Happy New Year!

2014 was an introspective year at #FFFFFF Walls. We thought about what kind of blog we wanted to be and what information we want to bring to you. After experimenting with a few things, we felt our sole focus should be spent on documenting artist’s studios and their work at the time – the reason why we wanted to start this blog. Going into 2015, we plan to continue to go on studio visits and interview artists. Thank you for reading and supporting. We couldn’t have done it without you!

Cheers,
Lorraine & Jonathan

2014 Studio Visits
Michael Dotson
Zuriel Waters
Stephen Truax
Cooper Holoweski
Alexandra Phillips
Shara Hughes
Austin Eddy

Walking into Austin Eddy’s studio, you get the impression that he is constantly producing. There are stacks and stacks of drawings, piles of in progress and completed paintings on canvas and sculptures lying neatly in piles in all areas of his small studio space. Even though his studio is a relatively new one since his move from Atlanta, it is evident that there was no time wasted in making work and there is a general sense of energy and movement in the studio.

Austin Eddy’s work is composed of different assemblages from old paintings and drawings that he reconfigures into a new piece. The way in which he works transcends beyond just painting into drawing and sculpture. The same sensibility in how he approaches his bleached and adhered scraps of paper and canvas paintings is reflected in 3D through his metal and ceramic sculpture pieces.

During our studio visit with Austin, we got to talk to him about his day to day and how his work in different mediums inform each other.

F: Can you start with describing your process?

AE: I ride the train a fair bit, and on the train if its not the L first thing in the morning I like to get a seat. I draw a lot on the train and fill up note books with lots of thumbnail sketches of shapes and figures and ideas for paintings and sculptures. Eventually I go to the studio and bring those note books with me, somedays I make sculptures and refer to the shapes in the books. Other days I make lots of drawings using scraps from the paintings or just drawing or taking the sketches and using those as the drawings. gluing them down, finding lots of ones that are similar and combining them. Most of the time I make paintings, sometimes I look back at the sketches and the other drawings and use those and starting points for the paintings and other times i just start with no end goal. I can’t really tell which I like better, since somedays it’s hard to get started with out the sketches and drawings other days they feel too much like a crutch. Once the ball is rolling regardless of the medium its all very intuitive.

F: You work a lot on raw canvas and using different materials to define color and texture through additive and subtractive processes. Can you talk about that?

AE: I do work on raw canvas. It’s very unforgiving, there is often no going back. I like that about it, it creates an environment for creative problem solving.

I also do use a lot of materials to provide colors and textures. I let things be what they are and am not trying to hide the materials, but make them work together. Recently I started working with bleach which is one of the few ways I have figured out how to start and work with reductive surfaces since the process is so additive.

F: We’ve noticed that your work is mostly monochromatic but there are some pieces that have specific uses of color. Do you lean on the materials in your painting in terms of color direction?

AE: Often the colors are determined by the materials. Pinks from pencil erasers, yellows from wood glue or the reaction of gel medium and news print a whole range of colors from various linens and papers and how they change with the gel medium or bleach, whites from bleach, blacks from charcoal, grays from charcoal dust residue in the gel medium. I will sometimes use white paint, and I often mix blacks to be sprayed.

F: Does the different processes affect the color such as the process of gluing paper to the surface? Over time do you anticipate this and repeat certain found processes?

AE: Yes, most of the time the process affect the coloration of things. Before when I was making the work a lot of the yellowing happened accidentally, but now I am consciously looking for those mistakes to reference color and time.

F: There are several pieces with simplified bird shapes, abstracted plants, and figurative shapes. How do you land on the imagery you use in your work?

AE: The simplified shapes are usually drawn from my life. Often autobiographical or referential to a personal felling or situation. Sometimes though I like a shape and I work through it over and over again, looking for some sort of understanding.

F: What role does figuration play in your work? Is it a launching point or does it evolve into these different subjects?

AE: I have always wanted to be a wild abstract painter like Motherwell, or DeKooning or something like that, but I could never do it. I have a hard time letting go of something solid right now. I am in this weird limbo between wanting to represent a figure while also trying to let go and push the figure into obscurity. But at the heart of it all, the figure is ever present and always the armature for how the painting is constructed. The figure is always the launching point to some degree, but there is always a decision being made about wether or not to tell a story or just make the shape in the most interesting way possible.

F: Before you had a live-work space but now you have a strictly work studio. How has changing studios changed the way you work?

AE: I had a live work situation for a few months when I was living in Atlanta sharing the studio / apartment with my Girlfriend Shara Hughes. Before then, and during, I had a studio in the Brooklyn Navy Yard. So for those few months when I was not living in BK and walking for an hour each way the live / work was kinda nice. It was also a little bit of a drag. Living in the studio makes it harder to turn off. I felt at times when I was living where I worked the work was never done (it never is, but..), like I couldn’t wash my hands and walk away and try to forget about it. On the other hand no commute and constant immersion made it so starting work was less of a process, no transition from studio time to home time to commute time or anything like that. But it never really changed how I worked, It just affected the amount of time I did work.

F: What is a typical studio day like?

