LONG RANGE STUDIO VISITS

GEORGE CHAPMAN + SASKIA FLEISHMAN

In this correspondence the invited artists talk about the notion of nostalgia, the use of borders in painting and their personal relation to memory. The conversation takes the form of written letters between London and New York.

Hi George,

I thought I would start by giving you a little introduction to myself and my practice. I went to PADA exactly a year ago in April 2019. Before that, I studied painting in undergrad at Rhode Island School of Design. I graduated 2017 and since then I have moved back to New York, where I am originally from, and have been attending numerous residencies. Before the pandemic, I was preparing for my first solo show and some group shows based in New York in my studio in Brooklyn. I’ve since left Brooklyn and am now quarantined in Maine with my parents where I have set up a little temporary studio. I’ve been working on “a painting a day” project where I make a little painting everyday while I am in quarantine and post it on instagram. I have also been taking commissions to paint landscapes that are close to peoples’ hearts. It's been a great way to keep me occupied and engage with others online. 

A bit about my paintings and practice: My paintings are generated from landscape photographs that are taken on my recent trips or images sourced from my families collection taken around the tidewater Chesapeake Bay area. The Chesapeake Bay is particularly meaningful because it is where my mother's side of the family has lived for three generations and I lived for the first 11 years of my life. I then recomposed these photographs as geometric abstractions or color studies derived from Josef Albers', ”The Interaction Of Color” by tilting the image, flipping the horizon line, or cutting out a part of the landscape entirely. I use these gestures to demonstrate the malleability and impermanence of memory over time and to contemplate perception and our relationship to memories embedded in our landscapes. I pair flat and smooth masked airbrushed gradients with textural materials such as sand and burlap to create an interpretation of place and moment with material. The sand, found at the beaches where the photographs are often taken, is mixed in with paint and applied while the painting is laying flat as clouds, water, or land forms. 

In addition to painting, I have recently been working in ceramic and fabric. My ceramic work consists of a series of vessels that act as a counterpart to the paintings. They are organic in their forms and textures and share a general feeling of landscape and light through their glazes and gradients. My fabric pieces are curtains that have been digitally printed with images of older paintings. I hope to show these three bodies of work together to offer an interpretation of nostalgia for place, fleeting moments, and notions of home.  

I definitely see some interesting connections between our work and I’m excited to learn more about your practice! I have a few questions right off the bat I’m interested in talking more about. 

How has your work changed over the years? Are you working on or excited about any new projects or ideas? 

Looking at your work, I bet Barreiro was a great source of inspiration for you. How did you document your time there? Did your time at PADA change any aspects of the way you work?

Is there a certain urban space that you feel has been a particularly large influence in your life for your work?   

Do you tend to paint from photographs? Do you sketch or work from memory at all? 

I’m interested in work that fluctuates between abstraction and figuration as yours does, do you tend to look to any specific abstract artists or movements as references? What other artists do you look to? 

I see that you often use a border in your paintings, as I utilize as well. How does the border function for you? 

Can you talk a little bit about the significance of your color palette?

What drew you to London as a place to live and work?

How has the pandemic affected the way you are working or viewing the world, if it has at all? What have you been doing on a day to day basis?

best, Saskia

Hi Saskia,

Thanks for your detailed introduction. It’s very nice to meet you too. I was at PADA in August last year and I’m feeling very nostalgic about it now.

I’ll start off in the same manner as you by giving a bit of background to my practice. I graduated from the Michael School of Fine Art at UCT in 2010, specialising in painting. I was born and grew up in Cape Town, and I drew a lot of inspiration from the urban landscape of Cape Town and its suburbs. I would drive around with a friend and take photographs of areas that held a particular significance, not just personally but that evoked a kind of poignancy. These spaces were often dilapidated buildings with faded signage that connected with the alienation that I (and probably other people) felt about the fading hope and optimism of South Africa’s development after democracy. A lot of these old buildings and schools, built during apartheid, still existed as relics of a pernicious and evil system. Seeing them in the landscape they look almost banal, their presence no longer threatening or suggestive, but sad and alienating. I’d have memories of a particular type of powder blue or a washed-out green wall that connected with that poignancy, and painting was a way of expressing that memory, that sensation, of letting it out.

The play between abstraction and figuration in my paintings helps to obscure the origin of the image. It adds a level of uncertainty. I’d had people look at my paintings and tell me they know the place that the painting suggests - it’s unlikely they do know the exact location, but I enjoy that the image evokes personal memories or a sense of recognition for other people too. The colours I choose for the paintings are a combination of trying to have different colours interact in new and strange ways, as well as making the image feel more uncanny or weird - a combined sense of loneliness, longing, and alienation.

