Kaveri Nair

Hydrometry, 2007, acrylic on paper, 11" x 14"

Untitled, 2009, acrylic and oil on canvas, 15" x 11"


Lagoons, 2008, acrylic on canvas, 20" x 16"


Untitled (Grey Clouds), 2007, acrylic on panel, 9" x 12"

Messy Machine, 2009, acrylic on canvas, 55" x 43"
Untitled, 2009, acrylic and oil on canvas, 20" x 19"

Untitled (Yellow and Copper Sun), 2007, acrylic on panel, 7.5" x 11.5"

Green Drapes, 2009, acrylic on canvas, 20" x 16"

I was happy to get to do a studio visit with Kaveri Nair recently...here are a few pics I took and some others from her site. I really like how many of these refer to and borrow from to landscapes, but they don't go all the way there.

This Saturday night Kaveri's work will appear in Thingy @ Occasional Projects: 1182 Flushing Ave. 3rd Fl, 7-9 PM, Brooklyn. Also see her website here.

Studio: Letha Wilson

Partially Buried, 2009, c-print on wood, 24" x 24" x 3"

Untitled View, 2009, c-print, aqua resin, paint, 16" x 20" x 8"
Sailor's Delight, 2009, c-print, wood, aqua resin, paint, 48" x 10" x 45"

Prism-Pyramid, 2009, xerox transfer, graphite, c-print on paper, 22" x 22"

Stained Glass Acadia, 2009, c-print, 24" x 20"

Golden Cairn, 2009, spray paint and c-print, 14" x 11"

Walden Pond Advent, (in progress), cut and folded c-print, 11" x 11"

I had the chance to stop by Letha Wilson's studio and check out what's she's been doing lately. Here a a few pics from my visit. Check out her show Lines Through the Wilderness, which opens at Hofstra University's Rosenbeg Gallery on Nov. 11 and runs through Dec. 14. Also see her website for more.

Rob Matthews

The Dumbest Man Over Austin TX

The Dumbest Man Over San Antonio #3

Rob Matthews’ The Dumbest Man series from 2004 seems to have begun as a cynical critique of the multi-millionaire adventurer/aviator Steve Fossett and developed into a study of selfish and arbitrary pursuits made by those with money to burn. Fossett attempted to go around the world in a balloon six times and was finally successful on the seventh. Since Matthews completed this series, Fossett has disappeared and while pronounced legally dead, no one has found his plane or his body. It was also the most expensive rescue effort on US soil, costing $1.6 million.

What I like about The Dumbest Man series is that Matthews takes a subtle conceptual approach, but that his jumping off point is not easy to pinpoint. The Dumbest Man Over Austin TX was actually the first drawing I saw of his, knowing nothing about the Steve Fossett angle. The drawing, of Fran’s Hamburgers in Austin, TX, was of particular interest to me because I used to live near Fran’s and I always loved its back-story. As the story goes, Fran opened Fran’s after divorcing Dan, who runs Dan’s Hamburgers. I always imagined the statue of this young girl with a guitar on Fran’s was a kind of f-you to Dan, who didn’t have a cool statue.

The Dumbest Man Over San Antonio #2
all drawings: 2004, graphite on paper, 6" x 8"

Since many of the works of the series are scenes of Texas, I decided to pull these out as a group. Texas, despite it’s many great attributes, really drives it home when it comes to such oddities and excesses. For some reason, this series makes me think of other Texas treats like the new $1 billion+ Dallas Cowboys stadium, border crazies, megachurches, Shrub, and the Big Texan.

Matthews currently has a solo show up through Nov. 15 at Daniel Cooney Fine Art and is in Vocabularies of a Metaphor at Hosfelt Gallery in San Francisco. He also has a blog: Matthews the Younger, where you can find links to his works and more.

Gianna Commito

Meet Up, 2002, oil on panel, 28” X 24”

Garages, 2001, digital print, 13"x 19"

Just a little while back, I posted some of Gianna's new works and promised an interview. She currently has work in Exquistide at the Geoffrey Young Gallery and an upcoming show at St. Mary's College in Notre Dame, Indiana that opens August 29. See the interview below...

