Sarah McNulty

       

          

 

Can you briefly describe what you do?

I make paintings. I also make drawings, objects and projections in relationship to the paintings. They are primarily abstractions, often with ties to the physical world and destructive elements of it, though ultimately I’m far more concerned with the materiality than any subject.

What drives you to make work?

The possibility of immediate, physical images that may alter experience and reveal greater truths.

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

I spend a lot of time in the studio surrounded by my paintings, maybe 15 or so on varying surfaces, as well as images, drawings and found/made scraps. I go back and forth between surfaces and scales, which vary between human and handheld. The surfaces of the paintings (their solidity, depth, edge and detail) play a strong role in the development of the images. 

A good deal of the time is spent looking and rearranging various constellations, making dumb work, photographing them to view them differently, reading, listening to music.  The paintings are often worked over, layer after layer, built up and scratched back.  Sometimes they form out of the remains of previous paintings, by re-use of materials or refinement of certain elements of imagery.

Action comes in frenetic bursts after long periods of stillness. I am interested in materiality taking over, when images and objects turn and deceive, suddenly becoming foreign. This happens when they writhe and jerk, as though outside my own physicality. Braced by the tension of making and ruining, they frequently become something not foreseen as an end-point, where a linear route of actions recedes.

How long have you been working in that way?

For about the last 5 years the work has become more focused in the particular direction it seems to be heading.

Which artists have had the greatest affect on your work?

Guston never ceases to have a wild impact upon viewing. Also Mary Heilmann, Raoul de Keyser, Richard Tuttle, Vilhelm Hammershøi, Manet, and Velazquez have been important recently.  I think the other artists that I spend time in conversation with on a regular basis have the greatest affect.

What, outside visual art, informs your practice?

Natural and manmade disasters, uninhabitable landscapes, decay, absence. I’m also quite fascinated with the idea of beasts.  

I watch a lot of film, and am partial to the uncynical beauty and awkwardness of Herzog’s, and Villi Knudsen’s volcano films are some of my favorite footage. 

I’m also interested in linguistics and translation, whether words or images, and usually studying a foreign language.  It’s been Danish for the last couple of years.

How would you like people to engage with your work?

I think that looking at work should be an active process. Ideally, I would like it to really take over when viewed.

 

Have you seen anything recently that has made an impression?

I keep thinking about the scene in Jean-Pierre Melville’s ‘Doulos’ where Maurice digs out a hole in the earth under the lamplight to hide the stash. It’s a beautiful scene, so tactile, all thrashing hands and flying dirt under the glow.

Also some interesting work by Phil Root, Paul Housley and Lydia Gifford in recent shows.

Do you have anything exciting on the horizon?

I’ve moved into a new, bright studio not long ago so am looking forward to getting to work in it now that it finally feels like a space I understand. Also the second half of a recent show I was in in Munich will take place here in London early next year.

Trevor Sutton

              

Can you briefly describe what you do?

I make paintings, prints and other works on paper.

What drives you to make work?

It’s the activity that feels most real to me.

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

In recent years I have once again returned to working with grids, after a long period of making glazed, atmospheric paintings that often employed a square or circular format. My latest paintings are constructed and painted with oil and paper collage on board. They refer to solid architectural surfaces – facades and interiors in preference to the skies and smoke of work made in the 90’s and for most of the last decade.

I go to my London studio most days, where alongside making work I read, think and listen to a lot of music.

How long have you been working in that way?

Since I gave up teaching at Chelsea School of Art in 2000.

Which artists have had the greatest affect on your work?

Roger Ackling, Ellsworth Kelly, Brice Marden, Agnes Martin, Jeremy Moon, Mark Rothko.

What, outside visual art, informs your practice?

Being in the landscape, being by the sea, being alone, being in Ireland, being in Japan. Music.

How would you like people to engage with your work?

Slowly, seriously and enthusiastically

Have you seen anything recently that has made an impression?

The Giant’s Causeway, County Antrim.

Do you have anything exciting on the horizon?

An exhibition has just opened in Austria.

DOUBLE VISION: Carol Robertson + Trevor Sutton

Ritter Gallery, Klagenfurt, Austria

16 June – 30 July 2011

Peter Blundell

                  

 

Can you briefly describe what you do?

I make paintings in oil on canvas on a domestic scale. I use handmade stencils cut from card to create compositions that I cannot fully anticipate. The paintings are built up in layers over time, sometimes I try to ignore what is on the surface at other times I will re-trace the forms onto a new layer. The intention is resolve the painting into a concrete pictorial form. It is very open to begin with and goes through many changes but after a time the painting determines itself.

