Phone Tag: Interview with Monique Mouton

Posted on June 28, 2016 by Linnea

Untitled (a door? a door?), 2014, oil on panel, 28 5/8 x 17 1/4 inches

In May, I Skyped with New York-based painter Monique Mouton for the fifth Phone Tag interview. Monique makes abstract shaped panels and drawings whose tactile, uneven surfaces feel deliberate and off-the-cuff at the same time. She received a Bachelor of Fine Arts from Emily Carr Institute in Vancouver and a Master of Fine Arts from Bard College–the same graduate school as the previous Phone Tag participant Ezra Tessler, who introduced us. Monique and I talk about making, introspection, and the usefulness of boredom, among other things, in this Phone Tag interview.

Phone Tag is a generative interview format, where I ask each participating artist five questions (plus others as the discussion meanders). At the end, I ask him or her to introduce me to a working artist whose attitude and work they find interesting and inspiring, who I then interview with the same five questions.

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Installation view, More Near, Bridget Donahue Gallery 2016

LW: What are you working on now?

MM: Right now, I am working on a piece that I hadn’t finished before a show I had recently at Bridget Donahue Gallery. After a show I feel like it always takes a little while to get started again in the studio. There’s so much build up and so much mental, physical, emotional energy that goes into making it that there’s always this lag time. But I had a piece that I hadn’t finished, so I’ve been working on that, very slowly. It’s a big watercolor. So far it’s watercolor, ink, and chalk pastel on paper.

LW: Is it something that originally you thought you would include in the show, or is it different from that body of work?

MM: I was thinking about including it in the show, but I felt like it needed more work and more time in the studio. So I just kind of dropped it and kept it around, which has been a nice way to have a thread to pick up on.

More Near (I), 2015, Watercolor, chalk pastel, charcoal, gesso, tempera paint mounted on sintra, 56 x 55 inches

LW: Who has influenced your practice?

MM: That is a question that I always find difficult because for me it’s a wide net. Everybody influences it in one way or another, whether it’s subtle or more obvious. But I think I’ve resisted answering that question to myself. Maybe part of my resistance to having a list of artists who have been influences is that it is a particular way of constructing a narrative around the work, and a lineage. That is something that, when I first felt like I was onto my long-term project – however long I am making art, I see it as a continuous practice – and when I was first discovering what that was, I was consciously avoiding narrative in the work. It was really important for me to remove any obvious clues to a story, because I wanted it to have a less linear effect in the way that a person viewing it would be able to take it in. So, unconsciously, that got into the part of me that thinks about influences.

That said, a way I’ve come to think about it relates to something that Charline von Heyl said in a talk she gave out in LA. She was talking about how when she’s making paintings, she has a cloud of images that she might draw from. Rather than there being this linear structure, it’s more like there’s this field of things floating around that she then picks from and pulls into her painting. For her I think she has actual folders of things that she’ll group together and then might destroy after completing a particular project (if my memory serves me). All the teachers that I’ve had, and the places that I’ve lived, and my family even, could be in my version of the cloud. They come forward and recede.

LW: And them as much as any particular artists or works that you’ve seen?

MM: Yes. Sometimes it surprises me when an influence comes to the forefront that I didn’t know that I was thinking about. One example is my dad’s side of the family. They’re Cajun. He has 15 siblings. He was born in New Orleans. When I was young and throughout my life I would go to these giant parties down in Texas, in Galveston, that were just kind of whatever in terms of sleeping arrangements. Like pieces of foam on the floor and random sheets and people just sleeping wherever. Everything was sort of cobbled together. After I had been working on my art for a while, I went back to this beach house in Galveston, which my dad built with his siblings and my grandpa out of a lot of salvaged materials. There was this aesthetic of things that just did the job—that maybe was not the first or most obvious choice. Like a piece of cloth covering the card table with a corner that didn’t quite make it that was fine because it worked well enough. These odd little edges to things. Everything functioned, but in this way that was precarious. I think my art is sometimes like this. It’s like it’s almost a painting and you’re not sure if it’s doing it or not, or where it came from, but it stays and it works.

artist's friend looking at Moon Room, 2016, oil on panel, 5 x 9 inches

Friend of artist looking at Moon Room, 2016, oil on panel, 5 x 9 inches

LW: For you, is art making a very introspective process?

