Animated Icons of Color – Don Voisine

Brent: Upon entering the gallery, your first show on the West Coast, San Francisco, Gregory Lind, immediately you become aware of all that is color. Oddly it is not the black that pushes its presence first. But like a good friend, faithful, the blacks unfold at a different speed, which require the intimate.
If dark be the turbine then color is the outwardly expressive, and is the meter. In the exhibition space this is what travels across to us in calibrated splendor.

Don: Your response sounds similar to the reaction people have when coming to my studio for the first time. Having seen a painting or two in various group shows they would expect the studio to be a dark and perhaps foreboding place. Often the first words uttered are, “Wow, look at all this color!” I think this explains why salon style installations of my work have been done in a few exhibitions. It replicates the experience of seeing the work in the studio.

Brent: Some of the work in this current show seems to be bent on finding harder and harder angles to work with. And there are a few other surprises too. But first I’d like to start with a sketch. At the restaurant later that night, after your opening, you drew a plan on the paper tablecloth.

Don: With the doodle I was trying to illustrate the origins of where I am in my work today. In 1980 I began working with imagery derived from floor plans of places I worked in or lived in.  It was an attempt to attach a subject matter to abstract shapes. (I think of subject as separate from content.  Subject matter is a vehicle for content but not a necessity for an artwork to have content.) The drawings were basically a quick sketch with marks to indicate the location of certain architectural features, doors, windows, stairs, etc. These were not hard edge and exacting architects’ blueprint drawings, more along the lines of what a carpenter might sketch out to visualize where certain things would go. Over time the paintings became more and more geometrically structured and less about a specific place but retained a reference to architecture.

Architecture is all about defining space. It delineates boundaries, opens up points of access, entry or exit, and enables one to interact within a defined space. These ideas informed my work as I searched for a way of creating an active and visual space in the paintings. The attempt to locate a unique spatial quality for my work has long been its driving force and finally determines the resolution of a particular painting.

Brent: When I think “architecture” I am immediately turned to something that has to stay up. The openings and closings, the thoroughfares, need structural hinges for them to work. So the spaces adhere to a fairly strict engineering principle of a bearing-load value. This is how we get the width for the opening of the door.

I’m thinking of a plan portion of the architecture – this feel for defining/ opening. There is something missing in a plan, which you see or get when you are physically involved with the architecture. Some say this is the weakness of painting, that in a traditional sense you only get one side of it. But then painting is about a different kind of defining opening.

I remember asking why you did this – create sketches or plans as paintings, and I think I remember your answer correctly, but I’ll ask again. The interesting thing is that the paintings are not based on imaginary spaces. Though you must have had to move around a lot to get a number of these paintings done.

Don: Let’s not over think this. I was trying to break away from how I was taught to do things in art school where a more improvisational approach was celebrated and encouraged. I was having difficulty finding a compelling rationale for what I felt were arbitrary compositional decisions and I was looking for a way of making paintings where I wasn’t following all their rules. Floor plans provided a personal reference and the placement of forms was predetermined. If a composition was unbalanced because of the locations of the real life objects I wouldn’t just move them. I had to find another way to make it work. Color, weight of the marks, something… The first floor plan I used was from a small carpentry job I was on in Tribeca. This was a simple square room with a raised platform with three steps, an inward swinging door and three windows. Another floor plan was of a room I had in Portland, Maine where I had a bout with kidney stones. I painted it red with a blue undercoat to suggest oxygenated blood. These were done with various materials on mulberry paper.

Then when I decided to try to do these on canvas I had to figure out how to make that transfer. I drew the image in the center of the canvas and colored the ground around the outside of the shape I had drawn. This was the beginning of my use of a border or frame of color around the perimeter of the paintings. I thought it helped to create the space, gave you something you had to ‘step over’ to get into the picture. A violation of the sanctity of the picture plane!

After a while I began to “run out” of rooms I had a personal connection to and found interesting enough to try to make a drawing out of. I started researching architecture books. I found interesting ideas in books on Leon and Rob Krier, Carlo Scarpa, Melnikov, a whole gamut, medieval, colonial, contemporary, whatever peaked my interest. After a while I just focused on parts of the room plan, architectural details, cutouts, stairwells often provided the imagery.

Brent: So, in a way, we are talking nature – the blue prints.
With these “detail” drawings how did the border and edge figure? Was the framing dropped, or did it get relegated to one side, with the color and mark continuing to do the balancing act? Or was it a matter of staying with the centered image?
All this back in the eighties, right: Peter Halley, Sherrie Levine.

Don: Yes. I was no longer in Maine; the city had become my nature. In a way New York City is very organic, it’s always changing.
I stayed with an overall centering; the privileged architectural detail was centered and contained within a field surrounded by a colored border. Symmetry has been another way for me to avoid arbitrary compositional decisions. I’d been at this for a couple of years before I first saw Peter Halley’s cell and conduit paintings with which I felt an immediate kinship (but my work wasn’t so theoretically driven). The art world had been dominated by Neo-Expressionist painting at the time, so Neo-Geo was a welcome respite from that mess. But then Neo-Geo got mired in French Post-Structuralism. What I liked in Sherrie Levine’s work or Peter Halley or David Diao for that matter might have been for all the wrong reasons. When I first saw Dan Walsh’s black and white or yellow and white paintings from the mid-nineties I felt a connection to and understood the diagrammatic nature of his work. I had been at it with the black planes already for a few years by then but I recognized a sensibility at work. It’s been really interesting watching his work evolve.

Brent: You say you stayed with the centering device, though the image on the cover of ‘The Downtown Review‘ suggests otherwise… do you want to rephrase there, or clarify? It’s a great little image.

Don: That image is an exception. I always do one of those once in a while. It seems to clarify the general run of things by contradicting myself a bit. That image could read as a diving board out over a body of water. It’s an obvious play with perspective. (I did like some of Hockney’s pool paintings.) Like K. Bradford wrote at the time: “It will be interesting to watch just how much imagery and content Voisine’s particular brand of “informed formalism” can absorb before touching on outright representation.” We all know how that turned out. This period was just the beginnings of my work. Its development has never been clear-cut and linear for me.

Brent: These exceptions seem to happen all over the place with you… when you start to notice.
Dan Walsh, architectural placement, diagrammatic, even Pop driven?
Malevich comes up when there is talk of your work, perhaps due to the use of the icon, the black square, the cross, the double reading of space on a flat plane, the spare.

Don: An aspect of Dan’s paintings I like is the fact they are precise but remain very relaxed, casual in feel. They have a certain geometric insouciance. Yes, Malevich is brought up all the time: Most recently about the Styrofoam painting installation in Hamburg. The iconic plays a bigger part in the black paintings, which began in 1990-91.  Late 80s grid paintings were very pale and subtle. I found it was easy for people to ignore them. The more explicit black forms made an immediate graphic impact garnering more attention. Drawing them in like a carnival barker.

Brent: The soft and pale was replaced with a more popular op keeping the framing device, the intersected, and while this perhaps did not mark the work more accessible it definitely enhanced the visible: The Styrofoam pieces demand that you work and think differently. Was there some kind of accessibility drive going on there?

Don: No, that was never part of the impetus for painting on Styrofoam. After the fact I noticed people reacted differently to them in comparison to the wood panels.  But their small size and “objectness” relates them to icons and Malevich certainly considered those as a factor in his work.  The small wood panels also have icon-like qualities.

Brent: In which way differently?

Don: People seem to get a little kick from noticing that this formal imagery, with dark geometric forms, is on such a cheap lightweight disposable material. The Styrofoam paintings are a little funkier, convey a bit less gravitas, and suggest a quality of humor not associated with serious reductive forms. I pretty much paint them the same way as on wood but the surface prep is rather dissimilar. I coat the Styrofoam with a two-part plastic epoxy which protects the foam from the paint solvents. It makes a hard shell surface with slightly rounded edges to paint on and lends itself to a different read. It’s interesting to have a side project that runs parallel to the main concerns of my work but gets its own unique response.

Brent: When I refer to icon, I guess I am thinking less in terms of “objectness” or “devotion” and more related to a graphic symbol, which has been reduced to “an essential” that in context is clearly readable. To borrow from the computer… we are sensibly able to click on the icon to enter.

This framing device, which was already present in the early carpenter drawings as the white space left around the plan view, really starts to make sense with ‘Yellow Grave‘ 1981, a largish piece on canvas, 81”x 66”. Like it or not it does have this comic/pop element that allows you to enter with some kind of knowing. The framing, however, deals with painting’s formal issues, what to do with the sides as they approach the edges, and how planes are dealt with on a single surface. These “hatch marks” are becoming less in number. In this particular painting they are flying off and cutting into the border’s color. The feeling is formal juxtaposition, harmony: Adding, ahead of its time, a touch of Itchy and Scratchy.

Don: No prescience on Itchy and Scratchy there. I was looking at Philip Guston at the time. His retrospective came through New York in the summer of ’81 and he was a big fan of George Herriman’s classic cartoon “Krazy Kat.” I’m not a connoisseur but comics and animations are all part of our conscious or sub-conscious cultural DNA. ‘Yellow Grave’ was something of a breakthrough painting for me. It set the course of my work for the next 5 or 6 years and certain features have remained a constant to this day.  ‘Yellow Grave’ had the immediacy of a “big drawing” but it was on canvas and made with paint. The yellow border anchored it as a painting. By the end of the 80s I’d probably lost that sense of immediacy but I think I found it again with the black paintings, especially now with the diagonals zipping across to and fro.

I’ve always strived for an “essence,” whether of place or of a specific space, that’s part of what initially appealed to me about abstract art. I don’t think my imagery became iconic until I began working with the predominately black forms, which made a more immediate graphic impression.

Brent: More yellow border, this time (give me a season–summer, spring) ‘88, with a title ‘Piet 1’. Guston and Krazy Kat fade. The work deals with formal things, heavy formal things manipulated in the slightest possible fashion. You say with a lost immediacy, I can’t judge. Here it is good, even if slowing in subject intervention. There is consideration of space, the line, where it sits, how it sits not arbitrarily. In ‘Piet 1’ the space hums. The taut lines are spaces too. Spaces delineating spaces, is what you get. The yellow pours over the whole experience. To the right the top line has a little nick that sends the work into some “known illusion” though it is not fulfilled. Then, ably back the articulation opens into another realm: Paris, Mondrian, California, and John McLaughlin.

Don: Spring or summer, I can’t recall for sure, could have been fall. Whenever I start a new thread in the work I go back to a very basic approach, just putting down the idea very simply and directly to see if it can fly before pushing it out to test its range. By this time I had run through the floor plans and the paintings were beginning to get a little baroque, fussy and overly detailed. The artistic discourse in New York was about appropriation and the End of Painting among other things. I strongly disagreed with this view and with a painting like ‘Piet 1′ I was simply trying to see if I could make something new through appropriation, not use it as an endgame strategy. Borrowing to grow on, to keep painting rather then bury the medium. The layout of the lines relates to a Mondrian painting which I had to fit within a different format then the original. I continued mining this vein for a couple of years and that’s when I felt the paintings began to lose their immediacy. The grids became more hard edge but at the same time ghostly, they were buried under a whitish scumbled veil. Looking back this probably was not the most fruitful direction to go in but sometimes you just have to do the work to get on to something else. For some reason I became very interested in black paintings, early Stella, Kelly, McLaughlin, that magnificent gigantic black Clyfford Still at the Art Institute of Chicago, and of course Reinhardt. They always seemed to be among the most difficult, challenging and least seductive paintings around. I had to give it a shot.

Brent: And black becomes.
‘Fall’ 1992 returns to centering – the hallmark, still, as yet, not ready for the admission of the diagonal.
The orange frame distinguishes the edge of the painting from the wall and weighs strong enough to handle any incongruity when looking slightly from the side. A white cross is painted just in from the border (one rectangle at a time), ostensibly creating another floating edge, over which a dark rectangular motif is centered just within the white cross to provide four notches, a hold that can be visually interpreted as partial presence of another border. This painting then appears to be about edges, borders and crossing them.

Very simple questions: Are you taping the edges? They look clean but the paint application still reads fairly plain and simple. In the image supplied there doesn’t yet appear that deft crispness. And this may have to do with the smallish scale and still working with canvas?

Don: I was making similar paintings up to 6 or 7 feet on linen at the time so I don’t think scale has anything to do with the crispness. My lines and edges became much cleaner when I switched to painting on wood panels.

I am using masking tape on the edges and to separate areas from one another as I paint them in. The straighter and exact the lines the more clearly articulated the space becomes. I have tried to do this without tape; carefully painting along a drawn line, but just the slightest wavering of an edge lessened the solidity of the forms and diminished the overall presence of the paintings. There is a slight build up of extra paint on the edge of taped lines that plays an essential role in the work. In the central area one black plane is laid over another and the built up tape lines of the form underneath the glossy layer is visible. This is important because it indicates the continuity of one plane over or under another. Otherwise the image can read as interlocking planes and suggests a flat cubist space. This distinction is significant in determining how the viewer reads the space.

From the first paintings I did using large areas of dark tones the basics were fairly well established. A band of color around the perimeter set the mood and tone (distinct from the blacks), a (somewhat) translucent shiny black is overlaid on top of a matte black, and areas of white or grays. These off-white spaces were the least worked, sometimes just a wash over the ground, but they actually did the most to activate spatial depth.

Although I got off to a fast start with these, the evolution of the work was very slow. Sometimes the delay was just a matter of life getting in the way of art. I knew I had something with the idea of these black paintings but I couldn’t quite break it open. I kept at it trying to figure it out. In some ways I think I was painting the same picture over and over again. Shifting a line or gap between segments very slightly altered the space, enough to constitute a different painting perhaps, but not showing a wide range of variations. Eventually the possibilities began to open up and I think I’ve found a lot of ways to make complex paintings with strict limitations.

Brent: ‘Untitled, Blue Diamond‘ 1999… OK, so you introduce the diagonal, in a fashion. Following this process that you describe, and I can see, one layer at a time, one system at a time, can you explain how we see two notches, one at the top one at the bottom? It has some optical challenges with a very simple and neat move/ shift, which also suggests that you are (well) on your way to new territory.

Don: Not so fast! With this I was trying out different formats. I wasn’t yet thinking in terms of movement which is what eventually led me to the introduction of angles, diagonals and Xs. At the time most of my paintings were done on square formats, either singularly or in multiple combinations. As you are well aware, a diamond is a rotated square (* see Visual Discrepancies – One or two Things I know – Linda Francis) and the interior blacks are two equal sized overlapping squares slightly shifted so that one doesn’t totally block out the other. This created the two notches which sort of anchor the top and bottom of this painting. Given the centered stillness of my imagery up to that point I was startled by the visual dynamics generated by the lozenge format. Apparently I wasn’t ready for all this action because I didn’t pursue it any further. In hindsight I can see that this painting was pointing towards issues that have occupied me for the past few years. I still had a few steps to take on the path to making the work you saw in San Francisco.

Brent: “a diamond is a rotated square…” Do we need to bring that up? But in this case we are not thinking in terms of curve, or are we? Though curve or warp space do come up… later. ‘Blue Horizontal Affair‘ 2002, and as we have touched upon in email is a long horizontal piece on wood that pumps up the volume without taking up the physical bulky space. You are generally all on wood from here on in… with these.

The layering is very obvious again. There is a sense of gracefulness, if you understand how a Kanji character gets formed… as I’m here waving my hand in the air through your painting. There is rhythm and great sense of space in the movement, both in the Kanji and with the ‘Affair’ as the mind moves through the physical paces.
First sign too of a crack in the border! It’s broken. There are these blue horizontal bands, with the vertical elements still there even though mostly hidden. This piece looks like it took work to complete.
‘Sway’, two years later, and the border is back intact. The layering is very clean. There is this illusion: Introduction to the warp. Every space has a character/ personality. It reads “at attention” and “at ease”. I’m almost inclined to think back to Mondrian. Reinvented.

Don: Mondrian is always in the room! Long horizontal formats allowed me to make paintings with the feel of a large piece without the bulk and weight of a big square wooden panel. It could fill your field of vision and engage your peripheral vision as well. Barnett Newman’s ideas on lateral spread and how he wanted a viewer to approach his work helped me work out these pieces. The blue border cut off at the extreme ends and not wrapping around all four sides allowed for a more expansive space, implying continuity beyond the edges of the painting. I continued using both approaches with the borders but recently the bands of colors are mainly on two sides.

‘Sway’ 2004, with the bottom side of the top black form set at an angle was among my first foray out of squares and rectangles. I tried this format to introduce more visual activity into a body of work that up to that point was very centered and still. I like your read, simultaneously “at attention” (top half) and “at ease” (bottom half), kind of like a mullet haircut. Although I think this painting works, as did a couple others I generally had difficulty reconciling the illusion of the lower right corner bowing out towards you. I decided to ditch the diagonal and tried to create movement more subtly by shifting the overlays slightly and creating some asymmetry. I was more comfortable with this approach while searching for other options. Along with these shifts I began to introduce an additional thin line of color, creating a little visual buzz at the edge of the border and interior. When I re-introduced angles, diagonals, and Xs in the latter half of 2006 I no longer created a warp in the space of the painting. They were more dynamic and active and the tensions that existed at the edges of the images became more palpable.

Brent: Your new work, what can I say… most are spinning, others are bending, one turns into a cube, “every” has a pair of horizontal color, and in each the black or a part of it extends past the open section. They are animated – animated icons of Color humming “slow down.” But the turbines continue, drenched in their dark matter.

You mentioned with ‘Sway’ you didn’t like the warping. I mistakenly said that the warp comes up again, though “warp” is not the right word. I have this little aversion to warping too, as a word, and for what it implies, but more importantly what this does to space, to the picture plane, and the outer bordering. And there is a way around this. It’s not a mechanical way that is error free, but is sensual… perhaps a negation of opposites?

Don: Or a reconciliation. It’s not something figured out before hand but in the painting of each. I try to make various elements in my paintings to read in multiple ways.  For example the white ground can read simultaneously as a positive or negative space, or in another painting the blacks can flip back and forth as to which is over the other depending on how you look at it.

Keeping the picture planes intact is certainly important to me. For all the movement and spatial ins and outs of my recent paintings the planes must maintain an overall pictorial integrity. Earlier attempts to do this created an incoherent image, the warped corner. It’s like looking at a figurative painting where the artist doesn’t have the skill to render the body in space, where the depiction of a limb doesn’t turn naturally. It might look like the shin is pasted on rather than reading as if it flows realistically from the rest of the body. It’s out of whack and the same thing happens in abstract pictures.

Brent: Can we talk about some of the picture logic, which to my mind plays out whack but also runs with a tenuous or dynamic visual sense, one I’m not sure has to do with shins and body fixture… As you suggest each system has its logic, and is tied to the planes, the color, or tone. With ‘Inauguration’, not in the show, and ‘Fahrenheit’, which is, the common thread here are the nicks, the white triangular spaces that through some sort of uniformity fail the logic of the so-called diagonally crossing bars. The color bars provide some stasis – have the second thin bar running across which in both cases alleviate some of the pressure providing space and float. All, however, tell the cross is skewed, and drive the feeling as something riving within. But you are right there is no apparent collapse. No part of the “gossamer picture plane” is disadvantaged, or slips back, fails, drops off, or falls into a hole. This is how the whole starts to avail greater than the physical constituents. Also we talked earlier about the process/ logic of building a painting. Can you offer that process here, for ‘Inauguration’ and ‘Fahrenheit’?

Don: ‘Inauguration’ and ‘Fahrenheit’ have a symbiotic relationship and there was a third partner involved called ‘Rehearsal’. I was working on ‘Inauguration’ for my show at Mckenzie Fine Art in New York last spring. Rather then figuring out the possible configurations directly onto the 5 foot square panel through trial and error I made smaller panels where I tested the layouts to see how it looked. Working from a study is nothing unusual but it is not my usual approach, besides there is always something to take into consideration when you increase the scale, it’s never worked in a direct 1 to 1 ratio for me.
In this situation once I made a decision and committed it to the large piece I’d then try out the next step on the smaller pieces. Once ‘Inauguration’ was finished I went back into ‘Fahrenheit’ and ‘Rehearsal’ and made a few changes, mostly in color, to finish them so as to be individual paintings on their own merits.

You can see how I got the pinwheel effect caused by the “failed logic” of the diagonally crossing bars by comparing ‘Inauguration’ to ‘Basic Space’ (also in the San Francisco show). I drew the tilted X onto the panel then centered the overlapping square over it.  Next I pulled some of the lines away from being parallel to meet the crossing line at the edge of the center square.  Disrupting the expected linear flow of the crossing diagonals created this sensation of a forward spin.

The choice of color for the ‘Inauguration’ was initially inspired by Michelle Obama’s dress at the presidential inauguration last January. The final color had to be adjusted for the painting so it would not match a direct comparison to the fabric but real life observation was a point of departure for the painting. On the other hand the color for ‘Fahrenheit’ was totally subjective and resolved through adjustments in tone and value in relation to the interior blacks and whites. To make another painting I could reduce the size of the white triangular wedges and this would increase the sense of compression of the black forms against the perimeter color, giving the painting an entirely different scale and energy. This is how my work changes and evolves, slowly through repeated explorations of variations and form.

