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

Michael Aitken is a painter currently living in Queens and working in Brooklyn. He graduated from the Rhode Island School of Design for Painting in 2010. His studio building is a block from the East River where the skyline of Manhattan runs undisrupted. Located in the basement, Mike’s “cave-like” studio is dark and secluded, a drastic change from above ground. A casino like room with no inkling of daylight, time seems to be nonexistent. We met up with Mike to talk about his paintings and how his studio plays a subconscious role in his work.

F: Can you talk about the use of a gridded system in your work? It seems to come in and out of your work from time to time.

MA: I was using gridded spaces a few years ago and decided recently to revisit them. I think I’m attracted to them because of the way they point to flatness and image production, or image duplication. Sometimes I like to think of my paintings as imagery that’s been run through a human scanner. I appropriate images and make them mine by wedging them into… or laying bits and pieces of them over or under sectioned off units of flat space. But I mean most of the time, my process is pretty lazily intuitive to begin with and gridding the surface of a white canvas is a way to introduce order and cut back on the fog a little bit.

F: How long do you work on a piece for? Do you revisit it? Is it a process of familiarizing yourself with the canvas?

MA: I guess it varies from painting to painting, but generally I’ll work on a piece for a very long time. Sometimes I’ll come back to it for months. Dennis Congdon, a former painting teacher of mine, once told me that unless a piece goes through an awkward, ugly teenage phase and comes out the other side, it will forever seem developmentally retarded. I think about that a lot in the studio.

As far as familiarizing myself with the canvas, I think that’s a lot to do with it, but the canvasses in my studio also are in an ongoing process of familiarizing themselves with each other. I’ll work on several pieces at a time, so they all kind of grow up together. When I was in Minneapolis I saw a show at the Walker that John Waters had curated where he pulled a bunch of pieces from the permanent collection in storage and arranged them to see how they would get along as “roommates”. I think it was called Absentee Landlord. In a way that’s how I see my process. As the paintings grow, some of them become friends and inform each other’s development, and some of them don’t really show their true colors or blossom unless a particular other one is out of sight. There are a lot of late bloomers in that bunch.

F: I like that analogy. You also use printmaking as a way of working as well as painting. How do these two different modes of making, inform each other?

MA: It’s difficult for me to make straight lines without tools, so I can appreciate any tool that allows me to quickly reproduce measured, straight-edged lines. My only issue with it now is lack of facilities. I have this one little hobby press that allows for like a 9″ x 12″ plate. It’s annoying to think back and count the hours you wasted during undergrad not taking advantage of on-campus facilities that were just lying around while you were at your apartment or some other god forsaken place.

F: How do you determine the subject matter in your paintings (your references to Matisse, digital rgb color screens, car windows, roads and maps and etc.)?

MA: Well, again, a lot of the paintings are begun intuitively. I’d say by about one third of the way in, I’ll make a move that decides the direction of the piece, and from there I’ll pull in imagery from different sources, often other paintings in the room or things I’ve been looking at that week. A few weeks ago I went to the Met to see a Matisse show and spent hours staring at View of Notre Dame. I’ve been thinking about that painting a lot since. It’s made it into a couple of recent paintings.

I think you were the one who picked out the windows of public transportation in some of my work. I hadn’t thought about it before you brought it up but now it’s clear. Besides being a long-standing trope in the tradition of easel painting, I think working windows into my paintings is largely a result of working in a windowless basement space.

F: The size of your canvases is rather intimate (small square canvases). Can you talk a little about how you approach the paintings at this scale. Do they become easier to see as objects at a smaller scale?

MA: They do. And I’m fairly comfortable working at this scale — plus, I bought stretchers in bulk in the 18”-24” ballpark, so I’ve been working through those for a while now. There’s something valuable about working on a series of paintings that are all the same size and shape, too. It’s like stripping down to a limited palette. When you reduce variables it’s easier to work through ideas without letting decisions about scale add unnecessarily to the complexity. That said, my next move is to make some
larger paintings.

F: Can you talk about the surface quality of the paint? A lot of the painting seems to be about taking away as much as adding. How do you walk the fine line in between the two (addition and taking away) even to the extent of the image being taken away vs retained?

MA: That goes back to Congdon’s advice about developmental retardation. Often a painting will arrive at a stage where I’ve constructed an image that I mostly really like but that falls apart for whatever reason, and it becomes clear that in order to maintain the integrity of the whole that image has to go, or at least partially be scraped down or addressed with “white out”. Regarding how that relates to surface quality of the finished piece, I think it’s sometimes important that in the final stage there’s evidence of having gone that maturing process.

F:Seeing your work and the labored process that each painting has, when do you feel you have finished a painting?

MA: Since I work on several paintings at a time, it’s often hard to tell when something is finished. I might consider something finished until I discover something in another painting that makes me change my mind about the first one. Sometimes when two pieces really don’t get along I’ll turn one around to face the wall and work on the other until it becomes unrecognizable. Then I’ll turn the painting around again and see where we are. I guess what I’m saying is that a painting’s level of completion might always be relative and unattainable, it’s just a matter of being okay with this or that stage given the context. Sorry this just got really Chicken Soup.

F: How do you like working in the basement? Are there any differences between working in a space with daylight? Do you think it’s changed your work?

MA: It probably has, but I’m not sure which changes I can attribute to working in a cave. The price is right, and there’s something to be said for not knowing when the sun is going down and kind of plowing through a timeless space, but it can’t be very healthy. I remember once when Tatiana Berg came to visit the studio, she noted that several of us down here have similar window themes and hopeful little moments of bright color going on. I think we’re all sort of desperate for sunlight but at a little over a dollar per square foot it’s hard to beat.

