A CONVERSATION ABOUT 21 PAINTERS

Christopher Miles: So how'd this selection come about?

James Gobel: It grew out of observing artists who were showing and working in LA, and in my own mind fantasizing about a dream list for a show of painters who were somewhere between just emerging and well along in their careers.

CM: Were you thinking of these artists as having some quintessential Los Angeles qualities?

JG: I think that in different ways they represent different things going on in Los Angeles as a city and as an art scene, but what really caused me to bring them together was that they all stuck with me for a long time after I first saw their work.

CM: So how about an example. How about Tyler Vlahovich?

JG: When I saw Tyler's paintings for the first time I thought it was one of the most shocking shows I'd seen in a long time. He really seemed exemplary of a new wave of painters who aren't afraid of raw canvas and muted color.

CM: He's exploring formalist concerns, but not through the kind of slick, high-key standards that you see in a lot of recent Los Angeles painting.

JG: Yes. You get the feeling that if someone compared his paintings to abstract painting from the 1950s, he wouldn't take it negatively.

CM: I think you see now a number of artists who are retracing modernist concerns and riffing on them and bringing them into a current line, but also not being afraid of going back to those roots in a way that doesn't shout irony. I look at someone like Jonathan Pylypchuk and I see someone who is making very clumsy, rough, materially driven paintings, but when he's at his best, he really shows himself to be a true formalist in my opinion. He's picking up on pop and funk and expressionist unfinished business left over from late modernism, and he's making interesting work. To go where he's going now a few years ago, you would have had to make work that was very clear about trying to be bad. He's breaking from the fascination with pure paint, but the formalist current is there nonetheless.

JG: It's a formalism of fabric and glitter and glue and wood and screws.

CM: It is. It's not slacker stuff. There's a real rigor.

JG: There is. I find a similar quality in Jacqueline Bootier's paintings. At first glance, her paintings seem so awkward and naive, but as you look at them, you see a real painterly involvement, a real romantic view of painting.

CM: I think there's a re-embrace of romance and romanticism in Los Angeles painting. It runs through most of the painters you've chosen. It turns up in different ways, but it's there. These are painters who come from what I would call a kind of post-cynical point of view. They're people who have come of age after the discussions of the death of painting, and after a generation of painters invested in the idea of painting as a critique or even rejection of painting. I don't mean to say that they're uninformed. In fact, the good ones are very aware, and they can go anywhere they want to critically, and they know how to signal it in imagery and material and
style, but I think they also are the first generation we've had in a while that seems to feel free to allow itself to have a kind of love affair with painting again.

JG: I like that idea.

CM: And I think that someone like Michelle Fierro is indicative of that point of view. Of the group you've assembled, she's really one of the first, along with Adam Ross and Steven Criqui. She's also one of a handful of younger painters who signaled that a next generation was still interested in abstraction in the early ‘90s, though she's received less attention for it even though I would say she was—from the start—one of the most committed.

JG: She's really into the paint, and I think her work always acknowledges that she knows painterly painting is a tough line to tow and that it can involve flirting with badness, but that she's going to do it anyway and try to get something good out of it. I find her work very poetic, very tough and sweet at the same time, and very unapologetic about what she's doing.

CM: Would you say the same about Stephanie Pryor.

JG: I would. The work is quite different, but there's a similar, very obvious involvement with the paint. Her paintings aren't as dense and concrete. I see them as starting with movement and continuing to address movement all the way through, whether in the suggestions of animal imagery, or just in the brushwork.

CM: I think it's work that well walks the line between premeditation and intuitive process. I see this again as an echo of an attitude that is about being savvy and also being pretty loose and free about what's going on. I see that as well in Lisa Mihm's work. You see that she's very aware of
aesthetic codes and images, and that she's very interested in pushing around meanings and definitions, and tweaking at what is proper, and it seems quite deliberate, and yet it is rooted in play, and there's an obvious integration of intuition into even the more seemingly calculated aspects of the paintings. And there's an obvious intuitive enjoyment of the material and process.

JG: There's also a narrative implied in her paintings. It's always fragmented, and sometimes it goes to almost pure abstraction, but it all plays out in what I see as a basic framework of landscape. Jane Callister has worked similarly. I think she's merged an interest in the romantic landscape with other interests from her past work having to do with decadence and sex. So you get these very charged scenes that also imply narrative and that suggest a kind of visual route you can travel through the painting, but they're also just these luscious abstractions.

CM: I think Jane's work really acknowledges the possibility of cross-referencing seemingly disparate genres and approaches and filtering one through another. They're abstract, they're landscape, they're pop, they're narrative, they're eastern, they're western. And it's not about pastiche or mutual cancellation. They're about finding new harmonies or new recipes where you didn't imagine they existed. Tom Allen also is someone who is mixing up some traditions and some codes. He's really the one who is most invested in the tradition of the romantic landscape. I mean you can see the Friedrich coming through.

