Mount M from the series Mount
The other day I heard author Michael Chabon ( The Yiddish Policeman’s Union, Gentlemen of the Road) on Fresh Air with Terry Gross speak about using “What If…” premises. It’s an enabling device that lets Chabon write funny, actually exciting books; books that refer lovingly to genre novels and other less-than-high-art literary forms. It also readily invites complex and serious questions about the topic at hand. “What if Such and Such….?” becomes “Why NOT Such and Such…?” and, inevitably, “Why IS Such and Such…?” Chabon’s not sermonizing, he’s playfully leading us to question assumptions.
Carla Knopp’s paintings act much the same as Michael Chabon’s writing. I see the premise. I play along. Thinking ensues. The paintings are engaging visually; fun to look at. The starting-point What If…’s are readily graspable. Sometimes these questions come in the form of quirky, postmodern allegories, like the Love Hovels series (which she describes by saying, “I imagine chaotic snippets of unknowable lives.”) Sometimes they seem to come from apparent connections to other artists–Redon, Ryder, early American Modernists, etc. etc. Sometimes it seems the questions are really about how paint acts physically. As she writes in her artist’s statement, “The overall experience is one of groping about. This can yield surprising results.”
Carla was kind enough to answer some questions for us about her work. Without further ado…
46N, 123W from the Love Hovels series
Please give our readers a little bit of information about yourself (upbringing, education, location, news, etc.)
I am from Indiana and have spent much of my life here. As the fourth of five kids, all spawned within 6 years, I spent much of my childhood plotting a future life of privacy and solitude… I received my BFA from Herron in the early 1980s, was briefly a founding member of 431 Gallery, then split for Austin, Texas for several years, and then moved back to Indianapolis. In the 1990s, I worked with Greg Brown of “Utrillos” on the cable-access show “Utrillo-vision”. We showcased artists, musicians, and poets, and our own very bad video skills.
I started doing applied arts as a day job in the mid-1990s. I painted display murals for the State Museum, and was on the crew of many restoration jobs around the state. Later, I formed my own company, and I now do murals and surface decoration for residential and institutional clients
I’ve always painted personal art work, but in spurts of attentiveness. Since 2000, I’ve been more consistently focused, and I’ve been developing a wider scope and language within paint. I now paint larger and I am also exploring abstraction. I hadn’t worked like this since college. The downside is that many of the past 10 years are without finished product, and subsequently, without shows.
I am exerting more authority over my work, and am finally able to orchestrate more. I’m finally producing paintings from my painted explorations, and this is great. I missed that part. I am currently in “The Big Show 3” at the Silas Marder Gallery in Bridgehampton, and it feels very good to show again.
Mount H
Many of us don’t grow up with painting and art as part of our daily life, especially many of us away from the coasts and our routes into the fine arts are circuitous. Was that your experience? How and when did you say, ‘I’m going to do this?’
Circuitous is right. I was a child art geek. I received little cultural input, but had an insanely focused enthusiasm for drawing and painting. I had always planned on doing this in some form, if not as a career then as a vocation which I supported with a day job. Herron dramatically changed me, and set in play a back and forth pattern of participation and seclusion. After college I began rejecting external art influences. I stopped reading art magazines, and largely ignored art world happenings.
A secular approach to making art has benefits and pitfalls; for so long I used it as a shield, while I established a creative territory of my own. Now I do have this well-grounded place for art, which is great, but I also can interact in the broader art community.
The internet has been such a wonderful tool for re-entering the art world. It’s amazing how quickly one can understand the current art climate, just by reading others’ thoughts and opinions. The blog format is so revealing, which makes it quite easy to find the useful and relevant sites.
Minor Deity 11
Talk about your creative mulch–that is your daily inspirations, ‘fine’ art & not fine art:
I make lifestyle choices which encourage mental vibrancy…(for real). My brain then fires in imaginative ways, creating a good supply of creative, sometimes delightful, responses to life. It’s taken a long time to realize the importance of this, and to know what benefits me.