What drives you to make work?

Painting for me is an outlet, a release that helps me channel thought, experience and allows for an element of risk to be taken into an on-going activity. I enjoy the feeling of being immersed in a prolonged exploration of my own making where I don’t know the outcome.

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

I work on around fifteen paintings in the studio at any one time. I select a painting to work on for the session. Sometimes I begin painting immediately, at other times I may loosen up by drawing or cutting out a stencil to use. I most often paint flat on a table and begin by wiping down or painting over a previous layer.

How long have you been working in that way?

I have worked in this way since studying at Central St. Martins in 2006. Prior to this, I made more systems-based paintings that were completed in a single session. I used grids and structural motifs worked out beforehand in studies to regulate the flow of paint. My current work is a reaction to that way of working in that it evolves organically and is resolved over a longer period.

Which artists have had the greatest affect on your work?

I don’t feel directly influenced by any one artist when I am making the work in the studio, however after a while I see aspects of other artists work emerge in mine. Recently I might have recognised Jean Fautrier, El Greco and Jessica Stockholder, although maybe not all in one painting!

What, outside visual art, informs your practice?

I guess playing bass guitar and vocalising in Temperatures informs the painting practice in some way. We fall in and out of grooves and patterns in the music which is all improvised so there is a clear element of risk added to a real-time live performance.

How would you like people to engage with your work?

I’d be just happy if they engaged with it at all, but I guess equal measures of puzzlement and joy would be good.

Karl Bielik

                 

Can you briefly describe what you do?

I make oil paintings on canvas and board, alongside this watercolours, inks, drawings and collages on cardboard and paper.

What drives you to make work?

I chose to paint 15 years ago and I am going to stick with it, it’s a long road to become a painter and I’ve got some distance to go. The feeling that painting is a frustrating and fruitless exercise is never that far away - but when one comes together it makes the hanging-in-there worthwhile.

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

I keep long and irregular studio hours. I begin by looking for connections between some of the 30 or so paintings which scatter my studio walls, floors and tables. I move paintings around to form smaller more digestible groupings, turn them upside down, turn some to the wall and decide where to start. I’ll choose a painting, a colour and mix some paint and start to change things, paint over ones that aren’t working, scrape the paint off of others and start the process again. The works feed each other and slowly start to form connections, which offer temporary solutions to problems and then themselves become problems further down the line. My paintings have no hard and fast direction and while sometimes making a painting can be quick process, others will take months. The ones that I cannot find anyway of adding to and don’t destroy, will be moved around the studio untouched until I realize they are completed. If I can’t find a place to begin a painting I will start making some marks on some old card or paper knocking around the studio, or just sit, look, think, drink, smoke or read, till I can work out what needs doing.

How long have you been working in that way?

It is around 6 years since I stopped using words and collage in my painting, reduced the scale of my work and started working in oils. Before that my studio was in my flat, or my flat was in my studio and I had a totally different approach to making work.

Which artists have had the greatest affect on your work?

Kurt Schwitters - as a 20 year old ex-electrician and drifting graphic design student who was making collages from found materials, my tutor Charlie Laycock told me to go to the library and look at his work. That started things rolling(slowly) and during the following years I made some work but was never truly focused on it until I had my first studio at the age of 28. Since then the list of artists I like is long but recently Diebenkorn, Sillman, Baselitz, Kippenberger, Tarkovsky, Ballard, Bukowski, The Fall and Daniel Johnston.

What, outside visual art, informs your practice?

Everything but nothing directly, bar photographs I take that can offer me a way into a new painting, an iron gate, a rust stained walls, washing lines - the photographs only function is as a starting point. Film, literature and music play a huge part in my life and may somehow inform my work. I also make music under the name Lark which functions as a solo project and a live band, we have had a full band album and singles released on Care and the Community Records, which is being followed up by a solo album release sometime in the next few months.

How would you like people to engage with your work?

First of all by looking and then they can take that where they want… preferably by discussing, exhibiting, publishing and buying it.

Have you seen anything recently that has made an impression?

Paintings in recent London shows by Varda Caivano, Patrick Galway, Philip Allen and Pheobe Unwin.  The films of Bela Tarr and Wim Wenders.

Do you have anything exciting on the horizon?

