005 INTUITION

LIVE CONVERSATION: MARY CRENSHAW INTERVIEWS KEVIN BLAKE

recorded on

www.facebook.com/LOLWOWSOS/

November 16, 2019

In the post below, Mary Crenshaw, painter from Milan, will interview painter Kevin Blake, who lives and works in Chicago.  Kevin creates vibrant and psychological paintings that critically examines post-WWII American idealism and culture. Let’s follow their conversation below and learn more about Kevin’s artistic practice, his sources of inspiration, and his views upon art and painting today …

LOL/WOW/SOS: Hello Mary and Kevin, thank you both for allowing us to follow your conversation here on LOL/WOW/SOS!  Looking forward to visiting Chicago and learning more about Kevin Blake's work!

Kevin Blake: Good Morning! I’m looking forward to our conversation!

Mary Crenshaw: Kevin, thanks for taking time to be interviewed! It will be interesting to learn about your process, influences, and your painting habits. To start, could you discuss your most recent series of paintings and what you are currently working on? Also, explain who these characters might be that people your work. Is your imagery from memory, or gleaned from the internet or collected photographs?

Kevin Blake: I’m happy to share this digital space with you, and I’m hoping to learn more about you as well. I’ve called my newest series of paintings “Legless Wonders.” I’ve cropped out the legs and/or feet of the all of the men in the images and I didn’t recognize the pattern until I made the fifth or sixth painting. The first thing I thought when I recognized the legless men was ... I must have taken their legs out so they couldn’t run away. I have no idea why I would think that because, of course, no painting is running anywhere. But the idea gave me pause. It made me frame the paintings within the context of my life. It is, after all, a mirror – each and every work an artist makes. So I decided that this initial thought and its tangents would become the conceptual framework for all of the work that I had already made, and was now developing as a series. I like to grab onto ideas when they flash into my mind. I like to trust the first impulse in my studio. I like to try and understand why my first impulse even exists. What’s it there for? What does the intuition know before the practical brain takes over and rationalizes a million different reasons not to trust the impulse? I still have no definitive answers from my explorations of these ideas, but I do feel that the intuition is an infinitely more interesting place to begin to do anything worthwhile. It is a method for understanding oneself, a way of seeing yourself outside of yourself. I’ve been interested, or maybe the correct way of describing it is that I’ve created an artistic obsession out of trying to understand what it means to be a man. A father. A husband. A son. A brother. A human. In this order. I’ve always felt that my understanding of all of those titles was a sort of a collage; a panoply of ideas pasted onto my mainframe from every corner of personal experience. Because of this, I’ve always approached painting as a collage of disparate elements colliding in space to provide ME with understanding, knowledge, and power within my own mind. I grab pictures from family albums; I buy vintage photos on eBay; I collect old magazines; I pull from the internet and social media. I never have a plan for a photo to be a painting. Though, when I feel attracted to an image, whatever the source, I try to save it ... down the road these things get collaged into paintings. And my paintings, I often cut up into collages. So it’s all a generative process in which nothing is sacred, all is perpetually evolving, and I try my best to keep intuition at the helm.

Mary Crenshaw: You succinctly describe your work as “a collage of disparate elements colliding” and trusting your first impulse as an important instinct in your painting. You also mention a desire to understand yourself and your assigned societal roles, conjuring visualizations of your subconscious world and investigating your deep psyche. As a result, this ambiguous figuration allows viewers to create their own fictionalized version of meaning. The Dada and Surrealist front runner, Max Ernst, comes to mind as a painter whose work revealed dream-like images. Has he been an influence? Tapping into this unconscious dream imagery is very interesting in relation to our contemporary culture. As far as the legless men, I remember how difficult being an artist was as a mother of two small boys, and questioning the frivolity of spending time in the studio when there were so many other needs to be met! There’s light at the end of that tunnel. 