MM: Yes, I think that is true for me. I’m interested in how something that is very internal or introspective materializes for an unknown audience and what that action could possibly affect or mean in our present culture. That’s the most broad way of thinking about it.

LW: There is something about your work that seems kind of removed from present culture as such, like they are separate things.

MM: That’s interesting. What do you mean?

LW: Well, that they don’t seem to have a specific referent, certainly. But not just because they are abstract—abstract paintings can certainly evoke very particular places and times and styles. There is something essentialist about them. They seem very much themselves.

MM: Maybe that is part of what a very introspective process produces. …You know, sometimes there will be something in my paintings that is not abstract. There is one that I think of—the first one after many years of only totally abstract paintings—a painting with a fish in it. Sort of a memory of a fish, that is, I didn’t base it off of a picture of a fish. For me, occasionally, putting these things in like a fish, which is so generic but could also relate to so many things, where there’s a lot of symbolism that could be attached to it or it could be just a very common animal in the world… I think I’m making these paintings that feel very stripped down, yet somehow there’s an accumulation of time in them or maybe there’s a mark or a color that reminds you of something from somewhere but doesn’t quite reference it. You’re right—there are no particular reference points.

What I’m thinking about in terms of all of that in relation to it being viewed in the present moment is that removal, where it doesn’t feel like it is quite present, actually causes friction. Because then you’re thinking about ‘OK, what is going on here? Because it’s not directing me in the usual ways in terms of how to look at it.’ But it’s also not totally hermetic. I do think that there are cues in the work that help place it in relation to other things that are happening now. I think I try to twist it or put things in sort of an awkward balance where it doesn’t quite hit you in the same way.

All of that is to say: I want to make art that works on you in that way because looking at art is a very specific activity. It’s somewhat odd and specific, especially if you pull out the whole commercial consumer aspect of it, which I like to do when I’m in my studio and when I’m looking at art. Outside of that, what does art do for us as a society? Painting especially, which has gone through various periods of death and irrelevance without every truly becoming irrelevant. There’s something about it that is special. I think it’s mysterious. It’s mysterious to me even as a painter. I’m kind of interested in that idea: That something that doesn’t really make sense manages to live on and change and hold our attention even despite everything that’s going on in the world, you know?

In the artist’s studio

LW: Speaking as a painter, maybe you could walk me through your process. An ideal day in the studio—what does that look like? Do you ever have one?

MM: An ideal day is probably rare. Days in the studio tend to always have their ups and downs. I’m a morning person and I like being in the studio early in the morning, just because it’s quieter and I have fewer distractions at that time. So, in an ideal day, I’d probably come to my studio early and do some reading or just look around, at whatever I’m working on and then go from there.

I often nap in my studio, which I’ve decided is ideal. I think the best naps are not too long and maybe have some dreams, whether I remember them or not. It’s like an altered state. Just waking up from a nap is a shift that is useful. Definitely lunch and lots of snacks. Spending a lot of time.

I like to leave my studio before dark. I don’t all the time—I will spend late nights. But for me I like to end my day earlier so that I have a timeframe to work within, which makes me more productive, and it gives me some space before coming back the next day.

LW: Are you in your studio now? Can I see?

MM: I’ve been rearranging it since my show so it’s kind of messy. That’s the door.

LW: Cool. Do you work on the wall?

MM: On the floor.

LW: Oh, on the floor. I see now. That’s awesome. Have you always had a studio since you’ve been living in New York?

MM: Yeah, I got this studio about 6 months after I moved to New York, so since late 2012. I’ve left town during that time and sublet it. Like when I was teaching in Richmond, Virginia for 9 months I was able to sublet. So I’ve had this space for a while.

Blue Margin, 2014, oil on panel, 47 x 36 inches

LW: Final question: Is it better, do you think, as an artist, to be in a place like New York where it has a big art scene but it’s crazy, or to be in a smaller place, like Richmond, where there’s a slower pace of life and you can focus on making?

