Clare
Kambhu
September 30, 2025
Volume 2
Issue 12
Gideon’s Bakery: What do you like about painting?
Clare Kambhu: Painting lets me slow down and alter how I see, process, and interact with everything around me. Through painting I get to examine my everyday environment with a quizzical, curious eye. The mundane things I look at all day shift from something I observe to something I’m creating, they become abstract and full of possibility and play.
So for example I might notice that the light hits my laptop screen at work in a certain way when I’m wondering when lunch time will roll around. It produces both an aesthetic experience (the pixels and reflections) and almost a communal one. I start thinking about everyone else and their internal worlds as they also wait for lunch. Then I wonder, why we organize our days in such a way that we’re counting down the minutes to lunch and how it could be different.
I’ll then paint a still life of that view of my laptop screen. Painting it gives me a sense of agency. I play with the brush strokes, building in texture to depict a surface that’s actually smooth and flat. I alter what I see and the painting becomes not so much a record of my laptop screen at work, but a record of the dance my hand and the pigments do when I pick up the brush.
I guess what I like about painting is the counterpoint it provides to other types of work.
GB: Do you feel a kinship with other painters from any point in time (past, present, and if so who (as many or as few as you like in as great or little detail as you like)? And in what way? and what does that feel like, the kinship feeling?
CK: If I’m being honest, the closest kinship I feel to any painter is to the one I’m married to - Kyle Utter. I pop my head into his studio whenever I’m feeling in need of a little pep and I get reinvigorated by his process.
My students: stepping into someone else’s shoes to look at their work inevitably makes me feel connected to them. Sometimes it feels easier to solve other peoples’ problems in the studio than my own.
Luc Tuymans: absence/presence of people communicated through mushy paint.
Josephine Halvorson & Sylvia Plimack Mangold: looking closely at the things around them (there’s so much more to say about all of these artists but I’ll leave this in list form for now).
Caroline Kent: Hard shapes and intuitive mark making.
Cy Twombly: paint as chalkboards and chalk. Totally abstract while referring to another material.
Joan Mitchell: I have a feeling that my hand moves in a similar way while applying paint (this is feeling is all in my head, but I still think it’s true based on how her marks look).
Montien Boonma: repetition of forms (alms bowls) as a place to put one’s mind.
Gary Stephan: very slight diagonals. I relate to the way his compositions come together through the process of painting down confident marks and then totally changing them.
On Kawara: time, painting as a way to experience time. Codified time vs flow.
Built environment (construction, city planning, etc.): Examining the corners of rooms, the blotches on the ground, the railings next to stairs - this is what makes me want to paint, just as much as looking at the work of other artists.
GB: How do you see yourself shaping these varied influences—personal, artistic, and environmental—into what comes next?
CK: I remember writing about the idea of time in the artist statement I used to apply to MFA programs 10 years ago. I was thinking about painting as a way to experience time passing. I had forgotten about it until now! Your question brought On Kawara back to mind and sparked the memory of writing about time. I had a more experiential relationship to painting before studying it so intensively. Somehow the compressed time of an MFA program made me forget the relationship that I had with painting and its sense of time that brought me there in the first place. I've now mostly recovered that relationship and sensation. I recently started focusing more on capturing light as it falls across institutional spaces at different times of day. Light depicted in the paintings evokes a moment in time while visible accumulation of paint on the surface of the pieces is a physical record of the time spent applying it. I’d like to focus more on the light cast by the sun in institutional rooms competing with the light emitted by screens.
Clare Kambhu is an artist and educator based in Queens, New York. In her painting practice, the attention she dedicates to commonplace surroundings of daily life leads to questions about the construction of our culture. Her current work focuses on the project of schooling and the ways in which our idiosyncratic humanness can break through within the constraints of educational institutions. She taught in New York City public schools for 9 years. Clare received her MFA in painting from Yale School of Art. She holds a BFA in studio art and an MA in art education from New York University. She participated in the Art & Law Program, Bronx Museum AIM fellowship, and apexart travel fellowship. Her work has been shown at the Katonah Museum and the Bronx Museum. Clare is an assistant professor of art at Allegheny College.
Aviv
Benn
September 17, 2025
Volume 2
Issue 11
Gideon’s Bakery: What do you like about painting?
Aviv Benn: My first intuitive reaction to the question was "I don't like painting!" haha. It is hard to describe my relationship with painting. I suppose it is the love of my life and the bane of my existence. As a viewer what I like about painting is the immediacy of seeing a great painting across the room and getting hypnotized by it, the allure of it; the attractiveness of the surface, being surprised by a fresh and even odd painterly resolution. Nothing is better than seeing a really great and bizarre painting. As a painter, for me, it is somewhat a compulsive relationship with the medium. It is very hard for me to achieve a serene energy in the studio when it comes to the act of painting. I am rarely pleased, and I get very obsessed and endlessly try to push things forward and I rework old paintings, sometimes more than once. It is a sisyphean battle up the mountain; finding your place in the history of painting, being better than the last day and making work that I would find compelling and exciting.
GB: When you describe painting as both a love affair and a Sisyphean struggle, do you think the friction — that relentless reworking and restlessness — is what keeps the work alive, or is there a point where the pursuit of resolution risks dulling the strangeness that first drew you in?
AB: That's the age-old question, no? What's more exciting; the immediacy of love at first sight, that strike of lightning of attraction, or working daily on your relationship and enjoying the depth and resilience of something you spent time building? I think you can look at someone and remember that moment that made you smitten even after years of working on that love together, and that time spent that wasn't always sexy and new and exciting, but the growth and hardship at times is what makes things feel alive. That's how I feel about painting; I think after decades of work, something comes together and through the relentless chiseling, this lightness and this flow and energy appears. I remember seeing the Mark Rothko retrospective at the Louis Vuitton Foundation, and you can see throughout his trajectory how he is carving away through style and expression, until he finds this succinct and gorgeous place, and when we think of a Rothko that's what we think of, not the years of searching and tedious efforts, but this pure thing that was always at the middle of it. I felt the same way when I saw the Philip Guston retrospective at the Tate Modern, and I could probably name 30 more artists who made this journey and found the answer after years of perhaps sometimes not sexy or exciting, but honest and steadfast attempts. So I don't feel the relentlessness is in contrast to what drew me in; it is the love affair that makes the daily work worthwhile, and it's the never-ending pursuit that keeps what drew me in alive.
