A Reflection of the Synthetic – Freddy Chandra

Brent: I think we live in a funny color world: I mean the hills and trees, they are green, rust, brown, hay, and they are soothing. The bay, well that has every personality under the sun, and the moon… and I think of your work, and I think of the light that is much less in the hills and more in the bay, while also a refection of the synthetic.

Freddy: For me the color of things becomes more poignant when its perceptual presence asserts some kind of independence from its source. Bluish dusk framed by a window… or driving in the rain with water drops obscuring as you look out the window at the glowing red light:  these are all recognized. But how do these things translate from recognition to sensational experiences? Being awash in blue, red, violet, or any other colors: even if only in the space of the mind.

I often have a hard time answering questions about the use of color in my work. The process itself is intuitive, maybe to the point where the colors in a specific piece become a given, as if there was no other choice. And maybe it’s always a reflection of the synthetic, as in everything has to be synthesized to start with.

Brent: Which brings us to an interesting point: you mention the fleeting moments, your example a red signal blown out of specificity by the rain on the windshield, the color exploding into an experience. And in a sense it is a shared experience, I can hear the wipers and the driving rain. I have my personal take on all of this, though it becomes collective as long as we have had the red light, the car, and the rain, or something similar. This way it’s not only the color that registers but also all that color signifies and addresses. It is then that the color is synthesized, released from any one label.

We did have the chance to talk in your studio before you left for Milan about the earlier time-based work and how that has grown into the newer work.

Freddy:  Yes, I was glad you came to see the most recent pieces I created for the show at Fabbri C.A. in Milan.
I should perhaps give you some background to how my work has evolved.  Painting was really where I had my first experience of engaging myself with the idea of art making. This was back in ’99; I was in the middle of my architecture course at Berkeley. At first, I think I simply drifted into painting  in order to find a more direct experience of using my hand in a way that did not feel like an analytical exercise. But of course, the moment this engagement started to feel alive, it required me to periodically take a step back and perhaps analyze what was going on. It was then that I saw the connection between the paintings  I was making–which actually felt more like drawing within the space of painting–and architecture, or the visual language that I acquired through the study of architecture: the structuring of space through time, and time through space. It then seemed to make sense to explore working in three-dimensional space again. In graduate school, my work was primarily about finding ways to build out into real space what I was trying to do with my early paintings. I completed several time-based installation works in the period from the start of graduate school into the four years that followed, up to 2007. The final installation in this series was …three minutes from now… at the Kala Art Institute in Berkeley. These works employed constructed objects integrated with multiple light projections within an architectural context. These pieces suggest sequential visual movement through different points in space. From 2008 on, I re-shifted to doing works that are wall-based. This partly happened because I felt a need to do work that would require me to have a somewhat consistent daily practice, a practice where I would be able to  move through ideas  more quickly. Having said that, I can see returning to three-dimensional space again in the future.

Brent: I remember your piece with the taut optical fiber at San Jose ICA, 2008. It was probably one of your last architectural time-based works (maybe the Headlands was the last). I should mention that nothing (no thing) moved in this installation unless you, who engaged the work, moved. What shifted was light, and for me that ties the earlier time-based work with what was to come: the use of the stationary object, here the taut threads of optical fiber, enhanced the fact that the interaction is very much part of creating the experience.

You insert drawing within the space of painting and architecture, or the study of architecture. I see your practice very much part of drawing. The way you work, looking down over the piece on a bench, and the instruments that you employ to draw the color out, remind of a draftsman’s drafting board and tools. Though you are probably talking about a more conceptual relationship with drawing with painting and architecture?

Freddy: Brent, you make a very good point about Fugitive Horizons at the Institute of Contemporary Art. The first iteration of this installation took place while I was in residency at the Headlands Center for the Arts in 2007. Cathy Kimball, who is the Executive Director of the ICA, came to see this, and it was subsequently shown in an exhibition there initiated by Nancy White called The Space Between, which was also where I first met you. The fleeting nature in the experience of this piece is absolutely tied to the movement of one’s body and vision; a slight physical shift could potentially alter your perception of light and material within it.  I haven’t consciously thought of this piece as being a link between the earlier time-based works–where elements of an installation (light from video projections) literally do move around–and the current wall-based works that are static in the literal sense while implying movement. But it makes complete sense.

This installation is very much about drawing; stretching each one of the hundreds of monofilament lines literally felt like drawing in space. The act of drawing/pulling a mark/ a line across space is a common denominator for me.

Although my current work is usually referred to as paintings, I often feel they are more about drawing. Yes, they are obviously painted. Yes, my use of color recalls that of color field painting.    But, the work comes together through the physical process of drawing: pulling a mark across space.   In this case, I am making a distinction between making a mark in painting, and making a mark in drawing. I think that mark making in drawing is about marking space, and marking time. The clarity of the structure itself and the rhythm it creates are important in relation to the resulting experiential quality. And in this way, it leads back into architecture. From conception to completion, making these works feels like drafting an architectural blueprint, or scoring music.

Brent: Both the architectural blueprint and the musical score are packets of information that tell the interpreter how things will turn out, while the actual structure/space of the architecture and the performance or recording of the music is what the partaker gets to experience. Clearly what you are saying is that you are the producer of the pieces you make and those who end up experiencing these visual scores or compact architectures don’t need the middle player to get it.
Are you asking your audience to work a couple of jobs?

Freddy: At face value, the answer would be no.  This is one way I look at it: the blueprint or the score and its tangible manifestation are the same entity. In a sense, I am interested in having transparency in the relationship between the logical structure and the lyrical flow surrounding the work. The audience clearly does not have an opportunity to literally construct the work, nor is there anyone to re-perform the piece to be experienced.

This is unlike what happens in the case of Sol LeWitt’s work. The work starts as a set of instructions–analogous to a score, perhaps––and for the work to be tangible, it has to be re-constructed or re-performed in a new situation each time.

I do think that if there is enough structural transparency, the audience has an opportunity to synthesize what they see into an experience that is specific to that moment. Perhaps this is about attempting to create an open-ended structure to allow for a synthesis that is not generalized, but specific to each individual and to that particular moment. Does this seem paradoxical?

Brent: Relinquishing specificity… I guess this is what non-objective art does. But we are talking about a concrete thing, whether it be a concert of indefinable gestures and marks, or, be it… one color over one thing, we can respond without the need to give it a name. And that, perhaps, is optimum life?

Are you consciously making decisions to keep the work open-ended, or does that just happen as part of the course?

Freddy: I don’t believe I can build it into the work, or perhaps I do at times, and this is when things usually don’t work. I feel more connected to the impulse of wanting to make when I can forget any deterministic rationale for it. It becomes about really trying to have a connection between what I can take in observationally, and what I can do to translate these sensations. Over time, certain parameters are established, and the visual language gains a more familiar structure; but I think this place of being open-ended has to do with not knowing what I can see before I see it. The physical work, in the end, is just a vehicle, an instrument, an artifact; but hopefully to make possible another layer of experience. These statements may seem obvious on the one hand, and nebulous on the other, and are more about a general drive behind working.

Brent: As objects the work is impeccable. There is not one thing out of place, not a mark to be physically seen. Color appears saturated, embedded in a thick block of Plexiglas. But this is not really the case. In earlier work you use resin. What made you shift the material, and how did that move the sensibility as well as where color physically sits?

Freddy: Often, the shift in material was initiated by the need to find a process that is flexible, as well as archival. There were slight permutations along the way, in this regard: graphite embedded in layers of resin, colored resin that is cast, colored resin applied on Plexiglas, and so on. Most of the work I had in my solo shows at Brian Gross Fine Art (San Francisco) and Walter Maciel Gallery (Los Angeles) used a combination of these methods.

At some point, the process of casting solid blocks of custom tinted resin became cumbersome, and I felt I was going through a lot of technical steps that took me out of a certain zone of focus. To prepare for my exhibition in Düsseldorf at Galerie Lausberg, I decided I had to find a process that would feel more uniform or ‘simplified’. The work now employs solid panels of clear Plexiglas as physical support. Subsequently, all colors, value gradation, and marks/ lines are applied to the surface of these Plexiglas blocks using transparent and translucent layers of acrylic paint with an airbrush. Because of the paints’ translucency and how it allows light to be transmitted through, there is this illusion that colors are embedded within the physical support.

I think this shift to using paint on a transparent support gives me more freedom in keeping certain elements of a composition open during working: colors, value, line density. Marks are made more precisely, to the extent, perhaps, that they are not ‘physically seen’. The use of an airbrush certainly has a lot to do with this; as a tool, it distances my hand from the surface I work on. All layers of paint, from the ground colors, to the modulation of line density, to the build-up in value gradation, are collapsed into a single physical film that sits on the surface of the support.

As you mentioned, the colors in my work have become more intensely saturated in the past year, year and a half. The use of paint film as a material sort of opened a valve for me. I am more aware of the surface tension of the picture plane, and consequently of the spaces before and behind this interface. The push and pull of color intensity, as well as the use of greater depth of value, are what come out of this, I think.

Brent: I like how the film gathers there on the surface, and that you simplify the process, which in turn intensifies the color experience. But all said and done, there is still a lot of process involved once the color gets put down. The color shifts, is still embedded, and leaves it all sort of ambiguous.

Freddy: Yes. I think the varnish and the thin layer of resin on top of the paint film further remove most traces of touch. This does perhaps create some ambiguity in terms of how everything is done: what creates the color, is it image or object, is it surface or depth, and so on. Maybe what I am trying to get at is making something that doesn’t look like it has been made. Does this make sense?

Brent: Like the sunrise!
So what happens when you take the color out?

Freddy: I like that analogy. So the phenomenological experience of something potentially overwhelms or transcends its physicality.

Okay, now you must be referring to Whether, a monochrome I recently completed for the exhibition w h i t e-h o t at Margaret Thatcher Projects in New York. When color relationship is taken out of the mix for the most part, I had to decide what kind of activity (and how much) I wanted a composition to have. With the color works, quite obviously, color plays an important role in affecting the structure and atmosphere of a piece, its rhythm and its resonant frequency. Without apparent colors to work with, I realized I would be dealing with a whisper. And probably because this was my first time revisiting a non-color situation in a long time, it felt a little bit like walking in the fog. This was exciting. But I also thought this whisper still has to have a clear, albeit less apparent, structure, in order for the piece to happen. Here, mark making was done with neutral iridescent acrylic paint, which has mica as its pigment source. The iridescence of the mica causes the painted surfaces to shimmer and change its appearance, depending on one’s point of view and the light. I decided that I also needed to have different surface sheen for the different parts of the piece: high gloss, satin, or matte. This is about modulating the surface tension you may feel in interfacing with the image. All these elements then form a kind of architecture to move around in.

I just now realized this. In a sense, with the color works, the structure falls into place in order to achieve some kind of overall resonance; while with the non-color works, the resonance seem to come first, and subsequently I have to find the underlying structure. This is probably too neat of a summation, but I think there is a kind of reversal going on.

Brent: With the color taken out you do read the thing as a whole first, and then the structure, which includes, in this case, the use of different finishes, thus a wider sense of space. I notice, too, that you become very aware of the wall, also the base or back of the work. Perhaps without the color you are apt to notice everything more, including the subtle shifts in color in the apparent non-color forms, even the room itself… but this also works with the color pieces. What role does the space (the gallery) play when viewing your work?

Freddy: In contrast to the architectural installations, which I consider to be site-conditioned and site-adjusted work, the wall-based work are largely self-enclosed systems. Having said that, the wall spaces in between discrete elements of a single piece are integral to how you read the work. External space punctuates and disrupts the internal space of the work. Rhythm is formed as presence relates to absence. Furthermore, within the context of an exhibition, I tend to explore the interrelationship between individual compositions. One is a precursor to another, and to an extent, this affects how a whole exhibition may be sequenced as an integral spatial installation.

Brent: I noticed that you made a vertical piece, and another that pulls apart the self-enclosed systems, at least in the organization of the modules… you have recently moved into a larger studio, more of that architectural space, do you think that it will have an impact on a new body of work, possible greater fragmentation, longer, or even taller strips?

Freddy: I am currently gearing up for an exhibition at Thatcher Projects in late October. I know there will be a couple of large vertical pieces for this as well. I have wanted to explore the vertical orientation for a while now, having initially felt uncertain about this move. The horizontals definitely have a very specific sense of movement that is inherent in its orientation. Visually, the horizon touches on what a person may glean in his or her periphery. The left and right edges of the work suggest an imaginary continuation into a peripheral condition. A vertical orientation, I think, has a direct correspondence with one’s standing figure. The sense of movement will inherently be different. I still have to see where it takes me.

With regard to the pulling-apart happening in Coalesce 01 and Coalesce 02 for the Milan show, and also in another recent piece, Murmur, it is actually an idea I have been exploring since 2009. What I find to be challenging in this direction is to avoid flamboyance, in a sense. What is the point of reference for this fragmentation? What self-enclosed system is being broken apart? How do you retain some kind of logical clarity in the process? A synthesis of structure and gesture has to be there.

I am thrilled about the new studio. I don’t know yet how it will affect my work. But it’s a big relief to be finally moved in and more or less organized. It will be a busy three months leading to the show in October at Thatcher Projects.

Lastly, thank you so much, Brent, for this conversation. This has been absolutely great for me!

Deep Black – Billy Gruner, Candida Alvarez, Brent Hallard

There is a punk painting by Billy Gruner and a couple of kiss paintings. One kiss is painted directly on to the wall, and is designed by this speaker, with the title taken from the onomatopoeia sound of mice nibbling, in Japanese “chu chu”. Another piece, formally a readymade–a black square table napkin–is later manipulated with color and pencil. Large would be a table cover, small the napkin–this work by Candida Alvarez.

The title of the show is Deep Black. There is a lot of black, though white predominates, that being the color of the wall.
The show is spare: one napkin; one wall piece; and one original punk painting dated 2011, none of which are all black, and all to which seem to have their roots in the everyday. Everything is abstract, or is it? Or can someone explain it out a little further… the individual work, the practice, the attempt at a unifying theme, or the disarray of it?

Candida Alvarez: …my sister is always putting the past behind her-Well I use the past to make my pics and I want all of it and even you and me in candlelight on the train and every “lover” I’ve ever had–every friend–nothing closed out–and dogs alive and dead and people and landscapes and feeling even if it is desperate–anguished-tragic–it’s all part of me and I want to confront it and sleep with it–the dreams–and paint it

–Joan Mitchell*

Here, deep black represents anticipation. It is like walking into a movie, once the picture has started. Memories, too, are like the everyday. They are abstract, swirling around in invisible space, until needed. My painting, “A Kiss” begins with a photo snapshot meeting a ready-made black ground. Drawing pulls it close, like a microscopic lens. In this painting, the picture transforms into an architecture of color-forms. The foundation is the photo, which gets shredded through drawing to serve as the memory pulp for painting. Disarray, is the common denominator

Deep black is sexy, no? In my painting, a sliver of black barely visible at first glance, fights for dear life to get noticed on a formal level. It is the deep black and like the kiss, reverberates throughout the painted body. In this conversation, I am nothing but that small glimpse of “black magic women.” Go towards the dark. There is always something there, waiting to be noticed.

