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10/21/2025 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.) 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.  6/10/2025 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.
5/2/2025 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
4/5/2025 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.
2/3/2025 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.    10/28/2024 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:     6/24/2024 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) 4/11/2024 The Semi-finalist is: Pat Boas Untitled 2023, acrylic and flashe on canvas over panel, 24" x 22" I have been a fan of Pat Boas’ work for over a decade, and its evolution has been a source of both fascination and inspiration. As a longtime viewer, it’s been interesting to note how the visual grammar in her recent paintings is related to her earlier conceptual and text based works. In Script 1 (2023), for example, sweeping, fluid gestures paired with skittering, semi-transparent dry-brush strokes and geometric sharpness hint at numerals and the alphabet. And it’s not out of the ordinary to find cartoonish profiles or the silhouette of a bottle tucked into some of her newer compositions, as in SL3 (also from 2023). It’s in this new work, too, that another side of Boas’s temperament starts to assert itself: overt signs and cryptic symbols regularly give way to unnameable forms and the allusion to language dissolves into planes of color, shape and texture. Even here, however, one can see that she is hanging onto her past aesthetic temperament as much as she is letting go of it. A piece like Saturday Painting #10 maintains the swooping cadence of a calligrapher even as the brushstrokes resist giving us a recognizable reference point. I get the sense that Boas is not so much saying goodbye to what has come before in her decades long career, but is instead greeting new interests with an open mind to what’s possible. In several of these charming and fresh “Saturday Paintings,” the directness of Boas’s hard-edged geometry is supplanted by lush atmospheres that skillfully retain their chromatic intensity. In these small works (often only 10” x 8”) we see the artist’s penchant for rigorous definition giving way to the joys of unapologetic ambiguity. It’s as if a singer on stage has graciously and confidently stepped aside so the band can have a go at improvising without vocals; narration takes a well deserved break while the feeling carried through pure sound is given an opportunity to move the story forward. Under Boas’s direction, this is never a complete rejection of the recognizable signs that illustrate, but rather an understanding that it’s often the suggestive pull of what is unsaid that slips in under our skin and stays with us. This month I'm happy to share a recent interview with Portland, Oregon based artist Pat Boas. -David Schell  Saturday Painting #11 (float) 2023, flashe on panel, 10" x 8" The Semi-Finalist: How did you get started as an artist? Pat Boas: I had one of those hero art teachers in high school who opened a lot of things up for me. As a child of the ‘60s, though, there was no straight path. I graduated from high school a year early and was making my way through my first year at Kent State University, but that came to an abrupt end when, during a protest against the US invasion of Cambodia, the Ohio National Guard shot and killed 4 students and wounded 9 others. Though I didn’t see the shooting, I was on campus that day and it shook my world. Naturally, the school shut down and I went to visit a friend in New York City for a two-week trip that stretched to a year. Coming from a small town in northeastern Ohio, it was pretty intoxicating. I took classes at the Art Students’ League, worked at various jobs, and explored. When I went back to Ohio, I made a serious attempt at finishing up my BFA. I’d say that Don Harvey, an artist who taught modern and contemporary art history at Akron University, filled the mentor role. Don organized frequent student trips to New York to look at shows and meet some of the working artists he knew. A handful of us rented a huge space for studios in a former dance school over a dive bar in downtown Akron (my rent for the year was $130). There was a lot of good energy, good music, and a sense of community. Despite that, or maybe because of it, earning an art degree became to seem less educationally important than being out in the world. I had an invitation to join friends who were living in rural New Mexico, so I left for the west and lived for about a year in a small, reclaimed adobe house east of the Sangre de Cristo mountains. For the next couple of decades, I traveled and lived for spells in Berkeley, Paris, more NYC, Boulder, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Amsterdam. Many