It is my great privilege to bring you an interview with the legendary painter Phil Hale, whose dynamic, enigmatic body of work has influenced so many of today's emerging artists, including Ashley Wood, Jeremy Geddes and João Ruas. Though he spends most of his time in his studio exploring new directions and cares little for self-promotion, he was kind enough to do an in-depth interview with me in the lead-up to the "Wild at Heart" benefit exhibition. We are thrilled to feature his painting "Study for Path Vacates" in the show, which continues through June 9th. "Study for Path Vacates" Erratic Phenomena: Soon after you were born in Boston in 1963, your parents whisked you away to Kenya, where you lived until you were 7. Tell me about what brought your family to Kenya, and what you remember about your time there. Phil Hale: My family moved to Nairobi when I was four or so — my father was involved in an overhaul of the educational system there. The most significant effect was probably... that I was a bit of an outsider in Africa — that's pretty obvious. And your character is developed in an isolation of sorts, not so socially determined. But it also meant I was an outsider again when I returned to the States. Our town and school in Massachusetts were fantastically homogenous. Any difference at all marked you out. The African experience was also pretty wonderful, though you don't have much perspective at that age. My mother was an artist and kept a journal with drawings of elephants, warthogs, baboons, all the wildlife — and my parents made a point of exploring while we were there. I copied my mother's drawings, and in some ways was very competitive with her — or at least wanted recognition and approval there. And clearly my parents were unusual in that they were willing to make what was a fairly extreme and unconventional choice — they faced real difficulties there. Some part of their attitude was a family trait. EP: What sort of books did you grow up on? Do you recall any illustrations that made an impact on you at impressionable age? Phil: I was a pretty compulsive reader as a child. I'm sorry to say I read a lot of Enid Blyton in Africa— I can still remember them, so they must have had a fairly powerful effect on me. But I also read some of my mother's books — I am sure she encouraged me. Carson McCullers in particular — The Ballad of the Sad Cafe. Probably my first uncomfortable sense of how complicated it must be to be an adult. So: Enid Blyton and Carson McCullers. EP: You were born into a celebrated family of creative people, including the painters Ellen Day Hale, Lilian Westcott Hale, Philip Leslie Hale and Robert Beverly Hale. Your family tree stretches back to such hallowed antecedents as Harriet Beecher Stowe, the abolitionist author of Uncle Tom's Cabin, and Revolutionary War hero Nathan Hale, whose famous last words before being hanged by the British for espionage were, "I only regret that I have but one life to give for my country." Even your grandmother and mother were painters, so becoming an artist yourself must have seemed quite a natural thing to do. Was there a certain subliminal pressure exerted by such a raft of accomplished blueblooded ancestors, sort of a familial expectation that you would grow up to do something creative and interesting? Phil: That's harder to answer, because my main influence was my mother, who was not part of that lineage. But a very driven and forceful woman in any case. To choose to be an artist was known territory. I didn't have to fight to make my way, the path was already there, and it was part of our everyday life (which is to say museums, libraries, music, etc.). EP: Your mother and grandmother were both painters, though your grandmother preferred your brother's impressionistic historical paintings to your own comic-inspired renderings of monsters and the like. Tell me a bit about the two of them. Phil: My grandmother preferred my brother, a year older, and very much in the eldest-child vein. A sort of precociously responsible proto-adult. I was much more self-involved, not so socially engaged, less obedient and respectful — less capable of being obedient and respectful. And we were a year apart, so I could almost compete. He was a very good and sensitive draftsman. My own drawings could probably be neatly divided into my own work (skulls, hairy pot-bellied monsters, worms) and attempts to do my brother's drawings better than he could (flowers, seascapes, spiders). And because my mother was an artist, the materials and environment was very conducive — invisibly conducive. I painted with my grandmother, as well. But not a lot of praise there. EP: Your first love was Frank Frazetta, whose work you encountered at the age of 14, when you came across The Fantastic Art of Frank Frazetta. Frazetta's work was revolutionary. I remember staring at his cover for Edgar Rice Burroughs' A Fighting Man of Mars, fascinated by the lush anatomy and sensuous lighting, but also by the way he represented women as simultaneously sexy, dignified and heroic, which seemed like something of a revelation at the time. Tell me a bit about the impact Frazetta's work made on you and how it influenced the development of your vision. Phil: I was in a mall, just becoming a little independent, and saw his first Fantastic Art book at a bookshop. I just couldn't believe it — too much to take in. A comic was comprehensibly simplified, but you could study the Frazettas for hours trying to internalise them. In retrospect what I really loved was the insane (insane!) vitality, and how true it felt to the Frazetta. It was how he expressed it as well, of course. But to a fourteen-year-old, that crazy vitality was just unbelievable. I still think Frazetta is stunning — you may not like it, but it's a pure message delivered in astonishingly effective and informed form. I'm still thrilled by it. EP: In the early '80s, at the tender age of 16, you were apprenticed to the master illustrator Rick Berry, an arrangement which seems quite unusual in this day and age. For such an unformed artist, Berry's influence must have been overwhelming. How did that come about? What do you think he saw in you? Phil: It was pretty overwhelming — I've said this before, so it's in danger of becoming its own cliche, but I left the country to get away from his influence. It was impossible to know my own mind. My work still — often — has a conflict between my natural impulses and what I took from that. He is a very generous guy, and a great believer in collaboration and education. I think he saw some potential in me, but also that he could offer practical help and guidance. It was never set out as a long-term plan, though. It was developed through pleasure in each other's company. EP: When you were 18, your apprenticeship to Berry ended, and the two of you began sharing a studio with a couple of other artists, while you continued to learn by association. For three years, you worked side-by-side with Berry, and then you decided that you needed to isolate yourself from him in order to extricate yourself from the dominating influence he exerted on you. Was there a catalyst that led you to that decision, something that made you realize you were unlikely to evolve further under his shadow? Phil: There was no single event — and at that age (and I was pretty naive in many ways), you're not always aware of what choices you're making or why. But I had grown up, and our old relationship was no longer such a good fit. And I could have evolved side-by-side with him as well — that was not impossible. After I moved to England, my art reverted a little to some of the themes and even approaches that I had been set on before he and I met, which is to say more work from photographs and a struggle to find a way to make the painting and the photography work together. This was never a significant part of Rick's practice. I was less comfortable generating images internally — I wanted some part of the actual world to shape the work against. It took me a long, long time to find out how that might work. EP: In 1985, when you were just 22, you wrote and illustrated a story about Johnny Badhair for the Marvel series Galactus, which played out its final moments in the pages of the magazine Epic. Your interpretation of that character made such an impact that he has haunted your career for decades. You've also been known to revisit him time and again, fascinated by the study in immediacy, extreme anatomy and destruction that the character provides. How did you come to write and illustrate that story? How much liberty did you have to make the character your own? Why do you think you're drawn back to him again and again, despite your desire to break free of your illustration roots? Phil: The character was really a love letter to Frazetta, initially at least. But I learned a lot through developing the series — it provided some unexpected routes. I was allowed to concentrate on the elements that interested me, and not worry about reinventing it every time — that was an incredible breakthrough for me. I had had a very limited (and unexamined) idea of what was justifiable. And to slowly realise that you could follow what interested you and not get sucked into the obligational work — it was an escape route. From things that didn't interest me. I think the central theme — which is really about frustration and protest — and perhaps the beautiful struggle, even though you know the effort is hopeless — is a perfectly valid subject for fine art. But it's not acceptable to construct the images like a craftsman. That's tedious and predictable (and I've tried it). EP: In 1987, you completed 10 strikingly original illustrations for Stephen King's long-awaited Dark Tower sequel, The Drawing of the Three, which paid so well that it allowed you to essentially stop working for five years. Tell me a bit about how that opportunity came about, and what inspirations you brought to creating those memorable images. How has your relationship with Stephen King influenced the direction of your career? Phil: The King job was a bit of luck. I was put forward for an illustration for a King book a few years earlier (another artist had dropped out), and King liked my piece. He offered me the entire book the next time around, with a ridiculously generous arrangement. I wasn't happy with what I produced, though. I brought more colour into the work — very exciting at the time — but couldn't pull it together; I didn't have the experience or skill to make it all work. It was clunky and unconvincing. Ten years later, in 1997, they were going to release a mass-market version with the original illustrations. That was such a terrifying suggestion that I did them all again at no charge. But the job paid so handsomely that I didn't need to work, and it gave me a chance to do work independent of anything outside the studio. I had a lot of fun. I recorded a lot of music and designed and built motorcycles, experimented with photography and much looser painting. When I eventually had to come out again I was un-hireable. The largest single benefit that came from the King association — and I hope he sees this as a plus — is that the financial freedom allowed me to move away from the kind of reflexive illustrational practice I had built. A pretty outrageous luxury that I didn't quite understand at the time. EP: Rick Berry taught you that painting the figure from imagination and memory is paramount, and that painting from photo references is tantamount to cheating. When you moved to London to break free of his influence, that was one of the dictates you were rebelling against, feeling that your paintings lacked some specificity of character when you relied solely on memory to create them. Exploring photography as part of your process, you realized that in working from photographs of the body in action, you were discovering new expressions of anatomical tension and instability that lie outside those generally visualized in paintings. Did you know what you were looking for when you set out, or was photography a process of discovery for you? Phil: It wasn't just bodies. I wanted the paintings to have a feeling of connection to something outside of the frame of the image, just as a documentary photograph does. Where the context is a much more complete world that you can never really access, but believe is there. I was also very keen to have what I would consider actual information in the pieces and how I thought about them, and not just something that I had processed and reformulated. The use of photography is such a significant part of how I think about working — it's tough to sum it up. I didn't want to be making things up, I wanted to be finding out about something real and developing an understanding of it in a very pure cause-and-effect model. Also — important to say that Rick didn't see it as cheating, but his practice was based around generating images internally. I wasn't sure I had the same ability — and I didn't, in fact. EP: In recent years, you've been exploring photocollage, both as an end in itself, with your strange amalgamations of black metal devices, and as visual reference for your paintings. To a certain degree, you've chosen to preserve the clumsy construction of the photo-collage in the paintings — stopped trying to hide the seams, allowing the piece to be more interesting, awkward and uneasy. While many artists use photocollage as reference, most of them attempt to match lighting and integrate the disparate elements into a coherent reality. Tell me a bit more about why you find this deliberate artificiality and pursuit of an unheimlich quality so compelling. Phil: I began doing photo-collage in the early '90s, in part because Photoshop had arrived, and with it you had this unbelievably powerful tool to manipulate imagery. But one of the first things it showed was that that sort of control was not what gave images their power. It seemed much more exciting to make the artificialness of the construction explicit, but to still have the image work — often even more effectively than a groomed treatment. It meant the viewer had to make the connections work, and because they were involved, they personalised the piece, or at least were directly involved in resolving it. I didn't set out to pursue this, but it showed up pretty quickly. I was really thrilled by it. It tells you something about not only how vision works, but about how imagination and narrative works. EP: Your career has been characterized by change more than most, as you switch gears every few years to stave off stagnation and complacency. For a time, you became known in Great Britain as a portrait painter, contributing several pieces to the National Portrait Gallery. That culminated in 2008 with your portrait of then-Prime Minister Tony Blair, in which you broke from tradition to paint Blair at rest, collar unbuttoned, melancholy and weary, looking away from the viewer, perhaps toward the failures that weighed on his mind. What do you look for in a subject? Are there certain tensions you try to engage in them, even within the typically sedentary compositions that characterize classic portraiture? Phil: The portraiture was something I had done since I was a teenager, but in part because it had been part of my family's history, I had never pursued it seriously. And it is so tough and demanding that it requires pretty complete attention for a long time before you even start to understand what the problems are. Then you have to find your own way to test them. Unless you are going to be a mannerist, it is pretty clear what the standards and expectations are. Very unforgiving, and you find out a lot about your weaknesses very quickly. It was extremely demoralising. I was lucky in that I became part of a circle of portrait painters in London, all exceptional painters (including James Lloyd, Brendan Kelley, Stuart Pearson Wright and others — Justin Mortimer was another, but we had a separate friendship). My work looked weak and a bit fraudulent next to theirs. I might have expected them to be privacious or careful. But they were (and are) a wonderful generous group of people, mutually supportive to an almost absurd degree. I spent ten years doing portraiture. But by the end, I knew I wasn't really cut out for it. It didn't quite line up with my actual abilities or inclinations. Though I still do them, still enjoy them. One of the surprises was that I never had to have any emotional or psychological insight into the person. They presented themselves and I tried to carry that over faithfully and without interfering. That is why the portrait of Blair turned out as it did. It is in fact an extremely accurate likeness of him as he appeared; there was no political or personal agenda at all. I prioritised that over making the composition racy, or unstable, or mechanically leading. EP: It's my understanding that you admire the work of John Singer Sargent, and I believe I can feel his influence on your work in a certain tension he engages in his portrait subjects. What do you find most intriguing about Sargent's viewpoint? Phil: He's just such an astonishing painter. The equivalent of the guy who runs the three minute mile — for pure paint handling, he's utterly in a different league. I'm not saying his art is the most profound. But technically, there is so much to learn. Again, demoralising and difficult. EP: In recent years, wishing to break out of portraiture, you began painting a series of abstracted skulls and faceless heads shrouded in darkness, repeating them ad infinitum with subtle changes. You've spoken of daily painting as an exercise to force yourself to get better by repetition of a specific practice. This seems to be an almost meditative endeavor, in the sense that Buddhist mantras can be drawn or written as well as spoken. Do you see yourself as seeking some kind of transformation or enlightenment through this practice of evolving repetition? Phil: It certainly has meditational qualities — and, related to this, when I'm working on a project, I often listen to a single CD every day until it wraps — one of the great pleasures of my working life. My head drops into gear with a clunk when the first song starts, fantastic. But the repetition has a very practical aspect. I'm often microscoping on a particular aspect. It helps to hold all of the variables steady except for one. It makes it absolutely clear what is happening. That is one of the crudest engineering-style tools available, but enormously helpful. And it is also... that I am always trying for (at least) two contradictory goals — to produce something with the minimum of intrusion and effort (which compromises accuracy), and the desire to make it as faithful as possible (and this is clear because I often have a reference). So the repetition allows me to leave something, to avoid polishing the life (and also the veracity) out of it. But to still have another shot at extracting more. I'm trying to learn about what is there (independently of me), and about how the image interacts with my vision (in my case, an ability to pull structure out of form). EP: You've entitled an ongoing series of your work "Mockingbirds." In nature, mockingbirds will incessantly repeat the same incidental sequence of sounds over and over again until something new catches their fancy — car alarms, meowing cats, croaking frogs, shrilling insects. Similarly, you have focused your attention on repeating a few familiar images over and over again, with subtle variations — the death's head shrouded in darkness, the shirtless old man wielding yard tools, Johnny Badhair endlessly plummeting through an electric blue sky. What does this "mockingbirds" concept signify to you? Is there a certain satisfaction you derive from plumbing an image to its utmost? Why do you think you find yourself so obsessed with those particular images? Phil: Again, you have already answered most of this. Often I'm attracted to an image without having any sort of conscious or intellectual framework. I hope it is not some dumb adolescent impulse (though that is there as well), but rather a synthesis of experience and a sense of potential. I don't have a specific expectation beyond wanting something unexpected to alter and redefine the piece. It's possible to be pretty clear about what is happening in the pieces, and why they would appeal. But that makes me uncomfortable, because it would sum them up, when I would hope that they can't be contained in that way. Some of them can be seen to work on an almost idiotically straightforward metaphorical level, but I don't think that is the true content. I should also say that I wanted those pieces to be, piece by piece, unstable. They only really worked in any comprehensive way as a show. The individual paintings are too unstable. Obviously the painter and the viewer have very different needs from the work. But after the fact, it's the viewer who is keeping it alive — that's a lot to ask. When I was involved in motorcycle racing, I heard it said that the ideal race bike is the one that wins and then falls to pieces on the other side of the line — it was designed to exactly fulfill its function. Anything else would have compromised the central requirement. You have to be willing to produce weak and stupid and ineffective paintings for a while. EP: Another recurring element in your recent work is the sometimes almost violent introduction of abstraction into an image, where a realistic figure might be abruptly truncated by a surface or partly obliterated, as if their existence in this reality is conditional and might sputter out altogether in a moment. You've said you try to cultivate a willingness to operate almost on the edge of collapse. Are these abstracted elements intended to activate the image in some way, lend it a sense of potential that mere description might lack? Would you say painting is more interesting for you when there's some fear or risk involved? Phil: That's absolutely right — to the point that anything that I say is really unnecessary. Activating the image, introducing something that jolts it or forces a confrontation or problem, or a barrier that the viewer has to overcome. Or even a contrast to some of the more reassuring elements. I am talking in ideals, what you might hope to allow. If nothing is at risk, it is harder to believe the piece is necessary. Why should it be necessary, anyway — that is a bit of a ridiculous term, and maybe bit of puffery. But you have to try just to get things moving and active. EP: I sense something like a self-loathing in this constant shape-shifting, a tendency to distrust your own instincts as puerile or craven, or perhaps a conviction that your true work still lies ahead of you, hidden by the clutter of preconceptions and habits you are struggling to break through. Would you say there's any truth to that? Phil: A great question... Well, it's necessary to act against yourself, or nothing can happen. Or at least to try to place myself outside of the control of my own self-delusion. In any case, it's probably accurate, but partial. The self-loathing (that is probably too strong) is more that I am the only one who really knows when my behaviour is cowardly — choices made out of some kind of failure or weakness. That's not unforgivable, obviously. The shape-shifting is more useful to talk about in specifics — the black heads were done at the same time as pieces in a more familiar vein. They were not a closet I locked myself in for the winter. But they allowed me to do pieces where the physical response of the paint was more important than shepherding it into some appointed position. They were a kind of practice and way of habitualising a particular expectation and response. The portraits in particular are vulnerable to over-determining, and it not only kills the piece, it reinforces a counter-productive approach — you're structuring your reflexes. A lot of effort trying to drop bad habits. Phil Hale's painting "Study for Path Vacates" will be on view at Thinkspace in Culver City through June 9th.

