When New York City was closed in the spring of 2020, Thomas Woodruff began sketching dinosaurs. As a kid, he wasn’t scribbling T. Rex, but as an artist who painted his self-portrait. At the age of 62, he had a 20-year career as head of the School of Visual Arts illustration and manga department, and began to worry that he and his students might have come from different eras. One class could not recognize Picasso’s “Guernica”, but was able to name Picasso-inspired spoke character Fokey. Toy story 4.. “If you’re a gay man of a certain age who has experienced an AIDS crisis, it’s no longer counted,” he says from the same drawing board in his studio, a reused barn in Germantown, NY. increase. The year he taught through Zoom. “It’s like,’Well, you’re a dinosaur.’ “
Woodruff does not look like a washed-out member of an old guard. In fact, on a sunny Saturday afternoon in April, he’s bounced around the workplace cheerfully in gold and zebra print VaporMax Gliese Nikes and a plaid tracksuit. His silvery hair is a psychobilly quiff. A 300-page hand-painted masterpiece in the form of a graphic novel, “Francis Rothbert !: A Grumpy Wild Story,” which he spent most of his decade on, will come out in the fall. And he changed his life: like his companion of great layoffs, he quit his job. “I couldn’t do that anymore,” he says. “I had to be an authority, so I had to be a bad guy when I was in a chair, but the truth is, as you know, I can shed tears right away. You can … “He remembered his loved ones who lost in AIDS, as he often experienced during this pandemic.
The northern part of his hometown is a monument to his late friend. His name is engraved on the paving stones in the garden. Credenza, a former assistant to queer artist Sean Peterson, who died in 2016 at the age of 49, stands at the top of the stairs leading to his studio. And a framed photo of Frank Moore, a friend of Woodruff, the inventor of the AIDS Ribbon, hangs on the radio playing a local classical station while he works. Even recent refurbishments were possible only after Woodruff sold the “Apple Cannon” (1996). It consists of 365 pictures of apples that riff the saying, “One apple a day keeps the doctor away.” Woodruff made a series in response to the questions he asks every day: why was he still alive?
Like many other teachers, Woodruff suffers from the questions he asks his students. The question is played in his head while working. But he may be the first to see his career on track in retirement as the darkness beneath the hawky surface of his paintings meets our new dark hours. When he held a show at Vito Schnabel Gallery in New York in March, the dinosaur’s cheeky rainbow-filled painting contained at least one asteroid. “I was thinking of the moment of extinction and was trying to ask,’How do you experience extinction with some kind of grace and acceptance?'” He says. One answer is in Woodruff’s “Benedict” (2022). Here, T. Rex looks like a saint of spiritual ecstasy. And then there is “Martha” (2021). This is a pterodactyl modeled after his choreographer Martha Graham, who bends his chest. Woodruff continues the Pelican Catholic parable. “She’s like a mother without children,” he says. “Like an asteroid collides.”
Woodruff has no children, but he has made deep friendships with some of his former students, including tattoo artist Regino Gonzalez (who gave a bird to the right of his neck) and painter and former cartoonist James Jean. (People who awarded SVA a scholarship in the name of Woodruff). Other Wood Rufians have become graphic novels (Farel Dalyrmple, Dash Shaw), children’s book authors (Steve Savage, Raina Telgemeier), and fine artists (Anthony Iacono, Mu Pan). Some of his disciples brought a bouquet to his recent opening. Yuko Shimizu, an illustrator who is currently teaching at SVA, brought the class. For Shimizu, Woodruff was more calm than ever.His retirement, she says, remembers Yakuotoshi, A Japanese term when someone cuts one problem out of their life and runs out of the rest. “You unleash everything, and suddenly everything comes to you,” she explains. “That’s exactly what I feel is happening to him.”
That was exactly what Woodruff was looking for when he retired and freedom came and he began his teaching career. “It gave me an financial safety net, so I was able to create my own unique work without the fear of the art marketplace in my head,” he says. At the same time, Woodruff wanted his students to understand the reality of the market. He has no tenure professor at SVA and is proud to hire only active artists. Woodruff, who did not come from privilege, considers himself a craftsman and an intellect in a field flooded with lofty scholars and snake oil salesmen. He wanted his students to learn the hustle and bustle needed to become an artist. This is to give the students an education that he did not receive. At the Cooper Union in the 1970s, I attended a drawing class taught by Hans Haacke, a conceptual artist best known for making airtight plexiglass cubes. “I think he attended the class as a bit of a slap,” he said, drawing storyboards for avant-garde theater director Robert Wilson, drawing magazine and book covers, and honing his skills early on. Woodruff says.
By 2000, Woodruff had been promoted to chair of his two divisions, and SVA’s cartoon program offered courses on three tracks: pencil, ink, and lettering. Woodruff hired pioneering cartoonists Gary Panter and Keith Myerson. He invited a figurative painter to teach the basics while diversifying the curriculum, and even added the country’s first tattoo design course. Enrollment has increased, the illustration category has more than doubled, and in 2020, the student received four of the top five awards from the prestigious Illustrators Association.
Throughout all that, Woodruff continued to teach. Some graduates call his practice of asking students to erase an entire semester and modify one sketch as “torture therapy,” but on Woodruff’s website at RateMyProfessor.com. One of the five-star reviews states: The painter Trey Abdella summarizes Woodruff’s style as “not buckling.” He says, “Tom was just like” but why? What is the reason you are doing this?think about that“It’s a deep and spiritual thing, and I teach someone to draw,” Woodruff says.
Still, he wasn’t so focused on the technique, so he forgot the big picture. Teaching people how to live as an artist. After graduating from his SVA, he taught in collaboration with Woodruff, where the painter TM Davy, who now leads his class, realized how Woodruff did it by telling the story of his life. I did. He learned tattoos overnight at three different parties, or when it was still illegal in New York, made friends with Ed Hardy, and trekked to a remote island in Hawaii to visit his last leprosy sanatorium. There he stood trembling. A large number of graves. “He told these stories that life is a devastating but wonderful adventure,” says Davie. “Teaching people that freedom is possible. There are works of art that are not easy or available to everyone, but can open the door a little more.”
Since resigning this fall, Woodruff has taken that freedom even further. He sleeps, makes art all day long, and when he and his husband finish their supper, they watch an old movie together. He is painting for another show at the Vito Schnabel Gallery next spring and is preparing for the release of his graphic novel with publisher Fantagraphics this fall. Currently there is only one void. “Teaching painting is one of the things I miss a bit,” he says. In fact, when he visited the gallery in April, he couldn’t resist taking an instant lesson in front of “Nest” (2022), a 9-foot painting of a mottled dinosaur egg. He shows how he recreated the landscape to achieve the effect of the retreating desert past the eggs in the foreground. What people don’t realize is that artists tend to spend the most time, he says. Examining distant details, he says, “the space between here is really difficult.”