of the people I met and things I got involved in made an impact. In Paris, I stayed for some months at the storied Shakespeare & Company bookstore when George Whitman (who claimed to be a descendant of Walt) was still there. In Boulder I sat in on classes at Naropa’s Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics and did chapbook covers and broadsides for a small press. I worked at the Social Public Art Resource Center in LA, first as a studio assistant to an older Communist artist from Odesa, and later led one of the teams that worked on Judith F. Baca’s “Great Wall of LA,” a quarter-mile mural depicting the ethnic history of Southern California. I co-hosted “Poetry Readings in the Old Venice Jail” and worked with Political Art Documentation/Distribution (LA PAD/D). Then motherhood and family life took over.  Above: Script 1 2023, acrylic and flashe on canvas over panel, 30" x 24" Below: SL2 2023, flashe on canvas over panel, 24" x 22"  S-F: I found so many of the things that we talked about in your studio to be relevant to your work, and I wanted to dig a little deeper into them here. Let's start off with your “Saturday Paintings” and how they fit into your overall approach to painting. PB: These are small panels I keep hanging around alongside larger work. I call them “Saturday Paintings” because Saturday mornings in my studios are usually times when I feel very focused. There’s no one else in the building, no trucks idling in the parking lot and somehow I seem to know what to do to with one or another of these little paintings that I keep brewing off to the side. Some finish quickly while others may go through multiple stages and redirections. I guess they serve as rehearsals, but their main importance is the way they help me think about what it means to resolve something. That keeps changing. It’s something that I’m always looking to change. I exhibited a few in a solo show at Elizabeth Leach Gallery this past fall and many more in a two-person exhibition with Michelle Ross last November at Ditch Projects in Springfield, Oregon. To show them at Ditch, which is a very large, beautiful white space, I had to bring them from the periphery to the center. And this meant I had to quickly finish (or declare finished) some that had been only lightly touched. I have some uncertainty about that but the shift has made a difference in the way I’ve been working since.  Above: Saturday Painting #4 (flame) 2023, flashe and milk paint on panel, 13" x 9" Below: Saturday paintings (and other things) on the studio wall.  S-F: How do you cope with “the treachery of titles?” PB: I used to think it was ungenerous for an artist to not take the opportunity to position a work with words. Earlier, my titles tended to be descriptive or referenced a source, sometimes with an element of word play. Now I try to think about what each piece needs and don't see a reason to be consistent. I like the idea of placing language alongside an image, like an echo, or finding something that anchors it. I collect words or phrases and look for a good match, but sometimes it takes a while to know what a painting has become. A title that earlier made sense may not stick once the painting is done. In some cases, any language can seem too heavy or limiting. I sometimes envy painters who simply number works sequentially because that tends to make me focus on what is in front of me, on what I’m really seeing.  Hat Trick 2022, acrylic and flashe on canvas over panel, 30" x 24" S-F: When I was in your studio, you described the experience of a painting "looking back." Can you talk about that? PB: This thought took hold during a discussion in my painters’ group about one of Amy Bay’s gorgeous paintings. I think of it as a particular place in a work where formal and material forces draw together and create a node, a sense of presence, some kind of “aliveness”. Maybe it’s related to Roland Barthes’ idea of the punctum in photography: literally a sharp point or tip, something that pierces. We all know it’s just inert material on a surface, but nonetheless I look for some point of tension, something that draws to it my own subjective looking and, crazy as it sounds, seems to return the gaze.  