More directly, I get a lot of visual ideas from seeing things wrong. Peripheral glimpses and visual skimming, as happens when driving or in crowded areas, are great for this. Thumbnails of other artists’ can work also trigger a new and incorrect image. I sometimes wish what I saw was accurate. For someone else to have actually done or built what I just (erroneously) saw would be incredible. It’s hard to give an example, because these peculiarities are more in the imagery, than in concept. I also skim from my own work, but not in a methodical way. It’s the same accidental error of vision which then creates a new image.
Minor Deity 59
What is a day in the studio like for you?
I’ve de-ritualized my painting process. I used to require certain conditions, both environmental and mental. (At one time, I’d drink coffee and beer together, convinced I could maintain a beneficial “alert buzz” by which to paint). Now it’s so casual. My studio is in my house, and so I’ll wander in and out, and I often see and then implement huge changes in just minutes. When I do plan entire days to work, the ritual kicks in again, and I spend a lot of time preparing to paint. I like getting entrenched in the work, but also then flitting in and making snap decisions from a different perspective.
47 N, 10 E from the Love Hovels series
How do you start a work?
When I start from nothing, I can be sensitive or quite brutish about applying paint. I’ll be lazy and really just mindlessly apply washes. Let these dry and act as triggers for a later painting session. I’ll also keep mucking around in the wet paint, scrape off, and leave a disappointing mess. This mess may also be next session’s fodder.
In some work I am using subject matter as a conceptual framework. It creates the context for the work, and also may inform the work pictorially. I still begin with a loose and random application of paint, but I pay more attention where it goes, and am more actively imagining future possibilities.
I do believe how I start a painting has become a default setting, and it’s something I may work to change. Long ago, my goal was one session paintings, and they would happen in 20-30 minutes. This produced some distinctive results. This is definitely missing. I need to add this method back in to the discovery process.
Thanks! See more of Carla Knopp’s work. Read her blog.
funny how studio practice seems to be such a fragile animal for so many people. my ability to get work done also used to be very contingent on a whole laundry list of circumstances being just so…like the stars had to align or something. i don’t know.
and if anything/anyone disrupted the balance -or the space of time and hours- committed to the painting ordeal, nothing could be accomplished. i wonder if this is just a young thing. or maybe just the problem of mixing art-folk with time managment constraints.
it is such a more happy arrangement just to be able to do the work when you have the time, and not worry about the rest.
and carla’s paintings have this sense of the familiar about them. not that they feel predictable. just that, through imagining her process, i can sense that she is comfortable with unpacking and repacking the paintings in a fluid way…and that even through transformation, they still retain an autonomous sensibility that feels distilled and particular.
the way she talks about ritual is also interesting, because these very much feel as though they depict ritual, or maybe just ritualistic-type objects.
I love these, I’ve come across them before, the mount paintings in particular. Love.
These are marvelous.
Thanks all.
there’s a Big Audio Dynamite song lyric “Rhythm is both the song’s manacle, and it’s demonic charge”. Ritual helps us hold on to things. At best, it propels the “what ifs” somewhere, at worst it has us drinking coffee and beer together.
Jen, I think my coping rituals are more in the process itself now. What conceptual or contextual framework helps contain ideas, but does so and still allows for infinite expansion.
But ritual is also very much depicted as subject matter too.
Do you mean coffee and beer at the same time in separate containers, or coffee and beer actually mixed together?
yeah, i was curious about that one too…
i guess you would be a genius for presaging the whole red-bull-beer thing…
you coulda made a million dollars. damn.
and, i hope my comments i didn’t make it sound as though i thought the work was ritual-ish in an entrenched way. i really respond to the paintings in a positive and joyful way.
at this moment, in my geographically uninhibited imagination, i am mixing a Flatbranch Brew Co. “Oil Change Stout” into a Soma “Blackbeard’s Blend”…
i was at soma this afternoon.
so delicious is their coffee.
but i think the blackbeard’s blend might be laced with crack. it’s jumpy and twitchy in a cup.
I’m tired of stouts and IPAs, but I don’t live where many of you do. Anyone try La Fin du Monde?
Ever notice how taste is such a fickle sense? It’s like you have to be receptive, in the right mood, on a physiological level. A food or beverage can be sublime one day and leave you cold the next.
