Portland Art Open

Kate Fenker’s most recent work consists of mathematically derived, organic structures that evoke a sense of their evolutionary process.  When speaking with me, she referred to them as eggs, or seedlings for what will grow out of the primordial soup of her own personally derived visual language.  Both she and Orji Walflauer sat down to discuss with me the recent trends in her work, living in New York City, and what interests her about other artists.

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Kate, I know that you’re showing work for the Portland Art Open - what about you Orji?

Orji: What I’m doing, I’m supplement and providing a context for Kate’s work. I’m making a caption and a poetical mediation on each piece that will accompany it, and I’m creating a soundscape so that anyone stepping in will feel like they’re being digested, slowly, by Kate’s way of seeing. That’s my intention with the soundscape.

Kate: Also, there’s going to be a video.

Orji: It’s going to be quite an assault on the senses, but it’s going to be very serene.

Kate: And the next show that we do, it will probably be me making props for his presentation, I thought. This is more of a regular art show context, and I’m the object maker of the two of us, so this is going to be more along those lines.

It should be a pretty immersive experience. My MFA show was the last time I did an immersive environment that incorporated sculptures but also branched out into creating an environment. I haven’t had the opportunity or the right kind of context to do that again. It’s only just now occurred to me that it’s been so long. It was really fun.

What of your work will you be showing?

I’ve been working for the last few years on - I have sort of a late blooming interest in math and science. I started reading and considering really heavily math and science over the last several years. The work is sort of drawing on ideas after that. I’ve always been attracted to the organic and primordial sort of forms. and when I started reading more about biology and evolution, mathematics and geometry, it gave a whole new way of seeing the way that forms develop in nature. So basically all of these forms are spun out of this new information and way of considering self organizing systems in nature, euclidean and non-euclidean things, hyperbolics, chaos, the way that form develops in a really basic way. Most of the pieces are really small, some of them are very very finished, and some of them are not so finished. Some of them are very successful and others of them not so successful, but they’re all part of this pool of thought. I’m sort of considering them a library of prototypes, and thoughts in various stages of progress, hopefully to be spun out once again in more elaborate and more developed forms.

So would you almost say that they’re the additional seeds of this visual language that you’re exploring?

Yeah, or almost that they’re the initial flowers, or the initial chickens and then their eggs will hatch, into the next more elaborate chickens. So they’re the protochickens, and I can’t wait for them lay eggs that’ll hatch into the next generation of mutant chickens.

This show is really, for my own use, it’s about serving and assessing what I’ve done and where I’ve been and what I’ve been thinking about. All this work I did in New York, it’s all over the last few years. It’s to fertilize this chapter, lay it out so it can grow into the next set of pieces.

You spoke of using mathematical systems in nature. What about this excited you, how did it influence the pieces? Were you actually writing equations for these sorts of pieces?

You might be surprised. I actually do write a lot of equations, but I never got much farther than trigonometry in school, as far as math goes. I never took any calculus or anything, and that’s what you have to do to get into very sophisticated math. Yet somehow I can get an intuitive appreciated for some of that stuff just by analogy. But a lot of these things are built out of huge towers of arithmetic. I wouldn’t got so far as to call it ‘mathematics’ but it’s definitely arithmetic. Complete with mistakes.

I guess I was frustrated with approaching art-making it on a purely intuitive basis, is I don’t mind the part where get an idea from wherever. But developing just out of your gut instinct was frustrating to me, and I wanted to have some kind of tool to use. I started learning about how things form in nature according to systems like the Fibonacci sequence, and according to certain sequences of proportion, and certain kinds of chaos dynamics, which are really hard to understand but really inspiring to think about. The Fibonacci sequence is easy to understand, but chaos is really hard to understand, and somewhere in between there is this rich terrain.

It’s like how artists use the cut up technique, or other things to get beyond themselves, and incorporate chance, so using some kind of numerical sequence as part of something else isn’t exactly chance, but it takes you in a place that you’re not making up. Your sort of plugging yourself into nature in way.

It grounds it.

Yeah, and I’m not stuck in it. I can make decisions in just the same way. If you see something even in nature, maybe if you completely abstract it and put in a vacuum, it can break down into these systems, but it’s not like that out there. All kinds of stuff is going on and messing it all up in all kinds of great ways.

I feel like there’s me and real life and everything messing it up. But then other times I’ve done things to incorporate chance, actual chance in a more conscious way. Like using arrangements and scattering stuff or rolling dice or anything to augment my - it’s never just purely that, there’s something that I’ve decided that I’m doing and a way that I’m executing it. But yet it’s nice to simultaneously ground things and shake things up, by adding a little bit of chance, and another mind to it.

Did working with these euclidean ideas and things like the Fibonacci sequence, did that change your perceptions of classical art? A lot of renaissance art is rooted in the geometry of those sequences. Not to say that you’re approaching your work in exactly the same way because it sounds like your approaching it in a more organic way.

It’s funny because I don’t know what the renaissance artists themselves would say. There were a lot of stokers on the golden mean - stokers meaning enthusiasts - devotes. I always bought it because I was told so many times and shown these dotted lines of how things corresponded to the golden mean. A lot of that I think just comes naturally, because that’s how we’re made. If you divide up your finger, that’s how it’s proportioned, from this knuckle to that knuckle, etc. You can’t escape it, it’s a comfortable place to be. Yet there are a lot of other places to be that are used very extensively because they’re not. If you have a long attenuated, spiky thing, that doesn’t have anything to do with the phi proportion or whatever. It’s effect is completely because it’s extreme and it’s not. And you find that as much as you find the other. I have the feeling that they were finding it because they were looking for it.

I don’t think you have to. I think people naturally find that kind of proportion. although some of the middle eastern geometry and the way they made their temples, that’s consciously based in various geometric proportions.

So there’s a lot of work that fits this pattern, and yet the creator of it isn’t always aware of it. It looks good because it is.

Kate: Yeah. If it’s natural to us then we go that way.

So when you talk about using these ideas in a primordial way - your work is knitted so it’s process oriented, so it’s a lot of the same action. Do you approach these pieces from the ground up, are you seeing what you grow into? Or, I know the painting term is ‘blocking in’ the picture, do you look at it from the outside, and then try and refine it down into something?

Kate: I go both ways. I’ve consciously blocked it in, worked it out completely, started from the beginning and arrived at the end exactly as I had planned. Then there are other times when I’ve applied a repeating process to something and seeing what it grows into, which is sometimes a giant mess. but there’s parts of the too. I’m always looking for processes that don’t just cave completely in on themselves really fast, but actually will go somewhere interesting without me being able to see exactly where they are going, because I think that’s really interesting to accept and adventure for yourself. An adventure would be no good if the first thing you did was step off a cliff and just fall to your death. It’s only a good adventure if you kind of know what your getting into so you can actually have an adventure. So I like it when I come up with a process that I can rely on to take me on an adventure, and not just eat itself up.

It can be nice to know that something might get away from you in the long run because that can be very interesting.

Kate: Yeah, there’s one piece that would be a good example where I didn’t know exactly how it was going to work. It was a process of subdividing into squares at different angles, and I just went until the squares got too small. I could maybe if my life depended on it, make the ten thousand tiny squares that would constitute the further branching out, but I’d probably go in the other direction. Stat with a bigger square to begin with and get down to squares the size I have now.

Orji: The fractalization of the fringes, and the inclusion of the formula in the grid, that sets up a mental space that sort of extends infinitely.

Yeah, right now it’s a visual thing your making, so it’s about visually where do you stop.

Kate: Yeah

Is there anything about this latest body of work that did surprise you in a good way or a bad way, when you finished it or as you were working on it?

