Trenton Reynolds: It is Saturday, March 16th, 2019. This is Room in the Trees.
Sabrina Ward Harrison: A podcast about artists and origami and the color green. A natural green. A natural green, folks. unnatural green this is room in the trees and you are trent reynolds i am sabrina ward harrison we are glad you're joining us this show is dedicated to my my nana anna ward who passed away this past october but this would have been her 100th birthday i love you nana thanks for all your light and and joy you brought into this world
Trenton Reynolds: It's been kind of dingy, kind of rainy for the past few weeks and pretty cold. And we've got a migration of butterflies.
Sabrina Ward Harrison: Oh, monarchs.
Trenton Reynolds: They look like monarchs, but I don't think they are monarchs. I think they're called like painted ladies or something like that. I could be wrong. I have no idea. I saw a picture on somebody's Instagram feed that had a picture of one of the butterflies. And it said, I think, painted ladies or like some other kind than monarch, although they look very similar. um but i mean hundreds of butterflies uh i get out of my car in the morning walking down the hill to the school and hundreds of butterflies just just floating in the breeze it's amazing and it's like day after day there are all these butterflies it's kind of magical it's really
Sabrina Ward Harrison: incredible about butterfly migration and how they know where to return to and they're just these little tiny eensy weensy things.
Yeah, it is. The whole thing. Where are they going?
Sabrina Ward Harrison: And how do they know?
Trenton Reynolds: I think we know where they're going. Yeah. I wonder if they've got like groupings. I'm sure they do have some kind of group like, you know, I'm in wave A of the migration, you know. Or they just take off whenever they're ready, you know. It's like, okay, here I go. Or is there an awareness like of the larger group of butterflies?
Sabrina Ward Harrison: I always wonder that when I see Canadian geese flying overhead or the trumpeter swans migrating. Like, when do they decide? Is there a social hierarchy within the flock?
Right. And...
Sabrina Ward Harrison: it's always sad when you hear the one crying alone in the sky just like I could just cry see it's like it's lost its tribe but you know it makes me think about how we do we have that same kind of instinct of knowing where to go and what to follow and it seems with our brain capacity we should have some sense of what to do next like pin tip of a pin and they're like oh i have to fly to argentina got it i know where to go
Trenton Reynolds: feel a little chilly today i think i gotta travel 300 miles or whatever 3 000 miles well it's interesting too it seems like i've been hearing more about this recently for some reason but the the idea that intelligence can be passed down genetically Some animals, the day they're born, they're already knowing how to walk and do certain things. Right.
Right.
Trenton Reynolds: That intelligence might be part of the machinery. There's intelligence maybe just in how the body is built, but there's also some kind of... like intellectual capacity, you know, some capacity to be able to see and process and, you know, that that's built into genetics. And I'm sure that has to do everything to do with migration and, you know, but it also like how we have a sense of danger around, you know, other people are kind of built in mechanisms for understanding the world that are just part of our DNA. Does it change between generations? Exactly, right? So if I have or develop a different way of seeing the world, is that somehow encoded in my genetics such that it would somehow influence the next generation? I've got to believe that. I love that. I love
Sabrina Ward Harrison: that. I love that idea and experience. I feel like I've got my grandmother's adventures in me, you know.
Trenton Reynolds: Good time to be alive in California. And I hear there's lots of flower blooms because of all the rain.
Sabrina Ward Harrison: Oh, I bet it must be incredible this year. Spring's going to be beautiful in California.
Trenton Reynolds: Yeah. A couple of years ago, I think we had an especially rainy winter and there was a California poppy bloom.
Yeah.
Trenton Reynolds: And we drove somewhere far away to see this poppy preserve.
Sabrina Ward Harrison: I remember seeing pictures.
Trenton Reynolds: I think maybe Laura posted a beautiful little video and stuff like that.
Sabrina Ward Harrison: I'm excited to go back to Berkeley. Spring is my favorite time to be in the Bay Area. And the smell of pink jasmine just has my heart.
Yeah.
