Louise P. Sloane: Optically charged text-ures

From an early age, Louise P. Sloane has been compelled by an intense fascination with how color and texture influence mood. “I was one of those art nerd kids who went nuts each time there was a new color crayon from Crayola!” she recalls, describing a childhood shaped by a relentless curiosity about different mediums and textures. Making art quickly became the dominant force in her life, guiding her on a creative journey that has spanned over fifty years.

Deeply interested in minimalist art, Sloane set out to create work that would follow many of the movement’s principles while adding her own voice to the conversation. Over the decades, her art has evolved in distinct phases, each step coherently building on the last, forming a continuous thread that ties her past, present, and future work together. In the following interview, Sloane offers insights into her journey, exploring the milestones and thought processes that have shaped her artistic voice.

Tell us about your art education and formative years.

I attended the School of Visual Arts and had an incredible, historic group of instructors. Printmaking with Bob Blackburn, Painting instructors: Brice Marden, Robert Murray, Larry Zox, Robert Mangold, and many others. It was Joseph Kosuth who told me one day the painting was dead and provided me with the inspiration and impulse to prove him wrong! Because I had this intense focus and drive to create art socially, I was always a bit of an outsider. When Ivan C. Karp left Leo Castelli to open his own gallery in Soho. I set my sites on OKHarris’s Works of Art precisely because he was regarded as something of a rogue. He did not possess a college degree, had a great eye and was one of the most powerful forces in Soho. He proved to be incredibly supportive of me as a young artist. He’d make studio visits and send collectors to my loft.

When Semaphore Gallery was seeking an eclectic group of artists to begin the gallery, Ivan suggested me to the gallery director Barry Blinderman, and I had my first solo exhibition in a commercial gallery at Semaphore in 1981. That gallery moved to the Lower East Side and changed its aesthetic; my minimalist monochrome wax paintings were no longer a good fit. Still sending collectors to my studio, Ivan started exhibiting my paintings in 1985. He exhibited my works through all of my stages of development up until his death in 2012. He was a great supporter and a wonderful man. I was very lucky to have him in my corner.

During the 1980’s I also became affiliated with Elaine Benson, who was the doyenne and catalyst behind the art scene out on the East End of Long Island, NY. Elaine was a great supporter of my work and a very positive force of nature in my life until her death in 1998. I was signed into a gallery on Long Island, DMContemporary, in 2005. The gallery expanded to a space in NYC for several years and closed its doors in, I believe, 2017.

What prompted your shift into bright colors?

I was growing restless with my work, and the impulse to paint in bold, optically charged colors was tugging at me. I had had a lot of success with my paintings that were created during the late 1980s-2004. A meeting with Richard Anuszkiewicz changed my entire trajectory. When I told him how moved I had been as a child by his work in The Responsive Eye at MOMA in 1965, he was, of course, pleased. When I told him that I had always wanted to paint in bold, bright, optically charged colors but was too intimated to do so, he looked me up and down and said, “You’re not getting any younger; what the fuck are you waiting for?”

When I got back to my studio, I thought, WHAT the fuck AM I waiting for? Then and there, I changed my painting style. A bold move when you’re having success with different imagery.

Somewhere around 2000, you met Richard Timperio.

We saw each other at various art openings and eventually began talking to each other. He told me that he had opened a gallery in Williamsburg Bklyn and that I should come take a look. And. I did. That was the beginning of an incredible friendship. We were constant visitors to each other’s places; he knew my work well and had included it in what became his annual extravaganza at Sideshow Gallery. He approached me one day at a dinner at my house and asked me if I’d like to have a show at the gallery. I was truthfully shocked. When I suggested that “people would talk because we’re such close friends,” his response was, “People will always fuckin talk. You want the opportunity or not?” And so, Richard Timperio rekindled my career showcasing what has become my signature style of geometric abstraction.

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How did you start showing at the Spanierman Gallery?

Between being shown at Sideshow, DMContemporary, and Amy Simon Fine Art up in Connecticut, I was also represented by a gallery based in San Francisco that participated in art fairs. I met Gavin Spanierman at Texas Contemporary in Houston in 2013. He was showing some friends of mine, and we chatted a bit and exchanged cards. He made a studio visit out here to look at my black wax paintings for a client. That deal didn’t work out, but he was interested in my bold, bright geometric abstractions and said that he was going to be forming a contemporary art gallery and was keeping me “on the back burner.” He contacted me during the summer of 2017, telling me he wanted to sign me up. I was preparing for a survey exhibition at Sideshow Gallery opening during the Fall of 2017. Gavin came out to the studio and selected works to take to Miami for the fair, and I’ve been with him ever since. No complaints. He’s a wonderfully supportive representative and works very hard for me.

