Bakery
Volume 1
Issue 6
January 10
2025
Patrick
Carlin
Mohundro
Gideon’s Bakery: What are you most excited about in the studio right now?
Patrick Carlin Mohundro: Procedure. Meaning, I have developed a set of rules and materials for working and now I am performing the rules with the materials in a procedural manner. This way of working–calm, methodical–is helping me keep a level head. I guess this keeps me from being too excited about anything!
GB: What is your dream response from a viewer of your paintings?
PCM: Surprise. I always like when a viewer believes my painting is just that—when, despite the material choices, the viewer is convinced that my painting is an ordinary painting.
GB: What is the one painting you are absolutely obsessed with (yours or someone else’s) and why?
PCM: I am never obsessed with painting–not in that way. Here and there a painting will catch my eye and I'll think about it for a while or want to reproduce it somehow (maybe have it printed on a towel or bath mat). Chang Sujung has been making these plein air paintings on the inside of shirt sleeves that she sews. I suppose that I am necessarily obsessed with those, being her spouse. We spend a lot of time talking about the work and I'll sit in Central Park with her as she makes them.
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Gideon’s
Bakery
Volume 1
Issue 5
December 4
2024
Michael
Gac Levin
Gideon’s Bakery: What are you most excited about in the studio right now?
Michael Gac Levin: The thing I’m most excited about in the studio right now is rest! The ability to just take a moment after an intense period of work and regroup peacefully and slowly.
GB: Can you share some of that reflection about your current show at My Pet Ram (NYC)?
MGL: Object Relations resulted from a slide into thinking about marriage and partnership after spending years thinking more about parenthood in my work. My wife is a parent-educator whose focus also shifted over the last few years towards thinking about parents and the dynamics of parent relationships. All the conversations we’ve had about that and are still having started coming through in my work early this year.
I try to let forms evolve naturally, even thoughtlessly in my pictures. The apple and tree started as peripheral elements around a tombstone shape during a period where my mind was occupied on mortality. I’d had the realization that once my wife and I decided to stop at two kids, our time as parents to infants was already behind us. That had a big impact on me, the visceral knowledge that major episodes in my life were already well behind me and wouldn’t be coming back. That got me thinking about my parents, about death and ending more generally.
That work around the tombstone image effectively gave birth to the next body of work as the apple and tree went from being peripheral to being central, and became a pair absent the tombstone.
Those changes are guided really by impulse and desire. When I want to draw the apple and the tree more than I do the tombstone, I do. Then new things start to happen around that. I try not to ever say to myself “this is what it’s about” until after a chapter of work is definitively closed. Like, now that Object Relations is up. If I do, the work freezes in place for a bit, that evolution stops occurring, and it’s hard to pick it up again.
When I’m keeping my thoughts at bay and favoring my impulses, I find after the fact that my pictures pose a lot more complex and thoughtful questions about what I’m going through at any given time than I find I’m able to verbally. More importantly they have enough of a symbolic texture and ambiguity to allow a viewer to interpret them according to their own experiences.
GB: What is your all-time favorite work of art and why?
MGL: I’m really bad at picking favorites! I think the “all-time” feels too permanent. I don’t have any tattoos. But here goes: my favorite artwork right now is a Saul Steinberg drawing from a series he made called “Cousins”. It’s a drawing of a little boy in a clock shop. There’s clocks and watches everywhere and they’re all surrounded by tick and check marks that fill up the space. The boy’s ears are abnormally large and he has a blank expression on his face. There’s a man in the lower corner, presumably the father, working on watches through a jeweler’s loop, totally indifferent to the child and the psychological drama that imprisons him. It’s so full of empathy for the child, but also of strangeness and estrangement, and it’s drawn so playfully throughout. Without much respect for rules of composition, perspective, and even good pencil use—but it all comes out beautifully.
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Gideon’s
Bakery
Volume 1
Issue 4
October 14
2024
Dominic
Terlizzi
Gideon’s Bakery: What are you most excited about in the studio right now?
Dominic Terlizzi: Right now I am excited about 2 projects: a group of mosaic paintings in development and also some large scale foot stamp paintings. These 2 projects have very different approaches to scale and labor.