GB: When you look back at a painting after some time has passed, do you still feel that first spark that drew you to make it, or does the connection change as you grow alongside the work?
AB: That’s such a great question, and one I think about almost every day in the studio. One of the biggest tensions in my process is knowing when my relentless search is productive — when being hard on myself is actually helping me build toward something — and when it’s tipping into being destructive, when I might end up destroying a painting that did nothing wrong. When I look back at older work, I can definitely be too harsh on it. Lately, though, I’ve been making a point to notice and appreciate the moments that sparked the work in the first place. Sometimes I’ll bring those moments forward into a future body of work, or simply appreciate them for what they were at the time. Even when I rework a painting from a year ago, I try to remind myself which parts are the building blocks — the scaffolding — that can support the next stage of the painting or even a whole series. I think what I’m trying to learn over time is to let the work be itself, leave it alone, and let it do its thing. The connection definitely changes as I grow — sometimes I’ll really dislike something I did a few years ago — but then I have to ask myself why. Is it just impatience and unease, or is there a way to make the work more complex and unpredictable in a constructive way? So the question is never fully answered — it just keeps shifting, the same way the work does.
Aviv Benn is a London-based artist.
She completed her MFA in Painting and Drawing at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2018, and her BFA at the Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design, Jerusalem in 2013.
Benn exhibited her work in solo and group exhibitions and art fairs in the US, Europe and Tel-Aviv, such as Pi Artworks (London), Rhona Hoffman (Chicago), SECRIST | BEACH (Chicago) Untitled Art Fair (Miami), Future Fair (New-York) and more. She participated in artist residencies including Affect in Berlin (2014), Pilotenkueche, Spinnerei, Leipzig (2015), the Vermont Studio Center (2019), PADA Studios, Portugal (2023), and East London Printmakers Artist Residency (2025).
She received the Pollock Krasner Foundation Grant in 2021, Rabinovich Foundation Grant in 2015 and 2019, and the Graduate Dean Professional Development Award from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2017 and 2018.
Oil on canvas, 86x86 cm 34x34 inches
Oil on canvas, 86x86 cm, 34x34 inches
Oil on canvas, 96x110 cm, 38x44 inches
Claudia
Keep
September 10, 2025
Volume 2
Issue 10
Gideon’s Bakery: What do you like about painting?
Claudia Keep: I like what painting can achieve and the way painting feels. The formal confines of paint and two dimensional surface give way to near limitlessness of expression. Painting allows me to render visually what I experience; it is a way of both communicating and understanding the world around me, which for as long as I can remember has always been most easily stood (endured perhaps) through images and looking. I like the physical nature of painting; the way a painting becomes an object to be looked at, and the bodily experience of creating it. I like the materiality of paint— it’s consistency, mixing colors, the way it feels to hold a brush full of paint and drag it across the surface of a panel. Standing apart from drawing, printmaking, sculpture, dance, writing, and all other artistic mediums I have tried, paint feels the most natural and, for reasons on some level that I don’t altogether understand, the most compelling.
GB: In your paintings, where ordinary moments become luminous and intimate, how does pausing to capture these fleeting scenes shape your creative process and the emotional tone of your work?
CK: The “pause” to take a picture of a scene informs my process and the tone of my work because it is a sensational experience, by which I mean It is a moment that had a temperature, a sound, a smell, and a physical orientation to me. All of these reference points not only furnish me with practical information about color, shape, etc. that help me later, in the studio, to compose and paint a picture, but that also are imbued with connotations and psychic weight that exist in the collective consciousness. Often the work I make is inspired by some sort of repeated experience and I think the familiarity is part of what lends it an emotional tone. For example, I have seen the sun shinning through the leaves of a tree my whole seeing life, and so has almost everyone else, so when it comes to painting it, I not only have the moment that I took my reference photo but I also have a lifetime of felt experience of that particular visual phenomena or, perhaps more accurately, visual banality upon which to draw.
GB: Do you think the act of pausing to notice a moment transforms it—turning the ordinary into something inherently reflective?
CK: Not quite, I don’t think the “ordinary” is inherently reflective but I do think that pausing to look at something, or to take a picture of something, can be not only a reactive action but a reflective one. Noticing and recording something can transform an otherwise unremarkable moment into one that has personal meaning, but I think that meaning is often projected and is not inherent.
Claudia Keep’s “New York” is on view at March Gallery from
September 4 -October 18, 2025
Sydney
Guzman
September 1, 2025
Volume 2
Issue 9
Gideon’s Bakery: What do you like about painting?
Sydney Guzman: Growing up, I hadn’t seen many paintings in person — most of what I knew came from images online or in books. But even in reproduction, I fell in love with them: their color, their texture, the way they carried so much presence. When I finally saw paintings in real life, my eyes were in awe. They felt so alive and still at the same time — they exist in a mystical, imaginary world of their own.
When I started painting in school, I felt like a magician — paint was my magic, and I guess so was my hand. I discovered that painting could hold things I struggled to express in other mediums. It’s physical and intuitive.
Painting makes me feel so many things while I’m making. Sometimes I feel completely free and open; other times I’m closed off, hiding in the work. I think painting has a way of revealing things about an artist — it becomes a kind of mirror or exchange. It helps me understand parts of myself I don’t always want to admit or that I haven’t fully seen yet. It’s a friend that’s honest and blunt — which I appreciate most.