Good Listener 2021, acrylic and flashe on linen over panel, 19 1/2" x 15 1/2" (installed on Bliksem, artist-designed wallpaper at Oregon Contemporary, February - March, 2022) S-F: Pat, your work over the last couple of decades has slowly inched away from overtly referencing its own conceptual foundations. Your current work - more than any other part of your career that I’m familiar with - appears to be painting that is about painting. Do you agree with that assessment? If so, can you talk about what is driving this transformation and where you see it going? PB: On the whole I think this is true but it does give me pause to think I am making paintings about painting, for that’s exactly the kind of thinking that drove me away from painting in the first place! Like many who had a 70s (or 80s) art education, my introduction to painting was that it was an indulgent and retrograde enterprise where ideas were not welcome. Harsh, right? (Amy Sillman has written about this in some of her essays.) For many years, I was all about concept, scuttling back and forth between drawing projects and printmaking – the latter for its distancing quality and relationship to commercial media. It was important to me to start with material that existed widely in the everyday and devise operations that would uncover something that was already there. I concentrated on visual constructions of reading and writing because I regarded text and the activities that generated and deciphered it as an incredibly mysterious brain technology – quite miraculous, actually. This is still important to me and always hovers somewhere around my work.  ...we, we, waves (LG) 2014, gouache on paper, 22" x 15" Continued... Eventually I became frustrated with the limitations I was setting for myself and was drawn back to painting. I first made small, very detailed renditions of ordinary people who appeared on the front pages of the New York Times and then began using handwriting-as-image in larger works. Handwriting gave me a roadmap with a loose set of rules and unpredictable destinations. It was a kind of halfway-house that allowed me to confront my love-hate relationship with subjective form and the gestural mark. It took some time but eventually the space of the page in my earlier work became a field with figure-to-ground and object-to-frame relationships.  Above: Untitled (purple-eye) 2019, acrylic and flashe on linen over panel, 19 1/2" x 14" Below: Saturday Painting #5 2023, flashe and milk paint on panel, 13" x 9"  Continued... For the past several years I’ve been working to find ways to step off the well-defined tracks I have to lay to keep myself moving without drowning in chaos. I do a lot of generative drawing, automatic drawing, trying not to “make a picture” but rather allow what filters in from years of attending to different visual vocabularies to come through. I look for ways to navigate the tension between structure and impulse and find myself asking “what kind of a thing is this?” It’s a question I don’t expect an answer to because it all lies beyond the threshold of language. This does leave me without an easy way of talking about current work, for there is no longer a “something” that it’s about. Unless it’s about painting, as you suggest. I now feel that in itself is a tremendous charge, that painting is temporal and rich and deep. I recently came across a statement by the Belgian painter Ilse D’Hollander, who left a tremendous body of work during her short life (she died at the age of 29). D’Hollander wrote: “A painting comes into being when ideas and the act of painting coincide. When referring to ideas, it implies that as a painter, I am not facing my canvas as a neutral being but as an acting being who is investing into the act of painting.” I like this. It makes sense to me.  Above: Saturday Painting #10 (amber) 2023, flashe on panel, 10" x 8" Below: Saturday Painting #8 (red T.N.) 2023, flashe on panel, 10" x 8"  S-F: The surfaces in your recent work have become so richly varied, not just with color, but with texture and density as well. Talk about that. PB: I’ve always been interested in the tactility of vision, so the surface quality of a painting is important. At some point – it may have been when I took another look at the Pattern and Decoration work of the 70s – a long-dormant part of my visual DNA was activated, reaching back to the Polish immigrant side of my family whose tastes in decorating ran toward weirdly clashing colors, patterns, and tacky textures. I realized that most of my childhood memories involve interiors that were not at all aligned with American or western European ideas of visual harmony. Maybe that attuned me to the visual force of putting together things that do not belong. Nabokov (Russian, right?) wrote: “I like to fold my magic carpet, after use, in such a way as to superimpose one part of the pattern upon another. Let visitors trip.” I also think a lot about how sight and sound are connected. When I began painting letterforms, for instance, I thought a line bent to form a shape that might be recognized as a letter might also carry with it a sense of that letter’s sound or produce in the viewer the impulse to verbalize. Maybe it has more to do with rhythm and intervals, the patterning and textures of text, the spaces between and the act of visually deciphering. Contrast and color have a big job there. And much of it comes from figuring out how to negotiate shape, and especially, edge – the way the body senses and the brain responds.  