Artist Statement

Trenton Doyle Hancock

doi:10.1353/cal.2014.0167

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Artist Statement
Trenton Doyle Hancock (bio)

I grew up in a very religious family. My stepfather was a Baptist minister. There were several ministers in my family. My mom and all of her sisters, my grandmother—they are all very, very religious. We went to church at least two times a week. That’s just how I grew up, and it was a sense of community. The church was filled with beautiful stories and great music, and it was a very visceral type of experience. And that type of experience also spills over into how you live the rest of your life. There was a very strict code of conduct, and most things were dealt with in spiritual terms. It was very, very old-fashioned. Punishment meant a different thing than it means nowadays. My folks would say, “If you don’t feel the punishment, then it doesn’t count.” It was that kind of a mentality. In the church, there were these beautiful stories involving archetypal heroes going through toil and trouble and coming out all the better for it, teaching us all a lesson, encouraging us to take a different path—I wanted to incorporate that kind of thing into the way that I tell stories.

And also, a lot of it comes back to my mother. In my imagined universe of characters, there is a guiding mother and father energy. Painter is the female energy and Loid, the male. My mother is Painter and she is Loid, wrapped up into one. She is the smiling face of Painter. She is the color that you get from Painter, but at the same time she could be stern. When she put her foot down, when she spoke her word, you had to listen. And if you didn’t, she made, you know, sure that you listened the next time. So, she was also Loid. So, in a way, the mother and father energy in my universe are both my mother.

from “Storytelling: Characters and Colors,” Art21, PBS.com

… What I am doing is in some ways codifying memories and imagined things, taking familiar systems and retranslating them into usable material. So the work I make is tethered to what we consider “real life.” It never tries to replicate it, rather it seeks to extend our perception of it.

from “Trenton Doyle Hancock: The Full Interview,” foconow (November 2011) [End Page 838]