GB: You describe painting as both a mirror and a kind of friend — honest, blunt, even mystical. Has painting ever revealed something about yourself that surprised or unsettled you? And if so, did that change the way you approached your work afterward?
SG: Yes, definitely. I wouldn’t say it’s unsettling, but when I first realized some of these things, I was surprised that a painting could hold and reveal so much about me.
Painting has shown me that I’m kind of an organized mess — and that shows up in both my studio and the work itself. Some of my paintings that feel stiff or overworked are often the ones where I know I was trying too hard. They’re still my hand, my ideas, but they lack a certain honesty. I can tell in the brushwork when I’ve been too caught up in how something is supposed to turn out, instead of letting the process lead me.
When I find myself in that kind of funk, I have a song I return to — September Fields by Frazey Ford. There’s a line in it: “All you have to do is wonder” and “Are you holding on so tight?” — and somehow, it gives me permission to let my guard down.
Other times, the paintings reveal emotional truths that aren’t always visible in the imagery. I grew up in an emotionally unstable home. I love my mom — she’s been really supportive of my art career and has always shown up for me in her own ways — but navigating the impact of her alcoholism while growing up has been difficult. I think that’s where a lot of my desire for escape or distance comes from. There’s often a sense of searching in my work, of wanting to be somewhere else, guided by animals and insects as spiritual beings — while also holding a longing to feel whole or held together.
Over time, that realization has shifted how I approach painting. I try to be more intuitive and to let go more. That’s still hard for me — some days it’s easier than others. If something isn’t working, I’ll wipe it away, start over, or paint over an old painting. I’m learning, still, to embrace the mess instead of hiding it. I don’t want to be an artist who hides from their inner truths — and even when something does hide in one painting, it always finds a way to come out in another.
GB: Several of your works—A Moth Landed in My Lap and I Held On Tightly, The Moth that Wept with Me, Saving the Insects, and We Watched the Birds and they Watched us Back—evoke a vivid connection between humans and delicate creatures. What draws you to depict moments of empathy or mutual observation between us and other species, and how does that dynamic reflect your personal journey or artistic philosophy?
SG: I’ve always been drawn to animals and insects, even since I was a child—I actually thought I wanted to be a veterinarian when I was little. Many of the encounters in my paintings are inspired by real-life interactions I’ve had, filtered through whatever emotions I’m navigating at the time. I sometimes feel like the universe sends an animal my way with a message—maybe as reassurance that I’m on the right path, or as a small gesture of symbolism and guidance. Whenever that happens, I’ll often look up the meaning behind the creature to see what it might be offering me.
In my recent insect paintings, I was responding both to my personal life and to the weather around me, as well as my curiosity about what happens to insects when it’s pouring. Maybe I could save them, or maybe they could save me—by keeping me company. It’s usually sunny in Texas, but during that time there were storms and heavy rains, which mirrored a kind of gloom I was processing, along with the presence of all the bugs that gathered near my balcony at night. That feeling led to works like A Moth Landed in My Lap and I Held on Tightly, The Moth that Wept with Me, and Saving the Insects. My painting We Watched the Birds and They Watched Us Back grew out of seeing birds pacing around outside my apartment building, paired with the influence of Philip Guston’s Couple in Bed painting. There’s something funny and beautiful about those moments—when you lock eyes with a bird and realize you’re both watching each other.
These interactions, whether humorous or symbolic, keep me paying attention. They remind me not to miss the small signs of connection around me, and that sense of empathy and awareness is something I carry into my artistic practice.
Sydney Guzman (b.1997, McAllen, TX) earned her Master of Fine Arts degree from the LeRoy E. Hoffberger School of Painting at the Maryland Institute College of Art in the spring of 2023, following her Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from Texas State University in 2021.
Currently based in Austin, Guzman is a lecturer in the School of Art and Design at Texas State University in San Marcos, TX. Her practice centers on immersive, layered works that explore personal growth, the cycles of nature, and the complexities of self-discovery. Her work has been exhibited nationally at museums and galleries including The Peale Museum (Baltimore, MD), Spellerberg Projects (Lockhart, TX), 82Paris (Portland, ME), and Ivester Contemporary (Austin, TX), among others.
Kyle
Utter
August 26, 2025
Volume 2
Issue 8
Gideon’s Bakery: What do you like about painting?
Kyle Utter: For me painting is a sort of elevated play. I like that painting is totally void of usefulness in any colloquial sense of the word. Unless you consider providing aesthetic enhancement or building niche communities use values, it has none. In a world where everything is instrumentalized this frivolity seems like a value to me. And at the same time we (painters) are very serious about this type of play we call painting. We spend huge amounts of time figuring out how to apply materials just so, reading art history or art theory, looking at other paintings, formulating thoughts and having conversations about other paintings. In so far as it ultimately doesn’t matter despite commanding a huge portion of my mental bandwidth, painting for me is like sports might be for other people. But the fact that painting is a solitary activity in which one competes primarily against themself makes it commensurate with my temperament.
In the studio I’m building worlds, playing with flatness and depth through a free associative process that allows me to think through materials and images. This process continues to excite me.
GB: You mention reading art history and theory as evidence of the seriousness of play in painting, which I agree with. As a new member of a shared reading group currently engaging with a Marxist text, I’d be very interested to hear your thoughts on how politics—or the reading and contemplation of political texts—might shape or relate to the serious play involved in your painting.
KU: Yea, over the last year and change I have been engaging seriously with texts by Marx, Althusser, Frederic Jameson, Anna Kornbluh and Ben Davis among others in reading groups and on my own.
The Marxist tradition provides an immense body of literature that contains a ton of important insights and a lot of great writing, but at the end of the day, I am not aiming to make Marxist paintings. Psychoanalytic insights are important to me and, as such, intentionality in the moment of making becomes suspect. It’s like in the moment of making a painting I’m too close to it to be able to realize what I’m actually involved in. In terms of understanding my own work there is a sort of belated comprehension that takes place well after I’ve finished a painting. Only once some time has passed can I look at the completed painting in the proverbial rear view mirror and see how the things I was concerned with/ thinking about/ reading at the time manifested in the painting.