A group show at The Drawers Gallery in London in October this year. The people at ‘Abstract Critical’ saw my work in the Marmite Painting Prize have been to my studio and filmed a documentary on my work which once edited will be online in the coming months. Phyllida Barlow has chosen my painting ‘Father’ for the Creekside Open 2011 in June. An Artist in Prague, where I lived some years back, is going to curate a solo show of my work in November this year. The 6th Terrace Annual is a one day show I curate, it is held outdoors on former wasteland at the back of my studio and will be on Saturday August 27th this year. Painting.

Dustin London

                

                                     

Can you briefly describe what you do?

I make impermanent, site specific, small-scale wall paintings.

What drives you to make work?

Making work is the by-product of my need to penetrate as deep within myself as I possibly can. I was five years of age when I first tried to imagine nothingness while laying in a bathtub. It made me keenly aware of myself, my existence as a human being, and my connection to the universe. Making work keeps me close to this place, maintains this connection and makes my life feel most worthwhile.

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

For me seeing and thinking is as important as making, and of course informs what I make. So, simply being present in the world and seeing things around me with a clear mind is probably half of what I do. I also make thin smooth shapes on the wall with joint compound and then paint on them. The decisions of what shapes to make and what marks or compositions go on these shapes is largely intuitive and made with the other shapes and compositions around them in mind, as well as what has come before on the wall. Documenting the work also takes up a significant portion of the day and is hugely important since it is all that remains once a work is destroyed. It can sometimes take longer to photograph a piece than to make it.

How long have you been working in that way?

One year. Though before that I was making oil paintings on canvas that had similar imagery and was based on very fleeting peripheral visual experience. I was accumulating my own stockpile of paintings that took less and less time to achieve the freshness I wanted, which became kind of ridiculous after a while. So, it seemed to me that the process of it, that basic visual thought, was the important thing and that the work could actually be impermanent rather than referencing something impermanent.

Which artists have had the greatest affect on your work?

Pierre Bonnard for his intimacy, buoyancy, and the way everything he sees feels like a nerve ending exposing all his feelings and thoughts. Philip Guston for his bluntness of mark and form and his deeply felt sense of magic and mystery. Edward Gorey who shares a love of dead trees against overcast skies.

What, outside visual art, informs your practice?

The centimeter rainbow cast on my wall by my front door's sunset peephole. The cheap clapboard of an old white house against a slightly cooler white sky. Icicles refracting. The moon's slow motion across the lens of a telescope.

How would you like people to engage with your work?

In person and in time. Unfortunately, documentation is the only thing most people will see, but hopefully there is something to be gleaned from that in its own way.

Have you seen anything recently that has made an impression?

The opening sequence of Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives was one of the most amazing filmic intros I have ever seen. It's a very slow, still, dark scene of a water buffalo in the jungle at dusk. Also, a scene toward the end of Kurosawa's One Wonderful Sunday where a despairing poor couple finds themselves in a desolate amphitheater and Numasaki tries to cheer up his lover by jumping onstage to conduct Schubert's Unfinished Symphony to an imaginary orchestra, only to be squelched by the howling of the wind. Absolutely beautiful.

Do you have anything exciting on the horizon?

I'm going on a residency to Millay in June, followed by a nomadic few months of camping, and then spending a year in the desert in New Mexico to focus on my work. Very much looking forward to it!

Philip Miner

                  

Can you briefly describe what you do?

I make paintings, drawings and collages. I am interested in how I can make paintings that reflect the momentary with a clear acknowledgment that it’s not important to be novel or new, but that there’s so much to build upon and consider.

What drives you to make work?

The uncertainty in our time; everything today seems so tenuous, hard to get a grasp on. Making work is a way for me to intellectually process the material experience of living today. Painting exists somewhere between the see-able and the say-able.

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

I take snapshots that mix into a wide array of source materials ranging from art history to images downloaded from the Internet. In the studio these images act as starting points for works. I’m always looking at and drawing from these images. I like to try to make paintings that have a historical awareness. Each move relates to something that already exists in the world, and I like how that ties into a larger construction of the universe.

How long have you been working in that way?

I would think with acute awareness that I was working this way only the past four or five years, but actually perhaps as many as ten.

Which artists have had the greatest affect on your work?

Matisse has really taught me to think about the relations between scale and color, Robert Ryman took that down to the wall, Mondrian keeps me within the picture plane, while Blinky Palermo and Josef Albers are about interrelations. Recent curiosities in still life subjects have led me to 18^th century still lifes. It’s interesting to me how the scale shifted from the Baroque to intimate paintings. And I really love to see non-representation in works prior to Modernism, as in Celtic manuscript illumination.

What, outside visual art, informs your practice?

