Link to Post:
http://bombsite.com/issues/124/articles/7204
Jeremy Sigler interviews painter Joanne Greenbaum about her work and career.
Responding to Sigler's comment about her work having a sense of rebelliousness, Greenbaum comments: "It is rebellious, and it’s also this stubbornness I have of sticking to painting, feeling like there’s still so much to do in the two dimensions—even though, as you see, I’m making sculpture. To me, painting is limitless; I don’t need to ironically quote modernist styles or modes of abstraction. I use all of that stuff in my work, but I believe, as corny as it sounds, that you can still be original."
Later in the interview Greenbaum adds: "The most conceptual, theoretical, strategic thinker is also going on intuition on a certain level. Just because my work is loose and handdrawn, it doesn’t necessarily translate into being intuitive. There are a lot of ideas about painting here. I think there is not great language out there for the purely visual, and art historians and others try to describe something that is so inherently preverbal. So that’s where the word intuition comes in. I think it’s the wrong word for a type of thinking that can be very deep but ultimately unexplainable."
Link to Post:
http://mwcapacity.wordpress.com/2013/06/18/q-a-with-thomas-berding/
Christopher Lowrance interviews painter Thomas Berding on the occasion of the recent exhibition Thomas Berding: Makeshift Futures at The Painting Center, New York.
Berding comments: "To recapture the studio process can be a bit like trying to retell a dream or untie a knot. That said, I often use elements like cardboard, color aid paper, and images I find off the Internet as prompts or triggers for painting but only very loosely so. Alternatively, such drawings and collages can be made in response to developments occurring in a painting. Other times, paintings generate other paintings. ... in these works, I have been interested in pursuing how certain gestures and color understandings or remnants of process, play against more pure and undiluted color that evokes quite another sense. Such color set-ups work alongside other compelling material tensions I try to conjure up, including the play between fast and slow surfaces, sharp and diffused edges, and more declarative verses more suggestive passages. It is through getting such tensions to function in concert together that I feel some measure of rightness is achieved."
Link to Post:
http://paintingperceptions.com/contemporary-realism/interview-with-michael-tompkins
Larry Groff interviews painter Michael Tompkins about his work and career.
Groff introduces Tompkins work noting: "What is remarkable about these paintings isn’t just the amazing technical skills in achieving these monumental structures but in how he makes it seem like it’s all such great fun. There is musicality in how intervals of placement, color notes and scale juxtapositions along the relentless horizontal and vertical thrusts that seem to mash up Bach fugues and Phillip Glass with Spike Jones and Captain Beefheart. Perhaps most of all I was enchanted by his color. The delights of color here isn’t just for it’s descriptive pitch accuracy, or even for the many satisfying moments where you feel the rightness of the sensations of one color plane vibrating against another. What got me most was the magic of feeling I was listening in on conversations between color groupings—how the reds and blues seemed to be speaking (or perhaps singing) in slightly different dialects of the same paint language, some mute or just whispering, other maniacally chatty, muttering or even yelling bloody murder—all which keeps your eye moving back and forth trying to figure out what it all means."
Link to Post:
http://burnaway.org/2013/06/nudes-in-venice-interview-with-ellen-altfest/
Ridley Howard interviews painter Ellen Altfest about her work.
I think I learned to be an artist as a still life painter and then applied that language to the figure. Maybe the body is more understandable when it is broken down into knowable pieces. I also like that the parts of the body become their own things, separate from the person they belong to. There’s a funny sense of ownership that happens too, like this part of a person belongs to me in a way, while I’m working with it... The model is part of the work, which is an intimate relationship, and a real bond can develop between us. Our dynamic, and how he is feeling, affects the atmosphere of the studio and my level of focus. Ultimately, it’s about part of the model I’m painting, not about the model himself. I have a separate connection with that body part, just like I would with a tree or plant."
Link to Post:
http://figureground.ca/2013/06/14/a-conversation-with-farrell-brickhouse/
Julia Schwartz interviews painter Farrell Brickhouse about his work and career.