Looking at the televisions with the rabbit ears and the clothes people are wearing, your imagery seems purposefully from another era that references time and memory. Any comments on this? Are the large, circular paintings your most recent works? What are the materials you are using working on this larger scale? Any special paper? Paints? Is this the first time you have made circular paintings? It is an interesting change and gives continuity to the series. You mention on an Instagram post how the most exciting time is when you remove the tape. Can you elaborate? Have you ever considered integrating the blue tape into the work? The work in progress image of the large circular paintings is very dynamic, almost like you have been drawing with the tape and uniting the singular works to form one piece.

Kevin Blake: Well, thank you for the words of encouragement about having a young family. I’ve recently had to move out of my studio that I’ve occupied for the better part of the last decade. I moved out because my studio and my art-making were operating as a financial detriment to my family. I have two young boys and I’m probably facing an all too similar situation for artists with and without children. So, I’ve run the gamut with feeling guilty about being an artist, which probably takes me directly back to the Legless Wonders I’ve made. HA! The title is sounding more desperate now than I intended! 

I do like Ernst’s work, and the Dada/Surrealist movements have made an enormous contribution to my understanding of what is possible with a work of art. However, I’ve become suspicious of influences as of late. At least for me, knowing too much can be a danger to my production. Trying to curate outcomes by knowing what’s been done before is a staple of art education. But, I’ve always felt like teaching art this way or making art this way is like teaching someone to drive using only the rearview mirror. Sure, it’s important to know what’s behind you, but it won’t help you successfully navigate what’s in front of you. Like making art, driving requires your complete attention on the forward momentum of the vehicle you’re driving. To reach a novel place, one must be willing to get lost. So I try to get lost. I look for dated ephemera from which to build a collage. I look for the birth of contemporary ideas in decades-old imagery. In this way I can see how ideas evolve from a generational viewpoint.

The paintings are all made on Arches oil paper – a super durable product. I love it. I prefer to work on paper because I use markers and pens and other paper-specific materials for a lot of the underbellies of my paintings. The circular paintings are all from the past year ... and was a change of pace for scale. 
Also, I like the clean edge that’s left behind when I pull the blue tape off. Somehow that clean edge encapsulates the painting inside a clean window. It can’t escape!

 Mary Crenshaw: Sorry to hear about you having to give up your studio of ten years! That must have been difficult. But artists are resilient! I read that Kiki Smith works at home in her kitchen. I think she has a vegetable garden and doesn’t want to miss out on working in it. I agree that it is important to get lost as a way of making new discoveries. Can you recall any ah-ha moments, times when you felt like you were on to something new in the production of a certain group of paintings, maybe after having been off track for a while? The story of Lee Krasner ripping up some drawings she was frustrated with and returning to her studio the following day, only to be inspired by this frenzied act and the pieces scattered on the floor has always rung true for me. Creation through destruction. 

So, you look to the past for material to resuscitate. Do you keep any kind of archive, or image bank you can refer to, like a shoebox of old photos and newspaper clippings? Even though figuration is at the forefront of your paintings, frequently there is a fluidity of the images that verges on abstraction at times. Three works in particular: the one that says old me, with a woman holding a red rope, the couple with wine and television tied together with red (which, by the way, I had to enlarge because it looked like real string because it was so carefully painted) and the work that curves onto the adjacent wall. In this last work you experimented with line thickness, like the butcher’s blue swipe or the pink line puncturing the cloud. You achieve a dream-like quality and really give the viewer things to look at with these playful elements that meander throughout the compositions. 

Describing keeping the painting inside a window where it can’t escape calls to mind comics and graphic novels. You are also a talented writer, and give poetic, evocative titles to your pieces that add another enigmatic layer to your work. How do you come up with them? Is it before, during, or after making the work, or all of the above? Could you tell us more about your titles, because they seem to be an important aspect of your practice?