MM: I don’t know. That question is one that I think about because I have a tendency to want to do both things. For me the ideal is maybe to do both. Because it’s definitely helpful to live in a community where there’s enough happening to see other people’s work and show your work and talk about it.

New York is so hard. It’s hard physically. There’s so much coming at you all the time; there’s no personal space. That can be energizing and it can also wear me out. Sometimes it’s hard to even know where I’m coming from in the city, because there’s so much going on. I feel like it can be really helpful to be outside of that, because then you can be not as distracted. I find getting bored helpful to working sometimes. I feel like boredom is really useful for creativity. Because you get to a point where you’re so exasperated that you have to do something of your own initiative; it can be a real spark. The most breakthroughs that I’ve had in my work is when I’ve have that kind of space, of boredom. Where I just had to figure it out. It’s really hard to have that in the city.

One thing I do want to say about New York: it is like no other place. But I also find it problematic that New York thinks that it is the only place. I’m sure people would say, ‘No, that’s not true.’ But I think it does, there’s a feeling here. It’s a bubble. It is its own world. I think that other places in the world, big and small, are really important to everything, including art.

LW: Everyone has a different answer to that question.

MM: It’s very individual. It depends what kind of artist you are. I feel like being here has definitely helped me grow a lot as an artist in ways that I wouldn’t elsewhere. That’s true of everywhere I’ve lived though.

LW: Well, thank you so much for participating. Those are all my questions.

MM: OK, great. It was nice meeting you!

LW: Likewise!

Phone Tag: Interview with Ezra Tessler

Posted on April 22, 2016 by Linnea

This Furtive Burg, Ezra Tessler

For the this iteration of Phone Tag, Chase Westfall connected me with the Brooklyn-based painter Ezra Tessler. Ezra is a painter who received his MFA from Bard College in 2015. He recently showed his work at ZsONA MACO contemporary art fair in Mexico City with Páramo Gallery. His work often deals with the nature of painting and image-making itself, and how it might expand the sphere of what painting can do in the world. Not realizing how close we live to one another in Brooklyn, we Skyped one recent morning, discussing Ezra’s recent paintings, navigating teaching and making work in New York, and somehow balancing life concerns at the same time.

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This Furtive Burg (alternate view), Ezra Tessler

LW: What are you working on now?

ET: I just came back from Mexico where I was in a two-person booth at MACO with Barb Smith, a sculptor who did her MFA at Bard with me. I worked on two bodies of work for that show. One group was a kind of three-dimensional painting, something I’ve been working through for a number of years. I wanted to do more than just makes “pictures.” I didn’t want to make paintings as images just to be consumed on the Internet. So I’ve been thinking about a kind of parity between the surface of the painting and the structure of the painting, a possible non-hierarchy between those two things. I’ve been making paintings where the structure is sort of equal to the surface. For example, there are the paintings I make that use clay and oil, these sort of pictorial landscapes. So there’s a pictorial space to them but they come off the wall at angles. Between the pictorial space and the physical space of the painting is this idea that they would create a sort of third experience of space for the viewer. If the cheesiest way to think about a painter’s aspirations is that he or she would like to move the viewer, these paintings try do that in the simplest possible way, they do it by literally making you move around the painting.

I had been thinking a lot about Cézanne, and the ways in which an apple looks like it’s about to jump off the canvas but also looks like its flat and dead. I like that idea of two distinct things—still and in movement, coming and going, falling apart and forming at the same time. Ideally these paintings feel like they’re coming and going at the same time.

Installation, Bard MFA Thesis Exhibition

LW: But you’re often working with more abstract imagery. So not like an apple…

ET: Exactly. I just finished grad school, during which I constantly battled a perceived struggle between figure and ground. I think a lot of my mentors came from a generation of painters still thinking in immediate ways about Abstract Expressionism and this idea that a painting should be an artifact of a series of battles the artist plays out on canvas. For me the culmination of grad school involved getting rid of the figure and making the painting the figure, oftentimes resorting to abstraction or pattern or stripe, things that in some way offered a field. The embodied field allowed – temporarily – to get past this idea of a figure-ground dichotomy. Those paintings present a clear pictorial landscape but ideally they could also subvert a presumed way of looking at a painting. The idea that you could hold two subject positions of being still and in movement…of coming and going…has some political possibilities. An identity position in which you were able to be both still and moving. I’ve been thinking about what the implications might be, however slight.