JL: I'm curious if you could talk a little bit about living and working in Ohio? It seems that you have continued to make smallish paintings regardless of the fact that you could have a large studio/space to work. How has scale developed in your work in relation to your environment?

GC: While my work has always been reflective of my environment, the newer work is less immediately so. My major grumble about living in Ohio is that I am so dependant on my car—I don’t walk nearly as much as I did in, say, Iowa City. My older work was about navigating and documenting space from the outside, usually as a pedestrian. Buildings, excluding the ones that you are walking to or leaving from, are usually viewed as interruptions or obstacles. You approach them slowly and work your way around them. These early paintings are reflective of architecture as an aberration within or an obliteration of the natural landscape: there is a simple mass, or figure, that interrupts an otherwise predicable ground. The masses often include some clue to their architectural derivations: tiles, bricks, or planks. In the later works these clues have been reduced to striped planes that change value to depict space.

Dipping in, 2001, oil on wood, 22”x 24”

But back to your question...I walk a lot less now and don’t observe space in the same way. I am inside a lot! As a result the work as become much more about interior space-the attic studio I used to work in, for example. It also feels more folded and claustrophobic, like origami or being inside a tent.

I have never been an artist in NYC, so I’m sort of blessedly naive about what opportunities I’m missing out on (though the ones I imagine are torture enough!). Ironically, one of the things you’d expect to get out here is a big, cheap studio space, but I haven’t found that to be the case. Despite having an almost completely dead downtown, there is very little raw space available in Kent, and none of it is cheap! So my studio is pretty small. However I don’t think that’s the reason I work at such a modest scale. I really like painting on a horizontal surface, and there’s only so large you can go in that position. I like being hunched over, focusing on 6 square inches a time, completely absorbed in that little square. My sister is an archeologist and my father a biologist who counts tiny marine organisms, so a certain level of obsessive compulsiveness comes to me naturally!

Silo, 1998, porcelain with low fire glaze, 15” X 6” X 4”

JL: How do you feel when looking at your older works? Are there particular aspects that surprise or annoy you?

GC: Sure, it’s a lot like looking at old pictures from middle school! How could I have worn that?! I had a friend from grad school visit my parents’ house—they are arguably my biggest collectors—and after looking at all the horrible old college paintings on the wall, he said “Jesus, your work hasn’t changed at all!” I’ve always been interested in architectural constructions and the way they nestle into their surroundings, and I guess that is more obvious than I might think. I also come from a background in ceramic sculpture, and I’m often surprised by how the 3D work I did as a student feels so directly related to the 2D work I make now. I think I’m surprised by how simple the older work was, how little I put in the painting. In retrospect it seems a little easy, the objects don’t have to work very hard because there’s very little competition, and so there isn’t as much tension or negotiation. The result is that people always wanted to group the paintings into diptychs and triptychs, so I started doubling and tripling the amount of information in each piece. The flip side is that it’s good to remind myself that I don’t have to put every “move” into each piece, either, and that the restraint I used to have is good to call up every once in a while. There was a series I did in 2003, including the piece “Gold,” that got super slick—mostly because I was using acrylic and not casein, which has more fugitive tendencies—and they drive me crazy.

Wave, 2005, acrylic, casein, watercolor on paper, 42” X 30”

JL: With painting, is there a sense that you need to work towards something?

GC: I start very loosely and the image crystallizes out of this messy, unplanned scaffolding of marks. So I’m working towards that crystallization but trying to do so with a hand tied behind my back. I am, at heart, a romantic, pentimenti-loving painter and I want some of the process to reveal itself: for the history of marks to almost be clear, for the geometry of the stripes to occasionally fail, for the painting to defeat itself despite my best efforts. This of course gets harder and harder with every piece, so I’m constantly throwing a new wrench in the works, either through image, size, or materials.

JL: What role, if any, does color theory play in your work?

