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.

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!

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).

UNTITLED

                 

Can you briefly describe what you do?

I make small abstract works in acrylic on wood. 

What drives you to make work?

I don’t really know, I just do, it’s what interests me.

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

When I first arrive at my studio I tend to just sit around, I’ll stare at what I’ve been working on the previous day, read things or listen to the radio. This can go on for a while as it takes me a long time to gear up to painting; I need to get myself into a certain mind set.

When I eventually get myself started I like to work without any pre set ideas. I like not knowing what’s going to happen, working things out and evolving the painting. I tend to only have two pieces on the go at any one time, any more and it becomes too much to handle. I’ll work layers of paint down and push them around before scraping them back. I do this until something interesting starts to happen and then try to follow this line until usually I ruin it, and the process begins again. Sometimes I’ll leave the work alone and allow it to set, I know I’ll go over it again but something about the structure may be interesting so this allows it to come through and inform the next layers. However a lot of this work is also buried in the final piece and doesn’t show through but somehow I feel it gives the painting a kind of energy and this is very important. I can spend a very long time on each piece, building it up and scraping it back again and again. It can start to get a bit desperate but this is what I find the most interesting. I love working in confusion and desperation as it makes me do drastic things that I wouldn’t think of, most of it can be a bit absurd but amazing things can come from this, mainly shit things but every so often something takes you by surprise.

How long have you been working in that way?

For a while now, I’m not sure it will change anytime soon and that’s ok.

Which artists have had the greatest affect on your work?

This is hard, so many have shaped my practice. I like artists whose works have a kind of defiance, like Phillip Guston, Rebecca Warren, Eric Bainbridge or those bird shit paintings Dan Colen did. I am also influenced by artists who take a more measured approach such as Thomas Nozkowski, James Siena or Varda Caivano, just a mix of a bunch of shit. However if I had to choose just one single artist I would have to say Frank Auerbach. It was through his work I realized I wanted to be a painter. I met him once on the street, we had the briefest of chats, and it was beautiful. 

What, outside visual art, informs your practice?

When I’m working I try to block everything out and focus purely on the work, so I would have to say nothing. But when I’m not painting I’m interested in all manner of typical things mainly talking about art over a beer.

How would you like people to engage with your work?

By looking at it and getting excited by it.

Have you seen anything recently that has made an impression?

Some of those ceramics Marcus Harvey made for his exhibition Tattoo. I never saw the actual show just some images on the web, but I've found myself thinking about them when I'm painting. 

Do you have anything exciting on the horizon?

Not really, maybe a few shows or the pub later.

Roger White

                          





Can you briefly describe what you do?

I make oil paintings and watercolors, and occasionally I work with an airbrush.

I think of these as simple ideas expressed in a complex way, or vice versa.

What drives you to make work?

I’m always curious to see how things look in paintings.

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

I do things over and over. I work out ideas in drawings and watercolors, and use these as starting points for paintings. I paint pretty quickly, over only a few sessions, but often I make two or three (or five or six) versions of the same thing before I’m happy with it.

It’s also important for me to have different kinds of paintings going in the studio at the same time—this allows for some unexpected crossovers. Lately this has meant: more abstract things together with more representational things. The connection to perceptual painting, however tenuous, is very important to me, and I think of even the most non-objective paintings I make as essentially pictorial—rather than schematic or process-based or conceptual, or any of the other ways abstraction can be understood.

How long have you been working in that way?

The paintings have changed considerably over the years, but I’ve always made them more or less the same way.

Which artists have had the greatest affect on your work?

I’m a big Jasper Johns fan. Richard Diebenkorn was an early formative influence. Fairfield Porter, Alex Katz. Luc Tuymans and Raoul De Keyser. Vija Celmins, Albert York, Giorgio Morandi, Paul Klee. Alice Neel, Lucian Freud.

What, outside visual art, informs your practice?