I’m now looking back at my Pastoral No. 2 which I completed late last year. Unrelated imagery, different mediums and various styles of painting are accumulated on a single surface- it’s a visual cacophony that does seem to reflect the experience of being embedded in the frenetic circuits of production, consumption and distribution living in New York City, the capital of capital. And of course there is the depiction of workers, appropriated from a FedEx advertisement which valorizes them in a very superficial and cynical way. All of this is an aesthetic affirmation of contradictions and incongruences. It is an affirmation of what is. A representation of what is. I don’t see it as part of a revolutionary program. I don’t think humanity is going to become more free or our political economy will be more fair because I make paintings in my studio a certain way.
GB: How does that delayed recognition shape the way you approach making the next piece? Do you ever try to resist or lean into that uncertainty while working?
KU: If I recognize some sort of content or formal pattern in a painting after the fact I may lean into it or push away from it in the next painting. As I develop a body of work I hope that there are connections between the paintings, but I don’t want it to be variations on a theme.
Even within the course of making a single painting if I see a narrative emerging I’ll often disrupt it by painting over or adding something. I don’t want obvious narratives. I want the viewing process to be a slow one where the viewer is invited to put together disparate pieces and draw their own connections. I want the viewer to be able to enter the pictorial space, collect clues in the form of image fragments and then be pushed back out onto the surface of the painting by its sheer materiality.
In terms of uncertainty in the process, I do embrace it, but also set up rules and structures for myself. In the works featured here I started off with images of architecture in my neighborhood. I used rules of perspective to reconfigure these images. These are the certainties that I started with. After that I allowed myself to intervene so as to create an interesting painting. In Pastoral No. 2 the purple brush strokes on the right really do violence to the representational space, they are completely non-objective, and as such they present a big risk. There were no studies to see how the strokes would look- it was uncertain but I just went for it, right on the surface. I put some purple paint on a 4 inch brush and took a leap of faith. I think it worked out.
Emily
Stroud
August 19, 2025
Volume 2
Issue 7
Gideon’s Bakery: What do you like about painting?
Emily Stroud: I like that painting is never-ending. I can potentially/hopefully spend my entire life painting and continue to uncover new problems both materially and conceptually. Every day in the studio, there are interesting moments where the paint acts differently than I expect it to, and I always find those new material experiences so exciting. When I tell people that I paint, a lot of the time they say that it must be so fun or therapeutic, but I actually find painting quite grueling a lot of the time. But eventually, there’s a moment in painting where everything clicks into place, and it’s like I’ve been holding my breath and I can finally exhale. I’m always searching for that feeling with painting, and sometimes it happens in the first five hours, and sometimes it happens after 50 hours into a piece. I also feel like a pretty solitary person, and I like painting because it allows me to be physically alone, but always a part of a bigger community and history. I’m never actually painting alone. I have so many paintings I am enamoured with flashing through my mind and conversations with other artists, interviews, articles, etc, ruminating up there while I’m working. I also love not only the act of painting, but looking at paintings, good and bad. I love an art opening and then the dissection of what my friends and I loved and hated over a drink afterwards. That’s also helpful for being solitary because my overwhelming curiosity in seeing other artists' work pulls me out into the world.
GB: Painting seems to be both a private obsession and a way of staying connected to the world. What keeps you going on the hard days when the “click” doesn’t come—or when solitude feels more like isolation?
ES: I think the nature of my studio keeps me from feeling isolated. My studio is located in an old high school that’s been repurposed into spaces for artists and businesses. There are always people to run into, other artists to talk to, and a coffee shop where I can go and do some work if I'm feeling cooped up. I also have a studiomate, so I’m rarely alone in my space. I actually feel most isolated in my practice based on my practice itself, not from being physically alone. That feeling comes when I’ve exhausted all of my ideas and I reach a point where I have to start from what feels like the very beginning again.
I used to work on just a few paintings at a time, and when I would finish them, I would feel defeated. The build-up to painting again would feel incredibly taxing, and then I would end up in my head about where to start. I have altered my practice to kind of work like a one man factory, where there are lots of paintings going at once, drawings for prospective paintings, and other prep to do (like building, stretching, preparing canvases, etc.). When I start to feel stuck in a painting, I can just turn it around for a while and move to another part of the studio and fend off that exhausted feeling.
The “click” or everything shifting into place for a painting definitely doesn’t happen every day or for every painting, but I guess I’m always searching for it. I also just really enjoy the physical aspect of painting. I love moving everything around, turning my paintings upside down to edit them or see them from a different viewpoint, stretching canvases, all of it. So being able to bounce around the studio and work on different stages of the process of a painting at any time has kept that feeling at bay.
GB: Do you think your studio has a memory of all the paintings that have passed through it—and if so, do you ever feel them influencing the new ones?
ES: I’m not sure how much the actual paintings that have lived in this space before I arrived influence my work. The floor above my studio houses an art school that teaches realist techniques in painting and drawing, and many of its graduates have studios on my floor. I’m surrounded by their paintings, which I find technically so beautiful, but that kind of work can be a trap for me. I tend to get caught up in what looks “right” and “wrong,” and that is not helpful for my practice. I am more interested in the natural flow of my hand and in creating a space that can only exist in a painting. I’m always aiming to make a painting that makes logical sense on the picture plane, but doesn’t make realistic sense? If that makes… sense.
However, my own finished paintings are always lingering, with pieces of them resurfacing in my new work for better or worse. The imprints of other artists’ paintings are also present in the studio. I often keep multiple books open while I work. I have artists' paintings printed and hung up on my wall, and they’re always swirling around in my mind too. I have Manet, Lois Dodd, Bonnard, Clara Peeters, the list goes on forever, all keeping me company while I work.
