Interview with Zachary Darlington

Laura Vahlberg: Hi Zach! Thanks so much for doing this interview. Can you talk a little bit about your drawing materials and your multimedia process?

Zachary Darlington: Sure, for the most part I'm using pencils nowadays; graphite, coloured, charcoal, carbon, and such. Sometimes I'll go a bit extravagant and use wax crayons, drawing pens, and pastels. I'm a bit of a hoarder in all honesty, and I've collected many different varieties of materials over the years that at this point, I'm just reaching for whatever feels right in a drawing, usually for a different texture or value. It kind of reminds me of my granddad's thought process in that he'll save anything that appears insignificant in the moment, yet my granddad knows that one day that seemingly bit of rubbish will come into it's own one day, and be useful.

I like to use a mix of quite crude, modest, or humble materials I suppose you could say, such as cheap pencils you'd find in a primary school like the stalwart Stabilo HB pencil, and more artist orientated 'professional' equipment.

I think the reason why I choose the materials I use is the familiarity and the almost nostalgic, childlike feeling I get from using them. I was using the same pencils I use now when I was a toddler struggling to learn how to write the number 3 (I've since mastered that). And although I wasn't using Conté pencils back then, those feelings are still there simply due to the fact it's still a pencil.

LV: What are some artists that influence you? Are there any artists that draw with pencil that inspire your work?

ZD: I think I'm generally more influenced by film and photography above all when it comes to thinking about drawing. My favourite directors are most likely Wim Wenders (he's also a fantastic photographer), and Ken Loach. I like things that are almost like a timestamp of something; an event, a specific feeling, or a location, which is something I try to translate in my drawings.

Of course when I was younger and a student, I went through studying art history and became acquainted with the masters. But as a working class lad from North West England, it felt a bit high brow for me and something I couldn't really relate to.

In terms of artists that use pencil, I don't really know of too many myself unfortunately. I don't really take too much inspiration from other people with regards to the materials I use, it's just something I fell into really. That's a bit of a shit answer I'm sorry, but I can't really elaborate past that I'm afraid.

Title: Hotel Room in Llandudno

Medium: Coloured Pencil and Wax Crayon

A4 Paper

LV: How would you describe a perfect drawing?

ZD: A perfect drawing for myself would be when it echoes a sensation I'm trying to convey. For example, when I draw using something here in England as a reference, I'm thinking about the smell of conifers or the sound of wood pigeons coo-ing or a faint bassline from someone's Vauxhall Corsa. Or when I use a reference of a place I've visited, I try to focus on a sensation that reminds me of that place; an example of which would be when I visited Genoa last year, everyone wore this specific aftershave that just takes me back to wandering through that city. I don't walk around specifically smelling people by the way, it's just when someone would walk past I'd get this waft of citrus, coupled with maybe cigar smoke. Of course, sometimes I use references of places I've never been to, in which case I use my own preconceptions of a place which I acquire through media, people I've met, or just what I can imagine that certain place is like.

Once I can feel, hear, smell, or taste that sensation through the drawing then I would consider it finished.

LV: Can you select one of your pieces and tell its story? What was its journey into being like?

ZD: I'd like to select the (below) image to speak about, titled 'Abandoned Gilera Runner'.

Title: Abandoned Gilera Runner

Medium: Graphite and Colored Pencil

Paper Size: A5

It started with the backdrop of typical housing found in my town and throughout the UK, hastily thrown up in the 70s/80s. The exact location I was thinking about was a housing estate not too far from me, which was built for the people of Liverpool when it started to be gentrified and they were shifting people out of the city to make way for shiny new buildings.

I then thought about a time when I was younger, when I would go down to the local park to play football. I was probably about 11 at the time, and from going to the park I befriended some older kids who were probably getting on to 18. They weren't the most responsible of people, but their friends were even worse. There was a guy I met through them who enjoyed stealing things, mainly cars. I think the first time I met him he was in a classic VW Beetle painted purple. Anyway, once we met up with him, and he had a freshly stolen Gilera Runner scooter, which was the choice mode of transport at the time for a tracksuit wearing teenager. In the middle of a conversation, a police car swooped round the corner and everyone ran. I was a pretty fat kid so I was absolutely terrified a policeman would come up behind me at any second and cuff me, but they went after the chap on the scooter. I lost everyone and so started to walk home, when I came round a corner and there was the Gilera Runner, abandoned. I was so scared that the police would end up knocking at my door that I didn't tell anyone; I didn't even brag to my friends at school that I ran from the police over the weekend, which was something I could've easily wore as a badge of honour.

I wanted to resolve the feelings I experienced of anxiety and relief when I realised the police weren't after me anymore, which is why I included a vignette of 11 year old me relaxing on the sofa.

LV: Do you make studies or thumbnails?

ZD: Nothing like that really, I tend to just jump straight in. Sometimes I'll do a simple framework of a drawing using a straight edge and a light pencil, but that's about the only preparation I do.

Title: Loads of Pots For Sale on Gumtree 

Medium: Graphite, Charcoal, and Wax Crayon

A4 Paper

LV: How do you go about choosing a motif?

ZD: It's kind of related to the answer I gave in (3), but the motifs I use are generally selected due to some sort of affliction I have with it. I also generally prefer the more forgetful, mundane motifs.

People like Turner, Constable, Gainsborough and such are generally considered titans of English artists, and whilst they are incredible, it isn't really synonymous with most people's experiences with living here. I think the only thing I take from those guys is the skies they painted, cos it's always bloody grey here. I didn't grow up in the foothills of a majestic mountain overlooking a choppy sea; I grew up on a terraced housing estate. I'm proud of my working class roots, so it's something I really enjoy delving into and celebrating.

Title: Church and Dead Tree

Medium: Graphite and Wax Crayon

A5 Paper

Ken Kewley Interview

Hi Everyone!

Here's an interview with Ken Kewley. I took a workshop with him at the Mount Gretna School of Art. His thoughts on art make so much sense to me. It was a treat to ask him these questions a year after taking the workshop.

Laura Vahlberg: One of the things I took away from your class was this idea of working continuously. I remember you said that it's good not to finish too soon-- to keep going and going. This has been a barrier for me at times because there can be a sense of loss in taking apart something that appears to be working in order to move forward. Can you talk a little bit about how you make pictures over a long period of time? What's the journey like for you?

Ken Kewley: This urging painters to push their work comes from ending up here with so much work that I quit too soon. Because there was something I liked. It’s better to go too far where one is forced to find a new way.

One does not want to make one’s paintings. That has trapped too many artists. It’s best not to be able to see the finish line. Not to know where the finish line is or what the finish line looks like. The finish line should be a surprise.

What is there for the artist to do when they finish a painting? Do another one. But you cannot just do the same thing. You do something different. You don’t worry about style. You don’t think about your work. You will still be there. Though you might not recognize it.

An image happens quickly. This can make one think that the work is done.

The image is made up of shapes. It’s the shapes that most likely could be pushed, strengthened, with more work.

Too often I hear abstraction and representation being spoken of as if they were different things. The abstraction of the work is the arrangement of the shapes. Shapes should not be placed in a way that they would not be placed if the painter was working non objectively. There is representation and there is non objective. Both need strong abstraction.

Children are praised the more their work becomes recognizable. Their sense of abstraction, which is very strong in the beginning, can all but disappear by the end of grade school due to a push to be more real.

To get back to something of what a child had to begin with, art instruction, when it does start, should start with arranging shapes non objectively.

This should go on until it’s well ingrained. Then when working representationally every shape needs to be considered abstractly.

Representational painters can push their work by, from time to time, working non objectively.

Working is continuously rearranging shapes. Rearranging the abstraction.

One does not rearrange things, one rearranges the shapes in things.

Things in themselves have little strength.

First one gathers the shapes. One then strengthens them. Making sure they don’t mush together. Marks must be well contained within shapes. Edges reinforced.

Shapes must be strong enough to hold other shapes and strong enough to be held by still other shapes. They must all hold and be held. They cannot just sit by themselves. Pushing the work is strengthening the shapes, adjusting them, making some lighter, other darker, moving them this way or that to both exert force on and to be able to withstand the force from the other shapes. It is like getting a better grip on a piece of furniture one is carrying. One has to be strong enough, the furniture must be strong enough, and where one is holding it makes a big difference. One often has to adjust one’s grip and have the help of someone else. Shapes need other shapes.

Working continuously does not have to be the same work.

In the workshop we scan and print work out our work and work into the print. We can go further without losing what we have. This push will be there when you start something new.

Abstraction is infinite. A few shapes can be arranged indefinitely. The shapes within the same subject rearranged from painting to painting.

If one has definite shapes, and not too many, it’s not hard to compose them. If not, things can quickly get out of hand and one can find oneself just moving paint around.

That’s when it becomes hard to know when one is finished.

If you have a controllable amount of shapes you can see if they are all working, that they all have a purpose, and that they are not weakening their neighbors.

When I’m trying to get painters to keep working it’s to strengthen their shapes and use them in a way that surprises them. Each time they reach where they have been before they push beyond to something new, something that surprises them. Sometimes it takes awhile for the artist to see that it is still their work and to warm up to it.

I know when I’m teaching if the student’s work surprises me I’ve done something right.

Everything I do must surprise me. What is the point of doing what one does again? Other than for filling an order.

There is nothing to lose, whatever is yours, will come back in another form. But there could be something that is also yours that you had never reached.

With my own work I’m just trying to do the same, trying to push it forward.

LV: What does a typical day in the studio look like for you?

KK: I don’t know what people do all day. One thing I don’t ever do is sit in front of my work and contemplate. For me that’s not working. Working is making a move and reacting to it.

Put down a shape, then a second. When you are putting down a second you must not have any idea about the third. How could you? You should only react to what is there and not think about what is to come.

A painting is not something you see in the distance and as you get closer it gets clearer. One must avoid this step by step approach, blocking in and then filling in. It must be shape by shape. Without knowledge of future moves.

I always have a to-do list of things I’m dreading. I make art to avoid these things for as long as possible.

The one thing I do every morning is I draw into that day’s calendar square. A simple composition. It is what every painting needs no matter how complex. A simple door that invites one in. These drawings take five seconds but they feel like a good day's work.

I don’t make art all day.

I walk, read fiction (no art theory), and look at a lot of images. Make meals.

I’m happiest when being productive. Making one thing after another. Teaching makes me happy since the work is multiplied by the number of artists in the workshop.

It does not matter to me if it’s my work or theirs. It’s being done.

I’m best when I’m confined to a room with only one thing to do. In the studio or in the classroom. Of late I get that on Thursday nights when I collage with painted paper shapes from the model and from those also drawing the model.

And I’ve been spending time carving out a classroom here in my house.

LV: It's been about ten years since you wrote Notes on Color. Are there any other notes you would add to that essay?

KK: That’s the other thing I do. For years I’ve been working on a book mostly about shapes.

That one must render with shapes, with abstraction. Where the same shapes can build one thing, be taken apart, and used to build something else.

One does not take representation and abstract it. That is backwards. One uses abstraction to make representation.

Observational painters who make a mark for everything they observe, when they look even closer and refine their marks, are correcting more than they are composing. If one observes a spot of color and puts down a spot of color eventually the canvas gets filled up and there will be an image but that is not composing. It is staying too much on the surfaces and the contours of the subject. If one can get off both of these and try to describe the subject with as few shapes as possible, light shapes and dark shapes, then one can compose those.

That color theory, anatomy, perspective and all the other things they teach in school to get representation right are minor things. If something is not working it is not those things. It is the abstraction.

LV: Are there shows or workshops that I can mention at the end of the newsletter? Or places readers can see your work in person?

KK: The only workshop scheduled is at Three Pines Studio, Cross Village, Michigan. It’s filled but there is a wait list and always a possibility.

As I mentioned before I am carving out a space in my house to do workshops with four artists at a time. That is in Easton, PA. If anyone finds themselves close I’m happy to have visitors.

In September into October of this year I will have, what I imagine will be, a small survey show at Lehigh Valley Charter High School for the Arts in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania.

Artist: Ken Kewley
Title: Thursday Night Drawing Group II
Date: 2023
Medium: Painted Paper Collage
Size: 8.5" x 11"

Piet Raemdonck: Begin Van De Dag II (Beginning of the Day II)

Laura Vahlberg: Hi Piet, thank you so much for agreeing to this interview! First, can you talk a little bit about your artistic influences?

Piet Raemdonck: Where in previous years the work of Tal R was unavoidable to me as an inspiration, I feel like lately my inspirations are so many! When I look at my ’saved art’ on Instagram (you’re in there Laura ;)) I really try to look diagonally and not stick to one particular image. So I look diagonally and say to myself : this is me! :)…and I really believe it.

Lately...I must say that I’ve been impressed by the work of Morteza Khakshoor (@mortkhakshoor), and I’m also referring to his older drawings there! The artist I exchange artistic ideas with most is my super gifted friend Florian Tomballe (@floriantomballe). I’ve enjoyed discussing our painterly practices with the great Terry Ekasala (@terry_ekasala). Check them out! They're great.

LV: What was your journey like in becoming an artist? How did you get started?

PR: I think I need to go back in time to when I was a very young child. I've always been into painting and drawing and crafting things. At age seven I started attending an art school on Saturdays-- this was the world of art opening its doors. I went there until I was eighteen and then I moved to Antwerp to do my master in visual arts.

Shortly after I got my masters I noticed I could make money painting commissions. In my early twenties I did lots of murals and painted portraits and I started working with art dealers /interior designers (Axel Vervoordt the most renowned for certain) who would place my work with clients. I also made illustrations for a magazine.

I traveled a lot in those years, and painted during these travels. Slowly I built an audience for the work I made independent from commissions. Now and then I worked with galleries in Belgium, the Netherlands, Germany, and France. I tried to stay very independent because I wanted my art to mature and develop freely.