Billy Gruner: I like the title Deep Black because it refers in many ways to a kind of mystic reading I like more and more, deep space implied for instance. But also a kind magic nature is summoned, its fun in many ways. The so-called punk works come from a long way back and issue from a certain aesthetic response, and many of these are done in black. The stripes just sit there vibrating without any pretense to design or meaning. These ongoing works are made simply, from ordinary inexpensive materials and have long been linked to a DIY understanding–that was punk’s greatest achievement. I have always admired the democracy of means and sense of lowbrow aspiration associated, and for these reasons I have always been a Post Punk style of artist. These works attempt to restate my interest in what my overall body of social oriented works may represent. Regardless these impromptu works done on site with a poverty of means have broader meanings than that, and have an almost Asian aesthetic response also: simple, repetitive, reflective, and utterly unique from each other despite the system of reproduction. The works emerge out of a longer background i.e., the tape works that I still do, and, the stereo works which have a music connection. I don’t believe I have to reinvent the wheel at present, I just like to make work that produces its own dialogue and I like how that resonates with other artists’ works, so difference for me is cardinal. In this case the relationship to colour and to its apogee, blackness is placed under discussion – this collective dialogue albeit in visual terms when paintings are used is referred to in the black paint, the gesturing of the stripes. Importantly, the act of making the punk works is symbolic, they are made just prior to exhibition or even during, so they are immediate, it is performative by nature.

* Lady Painter, A Life, by Patricia Albers.

Written Colours – José Heerkens

Brent: In a recent body of work where you employ, as you are known to do, grids, colors, and lines, the horizontal predominates. The vertical is there, like an armature, or is seen through the stacking of horizontals, but it is the long flat bars or lines of color that activate and play the paintings’ internal field.

José: For me line is an important means to visualize space: both the vertical and the horizontal are needed, yet it is the horizontal line that predominates through the painting process.
Line pulls the image out, to the sides, lengthwise, opening up to a place that can breathe. This sense of space is full of movement and rhythmic construction, and is very different from that of perspective drawing.
The vertical lines are there, as you say, and create the structure or framework on which the horizontals walk their own rhythm.  The vertical line also returns in the shape of aligned horizontal lines. And thus the dialogue ensures: between vertical and horizontal,  structure and freedom, form and space.

Brent: Could you talk about this ‘different space’ a little more?

José: Here I mean the difference of experiencing space, how it feels, not space itself. In the horizontal space I feel nature, breath, open air, rest and equivalence. The horizontal follows the basic line of the horizon–you can almost imagine lying down in it.
In the painting the underlying vertical structure sets the scale, suggesting places where the horizontal line/space can start and end, and restart. The perspective space is another emotion; it pulls your sight into depth and demands focus.
Horizontal space and perspective space each ask for their own way of looking. When looking at a row of trees I follow them horizontally. To figure which tree has the thickest branch I need to look at the form of each tree in that row.

Brent: Interesting what you say about this demand for focus with perspectival space. With perspective the logic of the picture is set, you find a central focus, and that pushes you along. Working as you do there is no fixed point, instead the color structure takes its place. After scanning one of your large-scale canvases,  there is no singular way to get to know the work. It seems you need to follow the drift instead of honing down on the painting as some fixed thing.  Of course, working the grid non-objectively releases the viewer from thinking in terms of space generated by the rule of perspective, though, as imaginations do run, one is still wanting to understand the experience in some logical and spatial sense. Yet you are denied the information needed to wrap things up into a tidy experience. And I wonder, within these planes of your working, where does it lead us, and if no place real, where do we acquiesce?

José: When you work the grid ‘non objectively’ the focus is not on a certain point in the distance but on the line and color, how the eye follows and reads the arrangement.  I work two or more layers that sit close to the front of the canvas. It’s not necessarily a flat space, but more of a shallow space where everything operates close to the surface. And this carries through over the whole canvas.

I have focused on talking about space, which is very important, but it needs to be said that space is actually just one aspect of the work. As a painter the focus is on the whole process of painting, including the concentration of line, its length, the width, the right dose of rhythm and repetition, and the color. Every color has its light, its space, its distance and energy; each color is not alone but rather responds to the next.  It’s a search for color, space, light–and, as mentioned, it’s not a completely formulated thing, but a discovery.

Brent: You sent a couple of images of landscapes; one of the Australian Outback, the other of a field near your home. In the Outback photo there is an obvious physical sense of scale and open space, whereas the photo taken near your home, while the land is flat the implied sense of space is set up structurally. But let’s not stop there… what other sense is working here, and how does this get translated into your work?

José: Both images tell about scale. I traveled in Australia for six months. The endless landscape of the Australian Outback touched me to the bone. It is empty and at the same time feels complete and perfect. It is silent yet full of life.
While the beauty of this authentic land touched me I knew it wasn’t a place to stay. There is no reference and your senses cannot find a grip. It’s beyond any human scale with the line of the horizon defining the border between all and nothing.

In The Netherlands the landscape is flat and every meter has its destination. Even when it looks like natural wilderness it is designed. The lines of the plowed potato fields surprise me with their unintentional beauty. Men create the rhythm, the structure and the form. The cultivated land has a human scale. Flying in an airplane over The Netherlands you see the lines of streets and canals that divide the land into rectangles and squares… it is the land of Piet Mondrian.

Both landscapes show extremes, the structured and the wild. Both are important for me. In my work I need to deal with the tension of extremes, challenging me to find ways to keep both in sight while going for clarity and simplicity.

Brent: As you say, a question of scale, and you are in the land of Piet Mondrian. What are your historical influences, if any?

José: A work of art communicates on a different level than words. When I engage a painting I like to think about the choices the artist made, try to understand the intention, and that often leads the way of the process.
Once while visiting the National Gallery of Scotland in Edinburgh,  looking at ‘The Virgin and Child with St. John the Baptist and an Unidentified Saint‘ by Titian I felt this sudden shock. It is a small painting, however the richness and combination of color drew me in.

When I think about my work color is the theme. And this continues. There are many theories about color, and I do apply my knowledge and experience, but in the end it’s largely a thing of navigating through intuition, what feels right in a given circumstance, what feels and needs to be said in another situation. Here I should mention Josef Albers–standing before his paintings I feel the heart of the color matter. In his work he gives everything–his ideas about color, his attitude to art, and life.

It is hard to say exactly where the influences are, looking to art is learning about art and I think this never ends. But to mention some artists, I believe that Paul Cézanne was my first teacher: studying the shapes and the space, and how they can complement one another. The work of Agnes Martin is inspiring, as well as her comments about humility. The clarity of Piet Mondrian and Theo van Doesburg tell that the painting is what it is, an objective accomplishment.

Brent: For a painting, what is can be a point of conjecture. When looking at a painting in a gallery or museum I understand I’m in a mediated space with what is, and it goes along. But for something to reach that state in the studio, how do you arrive at a place where you feel the painting is done? And when the work heads out into the public arena, what do you expect the viewer to do with this?

José: Actually, in the studio you are the only one who can judge your own work.
It is not easy to look at the work with “fresh” eyes. More and more I see how important it is to come to clearness. The clearness to define and determine your visual ‘language’, in order to get closer.
For me it increasingly concentrates in the small things. The exact color, how to form and paint the color. A little difference in the color can make a big difference in the perception of the painting.

A painting grows to its own identity, when nothing more can be done to strengthen its being. Sometimes I have to be patient and let the painting rest for a while, to sharpen my view until I know what to do next. Each time I am happily surprised that looking is an ongoing process.
You ask me what to expect the viewer to do with this… I don’t know. When standing in front of a painting I hope they feel air and the space to follow life.

Brent: Standing in front of  one of your smaller-scaled paintings the thickness of the line becomes apparent, there is this greater sense of touch, this especially noticeable since you can get close to the canvas while still being able to experience the whole thing. What is different between your recent large-scale canvases and the smaller ones?

José: Yes, it’s as if you can get closer to the canvas. These smaller paintings zoom in on color, on the touch and the physicality of paint, along with  the length and width of a line. There is so much to discover in noticing small differences.
I keep areas of the linen unpainted to let the color and structure of the textile become part of the painting. In 2010 – L10. mars black and cobalt blue and in 2010 – L9. vine black and emerald I looked for the moment where the light of a color becomes visible in the black.

Brent: And what’s on the horizon?

José: I been preparing more than 25 canvases with linen and sizing.
I’m looking forward to working on them.

Transitions – Guido Winkler

Brent: Here we are in the realm of architecture, painting, sculpture, photography, and digital imaging. You are an artist, curator, and an agent provocateur, among other things. Where do we start?

Guido: Agent provocateur?

Brent: Maybe a better label would be DIY. If an opportunity is not there you organize, find a place, and do it.
You happily, or disruptively, ask questions about genre–merge them–a large photograph of your studio in a recent state of demolition/reconstruction may secure the point I’m trying to make here. This image also turns up in a small IS Box, which is your project, as well functions as promotion, as well as a business–addresses something of the AP, or not?
I’ll let you answer.

Guido: To be honest my original background is in photography (and early video, 1986-1988), but ended up doing sculpture at the Academia for Visual Arts (1989-1994). Sculpture, I thought at that time, would give me the ultimate freedom within the field of visual arts, as it would be possible to incorporate anything in sculpture/installation type work. But funnily enough, slowly between 1998 and 2004 (for reasons I will skip here), I have been incorporating sculpture into painting. Since 2003, when the digital photography became more of a factor, I bought my first digital camera–initially for photographing my own work and for capturing sketches but some of these photos were good as is. In the end technique is only a way of getting somewhere. Maybe I get bored easily, but I would rather think that I get triggered by new possibilities.

The meaning of the work lay also in the way people respond to it.
Today, I came to the conclusion that art may make us human… but a collector, for instance, who lives with art in his/her home, brings art to life. Human beings are social animals and art is a social connector.

The commercial part is that if you hardly sell it is impossible to keep going. Having said that, I have a very hard time selling my soul to a gallery. Especially if a gallery asks for the exclusive rights to show my work but won’t give me a monthly stipend, which is sometimes the case here in The Netherlands.

I guess for me, my art can expand in the best sense when my position as an artist is as fluid as possible and I think the way I work as an artist and as co-director of IS-projects is close to this ideal. Though, as mentioned, flexibility is paramount.
…You know, you say DIY, but I always get invitations to show.

Brent: Understood.
In your own practice as an artist early works take on architectural form, hints to illusion, as well as metaphor–can be made up of parts to form recognizable things, things swing, sit, can also be specific as well as be seen somehow responding to the gossamer of the photograph.

Guido: True. I think it all relates to one specific experience I had somewhere in 1998 while walking in Leiden.

Brent: And that was?

Guido: I was walking on a very bright midwinter day along one of Leiden’s canals which is connected by narrow streets to the big shopping street. The sun sat just above the horizon and was shining straight into my face. As I passed a side street I looked down–both sides were completely in shadow and together they formed a black frame. The depth of the street had disappeared with the sun-bathed shop fronts at the end of the street looking as if they were projected onto a film screen.
I thought this incredible.
Not something that I needed to go home and paint, but more in the way that it left something dangling, about the notion of reality, of what it is, or might be.

Related, too, is the notion of the Renaissance central perspective, which requires the viewer to stand in front of a painting to see a due representation of a three-dimensional place, the thought of what happens to the perspective of a painting when viewed at an angle; or when passing by it, the shifting of position: the viewer may not be stationary in this, the third dimension, while still engaging the painting. And while aware of the perspective in the painting, the reality of it is, at the same time a viewer can see the painting as a thing, the different aspects of it as you move around… closer, further away.

Brent: Another spatial sense… you make doors that swing.

Guido: You are referring to, of course, the work ‘Passages’, made back in 2002. I was interested in playing with the problem of fixed point, keeping in mind the renaissance fixed point perspective that we talked about earlier, and I was thinking about how to make something that you could pass by, engage the multiple shifting points of the piece, at the same time know what is wholly there. I made a version so big (Passages II) that it was impossible to take in within one view except from an angle, thus came about the ‘door work’ that you are referring to: doors as canvasses.
I liked the shifting combination and perspective and also the fact that the viewer needed to actively participate to experience the work.

‘Passages I’ consisted of 5 doors fixed to each other by a single pole to the next. They were hinged like normal doors (They were normal DIY doors actually including their posts) and the viewer was invited to walk through and participate. But actually hardly anyone did this, instead seemed happy to move around and view the work from what you could call ‘the outside’.

Funny you ask because, just now, I am working on a new door work that will be exhibited in Leiden (Scheltema project of Stedlijk Museum de Lakenhal) in March this year.

Brent: After these early door pieces it would appear that you went back to this fixed point perspective, in small works, acrylic on wood, and mounted photographs of views seen through a particular frame of vision, whether they be doors, windows, or in one photograph a large duct. In the small works on wood you have this architectural space of a structure or room that appears to sit on one single plane that suggests an illusionist space from the inside while at the same time exposing part of the outside. Where the viewer or participator is in all this, what position they take to understand this kind of work, does that play a role, or does it matter? The photographs are small also, but suggest something larger this time the ‘suggestion’ an architectural element that grants access to but also diminishes the view to another outside or through the view place or space.

Guido: It would appear… yes. But with the wooden works I don’t really see the difference, they are still more object than painting. And it seems fascinating how small works can also be intimate and monumental at the same time. But not only this let’s add also the central and the shifted, the concrete and the abstract, along with the traditional notions of the object and subject in painting.
That said, I can’t tell the viewer what to see. Yet it has also crossed my mind that what I might consider to be personal and intimate may also come across as possibly well received by a large audience in that it reads multifarious, each individual getting something different.

I bought my first digital camera for completely different reasons back in 2003 but that was a new start to make photos. What I liked at that time was the possibility of sharing my point of view in a more direct manner with the public.
Even though a camera is a central perspective tool, most of my photos still open the viewer to an unexpected experience within perspective. In the images you mention the camera is often looking up, can be 10cm from the floor, or be a reflected image. The tunnel photos, of course, have that extreme renaissance central point of view as a counter position.

The duct is a ‘ski tunnel’. I took the picture in the summer. In fact, it is a large duct, approximately 400cm in diameter.
What struck me the most is that I tend to take photos through something, a door, a gap, or a window. This frame, very much like the frame of the viewfinder, blocks information, like the earlier impression relayed, the walls in the street on that winter’s day.

Brent: And so the paintings that followed were small, focusing on positive/negative, absent/present spaces, silhouettes of doors, walls and floors, a graphic rendering of interior architectural housings.

Guido: What does one see? How does one look? I am interested in these questions of perception. We live in the same world but no one sees it the same way.

Brent: ‘Transitions’, from an exhibition at ‘Le petit port’, 2006, pieces that primarily get worked with/in the actual internal architecture, do you think what you are doing here is still called painting? And, just to inquire, what are your thoughts on the framing device that bordered or supported painting for so long, once it became plain, or disappeared altogether, didn’t architecture tend to dominate the way we saw painting… as you say, painting became an object, though within another object, one that very much informed our perception, though because of scale we aren’t able see the whole thing, only aspects–a window, there a door, some furniture. And painting, as an ‘object’, became increasingly close to being read as decoration, sometimes still appealing to the illusionary, other times, flipping, into Objecthood.
How did ‘Transitions’ come about?

Guido: The Transitions exhibition was more a work in progress than a gallery show, really. Le Petit Port is just around the corner. Therefore it seemed logical to experiment and work in the gallery rather than just hanging and showing there for six weeks. So, I worked right there with paper, a beamer, cameras (still and video), a printer and a computer. When I wasn’t there to work, paintings or photographs from the stock or studio were introduced. I used the title ‘Transitions’ because of the shift in focus from painting and installation back to photography and new experimentation with digital printing and then even further, adding digital printing to painting. The title also referred to the continuing process of the exhibition but, and, also to the more general sense of making art as an ongoing thing. Some things I ‘showed’ for five minutes, others for two weeks. It has been a very creative period.

