Peter Roux answers:

I saw Peter Roux's work in June at the Lyons Wier Gallery, in NY. I was struck by the painterly use of both abstraction and representational imagery and his use of the edge to create depth, compression and expansiveness in the work.

Suspension (east sky) II   2015   oil, charcoal on panel   42x42"

Suspension (farm field) I   2016   oil on canvas with charcoal 30x40"

Suspension (take 6)  2017   oil, charcoal on panel   36"x48"

The Way Light Falls (on things you cherish) no.1   2012   oil, charcoal on paper   30x12"    

Inspirations?

Inspiration is such an elusive thing to define for me. I'm energized to make work based on many sources and experiences, most of which don't connect to each other whatsoever or fall into linked categories.

The natural world certainly inspires me- whether it be in sky, ground, or detail. I tend to think less in terms of a direct response to a place- that I want to paint that view- and more in the ways and means of the experience. I find myself paying attention to how I respond and the experience of seeing, and that seems to be what drives my work. Translating this into visual information in a piece crosses over representational and abstract platforms for me...which I like. 

I'm drawn a bit to contradiction as well, and rebellion. Those inspire me in odd ways. I don't think you see it directly in my work, but it affects me.

Edges inspire me too. If art is all about relationships (forms against space, points in time pressed together, color and value related to create new meaning) then the meat of it for me is in the edges of things, where they meet/blend/relate. I like them hard, soft, elusive, dramatic, quietly shifting, whatever. I can look at a glass on a countertop and get lost in the parts where the glass meets the space surrounding it...to speak nothing of the universe of values and form working within the glass surface. It's endless for me. It's not just about form either...it's where content lies. It always speaks about much more than the subject itself. 

And, of course, seeing good work made by others just makes my brain and heart buzz. I see things, have an experience with them, become slightly changed by the encounter, and feel a direct need to make new work. As a painter I tend to be most drawn to work in mediums that aren't paint. I know paint, and sometimes knowing the structures used can be slightly distracting when looking at artwork. So, I get pulled to the alchemy of things made by processes I don't normally use. And, in a weird organic response, it makes me want to paint.

Suspension (take 6)   2017   oil, charcoal on panel   36x48"

What is your personal history? Creatives in your ancestry that might have influenced you?

I've been drawing and painting since I was very young, and have always wanted to be an artist of some kind save for two or three childhood detours (astronaut, sheriff, rock star). Art school was always the goal, and it ultimately just came down to what kind of art I wanted to make, and how.

My mother in particular was instrumental in supporting me in that drive. She was a creative soul who played the piano beautifully and, later in life, had a short but successful career as a weaver. Beyond that, there's very little in my family background that I draw upon for influence. Quite the opposite, in fact: most of it is rooted in blue collar work histories. Art was appreciated and valued by a few, but the opportunities to even know it existed in life were almost non-existent for them. It's almost like I was born with a virus or something.

The Way Light Falls (on things you cherish) no.1   2012   oil, charcoal on paper   30x12"    

 Suspension (Iceland) IV   2015   oil on connected panels   60x36"

Name 5 favorite artists that turn you on..and why

Five artists who turn me on....that's a tough one. Different artists circle in and out of the category at different times. But if I had to list a few:

Vermeer: he's so often referred to as a painter's painter, and for good reason. He created intimate worlds of quiet light, where narrative is in every object but it's never shouted. Time stops in his images, and it stops for me when I look at them. 

Gerhard Richter: you just can't pin this artist down, and I like that. His work always explores, in some fashion, what art is. Richter moves from pure abstraction to photo realism just by jumping when he's ready without apology, yet they connect. Then, he fills in the spaces between the two with yet more works. Painting, sculpture, glass, installation, etc. Even the works I dislike, I like. Weird.

Brian Eno: I'm not very interested in anything Eno records with lyrics. Rather, I like his ambient compositions, the sound installations that experiment with hearing within defines spaces, and above all his writings about art. Eno has talked about no longer seeing artworks as objects but rather as triggers for experience. That pretty much makes sense to me. And, he works in a time-derivative medium, for which I'm just slightly envious.