I spent a bit of time in Johannesburg before moving to London. The history of Jo’burg fascinated me because it has a similar kind of sadness or faded glory to Cape Town, but was also an entirely artificial city built on industrial capitalism. I had a lot of fun exploring Jo’burg’s various suburbs and urban centre and read a number of books about the city before composing paintings based on this history.

In 2015 I moved to London mostly out of circumstance. I was in a long distance relationship with my partner Brittney, who is from North Carolina, and we had originally planned for her to move to Johannesburg to close the distance in our relationship. It wasn’t quite so easy because South Africa had recently changed the immigration laws and it was proving very difficult to secure a visa for her. But she had started an MA in art history at the Courtauld in London, so I decided instead to move to London to be with her as I have dual citizenship. So London incidentally became my home. But as a painter I can still draw a lot of inspiration from its cityscape although it’s probably affected my way of making images because I don’t hold the same associations with London as I did for Cape Town.

I also noticed the border is common in both our paintings. I’m not really sure when I started using it - a friend I shared a studio with ten years ago used to mask off his paintings on Fabriano with masking tape, and I think I liked the framing effect of the border. I then did a lot of painting on raw canvas and linen, as well as wood veneer, and in wanting to expose the raw canvas or veneer I started taping off the edges and again really enjoyed how it framed the painting. It felt sort of modernist. But then I saw the David Hockney retrospective at the Tate a few years ago and realised that Hockney had done it in his paintings in the late 1960s, so maybe I was also influenced by his masking technique without realising it.

Since the coronavirus pandemic I’ve not been going into my studio in south London. I’ve been at home and have tried to make some smaller works on paper, although I have to say I don’t feel very inspired right now outside of my studio. Instead I’ve decided to take the time to read books and watch films. I recently read Susan Sontag’s essays on film from the 1960s which compelled me to watch Robert Bresson’s films, as well as others from that era. I really enjoy films in general and it’s been fantastic to just absorb the imagery and think about what it means to tell a story or convey a feeling using images. There was a lot of experimentation happening in that era through film, and I think we can still learn a lot from the mistakes those directors made - they were really willing to try anything. It’s very refreshing compared to the kind of art, whether it’s painting or films or music, we are faced with today. There’s a lot of amazing work out there but there’s also a lot of dross, and there’s enormous pressure for artists to conform to a medium like Instagram or to make work within a particular visual language - like a particular trend in painting - that doesn’t correspond at all to a personal vision. The work becomes cynical. I’ve been guilty of this as much as anyone. But that’s all to say, I’ve been giving some serious consideration as to what it means to have a visual language and what I’m trying to do with painting.

Some questions I have for you:

I see you did the Wassaic summer residency programme. How did you find it compared to your time at PADA?

Both of our visual languages rely on nostalgia. Sometimes this word makes me uncomfortable as a descriptor because it harmonises or explains away the feeling of unease that often precedes nostalgia. Even the word nostalgia implies an overly sentimental perspective, remembering the world with an emotional bias - not “as it is”. What does nostalgia mean for you, in your painting? Are you directly referring to your own feelings about the Chesapeake Bay, for instance, or a more general idea of nostalgia? Do you think we can trust nostalgic feelings without suspicion, or is it something of a guilty pleasure to indulge in nostalgia? What prompts these feelings to being with?

Your colour gradients are very striking. Looking at a work like \ \ (Sunset, Sunrise) it appears like an incision was made in the landscape and imposed over the opposite side. There’s a discontinuity between the landscape on either side, but the colour harmony eases this transition or discontinuity between each side. Cut and paste can traditionally refer to creating a multiplicity of views; collapsing multiple perspectives into a single perspective. What does the ‘cut and paste’ technique mean for you? What does it mean to visually disrupt a landscape that feels nostalgic? Are there any artists that you’re referring to in your painting by using this technique?

I hope you don’t find my questions too probing or direct. But I think these are interesting ideas that should be explored and questioned, even if there are no clear-cut answers.

Looking forward to your response.

best, George

Hi George, 

Thank you for such a great response and wonderful thoughtful questions. 

What you said, “remembering the world with an emotional bias - not “as it is'''' is where this body of paintings originated from. I don’t really believe that there is an “as it is'' and that’s why I am so interested in Josef Alber’s book “An Interaction of Color”. This whole book studies color’s relativity; A color looks yellow when it is against blue but the same exact color looks red against green..etc. This simple concept is true about how we process memory and how we consume the world around us- everyone is biased and programmed to see the world in a certain way that is different from the way everybody else consumes it and remembers it. 