Kevin Blake: I think I have AH-HA moments every day. But I can never seem to grasp them fully, or fully wield the initial excitement of having a novel thought. It’s like trying to look at a pool of water in your hand. As soon as you stop to look at it, it’s running through your fingers. Then, having lost the essence of the idea, all the mind can conjure are words to contextualize it. And the words WILL fail to describe it. This failure may have led artists to abstraction. I know it has led me there. But abstraction has failed me in the same way. So much of it exists that it too fails to describe singular moments of an individual’s life; or even the individual experience of the artist making the image. Now, even a swipe of paint can reference someone else in the rearview mirror. So I’m constantly trying to toy with languages – visual and textual – in attempts to usurp the historicity of both. At the current moment I can’t really create an image without both elements. Text and image are constantly working together in ways that aren’t always clear to me initially. But they seem to need each other in my images. I have notebooks full of titles. Pages of words, phrases, word pairings, etc. ... that will later become titles for paintings, lines in poems, titles for books. When I’m getting into a new image, or when it’s coming alive on the page, I’ll start looking in the notebooks – piecing words together to please the image in some way. Something complimentary, or something contradictory. Something that creates potential in the minds of someone looking. And I’m constantly trying to be someone watching my work get made. For instance, in my newest painting that I haven’t finished, I wanted to have words look like they were knit onto a pillow. My original thought was to use a phrase that was above my basement toilet in the house I grew up in. It was “We aim to please, you aim too please.” I always thought that was a funny phrase to be over the toilet, but I also thought it was a dark thing to have on the pillow next to the image I was making of a young boy pointing a toy gun at what is seemingly a father figure. However, I also thought the words were too familiar and would likely transport others back to their bathrooms. That was a potential I wasn’t fond of, and I thought it limiting. What the words ended up being were “A Wick in His Ear Shells”...a collage of words that I believe have a sort of limitless potential within the context of this image. I had the words “his ears look like seashells,” and “he jammed his wick” written in my sketchbook. I don’t remember why I wrote either down. But together they said so much about this image. And history. And human behavior. And much more ... Ambiguity makes your perspective clearer. My hope is that the individual takes it to a place that will describe themselves rather than me. 

I do believe that all moments are necessary steps to get to the next moment. Of course, this makes intuitive sense. And though life can often feel like it’s taking you on a ride, the truth is that we are shaping those next moments in our minds in the form of anxious potentials; making scenarios in our minds. Story-boarding our future. As in life, when I try to control what happens to my art, I often make a mess of things. But it seems like art is the only place that I can still reject all the curating and focus on doing what feels right. Immediately. Sometimes for the purpose of creating a mess, so I can spend time on a solution.

 Mary Crenshaw: Your use of text combined within the imagery succeeds for me as an observer and it is unique from other artists using text combined with painting. How your words fit compositionally actually added to the images, like you said, “knit onto a pillow” is compelling. This way, text acts as a focal point that obliges us to look before continuing to explore the rest of the painting. With the titles, you give viewers a chance to use their imaginations, and draw people in to linger and really examine what is happening. You mention “creating potentials in the mind of someone looking and trying to be someone watching my work get made” seems essential, especially if you want to think critically. It is very difficult to do, isn’t it? Your notebooks are a crucial part of your practice. Have you ever considered exhibiting them alongside the paintings? What a fantastic idea to jot down ideas for titles! 

There is one work in particular, the man wearing glasses, that I would like to discuss with you. It is somewhat different from the rest, having an iconographic feel because of the singular, up-close view you have chosen. The foreshortening of the face and head brings to mind Mantegna's “Lamentation over the Dead Christ." Were you experimenting with using this kind of perspective? It is very effective. A sleeping, contemplating or even dead man is adorned with six pairs of glasses. The viewer is at the center of the drama because of being so close. The top three pairs of glasses are reflecting landscape; the pillow surrounding the head also mimics a craggy, mountainous terrain. There is a tag he wears on a string around his neck that reads “a sponge out of water.” No collaged elements are visible. For me, the text works very well because of its placement at the bottom center – again returning to the icon concept – and how a living sponge, when it is out of water dies, or a synthetic one, one which we are more familiar with, dries up and becomes hard and brittle. I understand you don’t want to assign meaning and give away thoughts, but could you explain the process of developing this specific painting? Was it spontaneous or more planned than the others?

