Cheers,
Jonathan & Lorraine

Loie Fuller – Danse Serpentine

F: You were talking about a screen. Are these found screens?

CH: Its a fine mesh screen. They’re basically window screens. I’m creating a literal interference pattern by putting the screens over one another and that creates a moire pattern, an interference pattern. They’re two grids at a different angle and I’m pushing paint through it and modeling the paint in different ways to create different effects. It creates a different sort of materiality and surface and visual effect. It’s an interesting combination between a strong visual effect and a strong material effect which synthesizes things that have always been a part of my practice.

F: What is your process like? Are you layering these surfaces on top of each other and squeegee-ing it through?

CH: I use a palette knife and push it through. I’m not literally printing through that screen. I’m making some sort of decision about how I’m creating it. In this one, I used gesso as the first layer and made that pattern. Then I sprayed the paint on top of it to interact, knowing that the raw canvas with the gesso will push the screen. This one shows the process more evidently.

F: When you sprayed the canvas, was the gesso wet? Is that how you get that spackling effect?

CH: No, it was more of the way I sprayed it. I was at a distance. I wanted to create that shift from pink to the purple. I put a little direction on it to get a little bit of the directional spray thing.

F: In terms of the heavier pieces where it seems like your hand is more involved, I mean your hand is still very involved in the other pieces but you kind of let the material dictate a lot of what you’re doing.

CH: Yeah, its a similar process. It’s maybe not as evident as that one. This one is stripped down to its process, like this one hides it a little bit more, but it’s still, for me, about that interaction between the materiality and the image interacting and fusing together in some way. I think a big part of these paintings is treating them, treating the paintings as images as well as objects and how those objects react in space to a view who’s moving around them, who’s moving to them, and back. The viewing distance, I think, matters and affects the paintings.

F: Completely, but even photographing them because they are very flat and 2-dimensional and then this has such a 3-dimensional feel to it. It’s almost completely different.

CH: Yeah, which is the exciting part about playing around with some of these surfaces. They really do sort of oscillate between image, object and that sort of ambulatory experience of them changes, the image you perceive the image. It’s those kinds of general things that these paintings in particular are dealing with and in the more recent work, I started making shaped paintings for the first time. I just did these two this weekend.

F: Do you un-stretch the canvas and then stretch it back?

CH: Well, if I am going to do the staining effects, I’ll do something with the raw material. I’ll alter it in some way and then stretch it and then apply it

F: Along with the architecture, the square or rectangle, you kind of play off of that image.

CH: I try to create some sort of perceptual effect with either a perceptual effect of the rectangle itself or the way the lights are modeled and the way it interacts with the raw material and those kind of layers of paint.. This is one of the older pieces…this and that one over there, the smaller black one. This painting was sort of a spin off of this body of work that uses that kind of motif but these are really heavily masked off and I cut everything by hand. I do that with all the paintings actually. Anything thats masked, I don’t just tape off. I’ll mask out the whole surface and then cut everything. Draw everything out and then cut it away. It’s just how I’ve done things for awhile. These like this are simple to cut. Ones like this become tedious, and then that has a few layers of it.

F: But you like working on the raw canvas.

CH: Yeah, I guess thats a new thing too. In some ways, it’s like getting out of school and having less time to work. You have to make things more efficient that same way, and that for me became seeing what I can do. The older paintings I was making in grad school had like 20 layers of gesso. You couldn’t see the weave of the canvas. They were really a lot about surface and what I could do purely with the surface of the effects of painting. That stuff is still present. I just started it in a different way; The process begins with the raw materials, which I think is a fun way to explore it. I’m really interested in some of the staining things I’m doing, because it really is this fusion of image and object when the paint becomes part of the support. I’ve been playing with the stain effects and in different ways. This black painting is all staining to some extent too, it’s building up layers of stain.

F: It’s interesting because then you see the thickness. It literally becomes the volume of the painting and that plays into the materiality of it as well. Then you’re also playing with very thin layers.

CH: Yeah, that’s like black stain canvas. I’m playing with the framed edge and that being a way to treat the painting as an object even more so than showing a raw canvas, staining the sides, painting the sides, doing those things. I feel in a really general sense, my practice is moving more towards sculpture and maybe that’s where the shaped canvas are starting to happen. That’s so new, I don’t know how it’s going to play out. Those are experiments I did yesterday, so I still feel like I’m being pulled toward sculpture, if any direction, I can sort of alter things and play with perception of the square and the perception of the rectangle

You can find more of Collin Hatton’s work at www.williamcollinhatton.com

F: This one was here when I was at the open studio and this one’s new.

MJ: Well, these are in progress.

F: This one seems almost like there’s a human figure in it. I can’t not see that. With all of them, even if I don’t try to, I kind of see figurative things in them. This almost becomes a human figure in a seated position through that one move of the spray paint. Is that something you think about?

