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 … 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
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: 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 … Continue reading
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 … Continue reading
Brent: If color were a stamp then yours would be green. Though recently not all things have come up this way: You have moved into orange and apricot, banana yellow and powder blue, just for starters. Alan: I have been watching colors besides greens for years as I mixed or ground different pigments to achieve … Continue reading
Brent: Out of location, a thing found – wonders in ways that form a new thing, in a different location – this is generally how I sense your various projects working. Patricia: It is my experience of a location or an object in a place that is important to me. I think that I’ve been … Continue reading
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 … Continue reading
Painting Studio – East Wall, Summer 2008 Brent Kevin, you sent a studio shot of your new pieces. I can see how they fit with the flatter paintings, and what this new wood and paint work is doing. You mentioned that these pieces come about much quicker. Have you been going through a process of … Continue reading
Brent Richard, I didn’t really notice but black has played a fairly consistent part in your painting, especially recently. Also, I have noticed the return to the open canvas in your work. It seems to me that both the open canvas and the increased presence of the color black coincide. Does it! Shadows Small Version … Continue reading
untitled, Color Chunk, John Tallman, 2008 Brent John, I’m looking at two recent chunks. Let’s start with the first: a bluish object that declares itself as something wrapped. What it is wrapping I have no idea, nor do I have the faintest what the wrap material is. I remain lost. However, I’m not entirely lost … Continue reading
Six, 2008, click for another view. Continue reading
Hudson, 2006, acrylic on cotton, 80 x 60 cm A Snippet of Text ‘It is in the balance of the shtick that thickens the giddy: The proportioning, the size with position, the shape with the color, the toying with emotional out-of-kilter states– the flags that flow with the flaws of the ‘natural’, the hard-edge taped … Continue reading
Nevermind 12.1 ‘Bugs’ These things, diminutive monsters really, are crawling all over a recent canvas by Mick Finch. They’re not actually crawling. They are sort of plopped there each likely arranged and placed and traced left to a hand to paint and fill. The brightly colored bugged gobs recall late-high Matisse-shapes, and remind of those … Continue reading
