Filed under: In the Studio, Process Of A Painting | Tags: Ellen C. Caldwell, Erin Murray, In the Studio, Nancy Margolis Gallery, Process of a Painting
Erin Murray’s (NAP #69, #98) oil paintings have a way of making the everyday environment feel surreal, fluid, informal, and in flux. Regular land- and cityscapes are painted to feel slightly off, making the viewer feel faintly uneasy compositionally, yet vaguely at home geographically.
Erin Murray | Settling (good neighbors), 2013, oil on panel, 24” x 24”
Familiar scenes – a pool, a backyard, a house, a farm – look commonplace, but feel so subtly upended that it leaves me, as a viewer, uncertain about the lonely and troubling feeling I have in contemplating and taking in her works. Regardless of my feelings while processing Murray’s works and subjects, the end result of her works is something for which most artists strive and most viewers yearn – her paintings are thought provoking, conceptual, and meditative, all in one. - Ellen C. Caldwell, Los Angeles Contributor
Filed under: In the Studio, Process Of A Painting | Tags: Ellen C. Caldwell, In the Studio, Matthew Bourbon, Process of a Painting
Matthew Bourbon (NAP #90, #102) creates a wonderful balance in his paintings – he fills organic shapes and figures with loud, bold, geometric shapes. Rather than seeming meddlesome or intrusive, though, these shapes look and feel quite at home in the spaces they occupy.
Matthew Bourbon | The Psychologist, 2012, acrylic on canvas, 48.5″ x 30″
Bourbon shared his step-by-step process for and thoughts behind his painting Ms. Motives in this Process of a Painting piece…There are quiet andwonderful moments throughout his process – one of my favorites being the point in the painting where he has painted Ms. Motives’ legs so naturalistically, before covering them in their metaphorical and painterly geometric “tights.” - Ellen C. Caldwell, Los Angeles Contributor
Filed under: In the Studio, Process Of A Painting | Tags: Ellen C. Caldwell, In the Studio, Laura Lark, Process of a Painting
Laura Lark (NAP #102) has been making pointillist portraits and video installations for the past decade. Painstakingly detailed and almost obsessive in artistic process and dot application (similar in methodology but even more precise than someone like Bonard Hughins), her portraits result in a delicate and even nostalgic aesthetic that walks a fine line; the softness of the images is almost undermined by the painstaking efforts it takes Lark to complete them. Seeing the miniscule details and knowing the time and potential agony involved in creating such works opens a window to viewers and makes the work far more complex than the surface of a portrait.
Installation view of Simulacra, Gaddis Geeslin Gallery, Sam Houston State University, Huntsville, TX. Ted Kincaid | Laura Lark | Shawn Smith, Curated by Michael Henderson, October 3 – 27, 2011.
Her work evokes mixed emotions: I found myself feeling sensitivity towards those portrayed, while also feeling a foreboding sense of anxiety as I contemplated the familiarity of the subject’s face and wondered why/how/and if I knew them, even though I knew I didn’t… Here, Lark’s end product, is not the portrait itself, but the video that captures both her process and the passage of time. In documenting her creation of and reflection upon ephemera, there is something of a meta-narrative running through her work that speaks not just to time, but to memory, fleetingness, and permanence all at once. - Ellen Caldwell, Los Angeles Contributor (more…)
Filed under: In the Studio, Interview, Q&A | Tags: Amanda Manitach, Eric Elliott, James Harris Gallery, Pairings
Eric Elliott’s fourth solo exhibit at James Harris Gallery, called Pairings, shows a body of work getting much muckier. And the muck is getting more colorful. Paint, slowly and painstakingly built up in daubs, nearly curls off the canvas like calcified petals, resembling the flora with which he is obsessed. (His botanical illustrations fill notebooks scattered around his studio; dried bouquets languish in vases.) Elliott’s fascination with rendering the representational abstract is consistently apparent in his work: the subject of his paintings is sometimes legible, sometimes it spastically dissolves. Pairings takes this study of abstraction to a dialogic place. As per the title, Pairings displays paintings side-by-side as diptychs and triptychs, situating identical or related subjects next to one another. Yet each is executed with different approaches to material and mark making that evolve as part of the ongoing painting process. - Amanda Manitach, Seattle Contributor
Eric Elliott
Filed under: In the Studio, Process Of A Painting | Tags: Ellen C. Caldwell, In the Studio, Jeffrey Deane Hall, Man Recast, Process of a Painting
Working with iconic images to unite similar subject matter, painter Jeffrey Deane Hall (NAP# 100) combines mathematical and painterly techniques to merge media and themes together. His paintings are a mix of assemblage and collage and they have an architectural and puzzle-like aesthetic.
Jeffrey Deane Hall | Man Recast, oil painting on panel, 18×24″, 2012.
In “Man Recast,” Hall explores the subject of marriage through two well-known and lauded works: Jan van Eyck’s The Arnolfini Wedding (or The Arnolfini Portrait), 1434, and Marcel Duchamp’s The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelor’s, Even (or The Large Glass), 1915 to 1923. During his 45-day process, Hall superimposes shapes and contours from both existing works to begin creating new shapes, lines, and planes where the painting fragments intersect.
