15 February 2011

Patrick Michael Fitzgerald


                


Can you briefly describe what you do?

I am a painter. I use mostly conventional painting materials – oil paint on
canvas primarily. More recently, I have been using collage on my paintings as well; bits of cut canvas, cloth or paper. My working process is quite organic and I like the materiality and directness of painting. Each painting is a kind of entity or body, they are layered and grow in unexpected ways, they are meshed and woven together using different painterly components, small gestures and marks, threads and lines, swathes and bands. I like the idea of cultivation and gardens and the paintings often refer to these directly or indirectly. Obviously, colour, light and form are essential elements in my work but also the qualities of surface, tactility and touch are very important too. I have come to understand that painting is as much about energy as anything else, nothing is really solid and finally formed. I have always made drawings too and they have equal value to my paintings. The paintings feed into the drawings and the drawings feed into the paintings in equal measure.

What drives you to make work?

I think it probably comes from a need to bear a different kind of relationship towards so-called reality. A reality - which perhaps due to my own character traits - I frequently cannot help feeling disappointed or even disgusted by. One does everything despite onself, what at first might seem like an escape from reality, is not really an escape at all, but rather, over the years, the slow formation of a new relationship to reality and being, one that is more intense and free. On one level (and thinking of Kierkegaard) what I do is like marking the stages on life's way, hopefully with a certain grace. It is do with time and recognising one's inevitable passing.

Can you tell me something of your day-to-day working practices?

I walk to my studio in the morning and spend most of the day there.
I always have a number of paintings and drawings on the go at the same time.
I probably spend more time in the studio looking and thinking than physically working. The physical interventions are often quite quick though works can take a long time to make. My decisions are often governed by what could be loosely described as a kind of negative theology; I act in relation to what I do not want to do, to what I want to avoid doing. Essentially, this is just a tactic I have adopted to be able to deal with risk and failure.

How long have you been working in that way?

For a few years. My earlier work was more varied in its use of supports and perhaps more hermetic. I would often make wooden box-like structures that projected from the wall but they always had a very obvious front plane and were to be looked at and considered as paintings. They tended to be objects lost in the world. Now the paintings have more of an inward quality and are lost in themselves.

Which artists have had the greatest affect on your work?

There are many but I should mention Pierre Bonnard, Raoul de Keyser, Edvard Munch, Piet Mondrian…

What, outside visual art, informs your practice?

Anything, potentially, especially the stuff of my immediate everyday life, though it's often difficult to explain how it’s all filtered and transformed into something new as a painting; things remembered, the pattern on a summer dress, shadows on a path, trees (always trees), the profile of someone leaning against a bar, fragments of newspaper photographs, the corner of a room, someones face...

Music is very important for me, and certain kinds of cinema as well; Robert Bresson for example.  I’m always reading something too, bits of poetry, aphoristic writings, philosophical reflections, short stories , history….the newspaper!

How would you like people to engage with your work?

No matter how isolated and introspective life in the studio might be, it is difficult to imagine a painting ever being fully realised without an understanding audience for it. Everytime a viewer stands before a painting, he or she creates it anew with their gaze and through their direct experience of it. This is one reason why painting is fragile because after a certain point it always depends on someone else.

Have you seen anything recently that has made an impression?

Paintings by the Argentinian artist Varda Caivano, the Rene Daniels exhibition at the Camden Arts Center in London a few months ago, a viewing of Samuel Beckett’s “Film” which was part of the Moderns exhibition at the Irish Museum of Modern Art and though not something seen but rather something read, a wonderful short story by Robert Walser called “The Walk”.

Do you have anything exciting on the horizon?

The paintings that I’m currently working on are always the most exciting thing for me. But other than that, one of my recent larger paintings will be on show for the first time at the Irish Museum of Modern Art in May. I will also be showing some new drawings at the Drawing Now art fair in Paris this March and also in March a book launch for a recent publication about my work will take place at Rubicon Gallery in Dublin.

03 February 2011

David Aylsworth

              


Can you briefly describe what you do?

I make paintings.  Mostly they are paintings of a small number of simple shapes in pretty simple colors that have some sort of relationship to each other.

What drives you to make work?

Going into the studio day after day is not a lot of fun until I have found the spark that interests me in a particular painting.  Once that has taken hold, there are few greater satisfactions I get from just about any other activity in my life, and I can't wait to get back to working on a particular painting and seeing it to completion.

Can you tell me something of your day-to-day working practices?

I put down a whole lot of streaks, shapes, and gestures of paint in various colors and configurations until something catches my interest enough to focus in more intently.  Until that time, I usually have eight to ten canvases of various sizes going at the same time, and I will go from canvas to canvas with a can of paint, making marks of no particular relevance on each one.  Once I get interested in a particular one, I usually abandon all but that one for the duration until it is finished.  Then I dab and daub paint on the rest until I get interested again.  The absolute worst time is when I have a room full of white canvases, but I rarely am organized enough to get a new one prepared once I finish one and have 7 others in the pubescent stage.  Once I think I have finished one, I am on such a high, I just want to continue bringing the others up to that same level.
My painting at the start is hugely gestural and expressionistic with a lot of goopy paint and sometimes disgusting colors until I think I see something going on that points to a direction.  Lately, these directions get pretty hard-edged (or, as hard-edged as I can get without measuring or taping off areas) and the shapes get pretty angular as they point, prod, and run away from each other.  I have this nascent belief that if I feel out a straight line on a shape, and paint it as sharply and cleanly as I can with my not terribly steady hand, that something more is transmitted through that process than if I measured and taped off the same line and shape.  It's that something more that I can't really define for myself yet.  Maybe it's something that I don't want to define for fear that once defined, it won't interest me anymore.

