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Interview with Ryan Cobourn

by Neil Plotkin

Ryan Cobourn is a Brooklyn based artist represented by Fischbach Gallery and Ann Connelly Fine Art. Currently, Mr. Cobourn has a solo show, titled “CRAZY NATURE” at Fischbach up until May 25, 2012 and was recently included in the Dark Matters Group Show at Steven Harvey Fine Arts in New York and also The University of The Arts’ ARTUnleashed Benefit Exhibition in Philadelphia. Though Mr. Cobourn’s paintings are more abstract than the majority of artists showcased on Painting Perceptions, his working process is very firmly rooted in direct observation. He draws from life and then works from those drawings in the studio. I want to thank Mr. Cobourn for taking the time to answer my questions.

Neil Plotkin: You’re from the Philadelphia area, and you did your undergraduate work there, but I wouldn’t say that your work feels confined by the traditions of the Philadelphia painters or the traditions of Philadelphia for that matter. Was this a conscious decision, and what do you think accounts for that?

Ryan Cobourn I think going through the University of the Arts—that painting program was much more of a contemporary program. We had so many painters painting different ways, and there was more of an emphasis on doing whatever you like. I think I constructed my own painting program. I spent a lot of time with the figurative painters on the illustration floor. I was really interested in the more rigorous drawing program. I learned anatomy, and I learned painting from life. I took illustration classes and also fine art classes.

I originally started as an illustration major, and then switched to painting halfway through. It really was a self-made program that was designed haphazardly, because I didn’t know that I wanted to be a painter. All I knew is that I wanted to be an artist. So, through that undergraduate development, I developed into a painter. It wasn’t until halfway through college that I realized that I don’t want to do anything other than make paintings. That’s how it happened.

As a student, I was taking art history classes, and I was painting through art history. It sounds crazy. We were studying Renaissance art, and Baroque art, and so I drew sketchbooks and notebooks full of master copies. I did painting copies of Velázquez and Rembrandt. So I was learning painting almost in a linear way for a year-and-a-half or two years, and just developed a repertoire of—I don’t want to say techniques—but I just developed an understanding of how painting related to different time periods.

NP: You never felt like you were a “Philadelphia” artist?

RC: No. I liked Eakins. I did some copies of Eakins paintings, but I was too transitory in my nature to ever fit firmly into that tradition. There were a couple of artists that were working out of that Philadelphia realist mode that I studied with, but I think I was just too restless to settle into that tradition.

Two Trees,, 72” x 42”, oil on canvas

Clay Hill 8,, 16” x 22”, pastel on paper

The figure paintings begin in an entirely different way. They are projects that require a lot of research, and I rarely if ever start from observation. They are all from secondary sources; drawings, memory, photos, imagination. All these sources have different kinds of realities, but in spite of this, it is possible to unify the painting because in the end, they all have to serve the image that is in my mind’s eye.

So these two kinds of painting start from different places, but as time has gone by, I feel less and less of a distinction between my perception of the outside world and the more transient images of my imaginative inner world. It all seems to be made of the same mysterious stuff.

NP: You and I spoke at really great length about your process for the painting of Two Trees, and I don’t want to go over covered ground, but there is something I do want to follow up on a little bit. You mentioned that distance from your source material as being beneficial to your work. What sort of things do you think you discover or invent that you might not be able to create onsite? [Please click here to download the EBook and read the story of the creation of this painting]

RC: I feel that my own inadequacies come out… The paintings that I had done onsite when I was younger; most of them came out mushy, and everything turned gray. Maybe I’m just not decisive enough to be an onsite painter. I’ll get distracted, so in the studio I can go to town, and scrape the thing off and let it dry, and go back.

It’s more about memory and being evocative, as opposed to painting details and specificity. I’m not really interested in specificity. I’m not really interested in how many petals are on a flower or what time of day it is. I’m not really interested in that. The paintings are more about the paint reflecting a notion or an idea. So, if like Matisse said, “exactitude is not the truth”, then something else has to be the truth, which is what painting really aspires to do.

Some of the my best paintings have some kind of movement where the forms hover and quiver, and you’re not quite sure where a building or a group of trees ends and the sky begins. Think about how hard it is to paint water. The water that you just painted is not there anymore. So what am I painting? Am I painting a moment in time, or am I painting an idea about what that thing is?

Clay Hill 1, 18” x 24”, pastel on paper

Clay Hill 3, 18” x 24” pastel on paper

NP: To me, your drawings, which are done from life, are very fixed. Do you feel that they’re fixed, and that’s enough for your connection, or is that just a starting point?

Drawing 8, pastel on paper

RC: I started doing the pastels to bring more ideas into the studio. They’re just ideas. It’s like planting a garden. I go out and come up with twenty drawings, and there might be something in one that really strikes me. That is an idea that I want to pursue, and I’ll pursue it in the studio because it’s not about recording what was there. It’s about remembering what was there, and then changing it. And if it changes, then there has to be a significant reason as to why it changes. That’s really where the paintings have a reason to be there, as opposed to painting a photograph. It is the dialogue, it is the process of pushing stuff around.

And as much I love a painter like, say, López García—I like looking at his work, but my own personality couldn’t do that, because it’s not what I’m trying to do. I’m much more interested in exploring ideas, maybe more abstract ideas in paint, and I’m using the landscape as the relationship. It’s a relative source.

Neighborhood, 46” x 52”, oil on canvas

NP: William Eckhardt Kohler wrote about your painting, Neighborhood, saying, “It is as if, after working all of a wet winter day, the painting reached fruition with the simultaneous arrival of dusk, both, a blue-gray murk.” Would you say that is how the process of your painting goes? You’re working and working and working, and all of a sudden, everything just emerges finished? Or is it a linear process of building towards a roughly realized destination?

RC: No, it’s more like the former. I work up into a crazy, frenetic manner. I’ll work on them for an hour or two, and step back. You work through periods of intense effort and you step back and think about it for a little bit. And usually it will all come together, and if it doesn’t, then you keep working on it. It’s interesting what he wrote. He got it half-right, because that’s kind of how it happened—but I worked on that painting for two years. [Laughter] It was a moment of enlightenment, but it was a protracted and long process to get there.

Waterfalls, 72” x 84”, oil on canvas

Drawing 6, pastel on paper

Drawing 7, pastel on paper

NP: It feels like in the painting Waterfalls, the painting on the left is based roughly on drawing seven, and that the painting on the right is based loosely on drawing six. At the same time, I seems I see elements from the other drawings in the other paintings. I’m curious to know how you use the drawings. Do you look at the drawings as models, forge ahead, and then come back to the drawings to keep you on course? Or do you leave the drawings behind and at some point paint towards something unknown to yourself?

RC: I didn’t really think about it until you brought it up in that question. But the way that I use a drawing in the studio is probably about exactly the same way as if I was a figure painter, and I was painting a model in the room. It’s the same type of thing. You look at it, and you know that you are working from that inspiration, whatever it may be; but at some point you have to stop and look at the painting and realize that you’re translating that into paint.

There are moments where I’ll work on the painting, and I’ll try to make a very specific mark or movement that relates to the drawing. Then I’ll work on a painting for a while, and I feel as if it comes together, so be it. But if I feel like it’s getting away too much from the initial thing that I liked, then I go back. It’s exactly like painting a model in front of me—at some point, I have to stop looking at the model and just make the painting, because that’s what I’m doing. It doesn’t matter where it comes from. But at the same time, if it gets too far away from the model, the motif; I have to bring it back. It’s that balance, it’s that back and forth—and that’s how I use the drawings.

Exploding Trees, 40” x 60, oil on canvas

NP: There’s a lot of attention, through the arc of your career, on the seasons and weather. For example, a theme that began with your MFA thesis is work that focuses on winter. Also, you have commented in the past that the weather infiltrates your paintings.

For example, when the weather is gloomy you need to do a moody painting before you can do paintings with color in them. Do you feel that this is in your control, this attention to the weather? And is this an aspect of your work that is taking greater control over what you do? Or is it a constant?

RC: I’m not a realist painter in the sense of a realist landscape painter. I don’t go out and try to specifically find and paint what’s in front of me. What I’ll do is I’ll take the world around me (specifically, the environment) and those things relate to an internal climate, an internal landscape. I could paint a winter painting in the summer, if that’s how it felt—the same way that a musician could play a really depressing song on a sunny day. It’s more of how does the world around you relate to what’s going on inside.

Because those ideas and those relationships—I feel that is how I can relate to the viewer. I can make a variety of different paintings and use a variety of different color keys, or I can use different types of compositions. The paintings express more of an internal thing than an external thing; but it’s the external thing that is the language that people understand.

When I tried to be an abstract painter, I never found the relationship, the same sort of understanding with the viewer. I don’t think the viewer understood those as well. But if I can create an image that is evocative, and they feel like they can almost relate to it, then that is really an interesting little niche that you can get into. The transitory nature of weather and the transitory nature of our environment—that’s provocative to me.

NP: The weather impacts you in a transitory manner? Is that what you mean?

RC: It’s like if you start to think about a building, it’s as if the building is fixed. The building is set. I can’t do a painting of a cup on a table, but I could do a painting of buildings at night where things are shifting. If you’re painting the weather, or if you’re painting light, or if you’re painting air, or if you’re painting water; nothing is quite fixed.

For me, there’s a recklessness in my nature that cannot necessarily be fixed, and the paintings need to reflect that. I’m not a very patient painter. For me, the paintings are always changing, and the paintings are always very fluid, and that painting process is evocative of how my actual mind works. The forms are actually expressing that notion. They’re expressing that notion.

NP: You’re a big baseball fan. How do you use the parallels of sport to inform your work? What are you channeling with sport when you paint?

NP: RC: Well, in baseball, if you get three out of ten, you’re a millionaire. If you can make three successful paintings out of ten, you’re a genius.

People talk about the polarity between art and athletics. People think they’re completely opposite but they’re close together in a lot of ways. It really is mind over matter, and whether you’re doing sports or whether you’re doing art, your whole life has to be focused around that goal.

For instance, there’s the cliché of the dumb jock. The jock doesn’t know anything. He just knows how to shoot a basketball, or he can run fast. But that’s a real fallacy, because professional sports are really complicated. Baseball is complicated. Football plays are complicated.

On the other side, there’s the other cliché of the artist as weak and intellectually-minded but physically not very astute—and that’s also a complete fallacy, because in both art and athletics, it’s not one or the other. It’s both of those things acting together.

And in both you have to make a lot of sacrifices. You have to overcome barriers that are beyond your capabilities. Whether you want to become a great athlete or a great artist, it’s the same high, almost impossible, ambitions that you have to strive for, that you have to achieve. The mental preparation of an athlete and the mental preparation of an artist are probably much more similar than people realize.

When I work, it’s like I’m on my feet for nine hours, and it’s a physically exhausting and mentally exhausting process. I work big, so I’m making big gestures. It’s not just gesture for the sake of gesture. It’s not eighth-generation action painting. I’m still working on drawing and sorting out the image, too. It’s a complicated procedure, and I think it’s more complicated than people realize.

NP: Who is in your pantheon of artists?

RC: Well, this is a real can of worms. So, I am just going to answer with little editing. I guess the same five artists I always come back to, that most relate to my endeavors, would be:

The Starters:
• DeKooning
• Guston
• Monet
• Van Gogh
• Turner

Obviously, they are all heavy hitters. I really don’t see the point of modeling one’s art after minor artist

The Bench
• Soutine
• Joan Mitchell
• Constable
• Courbet
• The New York School and the Bay Area Painters/li>
• Ryder, Dove, Marin, Avery, Burchfield, and just about any of the early American Abstractionists
• Japanese and Chinese Painters of just about any century

This is a list of historic painters that I think I work in a similar vein. Obviously, and we talked about this, is a list of artists who I love who work completely opposite ways: Matisse, Mondrian, Ingres.

A list of living artists that interests me, working in a similar fashion. They are all not necessarily all famous:

Still Going
• Leon Kossoff (I didn’t ever really respond to his work until the last show, but now, because of the new stuff, I think he is the best painter alive.)
• Bill Jensen
• Eric Aho
• Ying Li
• Barry Gealt (my teacher from Indiana)
• David Kapp
• Allison Gildersleeve
• Susanna Heller
• Susan Mayer

Probably a ton of people I forgot that should go on the still living list. Wolf Kahn, maybe. I like his work, you really have to see them in person to appreciate them. He reminds me of what NOT to do sometimes–No barn paintings.

I’m not really taking off from one specific artist. I draw from a variety of sources, but Guston and de Kooning are maybe the last guys in that line. Robert Motherwell said that everyone wanted to call the New York School Abstract Expressionists, but really Abstract Romanticism would be more of an apt term. If you think about that work in relationship to a longer tradition of romanticism, I feel like my work actually stems from not just Guston and de Kooning and Kline, but also Turner, Monet, Courbet, and Caspar David Friedrich. We can keep going back through all types of Expressionism, which is just another name for the Romantic tradition.

I try to make the paintings a lot like who I am, and the thing that people really respond to in the work is always this activity. There’s a nervous energy. I think you can see that in Guston. I think you see it in de Kooning, Van Gough, and Soutine. In those Guston abstractions, they’re not quite all the way abstract. They’re hovering there in this uneasy state. With El Greco, or Rubens, as soon as you get to one point, you’ve got to keep moving, keep moving, keep moving. I call it the “wobbly world,” a world where everything is not necessarily fixed.

I’m not just trying to paint like somebody. I’m just trying to paint like how my mind works, so I gravitate towards these artists.

NP: What is your advice for artists just starting out?

RC: Jennifer Samet was telling me that she was talking with Suzanna Coffey, and Suzanna Coffey said that her advice to young painters was to paint small and schmooze a lot. So Jennifer asked what my advice would be, and I said,

“Paint big and walk around like you own the joint.”

Setting Sun, 18” x 24”, oil on canvas

Interview with Susan Jane Walp by Larry Groff
for the Jerusalem Studio School

Susan Jane Walp graciously agreed to an interview with me for the Jerusalem Studio School blog. We conducted the interview through an exchange of emails. I would like to thank her again for her involvement and also with her generosity with providing higher resolution images as well as samples of her earlier work. Susan Jane Walp lives and paints in rural Vermont. Ms. Walp is represented by the Tibor de Nagy Gallery in NYC, where a show of her work is planned this fall.

In a recent conversation with the painter Stuart Shils, I mentioned my plans for this interview with Susan Walp and that I was troubled by the fact I’d never had the opportunity to see her work in person, only through reproduction. Stuart, who has stood in front of her paintings at great length over the years, said that he’d love to write a short introduction:

“The beauty of Susan’s paint narrative is really not visible via internet reproduction or even in well printed catalogs, because her moves don’t translate into reproduction, except vaguely. The slow, hypnotic seduction of her work is rooted within the wide range of ways that her brushes, knives, pencils, touch the canvas and how they all sit together to express a quality of observation characterized by passion and restraint. The immense sensuous appeal of Susan’s work is not about it’s subject matter, but instead with how and to what degree she has acted inventively, controlling and organizing painted space and the ways that our eyes move within it, using paint as a carefully shaped language with full bodied but delicate syntax.” …

“Among many people who care deeply about painting, Susan’s canvases are among the most respected, appreciated and coveted. A feast for the senses, there is an ironic and fascinating relationship between their size and the degree to which they hold our eyes. Although, “hold our eyes” is really an understatement. You cannot get your eyes out of one of these paintings and the deeper you enter, the more you realize what there is to see. At first glance these paintings reveal a humility and modest confidence, and when you begin to look closely, they really take your eyes with the compelling grip of a long dream.”

- Stuart Shils, 4/29/2012

In a 2007 Tibor de Nagy Gallery catalogue Stephan Westfall said:

“To look at her work is to have a conversation about the full history of painting up through the perceptual innovations of Modernism, and to find illumination in the realization that all the theory or historical imperative at one’s command still needs to be animated, or “charmed,” by sensibility. As a material awareness this is an intimate experience, one naturally suited to the physical scale of Walp’s painting, where we are invited to come close.”

Larry Groff:   What are some of your most important influences or events that lead you to become a still life painter?

Susan Jane Walp:   Probably the most important event was meeting up with Lennart Anderson in 1968 at a summer painting program run by Boston University’s School of Fine Arts in Lenox, MA. I was a student at Mount Holyoke College at the time and had enrolled in the B.U. program to make up classes that I had dropped due to an illness. There were too many students in the beginning section so a few of us had the good luck of being moved into the advanced class, taught by Lennart. I remember being so impressed by the seriousness and talent and training of the B.U. students…during the breaks they were reading Nietzsche and Camus…this was an entirely new world for me. It was a figure class and Lennart painted along with us. I recall he felt a bit guilty about this!—accepting a salary for a summer of painting. But nothing could have been more worthwhile for a young student of painting than to be painting by his side. By the end of the summer I had been transformed from an inward, ill, somewhat depressed and confused young woman into someone who had a purpose in life and an eagerness and confidence to move on and open more doors. At the end of the summer, Lennart recommended the New York Studio School, still in its infancy, as a next step for me. I did eventually go there, where I studied drawing with the other person who became an important lifelong teacher for me, Nicholas Carone. The Studio School was a wonderful experience, especially for drawing. I loved it there, I felt so at home, not only at the school itself, but also in the tenement neighborhood in the East Village where I lived.

Please read the rest of this lengthy and engaging interview at the Jerusalem Studio School blog.

A few days ago I made my decision to attend the Jerusalem Studio School Master Class Workshop in Civita Castellana, Italy this summer. I had previously been planning a trip to Jerusalem to attend the JSS landscape painting marathon where Antonio Lopez Garcia had been invited to teach his workshop this summer but regretfully his workshop was postponed and I happily opted for Italy instead.

