In the long slow summer of 2020 Kathleen Kucka, artist and former curator of the Shirley Fiterman Art Center at the Borough of Manhattan Community College, headed up to her 1850s country barn in Falls Village, Connecticut to make large scale works that would have been impossible for her in the city. During that time she discovered a unique building in the center of Falls Village that seemed to be lying fallow: A former post office, town hall, plumbing shop, and grocery store, this edifice was a bank just prior to the town acquiring it in the early 1960s. Twenty years ago, the Canaan Board of Selectmen began renting spaces on the first-floor to artists for their studios. Kucka saw a unique opportunity to bring artists she admired in the city to her own doorstep and in the process add life to her Connecticut community. An introduction to the powers that be led to a meeting with the town council, and before she knew it, she had herself a gallery.

Its name, Furnace/Art on Paper Archive refers to the town’s history as an iron smelting center while specifying her curatorial mission.  The 22 by 19 foot gallery has high ceilings that make the room feel airy and welcoming with lots of natural north light. The clean white flat files that hold the “archive” of works on paper by gallery artists, is prominent without taking up wall space and lets visitors know that there is much more to see than immediately meets the eye. In addition to her gallery space, Kucka has also taken hold of the bank vault as an exhibition space, accessed through a hallway where the Falls Village Café is about to be added.

Stephen Maine was the subject of the inaugural show at Furnace/Art on Paper Archive in May. The former Brooklyn-based artist and art critic and his wife, artist Gelah Penn, now live nearby. Titling his show “Cupcake Uptake and the Cloud of Unknowing”, Maine presented a selection of paintings on paper and two canvases.

His process-based abstract idiom combines the arbitrariness of chance with his acute aesthetic sensibility. Maine describes his practice deftly:

Some years ago, it occurred to me that conveying paint to canvas by means of a system that uses printing plates instead of brushes . . .yields the great pleasure of surprise while providing a concrete way to think about color, surface, scale, seriality, figure/ground, original/copy, and the psychology of visual perception.

When I look at these works, the artist Ingrid Calame comes to mind: Her tracings of actual shapes made by the every-day wear and tear on a typical sidewalk results in an all-over abstract pattern with a pristine graphic quality that belies the grittiness of their source. In Maine’s images, however, the organic patterns feel first hand, rather than mediated, in layer upon layer of mind-bending technicolor that protrudes from the surface like the buildup on any well-trodden road. Blobs sit on top of other blobs, creating not only the illusion of dimensionality with drop shadows, but actual dimensionality. They beckon scrutiny and reward the viewer with multifaceted incidents of color and form. His combinations of saturated color create dissonant vibrations that are mesmerizing and seductive and not a little jarring.

On the wall to the left as you walked into the space were four beautifully framed pieces (all of the works on paper are untitled, approximately 22 x 18 inches). They led you to the far wall facing the door and a six and half foot tall canvas, P17-0302 (2017) whose gorgeous aquamarine and ochre complemented, rather than detracted from the works on paper, adding to the sense of galactic immersion he masters in both scales. A further small canvas in bright red and green kept company with several more framed works on paper, as well as unframed paintings from the same series easily accessible in the flat files.

The show has a cohesiveness that illuminates the breadth and depth of possibilities Maine has been able to mine from this very specific and idiosyncratic method and yields an infinite combination of colorful possibilities that inspire reverie at a time we could all do with more of that.

Furnace/Art on Paper Archive, 107 Main Street, Falls Village, CT. Gallery hours: Friday–Sunday, 11:00–4:00

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But it was on her painting that we focused during a recent studio visit, a week before the opening of her second solo exhibition at Theodore:Art in Bushwick. She had just returned from a month at Yaddo, where she produced virtually all of the work for the show. Her studio was lined with fifteen 18 x 24-inch painted canvas boards and two large un-stretched painted canvases. We talked about her Instagram drawings, the source of her imagery for her paintings, her personal life, how that impacts the work, and about her love of process.

LESLIE WAYNE: Sharon, last year during Dumbo Open Studios, I bought your little book of daily Instagram drawings. I was struck by what you wrote about them, that they were created using a phone app called PicsArt to be viewed specifically on a phone, and that you made them as an antidote to the frustration you felt when viewing images of people’s paintings on their tiny phone screens. I totally get that frustration and I think it’s pretty hilarious that you took the devil in this detail and turned it into a workhorse for yourself. Looking at these images, it’s hard to believe they’re not photographs of paintings. But I also notice that this book contains only a small fraction of the more than 700 Instagram drawings you made over the course of two years, posting one a day. I know that these last couple of years have been particularly challenging for you, so what was it about these Instagram drawings that really kept you going through it all? Was it the daily ritual, as a kind of meditative practice? Was it a way of marking each day, like On Kawara? Or was it a testimonial to your own thoughts and observations, the way perhaps an artist like Tom Nozkowski translates his daily experiences through abstraction?

SHARON BUTLER: I’m not sure where to begin. Since I was a kid I’ve tried to create a record of daily life, at first by keeping notebooks about my activities, and later through drawing, painting, and book projects. I started the phone drawings after my last show at Theodore:Art in 2016, which was the year my teenage daughter got swept up in the opioid crisis and the country watched Trump rise to power. I was devastated by both. Making drawings on the phone was a useful way to re-channel my Twitter preoccupation and, at the same time, process my experience. The impulse to create a translation of life through abstraction is similar to Tom Nozkowski’s, but making digital drawings seems more immediate and, well, casual. Like “I Got Up,” On Kawara’s 1968-79 postcard project, they have a time stamp, and, looking back, I see that many were posted around 4 AM, when I was often awake and worrying. Limiting the drawings to the geometric shape tools – the circle, the square, the triangle, and the diamond – I developed a visual language that is embedded with personal content. I drew through the crisis and now I have a record of the experience. As On Kawara might have said: WE ARE STILL ALIVE. My daughter has been in recovery for more than eight months.

That’s fantastic. You must be so relieved, and relieved to be in a space where you can start approaching your work in a way that’s more deliberative rather than reactive. Though you have always championed the kind of resourcefulness that allows you to create within the constraints of your given situation. I know that the term you coined, “New Casualists” was to some degree based on your own peripatetic studio life, creating a way of working that accommodated your need to move studios every few months because of rising rents and short sublets. But now you’re in a great studio with a long lease!

It’s interesting that you decided to use these Instagram drawings as direct source material for your paintings. You’ve taken these records of very specific moments in your life and translated them from their digital form to analog objects. It’s an interesting kind of visual transliteration. I’m assuming that you want there to be a dialog between the two bodies of work since you’ve written the dates of the drawings onto the paintings. It’s as if you are still processing these experiences by reanimating them through another medium. On a purely formal level, the paintings have a soft and very lovely painterly touch, and a kind of ethereal light, both of which are unexpected given their hard geometric compositions. Painted light is very different from the light that’s embedded within a screen. You mentioned that comment one often hears about beautiful paintings having a “marvelous sense of light!” I take it though that that’s not what you’re aiming for here, right?!

To address your first observation, yes, I’m more than relieved, I’m grateful to the universe and proud of my daughter for recognizing she needed help. My decision to use specific drawings as subjects rather than to simply adopt the visual language allowed me to connect to specific moments and has given the project deeper meaning. Making these paintings has enabled me to go back and really consider what we’ve been through.

