The Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum has a Living Room and because they are and have been so wonderful to me and many other artists, they have allowed me to come to Mrs. G’s house, and sit in the Living Room and have talks with artists and whomever else. This is my first one and I could not have chosen a better guest.

Maggie (not Margaret) is an artist, educator, curator, and the mind behind, within and through out Alter Projects.  Because of her varied ways of participating in the art world I thought it would be great to talk to her about publics, practices, Boston, and engagement.

I loved talking to her.  She’s brilliant.  I hope you enjoy the show.

i wash my feet for you, gouache and gum arabic on panel, 15×15″

Steve Locke:  When we were in grad school together you turned me on to the writings of Mira Schor.  In those writings,  I discovered a way of working that allowed me to investigate figuration at a time when that was actively discouraged. Also, because our interests in gender, depiction, and subjectivity have dovetailed over the years, it’s always exciting for me to see the ways you address these in your work.

I’ve always had a sense of seeing something from the inside out when I look at your work.  It’s not just the way things are, it’s more like a combination of all different streams of time that come together for a moment to make an image.  

What has been evident to me in your work is a tremendous amount of power and weight in objects and images.  Things float and fall, or they balance with formal elegance and a sense of danger.  Sometimes, like in Back in the Saddle they actually seem to destroy the subject with the elements of modernist design. There is a sense of tremendous violence in your work.  Not just in the imagery, but in the methods and materials.  Toxic pigments, handmade inks, sewing (or suturing), cutting, and reforming the work and the body (sometimes your own, as in Most Improved) in the work are the hallmarks of your practice.  At first I thought it was at odds with the sort of gendered traditions of home and then I realized how sexist my thinking was.  I also think, in this time of tremendous backlash against women, that the urgency of these actions are clearer to me.

How do you understand the use of power in your work, and how do you use materials and methods to convey its presence or absence?

Disquietude

my dear, gouache, oak gall ink and gold leaf on deer parchment, 18″x24″

The idea of power can have several meanings. It means there is an ability to do or act and that there is the capability of doing. It is also possible to understand the implication that one may have power over another’s ability to do or act. I have thought about these conditions for a very long time- much longer before realizing that I was someone who would make images and that an image could have consequence.

As a young girl I realized that power came with the ability to be heard.  And not only to be heard, but to be listened to and to be allowed to speak.  Within my family, I found it difficult to find space to have my voice heard; often being spoken over, ignored, or simply not finding a gap to enter into conversations.  It was clear to me that male words were valued more for some reason and it was maddening.  Rather than staying angry and fighting out loud, I retreated and realized there was a quiet power in being invisible.  There was something to being able to slip in and out of a situation and this realization has directly influenced how my images coalesce. Navigating a conversation has always been pivotal for me.  How much to add, how much to divulge, is it worth the energy, and more importantly when is the right time to interject are questions that still run tandem with my daily interactions.

The internal and external coexist through the tension of juxtaposed images in the same way a cool smile can belie the heat of anger in one’s gut. I don’t think I would have used the word ‘violent’ to describe my work but can see it now as you have described it. I think honesty can be violent and there is truth in humor.  This is where the poetry is found and a cliché can be revived through a visual image.

In depicting something specific, I have often wanted there to be an effortlessness in the final representation; a gloss of the process. I understand that the delicacy of watercolor washes and the exactness of details with gouache give credence to an image that may seem confrontational or aid its “tongue-in-cheekness.”

This quiet command of materials is akin to a woman’s wile- her smile and nod, a silent acquiescence. Painting on old stained vintage linens that were once napkins or placemats provides a context to confront my fears of motherhood, my doubts of wifehood, my femaleness.

More recently, my investigation and research into the origin of materials has allowed me to make work in which the ingredients have a direct bearing on the inherent meaning. Rather than only being a picture of something, these explorations hover between image and object. Now, when I choose a material, I think about its greater significance. This has given me the freedom to unapologetically embrace a variety of subjects. When I use oak gall ink that I have made, I know that it is permanent; but caustic, and will eventually ‘bite’ through the surface I’ve used it on. There are other inks that I use that I know will fade and disappear.

How language, words, and images are interwoven have always been important.  I love old paintings that have banners swirling through the composition declaring what is true or have a small note lovingly painted with the artist’s name. So beyond titles, I am using text in a much more direct way.  Right now I am working on a fresco panel with historic blue colors and the sole words, Forever is a long time, painted as the subject.

So, for me, power comes down to the idea of voice, of being heard, and choosing whether to scream or whisper.

