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."