Kate: The truth is, yes there was something that surprised me. The work is very time consuming, and I’ll get very absorbed in the thing that I’m working on, and by the time done with it, even if it’s just a little turd, I have pretty much exhausted my interest in it for anywhere between five seconds, or five years (laughs). But what I mean is, so often when I’m finished with something, a lot of the stuff I’m not so satisfied with, and I don’t want to look at it because it’s driving me crazy. But now, bringing it all out, and looking at it all at once, I was really surprised by all the variety and all the liveliness that was all spread around me.

I was really surprised by all the live fecundity of the whole spread. I kept it putting it out of my mind as I went from piece to piece, putting them away so I wouldn’t have to look at them. Now that I’ve got a little bit of distance they don’t drive me crazy. It’s almost like I enjoy my work a lot better, after putting it all away and getting it out all at once than I ever though I would have.

Did you see a pattern emerge?

Kate: Yeah, there were correlations between different pieces. That’s one of the most surprising and interesting and useful things for me, and that’s one of the things I was looking for but didn’t really allow myself to find in the process, because I kept hiding my own work from myself so it wouldn’t drive me nuts. But now that it’s out, I can see relationships between pieces created with different media at different times, that give me ideas about where I could take mutations of two different ideas or more. I often didn’t realize that two different pieces were so similar.

So in terms of being eggs, they’re very successful, you have a lot to go on from here.

Kate: That’s basically it. As great masterworks, I don’t think that’s what they were ever really intended to be. But as eggs, and little crystals of ideas, I can’t wait to keep rolling.

Do you prefer to work by hand, did you use machines at all to make these?

Kate: I love to use machines. I don’t have knowledge or access to many mechanized processes, so most of the stuff is done by hand. But often when I was doing it by hand, I was pretending I was the machine that I would have do it if only I could just program it into a machine. I’d make the whole program and then act it out like I was the machine, because I didn’t have one (laughs). Some of the things were made on a knitting machine, but not an automatic knitting machine, a manual one. So even though it wasn’t automated, there was a process according to a pattern. It wasn’t like a just write a program and then hit ‘on’ and have it generate these things - which would be great! I would love it. Especially because you could potentially go so fast. Talk about trying things and seeing where they would go to surprise yourself. You could plug in rules and moves, and some might work and some might not. Some ideas are just too complex to get your head around. After the first step and then that second step, the third step gets really crazy sometimes, and you just have to do it.

Especially working with mathematics.

Kate: Especially fractals, you go first generation, second generation, and then it gets completely out of hand! Machines or computers would be really useful.

I could come up with ideas that would be implementable through any kind of process, too. so I hope to get more hooked up with processes so that I can try to use automated things a little bit more.

To expand the scope or the scale of things that you’re working on?

Kate: Yes, definitely. Something that’s so compact can be hard to consider and hidden.

Orji: We were talking earlier about how the arc of this was to expand, and make it more macro.

Kate: Yes definitely, it’s unfortunate that we’re just heading into the cold and rainy season. I have some stuff mapped out, big geometric networks to be made out steel wire. They’re soldered pieces so I want to do it outside.

Did you come from New York City?

Kate: Yeah, I lived just on the opposite side on the water, in Brooklyn.

Would you say you were part of the ’scene’ in New York?

Kate: I wasn’t really. I kind of meant to be. I guess what it comes down to is I just didn’t have the right kind of personality for it. No matter how it is that this mythology that you present of yourself, somewhere in there you have to really want to play the game, and get out there and shamelessly hustle yourself.

So your work isn’t about ego.

Kate: No, in fact, I’m always trying to put the intent and the ideas into the objects as if they just made themselves. And try to get myself out of it. Self-promotion and stuff, that was what I would’ve needed to do. I went into New York wanting to do that sort of stuff, and I ended up making a lot of work in secret and keeping it to myself.

Orji: That’s been one of the challenges with the show, or one of the points of it really. With this context that we’re developing, it’s about making the world that’s suggested by these pieces and the intellectual ambiance of her process, making that seductive. Generally there’s that personality factor where an artist is presenting this iconic, archetypal cartoon of themselves for everyone to digest.

Every piece is a self portrait.

Orji: Yeah, totally. In many ways, this is like the opposite of that, it’s making the place and the process that they come from mysterious and alluring. I think people do want to get immersed, they want to make emotional contact with someone who’s a world unto themselves and go all the way into that world. But with this work it’s not just about making a superhero out of the artist, it’s making a palpable, hungry alien world.

Kate: A place you can go, a different place.

In a lot of ways, the body of work isn’t judgmental. It’s in and of itself.

Kate: Yeah that’s true. It’s not much of a commentary on anything else. It’s asking you if you want to live in this dimension, to consider this.

I think that’s a great aspiration. That shows wisdom, in way. Most great artists that we look back on now, they succeeded doing that in whatever fashion. there work is not judgmental. Even though the work is by them, and could only be made by them, in so many other ways the work speaks so strongly for itself with the language that it has created.

Orji: I think that you can be part of the cultural conversation, without having a ‘message’.

Or an agenda.

Orji: Yeah, just by presenting a fierce beauty.

Kate: It’s funny. Like when I said I wanted to go to New York and do all that, that was an old dream. I went to graduate school in San Francisco and was stuck there for ten years, and it’s a very expensive city. You’re doing creative work, and your trying to save enough money to go to New York, it’s like ‘give me a break.’ that’s hard stuff to do. I was doing a lot of musical theater, having a crazy fun life, and actually doing a lot of art too, but always dreaming that I really wanted to go to New York.

I remember, I used to have a really great art history class in college, and we saw videos of the 80s art opening scene parties. The teacher was great, he brought into our class the flavor of what was going on in New York at that time; the crazy scene, the people, the action and everything, and I just wanted to be there and wanted to be one of those people. I was really into the whole Warhol story and all the art stars and everything. People who did good work and were art stars.

It’s just over now, I just want to be alone and think. It’s just different, it wasn’t a conscious decision. It’s just natural to make these things. I feel like we made a really good decision to come here. Portland is really inviting to things, and you don’t have to fight the hustle, and really sell yourself in order to have a chance to show your work or share your work, or get people interested in your work. The flavor of all of that is so different from New York. In New York, you’re in the art world or your kind of not. here, there’s participation at all levels.

I think the New York scene in the 80’s is different from how it is now. I think the whole city has really clamped down, and it’s really become a marketplace. It feels more like there are cultural commodities, but not as much cultural generation.

I would like to make work that meant something to people, and was known. I would love to have my future solo show at the Gegosian or something. But even now, I wouldn’t want to pressure these little seeds with all that. I’m not a kid anymore, but my work is kind of young. I’ve finally found the beginnings of my own real thing, and I just have to let it be, give it some space to grow. The last thing I need is bright lights.

That’s said to have happened in the fifties, with Abstract Expressionism. It all began with eight or so guys getting loft space and talking. It started to change when they began to sell a lot of work.

Orji: It’s nice to be in that environment where ideas are circulating freely. When you talk about these groups of amazing artists who are just all about tossing ideas around…

Kate: Yeah, they’re excited, because they’re actually doing something that’s strangely, inexplicably important.

Orji: Right, and then all of a sudden, that body of ideas is like a product, and everyone has different territorial claims to it.

I’m the big brush guy.

Orji: Yeah!

Kate: Yeah, and your dealer, and people getting more attention than others.

Orji: So you’ve been at war with ten years, and get your name cast in stone as the big brush guy.