Once upon a time, about a decade ago, I came across a picture of Joe Sorren's "La Luna," and had a bit of an epiphany. It was the first painting emerging from the lowbrow movement that plucked at strings somewhere deep within me — the luminosity, spookiness, aching-yearning and deep, thrumming palette left me breathless. I've looked at that picture thousands of times since, and never tire of it. Since then, Joe has evolved his aesthetic fearlessly, exploring his passion for color and texture, and performing intuitive alchemy with his improvisational compositions. So I'm thrilled to report that in anticipation of his retrospective exhibit, "Interruption," which opens at Grand Central Art Center in Santa Ana on November 6th, Joe was kind enough to do a little interview with me. "Interruption" "Interruption" (detail) "Interruption" (detail) Erratic Phenomena: You were born in Chicago in 1970, but grew up in the drier climes of Phoenix and Flagstaff. Tell me a bit about the atmosphere of your childhood. Were you a dreamer or an adventurer? Were there moments of wonder and beauty that you look back upon now as the genesis of your vision? Joe Sorren: Well, I grew up in the deserts outside of Phoenix, and spent most days either swimming, playing in ditches or skateboarding. As far as inspiration, from the 220 crickets we caught in one evening, to the hobbit-holes that still dent the landscape, Leigh, Jason, Vinnie —the whole slew of us — grew up in a situation that invited imagination, I think. "Given the Difference Between 1 & 2" "Given the Difference Between 1 & 2" (detail) "Given the Difference Between 1 & 2" (detail) EP: As a child, you drew incessantly. How did drawing make you feel when you were a kid? JS: HA! I did draw on everything growing up, I couldn't help it. But it wasn't that I enjoyed drawing certain things — I remember thinking how strange it was that certain kids kept drawing cars, or monkeys, or whatever. I just enjoyed drawing what needed to be drawn for the drawing. "Astraea" (2007) EP: Were there books you encountered as a child that may have influenced the direction you took in life, and in your work? JS: I loved the Frances series growing up, and Babar, and well, any sort of book that featured an animal, I suppose. Then eventually MAD came in and it was all over. "The Mushroom Hunter" EP: Unlike most of your contemporaries, when you begin a new painting, you try to keep yourself completely open to where the painting wants to go. You've often quoted your mother-in-law's saying, "If you lead with your hands, the mind will follow." There are no preliminary sketches, just an intuitive exploration of color, shape, composition and light that becomes more refined as the painting progresses, but maintains its fluidity throughout. When you think a painting is done, you give it some time to breathe, and revisit it only after some time has passed, to make sure it still sings. This approach, which I might liken to the way a composer would build a symphony, seems to foster a greater tendency toward evolution and risk-taking than the more staid approach of most representational painters. It also seems to relate a bit to the pattern-finding you've engaged in since childhood, when you first started inventing compositions out of random forms in stucco and wallpaper. What do you see as the advantages of letting a painting find itself? JS: In college, the great Marshall Arisman visited my university (Northern Arizona University), and in his lecture he talked about the value, the importance, of first thought — or rather, the first incarnation of a valued thought — and I believed him. Painting is kind of like playing tag with ideas, through landscapes of idiocy. "The Secret Collapse of Miss Lorraine" "The Secret Collapse of Miss Lorraine" (detail) EP: When you are finished with a painting, is it sometimes still shrouded in mystery, or have you by that time formed a strong sense of what the piece is about, even if it's not one you'd care to share with anyone else? JS: I feel like I have learned, at least, what the questions are by the time I have finished a painting. "In Bloom" "In Bloom" (detail) "In Bloom" (detail) EP: Until 2003, you worked exclusively in acrylics. Then you began to pick up oils, with which you have discovered a heightened sense of the space between the viewer and the subject, and the light traveling through that space. Tell me a bit about the qualities that you try to depict inhabiting that space, and what emotional and aesthetic value they hold for you. JS: It's funny, I feel like there is a "wrong" answer to this question for some reason, but I suppose what that question is getting at is,"What is in that space?," and I believe it is "God" that is in those spaces. Not God as a person, but God in a being-throughout-space-governing-but-not-really-aware-or-even-in-control-of-anything-more-like-seeing-the-beauty-of-the-universe-and-what-THAT-means, etc., sort of way. "Anthologia" (2001) EP: Of late, you have begun to integrate that evocative delicacy of light and atmosphere with elements rendered in a gorgeous, meaty impasto, a feat that few artists have the courage to attempt. JS: I think Monet was great for his bravery. I think Rembrandt and Michelangelo were too, because they displayed a fearlessness in art worth witnessing. From Degas' satin to Twombly's tremors, the vital moment is why paintings matter, no matter how they are treated, don't you think? (Joe then sighs and thinks to himself, "Ahh... Turner.") "The Luthier" (2007) EP: Music and art have gone hand in hand throughout your life. For over two decades now, you've been close friends with fellow painter/musician Lyle Motley, with whom you have performed in the bands Creepy Lyle and The Lyle and Sparkleface Band. How has your ongoing engagement with making music influenced your evolution as a painter? JS: The feeling of creation is similar, but one leaves a stain. "Corrina" (2006) EP: In 2002, you began experimenting with sculpture, and in anticipation of your next show, you have recently been working in collaboration with Jud Bergeron on a series of eight new sculptures. Tell me a bit about your relationship with Jud — an inventive sculptor in his own right. JS: Working with Jud is like working with a rhino. The guy is non-stop go with ideas falling out all around him. I am still waiting for a conversation that doesn't end with a laugh and a kind word. "Headlong" (with Jud Bergeron) EP: For the past three years, you have chosen not to exhibit, outside of the occasional group show. Why did you take such a long hiatus from exhibiting? JS: It's funny, it's a natural pattern. I showed in 1999, 2001, 2004, 2007, 2010, so I think it's in line with how it goes. For the future, Eric White and I are planning a show at the Dorothy Circus Gallery in the fall of 2011. "Exile" "Exile" (detail) "Exile" (detail) EP: What painter from the past moves you most powerfully, and what aspects of their work do you find most profound? JS: I like the quiet tension found in the work of the famous Dutch painters. "Secrets Know No Morning" EP: If you could hang just one famous artwork from history on the wall of your studio, what would it be? JS: Michaelanglo's "Pietà," but not on the wall. "Tryst" "Tryst" (detail) "Tryst" (detail) Don't miss Joe Sorren's retrospective exhibit "Interruption" at Grand Central Art Center in Santa Ana, which opens on November 6th. It will coincide with the release of his new book, Joe Sorren: Paintings 2004-2010. You can enjoy his earlier work in his books In Celebration of Balance and Opposable Thumbs and When She Was Camera. "La Luna" (1998)

0 Artworks by Andy Butler, Saatchi Art Artist

If Thomas Pynchon writes systems novels, Steve DiBenedetto makes systems paintings—paranoid, erratic, vaguely interconnected. His latest exhibition, “Mile High Psychiatry,” up through Saturday at Derek Eller Gallery, has an air of zany premonition to it that put me in mind of Pynchon’s Tyrone Slothrop, who in Gravity’s Rainbow predicts rocket attacks with his erections: a […]

I must once again direct all of my faithful readers to the fantastic blog Ektopia, which just posted a really embarrassingly complimentary review of my introduction for Mark Ryden's recent book The Gay '90s. Jay writes about something interesting almost every day, so you should make Ektopia a regular visit. Since I was mortified to discover, upon close perusal of the introduction in question, that Rizzoli must have assigned one of its less promising interns as copyeditor, I thought I would post the entire original essay here for anyone who'd prefer to read it in its original state, before the excision of overly subtle phraseology and the insertion of puerile grammatical errors. Enjoy! "Incarnation" "Mark Ryden and the Transfiguration of Kitsch" by Amanda Erlanson We humans are time travelers. While our bodies move forward in time at a constant rate, our minds are unfettered, and can move back and forth through time at will. In our idle moments, we cannot resist the bittersweet allure of nostalgia, and love to daydream over souvenirs of times gone by — cherished trinkets that allow us to reanimate an experience long past or evoke alternate versions of reality. As Marcel Proust famously mused, “When nothing else subsists from the past, after the people are dead, after the things are broken and scattered… the smell and taste of things remain poised a long time, like souls… bearing resiliently, on tiny and almost impalpable drops of their essence, the immense edifice of memory.” Through communion with those objects that resonate for each of us individually, we are able to conjure a delicious sense of longing for some wondrous time when there was still magic in the world, when nature abounded with mysterious things that seemed invested with a kind of spiritual aura. Doubtless primitive men also wondered upon their sacred amulets and fetishes, much as pilgrims in the Middle Ages journeyed far to gaze on mysterious relics associated with a miracle or infused with the holy effluence of a saint. During the Renaissance, collecting a multifarious display of eclectic objects and natural anomalies was de rigueur for any well-heeled aesthete. Their “cabinets of curiosities” or wunderkammeren were the precursors of the natural history museums we visit today in order to gaze upon the wonders of creation. As the rapid changes of the Industrial Revolution swept aside the natural world, an existential emptiness sprang up in the hearts of men. Having lost touch with the mysteries of the natural world and the predictable rhythms of tradition, they sought to fill that vacuum with a utopian fantasy of the pastoral idylls of yore. With the simultaneous advent of mass reproduction, the glorification of memory was soon popularized and commodified, leading to the frenzied production of nostalgic mementoes calculated to pluck the heartstrings of every segment of society. As those objects traveled through time and their original purpose became obsolete, their essence shifted to symbolize something subtly different for each succeeding generation. The arbiters of the “highbrow” art world disdain nostalgia and its physical manifestation, “kitsch,” as the pathetic refuge of the uncultured masses, and uphold appreciation of the abstract and conceptual as the distinction of the refined mind. Yet the universal archetypes that connect us all are not nourished within the haughty academies of artistic formalism. They grow within each of us, fed by the dark underground river of our thoughts, feelings and dreams. When we come across a stuffed bunny, a tin robot, or a storybook that sets off a haunting resonance within us, something deep in our psyche has recognized a conduit between the waking world and the fertile landscape of the unconscious. Despite its tawdry reputation, kitsch is a perennial focus of contemporary art, but artists like John Currin, Lisa Yuskavage and Paul McCarthy approach their subject from the supercilious viewpoint of camp, laughing at its “bad taste” while simultaneously reveling in it. Whereas an artist like Jeff Koons takes an ironic distance from kitsch, transforming a valueless object like a gaudy porcelain figure of Michael Jackson into something valuable — a work of art — by mockingly exaggerating its cheapness, Mark Ryden cherishes his ostensibly vulgar subjects, elevating them to the status of sacred talismans through the time-honored craftsmanship passed down to him from master painters like Ingres, David and Bouguereau. In doing so, he bestows on them new layers of meaning and ambiguity, reawakening them as symbols that can evolve and inspire. For Mark Ryden, nostalgia is more than a panacea, a gentle salve that soothes the raw edges of modern existence — it is the very lifeblood of art. When he sits down to paint, he is surrounded by a jumble of wonderful old toys, books and peculiar artifacts that whisper to him in their myriad voices, sparking distant memories and forging strange connections. But even a lover of nostalgic artifacts has his limits. Recently, Ryden has been pushing himself to embrace an arena of kitsch so egregious that it makes him feel strangely uncomfortable, and challenges his own aesthetic boundaries — the era quaintly known as “The Gay ‘90s.” He explained, “I would look at modernist attitudes that detest the taboo subject matter of nostalgia, imagination, and beauty, and think about how incredibly closed-minded this attitude is. But I came to realize I have my own thresholds. I gravitated towards the Gay ‘90s because it is the extreme of ‘distasteful kitsch.’ I wanted to play with it. Why not try to pull the lowest of the low into the highest of the high? It is interesting how those exclusionary modernist attitudes are as ‘olde tyme’ now as the 1890s were when modernist thinking was born.” Today, the 1890s have passed from living memory, and all that remains is a saccharine fantasy. Ironically, the period never actually existed as we now conceive it — it is a frothy confection concocted in hindsight almost two decades later. Our collective imagination of that time is shaped by the kitsch left behind by a thirty-year wave of nostalgia that arose in the early twentieth century. Gay ‘90s mania came to a head with the rise of a new consumer culture in the Roaring ‘20s, an era bracketed by two depressions and two world wars. Conservatives reacted to the turbulent times by pouring out waves of nostalgia about the golden age of their youth. For them, the 1890s were the equivalent of the 1950s for us today — an era of prosperity and idyllic small-town life, the last moments of a simpler time before the advent of automobiles and recorded music. Looking backward, they recalled the “good old days” of straw hats and striped suits, marching bands and barbershop quartets, Gibson Girls and bicycles built for two. Yet in the real 1890s, most Americans either worked on farms or in urban factories, and this small-town utopia existed only in summer enclaves where well-to-do people from the city went to escape the soot and heat. This extraordinary nostalgia for the Gay ‘90s was one of our longest episodes of cultural self-hypnosis, and lasted well into the 1940s. By the 1960s, when Ryden was a child, the lingering artifacts generated by this fad had begun to seem trite and old-fashioned. Even as a boy, he loved to spend his days drawing or painting alone at his desk, dreaming of Egyptian mythology and metaphysical numbers. But while his creativity was being nourished by the countercultural album art, psychedelic posters and underground comics his older siblings shared with him, he was also being exposed to sentimental pablum like The Lawrence Welk Show and schmaltzy trinkets that recalled “the good old days.” So a few years ago, Ryden started to use his own ambivalence about that sort of kitsch to explore the conflicting waves of attraction and repulsion we feel when we encounter imagery that feels clichéd and sanitized, as if a living symbol has been bowdlerized or neutered to satisfy some corrupt cultural agenda. In this series of paintings, as he has done time and again, Ryden returns to his trusted cast of characters — his own pantheon of swap-meet spirit guides. The mythic figure of Abraham Lincoln is invested with an aura of divine power, despite being done up in clownish Gay ‘90s apparel. Jesus Christ, the impotent wizard, manifests as a shrunken figure playing a toy piano, then bears his eternal burdens astride a bicycle built for two. Languid girls who exude both a doll-like innocence and a knowing sensuality appear in nearly every painting, sometimes bearing fetuses tidily wrapped in their birth membranes, like hard candy in cellophane. Considered within Ryden’s conceptual landscape, these porcelain waifs represent the anima, the Jungian archetype that mediates the feminine aspects of the unconscious in the male's emotional development. In his paintings, the anima manifests as Sophia — the muse, the fount of creativity, and the goddess of wisdom. Asked about his close identification with the feminine, Ryden said, “I believe that beyond the arena of art, the world would be a much better place if centered around a feminine perspective. The world has been really messed up by greedy white men who only work towards an agenda of personal wealth and power. It is this patriarchy of the past couple thousand years that causes so much strife. If the world was female-centered and if the dominant spirituality was based on the feminine and the earth, then human beings would know much more joy, peace, and harmony.” In Ryden’s masterpiece Incarnation, which translates from the Latin as “in the flesh,” an ethereal beauty walks through a formal garden, as self-possessed as a Gibson Girl, tightly corseted in a bell-shaped gown of meat. The sumptuous hues and textures of meat have long fascinated Ryden, for as he has asserted, meat is what holds our spirits on the physical plane. Yet in the modern age, we have become so remote from the source of our food that we rarely think of the creatures that are killed for our consumption. Though Ryden is as carnivorous as the next man, he tries to be cognizant of the suffering inflicted by our meat-loving ways. In animist cultures, a hunter would pray to the spirit of the animal he had killed, thanking it for its sacrifice and asking for forgiveness. Perhaps Ryden’s reverent oil paintings of the flesh are also a sort of incantation, a mantra written in muscle, fat and blood. In the essay for his 2005 museum show Wondertoonel, Ryden wrote that “children can see a world ensouled, where bunnies weep and bees have secrets, where ‘inanimate’ objects are alive.” Those childhood feelings of mystical illumination and spiritual connection with the energies of the universe still hold incalculable power for us today, though so many of us choose lives remote from nature. A sense of harmony with the natural world is vital to most primitive religions, and still takes the forefront in modern Japan, where Shinto beliefs assert that every rock and tree may be inhabited by a god. “When you stand before a giant sequoia, it is easy to feel this power,” Ryden reflected. “But it is not just the rocks and trees of the natural world that are inhabited by gods. Dolls, toys, and statues are also inhabited by their own gods. A stuffed bunny, a chandelier, or a ginseng root possesses an intangible presence that is difficult to explain. It is a thing’s ‘essence’ that is its little god.” Throughout his life as a painter, Ryden has listened to the voice of the wunderkammer which he has coalesced around himself, working surrounded by a thousand small spirits, each whispering of its own stories and dreams. “The paintings always come from an unknown place,” said Marion Peck, his wife and fellow painter. “He doesn’t really plan them, they more just come to him… When he is conceiving of a painting, he will be lying on the couch for many hours in a daze, surrounded by mountains of books, dolls, and scraps of paper from his massive collection of images that inspire him. Once he starts actually painting, though, he is in an amazingly wakeful, concentrated state of mind... He is totally paying attention to every tiny movement of his brush. Sometimes he says he feels like he is threading a needle all day long, poor thing. He is an amazing mixture of scientific precision and dreaminess, artist and businessman, young rebel and old man.” One of Ryden’s most profound convictions is that we instinctively know that there is more to existence than the physical plane we can perceive with our five senses. He is fascinated by the idea that the world is an illusion like a diorama. This concept is subliminally present in all his paintings, in which mysterious scenarios play out in sharp relief against a misty landscape, as if set before a theatrical backdrop. On some level, this awareness of a greater context is at the root of the human impulse toward spirituality. Ryden believes that if we look backward, past the societal machinations of religion, we can sense a more fundamental source of meaning — the natural forces our ancestors interpreted as forest spirits and primordial gods, and wove into a rich tapestry of myth. That same reverent intimacy with the natural world is intrinsic to childhood, but as we enter adulthood, our connection with those elemental forces tends to fade away. While some of us remain aware of these natural conduits to the mysteries of the unconscious realms within us, those pathways are often occluded by the perpetual distractions of modern life. Yet the more we risk as a society — the delicate balance of nature, the freedom of childhood, the wonder of a world not fully understood — the more important it is for creative people to help us imagine what could be, and might have been. Mythographer Joseph Campbell believed that the absence of religious ecstasy in modern life is what causes many of us to go off the rails and look into cults and drugs for the transcendent experience. One of the functions of mythology is to show us how to evolve into higher paths of thought and action, and ultimately to discover who we are and what course in life fulfills us. Though we live in an era where the idea of myth seems archaic, these universal stories are still springing up all around us in different guises — from urban myths to dream paintings, from science fiction movies to comic books. Many of the more visionary artists of today, whose minds are open to the sound of the universe, are continually conjuring new myths built upon the ephemera of our times — new traditions that respond to our environment, rather than that of some desert-dwelling nomadic tribe that disbanded thousands of years ago. Perhaps the most important function of the artist is to make mythology a living medium, enriching our perception of the world with new metaphors that reconnect us with the mysteries. In his finest work, Ryden transfigures the most clichéd artifacts of our culture into a modern mythology that rouses the wondering child within us and opens us to a greater empathy for all living things. In our frenetic modern world, people often find themselves restless and lost, deprived of a sense of meaning and purpose in life. Our souls yearn for mystery and beauty, whether we seek their expression through nature, love, music or art. Imagination can act as a bridge toward all the things for which our hearts ache — the ineffable, the spiritual, the eternal. Consequently, the artist’s most exalted function is to hold open doors into the unknown to help us divine the elusive nature of who we really are, allowing those parts of us that are seeking transcendence to evolve. In this respect, the artist takes on a shamanic role, mediating between the physical and spiritual realms, fueling our passions and healing our weary souls. Asked if Mark Ryden feels this sense of mission, his wife Marion replied, “Though he definitely would not use the term ‘shaman’ about himself, I think Mark certainly has the sense that he wants to bring something into the world, something it is craving and yearning for — soul, beauty, hope, things like that. He has an amazing something, a magic which has this very pure and loving quality, a joy. Everyone who is around him can feel it. There is something there that touches everyone in a very mysterious and powerful way, and they fall in love.”