(all images courtesy of the artist)
Rodrigo
Tafur
August 13, 2025
Volume 2
Issue 6
Gideon’s Bakery: What do you like about painting?
Rodrigo Tafur: I wonder about that myself. I have moments when I can’t quite say I like it. I believe most painters have a unique relationship with obsession—it’s like asking an addict what they love about their addiction. It goes deeper than liking. It’s not just a loving relationship.
But at the same time, painting is not really an addiction… it can just be pigment over a surface… I wonder if there are any simple obsessions… painting would be one for me.
It´s feeling happy and sad at the same time. I don’t just like it for the pleasure of its materiality, or for the magical atmosphere that only exists within the studio walls, or the softness of new brushes, or the personality of the worn ones, or the smell of oil paint, coffee, and cigarettes, or getting lost in color and thought, or the playfulness of starting a new canvas, and all of it wondering why I’m doing it at all. Painting can turn to be a heavy existential matter for me, if I think about it too much…
I like to see Painting as an agent of introspection. In this age of immediacy, they slow us down and ask us to feel. That might sound banal or insignificant, “just feeling”—and maybe it is, in the way that human existence itself can seem to be. And yet, that’s the point. A painting is like a intricate fingerprint. It says, “I was here.” It speaks of time, presence, and death.
Sometimes I love painting. Sometimes I hate it. Sometimes I don’t care about it at all. The more I try to answer this question, the more I realize I could just as easily be talking about myself. And maybe that’s not an entirely separate question at all.
If I had to give a final answer, I’d say what I love most about painting is the paint itself—to see how it behaves, how it’s handled by different hands. It’s such a malleable material, endlessly appealing to the senses.
I wonder about it... endlessly. The closest I can get to is that Painting is a complex relationship with a simple obsession.
GB: Could you say more about what you meant by “the playfulness of starting a new canvas”?
RT: When I talk about the playfulness of starting a new canvas, I’m referring to the freedom and spontaneity that comes at the very beginning of the process. At that stage, there’s no pressure—just the simple responsibility of responding to the emptiness of the surface. It feels almost like playing, where I can be completely impulsive. There are no 'mistakes' yet, only gestures, color, and motion... Intuition. As the painting develops, though, that sense of play starts to shift. I begin to make more intentional decisions—thinking more about color relationships, form, and composition. I start to wonder what the painting is becoming, what it might look like in the end. But interestingly, it never turns out the way I expect.
GB: Do you think the canvas ever ‘wants’ something from you in those early moments—or is the playfulness more about resisting that kind of demand? Have you ever considered leaving a painting at that playful, impulsive beginning stage—never resolving it—almost like preserving a fossil of your first response to emptiness?
RT: I believe the canvas is always demanding something—it insists on being acted upon. As a painter, I’ve come to understand that I inhabit a space I often think of as the In-Between—a realm where things are not fully defined, and even when they appear to be, they rarely behave as expected.
In those early stages, when I'm merely preparing the surface—not yet a painting—I’m focused on creating the right ground for what is to come. This stage is deeply sensorial for me: there’s touching, grasping, rubbing—a direct, physical engagement between my body and the surface. It’s during this process that I often slip into a kind of working trance. Its relevante to state that this playful stage is not without tension; it’s a continual push and pull, a cycle of surrendering and resisting.
I have often considered leaving a work at that raw, intuitive stage—preserving it as a kind of fossil of the first response to emptiness; as the question states. In fact, this temptation is present at every step. I constantly ask myself: Is it done? Does it need anything more? Is this enough? And yet, it almost never feels complete. Since its at everystep of the way... I really don´t mind to keep working, its makes me feel better (if that makes sense).
My current process, which involves a pointillist approach to color and texture, helps to relieve the pressure of achieving resolution in a conventional sense. I think of it as a factorization—breaking down color and brushstroke into countless parts, each contributing to a unified whole. This allows me to engage in a complex dialogue: between myself, the act of painting, and the image that is slowly emerging—eventually to be offered to the viewer, whoever they may be.
Ultimately, I feel that painters are, in a way, "doomed" or "cursed"—not just to persist in painting despite all obstacles, but to paint one singular painting again and again, across time and canvas. I’ve been painting that same image since I was a child. It’s the same vital energy that pushes me forward—the same inner light that illuminates different ideas, forms, and materials. In truth, it is all part of one vast surface, containing every experience and thought—even those I cannot yet recognize. A kind of alchemical index that will only come to rest when my body itself stops moving.
Oil, graphite and burlap on canvas
68 x 65 inches
Sue
Beyer
Interviews
Brandon
Dalmer
July 22, 2025
Volume 2
Special Issue
Sue Beyer: Tell us a bit about yourself.
Brandon Dalmer: I’m originally from Alberta, Canada, but I am now based in Montréal, QC. I completed my undergrad in 2007 at AUarts in Painting.
Since then, I’ve participated in residencies and exhibitions across Canada and internationally and have been active in artist-run organizations and curatorial projects, the most recent with Roundtable Residency (Toronto) and Wreck City (Calgary).
I recently completed an MFA in Painting and Drawing at Concordia University. My practice investigates how images are generated and our shifting relationship with technology. I use a lot of fabrication, generative processes and robotic assistance to explore the hidden systems that shape our daily lives. This also functions as a kind of archive. My work is open source, allowing others to expand upon it, granting a form of technological undeath.
Lately, I’ve been into magic, astronomy, and bad ’80s movies.
SB: How long have you been making art?
BD: I’ve been making art for quite a while, but 2015 marked a turning point when I returned to painting full time and began integrating coding and automation into my practice.
Since then, my work has shifted between experimental video, animation, and installation, but painting has always been the core. I see painting as the original human technology, or an adaptable medium for exploring emerging tools and systems.
SB: Do you have a studio space?
