<![CDATA[My Site - Artist Interviews]]>

<![CDATA[My Site - Artist Interviews]]>Sun, 07 Jun 2026 04:08:44 -0700Weebly<![CDATA[The semi-finalist is: trude parkinson]]>Wed, 03 Jun 2026 07:00:00 GMThttps://www.thesemi-finalist.com/artist-interviews/the-semi-finalist-is-trude-parkinson

Constellated
2022, oxidized silver leaf, wax on Kitikata paper, 9” x 12”

Trude Parkinson doesn’t just take a long view of history. Hers is prolonged. Cosmic, even. Now in her 80’s, she has stopped measuring time in terms of decades and centuries. Even millennia are inadequate for the sense of history she intends to evoke in her recent work. Instead, her preferred timeline is built on light years, a measurement that allows her to consider what we were long before our planet formed and what we will eventually become. From Parkinson’s point of view, stardust is our collective ancestor as well as our shared destiny. For all of the differences and disputes taking place on earth, it’s oddly comforting to know that we at least all have that in common.

Influenced to varying degrees by literature, art from around the world, Buddhism, astronomy, and chemistry, Trude Parkinson has also become practiced at loosening her grip and allowing chance to be an ingredient in the making of her work. This never, of course, involves relinquishing complete control over a process. Her choice of media and her subjects are deeply considered and thoroughly researched, from Nihonga painting techniques to the early photographs of stars by Edwin Hubble. What intrigues me most about her process, however, is how she has learned to let go so that her images can hold more. Like raku firing or the ever-developing patina on a Richard Serra sculpture, Parkinson’s surfaces are the result of using materials and methods that cannot be comprehensively controlled. What she conjures with them is a fleeting sense of form taking up residence in images rich with chromatic intensity and an iridescent shimmer. In Winged House from 2020, oxidized silver leaf and mineral pigments are used to summon an otherworldly mix of recognizable shapes and the intangible. Barely There from 2016 uses a similar process on recycled kimono silk, a substrate that appears delicate but is in fact quite durable. It’s a fitting surface for an artist whose work embraces both fragility and rigour in order to portray a sense of our place in the universe.

I’m very happy to be able to share my interview with Trude Parkinson. We started our conversation almost two years ago, so it’s especially satisfying to now have it available here on The Semi-Finalist.

- David Schell, 2026

Portrait of the artist with work from Aural Frequencies, her recent exhibition at Nine Gallery in Portland, Oregon.

The Semi-Finalist: Can you talk a little bit about starting out as an English Major and how you wound up as a visual artist?

Trude Parkinson: My decision to become an English major grew out of a passion for reading acquired as a child. My transition into visual arts was the realization that my passion for the visual arts was even greater. I needed to be grounded in the tactile world of object making. I learned about the world from reading. I believe my hearing loss, inherited from both parents, made it more difficult than usual for me to understand spoken words and phrases, even as a child. Written words provided a visual translation.

The visual arts were also a major part of my life when I was young. Both my mother and my great aunt, Kate, on my mother’s side, were visual artists who supported my interest. My mother attended the Oakland College of Arts and Crafts as a teen-ager, drew beautifully, and was involved in the California faience pottery movement. I learned to draw from her. She was not directive, but appeared authentically amazed at whatever I came up with. Art supplies were always available, and we were encouraged to leave work out so we could return to it. She enrolled me in a watercolor class when I was four, and I still remember the visceral sense of joy at painting outdoors on large pieces of paper attached to an easel. From the beginning, I loved the materials. Later, when I was accepted to the University of California, Berkeley, my family couldn’t afford the tuition. My grandfather (my mother’s father) offered to pay my way - on the condition that I not become an art major. He wanted to support my education but wanted me to be more stable and self-sufficient than my mother and his sister. I sidestepped the issue by majoring in British and Irish literature where I could immerse myself in reading.

I became mesmerized by the fact that marks on a page could give access into the lives and thoughts of others, just as the accumulation of abstract marks in the visual arts could give rise to a recognizable image. I’ve always been intrigued by the question, “What came first, the image or the word?” Both gave me joy. The transition into becoming a visual artist occurred through an accumulation of significant experiences. Among them was a visit to a van Gogh exhibition at the de Young Museum in San Francisco while I was a teen-ager. I was transfixed by van Gogh’s reed pen drawings and the realization that I wasn’t just viewing marks that accumulated into a field, but was witness to remnants of human energy left by traces of a reed pen made by someone standing in a field trying to record the sense of being alive in that place in that moment. I began to draw with reed pens and sticks dipped in ink.

Offerings For Outer Space
1984, collage with found papers on plexiglas 60" x 42"

Continued:
Another was a close reading of Paul Klee’s painting, Fish Magic, for a term paper while I was a student at U.C. Berkeley. I chose the painting because I didn’t understand it. I analyzed the painting on my own terms. Through an inventory of formal elements, the painting revealed itself to me. In this way I began to understand painting as a visual language. Another close reading exposed me to a deeper understanding of the purpose of art. When literary critic, Mark Schorer (New Criticism), led us through the text of James Joyce’s The Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man, I identified with Stephen Daedalus (gender aside), and took to heart Joyce’s aesthetic theory the best I understood it at the time: the role of art is to create aesthetic arrest, letting the world fall away. According to Stephen, in a quest for beauty, the artist creates “…a living thing, new and soaring and beautiful, impalpable, imperishable…” Joyce’s ideas, articulated by Stephen, touched the core of a spiritual need in me, and I adopted the idea of art as a sacred undertaking.

So I graduated with a B.A. in English. It took awhile before I thought of myself as a visual artist. I married at 24 and my art life was interrupted. My first child, a son, was followed by two more children, fraternal twins - a boy and a girl. I needed to devote time to care for my new family, but I also realized that I needed to take care of myself, stay connected to the adult world, and feed my intellectual and creative interests. As I searched for something that gave me energy and strength, drawing and painting emerged as front runners.

Wedding Riddle
1986, mixed media collage, 40" x 30"

S-F: I’m also interested in the trajectory or your work, starting out figurative and ending up zen abstract.

TP: My interest in figure drawing began in childhood under the auspices of my mother and as a way to combat the turmoil in my large, chaotic family. In order to survive and to compensate for my hearing loss, I learned to read body language. Through the process of drawing people, I attempted to understand their interior lives.

My MFA Thesis show, though, was an installation of mixed-media collages sandwiched between panels of broken glass - a foray into abstraction around the theme of communication. The literal fragmentation of materials to create collages with torn papers reflected the world I was experiencing more directly than the painted illusion of fragmentation. With three small children, I also had only fragments of time, and I began to make small collages with torn, folded, and burned papers at a scale I could manage during the time available. In my mind, each collage signified a human being, although materially abstracted. Each had its own character. I began gathering the small collages into large format communities, generating themes around the human condition and communication. At the time, my inspiration came from following the trajectory of the Voyager Space Probe. I marveled at the gold plated recording of undecipherable images, sounds, and writings that was sent into outer space to be intercepted and interpreted by an unknown intelligence. Paper airplanes began to populate my collages and they began to take symbolic flight with titles related to the myth of Daedalus and Icarus.

Icarus
1987, mixed media collage, 40" x 60"

TP (continued):
Silver became more important in my work. Alchemically, silver’s reflective quality signifies the mirroring of consciousness in the transformation from a base metal into enlightenment. In many cultures, silver represents the moon and the female principle. My collages were attempting to make metaphorical trips into outer space. I purchased Japanese handmade papers covered with silver leaf, and I collected milagros. These religious folk charms are used for healing purposes and votive offerings in Mexico, Latin America, and on the Iberian Peninsula. They are also found on the island of Crete and in Greece, where they are known as Tamas. I’m intrigued by the beauty of their immediacy. I included them in my collages as symbolic protective devices. Later, the experience of living and working in Arizona and elsewhere, influenced my collages, drawings and paintings in both their abstract and figurative states. Sketches of ancient Ancenstral Puebloan pictographs and petroglyphs in Canyon de Chelly inspired my materials, if not my imagery, and kept me connected to figuration.

A Mexican milagro
Oxidized silver

TP (continued):
At the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford, England, I sketched sails detached from ships that hung unfurled from the ceiling. These abstract shapes inspired folded paper structures in my collages. A residency with Nancy Graves at the Santa Fe Art Institute resulted in a trip to Crete to visit the Minoan female terracotta figures on view at the Heraklion Museum. I spent days in the Heraklion, drawing these tiny figures where the hand that made them was visible in the pinched clay. These figures (approx. 2000–1100 BCE) found on Crete are religious and cultural artifacts, mostly female, that served as protective charms, much like milagros. Many of these votives, found in peak sanctuaries in and near open volcanic rifts, display expressive gestures of worship honoring nature deities. Eventually, my drawings from the Heraklion found their way into the figurative work that was to come.

Incantation (left)
2000, book with words, prints,
string, cobblestone, and watercolor made
from Oregon mineral pigments, 12” x 6” x 5”
and
Minoan Drawings (right), 1992

TP (continued):
Meanwhile, I was selected as a visiting artist to teach painting at Princeton in the Art Department. I lived in Manhattan, where I readily absorbed everything art related - every gallery, every museum - revitalizing my interest in painting. Then, in 1994, I moved to Portland. Imbued with the spirit of Crete, the Minoan terracottas, votives, and icons encountered there, I used this opportunity to return to figure painting. Psychologically, I was investigating questions related to my new life in Portland. In that context, I began a series of figurative paintings exploring aspects of my parentage and my German heritage. I painted from old family photographs, not knowing where I was headed. The paintings became double-sided, where both front and back were intended to be seen. On one side there was a painted semi-abstract image of a figure whose destiny I had changed. Onto the other side, I put a collage with photographs and words copied onto silver leaf paper. I wanted to question the relationship between the imagined and the factual, the power of images in relation to words. I thought of the human body with all its vitality, mutability, and scars, as a material composition of compounds bound to disperse yet infused with spirit and soul. I continued to explore materials and techniques that seemed to best express my view of our human condition.

Woman Painting (front)
1995, acrylic on panel, 10" x 10"
and
Woman painting (back)
1995, collage, copper, 10" x 10"

In the figurative bodies of work that followed, I wanted to convey meaning beyond the immediate and personal. I wanted the idea of a person, rather than a recognizable image. So I took photographs of family and friends shown from the back and painted their images into abstracted landscapes as though they were walking through the painting into an unknown destination. Eventually, the landscape disappeared and the figures remained. Then the figures disappeared and only their alter egos or their shadows were left. Finally, the entire painting became ground where a glimpse of silver is revealed behind the veil of paint suggesting a realm beyond the purely material, which could be considered “zen abstract.”

Green Man (front)
1995, double-sided painting, oil on panel, 10" x 10"

S-F: I’m fascinated by your desire to incorporate oxidation (or is the term photo-oxidation more accurate?) into your painting process. Can you describe what it is, how you first became interested in it, and how you made it your own?

TP: In simple chemical terms, oxidation is defined as the loss of electrons by a molecule, atom, or ion resulting in an increase in oxygen present. In my artwork, I am interested in the visual and metaphorical possibilities of the chemical process of oxidation on iron, copper, and primarily silver. These metals have inherent cultural meaning in themselves. The transformation that takes place as a result of oxidation changes the surface color, texture, and value, and therefore, their meaning. Alchemy made psychological and philosophical use of these transformations. I make metaphorical use of the concept of transformation. I first used found copper with an oxidized blue-green patina as frames for the double-sided paintings that I hung from the ceiling by copper wire. This heavy metal is a known conductor, so oxidized copper became a time-based metaphor that symbolically connected the earth-bound paintings to a higher realm. Then I began to experiment with oxidation on iron in a series of prints. The oxidation of iron takes place in contact with water and oxygen, accelerated by salt, resulting in rust or red iron oxide. I used this method to create rusted iron plates. Then I used stencils to create simple geometric shapes, and printed the rust layer over a flat layer of bole, a colored clay ground used under the application of silver or gold leaf. The rust provided fascinating variations in color and texture over the flatness of the bole. There is a saying that “rust never stops.” However, the oxidized layer was so thin, it has remained pristine. Since iron is essential in our bodies as transport for oxygen, and our bodies are in a constant state of oxidation, I printed 50 images for my fiftieth birthday in honor of the process that was taking place in my body.

My desire to explore the visual properties of oxidized silver leaf, however, came from a life-changing chance encounter with a NASA exhibition at the Huntington Library in Pasadena, California, featuring Edwin Hubble’s early silver halide photographs of the Andromeda Nebula. These silver images took my breath away. In Hubble’s revolutionary early photographs, taken through his personal telescope, pinpoints of oxidized silver remained where starlight had literally transformed the silver halide photographic surface, leaving little piles of oxidized silver dust. I was touched to the core by this vision of tangible starlight. Since then, I’ve tried to find a way of painting that suggest both our current sentience and our origins in vast star-lit timeless space. In my first experiments with the process of oxidizing silver leaf, I adhered Italian or German silver leaf to a surface of paper, silk, or recycled kimono fabric with a layer of water based size. Then, I painted with a liquid solution of liver of sulfur (sulfured potash) to trigger the chemical reaction that forms a thin layer of silver sulfide on the surface of the silver leaf, essentially tarnishing it to create a patina. I used liquid liver of sulfur like watercolor - painting with watercolor brushes, puddling and pooling, tipping, turning the surface, spattering, using occasional stencils, and any method of painting that might come close to resembling the idea of an earthly accretion of oxidized stardust. Due to light reflecting off both the top of the sulfide layer and the silver beneath, the tarnish layer can progress through a range of colors - yellowish gold, a reddish brown, purple, and blue to black. Color can be controlled by the amount of water added to the liver of sulfur. Further oxidation can be controlled with water. After the painting is dry, oxidation can be stopped by applying a thin layer of Renaissance Wax developed by the British Museum for that purpose.

One of Edwin Hubble’s early silver halide photographs of the Andromeda Nebula

TP (continued): For my subject matter, I took photographs of cast shadows. At first I used my shadow or those of friends, then shadows of Buddhist sculptures that I found on the walls of The Metropolitan Museum of Art during trips to New York. I also took photographs of Etruscan figures and their shadows in the Guarnacci Etruscan Museum in Volterra, Italy, including that of Shadow of the Night, a favorite of Giacometti’s. I took photographs of dancers, Linda K. Johnson and Eiko Otake, trying to capture shadows in motion. These images and the imagery from my drawings of Minoan terracottas done at the Heraklion Museum found their way into these paintings. A large oxidized silver leaf shadow painting on silk, created from the image of a Minoan figure, hangs loosely in my studio where it casts a shadow on the wall with the over-sized presence of a goddess.

Shadow of the Night
Approximately 300 BCE, copy of Etruscan sculpture in the
Guarnacci Etruscan Museum in Volterra, Italy

She Who Is
2018, oxidized silver leaf, Renaissance Wax on silk 80" x 24"

S-F: When I visited your studio you mentioned that you were currently working with some water based Japanese pigments. Talk about that.

TP: Through the process of oxidation, I found the materials and techniques that support the images and ideas that have haunted me since I first began painting and making art. But I was frustrated because sometimes I wanted to paint over the oxidized silver leaf but couldn’t. When paint was applied over the leaf, the water based size used to apply the silver lifted and dissolved the silver. Then I learned about a Japanese method of painting that uses an animal hide glue to adhere silver. These materials and methods allow paint to be successfully applied over the silver leaf, oxidized or not. I found and took a workshop, Nihonga: Then and Now, given by Judith Kruger, a multidisciplinary American artist known for her alchemic painting, prints and mixed media installations, who initiated the course at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. I fell in love with the natural pigments and glues and took her course several times. Unlike other methods I had tried, the Japanese methods and mediums solve the problem of painting over silver leaf. This style of painting, Nihonga (Japanese Painting), has been used since the Meiji period (1868-1912) and after WWII to distinguish traditional Japanese painting from western oil painting. It uses finely ground mineral pigments and/or sumi ink on paper or silk. The process can incorporate gold or silver leaf. The silver leaf is sometimes oxidized. There is now world-wide interest in Nihonga by Japanese and non-Japanese artists.