AE: A Typical studio day… usually involves waking up getting it together enough to go over there. It’s close now, so its easier, but once i get there i putz around for awhile, sweeping, wiping things down, un-stretching the paintings i made the day before, re-stretching blank ones, once things are in order and clean again i like to try and go for a run, I’m not in the best shape, but i do it and when i get back i drink some water and then i jump into it. What i work on sort of is just a feeling, a lot of gut decisions are made and i work. I spend the whole time there, i don’t leave once i go in, and i don’t have any chairs so i don’t sit down. continually moving helps me keep my brain from slowing down i guess. So I work usually till i burn out and cant make any more good decisions, and then i sweep and wipe things down and throw away dirt rags and paper towels scraps from the paintings etc. take the trash out feeling frustrated and knowing i am going to go back tomorrow and fight the good fight another day.

F: How long does it take to produce a painting?

AE: It really depends on the day or the week or the month. When I am going to work a lot at my day job, I get less done. The paintings take longer to make with less time spent working on them. But usually I try and spend 8-10 hours working in the studio. On those days sometimes i can manage to finish a painting in a sitting. But most of the time the works takes a few days to feel resolved. I feel like I have slowed down and am taking more time with the paintings. Now that there fewer elements in them, I spend a lot more time considering how things lie.

F: In terms of your drawings and sculptures, do you see them as separate practices or do they all influence each other?

AE: They are all one practice i think, they are all made with a similar sensibility. I think a lot of it is trial and error especially when it comes to the sculptures, I am not a sculptor, I am a painter making sculptures, so there is way less pressure and that feels freeing to me. I try and bring that mentality to the other works, always try to use new tools materials marks etc. to make the paintings and drawings. I’d like to think I take that from the sculptures. As far as the paintings go, I am working on making paintings with out paint so there is a far closer relationship with the drawing. Mostly similar in materials and process used to make them, but not so much in scale or anything like that. But that could be subject to change. It all kind of is right now, really feels like a period of fluctuation.

You can see more of Austin’s work at austineddy.blogspot.com

We had been following Shara Hughes’ work for quite some time but had never seen her paintings in person nor met the artist herself. It was by chance that we ventured out for Greenpoint Open Studios and walked into her shared studio space where we instantly recognized her work. During our studio visit, we talked a lot about her paintings and her drawing practice and what it was like to move studios from Atlanta to Brooklyn.

Shara Hughes’ work draws you in to look longer and investigate deeper on what is going on in each painting. Each piece is loaded with layers of colorful combinations of paint and a variety of marks making up the abstract imagery of figures, portraits, and objects which are all loosely based on Hughes’ life. What is also interesting to see in conjunction with Hughes’ paintings, are her stacks of crayon drawings which feel very much “finished” and complete in their own way. Hughes uses her drawings on paper to make “formal decisions” in a more immediate and less precious way and to inform her as she paints. Shara Hughes is a RISD graduate who has also gone to various artist residencies including Skowhegan. She is currently living and working in Brooklyn. Her work has been exhibited in MOCA GA as well as exhibitions internationally.

F: How do you come up with the imagery? Can you walk us through your process?

SH: The imagery is all based on what is happening in my life, but I never know where it’s going to go when I start. I start very abstractly with some kind of wash background and begin to pull out shapes formally. The painting begins to take a life of it’s own and eventually some kind of story comes out of where it’s going and pulls it down to a solid idea. This may not happen until the middle or end of the painting. Some times I’ll have a title in mind when I start the painting and it builds around that idea, but most of the time that changes too. Working abstractly until the painting is kind of ready to take on a life is a way for the work to be more open and evolve organically as opposed to some idea I just come up with and then execute.

F: How long does each image take to build up? Do you ever revisit a painting once it’s “completed”?

SH: If I work on a painting for a week and have enough time in my studio to stay in there all day, an image rarely comes up immediately. It usually takes a day or two of me flip flopping on how much ‘fun’ I’m having when I ‘don’t care’ about where the work is going and how terrible I think it’s going. The extremes of those two thoughts are pretty frequent until I’m in a gray zone of something I can work with.

SH: I have revisited a painting once or twice after it was completed and it was kind of a disaster. If it doesn’t really work in the first place, I think I just suffocate it. If I revisit the piece a year or so later once I’ve kind of moved on from the first, it turns into a not so great painting. I think it’s hard to let something die, so there’s some kind of hope in revisiting something but for me it usually just makes it worse. In a way, the ideas are always getting revisited, so it makes less sense to work on a mistake when I’ve already gotten over it.

F: The drawings seem to get looser, exploring more of the mark and color relationships and less about a defined space. Can you talk a bit about how your drawing practice influences your painting practice? Do you paint from your drawings or use them as exercises informing the painting later? Do some of the same marks internally work their way from the drawing to the paintings or is it by chance?

