Praeterita

After eating all the food and drink, my friends kindly watched my new film... Last weekend I took part in my third open studio in the building that I moved into in February. The building, an old factory next to the railway tracks on the northside of Chicago, has about thirty studios, used mostly by painters and sculptors, plus a few people (like me) who use different media. My new studio is the biggest I've had since I closed my London studio in 2002 and it's also the first time I've been working in close contact with or proximity to other artists since 2004. For the last two open studios, I showed older work, hoping to sell it to make space for newer work. Last weekend, I premiered a short film that I've been working on for most of this year. After all this contact with the public and other artists this year, here are some things that I've learned: Collectors with deep pockets, gallerists, and curators don't go to open studios.  People who go to...

The latest installment in an interview series for which I pose the same six questions to artists of various species. Judith Mullen is a mixed-media artist working in Chicago, in a bright studio building that I visited for the first time recently. Her spellbinding, densely-layered, multi-textured work will be on show in 2014 at Chicago's prestigious Linda Warren Projects . Forest Floor Relief VIII PH: What medium/media do you chiefly use, and why? JM : I consider myself a mixed media artist and within that I do work with a broad range of materials. I started out working mainly as a painter using traditional painting media and supports. As my interest broadened to three-dimensional work, I found myself experimenting with fabric, tree limbs, paper and more. Rather than having a prescribed list of materials needed to work on a piece, I found myself playing around with various media, which allows me to work in a more open, experimental way. I still find this way of working ver...

Here is more great work that I saw at the open studios in Carroll Street, Chicago, last weekend. Beautiful constructions and work on paper by Judith Mullen, intriguing objects by Joan Giroux, and a terrific ab-ex painting by an artist whose name I didn't uncover.

I recently saw an interesting show of work at a gallery not too far from my Chicago apartment. Morpho Gallery runs a regular 'emerging artists' competition, and they were exhibiting the winners of the last few competitions. The first piece that caught my eye was by Michael Klaus Schmidt : The bold shapes and collage elements have references to cloisonne ceramic work, or collagraphs in the printmaking realm. They also remind me of 1970s poster design, which must be something to do with the curved shapes ending in heavily outlined forms. There's a lot of texture in the different areas, too, that stops them coming off as flat and dull. I believe the artist has collaborated with theatre people, and you can see the cross-over in the graphic impact of this work. I liked this painting by another artist in the show, for its colours, and good organization of all these shapes. It's something that lots of artists seem to be doing at the moment, but this is doing it quite ...

An artist’s studio, it has been said, is half science laboratory and half Aladdin’s cave. I was reminded of this when I visited the studio of Chicago artist Connie Noyes recently, on the third floor of a grand brick factory building that once manufactured Ford Model Ts. As soon as the steel doors swung open, Noyes guided me on a pathway that led between old and new paintings concealed in bubble-wrap and leaning against walls, tables laden with the recycled and cast-off materials that she uses in her current work, and works in progress standing against other walls, reclining on other tables, or lying on the floor, amid pools of wet and dried resin that she pours in cascades over her materials. We talked a lot about process. Whether in a series of works incorporating enlarged digital photos, pigment, resin, and hilariously gaudy frames, or in a piece that cocoons hundreds of peanut shells in a bright gold layer, Noyes spoke about finding her way by working with the materials. The...

Salon n . 2 . a fashionable assemblage of elegant notables (as literary figures, artists, or statesmen) Last Saturday evening, October 5th, Patty and I held a salon at our Chicago apartment. Patty is a writer and I am a visual artist, and since about 2003 we've hosted one party a year (sometimes more) at which we invite the many writers we know to read something from work in progress or published work, the artists to bring some work along and talk about it, and any musicians to play a song if they feel inclined. It's more of a party than a salonin the traditional sense--no Gertrude Stein holding forth about modern art in the corner, no competing for attention or ascendancy. Just an opportunity to eat, drink, and share some work to combat the isolation that usually goes along with the writer's and artist's lot. This recent one was great for many reasons, chiefly that so many people contributed, and so many were there for the first time. In addition to t...

Last week, I met Martin Garcia at my Chicago studio to talk over art related things (though we also talked about English football, which heathen US sports fans refer to as 'soccer'). Martin is an artist who also uses video, both for his own work and to record stuff for other artists and galleries around Chicago. Recently he formed a production company to work on a web series called Our Cultural Center , which will consist of a series of 2 minute films set in a fictional arts organization whose funding has just dried up. The series is called Our Cultural Center, and Martin has hired a group of real actors to work on each episode, which will feature art created by real artists from around Chicago, too. The stated intention is to talk about art and the art world in a humorous way, and simultaneously to raise the profile of art in Chicago and the issues facing the art world. It's an ambitious project, and I hope it gets the viewers it deserves. The series is scheduled to b...