KATHERINE MCMAHON
Habitat is a weekly series that visits with artists in their workspaces.
This week’s studio: Charles Andresen, East Hampton, New York. “It’s been a new, exciting, and daunting experience to work in Elaine de Kooning’s iconic space,” Charles Andresen said of his residency at the painter’s former home and studio out on the far end of Long Island. Andresen lived and worked at the house while preparing for his show at Christian Berst, which opened on October 14. He continued to describe the space “with those slanted windows pouring in the North Atlantic light,” adding that The North Atlantic Light happens to be the title of a Willem de Kooning catalog that he “constantly perused as a student librarian at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts.” That same light, he said, “also permeates other favorites of mine like James Ensor and Malcolm Morley.”
Andresen’s technique involves using a putty knife or kitchen spoon to deposit the paint onto the canvas, but has adopted new color schemes over the years. “Initially it was black, white, and gray,” he told me, “then bright prismatic hues, earth tones, metallic pigments, and finally the nocturnes of the past few years: light-tinted lines and dots atop very dark grounds. Recently I’ve begun using medium tones with black markings to create a fictive space.” Below, a tour of Andresen’s temporary workspace.
ALL PHOTOS: KATHERINE MCMAHON
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"This is a closeup of my setup, in the midst of a creative session. There are squeeze bottles of fluid acrylic colors and a slab of foamcore for my palette. Various plastic objects of many shapes to stamp in the paint and apply to the pigmented gel before throwing at the canvas with putty knives and spoons. You can glimpse the lower edge of a bright blue painting which was my response to Sammy's Beach—just down the road from the house and studio."
"Although with all the variables of velocity and gravity with my method it's impossible for me to directly copy one of my previous works, it was a real luxury to bring paintings of mine from years past out to the Elaine's studio as references to bounce off from. The piece on the left is called Hot Data and was completed in 2009 when I was tossing my organic splats into taped-off geometric sectors. The work on the right is from 2005 and entitled Yaqui Sword after the carved wooden weapons painted with red and green designs on a white base, which are burned in a bonfire at the climax of the Yaqui Indian Easter Ceremony which I've witnessed many times back in Arizona."
"Here I'm using a multi-pronged comb on a new red painting."
"I always carry in my pockets slips of paper to jot down all the wordplay associations, funny rhymes, and groan-inducing puns which spring into my brain during the course of the day and night. Eventually I transcribe them into notebooks with colored felt tip markers. Out of perhaps one hundred of these, maybe one will become the title of a painting. I still sometimes find it hard to assign a certain title to a specific painting. Though I have never yet used the most popular title of them all ("Untitled").
"One of the wonderful things about growing up in the Southwest is that if you get intrigued with American Indian culture—as so many kids across the globe do—you don't have to settle for images in books and artifacts in museums. You can travel a few hours away to the reservations and see the actual dances and ceremonies still taking place. On the right is an illustration of the Hopi Chili Pepper Katsina (nature spirit), the real-life embodiment of whom smeared my mouth with a fiery paste while I was looking at all the other different Katsina dancers off in a different direction. Cropped on the left is a Jackson Pollock black-and-white painting from the 1950s. I'm really looking forward to the late Pollock exhibition coming to the Dallas Museum of Art in November."
"The supports for my first throw paintings were leftover canvases I'd painted in previous styles, to which I collaged already dried chunks of acrylic paint. Now I feel free to experiment with all manner of brushed backgrounds, knowing that very little will be visible in the final painting. Eventually just a little of this pointillist exercise (seen here resting on the studio floor) will be peeking through all the impasto blobs."
"I mix small amounts of tube color with a larger amount of acrylic polymer gel—which would ordinarily dry clear—so it appears to be pure paint. I have the various batches of color in gallon buckets. The painting session starts by scooping the pigmented gel into a tupperware container, smoothing off the top with a putty knife, and inscribing marks with more fluid paint using found plastic implements. When you fling the mass at the canvas, it splays out on impact, amplifying and distorting the lines and dots that were in the tub."
"This is the cover of MoMA's first Jackson Pollock retrospective catalog. Pollock is of course the grand daddy of paintflinging and spent part of his childhood in Phoenix, Arizona where I grew up. But unlike the very moving Pollock-Krasner House in Springs, his boyhood home cannot be turned into a historical shrine since it was obliterated beneath the runway of the Sky Harbor Airport."
"I grew up listening to classical music and traditional Native American music. I didn't really get into pop music until I was a teenager and soon gravitated toward the punk and post-punk sound that later became indie rock...and have attended many gigs at many defunct venues over the years! Almost every night I listen to CDs of Morton Feldman—the official composer to the artists of the Cedar Tavern. His music has great parallels with painting in the way the isolated notes and chords decay into silence. It's definitely a plus in my book that he has compositions dedicated to Philip Guston (his best friend at one point), Samuel Beckett, Francesco Clemente, and Mark Rothko. And there can never be enough audiobooks and podcasts in the world, because I want to get as much information as possible through my ears while saving my eyeballs for looking."
"It was wonderful to go up on this wheeled ladder and imagine previous inhabitants of the studio doing the same. Like Elaine when she was making that series based on the cave paintings of Lascaux. Of course she was up there with a brush to reach the upper portions of large canvases on the wall. I was using it to get a bird's eye view of my much smaller works down below."
"The view from the ladder. A number of canvases in various stages of completion are lined up to the left. The blue painting in progress is on the drafting table in the center. The box to the side of the chair quickly accumulates debris like used paper towels and masking tape. Buckets of color are at the ready. The boom box is to the right, providing sonic inspiration."