The National Wet Paint Exhibition is an outlook and an overview of emerging contemporary artists across the United States currently working in the medium of painting. Wet Paint refers to the idea that this is a fresh group of artists. They are MFA (Masters of Fine Arts) candidates and recent MFA recipients working primarily in the medium of painting.

2010 marks the first decade of the 21st Century. Under the watchful eye of a technology driven society, online social networking and cyber interaction communities, emerging artists have been evolving and redefining one of the oldest mediums of art, painting. Wet Paint poses the following questions: How is the next generation of artists redefining one of the oldest art mediums? How are new technologies impacting their painting materials, methods, techniques, processes and ideas? How are graduate programs in America reshaping painting? What does painting mean to a new generation? Wet Paint highlights and gives a forum to a new generation of artists working from traditional to experimental painting media.

The National Wet Paint Exhibition consists of 52 paintings by artists selected from a national call which resulted in 255 submissions. The exhibition takes place in the 6000 sq/ft main gallery of the Zhou B Art Center in Chicago’s Bridgeport neighborhood. The Zhou B Art Center is a private, non-government funded art center designed to facilitate the exchange of contemporary art between Chicago and the international art community. The 87,000 square feet art center offers innumerable possibilities for exploring the arts in a charismatic location and collectively form an extravagant art center fusing culture and creativity. — Sergio Gomez, MFA

SELECTED ARTISTS

Jon Barwick, MFA, The University of Georgia

Jolene Beckman, State University of New York, University at Buffalo

Colleen Beyer, Georgia Southern Univeristy

Blaine Bradford, Northern Illinois University

Erica Buss, University of Michigan

Victoria H. Chang, MFA, Pratt Institute, NY

Nannette Cherry, University of Central Florida

Woojin Choi, Pratt Institute, NY

Tony Conrad, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee

Kim Deakins, University of Georgia, The Lamar Dodd School of Art

Emile Ferris, The School of the Art Institute of Chicago

Lisa Ficarelli-Halpern, New Jersey City University

Maureen Forman, MFA, Indiana University, Bloomington

Francine Fox, MFA, University of Delaware

Laura Grossett, Colorado State University

Jaime Gustavson, MFA, Vermont College of Fine Arts

Garry Holstein, University of Arkansas

Michael Hubbard, Washington State University

Andrea Jensen, University of Arizona, Tucson

Jason John, MFA, Indiana University of Pennsylvania

Jake Johnson, Missouri University

Maria Jonsson, University of Illinois at Chicago

Michael Kalmbach, MFA, University of Delaware

Saydi Indianos Kaufman, Montclair State University, New Jersey

Geoffrey Krawczyk, SUNY - University of Buffalo

Matthew Lahm, New Jersey City University

Megan Leong, MFA, Kendall College of Art and Design, MI

Suqin (Jackie) Lin, University of Missouri - Columbia

C. Matthew Luther, The University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee

Michael McCaffrey, MFA, Indiana University Bloomington

Kyle McKenzie, MFA, University of Arkansas

Susan Mulder, MFA, Kendall College of Art and Design, MI

Nicole Northway, MFA, University of Illinois at Chicago

Benedict Oddi, Indiana University of Pennsylvania

Injung Oh, MFA, The School of the Art Institute of Chicago

J. Thomas Pallas, MFA, University of Chicago

Katherine Perryman, Southern Illinois University Edwardsville

Rebecca Potts, MFA, Washington University in St. Louis

Shawn Saumell, New Mexico State University

Leah Schreiber, University of Wisconsin- Milwaukee

Elise Schweitzer, Indiana University Bloomington

Ryan Shultz, MFA, Northwestern University, Chicago

Garric Simonsen, Washington State University

Ernesto A. Trujillo, University of Arizona, CFA

Chris Ulrich, Cranbrook Academy of Art, Michigan

Ben Utigard, MFA, Memphis College of Art

Anthony Vega, MFA, University of Delaware

Amanda Voltz, Northern Illinois University

Robin Walker, Cranbrook Academy of Art, Michigan

Amanda Wallace, Goddard College, Vermont

Michael Wartgow, Southern Illinois University-Edwardsville

Sanders Watson, MFA, Queens College, NY

PAINTING STATEMENTS

"At some point, character and practice become indistinguishable from each other. Mine is struggle, mine is painting. I knowingly claw at it, this struggle, this painting — my boulder. The daydreams of escape and free will grow fuller, less random, more mediated with the course of things. My old science and I search for meaning through our struggle. We construct our own."