Sabrina Ward Harrison: That's coming up. When is that? Yes, I will be there in the beginning of April. Just to wander that old neighborhood. I was like Google mapping my old street. So many of the same. The bakery's still there. The old movie theater's still there. The Chinese restaurant's still there. It's amazing. 20 years later and it's still... There's a lot that hasn't changed because I kind of feared it would all be different. But there's so much that looks the same still. Yeah. I just cannot wait. So you had a rough week. Anything you want to share about it?
Trenton Reynolds: No, it was just busy. Lots of stuff going on right now at work. We installed the show last Saturday.
Sabrina Ward Harrison: Oh, how did that go?
Trenton Reynolds: In Long Beach. That went really well. It went really well. I was very pleased with how the whole show came together. And the opening was that night, last Saturday night, and had a good turnout.
Sabrina Ward Harrison: Did you have some of your new work in there?
Trenton Reynolds: I did. So this is the first time I've ever shown, like on a gallery wall, shown abstract work.
Sabrina Ward Harrison: That's exciting.
Trenton Reynolds: Yeah. Yeah, it was kind of exciting. And I... Man, I don't know. It's so... It feels a little bit silly, you know, but it is the case that I just... like I'm just kind of confused by this work. And I think it might just be because I haven't just allowed myself to own it. You know, I can tell that I'm kind of like keeping it at arm's distance. I don't know if maybe that's partly like anticipating that, And people won't like it or won't appreciate it as much as maybe other work that I've done. Or I don't know. I just, it's silly. I should just own it and move on and not think too much about it. But I didn't really tell any friends about this show. It's in Long Beach, so it's a bit of a drive. But I kind of just wanted to put it up. And, you know, I just wanted to look at it on the wall by myself before anything. I start publishing, you know.
Sabrina Ward Harrison: That's actually a good sign. That's a good sign because that means that you are pushing boundaries and limits of what feels safe. So that's a very good sign. did you have some representation of that really gorgeous green color in the pieces?
Trenton Reynolds: I think there was. I posted a picture of one piece that I put in there, the one with a really bright green grid, grid of lines with the orange. Yeah. So that made it in.
Good.
Trenton Reynolds: I don't know if there's any other examples of the green of life. Yeah. as I like to call it. And just to be clear for other people to understand, this is a green that Sabrina really does not like. I kept on trying to include it in the paintings that we were making in Madison. And you would like, you would shudder.
Sabrina Ward Harrison: You would shudder. Yeah, I was just thinking about it.
Yep.
Sabrina Ward Harrison: You guys, it's interesting.
Trenton Reynolds: In fact, I've got a little, I'm looking right now at this key chain I have up on my wall that is that precise green. It's kind of like Kermit the Frog green, but like brighter, more saturated. If you don't like it that much, why did you have, you know, a big piece of green paper that color?
Sabrina Ward Harrison: Good question. Because I had a set of origami paper, and that was a reject crappy paper I didn't want to use or see again in my life.
Right.
Trenton Reynolds: And you had so much disdain for it that you never even took the energy to throw it away. It just sat there.
Sabrina Ward Harrison: I didn't want to even touch it.
Yeah.
Trenton Reynolds: That sounds like a 90s rock band, Reject Origami.
Yeah.
Sabrina Ward Harrison: I think there'd be a funny exercise to take those origami, because there's some ugly colors in those things. And just, you know, sometimes there's like the skin color. Like how disgusting is like, in my rejects of origami paper, it's like that color green, the skin color, like... you know, white, white-ass skin color, and then brown and like a really gross wood brown. Just, just poo brown. Ew. What color do you Do you have any colors that just sort of drive you crazy?
Trenton Reynolds: I'm sure there are Nothing is Nothing's popped in mind I don't have any really strong Color hatreds
Nope I guess I don't.
Sabrina Ward Harrison: I don't like orange either.
Trenton Reynolds: You don't like orange?
Nope. Really?
Sabrina Ward Harrison: No, it's Molly's favorite color.
Trenton Reynolds: I mean, are we talking about like traffic cone orange or any orange?
Sabrina Ward Harrison: I just say your standard.
Trenton Reynolds: Your standard red plus yellow orange.
