Submitted by Brett Baker on January 12, 2013
I first met Trent Miller when he was my seat-mate on a plane traveling to Madrid in 2003. A group of painters, all Boston University MFA painters and alumni, were planning to spend a week perusing the Prado, Reina Sofía, the Thyssen-Bornemisza collection, and the surrounding towns. During the course of the flight and the following week, Miller and I discussed common interests from poetry and the films of Tarkovsky to the great Spanish painters: Goya, Velasquez, El Greco, and Picasso. We have kept in touch sporadically over the last decade, a period in which Miller has continued to develop his highly-complex and personal vision through paintings and drawings in which the observed world and that of the imagination harmoniously coexist.
Miller’s paintings render the abstraction/observation divide irrelevant as one becomes convinced, looking at his paintings, the artist does not distinguish between the two. The two modes are equivalent, and the viewer may wander between them at will.
Miller recently agreed to share his thoughts on the last decade of painting and his new work, now on view in the exhibtion Trent Miller: Spindrift and Tether on view at James Watrous Gallery, Madison, Wisconsin through February 24, 2013.
Link to Post:
http://hyperallergic.com/63349/when-paintings-come-apart-sharon-butler-on-the-inside-out/
Thomas Micchelli interviews painter Sharon Butler about the work in her exhibition Precisionist Casual at Pocket Utopia, New York, on view through February 17, 2013.
Butler comments: "To be honest, I’m a little apprehensive that some viewers will have... a sense of condescension or even indignation towards the seeming lack of skill and effort involved. As the Met points out in the excellent Matisse show that’s now up, making something look effortless isn’t always easy. But it’s worth trying to do well, if that’s not too much of a paradox. I guess what interests me are the metaphorical possibilities of lethargy, bad decisions, mistake-making, and turning things inside out as reflected in a painting. From these things, I reckon there is quite a bit to infer about not merely how we perceive the world but how we live in it."
Link to Post:
http://www.ahtcast.com/2013/01/artist-interview-paul-behnke.html
Phillip J. Mellen conducts an in-depth interview with painter Paul Behnke about his work.
Behnke talks several times in the interview about his spontaneous, materials-based approach. "To me," he comments, "especially at the beginning, the work is all about the materials, I just start. I don't have any preconceived colors I'm going to use... that all evolves as the work progresses. I do a lot of alternating... there's a lot of going back and forth in my mind between what to leave in and what to leave out, that's a tension that I want to be apparent in my work, that tension of what you keep and what you do away with - how those things are constantly jostling and competing with each other."
Link to Post:
http://studiocritical.blogspot.com/2013/01/patrick-michael-fitzgerald.html
Valerie Brennan interviews painter Patrick Michael Fitzgerald.
Fitzgerald remarks: "My process has become very organic; reworking things, interweaving things... paintings can have their origins in the history of my own work or the wider history of art. Some small aspect or detail can be enough. A memory of something or even certain sensations. I also use my immediate surroundings and day-to-day life as a source. For me this is important, it’s a way of transforming it into something else. The everyday can have a blind weight to it; the challenge is how to open it up, break it open even. The marvellous is always close at hand and often overlooked. There is also an element of recycling; discarded paintings or studio debris can be incorporated into a work, something from nothing, a kind of radical humility."
Link to Post:
http://bombsite.com/issues/1000/articles/6968
Samuel Jablon talks with painter Chuck Webster about his work and process.
Webster remarks: "I think the idea and the picture need to be one total experience for the viewer. Pictures have to be an embodiment of the idea while still remaining clear. Ideas for me come from the activity, from the evidence of putting down marks and removing them. I have to work my way through a number of ideas before the painting reveals itself to me. I believe in the transformation that happens there, with the materials and on the picture. My concept of making resides in that miracle, the awareness that starts to happen when something is made from raw material through time. Those things are one and the same: a picture is the concept. As it starts to transform, it creates new energy in the world and therefore its own version of form and narrative."
Link to Post:
http://thepaintingimperative.com/issue-6/beauty-as-depth-of-the-plane/
Bernhard Gaul interviews painter and stage designer Mark Lammert.
