Anne Sherwood Pundyk With Art Spiel – Part 3

 AS: What can you tell me about your painting process?

Anne Sherwood Pundyk Mattituck, NY studio exterior
with canvas works in progress summer 2018.
Anne Sherwood Pundyk at work, Mattituck, NY studio spring 2018, photo courtesy The Suffolk Times.

Anne Sherwood Pundyk: To begin, I am alone in my studio out in the country. I clear away the past. I am free. I don’t need to do anything. I have no expectations based on prior work. I wait. An urge eventually calls me toward my materials. My materials are humble drop cloth canvas and house paint. They will be transformed and elevated. I want to make something new. It will affirm a hopeful light. It will hold a dark truth. It will be more than the sum of its parts. It will take whatever size and shape it needs to take. I am there to shepherd its creation. I start by mixing a color that matches my mood. I pour a large quantity of paint onto canvas on the floor of my studio or outside on the lawn. I watch the movement and density of the paint. I pour more paint or water to compose in response to what I see. I work with large heavy pieces of canvas sometimes soaking wet with paint and water, bending, rolling, and pulling. I learn as I go. I extend my body to my materials. The canvas becomes my skin and the paint is a bodily life fluid. Action becomes image.

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Anne Sherwood Pundyk With Art Spiel – Part 2

AS: I am curious why you chose to use the term “manifesto.”

Anne Sherwood Pundyk, “Being Blue,” 2018, 90 x 100 inches, Latex, Acrylic, Colored
Pencil and Stitching on Canvas.

Anne Sherwood Pundyk:I could say, “Artist Statement,” but that feels too passive as a prescription for how and why I paint. I associate the term “Manifesto” with an urgent call to action. Since 2009, my painting has formally become more reductive through three distinct bodies of work each with their own written manifesto .  Respectively, each written piece affirms a new order in a different way. Common to all is my concern with the idea of agency taken together with my on-going re-examination of the tradition of the medium. As my thinking and understanding changes, so does my work.

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Anne Sherwood Pundyk With Art Spiel – Part 1

Art Spiel’s Interview with artist and writer Anne Sherwood Pundyk has evolved into a cohesive and richly layered personal essay that will be published in sections over three days – one part a day.  Anne Sherwood Pundyk’s essay in three parts seals Art Spiel’s Interview series for 2018, while opening a portal into 2019 with fresh insights and new writing formats. 

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Debra Ramsay: Painting Time

Debra Ramsay embraces “beauty” as a core in her work.  Throughout her installations and paintings she reflects on the relationship between color, light, time, and place with a minimalist’s impulse and a colorist’s flair.  Mara Williams, the curator of “Painting Time”, her recent show at Brattleboro Museum, eloquently describes it as both “reductionist and exuberant.” In this interview for Art Spiel the artist elaborates on her background,  ideas, and projects.

Debra Ramsay, Painting Time Exhibition, 2018, acrylic on museum board and polyester resin film, photo courtesy of the artist

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Liminal Worlds at Trestle Gallery

Anne Polashenski , Aliens in a New Land: Josef & Francziska Podleszański (Great Grandparents), 2015, C-prints, cut paper collage & gouache on paper, 23 x 19 in, photo courtesy of the artist

Curated by Katerina Lanfranco, “Liminal Worlds,” the upcoming show at Trestle features four artists who reflect on the fluid dividing line between the multiple realities we experience as part of the human condition.  Anne Polashenski and Greg Thielker examine notions of “self and other” through ethnography, immigrant experiences, and national borders. Ashley Hope and Elizabeth Insogna explore the elusive notions of spirit and afterlife. Altogether, through their artworks, these artists invite us to venture into territories that make us contemplate not only  politics, but also the potential for deeper self-awareness. Continue reading “Liminal Worlds at Trestle Gallery”

Thoreau and the Unibomber at Ess Ef Eff

Joseph Noderer, Neighborly, Paint on canvas, photo courtesy the artist
Joseph Noderer, Neighborly, Paint on canvas, photo courtesy by the artist

“Thoreau and the Unibomber”, David E. Kearns’ and Joe Noderer‘s two person painting exhibition at Ess Ef Eff, raises some current existential questions –  What point are we trying to access with our progress? What is the apogee of understanding? Is it all for a cosmic awareness and peaceful co-habitation? The show invites viewers to reflect on a dichotomous view of civil disobedience, of living alone in nature, along with the consequent personal and social fallout or success.  Continue reading “Thoreau and the Unibomber at Ess Ef Eff”

An Odd Symbiosis: Action in Non-Action

Artist Tirtzah Bassel, at the opening night of The Lines Start Here

Charged with urgency, precision and an acute sense of place, Tirtzah Bassel’s luminous oil paintings at Slag capture figures lingering in uncannily familiar public spaces.  Whether the subject matter of these canvases are crowds, couples, or single figures, the related verbs are of present continuous tense; standing, sitting, resting. These paintings, waiting in line at Trader Joe’s, sitting on an Ikea sofa to check a text message, or stretching horizontally on a bare mattress in the bedroom section, all entail the action in non-action. Although the commercial spaces these figures populate are filled with utilitarian objects such as red (and empty) shopping carts and a row of colorful sofas or beds, these interiors convey a strong sense of void. Objects multiply, proliferate and are caught along with their creators at the same space in an odd symbiosis.  Continue reading “An Odd Symbiosis: Action in Non-Action”