Sarah Mattes

I found myself in Red Hook again in the same building that Michael Berryhill's studio is in. This time I was visiting with artist Sarah Mattes, entertained by the fact that for the second time around I was convinced it wasn't the right building because of a sign at the top that reads "STORAGE." Lost on the huge floor where the artists are "stored," Sarah tracked me down and escorted me to her space. Sarah had quite a few new pieces laid out on the floor and hung on the walls. It felt like it was somewhere between an art installation, a working studio and construction zone - it was brimming with energy. As we began the day talking about her new work and catching up on what shows we had seen and which openings we had gone to so far this fall, I got out my little bag of pencils and she got out her big bag of clay. We were ready to do our studies, hers in the third dimension and mine in the second.

Two hours into looking at her work, I began to really let my imagination make a run for it. Sarah's sculptures/paintings are good at giving that run a head start. I began to think that her sparse yet intricate pieces sometimes look like scaled down stage sets. Not a set you might find for the newest Broadway Musical hit, but more like one that would be used for a play associated with the Theatre of the Absurd. I could almost envision thumb-sized actors walking back and forth among her collages of found objects. Maybe it is Nagg and Nell from Beckett's Endgame, sitting nestled in their dustbins at the edge of one of the repainted faux tiles Sarah uses as a base for one of her pieces. Discarded planks of wood stand like pillars or suggest the corner of a room - the details of dried up vines that once grew on the wood giving it a definitive history. Her work allows the otherwise discarded objects to live in a kind of fantasy world, where all things hold importance, from a spoon used to mix plaster and paint to a drop cloth saturated with yesterday's stains.

Sarah explained to me that much of the materials she uses in her work she happens upon on the street or down the hall in her building. It is very rarely a Home Depot sort of situation. I loved hearing about the free pile that has developed on her floor. She told me that at the beginning there were these crazy finds and slowly the finds began to have price tags on them as folks realized they might be able to make a profit from their studio debris, which is not so good for scavengers like Sarah. She did buy several bags of clay from the pile at a very low price, and she later discovered that she could fire clay works down the hall on her floor. I could see how this kind of serendipity finds its way into her life as an artist. Her work is alive with the chance happenings of her experience.

We ended our time together with scrumptious bites of fig on toast and some talk over whether or not we would make it out to openings that night. Sometimes after such a productive day it just feels so good to go home and prepare for the next day in the studio - nothing to disrupt the flow. She is curating a show at her alma mater Collgate University in the Clifford Art Gallery called External Original, which is up from October 29 - November 20, 2012. She is also in a show upstate titled Excursions on a Wobbly Rail that is curated by Brad Hajzak at Roos Art in Rosendale NY and is open until November 17th. That would be a nice trip up the river, equal parts foliage viewing and gallery going. All and all Sarah and I had a choice time together. Please check out more of her work at http://www.sarahmattesstudio.com/.

Chris Martin

Except for the tiny sign that hangs outside the door simply reading "studio," you would never know what magic lay behind this covered up storefront building on a busy street in Williamsburg. Greeted with an exuberant handshake by artist assistant Max Heiges, I was led further and further back, past walls of art books, shelves packed with sketch books, and numerous paintings, into the storefront turned studio space of Chris Martin. He acquired the building in 1984 after having moved his studio to Williamsburg from SoHo in 1980. Along with Max, assistant Linnea Kniaz was hard at work building large stretchers, 135" x 118" in size, for canvases that Chris had worked on while upstate in the Catskills this past summer. There was a lot going on between the four of us, drills drilling, painters painting, pencils drawing. Not to forget tails wagging - much to my delight, Tamara Gonzales and Chris' Pomeranian also spent the day romping in and out of the space.

Towards the back of the work room there is a moveable wall where Chris has put up images he will eventually use in his next installment of 280 + Cover. The first book in this series, the "Yellow Book," was sold at Koch Oberhuber Wolff in conjunction with a solo show in the Fall of 2010. He sent me home with a copy. Leafing through its sundry collection of photos, the book gave me an even deeper look into his practice, acting like a dialogue between his thoughts, his work and his everyday world: images consisting of his paintings, upside down trees, piles of junk, drawings, gnomes on rooftops, fluffy dogs on mountaintops, jam sessions, painted faces and cars, mushrooms, and award winning sheep. Chris' paintings and drawings already seem to come directly and generously from his life, calling on both his memory and immediate reality. Sometimes he does this by merely hinting at a landscape that he has experienced and physically attaching images or objects he has come across to the canvas. Or, in other ways, he might do this more explicitly by paying homage to the things that are influential or important to him, as he paints an artist's or musician's name across the bottom of his canvases.