When I was 33 I opened my own exhibition space in Antwerp. At that point I focused entirely on my personal artistic practice. I left this space behind after eleven years and that's when I moved house and studio out of the city and back to the countryside where I grew up.

LV: What is a typical day in the studio like for you?

PR: I have a tendency to paint during daylight hours..then again..I lately had some very inspired night sessions in the studio with a great flow.

I'm both the painter who can obtain a result very quickly (say in a few hours) and the painter who would continue working over a very long period of time on a canvas (we're talking weeks, months and years in those cases). Entire paintings can get hidden underneath the final paintings in those cases. I strongly believe both trajectories are valuable. I enjoy making a little meal in between painting sessions and feeling like the creation process just continues...but with other ingredients.

LV: I read in a recent interview with Otomys that you sometimes make collages. I make collages as well. Can you talk a little bit about that and how it informs your painting practice?

PR: I love making..and watching collage..

In my case they're mostly painted paper shapes that I glue together and paint over and then cut again and paint over. I love the fact that size and framing aren't decided upon in advance. I love the borders, visual jumps or visual collision you can get in making collages. I think there's something free and playful and anti uptight about collage. In the Otomys show that's coming up there are 3 paper collage works, and their large interpretation in oil on canvas. Here one of the collages featured in the show:

Artist: Piet Raemdonck
Title: Begin Van De Dag I (Beginning of the Day I)
Medium: Acrylic Paint on Painted Paper Collage, Color Crayon
Size: ~51 x 51 cm

LV: Your show at Otomys features paintings of interiors. How does your experience painting interiors compare with that of painting landscapes?

PR: Great question.

There’s very much this IN as opposed to OUT of course. It’s rare to see a skyline in an interior, yet a landscape often has one. I do think the duality of in and out plays with a contrast between the dense and concentrated as opposed to the wide open. I think of the interior world as a haven, a nest, and also as a reflection of personalities.

I like to look at an interior as if it is a big still life. The renovations we've been doing in my studio house were greatly inspiring in terms of seeing the changing space and light. Many paintings came out of that..(Breekwerk and Klein Breekwerk, both in Australian collections now, are two of them).

I looked at my place as if it were a moving object, a mobile much like a Calder or Tinguely. They say about architecture that it is basically about opening and closing. Maybe we can say that about the painting too…that it is about revealing and hiding. Showing and not showing.

LV: You mentioned that you make large paintings based off of some of your collage work. Do you find your process changes with the increase in scale and change in medium?

PR: Lately working bigger comes more naturally to me. It's an energy thing for certain. I often think of Alex Katz and his bold choreographic painterly actions on huge scale, that also came out of small studies.

When I work with oil sticks I often work bigger, I do think the material guides me to do so.

It depends a bit on the subject matter though. When drawing or painting people I mostly work small focusing on an intimism. And I also love sitting in a field doing a tiny painting.

But an interior painting…I really like it when the canvas feels like a space you can walk right into.

And I like it when you can walk to and from a painting and see kind of a recognizable image transform into its abstract building blocks.

LV: How do you know when a painting is complete? Do you have some specific goals in mind?

PR: It's very rare that I dramatically decide on the spot that the work is finished. Normally I would sleep on it and then make final changes the next day. Then I contemplate for quite a while before deciding the painting is complete. I have a tendency to write a bit before, during and after painting. This might be just a few words that describe painterly goals or visions I want to work towards. For example, I would ask myself ' what is this image about?' and write a bit about that. When during painting I make an artistic discovery I really try and write something about what happened there as a means to anchor it. Often I find the titles for the paintings in my writing.

LV: Where can readers see your work in person? You mentioned you have a show coming up with Otomys soon, right?

PR: My show BIJ DAGLICHT is coming up at Otomys in Melbourne in a few weeks (May 2023) and there will be one in London by autumn.

Instagram is an easy way to follow my work as well.

Interview with Ellen Siebers

Artist: Ellen Siebers
Title: Orchid's Chair
Dimensions: 10" x 10"
Medium: Oil on Birch Panel

Hi everyone!

This week we have a mini-interview with Hudson, NY based painter Ellen Siebers. I encountered her work on social media and was struck by the way she constructs worlds that feel like true mind space. It was great to get to chat with her here.

Laura Vahlberg: I'm curious about the picture within a picture that often happens in your work. I'm reminded of keyholes, windows, paintings themselves, and dreams. Can you talk a little bit about that?

Ellen Siebers: They certainly are all of the things you mentioned. I have a deep love affair with the history of painting and I am addicted to it, so I find myself often thinking about paintings or painterly moments in a way that relates to the concept of a viewfinder. Some of the references are from paintings and some are from my own life where I can see an instance that feels like a painting. I know that this is something many of us do, and we now more than ever live in a world of images. I want to make these moments live alongside other moments of immersive beauty (in a way that is more bodily vs. as an observer). So for me, the paintings operate within a tension found between being an observer and observed/lived-in beauty. 

LV: How does memory play a part in the creation of your pieces? In a previous interview with Art Hound you wrote that memories from the midwest landscape played a part in constructing the images in your work. Is that still the case?

ES: It plays a big part. During the time of that interview, I was still living in Bed-Stuy and was really missing green space. When I lived in Wisconsin growing up I always thought that living in the city would suit me better, but when I moved I found that I do really require daily time in nature to make my best work. The need really is ingrained. Now I live in the Hudson Valley and I connect directly to that need, so the memories I draw from are usually very recent and relate to trying to communicate and reiterate vibrational beauty from the landscape and objects around me. 

LV: Lastly, (I ask this question to everyone) how do you know when a painting is completed? Do you have specific goals in mind?

ES: It is that kind of “you know when you know” feeling that occurs in the gut, not the brain, and it has taken many years of work to get to a place where I feel confident connecting to that. I get this feeling of satisfaction when things lock into place and you know that it wouldn’t benefit you or the painting to keep going (I’ll always keep going if I think it will benefit either). It also can help to snap a photo and look at it later if I am questioning it, but honestly, if I am doing that then my guess is that it isn’t finished since when it is a good one I just know. And that feeling is very much the goal, but one that partially feels out of my control. After that feeling happens then I really need to try to get out of my own way and trust it. 

LV: Where can readers currently see your work in person?

ES: I have a few shows up this spring. I am exhibiting with John Joseph Mitchell and Elisa Soliven at Harper’s East Hampton from March 25 to May 8, and with Mads Hilbert and Rema Ghuloum at Pt. 2 in Oakland from Apr 1 to May 6. I have a piece in a charity auction with Ethan Cohen and the funds go to aid victims of the earthquakes that struck Turkey and Syria. I’m also in a group show called Nature Holds a Mirror in a virtual environment created by Ambar Quijano. 

Melanie Parke: Island Kettle

I came across Melanie Parke's paintings online a few years ago and I was struck at the way I felt when I looked at them-- a sense of awe and peace. Her paintings of open windows looking from the inside out-- it's like the outdoor light is singing on everything in the interior.

Here's a short interview with her:
 

Laura Vahlberg:  I've been experimenting with some memory painting. It's so exciting and challenging! I love the way memory distills an image. Does memory painting play a role in your practice?
 

Melanie Parke: I’ve been enjoying the game of trying to figure out which of your paintings is a memory painting now, looking for the distillations as a clue. The idea is so alluring to me I want to stop what I’m doing and get on your program of memory paintings! I have a real craving for discovering what distillation may come and what it could look like in my own work now that you mention it.

Memory is a huge driver for me. I’m more of a painter that relies on prompts and props, though, to reconstruct the memory of feelings, sensations, sentiments. Emotions of desire and longing play a big part in my work. I collect oodles of source material and sift through it when I first get to the studio. It fuels up my image engine. I rarely work from memories in my mind without these prompts. Thinking of distillation again, maybe I’ve come closest to that sense of distillation in my recent night paintings, remembering and reconstructing a summer I spent waking and walking before dawn, studying bird song. In that body of work I wanted to set up the visual experience of an image revealing itself very slowly from the dark, partially, and indeterminably.
 

LV: Let’s talk about your interior/window paintings. For some of your paintings you seem to bring the outdoor light into the room so that everything feels sort of electrified with light. For other paintings the inside space feels darker and more distant from the outside world. Can you talk a little bit about inside/outside spaces in your work? How do you know where to put the window frame in the picture plane (the picture within a picture)?
 

MP: Electrified with light, I like that. The landscape is super sexy to me. I spent my earliest painting years outdoors, deep in the mosquito buzzing woods, high up on dunes, on the beach, in windy grassy meadows, and I find nature endlessly stimulating. Interiors are containers of desire for me, and a window represents a sensual longing, because the landscape is a place that can absorb and return enormous amounts of desire. Every time I compose a window in a painting, I also feel like I am having a conversation with painters I have shared a great yearning with like Winifred Nicholson, Biala, Jane Freilicher, and I find so much comfort in a dialogue with them and this tradition. Where the window goes, I guess I place it in relation to gaze or objects on a table...
 

Sometimes desire in a work is less about looking outward, though, so may not call for a window. It is more ebullient, buoyant, exuberant, and in these interiors I like conveying desire flowering on walls, a source of it’s own light.

Perhaps the darker interiors contain a realm where desire can be found contented, slowed down, quietly curious.

 

LV:  How do you know when a picture is completed? Are there specific goals you have in mind in completing a picture?
 

MP: I have goals, so many goals, hence the desire! Yeah, I feel like this question is so compelling because we begin a painting with so many possibilities, yet we find ways to proceed and mark out a direction and eventually stop. I set up projects for myself, particularly to probe a certain emotional atmosphere. I often have a couple of series going, it’ a way of sowing a bunch of seeds. Kathy Bradford once said that a painting has many stages of completion and I like paying attention to that nuance, those open places where it just feels good to stop and soak up that stage for a while.

Melanie Parke's work can be seen at Garvey/Simon in NY, Anne Loucks Gallery (in Glencoe, IL), Kenise Barnes (in Kent, CT), Meyer Vogl (in Charleston, SC), Blue Print Gallery (in Dalls, TX), Beth Urdang (in Boston MA), and the Willard Gallery (in South Portland, ME). 

Frankie Gardiner: Bright Day

I've followed Frankie Gardiner for a couple of years now on social media and I just love her dreamlike pictures- each painting seems to have its own sun.

Here's a 2 question interview- I love when she mentions that certain aspects in a painting show up on their own:

Laura Vahlberg:  What is a typical day in the studio?

Frankie Gardiner: I like to have an idea to start with, so will often take lots of photos of the surrounding environment, inside, outside, or images seen on the internet.  I might make some drawings also.  Then I go into the studio with an idea. Turn on music, radio or tapes.  The music is energizing.  I start by mixing colors and then begin to paint. That can go on for a while, with breaks, then coming back to it.  Clean the brushes at the end. Sometimes there are many points that seem like the end, and the brushes get cleaned multiple times. It is always refreshing to use clean brushes.

LV: How do you know when a painting is complete?

FG: I don’t know when a painting is complete. Sometimes someone interrupts me and I stop. Later on I go back and discover that was a very good time to stop. Other times I might ruin what I have painted and go on and on, ruining more and more.  When that happens, it can be best to just stop and come back to it another time, another day.  It seems a bit arbitrary what an end point is.  You can actually keep changing and changing a painting.  Sometimes it gets better. Sometimes it is a loss. Older paintings that don’t interest me anymore can make great grounds to start with.  A lot of these decisions are intuitive and spontaneous. Sometimes you look at a painting and it seems complete. If you are aware, you stop.

I do have goals for completed paintings, but I find the surprises, the aspects that seem to show up on their own, can be the most interesting parts.  So, even though I may start with a specific idea, I like to let that idea transform as the process evolves and allow what arrives to be there. 

Frankie Gardiner's work can be seen in person at Galerie LarocheJoncas February 14- March 17, 2023, with an opening on February 24, 6-9.

Grant Watson: Seafront

I ran across Grant Watson's work on Instagram and then again later when his work was a part of Art at King's Oaks in 2022. His visceral brushstrokes and sense of design remind me of treasure hunting somehow- his works asks for a longer look as feeling and material objects converse symphonically.

Here's a short interview with him:

 

Laura Vahlberg: How did you get started being an artist?

Grant Watson: I got started pretty early and although as a young kid I wouldn’t have known what an artist was, drawing was always something I loved to do. My dad had been to art school and always encouraged my sisters and I in anything creative. Rather than read us stories, he would make one up on the spot and illustrate them with beautiful drawings. We were frequently taken to art galleries too and with this background it seemed very natural to go on to study drawing and painting at art schools. Along the way, I mostly learned from other students but there were a handful of painting tutors who were important in my development, including Maurice Cockrill, Giuliano Collina and Karel Appel.
 

LV: What does a typical day in the studio look like for you?

GW: I really enjoy the walk to my studio, it takes about 15 minutes, and I use the time for thinking about what I’m going to do when I get there. I get excited about all the possibilities, I start to dream of new paintings or come up with a strategy to continue one already on the go. On my way I may stop to make quick sketches or take some snaps on my iPhone. I’m full of hope and as I approach the studio, my palette will already have paint on it, just the 3 primary colours and white, and I will be ready to go. 

Once I’m inside, thinking time is over and I start working immediately hoping to be guided by sensations rather than thought. I always have several paintings on the go and I may work on them all in spurts for a while before focussing on just one for a longer period of time, which could be for most of the day.

Very often, my most successful stretch of painting happens towards the end of the day, I seem to be quicker and more decisive. It almost feels that the work I’ve done for much of the day has merely been a warm up, a rehearsal. And when I’m in this match fit state of mind, I will take full advantage by pulling out a fresh canvas. It’s a great way to end the day.