From his aerie high above the city of São Paolo, João Ruas has been exploring a haunting world swirling with strange energies and spirits, populated by enigmatic women and a host of unusual creatures. Although his work is intrinsically contemporary, it simultaneously evokes the timeless verve of turn-of-the-century master illustrators like Leyendecker and Rackham. Having appeared on the scene only a year and a half ago, he has already made an indelible impression on our visual landscape. "Dawn III" Though João is feverishly preparing for "III," his solo show which opens in the Thinkspace project room on May 7th, he graciously spared some time to answer a few of my questions. If you're hungry for more background on João, you can also check out my earlier profile of him. Erratic Phenomena: Tell me about your experience of growing up in São Paulo, Brazil. Was your childhood full of adventure, or did you spend it with your nose in a book? What gave you the most pleasure when you were a boy? João Ruas: I only recall good things from my childhood. I grew up in the suburbs of São Paulo, in a true mixed-class neighborhood. I had richer and poorer friends, from all ethnic backgrounds, and we used to spend our days outside, flying kites and playing soccer. My interest in drawing was always present, but I didn't really focus on it until early adolescence, when I discovered comic books. My family never really stopped me from choosing art, and I am extremely grateful for that, even though at times they didn't know what I was doing, since no one in my close circle has any artistic background. "Catch" EP: Your earliest artwork was inspired by comic books. Tell me a bit about those early pictures, and how drawing made you feel when you were a child. JR: In Brazil, there's a series of comics that's been running since the '60s called Turma da Monica ("Monica's Gang"), which every kid knows about and reads avidly at some point in their early life. It really appeals to the eyes, with a colorful pop and weird style. I was totally amazed how everything was so other-worldly, and how the characters had their own personality – it was like they were my real friends. I think that was when I realized the power of creating images had no boundaries, and it could reach unique realms. I used to draw them all the time in school. Then, one day, Peanuts was on TV and I got addicted to that. They were even more believable and fantastic. My interest in drawing was always present, but it wasn't above the level of an average kid – I'd rather play than draw. That changed when I was 11. I found an issue of Spider-Man and actually read it... from that point on, it's easy to imagine what happened. "Untitled" EP: When did you first begin to imagine the surreal universe you now depict, your own "inner myth"? JR: I think this universe surfaced when I was working in the UK. I had a lot of fun being there, learning about another culture and its behaviors, but the fact that I wasn't really creating – just executing somebody else's idea – had a big effect on me. My personal works started to have a certain narrative. I was favoring that instead of a perfect or realistic execution. Sketches for a triptych in his upcoming show EP: Do you envision your paintings as moments in a constantly unfurling narrative, or are these scenarios completely independent of each other? JR: I don't think the pieces follow a timeline, but I have to say there's a feeling they inhabit the same universe. "Haunted #25" EP: Your "Haunted" series depicts nearly-naked girls in a variety of strangely ecstatic situations. I believe the "Haunted" paintings are about your past girlfriends, so they must have a great deal of personal resonance for you. Tell me a bit about what you're trying to achieve with this series. JR: It relates to a lot of issues – most of them, yes, on a personal level. I am really fascinated by the fragmented moments that define a whole situation. I once heard the phrase "signature frame" – maybe it was a technical term, but for me it's a powerful idea, nevertheless. I think my memory is photographic, in the sense that it is static, as dumb as that sounds. I like it this way, though. The series shows what it was and what it could have been, basically. "Haunted #20" EP: What significance do the arrangements of red and gray dots that frequently appear in your paintings have? Their number and placement seem to carry the weight of symbolism, although they are utterly enigmatic. JR: I enjoy the mystery surrounding symbols and the graphic approach they add to a painting or drawing. I like to call the dots "a pair of pairs," however – when they are three, they are not. I like the significance of four and three. I'm very bad at math, though. "Beggar" EP: Is there a deeper meaning behind your internet handle, "Feral Kid"? JR: I would like to say something deep and meaningful, but it was just an in-joke between me and a couple of friends, back when I used to live in the UK. Channel4 was showing a series of strong documentaries and one of them was about feral kids. It's a theme you're not supposed to make jokes about, but we did. We started to imagine how it would be if you were raised by koalas or ducks, and then, obviously, it evolved to uber-nonsense. I enjoy nonsense – I guess it was all the Monty Python in my childhood. Drawing for Fables cover, Issue #94 EP: About a year ago, you took over painting covers for the Fables comic books from the much-loved James Jean, who had made the series his own while working on it for 8 years. What have been the biggest challenges of working on Fables, and what have you learned in the process? JR: Taking the Fables job was the toughest decision I've ever made, and sometimes I'm still not sure if I did the right thing by taking it. It took me about two weeks to say a final "yes" to the editor. That might sound ridiculous to most people, but I can enumerate a lot of reasons for considering and discussing it for a long time. In brief, the most important issue for me was that I was going to be marked as a James Jean copycat. To be frank, I think I have been regarded in that way by many since I took the job. I think the two of us have a very close set of influences, and we both combine figurative images and graphic design (I have a degree in design), so our work sometimes shows a certain resemblance. It would be very dumb for me to go after his look – James Jean has been in the spotlight for years. I think it's sad to go after anyone, anyway. All I can say is that I'm trying to portray my ideals and feelings through my work, especially my personal pieces. The Fables covers are pure illustration – much as I like doing them, I need to leave space for requests, like color schemes and compositions that I would rather not choose, but which are necessary. It's my job to combine function and sensibility. Fables cover, Issue #94 EP: One of the personal projects you've had in mind for a while is a graphic novel about Russian cosmonauts who were stranded on a space station as communism collapsed. Was this project to be called "Souvlaki Space Station," which is now the name of your blog? Do you think you'll pursue it further in the future? JR: That was years ago... I can still see it becoming some sort of illustrated book – not a proper comic book, though. I have other, more concrete projects coming soon. One of them – and the main one – is a collaboration with Barnaby Ward. I think he may be pissed when he reads this, since the project is in the very very beginning stages, but he won't hit me since he lives so far away. Actually, I will use this space to beg his pardon, since I have not worked on it recently. Sorry, Barney. Sketchbook, 2010 EP: One of your greatest modern-day influences is the inimitable painter and sometime cover illustrator Phil Hale, who employs dramatic lighting and subtly surreal anatomical distortions to convey dynamic, emotionally charged scenarios. Tell me about your relationship with his work, and why you find it so compelling. JR: For me, he has such a strong signature and his hand is recognizable in absolutely any media, and that is something that I think any artist should pursue – that touch. I had the opportunity to go to his studio a few months ago, and above all, he's a very nice person. "Haunted #11" EP: You generally begin your work in pencil, which remains at the forefront of the final composition. Shifting into watercolor and gouache, you use a light hand, never allowing a piece to become overly finished. You've described an almost sensual relationship with watercolor, which feels literally "alive" to you in its interaction with the paper and the atmosphere. Tell me a bit more about the way you work. What part of the process excites you most? JR: The beginning is the most exciting for sure, the possibilities are endless. I really find myself while using watercolor. However, I would like to feel the same with other techniques, since all of them have a certain charm. Watercolor is unforgiving, and that is the most beautiful thing about it. Oil in progress for his upcoming show EP: In your latest body of work, you've begun to explore working in oils. What sparked that decision? Does the new medium allow you to do things that you haven't been able to achieve with watercolors and gouache? JR: Yes, you got that right. I wanted some "weight" for one of the series, and after some thinking and research, I decided to use oils for it. The reason why I really never touched it before is that I have a very strong allergy to the medium. However, I was able to try water-based oils recently, and that worked pretty well. Work in progress for his upcoming show EP: Lately, you've begun to employ collage elements, and are also incorporating some gold leaf, breaking up the flatness of the page with intriguingly varied textures and opacities. What inspired this choice? JR: I want to break the flatness, like you said, but mainly my aim is to create a contrast between intricate detail and some expression through collage, almost in disdain. "Elephantman" EP: You deeply admire the Golden Age illustrators, and are especially fascinated with the work of J.C. Leyendecker, Arthur Rackham, Howard Pyle, Franklin Booth, Joseph Clement Coll and Ivan Bilibin. The work of these masters was lush and ornate, and had an unmatched fluency of line. Their intensely imagined fantastic subject matter would be the stuff of dreams for generations to come. Yet amongst the cognoscenti, they were disregarded for decades as mere commercial illustrators, rather than fine artists. Why do you think their work has become more relevant to us today? Is there some deficiency in our society which makes us yearn for a more craft-oriented aesthetic? Is there a void in the modern soul which orients us toward romantic and escapist imagery? JR: I think they were the first pop artists, and people never really noticed it. They combined the old and the new, it needed to be flashy to draw attention, and they all managed it with style, hard work and a lot of will. However, they were never really taken seriously by some. Art, like everything, is cyclic. For many decades, art wasn't about execution and thought, but about explanation and connotation, and this is changing recently, from what I can see – at least to some degree. That being said, people tend to rediscover what could fill this gap, and I think they do it masterfully. There's obviously a wall dividing fine art and illustration – however, people in the art field are taking a peek to the other side, and that is great. João's studio in São Paolo EP: Among your inspirations is Edgar Degas, whose paintings of women in the Parisian demi-monde are striking for their psychological complexity, unusual composition and sense of movement. A philosopher of painting, Degas railed against his contemporaries, the Impressionists, for painting their spontaneous impressions of what they saw outdoors. He said, "Drawing is not what you see, but what you must make others see." Could you explain why you find his work and ideas so profound? JR: He was really methodical in the sense that he thought that any aspect of creation had to be deliberately crafted, even the accidents. He made reality not a subject, but a tool, and that is something I aim for in my own work. Sketchbook, 2008 EP: What other painters or illustrators from the past move you powerfully, and what aspects of their work do you find most intriguing? JR: That is a hard question with an always-changing answer. I am rediscovering Andrew Wyeth right now – he is a master of the narrative in painting. On the illustration side, I would say Harry Clarke. I admire his graphic application on figurative work. EP: If you could hang just one classic painting from history on the wall of your studio, what would it be? JR: "The Astronomer," by Vermeer. "Procession III," work-in-progress João Ruas' solo exhibition, "III," opens in the Thinkspace project room on May 7th. If you haven't seem their beautiful new space in Culver City, make sure to come and check it out!