In terms of light, in early painting classes there is an emphasis on creating the illusion of light through color mixing. How light changes color is so mysterious and intriguing. I’ve been working on an artist’s book for the past few years using text from a color theory devised by philosopher Johann Wolfgang von Goethe in 1810 based on his own detailed observations—how candle illumination changes the color of shadows and so forth—that I absolutely love. In representational work, changing color, whether from dark to light or warm to cool, gives the objects the illusion of three-dimensional shape. But creating a “marvelous sense of light” gives the painting a kind of beauty. Light is beauty. Josephine Halvorson’s paintings are wonderful examples of this truth: paintings whose subjects are enhanced through the illusion of illumination. In the digital space, color is made from light, so illumination is a given. When I create the paintings from the drawings, I think about the translation from light to paint. In many ways the natural dullness of the paint echoes the experience of remembering a traumatic episode.

The sense of surface and touch, on the other hand, are inherent to a painting, while they must be invented in the digital space. I enjoy creating the illusion of worn backgrounds, fractured shapes, and broken lines – visual phenomena that occur naturally in oil on canvas – in the phone app. On canvas, I prefer a dull surface, like the ones on abstract easel paintings from the 1940s. I think about expectations – in particular, how they change over time – and this has become part of the content. One thing I have learned is that expectations have little to do with reality.

Yes, well that certainly applies to the process of art making. We start out with an idea in mind and through the process of manipulating material, things happen and we inevitably change course – that is, if we’re any good. To stubbornly stick to a plan is to forego the ecstasy of creating.

I’m interested in your attraction to a “dull surface” and the “natural dullness of paint.” That’s actually antithetical to everything one imagines when thinking about oil painting. We think about the lusciousness of oil, its buttery consistency, the depth of color one can achieve with it and its luminosity. If these paintings are evidence of a life lived, then it appears that right now you are still churning through the murkiness of your daughter’s future, and I might add, the future of this country. We can go out and see Spike Lee’s “BlacKkKlansman” or cry during Meghan McCain’s stunning cri de coeur for her father, both powerful rebukes of our current president, and feel better afterwards for its cathartic value. But at the end of the day, we know that the forces that are driving our current culture are born from greed, fear and a hunger for power. The forces that drive our personal destiny, however, are somewhat more within our control. The fact that your daughter has turned a corner is testament to that.

Yes, it is. I’m fascinated by the way the current political situation, the anger and powerlessness we all feel, has informed artists’ work, especially artists who would never call their work political. Yes, I’m actually hopeful about the future. It’s been murky for the past two years, but, fingers crossed, it seems that we are turning in a more positive direction. (Note to readers: Don’t forget to VOTE on November 6!).

But going back to your point about oil paint, true that it is admired for its richness and luminosity, but I mean in comparison to screen images, the color is simply less bright. The comparative quality of light, brightness vs. grayness, has emotional content. I forgot to mention another attribute of oil paint that I adore is that the color changes over time. The paintings age. Which brings me back full circle to the notion of the future, which I find interesting.

So tell me about your decision to paint on these canvas boards. To me, it’s very much in keeping with the modesty and practicality of your Instagram drawings. I also love the way they’re floating on the wall.

For me, an 18 x 24-inch canvas board is like comfort food, which means I suppose that it isn’t a challenge technically. The hardness suits pencil drawing, which is how I start all the paintings. And, of course, they are inexpensive so I can buy them by the box—like sheets of paper. Hanging canvas boards is a challenge, though, and when I was up at Yaddo photographer Regina DeLuise suggested that I make French cleats to offset the boards from the wall. Once we hung them at the gallery, Stephanie said that the size and the way they hover on the wall reminds her of computer screens. I hadn’t thought of it, but I like the association.

That’s great. So without your even realizing it, you’ve enlarged the images from an iPhone format to a computer format! One last question–how do you balance your life as an artist with your life as an editor of a successful blog, and teaching as well?

Honestly, sometimes I’m overwhelmed and just want to lie on the couch and read fiction, but I’m grateful that I can support art making through teaching and publishing Two Coats of Paint. Working in the studio, especially when the country seems to be falling apart, sometimes strikes me as self-indulgent, but the reality is that I wouldn’t be able to cope if I didn’t do it. I think most artists feel the same way. In turn, teaching and writing give me the opportunity to step outside myself and make a positive contribution to the art community. I love being part of academia because of the conversations and critiques. This year I’m affiliated with Parsons, the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, and the New York Academy of Art, where I have a slew of talented colleagues. And, frankly, I always learn something from the students, which is the best because it keeps my mind nimble and open to new ways of thinking.

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Brenda, last year I sat for you in your loft while you painted my portrait for your 366: A Watercolor Portrait A Day project, which documented the many faces of the art world. There was a sense of ease and comradery to it as we breezily chatted away about this and that, people we knew in common and what was going on in the galleries. This project, however, was distinctly different. Your subjects were extremely elderly and many suffered from dementia and debilitating diseases. It had to be a very taxing experience emotionally. Can you tell me a little bit about that aspect of it?

The portrait subjects in 100/100 had experienced an unusual degree of loss and their physical condition, as well as their levels of awareness and ability to communicate, was often compromised. Their stories were difficult and sometimes painful to hear. For instance, I painted a Holocaust survivor, who after showing me the number tattooed on her arm, told me about the 27 members of her family who were killed in the camp (including her twin sister) and how she had managed to survive. There was a woman in her 80’s whose significantly younger boyfriend had repeatedly beaten her, so severely that she eventually ended up in the hospital before moving to the Home. I painted parents who had just buried a child, and there were countless women who had lost their husbands and were in mourning (although a surprising number found it liberating!). Many of the subjects over 90, and quite a few over 100, had endured great hardships over their long lives, but it was the younger sitters with debilitating conditions that were particularly hard to face because it struck so much closer to home.
I felt anxious when painting subjects who were ’post-verbal’ (who could not talk) because I did not know what they were experiencing or how they might react. A subject might forget that he or she was being painted and become angry or even hostile. Once I was attacked. But sometimes through the painting I discovered a subject’s level of awareness and even made a connection. For instance, I was painting a man with advanced Alzheimer’s disease who was wearing an argyle sweater, primarily in shades of grey. When I loaded the brush with blue to paint a thin line that ran through the pattern, his eyes widened with alarm. He searched his sweater for the blue. Upon locating it, he visibly relaxed made eye contact with me and smiled. Trust was established and a new form of communication emerged. That was a small victory.

What an amazing experience. Were there other more positive exchanges?

In most cases, the attention of being painted was more than welcome and the sessions ended with hugs. A blind woman asked me to describe what I saw as each brushstroke of her portrait hit the page. I told her that her hair was styled in small curls and the auburn color looked nice with the red of her sweater, that her nails were done in red too. We had a frank conversation about blindness. It was very moving.
And while sometimes the conversations were joyous, they were always interesting from a historical point of view. Although midway through a particularly fascinating conversation, I might discover that the sitter was delusional and very little that they said was true!

Oy vey. Let’s switch gears here for a minute. Let me ask you about your process.

