BUREAU SEATTLE : ART SECTION
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BUREAU SEATTLE ART PICKS Archive:
AYANA V JACKSON at
Mariane Ibrahim GALLERY
Ayana V. Jackson’s work seeks to crystallize the experience of contemporary Africa and African diasporic societies. She combines honed technical skills with richly laced historical allusions to create hauntingly candid portraits that depict varying constructions of African and African-American identities. She does this through several photographic approaches ranging from reportage and portraiture to performance and studio based practice.
Based between Johannesburg, New York and Paris, Jackson has exhibited her work in association with Gallery MOMO (Johannesburg, RSA), Galerie Baudoin Lebon, (Paris, FR), Primo Marella Gallery (Milan), Galerie Sho Contemporary (Tokyo, Japan), the San Francisco Mexican Museum (USA), Museum of Contemporary African Diaspora Art (MoCADA), USA, and the Philadelphia African American Museum (USA).
She received the 2014 New York Foundation for the Arts (NYFA) Fellowship for Photography and has received grants from the Marguerite Casey Foundation, Inter America Foundation, US State Department as well as the French Institute, the latter supporting her participation in the 2009 Bamako African Photography Biennial.
Eric Elliott at James Harris Gallery
James Harris Gallery is pleased to present Overgrown, the fifth solo exhibition by Seattle artist Eric Elliott. For this exhibition, Elliott presents a selection of two paintings and two large-scale drawings. While Elliott’s botanical obsessions provide a sort of constant to his practice over the years, his process has continued to evolve with his own understanding of perception. Acutely aware of a phenomenological relationship to his subject matter, Elliott’s work is as much about light and atmosphere as it is about the awareness of his own artistic filter. In his ongoing dedication to a realist abstraction, Elliott’s new work explores this subjectivity to collapse the visual cues of observational painting and create a direct and candid experience of the abstract beauty in the world around us.
In the past, Elliott’s work began with an idea, and in his scientific way, Elliott methodically employed painterly techniques to render these concepts on visual terms. After some time rethinking this cerebral approach to image making, Elliott’s has taken a far more experiential turn to his process, abandoning preconceptions and allowing for his own experience of the world to directly inform his work. The result is honest and unfettered, no longer confined to subject matter, structure, and scale, this approach allows for ever-expanding monster sized plant drawings that eerily seem to posses human like qualities and emotion.
In his new paintings, Elliott abandons a single outside perspective to immerse himself in his subject, depicting the plant as a sea of leaves from an intimate vantage point. He offers a more complete experience of subject matter in this sense, true to the artist’s own discovery of form, space and light. In these works, Elliott returns to a more accurate treatment of color, informed more by this sense of light than the object itself where the variegated shades of green dissolve into dark and light. The palpable relationship between artist and subject is present in a way that offers an almost hyperrealist quality to the work. This relational treatment of abstraction reveals absolutes and pure form, an essence only intelligible through the perceptual clarity of experience.
SEATTLE PAINTER PICK: Fred Lisaius
Patricia Rovzar Gallery 1225 Second Avenue Seattle WA 98101 206 223 0273, 800 889 4278 mail@rovzargallery.com
Schomburg Gallery Bergamot Station Arts Center 2525 Michigan Ave., E3A Santa Monica, CA 90404 310 453 5757 info@shomburggallery.com
Seattle Art Museum Gallery 1300 First Avenue Seattle WA 98101 206 343 1101
Schomburg Gallery Bergamot Station Arts Center 2525 Michigan Ave., E3A Santa Monica, CA 90404 310 453 5757 info@shomburggallery.com
Seattle Art Museum Gallery 1300 First Avenue Seattle WA 98101 206 343 1101
WELCOME to FALL 2015 Edition BUREAU of ARTS and CULTURE MAGAZINE. This Edition contains The BUREAU ICON Essay: BOB DYLAN. Interviews + Photographic Essays with Alex HARRIS on The INUIT, Kanayo ADIBE in Baltimore, Lynn SAVILLE in New York City, Mike MILLER on West Coast Style, Ryan SCHIERLING in AUSTIN and BUREAU GUEST Artist: Melissa Ann PINNEY ART Interview with David BURKE in Bay Area. Plus: Michelle HANDELMAN. New FICTION: THEY CALL IT THE CITY of ANGELS Part III MUSIC Contributor: Sarah Rose PERRY on The Femme PUNK Scene. MUSIC Interview with JAHI. Plus US MUSEUMS: Detroit's 30 ARTISTS Exhibit, Milwaukee's Larry SULTAN, Photo LA, BOOK Stores Across US: BookPeople, Anderson's, City Lights, Book Reviews from STRAND NYC. Classical MUSIC and Rock & Roll: Not So Different After All. Elliott Landy and The BAND. Edward Hopper at The Cantor. All This and More Plus BUREAU On Line Links to The ART Fairs in MIAMI 2015 with Exclusive Audio Interviews, Reviews & New Online Articles All Year Round at The New BUREAU CITY SITES Across America an The World Through Internet. BUREAU is MEDIA Partner for PHOTO LA . RED NATION FILM FEST + MORE...
BUREAU of ARTS and CULTURE IS EDITED BY J. A. TRILIEGI
WELCOME : YOU ARE AT BUREAU SEATTLE SITE
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This is NOT The Actual Magazine: This is a Sampler
TAP THE LINKS to Download 200 + Page EDITION
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THE BUREAU ICON ESSAY
BOB DYLAN
THE BUREAU ICON ESSAY BOB DYLAN
By BUREAU OF ARTS AND CULTURE MAGAZINE EDITOR J. A. TRILIEGI
Bob Dylan transformed the idea of what it is to be hip, deep, cool, sexy, funny, ironic and intelligent, all the while, retaining a purist style that remained true to himself. Each step of the way, each level of transcendence, each pitfall, each breakthrough moment has it's challenges, it's problems, its rewards. Success in the creative field can mean as many things to as many performers, songwriters and those who fall in the center of the American spotlight of popularity. Few can survive it, even fewer are able to retain a sense of self and even protect that idea publicly. Dylan took the name of a poet, hopped on a bus, looked at America and told the world truths, that have to this day, remain truer and truer as time passes. The songs he wrote fifty years ago are more relevant now than ever, they will be more relevant in 100 years. The international press corp came at Dylan with the headlights on high beam. Instead of stare like a deer, he treated the alliance like a musketeer might approach a formal fencing match: Touché. The American Poet & wordsmith extraordinaire had become The Folkie, The Beatnik, The Rocker, The Philosopher, The Historian, The Cowboy, The Hermit, The Leader, The Champion of Underdogs, The Christian, The Anonymous, The Legend, The Icon and through it all, he's still Bob Dylan. An American guy from The Midwest who started with nothing but a blank piece of paper and a few ideas.
"They wanted more than the music, more than the lyrics, more than the concert, more than the records, they wanted a symbol they could use for their own parade, their own arcade, their own charade and Dylan denied the puppet strings, denied the sacrificial position, denied the groups that had latched onto him and he remained true to the only thing a human has from the very beginning to the very end: Oneself."
For every title, there also came a group of admirers and detractors, who wanted something. They wanted more than the music, more than the lyrics, more than the concert, more than the records, they wanted a symbol they could use for their own parade, their own arcade, their own charade and Dylan denied the puppet strings, denied the sacrificial position, denied the groups that had latched onto him and he remained true to the only thing a human has from the very beginning to the very end: Oneself. He has understood that selling albums, performing, having a contract to support the self expression is where it's at, and all the while, Dylan has offered us what he has. Critics through the years have expressions and titles and adjectives that glibly describe the various stages of Dylan's career: A Major Album, A Minor Album, Etc… His voice was laughable, compared to entertainers like Frank Sinatra, his stage presence was stiff, compared to singers such as Elvis Presley, his looks were nerdy, compared to performers like Johnny Cash and yet, he competed, sold millions of albums, and wrote anthems that have defined, to it's very core, what it is to Be : American. Bob Dylan is incomparable to other performers in the industry, he is an anomaly, he is the exception to the rule, there is no parallel story that can live up to Bob Dylan, so, please, don't even try. Today, we honor Bob Dylan, not for who you wanted him to be, not for what might have been, not for any ideas outside the realm of his oeuvre but, we honor him for what he actually is : The Great Independent American Artist.
"They wanted more than the music, more than the lyrics, more than the concert, more than the records, they wanted a symbol they could use for their own parade, their own arcade, their own charade and Dylan denied the puppet strings, denied the sacrificial position, denied the groups that had latched onto him and he remained true to the only thing a human has from the very beginning to the very end: Oneself."
For every title, there also came a group of admirers and detractors, who wanted something. They wanted more than the music, more than the lyrics, more than the concert, more than the records, they wanted a symbol they could use for their own parade, their own arcade, their own charade and Dylan denied the puppet strings, denied the sacrificial position, denied the groups that had latched onto him and he remained true to the only thing a human has from the very beginning to the very end: Oneself. He has understood that selling albums, performing, having a contract to support the self expression is where it's at, and all the while, Dylan has offered us what he has. Critics through the years have expressions and titles and adjectives that glibly describe the various stages of Dylan's career: A Major Album, A Minor Album, Etc… His voice was laughable, compared to entertainers like Frank Sinatra, his stage presence was stiff, compared to singers such as Elvis Presley, his looks were nerdy, compared to performers like Johnny Cash and yet, he competed, sold millions of albums, and wrote anthems that have defined, to it's very core, what it is to Be : American. Bob Dylan is incomparable to other performers in the industry, he is an anomaly, he is the exception to the rule, there is no parallel story that can live up to Bob Dylan, so, please, don't even try. Today, we honor Bob Dylan, not for who you wanted him to be, not for what might have been, not for any ideas outside the realm of his oeuvre but, we honor him for what he actually is : The Great Independent American Artist.
CATHERINE OPIE Untitled #5 (Elizabeth Taylor's Closet) 2012 Pigment Print 40 x 30 inches (101.6 x 76.2 cm)
Edition of 3, 1 AP Courtesy of REGEN PROJECTS / BUREAU PICK for PHOTO LA INSTALLATION / TBA
READ ALL OF SEASON THREE Plus The Final CHAPTER in
THE FALL EDITION OF BUREAU of ARTS and CULTURE ...
The Original Fiction Series: " THEY CALL IT THE CITY OF ANGELS," began in 2013 with Season One. A Literary experiment that originally introduced five fictional families, through dozens of characters that came to life before our readers eyes, when Editor Joshua Triliegi, improvised an entire novel on a daily basis and publicly published each chapter on-line. Season Two was an entire smash hit with readers in Los Angeles, where the novel is set and quickly spread to communities around the world through translations. Season III began in August 2015 and the same rules applied. The entire Final season was Improvised without Any Notes : A Chapter a Day.
FIRE + ICE PHOTO ESSAY and Article
By ALEX HARRIS
By ALEX HARRIS
Three parka-clad men, their backs to the camera, stand on an ice–covered field. Their body language – what we can see of it – implies rest, perhaps resignation, as they watch a building burn. Minutes earlier, inside a Quaker church in the Alaskan Inuit village of Selawik, these same men heard screams of “fire!” Outside, there was nothing to be done. The burning building, a schoolhouse, contained the only running water in the village, and regardless, the blaze was too far-gone to be fought.
On that April day of 1974, I was part of the crowd watching the schoolhouse burn. I was also a photographer with one roll of film in my camera, eight exposures left, trying quickly to make sense of the moment. Instinctively, I used my lens to see the fire and smoke through the bodies of the men in front of me, the way someone in the crowd would see the fire, the way the men themselves might be experiencing this moment. My instincts were to break most of the rules being taught in photojournalism school at the time. No faces are evident. No action is depicted. People standing in front of my camera mostly obscure the event itself. Yet this same photograph manages to suggest something larger than the moment, hints at the Inuit’s relationship to their environment; implies their acceptance of the power of nature.
Between 1973 and 1978 I made five trips to Alaska, living cumulatively for over a year in several Inuit villages above the Arctic Circle along the Kobuk River as well as other villages on the Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta of the southern Bering Sea coast. I often arrived on a single engine weekly mail plane, and if visiting a village for the first time, would be greeted by a small group eager to see relatives who might be on the flight, or anxious to retrieve mail and supplies from the outside. Invariably someone would ask, “Why are you here?” When I said I was there to take pictures, a second question followed. “Where are you staying?” I would respond that I didn’t know. “Then stay with us.”
I learned that there was nothing naïve about the invitation. The Inuit were hospitable and trusting in this sense: they gave me time and a chance to prove myself to be a person they wanted to have around. And I wanted very much to be that person. I believe I became that person. At the time, I was a few years out of college and beginning my second education. For one thing, I was learning the craft of photography, and starting to have control of the medium. I had studied Adams’s zone system for film exposure and development, and knew how to compact into visible detail the range of light in Alaska – from bright sun on snow to deep shadow on parkas – falling on my film. Still, I had quite a distance to go to master the medium technically.
Mostly what I had to offer was my eagerness to get to know the people and places I photographed. I hoped that my familiarity would be reflected in the pictures I made. I was shooting black–and–white film, some 35mm but primarily medium format, and storing my exposed rolls under my bed inside a red tin coffee can with a plastic top. But in another sense, I had to store the photographs in my mind, as I wouldn’t see any of my pictures until I returned to the “lower 48” and developed my film. So I often brought with me a couple of photographic books for inspiration, looking not so much to answer questions about technique, framing, or exposure, but to try to understand what a photographer’s work could tell me about how to get inside another world with a camera.
In 1975 one book I brought with me was Koudelka’s The Gypsies. Whether the Gypsies looked back at Koudelka with recognition, or ignored him entirely, I was enormously drawn to the implied intimacy of the pictures he made. Koudelka was absolutely present in his own pictures, yet his own likeness never appears. He made photographs full of life and also full of mystery. Though I didn’t take on Koudelka’s high–contrast, wide–angle style, I did begin to understand from him how to get inside another world with a camera. In Alaska I came know people in a way that allowed me to participate in their lives. On each successive trip to the villages, I saw it was possible to immerse myself in a world and at the same time to observe it, to step back from the moment I was experiencing and take a photograph. I learned to make pictures – like those I’d seen in The Gypsies – pictures that hinted at more than I saw, more than I knew, more than we can ever know about another person, place or culture.
- Alex Harris
Alex Harris is a photographer and writer teaching at Duke University. He is one of the founders of DoubleTake Magazine, of the Lewis Hine Documentary Fellows Program http://documentarystudies.duke.edu/projects/hine, and of the Center for Documentary Studies (CDS) http://documentarystudies.duke.edu . This fall CDS celebrates its twenty-fifth anniversary http://www.cdsfirst25.com/ with a number of events in Durham North Carolina including a November 20th-22nd Documentary Forum http://www.cdsfirst25.com/docforum2015/
[ Entire PHOTO ESSAY With many More Images Continues in The FREE FALL Edition ]
BUREAU OF ARTS AND CULTURE MAGAZINE Supports
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KANAYO ADIBE
The BALTIMORE PHOTO ESSAY
From The Street Scene Photographs of Everyday Life in Baltimore to The Weddings & Parties of Washington DC, Kanayo Adibe has gone from utilizing a cell phone to a professional camera and launched an unexpected career in less than a few years. He has a bold eye for balance, time and place. His subjects inhabit their city with a flare for life. His images capture the goings on in a way that is alive and well. He has a growing catalogue that is both valuable and interesting. We discovered his work through a special program at The Baltimore Sun Newspaper and have become a solid part of his growing audience. Today, we give you Five Questions, a Photo Essay from Mr. Kanayo Adibe's Black & White Images and a glimpse inside Baltimore.
Joshua TRILIEGI : Discuss how you approach photographing a Wedding versus a Street Shoot ?
Kanayo ADIBE : Photographing a wedding is pretty straightforward, there is a storyline, all the characters are present and all you have to do is work the timeline and capture the moments as they unfold. You are able to help shape the story, you are able to enhance it through great imagery or manipulate it by adding in poses. With street you are forced to find order in variability and chaos. You rely on variables beyond your control to tell a story as you see it. You have to act quickly when you find a moment unfolding or anticipate something occurring and hold your composition till it does.
Despite the differences between wedding and street photography a lot of the skills carry over, there is an unscripted part of weddings that remain naturally occurring and random. The difference is they occur frequently and the more attentive you are the more of them you capture. In the streets it’s a lot harder to find those moments because there are no predetermined characters to follow or a defined storyline, you have to pick and choose your subjects and hope that the right elements come together to give you that image you are looking for.
Joshua TRILIEGI : How important is representing our communities in America today and give us some examples in dealing with your subjects, creating relationships and being a strong part of the diAspora in America's culture today ?
Kanayo ADIBE : I think it’s really important to represent our communities accurately, not leaning towards what is more popular or less favorable just to get a rise out of people. As we know the traditional media is skewed in it's representation of certain demographics and usually just say and show things for higher ratings. As for my street work, I honestly photograph anything that stands out to me, good or bad. I’m not in constant search of that angle that will draw more attention to my work; I just shoot from the heart. It could be a special moment between strangers, amazing architecture, a homeless person on the street, it doesn’t matter. As long as it gives me that feeling, I will create that image. Relationship building is important, I have formed lots of bonds with other creatives, some of which have helped me grow creatively and as a business, I have also made new friends in my commercial subjects, my street subject still remain anonymous to me. As a Nigerian living in America and having to deal with the culture as it stands today is pretty interesting, I’m no different from any African American in the eyes of everyone else, so whatever they experience, I experience.
[ Entire Interview Continues in The FREE FALL Edition ]
The BUREAU Guest Artist Melissa Ann PINNEY
Joshua Triliegi : How Did The New Book "TWO" Come To Fruition ?
Melissa Ann Pinney : In a funny way, you could say that TWO came about because I finally organized my work, cleaned up my studio and pinned up dozens of prints on the walls. In the spring of 2013, I had been working on the project for a while but this was the first time the images were collected all together. Ann Patchett happened to visit, loved the photographs and proposed that we make a book together. Ann is a an award-winning, best-selling author with a gift for friendship and the ability to make big things happen. Ann is also a bookseller and she wanted to get the book out to an larger audience. To do so, Ann’s thought was to invite ten of our most distinguished contemporary writers ( aka, her friends) to contribute a short essay on the idea of two. HarperCollins loved the idea as did the writers. The images and text are meant to inform one another rather than illustrate in the usual way we think of words and images. For instance, there are no photographs opposite a page of text. Ann wrote the introduction and also is the editor.
Joshua Triliegi : Can You Remember Your First Impressions and Interest in Images early on In Life ?
Melissa Ann Pinney : As a young girl, I remember feeling compelled to make something, to have a work that was my own. Painting seemed too grand and intimidating, sewing- too mundane and stereotypically feminine. It was not until college that I stumbled into photography and it felt like mine. I bought my first photography book there– the 1969 MOMA edition of The Americans, and later books of Dorothea Lange and Julia Margaret Cameron’s work. Peter Hales, the brilliant cultural historian and photographer, was my photography history professor at University of Illinois, Chicago, for my MFA. Peter had studied with Garry Winogrand. Winogrand also was a great influence on my work, along with Helen Levitt.
"I am looking for pictures – everywhere and always, with or without my camera. The pictures I want most are those I see in passing; the unexpected ways light, people and objects come together. If I am ready and quick it’s sometimes possible to get the picture; if I had to approach, explain and ask permission the picture I wanted would be already gone. It’s the unstudied, uninterrupted sense of theater in the everyday that drew me to make the image in the first place."
- Melissa Ann PINNEY
[ Entire Interview Continues in The FREE FALL Edition ]
The Artist: http://www.melissaannpinney.com
The Gallery: http://www.schneidergallerychicago.com
BUREAU MUSIC INTERVIEW: JAHI
Joshua TRILIEGI : When I first discovered Rap at The Radio Club in 1982, I was still in High school, when did You first hear a Live MC and Did you ever think the Music would have such a long staying power ?
JAHI : 1982 was also an important year for me because of Sucker MC's by Run- DMC and Jam Master Jay and in my neighborhood of East Cleveland, Ohio we had DJ's on our block and had community block parties just like NYC. I remember my sister bringing home the vinyl to "Rappers Delight" in 1979 and it marks a time where I felt like I heard the term "rappers" more frequently. There was no doubt in my mind that Hip Hop music would have staying power. Deeper than the music, it was the building of culture.
Joshua TRILIEGI : Lets discuss The Newest Project: Whats It all About ?
JAHI : insPirEd is the second album from PE 2.0. I said to a friend yesterday that if I became an ancestor today I would leave happy knowing I was able to do this album. Its simply social commentary over boombap. It features my other mentor and friend KRS-One, and has incredible production from Divided Souls from Baton Rouge, the legendary Easy Mo Bee, and DJ Pain 1. It is a call of action. It's BLACK in scope and presentation. We've always know that Black Lives Matter, but this album is also about Black LOVE in a conscious kind a way. The love of my people who still stand strong in the face of tyranny by crooked police and judicial systems, out ability as Black people to still stand firm, grow, love, and live. Music is universal so everyone in Hip Hop will attach to insPirEd if they dig lyricism and hard beats, but its dedicated to my people on the front lines all over the world.
[ Entire Interview Continues in The FREE FALL Edition ]
THE BUREAU BOOK Reviews
By The Staff of Strand Books in New York New York U S A
My Lunches with Orson: Conversations between Henry Jaglom & Orson Welles
by Peter Biskind / Review by Jim at Strand Books NYC
My Lunches With Orson is a unique and hilarious peek at one of America's greatest and most notorious film directors and actors, Orson Welles. Forty years since his legendary debut film, Citizen Kane, and nearly a decade since audiences had seen a finished film of his, Welles sat at the Ma Maison in Los Angeles, treating the Parisian-themed restaurant as a pseudo-office while meeting with filmmaker Henry Jaglom for lunch to discuss business and various other topics. Taken from Jaglom's recordings long thought lost forever, Peter Biskind (famed film writer of Easy Riders, Raging Bulls and Down and Dirty Pictures) compiles this collection of lunch conversations between the two directors. In between discussing his own infamous career, Jaglom and Welles discuss nearly every major figure in American film between 1930 and 1975 - and Welles hates nearly all of them. Katherine Hepburn, John Ford, Pauline Kael, and Charlie Chaplan are amongst the many who are brought up and few survive his wrath. The candid conversations are a brilliant form of performance, as Welles was aware of the recorder but asked Jaglom simply to make it unseen. The legendary filmmaker vacillates often between showboating for his young friend with uproarious speeches, and speaking with the honest desperation of a man at his advanced age being unable to work, and the financial trouble that that situation places him in. All in all, Biskind's framing of the transcripts displays Welles as a dastardly charming man, bursting at the seams with knowledge while posing for his one-man audience as a charlatan. My Lunches With Orson may not be the most informative book there is to read about Welles, but it is one of the most entertaining - and it's all in his words.
