Category Archives: Studio Visit

Studio Visit: Alexandra Grant’s Bold Text Paintings

by

As part of our ongoing partnership with In The Make, Beautiful/Decay is sharing a studio visit with artist Alexandra Grant. See the full studio visit and interview with Alexandra and other West Coast artists at www.inthemake.com.

Alexandra’s studio is in the historic West Adams district of Los Angeles, just a short distance from Koreatown and Downtown. From the outside her building looks like a non-descript, kind of funky commercial space that in no way expresses how big her studio actually is. The place is huge with a cavernous feel to it— cold, shadowy, and resounding with echoes, it heightened every one of my senses. Everything I took in seemed exaggerated: the damp air, the bright fluorescent lights, the vibrant colors of Alexandra’s paintings, and the steady rhythm of her voice. Long after our visit those impressions continued to linger, as did much of my conversation with Alexandra. She is a force to be reckoned with— her brain is agog with ideas that she expresses in a continuous flow of conversation, often jumping from one thought to the next as they wildly run through her mind. Her energy is infectious and inspiring, and makes you feel like the world is in fact full of promise, insight and adventure. Many of Alexandra’s paintings are collaborations with writers and their ideas, which makes sense because she appreciates the complex nature of dialogue: the exchange of both concepts and language, the act of deciphering and interpreting, the twists of subtext, and the inevitable losses in translation and how we make up for them. By borrowing writers’ poetic language she utilizes the format of dialogue to create “conversation” between image and text. In engaging text and image this way, the work then becomes a liminal space that challenges the viewer’s ability to perceive and hold both elements at once.

Read More>

Studio Visit: Serena Cole’s Glittery Paintings Tap into our Dark Desires

by

As part of our ongoing partnership with In The Make, Beautiful/Decay is sharing a studio visit with artist Serena Cole. See the full studio visit and interview with Serena and other West Coast artists at www.inthemake.com.

Serena’s studio is in her Oakland apartment, a modest space that she has efficiently rigged to accommodate her needs. She’s set it up so that her studio takes up most of the apartment’s square footage, but she keeps things flexible with furnishings that are easily moved and rearranged. I’m always impressed with resourcefulness and am appreciative of the kind of ingenuity that comes out of necessity and that manages to circumvent a set of limitations. In fact, the idea of limitations kept coming up for me in thinking about Serena’s artwork because her pieces are very much visually dictated and confined by her reference material. Her work directly appropriates the fashion imagery of advertising campaigns and editorial spreads, highlighting the patterns and tropes used to elicit desire and encourage consumerism. In taking on this imagery, her work attempts to examine what is revealed about our collective psychology, the culture of consumption and escapism, and the complexity of fantasy. In our conversations, she acknowledged that she isn’t so much trying to create something new, but instead aims to deconstruct already existent imagery in the appropriation of it. But this is a slippery slope— in being so tightly tethered to the aesthetics of the fashion world, Serena’s work runs the risk of coming off as analogous instead of questioning. Serena is aware of this risk— in creating art within a framework already heavily loaded with well-established associations, value, and perimeters, she knows the trick is to get the viewer to recognize that there is actually a lot at stake amidst the glitz and glamour.

Read More>

Advertise here !!!

Studio Visit: Rebecca Morris’ Language of Abstraction

by


As part of our ongoing partnership with In The Make, Beautiful/Decay is sharing a studio visit with artist Rebecca Morris. See the full studio visit and interview with Rebecca and other West Coast artists at www.inthemake.com.

We drove to Rebecca’s studio on a Sunday morning, with a yellowish-grey almost dusty looking sky overhead and both Klea and I wondered how this visit, the first in our LA adventure, would go. Being in a new city had us feeling less sure about what to anticipate and we just hoped to get off to a good start. As soon as Rebecca greeted us and took us up to her studio, I knew our morning was going to turn out just fine. She instantly felt familiar and easy to talk to, and she had fresh croissants waiting for us! Rebecca paints large, open paintings in vibrant hues and utilizes a series of shapes, lines, and gestures to create a singular visual vocabulary within abstract compositions. We talked about how she finds the lack of specificity and the openness in abstraction appealing, and she likes that a viewer can come to her work with their own set of associations and leave with a very personal interpretation. Rebecca’s generosity regarding how her work is decoded and interpreted is a testament to her hard-won confidence. She’s put in enough years working at her art to figure out what’s right for her, and she doesn’t seem all that concerned with proving anything to anyone but herself. I was struck by Rebecca’s sense of self and her total commitment to her own beliefs and aesthetic choices despite what others might think. She calls it “a stubbornness.” I call it true grit. In her 2004 manifesto, Rebecca’s gutsy, no-nonsense attitude comes through in lines like: Don’t pretend you don’t work hard… Be out for blood…and, Abstraction never left, motherfuckers.She’s self-possessed, but there’s no chip on her shoulder. I guess because when confidence is real, it’s not complicated or loud— it’s just a simple, quiet thing. It’s inspiring to encounter a woman who has unapologetically taken a hold of her life, and is making choices based solely on what she truly believes in, artistically and otherwise. Visiting with Rebecca reminded me to recognize the weaknesses in the rules that were written for me, and to do something about it.