LV: How do you know when a painting is complete? Do you have certain goals in mind for a completed picture?

GW: The truth is, I’m never entirely sure when a painting is finished. Sometimes I’m convinced a painting is complete only to look at it the next day in horror. So I think it’s a matter of time for me, if I live with them for a while and if I don’t find myself wanting to throw them away or make changes, I’ll call them finished.

There are no hard and fast goals but generally I’d like a completed picture to surprise me in some way, for it to possess some sort of transformative magic. Of course a painting can work to some extent if you are able to use colour, form and composition successfully but it needs something else too, and I think a finished painting will have found this something else, specific to each picture.  ‘The something else’ is impossible to translate into words but perhaps it has to do with the painting needing some kind of emotional intensity before it can be called finished.

Grant Watson's work can be viewed in person at Three Works Gallery (Scarborough, north Yorkshire), Aleph Comtemporary (London), and at this upcoming group show in March:

"Dog Show," Thames-Side Studios Gallery, London, curated by Enzo Marra (Opening 18 March 2023).

Elisa Jenson Mini Interview

Artist: Elisa Jenson
Title: Early Morning, Port Clyde
Size: 20" x 24"
Medium: Oil on Linen

It was difficult to pick just one of Elisa's paintings to feature- I adore all her paintings - you can see more of them here.

Laura Vahlberg: How did you get started being an artist?

Elisa Jenson: I was an art history major at Smith, and took a painting class with Stanley Lewis which made me realize that I saw art more as an artist and not as an art historian. I never stopped painting after that moment, my life direction changed.

LV: What does a typical day in the studio look like for you?

EJ: With the advent of the pandemic I began to work less in my studio in industrial Brooklyn, and more and more in a small home studio. As an artist, this shift led to a greater focus on my daily encounters in my home, including the view out the window, the shifts in light that and attend the change of seasons, and the full pallet of domestic experience.The shift also allows me to integrate my painting into my daily life more fluidly.  I take breaks from painting to read, draw or play my flute.  Looking at the work has become a more important part of my process. I work on more pieces at a time, giving them time to rest (and dry) before reworking. This experience has confirmed my long-term belief that art, at it’s best, is part of life, rather than a separate experience. 

LV: How do you know when a painting is complete? Do you have certain goals in mind for a completed picture?

EJ: The work is always in charge, and by way of energy, color and shape relationships, and the tension between balance and imbalance the work tells me when it is done. Looking is everything.

Interview with Rob Werbicki

Laura Vahlberg: Hi Rob! Thanks so much for agreeing to this interview.

I came across your work during a workshop with Ken Kewley at the Mount Gretna School of Art. The other students and I were on a lunch break at MGSOA and we went upstairs in the attic to look at the work that was there in preparation for Mount Gretna's yearly auction. There were so many treasures there- works by Abigail and Holly Dudley, Ying-Li, and Amanda Case Millis stand out in my mind. Your large landscape paintings also really stood out- I had never seen your work before and it's really beautiful. Can you talk a little bit about those paintings in particular? (See below)

Corner Home  20”x30” Acrylic and Oil on Board

Side Street  24”x36” Oil on Board

Rob Werbicki: Sounds like a good time, the workshops with Ken hold a special place for many people, me included. I got to take one in 2015 as a student when he came to MGSOA and it was super helpful, especially to be able to go right back to painting the next day...

Yeah those are some good painters you mentioned. You should do an interview with them! As far as the landscapes go they were from the Four Pillars residency at MGSOA. It is an amazingly motivating place for me to have been able to paint, alongside friends, teachers, visiting artists and students who are all pushing hard. It's interesting to me how people can be in the same landscape and have different parts of that experience filtered through a pictorial expression. 

I began the residency painting in and around the homes in the Mt. Gretna community and that started to open up questions and possibilities. I had always been excited by looking and driving through the fields and found a place where I was able to access that kind of subject directly. There is something about the big space, clear light and broad shapes that is appealing to me, maybe related to the kind of kinesthetic gestures that I am wanting to make. 

Another element of the landscape I wanted to incorporate in those paintings is change. In this case I had been painting in a parking lot where the cars were always coming in and out- it could be a nightmare if you were set on completing anything. I loved that if a car was there one day the space would be blocked, and if I painted it out then that space would open up, although it could be just as flat. So I was able to work with that same idea with cows in a field, with the clouds blowing over. 

And of course painting multiple sessions every day for a sustained period has its own way of allowing things to come into the work that were unplanned. After the residency I was seeing a very tangible relationship between light and color in my paintings that was taking me longer to access before. There is something very particular to that Pennsylvania air that is compelling to try to get into paint.

LV: I wonder if you can talk a little bit more about this part of your email:

In this case I had been painting in a parking lot where the cars were always coming in and out, it could be a nightmare if you were set on completing anything. I loved that if a car was there one day the space would be blocked, and if I painted it out then that space would open up, although it could be just as flat. So I was able to work with that same idea with cows in a field, with the clouds blowing over. 

What do you mean by the space could open up if you paint out a parked car?

A couple more questions:

If a painting day was both sunny and cloudy, did you include both light situations in the painting or did you choose one?

Did you show up to work on a painting at a specific time of day?

I watched the recording of the talk you gave with MGSOA. You said that you started out making your paintings in one session and then at some point you started making long term paintings over the course of many days. Can you talk about your journey from one-shot paintings to longer term paintings? Do you still make one-shots?

RW: Well, I guess in part I was thinking about the particular shape a car would take up in a painting. Or the patch of asphalt that sits in that spot if the car is gone. Like a door. Whether the door is open or closed, you will end up with a door like shape you have to put in your painting. But the meaning of that size shape is going to be very different spatial readings for your painting.. this can force me to be thinking about the intention behind some of my decisions about what to include, what is best for the painting? which type of relationships feel like they are working? So on a painting level making this kind of change can shake up composition again.. If you look at other artists that include figures in their landscapes, there can be a certain feeling of correctness to the placement of the figure, and a volume that exists between the figures. How did they decide where to put them and what distance of space to put between? 

In a way I do a similar thing with the light. I block in shapes and then work lighter or darker shapes on top or around them. I change them as I develop the painting and the light changes. I change them back. Trying to develop a set of relationships. So if a day is both cloudy and light there is a good chance both of those things will be happening in my painting. I don't believe I have the technical facility or know how to pull off good studies of lighting situations one after another. But what I do find is that a particular time of day lights the subject in a way that is compelling for me to paint. So I work during that period. There is usually so much work to do in terms of setting up the painting that the light can wait to get developed. The magic can happen when its ready. Sometimes the changes benefit my painting and I come up with something better than what was happening when I began. This is why I like painting from life more than photos. I usually see something that gives me an idea for the painting I want to make, but during the process am able to search, change, find things so the idea of what the painting is evolves. There usually comes a time when the trajectory of the painting seems set and I do have to follow that, so if the weather is off, I will draw or work on something else. Over the course of a 3 hour session the light changes alot, so I might work on one section of the painting for a set amount of time and then another section and try to build them up consistently. That process kind of guides my daily activities. I tend to show up on time once I have something going.

Working this way allows me to follow through and tackle the complexity in what I am wanting to paint. I started to find this out during my time at Boston University. I would want to paint what was out the window, but my habit was to do a quick painting, and they were always unsatisfying. It's a complicated mishmash of buildings, windows, poles, wires, streets and trees. I was encouraged to work on projects for longer, and so I started drawing what I was looking at, working on a single drawing for weeks or a month. Then I could start a painting and know how things needed to fit. I still do this, not really making thumbnails but just drawing as if I were working on the painting. One of the ways this carries over into the painting is that if I am short on time I will start with acrylic,whether its black and white or a limited palette, and then continue with oils. Acrylic feels closer to drawing to me. I guess I am still searching for a balance in what I make, so that I can do longer paintings working with complex subjects and shorter paintings that have immediacy and elements of the unexpected or experimental. Some of the works you saw were one shots- although long sessions like 4 or 5 hrs, and some were week long paintings. They both allow me to do things that wouldn't otherwise happen.

LV: When you start a painting do you know if it will be a one-shot or a long term painting?

RW: Yeah I basically know what amount of time is going to be involved. Although it is true that everything takes longer than I expected it to. What varies is my intention in setting out.

LV: That makes sense. How do you know when a painting is finished? Do you have certain goals in mind for a completed painting?

RW: I would say it's less true that I know if or when a painting is finished, and more true that I have certain goals in mind for a painting. It is probably fair to say that my paintings lack a certain kind of finish. I actually dislike that part of the process, things get too dense, tight, cluttered, and I am not sure how to resolve them. It's something I am working on, but I much prefer starting. So what usually happens is I aim for a balance, where I want to leave the painting in the best state I can, at this point in time. This means that I have taken areas past the point I thought they would go, that I have probably seen some parts of the painting fall apart and have to rebuild them, and other parts of the painting got dense, and I had to group those decisions and open up the painting again. The silver lining for me is being able to understand the value range of the different areas of the painting in relation to one another and finding an extra few steps to make everything within those ranges snap into place. I want both my experience of making and the painting to feel full.

Hopefully over the long term that kind of pushing and finding my limits will allow me to get further in my starts, so that they embody more of the qualities that I look for during the longer paintings. There is a certain kind of growth that is possible within the time frame of a single painting and a different kind of growth that is possible over the duration of a series of paintings, or a residency, or a year. I am aiming for both.

Because I paint outside, my studio area is more like my corner to be able to assess and plan for each painting. I can have goals for things I want to incorporate long term and session to session. I am able to see a painting in the context of other works and the preparatory drawings. I might make some changes after painting, cut and paint paper to try out, mix different palettes, or put down a color note that I want to start with. I might think the painting is going awful when I am out there, but then see it more clearly inside. I'll see that one area of the painting is really not working and focus my energy there. Of course sometimes things don't go to plan, and when I take the painting back out, I can just look and start painting and find out that was exactly what needed to happen.

LV: You mentioned cutting and painting paper- do you mean collage? Is collage part of your practice?

RW: No, not really. I prefer the immediacy of paint and get too distracted working with collage for it to form a large part of my process. But as an editing tool it can help me see what a change in color or shape might mean for the painting I am working on. Because the paintings are made using fairly solid blocks of color, the language is similar and doesn't seem to disrupt the surface too much.

LV: So do you add painted paper pieces to the painting itself and then keep painting with oil paint on top? Do you make a small collage picture parallel to the painting in progress to test out ideas?

RW: I would paint a couple different pieces of paper specific to the shape that I want to investigate for the painting, try them out, take them off, and then paint the changes I wanted to make. 

I currently don't make any side projects that are running alongside the main painting I am working on, to try things out, that may be a time factor but is territory I would like to get into. 

Right now the most I have time for is to do a drawing, a small version with a more limited palette and then a larger version with richer color.

LV: Fascinating.

What art are you looking at these days?

Also, where can readers see your work online or in person?

RW: Well, there are a lot of artists that are always on my mind, like Corot, Constable, Poussin..I can get lost in their paintings. I enjoy drawing from paintings also, it can help me work through ideas and appreciate the work even more. So I would look at old master paintings, impressionist, cubist and the painters who came after them who were trying to pick up the pieces and make something.. Their work feels accessible in a way. The Mount Gretna school went on a trip to museums during the residency and I was really drawn to a Diego Riviera piece- Cubist landscape and a Braque, Landscape at La Ciotat , they both spoke to something I wanted to do. So painting is a big source of nourishment for me...as I had been thinking of your question about the moving cars and space, I looked at Sassetta, Corot, and Morandi. 

Alongside looking at other artists, the other source of ideas comes from conversations I've had with teachers, peers, friends and students. I always want to feel like there is part of a bigger dialogue taking place and that can happen in the painting. So these conversations and experiences are something that I want to continue to turn over and over again. 

There is not much of my work to see online, I am part of a painters collective that has been really generous to include me, called Perceptual Painters. There is a website that should be up and running by the new year (2023) and you could see works by all the members of the group at perceptualpainters.com

LV: There are so many wonderful painters in that group. I look forward to checking out the website!

Thank you so much for agreeing to this interview, Rob. You've given me a lot to think about and I'm excited to share this.

Neighbors  24” x 24” Oil on Board

Summer Pine  24” x 36” Oil on Board

Interview with Owen Westberg

Laura Vahlberg: Hi Owen, thanks so much for agreeing to this interview! I saw on your website that you’re from Pittsburgh. I lived in Murraysville for a while when I was a kid.

How did you get started being an artist?

Owen Westberg: Hi Laura, let me know if you want me to elaborate more on any of this.

I started off as a child. My mom and grandmother encouraged it a lot (my grandmother was an amateur portrait painter), but then stopped in early adolescence. I began to take a more serious interest in art at around 15 years old and enrolled in some pre-college art classes at Carnegie Mellon for figure drawing. By the time I was applying to colleges I had decided it would be an art school. I applied to MICA and RISD, was accepted at both, but decided to attend RISD which was great! I studied with Matvey Levenstein, Julian Kreimer, and Dike Blair among others. I definitely learned the fundamentals of observational oil painting there, and became enamored of Giorgio Morandi and Fairfield Porter among others.

LV: Looking at your teachers' painting-- it makes sense that you studied with them. I wonder if you can share any big takeaways from your time with them.

OW: I think Matvey taught the fundamentals of light and color especially complimentary colors very well. We all had a very specific palette of colors for his class so we’d be able to see how everyone used them differently. It was a more traditional class I suppose but he always was very open minded.

Julian taught me how to think outside of the box in terms of subject matter for painting and directed me towards looking at contemporary or modern photography as an influence. He also advocated for being fluid with the brush and medium and letting things happen as the painting was being created.

