Monday, October 17, 2011

KATIE BELL

Marble Mountain, 38.5 x 51.5",
Acrylic and vinyl on stretched fabric, 2011





What are you working on in your studio right now?


Recently I just moved to a new studio, so I am beginning a number of projects.  I am working on a series of small paintings on plaster, tablet-like panels.  I view these paintings as a testing site.  I am thinking about ideas and combinations of material through them.  In addition to the smaller works, I have started a large wall installation that combines a number of materials in a woven-like structure that hangs off the wall.  I don’t know where this project is going yet, but it is starting to form organically- reacting to each section that came before it.  Besides these planned projects I am also making miscellaneous studies- drawings, small sculptures, and collage.  Today I have this idea to make a fish tank with no fish, more of a viewing tank for material.  That is as far as I have gotten, but we will see where it goes.  The fake material of fish tanks interests me- the fake wood, rocks, and plants that make up the environment.  I find it strangely similar to the fake materials that we surround ourselves with in homes- linoleum, vinyl, synthetics that are supposed to be stand-ins for the actual.







Brooklyn studio part of the Marie Walsh Sharpe
Art Foundation’s Space Program





Can you describe your working routine?


My working routine has also recently changed dramatically.  I moved to Brooklyn, New York and started a new job as well as a studio residency program.  I am working during the day as a carousel operator, so I work in the studio at night.  It often takes me a few hours to warm up; I usually just have to meander around a while before I get in the zone.  I go to the studio almost everyday even if it is for a short time, I feel like I just have to check in visually.  In terms of how the work progresses, I am always working on small studies and the plaster paintings.  The larger wall installations I usually work on one or two at a time.  It is good for me to have a lot of different things going so there are various types of activities.  This way when I come to the studio there is always something I can do depending on if I feel like sitting on the floor working on something small versus climbing on a ladder and drilling something into the wall.






The Remnants,7 x 11ft, Acrylic, wood, carpet, plaster,
and window blinds on wall, 2011




Can you describe your studio space and how, if at all, that affects your work?
                      
My studio space is very important to my work.  I have a lot of stuff that I surround myself with when I am working, so it is crucial for me to make the space feel like home.  My studio has a large pile of material in it that is the source of all of my work.  The stuff in the pile is like my pallet, a batch of raw material that is a source of inspiration as well as the actual stuff that goes into the work.  The pile dictates how my studio is set up because it is kept separate from where the work is made.  Material gets extracted from the pile, and then it is taken away form the pile to be further examined.  I have 2 walls in my studio that I make large wall installations on and then the other walls I hang up smaller work as well as drawings and studies.  While I work there is always music on- all kinds of music, but always loud.





paintings on plaster tablets





Tell me about your process, where things begin, how they evolve etc.

Things evolve in various ways for me.  The initial base is that I am always looking for new material for my pile.  The material is found, bought, parts, pieces, bits, old, and new.  There is no criteria except for material that interests me and that I want to look at further.  Most of the time the material stays in the pile a long time before it goes into a piece.  So, my process begins with this pile of stuff.  I often take something from the pile I want to work with and then begin to make drawings.  Once I have some sort of idea, I being to construct.  Most of the time the piece rarely sticks to any sort of plan, it changes dramatically throughout the process. 



What are you having the most trouble resolving?

I have an interest in incorporating knitted fabric into my work.  I make a lot of knit fabric on a knitting machine and haven’t yet figured out a way to incorporate that language into my work.  Right now, the knitted work stays very separate from my other work.  So, I hope eventually to figure out a way to tie it into the work in a way that makes sense.






The Samples (Installation View)
Dimensions vary, Plaster, acrylic, and foam, 2010



Sample 2, 13 x 18", Plaster, foam, and acrylic, 2010





Do you experiment with different materials a lot or do you prefer to work within certain parameters?

I experiment with different materials often; really every piece is a new experiment.  The parameters I see in the work are its relationship to the wall.  I am interested in how the work relates to the 2D world of painting.  Even though my work is very sculptural, I see the work in a stage-like viewing space where the viewer is coming at the work from a specific direction rather than the work being seen in the round.



What does the future hold for this work?

The future of the work is very unknown to me.  I think this year living in Brooklyn is going to really influence my work in new ways not yet known to me.  I suspect that the work will continue to explore the boundaries between painting and sculpture as well as my interest in home building materials relating to abstract painting.  I see my work having everything to do with abstract painting except the paint and stretcher bars.  I hope to explore this idea more.


Is there anything else you would like to add?

I just want to say thank you for this interview, it was fun talking with you about my work and process. 





The Burial (Installation View) Dimensions Variable, 2011





Thursday, October 13, 2011

PAM CARDWELL

Geo 12, oil on canvas, 24 x 24", 2010



What are you working on in your studio right now? 