Sabrina Ward Harrison: Yeah, just straight up orange. Like a darker orange, gorgeous. Could be gorgeous, beautiful on a painting sometimes. Nice pop. but just straight, bright, not natural orange.
Trenton Reynolds: So you're not a fan of the unnatural spectrum. Colors. Natural spectrum. I have to say, though, one, and I think you would be sold if I could give you this experience. Okay. And maybe you have had this experience, but when I was in the Philippines and it was –
Trenton Reynolds: I don't know. It was just sublime. That sounds beautiful. Yeah, it was. But it kind of approaches that hated green.
Sabrina Ward Harrison: Hated. Hated. Can we just do that, like the artwork that goes by it, just that color green?
Just a block of it?
Trenton Reynolds: Oh, yeah, absolutely. That is a great idea.
Sabrina Ward Harrison: I just had a fantastic day in... First day, I actually did some big art in the studio, which was just fun and wonderful. And I had a great meeting with Austin Durst, who did the filming for and created Untethered with me. And we are going to collaborate again on the next course. Which is just really cool.
Trenton Reynolds: That's fantastic. Do you have any information about that that you can share or not yet?
Sabrina Ward Harrison: Well, just first off that I'm just, it's not going to be filmed like a, just the way on Tether is, it's cinematic. And it's... it will be somewhat live, but at the same time, like there'll be live elements, but it'll be just, I don't just really beautiful, beautifully filmed and edited and creative and, you know, a little avant-garde. And so I'm just excited to be, it's a, you know, it's a big project to take on. So we. we decided just to go for it. So that's happening. And then I came up with the title. So Untether, there was Untether, and this is Liberate.
Leave your mark.
Trenton Reynolds: Liberate. Liberate. Leave your mark. So you did not have, we talked about that, you didn't have a name for the book course.
Yeah, yep.
Trenton Reynolds: And I had recommended Troy.
Sabrina Ward Harrison: Yeah, I told him in the running class the other day.
Yeah.
Sabrina Ward Harrison: So the course was tentatively going to be called Troy. Working title, working title. Just working title. Don't get weird about that. Okay. Yeah, so I've had this... I was writing, doing line art for some of the line art that's going to go in the course. And I wrote liberate. And I'm like, that's just... I love that. It's an action word. The way untether is action. And liberate feels like, yes. Da! Liberate! And like, leave a mark. Leave your mark. Leave your mark.
So...
Sabrina Ward Harrison: um it's just going forth making it letting it be letting it be it's you know alive and real let it be made so that's exciting for me So the court that I do know that the course will open for registration for be five days, possibly five to seven days, it will be May 1, and then the course will begin May 15. Roughly, yeah, and we'll run through mid July. And it's gonna be really, I'll be really involved with everybody in it so it's going to be. total deep dive and a lot of working closely with me on it the whole way through. So cool. I think it'll be a much smaller group, much more in depth.
Trenton Reynolds: And is there any expectation or aspiration that each person in the course would end up with a complete book?
Sabrina Ward Harrison: Oh, yeah. A book that is for sale on Amazon.
Oh, boom.
Sabrina Ward Harrison: Yeah. Someone can, you know, New Zealand can order it, but they don't have to do it within that. They'll be taken through, but if they want to spread out the length of time they spend on it, they can. But I'll be leading, guiding through the entire course. the entire process and then ideas around how to kind of share it with the world. So I'm really excited about it. Yeah.
Trenton Reynolds: That feels like a course that, that I'm sure people have been dying for.
Yeah. Um,
Sabrina Ward Harrison: So we are going to talk about artists we love, right, today?
Trenton Reynolds: Yes, I did not make this qualifier, and you let me know if it's too much, but I thought we could talk about living contemporary artists rather than older artists. Oh, cool. why don't we, we're going to have a two part episode or two part, two episodes. Uh, this first episode, we are going to talk about a bunch of my favorite artists and then, um, I'll post show notes with links and, uh, images. And then next episode, we'll go through some of your, some of your favorites. How do you, how do you think?
Sabrina Ward Harrison: Love it. I can't wait. I can't wait to hear yours.