Candice Smith Corby received her BFA in painting from Tyler School of Art and her MFA in painting from MassArt.  She is the gallery director at Stonehill College where she also teaches in the Visual and Performing Art Department.  She also combines her studio research with traditional material workshops offered, through the arts collective The Bottega (www.thebottega.it).  She is represented by the Miller Yezerski Gallery where she will have a solo exhibition in November 2015.  Her work is included in the collections of Fidelity Bank, Framingham State University, Wellington Investments, and Cosmit.  She has been the recipient of the MCC Fellowship in painting in 2008 and 2014, and an Awesome Grant in 2013.  She is included in 34 an exhibition on the Boston Harbor Islands as part of the Isles Arts Initiative.  The exhibition opens 26 July and Smith Corby’s work can be seen on Great Brewster Island. 

Still from video found at http://www.thexanadugroup.com/videos/

Hello Colin,

I was looking at Houzz.com and I came across a few pictures of your work with The Xanadu Group. The site is impressive and I really enjoyed seeing the videos of you and your team installing the large scale projects.  I also appreciated seeing all of the inspirations.  It is clear that what you are doing now is still influenced by your interest in contemporary art.  Someone asked who did some of the artworks in the pictures so I replied and included links for Mariana Lopez, Mark Chariker, and the Colaço Twins.

I have not heard from you for a while.  I have reached out to you quite a few times since 2009.  I have sent emails and I have sent registered letters to every address I have for you.  I never received a response.  Also, I have contacted your parents as well and they could not (or would not) put me in touch with you.  Your father told me he had no idea where you were and your mother told me it was none of her business, which I can completely understand.  It is my profound hope that you are in touch with your parents and that all is well.  I did see that you mom gave you a very favorable review on the Houzz website of some work you did for her.  That goes a long way in assuaging my concern that you are estranged from her.

Shaun Leonard0, Colin, and the author. Basel, Switzerland 2009

The last time we hung out was with Shaun Leonardo in Basel during VOLTA5.  I’m sure you remember Shaun; he certainly remembers you.  We stayed at Sandra’s place during the fair.  Sandra and I have become quite good friends over the years.  Whenever I go to Basel I try to stay with her.  Her apartment is the same, as is she.  Last time I was there she asked about you.  I had to tell her I hadn’t heard from you in a very long time.

Shaun and I showed some of our best work at that fair.  I had a special project and it was one of my first ever neons.  Remember?  I installed it in the freight elevator at the Markthalle?  I was so freaked out that part of it broke that I actually considered getting high because I was so stressed.  Remember?  You talked me down and got things resolved.  I was so glad I had you to talk to in that moment.  I could have lost everything.  After you got me calmed down I went into Basel and bought some paint and paper and made the 39 drawings that would go in the elevator with the neon.  The blue light (the pink light had broken) made the faces seem like they were in motion.  I thought it was one of the best things I had done.  I remember Amanda Coulson coming by the booth and asking to meet me because she liked the project so much.  She and I have kept in touch.  She was very chilly to me in the beginning when I would see her at VOLTA or at other fairs, but eventually she warmed to me again.  I think once she knew that I was not working with you (and the fact that I was working with Camilo) made her feel safe enough to talk with me again.  It was great to see her in Basel last year and in NY at the fairs this year.  Her daughters are beautiful and growing tall and gorgeous like her.

Shaun had this amazing wallpaper and two of his cut out hero paintings.  I made “the boy with the thorn in his side” especially for that exhibit.  It was over 400 drawings.  We were exhausted because Shaun and I installed everything except the wall paper.  We were very nervous and we were methodical in putting the whole booth together.  But it was a lot of fun and we met artists from all over the place.  And I am still in touch with a lot of those people today and when i run into them at other fairs, they actually say hello to me now.  There was a time when they didn’t, but like with Amanda, when they figured out that I was no longer working with you, the easy camaraderie returned.

It was after that fair that things got very strange.  Phone calls ignored, emails unanswered.  Questions from other artists.  Mariana Lopez and Mark Chariker kept calling me asking me if I’d seen you.  The gallery was supposed to move to LA and I got a phone number and an email but I never got an answer.  Months went by with Shaun and I waiting for our work to come back from Basel.  It never did.  I called your former partners in Brasil and they had no idea what to tell me; they were looking for you too.  I called mutual friends in LA; Mark Schoening gave me a phone number, but I never got a call back.  Fernando Mastrangelo hadn’t seen you, but he did have one of my paintings that you gave him.  When he told me I knew you told me it had sold, but I had never been paid for it.  There were a few paintings that sold at SCOPE as well that you sent me photos with red dots, but I never got paid for those either.

