A Studio Evening for Parents, Tuesday, May 15th, free (details here)

Back in the winter I visited Jessica Beels in her studio in Mt. Ranier, Maryland. Jessica makes art in good company at Flux Studios, a distinguished Washington, DC area complex featuring artists that work in a variety of media with an emphasis on contemporary ceramics.  My interview with Jessica was filled with her memories of careful and close observations which clearly resonates with the work she produces today. Who can blame a little kid for looking down all the time? The floor isn’t too far away.

“I remember always looking down. Looking at the patterns on the doors of below ground elevator shafts, manhole covers and pieces of metal that are part of other things like fire hydrants. I just always loved that intersection of different materials. Those kinds of compositions that also might include words, signage. Always looking down – cigarette butts, gum. I remember rugs in my parents house, always on the reddish side, geometric, not terribly plush, red and black with intense patterns. In my grandmother’s house the rugs were beige and blue, light colors.

I was born in New York City near Columbia University. This is also where my grandparents had lived and where my mother was born. In a way it was like growing up in a provincial town in New York. It wasn’t “the big city” because it was every one’s little city. I went to a private girls school through 6th grade that really had ideas, certainly in the 60’s, about what a girl was supposed to be able to do and be interested in and their way of “molding” young women. And I did not fit their mold. The school was very interested on high academic achievement but they had their ideas about what that was. If you were interested in math and science, fabulous, you could go that way. If you were interested in English and writing, you could go that way. But somehow art didn’t fit in there. In the elementary school, art was this other thing you did.”

I have a distinct memory of being in Kindergarten and making a project with cork board which we painted and put pins into and then we made a pattern with thread through the pins. I still have an image of that piece in my head – it was abstract and relatively symmetrical. The school actually called my parents in and said “It is unfair that you are giving Jessica special art classes outside of school because she is showing up the other children.” And I had never said anything about this piece to my classmates. This was a total assumption on their part. They thought “how could a five year old possibly be making symmetrical art?” Of course my parents thought this was just stupid.

In the high school years at this school they had a really good, seasoned teacher and a studio where you could go but when you were little art was considered as you know, “That’s nice dear.”
I loved art – I couldn’t get my hands off the stuff. I’ve always wanted to handle materials and see what they could do, technically as much as creatively.

In second grade we used to dress these little toy mice from Germany that stood up holding a piece of corn with pipe cleaner hands and we would make clothing for them. Rather than giving the little mice personalities, this was all about embellishment. Starting in high school I did costuming and set design. There was a director of the annual Christmas pageant who needed someone to do costumes for the three kings and the wise men and instead of handing me a pattern and asking if I could sew them he said “I’ve got $200.00 bucks, you can go down to the garment district and figure out how to do it.” I don’t remember feeling daunted at all! A relationship to 3D art was just there.

There was an upholstered arm chair in our house with an open space underneath the arms. I remember I used to lie in this chair and look through the hole to create a different frame on the world. I remember sticking my head through the hole and it was like peering out into somewhere else even though it was the same space. I remember sitting under tables.

My godfather lived five blocks away from us and he was a painter, he made his own frames. My dad was building bookcases – the intersection what is “art” and what is something that is “made” was always a little fuzzy to me. We went to museums and saw the things that were formally declared as “art” but I think that for me it’s been much more about “what do I want to make?” It could be functional or decorative or also have a message, it really doesn’t matter what it is. So I really came to art with a crafts mentality. I find the functionality of things interesting and sometimes even if a piece of mine is totally abstract – to me half the fun of making it is how to make it stand the way I want it to, not even necessarily how it looks. That process of the engineering of something is as exciting as the end product. Cooking too – that whole idea of using a recipe, kitchen objects – tools – everything in our kitchen was hanging off the walls. Old stuff, new stuff.

My father has painted since college. He’s also always been a tinkerer too – building cabinets, and loving plants. I remember how he grew lots of plants right in the window of the tenth floor where the apartment was with lots of light coming in and I remember looking at plants all the time. Looking at the way the plants grew around the windows – in my room there were plants with little heart shaped leaves and little hanging prisms that would shine light onto the walls.