BD: Yes, I co-run a large studio space in the Mile End with 28 other artists working across various mediums. We started it together in 2020 during the pandemic, and it’s since grown to 6000 square feet. The community we’ve built is a key part of my practice, offering us all stability in Montréal’s challenging rental landscape. It also helps to foster collaboration between the artists.
SB: What transformative processes do you use to make your work?
BD: My work is entirely transformative. I use systems that convert digital information into new forms. Whether through painting, video, or installation. I’m especially interested in how codecs function, translating one type of data into another. I see artists working similarly: filtering information and lived experience into new forms and images.
SB: Do you ever use instruction?
BD: Research is a form of instruction. Open-source platforms like GitHub, Instructables, and Hack-a-Day really inform my practice. These platforms will often be a jumping off point for new methods. Recently, I started developing a series of ghost-detecting sensors based on a DIY ghost-hunting forum I discovered. I am constantly researching and experimenting, especially in the more automated areas of my practice.
Because I’ve benefited so much from these resources, I now share my own research through Gitbooks, where I host 3D files and tutorials. You can access these at: brandon-a-dalmer.gitbook.io/studio-notes
SB: In your work Congratulations from 2021 you are exploring affect mediated by artificial/synthetic aesthetics. How do you think your work produces or encourages affect for the viewer?
BD: This piece was made while I was a Teaching Assistant for an Intro Painting class during my MFA. I’ve always been interested in how artists replicate images, especially the use of projectors and printouts to translate digital images into physical paintings. I noticed that many students left in projection-related distortions, focus shifts and warped proportions, which immediately reminded me of David Hockney’s Secret Knowledge, where he suggests Old Masters may have used optical tools. These distortions, once accidental, now feel natural and a part of a new visual language shaped by technology.
As artificial aesthetics become more normalized, they also become less visible. The line between the real and the artificial blurs, and for many, that distinction no longer matters. I see this as a critical entry point: it’s how we begin to interact with technology visually. Once this layer is defined, we can start digging deeper and exploring the true deep magic.
SB: Can you talk a bit about Sample Return (Martian Regolith), 2025
BD: This piece started as an exploration of synthetic pigments, which is something I’m still working on. I discovered a whole world of synthetic extraterrestrial simulats: lab-made materials replicating the chemical makeup of lunar, asteroid, or Martian soil. These are based on data collected by various rovers and missions. Actual Martian soil is incredibly hard (and expensive) to bring back, although NASA has been working on this with each successive mission. Sample Return (Martian Regolith) uses a simulant that’s 98% chemically similar to real Martian soil.
This work is a bit of a gag, poking fun at the tech-bro culture dominating (and hopefully not preventing) space exploration in recent years. I’m fascinated by the potential of returning to the moon and beyond, but also wary. It sometimes feels like we're headed toward the worst possible version of Burning Man...
SB: When is your next exhibition?
BD: I will be part of a 3-person show with Colin Canary and Andrew Wright in 2026 at De Montigny in Ottawa. I’m pretty excited about this as we’ve been given a lot of room to experiment. The show will act both as a physical bibliography and the launch of a publication I’ve been writing over the last year.
Acrylic on Panel
36x24 inches
Acrylic on Canvas
60x54 inches
Acrylic on Panel
28 X 24 inches
Henning
Strassburger
July 15, 2025
Volume 2
Issue 5
Gideon’s Bakery: What do you like about painting?
Henning Strassburger: I am never sure if I actually like painting or not. It often feels so dull and overcome. There is all this good painting out there, but also all the bad. I was just in the Louvre in Paris. Endless walls and walls filled with paintings. From floor to ceiling. Really crappy ones, too. And just when I started hating it all, the master pieces popped out. Like literally popping out of the white noise of painting. And the question would be, why is the Fra Angelico so much better than those medieval paintings hanging next to his? Why is Ingres' portrait of Napoleon better than the ones by other painters? Why are the figures in this one Delacroix painting so perfectly painted and in the other one from the same year completely off? Well I guess that's the answer to my question: it’s because painting is a drug. One might hate it, but you can't get away from it.
GB: A clarification and a half-question—when you say "painting is a drug" do you mean painting is addictive or that painting has psychotropic powers, has healing qualities, or something else entirely?
HS: Well I guess that's all part of a drug. The addiction, the high, the down, the illusion, the psycho trip, the overdose, the medical dose... It also depends on whether you're the maker or the viewer, the dealer or consumer. Weird to use all these terms now to describe painting as such. I am speaking as an addict in both ways, maker and viewer.
GB: Could you fantasize about the greatest painting never made and describe it to us?
HS: The greatest painting? Let me see… I guess first of all it brings a personal story, which only a unique person at a unique time could bring. Then it has a material attraction, the unexplainable "how is it made"? Even when there are sloppy brushstrokes, which make you wonder how someone could possibly paint so precise in such an easy manner. And most important to me is, that the greatest painting encloses some secret, which can never be solved.
I just try to think about how that painting would look, taking these things as cooking ingredients. It has to have a shooting hole like Warhols shot Marilyn, it has to have sloppy brushstrokes like in a Rembrandt self-portrait with the golden helmet, and it most certainly needs a Mona Lisa smile, which cannot really be seen; or one eye, like the Nefertiti sculpture and one will ever wonder: where is the other eye?
GB: This is an exciting way to think about making a painting! Can you talk about what you're working on and how you're making it and what you think and feel about it? What're your Warhol holes, sloppy Rembrandt strokes, Mona Lisa smiles, and missing Nefertiti eye?
HS: Oh boy I really maneuvered me into something here! The good thing about my list is probably, that you can never achieve this intentionally. Everything that makes a masterpiece is unpredictable, unlead, unforced, maybe also unconscious. I mean all talent, virtuosity, experience and stuff is no guarantee to ever paint a single good painting. It needs this holy touch, wherever it comes from.
