in conversation
Jan Dickey moved to New York City during the pandemic by way of Hawaiʻi, where he completed his MFA from the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa. In New York, he has shown his paintings at My Pet Ram, D.D.D.D., and Below Grand gallery among other locations. Recently he completed a materials-based residency at the Sam and Adele Golden Foundation (2023) and this interview seeks to delve deeper into his unique use of hand-mixed natural painting mediums like rabbit skin glue, casein, egg tempera, and oil paint. Currently he has an exhibition of new work at Bob’s Gallery, an experimental space in Bushwick: “The Generations” on through August 18th, 2024. Dickey is also the newest member of Artcake, an art center in Sunset Park that provides artists with affordable studio spaces and artistic programming.
AMS: Do you have a goal or vision in mind when you’re painting, or a philosophy that you follow?
JD: My philosophy is to enter the river of change through a stream of materials. This body of work from the past year has been guided by light shapes that are cast through my studio window and fall onto the paintings. I trace those shapes, tape them off, and apply a paint to them. I let the paint dry, trace an overlapping shape, and then put on another paint application. The light changes throughout the year. In the fall, winter, and spring I was getting good shapes because they were coming through the half-closed metal gate over my window: creating these diamond-like patterns, as well as big sharp angular rectangles from the window frame. This July light is not giving great shapes. Maybe that’s a sign that this body of work is coming to an end. Next month I’ll be moving to a space that has no windows.
AMS: What are you going to do once nature has not given you so many gifts with forms made by light through your window? It has fed a lot of the structure for your work, right?
JD: I don’t know what the next phase is going to be and I’m excited to not know. I really want to enter the new studio space and feel it out from there and see what the next shift is going to be in the work. It does have an outdoor roof deck, so I may continue working with light, but I’m just not sure.
I’m interested in matter as light and light as matter. Doing a lot of transparent glazing and having these light shapes in the work has been my way of using hard, physical materials and making them seem ephemeral and transcendent. It is pretty core to who I am to have a bit of the divine in there.
AMS: What does light evoke for you?
JD: I feel good in the light—like the cat that sleeps in the patch of sunlight. I have always related to cats. When you’re sleeping in a patch of sunshine, you’re really in the moment and indulging in how wonderful it can be to be alive on this earth.
AMS: Your paintings are capturing that very essence by tracing different shadows or light that come through. Do you have a relationship with the divine or with God, or this sense of transcendence, as far as light goes?
JD: I’ve always had an interest in religion and the divine, and the ways that humans curate our environments to access the divine. I have a strong memory of being at the Notre Dame in Paris, during a church service with light coming through the stained-glass windows and frankincense smoke in the air, angelic voices amplified through the qualities of the space and its architecture. I’m enthralled by the things we design to access the wonder. For me, divinity is that state of wonder, rather than any sort of moral rulebook. It’s a way of accessing an experience that makes being alive worthwhile.
AMS: How is your work in the recent show in Bushwick different from what you’ve been working on in recent years?
JD: Bob’s Gallery is an apartment gallery, a DIY space. I wanted to think about the context of that kind of location, as well as the time of year—summer. My idea was to make a family of paintings in this relaxed summertime state within Bob’s bonus room. The paintings are like stacked diptychs, hinged together so the bottom of the lower painting touches the ground and the top of the upper one leans against the wall. The hinge makes a little bit of a bend in the work, with a suggestion of a relaxed spinal anatomy. It’s as if you were at a party, a little tired and leaning against the wall for support. The hinging makes them long and narrow, which I associate with the vertical, narrow human form.
There are various sizes. There is a big one in front of a small one, like a parent protecting a timid child. Others feel like teenagers off to the side, hanging out, being cool—with more of a lean. It was a good opportunity to do something experimental at Bob’s, to consider what it means to have a show inside a living space. The walls of the gallery have an installation component. I found bright white and gray primer house paint in Bob’s closet, and I used those two colors to scale up shapes from my paintings and put them on the walls. The primer is a very close match to the regular wall paint, and it ends up looking like a shadow on the wall, especially since it mingles with actual shadows in the space. Having installation components interacting with the space in all these different ways was exciting for me and it’s something I want to continue to play with.