Above: Installation view at Ditch Projects (November, 2023) Below: Blue Grid 2023, acrylic and flashe on canvas over panel, 23 1/2" x 17 1/2"  S-F: I love the title of your current show at Elizabeth Leach Gallery - Idiom. Can you talk about where that comes from and how it relates to your recent work? PB: The work I had been making for the show kept splitting off in different directions and I wanted to follow each one, not curtail anything just to make it fit, to make a show. Lately, as must be apparent by now, I’ve been working to see what happens rather than directing it. I don’t have an interest in making it all cohere. Or maybe it’s more accurate to say I want to see if I can make it cohere on its own. When it was nearing time to deliver the work to the gallery, some of the paintings seemed to have organized themselves into pairs that each shared a loose sense of genre (still-life-ish, landscapes, grid-based “scripts”) but there was no overarching theme. Idiom, which means a phrase whose meaning cannot be understood from the dictionary definitions of its component words, seemed to fit the situation. There’s an idea there about “compositionality” that I like, where one should be able to understand the whole if one understands the meanings of each of the parts. But with idioms, it doesn’t add up. They make a new meaning only through time and use.  SL3 2023, flashe on canvas over panel, 24" x 22" S-F: Who are you looking at (living or dead)? PB: I just got back from a trip to the Netherlands where I saw many early Mondrian paintings at the Kunstmuseum den Haag, and there also was a beautiful and comprehensive exhibition that traced his development alongside his contemporary, Hilma af Klint. Earlier this year I saw Rebecca Morris at the MCA in Chicago. It feels so good to look at work in person again. I recently got my hands on the new big book on Miyoko Ito. And I’m always looking at Prunella Clough and Thomas Nozkowski for the way they made compositions that cannot not be taken apart. Historically, Arthur Dove, Marsden Hartley, Matisse, ’80s de Kooning, Shirley Jaffe, Raoul de Keyser, Kimber Smith. I cycle through a long list of contemporary (mostly women) painters such as Victoria Morton, Patricia Treib, Jana Schroder, Marley Freeman, Elizabeth MacIntosh, Julia Dault, Jonathan Lasker, Tomory Dodge. And lately I’ve been looking at Sherman Sam, Ilse D’Hollander, Varda Caivano and Cora Cohen.  Above and below: on the studio walls.  S-F: What’s next for you? PB: After my two fall exhibitions in 2023, it feels good to be working without a looming deadline. I’m represented by Elizabeth Leach Gallery in Portland, Oregon, and will likely do another solo there in 2025. I enjoyed working with Ditch Projects and would like to build more connections with artist-run spaces: it’s useful to see work in different contexts and I like working collaboratively with other artists. You can see more of Pat Boas's work: - on her website: patboas.com/work/view/3369696/1/7614193 - on the Elizabeth Leach Gallery website - on her instagram page - on the Ditch Projects website More Boas:  The Artist in her Portland, Oregon studio. 
 Saturday Painting #1 2023, acrylic and flashe on canvas over panel, 15" x 12"  Saturday Painting #3 2023, flashe on panel, 10" x 8"  Saturday Painting (plus-blue) 2023, flashe on panel, 10" x 8"  On the studio walls in 2024.    12/3/2023 The Semi-finalist is: japeth mennes Security Camera 2022, acrylic on canvas, 12"x 15" One of Japeth Mennes’ many artistic gifts is the insight of the pragmatic optimist, a vantage point from which nothing is too ordinary to be seen and celebrated. His creative process starts by photographing common yet easily overlooked signs - such as laundromat icons and surveillance advisories - from the streets of New York. These regionally familiar symbols are nothing special on their own, but in the hands of Mennes they are transformed into moving studies of both color and shape. Scouring the city for examples of the ordinary is the work of the artist, and Mennes seems to enjoy the undertaking. His visual lexicon keeps expanding and now includes shutters, pull shades, and stationary (the design of that last item looks like it was transported directly through time and space from my middle school in the eighties). As the viewer, however, we are invited to join him at a moment post-transformation, a point at which the sign has become a motif. A completed Mennes painting is no longer a mere secular icon inviting us in or warning us off; it is instead an armature for a highly personalized and abstracted world that sings with color. In effect, Mennes turns the perfunctory visual utterances of an often cold, unfeeling city inside out and finds something new and beautiful in the inversion. The Big Brother undertones