GB: Can you talk more about the mosaic paintings and foot stamp paintings? I want to know as much about them as you’re willing to share!
DT: Long story short: I had an interest in bread as a medium. This led to mice and mold. So I preserved the breads in bronze while working at a Baltimore foundry during off hours. Bronze casting led me to casting in paints which led to mosaic cast paintings. I created public sculptures for communities in Baltimore and was impacted by community consensus tending towards geometry and soft edges. I began to draw using geometry and soft edges. Narrative images emerged. I returned to NYC and stamping images evolved alongside the mosaic painting as a way to explore faster leaner drawing. Stamping led to stomping feet in the snow to map out large images. Snow stomping led to recent large drop cloth slipper stamping with paint.
Short story long: starting with what could be called mosaic paintings, this approach combines several skill sets together and allows a scaffold large enough where my cycle of impulses toward material and image can exist simultaneously. This approach clicked in after I worked years on a series of bronze low relief panels that were made through lost wax and carbonizing burnout of bread sculptures with found materials. During grad school I had run toward bread for a number of reasons including the figurative qualities, cultural overlaps, baselessness, dumbness, humor, sincerity, ephemerality etc. Post grad I returned to my position as a foundry finisher which had begun just after graduating from Cooper with you. In the midst of completing huge public bronze works for other artists, I asked why not my bread sculptures? These were just waiting for mice and mold but by encasing them into gated ceramic shells and incinerating them, a void for pouring bronze and preserving them existed. I would work after hours on casting works at the price of materials used. This was by the generosity of the foundry owner. What I learned from the castings was that I was drawn to process and material approaches that create multiple areas of content simultaneously often contradicting their own existence. My impulse was to introduce color into the bronze which led me to retool my operation to cast paint instead of bronze.
I think the first attempt at making paint relief casting began around 2010 while attending the Triangle international residency in dumbo. I brought the unfinished bronze up from Baltimore to use the residency time for chasing, cleating, and patinas. I also felt the need to begin exploring methods to replace the bronze with solid cast paint. After many attempts I made some progress and cast into paint many of the objects previously cast in bronze. I then arranged them and attached them to canvas to create the first paint mosaic reliefs. This process over the years has grown to include a large collection of textures and as I fragment the texture and objects a mosaic quality arrives and allows for the presence of larger image mapping. This opens up so many associations toward image building outside a narrow scope of painting.
Alongside the exploration into casting my metal skills were called on by community groups in Baltimore seeking sculptural landmarks. Creating public sculptures for these communities was a collaboration with stakeholders and involved multiple maquettes before a design was agreeable. I was impacted by how strongly community consensus always tended towards geometry and soft edges. This agreeable area for stakeholders was an area I began to question. If geometry and soft edges are acceptable then in theory any image in this agreeable style could be acceptable. I began to draw using geometry and soft edges after this realization.
In recent years I began a stamp drawing practice as a way to explore images quickly by using stamped symbols and stamped images of objects. These found stamps are an extension of found objects in my paint castings. On a snowy day in Maryland at my family’s farm I decided to walk out an image and see if the snow could combine stamping and casting. This experiment stuck with me and recently I was called upon to fill the huge gallery at Art Cake in Sunset Park. The only solution I could find was to walk out images in paint on drop cloths.
GB: Is there another artist you’d like to talk about who maybe influences or inspires you, who maybe you don’t understand but think about a lot anyway, or some thought-feeling-idea you didn’t already elaborate on that you’d like to dive deeper into?
DT: Here is a story of two different ideas I have encountered about painting and the relationship it has to forms of music. These ideas have stayed with me because I find value in each of their truths and the conflict between them. In my retelling I am most definitely misremembering exact details.