The watercolor portraits in ‘The Itinerant Portraitist’ are always painted from direct observation with the subjects positioned very close to me and the sketchbook laying flat. The sitters can observe their image as it emerges on the page and they guide it, both consciously and unconsciously. I begin each painting with a quick pencil sketch to establish a likeness. Once the likeness is established, the subject is encouraged to talk. These conversations inform the portrait. I paint what I hear, as much as what I see.
In 100/100, each painting took around an hour. My goal was to paint 6-8 portraits a day. For various reasons, many of the subjects could not hold the pose so I worked in a state of heightened awareness, often orbiting the subject with my paints in an attempt to catch a glimpse of their face. Because I grew up with the Sicilian tradition of “Malocchio,” a tradition where children are discouraged from making eye contact with elderly people for fear of getting bad luck, the project was pretty intense initially.
I also needed to make changes in what I chose to paint. For instance, in my watercolor portraits I usually focus on the face and seldom paint furniture. But many of the sitters in100/100 were confined to wheelchairs, so the wheelchairs became an important element in the painting. I had to learn to navigate breathing tubes, organize layers of chins and capture silent screams as well.

You recently completed a very large portrait commission in oil paint of Yale University’s first seven women Ph.D.s. and on the success of that, you’ve been asked to paint another group portrait for Yale’s Davenport College. Unlike your Itinerate Portrait project, in which you are answerable only to yourself, commissioned portraits demand another kind of criteria. Do you find commissions challenging in a good way or demanding in a way that takes you away from other projects that you would rather be doing?

Well actually, in portraiture whether commissioned or not you are never answerable only to yourself. One way or another, there’s someone on the other end, usually with a strong opinion, who sees you seeing the subject. And navigating that is exciting!
I take on very few commissions and gravitate toward challenging, high profile projects, where I hope to learn something new. For instance, in my New York Times Magazine commissions, which have included portraits of Jeffrey Dahmer, Slobodan Milosevic and his wife, and Osama Bin Laden (for their September 11, 2005 cover), I got to explore evil. In these projects making a good painting while respecting the victims feelings was an engaging balancing act.
With Yale’s First Seven Women Ph.D.s and the new Davenport paintings, I had to come up with new working methods to organize groups of figures in invented, somewhat allegorical situations. These commissions have lead to more complex compositions in my studio practice.
In the end, the technical, as well as emotional discoveries that I make in The Itinerant Portraitist project, and in the commissioned portraits, are important for my studio practice because they play a role in my development as an artist.

You and I came to New York at about the same time, in the early 80’s. You had interned in Paris with Stanley William Hayter and had just graduated from Wesleyan. You moved down to the city and got right into the thick of it as a master printer, printing editions for Chuck Close and Julian Schnable. At that time you also met Alex Katz and David Hockney. You’ve stayed close with many of these artists, as part of a family of portrait painters. Do you see yourself as part of a tradition dating back to the Medicis, or do you feel like you are part of a newer conversation about what portraiture means in today’s art world?

Both. The role of the painted portrait in society is ever-changing, not only in terms of who is depicted but also in relationship to new mediums.  So while I view my portraits as part of a long lineage, dating back at least to the Egyptian Fayum portraits, and I definitely take cues from the ‘masters’, I see myself as playing a role in a constantly evolving discourse.
When I had my first portrait show in NYC in the early 90’s, portraiture was considered subversive. The white male language, and reinvigorating the medium was the task at hand. At the time there were very few artists who painted portraits – almost no women, so I gravitated toward the earlier generation, painting them as well as posing for them. These early friendships were key in developing my own project.
These days there are as many new voices in portraiture as there are subjects being depicted. And projects like the two Yale’s commissions, which help to diversify iconography in institutions, are playing an important social role.
The Itinerant Portraitist is also answering a need. In a time of virtual reality and high-speed, mediated experience, the connection between artist and subject created by the act of building an image stroke by stroke is unusual. There is much to be explored in the question of who is portrayed and how. I am interested in the multifaceted nature of portraiture in the digital age.

Brenda Zlamany: 100/100 remains on view at the Derfner Judaica Museum, 5901 Palisade Avenue, Riverdale, New York through January 7, 2018

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In an artist statement from a few years ago, MacPhee wrote that “My work has always been about survival both personal and as part of a species.” Not surprisingly, those collapsing cityscapes were made five years after the attacks of September 11, 2001, a length of time it seems that a lot of artists have taken to absorb that day into their psyche and their work. Since then her paintings have become more and more abstract, but held fast to her interest in both architecture and the body, in a really ingenious and personal way, I might add, by using pieces of fabric to create compositional form.

LESLIE WAYNE: Medrie, we’ve known each other for a very long time. I’m always fascinated by how the trajectory of one’s development keeps circling back on the same fundamental themes, in spite of how different the work may appear over the course of time. I recall so clearly falling in love with your paintings in the mid 80s, of large and surreal architectural landscapes. Since then, I’ve seen those water towers, industrial silos and stovepipes morph into highly chromed body parts floating in space, and later back into architecture in scenes of urban landscape subject to the forces of nature – and culture – at their most apocalyptic.

The story goes that you have a secret other life as a fantasy clothing designer. Is this right?

Medrie MacPhee: Yes indeed! Back in 2011 at a Christmas party instead of doing the usual re-gift at a Secret Santa event, I made a hat sculpture. That is, a collaged hat made out of a number of hats and notions. The impulse to collage has always been there no matter what body of work I was engaged in. For me collage is deeply rooted. Not within the classic intentions of collage. But collage/collaging as representing an idea of how one’s life is cobbled together. Barely holding often, but a tenuous balance where the parts and the whole are critical. The bringing together of disparate parts, the things that shouldn’t go together but must, the fragments etc. was more of an existential process rather than purely visual. That was the genesis. Or maybe it was my English mother who grew up in London at a time when one apprenticed and she wanted to be a hat maker! In any case my concoctions became a big hit with artist friends and hats lead to tops, vests, one-piece outfits and the idea of a clothing line called “Relax” with comfort being primary. “Comfort clothing for a fraught time.”

Well it’s fascinating, don’t you think, that here you’ve brought together the two things that have dominated your work for years – body parts and architecture, by ripping apart clothing and using the pieces – the sleeve, or the pant leg, to piece together architectural form. It’s brilliant. But I know you and I would venture to guess that you never set out to formally or conceptually plan this approach in advance. So tell me, how did you get here? And were you aware of this psychological process at work?

As you say, in the beginning there was no idea that the clothing/sculpture would be anything other than what it was.

Artists have often wondered why I didn’t make sculpture because my focus so engaged with architecture and forms in space. But I was resolutely a painter and – like many of my generation – interested in the edge between abstraction and representation. It was the measuring of a painting space between a full-on Renaissance perspective – painting as window – and everything in between that obsessed me.

Also, the older I’ve gotten, the more – as a woman of my time – identity politics and feminism have shaped me. Every woman struggles with how to expand the language of painting and yet must inevitably deal with the burden of a mostly male history.

My intention – in working with clothing – wasn’t overtly feminist, yet that said, it definitely felt transgressive. Fashion, style, sewing, clothing as identity have always been oppressive to me. My preferred style is “building management!”