It is my great privilege to bring you an interview with the legendary painter Phil Hale, whose dynamic, enigmatic body of work has influenced so many of today's emerging artists, including Ashley Wood, Jeremy Geddes and João Ruas. Though he spends most of his time in his studio exploring new directions and cares little for self-promotion, he was kind enough to do an in-depth interview with me in the lead-up to the "Wild at Heart" benefit exhibition. We are thrilled to feature his painting "Study for Path Vacates" in the show, which continues through June 9th. "Study for Path Vacates" Erratic Phenomena: Soon after you were born in Boston in 1963, your parents whisked you away to Kenya, where you lived until you were 7. Tell me about what brought your family to Kenya, and what you remember about your time there. Phil Hale: My family moved to Nairobi when I was four or so — my father was involved in an overhaul of the educational system there. The most significant effect was probably... that I was a bit of an outsider in Africa — that's pretty obvious. And your character is developed in an isolation of sorts, not so socially determined. But it also meant I was an outsider again when I returned to the States. Our town and school in Massachusetts were fantastically homogenous. Any difference at all marked you out. The African experience was also pretty wonderful, though you don't have much perspective at that age. My mother was an artist and kept a journal with drawings of elephants, warthogs, baboons, all the wildlife — and my parents made a point of exploring while we were there. I copied my mother's drawings, and in some ways was very competitive with her — or at least wanted recognition and approval there. And clearly my parents were unusual in that they were willing to make what was a fairly extreme and unconventional choice — they faced real difficulties there. Some part of their attitude was a family trait. EP: What sort of books did you grow up on? Do you recall any illustrations that made an impact on you at impressionable age? Phil: I was a pretty compulsive reader as a child. I'm sorry to say I read a lot of Enid Blyton in Africa— I can still remember them, so they must have had a fairly powerful effect on me. But I also read some of my mother's books — I am sure she encouraged me. Carson McCullers in particular — The Ballad of the Sad Cafe. Probably my first uncomfortable sense of how complicated it must be to be an adult. So: Enid Blyton and Carson McCullers. EP: You were born into a celebrated family of creative people, including the painters Ellen Day Hale, Lilian Westcott Hale, Philip Leslie Hale and Robert Beverly Hale. Your family tree stretches back to such hallowed antecedents as Harriet Beecher Stowe, the abolitionist author of Uncle Tom's Cabin, and Revolutionary War hero Nathan Hale, whose famous last words before being hanged by the British for espionage were, "I only regret that I have but one life to give for my country." Even your grandmother and mother were painters, so becoming an artist yourself must have seemed quite a natural thing to do. Was there a certain subliminal pressure exerted by such a raft of accomplished blueblooded ancestors, sort of a familial expectation that you would grow up to do something creative and interesting? Phil: That's harder to answer, because my main influence was my mother, who was not part of that lineage. But a very driven and forceful woman in any case. To choose to be an artist was known territory. I didn't have to fight to make my way, the path was already there, and it was part of our everyday life (which is to say museums, libraries, music, etc.). EP: Your mother and grandmother were both painters, though your grandmother preferred your brother's impressionistic historical paintings to your own comic-inspired renderings of monsters and the like. Tell me a bit about the two of them. Phil: My grandmother preferred my brother, a year older, and very much in the eldest-child vein. A sort of precociously responsible proto-adult. I was much more self-involved, not so socially engaged, less obedient and respectful — less capable of being obedient and respectful. And we were a year apart, so I could almost compete. He was a very good and sensitive draftsman. My own drawings could probably be neatly divided into my own work (skulls, hairy pot-bellied monsters, worms) and attempts to do my brother's drawings better than he could (flowers, seascapes, spiders). And because my mother was an artist, the materials and environment was very conducive — invisibly conducive. I painted with my grandmother, as well. But not a lot of praise there. EP: Your first love was Frank Frazetta, whose work you encountered at the age of 14, when you came across The Fantastic Art of Frank Frazetta. Frazetta's work was revolutionary. I remember staring at his cover for Edgar Rice Burroughs' A Fighting Man of Mars, fascinated by the lush anatomy and sensuous lighting, but also by the way he represented women as simultaneously sexy, dignified and heroic, which seemed like something of a revelation at the time. Tell me a bit about the impact Frazetta's work made on you and how it influenced the development of your vision. Phil: I was in a mall, just becoming a little independent, and saw his first Fantastic Art book at a bookshop. I just couldn't believe it — too much to take in. A comic was comprehensibly simplified, but you could study the Frazettas for hours trying to internalise them. In retrospect what I really loved was the insane (insane!) vitality, and how true it felt to the Frazetta. It was how he expressed it as well, of course. But to a fourteen-year-old, that crazy vitality was just unbelievable. I still think Frazetta is stunning — you may not like it, but it's a pure message delivered in astonishingly effective and informed form. I'm still thrilled by it. EP: In the early '80s, at the tender age of 16, you were apprenticed to the master illustrator Rick Berry, an arrangement which seems quite unusual in this day and age. For such an unformed artist, Berry's influence must have been overwhelming. How did that come about? What do you think he saw in you? Phil: It was pretty overwhelming — I've said this before, so it's in danger of becoming its own cliche, but I left the country to get away from his influence. It was impossible to know my own mind. My work still — often — has a conflict between my natural impulses and what I took from that. He is a very generous guy, and a great believer in collaboration and education. I think he saw some potential in me, but also that he could offer practical help and guidance. It was never set out as a long-term plan, though. It was developed through pleasure in each other's company. EP: When you were 18, your apprenticeship to Berry ended, and the two of you began sharing a studio with a couple of other artists, while you continued to learn by association. For three years, you worked side-by-side with Berry, and then you decided that you needed to isolate yourself from him in order to extricate yourself from the dominating influence he exerted on you. Was there a catalyst that led you to that decision, something that made you realize you were unlikely to evolve further under his shadow? Phil: There was no single event — and at that age (and I was pretty naive in many ways), you're not always aware of what choices you're making or why. But I had grown up, and our old relationship was no longer such a good fit. And I could have evolved side-by-side with him as well — that was not impossible. After I moved to England, my art reverted a little to some of the themes and even approaches that I had been set on before he and I met, which is to say more work from photographs and a struggle to find a way to make the painting and the photography work together. This was never a significant part of Rick's practice. I was less comfortable generating images internally — I wanted some part of the actual world to shape the work against. It took me a long, long time to find out how that might work. EP: In 1985, when you were just 22, you wrote and illustrated a story about Johnny Badhair for the Marvel series Galactus, which played out its final moments in the pages of the magazine Epic. Your interpretation of that character made such an impact that he has haunted your career for decades. You've also been known to revisit him time and again, fascinated by the study in immediacy, extreme anatomy and destruction that the character provides. How did you come to write and illustrate that story? How much liberty did you have to make the character your own? Why do you think you're drawn back to him again and again, despite your desire to break free of your illustration roots? Phil: The character was really a love letter to Frazetta, initially at least. But I learned a lot through developing the series — it provided some unexpected routes. I was allowed to concentrate on the elements that interested me, and not worry about reinventing it every time — that was an incredible breakthrough for me. I had had a very limited (and unexamined) idea of what was justifiable. And to slowly realise that you could follow what interested you and not get sucked into the obligational work — it was an escape route. From things that didn't interest me. I think the central theme — which is really about frustration and protest — and perhaps the beautiful struggle, even though you know the effort is hopeless — is a perfectly valid subject for fine art. But it's not acceptable to construct the images like a craftsman. That's tedious and predictable (and I've tried it). EP: In 1987, you completed 10 strikingly original illustrations for Stephen King's long-awaited Dark Tower sequel, The Drawing of the Three, which paid so well that it allowed you to essentially stop working for five years. Tell me a bit about how that opportunity came about, and what inspirations you brought to creating those memorable images. How has your relationship with Stephen King influenced the direction of your career? Phil: The King job was a bit of luck. I was put forward for an illustration for a King book a few years earlier (another artist had dropped out), and King liked my piece. He offered me the entire book the next time around, with a ridiculously generous arrangement. I wasn't happy with what I produced, though. I brought more colour into the work — very exciting at the time — but couldn't pull it together; I didn't have the experience or skill to make it all work. It was clunky and unconvincing. Ten years later, in 1997, they were going to release a mass-market version with the original illustrations. That was such a terrifying suggestion that I did them all again at no charge. But the job paid so handsomely that I didn't need to work, and it gave me a chance to do work independent of anything outside the studio. I had a lot of fun. I recorded a lot of music and designed and built motorcycles, experimented with photography and much looser painting. When I eventually had to come out again I was un-hireable. The largest single benefit that came from the King association — and I hope he sees this as a plus — is that the financial freedom allowed me to move away from the kind of reflexive illustrational practice I had built. A pretty outrageous luxury that I didn't quite understand at the time. EP: Rick Berry taught you that painting the figure from imagination and memory is paramount, and that painting from photo references is tantamount to cheating. When you moved to London to break free of his influence, that was one of the dictates you were rebelling against, feeling that your paintings lacked some specificity of character when you relied solely on memory to create them. Exploring photography as part of your process, you realized that in working from photographs of the body in action, you were discovering new expressions of anatomical tension and instability that lie outside those generally visualized in paintings. Did you know what you were looking for when you set out, or was photography a process of discovery for you? Phil: It wasn't just bodies. I wanted the paintings to have a feeling of connection to something outside of the frame of the image, just as a documentary photograph does. Where the context is a much more complete world that you can never really access, but believe is there. I was also very keen to have what I would consider actual information in the pieces and how I thought about them, and not just something that I had processed and reformulated. The use of photography is such a significant part of how I think about working — it's tough to sum it up. I didn't want to be making things up, I wanted to be finding out about something real and developing an understanding of it in a very pure cause-and-effect model. Also — important to say that Rick didn't see it as cheating, but his practice was based around generating images internally. I wasn't sure I had the same ability — and I didn't, in fact. EP: In recent years, you've been exploring photocollage, both as an end in itself, with your strange amalgamations of black metal devices, and as visual reference for your paintings. To a certain degree, you've chosen to preserve the clumsy construction of the photo-collage in the paintings — stopped trying to hide the seams, allowing the piece to be more interesting, awkward and uneasy. While many artists use photocollage as reference, most of them attempt to match lighting and integrate the disparate elements into a coherent reality. Tell me a bit more about why you find this deliberate artificiality and pursuit of an unheimlich quality so compelling. Phil: I began doing photo-collage in the early '90s, in part because Photoshop had arrived, and with it you had this unbelievably powerful tool to manipulate imagery. But one of the first things it showed was that that sort of control was not what gave images their power. It seemed much more exciting to make the artificialness of the construction explicit, but to still have the image work — often even more effectively than a groomed treatment. It meant the viewer had to make the connections work, and because they were involved, they personalised the piece, or at least were directly involved in resolving it. I didn't set out to pursue this, but it showed up pretty quickly. I was really thrilled by it. It tells you something about not only how vision works, but about how imagination and narrative works. EP: Your career has been characterized by change more than most, as you switch gears every few years to stave off stagnation and complacency. For a time, you became known in Great Britain as a portrait painter, contributing several pieces to the National Portrait Gallery. That culminated in 2008 with your portrait of then-Prime Minister Tony Blair, in which you broke from tradition to paint Blair at rest, collar unbuttoned, melancholy and weary, looking away from the viewer, perhaps toward the failures that weighed on his mind. What do you look for in a subject? Are there certain tensions you try to engage in them, even within the typically sedentary compositions that characterize classic portraiture? Phil: The portraiture was something I had done since I was a teenager, but in part because it had been part of my family's history, I had never pursued it seriously. And it is so tough and demanding that it requires pretty complete attention for a long time before you even start to understand what the problems are. Then you have to find your own way to test them. Unless you are going to be a mannerist, it is pretty clear what the standards and expectations are. Very unforgiving, and you find out a lot about your weaknesses very quickly. It was extremely demoralising. I was lucky in that I became part of a circle of portrait painters in London, all exceptional painters (including James Lloyd, Brendan Kelley, Stuart Pearson Wright and others — Justin Mortimer was another, but we had a separate friendship). My work looked weak and a bit fraudulent next to theirs. I might have expected them to be privacious or careful. But they were (and are) a wonderful generous group of people, mutually supportive to an almost absurd degree. I spent ten years doing portraiture. But by the end, I knew I wasn't really cut out for it. It didn't quite line up with my actual abilities or inclinations. Though I still do them, still enjoy them. One of the surprises was that I never had to have any emotional or psychological insight into the person. They presented themselves and I tried to carry that over faithfully and without interfering. That is why the portrait of Blair turned out as it did. It is in fact an extremely accurate likeness of him as he appeared; there was no political or personal agenda at all. I prioritised that over making the composition racy, or unstable, or mechanically leading. EP: It's my understanding that you admire the work of John Singer Sargent, and I believe I can feel his influence on your work in a certain tension he engages in his portrait subjects. What do you find most intriguing about Sargent's viewpoint? Phil: He's just such an astonishing painter. The equivalent of the guy who runs the three minute mile — for pure paint handling, he's utterly in a different league. I'm not saying his art is the most profound. But technically, there is so much to learn. Again, demoralising and difficult. EP: In recent years, wishing to break out of portraiture, you began painting a series of abstracted skulls and faceless heads shrouded in darkness, repeating them ad infinitum with subtle changes. You've spoken of daily painting as an exercise to force yourself to get better by repetition of a specific practice. This seems to be an almost meditative endeavor, in the sense that Buddhist mantras can be drawn or written as well as spoken. Do you see yourself as seeking some kind of transformation or enlightenment through this practice of evolving repetition? Phil: It certainly has meditational qualities — and, related to this, when I'm working on a project, I often listen to a single CD every day until it wraps — one of the great pleasures of my working life. My head drops into gear with a clunk when the first song starts, fantastic. But the repetition has a very practical aspect. I'm often microscoping on a particular aspect. It helps to hold all of the variables steady except for one. It makes it absolutely clear what is happening. That is one of the crudest engineering-style tools available, but enormously helpful. And it is also... that I am always trying for (at least) two contradictory goals — to produce something with the minimum of intrusion and effort (which compromises accuracy), and the desire to make it as faithful as possible (and this is clear because I often have a reference). So the repetition allows me to leave something, to avoid polishing the life (and also the veracity) out of it. But to still have another shot at extracting more. I'm trying to learn about what is there (independently of me), and about how the image interacts with my vision (in my case, an ability to pull structure out of form). EP: You've entitled an ongoing series of your work "Mockingbirds." In nature, mockingbirds will incessantly repeat the same incidental sequence of sounds over and over again until something new catches their fancy — car alarms, meowing cats, croaking frogs, shrilling insects. Similarly, you have focused your attention on repeating a few familiar images over and over again, with subtle variations — the death's head shrouded in darkness, the shirtless old man wielding yard tools, Johnny Badhair endlessly plummeting through an electric blue sky. What does this "mockingbirds" concept signify to you? Is there a certain satisfaction you derive from plumbing an image to its utmost? Why do you think you find yourself so obsessed with those particular images? Phil: Again, you have already answered most of this. Often I'm attracted to an image without having any sort of conscious or intellectual framework. I hope it is not some dumb adolescent impulse (though that is there as well), but rather a synthesis of experience and a sense of potential. I don't have a specific expectation beyond wanting something unexpected to alter and redefine the piece. It's possible to be pretty clear about what is happening in the pieces, and why they would appeal. But that makes me uncomfortable, because it would sum them up, when I would hope that they can't be contained in that way. Some of them can be seen to work on an almost idiotically straightforward metaphorical level, but I don't think that is the true content. I should also say that I wanted those pieces to be, piece by piece, unstable. They only really worked in any comprehensive way as a show. The individual paintings are too unstable. Obviously the painter and the viewer have very different needs from the work. But after the fact, it's the viewer who is keeping it alive — that's a lot to ask. When I was involved in motorcycle racing, I heard it said that the ideal race bike is the one that wins and then falls to pieces on the other side of the line — it was designed to exactly fulfill its function. Anything else would have compromised the central requirement. You have to be willing to produce weak and stupid and ineffective paintings for a while. EP: Another recurring element in your recent work is the sometimes almost violent introduction of abstraction into an image, where a realistic figure might be abruptly truncated by a surface or partly obliterated, as if their existence in this reality is conditional and might sputter out altogether in a moment. You've said you try to cultivate a willingness to operate almost on the edge of collapse. Are these abstracted elements intended to activate the image in some way, lend it a sense of potential that mere description might lack? Would you say painting is more interesting for you when there's some fear or risk involved? Phil: That's absolutely right — to the point that anything that I say is really unnecessary. Activating the image, introducing something that jolts it or forces a confrontation or problem, or a barrier that the viewer has to overcome. Or even a contrast to some of the more reassuring elements. I am talking in ideals, what you might hope to allow. If nothing is at risk, it is harder to believe the piece is necessary. Why should it be necessary, anyway — that is a bit of a ridiculous term, and maybe bit of puffery. But you have to try just to get things moving and active. EP: I sense something like a self-loathing in this constant shape-shifting, a tendency to distrust your own instincts as puerile or craven, or perhaps a conviction that your true work still lies ahead of you, hidden by the clutter of preconceptions and habits you are struggling to break through. Would you say there's any truth to that? Phil: A great question... Well, it's necessary to act against yourself, or nothing can happen. Or at least to try to place myself outside of the control of my own self-delusion. In any case, it's probably accurate, but partial. The self-loathing (that is probably too strong) is more that I am the only one who really knows when my behaviour is cowardly — choices made out of some kind of failure or weakness. That's not unforgivable, obviously. The shape-shifting is more useful to talk about in specifics — the black heads were done at the same time as pieces in a more familiar vein. They were not a closet I locked myself in for the winter. But they allowed me to do pieces where the physical response of the paint was more important than shepherding it into some appointed position. They were a kind of practice and way of habitualising a particular expectation and response. The portraits in particular are vulnerable to over-determining, and it not only kills the piece, it reinforces a counter-productive approach — you're structuring your reflexes. A lot of effort trying to drop bad habits. Phil Hale's painting "Study for Path Vacates" will be on view at Thinkspace in Culver City through June 9th.

