• In Conversation: Jason Stopa Interviews Kit White

    Date posted: July 18, 2011 Author: jolanta

    Jason Stopa: I am pretty familiar with your work, but not so much with your process. Can you tell me about how you work and how long you have been working this way? Do you create a painting all in one sitting?

    Kit White: Generally, I like to work wet on wet in oil. Part of this has to do with the feel of the paint and how it slides together, and part has to do with the look of the paint, its facture, when complete. A wet surface maintains a sense of spontaneity and there is a freshness that lends it a sense of speed and movement.

    “They employ a horizon that implies the world, but really just makes a stage on which events transpire.”

    Kit White, Phalanx, 2009. Oil on wood, 38x47in. Courtesy of the artist

    In Conversation: Jason Stopa Interviews Kit White

    Jason Stopa: I am pretty familiar with your work, but not so much with your process. Can you tell me about how you work and how long you have been working this way? Do you create a painting all in one sitting?

    Kit White: Generally, I like to work wet on wet in oil. Part of this has to do with the feel of the paint and how it slides together, and part has to do with the look of the paint, its facture, when complete. A wet surface maintains a sense of spontaneity and there is a freshness that lends it a sense of speed and movement. Part of my attraction to this way of working also has to do with my love of the touch of the brush and the trail of the paint. There is a sensuousness to a wet surface that enhances it viscerally and reveals the process of its making not just the static image that is left when the process is finished. I think, also, that the love of the spontaneous surface goes back to my earliest experience of painting that was with watercolor. It has the quality of a tightrope walk. There are no second chances. You get it right the first try, or it fails. Oil is more forgiving. You can always scrape it off if it isn’t working or if it turns to mud, or if it goes in a direction you don’t like. This was a lesson I learned early on from reading about Matisse’s process. But I think my love of the wet stroke comes from late Manet, Morandi and later, Guston. It gives a painting a physicality that I find appealing and it reinforces the fact that the image emerges from the paint and the paint isn’t a hidden agent. But as for the time it takes to make a painting, I have no agenda in that respect. That is strictly a practical issue for me. I can’t always get a painting down in one session, though the idea of that is appealing. But I do have to complete an image before the paint sets up. That limits my work window to days, not weeks, unless I scrape a painting off. Usually, I lay down a few layers of under-painting and let that dry. When that is ready, I start the painting and work on that one painting until I am satisfied with it. That could be two to four sessions over two to five days depending on how things go and the size of the painting. A large painting can take me weeks and I have to be more strategic about laying down the layers of paint.

     

    Kit White, Rig, 2011. Oil on wood, 19x22in. Courtesy of the artist

    JS: I remember reading about Matisse’s Pink Nude and how he would wipe it down each time just as carefully as he painted it. Going through those cycles of death and rebirth kept it fresh. I’m curious, what role does color play in the creation of the work? Is it intuitive?

    KW: Color is important to me and I consider it an important part of a painting’s content insofar as I use it as an affective agent. It sets the tone, the atmosphere, for the events that transpire in the image. Color is tricky because it carries its own agenda that has to do with the way we individually react to it. There is always an emotional/psychological impact imbedded in color and you always have to be careful that it doesn’t over-ride whatever else you are trying to convey in the image. So you have to accept that there will always be an emotional quotient that it infuses into the image and be willing to accept the ramifications of using it. I tend to use it intuitively until things don’t go right or the image isn’t coming together in the way I thought it would.

    JS: It’s so true, getting aesthetic distance can be tough. Especially when a certain level of intimacy is involved. I see a lot of young painters using mark making techniques that distance themselves from direct painting i.e. stencils, spray paint, etc. Your work references the history of how the painting was made. The under layers are exposed as well as the declarative marks on the surface. It is clearly intentional. Jean Baudrillard has called contemporary visual culture “a surface without depth”. Can you talk about history and surface in relation to the work?

