BRENDA ZLAMANY: At first it would seem that our work doesn’t have much in common, but then I read about your process, how you rely on layering and how you do the final layers very quickly. That’s similar to the way I work. I start with a very labor-intensive under-painting, which is more of an illustration and then obliterate it with various layers of tinted glazes until it becomes art. Toward the end it’s a risky business because I have to be willing to sacrifice the image. Do we have something in common in terms of process?

MARY JONES: The compelling difference is that you define your initial image as something that isn’t art. I don’t. It’s all art, it’s all of equal value to me. The painting may not be working at times but going through that process and experience is important to me. I work on a piece repeatedly until I find some semblance of form. I’m looking for something new, but something I recognize.

In Bridges for Hedda Sterne and Hover the scale is very specific to the roller that you’re using, and I see traces of symbols from earlier paintings. There’s a lot of stuff obliterated. Are there hidden images behind these roller marks?

When I use a roller it has a motion and a weight that’s specific to the tool, and an extension of my body. I want it to be physical. It’s a form of drawing, and it’s also working to cover plenty of process history. I’m consciously using my biography in this new work, I’ve been revisiting my past and these paintings reinterpret and recontextualize images from earlier pieces as a way to begin.

Looking at the painting, Hover, which is obviously painted with a roller, I’m thinking that anybody who’s started to paint a room is going to have that kind of gesture, especially if you’re not professional and you’re rolling every which way, but on the other hand it’s also a very complicated atmospheric moment. It’s like you’re painting light but you’re also just priming a wall, so there’s this tension between the atmospheric, romantic landscape and this utilitarian thing.

I hope so. I want it to have that edge, something ethereal rooted in the every day. I like that the roller signifies a kind of erasure, a fresh start, and also speaks to all the construction that goes into my work, while still functioning as a tool for gesture.

Also in Hover, I am reminded of Mark Rothko. Is this an accidental Rothko? But the light is very Frederic Edwin Church and there are so many other possible references, you could even see a Winslow Homer seascape in it. It’s the most representational of the paintings in the show. Maybe because there is a horizon, it seems to reference landscape. Bridges refer to landscape too. In these later paintings are you turning to landscape?

I’m not really interested in landscape. I don’t mean to shut you down with that comment, but if we went out to the beach to paint on an observational excursion, I’d be painting the people and not the waves. My work is much more about movement and consciousness, and although a sense of place may be a part of that, it’s not specific terrain. Hover is one of the last paintings made for the show, and began with colors from Giorgio Morandi, soft greys and pinks. But now the blues and whites could evoke the American West, and the skies of Georgia O’Keeffe. The title could bring Rothko to mind, it has a duality of forms in tension with one another that’s similar to his paintings.

How did you come up with the title for the painting, Bridges for Hedda Sterne?

The “Abstract Expressionist New York” show at MOMA in 2010 included Hedda Sterne, and she had this amazing painting, a spray painted Brooklyn Bridge that looked like it could have been painted yesterday. I liked the bold optimism of the work, and found it so embracing of industrial NYC and urban life at the time. As this painting progressed, it seemed structural to me, and I like the metaphor of a bridge as a connection, to a woman artist of a previous generation and to the bravado of American Post-war painting.

The stencils collaged onto the works on paper are literally from past work, so once you use them up, you won’t have them anymore. Because there are a limited number of these stencils, using them this way must be a big decision. In these pieces, the stencils are at the end of their lives. It’s like a eulogy. You’re putting your past work into your current work. Cleaning your attic in some weird way… Taking stock… How does that fit in with your life?

It’s like those dreams where you’re searching through a house and you unexpectedly find a spare room. One thing that’s hard about giving up the stencils is that they’re equally beautiful on both sides. I have some rules for using them, and one is not to paint or change them. I’m trying to keep them as unselfconscious as they were when they were tools. The stencil motifs are often derived from lotus forms, an image that speaks to a kind of evolution and transformation, but here it does become finite. I like that they look so old and worn, which of course, they are.

I see that spraying through stencils combined with pouring paint continues in these small collage paintings, but with added elements. How did you apply the feathers? It’s an interesting surface.

It’s feathered wallpaper, and they’re real feathers. I was doing some faux painting on a Peter Marino jobsite, and he was having a powder room wallpapered in this material. I’d never seen anything like it. I took all the scraps I could get that day, and then after having them lying around my studio for months I started putting them into paintings and now I’ve made a series around them. It’s an outlandishly expensive wallpaper and I won’t be getting any more. I find it beautiful but a little disturbing.

