Link to Post:
http://badatsports.com/2013/an-interview-with-ann-toebbe/
Caroline Picard interviews painter Ann Toebbe about her work on the occasion of the exhibition Ann Toebbe: The Inheritance at Ebersmore, Chicago, on view through March 30, 2013.
Toebbe remarks: "I have a knack for flattening space. It wasn’t considered a great asset in my early training in drawing and painting but I have cultivated my skewed perception — often called folk or faux naïve — of space. I imagine objects flat first, then bend and fold them in creative ways to make everything fit in a given room... I started out using predominantly a bird’s eye view. My early paintings look like cardboard boxes with the lid taken off. You’d look in and see a room in my version of three-point perspective. I drew the lines of the wall in perspective making the floor look like it was in deep space. As I painted more rooms the architecture flattened out — it’s simpler for me to unfold the walls rather than try to use extreme perspective to include everything. The rooms are unstable in terms of gravity but since I know from the start how the painting will be oriented and place things accordingly, they feel grounded."
Link to Post:
http://culturecatch.com/art/susan-bee-interview
Bradley Rubenstein interviews painter Susan Bee about her life, her career, and her recent work.
Asked about her newest work (which will be on view at Accola Griefen Gallery, New York from May 23 to June 29, 2013) Bee comments: "I have become very taken by the idea of theatricality and artifice. I am creating these paintings as spaces for a drama to take place. The figures are actors and actresses in a stage that I am setting up for them to play out their roles. The film stills I'm referencing are very dramatic. There is a subtle undertone that is pulling you in and pushing you out. I remain intrigued by the dangerous women and the desolate men in the film noirs. These paintings have brought into focus the power of the individual faces and bodies and their relationship to the painted ground -- and also their relation to each other. I'm now emphasizing the dynamic between the figures, whether they're pressing against a windowpane or pressing up against each other. In fact, the paintings' focus is on these relationships and the psychological space and emotions that are carved out among the persons that I'm portraying."
Link to Post:
http://figureground.ca/jennifer-wynne-reeves/
Julia Schwartz interviews painter Jennifer Wynne Reeves about her work and practice.
Submitted by Margaret McCann on March 16, 2013
Margaret McCann interviews painter Megan Marlatt on the occasion of the recent exhibition Megan Marlatt: Substitutions for a Game Never Played at The Visual Arts Center of Richmond, Virginia.
Megan Marlatt, Venetian Red Riding Hood, 2006, acrylic and oil on linen, 42 x 48 inches (courtesy of the artist)
Margaret McCann (PT): What does the title of your recent show, “Substitutions for a Game Never Played,” at The Visual Arts Center of Richmond VA, reveal about your sense of play in art-making? Jung said, “… play [belongs] to the child, [appearing] inconsistent with the principle of serious work. But without this playing with fantasy no creative work has ever yet come to birth.”
Megan Merlatt (MM): Jung is correct, and as the oeuvre of my toy work grew, so did my empathy toward child’s play and similarities between that world and the artist’s. I became interested in the “anima” in “animation”…what makes dead matter come alive, how do both the child and the artist imbue life into seemingly inanimate objects?
Megan Marlatt, Toy Pile with an Arabian Foot, 2005, acrylic and oil on canvas, 42 x 54 inches (courtesy of the artist)
PT: Large piles of toys gathering dust don’t speak well of our consumerist culture, and my inner hoarder feels slightly ashamed looking at them, but then they also reflect Baudelaire’s statement that “Is not the whole of life to be found [in a great toyshop] in miniature - and far more highly colored, sparkling and polished than real life?” Are the paintings also about pure pleasure?
Megan Marlatt, Profile of Ms. Oyl, 2010, acrylic and oil on round panel, 20 inches (courtesy of the artist)
MM: Yes, and I hope viewers have the same conflicting feelings - both damned and seduced by our plastic consumption. Admittedly, my first response to the toys was that of a visual artist; they were colorful and their forms were smartly engineered and enjoyable to paint and draw. But I’ve always been interested in the human condition and how social issues effect art making, so I couldn’t avoid that most of this stuff was wasteful junk. The more I collected and piled the toys up, the more the paintings began to speak to me of a mass, cultural vertigo…a dizziness of too much stuff, too much stimulation, too much information, too much plastic. Mass consumerism doesn’t just produce masses of junk, it can rob us of our sense of preciousness.
Yet I’m not above being seduced myself, and ironically, plastic can evoke a sense of preciousness, in that inevitably I’d pull from the wreckage a toy from my childhood, or one so well crafted one couldn’t help designating it ‘special’. As I’d paint these individually, as portraits, they turned out to be the ones through which I began to feel the meaning of child’s play in the artist’s studio.
PT: How important is 'degree of difficulty' for you? Paintings like “Venetian Red Riding Hood” show mastery – skillful but non-fussy drawing, clever manipulation of light, beautiful color, and an expressive handling of paint. Their ambition (50+ figures) reminds me of the technical virtuosity academic history painting placed on multi-figure compositions. Can toys be people, too?
MM: Well, I have been painting for a long time, and I’m aging, and life is short – so I feel my efforts are worthy of ambitious instead of half-hearted ones. My intention involves blurring the lines between genres, so that still lifes can read as landscapes, portraits, history painting, etc. But as gravity pulls the toy piles downward over time, and as the toys appear to move during close observation, jiggling in the corners of my eyes as I turned to find the right color on my palette, the blurring continues; I wind up painting 'un-still lifes’. Toys are so 'loaded' culturally and emotionally they can substitute for many things.