Right now I am transitioning from working on a large set of drawings/paintings that I have just installed at Long Island University in Brooklyn to working for a show of oil paintings next year at the John Davis Gallery.   The restless period between projects when I pace and read a lot would be what Martha Graham has spoken of as queer divine dissatisfaction.

The installation at LIU consists of 6, 5’ x 30’ and 5’ x 20’ pieces. The gallery wall is curved and these pieces were done specifically for this wall.  They are made with parachute cloth, a traditional muralist’s media, and enamel paint from the hardware store.   This was my attempt to integrate drawing and painting.  Four of them literally wrap around the curved wall.  You can’t look at the whole thing at once.  The other two are flat on the wall.  They hark back to the sense of space and color that I found in the early Christian frescos that I was lucky enough to see in Turkey and the Republic of Georgia.   In these the sense of color is very intense, simple blocks integrated with drawing in most cases.  Every time you move your head or body you see something new. 




Can you describe your working routine?

I do not have a set routine but I am disciplined about being in the studio and working a certain amount of hours every week.  My living space is separate from my workspace so there is the matter of navigating trains in New York to get to my studio.  Generally, I work at six hour stretches four days a week.  Doing this kind of work takes mental as well as a specific kind of physical focus that is hard to articulate with words.  I generally try to swim a mile on the days I’m painting.  It’s a matter of keeping things simple and eliminating obstacles in life to get to the studio.  I don’t work to music and I don’t have a lot of visitors when I’m working. 









Can you describe your studio space and how, if at all, that affects your work?

My studio is small it is almost like an office cubicle and I have lousy light except for very early in the morning.  But I don’t let that stop me!  I just think that it is all in my mind, in my mind I can do anything, in my mind the space is huge.   For this project with the parachute cloth it was 5’ high so I literally cut the widths of it into 30’ or 20’ pieces and wrapped it around the three walls of my studio, going inside of the two corners of the room. 

When I am working on oil paintings it is very different.   I start them, put them aside sometimes for months and go back into them, it is a bit of a teaser, back and forth, back and forth for months before they can stand on their own.  I once read somewhere that Titian did this, started something worked it very quickly and put it aside for months before stopping.  My paintings each read as a whole even though I work parts of them for months. 

With this installation work on parachute cloth I did it and left it, no reworking, it was a discipline to let it go.  There was almost no reworking it either worked or it didn’t and I think in part this was a reaction to my studio situation but it was also the nature of the materials. I worked with water based enamel paint.  The texture of the parachute cloth was a bit like rice paper and the enamel paint stained it in unusual and unexpected ways.  I did work in sections on these, right to left or left to right, sometimes starting in the middle, which might make them read in a more narrative way.  This could be a result of the shape of my studio but it is probably the way I would have worked in any space.  






Installation at Long Island University, Brooklyn




Tell me about your process, where things begin, how they evolve, etc. 

I have stones and other natural objects in my studio.   Some I collected along the Black Sea in Turkey and their border with the Republic of Georgia.  Others I’ve found in the mountains in Georgia and these are very rough and geometric.  The ones on the beach are smooth and worn down.  In the Republic of Georgia you can pick up a rock and look up and there is a medieval church made of rock the same color, beautiful oranges and greens.  You go inside the church and the frescos are the same orange and green colors.   It is a strange very visceral very moving experience to see this connection between earth, paint and image. 

Back to your questions, I start in a very general way, drawing the shapes and markings on natural objects.  My paintings and drawings are built and constructed.  I like to think that I work like a novelist.  They are imaginative constructs.  They exist in my mind.  The space that they make has light and air.  Awareness of the material, its limitations, the differences in the colors, the actual stuff of the paint is a big part of them.  Psychologically I begin each one anew and this depends on experiences outside of myself.  I sit and look a lot.   I tend to make very slow deliberate decisions.  The process from start to end is different for each piece.  Cognition is a messy business.  It brings in many contradictions that are ultimately unable to be resolved or articulated with words.   I can say that as I get older the work becomes more clear. 










What are you having the most trouble resolving?

My problem is learning how to get in trouble.  Learning how to get into trouble seems like a valuable thing and I don’t think it is possible to try and resolve things troubling or problematic in the work.   Letting go in the moment, being present in the moment and letting go is probably the hardest thing to do for me and I don’t think that is about resolution.  It is about allowing.  Trouble is an odd word because what is the most trouble or problematic in the work could be the thing in the work that is the most valuable.  Trusting intuition is hard.  Trusting what can’t be said is hard.   And get into trouble in the first place is hard.   I want to learn to possess my trouble.




Do you experiment with different materials a lot or do you prefer to work within certain parameters?