The second body of work paired the 3D work with these Delacroix sketches I’ve been thinking about for a long time. Delacroix’s sketches show Christ on the Sea of Galilee. He’s asleep and the disciples are crowded on the raft and reeling in terror at the storm. Christ wakes up and scolds them. Van Gogh and others seemed particularly struck by these sketches. There’s one at the Met that’s quite striking. I’ve been looking at this painting for a long time and thinking about this idea that a painting could be both a source of comfort and but also a source of exposure or risk. I was thinking about the analogy of raft, as an analogy for painting, for the studio, for larger political positions. The paintings that came out of this long process alternate between stains and images so that they move between abstraction and figuration.

Now that those are done, I’m excited to try to push further. I’m curious to see what’s next.

Still in the Tempest II, Ezra Tessler

LW: You mention Delacroix and Cézanne. Are those influences? Are your influences mostly painterly?

ET: They’re artists whose work I’ve spent a lot of time looking at and thinking about. They come up a lot in my own teaching with students as well.

But I would answer your question in two ways. One influence is the teachers and mentors whose work and lives I respect. A lot of the teachers I most respect offer examples for how to live a good life that engages a community–people like Nancy Shaver, Amy Sillman, Monika Baer, A.L. Steiner. People who offer models for life as an artist.

But also a lot of the work I think about and look at now is work that is very different from the work I do. For example, Sondra Perry, who you’ve interviewed. Or, I just saw a talk at MACO by Jenn Rosenblit, who gave an amazing panel talk. So much of my own work comes out of questions of social justice. Why make art of a particular kind and for whom? What is ethical work, what do qualities of generosity and empathy mean? The artists I respect most are artists who think about that and who force me to think about that further. Painting is a medium that perhaps doesn’t allow for such an opening up. I’m definitely a studio rat, but I find that challenges brought by non-painters to be ones that I want to engage in, the ones I think about most. People like Adrian Piper and Andrea Fraser, for example—even though a connection to a painting practice is tenuous, largely because painting so starkly embodies the problems or contradictions they challenge. I’ve also been thinking a lot lately about painters who work in three dimensions like Moira Dryer and Ralph Humphrey, for example, who really pushed parity between structure and surface.

LW: You mentioned being a studio rat, and maybe that is typical of a painter. So what’s an ideal day in this studio?

ET: A typical day involves getting to the studio early with my dog, Zalea, and spending all day there. I spend as much time as possible in the studio. I usually get right to work. My studio has always been very chaotic but it’s important to me to have a lot of work going at one time. I wake up excited to get to the studio and when I get there I’m equally excited to work, whether that means putting down a new layer of paint, sanding away an old layer, or riffling through books and images.

LW: If you have that many projects going, is it helpful for you to be able to jump from one to another?

ET: This has been the challenge. Deadlines often bring about an editing process. For example, there were two bodies of work that went to this show in Mexico but I had been working on a number of bodies of work leading up to it. As the deadline got closer, work got winnowed out. In the end, I make a lot of decisions in the editing process outside of the studio. Especially because paintings get dealt with in the studio in such dumb and absurd material ways.

Installation, Zona Maco

LW: When did you first start thinking of yourself as an artist?

ET: This is a challenging question. After college, I worked in human rights for several years, I did doctoral work, and only after that did I do an MFA. But the entire time I was doing that other stuff, I was painting and seeing work and reading about work. But it was always a balancing act. There came a certain point when I thought: “When am I going to make the jump?”—as if it required a large decision to change my life to enable it. But I looked up one day and was spending all my free time in the studio making work, so it sort of happened naturally that I started to think of myself as an artist. Simply because I was making work.