Benedict Oddi

"I'm interested in the space where sketch design and industrial design become drawing and painting, ideas realized on paper."

Maria Jonsson

"Kim Deakins’ drawings employ rituals, costume, myth, and consumer products as viable readymades to be utilized in the assembly of images. Her results play witness to a variety of cultural/historical elements stripped bare of disunion, co-existing in the same picture with an uncanny sense of harmony. The artist herself has often spoken of working from the subconscious, of indulging sudden urges without the interruption of an intellectual justification. If so, Deakins’ pictures become documents of a visual acculturation of the subconscious, enabled not only by an immediacy of information and imagery, but by a willingness to permit these Dada-esque whims to become valid and celebratory visual occasions. Celebratory is a key word in Deakins’ drawings, as her glittering cast of characters engage in behaviors divorced from any specific setting. They dance, screw, posture themselves, launch credit cards and diamonds from their butts. Their bizarre empathy posits the questions: where is our culture located, where are we going, where have we been? They’re also wonderful to look at and funny as hell. She’s really good." -– Brian Hitselberger, artist

Kim Deakins

"I utilize repetition, variation, and improvisation as working devices that generate product and ideas. The same dumb hand that Duchamp admired in Seurat has become the generative force behind my work. My application of the acrylic dot has evolved from a Yayoi Kusama-like net to its current stacked form. These dot strands take on the appearance of a woven tail, wave, aura, or explosion as they decorate poured forms. In other instances, the dot strands are responsible for the poured form as they direct the fluid acrylic that passes through them. All of these effects take place on a transparent film called Dura-Lar clear. Once painted, this film is wrapped over a fabric background creating a highly reflective surface that is similar to the resin coated works of Fred Tomaselli. Like Tomaselli and Kusama, I want the works to function as a transportive vehicle. The act of painting, and the experience of confronting the end product, transports me to a state where I can reflect on the series of contingencies that have brought me to this point in history.

I have only been able to access the sublime through chemicals. Of these experiences, the most productive were in the company of like minded people, where a love of irony navigated our humors through a shared experience that was often dangerous. My practice owes its curiosity to this time in my life. This irony now bridges my private practice with a larger community that can gather around the works and draw meaning from my choice of materials. Due to its immediacy, acrylic paint becomes the ultimate medium for experimentation —a certain effect survives in the studio when it begins todo something. By applying paint on the inside of the wrapped plastic, a super flat saturated surface is created. On this surface, I find parallels to the flat screen and vehicular clear coat finishes, but of course, all this breaks down when my atmospheric conditions, super novas, and Presidential auras give way to a ripple in the Dura-Lar clear, and the abyss reveals itself as elementary craft felt."

Michael Kalmbach

"Painting is the application and manipulation of a liquid medium to create an aesthetically and mentally engaging image. It is an extension of the artist's creative energy."
Laura Grossett

"As a painter I've always felt that there is sympathy between a paintbrush loaded with black ink and my favored animal - the crow. It is common for the natural world to suggest a working method to me - such as in the case of “Giant's Bridge,” which was inspired by watching a lone crow in a tree on Columbus Drive. It occurred to me at that moment to initiate the first stage of a painting by coming behind my classmates and pressing paper down onto the recently inked classroom palates, thereby pulling up the remains of the waste ink. [I recalled how the crows in my city had spied a harried mother leave her groceries in the parkway and how they’d alighted en masse on a loaf of Wonder Bread, tag-teamed the bread and how they then sat in the trees triumphantly, white slices hanging from their beaks.]

