Hypothetical Land

I think I’m getting back on the blogging bandwagon.  I’ve taken a solid 10 months off which is the same amount of time that I’ve been working at the new art center in Hanover.  The building didn’t actually open until last January, but in November plans started up.  Leading up to all of this, I showed up a couple times with detailed lists of things that I wanted to happen there and the answer to all of my lists was always “yes!” Now here we are leading into our NINTH gallery opening of the year and I could not be more excited about it.

This month the artists who will be showing are three painters dear to my heart.  Zheyu Zhou, Luke LeWand and Vanessa Varjian were all peers of mine in the MassArt painting department.  Each of them has a unique view of what it is to be making contemporary landscape paintings.  I could get lost in any of their paintings.  I went up to Zheyu’s studio in Quincy yesterday to pick up her pieces and you seriously could have gotten lost in one of those things!! The largest painting was not able to come with me because it was 6x8 feet.  Now I know Zheyu’s work is typically large, so I borrowed one of those big utility vans from Jeff’s family but ya, painting was still too big. 

Zheyu begins her pieces by carefully tie-dying the canvas she will later use to stretch, to begin the layout of the image she is heading towards.  After this is complete, Zheyu stretches her canvas around the stretcher bars to create her big squared off surface which then has to be primed with a clear primer or rabbit skin glue in preparation for the oil paint which is to come next.  Once Zheyu gets going with her oils and brushes, she focuses in on using a minimal amount of paint to create a solid blend of where the dye ends and the oil begins.  The process is meditative for her as she clears her mind and becomes one with this slow and careful process.

Zheyu is a truly gifted artist who began her artistic training while living in China.  It sounds as though her formative years of arts training were much more rigorous, as far as perfecting craftsmanship, than I have experienced here in the States.  This training started Zheyu on the way to an incredibly high level of proficiency; she could sit down and draw or paint anything she sees perfectly, but she chooses to create more ethereal works.  These paintings dance on the line of the conscience and unconscious, a beautiful place to be. 

Zheyu Zhou
Looking Homeward, 2011
Oil on Canvas
23"x28"

Zheyu Zhou
Meditation I, 2012
Oil on Canvas
45"x73"

I am so incredibly excited to see Luke and Vanessa's paintings tonight.  They haven't dropped them off yet so I'm not sure that the pieces I'm showing here will be in the gallery or not, but here are a couple of my favorites that I've pulled from their websites.

Luke paints in a way that just screams about his consistent studio practice.  You don't make gloppy, high chroma, gestural paintings like these if you're sitting down to paint once a month.  Luke is on a friggin roll and I love every second of it. There is so much to see here, I want to eat these paintings for breakfast.  Look at the consistency of the paint going from the top to bottom of the right side of "Runaway" and you'll see what I mean.  A thin background of medium yellow under thick, overlapping strokes of muddy green to a slightly thin thwap of blue, back to the yellow before hitting a patch of detailed green, possibly suggesting a plane, then you've got part of a pink figure hanging out on the edge and some fluid, ink wash consistency of green that circles your eyes around the bottom and back up the other side of the painting.  And that is just looking at one side of the painting, holy crap I can't handle it.  I want to jump into these paintings and swim away for one thousand days.

Luke LeWand
Runaway, 2013
Oil and Acrylic on Panel
14"x10"

Luke LeWand
Hills and Homes
Acrylic on Panel
10"x14"

Vanessa Varjian is looking around, picking up all of the interesting patches of light that she sees and putting them into a bottle for us to use as a nightlight.  These are solid, heavy pieces, that transversely are bringing up vague feeling memories.  I UNDERSTAND "November Sun Comfort," I have lived in that world and it has made me feel good.  Along with this Autumn painting below, Vanessa also has a bunch of paintings she did of the snowy landscape.  These are paintings I need to surround myself with in the cold months.  They remind me that there is light, beautiful beautiful light, even during our arid and dying days.

Another thing I'm in love with in these paintings are the dynamic shapes.  In "November Sun Comfort," look in the top right where the yellow horizon line bleeds into the gray sky.  It picks up in a couple spots and then kind of dances around in the outline of some organic and lumpy rectangle.  I don't know what is going on with that shape other than compositionally pulling what is happening below and above the horizon line together, a staple to further create the feeling of solidity in this dreamscape of a land.

Vanessa Varjian
November Sun Comfort, 2012
Oil and Acrylic on Canvas
60"x72"

Vanessa Varjian
Garden Beds: Long After the Storm, 2013
Watercolor and Acrylic on Paper
9"x12"

Opening is this Friday from 6-8 at Laura's Center for the Arts in Hanover.  You can follow this link for more details.  If you miss the opening but want to come and check out the work anyway, it will be on display until the week of October 21st, just let me know when you want to stop in and I'll be sure to be there to give you a tour of the space.

Also, here are links to the artists' websites in case you want to see more of their work:

Zheyu Zhou

Luke LeWand

Vanessa Varjian

Photos of people in their homes at night.

Untitled No. 50
Pasadena, CA 1995
Digital Chromogenic Print 38 x 46.5"

Michele Iverson takes photos of people in their homes at night.  They don't know she is there and they never do.

Untitled No. 59
Pasadena, CA 1995
Gelatin Silver Print 38 x 46.5"

Michele Iverson knows that what she is doing is perverse and intrusive.  This excites her. Her excitement makes her uncomfortable.  She is interested in this discomfort.

