Bio of the artist

Effective February, 2024, 

the new blog address for Lance Ash is

 https://lanceash.blogspot.com/

Follow the artist on Instagram at @lanceashpainter

Lance Ash is an artist in the Athens, Georgia area. His works include a period when he created

art under the name Toadsgoboad. Lance is a painter, a writer, a cartoonist, and a musician.
An untrained, self taught artist, he grudgingly accepts the label of outsider artist. As his work
has developed over more than two decades, his paintings have come to portray his cartoon
art through the acrylic medium.

At what point in your life, did you devote yourself to painting?

For many years I thought I was going to be primarily a writer. Then I thought I was going to be a Rock musician. To the surprise of many who know me, I chose painting to be my primary focus. I made this choice on the evening of July 3, 1996 after a crisis in which I felt that my life was going nowhere, that I was doing nothing. I had gotten married the year before and my wife and I had just had our first child a few months prior. In a struggle for some sense of direction and impetus, I suddenly made the decision to pick One Thing and make it my primary activity, even if I kept doing all the other things I was interested in. I chose painting; I made the decision based on how much fun it was. It was the most fun thing to do that I had found.

Then began the years of teaching myself how to paint. I had had art lessons here and there as a child, but in the main, I was unteachable. Either the instructors didn’t teach me what I wanted to learn, or they didn’t teach me in the way I wanted.

In what ways does your art reflect your psychological and cultural experiences?

I used drugs -- pot, opium, and nutmeg -- to fuel my painting in the early years, both as a means of “getting into it” and a way of staying on task.

Your work has a very distinct and stylized aesthetic. How has your work changed
over the years and what has informed its development?

I jumped into painting, going directly into making big canvases and big, sloppy paintings. In time I began to see that drawing is the foundation of painting. The better I got at drawing, the better my paintings became, and the better I got at painting, the better my drawings became. My drawing is cartoony; I do not draw realistically. Thus, my paintings are my cartoons fully fleshed out.

What role does narrative play in your art?

There can be no denying that I have always seen my painting as part of my writing or story-telling or world-building attempts. Many of my paintings are “snapshots” of some larger story.

Are you creating your own mythology? How do the symbols and motifs
within your art reflect this? Are there characters which reappear in your work?

After I quit drinking in 2003, I wanted to make a public statement of my resolve and new life, thus I started signing all my work, both graphic and written, with the word Toadsgoboad, which is a magic word I invented at about the age of five. This became not only a nom de plume, but a character in my fiction and comics, a magical figure who had adventures and meddled in other characters’ lives. After eleven years of using this name I reverted to using my real name. I felt that in many ways the whole thing was becoming too confusing, being both a fake identity and the subject of my own work.

Sometimes I even had Toadsgoboad interact with Lance Ash, as if they were two different people. I drew a webcomic for several years called Doodlenose. In this and in a novel I wrote titled At Home with the Gas Giants I wrapped up the Toadsgoboad saga neatly before ceasing to use the word as a name. I feel a strange obligation to my fictional characters and the macro-narrative of all my work, such that things must be resolved properly. The on-going characters still speak of “Toadsgoboad.”

What is your process of working? Do you plan your paintings or work instinctively?

I have definite formulas for composing a work and bringing it to full development. These are step-by-step instructions. I ride the line between slop and precision, between what I want the final image to be and how the circumstances, the materials, the paint itself, force a compromise on me. Unlike Woody Allen, who will not watch his films because he cannot stand the similar, inevitable compromise in the making of a film, I accept and relish “happy accidents” balanced against my will.

Who are your influences?

When I first became seriously interested in painting, the three artists who meant the most to me, the ones that were my inspirations to become a painter myself, were Francis Bacon, Jörg Immendorff, and Anthony Green. They remain the eternal trinity for me.

My influences are everything I’ve ever experienced, the memories of illustrations and comics from my childhood, the ability to see evocative images in random splatters of paint or rust patterns. I like Jean Dubuffet, Gruppe Spur, Jack Levine, Massimo Iosa Ghini. The painters of post-war Germany, especially those from the East, are of particular interest to me.

I am also influenced by the “Painting” article in the 1977 World Book Encyclopedia. This shows
how benighted was my childhood.

What ideas are you currently exploring in your work? Where do you see this taking you?

I am not only a painter, but also a writer, a cartoonist, and a musician/songwriter. It is my ultimate goal to bring all of these disciplines under one over-arching project, one that will unite everything I do into a single presentation.

Self Portraits