Sky Glabush: Mount Temptation

PM: I am delighted to be speaking with Sky Glabush today, on the occasion of "Mount Temptation," which is an exhibition that we have put together online, focusing on Sky's works on paper. Thank you so much for joining us Sky. How are you doing?

SG: I am doing great, thanks.

What are you up to in Chicago?

I have mostly been going to museums and galleries. There is a Georgia O'Keefe show up here and it was quite appropriate and timely for me to see it now. When I went to see the show I was thinking about how I am in a slipstream of artists who deal with abstraction but also recognizable things like flowers or the landscape. It is a similar set of problems to what I deal with. The show unfolds nicely from the photographs of Stieglitz to the drawings that O'Keefe made of the East River and some of the skyscrapers in New York. She unfolds this language that is both abstraction and figuration; it was really helpful for me to see that show. I will see it again too, I like to be able to see a show over a few days.

Maybe we want to get right into it; this is a piece called Mount Temptation that I saw in your studio this Summer. Do you want to talk a little bit about the work?

That image is from a postcard, it is an actual place in Palestine. It is the place where—supposedly—Jesus was tempted by the Devil. Anyway, I did not know any of that at the time, I just thought it was an interesting picture of a mountain, but then it turns out it is a specific site in Palestine.

This piece is interesting, it seems like a new motif possibly—a rain motif.

Yes; I have done this a lot in the past. I have avoided doing it for a while though because it always looks good when you cover a painting in a screen of dots—it resolves it almost magically. So, I was avoiding doing that in a way. There were a few paintings I had been looking at by Hokusai and Vangogh and a few others, where there was some kind of screen of rain or snow or sleet in front of the image. I was trying to think of a way to explore that in this piece. I was also inspired by thread and embroidery techniques that I have seen on certain fabrics. I was exploring making a color through an ambient screen. You get this sort of muted color that I have seen in textiles. But, yes, this was just a simple little experiment, a playful thing about using a kind of phenomenon like rain to activate the surface and in a sense to flatten things out but also to allow for this ambiance or overall quality.

Well, the feeling of a screen is very effective in that it locates the viewer. One thing that I was thinking about is that, whereas other artists might depict people in a landscape—putting the viewer in the role of someone on the outside watching the action—in your work you are able to situate the viewer in the place of the person having the experience—so to speak—by some kind of relationship to your own experience.

Yes, that is an important observation and it is something that I struggle with and think about often. What is the relationship between the person who is looking and the person who is the viewer? As the artist you kind of are the viewer, but you also know that eventually the work will go out into the world and you are not going to be the only viewer anymore. Anyone who is standing in front of will be in that position. Sometimes I have experimented with putting figures in the work or having the subject be another person. But with ["Pictures of You"], for example, there are two ways to look at this painting. I can think of the elements in the painting as figurative elements—in the sense that they have the energy or the qualities of another thing or another person or element that is active and alive. It is not just viewer and subject, the subject itself has a presence or personality—almost a figurative quality. Then, in some of the paintings it is very clear that there is a viewer and something being viewed. That quality of placing yourself within the image as the person experiencing it is an important aspect of what I try to explore.

I think that connects your work to abstraction and someone like Rothko or Terry Winters or Lee Mulligan. There is this feeling that the artist is both the creator, and then when they reach a final resolution the artist also becomes the first viewer of the work. It is the process of getting to that place that then enables—for all time moving forward—the viewer to be in that place.

Well, it is an interesting and tough moment when you get into the notion of how one as an individual is both a maker and then you are in communication with another individual as a viewer, meaning that if you are painting a still life or working from photos there is this question of,  "What is the thing that I am painting? What is my responsibility to that?"—so to speak—"What is my responsibility to the photo?" Photos can be very tricky because they are loaded with information, but at the same time they are completely abnormal to our human experiences. There is this question of responsibility—that word that I inadvertently used—and it is this shift of realizing that rather than having this responsibility to what you are doing, your responsibility—in a certain sense—is being able to make choices that enable the viewer to see the painting. That is intriguing because then you have to think "Well, to make this space work, even though these leaves are in this one area, painting them in that spot would make them incomprehensible to somebody and so I actually need to move those out of the way. I need to remove those leaves that are actually there to give the viewer the experience of leaf-ness in this other lived way."