Link to Post:
http://www.gorkysgranddaughter.com/2013/03/darina-karpov-at-pierogi-march-2013.html
Zachary Keeting and Christopher Joy talk to painter Darina Karpov at her exhibition Sudden Leap Into the Interior at Pierogi, Brooklyn, on view through March 17, 2013.
In a 2011 interview with Andrew Frank for BOMB, Karpov noted: " It’s very appropriate to see my work through the temporal lens and to think of it in terms of duration, as it unfolds over time whether through the build up of layers or through movement across the pictorial plane. I’ve always been influenced by time-based media—film, music, or theater—all the things that evolve and expand spatially and in temporal dimensions. I think kinesthetically, or maybe it’s the thought itself that’s actually kinesthetic and I am just trying to plot it or record its movement. The experience of dislocation and perpetual movement is fundamental in my work. I like to imagine how space is being affected by time, how new hybrid structures result from layers of paint bleeding through numerous translucent applications, or through other improvisational methods. It can produce a feeling of transience and transform the passage of time into space. The figure-ground relationships become really dynamic, nonhierarchical, and fluid. All sorts of liberating possibilities can open up like transcending the limitations of planar space and gravity, for example, or forming interfaces between different surfaces so one environment may easily slip or fold into another and structures may cluster or scatter. It helps me to think of the space as a kind of positive substance, active, vibrating, and malleable."
Link to Post:
http://arthopper.org/woven-topologies-of-chris-hyndman-susanne-hilberry-gallery/
Ron Scott interviews painter Chris Hyndman on the occasion of his solo exhibition Susanne Hilberry Gallery, Michigan, on view through March 30, 2013.
Hyndman comments: "I’m very interested in digital surfaces, screen technology surfaces, and the way they give us imagery. They have a particular kind of texture, color, and a thinness, which produces a kind of intensity, but also a frailty... Although my work is grounded in many respects in digital technology — I couldn’t make these paintings without it — I’m also skeptical of it. I don’t have an endless belief in it. So, larger but at the same time lighter and fragile."
Link to Post:
http://brenthallard.wordpress.com/2010/05/01/cecilia-vissers/
Brent Hallard interview with artist Cecilia Vissers, posted here on the occasion of the upcoming exhibition Cecilia Vissers: Wind Swept at Galerie Kunstkabinett Corona Unger, Bremen, Germany, on view from March 16 - April 28, 2013.
Vissers, whose recent relief works engage both sculpture and painting, describes how she uses "chemicals to intensify the colors and patterns sometimes using gunblue to retouch or cover up the scratches on the surface of the metal." She continues: "...the color is in the material and not on the material like paint. Up till now I only use the color orange because of its overpowering quality, it is a very direct color that immediately increases energy levels. Whereas the black can be so deep and absorbing like a sponge. There is this searching for balance and equilibrium between the form, the color and the finish of the material. The preference is for purity, and simplicity: the tension arising between the form, color and the finish of the material. It needs to be perfect."
Link to Post:
http://figureground.ca/brett-baker/
Julia Schwartz interviews painter and Painters' Table editor Brett Baker. Thanks to Julia for the opportunity to discuss my work, including the development of my recent miniature paintings.
"Moving from a large studio in the Catskills to a two-room apartment in Manhattan forced me, finally, to consider the role scale played in the work. I had to ask whether could I make serious paintings that were small, and to answer that question I had to try and make some small works and see if they 'measured up' to the large ones. I stretched ten small paintings, the limit that would fit on the apartment wall, and resolved to work on them until the question of scale was answered in the work. I worked on those paintings for four years. Interestingly, my existing visual language continued to evolve and thrive on the smaller surfaces. The size of the marks changed very little, but where they had more or less floated on a large surface they began to interlock, to push and pull against each other and the support. A visual compression emerged that hadn’t been there before, and the paintings began to realize the solidity I originally sought."
Link to Post:
http://blog.art21.org/2013/03/11/new-kids-on-the-block-far-out-with-lisa-sanditz/
Jacquelyn Gleisner interviews painter Lisa Sanditz about her work.
Sanditz comments: "I paint what I experience, or read about or see in the landscape that seems to reflect some absurdity, or tension or metaphor for the culture at large. I often seek out places that have a compelling visual element as well. This is because I love to move around and experience the world, go places, meet people, hear their stories—and I also love to paint, no doubt. It’s not in reaction to a highly digitized world, but the refreshing tactile experience of it for me. I get a lot from the real world and hope to put it in the paintings. And I am drawn to this in the work of others. I believe in the power of narrative, whether it’s the narrative in the work or the narrative behind making the work. I am attracted to this in film, photography, and sculpture as well as painting."
Link to Post:
http://studiocritical.blogspot.com/2013/03/joel-longenecker.html
Valerie Brennan interviews painter Joel Longnecker about his work and process.
Longnecker comments: "I’m after an organic, generative process where one thing slowly leads to another with each piece resolving itself in it’s own way. Working like this makes it impossible for me to duplicate what I’ve already done, keeping the process open and alive. I always start several things at once, but am careful to quickly fold them into the work that is already in progress. In a sense, my work never 'starts' or 'stops,' but instead is more like a continuous loop in which things are cycled in and out. Ultimately, what I want is for the paintings to look like they’ve created themselves, much like a tree, or any other bit of nature, that slowly grew into it’s final form."