It is my great privilege to bring you an interview with the legendary painter Phil Hale, whose dynamic, enigmatic body of work has influenced so many of today's emerging artists, including Ashley Wood, Jeremy Geddes and João Ruas. Though he spends most of his time in his studio exploring new directions and cares little for self-promotion, he was kind enough to do an in-depth interview with me in the lead-up to the "Wild at Heart" benefit exhibition. We are thrilled to feature his painting "Study for Path Vacates" in the show, which continues through June 9th. "Study for Path Vacates" Erratic Phenomena: Soon after you were born in Boston in 1963, your parents whisked you away to Kenya, where you lived until you were 7. Tell me about what brought your family to Kenya, and what you remember about your time there. Phil Hale: My family moved to Nairobi when I was four or so — my father was involved in an overhaul of the educational system there. The most significant effect was probably... that I was a bit of an outsider in Africa — that's pretty obvious. And your character is developed in an isolation of sorts, not so socially determined. But it also meant I was an outsider again when I returned to the States. Our town and school in Massachusetts were fantastically homogenous. Any difference at all marked you out. The African experience was also pretty wonderful, though you don't have much perspective at that age. My mother was an artist and kept a journal with drawings of elephants, warthogs, baboons, all the wildlife — and my parents made a point of exploring while we were there. I copied my mother's drawings, and in some ways was very competitive with her — or at least wanted recognition and approval there. And clearly my parents were unusual in that they were willing to make what was a fairly extreme and unconventional choice — they faced real difficulties there. Some part of their attitude was a family trait. EP: What sort of books did you grow up on? Do you recall any illustrations that made an impact on you at impressionable age? Phil: I was a pretty compulsive reader as a child. I'm sorry to say I read a lot of Enid Blyton in Africa— I can still remember them, so they must have had a fairly powerful effect on me. But I also read some of my mother's books — I am sure she encouraged me. Carson McCullers in particular — The Ballad of the Sad Cafe. Probably my first uncomfortable sense of how complicated it must be to be an adult. So: Enid Blyton and Carson McCullers. EP: You were born into a celebrated family of creative people, including the painters Ellen Day Hale, Lilian Westcott Hale, Philip Leslie Hale and Robert Beverly Hale. Your family tree stretches back to such hallowed antecedents as Harriet Beecher Stowe, the abolitionist author of Uncle Tom's Cabin, and Revolutionary War hero Nathan Hale, whose famous last words before being hanged by the British for espionage were, "I only regret that I have but one life to give for my country." Even your grandmother and mother were painters, so becoming an artist yourself must have seemed quite a natural thing to do. Was there a certain subliminal pressure exerted by such a raft of accomplished blueblooded ancestors, sort of a familial expectation that you would grow up to do something creative and interesting? Phil: That's harder to answer, because my main influence was my mother, who was not part of that lineage. But a very driven and forceful woman in any case. To choose to be an artist was known territory. I didn't have to fight to make my way, the path was already there, and it was part of our everyday life (which is to say museums, libraries, music, etc.). EP: Your mother and grandmother were both painters, though your grandmother preferred your brother's impressionistic historical paintings to your own comic-inspired renderings of monsters and the like. Tell me a bit about the two of them. Phil: My grandmother preferred my brother, a year older, and very much in the eldest-child vein. A sort of precociously responsible proto-adult. I was much more self-involved, not so socially engaged, less obedient and respectful — less capable of being obedient and respectful. And we were a year apart, so I could almost compete. He was a very good and sensitive draftsman. My own drawings could probably be neatly divided into my own work (skulls, hairy pot-bellied monsters, worms) and attempts to do my brother's drawings better than he could (flowers, seascapes, spiders). And because my mother was an artist, the materials and environment was very conducive — invisibly conducive. I painted with my grandmother, as well. But not a lot of praise there. EP: Your first love was Frank Frazetta, whose work you encountered at the age of 14, when you came across The Fantastic Art of Frank Frazetta. Frazetta's work was revolutionary. I remember staring at his cover for Edgar Rice Burroughs' A Fighting Man of Mars, fascinated by the lush anatomy and sensuous lighting, but also by the way he represented women as simultaneously sexy, dignified and heroic, which seemed like something of a revelation at the time. Tell me a bit about the impact Frazetta's work made on you and how it influenced the development of your vision. Phil: I was in a mall, just becoming a little independent, and saw his first Fantastic Art book at a bookshop. I just couldn't believe it — too much to take in. A comic was comprehensibly simplified, but you could study the Frazettas for hours trying to internalise them. In retrospect what I really loved was the insane (insane!) vitality, and how true it felt to the Frazetta. It was how he expressed it as well, of course. But to a fourteen-year-old, that crazy vitality was just unbelievable. I still think Frazetta is stunning — you may not like it, but it's a pure message delivered in astonishingly effective and informed form. I'm still thrilled by it. EP: In the early '80s, at the tender age of 16, you were apprenticed to the master illustrator Rick Berry, an arrangement which seems quite unusual in this day and age. For such an unformed artist, Berry's influence must have been overwhelming. How did that come about? What do you think he saw in you? Phil: It was pretty overwhelming — I've said this before, so it's in danger of becoming its own cliche, but I left the country to get away from his influence. It was impossible to know my own mind. My work still — often — has a conflict between my natural impulses and what I took from that. He is a very generous guy, and a great believer in collaboration and education. I think he saw some potential in me, but also that he could offer practical help and guidance. It was never set out as a long-term plan, though. It was developed through pleasure in each other's company. EP: When you were 18, your apprenticeship to Berry ended, and the two of you began sharing a studio with a couple of other artists, while you continued to learn by association. For three years, you worked side-by-side with Berry, and then you decided that you needed to isolate yourself from him in order to extricate yourself from the dominating influence he exerted on you. Was there a catalyst that led you to that decision, something that made you realize you were unlikely to evolve further under his shadow? Phil: There was no single event — and at that age (and I was pretty naive in many ways), you're not always aware of what choices you're making or why. But I had grown up, and our old relationship was no longer such a good fit. And I could have evolved side-by-side with him as well — that was not impossible. After I moved to England, my art reverted a little to some of the themes and even approaches that I had been set on before he and I met, which is to say more work from photographs and a struggle to find a way to make the painting and the photography work together. This was never a significant part of Rick's practice. I was less comfortable generating images internally — I wanted some part of the actual world to shape the work against. It took me a long, long time to find out how that might work. EP: In 1985, when you were just 22, you wrote and illustrated a story about Johnny Badhair for the Marvel series Galactus, which played out its final moments in the pages of the magazine Epic. Your interpretation of that character made such an impact that he has haunted your career for decades. You've also been known to revisit him time and again, fascinated by the study in immediacy, extreme anatomy and destruction that the character provides. How did you come to write and illustrate that story? How much liberty did you have to make the character your own? Why do you think you're drawn back to him again and again, despite your desire to break free of your illustration roots? Phil: The character was really a love letter to Frazetta, initially at least. But I learned a lot through developing the series — it provided some unexpected routes. I was allowed to concentrate on the elements that interested me, and not worry about reinventing it every time — that was an incredible breakthrough for me. I had had a very limited (and unexamined) idea of what was justifiable. And to slowly realise that you could follow what interested you and not get sucked into the obligational work — it was an escape route. From things that didn't interest me. I think the central theme — which is really about frustration and protest — and perhaps the beautiful struggle, even though you know the effort is hopeless — is a perfectly valid subject for fine art. But it's not acceptable to construct the images like a craftsman. That's tedious and predictable (and I've tried it). EP: In 1987, you completed 10 strikingly original illustrations for Stephen King's long-awaited Dark Tower sequel, The Drawing of the Three, which paid so well that it allowed you to essentially stop working for five years. Tell me a bit about how that opportunity came about, and what inspirations you brought to creating those memorable images. How has your relationship with Stephen King influenced the direction of your career? Phil: The King job was a bit of luck. I was put forward for an illustration for a King book a few years earlier (another artist had dropped out), and King liked my piece. He offered me the entire book the next time around, with a ridiculously generous arrangement. I wasn't happy with what I produced, though. I brought more colour into the work — very exciting at the time — but couldn't pull it together; I didn't have the experience or skill to make it all work. It was clunky and unconvincing. Ten years later, in 1997, they were going to release a mass-market version with the original illustrations. That was such a terrifying suggestion that I did them all again at no charge. But the job paid so handsomely that I didn't need to work, and it gave me a chance to do work independent of anything outside the studio. I had a lot of fun. I recorded a lot of music and designed and built motorcycles, experimented with photography and much looser painting. When I eventually had to come out again I was un-hireable. The largest single benefit that came from the King association — and I hope he sees this as a plus — is that the financial freedom allowed me to move away from the kind of reflexive illustrational practice I had built. A pretty outrageous luxury that I didn't quite understand at the time. EP: Rick Berry taught you that painting the figure from imagination and memory is paramount, and that painting from photo references is tantamount to cheating. When you moved to London to break free of his influence, that was one of the dictates you were rebelling against, feeling that your paintings lacked some specificity of character when you relied solely on memory to create them. Exploring photography as part of your process, you realized that in working from photographs of the body in action, you were discovering new expressions of anatomical tension and instability that lie outside those generally visualized in paintings. Did you know what you were looking for when you set out, or was photography a process of discovery for you? Phil: It wasn't just bodies. I wanted the paintings to have a feeling of connection to something outside of the frame of the image, just as a documentary photograph does. Where the context is a much more complete world that you can never really access, but believe is there. I was also very keen to have what I would consider actual information in the pieces and how I thought about them, and not just something that I had processed and reformulated. The use of photography is such a significant part of how I think about working — it's tough to sum it up. I didn't want to be making things up, I wanted to be finding out about something real and developing an understanding of it in a very pure cause-and-effect model. Also — important to say that Rick didn't see it as cheating, but his practice was based around generating images internally. I wasn't sure I had the same ability — and I didn't, in fact. EP: In recent years, you've been exploring photocollage, both as an end in itself, with your strange amalgamations of black metal devices, and as visual reference for your paintings. To a certain degree, you've chosen to preserve the clumsy construction of the photo-collage in the paintings — stopped trying to hide the seams, allowing the piece to be more interesting, awkward and uneasy. While many artists use photocollage as reference, most of them attempt to match lighting and integrate the disparate elements into a coherent reality. Tell me a bit more about why you find this deliberate artificiality and pursuit of an unheimlich quality so compelling. Phil: I began doing photo-collage in the early '90s, in part because Photoshop had arrived, and with it you had this unbelievably powerful tool to manipulate imagery. But one of the first things it showed was that that sort of control was not what gave images their power. It seemed much more exciting to make the artificialness of the construction explicit, but to still have the image work — often even more effectively than a groomed treatment. It meant the viewer had to make the connections work, and because they were involved, they personalised the piece, or at least were directly involved in resolving it. I didn't set out to pursue this, but it showed up pretty quickly. I was really thrilled by it. It tells you something about not only how vision works, but about how imagination and narrative works. EP: Your career has been characterized by change more than most, as you switch gears every few years to stave off stagnation and complacency. For a time, you became known in Great Britain as a portrait painter, contributing several pieces to the National Portrait Gallery. That culminated in 2008 with your portrait of then-Prime Minister Tony Blair, in which you broke from tradition to paint Blair at rest, collar unbuttoned, melancholy and weary, looking away from the viewer, perhaps toward the failures that weighed on his mind. What do you look for in a subject? Are there certain tensions you try to engage in them, even within the typically sedentary compositions that characterize classic portraiture? Phil: The portraiture was something I had done since I was a teenager, but in part because it had been part of my family's history, I had never pursued it seriously. And it is so tough and demanding that it requires pretty complete attention for a long time before you even start to understand what the problems are. Then you have to find your own way to test them. Unless you are going to be a mannerist, it is pretty clear what the standards and expectations are. Very unforgiving, and you find out a lot about your weaknesses very quickly. It was extremely demoralising. I was lucky in that I became part of a circle of portrait painters in London, all exceptional painters (including James Lloyd, Brendan Kelley, Stuart Pearson Wright and others — Justin Mortimer was another, but we had a separate friendship). My work looked weak and a bit fraudulent next to theirs. I might have expected them to be privacious or careful. But they were (and are) a wonderful generous group of people, mutually supportive to an almost absurd degree. I spent ten years doing portraiture. But by the end, I knew I wasn't really cut out for it. It didn't quite line up with my actual abilities or inclinations. Though I still do them, still enjoy them. One of the surprises was that I never had to have any emotional or psychological insight into the person. They presented themselves and I tried to carry that over faithfully and without interfering. That is why the portrait of Blair turned out as it did. It is in fact an extremely accurate likeness of him as he appeared; there was no political or personal agenda at all. I prioritised that over making the composition racy, or unstable, or mechanically leading. EP: It's my understanding that you admire the work of John Singer Sargent, and I believe I can feel his influence on your work in a certain tension he engages in his portrait subjects. What do you find most intriguing about Sargent's viewpoint? Phil: He's just such an astonishing painter. The equivalent of the guy who runs the three minute mile — for pure paint handling, he's utterly in a different league. I'm not saying his art is the most profound. But technically, there is so much to learn. Again, demoralising and difficult. EP: In recent years, wishing to break out of portraiture, you began painting a series of abstracted skulls and faceless heads shrouded in darkness, repeating them ad infinitum with subtle changes. You've spoken of daily painting as an exercise to force yourself to get better by repetition of a specific practice. This seems to be an almost meditative endeavor, in the sense that Buddhist mantras can be drawn or written as well as spoken. Do you see yourself as seeking some kind of transformation or enlightenment through this practice of evolving repetition? Phil: It certainly has meditational qualities — and, related to this, when I'm working on a project, I often listen to a single CD every day until it wraps — one of the great pleasures of my working life. My head drops into gear with a clunk when the first song starts, fantastic. But the repetition has a very practical aspect. I'm often microscoping on a particular aspect. It helps to hold all of the variables steady except for one. It makes it absolutely clear what is happening. That is one of the crudest engineering-style tools available, but enormously helpful. And it is also... that I am always trying for (at least) two contradictory goals — to produce something with the minimum of intrusion and effort (which compromises accuracy), and the desire to make it as faithful as possible (and this is clear because I often have a reference). So the repetition allows me to leave something, to avoid polishing the life (and also the veracity) out of it. But to still have another shot at extracting more. I'm trying to learn about what is there (independently of me), and about how the image interacts with my vision (in my case, an ability to pull structure out of form). EP: You've entitled an ongoing series of your work "Mockingbirds." In nature, mockingbirds will incessantly repeat the same incidental sequence of sounds over and over again until something new catches their fancy — car alarms, meowing cats, croaking frogs, shrilling insects. Similarly, you have focused your attention on repeating a few familiar images over and over again, with subtle variations — the death's head shrouded in darkness, the shirtless old man wielding yard tools, Johnny Badhair endlessly plummeting through an electric blue sky. What does this "mockingbirds" concept signify to you? Is there a certain satisfaction you derive from plumbing an image to its utmost? Why do you think you find yourself so obsessed with those particular images? Phil: Again, you have already answered most of this. Often I'm attracted to an image without having any sort of conscious or intellectual framework. I hope it is not some dumb adolescent impulse (though that is there as well), but rather a synthesis of experience and a sense of potential. I don't have a specific expectation beyond wanting something unexpected to alter and redefine the piece. It's possible to be pretty clear about what is happening in the pieces, and why they would appeal. But that makes me uncomfortable, because it would sum them up, when I would hope that they can't be contained in that way. Some of them can be seen to work on an almost idiotically straightforward metaphorical level, but I don't think that is the true content. I should also say that I wanted those pieces to be, piece by piece, unstable. They only really worked in any comprehensive way as a show. The individual paintings are too unstable. Obviously the painter and the viewer have very different needs from the work. But after the fact, it's the viewer who is keeping it alive — that's a lot to ask. When I was involved in motorcycle racing, I heard it said that the ideal race bike is the one that wins and then falls to pieces on the other side of the line — it was designed to exactly fulfill its function. Anything else would have compromised the central requirement. You have to be willing to produce weak and stupid and ineffective paintings for a while. EP: Another recurring element in your recent work is the sometimes almost violent introduction of abstraction into an image, where a realistic figure might be abruptly truncated by a surface or partly obliterated, as if their existence in this reality is conditional and might sputter out altogether in a moment. You've said you try to cultivate a willingness to operate almost on the edge of collapse. Are these abstracted elements intended to activate the image in some way, lend it a sense of potential that mere description might lack? Would you say painting is more interesting for you when there's some fear or risk involved? Phil: That's absolutely right — to the point that anything that I say is really unnecessary. Activating the image, introducing something that jolts it or forces a confrontation or problem, or a barrier that the viewer has to overcome. Or even a contrast to some of the more reassuring elements. I am talking in ideals, what you might hope to allow. If nothing is at risk, it is harder to believe the piece is necessary. Why should it be necessary, anyway — that is a bit of a ridiculous term, and maybe bit of puffery. But you have to try just to get things moving and active. EP: I sense something like a self-loathing in this constant shape-shifting, a tendency to distrust your own instincts as puerile or craven, or perhaps a conviction that your true work still lies ahead of you, hidden by the clutter of preconceptions and habits you are struggling to break through. Would you say there's any truth to that? Phil: A great question... Well, it's necessary to act against yourself, or nothing can happen. Or at least to try to place myself outside of the control of my own self-delusion. In any case, it's probably accurate, but partial. The self-loathing (that is probably too strong) is more that I am the only one who really knows when my behaviour is cowardly — choices made out of some kind of failure or weakness. That's not unforgivable, obviously. The shape-shifting is more useful to talk about in specifics — the black heads were done at the same time as pieces in a more familiar vein. They were not a closet I locked myself in for the winter. But they allowed me to do pieces where the physical response of the paint was more important than shepherding it into some appointed position. They were a kind of practice and way of habitualising a particular expectation and response. The portraits in particular are vulnerable to over-determining, and it not only kills the piece, it reinforces a counter-productive approach — you're structuring your reflexes. A lot of effort trying to drop bad habits. Phil Hale's painting "Study for Path Vacates" will be on view at Thinkspace in Culver City through June 9th.

Tomorrow night marks the release of Chris Berens' latest book, Mapping Infinity, which he asked me to collaborate with him on writing. It is exclusively available from Jaski Gallery in Amsterdam. The book will be released in a limited edition of 750, along with with 50 special editions which will include an original drawing, several of which you can enjoy below. These remarkable little process explorations, much like the verso pieces on his paintings, shed a great deal of light on his mysterious methods.

