Figurative Art
One painter’s apocalypse is another’s surrealist debauch.
A painter talks about portraits as love letters, the poetry of country music, addiction and compulsion, drawing out painful archetypes, and finding both resentment and dignity in daily life.
“Everything is equally treated.”
Reminding us of what should never have been forgotten
The bed sheet as metaphor for the continuous field of consciousness
Austin English is an artist living in New York. His book Gulag Casual was recently published by 2dcloud. He has exhibited his artwork and drawings in the US and abroad.
We listen in as two painters talk painting, studio practice, and the way their works live out in the world.
The basic conceit of Warm Equations is that a book can abstract the space of conversation typically delimited in front of paintings, that the thematics of a painter’s practice, in this case Alan Reid’s, can be constellated through a chorus of related texts.
While the art-world pendulum predictably swings back and forth between a taste for abstraction and an embrace of figuration, some artists remain steadfast in their pursuits. Such is the case with James Esber, whose work has long sought to merge these seemingly opposed tendencies.
MOLLY, MERCY, MADELINE,
MYRA, MAGGIE, MEREDITH,
MARLEY, MAGDA, MARGARET,
MINDY, MILLIE, MAGDALA,
MYRNA, MOIRA, MARIANNE,
MARLA, MAURA, MARIGOLD,
MEGHAN, MARY, MILLICENT,
MAITE, MAPLE, MITZI.
“I’m a nontraditionalist being a traditionalist creating nontraditional art, which means that I’m just making art.”
“I’m fighting between control and letting nature take its course.”
“A lot of times I end up turning on the camera on my computer and playing something out, and pausing it and seeing what tonal or emotional nuances are there that I can work with.”
Homebody, the title of Mike Goodlett’s first New York solo exhibition, playfully refers to his life of relative seclusion in rural Kentucky.
“I’m a Zimbabwean and I should show in my paintings where I’m from. In our culture, when you have a dream about dogs, cows, or whatnot, it means an evil spirit is coming to attack.”
“How does it feel to be a problem? they say, I know an excellent colored man in my town; or, I fought at Mechanicsville; or, Do not these Southern outrages make your blood boil? To the real question, How does it feel to be a problem? I answer seldom a word.