MJ: Yeah, I sort of finish them when there’s an implied figure and its usually sort of a very ancient prehistoric Greek Cycladic reference. I wanted to reference something prehistoric and from the beginning of human history to sort of connect with that primal part of art making. I think in terms of gestural painting, it roots them in another kind of impulse-the desire to find form in something and find form in chaos and to make it in this case, pretty literal.

F: Even the materiality plays into it as well. Its almost like the bigger brush and cave painting or even the idea that these things are weathered in a certain sense. The reason why I asked if they were kind of re-stretched was because it almost seems like you’ve carried them around the studio a bit. It definitely has that history of weathered feel and they’re all mixed media and its spray paint and oil paint and acrylic and all different things all in one and you’re also using sand paper too. That brings back that push and pull from the history of it as well.

MJ: Often, I think that they reference, not necessarily graffiti but a weathered wall which is like a cave painting in a way. Again where you start to find form and with the spray paint, I think as a gesture, it sort of connects to gestural painting in a way and to New York history. New York is sort of like the symbol of graffiti and AbEx. Its two positive gestures that are associated with New York and New York painting. I guess a painting is also a sign, and this one’s is of a woman that all ties into me.

F: Its interesting that you’re focusing on New York and this sort of AbEx feel because they almost remind me of the stripped down subway advertisements – these beautiful images and blips of moments of different scenery. That’s kind of how I view your work – as different blips and images combining together.

MJ: I definitely think about that in the process like a piece of the Berlin wall that came down or something that has a lot of time and they literally have a lot of time. It is part of the process.

F: How long do you work on a piece?

MJ: 3 or 4 months at least. In some cases, several years. They take a long time for me to see and I have to recognize the form myself and that takes a lot of time and a lot of layers.

F: How do you start a piece? In some ways, its all about reaction so you would need something to react to. Is it an accidental mark or something that starts that?

MJ: Yeah theres a lot of incident in the beginning. There is a lot of random pouring, scraping, sanding, false starts, not knowing what’s going to happen and sort of courting it.

F: There seems to be a lot of absorbency here too. Do you have it unprimed or do you have 1 or 2 coats and just let it absorb and let the canvas be a part of it.

MJ: Not all the parts are equally layered like this one. There’s not that much sanding and scraping. Other parts have been more worked through. This ‘green one’ that you saw at Storefront is really different than the other ones that have been sanded through and this one has been so many different things.

F: Do you remember the paintings that were before this one?

MJ: No. I probably have pictures somewhere but I doubt I’d recognize them.

F: How do you choose when you’re ready to make it a new painting or let it be and let it live?

MJ: It just never kind of felt right. There usually is a point when I try to put things away and forget about it and quit working on them. Sometimes I think I can be pretty obsessive when working a painting and it doesn’t help so I’ll work on something new. There is a point when I’m just over it whatever it was.

F: This one seems to be newest one.

MJ: Actually, it’s this [other] one but this one I was really determined to keep the softness of the stain. What went into it was, for instance, so much of the work are places that you can’t see.

F: Let’s see the new work.

MJ: In this one, I don’t know if any of this will end of staying. I’ll just have to keep going.

F: Do you feel that you have brighter colors in the beginning and make it darker?

MJ: Yeah, I want them to look sort of backlit and I use a lot of transparent colors on the top. I like them to be really luminous.

MJ: Finding a form might seem simple but it actually isn’t for me. Even though these could be those same Cycladic head, it’s not there so much there. I understand the process now and that, if anything, maybe it needs this. It has to go through a system of ownership. It’s an additive and subtractive process and I think this is still a little additive right now.

F: Do you ever get to a point where you know you’ve added too much and then do you push back?

MJ: Yeah, in a way, they’re almost paintings of sculpture and I do look at images of sculpture. I think that the negative or subtractive process is carving it out as well as building it up.

F: So the act of painting becomes this sort of sculpture carving which is interesting because I don’t think most painters would think of painting like that.

MJ: I think the impulse of that is that it happens really quickly.

F: To get back to your studio. How long have you been here?

MJ: I’ve been here at least 12 years. It could be even a little longer.

F: Obviously you must like your studio to be here for 12 years. How many studios did you go through before you settled down and found this place?

MJ: I’ve had a lot of different studios and all over the place but this one was great from the very beginning. The light, the view, and the thing I like so much about it is almost everything in here is usable. There’s no wasted space so it’s been great. My studio before this was a sub-basement that was adjacent to a parking lot. Literally the exhaust pipes would fill my place at 5 o’clock so I love this view. I was here before the Ohm building was built. Before this building was built. You see those skylights there? That used to be Annie Leibovitz‘s studio and there’s more changes to come.

You can see more of Mary Jones’ work at www.maryjonesstudio.com.

Clayton Schiff is an oil painter living in Bushwick, New York. He graduated from RISD’s painting department in 2009. His studio is located in the old Bruce High Quality Foundation space in Brooklyn. He most recently had a show of a group of paintings on paper at the Culture Room. In his interview, Clayton talks about his process in creating the images and his exploits in his studio.

F: To start off, tell me about what you’re working on.