Inside the Dream Palace
by Sherill Tippins / Review by Maya at Strand Books NYC
Inside the Dream Palace is an in-depth look at a New York institution full of great mini-biographies and quirky histories. From Mark Twain to Sid and Nancy, the Chelsea Hotel has hosted a wide variety of creative characters (Jack the Ripper may have even stayed in the Chelsea). It’s a great read if you want a book about New York that isn’t too dry or too gossipy. In fact it has very little gossip at all, but lots of interesting facts about the behavior of, mainly famous, creatives. It is a perfect beach book but also a great read for the historian looking to read something light that still has a great deal to say about New York history. I personally enjoyed the way that New York is shown through the eyes of writers, artists and musicians such as Dylan Thomas, Harry Smith, and Patti Smith. Sherill Tippins seamlessly weaves these separate stories together creating a biography of a building, a neighborhood and a city. It’s important to know the history of New York and specifically the history of it’s communities so that we can continue their work. In Dream Palace, Sherill Tippins exposes how creative havens can be fostered but also how they are often destroyed by non-creatives. Dream Palace joins the dialogue and the struggle of the book Black Mountain: An Exploration in Community, and the film The Art of the Steal. We need more voices to tell these histories of how spaces for artists, writers and musicians are being turned into money making schemes.
A Game of Thrones
by George R. R. Martin / Reviewed by Toni at Strand Books NYC
One of the most used cliches in all of high fantasy is that of the farm boy (or other "simpleton") turned hero. Since Tolkien penned his Middle Earth stories, this trope has been wildly popular in the genre. One of the reasons I love Game of Thrones so much is that it completely ditches this typical cliche. Martin writes his story in such a way that it grabs readers immediately. More than once I found myself unable to put the book down until I found out what had happened to the characters I had so quickly become taken by. With each chapter told from the viewpoint of a different character, it easy to pick favorites at the start. It also ditches the typical cliche of the fantasy trope, focusing instead on the individuals functioning as a part of the whole, with each character bringing something to the dilemma. And the dilemma is, what else in a medieval setting, a clash for power. Game of Thrones, for me, reinvented the genre more than any other fantasy series. With five books and counting, I grow more and more attached to the Seven Kingdoms, and root for my favorite characters each time I pick up a book. Of course, there are downsides to the series. Most noteable and really the only negative of substance is that he doesn't write fast enough. For those who have seen the HBO series, I urge you to pick up the books. While the series is phenomenal, the books bring so much more to light. There is so much that you miss simply from watching it on TV. You won't be disappointed.
Canned
By Franklin Schneider / Reviewed by Uzodinma at Strand Books NYC
A down-dirty, grit-covered gem of a book. Mislabeled as humor. Franklin is the pal we all have stories about, like a correspondent on the front lines of a war many of us are afraid to fight. I'd go so far as to say that even if you don't agree with the way he sloughs off society's rules, you've at least wondered about it. You, like me, we've all crunched through pointless jobs, or ones we may even like, and still something's missing. But something's always missing. And this, I'd argue, is what Schneider, would like us to laugh at and understand. Not the evils of culture, or the modern work-week, not necessarily. You can seize up if you want to on the bits about laziness and unemployment checks, but that's the light-hearted, topical fluff. Think about it this way, and it's true: the gifts of the culture we live in were created by thinkers, dreamers, that is, by completely different hands than the ones that use those same dreams to lock us down and enslave us . . . Or maybe that's too far out there. What I like about this guy Franklin though, is that there's no real dogma, no ten-step revolution, nor should there be. He wanted off the 9-to-5 treadmill to become a writer, and thus the book, this book, is the proof that we can create the life we want to live, or go down trying. Thus the saga. Sex romps in unfinished basements. Inter-office pranks. Ten-day benders. The arcade chapter. The dead man in the Porto-Potty. More sex. The sex chapter. More racing, full sprint, down moonlit streets. The lawn mower through the window thing. This is Franklin's saga. Like we each have our own, and it's up to us to stay awake .
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IMAGE: Edward Hopper (U.S.A., 1882–1967), New York Corner (Corner Saloon), 1913. Oil on canvas.
Edward Hopper: New York Corner
Through February 8, 2016 The exhibition showcases the painting New York Corner and contextualizes it by grouping works from the museum’s collection into several art-object-based “conversations.” These constellations point to the kinds of artistic practice that preceded the painting’s creation; showcase concurrent work, both similar and different, by Hopper’s contemporaries; and present the kinds of practice that followed.
The Cantor Arts Center at Stanford University 328 Lomita Drive at Museum Way Stanford, CA 94305
image: Elliott Landy Courtesy of The Artist and LandyVision.com
THE PHOTOGRAPHER ELLIOT LANDY
This Fall a New Book by Photographer Elliot Landy with Exclusive Images of Bob Dylan and The BAND will be available. Recent Documentaries and New releases on Audio of BOB DYLAN's Famed Basement Tapes Sessions have been celebrated with the participation of T. Bone Burnett, Mumford & Sons and a Showtime Series that included the participation of Elvis Costello have cast a new re-look at this important period in the life of one of America's most important songwriters. Elliott Landy took many of the pinnacle images that defined Robbie Robertson and The Band's Big Pink album as well as Dylan's retreat from the public eye in Woodstock NY. This much anticipated original publication is a must for music lover's, Dylan fans and Rock & Roll Historians.
Check your Local Bookstores November 2015 and for more information visit: LandyVision.com
The NOCTURNE
A Photographic Essay & Interview
With LYNN SAVILLE
Joshua TRILIEGI : What draws you to Night Photography?
Lynn SAVILLE : When I was five years old, two keys things happened. I looked out of the window at night into my back yard in Durham, North Carolina and noticed that the grass, tool shed, wheelbarrow and trees appeared scary at night. Illuminated by the single floodlight behind our house, the very familiar terrain became mysterious and dangerous during the night. It had looked normal and calm during the daytime. This very familiar place took on a new dimension at night. The second key occurrence was that my family boarded a steam ship in New York City’s harbor and traveled across the Atlantic Ocean to Italy. This experience created in me, a dramatic appreciation for New York City, and an awe of the night, the stars, water, the rare sight of the occasional ship at sea.
Joshua TRILIEGI : Take us on a shoot with you: Location, Number of Images, Time invested in The Walk about, Choosing the work, Printing and Exhibiting.
Lynn SAVILLE : When working in my own city [ New York ], I walk during different times of day and evening making mental notes and cell phone snapshots of places that attract my interest. Later I return when it’s dawn or twilight and look again at the way these chosen “locations” appear in the shifting light. I might return to a location three or four times to see what I find…always bringing my camera and tripod and any other items such as velvet to minimize reflections if I’m photographing into a window and a small flashlight or headlamp to use if I want to paint some light.
I edit on my computer and make contact sheets or small 4” x 6” proof prints through inexpensive online printing labs or with Xerox. These I put on my magnetic board in my apartment – to “live with them”. I find that seeing photographs at different times of day and night helps me select the best ones.
When preparing for an exhibition, I print the photographs 8 x 10 or 11 x 14 as “match prints” – fine tuning the files. I generally print on a paper size of 20” x 24” or 30” x 40” and occasionally 40“ x 50”. These are printed with archival inkjet process.
[ Entire Interview Continues in The FREE FALL Edition ]
Dark City Exhibition October 2nd - November 28th, 2015
Lynn Saville explores what she refers to as “limbo regions” in her series Dark City. These regions are undeveloped and overlooked spaces across major cities’ in the United States. Although Saville initially associated these vacant spaces with the economic turmoil of the recession, she came to realize that they also resulted from a natural cycle of decay and renewal in the urban landscape. She photographs at either dawn or dusk so that the place itself is lighting the scene with streetlight, window light, advertisements and surveillance lighting. Saville has been able to transform these spaces into lively and inviting places even with the absence of people and the cities usual attractions. She regards such places as “empty skeletal sets in which objects can dream, and light and shadow can dance uninterrupted.”
Visit The Gallery and The Artist for Sizes, Specifications and Available Photographs at:
SCHNEIDER GALLERY 770 North LaSalle Dr. Suite 401, Chicago, IL 60654
BUREAU BEST BOOKS : ANDERSONS
In 1964 they opened the first official bookstore: Paperback Paradise. Since then they have expanded and moved several times, opening Downers Grove store in 1980 and a children’s wholesale warehouse bookfair company, Anderson’s Bookfair Company (ABCFairs), in 1982. Bookfair company has grown and moved 5 times from being in the basement of Downers Grove store. Last November they opened Two Doors East, an eclectic and unique gift store, just two doors down from the Naperville bookshop. The members 5th generation that own and run the businesses today all started to work at a very young age in the family’s Business. " Working along side with your grandfather, parents, brothers, sister, and children is a family tradition that creates community within your family, and reaches your employees, your customers, and beyond your brick and mortar location." Each generation of their family has offered new touches and ideas to keep it innovative, fresh and exciting.
5112 Main St, Downers Grove, IL 60515 (630) 963-2665
Unidentified photographer, American, 20th century Circa 1950s Gift of Peter J. Cohen Courtesy Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
Museum of Fine Arts Boston
presents
Unfinished Stories: Snapshots
from the Peter J. Cohen Collection Now Through to February 21, 2016
Unfinished Stories celebrates a century of snapshots from the Peter J. Cohen Collection of amateur photographs. An avid collector, Cohen rescued more than 50,000 lost, discarded, or disowned personal photographs, culled from flea markets, antique shops, galleries, eBay, and private dealers. As he sifted and sorted through his finds, Cohen discovered mesmerizing, often humorous, shots removed from their original context: People at Play, Photographers’ Shadows, Double Exposure, Couples, Oddities, and Hula Madness. These pictures reveal the lives of strangers through intimate exposures, telling a story, or as Cohen puts it, “a teeny part of a story that remains unfinished.”
CRAFTED: Beth Lipman Cut Table Courtesy of Museum of Fine Arts Boston © Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
Museum of Fine Arts Boston presents Crafted Objects in Flux
Now Through to January 10, 2016
“Crafted” explores this moment of “flux” in the field, focusing on contemporary craft-based artists who bridge cutting-edge concepts and traditional skills as they embrace and explore the increasingly blurred boundaries between art, craft, and design. Featuring a selection of works from across the landscape of contemporary craft, the exhibition includes more than 30 emerging and established international artists. Looking to a broad range of materials and practices, the exhibition explores the connections between craft and performance; the opportunities provided by new technologies and materials; and the power of rethinking craft’s interactions with architecture and space. This exhibition is the first of its kind within an encyclopedic museum to explore the broad possibilities of contemporary artistic engagement with craft. By examining these interactions in proximity to historical examples in the MFA’s collection, “Crafted” demonstrates the vitality, viability, and variety inherent in choosing craft as a foundation for contemporary artistic practice. Tap: mfa.org
THE BUREAU PHOTO INTERVIEW
Ryan SCHIERLING
The How, The What and The Why of Taking Photographs for a Living . The Austin Based Photographer Discusses His Work in Seattle Washington +More
Joshua TRILIEGI : There is a real diversity in your catalogue, explain what draws you to a subject, how you approach it and where you decide to frame it?
Ryan SCHIERLING : I’m drawn to anything that’s visually and aesthetically pleasing, but I think that describes most photographers. The process of translating what I’m seeing into a photograph using a mechanical process of adjusting this and that is what, my style? Visually, I like clean images. I like to fill the frame with precisely what I want, because I don’t crop much. I want exactly what I want to see, and it’s done in camera, zooming a lens, or moving the legs here and there.
Shooting portraits, specifically environmental portraits, is what I worked the hardest on. Photojournalism is documenting a scene unfolding around you. You’re not supposed to be part of it, you’re an external, impartial observer. That’s easy. To engage someone before the camera even comes out of the bag and have them be comfortable with you, enough to give you a piece of themselves in a photograph, is difficult. There have been people I’ve wanted to take a photo of, but it just didn’t feel right emotionally, or they weren’t in the right frame of mind to be physically and mentally present for the camera. I was never good with the whole “Alright, you have five minutes to shoot Mr. Famous Person” because there’s no connection. You’re just making a visually-accurate representation of what Mr. Famous Person looked like in that 1/60 of a second. I’d rather genuinely talk to them for five minutes, as a real person, and take one frame before I leave.
Ryan SCHIERLING : I did that the last time I photographed John Vanderslice, and I’ve shot so many photos of him - live and portraits - over the years. I shot a few songs of a show at The Mohawk in Austin, and I just wanted to watch and listen for the rest. Throngs of people were looking to talk to him after the set. It was after 1 a.m., and I didn’t want to intrude. I only wanted to let him know that he’d played a wonderful show - as always - and shake his hand. I asked him if I could just take two frames, and he looked a little surprised, but graciously agreed. I said, “Close your eyes. Take a deep breath, exhale.” Click. “Turn around, relax.” Click. Those are some of my favorite images of him.
Faces interest me, body language interests me. How people relate to their environments. Things that happen to people, moments that they will never forget, moments that might seem small, or large, or insignificant. They all make a difference in our lives. I can’t be everywhere I’d like to be, so i just try to capture what I can, when I can. it’s all important in some manner, whether it’s politics, music, dinner, a first date or a death in the family.
There's a photograph in just about every situation you'll ever come across. Sometimes it's just a matter of stopping and looking a little harder. In some photos there are stories that need to be told, in others there might just be a feeling. One quote I remember from photographer Windy Osborne really stuck with me, and it's been probably 25-plus years. "Fill the frame with exactly what you want to see." I try to get all of the important elements in there, without making anything cluttered. And that tends to be my style in whatever I shoot, whether it's music or portraits or landscapes or anything that’s in front of me.
Ryan SCHIERLING : I don’t have a lot of photo books. There are no collections I keep other than cookbooks and old skateboards. The few photography books I do have are by Glen E. Friedman, Charles Peterson, Richard Avedon, Jim Brandenburg. I have all issues of “Loose Lips Sink Ships” from Steve Gullick and Stevie Chick. Gullick is incredible. He and Peterson certainly influenced my music photography initially. Both had a dirty, grainy style, but Steve did some lovely lighting for portraits and Charles captured a Pacific Northwest live music epoch with a camera and a strobe attached to a motorcycle battery. I dig Danny Clinch and his aesthetic. Old school? Windy Osborne and Spike Jonze - shooting for Freestylin’ Magazine in the late 80s - were huge for me, riding, shooting and working on a craft. Dan Sturt and J. Grant Brittain were massive talents at Transworld Skateboarding Magazine. Sturt’s mid-lens artistry and framing in a fisheye-lens dominated industry was incredibly inspirational. Brittain’s 1987 TWS cover of Tod Swank still makes me shake my head and smile every time I see it. At a young age, there were no finer photographers to emulate. New School? I love William Anthony, Dan Winters, Jonathan Saunders, Penny De Los Santos. I don’t shoot for a living anymore, so there’s no pressure to push the button for nonsense. I just try to stay true to the subject and the image, whatever it may be.
[ Entire Interview Continues in The FREE FALL Edition ]
BUREAU BEST BOOKS : BOOKPEOPLE
BookPeople has been the leading independent bookstore in Texas since 1970. Located in the heart of downtown, BookPeople has been voted best bookstore in Austin for over 15 years. BookPeople was voted Bookstore of the Year by Publisher’s Weekly in 2005. With visits from some of the most interesting and important authors of the past 43 years, as well as by Former Presidents Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton, BookPeople is the destination bookstore in Texas.
BOOK SIGNINGS CURRENTLY SCHEDULED INCLUDE APPEARANCES BY
OCTOBER 20TH 2015
ELVIS COSTELLO
NOVEMBER 12TH 2015
JOHN IRVING
DECEMBER 9TH 2015
SALLY MANN
603 N. Lamar Blvd Austin, TX 78703 512-472-5050 Visit : Bookpeople.com
THE BUREAU EXCLUSIVE ART INTERVIEW
DAVID BURKE : PAINTER
Joshua TRILIEGI : The New Work has both architectural as well as figural conflagrations with a seriously organic feel. What happened to you between the previous target series and the new work?
David BURKE : In graduate school I had a professor look at my paintings and say, “You’re not an architect, your belongs in a world that is more organic. Stay away from that other stuff.” It took me almost ten years to paint anything that was remotely architectural after that. It’s funny the things that stick with us, the grad school ghosts that haunt us and eventually need to exorcised. In 2011, I was a visiting lecturer at Chiang Mai University in Northern Thailand and I spent almost the entire year painting landscapes that were spawned by my inability to reconcile the tension between the beauty of the pristine Thai landscape and the destruction of this landscape driven by an increased surge towards westernization and development. When I returned to Bay Area, where I grew up, I was shocked at how a place so known to me could feel almost completely foreign. The intensity of the urban landscape was arresting. In order to get reacquainted with my environment I started painting what I call “fractured landscapes” that tapped into the disorientation I was experiencing upon my return.
"When I’m painting, once the first mark hits the surface, this stuff flies out the window and it’s all about making the work. A painting should never shake its finger at the viewer; nobody wants to live with a work of art that appears to be judging them."
In these paintings pools of ink recede like oil-saturated waters at low tide. Trees emerge from a tangled field of structures, gears, and wires. My process involves equal parts control and chaos, and echoes tenuous socio-ecological relationships depicted in the imagery. The use of synthetic material reinforces the commentary on man’s impulse to consume, contain and modify the earth’s resources in order to accommodate our own needs and desires. Contrary to some of the jaded ideas around the work, the paintings are actually quite optimistic in the sense that I am continually awestruck by the resilience of the natural world in the face of such heinous destruction. This relationship between man and nature has all of the trappings of a dysfunctional marriage that has lasted thousands of years. It’s filled with lover’s quarrels, abuse, comedy and beauty. When I’m painting, once the first mark hits the surface, this stuff flies out the window and it’s all about making the work. A painting should never shake its finger at the viewer; nobody wants to live with a work of art that appears to be judging them.
[ Entire Interview Continues in The FREE FALL Edition ]
Links to David BURKE At The Vessel Gallery Exhibit : http://bit.ly/1NxWCH7
Founded in 1953 by poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Peter D. Martin, City Lights is one of the few truly great independent bookstores in the United States, a place where booklovers from across the country and around the world come to browse, read, and just soak in the ambiance of alternative culture's only "Literary Landmark." Although it has been more than fifty years since tour buses with passengers eager to sight "beatniks" began pulling up in front of City Lights, the Beats' legacy of anti-authoritarian politics and insurgent thinking continues to be a strong influence in the store, most evident in the selection of titles. The nation's first all-paperback bookstore, City Lights has expanded several times over the years; we now offer three floors of both new-release hardcovers and quality paperbacks from all of the major publishing houses, along with an impressive range of titles from smaller, harder-to-find, specialty publishers. The store features an extensive and in-depth selection of poetry, fiction, translations, politics, history, philosophy, music, spirituality, and more, with a staff whose special book interests in many fields contribute to the hand-picked quality of what you see on the shelves. The City Lights masthead says A Literary Meeting place since 1953, and this concept includes publishing books as well as selling them. In 1955, Ferlinghetti launched City Lights Publishers with the now-famous Pocket Poets Series; since then the press has gone on to publish a wide range of titles, both poetry and prose, fiction and nonfiction, international and local authors.
Visit The Store: CityLights.com
261 Columbus Avenue San Francisco, CA 94133 (415) 362-8193
BUREAU INTERVIEW : MICHELLE HANDELMAN ARTIST
Cyphers from Irma Vep, The Last Breath, 2013, digital c-print on archival paper, 18” x 24”, courtesy Participant, Inc., New York City
BUREAU : Let’s discuss video art. Who are your earliest influences.
Michelle HANDELMAN : If by influences you mean cultural artifacts that absolutely transfixed my imagination, both visually and mentally, things that totally rocked my world, then without a doubt it was: horror films. In fact probably the earliest memories I have revolve around my brothers and I dressing up as vampires and watching old black and white horror films. We would put white powder on our faces, throw towels around our shoulders like capes, light candles and watch Creature Features every weekend—Tod Browning’s Dracula, Edgar Ulmer’s The Black Cat—all the 1930s classics starring Boris Karloff and Bela Lugosi. And so, from a very early age I had this interest in the macabre and the supernatural, and the symbolic language of monsters. Two films that thoroughly imprinted themselves on me back then were Mario Bava’s Black Sunday and Hitchcock’s The Birds. I mean, when Barbara Steele emerges from that iron maiden in Black Sunday with holes all over her face that was just the coolest thing I ever saw. It was deep. I mean, we’re all riddled with holes, metaphorically, and its all one can do to keep the tatters together and move forward. But to get back to your original question about video or experimental avant-garde film, the first moving image artists who rocked my world were Charles Atlas and Ulrike Ottinger.
BUREAU : Do you believe art can change policy? Acceptance and progress?
Michelle HANDELMAN : I look at the world of humans as one large dysfunctional family that has the ability to evolve and transcend hatred, but the cards are still out as to whether or not that will ever happen. I do feel I’m a realistic optimist, which means I believe in transformation, but I also know destruction is inevitable, and in fact necessary for change. But to specifically address your question, yes, I do believe some art can lead to a change in policy. I don’t think it can actually change policy, but it can open dialogue, that can lead to a change. My piece at Eastern State Penitentiary has been on display for three years now, and periodically I receive emails from people telling me how it changed them. Last year I received a call from the federal Bureau Of Prisons inviting me to present my piece to their corrections officers. That was the first time I actually felt my work was effecting change in a very direct way. I met with the head of the BOP, as well as an assortment of bureaucrats, guards and officers and they wanted to know….they knew they had to change the way they’ve been dealing with trans inmates. They didn’t understand it, probably didn’t like it, but still, they knew they needed to change and they asked questions, lots of questions. In fact just today I was reading in the New York Times about how police officers are now receiving mandatory training on interacting with trans people. I’d like to think that in some small way my piece played a part in this change.