Thinking about the frame, especially when I think of the heavy (neo) classical frame, they are probably derived from religious thinking, designed and used as an altar to separate the fictional world from the real. But really I’m not so interested in that. My interest is more the stepping away from the convention of a painting with its rectangular space, a window to another world and compositional verisimilitude, to something more object yet planar, yet with the suggestion of a plane complex–a folding/unfolding of the thing in time/space.

Brent: You did some billboards around the same time, a pair of blurry digital dots blown up to 400 cm x 400 cm, scaffolding, each facing the oncoming traffic, speed dots? I like them. I’m in a car, driving towards them, the dots are getting bigger, darker, blurrier… how do they fit in to what we have been taking about so far?

Guido: The billboard was a commission for a temporary Center for Visual Arts in Apeldoorn. It was a series of works done by various artists. Later, they put it along Apeldoorn’s entrance road in a monumental way with scaffolding.
Initially, the lights were already there as a layer in the images, similar to those at Le Petit Port.

Brent: The digital photographs ‘And then there was Light’ was part of the ongoing ‘Transitions’ project, and also related to the billboards?

Guido: Yes, in essence a part of that same series, but a bit later executed.

Brent: Can we talk about two assemblages, one in Leiden with taped elements holding the whole thing together by Swiss artist, Daniel Gottin: And the other at SNO, Marrickville, again with a structure holding the architecture and things in it in taught/but playful space, this time a circular motif created by John Adair?

Guido: These are the Assemblage series initiated and curated by Billy Gruner. I was lucky he put me in twice. The one at Petit Port was great fun. I remember installing it together with Jan Maarten Voskuil and Billy, mainly making a lot of noise, ha-ha. And in an instant when done all works fitted together perfectly, one after the other and together, playful and consistent. The whole combination read as one genre piece. A gesamtkunstwerk. Billy seemed to be interested in that. I consider it the best show that year in Leiden, however people may have a different opinion.

Brent: Yeah, I thought both ‘Assemblages’ worked… Billy has this idea of community, and is a bit of a raconteur, no?

Guido: Billy is a very special person in many ways and for sure he likes to speak about art. We were lucky he came along when we were busy setting up IS-projects.

Brent: I was going to leave this to the end but as it sort of has come up now, I want to ask about your IS projects, how it visually and conceptually sticks together, what influence you think it has on the community, what we call the artworld, and if it has any impact on your own work. Do you need to separate your curation/venture projects from personal art making, or are we talking all under the big top?

Guido: Yes, IS-projects… You know we already had this idea in 1999?

We actually executed an exhibition in our house in 1999 with our own work. After that, we thought group shows would be much stronger. This idea stuck in our heads and when we were able to renovate our house we made sure to make it for art and life, for IS. Lucky us, my sister is a very good architect and she helped so much. Prior to this we had asked Matthew and Rosanna from Minus Space to open things up, wanting to work with them to include Dutch artists. And then came Billy… October 2007. Three days later we had over twenty artists to choose from. Le Petit Port had a gap in the program, so we could extend: lucky, again. Then, Iemke–being educated as a print maker–initiated the idea of the edition. And since I have the digital printing background I could support and cover that direction too. Seven weeks later or so, IS opened with UND Jetzt with the presentation of that IS box set. Everything followed from that. We started a blog on the run… stuff like that.

So, IS-projects organizes two group shows a year connecting Dutch artists with artists living abroad. We choose from our personal point of view. Most of the artists actually come and we offer the artists a new audience and vice-versa. And somehow the word is spreading. People respond to it. We find it amazing how things develop. What we do like is that our audience are not only the artists, maybe 30% to 50% max. The editions seem to be a special IS feature but there is no rule, really.

For the IS @ SNO presentation we have made this special 25 -25 IS box (25 artists multiples 25x25cm.) It was a smart way to make a compact exhibition. We sold quite a few but it is still available. (Only 395 EUR). Spread the word. ;-P

Agent provocateur. Now I know… you know more about me than I about myself!

IS-projects is just something I do, like making art. That is the ‘big top’ part. It is connected to us. At the same time, I am not eager to put myself in our own shows: preferably not. Also, Iemke, IS-projects, and I are not a package deal. There is definitely a separation. SNO was different though, we were asked as ‘Guido and Iemke’ being artists and the directors of IS-projects. But like I said… there is no rule.

Between Heaven and Earth – Paul Pagk

Brent: At first glance what appears formal, color oriented, geared towards the minimal, turns out to be more than the sum of the economy of a painting’s means. What serendipitously moves towards the ‘anything goes’ is in fact facilitated by a number of very considered alterations and decisions. While the surface does not necessarily show what lies beneath the final stage in the painting it is very much indebted to what has gone on before.
Simply enough, at the beginning of a painting everything seems possible. When you get to where you are happy, when the painting arrives, in a sense you are back with the viewer, where you started: with a presentation of a few lines, color, and an arrangement. And this is how it goes.

Paul: In my last couple of shows there have been individual paintings dealing with line, surface, color, edge, image, narrative, abstraction, painting as object, pushing the limits of my vocabulary.

Most of my work goes through an extreme form of self-introspection and mise en question to bring them to some level where the possible is arrived at. Each painting has its own set of problems from where the painting takes its roots.  In your question regarding possibilities: I feel to allow the possible to enter as a starting point is very important as it defines the issues in a painting that I’m setting out to deal with. A painting arrives at this some level of the possible when I have gone through questioning, altering, changing, allowing, resuscitating from near failure and going further than what I started out to do; the painting then pulsates with a particular form of magic wherein a new limit arrives.

As far as the ‘anything goes’ it depends on what you mean.  When you look at the work I have been making for the last 10 years it seems more like a search, an opening up, to find the limits of the painting language in the form it is meant to take, and not an acceptance of ‘anything goes’. Every move within the painting, or from one painting to the next has a multitude of decisions in the making.

I used to dive into a painting and battle through, bringing the painting to completion in that way. The color would change drastically – a painting starting in red could finish green, blue or yellow.
While today the same color change may happen I don’t go about it in the same way. Now I start with a more concrete idea of form or line structure, deciding on the color slowly, often after building the painting in white and gray first. The alterations are now less extreme and only happen when I am totally convinced the changes are the way to go. That said it is rare that a painting ends the way I intended it to be.

With ‘Between Heaven and Earth’ some parts of the initial pictorial idea held. However not in its figure-ground relationship, or as form as free-floating volume. The curved central yellow element stayed, and is what I set out to use. Tackling a ‘ridiculous idea’ to see if it could work, in a sense, does bring up the idea of ‘anything goes’, and could be applied here.

Brent: A ‘work-in-process’ has no guarantees, as what is tenable can rarely be reduced to the logical. I would even go so far as to suggest that with your painting the formal appears bound by the illogical, that the liveliest condition arrives at the precipice of the sensible.

You have suggested that painting is about a number of things: abstraction has a narrative; there is figuration, or a figurative bent. In your case a surrealistic abstraction has somehow coiled around the formal elements and pulled tight the geometric persuasion, which springs forth into a readily available motif.  I would support that you are saying  it isn’t about one thing, or a singular gestalt. And the gestalt involves a sensorial overload, as well as a deprivation, where at the final stage/image a painting becomes ready for us.

Paul: I like your definition of the formal being bound by the illogical, for if something is too logical what else is there to know? I personally prefer to not totally know how a painting will become; with this approach there lies the possibility of discovery and freedom.

The physical working process, as much as it is necessary and very much integral to my work, is not the whole picture. Instead it is a way through to get to the result.
Process for process sake and process painting is too limiting. For me, what remains paramount are the direct issues within painting, and how they fit into a development of this dialogue with the subject, the subject of painting.

My mother was a painter and I’d watch her paint as a child. She’d paint us children, place a mirror behind her while she painted, and that way I could see what she was doing. She would take me to museums across Europe; it was like a gift, giving me a trove of vivid pictorial memories.
As a child I had a bad stutter so the only thing that really mattered was painting and going to museums. Painting became a second language, or even the first, for that matter.
After leaving England at the age of 9 for Austria, then to France, I realized that painting was the only language that didn’t need to be translated, that it was something I could understand no matter which country I was in.
I want the viewer to be able to look at one of my paintings and to be drawn in, as if placed in suspended time, to be totally immersed with its subject – painting, in flux with the color and structure constantly in transition.

It is funny that you bring up Surrealism as I have been thinking of it recently but wouldn’t view my work as being ‘surrealist’, even if I have been using aspects of it. That said I am drawn to its quirkiness. There’s a sense of play that I like, and I enjoy Surrealism’s ability to put work on edge, setting it off beat. Unfortunately Surrealism gets lost in its own subject matter and loses the issues of painting, turning them into what become pictorial puns. Fundamentally what I want to do is make paintings that bring you back to painting. And I find that Surrealism uses painting to express subject matter other than that of painting. The painting I am doing is not about a number of things but more precisely many related elements.

Brent: ‘Aligned Deep Down from Above on the Edge‘ is a large painting that registers intimate. You mentioned starting with gray to then build with color. And I can see this in the progress images that you provide. The first image reads line: a drawing of a box almost fills the lower part of the painting. This pulls right and is painted in pinkish-red. The line work doesn’t actually complete a box. However the new blue lines pull the box into focus while suggesting also a new shape, which then brings into relation the whole canvases’ edge. The line and the smudging at the top of the painting tells that early on you had decided to build a tilting form but needed time to figure how to address the incongruent spaces that you had created so far.

A new stage takes out most of the blue line. A lighter blue, or white, gets added, red gets added; the box loses form but still manages to locate.
Red fills the top area. Pink gets added which works to take out some of the passivity between what is going on above with the form and with the structure that sits beneath. This I see as the bringing together of a formal and pictorial logic: but you are not done.
At this stage it is clear that you work to make something almost sensible, but then pull back. I see it everywhere within the stages… making decisions, making sure that you leave an opening as an entry to go back to work or shift.

There are further changes this time; the softening of the harsh red to a more palpable orange; reintroducing the tilts, multiplying them; restating a more robust form that had started to creep in at the top. Oddly, now, the empty box area below is not quite there. The blue work is gone. Light blue and orange is now the defining edge for the painting. You have brought the opposites together without losing either one: that is hard-won. The painting is not far from where it began but is now resolved, simplified, and clear. The two aspects of the painting work together as a painting; the attention to the edges of the canvas within the content on the surface reads more than adequately austere, and it is a win.

Paul:  Before I get to ‘Aligned Deep Down from Above on the Edge’ what I should mention is that I can have up to eight paintings going at the same time. While I’m working intensively on one there can be two or more other visible paintings waiting with other works at various stages with their face turned round.
I will bring a painting that I’m focusing on to a limit, not to a finished limit but a worked limit, at which time I will set the painting aside and go to the next painting.
I can leave a painting in different unfinished states turned around from view for months.

With ‘Aligned Deep Down from Above on the Edge’ I set out to paint a painting in a light blue field that halfway into the process of its fabrication became red. The red acted as cutout, which defined the shape of the lower form.
With this painting I had a definite idea for the structure. This may have been the problem, and why, in the end, it took so long to resolve. But I needed to tackle the seemingly irreconcilable where a lower form was meant to contradict its own direction and to flatten out. Because of this illogical structure I created a mirrored upper form, connecting both the lower and upper forms to the left edge to have the painting’s energy read from left to right. But the more I worked on the painting the more it seemed to completely refuse to play out the way I wanted it to. As of April 09 more than 7 months into the painting the lower boxlike shape was defined and was echoed by a similar form above, although not a box shape. At this point the painting, which was predominantly light cool blue, strangely read as figurative and needed a radical shift, an element that would flip the painting, challenge the illusionistic space, negate the depth and the unwarranted representation. Here I came to the decision that I needed to introduce an opaque color that would act as form. One morning after my son had gone off to school, red literally broke into the canvas unsettling the safe space the painting had settled into, the desire to put down this red had been haunting me for quite a few days, I had to summon up enough courage to go ahead with it.; due to the fact that it was going to fundamentally change the painting and that I had to be completely sure. The red enabled the painting to address the ground radically activating and altering the paintings’ dynamics.
The painting thus went from being a painting of line describing form on a field of light blue to a painting that was predominantly red; the red added a new element and acted as drawing to generate another shape and that at the same time would be its own volume. Although it didn’t completely resolve the painting’s issues, it had opened up doors to a pictorial complexity that interested me.

A few months later I arrived at a nearly possible resolution for the painting with the two forms, which sat within the red as if there was a conversation going on, the upper form remaining a little daunting; I had painted on the right side of it a flat green shape and painted gray-white lines into the red to off set the red as form, which also echoed the lower shape (these gray-white lines played an important part in resolving the painting nearly a year later). By this point in the painting I had reached the limits of the possible.

I turned ‘Aligned Deep Down from Above on the Edge’ around and started to finish ‘Inner Dasein’ as well as ‘Between Heaven and Earth’ a painting that was also causing me trouble. I set about working on some other paintings that were going to be put in the Paris show. After sending off the work for my exhibition at la Galerie Eric Dupont more than eight months had past, I decided to take up the painting again and resolve the issues that were bothering me. I scrapped the upper form, painting over it by extending the red. Though through the process of reworking the painting an upper element did come back but instead of color shapes reacting beside color it came as a white-gray linear structure with a black line acting as drawing and shadow running along one of the gray-white lines.  This linear structure defined space in a field of color, it felt as if I had at last freed the painting, the ‘idea and concept’ gave way, replaced by that of painting, I had let go of the initial plans, while holding onto some of the structural elements, allowing (not without difficulty) the painting to evolve into what I hadn’t expected.

A lot of my paintings and drawings go through a similar form of pictorial mis en question, my work happens in the making, there is an unknown in each piece, I may have a visual idea of what the work will be, color, a scheme, structure, but as soon as I start working these ideas evolve, the painting starts its journey, for me a painting comes as a journey. New elements arrive through the multiple alterations as the painting goes on, but this said I think the first gesture that is put down will have repercussions throughout the painting, like here with ‘Aligned Deep Down from Above on the Edge’.

Brent: Through the adding and alteration of the marks, lines, color and overall structure of the painting the surface starts to build its own story. I wouldn’t necessarily call this a dialog with gesture as it feels you paint quite plainly: you place color or line, and after a while the surface becomes quite tactile. With ‘Inner Dasein’, which is predominantly blue, the surface holds  the multitudinous; marks made from battles that in the end hardly show themselves, except for what is left under the top skin. How important is this to the completed painting?

Paul: The painting has a different hue than what the photograph suggests. It’s closer to purple.

With ‘Inner Dasein’ there were no actual battles, per se, as there were with ‘Between Heaven and Earth’ and ‘Aligned Deep Down from Above on the Edge’ as I mostly stayed close to the initial concept and structure. What happened here is more rooted in the fabrication and process which would allow the painting to arrive at the pictorial, was a matter of pushing what was already in place, adding or taking out specific lines, to put them back in, in a slightly different place.
It had to do with finding the perfect angle, where a line crossed over and under another line; a matter of getting the right color for the ground or surface space which from the onset was an alteration of going back and forth between blue and purple; and the color of the lines that were first painted in yellow.