Trenton Reynolds: it's a hard thing to say favorites. You know, inevitably somebody is going to ask you who your favorite artist is, right? And I know I'm going to think of somebody tonight who is like my favorite, you know, favorite artist of all time. And I won't have said that. So, so this is right now in this moment, uh, some of our favorite artists and is not an exhaustive list, but is some of the people that stand out. So can I do over, like overview all the names and then we can get the highlights. Okay. So the people that came to mind when I was thinking about my favorite artists, um, are Alfredo Castaneda. It's A-L-F-R-E-D-O Castaneda. Actually, why don't we just plan on putting all these in the I'll put them in the show notes so I don't have to go through and say even say all their names spellings but Alfredo Castaneda, Dana Schutz, Laura Owens, Mark Bradford, Julie Maraitou, Harold Fletcher, Alan McCollum, Anthony Gormley, Gerhard Richter, Neil Roush, David Hockney, Carrie James Marshall. and Reject Origami, which I wrote at the bottom of my list. And they're a great band, man.
I love them so much.
Trenton Reynolds: All right. So Alfredo Castaneda is a – so I'm going to give the preface that some of my information might not be entirely accurate, and I apologize if that is the case – But what I love about Alfredo Castaneda's work, he's a Mexican artist, is it kind of ties in visually to the Mexican muralists. There's this really nice kind of cartoony, illustrative quality, but there's an emotion and kind of melancholy about it that I think is just fantastic. They're all self-portraits, or a lot of them are self-portraits anyway. And he paints himself in these really kind of... I don't know. He does a lot of really visual, clever puns and kind of interactions between illusionistic space and 2D space. Anyway, I think they're kind of quirky and weird, and they're self-portraits, and they're also just beautiful and thoughtful, and I kind of have a soft spot in my heart for... like that Mexican muralist illustration, illustrative style. Dana Schutz is a contemporary artist. I saw her, she was a visiting artist when I was in grad school and really enjoyed her personality. She does similar to Alfredo Castaneda. I kind of put her next to him because, Um, she is kind of, has an element of story and there's a darkness to the stories that she depicts sometimes. Um, and they're kind of cartoony and quirky, um, but also beautifully painted and they're all also very much about color. And she just has a beautiful palette, beautiful sense of, uh, color and color relationships.
Sabrina Ward Harrison: Are these large paintings? Yeah.
Trenton Reynolds: Alfreda Castaneda is small kind of small easel small to middle sized easel painting Dana Schutz she gets really big and then Laura Owens I just appreciate her invention she does a lot of really cool stuff playing around with paint and what paint is and does and You know, you'll walk up and there will be areas of the painting that are super flat. And then she'll have squeezed a tube of oil paint bead out that's just like barely hanging on by an edge to the canvas. You know, so there's this like, I don't know, extremes of materiality and flatness that I that I enjoy. enjoy her work in person. And she kind of relates, in my mind anyway, to Mark Bradford and Julie Moretu in that kind of the physicality of her work. And Mark Bradford is an artist. I've seen quite a bit of his work here in LA. And he does lots and lots and lots of layers of material. And then he'll carve through or kind of excavate through those layers by digging through them with like a knife and then peeling away parts of those layers. And they're big and there's lots of material and the mark making is really aggressive and I love that the history and the buildup of all those different layers of material.
Yeah.
Trenton Reynolds: And they're just really impressive and like physical. When you're in their presence, there's this really strong sense of I don't know, this painting having a life of its own type deal.
Sabrina Ward Harrison: Is it works on wood or canvas?
Trenton Reynolds: He's got a pretty wide range. He does work on panel and canvas and paper and... He's got a lot. But I feel like one of my mentors, a painter who I really respect, talking about Anselm Kiefer one time, he doesn't like Anselm Kiefer because he feels like he uses material and kind of, in an obvious way. Like, of course, people are going to respond to, you know, a two-story tall painting that has a bunch of little bits of, you know, material sticking off the surface. Like, just the enormity of that material is inherently impressive, right? Yeah. And I feel like Mark Bradford has kind of an extreme use of material that is obviously going to have a certain impressive quality just by its sheer size and its obvious difficulty in making it.