Yes I know! This is one of the funnier aspects of our friendship – my obsession with fashion and your complete disregard for it. But we could segue very easily into a discussion about fashion and feminism as a socio-political construct, and then we’d be getting a little off the point. But tell me how the pieces of dismembered clothing made their way – from a “fashion line” – into your painting. Was it purely formal, was it process driven, or were you always thinking about the idea of clothing from the get-go as a metaphor for something else?

It was not consciously any of those things. That said, I was on the move between 2009-14. At that time I was making intensely colorful and active paintings that had all of the architectural references upended and floating/exploding in space. Could have been the outcome of a disaster or a reordering of everything. I was on the lookout – but for what I didn’t know. Then I made a conscious decision to take the color out and basically mimic the minimal color in the works on paper focusing instead on structure and then surface. Somewhere in the middle of that process I had a sudden and powerful urge to put in a real object of clothing. It went in but like many times before when I have been ahead of myself it didn’t go anywhere for another year or so. At a certain moment I was convinced that the addition of the clothing provided that thing I was looking for. Even though (especially now) the paintings appear abstract, I still think of them as representations. For me, the clothing brings the paintings back into a context that tangibly refers to the world and to people. Additionally, as a way forward and a way of thinking about process differently, I settled on an idea of

the architecture of language. Using all of the inherent metaphors of language to visually suggest things like what is real and what is imaginary. What is the subplot? Is there transparency or opaqueness? Do these colors suggest something urgent/edgy or is the attitude more of stillness?

So as I understand it, the materials and the process presented themselves as metaphors for the architecture of language and that as you started seeing how the pieces of fabric could work, your mind opened up to the formal possibilities and the full measure of painting’s conceptual potential – beyond the normal confines of what we think of as paintings. Would that be accurate?

Well perhaps. I don’t think of decisions in painting as being so clearly linear. One thing is certain though, adding clothing and other collaged items (like the large acrylic transfers) took me out of my normal game into something entirely different. Even my idea about when a painting is finished became something new.

In a show we saw together years ago – it was the Brazilian artist Beatriz Milhazes – you explained the process of acrylic transfer – painting on plastic and peeling the painted skin off when dry. This was just “shop talk” between us at the time. Much later it occurred to me to bring this transfer process into my works on paper. The transfers initially presented themselves to me as enigmatic gaps/voids that within the context of architecture as language are inchoate.

In recent work they have taken on a dimensional aspect – more like characters but disruptive like the clothing. The heavy flat acrylic next to the transparency of the oil is a subtle discontinuity in the surface of the painting.

For me meaning and matter are inextricably bound up together. I don’t know what comes first. That said, now that my “palette” has stretched to include everything a seamstress/designer would use, it has radically changed my process.

So the pieces of clothing are functioning in a similar way as a collage material, to the peeled up pieces of acrylic paint you were making earlier. Except that clothing is a very different kettle of fish. The references are far more complex and far-reaching than paint. How do you see those references playing out in your work, particularly given that you are generally – can I say hostile toward – or perhaps just disinterested in fashion as a signifier? After all, even clothing for comfort makes a statement.

Of course. Once sweatsuits and jeans come into play issues of class do as well. This was not my original intention back in 2016 but inescapable as a theme given everything going on politically.

Comfort clothing is something you wear when the usual fashion signifiers don’t apply – which isn’t to say aesthetics aren’t involved. It is more personal and certainly more rebellious.

For the most part I am disinterested in women’s clothing and uncomfortable with the fraught nature of being on “display.” Signifiers inherent in women’s fashion – sexualizing oneself – are, at best, not interesting to me.

That said, in the past I probably wouldn’t have made the effort to see the Comme des Garcons show at the Met. The imagination, the humor, the startling combinations are truly inspiring. This definitely is not comfort clothing yet blurring boundaries between male/female/other appeals to me.

Blurring gender boundaries and blurring the boundaries that normally dictate how we define painting and sculpture is an interesting conflation. Do you want viewers to see that the fabric pieces are clothing, and is it important to you that the clothing be identified as “comfort” wear?

If the paintings were only seen online you might miss their dimensionality but it would be difficult to look at them in this show and not know clothes are involved. For example, in “Out of Pocket” – the largest painting in the show – there is an unpainted strip of blue jean with two pockets. Once identified, the seams and notions in the other paintings become obvious. Ideas of “comfort wear” started with the clothing but the idea that this extends into the paintings doesn’t concern me.

A couple of years ago I had an opportunity to be in Russia and found myself really engaged by their equivalent of the German Bauhaus, Vkhutemas (“Higher Arts and Technical School”). Like the Bauhaus, the school combined the art faculty teaching graphics, sculpture and architecture while the industrial faculty taught printing, textiles, ceramics, woodworking, and metalworking. Nowadays you have to be careful about admitting to Russian influences but I confess that these artists, including Malevich, Lissitzky, Popova, Rodchenko, Goncharova, Larionov and Stepanova, had a huge impact on meat that moment. I had been looking for something that was outside the strict confines of painting–not in any way a new idea but something that personally made sense to me. Indeed, the confines of a strictly painted language have been breeched in much more dramatic ways than by introducing clothing. That said, something organic and dramatic happened and I am just at the beginning.

The post “Comfort Clothing for Fraught Times”: Medrie MacPhee in conversation with Leslie Wayne appeared first on artcritical.

LESLIE WAYNE: You’re having a busy year – three solo shows which have opened within the last three months – Pain Management at the Library Street Collective in Detroit, Another Day in Paradise at the Abroms-Engel Institute for the Visual Arts in Birmingham, AL, and most recently Dose, curated by Nick Cave at the CUE Foundation here in NYC. Congratulations!

BEVERLY FISHMAN: Thank you! I’ve just had a very busy year that was in part fueled by a one semester sabbatical in the fall of 2016. It allowed me to temporarily move away from Detroit and set up my studio in New York for six months, which was an absolute inspiration.

You’ve stated that you would like to have your viewers “think about the seductive nature of the pharmaceutical industry as well as the purist and transcendental language of high modernism.” For any audience, whether educated in the arts or not, thinking about the pharmaceutical industry right now is extremely potent as we consider the political climate we are in with a Trump/Bannon agenda to privatize and corporatize our institutions and our American, and I might say, most precious – values. Using the language of high modernist abstraction to speak about those issues is a seductive way to bring people into the conversation.

A lot has been written, and written really well about the conceptual underpinnings of your work, so I thought it might be more interesting to approach this interview from another perspective, one more related to your personal history and your process.

As an artist myself, I was struck by a point that Bob Nickas brought up in his bristling catalogue essay for your 2015 show at Columbia College of Art & Design, when he made a comparison between your work and Tom Friedman’s one-to-one simulations of pills. While sighting the lyrics from Jefferson Airplane’s “White Rabbit,” he followed up with, “These are works of art. Their physical and visual properties revolve around the concerns of painters and sculptors – color, composition, form, material, scale and display.”