[ Entire Interview Continues in The FREE FALL Edition ]
CINDY SHERMAN UNTITLED FILM STILL # 7 The BROAD MUSEUM
The NEW BROAD MUSEUM in L. A.
PHOTO : Iwan Baan THE BROAD MUSEUM
The Broad makes its collection of contemporary art from the 1950s to the present accessible to the widest possible audience by presenting exhibitions and operating a lending program to art museums and galleries worldwide.The Broad is a new contemporary art museum built by philanthropists Eli and Edythe Broad on Grand Avenue in downtown Los Angeles. The museum, which is designed by Diller Scofidio + Renfro in collaboration with Gensler will offer free general admission. The museum will be home to the nearly 2,000 works of art in the Broad collection, which is among the most prominent holdings of postwar and contemporary art worldwide. With its innovative “veil-and-vault” concept, the 120,000-square-foot, $140-million building will feature two floors of gallery space to showcase The Broad’s comprehensive collection and will be the headquarters of The Broad Art Foundation’s worldwide lending library. The Broad is home to the 2,000-work Broad collection, one of the most prominent holdings of postwar and contemporary art worldwide. With in-depth representations of influential contemporary artists like Jean-Michel Basquiat, Barbara Kruger, Cy Twombly, Ed Ruscha, Kara Walker, Christopher Wool, Jeff Koons, Joseph Beuys, Jasper Johns, Cindy Sherman, Robert Rauschenberg, and more, plus an ever-growing representation of younger artists.
from BURDEN to BALDESSARI
from FISCHL to FRANCIS
from WALKER to WARHOL
221 S. Grand Avenue Los Angeles CA USA 90012 TheBroad.org
Larry Sulton Oranges on Fire 1975 LarrySulton.com
Milwaukee Art Museum
presents
The Photographic Works of Photographer Larry Sultan
October 23, 2015 – January 24, 2016
The exhibition includes more than 200 photographs ranging from Sultan’s conceptual and collaborative works of the 1970s to his solo works in the decades following. Sultan never stopped challenging the conventions of photographic documentation, exploring themes of family, home, and façade throughout his career. Larry Sultan grew up in California’s San Fernando Valley, which became a source of inspiration for a number of his projects. His work blends documentary and staged photography to create images of the psychological as well as physical landscape of suburban family life.
Sultan’s pioneering book and exhibition Pictures From Home (1992) was a decade long project that features his own mother and father as its primary subjects, exploring photography’s role in creating familial mythologies. Using this same suburban setting, his book, The Valley (2004) examined the adult film industry and the area’s middle-class tract homes that serve as pornographic film sets. Katherine Avenue, (2010) the exhibition and book, explored Sultan’s three main series, Pictures From Home, The Valley, and Homeland along side each other to further examine how Sultan’s images negotiate between reality and fantasy, domesticity and desire, as the mundane qualities of the domestic surroundings become loaded cultural symbols.
In 2012, the monograph, Larry Sultan and Mike Mandel was published to examine in depth the thirty plus year collaboration between these artists as they tackled numerous conceptual projects together that includes Billboards, How to Read Music In One Evening, Newsroom, and the seminal photography book Evidence, a collection of found institutional photographs, first published in 1977. Larry Sultan’s work has been exhibited and published widely and is included in the collections of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Solomon Guggenheim Museum, and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, where he was also recognized with the Bay Area Treasure Award in 2005. Sultan served as a Distinguished Professor of Photography at California College of the Arts in San Francisco. Born in Brooklyn, New York in 1946, Larry Sultan passed away at his home in Greenbrae, California in 2009.
The Artist: LarrySultan.com The Museum : MAM.org
Kehinde Wiley / 30 Americans : Detroit Institute of Arts Oct. 18, 2015–Jan. 18, 2016
30 Americans : Detroit Institute of Arts
Oct. 18, 2015–Jan. 18, 2016
30 Americans is a dynamic exhibition of contemporary art by African American artists, on view Oct. 18, 2015–Jan. 18, 2016. “30 Americans” includes 55 paintings, sculptures, installations, photographs and videos by many of the most important artists who rose to prominence during recent decades by exploring racial, gender, political and historical identity in contemporary culture. Organized around several artistic approaches used by the artists to explore identity: defying Western art traditions; portraying black subjects as real people as opposed to types; sampling multiple sources of inspiration, from historical material to found objects; freestyling by adopting improvisational and expressionistic styles to demonstrate creative and technical virtuosity; signifying through the use of symbols, materials and images that imply or trigger associations about gender, race, religion, class and sexuality; transforming the body’s appearance to examine the relationship between societal assumptions and identity; and confronting American history regarding race, racism and power in the United States. VISIT THE LINK AT: www.dia.org
Photo Image: : Melissa Ann PINNEY Courtesy SCHNEIDER GALLERY Chicago USA
The Underground Punk Music Scene : A Feminists View
By Bureau Music Contributor Sarah Rose Perry
Young people from far and near come line up in a Downtown LA alley outside of The Smell -- an all ages, self sustained “community oriented art and music space” waiting to see The Groans Joel Jerome, Sloppy Jane and Peach Kelli Pop. These bands collectively, along with countless more, make up a fresh and new underground music scene. Concentrated in the Inland Empire, but spread about Los Angeles and Riverside counties, the Groups range from garage rock to punk pop. The bands and their fans are something like that of a large family, with many distant relatives; you might not know each person there, but everyone is friendly and glad to see you. The Groans were the opening band at Friday’s show and when asked about why the scene is so important to us young people, they explained that the scene is very much a community and it’s exciting to be a part of, because “it gives people who are different or outsiders a sense of home.” It also provides a space for women empowerment. Whether they are deliberately taking a political stance, or simply being badass women, the message from these leading female musicians is clear and powerful.
As I myself can testify, being a young woman, and seeing these other ladies on stage, confidently doing traditionally male dominated work, can be a catalyst for a dose of adrenaline and self approval. The Groans first got together because the lead singer, Amanda, and the bassist, Annie, thought there weren’t enough women in the local music scene. They explain, “we wanted a band that represented women of color and women in general.” They have achieved this thoroughly and many of their song’s lyrics make that statement loud and clear. One of their more popular songs entitled “The Perks of Being a Girl” (“perks” being used rather sardonically) begins with fast paced music, sing - songy vocals and features a very catchy build up stating, “I can be pretty. I can be skinny. I can be everything, BUT I. Don’t. Owe. You. Anything.” The band states, “It’s about the shit all women go through on a daily basis… It’s us saying ‘fuck you’ to society’s beauty standards; I’m beautiful no matter what.” This turned out to be a highly relatable concept among the young adults at the show, boys and girls alike. During their performance of the song on Friday, a sweaty mosh pit opened up in the middle of the crowd and everyone screamed along, “I’m just another girl in this fucked up world.”
Of course, this is nothing new to punk rock. As writer, Rock Hall explains, “The anti-establishment philosophy of the punk rock movement was the perfect fit for those female musicians who still felt like outsiders in the male dominated music industry” Though this particular comment was in reference to the seventies, some sentiments have remained the same. Amanda, the lead Singer of The Groans states that, “It’s a bit of a boy’s club, but [ they ] are glad to see more women in the scene.” Women throughout history have made significant, empowering gains using punk and all its sub-genres as a facilitator to bring serious female issues to the media, and by making waves in punk in the past. The female gender today are able to make the ‘fuck you, society’ statement, and be critical of authority or social norms, more safely -- which was not always the case and in some parts of the world, still is not.
Like nearly everything else, punk rock began as an all male genre, but with questioning authority and social norms as their main agenda, it was natural for women to step in and take a piece of the spotlight. Inspired by the Sex Pistols, Poly Styrene decided to form her own punk band, X-Ray Spex. Although they only lasted about three years, producing only one album, the band will be remembered by their lead singer screaming, “some people think little girls should be seen and not heard… Oh Bondage Up Yours!” Before the start of their debut single. Chris Salewicz of The Independent says, “As a dumpy, frumpy,almost willfully unsexual girl from Brixton, with braces on her teeth, Poly Styrene was a perfect candidate to find herself through punk; turning this persona on its head into an art form, she became one of the movement's principal female figures, her song ‘Oh Bondage, Up Yours!’ a feminist rallying cry.” Also formed in 1976, The Slits were the first all women punk band. Their song “Typical Girls” includes commentary on the social pressure women receive along with the negative misconceptions upheld about them by society, “typical girls worry about spots, fat, and natural smells… typical girls are emotional / typical girls are cruel and bewitching.”
[ Entire Article Continues in The FREE Downloadable FALL 2015 Edition ]
ART FAIR REVIEWS, AUDIO AND VISUAL PRESENTATIONS ON LINE DECEMBER 2015 UNTITLED . MIAMI . RED DOT . LA ART FAIR . PHOTO LA . MIAMI PROJECT + MORE
BUREAU OF ARTS AND CULTURE MAGAZINE MEDIA SITES
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BUREAU LITERARY
BUREAU NEWS
The PORTRAIT : LANGSTON HUGHES
AMERICANS WHO TELL THE TRUTH By Robert SHETTERLY
We Thank: Da Capo Press, Cantor Arts Center, Stanford University, Pace/MacGill Gallery, National Gallery of Art, Georgia O'Keefe Museum of Art, Fine Arts Center Colorado Springs, Duke University, Andy Warhol Museum, Phoenix Art Museum, Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Art Institute of Chicago, Museum of Fine Arts Boston, Crystal Bridges, United Artists, Spot Photo Works, Nasher Sculpture Center, Dallas Museum of Art, Museum of Fine Art Huston Texas, Gallerie Urbane, Mary Boone Gallery, Pace Gallery, Asian Art Museum, Magnum Photo, Chicago Museum of Contemporary Art, Fahey/Klein, Tobey C. Moss, Sandra Gehring, George Billis, Martin - Gropius - Bau Berlin, San Jose Museum of Art, First Run Features, Downtown Records, Koplin Del Rio, Robert Berman, Indie Printing, American Film Institute, SFMOMA, Palm Beverly Hills, KM Fine Arts, LA Art Show, Photo LA, Jewish Contemporary Museum, Cultural Affairs, Yale Collection of Rare Books & Manuscript and Richard Levy.
Contributing Photographers: Norman Seef, Herb Ritts, Jack English, Alex Harris, Gered Mankowitz, Bohnchang Koo, Natsumi Hayashi, Raymond Depardon, T. Enami, Dennis Stock, Dina Litovsky, Guillermo Cervera, Moises Saman, Cathleen Naundorf, Terry Richardson, Phil Stern, Dennis Morris, Henry Diltz, Steve Schapiro, Yousuf Karsh, Ellen Von Unwerth, William Claxton, Robin Holland, Andrew Moore, James Gabbard, Mary Ellen Mark, John Robert Rowlands, Brian Duffy, Robert Frank, Jon Lewis, Sven Hans, David Levinthal, Joshua White, Brian Forrest, Lorna Stovall, Elliott Erwitt, Rene Burri, Susan Wright, David Leventhal, Peter Van Agtmael & The Bureau Editor Joshua Triliegi.
Contributing Guest Artists: Irby Pace, Jon Swihart, F. Scott Hess, Ho Ryon Lee, Andy Moses, Kahn & Selesnick, Jules Engel, Patrick Lee, David Palumbo, Tom Gregg, Tony Fitzpatrick, Gary Lang, Fabrizio Casetta, DJ Hall, David FeBland, Eric Zener, Seeroon Yeretzian, Dawn Jackson, Charles Dickson, Ernesto DeLaLoza, Diana Wong, Gustavo Godoy, John Weston, Kris Kuksi, Bomonster, Hiroshi Ariyama, Linda Stark, Kota Ezawa, Russell Nachman, Katsushika Hokusai and Xuan Chen
Contributing Writers: Robin Holland, Jamar Mar(s) Tucker, Linda Toch, Sarah Rose Perry
BUREAU ARCHIVE : ART INTERVIEWS, REVIEWS AND ESSAYS
ROBERT SHETTERLY . F. SCOTT HESS . HIROSHIA ARIYAMA . TOM GREGG . DAVID PALUMBO . MARGIE LIVINGSTON . LINDA STARK . ERIC ZENNER . ANDY MOSES . RUSSEL NACHMAN
ROBERT SHETTERLY: PAINTER
Guest Artist for Spring 2015 Literary Edition of BUREAU of Arts and Culture Magazine is Painter and Social Historian Robert Shetterly. He is the Creator of an On - Going Series of Portraits entitled, "Americans Who Tell The Truth." Yeah, the title alone is loaded with a multiplicity of meanings & interpretations. We were initially attracted to the Artwork itself, and have since been drawn in by the large cast of characters that make up this original and interesting series. Today, We honor the Art of Robert Shetterly & Americans Who Tell The Truth.
by Joshua A. TRILIEGI for BUREAU OF ARTS AND CULTURE LITERARY EDITION SPRING 2015
At first glance, one notices the vibrant colors, the bold backgrounds and the striking faces staring directly at the viewer. Closer inspection reveals inscriptions and quotes scratched directly into the canvases. Looking closer yet, one begins to actually behold the energy, the spirit, the 'vibe', if you will, of the subject. Somewhere between the WORDS they have spoken and the faces they were given and often times, mingled with the historical aspects of American history: Robert Shetterly's subjects come to life. The portraits are awake, they speak to us, they educate us, they demand respect in one way or another. There is bravery, beauty and brevity in this body of work. For sure, it is indeed, politically charged and at the same time, on either side of the aisle, politically speaking, many of these, "Truths," being espoused could ultimately be embraced by any person who cares deeply about America and beyond that, the rights of human beings everywhere. On the American front, the subjects vary from respect for the environment, to the right to be a pacifist, to the concerns of racial equality, to the rights of women, to the original values of the native Americans and on into the original purpose of creating a country like America to begin with. This is a series of paintings that many of the founding fathers and mothers of America would appreciate. With over 200 portraits and no shortage of subjects to honor, Mr. Shetterly has found a way to take his inspirations and hand them directly back to the people of the world in an absorbing and educational manner.
The subjects vary from extremely famous personalities to little known local activists who have brought to light the simplest universal truth to an issue that concerns themselves and the broader world. In a time of increasingly draconian rule with multiple abuses of power at the highest levels by some of the most powerful overbearing decision makers in America: The Series is a Beacon of Light. The power of an Individual, You, or Mr. Shetterly, or Me, or any of the American Subjects lovingly painted here, is very much alive. One may not even realize this fact, without perusing the Series itself. It is a very liberating and honest sequence of images, ideas and complete revelations. America is a beautiful idea, it promises so much freedom, so much opportunity, so much success and yet, the flip side of that promise is the very fact that if we as a people do not stand up for those original values, we stand to lose them and quite possibly, we already have. "Americans Who Tell The Truth," is an important, relevant and absorbing series of works that, in my estimation, is one of the most forthright, timely & intriguing series of paintings to have ever been created about America. Why? Because the truth is very hard to come by these days. The truth is a commodity, like money or property. Those who have it know how good it feels. Those who want it will do anything to get it. Those who try to take it away will lie to do so and in that act itself, become the antithesis of TRUTH. Such is the paradigm of the equation. Telling The Truth in America can lead to many sorrows and yet, it could also lead you to the presidency. Retaining that truth, once you get there, may be all but impossible. Mr. Shetterly's art retains an integrity and a value that will last well beyond the terms of any president, senator or congressperson, so too his subjects. How then do we proceed ? For starters: Simply Tell It like It Is.
ROBERT SHETTERLY: INTERVIEW
Joshua Triliegi : The Project entitled, "Americans Who tell the TRUTH" is a very intensive and wonderful body of work. How did this series come about ?
Robert Shetterly : The Americans Who Tell the Truth project was not something I intended to do. I had never painted a realistic portrait. In the wake of 9/11 our government began using 9/11 to beat the drums of war for an attack on Iraq. Iraq, as I hope you all know, had nothing to do with 9/11, no links with al Qaeda, nor did it have weapons of mass destruction. This was a tumultuous time. The 2000 election was full of corruption, then 9/11, then an avalanche of lies and fear to promote an unnecessary, illegal, immoral war. I was in a rage of grief for all the potential victims. And I was in a rage of grief for the total failure of our democracy. I was not surprised that the government was lying, but I was outraged that the corporate media was cheer leading for war and not exposing the lies. In a functional democracy, the Iraq war could not have happened. I felt alienated and marginalized more than I ever have in this country.
"The answer for me turned out to be very simple. Instead of obsessing about the people who were lying, I chose to begin surrounding myself with Americans I admired. I painted their portraits & scratched quotes from them into the surface.I chose a constituency I believed in and could draw strength from to stand up against a corrupt government."
I had a career as a surrealist painter and print maker, but all of my work seemed irrelevant now. I knew that I had to use the thing I do best -- art -- to gain a voice. And I also knew that if I presented my anger through my art, no one would be interested. I had to take the energy of that anger and use it in the service of love, compassion and justice. But how? The answer for me turned out to be very simple. Instead of obsessing about the people who were lying, I chose to begin surrounding myself with Americans I admired. I painted their portraits & scratched quotes from them into the surface. I chose a constituency I believed in and could draw strength from to stand up against a corrupt government. The US has always had a large gap between the values it professes and the reality of its actions. I was painting some of the people who have dedicated their courage and persistence to closing that gap so that the ideals of equality and dignity and freedom are present for everyone. I began with a goal of 50 portraits. I've now painted over 200.
Joshua Triliegi : The Title itself has a connotation, almost humorously, that not all Americans DO tell the truth. What is your criterion for choosing a subject and tell our readers about the working process of a single portrait ?
Robert Shetterly : Frequently, when I tell people the title of my project, I get an incredulous look and the comment, "I didn't know there were any Americans who tell the truth." Most Americans are deeply cynical about the level of dishonesty in all of their institutions, but particularly the government, the media, the corporations and the financial world. Sadly that cynicism most often translates into apathy. Apathy as much as institutional dishonesty destroys any hope of democracy. People also know at some level that governments all over the world are failing to govern, and that unless some serious world issues are dealt with, we will all be overwhelmed by these problems.
"When governments fail to do the right thing, the people must lead. I've been choosing to paint people both past & present who have done that leading. Without facing the problems and telling the truth, there is no trust; without trust there is no hope. I try to choose people to paint from the entire spectrum of fundamental issues of social, economic and environmental justice. I choose some very well known people and many unknown."
When governments fail to do the right thing, the people must lead. I've been choosing to paint people both past & present who have done that leading. Without facing the problems and telling the truth, there is no trust; without trust there is no hope. I try to choose people to paint from the entire spectrum of fundamental issues of social, economic and environmental justice. I choose some very well known people and many unknown. My point is not to paint only icons, extraordinary people who make the rest of us feel insufficient. I want to show that many great changes for the better were instigated by very ordinary folks. I spend more time researching my subjects than I do painting them because this project has become all about education. I spend most of my time now in schools showing the portraits, telling the stories, exhorting, and hopefully inspiring, kids to be better citizens.
Joshua Triliegi : The Works themselves are beautiful. They are somehow connected to early portraits of The Founders of our Nation, and at the same time have a slightly folk sensibility and yet they are very freshly presented. Tell us about your education and how that influenced the actual style and look of the work.
Robert Shetterly : I'm a self-taught artist who learned to draw & paint by copying the work of artists I admired. Leonardo, Durer, Degas and Goya taught me to draw. Rembrandt, Matisse, Magritte and Francis Bacon taught me to paint. There were many others. And you are right --- I am greatly influenced by folk and outsider artists because of their intensity and honesty. But the style of these portraits was a direct result of my intent --- to paint people of integrity and make that integrity the context of the painting. That's why the backgrounds are only color fields.
"I've learned enough about art to know that the quality of the painting is what authenticates the message. I'm trying to honor people I admire and present them as role models. Whatever success I may have at doing that depends on the my attempt to make real art, not simply political placards. So, as simple as the basic composition of these portraits is, it's very important to me to make beautiful paintings"
I want the viewer to focus entirely on the character of the subject and then on the subject's words. However, I've learned enough about art to know that the quality of the painting is what authenticates the message. I'm trying to honor people I admire and present them as role models. Whatever success I may have at doing that depends on the my attempt to make real art, not simply political placards. So, as simple as the basic composition of these portraits is, it's very important to me to make beautiful paintings. If viewers can appreciate the work for its artistry, they may be more inclined to be sympathetic to its message.
Joshua Triliegi : The color Fields in your work are extremely important, you also utilize quotes and then there is the actual portrait itself. Discuss the challenges and rewards in committing to a project such as Americans Who Tell the Truth.
Robert Shetterly : I think I may have answered the first part of this question. I'll focus on the second. When I first began this project, I really didn't think I could do it. Besides not having painted portraits previously, I decided I would not sell the portraits --- selling them seemed wrong. The people I paint have freely given so much. But how was I going to live? I had supported myself and family by selling art. I told myself that I needed to take this leap. That I would trust the world to either support the project or not, but I needed to do it. Frankly, though, choosing not to sell the art gave me a great sense of freedom. I could say whatever I wanted, make all my own choices about whom to paint.
"When I first began this project, I really didn't think I could do it. Besides not having painted portraits previously, I decided I would not sell the portraits --- selling them seemed wrong. The people I paint have freely given so much. But how was I going to live? I had supported myself and family by selling art. I told myself that I needed to take this leap. That I would trust the world to either support the project or not, but I needed to do it."
If it failed and I ended up with some portraits in my basement that nobody wanted to see, that would be OK. Instead, as soon as I began to show them I began to be asked to talk about them, to tell stories, to talk about history, ethics, social change. It's been over 13 years now that I have committed myself to this project and my learning curve is still vertical. My life has totally changed. The portraits have required me to be an artist/activist/teacher. I travel to schools, colleges, museums, libraries, and churches all over the country and even outside the country to talk about the portraits. The great challenges remain --- never relaxing the quality of the work and doing enough research so that I can talk intelligently and accurately about history, politics, economics and social change.