Brent: You are cleaning up the studio.

Don: I’ve been hard at it for the past couple of years especially with the shows I had recently, I would go to the studio every day and just get to work. It’s not a very large space (450 sq. ft) and I’ve been in there for almost 20 years. Since I’ve returned from San Francisco I’ve been reorganizing the storage and stripping paint off of failed pictures so I can reuse the panels. I’m now ready to step back into the fray.

One or two Things I know – Linda Francis

Brent: A drawing dated 1978, Untitled, chalk on paper, has a pair of identical penciled or conté grids which you use to make a series of what appear to be perfect arcs; there are finger marks or smudges; some arcs are taken out. The arcs appear to form some shape, allude to volume, but never really do. What I see is a point where you stopped. Was that because you felt the image had reached a stage whereby via the residue the movement just kept going on all by itself? I sense the building of form and then the letting go, engaging in a perfect slip, of folding in and out, in pairs, a synchronizing of different stages.

In Dark Nebula in Saggitarius, 1979, the marks have a similar feel in touch, and there appears to be some pairing, folding, and twisting. Though any geometric sub-structural hint is well hidden under what lay on top. I have an image of this as the remnants of a bout.

Linda: That was a smaller try of a group of large (approx 4×7′ or larger depending upon the space) drawings I made on the wall. The grid was ruled in with pencil and made a rectangular pattern. Each part of the symmetrical grid was drawn upon with chalk using simple rules: only quarter arcs, straight lines, changing the movement at a crossing, etc. They were freehand and each section done with each hand. That is to say, the right grid drawn on with the right hand and the left with left. I just started in the middle and drew out and then came back. I not quite erased what went before to push it into the background and then did it again, responding to the first drawing. I thought of it as re-seeing in time that could have gone on forever. I guess I stopped when I thought the movement was over. Kind of with a long exhale very much as you describe.

I went from the analytical gesture to some years of drawings in which I used the chalk and eraser to literally remake various spiral galaxies. I was looking at small photos in the Hubble Atlas of Galaxies. The epiphany was that these galaxies were the analog of the gestures in the earlier work, and of course by extension the body and brain alike were similarly organized natural phenomena. Drawing for me was a kind of research. Looking at those small pictures united my hand and mind as I tried to find the structure that was simultaneously building and destroying the form. This info was not commonly available as it is now and the few books that existed like Mandelbrot’s first and Pirogene’s were the only references I had to try to find out more of what I intuited to be true. In 1982 I did an exhibition of big drawings in Copenhagen. The show was titled The Order of Chaos and here is a picture of one of them done from the galaxy M101.

Brent: I find it interesting that you could work the drawing with both hands merging left/right personalities, the two forces. Is this also the case with Dark Nebula in Saggitarius?
With Untitled, 51×43”, chalk/paper, 1981, the action, the model, the energy in the final drawing is there.
What led you to Spiral, 50×38”, chalk/paper, 1992, ten years later?

Linda: I think what happened was that the left/right hand thing became an interest in the natural symmetry of objects as in the Dark Nebula and all the spiral galaxies (which are 2 spirals pulling in opposite directions around a central core): Symmetry so physical like Greek “contrapposto”, like for every action there is an equal reaction …etc.

In Untitled, 1981, and the others I began to think of the image as a character not in the sense of personality but in the sense of Chinese calligraphy. [No kidding- I actually own a very good piece by an early 20th century calligrapher, which I love].

Later, in work like Spiral, ’92, I began to see the macro world as it is comprised by the micro. Same interest in unfathomable things, conditions, states. Realized that if atoms were moving in every direction at once (!) the things we see are somehow the result of some stabilizing accident: If every speck is every line is every circumference of a circle, in every location, every possibility, then maybe handedness and symmetry might be conceived of as this. I thought I would draw it, stacked up improbably with the same two curves repeated. I actually found it amusing.

Brent: In Spiral you have arranged balls, some with strong erasing, others dense, horizontally as well as diagonally. There is a set of nine. Two sets of three are heavily erased, and one set are left very dense with a noticeable orb around the dark spots’ circumferences. This spiraling or lacing appears in the heavily erased. An extra dark ball snuggles into the two top-left. This all reads very visual to me. There is a wonderful balance, one that seems to be there for no other reason but to create a visual tension.
The left dark ball has a very stretched relationship to the three dark ones on the other side. In fact the travel of the eye hits pretty much center of the center of the dark ball set to the the right – the shortest distance. And while I see stacking, along with the twisting of the spiral, I’m reading this other arrangement that keeps the whole thing, all the things in the composition, in movement. The movement makes sense, but how? Was this just very much intuiting a sense, or did you have it all planned and ready to go, worked out in a small diagram, or testing?
With Divide, 44×32”, chalk/paper, 1998 it gets more problematic despite the initial simplicity. There are five years in there.

Linda: The way I work is not methodical at all. I have so many ideas floating around in my head that they just pop up at various times. The thing for me to do in the drawings is to make a field for them to sort of come up in. My field is a pencil grid of circles, very simple. The number of the circles depends on the width of the paper. The whole paper is a screen for me to do something in a comfortable place on it. Then I start to fill in with black chalk. No composition in the classical sense. Every place is just a place to start. One can see that (in Spiral) if I started erasing in the top 2 circles in the middle, then thought of going down the line repeating the loop that occurred in one, there really was no other place for me to go to connect or finish the movement. The circles left black were not necessary to the idea only in that they were part of the whole fabric. I’m kind of led by the nose by the structure that unfolds.

Small diagrams are things I do occasionally but those are just doodles and may wind up as a clear idea or may not. They function as a kind of exercise. I more often may use them in a painting. But I don’t work out the drawings in advance and don’t know what they will become, if anything.

Divide came about by my making a pencil grid of big circles. Only could fit maybe 2 on the piece of paper. I remember thinking what now? – Maybe see how many circles I can fit touching into each circle – hexagonal close packing. And then I realized that I could diminish the size infinitely, and strangely enough the smaller the circles became, the silhouette of the individual configuration started to resemble a hexagon. The structure became the object. Blew me away: All of this an organic progression from one understanding to the next. This kind of thinking was my way into Mandelbrot sets.

Regarding the time lapses: All of my work so far is part of the same continuum, which fascinates me. I don’t need to work in series like many artists do, the work is not design, it has real content, each work over the years has used the same elements and methods and can arrive at discreet structural and philosophical revelations. For example: The drawing Divide eventually resulted in the painting The Square and the Tortoise which was a send-up of Zeno’s paradox and another idea that a curve could be a straight line and circle could be a square.

Brent: Spiral, this time oil on wood, 1997, is a procession of circles each proportionality larger than the one before until the largest loops back into the smallest. There appears to be color. It’s very stark and geometric. I could go back to Five Four Three Two, 52×40”, chalk/paper, 1994 [fill me in on the title] looking for line work but there you are still working primarily with paper and chalk.

With Spiral there is almost a full frontal feel despite the proportioning. It really sits there in the squarish space of the panel support. And because of the looping and scale there is this sense of space. There is this shading or shaded out area that comes up in earlier work and again much later. This adds another dimension to the piece, and I’m wondering what and why, and where it comes from?

Linda: Five Four Three Two is just counting. I started out with overlapping circles in a pentagonal array and added the 6th over the space or hole in the center of the 5 to make 6 (would be a variant of a dodecahedron/ icosahedron if it were a solid). The central circle is One, the Five peripheral ones are divided into Two and Three. Overlapping each other, the three become Four etc. The filled in part is simply an area where everything joins.
Those two spaces don’t function as shaded areas in the actual works; they become floating forms. In the small painting of Spiral, the first one I did in 1997, the paint is pretty flat but there is a vague pattern in that central shape that kind of implies infinity outside itself. The whole configuration is really inverted; it collapses inside an invisible circle. In the wall drawing One or two Things I know (2009), which uses the same configuration, the encompassing circle is shown in pencil.  In the second configuration going from left to right on the wall, the form is breaking through a circle. It has an even number of protruding arms that turn out to not be divisible by two. The third configuration is a small group of symmetrical circles but flipped around a few times so as to be symmetrical in a sphere and not in 2 dimensions.

Brent: What made you pick up a tube of paint and panel support? I mean, were you out driving and there on the side of the road was a paint tube and a support with a little note reading, take me… if you can. And you did?
Or were other things going on at the time?

Linda: I started to feel like I wanted to make an object…ha ha ha. But that’s true. I love oil paint.
I actually started painting again in 1989, but just a few small things. I had to see how I could paint given my practice of drawing.

Brent: I’m interested in the model and its play, the mark and the sign, and how they often can work to together to produce a visual flexibility – wherein movement can be experienced as something quite restful, while, in turn, the sign becomes dynamic and alive.

Linda: Formal play has its own trajectory and reveals possibilities to the individual. The choice each time depends upon the what the individual sees or wants to see. Erwin Schrödinger’s codification of quantum wave theory is an interesting case of this: As a young man Schrödinger was seriously immersed in the study of Vedanta. Vedic thought is posed against duality. Schrödinger remade the quantum world into a real one by, generally speaking, uniting particles and waves in a functional description of the universe that had theretofore been made impossible by dualistic thinking.

And things are always moving and at rest.

I am thinking that the paintings exist as structures that I have found to have some meaning. That is, I think they reveal a truth about form and relationships of forms to the natural world, including philosophy, and to the structure of ideas. I am not modeling in the conventional sense as most science/art does. They are not models of things, maybe more like conjectures. But they must have a visible coherence for me to consider them successful, and contain all the things we have mentioned.
The way I paint is as straightforward as I can. I like applying the surface paint color, etc. The color is basically an issue of various analogies to black and white.

Brent: I’m looking at a smallish pair of paintings, square and diamond. There’s a lot going on there.

Linda: In that painting I was fascinated by the persistent apprehension that the two panels are of different sizes when they are not. Along with that support I was using a four-looped figure that I made by drawing a line around a sphere. It appears to conform to a square when seen on a flat plane, when in fact it is nothing of the kind.  The panels are made to work together in any combination of pairings. Mondrian’s use of the diamond always interested me. I think it was interesting/ problematic for him because the space was not confinable. Using a rotated square or diamond is very close to using curves. The title of the painting Squaring a Circle is a petit poke at impossibilities.

Brent: For us less dressed in the peculiarities of geometry could you explain how a rotated square is very close to using curves? Does this apply also to Untitled, Oil on wood, 68 x 91″, 1999, where you add another key motif that keeps coming up in your paintings and drawings?

When you pop up on canvas there are certain restrictions.
What this means is that the support has disproportionate physical presence compared to the marks that sit on it. You can think of Mondrian’s lozenges… take the support out and you would not really get what is happening in the work, the tension is not there. With your work this can also happen, say Squaring the Circle would not work without the pronounced thickness of the panel/edge, though with other motifs and diagrammatically drawn structures it can work… you can sense the space that a piece is working in without the reliance or necessity of the support. Then, in certain cases, when you use the support it engages the motif in such a critical way that you could not think it to be any other way… and then it is… another way…

Linda: Or pop up? Well okay, you’ve totally said it – and if I have turned the tables on you in the end, serves you right for assuming what you don’t know…

My assertion that a rotated square is like using curves is not geometrically derived. It is perceptually derived. It is that I am always thinking that a “flat” condition can be a curved condition. We know that it is just a question of the scale of the curve. I’m thinking that the brain/eye automatically tries to orient a line, edge, etc. that does not appear to have a simple relationship to gravity, to a horizontal or vertical for stability purposes, for us to be able to function in space. Oblique trajectories engage space and even time (interval) in a less manageable “macro” way. Perhaps they relate to tetrahedral structures or polychora that exist in 4 dimensions. Anyway, you yourself described it in terms of geometry when you called a diamond a “rotated square”.

The drawing Equatorial Precession, ‘96, was important for me. It was in the last all- drawing show I had in 1997. It is a kind of bridge. In it I took an idea that exists in three dimensions and described it in two. It actually created a “wobble” effect in plan. The Earth’s “wobble” is what astronomers describe as created every so many years as a result of its rotation around its axis and the sun. I had to laugh. But it got me into that place where seemingly unrelated ideas and facts can join up and create meaning in a nonlinear way.

Brent: The send up on Zeno’s paradox, The Square and the Tortoise, 2001, is red, oil on panel. And the lines are white.
In Squaring the Circle and Untitled, ‘99 the lines are very evenly applied. In Tortoise they appear erased, painted over as layer in places. You have the center motif, and then a second motif worked from an orb that flies full-blown as a new center/circle. The third motif pushes further into the top right taking its position as center, another center, shifting the same way the previous center had. We could go on, but there is physically now nowhere else to go? The repeated motif has reached its corner?
The white painted line sits back in areas as each new center moves towards the top right. There is a simple diagonal move, and a sense of off balancing softened to keep in check the frontal feel. Each center has its own movement and relation to the governing square. There is counterbalance as well as swing. There is front-load washer if you could only put another dimension in. There are these little patches of what appear white and lilac/violet, which muck with the spatial tension further – sit behind, and stand up, as such.
And all these circles… held together by the structure of the square, adding the extra dimensions as the curves wash, the arcs swag, as the triangulation jot the shortest distance – the focus?

Linda: The violet and other color you see is the result of the slide (the shine of surface) that these images were taken from. Although there are many layers of color, they are not visible in such an obvious way to the eye. The surface is basically smooth and shiny but has a slight transparency, which is why you can see some of the “erased” parts.

Each set of 4 progresses (depending upon where one begins) proportionally from large to small as you describe. They change size/position by simultaneously expanding in space, as they grow smaller. They approach the right most edges of the painting as they would a horizon. That is to say that if one could go on with this progression into infinity the series of curves that is seen joining together and flattening out at the top might become a straight line.

Brent: Fours, 90×40”, oil on wood, 2003 the “canvas area” is pretty much full. You have dark circles that are layered, presumably painted one system after the next.
Together these layers work as a very dense field of oscillating circular mass moving between figure and ground, edge and back. The two sets outlined are not sets at all, actually, as they leave out just as much as they contain, though they do give the impression that they are complete, intact, with four units within each set. The painted lines that orchestrate this also function to bring the focus right up there to the front, to play off from the open color at the edge to illuminate the internal dark mass as something as shape.

Linda: This is an idea I got from looking at a Tony Smith’s series The Louisenberg. He used a 2 D circular grid based upon a square grid. He connected the circles to get a group of four circles like the form in the lower part of my painting, which is outlined in yellow. He had the idea that this kind of grid was the exemplar of modularity. I became interested in it for a different reason:  my interest in counting. I saw that counting four on a flat surface could look like that, but more precisely, counting four on a “flat” tetrahedral grid looks very different – the tetrahedral grid more indicative of concrete reality – positions, patterns and the apprehension of number are dependent upon point of view.

About concrete reality: I can point to the painting Two Hexagons, which is derived from the drawing Equatorial Precession that I spoke about previously. In this case, the operation of ringing around and through the circles/spheres creates two separate and interlocking hexagonal arrays. In addition and as a result of the joining of the two, a third central hexagonal array develops which has a recognizable relationship to natural structures. Tony used to say that I was more interested in magic than painting.

Brent: Two Hexagons certainly roll. They also flicker: And the support gives the optical arrangement room. With Johnny there is not much room but a lot of space, and with a support again. In the easing back you have chosen the top right corner, any reason for the preference? I’m again reading “counterpoise” – an effortless movement of change.

You use circles. There are eight of them. Each one appears to move out and touch the edge, but only three of the small ones actually do. All the mark up is there. No mystery in its making. Each circle appears to wear two circumferences. The reason is [?] the beauty in the magic?

Linda: I was in love when I did this (for the moment) and it was simple. I looked at the three big circles and looked at the 3 small ones. They looked back at the three big circles. There are 2 squares; the small one occupies more space than the big one… You are right… The double circumferences are for color. This piece is my version of Tantra. Because of a song.

Brent: Interference, 78 x 228” 2008 comprises three separate panels.
The scaling plays whack.
The middle panel of the overall piece is the smallest though the dark area shows a progression. The dark areas’ shape also appears to shift and change depending on the context/framing.  The internal markings, what are they [?], where do they come from, or what do they represent [?] also appear to shift scale but in each panel the proportion of the rendered units are exactly the same. This is a major and perplexing piece, something I couldn’t wholly appreciate before having this conversation. Interference ties in your earlier drawing – a geometry and model expressed in a highly intuitive way, along with this odd 3-dimensional rendering that reads pure but also plundered.

Linda: I really envisioned these panels as not reading from left to right but up and down – the largest white panel on top and the same progression thru the diamond to the last painting on the right-but now on the bottom. This way the movement would not end. It is part of my thinking about visual habits that we spoke about earlier in our conversation and a try at defying gravity by having the eye refer back and forth between panels.
The two panels outside the large one have been pulled from the big one where they exist inside one another as the result of interlocking planes. I felt that I had stumbled upon an intriguing transposition. The center shape in the largest panel actually rotates 90 degrees as it grows in size.
The markings are screened from actual images of crystals produced with an electron microscope: An alternate geometric reality in three dimensions in an unlocatable space. The scale of the pattern stays the same but appears smaller and even a bit flatter as the area increases. I don’t know what kind of a perceptual shift that is. Maybe a psychological one, but again has to do with the vagaries of points of view and how much information one has.

Brent: The rotation continues with Neutron Star, 72×72” 2008, which declares itself very much graphic in personality. Red, the same red as The Square and the Tortoise, perhaps, has four sets of white circles. The top left arrangement is fairly close to the internal arrangement of Interference and as each set slowly pulls apart the circles decrease in size until a new large circle appears in the top right configuration. We could perhaps start with the slowest first, the right top one, and come back down to arc back to the tightest held group of circles: Though at the top is where you start.

Each set has it’s own spin, or dance, more like it, and own sense of spatial orientation. Each carry a vibration particular to their tune, though as a set, divided top and bottom, left and right, no one domain dominates or feels less active despite the different dances and speeds. The fifth and largest circle needs to be where it is to connect and continue a unified spatial orientation within that set: Though in the spin there appears a wobble.

Altogether a tune of raveling and unraveling – adding again a different kind of motion.

Linda: The red is very different, much heavier and deeper.
A neutron star is the remnant of a supernova formed by gravitational collapse – dense, hot, white. Each of the four parts in the painting is an expression of the other. Yes, as you said, a sort of fugue. Dreaming about these things, I see them as states of mind. I wrote a piece for “White Walls”, a Chicago artist’s writings mag, a long time ago – 1985 – in which I described what it would be like to fall into a black hole… to be drawn through the event horizon… be stretched to infinite length, etc. My idea of a good time…

Brent: I was wondering how you thought about the motif, and the traceable contextualizing of it. How you consider working in an economy of means, but also one of transaction where an object is bought and sold, things are owned and collected for their uniqueness… and, in a sense, where does this begin… where does it end, before an idea or thing starts to be read simply as a copy or facsimile? Or has that been conceptually dealt with quite some time ago?

Linda: Well, LeWitt dealt with it. His early instructions for making wall drawings etc were interesting as they were possibly mutable. Unfortunately, the actual work he went on to produce was decorative to the extreme and superficial. He ushered in the era of market gluttony where artists turned out buckets full of meaningless “series” and design reiterations- products. Still going on. In contrast, Jasper Johns becomes even more of a brilliant figure. Larry Weiner really is someone whose work I admire. He totally dealt with portability and poetics at the same time. His work can be many things but not something for Walmart – (yet).

I refused this spurious series idea. Every drawing is a discovery and happens once. And even in my beginning work, every wall drawing was unique and perishable. So, what do I think of my recent wall drawing, which in fact comes from some work I have already made? Well, I realized for various reasons that I did not want to improvise from the beginning. I would need much more time than I had and I didn’t want to bring work already finished. I decided to use some of the structures I’d found in the past and link them together in a way that put them in relation to each other and in comparison. This began a new idea about the movement from inside to outside a curved boundary and a look at some strange symmetry. So in fact their proximity to each other expanded the meaning of the work. I guess one could say the ideas became an essay.  The other thing that I liked was that these were really diagrams as you labeled them previously. They were just thoughts. And they will be destroyed at the end of the exhibition.

Easy Pieces – Richard van der Aa

Brent: Finding. You come out of a bit of a painting history; gesture; hints of constructive; a kind of record keeping; painting that pays attention to relationship more than heroics, though the mark and scale suggests that’s where you were initially coming from?

Richard: Yes, I do feel that what I do comes out of, and actually continues within, a history of painting. I trained as a painter initially during the early 80s in Christchurch, NZ and my teachers were predominantly abstract expressionists who were extolling the virtues of the New York school and the theories of Clement Greenberg (20 years after the fact.) Being young and impressionable, I came out loving that stuff and have been working my way out of there ever since. Even now, I feel that what ever I do is inflected by a way of thinking about painting which I took on board way back then. In brief it is about: The painting as evidence of process and most importantly for me, the painting as an object. When you say record keeping you are bang on. Perhaps it is more obvious in my earlier work, but I would say even now – I think of the artwork as a kind of physical residue of a physical activity that has taken place. I don’t try to hide the evidence of an artist at work – touch is important to me.