of constant supervision implied in a work like “Security Camera” (2022) become an opportunity to share a study in nuanced hues. And instead of glorifying an object due to its rarity or ephemeral nature, Mennes’ “Laundromat” paintings argue that even the consistently un-special can be elevated and act as brick and mortar to house an idiosyncratic rendering of the world. This month I’m very happy to share my Semi-Finalist interview with Queens, New York based artist Japeth Mennes. - David Schell  Japeth Mennes in his studio, June 2023 The Semi-Finalist: I'm always interested in what an artist's early path looks like, and your formative years had a few twists and turns. Can you talk about where you went to school and how you got started as a painter? Japeth Mennes: I studied painting (Cranbrook Academy of Art, Kansas City Art Institute, and for a brief moment at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago), but never really made straightforward paintings until fairly recently. I was very interested in media and the nuts and bolts of how images were created so I made drawing machines, sculptures, videos, and invented my own printmaking techniques. After a musical art-hiatus that lasted five years, I had the ideas for the paintings that I’m making now. Painting feels like the perfect vehicle for these ideas, so that’s where I am.  Double Glazier 2021, acrylic on canvas, 27" x 23 1/2" S-F: When I visited your studio, I was really taken with the process that you’ve established for yourself. Can you describe your method of painting and how it developed? JM: It’s pretty simple on my end! I look for objects and imagery that I think I can work with, I like things that can slip into abstractions and that have some sort of reflection of my landscape here. Most often it starts with photography, walking around the neighborhood.  Nine Laundromat paintings. Installation at 65 Grand, Chicago, IL (photo by Holly Murkerson) S-F: I’m very interested in how your paintings balance structure and improvisation. They always seem to be hinting at how subtle variations inevitably arise, even in a world dominated by mass production. Can you talk about that? JM: I’ll talk about the Laundromat paintings. In my neighborhood in Queens there is a laundromat on practically every corner, they each have their own way of illustrating a washing machine on the signs. There are 800 languages spoken in Queens, so it makes sense that everyone would use this as a way to bypass text based advertising. When I first noticed them I thought that they were really amazing, how everyone does it a little differently; sometimes it’s just lame clip art, but sometimes it’s a really weird handmade design that comes close to abstraction. At first I painted them because I just wanted to have one for myself, to hang it in my home. But the first one led to the next, and then another, and another, and so on. I find that there are endless ways to shift the color and the design (just like the different signs), and that when the paintings hang together on the wall they come full circle back to the actual washing machines in a row inside the laundromat. It’s a strange thing to paint a machine by hand, and to do it over and over again like a machine. Although I’m not painting a machine, I’m painting an image of an image of a machine. And I think the small shifts are inevitable and mean a lot to me.  Window Shade 2023, acrylic on canvas, 26" x 11" S-F: So much of your work is about understated but repetitive signs that act as warnings or wayposts (security cameras and laundromats). You also have a developing interest in depicting the barriers that we use to help us separate interior and exterior spaces (shades and shutters). How did these themes develop and where did your initial interest in them come from? JM: I also started painting the window paintings from signs I noticed above glazier shops in NYC. The same with the security cameras, sometimes you’ll see a sign for a security camera right next to an actual security camera, which is very funny. I went from there to painting some actual windows and then to the shutter paintings (which came from Brooklyn, not Queens). I’ve always liked art that can reflect upon itself, and the window is an old trope in art history that is nice to think about.  In the studio.  S-F: Do you see yourself connected to a tradition of landscape painting, or is your engagement with the contemporary urban environment fundamentally different from other representational movements? JM: We talked about that a little before, and I think that’s a very nice way to think about the work. I sometimes think about how art can conflate different ideas or create paradoxes. If you think about landscape painting in terms of coping with or processing an environment, then for sure. On the other hand I sometimes think about the paintings as somewhat figurative, especially the laundromat paintings. Then there’s also an easy jump to still life.  