Jeff Feld: The Chance Of A Lifetime

I met Jeff while we were exhibiting in Non-Declarative Art at the Drawing Center last year. He lives in New York City and is an extremely nice guy. I think his work is super interesting and you'll be able to see it if you click here.

Jeff Feld On Negation

In "the chance of a lifetime" I have taken the simple everyday cardboard box and have altered it with the addition of a candle. This enigmatic mix of the sacred and banal (high and low) creates a sense of tension via its own sense of negation. The box fails to contain it’s object, the candle, and use of the candle destroys the box (and potentially much more) Ultimately the viewer does not know what is in the box, yet the anticipation of receiving such a box can leave one initially surprised and hopeful (the chance of a lifetime) which upon further examination yields to a kind of mounting horror. By using negation this work plays upon desire, threat and/or fear, and ultimately our mortality.

Sharon Butler: Untitled, 11

"Untitled, 11" 2007 Oil on canvas board, 18" x 24".

Please check out Sharon Butler's website to see her great work. Being a big Melville fan myself, I just loved her "Search for Moby Dicks". The first part was called a "dickathon". While not painting, teaching or searching for Moby Dicks, she maintains the art blog Two Coats of Paint, and is a Contributing Writer at The Brooklyn Rail.

Sharon Butler On Isolation

This painting is part of a 34-panel series of linear abstractions inspired by paintings my reclusive father made in the Sixties. His main influences were Klee, Mondrian, Cezanne, Picasso, Braque, and Miro. Unlike me, he worked fairly quickly and didn't agonize over specific colors or shapes. Yet his paintings – all easel-sized abstractions on canvas board - have a prepossessing brushwork and simple charm. This painting, based on an image of an observation tower, captures the innocence, vulnerability, and isolation I see in his work.

Kevin Finklea: Bending Space

From 'Bending Space' at The Eagle Gallery/Emma Hill Fine Art, July of 2006 in London. Kevin lives in Philadelphia and is represented by the Pentimenti Gallery there and by Margaret Thatcher Projects in New York.

Kevin Finklea On Position

Position is certainly a central issue in my work. This has been the case for at least 30 years.

There is the most obvious matter of where I physically place my work when installing it in a given space. The work is often times inherently ill at ease; as most everything I do hovers between object and painting. Drawing directly on the wall serves my purposes but really screws the space up further still. I see all of this working in concert producing situations where the work appears to simply not know which thing it wants to be. Here you’d say it’s position is not clear.

I think all of this is fine. It pretty much sums up my experience from day to day. I consciously push the notion of position further with my color compositions. How can I take the positioning of the color to a place where the painting is almost falling apart? How can I push the pigments to heighten this? Can I position the color and it’s intensity so that the object resists being read integrally?

Email Address:

moahksan@yahoo.com

Next: Finklea On Position and Butler On Isolation

Thanks to Joanne Mattera and Adam Trowbridge for contributing to last week's posts.

Adam Trowbridge: snstncntnr

Adam Trowbridge is a Chattanooga-based artist who has recently been spending a lot of time in Chicago. You can see his excellent work and the way he views the world by clicking here.

Adam Trowbridge On Words(connected)

Words (connected):Selection Strategy: "Wantingicity" & Chance Forces (Negation of Negation), Temporary Weightlessness

I select (trap) flailing, falling, failing forces at the edge of cognition. Theoretically, it is an intense questioning of intersubjectivity: shared cognition, or any collective basis for meaning, purpose and communication. The intention is to create a potential for new sensation and incommunicable shared experience: a raw mix of naked exterority and sensations occurring outside of a cognitive existence.

Joanne Mattera: Silk Road

From her solo show, “Pure Color,” at the Marcia Wood Gallery in Atlanta in 2006. The paintings are from her ongoing series Silk Road, begun in 2006. Each painting in this installation is encaustic on panel, 12 x 12 inches.

Joanne Mattera On Arrangement

Like many artists, I think a lot about arrangement—the composition of elements within one painting, the installation of paintings on a wall—even though I typically adopt a simple format: squares or stripes, arranged in a grid as blocks or stacks of color. But of course “simple arrangement” (simple, another good word for your list) is never quite that.