AMS: It sounds that it’s pushing further this concept of the painting as an object and starting to think about it like a body?
JD: I see them as living forms. I would like people to be able to relate to them as they would a friend or relative. Ultimately, if you buy a painting, you enter a social contract with that painting and become its caretaker. You now live with it in your home, or in your storage, and you’re responsible for shuttling that painting into the next generation. Maybe your kids get it, or it goes to a museum, or someone else’s collection. These paintings are living things we care for, and they give us something. Just like our pets—they control us, too, because we must alter our behavior in order to keep them alive and looking good.
AMS: What strikes me about your work is a very conscious effort to play with materials. There is a push for natural materials in oil, egg-based tempera, milk-based casein, and rabbit skin glue. Could you let us know how you became so involved with these?
JD: The first painting medium I ever made myself was a rust medium for a project where I needed to oxidize some wood to make it look old. I prepared a jar full of vinegar and steel wool. Vinegar oxidizes the metal and breaks it down, and the longer it stays in there the more you develop a great red color, which varies in depth based on the proportion of vinegar to rust. There were two things going on: making the color, or knowing how it was produced; and also a realization that the rust was wild and outside of my control. The rust medium would do things that escaped my direct, human intentionality, producing effects that could have occurred without me there.
I started looking at paint—and the way it lived in the world—not just on paintings, but on walls and cars and roads. Old houses have lots of layers of old paint, but moisture starts to penetrate their lamination, and when the paint ultimately peels you can see into that history of layers. Likewise, I love an old, rusty car that has this contaminant in its perfectly painted candy shell. I got interested in paint “aberrations” as a way of seeing paint as a non-human substance that has its own lifelike personality, expressed through the things it does that we normally don’t want it to do: cracking, peeling, and discoloration. This interest led me toward materials that are more susceptible to those so-called aberrations.
AMS: Did you find vulnerability or susceptibility in natural paint materials, as opposed to industrially-fabricated or acrylic materials?
JD: At first, I was trying to achieve this effect with industrially-fabricated materials (acrylics and oils.) In grad school, I got interested in using the theater department’s discarded house paint, which they poured into buckets of sawdust to harden so it could be disposed of. The clump formed was a weird mixture of all these various colors and layers. It was drying in ways that made it crack, it was a thing of paint. I tried to replicate that thingness by making house paint clumps of my own. Eventually, I developed a chemical sensitivity to VOCs from the formaldehyde that was being off-gassed through house paint, and I began to associate these synthetic industrially man-made paints with all the toxins of the world: conceptually, emotionally, and physiologically.
At that juncture, I learned how to make casein, or milk paint, and later started using it in conjunction with other homemade recipes: rabbit skin glue and egg tempera. Egg tempera entered the picture as a way to glaze, because milk paint is flat and opaque. Acrylics and oils have both translucency and opacity, but milk paint can only be opaque, and egg tempera can only be translucent. In alternating the milk and egg, I was able to achieve the transparency and opacity I was used to with the manufactured paints. The animal glue can kind of do both, which is why I’ve leaned into it a lot in recent years. But the egg has a nicer sheen than glue––plus a stronger lamination.
AMS: I see you’ve immersed yourself in two opposite poles—from being really engaged in these cheap, fast-moving formaldehyde-exuding industrial paints, to suddenly engaging in something so classical and ancient, like casein and egg tempera. How did you know about casein and egg tempera? Egg tempera is not even something you can buy, you have to make it, and casein is a bit similar. Rarely do you go to any art store and find casein paints or egg tempera that are close to what those paints are about. How did you know to make these paints? Were you looking at certain books? Did you have a mentor? How did you find yourself in that world?
