Clary Stolte, CS_008 MODEL 003 overview, 2006 Galerie van den Berge, Goes, the Netherlands Brent: At some level an artwork needs to quench the desire – the need to know what something is. But also, it shouldn’t stop there. In your case what is ‘known’ is a shape. You generally use the square and it is often imbued with the hues around white. Robert Ryman used a square because it took away the need to [...]
Brent: While artist-in-residence in the most western point of Ireland, Achill Island, you tapped in a description of the landscape: Dramatic, With Cliffs, An Ocean, And Totally Isolated. This is your work: my first impression. There is Nature in your pieces. And it took a tough wind and a heavy sea to set this all in motion. I see firm – more than firm, hard. Hard material that has cuts, often just a few. The [...]
Richard Bottwin, Facade #5, 2009 Wood, Acrylic Paint, Textured Acrylic Sheet 15 x 15 x 4.5 inches “Brent: As a sculptor you work fairly pure, neither adorning pieces with mounts nor placing your presentations on pedestals. If a “work” sits on the floor and only grows to somewhere around or below the knees, well, that is where it sits. You suspend. In this case the body becomes very aware of its own mechanisms; how it [...]
“Brent: In “Treble II” you have an envelope-proportioned structure that has a fold but not like an envelope. There is a corner missing from one side: And a corner protruding from the other. The whole thing is one sheet of color, and of two forms… how did that come about? Connie: In the “Treble” pieces I’m working with parts of a whole, hence the single color. As to whether these parts become a single entity [...]
Don Voisine, Chemical Moment, 2009 Oil on wood, 16×17 inches “Brent: Upon entering the gallery, your first show on the West Coast, San Francisco, Gregory Lind, immediately you become aware of all that is color. Oddly it is not the black that pushes its presence first. But like a good friend, faithful, the blacks unfold at a different speed, which require the intimate. If dark be the turbine then color is the outwardly expressive, and is [...]
Installation view at Non Objectif Sud, France, 2009 Brent: A drawing dated 1978, Untitled, chalk on paper, has a pair of identical penciled or conté grids which you use to make a series of what appear to be perfect arcs; there are finger marks or smudges; some arcs are taken out. The arcs appear to form some shape, allude to volume, but never really do. What I see is a point where you stopped. Was [...]
Brent: Finding. You come out of a bit of a painting history; gesture; hints of constructive; a kind of record keeping; painting that pays attention to relationship more than heroics, though the mark and scale suggests that’s where you were initially coming from? Richard: Yes, I do feel that what I do comes out of, and actually continues within, a history of painting. I trained as a painter initially during the early 80s in Christchurch, [...]
Brent: You have a penchant for travel, often for the more exotic places on this globe. You return home, go to the studio, and take out your notes… what are these notes? Mel: I like to be completely immersed while I’m traveling—so this means not putting a frame/ lens/ color on paper between the experience and myself. Sometimes I take little snapshots with my phone, or quickly record video of small moments with my cheap [...]
“Brent: Pop, peek-a-boo, poking around, of color that is not of this world, though worldly set in architectural places that can eat up the logic of their interior. Indeed you have for lunch many of the preconceptions of the formal. Your sense of order of space and how you color it physical is full of humor often playing up to our own inquisitiveness, how we are likely to navigate – how we and our body [...]
Brent Hallard: Out of location, a thing found – wonders in ways that form a new thing, in a different location – this is generally how I sense your various projects working. Patricia Zarate: It is my experience of a location or an object in a place that is important to me. I think that I’ve been concerned with taking an experience – a place in time, perception – a feeling or idea and translating [...]
Brent: Color scales, gray scales, drums, unwrapped columns, the feel of folds, all different measures of light that sometimes manifest as light ‘actually’, though all together register as interest in how things unfold, expose, and fold back – that draw attention to form while somewhat masquerading with it – Linda, what is the common thread that runs through your work? Linda: Interesting that you refer to my work as folds, literal, or as a manner [...]
Lynne Harlow, Four Kicks, 2005 Pair of plexiglas boxes, 4 x 24 x 24 inches Brent: What are you currently working on? Lynne: I’m working the way I most like to, doing several different things at once. I have just completed a site-specific piece for a group show, I’m playing around with painted balsa wood strips that I’m gluing into shapes and, most significantly, I’m preparing for a collaborative project coming up this [...]
Devin Powers, Untitled, 2008 Installati0n, enamel and latex on wall Brent: The structure of space, theoretical models such as n-space and the hyper-cube usually lose most of us even in adult life. However you had an interest in this as a child. How did this fascination arrive? Devin: Well, I was no child prodigy. In fact, I was born dyslexic. I did not learn how to read until around the forth grade and it [...]
Read the complete interview Brent Hallard: You have been working on areas of color; vertical or horizontal bands of either matte paint or gloss paint with sometimes both present in the one painting at the same time. The structure between two areas of color, you couldn’t really call it a line, though, well, in the material – a space where something stops and then something starts. You have used aluminum supports for some time [...]
Brent: Of course the first impression I get with your collage work (we may as well start there) is that it rings Japanese: The color, the quirkiness, and freshness – the level and sense of reserve and adornment. Though that’s too simple. Quirkiness and perhaps freshness has been picked up, more fetishized, by western media, so we’ll leave that for a moment. And as you are not in Japan, and have settled in a [...]
Richard Roth, Full Cleveland, 2007 Flashe on Birch plywood 11 3/8 x 8 x 4 inches Brent Hallard: It seems to me that no matter where you position yourself to take these paintings in there are always two states forthcoming, though perhaps not always on view at the same time. Separately these different moods evoke, for example in ‘Full Cleveland’ or ‘Happy Hour’, the carnival and serene. When the two states mesh, it’s generally [...]
Brent: Kate, your pencil line drawings, either vertical lines or horizontal, always not the two together [?]: The framing device, the format and its edge seem to create the plus minus balance. How do you work on them? I noticed on your homepage that you had an image of quite a large one sitting flat on a bench top. Kate: Shape is very intriguing to me and sets the scale for each piece, [...]
View of Kevin Finklea’s studio, Philadelphia, PA “Brent: Kevin, you sent a studio shot of your new pieces. I can see how they fit with the flatter paintings, and what this new wood and paint work is doing. You mentioned that these pieces come about much quicker. Have you been going through a process of redefining time in your work? Do you think that changes a lot of things? Or is it that you [...]
December 12, 2008 – January 9, 2009 Also, be sure to catch a recent interview with Richard Schur: Midnight Run: Interview with Richard Schur, by Brent Hallard, Visual Discrepancies blog
Douglas Witmer, How Soon Is Now?, 2008
Karen Schifano, Coming Soon, 2008 Oil on canvas, 37 x 48 inches
