Liz Atlas
Brooklyn and Glenford, NY
Website
www.lizatlas.com
Social Media
instagram
How would you describe your work?
My work explores how the formal elements of shape/color/gesture/line can give voice to the unknown, unexpressed, embedded in my accumulated visual memory/experiences. Out of this language, I create paragraphs that evoke in me a physical and emotional response—at once unexpected and yet familiar— without needing to define specific content or meaning.
These concerns are visible in both rectangular paintings and shaped (collaged) objects, and over time these two approaches have been engaged in a dialog, back and forth. The paintings emerged from my long history as a sculptor, with a clear nod to that history in the tactile focus on shape and line. The more sculptural, collaged pieces, have begun to reference painting in their combining of painterly passages with the more sculptural elements of their physical materials and delineated shapes. I see all the work as one body, that no longer needs to be categorized into one bucket or another, but instead gives form to the ever present tension of reality being one thing and another— and my desire to hold both in one moment.
What inspires you?
I'm inspired by the materials I'm working with and the surprises that emerge via my process. A gesture, shape, or color that seems “right”—resonates with me emotionally and physically. To dig a bit deeper, behind that response is a lifetime of accumulated visual experiences and the deep seated emotive responses originally connected to them. These stored visual experiences include traces of shapes in the world that affected me, as well as my history of viewing and being excited by the art of others. I believe we carry around a treasure trove of emotionally charged visual experiences, somewhat out of reach from our day to day consciousness, but that become the source to draw from, for many creative endeavors. So I guess you could say my inspiration is my own visual/emotional history.
Can you speak about your process?
I begin working, with no preconceived ideas as to where I'm going. If I'm working on a painting, I usually begin with broad gestures, allowing the physical/muscular, and visual to work in tandem, and build from there, adding and deleting, until something that has emerged grabs hold of me that I can build on.
With the collage work, I often begin with pieces of discarded paintings-on-paper and see how combining these remnants with drawing and fabric can illicit a similarly charged response.
At some point, with both approaches, I begin to refine and extend what the piece is saying to me. Often a shape feels like it needs to be extended, a color tweaked, some additional drawing is needed to breaking up the space. On it goes until some ah ha moment is reached where the piece seems to justify its own existence, and I decide it “is”.
How did you become interested in art?
Both my parents were interested in many forms of art, leaning towards the abstract. They loved modern dance, and abstract painting and sculpture, and music was always present in our home. But perhaps over and above all this was the more specific and concrete influences of my dad, who was a structural engineer but always dreamed about being an architect, My being the last born, I believe he projected some of those dreams onto me in concrete ways. When I was 4 years old, I woke up on my birthday to the most significant present I think I ever received—a real (kids) workbench with various layers of peg board, chalk board, and the most exciting layer being a board to nail wooden shapes into with REAL nails and a REAL hammer.
In the years that followed I was encouraged to build things with various building block sets and a huge array of materials, much of which was provided by my mom. I built many things out of cardboard and other materials, but by the time I was 8 or 9, I wanted to build real things out of real wood—a tree house and go cart were two of my creations.
All this time I was also being exposed to art in museums via my parents' outings. I have an early memory of being at a kids collage making event at the Brooklyn Museum. I think all these early experiences set the stage for the work I'm doing today.
In terms of my more mature development as an artist, I owe a great deal to the conflation of my formative experiences of NY post-minimalism of the 70's, followed by my graduate school influences at the Art Institute of Chicago—a hot bed for intensely emotive work. It took me some years to truly find my voice that could synthesize these divergent forces into abstract work that allows simultaneous space for both.
Do you have any favorite artists, movies, books, or quotes?
I could go on for many paragraphs about the influences on my work, but for brevity sake here is a short list:
Artists—
Richard Tuttle (esp his early work of the 80's through early 2000s)
Franz Kline
Cy Twombly sculpture
Manet
Turner
Michelangelo's sculptures
John Chamberlain (amazing retrospective at the Guggenheim) Morandi
Elizabeth Murray
Joan Mitchell
and many, many more
Books— Literature is a constant part of my life that feeds me emotionally and indirectly influences my work. I am specifically drawn to poetic, visually rich prose that focuses on internal exploration rather than plot. Virginia Woolf stands out in this club, but there are many others as well.
Quote— Two quotes that I think fit together well: Franz Kline
“I paint not the things I see but the feelings they arouse in me.”
“The final test of a painting, theirs, mine, any other, is: do the painter's emotions come across?”
Tolstoy On Art
Art is a means of communication...and it is upon this capacity of man to receive another man's expression of feeling, and experience those feelings himself, that the activity of art is based....Whereas by words a man transmits his thoughts to another, by means of art he transmits his feelings.
What advice do you have for younger artists?
Keep at it—Seep yourself in the vast history of art, as well as contemporary work, and discover what truly excites you—important clues to who you are as an artist. Then work as much as possible and allow room for change and growth to happen. (Consistancy is overrated, especially early on.) Don't shy away from the destructive forces that emerge in the process. At times annihilating what's there, can allow for something really new to emerge. And to paraphrase Tolstoy, expression alone is not art. Art needs to communicate as well.
Any more thoughts about art, creativity, or anything else you would like to share?
In a recent attempt to tie together with words the various impulses present in my visual work, I have landed on a new frame to think about the “why” baked into the path I've forged. The desire to bring together disparate strands so they may, for an instance, exist in the same circumscribed moment (formal and emotive; painting and constructing; illusion and physical object)—speaks metaphorically to my unceasing wish to integrate the chaotic/unruly parts of reality into a somewhat messy and momentarily unified whole.