Rickie Lee Jones: If you want to feel what it's like to have your soul simultaneously uplifted and stepped on, listen to this artist. She's a raw nerve.

I'm going beyond five...

Agnes Martin: for me her works are like visual prayer. And I never pray, so that's saying something.

Sally Mann, Chuck Close (not exactly sure why), Willem DeKooning, Brice Marden, Christopher Wool, Richard Serra, Cecily Brown (at times), Wim Wenders, Stan Brackhage, Ridley Scott because he has made the future look gritty but probable and loves sun spots in his films (Blade Runner is amazing to look at), Jane Campion, e.e. cummings (gotta put it it lower case with that guy), any musician who makes music that transcends the instruments they play.

Mostly, though, I get turned on by the work of people I know or know of, who are making really great art but maybe aren't getting the press and exposure the super art stars of the world get. These are people who are making it happen somehow. I'll throw some names out in case people want to take a look: Amy Tavern, Liz Tran, Sean Thomas, Karen Philippi, Amy Spassov, Erik Hall, Stephanie Dalton, Laura Fayer, Jennifer J.L. Jones, James Austin Murray, Mark Zimmerman, Milisa Galazzi, Bernd Haussman. So many more as well. Google 'em.

Studio shot

What do you see outside your studio window (picture) and inside your studio at the moment?

Lots of trees outside my window. I live in the woods...sort of. Inside the studio it's curated chaos I guess. Multiple pieces going at once, shelves of disorganized supplies, oily painted rags. And occasionally a three-legged dog.

What do you listen to in the studio?

When I'm actively painting, I tend to put on music that won't distract me but instead filter into my head from the side somehow. Everything from Bach to hardcore punk, so it varies based on my mood. Lots of blues, new and old. When I'm stretching canvas or packing paintings or doing things other than painting, I tend to listen to NPR or interviews with interesting people, or just the news.

What’s on your bookshelf or podcast list? picture or list

I'll list some.

I really like the Savvy Painter podcasts a lot. In terms of books, lots of history books (especially 20th century stuff), and I'm a sucker for big monographs and expensive art books and catalogs. If I go see gallery shows and love the work but can't afford to buy- which is most of the time- I'll get a catalog if it's available. So, lots of those. They remind me of the work I saw, and its a way to bring it home and live with it. 

Oh, and Sophie's Choice because it has one of the best last lines of any novel.

What thoughts do you have to turn off in your head when you are in the studio?

Any thoughts about people. If I'm worried about someone, or in conflict, or just thinking about someone a lot it tends to be a barrier to working. I can eventually get beyond it and shut it out, but it can take awhile. I'm not sure how I feel about this, either.

I have doubting thoughts about the work I'm doing at times, like any artist. It's part of the process. It's not about trying to eliminate these thoughts but rather learning to manage them, because they're inevitable if you're trying to do something that matters to you. I've tried to figure out ways to manage them as best as I can, including trusting the idea that they'll go away. But they can get to me sometimes.

Best advice you have gotten about making/being an artist?

The best advice has generally been about just doing work. Pull energy out of thinking about being an artist and what it looks or feels like to be one, and just make make some art. Chuck Close is famous for staying that inspiration is for amateurs, the rest of us just get up in the morning and work. That's a bit heavy-handed, but I get it. I think you become an artist by making art. What an artist looks like is irrelevant. If you're making art, then the answer to what an artist looks and feels like is in the mirror. Let everyone else sort it out.

That, and trust yourself. This is the toughest one, as you're sometimes doing it without any external reinforcement. But another artist once told me that if you create something that matters to you, it's inevitable that it will also matter to someone else, somewhere...and you need to trust that. I think this is a logical extension to the idea that the act of creating means you're putting something (even small) into the world that didn't exist before. So, you alter the world just a little. Just trust that this occurs and that in some way it's important.