So the first phase of my painting is informed by recycling or scavenging. I then employ my version of Asian brush techniques and spontaneously intuit images within the odd roadmap I’ve appropriated. An economy of strokes must be maintained in order to relate the essence of the moment that I discover.

My mantra is that there are no mistakes – only happy accidents. I allow the loaded brush its unique voice as it contacts the paper. As in life - I accept what happens and I work with it. The final stage of the painting involves the application of digital coloring. During this phase I entertain many possibilities; mutations of color provide the flavoring within the boundaries of the black line.

I truly believe that this sort of self-revelatory working method could be a valuable tool were it taught to more people. It requires that a painter trust his/her inner being and rest in the knowledge that via the painted stroke, a message will be made manifest.

Despite this process having aspects of chance and mystery inherent to it, the images that I find always offer to me an oddly appropriate epiphany."

Emile Ferris

"Within a hyper-technological age, that is oftentimes exempt of emotion and spirit, the relevance of paint as a medium of expression is timely in that it allows the artist to articulate ideas with physical intimacy."

Blaine Bradford

"The figures are nude and strike natural poses; their facial expressions and eyes convey engagement. The bodily forms are simplified in their presentation with the distinct absence of sexual elements: breasts, defined musculature, and sexual organs.

Liveliness is depicted not through the vibrant use of colors and detailed skin texture, but rather through the precision of the body line. Furthermore, the sexually-effaced bodies suggest child-like innocence and symbolize purity or holiness. White is the dominant color scheme and is utilized to create the sense of light emitting from the body, which can be interpreted in a spiritual context; like angels.

These various elements focus the attention on the figures' faces, physical pose, and bring the details of the hands and feet, accomplished through fine brushstrokes, into subtle relief. The overall atmosphere is very static, but one or two controlled color palates create a strong energy."

Woojin Choi

"I use the lie inherent in representational painting to discuss ways in which we construct our visual realities. The world does appear in complex organisms of light and shadow, and when these are particularly uncanny in their simplicity or apparent orderliness I become conspicuously aware of the material world, of which I am a part."

Kyle McKenzie

"Paint has the ability to reflect the mood and emotions of the painter. Some days, scraping and drawing back into the paint is appropriate, while other days the paint is applied delicately. My everyday thoughts and emotions are embedded into each painting. It is my own visual journal."
Colleen Beyer

"For me painting is about playing, storytelling, finding adventure. I tell stories from my own experiences and memories, but I steal those of other people too. I sometimes use photographs from the past, present and any time or place that is handy for my purposes. Then, I smash elements from my mind and photographs from this world together on the canvas like a particle accelerator. I hobble images together on my canvas like a mad scientist who is searching for a new experience and/or a new memory, a new world. From the ashes of the old rises the fake, invented, concocted, Frankenstein memory. Chaos and confusion run amok in my laboratory. Earthmovers are forced to share the same canvas with a doctor and patient. Summer and winter collide, completely ignoring and dismissing fall. New worlds are born from the ashes of old; myth and memory combine to create a new reality, a new playground, a new story full of adventure and risk."
Michael McCaffrey

"Art, to me, involves not just one thought, but numerous thoughts marrying to form one finished piece. To be aware of what is occurring in my community as well as on a global level, is a concern that I internalize within me. In turn, my art is created with the feelings I carry within. Making my work allows me a forum through which I can process and communicate these feelings. I want the people viewing my art to feel what I feel, to understand what I am attempting to convey through my work.

I find a lot of my inspiration comes from merely walking through my neighborhood
looking at the trash and really seeing the world around me. I am passionate about the issue of how our planet is being abused. My passion for nature has made me curious about what causes pollution and motivated me to research issues such as religion, greenhouse effect, water pollution. ozone depletion, landfills, and air pollution.

I have learned man is the culprit of the earth’s environmental damage, and nature only contributes a small portion to pollution which destroys the ozone layer, causes dead zones in our waters, and ways to reverse pollution. My studies have inspired me to use recycled materials to create sculptural mixed media paintings. I chose these media, because I felt they were the right ones to communicate my feelings about pollution.

