Studio, Willard, New Mexico
Stuart Arends’ work appears here courtesy of Yoshii Gallery, NY

“When you take someone, put them in the desert, and make them live there for a year, they’ll never live anywhere else.” I found this quote from you, and felt like it was a good opening to this conversation. Even though place is not overt in the work, it seems fundamental to the work that you make.

Living in relative isolation in wide open spaces is not just something I prefer, which I do, but something I need. It feeds me in a way that is important, and not just for the work, but for me as a person.

After learning that you enjoy collaborating with the real light of a room it seems inevitable that you would end up making work in aluminum, pigment and wax. There’s something to the juxtaposition of desert light that compels the soft waxy luminosity of your surfaces as well as that zing that metal requires. Can you speak to the evolution of materiality in your work?

My work is all intuitive. It’s not planned or thought out in advance. I don’t have sketch books full of ideas to be made at some point in the future. One body of work leads to the next. If I’m working on wood for example, something towards the end of that work will suggest what the next material should be. The only things that have to be planned out and drawn in advance are the supports that need to be fabricated, like the aluminum or steel pieces. But once in the studio, the compositions and paint application on those is again, totally intuitive.

As far as the variety of materials and images I use; I started with a found cardboard box that was laying on my studio floor in 1980. With that first box I arrived at a neutral, cubical, support that has fed the work ever since. The transition of different material for the supports was just a natural, unplanned, evolution from one material to the next.

The first steel pieces were 2 inches square and intended to be installed alone on a large wall. I thought that anything that would be that visually substantial needed to be physically substantial as well and steel was the heaviest material I could think of. I came to wax from Joseph Beuys. My first wax piece, titled, “Rabbit”, (1991) was a direct reference to Beuys’, “How To Explain Pictures To A Dead Hare”. Ed Ruscha gave me words and Jonathan Borofsky gave me numbers. Since that first box I have used only “generic” subject matter, ie: stripes, checkerboards, numbers, or words repeated continuously over the entire surface; anything that is not open to interpretation.

What is it like to make work in the distinct light of the desert and then see it in places like Italy and NYC? (and can you speak to the quality of light and its effect on your choices if at all?)

I think the light in New Mexico is amazing. A photographer friend of mine once described it as, “A spotlight on everything.” I imagine the light has had an influence on the work, but it’s not something I’m aware of in any direct or specific way.

Stanza Dell’ Amore 23/4 2023. (Silver). Aluminum, ink, wax on wood. 5 X 5 X 1 3/4 inches

In your Colores interview for NM public television you describe art as a place. I love and agree with that, can you elaborate on what that means to you?

To me, art is about an exchange of energy between a person who makes or performs something and the person who comes into contact with it and has a meaningful experience as a result. There’s an energy in the Universe that drives all things. I feel that if an artist, and by artist I mean writers, actors, painters, dancers, whatever, are so involved and concentrated on what they are doing, everything else goes away for them and they unconsciously draw on that source of energy and it transfers through them to whatever media they are involved with. When a person who is sensitive and open to experience encounters, and is engaged by that work, everything else for that person goes away too; all of their distractions or concerns, or whatever; then the energy contained in that work is transferred to them. And that person, after just a few moments, is ever so slightly altered and comes away with the feeling of being refreshed, or maybe, complete. I think of that as the aesthetic experience. And to me, the arts are the only place where you can go to get that.

What was the cultural or creative make up of your family?

I grew up in a very small farming community in Central Iowa. My family had no awareness of, or interested in the arts. My father climbed telephone poles during lightning storms for the electrical coop, and my Mother was a Linotype operator in the local newspaper office.

Do you remember the first art that impacted your imagination?

When I was very young I saw a magazine article on the watercolors of Winslow Homer. They blew me out. I think they are the first things I saw that made me aware of art and the idea of maybe even trying to be a painter.

What initially strikes me about your objects is the scale and skin like surfaces - How have you arrived at the scale of your work? I love the series that use wooden blocks. How did this motif and series evolve?

The scale comes from the original cardboard box which measured; 15 X 11 X 4 1/2 inches. I worked with the cardboard boxes until 1982. I decided then that I couldn’t spend the rest of my life making little boxes so I let the work expand up to large scale installation paintings; oil on wood. The largest being 10 feet high by 40 feet long. I was awarded a residence with the Roswell Artist In Residence Program in 1983, and spent the year doing the larger works. After the grant I returned to Los Angeles, where I had attended graduate school, and moved into a small apartment in South Pasadena. The only studio I had was a small bedroom and a car port, so I returned to the small scale pieces out of necessity. At one point those pieces went around a corner that I had not anticipated, and those smaller scale cubes have engaged me ever since. I discovered that works don’t necessarily have to be big to be good, you just have to follow your own inner voice and make the work that needs to be made rather than work you would like to make. I realized that the larger installation works I had done weren’t any better because they were bigger, they were just bigger; so I had all them all destroyed.

Re the small cubes: I found them in an antique store in Iowa. They’re the wooden letter blocks that kids used to play with and helped them learn to spell. They were really small and they kicked around my studio for a year before I could do anything with them. But I eventually covered them with wax and oil paint and they became the “Kid Blocks”.

The lithographs have a gorgeous relationship to your works, can you share your experience at Tamarind?

I was invited to work at Tamarind twice. Lithography is not something I ever studied or had any interest in before Tamarind, so the first time was a bit of a challenge. The second time I worked with the two Master Printers, Bill Lagatuda and Jill Graham. They were very knowledgeable, helpful, and responsive to my questions and ideas so we were able to get some good images. It was a good experience.

What historic artist or movement do you return to, Or, simply put, how do you fill the well?

When I get to a place where I feel like I need to charge my batteries, I’ll go to New York for a week. Sometimes just the vibrancy of the city is enough, but usually I’ll go to the Met and take a hit off the Van Goghs or the Morandis, or if I can find some, Winslow Homer’s watercolors. Or I go to the Frick and spend time with the small Piero Della Francesca panel paintings. If I’m in Italy, I’ll go sit in one of the cathedrals and just absorb the ambiance of the centuries. To be in the presence of that stuff is pretty amazing and inspiring.

When you are getting ready to start a new piece, how do you begin? With materials? Color? A title?

To start a new piece, I just put the support on the wall and leave it alone. Eventually it will tell me what it needs; a mark or color. That mark suggests the next mark, or color, until the piece reaches a point of resolution. It takes a while; usually weeks; sometimes months and often requires tearing down and starting over several times.

Do you listen to music in the studio? What have you been listening to recently, or what do you return to?

I don’t listen to music when I work. I find it to be a distraction. The studios I have had for the past thirty five years have been out in fairly isolated places so I just have the sound of the wind in the grass or bird songs when I work.

Do you surround yourself with reference materials or colors? What does your studio look like? Or what is the cycle of making for you? Beginning and ending with a road trip?

Road trips on back country roads are one of my favorite things for sure. Not really certain what impact they have on the work, but they probably do. My studio is white and empty. Everything that I am working on is covered or put away so I can only see the piece I’m involved with.

At the end of a studio day, how do you extract yourself? Any closing rituals or routines?

don’t have a specific studio schedule or time to work. I have designed my spaces so that I can see whatever I’m working on from almost anywhere in the living space. The work is the first thing I see in the morning and the last thing I see at night so when a piece indicates something, I just go do it; could be anytime during the day.

What books are on your nightstand right now?

Louis L’Amore’s “Silver Canyon”.

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17 | Artist profile: Stuart Arends