Home, from afar

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Enveloped in color, texture and light and filled with movement on a large scale, I had the privilege of viewing Leslie Martinez’s recent exhibition, The Secrecy of Water, at the Blaffer Museum in Houston, Texas at the beginning of this month. From afar the paintings look like brightly colored topographies, maps to unknown worlds, even possibly alien in their configurations. Rivers of lemon yellow connect and thread through the three largest works, while islands of fabric some wadded, some with visibly sewn seams, adorn the sea of high key blues and greens. Pops of pink, orange and red emerge from the depths, as if transporting messages from other realms, secrets begging to be seen, known, and heard. Where Martinez has clustered thickness bulging off the canvas they also leave areas hardly touched by nothing more than the splatter of a spray of paint, the drops left behind from a whisk of a wet brush, or the thinest of washes of color to contrast the areas where the grit of charcoal or pumice or torn paper thicken other areas of the surface.

In 2019 as I muddled my way through my first painting critique at my local community college, my brain reached for words to describe what I was looking at in my fellow students’ assignments. For those not familiar with an artistic critique let me try to set the scene. The students would each pin up their paintings on the wall and we would then take our seats around the large table in the center of the classroom. Rearranging the furniture so we could all look at what had been hung in an arbitrary line up on the carpeted display wall. We would look at the works and then start from one direction and move down the line examining each for the feelings it evoked (I’m getting a deep feeling of sadness from these brushstrokes); where we could imagine it being hung in someone’s living quarters (this seems like the type of work you’d want to hang in the entryway of your home); or the success or possibilities for the painting and the painter’s choices. Sometimes critique was about asking questions, why did you choose that color? Interesting choice to place that object there, did you notice the way it blocks access to the whole right side of the painting because it cuts off the space? Sometimes, most times, critique for me was about grasping for the words to describe what I was seeing and feeling and coming up short. “I want to be able to talk about paintings like you do,” I told my Professor one day after critique. “You’ll get there in time,” he reassured me.

As I spent an hour with Leslie Martinez’s paintings I marveled at the ways balance and light functioned. Where Martinez might choose areas of bright, lemony yellows contrasting with cerulean rivers, only in certain instances do the overlaps produce a thin green manifested at the meeting place between colors. In most cases Martinez seems much more concerned with the addition of acrylic paint in layers after the previous application has dried. Whereas most of the colors appear possibly as pure pigments out of the tube, in the areas where Martinez seeks balance through contrasting darker hues of color like deep teals, or cobalt blue their mixing of colors helps bring a balance to the entire surface. Creating depth through these cool colors that recede into the surface, allows room for the cool yellows and reds to pop with a fluorescence assigned to the human-made world, in turn creating vibrational fields. Bronze-inspired browns hold everything together.

When I toyed with the idea of going back to school to get a degree in art history at the University of Minnesota Morris, I eagerly scoured the course catalogue. I noticed that all art history majors have to take art studio classes, Foundations of 2D or 3D art along with a visual art of their choosing. It makes sense for the art historian to need to be able to peel back the curtain on how something may be made. That they would need to be familiar with the principles and elements of art and design. The art critic too should know what goes into the making of a work. The painter’s “Master studies” of other painters’ works are a study in how did that artist achieve what they did. What tools did they use? What surface is the painting upon? How did they approach the application of paint? Was it smooth or textured, illustrative with line or more grounded by the building up of shapes? Which paint did they put on first or last? There was a time, the vast majority of my life actually, where if I was to be asked these questions, I would not have known the answers. And yet now, my obsessive tendency has me staring at paintings like painters do, up close, and for long periods of time.

The main question I sought to answer while taking in Martinez’s works, was how and why do they choose to build up these surfaces with so much texture? Could these paintings work without the painted on clumps of fabric, or the torn bits of paper collaged into the field? It is not enough for Martinez to shock the eye with their color choices, they seem to want to shock the viewer’s sensibilities about the surface itself, about the border of a painting’s edge. Not confined to the boundaries, Martinez’s works often go off the edge of the surface. Turning the edge and margin into a point of interest. Like bell hooks’ women of color feminism reminds us, when we move from margin to center, or put another way, center the margin, we challenge the very fabric of the social order dependent on a certain hierarchy. Martinez pushes their abstract mark making beyond the application of paint alone. In affixing scrunched up fabrics sometimes pre-painted, sometimes painted into the surface of the canvas, they challenge the norms of the rectangular space of the typical painting’s surface. In inviting the viewer through the peaks of fabrics jutting up from the canvas, we read it as a possible map. As an artist making work inspired by the Rio Grande Valley of the South Texas Mexico border, cartographies and border zones as well as the environment of the desert stand out as themes in the exhibition copy of the artist’s statement. As does referencing queer gender and sexual resilience— themes of joy, fluidity, and willful rebellion. In Martinez’s work they aim for a zero-waste studio practice, which curator Tyler Blackwell likens as aesthetic intervention of the Chicanx artistic technique of rasquachismo.

