Art Hound

Hollie Chastain is a found paper and collage artist who pounds the pavement for the perfect (i.e. stained, ripped, doodle-covered) books and ephemera for her mixed media pieces. Her work is currently for sale at Nahcotta’s ETA 7 (one of her pieces was included in this week’s picks) and through her etsy shop, Dr. Kennedy Jones. She lives in Chattanooga, Tennessee with her husband and two children.

AH: Tell us a bit about your artistic process. Do you start with a specific idea for a piece or are you inspired by the found objects you use?

HC: It varies. Sometimes I will have a composition in mind and go scavenging for exactly what I feel is right for that particular piece.  Only about 10% of the time will the end result portray the initial idea exactly but if something has been hanging around in my mind for a long time, never changing, then i stick with it. The composition and subject for some of my pieces were imagined months before I stumbled across the perfect scrap of paper that it required. But most of the time i start with one really great sheet of paper or board and start building up, pulling shapes and ideas and characters from the different scribbles and splotches and colors i find. Some of my favorite pieces have started from nothing but a coffee-stained book cover and an amazing scrap of blue from a geography book that accidentally overlapped in a great way at the bottom of a crate.

Last week I had the pleasure of meeting the lovely, Brooklyn-based Marcie Paper and gaining a better understanding of her work. I came across Marcie’s ingenious series, Paintings for The Recession, online and it really resonated with me. Paper has found a way to make the art she wants to make while also offering compelling pieces for low-end art buyers. So far Marcie has made more than fifty Paintings for The Recession and sold most of them, many to fans without the means to purchase her larger paintings.

(Paintings above available through the artist for $50, $50, $70)

Marcie works on two series simultaneously: her larger paintings, which take months, sometimes years to complete and her Paintings for The Recession, which are small exercises completed in a few days or weeks. Each Painting for The Recession represents a memory from that day in Paper’s life, a visual representation of a mundane yet significant detail (examples include seeing a mob of umbrellas, her knitting group or a leaky roof). These more modest paintings also allow Marcie to tease out specific ideas before layering them into her larger pieces.

Marcie’s larger paintings document these daily occurrences over an extended period of time. When Marcie runs out of space, she simply paints over the paper and starts again. The layers upon layers of paint harden the paper and make it heavy, turning it into a physical object as much as a painting. I never would have appreciated the incredible amount of work that goes into these pieces without talking to Marcie and watching her animated paintings, which show a painting’s typical progression. Marcie’s larger paintings are currently on display at Tinlark Gallery through December 19th.

Earlier this week, I had the opportunity to interview the energetic, Minneapolis-based artist, Kari Maxwell, about her new watercolor series and life as an artist. To see more of Kari’s work, check out her website and etsy shop.

AH: Your watercolor series, unadorned yet strikingly beautiful, is clearly a hit, but this is a relatively new direction for you. What did you work on previously and what drew you to watercolors?

KM: Oh, there is a subtle shift with everything and then, all of the sudden, I find myself somewhere else (this is typical for my process).  This recent body of work is meant to represent days I have “wandered and wondered”…  Over the summer, my husband and I made several trips to the South Shore ( a local get away for us) where there was a lot of time to sit, reflect, rest.  I spent a lot of time with my travel Windsor and Newton watercolor set on the beach.  It was glorious.  Although, at the time, I saw it as something temporary, it (obviously) stuck (the watercolors, I mean) to get me to this point, this body of work.

AH: What’s the hardest part about being an artist for you?

KM: Oh, this is easy…  Ha!  There is so much down time for me, so much time between bodies of work.  It’s at these times that I feel so creatively frustrated and anxious, always asking the question, “What is the next direction?”…  Of course, art never reveals itself this way (at least for me).  The creative process always surprises me (something else I LOVE)… I believe that if I show up for my art every day, my art will make itself known to me.  This has turned out to be the case over and over again.

AH: What’s the most rewarding aspect of being an artist for you?

KM: Two things come to the top of my head: 1. When I am completely absorbed in the process, so much so, that I catch myself dancing around my studio or when I am so absorbed that I haven’t even noticed that I needed to eat.  2. When someone can appreciate my work (or “feel” it) without even speaking to me (or even meeting me, for that matter).  I LOVE THAT!

AH: How does social media play a role in your career as an artist?

KM: I see the world and experience the world through images.  In fact, I usually require an image before I have anything to say.  I use social media as a means of putting my art out there, “to the universe”, a demonstration and an acknowledgement of the significance of art AS communication.

Sophia Brueckner is a West Coast artist I’ve profiled before, but given the dramatic evolution of her recent work (see left and below), I’m taking the opportunity to once again share her work. Her new pieces are distinguished by their emphasis on repetition and patterns and their degree of abstraction. Brueckner refers to these new paintings as generative, meaning that they are partly executed by computer algorithms the artist creates using javascript.  As it turns out, this is not an unexpected development for Brueckner who has a background in math and computer science and previously worked as a software engineer.

As Sophia states in the interview, this is an artistic process that she is dedicated to and excited to explore, and similarly we are excited to watch Brueckner’s work develop and flourish.

[View with PicLens]

 

HA: What inspired you to take this new direction in generative art?

SB: Actually, my hope would be to learn how to bring the strong, organic quality of my watercolor paintings into my work using the computer.  Art generated by a computer usually looks as if it is done by a computer, but I want my generative work to feel like a great painting.  My long term goal is to create generative work that is like what I do in my watercolor paintings but is alive, interactive, and always changing.