Brickhouse comments: "For me in painting there needs to be an epiphany, a trace of how the imagery conveyed thru paint was discovered and experienced by the artist. Not a graphic notation of the language of experience but the mystery of it. Art is a personal odyssey, a vehicle to carry me forward and find some deeper unity in what is happening in and around me. One of art’s chief functions is to resist the denaturing forces that are always present: those things that would take away our transcendent possibilities and turn us into stereotyped beings. Art is not the production of meaning but the providing of a genuine experience of what it is to be alive and in the world now."
Link to Post:
http://blogs.artinfo.com/modernartnotes/2013/06/the-modern-art-notes-podcast-joyce-pensato/
Tyler Green talks to painter Joyce Pensato on the occasion of the exhibition Joyce Pensato: I Killed Kenny on view at the Santa Monica Museum of Art through August 17, 2013.
Pensato discusses her working process and looking at Franz Kline and de Kooning as well as her interest in cartoon characters as subject matter. Pensato remarks on her focus on the eyes as the "soul of the image" and the fact that the characters are the already an "abstraction of a figure - it already goes into an abstraction... it's a model... Mickey Mouse or Felix the Cat. Yes, it looks like Felix the Cat but I want to make it my own, take it apart and put it back together with my own voice..." She adds that "the Batmen are the most abstract, because there's no eyes or nose - the mask and that's it."
Link to Post:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/john-seed/eve-ascheim_b_3420697.html
John Seed interviews painter Eve Aschheim on the occasion of the exhibition Eve Aschheim / Ying Li: Recent Paintings is on view at the New York Studio School on view through July 20, 2013.
Aschheim comments: "Much art is concerned with static and defined forms. I am interested in a more active situation, in which the structures are actually in states of transition. So you see it one way and then another way without being able to settle on a final image. I think this comes from many things. In Either/Or, Kierkegaard says that as we make choices for one direction, we eliminate the others. In painting, I thought we could have both. In The Interpretation of Dreams, Freud writes that there is no 'either' and no 'or,' only 'and,' in dreams because images can't be withdrawn. I wondered if I could have 'either,' 'or' and also 'and' in my work. In some of my works you can see a structure one way and then another way, but not at the same time. In some works this happens at the same time. I am also interested in that moment before thought has fully coalesced, when the choices are like a glimmer of some possibility."
Link to Post:
http://blog.art21.org/2013/06/07/nycu-eddie-martinezs-risky-business/
Jonathan Munar posts a new video about painter Eddie Martinez. In the video Martinez discusses the desire to seek a new, abstract direction in his work, a desire that was realized in his recent exhibition, Matador, at Journal Gallery, Brooklyn.
On changing from figurative to abstract painting Martinez says: "I really have to go into the paintings a little bit more to figure them out, to pull their potential out of them. Because I don't necessarily know what the imagery is and I don't know what the moves are going to be as readily as I did when painting a bouquet of flowers over and over and over again."
Link to Post:
http://studiocritical.blogspot.com/2013/06/jason-stopa_7.html
Valerie Brennan interviews painter Jason Stopa about his work.
Asked about the inspiration to begin a painting, Stopa comments: "It comes from anywhere. I just pick up on things around me - the feeling of a neighbourhood, places, things or people that mean something to me. I like to let intuition guide what I'm doing. Sometimes I'll be watching a movie or I'll read a line in a book that resonates with me on a personal level. From there I kind of obsess over that thing, whatever it may be. Then I want to paint. But, the painting is always something else. The painting is about describing an abstraction - space, atmosphere and sensation."
Link to Post:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/john-seed/grant-drumheller_b_3393938.html
John Seed interviews painter Grant Drumheller on the occasion of the exhibition Grant Drumheller: New Paintings at Prince Street Gallery, New York, on view through June 15, 2013.
Asked about the aerial viewpoint in many of his paintings, Drumheller responds: "I find that the curve of my vision is often something I want to convey and not just the 'crushed' space that one is familiar with from telephoto lens photography. So the dynamic of perspective and foreshortening the figures plays some part in the way I construct the paintings , also the geometry of the reserve -- what's behind and around -- and how it interacts with the verticals of the figures is an issue. I move the elements around a lot before things settle into place."
