Link to Post:
http://paintingperceptions.com/interiors/painting-panoramas-interview-with-matthew-lopas
Larry Groff interviews Matthew Lopas about his panoramic paintings on the occasion of an exhibition of his work at Narthex Gallery at Saint Peter’s Church, New York, on view from May 17 - June 19, 2013.
Asked about painting panoramic views Lopas answers: "The conventional viewfinder produces wonderful compositions, but it is always at a distance from the viewer. I find its frame limiting and alienating. In fact, our field of vision is much wider than the perspectival conventions originating in the Renaissance. My images are truer to the actual experience of what it is like to be in the world rather than to look at the world. A radically expanded field of view enables a profound intimacy with the real act of looking and creates an unmediated gaze of empathic seeing."
Link to Post:
http://www.aubreylevinthal.blogspot.com/2013/04/sunday-pick-eleanor-ray.html
Aubrey Levinthal conducts a short interview with painter Eleanor Ray. Ray's work is currently on view in the exhibition dooroomwindow at Steven Harvey Fine Art Projects, New York, through May 26, 2013. The exhibition features the work of Jane Dickson, Bill Rice, Kurt Knobelsdorf, Gideon Bok, Eleanor Ray and Stephanie Pierce.
Ray comments: "Painting a familiar place becomes easier for me when it appears unfamiliar, usually because I am seeing something more basic -- its abstract qualities -- rather than my particular associations with the place. I find that I can see places more clearly when I'm a bit removed from them -- if I'm returning after a long absence, for example, or if I'm simply seeing the place in a new kind of weather, out of the corner of my eye, or through a window. I often become more interested in painting the places I've lived after moving away from them."
Link to Post:
http://burnaway.org/2013/04/an-ideal-rhythm-studio-visit-with-andy-cherewick/
Rusty Wallace interviews painter Andy Cherewick.
Cherewick discusses his work and the daily practice of painting. He remarks: "The reality is you have to get accustomed to the fear of going into the unknown. You go into the unknown on purpose. If you’re sincere about wanting to do something vital and meaningful, you have to take that step. Fear is always going to be there... When you get to a place where you’re presenting your work and you’re looking at the work individually, are these guys doing something together? Are there little things going on inside them? What’s their relationship? Do they have enough to survive on their own when they get split up, sent to different places? Can each one transmit the story of whatever it is you’re telling in some way, shape, or form? Are you making sure each one of your works is doing that? For me, that’s the hardest thing to see and control and understand. And that is what is happening to your work versus what is happening in the world with your work."
Link to Post:
http://danielgalas.blogspot.com/2013/04/aubrey-levinthal-studio-visit.html
Daniel Galas visits the studio of painter Aubrey Levinthal.
Galas writes that Levinthal "varies brushwork, prefers pastel colors, and is not afraid to boldly interpret in subject. Aubrey primarily works from life but doesn't hesitate to alter the composition in any imaginative manner she finds fit. Still life is her subject of choice... mainly cups, tabletops, and food. I love her compositions, the confident loose brushwork, her focus on soft light and atmosphere, the melting of representation into abstraction, and her hints of naive/primitive articulation of form."
Link to Post:
http://www.gorkysgranddaughter.com/2013/04/catherine-murphy-at-peter-freeman-inc.html
Christopher Joy and Zachary Keeting talk with Catherine Murphy about the work in her exhibition Catherine Murphy: Recent Work at Peter Freeman, Inc., New York, on view through April 27, 2013.
Murphy discusses her process and how she came to care "about the whole surface." She explains: "It's a kind of way of seeing that I linger, I linger, I linger, I linger, so that makes… a flat painting. If you don't decide you're going to focus your attention in one place, you're going to end up making a painting that's flat." She continues: "So I think my paintings are flat… even though there's this detail, there's an equal detail throughout the whole painting. That's always what interested me, even when I was a very young painter… I decided if I was going to talk about paintings in which you were seeing reality… talk about the act of observation, I had to get closer to how I observed rather than just use as a model how everyone else observed. In so doing I realized that there's two things, there's what I'm looking at and there's this rectangle and they have to come into harmony…"
Link to Post:
http://hyperallergic.com/67886/catherine-murphys-challenge/
John Yau blogs about the work of Catherine Murphy, on view at Peter Freeman, Inc., New York thorugh April 27, 2013.
Yau writes: "Murphy doesn’t generalize, doesn’t develop shorthand for her subjects, doesn’t use paint in any way that announces painterliness or style. Rather, she does something far more difficult and demanding — she remains devoted to her subject, however plain and ordinary. And if the subject requires that Murphy paint layers of flesh-colored tissue paper or flakes of falling snow seen through a window on a windy night, then she will take up the challenge. Think of all the artists who become content to produce examples of their brand with just the right little twist. There is none of that in this exhibition. Every painting and drawing is distinct, no variations."
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://hyperallergic.com/66980/single-point-perspective-the-future-of-henri-matisse/
Thomas Micchelli blogs about Matisse's 1948 painting Interior with Egyptian Curtain (Phillips Collection) currently on view in the exhibition Matisse: In Search of True Painting at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, on view through March 17, 2013.
Micchelli writes: "Matisse has painted not one picture but three abutted together: the window, the curtain and the still life. While each competes for your attention in its own dazzling way — the window in an explosion of short strokes, the curtain with an interlocking pattern of abstracted shapes, and the still life with a simple but blazing interaction of yellow, pink, black and white — to the postmodern eye the combination of components seem to betray a loss of faith in the ability of a single image to express the fullness of an artist’s vision." Micchelli continues, noting that "the jangling, jazzy profusion of images deny the painting a conventional center of interest. The images, however, do not direct the eye to all four quadrants of the canvas, as Matisse does in his other interiors; instead they compact a heightened level of interest in three discreet sections. To again take the work from a postmodern perspective, Matisse’s “Interior with an Egyptian Curtain” can be viewed as more overt in its deconstruction of pictorial integrity than something like Willem de Kooning’s black-and-white 'Painting,' which was done the same year."
Link to Post:
http://newamericanpaintings.wordpress.com/2013/01/22/in-the-studio-pairings-with-eric-elliott/
Amanda Manitach visits the studio of painter Eric Elliott whose exhibition Pairings is on view at James Harris Gallery, Seattle through February 16, 2013.
Manitach writes that in Elliott's work paint is "slowly and painstakingly built up in daubs, nearly curls off the canvas like calcified petals, resembling the flora with which he is obsessed. (His botanical illustrations fill notebooks scattered around his studio; dried bouquets languish in vases.) Elliott’s fascination with rendering the representational abstract is consistently apparent in his work: the subject of his paintings is sometimes legible, sometimes it spastically dissolves. Pairings takes this study of abstraction to a dialogic place. As per the title, Pairings displays paintings side-by-side as diptychs and triptychs, situating identical or related subjects next to one another. Yet each is executed with different approaches to material and mark making that evolve as part of the ongoing painting process"
Link to Post:
http://studiocritical.blogspot.com/2013/01/jen-hitchings.html
Valerie Brennan interviews painter Jen Hitchings about her work.
Hitchings comments: "I paint from photographs, usually of a group of people at a party or some kind of celebration. They're always of very sporadic and candid moments. I'll usually draw from the photograph first, and then make the painting from the drawing. The first moments on the canvas are always the most terrifying for me. I'll sometimes paint an irrelevant landscape, or use a palette inspired by some image in my studio to start. Once the canvas is covered with paint, I'll start painting from the drawing. A lot of things in the original photograph make it into the painting, proportions are often accurate, but during the process of painting many objects/figures grow and become attached to one another."