You can find more of Michael Aitken’s work at www.michaelaitken.blogspot.com.

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

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

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

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

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

F: As kind of an object in a way?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Image courtesy of Greg O’Malley

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

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

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

Image courtesy of Tatiana Berg

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

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

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

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

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

Image courtesy of Tatiana Berg

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Image courtesy of Tatiana Berg

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

F: Or the gesso drips?

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

F: Right, a happy medium.

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

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

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

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

F: Do you mainly work in oils?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

APJ: I think that’s funny.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

F: Tell me about your space and what you look for in a studio.

JF: The first thing I want in a studio is for it to be 100% modular so that everything can move all the time. It’s free so any reconfiguration will work. The way I think about the studio in general is it can’t have any resistance to whatever you want to make and whatever you want to do and whatever condition you need. You need to be able to establish it without any problem which is why I have the blackout shades. It’s why everything is kind of movable. It’s why the lighting conditions can change.

F: Speaking about the lighting situation, you’re very much in this vein of observational painting. Can you talk about that?

J: This is a different type of practice than a lot of studios because I still do “easel painting.” Because I’m looking at something. There’s still this ‘looking at’ relationship kind of like as if I was painting a landscape but I’m doing it inside. Light is critical to observational painting because the thing you’re looking at is subject to the environment. So when I was working outside, the landscape is subject to weather, clouds, and atmosphere. When I started painting inside, I wanted to be in total control of the light instead of being at its whim. So I wanted to continue to paint from observation and paint light but eliminate the illusion of space. So I started painting surfaces. Just like the painting is a surface, the paint is a surface, I’m trying to recreate a surface with this painted surface but instead of painting something that’s sort of simple, I’m trying to paint surfaces that are hard to place.

F: Can you talk about the scale of your work and why you chose a sort of monumental scale?

JF: There was a middle ground between painting landscapes and painting these paintings which was painting objects. Painting objects in space which had edges to it. Object and a bit of space. When I did that, I felt like scale was important. When I made the step of painting in from the edges of the object and painting just a piece of it, it became so decontextualized that scale suddenly didn’t matter and anything would work so I made these a scale that were sort of in a human scale.

F: Can you talk about these ‘Plastic Bag’ works in relation to the ‘Prism’ work? I look at the ‘Plastic Bag’ paintings and I know exactly what they are versus the ‘Prism’ ones where you dont know what they are. Even if you did, you wouldn’t understand it as an object. Can you talk about that transition too?

JF: The ‘Black Bag’ Series clearly are an object whether or not people recognize it as a black trash bag or fabric folded in space. They’re totally recognizable. I saw them as working in a really limited color range. Also, painting in a near blackness, has a metaphorical weight to it. It literally and figuratively has a dark space. It doesn’t really tie much into these [the Prism Series]. I think of it as a separate project.

F: After this project, where do you see yourself going? In terms of these ‘Prism’ paintings, I know you’re working on three more, do you think you’ll keep on doing these?

JF: I keep doing paintings based on this motif. I plan on doing six of these or maybe a hundred. I finish a painting and then there’ll be a reaction to it so I plan on doing more. I want to continue on the ‘Black Plastic Bag’ Series and I want to get more depth into that. Both of these projects are reactions of a decade of painting from landscapes and both of them are objects that are not found in nature. So it’s something not found in nature and I think that’s what I’ll look forward to in the future. More weird things that I can look at that I have never seen in the natural world.

Click below for a 360 view of Jeff’s Studio.

You can check out more of Jeff’s work at www.ficherapaintings.com

F: Describe your process.

LA: I have certain rituals, if you will, and one would be to lay down a bright pink under ground and thats going to start to dictate the palette. And then, if I like something I saw that I did in an earlier painting, I tend to keep doing that. I create my own rules over time, based on what I did before.

I want to shy away from perfecting my system too much, then it becomes about something totally different. I don’t want everything to be too involved. I like a little bit of chance and intuitive play.

F: One thing I noticed, is that this feels like an under coat, and its coming through versus this [thickly applied oil paint] being painted over. Does that have something to do with the space or is it a conscientious decision?

LA: That can be this strange battle that I have where if something is too much on top, then I don’t like that. So then I will paint another layer next to it, to put it further back and then, maybe scrape it away if it comes too forward, or it goes back too much. Its this constant ‘drawing the line, removing the line.’ So sometimes, I scratch this [the paint] away and that sort of underpainting looks great and makes this whole form kind of sit further back and that works.

F: Do you look at the architecture of spaces when you’re painting or are you looking strictly at the palette and the canvas?

LA: Im pretty invested in just the palette of the canvas and my sort of structure that I’ve developed but I do think that my memory of images of things i see is definitely forming my painting.

F: Do you ever find that once you’ve painted something, you’ve realized where its coming from?

LA: Yeah, especially with color. I look at some things, i think “that’s my toys when i was 10″ or “that’s this furniture that I liked in a catalog.” It could be anything but it usually tends to be beautiful things…something that strikes me, either beautiful or strange. A lot of the times, strange.

F: Do you title your paintings?

LA: Lately, I’ve been choosing a group name. The ones with the lines are the ‘Stick Lines.’ The ones like that, with the box shapes are ‘Slices’.

You can find more of Liz Ainsley’s work at http://lizainslie.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

More of Jonathan’s work can be seen at JonathanChapline.com