The lines became an ice blue neon color. The linear forms appeared as if they were set in space and made of light, but the actual elements were not renditions. I worked on the dimensions of each linear form, I focused on how they would read between each other and within the painting as a whole, how they should indicate volume as well as reading flat; how the neon-like cobalt lines would relate to the entire size of the painting and react within the color of the purple field.
The structure of the cobalt lines had to have a seemingly logical function as if they were composed of a single line and that the more one looked at them the more complex and intimate they would become. One of the main issues was finding the exact ground color and transparency. At one point I nearly lost the painting due to a strange desire to make the purple ground less to do with color (it had morphed into a muddy gray but I suppose a necessary passage to go through to come back to what is the final purple color that I was striving for).

For this painting I painted the linear structure into the wet purple ground and then painted over that to cover the whole painting so in one breath there was the ground color, creating this feeling of depth, and the linear forms that had disappeared underneath. I would go back and forward repeating this, covering, redrawing, covering, redrawing, searching for the color, the structures, the way the ice neon blue lines were laid into the wet surface, how the purple would mingle with the freshly painted ice-neon blue, finding the right line, the right color, depth of field, and the right tension until the painting was finished.

Working on a painting, the process and literal fabrication does change the way a painting looks, does add materiality and a sense of layered time, but for the spectator to know how I got there does not necessarily need to be revealed: not knowing doesn’t hinder the possibility for there to be a dialogue between the painting and the viewer.

In the imperfect vs. the perfect, the human ineptitudes and off-beat objects that are made by hand interests me more than objects fabricated industrially.  I feel objects made in this way hold the body and call that of the viewer, (I’m not saying that the works of Donald Judd or Sol Lewitt and Dan Flavin, who I admire greatly, do not also have that aptitude).
What I am striving for is to manifest the ‘aura’ that Walter Benjamin much criticized. It seems to me in today’s contemporary environment where one is continually bombarded with supposedly desirable images, the sanitized mass-produced perfection among which the imperfect and individually made objects will find an essential place.

Brent: Mondrian among others talks about the body, and the point you make about the object holding the body is important… I have this idea that different points of one’s body actually help to inform the decisions you make in a painting, and if they are good decisions they actually energize the body… a painting is not just this thing that we look at.

Paul: One of the issues I love about painting is that it addresses the body as well as the mind.  A painting is more or less flat: so it’s tied to a world that addresses the cerebral field; we usually cannot walk around paintings, we move only in front and from both sides.
We move, the painting stays still.
The desire of the painter is to stop the viewer, to captivate and maintain the viewer’s gaze with the painting developing a problematic of time and space, space due to the position of the body in relation to the painting and the pictorial space in the painting. Painting addresses time and the body differently from some of the other arts, such as film, music, video and writing, as it doesn’t use linear time; there is no beginning, middle and end.
Painting for me has a very complex relationship with time. It has layered time, due to its frontality, to the application of paint, the process and thought through which it is fabricated; also there is no given time in looking… it is solely up to the viewer who can choose to depart from the painting with quite a good idea of what it looks like, just after a few minutes view, contrary to film and other linear time arts.
Like listening to the same track of music many times, one doesn’t have any difficulty coming back to see a painting over and over again.

Mutinies and other Strategies – Jessica Snow

Brent: Color is the thing that drives the narrative in your work: it is there, upfront, unabashedly. It clashes! And if music were the closest partner to its poetry then I would wonder about its cymbal. With ‘Amplitude’ color droops down to ooze behind the eyeballs to form the central glue of the tale. It can pitch fastball, or skein delicate spatial routes that in their local veracity raises the hair of one’s logic.  ‘Feedback Loop’, also 2007, gives a motif of a central nightmarish gaping grin, the Cheshire Cat!

Whether this all happens on a single flat plane of paper or stands up thick and ‘object-plus’ on canvas the structural form of paint and how it sits enables and mixes the program.
What appears clear and sensible, open and respective can soon come undone. Unlikely avenues, hallucinogenic and the raucous thus become the sum.

Jessica: I’m thinking of the other day when my car hit a series of low-relief bars spanning the highway. A sign on the right, bright yellow, warns ‘RUMBLE STRIPS AHEAD’. The jarring ‘Brrump, brrump’ of the wheels disrupts the seamless continuity of moving through space. The noisy clamor shocks, which has a similar effect on my mind as that of the high-keyed colors I employ in my work.
Imagine a color wheel slowly beginning to spin; the concreteness of the pie form is destabilized, and the senses are awakened by the non-fixity of the experience.  In the piece you mention, ‘Feedback Loop’, color operates at the high pitch of the color wheel.  In this work I explore how systems, which continually loop back, unravel due to their constant repetition.

I generally veer towards a free-for-all color sensibility, although color choices are considered.  The palette for any given piece will have an individual modality that is unique to its making.  The one thing I can say about color, which is consistent through my work, is that neutrals and grays are continually employed to balance out pastels and highly saturated colors.  Yet immediately upon saying that, I’m searching for the off ramp, wary of such an assertion.  There will always be an exception to my rule.

Brent: Like going down the Rabbit Hole?

Jessica: Yes, it’s a topsy-turvy world – here the Cheshire Cat smile curves an arc in space as he loops around and slowly disappears.  And like a curving grin, the curvilinearity of the shapes in a work such as ‘Throw me for a Loop’ continually overthrows the order of the triangles.  Space turning in upon time, time turning in upon space.  Yet clarity must come in if one chooses to follow the white rabbit, or all is lost.  So within this world, space is contained, shapes are clearly delineated, the white of the paper provides a pure ground upon which this loopy little universe functions.  So the Cheshirean play between visible and non-visible is operative at the edges of the form.  The whiteness of the page provides a clear counterpoint to the wacky world it contains.

Brent: You mention the word ‘page’ instead of a sheet of paper.

I might be getting sidetracked here. I initially wanted to move onto the small hand-made cups that I recently saw you unpack and play around with in your studio. There is a history to these odd brightly colored ‘cells’, as you call then. And there is reason for them being called as such.

In ‘Eccentricity of the Middle Ground’, 1999, fourwalls artspace, SF, the cups work dotted three-dimensional. Other aspects are so fastened to the flat that again color finds itself at the fore to work as plans and surface… shapes oddly curving. The game suggests that things are not working straight despite a wall’s uprightness.

Jessica: A flow exists from one piece to the next, each situated within a continuum – I avoid formulas but will always look to previous work to inform my next step.  Referring to the works on paper as pages implies a pictorial before and after; a story is unfolding, which references not only the greater body of work, but also daily life, and how abstraction can reference the quotidian, or the aesthetic aspects of the everyday.  I don’t think this contradicts the qualities of Wonderland we were just talking about; in both worlds there are simply different sets of rules.

The gallery you mention, where I was invited to have a show, had a typical Edwardian interior – the wainscoting was a prominent feature of the walls, and I didn’t find them conducive to showing my paintings.  I decided to work with these particular characteristics of the interior architecture and painted directly on the wall to integrate the wainscoting into the work. The white walls enhanced the structural aspect of the 3-dimensional details. I worked so that the painted and architectural forms would merge, along with collaged elements that were dispersed throughout.

These collaged elements are the paper cells – I made hundreds of them.  At the time, my mom was undergoing a stem-cell transplant for an uncommon blood cancer.  She had to spend weeks undergoing treatment in the hospital, and when she had enough energy, she would knit scarves or caps.  I would visit her there, bringing scissors, glue and paper from which I would cut circles and long strips, fashioning them into these cells.  When I completed a few dozen, I’d take them to my studio to paint.

The proliferating cells eventually bivouacked through the multi-planar geometries of the wall painting, along with wire, string, ribbon, and map pins.  These improvised structures dispersed throughout were the only salvageable bits from the show.

Brent: When you get onto canvas ‘Architecture’s Internal Logic’ 2008 spares us the enclosure of a physical room.  Loose unfixed geometries ride patches of color; a tighter system creates a dimensional model; color performs chromatically but also summons paint application. One system enters, another exits: color form and logic heat up, then turn and melt.

Jessica: Yes, with the painting installation, the architectural details of the interior kept the work within the realm of the physical – one was always aware of the work as object.  With ‘Architecture’s Internal Logic’ we enter the realm of the imaginary – an ambiguous territory where systems and structures of both the natural and the constructed world coalesce.  To me, this painting is about the underlying logic of the world we live in, beyond the immediate physical appearance of things.  All of my work is about that, fundamentally, but this painting references architecture and landscape in a more explicit way than most of my current work.  It doesn’t anchor us within the physical, however; we’re transported through illusion into the singular internal logic of the painting.

Brent: ‘Blue Parts and Other Aspects’, 2010 continues along the vein of the internal logic. It’s a largish canvas, and it is packed. Blue islands float, from which around emotional weather patterns appear to form visual thoughts. A storm brews within the swishy and sometimes muted color, adding somber gesture to the austere linearity of the dominant motifs that in each case extend outside the closure.

Jessica: Brent, you titled this painting, and I thank you!  As you know, for fun I had a little contest on Facebook—5 bucks to the person who could come up with the best title, and yours was wonderful:

The blue parts particularly impress upon me (I have my reasons.)  Though the other aspects are not simple, or secondary.  They weave.  They duplicate.  And they swirl.  There is a sense of intimate, yet also of massive scale.  Here I wonder the title of the painting.

You refer to it by its nickname, but what surprised me is that you were primarily impacted by the pools of blue (or ‘islands’ as you say), and these were among the first shapes I painted on the canvas.  The entire painting became organized around these pools, with the shape being echoed by the grey oval on the left, a storm cloud beginning to form, gaining strength before dispersing outwards.  The eye of the storm is turned inward while order holds court momentarily.  During the many months it took to make this painting, order would continually feel momentary, and usually out of reach. Twice I left off to work on small-scale work, frustrated by possible collapse or chaos midway.  Often I’ll stage a mutiny at this point if I’m starting to go a little nuts – either flip the canvas or scrape away a large portion of it.  And like a ship that’s lost a few deck hands in a storm, the painting gets reorganized midway.

For me, color is structure.  The painting ‘Against Gravity’ was brought to completion through shifting the color gradually. With gradual color adjustments of each element, I resolved the painting through the tightening of the chromatic structure – often an entire painting will get repainted, each color getting readjusted.  This might seem to contradict the ‘free-for-all’ sensibility we talked about earlier, but achieving that quality isn’t quite as easy as it seems.

Brent: Color runs like a Venetian blind in ‘Beyond a Reasonable Doubt’. The bars are tubes that form marimbas that play as you tap on each color.
The image is centered, or thereabouts, with the slats blinking at you in a slow and organized fashion. The flurry works when you strike one note, and then move to the next to do the same until it is understood that with the organizing structure you are able to take the sound and all its movement in at the same time. Though there is no overload, as you would get with more optical work: hence the pulse is presence not optical blight.
The squarish colored forms that circumvent the blinds have their vertices curved out.  They organize on planes and overlap to unfold in a mirrored dream-like play.  The attention is on color and the rhythm of the blinds at the juncture of a psychological state.

Jessica: Here I employed a certain system with color; I would match the bars of color from one side to the other, but then interspersed the matched bars with unmatched color, so the effect is staccato-like, jittery.  Reich’s ‘Nagoya Marimba’ is a great example to bring up, seeing the 2 marimbas adjoined while the piece is played makes it not only visually very similar, but the composer continually offsets the tones with the 2^nd marimba, so the sound is like the balance and counter-balance I was looking for with this painting. I’m also thinking of Gould playing Bach’s ‘The Art of Fugue’, in which his left hand is more expressive, looks to be searching, in contradistinction to the surety and even quality of the right hand.  The “juncture of the psychological state” you mention arrives when there is a fusion between these 2 states of being.

The linen ground of the painting is much like ‘Navigating the Ineffable’, another painting where I wanted to achieve a quality similar to the works on paper by leaving the ground unpainted.  The little colorful ship, which passes through this painting, trumpets its exuberance about the beauty and mystery of life, much like the gesture of Gould’s left hand while he plays Bach’s Fugues.

Brent: In ‘Navigating the Ineffable’ the ground is left as linen, though where the rich color sits it is enveloped by beige. I notice here how the color really pops… clear, vivid, and need I say beautiful. This work also draws me to your paintings on paper and suggests paper and canvas are nearing some sort of cross talk or collision.

Jessica: I daresay there’s always a collision around the corner, seemingly de facto with my work!  You’re quick to point out that the most colorful part, a little ship as I describe it, sits on a ground a few shades lighter than the linen.  The lightness of the ground makes the colors pop.  This is why I return to paper consistently—I like the inherent whiteness and smoothness, and acrylic paint sitting atop it will burst with saturation. ‘Riffing on Louis’ Point of Tranquility’, a work I did recently, takes its title and inspiration from Morris Louis’ work of the same name.  What I love especially about the Color-field painters, Louis in particular, is how they would leave the support untouched and apply color directly, so the white of the canvas would cause the colors to really burst, as in this work from his Floral series.  Louis’ paintings confirm the process of their own making, how new colors will form naturally as paint flows together.  My work doesn’t do that – it isn’t true to nature in that respect.  I will make up a color for the intersection where color flows into each other.  I’m after an effect that visually suits the eye, and this isn’t necessarily the result of a natural process.

Brent: In two versions of ’Riffing on Louis’ Point of Tranquility’, with the original turned upside down, your paint handling is flat and opaque, replacing the natural stains of Louis’ with solid forms and elongated petals that nonetheless burst forth. These smallish paintings on paper are not tongue-in-cheek, nor ideologically set towards the pure.

‘Target’ is closer to Noland than ‘Tranquility’ is to Louis. Acrylic and sumi ink on paper with dimensions 52″ x 46″ ‘Target‘ sits mid-size and is oddly positioned leaving unusual breathing room at the base.  A bulls-eye:  a number of concentric circles receding into or coming out from the void; orbs of colors, in your case thin bands of icy color that warble as they go around.

Jessica: Yes, thinner bands of hot pink and orange punctuate those icy colors, difficult to see in the reproduction. I wanted to paint a target because the image has a visual immediacy.  I think the eye responds to the target because in a sense it is a diagram about the act of seeing, being about focus, while at the same time suggestive of an awareness of the expanding visual field.

These recent works, the riff on Louis and the target, are similar in that they are weighted at the center and expand out visually to the edges, albeit through different optical flows.  And I did flip the Louis, rotated from the original, to emphasize that it is not about the natural flow of paint onto canvas. Ironically though, it was Noland who was open to having his targets sit any which way on the wall.  My target hangs in one position, the composition isn’t centered on a square rather it sits toward the top of a rectangular piece of paper.  The very center of the target is black, whereas the center of ‘Riffing’ is the untouched white of the paper, but both centers evoke an openness to experience that comes with focused contemplation.

Brent: Black lines, dense walls of different thickness activate a plan drawing that has been printed in an edition of four. The optical flows are dimensional and flat, perspectival and plan. Up appears up until you find it down at the bottom as a steeple. Architectural notes are the instruments that open every which way in their read, each time confounding the normal when you are confronted with the unexpected.
With this edition you make each print unique by further going into it.

Jessica: This series, ‘Case Studies 1-4’, I made while doing a residency at Kala Art Institute in digital printmaking.  Two of these will be in my forthcoming show at Jen Bekman Gallery, the other two will be in the show ‘Informal Relations‘ at the Indianapolis Museum of Contemporary Art, curated by Scott Grow.  I printed the black and white drawing with the intention of painting each one differently, exploring the possibilities in this odd imaginary floor plan. Perhaps I arrived at using gridded dots because they remind me of a computer logic board, which appealed to me.  The pieces became circuit systems that parallel an architectonic substructure, so the forms allude to the imaginary space of the Ethernet and real space of built structures.  And this is where I situate my work, between the imaginary and the real.  I look for a world beyond appearance, a substructure of reality, a delineation of a world full of discontinuity, endless flow, spare diagrammatic tendencies, saturated warmth after cool, and the flux of borders through time axis tides drawing back, discontinuity punctuated by the picture plane, or the tilting smoothness of the surface itself.