(TP continued): The method of painting is water-based, using paint made from natural minerals, shells, corals, and precious stones such as azurite, malachite, and cinnabar. These minerals and stones are ground in gradations from fine to coarse and mixed with a binder usually made from a deer hide glue solution. The same solution preserved with alum is used as a size to apply gold or silver leaf. A powder made from cured oyster or other bivalve shells is used as a white ground or translucent over-painting.

In my process, Japanese Komohada (cloud like) mashi (paper), made from a blend of hemp, kozo (mulberry), and ganpi fibers, is folded around a panel like origami and attached at the edges. The paper is prepared with layers of hide glue size over which silver leaf is applied and left as is, or oxidized. Another layer of size prepares the silver leaf for over-painting. Powdered pigments are mixed with a hide glue binder to form paint. Layers of color are applied one at a time over each other, allowing silver to show through accidentally or as desired. These multiple layers and washes can be used to great effect, depending on the coarseness or fineness of the powdered pigments. The surface dries hard as a rock and is archival. In addition to liver of sulfur, silver leaf can be ‘fumigated’ with powdered sulfur.

Eventually, I did a series of over 100 small paintings with both figurative and abstract imagery as experiments, to see what the possibilities were. I made a short video, Rocks Housed Churches, where images of paintings merge so the ghost of each image lingers in the presence of the one that follows. As each image appears and vanishes, one thing becomes another. Spoken word poetry in the video provides a counterpoint to the imagery. My intent was to provide perspective on the impermanence of things, all made of the same stuff - an accretion of stardust.

Above: Blue Buddha
2016, oxidized silver leaf on recycled kimono fabric, 10" x 10"

Below: Chrysalis
2020, oxidized silver leaf, mineral pigments, Sumi ink on paper on panel, 6" x 6"

S-F: I’m also interested in your obsession with the history of the universe, how we perceive light, and how humans fit into the bigger picture. Can you talk about how you started down this path and where it’s led you?

TP: I was raised in a family that was agnostic and did not go to church, but I was encouraged to explore ideas common to all world religions. When I did go to church with my Catholic cousins, I was transfixed by the ritual, the art, the music, all in Latin at the time - a complete mystery to me. I wanted to be a part of this mystery but was an outsider. I wondered about language and image. Besides the question of what came first, word or image, I wondered about thoughts, unspoken words, and what came before nothing? What was I before I was something? Basic questions about being human. I accepted that there was a mystery beyond anything I could know. My interest in the bigger picture, the history of the universe, stems from these questions, from an interest in the mythologies of origin stories, a curiosity about pre-language images, and images as language.

Along the way, I found that Buddhist philosophy resonated with me, although I’m not officially a Buddhist since I haven’t taken vows. In my paintings, I am still searching for a process and a visual counterpart to the concepts of impermanence and emptiness as I understand them—the idea that existence is transient and all phenomena are essentially empty, contingent on all else. I want my materials and images to reflect these ideas and act as a conduit between substance and immateriality, between earth and infinite space, between the representation of the body and its absence.

The materials I'm using - mineral pigments, sulfur, and silver - connect the microcosm to the macrocosm materially and symbolically. They are found throughout the cosmos and originate in the explosions of supernovae and the violent merging of neutron stars. The heavy metal, silver, has been found in the earth for as long as we know. It exhibits the highest reflectivity of any metal. It was considered by alchemists to be a noble metal. On earth, sulfur gets trapped in dust particles, but can also be found in conglomerate rocks in the crust and as boiling sulfur in the core of our planet. Sulfur is fire and brimstone. When lit on fire, it burns blue and is gaseous and poisonous. Alchemists believed that sulfur was the animating force in all matter and that varying the proportions of sulfur and mercury could transmute base metals into gold. Interestingly, silver and sulfur are often found together - veins of silver next to sulfur. Imagery based on the idea of shadow also acts as a conduit, a visual counterpart to the concepts of impermanence and emptiness. A shadow is impermanent, empty of substance, and transient. We perceive shadow in terms of light. The source of light, the sun, when blocked by a substance results in absence of light, forming a cast shadow, its clarity determined by the intensity of light and the density of the substance. The shape of the thing that blocks light becomes the shape that identifies the thing - not a reflection but a distortion, a bit like memory, which distorts the actual occurrence.

In his essay on my work for a catalog documenting the exhibition, Emanations, Peter Frank says: "Responding to the existential conundrum posed by the condition of the shadow – an entirely disembodied absence of light affirming the physical presence of a human being – Parkinson has considered the shadow from every epistemological vantage, intellectual, spiritual, aesthetic, symbolic - relying on and often motivated by a broad array of extraneous sources, from modern literature to traditions of religious art, to help define her comprehension of the image... These images play on our sense of fragility and mortality. They remind us that we, too, are made of stardust and precious metals, that water is as formidable as gold, and that some of who we are endures.”

Above: Barely There
2016, oxidized silver leaf, wax on recycled kimono silk, 10" x 10"

Below: Winged Home
2020, oxidized Japanese silver leaf, mineral pigments on paper on panel, 6" x 6"

S-F: Your recent work is a fascinating blend of letting go, chance, and a pretty sophisticated understanding of chemistry and physics. The question that keeps rolling around in my head is: “are there pieces that you make that simply don’t work? Do happenstance and science occasionally yield uninteresting results?” I think I’m trying to ask how you center yourself - or not - in your process.

TP: I work slowly, allowing time to seep into my images. I search for accidents as though they were signs, accepting imperfection and ambiguity. Yes, uninteresting results are always in the works, but that means the dialogue with materials is still in progress. Occasionally, pieces refuse to take part in the conversation, ask to be excused or let alone. How to represent something that can’t be represented is an ancient endeavor. In my process, the work is brought forth, nurtured, and, in spite of all efforts, escapes. In the attempt, there is progression, disaster after disaster, promising a glimpse of something vaguely called truth or perfection, or, perhaps, beauty. Destruction points the way. I try to catch what escapes. There are near misses. I approach again and make inquiries, attempting to portray the passing moment, to approach divinity, to pray with a brush until something breathes and comes alive in the image.

My inclinations align with the Northwest artists who sought to understand the sacred through Asian aesthetics and philosophy, who searched for consciousness through intuition. In the spirit of their efforts, I have attempted a manifesto to keep me grounded:

First, follow the commandment of mysticism, from the Greek word muein: “Shut the eyes and shut the mouth to let the mystery in.” Looking sideways is a start. So is silence. And listening.

Second, obey the capricious messages that arise in the body: Follow the body’s weather - volatile, turbulent, discontented. Make room for the rhythm of the beating heart, the quiet space between each beat, the joy in breathing, the reprieve in the interstices between catastrophes.

Third, absorb the language of materials: Those I prefer are ancient in origin, made of stardust manifest as mineral pigments, powders of colored earth along with silver leaf, glues, and brushes. I gravitate toward materials, techniques, and rituals that captivate my soul and challenge my contemporary sensibilities.

Above: Inaudible Frequency
2025, oxidized silver leaf, mineral pigments,
16" x 13"

Below: Available Frequency
2025, oxidized silver leaf, mineral pigments,
16" x 13"

S-F: Who are you looking at (living or dead)?

TP: The art that inspires me is often ancient and communal rather than contemporary and singular, anonymous rather than signed. I think of myself as a visual detective, exploring the physical world for artifacts and images—clues that speak to me about the workings of deep space and infinite time, about the mystery of our existence. I am indebted to the many philosophical and religious sources that inspire my artwork and contribute to my understanding of the world.

Books:
James Joyce, The Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man
Carl Sagan, etc., Murmurs of Earth
Roberto Calasso, Ardor
Karl Jung, Aion, Chapter II, The Shadow
Frances A. Yates, The Art of Memory

Anonymous:
Ancestral Puebloan pictographs and petroglyphs
Cultural artifacts, such as the sails in the Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford, England
Minoan Terracottas
Milagros and Damas
Icons, fronts and backs
Retablos
Ex-votos
Etruscan sculptures, Shadow of the Night
Buddhist sculptures
Shadows
Dancers
Meditative Tantric paintings
Close up views of Nihonga paintings
Images that turn up in dreams or in the act of painting

Artists (Named):
Robert Fludd for black
Fra Angelico for beauty and simplicity
Edwin Hubble for early silver halide photographs of the Andromeda Galaxy
Kazimir Malevich for spiritual integrity
Roberto Morandi for color and repetition
Mark Rothko for color and concept
Cy Twombly for permission
Sigmar Polke for painted chemistry
Gordon Park for semi-abstract figures
Etel Adnan for courage and honesty
Cora Cohen for materiality
Makato Fujimura for slow art and the metaphysical
Hiroshi Senju for pouring
Judith Kruger for mineral pigment experiments
Yoonhee Choi for folded collage drawings
V for energy, color, and use of space

Above: Dancing With Kintsugi
2020, oxidized silver leaf, mineral pigments, gold leaf on paper on panel, 6" x 6"

Below: Eiko Otake
2019, In rehearsal at the Portland Institute for Contemporary Art,
photographed with her permission

S-F: What’s Next for you (shows, residencies, projects, etc.)?

TP: In a recent exhibition at Nine Gallery, Aural Frequencies, prior to getting a cochlear implant, I chose to explore hearing through the silence of visual language. In my mind, an imprecise cloud of translation bridges the two. I built the installation around new paintings and older work related to hearing that had accumulated in my studio, adding the subtext of memory: Cast pigmented wax ear sculptures, small oxidized silver paintings from the exhibition, Plea, milagros of ears, a book with a burned opening and fragmented words, word collages, and more.

In new paintings, using oxidized silver leaf and mineral pigments, I want to suggest the possibility of visual conduits into another world as though a permeable skin of paint has the capacity to hear and listen, wise beyond our understanding. As I continue to make new work, I’m also downsizing and archiving, currently making books and boxes as archival objects and works of art containing small drawings and sketches that I come across. These books and boxes will become gifts and will contain instructions for their dispersal.

A project coming up, Between Times: Artists and Generation, facilitated by Carnation Contemporary Gallery, is designed to create opportunities for an intergenerational exchange between emerging artists with more established practitioners (focusing on artists under 30 and over 50). I was nominated by one of Carnation’s gallery members, and selected by the curator, Georgina Ruff. Georgina is a writer, art historian, and founder of MFA:NW, an organization that supports recently graduated MFAs and rural Northwest art ecologies. Georgina is curating a group exhibition at Carnation in June, 2026, and will choose from works already created. The show will be professionally documented, opening on Saturday June 6th and ending on the 28th, there will be an opportunity to participate in a panel discussion on one of the weekends in June. I’m delighted and grateful to be part of this project.

In December 2026, a show of my new work will be on exhibition at Nine Gallery, and I continue to be represented by Augen Gallery in Portland, Oregon.

After Hubble
2022, oxidized silver leaf, wax on paper, 9"x12"

You can see more of Trude Parkinson's work:

On her website: www.trudeparkinson.com/

At Augen Gallery

In the collection of the Portland Art Museum

On the Riverside Art Museum (CA) website. Parkinson's work was the subject of an exhibition in 2017

On Vimeo: vimeo.com/trudeparkinson (includes "Rocks Housed Churches" (2024); "Shadow Dance" (2017); "Ghosts" (2016); an episode of Oregon Art Beat, feature Parkinson and her work (2016); "Elusives" (2014).

Many of the photos in this interview have been generously supplied by the artist and were taken by Bill Bachhuber, Gene Faulkner, and Dan Kvitka. The studio shots at the end of the interview are mine.

Vestige
2016, oxidized silver leaf, wax on recycled kimono silk, 10" x 10"

Zodiac
2021, oxidized silver leaf, wax on 2 sheets of kitikata paper,
approximately 17" x 42"

Acccomplices: Memory and Metaphor
1995-6, mixed media, dimensions variable

Above and below: In the studio with Trude Parkinson, 2024

]]><![CDATA[the semi-finalists are: sue and al ravitz]]>Tue, 27 Jan 2026 08:00:00 GMThttps://www.thesemi-finalist.com/artist-interviews/the-semi-finalists-are-sue-and-al-ravitz

Textile work by Sue Ravitz; acrylic painting by Al Ravitz.

Tucked into an attic-like space with high ceilings and a picture window, Sue Ravitz’s studio can only be entered by a steep and narrow set of stairs that requires a bit of effort to climb. At the top of this ascent, however, the reward is the color, texture, and loose geometry that fills Sue’s work. And the work, in turn, fills the room. Sue’s textiles, already glowing and vibrant, sing in the natural light and cover just about every available surface. They have a formal rigor that embraces repetition and harmonious palettes, but inherent in her process is a wobbliness that lets her compositions shimmer. Even her most angular pieces hum and move. The stitching and patterning in her largely improvised designs play off of one another like pieces of glass or stone tile in a Byzantine mosaic as each small, thoughtful part coalesces into a large, formidable whole. The intricacy of each one makes me wonder how she ever has time to run 57W57ARTS, her New York gallery.
At times, Sue’s work playfully hints at a few of its domestic inspirations - blankets, hot pads, rugs - which are all things that do double duty as beautiful objects and hard working household items. When I was visiting there was a pile of finished squares in her studio that resembled trivets (see below), small crocheted martyrs ready and willing to protect the dining room table from scorching hot pans at dinner time. Upon closer inspection, they were segments of a large abstract grid waiting to be stitched together. This is just one of the things that I admire about Sue’s work - it doesn’t fit too neatly into any one genre and instead leans into its own quirky existence. Formal? Yes. Steeped in tradition and technique? Yes. Meticulous? You bet. But never is it dry and distant. Instead, its spirited beauty is almost begging to be simultaneously admired from afar and wrapped around the viewer while they sit in a comfortable chair. What finer way could there be to get to know it better?
Al’s paintings, made in a studio separated from the main house by a bit of patio and a patch of grass, head full steam in an entirely different direction. Acrylic on panel, they embrace a form of burgeoning, organic abstraction that is very nearly low-relief sculpture. At times his paintings resemble large chromatic tongues drooping over the top of his supports, at others they look like glowing volcanic terrain that has hardened in place with hues intact. Al treats both acrylic paint and color with a blend of scientific inquiry and a generous amount of irreverence. In his hands materials and elements are things to be stress tested and taken to extremes. How thick can the paint get? How much of it can be piled up around the support? What if the painting goes in the oven for a bit? And what is the most unlikely, aesthetically challenged and visually charged color combination that one can make? It’s in this searching that his voice as an artist emerges. The unconventional beauty of his work is never the destination, but an unforeseen byproduct of a process that privileges exploration, the unconscious, and the simple act of making something. It’s no accident that Al has been a highly regarded clinical psychiatrist in New York for over 30 years.

I’m thrilled to be able to share my interview with Sue and Al Ravitz below.

- David Schell, 2026

Sue and Al Ravitz in their respective studios.

The Semi-Finalist: Neither of you took traditional paths to becoming artists. Can you talk a little about how your creative lives got started?

Sue: I began with everyday crafts from the time I was a little kid, but I was never exposed to fine art, e.g. Anni Albers or Sheila Hicks. And I was raised in a family that couldn’t conceive of anyone going to school to study that sort of thing. So it wasn’t until Al and I began collecting that I had any exposure to the concept of “art,” especially textile art. On the other hand, I’ve always been sensitive to visual experience; I just didn’t know how to say that.

Al: A) I collected stuff – rocks, stamps, magazines, records – from early childhood. It gave me great pleasure to just “be” with my stuff. I was also into the way things looked. I can remember fighting with my mom about the clothes I wanted to wear as early as the second grade. As I got older, I kept collecting stuff. Then Sue and I began collecting “art.” Over time, our collecting became more focused. B) Over the last 10 years or so, I would doodle on the back of Rhodia notebooks I used to take clinical notes – there’s a piece of cardboard in front of the back cover. A few people – not patients – had a positive response to my doodles. I began painting at the beginning of the pandemic.

Above: One of Al's doodles in his studio.
Below: Sue's stitched text from Proust.

S-F: I’m amazed that neither of you start your work with a strict plan, and maybe not even much of a guideline. But you both seem to revel in the union of structure and improvisation. With that in mind, tell me a bit about how your work comes into being. More to the point: what is your process?

