J.J. Garfinkel

Chapel Furrow, 2007, oil, acrylic, enamel on panel, 54" x 48"

Terra Spectra, 2008, oil, acrylic, abalone on panel, 48" x 62"















Conjured A Sample, 2008, oil on panel, 40" x 34"
Untitled, 2009, watercolor, gouache, flashe and pencil on paper, 10" x 8"



Channel #3, 2009, oil on canvas, 45" x 45"

Landmine Spring, 2004, enamel, foam, plastic on panel, 24" x 24"

Aura of Nights, 2009, oil on canvas, 52" x 78"

Aura of Lights is part of J.J. Garfinkel's renewed interest in oil painting on a larger scale...it and Channel #3 are especially nice in person. I'm liking the way he moved from works like Landmine Spring into this more sophisticated and mysterious grouping of nature's objects. His works have been seen at Hogar Collection (among other spots) and you check out more 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.

Ned Colclough

Tug of Love (detail); Read Your Mind, 18" x 24"; Florida Room (detail)













Souvenir, 22" x 28"; All the Bass, 18" x 24"


Florida Room; Souvenir, 22" x 28"; Tug of Love; Read Your Mind, 2007, 18" x 24"

Pacific, 19" x 23"

Theme from Planets and detail

Anything at all

When I first got a peek at Ned Colclough’s studio a couple of years back, there were a few paintings on the wall, pinned up photos, and various parts that would become these constructions. I recently had a chance to stop by again and the room is now filled with finished pieces. Maybe it’s because there’s no space for more, but they seem to represent his first major body of work. I'm really into the the sculptures because they are deliberately precarious and oddly rythmic. They pivot, lean, brace, and balance with nothing but friction and gravity keeping them together. Keep an eye out for his work…

Stacy Fisher

I had the good fortune of meeting and working with Stacy Fisher this year in conjunction with The Longest Day, in which she had two great works. On this Thursday, September 12, she will be in a group show called The Grey That Thinks Itself Into Your Head Without Asking at Pace University's Peter Fingesten Gallery. For more info on her check her website and see the interview below.

JL: You once told me that you worked on sketches while on vacation. With works like Mohawk and Untitled in mind, I was curious as to what you might be drawing. It also seems like such a nice notion, to go away and make work, casually, comfortably outside of the studio. Could you tell me a little bit more about this process? How important is it for you to work in different places?

SF: I have always been an artist that loves to draw. I like the immediacy of putting ink on paper and documenting ideas, objects and people. When I work in the studio I don't typically use references for what I am making, I rely more on what I remember about the way something looks, or the details I want to exaggerate. When I am out of the studio, particularly outdoors, I don't like to read because I find I just want to look at things. I've noticed that if I make a drawing of a place that I have a much clearer memory of being there, much more than looking at a photograph I've taken. And though I would never necessarily enjoy taking photographs of strangers, if I'm somewhere like a beach, where people are occupied with activities but remaining some-what still, I have an instinctual urge to find compositions and draw them. It is also amusing at the time, when you can compare the actual person to the person you've drawn. It isn't about documenting them specifically, but an overall moment.

JL: You seem to have a very diverse body of work so far. What is it that fosters new ideas, directions, and different ways of thinking about our own work. Is there a part of you that thinks, "how will these 'fit in' with the rest of my work"?

SF: A friend of mine recently burst into laughter after walking into my studio, saying she never knows what to expect when I invite her over. I asked her reluctantly if that was good or bad, and she said it was good because so many artists make the same work over and over and don't explore new ideas. I definitely think about how the work is tied together, and am always surprised, when digging through old work, to find early sketches for sculptures that I might be currently making. I believe there is a certain sensibility that is carried through. When I start a new body of work, I try to take what I was most excited about in the previous work and really try to get to the heart of that interest. Aesthetically, I really try and push my expectations for what something might look like, and how it could be changed to look like something new.

JL: How important is it that there is a connection between your sculpture, paintings, drawings, etc.?

SF: The connection between my drawings, painting and sculpture is very important in that one informs the other. My abstract paintings greatly influence my representational sculpture, and my abstract sculptures rely heavily on shapes and textures in my landscape drawings. I find that if I'm working one way two dimensionally that I work the other way three dimensionally. I'm not exactly sure why, but I think it has to do with the exchange of information.

JL: Works like Green and Plaid Sculpture and Tennis Bricks and Sloping are the result of a very whimsical and sometimes bizarre combination of objects. Could you talk about your attraction to everyday objects and the compulsion to transform, combine, and reproduce them?



SF: When I choose objects to recreate it's often because I have an amplified visual fondness for them, and I either can't dispose of them (the tennis balls) or I shouldn't necessarily own them (metal trash can lids or bricks). It's a little bit like drawing people on the beach-a way of documenting and remembering the way something is or may be. In the end, I use sketches and clay models for determining how they will look rather than the model objects themselves. I like the sculptures to appear as active as possible, so I play around with angles and space relationships when choosing what objects to group together and while the work is in progress. I also consider how the objects are normally used and like to skew their purpose, just enough, to make them look either more stoic or slightly startled as sculptures. I would say I experiment more in terms of scale and painting than I do with the combination of elements. In the new works like Green and Plaid Sculpture, I'm not recreating actual objects but am making my own objects under the influence of my own work thus far.

JL: What influences or sources find there way into these works, artistic or otherwise?

SF: I have come across a couple of ideas that I like from other artists, over time, on the topic of using everyday objects. Claus Oldenburg compared the relevance and desire of recreating objects to portrait painting. An article I read about Frank O'Hara describes his poetry, as quick-paced as it is, as a wish to stop time.

On the Beach, 2008, marker on paper, 10" x 12"
Red & Green Collage, 2006, paper, cardboard, oil pastel, 5" X 4"
Tennis Bricks and Sloping, 2005, paper mache, resin, Magic Sculpt, flock, paint, 17" x 48" x 7"
Book Painting, 2005, acrylic paint on book pages, 8.5" x 11"
Fire Pit, 2007, ballpoint pen on paper, 11" x 14"
Green and Plaid Sculpture, 2008, plaster wood, hardware, paint, 26" x 26" x 5"

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.

Patrick Brennan

Pinky, 2004, 12" x 12"

Abstract Tree, 2003, 36" x 40"

I'm into Patrick's seemingly nonchalant approach to painting and his tendency t0 experiment with materials, form, and color. He is now working on large washes made from moving the work from the floor to the wall and more complex, layered compositions. He lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. Take a look at his new work here.

Aaron Steffes

Untitled (coffee cup), 2005

Mutated Turpenoid, 2004, oil and acrylic on board, 24" x 24"



Untitled, 2004, oil and acrylic on board, 24" x 24"

In and around 2004, Aaron was doing both narrative and experimental videos. He also created a body of paintings which featured pseudo-realistic distortions, pairing various objects that he found close at hand. He currently lives and works in Chicago, IL and is working on new video projects and drawings of popular fiction authors.