Brent: Colored pin heads, all black in a piece entitled ‘Fog City’ 2010; red, green and yellow in another entitled ‘Net’, 2010, function like tiny beacons that punctuate real space while also deploying illusion. An earlier work using string is entitled ‘String Theory’. Of course the title is a play on theory and the word. But what about the world these string pieces participate in?

Jessica: Playing with theory, perhaps the best use for it.  String theory may eventually be useful in the discovery of parallel universes, something artists have always explored.  At times this means down the rabbit hole, beyond the black hole, and numerous other imagined or real spaces.  These string drawings are on their way to a very real space in Paris, to the show ‘Touch‘ which you’re curating. So off to Paris – they are exceedingly lucky in that respect.

UNFINISHED – Clary Stolte

Brent: At some level an artwork needs to quench the desire – the need to know what something is. But also, it shouldn’t stop there. In your case what is ‘known’ is a shape. You generally use the square and it is often imbued with the hues around white. Robert Ryman used a square because it took away the need to make what he thought were arbitrary decisions. In your case I’m not exactly sure why you chose this shape, but it works. I consider the shape as a container, or a surface, a plate that you serve things on.  Left bare it goes back the other way: is a plate, a surface, and an empty container. But always there is something there.

In this ‘presence’ I am also aware of something that is very portable, an ornament almost. You can arrange this in any number of ways. It can be put away and brought back out, and ‘re-presented’. Then as shape, surface, container, and ornament all this starts to perform something like a gift. And how this gift is presented seems very much important. Now we move through into ritual.

Clary: When looking at my work I am often told that the observer is searching for some kind of support, looking for a ‘known’, looking for a way to ‘enter’. The eye tries to focus on something though may not know where to start.

“VOLUMESURFACE #2” 2004 (see image above) is a square; a semi-transparent work made out of folded paper.  There is not much there to lead you in; even the edges are hard to focus on.

To really understand why I use the square as a shape and white as a color, I have to take you back a bit in time to the moment I came to the decision to start working with these elements. The square and the color ‘white’ was used by artists from the early 60’s and 70’s, such as the American artist Robert Ryman, and the Dutch painter Jan Schoonhoven. My work is most placed in this tradition, and that of minimal art. But maybe when I explain a little further about my way of using these elements it will become clearer that my work also has other contexts in art history.

Brent: Okay… I’m with you.

Clary: My first experience with painting goes back to when I was a small child eating dessert. I would get a plate of white yoghurt and splash red lemonade, my favorite, over it. I’d take my spoon and start to stir. Each day the mixture looked different. After I had finished stirring I’d eat what I had concocted!

When I started art school I worked enthusiastically with all kinds of materials. I’d mixed paint, toilet paper, washing powder, coffee, and other things. Though when I arrived in the Painting Department I was taught to paint only in oil paint, to work with color and shapes. And with this education things started to change. I began creating large figurative paintings with thick layers of oil paint, which, nonetheless, were quite successful.

After graduating, and from the very moment I started working alone in the studio, I began to feel uncomfortable with this way of making art. These large figurative paintings that I had learned to make at art school didn’t feel as if they were coming from me, and I felt the need to start from scratch.  Well, I tried everything:  Left out figuration and put it back in, again leaving it out, back in, back and forth. I was constantly on the look for something that would be true for me, but in the end I was utterly confused. I had reached an end, my zero point. It was the year 2000.

It was only then that I realized that I could return to the earlier pure connections, something I had as a child, and more maturely as a freshman in art school. I decided to leave all I had learned at art school behind. There were no longer thick layers of oil paint; no figuration; no narration; no shapes; no color; no rectangular canvas where the horizontal or vertical would give direction necessitating that you understand why you are using such a format.
I decided on one size to bring uniformity, to place myself in a situation where I could open up to new steps, to understand what I was doing, and why I was doing. The new format became a square, 30 x 30 cm. White… with its hues. This was the fresh start I was looking for, and from where my work continues.

As a painter I am constantly confronted with questions: Who am I in my work? What kind of work ‘is still possible’ (regarding art history)? What is painting about? And, what is a painting? By repeatedly watching myself doing while doing I began to understand that these questions and processes belonged to the content of my work. It was all about the forming of the painting.

Brent: DEPTHSURFACE 1C (2000), as you explained, is 30 x 30 cm. It is acrylic polymer emulsion on cotton. I imagine this as a stretched canvas. But I also imagine it as not. I don’t sense the traditional but I do pick a clad surface. What I see are streaks that look to be formed by reflections.
The underneath material and color coalesce; there is this sense of something being clad, contained, but at the same time very mutable, bubbling infinitesimal. There is an inner building, while at the edges and with the surface an escaping of the material.

Clary: DEPTHSURFACE 1C is one of the first paintings after my zero point, and after deciding to work with the new format. For ’1C’ I applied polymer emulsion on to a canvas with a palette knife, which caused the subtle stripes that you see depending on how the light falls on the surface.  That is what these first new ‘white’ paintings were all about: The materials, and how they reflect and play with the light that is already present in the room.

Painters use polymer emulsion mixed with acrylic paint to create thick or shiny layers: When I started to look for whites to use on my canvas, I saw all these new transparent mixing materials in the shop and decided to use them directly on the canvas as autonomous materials. I started to use materials in different ways; this new way of working opened up an entirely different world. I think you can understand how excited I was to find a piece of plastic that held the white and the transparency in exactly the way I was looking for.

For my exhibition PLASTIC MEMORY (2003), I made a work consisting of 500 liters of hair gel: You know this kind of cheap hair gel that smells so bad? I contacted a company that produces soaps and hair gels and stuff to ask if they sold bigger buckets as it was such a lot of work to buy these small pots in the supermarket. The director of the company was so enthusiastic about my idea that he asked me if a donation of 500 liters was enough. I had no idea how much 500 liters of hair gel was, but of course my answer was ‘Yes!’
I spread the hair gel out on the floor in the gallery. Hair gel consists of water and alcohol, which evaporates in the open air. The idea was when the exhibition was over the hair gel would disappear evaporating into the thin air of the space. The odor was immense and the whole building smelt of this hair gel.

SUBSTANCE 1 – 500 lt. hair gel:  (2 minutes – animation of installing the hair gel on the floor)

I use various kinds of materials such as, plastic, medicine, chemical stuff, nicotine… ect. Because I use contemporary materials I consider my work as honest, light-footed, real, and sometimes even radical. But mostly these materials are not durable. Much of what we buy nowadays (equipment, telephones and so on) is cheap and has a short life. It is important that this ‘temporality’ and ‘throw away’ thinking is in my work. The paintings I make that sometimes use these temporary materials are constantly changing because of degeneration. In fact they are never finished because of this process. This is why I call them ‘UNFINISHED’. In these works it is expected that the surface collects dust or the color of the substance changes under the light, or in the humidity of the space it is shown. It reminds me of the rotting process.

That said, it’s not my intention to only make ‘funny inventions’. I also don’t cherish the illusion that I am the first person to put chewing gum on a canvas, or, for instance, add perforation to paper. Whether my work is embroidery with silver thread, stretched plastic over bracing, or where the frame is cut out, it is continually about the research into ‘forming’, of what constitutes painting.

Through my search for product information concerning a.o. durability I’m in frequent contact with producers and supply industries. Product information, however, proves to be a source of secret information (I’m talking about the plastic industry here) and it sometimes feels that I’m back in the Middle Ages where information should only be known to a few.

Brent: Ah, the world of Plastic.
The bubble gum painting consists of flavored and scented latex: the gum sits on a support, presumably, for as long as the piece exists. I’m trying to think of the process here, was it made as a single unit or as a part of a series with a number of them going along together? It’s hard to imagine you just stood there with packets of gum and chewed away posting until the painting was complete: although I can imagine a piece developing slowly over time, or in episodes of chew and glue. The process becomes intriguing while viewing the work. And you don’t necessarily need to know the secrets of how the piece was made, but you do start thinking about time, event, and the chewing of the day away. Of course the making happens in much the same way regular painting comes about. Except here a painting is formed with the teeth and the tongue, with saliva. It is then taken out of the mouth and attached to the support with the fingers. You are involved with a certain type of ‘body painting’, though here the internal parts of the body are doing much of the work.  The process suggests duration, and comes about through a process of release – stirring, mixing, applying, and standing back.

Looking at the painting I wonder if there is a rhyme or reason for where the bits of gum sit: structure is there, but is that something the viewer creates?  Or is it that the organizing principle is governed by the square, the event, and the retinal pop of where the vertical and horizontal interconnect, here as a slowed-down event?

With the gel, of course, the event is over when the piece disappears and the scent is no longer there – is released, then exhausted.

Clary: This CHEWING GUM PAINTING (2004) is part of the series UNFINISHED. I chewed the pieces of gum while making other works. While working on one of my embroidery paintings DEPTHSURFACE 1E, which takes considerable time to make, I’d start a ‘chewing gum’ painting too.

I would chew a piece of gum while embroidering and when I thought the gum was chewed enough I’d take it out of my mouth and paste it onto a prepared canvas. I could work on 2 paintings at once this way, so both could be considered ‘slow’ paintings.

You also mentioned ‘the process of release’. Interestingly this makes me think about my first plastic tape works, and I should mention them here: they began at an antique shop where I bumped into a book on handicraft. There was a section on how to make a plastic teapot. The teapot was wrapped in plastic tape, later the tape was cut open and the teapot taken out. The plastic teapot remained. It was so funny, but I was inspired and ran to my studio excited to try this idea on a wooden frame.

The use of industrial and daily materials such as plastic, acrylic polymer emulsion, epoxy, resin, wax, soap, chewing gum, yarn and PVC form the substance of my small monochrome paintings.

I bought some office transparent plastic tape (about 5 cm wide) and took a frame, 25 x 25cm. I put 5 rows of tape on the frame. Then turned the frame around and added again 5 rows of tape. I repeated this so many times that a thick layer of plastic tape grew and grew. The surface became a grid with blocks because of the turning of the frame after adding the 5 rows of tape. When I had a huge layer of tape over the frame I decided it was time to cut open the thing on the backside to try and remove the frame (as in the instruction with the teapot). I was excited to see if it would succeed, and if the frame would release… Well, it did. It was really hard to take out the frame. But I got it out! And then here I was with a painting in my hand that was totally made out of plastic tape.

After these first tape paintings I pushed the idea even further… I used all sorts of plastics and experimented with the idea of the painting without its frame and how many, or how few, layers were possible.

I discovered I could even go another step further and leave the frame out as a starting point/form. I’d take a piece of paper and start to fold it in the form of a box. This was the beginning of my paper folded paintings made out of all kinds of paper. I call these works VOLUMESURFACE because the surface is kind of filled with air; the air giving volume to the surface.

Brent: The paper then is a membrane formed to give focus to a small portion of air. The surface becomes luminescent as we are able to travel from one side of the membrane to the next.
I am going to go back to where we started this conversation when you brought up Ryman – the austere gestural painter, who also worked a conceptual bent. I’m still there, though what has been added is hair gel, teapots, how-to instructions, and furthermore a very astute and concentrated understanding of what a painting can be…  this under the umbrella of ‘the fundamental of painting’, of what a painting is: a rule-based activity built upon a flexibility that opens as circuit, engaged in reconfiguring itself.

Clary: That is funny; I think you were the one to bring up Ryman, ha, ha…

Brent: True.

Clary: I’m used to the comparison with Ryman. And it’s true – I’m curious about similar issues, such as white, light, transparency, density and the appearance of these in a painting, a drawing on the wall, or in a space. And as with Ryman I search for representing the color white in all its purity.

However; I also feel inspired by Arte Povera and the artists of Fluxus who wanted to widen the bridge between art and life by using perishable materials. I bring shampoo or acrylic dispersion to the canvas with a brush; pour hair gel, spread hemorrhoids ointment, and pour sugar water. The action of making the painting is important: the act defines the work. I feel close to the artists Dieter Roth (known for the chocolate-sculptures), or Thomas Rentmeister, who were also experimenting with ‘poor’ and various materials.

Because some of the materials do not dry quickly I lay them down on the floor, or work on tables in my studio. The light plays with the surface and this gives a very different experience from seeing them attached to the wall. Therefore, on occasion, they sit on the floor, or somewhere on a cabinet, so that you can pick them up and feel the material and their ‘objectness’.

There is a search for light, and a transparency.

In the exhibitions PLASTIC MEMORY Nieuwe Vide, Haarlem, the Netherlands; MODEL 003, Gallery van den Berge, Goes, the Netherlands, and A BIT ‘O WHITE at CCNOA, Brussels, Belgium, the work is presented this way – lying down on tables, or on the floor.
The surfaces react vividly to various kinds of illumination as well as to the light that is present in the space where the work is shown. This way sometimes a work may appear to be shimmering.  In another case, say with a high gloss surface, light sources and the architectural forms of the room become clearly apparent as a result of surface reflection.

Because the eye effortlessly registers changes of light every time the viewer moves, and taking into account that the naked eye serves best as a recorder, the work is connected to classic art concepts of light and perspective: how one creates light, how it is rendered – the contrast of light and shade.

The dialogue fully opens in situ: How a painting relates to what is around it, the wall, then the room, the whole architectural confines, or a release from it. Altogether this lends itself to question ‘what is painting?’

 

Listed:

Image: CS_001 VOLUMESURFACE #2 – 50 x 50 CM folded paper 2004 – collection Museum for Contemporary Dutch Painting Stadsgalerij Heerlen / Schunk, Heerlen,  the Netherlands

Image: CS_002 DEPTHSURFACE 1C – 30 x 30 CM polymer emulsion on cotton 2000 – private collection, the Netherlands

Image: CS_003 CHEWING GUM PAINTING – 30 x 30 CM chewing gum on cotton 2004 – private collection, Germany

Image: CS_004 DEPTHSURFACE #2 – 23 x 23 CM silver thread on cotton2004 – private collection, the Netherlands

Image: CS_005 TRANSPARENCYDENSITY 1A – 30 x 30 CM plastic tape 2001 – collection Museum for Contemporary Dutch Painting Stadsgalerij Heerlen / Schunk, Heerlen, the Netherlands

Image: CS_006 VOLUMESURFACE #1B – 24 x 24 CM plastic paper 2003 – private collection, Germany

Image: CS_007 CUPBOARD 1 – exhibition overview 2004 – Galerie van den Berge, Goes, the Netherlands

Image: CS_008 MODEL 003 overview – 2006 – Galerie van den Berge, Goes, the Netherlands

 

Courtesy – Galerie van den Berge, www.galerievandenberge.nl

Photography – DigiDaan, Edo Kuipers, CCNOA, Clary Stolte

Clary Stolte – www.ClaryStolte.nl / www.Clary.nl

The Wind Makes the Waves – Cecilia Vissers

Brent: While artist-in-residence in the most western point of Ireland, Achill Island, you tapped in a description of the landscape: Dramatic, With Cliffs, An Ocean, And Totally Isolated.

This is your work: my first impression.

There is Nature in your pieces. And it took a tough wind and a heavy sea to set this all in motion.