What I like about these pieces is that they have a kind of erotic vulnerability. And I see this throughout your work. There’s something particularly tentative and tender about the way these shapes are hitting there. It’s a very specific mood that’s distinctive to your work. Something that you’re saying. They’re intimate pieces that don’t overpower you, they subtly communicate with you.

They’re very much about imagination. I’ve been looking at a lot of Greek Cycladic sculpture and Miro paintings on sandpaper. They begin on the floor with splatters and pours and evolve slowing through something like a Rorschach experience. The painting titled Lion reminded me of how animal forms are found in constellations, which I think of as another kind of abstraction, points and fragments connected into form. The small scale is like the page of a book, maybe an ancient manuscript, and there’s gold and silver leaf applied.

[Jones and Zlamany then headed down to the Chelsea Arts Building, where Mary Jones’s studio has been located for 20 years. Paintings in every stage of completion line the walls and floor. Stencils and various other source materials cover the walls.]

These paintings are very different from the paintings in the show, are they finished? It looks like you’ve got X-rays of a body. Can we talk about what’s going on in them?

These are made from my late mother-in-law’s X-rays. When Ross, my husband, was cleaning out her apartment he brought these home for me to use.

Wait, is that her pelvis? Is that her ribcage? Is she still with us? Is she dead? This is really scary… And why did she have so many X-rays? Was she ill? Was she a hypochondriac?

We don’t know, and now she’s dead. I think every time she went to the doctor and complained she was given an X-ray. They’re all from the ’80s, and the films look so fluid, it’s a kind they don’t make anymore. Maybe she just did what she was told.

There’s a history of mother-in-law paintings. Larry River’s Double Portrait of Berdie (1955) comes to mind. What was your relationship with your mother-in-law? Does it mean anything to you that it’s her, or is it purely visual?

She was a beautiful woman well into her 80s. As she aged she reminded me of the way Paul Cadmus looked when he was old, she had very regal bone structure. She was like a character in a Dawn Powell novel, and late in life a terrible alcoholic. They’re clearly portraits, of her, of me, and of lots of stuff between. And like the work in the show, using them is a way to incorporate my biography.

One of the most interesting things that I’ve uncovered about you today is your relationship to the figure and these X-rays take it to a whole other level. These are portraits and they’re really aggressive, which is not what I was expecting. There’s a lot of anxiety in the heads. They’re not calm. They’re challenging and have a lot of pain in them… It’s a side of your work that I didn’t see in the exhibition. How did you make the faces? Do you paint on top of the X-rays?

That image was initially formed from pouring bleach and acetone on an X-ray, and this unsettling face came out of it. I photographed it with my phone and then put it under the sink to stop the process, and to my horror the image washed away, so now I use the photo, and paint on top of it.

Do you relate your work to the work of Sigmar Polke? It seems your work shares the alchemical properties: the way he used chemicals and chemical reactions. Also there’s the mixing of abstract and figurative imagery, layering and reaction, hallucinations and dream images…

He’s so important to me, because of his attitude as much as anything. He moves through so many materials and ideas, there’s a voraciousness in his work towards subject matter and experience. He’s kind of a beacon.

This one has a skull in profile in it. Earlier we were talking about Renaissance portraiture. Do you want to go into that further? They have a quiet dignity that reminds me of Piero della Francesca’s Portrait of Battista Sforza (ca. 1465–72) or Botticelli’s Portrait of a Young Woman (ca. 1480–85).

The profile, and the scale of the profile to the composition is typical of Renaissance portraiture. In terms of a portrait, it’s interesting to show the inside of someone first.

This one has stencils in it too. It as though you’ve dressed the figure in one of your stencils from past works. Are you going to start dressing these X-ray corpses?

I might, but this stencil is special, it’s a laser cut stencil given to me by a student, it’s her design, and now she walks through the painting too. It functions as a skirt or lingerie, and makes it notably feminine. It’s like she’s in a mirror or dressing room.

I’ve never seen a head “appear” as a chemical reaction. In a way you’ve brought someone to life, which is what portraits do. Do you think of yourself as a portraitist? It would not be stretching it. Is this a direction that you plan to continue?

I think I’m responding to the materials first, and I don’t see myself as a portraitist. It might be finite with these X-rays, like my mother-in-law.

