In conjunction with her solo exhibition, Off the Record and Other Stories, Maeve D’Arcy spoke to scholar, artist, and author Dr. Gail Levin about contemporary abstraction and painting intuitively. D’Arcy discusses the impact of Levin’s books, particularly the biographies on Judy Chicago and Lee Krasner, on her practice.
Below are excerpts from the talk.
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D’Arcy: That was one of my questions. What transferred you from the Hopper world to the Ab-Ex world?
Levin: So, Hopper was a detour. Realism was a detour but I come from a love of abstraction early on. I think going to college in the 60s, it was pop art, there was a lot of figuration but I never had to reconcile with accepting abstraction because it was part of my background.
D’Arcy: Well that’s something I get asked a lot about the work - where does this language come from, where does abstraction start? And it always, in a similar way, has always been my language. Always been the thing that made sense to fill in a blank space. I think it started with works on paper ever since I was making marks and navigating a piece of paper with a crayon or pencil. Then I got slightly more sophisticated materials moving forward.
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Levin: Can we talk about the way your art is so crafted, marked. I mean it’s just the opposite from Jackson Pollock’s drips. It’s definitely controlled, intentional and it’s related to writing and you have lots of symbols. It reminds me of the pictographs in the southwest by the Native Americans or I think of your Irish roots. Can you talk about Ogham, the Irish language? Tell us about how that’s informed these works and when that began in your imagination.
D’Arcy: I think it’s been the last couple of years that language has had an obvious relationship to the mark-making language. So thinking about pattern, which is, I think, about time and about mimicking patterns in nature but also in urban spaces.
And then there is written language, which we know what it looks like; even if it's not a language you speak, you can understand that it’s a language and text. And there's a space in between those two places that I’m interested in. So, the idea is that you understand how much information is embedded in a mark and how many variables there are.
Levin: But it’s spontaneous isn't it? I mean you don’t have it planned out, and there's no grid.
D’Arcy: No there’s no grid, but I’m always thinking about the grid. I’m always responding to the grid or lack thereof.