Stationary 2023, acrylic on canvas, 32" x 27" S-F: There’s an element of Pop Art in your paintings, but it’s infused with a quiet, elegant, sometimes-eerie-sometimes-bittersweet sensibility that I don’t see in the work of, say, Roy Lichtenstein. Where is that coming from? JM: I hope that a psychological or emotional experience is what stays with the viewer, even though it may not be apparent at first. I think that I’m working in a roundabout way of getting there, but it’s important to me to do so. I think that forms and color can hold a lot of elusive feelings.  A corner of the studio. S-F: Who are you looking at (living or dead)? JM: I find doing studio visits with my community here very enriching, I wish I could do it more. I just went to Elise Ferguson’s studio and was really blown away by how adventurous her way of working feels. Stacy Fisher (who you also recently visited!) too, she’s one of my favorite artists right now. There was a great Tony Feher show at Gordon Robichaux this summer. The Ed Ruscha retrospective at MoMA is incredible.  The artist in his studio. S-F: What’s next for you? JM: I’m working towards a two person show at Left Field Gallery in California. When I went back to Chicago earlier this year for my show at 65 Grand I met Mie Kongo and was really impressed with her work. She is the other artist in the show and I think it will be a nice pairing. You can see more Japeth Mennes: - on his instagram: @japeth_mennes - on his website: https://www.japethmennes.com/ - from his show at 65GRAND in April/May of 2023  Above: rabbit's eye view of Mennes's work. Below: visitor's eye view of Mennes's work.   More materials and techniques.    Not far from Japeth Mennes's studio in Queens, New York.
10/22/2023 the semi-finalist is: Pat Barrett Untitled 2022, acrylic on canvas, 50" x 45" As far as I can tell, Pat Barrett happily lacked the chameleon gene and was impervious to trends. He was an artist that was dedicated to his work, and I loved it when he described his time in the studio as “cheap thrills.” I am certain that both the irony and the sincerity of this frequently repeated declaration were entirely intentional - the irony being that after adding up art school, supplies, a studio, and time, nothing about being a painter is cheap; the sincerity being that, for all it’s potential for frustration, heartbreak, and tears, a single bad day of painting and drawing is infinitely better than a week at a fancy resort or five-star hotel. That may be overstating it a bit, but you get the picture. Pat spoke about painting in a way that resonated - and still resonates - with me. He described it as being in touch with materials and techniques as well as rhythms and movements; of letting go of a strict, linear narrative; of allowing gestural, figurative suggestions to casually saunter into an otherwise abstract composition; of not repeating himself and always feeling like he was moving forward; of not being bound by anyone else’s rules, only his own. He knew a painting was finished when it felt right, and he wasn’t afraid to paint over entire canvases when they felt wrong. He had a fearless, unsentimental streak that served him well in the studio. When I look at Pat’s work - especially the work of the last five years - I’m struck by his ability to hint at stability emerging out of chaos. His compositions are overflowing with calligraphic marks that at first appear to be endlessly speeding up, ramping up dangerously close to light speed. The more I look, though, the more I see his brushstrokes coalescing, linking up in ways that suggest conversations taking place rather than a detached series of intersecting monologues. These are paintings that know how to both speak and to listen. The intimate exchanges tucked into his highly gestural compositions slow Barrett’s paintings down enough to see how they are truly in the moment. In an untitled painting from 2022 (see above), for example, thick, steel and sky blue strokes pull over the top of the canvas, partially blocking out three or four horizontal bands in deep indigo and a tangle of yellow and brown. Rather than canceling each other out, they amplify one another, linking up to create an idiosyncratic sense of structure that is both solid and open. I also can’t help but see the angles, twists, and turns of arms, legs, and torsos. As in so many of Barrett’s paintings, they are forms and marks at the three-way intersection of architecture, the body, and nothing at all. Pat died recently, and I have to admit, this is a tough one. There’s no other way to describe it. Although the word disorienting keeps coming to mind, so I’ll add that as well. It’s tough and disorienting to start a project (this interview) with someone, and then finish it alone. The same goes for knowing that after multiple conversations and two hefty studio visits, Pat Barrett will never see this little bit of writing that tries to express how much I admired him, what I was drawn to in his work, and why I keep looking at it. Barrett did his part, though, for which I’m forever grateful. With the help of his wife, Gail, he spent a portion of his last summer responding to the Semi-Finalist questions, and I feel so incredibly lucky and moved that he did.  