Let’s get to your recent retrospective, Back to the Future, at Spanierman Modern, where you presented works from 1976 to 2022. Tell us about the genesis of this show.

I moved to my current location on Long Island during the summer of 1993. My paintings that were created out of beeswax, damar resin crystals and pure pigment powders had been wrapped in my racks from before I made the move. I had only 4 x 5 color transparencies and 35 mm slides, which had been scanned to digital in 2009 to be able to feature them on my website. But those scans did not really capture the surface textures and colors. I had applied for and been denied grants to have this body of work digitally documented.

So, last October, I bit the bullet and hired art handlers, had the skylights in my studio boarded over, engaged my photographer, and had 25 rather large paintings (48 x 48 inches – 48 x 84 inches) opened up, inspected and if in good shape, photographed. I asked Gavin if he wanted to be present, and he said, “Yes.” Of the 25/26 paintings, around three sustained damage from being mishandled – cracks through the surface. It was quite a revelation to just see these paintings again after 40+ years! I asked Gavin what he thought, and his response was, “This is a show. I’d like to do a survey of the arc of your career spanning 1976 – forward.”

Can you describe the process of selecting just eighteen works to represent 46 years of painting?

Gavin Spanierman selected the work. He is the curator and director of his gallery, Spanierman Modern. I leave the curation to the curators. We had some dialog about a few works, but I have total trust in his judgment. This is my 6^th solo exhibition with the gallery, and I have never been disappointed. I truthfully did not see the show until I walked in through the door for my opening. The more recent works, 2023,2024, will be featured in another exhibition. There were revisions made to the catalog up until it was printed. He engaged Lilly Wei to write the catalog essay, and she knows my work well. When she came out to the studio, I had the handlers pull out selections from my inventory for her inspection, as many of these works predated any relationship that I had with her. Seeing everything together in the gallery was truly a thrilling experience.

What is your takeaway? Did you notice any patterns, shifts, or surprises as you reflected on your body of work over time?

Absolutely! When I began my professional career, I was very interested in color bleeds, softened edges of color, and texture, and my first works were examples of that interest. Oil paint on raw canvas with melted paraffin applied around edges and smooshed through the paint provided me with the impetus to investigate “encaustic painting.” I had, of course, seen Brice Marden’s work and Jasper John’s works – but they were mixing wax into oil paint. I wanted to see if I could suspend pure pigments in beeswax without any other binder or materials and have it work.

I developed over time my method of grinding down damar resin crystals into a powder, melting it over a pot with hot water in it, in an old coffee can on a hotplate. I’d melt the damar into a thick amber goo, add chunks of beeswax, and dump in pure pigment powders, and stir it up with a paint stick until it looked like paint to me. Then, I‘d apply it with a cheap brush to cover the canvas. I’d do three layers of “paint” and then score it with a big nail to have a grid pattern. Once I had my grid, I’d start fusing the layers together. Heating a pallet knife on a hot iron, each stroke – fused the layers and revealed colors underneath. The undulating pattern suggested writing, as these marks were always made from left to right.

Sometimes, I would score in architectural “interruptions” along the bottom edge; other times, I’d change the patterns to create sections. I worked like this for about a decade and the medium was very restrictive, and I was itching to move forward. Then came 10-15 years of grabbing bits of language and lexicon from what I saw around me and incorporating those images into my picture plane. Writing and texture were becoming more and more a feature of my work. My monochromes were never pure, one color— always an amalgam of complex layers of paint and mediums applied and rubbed, applied and rubbed. This method created some of the nuances of the beeswax layers but with very robust freedom.

I became more and more interested in developing my use of language as an object and suddenly started making works with random phrases repeated, and finally, after a deeply personal experience, I began transcribing my journals directly onto canvas. This distinctive text-ure has become a hallmark of my work to this day. When I stand back and look at my early works, there is a definite thread that ties all of these decades of development together.

Lili Wei says in her catalog essay that you have experimented with “monochrome, Op Art, Color Field, P&D, and geometric abstraction—of the soft edge.” Could you discuss how these approaches have influenced your work?

As a young painter, I was very influenced by all of these movements. What struck me deeply was that many of the works strived to look as though they were devoid of the human touch. My aesthetic is deeply imbued with having my works be aggressively handmade. The “hard” edges are an illusion that is created by the geometric divisions and color contrasts. This holds true even in the monochromatic paintings, the texture overrides everything.

What are you working on now?

I’m currently working on paintings that take my constant muse, the square, and bring it back into the picture plane off-center, slowly moving either downward or upward, depending upon your perception, and maybe slowly exiting the picture plane. This placement has created movement, and the square is just kind of coasting on through.

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