JG: Yeah.

CM: But at the same time, it's filtered through an aesthetic sensibility that in both its awareness of painting and pop influences, could only have come about in the late twentieth century. It's post psychedelia, post music video, post digital imaging. But it's not about pitting that contemporary sensibility against romanticism. It's about putting it in its service.

JG: David Korty also is one of the most romantic painters in Los Angeles. He lets us see every mark, and he's honest, but also very generous. He gives us these serene images that are taken right out of the city. He give us all the best views in the city, and with some of them it feels like the light is being filtered through the smog, but they're beautiful.

CM: You wouldn't think of Los Angeles as a good place for impressionism, but there's a bit of an impressionist in Korty, and he gets a lot out of the city. He's more direct than Allen or Callister in that way. It's less fantasy and more observation, but it's fantastic nonetheless.

JG: So what about someone like Eric Niebuhr, who seems very connected to landscape but who doesn't really seem to be about landscape?

CM: I think if we took a broader look at the painters you've selected, we could see many of them as not necessarily in landscape, but in a more slippery category of scapes. I see this again as being somewhat generational. These are artists who have come of age at a time when space
has been envisioned in so many ways in the broader culture that it just makes sense that artists are able to envision a kind of scape that isn't connected to some sense of familiar environs or earth under your feet. I think of Eric's paintings as dealing in a kind of mind scape or even spiritual scape in a broad sense. I think they propose the possibility of envisioning an otherworldly realm without it being tied to a particular dogma or reference, and I think also that they tend to forgo the idea of a fantastic version of a world we know in favor of a world that arises from the fantastic itself.

JG: They also start to break down space in a way that violates familiarity. With some of them you literally lose perspective—you don't know from what point of view you're experiencing something. Adam Ross also gets into that. He's really refining and defining systems and combinations of elements that suggest place and intention and structure and civilization, and we can feel grounded in his work to the extent that we feel grounded in what is becoming
a kind of familiarity with such proposed locations or scapes, but they're far removed from anything we're familiar with in any actual sense.

CM: And in his recent paintings, he's removed the basic sense of landscape that used to help ground a lot of his images. It used to be that you might think of his images as representing a landscape on another planet or in a future world, but now that suggestion is gone.

JG: But the suggestion of space is still there, like with Phil Argent's work.

CM: Absolutely. With both Ross and Argent, the spatial qualities are emphasized, and the elements within the space are rendered in a kind of realist fashion, but the type of space and its contents are so far removed from anything that defines the world we inhabit, or even imagine inhabiting. The paintings could be pure abstractions if it wasn't for the fact that they represent space—just space we don't know—and they also deal with surface and form like a true formalist abstract painter would, except they're dealing with surface and form by representing them illusionistically rather than by physically manifesting them.

JG: I think also that they propose a very aestheticized, designed, slick world. Kim Fisher does something similar, but instead of proposing a space or scape that is specific in aesthetic sensibility but unclear in what we might call hard facts, Fisher's paintings seem less like visions of such a world and more like manifested products of that other world. They're of a similar kind of place, but rather than picturing it, they suggest they came out of it.

CM: Sean Duffy, also has made a lot of work that crossed between painting and product and design, but that always has kept closer to the here and now, or maybe even the recent past. It also doesn't seem to be about looking at painting as commodity, but rather about enjoying the aesthetic and functional crossover. So he makes a record player that is also sculptural object that is finished in a way that gets you caught up in the surface as minimalist sculpture did, so it pushes on the edge of painting. Or he uses the record player to make paintings, so the painting is literally a recording.

JG: Edward Johnson has a similar sensibility, and so really does Stephen Heer. They both make work that speaks so much of the technology of which it is born or of which its sensibilities are born. Johnson's paintings are very much in the tradition of scene painting, but they're really about the monitor, about the TV, and it seems reasonable to have them connected to an object that is so much a part of our lives. Heer's works couldn't seem to be more different, but I think they're related. Both of them are realist painters. One is making realist representations of the monitor. The other is making realist representations of something printed out from a computer.

CM: Wendell Gladstone also is mixing up definitions of art and design and image and sculpture and product, and he really jumps around in time. Here he's making things that seem like movie or stage props, or like oversized action figures, or like really misguided decorator objects, and then he makes paintings that are more like odd wall hangings, and they seem very contemporary in their design sensibility, but they also suggest ancient myths, except they're myths he's making up as he goes along.

JG: They're curious because you see the stories and they seem familiar but nobody knows the stories except Gladstone. It's just that he taps into all the ways people have tried to tell stories or embody characters, whether it’s sculpture or action figures or painting or embroidery or video game graphics.

CM: Gajin Fujita is another one who loves the crossover.