As Chicana feminist artist/activist/curator Amalia Mesa-Bains writes, rasquachismo is when “the irreverent and spontaneous are employed to make the most from the least… [it] has a stance that is both defiant and inventive. Aesthetic expression comes from discards, fragments, even recycled everyday materials such as tires, broken plates, plastic containers, which are recombined with elaborate and bold display.” She goes on to say, “The capacity to hold life together with bits of string, old coffee cans, and broken mirrors in a dazzling gesture of aesthetic bravado is at the heart of rasquachismo.” Martinez’s zero-waste process means they are painting old clothes that once adorned their body to now make new meanings and serve new purpose as part of a painting. They’re repurposing rags typically used to clean up paint and often discarded and transforming them into paint itself. Defiantly and innovatively pushing the boundaries of materials. While rasquachismo may be defined by an aesthetic sensibility, it also implicitly harkens to the ways that Latinx folks are the original recyclers and zero-waste originators. It reminds me of the holey socks and worn out undies my mama would repurpose as cleaning rags in my childhood home. I see myself in the work as a repurposer of tins, plastic, and glass containers for storage solutions, and in the ways I transform fabrics from their original purpose into paint rags, which in turn become quilted appliqués or paint in their own rights.

Meanwhile across town another abstract painter’s works hang—fourteen murals on the walls of an octagonal sanctuary. The Rothko Chapel speaks in a different language of abstraction. Here solid fields of varying hues of black wash over the canvas and the viewer as they sit in reverent chapel silence. Meditating on cushions or sitting solemnly on wooden benches, the more one looks, the more that becomes revealed. To have these works in conversation across space within the fourth most populous city of the US encourages me to think about translation. To have such bright, bold, visceral works with moments of serenity within them speaking to the Rothko paintings filled with their own vibrational messages across time and space helped me fall even more deeply in love with painting. I’ve been back in the snowy winter wonderland of West Central Minnesota for weeks now. In the whiteness of the landscape where the sky is often the same color as the ground, I’ve thought a lot about the messages between both sets of work and what it means to me in my studio 1300 miles away, seeking wisdoms in the journey and among the narratives painters write with pigment and brushes. Given my Minnesota State Arts Board grant support for the creation of this newsletter over the next year you can expect to receive more essays like this. It is my hope to profile art a little closer to home geographically speaking. While also exploring how ekphrasis might fill my well of inspiration. Might help me keep learning how to represent the visual verbally. A medley of artist life and a peeling back of the many ways we might think through the impact of a painting. An ode to the humanities currently under attack. A tribute to those attempting to live authentically in increasing cycles of state-led repression. A balm made up of the power of art to help us remember the unique joys of being human. A chance for the seekers, the learners, the helpers, the lovers, to find new trails amidst the shifting terrains of our home.

Artist Offerings

• Between now and my next newsletter offering I will journey to San Francisco to catch the West Coast Premiere of Locusts Have No King featuring the SF Return of Nathan Tylutki. Check out this write up for more information, and if you're in the area consider taking in some live theater! 
• ​The kind of real life lesbian rom-com we need turned into a movie! Who should I pitch this to?!
• I am so lucky to have a Jonathan Thunder original painting at the ChicFinn - watch this profile by PBS American Masters for his exploration of "good mythology" 
• I absolutely love learning more about Midwestern Chicana artists and an exhibit called Chicanisma by Elizabeth Rubendall means I'm going to need to figure out a time to swing through Lincoln, NE before September! Very possible for me given my two trips to KS I've got planned for spring and summer
• Food and art and public engagement... very inspiring
• This essay by John Paul Brammer on traveling and the power of drag is a must read - don't miss the highlighted video in the essay, it's worth your time.

Creative Ritual

Be sure to check out Calendula Gallery during the Spring St. Paul Art Crawl April 14-16! Also, if you’d like to see evidence of the work I’ve been brewing in my studio I have an example of my first quilted painting on view at the Charles Beck Gallery on the M State Campus in Fergus Falls, MN. The show is up through May 6th. I am 98% complete with one of the three commissioned Kitchen Saints paintings I’ve been working on since late last year with high hopes of finishing up the other two soon. I am also happy to share that I released eleven new 4”x6” or 6”x4” paintings of candies that have fueled my studio practice and that they are now listed for sale in my shop. As I continue to prep for my residency (leaving April 14th and returning May 13th) I will be closing the shop before I head out since I won’t be around to mail out paintings. Scoop up what you’d like while you can! I am in the midst of submitting a career development grant and was happy to receive word one of my Roots painting will be included in a virtual exhibition. I’ll link for you next time when it goes live. I also helped craft a narrative for another grant collaboration for one of the aforementioned possible trips to Kansas. I honestly don't know how I've done all this through the continued winter. Did you know that raking your roof is a thing? Welcome to one of the most snowy winters Minnesota has seen since meteorologists started recording!

Questions to ponder

What do you look for when you come across a painting?
How is art important to you?
What zero-waste practices have you incorporated into your life, or would be willing to incorporate into your life?
What is the relationship between home and travel for you? 

Thanks for journeying with me. I hope, as always, that you take what you need and leave the rest for someone else, or for another time. 

-KCF


The Art of KCF Newsletter is a fiscal year 2023 recipient of a Creative Support for Individuals grant from the Minnesota State Arts Board. This activity is made possible by the voters of Minnesota through a grant from the MSAB, thanks to a legislative appropriation from the arts and cultural heritage fund.