I look at a lot of design, both graphic and architectural. I like to see what industrial designers are inventing. Lots of reading – lately I’ve had a lot of interest in the classics – Homer, Plato. With that in mind, I’ve also been listening to a lot of 20^th and 21^st century Classical music, composers like Glass, Riley Adams, Luciano Berio, Elliott Carter, Edgar Varese, which is totally new for me, but so richly complex.

How would you like people to engage with your work?

What I like about paintings is that they can be short or long experiences, but the viewer can hopefully repeat viewing the work and find something different each time.

Have you seen anything recently that has made an impression?

There was a recent show of Picasso that I took in – the drawings and collages that he did at the point of breaking into Cubism. It all hinges on his guitars. I found that level of engagement with something compelling.

Do you have anything exciting on the horizon?

I’m working on new drawings and paintings that follow my recent show.

Lauren Portada

                

             

Can you briefly describe what you do?

I paint and draw.

What drives you to make work?

Making work is an active relationship with seeing the world around me and the need to articulate those observations. 

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

I am in the studio about half the week. I teach part time at a few different institutions and that keeps me in constant motion. I work on gessoed linen and panel, and while waiting for paint to dry, I make drawings so my ideas do not get stuck. I think Hemingway said it best in A Moveable Feast:

"The best way is always to stop when you are going good and when you know what will happen next. If you do that every day … you will never be stuck. Always stop while you are going good and don’t think about it or worry about it until you start to write the next day. That way your subconscious will work on it all the time. But if you think about it consciously or worry about it you will kill it and your brain will be tired before you start."

For me, it's important to come to a working place of knowing what needs to happen next as well as being surprised by what could happen next. I'm in constant negotiation: present-future, studio practice, work, loved ones, responsibilities, yoga, art-viewing, hiking, composting, day-dreaming, commuting.

How long have you been working in that way?

I've been working pretty consistently with a palette knife for 7 years. I abandoned the brush for a harder edge and ability to layer and scrape paint. In 2005 I received a Fulbright to India where dust and cross-contamination was inevitable. (I would open my studio door and a whirlwind of dust and debris would plow through). It helped me to be less precious and precise with my edges, which changed the space of the paintings.

Which artists have had the greatest affect on your work?

Giotto, Jasper Johns, Hans Hoffman, Piero della Francesca, Charles Birchfield, Vija Celmins, Raoul de Keyser, Alex Katz and, oh yes! Morandi: his color relationships continue to baffle and impress me.

What, outside visual art, informs your practice?

Expansive landscapes, horizons, voids and icebergs. I'm currently applying for a grant to go to the Antarctic to study glacial dynamism and alpenglow - how light translates space and shape in an environment with 'little' color and lots of reflection.

How would you like people to engage with your work?

I'm satisfied when someone is able to engage with my work on the work's terms. Maybe that seems somehow arbitrary, but I think it can be quite difficult actually; the work is always changing, whether due to lighting, environment, time, current conditions of our society. The work is connected to all of these aspects and also outside of it.

Have you seen anything recently that has made an impression?

Christian Marclay's The Clock. It was at Paula Cooper Gallery this February. What a feat of sound and visual collaging.

Do you have anything exciting on the horizon?

I'm a member of Regina Rex, and we co-curate and look at artists for shows in our space. We are a thirteen-strong artists' collective nearly one year old. This has afforded us the opportunity to have a dialogue with many artists and writers. I'm also very excited about what is now happening in the studio; I'm in the middle of finishing an 8 x 18 ft painting, the largest piece I've made to date.

Jonathan Allmaier

          

Can you briefly describe what you do?

I make painting-reality-based paintings.

What drives you to make work?

I try to be a better person.

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

I make the paint from pigment, because this is already almost a painting. I build and re-cut flat-front stretchers so that the stretcher is the foundational drawing for the painting. I stretch and prepare the canvas as an extension of this drawing, re-stretching the canvas if the stretcher is re-cut, or if the painting appears on the other side of the canvas. I want the paintings to make themselves, so I am the studio assistant for the paintings.

How long have you been working in that way?

I started making paint in graduate school. The working practice is really newer than that, though, because now the paintings make their own painting-context too.
This is important for me because every painting needs a painting-context, and it’s ridiculous for me to try to provide it ‘myself.’ I think it appeared that artists could do that at other time periods, but I think that is an illusion fostered by a certain kind of historical momentum, which is not the kind we have now.

Which artists have had the greatest affect on your work?