SH: I keep the work on paper practice separate from the painting practice because my state of mind when I’m working on both is very different. There’s a feeling of looseness with the work on paper partly because I haven’t made many drawings in the past few years and also because theres an ease of getting rid of paper whereas a stretched and prepped canvas seems more important. The drawings are a really great way for me to get out of my head and think about formal decisions in a more immediate way. I’ll make drawings for a month or two and then have them around to inform the paintings, but I rarely work directly from one drawing to a painting. Actually, I have one painting I just finished that I made directly from this series of drawings. I think there’s an interesting connection between the two but they also seem different.

F: The imagery in some, especially the larger works, seem disconnected when you look at each specific image. They look put together almost like collage because of the breaking up and confusing of objects and subjects but also from the textures and colors that create a multitude of different vocabularies. I see a lot of different types of textures and marks in your paintings other than marks that obviously look like they’re made from oil paint, what other materials do you use?

SH: I use oil, acrylic, spray paint, paint chips, airbrush, and oil bars. I like the thought that one specific instance in one painting can be something like a hat, but if placed in the painting next to it, it may turn into a hallway or part of an arm. This kind of idea speaks to how thoughts are formed. Much like a sentence to a story … you change one word, and it means something different. You change one thought pattern and it feels different. You change one thing formally, and it looks different. That kind of awareness is something I’m interested in.

F: Do you have a “vault” or grouping of different painter moves and marks that you use in a given canvas? How often do you find a new one? Is it through the description of objects that you determine the mark? Are you more conscious of how you set up your vocabulary to the point of “Wouldn’t it be funny to paint fingers this way” or is it a process of more unconscious decisions?

SH: Actually I feel like sometimes I use certain things too much. I think there is a large vault of painter moves that maybe everyone uses but to find something that surprises yourself is interesting. It’s nice to have something to use throughout the body of work to make it consistent at times, but I think it’s good to make sure you know why you are using it and not just as something to lean on. I think it’s tricky to get out of thing things you know that work, and I don’t think you have to. I guess since my work is particularly made up of different types of marks, I’m especially aware of being ok with using something predictable and being aware of it’s over use.

F: You recently moved from Atlanta, GA to Greenpoint. How was that move?! Moving your studio and apartment up here probably was a shock in terms of the small spaces. How did you find your current space and how long did it take you to settle in and start painting?

SH: I feel like I’m still settling in. I’m sure my experience will all reveal itself in the work at some point. Last time I lived in New York I was making work about being trapped and crammed in small closets. I’m hopefully out of that feeling this time around as I definitely feel more regular as a person. The space thing is different, but something I was expecting. Theres a shifting work around dance that happens too much and I think would take up less time if there were more space, but it’s not a huge deal. I really love being back in Brooklyn but miss Atlanta as well.

F: What are some things you had to do to make your studio, your own?

SH: Well, I’ve done a lot of residencies so the moving around thing to make work is something I’m pretty comfortable with, but the permanent move feels different than the thought of leaving in a few weeks. I have a big rolling palatte my moms neighbor made back in Atlanta that is really nice. Otherwise, I just bring my dog to my studio.

F: Have you seen any change in how you are working in your studio or has your work changed at all since the move?

SH: I haven’t seen much change yet, but I haven’t really been in there too long. I think the drawings are different and I will probably make more of those this year.

You can see more of Shara Hughes’s works at www.sharahughes.com

Alexandra Phillips’ work reexamines disregarded every day objects. She’s able to repurpose old toys, discarded signs, and materials that are specific to her surroundings to give them a sense of materiality and to create a platform to examine the excesses in every day. She defines her role as a “cultural worker.”

During our many conversations, we had a chance to talk to her and see her studio practice at her Bushwick basement workspace and to see her work out of context of her working environment and in a show at her residency at Wave Hill.

Phillips’ work has been included in exhibitions at the Emily Harvey Foundation, White Box and GoodWorks Gallery.

In 2013, she was the first artist to participate in a residency at The Vyrodepseio in Athens, Greece. Most recently, she was a 2014 Van Lier Visual Artist Fellow at Wave Hill.

Philips’ work is currently on view alongside Christine Heindl in a 2-woman show at Songs for Presidents through November 9th.

F: Your surroundings seem really important in your work. Do you seek out objects in your surroundings or travel to find these objects?

AP: I think I seek surroundings that seem to have the potential to contain the things I want to use. I have come to realize that a big part of my practice is meeting and engaging with other people who have access to the materials I seek. Basically I like people, I am curious about others; I think there is a lot to learn in a casual conversation.

This translates to my work as being curious about the materials that inhabit their respective worlds. By being open to interacting with all types of people that hang around here, or work here, or live here, my knowledge of what materials may or may not be available expands and in turn my perspective on my surroundings becomes better informed.

F: Can you talk more about how you find your materials?

AP: Lately I have been replacing found object with acquired object when I write/talk about the materials in my work. It seems a little semantic but I think acquired is a more apt word in my case because it suggests a level of chance while also suggesting a clear act or intentional effort. So I am using things that exist before me, but in most cases there is some obstacle to overcome or some exchange that has to happen before I can get the thing for my work.

AP: I am particularly attracted to materials that are by products of other activities (the cardboard angles used to pack heavy appliances very specifically designed but always thrown away). I have a desire to participate and this is my way of inserting myself into the ebb and flow of the happenings in my neighborhood.

