my love for you is a stampede of horses.

q&a with know hope.

Recently, I was able to chat with the Israeli street artist Know Hope over instant messaging. What follows are highlights from our conversations. I'm truly excited to share this interview with you; Know Hope is a street artist I admire greatly. Not just for his amazing paste ups and rad 3-d lantern pieces but for his no-holds barred earnest and heart felt messages. His solo show the Insecurities of Time, opens tomorrow at Ad Hoc in Brooklyn.
 
M: Hey! How are you?

KH: Doing good, how you been?

M: Awesome. Where are you right now? Are you in Tel Aviv?

KH: I'm at home in Tel Aviv, yeah.

M: So I first noticed your work a few years ago...I'm not sure where I first saw it. But it's so different than most street art.

KH: Thank you. I think...haha!

M: When did you start putting stuff out?

KH: I think it was right about when i moved to Tel Aviv...so like 4 years ago?

M: What was your work like in the beginning?

KH: Very text based. I used to write much more than I used to draw, so naturally that's what felt more relevant to me at the time. It usually consisted of a short piece of very associative writing and a small image paired to it.

M: Was it poetry you would put out, or free form writing?

KH: I don't know, it was just stuff from my note/sketchbook..I guess maybe a mixture of both..the term poetry is a bit ambiguous and problematic for me..the same way with the term art.

M: Yeah...it's really a personal take. Talk to me about the term art. What do you mean?

KH: It's funny, because the term is used in such an objective way, when the essence of the thing is to document the subjective. I think art serves so many various functions.

M: What do you look for in art that you like? For me...I need to be moved, I need to feel and think.

KH: I think accessibility, to know that the person was present when making it. Its very layered, the thought of trying to figure out what it is I need in art, because in a way, I am trying to make what I need. Like, I know which artists I like, and I know if something has an impact on me. But the function and aesthetics of art in my mind is constantly changing and developing as time/life goes by.

q&a with Jen Corace.

I must confess that I decided to put off this latest q&a due to the holiday season until now, I absolutely love Jen Corace's work and I did not want the interview to get lost in the shuffle of all the holiday madness. Jen answered these questions right after her solo show, Our Finest Hour opened at Giant Robot. I've included a bunch of the paintings from the show in this post, as well as images from her latest illustrative endeavor Hansel and Gretel with Cynthia Rylant. It was a pleasure to read about the goings on behind the scenes of Jen's illustrations, process and cooking with whiskey!

What do you love most about being a working artist?

I have always loved the schedule the most. There's no beating having a custom schedule to do what you enjoy most. I am a night owl...I have always known this to some degree but I have finally come to fully accept it. I prefer starting work around five or six and then working until two or three in the morning...you know, with some dinner and a few breaks here and there.

Can you tell us a little about the mediums you work in? What are your favorites?

My mediums of choice are pen and ink...which sometimes isn't ink, but concentrated watercolor, acrylic and watercolor paint on either watercolor paper or Rives BFK. I tend to stick to this formula. It works best for me, I've learned most of their strengths and have found ways to navigate around their weaknesses.  

q&a with kate bingaman burt.

photo by Lisa Congdon at Rare Device.

I'm especially excited to bring you the latest q&a with artist and graphic designer Kate Bingaman Burt. Kate has been extraordinarily busy with many projects ranging from hand lettering the brand new book Handmade Nation to a big move cross country, so it was super cool of her to make some time to answer some questions. She talks with us about everything from her project Obsessive Consumption to her mom on etsy. Kate's documenation of her purchases is so good for so many reasons, the main reason is that she takes an everyday occurence and turns it into art. That my friends is pretty neat. Please be sure to check out Kate's blog What Did You Buy Today? and her etsy shop where you can purchase a years subscription to her monthly zine (Kate has a holiday special going on too! If you purchase a years subscription you receive a drawing of Kate's as well with your subscription! Neat!).

You started your brand/project Obsessive Consumption to catalog your everyday purchases. Can you tell us a little bit about how that started?

I have always been a big list maker. In my early 20's I worked as an in house designer at a gift company in Omaha. Along with designing their products (candles, food packaging, bath and soap and other smelly things) I also went to trade shows all over the place to sell the stuff. It was there that I became pretty fascinated with spotting trends and trying to guess what store buyers would want. I would LOVE listening to conversations about what their customers wanted and why. I would try to design and tap into these purchasing habits.