I myself am in a real artistic transformation, which sounds tough, but is actually a lot of fun to endure this process. It is a long missed way out. With all what‘s going on in this world it really struck me earlier this year, that my own practice as an abstract painter came to an end. I was simply done with it. I said what I had to say. And I actually don‘t see that my abstract piers have something interesting to say anymore either. Things I highly valued yesterday are completely off my focus today and seem absolutely empty to me.
So one morning I woke up like in a Kafka book and wasn’t a bug, but certainly no abstract painter any more. I decided, that I am a realist now. I started drawing and painting the people around me. And I paint them from life. Not from photos, not from my phone. Just reality. No irony. No concept. No additional content. With all the alternative facts around me I document who is sitting in front of me and whom I know. Face to face. Painting is the only medium I trust today. How funny.
250 x 200 cm
Oil on Canvas
Oil on Canvas
60x50cm
Photo: Roman Maerz
Oil on Camvas
180 x 140 cm
Photo: Tino Kukulies
Sarah
D’Ambrosio
June 30, 2025
Volume 2
Issue 4
Gideon’s Bakery: What do you like about painting?
Sarah D’Ambrosio: I love how problem solving occurs in painting. I love tackling why paintings do work and why they don’t. I love being part of something that has been a human activity for thousands of years and indulging in something we absolutely do not need to survive (in the life/death literal sense). I love the mysterious poetry and language of formal painting. Oil paints fleshy ,sexy like material and trying to intuitively make work that seems tethered and sincere to me as a person.
GB: The figures in your show Brooklyn, Berlin at March in the East Village have an unusual relationship other the edges of the canvas, to filling up the space of the pictures, unusual in that it feels unique to you, a new take on this kind of imagery, and deeply connected to painters like Marsden Hartley, Neo-classical Picasso, and especially Bay Area painter David Park. Does the oil paint itself aid in determining a composition? How do you decide where the body is in space, in relation to other bodies? Could you guide us through one of the problems that needed solving, maybe in a specific painting in the show? While oil paint itself may be fleshy/sexy as you say, in these paintings I think it does something different though I don't know what that something is yet. It offers a kind of solidity, a wax figure, a vulnerable moment captured in wax but still very much alive.
SD’A: SD’A: The figures expand over time. Their parts are sometimes Frankensteined together from multiple memories of different male bodies. Haptic memory or invented fantasy. I prefer my boys large and in charge—gravity, form and weight are very important to me. They don’t always start so big but they get bigger and bigger every time I trace the memory of an edge of chest or leg over again in my mind. Sometimes they really suffocate the canvas and then I have to release a pressure valve somewhere—I do feel deeply connected to Hartley, Avery, Beckmann and definitely Park. Park being the stand out only that I always felt David Park was so gutturally responsive in a way that other Bay Area painters weren’t. That’s how I paint, from the gut, and try and shoot straight from the hip. I used to paint with just my eyes and head— intense observation. I still draw from observation but now I work primarily from my central nervous system, which is how I experience human beings anyway. There’s an energy to them I’m trying to capture or remember. So it seems fitting and more important, truthful. As far as problem solving, the paintings change so much throughout the process. At the end of the day the painting itself is the priority. I am a formalist. Shape and form are the gears that keep the machine spinning. If limbs and environments have to change or a head has to be completely lobbed off to suit the needs of the life of the painting. Then so be it. There’s nothing worse or more useless than a stagnant painting. You can’t fall in love with small moments and sacrifice the whole.
GB: What is your dream response to your work?
SD’A:Oh, that’s tough I think about this quote often: "I am Me, and I hope to become Me more and more," wrote Paula Modersohn-Becker in a letter to her close friend Rainer Maria Rilke, following her split from her husband Otto Modersohn.
I just want the work to feel like it comes from me. Connected to other painters and filtered through all of my experiences and understanding of paint but me nonetheless.
Sarah D’Ambrosio’s solo show “Brooklyn, Berlin” at March is up through July 25th.
Left: A Boy from Munich, oil on canvas, 60 x 48 inches , 2025 (not on view)
Right: Bathhouse Beefcake , oil on canvas, 60x 48 inches , 2025 (currently up at MARCH gallery)
Oil on canvas
12x9 inches
Oil on canvas
60x48 inches
Katie
Hector
June 25, 2025
Volume 2
Issue 3
Gideon’s Bakery: what do you like about painting?
Katie Hector: I'm addicted to the flow state I can access while painting. Where decisions feel intuitive and intentionally impulsive and when the image of what I’m working on is abstracted by the process of layering paint. I think tapping into that zone as much as possible enriches my life greatly. What happens to a work after its complete is a matter of context but I’ve always cared about the making the most.
GB: Did you play sports at a high level?
KH: I did, I was a swimmer growing up. I think it greatly influenced me in terms of discipline, endurance, commitment to consistency, and being able to generate motivation. Swimming is a funny sport because it’s a team effort culminating from solo races; head in the water, in your own lane, unable to see your opponent or hear the crowd. When I paint in the studio now all masked up in a respirator (due to the airbrush) I get a laugh thinking that I’ve trained for this since I was six.
GB: Louise Fishman visited Hunter while I was there and talked about her youthful love of basketball. Because her childhood was pre-Title 9 she couldn’t continue playing after a certain age. Her love of basketball manifested at the edges and grids of her paintings and spoke to her keen awareness of the boundaries of the court. She spoke to this for a while, the relationship of her body as a player and being in and out of bounds, how to play the edge of the court. It was fascinating to see it in the work. I had a feeling with your talk of a “flow state” you had a similar relationship to sports. Consistency is an interesting topic and it’s wild to think about your time spent swimming as training for painting. How does this thread, swimming to respirator, affect the content of the work? I’m thinking also of the act of making it, I’m not sure I have a question here maybe just a thought, that you can bear witness and participate in the making but no one else could bear witness unless they, too, masked, but of course they wouldn’t have your breath training and wouldn't be involved in making to it'd be very different.