AP: I like things that seem in unlimited supply (egg crates outside bakeries in Chinatown evening, grocery store coupons in your fence) I am puzzled by the insane amount of materials and goods that human beings put into the world. We have this tendency this need to fill up our surroundings with something, anything! I am interested in that cycle and that compulsion. I look upon it fondly, it has brought forth some of the most pointless things as well as the most useful.

F: There’s a conscious decision about where these things have been through the way they are presented. Can you talk about the different modes of presentation you employ like the platforms to the wall pieces?

AP: I work with such a broad range of materials because I like my studio practice to be fluid. When I am making a piece, it feels similar to solving a puzzle. I’ve already made the choice of what is available to work with during the collection process. Next it is a matter of taking advantage of the inherent characteristics of each thing, I try to find a place where material and idea meet and that’s how I know the form a piece should take. I think about my freestanding pieces as containing their own presentation method. So even though the work might take the format of pedestal and object, I think of the thing as being an autonomous work, top to bottom. I think the space between floor and object is an exciting place and I have come up with various methods of activating it, such as the plaster covered cardboard “pedestals”.

“Photo by Stefan Hagen , Installation view, Sunroom Project Space, Wave Hill, Bronx, NY

AP: I go back and forth between making works that are self-contained and things that are more dependent on the space they are in and the architectural elements in it. So a lot of works in my low ceiling studio span floor to ceiling and depend on those as a method of support (see any pics from TempWork).

AP: I think I am guided by the condition of the thing I am working with. I find myself doing a kind of restoration, not to make the thing look new necessarily, but to highlight its condition at the time.

You can see more of Alexandra Phillips’s works at www.alexandraphillips.net.

Anthony Palocci
http://instagram.com/apalocci
There’s a certain amount of grunge in Anthony Palocci’s instagram. It’s autobiographical in nature where he’s documenting 100 cigarette butts on the ground in one post and in the next, his new painting show. You get the same sense of energy from his paintings come out through his instagrams.

Michael Assif
http://instagram.com/michael_as_if_
As expected in Michael Assif’s Instagram, there’s a lot of green painted objects, plastic-y goo spills, and references to city-nature. However, he doesn’t just limit himself to these themes. There are also some interesting insights of objects and/or juxtapositions that he sees on the street.

Ben Sanders
http://instagram.com/bensandersstudio
Ben Sanders’ instagram is filled with shots of his paintings as well as his studio. The photos are always interesting and dynamic and there’s a clear understanding of his work practice in his day to day life in LA.

Guy Yanai
http://instagram.com/guy_yanai
Guy Yanai’s instagram provides a lot of great studio images that make you envy his sun-drenched space. There’s a real sense of his studio life in real time as he updates every day. Never forgetting his roots, he pays homage to his painting “gods”, artists that he looks to and references.

Inside Cooper Holoweski‘s studio, there are multiple pieces in progress and it seems as though he has his hand in almost every type of medium including music, film and painting. Cooper’s paintings rest on the line between the digital and physical constructions. From first glance, the domestic imagery looks pretty straightforward but after a second much closer look, the subtlety in the layers of paint applications and transfer processes indicate a much more labored process. With each added process or step, each painting becomes more in depth with more detail emerging. After talking with Cooper, we discover just how much planning and thought is involved and the exactness of each step. There is a linear methodology to his process which reflects his MFA printmaking background at RISD.

Unstructured with works by Cooper Holoweski is currently on view until September 1 at Yes Gallery

F: Can you talk about your process and the medium you use? There is a push and pull from the paint and the transfer process and it’s hard to tell which steps come first and which come after.

CH: There are a couple of different things going on and each piece is different but for most of them I started by staining the canvas and transferring the still-life via acrylic gel, then lots of masking, painting, and blending to make things cohesive. I add a lot of really thin coats of paint that I wipe away in areas that I want to glow. I really want them to look unified from a distance but break apart the closer you get. They have this old-masters vibe about them at first then you start to realize that all the pieces of furniture are digital 3D models and the rocks are photo transfers and candles are inkjet prints and they reveal themselves as a weird stack of collaged materials.

F: How are your images conceived?

CH: They all come from a pretty intuitive place. I mean, the imagery is undeniably loaded but the overall compositions are all from sketchbook drawings that start off really playful. The first one I made was the one with the Noguchi table on top of the cinder blocks and I just had that image in my brain for a while and I wasn’t sure what it meant our how it should exist in the world. It was like that scene in Close Encounters of the Third Kind where Richard Dreyfuss is making the plateau out of the mashed potatoes. At one point it just struck me that the furniture elements should come from digital 3D models. They are such idealized objects and it felt really appropriate to pull them from that realm where everything exists as a perfect version of itself. So there is this push and pull between logic and intuition in how I build these things and that seems to carry into their final state.

F: How do the video pieces and digital prints work with the paintings? Do you see them as separate and equal or more of one influencing the other?