Joshua Triliegi : Please explain to our readers about the line you walk between artist, social Commentator or witness to truth, in this case, and the actual organization level of presenting these works in the way you do around the world.
Robert Shetterly : Part of the obligation I've taken on by spending so much time --- literally & figuratively --- with my subjects is the necessity to attempt to act in the world with the same degree of courage. On the one hand, in schools I present the portraits and the quotes as places to begin dialogue: What do you think of this person? What she said? Is he right? Why? What forces was she up against? What's the historical context? Could you do that? Why was it necessary? But on the other hand, as an activist I need to put my body & integrity on the line, commit civil disobedience if I need to, take risks. If I don't do that, I undercut the lesson I am trying to teach about commitment. I have a great small team that works with me on enhancing the educational goals of the project, and another group I do political action with. Each reinforces the other.
"I present the portraits and the quotes as places to begin dialogue: What do you think of this person? What she said? Is he right? Why? What forces was she up against? What's the historical context? Could you do that? Why was it necessary?"
Joshua Triliegi : Looking at your list of Portraits, one immediately realizes that Americans that Tell The TRUTH, sometimes, pay a big personal price. Here at the magazine, we have indeed begun to experience some of that. Discuss, if you will, your views on Honesty in America.
Robert Shetterly: When one witnesses for the truth, stands up against the power of the status quo, one takes a risk. When one tries to expose institutional corruption and hypocrisy, that attempt can be very divisive and meet with ridicule, humiliation and attack. Power wants to maintain itself and all the profit that flows from that power. Challenging it makes one vulnerable to all the means it controls --- law, police, media, politics. But then where would this country be without the people who have challenged the status quo? Frederick Douglass, Susan B. Anthony, Rosa Parks, Martin Luther King, Jr., Rachel Carson, Daniel Ellsberg, Edward Snowden. Thousands more.
Joshua Triliegi : I see a touch of Andrew Wyeth in your work. Would you discuss your formative Influences ?
Robert Shetterly : My influences are various. I'm particularly interested in portrait painters who succeed at revealing the character of their subjects. Andrew Wyeth often does that. So does Alice Neel. I think, though, what's important to stress here is that an influence is someone who has helped you see. Not to see like him or her, but see for yourself. For me, having the patience to learn how to draw well has been my most important portrait influence. Being able to render the the eccentricities of any face, to really see what is there, is a big part of honestly conveying the character of the person.
"Most of our courageous whistleblowers don't even have have the opportunity to make their case to the public. The powerful use the law to sequester their voices. But, often the facts can overwhelm the attempts to suppress them ---whether it's about climate change, torture, mass surveillance or political and financial corruption. In a sense this is a great opportunity for truth tellers in America."
Joshua Triliegi : Edward Snowden and Bill Ayers are in the series and have names from more recent contemporary social events. Where do you think America is headed in terms of Truth ?
Robert Shetterly : That's a tough question. Never in our history has the media been so pervasive, so powerful, so continuous in its denunciation of those who challenge political orthodoxy or risk everything to tell the truth. That's intimidating. Most of our courageous whistle blowers don't even have have the opportunity to make their case to the public. The powerful use the law to sequester their voices. But, often the facts can overwhelm the attempts to suppress them ---whether it's about climate change, torture, mass surveillance or political and financial corruption. In a sense this is a great opportunity for truth tellers in America. The general public has so little trust in the honesty of most institutional leaders that they are open to the prophetic voices. The problem is for those voices to get access to the media. The powerful are not trusted, but they do still control who gets heard.
Joshua Triliegi : Do you have any particular Portraits that are significantly memorable, if so please describe why.
Robert Shetterly : Well, each portrait is memorable if only for the energy expended in attempting to make a good painting. But many of the subjects have become friends whom I continue to work with. For instance, Lily Yeh, the woman who founded Barefoot Artists & uses art to rebuild broken communities all over the world. I went with her to work in a village of genocide survivors in Rwanda & to a refugee camp in Palestine --- some of the most memorable events of my life. I painted John Kiriakou, the CIA agent who blew the whistle on US torture policy and we unveiled his portrait together in DC right before he was sent to prison. I got to know Judy Bonds, the courageous activist from southern West Virginia against Mountaintop Removal Coal extraction. Actually, I don't like answering this question because each portrait has a story like this & has enriched me enormously. I want to tell them all. Each person brings me into contact with courage. And, as William Sloane Coffin says, "Without courage there are no other virtues."
"… Each portrait has a story like this & has enriched me enormously. I want to tell them all. Each person brings me into contact with courage. And, as William Sloane Coffin says, "Without courage there are no other virtues."
Joshua Triliegi : Whats going on with The project this year and how can our readers support and participate ?
Robert Shetterly : AWTT keeps expanding. We are launching a series of new educational initiatives. I would hope people would visit the website and spend some time there exploring the people, the issues, the ways of teaching. Your readers can support our work by modeling their own citizenship on some of the portraits, by telling teachers about the project, by buying cards and posters, by writing to me with suggestions of people to paint. But mostly your readers can understand that most of the institutions that we have entrusted to care for the common good, to care for the future of our children, to care for stewardship of the earth, to care for the maintenance of democracy have failed. It is up to us not only to insist on better governance, but to do it ourselves. Our institutions --- political and economic --- are locked into systems of profit and exploitation which are endangering the future. We don't have to accept that. We shouldn't accept that. Morally, we can't accept it. And there is great personal and communal joy in building a sane, sustainable world.
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F. SCOTT HESS: PAINTER
By BUREAU of Arts and Culture Editor Joshua A. Triliegi
F. Scott Hess is an American artist with an education and techniques informed by European Masters. Mr. Hess was born in Baltimore in 1955 and raised in Wisconsin. He studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna, picking up ancient skills that were employed by the likes of Vermeer and Boticelli. Six years later, with a buying audience in Europe, he took a chance on obscurity in America, but soon found an audience at home as well. Mr. Hess's work could be described as narrative - figural with a heavy hand on the psychological symbolic field, though, I beleive, there is something much deeper going on in this man's body of work. There is an obvious shock value that we could affiliate with other great new artists born in and around the same time as Mr. Hess, such as Angus Young of AC/DC or even Johnny Lydon of the first punk rock band, The Sex Pistols. Some people in the audience may find trouble getting past the first few songs and for them, we are very sorry, if you stick around for the entire concert, you are bound to be changed. Utilizing history, poetry, dreams and a very keen discerning eye for light, situation and relationships of a social nature, with a healthy dose of very dark humor: Mr Hess is a social critic, willing to put himself on the front lines of the art world and bare his soul in the process. He is also a teacher and in turn many of his paintings work on so many levels that the casual passer by, the educated and the intellectual, will all see something entirely different while standing in front of the same painting.
Mr Hess's references are steeped in art history at all levels, from Hopper to Velasquez, from Lucien Freud to Rembrandt, he is immersed in the core knowledge of previous painters and it informs the narrative, the style and the symbology in a way that a Jazz great like Coltrane or Thelonious Monk might apply a classical riff by Mozart or any number of composers of note, while still retaining an originality and strange interlude that we as the audience applaud. Mr. Hess, who went through a family separation at an early age and is fully aware of it's effect on his emotional make up, shares that anguish, that pain, that angst, rather than hides it. Hess is sort of the David Lynch of figural painters, taking on material, subjects and narratives that create a sense of mystery or allow us to peak into the darker side of America: Blue Velvet on canvas. Hess understands the process and indeed has stated that, although it is not entirely the most comfortable aspect of working, "The process is the most important." He has undergone various transformations and even sites being hired by a film director to teach an actor how to paint like DaVinci as an influential experience, one that brought in more earth tones to his palette. Mr Hess's work of the 1980s has everything in common with the New Wave of music at the time: The anger of Elvis Costello, the color of The B52s, the social commentary of any number of punk bands such as Black Flag or The Circle Jerks. Many of these bands focused on everyday life and what a drag it really is. Suicidal Tendencies had a song called, "Institutionalized" wherein a story is told by a boy who is sitting in his room, he asks his mother for a Pepsi, "All I wanted was a Pepsi …" the next thing he knows, they're threatening to take him to a psycho ward: this is Mr. Hess's world in the 1980s. The art transforms as new information comes in, each personal discovery effects the work visually, from having a dream, to reading a poem, to disagreeing with a critic, to learning about his personal geneology. He is a jester without a king and some might say, he is dangerous, he is blasphemous, he is obsessed with sexuality [ who isn't ? ] but if you look closer, at the craft, at the guts, at the naked truth as someone like Leonard Cohen might say, you will see a poet, you will see a narrator, you will see a social critic, you will see a boy, in his room and all he wanted was a Pepsi.

F. Scott Hess's work of the 1990s and currently is decidely less electric, the colors are slightly subdued, not entirley, and this is not an artist one can generalize about, but due to the extreme vibrato created in his early work, there is a transition. Fatherhood, family relations and the discovery of a Southern American relative in the armed forces of ancient day produces entirely new works emblazoned with a fiery gusto and an understanding as well as a criticism that could easily bother sensibilities. Hess has no problem at all making waves, rocking the boat, screaming into the drunken night like a wounded howling animal, the big difference being, he does it in tune and it actually sounds incredible. He is much like the late great Los Angeles writer Charles Bukowski in that regard, intensely gutteral, poetically honest, sexually expressive and brutally critical of society, all the while laughung and crying for all that he has seen, felt, won and lost. If F. Scott Hess were not a painter, one gets the sense that he would somehow find a way to share his knowledge of humanity, history, archeology, poetry and or prose. When you have this type of technique, you can do what you will, when you will and roll the dice accordingly: Hess does not play it safe. There is experimentation in color, in relationship, in technique and in style. Just as soon as we think we know a Hess painting, he changes it up. Specifically, when he decides to allow a single figure to exist on the canvas such as the painting entitled, "Learning the Language of Water."
A beautiful Boticelli like figure with fiery red hair sinks to the bottom of the rich deep blues of a reflection pool, staring upward toward the surface. Rather than a 'relationship painting', as he is known for, the journey is now into self and in doing so, Mr. Hess takes all that energy and detail and applies it to the figures reflection, which appears to be data or language or text, as if she is reading her own story. It is a haunting and beautiful work that is both primal and contemporary. Hess is washing humanity of all the numbers, the stocks, the internet data that we so readily feel is important and immersing us into the naked realities of what would really be important, if all of it were suddenly taken away ? Certainly to have a body, to inhabit that form, to walk, to talk, to exist and on top of all of that, to actually be beautiful, what a gift, to be lovely, to be sensual, to be vulnerable. Hess captures all of this and more. The sinking figure reaches to the surface, she is not exactly drowning, but clearly, she did not expect to fall in. Because Hess tells stories through symbology, this indeed invites speculation. If water is emotions, then this woman is surely overcome, if reality is the surface, than she is drifting far from it, if numbers and letters and data are at the very surface, there is a good chance she will not return, better to see what lies beneath, rather than stay at the shallow end.
" Mr. Hess's references are steeped in art history at all levels, from Hopper to Velasquez, from Lucien Freud to Rembrandt, he is immersed in the core knowledge of previous painters and it informs the narrative, the style and the symbology … "
Going with this train of thought, it is safe to say that Hess is a deep painter with a magical and mischevious bent, a seductive style that conjures as it cojoles, he is a tempest willing to terrify as well as to terrorize our senses and all the while, he does it with such penache, grace and out and out visual poetry, that we find it hard to turn away. Hess is a master painter who has stayed in touch with his vulnerability and has no problem sharing those fears, desires, ideas with the viewer, and for those of us still in the audience, after each and every encore, we will never forget it. This body of artwork is as dangerous as an Egon Schielle drawing or as insane as a Salvador Dali print or as beautiful as any number of works, you name it. Hess has passed through the looking glass, he dove deep into the dark waters an ugly duckling and came back to the surface as a swan on a dare. No one can win everytime they go to the track, step up to the roulette wheel or roll the dice, but some gamblers choose wisely, they take educated guesses, they study the horses and when they win, they win big. F. Scott Hess is indeed a winner and for my money, I will always take a willing tip from this artist rather than any simple cashier sitting at the ticket counter any day.

Joshua Triliegi: What was a very young F. Scott Hess like and how did he view the world ?
F. Scott Hess: As a kid I was a bit introspective. I hated speaking in class, though I didn't mind clowning around. I lived in Florida and I remember doing things that make my hair stand on end when I think about it now. My friends and I were adventure seekers. We hacked out pathways and constructed forts in wild areas adjacent to the Kensington Park housing development in Sarasota. We built rafts and swam in drainage ditches where there were poisonous snakes, snapping turtles, and alligators. I set fire to the back yard playing with sparklers, and sitting on the roof of the house I blew up condoms I'd found in the trash. I didn't know what they were for, and my mother stood below yelling at me to "put down those dirty things!" When I was ten my family moved to Stoughton, Wisconsin. Again I set the backyard on fire, this time playing with gasoline. Inspired after visiting an archaeological dig, I built an earthen hut in the woods behind our house, and was visited one morning by the Chief of Police and the building inspector. I'd made the mistake of cutting the logs for my hut's roof support from city property, and a neighbor had turned me in. I worked on a city tree farm for a week to pay for my sins. The nature that surrounded our house, and me growing up, became a source of wonder and inspiration. My maternal grandfather was a minister, but at age eleven I decided there was no god, and found answers to life's questions in the natural world. I drew from an early age, and drawing was the only place I felt I had any control over my life. There I was master and magically controlled events.
Joshua Triliegi: An individual artist can indeed influence the world with a viewpoint, who were your earliest influences in the arts and how did it effect your work ?
F. Scott Hess: I did not see a lot of fine art growing up, and my parents also frowned upon low-brow comics. I remember being in the hospital at eleven and seeing the kid in the bed next to me with a slew of Marvel superhero comics. I had an embarrassing little pile of comic "Classics" that didn't interest him in the least, but still influenced me in some ways. Toward the end of high school I tried to work like Andrew Wyeth, but once college started I learned how uncool he was in academia. Being interested in erotic art, my first art love was Egon Schiele. I'd discovered a fat book on him in the Lawrence University library & that started an obsession with Viennese art. I focused on drawing & printmaking, and sought out artists that were good at that. After graduating from the UW-Madison I flew into Heathrow, hitchhiked across Europe, and set up a studio in Vienna. I started studying at the Academy of Fine Art there, in the Meisterschule of Rudolf Hausner. He was one of the famous Vienna Fantastic Realists, and very supportive of my work. I began to paint under his tutelage, and thus learned some very classic painting methods, like the egg-and-oil Mixed Technique. Learning the basic traditional skills required of representational painting through the centuries perfectly dovetailed with the kind of figurative imagery I'd wanted to make since I was seven years old.

Joshua Triliegi: Artwork that displays enough magic or craft or ability, then has the chance to seduce the viewer into a whole other realm, your work is obviously at that level. How does literature or music or memory play a part in your current works ?
F. Scott Hess: My work is narrative, but not in the sense that it delivers a finished story. If I read a book, that's it. If it was goodI might read it again, but not until years later. A painting, on the other hand, sits on the wall of a person's home for decades (this is my ideal place for my work, not a museum where the average attention span is five seconds). It is always visible, and it should continually deliver something unexpected, a new discovery, and new way of looking at something. So I layer meaning, constructing narratives that have depth and resonance, but no linear story and no neat conclusion.
One of the great advantages of painting is that all the information is constantly in front of the viewer's eyes. In a linear, time-based narrative, like film or literature, the flow of the narrative must be constructed in a way that is coherent temporally. Stuff has to be left out that might conflict with the flow of that time-based narrative. Painting can simultaneously hold all that conflict before the viewer, who can pick up and hold these opposing narrative threads, turn them over in the mind, consider the options, go with the multiple meanings. These in turn resonate with the viewer, purposefully triggering specific responses, but also giving the viewer's imagination enough space to ruminate endlessly on the possibilities. I aim to hit the viewer at a subconscious level. Through the movements of my characters I hope my audience 'feels' the content before they have a chance to cognitively analyze it.
The importance of embodied simulation has been ignored in recent art theory, and is just being rediscovered, this time with scientific studies that investigate exactly how it operates in the human brain (Freedberg & Gallese, Motion, Emotion and Empathy in Esthetic Experience, 2007). Intellectually investigating my work is fine and hopefully rewarding, but I want to own my viewer's soul before they have a chance to think about it.
Joshua Triliegi: The paintings are like good fiction, based in reality, dangerous and interpretable based on a certain state of mind. Discuss the psychology that envelops your characters.
F. Scott Hess: The interactions of the people in my painting has been crucial to me since I first started making images. Many of my students at Laguna College of Art & Design are pretty good at painting a solitary figure, sitting still, against an empty background. Social media is full of well-painted heads and solitary static figures that seem quite popular, but I get really bored with these, no matter how well done they are. So I have my students put a second figure into their images and suddenly there is a psychological interaction. Give one or both figures a little movement and you not only start to build a narrative, you'll imbue them with an internal life. The ancient Greeks discovered this in sculpture, when they moved from the stiff kouros style to contrapposto. Suddenly those sculptures had a believable inner existence. In developing the psychological interactions of those characters further I've discovered that a good rule is to use only as much expression and movement as is required to express the emotion you desire in the figure, and nothing more. As little as possible to carry your idea. Anything excessive becomes unbelievable and distracts the viewer, limiting their acceptance of the depicted action. I'm also not worried about creating pleasant people or getting likenesses of my models. I want character and a sense of inner life. I want to get at motives that really animate these invented people, to make them seem real, and many of those human motivations are not pleasant or positive.

Joshua Triliegi: Many of your paintings are reminiscent of the classics, specifically how you decide to position your subjects. Rubens utilized a similar suggestive figural style. Discuss how you technique.
F. Scott Hess: Most often there is a vision, a scene that pops into my head. I don't write it down, or sketch it out, because at this age I realize I get a lot of ideas. If the idea is still floating around in my head a few weeks later, then it is psychologically resonant with me and I have to develop it further, to turn it into a painting. Most often the backgrounds, the setting, is an invented space. I learned linear and atmospheric perspective well and long ago, so this invention comes easily to me and is enjoyable. I wander through the space even as I invent it. Models are most often people I know, myself or friends and family. If a nude is called for I'll hire someone who I've worked with in teaching. In advance I think out the poses I want the models to take, feel my way into it, think about what I want from them in turns of movement, gesture, facial expression. Then, when they arrive for a photo shoot, I direct them like a movie director, except I'm really bad at it. I forget what I want, get a little flustered with time constraints and never get everything I need to work from. So the process of getting them onto the canvas is one of using the information about reality that is delivered via the camera and inventing the parts that come from my vision of the scene. Flow and movement in a figure and a composition usually have to be invented. This relies on years of skill-building and anatomical knowledge to pull off effectively.

Joshua Triliegi: People often confuse the artist with the art, how important is it for you to be able to express a certain idea, regardless of its ' correctness ' or ' acceptability ' and what might you tell younger artists about this particular challenge ?
My work has always disturbed people more than a little bit. I have often wished I was more like these artists that don't seem to have a dark thought in their heads, make pretty works that easily decorate a home, and sell like hotcakes. It ain't me. I still have that kid in me, standing in the backyard with a can of gasoline in his hand. I have some burning issues to deal with, and art is the best and perhaps only place to play those out. Art is a place to play out fantasy, even if they are dark and socially unacceptable desires. However, that doesn't mean a venue has a requirement to show something just because it is considered art, or that a critic can't blast it for being artistically or humanly backwards, or that anyone else has to accept it because an artist made it. But an artist has to make what they need to make.


Joshua Triliegi: The early work of painter Paul Cadmus and even Thomas Hart Benton seem to have a relationship with some of your work, how much does art history actually affect a contemporary artists oeuvre ?
F. Scott Hess: I studied the great artists of Europe when I was in Vienna learning to paint. These old masters developed figurative painting to an extraordinary level. I don't think any art done in the last hundred years in America or Europe comes close to matching the greatness of what they did. That said, I really love the work of both Cadmus and Benton. Neither were influences, but we learned at the feet of the same masters. Like me, Benton and Cadmus absorbed all of this knowledge from centuries of European painting, and then gave it a pumped up American sense of color and a homegrown content. Why art teachers these days in academia think artists can communicate knowledge visually without skill is hard to understand. Building a multi-figure composition, with a believable illusion of deep space, and psychological connections between your actors, and content that relates to art history, history, mythology, current events, philosophy, politics, sociology, and personal experience, all while creating an object that visually attracts, has resonance for the viewer, aims for transcendence in some form, is intellectually challenging, and unique… is a tall order. The artists of the past who could juggle all of these things simultaneously are the ones Western culture reveres and remembers, like Rubens, Velasquez, or Rembrandt. I aim high, trying to juggle dozens of things, because I'm just not impressed with artists who can juggle two things at once. I expect more of myself.

Joshua Triliegi: Lets talk about the process in your studio, how many paintings do you work on at one time and what drives you to tell these particular stories ?
F. Scott Hess: When the idea sticks in my head long enough, and I know it will become a painting, I'm focused just on that. For most of my career I've worked on just that one piece, and only have that going at that moment. There are exceptions to this, like my conceptual exhibition, The Paternal Suit: Heirlooms from the F. Scott Hess Family Foundation, where I had as many as ten pieces going at once. But most of the time I work on one piece at a time. When I've sketched it out, planned it, and begin painting, the process is very exciting. I put on loud music, like Talking Heads, or The Stones, and bop around the painting, using fat brushes and trying to cover the canvas as quickly as I can. The second half of the process is more like grunt work. The new reality can be glimpsed, but needs to be completed. The flaws are evident. Some I'll fix, some I'll let ride. I just have to put in the hours to bring it to a point where the created alternate reality is believable across the canvas. Nothing is allowed to stick out of that reality that would jar the viewer out of their visual exploration. I've noticed that many of my students have more fun painting than I do, but for me it isn't about having an enjoyable time, but about realizing the vision in my head, pushing it out into the real world, making it exist.
Joshua Triliegi: Once you have completed a work or a series, does the result tell you or indicate what might be the next work ? How do you challenge yourself each time you step up ?
