Karla Wozniak interviews painter Mike Cloud about his work.
Asked about "painting as an expanded, flexible discipline that has the power to absorb other media," Cloud responds: "Painting is the contemplation of a skin, a painted film. Whether a painting is on a cave wall, canvas or wood, you can always conceptually separate a painting from its support. Wall space is sacred; it is the space of windows, doors, mirrors, and other kinds of portals. Sculptures are different; they have to share a space with living things, as does architecture. A chair could be either mundane or a work of art, so could a building. But all paintings are contrivances. They are all set apart… There is a point at which you simply aren’t making a painting, but something else. Part of the skill of a painter is in proposing those boundaries. This comes from experience. You have to paint for a long time to understand it."