Brent: I had the privilege to see you in action recently for 100 years since De Stijl, at the Open Air Museum De Lakenhal, in Leiden. I’ve been intrigued with what you do for a number of years, without actually getting a handle on why that is. And I think that this is okay – for …
Brent: Lines have been your thing from when I can first remember – and probably before that too. And for you, the lines and their infinite variety is the motivating bee in your bonnet, with a focus that is almost too obsessive, but it is what is for you – mostly. There is a …
BH: Emma, what hit me when I first came across your work, and I’m thinking the in situ installation pieces, was the strength of the color and forms you had used. And then there was that space – never completely adding up while offering a convincing cohort with the architectural elements that you chose to work …
BH: Deceptively simple, singularly shaped and formed, canvases bloom from the wall each in a different color. Hung together they suggest a word, a string of them, arranged to convey the written form, though any attempt to decipher or push this further only adds umbrage. Instead, when the syntactic muscle relaxes, the color forms open to the …
Visual: You know I’ve always loved the idea of making a white painting, a monochrome, a square, white, monochrome painting. And a lot of my colleagues have had that love too. And I think we’ve all tried our hand at it. I remember when we got close, when we thought it was time, we could …
Brent: Your work has long been understood as between a gestural prose and a geometric abstraction, and I think this continues, yet with a greater freedom, and a somewhat stronger persistence toward austerity. And, might I add, closer to the bone. Can we chart some of the background: what fuels this interest in dichotomy? Michael: …
Brent: We met in the afternoon outside the Apple store, downtown San Francisco. It was March, coolish… and we wandered back to Telegraph Hill. On the way we talked. It came as a bit of a surprise that you were not really aware of or interested in op/perceptual painting when you first began painting. What, …
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 …
Brent: You have been working on areas of color; vertical or horizontal bands of either matte paint or gloss paint with sometimes both present in the one painting at the same time. The structure between two areas of color, you couldn’t really call it a line, though, well, in the material – a space where …
I’m really involved in this idea of states-of-change. I see no real end to it. All of our discussions here relating to the formal aspects are fine, and that is whats possible at this time, but I have always felt that all I do is stare into a void. Continue reading
Brent: If a big slab of red, blue, even yellow or orange came out of nowhere and found home on top of one of your paintings, we’d be set aghast. But I guess you, the maker, get that all the time and cover it up so our experience is different? Add the scale, a work is … Continue reading
Brent: Behind every good story lurks a liar: a borrower, a truth teller, and a lark. First and foremost you are a painter. And the work you make is painted flat. The surfaces hold the legacy of hard-edge painting and color abstraction, and this is true whether you are creating large wall paintings in situ, … Continue reading
Brent: In painting you really do need to question why you go around the edge and paint the sides. Painting is about the face, the surface, and yes, the edge, which is not the end of the world, but is at the crossroads of a painting. The edge in painting engages the frame as something … Continue reading
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 … Continue reading
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’ … Continue reading
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 … Continue reading
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 … Continue reading
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 … Continue reading
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 … Continue reading
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 … Continue reading
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 … Continue reading
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 … Continue reading
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 … Continue reading
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, … Continue reading
Visual Discrepancies 