When I first saw one of Aron Wiesenfeld's charcoal drawings at the Los Angeles Art Show, I was immediately struck by two things — its ominous, enigmatic emotive power, and how much his use of light reminded me of Edward Hopper. I was overcome with such joy to see something that was so suffused with feeling and significance — at an art fair — that the image has haunted me ever since. Unlocking the subconscious reservoirs of the spirit should be the highest goal of art, but few painters in the "highbrow" art world have the courage to attempt it. "Train Tunnel" The latter-day philosopher Rebecca Solnit once wrote, "That thing the nature of which is totally unknown to you is usually what you need to find, and finding it is a matter of getting lost." To see oneself clearly — to step outside oneself altogether, and be free of all the baggage we carry through life, one must venture beyond the boundaries of comfort and security. Mystery, disorientation, fear — these are primal sensations that rouse the imagination. Aron once said, "I think it is necessary to leave unanswered questions in a painting... if it is not fully knowable, the truth it holds changes over time and the painting becomes like a living thing." Like waking up in a strange city or losing the trail deep in the woods, Aron's work provokes us to do our own mythmaking, opening our minds to the unknown. "William" Despite the fact that he's been busy preparing for his first museum exhibit, which opens on June 10th at the Bakersfield Museum of Art, Aron graciously took the time to share some insight into his work. Erratic Phenomena: You were born in Washington, D.C. and spent much of your childhood in Santa Cruz, California. Tell me a bit about your experience of growing up. Was anyone in your family an artist? What made you happiest when you were a boy? Aron Wiesenfeld: My grandmother was an artist — she painted watercolors. I remember her telling me that kids' drawings were always better than grown-ups', and that was very encouraging. So I felt I had carte blanche to do whatever I wanted, and I could always expect her to say, "That's wonderful!" She even made etchings from the drawings my brother and I did. My mom was also supportive of our artistic endeavors. She taped up all our drawings on the walls. The kitchen and dining room walls were literally filled with our drawings. So my creative seeds were very well watered. We also had some prints on the walls by artists like Rembrandt, Dürer, and Sorolla, and I think I was lucky just to know what great art looked like. I was kind of a loner as a kid. Not painfully so, but I was just as happy spending hours alone building models or whatever as I was playing with other kids. I remember building things a lot, so I guess that is what made me happiest. They were often very ambitious projects, like a three-story fort with a deck in the backyard. I think my work process now is like building — the joy of it is in seeing it grow and what it will become. "Flood" EP: You first began drawing when you were 12, inspired by comics like Conan the Barbarian. Tell me a bit about what you liked to draw when you first began creating images from your imagination. AW: A friend introduced me to comics in fifth grade, and I became obsessed. I always loved the medium. You can read a comic at your own pace, and you have to connect the pictures in your head to make the story happen, so the reader is a participant in the creation of the story. I was really into fantasy stuff, like D&D and Frazetta, and that was my initial inspiration to draw. Then I saw what Frank Miller was doing, and that made me interested in how the medium can be used to tell the story using a sequence of images — what to show and what to leave to the imagination. Becoming a comic book artist was something I had to do, and I pursued that goal tenaciously. I would give myself assignments — for example, I would have to draw a fist from every angle, and then I would have to draw each of those fists as if they were lit by a different light source. It was a bit obsessive-compulsive, but it paid off. "Landfall" EP: Throughout the '90s, you pursued a career as a comic book artist, with your peak coming in 1997 with the publication of the two-issue crossover comic Deathblow and Wolverine. Then, to the perplexity and consternation of many comics fans, you suddenly stopped drawing comics, went back to art school, and emerged a painter. What precipitated this sudden change of direction? AW: The comic book business is set up to crank out a huge amount of a cheap and disposable product. I was elated when I was first hired, and then horrified when I saw my work in print a few months later. The inker had butchered it, the coloring was terrible, the writer filled all my negative space with word balloons, and the printing sucked. I learned how to compensate for some of those things later, but those kinds of problems were always there. I think people who have long careers as comic book artists just learn to tolerate it, but I couldn't. The end came when I thought I would finally have control over all the aspects of Deathblow and Wolverine, and so I put everything I had into that project... When I saw it printed, the color was completely washed out, and the editors had changed a lot of dialogue without my knowledge. So that was it for me. I did a few other projects after that, but it was just too heartbreaking to let comics continue to be the focus of my work. "Girl with Dog" EP: Much of your work concerns young people persevering in the face of peril and uncertainty, a perennial theme of children's literature. Were there particular books you read as a child which impressed you with the potency of that narrative? AW: I think I had the usual books as a child... but Maurice Sendak's books left an impression. My favorite was In The Night Kitchen. (Who knew you could make an airplane out of bread dough? At 3 years old, I believed it was possible. I wish I was still that gullible.) Looking back at some of the books I had as a child has been very inspirational. Lately, I have been having a great time getting reacquainted with Richard Scarry. Other authors that deal with those themes of unchaperoned youth have been thought-provoking, like Lewis Carroll, Miyazaki and Edward Gorey. "The Delegate's Daughter" EP: In your work, the human figures – usually girls – have a palpable energy and power, but are placed in situations that emphasize their vulnerability. Fiercely determined, they face adversity head-on, despite their obvious lack of preparation. Although this is a very compelling idea, it's a rather uncommon subject in painting. Why do you choose to represent young women as heroes? AW: I don't know why exactly. On the surface, a lone woman is more physically vulnerable to harm than a man, and the hero has to be vulnerable. A friend told me I paint women because they are more internal, and that seems true. It's important to me that the characters have internal lives and stories. The images start out as notions that struck me for whatever reason. I don't give a lot of thought to what they mean or what the story is before I start, but things happen when I'm working. Accidents are always the elements that stimulate growth, it's like evolution. Right now I'm working on a drawing of a little girl... When I started it, I quickly scribbled in the facial features, and the way the mouth looked made me think it was like my grandmother as a girl, so that's the direction the drawing took. I try to pay attention to those accidents — I think interpreting accidents can be a way to release imagery from the unconscious, kind of like interpreting a Rorschach test. "David" EP: Over the past couple of years, you have moved away from painting realistic figures, and begun drawing from the imagination, rather than photo references. Your figures have become lithe and attenuated, at times achieving a prepubescent lankiness and at others a sinuous grace. You use light to give your subjects a very solid, dimensional feeling, and your low horizon line and flat backgrounds often make them seem as if they could be standing in front of an old-fashioned painted backdrop. Tell me a bit about the evolution of your aesthetic, and what these choices represent in your conceptual landscape. AW: I really want the figure to feel monumental, in a sculptural, larger-than-life kind of way, so that the viewer is confronted with the character as if it were a real person. One moment of discovery happened when I was drawing a boy in a Batman costume out in a windy field. I liked the subject, but I didn't feel like I was connecting with the character — in that context he was just a "type." So I wiped it out, redrew him in the center of the paper as big as possible, and it immediately worked. With the focus entirely on him, it allowed me to develop him as a subjective individual. I think a character has to have the type and the individual working against each other to be interesting. "Early" EP: Many of your paintings feel like a moment in a dream. Is dreaming important to your conceptual process? AW: Dreams are one of the sources of ideas, but there are a lot of sources. I think any artist has to have an access to the unconscious, and for me that access is granted slowly as I work — drawing and redrawing an image, stepping back to consider, and letting the image take on a life of its own. It's very rare that an initial idea makes it to the final stage completely intact. "The Gathering" EP: You once said, "The desire to see into the unknown is what inspires me the most." Why do you think the life of the imagination is so compelling for us today? Are we wired for wonder, and therefore driven to pursue the unknown and intangible as a substitute for the very real mysteries our forebears contemplated? AW: The best explanation I have heard was from Jonathan Miller, who did a PBS series about religion. He said that when our ancestors heard a noise in the dark, they didn't ask, "What's that?" They asked, "Who's that?" — which was an important distinction, because a "who" was probably much more dangerous than a "what." From that question, maybe we can explain the birth of myths and gods in the minds of our ancestors. Trying to come up with explanations about strangers in the dark has been fertile ground for storytellers ever since, so maybe it is still in our DNA to ask, "Who's that?" when we hear a noise in the dark. "The Fish Gatherer" EP: While your ominous landscapes sometimes betray their modernity with telltales like power poles and buses, there is something quite timeless about them that reminds me a bit of the windswept, atmospheric paintings of Caspar David Friedrich. Tell me about your relationship with the landscape and your emotional perspective on the forces of nature. AW: Landscape is a manifestation of our emotions — we all understand this without explanation. Nature is a language. Virgin snow, a fallow cornfield, steep cliffs... in a work of art, it is a priori knowledge that these things are metaphors about people. In a way, nature is a bunch of symbols just sitting there waiting to be used. Despite their apparent naturalism, Caspar David Friedrich's paintings were all invented in his studio. He used the language of nature to communicate about internal conditions, relationships, politics, and religion. "Suspended" EP: Charcoal is a limited and notoriously tricky medium, yet you use it to create large, detailed compositions. What attributes does charcoal have that make it one of your most trusted tools? AW: It's a very easily changeable medium, which can be frustrating, but that's also a strength. If you have quality paper, you can erase and redraw charcoal forever. It's very direct — it's like direct impulses from the brain to the paper without technical concerns getting in the way. Graphite gets shiny, but charcoal is just pure shades of grey, which is what our visual sensation of things is, minus the color. So I think that's why it lends itself so well to achieving a sense of atmosphere, like black and white photography. "The Tunnel" EP: Though Chris van Allsburg's earliest children's books may have appeared too late to have been a part of your childhood, there is something in your charcoal work that is reminiscent of the strange scenarios he depicted in books like The Mysteries of Harris Burdick. Would you say van Allsburg's work has been an influence? AW: I have heard that several times. I admire his work, but I think the similarity is coincidental because I haven't spent very much time looking at it. "Flowerbed" EP: Your paintings are sometimes compared to those of contemporary art star John Currin, whose figurative work is more grotesque and sexual than yours, but probably shares a number of influences. While you seek to instill your subjects with a sense of dauntlessness and heroism, Currin usually appears to be satirizing or mocking his. How do you feel about that comparison? Is it a facile observation based mostly upon the dearth of figurative painters in the contemporary art scene, or do you see it as a valid correlation? AW: John Currin is definitely an influence. When I saw his retrospective at the Whitney in 2004, it really blew me away. I had forgotten that painting was supposed to be fun! Most of his paintings are a joke in the form of a caricature, yet he has obviously invested a huge amount of time and energy learning the skills of the Old Masters. That combination of virtuosity and prankishness is such a strange combination, it's what makes his work so unique and unexpected. "Drain Pipe" EP: You seem to have a fascination with tunnels. Is there some memory or image from your past that makes them particularly meaningful to you? AW: Not only tunnels, but holes and big black areas are things I keep returning to. As far as tunnels specifically, scenes from the movies The Fugitive and Kurosawa's Dreams made me feel the tunnel entrance was a very poignant image. It's a loaded symbol about death, as in a threshold between one reality and another, and rebirth, as in the start of an underground journey... which is full of symbolism itself. "The Lesson" EP: Many of your paintings began as ideas that occurred to you while reading novels. Could you tell me about a couple of those images, and what books inspired them? AW: Some books and poems have evoked feelings that I wanted to put in paintings. A poem by Charles Simic was in my head when I was working on a drawing called "The Lesson." His poems are more like stories, and that particular one is about a boy who goes bathing in a river. His clothes are stolen and he has to covertly run home naked at dusk as the city lights start to turn on. I was affected by the off-balance, in-betweenness of the situation. I love the idea of being in neither one place or another, but in-between, which is the feeling in the drawing. Other times, a few words from a novel spark an image I want to sketch. It's usually totally removed from the context of the story, and if it ever becomes a drawing or painting, the end result has very little to do with the original source. "Soldier" EP: The simple yet mysterious paintings of Edward Hopper have been among your strongest influences. Like yours, his lonely, psychologically isolated figures have a sense of being shaped by light – of having real form and weight – and they often appear to be facing up to some unwelcome truth. What do you find most compelling about Hopper's work? AW: You put it very well. What can I say about Hopper that hasn't been said? I love his characters' relationship to the environment, or lack of relationship. His people seem to be in another place in their heads... their empty expression is, I think, paradoxically what makes them feel like real people. One of my favorite paintings is of a woman sitting in an automat, with a big dark window behind her reflecting the overhead lights, extending out into infinity. There is so much mystery in that big dark space behind her. The lack of any specific narratives makes it so inviting to impose some of my own. "Rain" EP: What other painters or illustrators from the past move you powerfully, and what aspects of their work do you find most intriguing? AW: I go through phases of being influenced by different artists, but there are a few I keep returning to, like El Greco. I'm always moved by the strength of his compositions, the intense dark and light patterns, his energetic brushwork, and the way the figures are integrated into the environments. In regards to the relationship between nature and emotion, his paintings are emotional in every aspect. "River" EP: If you could have just one classic artwork from history in your studio, what would it be? AW: If you asked me again in a month it might be a different answer, but right now I wish I could have Bruegel's "Hunters In the Snow." "Ruth" EP: Is there anything else you're finding really inspiring right now? AW: I want to do something very big and very black, with a person emerging from the blackness. It's like a vision I've been having. "Dog" EP: You have a museum exhibition running from June 10th to August 22nd at the Bakersfield Museum of Art. If we venture up to Bakersfield, what can we expect to find? AW: 18 pieces, charcoal and oil paintings. It's a representation of the themes I have been exploring for the past 8 years or so. Collectors have loaned back some of my personal favorite works for the show, and there are also a few new pieces. "The Nightingale" EP: What's on the horizon for you? Hopes, dreams, plans for the future? AW: I want to make the best painting that has ever been made! Which of course is impossible, because there is no way to measure that, so I'm doomed to failure. More realistically, I want to feel inspired, and fulfill my own potential, which I don't think I have come close to doing yet. If I am able to resist external pressures, it will happen one day. "The Ending" Aron Wiesenfeld lives in San Diego and is represented by New York's premier figurative gallery, Arcadia Fine Arts. His exhibition at the Bakersfield Museum of Art opens on June 10th. In addition to the opening reception, there will be a preview talk, barbecue and live music, so it will be worth the trip! Hope you can make it.

This post is part of a weekly series showcasing inspirational vector art. Although the series showcases vector art, some work might just be vector inspired, not created completely with vector art. If you have any art suggestions, feel free to comment! For more vector art inspiration, check out the Vectips Flickr Group. winter mountains by …

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Taking the less-traveled path as an alternative to pursuing a career in medicine, emerging artist Tran Nguyen aspires to heal hearts and souls through her enigmatic imagery. With a nod to turn-of-the-century fairy tale illustration and the spare, muscular paintings of Phil Hale, she creates compelling images meant to stir the depths of our psyches and compel us to confront the unresolved questions within us. Though her next solo show, "The Synapse Between Here & There," opens on Saturday, July 16th at Thinkspace, she carved out some time last week to answer a few questions. "Treading Through an Untrimmed Memory" Erratic Phenomena: Your parents grew up in Cần Thơ, a city in Vietnam's Mekong Delta region, with conflicts between the Viet Cong, the Khmer Rouge, the North and South Vietnamese military and the United States raging across the landscape for much of their childhood. By the time you were born in 1987, life was quieter in Vietnam, but still economically challenging. When did your family emigrate to the United States, and what finally drove them from their homeland? Do you have any childhood memories of Vietnam? Tran Nguyen: My parents had a very harsh life, living in poverty from birth to adulthood. When my brothers and I were born, we lived in a small shack with dirt floors and had very little to eat. In 1990, my family was given the opportunity to migrate to the States. To the Vietnamese, the U.S. is a land of opportunity, so naturally we sold everything we had (our land, clothes, and house) to pay for the plane ride over. We literally came to the States with nothing, but with the help of the American government, donations, and my parents' hard work, we went from having nothing to having the finances to send me to Savannah College of Art and Design (which costs an arm and a leg). Unfortunately, I was three when we left, so I can't recall any early memories. EP: Tell me a bit about your experience of growing up in Augusta, Georgia. How did your family cope with the transition to a new culture? What activities did you find most satisfying when you were young? Tran: My parents deserve the utmost respect for having the courage to care for four rambunctious kids in an absolutely unfamiliar country and language. As everyone does, we adapted to the culture via trial and error. Timid in the new environment, my parents decided to situate the family in the countryside, which is probably why I'm more of the adventurer — being stuck in the middle of nowhere is exhausting. I was a rowdy kid, so I would climb trees, transformer boxes, fences and houses, as well as falling off of them, head-first. Oh, and I loved traveling, even if it was to the Walmart Superstore. To me, anywhere was somewhere. EP: One of your brothers was also artistic, and encouraged your creative instincts. Could you tell me more about your siblings, and the influence they had on the development of your persona and your vision? Tran: My oldest brother, Minh, was the one that sparked my interested in art. He drew these amazing renditions of Spawn, and like any kid sister, I wanted to be just like him. So, I made my own renditions of Sailor Moon, Rainbow Brite, and Care Bears. Unfortunately, my brother never pursued art, but fortunately, I did. My brothers and I were/are tightly knit. They're the catalyst in my endeavor to become an artist... I think I would have been a doctor if it wasn't for them. "The Man with the Occupied Hands" EP: A few years ago, your interest in psychology led you to read Bruce Moon's book Art and Soul, which brought you to a bit of an epiphany and focused your direction in life. Moon believes that art can help us contemplate our place in the universe, confront existential emptiness and search for understanding in the face of death. He concentrates on the therapeutic effect of making art, and teaches that stimulating the imagination fills the spiritual void and creates meaning in life. Could you tell me a bit more about the realization you came to when you first read Art and Soul? Tran: I've always wanted to help others, but with art, I didn't know how applicable it could be. Moon's writings elaborated on the whats and whys of art for the mind and spirit, laying out the principles of therapy through visuals. With that, I became more insightful with my ideas in creating imagery for the sake of the viewer, making sure my paintings were personable yet unspecific, aesthetically pleasing yet discomforting. "When You Leave Behind a Fragmented Memory" EP: There is a school of thought that maintains that artists can serve a function similar to that of shamans in indigenous cultures, mediating between the physical and spiritual realms, healing sicknesses of the spirit and guiding people toward their true path. Do you see yourself purposely attempting to guide people in their encounters with their inner world and the collective consciousness? Tran: Yes, it's to evoke introspection. I paint what I paint to target the inner depths of the psyche. I'm interested in rattling the unsettled emotions that we subconsciously keep in the very back of our minds, which in time will fester. Sooner or later, we'll have to tend to these unresolved emotions to sustain an able mentality. This is where (I hope) my imagery can be of use. EP: Why do you think you are so drawn to the idea of helping people through art? Could your impulse toward healing be partly motivated by the emotional trauma your family experienced during the years of conflict and deprivation in Vietnam, and their difficult transition to life in another culture? Tran: It's quite the opposite. Yes, my family had its share of hardship, but so have others. It's actually the compassion they've shown me that's fueled my use of art as a vehicle to help others. I've been very fortunate in life thus far, and I want the rest of the world, particularly the less-fortunate, to experience what I've experienced, learned, and loved. EP: Did you ever experience any racially charged situations when you were young, and if so, how do you think that conflict affected your outlook on the world, and your approach to your art? Tran: In the '90s, there were several incidents involving nasty racial slurs, but luckily, it wasn't an everyday obstacle. Since it was minuscule, there weren't significant dents made to my perspective as a person or an artist. EP: Though you are Vietnamese, most of the people you depict in your work appear to be Caucasian. Why do you think you make this choice? Tran: In college, I used to illustrate Asians in all of my work. Then a fellow classmate commented on its redundancy. Taking it in as a constructive criticism, I started painting features that weren't familiar to me. Recently, I've been trying to get the hang of painting dark-skinned figures. So far, I've been sucking. EP: One of your earliest influences was Gustav Klimt, whose symbolist approach to painting evoked his belief in sexual freedom and his interest in Freudian theory, among other things. From his own life experience, filled with tragedy and loss, Klimt was convinced of the impotence of the medical profession to heal either the body or soul, and he expressed some of that anger in his mural "Philosophy, Medicine and Jurisprudence." What excited you most about Klimt's work when you first saw it, and how has your relationship to it changed as you have evolved as an artist? Do you think he recognized the healing power of art? Tran: I was very superficial when I first came across Klimt's work. I only paid attention to his beautiful figures and patterns. As I matured and learned more about him, I realized the depth of his work, symbolism, and psychological intentions. Klimt's recognition of therapeutic imagery was on a personal level, in that he found art-making a vessel to paradise, releasing his own pain and frustration. As for me, there are traces of myself in my work but, ultimately, the imagery is created solely for the viewer, and not so much for my personal ordeals. I think we both agree that art is a rehabilitative tool, it's just that our intentions differ. "If the World Keeps Churning, Turning" EP: While your recent work is remarkable, especially for such a young painter, there is still something about it that is a bit careful and calculated. As an artist, could you ever see yourself embracing the kind of freedom, rebellion and emotional nakedness that makes Klimt's work so revelatory today, nearly 100 years after his death? Tran: I think as young artists, our primary focus is to hone our raw skills so that we can grasp art through a structured learning process. Then in later years, when we've overcome all the fundamentals of art, we unlearn them, become self-expressive, and paint as a child would, without artistic restraint. Just like Klimt and Picasso. This is where we paint purely with our "naked" mind. "Sleeping with a Constellation" EP: Like Klimt, you have taken to using the flat planes of gold leaf in your work, usually to create suspended geometric patterns which interact with the painted elements behind them. Though there is order and repetition in these floating grids, it is clear that they are physical — they shift position, cast shadows and slide between layers of the image behind them. How does the dimensional quality of gold leaf — raised flatness combined with the false depth of luster — "read" to you on an emotional level? Do these permeable curtains help you create a sort of tension between the viewer and the image? Tran: Definitely — the juxtaposition of flat shapes and rendered figures creates a surreal void, facilitating the idea that the painting is not a representation of a tangible world, but of a psychological one. These "permeable curtains" may be flat, but they are filled with symbolic depth, representing the clusters of feelings that make one complete emotion. The shapes also create spatial depth, which I find irrational, peculiar, yet intriguing. "Our Flutter-some Ordeal" EP: Gold leaf has a long history of use in Japanese art, such as the screen paintings of the Kanō and Rimpa schools, as well as many other Asian decorative traditions. Besides your reference to Klimt, are there also Asian cultural allusions in your use of gilded elements? Tran: Consciously, no. Then again, when I was younger, I do recall my fascination with the gold embroideries on Chinese blankets and the gold-embellished designs on Asian food packages. So subconsciously, maybe? EP: You generally work on paper in colored pencil and dilute washes of acrylic, which allows for the luminosity of watercolor, with a good deal more control. How did you come to settle on this technique? What do you find most enjoyable and most frustrating about your chosen medium? Tran: I emulated a lot of other artists when I was in school. After some fails, I decided to further my skills with acrylics by dedicating my "Drawing on a Theme" class to exploring its tendencies on different surfaces. Later, I found color pencil to be a remarkable sidekick. Acrylics generally act like watercolors, except watercolors lack in permanence and versatility. The only issue I have with it is its difficulties with building contrast. My technique is glazing, which is painstakingly time-consuming. However, the subtle gradients that I can achieve from it are something I haven't been able to find in other media. EP: Much of your work has a sensibility and atmosphere reminiscent of turn-of-the-century fantasy illustration, such as the work of Edmund Dulac and Maxfield Parrish. Are there particular illustrators from that era who have inspired you, and what aspects of their work do you find most compelling? Tran: Kay Nielsen, Arthur Rackham, and Elenore Abbott are among the many that I look to for inspiration. Nielsen and Abbott have this incredible ability to incorporate ornamental designs into their work, not to mention their sense of composition. As for Rackham, I'm compelled by the eerie and dark moods he's able to depict in his illustrations. EP: Like many of your contemporaries, including Eric Fortune and João Ruas, you have been deeply influenced by the muscular, dynamic paintings of Phil Hale. What qualities of his work speak to you most profoundly? Tran: What intrigues me about Hale's paintings are his static yet dynamic figures. They're sharp, vibrant, tense, yet simultaneously stiff. No only that, but I've always had great respect for artists who execute negative space effectively. EP: For many traditional Asian families who are struggling hard to succeed in life, it is difficult to conceive of painting as a viable profession. How hard was it to convince your parents that you needed to study art? With the success you've had so far, have they begun to realize that you took the right path? Tran: You've no idea. Like most Asian parents, they wanted me to be a doctor, so I could offer medical service for the locals back home. Can't say they were filled with rainbows and bunnies when I told them I wanted to paint for a living, but of course, my parents are awesome and understanding. Once I had shown them how hard I was willing to work, they stopped their badgering and gave me their trust. EP: Is there an underappreciated artist working today whom you wish would get more attention? Tran: I don't know if I would say he's under-appreciated, but I'd love for him to get more attention — Vincent Hui. He creates these esoteric visuals of clustered figures that are usually erratic. EP: If you could have just one classic artwork from history in your studio, what would it be? Tran: That's like asking me who I would choose to save if the house was burning down. Hmmm, well, I would have to say Bastien-Lepage's "Joan of Arc." I saw it in person and it's EPIC. EP: Is there anything else you're finding really inspiring right now? Tran: The Illustration Master Class. I had the privilege of attending the workshop last month, and it's the most artistically invigorating week I've had in a very, very long time. Spending a week making art around others who share your passion is a remarkable experience. Before leaving for the trip, I was hitting brick walls while working on my upcoming solo show, so the experience helped rekindle my creativity. EP: Tell me a bit about what we can expect to see at your upcoming Thinkspace solo show, "The Synapse Between Here & There." Are there specific aspects of the psyche that you've been mining for this exhibition? Tran: Oh, yes — the show prominently focuses on the conditions of the psyche. "The Synapse Between Here & There" is a further development of the concept behind my previous show, "Nurturing the Uneased Soul." Instead of focusing on the tribulations in life, I'm interested in representing the human mind, in physical form, as it responses to a universal circumstance. It's the personification of a psychological impulse, with a splash of surrealism and a pint of fantasy. "What the World Doesn't Know" EP: Hopes, dreams, plans for the future? Tran: Conquer the (art) world. Tran Nguyen's next solo show, "The Synapse Between Here & There," opens on Saturday, July 16th at Thinkspace in Culver City.

