Beer With a Painter

Interview

Beer with a Painter: Suzanne Joelson and Gary Stephan

An artist couple talks about paintings with a punch line and a street full of rats.

Interview

Beer with a Painter: Emily Cheng

The forms in Emily Cheng’s paintings are suggestive of the most primary elements: the landscape, the body, and religious iconography.

Interview

Beer with a Painter: Paul Wackers

The cozy studio environment and the casual, gonzo aesthetic of the ceramic objects, not to mention Wackers’s personality, may bely how technically precise and complexly orchestrated his paintings are.

Interview

Beer with a Painter: Peter Acheson

Acheson does not care about trading niceties or being ingratiating. He would rather propose and debate philosophical ideas.

Interview

Beer with a Painter: Albert Oehlen

The long-reigning bad boy of German painting has consistently poked and prodded at whatever preciousness we associate with the medium.

Interview

Beer with a Painter: Jennifer Coates

Coates’s recent work depicts food: spaghetti and meatballs, sprinkle cookies, and s’mores. Her work is about matter and viscosity, but it is also rooted in grid-like structures, repetitive mark-making, and very sophisticated paint handling.

Interview

Beer with a Painter: Craig Stockwell

Painters who lived and exhibited in New England, like Jake Berthot and Porforio DiDonna, are highly represented. They, like Stockwell, have straddled the line between tough material abstraction, nature, and the figure.

Interview

Beer with a Painter: Tal R

Tal R talks about “watching” paintings — not just looking at them. It might be a language tic, but it also feels specific.

Interview

Beer with a Painter: Alex Katz

“It’s been my most productive summer ever,” Alex Katz declares. “The real work is here, though,” he tells me, unrolling pounce paper to show me his preparatory drawings. “I want to go even bigger,” he says.

Interview

Beer with a Painter: Billy Al Bengston

“Practically everything I do takes ten years for people to get,” Billy Al Bengston says — perhaps a reason why several of his 1950s and ‘60s exhibitions have recently been re-staged.

Interview

Beer with a Painter: Katherine Bradford

“Jen! Welcome to Maine!” Katherine Bradford exclaims brightly as she spots me crossing the street.

Interview

Beer with a Painter: Enrique Chagoya

I visited Enrique Chagoya in his Stanford University studio when classes were out for the summer. The bucolic fields outside the building were quiet, other than the rustling of tree branches, and a group of swallows and a hummingbird flying near the roof.