Beer with a Painter: Jesse McCloskey

Originally published on Hyperallergic Weekend Edition

Jennifer Samet and Jesse McCloskey

I’ve known Jesse McCloskey for years, but his work and words are always surprising me. They get to the heart of the matter quickly. In one of the early days after I had my first child, I wanted nothing more than to go out and see some shows in Chelsea. It still makes me laugh that this childless dude was the one who told me it was okay to bring the baby along, head into a café, and feed him when he got hungry. But that’s what McCloskey is about: keep working, no matter what it takes, or the devil’s gonna get you, and, whatever … birth, sex, and death are as natural as rock and roll.

Beer with a Painter: Kyle Staver

Originally published on Hyperallergic Weekend, February 9, 2013

Kyle Staver (left) and Jennifer Samet (right) (photograph by Janice Nowinski)

A couple of years ago, when I was still resisting Facebook, I heard about the debates Kyle Staver was spearheading there on the topic of Renoir’s late paintings. I set up a profile because I had to know more about this independent-minded female painter who likes Renoir’s work as much as I do. Since then, I’ve gotten to know Staver and her painting “in real life.” She’s dynamic on the canvas and off, a true cheerleader for her aesthetic causes, other artists, and friends.

Kyle Staver, “3 panels of Acteon /Diana,” (2012), oil on canvas, 68″x154″

It was Staver who, in part, suggested my interviews with artists take the form of “beer with a painter.” But when it came time for us to talk, I was invited to “the fort,” the corner table at Santa Fe Bar and Grill in Park Slope, where she and Janice Nowinski meet weekly for girls’ night over frozen margaritas.

Beer with a Painter: Susanna Coffey

Originally published on Hyperallergic Weekend Edition, January 26, 2013

Susanna Coffey, “Moss Glen Falls” (2008). Monoprint, 15 x 12 inches. (All images courtesy the artist unless otherwise noted)

Susanna Coffey, who was born in New London, Connecticut, studied at Yale, teaches at the Art Institute of Chicago, and lives and works in New York, is best known for her self-portraits. These frontal heads set against backdrops of world locales and events are rigorous, unrelenting penetrations of the meeting-point of humanity and violence.

Over the last year, I got to know her, and another part of her painting practice. She works outdoors at night, making pulsating, loose landscapes and cityscapes on tiny canvases and boards. The differences between her practices are a reminder of how compelling the range of one’s humanness can be.

The sternness that her self-portraits suggest is undone by her personality, the way she connects with people, her love of dance and her spirituality. The focus on symmetry in Coffey’s work is not, in the end, about evenness, but rather a reminder of balance.

Beer with a Painter: Mary Heilmann

Mary Heilmann, “Renny’s Right Geometry of a Wave” (2011). Oil on wood panel, 31.5 x 39.75 inches (all images © Mary Heilmann, courtesy the artist, 303 Gallery, and Hauser & Wirth, unless otherwise noted)

I visited Mary Heilmann recently in her Bridgehampton studio. At the end of our time together, she took a small painting of a wave, and turned it upside-down. It was the perfect gesture to sum up our conversation and the themes of her work — an offhand reminder of its yin-yang quality. Heilmann’s work plays with big ideas, but it does so playfully.

Heilmann, born in 1940, spent her childhood years in Southern California amidst beach and surf culture. She studied ceramics and sculpture at the University of California, Berkeley, where she received her MA in 1967. She moved to New York the next year, hanging at Max’s Kansas City with her friend Richard Serra, and gravitating toward the world of minimalist sculpture.

Beer with a Painter: Ellen Trumbo

with Ellen Trumbo, in front of her Grand Haven Landscape
photographs of us by Tyler Loftis

Ellen Trumbo’s paintings are (like her!) full of light and painted with an absence of showmanship.  She lives in Grand Haven, a beautiful town on Lake Michigan.  She and a small group of fellow painters have created an aesthetic sanctum of creative energy in the Midwest, and I like to visit, write, collaborate, and feed off their inspiration. 

Ellen is the kind of woman who quietly runs everything in town – and by that I mean she manages five restaurants, co-directs a gallery, and fundraises for multiple cultural events per year.  She is also the friend who can play a mean game of trivia and doesn’t flinch when I get competitive at beach soccer and nearly break her toe.

Beer with a Painter: Judith Linhares

Photographs by Elizabeth Kresch

Read our interview here on the Hyperallergic Weekend Edition...  

Judith Linhares’s painting has been on my mind since I saw a show of her work in the spring of 2011 at the Edward Thorp Gallery.  At the time I was thinking about both contemporary figurative painting and gestural abstraction, and these solidify in Linhares’s work with a rare conviction.  

In her paintings, hippie couples, twisted sisters, and talismanic animals cavort and tend to their cave-den, dream-cove environments.  For all the fantasy, there’s a metaphoric truth to their space and light, a connection to the natural world, despite the wild way she gets there – complementary, high-chroma bands of color succinctly and fluidly describing bodies and surroundings. 

Born in Pasadena, Linhares studied in the Bay Area in the 1960s and 70s, and has lived in New York since 1979.  She has had close connections to a panoply of artistic traditions including Bay Area figuration, California assemblage, outsider art, the Chicago “Hairy Who” and Mexican ritual objects.  But it was a nice surprise to realize she and I share an interest in some of the New York figurative painters as well, especially Louisa Matthiasdottir.

I invited Linhares to talk painting over beers at her bar of choice.  She’s in the process of moving, but already had her eye on the beautiful century-old Brooklyn Inn, in her new neighborhood of Boerum Hill.  Everything was amber-colored on that autumn early evening, from the wood bar to our Spaaten and KelSo of Brooklyn IPA.

Thank you Judith and Hyperallergic editors John, Tom, and Hrag.

Beer with a Painter: Rackstraw Downes

Originally published on Hyperallergic Weekend Edition, October 14, 2012

Rackstraw Downes, “Sand Hills with Cell Tower, Presidio, TX, P.M.”(2010). Oil on canvas, 20 5/8 x 35 7/8 inches. (All Images Courtesy of the Artist. © Rackstraw Downes, Courtesy Betty Cuningham Gallery, New York)

Rackstraw Downes’s recent paintings are currently on view at Betty Cuningham Gallery. Born in 1939 in Kent, England, Downes now lives between New York City and Presidio, Texas. Well known for his panoramic landscapes, Downes works for months on site in both urban and rural surroundings. He is often described as a realist but this term is perhaps better applied to his subject matter than his technique. Through his sustained and intensive outdoor working process, his paintings empirically draw attention to the true nature of the 21st Century landscape. They are places we don’t necessarily linger, but are nevertheless our environments.