GC: Color is enormously important, though I don’t think of it as color theory in the Albers or Itten sense but rather as color practicality or responsibility. It’s not so much about the phenomenon of color relationships as it is to their “real world” referents. It’s no coincidence that complementary colors are often used in advertising or to represent sports teams. I’m more interested in using colors that are less predictable, but that still remind the viewer of something. Sometimes that means appropriating color combinations directly from fashion, or flags, or logos. Sometimes I try to pick combinations that are less obvious—though they always mean something to someone, so I’ve yet to find a completely anonymous pairing! But I feel strongly that using color is just as direct as the figure or landscape is in a “representational” painting. In my work, the colors and shapes I use are the representational objects in that they do refer to things that actually exist. I feel responsible for identifying those things, even if they weren’t in my mind from the beginning. And since this is obviously an impossible task, I rely on the viewer’s experiences to satisfy that responsibility as well.

One very literal use of color theory is the way I shift value to create the illusion of space. It’s never as simple as adding black or white, but usually involves mixing complements or brightening with yellow, etc. I spend a lot of time on the palette, getting colors to shift from a pure, middle hue into darker and lighter shades and tints. I’m starting to sound like a teacher, though—so maybe I should just stop here!

JL: In the newer works, you seem to work outwardly from an axis…can you describe you method of developing these works?

GC: I mentioned tents above, and that’s really where this axis came from: the interior of a flea market tent in Maine. The axis, or in some cases, single vanishing point, do provide a centrality that makes the image feel specific to a certain space or place—there is some sense of perspective that you trust and rely on, even if only to confirm that the rest of the pictorial space is completely disorganized and impossible.

Sarah Brenneman

Oily Bricks, 2001, ink and watercolor on paper, 14 1/2" x 14 1/2"

Sarah Brenneman is currently in This is Not About Landscape at Jeff Bailey Gallery, along with Louise Belcourt and Mie Yim. You can also check her website for more. See the interview below...

JL: Oily Bricks seem to present the viewer with dichotomy and contrast. Of course, there is the oil and the bricks, but there is also this play between abstraction and representation. I wonder if there was a conceptual intention here, to present the two together in conflict of sorts?

SB: At the time Oily Bricks was made, the work was very intuitive. I was playing with the fluidity of the paint. My obsession with patterning had already begun and I realized that bricks were a wonderful pattern that people recognize and equate with the world around them, especially as city dwellers. Bricks also appear later in Brooklyn Nature Fix and in a more recent painting, Spring Tree, in a more three dimensional way. I don't think I was consciously playing with abstraction and representation. That intention came later and was realized after taking a long look at my paintings and thinking about what I was trying to achieve in the work.

Brooklyn Nature Fix, 2003, watercolor and ink on paper, 36" x 46"

JL: As is hinted at in the title for the show, This Is Not About Landscape, this play seems to be one of the common strains in you work. How has this type of play manifested itself in your work throughout the years? It is important for you to blur the line between the two camps? Do you believe that they exist in the first place?

SB: The contrast between abstraction and representation in my work became more deliberate starting with the paintings I made while at the Millay Colony in 2003. There I was surrounded by nature and the urge to paint it was very strong. Before that I was almost exclusively an abstract painter. At Millay I began to combine the abstract patterning and landscape imagery. It is important for me to blur the line. I most enjoy the sort of middle. I find that there is much to be explored there, especially when representational imagery can become more loose and strange.

JL: In Brooklyn Nature Fix you are telling the viewer what seems to be a very personal thing: that you are getting/attempting to achieve a "nature fix" through the making of the work. In a similar vein, the press release states that the works in the show "evoke a range of phenomenon and emotion"…I'm curious to what degree making your work is a therapeutic or revelatory activity? What else may be going on?

SB: Brooklyn Nature Fix was painted at a time when I was living in a very ugly apartment in a dirty neighborhood filled with concrete. I found a bit of comfort in some weed trees in a vacant lot near my apartment. This painting is really a recording of that moment. In making that painting, I realized that I could have my fix, taken in a fleeting moment walking past weed trees, and put it in a painting to look at whenever I want. This started a whole slew of tree/plant paintings that I am still making. These works do reveal to me the importance of spending time in nature to my well being. Part of the pleasure in making the work is painting what I love, which is for me therapeutic.