CH: All of the work has a similar process of combining digital 3D models with photography and something more tactile (paint, clay, ink, etc.). The prints are really different thematically though; they come from very specific places and are loaded with personal narrative. The print series is called “Memory Palace” and each one is a mental reconstruction of a place that I’ve lived or spent formative time. So one of them is a scene of my dad’s apartment in 1989 and it has all these elements from that space that I remember. I’m sure I’ve missed some things and added others to these spaces and that’s the point.They’re very flawed reconstructions that are cobbled together from Cinema 4D and SketchUp and digital photos and scans of ink washes and google images and a bunch of other sources, and it all adds up to this vivid and surreal image.

My video piece Katabasis and the paintings come from a similar place to each other though. They’re imbued with personal narrative too but it’s a lot less specific. To me, the video and paintings are responses to “what happens after the collapse?” They both situate you in that aftermath. The cause of the collapse is not really important but the tour of the wreckage is, and so are the weird beliefs that people hold onto and the objects they find sacred.

F: With the video work, there is a performance element alongside it. Can you talk a bit about that?

CH: The video (Katabasis) comes in two forms, and it sounds silly but I think they are distinctly different even though they are visually the same piece. So there is a version of the piece with a recorded soundtrack. It’s a self-contained video that can be screened anywhere and as a viewer you can walk in and out of it, and considering that it’s 40 minutes of a single tracking shot you probably will.

CH: The other form of the piece is to have it screened with a live band performing the soundtrack. For me, the live instrumentation makes it less about the formal aspects of the video and more of an emotionally cathartic experience. The drums are loud and the three of us give it our all every time we play. We also tend to change things up musically for each performance it so there is this ephemerality that contributes to that feeling too.

CH: There are 3 movements to the piece and if you see it performed with the live soundtrack, I think you’re more likely to experience the piece from beginning to end. That’s just the nature of things, people are more likely to loose themselves in the experience of a performance than a looped video. That being said there is a certain intimacy in the experience of watching the piece with the pre-recorded soundtrack. The piece itself is based on the cyclical narrative of death and rebirth so I also happen to really like the idea of it being looped and people only catching parts of it at a time.

You can see more of Cooper Holoweski’s works at www.thisisprogress.net.

Stephen Truax invited us into his expansive shared studio space where we got the opportunity to get a better understanding of his process. Truax’s small intimate works were lined up on the wall, drawing us in to look closer at his “beautiful surfaces”. At first glance, the marks appear effortless like happy accidents and in a way, they are, though not without (a lot of) effort. The surfaces go through a process of building up and tearing down until they are finally considered to be finished works. The final pieces contain an ephemeral quality of what Truax calls “light” or “air.”

Stephen Truax is an artist living and working in Brooklyn. When he’s not painting, he’s curating shows or writing about art.

F: There’s a lot of history behind each of these canvases. There’s a lot of washing off, applying, building up and tearing down. How long does it take for you to make each painting? Can you describe the process for me?

ST: I have been working on the paintings in large groups, ten to twelve at a time, looking at them all at once, trying to make them work within the group, to build a network of relationships between the paintings. I don’t have a plan for what the paintings will look like in the end, but I try to not repeat the same color palette, composition, mark-making, or technique in any two paintings. It’s kind of the opposite of professional production.

Images courtesy of the artist. Photography by Jason Mandella.

Each painting presents its own set of problems and concerns. They’re linked by identical sizes and materials, high-key color, the level of finish, and the overarching concern of “light coming from within the painting,” which comes directly from Modernism. Working in series this way frees me up to treat each image as a proposition within the group. It forces me to challenge my conception of the kind of paintings I see myself making, or being able to make.

When a painting gets stagnant or starts to look overworked, I wash the gouache off in the sink, leaving only the pigment stain on the gesso or the painting is sanded down and repainted entirely. There is a build up of the paintings underneath the final pass that I think is so valuable in terms of “making light,” or “space,” or “air,” or talking about painting as a medium, or the history of each individual image.

My friend Matthew Miller makes fun of me for repainting them over and over, to avoid “ruining my perfect surfaces,” and my friend Nathan Dilworth loves to say in studio visits that my paintings are merely an excuse to hang a “beautiful surface” on the wall.

F: That’s interesting. How do your “beautiful surface” paintings relate with your photo work?

ST: This particular group of photographs, “Studio Shots,” were taken in 2008 in my apartment-studio in Bushwick, Brooklyn, so in that sense, they’re literally images of my paintings, or actions in the studio. But I only developed them in 2013, and started the project last fall. I am working with a professional photographer, and a friend of over ten years now, Scott Tavitian, who is currently an MFA candidate at Columbia College in Chicago, to color correct and print the images.

Because the images are double exposure film photographs, they are so over-exposed that there is extremely high saturation of color and information, which leaves the final image largely open to interpretation. Through a dialog with Scott, the color and transparency became the most important issues, and final result had a strong formal relationship with the paintings.

Images courtesy of the artist.

In addition to merely looking like one another, the two projects were made in tandem, and I hope that one will inform the interpretation of the other. I want the photographs to position the paintings in a critical, or at least a self-aware stance. Making paintings for me is a part of a larger project that is sort of me figuring out what it means to be making paintings right now, in the context of so many other artists (in Brooklyn) making abstract painting right now, and so much ongoing critical dialog and discourse that’s come out in the last few years on painting. Conversely, I hope the paintings color the photographs in a specific way that is about the concerns of a painter.