F. Scott Hess: I've never set out purposely to challenge myself, but I'm not at all afraid to take on difficult tasks. I generally have complete confidence that I can do something, I know I'll just have to put in the hours to complete it. When I have what I think is a great idea that is all I want to do. My enthusiasm for it drives the work ethic. I'd rather be doing that than anything else, except maybe sex, and that doesn't take so much time! Sometimes the ideas are simple, and sometimes they involve a 7 x 12 foot canvas with a crowd of hundreds that I'll paint live-streaming or in a public gallery space. When something is as important to me as painting is, and you do it because you need to, then it drives itself to a very high level. You don't allow so much repetition that you get bored with it. You push yourself to the next exciting thing, and throw everything you've got into that.
Joshua Triliegi: Notoriety and acceptance or at least recognition are all part of the art game, you have retained a certain style through the decades and even had a hand in bringing figural work back into vogue, to a certain extent, tell us about your trajectory from your point of view and how the public has perceived your work then and now ?
F. Scott Hess: When I first showed in Los Angeles, 1985 at Ovsey Gallery downtown, I think there were no more than a dozen people doing figurative work in all of Southern California. Now there seem to be thousands! That is really a great advance for figurative art, and one that has steadily grown over time. If I had a hand in that, then that is quite wonderful. I've heard from a number of artists that I was an influence on their development, but painting is such a solitary endeavor that judging the degree of that influence is difficult. In teaching it is a little easier to see, as I've directly impacted a couple of generations of painters at this point. To see these former students out in the world, creating kick-ass representational work, getting recognition, having important shows, and making a viable living doing it, I feel like my kids have become great successes! I'm a proud papa. 2014 has been an extraordinary year for me. It started with a solo show at Koplin Del Rio, and was quickly followed by a retrospective at two venues, Begovich Gallery at Cal-State Fullerton, and the Municipal Art Gallery in Los Angeles. Both were organized by Mike McGee, who also published the monograph, F. Scott Hess, that came out in October, covering four decades of my work. I'm in two other important books on representational painting that came out this year, The Figure edited by Margaret McCann, and Behind the Easel edited by Robert Jackson. My Paternal Suit exhibition came home after touring the country and filled the Long Beach Museum of Art from July through October, with record turn-out. I must have been in a dozen group shows as well, and a couple of Hollywood producers are doing a full-length documentary on me. How I can ever beat this in the rest of my years on this planet I have no idea! It is getting increasingly difficult to feel like a repressed representational artist with all this love raining down.
HIROSHI ARIYAMA : PRINTMAKER
Hiroshi Ariyama is a master printmaker living and working in Chicago. He is a family man, a disciplined printmaker and an Associate of the Printmakers Collective which is currently celebrating it's 25th Anniversary in Chicago. His work is contemporary prinmaking based in Photography, but created with a classic eye and knowledge steeped in the great print making traditions through the centuries. We spoke about his artwork, the process and working in Chicago. His Print is on The Cover of The Winter MidWest Edition available for free download on this site ...
BUREAU: Tell us about The Chicago Print Scene and your relationship with The City.
Hiroshi ARIYAMA: Chicago has many vibrant art communities. And within each community, there are artists making all types of prints. I would say Chicago Printmakers Collaborative is one of the few places that offer the equipment and materials needed to practice or learn a wide range of printmaking methods. I found many printmakers in Chicago have a certain blue-collar tradition--they tend to roll up their sleeves and get to work and let the art speak for itself—very industrious. I'm not saying that the artists in other parts of the U.S. are not hardworking--but perhaps, Chicago’s industrial past paired with the long & harsh winter keeps us focused on our artwork.
BUREAU: Explain the Process from taking a Photograph to the actual Final Print.
Hiroshi ARIYAMA: The process of my printmaking does not always follow the same path and I think that’s one of the keys to keeping it from turning into a production process rather than an art making process. So in my process, each step represents a chance to incorporate something new, different or improve from my previous attempts. Having said that, here’s a general work flow leading up to a completed screen print. Taking photographs: I often roam the city looking for a fresh perspective to see a moment- a slice of the city, that tells a certain story. Editing photographs : I explore the potential of image I want to use by playing with a variety of composition, contrast level, and how much detail I would need for my print. Color considerations : Thinking about the use of color or combination of it is something that I take as much time as it needed until I am satisfied. Positive films : A series of positive films are made from the photograph. In most cases each layer of film represents a certain tonal range of the image. Most of the prints I have been doing lately take around five to eight separate films. Preparing screens : Each screen is coated with photo emulsion. Once dried it becomes photosensitive and is ready for exposure. I Expose the screen with the positive film between the screen and the light source (UV light). Once the exposed screen is rinsed, the area that light didn't reach because of the film is washed away and creates an opening for the ink to go through. Ink : I use a water based acrylic ink mixed with an additive to keep the ink from drying too quickly. Paper : I use 100% cotton, acid-free paper, that is hand trimmed to size. Printing : I use my hands to pull ink onto paper and use my eyes to register each of the layers. I feel very connected to each of my prints and the slight differences between them are unique and special.
BUREAU: What originally attracted you to creating images?
Hiroshi ARIYAMA: My subject matter - urban landscape - is not very beautiful to look at in most cases. We tend to look at the same scenes everyday on the way to work or to school and back. Yet once and a while, we stop and look at that same ordinary view and realize its beauty just because the way the light is hitting certain building or the color of the clouds in the sky. I strive to recreate this experience in my artwork. I often think about places where I lived when I was growing up. And I feel this strong urge to go back there and see them once again. These places are not necessarily beautiful places. The only significance is that they are where I spent portion of my life. I think my prints are like that. I see something that is worthwhile and memorable in each and every cityscape I have made. It meant something to me. Maybe it’s not for everyone, but it’s for the few who identify the special moment in it.
" I often think about places where I lived when I was growing up. And I feel this strong urge to go back there and see them once again. These places are not necessarily beautiful places. The only significance is that they are where I spent portions of my life. I think my prints are like that. I see something that is worthwhile and memorable in each & every cityscape I have made. It meant something to me. "
- Hiroshi Ariyama / Chicago Print Maker
BUREAU: Ravenswood is a striking Image, describe how it came about.
Hiroshi ARIYAMA: This was originally done as a commission for the Ravenswood Artwalk (RAW)--an art event created to promote the neighborhood as it progressed through urban renewal This visual was used in a broad range of marketing materials.
BUREAU: Besides creating Fine Art, you have also made ART very accessible to younger collectors, explain your view on making art that everyone can own and enjoy.
Hiroshi ARIYAMA: Printmaking in general is a more affordable form of artwork because each original print is a fraction of a total. So you’re paying for a portion of total effort not shouldering the whole cost of the creation of the piece. Offering various sizes and different price points makes it easier for everyone to choose what they can afford and also ensure that their purchase is more likely to look custom made—and intended for that particular wall space. Often the parents of young children buy my work for their kid’s room. They can decorate the room with a fairly modest budget. On a side note, I choose my materials carefully so that they last. I want to make sure that what is bought today will look good for a long time and perhaps get handed down to generations to come. That would be wild.
ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED IN THE DEC /JAN 2015 EDITION OF THE BUREAU OF ARTS AND CULTURE MAGAZINE 250 PAGES OF ART . INTERVIEWS . PHOTO ESSAYS . ARTICLES . REVIEWS + MORE WE HAVE CREATED 4 LINK ALTERNATE COVERS FOR THIS MOST RECENT EDITION :
TOM GREGG: THE BUREAU INTERVIEW
THE BUREAU OF ARTS AND CULTURE MAGAZINE GUEST ARTIST JUNE 2014
by Joshua TRILIEGI
Tom Gregg's paintings have a vibrancy, a super saturated presence that are difficult not to look at. Although based in realism, Gregg has taken the realist school of painting and cranked it up a bit. Sort of power popped it. Size is not really the issue here: style, color, shadow and light are. He's a very conscious painter with a clear understanding of whats happening on the canvas. As articulate on the page as off the page. Here at the Bureau of Arts and Culture, we talk a lot about craft. Tom Gregg is a master craftsman. Extremely dedicated to the personification of the object. Be it the American flag, a bottle full of candy, a crumpled piece of fabric, a disney curio toy or his famous on - going hand grenade series.
American Realist painters through the years have often been attracted to the Americana of yesteryear and the new America of tomorrow, check out the works of Richard Estes and Ralph Goings. They took signage, chrome, cars, everyday commonplace objects and locales and hyper fascinated them into extremely lush and rich tapestries. Mr Gregg is doing just that, but within a kind of candy coated lens, he's taken the rose colored glasses and used them accordingly to look at objects that sometimes by their very nature carry a much more loaded symbology and made us simply look at how the color, light and vibrato relate to one another. The single object in a Tom Gregg painting becomes a sort of icon due to the amount of time, positioning, scale and fascination with tonal studies. More than one object becomes a strange interlude, an odd marriage, a pairing of the Sesame Street variety where the question was asked to the viewer, ' Which one of these objects doesn't belong ? ' But here, Mr Gregg does not differentiate that view. On the contrary, he makes them belong together and indeed, somehow they do. Through style, tone, association and placement his choices simply make us see the union and with his saturated palette, his uber craftsmanship, his outright exuberance that radiates from the actual object, we are mystified in some way.
Where Estes and Going awed us with the fact that we could hardly believe it was a painting, Gregg takes us into a whole other ephemeral and wacked out hyper color experience that we need to see. Once focused on it, we may find it difficult to turn away, a kind of seduction of the visceral variety. An optical dessert of sorts, one bite leads to another and suddenly, we have gobbled it up. Not exactly eye candy, due to the sense of style and commitment to a serious painting, but possibly a rare delicacy. Once you have spent time with a Tom Gregg painting, the world itself may seem a bit heightened in reality, the way the light hits a color, the very sense of how colors will relate to one another, he is transferring a special experience that stays with the observer long after the viewing. It is Art.
TRILIEGI: Your work is based in realism, what led you to pursue this style ?
GREGG: As handy as it is, I hesitate to use the term realism because it tends to carry a set of limitations and might lead the viewer to be dismissive of the work before they get to what I think of as the most interesting part: the interplay of representation and thought. There is a conceptual impulse at the heart of all my paintings. They originate in an idea, a question, or a specific thought. This can be complex or ridiculously simple, perhaps even simple minded, hopefully Zen-like in some cases. In the most recent work it is as simple as a contemplation of symmetry and asymmetry, balance and imbalance.
I guess in my head I have some Platonic ideal of a Realist painter, and it is someone who bravely jumps into the fray and takes on the world, raw, unfiltered, and messy, with their brushes and palette in hand, responding to the visual stimuli before them and trying to capture some bit of what they see out there. It seems to imply an outward stance, whereas my work is much more inwardly focused. I almost always paint from observation, but it is a highly edited, controlled and conceptualized situation that I set up, more like a laboratory or stage set than the natural world. It is a space for a thought to occupy. Ultimately, I want the finished paintings to exist in a place that is firmly tied to the “real” world in all its physicality and complexity, while at the same time solidly staking a claim to a place in the world of painting; a 2-dimensional, painted world of image and thought.
GREGG: I choose to keep the color as keyed up as I can without breaking the internal visual logic of the painting. I try to push it to an edge where it just starts to pop a bit. The flat, pigmented world of a painting will never really compete with raw experience and the full range of real visual stimuli, but I take a perverse pleasure in trying to get it to. On another level, color is incredibly sensual and expressive, as well as elusive and limitless. I never feel like I comprehend color in its fullness; it always gets away and I am left feeling futile, with a mere record of the attempt.I think any true knowledge of color comes from experience. Outside of simply painting a lot, there were two fundamental steps in my understanding of color. The first was studying with a man named Sy Sillman at RISD. He had been a student and collaborator of Josef Albers and had us spend enormous amounts of time, until our eyes were shot, looking and looking at color, doing all sorts of color experiments with color-aid papers. I couldn’t tell you any one specific thing I learned, but I looked at and tried to understand a seemingly endless amount of color. The second step came in Saskatchewan, where I lived for a few years in an attempt to digest graduate school. It has a vast, empty, stunning landscape with a very specific light. I painted from this landscape, plein-air style, on an almost daily basis for most of the time I was there. I would do 2 or 3 or more small paintings a day, trying to capture the light, the atmosphere, the colors. I covered a lot of panels with a lot of paint, too fast to think much about it, relying on instincts and experience. Most were failures, but sometimes something happened, something was captured. I still have boxes of these paintings in my studio.
TRILIEGI: Objects play a key role in your body of work, how do you choose what to paint ?
GREGG: When people find out you’re a painter they inevitably ask what sort of paintings you do. Early on I noticed the answer “still life” was often accompanied by a glazing over of the eyes, or an “oh”, and a slow nod of their head, as if it were some sort of unfortunate news. I learned to enjoy this, and almost take it as some sort of challenge, to try to exceed the mundane and lowly expectations of the genre. I find that still life offers me almost total control of the visual situation, not just the objects, but also the lighting, the colors, the forms, the space. This makes it a great vehicle for a certain sort of experimentation and provides a great framework for conceptual pursuits.
I have been painting still lives for decades now and my choices of what to paint and the role these objects will play has shifted many times based on the conceptual demands of the paintings. Simply put, sometimes I want the objects to make the initial impact and be seen first, at other times I want them to be more transparent and secondary to the visual orchestration of the painting. I think there is a stereotypical or classical idea of still life subject matter: fruit, glasses, drapery, flowers, etc. These objects don’t ask many questions in and of themselves and therefore allow the formal choices and the mechanics of the painting to be the focus. The challenge here is to transcend the familiarity of the objects and arrive at something that will hold the viewer’s attention, almost in spite of them. On the other hand if I choose to paint hand grenades, guns, pharmaceuticals, Big Macs or crumpled up American flags, the viewer is confronted by a whole different set of questions and has a different entry into the painting. In an odd way the challenge here is similar, but starts from the other side of the problem: to transcend the confrontational aspect of the objects and seduce the viewer into the sensuousness and beauty of the painting itself. At the heart of it all is my belief that even the humblest and most banal of objects has the possibility of being transformed in a painting, and given existence at the core of something profound and meaningful. Even the most mundane of objects seem to possess some sort of secret or a dignity that lies beyond my comprehension and seems worthy of contemplation.
TRILIEGI: Each painting seems like you invest a large amount of time into, without attempting to quantify a value point, how much time will you invest in a painting such as the new works: Cocktails, etc …
GREGG: My “work” does involve a lot of actual work, though work I enjoy. The number of hours invested in a painting seems to have little bearing on the ultimate success or failure of the piece. And paintings can get worse the longer you work on them. There is no equivalency between time invested and success, which makes the process more engaging and demanding of my full attention.My working process starts with a lot of drawing. In these drawings I figure out the scale, the composition and placement. I get to explore and work out a lot of decisions before getting into the actual painting. I find it a lot easier to change my mind in a drawing than in a painting. The drawings are very much working drawings, not finished pieces, and primarily serve as a step into the painting. I transfer the drawing to the panel, re-draw it, and rough in the painting with this as a guide. Then I try to make the whole thing come together.
A lot of the process of painting for me is looking, and marking, and looking again, and marking again, adjusting and changing, repeating this process until I feel I have captured something meaningful or profound about what it is I am seeing. This seems to go beyond illusion and has more to do with the energy found in visual relationships. My guess is that a bit of life is given to the painting when a relationship or a set of relationships is observed and experienced openly and directly, (whether it be one color to another color, or one ellipse to another, one space to another, etc.), and then that relationship is reinvented and brought into the painting itself. Time has little to do with this in any direct sense, other than that if I keep the process open, then the longer I try, the more chances I take, the more likely I am to hit on something.
TRILIEGI: The shadows in the newer works appear to have eyes, were seeing a lot of reference to that lately, in much of the contemporary art scene, is this a conscious decision or just a happenstance ?
GREGG: I am not aware of the profusion of eye references, so I can’t claim to be a part of that as a trend or as a part of the contemporary scene. But I was definitely aware of the eye - like shadows in some of these recent paintings. So the effect was heightened, if only subtly. I enjoy the extra layer of visual reference that this gives to the piece. The viewer can flip their attention from “oh, it’s two cocktails” to “there are two eyes staring out at me” and have these competing stimuli struggle a bit in your head, a bit like the classic optical illusion of the rabbit or the duck. I believe a great deal in the power of subliminal decisions and the role instincts play in how we go about things, and it is undeniably fun to discover things within things, so on some level I am responsible for those eye references in the paintings, and glad you noticed them. I will add that my father passed away, rather suddenly, about 5 years ago and ever since then I have had the tendency to fabricate faces, most often his face, in all sorts of patterns and situations, as if trying to find his presence in my world, bring him back or just ease the loss.
TRILIEGI: Do you believe in a school of thought, or does the individual artist still have the power to express something alone ?
GREGG: Tough question, it sort of goes in a lot of directions. I believe we are all so embedded in our time and world that we are more or less completely defined by it, especially in this supersaturated media culture. The world seems to be made smaller by technology but at the same time fragmented, shattered and without boundaries.
I believe we are all formed by our environment and can’t escape our place and time. We all build on the work and accomplishments of others and operate in the context of our culture. Artists have always fed off of other artists; there is no avoiding it and no shame in it. I don’t think any of us exist alone, as some sort of outsider. A favorite quote seems applicable here: “we are only as original as the obscurity of our sources”. But I also believe that we each provide a slight shading or slight shift in perspective to the larger culture.
For about 5 years I helped coordinate and curate an artist run gallery here in Kansas City. There was a core group of artists who showed consistently over that time and occasionally you could see some direct lifting of ideas or stylistic crossing over, but for the most part the artists involved were distinctly defined in interests and direction. What did seem to be shared and what did get passed around was the energy, the ambition, and the desire to be a participant in what was happening, an impulse to step it up. So there was a sort of school of energy more than thought. At this point in our culture, which is so fragmented, and has unlimited options for expression, it seems almost impossible to narrow to a school of thought in any traditional sense, everything can and does co-exist simultaneously and it makes for a much more vibrant conversation. I trust that in a hundred years the art historians will put the labels on what is happening now and give the names to the schools of thought.
TRILIEGI: The craftsmanship in your work is amazing, how long have you been painting and who were / are your influences as an artist ?
GREGG: I always flinch at the use of the word craftsmanship in regards to painting. It seems that as an artist you just have to do what the painting demands and use the materials however they need to be used to get there. Any notion of craftsmanship is integral to the artwork as a whole. So it seems to be more a matter of necessity than craftsmanship. I guess in that way I would consider De Kooning a great craftsman, because the paint does exactly what it needs to do to get those paintings to work. Paint, as a material, can do so many things and be used in so many ways that I think all painters use it a bit differently. You have to find out not just how you can use it but also how you need to use it: it evolves with the vision of the work. My use of paint is always slowly evolving and changing and providing slightly different possibilities for the paintings. As for influences, I think I am generally voracious as an art and culture consumer and digester and like to think that, at least in terms of inspiration, that all these experiences get channeled into what I do. I get thrilled at a show of Tom Friedman or an Ingres retrospective. As I think it is with most artists, there is a big sort of soup that is always on the stove somewhere in my head and all kinds of stuff, everything, really, gets thrown in there and cooked together and then it gets ladled out in the form of my paintings. The influences more directly related to my paintings are most likely predictable for the sort of painter I am. From an early fascination with Giotto, Masaccio, and Pierro della Francesca I worked my way up through art history on up to the present and Lucien Freud, Balthus, and Euan Uglow. But my heart keeps returning to the Seventeenth century where, for me, some sort of pinnacle was reached with Caravaggio, Rembrandt, Velasquez and Vermeer. I am always cruising through both the past and the present for inspiration, and easily falling in love with an artist’s work, whether for a fleeting moment, a lifelong fascination or just a new spot on the map of my art experience.
TRILIEGI: Does Music or Film or some special activity inform or inspire your work process, if so, please tell our readers a bit about that process.
GREGG: Music has always had the ability to flood me with emotion, to overwhelm me, or bring tears to my eyes in a completely irrational, physical and emotionally rooted way. I have never studied music and never played an instrument and can’t carry a tune, so there is no other way for me to experience music. It serves as a source of inspiration because it hits me directly and leaves me feeling defenseless in a manner that painting almost never does. Painting and visual art enters through my eyes and mind, music through my ears and gut. That said, I do have my own, uneducated ideas about music that filter into my paintings. I often think of color as musical tones, as having a pitch and harmonizing with other colors. I also use ideas of rhythm and movement that come from musical ideas. Sometimes I think of my paintings as small, minimalist symphonies, each “instrument” playing its’ role in the whole piece. Haiku poetry is another form that I look to and hope to channel into my work. There is a stunning beauty in the sparseness and economy of conveying emotions and ideas and a stark use of the juxtaposition of image that I often think of in relation to my paintings. I have also been practicing Chi Gong and Tai Chi for almost 5 years now and have found it making its’ way into my work, particularly the recent series of paintings. In both these practices there is a strong emphasis on subtle movements and repetition, and on balance and gravity, and on being grounded. It is all ultimately about focus, energy and awareness.
TRILIEGI: The backgrounds in the newer works are extremely worked over, when your dealing with a smaller object, like say a shot glass, is there a need to invest a certain amount of time into the background or is there simply a habit of entirely presenting a serious work on every square inch of the painting ?
GREGG: The backgrounds, or what I think of as the wall, are always an integral part of the painting and often end up being what the success or failure of the piece rides on. It is the largest part of the painting and therefore the dominant color proportionally. It is a particular challenge to paint because in order to succeed it has to have a sense of light and atmosphere and it also has to create a space for the still life to exist in. And it has to do this with the barest of elements; it is flat, without detail, and has no definition beyond the play of light across its surface. Because of this I consider it to have a certain visual and conceptual purity. It is working with color and light, nothing else. To make it work is difficult, and most often leaves me with a sense of a long pursuit that comes to an end with me empty handed. That pulsing of life and light that I saw and experienced and seemed so palpable, and that I just spent all day chasing with paint, almost always gets away.
TRILIEGI: Where do you live and work and how does that influence your work ?
GREGG: I live and work in Kansas City, Missouri. I was born in California, in Long Beach, and at age seven moved to a town outside of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. I went to RISD and lived in Rhode Island for eight years and Connecticut for two years while at Yale, then spent two years in Saskatchewan before landing in Missouri.