You do well to speak of it being about scale/relationship more than heroics. I had dreams of being the next Franz Kline or Motherwell or de Kooning – a big gestural guy – but soon found that I had a tendency to want to structure things more and tidy them up, to some extent. So I veered towards the Rothko and Newman side of the NY school, and with a touch of Mondrian thrown in, my work became much more about simplicity, solidity, scale and proportion than the grand gesture. I think that to this day relationship is key to everything I do. In fact that word could well summarise it all.

Brent: An Untitled painting dated 1986 oil enamel on canvas 180 x 120 cm pretty much shows what you have explained. You can see Kline, Mondrian, maybe Motherwell; the scale is there. Though in this painting you can see that you are also playing with disparate scale, teasing with object and window.
Top left sits an enamel black square created by the white over black. It’s also brushed with white marks just inside, bottom and side of the black square. There is a different logic working, constructive while playful, less strictly formal, or emulative of the victories of past heroes. Here you inserted a little window, a painting within a painting, a two-in-one.

Richard: These paintings were a long time ago now. I do remember deliberately messing with that play-off between space and surface. (Object and window as you put it, which I saw as an important issue in the NY painting.) I enjoyed that push and pull in which the materiality of the paint along with the play of the mark and juxtaposed colour planes both created and negated space simultaneously. This positive/negative thing remains interesting to me. Colour-wise – there was a lot going on beneath the seemingly black and white skin of these paintings. They were about building an image.
The most memorable aspect of this early work is the element of surprise I felt with each piece. Each painting was about resolving a visual problem. In fact I could produce whole series of works, which were all different out-workings of the same starting point. i.e.: A certain division of a canvas of certain proportions. Perhaps this is the constructive element you speak of? The final image was always a surprise and never quite what I had in mind at the beginning. The spontaneity of the process was very exciting for me. I loved the idea of an image which came about as the result of a struggle. In fact I believed it was impossible to make a bad painting. There was no such thing as bad painting, only paintings which were not yet finished.
Further down the track, I began to appreciate the work of people like Stella, Kelly, and Marden. Things were simplified down to a single image. One form placed within the rectangle of the canvas that in itself really functioned as an object in literal space.

Brent: And ten years later you decided upon a canvas as thing, in this case cut and shaped mdf panels. It seems you were able to work with the asymmetry because it was also an object. You didn’t need to surrender the idea of design because you could achieve the frontal, with every part reading the same value. Was that the case?
Also with this you are very much in the material world. And luckily in that world there is color. With Soundings 1997 you have large mdf panels cut and placed in architectural positions in a physical gallery space. There is a vertical shape that has a foot or a diagonal added at the base. It brings to attention the vertical area above the foot articulated on the left by the opening: Oddly the space between the opening and vertical panel kind of hops over to the greater expanse of wall. You get the sense that everything is kind of filled up and working. On an adjacent wall a symmetrical panel, an upside-down ‘U’, hugs the edge of the wall. Again this brings the thing off-center. Here dark panels and the white walls are the major contributors to color. The description reads ‘and sand.’

Richard: At a certain point I came to the conclusion that a shaped painting was more immediate and literal than playing with shape within a canvas. By opening up the form the whole wall was integrated into the work. So you see the exhibition Soundings, 1997, was really more of a total installation than a show of paintings. Instead of being played out within the rectangular canvas format – the positive/ negative play became more about the cut form relating to the entire wall. In a sense this was site specific painting. Each piece was made to work within the specific scale and dimensions of the room. The shapes were made to be seen in relation to the space. Now there was an illusion of space on/ in the wall created through the placement of the object. You are absolutely right when you say I hadn’t surrendered the idea of design because I was able to still compose in a fashion while making a monochromatic, single image work. What inspired me was the objecthood of the minimalists but also the undermining of that.
I mixed sand with the colour on these pieces to create a very dense velvety surface, which seemed to suck up light and ensured that the image looked the same from wherever it was viewed. Each work also had a title as in traditional painting. The dark one in the slide was titled In Through the Outdoor as I recall.

The idea of the painting as an object to be placed and read in relation to other objects occupied me for some years after that. (Still does.) The scale decreased and the form became more three-dimensional. Some referred to the work as wall jewelry. I didn’t mind that. Matisse was often accused of being merely decorative so I’m in good company! The pieces were monochromatic – almost sculptural and with great emphasis on the surface quality. The relationship with the wall remained important. The work was often presented in rather unorthodox positions in terms of painting – but it never really became sculpture either. Just coloured objects that were beautiful in themselves and activating the space.

Brent: In New Day Art I can get the wall jewelry. With Spirit Level 2001 I see where you are engaging the space, what’s already in it, and drawing attention to both color and the things that are without it. Are you making these objects yourself and coloring them up? In New Day Art did you look at the space first and then go about getting or making the objects?

Richard: Actually with all these pieces I was just making one after another in the studio. Each one inspired the next. They were made from MDF, which I laminated and then carved and shaped. The colour and surface quality had to relate to the form and those decisions were very intuitive for me. Certain forms seemed to suggest certain finishes. I used various paints and sand occasionally to give a variety of finishes from matt velvet to high gloss and even iridescent at times. It was all about the similarities and differences between the objects. I was trying to build a sort of visual logic between them and again relationship was key. These pieces were not made to be seen alone. I thought of them as units of language (albeit an ambiguous one.) or an alphabet. I find that I am not as interested in saying something specific in my work so much as I am in thinking about how it may be said. How meaning is found. Usually it is in relationship: Hence the title of the Soundings installations. Sounding is a way of measuring the depth of water through the relationship of time and sound. We come to know the world through our understanding of the relationships between things.
Presenting these things in a public space was the final (and most exciting for me) stage of the work. I never considered them finished until they had been situated somewhere outside of the studio. They needed to relate to one another and the space in a vital way. Placement in relation to the physical details of the room was paramount. I liked to emphasize the fact that the art was functioning visually on the same level as what ever was already in the space so yes I highlighted those relationships as well. You are right – that thinking was probably more pronounced in the spirit level show, which was a much sparer installation than the new day one.

Brent: With RE:presentations a number of things are happening. You have stacked. There are pedestals on the wall on which you present color or colors as form. The proportion of the pedestal or shelf, or lower part, is the same as the color objects.
On the floor, you are on the floor now; a circular blue shape sits close to a very waxy looking shape learning against the wall. It appears the same shape. You can get the very different color and material playing off of each other, just as you do with painting, when you want to do it that way. The blue disk looks like a 16mm can. The leaning piece appears to be wax. Both wear symmetrical motives in the center to mimic the outer shape of the disk.

Richard: This next body of work came out of my Masters degree research. I wrote a thesis alongside it entitled Romancing the Minimal. It could well have been called ‘Putting the fun back into Modernism’. There was definitely an element of humor in the work – sometimes a gentle dig at the seriousness of high modernism. (That was hinted at in the titles.) It was a serious attempt though, to get away from the severity of much reductive work and to warm things up a little if you like. It was also an effort on my part to revitalize my own studio practice which I felt had become a little dry. I wasn’t surprising myself any more – the spontaneity was gone. To go back to abstract expressionist painting was not an option, but I did want to make work in which the process was an integral part of its meaning. I began working with found objects. In this way the work became more closely related to my everyday life – I was always finding things to work with where ever I was. The process involved a lot of spontaneous decision-making and I found it very stimulating. Sometimes I would go to the studio with nothing and no idea. I would try to make work with what ever was lying around there: maybe a bag of nails and some rubber bands or whatever. Usually it was a matter of finding an object and deciding how I was going to present it as art. I developed a series of works in which I made containers to house the objects. I would present them as a pairs with each object seemingly giving the other a reason for being. Other times I would make shelves or plinths that echoed the form of the object and present them together. While the thinking was related to Duchamp, and arte povera as well, my aesthetic remained minimalist and I presented the work in the form of installations, which activated the space and worked at times to highlight the physical eccentricities of it. There was often the question about what was art and what wasn’t!

The waxy disc piece you mention was just that – a disc of wax which I had cast using the blue plastic film canister as a mold. This work reversed my normal procedure of finding an object and making a container for it. In this case I found the container and wanted to produce an object to go inside it. As you say there were painterly issues at play in spite of the fact that for a few years there I didn’t even pick up a brush.

Brent: Easy Pieces 2007 consists of a number of found objects slightly altered in some way. You continue to mention your painting as a reductive aesthetic. In Easy Pieces the taxonomy of objects of different colors and shapes are presented on a wall, close to each other, one after the other.

Richard: The Easy Pieces were a deliberate turn back towards painting. I was excited with the direction my work had taken during my Master’s and wanted to continue down that track – but also wanted to see if I could bring that way of working with the object more squarely into the dialogue of painting. So I narrowed down the field of objects I chose to work with – selecting only those that bore some resemblance to reductive painting already. I tended to work with square or circular pieces. Fundamental shapes… more two dimensional than before. I looked for interesting surfaces, color, and proportion. Many of these didn’t need much intervention from me to be read as painting – only to be placed on the wall. Some I coloured and some of them needed extraneous parts such as legs or handles removed.
Once again the installation was critical to the reading of the work. With this 2007 show I only decided to hang them close in a line after two days of playing around with various other options. I chose to condense the relationships by presenting them all on one wall. I also liked the way that by doing so there was a hint of a left to right reading – a kind of narrative.
You mention the taxonomy of objects which suggests perhaps I am collecting and classifying things for display with regard to their former identity. I don’t think that it is though. I really am only concerned with plastic form – the physical qualities – not any other sort of reading that may come out of thinking about the history of the object etc. I do enjoy the poetic resonance that a found object seems to carry though – a sense of time – and the relationship to the non-art world.

Brent: With your show Pièces faciles some of the work is larger, they bring back some scale, yet ably sit within the domestic and our notion of what a painting is: They are reductive and monochrome.
Is it important to know the background, the location of the part to the whole, as something historical, where it had hinged off or taken a turn? Is it important to know where on the streets an object was found, and what part it may have played in a previous life, a while ago? Or is it enough to call up the beauty and let the viewer do the rest?

Richard: With Pièces faciles I really wanted to make a traditional painting exhibition – so the objects I steered towards were those with the proportions and scale of easel painting. The surface and material quality was an important consideration in my choices. Paris is great because much of the stuff thrown out is still solid timber and really substantial. We are not talking chipboard here… The domestic scale was almost a matter of course because most of these tableaux were originally tabletops or desks or benches. Those are the kinds of things that are out there on the streets. I keep the pieces around home and I live with them until they seem to suggest what needs doing for them to be complete. What paint – what colour – what finish? I rarely change them physically – don’t cut them – just add paint. I do feel that rather than merely finding supports to paint on though, I am using paint to draw out the inherent personality of the object. The group works as an ensemble because of the consistency of my approach but each piece really does have its own unique character. I work with each one until it sings.
The work is not all about art historical references but those who are interested will see it does operate out of a particular history. Perhaps it does help to know something of what I refer to here. I do find myself thinking about a line of progression in painting historically and imagining where I fit in or how I am adding to it. I see this work coming out of what I have identified as a European sensibility towards the object/painting. By that I mean a poetic reading of the object. This is something I see in arte povera and also in the French support/surface movement. There I find an approach to the object that takes into account both the process of art making and the allusive qualities of material. I am attempting to apply this understanding of the art object to the rigorous reductive apprehension I previously felt was the end goal of all art. It seems to me a way of revitalizing an often-clinical approach.

It is true that these paintings are named after the streets on which the panels were found. The locations in which I find the panels are important to me because I enjoy the fact that with that information they take on another layer of meaning. They can act as a sort of mapping of my daily movements around Paris. They hint at life in a place. It may surprise you to know that I don’t actually go out looking for these things. I just find them as I go about my life. I don’t drive in Paris. I travel by foot, by metro and sometimes by bicycle. I see interesting objects discarded on the street – I take them home. So these objects do become something of a recording of my life. My walks to the supermarket – commuting to and from ParisCONCRET and so on… I am enjoying having the work coming out of my life in  such an integrated way.

…to call up the beauty and let the viewer do the rest. You put that beautifully and actually, yes I do think that in the end that is enough. On one level this work is not about anything more than recognizing beauty in another person’s cast offs. I suppose I am resurrecting these things in a sense – giving them another life, but the role they served in a previous life isn’t relevant to their standing as art objects now. Without knowing any of that the viewer can appreciate the work as painting.

The strongest things are simple but not always easy.
They demand intention and choice.
The end is beauty.

Character, Letter, and the Misbehave – Mel Prest

Brent: You have a penchant for Travel, often for the more exotic places on this globe. You return home, go to the studio, and take out your notes… what are these notes?

Mel: I like to be completely immersed while I’m traveling—so this means not putting a frame/ lens/ color on paper between the experience and myself. Sometimes I take little snapshots with my phone, or quickly record video of small moments with my cheap camera. On this trip to Senegal I have three little videos I am happy with: one is walking on the road in a village by the welder’s stand. The welder likes to listen to Islamic music and blasts it on an old speaker (music and tools powered by a generator). So we are approaching this stand, walking behind our grandmother and a taxi is approaching from behind, sounding a sort of funny custom horn. It’s these strange moments, when layers of unrelated things that occur spontaneously, that characterize travel for me. I have no idea what will happen with these captured moments once I return.

Brent: The image you sent with two girls dressed in these beautiful soft colors in a landscape of grass gold and blue…
With that image in hand I’m going to turn to the subways of Tokyo, Japan. Then I want to jump over to Osaka. Japan is your friend, and the subways your inspiration: What led you to the subways?

Mel: I love train travel and the subway, especially in Japan. The beautiful fabric of the seat cushions, the carpet, the patterns and the clean white hanging loops to hold – they blow my mind. The trains are so clean, quiet, and perfectly on time. Everything about the subway in Japan is amazing – not to mention it’s in my favorite place and I feel happy and excited when I’m there. Even when the subway car is packed tight like sardines it’s still great. And the cute little bilingual LED scrolling signs that tell you where your train is, and how soon you’ll be arriving. Also – being underground and going somewhere distant so fast and then coming back up – surprise – you’re now somewhere else – it feels like time travel and like getting an unexpected gift at the same time.
As far as the work goes: when I began doing these drawings, I was looking for a way to use color and line in a more spontaneous seeming way. I started out by using an English alphabet gridded out and making my own sentences but these had a confessional feeling and were easy to control the outcome. Those works made me feel too serious, like I had to say something Important. I looked for something I loved and felt really excited about instead. I then worked with lyrics from the first five Led Zeppelin albums for the next series of drawings and these had a certain structure, based on the placement of the grid of the commonly used English letters. I am familiar with Hiragana, so the grid became a chart of 71 syllables, with the structure shifting from drawing to drawing, based on remembering them all.

Brent: How do you make a grid out of 71 Hiragana characters?

Mel: It’s a different process than using English, where I was accustomed to a certain order (A-Z). Using Hiragana, I put characters down in the order I could remember them – so it was a different structure each time. The Osaka Metro pieces are slightly off square, so I made the grid 8×9 dots, fudge-ing the math part to make the dots fit the shape. On a separate piece of paper I write the characters out as I remember them, usually the favorite shaped ones first and copy the rest. I finish the page of Hiragana and use it to match each syllable to each grid’s dot – for they are not ever written on the same paper. This reminds me of two things – when I’m painting the lines, it’s like that game Battleship, where you call out x and y axis locations to your opponent using skill and luck to win the game; when I’m painting, I’m locating each character, initially, by counting the x/y axis location. It’s also like the first web page I made from an image of an old scumbly number paintings; using image maps, rather than buttons, to make different locations. Only when you rolled over the spots that linked to something could you see that they were links to embedded sound files and images of related works. The grids are a way of structuring information that may or may not be related – but thinking in a three- or four-dimensional sense – involving memory and location.

Brent: Chiyoda and Yurakucho each refer to a particular subway line in Tokyo.
Yurakucho springs up with a network of lines from the base, or so it feels visually. There is a dense area of line work that reads directional, and not particularly structural, just going where the line has to go. As they spread out you start seeing through the line into a space – some manage to make it to the border, but, of course, these never get across: The line routes back.
In the area with less activity is this due to the Hiragana characters not coming up on the subway list? Are these gouache on pre-colored watercolor paper, or is there a ground preparation?

Mel: The Tokyo pieces are rectangular – so there is more play in terms of shape and density. The colored ground is painted gouache – some are opaque and others show brush-strokes, becoming “open” and spatial. But the way they will look when complete is unknown; I paint following the locations on the grid. This unknown-ness is really important to me – I don’t want to make a preconceived object at this point – I’m interested in being in the presence of the actual completed piece. This is how I began working with Hiragana. In the Led Zeppelin pieces I had begun to know where the lines would go, which letters occurred most often (a, n, t, i, e, s) and I could direct the color, density and shape more than I wanted to. I began using limited color in the Japan drawings, as each line used to have a new color and there were too many colors to be seen. The raw white of the paper was playing too heavy a role in the work and each line color was often modified by white – and tints only give a portion of the spectrum.
Also, I should say that I can’t see the 3D quality of these at all – to me they are almost totally flat. So I think I see these a lot differently than most people.

Brent: The Osaka Metro paintings on paper have a white background. I guess you could say there is the suggestion of architectural structure in each work, perhaps enhanced by the line versus light background, but primarily I see how space is arranged, working as color, mark, or in absence as they open. And in the Osaka Metro paintings there is a lot of absence. That this comes up following some rule, along with a certain level of forgetting or mistake is interesting when you look at the work.
I realize now, too, that you use both Hiragana and English. And when you make a boo-boo you highlight that in another color. Obviously Osaka has fewer stops on the line. But we love the place none-the-less.

Mel: I mentally assign the plain, unchanged paper of the Osaka Metro pieces invisibility, as though the white is air. Often people see these pieces and think they are colored string on nails and framed. I don’t see them this way; it’s not what I’m thinking about when I make them. Because I see things in 2D I am always imagining space as some sort of illusion. I use cast shadows to give me a sense of depth, flipping my mind between 2D and 3D in everyday life.

Open, to me is airy, atmospheric and suggested. Osaka Metro, and the other works on paper, have less defined parameters – they are more like directions. I like that they are very structured and have a beginning and end but they appear completely chaotic; and the urge to highlight the mistake feels absurd. I can imagine the architecture part but I see it flipping between line, plane and space.

One thing I forgot to mention about the mistakes being accentuated; I borrowed this from the Japanese tradition of repairing broken ceramics with gold. The feeling is that a repaired tea bowl becomes more beautiful with its imperfection.

Brent: Not at all surprised about the nail and string thing. It’s a real thing. You make them as a kid, and you know how they work. And the structure’s inherent illusion is intriguing because you get it and it’s all happening in real space but it’s also working with illusion. I don’t think it’s a disservice. But it is not what you are doing. Call it oddly associative.
You are looking to work with less defined parameters. And for me I’m very comfortable going off into the refined and controlled versus chaotic of the spare Osaka Metro’s dimensionality, where the pleasure of sensing does the rest.

You use taut panels to make a very different kind of painting. The practical surface perhaps is solid though engages color, vibration, order, in a very different manner.
These paintings do not come from the Tokyo or the Osaka Subway. Some do have titles that include Japanese location or events. Though they are of another world. What world is that?

Mel: The panels are a more hermetic practice than the works on paper, though they are also process driven. Although the oil paintings are more closed, there is play in the beginning and end, with the middle being the labor of paint mixing. I arrive at the base color slowly, beginning with a color I can see or imagine. Once the color is painted on the panel it takes over and needs to be something new, so I have a lot of time to play and experiment. The line colors are all premixed after the base is complete, but I don’t always paint them in the order mixed; I can repeat colors or skip them. Sometimes I feel despair while I’m painting because it looks like a disaster: I only know if the painting is a success or failure once it is complete and I am standing in its presence.

I like using the Japanese titles because the word is first a sound or a shape. Ume sounds round and full and I’m conscious of my bottom lip when I say it. Later I can look up how the word translates. Titles also come from what I have read and recall. Shin-Remon comes from making the gradient by shading a Hansa yellow mixture with Ivory black and Raw umber. In Japan I heard the word Shin everywhere and when I looked it up I saw it meant New. Suddenly I had a small window to see and understand parts of different names of places; Shinjuku, Shinkansen, Shinbashi…

The black paintings are about the Haenyo, Korean women who free dive for fish on Jeju Island. (In Japan they are called Ama, and they dive for pearls). It’s a traditional, matriarchal society and it is slowly dying with the elderly divers. There are beautiful words that relate to their practice that I stole for painting titles, my favorite being Sumbisori. This is the deep, whistling breath the divers take as they come up from the dive, and has great onomatopoeia.