Kevin Blake: Stepping outside yourself to look at yourself becomes easier with practice, I think. I used to make plans for my studio in advance. I mean, I never wrote anything down, but I knew what I was going to do when I walked in the door. I would obsess about it overnight – itching to get back to whatever I was working on. I shed that baggage a couple of years ago. In the studio, I’ve tried really hard not to trust the self that thinks he has answers to anything. His understanding of the world is practical, scientific, and learned through experience, and often those experiences don’t yield lessons until after the experience. So, I’ve tried to approach art as a learner rather than a teacher. In the past, I was trying to teach and preach about all the problems in the world through my art. Now I’m in it to reveal myself to myself. This is either an effective strategy for evolving my art, or a really subversive rationale for continuing to make art ... maybe both. As for my notebooks, I think these will stay mine, for now. 

The painting you are referring to is called “Starched by a Regal Roach,” and it ended up looking like a self-portrait in a coffin. I originally saw an advertisement of this Olympic skier or something and he had a pair of glasses on his eyeballs and some goggles wrapped around his neck, and another pair on his head. That was funny to me. That’s where I began. I thought the more glasses the better. Every time I stepped back from the painting, I could see new potential for meaning. Eventually I saw a younger version of myself, mummified with lenses. Young minds are often referred to as sponges that soak up information and I thought, maybe an old person’s mind is just like a sponge out of water. I’m both happy and sad to put that younger version of myself to rest. This was one of the last paintings I made in my studio, and I could feel the impending change. Though I never once thought to make a painting about any of those things, I can look at this image I made and say, ‘Oh, I see you now.’

Mary Crenshaw: It is so true what you say about the practical self, and how lessons are learned after the experience. Your approach as a learner rings true, and it seems like the best mindset to have for an artist who wants to continue to grow and experiment. 

Your paintings are very detailed and intricate. From the images you posted, it looks like you work on multiple pieces at once. Do you concentrate on one piece, or jump back and forth between them simultaneously? If so, has this given birth to new concepts – like that red line in a few that seemed to unite them as a series and give them interconnectedness? We haven’t spoken about palette. How do you decide on color? Is it an intuitive process or planned?  

“Starched by a Regal Roach” (great title!) is your final goodbye to the studio. Will you be working from home, or are you looking for another place? Any ideas you’re working on at the moment that you’d like to share, or any future plans regarding your painting/writing?

Kevin Blake: Sorry for the delay. I seem to have had a serpentine line in a lot of my work. Going back more than a decade, I used the line often to mask bad drawing or to complicate the perspective. The line has many different uses and I have many different reasons for deploying it now. Some painting reasons, some conceptual reasons. Sometimes both. I’ve always had a high key palette, or warm palette. Even why I try to cool things down, they are pretty bright. I feel like my paintings look very Crayola colored. I’m ok with it ...

I’m working on a book of poems and small collages called “The Myths of the Electronic Night.” I call them writing poems because I don’t know what else to call them. They are lyrical and have cadence but I don’t know anything about poetry, so I don’t want to offend any poets. They are vignettes. The edges of the narratives are always soft and ambiguous, the way I imagine my paintings to operate. I’ve been working at home for the time being – strategizing and planning what my future-making will look like. Until that viable vision arrives at my doorstep, my basement will do the trick.

LOL/WOW/SOS: Kevin, thank you for sharing your thoughts on your paintings and your studio practice. Mary, thank you for an excellent interview! Your conversation has been very insightful and inspiring!

LOL/WOW/SOS: For more information about Kevin Blake's art, please consult: www.kevinblakeart.net

Kevin Blake: LOL/WOW/SOS, thank you!!