I am using what might otherwise be considered litter to make pieces that raise
awareness about the effects of pollution. When I make art, I am trying to communicate the emotions I have toward pollution to my audience, and I hope they walk away with a sense of awareness about the negative attributes of pollution."
Amanda Wallace

"It is terrible to be a painter.

You are called upon to expand the boundaries of your craft while carrying the burden of thousands of years of precedent. Somehow, you must find a way to adequately put your fears and anxieties, your hopes and aspirations into a medium that everyone is intimately familiar with. These viewers expect to see painting; you must find a way to make paintings that they don’t expect. In the end, painting is an obligation to challenge your audience. The paint you put on the surface is you: your flesh, your blood, your being. You must disturb the status quo of the painting medium itself and the society you inhabit. For this reason, painters are not made; they are born. We carve through this wasteland not because we want to but because we have to. Some envy our task as if it were easy or a sort of play. Yet there are very few people who would choose to live their life with their conscience and their guts splayed across a canvas for all to see. Even fewer still would do so for neither financial security nor acclaim from peers but instead out of pure conviction that what they are doing somehow matters. To be a painter is to understand the contradiction of doing something that is both a wondrous act of creation and a draining ritual of loss. If we were doing anything else, many would call us mad.

It is terrible to be a painter but it is the only thing I know is truly me."

Geoffrey Krawczyk

"By utilizing reference photographs of myself in staged gestures such as offering a chocolate, or holding a parasol, I question benign actions that on a greater level affirm my role in society. My body is depicted from a low angle, in large scale and with extreme foreshortening to create a looming, dominant presence. This perspective examines ways in which I am responsible for oppressing others without even realizing it. By using my own image I have consciously stepped away from representing others in my work, in order to challenge my method of image choosing and to present myself, not others, to the scrutiny of the audience.

I have also relinquished the refined, smooth surface of life-like colors, to employ a contrasting color palette that utilizes highly saturated, contrasting color schemes. My work also utilizes gestural mark-making, which releases some control over the paint’s movement on the canvas, with thicker, more visible brushstrokes and drips. Working in this manner forces me to look more closely at the façade of perfection I often hide behind, exposing in paint that which is rarely, if ever, exposed at all."

Jolene Beckman

"For me, paint is the most fluid and emotional medium with which to work. The meshing of one color of liquid into another. I also draw, sketch, play music, collage, play with film and none of these mediums offer the seductive allure like paint.

This particular painting comes from a body of work where the process of creating the still life was just as attractive as painting the still life. Finding the little dead, feathery carcass on the ground is a special kind of moment. The bird is finally still and available for observation. Like that of a taxidermic bird, I intended to look at the found specimen as a work of its own. The painted still life becomes a representational image of that stuffed specimen and removes the subject from the viewer twice in the process of creation. I find that interesting because the process has to do with observation and analysis like science just as much as art."

Jaime Gustavson

"My paintings behave like sculptural surfaces that elevate the characteristics of common materials, transforming what is widely considered unusable or marginal into the sublime. These “paintings” turned “objects” undergo a tumultuous and fragmented journey, revealing and concealing their battle scars through every step. Each move is both composed and accidental, representing the inevitable pitfalls one endures during periods of self-certainty and self-doubt.
The image, as it pertains to the history of painting, has undergone advents of photography and digital technology, further complicating the medium’s presence in contemporary society. I react by making work that is quietly visceral and vulnerable, allowing the viewer to contemplate our relationship with the magnificence of the real".

Katherine Perryman

"I have always been transfixed by the way things and environments are revealed through illumination. Some of my earliest memories are of the shadows cast on the ceiling as I lay in bed. I remember being so fascinated by shadows, by how I could see them but not touch them and how color was never constant. As light changed, color changed with it. When I started drawing and eventually painting, I was, from the beginning, aware of light and how it moves through space and as a result, I became obsessed with recreating it. As a very hyper-kinetic child, I found that drawing and painting were things that quieted my mind and body. Though I express myself regularly in other mediums like music and poetry, there is something about this medium that is very specific in terms of my relationship with it.