F: There seems to be a ‘wait time’ between each of the moves you make through the application or the removal. Is each move calculated or is it more of an intuitive gesture?

There is always a certain level intuition in every studio practice, particularly in the open-ended way that I am working. But the wait time you’re talking about – I call it ass scratching, which I take from Robert Irwin talking about painting – is I think the real work of the project. Rearranging the paintings into different groups, reworking the paintings that don’t fit, completely changing or painting over them is a very fast process. But getting all these elements to function as a whole is a challenge.

For me, these paintings ask a lot of questions about what constitutes a “finished painting,” and how a value judgement can eventually be assigned to a painting without many parameters about how it should look. I want these to stop when there’s just enough information to hold an image together without “completing” it. It has also been really interesting making all these different kinds of abstract paintings, and realizing that some were better than others, and trying to understand why. It makes for a lot of ass scratching.

Image courtesy of the artist. Photography by Jason Mandella.

F: There’s quite a bit of humor in each of these from the palette painting as a painting and the haphazard paint splatter on the photos after years of being in a studio. Where does this fit into your work?

ST: I love stand up comedy. I have been thinking about it pretty seriously for a while. I really feel that the job of the stand up comic is analogous to that of the artist. I love that metaphor. I really see Louis C.K. and Doug Stanhope as artists.

I use humor in my work as a way of visualizing or formalizing a healthy amount of skepticism about painting in 2014, and self-criticality, which is so closely related to the self-deprecating joke. I want the paintings to be able to be funny, as easily as they can be earnest, or sincere.

Of course, the funniness of my work is really understated, and actually might only be funny to me. Or maybe to me and my closest friends – like this text message exchange between me, Matthew Miller, and Sam Adams.

While this insider-humor might be lost on some audiences, I feel that the attitude with which they’re made could be picked up on by my mom, someone who has no formal training in art or theory.

F: Your scale is rather small and personal. There’s an intimacy with your work that only scale can achieve. Can you talk about why you chose the scale?

ST: There are practical concerns behind making small paintings. I want to be able to make global changes to a painting very quickly and see if it works – like experiments.

But additionally, they underscore handmade, individual production. I see it as an economic, if not political position. In a recent dialog, Lauren Portada said that she felt this was a “radical” departure from the commercial art world – mega artists, galleries, etc. – rather than the readily salable objects these small paintings appear to be. I really agree with that.

Images courtesy of the artist. Photography by Jason Mandella.

F:You mentioned that you use gouache. Do you use any other types of medium? How do you create those textures?

ST: All of the small paintings are made almost exclusively with gouache on primed canvas or linen. I am experimenting now with Guerra acrylic and Flashe. But the small ones are gouache, which is a high-pigment content matte designers’ paint, dries to the same color as it was wet, and is reworkable.

There is a dryness about them. The pigments sit on the surface. Some of the marks almost look like spray paint or airbrush. Is this a conscious “trick” or is it more about letting the medium react freely?

I use a lot of different techniques in all the different paintings: resists, pours, washes, wet-into-wet (bleeds), dry brush, scumbling, salt resists, and washing them off in the sink, Mr. Clean Magic Erasers, the list goes on. There is no build-up of paint because I paint thinly and erase so much.

The dryness you’re seeing is the gouache – the gum arabic binder – sinking into the gesso and canvas. I see this in direct opposition to the sexy, slick oil painted surface, which is so beautiful, but to me feels cosmetic, and possibly even gendered (male). I want my paintings to be “in” the canvases, not just on top of them.

You can see more of Stephen Truax’s works at www.stephentruax.com.

Zuriel Waters’s self portraits are earnest investigations in painting disguised in flamboyant sexual figures. His paintings border on the grotesque and yet they attract the viewer to look beyond the man boobs and the penetrating hand gestures, to the marks and the history behind each brushstroke.

We first met Zuriel Waters at RISD where he got his MFA in Painting and we were interested to see where his paintings would take him. Waters invited us to his live/work studio where we got a chance to view his new body of work for his show ‘Bad Boys’.

In the gallery almost life size paintings are hung in typical gallery fashion on white (#ffffff) walls and with enough space to give each painting room to breathe. The various personalities of each ‘Zuriel Waters’ portrait create a dialogue with one another. The most interesting arrangement is of two paintings that are hung together and touching corners which give the impression of being just a smidgen too close to each other’s personal space.

‘Bad Boys’ is currently on view until February 16th at Group Club Association (GCA)

F:How do you start approaching your paintings? Do you start with the figure or the space?

ZW: I usually start with drawings, very fast line drawings and more recently colored pencil drawings. Sometimes these can actually function as studies for paintings but usually it is just a way to get myself into the mindset for working. In terms of space, I guess the figure creates the space you know, and sometimes it comes out of it. It’s hard to say.

F: Does the (self-portrait) subject matter propel the painting or is it more of a reaction through the movements of painting?