I started talking to the other artists from RHYS Gallery.  A lot of them hadn’t been paid.  Some, like Shaun and I, had works that were never returned to them.  I started compiling lists of what was missing, what had been sold, and what was unaccounted for.  There were a bunch of us who had no idea what happened to you or our work.

Lydia was left here in Boston to try to deal with all of this stuff and honestly I had no idea how she managed to do as much as she did.  Her marriage ended and she left Boston.  She’s in LA now.  I talk with her pretty regularly.  I told her that you were doing work for Xanadu now and she seemed surprised.  LA is big.  It’s not a shock that you haven’t run into each other.

It probably doesn’t matter to you, but I’ve done pretty well.  After RHYS Gallery closed, I was a bit of a pariah here in Boston.  See, I had talked to everyone here about what a great guy you were and how much I trusted you with my work and my career.  When Mariana called me from South America to ask me if you were a reputable dealer I said absolutely.  I even had a terrible moment with Andy Mowbray where I accused him of gossiping.  Remember that?  You and I laughed about it because we knew that all the rumors about you closing the gallery and not paying anyone were just that, rumors.  And we thought that people were just jealous of your success and your youth and your eye for talent and your groundbreaking shows.  Andy has been kind enough to accept my apology for that.  I still can’t quite forgive myself for mistaking his concern for me for jealousy.  I’ll have to live with that one.

Like I said, I was a bit of a pariah, and no one wanted to show my work.  I had meetings with a couple of gallerists but mostly they just wanted to hear about how I got taken and how much I lost and where were you.  There is something about failure, Colin, it stinks.  I mean it literally has an odor that you cannot mask.  Everyone smelled it on me.  I just retreated into my studio.  I got a couple of residencies and I went to Turkey for a while.  When I got back Camilo reached out to me and we started a working relationship.  I’m very fortunate that he saw past the history and looked at the work.  I got back on track.  The work got seen and Camilo makes sure that everything is out in the open.  I trust him.  And he helps me make my best work.  I used to think that about you, but now I realize the difference.

Colin, do you know where my work is?  Do you still have it?  Did you sell it?  Is it on a pier somewhere in Switzerland, unclaimed? Can you just tell me what happened to it so I can try and figure out how to get it back?  Can I be compensated for the loss of the work?  Have you contacted any of the other artists?  Have you returned some works and not others?  If so, how did you determine what who would get their work back and who would be ignored?

I have come to the realization that I may never see that work again.  I can live with that.  I would just like an honest answer as to what happened and an accounting for my loss.

I am glad to see you doing well and doing something you clearly love.  You deserve to be happy.  I’m in no way interested in ruining that.  I’m just trying to close a chapter of my artistic life and to put a nagging question to rest.  I’m sure you can understand the importance of that.

Steve

the answer, 2014-15, oil on panel, 18 x 24 inches

I have been working on this painting for about a year now.  It did not start out looking like this.

I had a photograph as a reference for this painting.  I don’t normally work from photos; it’s too difficult for me. I start to feel some kind of weird responsibility, as if the painting won’t be good if it doesn’t look like the photo. I start to get plagued by these aggressive thoughts about correctness and precision that have nothing to do with anything that interests me because the photo becomes the measure of quality.  I ended up getting very uninterested in the painting.  I put it away.

When I took the painting up again,  I was thinking of sanding the whole thing down and making a new painting, but for some reason I didn’t.  I started thinking about how unsatisfied I was with it and that got me thinking that maybe I could make a painting about satisfaction.  And if I could, what would such a painting look like. Are there painterly equivalents to being satisfied?  I started thinking about the last painting I looked at that I could say I felt satisfied.  Not pleased, not interested, not impressed, but satisfied.

At the Armory Show this year, I saw a Jocelyn Hobbie picture called Bee, Yellow, Indigo at Fredericks and Freiser.  I had never thought much about her work because I had only seen it in reproduction and seeing it in reproduction allowed me to completely misunderstand it.  The cliche exists because it’s true-the painting is better in person.  Magazine reproductions of Hobbie’s paintings make them look illustrative.  What I thought was simple geometry is an almost lapidary arrangement of color that makes up undulating and energetic forms that swirl like energy.  Like a Klimt painting, it is an image of tremendous confidence and erotic power.

What is so satisfying about the Hobbie painting was that every single moment is realized and held in tension with every other moment.  What looks like an illustration in reproduction actually looks like a hallucination in person.  There is a sense of air and movement in the picture that I was not expecting when I saw it.  She has painted this person as something more than a person.