I’d say Dike was just incredibly insightful about what I was becoming involved in. Directing my interests towards a sense of introspection and curiosity about why I was interested in what I was interested in.

LV: I’m curious about what you wrote here: Directing my interests towards a sense of introspection and curiosity about why I was interested in what I was interested in.

Can you give an example of how introspection and curiosity plays out in one of your paintings? Is it like the motif and interior imagery playing a game of catch?

OW: Well yeah I think it was more or less what was possible within a certain logic of painting. What is possible within the narrative of a certain type of painting (my paintings) when it doesn’t evolve towards pure abstraction. Lets take for instance the quilt painting or the bouncing ball painting (below).

Quilt 6” x 12” Oil on Birch Panel

Courtyard 5” x 7” Oil on Aluminum

Chase 5” x 7” Oil on Aluminum

Those works are as much about my interest in looking at artist monograph books as they are about anything else. It’s indexing and then the ball is like a question. Can I make a painting of a bouncing ball? It’s not possible to paint it as fast as observing it. This isn’t really different from painting waves or clouds though. It’s a pictorial question made into a painting.

LV: I've heard of a painting being a question, but not the idea of painting as an index. Are there other modes of painting that you explore beyond an index or a question? I guess this goes down the rabbit hole of painting as language.

OW: I explore a very specific palette and also try to become engaged in subject matter that I can return to. I think I'm attracted to paying attention to something over time with painting. The evolution of an actual place to a fictional place is interesting to me. Painting taps into a sense of history and beauty that basically supersedes the subject matter so I like the idea of how that can function.

LV: Can you talk more about the specific palette you use?

OW: Sure, I use permalba white which is zinc and titanium mix, cad orange or cad yellow deep, nickel lemon yellow or cad lemon (usually nickel), raw sienna, pyrolle orange, sometimes (burnt umber, Venetian red, or transparent orange), pthalo green, ultramarine blue, (sometimes cobalt or cerulean), Prussian blue, ivory black.

I like mixing local colors out of colors that sometimes don’t perfectly adjust to the subject. At least some of the local colors. I think it adds a sense of fiction to the works.

Also I like how new colors likes pthalo and pyrolle mix with earth colors. They end up making curious mixtures.

LV: Cool! I use some of those colors too.

So how do you know when a painting is complete?

OW: Nice, I think I know it’s complete when it feels like everything has a sense of resolution but not overworked.

Newport 6” x 12” Oil on Wood Panel

You can see more of Owen Westberg’s work on his website: https://www.owenwestberg.com/ and on Instagram: @owenwestberg.

Owen Westberg’s work can be seen in person at

Laurel Gitlen: https://www.laurelgitlen.com

Dunes: https://dunes.fyi/

The Castle: https://www.thecastle.la/exhibitions

Chris Sharp Gallery: https://www.chrissharpgallery.com

Interview with Clare Haward

I met Clare when I went to the JSS in Civita Master Class program with Israel Hershberg in 2017. She is one of my favorite living painters. You can read more about her and her many accomplishments on her website here.

Laura Vahlberg: Hi Clare, thanks so much for agreeing to this interview. My first question is how did you get started being an artist?

Clare Haward: I remember I wanted to be a Gymnast but wasn’t very good, so I drew gymnasts a lot. I drew them in all kinds of impossible positions and by a river with a waterfall, because I liked to draw the water flowing over the rocks. My grandma would keep off cuts of cardboard and a box of pens, and I would spend my time drawing these gymnasts. She was an artist and it was at her house that I saw real paintings. She had been a primary school teacher but she had attended art classes throughout her life; she copied flowers and landscapes in oils, some of which ended up on her walls.  

Art School wise, I did a Foundation Course at Camberwell College of Art. I worked on big canvases and loved playing around with surfaces and life drawing, but then I took a wrong turn, spending four years on a Fine Art degree program being told painting was dead. Several years later, I got myself a little studio, but rarely spent time there as I didn't really know what to do and my paintings seemed pretty terrible.  

I broke my right hand in my late 20’s and after a year-long recovery to get my fingers moving again, realised it was now or never if I was going to paint. The opportunity arose to take redundancy, so I sold my flat, had a bit of money in the bank for the first time, and ended up at the Cyprus College of Art, a fantastic little college in a village outside Paphos, set up by Cypriot/British artist Stass Paraskos. It felt like breathing space, I was encouraged to draw and paint and not to over intellectualize what I was doing. Later I spent time at Hatahana School in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem Studio School, where I felt like I was making up for lost time and even started selling some work. Nowadays I balance my week between teaching adults painting and drawing with Dulwich Art Group in South London, and painting. It works pretty well, they both feed into each other. 

LV: It’s so great to read this and learn about your background. I remember talking with you in Italy about the importance of making copies from the masters and I remember reading a great article with you talking about the same subject. When did this become an important practice for you? 

CH: You are right, I wrote an article about copying when I got elected to the New English Art Club and was asked about my practice. At Camberwell, we had a 'transcription' project, which I thought sounded very grand, we had to draw from a painting in the National Gallery in London and use those drawings as the basis for that terms’ work. Other students took 'drawing' to mean all kinds of inventive things, but I loved the fact that I was allowed to draw with pencils. I drew details of Titian and Rubens, not really to get 'into' the painting, but to use it as a starting point. I remember the drawing of an armpit got blown up to a large-scale kind of abstract landscape in the studio. It was quite liberating to have worked directly from paintings, rather than other imagery. Years later, the value of copying was shown to me during my time in Israel, where it was a core part of the curriculum. I didn't really get it at first, why students spent several years drawing and painting from these old paintings, rather than making their own work, but overtime I realized they were looking at something beyond the image itself, at a visual language, exploring a line, composition, structure, edges etc. There was an intelligence and complexity to their work that made sense when I understood how they were learning. Again, I realized it could be liberating and a brilliant way to learn. For me now, it is a way of looking and engaging, mostly recently it is small sketches in a sketchbook. I love finding things I hadn't noticed before, or finding commonalities between paintings, noticing how a whole composition comes together.

 

LV: What is a typical studio day like for you?

 

CH: During term time, ideally I am in there four days a week, but it can take me a while to get started. I have to get the life admin out of the way before I can focus on my work, but once I am in the studio, it is usually really focused. Though I do have this habit of going in there with good intentions but before I have even taken my bag off, I am scratching back into whatever painting I was working on yesterday, making a little 'improvement' here or there. If this happens, I can find myself three or five hours later having completely repainted the whole thing. Sometimes it is a good thing, but often I'll regret it. I have been trying to train myself not to do that, setting a rule that I won't touch anything for the first twenty minutes but just be there looking or thinking. I have also got better about leaving paintings facing against the wall at night, and not allowing myself to look at them for several days so that I can get some distance from them. On a good day, I’ll be making some drawings/sketches first thing, and then moving on to a focussed period of painting in the afternoon. If I am working on a larger painting, the pace can really change, I can spend ages trying to resolve a small part, looking at it, making one or two careful adjustments, and then suddenly a problem appears and before I know it I find myself totally redrawing or reworking an area. I often do a quick painting from observation or imagination at the end of the day. These days I also try to take a walk to the nearby park to see the ducks and leave in time for dinner.  

LV: This is something I've been thinking about in my practice lately-- when you start a painting do you have an intention about how long you will spend on it? You mentioned that you will often make a quick painting at the end of your studio day. Do those paintings ever turn into long term pictures or do they generally stay sketches? Do you ever start a painting that you think will take a long time and then finish it quickly? How do you know when a painting is complete? 

CH: I would love to have a beautifully ordered process, but no matter what my intentions, it doesn't seem to work like that. I wouldn't want a clear beginning and an end because I like to play about with things and be responsive to the painting as it progresses, but each time I start a new one I convince myself it will be easier this time. At some stage, when the painting is hanging around in my studio, causing me trouble, I know that I have to either paint over it and get rid of it, or commit to it.  

Until recently, I worked on smaller scale works, and would start a whole load of paintings, some of which would feel resolved pretty quickly, others would be scraped back and reworked, trying things out more instinctively, oscillating between observation and invention. Some of those would fall by the wayside and others would start to feel like they were getting somewhere. I would always have one painting that I work and work on, which would end up overworked and awful, but allowed some of the other paintings to survive. 

Recently I have been working on larger paintings, which I find harder to deal with. It can go on for months and still not seem to work, or I can undo a month’s work in an afternoon if I am not feeling it. Instead of always making new starts, I realize I've got to commit to it and just trying to keep it alive. I like planning for it, drawing and trying out some small compositional ideas, but it always ends up going in a different direction. As for when it is finished, I guess I am learning to find that place where I know that I am just changing it rather than improving it, but I have killed a lot of paintings this past year so I don't think I have worked that one out yet.  

The quick painting at the end of the day can be a way to get that excitement into the studio, of fresh eyes or a distillation of the days work. I don't always do them, and most get painted over, but occasionally something comes out of it that I like and they often reappear in a different way in a later painting. I can't do it first thing in the morning, as I would end up working on it all day. 

LV: Do you have some criteria or goals that you keep in mind for how to make a painting work? 

CH: Hmmm, good question. I feel like I am constantly changing the goal posts, and particularly this past year or so, as I have been trying to push my paintings further, to see what happens when I do this or that. Maybe the pandemic allowed me to try things out a bit without worrying about the results too much. It has felt like a leap into the unknown and I am finding I need to take time to look and reflect and work out where I was trying to get to. Questions of have I gone too far, am I just obsessing, is this improving it, when can I go no further with it? I have several paintings that have ended up that way, they have gone through so many changes and got to a point where there really is nothing more I can do with it. Then the question is whether it is finished or just dead. I try to remember what it was that got me started on the painting in the first place. In general, I want the painting to feel unified, I want to be able to get lost in a small area yet still see the whole, I don't want it to be too literal, I want some ambiguity, it has to have a sense of presence without specifically detailing everything and it needs to be a bit awkward. 

LV: I just have one more question. What do you use for reference material? Do you work strictly from observation? 

CH: I often used to start from observation, then later work away from the set up to try to resolve what the painting needs. Recently I have been trying to work out how to work with the figure and larger compositions without always having access to an actual model. I have been drawing a lot from life, from TV, from paintings or just kind of intuitively. Drawing from photos seems to be the least satisfying. I have a table full of books open in my studio that I glance at when I am painting - just to keep looking. I haven't worked out what works for me yet, and I am currently enjoying finding out how other artists deal with this. In Lennart Anderson's interview with Jennifer Samet in the recent catalogue, he talks of being uncomfortable with hiring models and having them hanging around the studio, and how he used the mirror and polaroids to work out his figures, or he 'makes figures up, which is always bad'. This sounds familiar. I draw a lot of compositions in my sketchbooks, often quite intuitively and from imagination, and I am trying to work out how to translate these into paintings. I recently dug out some drawings from some classes I had taken at the Royal Drawing School back in 2015, and there were all these multi-figure sketches from a group of dancers who had been moving around the space. I suddenly realised that one of the drawings of two figures ‘locked’ together has been appearing in my recent work and it was like a little ‘ah ha’ moment of realisation that all my drawing is from observation even if it was observed before. 

Interview with Elise Schweitzer

Laura Vahlberg: Hi Elise! Thanks so much for agreeing to this interview. So first I wonder if you can tell me about your connections to Italy. I understand you travel there on a regular basis and your most recent body of work was made there, right?

Elise Schweitzer: Yes! I'm so lucky. I take students to Italy during our January term at Hollins, and I've been fortunate to visit in the summers to plan those trips, and to spend time painting and exploring. In February 2020 I was a visiting artist at the American Academy in Rome, where I made most of the paintings for my sabbatical exhibition, "Painted Arches and Walled Gardens." We had just finished a month in Florence with Hollins students, and I was still turning over ideas about proportion and geometry, Brunelleschi's arches and the lapis lazuli in Fra Angelico's frescos in San Marco. We stayed in Italy until March 6th, and got back right before everyone went into lockdown.

LV: When I first learned about your work you were painting large scale narrative figurative pieces as well as representational works centering around horses and their riders. Your most recent show made in Italy looked to be a blend of observation and invention. I’m curious to know more about your journey between representation and abstraction.

Also, what is a typical day in the studio is like for you?

ES: For years I painted entirely from observation, but in the summer of 2018 while I was an artist in residence at the VCCA, I started making little color studies to "go with" the observational paintings, and it was a total surprise to me that those little paintings took off, with a life of their own. Ideas from Bauhaus color theory had been cooking in the back of my mind since teaching a color theories class at Hollins as a first year seminar, and suddenly it was all that I wanted to do- put one color and shape against another to tell a story, or to make space, or to evoke an emotion. I think folks who paint perceptually know that what I'm describing isn't really different from painting from life, but the reference is different. I was painting from memory, and from intuition, and from a sense of humor, and those paintings continue to build on themselves.

When I was in Italy and looking at familiar paintings, new things stood out to me, and those impressions became the start of the arches and the walled gardens in my work now. I would love to make large scale observational oil paintings again, and I'm waiting for those ideas to wander back into my studio. I don't plan to paint in any one mode, I'm following where the studio energy leads right now.

LV: I remember you mentioning that you have been to a couple of interesting artist residencies including VCCA. Can you talk a little about those and how they have influenced your practice?

ES: Yes! The best thing about residencies are the people you meet. The time and the space to make artwork is great but the inspiration is even better- the off hand comment in a studio visit that sticks with you for years, the work-in-progress that you see and hear, and the range of life experiences you talk about with artists and creative folks at all different stages of their journey.

In 2011 I went to the Vermont Studio Center for the month of March, and those friendships I made a decade ago had a huge influence on my life and creative career. When I was a visiting artist in Italy I had to carefully plan exactly what I would bring, and exactly how I'd get the work home. At VCCA I just threw all my supplies in my van and had faith that I'd figure it out there, and I did.