Chris explained to me that he painted on the soon to be stretched canvases while they laid in the grass behind his house upstate. You get the sense of how much his summer backyard had a hand in his process: the sky dropping water and shining a drying sun, the vibrant greenness and growth of the garden and grass giving an influence of color, footprints of animals and human's bare feet showing up scattered across the surface. In this instance, I see Chris playing two roles: part painter and part facilitator, collecting Summer's vitality by making these works a history of his days spent under the open sky of the Catskills.

The three working walls in Chris' studio are covered with layers of paintings. I thought that eventually the whole space might close in on him like some trippy Twilight Zone episode -- the artist enveloped by his own artwork. His incredibly large paintings tend to do this to the viewer on their own, enveloping us in their size and liveliness. Max and Linnea put together the massive stretchers throughout the day, having time towards the end to stretch a canvas on one. Propping it up against the wall, I imagined this to be the painting's vertical unveiling.

Chris and I talked about our mutual love for drawing. He told me that he had piles of stuff drawn on loose paper and showed me the shelves where he stored years of sketchbooks; he told me how his drawings often becomes the basis for his paintings. For me, spending the day drawing his new paintings, squinting to get the photo of Dylan pasted to the front of one of them to halfway resemble Dylan, while Chris closed out the studio day with some beats on his bongo drum, was an affirmation of why I love art. Check out more of Chris Martin's work at Mitchell-Innes & Nash.

PITS:UPDATE with Andy Cross

It came to me that I often revisit the artwork I see during my studio visits later down the line in different galleries. I would like to begin to catch up with some of these works in an installment titled PITS:UPDATE. I stopped by Andy Cross' opening of House Painter at Martos Gallery on September 6th. A couple weeks later I swung by again to draw it. It is a bizarrely rich culmination of his paintings that he has assembled into a house.  I saw him from time to time making the piece in his studio over the period of several months. It was quite different seeing it later -- illustriously floating in the gallery space.

An excerpt from Cross' statement:

"How much art does an artist make in a year? Multiply this by the number of artists in the world today. What does the proliferation of art as a physical/material object mean?

Art is in the studio, the gallery, homes, apartments, offices, lobbies, and hotels. Some art finds its way onto the walls of places we may consider important, such as museums. The fact of the matter is that the majority of art in the world sits in storage. Whether displayed, tucked away, and now digitized, all art occupies space. It is part of the consequence of creation, and it's not to be taken lightly".

The show is up until October 6th. I encourage you to go see it. And stay tuned for some upcoming Fall Pencil in the Studio visits.

Michael Mahalchick

Sometimes people make art, sometimes they make music, sometimes they delve into the different realms of performance, be it dance, theater, or performance art. Every now and then an artist comes along who does it all, like a giant art-making machine. In a recent whirlwind studio visit with Michael Mahalchick, I came to the conclusion that he was one of these artists, taking production to entirely new levels and seriously owning it. Mahalchick prompts his viewers to ask themselves questions and barely gives them the answers, allowing their own f-ed up mind to go wherever it might take them. It was like attending my own private performance to visit the lovely Mahalchick in his studio, which is appropriately nestled in his long-inhabited Williamsburg apartment. I was entranced the whole day through with every bit of his fast paced storytelling and truth-slinging art talk.

Michael's most recent solo show, entitled "IT," up at Canada this past spring, was an example of how seamlessly he is able to work the multiple layers of his creative spewing into an extraordinary solo exhibition. An opening night performance is where he finalized the installation of the show. The result of this being: a collection of mismatched objects in theatrical groupings on the floor (some as large as a wheelchair or as a small as a Mötley Crüe tape), an array of make-shift wall hangings (decorated with dirty socks and puzzling photographs), and a side show of prepared bacon pinned to the wall of a corner. Michael is giving new life to humanity's leftover dregs, using it in his work as a crude example of our cumulative experiences. As I walked through the show with my boyfriend and his brother, we found separate portions of Mahalchick's sculptural scenes to relate to, each of us lingering in different parts of the gallery a little longer as tidbits of our personal history began to tell us new stories. Later, as we left the gallery, we shared the stories we came up with, in a sense, collaborating with the artist.