When I first saw one of Aron Wiesenfeld's charcoal drawings at the Los Angeles Art Show, I was immediately struck by two things — its ominous, enigmatic emotive power, and how much his use of light reminded me of Edward Hopper. I was overcome with such joy to see something that was so suffused with feeling and significance — at an art fair — that the image has haunted me ever since. Unlocking the subconscious reservoirs of the spirit should be the highest goal of art, but few painters in the "highbrow" art world have the courage to attempt it. "Train Tunnel" The latter-day philosopher Rebecca Solnit once wrote, "That thing the nature of which is totally unknown to you is usually what you need to find, and finding it is a matter of getting lost." To see oneself clearly — to step outside oneself altogether, and be free of all the baggage we carry through life, one must venture beyond the boundaries of comfort and security. Mystery, disorientation, fear — these are primal sensations that rouse the imagination. Aron once said, "I think it is necessary to leave unanswered questions in a painting... if it is not fully knowable, the truth it holds changes over time and the painting becomes like a living thing." Like waking up in a strange city or losing the trail deep in the woods, Aron's work provokes us to do our own mythmaking, opening our minds to the unknown. "William" Despite the fact that he's been busy preparing for his first museum exhibit, which opens on June 10th at the Bakersfield Museum of Art, Aron graciously took the time to share some insight into his work. Erratic Phenomena: You were born in Washington, D.C. and spent much of your childhood in Santa Cruz, California. Tell me a bit about your experience of growing up. Was anyone in your family an artist? What made you happiest when you were a boy? Aron Wiesenfeld: My grandmother was an artist — she painted watercolors. I remember her telling me that kids' drawings were always better than grown-ups', and that was very encouraging. So I felt I had carte blanche to do whatever I wanted, and I could always expect her to say, "That's wonderful!" She even made etchings from the drawings my brother and I did. My mom was also supportive of our artistic endeavors. She taped up all our drawings on the walls. The kitchen and dining room walls were literally filled with our drawings. So my creative seeds were very well watered. We also had some prints on the walls by artists like Rembrandt, Dürer, and Sorolla, and I think I was lucky just to know what great art looked like. I was kind of a loner as a kid. Not painfully so, but I was just as happy spending hours alone building models or whatever as I was playing with other kids. I remember building things a lot, so I guess that is what made me happiest. They were often very ambitious projects, like a three-story fort with a deck in the backyard. I think my work process now is like building — the joy of it is in seeing it grow and what it will become. "Flood" EP: You first began drawing when you were 12, inspired by comics like Conan the Barbarian. Tell me a bit about what you liked to draw when you first began creating images from your imagination. AW: A friend introduced me to comics in fifth grade, and I became obsessed. I always loved the medium. You can read a comic at your own pace, and you have to connect the pictures in your head to make the story happen, so the reader is a participant in the creation of the story. I was really into fantasy stuff, like D&D and Frazetta, and that was my initial inspiration to draw. Then I saw what Frank Miller was doing, and that made me interested in how the medium can be used to tell the story using a sequence of images — what to show and what to leave to the imagination. Becoming a comic book artist was something I had to do, and I pursued that goal tenaciously. I would give myself assignments — for example, I would have to draw a fist from every angle, and then I would have to draw each of those fists as if they were lit by a different light source. It was a bit obsessive-compulsive, but it paid off. "Landfall" EP: Throughout the '90s, you pursued a career as a comic book artist, with your peak coming in 1997 with the publication of the two-issue crossover comic Deathblow and Wolverine. Then, to the perplexity and consternation of many comics fans, you suddenly stopped drawing comics, went back to art school, and emerged a painter. What precipitated this sudden change of direction? AW: The comic book business is set up to crank out a huge amount of a cheap and disposable product. I was elated when I was first hired, and then horrified when I saw my work in print a few months later. The inker had butchered it, the coloring was terrible, the writer filled all my negative space with word balloons, and the printing sucked. I learned how to compensate for some of those things later, but those kinds of problems were always there. I think people who have long careers as comic book artists just learn to tolerate it, but I couldn't. The end came when I thought I would finally have control over all the aspects of Deathblow and Wolverine, and so I put everything I had into that project... When I saw it printed, the color was completely washed out, and the editors had changed a lot of dialogue without my knowledge. So that was it for me. I did a few other projects after that, but it was just too heartbreaking to let comics continue to be the focus of my work. "Girl with Dog" EP: Much of your work concerns young people persevering in the face of peril and uncertainty, a perennial theme of children's literature. Were there particular books you read as a child which impressed you with the potency of that narrative? AW: I think I had the usual books as a child... but Maurice Sendak's books left an impression. My favorite was In The Night Kitchen. (Who knew you could make an airplane out of bread dough? At 3 years old, I believed it was possible. I wish I was still that gullible.) Looking back at some of the books I had as a child has been very inspirational. Lately, I have been having a great time getting reacquainted with Richard Scarry. Other authors that deal with those themes of unchaperoned youth have been thought-provoking, like Lewis Carroll, Miyazaki and Edward Gorey. "The Delegate's Daughter" EP: In your work, the human figures – usually girls – have a palpable energy and power, but are placed in situations that emphasize their vulnerability. Fiercely determined, they face adversity head-on, despite their obvious lack of preparation. Although this is a very compelling idea, it's a rather uncommon subject in painting. Why do you choose to represent young women as heroes? AW: I don't know why exactly. On the surface, a lone woman is more physically vulnerable to harm than a man, and the hero has to be vulnerable. A friend told me I paint women because they are more internal, and that seems true. It's important to me that the characters have internal lives and stories. The images start out as notions that struck me for whatever reason. I don't give a lot of thought to what they mean or what the story is before I start, but things happen when I'm working. Accidents are always the elements that stimulate growth, it's like evolution. Right now I'm working on a drawing of a little girl... When I started it, I quickly scribbled in the facial features, and the way the mouth looked made me think it was like my grandmother as a girl, so that's the direction the drawing took. I try to pay attention to those accidents — I think interpreting accidents can be a way to release imagery from the unconscious, kind of like interpreting a Rorschach test. "David" EP: Over the past couple of years, you have moved away from painting realistic figures, and begun drawing from the imagination, rather than photo references. Your figures have become lithe and attenuated, at times achieving a prepubescent lankiness and at others a sinuous grace. You use light to give your subjects a very solid, dimensional feeling, and your low horizon line and flat backgrounds often make them seem as if they could be standing in front of an old-fashioned painted backdrop. Tell me a bit about the evolution of your aesthetic, and what these choices represent in your conceptual landscape. AW: I really want the figure to feel monumental, in a sculptural, larger-than-life kind of way, so that the viewer is confronted with the character as if it were a real person. One moment of discovery happened when I was drawing a boy in a Batman costume out in a windy field. I liked the subject, but I didn't feel like I was connecting with the character — in that context he was just a "type." So I wiped it out, redrew him in the center of the paper as big as possible, and it immediately worked. With the focus entirely on him, it allowed me to develop him as a subjective individual. I think a character has to have the type and the individual working against each other to be interesting. "Early" EP: Many of your paintings feel like a moment in a dream. Is dreaming important to your conceptual process? AW: Dreams are one of the sources of ideas, but there are a lot of sources. I think any artist has to have an access to the unconscious, and for me that access is granted slowly as I work — drawing and redrawing an image, stepping back to consider, and letting the image take on a life of its own. It's very rare that an initial idea makes it to the final stage completely intact. "The Gathering" EP: You once said, "The desire to see into the unknown is what inspires me the most." Why do you think the life of the imagination is so compelling for us today? Are we wired for wonder, and therefore driven to pursue the unknown and intangible as a substitute for the very real mysteries our forebears contemplated? AW: The best explanation I have heard was from Jonathan Miller, who did a PBS series about religion. He said that when our ancestors heard a noise in the dark, they didn't ask, "What's that?" They asked, "Who's that?" — which was an important distinction, because a "who" was probably much more dangerous than a "what." From that question, maybe we can explain the birth of myths and gods in the minds of our ancestors. Trying to come up with explanations about strangers in the dark has been fertile ground for storytellers ever since, so maybe it is still in our DNA to ask, "Who's that?" when we hear a noise in the dark. "The Fish Gatherer" EP: While your ominous landscapes sometimes betray their modernity with telltales like power poles and buses, there is something quite timeless about them that reminds me a bit of the windswept, atmospheric paintings of Caspar David Friedrich. Tell me about your relationship with the landscape and your emotional perspective on the forces of nature. AW: Landscape is a manifestation of our emotions — we all understand this without explanation. Nature is a language. Virgin snow, a fallow cornfield, steep cliffs... in a work of art, it is a priori knowledge that these things are metaphors about people. In a way, nature is a bunch of symbols just sitting there waiting to be used. Despite their apparent naturalism, Caspar David Friedrich's paintings were all invented in his studio. He used the language of nature to communicate about internal conditions, relationships, politics, and religion. "Suspended" EP: Charcoal is a limited and notoriously tricky medium, yet you use it to create large, detailed compositions. What attributes does charcoal have that make it one of your most trusted tools? AW: It's a very easily changeable medium, which can be frustrating, but that's also a strength. If you have quality paper, you can erase and redraw charcoal forever. It's very direct — it's like direct impulses from the brain to the paper without technical concerns getting in the way. Graphite gets shiny, but charcoal is just pure shades of grey, which is what our visual sensation of things is, minus the color. So I think that's why it lends itself so well to achieving a sense of atmosphere, like black and white photography. "The Tunnel" EP: Though Chris van Allsburg's earliest children's books may have appeared too late to have been a part of your childhood, there is something in your charcoal work that is reminiscent of the strange scenarios he depicted in books like The Mysteries of Harris Burdick. Would you say van Allsburg's work has been an influence? AW: I have heard that several times. I admire his work, but I think the similarity is coincidental because I haven't spent very much time looking at it. "Flowerbed" EP: Your paintings are sometimes compared to those of contemporary art star John Currin, whose figurative work is more grotesque and sexual than yours, but probably shares a number of influences. While you seek to instill your subjects with a sense of dauntlessness and heroism, Currin usually appears to be satirizing or mocking his. How do you feel about that comparison? Is it a facile observation based mostly upon the dearth of figurative painters in the contemporary art scene, or do you see it as a valid correlation? AW: John Currin is definitely an influence. When I saw his retrospective at the Whitney in 2004, it really blew me away. I had forgotten that painting was supposed to be fun! Most of his paintings are a joke in the form of a caricature, yet he has obviously invested a huge amount of time and energy learning the skills of the Old Masters. That combination of virtuosity and prankishness is such a strange combination, it's what makes his work so unique and unexpected. "Drain Pipe" EP: You seem to have a fascination with tunnels. Is there some memory or image from your past that makes them particularly meaningful to you? AW: Not only tunnels, but holes and big black areas are things I keep returning to. As far as tunnels specifically, scenes from the movies The Fugitive and Kurosawa's Dreams made me feel the tunnel entrance was a very poignant image. It's a loaded symbol about death, as in a threshold between one reality and another, and rebirth, as in the start of an underground journey... which is full of symbolism itself. "The Lesson" EP: Many of your paintings began as ideas that occurred to you while reading novels. Could you tell me about a couple of those images, and what books inspired them? AW: Some books and poems have evoked feelings that I wanted to put in paintings. A poem by Charles Simic was in my head when I was working on a drawing called "The Lesson." His poems are more like stories, and that particular one is about a boy who goes bathing in a river. His clothes are stolen and he has to covertly run home naked at dusk as the city lights start to turn on. I was affected by the off-balance, in-betweenness of the situation. I love the idea of being in neither one place or another, but in-between, which is the feeling in the drawing. Other times, a few words from a novel spark an image I want to sketch. It's usually totally removed from the context of the story, and if it ever becomes a drawing or painting, the end result has very little to do with the original source. "Soldier" EP: The simple yet mysterious paintings of Edward Hopper have been among your strongest influences. Like yours, his lonely, psychologically isolated figures have a sense of being shaped by light – of having real form and weight – and they often appear to be facing up to some unwelcome truth. What do you find most compelling about Hopper's work? AW: You put it very well. What can I say about Hopper that hasn't been said? I love his characters' relationship to the environment, or lack of relationship. His people seem to be in another place in their heads... their empty expression is, I think, paradoxically what makes them feel like real people. One of my favorite paintings is of a woman sitting in an automat, with a big dark window behind her reflecting the overhead lights, extending out into infinity. There is so much mystery in that big dark space behind her. The lack of any specific narratives makes it so inviting to impose some of my own. "Rain" EP: What other painters or illustrators from the past move you powerfully, and what aspects of their work do you find most intriguing? AW: I go through phases of being influenced by different artists, but there are a few I keep returning to, like El Greco. I'm always moved by the strength of his compositions, the intense dark and light patterns, his energetic brushwork, and the way the figures are integrated into the environments. In regards to the relationship between nature and emotion, his paintings are emotional in every aspect. "River" EP: If you could have just one classic artwork from history in your studio, what would it be? AW: If you asked me again in a month it might be a different answer, but right now I wish I could have Bruegel's "Hunters In the Snow." "Ruth" EP: Is there anything else you're finding really inspiring right now? AW: I want to do something very big and very black, with a person emerging from the blackness. It's like a vision I've been having. "Dog" EP: You have a museum exhibition running from June 10th to August 22nd at the Bakersfield Museum of Art. If we venture up to Bakersfield, what can we expect to find? AW: 18 pieces, charcoal and oil paintings. It's a representation of the themes I have been exploring for the past 8 years or so. Collectors have loaned back some of my personal favorite works for the show, and there are also a few new pieces. "The Nightingale" EP: What's on the horizon for you? Hopes, dreams, plans for the future? AW: I want to make the best painting that has ever been made! Which of course is impossible, because there is no way to measure that, so I'm doomed to failure. More realistically, I want to feel inspired, and fulfill my own potential, which I don't think I have come close to doing yet. If I am able to resist external pressures, it will happen one day. "The Ending" Aron Wiesenfeld lives in San Diego and is represented by New York's premier figurative gallery, Arcadia Fine Arts. His exhibition at the Bakersfield Museum of Art opens on June 10th. In addition to the opening reception, there will be a preview talk, barbecue and live music, so it will be worth the trip! Hope you can make it.

