Trudy Benson is a painter living and working in Brooklyn New York. After working in a large space in Jersey City and a small basement in Brooklyn, she moved studios to her current location near the Navy Yard. We visited her space while she was getting ready for her solo show at Horton Gallery. ‘Paint’ opens on April 25. Graduating from Pratt with an MFA in Painting, Trudy has shown at Horton Gallery, Freight+Volume and Mike Weiss Gallery.

F: Where was your old studio? Was it nearby?

TB: It was in Dumbo. I was in a basement and I thought I was going to be able to fit big paintings down there and didn’t actually try it.

TB: I’ve had 3 studios within the last year.

F: Why is that?

TB: I had a studio in Jersey City and it was huge and beautiful and really cheap but it was sucking the life out of me. It was an hour and a half [commute] each way on the weekends so I moved to this space in Dumbo. I realized I couldn’t work down there and then there was the hurricane. The basement next to us flooded but somehow we didn’t.

F: That’s really scary. I can’t even imagine. So you moved here and you’ve been making these larger paintings but not quite as large as those [referencing the larger paintings]. Would you say you’re most comfortable making paintings that size?

T: I really like this size. It’s 63″ x 68″ and that’s one size that I’m really comfortable with, but I also like 80″ x 77″. I have done a couple 8′ x 9′s but I don’t always think it’s necessary to make paintings that big. I made one for my last show in 2011 and then bought all of these 8′ x 9′s thinking that I was going to make more of them.

F: Does the the size of the paintings dictate what you’re going to do?

T: Normally when I start a painting, I don’t really know at all what it’s going to look like and I think on that scale, for some reason, it works for me. At least, 80″ x 77″, 63″ x 68″ but on that scale [8' x 9'], I have to do more planning and it has to be more intentional about what I actually want to do before I even try it so it’s just a different way of working.

F: Usually from what it looks like, you start with this space layer. I’m familiar with your grids but not as much with your stripes. Is that new?

T: Yeah I haven’t done a lot of grids. That’s actually the only 2 grids I’ve done in the last year, but I think they can work. I started using the grids because I was thinking about making abstract computer paintings so I think that’s a really obvious reference. The stripes are doing the same thing but they also distort the space more.

F: From there, you kind of build up your vocabulary with different marks. It almost seems like in a weird way that you’re working in Photoshop and then making them into paintings but you’re not actually doing that.

T: No, I’m not doing that. For the most part for these paintings, I feel like they are a collage of different painting moves and I approach it the same way you would if you’re making a Photoshop file. I guess the better thing would be a paint program on your PC. I was using paint using different materials like paint in that way without kind of making the connection.

F: You were already doing that but it became more of the subject matter.

T: Yeah I kind of realized that that was what I was doing.

F: How do you apply the marks? It looks like your brush and that looks like you’ve tubed it out.

T: I’ve been using a pastry tool to get a thinner line than with the tube. That line I’ve experimented with a lot.

F: There’s something really comical about it. There’s these falling red candy sticks and this chocolate, it almost reminds me of this cake… I can’t stop thinking about it now that you’re talking about the pastry tool. So is this the last one you did?

T: Yeah. Sometimes paintings take me several weeks, sometimes it’ll take me one week. It just depends on what’s happening. This was the first painting I started when I moved into this space and I finished it third to last.

F: How many would you say you work on at one time?

T: As many as I have room for. There’s a lot of drying time. I like taping off over top of the oil paint so I always have to wait. For the next step in this painting, I’m going to tape off some shapes. I probably can’t work on this painting for two weeks because there’s a lot of down time.

F: So if you do, say, five or six of them, you can kind of go in and out in between them? Do you anticipate the next painterly move you’re going to make or do you let it sit and work on the next one?

T: It’s different. In the beginning of the painting, it happens really fast and I can do the first four to five moves pretty fast within one to two days and even up to the first oil move. Then after the first oil paint move, I can only think one step ahead. Even if I try, I sometimes forget what I’m planning on doing and I might change my mind too. Sometimes I work on a few different ideas. There’s a lot of painting that happens outside of the studio at this point. In the work in my last show, I was using a different medium, so things would happen a lot faster. Now everything is drying slow but I actually like that I can be more selective about what moves I make and I actually enjoy taking more time in between steps.

F: It’s almost like breathing and allowing yourself to absorb it, instead of going and attacking the surface.

T: And there’s a lot more intentions. The works are still intuitive but there’s a lot less of going in and filling the space with tons of marks.

F: It’s interesting to see how this one formed because there’s a lot of breathing room with this one more than some of these other ones.

T: I wanted this one to feel like all the marks were kind of floating in front of them in the same time. In a small way like when you have just a million windows open on your computer. There’s things in front of each other and weird drop shadows. It’s a weird compositional idea to have everything in one place in the painting.

