ELENA SISTO: You’ve scaled your work up and gone quite a bit more abstract in the imagery.

KATHY BUTTERLY: My new works are larger and it feels right. It actually feels great. My work has been evolving in this direction for a while. The larger ones are allowing me to speak more formally and allowing the materials to speak in ways that I feel communicate where I am now. I’m continuing the conversation/ideas that I have been interested in for many years: color, mass of color, line, mass of line. The materials themselves take on roles in the work, becoming the protagonists or antagonists within a piece. I still enjoy working on my smaller scale forms and they are shifting too. I really like the challenges they are bringing to me; they still reference the body while also becoming more abstract.

You’ll sometimes fire a piece many times, almost to the point of exhausting the glaze. Is that because you have a succinct image in your mind of what you are after in a piece, or are you are finding it step by step? Describe your process of revision and how you change your mind about what you want.

I fire a piece from 15-30 times, a few times up to forty. I have no idea what a piece will be about or look like beforehand; I “find” the piece by working on it. With each addition of glaze or clay I need to fire the piece in order to see what I’ve done. My process and world events equally influence the direction and meaning of my work.

I start by casting a form from a plaster mold that I’ve made from a store-bought form, so a readymade, and then manipulate the clay while it is still malleable until I see/feel something in it, sort of Rorschach-like. I may add some clay forms to it then start to refine the piece. I really love this part of the process. I carve the piece, smooth it until it feels alive and becomes like a three-dimensional line drawing. Next I’ll fire the piece, put some glaze on it, then fire again, take the piece out, decide on the next color or addition and fire again.

Many mistakes are made and many times the direction I thought I was going shifts according to the results I get. I look forward to making mistakes. They’re part of the process. They push the works forward. Mistakes are great because they create mysteries/problems for me to figure out and they often take me to a deeper place where I am willing to risk losing a piece in order to make it work for me.

The amazing work of George Ohr comes up often in the context of yours. Do you look at him?

George Ohr was a genius. He was a master of his material, a master of scale. He merged figuration and abstraction and that is something I am very interested in. If you give his work time, especially the unglazed ones, you may “enter” them and understand their architecture, the mindful directionality of the work and how, ultimately, they become huge, like a Richard Serra sculpture. You just need to allow yourself to go there.

What do you look to for inspiration? Do you listen to music, NPR (like so many artists), or play TV in your studio while you’re working?

I listen to WNYC, NPR, and when I get too depressed from listening to the news I’ll listen to music. The Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds, Iggy Pop and the Stooges, Courtney Barnett, Kurt Vile, Elliot Smith, Neil Young, and Ryan Adams are among my faves in the studio and I’ve also started to listen to podcasts like Sound and Vision.

Everything inspires me or at least I can say influences me, especially living in NYC and Maine. In terms of art, I’ve been looking and thinking a lot about how materials are used and how much empathy or power can be obtained from a brush stroke or a drawn line; the intentionality of a cut or a mark. Examples of this would be Mondrian’s Broadway Boogie-Woogie and how much thought, weight and sense of direction went into each stroke; or Alice Neel and how much feeling she got out of one brush stroke or a drawn line; Antonella da Messina and how I feel he was sculpting his portraits with paint – just look at how he described a lip or an eye. I look at Lucio Fontana’s slashed canvases and think how those probably would not have come into being had he not worked with clay beforehand and used a large fettling knife to cut through huge slabs of clay. So – how artists use their materials and get so much expression from them.

How important it is the acquisition of skill to you?

Skill is a big deal. Mastering something gives you options. It gives you freedom. When you have skill and knowledge of your materials your intuition can flow. You can take the work to where it wants to go.

Where did you study and with whom? Did being on the West Coast influence you at all?

I attended Moore College of Art in Philadelphia for undergrad and UC Davis for graduate school. At Moore I studied with Jack Thompson and Ken Vavrek where I was taught some important foundational skills for working with clay. At Davis I studied the closest with Robert Arneson. Other dynamic faculty were Wayne Thiebaud, David Hollowell, Manuel Neri, Squeak Carnwath, Mike Henderson and others. There was history at Davis and I was studying with the people who made it.

What I learned was that art was lived, it was a life style, it was your friends, it reflected the world, we all inspired each other. Of course I learned more skill, art history, etc. but it was the spirit of being an artist that probably left its mark most strongly on me.

Yes, California was influential on me and still is. I was being drawn there by the art, by the colors that were being used, how clay was being used in ways that were not traditional, not pottery – they were making art out of it. I first saw the work of Ken Price, Ron Nagle, Viola Frey, and Bob Arneson when I was at Moore College of Art. I had thought clay had no meaning- it was pottery-and they proved me wrong.

A visit by Viola Frey to Moore changed my life. At that time working with clay was not embraced by the art world the way it currently is. Viola made larger than life figurative sculptures that were equally painting and sculpture and they had meaning. I watched Viola womp down 25 lbs. of clay on the wheel and throw what was to be a large foot; this foot would be part of the base of one of her sculptures. She was a small woman who made work that was larger than life, powerful, political, and meaningful. She was a trailblazer, and she inspired me greatly.

Something that seems refreshing about working in clay is that it’s been with us for thousands of years, yet there seems to be less art theory involved than with sculpture. That may make it a more open space to work in. There’s great skill and technique involved but it’s a very empirical process. And it seems to me that you manage to elude both the more doctrinaire aspects of sculptural practice as well as the craftiness of ceramics.

Those are interesting observations. Yes. I find myself most comfortable not fittng in. This is a place for personal freedom. I don’t actively strive for this, its just who I am and the work reflects that.

When I first started out with clay I was also studying art history, painting, welding, etc. I felt a connection to clay and glaze and its potential. I also felt a strong connection to the vessel form. I learned what I needed to learn with clay and glaze to be able to make my work. I had no interest in learning how to make a pot or what temperature something was fired to. I just wanted the work to get fired to a state to where I could see the colors and the clay was hard. I’m interested in what my materials can do and how I can get to speak through them.

Many of your pieces stretch to reference an external system, object, order or artwork and then metamorphose or crumple into an intimate huddle–a pile up of attributes. (I can almost hear a whole range of sounds when looking at your work, like harrumphing, lip-smacking, quiet snorting, yawning, and dripping.) The pieces evidence psychic statthe collapse of an effort–or even a pretense–into a self-knowing and self-accepting humor and wellbeing. That brings to mind the psychoanalyst D.W. Winnicott, who had a concept he called “going on being.” He believed that in a healthy parent-child relationship, the child is allowed to develop within the benign attention of the parents and feels supported and safe in her investigations and challenges. This allows her to forge a sense of self-continuity, self-acceptance and awareness of her ability to accomplish things on her own. If the parent intrudes upon or curtails the child’s process it stops the child from “going on being” and forces them to react to the parent instead. Does that concept relate to what you feel you’re doing?

You nailed it! Yes, that’s a great way to explain how I work. I feel that while I am working on a piece, I am its enabler, I take it to where it needs to go, the psychic state which is a reflection of what I am feeling at the time.

There are also formal considerations that go into the works that help to reinforce the piece’s emotive qualities by either adding psychological strength or adding psychological disorder. An example of this is the quality of a line. A line can be confident by being bold, perfect, a solid color, or can be nervous or shy by being thin, wispy, jagged. So line is both a formal and an emotional aspect of the work. As one who works three dimensionally, I also consider line to be the outline of the form itself.

So when I look at one of my forms the first thing I see when I start is a three-dimensional line drawing. I consider it a perfect line. In my work I currently feel this need to have something absolutely beautiful and perfect in it so that I can allow myself to have chaos in it. I need a balance of grace and chaos in my work. Line allows this.

How important is color?

Color is very important to me. Like line, color can have personality and also works formally. I use color in many different ways. Over the years I’ve built up a strong relationship to color and how it can create meaning. Sometimes glaze is built up so thick on a piece that the color itself becomes a form, and many times a sort of protagonist or antagonist in a piece. I have built up an understanding of the qualities of color; it can be translucent, solid, dry, cracked, glossy, etc. This all adds to the dialogue and meaning. Colors also represent meaning in terms of association to things in the real world. I feel that I have relationships with colors as I am working on a piece. Just like I feel I need to enable a piece to develop, I need to enable a color to speak, have meaning, have form.