Brenda Zlamany is an artist working in Brooklyn, NY

The post X-Ray Vision: Mary Jones discusses her work with Brenda Zlamany appeared first on artcritical.

The church bells chime on the hour and Raftery is pressed for time. At completion, the show will consist of 12 16-inch tondo paintings and a portfolio of 12 earthenware plates with transfer prints from Raftery’s engravings. Each plate depicts a solitary, middle-aged man, (the artist) working with great determination in an ornamental garden, chronicling every month of the year and his corresponding duties in the garden from inception to fruition, decline to dormancy. In January we see him in his bed reading seed catalogs, in March he is watering, in April digging out the lettuce bed. Cut to November and he’s taking out the dahlia tubers. Lastly, in December, he’s standing in the snow contemplating the next year’s planting.

The depth and wit of the narrative are conveyed with concise lines on luminous glazed and dynamically shaped plates. These will be displayed against thematically-coordinated wallpaper so that a complete world is presented through mastery of narrative detail and marvelous skill. There is both satire and profundity, and the lone gardener’s Promethean toil in his small but precious plot reminds us of our own struggle against time and the elements. But while contemplating the smallness and beauty of our single lives, the appreciative viewer might not fully grasp the extensive process behind this artistry; the number of people and inventions cultivated for this project: that ink was formulated, ceramic glazes invented, original plate shapes created and named, and wallpaper designed and printed. And then, of course, there’s the work of tending the garden, and it’s most important collaborator, the artist’s mother.

MARY JONES: You’ve said your title, “The Autobiography of a Garden” refers to Gertrude Stein’s The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, because in that work Stein uses Toklas’s voice to describe their shared lives. To me, there many Alices in this project, including the garden itself, which belongs to your mother. Unlike the garden, she remains unseen throughout the project. What’s the relationship?

ANDREW RAFTERY: I started the garden for her, as a subject for her work. She’s a wonderful artist and she makes expressionist paintings of the flowers. At first, I just planted things I knew she would like to paint. She’s done so many paintings year after year of the garden, and it’s through her work that I remember and see it, more vivid than any photograph could ever be. In a way, her work completes the project and that’s always in the background. Even though she doesn’t appear in the work, she’s always there, and the sweetness of the time we’ve we’ve had together really comes through, because it’s her garden, too, and she absolutely adores it.

I hear she’s not alone in her appreciation?

Sometimes my mother wakes up in the morning to see people touring the back yard. Providence is a very friendly place and doing a garden in a neighborhood like this becomes a very public practice, something you do as much for your neighbors as for yourself. People change their route from work so they can see what’s going on in the garden. They’re always calling out to me from their cars and making comments to me as they drive by. When they see me out there with the easel it’s especially fascinating to them.

Your earlier work always took place indoors, in upscale malls where strangers evaluate each other and interact during commerce. In “Suit Shopping” and “Open House,” you critiqued social status through invented narratives transpiring in these semi-public spaces; the prurient curiosity of potential buyers at an open house, or the sly flirtations and homoeroticism of a man measured while suit shopping. But in “The Autobiography of a Garden,” you’ve moved outside, to a personal place of your own design, and you’re the only person depicted.

I think for the first time I wanted to put the lens of critique entirely on myself, and what’s emerged from this new work is a different kind of emotional tone. I’ve always thought of my work as satirical, but I don’t know if this project is anymore, it takes the risk of having a charge that’s a little bit deeper, a different kind of theme to it, that’s surprised me. I’ve always appeared in my pieces as a kind of witness, to show that this is a world that I know and whatever critique is in that world can be directed at me, too. I think the way I do it is fairly eccentric and relates very much to the way I make my art, the kind of planning and imagination that I bring to the garden overlaps with what goes into planning a print or any of my work, and it’s unlike anything else I’ve done before.

One of the most striking things upon entering your studio are all these models that you create for observational painting, part of your classical approach. Do you consider them artworks?

I don’t know yet, they’re so personal, after all, it’s me naked. I’ve shown the models that I made for “Open House,” but I’m not sure about these yet. Actually, the thing about them is compared to my other work they’re a bit provisional, I only take them as far as I need for the drawings.

I enjoy how they’re so loose and have so much vitality.

That’s what makes them so much fun to draw. The great thing about the models is they give me distance both from myself as a subject, but also the physical distance that I need to take from the figure, which is very different from anything I could do otherwise. It really helps.