Sue: With my needle points I start out with a traditional pattern that I then try to alter in order to create a different visual result. My goal is to distort the pattern, utilizing variations of colors in a painterly way. I do the same with my chain stitches, which are influenced by the needle points , but they’re portable, so I can travel with them. As for planning, I can’t do it with pencil on paper, but I’m comfortable figuring it out with yarn, thread, and fabric. Sometimes I think I may work the way I do because of my lack of formal training.

Al: Sometimes I have an idea, but most of the time I can’t realize it, so I just keep painting until I like what’s there.

Above: Sue in her studio.
Below: a corner of Al's studio.

S-F: Al, this is a follow-up to question #2: I’m fascinated by the relationship between the interior and the exterior of your paintings. It’s almost like you’re making low relief sculptures. How did this exaggerated sense of form come about?

Al: I've never seen my paintings that way, but now that you've mentioned it, yes, definitely concerned with physical volume. It’s not surprising that I love Alfred Jensen paintings.

For at least the last 30 years, I’ve been interested in monochrome painting, and in that type of work, surface is a key component. There’s a huge difference between a red Marcia Hafif and a red Joseph Marioni. When I began painting, the first few were designs on a flat surface. For some reason, I decided to mix paint with modeling paste – probably to make the color flatter – and gradually surface, volume, and underpainting became more important.

A drooping form that is a recurring motif in Al's work.

S-F: can you each talk about your relationship to technique and tradition in your work? What does it mean to embrace an existing method or, conversely, reject “best practices” altogether?

Sue and Al: Neither of us – again, possibly due to a lack of formal training – consciously considers responses to technique and tradition; and neither of us is sufficiently aware of “best practices” to either embrace or reject them.

Above: Sue
Below: Al

S-F: Sue, this is a follow-up to Question #4: You have such a deep and genuine feel for repetition and geometry in your textiles. Was it always there for you, or did it develop over time?

Sue: Now that you've brought up geometry: yes, definitely, I've always been interested in geometry. Again, I didn't have a word for it. What's happened over the years is that I've utilized pattern to underlie a practice that's experimental in nature – that’s focused on evoking some type of sensory, non-verbal experience.

Four works by Sue Ravitz on her studio wall.

S-F: You both have a strong relationship to color - talk about that.

Sue and Al: We just became more comfortable with color over time – especially looking at ugly combinations. It’s been liberating.

Above: Two of Al's paintings in his studio.
Below: Two of Sue's completed textiles.

S-F: One question that came up when I was visiting your home and studios was “what does it mean to make an artwork?”

Sue and Al: Sue works all the time; she thinks it would be sinful to not be productive. Al likes to turn off the left side of his brain. Painting helps with that.

Left: Sue's trivet-like tiles.
Right: A work by Al.

S-F: In addition to the gallery space, you are both surrounded by work that you have collected over the last few decades. Can you both share a few thoughts on what it means to live with a personally curated collection in your home? Does it influence you? Are there other side effects - psychological or physical - of being around so much work?

Sue and Al: Years ago, we looked at a Corona chair by Poul Volther at a store in LA. The salesman approached us. When we said we were interested in the chair, he said, “Sensitive people deserve beautiful things.” Of course it was a sales pitch, but it resonated. That’s been our philosophy ever since. Collecting is sort of a sickness for us. When we began, we had monthly gallery payments – art on the walls but not much furniture.
Living with a bunch of stuff evokes certain cognitive and affective experiences for us. That’s good.

S-F: Who are you looking at (alive or dead)?

Sue and Al: Way too many to name! Al subscribes to a newsletter that informs him whenever one of the 400 artists he follows – the list periodically changes – has work at auction or in a show. He’s found several amazing deals that way. Sue looks at art every day for 57W57arts. She ends up curating 40 or 50 little shows each year. That takes a lot of looking at art.

A finished piece by Sue.

S-F: What’s next (shows, interviews, residencies, etc.)?

Sue and Al: We actually have another Sue and Al show coming up in NYC at 201@105 on April 30th.

Left: a corner of Sue's studio.
Right: a nook in Al's studio.

You can see more work by Sue and Al Ravitz...

- on Sue's instagram account: www.instagram.com/sueravitztextiles/?hl=en

- Al does not use instagram, but #alravitz will bring up a fair number of images.

- on Sue's website: www.sueravitz.com/portraiture

- in an interview with John Mendelsohn on Art Spiel

- you can see more of 57W57ARTS on instagram: https://www.instagram.com/57w57arts/

More Sue and Al:

Sue's studio.

Al in his studio.

Sue in her studio.

]]><![CDATA[the semi-finalist is: Katherine Bradford]]>Mon, 08 Dec 2025 08:00:00 GMThttps://www.thesemi-finalist.com/artist-interviews/the-semi-finalist-is-katherine-bradford

The Gifting Bowl
2025, acrylic on canvas, 60 × 72 inches (152.40 × 182.88 cm)

The faces are largely eyeless, noseless, and mouthless. Hair and clothing are at most suggestions. But all of this makes sense in a world where fingers don’t bother with fingernails and shoes are too busy for laces. Even the proverbial man in the moon is somewhere off-stage in Katherine Bradford’s paintings, leaving her spare satellites to do what moons do best in an inky dark sky: glow and illuminate.
I’ve long admired Bradford’s ability to suggest a complete universe with nothing but paired down shapes and electric colors. It’s a form of figuration where less is more and the viewer gets to fill in the blanks with a participatory imagination. Like illustrations in the children’s books I was most drawn to as a child (Anything by Eric Carle or Harold and the Purple Crayon by Crockett Johnson), her dreamy figures are conjured up with a sense of reserve. Heads, hands, feet and planets all orbit one another, tethered not so much by gravity, but by color, shape, and a shared simplicity. As beautiful and playful as they are, however, Bradford’s paintings also have a heft that sets them apart. This comes in part from her ability to build eccentric compositions on an architectural scale. Stacked and welded with untamed brushstrokes and declarative lines, her images teeter on the brink - the sweet spot for so many painters - but never collapse. Bradford also smartly avoids painting with rote technical skill. She instead presents an emotional reality that - like real feelings - is full of irregular proportions, surreal connections, disorienting fragments, and unexpected chromatic pairings. The colors, layers, splatters, and glops all coalesce to describe an inner world thematically unfolding on canvas after canvas, improvised stories dedicated to both ordinary moments and life’s most opaque mysteries. Expertly crafted out of a personal and idiosyncratic visual language, Bradford’s paintings are homemade meals in a world hawking protein bars; they are pages from a poet’s diary in a bookstore full of instruction manuals.

I’m so happy to be able to share my interview with Katherine Bradford as well as images from recent visits to her studio and her show at Canada Gallery in New York.

-David Schell (December, 2025)

Katherine Bradford in her studio.

The Semi-Finalist: I know that your biography is well known at this point, but can you talk a little bit about how you got started as an artist?

Katherine Bradford: When I was living in Maine in the 70's I met an unwieldy bunch of passionate artists. I watched in awe as they dedicated their lives, their time and their talent to focus on making art. This was a revelation to me and I saw for the first time what an "artist's life" consisted of. I hadn't been to art school or tried to make much art, but I wanted the kind of intensity and independence that I saw that they had in their lives. Many of them were poets and when there was a poetry reading the visual artists were asked to hang up a sample of their recent work. That was my first foray into displaying something I made. My first solo show was held at the local Pizza place in the year 1978. I was hooked.

Paintings in the artist's studio.

S-F: When I visited your studio, Matisse in Morocco by Jeff Koehler was on your coffee table. Can you describe your relationship to Matisse or any other colorists that come to mind?

KB: I learned from this book (published this year) that Matisse left Paris to spend the winter in Morocco. It was early on in his career and he wanted to get away from the dominant style in Paris at that time (Cubism) and do paintings with the light and color of a distant Mediterranean country. Looking at these early paintings by Matisse I see a lot of experimentation. He simplified his people into shapes and stuck color on them wherever he liked. In his famous "Moroccan Cafe" painting of 1913, he showed a group of men with no facial features, just beautifully placed oval heads grouped together. Early on he painted very freely, letting mistakes show and letting one color bleed into another. I was hooked.

While Father Sleeps
2025, acrylic on canvas, 72 × 120 inches (182.88 × 304.80 cm)

S-F: Bold color and a sense of fragility live side by side in your work like the best of friends. Discuss.

KB: I don't believe color to be color unless it is bold. And I don't believe people to be people unless they show some fragility. The early portraits of the rich and powerful don't interest me much. I like to see the complexity of human emotions and the body language of struggle and a long life. My swimmers are not sexy and buff. They are universal bodies intent on forging ahead however they might be encumbered.

Detail of While Father Sleeps

Left: Tricolor Sun2025, acrylic on canvas, 40 × 30 inches (101.60 × 76.20 cm)

Right: Low Shining Sun2025, acrylic on canvas, 40 × 30 inches (101.60 × 76.20 cm)

(in Communal Table at Canada Gallery, 2025)

S-F: I’m drawn to the way you have themes that you return to in your work again and again, as well as new ones emerging all the time. Talk about your approach to developing a motif through iteration.

KB: One way of showing a group of people is to line them up, side by side like vertical stripes. Another way is to gather them in a circle around a table or a camp fire. And my most popular way is to gather them all together in a pool of paint, blue paint that looks and feels like water. During my quest to do swimmers I made some of them diving in the water or more freely, diving through the air. Perhaps by mistake I made some of them too colorful - they began to look more like superheroes than bathers. That was a fun idea to explore because i got tired of people who stood upright at the bottom of a painting and i realized that any combination of color looked like a superhero and the flyer could take a place anywhere in the rectangle of the painting.

Above and below: a bather (Diver Under Moon, 2025) at Canada Gallery and a superhero in the studio.

S-F: Communal Table, your painting up at Canada Gallery this month, is a monumental ode to the simple act of gathering together. Can you talk about how this idea developed?

KB: I painted this painting over an earlier very colorful one of standing figures. I deliberately chose to have the people take up space up and down the sides and along the top. Having them all sit at a table and be all different colors was an idea I'd been interested in before. After I finished the painting I realized that the gallery where I was showing, Canada in Tribeca, New York, had a big communal table where all the staff worked side by side instead of in separate cubicles. So the idea of a table with people seated around it took on a much larger and more universal meaning to me. I had been searching for a title for the whole show and this idea of community together appealed to me especially since we've had to listen to the daily news which has been having a divisive effect on the whole country.

Above: Communal Table
2025, acrylic on canvas, 72 × 68 inches (182.88 × 172.72 cm)

Below: Detail of Communal Table

S-F: Who are you looking at (alive or dead)?

KB: I'm looking at my most alive friends (you know who you are) and my most wonderful spirit guides like Marsden Hartley, Philip Guston, Matisse, Milton Avery, Susan Rothenberg and Mark Rothko.

From the often returned to theme of Women Leaving
(in the studio)

S-F: What’s next (shows, residencies, etc.)?

KB: I'm planning a solo show in Seoul, Korea at Gallery Hyundai and a show in Berlin during their gallery week and I'll be in a group show at Broadway Gallery on the theme of Night Swimming.

Small paintings in the studio.

You can see more of Katherine Bradford's work:
- on her instagram account: @kathebradford
- at Canada Gallery in New York
- at Adams and Ollman in Portland, OR
- all over the internet, just type in her name.

More Katherine Bradford:

The artist in her studio.

Above and below: Bathers.

Above and below: more studio.

Paintings in Communal Table at Canada Gallery, 2025.

On a table in the studio.

Near Katherine Bradford's studio in Brooklyn, NY.

]]><![CDATA[the semi-finalist is: Leslie Roberts]]>Tue, 21 Oct 2025 07:00:00 GMThttps://www.thesemi-finalist.com/artist-interviews/the-semi-finalist-is-leslie-roberts

GERANIUM
2022, acrylic, ink, pencil on panel
approximately 16" x 12"

Intimately scaled at about the size of a paperback, the paintings of Leslie Roberts almost rhyme with texts on parchment from miles away and centuries ago (Ireland and England in the 600’s or 700’s, Persia in the 1600’s). Roberts, however, avoids overtly or romantically alluding to the past. Instead, her works on panel (and sometimes paper) are like a fun-house mirror reflecting the rhythm and cadence of an illuminated manuscript, all without being tied to the particularities of a specific visual history. The reference point becomes incidental and the contortion is the feature.
Through an assiduous process that starts with observing the world around her and moves on to creating and following a flexible set of directions, Roberts’ compositions emerge with structural solidity. Her continuous hinting at a literary format is more sail than anchor as she explores and maps an endless sea of words, phrases, numbers, and personal interests. I’m partial to the way her use of text and the grid merges into a playful contradiction: abstractions that suggest precise meaning without requiring me to have a precise understanding of them. In the same way that I don’t need to know Latin to appreciate The Book of Kells, I am drawn to Roberts’ paintings without fully grasping her highly customized use of lists and organizational systems. They reference language and deny decoding. They are conceptually suggestive and uncoupled from a clear visual narrative. They are also beautiful without being decorative. And as a result of all this, her paintings feel tucked into a visual universe where words don’t quite cut it and the eyes are left to parse the meaning of a triangle, a line, a letter or a color. What I see and infer tells enough of the story, and ultimately I find myself enjoying something that is glowing, shimmering, coalescing. Leslie Roberts’ small compositions are considerable reminders that we are all - in our own ways - filters of experience and inventors of form.
I am very happy to be able to share my interview with Leslie Roberts below. In it she describes her formative years, her interest in systems and processes, as well as some thoughts on language and color.

-David Schell (October, 2025)

Leslie Roberts in her Brooklyn, NY studio.

The Semi-Finalist: Tell me about your formative years. When I was in your studio, you mentioned Paris, figurative teachers, never taking a color theory class, feeling disconnected from the contemporary/postmodern art scene. But feel free to talk about whatever.

Leslie Roberts: In high school I lived near the Barnes Foundation outside Philadelphia. My high school art teacher knew Violette de Mazia, who taught the Barnes art theory course, and his best students were able to take that course, taught in front of the actual paintings. I no longer recall much of what Miss De Mazia said, but a lot of those paintings are burned into my visual cortex. The Barnes was where I fell in love with Matisse, and with painting that’s about color. I also loved Cézanne and Seurat.
I went to college at Yale, where most of my art teachers were focused on work from observation. I think undergraduates got the teachers that the MFA program did not need. They were persuasive, though, and I was intently painting still lifes and figures. I don’t ever recall being asked or encouraged to make anything abstract (though it was allowed). That now seems odd.
I worked to push color past the literal. But I felt as if I had no idea how Matisse transmuted perceived color and form into his own parallel. I knew I was missing something. A summer at the New York Studio School was partly helpful, and partly a confirmation that there were art secrets I wasn’t in on.

BEFORE LEAVING
2024, acrylic, ink, pencil on panel
approximately 12" x 9"

After graduating, I spent most of a year in Paris on a Yale fellowship for independent work abroad. Then I moved to New York City, where I have lived ever since. My first job in the city was writing definitions for an ESL dictionary. Now that seems very apropos - writing lists upon lists.
I have always loved words. I’ve been reading nonstop since the age of three. I went to Yale rather than art school because I wanted to study literature and history as well as art. I supported myself for several years as a freelance editor, before I started to teach. I didn’t expect to find myself using language in my paintings, however.
After a few years in Brooklyn I entered the MFA program at Queens College, CUNY. I immediately gravitated toward abstraction. Charles Cajori taught there and helped me understand Cubism and Matisse. I still love both, and still think Cubism is wonderful and playful, with still a lot in it for contemporary artists to make use of. As they very occasionally do.
Anyway, Cajori helped me grasp how one could make non-literal work from observation. partly Involving shifting points of view. Finally having that insight was so freeing. For some time, my viewing of contemporary art felt more dutiful than exciting. Then one day at the Whitney, during grad school, I came upon a piece comprised of two large, shaped, seemingly abstract canvases. After a moment I realized they depicted a broken cup spilling coffee in cartoony drops and suddenly I loved it. The title made me laugh: Yikes. It’s the kind of informal idiom my paintings document now. I could also say the painting depicts the composed disorder of life, as I now do. It has such a sense of humor. (Also, it is essentially giant Cubism.) Elizabeth Murray became an idol and was a rare role model. In the 1980s, there were few women artists having major careers and virtually none who, like Murray, had children. There were even fewer women art professors.