While I sat drawing on his couch, Michael sifted through several boxes of "stuff" he had collected over the years, explaining to me that some of the debris, be it clothing or other, he acquires through friends or fans that drop off bags and boxes with him. It is almost as though he is the artist's Goodwill. He said that from time to time he has even used gifts that he has been given in his sculptures -- be it a painting, or a doodad of some kind or another. Later, when the gift giver comes to the gallery, they feel connected to the piece, seeing their object appear out of context, animated by Mahalchick's mysterious placements. In the midst of our conversation Michael came upon a library book he had found on the sidewalk years ago that had last been checked out in the 70's. Considering returning it, he leafed through its pages to find a poster of the 80's sci-fi movie Lifeforce with free passes on the back. I could see how his mind worked through the different ways he could use this discarded book and poster in an installation or performance. His is a truly captivating studio practice. Michael pulls from a pool of objects as eclectic as our collective unconscious to make his work. And he does it so well.

Time swiftly went by as the bags were being emptied, our boisterous laughter filling the air. I made it out this past week to a performance he had co-organized with Lizzie Scott at Klaus von Nichtssagend Gallery, Total Styrene: Breakdown. I watched as the performers moved the styrene around, the white of the plastic matching the brightness of the gallery walls. I saw as Michael took in the performance with excitement in his eye. I wouldn't want to miss another thing that he does. To check out more go to http://www.canadanewyork.com/artists/michael-mahalchick. And if you are a facebook friend of his, you have to check out the haikus he has been dropping, they are really something special.

 

             Total Styrene: Breakdown at  Klaus von Nichtssagend Gallery

Katherine Newbegin

While attending open studios at the Marie Walsh Sharpe program this past winter I discovered the work of photographer Katherine Newbegin and eagerly penciled her in for a studio visit. I made my way to Dumbo for an evening of drawing and chatting a few weeks ago. She has a roomy studio situated in the center of the Sharpe building perfect for her use of the space. Katherine has most recently completed a series of photographs she had taken of the deteriorating interiors of India's cinema houses. She had several of these images on the wall when I visited. They have a distinct way of transporting the viewer -- acting like portals to another time and place all together. The images are eerily empty and lush with the colors of a Bollywood movie. Katherine explained that with the continued globalization of India, these cinemas are a dying breed. You can feel an almost ghost-like presence in the wear of the theaters' seats and the collection of footprints on the theaters' floors. After a long conversation about the work, I began to draw the inside of her studio and the insides of the spaces she had so stunningly captured.

I was quite curious to what led her to this project in the first place. Katherine's description of her discovery captivated me -- much like the work itself had already done. She told me that she had always wanted to travel to India, and, with a grant from the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation, she was able to do so. On her own, carrying one large bag on her back and her precious camera safely in a backpack on her front, she began exploring a country completely unknown to her. With the brave compulsion of a novelist in need of telling a story, Katherine's innate desire for wandering eventually led her to the inside of one of these richly historic cinemas.  In 2010 she went to Kolkata, Delhi, Jaipur, Varanasi, and Agra. And then again in 2011, she went to Delhi, Mumbai, Chandigarh, Pune, and Shimla. On each trip she took nearly one thousand photographs. I have yet to mention that Katherine uses traditional photography, the result of which filled her bags with film canisters, later, upon her return, filling her bags with all of those indispensable negatives. In my mind I connected her wayfaring ways of travel to our need to satiate a desire for escape by watching a film - interesting that she chose these theaters as her subject. Both experiences can be filled with solitude and both can lead to a broadening sense of mind and spirit, often giving us new worlds of thoughts and ideas.

Naaz Cinema II, Mumbai, India, 2011, C-Print

Naaz Cinema I, Mumbai, India, 2011, C-Print

A previous body of work she had made while in Berlin on a DAAD grant from 2008-2009  focused on the old GDR (German Democratic Republic) hotels, or, as she calls them, "Eastern Block Hotels." The images of these spaces also capture haunting relics of what where once places used for a departure from everyday life. And there is a similar feeling of there being a human present with an absence of any actual figure. Only your imagination is left to fill in the holes of a story that Katherine has begun to tell. Some of the videos she has been working on, made while in Germany and India, operate in a similar sort of way, but with different kinds of visual mysteries to be solved. See if you can figure out what is strange about the beach scene in the film still below.

Video Still, Briesen, Germany http://vimeo.com/43700402

Hotel Hvar, Stari Grad, Croatia, 2008

I have so many more questions for her, I can only imagine how much she must have experienced in all of her travels. She told me about the hoops she had to jump through to get access to some of these cinemas, and that people would sometimes gather around her as she photographed, curious to what her interest might be. We headed up the street for a pint to continue our chat with a neighboring Sharpe studio participant, Rachel Hayes. It was nice to bear witness to the camaraderie that comes out of the Sharpe program and to end my evening with these two lovely ladies. Please take a look at more of Katherine's wonderful work at http://www.katherinenewbegin.com/.

