James Payne is a sculptor with a particular interest in light, space, and texture. We’ve visited his studio several times before while James was working, but for this visit, he cleared out his in progress concrete molds and set up his space to showcase his more completed works. The only sources of light in his basement studio, came from his concrete light pieces and a single clamp light to illuminate specific works during our conversation. James went to Bennington College for Architecture and Sculpture and received his MFA at the Cranbrook Academy of Art for Sculpture. James is currently living and working in Brooklyn, New York. His studio is located in the same building as Michael Aitken’s.

F: Did you go to school originally for printmaking?

JP: Actually I did my ungrad in Vermont at Bennington College and I did mostly sculpture and architecture. At Cranbrook I did mostly sculpture but in my last year, I did a lot of printmaking.

F: Why did you choose to focus on printmaking in grad school?

JP: I started to work with flat image when I was at this residency in Michigan. I did these prints first. They’re relief woodcuts. Then when I got back to school, I tried a different process with silkscreen stencils and layered image and I sort of tried getting back to where the light-based work is. I see these as related to the light-based installation in terms of capturing direct light and atmospheric field and the process of layering the screens. I’m working towards how the viewer perceives perceptual shifts within a flat image and using a lot of metallic inks and paints to achieve these effects.

F: The materiality of the inks are very integral to the piece. It makes it very object oriented in a way.

JP: They’re definitely more dimensional and I’m working on making them ephemeral in a way.

F: Did you create the light-based work with the lampshades before the prints?

JP: I’m sort of getting back into this work right now. In my first year of grad school, I pretty much only worked in light-based installation. A lot of it started with a loose collection of objects or materials (a lot of porous and reflective skins and membranes, screens and 2 way mirrored glass) that sort of become the work. My studio is in a dark basement, and my first year of grad school it was too. I had complete control over my environment in terms of light and so I just started moving lights around to figure out where I wanted to go.

F: It’s interesting though that you have come back into a basement setting. Has it attracted you? Your materials are so heavy and enclosing and the space that you work in reminds me of a place or a big part of your concrete and aluminum sculptures.

JP: Yeah, it’s nice to be back in an enviornment where I have control over the light and it has gotten me back into working in this way. I’ve really been thinking about light and perception and more moments of – I can go after a paticular moment of a perceptual shift or a condition of light that I am interested in and work with it and push it. With the concrete and foil, I made a little work in grad school but I never really pushed it and so I’ve had some ideas about how to pick it back up. They’re becoming more volumetric now. I’m using the containers I’m casting them into and the foil itself in a more volumetric way. Both things sort of find their own volume and form when I set up some conditions and parameters for working with the material. The heaviness or gravity of the concrete interacts in its own way with the fragility and sensual aspect of the foil.

F: It’s interesting. We were talking earlier about the duality of your work, and how it has this light and this kind of ephemeral-ness juxtaposed with this extremely heavy material in terms of the volume and the way the viewer looks at these things – vaciliating between the two extremes. The prints also relate to this juxtaposition. Can you talk about that a little bit?

JP: The solid mass sort of plays off of that relationship with the light being ephemeral. Suspending the pieces help deal with the gravity of the objects and complicate it.

F: They pieces are hung at this very specific height. It’s kind of at a human scale and the pieces become extremely apparent when they’re hung up versus when they’re rested on the ground. It’s almost as if I see certain personification aspects to them like this totem lampshade becoming a body. Each of these things to me represents, and I think it has a lot to do with the light, but these kind of stand ins for something or someone or representations or at least a nod towards representations of the figure. It’s really interesting especially when it comes down to the material as material which seems to be the opposite – how it melds together so well. You have also been working with the wooden peices for a long time ever since you moved to your studio.

JP: I worked alot with frames and framing as a device especially with loosely organized objects, artifacts and materials that help give it context. I became interested in frames and framing in arcitecture which also has a lot to do with the study of light. I look a lot at how architects use light as well as landscape painters. I was just looking at this Turner, Whistler, Monet book today. I saw the show in London in 2005 and they all have this relationship to how they paint light. Monet is with an almost textural way with gesture and with Whistler, it’s more dark and emotional and with Turner, it’s ghostly. These are all things that I’m looking at in my work in terms of light.

F: You can describe light so many different ways.

JP: They’re all painting the same thing but there are slight differences. The frames in the painting are something that I’m working on. This is a raw frame and I’m okay with leaving it like this for now. I see my studio as a testing ground, trying a lot of different things, pushing things around, figuring out through trial and error and looking at the paticular moment or condition of light and framing.

F: You mentioned when talking about these pieces, your architecture background and just in general with all of these the materials, they’re used in the creation of – building supplies. They’re almost all contruction materials, and I know you cast these pieces and they are specific to certain things but they remind me of re-appropriated or found materials.

JP: They are construction materials – like the molding. It’s molding but it’s more related to the visual pattern. They might become more structures or armatures for the concrete work.

F: The series was on the ground before. This is the first time I’ve seen them leaned up against the wall in this space but they are still very much objects. I find that they are completly different from your other work. I don’t know if it’s the red clay material that makes it seem that way.

JP: The patina allows you to see more of the pressure and weight of the material in these. They are more like frames in a way in terms of how I constructed them. The interiors of these comes from the center. Originally I saw them as more wall pieces but I see them as something bigger.

You can find more of James Payne’s work at www.jamesedwinpayne.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.