A corner of the studio.

My MFA show contained Murray-inflected paintings of bloopy organic forms. Queens awarded me a scholarship to Skowhegan, where I worked with Judy Pfaff and Bill Jensen. Post-MFA, I lived in Greenpoint, NY, and painted sinuous vertical shapes in oil on linen. I now think some of those are strong, but I never showed many.
I began teaching at Pratt Institute in 1986. (I became full time in 1996, and taught there until retiring in 2021.) I mainly taught an intensive year-long color-focused course called Foundation Light Color and Design. For some of us teachers it was a passionate color cult into which we indoctrinated students. That immersion in color certainly affected my work.
Another thing that affected my work: in 1995 I found a pile of blank jigsaw puzzles in a stationery shop. The shapes of the interlocking pieces recalled the undulant forms in my paintings. Their modular structure allowed me to devise numerous visual games. I felt I should get back to my “real” work but kept painting puzzles. When visitors to my studio were interested in the puzzle paintings, I realized I could continue. I created disrupted compositions by exchanging painted pieces between pairs of puzzles, and by randomly altering pieces before assembling. With oversized puzzle pieces, I made colorful freeform installations spreading across expanses of up to 20 feet. Joe Amrhein, who lived nearby, was just founding Pierogi Gallery, and he was very supportive of the puzzle work, including it in numerous group shows. I presented puzzle based work in my first NYC solo exhibition at PPOW’s project space, then in Soho, in December 1996.

An early puzzle piece in the artist's home; a sketchbook.

S-F: You mentioned that in 1999 you started playing with rules and systems as a game or diversion while riding the subway. Can you talk about how that developed into the work you are doing now?

LR: In the late 1990s I was making small paintings and large installations out of jigsaw puzzles. Meanwhile, to entertain myself on the subway, I began small studies with colored pencils on graph paper, in my pocket-sized datebook (it has long since been replaced by my cell phone.) For these Filofax-like binders, graph papers were available in an irresistible range of colors and formats, and I acquired many. I soon felt a need to escape my habits of composing color. I invented visual games, just as I had with puzzles. I first explored rules involving randomness and numbers. Finally I devised systems for charting informal writing, like to-do lists, into numbered and lettered grids. I liked the resulting algorithmic forms, which combined pattern and asymmetry. I initially saw the graph-paper studies as diversions, not serious work. They were on gridded paper and often contained squares, rectangles, and triangles: geometry. In graduate school I had absorbed the notion that geometric art was “mere formalism." The dismissive assumption let me work unselfconsciously.
As I mentioned, I was then teaching Light Color and Design at Pratt. It was partly because I was so intensely focused on helping students see color, that I needed a break from formal visual decisions in my own studio. I was looking for some surprise.

I MEANT TO SAY SOMETHING ELSE
2021, acrylic, pencil, ink on panel, 16" x 12"

In 2001 I was blown away by an Alfred Jensen show at DIA Chelsea. Earlier I had seen but barely noticed Jensen’s paintings. Now I responded instantly. They are enormous, and my graph paper works were minuscule, but I felt a kinship with their diagrammatic structures, which often contained language and numbers, but are much more visual than informative. I know Jensen alluded to and used systems and content from the Maya, the ancient Chinese, and other sources. But I don’t know how to decode them, and I don’t need to. It was around the time of that show that I began shifting my attention away from puzzles and toward this new gridded work full of words and color.
By the way, people often ask artists about influences, but sometimes affinities are more relevant. My work didn’t originate based on Jensen’s. Instead, it was after I was working in a related direction that I was able to see the power and beauty of his work.
For years I worked mainly on graph paper. Around 2013 I felt desperate to paint again. I needed a way to translate graph-paper drawings into painting. I started working on thin, 3/8-inch gessoed panels. As objects they are much like slates or tablets. They’re like sheets of paper made solid. I grid surfaces with pencil lines, using a T square. I format the panels like pages, with columns of text, blocks of color, and margins. This was the beginning of my current work.

On the studio wall.

The drawings sometimes contained strings of free-associated sentences that were essentially journal entries, not meant to be seen by anyone else. The paintings I make now rarely contain anything like a journal entry, or other prose writing, by me. They contain lists of found language: lists of street names, of email subject lines, of sentences from labels and packaging, of signs seen during a subway trip . . .
Some of the writing in the works on paper had been very personal and intimate. But I had not planned to show them to anyone. I did not want to put those confessional personal narratives into paintings. I started focusing on found language. I vaguely believed that by writing down words from around me, rather than writing my own thoughts, my paintings would be less self-revealing. And maybe the paintings are less intimate: but I’ve realized that, no matter who originally wrote the language I use, if it is chosen by me, it is personal.

TMI
2016, acrylic, ink, graphite on gessoed panel, 14" x 11"

SF: In your studio, I was struck by how systems influence the way you paint, but they by no means dictate how you paint. Can you talk about how you balance structure and spontaneity in your process?

LR: In the paintings, each entry on a given list is charted into a grid as a particular color and kind of mark.
So, it is not that the letter A is always represented by red throughout a painting, for instance. The letters in one street name might be represented by a red vertical mark. The next street name might be entered as a blue diagonal mark. And so on. It’s actually a pretty straightforward system. However, I am always deciding what the next color will be. There’s no system for that.
I sometimes am grouped with artists who are doing a kind of data viz (Mark Lombardi for instance). But my work does not exactly record data, nor am I interested in doing that. Yes, sometimes a painting more or less documents a subway ride or a walk. But what I’m writing down is language, and I’m not necessarily writing down facts or doing research. Sometimes I am taking a lot of pleasure from the non-sequiturs that result from making a certain type of list. And nothing concrete can be learned from the painted areas of my paintings. The paint structures aren't decodable, even though my system, my “key” so to speak, is laid out right in the painting.
I'm interested in discovering the formal structures that can be derived through rules and games (much in the spirit of OuLiPo writers like Perec and Queneau.) I also use my rule-based system as a way to filter my decisions, to get some distance from my habits of composing color. However, I spend a lot of time looking at paintings in progress, and I spend a lot of time deciding what color to use next, and what kind of mark. Those are completely intuitive decisions that I figure out as I make the painting. So my paintings are made systematically, yet they involve a lot of improvisation, and a lot of trust in my eye and my gut.

WE USED TO SHARE SECRETS
2021, acrylic, ink, pencil on panel
approximately 16" x 12"

SF: Color and negative space play such interconnected roles in your work. Tell me about how that relationship developed.

LR: This is an interesting question but I don’t even know how to answer it. Color and negative space are such fundamental qualities in painting that I don’t see how they could be anything but interconnected.
About the negative space--I didn't exactly "decide" to leave parts of the panel unpainted: the work evolved that way because the paintings are adaptations of work that began on paper and that had, just as manuscripts do, columns and margins. (So, you're exactly right that it corresponds to the space around written content on paper and parchment. ) Each work essentially has a "page layout."
Even aside from written pages: it has always seemed "normal" to me, on paper, in a drawing, not to feel any compulsion to cover the entire page with color or marks. But when I was making "regular" abstract paintings in the early 90s, on canvas, I don't think I ever left any part of the canvas unpainted, or even let any area be pure white paint. In those works, pure white seemed like a visual hole. So I often think how odd it is to be making paintings that have such extensive white areas. I do see the "empty" parts of the panel as integrated, optically and conceptually, with the rest.
Conceptually, I would say that they indicate the fact that these works are simultaneously textual and visual. Visually, I guess it leads me to be sensitive to, and search for, integration of the white with the marks and the color.

"I do see the 'empty' parts of the panel as integrated, optically and conceptually, with the rest."
- Leslie Roberts

Above:
IF YOU’RE READING THIS
2022, acrylic, ink, pencil on panel, approximately 16" x 12"

Below:
FORGIVE TYPOS
2016, acrylic, graphite, colored pencil on gessoed panel, 12" x 9"

SF: You’ve recently been to at least two artist residencies (Maison Dora Maar in Ménerbes, France, and Yaddo in Saratoga Springs, NY). Has this had an impact on your work other than increased production? How do you see yourself responding to a certain amount of self-imposed isolation and your ability to develop ideas in the absence of familiar distractions?

LR: During the last few years I have been to quite a few artist residencies. Not teaching since 2021 makes this easier. (Sending out a lot of applications, without being discouraged by rejections, also helps.)
Sometimes I’m amazed that residencies exist. They are such generous gifts. This body of work owes a lot to those retreats. I think I make, not twice as much work as at home, but five times as much. They allow not just more work but more reflection. And it is almost shocking how liberating it is not to have to shop, prepare meals, or even buy toilet paper. Your mind is free.
Residencies usually have beautifully sunlit studios, and I can see my work with more clarity in than in New York. My work is not large but it’s optically intense.

SOME BIRDS THAT ARE LARGELY BLUE
2023, acrylic, pencil, ink on paper mounted on panel, 12" x 9"

While solitude is easily available at residencies, and I typically spend long hours working alone, they also provide companionship, often with wonderful people. Isolation, for me, is more likely to happen at home. I know many people in NY, but it takes planning to see them. At residencies, contact with other humans is almost always built into the schedule. It is extremely welcome to end, or break up, a work day with conversation over dinner.
In the city, most of the people I know are artists, People in other disciplines, at residencies, have expanded my thinking. I was at a residency in Virginia when I made the first paintings on panels, moving from drawing to painting. I had shown the work to very few people. I realized I was extremely anxious about using language in my paintings. I take pleasure in collecting and assembling language. Lists are inherently poetic forms. But I’m not writing poems. I was afraid the language might appear to be amateur poetry. When writers responded strongly to the written content, it was a huge relief. I felt validated.
I’ve met writers who also love making lists, or who love using rules in writing. Sometimes they’ve lent me an idea or a sentence. Or have just helped me think in a new way.
I met a performance artist who made scripts out of found language, and they resonated so much with what I was doing. I loved her work and she was a wonderful visitor to the studio.

CHILDREN PLAYING
2022, acrylic, ink, pencil on panel
approximately 12" x 9"

SF: Can you talk about your thoughts on the relevance of abstraction in the era that we’re living through?

LR: Well, I can argue that my paintings aren’t abstract by some definitions, since they contain content and are constructed diagrammatically. But I agree that they can be seen as abstraction. The paint can look like code or glyphs, but the painted parts cannot be decoded or translated back. For all kinds of reasons. The marks in my paintings aren’t symbols or language. The marks are themselves.
The presence of content is important to me in this work. But as much as for what the painting does—how it charts the various elements of its making—as for what words or meaning it contains.
I have thought that the content in my painting is analogous to the content in a lot of still life: the specifics of both reflect their time and place, usually without overtly signaling a message.
While I’m constructing the painted areas, the visual outcome is more important than the words I am mapping. And the painted areas are neither an information graphic, nor an illustration of what’s written.
However, I and other humans are good at finding relationships between form and content when they’re side by side. So a painting documenting a subway trip can start to look like a map. A painting that names bird species can seem to present a bilateral outspread structure like that of a bird, or might seem to resemble sound diagrams, or might even seem to look like a bunch of birds on a wire. In no cases did I start out with those intentions, but all have come to seem like possible valid readings of the work.

CRIMSON RUBY SCARLET
2022, acrylic, ink, pencil on panel
approximately 16" x 12"

Continued...
Back to your question, which relates specifically to the present. At some of the fraught moments we have lived through in the past decade, I have certainly felt, at least briefly, how can I not address this time in my work? Occasionally I have found slightly oblique ways to refer to politics or world events: once, for instance, by compiling a list of protest-focused email subject lines.
In fact, many paintings with rosters of headlines or of excerpts from email contain a residue of current events.
However, I don’t feel any lack, any need for content, when I look at other artists’ “purely” abstract work, if it’s good or great. I think in bad times we are sustained in part by art and literature that is not about the bad stuff. Thank god Joan Mitchell and Matisse didn’t make political posters.
I sometimes feel dubious about awards and residencies that call for work that is going to make a difference to the world, by which they mean politically/socially engaged. Artists need to be politically and socially engaged in their lives, like other citizens, but their work is not likely to be what changes government or society. Even the most brilliant political art is virtually always preaching to the choir.
Some artists are by nature political artists and it is what they need to do. Other artists are not. I believe people make the best work by making their own work. I think some young artists feel pressured to make their work “relevant” and should feel free to make the work that’s their own.

AI ET AL
2025, acrylic, ink, pencil on panel
approximately 16" x 12"

SF: Who are you looking at (living or dead)?

LR: Just a few: Alfred Jensen, Persian miniature painting, Anni Albers, James Siena, various quilts, Tom Nozkowski, Dan Walsh, Cosmatesque tile floors when I’m able to get to Italy, vintage game boards . . . screenshots of screen glitches on my previous computer before it died.

Leslie Roberts in her studio.

SF: What’s next for you?

LR: In September: a solo show at 57W57 Arts, and a two-person show at Left Field Gallery—I am really looking forward to showing there with you! In January, I'll install work that refers to nature, listing names of birds and flowers, at Studio Light Space in Tucson,
And a book of the small daily list drawings I made on datebook pages during the summer of the pandemic. I’m working with CoMa Art Books, run by two wonderful artist/designers based in Amsterdam whom I have known a long time. Last year they published a book of eight of my paintings, titled I Will Console You with Language.

Somewhere near the artist's studio.

You can see more of Leslie Robert's work...
- on her website: https://leslierobertsart.com/section/281957.html
- on her instagram account: @lesliejaneroberts
- at 57W57ARTS in NYC
- at Left Field Gallery in Los Osos, CA

Leslie Roberts makes paintings driven by color, language, and self-devised rules. She has exhibited in the US and abroad, at galleries including Minus Space, Marlborough Gallery, 57W57Arts, Markel Fine Arts, and the Brooklyn Museum in NYC; the Weatherspoon Art Museum (Greensboro, NC); and the Hafnarborg Museum (Iceland.) She received grants from the Pollock-Krasner and Gottlieb Foundations in 2024. Residencies include Yaddo, Dora Maar House, Ucross, Ragdale, Willapa Bay AIR, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and Skowhegan. Roberts holds a BA from Yale and an MFA from Queens College. She is Professor Emerita at Pratt Institute. She lives and works in Brooklyn.

]]><![CDATA[the semi-finalist is: Ellen George]]>Wed, 11 Jun 2025 03:33:40 GMThttps://www.thesemi-finalist.com/artist-interviews/the-semi-finalist-is-ellen-george

Moonbeam
2023, gouache, egg tempera, casein, silverpoint and gold metalpoint on birch panel,
18 1/2" x 14 1/4"
(photo by Mario Gallucci)

Using some of the thinnest panels of Baltic birch available, Ellen George has developed a body of work that both floats on the wall and carves out space for slow looking. Each piece is graphically inviting from a distance - soft, organic forms in pale yellow, punchy red, unnameable blue, and barely altered raw wood. From across the room, they can at times appear delicate, with even the most chromatically intense pieces looking obscured by a soft haze; but more often than not, their simple shapes and reduced palettes offer more definition than uncertainty. Up close, however, the emphasis shifts and the atmosphere within the work is revealed. Embellished with paint and silver-point, each is a miniature world that highlights Ellen George’s sensitivity and confidence in the pursuit of understated abstraction - restrained arcs, fine lines, modest washes and the occasional brushstroke, all in the eye of a brewing storm that is rarely bigger than the artist’s own hand. At this intimate distance, it is apparent that she is as concerned with chance as much as intention, chaos as much as order. Nothing is certain and nothing is entirely unleashed. Even the defiant warping of her panels is tempered and graceful, as if to remind us that even as the universe exerts a will of its own, the artist has drawn on a well of experience to guide her materials and give her forms stability. In the painting Love Song (Summer), from 2023 (see below), silverpoint lines echo the overall panel shape in an attempt to define space within. Or perhaps it’s the other way around - it is just as easy to imagine the barely legible interior contours willing the larger shape into being and opening up a space beyond. Either way, George’s pale yellow is the perfect, glowing backdrop to this small drama.

I’m so glad to be able to present more small dramas as well as my interview with Ellen George here on The Semi-Finalist.

