May Artist of the Month: Michael Voss

Michael Voss’s oil paintings on linen have the look and feel of a bound book. In fact, he stores them in shelves when they’re not on view, emphasizing their smallness. Perhaps owing to their size, the paintings have a haptic quality that makes the eye scan the surface in a tactile way. In the studio, he shows me three canvases at a time, carefully placing them on the wall. He’s aware of the white space around them.  They require a few feet of wall space, despite their size.

His conversation, like his paintings, is sparse and quiet. On canvas, the viewer can see how much time passes, how decisive the marks feel. One color can yield several textures, like a word or name changing with varying inflections. It’s difficult to speak about the paintings individually, but this is not to say they’re not individual works. Each painting alludes to the one made before or in conjunction with another canvas. To put it another way, process is apparent. Decisions are clear but do not give away the painting all together in one glance.

Michael Voss, CHOQUE, 2010

Aldrin Valdez [BRIC]: Tell me about these paintings and how you go about making them.

Michael Voss: I try to go as intuitively about it as I can. They certainly reflect – because they are objects, they don’t make a secret of it – so they reflect the frame, the box that the painting basically is, with one side painted. And that’s an architectural idea to begin with. It’s hanging on the wall, too, which is a big part of the work. But then, I think the way I approach it has intuitively more to do with landscape. It’s very quiet. It has some light quality. And it’s surprising sometimes because there’s not so much paint there. I actually pay a lot of attention to it. When I was young I did a lot of landscapes. That’s how I actually started painting.

AV: You went to the Academy of Fine Art.

MV: In Munich, yes.

AV: And then you went to Hunter College for graduate school. How was that experience? How have your paintings changed from that time period?

MV: I think I’m a lot more confident about it. I think when I started doing this kind of work—especially when I came to New York, to Hunter—I certainly felt I had to apologize for it. I had to invent a lot of good reasons why I was doing this; I had to justify myself. Now I’m at a point where I actually think I’m quite happy with what I’m doing. The funny thing is, the friends from Hunter I still meet with, they know what problems I had at that school. They came around in some ways. They like my paintings now. But I’ve always been doing this. I feel now only freer than before, and that’s why I can allow myself to do things that might be confusing, like putting these paintings in a bookstore. You’re being vulnerable when you do that. That’s a fun thing to do.

AV: The scale of these paintings is larger than their size. Looking at them, I can see they need a lot of white space.

MV: Good that you point that out. I definitely think, that they expand outwards. They’re not so much paintings, you look into, but paintings that reach out and activate the surrounding space.

AV:   A lot of the mark-making is really important. The difference between the flat of that duller Indian red and that deeper darker red—that kind of interaction between texture and tone creates so much space.

MV: That’s true, but it’s also very clear, how it’s done.  One key thing that I’m interested in is some form of simplicity, but it’s more of an idea that simplicity is not something that you ever solve. It’s not something you solve once and then you have it. Simplicity is something that you approach, that’s fleeting, that moves. I’m very drawn to the moment when actually something simple starts to become complicated. It goes very quickly and I think that’s kind of a sexy point. Where does this start? It’s a boundary thing. Then things like this become very important. A line like this one is very different from any other line in this painting; it’s nearly another world. It’s interesting. Where simplicity dissolves into complexity—what is that boundary? That always interests me.

Michael Voss, Fenelus, 2010

AV: I think that quality is really present in the found-object drawings, in the decision to keep the marks that were already there, and to let them come through under or on the side of your own marks. I think it comes down to a decision. You had said in your statement that you don’t have a strategy. Could you talk more about that?

MV: I guess, I mean, I start from scratch. Sometimes I have a specific idea. It could come from something that I’ve seen or from a memory. Just a shape that I’m interested in; how to see that on the canvas. I put that down, and basically in the rare occasions the painting is done, that’s it. But mostly, I start like that and then I start reacting to what I did, it’s as if they’re the plywood drawings, in that sense.

I find an object. This object is a painting I’ve been working on before. I put those paintings away then I start to think differently about the work. I work pretty slowly on them. In the best case, they just develop by themselves. It’s more about reacting to what’s already there and playing around with that, and trying to go as far away from the initial idea as possible. Very often what happens is the initial idea I just find it too forced. You can just see in the painting that you intended to do that and that’s not an interesting painting.

You have to start somewhere. It is sometimes arbitrary. But I do know that I have to start with something that interests me; otherwise I can’t just put a mark on the painting and see what happens. It never works. I need to have an appetite for something and go from there, and develop.

AV: And you work in series, moving from one thing to another.