I’m particularly excited about painting in the Civita Castellana area for its historical importance to landscape painters, especially Corot. This region, as the JSS states, “was a center of attraction to Corot, Turner, Granet, Michallon, Valenciennes, Bertin and the many others who came to paint not only in Civita, but the spectacular nearby sites such as Nepi, Castel Sant‘Elia, Calcata and Ronciglione. Other favored sites such as Papigno, Terni, Cascada del Marmore and Lago Piediluco are just to the north. In short, a painters dream.” I’ve put up additional images and information about Corot’s painting in Civita towards the end of this article. I will add further information and images as I get the time. In the interests of full disclosure, I should state that I recently started working as an editor with the JSS blog (concurrent with this blog) I recently interviewed the still life painter Susan Jane Walp that will be posted very soon and is a terrific read.

This year the JSS Master Class, which involves an application process, is directed by Israel Hershberg. Additional faculty this year are Yael Scalia, and the 2012 JSS Master Class Guest of Honor E.M. Saniga. Information about E.M. Saniga can be read here. There are also a number of affiliate teachers, many whom I’ve interviewed here on Painting Perceptions, at this summer program who I will give more information later in this article.

Attendees will be staying at The Relais Falisco, a 4 star hotel in the center of the old town of Civita, and is part of the the famous French chain of Relais hotels. The hotel has 3 conference rooms that will be available for meetings and slide talks, a fitness center, outdoor patio and a restaurant. I also looked on google maps (google maps has a “street view” for much of the town) and the hotel is in close walking distance to many spectacular views of the old town and countryside.

The JSS states on their website for this Italian workshop:

“The “JSS in Civita” Italy summer program offers students and artists the possibility of an incomparable engagement with the history of art, its idioms, pictorial conceptions, methods, materials and techniques. The direct experience of Italy’s boundless artistic heritage has the ability to nurture artistic understanding, skill and life-long inspiration.” … “A divine haven for artists, the JSS in Civita summer program offers an artistic experience of a lifetime.”

View of Civita

View of Civita

Lennart Anderson giving me a critique at the Certosa

My previous experience with the JSS Master Class a couple of summers ago near Siena, at the Certosa di Pontignano, left a profound impact on my work. Responding to fantastic light over the awe-inspiring Tuscan countryside while getting feedback from some of the greatest landscape painters working today pushed my work much further along than would have been possible otherwise. It was truly one of my most memorable life events.

I often awoke before dawn, wide awake and ramped up to get in a painting before breakfast. Painting in a place, like the Certosa or Civita where I can more readily achieve a higher level of concentration makes a big difference in moving forward with my work. Being free from the distractions and responsibilities of the outside world and to just be focusing on the work opens oneself to fresh, new possibilites; both seeing the motif as well looking at my own painting. Of course, the overwhelming beauty of a place like Civita alone won’t guarantee coming home with a bunch of great paintings but it will likely open up my mind to new pictorial possibilites and new considerations about how to make better paintings.

I’m also looking forward to chilling out at the dinner table, eating fabulous local Italian food, often picked or caught in the surrounding area, with the other painters. At the Certosa when we weren’t too burnt out to talk, there would often be fascinating stories and conversation from painters from all over the world, many of whom were mature, accomplished artists already.

View of Civita

View of Civita

I can’t begin to convey how excited and thrilled I am to again return to Italy and reconnect with these great people, advice, inspiration and beauty – in all its permutations and manifestations.

View of Civita

There will be opportunities for close one on one discussion and feedback about your work in progress with the workshop leaders during the course of the day as well as group discussion and critiques. There are plenty of meetings of students and teachers during the meals along with planned slide talks, art lectures and group outings.

However, If you’re like me and need to occasionally get some down-time and be off on your own, it is easily managed. You are free to go wherever you want over the weekend and Rome is only an hour or so away by train where you can quickly find respite sitting front of a Caravaggio or Michelangelo. Also nearby towns and locations are other famed landscape sites such as Narni (where Corot painted his famous “Bridge at Narni” that is painting perceptions banner image.

The workshop is set up to be in blocks of two, four or six weeks of study. If for some reason you rather paint still lifes or the figure, a studio spaces are planned to be available at the local art school as well painting after daylight hours.

There are a number of group trips planned: the Piero della Francesca Tour of Arezzo, San Sepolcro & Urbino, Rome, Florence, and Bologna. A planned trip to Naples is also in the works. I’ve been told there are still opening available but since this will be a popular program it is recommended to start the registration process as soon as possible.

Of course the expense won’t be easy, especially in today’s economic uncertainties. But the way I see it; as far as I know, I’m only here this once and want to make the best of it. This workshop, if I make the best use of it, will enhance my skill and vision even more and perhaps help advance my career as a painter and make it all a worthwhile investment. (at the very least this is what I’ll be putting down when I write the expenses off on my tax forms next year!)

Some information about the JSS Master Workshop Faculty as well as a few quotes:

Israel Hershberg

Israel Hershberg was born in 1948 in a Displaced Persons camp in Linz, Austria. In 1949 he emigrated to Israel with his family and in 1958 moved with them to the United States, where he attended the Brooklyn Museum School in New York. He received his Bachelor of Fine Arts from the Pratt Institute, Brooklyn, and his M.F.A. from the State University of New York in Albany. He then taught at the Maryland Institute College of Art and the New York Academy of Art. His awards include: the Sandberg prize for Israel Art, 1991; and the Tel-Aviv Museum Prize for Israel Art, 1997. His work has been exhibited in museums and galleries internationally. He is currently represented by the Marlborough Gallery in NYC, which is widely recognized as one of the world’s leading contemporary art dealers. Mr. Hershberg lives and works in Jerusalem and is founder and artistic director of the Jerusalem Studio School

“C-Spot- Papigno,” 2005-2006, oil on linen mounted on wood, 20.3 x 26.5 cm

“Todi From Afar”, 2009, oil on linen mounted on wood, 8 3/4 x 15 3/4 in., 22.2 x 40 cm

From Art Daily.org in a review of a 2009 review of Israel Hershberg’s show at the Marlborough Gallery in Chelsea, NYC stated:

The landscapes are framed to accentuate quite consciously the great distance, hence the subtitle From Afar. But this word has additional meaning since in Hebrew “afar” is quite literally dust. This exploration of the raw matter of the landscape and of landscape painting – dirt or earth – is a central fascination for the artist who describes it as “very primal – the stuff of creation.” And as is visible in centuries of Italian landscapes from the background in Leonardo’s Mona Lisa onwards, Hershberg’s paintings are suffused with the atmospheric perspective created by these dusty valleys. As he notes, “All that dust in the aria hangs over everything, defining a seemingly endless nothingness into a measured and felt diaphanous volume of ether that starts where the eye begins to see.”

Yael Scalia

Yael Scalia was born in New York City and studied at the Rhode Island School of Design and the Maryland Institute, College of Art. She has lived and worked in Jerusalem since 1984 and is married to Israel Hershberg. She is currently represented by the Rothschild Fine Art in Tel Aviv, Israel and previously with the Ice Gallery, New York. Her work is included in numerous public and private collections internationally. I had an interview with her recently which you can read here.
From the interview with Yael Scalia:

“Structure is essential; I need to have a very strong sense of the skeleton of the painting and of the big movements from the start. Color, the rightness of the relationships, makes or breaks the painting. Color needs to be beautiful, but also so precise in the context of its relationship to the other colors. If a painting lacks color richness and harmony it is simply humdrum. When I look at great paintings, I’m always impressed by the sense of absolute necessity, inevitability, of one color next to another; it simply couldn’t have been any other way. The strong sense of the reality of a painting is the correctness of its color. It’s really what determines whether a painting is compelling. If I manage to create a harmony and a degree of believability, that’s very gratifying.

The abstract elements of a motif and its pattern of dark and light have to be very clear to me. Shapes need to be wonderful. I like to manipulate shapes for composition, and am drawn by the emotive power of shape. The genius of the Sienese painters in their control of shape has become a preoccupation. Figure/ground ambivalence is something that’s becoming increasingly interesting to me, and I expect will absorb me more with time. Over the past few years I’ve become more interested in a certain tension between the abstract qualities of the surface and the elements of the picture. However, I’m pretty sure I don’t really want to be an abstract painter – I have a desire to depict the world around me, as Albert York said, “put it into a design.” I find it interesting when a painting makes us notice the abstract, non-objective qualities of objects. “

Lud Street, Jerusalem

E.M. Sangia, 2012 JSS Master Class Guest-of-Honor

From an interview on the JSS Blog

I paint all of life – at least my life – but I don’t want to be adamant about anything in art. Honestly, one can’t, because there are no rules about what to paint or how to paint. It all is so artist dependent.
Can you imagine someone telling Corot that his range was limited?
When I make a painting it seems it may be because of some sensation; this can seem very old fashioned with its echoes of romanticism. Or it could be that something is just plain interesting and doesn’t involve one’s self, sort of like what T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound did as writers. Or even something else which I can’t pinpoint. Someone told me that Stravinsky argued that the highest level of appreciation of music is when you just appreciate it for itself, not for an emotion. Or something like that!
Representational painting is so old fashioned anyway, but we still do it in spite of the resistance to it in today’s world of art.
Its purpose may have to do with Oscar Wilde’s claim that nature follows art, or that it is the job of the artist to explain nature to the viewer. But I really don’t know.
I haven’t thought of the role of ego? Maybe Francis Bacon was right when he said it is perhaps vanity that drives artists.
Taking all of this together you can see for me at least, that there is a world of uncertainty in art, and that ranges from what to paint to how to paint to trying to decide when something is done. Maybe that uncertainty is some of the allure of art.

CIVITA CASTELLANA AND ENVIRONS

Civita Castellana, a medieval fortified town, lies north of Rome on the ancient
via Flaminia. The town, and nearby Castel Sant’Elia and Nepi, which belong to
the same geological formation, provided an ideal subject for Corot. Close by,
to the southeast, is the unmistakable profile of Mount Soracte, a subject of poetry
from Virgil to Byron. The town itself sits on a narrow plateau; from it, cliffs
descend two hundred feet to quiet brooks, which nourish dense thickets of
bushes and trees. From almost any point of view the rectilinear cliffs, decorated
here and there with clumps of foliage, present majestic silhouettes.

Corot made two campaigns at Civita Castellana, the first in May and June I
when his mature style was just beginning to develop, the second in September
and October 1827, when he was in full possession of his powers. Because it is not
always possible to attribute a given study confidently to one campaign or the
other, and because Corot’s total production at Civita Castellana is especially
revealing of his working method, I will consider the two campaigns together.
Arriving in mid-May 1826 for a stay of six or seven weeks, Corat did not
immediately discover the artistic potential of the cliffs, which later would become
his principal subject. He began by painting and drawing rather conventional
topographical views, in conception not dissimilar to his Palatine studies
March. 68 As if to provide a topographical survey, he wandered from one n
of the town to the other, recording general vistas and the major landmarks. He
also painted a series of broad panoramas of the Sabine mountains to the ea r an
southeast, and several variants of Mount Soracte’s serrated silhouette rising
above the flat plain.

p184-5
From:
Corot in Italy: Open-Air Painting and the Classical-Landscape Tradition
Peter Galassi
Yale University Press
1991
(PLEASE NOTE: If you purchase this book from the link below you Painting Perceptions will get a small percentage of the sale which will help keep this site alive and likely buy me a gelato or two this summer!)

An essential and perhaps the definitive book on Corot’s outdoor paintings in Italy is Corot in Italy: Open-Air Painting and the Classical-Landscape Tradition by Peter Galassi This book is also out of print but used copies are also currently available on Amazon.com

I have used my copy of this book as if it were part inspirational guide, part textbook over the years. Perhaps my most worn and valuable art book.
Here are what a couple of reviewers had to say about this book…

“Beautifully produced. . . . Galassi has assembled a formidable range of facts and new insights for this detailed examination of Corot’s first, and most important, visit to Italy in 1825-8. In doing so he has uncovered a wealth of illustrative material (much of it previously unpublished). . . . Galassi’s book deserves unrestrained praise. It probes far more deeply into Corot’s most impressive period than any previous study of the artist. It is also essential reading for anyone interested in landscape painting.”—Michael Clarke, Apollo Magazine

“Our view of nineteenth-century French painting may never be the same. . . . Corot in Italy is plentifully and beautifully illustrated, with many near-life-sized details that make Corot’s firm touch as evident as reproductions can. A delight to look at, Corot in Italy is also a delight to read—lucid, intelligent, and blissfully free of jargon, Galassi has a gift for the telling phrase and—a scarce commodity these days—clearheaded discussion. . . . Corot in Italy is on of the best, most absorbing new books on art I’ve come across in a long time.”—Karen Wilkin, New Criterion

JSS Summer Affiliate Groups

(for more info please see this link)

July 29-August 12, 2012 “Capturing the Light” with Elana Hagler

July 15-29, 2012 “Color in the Landscape” with Erin Raedeke

July 15-29, 2012 “The Plasticity of Space” with Brian Rego

July 29-August 12, 2012 with Emil Robinson

July 30-August 13, 2012 with Sigal Tsabari

July 29-August 12, 2012 with Amir Rubin

Interview with Gillian Pederson-Krag by Elana Hagler

I’ve been aware of Gillian Pederson-Krag’s work for a number of years, but finding good images of her paintings and etchings online was very difficult, which is why I was especially excited to discover the new monograph of her work covering the years 1970 -2011. The book not only includes great reproductions of her evocatively colored and enigmatically composed landscapes, interiors and still-lifes, but also includes a group of her essays, collectively titled “Reflections on Painting.” I found her writing, touching on the subjects of “why we paint,” “what we paint,” drawing, color, unity and the purpose of art, as compelling as the images of her work. I hope that this interview can help elaborate on her insights as well as introduce new people to work that I have found and continue to find so inspiring.

Elana Hagler: Whereas I read your landscapes and still-lifes as primarily visual, formal delights, many of your figure compositions seem to have more invention to them and also a very strong mythical, archetypical component to them. Could you speak to the different roles that these genres fulfill for you?

Gillian Pederson-Krag Still-life and Landscape paintings seem to originate from what I am observing. The figure paintings appear to come from some kind of imaginative concept, but if I look closely, they all seem to spring from feelings I carry around with me.

It has struck me often that when I go out to paint the landscape, I always have the idea that I will be finding something new, that I will be surprised. And certainly there is an element of surprise in the nature, but it is far more the case that I recognize what I want to paint because it is akin to something that I feel and already know in some way. It is as though I am projecting onto the nature as much as I am perceiving it—remembering it as much as looking at it for the first time. This is even more the case with still-life objects. I start with observation, but I already have an idea even before I arrange the objects I am looking at. And the objects are old friends, as I generally paint the same cast of characters over and over again.

Still Life, Oil on Canvas, 18” x 17” 2007 Collection: Michael and Harriet Eisman, Lodi, NY

Two Performers, Oil on Canvas, 22” x 24”, 1981 Innes Collection, Charlottesville, VA

The figure paintings begin in an entirely different way. They are projects that require a lot of research, and I rarely if ever start from observation. They are all from secondary sources; drawings, memory, photos, imagination. All these sources have different kinds of realities, but in spite of this, it is possible to unify the painting because in the end, they all have to serve the image that is in my mind’s eye.

So these two kinds of painting start from different places, but as time has gone by, I feel less and less of a distinction between my perception of the outside world and the more transient images of my imaginative inner world. It all seems to be made of the same mysterious stuff.

EH:

Your work has a striking sense of unity to it. In your essay on unity, you write:

“What makes a painting meaningful is the spectacle of the ordinary content living together with the equally important life of the picture plane and the unity of the whole surface. I actually think that this phenomenon is attractive and satisfying because it reflects a feeling that we all have a kind of nostalgia for – the notion that life is somehow meaningful and that while we are indeed separate, we continually seek out ways of discovering situations which will allow us to feel part of a larger whole.”

Pg. 24

You point to “teachers of non-duality” such as Joseph Campbell and Francis Lucille as being very influential. How do you feel that reading has influenced your painting? And do you feel that the act of painting over time has given you insights into the world, human nature and spirituality?

GPK: My study of non-duality has had a profound effect on my life in general and given me a source of self-acceptance, an alternative to approaching life with a sense of competition, and has been a real source of inspiration. So in this sense, it has made me more available to painting, just as it has made me more available to life in general. But what has been very interesting to me is to discover that my experience in the studio has allowed me to come to some understanding of the principles of non-duality.

A basic theme of non-duality is that we live in a world of apparently separate objects, but under this separation, everything is part of a larger whole. I actually feel that I, like a lot of painters, am attracted—indeed, addicted to the studio experience—because the process of describing separate objects on the canvas, and then finding some way through the craft to unify the surface, is a wonderful metaphor for this great truth. Something in us knows that we live on two different levels: the level of the narrative of our lives—events, objects, feelings, ideas that are “separate”—those come and go. And another level, which is somehow whole, that witnesses all these changes: that is our true nature. When we see this represented symbolically in painting as the awareness of the picture plane, and the level of the narrative, we are moved because something in us recognizes these two very basic kinds of reality that make up the fabric of our lives.

Landscape, Oil on Canvas, 18” x 22”, 2000 Innes Collection, Charlottesville, VA

Landscape, Oil on Canvas, 18” x 22”, 1989 Collection: Hobart and Wm. Smith College, Geneva, NY

EH: Is painting a meditative activity for you?

My current understanding is that meditation is a technique that can help move us past our constructed sense of ego (the fear-based self) into our true nature which is essentially love. If it is understood this way, then painting can certainly be seen as a kind of meditation.

For instance, I may appear to be handling life and look like I have my act together but in truth, inwardly, it is often the case that I am struggling with the stress of feeling that I will disappoint myself or that I will not fulfill my expectations or what I imagine are the expectations of others. At the root of all this is the fear of rejection and the bitter sense of being separate. Call it the survival instinct; it is the nagging inner voice that continually worries about how I am going to manage to get along in the world.

I go into the studio with these feelings often floating around in my head but then I finally notice some object or other in one of the still life set ups and it looks strange or interesting or captivating. Then I am pulled into painting by my feeling of curiosity and fascination with what I have seen. I experience the phenomenon that I have tried to describe in my book; a kind of self-forgetfulness as my attention narrows down to the canvas and the experience of looking at the still-life and the awareness of my hand with the brush in it, moving back and forth. I don’t know if I could call it love, it is more like a deep sense of connectedness with everything. After a couple of hours or whenever it comes to a conclusion, I always have a feeling of renewal which seems similar to what people have told me they experience in meditation.