Take the blocks of color. How big are they? Are they part of a larger composition on one panel? Are they individual panels arranged to hang singly or to be arranged into a larger whole? How is the color achieved in these blocks? Will I build up the surface with translucent layers to create a color that your retina perceives as the final hue, even though it is composed of many hues? Or will I scrape back some of the topmost opaque layers to reveal something of the hues underneath? Will I limn the edges to define the square as an object in space? Will that edge spark your eye to jump to the next painting in the arrangement?

And what of this arrangement? I typically work in series, so I like to show a selection of paintings in a way that lets you in on my visual thinking. Do I run a “zip” of paintings along the wall, so that A relates to B, B to C, and so on down the line? Or do I create a grid in which your eye can move back and forth, up and down? And, when I’m thinking grid, do I make a small grid or a larger grid? Because the larger it is, the more you focus on the installation rather than on the individual paintings within it—and there’s a whole little world in each of those paintings that I’d like you to explore. At the same time, I love that you can travel around the arrangement on a journey of your own choosing, alighting visually on one block of color and remaining there for a long time or just fleetingly before you move on.

My thoughts about arrangement have more questions than answers. But it is those questions that keep me endlessly engaged. And, of course, I hope some of that rubs off on you.

Artists On Words Has Kicked Off!

The Collaborative Project "Artists On Words" has kicked off. See Joanne Mattera's words and work above. More will follow. The submissions have been great and I very much appreciate the artists taking the time to participate.

To get things started I sent an invitation letter through email(see below). What's been interesting so far is the way different people have responded to the project, perhaps in some sense, reflecting an individual's relationship with written language and how they communicate. Some people are intuitive and spontaneous and others are more contemplative and deliberate. Some have responded quickly and others have taken more time.

Over the next few weeks I will post the responses in no particular order.

Dear Artists,

As you may know I have kept a blog called “Color Chunks” since 2006. If you have seen the blog, you know what it is about. It’s been fun, but I’ve decided I want to change the direction a bit. That’s where you come in.

As an Artist, and working as such, sometimes these words pop into my head and really seem to “capture” a particular facet of my work. They sometimes never turn into a “proper” artist’s statement but continue to bounce around in my head, remaining as a fragment. Or perhaps a word that I hadn’t thought of before springs upon me unexpectedly, makes sense at the time, but somehow gets lost. Have you had similar experiences? The following is an attempt to capture those fragments.

Below you’ll see a list of words in no particular order. Read over the list. If a word jumps out at you, if you feel there is a word that might relate somehow with the art you do, please write a few sentences on it(maybe a paragraph or two—more?), send it to me with a jpg of your work and I’ll post it on “Color Chunks”. The headings will read something like--- “Ron Buffington On Selection”, “Chris Ashley On Chance” etc. along with your work and whatever you choose to write.

I plan to post your writing without any editing, although I reserve the right to, okay? You can change the form of the words—“Saturation” can be “Saturated”, “Series” can be “Serial”. The list is a mix, with some words being kind of obvious in the artist’s lexicon—“Repetition” for example. Some are less obvious in connotation and more whimsical, like “Sponges”.

The more people participate the better it gets. I’m more interested in observing how things shape themselves, rather than achieving some kind of coherence from the top down.

The List of Words

Selection
Actual
Arrangement
Repetition
Mess
Reproduction
Root
Isolation
Temporary
Correlation
Influence
Conflict
Strategy
Saturation
Temperature
Care
Want
Layering
Sponges
Utopia
View
Conduct
Participant
Calculation
Category
Series
Practice
Chance
The End
Practicality
Plan
Forces
Syntax
Candy
Revealing
Inertia
Editing
Negation
Addition
Frame
Format
Organization
Effect
Transition
Length
Correction
Transfer
Spice
Weight
Posture
Position

Sail Forth!

"The blue color of the sky has been defeated by the Suprematist system, has been been broken through, and entered white, as the true real conception of infinity...Sail forth! The white, chasm, infinity is before us."

Malevich

The Blue "Tarp" Is A Service Tent

Red Napkin

Red Lantern

Roll

yellow sheet