CS: These paper things, they were probably all done within a couple of months of each other about a year ago. At the open studio, I probably got more responses to them than the other ones. Somehow in spite of them being thin and more collapsible, they seem to pose a bigger storage issue than the rest. This is what I did with it and then I ran out of space so I stopped doing it. All the paintings on canvas, just about, have been from 2012.

F: For a lot of them, it seems like they have this narrative. I can almost see this Mario videogame type landscape. They have this kind of world view aesthetic. This ‘maze’ that you’ve created has this specific vocabulary. Can you explain how you arrived at this landscape.

CS: Back in school, I started to view a physical correlation between the canvas itself and what was being depicted on it. I was depicting things that were inherently vertical like shelves or something of that sort. The more and more I viewed this illusionistic space, it, to me, seemed like pockets within them-like what would slide into shelves. I sort of wanted to figure out how to make something that would tell the viewer of receding space but at the same time, declare some kind of illusion to the canvas and still function as a canvas.

F: As kind of an object in a way?

CS: Yeah and that becomes less and less of a concern but probably becomes built into it. One of the challenges I have is to not make it function as a landscape but maybe a keep it a little top heavy or do something that keeps it flat so that the bottom is closer and the top is farther and to keep the entirety of the plateau functioning like the surface.

F: Yeah, so you want it to be this illusionistic space but at the same time, keep it as this flat realm.

CS: Yeah and I want it to be not too seductively illusionistic or not too … I didn’t want the space to fully trick the viewer into a projection of his or her inhabitance but sort of consciously, I have presented itself and to offer up amenities as part of the space.

F: Right and then you can break it down further into each object or negative space.

CS: One thing I thought about at the time which I haven’t thought about lately, is the idea of the vertical forms, the wall forms which would typically be the ones that don’t recede.

F: Right, the ones that stay flat and parallel…

CS: Yeah, they remain parallel to the canvas. Those being the ones where there is illusionism and the surface ones where they flatten.

F: I think the two most successful ones, in that sense, are the ‘blue one’ and this ‘red and green one’ because its almost, especially in the ‘blue one’ I see that ‘its a brush mark as a brush mark’ but then that shading with the darker green tone makes it illusionistic. It’s a brush mark but you couldn’t see it going into space without it.

CS: Yeah and with these I think you can separate those ingredients and that might be something I might want to do a little bit more of. The more I’ve tried to diversify them, the less that’s become the central focus.

F: Then it becomes a narrative of your scene whether that becomes the profile of a face or an anamorphic figure. In the same way, you have these brush marks that retain themselves as being brush marks but through the nature of the shape or the negative shape, it creates a kind of landscape or an intestinal tract or whatever you see in it. It’s also interesting how you use color. It seems like you use very specific color palettes in each of your paintings. Can you talk about that?

CS: That’s something I haven’t had too much of a good hold on. I think that this year, I’ve maybe gotten a little bit better at it probably because I’ve accumulated more paints. A lot of the time, its been a matter of a sort of accident and feeling indebted to this sort of faith that I have. In this one, I made the disgusting batch of mud and it came to look intentional because I added slight variations to it. But I’m basically trying to figure it out. As far as what I strive for with color, it’d be something that is fundamentally not naturalistic but that applies to things that one can relate to or that lends itself to a context that you won’t be overwhelmed by, something that makes for easy association but that still has a feeling of urgency.

F: It almost reminds me of a child’s drawing where you have green as the grass and blue as the sky but then you’re doing it and kind of twisting it. It seems like there’s a lot of a Guston influence especially with the paper ones. I think it creeps into the oil on canvas ones as well. It reminds me of his very figurative work and his AbEx work. Do you have an affinity towards Guston?

CS: I think perhaps an embarrassing sentiment towards him that I haven’t yet figured out a good way of masking or dealing with other affinities, but I do. I think a lot of it also might relate to cartoons in this codified way of dealing with form and this very minimal way to conjure something. I think the things like the hand and the certain kinds of wobbliness comes naturally but the indecision in all that is something that I like.

F: Right and there’s a hesitation there and that’s literally recorded onto the image.

CS: A lot of these to some extent, I’ve been thinking about them as trying to build an island to stand while wading in the water or something. It might be a little heavy handed but if my initial lines in my initial ways of establishing the form wind up being super tentative because they don’t yet exist and then after a certain point once there’s some kind of coverage, it becomes a matter of tweaking or reshuffling. For a long while, it’s a very tentative kind of venturing out.

You can see more of Clayton Schiff’s work at www.clayschiff.blogspot.com.

Traveling to rural Connecticut to see Ted Gahl’s studio, further and further out into the northeast landscape, I witness dilapidated factories scattered in between the hills of towns that have long been abandoned by thriving industry, and over time have gradually started to fade back into the surrounding nature. I realized through this emptiness what this place was about. It was an echo of its past, the furthest place from New York. A place to focus, a place to paint. This was exactly what Ted is here to do. I finally get to his space, which is in an old stocking factory adjacent to a river. We walk into his studio, where he is gearing up for a solo booth presentation with DODGE gallery at the Expo Art Fair in Chicago.