Also, that beauty isn't a bad word. This idea in contemporary art that beauty is too simple and trite as content is ridiculous to me. All that happens when artists make work that is intentionally ugly or anti-beauty in order to push things is that they're ultimately redefining beauty. It still hits us in the same place. We need more beauty in the world, whatever it looks like. Especially now.

Some see being an artist as self-indulgent. By that measure simply living in the world is self-indulgent. Creating work places me in the world somehow, and calms me down. That's not self-indulgence, it's survival. And, hopefully, the process leaves something in its wake that's bigger than any one individual. 

Jeanne Heifetz Answers:

Thank you to Jeanne for answering some of my questions. I love the materiality and mapping quality of this new work. 

Pre-Occupied 66

graphite on flax paper tinted with iron oxide
21″ x 29″
2017

 Pre-Occupied 76

graphite on flax paper sized with persimmon juice 
29″ x 21″

2017

Pre-Occupied 18  
silver graphite on flax paper tinted with iron oxide

21″ x 29″

2016

Pre-Occupied 12

silver graphite on Indian sunn hemp paper

13″ x 17″

2016

What inspires you?

The series I’ve been working on for the past two years, “Pre-Occupied,” was inspired by Doris Salcedo’s retrospective at the Guggenheim in 2015. Up to that point my work had been very process-based, but Salcedo made me wonder whether artists have an obligation to make work about things that frighten us.

Pre-Occupied statement:
In this series, I challenged myself to confront something that terrifies me.
I have had death panics since I was eight years old. Ironically, the only real estate I am ever likely to own is a parcel of eight cemetery plots I inherited from my grandfather. The deed to the plots came with a map of the cemetery, which seemed like the logical place to begin to address my fear. Each drawing in this series is based on the map of a different Jewish cemetery, including the ones where my own relatives are buried. (I am not religious, but the historical and familial connection was important: these are all places I could be buried, even though I remain completely unreconciled to the idea of my own death.)
I can’t claim that drawing the maps allays my panic. Death remains entirely unknowable terrain: the map can never be the territory. And yet, stripped of identifying text, the cemeteries’ abstract forms are mysteriously compelling, grounding me in the universal human drive to create beauty, order, and ritual in the face of our own mortality.

I don’t think of my work as political, as Salcedo’s clearly is. Yet after the 2016 election, as my husband and I started pulling together our passport applications, I began thinking about what it means to flee a country and leave your dead behind, exposed and vulnerable. In Europe during and after the war, Jewish headstones were pulled up and used as the foundations of houses or as flagstones in patios and roadways. I also started thinking about the way we can carry our dead with us, and the way the remnants of the destroyed shtetls of Eastern Europe can be found in American cemeteries: you can trace our ancestral villages in the names of the burial societies. So while many of us have been asking ourselves how to respond to the current political moment in our work, I found my work connected to that moment in ways I hadn’t anticipated.

What is your personal history?

I grew up in an apartment on the Upper West Side of New York City and considered the Met my playground. I knew the layout of the museum by heart. I loved the children’s wing with the diorama of the medieval workshop, the interactive color wheel, and the film of how egg tempera is made (the current version of the children’s wing is completely sterile by comparison). I still have the tiny books I got there as a child: How to Look at Paintings and How to Look at Sculpture. But I never imagined myself becoming an artist. My high school’s art program was pretty tepid: I could swear we drew the same still life every year. I can still close my eyes and see that spider plant. But something else happened in those years. Our school librarian was also a dance critic, and she taught an afterschool class in dance appreciation. I got hooked. In that era, you could get tickets to New York City Ballet for $4 or $5 (in the highest tier of the theatre – but if you spotted an empty seat below you could claim it during the intermission). I did that about three times a week, and I think my education in pattern and structure and visual rhythm as well as my interest in light and shadow and playing with translucency and scrims came from watching Balanchine ballets (not to mention Karinska’s costumes and Jennifer Tipton’s lighting). I never had any formal art training. I have two degrees in English, and a background in weaving, which I learned in a summer course at 14 and did professionally for years. Eventually I moved from making functional work on the loom to making sculptural work using textile techniques with non-traditional materials (wire and glass) to drawing on stone with powdered metals mixed with cold wax, to drawing on paper.