- David Schell, 2025

The artist at Nine Gallery in Portland, OR, for the opening of her recent installation, "The Heart Catches the Hand"

The Semi-Finalist: Let’s start off with a question that I like to ask every artist that I interview - what were your formative years like as an artist?

Ellen George: I am fascinated by the unknowably large and infinitesimally tiny. It all starts from growing up in an environment, on an island, from where every day I could see out over the waves to the horizon. This expansive view was alongside visions of tiny aquatic life, teeming in drops of Gulf water we collected and viewed under the microscope in my parent’s laboratory. The scale-shift, motility, clustering and translucency of these microscopic animals and plants inform my work to this day. I am fortunate that art, dance and playing music were important in my family. And somehow, still a young teenager, I became connected to a community of artists living in the lofts of 19th century buildings there on Galveston Island (Texas). I identified very early with all these various ways to live life.

Above: Love Song (Orange)
2023, casein, silverpoint, and gold metalpoint on birch panel, 12 1/2" x 10 3/4"

Below: Love Song (Summer)
2023, casein, silverpoint, and gold metalpoint on birch panel, 12 1/4" x 10 3/4"
(both photos by Mario Gallucci)

S-F: You mentioned having an evolution early in your career from being a realist to focusing on reductive forms of abstraction. How and why did that transformation take place?

EG: Beginning college at age 17, in the 1970s, I was making all kinds of things - artist books, installations, wall hanging assemblages using found materials, and paintings. The painting I did was figurative. Here’s an old Swinger Polaroid Camera photo of me sitting in front of my 6 x 8 foot portrait of Yo Tii, my tiny dog.

Ellen George in front of an early work from the 1970's.

EG continued: I continued working in all of these ways into the 80s and 90s. I was making beaded velvet works, knitted garment sculpture, sending lots of mail art (still do) and always painting. I had a lot of energy and I was restless. At around twenty years in, a couple of developments had my attention:

1. Using found materials began to weigh heavily on me… I would have this perfect wooden spoon, or the perfect tin box. And I would feel some immobilization at the thought of ruining the object in working it into a piece.

Tinker Toy painting circa 1995.

2. My young child was growing away from a very strong attachment to beloved and sibling-like stuffed toys. I had the idea that I could paint these objects and small toys as realistically as possible as a way to preserve them. The resulting paintings were a specific project that went on several years…the little floating bear, the tinker toys… Painting objects realistically - with as much detail as I could - nurtured my ability and my love for working very slowly, observing carefully and closely. Eventually, the desire to paint objects this way diminished. That desire was overcome by the feeling of my own forms and marks emerging from within me. The attention, the listening, that I had applied to objects outside of my body was becoming focused on an internal attention, internal listening. I turned to the practice of bringing these forms, by way of internal listening, to visual conveyance.

Work from "The Heart Catches the Hand," George's recent installation at Nine Gallery.
(photo by Mario Gallucci)

S-F: So many elements of your work have an airy, almost fragile, sensibility to them - your use of silverpoint to make the most delicate lines, the thin sheets of baltic birch (1/32” !) used for your panels, your often spare use of color. Can you talk about this light touch and what it means to you?

EG: It may be that the delicacy, light touch and scale of my work is associated to a sense of vibrant calm and quiet that I cultivate inside myself. Janie Beebe (of PDX CONTEMPORARY) long ago asked me if I’d always been in my own private world. The answer then and still is yes. As a youngster I had a lot of freedom to roam. I was always outside riding my bike down to the beach or saltwater flats, building hidden forts and fanciful habitats under shrubs in remote corners of the yard. I still enjoy a fair amount of solitude and silence. I mostly work in silence, no music…well, it seems quiet, and thoughts can easily drift in and out, but really I’m listening to what’s going on inside. I like tapping deeply into this inner sound, making micro adjustments in paint and line until I hear/feel a soft ping, signaling that work can be paused.

Push Boat Along The Current
2025, casein and silverpoint on birch panel, 5" x 2"
(photo by Mario Gallucci)

There is a certain durability to the delicate materials that I use in painting. The permanence of metalpoint and woodburned marks. Paper-thin wood panels that are very strong - they are triple-ply panels. The casein or milk-paint that I use so much now is especially durable after a period of curing time. And I love the scent of it. I often gravitate to a palette that can be saturated, sun-drenched or sun-bleached and chalky. Maybe that’s from the sunny, low latitudes of my childhood. Sometimes I incorporate soft color cast onto the wall from the backs of my paintings. This glow expands their domain a little. I have an affinity for things that can be held in the hand - mementos like buttons, rocks and shells. I like working at this size. Diminutive scale can offer the feeling of timelessness. I feel like this whole way of working supports articulating an open expansiveness within the intimate scale of my work.

Above: Heart
2024, watercolor on paper, 4 5/8" x 6 1/8"

Below: Three pieces on birch panel from "The Heart Catches the Hand"
(photos by Mario Gallucci)

S-F: Cloud Hands came up in our discussion about the homemade forms that you paint on. Talk about that.

EG: By homemade forms, I think you mean the contour or outline of the panels, right? The curved panels…

It's not the only influence on my approach, but Tai Chi is an important one. It comes naturally to want to capture something of the spirit found in the coalescence of my Tai Chi and studio practices. Patient internal listening supports and is necessary to both. In the studio, shapes, gestures, and lines derive from this exploration. Drawing plays a significant part in the process. I go for loops, arcs – something buoyant and expanding. Each line is an axis, a bit of geometry that paint can flow up to and around. The idea of the axis as a still point to jump off from, mentally and in manipulating materials, has long been central in all my studio pursuits. When we visited here, every element for the upcoming installation that I later titled "The Heart Catches The Hand," was on my walls. It had all come to feel like everything - the emotions, the considerations - that goes into all of my work was present in these pieces. And I was thinking a lot about Cloud Hands.

…Cloud Hands. . .

I’ve practiced Tai Chi in many ways, many forms, for a good while now. And I will always be a beginner - through the years, a happy beginner. Learning and development is gradual. Most of my practicing is solitary. I also have group practices, where I move in unison with other people in a collective silence. Either way, the practice is calm and quietly electrifying. In Tai Chi I find increasing mental and physical focus and sensitivity. The movements are circular, spiral. The concept of the axis is foundational, essential. I understand it as a place (but not the spine) of focus, a connection through the torso from feet to hands that I listen for in generating movement. The Cloud Hands movement is very soft and round. When I isolate Cloud Hands from the thirty-minute sequence I practice, Cloud Hands is continuous, unending, energy moving up and down, left and right at the same time. I love spending lots of time in this repeating movement. There is a spiraling rotation through the body axis, directing the movement of the hands. The heart catches the hand. I find my way in the world paying close attention to these sensory experiences. And I let myself follow the brush, making paintings that express the intuitive workings of my mind. Painting is how I live my day-to-day. Tai Chi is how I begin.

Cloud Hands from George's recent installation at Nine Gallery.
(photos by Mario Gallucci)

SF: Your titles are often spare, poetic, and elusive. What do you want them to reveal about your work?

EG: Sometimes titles commemorate or indicate a group of work. I don’t mean them to be riddles. Mostly they are a slight extension of the piece, something extra, maybe something I see in the piece after it’s finished. Generally I like to leave plenty of breathing room so that being with the work gives rise to surprising associations and elastic meaning in the viewer’s imagination.

Works in the installation "The Heart Catches the Hand" at Nine Gallery.
(photos by Mario Gallucci)

S-F: Who are you looking at (living or dead)?

EG: This year and many visits through the decades to the Rothko Chapel, the Cy Twombly Gallery at the Menil Collection, Dia Beacon. Laurie Anderson - since forever. Her performance at the Keller/Portland last year… her exhibition at The Hirschhorn a couple years before that. The tiny Giacometti sculptures at MOMA last year. Storm Tharp’s recent exhibit at PDX CONTEMPORARY and the new exhibit from Peter Gallo at Adams and Ollman, both breathtaking. Over and over Agnes Pelton, Agnes Martin, James Turrell, James Lee Byers... and Lee Ufan, Wolfgang Laib, Myoko Ito, Pina Bausch, Fred Sandback, Jack Whitten, Ilse D’Hollander, Tomma Abts...

AXIS (SPD-16)
2018, silverpoint and gouache on panel, 3 1/2" x 2”
(photo by Mario Gallucci)

S-F: What’s next for you (shows, residencies, etc.)?

EG: When we began this interview process, I was closely anticipating "The Heart Catches the Hand," my installation at Nine Gallery in Portland, Oregon. The Semi-Finalist was the very first to see the final plans before installing. I thank you for that important studio visit, the response, and for this interview! Continuing into this autumn I have a suite of paintings at the Museum of Northwest Art (LaConner, Washington) in the exhibit "Through the Light: The Sublime in Contemporary Northwest Art" with Drie Chapek, Weston Lambert, Camas Logue, Adam Sorensen, KCJ Szwedzinski. The show is curated by Chloe Dye Sherpe. My next solo exhibition at PDX CONTEMPORARY ART (Portland, Oregon) is in late spring, 2026. I’m also excited to have work included during the summer/autumn of 2026 in a Pacific Northwest museum exhibition. Details will be announced by the institution before long.

Works in progress on the walls of Ellen George's studio.

You can see more of Ellen George's work:

On her website

On the PDX CONTEMPORARY website

On instagram: @ellen.ellengeorge

More Ellen George:

Ellen George in her studio in Vancouver, Washington.

Aqueous/Dance
2024, Watercolor on paper, 4 5/8" x 6 1/8”
(photo by Mario Gallucci)

Above and below: three installation views of "The Heart Catches the Hand" at Nine Gallery
(photo by Mario Gallucci)

Above and below: more scenes from the studio.

Near Ellen George's studio in Vancouver, Washington.

]]><![CDATA[the semi-finalist is: nick wilkinson]]>Fri, 02 May 2025 07:00:00 GMThttps://www.thesemi-finalist.com/artist-interviews/the-semi-finalist-is-nick-wilkinson

Untitled
2025, found wood, found trellis remnant, found metal, flashe
14” x 24” x 1.5”
(photo by Elliott Johnson)

Nick Wilkinson’s studio is in a warehouse adjacent to a storage site for Grow, the native plant nursery that he owns and runs in Los Osos, California. Rather than being formally isolated from his inventory, however, his art space flows seamlessly into his day-job work space. Walking through the nursery, we passed several drought tolerant specimens that Wilkinson quickly identified with both their latin and common names, a blending of the formal and the casual that I have come to see as defining elements of his artistic temperament.
Nick Wilkinson is making work that is both non-narrative and in conversation with the space around it. But first, a quick aside: Last November, I had a chance to see Siena: The Rise of Painting, 1300-1350 at The Met in NY. It’s a show that is certainly about painting, but also the blending of skills and materials, surfaces and sensibilities. It is as much about pushing pigment around as it is the complex supports that don’t just present individual saints or scenes, but are part and parcel of them. What struck me about so much of the work in that show was the sense of scale. Nothing was all that big by today’s standards, and yet the altarpieces and portraits felt enormous. The colors, forms, woodwork, and gold all came together to suggest immensity, an awareness felt more deeply because its opposite, intimacy, was also on full display (*see images at end of interview).
Wilkinson’s constructions work in a similar way - minus the overt storytelling - with forms that present as bigger and more grand than the actual square footage of any given piece. Using the opening and closing of wooden lattices and other ready-made supports (see Untitled, 2025), they activate the space around them as they extend their presence. Weathered, humble surfaces allude to a utilitarian past lived under the California sun, while geometric arrangements and buoyant color ground the artist’s restrained visual poetry in the here and now (Untitled, 2025 and Untitled (Web I), 2023). Working outside of singular categories that might otherwise constrain his work, Wilkinson’s fusion of painting, sculpture, and the ready-made tradition show him to be an artist deeply connected to both the history of art and the impulse to simply create.

I'm so happy to be able to share the work of Los Osos, CA based artist Nick Wilkinson in this iteration of The Semi-Finalist. Open, warm, and gracious, he talks about his formative years and about how his studio and process have merged with his daily life.
- David Schell, 2025

The artist in his studio.

The Semi-Finalist: To start things off, can you talk a bit about your formative years and how your life as an artist began to take shape?

Nick Wilkinson: I was born in El Centro, California, a small farming community 2 hours east of San Diego and along the Mexican Border. I don't remember it being a place where the arts were celebrated much, so it wasn't until I moved to Bend, Oregon, my junior year of high school that I began making work. After high school, I moved to San Diego and ended up at San Diego State where I got my degree in painting and printmaking despite really doing a ton of sculpture during my final two years with great mentors like Richard Keely and Walter Cotton. Richard was the sculptor that first opened my eyes to the use of found objects through his work, and as a collector of many different things I was instantly hooked. As I moved out of college and finally to the San Luis Obispo area where I still live, I didn't first find the gallery structure that was open to my installation based work. Without a big studio I focused on growing plants and running my specialty plant nursery, and I built it out like a sculpture while looking at the project as an extension of my practice. It wasn't until a few years ago that I came back to this way of making work and I have really been enjoying it.

Untitled (Detail)
2025, found wood with concrete, found metal, flashe, colored pencil
35” x 1.5” x 5.5”
(photo by Elliott Johnson)

and

Untitled
2024, trellis remnant, flashe, 35” x 7” x 1.5”
(photo by Elliott Johnson)

S-F: A significant part of your aesthetic is tied to a form of alchemy or aesthetic upcycling. How did you land on the “trash to treasure” model for making your work? And do you see it being connected to Arte Povera?

NW: It's funny because until very recently I hadn't really thought about the supports that I weave into this work as trash, but more objects with a history. Unlike Art Povera, my practice steers away from any political meaning and is for me simply a mode of working that is tied to my sensibility as a crazy collector of all types of things.

Recent works in the studio.
(photo by Elliott Johnson)

S-F: Do you want your supports to reference the life they had before you found them? I think I’m trying to ask if you want the viewer to “read” your assemblages in any sort of narrative way, or are you more interested in creating a visual/non-verbal experience?

NW: Not really. I never set out to make something look like something else nor imply a narrative. If that is picked up by the viewer, that is all unintentional. I see the supports I'm using (primarily old wood and other construction materials) as pieces of abstract puzzles I have to figure out. The supports bump around the studio, get painted, drawn on and collaged together until one day I think they're done. So much of the way things land is also based on chance and me to try to find parts from around the studio that key into each other, or more specifically, when connected just sing in a sharper tune. It's a lot of pinning things together, living with them, pulling them apart, trying again - and when everything is right, the final construction happens.

In the studio:
"So much of the way things land is also based on chance and me to try to find parts from around the studio that key into each other, or more specifically, when connected just sing in a sharper tune." - Wilkinson

S-F: In your studio I remember thinking about how time is a really unconventional ingredient in your work. There’s the span of months, years, or decades that your supports had in the world before you ever came across them. And then there’s the studio time, where they seem to transform slowly, picking up new scratches and dings, getting disassembled and reassembled, layered or splotched with paint. Can you talk about time in relation to what you are trying to accomplish?

NW: Time, surface, and quite often the history that the objects carry were one of the first things that drew me to begin using them in the work. When I find pieces that I deem good candidates for the studio, I believe that it is my duty to be immediately suspicious of them and their worth. When you grab as many objects as I do you need to be sure things have a certain value/weight on their own and that they are compelling enough to be drug around the studio, sometimes for years, before they key into the right puzzle.

Above and below:
Untitled (Web IV)
2023, found trellis, found wood, flashe, colored pencil
28.25” x 28.25” x 4”
(photos by Elliott Johnson)

S-F: Can you talk about how structure, improvisation, rhythm, and space all play roles in your work?

NW: I have always felt very comfortable working improvisationally both professionally and in my art practice. As mentioned above, when I'm working in the studio I definitely feel like so much of the construction of these objects relies on moments of chance. Sitting down and plotting and planning is not what drives me .

Untitled
2024, found trellis, found wood, flashe, colored pencil, wire, plastic tape, hardware
96” x 67” x 3.5”

S-F: You are in a relatively small town that is far from traditional art hubs, and yet you’ve built a career and championed a community of artists. Can you talk about the pros and cons of living in Los Osos and doing what you’re doing without a lot of art world infrastructure?