As a viewer of your works, I am first and foremost drawn to the physical qualities of your paintings – their jarring palette, their forms and shapes, their dimensionality and their extremely seductive reflective surfaces. As a native of Southern California, I immediately think of the Finish-Fetish guys of the early 60s. But there’s a huge difference between their process and yours. Their cult of hand-sanding and polishing their works by themselves came right out of the shortboard revolution and hotrod counter-culture. For you, the process of getting that industrial finish is more a means to an end rather than an important and integral part of your studio practice. But obviously there’s a great deal of process that does go into the conception and realization of your work, experimenting with color combinations and establishing the shapes of each panel as they relate to specific pharmaceuticals. But I imagine that these are experiments with very specific goals in mind. I’m reminded of something Gerhard Richter said in a recent interview when he was asked, “What do you think about when you’re painting?” and he replied, “I’m not thinking about anything. I’m painting.” Are there moments in the studio where perhaps you stop “thinking” and something else takes over?

That’s a great question! It’s true that I am not interested in sanding and hand-finishing these paintings; but, at the same time, I have always been very physically engaged with these works. For me, color is an extremely material substance—hues change depending on their finishes, their values, their saturation, their sheer quantities (i.e., the areas that they cover), and the other colors that you place in relation to them. For this reason, to understand the effect that different colors have, I need to physically engage with them through collage. So, when I’m in the studio, I’m always developing a series of color studies, a set of works on paper that incorporate natural and artificial color systems as well as matte and glossy finishes. These collages are based on a limited set of pill formats, shapes that have been selected so that they also evoke the tradition of high modernism, from hard-edge painting to minimalism. By making study after study, I get to explore color permutations, searching for relationships that surprise or shock me. And when I’m doing this—which is how I spend a lot of my time in the studio—I’m not really thinking about the concept behind the series anymore, but rather I’m working through the effects of different colors. That’s where the spontaneity of my practice lies for me: in the process of gluing down different colors and responding to the material impact that they have on me.

It’s great to see on page 27 of the CUE catalog a studio shot of your color experiments on paper. I understand that you are working with a given range of colors based on skin tones and the kinds of synthetic colors one finds in the advertising world. But beyond that, your approach in the studio sounds like it’s very intuitive. Did you study color theory in school?

Yes, I studied it, and then I taught a course on color theory, which helped me think even more deeply about it. I don’t directly follow anyone’s color theory, however. For example, I love how Wassily Kandinsky connected particular colors to specific sounds and properties. By reflecting on his system, I think about how colors can refer to other types of sensations that are not necessarily visual. Joseph Albers has been a huge inspiration—the way he worked through such a wide range of color relationships has made me much more aware of value and saturation, for example. His work is part of a mental background that inspires me. At the same time, I’m not thinking about color theory when I’m working. Instead, color is completely intuitive when I’m in the studio. I’m searching for a sensorial experience.

Traditional color theories have only helped me so far, because they don’t deal with fluorescents. Because I use so many synthetic colors, I’ve have had to develop my own ways of thinking about color. For this body of work, I started looking at cosmetics and makeup much more, and they became a way of bringing another layer of identity questions into the mix. However, once I had added this palette to the various color systems that I use, manipulating it became intuitive once again. I incorporate palettes that I find in Home Depot and CVS, mixing them with more traditional palettes, such as the ones I find in standard art supplies.

You packed a lot into that answer and I want to unpack a couple of different things from it separately. One is the idea of color referring to other kinds of sensations. Kandinsky was believed by many to be a synesthete. I get the feeling that some of your colors are meant to inspire synesthetic responses, or at least physical ones if not specifically aural or related to taste, etc., though taste would make sense given that the work is all about pharmaceuticals! The way you lay out different color combinations for example feels almost musical in the colors’ rhythmic relationships to one another, like a fugue – the way you have the viewer’s eye move from one color in one quadrant to its mirror in a darker shade in another quadrant, and then flip over to do the same thing in its complimentary color in the other two quadrants, like in the blue and red Untitled (Opioid Addiction), 2016. But you also do something else with the colors when you paint on the inside and outside edges of your panels, as in the lovely fluorescent Untitled (Opioid Addiction/Missing Dose), 2017. I love the way those colors cast fluorescent halos onto the wall behind the painting. It’s a very delicate and sophisticated balance that you get just right. I suspect though that no amount of collaging with colored paper can anticipate exactly how that will look once you’ve created the final piece in three dimensions. Are you ever surprised?

I am definitely surprised by how certain pieces turn out. Because of the shift in scale and medium, my color collages are not the same as the large works. It is exciting for me to see the piece fully realized. Most of the time, I am satisfied; but, if the painting doesn’t have the effect that I want, then it must be repainted. Pieces can sit in my studio for months and gnaw at me until it becomes clear that they will never see the light of day! At other times, I know instantly that the painting is not working. Some pieces are repainted multiple times. As far as the question about synesthesia goes, I do believe that color creates linkages between vision and other senses. I have a synesthetic response to fluorescent yellow—I get a sour taste in my mouth—but this is an exception. No other color gives me a corresponding sensation. I believe that colors trigger responses in viewers, experiences that include not just mental associations, but also actual sensory reactions. I definitely want you to see a bright, shiny, candy-like surface and think about what it feels and tastes like. However, I am often quite surprised by viewers’ responses to my colors.

As far as the connection to music goes, I love your analogy between my paintings and a fugue. I’m definitely thinking about that—contrasting parallel movements between complementary colors or colors of different shades. I use colors to create the effect of afterimages or moments in which our vision flickers. I also paint on the inside and outside edges of my panels in order to destabilize the physical limits of my works. I want the glows to create a situation in which it is hard to tell where the wall ends and the work begins.

It definitely does that! You also do something dynamic with the shapes, particularly when you combine two different pill forms, as in the green and black Untitled (Stacked Pills), 2016, which is a beauty. It seems from some of the titles however, like Untitled (ADHD/Opioid Cocktail) 2016, that you not only thinking formally about your choice of shapes but about the actual chemical interactions between the pills as well. Do you privilege the formal considerations first, or the conceptual ones?

I don’t really privilege either. I am drawn to certain forms because of what the pills are used for medically. I won’t use a shape if the chemical compound is not significant to me in some way or other. At the same time, the formal combinations are also very important to me, and I won’t create a “cocktail” if the structural components don’t function well together. In my most recent urethane paintings on wood, I am working with the forms of generic legal drugs. Many generics have the same shape—despite treating vastly different diseases or conditions. For this reason, there is some leeway with the combinations—the same piece could represent a number of different mixtures of pharmaceuticals.

So, switching gears here for a minute – I understand that the AIDS crisis was a pivotal point in your artistic thinking. Many of your friends died of AIDS and that compelled you to rethink what you were doing. Can you talk about that transformation?

The AIDS crisis had a profound impact on me, but it did not cause me to work in a new way or with different materials. Throughout the 1980s, I was exploring questions of the body and disease. My initial reasons for this focus were personal—they had to do with my family. My interest in sickness and health was there before I was aware of the AIDS crisis. At the time, I was making sculptures that mimicked flayed bodies with all their viscera exposed; and then, in the late-1980s, I turned to mixed-media paintings that incorporated cellular and biological images that I appropriated from medical texts with a black-and-white Xerox machine and a color copier. The AIDS crisis reinforced my interest in exploring how our culture defined us as either sick or healthy and how our bodies—our chemical and physical compositions, our DNA, the viruses we acquired—strongly determined who and what we were. It made me all the more aware that I was dealing with issues of identity as defined by science and culture and how critical those issues were to me. Perhaps even more importantly, AIDS had a huge impact on the ways in which I approached my work and my life. I saw close friends die in their twenties. It made me realize how fragile life was, and how our time on earth was finite. The crisis taught me that being alive and healthy was a profound gift, and that if I wanted to be an artist, I needed to live my life as an artist every day.