I Would Have Remembered That 13

ink on handmade abaca paper

11″ x 14″

2015

 Geometry of Hope: Cobalt, Emerald

acid-etched glass rods, coated copper wire, coated silver wire, stainless-steel mesh.

20” x 20”

2009

Creatives in your ancestry who might have influenced you?

 My parents met at the High School of Music & Art, but both of them were musicians. My mother worked in cultural and educational exchange for the State Department, but she also took classes at the Art Students’ League. Her grandfather had been a goldsmith who made beautiful Art Nouveau jewelry with a lot of delicate filigree and repoussé work. I guess if there’s a gene for doing detailed work on a tiny scale I inherited it from him. My mother’s best friend from high school was the Israeli painter Nora Frenkel, whose work filled the apartment I grew up in. My father was passionate about photography, and taught it out of our apartment. We had a darkroom at home where he (and later I) developed both color and black-and-white film and prints.

Nora self-portrait 1995

Saki-Ori: Indigo, Logwood
tussah silk hand-dyed with indigo, fustic, catechu, logwood.
63″ x 36″
2007

Name 5 favorite artists that turn you on…and why?

That’s a tough one. I keep a spreadsheet of artists whose work I admire (and share on Facebook) and it’s got almost 900 names on it. But I also have keywords on the spreadsheet to help me remember each artist’s work, and some of the most frequent keywords are “obsessive,” “cellular,” “biomorphic,” “mapping,” “accretion,” “layering,” and “installation.” So that gives you an idea of what floats my boat.

 studio bulletin board

 studio bulletin board

"tape wall" (tape used to mask out areas of drawing). 

Studio Shot

Jeanne's Website 

 

 

 

Paul Bowen answers

Paul Bowen was kind enough to answer some of my questions about creative ancestry and artist connections.  I have never met him but have always appreciated his work when I have visited Provincetown. Thanks, Paul!

Lisa, so glad you ask about creative ancestry !

It is something that I'm conscious and grateful for.

I grew up in Wales in the 1950s Welsh was my Dad's first language, but in those days uniformity was encouraged so my brother and I never became fluent. In Wales, conscious visual culture is relatively recent, whereas music and literature have always been central to the culture.

Part of our family worked in the slate quarries and I was thrilled to find out recently that there was ships carpenter among them. My taid (grandather) worked in a hardware store and had a sideline engraving coffin plates ! I have his tools in my workshop. My Dad was an architect and although he was well known for his Bauhaus-ish buildings, his real love was the old architecture, castles, churches, burial chambers and standing stones of the area we lived in. Much of our family time was spent exploring there and I am forever grateful for my parents love of the landscape. In WW II my Dad served in The Royal Engineers, building bridges, and in bomb disposal..I had had a couple of the bombs he defused, hanging on my bedroom wall when I as a kid.

Apse, 2016-17, Rust Stained Wood, 12.5 x13 x 2 inches

Latch, rust, 2017

Hiraethum, 1986, wood and chalk, 101 in x 81 in x 14 in, private collection

Kedge, wood, 1990, 168 x 108 x 18 in

I'm working on a list of artist I connect with, some from long ago, others more recent, and some are peers. A proper list would be pages long !

Susan Wall, Paula Modersohn-Becker, Gwen John, Lyonel Feininger, Samuel Palmer, Ben Nicholson. Eric Ravilous, Sal Scarpitta, Robert Mallary, Lee Bontecou, Helen Carnac, Mondrian, Brancusi,  Provincetown Printers, Jean Smith, Myron Stout, Paul Nash, Magdalena Abakanowitz,  Christo, Nolde, Brenda Chamberlain, Eva Hess, Joseph Beuys.