I guess to anyone who does it for while, if you’re not into the whole scene, it’d be nice to be that grand old man. Like you get to be Monet wit his waterlilies, or Matisse, drawing on the walls with a stick. They’re respected and appreciated, but were able to extricate themselves from all that.

Orji: That’s kind of the idea with Portland, for it be that teeming laboratory where there aren’t those demands placed on everything. New York will always be the ultimate marketplace. that’s where you take things to sell them, to network.

It makes sense, with your work being based on growth, that you’d want to get somewhere it could be allowed to do that in an organic fashion.

Kate: When it’s big enough to eat you, it can go back to New York.

How long did you live in New York?

Kate: Ten years.

Did the geography inform your work at all? In your work, you’ve paired everything down, and you’ve started small, and it occupies mental space, rather than being responsive to all the external parts of the city. Was that due to New York?

Kate: Definitely. Partly because of the shortage of space in general, and having it difficult to transport stuff. If you have a large painting, well now you’ve got yourself a ball of worms, don’t you? Are you going to take it on the subway? Sure, if you’ve got big money deals, you can transport those big glass Jeff Koons. I just wanted to be able to be free, so I got small.

Also, the artistic environment there, the art that you see, if you do go out - oh my god, it’s so good! Having that constant onslaught of really serious work. Serious, awesome work being taken so seriously, and being valued a lot. Just seeing it exist, it’s heartening to an artist, seeing it be a successful part of culture.

That was one of the last things I did before I moved out here, was visited the museums one last time.

Kate: Before I got on the plane, I jetted to the Whitney, I only had half an hour. There was an exhibit of Buckminster Fuller, his concept pieces and his drawings. All these weird little objects. It was really, really interesting.

There’s a research and mathematical aspect to your work, where did that stem from?

Kate: I read one book by Steven J. Gould, essays - I think it was because the title was funny. I don’t know, this was years ago. When you read these books by scientists they mention a lot of other scientists, a lot of philosophers, a lot of writers, and it just branched out from there. Did it come from New York? I don’t think so.

Orji: I think an arc can be traced, your older work, they’re paintings, but they’re these paintings of amoeboid entities. There are some that are a very clear sort of microverse and there’s weird bodies and weird states of mutation. and then there’s your work with decorative materials.

Kate: Then it started snowballing a lot. It got substructure from the science and math. I don’t think it came from New York, it just happened. I could’ve been anywhere. But I did find that New York being a big place with all kinds great stuff going on, I did find a great sort of fun science subculture, like the Secret Science club at Union Hall, where you could here lectures from people who are from the jet propulsion laboratories, or Cornell, or wherever! (laughs). Super interesting stuff, but in a bar, down in the basement, once a month!

What do you like about the materials you’re working in?

Kate: There’s a whole complex of things that has resulted of these types of media being in play. A technical reason for the knitting, as well as the beads, is because there’s a unit-by-unit sort of structure with the knitting that makes it really easy to employ a sequence of equations or a number sequence, because there you have. It’s numbers and units.

The beads, they have that, but they also have different sizes. Knitting stitches are always kind of the same, but beads can have these units but they can each be different. I’m interested the way things together and somehow can become really firm by little pieces fitting in between bigger ones.

The other reason for the media, which isn’t technical, is because I’ve done so much work in costume, fashion, theater, decoration, it just seemed like not only developing a fluency with those materials because I was working with them so much, that’s useful. But also because there’s a biographical, real life honesty of making your own ideas out of the stuff you’re always working with anyway. Like Lichtenstein painting billboards and then making his paintings like that.

Like with the big bright billboard paint.

Kate: Yeah, his own work didn’t cut itself off from the commercial work that he was doing. It took it higher or to a more personal level. It transmogrified it into something more artistically relevant without denying. I guess that’s how I feel about what I’m doing with these materials, craft and clothing and decoration kind of materials. Making those materials that I’ve had to work with fit my purposes.

That’s all true, but there are structural limitations with knitting. I don’t like things where the structure is faked. I like the structure to be integral to the way the piece is created. So I would like to put a knitted piece on an armature, or something like that. I don’t like anything where you have to say ‘oh don’t look at the back.’ To me, that’s show business. So however they’re made, that’s a part of the piece. And knitting is fairly limited in how much of a structure you can create. It’s soft, you can only make things by piling or stacking, curling or convoluting, while also being so time consuming. Ultimately, if you had enough yarn, you could make something HUGE, but there’s a reality check there.

Yarn also doesn’t last so well. Small pieces you can protect, but if you make something really huge, it’s going to get eaten and destroyed. You couldn’t clean it really, if it’s too big. So this is the genesis of these pieces. But I think that their evolution will grow into different materials. And once I realized I could teach myself new skills, I can employ these similar kind of structural techniques but expound upon them. They can bare more weight, grow quite a bit if I can use stronger stuff.

I’m a painter. and it seems like these days the traditional oil painter is the least ‘natural’ way of becoming an artist, because you’re never going to use that stuff in any other aspect of your life. You have to say ‘I’m going to approach this thing and learn it purely for the purpose of making pictures’ rather than making art with something that I already had familiarity with. And now, even if you are a successful oil painter, the only people who are going to identify with it from a materials or craft standpoint are other painters.

Kate: It has it’s pros and cons - because it can be misleading. I am really enthusiastic about knitting in a way, but you’re never going to see me knitting a sweater, ever. I’m more likely to make something that sweats.

Sometimes people because of your technique can relate to your work on a craftsman like level, whereas painting only has ties to art history, and traditional art. So no one’s ever going to mistake what your doing for something else.

So by knitting, you’re not necessarily commenting on women’s domestic roles?

Kate: No, except it’s funny… because I wouldn’t entirely say that’s not a part of it, but it’s just a part that came naturally, rather than a part I chose. Because my mom did not teach my brother to sew, but she did teach me to sew. Therefor, I knew how to sew. I didn’t learn to knit until later, but I knew I could because I was comfortable with that type of thing. I could have decided not to do that, and there have been times when, because of its correlation with women’s domestic crafts, I’ve wanted to not do it. I didn’t want to be that. Yet there it is, and I actually really enjoy it. I’m actually really heartened to see that many men are taking on these kinds of crafts these days. It’s a little problematic for me, but it’s honest.

It’s inherent.

Yeah it is. Even just blindly what I was attracted to when I first started painting were there were these primordial forms. They were just imagined and executed, they weren’t yet grounded in anything else. So those same ideas have been expressing themselves through different mediums that happen to be around me. And it could be other stuff. I think that’s what it is, your ideas have a life and they want to grow and they express themselves through whatever they have. If there’s other stuff around, which I guess there will be, they’ll use that.

So are there any artists that you really like?

Kate: The artist who really rocks my world is Tim Hawkinson. He made a tiny bird skull out of his fingernail clippings, and a tiny spiderweb out of his hair. And he made this strange contraption made out of a chair and a record player turntable and a ballpoint pen, and all this stuff cobbled together, and it signed his name over and over again on little shreds of paper. This chair is surrounded by all sort of paper with his signature. In his handwriting! I would say that’s an artist whose work I really admire.

Old Leigh Bowery was quite an inspiration to me as well. The things that really got me were - for example he was on this talk show with a bunch of these New York club kids, and he had this weird suit on, and his head was like a giant fungus, and he just sat there and didn’t say anything. Being like that, this mute presence, this kind of lurking dramatic thing.

There are lots of artists who’ve inspired me a lot without directly relating to my work. I love it when people do things that surprise me, and in fact it’s better when it doesn’t have anything to do with what I do. I love to see people be defiant, and just filled with the joy of being alive.

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Kate will be showing her work in room 401 at Milepost 5 for the entirety of the show.  Thanks again to Kate and Orji for taking the time to talk with me!