Keltie Ferris

I was thrilled to be able to stop by a favorite painter of mine's studio for a drawing session recently. Taking the Q59 bus down Grand Ave., I arrived in front of Keltie Ferris' studio building in Williamsburg. She has several new and intoxicating paintings in the works. Keltie has a solo exhibition opening at Mitchell-Innes and Nash this coming December. The energy in her space is brimming over, reminiscent of the juiced and electrifying feeling I so often get from looking at her work. She showed me a new spray tool she was excited to start using as we sat down to talk about her studio and its set up. Keltie explained to me how she comes to picking a space. She told me some of her "must have" criterias. For her there needs to be a substantial amount of natural light and an accessible way to escape the fumes put off by some of her art making techniques. A sky light ablaze with the mid-afternoon sun sits just above her largest painting area and a sizable window with a fire escape perfect for climbing out onto juts off the back of the studio. Keltie was delighted to have a guest visit her through the escape once a day for several months, a big orange alley cat that would show up to keep her company, perusing the paintings before heading back out the window and onto the roof.

                

           

            

I settled down in front of one of her paintings in order to make an attempt at drawing its portrait. With Keltie's mystifying fields of color and pattern, with her explosive yet minute repetitions of mark and her uncanny ability to make paint vibrate like the addictive bass riffs of our favorite songs, I was weary of being able to draw the image before me. With each initial glance up at the canvas I became increasingly aware of how intensely these multi-layered planes are worked on and how intricate each square inch of the surface becomes, creating a vastly charged almost three dimensional phenomenon. Visually breaking down these layers to be able to draw them, I couldn't see through to the canvas below, only to whole other worlds of painted surface, suggesting a new meaning of "paintings within paintings." Bubbles of soft edged sprays lead to painted out sections of pure color with geometrically jagged edges that lead to stripes of quivering prismatic lines that dart from one section of the painting to the next. This varied collection of painted marks that Keltie accumulates seems to make her work move rhythmically to and fro. In doing so the paintings become forces of their own, to say the least.

 

Keltie mixes and then sprays paint onto her canvases. I saw that in the back of her large studio she had built a translucent, sealed off, make-shift construction. I was taken by this corner's almost lab-like feel, knowing that this is where a solid amount of the magic happens. It is a brilliant resolution that still allows the space to feel open while keeping some of the toxicity of her spraying out of harm's way. The paint captured on the back wall of this alternate working zone collects historical traces of the vibrant colors she has used in her pieces. Keltie moves the paintings in and out of this area several times a day. What a dedicated step in her process. She has got the subtleties of singlehandedly moving these massive canvases down to a science. My offering to help was quite futile. We both laughed at the things that artists do to enable their practice.

Keltie and I talked about the myriad of jobs we have had in the past to keep our art making afloat. She proudly showed me a section at the front of the space she had recently built out to hold smaller works, books, and so on. Some of her early NYC jobs must have helped her build the skill set it takes to do this kind of work. We also talked about what kind of dedication to time spent in the studio you need to make things happen. She is über dedicated. After getting this tasty preview, I am super excited to see her paintings completed and up this coming winter. It will definitely be a must see show. To see more of her work go to http://www.miandn.com/#/artists/keltie-ferris/.

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Ariel Dill

A week ago I took another quick jaunt from my house and arrived at the opening of Ariel Dill's solo show Oscillations at SOUTHFIRST Gallery in Williamsburg. I visited Ariel's studio days before the install, catching a few of the paintings still up on the wall before they were taken to the gallery. Ariel's studio is in Ridgewood, Queens. She has her space set up in an especially sweet, large room just off of the back of her apartment. The light basking in from the bay windows and the sand colored wooden floors gives it a certain kind of relaxed beachy vibe, all too perfect for California native Ariel. At the beginning of our visit she set out some delightful snacks of feta, roasted beets and taramosalata. I told her that the garnet-red color of the beets reminded me of her and her work, with their intensity of color and taste. We dug in as we talked about her upcoming install, her move to Queens and her lovely new group of paintings.