I had been working in these other worlds that in my mind were connected to the studio but for other people weren’t connected. For me, it was very clear why I was involved in human rights but also keeping up a studio practice, or doing a doctoral program and painting, but for other people it wasn’t so clear. I had probably been worrying too much about that category of an official artist.

LW: I ask the question because for me it took a long time to call myself a writer. When did you start painting? As a child? Always?

ET: Always, always. When I was in the womb, my mother—who was not a professional artist—was going to the Barnes museum on the weekends and taking classes with Violette de Mazia. My earliest memories are of going to the Barnes Museum and the Philadelphia Museum of Art, or looking at books of the Ashcan school with my grandfather.

Heather and Lore, Ezra Tessler

LW: You live in Brooklyn now, and I take it you’ve been in the New York City area for a while. My final question is whether it’s better to be in a big city like New York where it’s tough and expensive but there’s a major art scene, or to be in a smaller, quieter place where you can maybe focus on making?

ET: Several friends have brought their graduate student classes from outside of New York for studio visits and I always get the question ‘Should I move to New York City?’ It’s such a personal question though. A number of friends have moved upstate or out of NYC so they can live cheaply and have a bigger studio, and that makes a lot of sense. But the answer seems clear to me right now–it’s where I have a community of people. For me, that’s most important—to be talking about and looking at art and fighting things out in the studio with friends and studio visits. Right now almost everyone I know is in New York… people who offer a source of comfort and challenge in the larger project of making work. For me, the most important thing is to have the ability to make the work as much as possible and to have a community.

It’s also such a personal decision how one participates in the art world and which art world you participate in, because obviously there are many art worlds inside and outside of New York City. Sometimes when NYC gets to be a bit much I think about people like Nancy Shaver, Martin Puryear, Dana Hoey, and other artists who I respect a lot and who have moved upstate and built a life that seems conducive to making work and community. But I’m still building my life here and it’s hard to want to give that up.

LW: Yeah, absolutely. This has been great. Thank you for participating.

ET: Thank you.

Phone Tag: Interview with Chase Westfall

Posted on February 3, 2016 by Linnea

Small Offering, Chase Westfall

For the third interview of Phone Tag, I spoke with Chase Westfall from his office at Gallery Protocol in Gainesville, Florida, where he is the director. As an artist, Chase draws on a broad range of philosophical, theological, and artistic influences to consider the cultural meaning and societal function of violence. His practice encompasses a broad range of media including sculpture, installation, video, and performance in addition to painting. I worked with Chase on a text for a solo exhibition, Terror Function, that he had this past winter at 101/exhibit gallery in Los Angeles. In addition to his artistic practice and Gallery Protocol, Chase is a part of Imperfect Articles, a Chicago-based t-shirt company that seeks to challenge the relationship between image, audience, and “exhibition” space by working with artists to create t-shirts. I caught up with Chase after he was recovering from a busy period of teaching, preparing for his most recent exhibition, gallery projects, travel, and the holidays.

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LW: “What are you working on now?”

CW: “Right now I’m pursuing something I haven’t done in a number of years: a couple of local exhibition opportunities. I grew up in this area, but then moved away when I was about 19. Since then, for the past 15 years, I’ve had that stereotypical nomadic lifestyle–two years here, two years there. And there was actually a brief period when I was back here finishing my BFA (I graduated in 2008), but then it was off again to the next thing. About two and a half years ago we–my wife and kids and I–moved back here when I accepted the position as the director of Gallery Protocol. With all of that coming and going, it had been almost 9 years since I had exhibited any work in Gainesville. Then a friend of mine approached me about doing a show in a space here in town. It shifts my set of personal criteria for the exhibition. Not in the sense that I don’t take it seriously, but for whatever reason doing a show in my hometown after so long is a way of like, snuggling in. All the people and reasons integral to my start are here, so it becomes a chance to celebrate them. I’m going to focus on making a set of paintings. The 101/exhibit show was very interdisciplinary, more so than I’ve worked historically. I had a lot of fun with that, but it also felt raw and vulnerable. All my current efforts are about rediscovering my comfort zone. I’m just going to make some paintings, which is my metaphorical artistic home.”