I then realized I couldn't design that way anymore. I wanted some time to explore some of the thoughts I was having about consumerism. So I was fortunate and spent my mid-20s in graduate school researching these consumerism questions, but in a personal way. I really wanted to know the history of objects. [I] spent a lot of time in thrift stores and yard sales taking pictures and talking to people about what they were buying or what they were giving way.

Eventually I decided that I was going to focus on the history of my own objects, that is when I started documenting all of my purchases. I did this for 28 months. I would take a picture of the purchase, print it out and then place the picture and the receipt into a glassine envelope. I would then date stamp the envelope, rank it and upload all of the purchases to my website.

Through this process of tracking and drawing your purchases, have you found out things about yourself that you didn't know before?

The emotional revelations really happened more when I first started uploading purchases to the internet (2003), then when I started drawing my credit card statements. Drawing my purchases is actually a lot of fun. Having the evidence of everything that I buy pretty much only confirmed things that I thought about my consumerism before: I need to eat better, I need to stop buying magazines so much and I need to think more about the purchase before buying (which I TOTALLY do now).

q&a with christian rex van minnen.

key-hole portrait 3.1

christian rex van minnen's art is a bit of a departure from what i normally showcase on the blog. but as i write this blog, so i write the rules...and i find christian's work to be both beautiful and captivating. i wanted to learn more about his inspirations, processes and overall thoughts. his latest series, the key-hole portraits are as dynamic as they are fantastical in their bio-morphic beauty. i found this q&a to be super thoughtful and insightful. i hope you enjoy it.

your portraits are really intense. overflowing with layers of excess skin, tumors, organs etc. often you can't even really make out faces in your subjects, yet there they are. can you tell us a little bit about your work?

i’ve always been fascinated with anatomy and physiology as well as biology and other natural sciences. however, i generally don’t work from sketches or images, but rather from abstraction. i like to create a kind of mess of an underpainting, a primordial soup of paint and information that i can see things in and pull form from. a lot of the time, this results in bio-morphic images and sometimes representational images. i have recently been utilizing this technique within the language of portraiture, creating a portrait without a sitter. the basic elements that make a painting a portrait are the geometric language of the stable pyramid, centric oval and rectangle.

it’s interesting what you said about the faces; i think that because they incorporate these basic elements of portraiture, we want to see a face completing a sentence or dialogue. by not having the eye contact or immediately recognizable facial features the viewer is left to fill in the blanks, often with aspects of ourselves.

one of the things i find really interesting about your paintings is the delivery; beautifully rendered paintings of very unpleasant beings. if you were to see these characters in real life, societal norms would dictate that we look away. yet you have a way of transforming the grotesquely bizarre into a real beauty. they're fascinating to look at. what is it about your subjects, or you for that matter, that makes you render them this way?

i suppose i have always been attracted to the grotesque because there is a truth and beauty that is inseparable from what is immediately unpleasant. our lives are filled with such unpleasant beauties and opportunities to make light of dark. i don’t paint these things with the intent to produce something explicitly unpleasant or for shock value. but at the same time it is my tendency to ‘enter the forest where it is darkest'. as joseph campbell would say “where you had once thought to find an abomination, you will find god.” i suppose i’ve got equal parts joseph campbell, charles bukowski, and john james audubon. humor serves as the lubrication for the tight squeeze into dark places. like laughing at a horror movie.

abstract figurative series 2.3

although your work has a dark edge, you've got a great sense of humor...take your painting abstract figurative series 2.3. were the mickey ears an afterthought?

those ears were already kind of in the under painting, just the remnants of the wild early brush play. after all was said and done they held out as an essential component of the composition. i actually had a hard time leaving them in because it felt a bit divisive, but it just made the piece. who knows, perhaps subconsciously when they first appeared i was thinking mickey. i don’t know. they make the piece to be more accessible, like the trojan horse to get in your dome.

key hole portrait 3.3

what influences you?

i have always, always, loved field guides and nature/biology/anatomy books of all kinds. my earliest drawings were these little made up creatures that i would draw by the dozens on those little pieces of paper that they kept behind the pews in church, i guess to quote scripture or something. my dad was a baptist minister, so we spent a lot of time in church in those early years. i spent most of that time drawing.