I think the challenge that you are having is the challenge that we all have. It is difficult to speak about and articulate some of these things. In a lot of ways I make a living by talking about art, so it is frustrating that after so many years language is still so cumbersome and awkward when it comes to unpacking these things. But I think what you are grappling with is, sincerely, the core problem. For me, if I take an artist like Clifford Still, for example—who I have always really loved and I remain deeply affectionate toward—you have motion, you have energy, you have light, you have tension, but the resolution is a completely individuated completely unique visual language, and it is one of pure abstraction. In my case, I am looking for something very similar to that except my language is not a pure individuated one, it is a shared familiar language that any four-year-old would understand. In a sense that is the only difference, that when those shapes or those moves come together they also come together in a very recognizable way. It is not like I give a crap about it being recognizable, it is that the language itself is a communal language.

It is interesting that you say that, because I think then it leads to this question about the division we impose between abstraction and representation. It gets hammered into us that abstraction and representation are different somehow. When the mind is grappling with these things they are different pictorial systems, and I suppose you could largely group them as separate, but in terms of how things function—in terms of pictorial construction and the experience of something—they are entirely related.

Yes, that is what I am grappling with. I personally do not feel that there is that much of a difference between abstraction and figuration. As I was mentioning earlier, I am here in Chicago and I am looking at this Georgia O'Keefe show which is an amazing exhibition. She really makes the case that there is not a big distinction between abstraction and figuration—and that was a hundred years ago in the twenties. I do think there is a different kind of freedom in, say, Clifford Still being able to completely invent his own pictorial or visual language. I think there is a freedom there that I envy. I want and need that freedom, it is very important. But for me there is also value in making something that any person could walk in and understand from the language it uses. Then the visual experimentation or the energy or the curious ventures that you take actually make sense because you can see them. There is a corollary to them—a nature—something that you are familiar with and makes you notice, "Oh, wow, that is an interesting way to deal with light," et cetera.

As a gallerist, when we talk about these things I am usually in the position of being the explainer. I have to grapple with the obstacles people put in front of their own experience. I think a piece like ["Burning (Study)"] is really remarkable because you are hit by it so immediately. You are so pulled into this experience bodily, visually, and emotionally; you are in it and you recognize what you are seeing and what you are experiencing. In a certain sense that all goes straight into your mind and it satisfies that intellectual core question almost immediately as you are experiencing it.

I think with that one—which is a motif I have explored a number of times—what I get from that particular watercolor is, obviously you instantly recognize that it is a Sun, but then you are compelled to see behind it or around it or you want to see what is going on in between. I feel like the rays of the Sun actually become—not an impediment—but you know how oftentimes when something is very bright you have a hard time seeing it? It is like there is a struggle or an effort to actually see what is there. So instead of the light being totally illuminating, in some ways the light is obscuring in this case.

Well, it is interesting that you say that, because you are working on these paintings for Stephen Friedman and there is a painting in that group where you have a screen of branches but the real focus is this exact intense light right on the horizon line that you know you are in. So, it is interesting because, as I hear you talk about this, it is as if the rays are almost a barrier in some way to seeing that sun. In the painting that I am describing those rays are not there in the same way. You are in there with the feeling that you are almost going past the branches around you.

Hopefully, when that painting is on view it will be another opportunity to talk about it, because that was a huge challenge for me—this idea of a screen in front of the picture plane. It is a very ambient and diffusive overall quality with the rays of the light; to have something superimposed in front of it presented a real technical challenge for me.

Well, the show is opening September 6 in New York and if you are there you will want to come see it. This flower study is a painting that is titled after Redon.