I see firm – more than firm, hard. Hard material that has cuts, often just a few. The cuts themselves appear powerful. They can cut into a shape. Another piece they cut to form the shape. And if anyone were to ask me about the lightness of your work, I would reply ‘Weight!’

Cecilia: I am glad you brought up the residency in Ireland. The Achill Heinrich Boll Foundation operates the residency and it is a great opportunity to explore this particularly isolated peninsula.

As noted, Achill represents the most western point of Ireland. It signifies the ‘extreme edge’ of the land. You cannot physically go further.

I would walk over the high cliffs and see the ocean there below, and could do so without distractions: There were only the sea and the waves, the wind and the lines.

In 2008 I visited Canna, a similar island. Canna is part of The Hebrides, located off of the western coast of Scotland. Only 15 people live there. And it is filled with nothing: There are no roads – traffic, shops, or computer. The only payphone you could find was in the little white cottage from which you could view the sea from every window. These are the places that impress me most. They allow a focus on the rhythm of the landscape. And this gives me time to find the repetition. The tougher the wind, the higher the wave, the more I like it.

In front of a work you are likely to focus on color, line and form. Maybe there is a sense of weight. I want to transfer this sense to the viewer. It’s kind of an abstract value until you actually lift the work.

The sculptures are flat and executed in thick (8-15mm) plates of metal. While they appear light (like graphic signs or forms), they are actually very heavy. The challenging features of the material are the power and strength of the metal. This is what I like to work with.

I use the saw-cuts to interfere/delineate the square form or circle. The placing/location of the cut is crucial and is a very clear and radical decision: once performed in steel it is irreversible. If it is 1 or 2mm to the left or right the whole work can change, shift. The balance and composition has to be just right. I admire the work of Ad Dekkers (NL) and Gordon Matta Clark (US), construction and de-construction are important features of both their work, however they  interpret it.

Brent: Did you work through other materials before you came to metal or have you primarily focused there?

Cecilia: I finished the Academy for Art and Design in Den Bosch (NL), specializing in sculpture. Back then there was a very strict division between the disciplines; painting, sculpture, graphic design, etc. It seemed as if we all came from different planets!

From the very beginning I had a fascination with metal, the welding, the cutting, the strength of the material, along with the sharp edges. When I have an idea I can see it in metal. It’s there. I don’t see clay, wood, plastic, or any other material; it is just there – in metal. My dreams… they come, and they are with this material. On rare occasions they do arrive in color.  But it’s one color.

Once I left the Academy I got a chance to rent an old forge. This became my first studio, a very dark and cold place with horseshoes hanging on rusty nails on the beams. The blacksmith taught me how to use the fire, to understand the glowing coals, along with the practical side of metalworking.

Metal becomes like bubble gum

When I first saw the intense orange glow of the molten metal I couldn’t take my eyes off of it. It was beautiful, fascinating, and dangerous.

I thought whether this could be alchemy: at the very least it certainly is about transferring energy.

Brent: Transferring?

Cecilia: Carrying-over ideas and thoughts. For me to materialize an idea or a concept, which can also be thought of as a conversation, similar to what we are doing here is about communication. We write our thoughts down. Eventually they become more concrete, more real, and one person’s ideas  glide over to the other. The same may happen in the other direction. This becomes concrete, real, and something that breathes life.

To bring this idea back to ‘Gaoth’ – while still considering the word or the idea of ‘evaporation’ – the thing I was actually after in this work was to catch the wind, to bring out the movement. Impossible? Oh! Perhaps not! In a sense, to attempt to materialize this elusive thing is what I am aiming for: this chasing dreams and catching butterflies.

The longer I work with metal the more I get to know its character, its resistance, obstinacy and strength. The metal definitely has its own plan/idea. At the same time I have my idea.  So it is a matter of going along, getting along, this happening with greater consistency, while this process of giving-and-taking still challenges the relationship.

Brent: And your earlier work?

Cecilia: When you look at the earlier work you can get that I am a sculptor dealing with formal aspects like; balance, weight, measurement, scale and of course the material. I made a lot of floor-sculptures using iron balls and bars. I would play with the material, look for composition; there was a kind of building and construction thing going on: ‘Meccano’ or ‘Lego’ come to mind.

In recent years I feel my work has changed, it has become clearer, straightforward, and less complicated. When I use constructive methods I don’t want them to be visible. This is something I’m very conscious of from the beginning, I try to keep things simple or at least make them look simple.

Brent: And now?

Cecilia: There are some minimal changes; at present my work is more object than sculpture, mainly wall based but it still is three-dimensional. I think everything comes in a third dimension, I don’t know about flatness, to me there’s always a minimal slope, a beginning and an end.

I also feel that the placing of the objects in a space is crucial, it has become increasingly important to extend the lines, to draw visual lines from one object to another, and another… I like the use of repetitive forms and patterns, a way to emphasize the onward motion in space and time.

I respond to the plate, whether this is steel or aluminum, and the focus then is on the cut and the new shape that it forms. The metal needs to sit on the wall and as it’s pretty heavy there needs to be proper suspension points (certainly you would not want one of these plates coming down on your toe.) I use milled cubes of aluminum that are custom-made, which suspend the plate of steel exactly 10mm out from the wall. Here sculptural principles such as scale and balance, composition and symmetry come into play. This is the start. And literally what moves is a physical response to the earth being under my feet, the steel, and its weight.

Brent: With ‘Needles and Pins‘, which is a pair of vertical rectangular plates, the sides each have a pair of cuts that appear identical on both plates. The patina suggests a landscape, a mountain… could it be Mount Fuji? With the left plate there is a sense of foreground. The base on each is heavier, so the read is very solid. The cuts pull down, perhaps under the pressure of gravity. The curves suggest this.  Despite the very solid and weighty feel the shadowy landscape offers an escape – lightness emanates from the tectonic. With the internal space between the two plates, the cuts no longer appear to bend down from the pressure. Instead as a reverse image the center pushes against gravity, like a force, surging.

And your titles, where do they come from?

Cecilia: Well, whilst working I heard this easygoing song from the seventies by ‘Smokie’ titled ‘Needles and Pins’, it is so uncomplicated and smooth, therefore I love it.

Other titles refer to landscapes, oceans, forests and the wind. These titles remind me of special places and experiences. By using them I know exactly when they were made and why.

‘Needles and Pins’, the perception of a landscape – my back garden.

I woke up and saw the wooden frame of my window and the two dark high pines in the garden, the massive strong volume of the trees and the shimmering light shining through the branches. There were darker and lighter parts in this panorama; also sharp edges like saw cuts. I could only see part of the high pines; in my imagination they were so high in the sky, never-ending: apparently immovable, but increscent.

On closer observation I only see a fragment, a dark volume that is completely abstract. Throughout the years I have made lots of drawings of trees trying to understand their form and volume. The sight of this tree is just a feature or trigger that arouses action towards my studio. For me the observation of a landscape often brings out new ideas and clears the mind. It’s not about representation, if it were I’d take pictures. 

Needles and pins is my first vertically oriented work, it measures 70 x 44cm, and this upright position is so different from the horizontal works, as if the whole world turns. I found a ‘building aspect’ in this positioning, which opens up new possibilities in the vertical direction.

Maybe the patina suggests a landscape or a mountain: there is a solid darker base and there are lighter parts.

I use the change of color to intensify the form, lighten it, to make it look less heavy. There is a rise and fall and shades of color – I want to extend the lines from one piece to the other. You mentioned ‘surging’, that’s the right word because it implies a movement like the tides of the sea. In ‘Needles and Pins’ and ‘Blacksod Bay’ the patina stretches over the two parts of the work, from the left side to the right side. To answer your question: ‘Could it be Mount Fuji?’ I honestly don’t know, I sure like the idea and would love to see this mountain some day. You have seen Mount Fuji, and it must be fascinating. Pity we don’t have Dutch mountains!

Now that we’re talking about Mount Fuji I’d like to mention Hokusai, (1829-1832) who created thirty-six views of Mount Fuji. He was focused on landscapes and had this wonderful personal obsession with Mount Fuji, making 36 woodblock-prints of it in differing seasons and weather conditions from a variety of vantage points, different places and distances. I think art is very much about obsessions and perseverance.

Brent: The mountain expresses a record of time and timelessness.

The surface of the metal plate has become increasingly important for you; the metal accentuating time and age, while the bright orange anodized aluminum is very much signaling the ‘now’.

Cecilia: Yes, the plates have a ‘patina’, each one very unique, and the color of the plates vary dramatically with sometimes more blue at the edges, more gray in the center of a sheet, in fact, it is just like a fabric with a special structure, the pattern.

I use chemicals to intensify the colors and patterns sometimes using gunblue to retouch or cover up the scratches on the surface of the metal. When working with aluminum the surface treatment is very different, it is a factory finish, the aluminum works have been anodized: this to obtain a specific color and protect the aluminum from corrosion. The process is hard to control and sometimes this really worries me, not knowing what the result is going to be this time… for me it is important to maintain the radiation of the aluminum, the color is in the material and not on the material like paint. Up till now I only use the color orange because of its overpowering quality, it is a very direct color that immediately increases energy levels. Whereas the black can be so deep and absorbing like a sponge.

There is this searching for balance and equilibrium between the form, the color and the finish of the material. The preference is for purity, and simplicity: the tension arising between the form, color and the finish of the material. It needs to be perfect. And fortunately I found some technical engineers who take the challenge to make something ‘on the edge’ and divert from mass production. Right now I am working on ‘Orange Tide III’, making two equal pieces and want to hang them side by side in the show ‘Formeel’ at the Waterland Museum in Purmerend. The forms have already been cut but the anodizing is so complicated… it is almost impossible to obtain this smooth orange surface, I don’t know…  I might have to start all over again.

During my residency in Ireland I definitely wanted to visit Clare Island, a small island just beneath Achill Island. It was hard to get a ferry because it was out of season,  nobody went there this time of the year. Only the doctor’s service would go once a week to visit patients, taking the life rescue service boat. I was welcome to go with them. The name of the boat  ’very likely’, which is a nice name for both a boat and a new work, is suggestive of expectations and possibilities. In referring to this journey to Clare Island, it is likely but not certain that dreams and expectations can become reality.

At the moment I am working on ‘Blacksod Bay’; a work inspired by a bay in County Mayo that opens to the Atlantic Ocean on the south. The bay is 16km long and 8km wide at its mouth, and is a safe place for anchorage. The color of the Atlantic was a very deep gray, with bluish undertones.

I was very happy to find an appropriate plate of steel with this intense gray/bluish surface. When starting a work I begin by making a huge amount of sketches based on a rectangle, then I cut the molds out of thick cardboard on a scale 1:1 and hang them on my studio wall for several weeks, sometimes doing a little shift, changing the curve a little bit or replacing the saw-cut a few millimeters. There has to be a natural tension in the lines and forms, it is not a mathematical thing. I look for a certain flow in the lines and a directness in form. Many molds end up in the wastebasket, only a few pass through. ‘Blacksod Bay’ consists of 2 equal parts, each part measures 95 x 9 3 x 0.8 cm, again it is a set of two and obviously there is a lot of similarity with ‘Needles and Pins’, this work also is upright and the patina is very unique, also I like the white wall to be part of the work. I like the ‘nothingness’; maybe the space in between is the most interesting part of the work?

Dreams, butterflies, how to put them in formation and how to let them go…

The representation of things difficult to detect or grasp by the mind, the subconscious… yes, the intuitive part is present in my work and me,  some things remain indefinite, they just happen because…  and despite of all theories and science. Focused meditation is an interesting way to clear the mind and find new ways and directions, when we started the conversation I asked you about ‘the act of raking the gravel’ in the Japanese stone gardens, remember? I have a great interest in this kind of Zen; I admire the intense concentration and the focus of the monks.

Brent: I remember… I also remember saying that you didn’t necessarily need to go to Kyoto to see that mood and air, in fact it is here in Tokyo, and can be anywhere. It seems to be about how one touches things in a mental way, which then affects the touching physically.

Children are generally taught to respect objects just as much as they do living things, carrying through. This makes the waves… whether it be seen on the busy streets of Tokyo, or within the tranquil history nests of Kyoto. The wind you find in these different locations might be coming from different directions, but it is still the wind?

Cecilia: The wind makes the waves. Yes, it definitely is about the transformation of energy and the force of nature, without wind there will be no waves thus no movement and no progression. In this context I would like to refer to the ‘Great Wave’ (1829-1832) of Hokusai.

Interestingly he made several Great Waves, there is a ‘pre-great wave’ and a ‘post-great wave’, all about man versus nature. Hokusai is so right; we need a lifetime and even more to reach a stage of ‘understanding’.

From around the age of six, I had the habit of sketching from life. I became an artist, and from fifty on began producing works that won some reputation, but nothing I did before the age of seventy was worthy of attention. At seventy-three, I began to grasp the structures of birds and beasts, insects and fish, and of the way plants grow. If I go on trying, I will surely understand them still better by the time I am eighty-six, so that by ninety I will have penetrated to their essential nature. At one hundred, I may well have a positively divine understanding of them; while at one hundred and thirty, forty, or more I will have reached the stage where every dot and every stroke I paint will be alive. May Heaven, that grants long life, give me the chance to prove that this is no lie.

Brent: To keep with the practical – recently we have been emailing back and forth regarding the anodizing of the aluminum pieces, also about the small multiples that have been in process, pieces that will be set in a box. Firstly I need to say how much I admire these small multiples but the anodizing has recently given you trouble. Could you talk about that? Also when we go back to the metal pieces each with their distinctive patina, the anodized pieces are very different, the color needs to have an even flow. Why the demand for the difference?

Cecilia: Oh yes, always looking for an equilibrance between the concept, idea and the technical implementation. Working on the edge of technical possibilities and impossibilities you have to take the risk sometimes hoping for a favorable outcome. I am glad to hear you admire the multiples. And yes, there was trouble producing these works. They all went wrong: a domino effect. The metal supplier brought the wrong alloy of aluminum – I know that now. I had it cut into shape, did the tapping and drilling, and it looked great. Thereafter I brought the work to the anodizing company… Brent, do you really want to know more about the technical problems considering anodizing?

Brent: Yes!

Cecilia: I have my works color-anodized, orange, and there’s only one company that can manage these sizes of work in this specific color. Here we are talking large-scale. Though to start I had some small pieces anodized. The surface came out with all kinds of stripes and spots. The anodizing company said it was the result of the quality of the aluminum while the steel-company said it is the anodizing. Of course each blamed the other. Meantime I consulted some technical engineers and learned about all the different alloys of aluminum and their applications. The metal supplier partly compensated for the expenses and I had to start all over again… Orange Tide III is now ready finally – it is very smooth and very orange.

As you notice there’s a difference between the colored pieces and the more ‘rough’ metal pieces: the even versus the rough, the perfection versus the imperfection, etc. In the first paragraph of our conversation you said: ‘there’s nature in your pieces’, and yes, the landscape obviously is my main resource: sometimes I like the rough and the unspoilt landscape, other times I love the industrial landscape. I think this leads directly to the surface treatment and the finishing of the metal plates. The purity of the metal plates have their very own beauty, each piece is unique and has its very own quality. In contrast the anodized works go through several processes to obtain their specific color and I prefer to make these works in series.

The use and presentation of industrial and plainspoken materials is very much related to minimal art, which I highly admire especially for its directness and force: no need for bells and whistles. It’s certainly the pureness and directness that I’m looking for.

