SURFACE TENSION
Michelle Jezierski and Kimberly Bradley in conversation
Let’s begin by free associating: What words come to mind when you reflect on your painting practice?
Interference and interruptions. Disrupting spaces and creating different modes of interference.
What else?
Sonic. There’s a musical aspect. And space. There is the vastness of landscape, but I use landscape only as a starting point to examine space and how we are involved within it. There’s also ambiguity.
What kind of ambiguity?
The simultaneity of space in the paintings. With landscape, you’re looking inward and outward at the same time. Landscape can be a metaphor for internal and external states of being. I don’t want to tell the viewer how to be or what to see. I’m offering options.
Another key word is contrast. Organic and gestural versus manmade and geometric. Light versus dark. Quiet versus loud. Gentle versus harsh. There are so many contrasts in my work. I’m interested in the boundaries, those little seams between spaces, and the tensions and frictions right at those seams. It’s what holds the painting together and at the same time disrupts it. Coexisting contrasts represent an interesting starting point for a multitude of things: that’s what I’m trying to tap into.
You haven’t yet mentioned color, but it’s impossible to take in your work without seeing how much you orchestrate scenarios with multiple, layered hues.
Of course, color. I see the chromatic aspects in my paintings a bit like in music. There’s a tone. Then I build a chord with harmonies and dissonances around it. It’s also about light: I try to capture light situations, like when you look at the sky and see a band of something on the horizon. The color evokes certain atmospheres, and different modes of being, and its use is intuitive. At the same time, I don’t like repetition of color. I use color families that I haven’t explored before. Color choice is about resonance and space.
Let’s return to your first association of interruptions or interferences. In your most recent work they appear mostly as parallel lines, whereas in past works, you used cross-hatching or grids. Why do you use interruptions in your paintings, and what do they have to do with landscape?
My work is based on the idea—in a very abstract sense—of the feeling of a landscape. But it’s not enough to simply paint a landscape. I’m more interested in interrupting this non-landscape with geometries, with lines that slice it, shift it, weave it together. The interruptions also augment the landscape, a bit like how a sculptor uses clay. But instead of molding clay, I use space and mold it with color, and light. I studied with the sculptor Tony Cragg in Berlin, but spent time among painters for the first time during a semester at Cooper Union in New York in 2005. On weekends I’d travel to Long Island and take pictures of suburbia through the windows of the moving train. The houses became streaks of white light. That’s when I started thinking about light as a material, related to outdoor spaces.
Why are you interested in the feeling of landscape, and how do these interruptions evoke that feeling? This is the crux of abstract painting.
I never wanted to illustrate a specific scene. Art history is filled with landscape painters, so why paint a landscape? But landscape in the broadest sense—sky and earth—is the perfect playground in which to explore space. The horizon is all the information you need. A landscape doesn’t tell you how to read it. It’s what’s happening in you. I want to translate this onto the canvas. I infuse glitches into the experience: this element is important, because it’s very much of our time.
Your glitchy geometries are not fixed, though, like the strictness of Agnes Martin’s grids and stripes: They’re recurrent but not rigid—they seem more percussive than structural.
In some ways it’s about rhythm as the interruption of pattern, and the different movements of the interruption. Here we have the musical aspect I just mentioned. I grew up in a musical family. My parents are both classical musicians, and I also played music for many years, so music influences by work. Coming from this background, rhythm is important. In music, the beat adds structure. In my paintings, the geometries add structure as well, but these geometries are imperfect. I don’t plot out my work; it all happens directly on the canvas as a dialogue between me and the surface. These marks are irregular because they’re human, and different from what a computer would do. I find perfection boring.
You don’t plot at all?
No. First I set the tone with colors and pour the ink and think of an atmosphere I would like the painting to start with. My life and what’s happening in the world can affect this. I absorb my surroundings—so each work comes from a mix of intuition and reactions.
What within you makes you create a certain external atmosphere? I was just rereading the diaries of the late Romanian artist Geta Brătescu, Apparitions (2017). In it she asks: “But what does it mean to be an artist? It means being the receptacle in which there occurs the chemistry that transforms experience into expression. The fable of the alchemist, the transformation of gross matter into noble matter, into gold, is a story about art.” Is it like this for you?