He reworks these masters by creatively reexamining the art historic canon, bringing both the subject and work to the present, and challenging viewers to consider what makes a marriage last—and even, perhaps, what makes a painting last? In this Process of a Painting, Hall explains his process and methodology as he recasts van Eyck and Duchamp in Man Recast. - Ellen C. Caldwell, Los Angeles Contributor
Filed under: In the Studio, Process Of A Painting | Tags: Ellen C. Caldwell, In the Studio, Process of a Painting, Robert Josiah Bingaman
In his painting “Texas,” Robert Josiah Bingaman (NAP #90, #101) traces and records the feelings surrounding his night wanderings and musings as he is in different states across the U.S. So far, Bingaman has completed eight of this Nocturne series, with “Texas” being the most recent and most intricately recorded, process-wise.
As part of our Process of a Painting series at NAP, we were eager to share Bingaman’s journey in beginning and completing “Texas.” For the most part, his process, video, and images speak for themselves. But he has provided additional narrative to accompany some of the images below as well.
- Ellen C. Caldwell, Los Angeles Contributor
Robert Josiah Bingaman | Texas, 2012, acrylic on linen, 61 x 102 in. (more…)
Filed under: In the Studio, Process Of A Painting | Tags: Aurelien Couput, Ellen C. Caldwell, In the Studio, Process of a Painting
The topic of visibility and invisibility is something I am really drawn to in art – what an artist chooses to make visible or invisible is a theme that I find to be fascinating, densely packed, and layered.
Aurélien Couput’s (NAP #99) painting Enola Gay falls in this category. As the title suggests, the subject of his work is the Boeing B-29 bomber used to bomb Hiroshima. However, Couput eliminates the object, central focus, and namesake altogether, shifting the subject of his work to the aftereffects brought on by Enola Gay.
Aurélien Couput | Enola Gay, 2012, Oil on canvas, 75 1/2 in. x 133 in.
In making Enola Gay invisible, Couput makes the horror, tragedy, and force of the event visible and central. Below, we follow his progress and process of completing his painting, accompanied by his own words and sentiments. - Ellen C. Caldwell, Los Angeles Contributor
Filed under: In the Studio | Tags: Amanda Manitach, Chris Buening, Greg Kucera, Joey Veltkamp, Pole Drift
Chris Buening’s (NAP #85) three large pieces at Prole Drift weave in and out of themselves, mesmerizing snarls of color and line and coiling worms. Illustration of Events Happening is the title of the show, as well as the name of a diagrammatic installation on one wall that consists of 29 resin and plaster discs connected by a network of brushstrokes. Embedded in each disc, like fossils trapped in translucent bands of sedimentary strata, are layers of correction fluid drawings, rainbow foil, glitter and Sharpie. To either side of the installation are two large paintings on paper. One of the paintings has been meticulously cut out to form a hydra-like lacework of earthworms (as colorful as Gummi Worms). Facing it is a prismatic, molecular abstraction pulsing with bright spots and worms. Worms are everywhere.
Chris Buening and Illustration of Events Happening (wall installation), 2012, wood, powder pigment, foil, epoxy resin, correction fluid, and watercolor, size varies.
As the title suggests, Illustration of Events Happening sheds light on some recent events in Buening’s life. I met him at his studio to discuss it. – Amanda Manitach, Seattle Contributor
Filed under: In the Studio, Process Of A Painting | Tags: Ellen C. Caldwell, In the Studio, Jave Gakumei Yoshimoto, Mark Schoening, Process of a Painting
Jave Gakumei Yoshimoto’s (NAP #99 & 102) recent work “Baptism of Concrete Estuary” was massive in size and massively received.
After the 2011 Tohoku earthquake and tsunami in Japan, Yoshimoto began working on a scroll painting to highlight the destruction and devastation the country faced. What began as a small endeavor, however, grew to be a 30 foot long scroll painting that also acted as a fundraiser for building an art center in Japan in the wake of nature’s destruction.
Because “Baptism” was never meant to be 30 feet long at its inception, though, Yoshimoto returned to his original idea this year, using a traditional rectangular piece of paper as his canvas and a small study as his inspiration. Just as we did with Mark Schoening, we are pleased to feature Yoshimoto’s process through a diary of images. - Ellen C. Caldwell, Los Angeles Contributor.
Images after the jump!
“Harbinger of Late Winter Day’s Dusk.” Holbein acryla gouache on BFK Rives 270gm paper, 30″x41″
Filed under: In the Studio, Q&A | Tags: Amanda Manitach, In the Studio, Pole Drift, Q&A, Seattle, susanna bluhm
This month in the back gallery at Prole Drift, Susanna Bluhm is showing her latest installment in an ongoing series of works based on passages from The Bible’s nightmare-and-sex-heavy Song of Solomon. You may remember her lush paintings of islands (not part of the biblical series) reviewed alongside work by Cable Griffith at SOIL Gallery last September. This new work at Prole Drift cites the darker passages of the Song of Solomon and comprises fifteen prints pulled from a single plate that’s been etched with images of an infant’s incubator, breathing tubes, little foxes, twigs, creeping ivy and bottles of milk. The prints themselves are wildly different, having been inked or wiped with varying degrees of thickness, then collaged or painted over.
On a work table in Bluhm’s studio is a small children’s Bible bound in red leather that she says she picked up at a local Goodwill. It’s spread open to a chapter in The Song of Solomon and has been heavily annotated with red ink and underlined in pencil, outlining plans for paintings. - Amanda Manitach, Seattle Contributor