KH: I think the sensory deprivation allows me to access a flow state in the same way being in the water used to when I was a kid. It feels like putting on blinders and being able to hyper focus for short bursts at a time. I typically paint in short yet energized 15-30 min bursts at a time. Katie Hector I think the toxic nature of my process (the need to wear a mask while painting) makes me think a lot about a dystopian future. I think it deeply impacts my choice of color, an acid hyper saturated pallette. I envision my subjects as beings from a toxic future, shellshocked.
Acrylic on canvas
40 x 30 inches
Acrylic on canvas
22 x 22 inches
Acrylic on canvas
40 x 30 inches
Erica
Newton
June 12, 2025
Volume 2
Issue 2
Gideon’s Bakery: what do you like about painting?
Erica Newton: I like the way it gets me to look at the world, like I'm active listening/looking. I like the space it offers me to kind of worldbuilding and dialogue with myself and my memories and fantasies. I like the mystery of it and the surprise. I like the all-at-onceness of painting, there is no order for how you are supposed to receive the information. I like what that does to our sense of time and space and order. And of course, I like the materiality of the whole endeavor.
Oh and I also like the problem solving aspect—there’s always something to be worked out.
GB: Can you say more about the materiality of the whole endeavor? How did you come about using the materials you use in the way that you use them?
EN: Well I didn't pick up oil paints until I was an art model at the New York Studio School (which is where I got my MFA). I would be sitting there for hours watching other people mix paint and imagine what it might feel like and entertain myself by thinking about how I would mix a certain color in the room. So I kind of craved them from afar before I took the plunge. I also have the studio school to thank for the plaster. The school does these intensives for two weeks between terms that they call marathons and I started taking sculpture rather than drawing ones (Marathons are also how I started out with oil painting too because they are open to everyone). I was introduced to plaster in one of these marathons and had so much fun with it. The quality of plaster when it's wet is enticing and the possibilities feel endless and then there's this big reveal moment where you don't quite know how it will turn out (at least the way I do it, hah). But I was also so immersed in painting, image, and color, so I thought I'd try making plaster slabs to paint on and it was immediately exciting and experimental. I am still getting surprised by what paint and plaster can do together so that's probably a reason I have kept with it. I also like immediately being involved in making the actual art object, which the plaster part of the process definitely is. It's sort of funny, but I don't have much patience for stretching and preparing a canvas and don't especially love the quality of the surface. I want to get right into it and I want something that talks back. Though this wasn't a conscious intention (and still isn't really, though I'm more aware of it) I guess I'll just say there's something intriguing about walking the line between a painting and a sculptural object. Something about the presence of it.
GB: How does the materiality affect the content? If it doesn’t, why do you think that is?
EN:My counter to you might be what’s the difference between materiality and content? I’m not sure I can totally figure how to draw the distinction. It’s all metaphor and it’s all itself simultaneously. Image and the senses engaged by the material get interlocked in the making. For me, there is no content without material, I think they’re inextricably linked.
My less esoteric answer is that, in terms of process, often the plaster offers something to respond to and build an image off of. Sometimes when it’s setting I start playing around or composing with something in mind but often when I get the first pass of paint on something else happens other than my original intention. So I guess what I’m saying is there’s this oscillation between what elements are directing the unfolding of the work. I don’t try to foist an idea onto a material, there’s always a dialogue.
Erica’s work is currently on display at Ruby/Dakota (155 E 2nd Street, NYC) in a two person exhibition “Stretch Marks” with Ellen Hanson through June 28th. You can learn more about Erica on her website and instagram.
oil and plaster on wood
11 x 9.5 inches
Photo: Rosie Lopeman
Photo: Tyler Mathew Oyer
Spray paint, plaster, paint skins, oil paint, burlap
5 x 6 inches
Photo: The artist
Adrianne
Rubenstein
June 5, 2025
Volume 2
Issue 1
Gideon’s Bakery: what do you like about painting?
Adrianne Rubenstein: I like how paintings look and feel, and the depth of experience.
GB: Could you describe a painting's look and feel and depth of experience that has a special place in your mind and heart? Yours or someone else's painting, doesn't matter, or maybe both?
AR: I like to see rebellion in a painting and a contrast between assumed or accepted realities and fantastic ones, and for the space in between to be the revelation. I like paintings that take down power structures. Decisions can be a code into the raw and sometimes painful experience of the artist. I think painting and looking at painting is basically the same thing. I think super smart people like Dana Schutz are able to make paintings that tell enormous long stories of time and detail and that dumb funny painters like (Georg) Baselitz can make grand overtures about humanity with one crooked gesture.
GB: On the spectrum of "super-smart-painters to dumb-funny-painters" where do you place your work and could you talk about the stories or overtures you are making--not necessarily what the stories/overtures are literally unless that's what you'd like to do, but more what it feels like when you're about to start a painting, when you're in the middle of it, when you've decided to stop painting that painting, etc.?
AR: I think I’m on the dumber end. The paintings i make are exactly and only what i am able to make, i don’t think anyone else could do them and i don’t think anyone’s ever going to hire me to do highly skilled labor in a dot factory, but I think the extent that I love and admire painting us very very evident in my work and conduct as an artist. people always say that my work looks fun to make but actually a lot of the process us fighting and just forcing myself to do it like anything else that you’ve somehow made yourself responsible to. So, when I’m making a painting i am mostly coming up with subtle mind tricks to trick myself into doing the stuff I like looking at which needs to be not overly thought about. I think there’s an element of covering tracks and also trying to give “a lot.” When the paintings are finished, I’m not really sure, but it could be a lot of points earlier or later than they are, but the thought process might be like: I’ve gotten at the essence of something and any more would be taking it away, but I also like to be able to ruin my paintings and experience them dying so I can make sure it’s a part of my process not to create finite things.