as far as art, i was really into comics when i was young. especially the darker ones. i was fascinated with the way these artists would create such expressive language in the anatomy and physiology of the subjects. actually, i don’t think i ever really read comics, as much as watched comics. i discovered hr giger early on and he has been a huge influence for those same reasons; conveying emotion through depictions of flesh. recently i have been very influenced by the great masters of the northern renaissance and the golden age of dutch painting, like rembrandt, van schriek, frans snyders, and hans memling. a few of my favorite contemporary  artists that i find to be particularly inspiring would be gregory jacobsen, walton ford, ryan riss, robert hardgrave, matthew bone, aurel schmidt, and odd nerdrum (too many to list!).

key-hole series 3.1 detail.

the light in your work is gorgeous, can you talk a little bit about your physical process?

i have spent a lot of time visually dissecting the old masters works, particularly dutch golden age painter’s use of chiaroscuro. i guess caravaggio would have to be included in there too. i have learned some basic principles from studying these paintings such as complementary color under paintings and glazing. also, I have learned to be disciplined enough to always consider the light when moving forward with the painting. everything is affected by the light source - from start to finish the light source is what pulls form from abstraction.

what do you paint in?

usually my sweet nike running pants.

ha, very cute. do you ever work in any other medium besides oils?

no, not very often. i have painting in oils since i was 15, so about 13 years not and i feel i am still learning from this medium - it makes sense to me in this strange alchemical way. i sometimes use ink on paper in two to three day furies where i’ll produce 50 or 100 drawing/paintings. i also make masks out of cardboard and papier-mâché, but those are secret.

key hole portrait 3.2

what was your earlier work like?

my work has always focused on the expressive qualities of figure and form. my older work, however, had more narrative and was more explicit in making a statement. i was a bit more liberal with color. there was a point where i had lost connection with my palette so i cut it back to a few colors: red, black and yellow. i have slowly introduced new colors and now have a large palette again, but a better understanding of each pigment. i suppose my earlier work had its roots in surrealism and comic book elements, whereas now i don’t feel those allegiances so strong strongly.  

your latest series the Key-Hole Portraits combine both the natural and preternatural, a beauty and a rawness. can you talk a little bit about this departure

i have started to be more open to mixing representational images into compositions that are also inhabited by forms derived from abstraction. it makes the believability of the latter more accessible. again, a trick, a lube, or trojan horse - like the foundational geometry of the portrait itself. i am not being didactic in painting; there is no symbolism here. there is something about looking at plants and animals in a field guide, alone on a white page, out of its element that makes them more human. this is where i am finding mystery.

the Key-Hole Portrait Series are actually multi-layered. composed of two panels, the first panel sits about two inches above the actual painting...what were your thoughts behind this group?

my work has been explicitly concept driven lately, which is kind of unusual for me as the concept is usually implicit. it all comes from this notion that we see ‘human-ness’ in things nonhuman. so when i started doing the first Abstract-Figurative Portrait Series and the ManFungus Series, i started thinking more about how the viewer attributes their own qualities of self onto the subjects within the portrait. whether that [portrait] is a rembrandt sitter or one of my pieces where there are no faces or easily recognizable human forms, but natural forms nonetheless.

in the Key-Hole portraits i am pushing that theory a bit further by taking a recognizable human portrait, such a rembrandt’s self-portrait or davinci’s ‘lady with ermine’, and translating that image into the negative space of a cut out silhouette. the front panel becomes a keyhole that one looks through to the painting on an interior panel. the insides of these portraits are compositions of flora and fauna, both natural and preternatural, in a vast and mostly empty environment. this scene is cropped by the front panel to varying degrees, depending on your visual perspective to the painting.

man fungus series 1.3

what is coming up for you in the next few months and 2009?

this month (Oct-Nov) i have some work in klaudia marr gallery’s (Santa Fe) 15th annual realism invitational and also at last rites gallery’s (NYC) 13th Hour show. i’ll be showing a couple pieces at bert green fine art (LA) in january. i am working hard towards my first two person show at roq la rue gallery (Seattle) in march of 2009 where i will be showing with the amazing painter, yoko d’holbachie. in september 2009 i will be in a  two person show with another amazing painter, scott g. brooks, at last rites gallery in NYC. Oh yeah,  another shameless self-promotion; metamorphosis 2 by beinart publishing will be released this december’09 and will include folks like hr giger, travis louie, lori early, ron english, and yours truly.

key hole portrait 2.3

q&a with susie ghahremani.