For me ‘extreme abstraction’ is a way to separate the fibers and threads of life. Just a simple intervention or a minor shift can cause a change of view. Like the wind slightly changing direction or blowing a bit harder, things change… first one wave, then another, and then… the whole ocean is in motion.

Façade – Richard Bottwin

Brent: As a sculptor you work fairly pure, neither adorning pieces with mounts nor placing your presentations on pedestals. If a “work” sits on the floor and only grows to somewhere around or below the knees, well, that is where it sits.
You suspend. In this case the body becomes very aware of its own mechanisms; how it values weight, position; how this operates within the sense of the temporal.
Smaller scale: The eye moves in and latches onto visual sensations that convince, though also deceive.  And while no guesswork is needed to place the vocation in the realm of the sculptural there is a question to whether the form adds more, or if there is more to what there is?

Richard: My very early freestanding sculptures, although stable, looked like they were always about to fall over.  Now I strive to make it very difficult to get a vertical fix on what you’re looking at.  Walk around them and any expectations you had during your first scan will be subverted.  Some recent pieces create a slight sense of anxiety in my gut when I look at them.  Not a panic response exactly, more fun than that. Confronting a human-scaled construction that is standing on the floor, does engage the body of the viewer as you suggest.  In contrast to this, I have found that the import of gravity is not such a big deal in small, pedestal size pieces.  Maybe that’s why I moved them to the wall and used them to explore other issues long ago.

I’ve always been suspect of the  conventional “modern art” solutions to gravity; Sculpture on a pad, sculpture on a stick, sculpture on a hidden pad (underground) and sculpture hanging on a wire doesn’t interest me. I like things to stand alone, solidly on the ground without artifice. Recently, I’ve been very conscious of wanting the things to stand in a thoroughly inevitable way, like junk casually left on a construction site.  This allows the environment to intrude upon the sculpture and the sculpture to engage the environment.

The environment may be the “More” in your question.  I’d like to have several sculptures in an installation working together, or, a single built environment one can enter that remove the viewer from this reality.  I’ve always been moving toward architecture and have brushed up against it a few times.  I feel like I’m collecting information to eventually build a pavilion or a “house” of some sort again as I did a few times in the past.

One vice I have is a passion for the decorative.  For a brief period, around 20 years ago, I threw 22k gold leaf on my sculptures and sometimes glazed it with color.  I learned a lot about pigments and transparency that way and then got over it.  Now, I employ that love of decorative surface to create allusions to functionality.  Veneers make the sculptures look like furniture and that confuses expectations.  Figuration in a veneer also initiates visual activity that I can play with in the form of the sculpture.

Brent: With more recent pieces color registers greater than the inches it supports. Here are folding planes where color gathers: Into depths, in areas, loosens into light, depending on where you are, and where the color sits. The surface works with illusion, while there is also this strong body of wood – the particularities of the grain – when there is a join, how the grain shifts…

Richard: I like your comment about color “greater than the inches it supports”.  When I have used solid areas of color. They are underpainted and glazed, resulting in 15 or more coats.  This is to make the surface interesting and mysterious.  In the “Profile” sculptures, I was pleased to discover that the perpendicular configuration bounces light between the angled planes and the glazing creates a virtual space that is practically gelatinous.  Now that’s interesting and mysterious.

Brent: And plastics, colored, textured, and translucent.

Richard: I used plastics long ago in grad school for purely architectural reasons (the sculptures looked like buildings).  Now I’ve started to play with the stuff again and I haven’t really mastered it yet.  Viewers enjoy the shadows cast by my wall sculptures. The tinted, textured acrylic I’ve been using creates colored shadows on the wall that are more predictable and merge concretely with the built sculptures.  That interests me a great deal.  The pieces also start to look more literally like buildings again and I have to decide if I want that.  Technical issues of attaching the plastic to the wood structure in an inevitable way have also not been solved.  That, along with the radius created by bending the acrylic sheet to wrap around the form in some works, can make the whole assemblage look tortured and not inevitable at all.

Lately, I’ve been very conscious of using as few elements as possible to create the most change and movement the sculptures.  Sometimes I even count the pieces of wood in the construction to keep the number down.  So far, wood and color work well.  Adding a third element, acrylic sheet, does start to “spoil a sense of the pure”, and it will require a great deal of exploration before I am comfortable with it.

Brent: Simplification.

Richard: I’m very conscious of simplifying things so that I can get maximum amount of activity and change in the sculpture with as few elements as possible.  It is my goal for the viewer to be presented with a construction that reveals itself entirely in form and joinery in a very short period of time.  At the same time, what is being presented should be utterly enigmatic and difficult to read.  Walk around it and the other side is completely different.  All that with just a few pieces of wood cut in a few angles.  I love clarity and pairing it with deception makes it more precious.

Brent: You said you have “a passion for the decorative” and then wanting the simplest state.  Isn’t there a conflict?

Richard: After going (briefly) crazy with decorative surfaces in the early 90’s, I backed off and then returned to use them very judiciously.  A strongly directional wood grain in a veneer sets up movement in a sculpture that can enhance or contradict the form.  There is also the subversive reference to the functional (furniture). I finish the wood with a water-based polyurethane varnish because it does not exaggerate the iridescence and color of the grain the way an oil-based finish would.  The decorative quality of the material hits just one note, and then it’s over. There is just enough low-key surface fun to keep it entertaining, but not overwhelm.

Brent: In your wall piece “Profile #8”, 2007 the experience can’t readily be taken in from any one view. Something quiet small, under 20 inches, keeps declaring itself differently not simply because there is a color aspect, a grain, a thickness, along with the lines that make up the Birch ply strata… it is because the design can lead a view to misalign with the expectation of the next, and a confirmation of the last – to coordinate a vast and logically inoperable read. We can count, but numerals seem less important than the position we need to take, to shift to take in the shifts. I sense much more than “one note, and then it’s over”.

Richard: The direction and energy of the grain is extremely important to me.  The “one note” I spoke of is the decorative quality of the rich color and flame (iridescence) that accompanies the grain.  I try to handle that with economy.

Your response to “Profile #8” is right on.  The “Profile” sculptures began with the simple configuration of two boards, joined at right angles and hung on the wall.  The surfaces, contours and edges of the boards were then manipulated in the service of an animated narrative that defies the austerity of the format.

An interesting portion of the veneer (Olive Ash Burl) was chosen and cropped so that the contour of the veneered shape appeared to be “engineered” by the swirling grain.   This polygon, laminated to plywood, became the plane perpendicular to the wall – the “profile”.  The adjacent plane was shaped to comment upon the “profile”.  Resolving the transitions in the edges between the two boards further modified their contours.

One is presented with the figured “profile”. Forced perspectives create the illusion of movement as one walks by. Portions of the interior painted plane peek over the edge and pull you around.  The interior planes of saturated color then flatten out and tell you a related, but entirely new story.  Hopefully, each new chapter is a complete surprise, but also inevitable.  That is why some of our friends who have actually seen the sculptures still leave a little baffled.

It is not evident in the photos, but the plane that is flat against the wall is twice as thick as the veneered plane, the edge is beveled and not visible.  This further disengages the painted surfaces from their support as they hover in front of the wall.

Brent: I like that you make scale models: Do you figure the color and the grain into these?

Richard: For the 10 “Profile” sculptures, 5 of which employed the burl veneer, I scanned the chosen veneer sheets on a large bed scanner.  The images were reduced by 50% and printed out in multiples.  These smaller representations of the veneers were used in 1:2 scale models that were built, torn apart and built again in the process of reduction and resolution. at that point, the painted color was chosen intuitively to compliment the form of the piece. My goal with this series was to make my work less encumbered and more direct, using a simple right angle configuration.  Oddly, some pieces, like #8, come across as even more baroque than my previous work.  In the middle of this series, I was glad for the opportunity to do the installation at the Sculpture Center.  Nothing very fancy could take place in a damp basement.

Brent: The installation at the Sculpture Center actually works very well. In this basement, in its architecture, with the wooden struts and beams amidst rough concrete, the actual left-wood part of the sculpture looks to meld with the surrounds leaving the color capsules to float almost released from their physical bond. To be there I would imagine this experience similar to moving through a strange and enchanted forest, and because things are figured out in such a way that they allude to the organic, the forest and its inhabitants would appear to us as natural despite their “geometric”

While we have petted the illusionist play within the structural and its read, played with the deceit of the decorative, the inherent quality of material and its surface… we have yet to touch upon light.

Richard: As mentioned, functional design informs my work and I am in love with lighting design.  I have made lamps for myself when I’ve needed them.  Putting light into the Sculpture Center installation was necessary in order to confront the site-specific issues there.  The basement exhibition space at the Center is an environment that devours light as soon as it leaves the bulb.  I had originally submitted my proposal for a wide, rectangular area and was going to have the light emerge from under box-like constructions on the floor.  This would have been an unexpected light source in a space that is usually lit from above. At the last minute, I was given a corridor, 96 feet in length.  This had been the electrical power plant for the building, which had been a trolley car repair facility at the beginning of the 20^th century.  The corridor was lined with beautifully made brick piers alternating with shelves and niches made of thick slabs of soapstone.  Some white glass insulators remained fixed to the walls.  A complete redesign was necessary and I had a little more than 3 weeks to do it. There was no floor space and I could not drill into the walls to hang anything.  To install the first three hinged, painted constructions, brick piers had to be sheathed in plywood that was buttressed in place by those struts wedged between columns.  There was no time to figure out how to incorporate light into these sculptures so they were lit with small spots, to my mind, an unsatisfactory solution.  As I began to understand what I was doing, some of the rectangular voids were illuminated with fluorescent tubes and the last two constructed elements were internally lit.  They pleased me a great deal. One was placed at each end of the installation, beacons inviting you in.

Brent: Interesting about the domestic lamp that you made. First thing that came to my attention was the cord. In a functional piece you need the cord, because of electricity, or the way we use electricity… so the functional object can’t function as art because the parts aren’t working with each other… for example a Flavin does because all the components work together. The fixtures are also the art.

Richard: Ah, the wire! It is an issue in the realm of “fine art”.  You may notice one snaking away behind “Gravity”.  I know it should not be there.  Matthew Deleget of Minus Space apologized for not hiding it at PS1.  For some reason I think it is hilarious and the fact that it dangles so inappropriately behind the “pure” object gives me some kind of perverse pleasure. I realized that the piece should be installed on a low platform, the wire secreted away below, but it was to be shown in a basement area so I didn’t fret about it.  Every now and then, I have the urge to include a detail like that, something that tethers the sculptures to our absurd reality.  I suppose it’s just to amuse myself during the tedium of fabrication.  I usually get over it and then clean up the details.

Brent: The “Facade” series is very new, and they use this textured plastic.
“Facade #5″ 2009 is wood, acrylic paint, and textured acrylic sheet, no wires, no wood veneer, though plenty of illusion, and a good dollop of impurity, and it works  –unsettling. The image reads square, but then you see the right edge, then you notice the rise in the underneath bottom green. It’s green: Green as green. The texture acrylic sheet is square? It reads not overly common but not high either, when you think of Judd… the perplexing planes and the kink at the corner suggests something similar to a Tony Delap.

Richard: This is the fifth piece in a series that began as a specific image in a dream.  This is uncharacteristic of how my work is generated but my teaching schedule is consuming and the subconscious part of my brain has been trying to be as helpful as possible lately.  Sometimes I’ll go to my studio on a weekend when I’m free, drop off into a deep sleep I can’t fight off, and wake up with a really great solution to a problem.  In this case, shortly after the school year ended in June, I woke up in bed one morning from a dream, and saw a new sculpture of mine in a group show.  It was the oddest thing, a slab of brick red painted wood, partially wrapped in 1970’s textured amber Plexiglas.  I’m usually suspicious of dream imagery because it is almost always about something else.  The sculpture was so compelling though, within an hour I was online, and the on phone looking for the material.  It was perfect timing.  I had planned a group of sculptures that I was going to make in July, but August was free.  The brain, in its wisdom, had set my course.

In pursuing the “Façade” group, I found that colored textured acrylic is no longer in fashion and not manufactured.  This was a good thing as the “rain” textured stuff had a good pattern and glazing it with acrylic color gave me more flexibility and better color.  I made five pieces and only the last one came together aesthetically and technically.  Some are too indulgently architectural; others were plagued by unanticipated changes in the thickness of the acrylic sheet and need be remade.  There is still a problem in attaching the plastic to the wood in a subtle way.

To my mind # 5 was the most successful of the “Façade” group.  It is a thick slab of plywood, 15” high and 11” wide.  The plywood is laminated with ash veneer that was unsanded when I primed and painted it, leaving the grain to assert itself through the color.  I was thinking of the inexpensive exterior renovations given to the houses and storefronts that I saw when house hunting in working class neighborhoods.  Because of this the surfaces surely don’t have the purity of a Judd.  There is a stronger tie to the perversity of Artschwager in that textured green if we must go “fine art”.    The upper left corner does bend forward and the whole slab is angled out a few inches on the left side, leaving the right vertical side close to the wall.  The plastic is nearly square, the lower edge angled down to the left an extra inch or so.  These angles create the most bizarre visual compression when viewing the piece obliquely.  As you walk by it, the thing changes radically.  The plastic also creates a shadow effect that I really like.  When most people view my wall sculptures, they are very engaged by the shadows and imagine that I have engineered them while designing the piece.  I think if them as “free gift with purchase”.  Nice forms + good lighting = interesting shadows, nothing I have to consider, they are an easy bonus that comes from the process.  With “Façade #5”, the shadow of the plastic hovers just behind the work and is tinted with color.  It is completely integrated with the sculpture.  I am controlling and creating it.  This aspect of the sculpture fascinates me and I want to pursue it.  Perhaps I will this summer when I have more time to immerse myself in the problem.

The Tony Delap reference delights me.  I am familiar with his work although I haven’t seen it often or recently.  Back in the ‘70’s, I saw a show in New York of disk shaped paintings with iridescent, “California” surfaces.  I wasn’t attracted to the painting aspect of them but the way the edges angled back, appeared, disappeared and mysteriously reappeared, entranced me.  I’m sure the memory of that show stayed with me and influenced me.  Your jogging my memory about this interesting artist makes me want to see more of his work.

Brent: I noticed you have a drawing of #5. Is it a before or after… the completion of the work? As a drawing it gives a certain amount of detail that I couldn’t pick up in the jpg. It sort of demystifies the object, which I like. But, of course, it is in this beautiful mystery that is the boat!

Richard: The drawing happened before the sculpture.  I made a model for the first piece (seen in a dream).  It looked surprisingly good.  After that, I developed the idea in a series of very specific drawings.  A few tiny models were made just to check things out.  Five pieces were made.  I like #5 enough to show it.  I thought I’d be done for the summer after the series.  The forms realized by this group then precipitated another group of larger wood-only wall pieces at the end of August and into the fall. The “Facade” series mostly acted as a catalyst for other works. It was a really intense period of R & D.  If you need images of the Wood Fold pieces, I’ll send them.  Two of them will be sent to Zurich for a show that will include Kevin Finklea and Max Bill (*sigh*) in March (At Forum Ute Barth).  Funny, I originally saw the first Facade piece in a dream.  It was in a show that included Kevin.  In the end, the piece got made and the show will happen, although it is a cousin of the dream piece that will be exhibited.

Brent: The “Wood Folds” not only sit without add of a synthetic color they also hug pretty close to the wall. “Wood Fold #1” counts two main planes. The back of the lower structure has a shoe that helps pull the plane off the wall. Bare and reduced with the slightest amendment for display, counting right down, how did this work figure as next the step after “Façade”?