Goya, Yves Klein, Andy Warhol, Paul Thek. Of course Velazquez, but I am on the Goya-Warhol side of Velazquez, as opposed to the Manet-Picasso side (although I love those artists too, I’m just not on that side). Dona Nelson, who was also my teacher. Thornton Dial, Joe Zucker, James Ensor, Giotto, Harriet Korman, John Marin.
There are many artists I admire that I would like to have an effect on it, but I think this is only partially up to me.

What, outside visual art, informs your practice?

I like to read, and I keep a notebook. I don’t read much art-philosophy, but for metaphysics and philosophy of mind I like Derek Parfit, Saul Kripke, Thomas Nagel, Nietzsche, and Kant. Also folk tales, like Native American stories and the Arabian Nights. I also like to read literature, but I don’t clearly know how that informs the practice, except for maybe indirectly. Maybe it’s because literature is a metaphoric medium, because it really stays in the (referential) language, that keeps it away from objects like paintings. I like Proust because his book is almost not a book, it’s too long and the sentences are too complex. It takes so long to read that it’s a physical entity.

How would you like people to engage with your work?

I would like people to be in the same room as the paintings, preferably with furniture so they could sit down. Preferably this would be regular furniture, not the usual pew-style gallery furniture.

Have you seen anything recently that has made an impression?

There is a Thornton Dial exhibition up now that I thought was very moving. It was also interesting as a critique of a lot of contemporary art – the work has so much clarity with regard to its subject matter that it’s not aesthetic.

There’s also an interesting exhibition uptown comparing Malevich to later American artists – it’s supposed to show a lineage. It’s interesting because Malevich makes a lot of the American art look silly, if you do want to compare them – we (Americans) cleaned it up, we tried to de-culturize it. We thought we could be free. And that actually left the work open to be inhabited by culture in an unintentional way, so that a lot of the American work looks dated in comparison to the Malevich. 

Do you have anything exciting on the horizon?

I’m in a three-person show this summer in LA.

I’m also excited about work in the studio. A lot of paintings need other paintings, and I’m very excited about what the new paintings will be.

Susan Post

    

             

Can you briefly describe what you do?

I try to find ways for paint to ‘behave’ rather than depict

What drives you to make work?

A sense that there are universal truths and a conviction that I can add to an understanding of them.

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

I am fortunate to have a lovely studio in a cooperative not far from my home, where I spend between 0 and 10 hours per day -  probably 30 - 40 hours per week on average. Stretching and priming canvasses is a great way for me to enter into a productive frame of mind. When working out a composition I draw with pencil on graph paper or with ballpoint pen or Sharpie on sketch paper, and use gouaches to make color studies. Sometimes it is important to work out in advance the order in which I apply the colors, but generally I'm loose enough with what I'm doing that I can start a new painting without too much pressure, as the colors will shift in response to what's come before. If I get lucky I experience periods of concentration - intense and meditative - where I lose track of time.

How long have you been working in that way?

I went to graduate school about 5 years ago when my youngest child was almost out of high school, and since then have been able to work more consistently and without dividing my attention so much between home and studio.

Which artists have had the greatest affect on your work?

Elizabeth Murray was a visiting artist when I was an undergraduate at Princeton - I remember being encouraged by her example as an artist who was kind and caring and also a mother. My mentor in graduate school, Jodie Manasevit, provides me not only with spot-on critiques but is also a model of persistence and integrity. Other artists whose work I respond to include Joel Shapiro, Howard Hodgkin, Sean Scully, Jeff Wall, Agnes Martin, Lee Bontecou, Anne Truitt, Stephen Westfall, Jim Campbell, and Dan Walsh.

What, outside visual art, informs your practice?

My relationships with the people in my life have brought empathy, understanding and some wisdom that I hope informs my work.

How would you like people to engage with your work?

I hope that they will make the effort to see them in person so they can appreciate the surfaces directly, as participants - there are optical effects that can take time to experience. I also hope that viewers will respond to the language of the edges so that they can read the emotional content.

Have you seen anything recently that has made an impression?

In the opening sequence of the movie "I Am Love" (dir. Emma Recchi; starring Tilda Swinton) it suddenly becomes clear that what appeared to be a black-and-white pan of a wintry Milan is actually shot in full color. I loved that sensation of shifting perception and also how it draws attention to the fact that black and white are colors too.  

Do you have anything exciting on the horizon?

I will be exhibiting my most recent work in one of two concurrent solo shows at The Painting Center gallery in Chelsea, New York City, in February of 2012. Next week my woven line pieces will be part of a celebration of the environment of the outer shore of Cape Cod in Appearances: Provincetown Green Arts Festival