Do you undergo the same process for every single image? Did you have to make a model for the painting of you in bed?

There are nine images with models. Actually, for an image in bed, I stuffed the bed with a dummy of myself which is the creepiest photo, but that’s how I did the drapery on the bed.

So you work from a photograph to make the models? Who takes the photos?

I do it myself. The photos in the garden are very specific to establish the scale.

Working from the photograph to the model, then from the model to painting allows a lot of slippage and infusion of expression, a facture that’s outside the photographic, or realism. Are you purposely creating a character for yourself?

The issue of self-consciousness is really central for me, to try to create figures that are not seemIngly conscious of being watched or posing. It’s very important to the tone of the narrative itself. If I can achieve that, the work becomes less theatrical.

Is the characterization revealing for you?

That’s why I do it. Here’s’ a project that’s so super-crafted, so super planned, and then there’s this by-product that surprises me.

What is important to you about your extensive process?

I’m inventing these images, they haven’t existed before, and as I go through each step the image becomes more believable to me, and more memorable. When I think about visual narrative, I think about what’s possible to show in a handmade still image that’s separate from a film or novel, and depicting very particular external details to reveal character and content is something I’ve always been interested in, and what led me to Stein’s writing. One of the things about engraving is that there’s no fudging allowed, you have to know where every single mark is going to be, so I need to know my subject thoroughly. I begin with the form of the body in sculpture, insert that into a grisaille painting of the landscape done from life to get the tonal structure and detail, and then I trace that onto acetate for the engraving.

Is the particular time of day relevant to each piece?

Yes. Each one tries to use the particular light of that time of year. For example, In February I’m using the kind of light that comes into my kitchen from a particular angle that is the never the same in other months. There’s a washed out light in August, the dog days of an overcast day. These things are very important to me.

It’s significant that you’ve returned to painting after such a long hiatus. What brought it back?

I can clearly remember when I stopped painting. It was during on my first sabbatical in 2001, I was working on a self-portrait my kitchen amongst the transferware. It was an oil painting and I was detailing the images on the plates. And I just thought, “I’m so sick of this.” That painting remains unfinished. At that point I turned to the engravings for “Suit Shopping,” I was so happy to be working with engraving because it had a natural simplicity to it, a necessary stylization that didn’t allow for all that detail. So, it was with trepidation that I turned to painting again. It was through the back door, in a way because it’s in black and white Flashe, and very close to what I do in drawing. I thought that this would actually help, as there’s a limitation to the kind of modeling I could do, and I wouldn’t be tempted to go as far as I would in oil painting. But the funny thing is that it’s come full circle. Just in June, I finished the kitchen painting, and as I sat there working on it, I thought this was the same painting I was doing when I decided to quit painting because there I am doing a self-portrait of myself in my bathrobe surrounded by all this transferware. I think it’s exciting that I picked up where I left off and found a new way to make it satisfying. When I quit painting, it was because I felt the drive towards a greater and greater verisimilitude and realism, a kind of smoothing out, which felt like a conservative impulse. I need to make it clear that my images are constructed fictions.

The transferware has made a transition from the background of your kitchen to the actual ground for the engraving. You and your partner, Ned Lochaya, are avid collectors. What’s your attraction?

Transferware for me has been a lifelong thing. As a child, my family had a set of Johnson Brothers pink transferware and I really loved it. I loved setting the table with it because there’s nothing like eating dinner and looking at a picture. I remember I took that set with me to graduate school, that’s how much I liked it. Then, once while admiring the big 19th-century brown transferware on the dinner table of print historian Richard S. Field, he said, “You know these are really prints.” That was a revelation to me. I started to think of transferware differently. Shortly thereafter, Ned started accumulating a collection that is now at about 1,500 pieces. That’s a lot of anything, but we live with it and use it all the time, and I also look at it as a print collection. Our collection goes to about 1850, but there are other artists who’ve done printed pottery in my collection, like Claire Leighton, who’s been very important to me.

Can you talk about the shapes and designs of your plates?

Of course, the big question for someone who’s never designed ceramics before, is what are you going to use? At first, I explored the idea of finding a potter who would design the shapes for me or use things that already existed. But then I saw that I could use paper, which I know really well, to invent my designs. So I started to play with tag board, and by using something that straightforward I could come up with many different solutions. It was so generative, I could refer to Victorian forms, which like mine are also often based on 6, 12, or 24 parts, or I could just use geometry to develop brand new shapes.