MV: On a good day, I really like to work on at least three canvases, at least do something on three canvases. The first I start. The second one I get a bite into it. The third one, if I’m lucky, I’m loose enough to actually have something happen. That is something, too, that I developed later on. When I was studying I was very much concentrated on one painting. Weeks in one painting until it was done. It’s a more painful way of working.

AV: In his essay “Provisional Painting,” the critic Raphael Rubinstein questions why some painters would intentionally make a painting that looks unfinished. I can see how some of your compositions have that quality of not being entirely resolved. I’m not saying they’re unfinished, but I can see why some viewers might have that impression. They’re decisively simple. This ties in with what you said about moving from one painting to another and working on several at once. How do you decide when they’re finished?

MV: In the end, the only real thing I have is time. That means if a week or month later I’m still interested; if it holds up, it’s  finished. If not, I have to either work more on it or unstretch it and start all over. There are paintings that I finished and I left happily the studio and then a week later I couldn’t live with it because I saw all the weakness in there, you know? [Laughter] And all the obviousness of that.

Michael Voss, Plywood Drawings, 2010

AV: I think for some painters it’s almost like you have to fool yourself in order to work. There are clichés that you have to work out of. The plywood drawings that you have—how do they feel when you’re working with them? You mentioned that they’re more free.

MV: I don’t think they’re more free as a result, butwhen I started making them, it freed me up, with the paintings. What I mean is, they have a few things going for them from the start. They’re found objects; there’s already a world there that you can react to, you don’t have to create that. In that sense, they’re a lot easier to do. But the most important thing is that I didn’t take them as serious. I was never afraid to make a mistake with them. There are millions of pieces of wood in the world that I can find and work on. That is maybe the main thing that I took from them and brought to the painting. Just don’t have fear of messing up. That’s why I think it’s good to work on three paintings a day. You don’t put all your investment in one piece.

I like to work quite a bit but in some ways I’m not disciplined too, which means, when I paint I really want to have the pleasure of painting. I want to see what happens. That’s the main reason I get up and come here to work. I want to just see what happens. I don’t think I would have the discipline to produce a painting knowing exactly how it would be. I couldn’t work like that.

AV: It wouldn’t be as fun [laughter]. Could you talk about the size of these paintings?

MV: I really like the format for a lot of reasons. Their compact size is not intimidating. But I think, they are not too intimate either, because the paintings aren’t. They are all short verticals, about the same size, but each an individual. I think, if I had decided in forehand, “I’ll make a body of work, and they’ll all be, let’s say, 12 by 14 inches”, that would have been too arbitrary. So now I decide each time and again for a format in about that size.

Also: when I show them in small groups in a row: your eye doesn’t glide over them, as if following a rail. That’s a more practical thing.

AV: They almost feel like alphabets, with the way you’re constructing, the scope of the small square.

MV: I had paintings where I thought of some sort of alphabet. I sometimes think of them, too, as sort of little biotopes, an environment. There’s something living in them, something working. When I was still at Hunter, this person said to me, “Oh this painting is doing this, this painting is doing that.” In the beginning I was devastated. I thought, oh my god I’m all over the place. But then much later on, I thought, wait a minute that’s exactly what I’m doing. I’m trying to make a painting every time, not working on variations of something.

AV: Was it difficult to come to that realization?

MV: Yes, even if it seemed so natural to operate like that. For me it felt, for the longest time, as if I just didn’t know what I was doing. And that was just not true [laughter].

AV: There’s a certain kind of feeling in them. Some have a specific type of light. Like past 5 p.m., really crisp edges between color.

MV: That’s a very silly color with the blue and yellow. They’re nearly complementary colors. They’re probably the closest to any painting I’m going to show you, where it looks like the paint was taken right out of the tube. Silly, in that sense.

AV: How do you come to the color-scheme for each painting?

MV: Colors are really important for me. I think if you’re a painter, you have to get your own color vocabulary. You have to develop it. I think my initial idea of how to approach that was to think, that we as humans not really very focused on color. I think for just plain survival, it’s not the most important thing. Movement is much more important, if you see a predator approaching. That’s why we don’t have really good color-memory, too. So what is happening when you work in your studio and you look at the color you have in your tube or your palette, you cannot think of anything else. You cannot imagine any other color.

My initial thought, then, was what kind of color do I have in my head if I don’t look at a color? And something is there; it’s not gray. That question helped me develop colors that I actually wanted to function in a certain way in the painting. It’s not so much orange or red, it’s more like what do I want this orange or red to be doing—what do I want it to stand for. Sometimes, I like it to have the quality of an object—sometimes in a more aggressive way, sometimes in a more forgotten way. Or maybe sometimes I want it to have a fleeting experience of something that happened before. It could be more of a shadow or an after-image of something that you looked at that was really bright. When I start mixing paint, before I open any tube, I think of what I want the color to do. I try to imagine what it should look like. But that’s how I approach it. I think it’s a very personal thing. I have to start with some appetite.