My maternal grandfather was a physicist (nucleomagentic resonance), so I was always hearing about the intricate workings of  invisible worlds that could determined our very existence – radar, sonar, electrons, deep space.  Ever since I was young I have had a randomly recurring image of  spinning nuclear particles because of stories about Dr. Wu discovering that the rule of parity (indiscriminate spin direction) was false.  It is important, I think, that I have such a strong memory or someone proving something false rather than proving something true. I love knowing that one discovery can change the way people look at the world, open up the possibilities to new interpretations.  Chaos and uncertainty lead to adventure and learning and are not (necessarily) things to be avoided.

“When They Were Kids: Artists Talk About Their Childhoods” resumes this fall with an interview with the prolific Washington, DC artist Matt Sesow. Almost anyone who makes art in the DC area knows Matt for his ability to produce insane amounts of art which he successfully markets locally and around the world. So where does someone get this kind of drive? Was Matt Sesow an art kid like Studio Neptune’s sixteen other previous interviews? Actually, he wasn’t that at all. Growing up in a rural area of Lincoln, Nebraska, Matt’s childhood was filled with sports, a great family, plenty of friends and a fascination with computers. In the early 1980’s he taught himself programming language and eventually those childhood skills developed and led him straight into the corporate world of Internet technology. No one in Matt’s family had a career in the arts, no family friends had art studios to visit. Drawing and playing with creative toys were minimal. Visits to art museums were rare. It became clear in our interview that one significant incident became the catalyst for Matt’s artistic expression.

Growing up in Nebraska, our rural home was situated across the street (gravel road) from a small airfield with a grassy runway. Small propeller airplanes would take off and land almost daily. In 1975, at the age of eight, while playing a game of “SPUD” with the other neighborhood kids, I was struck by the propeller of a landing airplane that hit my upper arm. The accident resulted in the amputation of my left (dominant) hand at the hospital due to gangrene. Thankfully the doctors, one just back from the Vietnam war, were able to re-attach my arm saving the elbow.

My family was super supportive. They are the reason I was able to get through this whole trauma. I was in and out of hospitals for about two years. It almost became like “oh, of course this is normal, getting hit by an airplane.” But I still played sports and everything. I even tripped once and broke my left arm again. It wasn’t this thing of slowing down – you had to be tough. I guess that’s a natural attitude growing up in Nebraska – part of that mid west pioneering spirit.

I hadn’t talked about the accident or had any real therapy about it – I don’t feel I dealt with it at all until I started painting. In the beginning, around 1994, I was trying to impress a girl who lived in a group house in Mt. Pleasant. There were painters there and I saw their work and thought “Oh – I could do that too” but I was really seeing it more as a joke, it was not serious for me yet. Before that I had entered some short videos into the Psychotronic Film Contest in 1993. I did a film about my arm “A Short” but I didn’t really know that it was about that. Years later I looked at it and thought “Oh god – this is totally a self portrait.”

Francis Bacon, Study for the Head of  a Screaming Pope, 1952

I experimented a lot. I didn’t follow any rules. I used the museums to help me understand how to paint. Looking at paintings by Francis Bacon and Willem deKooning – those were my favorites. I took the whole idea of Do It Yourself into my painting and business model – the whole punk scene influenced me.

There were both East Coast – West Coast musical influences. I saw a lot of really good bands growing up and that was a huge, huge influence on me. I think of it as inspiring my style of painting more than anything else. That was my artist connection.

Now I start with some photos, maybe I see something I like, and it becomes the composition but then of course it becomes my own painting. You wouldn’t even recognize the original image, whether it was male or female. Things like that, everything morphs during the process of painting for me. Once a painting is done, it’s not for decoration, it’s something to get out into the world. I don’t really have a favorite painting. I don’t have an attachment to them anymore.

Painting is such a solitary experience, unlike the sports activities that were so prevalent in your life as a child. There are always teammates to interact with who are integral to the outcome of the game. Kids often turn towards art making because it is their own little world they can retreat to and feel safe within. Did making art provide you with something you had not really experienced before?

I taught myself Pascal, Basic, and some assembler language programming when I was in kid in the early 80′s. Since our house was in a rural area of Nebraska, I didn’t have friends nearby or in my neighborhood. Oftentimes I would spend entire days messing around on my Apple2 computer. My parents originally let me have the computer in my bedroom, but later made me move it into the living room. I was spending too much time by myself on the computer in my bedroom.

