This painting is going extraordinarily slow. I’m doubting myself and choice of method tonight. I need to figure out the process. Might need to pick up some small canvases and work with some different approaches just to see if something else works better. I’m concerned that once again in my eagerness I jumped into a big canvas too quickly. On the other hand it forces me to sink or swim. If nothing else this is a practice in patience.

It’s a challenge to come into the studio, work for a bit, struggle,p and after a few hours realize that really all I did was make a mess and figure out what not to do. Well that’s been the state of affairs over the last few weeks when I’be made it unto the studio. It also doesn’t make it any easier to pull myself in here after 8 hrs of office drudgery.

As much as it feels like a waste because I have nothing tangible to show for my efforts (in fact a particular voice in my head keeps whispering that I’m not really painter because I haven’t produced any paintings really for over a year), I certainly know that I grew closer with my materials and have a better feel for the medium, pigments, brushes, and canvas I am working with. I just wish I had something tangible to share. Something I could see.

gordonfraserfinearts.com

Simone Lanzenstiel / O.T. / 2007 / Acrylic and spray paint on cotton / 200 cm x 230 cm  / Barbara Gross Galerie

From Art Knowledge News

The artist begins with imaginary and immediate elements, such as pavement, construction scaffolding, graffiti, or blotches of paint on the floor of her studio. This recourse to found markings is a breakaway move from the conventional means of painting.

Simone Lanzenstiel develops her painting as a series of actions on the canvas. She shakes, splashes, sprays, brushes, scrawls, and wipes – in an apparently accidental, fleeting manner. This creates free, open zones, light and soaring. In contrast, colors are varied and re-worked until they are finally condensed into painterly figures and powerful accents of color; this finely attuned balance lends rhythm to the work.

The artist prefers to work with acrylics and enamel sprays in predominantly cool, brilliant tones, such as blue, green, purple, and magenta. Each painting is specified by a precise color composition, dominated by white. White is used as ground and mask – it is a color and a non-color, passive and active. White simultaneously limits and intensifies the space in which all of the other colors are expressed. Strong and gentle color gradients cover the entire surface of the picture, only coming to an abrupt stop at the edges of the painting. Hence, the paintings seem to have been removed from a larger context, and yet they expand far into the space. {Read More…}

Simone Lanzenstiel’s work featured at Barbara Gross Galerie

Sharon Butler over at Two Coats of Paint has a great piece where she writes about her summer studio and adjusting  her work to the limitations of her studio. I have recently done the same with my own work and have been energized and inspired. It was such a revelation when I figured out it was easier to adjust my work to the studio than to try to adjust the studio to the work, especially in NYC. Now instead of being frustrated and pissed-off and not painting because I don’t have a huge loft in Tribeca or Williamsburg or Dumbo, I can just be happy painting instead…

Sharon Butler, So Long, Little Shack