The first idea is from Brian Eno who gave a lecture at the Chelsea School of Art and Design in London around 2002. He was exploring algorithms to create soundscapes that evolved and never looped the same way twice. He proposed that visual artists/painters should explore the same notion of evolving in real time with the viewer as a new way of creating. His line of inquiry was in regard to the way visual artists through history have forced their vision on to mediums in a tyrannical way. For example revealing a preconceived statue from within a rock or painting an image in a direct line of moves ending in a completed image. He explained this as an outdated god complex that aligns with creationist myths where the world is built in a fixed period of time. He wanted to know why Art had not drastically changed with ideas about evolution and Darwinism. What he questioned is why we have not found ways to create scenarios for creation that mimic how we developed as humans through evolution and natural selection. Why do we continue making through an outdated idea of the creative process? What does it look like visually if we adjust the creative process to align with Darwinism? The best answer he could lend at the time was screensavers. Those early clunky ever changing digital screens were arguably more complex than paintings because the compositional components continually competed to become the image. Whether this could be considered good image making or painting was not the primary concern. It was for ideas of what painting could become. Just as he was searching for new types of songs in his audio work he was proposing new types of paintings by exploring new ways of creating.
This way of thinking about painting is the elimination of a controlled narrative and all the mechanisms that have helped paintings hold a specific meaning. Also arguably the power of painting is in the efficiency of reading fixed sensory data without any changes occurring. There is something at stake with a fixed image that a moving image avoids entirely. I also encounter this process of an ever changing painted image as a developmental phase most painters will experience as they try to develop a painting practice with multiple failures along the way. For most painting students it may never become a fixed final image until it is abandoned or finds its way to a dumpster.
Many years later around 2015, I encountered a counterpoint thought about painting and music. At a round table of prominent academics, painters, and poets the recent history of painting was discussed as well as a vision for the future of painting. A parallel was drawn that good painting should be generic like a basic 4/4 measure rock and roll song. I am loosely recalling the argument here that a good rock song does not depend on who the musician is or on a process taken to create the song. Once a listener hears that the song occupies a generic space that feels good they approve of it as something authentic. In this regard it was argued that good painting behaves as one should expect it to and delivers on the expectations of the viewer. Good painting plays the known song and the known chorus. In their opinion any deviation from this is trying too hard which automatically becomes a purely academic exercise.
I think they are right in one way and wrong in another. A good song is a good song. But is a generic cover spin off automatically good? In this way of thinking, where does new territory come from? How could jazz evolve or ab-ex painting begin? I imagine not by leaning into comfortable territory. If I align this to painting I can’t imagine any notable painter intentionally making images equivalent to generic songs. Imagine trying to emulate generic qualities inherent in painting. Maybe there is something there. In fact maybe upending discovery and demystifying the arrival of art is a wise strategy. I’m curious though how the musician or painter gets anywhere new with this line of thinking.
Maybe this idea has less to do with the initial ethos of making rock and roll and more with the consumption and selling of rock and roll or in this case paintings. Maybe it’s about fetishizing the knowledge of the forms of music and painting and desiring the greatest hits of either. This approach asks for what we already know and declines the challenge of reinvention.
Imagine making a generic spin off image, claiming it as original, and getting applauded for it. Or worse imagine having insurmountable student debt and this generic cover song approach toward painting is the strategy offered by industry experts to help save you. Even worse yet, imagine that it works and your entire career is full of generic spin off cover song paintings. Imagine keeping it up until interest disappears. Who among these painters will afford the risk of going their own way at any point? Who will be willing to add a drum solo to their work? I think in Brian Eno’s proposal for creating you may never know when a sound might arrive, for better or worse.
I am not sure how to reconcile these ideas and so they have both stuck with me. Perhaps they tell us something about ways to value the origin and cultural absorption of images at a given moment more than about what painting could be. To bring another idea into the mix from Dave Hickey’s ghost, if alive today I could imagine he would argue both ideas are dead on arrival in 2024 because Art should offer what culture has taken away for our human experience. In the current state of things technology is generating moving images in infinite ways and can make infinite versions of derivative rock songs or derivative paintings. With screensavers all maxed out and generic rock songs overflowing there is still painting. So in conclusion, and from considerable disharmony…keep on painting in the physical free world.(™, ®, © )*keep on painting in the physical free world is a phrase created for this question response and is not intellectual property or lyrics associated with any generic musician or painter.
