Interview

August 10, 2018, 4:36pm

A Conversation: Eric Fischl

New American Paintings Contributer, Arthur Peña, speaks with Eric Fischl on the occaision of his survey exhibition, If Art Could Talk, at the Dallas Contemporary. 

 

Rift/Raft, 2016, oil on linen, 98 x 220 inches

 

 

Arthur Peña:    There are so many moves and nuances playing out on the surface of the paintings. The work has a constant restlessness in the how the paint is being pushed around. 

 

Eric Fischl:       I don't know if you have that as well. I'm assuming you do, I think all painters do, which is that I’m always wondering what's enough. What does it take to make it feel alive, make it feel real? How much detail do I need? Do I stick to some strict formula? Do I deviate? Do I whatever? I thought the older I got, the better at the craft I got, the more that question would go away, but it gets worse. 

 

Listed under: Interview

March 05, 2018, 9:04am

A Conversation: Nina Chanel Abney

When I met Nina Chanel Abney on the occasion of her FOCUS show at The Modern in Fort Worth, she had just returned from South Africa where she spent three weeks. This much needed vacation was taken after her critically acclaimed duel solo shows opened at both Mary Boone Gallery and Jack Shainman in New York on the same night. Through her friendly smile, she mentions that she will be flying out to Paris in the morning for her show at Palais de Tokyo then flying back to open her solo show in her home town at the Chicago Cultural Center on what would end up being a very snowy day. About a week after our conversation, Abney was a recipient of a grant from the Tiffany Foundation. Needless to say, she has been busy. - Arthur Peña, Texas Contributor


Hobson's Choice, 2017, Acrylic and spray paint on canvas, 84 ¼" x 120 ¼", Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University; Museum Purchase.

Listed under: Interview

November 27, 2017, 10:07am

A Conversation: Katherine Bradford

There is a place, a safe place, a new place, somewhere other than where we are. A horizon, hazy like memories, colorful like wild dreams. Guided by a soft glow, carefree bodies drift afloat in an infinite ether. In the midst of cultural upheaval, Katherine Bradford steadily paints a path through a fantastical world, spared from the troubles of ours. On the occasion of her first solo museum show, and as part of the phenomenal series of FOCUS shows at The Modern in Fort Worth curated by Alison Hearst, Katherine and I had the chance to revisit with each other and have a conversation. - Arthur Peña, Dallas Contributor

Listed under: In the Studio, Interview

March 22, 2017, 9:39am

A Conversation: Stanley Whitney

Arthur Peña: We first met in 2011 while I was at RISD and what stuck with me from that meeting was a story of how your father wasn’t allowed in museums because they were still segregated. How I remember the rest of the story is you saying that when you did have your first museum show you wanted to make paintings big enough that they wouldn’t fit through the door and the museum would have to work to get them in. Did I remember that right?

Stanley Whitney: Well it’s true that my father couldn’t go in to the Philadelphia Museum. Jack Whitten calls those years the “American Apartheid.” I have lots of stories of paintings not fitting through doors but I don’t think it’s exactly those circumstances. Although, I might have mentioned something like that. It could have been related to a story from around 2006 when my dealer José Freire came to me and asked me to make the biggest work I could make to take to Basel to try and make things happen because he kept putting me in shows and no one was paying me any mind. So I made the biggest painting I could make in my studio, 96 x 96 in., and to get it out we had to cut it in half to get it through the door. We showed it on a big expensive wall and it didn’t sell.


FOCUS: Stanley Whitney at The Modern in Fort Worth, TX

Listed under: Interview

March 14, 2017, 8:20am

A CONVERSATION: ROSS BLECKNER

This interview took place on the occasion of Bleckner’s solo show, “Find a peaceful place where you can make plans for the future” at the Dallas Contemporary. 


(L to R) Dome, 2016, Oil on linen, 84 x 84 in. Ladder Painting, 2016, Oil on linen, 96 x33 in. Dome, 2016, Oil on linen, 120 x 78 in.