F: I like this ‘sailor’ one.

TG: Oh yeah, that’s a reef knot. Its like a really simple sailor knot and the idea was that it was also kind of in the shape of a sailboat.

F: You know what it reminds me of? It reminds me of the framed knots that you can buy at a gift shop.

TG: Oh yeah! Or like at a seafood restaurant. That’s kind of like the nautical equivalent to being in Texas and seeing wagon wheels on the wall at a barbecue place. That’s really funny.

F: Yeah. Its almost like that knot becomes a mark.

TG: Yeah and again, that’s a thing that no one probably will get. That’s okay, I guess. It’s more for myself.

F: I think its pretty clear with the context of the other ones.

TG: Yeah and that’s one that, you know when I show stuff like that, I like them to throw it off a little bit. Five of these (more traditional paintings) and one like that in a row of six.

F: So is it a constant reevaluation of “this is an image” and “no, its an object”

TG: It’s like a comma in a sentence. It’s a break. I like showing them all in clusters. I treat my smaller work a lot like the drawings I do on napkins or paper. I almost look at them as sketches more than I look at them like singular paintings. The ones I just did in California are a good example of that. You know, that’s like working for a week – Some are made at night and some are made in the morning. They’re all a bit different.

F: It seems like they’re the same idea executed differently. Some of the ideas pick up other ones.

TG: Definitely. I got a lot of sunglasses going on in there [painting]. In LA, they’re so obsessed with sunglasses and sun. Everyday it was so nice.

F: Did you paint the larges ones after or before?

TG: Before. I didn’t want to come back and totally rush so I did these three roughly before I left.

This one is called ‘Tuesday Ideas.” I went to a bunch of shows before I went to L.A. Basically all the drawings and the paintings are quick sketches of actual images in shows. This (pointing to sections of painting) was a show at Gavin Brown where there was a really great Carroll Dunham so this was the arm in the Carroll Dunham painting and the guy with the gun behind himself. These are all little details. They all become pretty abstract now but this is just a woman looking at a painting, and a woman looking at another woman’s hat in one of the galleries. They’re quick drawings. So this essentially, you’re looking at my Tuesday in the context of a fictional studio and here’s the easel. This is the painting on the easel, and this is the painter in the studio with the arm relaxing, looking at his painting with his fishbowl-a little Matisse reference. All these different things and this mirror, tools and stuff and the paint rag hanging off of the easel and the floor with paint spills all over it and the mouse hole, so… I’m sure some people look at it and they just see a bunch of shit, but that’s where it’s derived from, it’s not completely arbitrary.

F: It’s interesting, looking at an older painting at your house, which was so figurative, and then looking at the ones you were cutting apart at RISD where you peeled stuff off. Those were very abstract and now it seems like your work is somewhere in the middle, back to being entrenched in imagery, and at the same time, kind of hidden or subdued.

TG: Yeah I think what I’ve been trying to do in the last couple years is to find a balance within those two ideas. I think when you’re a young person painting there is always this pressure, whether brought on by peers, faculty, etc,. If you’re going to paint abstract, you can only do that. If you’re going to go figurative, you have to stick with that. I employ both modes in my work, and the scale tips one way more on some than others. It’s really fun to try to do and that’s what I’m going for. I also got to the point where doing this stuff, the abstract ones with the paper and stuff was getting too far away from actual painting. It got to be almost too much about placement and collaging, with an outcome more based on the material. From here on out I just want to make paintings. With the small ones, there’s definitely stuff going on where it goes off the path a little bit, but when it comes down to it, 90 percent of the work is just painting. Paint on canvas. That was a big thing for me the last couple of years, just to try to keep it bare bones and not go crazy with the materials.

F: Right, not leaning on the materials.

TG: Right, and when I showed you the back of that card (undergraduate work at Ted’s house) you had a really good point. It’s really funny that those were so different and figurative, but even then you could see how they were the basis for my current work, this collaged, drawing-based imagery becoming a painting. It was just a little bit more blatant, the image was clearer for people to read. Now you have to do more work when looking, and I like that idea. I want it to be more difficult to pick out what’s going on, because otherwise I might as well do screenprints, or make a logo or something.

F: The napkin ones: do you do sketches and then put them together?

TG: Yes, and you can see I literally do them in the shapes of a canvas. I’ll do a shape that’s a 48×72 inch shape, but basically done on a napkin. Sometimes four drawings will turn into a painting where they literally snap together in four pieces, like a window. Or, what I’ll do is go in and say “I really like this kind of chest shape, or this weird shirt thing, or this head silhouette.” Basically pick and choose. This painting (60 x 72 inch painting in progress) was based on drawings I did of a Bastille Day party I was at. I was wearing this shirt that had these pipes and cigars on if and kept looking at the shirt upside down. There where these patterns and leaves – and croissants in this bag. So now I have that for half of this painting, maybe I will keep it, maybe I won’t.

