New Fascinations

What better place to express obsession than on your own blog... I've been very engrossed with Charlene Von Heyl for a few months now and was reading some critiques on her aswell as writings by her the other day and think it is necessary to share her gems of thought... Charlene is an abstract painter whose process consists of throwing paint onto the canvas without thinking, often using whips and found objects and basically taking something that looks like shit and making it work. I find her work mesmerizing and I am in awe of her process.

These quotes were extracted from an interview she did with Modern Painters...

“ I start with paradigms I know I can’t fufill, so I am setting myself up for failure every time, every time for a deeper fall… For me, what makes a painting is a mixture of authority and freedom, where it really just wants to be itself, where there is no justification, or explanation, or anything like that. Where it’s just what it is for whatever reason.”

“…Everything about beauty is what you struggle with as an artist; beauty is so attractive, but it’s also what limits us more than anything else. So you have to create a form of interest that goes beyond that. As we know, it cannot be ugly either, because ugliness is the other side, the other extreme of beauty. You have to really find a way of maneuvering. For me, that’s where the sabotage comes in. When you create something indifferent and destroy, transform, and manipulate that into something you can’t quite read anymore, but that has a strong feeling of atmosphere, then you have created something new; this process of extraction is actually quite brutal. I find that when I start working again, I always have to get to the point where I disrespect my work.”

“You’re like a druggie that gets addicted to the high of creating something, to creating all this weird shit.”

And here are some other paintings I have discovered recently that are really doing it for me...

Artists Anonymous - a group of artists primarily out of Germany and the UK who function as a team, working on every piece together and never using their individual names, always signing with 'Artists Anonymous'

Cecily Brown

Krisjanis Katkins-Gorsline

George Condo

Can't wait to hit the canvas...