Gina Magid + Bradley Rubenstein
Bradley: As a child did you look at a lot of art? Growing up in Long Island and being near NYC with all its museums and galleries, did that have a big affect on you?
Gina: Sadly, experiencing fine art wasn't an integral part of my childhood. My family didn't have a knowledge of, or interest in, that sort of thing. It's something I came to on my own, which is also nice. I stumbled upon and discovered for myself a whole world of thought and action and philosophy that made sense to me. I think I went to the MOMA maybe once in late high school with my mother. There was a Francis Bacon retrospective up at the time and needless to say, it rocked my world. I thought they were really disgusting and violent and beautiful. I don't know if I'm getting this right, since it was a while ago, but the way I remember them was with candy pink backgrounds. Since then, I've probably read the book "Interviews with Francis Bacon" about eight times.
oil paint, pastel on satin, 54.25 x 50"
Bradley: I remember talking with you a while ago, after seeing some of your recent things, and remarking it seemed like you'd never seen a painting before. Your work somehow has a quality that is truly innovative—not innovative in a planned sense—but more like really good punk music. It has an "I don't know what is gonna happen next" feel to it for me; I get that looking at Clifford Styll for example. Here is this guy who just made it up as he went along. How do you feel about that? I know you are actually a really good printmaker. You know technique.
Gina: I'm down with the comparison to punk rock! I want my paintings to feel fluid and free and risky and chaotic and beautiful and all of this other crazy shit that is essentially nonverbal. I'm trying to develop a language of mark-making which will touch upon these ideas.I remember when I was first studying abstract expressionism there came this pivotal moment where I saw clearly that painting was a form of language. This idea has stayed with me, grown, evolved. I think about how someone like Franz Kline is read as spontaneous and free and bold when actually he was making very small, careful studies which he then projected and basically copied to create some of his larger works. That's not necessarily a spontaneous, free or bold way of working. But it doesn't really matter because they still read that way.
oil paint, pastel, charcoal on satin, 60 x 48"
For me, it's super important that my paintings come from my heart, from a level of deepness. That's a basic attraction to working. This language development concept is part of a process to take the internal nonverbal and start to communicate. I always approach a new painting like I have no idea what is going to happen. So maybe that comes through. I really do feel that way. If I knew what was going to happen, I'd be so bored. I like what I have to go through to come to terms with a painting. Each one is different. Some come out sweet as sugar, and some I struggle with and freak out over forever. I destroy a lot of them—one of my Bacon lessons—that it's okay and can even feel great to kill a painting. Sometimes just before I'm going to destroy a painting that I've been really hating, I'll give it one last ditch, totally ridiculous, risky effort and it'll all start to come together in a new way that opens a door.
Bradley: Your paintings are packed with imagery. Some of it is really loaded, I think. Things mutate from one form to another. It seems like you kind of riff off the paint as you work. Can you describe how it all comes together for you?
Gina: I just try to be as open and perceptive as possible to the world around me and to myself. And then I sort of process the information through my work. So maybe I'll start with a drawing of something I'm attracted to or find sexy or interesting or whatever and I'll put it down on some satin and then I'll start adding paint and take it where it needs to go. I usually don't cover the entire surface with paint because the bare satin is so beautiful and meaningful for me to look at. I just want them to be as alive as possible. I 'm into mixing different visual languages and playing with style. I grab images from wherever I find them. I think of this as related to sampling in music. Definitely color and expressive brushstrokes are also important elements. Some of the imagery I generate myself, and others I find in sources such as magazines. Pop culture is referenced, but hopefully I'm able to subvert it enough to move it towards the realm of allegory.
Bradley: Is it an intuitive process for you? Or do you already have some idea in mind where you're heading?
Gina: I usually have a few things in mind, but I let it play itself out on the surface of whatever I'm working on. I'd say it's an intuitive way of working. This is great when it's all gelling, but hard to find when it's not. I sometimes wish I had more of a concrete structure to rely on, but that could also be said about my feelings toward life in general.
oil paint, charcoal on wood panel, 24 x 24"
Bradley: One of the things Bacon said about his process that seems to relate to your process: "I hope to be able to have the first instinctive kind of basic thing and then to be able to work, almost directly, as though one were painting a new picture."It was really great to see the work develop over the last year in preparation for the show at Feature, Inc. It was interesting to see some of the pieces which I thought were concluded, being added onto in ways that seemed to make them more fucked up, or less composed. One that I really liked last fall, of the dead animal, ended up getting a pair of swans, which really changes the tone of the piece—taking it from some kind of existentially dark and creepy place to something just weird. How intentional are these sort of things? Or is it just that you felt like adding the swans at the expense of the original idea?
Gina: That one didn't make it into the show at Feature, I'm keeping it because I really like it. The original idea of the painting is still there. I painted that dead skunk from life. It was a pretty intense experience for me. I did a whole series of roadkill paintings when I was in Wyoming last year. I passed them each day as I rode my bike to my studio and they really affected me. Here in New York we are so cut off from nature, so encountering wild life—both alive and dead—was a profound visual and emotional experience for me. I watched as those animals on the road deteriorated each day, it was awful. And there were always new ones. I really started thinking about how animals have NO IDEA of what is going on as far as cars are concerned, cars being just one element of this artificial world we are creating. It's so out of sync with the rest of the life on this planet. The pair of swans at the bottom of the canvas I added much later, but the painting is still about the skunk. Now the swans can add their own mystery, magic, beauty, and love to the piece. I don't like things to be too direct or about just one thing, because that is never how I experience life. It is much more complex and layered.
oil paint, pencil, pastel,charcoal, glitter on satin, 54 x 47"
Bradley: The most recent ones, or at least the ones that seem like you started them more recently (it's hard to keep track of what is a work in progress) are more sparse, more linear. These seem to be really concise ideas, sharp depictions. How do these work for you? They seem more planned in a way.
Gina: I've always made some pieces that come out fairly minimal, and others that become layered and rich with imagery. I try to go with what I feel is required to bring the thing to life and make it feel whole. There's a painting in the show called "Making the Bunny" which addresses this. In it the figure is conjuring or forming an unruly mass into a rabbit, but it's not going perfectly smoothly. For me this is an allegory of the artist's work. The figure is trying to somehow shape all of this energy into something beautiful that she can love, but it's not always such an easy ride. I use the word "conjuring" because I'm pretty sure that some crazy magic must be involved when it works.
Bradley: Sounds very mystical...
Gina: It is.
oil paint, pastel, charcoal on satin, 59.5 x 48"
Bradley Rubenstein is an artist who lives and works in Brooklyn. He is Co-Editor with Lucio Pozzi of the forthcoming book Teachart, an anthology of writings by artists on art education. Mr. Rubenstein was a 2000 recipient of the Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant for painting, a former NEA Fellow in Painting, and is represented by Universal Concepts Unlimited in New York City. ArtKrush Copyright © 2002 ArtKrush, LLC. All Rights Reserved.