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.
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.
Submitted by Brett Baker on November 21, 2012
From Rome to Atlantic City, an exhibition of paintings by Margaret McCann, is currently on view at the University of Virginia’s Ruffin Gallery, through December 7. In works rich in both allusion and painterly craft, McCann merges careful observation, popular culture, and an encyclopedic knowledge of the tradition of painting. To view McCann's paintings is to understand that popular culture has long been a part of the language of painting. Each of McCann's works is an enigmatic parable inside a dynamic formal structure that is animated by a personal sense of touch and color.
McCann recently agreed to discuss her work with Painters' Table.
Margaret McCann, Lookout, 2008 (courtesy of the artist)
PT: I think we have to start by acknowledging that your Atlantic City series has an unanticipated additional reading after Hurricane Sandy. What We Worry? (2009) depicts the sea looming over a spiraling Piranesi-esque Atlantic City boardwalk. Lookout (2008) depicts the boardwalk being inundated by the sea. How do you feel about this unexpected, yet unavoidable new reading?
MM: During Irene “What We Worry?” and “Lookout” were in my show “Boardwalkers” at the Atlantic City Art Center on the Garden Pier, the front of which was washed away in a previous hurricane – you can still see the broken piers. When the nearby Revel was built, huge amounts of sand were added to the beach so the pier is now ‘sand-locked,’ but it used to extend over the water, so I had to temporarily remove all my work during the storm. On a barrier island the weather and water encircle you and the possibility of high water feels ever-present.
Their meaning is probably more journalistic than metaphysical now. At least I painted them before the tragedy (I’d be too self-conscious now), and the synchronicity supports painting’s power and reach - the kind that draws non-artists to painting. But floods are archetypal events, as Guston’s versions express. I was struck by how much my painting “Water Country” resembles the roller coaster washed offshore in Seaside Heights.
Submitted by Brett Baker on October 29, 2012
A retrospective exhibition of works by Gillian Ayres is on view at the Jerwood Gallery (in cooperatation with Alan Cristea Gallery) thorough November 25, 2012.
This 1988 video interview with Ayres by Geoffrey Robinson (below) was recently re-edited for the web. During this extended look into the artist's studio, viewers see Ayres at work and hear her thoughts on painting. She remarks:
"Painting is about the area or size of the canvas you choose and how you relate marks on that area... you're doing area against area of color. On that area, this chosen area, the thing has to work. It doesn't only have to work... one hopes it touches the soul... at the end of it. It has to do a lot more things at the end of the line but it also does have to work visually in that way. Perhaps surprise too, and shock... I mean in those areas of color, I don't mean shock in an other sort of literal way. I mean within itself... It probably sets up moods, it probably sets up poetry... it has to do lots of things, but you still only read it as it's put down, as these marks."
Submitted by Brett Baker on October 18, 2012
The landscape has inspired painters from Courbet, Monet, and Cézanne to Jackson Pollock and Joan Mitchell, the immensity of nature acting as a catalyst for each of their highly individual visions.
Tenses of Landscape, on view at the University of Arkansas Fine Arts Center Gallery through November 4, 2012, takes a look at the influence of landscape in the work of nineteen contemporary painters: Ricky Allman, Julie Cifuentes, Mike East, Emily Gherard, Grant Hottle, Michael Kareken, Tim Kennedy, Carla Knopp, Michael Krueger, Mark Lewis, Kristin Musgnug, Joseph Noderer, Margaret Noel, Casey Roberts, Claire Sherman, Kimberly Trowbridge, Shane Walsh, Megan Williamson, and Jenn Wilson.
In the exhibition introduction, Sam King writes that the show “presents both broad and dynamic depictions of landscape revealed as motif. Moreover, each artist examines the terrain dictated by these approaches and in turn addresses the act of painting itself.”
In addition to publishing statements by the artists each Monday on their blog MW Capacity, exhibition co-curators Sam King and Christopher Lowrance agreed to share their thoughts on putting together the show with Painters’ Table.
Submitted by Brett Baker on August 16, 2012
Never Let the Screen Door Slam is a video interview and studio visit with painter Frederick Hammersley (1919-2009), directed by Vanessa H. Smith. Hammersley's work was most recently on view at LA Louver.
Hammersley discusses his general thoughts on painting as well as the specifics and development of his practice, including what he calls painting by "hunch" or intuition: "You put down a shape and they just lie there, and then you make a movement and it comes alive. I've never quite understood that, but it's marvelous. The shapes have attitudes and the painting just clicks."
Submitted by Brett Baker on August 15, 2012
One in a video series posted by Betty Cuningham Gallery, painter Judy Glantzman discusses her work and her idea of art.
Glantzman notes her interest in "the combination of a kind of a contrivance and a kind of truth - truth and contrivance simultaneously - that's what I think of as art… when I mean true, it's that I am not conscious of what my painting is going to look like, I'm more engaging in a relationship…" She continues: "I came from a kind of self-portrait orientation… the more I'm in it the truer it is and the more I'm in it the less it is about me… There's two things going on. One of them is the sort of desire to reveal myself to myself, and therefore if that's honest then other people respond. The other part of it is, it's inseparable from the building of something, it's a visual language..."
Submitted by Brett Baker on April 19, 2012
In one of a recently posted series of videos from Betty Cuningham Gallery, painter Gordon Moore discusses his work and the experience of being a artist.
Moore notes that over time: "you become very clear about what's essential and what isn't, and gradually that leads to a specific direction, in which the path becomes much clearer for you, much more open and I think that's the one great virtue of staying with something… If you pay attention and you're alert you start making progress…" He continues: "I'm feeling better and better about first of all the opportunities, the possibilities, the expansive possibilities of what I can do with this material - paint - and secondly that what I'm doing is more formed because it's based on… constantly looking and making."
Submitted by Brett Baker on February 8, 2012
Click below to watch Per Kirkeby discuss his work while visiting his retrospective exhibition at BOZAR Brussels, on view through May 20, 2012.
In the film, Kirkeby discusses the experience of seeing his entire body of work represented in a single exhibition. He notes remarks that "it doesn't care too much if it's from the 60's or from last year - it's kind of the same thing... apparently there are certain structures, certain ways of organizing a painting that's there, that I'm born with as a painter."
Submitted by Brett Baker on December 20, 2011
Artist/teachers from Thomas Eakins to Robert Henri and Charles W. Hawthorne have played an important role in shaping generations of American artists. From the mid-century and into the post-war period Josef Albers had a great and lasting influence on American art. His famous color exercises, collected in the seminal text The Interaction of Color, were published in 1963 with the help of his students.