Up it Sprang, 2007, watercolor and pencil on paper, 30" x 22"

JL: Up it Sprang is nice because you seem to be referencing nature, but it's hard to identify exactly what you're seeing. There is a sophistication and care in the marks that mixes with an almost diagrammatic deliberateness. How did this work come about? Are you actually using visual materials here or is completely intuitive?

SB: That painting is all from my head. Meaning I wasn't referencing anything that I have seen in the world around me, which is sometimes the case. I was obsessed with rocks at the time. An obsession that started with a series of rock collages I began at Skowhegan many moons ago in 2000. I began Up It Sprang with the rock shapes that look sort of like eggs too. Next came the triangles on top of them. There are a lot of these sort of crystal like triangle forms in my paintings. The lines in the middle were a way to sort of create a pull in the void of the middle. The dark bottom grounded the shapes and gave it more of a landscape feel.

Crystalline, 2008, watercolor, colored pencil, and collage on paper, 51" x 44"
Drunk and Potted, 2008, watercolor and collage on paper, 30" x 22"

L: There is a certain amount of technical facility that seems to have evolved from Oily Bricks to Drunk and Potted. Is this as a result of you're consistently working on paper?

SB: Well, there are seven years and many many paintings in between Oily Bricks and Drunk and Potted. I work mostly in watercolor and over the years have figured out how to manipulate and control the paint in new ways. Also, Drunk and Potted has the added element of collage that I have been working with for a couple years now. This adds a crispness and a difference in surface that adds to the richness of the work. Also the earlier paintings are just more simple. At the time I was quite content to just paint a few triangles on a small sheet of notebook paper. I have boxes of those.

Jesse Farber

Dune, 2002, oil on canvas, 56" x 44"

JL: It appears that Dune is a foreshadowing of what is to follow. There are very sculptural/modeled elements: the abstracted trees, the carefully crafted blanket, the shadows, and the perspective. Did you use some sort of physical construction to develop these paintings? Had you in fact been working on any other sculptures at the time?

JF: Yes – Dune was painted from what I was calling a “setup.” I made or arranged all the physical objects in the picture, though it was all very makeshift. By this time, I had worked out a system for making paintings which grew out of a collage or pastiche approach to images. For a while, I had been piecing together paintings out of found images, my own doodles, cartoon imagery, and observational painting. At one point, I tried simply setting up all of the things I wanted to use in physical space, making them into a tableau on a studio shelf, instead of on the canvas. Some of what I wanted to put in were cartoon drawings, so I brought those into this world as flat cutouts.

The new approach pretty much guaranteed an overall unity in the paintings, since all of the elements now occupied real space together. I would spend some time drawing the setup from different perspectives, moving objects around, finding the best view. I had complete control over the lighting, the point of view, and the compositional choices, all of which let me add new layers of meaning. I was playing around with materials, having fun and learning a lot. Sometimes a compelling object or material I came across would generate a new setup.

JL: You began strictly as a painter?

JF: I was definitely a painter. The original purpose of making objects and tableaux was so that I could paint what I wanted to. But no, I wasn’t really involved in modernist or postmodernist dialogue about Painting with a capital P. The reasons why these paintings made sense as paintings, not as sculptural scenes, had more to do with the meaning of the scene being mediated through painting. Part of that meaning was knowing that the whole thing was all fabricated, and not necessarily all truthful.

Also, there was something very interesting, almost metaphysical, about painting from my own hand. In Dune, for example, I had made this set of cutout trees, and then a set of “antimatter” trees with atomic-looking symbols replacing the foliage. I had hand-painted those very carefully. Later, I spent hours in the dark looking at them and painting them from observation, learning all of the colors and curves and how light and perspective changed them, even though I knew exactly how I had originally made them. Having built them, I believed they had this ideal Platonic existence, but then I would learn, slowly, over the long hours painting, that the ideal object I thought I had made didn’t really exist! And in the paintings, I was again creating a new Platonic reality which was also a fiction, because I would make everything more neat and perfect than it really was, which ironically made the paintings feel more realistic.

