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

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

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

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

Images courtesy of the artist. Photography by Jason Mandella.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Images courtesy of the artist.

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

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

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

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

Image courtesy of the artist. Photography by Jason Mandella.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Images courtesy of the artist. Photography by Jason Mandella.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Courtesy of the artist

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

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

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

ZW: Ew gross… I mean, totally

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

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

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

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

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

It seems as if Korakrit Arunanondchai‘s name is popping up everywhere. Collaborating with musicians and artists on videos and performances while simultaneously preparing for his show at CLEARING in both Brooklyn and Brussels, Korakrit Arunanondchai is not slowing down anytime soon.

At the time of our visit, Korakrit’s studio was filled with denim fire paintings for his solo show,’Muen Kuey.’ ‘Muen Kuey’ is currently up at CLEARING in Brussels from June 6-July 20. During our conversation, Korakrit talked about his identity and label as a Thai artist and his new body of work.

Courtesy of the Artist

F: You call yourself a Thai artist. What does that mean and how did you embrace that label?

KA: Since my 2nd year at my open studio in Columbia, I have wanted to embrace the idea of being a Thai artist. I was born in Bangkok but have studied as an artist in America. I went to RISD, which I feel is like the most uber-American art school and then Columbia. I was trying to fancy the idea where I would become a Thai artist and return to Thailand and somehow land in a place between the two.

KA: At RISD I was really into abstraction and fantasy – things like spaces in video games. I really didn’t want to locate my practice within this weird cliche of the Asian artist. But at Columbia, I realized that actually, I do want to. I have a western art education now, but in a way, the history of Thai modern art is one that traces back to the west as well. To try and draw a link in-between to parallel trajectories of these two distinct places that I live in, is the paradox that I am dealing with.

F: Can you talk about your work at Columbia and how that tied in with the work you made at Skowhegan?

KA: I started this series that ended up becoming a trilogy. One for each year. The first one was for my thesis for Columbia University a year ago of a Thai funeral themed installation. It was called “2012-2555.”
When I was at Skowhegan in Maine, I made the second video called “2556″ which is the year 2013 on the Buddhist Calendar. “2556″ is like me being stuck in a purgatory trying to figure how to become an artist through different artistic figures in Thailand. One of the key things that happened in “2556″ is a video clip from the famous Thai TV show, ‘Thailand’s Got Talent.’ This female performance artist did a performance where she was covered in body paint and danced against a white canvas. It became a big taboo because she used her breast to do so and later on, they found out that she actually was a go-go dancer paid by the TV show to boost their ratings.

Korakrit “2011″ performance documentation from Korakrit Arunanondchai on Vimeo.

KA: I wanted to expand this moment so I made a video which ends with me body painting and singing this song. It’s a Thai love song by a 60 year old famous singer who is singing to his wife. In the song, the singer tells his wife she grows more beautiful every day. I feel that it’s a nice song to sing to a painting.

F: So what’s next?

KA: Yeah, so this is the second video. For the next two years, I’m going to work on the third one which is going to be more of a feature film and I’m not going to be in it. It will be an adventure of these 3 Thai girls.

2556 Trailer from Korakrit Arunanondchai on Vimeo.

F: In Thailand?

KA: In Thailand and America. It’s going to be a flashback and forward structured … kind of like the t.v. show, LOST. The main character comes to America to find a guy that she has been talking to on OkCupid and it’s more of a travel log through the landscape of America.

F: Kind of like an Easy Rider type?

KA: More like Crossroads by Britney Spears. Then it will be broken up with all of these installations as pretty much all the shows act as small vignettes in the whole narrative structure.

Muen Kuey is up until July 20 at CLEARING Gallery, Avenue Louise, Louizalaan 292 1000 Belgium. You can see more of Korakrit Arunanondchai’s work at www.korakrit.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.

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

MJ: Well, these are in progress.

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

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

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

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

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

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

F: How long do you work on a piece?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

F: This one seems to be newest one.

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

F: Let’s see the new work.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

F: As kind of an object in a way?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

F: I like this ‘sailor’ one.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

F: Right, not leaning on the materials.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

F: Have you been focusing more on sculpture than painting? I know that you were painting from your sculptures at RISD but now it seems to be primarily about the sculpture.

SW: Right, the sculpture has kind of taken over.

F: Theres this juxtaposition from this nature and this found automotive aspect but then this [the sculpture from the Brucennial] is very nature oriented versus this even though its anthropomorphic, it’s still seems machine driven. Is there that conflict?

SW: Everything is about the natural things and human made things and our relationship to nature and I guess the idea of this was to try to make this really synthetic looking plastic into a really organic form. By taking these two opposite things and trying to bridge them and seeing what that synthesis turns into.

F: It almost seems like this isn’t anthropomorphic at all. It almost has nothing to do with the figure in some way and from what I remember from RISD, it was almost these kind of landscapes and this kind of ‘peering through different passages’. These automotive parts become “natural” but how did that make its way into the figure?

SW: It was kind of an accident. I have been on this path of making representations of water to paint from. I made an aquarium that turns into a coral reef in my studio, I made a pond and I did paintings of that and so then the next thing I wanted to make was a waterfall. And so I had to figure out a way to keep the water up in the air.

I came up with the idea of making columns that would hold it up. The columns would hold up this basin and then the water would cascade from the basin. So I saw this [second styrofoam column] as futuristic and I saw that [first box column] as modern. I was thinking of these columns representing art history and I wanted to make one that was Classical. I started thinking about this thing holding up the basin kind of like a Caryatid (Grecian women who are the support for architecture). I started thinking about that idea but mainly its this thing that unifies the American perception of landscape through the car. The anthropomorphic perception of cars. The bilateral symmetry of cars that mimics the figure. Cars that are people. Plus, this previous idea of this being a ruin in a jungle.

I have a lot of visions of what this [sculpture] is going to become. I want to make my studio into this ultimate landscape where I would want to paint from. This [photograph seen below] is a place called Las Pozas which I went to when I was in Mexico. This is why I wanted to make a cement statue in a jungle.

F: So these are ancient ruins?

SW: No, these were actually built from 1949-1984.

F: So do you think you’ll create more than one figure? Once this figure is complete, would you create more figures because of the architecture that you’re referencing?

SW: I can’t imagine there being more than one figure.

SW: I don’t ever like to paint sculpture, I paint color through light.

F: Getting back to the whole reason to why you’re creating this and how you wanted to represent a waterfall and how you needed a way to do that, would you then go back and paint from this? If so, what would be your final product?

SW: Well I am a landscape painter but it began to feel kind of limiting to paint the existing landscape from observation. I started building landscape-esque environments in my studio on eye level platforms so there was that depth. I painted from those but I never made a really large painting from observation because working outside, the scale is sort of limiting. So I thought that a way for me to make a really large painting from observation was to make a really large set-up and that’s what this is. I think it would be really great for it to be one to one.

F: Also in terms of water and movement and the ephemeral nature of it, your documentation of it is like creating a moment in time as opposed to creating a sculpture thats always moving. Are you interested in water because it’s hard to reproduce? Can you talk about that?

SW: I think part of it is because I’ve used watercolor a lot. I did a big project with swimming pools. I don’t know but I’ve always been very attracted to water. I just think its one of the most interesting things to paint. I especially want to recreate water and mist and light. It’s such a challenge.