Jacob van Loon (on Tumblr) & Chad Wys (on Tumblr)
CW: I admit I’m guilty of delivering that line quite a lot: “I make art for myself.” I know I started out creating work for my eyes only, and occasionally I still feel that genuine sense of isolation in my craft. Years ago I made the decision to stop painting relatively traditional landscapes and to start using visual information from culture as a means of social commentary. I made that abrupt change for myself and I never had any intention of sharing the results. Eventually I did start sharing, and now I feel a bit of pressure and responsibility to craft something successful and meaningful (as amorphous as “success” and “meaning” is). But at the same time my work has grown stronger precisely because its meaning is influenced by, or even dependent upon an audience.
JVL: Landscapes? I’m both surprised and interested you went from something as innocuous as landscapes to something as confrontational as your current works. What are some pieces you consider transitions? How much did you experiment before realizing your current body of work?
CW: It was an abrupt decision to begin working with found objects (the impetus came from different directions, but I suspect mostly from my academic studies and the desire to push myself artistically). Initially I spent time divided between painting landscapes and experimenting with appropriation and found objects; now, I haven’t painted a landscape in years. I suppose it makes some sense that my first readymade consists of a large 19th century landscape found in a thrift store, on which I painted a rudimentary color test (a series of contrasting, bright hues slopped on at the center of the picture plane). I’ve always had a fondness for art historical motifs; I began, more or less, by painting them outright and I’ve ended up appropriating them from the visual culture around me.
JVL: How did the bars come about? I’ve seen similar markups on old illustration plates too. I’ve taken after that approach after seeing how you use planes of color in your work—smaller sheets I make to study Audubon’s palette (which I thought mine was similar to but it’s really not).
I have a hard time remembering work from more than two years ago—I see older work resurface online sometimes and it blows my mind that I ever made something like that. There’s still this underlying fussiness in my work that I feel like I am combating a lot of the time, but the technicality and certain pangs of bleakness tie most of my work together. There are a lot of thin veils separating the ideas I pursue in my work and I don’t know if they should be there anymore. We should get together sometime, get hammered and paint some landscapes.
CW: Absolutely! I once held an art lesson with some family—my mother and grandmother to name two—and we had more fun painting landscapes than we could have imagined. I think they began to appreciate how difficult the whole “art thing” really is; or, judging by their output, they should have!
As for the color bars, etc., in my work: I think the initial idea came from the printer registration marks and color-blocking found at the margins of commercial packaging, as well as older photomechanical reproductions of fine art, etc. I suppose I wanted to bring those marks from the margins into the image area in an effort to draw attention to them, to underscore the status of reproduction and mechanization. Part of it had also to do with combining elements of Color Field and abstract expressionist theory into unexpected places: a hybridization, or bastardization, of artistic styles and eras. How have you arrived at your current stylistic choices?
JVL: I think there’s a lot of different vehicles for art to travel in, although my parameters are less stringent than my peers. Illustration is an artform designed for consumption of narrative. It usually illuminates an existing situation but also facilitates an accessible new consideration for the viewer. To me, there’s something edifying about being able to design an image which can dictate large amounts of information to another person.
CW: Your work is certainly illustrative in style; some of your latest pieces recall great botanical engravings of the 19th and 18th centuries. There’s a fragmented and perhaps subversive narrative present that I find alluring, especially your glancing homage to the motif of scientific categorization as a system of knowledge and visual information-sharing (you seem to be obliterating scientific order). But your work is expressive, highly abstract, and it grapples with definition in terms of form and color practically as narrative forces unto themselves; in this way, I think we share some creative/aesthetic interests.
Your First Flower paintings are explosive, enigmatic, energetic, wonderful. How do you see yourself having evolved, stylistically and conceptually, to this point?
JVL: I had a stint while studying Illustration in college, making things as ornate and detailed as possible, which involved a lot of pen work laced with the all-too-typical non-committal application of soft colors. That work ceased to feel rewarding, my ideas were polluted by a need to fulfill technical proficiency. Taking extracurricular initiatives in collage and painting allowed to me to confront some of the same ideas in a more efficient and honest way. I’ve had an argument with myself for the past three years on and off along the lines of “just because I can do it doesn’t mean I should do it.” The First Flowers were my foray back into technical ink work in a while and imposing geometric and painterly motifs as placeholders for objects or as disruptions made sense to me. To be able to fill three square inches with ornate detail is one thing, rendering the same three square inches and then blotting out areas of it is another. It’s a simple aesthetic liberty but took years to come to. I was once asked why I would spend the time to build up so much detail only then to cover it again. It was implied that I was wasting my time. Maybe I am.
Chad Wys, A farm At Midday. Acrylic on canvas, 11"x8.5" (2008)
Chad Wys, Thrift Store Landscape With A Color Test. Paint on found print and frame, 34"x42"x2" (2009)
Chad Wys, Caution: Goya. Mixed media on found print and frame, 21" x 25.5" x 1.5" (2010)
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Jacob van Loon, First Flower I. Ink, watercolor and acrylic on paper, 16x20" (2013)
Jacob van Loon, First Flower II. Ink, watercolor and acrylic on paper, 16x20" (2013)
Jacob van Loon, First Flower III. Ink, watercolor and acrylic on paper, 16x20" (2013)
[art discussion hosted by Artchipel]
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