LW: “After nine years, there’s a lot of room to reflect on what has happened.”

CW: “Yeah, and it’s actually in the same space that I did my BFA exhibition. As I was getting ready to graduate, I wanted to do something off campus and this space was available for rent back then–it was something like $75 a night? They were just trying to cover their costs. At the time it was called Downhome Gallery, but it closed after we moved away. One of the guys I was in school with when I was here, Micah Daw, also recently moved back to Gainesville and reached out to the owners of the building and got permission to start doing shows there again. This upcoming exhibition feels like it completes the circle since it’s in the same space where I did my first real exhibition–the first time I did a show on my terms and, more importantly than that, was able to pursue my own vision.”

Installation view, Terror Function exhibition at 101exhibit gallery

Installation view, Chase Westfall: Terror Function exhibition at 101/exhibit

LW: “You live in Gainesville, but you just had an exhibition in L.A.. Do you think it’s better for an artist to be in big city like L.A.—with a strong cultural scene but higher cost of living—or to be in a smaller place like Gainesville, where maybe the focus can be more on making?”

CW: “Honestly, because of a number of personal life choices and circumstances, being here in Gainesville is the right thing for me. But I tell any young, genuinely ambitious artists I talk to: go to New York, go to Chicago, go to L.A. You’ll face real challenges but those challenges, over the long term, will help you develop the qualities that you need to have as an artist. Even if you can only take it for a couple of years, have that experience and it will give you a lot of perspective for moving forward.

The nature of access is changing because of the internet. But there is still a visceral energy and phenomenological pressure that you get in the city. For me, there is something about these big cities as places where the talent collects and pools and, in a healthy way, you realize you can’t sit around and wait. You gotta’ hustle and get after it. There is a larger mythology about what it means to be an artist that centers around a fantasy of self-fulfillment and self-expression. While those are really wonderful privileges of being an artist, they aren’t sustainable over the long term unless there’s a real blue-collar work ethic to lay a foundation for that self-indulgence to happen.

So, I still say get to the big cities. You can stay informed and educated in smaller places in a way you couldn’t in the past, but even so, you want to be around the best people. You want to be around the freshest, rawest, toughest, and grittiest ideas, and the areas of critical mass are still the big cities.”

Blue Barricade, Chase Westfall

LW: “Speaking about being an artist, when did you first consider yourself an artist?”

CW: “That’s a great question. Well, like a lot of artists, I was the kid who could draw really well. I developed a sense of self-worth around that skill. But that sort of lost its importance for me as I got older –by the time I got to high school I didn’t want to be the kid who could draw really well–I wanted to be the kid who played soccer really well. So I spent four years of high school, despite my lack of natural athletic ability, focusing on that. After high school, I started messing around with BMX but then broke my ankle really badly. I was in a walking boot for 8 months. I was stuck in my house. We lived out in the country and I couldn’t drive, so I stayed at home all day. And my parents are kooky enough people that, one day, when I got the urge to start painting murals on the wall, they said ‘go for it.’ So I started painting murals and had a lot of fun with that. At that time I was also getting ready to serve a religious mission for my church. The timing of the injury was such that just as I was getting out of the boot I left the country for two years to serve as a missionary in Costa Rica. All I had been doing before I left was painting, so I left in that mindset–thinking about art. Maybe not art with a capital “A” but certainly drawing, the rendering of images, etc., had had this sort of stunning rebirth for me. The whole time I was serving my mission, I felt like that was what I wanted to do when I got back. I couldn’t really rationalize it—perhaps it just was a coincidence that that was the flavor I left home with. I would tell people there that when I got back, I was going to be an artist. That was it. I never really questioned it after that.”

LW: “Who has influenced your practice?”

CW: “That’s a question I really struggle with. It must be like a mental block that I have because I look at a lot of art and I know it influences me, but the influences that I’m the most conscious of, or self-aware about, are more the conceptual or philosophical ones. A lot of it comes from things I read, so a lot of authors have been very influential.