Brent: Your recent paintings have that deep whistling sound. They are to the tune of black. None are actually black, but they are very dark with the light coming though as vibration and color. What decided you to focus there?

Mel: I relied heavily on white for color and visibility and finally became aware of it. I needed to break my rule about using black from a tube. I bought a range of blacks: Slate, Mars, Lamp and Ivory and started doing color charts to see their character. I love Ad Reinhardt paintings and how they slowly reveal themselves. Have you ever gone under anesthesia or passed out? I like that slightly scary feeling of the ear-ringing hum that becomes a roar, right before you become unconscious. For me, black paintings have a slow read that engage me in a visceral way – it’s a more physical reaction than optical and are a part of another world I can now enter.

Brent: I remember a young woman standing in front of your painting in LA.
She said to her friend without turning, without moving her eyes, So this is what you see before you die.

It wasn’t a black painting, but it had the horizontal buzz of vertically stacked lines going out. Purple Haze the climate, electric blue the pinch, and as some may experience, the signing off just before the lights goes out.

Dark grays, works on paper: Following the route and rhyme as you described with Tokyo and Osaka subway paintings, continuing the play with line, geometrics and their travel, of theater, something else is coming up, mysterious, with character, letter, and the misbehave. Is this a new direction?

Mel: Oh, yeah, that was Sumbisori; I hope I’ll see that before I die!
Yes, I have been holding on to a place for a long time before I make the turn. I think I will paint a second line, but I want to do more of what I don’t know.
Thanks Brent!

Glow – Henriëtte van ’t Hoog

Brent: Pop, peek-a-boo, poking around, of color that is not of this world, though worldly set in architectural places that can eat up the logic of their interior. Indeed you have for lunch many of the preconceptions of the formal. Your sense of order of space and how you color it physical is full of humor often playing up to our own inquisitiveness, how we are likely to navigate – how we and our body often lurch into understanding looking for an easy registration, and what happens when this is not possible.

Henriëtte: Well, I have been poking around for a while hoping to make people aware of color and shape, and of non-existing space. In Joint I transformed a little area into something new and unexpected, joking around with color and shape while not knowing where it would lead – just having fun, and working through ways that would perhaps mislead the audience.
I always trust myself to find the next step in the direction I am going, but this is also scary, I can tell you. But usually the work I’ve just completed hints to what is going to happen next, even if I’m not totally aware of it.
I like the idea of making something that nobody has seen before. Although I am aware that everything has been done already, it doesn’t matter. I am also aware that I’m working in a tradition, but that doesn’t matter either. Actually I think it’s a strength knowing that I am working in a tradition. There is a chance to break all the unspoken rules. And then you find out that what you have to do is invent new ones, your own rules, otherwise the work doesn’t work. And this is odd, and interesting, and matters.

But back to the little installation Joint: It was situated in the smallest of spaces, called the cupboard, at the exhibition space RC de Ruimte in IJmuiden, near Amsterdam. It was easy to pass by the space without noticing that there was anything inside. You had to pop your head through the opening to see the work: peek-a-boo indeed!

Brent: With Joint you went into the area and started from scratch, building up the intoxicating planes, the mischief space, along with decisions of color, while you were there. In a manner, Joint was built for the cupboard.
Your architectural use of space, the modernist sense of absence, the trace to Sol LeWitt that disintegrates along the way, the fold, the feel, the synthetic, even a sense of loss when an area is cut off or cut out replaced with a solid bit of air, then when on closer view the material surfaces, the color that sits on and bounces off and back, all tally trouble but also to structure.
What do you expect someone to do with this?

Henriëtte: In a sense my work is very clear. I like clearness. But the use of heterogeneous colors, which can hardly stand each other, and are on the edge, together with the use of preprinted vinyl makes the work even more mischievous. And of course there is the emotional connotation with those vibrant colors. So I hope when people step inside this small space and see the play with the flat and the three-dimensional, the play with the perspective and the triangular objects and how a painted piece of paper is disturbing their expectation, together with the strength of the color, that their experience will hit the roof.

Of course I know this won’t happen, but it is nice to think of it. The whole piece looked like a Fremdkörper in this particular surrounding. It wasn’t set up that way.

Brent: The dangerous liaison is with decision-making. But how does this all work? Do you first make models? Do you work directly in the space that is allocated? I’m wondering how Joint came together coupling the creative with the practical?

Henriëtte: I always make a model for an installation. I need to do this otherwise it’s not possible to know how the work will fit into a particular space. The scary thing is when you realize a work using a model that you think you know how it will work often this turns out not to be the case. In location, in reality, when following the model in very strict terms it turns out that you end up with no more than an enlarged duplicate of the model. The scale brings in specific qualities of its own. So the actual setting, the object in the space, dictates changes and amendments that need to be made for it all to work.
I hardly sketch on paper. When I see the space, the idea comes to my mind and when I sort of know what I want to do I start to sketch with colored paper. I have gathered a nice collection. I use it as my palette. Then I start to cut and glue, undo, redo and so on, till I begin to like it and become excited about the work. At that stage I always invite my friends to criticize what I am doing, asking ‘Am I crazy, or not crazy enough?’

In Joint I have combined three-dimensional triangular objects with a flat perspective play in a very narrow architectural space. The use of the triangular structures come from an earlier installation entitled Plissé.
Here’s a little background.
I was invited to make an installation in an old empty house; curators thought it would be inspiring for artists. I immediately had the idea to create the opposite of how the space looked, a Fremdkörper, clean, sophisticated. So yes, in that way it was inspiring. I had cabinets from an earlier project with English colleague Michael Wright that combined large mural installations and cabinets used to display Michael’s photos and videos. Under the name Wright and Van ’t Hoog we still on and off work together. Therefore I knew the disrupting effect of the combination of something three-dimensional and something flat with perspective play on a wall.

For Plissé I asked a carpenter to make three triangular objects for me. This was the starting point. The color choice wasn’t difficult. I choose one of those ugly and depressing colors already present in the house and combined it with fluorescent yellow and white to see what happens. Indeed it became a Fremdkörper, but it also looked as if it had been there all along, a kind of IKEA kitchen that someone had forgotten to remove when they stripped the house.
Back to Joint: I re-used two of the triangular objects as the starting point. They didn’t fit at all so I started ‘coupling the creative and the practical’. I put them in a certain constellation and made a connection between the two.

Brent: And it works.
With Plissé, and to a less extent Joint, the ‘visually deceptive’ slips over to the plain and simple. This is the case with the vertical planes of Plissé, and the interior drywall enclosure of Joint.
You have made murals painted directly onto the wall. The murals particularly draw attention to the flatness of the surface you are working with, also to the flatness of color when it is set to a single plane. In Cubes (2007) you have this working again, yet this time in new and strange ways. The ‘models’ are just as the title suggests ‘cubes’. They read open or closed and are painted directly to the wall, to fold onto the floor, or bend back with the above ceiling duct. They are cubes, not particularly complex in their reading, and as cubes allude to volume. Yet they also bring to attention flatness and openness. Unlike Plissé or Joint, Cubes appears easy to navigate optically; the [A-beam structures] being the thing that physically needs to be got around to see, again making use of the restriction. But you have created a whole new space.

Henriëtte: You have given an intriguing account of Cubes, thank you. In my head I was still busy creating something three-dimensional together with something flat. But in this case the three-dimensional was already there, that ceiling duct, that in-between ceiling. The exhibition space used to be a modern Protestant church, with a peculiar shaped wall. It has very beautiful light from above. I didn’t have to add anything, but could just use what was already there. The whole work is based on parallelism. The diagonal is in the same direction as the direction of the beam. When you walk along, the perspective changes all the time, a cube changes into a trapezium or into an impossible geometric shape.

Cubes is made with fluorescent paint. The shining adds something poetical, something not rational, something you don’t know forehand. There is a contrast between the initial formative idea of this mural and all the more intuitive connotations it brings along. The vibrant colors make an appeal, calling ‘Look at me’, and the ‘shining’ gives a sense of vulnerability to the object.

Cubes and all the other site-specific installations I did were temporary. This is strange, they exist for a shorter or longer period and then, boom, they’re gone -– only some pictures remain. It gives me a forlorn feeling…I had changed the space, and then it’s back to ‘normal’.

I think Cubes was crucial to the development of my work. The last couple of years, before I made Cubes, I had only made site-specific work. I hardly had any work for sale, besides a nice series of abstract watercolors. But they were different, on paper, and had nothing to do with perspective, not yet. When I saw the illusionistic perspective of Cubes, I decided to make those strange shapes in the ‘real’, meaning make them three-dimensional, as with Inner Glow I. The first couple of pieces were executed in MDF, all other Inner Glows, Corner Pieces and Fotons are in zinc. The ones made of MDF were a little bit robust because of the material, but the size fitted to the material. I am very conscious about size and scale of the work. For the next series of work I was looking at the delicacy of the material, the material had to be there as support for the color. And I chose zinc.

Brent: Did you have in mind that you were about to embark on a very different way of working – studio work, where all the decisions are made? And when a ‘piece’ moves out into a new location, more decisions, of course, but this time the object is easily transportable, and is saved. Was this a conscious decision, a natural next step after Cubes?
What stays the same, of course, is that you need to make models first, similar to your installation work. Though these models don’t need to fit somewhere other than in the space of your experience, and in your studio? You then send these models out to a fabricator?

Henriëtte: Yes, it was as you described, a conscious decision, a natural next step.
I was happy to make studio work. The fabricator works in my studio building, is an artist himself, and understands what I am doing. He also was able to help me to refine the hanging system.
But something even more interesting was happening: Looking at the Inner Glows (which are actually convex), the optical illusion is that it can be read either convex or concave. And when you look at the Fotons (which are actually concave), it is working the other way around. This becomes even more giddying when you negotiate the objects from different positions, or even walk along past. I hoped for something optical like this to happen, but had not expected the visual power of this – wow!
The back of each work is painted. The reflection on the wall is an important part of the work. And while the object is ‘transportable’ it is very much dependant on a wall, one that needs to be white to reflect the color. The intensity of this ‘glow’ depends on the color, of course, but also the use of light. All colors produce a glow over a short distance, so even when I’m not using fluorescent color you still get the desired impression. While this optical flipping is nothing new I feel the way I am using it, the play of form, adding my own personal color spectrum, offers a whole new field for creating more mischief.

Brent: And you continue to make site-specific work as well. Have the small portable pieces had any impact on that practice?

Henriëtte: Yes, the site-specific installations had a big influence on the small works. However for this to also happen the other way around with the smaller pieces impacting on the site-specific installations is new. I make both simultaneously. When you look at Spandrel II, perhaps difficult to see in reproduction, I have painted MDF panels both sides, which sit about half a centimeter out from the wall. The outline thus appears somewhat diffused. This, for sure, comes from working with the newer small convex pieces where, in their case, the hanging system gives the impression of them floating just off from the wall.

Brent: Spandrel II has a very clear feel. There is this play with flatness. And while you employ MDF board instead of working directly onto the wall the space reads very open and clean. This, for me, offers even more play. I’m relaxed with the simple shapes and color and the planes they sit on. But I’m also intrigued with what’s going on.
Your latest portable pieces, Inner Glow (corner piece I) 2009 and Inner Glow (white, blue, gold), both 2009, also work opening towards a clarity, a playing fast against slow. The read is very simple. Each uses the physical traits differently. Color is there, and there. The impression is less in the trick or the illusion. They expose, hold back some, and then gently declare – I think that way of experience is worth the distance.

Henriëtte: I know by looking at others’ work and also by looking at my own earlier work that there often is a kind of a wave. One starts with complexity and often the evolution is towards simplicity, then back again toward the complex. My direction at this moment is simplicity – looking for openness and clarity. When I read over our conversation it appears that you have gently suggested this process through comments about my work.
But we never know what comes next.

Suspension in Blue – Alan Ebnother

Brent: If color were a stamp then yours would be green. Though recently not all things have come up this way: You have moved into orange and apricot, banana yellow and powder blue, just for starters.

Alan: I have been watching colors besides greens for years as I mixed or ground different pigments to achieve this stamp of color. As there are not too many naturally green pigments, powder blue and banana yellow mixed together would have been a likely place to start. But before we go any further let me say that I have no idea what powder blue is, or banana yellow? The many different shades of yellow-green that are apparent in a typical banana could actually encompass 15-30 various hues, and is powder typically blue? If one were able to see the under painting, or ground of a typical Ebnother from 1990 under the Veronese green earth, one would find pinks and oranges waiting for the earth pigments to lose their opacity and slowly become transparent: A process that starts after 100 or so more years. What has changed over the last period of time is that these colors are no longer hiding under a green skin; slowly working their way to visibility, they are out of the closet and onto the surface.
For that matter if you happen to see a painting of mine from 2002~2007 you will see what I call windows. Small areas where these non-green alien colors are visible and poking through…I basically moved to the desert in an attempt to completely open the surface of my paintings, and let the light out.

You know, I’m still a bit ticked off about the reference to “banana yellow.” Before color can be used as an expressive medium it has to become abstract. Unless we develop the skills to distinguish or acknowledge different hues of a color without referencing nature or society our color sense has no way of developing further. Remember color is not a given, and human interaction with color is a sense as is hearing, seeing, taste, and smell.
I firmly believe that even for you to be referring to a certain yellow as “Banana yellow” degrades the whole concept of a color experience. Come on, we do not have a vocabulary for most of our senses–so why do we think it is correct to attempt to categorize a color experience?

I was extremely interested in painting green.
When asked how long I would paint green my answer was until I got bored.
One morning I went into the studio and painted a red painting. That was 2008. Greens came and went. One day I went into the studio and painted five small red paintings. Yellow came and went. One month I painted ten orange or “golden ” paintings, green came and went. One month I painted seven white paintings, my finger came and went. The past five months I have painted thirteen blue paintings—blue came and is still here.

Brent: Thought maybe you’d be a little peeved by the banana yellow reference. Actually I was looking at the paintings you had in your recent show at George Lawson’s in S.F. One is orange. Another, the color brought down, becomes peach. And then I turned to the yellow and thought, ‘what color is this?’ You are right! When I started thinking about the color as ‘label’ I was already switched off.
So what you are saying is that color should be seen for what it is first without reference or association, and definitely without fancy label. And for a painter who is quite literally painting color the experience of color has to work direct.

Alan: I started painting later then most of my colleagues or contemporaries. And having a concept to hide behind green hopefully gave me two things: A school, with boundaries, that I could function within, and boundaries that I could later push, and push against. Also it was a concept that the current art market would accept, which would give me time to actually learn how to paint, while being a participatory member of the scene.
Painting Green gave me this, and painting tondos for over twelve years further distanced my work from any of the current critics, allowing me the freedom to develop.
What you are referring to as ‘cameo appearances’ was a slow evolution of allowing. I allowed the color to emerge after time. I relaxed, so to say, and opened to the color world.

Brent: You mention a small red painting. Did you have it in mind to make a red as apposed to green painting? Or did it happen as part of a stage, a layer of red?
When you decided that indeed you had made a small red painting, what was the initial impact?

Alan: Red being at the opposite end of the spectrum from Green was of course inviting for my mind. The red painting that I spoke of doing was not entirely successful for me, and eventually it was put in the storage. The left over paint I remixed and softened with yellows, moving on to paint five very small 12×9 inch panels. These were very successful paintings but Red pigments remain an enigma for me and I feel a lack of understanding for them. I am assuming that there is a personal color memory, or a piece of cultural color baggage that I carry around that is keeping me from understanding red.
The color baggage that we drag through our lives is amazing. Our color memories are stamped and formed by personal associations gathered from childhood on.

Brent: Smaller paintings, for example Small Pink, July 7th 2009 and June 3rd 2008 #4, 2008, expose a playful structure of angles and lines. Small Pink appears to have this beautiful white underground upon which you have moved in with some structural line work first?
June 3rd has similar structure going on too, but feels that it has been embedded more (I can’t tell where you started with the final skin.) Both the marks appear quick and mostly made without too much going over the surface again. Another, Blue, March 8th 2009 suggest something different, you can ‘feel’ the paint moving over paint via observing the surface. And that feel becomes the color. Do the marks shift depending on ‘group of paintings’ ‘color of paint’, again, probably related to group ’scale’, or is it just what comes? Has the shifts in color impacted on your mark making?

Alan: Small Pink, July 7th 2009, has an under-painting ground color cut with lead white, which registers as light pink. Basically I moved into this painting with the final skin and the color contrast was a bit much for me to handle. I was working on building up a painting but leaving it as open as possible. The light pink under-painting was too strong for the delicate pink skin and I instinctively began to mark stronger and define the bottom perimeters of the support in an attempt to acknowledge the edge of the support to overpower the color contrast that was happening. This is a love hate painting, and I am 50,50. It’s certainly playful, and certainly does acknowledge the structure and play off of the support. For me the question still remains have I achieved more than this with the painting, or is it a throw away.

June 3rd 2008 #4 is one of the five small red paintings of which I spoke. #4 has a greenish yellow under painting. I went over this with a thinned down version of the red final paint working extremely relaxed and playing off the work that came before. Building this painting off of the left (almost centered) triangle––this painting is for me almost perfect.
Regardless of what I have said painting works of this size is extremely demanding and requires everything that I possess. The reality is that in a work of this size you cannot enter and easily lose yourself in a field of marks encompassing your peripheral vision. This means that the defining and creating of space through definite marking is all that the viewer owns or has to go by.

Brent: I like that you have very clear opinions about what works, what isn’t working, and 50/50. A painting that fails is a bummer. An almost perfect success speaks for itself – and that 50 is in the mix.
Clarity is ruthless and can seldom tolerate less. Though waking and seeing differently can kick it either way. And isn’t it just often a matter of waiting?

A few words you sent…

defining space
creating space
giving a color feeling creating a small world, defined enough to allow time and space suspension are all extremely realistic problems related to the painting of a small painting.

These phrases can just as easily equate to what is happening inside the paintings’ borders as to what is going on outside of them. Likewise, with this word ‘feeling’ it works internally but also has the sense that you want it to move out, to externalize. You continue by saying, what amounts to, ‘defined enough to allow time and space suspension.’
Talking optimum, taking out that 50/5o, considering all things that are going on inside a group of individual paintings, your recent body of work if we could, in a physical space, what is this optimum time / space suspension?

Alan: When I go down to the studio right now it is filled with new blue paintings. There are seven walls in the studio, the smallest being 7 yards across by 23 feet high, and the largest 14 yards across by 23 feet high, so basically there is room for a few paintings. At the moment there are eleven new blues up and there is room for five more, without crowding. I paint around the studio on the free wall 85% of the time but there are a few walls where I am not comfortable painting on them at all: On those I simply hang.
Before I started the blue works the studio was filled with work for rfprfp in San Francisco, and work for Gisele Linder, Basel, two solo shows happening fairly close to one another. I emptied the studio and slowly began filling it with the new blue.
The work is still so new to me that when I walk in I pretty much just drop my mouth and stare. IT IS ALL BLUE! I really have no idea what to think, except that it is really beautiful and the range of blue is getting impressive.
This group of work was started with stretching five canvases and then starting to ‘rabbit skin glue’ them, one at a time.
And as one was drying I’d start the next. After doing a couple I would begin to put a lead ground on the first one, etc…
Always a few going on.

Gravity’s Architecture – Tim McFarlane

Brent: One of the things that intrigue me about your work is how very immediate it feels.
But then, also, there is this fine sense of order; a tension that just reads so. There are often layers, sometime layers upon layers, some almost obliterated, or covered over. There is this sense of frenzy at work, though every move feels so considered, every layer, or clean slate making sense to the next. But this is, of course, looking at a finished piece. I’m sure the actual act, the sitting looking, the going back in, the results so far… these aren’t perfectly arranged layers and movements that happen. What appears in the end as a beautiful display of order and chaos, a pitched tension between control and free play, is something worked at?

Tim: You’ve hit on a lot of what goes on in my decision-making process while painting. There is a lot of back and forth, playing one layer/color/direction off of another, making decisions about how much to save and what to sacrifice. There is a dance between control and chaos that contributes to that tension that you sense. Some of that is because I do work fairly quickly once I get going, but as most of the paintings progress I take more time to evaluate what I want to do next. One of my prime concerns is maintaining a sense of freshness and immediacy through to the final version. From one layer to the next, I find myself taking more time making decisions about how colors are interacting, how thick or thin my marks should be, and how much of the previous layers I want to leave in.

In All That Could Be, from 2006, I began a practice of building my works up using the color of the support, in this case, canvas, as a starting point for mark making as opposed to laying down a color first. I found that leaving even a little bit of the raw canvas showing kept me keenly aware of where I began and the type of energy I wanted to maintain through the completion of the piece. Also, leaving earlier layers showing through to later layers gives viewers a chance to experience something of the journey I took in the evolution of the painting. So, yes, I’m always working to keep some amount of freshness amid the multiple layers in any given piece.