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LESLIE WAYNE: You grew up in Rome and have been living in NYC for the last six or seven years, right?

BEATRICE PEDICONI: I first came to New York in 2009 for two months because some artist friends invited me to check out what was going on here compared to the European art scene. On that first trip I met Stacey D. Clarkson, Art Director at Harper’s Magazine, who asked me to do a portfolio for their April 2010 issue. And because of that I was contacted by Michael Gira, of the New York City musical group Swans, who invited me to do the cover of their upcoming album My Father Will Guide Me up a Rope to the Sky, released in September 2010.

That’s interesting. The cover of the new Radiohead album reminds me a lot of your work and I remember thinking, “Gee, Beatrice really ought to think about doing something like this!”

Yes! Good thinking! That encounter with Swans really made me aware of the connections between music and my work and from that moment on I’ve often collaborated with musicians and composers for my videos.

You just did a collaboration with a dance company at the Sheen Center in New York recently and I was sorry I missed it.

Yes, the choreographer Vanessa Tamburi, and Artistic Director of Flusso Dance project asked me if I would do a video scenography for one of their performances during the Idaco NYC Festival of Dance. I like the idea of collaborating with other artistic disciplines to see my video in a different context. So I was very curious and I totally embraced the project when she told me that it addressed the issue of foreigners, which in my opinion is one of the ancient ghosts of mankind. It’s certainly a reflection on the future of Europe, which needs to solve the conflict between its bureaucracy and the desire to be hospitable, and perhaps rethink their fundamental choices about human mobility. Also I liked that when she asked me to do this project, she said it was because I was working with water, which represents movement and displacement. And in my work it’s not the water that moves, but all the substances/elements I make pass through it. So that project became Moving ID-ENTITIES, which I am sorry you missed. It was great and we hope to present it in another theatre in the future.

It sounds very dynamic. I also hope there will be another opportunity to see it. So where did we leave off? You were telling me about your album cover for Swans. That was back in 2010.

Yes. During that same period I met Lyle Rexer and after showing him my work he included me in a group show he curated for the Aperture Foundation called “The Edge of Vision.” Esa Epstein, the Director at Sepia Eye, who was at that time running Sepia International, saw my work there and suggested I apply for an artist residency called The Lucid Art Foundation, in Inverness, California. I got that residency, which brought me back to America in 2010 for three months. On my way there I stopped in New York and met David Freedberg, Pierre Matisse Professor of the History of Art, and Director of the Italian Academy for Advanced Studies in America at Columbia University, who asked me to do a solo show at The Italian Academy in February 2011. A few months before that show I decided to move to New York with my brand new artist visa. After all these incredible events happening in such a short time, wouldn’t you have moved to the US too? I saw it like a call I could not refuse!

Absolutely! What a whirlwind of amazing experiences and connections!

You know, I first saw your work at the Collezione Maramotti in Reggio Emilia two years ago. It was an immersive experience, and completely transformative. You projected a video of these moving fluids on all four walls, and they floated round the room on an endless loop and in total silence. It was as if I was back in the womb!

Can you tell me how you first came up with this idea of painting in water, as you call it?

When I was studying in my twenties, in Rome the most professional and prestigious school of art was the University of Architecture, so that’s what I got my degree in. During the first two years I was able to take courses in drawing and photography and I loved both techniques. I supported myself by photographing my professor’s architectural projects and publishing them in architecture magazines. That income helped me to continue my own research, which was more focused on drawing and abstraction and the very opposite of the static and immobile architecture I had to stage and photograph for money. I was much more interested in movement, the unstable and unpredictable.

Then one day around the beginning of 2000, I found myself in a shocking situation. Someone I knew very well had fallen down some stairs. I went to help them, not knowing what to expect and was feeling very anxious about what I would find. There was blood everywhere and I totally remember the exact moment I found emotional detachment from that scene and started to look at the beauty and the texture of the blood. I was amazed by it and this allowed me to find the strength to enter the room and call for help.

The day after when I woke up I took a tank from my dark room, put some water in it and I started to drop whatever color I was using for my drawing and painting into it, trying to re-create that beauty I had seen in the blood. The moment I saw the colors disperse in the water, I felt a kind of serenity I had never felt before. So from that traumatic experience, I created something that gave me a sense of relief, of being able to transform a tragic situation into a magical experience. I thought if just one viewer looking at my work could feel the same thing, that this was already a great success. So I really like that you describe my work as transformative, you totally get the sense of it.

Yes, I felt as if I was enveloped in an environment that had no language, just a kind of primordial beauty. But I also felt that it was utterly contemporary and of its time, in spite of our being in the middle of a digital revolution. It felt like you were taking a stand.

Unlike Andreas Gursky for example, whom I always thought was brilliant in the way he uses digital manipulation to create photographs like one would create a painting. But you literally are putting painting and photography on a level playing field.

But let’s talk first about your current show at Sepia Eye. You have on display four different manifestations of the performative act of painting. A limited edition artist’s book, a series of Polaroids, large format prints from 8 x 10 transparencies and a video.

I want to ask you about the performance first, as it is gestational to the rest of your work. From that initial traumatic experience, you have developed a unique method of painting as performance by injecting different substances into water, from honey, egg, oil and milk to inks and paints.

I say painting because I actually paint on the water. I have many brushes, all different kinds and thicknesses and also different syringes. To be more precise, I first drop the color, previously diluted with solvent in the case of the oil paint, and then I paint with brushes on the surface of the water.

It sounds relatively simple, but I know that you’ve done a great deal of research to find the perfect chemical structure for the water to accept the fluids in a way that they would perform most compellingly. You then document the fleeting essence of these fluids in motion, in prints, books and videos. 

Actually this is the first time I have treated the water with a powder because water and oil don’t mix, and in order to facilitate my painting on the surface I had to make the water more jelly-like.

So for this project, you used only oil paint and the effects are quite different from some of your earlier works. The Polaroids and large-format prints look like aerial maps, or strange geological pools of something prehistoric. They also have the delicacy and beauty of marbleized paper.  

First of all, the very idea of using Polaroid today is nostalgic. I so remember as a child being captivated by the magic of its instantaneousness! Now it’s a virtually forgotten medium, overcome by the newer magic of the digital revolution. Are you, like Tacita Dean, taking a stand for the inherent value of analogue film and the unalloyed image of an instant in real time?

Of course there is a kind of nostalgia in the use of Polaroid, but in my case it’s not intentional. I have been using Polaroid film since I first started to record my ephemeral painting process. What is new in this show at Sepia Eye is the format. I was lucky enough to work with the Impossible Project in 2014, which revived the use of the large format 8 x 10 inch Polaroid. I started using 4 x 5 inch Polaroid film first, as I felt it made perfect sense with the action of my work. Each print is a record of a unique instant in the paint’s movement. But also, Polaroid cannot be reproduced and so the prints are a singular and real record of the painting in the exact moment the paint exists before it dissolves.