Yes. This would be an example of—instead of using a photograph—I was working from a painting. Although, I guess I was working from a photograph of the painting but I had actually seen it in person too. What I did with this one—and what I have done with many of these—is just made a reproduction of it very quickly. Maybe I will spend an hour laying it out, and then I put the Redon painting away and try to never look at it again. I have weird sort of technical things I do as well. I will mask off lots of parts of the painting with liquid rubber just so the areas that I want to leave alone will stay how they are. Then I will cover the whole painting with black or purple or green, for example, and then pull the masking fluid off and see what is there and keep building from there. These works on paper are kind of like exercises in a way. For me, the purpose of the exercise is to use a very recognizable very traditional conventional sort of motif and then try to have something occur that is not conventional and not necessarily weighted with history, but feels like it could be doing something for the first time or like you are experiencing something very familiar but in a new way. The reason it is an exercise is because it is such a convention. It is hard to get through the convention, but if you can it is a little bit like jazz or playing scales. Everybody plays the same modal A minor scale but you can push your way into a new place sometimes when you accept a convention. When you accept something that is static or very stable, it is actually a form of freedom, because you can just play with it and not worry about inventing a brand-new language. What you are more concerned about is using a very accepted standard and trying to do something within that that feels new. Not "new" though—that is not the word. I do not necessarily care about "new"-ness. Yesterday, I saw a pot from Korea from the sixth century and it looked totally new—like it really looked new—it looked new to me at least. I had never seen anything like it before, it looked completely fresh and amazing and great. So, it is not so much about it feeling "new", it just matters that it feels alive, it feels like it is in the present moment, it is not freighted by a kind of imitation-pastiche of the past.

["Branches in Light"] is a wonderful winter painting, do you want to talk a little bit about it?

I always feel like every artist talk should have something slightly titillating or moving in it, but what I was feeling yesterday was that my work was very superficial. I was having one of these moments of real—not only doubt—but also a kind of resignation that I was making sort of superficial things. The reason that I felt that was because I was trying to reconcile a deeper language, one that really moves the world, really shakes things up, with—say—a painting of some flowers or branches or something, and that dissonance was weighing me down. However, I had a realization that as soon as you leave imagery behind—when I was looking around the Art Institute of Chicago you can see this in almost any painting—you can accuse that artist of not dealing with certain pressing issues like identity or war and other issues of that nature. I do not think it is fair; I was looking at this Brice Marden painting and thinking, on one level it is just this sort of swooping graduated line. You could also accuse that painting of being—in a sense—superficial. But that would totally miss the point! The point is that, just because imagery has been subsumed into something else, that does not mean the content has dissolved or is any less meaningful. So—for me—the way I thought about it was, just because I am using recognizable forms does not mean my painting is not—in a sense—abstract painting. If it is abstract painting, then the tension or the movement or the energy that enters into it is very similar to what you would see in any abstract painting. Therefore, it is just not fair to put the burden of a very overt subject matter onto that reading of the piece. It is not going to help you and it is not fair for me to do that to myself either because that is not really what I am about. I do think some artists are both topical and very experimental and very free—and I admire that—and then some artists are really much more focused on a kind of internal feeling and energy about things. Those things do actually talk about more than just these idiosyncratic personal whims, they do try to reach beyond the immediacy of branches or flowers to something else; but there is also a way that the subject matter is not really what you are looking at.

Let me see—in the Q&A I see someone asking, "How important is emotional engagement in your work? Can you describe your studio practice?" Well, I think it is absolutely about emotion, it is about a feeling—and here is the deal—sometimes you get big emotions from things like a speech or a rally or reading a great work of literature; but I sometimes get great emotions in these completely innocuous little moments. I can be overcome with emotion from something so small. Sometimes I will see somebody and just their face can make me feel so close to them, even if they are a total stranger. There is a lot of humility and something really beautiful there. The point is, the emotional register is very important to me. It is sort of like when you are a child and everything seems so big and then as you get older it is almost the opposite; you get so crusty and jaded that everything seems like it is in your purview—you dominate everything—and I want to move away from that. I want to get back to that place where my relationship to the world makes me small and open and present. Especially as an artist, you are not in control of when that moment is or is not going to arrive. I try to create conditions in my own day-to-day practice that allow me to be receptive and open to the possibility that beauty could come out of anywhere or from anything. In a sense, my work is trying to create those kinds of opportunities. I also want there to be tension. For example, in ["The Sun's Escape"], yes, it does look like a field of flowers, but in the middle—where you see what resembles a star—that is where someone has walked across the flowers and stepped on them, but instead of crushing them and turning them into nothing it turns them into a star. It is a simple moment, where something is kind of dying or being obliterated or crushed, but also it is in that act of it being squished down that it actually looks like the sky again or kind of looks like a star and it feels like being really close to something and really far away from something.

