Handmade things tend to be so expensive that only a small part of the population can afford them. And yet making things with hands is such an essential part of being human.
Jessica Stockholder
I think what kids do is play.
I love the way painting is so full of illusionistic possibilities.
Focused attention necessarily has an edge, but as focus changes, the edge shifts.
I make things complicated for myself and chaotic, so I feel unsettled, and then the challenge is to make something structured and complete emerge from that.
Looking at younger artists, like Varda Caivano and Kerstin Bratsch, I see that their work has something in common that is new to my generation. There's an effort to value the evidence of the hand and the handmade thing while also acknowledging the way in which the making of things with hands has such a complex, alienated place in our culture.
Things have character. So I'm interested in how the character of the thing might function as a protagonist in what isn't a narrative.
My idea is to fill an intersection with color. That will include the road and the sidewalk and up the building, so there's a cubic volume of color in the intersection wedged between four corners and four buildings.
I've always loved color because it's a little bit like music. I love that it seems to be both physical and ephemeral and engages us as a metaphor for our feeling lives.
I don't have assistants and things in the studio.
In a park, you are not working with studio materials or a flat piece of paper. You have grass and the people and the city and the daylight.
My work participates in that really quick and easy and inexpensive material that's part of our culture. In that way, my work engages the means of production that we live with, even while it's classical and embodies some things from a very long time ago.
I suppose I consider my work a kind of picture making.
I feel a bit like a magpie attracted to shiny things.
I work in response to the limitations of any situation and in relationship to what's possible.
Pictures often sit inside of pictures, but the edges of pictures and objects are rarely subjected to serious challenge; we are presented with distinct, whole pictures and objects.
I am more interested in asking questions about the edges of things and thoughts. So the objects I use are not initially the subjects of the work; they are its ground.
The very formal, beautiful, composed order that I make with paint and color is freighted with objects, but like leaves falling from a tree onto a lawnmower below, the edges of this 'thing' have a certain serendipity.
It doesn't matter what I use. It can be anything. What's interesting is how what I'm doing meets with the stuff I use.
I don't fetishize objects.
Paint is the skin of a painting: it is fiction. In houses, it disguises the plumbing and wiring and studs and nails.