NW: Living in Los Osos has provided a great life. It's a great community of people and my entire life, home, studio, gallery are all very close. I feel so lucky to be able to do what I'm doing here but it is far away from the larger art scenes and because of that studio visits are not as frequent as I'd like. When I first moved here (before smart phones and instagram) it was a pretty isolating moment for me, especially making the work I was making and finding myself in a community of artists and galleries that were rooted in a more traditional mode. When we started Left Field and began to bring shows to this community, the goal was to bring the art I wanted to see and bring other art communities HERE. After 10 years of that, I really think we have achieved that goal and continue to bring work to this area we wouldn't otherwise see here in San Luis Obispo county.

Above: the studio.

Below:
Untitled
2025, found wood, found hula hoop, found wire, flashe, colored pencil
52” x 39” x 3”
(photo by Elliott Johnson)

S-F: Who are you currently looking at (living or dead)?

NW: The beginning of an incomplete list of artists I admire includes some favorites like - Marlon Mullen, Lauren Satlowski, Ida Ekblad, David Hammons, Genvieve Figgis, Ryan Preciado, Sister Corita Kent, Marisol, Joe Bradley, Strauss Bourque-LaFrance, Robert Colescott, Matt Conors, Sean Sullivan, Daniel Giordano, Patricia Treib, Robert Gober, Martin Wong, Kristy Luck, Kawaii Kanjiro. AND with Left Field, the gallery I run, I am so lucky to have new artists entering my life and community every month as well as artists that come back to show multiple times. SO many, really too many to list, excite and inspire me so I'll save that list for another day.

S-F: What’s next for you?

NW: I'm currently in a big group show at Rockford University curated by Ari Norris and called Homage to the Square which runs through the end of February. I am also in a 4 person show that opens mid February at Santa Barbara City College Called Deep Color alongside the work of Jackie Rines, Vanessa Chow and Lauren Goldberg Longoria which I am also very excited for.

You can see more of Nick Wilkinson's work:
- on his website: www.nwilkinson.com/
- on his Instagram account: @_nickwilkinson_
- in maake magazine

Even more Wilkinson:

Untitled (Tower)
2024, found wood, flashe, screws
48.5” x 11” x 7.75”
(photo by Elliott Johnson)

Works in progress.
(photo by Elliott Johnson)

(photos by Elliott Johnson)

Drawings, sketches, etc. in the studio.

Wilkinson is the owner and director of Left Field Gallery, Los Osos, CA.

A peek of Wilkinson's inventory for Grow, his nursery. He also runs a drought tolerant landscape design firm called Botanica Nova.

Near Wilkinson's studio in Los Osos, CA.

*From Siena: The Rise of Painting, 1300 - 1350

]]><![CDATA[the semi-finalist is: mel Prest]]>Sat, 05 Apr 2025 07:00:00 GMThttps://www.thesemi-finalist.com/artist-interviews/the-semi-finalist-is-mel-prest

Arrow Wing
2025, acrylic on wood panel, 48" x 48" x 2"
(photo by John Janca)

Writing about San Francisco based artist Mel Prest’s work during the early days of spring feels right. Of course I would love to contemplate her work at any time of year, but late March and early April in the Pacific Northwest where I live mirrors and rhymes with the hum and buzz of her paintings like no other season. To be clear, I don’t believe that Prest is trying to imitate anything - her color choices are decidedly less natural and more acrylic forward than what I see on my morning walks, and her hand drawn linear geometry is layered in a way that dispels any associations with spiderwebs. Instead, she accomplishes something else entirely with canvases revealing the same understated confidence as new growth at its most subtle and promising. Echoing our cyclical experience of the natural world, they hint at the infinite and the perpetual. At times they are whitecaps on the ocean seen from the window of an airplane. At others, the shifting light of fog. A sheet of ice. A dense hedge within an arm’s length and a distant haze. Spring’s assurance and autumn’s last gasp. They are the late summer evening chorus of the outdoors - insects and amphibians singing in unison, a hypnotic pulse that fills up the night.
Mel Prest’s paintings are all of those things, and none of them, because ultimately her canvases are for looking at. What you see and how your body experiences them is the point. A work like Rain Diamond (2023) celebrates the simple act of seeing and the personal experience that goes along with it. Nature can’t be overlooked as an inspiration for her painting (she even says as much in the wonderfully succinct artist statement on her website), but it wouldn’t be wrong to suggest that the direct link between the eyes and the brain takes precedence over allusion, narrative, and allegory. Standing right in front of a Prest painting, one can see how the artist’s temperament leans towards flat and practical. Panache is avoided and the artist’s touch is reduced to the simple addition of unruled, hand painted layers. It's almost a magic trick, then, when her paintings transition from a network of rational clarity up close to a shimmering thrum from a distance, all through the use of her thoughtful, direct, and restrained paint application.

I'm thrilled to be able to share the work of San Francisco based artist Mel Prest in this iteration of The Semi-Finalist. A warm and inviting person, Prest graciously let me visit her studio in January of 2025 and opened up about her life and artwork. Below is the resulting interview that has been stitched together over the last couple of months.

Mel Prest in her studio.
(photo by Andrew Kleindolph)

The Semi-Finalist: Hi, Mel. Thanks for letting me into your studio and agreeing to continue the conversation via email. To start things off, can you talk a bit about your formative years and how your life as an artist began to take shape?

Mel Prest: I was lucky to go to a private school in Minneapolis for 12 years that had a good upper school art program. By ninth grade I had a little area in the art room as my studio, and I was able to intern with an artist who worked with paper sculpture in downtown Minneapolis. I had an art teacher who taught an aesthetics class, had us read Walter Benjamin, and write essays on seeing and whether art exists without the artist. I took some weekend painting classes at the Minneapolis Institute of Art and I often went to the Walker Art Center, where I had so much amazing art at my fingertips. I spent a lot of time alone, either in the woods, reading, or painting in my bedroom. There was a great deal of conformity at my school that I couldn't relate to, so I got a crewcut and hung out with Minneapolis punks and arty people. I got into RISD for undergrad and was so happy to find some people! And they were all great at artmaking and I had to work hard to keep up. I’d never done life drawing and it was hard to be such a beginner! But I loved having 3 and 6 hour classes and staying up all night going nuts making stuff with friends from exotic places like NYC and DC and LA. I never went without a place to paint after age 18. At 20 I dropped out of school for 6 months to live with some decade-older NY painters in Mexico and painted or modeled every day. Then I realized isolation wasn’t great and returned to school to complete my degree on time. Lived in Boston, Providence, and then Philadelphia, where I joined Vox Populi, a non-profit co-op gallery that’s still in business. I was the youngest member at the time and learned a lot from folks who had been to grad school, were showing in NY, had gallery representation, etc. I feel so lucky to have stumbled into so many great situations or learning experiences and being some combination of naive and fearless.

Rain Diamond
2023, acrylic and mica on wood panel,
48" x 48" x 2"
(photo by John Janca)

continued...
I moved to SF in 1995 and, while waitressing, volunteered at the Jewish Museum, Capp Street Project, New Langton Arts, The Luggage Store. I thought I wanted to do non-profit arts administration and learned I definitely didn’t! I went to grad school at Mills College 1997-1999, where I studied with some great people, like Hung Liu, Ron Nagle, Catherine Wagner, Gail Wight, and Ann Chamberlain. We had visiting artists, like Kerry James Marshall whose one visit taught me so much, and we had great cross-pollination with music, dance, and English departments, which created great possibilities for collaboration and overall immersion in art. After graduating I was a studio assistant for Hung Liu (1 year) and Ron Nagle (5 years).

A corner of the studio.

S-F: One thing we briefly discussed in your studio was how your focus shifted at some point from representation to abstraction (in my notes I have Lawrence Weschler’s book on Robert Irwin as having an early influence on you, am I remembering that correctly?). How did the change in your approach to materials and a desire for a different outcome transpire?

MP: I went to RISD in the late 80's and big, expressive, figurative painting was IT! Georg Baselitz, Lucien Freud, Francesco Clemente, Nicholas Africano, Frank Auerbach, Cezanne, and Soutine were my heroes. I worked with a heavy oil brush. I was into dramatic painting, and so much about depicting trauma and family.
During grad school the figure walked out of my painting and I moved into large, gestural abstraction with big brushstrokes hiding layers of writing and numbers. Then I picked up Seeing is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees by Lawrence Weschler about the artist Robert Irwin, and everything changed. I’d seen a work by Robert Irwin at the Walker Art Center as a teenager and I’d loved it. I could appreciate how he talked about his innate ability to draw and how it was something he had to overcome to find what he was after in his work. I realized the emptiness of me making these big late 80s/ 90s inspired oil paintings forever while using someone else’s language/ brushstrokes. I needed to discover who I was and what I was looking for in my own work. In this process, I found I was looking for COLOR. Moving into this I’ve eliminated the brushstroke and put away figure/ ground, and perspective.

Thunder Fuchsia
2025, acrylic on wood panel, 60" x 60" x 2"
(photo by John Janca)

S-F: Describe the materials you use and the process that you’ve developed for making your paintings.

MP: In 2012 I was lucky to be awarded a residency at the Sam & Adele Golden Foundation, who make the most beautiful Golden acrylics. I’d been working with oil paints since I was a teenager and finding acrylics helped me move my work in a new direction. The biggest hurdle in painting is getting the paint to do what you want it to, and now, using acrylics and mediums, I feel more conscious of the qualities of my painting- what is soft, matte, transparent, etc. One of my co-residents at Golden mentioned that unlike oil paints, acrylic paint was constantly evolving and new mediums were being made.

Above and below: studio views.

S-F: You’ve written and talked about your work being inspired by nature, the senses, and the passage of time. Can you talk a bit about how you see these concepts reflected in your very non-objective (or abstract) paintings?

MP: Being in the outdoors, I’m immersed in non-verbal, non-linear sensation. Today I went for a walk in my San Francisco neighborhood and the Victorian Box trees had suddenly begun blooming, radiating their thrilling scents. Watching the sky fill with fog, feeling the coming rain. Sudden dazzling blue. A few miles away at my studio I’m in the bright sun. All this drama! We live in a magical, ever changing world. Nature is timeless, creative, it exists regardless of the cultural moment. For example, when I’m at LACMA and looking at the La Brea tar pits- I’m literally looking at a hole in time. The tar pits exist in the same moment that I do, and the museum, and the art, and the traffic. This everything simultaneously blows my mind.

Rain Field
2025, acrylic on wood panel 28" x 22"x 2"
(photo by John Janca)

Oaxaca
2025, acrylic on wood panel, 28" x 22" x 2"
(photo by John Janca)

S-F: We live in a world that is hyper-polarized, politically charged, and altered by changes in technology on an almost daily basis. How do you see your work fitting into this moment in time?

MP: My work doesn’t fit into this cultural moment. I hope that we are all making the work we need to make. Like many artists I despair the cruelty of the current political situation and I take action to resist and support resistance outside of my work.

Lilac Orchid
2024, acrylic on wood panel 48" x 48" x 2"
(photo by John Janca)

S-F: I keep thinking about how your work is visual to the point of existing without the need for words to tell us anything we're not already seeing. Can you talk about how you navigate language when you talk about or write about your work?

MP: Thank you so much for this question! It feels really challenging to talk about the work with words so I talk about the making and the conditions around making (inspired by scent/ sound/ color/ feeling/ places) more easily. Painting comes from the process, intuition, observing with fresh eyes, and improvisation, and my hope is that the work transmits a feeling of some sort. I want to provide entry into the painting somehow and, since I love to read and to listen to stories/ books, I steal the poetic phrases for my titles.

Installation view of "Looks Like a Flavor," Prest's 2024 show
at K. Imperial Fine Art in San Francisco.
(photo by John Janca)

S-F: Who are you currently looking at (living or dead)?

MP: 99% of my friends are artists and I feel lucky to live in a place with so many possibilities to see art in person. I cannot name all the contemporary artists I love- all I can say is that I'm grateful to live at this time and to feel deeply moved by things that people make.
Ok, a small list: Robert Irwin: phenomenon/ pure experience; Agnes Martin: Zen, “imperfection”; Bridget Riley/ Monet: observation of nature, shifting light; Josef Albers and Sol LeWitt: setting the rules and then conducting experiments; Stanley Whitney: color, composition, presence; Judith Scott: to expose the process, the hand, the eye while concealing/ wrapping something inside the work.

From "Looks Like a Flavor" at K. Imperial Fine Art
7 Time Ball Works
2024, watercolor and mica on Fabriano paper, each 12.4" x 9.5"
(photo by John Janca)

S-F: What's next?

MP: I'm getting ready for my fourth solo show, COLOR CHORDS, with the amazing Dallas gallery, Galleri Urbane. I've been working with them for years and I'm super excited for this show. The show opens May 10. My work will be included in The Abstract Now, a group show this summer at studio e gallery in Seattle, co-curated by Dawna Holloway and Scott Malbaurn, with a catalogue and essay by Barry Schwabsky. I just had my second solo show with K. Imperial Fine Art at the end of 2024, and she is taking my work to the Ferrari Art Week fair in Scottsdale. I'm hoping to apply for some short residencies, too.

Below: Two from the series Time Knots on a String
2024, watercolor on paper, 39.30" x 22.5"
(photos by John Janca)

You can see more of Mel Prest's work:
On her website: www.melprest.com/
On instagram: mel_prest_k
On the K. Imperial Fine Art website: kimperialfineart.com/
On the Galleri Urbane website: www.galleriurbane.com/

More Prest:

Sky Ladder
2024, acrylic on (28) 5" x 5" x 2" panels
96" x 12" x 2" overall
(photo by John Janca)

The studio

Iris Wing
2025, acrylic on wood panel, 48" x 48" x 2"
(photo by John Janca)

Berlin Bell
2025, acrylic on wood panel, 12" x 12" x 2"
(photo by John Janca)

Recent work.

From the studio.

Near the studio.

]]><![CDATA[the semi-finalist is: karen schifano]]>Mon, 03 Feb 2025 08:00:00 GMThttps://www.thesemi-finalist.com/artist-interviews/the-semi-finalist-is-karen-schifano

A Bit Frantic
2024, flashe on canvas, 28" x 36"
(photo by Katrina Peterson)

I walked into Karen Schifano’s studio in the Brooklyn Navy Yard last November not knowing what I would find, and 2 ½ hours later I found myself more than a little reluctant to leave as the sky darkened outside an industrial wall of windows. What hit me right away during that visit is that drama is a key ingredient in Schifano’s abstract canvases. At times it reveals itself as something approaching a theater itself - a curtain gently pulled back or stretched taut to reveal a stage of shapes, colors, and lines. The rhythm in a work like “A Bit Frantic” (2023) is part tangled baroque scrum and part classical grace, the latter reminiscent of the deliberate moves in an understated Nicolas Poussin painting (see The Companions of Rinaldo from 1633 or Midas Washing at the Source of Pactolus 1627). Looking even further back for the roots of her DNA, Schifano’s compositions pulse with the abstract cadence of ancient Greek painted pottery while reflecting our own era’s emotional intensity. She largely avoids specifics that could too easily be tied to myth or the nightly news, yet somehow produces image after image that registers as both ancient and contemporary.

In a recent series of small works, Schifano playfully drops over-sized black dots into her compositions. Her confident and casual approach gives them dual lives as flat shapes and endless voids tucked into a loose net of brushstrokes that is equal parts gesture and restraint. Serially titled “Ghosts in the Machine,” the dark circles in these paintings are at times more like animated, dimensional forms making their way to the foreground, moving with the energy of devoted fans pushing up to the stage at a concert. Or maybe they’re salmon sniffing their way upstream, searching for both a home to start something new and a final resting place. Whatever their intent, they wordlessly present themselves advancing, receding, settling into place. Like so many of us, they are figuring out where they belong in the world.

I’ve followed Karen Schifano’s work since 2013, but we’ve only recently met outside of the internet. I admire the way her paintings remain deeply grounded in abstract principles even as they embrace growth and evolution. Searching and finding are both star performers in the theater of Schifano’s studio, and I’m very happy to be able to present some of that here. Below is the interview that resulted from a studio visit with her in the fall of 2024.