Reza Antoszewska works in Ebru, a technique dating back to ancient Islam.  In her work, she combines the practice and history of the art form with references to western art history and contemporary sensibilities.  With it, she hopes to not only foster an appreciation for a historical art form, but to also promote respect for another culture at a time when we need it most.  I met her at her home in Portland, where she showed me her works an materials.

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What will you be showing at the Art Open?

I’m going to have 20 original works. On cotton paper and silk There’ll also be a Presentation on and Demonstration of the Art Form at 2 PM on Saturday . It will be in room 403 at Mile Post 5.

 Could you describe Ebru as a technique?

It’s a monoprint technique. You work over a substrate. You have to forget everything you know about painting, because it’s such a different process; and everything you know about printing because it’s also a different process, there’s no machines, this is it. You can use all kinds of stuff to lay down the paint, and then you use other tools to work into it, like combs, styluses, and atomizers.

You need a tray that contains the medium that you lay the paint down on. You need to treat the print surface with something that will hold the paint. On the medium, you first lay down the paint and then work the paint once it’s in the tray to get the imagery you want. Finally you lay the paper down for the print.

So you’re really getting into the craft and the materials that you are using.

I feel like with this, it’s exponentially true. Even the humidity can effect how this stuff acts and reacts. There’s some people who drive miles to get certain kinds of water because they feel like it works better than other kinds. I just use distilled water for my paint. You’ve got a chemical process going and there’s a lot of variables to play with, that you can learn to work with. It’s sort of like life, you can have an expectation. Sometimes, you really have to struggle to get exactly what you want out of it, and sometimes it just happens. I even like having a sort of relationship with it where I have an idea of what I want to do, but the totality of it is being worked out as I’m doing it. Which is more like my everyday life is (laughs). I’ve accepted that it’s not going to work out how I think, but it may work out even better and more interesting if I just follow and work with what is going on. Other times I work toward a very specific result.

How are these calligraphies applied to the marbled paper? Do you marble the paper first and then put the characters over top?

That’s right.

With this one I put the bright layer and cut these masks. I then applied the masks with a temporary glue and applied my second blue layer. You can, of course, do the opposite.

So it’s a process of masking

Correct. In Qayuum, you have three different masks done - and there’s a technical part to this that an Ebru artist would appreciate more. I haven’t show this to my teacher yet but I think he’s going to like it. First I put the green, and then the next layer was the yellow. So I masked here and here, where the image was going to be, and then did the yellow. Then, I masked out here and masked out the edge, and placed the red. and then, I did the opposite of that, and cut out the image, and then covered everything except certain lines. And that way it gives the illusion that the blue is behind the green, but the blue was in fact the last layer.

 

Light Upon Light, I meant to be muddy. It was working out of the symbolism that’s in here. This image, this is the Arabic here - and interpreted it means light upon light. And this is a reflection, or a bookend of it. There’s a metaphysical significance; the light that’s transcendent to the world, something that’s kind of pre-eternal. They have this notion, which I guess any of us around the world have this idea in some form - of the Dunya, the everyday world ,can keep us from seeing that kind of light that we can see inside but it’s often hard to see it outside in the world, because of all the distractions.

For me, the artist, it was even cooler because when I put down this layer first it was all the light, the beautiful light colors. When I put the Dunya over it, that kind of messy world, it was still very beautiful but it was kind of chaotic. It masks most of the light, but then the other thing, and this is very prominent in a lot of Islamic mysticism, that in reality it’s that chaos that is there that helps us see what it [the light] is by it’s contrast. If it were all one field all you would have seen was the light. If you have something that gives it contrast, you can really understand the nature of this light. By contrast to something else. So it’s kind of playing out that image, with the symbolism that is being expressed in the words, the language and what is behind them.

And that’s an ancient belief in this art form?

Yeah.

So you’re embracing some of the philosophy of Ebru?

Yes. And sometimes the relationship that I have with these images helps me to understand it even better. They’re almost like little textbooks in some ways. There’s a great guy, Al-Hallaj, he lived in the 1100’s or so, and he was this amazing revolutionary kind of mystic. He was outspoken, and didn’t make too many friends in high places, and they ended up chopping him up and doing terrible things to him. He has this one book that has all this imagery in it. I want to do a series of that because I think it would be so cool to work with those images. And once again, because of that relationship that happens with the images as I’m working with them. It would also be an opportunity to bring some of that to us, to our culture. To make it accessible. That’s another series that will probably start in the fall.

I had a lot of fun making Wahid because I love the Hubble telescope and the pictures that it’s sending back. And this one’s called Wahid which means that there only is one of, or unique. So you know that light lines that you see in Hubble photographs, you can do that by shifting the paper. I did this whole thing of making something that looks like these hallucinatory things they see out there in space. And then there’s this uniqueness floating in the middle of that.

So these characters can be assembled in the form of a structured, formal language?

They are a formal language, Arabic mostly, but there’s different ways they can be used. Some are just made for the beauty of the written language. But as you can see they can be used as ornamentation and made to represent things like animals. One of the drives of this is that in Islam, you aren’t supposed to create images of people, like in Buddhism how Buddha requested that people not make images of him. The idea being that there’s something that’s more abstract and formless to focus on. But I think that the artist’s soul always wants to have something in front of us of beauty. It’s kind of taken this turn, turned into all of this [ Eastern Calligraphic Art]. It’s kind of like you can’t contain it. And then you come full circle, and you can see actual human figures made out of these characters.

 You refer to your pieces as prints, but they are originals?

They are originals, they’re monoprints, each unique. But I’m in the process of making limited editions digital prints of some of my works. I got some made across the river, they’re expensive but it’s worth it. Great quality.

What’s the big difference between Turkish vs. Western Abstract Ebru?

With the Western abstraction, it’s much more freed up and broad reaching. In the Turkish method, there really are certain manners in which you do things. If you look in the backgrounds of some of my pieces, these are very traditional patterns.

People say ‘that’s the traditional way.’ But it occurs to me that there must be a time in history when that was revolutionary, and then over time it becomes viewed as the only way you can do things.

I integrate both East and West in some of the works. Gustov Dore did these drawings for the divine comedy. There’s one that is this beautiful image that has this center of light with all thee angels flying around it, The Empyrean. This was the inspiration for Bismallah. I was taking a traditional Western image and incorporate Ebru imagery. Bismallah means “In the name of Allah.” So in this piece I had the abstract inference of the angels swirling around that name, the underlying inspiration from Dore . Instead of trying to make myself into a Turk, I’m coming to this from where I am.

I guess some of the difference in my work from the Eastern Tradition is that I’m much freer with my use of the techniques. Allah Karim is very traditional, and was a tribute to my teacher. You can see how constrained everything is as opposed to some of these other ones. In this I was wanting to appreciate my teacher and what he had taught me.

Can you tell me a little about how you learned the technique?

What was fortunate for me was that I spent most of my adult life in Boston, and Feridun lives in East Boston. At that time when I met him, his wife Nan was teaching at Harvard, he was a former engineer, but the arts were always calling to him. He’s a musician and also an instrument maker. I met him because I was learning some traditional Turkish music. Mainly what I learned from him was not to get stuck in the notion that we have to be one set role. I saw him work [at Ebru] once and was totally intimidated by the magnificence of his work. I thought this work was so cool.

I met my other teacher when I brought over a bunch of Turkish musicians. I was very interested in music for healing, using pentatonic music. There were these guys who was traveling all around central Asia finding very old music. I wanted to bring their group over to Boston, and they brought Hikmet with them. And it turned out these people weren’t very interesting to me, even though their music was interesting. But Hikmet was really interesting and I did Ebru for the first time with him.