My grandmother is a quiltmaker; I have many early memories involving paper patterns and scraps of fabric, and this has certainly had a big impact on what I do. I also worked as a printer for a long time, and many of my studio principles are derived from aspects of printmaking: repetition, an economy of means, a step-by-step process.

How would you like people to engage with your work?

Most everyone I know is juggling multiple jobs, various creative pursuits, relationships, children, students, art collectives, blogs, bands, yoga…. So if someone carves out even a little time to go look at the paintings, I feel very honored.

Have you seen anything recently that has made an impression?

It’s nice to see so many Alice Neel paintings in circulation because of the retrospective. The Roy Lichtenstein drawing show at the Morgan Library last fall was fantastic—it focused on a few years in the early 60s when he was fine-tuning his inimitable method. It made me want to rush back to the studio. Joe Bradley’s new paintings are great, and I’m really looking forward to the Hurvin Anderson show at Michael Werner in New York.

Do you have anything exciting on the horizon?

Dushko Petrovich and I are illustrating a book-length poem by Andy Fitch called Island. The project will involve a rigorous program of walking and plein air drawing in New York, for which we’re currently in training.  

Brooke Moyse

                    

Can you briefly describe what you do?

I make abstract oil paintings that could be landscapes.

What drives you to make work?

I have to solve an unsolvable problem.

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

I work full time, so my studio hours are relegated to a few nights per week and full days on the weekends. I work best with long stretches of time in which to get situated, be excited, be bored, and then to just work and forget where I am. I have a lot of painting books in my studio, which I refer to regularly. I know a lot of artists never look at other artists work, but I need to. Not only is it fun, but it keeps me feeling like I’m contributing to the very long conversation. I often use drawing as a way to enter painting. I don’t really do full sketches of potential works (I find that doing so actually closes the painting off for me), but use it more as an exploratory tool to examine a particular aspect of an image, or to take a deeper look at something that has been ruminating in my head for a while. For the past several years my drawing has just been in notebooks, but I have been trying to expand beyond the notebook, and to think about drawing as a more substantial counterpoint to the paintings.

How long have you been working in that way?
 

I have always been pretty structured in my studio practice, but have been working in this particular way since finishing graduate school almost 5 years ago.

Which artists have had the greatest affect on your work?

The first artist who really gave me an actual understanding of what art meant, was Piet Mondrian. The Museum of Modern Art had a major retrospective of his work while I was in high school, and had just starting digging into art. I think that because it was the first big “ah ha” moment, Mondrian’s work is very personal to me, and holds a place within me that I need to keep protected. Another major influence was Philip Guston, who I discovered as an undergraduate. His work is complicated, rebellious and immediately personal, which is kind of a dazzling combination. I think that what I finally took away from Guston is the urgency.

What, outside visual art, informs your practice?

Film, literature and music. The films of Jean-Luc Godard have had a big influence. I am interested in the way that his films are so sculptural and painterly, with an interesting tension between spontaneity and extremely deliberate structure. I am always surprised by the way that color and sound combine and combust in his work, and I think that this has influenced my understanding of collage in my own work. I read a lot of fiction, and recently began with Haruki Murakami, whose fibrous tales have been sneaking into my work. I have an interest in words, and love novels in which there is a sense of the spaces between the words.

How would you like people to engage with your work?

My work takes time, and I feel like a piece is successful when it keeps bringing the viewer back, and giving them a different experience/story each time.

Have you seen anything recently that has made an impression?

I keep thinking about a painting I recently saw at White Columns gallery by Gregory Edwards. I haven’t seen his work any place else, but I can’t get it out of my head. I was also very impressed with the Chaos and Classicism show at the Guggenheim, which was a very scholarly and non-commercial exhibition. A nice refresher from so many of the museum shows.

Do you have anything exciting on the horizon?

I will be in a show at Storefront Gallery in Bushwick, Brooklyn in October 2011.