I enjoy social interaction and the benefits of working on a team; however, I am able to spend copious amounts of time by myself without human interaction. I think the time on my first computer was a way for me to create my own world.

I worked at IBM, AOL, Netscape, I’ve lived in the corporate world, going through performance appraisals, I was programming since the age of fourteen, working in software development. I always knew to just bust ass no matter what I do. Not be a weeny, don’t be a wimp. Playing football as a kid, I knew that you would break bones, get hit, get hit in every single place, but you have to realize that you can take a hit, you can come back. You have to have a hunger, a drive, perseverance, lift weights. It’s that whole package. One of the greatest things about football was thinking about what the other guy that I will be playing against was doing. Is he lifting weights or just sitting back being lazy? So I would take that to the art world too: what am I doing today? Am I painting or am I sitting in a coffee shop talking about painting? Once I decided to paint, it was “OK, this is 110%”. You’ve got to give it your all. It’s in your heart – you just know it.

The art of Matt Sesow can be discovered at www.sesow.com.

Here is the second video in our series of interviews with artists, produced by the talented team at KS12.

I spent a lot of time alone, just drawing. All my life I have made art, the mediums changed from drawing to painting to photography. I was born in Australia and went to school there. I went to art school there too. I went to public school and when I was in 8th grade I went to private school. My parents thought I would get a better education in private school. It was a really nice school but I didn’t like it. It was really uptight and strict. The kids I went to school with (and I’m generalizing) were rich and snotty.

I loved cartoon characters and also trying to draw trees. One very specific memory I have is of a very old tree we had. Our veranda went all around the front of the house and I’d sit out there and look at these huge, old pine trees. I was trying to draw the whole tree, but twig by twig. I didn’t realize that I should have first tried to get a general impression to suggest the tree. I sat there and thought “Why does this look so weird and fragmented and disjointed?” And its because I tried drawing every twig in the tree but it didn’t fit in the whole tree properly. I wanted to get it perfect and kept rubbing it out and trying again. But today I love the happy accident and try to entertain a bit of chaos or something that’s sloppy in my work. I actually like when something isn’t quite right. Sometimes it shows me something different. I try to not fight my fussiness but incorporate the changes.

I was a weird kid who would make things from plasticine. I was obsessed with Smurfs and Playmobil. I’d make these tableaux, these scenes. The whole periphery of my room would have these little worlds. I had a balcony and I’d use that as well.

The living room was really reflective of my dad’s sensibility and aesthetic taste. It was all from his parent’s house in Switzerland. Gorgeous Persian rugs, unbelievable. Chairs and sofas that were striped, dull golden velveteen with tight stitching, lots of details. Wall hangings with thin sabers, hand guards. Spear like medieval swords with elaborate medieval tapestries and dangling bits, gold fringing. This was something my dad collected. I loved it. I associated it so heavily with my dad, both fearful of it and something reverential about. Like make sure you don’t touch that, make sure you don’t bump that or break it. The table in there was made of marble and it was very old and beautiful. The rest of the house was all my mom’s taste – a 70’s kitchen with this bright orange curtain around the windows. Everything else was very English and tasteful, neutral, cream colored. There was the pale blue Wedgwood china with pastoral scenes. But around the kitchen table were these ORANGE cushions! I hate orange.

Any well known artists I came across were usually dead and in books. It was really frustrating when I would see something and didn’t know who did it. When I went to art school I finally learned about movements like the Pre-Raphaelites.

I also loved Anime. I wanted to live in a Japanese cartoon. I had such a crush on Astro Boy.

I love books and I love the smell of books. I’m still a big book sniffer. I would stick my nose inside the book and huff it. There was this book about a bumblebee that smelled so good, it never lost it’s smell.

Our conversation ended with some thoughts about growing out of childhood and what remains.

I would get one pair of new trousers a year. I would wear my brother’s hand me down stuff. So I tried to be as invisible as I could. When I was about twelve, I went shopping in thrift stores. I was turning into a rebellious teenager.