opening this saturday at giant robot in LA is susie ghahremani's 5th solo show, the wild life. w/ promises of an interactive installation and a haiku contest it sounds like it's going to be a hoot, a holler and a heck of a good time. susie recently answered some q's for me about the upcoming show. she talks about the show, her inspirations behind it and her latest creative endeavors. i hope you guys enjoy it...and if you are in the LA area i would get on over, sounds like a show not to be missed.

what i love most about your work is how you depict animals. your color palette and the environment in which you create for your subjects really speaks to how passionately you feel about animals. what it is about animals that make them your primary subject?

thank you!  aside from being an animal lover in general, i feel like animals are universally relate-able which is a big reason why i paint them so much -- they can be seen and understood independent of distinction of race, gender, etc. and the animal kingdom is so diverse i never feel like i run out of subjects and possibilities. plus, i'm around animals a lot (i have five birds and a cat and volunteer as a wildlife rehabilitator) -- probably more so than most people -- so they seep into my work naturally.

your volunteer job as a wildlife rehabilitator heavily influenced the show. can you tell us about how you were inspired?

the place where i volunteer has a strict "no bunny hugging" policy (that means: no treating wild animals like they're pets) -- basically, endeavoring to keep the animals in their care 'wild', making sure they do NOT get used to being around humans so they can survive independently in the wild following release. this got me thinking about the irony of things like birdhouses, and how weird it is that humans try to coax wild animals like birds into habitats outdoors that resemble their own. birdhouses look like human houses, but that's not a natural environment for a wild animal at all -- sort of funny, don't you think?

so, i focused on that for this collection of work really pushing and exaggerating a ridiculously domesticated life for these animals -- sleeping in beds, eating at tables, owning furniture! -- and many of the animals in my show (owls and hummingbirds, skunks and opossums, squirrels and rabbits) are animals i myself have handled while volunteering. plus, i feel such affection for animals, and since i'm not allowed to cuddle them at my volunteer job, painting them in such detail while humanizing them kind of balances out the professionalism i maintain while volunteering!

there will be a 3-d installation at the show. there are tantalizing hints on the press release that visitors will be able "to physically experience the world she creates in her paintings for the first time". can you give us any more hints about this? it sounds so exciting!

i'm hoping to transform the space of the gallery with this site specific installation so viewers, while at the show, are truly enveloped in the world of the artwork. a big part of this includes the hanging installation -- suspended from the ceiling and comprised of over 100 3-dimensional parts!  i'm also planning a mural that i'll be painting on site. basically, the show will have a lot of different layers so it'll be so much more than an art-on-the-wall type show :)  i've never not done an art-on-the-wall type show before, so i'm nervous and excited for the outcome!

a haiku contest is part of your show as well. haiku is so awesome. was this your idea for the show?

it was! there are literally hundreds of miniature paintings in the show, and the visual effect of my shows can be sometimes overwhelming just from the sheer quantity and insane detail of my work, so i thought it'd be fun to add a little creativity and invite participation with the haiku contest!  one reason i thought it'd be cool is that it would be a reason for viewers to connect with individual pieces from the show instead of the show as a whole. plus, painting is such a solitary activity, i feel like it'll be fun for everybody to see the varying responses to the work. and haiku is so clever! we'll be hanging up the haikus the audience writes as part of the installation and giving awesome prizes to the top three, judged by giant robot and i!

you've got an amazing range of products from eco-friendly tote bags (which i own and LOVE) to jewelry, what are some of your most recent products and/or projects you are especially excited about?

thank you!  hands down, my new products with chronicle books are the most exciting for me! i feel like chronicle can make anything happen -- i just love all their gift and stationery items so it's not only a career highlight for me to have collaborated with them, but the final products (a full color journal, a set of note cards, a set of sticky notepads and more to come in the future!) are something i'm truly proud of and enjoy using!

i recently also illustrated the sets for a series of bank of america commercials , which was pretty different than any project i've ever done, and was very exciting!

you have been extremely busy so far this year. what else do you have coming up?

i have a line of autumn-inspired tote bags made in collaboration with the ever-amazing bungalow 360 bag company and a collection of baby clothing coming out with a new company called spark baby apparel. both of those are to be released within the next few weeks. i hope to participate in the amazing & juried LA crafty shopping event called felt club in november, got a few more group art shows before the year is through, working on a limited-edition letterpress collaboration with paper stories letterpress, and um.... who knows what else??  whatever comes my way!