Brent: The mark-making in All That Could Be is very curious. It’s chain-like. Little open areas of color, color actually drawn as rectangles that join together?
The structural feel is that it allows openness for the color to breathe, for the layers to work so well. The chains run each and every way, while they build up a rhythm of marks and surfaces. The piece becomes very unified that way.
In Candy Coated, 2008 chains appear again. Plus there is larger and looser interlocking that fit differently together. And there are areas of diversely treated color and surface.

Tim: Allowing the work to breathe is what brought me to the way I’ve been working for the past three years: The chain-like structures evolved out of slightly harder-edged architectonic forms in earlier works that suggested buildings, ladders, grids, and other man-made structures. The colors were more opaque and the individual layers were much more distinct. In the months that led up to All That Could Be, I began moving away from the denser, hard-edged forms so I could engage in the type of open, all-over composition that is present in ATCB. Having a sense of movement and allowing earlier stages of the work more directly influence the later stages became the challenge that I set up for myself. The ‘chains’ are all joined by folding them back on themselves while painting to provide more of a cohesive whole. Each layer of loops is made up of one or two layers because of this back-and-forth brushwork that reinforces the forms.
By the time I got to Candy Coated, close to two years after All That Could Be, I felt that my ‘all-over’ approach had run its course. I was fairly certain that if I continued along that course I’d become bored and the paintings would suffer, becoming lifeless and dull.
One way I keep the work moving is to look back on the past; I like to see if there is anything worth bringing forward that might generate new ideas. I looked at some older paintings and decide to revisit some of the graphic, linear patterns. I thought that by bringing some variation of flat patterning back into the work and play it against the interlocking layering, I could create situations with new kinds of tensions between colors and use of space.

Brent: The horizontal lines in Candy Coated are about the same thickness as the loops, so there is this unified feel – the loops just having been stretched out and ordered differently. With later paintings you thicken up the straight lines so there is greater disparity between the links or loops and the straights.
From Here To Now, back on canvas, started 2006, completed this year, has a very fast and furious feel of links and loops chaining in the center that run almost past the top and bottom edges of the canvas. The sides are free. ‘Thick’ is a suggestion of a series of veils, or a heavy net, though in each case there is still this transparency. The two sides that appear free and open are actually quite dense compared to the veils of dark area. There are no pattern lines shifting space here, but there is still a shift.

Tim: The change in the stripe thickness in later works is just me wanting to push things a little. Once I’d done Candy Coated and felt that the combination of stripped and netted worked, my very next thought was to see what would happen if I disrupted that unification-how can I change the relationship between the main elements and still make the combination work? That’s where the later changes came in.
From Here To Now actually covers another painting that I completed in 2006 called Blue Rush. BR never quite came together as a painting. It sat in my studio for almost three years until I decided to finally just reuse the canvas. I actually documented the reworking on my blog. The final composition of this painting mirrors a similar one I did with a large (60” x 50”) work on paper in ink. The middle tangle of layers was horizontal in that piece. I needed to see how that idea might work on canvas and went for it. Also, the forms do go off of the edge of the painting, so it seems like you’re just seeing part of a flow of color.

Brent: Are all these paintings within eyeshot when making decisions?

Tim: Yes, most of the time I’m working on two, three or maybe four pieces at one time. It’s a habit that came out of my college days. One wall is used for recently completed works and the adjoining perpendicular wall is my ‘working wall’, so there are always visual references to inform newer works. So, for example, Pour was around for a few months before I got around to working on Another Place and Argo. Having Pour there gave me a place to start a dialogue for the later works.

Aside from works of my own, I keep books about other artists, exhibition postcards and random art magazines in the studio along with a wide range of music to listen to. Sound inspires me a lot, from experimental, glitchy electronic music, minimal techno, and deep house, to Philip Glass, Bjork, and Radiohead and a lot in between.
I’m constantly coming across images on the ‘net that get added onto the layers of visual information/inspiration. I’m constantly looking, looking, looking while walking and even just sitting. The smallest crack in a wall can have the same impact as a book loaded with images of a favorite artist.

Brent: Pour is the ultimate in disparity… very clean horizontal lines appearing almost measured, and then you make your music over the top of them. And, as you mention, your opening bands, they get wider and messier, start to disagree with the thin ribbons though resemble links and chains in density and playfulness: Here I’m looking at Another Place. And then Argo where the bands are wide and open but almost covered completely, though in good operational order noticed as you run your finders down the edges of the different colored blinds.
What artists are you looking at? Does Gravity’s Architecture and Mary Heilmann have any relation?

Tim: I thought you might ask me about Mary Heilmann’s work in relation to Gravity’s Architecture. I’ve been aware of Heilmann’s work for a while, but it’s always been on the periphery of my attention until recently, that is, after I’d completed GA. Two other artists who have informed a lot of my work over the past 8 years or so have been Brice Marden and Sean Scully. For various reasons, others include: Richard Serra, Mark Rothko, Matisse, Cezanne, Franz Kline, Ellsworth Kelly, and more.
Originally, I thought what wound up being GA would be the base for some other structure on top. I wanted to see how the thinned out acrylic washes I was utilizing in works on paper at the time would translate to wood panel. I wasn’t sure about the results at first because I struggled with not covering the horizontals over with some other form(s). I let it sit for almost a month before it grew on me enough to include it in my last solo show at the Bridgette Mayer Gallery (‘Right Now’-April, 2009). The drips provide a sense of immediacy while also providing visual ‘stops’ for the quick horizontal movement of the lines. I think it stands out in a good way from my other concurrent works. GA has provided a new line of inquiry that allows me to still explore the shallow, but dynamic space and layering that has permeated my work recently.

Brent: Interesting I thought Guston would have been up there at the top of your list…
You seem to have solved a few of the problems he was having with abstraction.
The horizontal bars have a rest. The drips become part of your vocabulary. And the only way to get something to drip at the scale you are working is to have the paint quite thin.
I think of these newer pieces as moving out of the frame while actually working well within the edges. The background is either plane, or left as is. If working on panel the wood texture and color assumes the background field. And you build clouds out of your interconnecting marks. And the parts rain, color pulls down with gravity. These drips also stand up quite solidly, or as solid as a cloud.

Tim: You know, a lot of people have brought up Guston’s name in relation to my work but I’ve never made a solid connection for myself. I like some of his work, but, again, Guston is one of those artists I haven’t paid a lot of attention to. Maybe that’s how it happens, you know, we pick up things subliminally from sources that we show the least amount of interest in at first.
I stripped away the bars in Masks because I love seeing the wood grain in the panels and wanted to preserve some of it in the final stage. It also meant that whatever images I painted would be sitting/hanging in an undefined space, creating a new set of issues to deal with and bringing more focus on the forms themselves. The directionality of the wood grain also acts as a counter point to the steady, floating feeling of the main image. Interestingly, the drips seem too serve to enhance the floating feeling by acting as visual tethers, connecting the ‘floaters’ to the bottom edge of the paintings.

Brent: Floaters, balls, clouds… Recently, you had the opportunity to work direct… well, to paint a small room. This gave you the chance to forget where the painting was in relation to the support, making it very clear that the painting was working with you—Any new awareness that developed along the way?

Tim: There was a lot going on with this project, which I titled, This Moment. It was my first site-specific piece, located in what we call the vault room, a small project space in the rear of the gallery. I worked on it in April, 2009, during gallery hours, while Right Now was showing. I took myself out of my typical solitary studio situation and put everything out there for everyone to see as it developed over the month. I didn’t have any plan except to go in there every day, work and see what happened.
This Moment began as a drawing project but, a few days into it, I wasn’t satisfied with how things were coming along. The drawing wasn’t strong enough for my taste and after stepping away from it for a couple of days, I returned and jumped into painting. Painting allowed me to engage the space in a much more direct manner. At the same time, I found that painting in such a small space (71” wide, 61” deep and 115” at its highest point) affected me psychologically as I built up the layers. I became acutely aware of how the shallow layering I use can change a flat surface depending on the density of marks. That, coupled with a small amount of space to step back from the work in either direction made it much more confrontational as the painting evolved.
Not having the type of control over the support that I’m used to in the studio made this project a real challenge. However, when all was said and done, I felt that I’d opened a new path for myself, one where the studio can be where ever I find a space to paint in or on.

A Place of Ritual – Patricia Zarate

Brent: Out of location, a thing found – wonders in ways that form a new thing, in a different location – this is generally how I sense your various projects working.

Patricia: It is my experience of a location or an object in a place that is important to me. I think that I’ve been concerned with taking an experience – a place in time, perception – a feeling or idea and translating or transforming that into a physical object. The installation I made at The Queens Museum in New York is an early example of how I translate my experiences into object. I was still working exclusively in black and white and the imagery was representational. At the time, I had been making 3 x 3 inch grid-drawings on paper, each cell had a drawing. It was very graphic and I wanted to somehow translate it into a larger space. I worked in my studio trying to figure out how and what I wanted. For the exhibition I used two adjoining walls, drawing a one row grid measuring 1 x 312 inches, each alternating one-inch cell had a drawing. The placement of the work was vital, from a distance it looked like a solid line, as the viewer came closer the imagery unfolded.

Brent: The drawing’s imagery came from the urban landscape, a line made up of these tiny images, figurative formal, very delicate and elegant, that marks a space, a new thing and a ‘locational’ experience. I was looking at your installation images precisely here.
How do you find things that you may want to work with? What draws you to say looking at the clouds and crossing lines that you inevitably get living in a city that still uses overhead lines? What triggers a desire to start working with something, a very real and physical/emotional experience?

Patricia: I think what ends up in my work are things that keep coming back to me, visually and emotionally. There may be a view or scene that stands out – I may write it down or take a photo or the visual is so strong that it stays with me. It may take awhile before I do something with this visual. One of the things I’m interested in is how we see. I use my own observation and perception to explore this – I find working serially helps me in this process. One example would be the cloud and crossing wires piece you made reference to earlier, entitled Lines. It comprises eight panels, each showing passing clouds and phone wires. The wires are viewed from the same position in all the panels. In retrospect, I could have referenced the place and time this occurred, anchoring it to a local.

Brent: You did a whole bunch of serial work around “Fade” that appears to be addressing some of the conundrums around the idea of primary ‘optical’ experience. Can we get inside that personal to get a handle on this – how we see, or don’t see, or how we make use of ‘stored’ information to fill in the gaps?
The “Fades” seem to be dealing not only a series of events and visual harmonies but also perceptual glitches.

Patricia: Yes, the “Fade” work was important – I started using color again and I eliminated the figurative imagery but kept the grid. At the time, I was thinking about reflection and how color and light (time of day) affect how we see. Walking from my home to the studio, I’d see the same glass enclosed structures, over and over again. I started looking, really looking, at how light would reflect onto these structures and how the color of the “glass” would change. Somehow, I wanted to work with this and I decided to make the “Fade” drawings, using colored pencil on colored paper. The “optical” experience really starts happening as you look and spend time with these works. The color gradually fades away – so much that one has to “fill in” with “stored” information from the pieces that are darker. This led me to thinking about memory and how we are aware of it or not. The work entitled Vertical Paintings addresses this and is also concerned with placement. The two parts of the piece are to be installed on different walls or in different rooms. Here you try to fill in the information from one room to the other, trying to remember if what you saw is the same as what you are seeing.

Brent: So you are saying that you engage this ritual/visual experience, take that in; conceptualize, to then get it back out as a visual thing that we can go for.
You started using long pieces of wood, why the choice ‘long’? Around the same time you are working with origami paper… You have long pieces of thin wood that you paint, and colored origami paper that you arrange, cut and put together.

Patricia: Yes, it comes from my ritual-like experiences of walking through the city; from observing the every day, the exceptional – a rainbow, the mundane – light flickering on and off, or as now on the bottom right hand corner of my computer screen I have an icon bouncing up and down. Anyway, that’s where I begin and when it is completed I place it out there for the viewer to see.
I started using long pieces of wood in 2005 by chance. A friend of mine calls them “skinnies” – I guess because they are thin. Someone in a neighboring studio was tossing some 8’ x 11/2 “ x 3/4” pieces of wood that I decided to pick up, not knowing what I would do with them. Anyway, I wrote a proposal to do a piece in New Jersey using these long pieces of wood; it was accepted and I found myself making the piece. I’ve been using this format or some variation of it, ever since. I love the size and the way they feel, the thinness and lightness. I spend a lot of time preparing them – sanding, gessoing, sanding again and finally they are ready.
These pieces tend to take a long time – I like to use thin layers of paint and build it up layer by layer. I wanted to work out ideas a little faster; I wanted a bit more flexibility. So one day I picked up a bag of origami paper in the art store. At first, I cut strips of origami paper and arranged them into squares, again another timely process. At one point, I decided not to cut the paper but rather to use full sheets or join two sheets together. Of course, I don’t use origami paper for origami but rather for the colors – it’s really helped me play with color.

Brent: The early wood lengths tended to lean or sit vertical, some horizontal: Any reason for the vertical preference?
Origami paper is great…Great for its lightness. Also how the color works with the sheerness of the paper. This really gives an instant color area that you can respond to and would actually be very difficult to achieve another way. It’s like the opposite of building up a surface of color. Have you ever attempted to translate the color feel of origami paper over to a different color material and surface?

Patricia: Looking back on this body of work, I see that most are vertical. It’s interesting because I think at first I was thinking of making a painting, so I simply put it on the wall and then I found myself leaning, stacking or placing them on the floor. Leaning the long wood pieces creates a space behind, light that I work with. Now, I consider these works to be a “hybrid” painting/sculpture.
The origami paper is great for that immediacy of color, lightness and as you mentioned, sheerness of the paper. 2 Color Squares from 2006 was a piece that I was interested in translating to paint. This piece has a certain lightness and airiness, literally. At the time, I was rereading Josef Albers’ “Interaction of Color” and one quote that I kept, and keep going back to is “a color is never seen as it really is…as it physically is.” As much as I tried, and try, to match the color of the origami paper it was physically different. Some acrylic paint dries with a matte finish and others with a glossy one. The piece I created, entitled Color Inter Action, has a luscious smooth surface that is grounded, as opposed to the lightness of the origami paper.

Brent: Your latest wood pieces have a different feel. There is this motif. The color is very active and bright. They remind me of ‘ritual’ perhaps – brightly painted instruments that are used to create excitement, war, dance. They work interesting against the concrete, for example. They can be vertical or horizontal, slot in to an area. They appear eventful; even take on the feel of ‘trophy’, as something symbolic of an event.
You mention painting hybridizing sculpture. These wood pieces I just see them as they are, neither thinking painting or sculpture. And I think that is a good thing.

Patricia: Thanks Brent. Your right about the different feel. In the earlier work I was making subtle, quite pieces. Lately, I’ve found I want the work to be playful and more active. I like your reference to dance. The colors are more vibrant and bounce off the walls or jump at you. I guess, I’m in a different place too, I feel more comfortable with color. The latest piece, entitled Color Bundle, takes off on this dance, strips of colored paper are bundled together and glued in the middle making the ends of the paper curl and activate the space.

Measure of Light – Linda Arts

Brent: Color scales, gray scales, drums, unwrapped columns, the feel of folds, all different measures of light that sometimes manifest as light ‘actually’, though all together register as interest in how things unfold, expose, and fold back – that draw attention to form while somewhat masquerading with it – Linda, what is the common thread that runs through your work?

Linda: Interesting that you refer to my work as folds, literal, or as a manner of speech—each way is interesting. For me everything I do leads back to light and space. What I am after is capturing a sense of space and how light naturally opens, informs, and suggests. When you concentrate on the one aspect [light] the other [space] becomes an irrevocable subject that needs attention. Each aspect involves the other, not altogether different from how we experience ‘real things’, or how nature informs. Actually the canvas itself stands in for a sort of space also. It’s a complex relation where you try to tie the two by engaging a process, sometimes ignoring one for the other. Looking for a reconciliation, accepting what is done, and further working through the given… in a manner. Eventually there exists a tension. The work, also, is as much about darkness as it is light.
At this point it’s probably quite important to mention that though my work may appear distant and concrete, or minimal, more or less the result of a mechanical process (especially when it’s photographed or digitally reproduced) -, this is not the case in reality! When it is reproduced the little irregularities in my work caused by hand and the under ground aren’t noticeable. And that’s a pity because it is a deliberate choice that they are seen. Human touch is allowed in my work, if not necessary. As I said: my work is about finding and combining opposites. This means that the tension between mechanical and handmade must also have its place, must be shown, to be felt and to have its indescribable effect.

Brent: Your process, the way you lay out a field, does this involve taping each area or are the color or registered divisions done by hand?

Linda: It’s both. What goes down before informs the next. I use tape. And then I go over that using a different sensibility. It may happen that I need to go back to the last physical impression again, using what is necessary, hand, tape: Each decision is informed by the previous, using a sense for what is wanted for the next.

Brent: Then starting at the beginning: A canvas works with light, space or spaces, and has a physical presence – what do you do with that?

Linda: I have this book in which I draw and describe my ideas. I have many of them. These books, together with the paintings I’ve already made, inspire me to a new work. So when I start a new painting I know more or less how I want it to be. However the outcome is never certain because the working process has a life of its own that interferes and surprises in the act. The paintings are always made on a wooden panel (which I also call canvas, so don’t be confused), and are a deliberate choice because I like the structure of the wood. And I don’t have to deal with these irritating folded corners. When I’m painting the canvas lays horizontal. It takes several layers to get what I want (make it how I want). And because I use oil paint most of the time, I can work simultaneous on several different images. When the paint is still wet I hang them on the wall to see and decide what steps I need to take next. Because of the way I work, there is always some kind of logic continuation to it. One emerges from the other and points to the next. You may have noticed that the sides of the canvas are very important. I consider them a part of the space the canvas offers. I involve the sides into the frontal composition, also using the light and color shades that spill off onto the wall.

Brent: Interesting that you talk about the physicality and its calibration. I understand how you make use of the edges of the structure. I can see it in some of your installation shots. I’m virtually blind here, as I’m not physically there. So you are going to have to take me through some of your pieces, if that’s OK? #191, first of all, has a title that suggests the unemotional. It’s a number – not a place, not a hint from where it came from (except maybe a turn of a page in your book.) And definitely there is not the poetic. Though the way you talk about your process seems to be very much geared to an emotion, a physical response, poetic in the sense that you are very much aware of the changeableness and intricacies of how you or a viewer inhabits the work. In #191 you have four horizontal bands of gray, scales. They feel fairly even in paint quality. The idea is that they go left to right, or the other way, to create an expanse: They are bars that run darkest at the bottom and soften as they rise. What goes on between this looks to be more bars though running vertical. It doesn’t read as a layer that runs exactly the same underneath. Instead it registers that each-between-the-solid-horizontal-calibrated-bars is an independent activity. And it’s tuned depending on… the feel that you are wanting? How it works is that for me there is a subtle spatial reading, not just with the underneath but how the whole thing is working. Also the diagonal is introduced. And on the right side the gray horizontal bars read almost adrift from the support. In photograph this communicates the way you are talking, ‘light’, ‘dark’ and ‘thing’ – space.

Linda: Right! I don’t use titles. Paintings are numbered for administrative purposes. I want the observer to be free of suggestions. No more, no less… though probably less as a poet in this case. The images come together through choices… of what can happen in-between, while I’m waiting for the paint to dry, or just looking.
The diagonal that you pick upon in this work (though exists in some others also) is a new element. I’m developing that one step further, and it’s incorporated or emphasized in paintings I’m working on right now. I’ve sent you a snapshot.

Brent: Quite erotic.

Linda: Funny. OK, I think I know what you mean.

Brent: Can we talk about the light, and color?

Linda: The light… It’s a Dutch thing, I assume. I grew up in a little countryside village between the Dutch rivers – I had an outside life. And because of the rapid weather changes it was an inevitable interest – something I felt ever drawn to. When I began to draw – I was still at art school – I made very dark charcoal drawings. I tried to make them as dark as possible, because I discovered this made the light stronger. The images appeared to explode out from a darkness.
Much later, you could say, the specifics of working the sides of the paintings, along with the frontal graphic appearance, were related to those early drawings—the fascination with light and how that works in odd and sometimes contradictory ways. Color came much later. Earlier on it was something that I just didn’t feel the need to use. Recently I’ve started bringing it in to push against and to create a new tension within the other aspects of an image.

Brent: You also employ light, as in ‘light works’ that move right off the canvas.

Linda: The light-works came out of a framework of painting and make use of the surroundings. The measurements are given by the actual space and bring in a complete new element to work with (and this is very exciting). It was the light in the work itself that allowed me to break free from the boundaries of the canvas and use the actual space as boundary. In that way I replace the framework and change the starting point of the work. The process is more or less the same but now it is the light [and shade] that replaces the paint or suggestion

Brent: The ‘measurements’, what are they based on? These are perceptual decisions. Or are they proportional and use math?