JG: Fujita is the real deal. Boyle Heights. I mean, this guy really paints LA. He paints all the weird stuff that comes together here.

CM: Or all the stuff that starts out ordinary but winds up weird when it crashes into something else.

JG: Exactly. I think the paintings are misunderstood as being strictly about a tagging or graffiti aesthetic. That's just part of Gajin's experience and part of his process. But he also is bringing in traditional Japanese culture, contemporary Japanese pop culture, European and American culture, both traditional and pop, Catholic imagery...

CM: One thing I think his work really hits on that is very Los Angeles is the way that nothing lasts very long here without being hybridized and without being filtered through a pop-cultural form, as well as a variety of other forms: street imagery, "fine" art, high design, etc.

JG: And Los Angeles itself becomes the great filter.

CM: I think Steven Criqui does a similar thing in making work that clearly is influenced by the odd commingling of images and forms that occur in Los Angeles, and then bringing in an overlay of attitude that is both very optimistic and very cynical at times. Of course that double edge is something that has been widely discussed regarding Los Angeles art, but I think you rarely see an artist so fully indulging in both sides of the duality.

JG: It's always something sinister.

CM: "Sunny sinister." I like that.

JG: I think as Fujita paints his LA, Criqui paints his, and it makes sense that he brings a lot of photography and digital imaging into the work, because it's really about catching moments, like if you could cruise around Los Angeles and instantly paint scenes as you were driving. And then he's altering as he goes for the sake of making the images more balanced, fixing them up aesthetically, but also for the sake of offering real commentary about the city. I think Kelly McLane has something in common with Criqui. The work is much slower and much more subtle, and it only on occasion suggests LA in imagery, but it shares the attitude.

CM: Sunny sinister! (laughs)

JG: (laughs) Did I even say "sunny sinister"? I thought I said "something sinister."

CM: Oh. Oops. Well, I like "sunny sinister." It's very apropos. I'm gonna use it.

JG: I think it is apropos. You look at her work from a distance and it's very open feeling, very loose, free and easy, very toned down, and then, as you get closer it gets much more detailed and precise; an obsessive aspect kicks in, and the more you look, the more you realize that this
nice- seeming picture has something weird or sad or dark in it.

CM: I think also that McLane's work exemplifies a sort of sliding scale between more abstract information and more literal information that a lot of the artists you have chosen are getting into, and it's funny because, in a way, the show represents this sliding scale as you move from artists who are more on the abstract end of things but are flirting with representation to someone like McLane, who is making what on close inspection are highly representational images that also can really be understood as abstractions.

JG: Aaron Romine then really takes us out the other end with paintings that are just undeniably beautiful and unflinchingly representational and realist, but they also are about really enjoying the paint. They hide the paint and the mark in places, but not always.

CM: Well I think they ask us to forget the paint for a moment and really see the image in clarity, and at first glance you're tempted to put them in a category of something like hand-painted photography. But then they also invite you to drop out of that and consider how they're made, and to enjoy the economy of how shortcuts and flourishes add up to an image.

JG: Which is an old line to tread in painting, but I think he's making it very new in the imagery and content. It's very informed by photography and by how we understand the figure and figure painting in a world where our idea of imaging the figure is really informed by film and photography, from porn to fashion photography and advertising.

CM: You know that's everyone.

JG: It is?

CM: I've been checking them off as we go. Might as well be honest about the fact that this isn't just a random conversation in which we happened to discuss only the artists in the show.

JG: But we didn't really start with an idea of where the conversation would go. We just started with a list of artists I'd put together for a show and a pile of slides on a table, and between my familiarity with the work and your familiarity with it, the conversation flowed down this path.

CM: And I think it's only honest and worth noting that on a different day or with one more cup of coffee, this conversation might have flowed differently. There are a lot of different ways you can link these artists or separate them, and if we go back to how you pulled them together originally, which was really according to a fairly random logic of interest and desire, I think
what we see is that this conversation, and any conversation you could have about this selection of artists, is really going to be dictated by the work. I think all of this work is work that really sends out feelers into the world, as if it's looking for connections, really coaxing at us to make
them, and these are the ones you and I made today.

JG: Agreed.

August, 2002

James Gobel is an artist and professor of painting and drawing at California State University, San Bernardino.

Christopher Miles is an artist, writer and curator based in Los Angeles. He is a lecturer at California State University, Long Beach and currently is a visiting instructor in the art MFA programs at the Claremont Graduate University and UCLA.

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James Gobel
is an artist
and professor of painting
and drawing
at California State University,
San Bernardino

Christopher Miles
is an artist,
writer and curator
based in Los Angeles.
He is a lecturer
at California State Universit,
Long Beach
and currently is a visiting instructor
in the art MFA programs
at the Claremont Graduate University
and UCLA