God's Beard, 2004, Styrofoam, wood, latex paint, acrylic, wire, cardboard,
foam rubber, spray foam; Ramp 48" x 48" x 96", Beard 96" x 120" x 60"

JL: I'm curious if you were looking at contemporary art at all or thinking about the history of painting in any sense. There is a nice mysterious quality to these works that for me, makes them hard to recognize any direct or obvious influences. They are refined plays with traditional still life and landscape. What are some of your early influences for these early paintings, like Dune?

JF: At the time, a couple of artists I was thinking about a lot were Alexander Ross and Thomas Demand. Both of these artists made convincing-looking pictures which gave cues to their fictional content. Ross’ paintings incorporate Photoshop techniques and a map-like construction to remind you of this mediation, and of course he also paints from models. Demand’s photographs are of uncanny paper models, but the material betrays itself – the images have this airless, deadened quality.

In a more general sense, some of the artists who are important to me also worked with the area between figuration, still life, and landscape. Giorgio De Chirico and Yves Tanguy are perhaps two of my biggest influences. Kenny Scharf is also a favorite. Robert Gober is in this universe, too. There’s my cosmology, but in general, I don’t think any of these influences are very direct. I look at a lot of contemporary work, but I’m not sure I could identify a milieu for myself.

JL: How would you describe your transition from painting to sculpture? How important was it for you to leave painting behind as a single means of representation?

JF: I was surprised as anyone that I ended up making sculpture. It was an indirect transition, and it was difficult at the time. I had worked out this wonderful system for making paintings, and I really believed in it. But the bottom line was, once I had perfected this system, I felt trapped in it. It was fun making cartoony drawings of scenes I might make, then constructing different objects, setting them up, playing around with them, moving the lights and my vantage point, figuring out how it all might fit together. But once I had it figured out, I knew I would be confined to sit in that chair and make that painting until it was finished. It started to feel like everything creative stopped when I put the canvas in front of myself.

JL: Did works like Dune become studies of a sort for God's Beard? There is a similar, dynamic movement upward, but of course on a much larger and 3-dimesional scale.

JF: There was a period of transition that lasted most of a year. I was working at the idea of pieces that bridged 2- and 3-dimensional space, assemblages with drawings and objects and cutouts combined, a hybrid space. I was also learning how to make things and getting more comfortable with different materials. God’s Beard finally felt like an arrival – I had created a pictorial space that was similar to that of my paintings, only now the viewer experienced this space from within. I read a lot about architecture and amusement parks around that time.

I think both pieces are mostly about a yearning for transcendence, and both have a sort of subterranean/terrestrial/celestial split in them. God’s Beard is more head-on about it.

Tron Pretzel, 2006, enamel, wood, vinyl, lights, digital print on billboard vinyl;
Pretzel 96" x 72" x 6", Tron Cookie Basket 72" x 104" x 4"

JL: Tron Pretzel seems like quite a diversion. While you continue to experiment with materials, you have moved away from crafting the works piece by piece. Instead, you have chosen two different images, appropriated and then blown them up. I like the mix of the pop culture reference and the pretzel. How did this work come about?

JF: At the time, I was thinking about looking at the world as if everything in it contained encoded information, some sort of coded message. I had been experiencing this a lot spontaneously – in the crack pattern of a sidewalk, in the dried residue on the bottom of a pot of hot chocolate, and especially when I flipped through images in old cookbooks.

I thought about how knots in rope have been used as code, and then I imagined how one who understood such a code might “read” the knot of a pretzel. Then I found an image of a basket of cookies which seemed also to have that quality of ciphers, as if each cookie could represent a piece of information, arranged to spell out a particular meaning.

In connection with this, I was thinking about the movie TRON, from 1982. In that movie, the programming environment of computers is portrayed as a physical world, in which programs, as characters, live their lives as slaves to a master system. This movie was working with this same idea that I was getting from my experiences, only in reverse; it was positing code as a physical world, instead of looking at the physical world as if it were some sort of code. So in my image of the cookie-cipher basket, the cookies, those bits of code, are emerging from the world of code that is TRON.