And once you had the design, how did you make the plates?

The pottery production has been an absolute saga in itself, and fortunately for me, Larry Bush, professor of ceramics here at RISD, has taken the project on. He really likes the plate shapes, which is a true compliment to me, and he figured out the production method, which is to use a hydraulic press with two part plaster molds. He also invented a special clay for the project, made entirely out of American materials. It’s a beautiful white earthenware, and people who know these things find it to be very close to a beautiful white 18th clay that Wedgwood once made, and he came up with the creamy clear glaze. He’s been super involved every step of the way.

And the engraving?

Just how to get an engraving onto the ceramic was also a dilemma. Millions and millions of pieces were produced in the 19th century in England, but that industry is really gone. I had really hard time finding any concrete factual information about the process.

I’m very surprised this information is lost, were you?

Wedgwood and Spode are closed, that industry is gone. There’s one factory left as a kind of heritage thing from what I understand. Industrial techniques are so vulnerable to loss.

Studio techniques are constantly being taught to new people through art schools and atelier practices, but when you’re dealing with assembly lines and everybody just knowing a little piece of the process, and with proprietary methods and materials, once it’s gone it’s very difficult to reconstruct. I called my friend in England, Paul Scott, author of “Ceramics and Print,” the first edition of his book has a list of resources, and from this list, I started calling people in England. They would say “Well, we don’t do that anymore,” or “We all just all got fired.” I did a lot of research on old patents and also on contemporary materials. We ended up making our own inks, and instead of printing on tissue paper like they did in the past, we used decal paper that’s used for digital transfers. The process brings together 19th-century technology and 21st-century technology.

When did you conceive of the wallpaper to put behind the plates?

When you do an 8-year project, you have many opportunities to talk about it as a work in progress. I knew I didn’t want ornamental borders on the plates, like traditional transferware, but I did understand that these borders function as an opportunity to comment on what’s in the interior. I started thinking about a way to extend the work and began making pattern motifs based on the garden. I looked at an old style of wallpaper, a French style called “Dominos” which allows a patterned ensemble to be created from nine-by-12-inch sheets. Mine is similar and done in letterpress. Doing the wallpaper is what encouraged me to also make the ornamental cartouche for the back stamps with the title and the month of each plate. I’ve always been so dedicated to representation, and working with patterns and geometry has opened up a new world for me.

How did the fanciful names for the plate shapes come about?

The thing I didn’t know about ceramics is that once we press a plate, we have to spend at least half an hour trimming, sanding, and refining each one. When you do 1,500 of them you have to have, first of all, a lot of people to help, and along with the labor and time involved, an intimacy with each shape develops, and all of the forms got names along the way. Larry called the October shape “Fox Points,” because it reminded him of the landscape of the Fox Point neighborhood of Providence, but to me it suggested Chrysthanthemums. The May shape has this sort of lobed form, which is definitely our lettuce shape. I think the most poetic name is for the November shape. One of the assistants began to call it “Swan Wings,” and I think when you look at it just knowing that emphasizes the poignant quality of the waning light of November.

As in your earlier work, time is very specific in the garden, but your character is hard to place. Why?

One thing in my earlier prints that I was really trying to avoid was that sense of reflecting American regional arts and regionalism. That’s why I took on that extreme quotation of 17th-century engraving techniques. Don’t get me wrong, I love American regionalism, I grew up surrounded by it in Washington D.C., but I felt it might be dated, it’s a movement that went out by 1938, and it’s so discredited now, But in this new work, I wasn’t trying to mask it, I really went for it. With the house being from 1929, the way I dress and with the hats I wear it could conceivably be 1945, and then there’s something about the historical character of the neighborhood, and even the style of the garden, that taken all together implies this broad swath of periods. That kind of regionalism was brought into this project, and it’s very new.

Are there political or personal implications for this?