I think you have achieved a mastery of your medium. There’s a fairly sizeable cohort of women artists for the first time in history coming to the fore that have really achieved mastery. It’s an exciting phenomenon to witness, enjoy and benefit from. Do you feel this also?

Absolutely, and thank you. I love what I do. I love learning about my materials and this learning is not done by reading or watching what others do but by doing, by making, by making mistakes that then turn into knowledge and possibly add value to the conversation and become a tool. I’m a big fan of Sheila Hicks, Rachel Harrison, Charlene Von Heyl, Amy Sillman, Phyllida Barlow and so many others. And though Alice Neel and Joan Mitchell have been embraced by the art world for quite a while I feel there has been renewed interest and re-evaluation of the importance of their work. Alina Szapocznikow also comes to mind.

I agree about these artists, but for the sake of argument I would call Alice Neel and Joan Mitchell pioneers. I’m thinking of the cohort coming after them. There’s a real swelling of the ranks starting with women now in their late 60’s or their 70’s, like Katherine Bradford, Louise Fishman, Mary Heilmann, Judy Linhares, Melissa Meyer, Catherine Murphy, Dona Nelson, Joyce Pensato, Joan Snyder, Barbara Takenaga, and many more. Many of these women are associated in some way with feminism or at least are benefitting from the gains of feminism. Then the next wave of women gets even larger. Maybe because of the effects of feminism women are finding a real place to stand in the culture and have a lot to say – and new ways of saying it. It’s invigorating for everyone.

Yes, I and I would include you too. What all these women have in common is a command of material and a strong sense of self. I’m friends with many of these artists and can say that all have dedicated their lives to their work.

Thank you.

Speaking of Joyce Pensato, she has Giacometti in her DNA and he was the king of repetition within very narrow parameters. What is the importance of repetition to you?

I feel a connection to Joyce, taking the same form, Mickey, and using it over and over again as her “vessel”…..yes, I do feel a connection and an understanding of why she does it.

Is repetition a way of making a place and an identity for yourself? Could you say that if one didn’t repeat oneself their work would lack meaning, it’d just be permutation?

KB:I like the idea of place. Yes, it is a place- a personal space in my mind for thought. I think the word identity feels too self conscious for me, I guess identity comes out of it but its not the starting point. Artists who immediately come to mind, whose work is repetitious and whose work I admire, are Stanley Whitney and Bernd and Hilla Becher. Repetition of an idea is, in a way, the same as mastering your materials- you are ‘mastering’ a concept or trying to fully understand an idea or a feeling- you are searching. The more one works at it, understands it, gets lost in it, fails it, triumphs, and walks into the unknown the more one masters it and then ‘owns’ it.

The other thing I can say about repetition or limiting oneself to an idea is that it is actually not limiting! Same thing for materials. You keep pushing the boundaries and you go to deeper places. I guess one could think that by ‘limiting’ myself to only ceramic materials and to a vessel oriented form that I would be bored or repeat myself, but I actually find the opposite to be true. There are times in the studio when something feels too familiar so I sabotage it and then deal with it—sometimes coming out with a new color, texture, idea. I know that for me the artists whom I feel the deepest connection to are artists who are obsessed with an idea, are forever on the ‘search’ and have a deep connection to their materials.

To address the second question- I can’t say that lack of repetition equals lack of meaning. I think there are plenty of good artists who have the ability to work with varied materials, varied styles, and varied ideas and find meaning in their work. I think they have an idea and need to see it out in different ways; Fischli & Weiss and Picabia come to mind.

What about Alina Szapocznikow?

Her stuff is creepy and beautiful and amazing. I saw her show at MoMA a few years back. There was a lot of work and I wasn’t sure how much I liked it but it stuck with me and now I really like it, but probably in small doses.

There’s often a smile in your work. Literally an upwards-turning curve that creates an emotional lift.

Yes, lately that has been my “in” to the piece. Don’t know why, just going with it.

Sometimes the grin is hopeful and happy. Sometimes it’s sarcastic and sinister. Sometimes it’s an ambivalent and worried smile. I work with or against the smile. It’s always there whether I cover it up or keep it.

The post “Going on Being”: Kathy Butterly in conversation with Elena Sisto appeared first on artcritical.

ELENA SISTO: In these new paintings you’re pushing towards working more coloristically-you’re clearly looking at Matisse’s Le Bonheur de Vivre, Mondrian and early Modernism. You’re a violinist, like Matisse, and music’s important to you. Is there a relationship between how you’re thinking at this moment about your music, your color and Modernism? Why Matisse?

JENNIFER COATES: What’s important to me in playing violin is actually very related to my paintings: emotional intensity and patterns. In violin I find emotional intensity through lyrical phrasing and clear notes sustained with vibrato – I try to create arcs within melodic lines, so there is an ascending and descending presence to the phrases that can coax emotional engagement with the listener. I have a brain that is good at remembering sound patterns and fingers that learn them pretty easily. I love to play phrases that repeat and become spatial and trance-like in their repetition. I’ve played a lot of Old Time fiddle tunes, which I love, because they are all about pattern and disruption. They’re like brain teasers: just when you think you know what’s going to happen next in a seemingly simple tune, it totally surprises you keeping you awake and alert.

In painting, I’m drawn to repeated mark-making generating fields of visual information. I try to create emotional intensity through radiant light and color harmonies, heightening the presence of a shape with a surrounding aura, making each shape hyper-present through optical vibrations of color.

Matisse and early Modernist painting has become really important to me in the last few years. I teach a class on Modernism at the New York Academy of Art where we look at late 19th and early 20th century painters. Examining that period and having to account for its importance in art history (often to students who are not necessarily predisposed to care about it) I’ve developed a heavy crush on these painters.

I stare at an image of Matisse’s Joie de vivre almost every day. That painting sums up what is interesting to me about these Modernists. It relies on pure passages of color – color is part of the content in this intense and straightforward way. It depicts an idealized, utopian landscape that is about abstraction as much as it’s a picture. The figures and animals have an ancient, primal quality to them: these painters were being exposed for the first time to artifacts and objects plundered from all over the world brought back for international expositions and museums. They were also seeing cave paintings – Paleolithic imagery – for the first time valued as art. Matisse’s figures look like they could be based on Neolithic figurines and the animals based on those found in the caves in France and Spain.

Color was so important at the time. There was scientific inquiry into its healing properties called “chromotherapy.” Synthetic pigments were being discovered and distributed. Many Modernist painters believed that colors had occult meanings that produced certain states in the viewer. In particular Matisse believed in the hypnotic power of color. While I don’t believe that color can hypnotize anyone, or that colors produce measurable, repeatable reactions, I am indulging my own intuitive relationship with color, trying to establish mood and temperature, ultimately, creating the conditions for a meditative experience.

I believe one of your close relatives is a chemist. Do you think that has influenced the way in which you view your materials: in terms, for example, of viscosity, or the organic and mineral versus the synthetic nature of pigments?

It was my mother’s parents who were chemists. My father was a geneticist and my mother studied electron microscopy in grad school and then worked for a healthcare research institute for decades. Science is big in my family. I find the history of chemistry absolutely fascinating – the evolution of alchemy to modern chemistry. The relationship of this history to the history of pigment and dye making is another thing I love to read about. Some pigments are ancient and “natural” and others are by-products of industrial run-off – unpromising looking and smelling coal tar, black sludgy pollution made from the coal factories that rendered a slew of synthetic chemicals. Just as industry makes things from sludge – painters make pictures from inert piles of colored goo.

The artist Sidney Geist spoke often about hidden imagery in Cézanne’s paintings. Geist would point out a giant face in the foliage above a group of bathers, which Cézanne was using as a structuring element to organize the space and complexity of the trees but also to give the painting an emotional charge. I do see a lot of emotion in this work. You seem to be aligning or identifying with your idea of a tree, using it as an armature for the progression of your own psychic states.

Yes. For me, trees provide an opportunity in nature to meditate, find patterns that turn into images. It seems like humans always want to find images in a chaotic tangle or mess. Painting trees provides an opportunity to tease out meaning whether it’s a hint of an animal or figure, written language, the dots and dashes of Morse code or the x’s and y’s of chromosomes.