I think when you turn twelve or thirteen you begin to define yourself for yourself. You want to be something you feel you should be intuitively. You feel that need to break out, explore your world more. What is interesting about our chat is that I really sense the Victoria you are now, was waiting to be that as a child. Something has been waiting to bloom. As a kid you were well cared for but there was just this moment when a natural aspect of who you are rose up. I feel that your vibe, your voice, the way you are speaking, is probably very, very much who you were as a kid. I can feel that. A very gentle, sweet, good natured person. I think it is wonderful that you are living and breathing what you really need to be, right now, as this type of artistic person. It’s a wonderful, eclectic mix.

Do you find that with other artists? That they have that progression where they stay who they were as a kid?

Absolutely. As the British director Michael Apted, who made The Up Series proved – it is absolutely that way. We are very much who we are going to be by the time we are seven years old. That’s what makes this project even more interesting for me.

in her world

in her drawing book

she recreates the massive tree

only to find that lines escape the paper

art is so big, art is so necessary

which way will this enigma walk?

into a stew of mangled messy magic

into the place where she greeted original thirst

the early days are like a dance with strange and friendly fairies

who have lifted her onto their scaly backs for a ride into the future extreme

www.victoriafgaitan.com

My brother, the second oldest, had an attraction to art so he received all the art supplies. When I came along and wanted to draw too my parents would say, “Well you can used his dried up ink set or paints, just use that” because they weren’t going to buy any more art supplies. But the drive to make art was right there, so it didn’t matter. One of my earliest memories was when I was about three, my brothers would go off to school and I would spend the day saying “I’m going to do drawings for cards”. So I would make my Mother’s Day card, my Father’s Day card and I would think that any word ending in “er” would have a card made for it. So I would make a Brother’s Day card too and that way I could be drawing all the time. I remember going to the Chicago Art Institute and seeing the Robert Rauschenberg exhibit of the goat and the tire.

It was so unusual to say “Why is there a goat in the middle of the gallery floor? There was another installation of modern art where the tiles of the floor were actually the artwork. So you’d be standing on it and then realize you were standing right on the artwork. You’d step off, but then wait – it’s on the floor and you SHOULD walk onto it. That whole quandary of theoretical art, what it means and how bizarre that is to a young child.

I always liked buildings. In second grade I made my own slide show by taking two paper towel tubes and attaching them to a roll of white paper. I drew the individual slides which were buildings in downtown Chicago. I did the Shedd Aquarium that showed all the fish in the tank, the Art Institute where I showed the lion statues outside and I drew the tall Prudential Plaza.

I was an “art kid” at school and I would be pulled out of class to do posters for the school and I thought it was the greatest thing. I saw it as a lot of fun – I would be having fun with other kids and the teacher would come out to the hallway where we were working and say “What’s going on here!” Obviously I was too loud, having too much fun, so I’d get yanked off more than one project. Instead of playing during recess we’d have art competitions. Who could draw the globe the best way? All the kids would choose the winner. These memories are of using art as a way to distinguish yourself. That hyper realistic desire to draw accurately stayed with me all the way through college. I liked that kind of Richard Estes imagery more so than abstraction.

My strongest memory about toys I had was when I was about five years old, I got a GI Joe Doll. I was so excited that I just ran through the house saying I got this doll, even into the basement where there was no one there! I looked at this doll as a model that you could study. I wanted to know what a body would look like if you threw it out the window, how would it look when it landed. So I would throw it constantly out the window and say “This is what a body would look like if it fell on the concrete.” Eventually its clothes wore off, because I’m throwing it and abusing it in every way possible and I started using paper towels and napkins to hide his shame, but it was also a way to see how the clothes would look on a body! You know “This is how a toga would look like on a body!” I’d also take my matchbox cars and say “This is what a car would look like if you threw it out a window! Except that the strength of the steel in the small cars didn’t crash like a regular car so I would take a hammer and say “This is what it REALLY would look like!”

I remember going into the subway and seeing the Juicy Fruit gum dispensers on the columns in the subway, how bizarre it tasted and the funny smells in the subway. When you take the trains in Chicago you go from the underground to above ground and just that whole process coming above ground from the darkness to the light and to go above traffic, it was such an unusual thing. The loop goes straight towards the buildings and at the last possible second you’d turn and be careening around it. You used to be able to sit right in the front. In creative writing in high school I’d use that “L” experience because I love that whole concept of shifting perspective.