- David Schell

Karen Schifano in her studio.
(photo by Katrina Peterson)

The Semi-Finalist: Hi, Karen. Thanks for taking the time to be a part of this interview series. I’ve been wanting to meet with you in your studio for about a decade and I’m glad we were finally able to make it happen. Can you talk about your formative years, how you got started as an artist, mentors you had and your big takeaways from undergrad/grad school?

Karen Schifano: So great to finally get to spend some time with you, David. I've long been an admirer of your tasty reductive work! Before getting into schooling, I must mention that my parents were both art lovers and artists, and they brought us to MoMA when we were fairly young. I learned about reductive abstraction early on, so I was always comfortable with it, not afraid of the lack of obvious subject matter. I received a BA in Art History from Swarthmore College, and then an MFA in Painting at Hunter College, where I was fortunate to be able to study with Ralph Humphrey, Robert Morris, Bob Swain, Sanford Wurmfeld, one class with Ron Gorchov, and Art History with Rosalind Krauss, among others. Quite a line-up!

At the time, the idea of painting functioning also as an object, in addition to being a "picture," was a major point of discussion. The "framing edge," therefore, was seen as something to pay particular attention to, and Humphrey also spoke of the difference between "light color" and "object color," which took me a while to understand. Other formative ideas for me came from semiotics, via Rosalind Krauss, whose classes were mind-blowing!

As I've grown and developed as an artist, I still hold those ideas in the back of my mind. I began to make work with edges outlined that seemed to be "windows", then "doors", actual door-sized paintings that sat on the floor as theatrical objects. That idea, now that I think of it, emerged from paying attention to Robert Morris' early work with dance and sculpture, with the viewer as almost a performer in the literal space of the work.

Ghosts in the Machine, #5
2024, flashe on canvas, 12" x 16"
(photo by Katrina Peterson)

S-F: You mentioned being a creature of habit and also recognizing that instinct and improvisation play a role in your process. How did that all unfold for you in the studio in earlier work, and in the present?

KS: I like the idea of being a channel, but I also need to have something that I understand to be a "set-up" for myself, which is maybe where the idea of being a creature of habit comes in. I tend to prime a bunch of same sized canvases or pieces of paper with a background color, a field color, so to speak.

To backtrack a little: since maybe 2012, I began to set things up with a "framing" shape, a kind of symbolic and formal device, often an opened curtain form, or mouth, an empty sign, a framed void. I wanted to bring in the outside and my own personal world, make art that was less about inventing a new formal painting language and more about expanding what abstraction could allude to.

Happening (My Foolish Heart)
2024, flashe on canvas, 28" x 36"
(photo by Katrina Peterson)

This created the question of what would be "appearing" on that stage or space behind or below those edges. My abstract work entered a period of being almost narrative, with symbolic shapes and the spaces that they inhabited. I began looking at people like Sarah Charlesworth and Robert Gober. I also looked at Louise Bourgeoise's early paintings, and of course, Guston, when thinking about shapes, signs, symbols, their raw, "truthful" mark-making and spare compositions. I tried to find my own way, thinking about what matters to me, what felt compelling as "story-telling" in abstract terms: shape in a theater space, and in a cubist space, receding and projecting.

After my wife's long illness and then passing at the end of 2023, this format may have run its course. It may be that the abstracted "subject matter" of the years before was "done", no longer had the urgency it once had. I began to work using gestures on small canvases, so that I wouldn't feel the pressure of needing to make something complete, in order to allow myself to be able to mess around and toss things that didn't work. After that, it seems to be a kind of dance, putting down, taking away, in an improvisatory way. The "habit" here might be the color palette which immediately came to mind and that I've stayed with: a slate gray field, upon which white, peach, black, would pop out, and yet also live together. Instinct, based on my years of painting, allows me to improvise within this structure. I have no idea where it will shake out!

Recent work in the studio; flashe on canvas

S-F: The word “restraint” often comes to mind when I’m looking at your paintings. I think of them as living in that wonderful space between representation and abstraction, where form and space are only ever hinted at, almost always with a sense of understatement. How do you see your work in that regard?

KS: I love how Miles Davis drops notes into a kind of big space in his solos. There's something lovely about the openness he leaves there, a choice of notes that leaves room for things to resonate... I want my work to be resonant in that way, without laying it all out. I want there to be mystery and a slowing down for multiple viewings, many possible readings.

Ghosts in the Machine #2
2024, flashe on canvas, 11" x 14"
(photo by Katrina Peterson)

S-F: Your work has evolved over the years, but the individual paintings always look like a “Karen Schifano.” What's the through-line in your work that holds it all together?

KS: Beats me! I do think I have a bold approach, can be fearless when starting out, and then try to keep that without getting too careful and fussy. Can't always pull that off. I do love shape and its ability to read as object, symbol, sign - and also the back and forth of positive and negative space around the shape. Maybe also my color palette and its graphic quality sometimes?

Ghosts in the Machine, #3
2024, flashe on canvas, 11" x 14"
(photo by Katrina Peterson)

S-F: You mentioned a few 20th century artists that you have been thinking about lately and how they dealt with the concept of structure in a painting. Who have you been mulling over and what have you been gleaning from them?

KS: I've been thinking about Picasso's fearlessness, and his ability to create many different styles of work, unlike today's market-driven art world. He was experimental and restless, had the bravery that I aspire to. I still go back to Demoiselles D'Avignon and am surprised by it - the chutzpa to leave unfinished areas in, tribal masks mixed into the cubist structure of it. It's breathtaking. I made a painting called "Demoiselle", that was my homage, and at a point in my work when I felt fearless myself. I also think that we are still plumbing cubism, that it is a treasure chest of devices and ideas that artists use in abstract as well as narrative work. Even artists who use photography and digital tools are playing with cubist structure.

Demoiselle
2021, flashe, watercolor pencil, on canvas, 28" x 36"
(photo by Katrina Peterson)

At the moment, I'm still thinking about Peter Doig and the show he curated at Gagosian uptown, which reinforces an idea of ways to divide the canvas surface, and space beyond it. I had an epiphany about my own earlier work there, which had a kind of meta feeling derived from actual spatial formats that become "tropes". Not sure if this makes sense, but it occured to me when I saw the show. And I always try to see Alex Katz, for his boldness and panache. He's 97, I think, and is still taking chances when he paints! Others artists that I admire are all over the place stylistically, but maybe share a sense of wit and humor: Ron Gorchov, Stuart Davis, Richard Artschwager, Ed Ruscha, Blinky Palermo, Robert Gober, Myron Stout, Richard Tuttle, Moira Dryer, and of course, Guston. The list goes on and on.

The Way Home
2024, flashe on canvas, 28" x 36"
(photo by Katrina Peterson)

S-F: An unanswerable - or perhaps infinitely answerable - question that we chatted about in your studio: what is quality? Talk about that.

KS: The big question! I think about it as what lasts over time, beyond the flavor of the moment. It can be in work of any period and any culture. You feel it in your body, and it has duration, it hits you but also may keep changing each time you see it. I worked for decades in an art conservation studio, and I noticed that sometimes when a particular new work came in, everyone noticed it, stopped and said, “That’s good”. There was a consensus, even though most of us were artists of differing sensibilities. We felt that “quality” immediately, and it maybe had to do with the solidity and confidence of its formal construction. It “hit the spot”, and kept us looking, it had “duration”, as we used to say at Hunter, not just a momentary thrill.

Last Hours
2023-24, flashe on canvas, 28" x 36"
(photo by Katrina Peterson)

S-F: What’s next for you?

KS: I will attend another Returning Fellows Residency at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown in the Fall. It should be a time to focus and experiment, as I have been doing for the last twenty or so years that I have participated. And I will have more time to create some new career energy, after the last five years of being a caregiver, and my recent retirement as a painting restorer. It's all open, and I feel exhilarated to now be able to paint as much as my heart desires!

A recent painting.
(photo by Katrina Peterson)

You can see more of Karen Schifano's work...
on her website: www.karenschifano.com/
on her instagram: @karenschifano
in On Balance: New Work by American Abstract Artists at Art Cake (2023)
Karen Schifano is a member of American Abstract Artists

Works in progress.
In and around the studio.

]]><![CDATA[the semi-finalist is: colin Kippen]]>Mon, 28 Oct 2024 07:00:00 GMThttps://www.thesemi-finalist.com/artist-interviews/the-semi-finalist-is-colin-kippen

Work in progress in Colin Kippen's studio.

Colin Kippen possesses a nuanced understanding of how our emotional reality is presented through color and light, a trait that brought to mind (quite unexpectedly!) the work of Pierre Bonnard. Although separated by a century, a continent, and obvious compositional proclivities, both artists revel in and reveal the mysteries of the everyday. Unlike Bonnard, Kippen often employs a deadpan sense of humor to comment on subjects like consumerism, but he and his long deceased predecessor both engage in a form of simple, poetic storytelling to insist that the quotidian is special, not because of how it objectively looks, but as a result of how we experience it with our heads and our hearts. A table with fruit, a Mediterranean garden, or (as in the case of Kippen) an old oven mitt all radiate the colors of dreams and memories. To be too literal in representing these objects, Kippen and Bonnard both seem to be arguing, would mean disconnecting them from our inner lives.

One of the many, many things that I enjoyed about visiting Kippen’s workspace this summer is that I often didn’t know where the studio stopped and the artwork began. At times it felt like a mildly chaotic workshop, a realm where the nooks and crannies are only ever truly understood by the artist reigning over it - and that was the familiar part. It was such a joy to spend time in his personalized atmosphere of controlled chaos. Kippen’s studio, however, also acted as a door into another world, one where the materials, methods and outcomes felt like they were taking shape in a parallel universe - this was the unfamiliar part. It struck me as a place where gravity and physics often work in alternate and confounding ways; where ordinary, overlooked objects shimmer with an iridescent glow that I normally associate with hummingbirds and certain insects. A natural raconteur, Kippen had no trouble bringing the surrounding overgrown garden of a studio into manageable relief with tales of his years as a student, an apprentice, and eventually an artist dedicated to developing his own creative voice.

I’m very pleased to be able to share my interview with Colin Kippen this month on The Semi-Finalist. Below are photos and responses to several questions I sent him not long after I visited his studio.

- David Schell
10/28/2024

Colin Kippen in his studio.

The Semi-Finalist: When I visited your studio I loved hearing about your path to becoming the artist that you are today. Can you talk a bit about your formative years, the work you were doing early on, and who influenced you along the way?

Colin Kippen: I took art classes in high school but never really considered myself one of the “art kids,” even though my mom is an artist and my dad was an opera singer. Those art kids were way better at drawing and seemed too out there for my straight-laced younger self. I went to a liberal arts college and tried on a number of majors, 8 to be exact, and when I had to declare a major, I felt the most drawn to and fulfilled in art classes. I took my first metalsmithing class in 2002 and was immediately hooked on the torches, the hammering and the challenge of using this material as an expressive medium. Growing up rural and poor primed me to enjoy the practical aspects of knowing how to solder and hammer metal: I was able to ply my trade to pay tuition and even exchange wedding rings for a car. When I moved to Portland in 2004, metalsmithing helped me find gainful employment working part time for two earring manufacturers while beginning an apprenticeship with a local jeweler. The apprenticeship expanded to full time and lasted a total of 9 years, leaving me able to fabricate lots of intricate things out of platinum and gold, repair fancy jewelry with a laser welder, set diamonds, plus countless other skills and knowledge. In 2005 I enrolled in a post-baccalaureate program in metals at Oregon College of Art and Craft. This is the fully functional teapot I made in my spring term out of sterling silver:

Swoop
2006, sterling silver, wood, tea infuser
Photo: Dan Kvitka

I also began a series of cast rings inspired by geologic formations. After graduating, I began selling my own work at two galleries in town, creating work in my makeshift home studio, buying tools as I sold pieces. This is a good example of the wedding rings I created for couples:

Horacio and Richard
2014, stainless Steel, patina

As the apprenticeship became a full-time job, I was working 9-5 and then also working parts of evenings and weekends making jewelry for my own clients. This grew tiresome and, after taking classes to see if I wanted to become an engineer, I enrolled in Oregon College of Art and Craft’s MFA in Craft with the hope that I could discover my own artistic voice.

Grad school was transformative. My first year was spent almost exclusively working in metal, trying to find my way into an expressive visual language. Under the guidance of Christine Clark, I started by making a teapot in copper, then a coffee pot, then a kettle:

Teapot, Coffee Pot, Kettle
2014, copper, wood, found iron, spray paint
Photo: Richard Gherke

I was battling my inner need for practicality, annoyed at how long things took, how toilsome the material was. I discovered Brian Eno’s Oblique Strategies and began to incorporate randomness and chaos into my practice. I love the prompt “remove specifics and convert to ambiguities.” I decided to make a vessel, cut it up into a random number of pieces and reassemble it into 4 new vessels:

One into Four
2014, copper, brazing rod
Photo: Richard Gherke

Then I did the same with something that I purchased rather than made, in this case a copper gutter downspout:

One into two
Copper, brazing rod, spray paint, 2014
Photo: Richard Gherke

I was looking at Vincent Fecteau’s work and was blown away by his use of color on form, his use of cheap materials like cardboard and papier mache to create abstracted form. I soon began my color journey (with the above piece as my first) using graffiti spray paint and falling in love with the overspray of colors seen for the first time on the bottom of this sculpture:

Two into One
2014, copper, brazing rod, spray paint
Photo: Richard Gherke

Heidi Schwegler took over from Chrstine as my 2nd year advisor and she pushed me to engage with other artists' work on an emotional level, tossing aside analysis and planning. I switched to casting cement (faster and cheaper) and embedding objects into it while it cured. This is an in-process shot of a sculpture from my thesis work, a cement casting of plywood with a cut tire embedded into it:

Zeugma (Ply)
In Process photo, 2015

At this point I was looking at artists like David Benjamin Sherry and Tauba Auerbach for their use of color: I wanted to instill in the surface of my sculptures an otherworldly appearance, something that draws in the viewer. I also was intrigued by the sculptural musings of famous painters, particularly Cy Twombly, Robert Rauschenberg and the wonderful bronzes that Miró created. Each of these artists, in particular, created 3D objects that still had a frontal image quality, or at least a side to the object that contains a great deal more information.

Zeugma (Ply)
2015, concrete, wire mesh, tire, spray paint, binding wire, 50"x29"x23"

My MFA thesis work solidified a process that continues in a similar fashion nearly 10 years later. I found objects I loved in free piles and on the side of the road, often while taking my first child on walks and drives. These objects needed to have some sculptural content that caught my eye: a particularly stunning crumple or something related to a theme I was curious about. These things would then be combined with cement castings of various textures found in and around the home. Textures like grocery store fruit box dividers attached to a crumpled trash can:

Rubbish
2016, trash can, concrete, shredded personal documents, wire mesh, spray paint. 20"x26"x15"
Photo: Julia Saltzman

Or a casting of a bibb-lettuce clamshell attached to a rusted, handle-less shovel:

Reap/Sow II
2016, cement, perlite, shovel, wire mesh, binding wire, acrylic paint. 19"x14"x9"
Photo: Evan LaLonde

This combination of two disparate entities, one cast and painted, the other found, creates a new conceptual meaning, akin to wordplay. Sometimes the meaning is clear to me the moment I join the objects together, other times the meaning remains obscure even though I work the metaphor over and over. In the case of the bibb lettuce container and the shovel, I had a clear idea that the shovel is part of the sowing process and the plastic container comes from the packaging and shipping of the harvested lettuce. The sculpture represents a compression of the beginning and end result of farming in contemporary society.

Diet and Exercise
2020, cement, tricycle wheel, acrylic paint. 16”x16”x13.5”
Photo: Mario Gallucci

A tricycle wheel embedded into a casting of a gallon milk jug made sense to me as a musing on parenting: what we feed our kids and how active or sedentary we are can have a big impact on their health.

Feed and Nourish
2020, cement, IKEA high chair, flexible conduit, plastic pipe, acrylic paint. 18”x36”x65”
Photo: Mario Gallucci

Above is an example of a piece that still doesn’t make sense to me: An IKEA high chair with its opening glommed over with the casting of a Costco-sized egg container. I understand it as a metaphor for exhaustion but is the cast egg carton a stand-in for a child, or does it comment on how much we have to feed our kids? Is it significant that the egg carton once held 24 unborn chickens and now it weighs down the high chair? I don’t know the answer yet but enjoy the conceptual puzzle these combinations provide.