Linda: The measurements are based on the space the work is in; they are perceptual and proportional decisions more than mathematical ones. The light object is made especially for the space, so you can’t move or see it free from the physical constituents. In a temporary setting the installation is disassembled after the show and will not be rebuild in that form again. In the image I sent you the starting point was this open box in a U form of prefabricated not very high walls under an open very dark ceiling. I decided to accentuate that form by making one very small light-line exactly in the middle of one of the walls. To get this I placed a new wall in front of existing one and made it look like the light-line was coming out from the wall. Staying with the original U-form I made the following interventions: At the left wall I placed a warm white light, I also left out the upper wall there (above the light line) so the light could shine up freely. At the middle wall I clustered the light into a small line and used a basic white color. On the right wall I left out the lower part and placed a cold white colorless line. My goal with these interventions was to give the viewer a different perception of the surrounding space. The different tones and fall of light brought that about.

Brent: Do the ‘light works’ replace the paintings?

Linda: First and foremost I am a painter. That is the base from where my work evolves. 3-dimensional work or installations in public areas will always be a challenge, but my main focus is painting.

Galaxies, Grids, Scattered and Gathered – Devin Powers

Brent: The structure of space, theoretical models such as n-space and the hyper-cube usually lose most of us even in adult life. However you had an interest in this as a child. How did this fascination arrive?

Devin: Well, I was no child prodigy. In fact, I was born dyslexic. I did not learn how to read until around the forth grade and it was a few more years till I could honestly say I was a fluent reader and several more before I became confident in writing. In an odd way, this deficit propelled me toward asking and thinking about big questions early on. My parents are well educated and impressed upon me the value of education not just as a method of upward mobility but for its own inherent value. I believed them. Books became these mysterious venerate objects to me that contained great secrets that everyone else had access to except me. I deeply wanted to read in order to gain access to this knowledge. I believed that there was some deep mystery I did not have the pass code to and I wanted to know it, I wanted to know everything. I remember fantasizing as a boy that if I had a superpower it would be the ability to instantly absorb and comprehend any book I had contact with. I pictured myself visiting the Harvard libraries and being immediately inundated by the immense tidal force of knowledge housed within its walls. I could not imagine any better power. Understanding was everything.

The big ideas and mysteries attracted me the most. I liked thinking about things just beyond the crest of understanding. PBS shows like NOVA were huge for me as a kid, especially when the subject was space and cosmology. I remember staying up late into the night thinking what space would be like before “the big bang”. Could there be nothing? What would nothing be like? There would be no time. There would be no direction, dimension or space. Just nothing. Then something, and with it the beginning of time and its direction. With something, there would be space and dimension as well but what about direction and scale? Ok. If there were two things then there would be direction and scale as well, an orientation. Now, how does something come out of nothing? These were the questions that kept me up at night.

The truth is no one knows what the structure of space is past the third dimension because we exist here in the world and the world as we know it is three-dimensional. I can give you some answer like, “the fourth dimension is another axis which is perpendicular to X,Y, and Z”, but what does that really mean? It is unknown. In geometry, we have illustrations of basic higher dimensional shapes as they appear as two-dimensional and three-dimensional projections and models. In physics we have theories that include higher dimensions. We do not know if it exists. It is unknown. And frankly because it is unknowable, I do not waste my time with it. I am interested in the shadow it casts on our world–my body of work began with a fascination for the shapes created by two-dimensional models of these higher dimensional ideas in geometry. The strange kind of illusory space a hypercube drawing creates captured me and led me to a love of complex geometrical form. I think that is as best as I can answer that one.

Brent: Your earlier tape and ticket pieces utilize an open space that makes use of fairly simple constructions of the hyper-cubes. These exist either in a white cube environment or in public space. They make use of the physical structures available, wall, floor, and or ceiling. The structures often mirror, shift, and even droop.

Devin: Yeah, that is true. That was the Fall and Winter of 2005. I had moved to Brooklyn. I was tired of painting and I was broke. I wanted to do something large, something that interacted at a human scale, something that took in the architecture and reacted to it. At the time I was stuck with easel-sized canvases because I could not afford the materials to make a big canvas; painting felt too bound to the limits of the support. I wanted to do something that was hard-edge but also more wild, fast and loose than the kind of same-old geometric abstraction I was used to seeing. I hated the tedium of the taped off painted edge. It drove me crazy. I was good at painting a freehand edge but it slowed me down too much. I thought there had to be a better way. Then it dawned on me, the tape is the line: forget about the paint, forget about the canvas, just use the wall. It was fast, it was cheap – the price of tape – and it was effective. I did not care if they lasted. They were sketches to me, quick ideas like the kind you find in a notebook, except they were on a building. The important thing was that they were realized, made physical. I always took a picture of it when I finished. That was what was important: it had been made, it had been seen and there was a document of it.

I did make pieces in public spaces and nontraditional spaces, sometimes without permission, but this was not an overtly ideological act. I was not trying to make a comment about the “white cube”. I was aware of those ideas at the time. I had read “Inside the White Cube” by Brian O’Doherty around then and loved it but honestly, I like the gallery and the museum space. I think it is great that we have these spaces dedicated to looking, thinking, and interacting with these things we call art. It would be better if art spaces were more ubiquitous and more inviting of course. I know they are not perfect institutions and are exclusionary but I do not want to make art about that. I made the tape pieces in the public realm because I wanted everyone to see them and I did not have access to the gallery space or the museum space. They were not an option. I wanted to make due with what I had and could do. I was also interested in how a wider spectrum of people would react to the work other than artists and art world people. I would sit, read a book, and watch people encounter the work, stare at it, walk by it, touch it, and ignore it. Sometimes I would talk to them and listen to their reactions and impressions. That was exciting to do. There was a potential for something unexpected.

I wanted a bigger perspective; I approached mathematicians, started correspondences with a string theorist, and consulted architects. I became drunk with ideas. At one point, I was convinced I had made a new contribution to mathematics, a 4-space Menger sponge and then a 5-space Menger – I had not, it had been already thought up years ago. Making objects became less important. I stopped caring if what I was doing was art. What was art anyway? I remember thinking. I had momentarily forgot my role. I am an artist. It took a while to remember that.

Brent: And you became a furious drawer too! I remember you saying that you would do a drawing in one sitting. These were pencil or pen on paper? It’s hard to believe, especially with some of the very complicated structures.
I notice too that there is this constant shifting sometimes moving very close to say some known form, that architecturally, or as a reading, resembles a skin for some known or probable thing. Other times the lines and fields are nothing more that a beautiful web of geometry and space. Sometimes you make use of different planes on a sheet of paper.

Generally in that period of drawing you were working with similar models of space, still the hyper-cube, though with more and more complex settings.

Devin: I make my best work when I push myself hard. I think that is probably true for most. For a while, I told people I wanted to obliterate the difference between order and chaos in an image. I think this is still true. I do not think it has happened yet, but it is one of those things that keep me moving forward. Why? I don’t really care. Why is less interesting then the moment of experience, than the experience itself.

The drawings in that period, 2006 and early 2007, had a lot to do with that kind of conflation of contradiction. I did make most of them in one sitting. I believed if I got up, I would lose the energy or power of focus to return to the image. I also wanted to know what a drawing would look like and I did not want to wait. Many of the decisions were made in the moment. There was not a lot of preplanning. This added more risk, making it more exciting for me because if I made a wrong decision I could ruin 12 or 18 hours of hard work.

I think all the labor comes out of a belief that if you want to get anywhere new, you have go through something, something that tests your limits. It is a little like swimming down to try and touch the bottom of that pond when you were a kid. Will your lungs give out? Will your ears start to hurt too much? Will it get too cold, to dark and too scary down there? And finally, do I really want to touch what’s at the bottom? I am curious to see how far I can go.

I made those drawings with Micron .35mm Red, Blue, Orange, and Green pens on gray Rives BFK paper with a hand drawn 1/2 inch grid guided by a straight edge. The lines on top of the grid were free hand, no ruler, mostly because it made things go faster but I also liked the touch of the hand. I drew them sometime after Katrina – about a year after. I wanted to capture that spiral you see in aerial images of great hurricanes and in Hubble images of some galaxies. The spiral gives movement to symmetry. The spiral is fundamentally turbulent. Some of the most powerful and terribly destructive phenomena take on its shape.

I made a few drawings that dabbled in perspective and then perspective within perspective and impossible and contradictory perspective. I also emphasized planes, giving the drawings the illusion of volume. But all this play of illusion became confusing and too much of a perceptual game. I think art is more then a game.

Brent: Well, perhaps a game that you set up the rules for and at some stage go in and break. I don’t mind that sort of game. If art isn’t a game then it sure has a neat way of playing tricks on you. You mentioned about the world we live in, very physical and practical with its challenges and ponds. Personally I think we build those worlds and build the challenges. Challenges are like plotted points, I guess that hold things and ideas that are out there. And you bring them towards you or you go towards them. A bit like turning on the magnets to a certain range of attraction, and you identify some of the things that you want to attract, but also things that you are not aware of are also getting attracted. And there are questions. Goals seem to be about building a reality, like you build a drawing. You start with something; it’s got to be pretty clear otherwise there is no telling what the good mistakes are. And there is this kind of freedom. And ‘where is freedom?’ is a question.’ And this sometimes can undo worlds, or change the course of activity.
You did a number of large drawing installations, very beautiful, each different that relate to the fine line and color paper drawings. They reached a very high point.

Devin: Thanks. I think a few of them were successful at taking what was happening in the complex works on paper and transferring it to a human architectural scale. That was actually the idea all along. The works on paper were meant to function as individual drawings as well as a blueprint or model for large-scale wall drawings. Most of them were never realized because they would require a truly huge wall. It is hard to get a wall like that in New York where space is premium. Some day I hope to get the chance.
I was flipping through Battcock’s Minimal Art anthology. I love how it begins:

I think both art and life are a matter of life and death.

- Walter De Maria

It really sets a heavy tone for everything that follows. You feel the weight of his words and you know he is not joking around. He is not playing. I understand what he means. I even partially agree. If you are seriously engaged with art, if you are serious at all, you believe in what you are doing, you believe in what you are making and you put everything you have into it. Everything you make is made as if your future depends on it. And it does, up until you make another piece. Art is not about making things that are good or nice or satisfactory or fashionable or fun (although it certainly can be fun). It is about striving to make something great, something singular, something honest, and something true. When I forget this, I make bad work, but when I take it on fully, that is when it is the most rewarding.

I agree with you. We do set our own rules and by necessity we eventually break them. Things do not stay the same; that is time; that is the law of entropy. But the question of freedom is especially interesting to me. Freedom can be paradoxical. For example, in my experience, when I get rid of all restrictions I come up with conventional compositions and solutions to making art. One decision has no more weight then any other. There is little or no justification other than some vague notion of “expression” but what are you expressing? Yourself? Well, that always struck me as kind of presumptuous. Do you really think you are that interesting? That important? I think art is about a lot more then the self. The self is the vessel or conduit for something larger then you, perhaps it is life expression or some sort of universal expression. I don’t know. I am still out to vote on that one but I know I am not just trying to express myself. I like what T.S. Eliot wrote about this one in, The Sacred Wood, “The emotion of art is impersonal. And the poet cannot reach this impersonality without surrendering himself wholly to the work to be done.”

I have found that by setting up rules or parameters or systems or limits or whatever you want to call them, my work becomes free. It opens up new possibilities I would not have discovered otherwise. That is one reason why I like working on the grid so much. I think it creates the necessary pressure for that part we call the art or the subjective to build up and burst to the surface.

I think the grid gets a bad rap. We associate it with this sort of dystopian controlled world of endless office cubicles or something and that vision is not unfounded but it is shortsighted and a bit overblown. Yes, a lot of boring modern architecture comes out of the grid but so does the good stuff and so does the Book of Kells and the Islamic Art of around the same period. Anything we make can be plotted on a grid; probably everything physical in nature can be plotted. Someone once said nothing in nature arranges itself in ninety-degree angles. Not true. Go to a natural history museum and check out the gem and mineral room. The grid really is fundamental and omnipresent. It is also neutral – we add the politics.

Brent: Recently you have made small paintings. Again there is the grid. And there are lines. Earlier pieces play with creating curves with straight lines. While this is a simple enough system you continue to navigate the thread quite intuitively. They all have a black background. The line appears to be white. These are on stretched canvas?

Devin: Yeah, it feels good to make paintings again. At first they were small, 12 by 12”. I lost this free space in Long Island City so I had to make stuff in my apartment until I found a new studio. I did not want to make anything big then. I did not have the space. Now I have a new studio and I am working on a 6 x 4ft canvas.

For the new series, I asked myself, where is the energy really coming from? What really interests me? What is the source? The answer is in the structure. The geometry. The form. So I thought I would focus on that and filter out all the other stuff as much as I could.

The ground is black. The lines are white. I call the series Black & White. I want to be literal about it. I asked myself what is this thing I am making? I thought it might be interesting to answer the question concretely. Is it the sum of its parts? I came up with this description:

Straight line segments made with Sakura Pen Touch extra fine point 0.7mm quick-dry opaque paint pens plotted on a _” grid drawn with a Staedler Mars Lumiograph 2H graphite pencil over a mixture of Golden Acrylic Primary Cyan and Golden Acrylic Carbon Black paint on Soho Art Materials #12 double gesso primed canvas fastened with Arrow Type JT21 8mm staples to Tri-Mar Enterprise Inc. 1 _” deep heavy duty stretchers made out of Obichi wood.

It is a bit absurd but it makes a strong point.
I don’t trust metaphor either. It is too easy. It feels lazy to me. It feels like a diversion. A lie.

It is it. It is itself. It is not made of words. It is not an idea. It is strait lines of paint on a surface. The meaning occurs in the visual perception of the structure of these lines of paint on the surface.

Brent: Currently you are working on two projects that I know of. One is What was Scattered Gathers. The other is Space/Time. You are working with the computer?

Devin: Yeah. The Black & White series is ongoing. There are three other related projects. What was scattered gathers/What was gathered blows apart is the title of a branch Black & White series taken from a quote by Heraclitus. The series consists of random line drawings that are then exactly copied as their mirror reflection.

Symmetry is to space as rhythm is to time, tests the truth of the analogy. I am collaborating with a composer, a mathematician, a programmer, and a sound engineer/experimental musician to literally play my drawings as music and then make music that is then drawn and back and forth. If the drawings have rhythm as sound, and the sound has symmetry as an image then we know the analogy is true. I do use the computer for this project.

The other project is a book. It is called, the point from whence we came, and I think that is all I am going to say about that one right now.

Brent, a warm thank you for this interview. I got a lot out of it. It was a real pleasure.

Thanks Devin.

How Little is Enough – Lynne Harlow

Brent: What are you currently working on?

Lynne: I’m working the way I most like to, doing several different things at once. I have just completed a site-specific piece for a group show, I’m playing around with painted balsa wood strips that I’m gluing into shapes and, most significantly, I’m preparing for a collaborative project coming up this summer in Houston, TX. A terrific artist in Houston, Ariane Roesch, has organized the project and she has paired me with Brett Davidson, a writer currently living in Zurich. I’ve never collaborated with a writer before and it’s very good new territory for me. The current pieces continue to explore the question that’s central to how, and why, I work: how little is enough?

Brent: Your work almost disappeared there for a while. What I mean by ‘disappeared’ is that, and as you say central to your inquiry ‘the thing’ was almost not there. I’m thinking of a collaborative piece you sent to Tokyo, where aluminum powder sprinkled on black rolled up felt was patted to the wall: Gold thread-like chain I think went to Sydney? How are they enough?

Lynne: Although all of my work is at the reductive end of the spectrum, my own sense of what is enough varies. Sometimes I’m really curious about using so little physical material that the piece and the resulting experience are barely there. They’re right on the border of dissolving. But they hang on. I’m really attracted to working at that border. The challenge for me is to stay as sensitive and disciplined as I can, recognizing how little aluminum powder or gold-plated chain seems necessary to make its presence adequately felt, to make something that barely exists but does in fact offer a very specific visual experience for someone who encounters it. My hope is that once the nearly imperceptible piece is discovered, its presence fills the room.

Both the aluminum powder and the fine-gauge gold chain are ideal materials for that kind of exploration because they have beautifully active reflective surfaces. Light becomes an essential part of the work and really behaves as one of its materials. These materials and the others I tend to use, like fabric, Plexiglas, and copper, all have such dynamic physicality that I do as little as possible to alter the actual materials and instead arrange them in ways that make full use of their attributes. In a sense I ask them to do the work.

Brent: And for we to discover.
The materials that you use, though, become something like a reflection, instrument, and extension of probably what is running along inside you: The choice and context, how things are placed, often with very slight intervention, for example with Norse Wall, register very much, for me, that you are picking up things for their ‘shared’ qualities, and emotional processes… you bring up how something behaves: ‘dynamic physicality’ ‘use of attributes’. To me you are not talking about things, but expressions. And those expressions appear very much tied to who you are, and what light you wish to give off. It’s obvious that you are attracted to certain looks and materials: And your wish to share this experience, in aspects and subtleties. I’ll count in even an exoticness noticed via the simple and plain. But how you become attracted to a material… it would be interesting to learn some more? How and why are you attracted to say a sheet of Florescent Plexi, why the choice of color? And back to Norse Wall and the attention you gave to a particular situation, the skirting edge, the slight intervention, did it happen because it was available to happen, or was it planned, or did it, at the time and location, appear necessary?

Lynne: I think for most of us it’s fair to say that our daily living is the combined experience of physical navigation and visual analysis, but much of it occurs with minimal awareness. We’re reading advertisements on the sides of buses while trying not to crash into people near us on the sidewalk and simultaneously avoiding obstacles like trees and fire hydrants. It’s pretty basic, but it became really interesting to me as I was finishing graduate school and since that time I’ve been looking at both how we do this and how a piece of art can slow down and bring some consciousness to the process. While we can turn to phenomenology for an intellectual investigation of these ideas, I find it as informative and more relevant to carefully observe how we live. This is a long way of saying that all my work and the materials I choose revolve around how we navigate our surroundings and whether or not we’re aware of what’s there.

Going more specifically to your observations about my materials, you’re right to say they’re expressions. I’ve never categorized them this way before, but I think beyond the varied associations they all have, the materials share an expression of spirituality. And by spirituality I mean the state of one’s soul. Not religion. (I think of a critic who once described Agnes Martin’s practice as “spirituality as a secular discipline.”) The movement I encourage, the slow discovery I suggest in my work might leave a person’s soul feeling just a little bit lighter. Or at the very least help a person to locate oneself, body and soul. Whether it’s Plexiglas, chiffon or gold-plated chain, I’m attracted to materials that allow me to use them in spare, deliberate arrangements that don’t feel spare and deliberate, but rather full and generous. That’s where color is especially important to me. Things like fluorescent green Plexi and saturated pink fabric give and give and give, but also appear weightless. Doesn’t that seem like an ideal way to be?

Brent: This weightlessness, lightness, without weight, hardly touching, has me thinking in terms of moving through the world. Touching lightly so not to disturb the balance, yet to add resonance. These ideas are generally found in, say, a monastery, or develop, as you become a master of tea ceremony. It’s about this lightness and giving. To become a master takes all the patience and practice one can muster (not different from a western idea), though with the goal not to dominate over some thing or win (an audience over.) It’s more a mastering of this simple act called generosity. This is what I get from your work. I need to put in this ‘effortless’ work to meet what you have ‘given’. By effortless, I probably mean having to put on hold this desire to look for answers, or clues to authenticity. Instead you are suggesting let be what is there, and if you can do that it will wash over and through you.
It’s a kind of deprivation. And for some, I would imagine, this would be quite painful.
I was bicycling the other day, and I starting looking around and seeing why things are the way they are. The things around us are built to protect us. I saw dwellings; roads where cars go, pedestrian areas, road signs and railroad signals. They make life easy. And they are there, built over time and research to help us and things run smoothly. They’re there to protect a society.
You are offering something that I consider not dissimilar, it’s about fluidly, and you have given all that needs to be given in order for an audience to participate free of harm. However the element of ‘control’ which is part of the ‘protect’ doesn’t seem to be present. I have images, well conceptual ones, of a world without railways signals. And then I have this image of ‘when the train comes.’

Lynne: Your train example makes me think about good design and urban planning. When it’s really, really good, there’s a sense of freedom. A sense that things like safety limitations and municipal restrictions are easing rather than controlling our lives.

I’m not interested in controlling anyone who encounters my work and I take care to keep my pieces absent of that element. Instead I think about the installations (and even some of the drawings) as arrangements that encourage particular movements and responses in the space without dictating the exact nature of those actions. In this sense I think of myself setting up an incomplete choreography, a situation that gives only limited information regarding how and where one’s body should move. These pieces then rely on the participant to absorb and synthesize the given information and complete the piece with his or her own thoughts and actions.

Ideally people will approach the work without looking for answers and allowing the piece to “wash over” them, as you described. Easier said than done. But I hope that even those who begin looking at the work with expectations of a clear answer, a quick punch line, will be slowed down by the physical participation the work encourages.