Since then Feridun has been my teacher, in a very flexible way. I don’t think he’s ever stood over me and said “do this.” I watched him work and then I work, and I bring it to him and he critiques. I guess it’s like being an apprentice rather than being in an art class. It’s an old way.

It’s a very different relationship to learning, and I think it’s a wonderful way to learn. I supposed it wouldn’t work if there wasn’t someone you resonated with. When I started doing the multi-layer stuff, which is what my teacher specializes in, somehow my life really changed. I remember when I told him and I showed him what I was doing, our relationship changed too. One of the first things he said to me was “are you losing sleep yet?” and I said I was, and he said, “Good.”

Feridun’s teacher, who lives in Turkey, is also a master musician, and a master at Ebru. And he learned from one of the Turkish masters of Ebru. He’s also an instrument maker and is a Neyzen - he plays the reed flute, and he raises roses and finches. I mean, what a life. He came to a show at the Museum of Fine Arts, in Boston, and I was immediately in love with this guy. He was 88 years old. And I was watching everybody else who was having that experience, that everybody who came in contact with him would just melt. He has some art of humanity to him. So there’s a lot going on in this kind of student teacher relationship, this heightened form that was developed in the East.

You can compare to the history of when this art form came to Europe, it went into the guilds. It just became a whole different thing. It became a commercial venture. I’m sure there were people working in a different way, but at the forefront of it, the guild masters would teach each person just one little piece of it, so they couldn’t steal it.

Here in America, you can see the inside covers of expensive books that have the marbling in them. they’re using the same techniques, there is a very different intent, but the process is somewhat similar. There’s a lot of American and German people in particular who are taking this technique and taking it into very extreme and interesting abstractions.

Do you have any other western visual influences?

Nicholas Roerich. His work influenced me in his use of colors - his use of blue. He started in Russia but traveled all around in the East, and spent a lot of time in the foothills of Tibet, in what is now India. He eventually came to America. He tried to start an organization that put this symbol on places like museums and universities, he wanted to have different countries sign a pact that they wouldn’t destroy these buildings having to do with culture in times of war. I think that sense of being able to touch something, and to say something with your art that’s impossible to say with words is so present in his work.

What other parts of Ebru’s philosophy do you feel connected to in your own life?

When I’m working with the process, it’s really so relational with these images. It’s not a cereberal process. I get to access something that’s a little more essential than my intellect and something that’s a little more profound than my emotions. Working out of that inner process of how this thing is going to look, I really cherish being in that state.

There’s also the patience that’s involved. There are so many steps to go through. It reminds me a lot of going through a birth process. When I lived in Massachusetts, we had a whole bunch of little studios that were linked together in one hall. I remember I just finished this piece, and I was really happy about it, and I ran down the hall with it to show another artist, still at work at the other end of the hall. It was three A.M. and we were the only people that were still there. I had this thing in my hands and I came in, and she said ‘how come it’s all wet?’ And I looked at it and though ‘God, this is like a baby. Baby’s are all wet when they come out too.’ There’s this gestational part of it, but when you actually get to doing printing, you’re working with nature, with the fluid and the humidity. I find it to be much more a sense of relating to nature when I’m working in this way than I have in any other art form that I have tried to do.

You do a great job of describing each image on your web site. Is there a particular way that the viewer is supposed to perceive the backgrounds or the marbling beneath the written characters? you described it as light at one point, which I found to be very interesting.

Some of them, there’s definitely an intent for it be seen symbolically. This one is ArRahman Ar Raheem, ‘the mercy and the compassion.’ The layer beneath the characters is these lily pads, which is to show that this mercy and compassion can be found in nature. From a symbolic point of view, there might be something I have done to imbue it with a certain imagery. But in other pieces, I don’t think it’s needed.

I think that for a western audience it can enhance the piece to know what the characters mean.

There’s a feeling of transience in the technique that you use. That feeling of water or a liquid that you’re almost ‘catching’ at the right time, but it’s also contrasted with these characters that you’re using. theres the notion of language or a letter being such an abstraction of the visual that it extends into infinity. Is there a feeling of time that you think is evocative in your work?

I haven’t seen much of that. Although I can think of one comment. A gentlemen came with his wife, who worked in the same studio, and he was looking at an Ebru piece. We were talking about an Italo Calvino book, and time, and reading this book and how absorbing it gets. Then he said ‘or we could just sit here for a while and just look at your artwork…’ and he just got lost in it.

I think that it’s more representational of the timeless world, where the temporal is lost. Even the words themselves are speaking to something that is very often beyond time. I’ve worked very hard to even put a sense of time into some of these, because I feel these are almost windows into a place where time isn’t really so relevant.

In some ways, it’s almost two sides of timelessness. The backgrounds are like flowing water, an organic kind of timelessness with nature and the world going by. The characters are a different kind of timelessness, unchanging and eternal.

That’s what I love about those images. That’s why I like to work with them, because they’re access to something that I feel hungry for. It’s like taking something that’s transcendent, and then mixing in the physical elements that are so present in the medium.

I think there might be something eternal in the calligraphies themselves, but there’s something in the elements that’s relational with that. Maybe that’s the essence of poetry and prayer. There’s something that is totally transcendent and eternal, and then we have a way of touching that and integrating ourselves with it.

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Reza Antoszewska will be showing at Milepost 5 this weekend.  Her work will include prints on fabric and paper, as well as a demonstration of the Ebru technique on Saturday, September 27.

 

 

Alisha Wessler’s drawings are little vignettes of organic beauty: figures and fauna emerge from densely patterened masses that evoke the plants and landscape where they reside.  They are successful often in the way that they deny expectations.  Her drawings are small but panoramic, decorative yet expansive, and dense while still providing the viewer’s eye room to explore.  Recently she has applied her practices to installation work that combines drawing with layering and lighting scenarios.

Alisha was kind enough to take the time to speak with me about her work, influences, and what’s great about paper.

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What first drew you to the arts?

I have loved making things for as long as I can remember.  I think it was a pretty natural progression.

You went to The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, what did you study there?  Is your current work similar to what you did in school?  If so, how did the faculty respond to it?

I was in the fiber and material studies department so I was focusing most of my energy on embroidery and soft sculptures during that time.  Most of the work I was making was pretty different from what I’m doing now.  It wasn’t until the end of my time there that I started drawing a lot more.  I was doing a lot of screen printing and I would draw over the failed prints to try to salvage them.  I started to find that ones that I had drawn over were more interesting than the clean and perfect prints.

You’ve done drawing, illustration, and installation.  What kind of work can we be expecting for the PAO?

Hopefully a bit of all three.  I will be showing my most recent works - drawings on wooden panels and framed illustrations.  The installation part is still in question, I guess I should say that it will be a surprise.  Right now I am working on building some sort of structure from old drawers and found wood.  I am hoping to create a really fun and stimulating environment, regardless.

What about drawing and paper are you attracted to, in particular?

For me drawing has always been the most natural thing to do, it is such an elemental way of unwinding or communicating.  In the same way, paper seems so basic.  It is a readily available resource and something that we are familiar with from the beginning of childhood.  I love paper as a building tool - it is lightweight and mailable - add flour and water and you have a material that becomes surprisingly hard and durable.  Last year, when I built a papier-mache cave installation for the Mississippi May warehouse project, I got all my paper for free.  The Oregonian is an amazing resource - they will give you three huge rolls of blank end-roll paper a day.

What tools do you use to draw with?