    KW: Well, I think for starters, recent history, criticism and philosophy have conditioned us to acknowledge the self-consciousness behind virtually every action. This is the contemporary condition. And a surface that reveals its own making is perhaps a recognition of that very self-conscious gesture as long as you get beyond the fetish of the personal mark. But the literal surface, the physical surface, is not what Baudrillard was referencing. He was addressing the issue of the simulacrum, that which has the look but not the substance of the thing itself. He was referring to our cultural propensity to prefer the simulation to the real – assuming, of course, that you can ever define the real. And he was suggesting that we are losing the ability to distinguish the real from the simulacrum. I think that one of the things that attracts me to paint and particularly, to an active, physical surface is that you can locate the materiality of that surface in the physical world. It is the thing itself. It is not a copy, not a simulation, but a bit of real material that creates an image, a metaphor, without losing its reality as material, as stroke, as an object in real space with the capacity for affect.

    JS: Well we are physical beings who live in a physical world, despite the seemingly omnipresent condition of virtual realities. I think this automatically posits us in a certain time and in a certain place, even if it is without ultimate specificity, thus history is inescapable. Which brings up another point, do you see these as complete abstractions or as metaphysical landscapes? Somewhere in-between?

    KW: I am going to go with door number three: somewhere in between. As a default position, it is somewhat compromised, but these painting are nothing if not impure. Formally, they fall outside of most categories. They employ abstract gesture to refer to things that might be recognizable but clearly do not exist in any world we know or reference anything that might be construed as actually existing. However, they do share patterns with many things in the world. In that way they refer to a commonality of form that applies to both the animate and inanimate and point to the fact that everything we know emerges from the same material but in different combinations. They employ a horizon that implies the world, but really just makes a stage on which events transpire. I don’t think of them so much as meta-physical – that has too strong an art historical connotation for me – but I do think of them as metaphorical. And I do think of them as landscapes of a sort. At least, I wish to summon the context of landscape. This isn’t haphazard; it is a direct attempt to reference the deep debt that American thought owes to the role of landscape in the development of our cultural and philosophical life. It has been our temple and crucible. Out of it came our own version of Romanticism, Transcendentalism, Pragmatism and our deeply materialist bent. Referencing landscape also is a way of declaring priorities. We can lose pop culture, social preoccupations and hierarchies and still form identities and carry on. But when we lose the physical world by denying our total dependence upon it, and our relation to it, we lose our lives and everything humans have ever made. I suppose, in that sense, they are a form of Memento mori.

    JS: Are you working on any specific body of work right now?

    KW: Yes. In the fall of 2010 I had the good fortune to be in Italy at Civitella Ranieri. While there, I did a suite of drawings that were different from what I had been doing previously in that they were more intricate and complete than the sketches I usually do in preparation for paintings. I really thought of them from the beginning as something unto themselves. But when I returned from Italy and started preparing for a small museum show at the Clay Cultural Center in West Virginia, there was something in these drawings that spurred me to return to large-scale painting, which I have avoided for at least a decade. These larger paintings have made me reconsider how these images operate.

    When the horizon re-entered my images more than a decade ago, I made a conscious decision to keep the paintings small so that they read metaphorically. I did not want to confuse the issue by making a space that could be read as an illusion of the actual. But now that I have lived in this virtual space for ten or more years, I am ready to inhabit those spaces in a different way. Maybe some of this comes from acknowledging the ubiquity of virtual space in visual culture right now. It no longer seems a stretch to propose illusion. Digital virtuality has given us a different context in which to see it. But for one brought up in the hey day of abstraction and who still believes that it represents the greatest challenge, there is still a lingering apprehension about anything too invested in pretending to be something it isn’t. I recall reading a story that Mark Tobey, the abstract expressionist painter, told about a Chinese painter friend who asked him once why all Westerners insisted on making images that looked like holes in the wall. It is still a good question even though I think I know the answer.

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