Wordsmith > I Am Not That

i have a doc that i started a few months ago called "good artist statements". they're statements or snippets from reviews, blog entries, etc that i felt captured some essence of my painting. it's an attempt to help me craft an artist statement. talk about my art w/friends and artists? yes, i can do that. craft an artist statement? not so much. i'd rather listen to noam chomsky's monotone voice for 3 hours straight. so today i'm sharing these snippets to help communicate what's going on w/my painting. in a comment in an earlier post i mentioned one thing i tend to do in my artist statement is write about what i want my paintings to be, not where they're at now. or write where they've been and how they've changed. but that's not what's going on. writing about what i'm doing now is trickier to navigate because i'm trying to figure out what it is i'm doing. my paintings are influenced by a wide variety of stuff (like this, this and this) and heavily dependent on working shit out in the studio. i don't think that last sentence is all that eloquent. snarky? yes. articulate? no.


Sharon Butler

the links below are to her blog and to the comments that the post generated. A GOOD READ! http://www.twocoatsofpaint.com/2011/06/new-casualists.html

http://www.twocoatsofpaint.com/2011/07/reader-response-to-abstract-painting.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+twocoatsofpaint+%28Two+Coats+of+Paint%29&utm_content=FaceBook

The casualists use earlier abstract styles and motifs intuitively as a visual language rather than as a conceptual premise. Plenty of artists believe in the premeditated strategic employment of references to historic abstraction, but the paintings I’m discussing are more likely to emerge unplanned through the process of painting – not through the focused exploration of a front-loaded conceptual proposition. All casualists could be called provisional painters, but not all provisional painters are casualists. That many contemporary artists appropriate and strategically quote previous styles is less relevant to the casualists’ way of working than the way Rauschenberg used, say, a tire or a cardboard box.
The painters I call the casualists, however, are far less concerned about framing their work in terms of the impossibility of painting than they are with uncovering, with good humor, new possibilities for painting.
The painters I call the casualists, however, are far less concerned about framing their work in terms of the impossibility of painting than they are with uncovering, with good humor, new possibilities for painting.

Jennifer Bartlett

from MoMA website: http://www.moma.org/collection/artist.php?artist_id=357

... Her ambivalent use of systems to establish an order and to oppose it allowed her to explore the material and the conceptual process of making images and objects.

Keltie Ferris 
KF + CM 4EVER at Horton Gallery - From the press release

Treating every mark like a found material, Ferris builds her work ... Each mark remains openly and honestly itself, and of its material: the spray is not masked, the oil pastel is not blended, and all 48 colors from the box set are used. However each mark is tightly knit to the structure of the painting.

Vince Contarino 

...searching for thrown away or discarded marks and pairing them with more deliberately constructed forms. While there is room for chance and discovery, I strive to operate in a middle ground that is neither restrictive or self indulgent, continually editing down the paintings to their most important elements.

Wendy White
AUTOKENNEL at Leo Koenig - from the press release

...off-kilter compositions prove well considered with time, though perhaps deliberately confounding.
 ... a surface that is consistently finessed.