Redefining how art is seen and experienced ™
N E W
Y O R K
Which of your works stands out as a highlight, favorite, or significant point in your creative growth and development? And why was it most significant to you as an artist? I feel my most important, and certainly most exciting first solo exhibition was “Sand Columns” at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Montreal. It took two years of many hours of daily work and resulted in a well - received installation. Eventually, the practical problems of producing and storing such large work became overwhelming and the ideas that were written about painting at the time, became so intriguing that I switched to painting and also to works on paper. These paper works used the same idea of allowing chance to produce the forms by blindly folding children's construction paper as initial imagery and then photographing, printing, tracing and reproducing them in paint.
Artists always vary in the importance placed on communicating their own vision without question or limitation, and the emphasis and importance placed on the audience, and how it can and will relate to them. How do you feel when people interpret your artwork inversely, or is there one primary thing you hope to have the viewer experience? As might be clear by now, I think of making art as a “prod” to start a conversation with a viewer –both in terms of sharing interpretations and ways of seeing things and even physically inviting them to move around, to look, compare the doubled forms and perhaps even go back to look again.
The creative approach is a very personal methodology, and every artist differs when it comes to their artistic process. How do you approach creation- can you elaborate on your working process? From the very beginning of my life as an artist, my process has started with, the perhaps eccentric gesture, of performing things in reverse. For instance, instead of building sculptural forms in clay, I made holes in clay, poured plaster into them and took away the clay. Instead of constructing large panels for my environmental sculpture (“Sand Columns”) I made clay slabs, let the cement pick up the textures and become the building blocks of the columns. My painting process, was quite similar in that I transcribed tracings of chance images onto poured and squeegied paint surfaces and then filled in the background between the forms with tiny brushes. Eventually this very slow process was no longer important to me and I started to use the available technology of laser cutting and the new acrylic spray paint. However, it was the above process that engendered ideas both in life and in art for me and in a strange way, taught me to look at things from underneath and from the other side of things. In every case, I have wanted to make work by hand and spend many hours alone inthe studio.
The creative approach is a very personal methodology, and every artist differs when it comes to their artistic process. How do you approach creation- can you elaborate on your working process? From the very beginning of my life as an artist, my process has started with, the perhaps eccentric gesture, of performing things in reverse. For instance, instead of building sculptural forms in clay, I made holes in clay, poured plaster into them and took away the clay. Instead of constructing large panels for my environmental sculpture (“Sand Columns”) I made clay slabs, let the cement pick up the textures and become the building blocks of the columns.
My painting process, was quite similar in that I transcribed tracings of chance images onto poured and squeegied paint surfaces and then filled in the background between the forms with tiny brushes.(If still interested, please see copy and paste below for details) Eventually this very slow process was no longer important to me and I started to use the available technology of laser cutting and the new acrylic spray paint. However, it was the above process that engendered ideas both in life and in art for me and in a strange way, taught me to look at things from underneath and from the other side of things. In every case, I have wanted to make work by hand and spend many hours alone inthe studio.
*What are the principle themes and focus of your work? My principal theme has always been women and their work; their emotional lives and their means of expression. Art and its history was also of interest to me and when I first went back to school as a mature student and mother of three, and took art history courses, I felt that absolutely all had been done and there was nothing original left to be discovered. This of course was not true and I soon realized that the story of art was not a linear narrative with boundaries always waiting to be crossed and felt free to use “ready-made styles” to speak with. I wanted my work not to “remind” people of work of other artists of the past but very directly and unashamedly refer to it.
*What are the principle themes and focus of your work? My principal theme has always been women and their work; their emotional lives and their means of expression. Art and its history was also of interest to me and when I first went back to school as a mature student and mother of three, and took art history courses, I felt that absolutely all had been done and there was nothing original left to be discovered. This of course was not true and I soon realized that the story of art was not a linear narrative with boundaries always waiting to be crossed and felt free to use “ready-made styles” to speak with. I wanted my work not to “remind” people of work of other artists of the past but very directly and unashamedly refer to it.
Your aesthetic; while routed in fundamental art historical themes, is also very distinctive. I’m very interested in are artist with a unique vision places themselves within the art context; which other art and artists they are inspired and influenced by. Within the evolution of your artistic journey, have you found a specific affinity to certain artists, and if so, why? My most important influence and why I switched to painting was Jasper John’s work and his notion of ambiguity. I loved his coupling of the conceptual with the sensuous and the way his work expected no single answer, no single interpretation. In life as well, I’ve learned over the years that we have to be able to live with ambiguities. Two meanings or solutions have to be able to live side by side. Or even to exist simultaneously.
Being an older woman student and an artist in the 70’s I soon became aware of, and inspired by, artists who lived and worked in a largely male world and yet continued to make very strong work. In painting this was Helen Frankenthaler, Joan Mitchell and Agnes Martin but also sculptors such as Mary Miss and Alice Aycock and their move to include the viewer in a much more whole and physical way. This led me to construct my large environmental installations and then in painting to create environments that invited the viewer to move around the space, to read texts beside the paintings and to find meanings hovering in the space between painting and text. Art historically I thought of this as contaminating the purity of Greenbergian abstraction and as contaminating the purity of formalism. (please see “Miss Lonelyhearts” and later, “Wallworks” etc.)
IN CONVERSATION WITH: Brigitte Radecki
In a wider context, why do you think art is imperative for the world, and why is it important for you personally as artist? Of course, I believe that art is absolutely essential for the development and health of humanity. It makes us slow down, be quiet if only for a few moments and allows us to look at reality differently or from another point of view.The[1] openness of abstract painting is, for me, the perfect medium in that it allows viewers to interpret what they see freely. It means the start of a conversation with a viewer as opposed to the feeling that there is a message that needs to be decoded.
* In your evolution as an artist, (both creatively, conceptually and pragmatically), what has been the biggest frustration or obstacle? The biggest challenge for me has always been to create work that seduces people to spend more than 2 second of looking and to actually notice certain ambiguities, be they perceptual or conceptual and for me as an artist to be accepted as developing and working in more than one “style”. A very important aspect of my creative process has always been to invent new ways of working with the physical matter of art and this has of necessity brought with it different “looks” and has led to several differing series but which are of course, still connected by underlying themes. Another notion I explored from the beginning was to make doubles of my work. This took away the importance of the “original” and meant accepting the world of reproduction we now live in. This attitude also led the way to my interest and acceptance of the decorative which is so often based on repetition and symmetry and which I have followed since.