Today I’m featuring Jenna Newton, a super-creative and prolific New York-based artist. I first discovered Jenna on Etsy where she sells her Automatic Drawing series, a collection of simple but gorgeous drawings for $50 or less.  The concept is so fun and the result is one-of-a-kind really cool inexpensive art! Check out some of Jenna’s Automatic Drawings below, followed by an interview.

[View with PicLens]

 

HA: You draw, paint and use mixed-media. What do these different media represent for you?

JN: I love the act of painting, the nature of paint itself is just seductive. I also like feeling part of the tradition of painting. Mixed-media appeals to my need for complete freedom in my work, I can use anything I feel the piece needs, and that’s really fun. Drawing is my favorite medium as of right now, but I’ve always loved to draw. I am attracted to the immediacy of drawing, it is compact and economic. At the moment I have little space to work in, plus little patience to plan large paintings, so drawing suits where I am right now very well.

HA: Can you describe your Automatic Drawings and how they’re different from your other drawings?

JN: The Automatic Drawing series came about as a sort of drawing meditation. I was a bit stuck, and began drawing freely, letting the associations lead to other shapes and forms. Originally I thought I would turn them into paintings, but I enjoy making these drawings so much, I can’t seem to stop to go back to painting. I’ve got quite a few of them now, close to 400, and it’s almost a contest to see just how many I can come up with. It’s also incredibly freeing, as a person who tends to resist planning, to allow myself to be so spontaneous.

HA: Are you inspired by other contemporary artists? If so, anyone in particular?

JN: I’m always looking at painters, because I think of myself as a painter, so I like to stay current with what contemporary painters are doing. As far as what I’m inspired by, it’s mostly art of the past. I’m drawn to big, abstract paintings, so I really like the Abstract Expressionists. I take a lot from architecture, too. And of course, I adore many of my fellow artists who have shops on Etsy, there is so much great work there.

HA: You’re on Etsy, Flickr and have a blog. Do you think social media is changing art?

JN: I think it’s wonderful, in the way that as an artist without gallery representation, I can reach a great amount of people on my own. There are so many resources for artists to establish their careers – it’s very exciting. On the other it can be daunting, with so much to keep up with. But, If you implement a systematic approach to keep yourself up to date, it is definitely manageable. Social media is surely allowing artists many opportunities that in the past were unavailable to us.

HA: What’s the most fulfilling aspect of your work?

JN: I am a little surprised every time someone tells me that they enjoy my work. It’s easy for me to feel isolated, as if I am producing art mostly for myself, and then possibly for others to see as well. It is incredibly pleasing to hear that something I created touches another. Also, being able to sell pieces through my shop is incredibly fulfilling and somehow reaffirms my love and desire to create art. I’m very happy that I’ve been able to find outlets for my work.

Ashley Goldberg is a very talented, multi-dimensional artist whose custom portraits are both beautiful and innovative.  Goldberg takes an art form, the portrait, that has been around for thousands of years and succeeds at making both the process, which is truly collaborative, and the end product feel totally modern. A portrait of one starts at $200. Browse Ashley’s work on Etsy.

[View with PicLens]

 

HA: How did you get started with custom portraits?

AG: I get so many requests for commissioned work and I wanted to offer it at a reasonable price with a reasonable turnaround time, so this seemed perfect. People are one of my favorite things to draw.

HA: How do you make color choices such as blue or lime-green hair?

AG: Well, people pick colors from my palette and I incorporate those where I feel they best go (shirt vs. hair). Sometimes they leave the colors up to me completely. Normally I have the photo of the person up while I color so I can see that it still looks like them even when I pick an outrageous color.  Like the blues tend to register as dark hair, and the greens like blonder or medium hair colors.

HA: Do you incorporate the personalities of the couple into the portrait? Is the process personal?

AG: I don’t know about funny—normally they are really flattering and people use them for their wedding invitations or save the dates. Some couples have used them to commemorate their pets that passed away and that is so touching. One person did ask me if it took this many photos (I asked him for more) to create the Mona Lisa…

The Soap Factory is a gallery and raw space in Minneapolis that hosts a monthly TV show called SFG4.  The October show, below, tours the space midway through the installation of The Austerity Cookbook and interviews the artists about their process.

Soap Factory October 09 from Soap Factory on Vimeo.

Technology, media and the art experience:

Wendy DesChene (4:37) “There’s no quality control on google (images)… I just started thinking about what that was doing to art and how it was playing with our perceptions. All of these things that were originally done by artists then became these things that they couldn’t even imagine. And people were having art experiences that nobody intended through all this digital distortion. And so it kind of comes full circle back here because this is only a temporary painting, this will only be up for the duration of the exhibit, so to see this the way I intended it you have to physically be here.”

Discovery:

Wendy DesChene (10:10) “I know exactly what it’s going to look like usually before I begin. I take a picture of the space and then I use Photoshop to lay it out. I went through probably about 40 different designs before I settled on this one… And so before I even made a mark on the wall I knew exactly what this would look like.”

Peter Owen (17:20) “With my practice, there’s nothing laid out, there’s no overall plan. It’s very intuitive. On one hand it’s really exciting seeing how things develop, on the other hand since there is no plan there is that possibility of failure.”