For me, painting has been like prayer, silent and meditative prayer. It brings me into the most profound peace I have ever known and that is the essential reason for my ongoing fascination with it as an artistic endeavor. I enter a state of sublime emptiness that leaves me with nothing to say, exhausted and satisfied. I can totally lose myself while I work because when I paint, there is nothing but the painting. I think that it’s due to how non-verbal painting is in terms of process. There is no rational intermediary between the work and me because I believe my art is an extension of myself. For this, the manual aspect of painting appeals to my temperament and sensibilities. Since a painting is simultaneously an image and an object to me, I can physically experience how the image is an extension of mind and the paint an extension of body. In hindsight, this could shed light on why body and flesh are my subjects. I love the way light itself becomes sensual when it bathes the body; it is a type of self-portraiture."

Matthew Lahm

"A rubbery mass is suspended in viscous fluid framed not by wood or glass, but by bone.

An oval structure that is relatively small in size is dedicated to preserving the energy held and transferred throughout this mass.
Tragedy, memory, excitement, horror, humor and first loves float freely as a butterfly in warm sunlight.

Images of black and white half tones, grey music notes, and the smell of skin float through like electricity. Moments of near lucidity come to reason and leave only to stay contained in a bone frame. A fragile containment of memory.

My work is influenced by the unconscious visualization of memory, cinema, television, and photography. Traumatic memory and images stored in the brain can trigger automatic responses that are foreign. I believe this response is an important step in understanding basic human interaction in the physical world.
I have developed a psychological landscape in the practice of my painting I refer to as a “mentalscape”. Landscape as a specific term is used to describe a work of art that depicts a natural geological structure or a scene of human interaction in nature. My “metalscapes” are of a human mind that is profoundly influenced by the visual world through mass media.
The imagery of the physical world collected in my mind feeds my subconscious in dreams. My illusions in turn feed my interaction with the physical world as I challenge the interpretation of dreams through art and language. It is the geography of the mind, memory, and how culture may or may not be influenced by media, memory, and the unconscious that informs my artwork."

C. Matthew Luther

"Mr. and Mrs. Green Card is part of my newest series ‘Meet in the Middle?’, which are works that depict possible conflicts between international marriage, specifically those between Asian and American. These kind of cross-cultural couples obviously face more conflicts than couples from the same countries/cultures, due to, for example, culture, language and moral consciousness, etc. Furthermore, some of the conflicts in this kind of marital relationship go beyond the obvious. For instance, ‘mail-order brides’, who may be trying to have a better life via marriage, can add another layer of complication to an international marriage.

Mr. and Mrs. Green Card is inspired by some real stories from news report. In order to create such a disturbing and sense, I apply dark blue as the main tone of the painting. While the shining light green projecting from the Green Card, which contrasts with the dark tone, reveals that the Green Card is the only connection between this couple. The manipulation of textured surface also implicates their defective marital relationship. Finally, the life-size of the figures forces the viewers to experience the situations in the paintings."

Suqin (Jackie) Lin

"The contemporary practice of painting has gone the way of philosophy and its use is now largely limited to conceptual matters and self-reflection. The question posed by this exhibition is the proper one (possibly the only one): why have these artists chosen to work in a medium that is retrograde at best, and at worst outdated? This choice is at the root of painting’s strength. Every painting is connected to a vast network of ideas, histories and objects, both physical and ephemeral. Each painting is bound to all paintings and to the ubiquitous and varied practice of applying colored pigment to surface. To make a painting today is to engage the act, the experience or the history of painting (or some combination of the three), along with the myriad concepts connected to each.

The most effective painting today must involve a rearranging and re-contextualizing of the definitions, qualities and histories of painting. This should in no way be viewed as a limitation on the importance or potential of the medium; paint possesses an historical prominence shared by no other medium, and for this reason remains uniquely significant. Painting is a juggernaut, its relevance maintained by the momentum of history."