Pat Barrett in his studio. The Semi-Finalist: Talk about your early years as a visual artist. I know that you also spent some time playing music. What was it like trying to balance two creative outlets while still in your twenties? Pat Barrett: I grew up in orchards planted by my great grandparents in a rural part of Northern California. My childhood was filled with sensations of the natural world, space, shape, and color. The generations in my family before me were all makers. Master builder, seamstress, writer, inventor, photographer. They did all of these things in the context of still running a ranch. I started drawing when I was very young and a foundation in drawing forms the groundwork of my painting. After my mother’s death, I found a portfolio of drawings saved in a closet that I thought was work that could have been done by me. It turned out the drawings were done by my mother when she was young and I was surprised by how they had the same hand, the same choices, a similar sensibility to my work. I never knew that she could draw. But looking at her drawings confirmed for me how the urge to draw is the substance of what informs me as an artist. I earned my BFA and MFA at Otis Art Institute in Los Angeles. After graduation I maintained a studio in the city and continued to explore my interest in abstract painting. At Otis I had discovered avant garde music (John Cage, Luciano Berio, Kathy Barberian, David Tudor, Robert Ashley and others) and would spend time making sound collages of their work using a tape recorder. That form of music, which is essentially abstract, synced up with my understanding of how the elements and principles of painting worked on an abstract level. When I look back at those early paintings, I see the beginnings of a movement towards more expressionistic imagery. In graduate school I worked a lot with serial imagery and in that LA work I can see where I was working to resolve one form in the context of the other.  Untitled 2022, acrylic on canvas, 44" x 48" I eventually moved back to rural northern California and began working on what I think of as process oriented abstract paintings. I didn’t have a lot of money to spend on supplies and I had to work with a kind of economy. Working with less trained me to listen closely to my intuition for direction, to make decisions while working that were based on signals that were unclear but motivating. That is what I mean by process. I still find that it is feeling that lands me on the painting surface, an urge to articulate what isn’t yet formed. Music has always been integral to what is happening in my paintings. In my late 20’s and into my 30’s I was in a band. We wrote and played original work, grown out of improvising words and sounds, and performed in venues in San Francisco. I sang and played trombone. I also experimented a lot with playing the shortwave radio. I combined that work with the visuals of my paintings. I loved playing live music, but it was hard to sustain both painting and playing, not creatively, but time was the issue. There wasn’t enough of it. People have often commented that they hear sound when they look at my work. When you are asking me these things about early years and balancing music and painting, I am reminded that I don’t really have a linear sense of time.  Eros 2020, acrylic on canvas, 56"x 50" S-F: One of the things I really enjoyed talking about when I was in your studio was the process of painting and the process of finishing a painting. Can you elaborate on your relationship to those two inevitably coupled subjects? PB: For me making a painting is making an object. I decide on a size and shape, choose stretcher bars and canvas and build it. At that point, I am committed to evolving the object as a painting. It is more of a commitment to see it through if I already have the canvas on the stretcher bars. Some paintings resolve and come together quickly. Others take weeks and months to come to a resolution and there may be lots of attempts to make one of those paintings work. What gets me painting are essentially formal concerns: creating structural opportunities to enter the picture plane with content. My approach beyond mechanical structuring is in large part emotional. The way I use color is subjective and sometimes random. Composing is improvisational, around some kernel of an idea or feeling. I am interested in creating a visual representation that has impact psychologically, emotionally and intellectually.  Untitled 2022, acrylic on canvas, 56" x 48" Much of the time working on a painting is spent observing the painting. The series of actions are layered over time. I know it is done because it works on a formal level and then on subjective levels of feeling and intuition. When you are forming a painting it begins to draw you in, it can repel you as well, but when the painting draws you into itself more than demanding of you that you solve something, then you know you want to look at it instead of changing it. The trick is to keep the painting fresh. A lot of times my paintings can become really dense. I have to really work to keep it fresh so that it doesn’t look confusing and overworked. I often refer to these paintings, the dense ones, as being in the trenches.  Untitled 2022, acrylic on canvas, 46" x 50" S-F: Your work is largely abstract, but you don’t shy away from gestures, lines, and forms that suggest the figure or objects in space. Talk about that. PB: Playing with light and gesture, for example, puts my painting into a realm that evokes a sense of place and a kind of ground for interaction not unlike improvisation around a musical idea. The way that I work chose me. I have a huge appreciation for all forms. I am in love with figurative drawing and painting as well as with highly reductive, abstract work. I think that working the way I do gives me opportunities to tap into a kind of ineffable area that transcends linear time. Imposing linear concepts would only interrupt my intuitive flow.  Untitled 2021, acrylic on canvas, 50" x 46" S-F: When did you start your series of ink drawings on Yupo and how do they relate to your larger acrylic paintings? PB: In 2018 I had a surgery that for a couple of months left me unable to build large canvasses or move bigger pieces around. I needed to work. I had done some small pieces using acrylic ink on paper and decided to try ink on a non-absorbent surface. Working on a slick surface using a transparent medium gave me effects that pleased me. I also experimented with non-conventional tools. The imagery and marks in both forms are related but the process of creating them is different. Light and white in the drawings are the paper, not ink or paint. The yupo drawings take minutes to work and are purely spontaneous. I don’t labor with them. You get what you get. I think of them as haikus. I like their scale. Paintings feel like novels. They are always getting reworked. I use tools on the yupo that I also use on the canvas, but the scale and either ink or paint create a very different range of shapes and characters.
Ink drawings on Yupo paper and a little corner of the studio. S-F: One question that came up in your studio and has stayed with me ever since is “what do you want from a painting?” It came up in a general way and I can’t remember who asked it, but I think it’s a haunting question because it really gets to the heart of this whole business of trying to be creative. So, Pat Barrett, what do you want from a painting? PB: I want a painting to call out to me, to get my attention throughout the making of it and at the point at which I stop working on it. So, I guess that means that there’s a conversation initiated and sustained throughout the process of making and beyond. I recently found a photo of a piece I did when I was about 24 that appears to be describing a significant personal event that I am in the middle of right now. I guess you could say that I value nonlinear and intuitive perceptions. I want a painting to be formally sound on my terms. It’s important that its structure has the integrity to get the most out of it. You have to make yourself vulnerable. I like a sense of bravery. What I want in my work is often what I look for in other’s work. I like to see facility but what I really want to see are inexplicabilities. The awkward messiness that has nothing to do with trying to impress with ego or personality but makes you curious about why these images come up.  Materials and the evidence of process. S-F: Who are you looking at? PB: I follow a lot of regional painters. I like painterly work. I like Instagram because I can follow painters all over the world. I have a roving eye that is not inclined towards editing and I don’t have much of an academic approach. You can see more Pat Barrett: - on his website: www.patbarrettstudio.com/ - at Gallery 114 - on his instagram: @pathbarrett  Pat Barrett 1949 (San Jose, CA) - 2023 (McMinnville, OR)  Blindsided 2020, acrylic on Canvas 54"x 46"  Untitled 2021, acrylic on canvas, 62" x 56"  Untitled 2023, acrylic on canvas, 54" x 48" Early Drawings      Untitled
2023, acrylic on canvas, 54" x 48" |
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