The work builds on past work, combining with my current interests and experiences, to grow into the next body of work. I go wherever my brain seems most excited to go. What’s next for you, and what’s next for painting? I never know what’s coming next. I need to have space to fail in order to learn and react and take chances. Have you ever destroyed one of your paintings? Oh, all the time! I make a lot of paintings that fail. Gesture, 2015 - Alex Olsen - Courtesy Laura Bartlett Gallery, London and Shane Campbell Gallery, Chicago Courtesy The Walker Art Center, MinneapolisĬan you control it? Yes, but it’s best not to. What I consider “my work” started right after that, and it’s been a slow and steady crawl ever since. What brought you to this point? I made the worst painting I’ve ever seen between my first and second years of grad school-one that I thought would please the professors rather than for reasons I cared about-and seeing it made it clear I needed to make work I believed in, first and foremost. I tend to think of the paintings as social, meaning the experience for the viewer is one of an exchange with the painting. Two iterations of an idea are often presented along side one another for the viewer’s reflection. Within each body of work, and even within each painting, there are dialectical relationships. How does it fit together? Each body of work leads to the next, so while I make a wide range of work in terms of how the paintings look, if you could take a macroscopic view, there’s a lineage to the whole. Stack, 2015 - Alex Olsen - Courtesy Laura Bartlett Gallery, London and Shane Campbell Gallery, Chicago Courtesy The Walker Art Center, Minneapolis Here, the Vitamin P3-featured painter tells us what interests, inspires and spurs her on. Each individual hair in each brushstroke seems to have been accentuated through black dry-brushing, or under-painting, or sanding-through, in contrast to the smooth and wet-looking strips on top. Frequently listed in her media, along with oil paint and linen, is modelling paste – indicating that the paintings are more fastidiously fabricated than their gestural surfaces might sometimes imply.įurthermore, the ground on which they sit, which consists of an even field of brushstrokes curving in all directions (another Olson trademark, perhaps lifted from domestic wall textures of the 1970s) is uncannily tidy. Certain things about them do not quite add up. And yet there is something about Olson’s paintings that is a little too perfect to be taken at face value. The mark seems to tell us everything we could want to know about the texture of oil paint: its viscosity, its speed, its consistency – all this information is readily available on the surface. It appears in a great many of her paintings, including a number of works in her ‘Proposal’ series (2012): a squeegeed strip of colour, immaculately smooth except at its tail end where a curling crest of paint betrays where the artist lifted her tool from the canvas. There is a particular technique of applying paint that distinguishes Alex Olson’s work. Alex Olsen - photographed by Brian Forrest Alex Olson - Why I PaintĮxploring the creative processes of tomorrow's artists today - as featured in Vitamin P3
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
Details
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |