Praeterita

Boudoir II , 40 inches x 48 inches, acrylic/charcoal/collage on panel, 2022 Part 43 of an interview series in which artists reply to the same six questions. Leslie Peterson Sapp is a painter and printmaker based in Oregon, USA. She makes painting and prints that call to mind mid-twentieth century magazine and book cover images, and film noir mystery. You can see more of her work here . Other interviews on this blog are available here. Philip Hartigan : What medium/media do you chiefly use, and why? Leslie Peterson Sapp: I use acrylic paint and paper. This is because I enjoy being able to collage paper and combine it with paint. Back in college I used oils, which are a far more sensual experience. But oil rots paper, and once I started working with collage and drawing, I switched. Now I am accustomed to the short drying time: it has a completely different rhythm than oil paint. PH : What piece are you currently working on? LSP : I’m working on a piece I’m calling “Boudoir”. It’s a ...

In the last week, I saw two terrific exhibitions of work in and around Chicago. The first was at a small but beautiful gallery space in Evanston. The work on display consisted of prints by Socorro Mucino and Janet Webber, who took one of my printmaking classes at the Lillstreet Art Center nearly two years ago. The title of the show, Paper Dolls, suggested a pun on the fact that these were works on paper depicting either a child's play-doll, or women as objects of desire (as in "hey, doll!"). Janet Webber, paperlitho transfer and monoprint Janet Webber's pieces were altered images of mannequins, ball gowns, and beauty queens, presented in rows or in combination with overprinted images and text. Very often the faces were obscured, and the image itself subjected to deterioration in the printmaking process, perhaps as a way of interfering with how these images of banal and old-fashioned female beauty would normally be seen by the male gaze. Socorro Mucino'...

It's about time I wrote another blog post. As it is the last day of 2017, here is a list post looking back at some of the highlights from the last 12 months. January : Taught in Paris for most of the month with my wunnerful colleague Kathie Bergquist from Columbia College Chicago. We were teaching a class which is basically "Hemingway and Baldwin in Paris." Here is a photo of our drinks, purchased at the newly reopened Hemingway Bar in the Ritz Hotel, Place Vendome: February : Participated in a group drawing event at the Ed Paschke Center, Chicago, organised by the terrific artist Anne Harris. March : Spent a week in Tucson, Arizona, truly one of the most magical places in the United States: May : Two of my small handmade books were purchased by the Joan Flasch Collection at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago:   July : Patty and I moved after 10 years in our third floor apartment, to the 9th floor of a high rise building overlooking Lake Michiga...

At the end of 2010, I began working on a set of 18" x 24" panels, that I posted about here regularly during the first few months of working on them. Gradually, I posted less and less, as I got stuck with them and worked on them less and less. But every six months or so since then, I have taken some of these panels out and worked a little more on them, to the extent that the first coat is now buried beneath many layers of stuff. Well, god help me, I pulled one of them out today, and worked on it for a day: If I can recall correctly, the media that I've used over three years are: acrylic paint, acrylic gels and medium, airbrush pigment, gesso, modelling paste, ink, and oil pastel. If I used a texture, or I drew a shape, what I had in mind were things to do with coal, and mining, just the same as the short film I just completed. Some of the abstract marks still derive ultimately from remembered shapes of machinery, pipes, and so on. For this latest foray, I took ou...

During the last studio session, I did something loose and bold with the picture that used to look like this: After adding acrylic grey paint, squeezed out of a nozzle-dispenser, it now looks like this: I hope I didn't spoil it. What I need to do is to mount it on a panel or canvas, bring it home, put it on a wall, and live with it for a few weeks to see.

Today (Thursday) in the studio I added lots of linework to this painting, using India ink and very fine nibs: There's a long way to go still - lots of space to fill up. When my wrist got tired, I painted the recto side of the accordion book I started the other day ... ... then added some thin India ink lines to the verso side: The dried layer of acrylic gel medium makes a perfectly smooth, non-absorbent ground for this sort of drawing.

Working on some of these coal circle-acrylic collage-airbrush drawings yesterday, things went a bit mental with one of them: Compare this to how it use to look: This new one is proceeding in a calmer manner: It's all painting so far, with thick brushes for the circles in the background, and a thin brush for the linear shape floating on top. The next step is to collage some of the poured acrylic shapes on top of this. Dimensions on this one: 28" x 42". Before I left, I started the same process going on an accordion book, dimensions 8" x 40" unfolded: In the close-up photo, the shiny reflections are because I poured some acrylic gel medium, mixed with a little white paint, and squeegeed it across all the pages. When it dries, I will be able to draw on it and collage stuff, as I am doing with the bigger works on paper.