Everyone has some way, or many ways which release them from fear – very often through the loving relationships in their lives. I also have many ways but I am grateful that I also have the experience in the studio where my fear of being separate just gets dissolved by my engagement with painting.

Seascape, Oil on Canvas, 16” x 18”, 1983 Collection: David Benn, Stevenson, MD

Landscape, Oil on Canvas, 16” x 18”, 1990

Woman with a Piece of Yellow Silk, Oil on Canvas, 20” x 21”, 1998, Private Collection

Statue of Persephone, 12.25” x 13.75”, 2002

Landscape, 11.25” x 12.25”, 2001

EH: Could you expand upon the idea of narrative in your paintings?

GPK: For me, the notion of the narrative just refers to content in general, my narrative is the way I answer the question “what shall I paint?” This is not really as straightforward a question as it seems, though, it has many layers. On one level, it is the name of an object: an apple, a figure, an interior. But I also have to have a feeling sense about what kind of reality I want to see: the reality of sense experience? Dream reality? A somewhat stylized or abstracted reality? And of course these are not questions that I can answer with words; they are all issues that only get resolved through working in the studio. And like everything else about painting, it seems to change and grow over time as I also evolve.

Still Life, Oil on Canvas, 18” x 19”, 2005, Private Collection

Seascape, Oil on Canvas, 16” x 18”, 1993, Private Collection

Monopoly, Oil on Canvas, 21” x 24”, 1998, Private Collection

EH: What advice do you have for young painters?

GPK: I don’t really have any advice for anyone else. When I put the book together – which is a collection of the ideas about painting that have been the most useful to me over the years, I did it not so much to offer advice as to offer myself as a companion. I had the idea that others who are like minded and traveling on their own might come across it and benefit from feeling reassured that their emerging point of view was shared and reinforced by someone else. It seemed the best way to respond to the fact that I have found friends and kindred spirits hidden in books in the past and discovering that they are out there has been enormously helpful.

Seascape, Oil on Canvas, 16” x 21”, 2010

Seascape, Oil on Canvas, 17” x 16”, 1999, Private Collection

Landscape, 9.5” x 10.25”, 1981

Winter, 8.25 x 9.25”, 2001

Video of Gillian Pederson-Krag’s artist’s talk at a book reception

Gillian Pederson-Krag Book Reception Talk from Mark Scorelle on Vimeo.

Gillian Pederson-Krag Link to Gross McCleaf Gallery
Artist Profile in Outdoor Painter Magazine
Link to Larson Publications to order and more information regarding her Gillian Pederson-Krag Paintings and Etchings 1970-2011, published in 2012

Gillian Pederson-Krag grew up in N.Y.C. and went to the Rhode Island School of Design where she received a B.F.A. in 1961. In 1963 she received an M.F.A. from Cornell University where she later taught painting and drawing from 1966 to 1979. As a visiting critic, she has been to the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, Indiana University, Boston University, Maryland Institute College of Art among other schools. She has had several one person shows at the Hackett-Freedman Gallery in San Francisco, as well as the Johnson Museum in Ithaca, N.Y., The Hood Museum, Hanover, N.H., and the Southern Vermont Arts Center. Her work is represented in the permanent collections of the M.H.de Young Museum, San Francisco, the Clark Institute, Williamstown, Mass., the Memorial Art Gallery, Rochester, N.Y.., the Heckscher Museum, Huntington, N.Y., the Library of Congress Print Collection and the N.Y. Public Library Print Collection.

Stuart Shils in Conversation With Nikolai Fox

March 2012, in advance of an exhibition at steven harvey fine art projects, April 26 – May 27, 2012

Nikolai Fox is a Philadelphia based photographer, painter, musician, and filmmaker. You can find out more about him at his website, http://www.nikolaifox.net/

photos courtesy of nikolai fox, jesse freedman and stuart shils

Nikolai Fox: So last time we were talking, we were discussing a kind of a struggle related to pulling away from previous ideas you had about making a painting and the idea that there’s no way you can escape the kind of life that you’ve lived to this point in front of previous paintings and your involvement with the history of painting.

Stuart Shils Yes, well you can never really escape from anything, you just learn and re learn how to carry who you are and what you have, and translate that into what you want to be. You go to school and learn how to do this and that and you see what others have done and you go to art school and learn a way of doing things and go out into the world expecting or looking for some kind of “success”, whatever that means, and you construct a world based on intellectual understanding and in time you explain to yourself who you are.

And then, one day something happens and you realize that the explanation of who you are really doesn’t work anymore because you had an experience or saw or felt something or had a complex layering of experiences and you admit to yourself that something might have to change. And if you are going to be honest with yourself, the way you proceed can be very difficult because you might have to turn yourself inside out or upside down. But does it mean you have to throw away everything that you were? Of course not, but when we confront the unknown or the prospect of change, the road can be perilous. Also, I like the leaving home analogy, how do we leave home – gracefully with optimism and a dreamy head, with fear, or like first learning to drive a stick shift, with many lurches and stalls?

NF: It seems like there is a work ethic in these paintings, where you’re pushing on everything you’ve ever known and thought about and felt and there’s an incorporation in each piece of all those struggles and an attempt to move forward and keep from being stale.

SS: SS The path we are trying to make and to stay on is to work and to follow that internal, flickering meter of response, intuitively, and at the same time to be aware of the intellectualized/analytical mind and history; and concurrently, pushing it all away. But where is that other place, how do you get into your gut or whatever part of your body your impulses come from, that you feel with, how do you get access to that? How do you dig your nails and hands into the pay dirt? That place is not in the intellect, it’s something else and you have to go out there as a foot soldier ready for battle and willing to risk desperation. Because you are not going to find the answer by making libations at the altar of your intellect or at the alter of history with a rare 1952 Chateau Lafite. it doesn’t work.

Stuart Shils in his studio

I have to forget all that and follow some…., I don’t even know what to call it, I don’t know what to call that place from which I know the answer comes. It’s a place that I can only sense and I’m connecting there as each painting comes into focus. It’s a place where like you’re biting into an animal not even fully dead and blood is coming out and if you’re honest it can be pretty scary. That pink painting over there, the one on the end of the shelf, I don’t know how I made that. It’s coming from an internal conversation with myself but also it’s coming from being out of doors for many years with the sensory sails hoisted, from the long conversation with many observations and considerations of things in the visible world even if they were only absorbed peripherally. And when you’re working “out there”, your job is not imitating what’s there, you’re trying to bring it all inside of yourself and beat your way into an interior place where it can get cooked up. And how all of this is going to come to the surface, how it’s all going to work out remains to be seen.
All of these paintings are rooted in sensation; like that painting:

Leaving Rome, Early Evening, Late Summer, 30×40 inches

I’m leaving Rome on a bus in the early evening, and I’m sitting next to a very good friend and we’re deep in a conversation mulling over our experiences around the city that afternoon, walking around and going into the Palazzo Massimo, and we’re settled into the bus talking and I get a glimpse of the city as we’re passing out of it, in the last, overheated gasp of light. I didn’t have time to make a drawing, I just saw it out of the corner of my eye in the midst of talking to my friend. I carried that all year until I sat down two months ago and tried to pull some form of it out of my memory.

Fresco Walls at Palazzo Massimo

NF: So is it something that was really in the depths of your memory? I’m thinking about the analogy you made a minute ago about how it’s not necessary to push things to the bottom of the ocean. When you said that I immediately thought of the cave paintings and the recent documentary (Cave of Forgotten Dreams) that Herzog did and the kind of physical journey that these modern people have to take to get into this cave to see the paintings. I wonder about the kind of physical journey that the cave artists had to take to get to this place where they would make them. It seems like if they were going into the depths of the cave in order to scribe these images onto the walls that there was some kind of intuitive feeling that it was necessary to bury this expression or to go deep into the earth and place it in the depths. Perhaps they were doing things on the surface also that we don’t have because time has worn them away, we can’t make any assumptions and of course maybe the caves were not so deep as now. And now we have – this week – James Cameron, one of the richest and craziest filmmakers in the world, going 35,000 feet down into the ocean to take pictures because we want to know what is in the pockets of our existence that we cant reach physically. And so in a sense this memory that’s coming back to you that is a glimpse, you’re saying it sat with you for so long and I’m curious, was it buried at times or was it always just screaming at you and finally you let it out.

SS: Well you’ve both posed and answered a deep question. In a way we no longer have to go into that earth cave because (pointing to the head) this is also the cave. Our heads, our memories, our experiences, everything we’ve absorbed and constructed, this is what Freud re opened for us, he was like the Maître De or the Sommelier, he had both the wine list and he brought us in and opened up that interior door, put on the light and got us settled. All painters are not siting outside painting exactly what they see, but neither was Corot. Art is invention, so let’s not think he was making literal inventory lists and anyway, what is literal and how much information does one provide? When I was a student I remember there were the people who worked from “life” and then those who worked from the “imagination”. But in a way, really, what is the difference and what’s the inter relationship?

The thing that I’ve been dangling in front of myself in the last couple of years has been the prospect of understanding how to work in the studio accessing memory and just what is that, what does “memory” mean? So we’re calling this show The Residue of Memory. When I had that sensation while on the bus leaving Rome at the very end of the day with the last gasp of warm light on the city and I was talking with my friend in the middle of a deep conversation. I was not thinking “Oh, this is an art moment.” We have many moments and most of them just sit on the shelf. The thing is, how do we get to them later and then how do we paint them when they are not right before our eyes? How do we get back into those moments?

Drawings and Collages

Often it’s by drawing, like the ones behind your head on the studio wall. Often I’ll return to them, and the same with those collages, I’ll put them up as peripheral but significant reference, as a way of taking myself back to a memory resonance; and it’s fascinating to me what even simple linear movements on a page can offer as far as recall, aide – memoire. None of these paintings are descriptions of specific places, they are evocations of the feeling of place, and drawings help establish ledges of concrete footing that contribute to the improvisational development of the forms in the studio. It’s a very different process than before.

NF: Are you sure about how different the place is? There’s something really interesting about what you just said because I think about the work I know from looking at reproductions and seeing it since I met you 12 years ago. The size, the way they’ve grown in physical size over the years is really interesting. Especially as you make the point that this show is about or called The Residue of Memory, because it defines for me, or suggests, where that place is.

You told me that in the years after you left school the small scale was a really important thing to you. Small size I mean. And now the title of the show is a very clear pinning of the priority of the internal landscape as opposed to going out and looking at things. But the influence of the external landscape is so strong and this is bigger than I’ve seen you work. It’s like an eruption of color and size. Is there anything about that that you have a clear thought about? Like the way that the size of the paintings has gotten bigger? Do you think there’s any connection between the power of memory and the buildup of looking for so long and saying well now I’m going to approach paintings from memory?

SS: Great point. I never really considered the relationship between the power of the memory to the size of the canvas. But now I want them to be even bigger, twice the size of that red one, maybe 40’’ by 70’’. I’m ready because there is something just delicious about not only seeing the color smeared out on this size but there’s something about that size and the use of materials and the physical presence of a brush stroke or a mark that in a way I find liberating in terms of the reality of the paint is taking over, separate from what it is describing. And of course, what is it describing, or what is any painting describing, if not only itself. Each one of these paintings even though it (hopefully) looks very fresh on the surface, underneath is a tormented sequence of many moves, many marks; they’ve gone through so many stages. And along the way I’m getting very worked up, threating them, like I’m going to beat the crap out of them, you know just getting so angry and unleashing a storm of emotion that brings many, many changes. .

Detail of End of a Sumer Day, Last Blast of Warm Light, Looking Back

NF: And if the painting is smaller you can see the edge of the image very clearly. And as the painting gets bigger at a certain point it’s so big that you wont see the edge. If you stand in front of a 20 foot by 20 foot painting and you’re close enough, you’re entire visual experience is inside the painting and when you shut your eyes and see only with our mind’s eye, there’s no edge to the imagery that is generated by our imagination and memory.

SS: Well that’s an important observation and doing these has given me a completely different handle on how to read a painting. I’ve been using the camera on my phone as a viewfinder all year. What the lens does is it pushes the image back, away from us, so we see it differently. The distinctive optical fact of camera is that with a lens you can see whatever you are looking at, all at once. I can’t see a painting all at once with my eyes, it’s physically and optically impossible, unless it’s really small or far away. We talked about this the other day. How when I look at that,

A Giotto in small reproduction

I can see the related pattern of shapes and colors, all at once. But when I look at a painting this size, like the one on the wall, 30 x 40, I can’t see it all at once. I have to look at that part or that part or that part, except, when I hold up my phone and I look at it through the camera because in the camera everything gets pushed back, flattened and can been seen in the lens as a unity – like a flash, it reads as a pattern, like on Google maps and you’re looking down on the earth from above.

NF: Last time I was here we talked about what is important about a diptych as opposed to a “real” painting. You were saying that people in the past were critical of the diptych, they said why not just make one canvas, who does this? But there are important things about the role of the two images as they come together and what that line in the middle does to your head as you look at it.

glorious afternoon with so many surprises, 20×40 inches

SS: I don’t think the line in the middle has to be seen (as some people have stated) as an awkward divider. Because in fact, that line proposes some kind of game, a visual game and in a way is a witness to some things. These are physically two separate canvases but they exist as a single image, together as one, but it also breaks down into two separate parts each with its own contribution. For me what’s interesting is that that vertical line is also a separator and the world on this side is confined within those edges and the world on this side is confined within those edges. Yet curiously they also live together, but when you look at the composition and geometry of this side, it’s a completely different story than the composition and geometry of this side.

NF: I don’t think you necessarily have to explain it with words either, I mean it’s a very difficult thing to explain with words because you obviously wouldn’t be doing it if it didn’t play some kind of important role that you either wanted to struggle against or support.

SS: Right. But I’ve had to explain it in words because people say what is this, who puts two canvases together?

NF: And you can’t just say it’s a diptych?

SS: No you can’t just say it’s a diptych. I had an exhibition of paintings 4 or 5 years ago and in the catalog they edited out the separation between the two canvases, as if that division was some kind of mistake. The thing is it would be nice to just put away all the words but people always say things so you have to explain things back to them.

NF: Well do you? I always feel frustrated when people ask me about visual work that I’ve made, or music. Why would you be trying to address the issues and struggles that the medium of paint presents with words?

SS: I feel with painting that all you can really do is go to the edge of the sea, take your clothes off, jump in and start swimming. You know you can’t stand there and put your toe in, slowly, etc. You just have to swim. I often think, “Why am I wasting my words, like why even bother, they’re not going to understand anyway?” Yet, at the same time you can use words. I mean, you must try to use words with precision to help someone who doesn’t get it, to learn how to be a better reader. I think it’s possible to use words almost as stones in a garden. You put down slates in the garden to get from the front to the back without having to walk on the flowers or vegetables. But at the end of the day painting is not about words at all nor about the verbal intellect, it is much more for the senses. You just have to be aware of the fact that your point in using words is to take someone to the shore and then to let go of their hands and say bye, bye I’ll meet you for a coffee at 2:30, see you. And then they’re on their own. And that’s it!

Years ago just after 9-11 when my Irish paintings had become atmospherically incomprehensible for some people, I knew a collector who couldn’t figure out why I was abandoning where I had solidly stood and the place that he liked in my work, and he said to me something like “especially in times of economic difficulty, we want paintings that reinforce our understanding of the world as we already know it, and I thought, oh my God… I don’t want paintings that reinforce anything except the imperative and fun of exploration. I want art to be like a playground and like a frontier. Where else can you have fun and explore – in the corporate boardroom, at the bank?

NF: Well it’s wanting something to lead you to something new and to give you hope right?

SS: Right, to open up a new place of wonder and that’s the beauty of all kinds of art especially the kinds that we don’t know and is perhaps or can be, difficult. Think of the possibility of getting connected to a new way of seeing, a new way of hearing, a new understanding a kind of art that maybe I didn’t like before that I’ve come to understand. I didn’t always like Agnes Martin or Gorescki, or Guston or Morton Feldman. And not that many years ago I didn’t know the work of Sheila Hicks, James Bishop and even Conrad Marca – Relli. Now, I can’t imagine not knowing that work. We try very hard at opening ourselves up to new experiences and to indulge the senses in different forms than those that are familiar.

NF: It’s the point of the experience.

SS: That’s the point of experience. And that’s what life is all about in a way. Not, making more money or buying another suit and being able to say “Well I have another Armani.” I went with my son Gideon to see that fantastic piece that Richard Serra installed in Gagosian Chelsea, Junction/Cycle, and you go into this gallery space and it was that snake like piece with the tilted walls and once you’re in there for like a minute you don’t know where you are. He’s completely shifted, erased and transformed your understanding of what it’s like to be on this planet.

NF: Well he’s riffing on the labyrinth.

SS: In the most brilliant way. And he’s used these heavy metal walls that feel like they’re made from silk underpants. The material is so beautiful and massive yet seemingly without weight at the same time, and they’re tilted and quite high and he’s taking you through a disorientingly, provocative narrative of movement. And a minute and a half later you don’t know where you are. Where else can this happen except in art? And who cannot go into that installation and not come out screaming with delight? It was the same with the Orange Gates. When Christo opened the Orange Gates, I remember reading a sour, depressing critic in the New York Observer who was saying they were an “unforgiveable defacement” and a desecration. Come on, that installation provided us with one great urban playground experiences, pure exuberance, and asked us to reopen our consideration of the dimensions of possibility within art.