I made this big light-up sign with a stylized pretzel image on it broadcasting the pretzel knot-code, and then I had the TRON-cookie basket image printed on billboard vinyl, which I made into a shaped billboard. So the piece ended up being about broadcasting these codes through baked goods, and communicating this through signs, but I also felt like these signs were sort of receiving and transmitting their information to each other. I didn’t realize it at the time, but I think the dynamic of this piece was predictive of the smaller pieces that were to follow.

Hero + Villain, 2007, papier mâché, Styrofoam, acrylic paint, digital prints,

museum board, wood, found objects, 22" x 21" x 27"

JL: Lately, you have really been concentrating on the idea of a vortex. You can see it in Dune and it really becomes developed in Hero + Villian. You have moved from these large works to intimate, small scale sculptures. More than any of the works, you have come across a very developed and carefully constructed language. Can you describe you process of constructing these works? What role do your drawing and collages play in them, if any?

I made a deliberate break from the large sculptures for this specific idea I was having about tunnel-shaped works, and I’ve been going on that ever since, for about a year and a half. Hero + Villain is one of those pieces, and the You/It collages are studies for an upcoming one. These are cone-shaped tunnels made out of papier mâchè, painted, with all kind of objects and cutout photographs and so on inside of them, and a photographic backdrop at the end.

I thought of the interior space in these pieces as a metaphor for interior psychic space, the space inside the mind. Tunnels are really common metaphors for the space of visionary experiences, and that was what I was looking to set up. It’s a framework for how symbolic elements could relate to each other, with the vision’s profound spontaneous logic. Formally, these are weird spaces to work inside of, but I think the fact that it feels so unnatural is part of what compels me to keep working on it.

Sticking with this relatively consistent format has freed me up in terms of the images I can use, and somehow the language has just fallen into place. I’m still using lots of imagery from cookbooks, which I am totally fascinated with. The photographs of food are so carefully arranged, and so dense with meaning – it’s like a million little signifiers all set up into tight sculptural arrangements, almost architectural. And there are lots of conventional kinds of images in cookbooks which repeat, and these start to take on special meanings when you see a lot of them. That’s one big source, along with science and nature images, which are often connected either to constructing landscape or serving as quasi-figurative elements. I’ve also incorporated a huge amount of more experimental painting and object-making.

The You/It collages are exciting for me, because there is no real subject in them other than the implied viewer. There are the photographs I took of rocks, and then there is all of this painted stuff. The painted part looks like a physical surface in one place, and like deep space in another, and the rocks set up this portal, but it’s never very clear what is solid and what isn’t, or whether the view is in or out, up or down, outer or inner space. In a way these feel like the most serious things I’ve done, in the sense that they feel mute and eternal.

You/It Collage 3, 2008, acrylic and digital prints on paper, 14" x 17"

Jesse Farber lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. You can see more of his works here and a video collaboration with Jasmine Justice here.

Max Schumann

Untitled (Bay Watch), 2005, acrylic on cardboard, 15" x 13"

Untitled (Terror Watch), 2005, acrylic on cardboard, 8" x 15"

Untitled (The Tough New Spirit of Dodge), 2005, acrylic on cardboard,
48" x 33"
All images courtesy of the Artist and Taxter & Spengemann, New York.

Matthew Fisher

By the Bay, 2003, acrylic on linen, 14" x 12"

In Matthew’s first series, he worked solely with the bewildered and curious Neanderthal. He often planted a lone caveman wanderer within an honest homage to 19th and 20th Century American landscape painting.

Matthew's current subject is the soldier. They are the more complex, yet equally ambiguous sons of the early man. Reverse Migration is an early example; check others out here. See below an interview with Matthew...

JL: Can you talk a little about what came before the caveman?

MF: The basis of my work from the last six years has been "historical". Before the caveman, I was using images from old newspapers and books. I would make sure that I would not leave the picture's caption so that the true "story" of the picture was lost. Not knowing my pop culture history, I finished a painting once and showed to a friend, "Oh, James Bond". I had no idea.