ZW: The subject matter is kind of all important at first and sometimes, I’ll have a very clear idea of what I think the painting should be about. Sometimes this works! I love it when it works, because usually it does not work. Most often the initial idea gets painted over but maybe some small part of it will inform the next layer, like a general compositional idea or something. It’s funny, the ideas that will work in a painting, sometimes they are so dumb and simple, and sometimes just awkward overwrought pun-like things.

I think jokes and paintings are really similar. There’s this weird pdf I found online called “Greg Dean’s Step by Step to Stand-Up Comedy” that basically outlines jokes in this insanely formal way that ends up looks like lines of code or a math problem. It doesn’t exactly produce funny things, but if you follow the rules, you definitely end up with something that feels like a joke. Sometimes that’s the best kind of joke though. Rodney Dangerfield seems to do that all the time in his stand-up. There will be this litany of one-liners that are so off the mark but you end up laughing because of the constructed-ness of the situation, where you begin to see yourself almost as the laugh track and less of as a discerning audience member that gets to vote with their laughter. Tig Notaro too; her jokes are kind of the opposite in a formal sense because they are so long winded that finding the conventional joke structure within her stories is somehow really part of the humor about the situation. It seems like these kind of comedians are using the ‘joke text book’ in a more abstract way, something to work against. So yeah, I think you can look at art-making like this. There is a sense of standard expectations that we have when we go into a show and that creates opportunities for artists to hit them or play with them or intentionally completely avoid them. I guess this is all a way of saying that the subject matter is completely embedded in the formal structure of the painting. It’s like if paintings are people, then you wouldn’t say (anymore) that you know, you have your brain and then your have your body and there’s this cartesian split between them, because now I think we know how constructed and physically molded our identities are. I mean unless you are a religious person. I guess it’s easy to take atheism for granted in the art world though.

F: I have to know. Are your self portraits painted from life or from a reference?

ZW: Well, not really either. At one point I did take some photos of me to use as a reference, and it was a really cool body connection to have with the kind of posing and attitude that I was going for. Maybe it’s something I should do more, but usually, if it is a reference then they all come from those little drawings I make.

I’ve been thinking about getting a big mirror though…

Courtesy of the artist

F: Your paintings are overtly sexual in nature and there’s a conflicting ambiguousness in the subject matter’s gender. Can you talk about the feminine and masculine qualities found in these figures?

ZW: If you google search for my name ‘Zuriel Waters’ there is this cheesecake style photo I took of myself as an art piece during grad school that comes up really high on the list. I’m just wearing frumpy socks and rolled up underwear and Im trying my best to have this lolita like victim/aggressor attitude. I don’t know why, sometimes you want to feel edgy and sexy, you know. So, I started adding boobs to my body. There’s this painting I did for Steve Mykytien’s Orgy Park show that is me in this sort of painful orgasmic rapture clutching my tits and having an aching hard-on that was really inspired by that photo. The boobs afterwards ended up being this almost like cartoon character uniform symbology. In other words they started as a way to amp up my ability to sexualize/objectify my body and are now these almost like dumb appendages. I also have boobs in real life too, I mean not me especially, but men have boobs too obviously and sometimes they are kind of floppy and misbehaving and I always thought it was annoying that we have no way of like claiming that body part in a non like body armor kind of way.

F: I feel that these paintings verge on the idea of painting as a form of masturbation especially since these are self-portraits. It’s as much about you masturbating by making the work as it is masturbating for the viewer visually. Either way, we’re all getting off…

ZW: Ew gross… I mean, totally

F: The colors are really great in these paintings. The thick paint and bright colors really pop off the gray surface which in turn, invites the viewer to peer closer at each individual mark. Can you talk a bit about your process and decision making within this?

ZW: Um… color is so hard. It’s such a weird thing to think about. It’s really important to me, because it is so associative and really connected to the way we get around in the world. I noticed in this show that I use a lot of green, but it’s not something I really ever thought about before. Paint is hard too, I mean just getting a color from the palette to the surface and have it be anything like you want is a challenge, and it’s so physical the way that certain pigments are really aggressive and others are so passive. I guess in terms of color and paint handling I just do the best I can, because I am so mystified by it. Growing up with Photoshop I think messes you up a bit when you think about painting and especially color, because it’s really the easiest thing to control on the computer and the opposite in paint. I feel like really primitive when it comes to it, like I have funny mythological explanations for it like as if it’s based on the weather or the stars or something.

F: How do you see these paintings evolving? What future projects do you have in store?

ZW: I mentioned the big mirror before, that could be one avenue. I know I want to get more deep into the space in the paintings, the most recent painting I made has the figure sort of painting on glass in the foreground with a super simple approximation of my studio in the background and it sort of opened up a different way of thinking about it all formally. So there’s that, but you know I wouldn’t really expect that anything like that will actually happen, it’s just a way to get started.