Read More>

Studio Visit: Allie Pisarro-Grant

by

Allie Pisarro-Grant is an artist I was very delighted to have met here in New York.  She attended RISD and has been working in New York City for the past 7 years. One day while commuting to work I saw Allie holding a Pearl Paint bag, so I decided to talk to her. Since then I’ve caught her work at The Brucennial and we’ve been friends ever since. She also coincidentally showed last New Years with some of my friends in Milwaukee. Recently we met up to do a studio visit and I got to know her work a little better.

Read More>

Studio Visit: Trudy Benson and Russell Tyler

by

Trudy Benson and Russell Tyler are a married, power-painting couple. I first found out about Trudy maybe 3 years ago. My friend friend showed me her work via the internet and I was very impressed.  A couple months after that I went to New York and got to check out her show at Freight + Volume and was blown away.  Recently I got in touch with Trudy to see if I could come visit her studio- I took the opportunity to check out her work and as well as Russell’s.

Read More>

Studio Visit: Andrew Schoultz Draws on Historical Themes with Mixed Media Works

by

As part of our ongoing partnership with In The Make, Beautiful/Decay is sharing a studio visit with artist Andrew Schoultz. See the full studio visit and interview with Andrew and other West Coast artists at www.inthemake.com.

We were warned by Andrew’s wife and fellow artist Hilary Pecis, that his Mission District studio was in a state of disorder and it definitely lived up to the hype, but as Klea always says, “mess is photogenic.” An incidental side effect of making work, messes are often as telling and interesting as the end product itself. In many ways, there’s more story in the mess left behind; beginnings are laid bare, shifting and unfolding ideas can be tracked, and the push towards completion takes on a very real and tangible form. I think Andrew’s messes speak not only to the textured nature of his current work, which often features layer upon layer of varied materials, but also to the way in which he absorbs information, appropriates it, and then reconstructs and presents it. The course of political history and the themes that play out over and over again are of particular interest to Andrew. He keenly reads about, listens to, and observes a great deal about our historical and present-day developments, particularly around social, environmental, and economic issues, yet in his work he doesn’t depict or reference anything too closely to the facts. Instead he takes possession of information and personalizes it with his own visual language to get at the heart of a feeling, rather than clear-cut particulars or opinions. The imagery in Andrew’s work, the recurrent motifs and references, express a state where past and present continually converge, and where the future is not a new and distinct period up ahead, but rather just a reiteration of what came before.

Read More>

Studio Visit: Sandeep Mukherjee’s Abstract Visions of Topography

by

As part of our ongoing partnership with In The Make, Beautiful/Decay is sharing a studio visit with artist Sandeep Mukherjee. See the full studio visit and interview with Sandeep and other West Coast artists at www.inthemake.com.

Klea and I visited Sandeep at Pomona College in Claremont, a small town about 30 miles east from downtown Los Angeles. Sandeep lives in LA, but as an Assistant Professor of Art he’s been provided with a studio on campus (lucky him!). After getting a bit lost and stopping for a quick lunch at a random Mexican family-style diner, where we feasted on tasty pozole and camarones del diablo, we finally made it to Sandeep’s studio. The space is big; it’s a wide, long room with a little office area at the front, and it’s extremely tidy and well organized— not one thing appeared to be out of place, and everything is color-coded and meticulously labeled. There was lots of work on the walls, and for the first few minutes Sandeep wildly darted about the room, enthusiastically gesturing, and breathlessly explaining this piece and that piece, and to be honest, I was having a hard time keeping up. But finally, we settled into his office area with cups of green tea and his high-octane energy mellowed a bit and we fell into easier conversation. Sandeep’s thoughts move quickly, and they don’t follow linear paths, instead they zig-zag, whizz, and dash about, but they circle back upon themselves, and are brought and held together by recurring themes. Much of Sandeep’s art is fueled by his curiosity about in-between spaces— when something is no longer what it was, but hasn’t quite yet become something else. His work explores the territory of collapsed tangibility and structure, when meaning and corporality become destabilized, allowing new understanding and perception to emerge. When discussing his current work, which incorporates painting and embossed drawing on Duralene, Sandeep said he was inspired by the idea of a landscape folding in upon itself, where the valleys, the mountains, and the horizon give way to abstraction, but the topography still manges to come through to the viewer. This mutability is enhanced by the film-like quality of Duralane, which creates a range of variation in the material— translucency, opacity, and dimensionality simultaneously exist within the striated colors and black spaces. Sandeep’s work reveals the nature of materials and the impression of the hand and body, as much as it emphasizes the amorphous quality of space and experience.

Read More>

Studio Visit: Leon Reid IV’s Public Art

by

I stopped by Leon Reid IV‘s studio in Greenpoint to see what he’s been up to lately. He’s been pretty busy. Last month, he installed “100 Story House” a public art piece created in collaboration with Julia Marchesi. And he released a new sculpture series less than two weeks ago. On top of all of that, he’s in the midst of raising funds for “A Spider Lurks in Brooklyn”, his proposed project to put a giant spider between the cables of the Brooklyn Bridge during October of 2014 (you can get involved with the project here). So I was pretty psyched that he was able to make time to show me around. Leon’s been creating public art in some form or another for eighteen years now, and his studio was full of past projects and concept sketches.

Read More>