F: So with all these ideas from the napkins, do any paintings ever get made that depict one singular image?

TG: That happens in smaller work, but hasn’t happened yet with the larger paintings. I think it takes a long time to do a painting like that, kind of like Alex Katz does. I don’t feel like I’ve done enough yet to do that kind of painting. I admire that, but I can’t do that yet, I think I have to work up to it.

F: Do you play your VHS movies while you work?

TG: Yeah, that’s all I do! A lot of titles and little nuances in the movies I watch are put into the pieces. I used to listen to music, and still do, but I find that I’m tired of my iPod because I haven’t gotten any new music lately. So, I just put in a VHS. Obviously I’ve seen all these movies, but I love to listen to the dialogue. You can tell by my movies that I like dialogue. I could listen to the scenes in “Jackie Brown” all day.

image courtesy of artist
F: Did you ever paint in oil paint?

TG: Yeah, I took oil painting courses when I was at Pratt junior and senior year, and did a lot of still life paintings and stuff like that, but as far as making my own work, no I haven’t used a lot of oil. Mostly because of space issues and chemicals, but I’m getting pretty close to giving it another go.

F: You should, but its interesting the way you use acrylics it feels so much like oil.

TG: That’s what Seth (from Nudashank) was saying when he was here the other day. “This looks like oil, this one looks like oil.” I don’t work in an impasto style, but I do layer a lot of paint at times. You can see a chalkiness or tackiness from the layers, but there is not a lot of paint coming off the canvas, I keep it pretty flat.

F: How long does it usually take you to do one of these small paintings?

TG: I find it’s interesting to talk about how long work takes, because you make paintings too, and it’s a lot of fun when you’ll be messing around, and you have an idea and do it and it comes out just the way you want it to on the first try. Then there is other work that is cursed, and no matter what you do to it, it never works. You have to literally throw away the stretchers. No matter how many layers of gesso or how much cool shit you do to it with whatever, it just doesn’t work.

F: Sometimes for me I have to get acquainted with the canvas, break it in a little. But foryou it seems like, and maybe because the repetition of some sizes, you can attack it and get what you want out of it.

TG: I think it’s always hard. Regardless of content, I think one of the hardest things for artist or painters or whatever, is to realize what you should be doing. Realizing what your strengths are. What you’re best at, or what you enjoy, or a combination of both. At the end of the day, all my work is based on these drawings on napkins. Like I was saying before, you have to try and search for that balance. This is what I always do, what I have always done and probably what I will keep doing, so why not pay attention to it?

You can see more of Ted Gahl’s work at www.tedgahl.blogspot.com.

For those of you living in New York, there is a very exciting community-based initiative called GO taking place today and tomorrow from 11 AM – 7 PM. Artists working in all areas of Brooklyn will open their studio doors to the public. You can then vote for your favorite artist and the winning artist gets featured in a show at the Brooklyn Museum. Register as a voter and you can help determine who gets featured in a show!

Click below to see how GO works.

Here are some you should check out.
Chris Willcox
Corinne Schulze
Daniel Georges
Fowler Arts Collective
Jonathan Chapline
Sanders-Estep Collaborative
Sterling Wells

Here are some preview photos of the show along with some outtakes from our previous vist with Alex in Montauk, New York.

Image courtesy of Greg O’Malley

T – As you can see, I’ve been working on flat walls for the time being.

F- Why is that? Are you taking a break from your tents?

T- Yeah, I guess I have been going where the work has taken me. I’ve been having a lot of fun on the flat canvases and a speed has started to reenter my work as being an important thing. Trust me, after you spend a long time trying to put together those things [the tents], a flat canvas to me is like a piece of sketch book paper. Plus, the tents, they’re not going away. I still consider them the meat of the work that I show people but I am a little…they haven’t changed in awhile, and I don’t consider them different than the flat paintings and I always work on both usually. I never stop working on the flat paintings. I tend to work round robin. I work on everything at once.

Image courtesy of Tatiana Berg

T: Every six months I like to repaint the floor.

F- Does it help make the pieces more of a piece that way?

T- Yeah, The floor is hilarious and I think every once and a while I do it. You’re able to see stuff better and when I invite other people into the studio, especially for the floor pieces, they’re against the floor and the wall, thats really important. You know how it is, after awhile your walls get really dirty and you clean them and its like “oh, I can actually see it for the first time” and so I think that that is a healthy thing. It’s funny because when I go up to other peoples’ studios I really like to see their junk and I like how their studio actually looks like they’re working, but I dont generally like to show my junk to other people. Or when I’m having an open studio I like to really clean it out and make it a presentation and I’ve had some people ask “Why are you trying to turn your studio into a gallery? That’s not what this is.” Which is making me – I dont know – Maybe Im being un-generous in the way I like to see other peoples studios but at the end of the day these paintings are so casual I almost feel they need to be grounded in something and I like to have some control over how they are viewed.