How long have you been working in that way?

For my final project in school, I did a lazy version of geometric abstraction, but that seemed to lose relevance for me once I moved to Texas twenty years ago, so I started painting more gesturally and expressionistically, with a dash of goofy balloon animal type forms floating in and out of the slapdash paint.  Letting the gestural layers become more angular and giving in to my desire to see flat and filled in painted shapes has been a pretty recent thing--probably in the past three or four years.

Which artists have had the greatest affect on your work?

I guess you always think of the people who you've been thinking about most recently, don't you?  Recently I haven't been able to get a particular painting by George Braque out of my mind.  For clunky, socially awkward but distinctive shapes with personality, I think of people like Thomas Nozkowski, Arthur Dove, John Marin, Esphyr Slobodkina, Charles Burchfield, and Marsden Hartley.  For sheer beauty and awe-inspiring painting, I love looking at Elizabeth Murray, Georgia O'Keeffe, Lawren Harris, Rockwell Kent, Grant Wood

What, outside visual art, informs your practice?

Music.  Predominantly Broadway show style music, but recently a good deal of jazz and slowly a bit of grand opera.

How would you like people to engage with your work?

You always want to make something that is intriguing to look at.  I would hope that people would look at the shapes and how they interact as practically living and breathing beings that have a quirky existence that mirrors their own.  Most of my paintings are titled after some inner rhyme or line in a show tune lyric, and I always fantasize that someone as geeky as me about showtunes will see a painting, recognize the lyric, and have the song stuck in their head as a soundtrack while they look at the painting.  I don't think it ever really happens like that, but it is what I fantasize about the ideal viewer of my paintings...

Have you seen anything recently that has made an impression?

About a year ago, I saw an exhibition at the Peabody-Essex Museum in Salem, Massachusetts of paintings, drawings, and photographs by people who had made expeditions to Antarctica.  Lawren Harris, Rockwell Kent, Frederic Church and the like.  Everything was figurative, but maybe because of the majesty of icebergs and aurora boreali, the figuration often came remarkably close to abstraction.  I really got into the airtight, frozen and silent gravity and spiritual splendor of just about everything I saw there, and I've been trying (rather unsuccessfully) to bring those feelings into my own paintings back in my studio.  Maybe it's the activity of painting itself that distracts me from that feeling of wonder and awe... when I'm moving around, flinging paint, or fixating on straightening a line, it's hard to sit back and be awestruck... but I guess that's almost getting back to your question about "what drives you to work?", isn't it?

Do you have anything exciting on the horizon?

Talking with you here has been the most exciting thing on my horizon in a long time!  Aside from THAT, you mean?  I was lucky enough to get a grant last year from the Artadia organization, so I will be having work in a group show of grant awardees in Chicago later this year.  I've never shown any paintings in Chicago before, and I like the city a whole lot, so that should be fun.  I'm also lucky to work with two galleries in Texas--I had a show with the Holly Johnson Gallery in Dallas last May, and am just starting to talk with having another with Inman Gallery in Houston sometime in 2012.
But, probably the MOST exciting thing for me is that after about two seemingly endless weeks of mucking paint around blindly and stupidly, I just started getting a glimmer of something that I think might lead somewhere this morning.  It's such a relief to actually feel excited about going back to the studio!

02 February 2011

Emma Biggs & Matthew Collings

                
 
Can you briefly describe what you do?

Paint abstract paintings that have a lot of content to do with the following - how things in the world actually look; colour relationships; the way light works, and the fact that colour is light; finding convincing visual metaphors in an improvised abstract language for the way perception of tone affects form, as in graded tones on a body or a bit of architecture (etc); the way in which nature is perceived, even if its often unconsciously, to be structured and patterned, and the way that visual traditions built up over centuries (in all sorts of different types of art) are really about finding and refinding metaphors for that sense of structure and pattern.  

What drives you to make work?

Optimism, seriousness, interest in history. 

Can you tell me something of your day-to-day working practices?

Emma Biggs conceives the colour relationships and mixes the colours; Matthew Collings does the actual painting.  Within that framework, which is fairly rigid, the practice is extremely improvisatory.  There are no systems or preplanning.  A few relationships are set up, then some more, then some more, etc.  Most of the work is adjusting and altering. 

How long have you been working in that way?

We have been working together and exhibiting as a duo for just over ten years. 

Which artists have had the greatest affect on your work?

A collection of works in the maritime museum in Venice which are thank yous for people whose lives have been saved at sea.  They are mostly mid tones, because they're sea scenes, and then there will be certain accents or surprises, for example, a black boat.  Or there night be a little depiction of a Madonna or a symbolic representation of the number of souls saved at sea -- and these are likely to be in a much more brilliant colour. 

What, outside visual art, informs your practice?

Nature, textiles, movies, ceramics.
 
How would you like people to engage with your work?

Any way they want.  Look at it, we guess! 

Have you seen anything recently that has made an impression?

Richard Wentworth's film in "Modern British Sculpture" and the ancient Egyptian carving of a baboon at the beginning of that show.  

Do you have anything exciting on the horizon?

Our next show at the Fine Art Society, Bond Street, London, at the end of this year (2011).