JD: I basically started researching nontoxic ways of painting; and, for the first time in my life, I tried to get to know what was in paint. Because I was having this chemical aversion, I needed to question: what is inside of this stuff I’ve now been using for years? I looked into what sort of paints are inert and don’t have VOCs, or volatile organic compounds, which are mutagenic and can trigger cancer. I came upon this company called Old Fashioned Milk Paint, which at the time was making paint mainly for antique furniture. Antiquers like it because colonial furniture and walls were painted with casein before the ready-made paint of industrialization took over the market. It’s only recently, near the turn of the 20th century, that people started using oil paint for walls and other interior decoration, before being slowly replaced by synthetics mid-century. Not too long ago, people had to make and mix their house paint on the spot. Casein is not commonly used in easel painting because it’s fragile—and not water-resistant, like oil is. Plus, it’s brittle. It works best on a hard surface because it doesn’t have the flexibility of an acrylic or an oil. But for me—as someone that is trying to force these house paints and acrylics to crack as part of the natural life of the paint—the milk paint was perfect because it cracked so easily.
AMS: Did it speak to breaking away from the perfection of the industrial paints, and how did you encounter egg tempera?
JD: In my mid-20s, I enrolled in classical training in North Carolina and studied under this artist by the name of Jeffrey Mims. It’s called the Academy of Classical Design and it’s in a little town called Southern Pines. Mims grew up there and studied with a fresco painter, Ben Long, who lives in Charlotte, NC. He also studied independently in Italy for a while, before settling back in his hometown. His studio/school comes close to historical re-enactment. Mims dresses himself in clothes from the past and the inside of his studio/school is modeled to look like an old French atelier. We drew from plaster casts with charcoal. We also conducted our own workshops making black walnut ink and experimented with egg tempera. It’s a revivalist school where people are interested in painting traditions and methods of the past. Later, when I started playing with milk paint and came to realize I couldn’t glaze with it, I remembered that I could glaze with egg tempera. I love luminosity and the way light passes through layers of paint, so eggs became important.
AMS: In the United States, you find all these pockets of people that are so passionate about a certain era in time, like the Renaissance Festival, then, the groups obsessed with the potential of UFOs in New Mexico. The starting of a group and a following…With this knowledge of combining casein and egg tempera, you started getting closer to the sensitivity of nature with paint. You also are using a lot of rabbit skin glue, I believe?
JD: I had been using rabbit skin glue occasionally as an oil painter, as a way of priming a clear surface when I didn’t want a white gesso ground. But when I made the turn to nontoxic painting, I became more familiar with traditional gesso, which is made by adding powdered marble or chalk to rabbit skin glue. Traditional gesso is also a way of making a lot of paint, so I can apply it thickly at low cost. It operates similarly to casein, but it cracks differently and has some other different qualities. Rabbit skin glue is more transparent when there is a higher portion of rabbit skin glue to chalk. It also sands down smooth (especially powdered marble) and when you get down to a fine sandpaper, it has this marble-like quality. When sanding, casein gets smooth, but not quite as glossy as traditional gesso. A lot of the paint that’s built up on these surfaces is with a rabbit skin glue base. It’s my primary medium. Another word for it would be distemper paint, because it’s a glue-based paint.
The binders all get mixed together. There are a few glazes of egg tempera in there and I’ve been using more oil recently. Oil was something I phased out, because I can’t have anything that’s off-gassing, and I was previously using varnishes and mineral spirits. But then, you know, I just really love oil. It’s a really strong material, and it’s nice to have something strong in between these more fragile layers. I’ve slowly started getting back into oil by just using walnut oil as a medium, because it’s thinner than linseed oil and can wash out of brushes with soap and water.
I like Stand oil too, because it’s so thick. Sometimes I mix it with walnut oil, which thins it out, making it easier to spread; but you still get that nice thick layer for light to pass through. It becomes almost like stained glass.