NF: What you said a minute ago about the way you couldn’t imagine using cadmium red and certain things in the past that now are exactly what you need to be doing is really interesting and that relates to what you brought up about Sera and the feeling of the labyrinth and the way you lose yourself and, that something you look for in work is the way that it can take you away from what you expect. And it seems to me that the relationship with painting that you have is one in which you establish a certain parameter that’s just at the edge of understanding and then you head for the edge. The task of art is something that slowly pushes back that veil so that it’s pulling you into places that you don’t understand; but in a way you can enter those places you don’t understand with an understanding of how to be open to it and how to let it be an empowering experience instead of being something that makes you afraid. To me that seems like one of the most basic and important roles of art. It’s a shame when people only look at things that don’t challenge them because it’s important for us to grow and move past the things that we’re afraid of.

I remember seeing a Bonnard show when I was 20 like 1998 at the MOMA, right? I didn’t get it at the time. I liked a couple things, but now, years later I still look through the catalog and I’m totally in awe and I wish I could go back. My father said you have to see this show and I walked around and I looked at everything because I understood that by being engaged in painting and being engaged in art that one of my jobs was to push myself emotionally and psychologically and to look at people who were considered masters even if I didn’t get it. To stand in front of the painting and to look at everything I could look at and let it hit me in as many ways as possible so that maybe it would open me up and take me into these places I was curious about.

Bonnard

SS: I saw that show, it was the one John Elderfield did at MOMA. I had seen another show of Bonnard at the Phillips in the early 80’s, and I went with a school friend of mine who hated it, and I could feel those colors calling to me but I couldn’t find the road in given my academic education, and with the context of his contempt, I hated it also. I couldn’t even begin to comprehend Bonnard when I left school. But then the show at MOMA in 1998 hit me like a ton of bricks, so exquisitely beautiful. I was at a point ’98 where qualities of understanding were starting to open up for me on the Irish coast, my work was changing, and that show just wiped me out. I remember thinking though, “What am I going do with this?” I mean, it was like feeling color for the first time, not understanding color, but feeling it. This is a beautiful thing about a retrospective. Having all that work together. I could feel the radiation from the color coming into my body. And it’s like I wanted to take somebody and kiss them, I was that worked up.

NF: What was the difference do you think in where you were coming from when you saw it the first time when you said you hated it?

SS: Experience. You know that what a painting can mean to you at one time is not what it’s going to mean to you at another time. This is why we must have ourselves in front of paintings all the time because it takes years. You know with someone like Poussin, I’ve gone through a very long, complicated conversation. Loving him in school, hating him when I left, not looking for 20 years. Now I’m in love with him again but in very different ways. I’m not looking towards Poussin as a model for how to paint and I don’t need him to be something that he isn’t. I really don’t think that those masters and it doesn’t really matter which masters – Poussin, Piero, Matisse, Bonnard – they don’t want us to make paintings that look like theirs in appearance, really. The lines of interest in all of them are much deeper than surface.

Bonnard and Poussin

And the other thing is that everything you were saying about fear and discovery and the unknown – that if you’re really engaged in painting, you have to submit yourself to the possibility that … well let’s go back even another step, that if you’re really honest with yourself.. and I guess everyone is honest in a different way so I can’t talk about other people, but one of the things I’ve learned from this whole procedure of making these paintings is that… making these really threw me into a different kind of encounter with fear. Because these are larger oil paintings and they’ve been done over a long period of time, many, many days and I had absolutely no idea what I was doing. And the fear factor (as I began working and asking myself what am I doing and trying to find a footing), put my head through some very complicated places. But then I began to really enjoy that and to recognize that this is exactly where I want to be, in this place where I don’t have a footing or concrete sense of security. At that point so much is open in terms of how to illuminate the path ahead of you. You just make it up as you go. Remember, nothing existed before someone brought it into life and that’s our job. To use or judgment, discretion, senses and daring, to make form.

NF: Is it something that you learn to enjoy as it is happening or… It sounds to me like the engagement is so intense that you’re not self aware enough to be able to say “hey this is fun” as you’re doing it, but as you step back, it’s like you’ve just run through an obstacle course and you’re sweating and your body is alive and you feel like you’re worn out and you’re going to sleep well that night.

SS: It is something that invigorates, and when I went to Ireland and started making those paintings it was like painting on roller skates, drunk. I was out of my mind for a long time in terms of that place and the experience in it, completely pulled the rug out from under me. And it has been the same this year with this work. And with regard to how we are in or within experiences, an analogy might be, if you’re out on a date with someone very nice and you’re having drinks and sitting in a quiet corner of a restaurant and kissing them and you’re looking at something else across the room simultaneously, you’re not really there in that moment within the kiss. If you’re looking at something on the other side of the room and saying to yourself oh look at that nice sports jacket, I want to get one of them, then you’re really not there, you’re not in that kiss. And with painting you have to be in the kiss.

NF: Or if you’re thinking about something.

when we were walking near the walls of gaiole, 20×40 inches

SS: So how are you really there with painting? Frank Auerbach refers to those special moments as, “glimpses of glory”. And the reason that many of us work, is to know more deeply, this place in which we are both pulled simultaneously into and out of ourselves through our connection with the material and the whole process. Many of us discovered it very early, that place in which we leave our minds, where we are dragged into another level of consciousness, swimming in this beautiful world of our higher self, where we’ve gone outside of “normal” daily, waking conversation. And it doesn’t last forever. Nothing lasts forever. But we’ve seen glimpses of it and that is what has kept us going. Not the sale of a painting or the fact that we were able to draw the building with proper perspective. If those were the things that keep us going then we’re bankrupt to begin with. Instead it’s those glimpses of that place where it’s like we are in love with something, where there is a kind of an intermeshed unity of feeling and purpose and gesture.

NF: And you can’t realize that you were there until it’s over. And so you have a painting when it’s over if you’ve done it right.

SS: And that’s what we try to do in painting. And where we tear our hair out is when we’re working and then the spell gets broken, because we know, we can sense the wind pushing us back and forth between the inevitability of the process of doing and then standing back for that proverbial, conceptual cigarette break and bringing to bear the analytical mind. But each painting is an attempt to prolong the spell, to throw us back into the hypnotic grip and that only comes through process not through thought. You can’t just come and say “ok, I’m here, it’s spell time.” You have to work and often that means grrr, ***#$$#%F++??%%$%. You work and you scream at yourself and next thing you know, you’re cruising to Mexico with an ice tea and a cigar in your hand and you’re listening to the New Riders and the Purple Sage and you’re just cruising. And then the song goes off. But you know, that’s the place, and you learn how to go back. So you learn how to re enter, you learn how to go back fluidly and rekindle the relationship and it might mean knocking down a few walls and going back into the painting, taking some things away you thought you liked or needed.

NF: This experience of complete connection to the moment and the revelation of existence is the thing that the paintings embody at their best. And that as a gift to the viewer is why people value art.

SS: It’s the whole point. Where you tear your hair out is when people say, “Well modern art stinks.”
Of course you want to share your adventure. That’s why we read national geographic. Because there we can see that Thor Heyerdahl built a raft and… Each one of us is not going to build a raft but we can then go out and we can buy a copy of Kon – Tiki.

NF: Well, Thor wrote Kon – Tiki, but he didn’t have to. He could have just gotten on the raft. But writing the book was not as much of a good time as being on the raft. Think about what it means to write a book. You’re sitting in front of a machine for hours and hours and hours on end struggling, revising, being frustrated, you’re back hurts.

waking late from the previous night, 24×24

SS: But it was the sharing, it was his desire as a human being to share this thing with other people because that was part of his agenda. He saw himself in the world in that way. That’s what drives me crazy about these artificial walls of division that we make based on ideologies. “Well, I don’t look at abstractions because it’s empty and simpleminded”, or “I don’t look at realism because I know it’s for putzes”. Come on, It’s all the same. You can look at one type of thing and also enjoy another. The point is trying to really get into what it is and to check your preconceptions in the coatroom, if you can. And to ask, what does it mean to you? And you don’t need to know history and lineages and chronologies and you don’t necessarily have to have read Gombrich or the Janson History of Art.

NF: Janson’s Histoy is his attempt to share his experience. But it’s a very different kind… It’s like trying to share something that people have shared already. Right? It’s a very strange thing. The historians chore. To try and take this very potent experience that we’re talking about and reframe it in the context of time.

SS: Yeah and of course he’s writing a textbook for college, where time and form are being dissected and evaluated in a certain kind of formalized chronology.

somewhere in germantown, 19×22 inches

NF: According to other events that are considered appropriate by whatever….

SS: : Right. I had a really interesting experience as my first year of art history at college. The class was taught by a painter, her name was Lee Hall. She wrote a famous and very scandalous book about the De Koonings years later and she was an abstract painter whose imagery was rooted in landforms and I couldn’t even comprehend abstract painting at the time. But she said to us the first day, “I’m not going to teach this as chronological art history. I’m just going to show you lots of paintings that I like and I’m going to talk about them.” So she didn’t start with the caves. She made many different kinds of juxtapositions and talked a lot about qualities of seeing. Not about the kind of stuff that my students who are taking art history at the University, you know, they come back and they tell me how these classes are being taught and it all sounds so anti visual.

NF: Memorize the titles and the years…

edge of the city before a storm, 36×36

how did i find my way back from here, 20×32

SS: Yes, but mostly, all those ideas. I don’t want to know about ideas! But visual ideas yes! How does a yellow feel next to a blue? What is an orange shape doing next to a red? But that’s not really an idea, that’s more of a quality or condition. And you made some point earlier about talking about paintings – the point of talking about paintings is to bring you closer to the painting and to the experience of the object, which is a sensory thing. Ideas don’t help. Ideas are for Neo Platonists, for the academy. And I don’t mean the Pennsylvania Academy (PAFA), I mean the intellectual academy. Remember that Plato hated artists and didn’t want them in his Republic, he was very concerned with ideas and regarded the senses with suspicion. Within the theater of art, whether holding the brush or standing in a gallery space, I just don’t see how ideas relate or how anything relates unless they/it take you closer to the process of looking and engaging with the senses. Unless all those words send you with urgency to feel like, “come on, now, quick!” That’s what good art writing should do. And there are writers like that like that, and when you read their work you just want to go and look and taste.

wandering in the sun after palazzo massimo, 36×36

urban landscape, 20×40

NF: It should illuminate the work not explain it.

SS: Illuminate the work and it should leave you with your tongue hanging out, like it does in a gelato shop. Where you go in to get an ice cream and the colors are so seductive and provocative that you just can’t wait. Our job, whether as a painter or a viewer is really to learn how to feel. To feel in front of a painting. Not to think, but to feel. Of course once you go into analytical mode you have to learn how to ask yourself questions about what it is you’re looking at, but even in an analytical mode those kinds of questions often border on sensation and we have to learn to do both. It’s like when you’re cooking a fish and you test it. The testing is really being done through the senses, not through ideas. We have to learn and relearn this and ask ourselves all kinds of questions. If you want to be analytical you could step back and say to yourself, what’s this painting all about, what are the shapes and what are the colors? But as the maker, basically to just get into it we have to open ourselves up to its form from the senses and let those qualities come inside, to taste them. And learning how to taste is not about words or ideas, yet, it is informed by layers of experience and analysis preceding that moment. And it could be very risky. Because when you’re at your easel in front of a painting, you’re engaged with a form that you cannot make sense of rationally or logically. And potentially you might not initially understand what’s going on or to even see it clearly, so you might have to redefine for yourself the basis of or foundation of your understanding. And I’m saying that as a painter, I mean there is a possibility that making paintings is going to turn you upside down, and are you willing to go there?

yellows and greens from my window, 20×20

I pleased to present a telephone conversation I had recently with Tim Kennedy, a Bloomington, Indiana painter who teaches at Indiana University and shows at the First Street Gallery in NYC where he is currently having a solo exhibition (up until March 24, 2012) His gallery press release states:

… In this exhibition his focus is on the people of the area through portraits of neighbors and colleagues as well as paintings in the genres of interior, still life, townscape and figure composition. … “Tim Kennedy’s paintings fall solidly into the tradition of painterly American realism that prizes the particular and the empirical. They allow the viewer to examine the sharply experienced, yet ordinary event. The unspoken character at the center of the paintings is the connection of human relationships whether people are the primary subject or whether the subject consists of objects, interiors or landscape views. The paintings celebrate life experienced through the senses. Mr. Kennedy’s use of oil paint favors visceral color and the undisguised presence of the artist’s hand. This is work on a human scale that communicates direct experience with the subject and is filled with light and air.”

Larry Groff: You studied at Brooklyn College in the early eighties. Did you study with Lennart
Anderson, and if so, how much of an influence was he on you?

Tim Kennedy Well, I did study with Lennart, and he was a big influence. I don’t think,
necessarily that was the reason I had gone to Brooklyn, but he ended up being an
influential person. There were three people that had a big effect on me. Lennart, Paul
Gianfagna, who taught the anatomy class, and Joe Groell, who taught a very personal
history of design class. I had initially found out about Brooklyn when I was at
Skowhegan. Lois Dodd was one of the people teaching my first summer there. I actually
went to Skowhegan for two successive summers. I am the only person of my age I am
aware of that went to Skowhegan for more than one summer.

Anyway, at Brooklyn Lennart had a Saturday morning painting class that he taught from
the figure. My grad class at Brooklyn was a funny class – we were a little rebellious. I
actually ended up painting abstractly when I was there. That might be a bit of a
surprise…

LG: That is a surprise.

TK: Regardless, Lennart was very influential. He had this Saturday morning class
with the figure. I also went to a still life class he held for undergraduates during the week
a few times. So, when I went to his class I painted from life and got a great deal from it
as an experience. This is the only real painting class where you paint consistently from
the motif I have ever taken. My undergraduate experience at Carnegie-Mellon wasn’t like
that at all; it was more about assuming that nothing was known and it all had to be
reinvented – which was valuable in its own way.

LG: Was he supportive to your painting abstractly?

Planting 48″ x 40″ oil on linen

TK: Not really. But this was the time of Neo-Expressionism and I felt that I ought to be
doing something like that. I suppose I was a little disappointed with the type of reaction I
was getting to my modest paintings from life. As I said, it was a rebellious group that was
in there, and I think Lennart actually found it a little frustrating. With Lennart’s class the
idea was that you would be showing up and painting the model in a more or less
structured way—it was actually a new thing for me at that point, and it didn’t necessarily
come easily. He had good things to say, but I was totally unused to that as an
experience—somebody coming around telling you what you were doing wrong. I think
ultimately he would have been happy to work on my painting, but from my background at
Carnegie that was something that just wasn’t done. I was foolish – I was too precious
about my paintings. But, I mean, just even on the one occasion where he touched
something I was working on and he blurred a couple of edges, there was something
magic and healing about that.

In a sense his real influence came years later. A friend I
knew at Brooklyn turned me onto the book popular with Lennart’s students, Hawthorne
on Painting. That is a book that has only become more influential for me with time.
The thing that was really interesting during that first semester were the ways he would
teach us how to look at other artists and how to look at the motif. He would bring books
to class on Corot, Ingres and Morandi and talk about the things he saw in them. There
were shows of Edwin Dickinson, at Hirschl & Adler Modern at that time that were
extremely influential. He helped me understand what was going on in Dickinson’s
paintings.

But he got a Guggenheim during the second semester of that year and was going to take
the year off. As a group we felt a bit shortchanged so we talked him into continuing to
come on Saturdays to paint along side us. It was really valuable to watch him paint.
I went to Italy the summer after grad school, and I painted landscapes there. I painted
portraits of a bunch of students that were at a printmaking school there too. That was
when a lot of the things that Lennart would talk about and the things that were discussed
in the Hawthorne book kicked in.

Lauren and Brenda (with Babar) 48″ x 56″ oil on linen

LG: What school was this again? I missed what school it was.

TK: It’s a place called Studio Camnitzer, and it’s outside of Lucca. It was actually run
by the conceptual artist Luis Camnitzer.

LG: Is it still in existence?

TK: Yes, as far as I know. But anyway, I helped David Finkbiner, who taught there, fix
up a house that he had bought, – I wasn’t even actually part of the school.

LG: There appears to be a remarkable directness and freshness to your paintings.
They are carefully drawn, observed, and resolved with very specific tones. Is this
something that comes easy for you? How much of a struggle goes on behind the scenes
with your work?

TK: The artist always sees the imperfections in things. But I think from early on, I was
able to get a likeness when I drew, and I did watercolors in high school. Watercolor was
the way I was introduced to painting. I don’t even know how to answer this exactly. I think
it’s something that developed over time. Initially, when I began painting, this ability to get
resemblances — if anything, I was a little suspicious of it, and the idea of a high finish.
When I was in undergraduate school, particularly, the kinds of things I admired were a
little rough. I mean, I admired Abstract Expressionist painting. I admired Dada. I admired
Pop Art. I liked people like Morandi and Diebenkorn and Porter. The idea of finish—I
wasn’t sure whether that was the kind of thing that I should be trying to achieve.

I don’t think that I’ve ever felt that I fit comfortably into other people’s expectations in
relation to this stuff, either. And who knows, exactly, what those expectations are. It’s a
funny thing in terms of the art world. The interest, I think, in the kind of painterly painting
that you celebrate through your blog, and the kind of thing that I’m interested in is
something that kind of expands and shrinks in terms of interest over time. There seemed
to be a surge of interest around ten years ago. I think it has shrunk a little bit since, but
maybe it is growing again, particularly through the kinds of things that you are doing and
Catherine Kehoe is doing.

Hannah 30″ x 22″ oil on linen

LG: There definitely seems to be wide interest in perceptual painting. I think more and more people are becoming attracted to painting, especially people with more available time like those
starting to think about retirement or whose kids have left home. Maybe with the economy
they’re laid off, can’t find work, so they think, ‘I might as well do what I want.’ For any
number of different reasons people, I think, are more interested in learning how to paint.
But sadly, I think, they’re being sucked into thinking painting is more about the subject
matter itself, copying photographs and other less helpful directions artistically. Many people who want to learn how to paint realistically are much concerned with learning techniques. Ateliers, workshops, magazines, DVDs, etc. teaching the
secrets and techniques of so-called “Old Masters” have become far more visible than in years
past. What is your take on the popularity of learning technique? Do you think having a
good technique leads to better painting?