Richard: The “Façade” pieces were experimental in their use of plastic supported by wood structures. The wooden elements in this group became so intriguing to me that when they were complete, they suggested a whole new series of sculptures.  I reinvented the “Façade” forms on a larger scale and with a more reductive format.  I used more subtle structures and limited color, if any.  I think that the “Wood Folds” became what the “Facades” were meant to be.  To my mind, they are more resolved and they have a larger, more imposing presence.

The “Wood Fold” sculptures were kept very low in relief because I wanted to get the maximum amount of activity with as little three dimensional extension as possible.  This was an aspect of the reductive thinking and to a much lesser degree, a practical matter.  People bump into wall sculptures that really stick out.  I thought it would be good to follow the “Profile” sculptures, some of which project as much as 14” from the wall, with something much flatter.  It’s a challenge and it builds the sculpture muscles.

Brent: With “Wood Fold #3” the foot is topside, and is no longer a foot but an eddy. In “Wood Fold #1” it functions to distribute the planes to position in relation to the wall.  In both cases there is something strange going on. To move this to the front reads as an anomaly, and as such functions even more as an oddity.

Richard:  The “foot” began as just a scrap of plywood I slipped under “Wood Fold #1” to support its weight during the final stages of fabrication.  I looked back from the door as I was leaving and realized that the extra step was necessary for the reasons you mention in this and the last question.  I was surprised that just a little jog could affect the piece in such an unexpected way.  Ultimately, that layer change happens in all four of the “Wood Folds”.  In #3 it plays with the lamination changes along the top edge, emphasizes the angle at which the piece is hung and creates a lovely little triangle of negative space with the angled plane on the right.

Brent: Architecture has come up more than once in this conversation. You have also worked with outside sculpture. The first that I know of is “Swing Pavilion” made in 1987, and then a decade later with “Diagonal Bench” and “Ledge”. Are there any plans to go back to environmental sculpture in the near future, taking in consideration the new developments within your practice?

Richard: Architecture has always been my first love and a direct influence on my work.  I can remember at the age of 3 or 4, lying in my bed and imagining that the windows in my room were in a different, more interesting configuration.  That has never stopped.  By the age of 9 or 10, I became aware of Frank Lloyd Wright and I was infatuated.  Around 15 years ago, I finally pushed his decorative vocabulary out of my sculpture.  You can see that influence in “Swing Pavilion”. When my work becomes architectural in scale, I believe that it should function as architecture.  My long-term goal has been to create architecture on my own terms as a sculptor.  All three of the installations that you mention were designed to be site specific.  They lure the passerby in to sit down and then require that person to experience some disorientating geometry while looking at a carefully framed view.  There is a stream just below “Swing Pavilion”.  The bench swings up to the edge of the structure at an angle to give the participant a moment of vertiginous suspension over the sloping bank to the water. If you look up, there are layers of angled beams.  It’s confusing but structurally very simple.  I learned that bit from Frank L. W.   Sometimes I think of my smaller wall and freestanding sculptures as a means to collect information that I will eventually incorporate in an environmental structure.

Where one Aligns – Connie Goldman

Brent: In “Treble II” you have an envelope-proportioned structure that has a fold but not like an envelope. There is a corner missing from one side: And a corner protruding from the other. The whole thing is one sheet of color, and of two forms… how did that come about?

Connie: In the “Treble” pieces I’m working with parts of a whole, hence the single color.  As to whether these parts become a single entity or are in the process of individuation, well… it can go either way. That’s the point – the uncertainty.
Transformation, the presence, and a stimulus are all part of the move.  There is always a “present”: And there is in every piece a “movement” just as there is a pull to and away from gravity. I work a disturbed equilibrium. And it’s there where I find the accord.

I’ve worked off the square/rectangle shape for years. This four-cornered parallelogram is static, constant, perfectly composed.  But I take that parallelogram and cut into it, knock it off balance. I have it strive toward another less stable shape and then strive back for perfect containment. The shape wants to stay intact, but countervailing forces are always eroding and pulling at its perfect equanimity. The differing depths of the components in the piece are intended to enhance the notion that this is a changeable, morphing form.

Brent: The moment, or the moments, where things start to impress upon you differently can you talk a little about this in terms of “plate” and “shifting”?

Connie: I could be “new agey” and say these moments are a gift, but I won’t.  On the contrary, I believe, in a sense, they are earned.  They come about as a consequence of thorough engagement with the creation of the storyline.  My work informs itself.  I rarely decide off the wall that I’m going to do this now, or that now.  Rather, as I work thoughts and ideas permeate and suggest alternatives and shifts in the storyline. It’s important to register them because they can send you off in an otherwise unexpected or seemingly new direction.  For example, I may have executed a body of work a few years ago.  I may be using a certain kind of palette on a newer body or work, and the thought may cross my mind, “What if I had used this palette for that body of work? How would that have affected the impact of those pieces?”  I’ll follow up on those questions.  Or perhaps I used a horizontal orientation for a series of pieces… “What would happen if I turn those pieces and orient them vertically?”  I do a great deal of elaborating.  Occasionally, as in the “Phasis” series (which is ostensibly about moon phases), I’ll have sat on an idea for years.  Something boils over into the present, and I’ll start to make sketches of my ideas. This germ of an idea seems to suddenly become concrete.

The shift into using differing depths or layers was something that grew out of my long-time use of multiple panels.  For years the multiple panels emphasized the notion of metaphor.  Then as I left imagery behind and was incorporating the space around and in between panels into my compositions, I began to use the differing depths as code for change vs. stasis, impulse, the constant ebb and flow of forces.  It made perfect sense in relation to what I had been doing all along.  When I try something new it has to resonate with the internal logic of my little world or it feels disingenuous.  I have strong convictions in that way.

Brent: Does the ebb and flow always go the way you want? Or can it work that sometimes you just have to go with the flow, and ebb back when you know you have something?

With “Arena XII” a front plane is white, and the back plane looks to be a gray.  You mentioned there is a change in color at the edge, which I can’t see. There is no sense of fold here. It’s rotation. The white rests. The gray moves, rotates. The cuts are calculated to a precision, but as you say they’re figured while you are working, nothing happens on the drawing board…  there is no suggestion of preplanned. Yet, once you make a cut, in what you are using, mdf, I think you said… once that cut is made you can’t really do much to repair it. How then do you work with “change” when the material only gives you one chance?

Connie: I always have to go with the flow. I learned a long time ago that I couldn’t impose my will on my artwork. I can have preconceived ideas, but inevitably they go by the wayside to one degree or another.  Once the panel or panels are made, yes, I’m stuck with them – but not really… There is plenty of room for intuition, whether that means surface, color, or even eliminating a piece from the whole.  And of course I’ve done that.  Inevitably the piece turns out better if I follow it and give it gentle nudges as opposed to squashing it so it conforms to my expectations.  It’s a give and take relationship.

Speaking of which: I do not paint the inside edges on all the works.  When I have insisted on doing that I found that (at times) it could become a visual jumble.  On the “Brook” and “Arena” pieces the inside edges are not painted.  With “Brook”, when I attempted to do that things got too busy, and I decided it was enough to let the differing depths express the metamorphosis.  You are correct in your description of the “Arena” series.  There’s no fold, although there still exists the change in panel depth.  There is, though, still a movement toward change and an effort to maintain harmony – opposing forces.  As you say, the white center was stable; that is until it had a corner cut off. And in the periphery the action is happening.  For me it evokes a feeling I had when I was pregnant with my daughter.  As she got big in the womb I frequently had little elbows and knees poking me.  That’s what’s happening in Arena.  There are elbows and knees poking out of the mother figure, portents of things to come.

Brent: I’m still intrigued with how the panel shapes are decided. A darker pair of plates “Arena 1” feel so worked out. I can’t imagine you just randomly cut bits to see how they worked together, but you say it all happens on the wall.

Connie: I didn’t mean to give that impression.  The compositions are decided ahead of time.  I do a lot of drawing, thumbnails at first.  I will work out ideas, drawing free hand, but eventually they are firmed up on graph paper so measurements are precise.  What I was talking about before was the paint process.  That’s where intuition happens.  Yes, the general form is firm, but there’s plenty to play with after that.  By the way, I love the graph paper drawings that precede the paintings.  I fantasize about someday exhibiting those.  I’ve also done finished pieces on graph paper.  Graph paper plays a big role in my life.

Brent: In the “Phasis” series the planes, the plates, do not overlap.

Connie: The “Phasis” series was one of those bodies of work that percolated literally for years.  I always wanted to do something about the moon, about its phases in particular.  The constant flow, the waxing and waning are so obviously connected metaphorically and literally to what I do, what I seek in my artwork.  But it could be so easy to come up with something so trite that I kept putting it off.  It isn’t necessarily consistent with how I normally work using the differing depths within a given piece.  However it is very consistent in its use of negative space.  I was drawing one day, and it dawned on me that I didn’t have to use a sphere or quasi-sphere to depict the moon.  The negative space could be the moon shape, and the positive space could express the passage of time and distance. The ephemeral became the tangible and the tangible, the ephemeral. It was great fun.  I love the shapes, how at times they are plant-like.  There is more there to explore, and I know I’ll go back to it.

Brent: So you are quite happy working with metaphor, or even narrative where one piece aligns and talks to the next, here also the moon as ephemeral body shining, the arc suggestive of a full-blown, or as curves the crescent. There are formal things too, in that you need to look to take the information in. Because of the severity of the column or bar in absence between the pairings, while sometimes there is three or four compiling one work it is in the space between two parts that appears most dramatic. Of the curves, they fill and suggest. There is a gentleness to them, yet also a pinch in the positive space when a curve and a straight edge end at a razor’s edge.

Connie: I see the space between the panels as necessary visual air.  I tried and didn’t like abutting the panels because that seemed too severe.  It also seemed too illustrative of moon phases per se.  Providing space between the panels offered more of a time and space lapse and, of course, simple breathing room.  In my mind the space trips the viewer psychologically and visually just enough to remove the piece from too literal a reading.  It reads more strongly as metaphor this way. The squared edges on the periphery of each piece are my nod to the fact that while I am addressing unending processes, this is still an enclosed, formal composition. That’s why I set a prescribed distance between the panels.  Too much or too little compromises the composition. (Ever the formalist…) It’s a challenging thing to marry the formal, narrative, metaphorical.  But, of course, that’s the defining measure of successful art – how well these support one another.  If I return to this body of work in the future, I know I’ll tweak the goals or concerns whether they are formal or metaphorical.  That’ll change the game plan and thus set up a roadblock to any formulaic devices that could possibly try to manifest.  That’s something one has to be vigilant about.

To answer your observation about how I allow pieces in a body of work to play off one another, I’ll offer a resounding affirmation. I do tend to create suites of work.  Very seldom do I make one-off pieces any more.  An idea will manifest, it will germinate for a long time, and I will try several or many ways to elaborate on the theme. Thus the grouping of pieces as a whole takes on a symphonic quality.  I like the notion of there being an orchestration of the individual pieces as well as the larger body of work.  I guess in a sense I’m an installation artist.  But really, all artists are if they publicly exhibit their work.

Brent: You mention that there is plenty of room to move even once the plates are set, and that further elements can be taken out.  Color?  Are you adding?  It feels more that you are tweaking, looking for a resolve. Sometimes, I notice, colors in certain situations clang when they meet halfway…
Let’s go back: Once the shapes and plates are set, when you feel you have them performing the way you want, is color the next place you go?

Connie: When starting a painting or a body of work I’ll have ideas for color schemes, color relationships, and surfaces. But I’ve also learned to be flexible. Color is the icing on the cake in the painting process.  It’s palpable.  When you hit the right combination it’s vibratory, visceral.  I liken it to how we know when what we’re whistling or singing is on key.  It feels right, physically. It can take awhile to get there. Occasionally you get lucky and hit upon it quickly.
In painting sometimes I think it’s there, but later find that it’s not.  This happened today, incidentally, whereupon returning to the studio ready to bolt a work together I had to stop. The color just didn’t have the impact.
Color relationships sometimes have to be jarring. With the “Treble” series when you view them frontally they are monochromatic, calm, and harmonious.  However, walk around any piece and you’ll be met with a really jolting or surprising color relationship.

Surface plays a huge role in my work.  Sometimes I’ll juxtapose different surfaces for expressive purposes.  For instance, in the “Arena” series the center squarish piece is smoother and more matte than the outside pieces, which are a bit more textured and a little glossier.  The difference here is important to the visual and “narrative” impact. This takes time. The surfaces and color are built up very slowly.  I use oils because of the quality of the color and finish. I build the layers sanding the paint sometimes adding “china clay” or “cold wax” to the medium.  I work this until the surface quality looks “right”.  It can take four layers; it can also take ten.
I’ll admit to fussiness, but it stops well short of fetish. The last thing I want is for the surface to be cold or industrial.  It’s important that a sense of handedness is present.  If you look closely at the surfaces you will find that they’re quite imperfect, and very warm. The rub is always what level of imperfection is acceptable: And that’s an aesthetic decision.

Brent: Interesting that you say that color is the icing on the cake.  Does this mean color sits as a secondary value? That it adorns something sculptural?

Connie: Well, that’s a provocation if I’ve ever heard one (she said bristling).  I’ll agree and argue at the same time.  I can’t separate the two.  I won’t separate the two.  I call my work painting because that’s my native language.  If I were doing performance art or printmaking I’d probably call it painting.  It’s all the same to me. My work has evolved to a point where it has characteristics of both painting and sculpture.  Call me what you will.  I really, really like straddling the boundaries. But it confuses those who want neatness. The categorizations are purely for other people’s convenience.  When I said the color is the icing on the cake I wasn’t implying that it’s fluff or decoration.  It meant simply that I love color. If my work didn’t feature color as an essential formal element it would lose a huge amount of its impact.  If Anne Truitt or Richard Tuttle were here they’d take you to task, Brent.

Brent: Both sculptors!
Categories get bruised. I often hear painters say, painting is about paint. And it sounds true enough. However painting is a very open forum. In your case you put color to the service, and choose a particular vehicle, that of oil, mentioning that you like the give and the quality. So the “paint is about painting” or an aspect of it, of which there are other parts in the play, in a sense. When something works it ceases to be a problem that needs to be worked out. Or, in your case, when a work is done is it complete?

Connie: Here’s a blurb by Charles Biederman (American, 1906-2004) who coined the term “Structurist”.  Biederman said, “a Structurist work is neither painting nor sculpture, but a structural extension of the two.” Conclusion: I think if we ask three more people we’ll get three opinions. I’ll leave that there.

I kind of like the possibility that not all queries can be completely answerable.  That’s what keeps the art fresh and me going.  As long as there are propositions and problems there remains fertile ground.  That’s not to say that a particular work isn’t resolvable in terms of the specific questions that it poses. But I think it’s important to push away from conventions and invent one’s own language and logic.  Even better, isn’t it great when the work invents its own language? That’s what good and challenging art is all about.  Yes, one has to tip one’s hat to what came before and be informed.  But if that’s a given, I believe you can create a unique and viable vocabulary with its own internal logic just as long as all the variables are doing an acceptable job of being mutually supportive.  And it may be okay that things get a little messy along the way, even if it’s uncomfortable. I really hope that the work I make is always a little open-ended. If I don’t have curiosity about what’s possible I don’t see any use in making art.

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.