The pulls on all our 1950’s era house cabinets were little highly polished convex circles. So if you look into it, your image was upside down, and I thought that was the coolest thing. I would just sit in front of the cabinet moving my head in and out so I could get this odd perspective. Because if you got right up on top of it you would turn right side up, but anywhere from an inch beyond you were upside down.

At age 14 my mother got me a job in a movie theater. It gave me access to film, imagery that I had never considered before because film was something you’d see on TV between commercials. Here I’m suddenly seeing it on the screen the way it should be, and I could keep seeing the same scene over and over, starting to appreciate nuances that I never knew existed.

In my work I don’t mind borrowing things from pop culture, in fact I source that. I never really gave it a lot of thought but cartoon images would have been my earliest cultural images. I do respond very strongly to Dada art and surrealism. It’s almost nonsensical but then you begin deriving some kind of connection between art from the 1920’s and cartoons that came later in the 50’s and 60’s. Those children looking at cartoons would say that’s part of their back ground, not even question that that’s the way it should be. You don’t think of it as nonsense, you think of it as part of the story.

It is true that I didn’t have a lot of luxury growing up so I learned early on that I wanted to look at things, I liked looking at things. So if it wasn’t on TV, or it wasn’t in a book, I would look at the ant hill in the back yard. I would find things that I could really study. Those experiences absolutely informed me as I got older, especially as an architect. I will look at things and say what’s the perspective from down, or up. Always looking for a different point of view.

We’re doing our thing every day as a kid, a lot of that means we’re playing. We’re playing. When you’re a kid you’re not sitting down and analyzing what you’re playing with, you’re just attracted to things naturally. And you’re deepening your own understanding by interacting with things. You know there’s pleasure that you’re deriving for whatever reason. So I think that the child who becomes the adult who has influence in the world benefits from as rich a creative climate as possible. The access we have as children to explore our imaginations, discover things and have support around us, all of that encourages us. You’re going to take all that information which you may not be aware of when you are six or seven years old and as you get older that same feeling of discovery will stay with you. As a result those creative experiences will be right there behind you and push you forward as you pursue whatever you do as you get older. Adults who have that kind of influence will affect their community with that very real and solid understanding of inventing and exploring. Like Michael Janis does.

See more of his work at www.michaeljanis.com.

My work in visual art education started many years ago when I was asked by a group of adult friends to create an art class for them. They knew my dedication to making art was so solid that whatever I came up with would be rewarding. I took on the challenge and we all had an unforgettable time with it. In fact, the experience revealed something unexpected; I saw what a natural role it was for me to inspire people to be creative. Soon after those first classes, I created an art program for children. Fast forward to today and Studio Neptune has had more than a thousand children pass through its program. An amazing fact due to an unexpected invitation.

Working with kids in a studio setting almost every week of the year is in a word, splendid. Splendid: Latin splendidus, from splendēre to shine. Art kids are great company. They are curious about materials, eager to draw whatever they are thinking about and often have a great sense of humor. It really is the most natural thing in the world for children to use art to say who they are and so I wanted to get to know the kid inside of artistic adults. I wanted to trace the patterns I saw in the art of adults back to their child-selves.

“When They Were Kids” has some interesting themes already. We like small worlds when we are little, a place to be in charge, to invent and tell stories. We like to stare at textured paint on ceilings, collect moss for mini carpeting, make full course dinners out of clay and use Fisher Price record players to scratch Rap music.

For the rest of this year I plan to continue making studio visits, adding to this project. And then it will be exciting to see if “When They Were Kids” grows into something bigger. If the posts ring a bell because of how you think or the work you do, let me know! I’d love to see this conversation stretch beyond the interviews.

I went to public school. There were visiting art teachers and an occasional art period which felt like only twice a year! However, I loved to draw and my parents acknowledged and recognized that. I started to go to art classes for a year or two and then I stopped and picked it up again in high school. I wouldn’t have considered myself creative when I was a kid but I knew I loved adventure. We lived in the urban part of Hyde Park so there were buildings all around. It was a nice area to grow up in because the buildings there were old and very beautiful. It was small, very culturally integrated, a lot of university professors running around sending their kids to school with me. The lake front was just two blocks away, which was huge. We were close to a place called The Point. You could walk around a path there, there was a little castle and trees and a great view of the Chicago skyline. And tons of rocks – I loved to climb on the rocks.