TK: I’m not certain. I don’t think they could hurt that much, but I think probably people
should be cautious not to get stuck in it. I think in an interesting way that people develop
their own techniques by whatever the painting is calling them to do. Eve and I, obviously,
we’re partners and we’ve lived together. I really like watching her paint, but I wouldn’t say
that I have a technique when I paint, and I wouldn’t say that she necessarily has a
technique herself. Basically we both just do stuff until it works – a lot of making and
unmaking. I’ve heard of really elaborate descriptions of how Scott Noel paints from
former students of his. Have you talked to Scott?

LG: I haven’t talked to him, but I’m familiar with his work, and I know people who have
studied with him.

TK: And I don’t know how strict he is about doing this anymore, but I think he had a
real group of things that he would do that were real interesting. He would apparently lay
in everything with a palette knife, and specifically use Cremnitz white. And then
apparently, when he had things laid in he would take a large paintbrush and essentially
stipple it to blur everything out, and then he would work back into it. Which sounds like
an interesting thing, and you can kind of see it in the paintings. And again, that’s sort of a
Dickinson idea, I think.

When we were at graduate school, actually, there were techniques classes that we
would take. Philip Pearlstein and Paul Gianfagna and I think Joe Groell, too—they all
taught technique classes, and usually it was a history of techniques class. And Philip’s
class was a little perfunctory in the sense that it was more about the ideas that
surrounded different periods of history. He was interested in it enough to be able to
discuss ideas that came up at different points in history. But in Paul’s class you actually
learned how to do tempera painting. And that was an interesting thing.
And part of it was ideas about scumbling and glazing. And it really worked: the glazes
were darker colors that were going over lighter colors. This is the theory of Cennino
Cennini—that this is always going to be inherently warm, and then the scumbles, which
would be the lighter color over a darker color, were always going to be inherently cool –
no matter what the actual color. It sounds fishy, but it’s really true.
And the weird thing is I can see it in painters like Veronese in lots of places. You can
see it in somebody like Vuillard. It’s not a specific technique, but it is a powerful idea that
can be embedded in paintings and I think it is something that is really active – which
makes it interesting to me. This is actually an idea that I try to use when I paint.

LG: That certainly makes sense. I guess, in terms of my question, it makes sense
coming from when we were in school, back in the eighties or even in the nineties—that,
that was the kind of technique that was taught. It was taught in a much broader manner
and a more open sense, whereas today a lot of times you see technique—at least not
coming from the universities, but more from the ateliers and magazines that emphasis
things like the rules or steps needed to properly paint a certain subject.

TK: No, I can see that. Like I say, sometimes I can think of it as kind of good and then
other times I think, Oh, gee, I don’t know if I like that so much.

July 48″ x 56″ oil on linen

LG: Like the people who want you to learn how to paint like Bouguereau or
similar—more academic approaches. An impressive level of skill that they’re after in
terms of drawing and painting ability. Don’t get me wrong. I just think there’s so many
people hung up with perfecting technique that they put off whatever their reason to paint
to begin was perhaps. They sort of figure, Well, I’ll figure that out once I learn all the
technical aspects first. When I can draw and paint good enough; then I’ll figure out what
it is I want to paint about. It doesn’t always seem to work out that way.

TK: Yes, I agree with you. I guess I tend to like the idea of a painting developing in an
active way. I don’t know. Maybe it’s something out of the Studio School or maybe it’s
something out of Hans Hofmann. It is a more constructed attitude toward a painting and
that is appealing to me. Although, I don’t want to pooh-pooh the other approach,
completely. I am sure there are things to learn from a technique driven approach, but the
structures beneath technique interest me more.

I’m teaching an anatomy class these days, and that’s an interesting thing, just in general.
First of all, it was valuable when I took it in graduate school, and that was, again, an
eye-opening thing – that there was something outside of you in the world that was real,
that you had to measure up to in a particular way—and that it influenced how you looked
at the things in the world, whether it was the figure or objects — and that they had some
sort of inherent form that you had to decode.

And again, these structural things are useful, I think. The more technical things such as
the way that you hold your brush or the order that you put down your color or how you
hold your pencil are less important to me. I guess what I am saying, is for myself , when I
work, that it is almost never the same twice.

LG: I can certainly understand. When I was in school, it was really hard to get that kind
of information, and…

TK: It’s true, it’s true. You’re right. But that’s exactly the experience that was at
Carnegie. And I got very valuable things at Carnegie. I thought that the other students
there were very talented, and you sort of made stuff up as you went. And actually the
teacher I had there—a wonderful person and influential person for me and a friend,
David Schirm—he just was not interested in telling you about stuff like that; so, you sort
of reinvented the wheel in a weird way.

And again, in an odd way, truthfully most of the stuff that I discovered in terms of painting
from the world and painting from objects were things that I did on my own. As a matter of
fact, there were a bunch of instructional books. I read a book called Art and Reality by
Joyce Cary who was a novelist, and that was a really interesting book to me. There were
a couple of books by an English artist by the name of Bernard Dunstan, who would tell
you practical things in a lot of ways, but it wasn’t open and closed kind of technique
advice. It was about tendencies that he applied in relation to how he might look at a
composition or how he might put together a still life.

There was a problem I remember he had (I actually did this out of his book). It was the
idea that you might collect a bunch of similarly colored things and scatter them across
the floor and paint them. Then you would find out, actually, how different the colors were.
So anyway, that was the extent of my technique, as it goes.

Badminton 48″ x 40″ oil on linen

LG: I think some of the most interesting painters are the ones who figured out, on their
own, what painting they wanted to paint. What painting was theirs. That, that was a really
big part of the subject matter, was how to take the familiar theme, but to make it theirs
somehow.

TK: There’s truth in that. There’s definitely truth in that. I mean, one of the things that’s
actually quite interesting is to see how Rackstraw Downes’s paintings developed over
time. Some of the first ones he did in the seventies—they look more like Neal Welliver
than Fairfield Porter because they weren’t quite as organic looking. But he gradually
built up a way of painting where he could do more and more things. But I don’t know that
anybody really told him how to do that.

LG: He doesn’t seem like he comes from any kind of place other than just responding
to nature, really. He just sort of decided on an aesthetic basis that he wanted to paint the
world as he saw it, and that, that was good enough. That you didn’t need to editorialize
as much as some people say you have to.

It interests me a great deal—the idea that total concentration on painting what you see
and how this can actually help you to become more self-expressive, more honest than if
painted through some notion of making high art. Going after a style and imposing your
will on the scene in order to “make art” often paradoxically winds up being less art and
more artifice. Sometimes you can better find your true voice by turning down the volume
of your conscious brain.

“You must forget all your theories, all your ideas before the subject. What part of these is really
your own will be expressed in your expression of the emotion awakened in you by the subject.”
– Henri Matisse

TK: These are all kind of very familiar attitudes to me. I mean, I agree with them. And
again, I think that maybe some more current ways of going into this—these are not the
things that people are assuming—but I totally identify with the kinds of things that you’re
saying. Again, early things that I was reading and interested in when I started painting
from the subject…I thought the critical writing of Fairfield Porter was really interesting
stuff, and it sounds very much like a lot of the attitudes that you’re referring to. They seem
to be very much a part of that attitude. The idea of not imposing yourself too much,
certainly, was a big thing. And I guess I still very much represent that as an idea in what I
am trying to do. I don’t know that people automatically understand where I’m coming from
with it anymore.

LG: Right. So many people think that by doing that, you’re copying nature. That
somehow it’s a lesser activity. That it’s just, “Oh, you’re just copying nature.”

TK: I suppose that, that is part of the attitude. I mean, it wasn’t at the time when I was
first exposed to these ways of doing things. It was not just the painting at that time that
reflected these attitudes. I think that you can see it in movies from the time too. Eve and I
watched Nashville, the Robert Altman movie recently. And there’s so little that’s imposed
onto the movie, it almost feels like things are just happening. That would be unusual to
see in a film now. Now it’s just all fast cutting and car chases and blood.

LG: Well, Nashville was a little more exciting than, like, say Warhol’s Empire State
Building or something.

TK: (laughs) I guess I never made it to the end of that one.

LG: You’re right. It’s funny, sometimes it seems as soon as you start to make a rule, or
some sort of belief system, then you find ten other things that contradict it and makes it
look ridiculous.

Shower 48″ x 40″ oil on linen

Peonies 18″ x 24″ oil on linen

LG: In your interview with Maureen Mullarkey you discussed the pros
and cons of your moving away from NYC to Indiana when you said:

“On the other hand there were unspoken limitations and constraints on what I would paint and not paint when I lived there. And I feel that those are completely gone now. I paint the interior of my house, my yard, town landscapes and pose models in situations that somehow mirror my life here. In a sense I have a life to paint…”

Paradoxically, you later said how living
outside NYC can have a downside when: “groups of people out here can be more
censorious of things that aren’t hip.”

Many readers of this blog might seem to be working underground in a “painting ghetto”,
as you said: “The painting world is a kind of ghetto—but ghettos can be very vital
places“. I’ve heard painters complain of working in isolation and of rejections by local art
venues because work from observation seemed academic, conservative and unfashionable while at the same time snubbed by traditionalist, plein-air type venues who see their work as being too crude or modern. Is there any hope for a solution to this conundrum? What solace can you offer from the heartland?

TK: First of all, I think coming out here, it’s actually been a really good thing. In
Maureen’s interview, I say something like “having a life to paint.” And I do feel like
there’s a bigger range of subjects, and things that I might not have painted while I was in
New York. But the way that you’re phrasing it—that people are very
technique-driven—they don’t understand completely where a sensibility like mine is
coming from, and in the sense that they do see it as a little crude.

And then other people that are maybe doing completely different kinds of things in art,
whether it’s an installation or something like that, they would see the kinds of things that
I’m interested in as being very tradition-bound. And it is hard to find a place for yourself in
that way. It’s not impossible. I mean, there have been some nice situations here. There
was a gallery run by Mark Ruschman in Indianapolis that unfortunately closed and there
were several people there that painted from an empirical sense of things.

One of the places that seems the friendliest to this kind of sensibility is Philadelphia.
There are people that surround the Academy and actually a lot of art students that are
particularly interested in this approach to working have gone there.

LG: The Gross McLeaf gallery is a great venue for this.

TK: Yes. That’s a place, certainly, where a lot of people have shown up. And then
there’s a couple of others, too. There’s a student of ours, Chris Fiero, who is currently
having a show at a place called Rosenfeld, that’s part of that sensibility as well.
I do think it’s actually survived in Boston, quite a bit. Maybe it’s that some of the
mid-sized cities that are not New York have a level of culture to begin with and a kind of
tradition that already exists. And certainly, when you do run into individual artists, they’ve
existed in these places for a period of time. I mean, George Nick is certainly a great
example of that. He’s a wonderful painter. Also, Barney Rubenstein, who is no longer
living, was a great figure from Boston and Catherine Kehoe practices there now. So a
tradition carries on.

LG: And there’s a number of great galleries there…

September Porch 28″ x 34″ oil on linen

1003 8″ x 10″ oil on muslin panel

TK: And actually this is something from the time that you were maybe at BU. Did you
know a person by the name of Jonathan Imber?

LG: yes.

TK: I lived in Boston for a while. I thought that was a really interesting painting town.

LG: Sure…

TK: And also from BU—you wouldn’t have met him personally—but I’m sure his
presence was really felt there, was Philip Guston

LG: Definitely. There was a lot of that influence. Also Walter Murch was there for
awhile.

TK: I didn’t realize that. And he’s somebody whose paintings I’ve always admired.
He’s sort of a treasured, unknown person. Boy, talk about somebody that has just this
great way of seeing. I don’t know that there’s any particular technique. It’s just sort of an
invented technique. I mean, in a weird way some of those paintings that he did in the
forties and the fifties, they seem to begin like Jackson Pollock paintings.

LG: Well, he was very close to many of the abstract expressionists, and studied with
Arshile Gorky.

TK: I did not know that. That’s really interesting, because I don’t know much about
him.

LG: I have a whole big post on him on the blog… (Link to Walter Murch article) I actually scanned in a whole catalog of his
paintings. There’s a very rare catalogue from the Rhode Island School of Design. They
had a big retrospective back in the early sixties. And I was lucky to get that book a long
time ago when I was in Boston. I found it and snagged it. I figured it was out of print like
ages ago, so I wanted [it]. People have heard of him, but then you can’t find his work, or
you used to not be able to find the work. But now you can.

TK: It’s like a hidden history.

LG: Well, there’s so many painters like that. And that was part of my motivation for
starting the blog was to let people be aware of all these people like George Nick who
were great painters. Who if you’re not already connected to a school or a big city, you’re
likely never to hear of, and never be able to get any influence from. So, I really felt like
there was a need for that. And that’s a big consideration with this question.

There are all these people in all these cities that are painting, some of them self-taught
or they just take workshops, or any number of different ways, but it seems like there’s a
basic human need or drive, artistically, to want to paint the world in which we live, and I
think there needs to be reinforcement that there’s nothing wrong with that. That so much
of the art world has dismissed that as being unimportant or somehow lesser than
painting about grand ideas or historical events or whatever. But just simply painting
some flowers or a couple of friends sitting on a couch can have great visual power and
that people should be supportive.

Not to say that you’re going to make some clichéd thing that people have seen a million
times before…

TK: Well, I agree. Back to your earlier question about technique, I suppose that’s why
I wouldn’t rely on technique too much. I think you want to go into it with a pure heart – the
idea is that if you are genuinely experiencing the things around you, I mean, it is a new
experience. I don’t know. Maybe I’m not phrasing that very well.

LG: It is. I know what you mean.

TK: You’re seeing through an individual filter. You’re seeing the world new. And to tell
you the truth, for people maybe complaining and saying, “Well, we’ve seen this
before…” In a weird way, I don’t think there’s any real progress in art. And things are
different enough, in a weird way. Fairfield Porter idealized Vuillard but he ended up
doing something very different from him, just through being who he was. Just being
American. Seeing an American landscape. Experiencing American life. There are so
many things I admire about Porter, but hopefully I’m doing something a little differently
than what he was doing, as well, and I suppose that’s how things get carried on.

Interior With Game Board 34″ x 28″ oil on linen

Daisies and Bentwood Chair 20″ x 16″ oil on muslin panel

LG: Your paintings appear to celebrate joyfulness, beauty and simplicity. George Nick
once asked, “How can anybody paint unless they’re happy?” Would you say you’re a
happy person? How important is your mood to the success of your work? And is being
happy enough for a painter?

TK: [Laughing] Actually, I’m probably a little depressive, and I’ve been a little
depressive for most of my life in an odd kind of way. So, I don’t know. There’s a little Irish
darkness or something like that, which is sort of the way my family was. Not that we were
all that self-identifying as Irish or anything.

I was thinking about this. I think, if anything, I don’t necessarily have to be in a good
mood to be painting, and if anything, maybe if I’m sort of in a dark place, but, once I start,
I think the idea is maybe you work through that, and that something joyful comes out of it.
But, it has its complexity. And to tell you the truth, even a figure like Porter, if you ever
read that Justin Spring book…

LG: I did…

Iris 10″ x 8″ oil on muslin panel

Rose and Teapot 10″ x 8″ oil on muslin panel

Marigold 12″ x 10″ oil on linen

TK: Actually, he’s a pretty complicated person. There were many troubled and
troubling things about him, and I don’t think he had an easy time of it. Eve stopped
reading that book because she didn’t want to know about it. But I can identify with a lot of
that stuff. And I think that if anything, maybe that’s the point, that maybe you want to be
the “happy warrior.” That you deal with the surface of things and you deal with what is
necessary in life, and you persevere, regardless of difficulty, and so that it appears easy.
There’s a quote by Matisse. I don’t know where I got this from. Somebody had asked
whether he believed in God, and he said, “Well, I do when I’m painting.”

LG: There you go.

TK: And Scott Noel actually uses a terrific quote from Nietzsche as an introduction for
something that he had written. It’s about the Greeks and profundity, because they
stopped at the surface. They believed in appearances. There is something profound
about that. I think it’s more complex and more interesting than people give it credit for.

“Oh, those Greeks! They understood how to live. What you need for that is to be brave and stop
at the surface, the fold, the skin, to worship appearance, to believe in forms, tones, words the
whole Olympus of appearance. Those Greeks were superficial – out of profundity… “
–Friedrich Nietzsche

The other thing is I also think you have to know about something to see it. The people
that really understand paintings are people that have also painted. The frustrating thing
is the people that are frequently writers—which a lot of people in the museum and the
exhibiting world are—give this other way of seeing things sort of short shrift, because it
isn’t a written thing. At its heart painting is a wordless experience.

LG: Absolutely. It’s about feeling. It’s about visual feelings, in a way…

TK: Oh, very much. Very much.

Mezzaluna 8″ x 10″ oil on muslin panel

Late Summer Zinnias 10″ x 8″ oil on muslin panel

Summer Flowers 16″ x 20″ oil on muslin panel

LG: …it’s almost impossible to write about. So they write about your subject matter…

TK: This is exactly true. People do write about the subject matter, and that is the thing
that comes across in something like a press release or something. Which again, it’s a
shame. I think that people are missing the point. Truthfully, people are robbing
themselves of a pleasure. It isn’t the things in the painting that are the important thing.

LG: Is that why the title of your show in New York is called “Appearances?”

TK: Yes.

LG: What are your thoughts on that title? Does that have any relationship…

TK: The Nietzsche quote has been on my mind, and truthfully, appearance is what is
available to you concerning the world. It is also a bit of a pun in the sense that here are
these people walking in and out of where I’m painting, and they’re making an
appearance. I guess it was both ideas.

But again, the information that you get from the world is through what you can glean from
its surface, and you have to infer a lot of things. It’s a bit of a detective story in a weird
way, just even interpreting what you’re seeing light wise. Which is interesting.

Essentially, you’re watching how light falls on things. And sometimes it takes a long
period of time to see what actually is happening, whatever it is that you’re looking at. You
define the subject by being out there for hours at a time. And you learn something about
it. It’s intriguing.