Untitled No. 62
Pasadena, CA 1995
Digital Chromogenic Pring 38 x 46.5"

Iverson says that she would not want photos like this taken of her.  However, she quickly follows that statement with the acknowledgment that if photos like this were to be taken of her, it would be her own fault for not closing the curtains.

Untitled No. 63
Pasadena, CA 1996
Lightjet C Print 40 x 48"

Have you ever looked in through somebody's window at night?  Even just from a car window driving by?  I have.  I wonder sometimes about what color people paint their walls or how they set up their furniture.  I've never really SEEN anything though.  Maybe if I hung around for a while, I might.

Untitled No. 66
Pasadena, CA 1996
Lightjet C Pring 38 x 46"

Follow this link to the website for the Third Coast International Audio Festival and listen to what Michele Iverson has to say about her work.

Follow this link to see Iverson's website where you will find more photos from the "Night Surveillance Series."

Artist Interview: Robert Jessup

Alright.  So I just recently had a whole bunch to say about Robert Jessup.  After I said what I had to say, I figured I would take a shot in the dark and send him an email letting him know just what it was that I had been saying. 

So now I have something else to say about Robert Jessup.  Dude is a gemstone.  What a great guy.  Robert got right back to me, both thanking me for my interest and responding that he would be “delighted” to answer some of my questions about his work.

A bulk of my questions centered around one bigger idea:  “What is going on with the major switch in stylistic choice that began in 2008?"  Looking through Robert’s work during this time period,  it is clear to anyone that this artist was making some major decisions about how to make a painting.

Check out these paintings:

2008

"Man Climbing a Cliff in the Mountains", 2008, 68 inches by 64 inches , oil on canvas

2010

"Robert", 2010, 44 inches by 42 inches, oil on canvas

2012

"Landscape with Two Figures" , 2012, 60 inches by 66 inches, oil

Pretty clear, right?

“My work has changed drastically since returning from a life-changing trip to Europe in 2008. I went with the intention of learning from the techniques of the great Baroque masters, but I came back fueled by a spirit of radical invention and expression. While my narrative paintings had always been anchored in my ability to envision what I could remember and imagine, I returned from this trip determined to not just envision, but to become aggressively visionary.  I wanted to reconfigure my imagined world, to subvert what I knew and destroy what was comfortable. So I changed what I imagined. Then I changed how I drew.  Then I changed how I painted. Now, my drawing is primarily directed by my capriciously impulsive, insouciant, and perverse Line.”

  

I am in love with Robert's more recent body of work and am so thankful (Thanksgiving day post people!) that this transition developed.

In the studio:

Another thing that I am thankful for is the dedication that was drilled into me at my alma mater, to straight up do WORK in the studio.  I think my parents can probably get in a bit on that hard work and dedication thankfulness too, but I'm getting away from my point here.  Because of this beliefe that hard and steady work in the studio is so vital, I am strongly compelled to hear about other artists’ studio practice.  The variation from artist to artist is huge, but one thing seems consistent and that is that the artists who go to the studio with consistency, and make SOMETHING, even if it is terrible or unimportant, seem to be the most satisfied with their efforts.  I remember hearing Dana Schutz (post about her work from a little while ago) answer questions about this during a talk she did at BU four years ago; she sleeps in, gets coffee, makes her way to the studio in the afternoon sometime, looks at things, preps for a while, breaks to eat, then paints until about 4am.  I could live like that.  laxin laxin laxin WORK.

What a beautiful mess this pallet is!


























A studio day for Robert is any day that he does not have a class over at the University of North Texas where he is a Professor of Drawing and Painting in the College of Visual Arts and Design.

"Sometimes, the painting sessions are fifteen minutes, sometimes they are three to four hours..."  "I'm doing these little works on paper and when I don't feel quite up to the messy work of slogging around in the oil paint, I can make these little pictures. My table for doing them is set up in my studio, where I can look up and see the canvas that I'm working on. I usually only have one painting on canvas going at a time, but during the course of a painting, I may have several works on paper going. I also usually don't complete a work on paper in one sitting. I often have a fast start of one sort or another then leave it alone. Then I'll come back and respond to those first markings and try to advance the form and nascent imagery. Altogether, these little works probably take between two and four hours over a couple of days to bring to completion. The paintings proceed in much the same way, but over a longer period of days and sessions. Most paintings, though, have always been completed in a week to ten days."

Influences:

A woman looks at 'Le jardin d'Hiver,' 1968-1970, a work by French artist Jean Dubuffet 

Jean Dubuffet

Sean Scully

Guston, de Kooning and Picasso were also on the list.

Dubuffet and Scully are two artists I haven't seen before, always thrilled to see more artist's work.  I know the last three artists' bodies of work but they are definitely worth looking at for those who are unfamiliar.  

So that wraps it up.  A big thank you to Robert Jessup for being game for my question, hopefully this is something I can do with other artists in the future.

Oldies but Goodies and Autopsies

I've recently had a spike in interest for some of my internal organ pieces from back in 2009.  So far, I've located two uteruses and a liver.

Most of the organ paintings had that colbalt blue background.  I used reference photos from this amazing and incredibly gross book I found in the library at MassArt.  I think I was originally looking for references for some figurative work but instead found these photos taken during autopsies.  The organs were taken from the human and put on this blue table and in some cases pinned down to show all the nooks and crannies.  I love the flash you can see shining off the organs from the camera, things are slimy. 

I really need to find that book again.