We think of trees as being stable, soulful and structural. They can be centuries older than we are; they are vertical; their branches open up to the space around them; they have roots; we build things out of them. They pass through cycles we can easily observe, demonstrating the relationship between light, water, chemical nutrition, air and temperature. They’re one of the oldest and most central images in our culture. A tree by Jake Berthot becomes solitary and mystical. In Caroll Dunham’s paintings they can be stunted, abrupt or profuse and ecstatic. What do you want us to think about your trees?

Without trees we can’t breathe, we can’t exist. They communicate with each other and other plants and fungi. They are better than us and we can learn from them. As you say, we use them and make things from them: houses, furniture, pages, books, but they also make us. I am interested in the mystical aspects of trees, that they have inspired Pagan nature worship, that have encouraged people to imagine them alive with spirits and deities. Images of the brain and brain activity branch out like trees. I want to merge the tree with the brain – make images of a heightened state of consciousness and experience, images of trees that contain and make meaning.

Considering your last paintings were of junk food, why did you move to this imagery?

I had been making images of food for almost 4 years and I felt like I knew how to make those paintings and was itching to get into new territory. Towards the end of the series I was painting anthropomorphized food like animal cookies and popsicles of cartoon faces, chocolates in the shape of animals and humans. It was always about how these mass-produced, overlooked items might contain secret histories of shape and pattern that they might be occult talismans that I was trying to elevate. In the artificially made mass produced unhealthy food there was an implied opposite for me, which was nature worship. I wanted to literally get out of the studio and off the device driven research that inspired that body of work. I am painfully, acutely aware of climate change and how it has damaged and will continue to damage our ecosystem. I wanted to be in nature, learning from the plants and the trees, from the most run of the mill weed to the most majestic old tree. I had no idea where that endeavor would lead me or if it would lead me anywhere at all. I just thought I’d put my trust in plant life and observational drawing. I very earnestly wanted to celebrate and immerse in nature as it still exists. There is an urgency to it for me as I worry constantly about their ability (and our ability) to survive. But what was most exciting about this body of work was that as a new language developed, I felt it incorporating the confectionary aspect of the junk food paintings, the anthropomorphic aspect and also an earlier body of work that explored a sort of mystical, landscape-based abstraction. It’s always exciting when you feel disparate interests merging together and re-incorporating ideas from the past into new work.

Did you work from the landscape then? How did these paintings emerge from going outside?

The large paintings were made in the studio. I spent several weeks outside in the late spring and summer drawing plants and the landscape from observation. I made several small pen drawings that served as the basis for a few of the first small landscape paintings that I felt were on the illustrative side. After I switched to colored pencil, I found it easier to make paintings from those, as I was able to work out color ideas and begin abstracting things, establishing a language that I could explore in the larger works. I was particularly excited by the movement created by the expanding networks of branches.

Your pictures are in a constant threat of being overtaken by the poured, clotted magma-like paint. Would you comment on that?

I am really interested in how paint can both make and unmake images. An insistence on paint’s material, physical, properties is really important to me. I like to see what the paint wants to do, let it puddle and bleed and drip as well as corral it into recognizable imagery. For me it is also a metaphor for the contingent nature of the body – bodies are all eventually overtaken and disintegrate. I also think about it in terms of the sublime – the force that threatens to overwhelm the individual.

You seem to be painting a collaged space. Do you think in those terms?

I think I am abstract painter who won’t abandon imagery. The collaged aspect to the space is a result of keeping the process really open and driven by the materiality of the paint. With acrylic paint, it’s really easy to work in layers quickly due to the fast drying time. I have learned to work sort of indirectly, assuming one layer will be subsumed under the next, inform the next, but still be present. It allows me to feel freer with the paint – with each layer I say, it’s ok if this looks like crap because you can keep layering on top. The paintings are sometimes a series of failures one on top of the next, until the final, surprising and unexpected result – getting it right by allowing myself to get it wrong over and over.

Jennifer Coates: Correspondences at Freight + Volume. March 16th – April 15th, 2018, 97 Allen Street, between Broome and Delancey streets, New York City, freightandvolume.com

The post A Heavy Crush: Jennifer Coates talks Modernism, Joie de Vivre and Trees with Elena Sisto appeared first on artcritical.

The fluidity between objective and non-objective imagery in the work of Sarah Faux interests me. The use of abstract means ties her to earlier painting traditions such as Synthetic Cubism and Abstract Expressionism, but she comes to a fresh synthesis that has a markedly unstable quality. Rather than seeking a final gestalt, image closure seems deferred almost indefinitely. Her painting has a provisional quality that flies in the face of the high production values and internationalist trend in so much recent art.

ELENA SISTO: I’m curious to know how you go about making a painting, the relationship of your technique and your physical identification with the space of the picture. You use quite a variety of techniques in your work: For instance, paint can be both matte and shiny in a single painting, sometimes even within one brushstroke. It looks like each painting is started differently. I’m also interested in the identification of your body or self with the canvas, in part because that is something that also matters to me.

SARAH FAUX: For a long time now I have seen the canvas as analogous to a body. It’s got a skeletal frame with a skin stretched tight over it. It’s rough, smooth, oily and waxy like skin, too, and even has little hairs hanging off its edges. I used to take this analogy to its most literal endpoint, painting rectangular torsos where one torso equals one canvas, really looking at the body as an object.

Now I’m a lot looser with this analogy. I’ll work on many surfaces at once, and prepare them differently, starting with raw canvas, or a single color, or an oil stick drawing. While I’m preparing a canvas I can get to know its proportions in relationship to my body. I like to make surfaces that are shifty. A surface in flux can set a whole painting into motion. Just when an image clicks into place, its edges slip on a patch of oil primer.

And that is meant to keep everything in motion, unsettled, breaking down hierarchies?

Yes, I want this shiftiness to keep any quick readings at bay. I’m trying to extend that moment between perception and recognition, prolonging the period where the elements of a painting are just taking shape. Maybe as you’re looking an image will coalesce for a moment and then fall away. It’s like your eye is touching the canvas, rearranging fragments.

When I’m painting I want something similar, but I want the viewer to think they know what they’re seeing at first and then realize that what they thought they saw isn’t really there, except in glimpses. You want yours to be a little more slippery.

How do you achieve that effect in a figurative painting? Through a specific type of touch or materiality?

Through shifting back and forth constantly between working on the piece narratively and working on it abstractly or thinking about the physicality of the paint. I especially try never to take two narrative steps in a row.

We both seem to be interested in the relationship of psychoanalysis to our work and how the self can be conceptualized as a cloud of shifting elements, constantly changing while maintaining some kind of integrity. We both often crop in on our subjects, which to many people would imply a lack of wholeness (cutting off the head of a figure for instance). What about the way social constructs penetrate to the intimate realm? Can you describe the spatial structure of your paintings and the way it supports and provides an arena for these ideas?

I feel an affinity with your work and how you’re able to build a rich internal world for your subjects. I’m trying to do something similar, to crop and isolate a moment of touch between two people, letting the whole painting exist in the interior space between and inside of these bodies. I approach constructing each painting differently, corralling loose puddles of paint into a plaid-like scaffolding in Too late to be free or overlaying quick lines on top of a field of gray-blue in Breathe under water. I want the process to be analogous to the emotional content of each piece, like trying to contain anger by giving a pour hard edges. I take long periods to look and think between making choices on my paintings. Sometimes I’ll take something painted flat on the floor with wet into wet paint and come back into it weeks later to contain those pools of paint with sharp, knifed-on, pressurized shapes.

I’d also say that there’s a strong bias toward the narrative in all of our minds, and that a face immediately starts to spin into a story. I’m trying to avoid narrative dominating the somatic, sensory experience of the body, which is present with us always. But we’re usually ignoring it, how our body feels. I see those forces battling it out through line versus color. Like the two have a kind of power play going on, where in one painting line and image might dominate and in another the image could be completely subsumed into puddles of yellow.

So your actual technique or paint handling is more expressive, rather than a gestural brushstroke or a figurative narrative expressionism? It’s an age-old conflict between drawing, which is often thought of as more rational, and color, which is thought of as more irrational. So the resolution or non-resolution is different in every case?