Working with parachute cloth and enamel paint has been an experiment with different materials.  Working very large within a specific architectural space has been different.  Functioning within different parameters pushes me to a different place, a place where I can look and think differently.   I think in opposites, small can be large, large can be small.  It is all a matter of scale.  I tend to work smaller with oil paintings. That being said I love oil paint, the smell of it, it is very earthy stuff to me and I am looking forward to getting back to it.











What does the future hold for this work?
I hope to do more of these sorts of pieces in architectural settings.  I am looking for opportunities to write proposals for specific architectural spaces.  But for now I am looking forward to going back to oil paint and working for my show in Hudson at the John Davis Gallery next year.  The difference between large and small work could be the difference between manuscripts and frescos and I will be happy to look and think in  manuscript form for bit.   



Is there anything else you would like to add? 
Thanks




Tuesday, October 11, 2011

JACK DAVIDSON

Hey! mister sky, oil on canvas, 116 x 73 cm, 2011




What are you working on in your studio right now?

At the moment I’ve just finished preparing for a show at Pulliam Gallery in Portland, Oregon, which opens on the 2nd of November. I always find these moments difficult. After working with the show in mind for the last couple of months I find the rupture and the emptiness of the studio challenging. The options are to do nothing until I come back from the trip, or to start something so it’s waiting for me when I get back. The first choice often means simply delaying getting back into the swing of things, and the second means the work I started before I left can sometimes get sacrificed on my return.




Can you describe your working routine?

First thing I do in the morning is make coffee and take it through to the studio. I potter about, read the paper, and look at what I did the previous day. It’s that moment - which we probably all share - when things either look better or worse than I thought they were when I switched out the light the day before; when I can resume the dialogue under a different light and from a fresh point of view. Then I go for a swim, run errands, cook lunch, interact with the world. I live on Spanish time so my working afternoon in the studio is from around 4pm until 9pm. That’s when I paint.






of elephants & hares-home, dry-run installation



Can you describe your studio space and how, if at all, that affects your work?

Lately my studio tends to expand and contract. I always have two connecting rooms in our apartment, one for working and the other for storage and clean-up. However my partner and I also run out of the apartment a sporadic project space called JiM Contemporani. When there’s not a show up, which is most of the time, I move into some of the space used for that. This allows me room to paint and work on paper at the same time, to be able to move the paintings around to see them in a different environment, and to photograph work easily.

For many years I was a night painter so the issue of natural light was never even entertained. At one time in the early 90’s I shared a studio in the old meat-packing district in New York which had previously been used as a giant, walk-in refrigerator for sides of beef and so obviously had no windows at all. Nowadays I’m very privileged. I’m on the fifth floor with a balcony which gives onto one of the main streets in Barcelona. My painting room is about 4 x 5 meters with 3.25 metre ceilings.

I’ve had much bigger spaces and also much smaller ones. I’ve done small work in the big ones and big work in the small ones. I’ve lived in my studio and I’ve had my studio separate from where I live. What I’ve never thought important was to find and fit out the perfect studio before I could work. For me the container has always been of less importance than the content.





I was in love with the place, oil on canvas, 81 x 100 cm, 2011




Tell me about your process, where things begin, how they evolve etc.

When pushed to describe what I do I call myself an abstract painter, but it’s a tag I’m fairly ambivalent about. Everything I do comes from some external source. I’ll jot down a note to myself or take a bad photograph with my mobile phone just to remind me of what I saw. It can be an object, or a play of light, or a colour combination. That then is the basis of the painting. In terms of drawing and composition I really don’t change things much after that, in matters of colour a lot can happen.

I used to work in series but the series would dry up and I would have to find something else, and eventually it felt forced and false. And it was slow, and I’m a slow worker to begin with. About sixteen years ago I was finally able to move away from the series, and started making paintings which each had their own internal logic and autonomy. But I was still inventing the painting at the surface and I found that an incredibly painful way to work, and it was discouraging too. Also, I could no longer sustain belief in the notion of everything coming from the inside. The next step from there, and I’m not altogether sure how or when it came about, was to start using outside input. In the same way that I often use song lyrics as titles, using images I see around me kind of lets me off the hook. I may choose them, but ultimately I’m not responsible for them.






studio



What are you having the most trouble resolving?

I don’t like my work to be painterly, which doesn’t mean that I deny one of the basic characteristics of the medium. I just don’t find interesting a painting made from a series of painterly gestures which ergo signify an abstract painting. Moreover, I have very little facility for paint. I don’t have this huge bag of painterly tricks that I can draw from. As I said earlier, the composition of the image doesn’t change much from the beginning so I don’t get all those layers of paint, and wipe-outs, and palimpsests. So the problem for me is not letting the work end up too graphic, because I don’t want it to be that either. It’s a thin line. I have to just let the paint be paint, which sounds simplistic and stupid, but I find it hard.