Kansas City has a lively art scene, and I think a true sense of community among artists across a range of disciplines. It provides an ease and a clear feeling of being connected, perhaps due to its size. It ebbs and flows, but at times there has been a vibrant dialogue between the art makers here, a feeling that there is something being shared, that the community is being pushed farther than any one individual could go on their own. A sense that there are other tuned-in voices right here that are listening, and responding: an audience of artists and other participants in the aesthetic cultural here and now. There is a lot going on here, a lot of opportunities for artist driven projects and a real commitment to the arts all across the spectrum.
Mr Gregg The Guest Artist JUNE 2014 and you will find his work available at George Billis Gallery
in Los Angeles at Culver City's Art Row on La Cienega and in New York City with a New Show
scheduled this Fall 2014. Many of the Interviews throughout this Publication feature Mr Gregg's
Paintings and we are very pleased to have him at BUREAU of ARTS and CULTURE Magazine.
George Billis Gallery LA 2716 S. La Cienega Blvd. Los Angeles CA 90034 T: 310-838-3685
George Billis Gallery NY 525 W. 26th Street, New York City NY 10001 T:212- 645-2621
DAVID PALUMBO : Painter
By Joshua Triliegi
Mr Palumbo is a prolific painter working in a multitude of styles. David has an ongoing series of works including: The Tarot, The Portraits, Fantasy illustration, Gallery Fine Art and his sexually charged, if not controversial Quickies. The later available in publication as well as for purchase individually. Once familiar with David Palumbo's work, each style or series is immediately identifiable and interesting. The Quickies definitely push the envelope and raise the bar as well as the blood pressure on sexually charged and inspired figural work.
David Palumbo is that rare breed hybrid of working illustrator, fine artist and individual creator who is pushing the envelope on what can be done with an image. Mr Palumbo's portraits of well known personalities such as Sidney Poitier, Mathew McConaughey, David Bowie and Jane Fonda capture the essence of the person and also stamp his own style and interpretation accordingly. David Palumbo has what we might call a painterly style: excessive brush strokes, textural experimentation, impressionistic via the materials. Schooled as a classical figural painter with a keen interest in cinema and raised among a family of artists has led him to be commissioned by a wide variety of publications and we are very proud to have him as Guest Artist for The June/August Edition of BUREAU of Arts and Culture Magazine & BUREAU of Arts and Culture . com & Community Sites On Line.
The David Palumbo Sci-Fi or Fantasy illustrative work is not only exciting, bold, striking, sometimes scary and even gory, but also imaginative, humorous and always services the story being told. BUREAU readers may remember Mr Palumbo's artworks affiliated with the Fiction project in the recent June edition of the magazine. David's work brought an entirely new & fresh approach to telling the story and we noticed right away how accessible and welcoming as well as supportive his work is to the text. The dark humor involved in his fantasy illustration harkens back to the American comic books from the nineteen sixties and even further back than that, some of his themes relate back to early 19th and 20th century illustrative technique's of the English variety: Sherlock Holmes and Jack The Ripper.
With the resurgence and popularity of Vampires, Zombies and a new form of sexually expressive literature, art and film in today's current creative landscape, we are sure that the popularity of Mr David Palumbo's artworks is on the rise and we are glad to introduce our readers, as well as allow Mr Palumbo himself to describe his process and share a top ten of his favorites. We spoke with David Palumbo about his career, his education and his approach when it comes to making Art for a living and who he keeps an eye on when it comes to inspiration. Enjoy The David Palumbo Interview and many Artworks dispersed throughout.
Guest Artist David Palumbo discusses his career with BUREAU Editor Joshua Triliegi
BUREAU: You are a painter, an illustrator and you are represented as a fine artist as well. How do you balance theses different jobs ? And do they inform one another ?
DAVID PALUMBO: Over the years I have placed different emphasis on commissioned work and gallery work. The gallery was initially how I was making a living, though I became more focused towards illustration after a time for reasons both personal and practical and, for a number of years, that was my dedicated outlet. To the extent that I did shift back towards gallery work, I used it as a sort of laboratory to explore and experiment which really helped me to continue growing as an artist while working commercially. Much of my current process and method was developed with that balance.
BUREAU: Your parents are both relatively established and respected artists, tell us about growing up around art and what its like to be the child of artists.
DAVID PALUMBO: I feel that the biggest boost that this gave me, other than their enthusiastic support, was removing the doubts that so many aspiring artists have to struggle with over the possibility of making a living. I saw them working daily as freelancers and understood intimately as a result that it is as viable a career as any more traditional occupation. I think that was huge.
Now that I am also a working artist, I also appreciate how fortunate I am to have so many people close to me who understand that side of my life. My brother is also a painter and just about every person who I have a close friendship with is a creative person. That isn’t to say that I can’t relate to non-artists, though I do find it easier and it is wonderful to be able to connect with my own family in that way. We certainly all push each other, either directly or indirectly, to perform at our best and to continue striving to improve.
BUREAU: Your family reminds me a bit of Stephen King and his family, each person is an artist and obviously their father is a master of the macabre. How much does literature inform your work ?
DAVID PALUMBO: I enjoy reading, though I don’t know how directly that ties to my painting. I’m sure that it doesn’t hurt, though I probably am more influenced and inspired by more directly visual mediums like cinema and photography.
BUREAU: Some of your paintings push the envelope on female sexuality, but there is such a fine art craftsmanship, that it is very difficult to call it pornographic. Do you think humans are afraid of sexuality and if so why ?
DAVID PALUMBO: From the point of view of Western culture, specifically American culture, I think that sexuality is a very complicated issue to the point that I’m not always even sure how I feel about it. Understanding how other people feel about it is likely beyond me. Even though I disagree with some cultural norms, they still shaped my views of the world and it can be difficult to navigate that at times. In general though, speaking again as an American, yes. I think we are entirely too freaked out by it. The fear of or fixation on nudity, even absent of sexual context, is a product of our weird society.
So far as my own paintings, I feel those with any sexual nuance are primarily about beauty and certainly nothing even approaching pornographic by my own definitions. I don’t condemn art which explores sexuality in more explicit detail, don’t get me wrong. For my own motives however, I tend to be more interested in simply appreciating figures from a flirtatious, confident, and natural point of view. That side of my work has been evolving for some years now and I’m sure it will continue to. I don’t always know what it is about but I think art created with an open question rather than a defined statement can be very poetic and universal, so I’ve let the series find its own direction over time. Inevitably some people will find it tame while others offensive. Like anything else creative, all I can realistically aim to do is satisfy myself.
BUREAU: Explain your process when creating works in a series such as the Tarot, The Postcards, the Subway.
DAVID PALUMBO: Working in series is something I generally find very appealing. I think in part the reason may connect with my love of art books. When I think of a series, I think of them as a chapter in my own book and somehow that adds extra interest and excitement for me. For one thing, it removes the pressure of saying everything in one image. Instead you have the opportunity to create story and communicate ideas through the broader world which the series collectively describes. I don’t often know at the beginning if a series will be short or long, that more depends on my level of interest as I develop it. When that interest dips, a new idea has most likely taken its place. Others, like the postcard nudes (and related works) just seem to continue indefinitely.
BUREAU: How difficult was it to break into mainstream illustration and tell as a story that exemplifies that hurdle ?
DAVID PALUMBO: Breaking in to illustration is just a long slow process. Even if you have the chops from the outset, which practically no body coming right out of school does, it takes time and dedication to get the work in the right hands and have them think of you at the right moments. My own long slow process wasn’t likely any different from most emerging illustrators in the post internet job market: creating samples, sharing online, and getting out to meet art directors and other artists face to face whenever possible. Repeat forever. For me it took about three years of gradual progress to really gain any initial ground. That time was spent learning how to apply my basic understanding of painting into the specific needs of illustration and then learn to do it well and efficiently. Every year since then has been dedicated to improving those skills.
BUREAU: Does any music play a key role in your work and what are you listening to now ?
DAVID PALUMBO: I like to listen to music while painting, though it probably plays the most significant role during sketching. I’ll often choose music which helps me get into the mood of the piece which I am planning and it seems to help me push that mood further. For that purpose I listen to film scores quite a bit (Vertigo is one of my all time favorites), though in general I have a pretty wide variety of tastes. I’m much more broad-minded about things like that than I used to be. I’ve always loved movies in particular and often aim to bring cinematic qualities to my work. Sometimes that might mean taking inspiration from favorite films but more often it simply means trying to bring a narrative tone and composition which is informed by them. I’ve done some very basic study of cinematography to better grasp that art form, and done quite a bit more study into still photography. I’m lucky that I really enjoy learning the technical aspects of photography as opposed to feeling it to be a chore, because the more I study lenses and photographic concepts the better I can use that knowledge to plan and execute my paintings effectively. All of that started with a love of movies though.
BUREAU: How important was school for you and share why with our readers ?
DAVID PALUMBO: I think school was pretty important, though it has become so expensive these days that I’d advise prospective students to consider less traditional options as well. My own school was very focused on an academic classical approach and I feel that was a great benefit to me. The nuts and bolts of picture making should be a huge part of your basic art education. If you want to do figurative painting and are not studying the figure from life in your first semester (or, as some people have told me, at all) then you might want to seek a different program. Besides the big art schools, there are many very promising ateliers which tend to cost less and have more intense curriculums. One big advantage to traditional art school can be the connections which you make with fellow students and opportunities you might be exposed to through faculty. I didn’t personally enjoy this perk so far as my illustration career (my school was strictly fine arts) but having family in my chosen field surely offset that for me.
BUREAU: A guy like you could put a product like Viagra out of business. Do you think that sexuality in film, in art and in literature is judged more harshly than violence and if so why ?
DAVID PALUMBO: That the two are even comparable as concerns is weird. I don’t really know. I don’t understand it. I caught some of Kill Bill 2 on TV the other day and it seemed strange to be able to show brutal fights and painful death one moment but have to dub out the word “cunt” (used in a non-sexual context even) the next. I think most people who I regularly interact with would agree that it’s craziness so I suppose that I‘ve adopted my own sort of social reality. A reality when I might have a friend pose nude and it’s no big deal. The people who are terribly concerned, I guess I just don’t get them. Not to imply that I don’t personally enjoy action and horror movies, because I generally do. I just don’t understand the relatively casual acceptance compared against the deep discomfort that many people seem to have with sexuality.
BUREAU: Please suggest a list of ten artists that our audience should know about and why.
DAVID PALUMBO: Hmmm. Ok, I hope some of these are already well known, but here are ten artists I’m currently really digging:
Mead Scheaffer - I don’t know much of his story, but damn can he paint. Scheaffer was an illustrator in the first half of the 20th century who was brilliant with design, limited color, and something about his brush calligraphy just kills me.
J.C. Leyendecker - Another early 20th century illustrator, Leyendecker was so bold with shape and silhouette that I’m often looking to him for inspiration. His stylization of figures adds such elegance and drama. Precursor to Rockwell.
Jeremy Geddes - an Australian contemporary painter who has transitioned from illustration to fine art. His work is so moody and stark. I love the illustration and gallery work equally.
Antonio Lopez Garcia - a Spanish painter, still active I believe, who is known for his immense cityscapes and incredibly life-like interiors. The depth and tangible quality of his work is unreal, especially if you ever have the opportunity to see one in person.
Sam Weber - a contemporary illustrator based in Brooklyn who’s done mostly editorial and cover work. Sam’s look has been evolving since I first became aware of him. Back then it was very graphic and stylized, often monochromatic and minimalist. Recently he’s been turning more hyper-realist but still with a strong graphic punch and terrific mood.
Alex Kanevsky - a contemporary fine artist who does very abstracted depictions of figures and such. I’m endlessly fascinated by how far he can break the lines and planes while still showing a clear representation of the figure.
Robert McGinnis - an illustrator who did a ton of crime novel covers with sexy women in the 60s and 70s. Think of Bond girls and you’d think of McGinnis.
Sanjulian - a European illustrator who did absolutely brilliant 70s gothic and horror (and romance) book covers. Wonderful 70s texture and amazing montages
Greg Manchess - a contemporary illustrator who does genre and mainstream work with a very painterly hand in the spirit of the Pyle school. Wonderful chunky strokes and incredible compositions.
John Harris - an English illustrator who does beautiful painterly space scenes rich in color and emotion. Almost nobody can get away with loose atmospheric takes on SF like Harris can.
By Joshua Triliegi
Guest Artist for October 2014 Edition of BUREAU of Arts and Culture Magazine is Eric Zener. Mr. Zener is currently working with figural subjects in relation to the element of water. The very act of diving in, the splash, the plunge, the immersion, the submission of giving yourself to a body of liquid. Normally, this subject might be considered a perfect summer series, but with record heat waves on the West Coast, we decided to celebrate these refreshing images. Although the work is influenced by photography and lush saturated realist tones, because of the expressionist nature of the reflections and the water's reaction to the figures, there is a large amount of experimentation and abstraction within the work. Each painting is worked over with an extreme amount of detail. Many of the subjects are proportionately larger than life, in terms of scale, which takes us into the picture in the same way that a camera might magnify a subject, bringing us as the viewer into closer focus with the subject & the scene.
The poolside in the contemporary arts has become a symbol and almost a genre of sorts. Think of Films such as The Graduate and its isolationist emotional meaning or David Hockney's pool paintings and drawings, which have a new relationship's reflective quality, or on a darker side, Billy Wilder's opening and closing scene in The classic film, Sunset Boulevard. Water equals emotions, pool side water is a slightly more controlled emotion, it is not the all powerful ocean, but a man made version. Mr. Zener's most recent work gives us pause to reflect on the stages before, during and after the experience of diving into our uncertain future. Many of the works allow for the individual to feel that surge, while others within the on going series represent a relationship of two. Zener has an evolving craft that is currently at a pinnacle, Over the past decades, he has developed a style that is in a territory which might be called realism or even symbolism. What you call it is not as important as what you experience, feel and imagine while viewing it. All to often, the Art Critic, the Presenter, the Gallery and the Historian's interpretation of any given work eclipses the actual experience of simply enjoying, owning and living with a work of art. We suggest, in the case of Eric Zener's paintings, that you simply allow yourself to dive in and feel the work, immerse yourself and reflect on the refreshing qualities ofrelating to the element of water.
This Series of paintings brings new meaning to the term, "West Coast Cool." Also included throughout the entire edition are earlier works by Mr. Zener that relate to the elements of Wood, Earth & Air, making him a sort of alchemist of images. Man's Relationship to Nature: The great on going story that never ceases to effect, edify and entertain. Humankind's relationship to the elements are once again asking us, even demanding for a reevaluation of what it actually means to have an ecosystem, to relate directly to the elements and to reciprocate by preserving it's offering. Zener's newest work is exhilarating, impassioned and fresh. We are proud to have him as Guest Artist for the October 2014 Edition of BUREAU of Arts and Culture Magazine & Our On Line Sites.
BUREAU: Your work is based in realism, what led you to pursue this style ?
ERIC ZENER: As a self taught artist my approach to painting, and what has led me to where I am today, has been a long process of evolution. I grew up around art and like any child, enjoyed the freedom of expression with drawing and painting. Now after 25 years of painting full-time, it is interesting to see all the changes along the way in terms of theme and style. To be honest there was not a singular moment when any particular change happened. Often times the evolutions were slow, unplanned and unnoticed. My very early work bordered on a sense of cubism or crude illustration.
ERIC ZENER: Where the overlay into realism happened is hard to pinpoint.10 or so years ago I began to use a camera to take photos of models under water; as attempting the authentic pose in the studio with chairs, pillows and fans proved stiff and unnatural.
"… Photographic reference may have sparked a
challenge to capture more & more realism …"
Having a still two dimensional photo reference gave me a tool to capture the poses I wanted. I suppose that photographic reference may have sparked a challenge to capture more and more realism in the process. I don’t know….but clearly that is where I am at now.
BUREAU: Although it is realist work, there is a pure quality to the colors, discuss your choice of tone when painting.
ERIC ZENER: The mood of the narrative of each piece generally influences the color, which then informs the tone. I use the pose I capture only as the “police chalk outline” in a sense for general composition. After drawing the figure I think about what they are doing…where they are heading, and depending on how I feel, what the idea may convey. Are they on a metaphorical journey into the unknown?
" The mood of the narrative of each piece generally
influences the color, which then informs the tone."
Perhaps they are voyagers heading into a place full of risk and escape. Or are they enjoying the ephemeral break from the noise above of daily life? Often I choose the tone or color to simply reflect the lost sense of childhood joy of a carefree summer day. We are all orphans of our childhood…and those moments of diving into a summer pool pull us back for a moment.
ERIC ZENER: I think there is a universal quest we all are all on. For some it is more convenient than others to explore it. Socio and economic circumstances allow some more freedom than others to have the time to self explore. However we all at some level all desire a “break”. Immersion in water is both physically cathartic, but also speaks perhaps to a deeper metaphysical and universal human experience. We are from water in birth and made largely of its substance. Using the figure in or around water, at times anonymously, always us to find ourselves in the composition and that connection we share.
BUREAU: How much time will you invest in a painting such as the new works: Pool Subjects.
ERIC ZENER: There really is no timeline that any good painting can follow. It finds itself done when it’s done. The painting tells the painter to stop. As overly dramatic as it sounds it is like a boxing match for me. At times you are wining and at times loosing.
" When I am painting, I only work on one painting at a time. "
The beginning and ending are easy…it is the time between that the struggle pushes your passion and endurance to reach the beauty and idea you set out for. When I am painting, I only work on one painting at a time. I’ve never been able to put something aside and move on. They haunt me too much unresolved. I like resolution.
BUREAU: The reflections in many of the new works have abstractions, tell us about the need to express the abstract within the realist style.
ERIC ZENER: Somebody said once, “We don’t see the world the way it is, but how we choose to perceive it.” With that there are abstractions in everything as it’s relative to the observer. Particularly with water, I like the play on that theme as what appears solid on one side of the dividing line, between water and air, is indeed “solid” yet fluid and abstract from its opposite perspective. Like life itself, for better or for worse, we are in a constant state of transformation and change. The abstracted figures reflect that idea. Nothing really is how it really is. In fact I think we can never observe anything as an absolute. All our perceptions and conclusions are based on our relative position observing it. The mirror images in this body of work show that constant state of transformation and the metaphor of change we may or not always see.
BUREAU: Does the individual artist still have the power to express something alone ?
ERIC ZENER: I agree with the concept that the individual artist has the power to express something alone. At some level we all may be unknowingly borrowing from our life’s experience, however true authorship comes from our own voice representing our individual visions and narratives.
BUREAU: How long have you been painting and who were/are your influences as an artist ?
ERIC ZENER: Painting has been my profession for 25 years. I’ve never been somebody that has one “hero”. For me music and quotes I hear tend to provoke thoughts and emotions more than visual observations. As my tastes and interests in music have evolved, so has my taste and interest in visual artists. I may be interested in one painter for a while and then another later. No one person has been a constant influence. That said I tend to be impressed and excited about art that is very different from mine. I gain nothing creatively looking at things that are similar to my work. I would rather find the spark in something totally different than what I do.
BUREAU: Does any other Art form or some special activity inform or inspire your work process, if so, please tell our readers a bit about that process.
ERIC ZENER: So many genres of music and musicians have a daily and ever-changing influence on what I think about. I’m moved by musicians and artists who express themselves fully and vulnerably. I’ve spent my life surfing and swimming in the water and find great peace and joy there. With my nature series it may be more linear. I enjoy being alone in nature and the influence of the slow patient growth of the trees inspires me artistically and personally.
Water may have some relationship to my youth and personal pastimes. I’ve spent my life surfing and swimming in the water and find great peace and joy there. My intention in my art is not about the physical act of swimming etc., but rather the joy of the immersion into a deep and buoyant other world.
BUREAU: The backgrounds colors in the newer works set a certain tone, tell us how you decide to work with a color such as the Yellow, Turquoise & Blue background in the images.
ERIC ZENER: A great deal of my water work has been metaphorical and more open to interpretation and introspection. After a particularly challenging year, I have personally gone through a lot of changes in my life and I wanted to cathartically express the simple pleasures of joy and playfulness which these colors evoke for me. Rather than using the color or light of the water….or the depth of the figure entering as the narrative, I wanted to focus on the pureness of the figure, and hopefully their joy in that moment. Happy, bright and light!
BUREAU: Where do you live and work and how does that influence your work ?
ERIC ZENER: I live in the SF bay area, but honestly the location of where I paint has little influence. It’s the interior space of my studio and interior space of my mind that influences my work.
" I suppose being in city or in a country could have some influence, however for me it is the music, the friends and the input from other sensory and emotional sources that are the real fodder of my work."
The Bureau Profile: MARGIE LIVINGSTON
BUREAU: What originally attracted you to modern art and share with our readers an early inspiration?
Margie LIVINGSTON: Two things attracted me to modernism: the grid and a spirit of experimentation. Working with the grid connects me to many artists including Mondrian, Sol LeWitt, Eve Hesse, and Agnes Martin. But I’m also interested in a much earlier version of the grid: Renaissance perspective which, as Rosalind Krauss wrote, “is inscribed on the depicted world as the armature of its organization.” The entwined histories of the grid and painting inspired one of my new works, Falling Grid with Underpainting. To make it, I wove a three-dimensional grid out of string, to literalize the perspective grid in space, and then covered it with paint. Of course, paint doesn't have much tensile strength, so when I cut the grid off the frame, the painting slumped under the force of gravity. This kind of experimentation, where I push paint to do what’s not expected, is at the heart of my practice.
BUREAU: The series of works that are sculpture crafted from paint are extremely interesting, share how this technique was discovered and where you are currently taking it.
Margie LIVINGSTON: Six years ago, I started experimenting with acrylic paint to discover its physical properties in order to exploit them for their own qualities, not pictorial qualities. I glued dried paint directly to the wall, like a decal. One of the glues I tested failed, and the paint skin fell on the floor. Instinctively, I picked it up, brushed it off, and folded it neatly like a blanket. This accidental discovery led to a new body of work where I poured out gallons of paint to make huge paint skins that I then folded and placed on shelves. The “Draped Paintings” hang on a peg like a coat or scarf. When I make them, my relationship to the paint is sensual, body to body, as I must caress the paint skins to shape them. I work with the weight of painting and the paint sags in response to gravity--just like we all do. That paint so readily took on the properties of fabric led me to my newest works. I tack paint skins directly onto stretcher bars and the paint literally stands in for the canvas. Body of Work, a jumble of these paint-as-canvas works held together with wood and metal brackets, will be shown at UNTITLED 2014 this year by Luis De Jesus Gallery in Los Angeles.