JL: So, how did you stumble upon the caveman and decided to pursue it...why you seemed to have sort of paused with a specific theme for the first time?

MF: I can't remember why I started painting the cavemen. Thinking back, perhaps it was for the same reason I started painting the soldiers. Both series were inspired by used books I bought after work on my way to the 59th Street subway station back in 2002. The used bookstore on 59th St. has a large table outside its front entrance. Each week they have different genre of book for sale: Cook, Art, Music, etc. One day I walked by and it was Science Books. Flipping through I found one that was about early man and purchased it.

JL: So you might say that the initial attraction was purely esthetic? What made you continue to paint them? Was there any attraction to the fact that were not pop or mass-produced culture image like James Bond? I mean, it's not often that you pick up a magazine or newspaper and see a picture of a caveman, or a Napoleonic soldier for that matter. These figures are historical and heroic, but also exotic and mysterious. Is this what you mean by escaping “cultural baggage”?

MF: The caveman attraction could of been purely esthetic. I thought they looked interesting and I felt that I could make them do things that would create an exciting narrative. That's the same reason I was pulled towards the soldiers. An image that is strange but not too strange.

There are a few reasons why I stopped with the caveman. One night, someone asked me if the paintings where "pre-man" or "post-man". That blew my mind to the point I was unable to think about the work the same again. I made one more caveman painting after that. It had a crushed beer can in it to give the painting a post-man read. I was also tired of naked hairy, and finally, America went to war and I wanted to use subject matter that spoke of this horror without being in your face. So I went from cultural baggage to historical baggage.

JL: What were some of the other things that you were looking at as sources? Were there direct appropriations from theses sources or more subjective interpretations?

MF: The landscapes that I surround the cavemen in were lifted from the paintings I was handling at an American Art gallery on 57th Street. I studied these paintings up close and became familiar with how they handled paint: Homer, Heade, Bierstadt, and all of the other thousands of lesser known artist from the past. The two plus years I spent there further my art knowledge of that period in a way that no classroom could provide. The cavemen was a way for me to get past the culture baggage of the images.

JL: And the soldiers?

MF: Like the caveman, one day I walked past the bookstore and they had "Military Pamphlets" for sale. Within the pile there was a few that featured Napoleonic soldiers. Their uniforms where funny and ridiculously over-the-top so I bought them. The pamphlets sat in the studio for several months before I used them and started my current body of work.

JL: I'm curious about your attraction to American painting… because this is certainly not the most popular genre that a contemporary artist would find themselves attracted to…were you ever self-conscious about how the re-use of these precedents might appear? What role does irony or criticism play? Are they really an "honest homage" as I say in the introduction?

MF: My use of American painting was an honest homage. Several of my friends can go on for hours and hours about the great painters of Europe, and for me, I like that work, but it's a little boring. I am more interested in the bastardizing of those great painters by the earlier Americans. I like the idea too that I am American and am pulling from our country's history. But the main thing that excites me about this time period is the great weight of sadness that the work has in it. This landscape, so pure and lush, so beautiful, will in less then 100 years be torn up, divided up, and a Civil War will tear apart the country. It's just one of the most fascinating time periods. It's before the mass use of photography so all we have are paintings to tell the story.

Caveman (Finger), ca. 2003, watercolor on paper, 5" x 6"

JL: Some might assume that the sole man refers to yourself…Do you find that you began to deal with autobiographical issues? The absence of women also suggests an autobiographical element. Why no cave-woman?

MF: Ah the women question. Honestly, I have trouble painting women. Maybe I get too excited; I painted one this year and she looked like me. I really want to paint nude women. There's such a long history of that. I have done a few nude males, so I think it would be OK.

JL: To what degree does your everyday life enter into these works?

MF: Everyday is a strong part of my work. I feel that as an artist, the most important thing I do is look. I want my paintings to reference the real world. I have dozens of books in the studio that help me paint plants, animals, oceans, or landscapes with the most detail I can. Autobiographical issues have to be in the work (especially the earlier soldier works), but now they are buried. Now it's more about this great photo of a stone fence I found. I should use that in a painting.

