Compositional counterbalancings and directional recalibrations have played significant transitional roles in the arc of Jeffrey Bishop’s career as an artist. I got a broad glimpse of all such consistency and flux when I visited him in his Fort Greene studio, where our conversation about his work led us also to converse about scientific minds, [READ ►]
Cathy Nan Quinlan’s current body of paintings—many of which will be shown at Outpost Gallery, in Bushwick, later this fall—are optically playful, chromatically ranging, formally harmonious and compositionally soaring odes to clouds, light, air, skies. They were a transportive treat to take in while she and I talked about hometown humidities, hurricanes, and debatable [READ ►]
One of the current artists in residence in John Silvis’s Williamsburg studio is Italian ‘interventionist’ Carlo Galli. I visited with him today, and we discussed the sociopolitical implications of ‘spiagge libere;’ the subconscious ‘delimitazioni’ of materials deployed to warn, prohibit or delimit; and the potential for surface features, especially those related to authority, to obscure unexpected [READ ►]
I had a great time with the ever-affable excavator of exit signs, Bob Seng, in his Williamsburg studio on a recent afternoon, at which time he showed me a couple walls brimming with more or less new pieces while we chatted about egresses, extremes, earthquakes and eventualities. We also talked about lettuce. And peaches. [READ ►]
Florals and reconfigurable puzzles proved to be excellent conduits for conversation and recompositional chromatics on a rainy day that might have otherwise been quite color-deficient when I visited Kay Sirikul Pattachote in her Greenpoint studio. There I saw loads of flowers in variable states of yet-colorful desiccation, which is the stage at which Kay prefers [READ ►]
Given Shawn Gallagher’s extensive holdings of supposedly obsolete apparatuses, and of course the many wonderfully imaginative images and sounds he produces using the same, his Bushwick studio is a world (or various worlds) unto itself (or themselves). His Castle Dracula project, for instance, on which he’s been working for quite a while, is a humorous, [READ ►]
A fortunate person indeed is one who has the chance to visit Tom Butter’s magnificent Bushwick studio—in which ‘magnificent’ pertains to size, constituent objects and resident artist alike. Tom’s brilliant kinetic sculptures and zestfully gestural paintings got us talking quite a lot about turbine motion, formal unquestionabilities, centripetal and centrifugal forces, compositional foci and simplicities, [READ ►]
Thanks to an extensively meandering conversation with Larry Greenberg at Studio 10, I wound up paying a most unexpected yet nonetheless extremely pleasant visit to Charles Yuen’s studio, located in the general environs of Carroll Gardens. Conversation there continued to meander in splendid ways once Yuen was in the mix, and it pertained now [READ ►]
There’s not a Borges story in which an artist who uses various forms of variably manipulable packing materials to create his works begins, over time, to amass enough works and works-in-progress in his studio that he finds himself veritably packed into their midst, as if he were a sort of fragile product whose safe [READ ►]
I got plenty of time and space to look good and hard at a fine selection of paintings when I visited Lizbeth Mitty in her Red Hook studio. Her current fluctuations in subject matter and surface treatments led us to talk about structures as nature abstracted; urban tumult as abstraction in action; and city life [READ ►]