This sense is enhanced by her technical restraint – it is what stops the painting from being an academic exercise of “solving painting problems.”  Her use of painterly processes are in service to creating this sensation about this person in addition to a sense of visual satisfaction.

A painting has to be more than a demonstration of the fact that the painter solved a problem.

I don’t think about process when I am working.  I think that is because the act of painting requires me to think about so many things at the same time.  I am never thinking about “the process” because it isn’t really something that is outside of me.  If I tried to make paintings about process, I fear that they would become a concatenation of painterly effects, “full of sound and fury/Signifying nothing.”  I’ve never been able to be satisfied with process for its own sake.  This may be a reason my work has always been about the figure.  I have always had a subject. It would not occur to me make paintings about process independent of subject.  The subject drives the kind of processes I would and do use.

I have been thinking about Hobbie and a few other artists a lot in the studio these days.  I’ve been seeking out their work and looking deeply at it for some answers.  I struggle greatly with painting because I am after something that I see less and less in contemporary art and I think that thing is satisfaction.  That is not to say that I am looking for art that is simple, or uncomplicated, or facile. What I think is that I am looking for an art that operates outside of the language and techne of marketing and spectacle.  I remember a studio visit with Nayland Blake I had back in 2002.  I was going on about how I wanted to make work that talked about a sense of desire.  Blake said to me, “Desire is the only thing that is produced in late-stage capitalism.  Everyone knows about your desire.  What we don’t know about is your pleasure.”  Thinking about that conversation now, I see the link between pleasure and satisfaction, between process and image.

Cupid and Psyche had a daughter.  Her name is Pleasure.

Nat Meade, Study (Plaid Pantry)

Steve Locke: I have been following your work since we met at Skowhegan 2009 (and I’m lucky enough to have one of your works on paper). I have always felt an affinity for your work not just because of the subject, but because of the qualities of the paintings themselves. You have a way of making images that appear to be simple but upon deeper investigation reveal themselves to be complex and layered in their realization and, by extension, their possible meanings. In an era when so much of painting is directly informed by the digital and the photographic, your paintings don’t just require a slow looking, they demand it. Because of this, your work rewards the viewer not just with an image but with a sensation. I mean this in the way that someone like Bridget Riley is interested in the effect of the painting on your eyes and your body. I get a sense of air, light, energy, heat, and physicality of space from these pictures. That does not happen a lot in contemporary painting the fact that it does in your work is a testament to your practice. In the current moment, you are making paintings that reveal and foreground their process without losing their integrity or importance as pictures. Pictures that illuminate the body as a site of contemplation, disappointment, extremity, or disbelief. Which lead me to my question:

In your painting practice, how do time and light (in both a real way and in a poetic way) influence the choices you make in depicting the body, its movements, and its locations?

Nat Meade: Light is another player or character in my work. I want it to be as tangible and, in a way, as physical as the figures and forms.

Around the time that we met I set out to change my approach to painting. I no longer wanted to make paintings that were referential and dependent on an external source. Instead I wanted to invent a painted moment- performative in its small and inward way. It was important that the images were discovered through their execution. The transition was difficult and for a long time I struggled to make anything satisfying. I needed parameters to make what I was doing challenging and tangible. I came up with a set of self-imposed rules and light became the constant player, a means of focus that also allows for playful discovery. Along these lines forms and figures have been reduced to simplified shapes in a shallow space. I can (hopefully) (more or less) predict how light might rake across the things I paint. I treat everything- light, color and form as a thing-just a stupid thing.

(Photos from Nat Meade’s studio by Jean Paul Gomez)

James Ensor has been described as employing an allegorical use of light. I only know what this means intuitively. It has to do with light asserting itself as a persistent actor. I see it in his work and want it in my own. There is directional lighting in all of my paintings-overly defined beams cutting through the composition, splitting figures, casting shadows, indifferently raking over faces. Color and light are closely linked. I like to assign the light areas a color and dark areas another: make the light areas yellowish and the dark areas green. My friend and artist Michael Brennan has said that “…[t]ime and light are made manifest in [my] work as color. Color as crumpled light.” I think I understand this intuitively as well. I like to build up opaque areas of light and emphasize the literal ridges of light and shadow. It is like repeatedly saying, “Here is the light AND here is the dark.”