Most of the time I use ink and a dipping pen, the kind with replaceable metal nibs, but recently I’ve started using a really fine brush.  I’ve also been experimenting with airbrush paint because it’s less viscous than ink.

A little bit of a shop question - do you prefer to work flat, or vertically?

I work on a flat table most of the time.  I actually prefer to work at an angle, but I tend to use the drafting table only for illustrations drawn on paper.

You’ve said that your process is largely intuitive.  How do you begin and end a piece? Are there a lot of preparatory steps in order to get started, and how do you know when you are finished?

Lately I’ve been making most of my drawings on wood.  Sometimes I will lay down paint first and then draw into the fields of color.  That was how I made all the pieces in the Necessary Territories series.  More recently I’ve been drawing on bare wood and I find that it’s a really interesting way to begin.  The wood grain is often full of great imagery and gives me something to play with.  Similarly, I am a huge stain enthusiast.  I love drawing over surfaces with peculiar stains or marks - they often dictate how I begin a piece.

Knowing when I am finished is a lot more difficult.

Your pieces manage to evoke the sensation of figures and landscapes, often simultaneously.  Your most recent images show this perfectly, with their dense patterning, earth tones and sky-blue backgrounds.  What are your visual influences, and how have they impacted your recent work?

That’s a great question.  There are so many places and objects and images that inspire me but when you mention landscapes, Joseph Yoakum’s drawings instantly come to mind.  He was a self-taught artist who, in his later years (during the 1960’s), made these amazing panoramic landscapes drawn from memories of his extensive travels with the railroad circus.  I love his process of drawing a specific landscape (Crater Lake, for instance) from memory and then allowing it to change into a much more magical and otherworldly scene.  He was incredibly prolific too - I used to work at the Roger Brown Study Collection (artist’s house museum) when I lived in Chicago and there was an entire room full of Yoakum’s watercolor and pencil landscapes - it’s probably my favorite part of the entire collection.  Being around his work so much must have changed the way I had been thinking about drawing and perspective.

Considering that your work makes so much use of density, line weight, and patterning, what role does scale play in present and future pieces?

So far I’ve only made one really big drawing - it’s a mural I did for the restaurant Nutshell (on N. Williams Avenue).  It was such an adventure for me making something that large, as I am always working on these extremely tiny, detailed pieces.  I loved being high up on a ladder, drawing from the top of the wall and then slowly working my way down.  I am currently working on one slightly larger panel for the Portland Art Open (2×4 feet) but I know that’s still considered rather small in the grand scheme of things.  I hope to really bust out and make some super large drawings soon.  I would love to do another wall drawing in the near future.

I’m curious as to what in particular drew you to this form of expression.  On a pure gut level, it just resonates with that almost animal instinct to fill up a page with a little doodle repeated over and over again.  Yet it’s being used in extremely sophisticated ways by some artists today.  Not only that, but it’s extremely practical in terms of size and materials - I would imagine you can work on these pieces almost anywhere.

Yeah, it’s definitely one of the perks of working with pen and ink.  I am always carrying around materials just in case I get the chance to work in some random place.  I love being able to take projects to coffee shops in the winter - and even better, being able to draw outside in the warmer months.  Today I was drawing in the backyard until it got too dark to see.  I feel so lucky to be able to do that.

There’s a tendency among a lot of people to view drawings and paper-based installation art as less serious, or less sophisticated than painting and sculpture.  I wondered what your reaction was to that tendency or if you disagree with me there.

Oh, I agree.  People definitely undervalue drawings - always have and probably always will.  It doesn’t really concern me, though.  It’s interesting because I would never consider myself a painter, but I do use paint and the act of painting to create the images I make.  I see the paint as a sort of backdrop or stain for the drawing that goes over it.  I am more interested in what happens in drawing, which feels like expression in its rawest form.

Your style is rooted in the fine arts, but is still fairly accessible.  Have you ever been tempted to do drawings in a more literal or narrative way?

Yeah, sometimes I get ideas that would require a more sequential format.  I have been thinking about making a series of illustrations based on the sea chantey, “The Turkish Revelee” which is a variation of “Sinking in the Lonesome Sea.”

Many of your drawings seem to be defined in some ways by absence.  The horizons perceived in on the edge of your patterning are uninhabited, at least on the surface.  Many of your plant forms can either be read as being extremely close, or a thousand miles away.  Yet this is offset by the dense interior linework that draws the eye in and surrounds one’s viewpoint.  I was wondering what causes you to leave these landscapes largely unpopulated; these plants unharmed?

I don’t think there’s really a set reason - my process is largely intuitive so sometimes I feel that the work decides itself.  On a more conscious level I am trying to give these scenes an element of loneliness, which would explain the uninhabited landscapes.

What drew you back to Portland?  Why here, why now?

I remember when I was a kid thinking that I would come back to Portland someday.  For some reason I really romanticized the idea of my birthplace.  So I’ve been feeling the pull for a while - and more realistically in the past few years.  It just so happened that my two oldest and best friends from childhood happened to be living here after I finished school.  It seemed like the right time to make the move - and it was.  It’s a great place to be making and showing work as an emerging artist because the art community is so supportive.

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Thanks again to Alisha Wessler, who will be showing her work at Milepost 5 starting Friday, September 26.

 

Mark Clarson’s work is rooted deeply in what might be a life-long wanderlust, he has lived in over thirty different homes so far.  Perhaps it should come as no surprise, then, that his work contains references to travel, circuses, and the very structures in which we spend most of our time - albeit in unexpected ways.  It is also an observant art that is rooted in historical knowledge and a sensitivity to Mark’s surrounding geography. 

Mark was able to take the time to discuss with me the qualities of his own work - and where it might be headed in the future.

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What first drew you to the arts?  How long did you intend to become artist?

I began drawing at a young age and communicated visually for as long as I can remember.  As soon as I realized that being an artist as a profession was a feasible option, it was my chosen course.  I was very fortunate to have an artist in my family in my grandmother who supported me in my visual pursuits from an early age.

 

You spent the majority of your formal art education in Chicago.  What impact did this have on your art?

I went to art school and graduate school in Chicago and ended up staying there for other reasons.  I lived in the city of Chicago for 16 years of my adult life.  I became very interested in Chicago’s deep industrial manufacturing history and I would say that it a direct influence on my art practice.  It is in Chicago that I became interested in metalworking as a means to express my visual discourse.  I really struggled with the notion of working with these very traditional materials.  Working with metal (specifically bronze and steel) brings to mind the work of the high-modernist sculptors of the 1960’s.  Working with these materials is in many ways taboo in the post-modern lexicon.  I became involved with fabricators and metal workers in various trade applications in Chicago.   It was through these relationships with non-artist metalworkers that I began to start using these materials in my work and seeing the materials inherent visual value.

I would also say that Chicago has a very rich public sculpture history that has influenced my approach to art practice and exhibition.  It is difficult to name the many influences the city has on my art practice.  I will say that while attending graduate school I was lucky enough to work with Homi K. Bhabha.  This influence directly informed my work as it relates to identity, colonization and the politics of cosmopolitanism and multi-culturalism. 

 

You hail from Texas originally, and your work references both Mexican Circus Tents as well as the infamous outlaw, Joaquin Murrieta.  What is it that drew you to Mexican culture in particular?

I was raised in Texas but I am truly a nomad at heart.  My mother is a professional tarot-card reader and I was always surrounded by mystics of different calibers of skill throughout my childhood.  I have lived in over 30 residences so far in my life. While living in Chicago, I took a sabbatical to West Texas and became very interested in the nomadic tent circuses of the 17th and 18th century.  I especially became interested in the nomadic-mystics of the Las Carpas and their influence on West Texas.   In Southwest Texas, Anglo culture has appropriated many of the visual and cultural practices of Mexican culture.  From architecture, art, food, and dress the two cultures are virtually intertwined into the West Texas landscape.   It is part of what makes that region of Texas so interesting and unique.  This influence is specific to the Las Carpas and Joaquin Murrieta pieces. 