I'm guessing that for you, life may seem a colorless and shopworn thing, because you have not yet discovered the World of Kelly Vivanco. I've hesitated to write about Kelly because her work means so much to me, and I certainly won't be able to do justice to it. With that caveat, here I go... Kelly grew up in suburban SoCal and now paints (and draws cartoon rodents) in North County San Diego. She is a studio artist at Distinction Gallery in Escondido, and she will be part of an upcoming show at Thinkspace called "Uncommon Gardens" that opens on May 9, 2008. Once upon a time, I happened across one of Kelly's paintings at Thinkspace, and I just couldn't stop looking at it. It was beautiful, mysterious, and slightly surreal. The colors were otherworldly and the technique was masterful. It combined the classical qualities of a turn-of-the century fairy tale illustration with an environment reminiscent of ruins on a distant planet. To me, this combination was utterly delicious, so although I had come to Thinkspace to check out something else, I couldn't leave without buying "Alcove." As it happened, that purchase kicked my art addiction into a new gear, and by the end of the year, I had a house full of Kelly's work. Unlike many artists you'll encounter these days, Kelly Vivanco doesn't have a narrow specialty – she paints portraits, tableaux and scenarios; women, children and animals; fantasies, dreams and enigmas. Emotionally, she covers a wide territory – whimsy and silliness, wonder and longing, apprehension and daring, sauciness and pride. Though her technique varies quite a bit from piece to piece, her work is distinctive and instantly identifiable. In a recent interview with the webzine Creep Machine, Kelly spoke about how her style came together. "I used to think my work looked a bit schizophrenic. It took an effort to eventually congeal. I am inspired by old photos, vintage things, quirkiness, decay, animals, colors and moods… if that makes sense. I try to get a certain feeling going in the look and atmosphere of a painting." In many of Kelly's paintings, it is the eyes that grab you first – they are liquid pools of emotion that lend a storyline to even the simplest portrait. Looking into the eyes of the heroine in "Her Favorite Red," one can't help but conjure up explanations for such naked expression. Creating images is an intuitive sort of experience for Kelly. Though she takes inspiration from children's books and vintage photographs, the animal world and dream imagery, she doesn't seem to be entirely sure where the scenes she paints arise from. “I have been drawing and painting and making stuff since I was little. I would make a nest of paper, crayons, markers and other materials wherever I sat down. I used to draw subterranean cities and space warrens at home and in class and was fed by praise, I guess because I drew well.” “I guess people are surprised that I don’t have some elaborate back-story for my paintings. They take shape spontaneously and organically and aren’t full of fancy meaning. I like to paint and see where it goes. I often don’t have answers to questions posed by my finished works. People ask me what a painting is about, I just ask them what they think it’s about. Their answer is as valid as mine, in my opinion.” Kelly's "Constellation" is a piece that always elicits a strong response from those who view it. From the moment I first saw the painting, I felt an affinity with it. I immediately recognized in it the surreal logic of dreams, and I am always on the lookout for dream paintings that resonate on my frequency. It also reminded me of one of Sir John Tenniel's illustrations for Through the Looking-Glass, yet when I mentioned it to Kelly, she said she didn't remember that drawing from the book. "New Growth" is another dark, enigmatic piece that is part of Kelly's "Dispatch from the Peppermint Forest" series. The nestlike swirling grass is mesmerizing, the light effects are amazing, and the scene is so mysterious that it invites endless speculation. One can't help imagining what sort of strange, harshly lit underworld the peppermint seedling is emerging from. This painting hangs next to my bed, so it's the last thing I see as I turn out the light. I enjoy interesting dreams! One of the most impressive aspects of Kelly's work is the quality and variety of expression in her subjects. "Sky" instantly brings to mind speculations about the person who has left this young aviatrix behind, seemingly having flown away, probably in a biplane. I speculate that he is heading to a dangerous place and will be gone for some time, because she looks rather worried and wistful already. Kelly says she based this face on a sculpture she saw in the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, and the comparison is striking. I have always been intrigued by this young woman's bold attitude and eye for adventure. She is clearly ready to take on all comers, as they say. I think she may be undertaking an arctic expedition to retrieve a mysterious alien artifact. "Lens with the Fur Hood" is the sort of painting I want to look at every morning as I'm leaving the house, just to put the right face on the day. As I see it, the intrepid, cocky stance of the girl in this piece is rarely seen in art, and I find it incredibly compelling. These days, paintings of women tend toward the seductive and sensual or the ornamental and vulnerable – and there is a profusion of states of being that aren't seeing much canvas. (One of my theories is that most art buyers are men, who most likely prefer their women with less attitude, and sales tend to influence future subject matter.) Personally, I prefer women who are spirited. Plucky. Perhaps even a little prickly. (So if I'm right, what we need is more women buying art!) The headstrong tomboy in "Thistle" is a recurring character in Kelly's work, a phenomenon I have noted in many of her paintings. “The same fictional girls would reappear and I would do it completely unintentionally. I would look at one painting up in my studio and then across to another earlier painting and see the same girl at different ages. I don’t use models or try to portray anyone in particular, but the same ‘characters’ keep coming up unintentionally. I am sure a psychologist would have a field day with that, but tell them to keep their findings to themselves. I prefer the mystery.” For example, a few months ago, I came into possession of Kelly's charming "No Bother"... ...and kept having the nagging feeling this girl seemed rather familiar. Eventually, I decided that she must be an older version of the girl in "Pink Molecules." I'll let Kelly Vivanco finish off this little survey of my appreciation of her paintings with a philosophical statement that may shed some light on what makes her work is so fresh and intriguing. "Do it for yourself. If you draw or paint to please other people, you will always be dissatisfied and unsure. One can never really know what anyone else will think. If you do it for yourself, and avoid the fear of ‘looking stupid’ or ‘doing it wrong’ you will get lost in the process and then the amazing stuff happens." "Undercurrent"

The Tower of Beowulf an action-packed novelization of the ancient poem by an author who received rave reviews from heavyweights like Robert Jordan, Terry Brooks, and Morgan Llwelyn.

I'm guessing that for you, life may seem a colorless and shopworn thing, because you have not yet discovered the World of Kelly Vivanco. I've hesitated to write about Kelly because her work means so much to me, and I certainly won't be able to do justice to it. With that caveat, here I go... Kelly grew up in suburban SoCal and now paints (and draws cartoon rodents) in North County San Diego. She is a studio artist at Distinction Gallery in Escondido, and she will be part of an upcoming show at Thinkspace called "Uncommon Gardens" that opens on May 9, 2008. Once upon a time, I happened across one of Kelly's paintings at Thinkspace, and I just couldn't stop looking at it. It was beautiful, mysterious, and slightly surreal. The colors were otherworldly and the technique was masterful. It combined the classical qualities of a turn-of-the century fairy tale illustration with an environment reminiscent of ruins on a distant planet. To me, this combination was utterly delicious, so although I had come to Thinkspace to check out something else, I couldn't leave without buying "Alcove." As it happened, that purchase kicked my art addiction into a new gear, and by the end of the year, I had a house full of Kelly's work. Unlike many artists you'll encounter these days, Kelly Vivanco doesn't have a narrow specialty – she paints portraits, tableaux and scenarios; women, children and animals; fantasies, dreams and enigmas. Emotionally, she covers a wide territory – whimsy and silliness, wonder and longing, apprehension and daring, sauciness and pride. Though her technique varies quite a bit from piece to piece, her work is distinctive and instantly identifiable. In a recent interview with the webzine Creep Machine, Kelly spoke about how her style came together. "I used to think my work looked a bit schizophrenic. It took an effort to eventually congeal. I am inspired by old photos, vintage things, quirkiness, decay, animals, colors and moods… if that makes sense. I try to get a certain feeling going in the look and atmosphere of a painting." In many of Kelly's paintings, it is the eyes that grab you first – they are liquid pools of emotion that lend a storyline to even the simplest portrait. Looking into the eyes of the heroine in "Her Favorite Red," one can't help but conjure up explanations for such naked expression. Creating images is an intuitive sort of experience for Kelly. Though she takes inspiration from children's books and vintage photographs, the animal world and dream imagery, she doesn't seem to be entirely sure where the scenes she paints arise from. “I have been drawing and painting and making stuff since I was little. I would make a nest of paper, crayons, markers and other materials wherever I sat down. I used to draw subterranean cities and space warrens at home and in class and was fed by praise, I guess because I drew well.” “I guess people are surprised that I don’t have some elaborate back-story for my paintings. They take shape spontaneously and organically and aren’t full of fancy meaning. I like to paint and see where it goes. I often don’t have answers to questions posed by my finished works. People ask me what a painting is about, I just ask them what they think it’s about. Their answer is as valid as mine, in my opinion.” Kelly's "Constellation" is a piece that always elicits a strong response from those who view it. From the moment I first saw the painting, I felt an affinity with it. I immediately recognized in it the surreal logic of dreams, and I am always on the lookout for dream paintings that resonate on my frequency. It also reminded me of one of Sir John Tenniel's illustrations for Through the Looking-Glass, yet when I mentioned it to Kelly, she said she didn't remember that drawing from the book. "New Growth" is another dark, enigmatic piece that is part of Kelly's "Dispatch from the Peppermint Forest" series. The nestlike swirling grass is mesmerizing, the light effects are amazing, and the scene is so mysterious that it invites endless speculation. One can't help imagining what sort of strange, harshly lit underworld the peppermint seedling is emerging from. This painting hangs next to my bed, so it's the last thing I see as I turn out the light. I enjoy interesting dreams! One of the most impressive aspects of Kelly's work is the quality and variety of expression in her subjects. "Sky" instantly brings to mind speculations about the person who has left this young aviatrix behind, seemingly having flown away, probably in a biplane. I speculate that he is heading to a dangerous place and will be gone for some time, because she looks rather worried and wistful already. Kelly says she based this face on a sculpture she saw in the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, and the comparison is striking. I have always been intrigued by this young woman's bold attitude and eye for adventure. She is clearly ready to take on all comers, as they say. I think she may be undertaking an arctic expedition to retrieve a mysterious alien artifact. "Lens with the Fur Hood" is the sort of painting I want to look at every morning as I'm leaving the house, just to put the right face on the day. As I see it, the intrepid, cocky stance of the girl in this piece is rarely seen in art, and I find it incredibly compelling. These days, paintings of women tend toward the seductive and sensual or the ornamental and vulnerable – and there is a profusion of states of being that aren't seeing much canvas. (One of my theories is that most art buyers are men, who most likely prefer their women with less attitude, and sales tend to influence future subject matter.) Personally, I prefer women who are spirited. Plucky. Perhaps even a little prickly. (So if I'm right, what we need is more women buying art!) The headstrong tomboy in "Thistle" is a recurring character in Kelly's work, a phenomenon I have noted in many of her paintings. “The same fictional girls would reappear and I would do it completely unintentionally. I would look at one painting up in my studio and then across to another earlier painting and see the same girl at different ages. I don’t use models or try to portray anyone in particular, but the same ‘characters’ keep coming up unintentionally. I am sure a psychologist would have a field day with that, but tell them to keep their findings to themselves. I prefer the mystery.” For example, a few months ago, I came into possession of Kelly's charming "No Bother"... ...and kept having the nagging feeling this girl seemed rather familiar. Eventually, I decided that she must be an older version of the girl in "Pink Molecules." I'll let Kelly Vivanco finish off this little survey of my appreciation of her paintings with a philosophical statement that may shed some light on what makes her work is so fresh and intriguing. "Do it for yourself. If you draw or paint to please other people, you will always be dissatisfied and unsure. One can never really know what anyone else will think. If you do it for yourself, and avoid the fear of ‘looking stupid’ or ‘doing it wrong’ you will get lost in the process and then the amazing stuff happens." "Undercurrent"

They say that visual arts like drawing, painting and even sculpting starts with the drawing of a line. What if the line itself became the entire art? For

I consider Tiffany Bozic to be more than a painter — she also is a science junkie, expert bird-skinner and wanderlust-stricken natural philosopher who transmogrifies her unique intimacy with rare and wonderful things into exquisite visual poetry about spiritual evolution and our relationship with nature. In anticipation of her upcoming exhibition, which opens on November 11th at Joshua Liner Gallery in New York, we decided to share this interview, conducted earlier this year for the Heroes & Villains book — which is scheduled for release in the spring. "Under My Skin" Erratic Phenomena: Tell me a bit about your early childhood on a goat farm in Russellville, Arkansas. Was your family part of the back-to-the-land movement? Was that era of your life carefree, or was there a darker undertone to rural life on the edge of the Ozarks? Tiffany Bozic: My mother was raised on a farm and couldn’t get it out of her system, so she talked my father into moving down to Arkansas, where land was tremendously affordable. Though some of our fondest thoughts took place on the farm, it was also unbearably difficult and traumatic at times, because of the rising cost of feed and utilities. We were poor, and there was just too much for my parents to do, working full-time jobs and taking care of 350 goats, horses, pigs, three kids, etc. Like so many children, I lived in a fantasy world and had complete freedom to dream and explore, so it is easy for me to romanticize it. Some of my first memories were of animals giving birth, and of taking the animals — ones that we had given names to — to the slaughterhouse. I came to accept that this was just a part of life. In the end, we had to sell off all the animals, load up all of our belongings in two trucks, and abandon the farm. We drove up to Cleveland hoping for a fresh start, and it was there I spent the rest of my childhood. "The Birds and the Bees" EP: You've said you still long for the sense of communion with animals that you had as a child, when you felt they were telling you their secrets. Mark Ryden speaks of recapturing the state of childhood in which we see "a world ensouled," when it feels as if we have a direct connection to the life force of the universe. Is that sense of wonder something you can still access when you need to? TB: Well, I don’t think of it in exactly the same way, but I do believe that I was born with a heightened sense of this feeling that everything is connected. In ways, this feeling has been a lifelong companion, and now I trust it more than ever as I continue to cultivate my relationship to my work. "She Will Supply" EP: In the past, you've recalled early memories of drawing at the kitchen table with your older brother and sister. Tell me a bit about those early artistic explorations, and how they made you feel. TB: My parents were interesting characters and encouraged us to enjoy creating. My mother, in particular, was a gifted artist, but unfortunately she didn’t have time to pursue her talents. My brother and sister were both very good at drawing as well, but I guess I was the only one that left my childhood thinking that this was the only way I could live, for better or worse. "Finding Real" EP: When you were six, your electrician father and schoolteacher mother moved your family to Cleveland. Was relocating from the country to the city a difficult experience? Do you think perhaps your current state of being — living in San Francisco, while longing to travel to remote, wild places — was influenced by that early psychological and geographic transition? TB: Well, once we got to Cleveland there were a number of difficult emotional transitions that I underwent, and therefore I never truly felt at home in Cleveland — which is why I left for the west coast at such a young age. Early on, I saw myself as a citizen of the world, and after traveling and developing friendships with people from all over the world, I feel this is especially true now. I don’t think there is a ‘home’ left for me. My home resides in the people I love. "Shaped by Reaction" EP: Do you remember when you first became fascinated with naturalism? Did scientific observation of living things seem almost second nature to you, or was there something in particular that first sparked your interest? TB: Because I was so heavily immersed in nature as a child, it is hard for me to separate myself from it, or define if there was ever a moment that it sort of clicked over for me. My parents were nature lovers, and I’ve always been drawn towards others who feel the same sense of captivation and wonder with the natural world. "Unison" EP: Harkening back to the sublime artistry of naturalists like John James Audubon and Ernst Haeckel, there was once a time when art and science were almost inextricably bound together. You've endeavored to relink them in your work, with your adventures in Papua New Guinea with a team of biologists, and your collaboration with the California Academy of Sciences. How were you first inspired to take these ostensibly documentary-style images and transform them into surreal elegies about human emotion and the vanishing natural world? TB: I suppose it all came together quite organically, as a result of me being a bit of a science groupie. Just kidding — I am very grateful to be a part of a group of incredibly interesting people who are motivated by a sense of playful excitement. I am a student of life and am constantly turning stones searching for a way to translate my emotions through my work. For now, my subconscious has taken over and has cast little critters to star in my psychological thrillers. But who knows how long this will continue. "Fading Rose" EP: Your life with your ornithologist husband has recently taken you to a number of remote, exotic locales where you can observe rare species firsthand, and often literally in your hand. As a result, you are one of the very few people painting the natural world today who have such an intimate connection with their subject. How have these experiences changed you as a person, and as an artist? TB: What this has meant for me personally and in my work has been extremely profound. When I see an artist depict something that they may not actually be familiar with, I can tell right away. Even though Audubon and Haeckel spent a lot of time outdoors studying the personality and characteristics of their subjects, there was still a lot of blank space to fill. To capture all the detail, oftentimes Audubon had to resort to referencing dead specimens, and you can occasionally see it in the unnatural way he posed his birds. To his credit, usually only birders can notice the difference. Haeckel overcame this through sheer genius. For example, where only small parts of animals were dredged up from the bottom of the sea, and because they were new to science, he had to sort of let his imagination take care of the rest. Which is what I feel makes his work truly awesome and full of spirit. Getting the chance to observe nature firsthand is not always easy to do, and happens in varying degrees for most realist painters, myself included. Most of us — not just artists — feel so separate from not only the outdoors, but from the very idea that we are in fact animals. I imagine it wouldn’t be too difficult to find one grown adult in each American city today who has never actually held a chicken or touched a cow, yet they may consume one every day. "Barrens of Suburbia" EP: Working in acrylic washes on maple panels, you achieve a soft translucency that allows the natural glow of the wood to shine through. How did you arrive at this somewhat unusual technique? What do you find to be the advantages and disadvantages of working this way? TB: I dropped out of art school right after my first year, so this is just a self-taught game of trial and error. I first started exploring acrylic on wood in 1999, and somehow the medium has kept my interest until now. I still find it challenging, unforgiving, and truthfully, there are no short cuts. I think if it were easy for me, I would tire quickly and move on to something else. In many ways, the actual technical process I’ve developed over the years more closely resembles using watercolor than acrylic. I like the way the paint shimmers on the wood — there is an interesting depth that I can create on the surface with this technique that would be hard (or impossible) to create any other way. "Untitled" EP: You once revealed that your mouse-sphere painting was an attempt to describe what you call the "little big dream," in which everything seems microscopically tiny and infinitely huge at the same time. Though rarely described, I think this is a fairly universal and very powerful archetype. Could you describe your conceptual process on this piece — what choices you made in searching for a way to convey that abstract idea? TB: I made this painting after my husband and I spent some time up in northern California studying spotted owls. We were quietly crawling through redwoods and ferns under pitch darkness, calling them in with hoots. As part of our study, we would hold out a white mouse on a short stick, to see if the owls would swoop down and take it from us. Then we would watch to see if they would either eat it right away, or not. If they flew off with it, it would tell us whether or not they have a chick to feed. If they ate the mouse, well, they were hungry. The “little big dream” is filled with anxiety and intense loneliness, and a great feeling of claustrophobia at the same time. I had this dream brewing in my mind ever since I was a child, so I thought at the time that this experience with the owls could help me explain that mood somehow. So I ‘saved’ one of the mice, named him Number Two and took him home from this trip with us to keep as a model for this painting. Sometimes you just need a little help from a friend, and I couldn’t have done it without him. "Eat or Be Eaten" EP: From time to time, you employ a certain stylization reminiscent of Henri Rousseau's jungle fever-dreams. Would you say that his aesthetic or ideas have informed your work in any way? TB: When I was a little girl, I saw a painting by Henri Rousseau of a tiger attacking a water buffalo at the Cleveland Museum of Art, and I remember at the time thinking, “I see like that.” So there is something there. "White Chalk" EP: What other painters or illustrators from the past move you powerfully, and what aspects of their work do you find most intriguing? TB: Honestly, I don’t think I have ever looked at a painting and felt truly moved to tears, like the way music touches me. But maybe if I were a musician, I would love emotion conveyed visually, who knows. I feel up until now I have for some unknown reason an absolute need to paint, and it is the daily process of creating that keeps me going. "Violin" EP: If you could hang just one classic painting from history on the wall of your studio, what would it be? TB: Aaah, yes! This is an easy one for me. They may not be classic yet, but they will be! I would love to feature four paintings called the “Nova Series” by my dear friend Isabella Kirkland. "The Raft" EP: Is there anything else you're finding really inspiring right now? TB: Yes, giving and sharing. Love is my inspiration. "First Frost" EP: What's on the horizon for you? Hopes, dreams, plans for the future? TB: I have a solo show in New York coming up on November 11, 2010 at the Joshua Liner Gallery. I have been having a lot of fun exploring new ideas for it. Other than that, I hope to continue to grow, travel, and explore the unknown.

Collected by LordofMasks

Self-Potrait (2005). Nelly Drell (Estonian, b.1979). Oil on canvas. "She is able to mold an image even with the most erratic of brush strokes, lend it depth with the gentle tempering of tonalities,...