Now that I'm back from Texas, it's time to get into my studio again. Tonight will be the latest of the Klein Artists Works online seminars that I signed up for, during which art consultant/writer/gallerist Paul Klein gives a bunch of artists advice on their careers. A major aspect of my participation in this 12 week course is to reassess the studio work I've been making for the last five years. I am entirely open to staying with what I've been doing, but I am also open to the possibility of changing course entirely. Actually, the work that I have been looking at is a strand that I have been working on for a few years, too, so it would be a reconsideration of existing things, rather than a wholesale change of style. But the things that are taking my attention most strongly as a result of the Klein seminars are these works on paper: Here is a diptych that I did at the end of last year, which kicked off this interest in circles underneath twisting shapes and blac...

Part 20 of an interview series in which I invite artists to respond to six questions about art, process, and creativity    (previous interviews:  1 ,  2 ,  3 ,  4 ,  5 ,  6 ,  7 ,  8 ,  9 ,  10 ,  11 ,  12 ,   13 ,   14 ,  15 ,  16 ,  17 ,  18 , 19 ). Today I talk to painter Tim McFarlane, from Philadelphia. Tim's paintings are an absorbing combination of symmetrical pattern overlaid with sensitive gestural mark-making, a procedure that is sometimes interestingly reversed, with a rough background giving way to a geometric shape. Looking at his paintings reminds me of the way that passages of music follow each other in a composition -- indicating that it's no accident that music and visual art use the same term. Imposition (indeterminate passage) , 2012, acrylic on panel, 36 x 36 inches Philip Hartigan : What medium do you chiefly use, and why? Tim McFarlane : I use acrylic...

The last time I was here, before I went to England for a few weeks, I did some preparatory work  with acrylic pours and underpainting. I took some of those dried acrylic shapes and collaged them to printmaking paper, marked with the coal-circle shapes: The next stage with them is to draw into them with India ink and airbrush pigment, as I did with these two: The one on the right in that picture is the newest one (I've posted pictures of the one on the left before). It's 18" x 16", and it also has collaged bits of printmaking paper in addition to the collaged acrylic skins, because I wanted to cover up some stuff that went wrong, but I didn't want to throw away the entire picture. I'm starting to let go of the anxiety about these images not relating with absolute directness to the narrative-based work that I am also working on (and which I am exhibiting in a couple of weeks). I am  heartened, actually, by the Rashid Johnson show I saw at Chicago...

I am still relatively new to teaching -- this is only the fourth full college semester that I have (co-)taught the Journal and Sketchbook class at Columbia College. So it is still also a new experience for me to be contacted by a student and have a nice exchange about ideas coming out of a class I taught. In this case, a student called Jonathan Leithold-Patt attended the J&S workshop that I gave in the Film and Video department last week. His was one of the pieces of in-class writing that I recalled from at the end, as I read back phrases that stuck out to me from the pieces that students read aloud. Jonathan followed up a few days later via email, and it turns out that he paints as well: "Contact," acrylic on canvas, 14" x 11" I asked him to say something about his pictures, and he wrote: I don't exactly make movies outside of what I'm doing for school, as my interest in films is more in watching them and analyzing them than actually creating...

Like this: It's pretty thick, like a cake mix. I pour it all along one edge of the panel, then tip the panel up and let it slide down the surface until it reaches the bottom, I turn it 45 degrees and let it settle in that direction. When it's all flat and smooth, I get rid of any air bubbles by spritzing it quickly with some surgical alcohol (warning, kids: don't drink this!). The acrylic matte medium is mixed in with a little white acrylic paint, so that it masks the circle painting, but not entirely:   Subscribe to Praeterita in a reader

Some decent photos of these, for once. The hazy shapes are the ones that are buried beneath many layers of acrylic gels. The gritty texture of the darkest shapes occurs, I think, because there are minute pores in the surface of the acrylic skin that the paint sinks into. As soon as I painted the dark shapes, I blotted them with newsprint, and then ran the panels under water for a few minutes to dissolve the shapes a little. Here are the pictures and details offered without further comment:   Subscribe to Praeterita in a reader

And on the same day as I'm throwing lots of blue and white pigment around, I'm also working on our old friend Mr. Tondo: As well as this wood panel: Which series will win out? Will they converge, and become sufficiently coherent to be considered part of one series? I don't know yet. If I were still at art college, this would be the time to have the studio visit from the course leader, or the group seminar with my beady eyed peers. But it's just me at the minute, me and the materials, and the hours in the studio, and the process of making decisions or not, but always working, reworking, erasing, adding, hiding, and bringing back.   Subscribe to Praeterita in a reader