The newer work  (Space Race and The Visitation) is not specifically influenced by West Texas at all.  The sculpture I am showing for the Art Open is based on my time New Orleans.

 

How do you perceive the outlaw in modern America?  Do you believe that the notion of the ‘bandit’ has changed drastically from the time of Murrieta?

The two sculptures featuring Joaquin Murrieta and his captor Harry Love are still in progress and will be in a show at the Guardino Gallery in 2009.

The outlaw is a classic figure in American folklore and a great deal of scholarly work has been created cataloging the mythology of the written and oral history of the outlaw.

In the West of the mid 18th century there was a distinct mythological narrative attached to the Outlaws of the day that was inherently moral.   This is not an exclusively contemporary notion that was developed in Hollywood as many think.  There is a Robin Hood approach to outlaws such as Joaquin Murrieta that was a popular tactic for storytellers of the day.  This is in fact where the character of Zorro was created.  Of course, the historical truth was a completely different set of circumstances.  Joaquin was responsible for many cold-blooded and unprovoked violent deaths.  This however does not interest me as an artist.  I am interested in the mythology as a visual language. The bandit in contemporary American culture continues to be mythologized in ways that are a telling reference point for cultural self-examination.  The collective memory of the outlaw as it relates to contemporary storytelling has evolved in recent history to one less concerned with a moral imperative to one that is more focused on issues relating to self-indulgence and power. 

 

The circus is typically viewed as a visually wild and chaotic place, yet your drawing and sculpture appears comparatively subdued.  Your drawings, in particular, show figures in constricted, visually enclosed spaces.  What led you to portray your subject in this way?

In Las Carpas, I am not interested in the physical act of the circus performance itself.  I am interested in the time and space spent traveling from show to show within the Texas and Mexican deserts.  These pieces originate from the moments spent in camp in a state of waiting to perform. The representation of solitude is ever present in my work.  A searching to connect through an act of visual performance is inherent in these fictional characters of the Las Carpas.

 

Your sculptures in Las Carpas often show a human, animal, or both standing over unmoving relics of humanity like cars and houses.  How does this tie into your subject matter?

The fabricated vehicles and homes in my work are visual signifiers that associate the viewer to a specific time and place.  With that being said, I am not interested in nostalgia per se.   From very early on I was influenced by the way the stack or column was used in the work of Constantin Brancusi.  I became interested in a notion of a visual hierarchy.  The vehicles and houses often serve as a reference point of place within my work.

 

When it comes to day-to-day routine, one might view the ‘occupation’ of artists and outlaws as polar opposites.  Yet the mentality of each is up to debate.  This is an extreme statement (I’m playing devil’s advocate here) - but one might see the artist of today as supremely self-indulgent, but completely powerless.  Do you ever see yourself or other artists as having a relation to ‘outlaws’ of the past?

In terms of power, I do not tend to think of artists as having inherent power per se.  The artist throughout history has consistently played the role of a for-hire craftsman serving the needs of the bourgeoisie.  Only recently through Modernism, Conceptualism and now Post Modernism is the artist on a self-guided journey of representation that has not necessarily been driven by the desires of their clientele.  However the art market is a finicky place, and I am not kidding myself in the belief that art makers of today (myself included) do not change their practice to address the tastes of the moment.   With that being said, the artist certainly does provide visual input to the culture in which the artist works.  Certainly there is a power associated with the ability to transcend time and be viewed within art history.

In terms of the artist as outlaw, I think to the works of Andres Serrano, Jeff Koons, Robert Mapplethorpe, and of the suspended formaldehyde animals of Damien Hirst to a lesser extent. There is a distinction between controversial and illegal, but I believe that these examples illustrate your point well.   All of these artists explore boundaries of visual representation as it relates to the notion of beauty.  They do not necessarily break the law, but they certainly challenge the status quo. 

In terms of actual illegal art practice; you have the work of British artist Robert Thwaites.   He became well known for his wonderfully executed forgeries that cost unsuspecting art collectors millions of dollars.  He was eventually captured and imprisoned.  However, once he was released from prison in 2007, he has become quite successful selling his forgeries as forgeries.

 

The pieces contain familiar elements such as houses, cars, and animals - yet they are of a size not quite small enough to be considered models in the traditional sense.  You also mention public sculpture as an influence.  What do you like about the scale you work in currently , and have you considered doing larger, sight-based sculptures in the future?

I have to work in a scale that I can physically handle without asking for too much help from others.  All of my materials are quite heavy and I try to keep the work on a manageable human scale.  Most of my gallery work falls in the 36″ x 36″ x 36″ realm which works fairly well for indoor exhibition.  I try to be careful in this scale range because at some point they start to look like toys or models.  There is a fine line between sculpture and model making that tends not to be very well defined.  It is a problem with representational object making that is not unique to my work.

I have submitted a few ideas for public site-specific works and we shall see if they go into production.  In those pieces, the work is responding to the scale of the architecture so we are getting in the 20′ x 20′ arena (which is quite expensive to produce using my methods).  I would require some outside capital to be able to produce work in this scale.  I am interested in working in a larger scale and I do hope to be able to achieve some site-specific works in the future.

 

What brings you to Portland?  Considering your work is so informed by geography, have you found aspects of your current home creeping into it?

I have been coming out to Portland annually since 1992 to visit my mother.  I also lived here for a brief stint in 1995.   I have three children and I want them to have the best childhood experience that I can provide.  Chicago is a great city for adults and it may even be a great city for children if you are stinking rich.  Portland allows a very sustainable lifestyle on a relatively modest income.

As a secondary reason, I moved to Portland because the local art scene blows Chicago’s out of the water on almost every front.  The art community here is fantastic and much more supportive than you find in the bigger cities of the Midwest and East coast. 

In terms of new work based on the Pacific Northwest, I have been making some drawings and I will see where they take the work.  I am still finishing up some of my other pieces from my time in Chicago and I need to get those completed and out into the world before I begin anything else.  With that being said, the things that immediately captivated me on a visual level when I moved here were the OHSU Willamette Shore Trolley over I-5 and those strange skyline cables that are attached to yarders in the logging industry to move felled trees.  I am going to see if I can make a sculpture that integrates those two very visually striking elements in a kinetic sculpture in the near future.

 

You’ve said that you’re a nomad at heart.  Do you have anywhere that you’d really like to go to soon?

I have settled on Portland and this is home base. It is a wonderful city and it is where I want to raise my children.  I have a house in a great inner-city neighborhood and the children are attending an amazing public arts focused elementary school that I adore.  With that being said, I would very much like to spend some time in Uruguay.  I am really interested in the gauchos of the region, and I would love to learn as much as I can about their experience in the Uruguayan outback firsthand.  On a side note, I hear the Uruguayan beef is fantastic as well.

 

Which of your pieces can we be expecting at the Portland Art Open?

I am showing a sculpture that is based on my time in New Orleans entitled Floating on the Ninth.  I am also showing one of the Las Carpas etchings.  I think these two pieces will showcase what I am about as an artist well.  I really do not want to crowd the space with too much work, so I think these two will be the perfect amount for the space provided.

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Thanks again to the artist for an excellent interview.  Mark Clarson will be showing his work at Milepost 5 on 900 NE 81st Ave. 

