Category Archives: Metcalfe, Eric

Eric Metcalfe

Eric Metcalfe interview with DJ Fraser, Research Assistant with the Williams Oral Art History Project on Thursday, January 24, 2013.  Interview transcribed by DJ Fraser.

Click the arrow to play the sound bite of the quote from the interview (below).

“You wanna go for it, and take it, so I went for it.  And that’s how I got in. So it took some maneuvering and this and that, that’s what you gotta do in the art world, a bit of this and that, I was determined.”  -Eric Metcalfe

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“I met Max in 1964, maybe mid-64. And he said, “I want you to come out every Saturday, bring your sketchbook and your paints and we’ll talk about what you’re doing.”  I’d spend the morning with him, get up there at about 9:30-10:00 and we’d go until noon and he’d have a glass of scotch midday and then I would leave probably around 12:30 and carry on with my day. He’d say, “come back next week”, give me a book to read or look at, “look at this, think about this”, really tremendous mentoring, he was so generous to me in doing that.”  -Eric Metcalfe

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“Dana was really the thing. He encouraged Kate and I to pursue this and leave Victoria. Once he saw my artwork, what I was doing he said, “I like what you’re doing, I like your art.  But I’ll tell you what the real artwork is, it’s the comic strips.”  He said, “that’s the real stuff.  That’s what you do best.”  I said, I think I’ll call myself Dr. Brute, he said, “What a great idea.” And that was the beginning of Dr. Brute, in Victoria.”  -Eric Metcalfe

Click the arrow to play the sound bite of the quote from the interview (below).

“So you can see that I’m still making art, I haven’t stopped…what I tell my students is that it takes years to find your form, find out what you do best. This was a very liberating thing for me to suddenly be able to step into Dr. Brute’s shoes and adopt leopardskin as the totem. I’d been reading Claude Levi-Strauss at this time and was trying to find the West Coast identity thing and all that. Everybody was doing something alternate. And so I thought, here’s Dr. Brute, his MO is going to be different from just being another painter. I can be a performance artist and do videotape and all the rest of it.”  -Eric Metcalfe

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