I'm hopeful that I'll be able to find residencies that welcome family members in the future. The American Academy was incredibly welcoming to my family, but it's tough for artists with little kids, and I wish there were more opportunities.

LV: That’s a perfect lead in to my next question. You and I both have two year old kiddos. How has it been navigating being an artist and a parent and a professor?

ES: Add in the pandemic- which makes each of those things so much more complicated. Can I answer this question with a primal scream of frustration?

I don’t know what it’s like to have a toddler when there’s not a pandemic happening. I started painting abstractly before we had the kiddo, but the mode definitely fits the compounding pressures we’re all feeling right now. My paintings are all water based now, and come from ideas I can think about for a while and then realize quickly when I have a small opening of time to be in my studio. I have a beautiful small space to work in our new house, with excellent light, which makes all the difference.

LV: Yes! I know I had to change my mode of work to fit the life of being a parent.

Do you have any advice you would pass on to artists just starting out on the road to painting?

ES: The best advice is to be ambitious with your work, make big plans and commit to the process before you know for sure it will work out. I so clearly remember starting multiple 9 foot wide paintings before I knew what the paintings were really about, and before I had exhibitions lined up, before I got grants, before I got a good teaching job... if I had waited to know for certain things would work out, I never would have gotten started.

It's such a strange timeline, maybe a bit like writing a book. You have to write the whole book before you even find a publisher, right? I see students hesitating over their work, reluctant to commit if they're not sure the painting will go well, or if they'll get to that next step. You just have to jump in.

LV: Last question: How do you know when a painting is complete? Do you start a painting with a time frame in mind (one-shot painting vs. long term)?

ES: I know a painting is complete when I can live with each part of it, and yes, that’s kind of a circular answer. For oil, the life of the painting can be so long, there’s so much flexibility in the media for revision, scraping back, sanding, etc. In the past I documented each working day with my large oil paintings, and they often took 20-30 full day sessions. Or about 3 months of painting. With gouache, especially gouache on panel, I’ve found I have a narrower timeline for making changes. I can only repaint a surface 3 or 4 times before I feel like it’s losing the clarity I really enjoy in the paint surface. I probably abandon 1 out of 5 gouache paintings, and the ones that work usually happen in 2 or 3 passes.

LV: So then the length of a painting is determined by the material? That makes a lot of sense. That a painting can be a sort of dialogue with the material as well as the motif. Thanks so much Elise!

ES: Absolutely! Thank you Laura!

An Email Interview with Yonatan Becker

LV: Thanks so much for agreeing to this interview! How did you get started as an artist? How did your journey as an artist begin?

YB: I always painted as a child with my father. We would paint and listen to classical music. In High School I would walk around with my sketchbook and draw people. I used to go to a private painting class and it was the most important thing to me.
In 2009 I went to the Jerusalem Studio School landscape marathon in Jerusalem. The teachers were Israel Hershberg and Ken Kewely. I was very moved while painting landscapes from looking with a palette knife. I still paint with a knife and usually without brushes. Teachers can help you start but actually you really need to find yourself. To discover your language and how you translate your experience into painting.
I loved making many copies after the old masters, because the gap you fell between who you are and them forces you to make up a new language.
After studying in the JSS I went to New York and met Lennart Anderson in his last months. He was already very tired but kept on painting and spoke enthusiastically about Degas and Titian. He told me I’m a landscape painter. And there is something true about that. I look at things as a landscape. Everything has a place in the composition. I see things as flat tones like in nature.

LV: The paintings of people with miniature people on top of their heads-- they are fascinating! Can you tell me about these?

YB: The paintings of a portrait with a body on top of their head are part of a series of paintings I made with industrial oil paints, black and white on paper ( later I also had a red). I didn't paint them from direct observation. I painted them rather from drawings I did from the imagination , from photographs, and after the old masters (like Velasquez, Titian, and El Greco). I also thought a lot about Georges Rouault. The figure on the head is like an alternative ego . The portrait is like a mask. I was thinking about African sculptures I saw in Jerusalem and Paris.
The industrial oil paint dries fast and creates a heavy layer of paint. I tried solving the tonality and composition out of my imagination. The character of the synthetic oil helps to create edges like painting with a heavy medium with resin. After you scrape it, it looks like a monotype. I loved it but later moved to acrylic.

LV: I've noticed that some of your work involves making copies from the masters. Can you talk about how these copies impact your work?


YB: I always loved making copies as a child and as an adult. In New York I painted a portrait of Velasquez in the Hispanic museum in Harlem. I make lots of drawings after the old masters— I turn them into my own. Sometimes I see in them many hidden jokes and eroticisms. The old masters have many comic secrets. The secret of the old masters is humour. I turn the drawings into short animations in order to see what could happen with the composition, what would I change. Maybe I should enlarge the figures or the space. Maybe you can change the direction the figures are moving toward. Behind the composition there is a lot of movement. In Poussin when a woman is raising her hand your eye follows her hand. Sometimes I paint in the studio the composition from memory.


LV: Your subject matter is so varied yet maintains a common thread of thought. It's interesting how you paint an erotic scene and then a calm day at the beach in a sort of similar manner. Can you talk a little bit about how you choose a motif?


YB: Usually I paint landscapes from observation. After painting a lot outside I feel purified from thoughts and I start having ideas about figures and composition. Eventually I want to find the harmony between nature and my imagination. I started taking drawings with me to the landscape and I used the motif as reference for the colors.

I choose a motif that attracts me . In Piero there are people with a tree growing on top of their head. In Picasso you will have a door above a head of a woman. Surprising geometrical connections move me a lot. I think of things as drawings. But in the end it all connects. I have actually a big dream…like a woman in Titian she would press her hand toward the sky... in Balthus you can find it too. Different archetypes of art are moving toward and connect with each other, and I want to be part of it.


LV: I remember talking to you a while back about how you paint with acrylics and plaster. Can you talk a little bit about that process?

YB: A few years ago I traveled to Greece to paint in Lesvos, its small Greek island that used to be the center of the archaic Greek world with Sappho.
It’s there where I moved to paint with acrylic— many years I painted with oil and chalk.
The white in acrylic is too transparent and you need to have something to give it more body. With plaster it dries faster and with matteness. You can create heavy layers with it and draw on it after it dries. Its more of an additive process.
In Lesvos there are small special churches made from local colored rocks. You can feel how you can build a church from simple stones. Like a Greek vase that has just a few colors. When you use just a few colors the relationship between them is more closely knit. They form a stronger bond.
I think also about Sienese painting and how from just a few local pigments in tempera the old masters managed to discover so much.


LV: What are you working on right now?

YB: I usually work at the same time on different paintings. I paint still lifes from looking, it helps me a lot in my process and daily coping. I make self portraits and invite friends to sit for me. I look at paintings of the old masters and imagine what they would be like today and I solve it by looking.

LV: What is a typical day in the studio like for you?

YB: Many times when it doesn’t rain as often now, I go to a deserted beach on the edge of the city. I need to be alone and get away. It’s a time of inspiration and many things are revealed to me. I have many small paintings but I'm starting to make bigger ones and grow in size. I keep on discovering my surface, what works for me.

I paint with a wood box on my knees, I bring with me a canvas mounted on wood or cardboard and I mix acrylic with plaster. I paint with a palette knife without brushes.
In the landscape I try to go to the same place every time, to the same motif and try to say something painterly, something different each time.
The paintings reveal my feelings but in the motif itself there is something physical that goes beyond personal feelings.

Going out to the landscape gives a sense of urgency and freedom. That I want to keep and bring with me to the studio. But really the deserted beach is also my studio..

In the studio I also enlarge some of the landscapes/ studies where I can develop them according to my feelings.

I usually arrive in the studio after making a landscape painting. In the studio I make still lifes, portraits, and paintings after the old masters.
I try to be in the studio every day for many hours. I try to do what I can, and be in the studio as much as possible.

LV: What artists have you been looking at lately?

YB: Lately I went back to look and be excited about Vuillard and Bob Thompson.
I love the drawings of Walter Sickert of Paris. It moves me to look at the city and make drawings from looking.
I love the drawings of de Stael , he made them with a black marker when he traveled in Sicily and later he came back to Provence and turned them into paintings.
I look at drawings and comics of Balthus that he did when he was a child. He has a comic strip about a cat getting lost. Cats are always lost like painting. But you can rediscover them.
Balthus has a series of drawings about Wuthering Heights. It moves me and connects me to whats real about painting.
Vuillard's early paintings of women with decorative dresses- I look at him all the time. His woman are always sitting with their back to the viewer and there is something mysterious about it.
In the center of Tel Aviv there is a big painting in an entrance to a lobby. It’s a painting by Susan Wilson who is a great English painter. She has so much freedom to make different kinds of spots. She has a very rich language of painting. She is very inspiring for me.
I look at imaginative painters like Kevin Paulsen and Scott Daniel Allison on Instagram.
I also love Pasolini Arabian nights and Medea.

You can see more of Yonatan’s work on his website and Instagram account.

An Email Interview with Conrad Frankel

I met Conrad and got to see his beautiful work when I went to JSS in Civita in 2017. You can learn more about him and see more of his paintings on his website at www.conradfrankel.com

Laura Vahlberg: Hi Conrad! Thanks so much for agreeing to this interview! How have you been doing?

Conrad Frankel: I’m doing well, thank you. I’m thinking a lot about painting, but waiting till next month to get going!

Btw, top tip, new Adam Curtis documentary called can’t get You out of my head

It’s six part, and best to watch it over six days, as it’s very dense! It’s on YouTube now....it’s about how the world situation got to be where it is.. a bit heavy, but with great footage..

LV: Thanks for the tip, I'll check it out!

My first question is, how is it going being an artist and a parent? Also, what kinds of thoughts are you having about painting?

CF: It’s going great being a dad and a painter! Siegfried was born when I was 40 and it’s brought alot of joy into my life. I was ready at last to be a dad. My wife Lily is his primary minder and I”m the grey person in the background… as most parents know it’s a deep deep joy to have a child and I’m really grateful it has happened to me. It has changed me as a painter, but I don’t think I can say how yet! Only to say, everything I do now seems more vital.

As for thoughts about painting

Well, I look at paintings on the walls, in books and almost shut my eyes looking for their essence...the dream behind them, the lump

I think of nature, ( I walk through a forest every day with my three dogs), of what life means to Siegfried and of the dreamy world of painting... and I think way back to my first interest in it, way back when I was 4, the blue sky on top and the sunshine sun, lolypop trees, I knew the lumps well back then...

I’m thinking about it more than I do it, but it’s winter in Ireland and my thumbs are numb with the cold, (I have no central heating system)and I’m busy spring cleaning! I’m waiting to get into the sunlight, in Greece, hopefully in April, and paint a gnarled olive tree, or a panorama of the island...

Of course I think of Morandi’s soft snow print creamy cement paint... and of William Nicholson’s harsh yet oh so beautiful simplicity. But less and less. I think of mixing all the colours and forms together and building an image of muddy oneness, well digested, yet still fresh..fed by ochre, greens and blues along the way...

Unity is my main driver, visual unity, harmony. I think of painting two objects and the energy between them being the secret subject...

But I also think of the world I’m painting for, and I’m still confused as to what to feed people these days... so it’s a long inactive winter meditation.... covid has suited these ponderings very well...as has playing with my beautiful baby boy...who now walks like a drunkard! He turns one in six days..

The Italy Corot painted is still there.... and the countryside of Europe is where I love to paint from spring to autumn... I’m always looking at the sky and the way it grades, from a colder violet blue on top, through light blue, green blue, yellow duck egg greens down to a grey pink...that’s my primary focus as a landscape painter. I want to feel the bubble of our atmosphere

The landscape below the sky is a wonderful detail...I tend to be happy when I’m out painting... I love the solitude and the focus of the practise, and I always start with the sky

I’m thinking of still life too...but that’s a very different practice... I’ve been collecting trash from the roadsides on my way back from landscape painting, plastic bottles and paper coffee cups, grey tennis balls, bricks of styrofoam. I assemble them and think about them. This year I plan to paint a lot of rubbish! But I don’t know why I’m doing that... it sort of feels relevant.

They are a few meandering thoughts, next question please...!

LV: Okay, great. What is your relationship to memory painting? Do you paint mostly on site or in the studio?

These rubbish paintings sound very exciting!

CF: Yes, thanks Laura!

Lots of rubbish paintings a comin’ up!

As for memory....well, I believe all consciousness is a memory, we are always following it (the Buddhists wisely speak of following the breath).

The world is a story...I always work from life, in front of the subject, and it’s all story based, if that makes any sense?

thinking thinks and painting paints, so it’s a visual narrative but a narrative none the less.

I have worked from photography and from my mind alone but I’ve never broken through enough to develop anything I could take seriously..

my improvisation comes from external stimuli and mostly from the body of the paint itself... plump paint pulled by hog hairs...generally no medium added. And from the painting knife, a Holbein series A no. 6S... that knife makes marks that constantly lead me on...the loose and the tight is a big part of the my visual painting narrative

As for where I paint, it could be anywhere! I have a studio, I have three tables at three heights, one is quite low, an old green baize card table, and the other two are a beige velvet covered display tables from a jewellers that closed down, one is waist height, and the other is just below my eye level! I prefer the eye level platform... and I like things front lit, but for the last few years I’ve been working with side lit objects. That’s changing now.

LV: Now that you’ve told me about your studio I would be curious to see a picture of it. You mentioned earlier something about feeding people with paintings in today’s climate- can you talk a bit about that? How would you say paintings feed people? I think I know what you mean, but I’m curious.

CF: Paintings need to feed the eye and the heart with visual nourishment, both. They should never be made to prove a point.