Light can add drama and brevity. It can also conceal and ridicule. There is something inane about the cast shadow from a nose or a pair of eyeglasses. I like to zoom in on these moments. My subjects are meant be contradictory: elevated or beatific and buffoonish or absurd. I have been painting these bearded figures at three quarters view, a wedge for a nose, sometimes with gaping mouths like a hollowed out tree. They are these male stand-ins. I have recently realized that this goes back to an Antonio Frasconi print that was in my childhood home, a minimal woodcut of a bearded Walt Whitman with a triangle nose and series of dashes for a beard. It looked just like my dad. In my head the image was both God and Father, which were probably the same thing. On some level my work deals with this kind of elevated personage and its frailty.

I feel like this doesn’t exactly answer your question. Light is the constant character. Time and setting are frozen. And the body is reduced to its dumb, tangible parts so I can play with it like a Mr. Potato Head toy.

Thanks again for asking,
Nat

Find more of Nat Meade’s work at www.natmeade.com.

The edge of Gardner Lake in Connecticut.

I have been making watercolors for almost a year now.

I started by accident really.  It was around my birthday and my friends Susanna and her sister Jane invited me to come to their place in Connecticut for a few days to hang out.  My friend Linda came too.  Jane even made me an incredible strawberry shortcake with whipped cream for my birthday cake.  I finally began to relax after the grueling school year I had just had.  It was a wonderful time.

Linda and Jane were cooking and Susanna and I sat in the back yard under a huge tree.  There were stone steps down into the lake.  We brought watercolors and spread them out on the ground.  Susanna had a huge book of watercolors that she had been working on.  They were marvelous to see.  Very directly painted with some dry brush textures over luminous washes of color.  They captured the motif of the lake but also carried the weight of the air.  You could clearly see that the difference between the water and the air was just a question of a soft shift of color.

Susanna went for a swim and I started to make some paintings of my own.  I have to say that I never liked watercolor and even when I had to do it in school, I was not very good at it.  I had a very patient teacher, Donna Rae, who kept telling me that the medium was trying to teach me patience.  I didn’t know what she meant.

I soaked a bunch of paper in the lake.  I could see Susanna swimming back and forth and was taken with the way she belonged to two places at the same time.  The binaries kept flashing in my head: wet/dry, over/under, inside/outside and so on.  I also thought a lot about the way the water was all around her and separate from the same time.  I sat on the edge of the stone steps and put my legs in the water, watching the way the transparency of the water changed the color of my legs.  I pulled some paper out of the water and started to paint on the wet paper.

Susanna came out of the lake and sat with me.  We painted.  We talked.  Susanna has been a mentor to me since graduate school.  I have learned more from her than I could ever say.  That day, we talked about color and light.  We talked about loss and losing.  We talked about work and how to preserve your self and give to your students at the same time.  We worked.  She painted the motif in front her in luminous greys and humid yellows.  I thought about the movement of a body in the water and how to shift the sense of weight in transparent waves.  I remembered what Donna Rae was trying to teach me.  I didn’t realize I had learned.

I’ve made over 100 watercolors since that last time Susanna and I touched the water.  I was able to show about half of them at the Hudson Opera House earlier this year.   Because of its historic character, I wanted to have the pictures presented in a manner consistent with the venue.  I went on a scavenger/treasure hunt for a variety vintage frames.  I used some without glass so the viewer could experience the texture of the paper.  I also included 4 free standing paintings in the show.  One of them, you don’t deserve me was from my Samsøn show years ago, but the other three were new.  Their execution revealed some of the things that I had learned in the making of the water colors.

I am thinking about my palette for paintings and I have been doing a lot of walking lately.

Now, I am not the sort of person who has ever been remotely interested in painting the landscape.  Seriously, it was something I did when I was in school but I was never very good at it.  Then I went to Skowhegan and I met amazing painters who were really committed to painting the landscape (like Ellen Altfest, Frank Meuschke,  Lois Dodd, and Yvonne Jacquette) and I knew I didn’t have that kind of commitment in me for the landscape.

I will say that the color in the landscape has become very urgent for me lately.  Specifically, the way green is becoming a situation for color.  I start thinking what it could mean to formulate a painting where varieties of green are the basis for the color relations. So I’ve been walking in the landscape a lot lately and looking at trees. And mixing that color when I get home.

A detail from the glorious “Self-portrait in a Tuxedo” (1927) on view at the Harvard Museums weird ass “greatest hits” installation at the Sackler. Everyone is usually kvelling over his use of black but the joy is the chromatic shadows in the face. You can see this painting and then go look at the Poussin’s upstairs and wonder how people could ever think that making a shadow was a matter of adding black.