Daric Cheshire’s riveted aluminum paintings are unique in their materiality and sturdy in construction. They are the product of a man who has applied his intuition and skill with an industrial medium to the concepts of painting, and are all the more successful for it.

One of the strongest qualities of these paintings is how they circumvent the static nature that seems inherent in their construction. Though they’re riveted firmly together with grid-like compositions and flat planes of color, the mechanical surface belies more painterly sensibilities. The metal has been scratched and worn, while the colored lacquer shows signs weathering. In these spaces we can see Daric’s hand at work, as well as the external forces that often act on his materials.

Thanks to him for taking some time out of his day to discuss his work with me.

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How long have you lived in Portland?

I’ve lived in Portland since early 2005.

And where are you from originally?

I was raised in Texas and I spent a lot of time in the bay Area.

How did you get into the motorcycle business?

Nearing completion of art school and realizing I wanted to do a little bit more, I was interested in mechanics and motorcycles, so I literally dropped out of art school and went to Mechanics school. And I’ve just been doing it from there.

So you did go to art school at first?

Oh yeah, right out high school I went to San Francisco Art Institute. I spent two and a half years there with a semester in New York. It just became a combination of me being burned out and sick of it, and seeing friends get out and working for minimum wage; I didn’t like that. I wanted to experience a few more things.

So you went to art school for a while - what caused you to go in the first place? What turned you on to art?

I’ve been doing art since I was six, for summer camp. By fifth grade I was being bussed to Vanguard school and then graduated from an arts high school. So I’ve just been doing it my entire life.

What did you study in school?

Basic liberal arts, painting, and sculpture. And some printmaking.

Was anyone else in your family an artist?

My mom did some painting when I was in high school and junior high. She took some city college classes, but didn’t paint professionally. My sister’s an attorney, and my brother’s a professor.

Are you the oldest child, youngest…

Middle.

Do you bike or race at all yourself?

I ride on the track occasionally. I don’t ride on the street personally anymore. I have a Vintage Bike that I was going to race, but I haven’t gotten around to it. I’m building the motor now. Through the shop we support a race team, I built a racing bike for the guy that runs it locally.

What interests you about bikes?

Like a lot of guys in high school, I was fascinated with them, but never allowed to have one when I lived with my parents. I moved to San Francisco and got one, cause it was the practical way to get around the city. And there’s just this side of my brain that likes the mechanical aspect. Not just bikes in general. I do Ducati and BMW, and they are different from other bikes in the way they’re put together.

So it’s nice to work with something of superior quality?

Superior quality, build, character, yeah.

What work are you going to be showing for the Portland Art Open?

It’ll be primarily the metal work from this past year, the paintings out of aluminum. I’ll have the wrist bands as well.

Why do you work in aluminum?

It’s a part of who I am. It’s very mechanical, it’s trade-like - the methods for making it. I spent about a year and a half working on airplanes back in California, so I picked up some of the trade. It’s an idea I came up with of putting who I am and my experiences back into art.

What kind of tools are you using when making these paintings?

Drills, presses, breaks for bending it. A rivet gun, because everything is hammer riveted together. I also use lacquer on the colored portions.

Do you color the metal before you assemble the painting?

I color it before I assemble it.

Do you have an ideal space in mind for these paintings?

Museums. (laughs) White walls, high end loft space. Somewhere you can see it in a good scale.

You work in metal, and you work on motorcycles. Do you ever consider pushing the two together even more? Have you ever thought of using bikes or bike parts in your work?

No, I’ve seen that a lot, and that’s not really who I am. I like to build custom bikes and I’ve built custom bikes before, but that’s being creative with the motorcycles. But the motorcycles being the painting or the sculpture, I don’t think that will ever happen. I don’t really like using found objects - I like everything from scratch. Even with the other work that I’ve done or studied, I’ve always considered myself to be a painter in what I do.

Do you treat the studio experience similarly or differently from the shop experience?

The painting with the metal is creative but it’s pretty structured at the same time, which may be why it works well for me, or has been in the past. It’s pretty tedious - it’s completely different from doing an oil painting. You have to do things precisely, which was something I had never been used too with artwork. In that way it’s like work with motorcycles. But sitting there and thinking about the painting and looking at the painting, it’s nothing like shop work.

You mentioned structure. Do you do a lot of preliminary sketches for your paintings or are they more free form?

They’re pretty free form. I don’t think I’ve done a drawing for any of them. I start with a couple shapes and just go from there. It’s like a collage, but using painting sensibilities as well.

Do you have any artistic or visual influences?

I like a lot of the old masters, my favorite painters are Bacon. Gordon Matta Clark is my favorite sculptor/installation artist. But I’ve never really liked looking at lots of other artists. One thing about art school is that you are forced to look at artists and that used to always bother me; how depressing I found other artwork to be, especially acceptable, “showing” work. I’d say some of these were influenced by Bacon, just slightly. I did borrow his dimensions for the larger pieces. They’re modeled after a couple of his figurative sizes that he used consistently.

How did you like working in that size?

It was great. I’d like to work bigger and do some tryptics, but I was working out of a one car garage when I made all those, so I didn’t have the space. I’d like to try making a painting as big as I could possibly get, so I hope to use the space here (Cheshire Motorsports) to do that. I envisioned blocking off the back section, and making a studio back there.

Do you ever feel tempted to do something illusionistic or representational?

I lean towards abstract. I’ve been drawing all my life, but when I work realistically, it’s a little bit too contained for me and I’m never really satisfied with doing it. I consider this recent abstract work a breakthrough for me. It gets back to who I am and reflects my personality as well. When I want to get more literal, there’s projects like Domestic Surveillance and the wristbands.

Your Uninsured wristbands and Domestic Surveillance both seem very conceptual, but your paintings are lot more abstract. Do they have a conceptual motive behind them?

I think everything does, subconsciously at the very least. Not actively, though. Not in creating them. All my art has been based on individual aesthetic. I’m not much of a conceptual artist. Who I am makes up the paintings, but the end result is a product that could only really be done by me, because it takes the technical skills and the fine arts background when it comes together. I don’t know any artists who can bend, break, roll and rivet panels together in this way. So there’s kind of a concept in that respect. Ultimately, though, I’m more about the materials and the process.

 

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Thanks again to Daric for taking the time to participate in this interview. Daric Cheshire and Carrie Cheshire will be showing their work at Cheshire Motorsports, 4815 SE Division St. There is an opening reception Thursday September 25th, 6 - 8pm.

For your perusal, here is a map of event locations so far.  Just click on a hot air balloon to get more info about a particular space.

 
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Hello and welcome!

This is a space set aside to provide you with news and updates relating to the event.  It is also a place where we will be posting interactions with participating artists, as well as interviews, articles, and soforth.  The next few weeks are going to be a whirlwind of activity as the event date approaches and we attempt to keep the sky from falling on our heads, so check back often.

Considering this post is the Blog’s maiden voyage, I’ll stick with the facts.  Here’s the pertinent info:

The event is free and open to the public, with 70 artists in over 30 locations around Portland. 

We’re operating on a shoestring budget, as this is not a profit-making venture for the event coordinators, but rather a way to increase public awareness and enjoyment of art.  It is also a way to provide artists with a presentation space that they may not normally have, and give them access to a wider audience.  Our two main event hubs are located at Milepost 5 and Voodoo Doughnuts (Too).  There you can see multiple artists and performers, as well as pick up copious amounts of written material that will give you the lowdown on the wider event. 

To view work by the artists, and to get more information, visit the website.

The schedule is as follows:

September 26  :  5pm - 9pm
September 27  :  11am - 6pm
September 28  :  11am - 6pm