I’m not sure how to define the word expressive, but yes, I am looking for different solutions in each piece. In E. I got the most gestural. The painting became a lexicon of drips and marks, semi-linguistic shapes like a giant green letter “E” in loose black parentheses. But that piece is a bit of an exception. In most of these paintings color ends up dominating over gesture or narrative. And ultimately that’s an intentional statement, even if it’s a consequence of process. I’m advocating for the senses and for the synesthetic power of color to evoke smell, sound, taste. I’ve been reading a lot of Maggie Nelson lately, along with the rest of Brooklyn, and I loved “Bluets.” Through short vignettes she approaches the color blue via her own ex lover, Goethe’s color theory, medieval nuns, Joni Mitchell and Joseph Cornell. It’s amazing! What a thrilling way to unpack color. I’ve been keeping it in my head as a working analogy for some deep painting goals.

How are you choosing colors? Are you working completely intuitively, emotionally, symbolically, spatially, in terms of light? All or none of the above?

Hmm, it’s hard for me to be sure if it’s the same driving force each time. I think picking color is the most intuitive part of painting for me. And it’s emotional and definitely spatial. I’m drawn to a somewhat pop palette – a lot of straight or just slightly tweaked pigments that suggest nail polish or lipstick shades or maybe commercial packaging and textiles. They’re purposefully not naturalistic, both because human behavior is learned and sometimes dictated by commercial forces but also because pure pigments are just so beautiful. I can’t resist cobalt, you know? But I’m trying in each piece to let that intense color have a lighting condition as well – backlit, spot lit, dappled light, or even-toned dusk.

What about manganese, my favorite color. You can’t buy it anymore!

I still use it! But maybe it’s imitation manganese?

Unless you bought it more than a year or so ago, I’m afraid it may be. Does it seem important to protect a certain innocence while you are working? There’s a childlike approach to your process. Does this imply a desire to get to an unselfconscious arena within which to play? Is there an effort to reach a place of child-like sexuality?

Yes, for sure. Without knowing exactly how to put this, I think childhood sexuality is still taboo and the sometimes-childlike nature of adult sexuality is, often, too. Sex and play and painting all feel very connected to me in how they deal with pleasure and power. While I had been under Freud’s spell for a while, I got into D.W. Winnicott’s ideas about play more recently. Basically, I find a more authentic self comes to light through play than through the narrativizing tendencies of talk therapy. And also that play continues into adulthood. I wouldn’t use the word “innocence” though, because that implies naiveté. I’m an academically trained painter, and I’m not trying to “de-skill”. Really I just want to tap into a guttural place, not to paint sex as it appears from the outside, but as it’s actually experienced, fraught with expectations, anxieties, constraints. And also with moments of uncomplicated release, where an inner child does come out, or an inner animal. I’m also painting from a feminine perspective and want to do so unabashedly to fight against the shame around women’s sexuality.

I couldn’t agree more about not being naive or de-skilled. I meant getting to a place where you’re not thinking about what other people think, you’re right there in the moment with your work, knowing what the next right step is. I’m glad you emphasize that you are an academically-trained artist.

Can’t deny that! There can be a confidence in being a kid too. And maybe that’s what you’re getting at. A feeling of certainty.

Isn’t that what Winnicott called “going on being”?

I understand you also consider yourself a third generation feminist. Would you talk about that?

SF: I’ve always considered myself a feminist, thanks to my mother, I’m sure, and I suppose that makes me third wave. In the sphere of painting, there’s a macho ego associated with the New York School and it’s an energy I’m drawn to, and that I’ve been influenced by–de Kooning, Guston, also Frankenthaler and Krasner–but I’m co-opting that bravado for my own means. There’s a fair amount of buried anger in these paintings, hence the show’s title, Seether, which implies a bubbling, seething, libidinal force under the surface. And I tend to organize my compositions from a first person point of view. I want the viewer to see these paintings as extensions of their own body (in the way of Joan Semmel or Nicole Eisenman). Hopefully viewers, whatever gender they may be, will contend with their own role in a scene. Women are forced to read novels or watch movies with male protagonists an inordinate amount of the time. I’m trying to right the scales a little bit.

Well, I said third generation, I’m not sure what exactly constitutes a wave. I think the identification of the New York School with machismo is a little exaggerated, myself. Were they really so much more macho than anyone else in the culture at the time? And you’d have to say the women were macho then too. Let’s not forget how distorted things can get when they are being promoted and marketed. My main issue with A.E. and women is that the women haven’t been promoted enough. I think painters in the U.S. have done themselves a great disservice by reacting so strongly against A.E., throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

I see your point, and I think we’re probably agreeing with each other. I’m certainly not throwing out the lessons of Ab Ex or turning away from that tradition, and don’t think American painting would benefit from doing so. I was very into Amy Sillman’s article a few years ago called “AbEx and Disco Balls”. She broke down that gender essentialism we ascribe to AbEx and pointed out that that energy could be seen as fertile as easily as it could be dismissed as being ejaculatory, so why are we so set on labeling AbEx “male”? So maybe I’m revising my earlier comment. I’m a huge fan of Charlene von Heyl, who continues to shape shift while maintaining a deep connection with her material and process. I’d put Dona Nelson in that category, too.

Earlier you seemed to be mystified by the word “expressive”? Tell me what that is about.

“Expressive” feels like a historical term to me, and I’m not sure what it means right now. We’ve been talking about AbEx, but there’s also German Expressionism. And geometric abstraction is expressive, political posters are expressive… disconnected from an historical moment, “expressive” feels very general to me. What did you mean by it?

I’m using the word with a small “e.” There’s an emotionality to your work without making that your agenda.

“Emotionality” I can get behind! When we were speaking earlier you’d brought up the difference between psychology vs. emotion in painting, and I’m realizing that emotion might be the stronger force in this group. I’m thinking of emotion as the feelings themselves, which manifest physically and mentally at the same time. And painting is an emotional act for me. If I don’t go to my studio for a while, I’m miserable. We tend not to talk about painting as a primal act all the time – opting for a more critical approach to explaining this activity that really consists of manipulating and responding to liquids and colors and textures. So while my paintings are not specifically autobiographical, they do reflect my emotional life.

I heard a great term the other day: “auto-fiction.”

I loved that Pipilotti Rist video from her New Museum show called “I’m a victim of this song,”where she was singing Chris Isaak’s “Wicked Game” in this creepy screaming childlike voice. Pop music is so good at expressing feelings that play out over and over again in people’s lives, like that feeling of falling in love in spite of yourself or that feeling of a pop song penetrating your psyche! This group of paintings is dealing with tenderness, joy, desire, touch, friction, estrangement and all the abstract, unnamable physical sensations that accompany these basic elements of desire.

The post Sex and Play and Painting: Sarah Faux in conversation with Elena Sisto appeared first on artcritical.

Leslie Wayne is known for the vivid density and colorful materiality of her work, most recently a collection of what she called “paint rags” which hang from the wall, and are actually made of many layers of paint. Her latest work, on show at Jack Shainman Gallery through October 21, has undergone a marked change: there’s larger scale of image and an intensified playfulness with modes of representation and with process.

ELENA SISTO: I love the way humor is fore-fronted in this new work. You’ve scaled up your subject, slowed it down and gone directly for the comedic instead of sleight-of-hand.

LESLIE WAYNE: I’m told that I was the family clown as a child. I do love making people laugh and I am mad for puns. Having said that, I can’t claim that I decided in advance to make funny paintings. Perception has been at the crux of my thinking about this work, trying to dislodge the viewer from their expectations. Humor is just one tool among many, but it’s a seductive one and I love using it.

I enjoy playing with the relationship between language and the conceptual core of the painting. For example, in (W)resting Robert I’ve painted an image of a metal chair in my studio which takes up the entire space of the panel, making the panel in effect the chair itself. Then, draped over the back of the panel/chair are various sheets of paint that resemble fabric, the most prominent being a copy of an early Robert Ryman painting. I’ve wrested his painting from my pantheon of idols and laid it to rest on the back of my studio chair. I’ve moved on!

