Letters, Paint Marks and Collaged Elements
“While Schnabel works on an immense scale…the letters, paint marks and collaged elements — fits comfortably within the overall schema. He wants the viewer to see the painting and everything in it all at once, to get it, because there is nothing more to see after that first glance….
In addition to working on found and, often, previously used surfaces, Schnabel also exposed their surfaces to the elements and dragged them across the ground. When he joins two large sections of velvet or drop cloths together, he makes sure the seams are visible. If the support can’t be stretched tightly, this is proof of some kind of authenticity. Sometimes he applies just enough paint to produce an imprint from the stretcher bars. Paw prints are another sign of casualness. This calculated offhandedness tempers the pretentiousness, as it activates the surface upon which the artist will deposit the paint, gesso, resin and other things.” [John Yau on Julian Schnabel]
“Black serves as a drawing tool, a way of obscuring the part of the painting that needs to be obscured. Is it even really a colour? I think of it more like ink – a drawing medium – but I suppose it can also be read as outer space, or just the absence of colour.
I almost want palette not to present itself as an issue. I don’t want the viewer to get lost in the nuances of colour. The palette skews towards iconic – the sort of colours you might see in a flag. When you look at a comic book, there are no more than eight colours – they register, but it’s not something that’s occupying too much space in your head.” [Joe Bradley in conversation with Samuel Reilly]
Paintings happen in the studio where I have my own kind of system, although there can be physical residue of performance in them. I like to cut up the canvas in different sections, work on them individually, fold them and just leave them around for months. I don’t work on a painting with the goal of finishing it or having a complete and finished painting at the end of a work process. The idea is to get through as much material as possible, and various materials go through various processes. In most parts there is this mark making that happens with a broomstick and oil paint. I make a bunch of those canvases, fold them in half, and put them on the floor….
The individual canvases are very much the DNA; they record that movement, the process of making. When these different processes are done, I move on to the stage of actually composing a painting. The individual canvases are laid out with the aim of making a composition. [Oscar Murillo in conversation with Legacy Russell]