I have a direct conection to some of these artists through the materials, process or imagery they use, the others listed are mostly painters and it is painting and drawing that I find myself looking at these days. The block-buster rather corporate feel of much current work interests me less and less and I find that I'm drawn to simple direct expression, and often to the work of amateurs, sincere, intimate and authentic.

Boat and Bridge

Bridge Boat

Bridge Map

Sketchbook drawing

Armada, 2016, wood and bronze, 9 x 8 x 4 in.

Beacon, 2016, wood and bronze, 9 x 5 x 3 

Paul's Studio

What books are you reading these days?

Upcoming exhibitions:

I'll be showing a major work built from oars in 'Preserving The Very Nature of Cape Cod' at the Cape Cod Museum of Art, Dennis Ma, March 15 - May 20.

And currently working on a series of commissioned table top sculptures for 'On Edge ' at The Aldrich Museum, Ridgefield By. May 20 - January 20, 2018

And will have new work at Albert Merola Gallery in Provincetown this summer and at Big Town Gallery , Rochester, Vermont.

New Beginnings

Studio wall 2017

I began this blog in 2009 with "some of this and that about art " and also featured artists working their studios. I have always been interested in artists' inspirations, story, personal history,point of view and studio life.

What inspires you? What makes the hair on your neck go up? What do you take pictures of? What is your personal history? What artist's work turns you on and why? What do you see outside your window in the studio? What's on your bookshelf? What do you listen to? Thoughts in the studio?

Those are the kind of questions I will be asking myself and others again.
Stayed tuned but meanwhile here are some interesting posts from the past:

Mine from 2009
Steven Alexander,Paul Benke,Hannalore Baron,Rebecca Crowell,Diane Englander,Lorrie Fredette,Brenda Goodman,Matt Langley ,Lucy Mink,Diane McGregor,Tim McFarlane,Nancy Natale
Leslie Neuman,Sue Post,Fran Shalom,Titles,Inside/Outside,Etiquette of the Studio Visit

"Talking" 48 x 38 pigment sticks on panel 2016    R&F Handmade Paint Collection

Exhibitions

Snow day in Spring! Hoping all is well where you live and you are enjoying art full days! Lisa Happy to be included in the first show at the Jen Tough Gallery, Vallejo, CA open until April 8th Free Passage at Addington Gallery in Chicago through May From Dan Addington: I'm really excited to announce that Addington Gallery will be featuring noted abstract painter Lisa Pressman in our upcoming group exhibition "Free Passage: ).Lisa is a fantastic painter and a leading practitioner in the US of encaustic painting, although she often incorporates oil and other wax-based mediums into her work. These paintings are deep, layered, and visceral, yet somehow they always remain fresh, immediate, and vivid! Lisa is a true colorist, and when you see these pieces in person (as I hope you do, here, on March 3) you will be captivated by how she speaks the language of color, and how clearly you can hear her voice. These gem-like paintings (many are 12x12) are capable of taking you on long journeys (hence the title of the show "Free Passage"). I know this, because one hangs in my kitchen, and it helps wake me up every morning. - Opening March 3, 5-8pm at Addington Gallery, 704 N Wells St. Interview with Abstract artist Lisa Pressman I have  decided to create a Facebook group that would be : updates on my exhibitions and workshops, a place to share art, information, ideas, thoughts  and discussions. A little more interactive than a blog and a Facebook page and no politics. Just Art! So if you are interested: please ask to join MORE PAINT on FB. See you there. Lisa http://www.lisapressman.net Please visit my website for new work and news. Share Tweet Forward Drop Content Blocks Here Drop Content Blocks Here Copyright © *|CURRENT_YEAR|* *|LIST:COMPANY|*, All rights reserved. *|IFNOT:ARCHIVE_PAGE|* *|LIST:DESCRIPTION|* Our mailing address is: *|HTML:LIST_ADDRESS_HTML|* *|END:IF|* Want to change how you receive these emails? You can update your preferences or unsubscribe from this list *|IF:REWARDS|* *|HTML:REWARDS|* *|END:IF|*