Do you experiment with different materials a lot or do you prefer to work within certain parameters?

I certainly used to, and often such experiments would be dictated by economic reasons. When I first moved to New York in the mid 80’s and was working as an art- mover, for a while I painted on old wrapping blankets. I also used industrial materials such as enamel paint or deck varnish. I’ve painted on wood panels. I used raw powdered pigment for a while, lumpily suspended in an oil medium. I used to mix gesso and liquid pigment in a blender to achieve a coloured ground where the colour really went deep into the surface. I twice tried to switch to acrylics. But I’ve always gone back to oil paint on canvas or linen. I like the give of the fabric. And I love the smell of the paint - since the first day I walked into art school. On paper I’ve worked for the last five years or so almost exclusively with gouache.





Thirsty´s calling, oil on linen, 65 x 54 cm, 2011



What does the future hold for this work?

That I go into the studio tomorrow and do something. I suffered a lot from bad discipline in the past and it took me a long time to figure out that if I wasn’t in the studio doing the work it certainly wasn’t going to do itself.




Is there anything else you would like to add?
Thanks for asking me to participate in this. It’s always good to have to sit down and think about what I actually do, and why, and it’s been fun too. Also I’d like to say that while everything I’ve said is true today, happily, tomorrow it could all be different.





 

Wednesday, October 5, 2011

ANTHONY WHITE

Fugitive, oil on linen, 51 x 51cm, 2010



 
What are you working on in your studio right now?

I´m working on a large commission for a filmmaker from New York. The painting has taken about six months and there are many many layers. The painting is 100x 150cms and weighs around 40 kgs at the moment. It is really annoying but at the moment I feel like developing the surface and physicality of paint as much as possible. They are sort of turning into dense relief sort of paintings.



Can you describe your working routine?

My work routine starts like this: I work on the painting first, that has the least amount to lose. I make huge amounts of changes trying to find the right relationship between colour and power of gesture. I scrape off large areas of paint on the floor if it’s not working and I keep these scrapings often applying them to other works. This generally takes 4-5hours.
I clean up a bit from the previous day. Sometimes this turns into procrastination as well, so you have to watch yourself. I sit down and think about things and write in a stream of consciousness style about where the work is, and then I get back into it. I often work on 15 paintings at once and recently alternating between works on paper tacked to the wall. After this I’m stretching canvases, and cleaning up and paperwork editing images in photoshop etc.










Can you describe your studio space and how, if at all, that affects your work?
I guess the bigger the space the longer for the creative process of where I make a mess and then create work, then clean up…make work…There seems to be a cycle.I like bigger spaces as it lets me be able to leave all the work hanging on the wall. I detest easels I like to see the work as flat as possible against the wall. Sometimes I will also let the work migrate to the floor and work above it.




Reproduction, oil/collage on handmade paper, 80 x 60 cm, 2011




Tell me about your process, where things begin, how they evolve etc.

My process annoys me. I want to be rational and logical and measurable and certain about things. But the way I am, I work in many different directions at once. Which means lots of mess and lots of things unfinished. I jump between drawings collage and painting to gain insight into each different working method.
When a piece isn’t working then I turn it to the wall and work on something else. I think the moment you enter the studio you see the work with “fresh eyes” and you are able to discern clearly the changes that need to be made. I need to not see a work for some time to be able to resolve the work











What are you having the most trouble resolving?

When is enough enough? Its hard to edit your work and be ruthless in the edit of the image. I mean to be as concise as possible  it is quite difficult.



Do you experiment with different materials a lot or do you prefer to work within certain parameters?

At the moment I’m trying to set parameters in every aspect because my process is really spontaneous. Quite often Ill find myself taking home things off the street, I think objects speak to you at certain times and we as artists have an obligation to listen to that. But we also need to be project driven and not all over the place sort of avoiding what I was meant to be doing. So I would I work better with parameters but sometimes I think you need to bend/break the parameters as well.






Regime, oil on linen, 150 x 120cm, 2011




What does the future hold for this work?

I think I haven’t really found whether I’m an abstractionist or more representationally inclined. I’m think the work feels like its on track but not at it’s final destination. In fact I’m not sure if it ever really gets to a final destination, but at the moment I’m content with the progress of the work



Is there anything else you would like to add?

Yes just an unashamed plug…. It's with great pleasure I invite you to the opening night of Scratching the Surfacat Iain Dawson Gallery. The show opens on the 6th of October.I will be in Sydney for the opening.The works in this exhibition were made on residency at The Leipzig International Art Programme, Germany.