T: I was having a studio visit with someone the other day and we got to talking – he was also a painter – and we were talking about stopping a painting and knowing when it’s finished, a problem that absolutely everybody has. Especially with these guys [the paintings], some of them get really really really over-worked and that’s great – which I enjoy — and some of them can stop in two moves, like that green one over there. That whole notion of leaving openness in paintings is something I could go on and on about. How do you know when to stop? I am a chronic over do-er and I feel that if I don’t have a lot of blank canvases waiting, I’ll just ruin it cause I just want to keep going. So if I’m making this painting and I’m like if I just – say symmetrically I want to put a big green square on the left. I want to do it, but it will probably ruin it. So then I go and put that big green square on another canvas, “Oh whew I feel better!” Its like, “Uhhh redirect it!”

We were making these jokes. This is like an over-used metaphor, and I feel like I’ve used it more than once, so I don’t want to be too… It’s like painting with the pull-out method. That’s what I think about the desire to like – I like open painting more and I find it infinitely harder to do. I can do a bunch of uptight over-worked paintings like nobody’s business, but the ‘open-casual-abandoned-before-it’s-done’ type of painting I have found to be a million times harder to make. But that’s just me, and I enjoy that challenge.

Image courtesy of Tatiana Berg

F- Do you think it’s intuitive for you to overwork your paintings and do you knowingly pull back to prevent that?

When you think is it kind of intuition now where you know your over working it you still want to keep on going you just put it away or not look at it for awhile?

T- Yeah, intuition is pretty much the only way to describe it. Turning my back on [a piece] to work on another canvas is something, but I think I just spend a lot of time looking at them for long periods of time. Sometimes I like to take them out of the room with me and look at them in natural light. And I have no problem destroying them, which has been a big help. When you’re making paintings like this I think it’s really important not to be precious about it. If it’s not working, cover the entire surface and move on. I only started to recently paint in acrylic, as much as I love love love oil paint, but that speed and the ability to easily wash every thing away has been a godsend.

Sarah Faux and I have talked about this sort of thing– I feel that my favorite paintings, or the most successful ones, are ones where a problem is slowly developed but the solution arrived at suddenly. You said something about being able to see everything that’s going on. That’s my favorite thing – like when you’re making a painting, you’re setting up some kind of problem to solve and if the problem is too easy, you end up with a boring painting. If there’s no struggle, no resistance, it’s like you’re pushing into mud. And if the problem is too hard, you fail and it gets away from you. The best ones are the ones where there’s still some element of the original problem visible and by that I mean, basically you’re able to see every decision that went into it.

In some, not everything has been obscured and then I feel … I’ve been asking myself for a long time. Why do I naturally… why am I drawn to this type of work? In other people’s paintings. And why is it that it’s this quality that I like the most in my own work? I have this feeling that it has something to do with the fact that when you look at a painting like that, you are solving the painting along with the painter in your head, and that’s so incredibly satisfying. That the only place the painting exists is in your mind, so you have a natural tendency to complete it if there is something incomplete, you want to fix it. It’s like how in contemporary tastes, people tend to prefer Renaissance sketches over really tightly finished Renaissance paintings – not to say that one is better than the other, but I feel like there’s a reason why in contemporary tastes, I would bet that more people are into that.

F: Or like if you go to see Leonardo’s sculptures, his unfinished sculptures are fantastic.

T: Oh my god yes! The dying slaves. I think those are his best ones.

F: Of course and to see that thought processes kind of a logic or vocabulary through that where you hide it – or even getting back to your work when your doing more than 5 moves for that painting then your hiding other pieces/moves. where is like 2 or 3 moves you can still kind of break through it and see these kind of like almost like half facades if you will that you can look through which is really fantastic, now that one ["Halloween Candy," 2012] which is insane! That one seems to be interesting because in some ways you have more than 5 moves there but your still able to see everything or most of everything that’s going on.

Image courtesy of Tatiana Berg

T: As layered as it gets there is still little windows into space, and maybe that’s part of why it works. I don’t know why a painting — like that one with the horizontal sagging black lines — of all these paintings that is the one that has gone through the most iterations. It’s been a lot of different paintings. There may be trace elements of it but in the end it’s like, the last thing you see is a pretty simple painting. It’s not just two moves, but the last thing I did was two moves. I put that big sort of brown glaze which sort of makes it a night-time painting, and then the horizontal spray lines, and then rested the canvas at a tilt so the bottom will seep through the top, and that was satisfying enough. I think it’s a really moody painting.

F: Oh completely. A lot more than the other ones definitely. It’s like “What happened that day” right?

T: [chuckles] I don’t know, I was having a good time making it. I say this a lot but I feel like I’m really a seasonal painter. My palette really changes. Winter, it gets really dark — it may be a little cliche but it definitely has been true for me.

F: When do you work usually, Do you work during the day or at night?