I guess some confusion comes from knowing there’s an “art world” that’s self conscious, and always with a desire for the new...I pay no attention to the art world anymore and I don’t subscribe to any magazine,I have no idea what’s going on. But I also know that’s it’s there as a zeitgeist backdrop and as a perceptual painter I am in danger of being sidelined into the conservative camp... another pretty landscapist. It’s an old story for so many painters by now, but it does exert some influence on all painters, and quite often a healthy one. Nothing is worse than boring paintings...

Creating paintings is a delicate process, and it can take years of work to get to something with a meaningful visual essence. I don’t want to be interrupted in my pursuit of this... it’s become a practice of making private poetry with an audience of one, me, and then, every so often, a show manifests...I need a lot of time, I exist almost continuously in failure, one after another I rub down, sand back, go again. It’s quite dispassionate for me...but it’s also a long distance process with real struggles along the way. Ultimately it’s a meeting of this private activity with my projections of what people want to see, and also a projection of what a bigger audience will appreciate. So it’s not always a clear path to follow. But I am defined by the future i project and then live into, even if it’s not what I expected it to be when it arrives, and sometimes it’s not so bad a surprise!

I have nothing to prove to anyone, I see that humanity is one person deep and none of it is bigger than me. I don’t even want to share what I do with anyone. I paint basically just for me. C.S.Lewis spoke of “the gluttony of delicacy” and to some extent I see all art as a sort of mistake, until it’s not... it’s all bad, until it’s great... and I’m that glutton, seeking out something that’s satisfying, presenting the problem accurately for others to appreciate. It’s certainly pointless, wonderfully so. But it gets meaningful for me on very rare occasions when I feel there’s beauty standing naked in the mud. And that’s the food I’m seeking out.

LV: Okay, I had to really think on this one. So are you saying that a clear presentation of a problem that is a lump or dream is the nourishment that can happen from painting? And when one paints to prove a point, to you, that is not nourishing? How is proving a point and presenting a problem different?

CF: Thanks Laura, I appreciate the feedback and your thoughts and questions. I’ll attempt a reply but I’m aware it may only add to the confusion, which can’t be a bad thing, right...!?

Well, let’s start with the lump! For me, it’s something like the question: what’s the big simple thing happening in this painting. Say, if an old statue gets eroded by time or acid rain it can sometimes reveal a form that is very evocative, perhaps of nothing in particular, but evocative none the less. And the initial intention of the sculptor may be more apparent without all the finishing touches.

And that’s what I meant when I said I look at paintings with my eyes almost closed, in soft focus, to see what’s the big simplicity of the painting. What is the large distillation before the perfumery finishes were added. That’s the “clear presentation of the problem” I was talking about. All good paintings have clarity in them, and yes, they change in seconds as they get made, but they also have a very important initial set up phase which is where all images must necessarily be generated from. The clarity will always be linked with a knowledgeable handling of paint, as well as a healthy appetite for composition!

Paintings nourish when they delight... there’s a quote I read that goes something like this: art is that which when seen pleases. Now paintings, like books, cannot defend themselves against fools. And I have learned to appreciate different painters along the way and I go in and out of love with different artists and I’ll be a fool until I die...but one who loves Corot’s Italian paintings... and Morandi’s late work.

As for proving points with a painting, let me quote the singer Morrissey! In the opening track of his latest album he says “If you’re going to sing then sing, just don’t talk about it”. It’s the same with painting. Paint to paint. I remember listening to a Gerhard Richter interview where he was saying that painting had died in the 1960s and he had to paint his photorealistic paintings to prove it was still alive, and I thought, what rubbish. Paint or sing because you like to do it. There’s nothing for anyone to prove to anyone. We must all find out for ourselves, and if we achieve authenticity our works may attract a following, or not.

I don’t think painters need to make points with their art. All art is quite useless, to quote Oscar Wilde. Of course many many people do want to make points about many things with their artworks, I just don’t want to be around or think about that sort of thing. Another quote I love is a zen Buddhist one: people with opinions just go around bothering other people. I know you might say, but you hold strong views and opinions, and yes, I have my views, and I am sharing them here, but it’s not something I’d usually want to discuss or talk about. For me it’s clear that paintings are like unimportant dreams, made by unimportant beings, that can evoke eternity or be charged in such a way, that the stimulation feels like it adds to life. It takes a lot of work to get to a simplicity that impacts.

Presenting a problem is another way of describing the motif. We all have strategy somehow, be it of a more ordered sober nature or a more chaotic bravado approach. But wherever on the spectrum it lies, as painters we skid around a liquid puzzle and that is our destiny, and no matter what we paint, it’s going to be quite demanding if it’s going to get good. Presenting the problem is really saying two things. First we have a chosen motif, or problem,(that’s always fictional) that we take on, and secondly there is the painting process. The process ultimately is the product, so the process itself is both the subject and the means of delineation that brings whatever we want to present into existence.

When I paint I want to have an authentic experience, even if it’s all made up. And for me, painting is a problem and one I want to work at so I can produce something simple that is somehow charged with life. It’s a mystic process and perhaps one I am incapable of describing

I’ve always loved to look, and I’ve painted since I could paint. Finally to quote Leonard Cohen from his posthumous album Thanks for the dance : no one to follow, and nothing to teach, except that the goal falls short of the reach”

That about sums it up! I hope it’s clearer now.... but I fear it may be a muddied puddle

LV: I just reread all you said-- so much good food for thought! I like how you grapple with the mysterious with words.

Thank you for the photo of your studio!

You mentioned earlier that the loose and the tight are a big part of your painting narrative. Can you tell me a little more about that?

CF: Thanks Laura, yes I write with a certain looseness or gesture of thought mixed in with forthright beliefs, perhaps akin to how I paint. I guess it’s best to take everything I say as a sort of nonsense that may evoke my meaning and method of painting. It’s not necessarily going to be organized but if I can nudge something off a shelf for someone then that’s good enough for me.

Ah yes, the loose and the tight, putting the blade into the smoke! The traffic jam between the skyscrapers...Printing and scraping with the edge of the painting knife...a razor straight mark does so much, and it’s very a complex event to describe in words... razor blade consciousness! Something cut off, a part of something, a fragment. A pressed knife mark can suggest a layer, or a hidden layer in a painting… an obstruction. It has a different intention to brushed paint. It’s somehow a more autonomous presence. It’s a good answer to the complexity of light and the tiny hard events we can witness if we look very carefully.

In all paintings there is some sort of background and some sort of thing, and the thing is in the middle of the background and made out of it. Like the world and the sky; the world is in the middle of the sky, rotating through it, so really, we’re in heaven! I remember Israel Hershberg saying “the sky is light, the world is a shadow”. A wonderful teaching for all perceptual painters, a key insight. Half close the eyes and look at the big event before doing any painting outsides and ask, what’s the big event happening here. Fill all the landscape with the colours of the sky, but don’t forget to put the worlds colours up into the sky as well. It goes both ways. Real sky blue has plenty of the world it. Blue blue is for making amateur skies.

And that leads me back to the drama of razor blade consciousness! Once atmosphere exists on a canvas, it can be inhabited if you want it to be.The thin and the loose. I think Morandi is the greatest master of this in modern times. He paints soft worlds, where plains shift, under and overlap and interrupt our assumptions all the time. There are these two wonderful Naples yellow bottles, or white and orange cuboids and between them a bottle neck of traffic-jam shadowy forms, overtaking and undertaking as they follow the most human of brush marks on the daily journey. The earthly grind is always present in these pictures. Touch and Presence, with capital T. and P. But it’s best not to look at him too much... one can discard many influences but if he gets into your head...

I love to create atmosphere in a landscape or a still life, and I also love to people this with events, be it water reflecting from within a plastic bottle or the shine on a cars roof. Something tight to articulate the rest. Something that says, I am happening now! Something that makes the mess seem right! The loose and the tight is simply melodrama. All painting has it, by its nature, even a Rothko has it in those loose but very organized elemental forms. I think it’s how we get satisfaction from art. If we are going to put one thing behind the other we need some sort of line, some tightness to articulate the space, and we love to look at a stacked painting.

I’m not sure if I’m making sense with this one Laura... it’s one thing to write about it, and another to push some paint about... let me know if it’s too nonsensical and I’ll see if I can put it clearer...

LV: A couple more questions come to mind. Once you start a painting, when do you start in on the little details? And then, how much time do you typically spend on a painting?

CF: Thanks for the questions Laura,

How soon do I start in on the details... reminds me of a cartoon I saw once

Here it is!

I tend to leave details out and build and break down bigger areas first.

Details that are at junctions, or crossroads, as opposed to purely decorative or incidental details, get put in and removed many times along the way...as they are markers. I have a tendency to mash my first attempt together with a back and forth action with the palette knife rather than a scrape back, though I do scrape back.

So some details are markers in the painting, and they come and go as I establish the painting, while incidental details, like a line of windows or some flowers, may appear right at the end, or never even appear. I’m even quite hesitant to put highlights onto things now a days, as they can be a distraction from the greater challenge of generating a real presence in an object.

As for how long I spend on a painting... about two to four hours. I work small, I’m not into big problems these days, call me lazy, I am.

LV: So are all of your paintings made in one sitting?

Also, what are reading these days? Anything you would recommend?

CF: No, they’re not all made in one sitting, but a lot of them are 95% complete after the first go, so in a way they are one hitters that I tinker with a bit...

I do find it very difficult to re enter a painting once it has dried, and if you have any tips on how to do this, I’m all ears...

So I have this rubbing out (side to side with a painting knife)mashing down method which is much as it sounds, I use the knife to drag the image across itself many many times throughout the painting process, sort of ageing it, and also establishing it. Blurring and fixing it simultaneously

Thus in a relatively short time I can make an image that looks like an old worn out pair of boots! Tones get set at very specific pitches. If I leave the painting after one session,I find they can have a ‘sunken’ feeling and do need some propping up later, usually with tiny adjustments in the darker areas... one great danger is having one colour running throughout a painting if it’s done in one go. It cheapens it.

As for what I am reading...I just finished a riveting book on William Nicholson by Sanford Schwartz which I thoroughly enjoyed. It’s one of those rare biographies where the subject has been taken so personally that one can’t help being swept deeply into its reality... I know it’s one I need to read twice... and I’ve been reading a series of articles called Morandi’s influence in British art which is jam packed with insights about him by different artists. I’ve also been reading a great book called The old ways by Robert Macfarlane, which is a series of wonderfully poetic descriptions of walks, mostly around England.

LV: Last question, I’m curious about what you do as a landscape painter when the weather changes- for example when it’s a sunny day and then a rainstorm comes when you are halfway through your painting.

CF: When the weather changes I usually just plough on regardless, tilting the canvas towards me to avoid direct rain

Weather is a concern in Ireland.... living under the grey sponge has its challenges

I tend to paint in changes along the way, and then reduce things back to the main earth sky image..so all the changes I register along the way usually get knocked back, and all their colours add into the body of the landscape, somehow, in my mind at least, adding to the ‘presence of the practice’. In the end, the changes that come back the most often are the ones that remain in the painting when I stop.

LV: That’s beautiful. Thanks so much for your time Conrad, your thoughts are very rich!

LV: I did think of one more question for you-- I remember in 2017 you said you got to spend some time painting with amazing painter Clare Haward and in years since you painted alongside artists Lena Chermoshniuk and Kurt Knoblesdorf. Can you talk a little bit about how it was painting with those people and how they might have impacted your work?

CF: In 2014 I went to paint with Israel Hershberg in Italy for two weeks. It was my first actual experience of any painting teaching, and at 34 I’d left it somewhat late. I’d had this feeling of annoyance in me for many years, and frequently, as a painting went wrong, I’d mutter ‘but i haven’t been taught’. I went to Italy for five summers, painting closely with Clare for a month in 2017, and for a month with Lena and Kurt in 2018.

It’s a hard thing to say what I learnt from anyone. The Jerusalem Studio School is quite free in many ways. One is encouraged to go out and paint around the town and then there’s a weekly critique.

I painted with Clare in 2017, long morning and shorter evening sessions 5 days a week for four weeks. That’s quite a lot of regular painting, and more than I’d ever done before, a lot more! While out at the motif she would always offer a useful comment, towards the end, that helped me to open things up or unify the painting with one big shadow or something like that. She is more knowledgeable of colour mixing than I am, and has a great sensitivity as a teacher and I benefited from painting by her side. Often I’d look over at some beautiful painting she had made and when I looked over again it would be gone! No hostages were taken! It was great to see someone rugged and determined with the painting process.

Next year painting with Lena and Kurt was somewhat of a rollercoaster ride. Lena painted some beautiful landscapes and helped me a few times by coming over to what I was doing and mixing up a special grey for me and daubing it in the perfect place, activating my painting for me. It felt like cheating but I didn’t care, it made the dying painting alive again, and I was thankful to see her thorough mixing capabilities. And it showed me how a little bit of authenticity can make a whole lot of difference in a painting. Small is big.

Kurt is a one off... the first time we painted together I noticed he was painting through a peephole from a door and using huge amounts of wax. And he only had four colours on his palette (Zorn) and those in huge quantities. He used tiny cheap brushes and held his easil box and painting up in his left arm while he painted, a very difficult thing to do. Once he took a photo and painted from his iPhone and from nature on site. Every day it was something new... I remember seeing him painting a field and when I came over to take a peek he said the painting was like a bald man combing his head until it was bleeding! Often he was joking and cartoonist in his manner and suddenly, deadly serious. A very strong character. He really opened things up for me as far as warm and cold sensibilities go. Warm colours like yellow ochre and cold colours like violet became more apparent to me after watching him paint. He often embodied the joker archetype and brought a lightness to what is a tough and tradition laden activity. I enjoyed witnessing that and that freedom has stayed with me.