An artist I have been thinking about recently is Grant Wood, and the tragedy of Grant Wood is that he was in the closet. In some ways, Wood’s Daughters of Revolution or Parson Weems’ Fable, are very gay works with a pointed critique from an outsider’s perspective. Some unbelievably humorous things are carefully placed in the paintings, such as the transfer-printed Blue Willow teacup held by one of the aged daughters that is our key to understanding her pretensions. But in some cases, such as the weird interpretation of the George Washington cherry tree myth in the Parson Weems picture, Wood’s meaning remains ambiguous, as if there were some things he could not make explicit. As with Wood, you could see my work as “very gay” in its sensibilities and the avocations depicted, especially in the case of the extended self-portrait in “The Autobiography of a Garden.” But because I don’t have to take on the pressures and prejudices faced by Wood, and have the privilege of being open about who I am, I’m free to use the conventions of American Regionalism to create new subjects. Maybe I’m a little like Grant Wood if he’d been out.

September 10 to November 5, 2016 at 515 West 26th Street, between 10th and 11th avenues, info@ryanleegallery.com

The post The Autobiography of a Garden: Andrew Raftery in Conversation with Mary Jones appeared first on artcritical.

Rhodes, who began his career in London, committed to New York almost two years ago after years of painting, exhibiting and critical writing in Berlin, Barcelona, and other European cities. His criticism appears regularly at artcritical and The Brooklyn Rail, and he’s also written for Artforum. I met with him at the gallery to discuss the developments in his work over the last few years.

MARY JONES: You’ve titled your show “Between the Days,” which is the also title of one of the paintings, the others remaining untitled, with the date and city of completion listed on every painting. What’s the reference?

DAVID RHODES: The title refers obliquely to time and recall, between one moment and another. And also, as the paintings quite often are completed in a day, between one painting and the next and the next.

You share a number of things with On Kawara: a painting completed in a single day, the use of black, frequent travel, and a consistency of process from painting to painting. Do you feel a connection to his work?

Rhodes: I do feel identification with his making a painting that is clearly about the day it was made. For me, that moment in time is important to acknowledge, and for years I’ve listed the specific date and city on every canvas. I don’t work on pieces simultaneously, so it’s a means of marking time, and although the paintings aren’t about that specific day and place, they’re subject to those circumstances, and because I’ve moved around so much, it’s important for me to keep this in mind.

I found Kawara’s Guggenheim exhibition last year very moving. It was interesting to consider the choices he made in painting the numerals and letters, which seemed to change over time, and in each painting one could see he was making very careful decisions about how they looked. There was a format, but in that format the paintings didn’t remain the same or become stereotypical. Inside the box made for each painting, he always put a sheet of newspaper from that day, so they must be intended to act as metonymic as well. Although they might read as formal and neutral, they’re rooted, both conceptually and by process, in everyday life. There’s a connection to mortality in this passage of time. I can identify with this, in and out of the studio.

One thing that’s very different from Kawara is the scale of your new paintings. How has scale changed your work?

The scale alters the way it’s possible to relate to the painting physically and conceptually. Because the space of the painting has become large enough to enter imaginatively, it makes a very different physical and emotional impact. It’s not a question of more complexity so much as a different kind of intimacy.

Could you describe your process?

The actual process of making contributes to how the paintings appear. There’s a degree of given structure. I make them in a way that allows movement and spontaneity, in that speed — the creation of circumstance — rather like a dance movement, creates something through the way it happens. The way the paintings are taped allows for each section to be made consecutively without too much deliberation. The vertical lines are different widths, but they’re always vertical, and from one section to the next go in opposite directions, like cross hatch. They are usually, but not always, done from left to right, and as each section is painted, the tape is removed, and in response to seeing that the next section is made. There’s no planning it all out beforehand. It’s a question of responding to the relationships as they appear. The reason for this apparent economy is that it’s possible to make comparisons to the repetitions and differences in each painting and from one to the next.

You’ve written about the work of Amy Feldman, and there are some interesting comparisons to be made. Her paintings are also very immediate, spontaneous, and done in a day. Feldman is well known for having many “rehearsal” drawings, a preparatory practice on paper before she approaches the canvas. Is this part of your process?

No, kind of the opposite. It’s important not to know what the outcome might be, and the tension it produces is transferred to the work. It’s a case of making these paintings in the moment and not knowing. But, because of the economy of means and the repetitions, a kind of armature is created for the differences to establish themselves. It’s those differences, the breadth of different emotional values or different formal incidents that makes them interesting. I paint myself out of the paintings.

Feldman is known to sharply edit her work, to allow failure into her process, as revisions aren’t possible. Do your paintings ever fail? Are you able to make revisions?