AV: Who are some of the painters you look to or feel you’re in dialog with?

MV:  An important painter for me is Morandi. There are some paintings by Palermo that I really like. I was told at Hunter College that it’s a total mistake to like those painters together. [laughter]

Of course, I heard about the Ab-Ex painters. Clifford Still used to be important to me. Guston.

I like Terry Winters. I think he allows himself to go through phases where he really tries things out and it doesn’t always work out. And I think it’s interesting. He moves on and again and again comes to something that’s really strong. He’s quite an amazing painter, actually.

The funny thing is most of the friends I have are sculptors. I don’t have too many painter friends. I don’t know why that is. Donald Judd was very important to me.

AV: You mentioned Morandi. There’s definitely that quietness in his work, an insistence to stay with very simple elements—rectangle or a square. And here in your work, I’m seeing how every decision is very important. They may come across as quiet, but they’re not passive.

MV: I hope not. Someone said they’re very slow.

AV: Do they mean in the looking or could they feel remnants of your process—that it’s a slow process?

MV:  It’s a slow process but I think, too, they come to you slowly. I’ve had this experience that very often the paintings actually grow on people. They have a stronger reaction when they come for a second time, or see them again. Slow, in that sense. It’s not in your face. I think it’s just a mentality thing. It’s not that I chose that.

AV: Do you see any relations between your work and Bonnard’s?

MV: In some ways, I kind of identify a little bit with Bonnard’s troubles in the sense that he was treated for a very long time as some sort of afterthought of Impressionism and not a very important artist. But actually, if you look at his paintings, they’re quite radical. It took people a long time to get around and actually look at them. And I understand that, because his subject matter “is so uninteresting” in some ways. It’s sort of just family life.

AV: But you get lost in them.

MV:  Yes, it’s incredible how he paints. He’s quite radical. He’s one of my favorites.

AV: I definitely sense a similar sensitivity to light in your work. And space—what’s receding, what’s coming forward.

MV: That’s nice to hear [laughter]. I wish for the paint not to be totally flat. That’s why I like the surface to be matt. It’s more vulnerable. For example, I’ve heard people say that glossiness is sexy. But I think glossiness is more pornographic. Skin which is translucent and mat is very sensual, very sexy.

AV: Tell me about your titles.

MV: A lot of them don’t have titles. I’ve started to give them names; it doesn’t always work. It’s kind of funny. The first painting I gave a name to is Jacqueline. That was the first one. I started collecting names that I read or would find somewhere. It’s kind of weird to find these names in public places. For example, Jacqueline was the name of the subway station manager at 14th Street and 7th Ave. They used to put the superintendents’ names in public; they don’t do that anymore.

So, I kept a little notebook where I would just collect these names that I came across everywhere. It’s a beautiful thing because a name is so personal and you don’t know that person and you start to wonder who that is. I thought in some ways, that’s a what I want to do with the paintings. That’s actually what about I like abstract paintings. It’s the same thing. I want to do something that’s very personal and very specific, in that moment, on that one canvas. But it’s open to everyone to see something else in it. I just give it a personal name.

Michael Voss, Jacqueline, 2010

AV: Does the name come after the painting?

MV: Yes, when the painting’s done, I go through my notebook, just intuitively. For me it’s very clear that this could not be Jacqueline. It’s a tongue-in-cheek thing; you cannot force it. There are paintings that I haven’t found a name for, but some are very obvious. It makes me very happy to give them a name.

AV: So naming is a way for language to seep into the work?

MV: Right.

AV: I’m wondering what makes this a Jacqueline for me. And I probably couldn’t tell you [laughter].

MV: Well I can’t tell you either. When it seems clear to me, then I give them that name.

AV: They have to earn it!

MV: Exactly.

AV: What has it been like working as an artist and being in a community of artists in Brooklyn?

MV:  Maybe when you first go to art school or before you go to art school, you’re sort of an outsider. When you come here you have to accept you’re just one of a million people doing this. That might be humbling in the first moment, but then on the other side, it might be very nice. It’s actually great that there are so many people that share a common interest, especially if it’s all very different things that we do.

Okay, sometimes there’s just too many people like us around, and it seems unreal. But we forget about it when we’re on the mainland, when there’s actually a few people to talk to. I think, too, that for the most part I’ve had good experiences with artists. It’s not always simple. Everyone does his own thing but there’s a big understanding that we’re part of something. I think that’s a pretty good thing. You meet a lot of generosity from people. They’ll donate paintings for a good cause.

Or come to your studio and talk about your work.