I had a more conscious feeling of nostalgia for old artisanal techniques in the making of my book. Each book was individually wrapped in linen and each page was bound by me, using a loom I made for the occasion. The book is also wrapped and tied in the traditional method historically used for illuminated manuscripts.

The book is pretty complex in its conception. It’s not just a limited edition. It’s a project of nine unique books. The first book only has two Polaroids in it, taken during a session in March. The second book has three Polaroids, taken during another session in April, and so on, until you reached the ninth book which contains ten Polaroids from the last session taken in November. It’s a crazy idea, but at the same time makes perfect sense when you think about it. The Polaroid print is unique, the moment in time that it records is unique, and so each book is unique. Together, they form a kind of gestational record of the whole project, from conception to birth! Nine months, nine books.

Yes, exactly.

Also, the way you open the book and see the Polaroids first framed behind a passpartout and then revealed when that window page is turned is very interesting. Just visually, seeing the pink of the film paper exposed is formally striking next to the monochrome of the print. But also to see the naked Polaroid like that is a way of declaring once again, that each one is unique. I can’t help but think that your knowledge of architecture contributes to the way you visualized these books as objects rather than simply enclosures for your photographs.

In general, do you think three dimensionally, or are you thinking only about what the two-dimensional photograph will end up looking like?

I love this question! To be honest I never think about what the photograph will look like. I just think about what I see while I am working. Even now with this new body of 8 x 10 inch Polaroids, I was painting with oil paint using red, blue, green and yellow but I recorded them with black and white instant film not even knowing exactly what kind of black and white grade they would be. I liked the idea that by giving the painting over to photography the work would continue to change, not just as a technique but in its color.

Transformation, illusion and movement are an integral part of my work in every sense. But I agree with you that my architectural studies have somehow influenced me in thinking three dimensionally. They’ve trained me to arrive at this kind of mental process, and I realized this even more as I started doing video installations to create an environment, a space that becomes a vessel in which the visitor is invited to enter.

Sepia Eye is at 547 West 27th Street, #608, New York, 212 967 0738

The post Painting in Water: A Studio Visit with Beatrice Pediconi appeared first on artcritical.

LESLIE WAYNE: Your new paintings are terribly funny! How refreshing to bring humor into a canon so historically laden with gravitas. Particularly since the underlying themes of your work have always been deeply psychological (not that the human mind isn’t fodder for constant hilarity).

As I understand it, there are many members of your extended family who were in the mind trade. When I look at your work of the last 15 years, I can’t help but think about the impact of that personal history, subliminal or not, on the ideas that have consistently engaged you over time, the female personae, personhood, and identity as an individual artist within the wider membership of a tribe of artists and the art world. 

You’ve said that you love Freud. But the Jungian concept of the collective unconscious immediately comes to mind when I think about how your paintings, from the three-quarter female figures of 2005 to the young women artists in their studios, which you made between 2010 and 2012, have represented the idea of a collective identity within this tribe. In your current show, you have shifted from the female personae/artist as an archetype, to the self-portrait. You, the individual, an individuated artist, in her own studio. What prompted you to make that shift?

ELENA SISTO: My father is an aeronautical engineer, which has influenced me very much. My mother is a social worker and I had an aunt and uncle who were therapists and a cousin who is a psychiatrist. The conversation in my family was oddly “psychoanalytical” — not sure how accurate that term actually is for what went on – and intellectualized. Freudian concepts were thrown around rather recklessly, I’d say, in retrospect. Consequently I had to look up Uncle (because his name was invoked so often) Sigmund for myself in order to get an idea of what he was really about.

That family experience sent me and my work on a path progressing very purposefully away from the psychoanalytic towards emotionality and the pleasure of paint, a shift from above the neck to below the neck, so to speak. I really liked Freud’s writings, especially what he wrote about humor, loss and the uncanny. He was a warm human being, I think. I was interested in Jung’s ideas as well, especially the collective unconscious, but I he wasn’t so nice.

In the long-term view, the “Girl” or “Daughter” paintings and my last show of young women artists were the anomaly. I have mostly always painted autobiographically. Those two shows were about my daughter, Clara, and the insight that observing the process of her life gave me on my own experience of adolescence and young adulthood. I wanted to go back over that period and set some things straight for myself. I was comparing her experience to mine. But I also knew that the issues were ones many young women are involved with, balancing between the public and the private, self-consciousness and the need to be seen. The bottom line is that I always seem to work from what’s right under my nose.

Humor is a way of disrupting the current order of things, touching the emotional depths and coming back up to new possibilities. My father, the engineer, has a great, dry, sense of humor. It takes a minute to realize he’s made a joke and then you can’t believe how silly it is. He was able to slip in and break up the tyranny of the psychological, thankfully.

I’m glad you found them funny, by the way.

Yes, and they’re actually funny to me in the way that you describe your father being funny. They’re kind of sly. They sneak up on you and then they continue to tickle. The extreme close-ups feel like you’re saying, “Can you believe how great that is?” But I wonder also about your father’s being an engineer and how that’s influenced the way you think about your pictures as constructions. 

I’m glad you asked that.

There are three ways. First of all, an engineer is a designer. I can remember seeing my father sit in his chair at his desk thinking for hours and hours. Just thinking. And then swiftly writing down pages of numbers and formulas on a yellow pad, a completely foreign language, with sketches. The solitariness of the pursuit. The drawing. And the experimental approach to structures.

Second, his field was flutter, of airfoils and jet engines mostly, anticipating and dealing with turbulent airflow. To me the ideas of fluid mechanics have always seemed analogous to the movement of form and paint in the space of a picture: the effects of compression, expansion and temperature on flow, what happens when a passage of paint is squeezed by the forms on either side of it, or when those forms let up and allow expansion, rhythm, speed and momentum. Those things all relate to ideas of plasticity in painting and drawing. He doesn’t necessarily agree by the way.  But that’s ok.

Finally, the far out weirdness of some of his inventions, the willingness to really go out on a limb is like an artist.

Hmm. Cubism would be the most obvious analogy to an experimental approach to structures, and your work certainly takes many cues from that period of Modernism. Whereas your interest in the fluid mechanics of material feels completely Post-modern – a passion for the inherent thingness of paint and how it behaves as separate from the image. Using oil and water based paint together seems like a way for you to achieve a sensuality that is both mechanically challenging and delicious to behold, but never at the expense of the picture. In other words, your technique does not hold the image hostage to its materiality, which is hard to do. 

But let’s get back to the space in your paintings. Unlike standard Cubism, or say, reverse perspective in the works of Mernet Larsen and Scott Grodesky (both recently the subject of discussion over Facebook by two spaceshifters in their own work, David Brody and Alexi Worth) your space seems to come out of the flat world of cartoons. Your space is very shallow and in some cases feels like it’s pressed right up against the surface. In “Couch” it’s almost as if the space in the painting and all the objects in it, were painted originally in the round – literally bent around a tube – and then splayed out flat on a table. SPLAT! In “Splurt” the hand holding the paint tube (which itself has a picture of a hand holding a paint tube or some sort of jar on the front) and the paint that’s being squeezed out of it, have nowhere to go but right up against the camera lens. IN YOUR FACE! But in spite of the lack of room to move, your pictures feel neither aggressive nor claustrophobic. On the contrary, they are filled with light and air and joy, which I believe has a lot to do with your palette. Can you talk about that? 