BUREAU: Do you subscribe to a specific thought process in your work, or is there a more tactile approach and please explain how theory meets reality in the actual creating of a work ?
Margie LIVINGSTON: My latest piece, Body of Work, provides a good example of my process, where the idea -- paint as canvas -- morphed and changed in response to the process of making. This piece came together using a combination of planning, model making, research, reflection, seat-of-the-pants problem-solving, and luck. Until I finally put it all together, I didn't know if the braces would hold. The stickiness of the paint is integral to its construction, but I didn't test that element at full scale until the final assembly, because putting two paint surfaces together creates a permanent bond. So I didn't know until the very end if I was making a prototype or the final work. This kind of problem-solving keeps things interesting. The white paint references Rauschenberg and Ryman, but a pile of white paintings reaches further back to the father of German Romanticism, Caspar David Friedrich, whose work I studied while in Berlin on a Fulbright Scholarship. The jumble of white paintings reminded me of his painting Sea of Ice (1823-24). As I worked on how to hang a pile of paintings on the wall, I made a small model out of foam core, balsa wood, and hot glue. The miniature paintings looked great on the wall, but I didn't like the way they hung there like a magic trick, denying the technical challenge of getting 18 canvases to hang together as one. This is when I added wooden and metal braces to hold them together, so its structure would be visible. I chose to use the utilitarian language of crating for this part of the piece, because I'm interested in the differences and similarities of making a painting and making a crate. During the three months it took to make Body of Work, I was imagining it hanging on the wall like a painting. The final twist came when I realized it looked great standing on the floor. As a sculpture built out of paintings, it blurs the line between sculpture and painting; it can either stand on the floor or hang on the wall with its ancestors.
ANDY MOSES
The BUREAU ART INTERVIEW
By BUREAU of ARTS and CULTURE Editor Joshua A. TRILIEGI
Joshua TRILIEGI: We have been following your work now for almost two decades, back when the magazine was an artists’ collective. You made a sort of break through with the Fire and Ice Series some years ago: could you talk about the process from that time to the present?
Andy MOSES: The paintings that you refer to as the Fire and Ice series are a series of paintings that I exhibited in Los Angeles in 2002. I had moved back from New York in 2000 after having been there for 18 years. The work I had been doing there was done in a similar fashion to how I currently work which is by preparing, pouring, and manipulating paint on a flat surface.
" After moving back to California I became interested in nature on a more human or tangible level and began making these panoramic paintings that were once again abstract, but now suggested horizons as seen from the ocean or the desert or the sky."
The paintings I did in New York were mostly done through chemical reactions. Those paintings were mostly abstract but they also suggested galactic or microscopic phenomena. After moving back to California I became interested in nature on a more human or tangible level and began making these panoramic paintings that were once again abstract, but now suggested horizons as seen from the ocean or the desert or the sky. They were made with one color of pearlescent white and were once again poured and manipulated on a flat surface. This time there were no chemical reactions. It was just the thickness of the paint that determined light and shadow. Shortly after that I made the first pearlescent white paintings I began making them on convex and then concave surfaces. I started making them convex and concave because of the way they interacted with light when you walked around them but also how the curve in the canvas seemed to suggest the curve of the earth and the curve of all space.
" They were made with one color of pearlescent white and were once again poured and manipulated on a flat surface. This time there were no chemical reactions. It was just the thickness of the paint that determined light and shadow. "
I have developed this work over the past 12 years going back and forth between being extremely monochromatic to working with color in extremely complex and varied ways, which is where I am at now. Also I have pushed the color from extremely subtle color variations to extreme contrast, which again is where I am now. Lastly the work has fluctuated between having what I call a defined horizon to being more topographical looking and more abstract.
Joshua TRILIEGI: Being a second-generation artist is both a gift and a challenge, I remember hearing people compare you to your father [Ed Moses] back in the day. Discuss what you have dealt with and how this has affected your own style.
Andy MOSES: Growing up with an artist Father has always made people make very strong assumptions about whom I am and where my work must be coming from. The truth is, both my brother and myself were consistently told that we could do whatever we wanted except be painters. We didn't grow up around the process at all as my Fathers studio was about five miles from our house and we were not encouraged to visit. Therefore I was never around the process of work being made growing up. I was however around finished work both in our house and at the occasional openings that we would go to. I was always intrigued by the work and always looked at it closely to try to figure out how it was done. We had a Sam Francis painting in our house for a while and I remember my Father always telling everybody that nobody knows how he does them. That intrigued me a lot - the fact that painting could be this mysterious and magical or even alchemical process. I went to Cal Arts in 1979 to study film. Once I realized how many chefs and how many elves had to be involved in film I realized I was a solo act. I had surfed a lot as a teenager and probably my favorite thing about it is that you could do it alone. You could paddle out by yourself and speak to no one and convene with the ocean. I had issues with authority as a teenager for sure and surfing was my escape. I was actually accepted into the art department at Cal Arts to make film. My teachers were John Baldessari, Douglas Huebler, Michael Asher and for one semester Barbara Kruger. Cal Arts was a very rigorous conceptual program that was extremely stimulating to me. I continued to work in film but added performance and installation to my repertoire. I did one pretty controversial performance/installation called Father Knows best. I did some paintings that were essentially like props for various installations. It was during this period that I experimented for the first time with painting flat and flowing the paint on to create an effect that I was looking for. This type of painting was like a drug for me. Once I tried it I knew I was hooked for life. Shortly after that, there was an artist visiting from New York who asked me to work for him in New York. I had only been at Cal Arts a couple of years and really loved it, but I knew I had the painting bug and I knew that it was going to take some time to develop these paintings. During that time I wasn't interested in having them critiqued as I was teaching myself how to do them and I figured, I would know when they were ready to put out in the world, to be looked at, and then critiqued,. So I moved to New York at age nineteen. When I got there the job I had been offered was gone, but that artist hooked me up with another painter Pat Steir and I worked for her. It was during the fall of 1981 that I did my first painting that I felt was successful. It was black and white and looked like a galactic explosion. I began exhibiting this work in New York in 1985 and had my first solo show in 1987 at Annina Nosei which was a very prestigious gallery for a 25 year old to have a first solo show. I lived in New York until 2000 when I moved back to Los Angeles. Some people had heard of me through my work in New York. Others who saw my work in the early 2000's just assumed that I had started painting a few years earlier and that this was the first work that I had ever exhibited. I didn't really have to deal with comparisons to my Father's work in New York but when I moved back to L.A. there were certainly some. I know that those comparisons would have been much more intense if I had never left L.A. I feel that it has been a double-edged sword for sure. I have definitely benefitted at times and have been afflicted at others, for being a second-generation artist, but I am certainly not complaining. Everybody who has ever lived has some kind of cross to bear. I will be having a thirty-year retrospective at the Pete and Susan Barret Gallery at Santa Monica College in 2016. For the first time my New York and L.A. works will all be exhibited together. I feel like this show will put a lot of ghosts to rest, as people in L. A. will be able to see how the worked developed and evolved over the last thirty years.
Joshua TRILIEGI: The current works are slightly concave, how important is surface in your work and tell us why?
The curves developed in an interesting way. I moved to New York in 1981. I was always very impatient and I wanted to make my stretcher bars as fast as possible so I could get to painting. I wanted to make paintings that had a weight and authority to them then so I decided to make my stretcher bars using 2x4's instead of something narrower and lighter. I wanted to make them 3.5 inches deep. I put the 2x4's together using only corrugated nails on the back. No cross bars and no triangles at the corners.
" I had to leave the studio really quickly to go somewhere so I just leaned the painting at a 45-degree angle to the wall because there was no room to lean it flat on the wall. When I got back the whole thing was lit up in a way that I had never seen before…"
As soon as I stretched the canvas the whole structure curved out from the wall like a sail. I kept that canvas hanging for a while because it intrigued me. I was just starting to make paintings flat on the ground by pouring and manipulating paint. I couldn't find a way to connect my paintings to that form and about 3 months later I had to move out of that loft so I took that curved structure apart. The idea of working on a curved surface remained dormant for twenty years. I had just moved to a new studio in Venice in 2002 that had incredible south light. I had just started making these very reductive pearlescent white paintings and the front of my studio was getting jammed up with clutter. I had to leave the studio really quickly to go somewhere, so I just leaned the painting at a 45-degree angle to the wall because there was no room to lean it flat on the wall. When I got back the whole thing was lit up in a way that I had never seen before, but if I moved a little to the left or right the color intensity would drop off and it had this much more mysterious shadowy look. At that moment the light bulb went on and I connected the dots. It was not long after that, I made my first convex painting and shortly after that, I made my first concave painting. I like the curves for a number of reasons.
" … If I moved a little to the left or right the color intensity would drop off and it had this much more mysterious shadowy look. At that moment the light bulb went on and I connected the dots. "
They blur the line a little between painting and sculpture. The curve has a functional aspect as I work with colors that shift in hue and intensity as you move from side to side and the curve enhances that. Also, I like the way that they refer to the physicality of the world at large, both the shape of the earth and the shape of space. I have continued to use and explore the curves since late 2002. I am just starting to really push the curved aspect as of late and have found some new materials to paint on. I have one painting in my current exhibition at William Turner Gallery called R.A.D. that I am really excited about.
" We didn't grow up around the process at all as my Fathers studio was about five miles from our house and we were not encouraged to visit. Therefore I was never around the process of work being made growing up. I was however around finished work both in our house and at the occasional openings that we would go to. I was always intrigued by the work and always looked at it closely to try to figure out how it was done. We had a Sam Francis painting in our house for a while and I remember my Father always telling everybody that nobody knows how he does them. "
- Andy MOSES / Painter
Joshua TRILIEGI: Abstraction has it's own challenges and rewards. Would you discuss some of your influences and how you developed a style of your own?
I have never thought of myself as a purely abstract painter. I was always looking to find a new direction through process-oriented abstraction into a new kind of language. I guess one of the things that draws me to abstract painting is it's freedom. It's free in terms of making a mark that is not beholden to anything outside of itself. I am very drawn to atmosphere as well as gesture, so I guess going back historically Pollock and Rothko sit in prime positions in terms of influence. A Rothko painting is filled with so much atmosphere and mood. A Pollock is infused with so much energy and turbulence and let's call it freedom. So historically I have been influenced in terms of abstraction by both of them equally. Yves Klein has been a huge influence as well for bringing this Metaphysical element to his work that is simultaneously extremely genuine and also somewhat staged. It keeps the viewer guessing. There are so many painters going back hundreds of years that have influenced my work as well. I love the Venetian Renaissance painters as well as the French Impressionists as well as Turner and John Martin, as well as the Hudson River school. I loved the radical approach of the early twentieth century and the Futurists, and the Surrealists and on and on and on. When I first moved to New York in 1981 there was an explosion of painting happening. I loved so many of the local painters and there were a group of young Italian painters being shown. Most of all, though, I loved the German painters that were being shown in New York. Their work went back to the sixties and Seventies but all of a sudden you saw it everywhere in New York and it was being talked about everywhere.
" I think what also gets lost a lot in an art world that is so obsessed with naming who is on top every five minutes is the contributions of so many artists that keep the language and dialogue moving forward. Every time I go to multiple galleries I see something that I find interesting on some level. "
My favorite German painters at that time were Gerhard Richter, Anselm Kiefer, and Sigmar Polke, and they still are. They brought gravitas and history to their work and their work was both figurative and abstract. Over the years though, I have really loved so much painting and so much art and so many artists that run the gamut of mediums and approaches. I always thought Barbara Kruger's work was so graphically strong and conceptually powerful and direct. John Baldessari and Ed Ruscha have carved out unique niches with their different kinds of deadpan humor. Jeff Koons with his perfection. The whole light and space movement out of Southern California, which is finally being appreciated internationally. All of the really radical art that has come out of Southern California since the seventies. Also there is so much great work being done right now pushing the envelope in photography, sculpture and installation. All of the great artists from Los Angeles who are still under the radar internationally, including Ed Moses. There are too many great artists to name. I think what also gets lost a lot in an art world that is so obsessed with naming who is on top every five minutes is the contributions of so many artists that keep the language and dialogue moving forward. Every time I go to multiple galleries I see something that I find interesting on some level. You see a lot of cynical and derivative work as well: but the good overshadows the bad. I think for the moment we are in a golden age.
" I made a very seminal painting in 1990 that was about Alchemy. I worked in Gold and Fuchsia and Black. This was the most color I had ever used and from that point on I was addicted to color. All through the nineties I worked with a lot of very intense color and the imagery although abstract hinted at earth forms and later back to galactic and microscopic forms. "
- Andy MOSES / Painter
Joshua Triliegi: What attracts you to a certain color, tone and creating combinations that develop into a series such as the current work?
Andy MOSES: Color has been an interesting exploration for me. Through most of the eighties I only painted black and white. I loved the immediacy and the contrast. It felt very powerful and very connected to the types of paintings which I was making which included abstract paintings that hinted at galactic, microscopic and rock like forms. In the late eighties I began silk screening images and text from the newspaper, which at that time was only black and white. In about 1989 I began using color for the first time and the color I chose to work in was blue. I was still working with these images silkscreened from the newspaper but now some of the imagery related to water and sky so it was a vey logical progression. I made a very seminal painting in 1990 that was about Alchemy. I worked in Gold and Fuchsia and Black. This was the most color I had ever used and from that point on: I was addicted to color. All through the nineties I worked with a lot of very intense color and the imagery although abstract, hinted at earth forms and later back to galactic and microscopic forms. In 2002 I sort of wiped the slate clean as I began working in one shade of pearlescent white. From there I brought color back in very subtle shades of pearlescent colors. In 2004, I was working again with a lot of blue as it hinted at water and sky, which the paintings were starting to make allusions to. I really exploded color again starting in about 2010. Over the last year, I have really pushed color saturation and contrast, the most that I ever have, as well as brought very complex and layered color palettes into the work. What I always look for with color is to cause sensations that physically overwhelm and create very strong visceral reactions. Usually the reaction I am looking for is a kind of euphoria but at other times, I want those sensations to be more aggressive or turbulent.
ANDY MOSES is Currently showing at William TURNER Gallery Santa Monica CA USA
Visit his Current Exhibition or The Official Gallery Website www.williamturnergallery.com
BUREAU: Tell us about the watercolor entitled FOUNTAIN.
Linda STARK: “Fountain (crying eyes)”, is a caricature of the eternal crier, from the ongoing investigation of an archetype, and more specifically, woman as eternal crier. But in this work, she has full spectrum rainbow colored tears, so there is a combination of the auspicious with the tragic.My paintings and drawings operate as metaphors, sometimes for emotionally charged wounded states regarding the human condition, often from a particular standpoint of living in the physical body of a woman, in a world entrenched in patriarchal systems. Or they may be inquiries into feminine mysteries, and a woman’s relationship with nature. I like the pairing of opposites, expressing dualities, often with mordant humor.In this work on paper, the tears are dripped in watercolor, an ephemeral medium. But the idea stems from earlier oil paintings, such as “Crying Eyes” 1991, a face-sized self-portrait with paint heavily dripped from the eyes, like a murky gargoyle. At that time, I was influenced by the industrial storm drains, with their mineral buildup, near my downtown LA loft. I was drawn to explore the natural gravity and fluidity of oil paint, it’s tendency to drip, the way it builds up over an extended period of time, to convey a sense of geological and emotional density.
BUREAU: What originally attracted you to painting?
Linda STARK: I have always had a reverence for the activity of painting, instilled in me when I watched my mother from a distance, painting her pictures, in the garage on weekends, with special intensity. She painted out of inner necessity. It made me want to paint, but I didn’t start until college. It was in Cornelia Shultz’s Beginning Painting class at UC Davis, that I fell in love with oil painting. I still remember how she made the act of painting seem like an alchemical process. She taught me a valuable lesson on how to nurture and protect my creative flow. My paintings were expressionist then, and Cornelia told me to “go to the library and look at a book on Soutine, then put it back on the shelf, and walk away.” She cautioned me not to over-saturate my mind with other artists, in order to maintain a strong connection with my own voice.
BUREAU: Can you describe an early time in your life when a work of art spoke to you?
Linda STARK: When I was in grade school, we had a field trip to the Balboa Art Museum in San Diego. It was my first trip to an art museum. I remember sitting in front of a Gorky painting, entranced. I opened myself up to the painting and experienced what I later learned was synesthesia. I heard an orchestra of sounds, as I looked at the complex abstract forms. That was when I had a profound realization of a painting’s potential. It was talking to me.
Linda Stark received a B.A. from U.C. Davis (1978) and an M.F.A. from U.C. Irvine (1985). Her work has been exhibited in museums and public spaces such as Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Albright-Knox Gallery (Buffalo, New York), UC Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, The Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art (Ridgefield, Connecticut), Oakland Museum of California, Site Santa Fe, Santa Barbara Contemporary Arts Forum, and Pasadena Museum of California Art. She is the recipient of two National Endowment for the Arts Visual Artist Fellowships, a California Arts Council Fellowship, a COLA Visual Artist Fellowship, and a California Community Foundation Fellowship. Stark lives & works in Los Angeles, California USA. Tap The Link Below Visit ANGLES L A
KRIS KUKSI: SCULPTOR
By BUREAU of ARTS and CULTURE MAGAZINE Editor Joshua TRILIEGI
Picture if you will, The Titanic, after submission. The bodies and their souls: passengers, crew and stow ways. What would it feel like ? What might it it look like ? Imagine a world in all it's minute detail that could illustrate such a scene & you will begin to fathom the world of Mr. Kris Kuksi's sculpture. An accomplished painter who happened upon sculpture by hobbling together preexisting objects into new and original arrangements which set the bar a notch or two above any previous ideas of sculpture since, say, French Rococo or Italian Baroque architecture of olden day. Mr Kuksi subverts the ideas of religiousity, empiric nobleness and the wreckage of a post modern society into a sort of anarchy of the mind. One of the very few artists in our known history to tap into an ephemeral world with all it's detail, all it's nightmarish qualities, all it's passion, lust, violence and posture, in a tone and style that is wholly original. Mr Kuksi is steeped in mythology, astrology, greek gods and a modern history that includes Napolean, Beethoven and Oedipus. Comparisons are few, though, I would suggest Dore', Heronymous Bosch and the films of Terry Gilliam. Kuksi manufactures an overall visual schematic that provides a battlefeild of ideas which suggest the afterlife of a major event, such as, The Civil War, The French Revolution or the end of the world.
" One of the very few artists in our known history to tap into an ephemeral world with all it's detail, all it's nightmarish qualities, all it's passion, lust, violence and posture, in a tone and style that is wholly original."
He creates a fantasy world come true in mono and duo chromatic form, that is entirley haunting, fantastic and when he is really on his game: darkly humorous.The artwork utilizes themes that freely criticize war, religious crusades and ideas of empiric ideology, while at the same time, employing the very devices, symbols and gestures that originally propagandized and sold those ideas to a hungry public. Kuksi is like a fiction writer who has established identifiable characters who will then willfully act out scenarios of a horrendous and beautifully haunting plotline that leaves us aghast, enthralled and sometimes in awe. When Jack Nicholson was asked to describe the filmmaker Stanley Kubrik after working on The Shining, he famously replied, "Brings new meaning to the word: Meticulous." To echo those sentiments and ride Jack's wave a bit, Kuksi, it might be said, brings new meaning to the word: Obsessive. Like Kubrik, he is creating a world that hints at a larger literary and historical idea wherein each character plays a part. So far, Mr Kuksi has spent a large amount of energy and time tackling European history. When he has focused on American history, there are modern takes on issues of politics and religion, though the canon is scant of our own story, such as the Native American experience or African American slavery, which is indeed a landscape worth considering. Mr Kuksi, who was born in 1973 has discovered and mined a mature style and body of work that has captured the attention of both collectors of fine art and the general populist, it will be interesting to see where he takes us next, whether it be Heaven or Hell is simply a matter of opinion.
RUSSELL NACHMAN
INTERVIEW: The PAINTER
BUREAU: The current paintings derive from a core story and literature, explain how that process works for you.
Russell NACHMAN: The basic answer is connective threads. In the case of my current show at Paul Loya Gallery, I was reading Stay, Illusion!: The Hamlet Doctrine,* when I first started thinking about possible themes for the exhibit. The book is an examination of Hamlet, combining literary theory and psychoanalysis. One of its themes conceives the temperament of Hamlet as a kind of impotent louche... which I found resonated with the insouciant temperament of my painting’s characters. As far as ideas based in literature, I have always found more inspiration in novels, poetry, and philosophy than I have in the theories of contemporary art (which I personally find circuitous). * by Simon Critchley and Jamieson Webster
" My audience is that person out there, whoever he or she may be, who sees a painting, hears a song, reads a book that totally enriches their life, augments their thought, stirs their emotion, and adds to the quality of their life. That is what all the art I love has done for me and I want to return the favor."
- Russell Nachman
BUREAU: Your aesthetic is both post modern, punk rock and 17th century, that’s an interesting mix, how did this develop ?
Russell NACHMAN:I wanted to continue the art historical trope of the harlequin to best express my ideas and emotions via an “every-man.” My harlequin developed into a stooge wearing Black Metal corpse paint. The Black Metal death mask is meant to be seen in the same way that Japanese Kabuki face paint is meant to be seen—as an embodiment of a theme or emotion, not as an individual. Using these characters I want to explore the thoughts I have concerning what I see as a loss of relevance in theOther of religion and metaphysics. Now I’m not referring to a general mind-set, I am referring more to the current state of aesthetics, philosophy, science... basically the current state of serious thought. Historically, the underpinnings of expression most often had relationships to religion or to a metaphysics concerned with “something larger than ourselves.” Presently an ambivalent stance exists that dares neither to go forward nor to retreat. A stance curtailed by an understanding that it is almost certain that there is nothing to us but matter and energy (a “dead weight” of simple mass). The current theories of consciousness and free will rest on the basis of complexity rather than exteriority. To put it simply, you are an individual with free will because the mechanism of consciousness is so intricate and “un-mappable” that, as such, manifests identity. We are much more complex than toasters, and therefore, conscious, individual beings. I have reluctantly come to see this as a more probable truth than any metaphysical truth, however much I find a need for something more or outside to my being. As a result, I arrived at the idea of post-religious documents that are figured like Christian illuminated manuscripts, that depict a naive “fuck it” bacchanal of existential aporia.
