Studio Visits

I love studio conversations. I don't have enough of them. A really good studio chat usually involves some heartbreak, some navel gazing and eventually becomes a great critical discussion on current ideas. The best visits have ended up occurring when I least desire it. The visits allow me to really face up to what is being done - or avoided. Sometimes those ideas wouldn't ordinarily express themselves otherwise.

I had a great visit with Nick. I remember the realization that the ideas we were talking about weren't yet being demonstrated in my new painting. I deflected to explaining ideas about cleaning up my palette, my marks, etc, at which point he scolds, "I think you can safely say your a good painter and just put it in your back pocket for awhile." Anotherwords: get over it and get on with painting.

Via, Two Coats of Paint, T.J. Carlin's Studio Visit column is great! The Lisa Yuskavage conversation that Sharon Butler points to is also one of my favorites.

Something that does disturb me is when someone tells me I’m a good painter, and they mean technically. That’s like telling someone who flies an airplane that you’re good at it. If you’re painting—or flying an airplane—you should be good at it! High-quality craft is a part of what we do as painters. If it was merely technique or being provocative with the imagery, I’d be totally disinterested in what I was doing. I’m not trying to make merely a spectacle. There are two kinds of reality—there’s the reality of the painting and the pictorial language of all that is happening there—that part’s not that interesting. How those things interact is what is potentially really interesting.

I have always liked the way Yuskavage paints, but not her subject matter. Except for the pie face paintings. (which is an idea that's explored by Adrian Ghenie too!)