T: One of the most challenging things about this painting is, I wanted to put something there [in the void]. I really wanted a giant circle right there but I didn’t want to do that. I was resisting the urge to make an easy composition I guess.

F: At the same time it gives room for this square to exist more fully too. There’s this weird play between this computer idea but also the way that the paint is laid on the surface. It has the duality of the logic of the computer but this body plays a huge role in it. I can imagine you making that mark and I think that it can exist physically and it can exist in this digital way too.

T: I definitely think about those ideas. I feel like going through school and everything, there’s all of these different people that are saying to you ‘Why are you painting? Why are you making paintings?’ I feel like because of the way our generation is raised, it is so much easier to work on a computer. You can just undo and because of that that makes painting so much more interesting. I feel like these are kind of like that. They’re influenced by digital imaging programs but they are more of a testament to what painting can do that computers can’t do.

F: Until there’s some printer that starts printing out paint!

T: Well, I think that’s why some of the most important parts of these paintings are where there’s a tape bleed or paint that falls off the brush because the way these paintings are made, I can’t clean up that mark without leaving a huge stain.

F: Do you ever think about your work viewed online vs physically and how you deal with that?

T: It’s really hard to. Since I moved from my studio in Jersey, I have been having more people in my studio. A lot of people first saw my work online and then saw it in person and there’s always a kind of ‘Oh, I didn’t know there was this much paint’ so I think these images can flatten really easily online. They’re really hard to photograph. I think it’s a lot better to see them in person. Ideally, you would walk into a gallery full of paintings like this, and you can also smell them so I think there’s that element to them that’s missing big time in tumblr paintings.

‘Trudy Benson : Paint’ is up from April 25th through June 2 at Horton Gallery 55-59, Chrystie Street. You can see more of Trudy Benson’s work at www.trudybenson.com

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.

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.

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

F: I know your background is in architecture. Can you talk about how why you decided to enter painting?

NN: I started in Milwaukee at an architecture program, setting up to be an architect and after the first semester, I was like, ‘Yeah, I don’t really care how a building stays together’. I’m more interested in conceptually how these things happen. Then I switched to fine art. I still have a minor in art history and theory and architecture. I figured I might as well just do it. I think a lot about buildings that exist in the world and the idea of them being physical places and then I take them and make them completely not physical and they become this illusion on a 2-D surface. That interests me and also thinking about, specifically now, buildings Communist and Fascist architecture. Prisons are really interesting to me. Construction sites are pretty interesting too. So that’s where I’ve been kind of focused recently.

F: In your work, you have these very specific hard edges and in that sense, can you talk about how you went from architecture to painting in your work?

NN: This painting and that painting and I have a lot of other ones in the kitchen. They’re taken from the neighborhood. These are brownstone façade as you would see them as you’re walking down the street. What it is, is just a section cut of just the façade and then what I do is, I extract them and I connect them. In that piece, they’re more specifically the frontal piece of this and they do look really hard edge and pristine but I don’t use tape. I hand paint them. For me, it’s really important because, I think, its that futility of the mask. How the mask of the building are the details of the façade and how upon closer inspection, that façade is really deteriorating because of the weather and the things that happen to it over the years. That’s why I don’t use tape.

F: So its about this imperfection from the hand and the obvious materiality of the paint.

NN: Yeah, from far away it does look perfect but upon closer inspection, you can see the build up of paint where I’ve really tried to get that edge to be as crisp as I can or where I might’ve missed the paint because I always start with an underpainting of bright orange or yellow. Its always the complement of the primary color that I’m using. This painting is purple so I used yellow as the base. Not that it does so much because it gets completely covered but it definitely influences the colors that come on top of the surface.

F: Is it oil based or acrylic?

NN: Its acrylic.

F: You even see these subtle shifts in hue but not really in tone. So that gives it that fuzzy look in terms of space. Does that come about naturally or are you very conscious about how the next one is going to be this and the next one is another hue shifted?

NN: I put down a color. I see what it looks like and I’ll mix another color from the color that I’ve already used and I’ll see like ‘Okay, maybe it should be just a little bit lighter or a little bit darker’. I kind of work that way but then then I also do that Albers thing where I play with making one color look like two colors. So in the center of this painting, the center black is the same black thats on the outside. I’m conscious of that. I’m playing with those sorts of color. The technical things are something thats interesting to me. Specifically when I look at buildings, its more at twilight when the light is hitting them depending on where they are on the block. The light is different but then theres the light that’s being cast from the outside to the inside. There’s this idea of privacy and not privacy. That’s where the colors stem from.

F: In this one, its not as much about the silhouette. It becomes something completely different and it almost becomes unrecognizable. I can’t read where the building is versus the space. Can you talk about that?