Brent: Dedicated to All You Are, 2008 comprises six drawings and a final installation. The drawings each hold a coppery orange painted square and a number of small crystals attached to the paper. The square, from the three I can see, is in the same position each time. The crystals move around in relation to the square in relation to the borders of the paper. The overall feel is that the square both floats and anchors. The area around this works so that no side feels like a border. The spaces around the square feel very open though thought out, and suggest an ongoing openness. The bottom area does offer the sense of grounding. And when this is observed, you start to sense these other openings but as clear spaces. It’s hard for me to see but I’m sensing the small crystals further inflect upon that initial decision of where the orange is positioned. Again the feel is this openness. And the anchoring is a ‘just’ holding, like a balloon filled with helium, though unlike a balloon which moves side-to-side looking for release. The release comes with the square moving towards you, and then settling back, not in a push pull way – Nothing really to do with that. Or if aware of this possibility the square doesn’t perform that way. You then move these drawings into an installation based on the performance of the drawing, or did the installation come first? It’d be nice to get some history of this.

Lynne: The Dedicated series from last year deals in an extremely restrained way with locating. Anchor, float, hold, move, ground – these are all sensations we feel when we’re making sense of where we are and how we fit with what’s around us.

The crystals in these pieces are faceted and are about 1/8” high so placing them on paper or a wall creates a very shallow sculptural surface. Really shallow, and that’s what was interesting to me. The drawings and installation developed together as a way for me to understand how the crystals would function on a small scale and a larger one. These crystals reflect light and cast small shadows so despite their small size they are very present. They’re also a significant counter to the flat painted square. As you note, the square is a constant (its size and placement) while the locations of the crystals change in each piece.

In the Dedicated installation drawing, as in most of my work, I wanted to avoid having a clear edge to the piece. The openness of the wall is part of the installation and it doesn’t make sense to conclude that the drawing ends where the outermost crystals are located. I think there’s a much stronger sense of physical engagement with a piece of art when you can’t tell quite where it stops because you’re left a little unsure about your own proximity to it. The more spatial the work, the more exaggerated this feeling. In the paper pieces, I used the openness of the paper to suggest that spatial experience.

Brent: In Tropic, several works on paper, the edges hold color in the form of skewed bars that either address the edge[s] or pass through the sides of the paper. However the structure remains very open: The color especially helping this. You could say these drawings play very close to the wall of the paper structure so the float is further pushed asymmetrically, existing and exiting off the paper field. The color tends also to feel more like a fold, a folding ribbon of color space?

Lynne: The Tropic drawings feel spatial because they refer directly to a temporary installation I made last year that dealt with color in a large contained space. The Tropic installation was made in a fairly large but shallow storefront window, the space being about 15’ tall and just 3’ deep. I limited myself to two colors, yellow and pink, and used mostly sheer fabric with a strip of Plexiglas and a strip of tape. The colors were pretty saturated so even with the sheer materials they remained vivid. To prevent the installation from feeling too contained and inaccessible behind all its glass I ran one piece of yellow tape down the outside of the building as a continuation of a line within. Playing with color and space quite literally.

Most of my installations are temporary and while some can be remade in other locations they tend not to exist beyond their initial creation. In the last couple of years I’ve become focused on making small-scale works that relate to and evolve from the temporary installations. These small pieces are sometimes drawings, sometimes prints. They fit somewhere between the actual installations and the photographs that serve as documentation.

Once the Tropic installation was complete I began the group of seven drawings dealing with the play of colored planes and their relationships in space. The drawings don’t depict the installation but they do reflect the structure of the installation as well as a sense of movement. They’re hard edge, geometric pictures in conversation with their delicate, organic source that no longer exists. They’re distillations.

Brent: Outside the window, Tropic, the installation, the small interventions on the storefront really do balance what is going on inside. Also, from where I can see you pay attention to the space just above the window and below, the area that reaches down to the sidewalk.

Lynne: Those decisions, I think, made the piece something that people could really engage with. It brought the piece right onto the sidewalk so it wasn’t encased in glass and withheld from a passer looking at it. The yellow taped line down the outside of the building has given me a lot to think about and work from in future pieces.

Brent: You seem to be making use of chiffon again. I hadn’t seen it for a while. Though it’s different. Before I understood it as alignments, as you move around you become involved with different links – architectural, spatial, and also to either another veil of color or a painted area on ‘say’ a wall. As with Tropic this interest has continued, though the ‘fabric is further reduced, while the outside environment is further included.

Lynne: I hadn’t been conscious of the shift in my use of the chiffon so it’s really informative for me to hear your observation. As you point out, it has certainly acted as an element for aligning; locating in many pieces and in Tropic it had a less dictating role. This time it became primarily material color. As we talked about earlier, these open-ended materials like chiffon allow for so many different uses and approaches.

Brent: We started this conversation with you mentioning ‘playing around’ with painted balsa pieces.

Lynne: The painted balsa shapes are turning out to be a way for me to look very specifically at the relationship between color and structure. The colored lines become drawing and support and sculpture all at once. I’m realizing that this work might not actually result in any finished pieces. I think it’s more of a tutorial for me, a chance to take an element in my work and really think about it. I have a 3’ balsa square leaning against the wall of my studio right now and I can’t stop looking at it. It’s so great that this comically simple construction has so much to offer. I like doing this kind of thing in the studio from time to time. It feels like I’m tuning myself for what’s next.

Bands of Color – Kasarian Dane

Brent: You have been working on areas of color; vertical or horizontal bands of either matte paint or gloss paint with sometimes both present in the one painting at the same time. The structure between two areas of color, you couldn’t really call it a line, though, well, in the material – a space where something stops and then something starts.
You have used aluminum supports for some time now. They sit well, both functioning as unadorned surface where paint can just glide over, and as a sheer and clean plane on which to see the color, the paint.
What brought you to use these supports? Do you do all the preparation yourself? If so could you tell what that entails to get something to sit on the wall, for paint to sit upon the support?

Kasarian: I’ve been using aluminum since about 1996 or so. I discovered it as a painting support in graduate school at The Art Institute of Chicago. I was making these fairly reductive paintings on canvas and was really struggling with what to do with the sides of the canvas: do I paint the edges of the canvas? Do I tape the sides so they stay clean? Are the sides of the canvas with the paint build up an important index of the process or a distraction from what’s happening on the surface plane? How thick or thin should I make the stretcher? I tried a lot of different ideas with this, thick stretchers, thin stretchers, etc. and it was not satisfying. The sides of the canvas were always another plane to deal with in relationship to the surface plane, and I was just not interested in making paintings on the sides of my paintings.

Another aspect of painting on canvas was that I would spend large amounts of time building up the surface of the painting, priming the canvas with oil primer and painting knife in several layers, sanding them, repeating, until the canvas texture was basically gone and only a smooth surface remained. While in some ways I enjoyed the process of building the surface, it also seemed logical to ask: why paint on this canvas surface if I don’t really even start adding color until the canvas surface is hidden? Or, why not just start on a smooth surface?

I tried some wood surfaces, which was OK but not satisfying. I worked in the metal & woodshop of the school at the time, and one of the guys from the metal shop just said one day, “Hey, I’ve got some aluminum, why don’t you try that?” The first paintings were constructed from 1/16” aluminum that was laminated onto 1/4” Masonite. I then added a beveled frame on the back of the Masonite, and this was when the idea came to “float” the panels off the wall by inserting the frame structure several inches inside of the edge of the panels. This immediately solved my side of the painting problem (I could deal with a 5/16” panel edge) and also gave the paintings an immediate presence on the wall, with the surface plane suspended about 1 _” off the wall. It immediately just felt right. I used this laminated aluminum method for about the next 3 years.

Later, due to some technical problems1, and because I received an artist grant, I was able to have a group of 10 panels constructed completely of aluminum. This was the next stage, so to speak, because once I saw the panels of 1/8” aluminum mounted one-inch from the wall with an aluminum bracket, the earlier laminated works seemed more like rough models for these more “machined” panels. The presence was better, more extreme, with this thin plane just suspended in space, with even less edge to deal with. Also, around this time, I saw a grey monochrome painting of Blinky Palermo that was done on thin steel at Art Chicago on Navy Pier, and it was like, whoah, that is sooo sweet.

As far as how the aluminum panels are made, the process is fairly straightforward. Two one-inch right-angled brackets of aluminum are welded to the back of the 1/8” aluminum panel, inserted a few inches from each edge of the panel, one near the top, one near the bottom. Two holes are drilled in each bracket on the painting, near the ends. A third section of the right-angled aluminum serves as a bracket, which is mounted on the wall. Two nubs of aluminum are welded to this bracket and fit into the holes on the top bracket of the panel, locking the panel to the wall. It sounds complicated to write all this, but the system is very straightforward.

One aspect of this system I really like is that the top edge of the painting can be changed, since I can flip the panels upside down to hang on the other bracket. The panels can also be interchanged with other panels of the same size, so when I’m installing an exhibition, I can mount the holding brackets on the wall and then switch around both the order and orientation of the paintings.

As far as surface preparation, welding the bracket on the back of the panel leaves a series of small bumps on the surface of panel. They look sort of like raised lines, and though slight, they need to be sanded off. So I (or my studio assistant) use a palm sander to sand the surface of the panels, focusing on the raised welds. The surface is then degreased, usually with turpenoid simply because it is less fume-y then other solvents, and then primed with Zinser multi-purpose primer, which you can buy at Lowe’s or Home Depot, etc. It’s a great primer, it sticks to anything (even if the surface is not roughed up or degreased), and it holds oil or acrylic paint very nicely. The primed surface is sanded several more times, usually about 3 or so, and primed in between. The sanding takes down the weld mark, and each layer of priming, applied with a foam roller, builds up the surface, until eventually the bumps are gone and a smooth surface remains. It probably sounds like a pain, but it actually is quite easy. The primer dries fast, in a couple of hours, so in about 2 days or so, I can get a new group of panels prepared and ready to paint.

1. The laminated method was economical and worked fine, until one day in mid-January in Chicago, the heating system went down in my studio building. My studio mate, painter Matthew Girson, called and said I better get over there right away. The boiler had shutdown in the middle of the night, and the temperature in the entire building dropped to about zero degrees. The boiler was then turned back on full blast, and in a few hours the temperature went back up to about 70 degrees, tropical-style. The composite panels could not take the stress of this sudden temperature change, and the laminated aluminum bubbled up and popped off the surface of the Masonite and wood supports. It was extremely disconcerting, and the set of works was completely ruined.

Brent: And then they are ready to work on.
After you started working with the aluminum panels for a while were there compositional changes taking place as well? Or was it just a new support, and painting carried on as usual, change taking place for perhaps completely different reasons?

Kasarian: Yes, there were compositional changes, but it started more with the paint application. When I began working on the aluminum, I had been using this mixture of really thick, slow oil paint, with wax medium and calcium carbonate added to really slow the paint down, so that it applied like a half-dried out can of drywall joint compound. Initially, I really liked how the slow, paste-y paint sat on top of the slick, smooth “fast” aluminum. But it took me like 6 months to make 3 paintings and got kind of old. I still love the surface of those paintings, they’re very radiant and layered, but the process was bogging me down. These were mostly monochrome paintings, with primarily muted, earthy colors.

When I started to thin down the paint initially, I was still using oil, but it made the process speed up, and I also began to make color divisions in the panels, something that at the time was a really big jump. The color slowly started to become more vibrant and less earthy. And then I did something I had never thought I would do. Up until this point, all of the paint surfaces were highly matte in sheen, absorbing light. At the time, I detested glossy surfaces. I’m not sure exactly why, but I think I associated glossy surfaces with fakeness, like plastic or something. Glossy was superficial, slick, commercial, sellable…not what I was interested in. But then after making these matte surfaces for several years, I just needed to change it up; all these “slow” surfaces were just bogging me down.
One of the most memorable critique phrases I’ve ever heard about my work was from around this time when an artist told me: “Your paintings look like Yves Klein went for a walk in the mud!”

So I started to use some gloss oil medium, like Galkyd, with the paint, and it just was this breakthrough that I really needed. It probably seems funny to some that using a glossy paint was such a big deal or a big change for me, and it sounds funny to write about it, but it really was a big move at the time! Later, this lead to using One Shot enamel paints. This type of paint just sits so awesome on the aluminum, and I began combining the glossy One Shot enamels with the matte, velvety surfaces of acrylic Flashe.

So back to the initial question about composition, going from the thick oil to adding glossy paint, and then to the One Shot and Flashe, the paintings changed significantly. Color became more vibrant, especially with the colors available right out of the can with the One Shot enamels, and I also let go of the idea that the paintings had to have only 2 or 3 colors, and just let myself do some more multicolor stripe paintings. My detest for the superficial glossiness became more of a love of this surface, and I really became interested in how a fast, high-gloss surface could be placed next to a slow, super-matte surface, and not only create an intense visual contrast and edge, but also situate a sort of commercial, candy-colored “pop” surface (like a Warhol pink) next to a super-matte, “deep” Modernist-type surface (like a Reinhardt black). Does that make sense?

Brent: What year are we talking?

Kasarian: 1997–1998 Started working with aluminum. 1999 Moved primarily to aluminum, with all aluminum panels. 2000–2002 Color shift. Started to use One Shot enamels. 2003–2004 Started combining One Shot enamels and Flashe paint. 2004–2007 Worked primarily with One Shot and flashe on aluminum, with some works on paper. 2008–2009 Began working with Golden matte acrylic to replace flashe.

Brent: So more colors started to appear. They came up as stripes. You wanted more color and different color all on the one surface. Was composition mostly important at the time? Or was it more getting the ‘clang’, or the ‘sing’, that was important, and you’d just shuffle the color along, in their container, until it all came up?

Kasarian: It was mostly that I would start laying colors down, and look for when the color would really hold together. I don’t really think of it in terms of composition, but more as a surface to be divided by a few or many colors. At first, there was some hesitation to divide a surface into many bands of colors or stripes. I had been so accustomed to a certain minimal look, that having that many bands of color seemed a little strange, sort of like, can I allow that into this process? But it made sense at the time, and I liked how it was new to the process, so I just let it happen. This was around 2003–2004. Also, I feel like it sort of set the parameters for my work: on an aluminum panels, there can be a few or many bands of color, and I’m comfortable to work within this setting. I can be very minimal with the color bands, or I can really divide the surface with many bands of color.

Brent: It’s interesting in a way: You have a range of colors, you can mix them, but you know you are going to do bars.
Do you sometimes think approaching painting in this way limiting – working with such strong precepts? Or, another way, do you think in terms of there are so many choices…and it is a wonder you are able to make a start?

Kasarian: I do think approaching painting in this way is limiting, and that’s part of what is so engaging for me about it. What are the possibilities within these limitations? How many possible combinations of color/amount/proportion/surface are there with this set of colors? When I start to work, it quickly becomes apparent that there are so many possibilities that this way of working is not really limited, but presents a vast number of problems and solutions to deal with. It’s usually not a question about where to start. It’s very straight forward: here is a set of colors that I’m interested in at the time, divide the panel into horizontal or vertical bars, and then start applying color. That’s the really exciting part, starting the problem, the process of applying the color, wow, it’s great. The difficult part comes more on the “end” of the process…where do I stop? Because in the process, it’s like, what if I put this color here? What if I placed a gray here? What if there is an orange bar here? What if the orange bar was a half-inch wider? What if the gray area were an inch thinner? What if the gray was warmer? Or more yellow? Or glossy? This is terribly exciting for me, and I love to just keep making those decisions and changes over and over again…like maybe, just maybe something more will happen on the panel than is happening now. When to stop this process can be a real problem, and I paint and re-paint paintings multiple times.

Brent: I think you said somewhere that no work is really absolutely complete. But there is a state isn’t there… I don’t know… a state where you actually ‘feel’ that a work is succeeding? Can you pinpoint that, those moments… perhaps days pass before you decide… ‘OK’… ‘I’m happy with that!

Kasarian: Yes, there is a state that I’m aiming for. While the painting process is exciting, it’s not aimless wandering so to speak. But to pinpoint that state is very difficult. I spend a lot of time looking near the end of the process, a lot of time just sitting and looking at the work. This can be difficult because my time in the studio is more limited these days, between teaching and family life. Sometimes when I get in the studio I just want to paint so badly, it can be challenging to get to the end of a group of paintings and just sit and look at them. In the past, I’ve used a sports metaphor to try and describe the state I’m aiming for: the Zone. Like when an athlete is really concentrating so intensely that they are performing at such a high level mentally, and everything is just clicking for them. I play goalie in ice hockey, so this is the state where the game just seems to move more slowly than usual, and you’re just on, stopping every shot. And mentally, it’s just like everything is so clear, so clear and so intense. I like this metaphor because I get to talk about hockey and it works nicely in an artist lecture! But this isn’t exactly it either, it’s not exactly the same, but it does involve vision, like your eyes are really working with your mind and body, really connected.

It’s like when you put a group of colors together, and it’s just right, it all comes together. There’s an aspect of unity or totality, where though you may have a panel made up of several different colors, it holds together as a whole, it reads as one unified work. And the whole becomes something more than just this color sitting next to that color, something happens that just clicks, and the colors open up and become more than the two or more than the group when put together. Really, I think this is what makes the work more than color exercises, so to speak. I mean they are color exercises, but when the paintings really work, there’s something more there than a formal arrangement of color, or so I believe.

I went to hear David Batchelor talk at MoMA last spring during the Color Chart exhibition, and he was talking about how his new work was trying to get color that was “uncontained”, by using light to bring color outside of the boundaries of a rectangular, “contained” color work, reflecting colored light into the room and so forth. While this made sense to me, my thought at the time was that if you use color in a certain way, it does become “uncontained”, it expands, it becomes bigger that the surface it sits on, even though it is physically “contained” on a limited surface, like a 24” x 48” panel, it seems at times to open up and expand beyond it’s physical dimensions. The work takes on a presence that is bigger than it’s physical size, vaster, more expansive. Maybe that’s the state I aim for, it’s tricky, it’s elusive, and it can be difficult to recognize.

Sometimes when I’ve been out the studio for a while, and I come back in, I have to be careful not to just paint over all my paintings again! I can forget what I’m doing, and so I need to spend some time with the work to get back in the grove, to remember what I’m aiming for.

Brent: There’s a greater expanse of color in very recent work.
A few years ago I noticed something very new. You seemed to work in and out of it for a while…
In L.A. recently I could see a really good example of what I would consider an earlier piece where this color and space is structurally beautiful, very active and clear. The newer pieces hold that space though in a new state as ’sound’ – coming out as painting. I say sound, because if I talk just about color, or color container, I’m going to get stuck on the local physicality of paint on a surface. What I experienced was ‘vibration’ and ‘arrangement’, not just expanded areas of color or more minimal areas. This new arrangement comes out very much into the air—you can feel the air filling, moving toward you in a very elegant and ‘sounding’ way.

Kasarian: Yes, that’s a nice description. Currently, I’m working on a set of thirty aluminum panels, 24” x 48” each, and just running with the color variation. This is the first time in a while that I’ve had this many panels going on all at once, so I’m really excited to be moving through a variety of color ideas more quickly, to really see what I can do with the group of paintings. The color is generally more “stretched out”, with a central color surrounded by one or two adjacent colors. I also always have smaller panels around the studio that I continue to paint, usually with thinner bands of color. In addition to the small panels, I keep a notebook of paintings and do some work on paper, to keep getting color ideas out there and to keep things moving. At times I’ve become so focused on one set of paintings, like a set of ten, that I just keep re-painting them over and over again. While this can be good in some ways, I’m trying to get more ideas out more fluidly by keeping smaller panels around and by working on paper. Summer is coming, and I’m on sabbatical next fall, and I just can’t wait…painting, and playing some hockey in between, and painting some more…

The Carnival and Serene – Richard Roth

Brent: It seems to me that no matter where you position yourself to take these paintings in there are always two states forthcoming, though perhaps not always on view at the same time. Separately these different moods evoke, for example in ‘Full Cleveland’ or ‘Happy Hour’, the carnival and serene. When the two states mesh, it’s generally considered that a third state arrives. Though in your paintings, Richard, the third state is already there, as a three-dimensional completed painting, something that we need to move around to see.
In ‘Plywood Violin’ the mood swings are less obvious, perhaps operating more as object/surface/spatial disorientation—naughty austere.

Richard: Mentioning “states” and “moods” is an interesting way to begin our discussion of paintings that are extremely abstract and highly reductive – and it pleases me. First of all, I do not consciously try to insert meaning into the paintings; though I am delighted that the paintings are seen as carriers of moods and that they contain such readings or multiple readings. I am interested in and draw ideas from a wide range of artifacts and disciplines such as product and package design, visual perception, nature, architecture, popular culture, custom cars, and fashion. As these influences interact with specific formal concerns, as well as my riffing on the three-dimensional structure of the support, it is hoped that a certain power/depth is achieved in the fusion. “Full Cleveland” for example, when viewed frontally, is a straightforward horizontal stripe configuration, but when informed by its side-view, the stripes become components of a dynamic red and white object that appears to be formed by extrusion. In the end, I expect the paintings to be open to anything, conceptually informal rather than formal – so, your observation of “Plywood Violin” – “naughty austere,” sits well with me. I much like this quotation by Vitaly Komar (on the work of Komar and Melamid) in relationship to my work and to painting in general: “Generally, art wavers between being closer to a book or closer to a rug – more conceptual or more decorative. Our work is somewhere in between. We try to make conceptual rugs.”

