Todd Camplin

Biography I was born is South Bend, Indiana and was raised in Kentucky. I am a son of a coal miner and a home maker, and they encouraged me to go to college and seek my own way. I felt pressured to be a business major and to work with my hands, so I compromised by seeking a graphic design degree while taking as many painting and drawing classes as possible, plus I felt the need to get a philosophy minor. Although I worked under some Logical Positivist philosophy professors, I came out of the program with a more Existentialist world view. Sartre and Camus were my main focus and my paintings and pastels were based on my emotional responses to my friends and surroundings. A Picasso and then a Matisse show at High Museum in Atlanta were great influences on my early work.

After completing my BFA I spent about two years in Philadelphia. While there, I started to read a variety of fiction from the beat generation and some new contemporary fiction. Then I moved to Dallas, and Texas is where everything changed about me and my art. I left my art based on emotional content in favor of a conceptual, intellectual bent. I helped to foster that slant through seeking an MA in Arts and Humanities at UTD. There I meet several professors who helped me develop my ideas, but one in particular helped to reinvent my approach. John Pomara is the professor that reminded me that I had rejected the tools of graphic design and those tools were going to waste. I started to incorporate computer based art into my work along the lines of Derrida's deconstructing text theories. Then I traveled to NYC for a week to see the Armoury show. Seeing all that work presented in such a professional setting, the art fair inspired me to use industrial printers and materials.

Finally, I felt ready to seek my MFA and I applied to only one school, the University of North Texas. I had my eye on the university for a long time, so I only wanted UNT. Vincent Falsetta and Annette Lawrence were the two artists that I really wanted to work with, but once I found myself in the program, I found that all the painting and drawing professors were very helpful to develop my ideas, style, and work ethic. When I came to the end of my MFA program I had the epiphany that my work was directly linked to my problems with dyslexia. Words have always posed a challenge for me to understand because words partly act as a space between an object and meaning. That tension has been inspiring me to build these im