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Mary Cook is a Brooklyn-based artist. Greg Lindquist’s work was on view February 7-March 8 at Elizabeth Harris Gallery.
Greg Lindquist, Red Hook Revere Sugar Refinery (Flattening the Remains, The Age of Steam), 2007. Oil, metallic and graphite on linen, 17.5 x 50 in. Courtesy of Elizabeth Harris Gallery.Mary Cook: Greg, Congratulations on your first one-person exhibition at the Elizabeth Harris Gallery. It is a pleasure to get a sneak peak of your work before it is on view across the river in Chelsea.
Greg Lindquist: Thank you for visiting. This show Industry follows the trajectory of the last show, To Brooklyn, which was documenting the urban reclamation of industrial Brooklyn. So now, basically, we are looking at warehouses and places of production that have been abandoned and are being turned into luxury housing since outsourcing through globalization.MC: Why does this particular subject matter interest you? Is it because we are in Greenpoint, a place that is in the process of being gentrified? What initially sparked your interests in the “industrial into the luxury home/condo”? Why do you choose to make pictures of that?
GL: I think it started as an interest or rather spawned from an interest in landscape as memorial or monument while I was at North Carolina State University, where I did my undergraduate studies in art and English literature. In my undergraduate painting classes I was looking a lot at images from the Holocaust, specifically the prison camps. It interested me how the concentration camps in these spaces are historic monuments that are kept as public memorials. I also found it fascinating that these spaces are completely empty of the horrific activity that happened within them. That is, of course, a really difficult issue. I kind of gave it up when I came to Pratt for my graduate studies and I ended up doing about three or four paintings to bring closure to that idea. What I ultimately found was that this was an event that can never be adequately or definitively expressed—there are words or images to do justice—and I was not interested so much in the specific event but rather the idea of landscape as memorial.MC: So would you say that, stemming from your experience with some of your past work, that you are in some way homogenizing the memorial by even attempting to represent it through a series of painting those images?
GL: Yes, that is an interesting way to put it—but ultimately, I am trying to connect events to more of a universal experience. I think that what I was getting at is more of an idea than a specific event or an opinion of it. I think this situation can be a bit of a conceptual quagmire.MC: How do you see your relationship to other contemporary landscape painters such as Rackstraw Downes?
GL: What I realized was that the essence or the feeling of what I was looking at was happening right in front of me in Brooklyn. The paintings in this current body of work are really about documenting the bygone era of the Industrial Revolution. Even though I am not doing what Rackstraw Downes is doing when he lugs his easel and canvas out into the landscape and paints en plein air, striving for optical verisimilitude in which he is trying to capture exactly what he sees and how he sees it. My paintings are very manufactured and abstracted in contradistinction to Rackstraw Downes’s empirical approach.MC: Photography is pretty essential to your painting process.
GL: Absolutely. I go onsite and carry around my digital camera. I wander around on foot, climb over fences, and I take photographs. I’ve always enjoyed taking photographs—it’s a way into making a painting. I also will crop these images in Photoshop and I will heighten their contrast, or lately lower their contrast, and then I’ll work from the photograph. These are sites that change pretty quickly. A lot of times the photographs capture atmospheres and qualities of light that you can’t capture standing in the landscape looking at something and trying to paint it over a period of days—these magical moments happen quickly, too quickly for the eye and hand to automatically transcribe.MC: I notice that the particular time of day that you seem to choose is often the same in terms of color. What does this time of day and the kind of cloudy overcast sky signify for you? What is your relationship to this particular ambience?
GL: I think I am looking for an atmosphere to emote a particular feeling that describes the overall event of gentrification and urban reclamation. I think these times of day are very fleeting and temporal. I have begun to think that this quality of light—I am trying to capture the white light of an overcast day—may be a result of air pollution, which I find pretty ironic. My work has become more and more monochromatic in terms of value and color palette. I think that this particular approach is important in achieving the overall brooding, somber feeling of this event.MC: You approached your subject with a particular distance that can be seen as indicative of your photographic practice. It seems that you are trying to capture the aura of something that is untouchable. While at the same time these paintings seem to be touching on something rather curious…
GL: Well, I think in terms of distance you are absolutely right. When I take the photographs and put them through a certain number of digital processes in order to get to the final image, it does create a distance from the subject matter. Although I am capturing a particular atmosphere, I am completely changing the color palette. I don’t look at the photograph when I am mixing colors. I use a specific limited color palette, most recently a palette of almost indiscernible grays. Photography is a great way to distance oneself from the original experience. Gerhard Richter’s October 18, 1977 series of paintings is a great example of this.
MC: There are some minor distortions visible as part of painting images. You project your images onto the canvas?
GL: Yes and there is a problem with the distortion that happens in key stoning the image, which is difficult with the slide projector. It is something that I am aware of and I need to eventually resolve. What I mean by keystone is when a projector is positioned at a tilt, the image is projected onto the canvas at a rhomboidal shape instead of a rectangle at a right angle. I think this problem kind of dovetails with my interest in using a video projector because it easily corrected digitally. But what’s interesting is with a digital projector in order to experience its crisp resolution the projected image has to be viewed from at least 10 feet away. It doesn’t work when you are up close. The images break up into a series of squared grids.The way that I respond to the slide projection is that in projecting at a great distance, shapes become distorted by the scale shift, which lends itself to the shapes that I paint on the canvas. I thought at first when you said “distortion,” you were talking about the way when you squint your eyes what you see tends to break things up into shapes and value and colors. And for me that is more of an inspiration that I see in paintings by Fairfield Porter, who believed that every shape has a character, every shape has its own personality. He sought to find in these shapes the essential character of the objects that they describe. I’ve always loved that idea.
MC: I find that the liberties you take from the projected image as produced painting images provide a definite quirky feel to your paintings.
GL: Photography is a good tool for this. It is interesting to think about the relation to abstraction in my work because also by using the photographic reference I feel more freedom in the way that I paint—it allows me to focus on exploring texture, brushstroke and transparencies.In some ways, I have an affinity to abstract painting even though I am painting a representational image. I am not going for something that has a descriptive truth and at some point our visual culture has become so confused by the photograph. For example, Rackstraw Downes has made the point that when people tell him his paintings look realistic he takes that to mean it looks like a photograph. Because our culture has become so assimilated with photography, we start to not even notice the differences between seeing through the lens of a camera and our own eyes.
In such paintings as Red Hook Revere Sugar Refinery (Flattening the Remains, The Age of Steam) and East River State Park (Endangered Site for Preservation, Nest Egg for Luxury), for example, I was very conscious of the distortion caused by the camera lens. Basically, the horizon line and all buildings on it tend to become bent in awkward ways by the camera lens, and I was determined for it to be seen more naturally—so I straightened the horizon in Photoshop.
MC: How about the metallic paint you use in your paintings?
GL: I started to use the paint to represent construction materials—the steel beams of exposed structures in the middle of being built. But, also if you look at my paintings from the To Brooklyn exhibition I was just painting the skies in with oil paint. The real shift from the work at that show last year is that I am no longer painting the skies. I am letting them be the ground, which is composed of the metallic paint or hard molding paste. But before that I thought, what if I used the metallic ground to show something of the same visual effect of light reflecting off the surface of water. For example, in North Sixth Crepuscule (Mast-hemm’d Manhattan) I use the metallic surface to describe the East River. And then I went a step further and asked myself, what would it look like as the sky? And then I started experimenting with actual stainless steel on panel. So that’s how these paintings came about.