Brent: I noticed in your last email you mentioned something interesting about the paint ‘delivery’. You wrote, “I don’t think there is much to be seen. In other words — the paintings are very flat and super matte — no brushstrokes or other events to notice – no magic in the paint application. They are painted with Flashe paint.”

Richard: True – flat, matte, straightforward paint application is an important aspect of my work, but it doesn’t carry it. If there is magic, it is in the total sensibility – how all the parts come together, and how they are read.

Brent: The paintings are small and all the same size. What brought you to those choices?

Richard: At present, painting for me is like returning home. I painted for many years, then for approximately ten years my practice became more conceptual – creating collections of contemporary material culture. I returned to painting in 2006 with a renewed and revitalized interest, fueled by conceptualism and informed by postmodern attitudes. In this light, I am pleased with the anti-heroic stance these paintings take. When I started painting again I had no idea what the work would look like – that was a pretty exciting moment. I did a number of different things to start, but the first small painting that dealt with the painting’s sides really resonated. Its box-like proportions allowed a wide range of new issues, both formal and content related, to enrich my practice. So, I just stuck with the same scale and proportions. In the beginning, I thought, “OK, I did ten of these, I don’t think there are any more possibilities for a format so diminutive.” But, new paintings keep coming and ideas just bubble up, so I’m sticking with the limitations for now – while they are productive. Sometimes, I look at these little paintings and think, “What the hell am I doing? These paintings are the size of a shoebox!” But when they are completed, they occupy the wall with real authority. So, I think there is something important going on here. One other thing that relates to the size consistency is the fact that my previous practice was collecting. These paintings are very connected to what a rock or butterfly collection is about, but now I am making my own ideal collection.

Brent: Could you explain ‘making my own ideal collection’ a little more?

Richard: Well, having utilized collecting as a working method for past work, I am very sensitive to the idea of collecting and classification as a methodology for creating art and, more importantly, for ordering the world. I have come to see most everything as a collection – the furniture in your house is a collection of furniture and you are the curator. Likewise, an artist’s oeuvre is a self-created collection. My new paintings, being small and all exactly the same size, call attention to the fact that they are a set of objects whose inclusions I am carefully controlling.

Brent: An early work ‘Allsorts’ dated 2006, which must be among the earliest of the small box works, and appears to play with scale in a loosely associated way. I’m thinking liquorices with the front and back layer peeled off… how small those things are… then the scale of the painting and the visual flip back to the confectionary… the odd scaling through this association, and the actual formal sturdiness of the design, and the box.
I might be right off track, but that’s what I’m getting.
Also this absence, the black space in the middle, the emptiness, the candy each side, reads very playful, but also moves towards gestalt.

Richard: “Allsorts,” the painting, is only loosely related to the candy, allsorts. I certainly had much fun looking at a wide range of those little confections. Allsorts candies, like many other confections, are constructed by layering sweet pastes, licorice, etc. (material/color) and then slicing through those layers to form small pieces. It is the notion of a polychrome object that is formed by a process other than the application of paint to a surface that really interests me and expands my visual vocabulary.

Brent: The paintings appear very worked out. Do you make models first?
Drawings? Or do you stick paper covers over a ready-made box, and then go back and rework the image or structure? Or does it all come together is some miraculous way? I’m very interested in the process you use to get to the stage where you can paint the information in.

Richard: First I am always making sketches – just rough, crude notations really – as I get ideas or see things around me that generate ideas. But the real action takes place as I paint on constructed wood supports that are exactly the same size as the finished paintings but are not the paintings; they are the place for generating ideas, finding and resolving paintings. These preliminary supports allow me to try many configurations fairly quickly – they are quite roughly painted and I also use masking tape that I collect in numerous colors – whatever will allow me to get a good sense of a configuration. These preliminary paintings are somewhat like full-scale prototypes. I say this is where the action is because everything happens in this stage of the painting. I usually start with one idea and then get other thoughts—which I follow, repeatedly painting and taping new thoughts, new variations directly on a single preliminary support. I take digital photographs of every configuration; in this way I maintain a record of all stages of each painting’s development and an archive of possibilities. This may seem surprising, but not unlike abstract expressionist paintings, my paintings evolve and are resolved through a lengthy process of feints and jabs, hunches and discoveries. When a right conclusion presents itself, I paint the final work on a new support.

Brent: With furniture the first thing you become aware of is the function [semantics], then the design – the sculptural thing in space; the weight, the lines, and the color, when or if used. Though in painting many of these things carry on in an almost virtual way: The design, space, object, weight, line and or color. Each part, at least what I would consider a major part + function of painting, arrives in a syncopated way to drive a ’shift’. The elements come together not necessarily as something totally disclosed, in your face, all at once, but as a ‘total’, whose sum of parts unravel, move us into a different sensual awareness, perhaps even past the something to just look at, as we sit in on the couch. Richard you work with both furniture design and painting. Any insights you would like to offer?

Richard: I have an extremely democratic view of esthetics – flat, no categorical hierarchies. In any object, I look for a kind of intelligent sensitivity. Whether or not an object is art or non-art, made by hand or by machine, decorative or functional, unique or one of thousands makes little difference to me. What really excites me, as a viewer, is discovering a display of heart and mind. Furniture itself is a more democratic medium than art. Few of us can afford a Noguchi sculpture but most of us can afford a Noguchi lamp. Both sculpture and lamp embody the same power – a life of thoughtful creativity – Noguchi’s very unique sensibility. Furniture has been the subject matter and inspiration for numerous artists throughout history and has been admired by modern and contemporary artists for its humble vernacular use-value (Shaker furniture is a good example). These modern and contemporary artists desired to make art objects that would participate in the ordinary lives of viewers, naturally and without the pretensions of so-called high art. I am very proud to be part of the tradition of artist-designers that includes Harry Bertoia, Isamu Noguchi, Donald Judd, James Hyde, and many others. In short, furniture design is not only closely related to painting and to sculpture, but these design and art practices inform each other in ways that are provocative and philosophical.

Brent: Thank you Richard.

Everyday Composed – Shinsuke Aso

Brent: Of course the first impression I get with your collage work (we may as well start there) is that it rings Japanese: The color, the quirkiness, and freshness – the level and sense of reserve and adornment. Though that’s too simple. Quirkiness and perhaps freshness has been picked up, more fetishized, by western media, so we’ll leave that for a moment. And as you are not in Japan, and have settled in a different environment, I’m going to leave the Japanese thing aside as well – for the moment. Sensibilities, or where the work comes from probably will flow naturally without the need to make some grand cultural point.
That said, if I didn’t live here, I don’t know if I would have got the collage work that you do, as well as I think I do. Simply said I enjoy and feel it. It’s very much part of this culture’s fabric. Said from someone who is still coming to terms with what that fabric is. In the process, so to speak – never expecting to get there, of course, but open to the process.
I wouldn’t mind starting with ways of looking. And perhaps how you see something that interests you. How you pick that up, give it some attention, notice its qualities, what memory that triggers, its instance, and some of the more intriguing background operatives, how you are thinking when you move that into that position.

Shinsuke: I am interested in encountering activities and accidents that convert or flip over concepts, stereotypes and prejudices. As an artist, I am trying to create artwork that suggests to the audience several different points of view toward things and phenomena around them.

The series of collage work is one of my main practices. They are created by using a great variety of found materials including paper, fabric, plastic, tape, thread, and hair embellished with doodle-like touches of pencil, pen and paint marks. The first step of this process is to encounter materials in my everyday life, to collect and preserve them. Secondly, I re-contextualize the materials as shapes and colors by trimming, cutting them up, tearing, crumpling, adding marks and juxtaposing the elements with other materials on a paper ground.

What I am looking for in my daily life are awkward combinations of objects, placed in unexpected situations either by accident or through somebody’s intention. When I make the collages, I’m always concerned about the weirdness of mixture of the elements as well as the composition. To create these strange situations, I need to collect as diverse materials as I can, especially the papers: I have the local Chinese restaurant’s menu, porn, advertisements, found pictures, kids’ doodles, somebody’s memo, packages, tacky party decorations, fashion magazines, cartoons, newspaper, fancy wrapping paper, receipts, cardboard, envelopes, flyers and various kinds of catalogues.

It may be hard for you to imagine but you are only the second person who mentioned about the ‘Japanese’ taste in my collage works. I tend to avoid making stereotypical Japanese contemporary art such as the cartoon look, cute stuff, or a contemporary subject depicted with traditional technique. The Japanese taste in my work is not really cultural or artistic. It’s a different kind of taste that is considered uncool in general. I recently realized that this derives from landscapes of my hometown, a suburb of Japan.

You would imagine Pachinko neon signs glaring in the middle of rice paddies; brand new bow windows on an old wooden house patched with corrugated tinplates; a shiny red Ferrari parked next to a farm tractor in a barn; weirdly themed ‘love hotels’ clustered together on a side of a mountain; hand-painted anime characters on the wall of a kindergarten; a trace of a landslip covered with concrete; a zebra-patterned two-car-long train running through rice paddies; a line of vending machines shining in the darkness of night; an abandoned old refrigerator half buried in mud by a odorous bad smelling river; curves of electric wires in between massive pylons.

These things don’t look very sophisticated yet has an impact. And that attracts me. Perhaps it’s difficult for an audience who has never lived in Japan to understand this taste. Actually, on the other hand, the first person who mentioned about the specific taste was my local friend who does not have much knowledge about art. He nonchalantly said, ‘Your artworks remind me of our town’ after he saw my collages for the first time. His comment really shocked me because I didn’t even think of it until then.

I feel very excited when I encounter strange phenomena and keep this same excitement when it turns up in work: Although the excitements are very different. The former is like stepping on a mine, which is totally unexpected and shocks, or kills me. The latter is similar to creating a booby trap.

In addition, I am interested in art as a ‘phenomenon’ — that is able to convert the meaning and value of things. As mentioned, the materials I use are mostly discarded from our society, but they acquire currency as you work with them.

Brent: I don’t know how many times I’ve seen visitors standing in front of those glowing vending machines, getting their photo taken. This thing, glowing on the street, a whole set of them, is strange, but at the same time so appealing.
In your collages, where this odd connection between things works, you mention they are part of the everyday.
How different is the everyday that you are presently in to the everyday of your childhood? Is there an equivalent to glowing vending machines, or love hotels on the hill?

The collages are very much ‘telltales’ of a system of a way of life and way of thinking. And as such you are working with these disparate links both at a formal level and also as something that has history. There is the story of the everyday, odd and diverse as it is. And that is primarily local, where you are now. Though there is this totally different history too, that is working and that is embedded in another local time, the one of your hometown as a child.

I like this. It reminds me of you a bit.
The black drape as a tie, and the white the shirt.
And the lock of what, synthetic golden hair: The blue dangle of the ribbon.
I also see a color thing happening that is stereotypically ‘Barbie’, the western doll version – the blond and the blue – a prom even.
And what of formal arrangements: How things perform under their own steam, the different hangs of the materials, the way gravity plays on different material, how the colors of those things perform. This piece is also very structural.

Shinsuke: It took a while to get back to you, Brent. Again nobody has asked me these questions before, and I thought that it would be worth to take time to answer.

The ‘everyday’ of my childhood and the recent one that I am in are obviously different. I am now living and working in New York, have been getting older, and have learned more things. However, I feel I still have the same excitement and interest as I had as a child, growing up as a teenager. In other words, a part of my psychological life is still on the same lineage of my childhood.

Landscape-wise, it is hard to find the equivalent experience here in New York. The nature of things, the half-natural-half-artificial, such as farms and rice paddies, coexist in Japan. (By the way, I use the word ‘nature’ here as a comparison to things created by human beings.) In NY the half-natural-half-artificial works differently. Of course the cultural and populational diversity in New York differs greatly from a small town just outside Tokyo.

The City of New York provides me with a huge resource for the collages. I don’t need to buy much except for glue, tapes, staples, and different papers for ground. As a result of living in New York for more than eight years, most of my materials can be found here, and are free. Luckily the city supports a very diverse and complex interweaving of cultures, as I mentioned before, and this huge reservoir supplies me with an abundance of interesting materials often that can be found coming from all parts the world.
Although I use these materials, that end up here, or are of New York, the way I compose them into a collage has more to do with the aesthetic of ‘the weird landscape of suburban Japan’.

In terms of my artistic inspiration, I would like to add monsters that I saw in animations, cartoons and live-action super hero TV programs as well as odd looking animals and plants such as deep sea creatures, tropical animals and poodle-cut pine trees, dinosaurs and mutants: All most likely derived from my experience of growing up, watching TV, and immersed in the everyday weirdness of landscapes in my hometown.

The elements in my collage, as with the individual as audience, and I, each have very distinct histories, so-called an ‘everyday life’. When these histories intersect through collage, different stories are being created depending on how I compose the elements and how the audience interprets them based on their knowledge, experience, and memory. For example, the work above reminded you of a Barbie doll, a prom, or me, while another person simply thought that it looked like a hammerhead shark constructed with junk. You read the work through the color combination and what each element means to you. On the other hand, the other person just saw it as one shape and didn’t pay much attention to the meanings of the elements and colors.

It’s hard to see what the exact elements are from the jpeg image. Actually, the hair is real extension hair that was used in fashion shows, the black drape is a torn up t-shirt, the blue ribbon came out from a party cracker, and the top part is a cut-up piece of another collage including black paint marks, a picture of some garden and somebody’s memos. For me the hair symbolizes the stereotype of Western beauty or sexiness in the Eastern world, the t-shirt gives an impression of punk rock culture, and the blue ribbon recalls my neighbor’s kid’s birthday party. I try to create an artwork embracing these mixed elements and meanings yet work visually to get them well composed, where all elements are leveled out no matter what they were, or where they are from originally.

I recently realized that the physical, visual and conceptual freeness from gravity is very important to all my works. This invisible freeness is presented as dangling elements (dangling lines in collage) that often come up in my works. These elements are similar to a string attached to a balloon. And in the fact that they hang down visualize the gravity of the earth. However, they also emphasize the lightness of bigger objects that are placed above them simultaneously. In the collages all elements are not touching edges of the paper. That makes the elements appear to exist free in space. Furthermore, each element is alleviated from the gravity of its meaning being mixed with other elements or composed simply as shapes and colors.

Brent: Thanks Shinsuke.

Drawing Lines – Kate Beck

Brent: Kate, your pencil line drawings, either vertical lines or horizontal, always not the two together [?]: The framing device, the format and its edge seem to create the plus minus balance. How do you work on them? I noticed on your homepage that you had an image of quite a large one sitting flat on a bench top.

Kate: Shape is very intriguing to me and sets the scale for each piece, which is specific to each individual surface. All of the line work is in response to shape. When I first started making these, Brent, I spent a lot of tedious time drawing boxes – four connected lines – trying to perfect the exact size and shape within the surface before working the line. I was always at odds with my material because, you know, beautiful paper has an aspect of life in it; it’s not perfect. Trying to force a perfect line went against the nature of the material. This created a false tension on the drawing surface because the white space – the space not marked within the surface – is a critical component to the works, it’s not simply left out; empty. To get closer to my work, I have had to let go of creating these pre-shapes which has allowed a more natural relationship to transpire between the paper, and my hand. I think the resulting shape and scale is both more sensitive, and dynamic.

As you saw in the photos, I do create my work on a large table. I lay out drawing paper and cover the edges with thin, brown postal paper, which serves as protection to the underlying white space and also acts as a boundary which, when in place, reveals a core white shape. I mark into the white shape. My first lines are very spare, made with a mid-tone pencil; purely in response to that white shape. I use a metal straight edge. Each successive line is in response to the one made before it. These first few lines set the entire body and pace of the eventual finished work. I guess that’s my initial perspective.

Brent: What is the simple explanation for creating the drawings on a flat horizontal surface?
I think that I have it that you work on one window ‘an opening of white’ at a time, or do you shift the windows after you have worked on an area for a while?

Kate: First, it is functional. I have more flexibility to manage the materials on a flat, horizontal surface. Initially, I did work from the studio wall vertically – which is how I paint and how the work is meant to be viewed, as well, so it seemed natural to me. This turned out to be very different, though. The on-going line resolution in the drawings can be intense and I found I just couldn’t hold the perspective I needed – neither physically nor visually. It was very awkward. The flatness of the table allows me to work from multiple directions at once so that the piece has a more continuously thorough resolution overall. It flows. And I really like that. I move around quickly – both on my feet and with my hands – so it gives me incredibly more freedom. That’s not to say it isn’t challenging. I’m leaning over the table for long periods of time. I usually finish a studio session with yoga to relax my neck and shoulders. I swim, also, which helps.

But you’ve brought up the white…. I think it’s important to note that I perceive my drawings as objects; concrete elements of structure. So it’s interesting to me that you observe an ‘opening’ of white. I use white as a color and as a definer of space, and thus shape. It is simultaneously color and form. In my drawings, the unmarked passages are as incremental to the whole as is my tonal line. The white signifies fullness and color, as opposed to emptiness or colorlessness. In the drawings, I use line tonally to further explore and heighten that conceptual response to shape. In this sense, I embrace white as an element possessing both the ability to open up and to negate space at once. I think that’s rather amazing, and indicative of the truly powerful nature of color. Ryman, with his early white paintings, took this implied notion of the relative none-ness or nothingness typically associated with white as a color and basically blew it apart. He allowed us to experience such an incredibly dynamic presence within the ‘empty’ surface. White is not pure, nor static. It is ever-changing. We ‘see’ it only through light, by nature of our physical and emotional vision.

So far, most of my drawing has involved only one central shape that is marked into so I have been working the entire surface all at once. My new work, however, does contain multiple shapes set within certain trajectories, or shapes within shapes. With these, I work each shape individually keeping an overall evenness to the progression of the drawing so that is stays balanced.

Brent: I’m thinking of the materials too, as you mention them: The soft imperfect white of the paper; pencil, the initial one – not hard, not soft; brown paper; a metal rule. They are like the characters in a play. And of course, the metal rule would be the one that is unyielding, steady and firm. In every play there are lines. Though here they are very quiet. Do you hear the lines—feel the different materials as you move them around?

Kate: Your parallel to ‘characters of a play’ gives me an opportunity to discuss process, and my feelings about the connection between process and drawing. Yes, I think my lines are quiet, but not, perhaps, understated. They are very deliberate. My husband speaks of the space between notes of music; how powerful silence can be. I often listen to piano or cello music when I am working. The breaking down and building up of my materials is very similar. The work arrives through attention to the materials and a given space, and to the systematic manipulation of those materials within that space. In this case, the marks that I introduce to a white shape are drawn, erased, and re-drawn over and over, leaving traces of the journey of the mark throughout the shape, which also exists within the white space of the paper. I am quite infatuated with this act of refining the tonal line relative to each mark and to the shape as a whole. The drawing is both conceptual, and sensible. Visual thinking; figuring out. I am very caught up with this.

Brent: Let’s keep on that track of music: Do you make mistakes?

Kate: Well, I do … Perhaps there are different kinds of mistakes to be made. The most unforgiving is when the paper itself is compromised. This is an on-going battle… Once a mark is down, it never leaves the surface entirely. Depending on the density and surface quality of the paper, the sharpness of the pencil lead, the pressure with which I am marking… Occasionally I am working so quickly and intently that I inadvertently fling the pencil and it dances end-over-end across the paper, leaving marks and dents as it goes. Miserable…

Within a broader, even existential context, however, there is a question of truth – which is not rightness, nor wrongness. Mistake implies corruption; wrongness, and yet it is implicit in the quest for truth. My work is not about perfection. It is about resolution. In the drawings, the resolution of the line is subject to the environment in which it is bound. The more it evolves, the more the architecture of the shape is defined, thus the drawing is evidenced; it exists. That environment is comprised of dual perspectives: vertical and horizontal. From these opposite directives, I attempt to reach a point of balance or suspension. For instance, I may find that lines I thought were straight from one perspective turn out to be entirely off the mark when seen from the opposite direction. So that is a mistake I try to correct. It is a continuous back-and-forth, give-and-take, working in the round. Ultimately, any differences from the two perspectives become pulled together more closely as the drawing evolves. I’m not sure that makes it right, though, or correct.

I draw with the support of a straight edge, but I do not measure. Although my line and shape may appear to be concise and rational, they are actually tempered with a high degree of softness and color. People often think they see other color within my surfaces, even though I work quite purely in black and white. And to music? I don’t know. But it is the spaces in between which hold a certain power: the word that is not said, the sound that is not heard, the line that fades away only to return again; that pause which allows room, perhaps, for the individual. I think the most meaningful response I’ve had to my drawings is their likening to poetry. It was from the painter, Judith Linhares.
I was moved by that.