It’s like looking at the ocean that can change all the time, depending on the day. In a good painting, something can also change every time you look at it. It can be stormy; it can be calming. It can be those things at the same time. There’s no set mood. Time, too, is fascinating. When you look at sculptures, you see things from different angles within a span of time. In the works I’m doing now, I’m trying to grasp the multitude of aspects in the world, and within us emotionally. In one work, Loop (p.45), there’s just one big break. It’s about playing with time, and the feeling of passing time, looping time, and repeating time. Some of the gestures are done quickly. Then come breaks that overlay the gesture and interweave with it. They of course almost negate and augment the gesture.
All this is why I feel that landscapes are a metaphor for different states of being. I’ve sometimes tried to let the gesture have more space. And then there are paintings where the grid, line, or geometry has more space. It’s a constant battle between the two. I’m fascinated by the separation between gesture and the pure line. I think of Robert Irwin, one of my absolute favorite artists from the Light and Space movement in southern California in the 1960s, which was a kind of backlash to Abstract Expressionism. He was a painter until he realized that each mark that you make has such gravity that he became too self-conscious to paint. Ever since, he has used light as his medium. He wrote one of my favorite books, about forgetting to see the thing one sees. In almost each sentence, it can be read in a contemplative way (Seeing Is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees, 1982—Ed.).
Do you forget the name of the thing you’re working on, or even the thing itself, when you’re working?
Yes, because it’s not important. Irwin talks about perception: what you see is what you get, but what you don’t get, you don’t see. He leaves a lot to the viewer. In the foreground is his perception and what he can do in order to enrich our perception.
Your paintings have a wide range of formats and complexity, and evoke different registers of perception.
You know, there’s Mahler’s orchestral music and there’s techno. Both create soundscapes and expansiveness that evoke vastness and depth. But like music, my artworks have different intensities. Feelings or states are also like frequencies, or heartbeats. Your pulse can be quick or very slow, but it’s still a heartbeat. I do believe in universal frequencies. If you look at the bottom of the ocean, there are ripples in the sand. But that pattern can repeat in the clouds in the sky. There are different molds of material, but basically, it’s the same thing.
When you speak like this, it’s as if you’re looking to transcend not just material limitations with your work—you’ve often told me about enjoying the challenge of a canvas being limited to two dimensions—but also universal or emotional ones.
Probably. There’s that feeling that when you’re in an orchestra surrounded by other sounds; you become part of something bigger. You forget yourself.
This makes me think of Mark Rothko, one of the few well-known abstract artists who admitted to aiming at a spirituality in both his practice and the effect of his paintings on the viewer.
It’s just opening up the state in which there are so many things to see and feel. All these things relate to what Rothko did, but for me, spirituality is too connected to religion. I don’t want to confine my work or name things, getting back to Irwin. Naming something weighs it down in a way that takes away its power. The transcendence I’m looking for is intuitive and not intentional.
In Seeing Is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees, Irwin talks about energy and light frequency. He says that each mark you make either gives or takes away from the painting. If it’s not adding anything to the work, it’s taking its energy away. There’s one passage in which he compares a large James Brooks painting to a small one by Philip Guston. The smaller painting is subtle and in pastels compared to the large, bold Brooks, but because of what Irwin calls the inner life of the painting, Guston “blows the Brooks right off the wall.” I’m definitely on the Guston side of this. Each mark is subtle but so strong. Each mark needs a purpose. Irwin has given this to me. It’s a timeless issue, and that’s what painting is about, or should be about. Mark-making is a metaphor for the human condition.
How do you know if your marks are giving or taking?
I sense it. It’s an experiment, a dialogue. It’s about the physicality of me in the space with the format that I have in front of me, and confronting and being confronted by it. I make a mark. How does it feel? If the mark is too intentional and forced, you can kill the flow of the work. It’s harder to get rid of a mark than add a mark. In each painting, there’s a certain tactile memory.
So this painting: I’m looking at the lines to the right. And the marks. (Reverb, p.85)
You know when you’re looking through a chain-link fence? If you’re standing very close to it, you feel the fence, but you don’t really see it: it’s as if it blurs. But if you’re standing further away, you see it clearly. It’s about perception and focal points. Seeing. In music, the pause is as important as the note. It’s about positive and negative space. There’s Robert Irwin again, Light and Shadow—it’s all connected, you know? I know I’m finished with a painting when I’ve created simultaneous spaces, and they dance between foreground and background. Sometimes I relinquish control and let the painting guide me. The process is very important.
How might your work develop in five years?
It might become even more multifaceted. I’m interested in unifying multiple perspectives. Like looking through a kaleidoscope—but brought together in one painting. Fractal, even as it gets more specific. I hope I can keep finding modes of disturbing, interrupting; finding more ways of augmenting space. A lot of the magic lies in the unspoken.