Listed under: Interview

November 01, 2016, 10:23am

Kristen Dodge: Back in the Game at September

Kristen Dodge is not just one of my favorite art world people, she is one of my favorite people, period. In a business replete with elusive characters, Dodge is a rare straight shooter. (She is also rare in that she combines a deep knowledge of art with deadly business acumen.) In late 2010, after a number of years in Boston, she opened Dodge Gallery in New York’s Lower East Side and did what she does best: aggressively advocated for the artists and ideas that she passionately believes in. The gallery was open for four years, at which point Dodge decided she needed a break from the art world’s frenetic pace and rapidly shifting landscape. She and her husband, artist Darren Foote, moved to Upstate New York where they embraced a very different lifestyle.

Now, just over two years later, Dodge is back, and I think the art world is the better for it. Her recently opened space in Hudson, NY, September, has already gained a lot of attention. I wanted to know what brought her back into the “game.” – Steven Zevitas, Publisher

Listed under: Interview

September 12, 2016, 8:51am

Deb Sokolow’s thoughts on Men

Those unfamiliar with the work of Deb Sokolow (NAP #41, 107, 119) might be surprised to find studio walls plastered with images of Kim Jong-un, conspicuously undetailed renderings of David Copperfield’s brain, paper models of Frank Lloyd Wright buildings, as well as diagrams dissecting the psychological motivations of our country’s most notorious politicians. And over the past decade she has found excuses to cook up an impressive collection of home-brewed conspiracy theories that cover everything from subterranean pirate tunnels to coded messages in your McRib. Though while she has earned a reputation for drawing on eclectic source material, the most surprising thing about her work is its ability to synthesize all of it into something that’s not only visually cohesive, but as immediately compelling as anything in the National Enquirer.

Between exhibitions in Washington DC, Indianapolis, as well as New American Painting’s Midwest Edition show and another coming up at Chicago’s Western Exhibitions on September 17th, she has certainly kept herself busy in 2016, making it the perfect time to check and learn a bit more about what goes into her work. – Brad Fiore, Chicago Contributor


Deb Sokolow | Various notes and studies, 2016

Listed under: Interview

September 06, 2016, 9:02am

Light, Letting Go, and the LA River with Debra Scacco

Debra Scacco creates rich, multimedia pieces that play with light, reflections, shadows, walls, and borders. Her 2015-2016 solo show The Letting Go at Klowden Mann was full of works on paper, paintings, and more sculptural installation pieces that reference and play off of nature and geography in aesthetically pleasing and deeply profound ways. – Ellen Caldwell, Los Angeles Contributor


Debra Scacco, Installation view of “The Letting Go” at Klowden Mann, 2015.

Listed under: Interview

April 19, 2016, 9:01pm

Camille Page’s Underwater Wonder

Camille Page’s underwater paintings blend a perfect amount of the figurative with the abstract. Painting with a palette knife in a kind of push-pull-combination of heavy applications of paint and fierce scrapings, Page creates large paintings that feel familiar and momentous.

In this series, Page captures her friends and daughter swimming and enveloped with water in order to paint from the images. With an underpainting below and the palette magic on the surface, she captures action, form, color, and light in a way that invokes a sort of contradictory feeling of both timelessness and yearning for time’s past.

On a recent trip to Kaua’i, I was able to visit her gallery and meet with Page, speaking to her about her underwater series, process, and inspirations. – Ellen C. Caldwell, Los Angeles Contributor


Camille Page | Dip, 24 x 30

Listed under: Interview

April 05, 2016, 9:10am

Gallery on the Edges: Q and A with Sharon Arnold of Bridge Productions

The last time I spoke with Sharon Arnold in her first gallery in Georgetown, I found myself surprised at my own sadness. Her modest space LxWxH, hovering over a pizza restaurant, was closing. Arnold wasn’t going far—she was moving on to collaborate with another well-respected gallerist, in downtown Seattle. LxWxH was small in scale and remote by comparison, two miles south of the city center, in Seattle’s historic, industrial neighborhood of Georgetown. But its presence had bored deep into the landscape of the community’s visual art, through not only the gallery that balanced the homegrown with the sophisticated so well, but also through the accessible boxed sets of small works that she sold to foster collecting in the city. I knew I would miss this gallery’s ideas when it was gone. - Erin Langner, Seattle Contributor


Tectonic, Installation View. Image courtesy of Bridge Productions.

Listed under: Interview

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