BUREAU: When did you first utilize drawings and paintings as a way of expressing yourself and tell our readers about development.
Russell NACHMAN: I grew up drawing. For as long as I can remember drawing has been a constant companion and a source of joy in my life. I was a Sci-Fi, Fantasy, comic book kid and when I discovered “high” art in my late teens, I eschewed my former aesthetics, fearing them childish and low-brow. Fifteen years of avid exploration in art history and contemporary aesthetics found me constantly enamored of rebellious movements, such as DADA or FLUXUS, that challenged the status quo. With that under my belt and a dogged need for a truly individual voice in the art world, I returned to drawing and painting on paper— to the rendered image. Everything is permissible in the art world now, except for highly rendered “illustrational” images. So fuck, that’s what I’m going to use, not only to challenge the status quo, but because it is a part of who I am as an artist.
BUREAU: Cinema effects your subjects and characters quite a bit, explain how you relate to film in this way.
Russell NACHMAN: Cinema is the lexicon of facial expressions! I turn to cinematic images for moments, for those amazing expressions you see in freeze frame.
BUREAU: The paintings are brave, ruckus and yet disciplined and visually pleasing, who would you say you paint for and how important is finding your audience as an artist ?
Russell NACHMAN: It has always been my goal to craft a voice that is contemporary without being complicit. I’ve never wanted to be relevant based on a shrewd, “professional” adaptation that jibes with the current climate. I paint for me, above all else, but I also have a great desire to share my work with other people. I need people to see my work. My audience is that person out there, whoever he or she may be, who sees a painting, hears a song, reads a book that totally enriches their life, augments their thought, stirs their emotion, and adds to the quality of their life. That is what all the art I love has done for me and I want to return the favor.
Represented By Paul Loya Gallery in L A at http://paulloyagallery.com/
Represented By LMAK Projects in N Y C at http://lmakprojects.com/
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The Bureau Profile: MARGIE LIVINGSTON
BUREAU: What originally attracted you to modern art and share with our readers an early inspiration?
Margie LIVINGSTON: Two things attracted me to modernism: the grid and a spirit of experimentation. Working with the grid connects me to many artists including Mondrian, Sol LeWitt, Eve Hesse, and Agnes Martin. But I’m also interested in a much earlier version of the grid: Renaissance perspective which, as Rosalind Krauss wrote, “is inscribed on the depicted world as the armature of its organization.” The entwined histories of the grid and painting inspired one of my new works, Falling Grid with Underpainting. To make it, I wove a three-dimensional grid out of string, to literalize the perspective grid in space, and then covered it with paint. Of course, paint doesn't have much tensile strength, so when I cut the grid off the frame, the painting slumped under the force of gravity. This kind of experimentation, where I push paint to do what’s not expected, is at the heart of my practice.
BUREAU: The series of works that are sculpture crafted from paint are extremely interesting, share how this technique was discovered and where you are currently taking it.
Margie LIVINGSTON: Six years ago, I started experimenting with acrylic paint to discover its physical properties in order to exploit them for their own qualities, not pictorial qualities. I glued dried paint directly to the wall, like a decal. One of the glues I tested failed, and the paint skin fell on the floor. Instinctively, I picked it up, brushed it off, and folded it neatly like a blanket. This accidental discovery led to a new body of work where I poured out gallons of paint to make huge paint skins that I then folded and placed on shelves. The “Draped Paintings” hang on a peg like a coat or scarf. When I make them, my relationship to the paint is sensual, body to body, as I must caress the paint skins to shape them. I work with the weight of painting and the paint sags in response to gravity--just like we all do. That paint so readily took on the properties of fabric led me to my newest works. I tack paint skins directly onto stretcher bars and the paint literally stands in for the canvas. Body of Work, a jumble of these paint-as-canvas works held together with wood and metal brackets, will be shown at UNTITLED 2014 this year by Luis De Jesus Gallery in Los Angeles.
BUREAU: Do you subscribe to a specific thought process in your work, or is there a more tactile approach and please explain how theory meets reality in the actual creating of a work ?
Margie LIVINGSTON: My latest piece, Body of Work, provides a good example of my process, where the idea -- paint as canvas -- morphed and changed in response to the process of making. This piece came together using a combination of planning, model making, research, reflection, seat-of-the-pants problem-solving, and luck. Until I finally put it all together, I didn't know if the braces would hold. The stickiness of the paint is integral to its construction, but I didn't test that element at full scale until the final assembly, because putting two paint surfaces together creates a permanent bond. So I didn't know until the very end if I was making a prototype or the final work. This kind of problem-solving keeps things interesting. The white paint references Rauschenberg and Ryman, but a pile of white paintings reaches further back to the father of German Romanticism, Caspar David Friedrich, whose work I studied while in Berlin on a Fulbright Scholarship. The jumble of white paintings reminded me of his painting Sea of Ice (1823-24). As I worked on how to hang a pile of paintings on the wall, I made a small model out of foam core, balsa wood, and hot glue. The miniature paintings looked great on the wall, but I didn't like the way they hung there like a magic trick, denying the technical challenge of getting 18 canvases to hang together as one. This is when I added wooden and metal braces to hold them together, so its structure would be visible. I chose to use the utilitarian language of crating for this part of the piece, because I'm interested in the differences and similarities of making a painting and making a crate. During the three months it took to make Body of Work, I was imagining it hanging on the wall like a painting. The final twist came when I realized it looked great standing on the floor. As a sculpture built out of paintings, it blurs the line between sculpture and painting; it can either stand on the floor or hang on the wall with its ancestors.
Represented In Los Angeles, CA USA at Luis De Jesus Gallery : http://luisdejesus.com
Represented In Seattle, Washington USA at The SOIL Art Gallery : http://soilart.org
BUREAU OF ARTS AND CULTURE MAGAZINE
THE LINDA STARK INTERVIEW
BUREAU: Tell us about the current piece at Angles gallery.
Linda STARK: “Fountain (crying eyes)”, is a caricature of the eternal crier, from the ongoing investigation of an archetype, and more specifically, woman as eternal crier. But in this work, she has full spectrum rainbow colored tears, so there is a combination of the auspicious with the tragic.My paintings and drawings operate as metaphors, sometimes for emotionally charged wounded states regarding the human condition, often from a particular standpoint of living in the physical body of a woman, in a world entrenched in patriarchal systems. Or they may be inquiries into feminine mysteries, and a woman’s relationship with nature. I like the pairing of opposites, expressing dualities, often with mordant humor.In this work on paper, the tears are dripped in watercolor, an ephemeral medium. But the idea stems from earlier oil paintings, such as “Crying Eyes” 1991, a face-sized self-portrait with paint heavily dripped from the eyes, like a murky gargoyle. At that time, I was influenced by the industrial storm drains, with their mineral buildup, near my downtown LA loft. I was drawn to explore the natural gravity and fluidity of oil paint, it’s tendency to drip, the way it builds up over an extended period of time, to convey a sense of geological and emotional density.
BUREAU: What originally attracted you to painting?
Linda STARK: I have always had a reverence for the activity of painting, instilled in me when I watched my mother from a distance, painting her pictures, in the garage on weekends, with special intensity. She painted out of inner necessity. It made me want to paint, but I didn’t start until college. It was in Cornelia Shultz’s Beginning Painting class at UC Davis, that I fell in love with oil painting. I still remember how she made the act of painting seem like an alchemical process. She taught me a valuable lesson on how to nurture and protect my creative flow. My paintings were expressionist then, and Cornelia told me to “go to the library and look at a book on Soutine, then put it back on the shelf, and walk away.” She cautioned me not to over-saturate my mind with other artists, in order to maintain a strong connection with my own voice.
BUREAU: Can you describe an early time in your life when a work of art spoke to you?
Linda STARK: When I was in grade school, we had a field trip to the Balboa Art Museum in San Diego. It was my first trip to an art museum. I remember sitting in front of a Gorky painting, entranced. I opened myself up to the painting and experienced what I later learned was synesthesia. I heard an orchestra of sounds, as I looked at the complex abstract forms. That was when I had a profound realization of a painting’s potential. It was talking to me.
Linda Stark received a B.A. from U.C. Davis (1978) and an M.F.A. from U.C. Irvine (1985). Her work has been exhibited in museums and public spaces such as Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Albright-Knox Gallery (Buffalo, New York), UC Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, The Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art (Ridgefield, Connecticut), Oakland Museum of California, Site Santa Fe, Santa Barbara Contemporary Arts Forum, and Pasadena Museum of California Art. She is the recipient of two National Endowment for the Arts Visual Artist Fellowships, a California Arts Council Fellowship, a COLA Visual Artist Fellowship, and a California Community Foundation Fellowship. Stark lives & works in Los Angeles, California USA.
ANDY MOSES
The BUREAU ART INTERVIEW
By BUREAU of ARTS and CULTURE Editor Joshua A. TRILIEGI
Joshua TRILIEGI: We have been following your work now for almost two decades, back when the magazine was an artists’ collective. You made a sort of break through with the Fire and Ice Series some years ago: could you talk about the process from that time to the present?
Andy MOSES: The paintings that you refer to as the Fire and Ice series are a series of paintings that I exhibited in Los Angeles in 2002. I had moved back from New York in 2000 after having been there for 18 years. The work I had been doing there was done in a similar fashion to how I currently work which is by preparing, pouring, and manipulating paint on a flat surface.
The BUREAU ART INTERVIEW
By BUREAU of ARTS and CULTURE Editor Joshua A. TRILIEGI
Joshua TRILIEGI: We have been following your work now for almost two decades, back when the magazine was an artists’ collective. You made a sort of break through with the Fire and Ice Series some years ago: could you talk about the process from that time to the present?
Andy MOSES: The paintings that you refer to as the Fire and Ice series are a series of paintings that I exhibited in Los Angeles in 2002. I had moved back from New York in 2000 after having been there for 18 years. The work I had been doing there was done in a similar fashion to how I currently work which is by preparing, pouring, and manipulating paint on a flat surface.
" After moving back to California I became interested in nature on a more human or tangible level and began making these panoramic paintings that were once again abstract, but now suggested horizons as seen from the ocean or the desert or the sky."
The paintings I did in New York were mostly done through chemical reactions. Those paintings were mostly abstract but they also suggested galactic or microscopic phenomena. After moving back to California I became interested in nature on a more human or tangible level and began making these panoramic paintings that were once again abstract, but now suggested horizons as seen from the ocean or the desert or the sky. They were made with one color of pearlescent white and were once again poured and manipulated on a flat surface. This time there were no chemical reactions. It was just the thickness of the paint that determined light and shadow. Shortly after that I made the first pearlescent white paintings I began making them on convex and then concave surfaces. I started making them convex and concave because of the way they interacted with light when you walked around them but also how the curve in the canvas seemed to suggest the curve of the earth and the curve of all space.
" They were made with one color of pearlescent white and were once again poured and manipulated on a flat surface. This time there were no chemical reactions. It was just the thickness of the paint that determined light and shadow. "
I have developed this work over the past 12 years going back and forth between being extremely monochromatic to working with color in extremely complex and varied ways, which is where I am at now. Also I have pushed the color from extremely subtle color variations to extreme contrast, which again is where I am now. Lastly the work has fluctuated between having what I call a defined horizon to being more topographical looking and more abstract.
Joshua TRILIEGI: Being a second-generation artist is both a gift and a challenge, I remember hearing people compare you to your father [Ed Moses] back in the day. Discuss what you have dealt with and how this has affected your own style.
Andy MOSES: Growing up with an artist Father has always made people make very strong assumptions about whom I am and where my work must be coming from. The truth is, both my brother and myself were consistently told that we could do whatever we wanted except be painters. We didn't grow up around the process at all as my Fathers studio was about five miles from our house and we were not encouraged to visit. Therefore I was never around the process of work being made growing up. I was however around finished work both in our house and at the occasional openings that we would go to. I was always intrigued by the work and always looked at it closely to try to figure out how it was done. We had a Sam Francis painting in our house for a while and I remember my Father always telling everybody that nobody knows how he does them. That intrigued me a lot - the fact that painting could be this mysterious and magical or even alchemical process. I went to Cal Arts in 1979 to study film. Once I realized how many chefs and how many elves had to be involved in film I realized I was a solo act. I had surfed a lot as a teenager and probably my favorite thing about it is that you could do it alone. You could paddle out by yourself and speak to no one and convene with the ocean. I had issues with authority as a teenager for sure and surfing was my escape. I was actually accepted into the art department at Cal Arts to make film. My teachers were John Baldessari, Douglas Huebler, Michael Asher and for one semester Barbara Kruger. Cal Arts was a very rigorous conceptual program that was extremely stimulating to me. I continued to work in film but added performance and installation to my repertoire. I did one pretty controversial performance/installation called Father Knows best. I did some paintings that were essentially like props for various installations. it was during this period that I experimented for the first time with painting flat and flowing the paint on to create an effect that I was looking for. This type of painting was like Heroine for me. Once I tried it I knew I was hooked for life. Shortly after that there was an artist visiting from New York who asked me to work for him in New York. I had only been at Cal Arts a couple of years and really loved it but I knew I had the painting bug and I knew that it was going to take some time to develop these paintings. During that time I wasn't interested in having them critiqued as I was teaching myself how to do them and I figured I would know when they were ready to put out in the world to be looked at and then critiqued,. So I moved to New York at age nineteen. When I got there the job I had been offered was gone but that artist hooked me up with another painter Pat Steir and I worked for her. It was during the fall of 1981 that I did my first painting that I felt was successful. It was black and white and looked like a galactic explosion. I began exhibiting this work in New York in 1985 and had my first solo show in 1987 at Annina Nosei which was a very prestigious gallery for a 25 year old to have their first solo show at. I lived in New York until 2000 when I moved back to Los Angeles. Some people had heard of me through my work in New York. Others who saw my work in the early 2000's just assumed that I had started painting a few years earlier and that this was the first work that I had ever exhibited. I didn't really have to deal with comparisons to my Father's work in New York but when I moved back to L.A. there were certainly some. I know that those comparisons would have been much more intense if I had never left L.A. I feel that it has been a double-edged sword for sure. I have definitely benefited at times and have been afflicted at others for being a second-generation artist but I am certainly not complaining. Everybody who has ever lived has some kind of cross to bear. I will be having a thirty-year retrospective at the Pete and Susan Barret Gallery at Santa Monica College in 2016. For the first time my New York and L.A. works will all be exhibited together. I feel like this show will put a lot of ghosts to rest, as people in L. A. will be able to see how the worked developed and evolved over the last thirty years.
AM: The curves developed in an interesting way. I moved to New York in 1981. I was always very impatient and I wanted to make my stretcher bars as fast as possible so I could get to painting. I wanted to make paintings that had a weight and authority to them then so I decided to make my stretcher bars using 2x4's instead of something narrower and lighter. I wanted to make them 3.5 inches deep. I put the 2x4's together using only corrugated nails on the back. No cross bars and no triangles at the corners.
" I had to leave the studio really quickly to go somewhere so I just leaned the painting at a 45-degree angle to the wall because there was no room to lean it flat on the wall. When I got back the whole thing was lit up in a way that I had never seen before…"
AM: As soon as I stretched the canvas the whole structure curved out from the wall like a sail. I kept that canvas hanging for a while because it intrigued me. I was just starting to make paintings flat on the ground by pouring and manipulating paint. I couldn't find a way to connect my paintings to that form and about 3 months later I had to move out of that loft so I took that curved structure apart. The idea of working on a curved surface remained dormant for twenty years. I had just moved to a new studio in Venice in 2002 that had incredible south light. I had just started making these very reductive pearlescent white paintings and the front of my studio was getting jammed up with clutter. I had to leave the studio really quickly to go somewhere, so I just leaned the painting at a 45-degree angle to the wall because there was no room to lean it flat on the wall. When I got back the whole thing was lit up in a way that I had never seen before, but if I moved a little to the left or right the color intensity would drop off and it had this much more mysterious shadowy look. At that moment the light bulb went on and I connected the dots. It was not long after that I made my first convex painting and shortly after that that I made my first concave painting. I like the curves for a number of reasons.
" … If I moved a little to the left or right the color intensity would drop off and it had this much more mysterious shadowy look. At that moment the light bulb went on and I connected the dots. "
AM: They blur the line a little between painting and sculpture. The curve has a functional aspect as I work with percent colors that shit in hue and intensity as you move from side to side and the curve enhances that. Also I like the way that they refer to the physicality of the world at large both the shape of the earth and the shape of space. I have continued to use and explore the curves since late 2002. I have made a couple of sign waves and some vertical curves as well. I am just starting to really push the curved aspect as of late as I have found some new materials to paint on. I have one painting in my current exhibition at William Turner Gallery called R.A.D. that I am really excited about.
" We didn't grow up around the process at all as my Fathers studio was about five miles from our house and we were not encouraged to visit. Therefore I was never around the process of work being made growing up. I was however around finished work both in our house and at the occasional openings that we would go to. I was always intrigued by the work and always looked at it closely to try to figure out how it was done. We had a Sam Francis painting in our house for a while and I remember my Father always telling everybody that nobody knows how he does them. "
- Andy MOSES / Painter
Joshua TRILIEGI: Abstraction has it's own challenges and rewards. Would you discuss some of your influences and how you developed a style of your own?
AM: I have never thought of myself as a purely abstract painter. I was always looking to find a new direction through process-oriented abstraction into a new kind of language. I guess one of the things that draws me to abstract painting is it's freedom. It's free in terms of making a mark that is not beholden to anything outside of itself. I am very drawn to atmosphere as well as gesture so I guess going back historically Pollock and Rothko sit in prime positions in terms of influence. A Rothko painting is filled with so much atmosphere and mood. A Pollock is infused with so much energy and turbulence and let's call it freedom. So historically I have been influenced in terms of abstraction by both of them equally. Yves Klein has been a huge influence as well for bringing this Metaphysical element to his work that is simultaneously extremely genuine and also somewhat staged. It keeps the viewer guessing. There are so many painters going back hundreds of years that have influenced my work as well. I love the Venetian Renaissance painters as well as the French impressionists as well as Turner and John Martin, as well as the Hudson River school. I loved the radical approach of the early twentieth century and the Futurists, and the Surrealists and on and on and on. When I first moved to New York in 1981 there was an explosion of painting happening. I loved so many of the local painters and there were a group of young Italian painters being shown. Most of all, though, I loved the German painters that were being shown in New York. Their work went back to the sixties and Seventies but all of a sudden you saw it everywhere in New York and it was being talked about everywhere.
" I think what also gets lost a lot in an art world that is so obsessed with naming who is on top every five minutes is the contributions of so many artists that keep the language and dialogue moving forward. Every time I go to multiple galleries I see something that I find interesting on some level. "
My favorite German painters at that time were Gerhard Richter, Anselm Kiefer, and Sigmar Polke, and they still are. They brought gravitas and history to their work and their work was both figurative and abstract. Over the years though I have really loved so much painting and so much art and so many artists that run the gamut of mediums and approaches. I always thought Barbara Kruger's work was so graphically strong and conceptually powerful and direct. John Baldessari and Ed Ruscha have carved out unique niches with their different kinds of deadpan humor. Jeff Koons with his perfection. The whole light and space movement out of Southern California, which is finally being appreciated internationally. All of the really radical art that has come out of Southern California since the seventies. Also there is so much great work being done right now pushing the envelope in photography, sculpture and installation. All of the great artists from Los Angeles who are still under the radar internationally, including Ed Moses. There are too many great artists to name. I think what also gets lost a lot in an art world that is so obsessed with naming who is on top every five minutes is the contributions of so many artists that keep the language and dialogue moving forward. Every time I go to multiple galleries I see something that I find interesting on some level. You see a lot of cynical and derivative work as well but the good overshadows the bad. I think for the moment we are in a golden age.
" I made a very seminal painting in 1990 that was about Alchemy. I worked in Gold and Fuchsia and Black. This was the most color I had ever used and from that point on I was addicted to color. All through the nineties I worked with a lot of very intense color and the imagery although abstract hinted at earth forms and later back to galactic and microscopic forms. "
- Andy MOSES / Painter
Joshua Triliegi: What attracts you to a certain color, tone and creating combinations that develop into a series such as the current work?
Andy MOSES: Color as been an interesting exploration for me. Through most of the eighties I only painted Black and white. I loved the immediacy and the contrast. It felt very powerful and very connected to the types of paintings which I was making which included abstract paintings that hinted at galactic, microscopic and rock like forms. In the late eighties I began silk screening images and text from the newspaper, which at that time was only black and white. In about 1989 I began using color for the first time and the color I chose to work in was blue. I was still working with these images silk screened from the newspaper but now some of the imagery related to water and sky so it was a very logical progression. I made a very seminal painting in 1990 that was about Alchemy. I worked in Gold and Fuchsia and Black. This was the most color I had ever used and from that point on I was addicted to color. All through the nineties I worked with a lot of very intense color and the imagery although abstract hinted at earth forms and later back to galactic and microscopic forms. In 2002 I sort of wiped the slate clean as I began working in one shade of pearlescent white. From there I brought color back in very subtle shades of pearlescent colors. In 2004 I was working again with a lot of blue as it hinted at water and sky, which the paintings were starting to make allusions to. I really exploded color again starting in about 2010. Over the last year I have really pushed color saturation and contrast the most that I ever have as well as brought very complex and layered color palettes into the work. What I always look for with color is to cause sensations that physically overwhelm you and create very strong visceral reactions. Usually the reaction I am looking for is a kind of euphoria but at other times I want those sensations to be more aggressive or turbulent.
ANDY MOSES is Currently showing at William TURNER Gallery in Santa Monica CA USA
Visit his Current Exhibition or The Official Gallery Website at : www.williamturnergallery.com
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