Swept
2021, paper pulp, spray paint, broom head. 18”x16”x9”
Photo: Mario Gallucci

In 2021 I was awarded the GLEAN residency and spent many weekend days wandering around the waste transfer station in NW Portland looking for interesting things. Finding artist materials at the dump was like a fire hose of objects compared to the pace of discovering cool things in free piles in my neighborhood. It also opened my eyes to the immense problems in our throw-away society. I switched to using paper pulp to cast into various textures and continued the practice of combining found objects into the pulp as it cured. Swept (above) is a visual representation of what happens when we purchase a new item and throw away the old thing we replace it with. In this case, it’s a paper pulp casting of the styrofoam packing blocks of a vacuum cleaner joined to the tired broom one might throw away once the new purchase is unpacked. Another sculpture is a paper pulp casting of some old carpet padding with a dustpan (not visible) embedded in the back side as a hanging mechanism. The only reason I can think of to put these two notions together is their common relationship to the floor: one element is an invisible cushion under the rug, the other an implement for picking up after sweeping. The resulting sculptural form has an undulating and bodily presence which pulls it firmly away from the banalities of carpets and chores.

Floored
2021, paper pulp, spray paint, dust pan. 39”x17”x5”
Photo: Mario Gallucci

As the pandemic has waned, my sculpture storage has filled up, and my studio time has shriveled, I've been doing a series of smaller flat works that act more like paintings than in-the-round sculptures. These are quite fast and allow me to focus on color and form as the main aesthetic factore. They have the added bonus of being easily hung on the wall in the living room when they’re done being shown. I have been exploring textures of objects that are integral to our home life, integral to the support and protection of our bodies. These range from a cement casting of a mattress:

Sleeping Patterns II
2023, cement, wire mesh, picture wire, acrylic paint. 18"x15"x1"
Photo: Mario Gallucci

Or a casting of a baby changing table pad:

Changing Patterns
2023, cement, wire mesh, picture wire, acrylic paint. 18"x15"x1.5"
Photo: Mario Gallucci

Each of these wall sculptures memorialize daily routines like sleeping, cooking or changing diapers, presenting the viewer with a facsimile of these intimate objects, brightly colored to entice a fresh look. Last year I found a 3D printer on a parking strip and have been trying to integrate the very hands-off process of scanning an object, cropping it in software, printing it, and then adding paint to its surface. During my GLEAN residency I so badly wanted to cast a series of mattress textures but only two out of dozens I saw were free from stain or smell enough for me to feel okay bringing sections home. Now that I can effectively scan and print textures I can both bring less junk into my studio and avoid potential health risks when I finally get around to collecting more mattress textures. For now, I have scanned and printed an oven mitt and the backrest to a velvet rocking chair:

Mitt
2023, 3D printed PLA, acrylic paint, 9x7" x 75"x1"
Photo: Mario Gallucci

Chair Back
2023, 3D printed PLA, acrylic paint. 7.75"x9"x1.75"
Photo: Mario Gallucci

S-F: One of the things we talked about in your studio was how to squeeze an art practice into a very full life - something that you truly appear to be excelling at. Talk about how you make it all happen.

CK: I find it funny that anyone thinks I excel at an art practice! Lately I’ve felt pretty buried by the demands of parenthood and maintaining my multiple adjunct teaching positions throughout the metro area. This past year has seen the longest lull in studio time since grad school but this summer has allowed me to rekindle a practice that I hope to maintain more intentionally going forward. I focused a great deal in grad school on laying the foundations of a solid studio practice: bringing in objects I love into the “stew room” (a great term for a studio, borrowed from someone I can’t remember), keeping a hint of workspace free so I could make on a whim, and trusting that even if I just come into the space and shuffle things around, it will be enough. I admit that trusting this notion is not easy but I now know that my studio habits can withstand a 9 month break…

I maintained a steady trickle of studio time after my first daughter was born (this was only 6 months after getting my MFA), sneaking in concrete pours during nap time, working with her in a carrier, etc. At that time I taught one class and was the primary caregiver, with some help from my in-laws. We moved to this house in 2018 and I got the garage which is what you see today. My second kid was born shortly after this and I spent time cultivating a practice in this space until the pandemic hit. I was able to keep my art going through this time, largely because I had some great opportunities lined up, among them the GLEAN residency. After about two years of online teaching, late night grading, art practice and family life I hit a pretty big wall and felt absolutely burnt out. I’m only now recuperating from this and have scaled back my nine-to-midnight studio time so that I can keep some energy in the tank. This fall I will have both kids in school full time and that gives me some hope that I can juggle teaching and even have some time during the weekdays to make art in my studio. I am thankful that my adjunct teaching allows me to keep up a “minimum creative output” of sculpture demos and drawings even if none of that amounts to official artistic output.

Above and below: work in and around the studio; the artist in his backyard.

S-F: How do you see your work relating to the concepts of the practical and the impractical (I believe "post-rationalization" was a term that came up)?

CK: In my years as a jeweler I developed a way of making that was necessarily practical: clients and my boss wanted me to work from a plan so that when I was finished, the ring or pendant looked like what we agreed on from the start. This meant that any work I did had a predictable and consistent end result each time. This is a great for getting good at a particular trade or craft, but didn’t fit my inner artistic needs. Throughout graduate school and since that time, I've been interested in creative processes that surprise and confound me. Even if I have a notion of what I’d like to make, whether it’s a simple rectangular casting or two specific things I want cemented together, I let the process, materials, and especially color have an outsized influence on the end result.
Post rationalization is the idea that you make something and then, after it’s done, try to figure out what just happened. It allows for intuitive and playful things to happen while you’re making and can free up some anxiety about the end result. Post rationalization is also consistent with Rule Number 8 from John Cage’s 10 Rules for Students and Teachers: “Do not try to create and analyze at the same time. They are different processes.”

Work in the studio.

S-F: I’m so drawn to how your electric, radiant palette fuses with your casting of ordinary - and often overlooked - objects. Can you talk about how this merging of materials came about?

CK: I spoke a bit about this in my origin story above but didn’t really delve into how it came about. In my earliest cement castings, I was thinking about analog ways to copy objects and, in a way, 3D collage them next to found objects so that I might work through notions of past, present and absent. The found object–typically something discarded, worn or fragmented–retains evidence of a past life: the rusted and bent shovel, the food stained high-chair, or the battered mop handle. The fresh casting is formed from something now gone—a ghosted imprint of a 7-Eleven food tray, a blanket or a door. The color infuses the cold lifeless cement with a glow that visually connects the sculpture both to the present and to a presence akin to vibrant flowers, phone screens and workout clothes.

Color usage for me varies depending on whether I have a plan or if I want to intuitively respond to colors as I mix them. I’ll sometimes swatch colors from contemporary paintings I’ve seen recently, or colors I’ve seen on my kid’s toys. My main goal is to have the surface of the cement command equal or greater attention than other colorful things we’re constantly distracted by. In this way, like a flower attracting a bee or a snake warning of venom, I draw the viewer in so that they might stare at the texture of a washcloth or a weaving pattern on a mattress.

Work on the wall in Colin Kippen's home.

S-F: Who are you looking at (alive or dead)?

CK: I haven’t been seeing much work in person lately so I rely on the horrible Instagram algorithm to deliver work to my phone. I just stumbled on paintings by Robin F Williams who uses amazing colors for her figure paintings. Some other painters that I look to for color are Ramona Nodal, Amy Bernstein, Elizabeth Wise, Anya Roberts-Toney, Wayne Thiebaud, Annie Lapin and many others I can’t list. I love Anselm Kiefer’s sculptural paintings. Sculptors I often look up are: Richard Tuttle, Franz West, Rachel Harrison, Tim Hawkinson, Ivan Carmona, Hannah Levy, David Altmejd, Robert Gober.

The outdoor studio.

S-F: What’s next?

CK: I was asked to share work in the next issue of the Buckman Journal which should be out in December. I also have a group show coming up in October at Threshold Collective in Chattanooga, TN where I’ll have work alongside Rachel Zur as well as a fellow OCAC Alum Lindsay Martin Gryskewich. I will also have another show at Albina Press in December to show some more flat texture castings.

You can see more of Colin Kippen's work:
- on his website: www.colinpkippen.com/
- on instagram @colinpkippen
- at the Archer Gallery website: www.archergallery.space/colin-kippen
- in Drain Magazine:
drainmag.com/indexing-the-unwanted-a-conversation-with-colin-kippen/

More Kippen:

]]><![CDATA[the semi-finalist is: dennis foster]]>Tue, 25 Jun 2024 05:28:42 GMThttps://www.thesemi-finalist.com/artist-interviews/the-semi-finalist-is-dennis-foster

Untitled
2023, gouache on newsprint, 19 1/2" x 29 1/2"
(photo by Dennis Foster)

Color in Dennis Foster’s work is its own language. In place of words, hues and shades present themselves as a complete story told in a single viewing. A painting by Foster is a book in which every single word on every single page is being uttered at the same time and still, somehow, it all makes sense. Perimeter (2023), for example, announces itself with a measured mix of confidence and vulnerability, with colors that are both bold and remarkably personal. Each one is a voice that holds its own. Instead of drowning each other out, however, they amplify one another like accomplished actors on a stage or singers in a choir. These colors are there, in part, to pull the best out of those around them.

Structure in Foster’s paintings is a vehicle and a scaffold. It carries hues and intensities forward in compositions that feel more snug than forcibly penned in. Everything that appears fragile or elusive - a color, an edge, a subtle chromatic shift - is held tight by an uncomplicated armature that knows exactly how much pressure to exert. In a painting like Morning Room (2024), the motif of the somewhat irregular grid presents two colors - blue and green - that breathe and nearly escape from either side of the centrally checkered “T.” The generous size allotted to them is their getaway car and best option for exiting the frame, but the composition gently guides them back into place. Adding to the visual load and tension, four colors up top (purple, ochre, maroon and orange) weigh down as if influenced by gravity. As in all of Foster’s work, however, the framework is sound and it’s clear that the top of the “T” will hold. This is a painting that is as solid as it is beautiful.

I’m so pleased to be able to share my interview with Dennis Foster this month on The Semi-Finalist. In it he talks about color, process, music and more. I have such a strong visual memory of being in his studio last March, surrounded by his paintings, and I’m already looking forward to my next opportunity to see more of them in person.

- David Schell

Dennis Foster in is studio.
(photo by David Schell)

The Semi-Finalist: Tell me a bit about how your life as an artist started. What was your path and who were your mentors (if any)?

Dennis Foster: I grew up in Southern California and spent most of my teenage years skateboarding and snowboarding. I got into photography around this time and started making photos of my friends while on trips or just being around one another. I really enjoyed the documentative aspect, but at some point I found myself more interested in trying to make photographs without being reliant on a set of people that would need to be present for the process to happen. I really enjoyed just aimlessly driving around looking for things to photograph and for situations to present themselves. It should be noted I was not making any good photographs at this time - ha! In 2005 I moved to Portland, OR, where I decided to attend Pacific NorthWest College Of Art with photography being my focus. I had no business at the time being a student. My scope of artistic inspirations was so narrow and uninformed that I had no idea what I wanted to be making. (A sincere apology to all of my professors at this time) I think arriving completely unprepared for that experience woke me up to the realization that I had never arrived at a discipline and was therefore under-equipped to gain anything from continuing schooling. Around this time, and I credit the Northwest's particularly isolating feeling, I started to do a bit of drawing and experimenting with paints. My inspirations were still coming from, or rather culturally adjacent to, skateboarding - Artist/ Surfers like Barry Mcgee and Thomas Campbell, but I also now had been exposed to people like Frank Stella, Ellsworth Kelly, Bridget Riley. I arrived very late to any sort of Art History and grew up in an area of California not particularly hospitable to The arts, but seeing work like that really clicked for me in the sense that it could be reduced to a few elements and be very effective.

Italian Stained Glass
2024, flashe/acrylic on canvas with pine frame, 9" x 12"
(photo by Dennis Foster)

S-F: When I was in your studio, we talked about feeling connected to other artists and the fine line between inspiration and overt influence. Who’s in your visual family and how do you think about carving out a unique voice while using a reductive approach to image making?

DF: There's only so many visual languages to tap into and I rather like seeing work where I can identify the reference point it's coming from while still retaining its own essence. I think especially as I feel like I'm honing in on my own personal visual language, I can look back and identify work that self-admittedly leans overtly into particular influences. I think dealing with color field paintings, it's going to be an obstacle to navigate. Painters like David Novros, Brice Marden, Jack Bush - work that's relative to each other and seems to be pulled from the same well, though they all have their own personal imprint. What's remarkable is taking a distilled element such as color and making it your own. I think for that to be possible it must live within an actualized body of work. That's where the personal visual language is born.

Above and below: Wake Up New in the Project Room at Nationale, 2023
(photos by Mario Gallucci)

S-F: Your work strikes me as being primarily about a visual experience. Is that accurate? And can you talk about why it is or isn’t (in an age of global upheaval, how does this fit in)?

DF: In a sense, yes. Ultimately, what gets produced is purely visual. But painting is largely, for me, an act of therapy. I think a lot of subconscious emotions come to the surface when I am actively working, so in a way the paintings are instilled with personal conflict. The overall goal I'm hoping to achieve, especially with current work being made, is a sense of calm. That's an especially sought after feeling for all things considered within a worldview.

Long Thought
2023, flashe/acrylic on canvas with pine frame, 16" x 20"
(photo by Mario Gallucci)

S-F: Your work also has a musical quality to it. Talk about that.

DF: Well, I want the work to activate each other, so much like the instrumentation of a song, I want the individual elements within each painting to be communicating to one another. I like to borrow color schemes and reintroduce them into paintings when working on a series. There's a rhythm to color that's visceral, so if I want to present a particular thematic feeling, I'll employ recurring color to tell the story. I think this acts as a good tool for grounding the work. You can identify a storyline of sorts and the paintings come back to each other.

Above: Morning Room
2024, flashe/acrylic on canvas with pine frame, 9" x 12"
(photo by Dennis Foster)
Below: Untitled
2024, flashe/acrylic on canvas with pine frame, 16" x 20"
(photo by David Schell)

SF: When I first entered your studio, I remember thinking about how your work has a wonderful way of activating the space around it. Can you talk about your paintings and their relationship to architecture and how you want them to interact with context?

DF: I've always made work that was in relation / response to whatever space I was making the work in at the time. Currently my studio has a rather tall ceiling on one side with a slanted roof, but the overall space is quite small. I had been making these somewhat large striped panel pieces that I intended to hang together as one solid painting but the spatial restraints were becoming unsustainable. Eventually what came of that was to hang them towards the top of the ceilings, acting as almost columns or pillars and freeing up space on the walls beneath where an entirely smaller yet complimentary body of work could be hung. It becomes an extension of the problem solving that occurs within the canvas but opens up new possibilities in regards to interacting with the work.

A view of Perimeter and smaller works in the studio.
(Perimeter, 2023, flashe/acrylic on canvas, 48" x 108")
(photo by David Schell)

SF: Who are you looking at (dead or alive)?

DF: I love how musical and alive the paintings of Stanley Whitney are. The movement in Marina Adams' work. Suzan Frecon while we're on the topic of calm - also Lynne Woods Turner. Harriet Korman, Matt Kleberg, Ethan Cook, Mary Heilmann, and especially Patricia Treib!! What a painter!!!

Above: Works on paper in the studio.
Below: Objects in the studio.
(photos by David Schell)

SF: What’s next (shows, residencies, etc.)?

DF: Making paintings for a TBD show in Los Angeles in the Fall? I'd love to show beyond The West Coast if the opportunity were to arise!

Above and below: in the studio, Los Angeles, CA.
(photo by David Schell)

Warm Room
2024, flashe/acrylic on canvas with pine frame, 9" x 12"
(photo by David Schell)

You can see more of Dennis Foster's work:
- on instagram: @finessedobson
- on his website
- on the Nationale site (Project Room)

Dennis Foster in his studio
(Photo by Kara Holekamp)

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