Overall it’s hats off to Israel Hershberg for organizing the whole project for so many of us. I see Israel as the hunter archetype. He is patient and discerning and has found many wonders and generosity shared them with many people. He has brought very special artists to his summer school to guide the students. And his teaching style is wonderfully hands off. He allows people to become the painters they already are and just knocks them into shape in the weekly crit, which are not for the faint hearted. He guides with firmness. And always stresses that what is there to be learnt is from getting out and doing it with ones fellow painters. Id been in complete artistic isolation before I went to Italy for those five summers, and while I feel I’ve had my fill for the moment, I can certainly recommend getting out with other painters in a landscape to widen and heighten ones view of the process.

On a slightly related topic, I left all social media about a year ago, and lost sight of all the work that many friends are making! Sounds bad right... however I can report that’s it’s actually been better for me not to ‘post’ anything anymore and wait for likes, and also not to see anything anymore. What stayed with me is meeting people and painting with them, and growing together. And I hope to do this in the future from time to time, as well as just enjoy what is essentially the singular, private life of a painter.

Stuart Shils: notes on a zoom lecture through Art Workshops Boulder

-see the surface as a living presence

- develop your improvisational imagination

-dropping the bucket down the well

-art is the business of sensation and mind married

-the athletics between the analytical mind and feeling

-allow decisions to be guided by feeling

-how do we converse with the working surface

-how do we harvest sensation

-does an experience leave a residue?

-do we take our sensations seriously?

-subject matter is not important

-muscularity of the design

-music is pure design, no subject matter- just form

-a painting is a complexion

-color makes its own light

-how do shapes occupy the space they are living in? and what is the musculature of that occupation?

-do we follow our curiosity?

-conversation with paint, not with subject matter

-float in mystery where you do not need rationality

-become closer listeners to our own voice as it manifest in the surface

-allow destination to emerge from the process

-borders are important places in paintings

-how to lose control and how to swim in it

-build the muscles to hold yourself in your experience

-how do we deal with unexpected in our work?

-know a place in a complex way

- the more one sees the more one knows

-just because I see them, doesn't mean I need them

You can check out his upcoming online classes here:
reframingtheordinary.com

Interview with Lena Chermoshniuk

Lena's Website: https://lena-art.weebly.com/

"From the garden" 2018 Oil on linen mounted on wood

Lena Chermoshniuk is an accomplished painter who studied under Israel Hershberg in the Jerusalem Studio School. I encountered her work shortly after going to the JSS in Civita Master Class in 2017. You can view her CV here: https://lena-art.weebly.com/about.html.

Laura Vahlberg: Hi Lena! Thanks so much for agreeing to this interview. So I understand you are a tattoo artist and a painter. How do those two art practices inform each other? Which art form came first for you?

Lena Chermoshniuk: I was always interested in tattoo art, but I was definitely a painter before. I've actually started tattooing quite a few years after finishing school. My big challenge was to bring my drawing and painting to my tattoos, to make them look more like drawing, like art, and less like standard art tattoos. I don't think there's an influence in the other direction.

LV: I love the sense of atmosphere you have in your paintings. Can you talk about how you accomplish that feeling of air in your pictures?

LC: That's a big question... I guess Israel Hershberg was always talking about air in painting, and how the sky starts at the tip of your nose. That makes you realize air is a substance, it has volume, it changes the way things look through layers of it. I remember trying so hard to achieve that feeling of air during my first time in Italy. I think it has a lot to do with colour harmony, and as to landscape painting in particular, the realization that everything has some of the colour of the sky in it. Maybe also me working with a rather limited tonal range, and having a bit of a grayish palette makes you feel that air. I like subdued colour, delicate variations, close tonal range. I actually don't consider myself as someone who's creating a lot of space in their painting, I usually choose closer, almost two dimensional motifs when painting outside, I think more of the surface of the painting then of creating this Alberti style window (https://federicoart.wordpress.com/2015/07/10/17/) to some reality. I like to condense space against the paintings' surface.

LV: Yes I can feel that sense of condensed space- the tactile air between your motif and the surface of the painting. I’m curious about how you mix your colors and how many colors you use- do you have a pile of gray paint from a previous painting session that you use to mix in your colors?

LC: I don't believe in limiting your palette, I have quite a lot of colors on mine, and I always like to try out new ones. My favorite at the moment is sap green, which I only discovered a few years ago, it's this beautiful warm, transparent, green that can be used to enrich almost any color. When I mix colors I don't usually think of the color itself, but more about temperature, vibrance and value- do I want it warmer or cooler, is it more of a live or a "dead" color, is it darker or lighter. I also try to compare everything to everything else, so as to create a relationship in my painting, that sense of everything being in the same air and atmosphere. It's rare that I will use some of the grey paint from the pile on my palette because I don't want to begin with a muddy color, so I will only use it if I really need that muddiness. Usually I prefer to mix some kind of gray from a few colors that contradict each other, make it in the value I need it to be and then play with the adjustments, cool it down or warm it up with a cooler or warmer color. If I want to brighten a color I will usually mix in some white mixed with another color, because white will automatically cool, and "kill", the color if mixed by itself. I think the most important thing is the temperature, that's what excites me most in paintings, the small variations in temperature, so I pay the most attention to it.

And here's a picture of my palette, as you asked. It's rather messy and dusty, sorry about that. The powder near the white paint is marble powder which I sometimes use to make the paint thicker or more opaque.

LV: Thanks for that window into your process. What does a typical studio day look like for you? Do you paint every day?

LC: Unfortunately these days I don't paint that often. I have a lot of work, and I'm studying for a b.a. in philosophy and arts. I do try to paint at least on the weekends, and more when my schedule allows. I don't really have a typical studio day I can speak of. My ideal studio day would be to start with some small sketch, either a transcription, or an invented composition, then go on to a big painting I'm working on, or starting something new. If I'm feeling a bit lost, I would start with organizing my studio, going through old paintings I might work on some more, looking through books and such.

LV: Fascinating! Do you find that your studies in philosophy and arts influence your painting and/or your tattoo art?

LC: Not really, it just means I have less painting time at the moment. I'm not a cerebral painter, I don't really think when I paint, at least not in the same way as when I'm reading philosophy. I do think it's important to develop oneself as a person, and that it can be seen in one's paintings, but I can't speak of any direct link between theory and the actual practice of painting as far as my art is concerned. As to tattooing, most of my work is developed to the clients request so my part is mostly the visual and aesthetic, not the conceptual.

LV: Do you have any advice you might offer to an artist starting on their journey?

LC: Well, that's quite a big question, there are so many things I could say. I think most of all, it's important to be patient. Don't try to make a beautiful painting, don't try to succeed, just try to look and to enjoy the process. I think a good thing is to make a lot of studies from old masters, they will be your best teachers. Small studies are like a laboratory, you can really try things, explore. It doesn't make you feel as committed as a larger painting might do, so you can be freer, more creative even, and then you bring that energy to the larger, or more "serious" paintings. Also, I find it extremely important to try and understand the meaning of composition, which master copies will help with. I think for me it was the biggest struggle, to really let go of the figurative, to be committed to the painting, to the composition, rather than the thing I was painting. I guess letting go of some aspirations is an important part of the process, as well as gaining new ones. I was afraid to try things out, and I'm sorry about not being bolder as a student. Also read "Hawthorne on Painting".

LV: You mentioned before that you don't think of yourself as a painter who is creating a lot of space in your painting and that you think more of the surface of the painting. Can you talk a little bit more about that?

LC: I think less of creating space because I don't really think of a painting in the Albertian way, of it being a window to a reality. I'm interested more in the surface of it, in the inner divisions of the square. I love early renaissance paintings, manuscript illustrations and Persian and Indian miniature paintings, which have this rather flat surface, and strange sense of space, so I guess they have a big influence on me. I do think of space and air but I can't say it's my main concern, it's more about the shapes and divisions. When I would go out painting I would always find myself drawn by close motifs that make for a rather flat painting, as well as motifs with a close tonal range, so with time I realized these are my interests more than creating this vast airy landscapes. This is probably why I do more cityscapes and buildings.

LV: Thank you for the clarification, I think I understand better. I also wanted to ask you about making transcriptions from the old masters. Are there any masters you recommend copying? Also, how would you go about making a copy?

LC: So about copying- the masters I copy the most are Piero Della Francesca, Caravaggio, Titian, Corot, early Italian renaissance masters like Giotto and Lorenzetti and Degas. I think the reason to copy, or rather make studies, of old master paintings is to learn something from them, so the best thing to do is to find the ones you like the most, the ones you would want to paint like, or have a certain quality you would like to have in your own painting, and do studies from them. Do small sketches, charcoal studies, color sketches, just don't try to copy the painting as it is, there's no point in that. Making a study after someone's work allows you an insight into their thought process, into the way they look and make decisions, it provides you with an opportunity to engage in a close relationship with them in a way studying about an artist will never do.

The other thing about these studies is that they provide you with a kind of experimental playground. Somehow these studies make you feel less committed, less serious, than when you are facing a still life or a portrait for example. I feel I can experiment more with studies after the masters, push the colors further, try combinations I would normally be afraid of and generally make more of a mess. The pressure of making a "good" painting isn't there, because it's not your painting anyway.

Also, transcriptions are not something you only do as a student and that's it, it's something worth doing as a continuous practice. When I'm in the studio and have no idea what to do, or stuck on the painting or just generally uninspired it always helps.

I also recommend looking at Balthus's studies of Piero, and Picasso's studies of Velasquez to see some good examples of the way these great painters interpreted old master works.

LV: Thank you for these replies! I just have 2 more questions.

Do you premix several colors before you start painting or do you mix one color at a time? Or a different process altogether?

When you're making a copy do you use an image for reference on a screen like your phone or computer or an image on paper? Does it matter to you?

LC: I have simple answers for both of those. I never premix colors. I look and react, I mix the colors I see and try to make them work together, which means I have to change them and adjust all the time. I think a good painting gives the feeling of the painter being surprised by what they discovered about the world through the act of observation and painting, so I find pre-mixing to be the opposite of letting oneself be surprised, the opposite of exploring.

When I'm making a copy I use whatever I have available, be it a reproduction in a book, from the internet, or a photo I took myself. I do find it more convenient working from a book, but it doesn't matter that much. As I explained in my previous answer about copying, it's never about making a copy, or a reproduction, of the painting, and sometimes less information is even more helpful to see the big picture and to not get caught up in the details. Anyway, even in a good quality reproduction, you never get the actual colors of the painting, so when making a color study one has to invent.

An Email Conversation with Anh Nguyen

LV: Hi Anh! Thank you for agreeing to this email interview. I was just looking at your website and I saw you have 4 children. You must be very busy! I have a two year old and it is a constant juggling act for me to be both an artist and a parent.

I would love to know more about how it is for you to be an artist and a parent. I see a wonderful tension in your work between stillness and movement and somehow it reminds me of being an artist and a mom-- having an hour of silence while the whole world rushes on.

AN: I constantly think about how to navigate parenting and sustaining an art practice. Not just painting time but also ‘percolation and interleaving’ (a nicely articulated term I heard from the British artist Sara Lee Roberts), which is really thinking time, but a kind of thinking that embraces interruptions, unexpected occurrences and distractions...The idea is that this allows your brain to switch off, refresh, and re-engage. So that when you do get that studio time (ie. nap times if your children nap!), it all comes out real quick! I also recall a quote (though unfortunately I can't attribute it!) where a female artist with children likened the time of intense parenting as preparation and practice, so that ‘when the time comes’, then one can travel as the arrow straight - true and direct.

I started my art practice during maternity leave with my 2nd child, about 5 years ago. I have described it in the past as a ‘catalyst’ of sorts. When I won the Basil Sellers in 2018, an interviewer asked a similar question, and my reply was something along the lines of not expecting painting to ‘save me’ - and this was met with a blank look, but now I think I can talk about it better. What I meant was that I don’t try and expect anything from my paintings, or rely on it to temper my mental and emotional state, nor do I wish to treat it as a kind of escapism. It is important to me to try and approach painting life as part of life, to be attuned to it - chaotic, hilarious, sad, weird, boring. And perhaps my paintings contain a sense of that, I’m not sure. I think approach is different to motivation. My motivation is more about visual experiences.

Another thing I’ve been thinking about in answering this question - that boredom has a lot to do with it, and it might explain why I am a relatively old emerging artist! I frankly don’t think I had it in me any earlier. I didn’t go to art school and I had more or less stopped painting in my 20s, though I still kept a visual diary of drawings and my own photography, and I watched a lot of movies in that period. Being a new mother reminds me in many ways of being a teenager at home in the suburbs again, with limited choices and mobility, and that you’d better get resourceful and imaginative very quickly, or how would you bear it. I feel my internal life and creative responses had an intensity to it then as when I started painting again as a parent.

LV: I love what you said about percolation and interleaving-- that is such a lovely image. Which leads me to my next question-- I'm curious about what you have to say about movement in your work. When I look at one of your pieces for a while I feel like I can sense the movement of time and also the movements of everyday life going on around you (like children running around). Do you work on your pieces at set times of day or do you include multiple times of day in one picture?

AN: It has changed depending on the ages of the children, what the daily activities are. When I first started my art practice, it was mostly commission work, so I would do that in the evenings. When I had little or no work, I started painting from life in the day time during naps. In the past, I think there was a kind of unconscious pressure on myself to complete paintings in one or two sittings, very intense high-stakes alla prima! Now I allow more slow paintings, over a period of time, and I use everything at my disposal - painting from life if it allows, painting from photographs and videorecordings, from invention and memory. There is no approach or method, except to take what is possible. So perhaps each time I return to a painting, I give it a little more energy, this movement you sense!