T: I’m not that much of a morning person so, I might get in here at 11. “It’s morning!” I usually work in the afternoon and evening. I’m not going to lie, I haven’t been in here very much in the past month or so. Even though it was a while ago, I still feel that the whole grad school application thing was so disruptive. I’ve been having trouble sort of making my work. For a while there I was having fun doing the flat paintings again, but right now I’m thinking about all this other stuff like moving so I can’t paint as much as I would like.

F: Do you think that’s why you are doing the flat paintings too?

T: Yes, it’s a bit less uh, I’m sure that it also doesn’t hurt the fact that it will be a little easier for me to pack up. But I really did just feel that taking a break from building those things [the tents], plus I was worried that i was repeating myself with them, that I wasn’t saying anything new. I was worried that the ones that I was making, anyone that was already familiar with my work and saw it wouldn’t get anything new out of it. I was just looking for more. I feel like with the tents there is a lot of things you can do. You can complicate the structure, you can complicate the surface, and right now I’m thinking about surfaces.

In a way with these paintings, they strive to have everything visible, so they look like they happen all at once. I think about the tents in a similar way. All the materials remain visible and so nothing is obscured, therefore it’s pretty anti-illusion. That’s one way I think about them. They will never be made out of immaculate steel or perfect edges. If they are painted on canvas you’re going to see the staples.

F: Or the gesso drips?

T: I have a lot of debate about the sides. Doesn’t everybody? Sometimes I go through the trouble of taping them and making them really clean. Right now I feel that it’s a compromise. I don’t want them to be too dirty and I don’t want them to be too clean either.

F: Right, a happy medium.

T: Maybe gesso drips, but no other drips. It doesn’t always work sometimes I get a little spray-paint on the side. When I have a thin painting I like it when the gesso has a meatiness. It makes it more object-y in a way that a thin painting needs.

F: Right, like these three right here need that materiality. It’s not lacking in that, but comparably it’s not.

T: The work on the floor is probably not done. So they might end up in a totally different place then where they currently are. They have gone through a couple different phases. Every once and awhile in a canvas work I’ve done its over so many times it’s just time to scrap it.

You can find more of Tatiana Bergs’s work at tatianaberg.com

F: Do you mainly work in oils?

APJ: Now I just do oil paint. I make drawings with charcoal and pastel but when I use paint, it’s just oil.

F: I think its really effective. From the sketches, do you create the painting or do they come together by themselves like painting as painting?

APJ: I’ll make sketches in my sketchbook just to figure out ideas of things I should paint. I’ll make drawings from that just kind of working out ideas further than the sketches. From that, I actually…I make models. I have to paint from life so I make models and then I paint them. The beds series – that started out…I had ideas of what I meant to do and I had ideas of how that image could be created. Each painting was a different way that I felt like that could happen and I built a model at first to see how light would hit it if it were made a certain way. Then I kind of went away from the model because I was taken with how flat I could make it. It was this funny thing where it turned into an abstract painting. Then I found myself hitting a wall cause I felt like I wasn’t painting anything anymore so then I made a big model and I painted from that. I mainly do it [paint] from models.

F: For all of them? Even the food ones?

APJ: Yeah, the food ones specifically, I have to make myself because there’s information there that I couldn’t make up.

F: You were talking about the bed series. Was that the first time you made the models?

APJ: Yeah, I think the first one that I did isn’t here. It’s the one that’s on the postcard. The first food one was the cheeseburger and I made a very small model for that. I cut squares out of a piece of paper to see how light would hit it when you fold it up from the right hand side. That was the first one and then the other ones came and then the final one is that one with the blue and the yellow stripes. That’s the one that’s more directly from a set up.

F: Are they all from the same model? Are they just paper and objects that you find or…?

APJ: The food paintings are all made by cutting and folding paper. Thats the only time I use acrylic anymore is when I paint the models themselves. I’ll paint like, to make a pepperoni or a tomato or a chicken nugget, I’ll cut a circle out of stonehenge or some heavy printmaking paper and its larger than I want the actual chicken nugget or pickle or whatever it is to be. I’ll cut fringe, like lines and fold those over so it kind of stands up but before I do that, I’ll mix a color that I want it to be in acrylic and take my brush and paint them all individually. For the pepperoni, for example, I don’t have to make this cadmium red with alizarin crimson in it because I just paint it all cadmium red light. I light it and the rest of it happens and that’s stuff that I need to make a painting.

F: I guess when you’re with the bed one for so long, you change up the scene in a sense by changing the sheets or whatever you do to it. You’re working on the painting but you’re also working on the model as well.

APJ: Yeah, you got to change your sheets. Yeah, it’s like however many ideas I have of making that one thing. They’re all kind of different based on different ideas. That one’s called Nightlight. That one, I was thinking about this flatness again, but there’s a light source right here in the painting and I broke it up into those radiating circles but then it becomes flat. It becomes some sort of strange color wheel. Its like in a fight with itself because it wants to be flat but those circles don’t meet up so you see these layers of flat plains. If you look at it pictorially, its kind of what I was working with and that’s kind of where the beds were going. If you look at anything from above, you flatten it out so its kind of what happened with those paintings.