AMS: Stained glass certainly resonates with your work because there are so many instances where it does feel as though light is refracting in a kaleidoscopic way. There are many fragments of different panes of color and the sensation of glass. Yet, we don’t have that stark segmentation that stained glass forces us to have as a structure. Here we have many layers of excavation, of searching, of different colors mixing, going under each other. It has an organic presence, as organic as the materials you’re using. It’s interesting that what you’re essentially aiming for is a disaster in painting– the perfect lamination challenged by the elements—this work speaks to a form of dystopia. In all these experiments with paint materials, can you recall any breakthroughs or failures or happy accidents that we now see in your work and have become a real part of your process?
JD: If I haven’t had a happy accident, I haven’t had a good day. The accident is what keeps me coming to the studio because something can happen any time that I’ve never seen before. I let these combinations of paint interact wildly because I love to not understand what’s happening. But, inevitably, I learn and begin to understand it. I’m looking kind of crazily and haphazardly for these connections between things that according to the rulebooks aren’t supposed to bond together.
There is layering that I’ve purposefully done that has created active situations that keep the painting constantly on the verge of its lamination being corrupted. There’s water-based media over oil media. Usually when I do casein, I’ll do some egg tempera, more casein, and keep layering it up, to see what situations will occur. I will further traumatize the surface through sanding, but it’s also a way of moving toward a surface with more structural integrity. I do both hand and power sanding, and this process will take off the weakest spots in the painting. You’d be surprised by some of the things that can be stuck together when they’re not supposed to be able to. Certain things will amaze you and hold on, like an acrylic will hold on to an oil.
AMS: In addition to sanding, are there other tools you’re using? Are you employing a brush?
JD: I use a big wide and flat boar-hair brush, and my favorite is made by Kremer Pigments. I almost exclusively will apply the paint in long horizontal strokes. I’m not doing gestural marks, because for me, I just want to apply the paint. That’s where looking at someone like Robert Ryman’s work comes in, because I enjoy the simplicity of “this is how you put the paint on.” Sometimes I allow brushwork to stay in the work, but it’s usually pretty subtle. I erase my tracks quite a bit through sanding.
AMS: There is practically no gestural trace in your work in the way we think of postwar gesture in painting. Yet the materiality is very close to that postwar, industrial, muscular kind of painting. Going back to an earlier word you mentioned, which is that laminate of the car shield—we can really feel your work has this smoothness you’re after. An industrial smooth that takes away the human hand. Whereas we really see this in Robert Ryman’s work, with the tactility of the brush and its little marks–There’s no denying it was made by a human. In your work, there is a play between the industrial perfection and also the elements that destroy its laminate. You’re the puppeteer behind that interaction, and your hand is not leaving any hints of having been there.
JD: I like to tone down my presence so that my authorship is not the first thing you’re thinking about. I do want it to be there—I’m not crazy about a painting that feels as though a human wasn’t involved at all. It is a handmade object, but those natural processes breaking down the industrial, the cracking, are a major component of it. I feel more comfortable in that space as it makes me feel a little uneasy with my mark being loud in the painting.
By entering into that process, I’m acknowledging there are things that are going to happen to the painting in the future that I don’t know about, and no one really does. I feel strongly it is an important aesthetic decision. I believe that we hold on to the illusion of permanence, in this world, in a way that is unhealthy. I think we need to be able to accept that everything is going through a process of change, aging, evolution, and transformation.
My paintings already look worn down. That’s a way for me to invite further change into the work. If something were to shift over the decades, it’s within the same language the painting looked like when it was fresh. I want the paintings to embrace age and the signs of aging, the wrinkles. They’re old souls.
About the writer: Amanda Millet-Sorsa is an artist interested in the transparency and the luminosity of oil painting, who has also experimented collaboratively with performers in dance and theatre. She is a contributor to The Brooklyn Rail and a member of AICA (International Association of Art Critics), participating actively in the NY arts community by writing art exhibition reviews and artist interviews. As of 2022, she partakes in the curatorial team at Below Grand gallery in the Lower East Side She holds an M.F.A from the New York Studio School and B.A. from Brandeis University.