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Gideon’s
Bakery
Volume 1
Issue 3
September 10
2024
Pol Morton
Gideon’s Bakery: What’re you most excited about in the studio lately?
Pol Morton: I think this is an incredibly intricate question that masquerades as a simple one. I don’t think there is one answer.
A big thing right now, would have to be how the art that I make, that I conceive of, that I do almost every part of, continues to surprise me. Like HOW?!? I made it, how can it surprise me? But it does. And I think this is a shared artistic experience that I’m so glad we don’t grow out of.
New materials have always been one of the major catalysts for me in the studio. There’s a discovery high that comes with creating, and when I use only one material I lose the drive. Something about being in a time-restricted process (often with materials that will dry and you get one chance to get it right or the piece is ruined) allows me to break out of any potential preciousness. I made giant bike helmets for my upcoming solo show at Olympia. Before this, I had never used purple insulation foam. I had never used aqua resin. I had never used fiberglass. And I had never really used spray paint. Not to mention I had never carved at this scale and I had never carved anything hollow or with holes in it. Each stage in making these helmets was a series of choices that irrevocably affects every following step. This newness and steep learning curve balances well with the ease I feel when painting.
On a more basic note, I’m unreasonably excited about my studio dehumidifier and the sink that the Monira Residency provides us in our studios.
GB: Can you talk more about your show at Olympia that opened last week (the artist reception is Thursday, September 12 from 6-8pm)? We would love to know more about what goes into making a show (vs making a work)? How do you think/feel about that difference (if there is any)?
PM: At the moment I am at the Monira Residency in Jersey City where I am deeply grateful to have a huge studio. Several of the individual paintings for this show, however, were in their nascent stage in my previous studio–the paintings are 7’ tall and would barely fit when raised off the ground to work on them. Being in a space that barely held the work created a non-consensual maximalism. Just by making large work in a small space, one creates an environment. There’s a beautiful claustrophobia to it, and a play with scale. Things shift in perceived shape and size depending on the space they inhabit.
When Olympia invited me to show with them, I was so excited. The show basically already knew what it wanted to be (at least in my head it did). These paintings and sculptures were living in my head long before they were made. I had envisioned making the bicycle helmets (“Accident 1” and “Accident 2”) for a year, but hadn’t had the opportunity to create them. I immediately knew I needed them to be in the show.
Creating a final curation and installation at Olympia was a beautiful collaborative process with Ali Rossi and Chantal Lee. There is a magic to having someone else’s eyes on your art. And it is an honor to get to work with two people who really see the work and understand it.
Each individual piece is incredibly meaningful to me, but the ways that the works talk to each other and being in person with the work is equally important. Being immersed in the vocabulary brings new connections and excitements that end up being the inspiration for the next piece I make.
GB: Ali and Chantal are really great. We cannot wait to see your show! Last question: What is your all-time favorite work of art and why?
PM: Oof. That’s a hard question. And I would say an impossible one to answer. I can, however, for a fact say that there’s an artwork that has been living inside my mind wiggling its fingers, and that’s Paul Thek”’s Untitled (Hand with Ring)” which he made in 1967 as part of the series “Thechnological Reliquaries”.
The first time I saw it in person (at 125 Newberry in September, 2022), I literally cried. Crying on the subway is one thing, and crying in an art space is another. I see a lot of art, and if a piece makes me cry normally it’s because of how beautifully it’s crafted, or the color, or the scale. And often, I’m crying through a smile of discovery. In this case, I was taken fully off-guard. I was moved. And I didn’t have words for how or why. The piece felt familiar even though I’m sure I’ve never seen it before and somehow hadn’t even seen an image of it. Something about the gradient arcs of purples and pinks on the nails, like a deathly rainbow. I’m often contemplating the beauty in my own injury or illness. The ways that the colors of angry flesh still look perfect on a palette. In my own work I try to find ways to talk about queerness and illness in myself, as two things that are true simultaneously. And Thek’s hand felt like it was just perfect. I knew basically nothing about him, but felt and found shared moments through the art and not from some printout by the front door. That’s the power of art.