That was only two blocks away but then I would also love to go exploring in the alleys. I got my kicks by being let loose – you know, my parents would just say be home by 6 – in time for dinner, I would just go running around all the alleys and up and down the streets in my neighborhood. It was my playground.

My drawings were largely about science fiction, space ships, outer space stuff, an occasional dragon. I built jet fighter model airplanes and only that for about two years. I was very patient and wanted it to look the best it could.

When Willie Wonka hit the shelves, that was really great. It was not only fun and playful with child like designs and names, but the packaging was creative and the taste of it was really good. It definitely exceeded the other available candy. It was mostly just sugar, right? But the artificial taste was superior!

Our apartment had a real eclectic mix of materials around the fireplace. I remember a dark brown rocking chair that was sculpted with round pegs and armrests. There was a rug which was really frilly, it was black and white, or dark brown and grey. There was a lot of brown around the fireplace. The design was very earthy, not subdued, but it was international.

Joren Lindhom, Natural’s Fumble, 2010, oil on linen, 28” x 22”

I was really into the Field Museum. The sense of scale and the lobby, the whole museum was an empty space, a huge lobby. A wide open space with Tyrannosaurus Rex, Woolly Mammoths. Very dramatic. Walking into that space was huge! We would go on field trips to the Art Institute and I had no orientation and no inherited knowledge or studying or anything and coming to that containment of the art world was baffling. It was daunting but also exciting.

Ivan Albright, Portrait of Mary Block, 1955-57

Ivan Albright, a Chicago artist from the turn of the century was someone I decided to do a project on in high school. The subject of his work is what is most interesting to me but he’s a hyper -realist! I’m the inverse of that! Later on Matisse, Gorky, Cezanne became much more important to the way I worked. I think that if there is one sensibility I have it’s eclecticism, versatility.

When I was twelve I saw the goriest movie I have ever seen. It was Dawn of the Dead, a classic. Here we were, a group of six unchaperoned twelve year olds watching this movie and it is burned in our memory! My parents had a stereo and I remember the 12” vinyl record covers. I remember being this little kid just looking at the record covers. You know – Barbra Streisand’s head and it was really big! That’s unforgettable!

Speaking for myself, but maybe for all artists, there’s that situation where you can just stop and look at anything and find fascination. It’s removing yourself from the “norm” of experience, taking a step, making a gap, a distance and just looking at it new. The element of surprise runs very deep in me. Maybe it’s the drama. My dad took me to India when I was 12 and so dismantling stereotypes, that was very important to me. It gave me a sense of infinity in a way, that there is always something beyond what you see. Today in my work this kind of shifting of images is key but I am searching to create the right kind of balance. The amount of shifting is critical because if there is too much it won’t look like anything. People won’t even recognize that something has shifted. You have to create a sequence with enough continuity that when it shifts it actually means something.

images of Joren’s studio on 14th St., NW Washington, DC

recent work

Living Death Friend (The Game We’re Playing), 2010, oil on canvas, 24” x 20”

The Traveler and the Travel (Beware of Sanctuary), 2009-2011, oil and mixed media collage on canvas, dual panel, 48” x 68.5”

As a child Jordan grew up in numerous American cities, following the career of his father who traveled the country opening hotels and restaurants. When I was a kid I did art like any other kid – I made up cartoons, stories. I remember at a very young age, maybe 2nd or 3rd grade, we’d go to a restaurant where they’d cover the table with paper. My parents would be having a business meeting and I would just draw the entire time. When we left, I would leave my drawings on the table and the servers would take the drawings and put them up inside the kitchen. So the next time I’d come in they’d take my hand and bring me back there where they’d show me my drawings in the kitchen that all the servers would look at everyday. I think things like that influenced me to do things that please people and of course because I am teaching art now it feels like something I can be good at and that can make people happy.

We used to visit my aunt in the summers in Maine. She had a best friend who was a writer who had a book with beautiful graphite illustrations and no text. The idea was to create stories using the illustrations as a jump start to write. I really remember those illustrations and the interaction with writers at an early age actually influenced me to get a degree in illustration in college. I made characters in school that interacted with each other without using any words. That visual expression is all you really need to tell a story. My dad used to read a picture book called “Good Dog Carl” to me. But there were no words and my dad would create all the narration and it was really funny. When we’d get a book where there actually was text in it, I’d say “read if funny daddy” and we’d have to change all the stories and just use the illustrations –  tailor written stories just for me. My dad was really expressive with his face  and it was like theater for me.

