For Apparatus, having an artist-in-residence—retired Wabash instructor Greg Huebner—means asking some tough questions.
The question took Greg Huebner by surprise. After four decades of abstract painting—and nearly as many years teaching it to inquisitive students—he’d fielded it before. But he didn’t expect it here at Apparatus, the Indianapolis-based IT firm where Huebner, longtime chair of Wabash’s Art Department, now has
his studio. A hardwired techie had taken a break from hammering away on his computer to watch Huebner work.
“How do you know when it’s done?” he asked.
“That’s a much more profound question than you think you asked,” Huebner replied. “How much time do you have?”
The thought-provoking exchange was made possible by Huebner’s chance encounter in an Indianapolis grocery store with Apparatus founder and CEO Kelly Pfledderer. They knew each other well: When Pfledderer was growing up in Crawfordsville, Huebner was his neighbor. So the two caught up. Huebner had retired from Wabash in 2011 and moved to Indianapolis; Pfledderer was renovating a beautiful new facility for his fast-growing tech company. And that was that—or so Pfledderer thought.
“Greg said, ‘Hey, we need to go get a beer,’” Pfledderer recalls. ‘I’ve got an idea.’”
What Huebner had in mind was this: Pfledderer had lots of space in his new building. Huebner was looking for a work studio. Bingo.
When Pfledderer thought about it, it made a lot of sense. Creativity was Apparatus’s bread and butter—cultivating a workforce flexible and bold enough to devise novel digital solutions for its clients.
And Pfledderer wanted to foster an environment where that kind of thinking would thrive. So in 2012, Huebner moved his paints, palate, and easel into the basement, and Apparatus had an artist-in-residence.
Both Pfledderer and Huebner enjoy material benefits from the relationship. The offices are ablaze with Huebner’s bold, color-splashed canvases. (“He calls it Apparatus; I call it the Huebner Museum,” says the painter.) Huebner gets a workspace and a dramatic showcase for potential buyers.
But the biggest payoff might be intangible. Pfledderer’s employees have a place to wander when they need a few moments of looking at something other than a computer screen. Which is how one Apparatus computer geek got to watch Huebner turn a blank canvas into an engrossing field of line, form, and color—and was moved to ask Huebner when the composition would, at last, be complete. And for his part, Huebner was pushed to articulate a response that he normally answered with instinct.
So how does Huebner know when a painting is finished? “Eventually it comes down to, you made the right decisions where you made decisions,” he says. “And when they’re all right, then you’re done.”