I like words that function as both adjective and verb. For instance, the word free in Free Experience functions that way. Or I’ll play with a word as it relates to an idea in a painting. It might sound like it could be the subject of the painting if you hadn’t read it. Would for example begs the question–would water really come out of a fence like that? But it also sounds like the word “wood.” That’s funny to me.

Is the humor a purely personal development? Or are you responding to politics? You have one painting of a window through which I see what looks like a melting atmosphere. Does it relate to climate change?

You’re talking about Snowmageddon. That painting started out as an homage to the Ukiyo-e prints of Hokusai. I happened to finish it right after the last major snowstorm of the winter, hence the title. I am keenly aware of our environmental crisis, but that is as political as my work gets. At one time I worked with an ocean conservation group and my paintings during that period dealt with issues of sustainability and climate change. It’s never far from my mind, however it’s not really the focus of this body of work. But who could possibly ignore the politics of this moment in time?! It’s insane!

What are some of the other tools you might use to dislodge the expectations of the viewer? And why is that important to you?

Using trompe l’œil and abstraction alongside dimensional verisimilitude is pretty interesting – mixing it all up, like in the piece entitled Wood. I wondered how many different ways I could describe a subject in one painting. I wanted to surprise myself as well as the viewer. That was important to me – to free up the experience for both of us.

It’s important to be surprised and delighted by something visual in the real world, as opposed to the virtual or the digital world. Painting has the power to do that – to make you see something you think you know in a completely new way.

You’ve been working and showing for quite a few years. Have you been involved with any long-term underlying themes?

The two consistent driving forces in my work have been nature and perception. The subject of nature has to do with my having grown up in California-its particular sense of color and light, and a specific relationship to the landscape and geology: earthquakes, giant Sequoias, the desert and the Pacific. There’s also a kinship with craft and materiality that is uniquely West Coast. Even the most conceptually driven work of many West Coast artists has been grounded in phenomenological experience rather than theory. Robert Irwin is a great example. Maybe that’s where part of my interest in perception comes from. One of my favorite books of all time is Lawrence Weschler’s “Seeing is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees.” I want my paintings to make you forget language, even while I’m punning!

Do I see intimations of Léger, Guston, Oldenburg? Are the paintings more Pop?

Guston, yes, but Pop is not a reference, unless you’re talking about Duchamp as the forefather of Pop. He was a driving force in my last body of work. Guston gives everyone permission to move from abstraction to figuration. I studied painting and drawing in a traditional manner. I’ve been trying to bring that deeply satisfying activity of observational image making back into my work, in a way that makes sense given my very peculiar process.

Your process is unique. The only person I can think of who has used paint similarly to you is Scott Richter, in his older work. How do you make a piece?

Richter was involved with a kind of spectacular accumulation of massive amounts of paint on a surface. Those tables were pretty dazzling. I use what some consider a massive amount of paint, but I’m not interested in the accumulation of it per se. It’s the ways in which the paint can be manipulated to resemble forms in nature that interests me–using paint to create dimension disarms and surprises the viewer, because of the way it mimics the object it represents in the real world. I’ve manhandled paint in many different ways over the years, mostly by building up thin layers of color and then doing things like scoring, peeling, scraping, folding, draping and collaging it. But I’m not interested in describing my process. It’s not that it’s a secret. It just detracts from what I think should be the driving experience of looking at art–being transported.

You mention a West Coast-type phenomenological approach. Could you explain why it’s important? 

Southern California was a magical place to grow up. Blue skies every day, temperature a steady 73°F year round, beach to the West, desert and mountains to the East. Even my most vivid memory of an earthquake is dreamy, as I recall the street I was standing on and the whole neighborhood becoming like the deck of a ship, gently rocking back and forth for several long minutes. My sensibilities were honed on my physical experience of the world, not on ideas. I’m not particularly intellectual, and that plays out in my approach to making art. Having said that, my work is decidedly not about process, it’s more about a desire to make the material connect with the subject in a visceral way.

Who are some of the artists you admire? I see references to different textile traditions–African for one.

I do love textiles and textile designs from around the world. They inform the more decorative aspects of my work. The term decoration has suffered from quite a lot of cultural bias. I don’t see myself as belonging to the Pattern and Decoration school, but I do find that pattern is a universal vehicle that everyone can take deep pleasure in.

Forms in nature have long been a source, but I’m moving away from that now. I’m drawn to a wide gamut of artists who are peculiar and unique in different ways. Right now an image of a beautiful Mamma Andersson painting is informing a new work; also a photograph of Rodney Graham in a tux sitting at a set of drums with a plate of steak and peas, which is hilarious. I often revisit Elizabeth Murray or Martin Puryear for inspiration or look through books of Matisse, Stuart Davis or Charles Burchfield, just to snatch up bits of imagery. There’s no denying a relationship between my work and that of my husband, Don Porcaro. We are in each other’s studios all the time. Mostly I like to see what my colleagues are doing, and what the next generation of artists are making and how they are thinking. On the one hand it’s an embarrassment of riches to have so much to look at. On the other it’s overwhelming to the point of distraction. Then I re-focus in the studio and remember what it is I do best. And that’s all one can do, right?

Do you have any rules for yourself in the studio?

Yes I do actually. Accomplish at least one thing.

The post The Family Clown: A Studio Visit with Leslie Wayne appeared first on artcritical.

One of the many artists and writers mentored by Bob was Stephen Westfall who generously helped edit this piece from a much longer transcript. artcritical joins me in thanking Stephen for his efforts in this endeavor. ES

ROBERT BERLIND: NSCAD [Nova Scotia College of Art and Design] [Berlind’s first teaching gig after graduating Yale] was a stronghold of conceptual art. And that was my first direct exposure to a lot of people who were involved with it and I found it very interesting. I was painting portraits at the time and I don’t think they knew what to make of it, except I think they thought it was conceptual. [laughter] And I painted everybody. Turned out that probably the most interesting people around were, you know, friends, students and faculty. And after two years I decided it was time to leave and I came to New York and I found this place for $250 dollars a month.

ELENA SISTO: No kidding? Oh my God.

[laughs] It was raw, this place.

When was this?

In 1976. And I got back all of my taxes that I had paid to the Canadian government because it was not more than two years.   The exchange rate was good at that time, so I came with about $11-12,000 dollars and was able to get started. And then I did gigs. I went out to the School of the Art Institute in Chicago and did a month. And a year later, NSCAD asked me if I’d come back to teach a foundation course because somebody was leaving. I said okay, and eventually started showing. A friend said, “You should be having a place to show your work and a place to publish your writing and a place to teach. ” And I got them all within a fairly short time.

Amazing

I was amazed.

So who were you showing with?

I first started with Alexander Milliken on Prince Street. I had a few shows there. Then I went to Jeanne Siegel on 57th and then I went to Tibor de Nagy and then I went to Findlay Fine Art.   I’ve left that and so now I don’t have representation. But I had a lot of shows in New York during the course of that time, and outside of New York. And I had—what was I painting? From the portraits, I got into painting spaces in rooms, windows and reflections in windows at night and so on. And those were the first paintings I did in my studio, which then had the old windows so it was kind of an interesting reflections, and looking through and painting the reflection at the same time. And it was clear by this time that my interest was really in probing perception itself and those situations where you see more than one thing at a time, like seeing through a window and seeing a reflection and seeing the window itself, you know? I thought how do you do that?

So you’re seeing three things—

Plus whatever—

Plus then you intermix them in ways that—

You find ways of trying to make that distinct. And sometimes with a portrait involved. In fact, I discovered how to deal with the glass by doing a portrait, and it was my peripheral vision that kicked in.

Oh yes, I see what you’re saying.

So I did a whole series of night paintings of windows, and then moved through the windows and made night paintings in the country and in the city outside.

What year are we at now?

1980, 1981. And I did a large series of night paintings, some of them very large, one up to fourteen feet. And—where did that go? Then I started doing them in the daytime. I mean it just opened up, you know? So I was painting mostly outside by that time and we had a place upstate.

 And you always paint from perception?

I always had, yeah. And I would go out and do a small—if it was very dark, dark, dark, I’d make a, just a rough charcoal drawing and come inside and make a little oil study, and if I had something, it would become a larger painting. And I stayed with that basically or I’d do a little painting outside. And I sort of fell in love with painting in a new way because every move you make counts for so much.

