This painting happened at the end of a work session on a summer day, when sweatiness, general mess and frustration let mind barriers fall. I was on a pink jag, thinking about Wendy Davis’ filibuster Mizunos and the image of Malala Yousafzai making her speech at the UN, clothed in Benazir Bhutto’s sari.” Marianne Gagnier, […]

Like we said in Part II of our Annual Recap, what stayed with us most from 2013 was mostly small and mostly quiet, meditative works that brought us back to the pleasures of long looking. Here’s a shortlist of the galleries and museums we felt did right by riding the counter-current, giving us intimately scaled […]

My dad gave me the paper sometime in 2005…and the first “School Papers” pieces are dated January 2006. I’m not sure I thought in terms of notation so much as the paper itself and the fact my dad gave it to me reminded me of my childhood; perhaps that allowed me to begin with a […]

Each of us will have a unique compilation of remembered sensations and it is how this material shapes our work that will distinguish my paintings from those of the next painter. We really don’t have all that much control over what we produce when we work from within. What unfolds on the canvas evolves slowly. […]

When I made this painting it felt as if it was taking shape in my peripheral vision. It took a gentle act of will to keep it there long enough to finish it, like one of those dreams in which you’re flying but you know not to think about it too much or the dream […]

Absurdity, as a concept…can transcend immediate frustration by asking the viewer to question, not only what they are seeing and feeling, but, more importantly, why they are questioning their awakened uneasiness. Hopefully, the dichotomy only increases when one is seduced by the richness of the painting’s surface and the enticing vividness of color… Arnold Mesches, […]

Eventually a structure that pleases me starts to emerge. Sometimes shallow space, sometimes deeper space reminiscent of a landscape or an interior. I want imagery in my work to be difficult to pin down…I want the viewer to be able to enter into an open-ended dialogue with the work, the same process that brought me […]

…so much of painting is this. It’s a recalling and churning up of experience and memory that can never be planned, relied on, or trusted. But my process requires trust. I begin with random marks and colors that over time coalesce… . Little by little, the anxiety lessens as…decisions are made and options grow fewer […]

…I felt I’d gotten the light I wanted. It looked and felt like water at night. The layering and pale pink over dark purple created the effect of light bouncing off a surface and I recognized a kind of transparent glow that had happened in the course of painting the barges… Katherine Bradford, “Night Divers.” […]

The degree to which the painter is transformed by their process is the degree by which the viewer can be transformed by, or enabled to “enter,” the painting. It’s not a finite record or exchange, but in the face of that genuine and meaningful articulation of transformation, the viewer does feel it, does “know it.” […]