You always take material cues from other artists. But I think the biggest thing I learn from other visual artists–speaking in the broadest terms–is about what is and isn’t effective–what kinds of things can and can’t be reached through the language of visual art. Looking at where their works succeeds, where it fails, developing a sense of what kinds of information it can most effectively communicate. That was something I personally struggled with early on, confusing the communicative potential I wanted my artwork to have with the kind of communication that was better left to other forms of expression. I was very fixated on being able to express specific ideas and being able to communicate in very concrete ways. I’ve learned through engaging with visual art that you have to let go of that to a certain extent.”

Jihadi, Chase Westfall

LW: “Speaking of the difficulty of representing certain things visually, and being inspired by a lot of writers, do you ever write?”

CW: “I have. I’ve written criticism and what I might call art theory, but I’ve never really undertaken writing as a creative practice. I’ve thought a lot about doing it. The first baby step I took in that direction was the poem I included in the Terror Function show. My brother and I composed a poem—my brother’s a writer—and had it displayed in the space as part of the exhibition.

There’s this mythology around artists, which could very well be true, that real makers can’t live without making. And that’s never been me. I like being in the studio and I have certain skills for art making, but I also acknowledge, as we all know, that making a good drawing, for example, is not the same thing as making art. And I don’t have that emotional dependence on art making that I hear other artists talk about. The satisfaction that I derive from writing, even when it’s something as simple as the press releases here at the gallery, is often equivalent to making paintings. So, I have thought about transitioning parts of my practice into writing.”

Installation view, Chase Westfall: Terror Function exhibition at 101/exhibit

LW: “Regarding making and how you approach making, what does an ideal day look like in the studio for you?”

CW: “An ideal day?…is something I’ve probably never had. I don’t really believe in the value of the ideal or perfect world—the challenges we face are the vital spark that keep things moving forward. That sounds pretty corny really, but I’m embracing it more and more as I get older: it’s the little thorns in your side that keep you moving, progressing. For me, that’s the best way to ensure that what you do has a vitality and edge.

But an ideal day would involve getting up early, so getting into the studio by 5 or 6 am. Read for an hour or two. Then, a combination of prep work and actual execution. The prep work can be as enjoyable as the making itself. Of course, you can’t really separate it out from the making. But if there is a kind of zen state to be achieved in the studio, for me it happens when I’m assembling and stretching canvases. You’re not making complicated value judgements. There is a cleanness that process has that other aspects of your studio practice don’t have. Then you really settle in to work and get some painting knocked out for the rest of the day. When you’re ready to go home you make a few calls to check up on the progress of your other projects–because if this is an ideal day I am farming out my sculptural stuff!”

Untitled (Veronica), Chase Westfall

LW: “How often do you try to get in the studio?”

CW: “It’s streaky; I’m definitely a studio sprinter. I don’t have—just because of life circumstances—consistent studio time. For instance, I’ve only spent a couple of days in the studio since the Terror Function exhibition, and that work was delivered in late October. There has been a ton going on since then with the Gallery and Imperfect Articles so that’s how it goes sometimes–I’ve only been in there like one day a month. What will happen is that as a deadline gets closer I will switch gears and then I’ll be in there every day for as long as it takes to get the work knocked out. That’s not ideal—I wish it wasn’t that way. But, the frequency of the studio time is really dependent on the immediacy of the deadline.”

LW: “Yeah, but I can only imagine. You do have a full-time job and you do have a family. You fit it in where you can.”

CW: “That’s true, but it still puts you through the emotional wringer. Every few months it’s like: ‘OK, I’ve allowed other things to displace my studio practice as priority. You think, maybe I’m not a real artist, maybe I don’t have the dedication or passion that it takes. Would a real artist go two months without being in the studio?’ You start to ask yourself, should I try to transition into something else, do more writing for example? And then, as soon as you have those doubts, you have a good studio day, and you’re stoked again. It’s a constant back and forth.”

LW: “Certainly for me, the way I approach the writing I do, it’s a balancing act. Those are all my questions. Thank you for participating!”

CW: “Thank you so much.”

Linnea West

Tag Archives: painting

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