And I realized that’s what I was doing in the portraits, actually too. Because I had been doing pencil portraits for a while and rather stylized, and at one point I was working on somebody, earlier when I lived in New York, and I had a young woman, a Haitian woman who would sit for me sometimes. And one day she had her hair in curlers, these big curlers. And she was very pretty and I thought she looked like a princess, and I asked if I could paint her and she had to check with her family because this was not considered right. And I started a big painting of her. And I was having trouble with the drawing, getting it right, and then I started working directly with the painting. And I thought, this is amazing, it’s so much faster than drawing and says so much more, and everything you do counts in such a deliberate way. And I loved that. And that was really counter to my earlier idea about painting, which is about an abstract configuration that may or may not have a subject. So I loved that that my perception was leading my marks. And I was in love with that idea that it’s happening right now.

That ultimately—and I think going to Japan was part of this, many years later, in 2011. I got interested in the more synthetic aspect of Japanese culture. Which is to say, you’re doing a lot of different things and putting them together in a quite deliberate fashion. And I thought, well, that’s more conceptually controlled.

You mean “synthetic” in the sense of somewhat—

Synthesis of different things.

In the sense of synthetic cubism ?

Yes, it’s a synthesis of different perceptions, and perhaps even materials. And really, Japanese culture seems to me like that. The language is like that and the food is like that and one thing modifies another in interesting ways. And it wasn’t so much any painting that I saw. I always loved the Ukiyo-e woodblock prints and I studied that and made some while I was there. I’d go out and draw every day. I couldn’t set up and paint in the temple complexes, but I would draw the gardens and parts of buildings or whatever struck me. Toward the end of my time there, the rice paddies started coming up. I’d seen them being planted. I came back with some studies and drawings and photos and did mostly that for a couple of years once I got back.

Now, we’re coming close to the present, right?

Yeah. This was 2012, 2013. The paintings that you saw in the American Academy and that you’d seen here were all done here. A few of the first ones were done there. It hooked me. It related to things I had done before and I kept thinking, well, okay, that’s probably enough of this, and then I’d have an idea for another one and have to proceed. They’re part invention, part synthesizing different drawings or studies I had made and part inventing as I went along. I used to think if I really knew how to do something, it couldn’t be authentic. It was just repeating Abstract Expressionism. Not that those guys didn’t do exactly that but—You can spot any Ab-Ex painter from a block away because they have a signature for that and a way of handling paint and so forth.

Okay. Yeah. Which was against their ethos in a way.

But the idea was—Irving Sandler tells this story about being at the club one time and somebody standing up and saying, “When I approach that blank canvas, I have no idea what I’m going to do. It’s all, you know, just leaping into the void. I have no idea what’s going to happen. ” And someone said, something like “After twenty years? ” [laughs]

Oh, that’s great, yeah.

So that’s the end of Abstract Expressionism. [laughs]

When I was at the Studio School, I have this very great, very vivid memory of Rosemarie Beck sitting on the stairs going down into the drawing room, going like this, “Oh, it’s not possible! It’s not possible!” Meaning, you know, it’s not possible to make a painting.

Right. Right.

[laughs] I didn’t have the nerve, but I wanted to say, “Why are you teaching then,” you know? But that brings up a good subject, which—

It was a real shift in attitude.

It’s a real shift in attitude and, actually, when I was there, we were considered—if we thought about the market at all, we were considered dirty. But within a few years, all of those teachers were sneaking back up to us and saying, “Well, how did you actually get a gallery? ” you know? But there was a time period in the 1940s and 1950s where—the idea was not really about making money from your work. And then people started making money from their work. But along with the extreme of something like the Studio School or the Abstract Expressionist ethos came a certain attitude towards process, right?

And still very essential to my practice really. I think process is crucial.

So you’ve got that throwing yourself to the universe and finding your way back sort of?

No.

Well, I mean the ethos of the Abstract Expressionist, you know, in psychoanalytical terms would be to get yourself down into your unconscious, get lost and find your way out again.

Right.

And in that process, you’re making a painting. And then on the other end of the scale you’ve got people who are, you know, painting for the market. They already know what they’re painting. They have signature paintings. Someone can order a painting before it’s even painted—the waiting list. So bringing those two together without losing—it’s a very difficult balance to bring the integrity, even if it’s a little bit corny and a little bit false, maybe a little bit exaggerated, of the Abstract Expressionist ethos and then the practical considerations of needing to sell your painting in order to make painting.

Sure.

I mean the 1950 and the 1940s were the only time in the history of painting when people thought it shouldn’t be sold.  

That’s right, sure.

So for you, how have you resolved that conflict over time?

Well, I taught for years. I didn’t depend on sales. If I had something sold it was great, but it was gravy. I wasn’t ambitious. I wasn’t in New York until 1976 in a kind of really constant way. So I was very unprofessional in that way. I mean it wasn’t virtuous. Finally, it was not paying attention to something. But what continues to be true is that you have parameters within which you can work naturally, in some way that really connects to your proclivities, your abilities, your talents, your interests, so that whatever you’re doing, you probably find, well, you work certain sizes of painting. And if you get out of that suddenly you can’t make the moves that you’re used to making. If I am working on a painting and it’s the wrong size, I can’t get it.

Yeah. So in other words, you get lost but you’re lost within the parameters. So there’s a safety in knowing your parameters.

And if you lose that then you don’t know what you’re doing. And a lot of artists don’t know where they connect to what they’re doing, however good it might look.

Yeah.

Your work is very specific in size.

Mine?

Yeah. Very specific, and it wants to be that size and it doesn’t want to be—I mean if it got three times as large. But it wouldn’t be the same painting at all. So you’re working at a scale where you can feel it through and stay in touch with the entire image in every respect. And if one doesn’t find that it’s not going to feel right, either to the painter or I think ultimately to the viewer.

Well that brings me to the next question, I believe, because your parameters are obviously not only size. How would you describe what the parameters are that you work within, in every sense? Like the way you set up your studio, the way that you listen to music, how much stimulation you need from the outside . . .

I find I work best now in some seclusion. It’s great to be Upstate and in my studio and nobody sees the work until there’s a bunch of work. And somebody said, “Well, what is your inspiration? Where do you get your inspiration from?” And I think you get it from working. That’s where I really get the, you know, the forward drive, doing something and questions start to arise and possibilities and your appetite increases.

At the Studio School, painting was treated almost as if it was a calling rather than a profession. We spent eight hours every day and every night and on the weekend in the studio. And then when we weren’t in the studio, we were in the museum, and when we weren’t in the museum, we were in the library.   When I go into my studio, my ideal is to just sort of putter around, clean up, do things and not even notice that I’ve started painting. And then, you know, when you finish what you have to finish, you stop. And that takes many hours at least five every day, and many more than that. Do you feel similarly to that?

I do when I’m on. And when I’m off—like this winter, I didn’t do much work because my health was so bad. And then barriers start to get put in place somehow. I become more critical of what I’ve done, of what I’m thinking about doing, because all I have is my mind to think about it at that point, Then it’s very good to see some work that I love, you know, somebody else’s work—

To get your juices flowing—

Or just find a way in. And usually when I start, it’s right there, it’s just waiting for me. But I feel the obstacles and so I’ll be in a place where, oh, you know, maybe I’ll just take a nap or I’ll read or I’ll do yard work or I’ll do something else, where I find myself resisting, to a certain point, getting in to it. Because I know once I’m in it, it’s like, it’s consuming, you know?

I read a great Matisse quote, which I’m paraphrasing it, but he said, “You have to work every day all day long in order to be irresponsible enough to do what you need to do. ”  

Isn’t that great?

Because you don’t even know that you’re taking a risk at that point, that you might lose something if you pursue something.

That’s quite true. Because when you’re aware of taking a risk, it’s in relation to who you think you are.

That’s a good point.

You know, and who you think you are, that’s always beside the point in a way, isn’t it, for real work?

It’s totally beside the point.

Guston made this famous remark that when he goes in the studio, art history is there, his teachers are there, his critics, everybody, and then one by one they leave the studio. And then he said, “And finally I leave too. ” And then it’s clear time—then you’re in the zone to really work.