F: The bed is like this living situation and the burger is sustenance. Is this almost a documentation of your life in a certain sense? Like everyday things?

APJ: Right and yeah definitely. My thesis show was called ‘Eat and Sleep’. For awhile its all I could do. That’s when I say to myself, “Oh, the day is done. The day is beginning. Oh, I have to eat now.” Its just kind of those fundamental things that you don’t really pay a lot of attention to but I feel like they kind of dictate the way we function. Its also, I was thinking about them as, sometimes I think of them as rewards. I’m not making a painting of a slice of pizza, I’m painting a model I made of a slice of pizza. The same thing with my bed. I’m not painting my bed, I’m painting a model I made of my bed. So, its like never there and its also, its always the idea of what everything is. I kind of like playing with that more than being literal because I like the idea of looking at this and being like, “Wow, that’s a really fucked up way to see a hamburger.” But its because I’m looking at a hamburger but I like that kind of play with perception.

F: You’re like looking for these different layers then the idea of a hamburger or a piece of paper through a painting.

APJ: Right. I also like how absurd that is.

F: Right. You have to work so hard to get to a hamburger but it’s just a hamburger.

APJ: I think that’s funny.

F: So the small ones…are they studies? I noticed the green texture one showing up in that painting over there.

APJ: Those ones were kind of the last ones that I was doing. They’re ways for me to carry on the ideas that I had while I was making the larger paintings and you kind of see them more so. The ideas that I had weren’t dead to me yet. They’re still stuff that I need to resolve. When I was doing that painting with the clothes, I made that big green rug with that wood floor and I was like, “this could be a painting” and I really liked how that looked but I wanted to make it the painting that it was supposed to be. At the same time, I didn’t forget about the painting that it used to be so I wanted to do that again in a different way. It might happen again. These motifs, these sleep motifs like symbol objects, like that bed, it was always a reoccurring thing. I had many ideas about what anything could be. It could’ve been one painting and I could’ve just worked on one painting for 6 months. I could’ve worked on a painting for 2 years but I have so many ideas when I’m painting, I just – as soon as I see that, I’m just, “Oh, I should just stretch another canvas.” I usually have a few going at the same time. When I was thinking about the light happening, it gave me another idea.

F: So painting is kind of like your ability to work through that.

APJ: Yeah, it’s like putting up a thing of canvas as a necessary thing so I can lend another thing from it. The ideas just keep coming as I’m working – which is a good thing. Its like one thing leads to the next. Not always but sometimes. I made this painting called “Weave” and it was a painting of the weave of a canvas like if you zoomed in and I thought that was what painting was – just layers upon layers and just assembled in a certain order. That started happening and then I thought it was too much surface and there wasn’t anything to the painting but the surface. In a lot of ways, that’s all that painting is but I like there to be something there – some upheaval, and for there to be some kind of decision made. That’s why I got into these paintings. That has been reworked several times and stretched on two different stretchers. They always come out of some kind of struggle and I like that in a painting. I like that I can see the work and I like how the painting ends up being the result of something that went on and not just something that was just executed. That’s when I thought I was backing myself up in a corner when I was painting some of the beds, cause I wasn’t painting anything and that happened to me a lot before this body of work. I feel like this [the models] opened that all up for me. I can just make whatever I wanted to paint. I like that. I like that everything comes out of my hand too. I’m not painting a real thing. I’m painting a thing that I made and painting my thing. It’s like making my own world.

F: In terms of the space, has that changed the way you work? Can you talk about your studio and how you work in it?

APJ: Before here, I was in a space that was much bigger. It was like a warehouse space. As soon as I got there, I had enough space to make a huge painting – not just a big wall but enough space to look back. So I went into my studio and stretched this huge canvas. It was like the size of half of this [current studio] wall. I was making paintings like that. When I moved here, I started to think about scaling down and really honing in on the craft that I was doing – starting to pay attention to mixing color, starting to pay attention to what I was doing with the space and that led me to making the models too. I also have a door now. Before it was just open space. So a lot of people would come in and talk. I would have critiques in school and I just wasn’t finished with work. I feel that that could really screw you up really bad. It takes me a while to make a painting. I need the space. I need the privacy. I like this place. I like feeling like I can spill a bunch of paint on the floor and not worry about it. I have an easel. I like to paint on an easel. I like to paint on the wall. I like to just have a bunch of stuff everywhere. If I feel like making the cheeseburger today then I can do that and its already set up and ready to go. I don’t have to put everything away and put back up. No one else is going to come here and use it so I don’t have to worry about it. This is my place. Normally I’ll have stations. I’ll have a station where I’ll build all the models and a table where I have all my paper and acrylic paint. I have my oil station with my glass palette and all my paint is organized so I know where everything is. I’ll have a drawing station where I keep all my drawings. There’s a definite organization thing that needs to happen so I know where things are and I can do whatever I want that day.

You can find more of Anthony Palocci Jr’s work at www.anthonypaloccijr.com