LG: Right. For me, your paintings may start off in a dark place, but it ends up being
very light-filled and joyous to look at. You must at least be very happy when you finish
the painting. Your painting must be a transforming experience for you. Here’s the world
as I saw it, or perhaps even a record of my evolution of feelings about it.

TK: Well, I would hope so, certainly. Again, a controversial quotation by Matisse is
that quote about the armchair.

“Art should be something like a good armchair in which to rest from physical
fatigue. “

But I think that the idea is that the painting would be a place of respite or a place of
refuge or a place of solace for a person after they’ve spent a day encountering the world.
And people will sometimes look at that attitude askance because there’s a feeling that it
would be escapist. I suppose that would be the criticism of it. But, you know, life is hard
enough. I think that people are entitled to this kind of pleasure. And it’s the kind of
pleasure that actually demands a certain kind of discipline to be able to even understand
it.

LG: You certainly do a fantastic job with it. Thank you for taking the time and energy to do this interview.

Claw and Cone 6″ x 8″ oil on muslin panel

Ruff for Council 22″ x 28″ oil on canvas

On Lincoln Street 18″ x 42″ oil on linen

click here for a larger view

I had recently watched several of the delightful videos made by John Thorton about his friend, the Seattle based painter Kurt Solmssen .
I was intrigued and arranged for an interview using skype with webcams on our computers where he talked at length about his background and work. Seeing each other face to face on the computer helped turn the interview towards being more of a conversation than a formal interview. I would like to again thank Kurt from taking the time to do this and to share his words about his art and life. Kurt Solmssem shows at the George Billis Gallery in NYC and studied at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts.

LG
What are some formative experience that shaped who you are as a painter. How has your work evolved over the years?

KS Well, I didn’t go to art school until I was twenty years old. I’d always been interested in art, but never really painted until right before that. I decided to go to art school. I had started painting on my own and realized, Hey, maybe I’d be good at this and I really enjoy it

So, I looked around at some art schools, and I saw the brochure for the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts. In there they had work by Ben Kamihira, Sidney Goodman, Arthur De Costa, Lou Sloan, Bruce Samuelson. I really liked the work a lot, and it was my hometown, so I ended up going there.

And in those days, the school was in a hotel building, the Belgravia Hotel. And after a couple of years, [the students] could apply and get a studio, which was basically a hotel room with its own bathroom and a bathtub. It was really nice. And the teachers. For example, Ben Kamihira had a suite of hotel rooms in this building. He had models come in. He lived there some of the time. It was a great experience to see these great artists at work. Sidney Goodman was around. Those influences were great. Lou Sloan. I don’t know if you’ve ever heard of him.

video (part 1 of 2) by John Thorton about Kurt Solmssen

The Yellow House / Winter, Oil 2010 25″ x 28″

LG No, I don’t know him.

KS He taught a lot of people how to paint landscapes at the Pennsylvania Academy. So, I learned a lot from him going out on painting trips. You know, the palette that I have now is pretty much influenced a lot by him.

I just liked working outdoors, just the physical aspect of it. To make it a short answer, if I could get the results I wanted by working in the studio, I wouldn’t work outside. I just found that what I could get from being outdoors, the information that I could get and just the physical thing about being there, was what really made me enjoy that. And I liked getting out of the school studio where there were fifty people with easels. It didn’t feel like I was making art as much as… Or maybe I’m just a bit of a loner. I don’t know.

I was influenced [early on] by the Pennsylvania landscape painters, who did a lot of winter landscapes, like Willis Redfield. He would do these big paintings in the wintertime all at once, large scale paintings. And those were some of my early influences.

LG I’ll have to check. I’m not familiar with him.

KS He did these really amazing things all at once, in really cold temperatures.

KS And Daniel Garber was another one.  And George Nick’s work, I saw. A friend of mine, Doug Martenson. He’s another person you might want to look up, Doug Martenson.

He teaches at the Pennsylvania Academy now. He would have George Nick’s painting cards up. The paintings of trucks and so forth. When I first saw Fairfield Porter’s work, I had been painting for a few years. I really responded to those, because they were about his family, his domestic surroundings, and they were so directly painted.

We did a lot of cast drawing in school, and that sort of very academic training, but I wasn’t as interested in that as the more painterly stuff, like the Bay Area painters. Diebenkorn. Hopper was a big influence on me. But I guess about Fairfield Porter, I really liked how he seemed to be influenced by de Kooning and so on, that really direct painterly stuff.

Autumn Yellow House Oil 2011 50 ” x 70 ”

LG When you’re painting, what helps you to reach a state of mind where you find yourself doing your best work? How do you get into that zone where you can turn everything else off, and you’re just there with your painting? Is that something you think about?

KS Less distractions, I guess. One thing about going out in the field, that I like, is that you remove yourself from a lot of distractions. In the beginning, I didn’t like it when people came up off the street and talked to me, but now I’ve gotten used to that.

I like the feeling of going out and finding something to paint, and then coming back, almost like a hunter/gatherer or something. You go out, you do the work, and then you come home; as opposed to always being in the same studio. I do a lot more in the studio now. Sort of both. Paint on-site, in the house, and then also work in the studio. I built my own studio when I moved out west in 1988.

KS As far as what makes me concentrate on painting? I don’t know. The thing about working from life… I talk to Scott Noel about this quite a bit. He, like many artists, likes north light. Very constant. And he’ll just work for ten hours straight. But I tend to like more directional light, especially when I’m outside. The light changes in about three hours, so that kind of gives you a framework, as you know, for doing that.

So, setting up the paint and working for several hours, and then the light changes, and so you’re sort of forced to stop. That gives me a time frame where I really concentrate. Then after a few hours, I come out of that state, whatever it is, of concentration.

LG Of course concentration is critical but another aspect of this you may have experienced, is when there’s other people around me, I become aware of unconsciously playing to an audience rather than to myself. It’s like I catch myself anticipating, What is the viewer going to like? Having a people-pleasing mentality while painting is disagreeable. It usually runs contrary to what the painting really needs. Do you find that?

KS Yes, absolutely, because you’re less self-conscious. And I also think that when I’m working on a painting, that it can go through a state where I’ve destroyed it. I’m going to completely change it. I think this is the worst painting I’ve ever done, maybe after hour one. And then it gets to point where hopefully it’s a lot better than where I started it.

But if you have someone watching you do it, I’m a lot less likely, I think, to go to that place where, Okay, this painting is really bad and then I just completely change it.

Red Centerboard, Oil 2011 50″ x 70″

Vaughn Morning, Oil 2010 50″ x 70″

Sunset State 4, Oil 2012 8″ x 10″

LG Tell us something about color in your work. Some of your work uses a higher chroma palette with strong contrast of light and dark and others use a muted, close value with soft atmospheric edges. Is this mainly due to weather conditions and what you are seeing or are there other concerns going on. You often evoke other painters – like Fairfield Porter and Hopper on one hand and Whistler and Monet on the other.

KS Well, the seasons are so extremely different out here in the Northwest. We have so much fog and mist and gray weather in the winter, and then the summers are like Fairfield Porter, like New England clarity. So, just for that reason, the paintings are very different generally. Unless the sun comes out in the winter, we have a very low horizontal light, which is beautiful. But I was just talking about how I work outdoors in snow and rain and stuff. I try to make an abstract, minimalist… There is a kind of abstract, minimalist beauty to the Northwest landscape, and I try to capture that.

LG It was just such a difference in your whole sensibility between the winter and the summer. I guess that makes sense that that’s how you would view it, between your winter and your summer paintings. It’s almost like two different painters were…

KS I’ve heard that…

Yellow Boat in a Blue Bay, Oil 2011 34″ x 46″

 

Winter Above Vaughn, Oil 2011 44″ x 60″

LG There is a similarity in the sense of how you’re moving the paint around, it has a real vigorous, gestural quality to both your winter and summer paintings, even the ones where there’s sort of a higher degree of resolve. But the color was interesting in your summer ones. You seem like in your more recent work—I’m not sure—where your color is evolving more, or it’s changing. Can you speak more about your color?

KS I guess I’m not aware… People say they’re very colorful. I don’t always think that they’re that colorful. There is a lot of saturated color, and I’m always trying to keep the color pretty keyed up, but still have them work as representational paintings. I don’t know. I don’t think that artists always realize how their color sensibility or their way of seeing is so different, but each person has their way of seeing and it’s just kind of an individual thing.

Study for Looking Towards Minter 2, Oil 2010 11″ x 20″

The Davis House In Snow, oil 2009 46″ x 120″ Diptych

LG You often paint large canvases outdoors, what is the appeal for you – putting up with the obstacles of wind, etc. With some of your larger paintings you don’t seem to use an easel and use a very large palette, can you speak about how you go about making one of your larger paintings? I’m curious about your working method.

KS Well, I liked working large scale from the very beginning, relatively large scale outdoors; because as I mentioned, Willis Redfield. I just like the physical thing about working large. And I tried making my own easels to set up outdoors, and they would blow away in the wind. So, as with frame making, also, the simpler, the better. I eventually just found the simplest thing to do is take a piece of 1×2 and attach it to the crossbar on the back of the painting with a little hinge, like a little door hinge, and just wire or tape the bottom part of that to the support.
So then when I go outside (or if I’m even inside) I have a little tripod. I just set the little 1×2 to prop up the painting, and then I set a big piece of plywood as the palette right on the ground. I squat there, and stand up, and sit down, and paint with the paint sitting right on the ground because it’s simpler. I can just pick the painting up when I’m done (there’s no easel) and put it in the truck or take it up to the studio. Carry it on my arm.

Similarly, the palette I like to be big, because I’m trying to mix all these variations in that three-hour period, and I don’t premix colors, so it just gives me more space to work with. I paint outside in the rain and snow a lot, and experiment. I used to put up little lean-tos, kind of like tarps. That became too much work to set those up. I’ve even found that letting the snow and rain land on the oil paint does something which… I’ve done these, I guess you’d call them experiments with mixing oil and water. Really unusual textures and things you wouldn’t be able to reproduce. They’re very unexpected. It’s kind of beautiful in a way.

The Green House 2010 Oil 28″ x 34″

Snow on 7th St., Oil 2011 26″ x 36″

LG Now, you keep coming back to some of the same subjects. Over the course of several years, I’ve noticed that you see the same houses, the same views from your yard, I would imagine. Like of the boat, the yellow boat, and the dock…

KS That boat, in particular; that’s a boat that my grandfather bought in 1936 here in Tacoma, and he rode it back to his house. We’ve had it ever since. I just started painting it when I would come out here to visit. It had this Cadmium yellow color which was great in the landscape out there, this blue and green landscape. I don’t know. It’s sort of a symbolic thing. It’s part of my family history. It becomes a part of these semi-narrative paintings. I don’t try to make narratives. It’s more like I’ll see something and want to paint that scene.

LG The houses that you see. There’s a green house and a yellow house that you’ve painted. I imagine they’re all fairly close by. Do you see them fairly regularly?

KS Yeah, we live on a peninsula, and there are some older homes around here. I’ve driven around. I’m always looking for another thing to paint, so there are these old homes that I like to paint in the landscape. You know how Edward Hopper said at one point. He said, “I’ve painted every picture there is to paint here on the cape…”  I feel that way, sometimes, until I find the next idea. But there’s this white house with a big porch that I’ve painted many times from different angles.

Sunrise Over Water, Oil 2011 30 ” x 40 ”

Morning Sunlight, Oil 2011 48″ x 116″ diptych

KS I recently started doing this diptych, really big paintings, like ten-feet long, in two parts. I started those as one canvas, for instance looking up at that white house from the beach, and then I realized I wanted to also show the beach in the distance off to the left.
Antonio López Garcia. You know that painting of a sink where he’s looking down, and then it’s in two parts?

LG Yes, I do know that one. It’s in the Boston MFA.

KS And he said, “Well, you know, you look down and then you look up.” It’s two different angles. And that’s how I felt about this. When you’re there, you think, Well, I see all this expanse, but actually, you have to turn your head to see the whole thing, and it’s really two views. The first landscape I ever painted in Lou Sloan’s class, he came over and said, “Well, you’re painting from all the way on the right to all the way on the left. You don’t really see that much.” So I learned to focus in on something. But with these paintings, I’m trying to just show the whole thing. Having it in two separate paintings that fit together makes sense.

LG So you’re not into showing the sort of distortion that you would get, the perspective that you often see in some people who do that, like Rackstraw Downes…

KS Yeah, like Rackstraw Downes…

LG …and other people who are following on a similar vein.

KS Well, he’s a master. He’s a great artist. He came to speak at the school, and I know how he works. He does these fantastic drawings, and everything’s from life. And he does have this interesting way of bending the perspective. But no, I don’t work like that. By putting these two paintings together, it’s also a practical means. How do I carry around a ten-foot painting? So, also having it in two pieces made sense.

LGWhat do you think is the difference between West Coast landscape painting and East Coast landscape painting? We had started talking about that a little bit before. I’m curious, since you’ve been on both coasts, now, if you have any thoughts about that?

KS Well, the West Coast painters that I liked early on were the Bay Area painters. Diebenkorn, when he did the figurative work. I like all his paintings. But those painters that were working in San Francisco had these big shapes.

There are so many East Coast painters, I don’t know. How do you encompass all that? But I think that I am sort of a hybrid between East and West Coast, because I grew up in Philadelphia and went to the Academy. The Thomas Aikens tradition. It was influenced by Fairfield Porter. But then I spent a lot of my life out here on the West Coast. It’s a different kind of light and somewhat different influences.

After I moved out here, and I started being influenced by the atmosphere, Morris Graves is somebody I mentioned. And Whistler is another one, his nocturnes and so forth. Trying to get ahold of this Northwest winter landscape… I feel like I absorbed a lot of that East Coast/Philadelphia realism from going to school there. Wherever you go to school (and who your teachers are) is going to influence you a lot. And then moving out here, I have that influence on me, too.

I think these different areas of the country have developed in certain ways. I was in Santa Fe, recently, and I learned more about the history of that area and how artists came there to work. And Los Angeles has its own really interesting history. Seattle has its own particular history of certain artists moving there from other places and germinating.

I just think there are really good artists working everywhere in America. They may not show in the same city where they’re living. And I just think that there’s a lot going on everywhere. But New York is still where a lot of people go to bring their work, but I don’t know.

LG Now, what’s the art scene in Seattle like? Is that supportive to landscape painters? People working from observation?

KS Somewhat more than it used to be. When I first moved here in 1987, there was even less of that. It’s definitely not in the mainstream. Seattle has kind of a funky aesthetic. You know, each city has its own solar system of artists. You find this if you’ve shown in different cities and lived in different places. There are certain people who are very well-known.

In the Northwest, there’s Morris Graves [and] that school of painting. I really like [Morris Graves' work] a lot. But there wasn’t very much of realist painting. I met Gary Fagan and his wife Pamela. They were starting up a little school back then, basically out of their kitchen. It’s now grown into the Gage School. It was first called the Academy of Realist Art, and then the Seattle Academy of Art. She’s from Canada. They lived in New York for a while. I think they went to the Art Students League. They started up this school and started bringing in artists from around the world to teach there, and have really built it into something where this is a community of representational painters.

The history of art in Seattle is interesting. There’s Davidson Gallery, which shows realist work. The owner’s family had a collection of prints. He’s a print dealer, but he also represents a lot of realist artists.

When I came here, the galleries that really interested me were Greg Kucera, who does sort of avant-garde stuff. He doesn’t really show any representational type work. And then  (Don) Foster/White Gallery, which showed Morris Graves and Dale Chihuly. And he didn’t really show [any] figurative work, to speak of, but I wanted to be with that gallery just because it was such a good gallery, and I like Morris Graves’ work. So, I approached them. They didn’t know who I was, and it was sort of a long process of them getting to know me.

In the meantime, I started showing in Santa Monica, because I had been approaching Tatistcheff & Co in New York for years. You know, Peter Tatistcheff .

LG Sure. I know the gallery. They’re no longer in existence.

KS No longer in existence, but he was one of the dealers who would talk to art students off the street. So, going back to art school… In Philadelphia we’d go take the train up to New York, and he was someone we could talk to. He would give us some hope that maybe we could show there.

So, Terry Rogers was working at Peter’s gallery in New York at that time, and then he moved back home to Los Angeles and started his own branch of Tatistcheff . So, he knew my work. He got in contact with me and said, “You know, I like your work.” There was someone who was interested in me. So, I started showing in Santa Monica. Every time I had a show there, I’d send the card to Don Foster in Seattle. And then they eventually called me up and said, “Hey, would you like to be in a group show?” So, that’s how that happened. In sort of a roundabout way.

So getting back to your question about Seattle’s art scene. I had to find my way into that, but in the meantime, show in a different city. So, I think you just have to find the right venue that’s interested in your work

After a Snow Fall Oil 2012 38 ” x 48 ”

LG John Thorton, in one of his videos about you, talks about the difficulty of painters succeeding in the artworld, he quotes the New Yorker article where it talks about: “radiating a half-life of blighted ambitions” (The New Yorker, The Art World, Looking for the Zeitgeist Dec 6 1982 by Calvin Tomkins)
(here is the full quote from this 1982 article…)

“Precious few ever become rich or famous, needless to say, but more and more of them are trying. In its current “Guide to Galleries, Museums, Artists,” the magazine Art in America lists some fourteen thousand artists in this country, each with his or her gallery affiliation. Assuming that for every artist who has a gallery there are at least twenty who want one, it appears that the profession is getting a little crowded. What are we going to do with all these artists, with all this art? Teaching jobs in the fine arts are even harder to come by these days than gallery affiliations. Works of art must be piling up throughout the republic in dangerous profusion, unsold and unseen, radiating a half-life of blighted ambitions.”

30 years later, the over-population of painters today barely leaves room to breathe sometimes. That combined with many galleries closing due to the economy and even that painting itself increasingly becoming irrelevant to the NYC-based artworld, painters have what seems to be an impossible struggle ahead.