Yeah.

There’s a point where I don’t even know I’m painting. You just work, you’re just doing—you look and you know what to do next and you just keep doing what you need to do. And then you back off and you think about it, or somebody comes in the studio and you talk about what you do and you conceptualize things that didn’t necessarily come out of any clear plan.

So what else do you have to have in order in your life and in your studio in order to be creative?

Well, it helps once I’m on a trajectory, once I’m plugged into something, I would just go outside, look around and see something interesting and paint that. And I would discover what was interesting about it. It wasn’t just that it was pretty. It was that some issue emerged in the course of it. But it wasn’t with a lot of planning. I might have a notion I want a deep space or I want a certain kind of structure, but it wouldn’t necessarily be what I’d find. So I just followed my instincts and my pleasure in painting, or attraction to a difficulty, whatever that might be. For a long while I did images of water without ever thinking about water as my subject. I just like this play of reflection.

The rice paddy paintings?

The rice paddies as well. You can see the bottom, you can see a reflection, you can see a ripple, you can see something floating on it. And I did a lot of paintings of just that kind of a situation: streams or ponds or whatever in the country. That was already about more than one thing going on at once. And back to those windows, the things that keep attracting me were things that escape complete mental control in a way. There’s something going on that puts it in the now.

Something ambiguous, yeah.

And that itself had been a shift from an idea that, you know, the Impressionist idea that you’re just painting a field of vision. I thought Porter in a way extended that, though he was doing other things as well. And I thought, no, because a field of vision depends on what’s in your mind.

Yes, of course.

I mean that was Cézanne’s break, after all, from Impressionism, that it depends what you’re looking for or how you’re looking. So what you really see is not just how you’re painting or what it looks like. It’s how you are looking. So that ultimately that becomes a subject—not too self-conscious, hopefully, but that becomes a subject. And so you’re painting. I guess we’re all working on what it’s like to be alive in this world today, how we experience that in the most vital way that gets us actually doing something and tangling with it and wrestling with it and whatever else we do with it. And so painting requires a heightened desire to be painting.

As far as talent goes— I’ve always been very diffident about my own skills. I started a little bit later in school, you know, and I always thought, well, there are people who are so fluent — John Singer Sargent, to take an extreme case. And not that I want to make Sargents, but there are people who can just—a Rembrandt—have a thought and do a little squiggle and it’s all there. And I thought, God, I’m a long way from that. And then I realized, now, wait a minute, anything you really want to do, you can figure out how to do it. You know, I used to worry about, oh God, how can I mix those colors, I never kept track. It takes two minutes, I can mix anything—you know, thinking I won’t know how to, but it happens. So the difficulty of something is not an issue for me.

Do you premix your colors before you paint?

Sometimes I do. I intend to do it more for large paintings.

You intend to do it in the future or you always intend to and it doesn’t work out?

Well, I have intended to also but sometimes I can’t wait. [laughs]

Robert Berlind: Kyoto/Cochecton at Lennon, Weinberg, Inc. January 9 to February 13, 2016
Elena Sisto: Afternoons at Lori Bookstein Fine Art, March 17 to April 23, 2016

The post “What You Really See Is How You Are Looking”: Robert Berlind Interviewed appeared first on artcritical.

Five years ago, Lisa Hoke was searching around for sources of found color. This led to the recycling bins in the basement of her NYC loft building, a way station for the torrents of packaging we all discard on a continual basis, which in turn led to her creating giant, ebullient murals and freestanding sculpture in an intensely colored palette of refuse. In my opinion, her show at Pavel Zoubok takes her sculptural concepts to an even higher level.

Elena Sisto: How and when did you decide to become an artist?

Lisa Hoke: I got my degree in English literature at UNCG [University of North Carolina, Greensboro]. I planned to be a writer but when I discovered Faulkner I realized I was a reader, not a writer.

A friend in Greensboro, a weaver, was making dyes out of cochineal from Mexico and walnuts. She taught me about dyes. I wanted to know more about the whole world of color. I went up to the art department at VCU in Richmond and interviewed with the Dean. I said, “I don’t have any portfolio, I have no idea what art is but I’d like to know more.” He says, “Sure, if you agree to start all over with freshman. Curiosity and desire, that’s fine with me. That’s all you need.”

I enrolled in the art department at VCU for $500 a semester as a Virginia resident for three years with no portfolio! You can’t do that anymore. It breaks my heart, because otherwise I wouldn’t have been able to be an artist. The world it opened up! I’ll never forget the first class, watching a Bruce Conner film. I walked in, everybody was sitting on the floor, I thought, ‘Oh my God, this is what I was looking for!’

So you think education has changed since then?  

The level of experimentation and risk taking couldn’t possibly be in the equation now, with everybody looking to have a career right out of school. One thing I noticed when I went to graduate school in 1979 was that it all was being shuttled into “create a show for your masters.” I am so opposed to that. I hate the idea that you need to produce a catalogue in graduate school. What are they doing?

At my post graduate school, painting was considered to be almost like a religion or a calling. It was all about process with a large dash of Existentialism. I heard a teacher once exclaim, head in hand, that “it wasn’t possible” to make a painting. On the positive side one gained a huge capacity to be in the studio and tolerance for being lost. But there was no preparation for the practical side of being an artist. Grad students now intellectualize and strategize much more trying to be creative and analytical and practical all at the same time.

I can’t be both analytical and creative at the same time or they cancel each other out. There’s too much self-doubt that creeps in for me to allow myself to go to a place where I can discover something new. There are certainly appropriate places to stop, look and question, but one of the reasons VCU was a good match for me was it wasn’t theory oriented.

There was plenty of theory around then, though, especially Marxist aesthetics but mostly within actual philosophy departments. Theory wasn’t brought to bear on work in the studio quite as directly as it is now. In fact I often seemed to be hearing people quote Barnett Newman saying, “Aesthetics is for painting as ornithology is for birds”. So turning off your analytical mode allows a mental space that has more freedom?

There is a freedom that I take to be as naïve as possible when I approach materials. I demand of myself to learn something new about a material and the structure of sculpture. I protect that freedom and enjoy it until I have to analyze the success or failure. In graduate school I found the art dialogue stifling. But I was fascinated by a dance teacher and her class about movement, the way the body inhabits space.

Do you think your education in literature was influential on your work?

I’m fascinated with the way a sentence is put together. I approach sculpture in the same way—and the way that a story is told, maybe in a sentence or two, like Lydia Davis. How you accomplish something in either a small space or a large space, whether it’s a book or a short story that’s told in four sentences, has an impact on the way I look at scale. In the last five years, the scale of my work has increased dramatically.

Why?

I go on site for installations, building pieces that I can’t draw and I can’t predict because it’s bigger than my studio. That gives me the opportunity and the horror of facing questions I hadn’t had time to answer in the studio. It’s the thing I fear most, public performance where people are standing around, waiting for me to build the thing. They invested money to get the pieces out there and then I have to put them together. I’m baffled by how I could have arranged something to be my exact Achilles heel. But it has made me more fearless. The risk involved could mean failure. Between failure and success is discovery.

There’s an issue for artists about signature work, a big question. When we become known for a certain kind of thing, do we produce that thing we’re known for or try to push the idea along slowly and reveal something new? I may move too fast and miss steps or too slowly and stay too long. I don’t regret any of those things. I like to talk about the dead end paths. If I can’t understand why a piece doesn’t work then I’m not going to understand why one does.

Before I open the studio door in the morning I take a breath, and I go with whatever that little voice says when I open the door. If it says: “hmm, not this, not the way you should go,” I really pay attention.

You always let your intuition lead you?

After all these years of working, that part is not naïve, it becomes an educated intuition.

Do you ever get to a point where you have too many options open, no conclusions and you need someone to help you conceptualize? Maybe someone who has known your work for a long time who understands what you’re up to?

It gets harder and harder to find somebody to do that especially when I’m trying to show them something that’s bigger than the space I have available to see it in. I do ask people to come and talk occasionally like when I made the big change using the color packaging, I asked a few people to come by.

I asked a fellow sculptor who knows my work for many years to come over specifically to ask, am I crazy? Do you see any future in this? I hear right away if they’ve got it and whether that’s helpful. One of the luxuries of having a gallery is not to ever let somebody in my room whose voice I wasn’t sure I wanted in my head. I only have assistants infrequently and the ones I have had have been amazing.