Ariel's paintings are lush musings on color, pattern, and, as described in the title of her exhibition, oscillations. She arrives at these vibrating medium-sized works both through her vast experimentation in brush stroke and her contrasted pairing of pigments. Lately, I have been thinking a lot about the act of making, purposefully picturing the artist working on the piece as I respond to its visual proclamations. I explored this idea while looking at Ariel's paintings. I saw her cavorting, whirling, twisting and swaying as she worked. I visualized her arm carving out layered details hidden in the background so that they might be levitated to the surface. I saw her repeating single movements with short marks like you might do in a dance in order to gain emphasis of form or interest. These impromptu choreographies of Ariel's gave way to a very engaging series of eight canvases.

Ariel explained that she would be painting the lower half of the gallery grey. She would then place the bottom of the paintings on the line that is made from where the grey meets the white. This could give the illusion of the work sitting on a shelf, or might give subtle reference to the influence the architecture of her studio had on her while making the paintings. After seeing the show, however, I found that the grey's strongest role was to intensify the color of the the paintings themselves. Grey makes a saturated color pop and, with the works hovering just above this muted hue, it was as though the paintings' last study on movement was in questioning the stillness of the canvases.

I am a sucker for a studio pet and Ariel had two for me to follow around on my day visiting her, Figaro and Popova. At the end of the afternoon we took a moment to see what kind of mischief Figaro could get up to by putting layers of newspapers on top of his head. Each of the brother and sister team seemed like the perfect art making companions, sliding up next to the studio wall to take a look at Ariel's paintings before they made their way over to the window. Please go see her show up until May 27th at SOUTHFIRST Gallery. And to check out more of her work go to http://arieldill.com/.

Katherine Bradford

Twenty minutes after leaving my place, I was greeted by Katherine Bradford at her studio building just off of Bedford Avenue. As she took me up to the second floor, I asked how long she had been working in this building -- since 1985 she explained. She said Williamsburg was more of a working class neighborhood back then, just a place where people lived. She said it wasn't so easy to get folks over to her studio. The art world didn't often visit Brooklyn, even though for her it was only one stop over on the L train. Funny to think how things have changed, since the majority of my visits have been in this borough. Kathy's space is pretty excellent -- ideal for any painter's practice. There are multiple working zones, an area for smaller paintings and mini-sculptures, a wall for viewing and painting on larger pieces (one side for oil the other acrylic), and a serene sitting area set up in the middle for checking out the works in progress. We started our afternoon talking over the paintings she has made for her solo exhibition opening at Edward Thorp Gallery this Thursday, April 19th. Some of them being two years in the making.

Where do I begin?  Maybe by saying how delighted I felt to be getting to see these works in their original setting before heading to the gallery, maybe by saying just how much they inspired me. Kathy's  paintings ask the viewer to let go. They allow for connections to be made between the compelling imagery and space within them freely and without a push from any kind of direct narrative. Like reading a poem that never overtly connotes its subject, the viewer's imagination is as active a participant while observing as Kathy's must have been while making. One recurring theme in this body of work might be buoyancy or ethereality. And then there are these two powerful, almost monumental figures used in most pieces -- a big ship or a Superman, both being held up by the elements much like we might hold them up in importance. It got me thinking, maybe all things rely on something else to hold them up, regardless of what we might think of their strengths. And maybe the paint itself could be seen as an element -- earth, wind, fire, water and paint, as though Kathy's application of paint could give buoyancy. I liked to think of Superman as he headed for the clouds, levitated by Kathy's chroma saturated world, almost stuck to the canvas like my eyes were to the painting. My mind was running wild.

We talked a bit about process. Kathy does a lot of adding and removing when working on a painting. There are these supremely subtle and delectable shifts of color and mark making found in every inch of her work. When I looked closely I could see a house hidden behind the large supernatural polka-dot ball that seemed to have landed softly, lighting up the night sky.  I asked about her smaller works, if making them gave her any kind of immediate pleasure that the bigger works could not. She laughed and said yes. They are so satisfying to look at too. Scaling down the ships so that they might be held in a hand seemed like yet another way to question their importance and weight.

Our time went by so quickly. As I stared at the painting of Superman with his legs crossed, as though he was sitting for a portrait, I got lost in all the its magic. I was telling Kathy that often people don't view a work for as long as I do when I draw it, that I get to experience the paintings in a different way, really studying them, each part from top to bottom. By the end I thought I could have lived under those floating colored puffs of air gliding above the man in red and blue. She also gave to me one of the beautiful catalogues she had made with a grant she received from The John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, with photographs and images of her sculptures and paintings, an amazing work of art in its own right. I so enjoyed getting to talk to Kathy and hearing all of her stories. Our conversations were as rich as the visuals. I strongly encourage you to go see her solo exhibition, to get lost like I did. And to see more of her work go to: http://www.kathbradford.com/.