KS Yeah, you mentioned about this quotation about unsold artworks radiating a half-life of blighted ambition, and we joked about that when we were art students living in the same house in North Philadelphia. We had a great landlord. We lived in this beautiful, old home in kind of a rundown neighborhood about ten blocks north of the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts on Mt. Vernon Street. That’s where Thomas Eakins used to live, right on that street. And Daniel Garber, also in that neighborhood. It was a beautiful old home with tall ceilings and all sorts of beautiful moldings and everything, and there were five of us at a time living in there.

So, we had this little community of artists. You know, when you get out of school and you start working on your own, it may be harder to keep in touch with other artists. So, as you said about teaching, if you’re in an academic environment, you have that connection. I haven’t done as much teaching, so I am kind of isolated, in a way. I live out in the country, but I do keep in touch with artists that I’ve known since way back in art school.

LG That is a good suggestion to not limit yourself to only trying to show in a gallery where you live. There is so much competition amongst painters now, that it seems like, in my mind anyway (it’s perhaps different for you) but there’s almost no point to competing anymore. The market is just so saturated with a very high painter to buyer ratio, that to my mind, it’s just better to have it all just be a labor of love and just to have the integrity… and to let go of notions of “making it big someday”. You’re probably not going to get ahead anyway. You might as well just do what you want.

KS Yeah, absolutely. It has to be about the work, and there’s no reason to be doing it if you don’t really like what you’re doing.

The Cherry Tree 1999 Oil 50″ x 70″

KS My personal story briefly is that while I agree with everything you just said; if I can get a good gallery relationship, and keep that healthy, and have a place to show the work, and sell some of it, and have some kind of following, and just be paying attention to the work I’m doing, and be happy with that, that’s all I could want.

When I was an art student (I had just started in art school) my grandfather said to me, “You should have some other skill or trade.” It’s practical. As it turned out, they were restoring the sculpture collection at the Pennsylvania Academy Museum. I was hired by Virginia Naude, an art conservator, as a lab assistant to help her restore all the sculptures in the museum collection.

Through that I was introduced to another conservator. And so, all these years I’ve been doing sculpture conservation. I get to travel and see collections, fantastic art collections. I walk into a room, or in someone’s house, or in a museum, and I see these works; and I get to work on these fantastic pieces of art I never would even see.

And so, I have that outlook on the art world, and I see the art world on the level of the top tier galleries, anyone you could name, and I realize I’m not in that world, and I never will be, but that’s fine. I show in the best galleries that I can make a connection with, and some of them have been pretty good. But I realize I have my place, and I have my friends, like we were talking about. I met George Nick and Scott Noel. I’m meeting you.

I’m just happy if I can be doing paintings I think are good and getting better. Then that’s all I really want. It’s important to sell some of the work. I really try hard to keep a good gallery relationship. And that’s a whole other thing I really feel strongly about, that artists should realize that keeping that relationship strong is really important in terms of bringing people to the gallery, and everything being transparent, as much as possible.

LG You work with the George Billis gallery? Is that your main gallery? …

KS Yes, it is right now. Yes. I had been showing at the Tatistcheff, the first show I got in New York. It was on 57th Street and everything was nice, but that went bad. He had financial problems. And it took me a long time to get another gallery. So I met George, He’s a pretty young guy. I just met him. I was there one day with Scott Noel, just looking at galleries and just struck up a conversation. That eventually led to being in a group show and then having a show. And it’s really tough if you lose a gallery to get another one. So, I think it’s really important for anyone to appreciate, if you can get one, just to keep that relationship healthy.

LG Right. Especially with the economy the way it is. A number of very big galleries have gone under. And so, all the ones who were in good galleries that have closed are now moving into the other ones, and making it even more impossible.

I think you had asked me one of these questions about how do you make it [and] survive in the art world. And my answer to that would be try to keep expenses low, the overhead low. Certainly in the beginning. And building a studio was one of things I wanted to do to…

Alex Kanevsky J.F.H. 48″ x 48″, oil on board, 2011
click here for a larger view

Many readers are familiar with Alex Kanevsky’s work but perhaps not all of his details. The internet offers a great deal of information about Mr. Kanevsky but unfortunately much of it is, if not false, not exactly accurate either. I was recently fortunate enough to visit Mr. Kavnevsky in his studio and I got the sense from him that this situation didn’t bother him, and that perhaps he even found it amusing.

I asked him about being from Lithuania and his studies there. I had assumed he was an ethnic Russian who grew up in Lithuania or was from near Kalingrad or something to that effect (This will probably only add to the general confusion about his background). He quickly corrected me and explained that he was from the provinces in Russia and studied in Lithuania. He then told a story about an article that had been written about him in France recently. The article seemed to only have one fact that was correct. Mr. Kanevsky seemed resigned to the errors. He said that he felt that these facts about him end up being similar to his drawings. The information isn’t always correct but when you put everything together it tells a sort of truth.

The details that I know to be true are the following: Alex Kanevsky is a Philadelphia, Pennsylvania based painter who teaches at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts. He shows at J. Cacciola Gallery and Dolby Chadwick Gallery, and had a show in December at J. Cacciola Gallery. He will also have a show in Milan, Italy at the Barbara Frigerio Gallery in November of this year.

I want to thank Mr. Kanevsky very much for opening his studio to me and being willing to take the time to answer my questions.

Neil Plotkin: You grew up in Russia and have lived as an adult in the US; you studied art in both Lithuania and Philadelphia in – by your own description – quite different educational environments: do you feel that you are more tied to the traditions and lineages of Philadelphia than Russia/Lithuania/Europe?

Alex Kanevsky: I was fortunate to depart Lithuania and to arrive to the US at the time when I was already well familiar with the European /Eastern European traditions and somewhat educated in that direction, but not convinced yet that I wanted to go in that direction myself. So in the US, I found myself with one foot in each tradition, both feet not too firmly planted. Having been deprived in this way of strong authority figures, I mostly had to fill the vacuum with my own inventions. As the result, I don’t feel strongly tied to either tradition and certainly do not feel myself to be a part of any lineage. It is a rather confusing mix of influences that I never tried to sort out.

Kitchen Landscape 48″ x 24″, oil on wood, 2011

NP: You studied math previous to studying art. In many ways the two are very related. In practice have these two aspects of your education intertwined in any way?

AK: Mathematics for me is related to art in many ways. Most importantly, it is because much of what it deals with cannot be expressed or even approximately described in words. Getting used to being comfortable in that situation is a good training for an artist. I understand this situation as being more liberating than limiting. That led to an additional, unintended conclusion that artists statements are not possible and any attempts to write one lead to confusion and misinformation.

R.W. 24″ x 24″, oil on wood, 2011

NP: As we discussed previously, it seems that your work underwent a rapid evolution about 10 years ago, becoming more fluid and comfortable. Can you talk about that transition and how your thinking changed at that time?

AK: A little more than 10 years ago I won a Pew Grant that allowed me to do nothing but paint for almost two years. Doing that, I discovered continuity. Being able to come back in the morning to the painting I left last night, the memory of the work still fresh, and the sense of flow uninterrupted. It made a big difference to me, probably because I am not a fast painter, so I can never start and finish anything in one day. Usually, the paintings stay with me for weeks or months. The continuity was addictive. It gave me the taste of my personal right modus operandi. When the grant money run out, I realized that I was now committed to this kind of life and would rather be very poor, but paint every day than return to the part-time world. For a while that is what I did, and later the paintings began to sell in the galleries, so I was able to go to my studio and paint every day ever since. That was my personal mini-revolution: the understanding of how I need to function as an artist and the commitment to do just that regardless of the circumstances.

J.F.H. with Four Doors, 36” x 58”, oil on wood, 2011

NP: Can you describe the perfect studio for you?

AK: The perfect studio is not very important. I think one should not become too attached to buildings and geographical locations even if one works happily there. It is a good idea to move from time to time to shake up the old paradigm. Some things are important to a painter: good constant, natural sunlight. Enough space to walk away from paintings. Otherwise I am more clear on what I don’t want: big multi-studio buildings full of various artists.

Blue Room with Running Dog, 55” x 77”, oil on wood, 2011

NP: You teach at PAFA one day a week. You have said that one day a week is the ideal amount of teaching, what does it bring to you/your artistic practice?

AK: It keeps me honest and on my toes. We deal with the same painting issues in this class that I face myself every day in my studio. The class forces me to verbalize these issues and find the ways to express them and the solutions clearly. I would not be naturally inclined to do that if it were not for the students. It is clearly an adversarial situation both for them and (less evidently) for me. At the end we all benefit from more clarity.

Morning Television 8.5″ x 16″, oil on wood

NP: You’re considered by many artists and critics to be extremely at ease in your drawing and painting skills. But you often talk about how difficult you find painting. What are you struggling with right now?

AK: Well, it is the road with no end. As your skills inevitably get better with time, you expect more from yourself. Skills in themselves, beyond certain serviceable level, don’t matter very much, but I always want to function at the limit of my current abilities to keep things exciting. There should always be danger of painting crushing and burning. I want painting to be difficult so that there is always room for failure. Working this way has an unintended consequence of improving the skills.
The struggle then has nothing to do with the technical difficulties and the level of skills. The struggle is mostly to find clarity.

Annunciation 66 x 66, oil on linen, 2007

Chelsea Hotel Landscape?48″ x 48″, oil on wood, 2011

NP: Titles can change work entirely and in the title of paintings like The Annunciation and Chelsea Hotel Landscape or the titles of bodies of work, like Proserpine, Heroes and Animals, Parlor Games etc, it seems that there could be a narrative to the work. Does narration play a role in your work and if so, what role does the narrative play in development of the work?

AK: There are no linear narratives in this work, despite of what the titles might suggest. There are absurd pseudo-narratives in the paintings that you mentioned. They are used as working tools: mostly to accomplish certain precise emotional climate rather than to tell a story. If you think of stories or memories from your own life, they are important to you as triggers that allow you to relive the meaning of the events, to recapture your own emotional response to them. I use, combine and fracture these “narratives” for the same reason. It is more interesting to trigger than to describe. I don’t mind it if these titles or the implied stories mislead a viewer to some extent. To make a painting her/his own, a viewer will have to accept the ambiguity, confusion and search for clarity that were the conditions of its arrival.

Large Nude with Several Pictures of Herself 35.75″ x 59.5″, oil on wood, 2011

NP: In your Progress Sequence, you’ve described your process of painting as being a bit like “wandering in the dark with uncertain goals. Not aimless, but not exactly purposeful.” If that’s the case, how do you decide that a painting is finished?

AK: When I am happy with it. When all the potential improvements will only do harm. When any roughness and awkwardness left in it ceases being a shortcoming and becomes a vital part of composition.

Or it is irretrievably lost (finished in a different way).

Paintings do let us know when to leave them alone. Artists often overlook these signals, being so focused on imposing their will. I don’t think of painting as something I do to a canvas. To me it is a complicated relationship of equals. A form of conflict. When we reach some sort of agreement that makes everyone satisfied it is the good time to leave it alone.

C.M. 2011

NP: As drawing can be so different from painting, do you feel that you have different mentors in drawing than in painting?

AK: There were different artists I looked at. Drawing is very specific, very abstracted form of communication. Drawing is to painting what a game of bridge is to life, to use a somewhat convoluted analogy. Anyway, I looked at Balthus, Raphael, Giacometti, Auerbach, Andy Wyeth, Antonio Lopez, Seurat, Joseph Beuys, Cy Twombley, Adolph Menzel, Euan Uglow for drawings – among many others.

Road to Todi 2011

NP: When I visited your studio, you mentioned that you had started to draw again a couple of years ago. I understood this to mean that it had been several years since you drew on a regular basis. I’m wondering what your reasons were to get back to drawing.

AK: Curiosity. To see what’s there. They fascinate me now. Looking at a good drawing is like talking to a completely insane person, who nevertheless says some beautiful and profound things. Naturally I wanted to try that myself.

And seeing Lopez Garcia show in Boston and Michael Rossman’s here in Philadelphia and Sangram Majumdar in NY.

L.D.V3, 2011

L.D.V.4

NP: When we talked, you explained that when you draw your models, after breaks you ask them to get back into position but don’t require that they get back into the exact position. Could you describe this process and how you came about this approach?

AK: After not drawing for a good 15 years (why draw when you can paint?), I wanted to try again fresh. A model came to the studio and we attempted a pencil drawing on the back of some big old watercolor that was around. I was out of practice in trying to express volumes with lines. In fact it seemed like a rather bizarre idea. Things were pretty rough for a while. I couldn’t find one shoulder, and since I did not have an eraser in the studio, I had to re-draw it over and over. Eventually, it was in the right place, along with the collection of the wrong lines surrounding the good one. Later, as I looked at it, I realized that the search for the right line that went on, or rather the agglomeration of the wrong lines, implying the existence of the right line somewhere among them, was the most interesting thing about that drawing. It connected the drawing in my mind with my own commutative wave paintings that I did in Ireland a little earlier. It also reminded me of someone’s project I have seen once. The artist photographically superimposed 10 years of the Playboy centerfolds, and the resulting image surprisingly looked like a beautiful abstract Titian painting of a flesh cloud.

Now, that I have been drawing every week for a couple of years, I have become better at it, I don’t make enough mistakes.

So, in order to give myself some space to fail, I ask the models not to be too precise in keeping the pose, or sometimes even to move intentionally. These are implied rather than realized drawings.

K.B. 1, aquatint

J.F.H., aquatint

NP: Your drawing work is completely linear whereas the painting is done in broad color swaths and your prints are done in thin layers piled up. Can you talk about how the different approaches in each medium influence the other media?

AK: I am not sure they do. In my mind they all exist independently. That is their attraction for me. I use every one of these media the only way that seems right to me. For example, if I want to work tonally, why would I draw? Painting seems more natural for that. And the printmaking is actually collaboration with Erika Greenberg Schneider. My part of it resembles watercolor mere than anything else. I don’t have anything to do with the actual printmaking.

Diego with his knives 2010

Polish Rider 28″ x 48″, oil on board

NP: When I look at some of your drawings and Spinning Figure, in particular, I am reminded of Tony Cragg’s sculptures. One of the first paintings of a horse in recent years was named The Polish Rider – I am assuming that this is a reference to the Rembrandt in the Frick Collection. And of course there’s the painting Nude Descending a Staircase. Are you creating work with the idea of a dialogue with other artists and artworks?

AK: I do. The connection with Tony Craig sculpture never occurred to me, but you are probably right about that. I feel connected to what so many other artists did. We are not in vacuum. The dialog really exists. I don’t think it is some sort of linear progression that art historians are so fond of. It is more like a complex fascinating conversation with many people, dead and alive spanning several hundreds of years. It is a wonderful feeling to be able to talk with Rembrandt, and there is no other way to do that for me.

T.S., 2012

L.H. 2012

L.G. 2

More interviews with Alex Kanevsky:

http://www.vivianite.net/alex-kanevsky
http://rtspot.wordpress.com/2009/01/08/alex-kanevsky/

click here for a larger view

Interview with Sydney Licht
by Neil Plotkin

Sydney Licht is a painter based in New York. Ms. Licht studied at Smith College and received her MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She is represented by Kathryn Markel Fine Arts in New York and is also a member of the still life group Zeuxis.

This past summer, Ms Licht had a solo show at Kathryn Markel and was included in two group shows which opened in December, the Small Packages show at Cumberland Gallery in Nashville, TN and The Common Object at the Maryland Institute College of Art. She will be included in the upcoming Zeuxis show Reflections, which opens at Linwood University in Missouri in February 2012.

There is also a video interview with Sydney Licht in her studio at the end of this interview.

I would like to thank Sydney very much for her time for this interview.

Neil Plotkin The classic artist story, the one here in America, is very often that a young artist moves to New York, struggles, builds a career and then moves and sets up life elsewhere. And you’ve done the exact opposite. You’ve built a career. You’ve lived around the country. You’ve raised your children. Once that was done, you moved to New York. How do you think this has benefitted you as an artist and how does living in New York now help you as an artist?

Sydney Licht I went to a liberal arts college on the East Coast as an undergraduate. The great benefit of not staying on the East Coast for grad school was that I was exposed to a different perspective at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, which is where I went to grad school for painting. Living in Chicago was a revelation, permitting me to move past the European canon of art history.

I don’t know if you are familiar with the Art Institute of Chicago or the school there, but the professors I studied with were so open to influences outside of the European painting tradition (which I had, had a lot of as an undergraduate). I was exposed to the Field Museum of Natural History, Outsider art, Chicago Imagist paintings and art inspired by popular culture, comic books, etc.

It was eye-opening and I realized that I didn’t have to follow all those “rules” I was given as an undergrad. I could do any kind of painting I wanted. I could define my interests in a very personal way. Having this opportunity in Chicago and not going to New York right away right away helped to shape me as an artist.

Still Life with Artificial Sweetners, 12 in. x 12 in, oil on board, 2010

NP: In the past, you told me you started out as an abstract painter. Can you talk about your transition from being an abstract painter to a representational painter?

SL: In Chicago, both while I was in grad school and after, I was painting large, neo-Expressionist, autobiographical paintings. The paintings weren’t completely abstract, however, with some evidence of imagery apparent. I called them ‘organic abstractions’. Each painting took a very long time. I was interested in the materiality of paint, and the painting process involved much scraping off and putting on; finishing a painting became so unending. I came to realize that the paintings weren’t getting resolved because I was using color arbitrarily.

To resolve this, I gave myself a problem and therefore, some structure. I decided to translate the formal aspects of one of my organic abstractions into a still life painting. The painting I first chose to translate had a huge slab of white paint cutting through a dark form, splitting it in two. To mimic that relationship in a still life, I placed two objects next to each other, touching in such a way that an interesting negative shape in between them was created.

To understand color more fully, I restricted myself to a very limited palette, using only four or five colors. I think the colors were yellow ochre, alizarin crimson, ultramarine blue, ivory black and white, essentially the primary colors plus white and black.