Thek also changed his name to Paul (though I spell mine differently) and passed (1988) a year after I was born (1987). These two last facts have little to do with anything real, but they feel like a magical little connection in my heart.
Pol Morton’s “Get Well” opened at Olympia (41 Orchard Street NYC) September 5th and runs through October 5th. A reception for the artist will take place on September 12th from 6 to 8 pm.
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Gideon’s
Bakery
Volume 1
Issue 2
June 13
2024
Sarah
Alice
Moran
Gideon’s Bakery: Do you plan your finished paintings/drawings ahead of time? If so what does the planning look like, why do you do it, can you imagine not doing it? If not why, can you imagine planning your paintings/drawings and what does that look/feel like?
Sarah Alice Moran: I plan enough so that I can let go when I’m painting. For me that means, figuring out the basic composition and color direction, so that I can allow my intuition to take over once I start. I make small sketches - maybe 2 x 3 inches - where I work out the composition. I also gather images that inspire the idea for the painting or will help me figure out what something looks like (how DO tigers sit?). Sometimes those images are art historical references, sometimes it's a cartoon, a vintage photo or even a stock photo or just things that catch my eye on the internet. I also take photos of myself if I need to figure out a pose or I can’t find an image online or in art history that is doing the thing I want it to do. I like to print all these things out so I have the images on paper all around me when I’m working. I also think about the palette. Do I want this to be a cool painting or a warm painting, is it nighttime or daytime? Then I force myself to mix colors before painting. That’s hard because I’m usually excited and want to jump right in, but I know if I have to stop and mix a lot more in the middle it will slow me down - and once I get going it goes fast.
Acrylic on canvas
40 x 60 inches
GB: What is your best fantasy response to your work from a viewer (or Guston’s “looker”)? (We had the shared experience of that woman running into the gallery to tell you a painting she saw from the street is beautiful, that’s pretty good!)
SAM: You mentioned when we were together at my recent show, Thirst Trap, at My Pet Ram - the gallery has big windows on the ground floor of Hester St. It was exciting to have people walking by who were not on a mission to see paintings, and probably weren’t expecting to see paintings, feel a pull from them to come into the gallery and spend a moment with my work. I surprised them.
The images tend to be an intuitive distillation of my research, education, interests and experiences. I describe my paintings as magic paintings because that’s what they feel like to me. Making a painting - when it works - feels like this wild magic spell. So I just want each person to take some of that magic with them, whatever that means to them individually. I don’t have an agenda per se, I certainly have opinions, and I think my perspective comes through in the work, but that’s just me. There’s never one side to a story.
Thirst Trap, Moran’s first solo show in New York, at My Pet Ram, ran from February 23 to March 24, 2024.
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Gideon’s
Bakery
Volume 1
Issue 1
May 7
2024
Heather
Drayzen
Gideon’s Bakery: Tell us about your process—what’s a day in the studio like?
Heather Drayzen: During the school year, I teach full-time from September to June. I used to paint in the mornings before work, but now I’ve shifted to enjoying a bit more sleep and drinking a pot of Stumptown coffee before starting my day. lol.. I try to do my daily journal and sit in my home studio and look at my paintings. I love this quiet time with them. I often look at pictures of my paintings during my commute, playing around with different edits like mirroring them or converting them to black and white, all while contemplating my next moves. When I get home, I unwind by spending time with the pups, chatting with Josh, and painting either before or after dinner.
Once a month or so, I prepare a large palette and store it in butcher trays in my studio’s mini-freezer to keep the paint fresh for extended periods. Throughout the week, I dedicate varying amounts of time to painting, depending on my energy level. Weekends are reserved for longer painting sessions along with chores and other tasks. And mercifully I get some public school holidays to paint as well. I typically have several canvases in progress simultaneously, some in the drying stage after oil grounding, while others are in the underpainting stage. The underpaintings vary from quick base coats with a few colors and I draw back into the wet paint with a brush to more elaborate ones where I work wet-on-wet, incorporating spontaneous elements as I go along. I use a projector to maintain the composition. During the work week, I am generally working on the canvases with dry underpaintings. When possible, I add ephemeral touches like prism or window light, inspired by the ambient lighting around me.