That being said, I do trust nostalgia.. Because nostalgia is different then memory. My feeling of longing and wishing is just as real as anything else and I believe I should indulge in it. There’s a sincere childness that comes out of nostalgia that I’m interested in utilizing. 

I don’t trust what surrounds the nostalgia. The parts of the nostalgic memory that have been forgotten, perhaps because they were too painful or boring? I think a lot about repressed memories in relation to nostalgia too and more about personal individualistic memory rather than collective societal. The short answer is that I don’t trust memory in general because I believe it’s always biased.   

The cut and paste is a gesture to try to replicate this feeling of untrust that, for me, is imbedded into my memories. The cut and pastes disrupts these beautiful nostalgic landscapes to ask the viewer, “What are we missing in this memory? What aren’t we seeing or remembering within this frame?”  Sometimes these images are tilted or deleted or covered up as gestures to serve to this idea. I want to present an image that feels strange because something is off but it is still sincere and genuine in its search for some kind of truth within memories.

On a different note, Wassaic was wonderful! Totally different vibe than PADA. What I enjoyed about Wassaic was that it had a large number of residents at a time and being in the Harlem Valley of New York State. I also was able to be very social at Wassaic while making a ton of work. PADA was incredible for different reasons. It was very international so I made friends with people all over the world and I got to explore and travel around Lisbon while learning about the deep history of Barreiro. I feel like I have a home in Portugal with Tim and Diana. I felt like I was part of something really special in both Wassaic and PADA and doing them back to back made for a very special time in my life. 

On a final note: I’m curious to know if you have any interest in partaking in future residencies? Or if you have any upcoming shows/ projects or travels (post pandemic). 

Do you have any response to this conversation about nostalgia or memory, I am particularly interested in the question you posed, “Do you think we can trust nostalgic feelings without suspicion” and how that relates to memory as well as nostalgia. Furthermore, do you have any movie recommendations on this topic?

Thank you again so much. This has been so much fun and very thoughtful.

best, Saskia

Hi Saskia,

It’s been wonderful to read your replies to my questions. I particularly enjoyed what you said about the individual’s nostalgia in comparison to the collective societal nostalgia. Personally, I am very suspicious of nostalgia. For example, there is a photographic series by the South African photographer David Goldblatt which he began in 1979/80, called ‘In Boksburg’. Boksburg is an Afrikaans town on the East Rand of Johannesburg. The photos document what appears to be a very idyllic life in the suburbs, where homes are very quietly beautiful and social events appear ‘wholesome’ or part of a community spirit. However, when you realise how this very small section of white society came to enjoy their middle class privileges - i.e. by exploiting the majority black population through state racism - the images are imbued with a much darker sense of nostalgia. How can we enjoy the comforts of middle class life when we know they are the product of racist oppression? So there are at least two ways of looking at the photos, and I’m familiar with both sides as I also grew up in an ‘idyllic’ Afrikaans suburb myself. Perhaps that is what I’m also trying to address in my idea of nostalgia through painting.

Your cut-and-paste technique also makes a lot of sense as you explain it, when you ask the question, “What are we missing in this memory?” Memory is fragile; it can be comforting or disruptive. I like how you address that question visually in your paintings through the disruption of the landscape.

Yes, I’m definitely interested in taking part in residencies in the future. I had such a fantastic time at PADA that I’ve been keeping a lookout for future opportunities. The reason I asked about Wassaic is that my partner Brittney has a friend who lives in New York, who visited Wassaic last year and said I should look into it as an artist residency programme. I’ve not yet met anyone who’s done the residency so I was quite keen to read your comments. It’s great to know you had such a wonderful time there! Another residency I’d like to apply for is the Anderson Ranch Arts Center in Colorado, although I understand it’s quite competitive. The Josef & Anni Albers Foundation residency in Connecticut also sounds fantastic.

Film recommendations about memory/nostalgia? Perhaps the two I can best think of are Paris, Texas (1984) and Last Year at Marienbad (1961). Strangely I couldn’t really think of others; you’d expect there would be more films directly about this topic and I’m sure there are, but I can’t seem to think of them!

Thank you as well for taking the time to share your insights and questions with me. I’ve really enjoyed our conversation.

best, George

For more information and to see more examples of work visit
George Chapman and Saskia Fleishman