You can see more of Zuriel Waters’s works at www.zurielwaters.com

We met with Michael Dotson in his Bushwick live/work space. We climbed up to where his bedroom/studio was located in his makeshift 2nd floor of his apartment. The space was crammed but laid out efficiently for a maximum amount of workspace. Michael’s paintings touch on a diverse array of subjects ranging from alien abduction to Disney cartoon characters. Wallpaper and textile patterns reminiscent of 90′s outlet malls make unexpected appearances in bright hues. His work has popped up in a number of shows around the city including ‘Acid Summer’ at DCKT and most recently ‘Windows’ at Denny Gallery.

F: Are you more concerned with the image or the painting as an object?

M: The image. I think the object is a tool to get the image, so there is no concern in trying to make it accurate or representational. I was thinking about it as having a magic eye that automatically works for you.

F: Magic eye like a puzzle on the back of a cereal box that you give up on after 20 minutes?

M: It’s already there with no effort on the viewers part. It’s for all the kids that were never able to get it. It’s a magic eye and also when Predator is invisible.

F: Your work ranges from small to medium sized paintings. Is there a specific choice for doing so?

M: The [size of the studio] space dictated it. Normally, I would work a lot bigger than this but it’s turning out to be better because a big painting takes forever to do. When I was in grad school, I was working all the time and I made half as many paintings as I’m making now. On the Internet, they’re all the same size.

F: Where did you go for grad school?

M: American University in DC and then to Brooklyn in 2011. I came up for an interview for a job and had a duffle bag full of clothes for 3 days and ended up staying on a friend’s couch for 3 months.

F: With some of your paintings, there’s more figurative elements while in others, they are bordering on more pure abstraction. Do they all come from an object or a physical vision?

M: I view them all as abstract, even the older ones that were landscapes. The spaces have gotten shallower and shallower until they became more abstract paintings.

F: So ultimately you gave up the landscape aspect of them?

M: I gave up making them with strict perspective. I used to establish vantage points and then start building stuff in that space but now its not about the space at all. It’s about the texture so it lends itself more towards the shallowing of the space. It’s still using space a lot. I think I just eliminated that structure.

F: In most of your work, I noticed that you have these framing devices.

M: Yeah, ever since I read this book, “The virtual Window”, I’ve felt that it’s just all about the idea of a window. I used to make perspective paintings. After reading that book I realized how paintings like that references a window. Also it relates to the human body more and just thinking about painting as a kind of framed view or something. The frame comes in just because of that ‘just captured moment’ but it’s contained within that structure. There’s nothing more there.

F: Yeah you can look at the surface with these textures but then you have to view it looking in.

M: I think the frame draws attention to the flatness of it.

F: That’s interesting to me. I almost find it more true with the ones on panel compared to the ones that are on stretched canvas. I start to think about them in that framing effect from looking at the materials.

M: I think it just had me thinking about paintings as windows and it’s hard to say specifics, [but] it changed the format of my paintings. It had me thinking about framing and got me away from landscape format. I also got more into squares. It’s more neutral and it doesn’t reference anything else.

F: Yeah, it’s not defined as a portrait or landscape.

M: This book’s funny. There’s a lot of funny things in there. People just started flipping out when people started making windows in houses that weren’t in a portrait format. It was a huge debate. And then there was a time when there wasn’t a standard aspect ratio for movies. Every single movie was different and they were convening to come up with something. This one person proposed that movies should be in a portrait format.

F: Thats great! Like when people shoot video the wrong way on their cell phones. That’s amazing!

F: It seems like you’ve come up with these different vocabularies that come in and out of your work.

M: Yeah, I like to come up with something and repeat it a lot. These originally came from a long ass time ago when I was making a stadium and made people and signs and I really liked it and kept using it. I think it’s funny to paint dots.

F: They remind me of beads on a dress. A lot of these textures and color choices seem textile based, like they exist in some mall in north america in 1995. This reminds me of my wallpaper in my childhood house’s bathroom. It is totally that exact wallpaper.

M: I can see it as a textile on a couch in the 80′s and then these were from a tabletop in a chinese restaurant. I like looking at that kind of stuff. You just look at it and ask who the fuck designed this? Anything goes. This one painting I titled ‘Magic Johnson’s The Movie Theater’. It’s like that could potentially be what a carpet could look like in a movie theater.

F: It’s all weirdly familiar in a nondescript type of way. By taking away the context, there’s something sinister that happens. You remember it but you don’t know why.

M: Yeah, I don’t know how that happens. Maybe living in Cleveland for so long… It’s just bright as hell. I think it’s appropriate that dayglow comes from Cleveland.

F: It’s interesting looking at that large one out there that makes me understand the smaller new works. You built a world out there in this 3D rendered – almost like you went into a 3D program and made the world and then painted from it. But with these, you’re using the different marks and with the window framing devices you’re making your own world without having to use that space.

M: I would like to have it where I didn’t have to talk about virtual reality every time I had a studio visit. I was always trying to make those paintings where there was an illusion that was broken by other things so there was never actually an accessible space. It could never be real. I guess I’m doing it with these. It’s just that I think that’s what every painter is doing. They’re just enjoying how painting can be flat surface and a special device. That’s probably the biggest interest for me.

You can see more of Michael Dotson’s work at www.michael-dotson.com