Michael Hubbard

"The medium of painting has existed in some form for virtually all of human history. I am happy to be a part of this continuation. Paintings have the ability to address and reflect the times in which they were created. I construct large-scale paintings that acknowledge the hyper-paced, media-saturated, technology driven society in which we live."

Jon Barwick

"Over the past few years I have been seriously invested in making paintings while taking into consideration; art history, personal goals, and refining the craft. This endeavor has led me to better understand how to communicate using symbolic language and then create a context to support it.

While in graduate school, I began to realize the importance of art history and its affects on the language associated with painting. I came to realize that historical references are impossible to avoid, and therefore should be embraced in order to fully understand my work. I was interested in the various movements and styles that have dominated a changing art history and their reasons for existence. During this investigation I came to realize what is personally important, which then evolved into my current subject matter. At that time, I became intrigued by architectural structures and the resulting beauty they possess when painted. Also, from a sociological perspective, I developed an interest in the implied ideologies designated to people based on their personal living structure and environment."

Sanders Watson

"For me, painting is just another medium of saying something through visual imagery. I work in all media and while I embrace the rich history of painting (and of printmaking, sculpture, etc), I’m more interested in blurring the lines between media. The piece in this show has been shown as a print as well as a painting. It looks like a painting, but its process of creation is more similar to printmaking – I place ice on paper and then let it leave its print by melting. It exists somewhere between media, as much of my work does."

Rebecca Pott

"My most recent completed body of work presented large-scale, multi-figure paintings of dancers and musicians in achronistic, ambiguously exotic settings. In these paintings I experimented with images of performances, assigning a different character to the viewer in each painting. In one the viewer is simply the audience at the performance, in another the viewer is closer to the musicians, and the action is happening “off stage.” In each of these images a sense of the exotic appears.

There is a complicity between the viewer and the artist when the subject is something exotic. An image that evokes the exotic has more to do with reflecting a bit of the artist’s own fantasy back at them, and less to do with accurately portraying a foreign culture. The artificiality and the disconnect of the exotic image from the original culture fascinates me—it implies that the world the artist is constructing originates in an internal escape, rather than a particular foreign location."
Elise Schweitzer

"Throughout the process of painting I translate my ideas about growth and change into the visual world through light and its relationships to its surroundings. I believe in the time-honored standards of painting and its complexities. I also continue to explore how we exist in nature and the relationship we share with each other. In my work, methods of developing colors, shapes, and depth of space is meaningful. Values, repetitive shapes, and forms may invoke a narrative in the painting. Though my concerns are initially formal, these elements are merely tools to assist me in arriving at a more meaningful place in the work. It is the process of painting which for me, is highly enjoyable and provides a great challenge.

Those distinctive marks which distinguish the hand of one artist to another convey what the artist’s mood, temperament, beliefs and ideas. The expressive surface may relay mood and materiality that are one in the same."

Michael Wartgow

"Inside the belly of contemporary art, painting serves as a vital organ, contextualizing and mediating the fragmented components of cultural identity. All around us, these bits and pieces are constantly being broken apart, revised, and projected in new ways. Painting allows me to systematically explore this cultural phenomenon as my work aims to highlight the potential beauty that lies behind the coexistence of difference."

Tony Conrad

"I paint very large pictures. I realize that historically the function of painting large pictures is painting something very grandiose and pompous. The reason I paint them, however – I think it applies to other painters I know – is precisely because I want to be very intimate and human. To paint a small picture is to place yourself outside your experience. However you paint the larger picture, you are in it." —Mark Rothko

Saydi Indianos Kaufman

"I aim to make work that teeters on the edge of abstraction and representation.  My images are a complication of lines, shapes, and colors that slowly register into real objects.  The space in the paintings is simple but the details are complex.  I hope that my work has a sense of delicacy, stillness, awkwardness, and beauty."

Maureen Forman

VIDEOS

www.wetpaint2010.com