You can afford to be selective because you have a gallery you’re showing with and many relationships already set up.

To me, that’s the truly fabulous part. When I look back over the dealers I’ve had, Rosa Esman, Horodner/Romley, Holly Solomon. Elizabeth Harris and now I’m very happy to be working with Pavel Zoubak–they were and are people I trusted. The five years with Stuart was an exciting time, to have a dialogue at that level. That set the standard for what was possible.

You’ve spoken in the past about the salability of your work considering the materials. Have you found a way to resolve that by doing installations? Made it into a kind of performance?

Right. I’ve found the incredible support of small museums and university galleries. They were happy that it was a temporal situation. It enhanced their educational system and their museum and it enhanced my ability and I got paid. I got to investigate brand new works with fabulous staff and curators. I wouldn’t have known it was possible unless I had to find a way to exhibit work that was oversized. And the performative factor that makes me so uncomfortable was an added attraction for the museum.

Do they actually watch you working?

A lot of times they don’t but they do time-lapse photographs. At the McNay, where I built it in the lobby there was no hiding. After that I refused to let the public watch me work. But recently in Sarasota, I let the public come in again. I didn’t let them speak to me up on the scaffolding. I realized it was a way for them to understand the end result.

You said earlier that you like to have a protected space to work in, like a bubble where you can be vulnerable. What’s the value of being vulnerable?

I grew up in a situation that was very judgmental so there was a secretiveness that I had to have. When I close that studio door, husband, son, nobody is allowed in in unless they knock. I know the minute that door’s open figuratively and metaphorically the judgment starts. When it’s closed I experience the joy, the unmitigated, unknowable joy. I’ve always hidden anything that I really feel—

Has the objective always been to attain that kind of joy?

Yeah. When I worked with the cast iron and wire there was this moment when it worked, when I just tied those wires together where I felt this rush of joy.

So is that just something that you want for yourself or—

No, I want to feel it for myself, and then my next step is to share it. I’ve always been those two people: the person who is private and the one who wants to be part of a dialogue. Fundamentally you need both of those components.

You’ve always been interested in color but I remember when you read Chromophobia in the early ‘90s it was a real turning point for you. Is there a relationship between color and the joy you spoke of before?  

That’s a really good question. In about 1984/85, I had to get rid of everything, start over and reduce all my information, all my color because I wasn’t understanding it. I went to cast iron and wire and created a set of rules for myself.

Shortly after that Adam Weinberg curated a show at the Whitney of four women sculptors, Jessica Stockholder, myself, and two L.A. artists. That was a real turning point. I felt self-confident enough to re-introduce color but in a way that I remembered or knew. That’s when I took two polka-dotted shower curtains, sewed them together and suspended fifty pounds of steel from them. That was called Malaprop and that was the first time I realized I needed found color. I read Chromophobia a few years later. It made me feel really courageous like, ‘This is exactly what intuitively I felt about color.’ I realized the most important thing for me was the pure saturation of it, not trying to understand it intellectually.

Along with finding your preference for working with found color and objects came a slew of references to the realms of the kitchen, home, and bedroom, vanity, commercialism.

When I first started, it was strictly about making work inexpensively, using anything within fifteen feet. Dog food cans. It didn’t matter. If it was siphoned through my vision then it was going to be part of my dialogue, napkins popsicles dripped on, if you collected enough of them, or coffee filters. I wanted the unedited. I didn’t need to go to the foundry in New Jersey or the art supply store.

Originally you were making more of a point about that and now it’s transformed into something else through color, more like making an abstract painting.

Which is accidental in a way. I was amazed at how much is produced in our society that is painterly, how much design goes in. It’s all thrown away. It really excited me, this whole world of, literally, art to be cut up and put back together again. The confusing thing about any of the materials that you take is that it has associations. I stumbled into consumerism– the way we sell, the way we buy, and impulsivity. I thought at first it was going to be a distraction. I’m not a recycling artist. That’s not the message. But inherently there is a message about recycling. It’s just not so pedantic. There’s a secondary life of things, there’s no denying those things come into play. That’s the delicate balance; can you transcend that into another entity?

Now those meanings just sort of move throughout the work as another element, like color. You’re not making a point about recycling. You’re just recycling to make your work.

Right.

What are you thinking about when you work?

I’m thinking about reducing things, making an order out of all this material, reducing it to almost an alphabet. There’s a structure in setting up color bins, cutting the material up and knowing what is going to be an important element. The thinking is more complex than when I’m doing collages. Those are really intuitive situations. I’m sitting, I have my pieces and then I get into sort of a stream of consciousness where it just rolls. I love doing the small works because it’s a world that I’m just lost in. I don’t have to worry about it. I can indulge in the fantasy of them because they are small and intimate.

How do you set up the context of your studio? What do you do to enhance it?

I always have noise going. When I’m working part of me is listening elsewhere to music or stories that allow me to have my scissors and my exact-o, and like you with your brushes, my movements are very sure. I give myself permission to be very adept with that cut and amuse myself. That’s a really important part of it. I find it fascinating when you make a cut and two pieces of cardboard fall into this unexpected relationship that then leads me to the next step. These steps are not preconceived, they’re not drawn, they don’t even exist in my head, they exist only in relation one to the other.

Like the video of Matisse cutting the paper in the MoMA cutout show.

I love that moment of how those hands went around—

Listening to books provides an atmosphere, it allows you to stay in the room and relax, enjoy yourself and take the time to do what you want to do instead of rushing ahead.

That’s right. A lot of times when I run into a problem, I’ll take a twenty minute nap and I usually wake up knowing which way to go. It has changed my life to trust that if I move away and close my eyes, I always solve it.

I wanted to ask you about your father because I believe your father has always been a big influence on your process.

He was a navy test pilot. In the early days of testing they didn’t know where to place the fuel tanks, hadn’t yet studied where they should be. He was out over the ocean — heading towards Texas trying to get to Love Field — he always said that it was really important to know where you were without your instruments, know what you were doing without a guidebook. So on this trip his instrument panel went dark and because of where the fuel tank was his plane was starting to get unsettled. He couldn’t tell where he was. He was about to go into the ocean and eject. Then he saw this little red light blink out of his side vision. And he realized that it was the Pegasus on top of the tower right above Love Field. So he dove straight down in the dark and landed right on Love Field. It still chokes me up because it took such profound self-confidence.

Could you say a little about this new work? It looks like you’re coming down off the wall now.

I create collage elements in the studio that I later merge into large-scale, site-specific installations into currents of color, product patterning and vivid signage. The scale often mirrors that of consumer culture, championing desire and design. When I look at the sculptures I’m working on, I think of small colorful islands, parade floats made by hand, tipping monuments, hints of things I recognize.

I am currently moving off the wall and into the “aisle”. The freestanding forms are defined by the strength that cardboard offers, with color, text and weight taking on a new, more precise role.   I screw and glue elements together, cut them apart and reform them, the packaging is endlessly alterable. As the sculptures have begun to take shape, I’m always surprised that they look nothing like I thought they might.

Who are the artists who have most influenced you?

It changes. Early on Richard Serra and Chris Burden, when I first wanted to see what courage was about. And it was male-dominated. Then it became people like David Smith, early Louise Bourgeois, Eva Hesse, then my peers.

With collage in mind, what about Kurth Schwitters?

I loved the Merzbau, that was just beautiful. But I don’t look back that much. Judy Pfaff, the first Tom Friedman pieces I saw. Tuttle. Franz West. I appreciate restrained, carefully situated almost minimalism like Fred Sandback, something I don’t have.

Martin Puryear’s last show at Matthew Marks was my favorite of his shows. I thought, ‘Wow I’m really glad I’m making sculpture, because I forgot how interesting and complex it is to try to make an object.’

I’ve used the wall for the last twenty-five years. The wall has this magic ability to give something dignity and space and everything it needs. So I forced myself to get off the wall again. Bring it down on the floor. I really don’t know how this is going to go.

The post “Unmitigated, Unknowable Joy”: A Studio Visit with Lisa Hoke appeared first on artcritical.