Sabrina Ward Harrison: Yeah, I'm looking at it now.
Trenton Reynolds: But I think he does it in a way that's like... he owns it and it's not just like a ploy to get people's attention, but there's a, it's decisive and confident and it doesn't feel gimmicky. Like it feels, you know, that it's not just done as a way to get attention. You know, it's not like a cheap or easy, uh, way to appeal to people. He's taking risks and chances and experimenting and pushing. Anyway, I love his work. Julie Moretu, her paintings are more flat. There's not as much material, but they're just impressive in size and the sheer energy of them are...
Trenton Reynolds: This chaos of line and pattern and energy and there's representation, but there's in the sense of architecture or vanishing point, but then it's just this, you know, chaos of...
Sabrina Ward Harrison: Beautiful texture.
Trenton Reynolds: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, they're beautiful.
Sabrina Ward Harrison: Where did you discover his work, their work?
Trenton Reynolds: Mark Bradford, I think I just was going, looking at work at a gallery or museum and ran into some of his stuff and really responded to it. Julie Moreto, I think she had an Art 21 or was in Vitamin P, the book of contemporary painters. And I really like to work. She also had, I believe, a piece exhibited at LACMA. Then the next group, and you tell me when this is getting... No, fantastic. I mean, this doesn't have to be painters. I'm citing painters because that's just kind of who I have looked at.
Right.
Trenton Reynolds: The next two that I think are extremely interesting and who I like as much as people as I do their work... Like Mark Bradford and Julie Marietta who never, haven't really, don't know much about their personalities or haven't seen too many videos or interviews with them, but their work is phenomenal. Harold Fletcher and Alan McCollum both, I like them as people just as much as I like their work. them as people or their personalities and what their ideas and the way they present themselves and interact with the world are just as important to me as the actual physical objects they create. What's an example of that? Well, like Harold Fletcher, he is a teacher and also an artist. He does social or interactive types of art projects. He has a website, haroldfletcher.com. Okay, so for example, this is one of the projects that he has up on his website. It's called If I Wasn't Me, I Would Be You. And then it's video of people's scars with the stories of how they got them.
Oh, I love that.
Trenton Reynolds: People would send in videos of any scar on their body, and they would just tell the story of how they got them. And then he'd publish his video with all these people telling the stories of their scars. I think if I'm remembering right, there was another one where it was like mole constellation, where people would connect the dots of their moles on their skin.
Sabrina Ward Harrison: Oh, I love that too.
Trenton Reynolds: To make constellations and then send in pictures. And he'd make, you know, publish picture books. And there are video assignments and photographic and written and all sorts of different things. He also did a book in collaboration with Miranda July.
Sabrina Ward Harrison: I was just thinking of her for some reason just as you were talking about this. Interesting. Yeah. Yeah.
Trenton Reynolds: Yeah, I believe they did a book together called, I think it's called Learning to Love You More.
Sabrina Ward Harrison: Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes. I love that.
Trenton Reynolds: Yeah, so he was part of that project. Well worth taking a look at. And it's just as much about these really awesome ideas that he has, ways of... It's kind of like your prompts, you know, giving way, framing a new way of looking at things in a way that encourages people to share and connect and feel more like a part of a group, you know, like a part of something.
Sabrina Ward Harrison: Yeah, the human experience.
Trenton Reynolds: Human experience. And then Alan McCollum, I met him, he was a visiting artist when I was in grad school and I had a studio visit with him and just immensely enjoyed our conversation. One thing that I really like about his work, he does similar types of projects to what Harold Fletcher does. He does like collaborative stuff with projects with different communities and making paintings and collaborative paintings and stuff. But he also does these sculptures where he comes up with ways of mass producing things, but mass producing things that are each unique. So there's this interesting tension between mass production and mechanized production. But he is able to do it in a way that results in each of the individual mass produced objects having a slight unique shape or character or something. So one of them are the same. That's a really gross oversimplification, but I think that whole concept is a very, very interesting one, and one that he's pursued in a lot of different ways throughout his career. All right. Anthony Gormley, sculptor, does a lot of really cool... The beginning of his career was a lot of sculpture of his own body. And he just have these static casts of his own body in different environments. And it's kind of hard to explain without seeing examples of it. But it's just like a cast iron black guy standing. Yeah. and he'd put them in the ocean. So when the surf went down, these black figures would slowly emerge out of the ocean. Wow. And he's done others where he has a mold of his body, but then he fills the mold with these pieces of stainless steel rod. So it looks like this frantic line, but when seen all together, you can see the kind of shadow of his body. Anyway, a lot of really cool things.