LV: Who/what has been inspiring you lately?

AN: I just received a copy of ‘Hockney on Art’, which I’ve never read before, and comes after reading his ‘Secret Knowledge’ last year. I am very interested in photography and what he talks about, the relationship between the mediums in terms of seeing and constructing a picture is really fascinating. I’ve just finished the chapter introducing what he calls ‘joiners’, which are like collage composites, ‘drawing with photography’, and I have started making my own responses to this with my iPhone and simple printouts.

LV: Those books sound great! I’ll add them to my list. I’m really curious about your collage cutouts. Any chance you would want to share some of them with me?

AN: Please find attached 5 joiners. Very basic but an interesting exercise in creating an account of many small moments without joining the lines that a panoramic or video eye would do. In the spirit of David Hockney’s approach, I did not alter or cut up the photos.

“Dancing w Doll”

“Opposite the Sea”

“Corner R & M”

“Driveway”

“Night Studio”

LV: These are great! They remind me of a talk by artist Elizabeth Flood who made some large paintings with several panels that included multiple horizon lines at different heights- she said this created a sense of being the viewer looking all around a scene (I don’t remember her exact words so I’m paraphrasing here). Have you found that making these joiners has influenced your painting practice?

AN: It’s too early to tell of a direct influence I think! The Hockney book has prompted me to think more about looking in a more ‘cubist’ way certainly, that is, breaking from looking at something from a single viewpoint. The multiple horizons is a great example, it’s moving through the pictorial space because it forces you from standing still. I shared a painting a few months ago (below) where I had started thinking more about this, and I received a message later from another artist with the idea that multiple vanishing points can denote duration. That’s something to explore.

‘All of me’ (2020), 76x92cm, acrylic & charcoal on canvas

LV: It's true! My eye slows down a lot in looking at this picture! Okay so I’ll ask you one more question- how do you know when one of your pictures is complete?

AN: It’s finished when I’ve considered every bit of the surface and think it would simply be mucking around to do any more. Or I’ve lost interest. That’s ok to me to move on, I’m not after a perfect picture! Thank you for this very nice chat!!

LV: I keep thinking about something you said- that you’re not trying to make a perfect painting. So I’m curious what the inverse of that is- what kind of painting are you trying to make?

AN: It is so good to have these things to think about. :)

I'm not sure if it's the inverse, I think the painting process can be quite a perfect experience actually. In thinking about a response to your tricky question, I looked up the Latin meaning of "perfection"..."to finish" or "to bring to an end", but the origin of the concept apparently goes back to the Greeks, defining it as: complete (contains all the required parts, nothing to add or subtract), is good (nothing could be done better) and has attained its purpose.

Why not allow paintings to contain mistakes, bad decisions and unresolved areas? If we are self-conscious about technical ability or sloppiness, or repetition and unoriginality that's another matter. The kind of painting I want to make is serious about its motivation and intent for being made - why do I want to paint it and how? And thanks to the wise guy whoever said "A work of art is never finished, merely abandoned"!

LV: Thanks for your thoughts! I saw this post by Alex Kenevsky on facebook and it made me think of this question. What do you think?

Notes on Cy Twombly from the airplane over Great Plains.

as promised to Robert Bohné and anyone else who cares

Cy Twombly. I love the work this man did. Maybe I dont’ look in painting for something that many other people value. Academics look for theoretical underpinnings, intellectual games, semiotics, language theory, god knows what else, but it is always language based and outside of the art itself. Many look for political statements, expression of straggle: class, gender, race, environment, etc. Still others look for the evidence of superior skill worthy of admiration. I am just interested in painting as a form of visual poetry.

It seems to me that what the man attempted to do is the most difficult thing in art: he crated his own language that nobody other than himself knew and he wrote visual poetry in this language that was clear and transporting to anyone who would take the trouble to listen (or look).

The language of visual poetry, is direct and defenseless. It does not appeal to all. It does not appeal right away. It does not appeal for the reasons outside of itself. This often put this kind of art in and extremely vulnerable position with critics.

In his Doctor’s Notebooks William Carlos Williams tried to define what I am straggling to define here: how the true poetry is born. Williams worked as a pediatrician in the city hospital of Patterson, NJ. The population of Patterson was and still is largely immigrant. Many of the inhabitants speak very limited English. When coming to see the doctor they had to describe what was wrong with the children, fully understanding how important it was that the doctor understood. They often had to do that out of very limited vocabulary that they possessed. Try to speak clearly and eloquently about the things that are deadly important knowing only 200 words of the language that you must use. To Williams the parallel was clear: this is also how all real poetry is written.

This language that Cy Twombly developed seems childlike because it took what we find so compelling in children's’ drawings: simplicity, directness and vulnerability of means in order to express profound human drama. This can’t be faked. It is a difficult formal problem. Twombly attempted to solve it when he spent two weeks in a darkened garage unlearning his hand from anything it knew about drawing. He did hundreds of drawings by feel in this dark garage. Every time he felt his hand holding a pencil slipping into a familiar routine he would change something about the line: the pressure, the direction, the speed.

Because it is not about what it says in the word “Appolo", it is really more how it says this, how fast, how big, how careful or careless, what’s next to it, what’s hidden below it and what runs on the top. This syntax was developed in the dark garage, the greek myths were used more for their human rawness than for the metaphors contained in them.

If you accept this language as valid, suspend your habitual disbelief, the work begins to open up its formal sophisticated beauty. No real art is available to people who expect a sham. Don’t worry about being taken for a ride, don’t be too careful. Safety is not first. Put all your eggs in one basket. The outcome will be exhilarating one way or the other.

The direct emotional impact of this work never ceases to surprise me. Incidentally it is the same with the horribly wrong Cezanne’s bodies. Cezanne and Twombly made their choices. What mattered to them they wanted perfect. The rest of it they barely bothered with. This includes Cezanne’s anatomy and Twombly’s lack of interest in the modernist dogma. If you try to make everything perfect the work dies. If you focus only on things that matter to you and try to make only them perfect you might achieve something great, but it will leave you vulnerable to rapid judgements of the fearful and the suspicious.

AN: That was a great read - thanks! I like that train of thought actually, to aim to perfect only what matters to you. That’s good.

LV: Yes I agree! I used to almost only make one shot paintings and now I’m making paintings that take much longer- it’s been a rewarding and frustrating and rich experience. I ask about the idea of a perfect painting because I’m not really sure when my pictures could be done- they can go on and on and to so many interesting places.

AN: Ah, I see! Are you bothered by not being sure? Maybe if you perfect the thing that matters (or one or two or three but not everything in one picture?) - I think that thought is helpful. You can make lots and lots of paintings to discover all those things. :)

9th Street Women

It’s not often I get to curl up with a good page-turner that also happens to inform my art career— but reading Ninth Street Women by Mary Gabriel was this and more.

I found the book addressed two major topics- what it was like to be a woman in the art world from 1939 -1959, and some of what Abstract Expressionism is about.

So this is mostly a collection of quotes from the book with some of my thoughts mixed in.

The first page of the book introduces Grace Hartigan— a female artist in a time “when servitude to family was the only goal toward which a ‘healthy’ woman was to aspire.” (p.xi) (has that time passed?)

Gabriel writes about Elaine de Kooning’s mother who “would have been expected to seek fulfillment in cooking and cleaning, washing and ironing, in making her home a castle for her husband and a sanctuary for her children” (p.64). Neither Grace Hartigan or Elaine’s mother bought into these societal pressures.

In talking about her experience being a female artist Elaine de Kooning says “You have to have confidence amounting to arrogance, because particularly at the beginning, you’re making something that nobody has asked you to make.”

Willem de Kooning painted a series of paintings titled “Woman.” Gabriel says in these pictures “his painting playfully mocked the hypocrisy of 1950s society, in which women were exalted as queens in order to make their social and domestic servitude more palatable” (p. 331). (has that time passed?)

Gabriel quotes Grace Hartigan talking about being a woman artist: “There you are alone in this huge space and you are not conscious of the fact that you have breasts and a vagina. You are inside yourself, looking at a damned piece of rag on the wall that you are supposed to make a world out of. That is all you are conscious of. I simply cannot believe that a man feels differently…” (p. 353)

There is a lot more commentary on the experience of women artists in the art world but now I’ll move on to the ideas of the Abstract Expressionists in general as quoted by Mary Gabriel.

Gabriel introduces three other female Abstract Expressionist artists who painted around the time of World War II: Lee Krasner, Joan Mitchell, and Helen Frankenthaler . In talking about the art they made Gabriel quotes Albert Camus “ In the world of condemnation to death which is ours, artists bear witness to that in man which refuses to die” (p. xvi).

She said the artists were struggling “to grab hold of the intangible” in their work (p.35). In John Graham’s (the cofounder of the Tibor De Nagy gallery) System and Dialectics of Art he writes, “Because art was therefore intrinsically abstract, the duty of the artist would be to push abstraction fearlessly to its logical end instead of evading it under the disguises of charm or being ‘true to nature’ “ (p.69).

I paint from observation or as some people call it “from life.” But here I felt challenged— is there a way to push abstraction fearlessly to its own end and be true to nature? Are the two mutually exclusive?

Isn’t abstraction a form of nature?

Perhaps nature and abstraction are the same in the realm of the unconscious. Graham goes on to write that the unconscious “is the creative factor and the source and the storehouse of power and of all knowledge, past and future… risk all and let the unconscious be your guide.”

Around the time of World War II the artists in New York who were forming the Abstract Expressionist movement strove to make work that “revealed true spirit” in a time when the future of the world was so uncertain. In the 1946 book “The Artist and Society” Gabriel quotes Gino Severini “We need, therefore, to go deep down into ourselves, into the depths of our subjectivity, so as to search for a Truth that can revivify and strengthen our certainty that life is useful, beautiful and eternal.”

It seems that most of the work that came from these artists was a sort of distilling of the spirit and of the times. Which leads me to ask— what is the spirit of our times? How has this time been built on theirs?

Gabriel quotes William Seitz who speaks of artists past and modern here: “The painter of the past, as a functioning unit of society, painted the public myth, ritual, and propaganda of his time, whereas the modern turns to his inner experience… not necessarily because he is so egocentric… but because private experiences have become the chef, and often the only, ones he trusts.”

I love the way Gabriel talks about the experience of being an artist. Here she writes about great art “ Great art in general, is not about materials used or methods mastered or even talent possessed. It is a combination of all these factors, and an individual driven by a force that seems outside them , toward expression of an idea they often to do not understand.” (p.461)

Gabriel quotes Virginia Woolf here “ All artists succumb to self-doubt; it is the handmaiden of creation.”

Gabriel quotes Joan Mitchell about the feeling of painting “ When you are really involved in writing or painting you are someone else… You are what I call ‘no hands,’ the riding a bicycle. You do not exist.” (p.471)

Another quote from Grace Hartigan: “ One of the most difficult things of all is not to have the painting be a depiction of the event but the event itself… Most art looks like it is talking about something that happened some other place.” (p.487) (does the event have anything to do with narrative?)

Gabriel quotes Elaine de Kooning: “There are two images the spectator gets from every work of art: one while looking at the work, the other— the after-image, while remembering the work… The artist creates the after-image, the painter makes the painting.”

Another Elaine de Kooning quote: “True art… is that which reflects an individual creator in a particular time and place, and by its very nature must adapt and change.” (p. 562)

A quote from Joan Mitchell: “I paint from remembered landscapes that I carry with me… and remembered feelings of them, which of course become transformed. I could certainly never mirror nature. I would like more to paint what it leaves me with.” (p. 565)

A quote from Mark Rothko: “I take the liberty to play on any string of my existence… Everything is grist for the mill.” (p.596)

In talking about Lee Krasner Gabriel writes, “The surprises a canvas held for an artist who painted it were, she believed, what sustained them.” (p.632).

In talking about a Helen Frankenthaler painting Gabriel writes about the particular problem Helen was wrestling with: “Can a mass of brushstrokes of a bed of color at one end of a painting be made to weigh the same as a line or smudge at the other?” (p. 642) (a fascinating challenge!)

A quote from Joan Mitchell that has stuck with me: “When you are tired, depressed, or even sick… there is only one cure: get up and work.” (p.695).

Gabriel quotes a critic from the publication Revista about the abstract expressionists’ work in the New American Paintings show: “Each picture is a confession, an intimate chat with the Divinity, accepting or denying the exterior world but always faithful to the more profound identity of conscience.”

I work from life but think of my paintings as abstractions. These thoughts from the Abstract Expressionist have been very chewy. What do you think?

There is so much more to this book I highly recommend it!

Elizabeth Flood- Notes

I had the opportunity to listen to a talk by painter Elizabeth Flood through the Mount Gretna School of Art a few weeks ago. Here are my notes from her talk:

- (in discussing outdoor painting one is) highly aware of the sensation of the weather

- when painting outside there is a feeling of connection to the place, and the other people who have been in that particular place. 

-"works attempt to survey complex layers of usage, movement, violence and occupation which make up a particular site and anticipate future impact"

- painting the sensation of light and wind through urgent mark making and color

- adding pumice powder to oil paint- the paint is harder to move around the palette, the resistance of the material feels like digging, excavating, scrambling over the terrain

- Charles Burchfield painted the sensory experience- he would paint the weather over the course of a day and call them his “all day paintings”

- painting is a tracking of observations

- painting at night in low light- requires use of other senses 

- sometimes paint multiple horizon lines, vantage points, and elevations to give a more real sense of being there and moving through space.

- went to Gettysburg to paint thinking “what does it mean to make a painting standing where so many people died?"

-At Gettysburg while painting, armed alt-right militias on July 4, cycle of violence and hate visible in the land and the actions around it. 

- landscape painting can be important as a picture witness to the land