Asked about the relationship between his painting and designing for theatre Lammert replies: "I believe there might be overlaps in terms of creating a lot out of just a few elements. Let’s say: the old problem of expressing a lot with just a few colours, or to create a big physical presence with just a few elements. But generally there aren’t that many commonalities. There are specific reasons why I think that the spaces I built for the theatre are slightly different and also have a different impact. That might have been most evident maybe at the second staging of Aeschylus’ The Persians in Epidauros, the relevance of that old Hebbel quote: “Beauty is depth of the plane”. Meaning: before which ground or base do you put something? That plays a very important role. And in addition there is also the effect of colour. These spaces are in this sense quite seriously dramaturgical machines, in some way (in the best case) co-players."
Link to Post:
http://anaba.blogspot.com/2012/12/ken-weathersby.html
Martin Bromirski visits the studio of painter Ken Weathersby.
Bromirski's photographs document Weathersby's process as described by Chris Ashley: "At a quick glance, his images are of a type one might expect to be manufactured, but instead we see that every single aspect of the work is handcrafted, from the elaborate stretchers and framing, to the taped and painted areas, to the surface cuts and insertions. Materially and structurally, he makes plain how the object is made, but there is often a sense of peekaboo or sleight of hand in the layers, displacement, and disruption of image and spaces. One would expect the use of the grid and checkerboard to lead to stability, but more often than not these normally regular fields are set ajar, slid apart, flipped open, broken, or misaligned. This is not art that panders, but rather insists that we engage by visually assembling, disassembling, and reassembling each work’s constituent parts in order to see, experience, and understand a holistic image and object. This is one way that Weathersby’s art extends painting’s possibilities."
Link to Post:
http://ffffffwalls.com/2012/12/collin-hatton-bushwick-part-i/
Studio visit and interview with painter Collin Hatton.
Hatton comments on his interest in the "interaction between the materiality and the image interacting and fusing together in some way. I think a big part of these paintings is treating them, treating the paintings as images as well as objects and how those objects react in space to a view who’s moving around them, who’s moving to them, and back. The viewing distance, I think, matters and affects the paintings."
Link to Post:
http://figureground.ca/interviews/joy-garnett/
Julia Schwartz interviews painter Joy Garnett about her work and studio process.
Garnett comments: "I think that painting is a radical gesture. Painting itself is a political act, an intervention, a détournement. By contrast, I don’t think it is truly radical or politically expedient to try to hitch painting or any art, really, to an ideological or political agenda. As is often the case with so-called ‘political art,’ the moment that a work pushes through a clear, unadulterated message, it stops being art and crosses over to agitprop — propaganda. It becomes a pitch, an advertisement for a cause that displays the trappings of art on its surface. Art, by contrast, when it functions as art, is not clear, it’s much weirder than that, and it does something more profound than promoting a particular message or political agenda. How can the age-old medium of painting serve as a radical gesture? To paint or to engage paintings as a viewer are activities that go against the grain. That’s where the politics of the everyday comes in. Painting disrupts the ubiquitous dominance of the electronic image, of all that is infinitely reproducible, streamed endlessly, transmitted instantaneously. A painting asks the maker and viewer alike to give up very different parts of themselves than what they have become inured to giving up. It is radical in terms of where we’re at."
Link to Post:
http://www.paintersbread.com/2012/12/farrell-brickhouse-interview.html
Michael Rutherford interviews painter Farrell Brickhouse about his work and process.
Brickhouse comments: "One question I ask when entering the studio is, 'what needs to be said, what can my art contain?' My studio time is not unique, it runs the whole gamut: from the workman-like strokes that one makes until something more significant can happen, to the terrible certainty that it is all collapsing and one should just buy a boat and be done with it. There are the moments when I come alive; the marks seem determined, as if they always existed, and I am witnessing the process unfold—and all that one knows seems to be available in this illuminated moment. One also learns when to stop and step out of the trenches and look for a while to see what has been achieved, especially after the novelty wears off. Sometimes it’s a way forward that’s been rendered and sometimes one is rewarded with a decent work. My practice is one of having multiple paintings going at once. I may focus on just one thing, but usually there is this leapfrogging going on, where one work liberates the other to take the next step. I’m often amazed at how a casual three-minute sketch on a small piece of paper can inform a painting. I putter around and I have lots of visual sources lying about, as well as my own drawings, gouaches and such. I’m very organized, but in the immortal words of Patti Smith, 'one has to lose control to gain control.' "