NN: This [Façade 12] is a later painting. I was taking the façades and I was starting to connect them and creating large squares so that there would be four façades connected. Where the stairs connect, there would be the upper portion of the cornice. I would start to create these different abstractions with just a variation. Some of the blocks overlap one another and interact. There’s this idea of inside versus outside but then also what shapes are created out of these built shapes so that they create their own spaces. Its a question of what’s positive and what’s negative and what’s inside and what’s outside.

F: Which is going back to that one with the color and the lighting but in this one, it’s more about the shapes and the composition. Now in this one, this is interesting too because its drawn on the wall so its directly referencing space and your studio too.

NN: Its something I’ve wanted to do because these exist in smaller drawings and I have this large wall. I worked for Pat Steir on a wall drawing that she did on the Lower East Side and I was like, “Well, maybe I should try and do a wall drawing’ because I used to make drawings that were pretty large. They were about 7 ft by 10 ft long and I was like, ‘what would happen if I did it directly on the wall’. So, I feel that by doing it on the wall, for me, it has more of a relationship to our body because its starting to get closer to our scale. Obviously it isn’t exactly our scale because I can only go so big in here but I think it opens up a lot of possibilities for me as to the tools that I use and how it interacts with the actual space versus a space on a paper and how the viewer interacts with it. What that relationship is becomes a little bit more visceral than having to imagine being inside one of the smaller drawings.

F: You’re kind of doing it for yourself in a sense because its in your studio.

NN: Yeah, absolutely. And I would be more than happy to do this any other place too but this is the support that I have and this is the space that I can do it in.

F: Its interesting because, getting back to the previous conversation, about how these studios were actually dorms. You’re creating these things in this living, or past living environment and then you’re painting living environments too.

NN: Yeah, I’m actually going to paint this over tomorrow and then do another one because I want to get another one done before I don’t have this studio.

F: These two panels and the drawing too, those are graphite as well?

NN: Yeah, everything is graphite.

F: Do you draw it out first before you paint it?

NN: So, what I do is, I do draw it out. The first layer that I do is obviously gessoing. Then the color ground and then I build up on top of that with a soft pencil because it just mixes into the paint. I don’t have to worry about it coming through and then I paint it. They’re all different. I guess that’s another thing that I didn’t really mention. They look symmetrical but they’re not. Everything is completely different. The space is different. The façades are different. Everything is different.

F: So for this, they’re actually taken from around the neighborhood?

NN: The dark paintings are. They’re from the neighborhood: Bedford-Stuyvesant, Clinton Hill and Fort Greene.

F: But then these, the linear ones are a lot more imaginative.

NN: Those come directly from my head.

F: It seems that its attacking the same thing but from a different kind of point.

NN: Yeah, they have similarities in conceptual issues but I feel like the drawings which I call ‘Constructions’ are speaking to something that’s a little bit different in a way than the paintings.

F: In talking about the support because you’re painting on canvas versus painting on a panel. Is that because you’re doing very linear drawings so you need that surface or…?

NN: I used to draw always on canvas. I would do fine drawings on canvas and then I kept getting questions, ‘why are you drawing on canvas?’ and I was like, ‘well, I like drawing on canvas’. I guess what happened was, I was taken to a place where I really wanted to paint again and I hadn’t painted in 3 or 4 years. I was doing drawings, just constantly doing drawings on all sorts of supports. I didn’t actually think at all about painting the paintings on panel but I felt that these drawings specifically felt like the panel would work for them. I like the fact that the panel, unlike the canvas, because I’m using a hard pencil (I’m using like a 7H pencil), it becomes a little bit incised into the board because it accepts it. If the light is hitting it just right, you can see that there’s these incisures in them. The other thing with the drawings is like the paintings, they look perfect but they aren’t perfect. There’s a lot of overdrawn lines. There’s a lot of erasing marks and I can’t get rid of them because they’re incised.

F: Can you talk about your space a little bit?

NN: This was the second space that I had at Pratt. The first one was also in the dorms and it was a space that was shared between me and five other people which was kind of weird. It was the only studio in the dorms. It was one of the big dorms. It was on the 17th floor, so it was kind of nice to come over here and have a door that I could lock and just be in here. I think this space is really interesting because its kind of the same era of the dark paintings that I’m doing. It has the same sort of old decrepit feeling like the ceiling is falling apart. It has this homey feeling in a weird way.

You can see more of Nick Naber’s work at www.nicknaber.com.

Alex Markwith is an artist currently working in Montauk, New York. He graduated from the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) with a BFA in Painting in 2011. He has had solo shows at Nicelle Beauchene Gallery (New York), Hiram Butler Gallery (Houston) and has recently been part of the Bone Yard Project at the PIMA Air & Space Museum (Tucson, AZ)

F: The objects, how sturdy they are and how heavy they are, completely changes the way that I look at these things. I look at them as a solid mass.