Cubism has been quite important to me. I see it as the last great innovation in pictorial structure. The concepts of Cubism are extremely provocative. They open up a huge amount of freedom to paint what, where, how and when you want, not to mention painting what is otherwise unseen. I don’t think we’ve played this out yet by any means. Alexi is a great example of someone taking advantage of those freedoms, as are Carroll Dunham, Judith Linhares, Katherine Bradford, Tom Burckhardt, Elliot Green. Dana Schutz’s work has become very Cubist recently. I would say all these people are working in a classical Cubist painting space. It’s the imagery, the content and the authors that are different. They may disagree.

I don’t exactly think of my work as coming out of cartoon space or as flat, unless you are calling “compressed” “flat”. Because there’s flat “flat” too. I think of the space as compressed and the imagery influenced by cartoons. The Post Modern element is in the imagery.

And I think one of the best examples of the compression and expansion I was referring to would be Morandi. The rest you describe better than I probably could. But if you think of Morandi, Matisse, Picabia, Picasso, Guston, they all were involved with these issues.

I do want my painting to move forward from the canvas and I feel like I am only beginning to understand color. It’s so powerful all on it’s own and there’s a great deal of emotion in it.

Getting away from the city makes all the difference. Where the air is cleaner, color is pure energy. In the city it seems to be more of an attribute of something else.

Everyone’s sense of color is so intuitive, even if they’ve studied color theory. I have a friend who has the weirdest palette and I finally asked him one day what he based his color choices on, and he told me that he was color blind to red. He saw all reds as grays. That’s an extreme case. But beyond the technical optics of color and light, there’s no denying the intense emotional power of color. I think color can function as a reflection of one’s internal make up and history as well. What’s bred in the bone. I never studied color, and so my color sensibility is completely informed by having grown up on the West Coast. The Pacific Ocean to me just seems to fill the sky with more lumens! So I understand how environment can deeply affect your work. So do you generally prefer to work upstate, or is this something specific to these new paintings? How does being in the country influence your process?

I love being upstate because I can forget about everything and just work. I feel like I am in love with where I am and I am working all the time up there even when I am not painting. People are more casual. There’s more elbowroom. I have great neighbors. Everything is good to look at. We’re surrounded by animals. The animals are intense! I can see things more clearly. I do need to bring the paintings down here for a little reality check. I can begin to believe they will make themselves up there or that everything is good. But most of the paintings in the show were painted up there at least in part.

Surprisingly, my dog and studio mate, Busby, prefers the NYC studio. Mostly because he has the perfect place to bask in the sun here and get rainbows scattered all over him, my little sybarite. I keep prisms in the windows everywhere.

Prominent in this group of new paintings are your hands — swatting flies, cradling Busby, clutching a bowl of salad while painting, squeezing out a tube of color, and of course, forever holding your brushes. Was that an intentional theme or did you just find yourself subliminally coming back to the one tool that forever connects your heart and mind to the muscle memory of making pictures?

I decided to crop in on the figure and lose the head for a while because the head implies consciousness and then suddenly the viewer is thinking about what the painting is thinking. The face can suck up all the meaning out of the rest of the picture and make it too specific. I want the painting to be about what I feel so I concentrate on other parts of the (my) body that are more available for identification. In fact, the plane is often completely identified with my body.

The hands function very much like the head without that extra degree of specificity, which can send the entire picture off in a narrative direction or turn the figure into an object. I don’t paint narrative. I’m much more interested in the emotionality, the abstract level of the work, the paint and light. That said, I am always trying to bring the head back in but in a more dynamic way. Or maybe I should say less dynamic.

They are amazingly successful at attaining a perfect tension between emotionality, conceptual rigor and technical light-footedness. Then there is the subject of the artist in her studio, which has been a subject of fascination for generations. How do you see your work in the context of that history? Or does it even matter to you?

Thank you! I totally see my work in that context and I keep it around me in the form of reproductions. I’ve thought long and hard about what I want to put into other people’s lives and what I have to offer. Since the studio is what I know best at this point, that is what I am painting. I think people are very interested in artists and artists are interested in each other. The different states of being in the studio, the sense of suspension and potential, making your own rules, the cooperation between forms, the ability to be your own best judge, the sensuality of it — how can you go wrong?

The post “The Solitariness of the Pursuit”: A Studio Visit with Elena Sisto appeared first on artcritical.

I first met Claude Simard in 1989, a year before I joined the gallery, when it was on the second floor of 560 Broadway. He was a strapping, beautiful and exotic looking man, like some sort of First Nations prince. Over the 24+ years I have known Claude, three qualities have come to identify him most profoundly in my mind: connoisseurship, generosity and passion.

About his connoisseurship. Claude had an extraordinary eye that was supported by a deep intellect, an extremely wide base of knowledge and catholic tastes. He travelled often and far, seeking out art and artifacts for the gallery and for himself, as he was voracious collector of everything from antique Indian jewelry and African mud-cloths, to modern and contemporary art. He and Jack shared a deep love for the formal qualities in a work of art that make it above all, a thing of beauty to behold. As a fine artist, his own work was highly intellectual and conceptually based, but always formally rigorous, exquisitely crafted and beautiful to look at. His eye helped trail-blaze the gallery program, which over the years grew and expanded to reflect a deep appreciation for cultures beyond the Western contemporary cannon, and a preternatural instinct for risks worth taking.

As a person, Claude was exceptionally generous — generous with his time, with his support and with his honesty. Studio visits with him could sometimes be brutal. He was a man of little words, but when he spoke, you knew exactly what he liked and didn’t like. If he knew you were developing a new idea or direction in your work, he would send you a book or give you a piece of art from one of his travels that he thought would inspire you. Some years ago when the Gallery had several artists represented in the Venice Biennale, Claude said to me, “Come with us. You should be part of the ‘international blah blah’.” This cracked me up of course, because it expressed with good humor and clarity his attitude about the contemporary art scene. He knew it was important to be an artist with international reach, but he also understood much of the blah blah that inevitably came with it. I remember being reticent about all the socializing I’d have to do if I went with them, and then being both irritated and greatly relieved when he and Jack went to absolutely no parties. Not out of disdain, but because they worked so hard engaging during the day that all they wanted to do at night was have a good meal and go to bed. On further reflection, this seemed to me an eminently reasonable plan of action.

As for passion, the depth of Claude’s passion seemed almost without bounds. Everything he did was ardent. He took tremendous risks, the limits of which exceeded what most others would consider normal. For the Gallery, those risks more often than not paid off extraordinary dividends. For himself, they seemed driven by an insatiable hunger. When Claude decided to get tattooed, he tattooed his body from heel to neck in virtually one fell swoop. It was an extravagant act that turned his very self into a veritable work of art. His voracious collecting had that same level of hunger and aspect of pathos, almost as if he needed to surround himself with objects that could hold the secret to happiness and fulfillment.

One cannot judge for another what constitutes fulfillment. But I think it’s safe to say that Claude lived a life of extraordinary richness and depth, and that he pursued his passions without reserve. Not many of us can claim that accomplishment, and in that sense his life, while cut short, was well lived. I feel lucky to have known him.

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