They do fail, but not so often, and there is a possibility for revision, though in a very limited way. It’s usually an adjustment rather than a wholesale change. If there’s a line that seems superfluous or a transition of space that doesn’t feel interesting, I can paint it out, and hope that it works. But I accept the accidents or failures; it’s a case of “Fail, fail again, fail better,” as Beckett said.

The color black has so many connotations; urban life and industrialization, as well as transcendence and negation. Are you using black metaphorically?

Not exactly, but the viewer will project what they will, and that’s fine. Before these paintings I was using a full range of color, and I felt the relationships that color offered, and its relationship to structure was such a subject in itself. I wanted to work in a way in which color wasn’t about its relationship with other colors. Even though I use black as a color, it’s more about light. In the current Philip Guston exhibition of paintings from 1957 to 1967, he reduced the color to black adjusted by white, so producing grey, and he talked about not wanting to use seductive qualities of color, but to work with light. I feel similarly.

Malevich formulated the black square to signify an absolute rejection of any possibilities for pictorial representation in favor of pure expression. Do you identify with this kind of abstraction?

Indirectly. The paintings have forms in them, but they’re really about relationships, either in time, or in space. They’re about the disjunction of different spaces and different moments and how these impact emotionally, and the implications of this intellectually, and how it might factor in a world view. But these issues arise because of the painting, rather than the other way around.

Can you describe this further?

I feel as if I follow the paintings. They’re not describing ideas that I have a priori, or illustrating something I desire to manifest through painting. I feel that they amount to a dialog, and in this they are smarter than I am. They’re not an expression of my ego: they’re interesting for me; they move me. I find the paintings of interest so I make more, and they surprise me. The relationships they establish and the resonance of the day-to-day world of abstract ideas are also very interesting. The issues come through the painting. They produce a philosophical position and so also reflect one.

Is it important to you that there be a feeling of urgency in your work?

It seems necessary. It’s how the paintings feel. With a different desire they’d be decorative.

How so?

They’d be passive. They could be viewed as decorative if it were in a violent way, as the decorative aspects of Matisse have been described, there’s pleasure, but there’s an urgency also.

The surfaces of your paintings are very straightforward, there’s no enhancement. It’s a surface that identifies its elements; it doesn’t transcend its materials, it underscores them. Is this in the service of immediacy?

Yes. It’s a very specific surface. It’s neither stained for layered, it’s somewhere in-between. It’s a resistant kind of surface, and it’s not a surface that has a kind of “drama.” My paintings don’t have an overt element of craft, they’re harder surfaces. They’re painted like a wall.

Is this a connection to the black paintings of Frank Stella?

When I was at art school, early on I came across a Hollis Frampton photograph of Stella kneeling in front of a painting with a house painting brush on his way to completing some rectangular concentric lines, and it made a lot of sense to me. I didn’t feel at that moment I could enter into expressionism or conceptual minimalism, there seemed to be too many assumptions that I didn’t yet connect to. But when I looked at these black paintings, they seemed to have an emotion, without relying on transcendence or a narrative. They’re pragmatic in their making, and they inspired me early on. I found myself returning to something that has a relationship to those paintings without being imitative, or admiring. My current paintings actually feel like a critique of his work, in the sense in those early black paintings, he wanted to move space out of the paintings evenly, and I would like space to be in the painting unevenly.

How does writing about art affect your practice?

It feels as if it accesses a different energy, and a different aspect of my relationship to the work that I see. In the craft of writing, ideas are produced. Actually, in much the same way as in painting, something takes over to a degree. In writing about say a group of paintings by another artist, unexpectedly different ideas connect, different associations are made that couldn’t happen any other way. It happens to a degree with conversational thinking, but in the isolated form of writing a text, it’s surprising how things occur. The craft and process of writing gives something back. It’s expansive. Also, it’s political in that you choose what you write about and you can support art that you think is worthwhile, neglected or misrepresented. I gave a lot of talks in galleries and museums in the UK before leaving for Berlin because people were speaking about artists I respected in ways that I thought were unacceptable, artists like Blinky Palermo and Mary Heilmann. Their work was important to me and it needed more than just some facts reiterated about the work for the audience.

Tell me what are you reading at the moment?

The collected poems of Elizabeth Bishop; I’m always returning to Proust, and Light Years (1975) by James Salter. I’m reading this last one particularly slowly because I like it so much. His writing is so beautiful, and there’s something about the style that’s moving and provocative. Economical, but also endlessly sensual and thoughtful.

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