AM: I’ve been more conscious of trying to make them be sturdier. The first show I did, I felt like everything was very frail. I was sewing into the pieces a lot, using hot glue. Now I’m using gorilla glue and I’ve been nailing everything down. These are very much sculptural. That’s part of the process. I just start tearing and nailing and using things not really knowing where I’m going.

F: So it’s more about the dictation of the found materials?

AM: Yes, in a way. It’s a tough balance. I often choose materials I think look great on their own, like these scraps of denim, but the work is all about manipulating them.

F: Then that becomes another dialogue in itself or vocabulary that you couldn’t even expect from before.

AM: You can’t be too precious about your materials. I find that to make them work in a piece, I have to alter them. Maybe I’ll soak them in paint, or tear them up. Then they start to take on new characteristics. Different weaves of fabric take the same paint differently, and that is important. And when I do use an old garment I’ve collected from somewhere, and I tear it up, I end up with seams and shapes I would have never arrived at on my own. Those seams and half-random shapes play a large role in my compositions.

F: Not only are you using that idea but also pointing that out by the red paint mark.

AM: Right. Because that line has become part of the composition of the painting. For whatever reason I decided it should be emphasized.

F: Do you ever take those out afterwards?

AM: Sometimes. Or I soften them. I can draw attention to them or subdue them. It just comes about from me looking at the painting a lot. The pieces are very three-dimensional, but those decisions have to do with the two-dimensional composition, which is still a major focus. I say the painting is finished when it seems to appeal to an intuitive sense of order that I have.

F: Then it becomes about building it up until you can find that order.

AM: Right. As I work, I feel like I’m sort of wrestling with the decisions I’ve made earlier in the painting. I’m constantly re-assessing what I have already done. Because I can slap any number of things on the piece and have it look interesting, but the goal is to get to a point where I can look at it, and say ‘Okay this makes sense.’

F: This large one that you did. It seems like there’s a very specific order in a very specific way versus the one that was hanging up here. You’re doing the same things with the jeans and the t-shirts, that you’re now doing with the cardboard. It seems more logical or more considered in some ways.

AM: A lot of the lines in this piece were found, not invented. What’s creating the lines is where the sections of cardboard meet. I think that having this big plank of wood nailed on top is sort of a similar idea where I take the material and I lay it there and let it be.

F: Its so easy to translate this [the materials] from a large brush mark in a way.

AM: It does look like that. It’s something I thought about when I saw that [knotted wood that juts off of painting]. The texture of that plank of wood looks like a thick brushstroke. That’s sort of how I was thinking of it. I don’t know if I ever answered your question about breaking the rectangle, but that’s what I think of it as – a big mark where I take something and put it on there, breaking the boundaries I had set for myself by choosing the rectangle in the first place. It shows that the real work isn’t about about this square. It’s about what I’m doing to it. It’s not about the rectangle itself. Again, it’s an additive, sculptural process.

You can see more of Alex Markwith’s work at www.alexmarkwith.blogspot.com

Where is your studio located?

My studio is located in Bushwick, Brooklyn, NY.

Where are you from and where do you live now?

I was born and raised in Puerto Rico. I’ve been living in NY since 2009.

Does Puerto Rico / Brooklyn influence your work in any way?

As an islander, my work is strongly influenced by the light and colors of the Caribbean. And by Bushwick, I can say that it inspires me everyday. Just walking in the streets, visiting studios and galleries, BBQ on rooftops, or hanging out in bars; it’s a great source of inspiration.

What are your current projects? I noticed that you also have some small sculptural work, how do these practices relate to your painting?

Recently, I’ve been working on paintings made entirely by transferred oil and spray paints. It gives to the creative process a wide range of possibilities in the mark making and visual language. Also, I’ve been working with small sculptures, which are like extensions of the paintings in an attempt to extend the physicality of the paintings to a sculptural realm.

What is your process like?

My process is one full of improvisation and accidents, but within a structure. I call it “Methodic Chaos”

Can you talk a little bit about your material choices from the plastic bags, glitter to textile prints.

In my last body of work I was incorporating different materials such as plastic bags, glitter, textiles, among others. I treat them all as painterly mediums. I was interested in these materials because of their unique qualities on textures and transparencies. Apart from that, they are cheap and may be found dumped in the streets.

What’s a typical studio day like?

I try to be in the studio around 10 am and work until 5 – 6pm or later. I usually work with music such as salsa music, reggae, fado, Manu Chao, Bob Dylan, etc.

How long have you been in your studio?

I’ve been in this studio for one and a half year

You can see more of Sebastian Vallejo’s work at sebastianvallejo.com