Art Sync: Atmospheres and Subtones

EJ: Your “hit it and quit it” brushwork has grown both bolder and sharper over the years. The hues you are working with are rich and exciting, and your paintings look fresh and delicate. Do you generally work directly from life? Do you use photos as aids?

CL: Painting on location in places with variable weather conditions has required me to change my process from a more planned and indirect approach to a more direct approach. One technique I’ve developed is taking time to premix large color relationships in a scene before I commit to the painting’s composition. I use this technique to tune in to the visual experience. This allows my paint handling to be intentional and direct.

Another way I have accommodated working from nature or a still life that is changeable (say, flowers) is to work in series from the same motif many days in a row. For example in this show, there is a series of rock paintings and another series with delphinium, roses, and a trumpet. A series lets me experiment with composition and scale up ideas for larger, more complex paintings.

With the loss of daylight in November, I work from the sketches in my studio....

CL: Yes, I’m very interested in “melodies” of color that move across a larger color field or key. Sometimes there might be a progression of saturated color along a field of neutral color. In the painting you mention, I played with having the melody first be contrasted with a light background and then be contrasted with a dark background. I may think of this melody as a gestural relationship, which implies a kind of figuration.

Setting up a still life is like playing with dolls, where I am creating a tableau that can read both as an abstract design and as a figurative narrative. Composing a still life takes a long time but once I feel settled enough to accept every corner of the tableau, I tend not to rearrange, but just play the notes I’ve given myself.

EJ: Your landscapes are more naturalistically grey. Acadian Sea with Red Buoy stands out because there are pink and yellow zones in the water, yet a red speck, perhaps the buoy, is subdued...

CL: Yes, it is a combination, not just with landscape but also with a cityscape or metropolis. There is an architectural element that comes into my visual vocabulary because of living in New York, riding the train, looking out windows and seeing the urban frames of Brooklyn and Lower Manhattan. Still life becomes a visual metaphor for the places I see in my mind’s eye. Seascapes and cityscapes re-imagined on an intimate scale become the “tablescapes” I populate with various objects and flowers.

How I compose landscapes and still lifes is influenced by my training as a figurative painter, although it’s not compositionally obvious. It’s more evident in the formal terms of gestural relationships between similar tones and colors.

EJ: Did Teapot, Trumpet, and Roses come from the same setup and before Teapots with Trumpet and Roses? Both fully leverage strong composition, and the latter seems to break into more abstract space by using floating color.

CL: Cezanne builds form with color and light, so the color and light have their own kind of structure separate from the objects and the space around them. This does interest me. I’m also interested in the way Vuillard and Bonnard place figures into patterns that make them part of the pattern. They’re playing with visibility and invisibility.

As for contemporary artists, I think about my colleagues, friends I work with, and what problems they’re solving in paint. I enjoy taking on their problems to grow as an artist. Other inspirations include my late teachers Seymour Remenick and Lennart Anderson. I think about what they taught me, what painting meant in their lives, and what they were using paint to express.

Over the last year I’ve had many conversations with my friend and painter Bill Scott. We both lost our friend Patrick Connors in January 2022. When I speak with Bill, he makes me think of building a painting and responding to nature in different ways. He suggested I try working in triptychs or quadriptychs. This inspires me to reimagine a series of paintings as places in a larger composition rather than isolated snapshots in time. This makes me reconsider how I start a painting. The start of a painting can hold intention that carries like a breath through a phrase of music. It too is like a subtone, a resonance that pushes through till the end. The start is the critical moment. It is when the picture in the mind’s eye gives way to the material of paint, which can be all sticky and oily, the color surprising, the marks crude and sometimes eloquent. Change the start and you change the painting.

EJ: When a painting of mine imparts more than just its information, I chalk it up as a success. How do you know when you succeed?

CL: I am drawn to subjects that I don’t fully understand visually, that are mysterious, elusive, and at times almost impossible to see clearly. Often, I think: “I don’t understand what I’m seeing, but maybe I can understand what I’m seeing it by painting it.” Over a period of contemplative looking, often included in the painting preparation time but just as often during time spent looking without a thought of painting, I begin to transpose visual experience into an imaginary painting experience. In other words, like a musician who reads music with the playing of a specific instrument in mind, this kind of looking is experienced in the language of oil color, brushwork, and flatness. I am delighted when I can be clear enough to take in visual experience this way and then have the time, energy, and perseverance to allow the painting process to teach me what I’m seeing.

––Elizabeth Johnson
(elizabethjohnsonart.com)
Edited by Matthew Crain
(@sarcastapics)

May 2023

"Returning home, to the rooftop of my studio in Brooklyn, the city spreads itself toward the New York Harbor like an expanse of stony outcroppings and rivulets. As the weather turns cold, I am in the studio, building still life arrangements that are like tiny cities floating on an enamel sea. I am conjuring up milky fogs in the space around each season’s crop of flowers: tulips, daffodils, peonies, roses, zinnias, ranunculus, lilies."

- Christine Lafuente

To learn more about Christine, Click Here to View her Artist Page