Something I would also like to point out that people would enjoy is the press release for this show on our website. There is a lengthy quote in it that I did not edit at all because it is just very clear and fantastic with regard to how you make the works on paper in the studio. In that quote you commented that you will make something like 50 works on paper, but your point being that—as you make one—if you know where it is going you will set it aside. I was so struck by that comment and it is such a profound way to think about making work, that, if you know where something is going you are going to set it aside. You describe yourself cycling through the stack and ranking them, and only through this process of starting and putting away and coming back to things anew and working with a large body of work, do you know where a picture is going to go finally. Then you spend a whole day realizing that singular idea. What a wonderful way to think.

Well, of course it is. You know, with poetry, you have opportunities to have words just not be related to what they mean, per se, what they feel like. They can invoke all kinds of things. And then the long form is an opportunity to do something different. Painting is very similar to that play of back and forth.

Yeah, that and also the familiarity of language. Like, language, the way everybody shares it, but then some people use it with such a profound clarity that it changes the way you think about your own use of language.

Do you have pieces like this where you really clearly see your language or see brush marks and have that back and forth between what is my brush mark and what is this subject matter?

Yeah, I am pretty brutal with my work, when I am in the middle of it I think I am very much like a butcher or something. Like I am just cutting it into pieces. There is very little emotion. There is very little sentiment. Even when we talk about poetry and things like that, when I am in it, it is very brutal. I am just trying to make things work and I just want it to work as a thing. It is later on in conversations like this that I look back and know, like, "Oh, what were you really doing?" And in ["Above as Below"] I know it is quite obvious I was dealing with what is above and what is underneath—just trying to make a very simple equation or a very simple exploration of some kind of flower fluorescing—but then underneath there is this swampy, kind of watery space, and that is it. That is what the whole thing is.

Well, I mean, on that note, I think that is it. You have made that point sometimes you just have to finish something and get it out there and then of course the beauty of making a painting is that you can go back and look at thoughts and crystalize it that way.

Well, yeah. It is just that it is a different thing. There is the playing thing that is very important, and people confuse that, they think that playing needs to be execution, that playing needs to have a result. If play is play, you are just exploring, but then when you get to the final stage it is a different process. It is nice to separate them because we put a lot of pressure on ourselves to always be in this playful place. You asked me earlier if there was anything I wanted to say that I have not said yet and the only thing that I think we did not really cover that is really important is how important these works on paper are to my practice. Everything I do stems from here and the way the studio practice unfolds is I have many, many--as most people do--little journals. I am constantly writing down little notes and making little sketches and making little drawings, and I am also taking lots of photos on my iPhone. So, out of a thousand images, you might get one or two that you feel like you want to make a watercolor or drawing from. And of the hundreds of watercolors and drawings that I make, I might get one or two that I might want to turn into a larger-scale painting. Stanley Whitney talks about this a lot--how you get stuck as an artist--you get lost and drawing is the way out. Drawing is the way to get through it. Drawing is the way to keep yourself constantly in this state of finding new things or looking for new things and it is really, really important, and I am excited that you embrace showing them as proper works in and of themselves and not just preparatory works, because, so much of what I do as an artist is crystallized and embedded in these works on paper, and I think they are just as valuable in some ways, if not more, than the other works because this is where I go, this is my well, this is my reservoir that I use to keep trying to find things.

I have a wonderful one here and I would suggest to anyone who wants to see Sky's works on paper at the gallery, please do. I think they are materially really different than your paintings in a lot of ways. I think a lot about Jasper Johns' printmaking, for example, and I think if you want to be informed on Jasper Johns' works, you really need to know those pieces and see how his ideas move materially through that medium. He is one of America's greatest printmakers of the second half of the 20th century. I feel that a lot of your works on paper activate a similar conversation around your wonderful thoughts on drawing as a way out and a way to reopen ourselves and keep ourselves focused on how to be open. The works on paper embody themselves differently from the large-scale paintings. You have this process of both playing and coming to conclusions. Sky, thank you so much for taking the time today and sharing your work with us. It is really a pleasure to work with you. I can not wait for the show that opens on September 5th at Stephen Friedman in New York. I hope that people have a chance to go see it. If you have any questions about anything you saw today or want to talk send me an email or give me a call. Thanks so much, Sky. I hope you have a great trip to Chicago.

It is nice seeing you again, Philip.

Alright. Take care.