Perhaps the inflexibility of modernist art, or even the whole definitive aspect of the Renaissance inheritance (linear perspective) is an attempt to conquer this fickleness of taste and make something that we can go back to over and over for the same experience. Maybe ritual in the broadest sense acts dialectially, acknowledging the fickless and inconsistency of perception and aesthetic response, by at the very least regularizing our activities, setting the trap for the sublime. We have a repetition against which we can more clearly measure changes.
Is sublime an appropriate term for these paintings? I guess in contemporary discourse, that question never means “ARE THEY X?”, but rather “do they bring up the issue of X?”
Drunk from separate containers and at their respective temperatures. I’d achieved the Red Bull concept, but would never have made the marketing/packaging leap.
Jen, no I didn’t take it that way. The subject matter of ritual is real apparent in these, but also incidental, I think.
…setting the trap for the sublime…I like that.
I don’t think the phrase is mine, but hey, what is?
man, i’ll have to stop at soma on the way thru bloomington today… and barry did give us a bottle of red wine last night. looks like there’ll be a party in my mouth today!
PS: carla – i dig the asymmetrical supports and amorphous shapes of the minor deities… for some reason i keep thinking about cthulhu when i look at them.
Matt, I imagine he’d take exception to being pegged a ‘minor deity’, though. So, you know, be on the lookout for an angry giant octopus-faced thing.
ps, allow me to echo other folks: Carla, I really like your paintings (paintings… paintings… ). How do you size the odd-shaped panels?
barry just left my house, and man, he didn’t give me any bottle of wine; he just dumped 3 boxes of old art catalogues in my living room, high-pitch-told me to take the two figure drawings off my website, and scadattled. wtf. now i have to move with 3 more boxes o’ stuff that i didn’t have before…
minimalism is hard to come by in this world.
thanks again for all the input.
The panels are 1/2″ plywood (Oak, ash, or birch), cut with a handheld jig saw. Northwest lumber on Lafayette Rd in Indy is a great source, especially for larger pieces.
Originally, I cut these after the image was painted. If you’re asking about the shape/size choice, this was very much visual intuition. I just drew with a water-soluable pencil and cut.
Actually I meant how do you prep them to take oil paint (glue, gesso, or other primer?)…
I’m a big fan of 1/2″ birch ply, myself.
Oh, by ‘size’ your meant ‘size’. I use gesso on all sides.
I’m pretty sure that there are people looking at this interview who aren’t weighing in, so once again, I just want to make one and all feel invited.
Here’s a less serious discussion topic…what are other playful rituals, rules or roles that people use to get going in the studio?
–The USA is a Monster’s Tasheyana Compost album.
–The drive (through yucky chain-store-mall-town Fayetteville) to my studio is also a motivator, though not exactly a pleasant one.
usually, i just do the usual, which pretty much equals coffee+sound.
what gets a bit ritual-ly is that when i start a painting to certain music, i usually paint the whole painting to the same music. meaning i listen to it over and over and over again. pretty lame. but for some reason it works.
when i’m stuck i:
-buy a new color
-go to the studio and mix paint on the palette just for the sake of mixing paint but without worrying about doing anything with it.
-bring flowers to the studio (sometimes to paint/mostly just to look at/smell)
-go to the studio and read. not art books, just books.
i guess what i’m figuring out is that a lot of what i do to get unstuck is pretty un-painting related. i used to spend a lot of time trying to ‘paint through’ bad painting problems. which mostly amounted to slopping a lot of expensive paint on the surface and scraping it off 8 hours later without anything to show for the day’s efforts. this is not economical. it’s also disheartening. better to put forward small efforts in other directions and wait for the painting to come round.
actually happens to be what i’m doing just this moment… cause i have a bad headcold (who gets a cold in june?). and shit…i was just looking at my beautiful bicycle and realizing that i have some swaggy piece of gum all strung up through the rear sprocket. this day just keeps getting better.
i connect with all of these comments about ritual and how to get things going in the studio, etc. but i feel like recently – as in post-grad school – it’s been about just going in there and doing SOMETHING, anything (reading, building a panel, pulling a monotype print, etc). i feel like motivation is just a pas de deux: in the context of focusing and forcing myself to work, i end up getting into that intuitive space before i know it. when i realize i’m back into the zone, i’ve already been there…
Nice, did not know about this interview until today.