For a long time I wouldn’t listen to music because I felt it was influenced by painting too much but now I really try to bring these feelings into my painting and work with them. Listening to music and painting make me feel more alive and in touch with my inner voice. Give me some Cat Power or Elliot Smith and I feel at home. Sometimes I’ll watch a show if I’m really into it to keep me going longer. When summer comes, I get to sleep in and then paint and then go to the pool. Then nap. It’s wonderful!
GB: Who are your loves of art history and how do they influence your paintings?
HD: I love a deep dive on artists, and hearing about artists and their process gives me gas in the tank to keep going. My love list could go on for several pages and there are many artists I nod to in my current show including Bonnard, Morisot, Munch, and Vuillard. Pierre Bonnard has been my main source of inspiration in recent years. His paintings transport me, and I feel deeply connected to them. He once wrote, “I should like to arrive in front of the young painters of the year 2000 on the wings of a butterfly.” As I write this, I’ve recently begun painting a small canvas based on Marthe in the bath but placing myself in her role in the tub and his role and as the painter simultaneously. I’m thinking about transformation and how water, light, and daily rituals play into this while also nodding to the influence his paintings have on my own. The light, sensitivity of touch, and feeling in his work are incredibly moving to me. I’ve read some criticisms about how he objectified her, but all I see is love when I look at those paintings. I recently saw three of his bath paintings at the Kimbell Museum in Texas. He began the last painting before she passed and finished after she died. I don’t believe for a second that those works could be painted that tenderly without real affection and connection and longing. He was able to spend more time with her through painting and that is so moving to me. All of my work thus far is diaristic in nature, but I continually nod to art history, thinking about how I can relate my life to the paintings that I love and then paint the people I cherish and moments from my own life as tenderly and intimately as I can. I think about light and glow and how this can make a painting feel transcendent across time.
GB: Can you talk about how you came to focus on your subject matter—zoomed in portraits and domestic scenes of family, friends, all deeply personal, intimate, and vulnerable—
HD: My artistic journey is deeply entwined with my life experiences stretching back to childhood. In high school, I made a series of self-portraits for my AP portfolio, focusing on the psychology of self and life cycles. At 38, not much has changed on that front! I met my husband, Josh, at a young age; we were 18/19, which means I’ve been drawing and painting him and his sister/my sister-in-law, Sarah, for over two decades now.
Recently, I’ve consciously embraced vulnerability depicting not just the good moments but also the raw realities, like with my own health scares. Looking further back, my father died of lung cancer when I was very young. This shaped my fascination with family photos, I would spend a lot of time staring and stitching together fragments of our lives visually. Despite the darkness of loss, my upbringing was filled with love. These memories shaped my viewpoint very early on and looking back, I can see how these experiences set the stage for my past and current work to paint my own life.
In terms of zooming in, taking a Crit Club class with Clare Grill was transformative for me. Clare encouraged me to be more specific and to pinpoint the exact moment or feeling I wanted to convey and then amplify this in my work and composition. It was also during a drawing class with Langdon Graves that I began to seriously consider the power of cropping and zooming in to enhance intimacy in my work.
GB: What is the larger role painting plays in your life?
HD: I need to paint to feel like myself. If I go too long without painting, I start to feel off-kilter and I get cranky. Plus, painting has also helped me make a lot of friends–like you, Matt!! I love sharing ideas with other artists and feeling like I’m growing as a person. Painting gives me a feeling of forward momentum and helps me process my emotions and experiences. If I’m going through something tough I can always think about how I might paint it and that helps me get through it. On a daily basis, I notice things more and the world is more beautiful.
GB: How do you feel about sharing your work with an audience?
HB: I make these paintings for myself and at the same time I’m excited to share this work with people–I do get pangs of terror for full disclosure! Back in my 20s, I was more focused on teaching and figuring out life and I wasn’t painting as much. I didn’t show too many people my work beyond close friends and family. Now, seeing my paintings hung on a wall is a dream realized and I know my younger self would be super proud. Overall, I believe the more personal my paintings are, the more people can connect with them on a universal level. And that connection and shared understanding is incredibly rewarding.
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