel religion—religion in terms of comparative religion, mythology, legends and my own background. So this was the leading motif that formulated my work—and it also separated me from [the African]narrative which Dr. Biggers’ experience had brought into the department.

Converging ideas

An exchange instructor [who had been] with Dr. Biggers at the University of Wisconsin noticed [what he felt were]some inherent, compositional advantages that I had acquired through observing illustrations and art history—then a year later I came across a book, The Painter’s Secret Geometry by Charles Bouleau, and right away I saw what he was speaking to in terms of the compositional aspects of the picture plane and the geometries that were involved. I started [intentionally] using geometric schemes and musical ratios as opposed to the golden ratio of Renaissance art. I wouldn’t say I created, but I distorted the formal elements into something that was more pertinent to what I was doing.