Pamela Jorden: Light Falls

What do you mean by words like sagging and leaning?

It is a very physical process. Often I will stretch the paintings myself, sometimes it takes a couple of people to help me. The active nature of the process leads me to think about dance and contact improvisation--how two figures might interact with each other. There is an unexpected interaction, movement, play, and pressure that happens through the process. I go back and forth between using water-based paints, oil-based paints, and solvents. I start with the water-based and then build up with the oils on top. I have played around with the difference in surface tension between water-based and oil-based paints, and how the interactions between the materials can create strong cuts and lines. Often the solvents will disperse in different ways. It is a way to think about how the paint will behave, often it dries in a way I do not expect, especially as the pigments dilute in a solvent.

Some of the cuts are so clean; I know you are not using tape, but are you saying that some of the clean feeling in the cut is because of the different vehicles repelling one another?

Sometimes I paint with water, then pour the paint into that and watch it pool up to the edge of that mark or create a line. There is a lot of trial, error, and play. Sometimes I will start with an idea of how a couple of marks might sit on a surface. I think about how that paint might react to a pool of water, whether it’s wet onto a wet surface or a harsher mark made with just a brushstroke of water, and then I start to respond to that.

So you watch the pigment move toward the edge of the fluid pool, is that correct?

Sometimes I will watch and wait for it; I lean the structure and let it pour over the sides and interact with the edges. There is a lot of activity and waiting and watching, sometimes I will come back the next day to see what happened. There is a lot of layering in my work. There are parts of paintings that are very open and other parts that are quite layered and worked. They change constantly, so I take pictures along the way.

Do you do a lot of contemplative looking?

I do; I tend to isolate the paintings by looking at them through photography. I am a messy painter, there is a lot of activity in my studio. Everything lays around drying or goes back and forth on the wall. In the studio, I tend to have a sense of the relationships between paintings, and photography gives me a better sense of them individually.

Tell us about what you see in a painting like “Birdsong”. How do you see these marks coming together? You are describing a looking process that pushes you further in your painting process. Talk to me about some of these different marks, how did this painting get to where it is? Which marks create layers, space, gestural possibility, or surface texture that excite you? Tell us about the material signs of this painting and what you see them doing.

I had a different approach to the bottom half of this painting, it was more like a drawing. I had a sense of how I wanted to carve the space with the blue lines and repeat the curve of the stretcher frame to some degree. I also wanted lines that would feel cropped by the edge of the frame. The top half started similarly, but I ended up pushing it further with layers of paint. Some areas of paint are quite shiny and others are very matte. There is probably metallic paint in there somewhere. Light has a significant effect on how the painting appears. As you walk by it, the painting is moving and changing. When I layer paint in the studio I think about how light interacts with the work and how I want to push those relationships further.

So when you are talking about layering and density, do you see that in terms of pictorial space, or are you talking more materially, or both?

Sometimes the work has pictorial references. I think about how a spider might build a web, and how the construction of that geometry is improvisational to a degree. Natural circumstances will cause the web to shift or reshape. Materially speaking, there is a lot to play with in terms of texture and how I can create an active space in the painting that excites me and does many things at once. If the light hits “Birdsong” in a certain way, the shiny black areas might turn completely gray, altering their relationship to a shape below. That activity of moving and changing happens the most in the more densely layered areas. For example, “Waterfall” has many layers in it; I enjoy it when the painting looks or feels somewhat effortless but is not at all effortless in the process. There is a lot of density there.

Have these more gestural sections become part of the idiom recently in your paintings?

It feels like coming back to something I did more in the past. When I first started working with circles in 2012 I used bleach and other materials experimentally. Pouring the paint helped me work through my ideas about chance and gravity; I think about Pat Steir and how she layers. Sometimes I try to work with regular geometric shapes and I find it quite challenging because the symmetry makes me uncomfortable. There are many cuts, triangles, and shapes in this work that create geometric repetitions.

You use the word uncomfortable, can you talk a little bit more about what you mean by that, or what that experience is?

It is almost a constant state of mind during my process. It is a challenge to work this way but I enjoy not knowing where I am going with the work. It creates so many surprises and possibilities for me to work through. I want the work to be surprising to the viewer, they are to me. I strive for compositions that elicit a feeling you might not expect.

Interestingly, you are not using the rectangle, which is one of the most basic givens that most artists work within. Usually, that form provides certainty for people and it is intriguing that, right off the bat, that is something you are not doing. Was it a process to get to moving beyond the square?

Thinking back, there was a circle in my first show with Klaus Gallery, so maybe it is something I have been thinking about for a long time. I was working with squares at the time instead of rectangles, which allowed me to move the painting in different directions while I figured it out. Sometimes I would start with a black background on a gessoed surface. With a rectangle or square, the first layer I put down was a black background, and that immediately asserted shape and scale for me on the wall. The square is no longer a white slate in relation to the wall. Instead, it immediately has shape. Although I design the structures to be oriented in a particular way, I am not planning out what they will be in their final form, or how the paint will crop into the shapes created by the structures. The paint creates another type of shape through the relationship of the raw linen to other less-painted areas. This becomes another way of carving and shaping for me.

Going back to the conversation about the exterior shape, what is interesting about these works is the acceptance of a rectangle or a square and then the movement to the circle. It is fascinating how, through your practice, you examine assumptions and then return to them and throw those assumptions into relief in yet still another way. When you make a circular piece like this it is a real surprise to viewers, and I have to ask ‘Why is a square normal? How did that come to be the normal thing?’ I think these are also interesting in a home, for example, because once they go into conversation with other odd shapes, lines, and spaces, they do something fascinating in a domestic setting that is completely different than in a gallery setting. The circle is the initial move away from the accepted shape of the rectangle and toward something new. With a piece like ‘Waterfall,’ that gets thrown into relief by the decision to cut the circular shape. The circle has become the term we are used to and now we are in a new relationship within that. I find that thrilling, I don’t know if any of that resonates with you, but it is one of the surprising aspects of these paintings that I have enjoyed.

The process is so fun and I am very grateful to the fabricators who help me figure out how to do almost anything that I want to try. It is exciting to play with the space. I was working with some 80-inch rectangles, and the windows in the gallery are 80 inches tall, so paintings like “Birdsong,” and “Light Falls,” ended up being the same size as the window panes. I enjoy the idea of forming a relationship with an architectural space. With a show, I think about all the paintings as pieces that are going to get to hang out with each other and play off of each other. It was exciting to think about what interactions they may have with different spaces.

I particularly like this painting, “Vertical Field,” because somehow the cuts in the structure cause you to see the painted lines in this very clear way that I do not usually encounter. I like what these are doing, they are really exciting. Is there anything that we have not talked about that we should cover?

It was so much fun for me to install the show. I hope if people are around LA they will have a chance to take a look in person because the paintings are so different in person and they are playing off each other a lot in the space. It has been really fun to explore the scale shifts happening between paintings by including the smaller works with the larger ones.

It has been such a pleasure, I feel like this is a major show for you. One lives one’s life and looks for the unusual stuff and surprises one’s self. Who knows what the studio holds for you, but I enjoyed the show in New York at Klaus very much and I am excited to have the opportunity to show these pieces in LA. People spend a lot of time with the work, there is a lot to look at in the show and that is exciting.