Aside from book illustration the other big influence for Jordan as a child was Legos. And yes, if he has the opportunity to sit down with someone’s son or daughter to play with Legos, the invitation is still is completely attractive to him. I asked him what was it like to play with Legos as a kid?

Oh, well time stopped.
I always followed the instructions once and then of course the building would get demolished. It was fun to destroy things after I built them. Then I would rebuild them into new forms and it was my dream profession from ages 8-12 to work for Lego and design for them, because I felt my designs were better than theirs! I know there are artists now who use Legos as their primary medium.

Gray, Legos, 45″ x 45″ x 15″ by  Nathan Sawaya

We know Legos were made to build and destroy and rebuild and I think that kind of idea is prevalent today in my own creative process. You build and destroy since you still have the building blocks to create something. It’s like when the Romans designed with beautiful stone blocks to build their buildings which were destroyed in war, they would reuse those same blocks to build cathedrals. I think that idea became more important to me due to all those countless hours sifting through Legos and seeing what was useful or not useful – building my structure and then becoming interested in something else so I would destroy that first structure, take the pieces and then build something else.

Swerve, graphite on paper, 42″ x 42″

Conch, mixed media on panel, 24″ x 24″

It is easy to see how those three dimensional design experiences with Legos are actually a very important part of Jordan’s art which is two dimensional. In addition to the subject matter which is often based on structure, Jordan’s drawings and paintings are all about actual building and rebuilding. Graphite drawings are made through a reduction method using an eraser (destruction) and built up again with pencil (construction). His painting process is another example of this, in reverse. Starting with a chaotic approach, he allows the paint to move around using mediums that flow so freely they are difficult to control. Later he will come back to the painting with a brush to realize new forms that have already been implied abstractly.

I like the idea that art can be about more than one thing, like architecture that is functional but is also visually exciting, different. There is chaos, there is order, but with a distinct harmony present.

See more art by J.Jordan Bruns at his website: www.jjbruns.com

In the exhibition hallway nearby was Bridget’s latest exhibit I Had Fun Last Night. Large scale photographs transport us directly into the dollhouse rooms where they have been purposefully arranged and documented to evoke the drama of romantic human relationships.

I could not help but make an immediate association with Bridget’s art and one of my favorite films, Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window. Rear Window creates a layered dollhouse effect through its set design – the rear court yard of a 1950’s apartment complex with large windows which allow us to follow the drama unfolding in various apartments.

Something Bridget thought about becoming? An architect.

My dollhouse was given to me when I was five. My grandfather built it and almost everything in it. And I loved it. My grandfather was my favorite person around. I used to spend some summers with my grandparents who lived in Connecticut. We used to drive there and the whole dollhouse was built so that it could be taken apart and flattened so I could bring it with me. I made tons of things for it: full course dinners out of clay, fruit bowls.

I wall papered it, it had electric lights. The dollhouse was eventually put away in our attic. I had a solo show coming up in 2006 and I was trying to think of something different to do. My previous work had included miniature people that I had photographed with different back grounds and suddenly I found myself calling my parents to see if they still had the dollhouse. They did and so I simply said “I’m coming to get it.”

When Bridget was a kid she played with the dollhouse all the time, constantly arranging and rearranging the rooms. I asked if she could draw a parallel to the art she is currently making or whether the content was too adult in nature. I don’t know about that – I was joking about this with a friend and we agreed that we always made our dolls kiss each other. You are acting out family things, like playing, arguing.

So really the drama was always there, it was just more G rated than R.

As we concluded our interview Bridget made this comment about dollhouses: You know what they say about dollhouses – at least when adults build them – that it’s a way to control your environment.

I think that’s also true for any artist. We ultimately control all the decisions in our work until we reach a level of balance within ourselves. We ask ourselves “have I reached it?” And if we do then we walk away feeling really great in a truly satisfied, self controlled state. Something to feel good about, something no one else may ever know.

Some of Bridget’s work from I Had Fun Last Night will appear this summer in a group exhibit at Addison Ripley Gallery in Washington, DC, June 18 through August 30.