Andrew Graves

                

Can you briefly describe what you do?

I make paintings and drawings. I usually use oil paint, but sometimes tempera, mostly on panel. They are abstract, but for me always contain a certain figurative reading. A geometric grid in a painting may be derived from the textile of a shirt, or an outline of a landscape. My paintings work through an understanding of abstraction, specifically in the context of European and mid century American painting.

What drives you to make work?

The language, formal qualities and conventions of painting fascinate me. My work is an engagement with the anatomy of a painting and the conceptual practice of the painter. I am interested in the point at which the work comes into being. I try to make works that contain within them the precariousness of their making.

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

I go to the studio, work things through, try to keep doing it. I am usually working around a cluster of paintings. However, I have a painting wall with one painting on it and that is my focus for the day.

How long have you been working in that way?

I have always had a studio-based practice, I have made films, taken photographs but these things were always concerned with painting. I tend to work from two types of source material; either abstracted from a figurative source or derived from a kind of hand made geometry that can be mine or borrowed.

Which artists have had the greatest affect on your work?

Those I have been thinking about recently are Bridget Riley, Marcel Broodthaers,  Joan Mitchell, Bronzino, Bram Van Velde,

What, outside visual art, informs your practice?

I am a cyclist, watch films, listen to music, read; when I am in the studio it is these things that help me in that search for something to paint.

How would you like people to engage with your work?

Affectingly and intimately.

Have you seen anything recently that has made an impression?

Bridget Riley exhibitions always leave an impression, the current National Gallery show impressed me and brought back fond memories of the Serpentine Gallery exhibition some years back.  

I saw a Phillip Guston drawing accompanying an interview with him in a book I am reading, the drawing is barely two lines and the quote has the same economy as the image. He says “… But the ones that work are, of course, where there’s a double thing going on. I mean, they’re lines but they’re not lines, because the spaces are brought into operation.”

Do you have anything exciting on the horizon?

Yes I am planning a group painting show this year.

Max Mosscrop

               

                 

Can you briefly describe what you do?

I make things, mainly paintings that hang on the wall, but also objects, usually painted, which don't. And I teach. For the last ten years I've had a studio in Brixton, in South London, but I’m in the process of moving to Camberwell so everything is in boxes while I get the next place sorted.

What drives you to make work?

I’ve no idea. But no one tells me what to do, I can do it while listening to music, and I've got a comfortable chair to sit in to look at what I've done. At the moment I'm missing it because everything is in boxes.

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

I work mainly with watercolour on gesso panels or paper. I make the panels to paint on, from wood, mdf and gesso, which is time consuming and messy. I also make structures to support the panels that don't go on the wall. I’m not sure where painting ends and everything else begins, but I spend more time getting ready, clearing up, and working out what to do with what I've done, than I do actually painting.

How long have you been working in that way?

About five years. Before that I was working with a broader range of media, including photography and video. I wanted to simplify my practice. 

Which artists have had the greatest effect on your work?

As a child I was a big fan of George Stubbs. We used to go to the Walker Gallery in Liverpool, which owns A Horse Frightened by a Lion, and to Manchester City Art Gallery, which has Cheetah and Stag with Two Indians. I had a print of the Manchester painting on my bedroom wall, mounted on hardboard and covered in transparent sticky-backed plastic! These days I think I’m more influenced by a small group of friends than by any famous names.

What, outside visual art, informs your practice?

"Love is A Highway", the title of my 2010 solo show at Five Years Gallery, came from miss-hearing the lyric in a song by Kimya Dawson.

How would you like people to engage with your work?

By buying it?

Have you seen anything recently that has made an impression?

I enjoyed George Kuchar’s films about the weather in the Berlin Bienalle last year. And Norbert Prangenburg’s paintings at Ancient and Modern.

Do you have anything exciting on the horizon?

My new studio, when I finally get moved in, has a great view of the railway tracks.