Trenton Reynolds: And Gerhard Richter, love that he has two parallel bodies of work, one completely abstract, one completely like over the top, photorealistic. And I love how those throughout his career, those two bodies of work have kind of played off each other. That's an idea that has influenced my own thoughts about creativity and how to...
Sabrina Ward Harrison: make work. Do you like one more than the other? One set more than the other?
Trenton Reynolds: I don't. I love them both. And I love very much when the two are more integrated. Like when you see evidences of his abstract kind of processes coming into play when he does his realistic paintings. So there's a series that he did of women breastfeeding And they're beautiful paintings, but then he also has kind of abstract or added, like has scraped the wet paint in the same way that he would scrape his abstract work. So you get these kind of these abstract marks. And the way that abstract texture and mark making integrates with a photographic image is just amazing. I just think it's beautiful.
Yeah.
Trenton Reynolds: Yeah. Are you seeing those paintings?
Sabrina Ward Harrison: No, not, but I'm, I know what you're talking about in my head. Yeah. Yeah.
Trenton Reynolds: And two more, one Neo Rausch, German artist, like Gerhard Richter.
Yeah.
Trenton Reynolds: Love me some German artists. Yes. I love how dramatic they are, melodramatic and over the top and dark and weird, quirky. A lot of German art kind of has a flavor to it that I really like. and he is no exception. He's figurative, but he has a lot of really surrealistic types of landscapes and combinations of different visual styles and flat and illusionistic space and all sorts of stuff. And the last person that I'll mention here is Kerry James Marshall, who is a Chicago artist. That was getting some retrospectives and stuff when I was in grad school. So he was, his artwork was around a lot when I was in Chicago. Figurative painter and just very technically adept, but also there's a mood there. that I really respond to. And some of them are kind of illustrative, like graphic, but then he combines this illustrative style with some more kind of painterly abstract types of mark making. Yeah. Anyway, I really like narrative painting. Yeah. And I guess that's kind of where Dana Schutz and Alfreda Castaneda come into is like, I love the story. I love the fantastical worlds. I love the, it's like, you know, that book that we talked about long ago, the Invisible Cities, you know, there's that.
Sabrina Ward Harrison: Yes. There's a kind of.
Yeah. Yeah.
Trenton Reynolds: Right. Yeah. A kind of truth that is revealed through that fiction, you know, that can only we can only get to certain kinds of truth and communicate it and embody it or put it in our artwork through through fictional types of representation.
Sabrina Ward Harrison: very cool. I can't wait to see the show notes so I can go through and, and explore some of these guys and gals. Great job.
Trenton Reynolds: I'm looking forward to hearing who your favorites are next week. Yeah,
yeah.
Sabrina Ward Harrison: and thank you all for the great feedback the last couple episodes about great and limited shout out to Susie who shared a nice post I sent you a message on Instagram about that
Trenton Reynolds: is she the one that did the journal yeah the book with the
Sabrina Ward Harrison: the nesting journals yeah beautiful awesome yeah
totally
Sabrina Ward Harrison: and you can find both of us on Instagram I'm at Sabrina Ward Harrison and Trent is Trent Reynolds Art and show notes can be found at roominthetrees.com and we'd love you to be up patron and support us and that's patreon.com forward slash room and more to come please leave us a review on iTunes we'll give you a shout out and rate us and share with your friends it's been awesome and we are soon going to be looking for sponsors and getting this uh getting this rolling big so
Trenton Reynolds: i just don't know if you have any interest in in a sponsorship this has been sabrina
that has been trent
Sabrina Ward Harrison: together we have been room in the trees