Traditional Artist Interview
First Impressions
Greg Manchess
How martial arts training crafted an artistic talent
Where did you grow up and how has this inf luenced your art?
I grew up in northern Kentucky, across the river from Cincinnati, so I was quite close to the Cincinnati Art Museum where my long-dead mentor, Frank Duveneck, taught art classes. I was immediately inf luenced by his work when I stumbled on it at about 19 years old. His work has affected my oil painting technique ever since.
What, outside of art itself, has most inf luenced your work through the years?
I learned how to understand painting from my years studying the martial arts. I was a personal student of Stephen K. Hayes, who had travelled to Japan in 1975 to train under one of the last surviving members of a line of ninja families. The way that Stephen taught such complex concepts of moving stealthily by breaking them down into simple components helped me to understand how I was doing a similar thing when teaching myself to paint.
Training physically helped me understand the mental training