JL: In general, how do you go about incorporating the relationship between everyday interests (art, music, movies, lit. etc.) and your created, fictional world? Like a Bierstadt landscape, your work is kind of idyllic pastiche where the various elements take on a symbolic character. Are there specific examples where you take directly from real life? How do these appear in translation on the canvas?

MF: I want to bring together elements that make a good painting. It's formal. I am no longer as interested in the American landscape as I was. Now it's about finding interesting pictures. This creates European soldiers in front of the Rocky Mountains, next to a flower that grows in South China, with a mushroom that is native to North America, behind a sky that was outside my window that day. It's a total mash up. The overall visual image needs to be as strong as I can make. The painting in the studio now has a mountain range from Chile in it.

JL: Am I correct that you also began exploring drawing simultaneous with the caveman? How have your drawings developed from the caveman to the soldier? What role does drawing play in you work in general?

MF: Drawing was not important to me for many years. It was something I could do at work so there are a few caveman drawings. I started it again when Shelley Spector asked me if I want to me in show in 2003. Drawing now is like an advance study for a painting. This year I have made only four or five drawings that are successful. I have yet to make a painting out of anyone of them. I love the magic of drawing, how one line can create space, how rubbing the pencil on one side of the line forms space, it's just so simple and the trace of the artists hand is right there, not hiding behind paint, glazes, or brush.

JL: Can you talk a little about figuration in contemporary painting and how it informed your work (if at all)? Were there painters that your were looking at that might have helped to steer yourself into more detailed, dimensional figuration?

MF: Holly Coulis and Ridley Howard are very important to me. Earlier on, I felt I was somewhere in between them, a little subject matter from Coulis, a little styling from Howard. I enjoy looking at our work now, years down the line and seeing how far we have all grown from that point. Rob Matthews is the other artist whose work is saying what I want to. It's more autobiographical then mine, but there is a strong narrative, one that is odd but not strange. The use of everyday is the work and how Rob goes about the business of drawing is so unique and exciting. I like to think in the end, it's the image that is most important to Rob. It carries the story. The act of drawing is an excuse to make the image. I see Jim Nutt as the same way. You can certainly get lost in the great skill he has, but it's the image that keeps you in front of his painting.

Other current painters that excite me are Brian Calvin, how he uses the figure as an abstract element to tell a story, a story that he might know the beginning or the end, but he nails the middle. Peter Doig for his use of the figure and landscape and how he paints. Alex Katz and Neil Welliver's paintings from the 60's and 70's how that this work is 'no excuses painting' Here is what I paint, don't like it? Find another painter.

When I am in galleries today, I fell a bit of an outsider. I don't see many artists who are addressing similar issues or painting like I do. Artists such as James Benjamin Franklin and Robyn O'Neil are a few more who do that. I want interesting images, no matter how they are painted: Chris Vasell, Donald Baechler, Carrie Gundersdorf, James Seina, all make me excited to paint when their approach is as far from mine as can be.

Oddly, there's a current trend of sculpture that is closer to what I want out of paintings. Johnston Foster, Daphne Fitzpatrick, Aaron Spangler, Mike Hein, Lawrence Seward all have the type of narrative and strangeness that is very hard for me to find in contemporary painting.

Reverse Migration, 2003, acrylic on linen, 14" x 22"

JL: You have now been working with the soldier for a few years… What have you been able to do with them that you may not have been able to do with the caveman? What's next?

MF: The soldiers have more of a universal appeal. They are not limited by their intelligence like the caveman. I found with the caveman, certain poses or props I placed with them, the work became too much about evolution, something I was uninterested in. With the soldiers, I don't seem to have problems like that. As far as what is next? Everyone asks that. Right now, I don't think there is a next. Rather, I want to add another body of work to these paintings. I don't think I have to close up the soldier shop, I have worked too long and hard and they are finally getting interesting. If it were nude women, that would add a lot to the soldier paintings. Only time will tell.