After this first still life, I made at least ten more in the same vein. I was reinvigorated by what I could do with such minimal means. Because I was learning so much about color harmonies with respect to value and hue, I kept working with this limited palette for at least five years.

Still Life with Espresso Bag #1, 24 in. x 16 in., oil on linen, 2008

NP: Some of your colors are very keyed. Have you changed your palette a lot? How are they keyed? What kinds of colors? The yellows are very vibrant. The oranges are very vibrant.

SL: Not that much, although now, I think more about the warm and cool aspects of primary colors. I stopped using black many years ago. Usually a painting idea starts with a question. When I first started the still life project, it was, Can I make a still life that mimics the abstract ideas that I’m interested in? Or can I understand color better by using very little of it? As the questions have changed, the palette has changed.

At one point I asked myself, “Can I make a monochromatic still life with just slightly tinted hues of white?” Right after that, I really wanted to see how far I could go in pushing color intensity so the palette expanded to include a fluorescent yellow.

Still Life with Dessert, 30 in. x 30 in., oil on linen, 2011

NP: So you’re just using alizarin, ultramarine, yellow ochre and then you’ll add only one or two colors. You have a very tight palette then?

SL: I still use yellow ochre to which I’ve added lemon yellow. I use alizarin crimson which is a cool red and to that, I’ve added cadmium red light, which is warmer….so a cool and a warm of the same primary color dynamic are usually what’s on the palette. I’ve replaced ultramarine with cobalt blue and added manganese blue.

NP: Recently you completed a residency at Yaddo. Can you talk about the experience that you had there and how the work emerged from it?

SL: Even before I got to Yaddo, I knew I wanted to create a visual diary of the experience.

When I arrived, the first thing that the staff presented me with was a white paper bag with my name on it. It was my lunch to take to the studio. Receiving this white bag with my name on it was a very welcoming thing, like a gift.

I took the bag with my lunch in it to my studio which was completely empty and white and beautiful. A gorgeous space with nothing in it. When I took the sandwich out of the bag, it was the only visual thing in the whole room, and so I decided to paint it. I had such a good time painting it.

Yaddo Lunches – 6 in x 6 in – watercolor

On the second day and for the the rest of my three week stay, every morning I would pick up my lunch pail at breakfast and go to the studio. My visual diary became this ritual of painting my lunch before eating it. I would spend the morning getting warmed up by doing a watercolor of what I was given for lunch. I’d eat the lunch. Then in the afternoons, I worked on still life paintings in oil.

It was a wonderful experience. During working hours at Yaddo, everyone is expected to remain quiet in public areas so as not to disturb the other residents. All residents meet for dinner and then you can either go back to work or socialize. I found it to be very productive.

Yaddo Lunches – 6 in x 6 in – watercolor

NP: From my perspective, you’re a very established artist. You know what you’re doing. You’ve been doing it for a long time. You know how you’re going to approach things. How do you feel this residency helped move you forward? How did you benefit from it?

SL: Even though I’ve been painting for a long time, there are continual interruptions in my daily life not having to do with painting. Fighting to minimize those interruptions is a constant battle for me. When I go to a residency like Yaddo, I don’t have to think about what I’m going to make for dinner and all the other practical aspects of living my life. I’m on a mental holiday which makes room for true and consistent focus. Finding moments of focus is rare in my daily life, and easier to achieve at a residency. Also, I met some great people at Yaddo. Besides visual artists, some terrific writers, composers and performance artists were in residence while I was there.

[A group of images from this series]

Yaddo Lunches – 6 in x 6 in – watercolor

Yaddo Lunches – 6 in x 6 in – watercolor

Yaddo Lunches – 6 in x 6 in – watercolor

Yaddo Lunches – 6 in x 6 in – watercolor

Yaddo Lunches – 6 in x 6 in – watercolor

Yaddo Lunches – 6 in x 6 in – watercolor

Yaddo Lunches – 6 in x 6 in – watercolor

Yaddo Lunches – 6 in x 6 in – watercolor

NP: For your 2008 show, you received a favorable review in the New Yorker and the reviewer commented that Morandi was a touchstone of your work and that he looms large in your work. Anybody who is a still life painter or any kind of painter would be very happy to hear that. Rather than letting a reviewer determine your sources of inspiration, I wanted to hear where you feel that you fall in the tradition of still life painting or painting in general?

SL: I don’t think about that question a lot. I think more about where I sit in the world and about trying to incorporate the life that I live into the work, while still making the work—I hate to use the word universal but—accessible to all who are drawn to the visual. Incorporating both in each painting is a goal that I strive for. Being of my time, but also recognizing that I am a product of history as well, especially art history.

Still Life with Coffee and Tea, 16 in. x 12 in., oil on board, 2010

NP: Your work has a lot of colors poking through the surface layer of paint. Within each block of color there’s a shimmer of what’s underneath. For example, in Still Life with Coffee and Tea, you see what’s underneath a little bit. What’s your process regarding those previous layers? Are these color revisions or are they a part of how you create the blocks of color? How do you do this?

SL: Well, with each painting it’s a different story, like a different puzzle to solve. What shows through from underneath is the result of the process of finding the right hue and value relationships as a natural part of making the painting work. It’s not premeditated. I don’t paint on a colored ground. I start a painting with a palette knife, and that enables me to not get bogged down in details too quickly. At the beginning of each painting, these color/value approximations are just that…first attempts that are refined as the painting progresses through thoughtful readjustments.

Still Life with Open Box #1, 12 in. x 12 in., oil on linen, 2006

NP: It seems that negative space has always been an important part of your composition. Is that how you approach work?

SL: I realized when I first started the still life project that the negative spaces around the objects was the real subject matter; meaning can be found in how the space around the forms impacts those forms. You’re right, that composition is the first thing I think about, and finding a compelling negative shape or space inspires me to do the painting in the first place.

Still Life with Sweet and Low #1, 12 in. x 12 in., oil on linen, 2010

NP: The paintings are so well composed; for example to say there are four millimeters on the side of the canvas. I’m looking at Still Life with Sweet and Low. Are you looking at a viewfinder to capture that or do you draw it in?

SL: I don’t use a viewfinder. I do make a very minimal sketch; just a line drawing of how the objects relate to the edges of the picture plane and how things are relating to one another. Sometimes I’m happy with the first sketch, but often I have to do several versions of an idea to arrive at a successful arrangement of elements.

NP: On the canvas or in a painting?

SL: No, I use a sketchbook. Once I think I’ve got something, I will mix up several piles of color on the palette and go at the canvas with big slabs of paint using the knife. I rarely sketch it out on the canvas first. I learned a long time ago if I make a very detailed drawing ahead of the painting; that I’ve already answered my question and in so doing, I lose interest in the painting. Maintaining the excitement in solving a problem is key for me to stay engaged. I have restricted my drawing over the years to remain curious and surprised by each new work I make.

NP: What is the discovery that you’re looking for?

SL: Something I didn’t know before. Absolutely. The best kind of resolution is when the unexpected happens at the end of the painting process and I learn something new. If I have an initial idea and it works that’s great. At other times, I think an idea will work and it doesn’t. When that happens, I have to push myself by asking, “What is it that I’m really interested in here?”

Hard questions come up in the middle of painting. Through desperate acts, I am pushed into finding new solutions. That can mean painting out an object I first thought was crucial to the work. Or, the desperate act can be suddenly adding a piece of color at the edge to make a statement. The painting talks back and points out what I had not considered before.

NP: You’re talking about when things aren’t working. In desperation, do you abandon canvasses or do you keep beating it until it works?

SL: I keep making changes. I don’t give up on paintings, no. I mean, sometimes they’ve taken 8 or 9 years to complete but I rarely abandon a painting.

NP: You’re a member of Zeuxis, a still life group of painters. Has the exposure to other still life painters benefited you much or influenced you in any way?

SL: It has. Often, the themes of the exhibitions have pushed me in directions I probably wouldn’t have gone and forced me to look at things I may not have considered otherwise.

The Common Object exhibition currently at the Maryland Institute College of Art is a good example of that. We were all given a dishcloth that we had to include somehow, in a painting. I probably wouldn’t have placed a dishcloth in a painting without that impetus, but because I had to, it brought me back to thinking about what it means to fold and arrange cloth. This led to the paintings of tied up bundles of cloth.

Still Life with Two Bundles, 8 in. x 8 in., oil on linen, 2010

In the Common Object painting, I kept the dishcloth relatively contained so that the original folds were still in evidence. That made me relate these folded pieces of cloth to the boxes I’ve been painting recently because like the boxes, these bundles are like beautifully wrapped gifts.

Still Life with Bundles, 12 in. x 12 in., oil on linen, 2011

NP: You keep talking about gifts and these small things. When I look at Still Life with Bundles, I think of the Japanese tradition of gifts being very well packaged. They’re small and compact. It’s all very considered. Is that something that you think about? The Asian approach or the Japanese approach in particular?

SL: No, but that’s interesting. I hadn’t thought about a Japanese influence before. I am attracted to non-Western approaches to making two-dimensional works though. I love Indian miniature paintings because of the emphasis placed on shape and pattern, flatness and color, but I hadn’t considered the Japanese approach you’re referring to. Maybe I will now.

Containers, in general, fascinate me because they bring up issues surrounding consumption. Tabletops have become resting places for fast food containers instead of elaborately prepared meals to enjoy

NP: Why have you chosen the things that you’ve chosen? Why do you use bags and packages as subjects?

SL: I choose things I’m attracted to visually and conceptually. I’ve painted food for a long time because of its association with desirability; especially certain kinds of fruit, for a very personal reason. As a child, I was very allergic to raw fruit and exposure to certain foods produced a very severe allergic reaction. Consequently, I was denied many tastes that I Ioved.

Perhaps because I was faced with this promise of the forbidden at an early age, I associate painting with desire and physicality.

Still Life with Orange and Stem 2, 14 in. x 16 in., oil on linen, 2002

Painting images of boxes and packages is an extension of this. A package has the promise of something delightful inside just as a piece of fruit presents the promise of something delightful to taste.

We live in a culture where we see food packaged up more often than not. These packages can be so visually appealing. There’s one painting image I sent you in which an orange is pictured in front of a plain cardboard box…[Still Life with Orange]…and the shadow thrown on the box by the orange… I really love that box because of the simple way it catches the light. I’ve painted it over and over again. The light will shift on a box or bag depending upon the time of day or what it’s next to. Boxes and bags are great color catchers.

Still Life with Pasta, 12 in. x 12 in., oil on board, 2010

Video interview with interview with Sydney Licht in her studio

Albers, Josef, b. 1888 d. 1976, was one of the most influential artist-educators of the 20th century, was a member of the Bauhaus group in Germany during the 1920s. In 1933 he came to the United States, where he taught at Black Mountain College for sixteen years. In 1950 he joined the faculty at Yale University as chairman of the Department of Design and was professor emeritus of art at Yale until his death in 1976. Joseph Albers was a significant contributor and influence on modern painting.

From his wikipedia page…”Accomplished as a designer, photographer, typographer, printmaker and poet, Albers is best remembered for his work as an abstract painter and theorist. He favored a very disciplined approach to composition. Most famous of all are the hundreds of paintings and prints that make up the series Homage to the Square. In this rigorous series, begun in 1949, Albers explored chromatic interactions with flat colored squares arranged concentrically. Painting usually on Masonite, he used a palette knife with oil colors and often recorded colors used on the back of his works.”

Albers is perhaps best known today by art students for his famous book and course of study Interaction of Color Originally issued in 1963 as a limited-edition set of commentary and 150 silkscreened colour plates, the book introduced generations of students, artists, designers, and collectors to Albers’ unique approach to complex principles. A smaller version of the Interaction of Color was published later (1975) and has been a mainstay color bible for generations of art students.

The original publication has long been out of print and is extremely expensive if you could find it at all. However the original silkscreened printing likely have the greatest color fidelity. A the January 2010 reissue of Interaction of Color: New Complete Edition [Hardcover] is considered by many reviewers on Amazon to be a gorgeous book. From the publisher’s blurb… “Lavishly produced as a two-volume slipcased set, this book replicates Albers’ revolutionary exercises, explaining concepts such as colour relativity and vibrating and vanishing boundaries through the use of colour, shape, die-cut forms, and movable flaps that illustrate his astonishing demonstrations of the changing and relative nature of colour. Also included for the first time are new studies from the Albers archive, produced by the artist’s students in the early 1960s. A celebration of Albers’ legendary achievements, this beautiful publication is an essential addition to any serious art library.”
in a shameless promotion, I’m linking this book to Amazon where a small percentage of the sale goes to help support this site if you click from this link…
Interaction of Color: New Complete Edition

There is also an interesting new biography,Josef Albers: To Open Eyes you may want to consider.

A very interesting video from one of Albers former students (note he has several more related videos on Albers Color Theory for viewing on Vimeo)

Albers Homage To The Square: An Explanation from Richard (Dick) Nelson on Vimeo

A few excerpts from a long interview with Josef Albers from the Archives of American Art Smithsonian Institute Oral history interview in 1968
Complete interview can be read from this Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution link

JOSEF ALBERS:
And why do I paint squares since 1959, in the same design, in the same arrangement; Because I do not see that there is, in any visual articulation, one final solution. In science they think sometimes they have found a solution. Already the next year the whole thing may look upside down, and its not the truth any more. An example I have quoted repeatedly: in 1848 I think it was, (it was at that time when flying was considered an insoluble problem) that was a time when the chemists at an international congress agreed that we are not able to develop an organic compound from inorganic constituents. And in the next year, in 1849, Boettcher was able to develop an organic compound urea, you see. So, in science what seems true today may not be true tomorrow. There science is dealing with physical facts, in art we are dealing with psychic effects. With this I come to my first statement: The source of art – that is, where it comes from – is the discrepancy between physical fact and psychic effect. That’s what I’m talking about. When I want to speak about why I am doing the same thing now, which is squares, for – how long? – 19 years. Because there is no final solution in any visual formulation. Although this may be just a belief on my part, I have some assurances that that is not the most stupid thing to do, through Cezanne, whom I consider as one of the greatest painters. From Cezanne we have, so the historians tell us – 250 paintings of Mont St. Victoire. But we know that Cezanne has left in the fields often more than he took home because he was disappointed with his work. So we may conclude he did many more than 250 of the same problem. Yes?

SEVIM FESCI: Yes.

JOSEF ALBERS: How see Van Gogh. You know his Sunflowers?

SEVIM FESCI: Yes, of course.

JOSEF ALBERS: He has traced them on tracing paper and then has transferred the tracings on new canvases, precisely the same shape. Every flower and leaf form is repeated precisely. This mad man undertook a method to save time and traced and transferred it on another canvas again and again, and filled out the contours with other colors. So we have multiplied sunflowers – I have photographed them, I have slides on it that prove that he made the same contour of sunflowers in other colors. We have two l’Arlesiennes. Why two? Because he was not satisfied with the first one. He said there is another possibility, you see. And that is what Picasso has said this way, I quote now, “When we are honest we have to admit that we never get what we want.” So I am excused when I make now several hundred squares. Yes? Or when you go downstairs and see – I am now in my red period. I was for years in the yellow period, you know. But now I am with the reds, it was hard for me to get into the reds. Very hard, how I am tickled to death to make more reds. Which one is the best I don’t know. But this is to show why I am promoting serial image. Because like Cezanne has demonstrated it, like Picasso has said it, “We don’t get what we want.” And therefore we continue, and therefore my saying is, “A painter paints because he has no time not to paint.” And I am a teacher because I teach all the time – now you are my victim – I teach and I have no time not to teach. And I’m a little bit disturbed when I have to play retrospective, as I did before. You see that I’ve changed my viewpoint

JOSEF ALBERS: I understand. But, you see, I am more interested to stimulate the creative process. In my basic courses I have always tried to develop discovery and invention which, in my opinion, are the criteria of creativeness. I have tried to make people aware and ready to recognize – that’s again observation, the word I used before, and in articulation what is then the reaction to it. The creative process as such I have tried to lead back to the most basic attitude, and that is by presenting, and there I feel very instrumental, by presenting to my students material as such without telling them what to do, how to handle it, but ask them to find a new –

SEVIM FESCI: Way of expressing.

JOSEF ALBERS: No, not the word “expression” – I have told you already that’s not –

SEVIM FESCI: Of presenting them?

JOSEF ALBERS: — to find out what it is able to do, by presenting it with a new function. Therefore, I came furthermore to the conclusion just at the end of my formal teaching – I usually say I taught for a hundred years – that all art studies are in the end basic and that at art schools there are no graduate studies. The graduate studies come when they leave the school and are working their whole life and demonstrate that also in other fields. Graduate students don’t want to be led by professors. They want to find their own “nonsense”. So I have come to the conclusion that the graduate art school is an error. And I have experienced that in another way, also, When I was called to Yale Art School here I was expected to teach mainly the older – graduate students. But I made a point that I took first and mostly the beginners because the babies need more education than the grownups. And so the students out of the graduate class came into my basic courses without being asked to do that. Therefore I had such large classes in the basic courses in color and in drawing and later also when I gave basic design again. I’m very rough in the treating of my students. And in saying it now, I have said to my students “I am putting you into a vacuum and ask you to breathe.” But at the school we came to new discoveries, to new formulations, and that, I think, has been followed up more or less everywhere in the world.

JOSEF ALBERS: Well, I would say the aim of art is a constant, and a continuous job to reveal visually the attitude of our mentality. And the less we disturb the influence of our mentality the more I believe we come close to the truth. And therefore the last 15-20 years in which everyone tried to be different from everyone else with the result that in their work, they all look alike, there is an artificial and not true relationship because honesty and modesty are forgotten. The more eccentric one behaved the more he was considered a personality. On the other hand, the, more you obey your constitutional inclinations, your constitutional preferences and prejudices, the more you are yourself. You have not to force so-called individuality. You have to avoid everything that makes you a Wagnerian blowing up your gestures, blowing up your verbal formulations. Therefore I recommend simplicity because it is honest against all over-dramatization.

More great information and imagery can be found on the Albers Foundation website