WAS THE NEWSLETTER #51

I’m Paige Wassel. WAS the Newsletter is your weekly dose of design inspiration, where good art is worth a thousand words.

LET ME HELP YOU FIND SOME ART

Finding good art is a lot like finding good furniture–sure, it might be easier to buy the mass-produced stuff, but it’s way more valuable to buy one-of-a-kind pieces you’ll cherish for the rest of your life.

This week, I’m featuring 3 artists I recently discovered. I hope you love their work as much as I do.

EMMA CC COOK

Hailing from the Midwest, Emma Cook is a Los Angeles based artist who is redefining the genre of landscape painting. Utilizing a wide range of mediums, Emma’s paintings deftly explore different depths and textures of darkness, where figures and forms float in and out of the frame like storm clouds, and color is used with skillful restraint. Nothing is loud about Emma’s works, which I love. Instead, they’re quiet, the kind of quiet where you can’t quite discern if it’s peaceful or eerie. Her paintings invite you to pause and try to figure out what, exactly, it is that you’re looking at–in the absolute best way.

1. What is your process? How do you begin a project?

For me, the most memorable ideas are still found in open spaces and maybe always have been – roaming around outside, cutting through the field, picking up little bits of things – being small, if you will. For a while, I tried to occlude myself from stumbling on inspiration in this way, in nature. I spent a lot of my time on concept and academic research, learning about artists, art history, etc. I thought I could shortcut to a style through digesting art. Education within your field is of course a priority and a necessity, it’s continually important to me, but the labor of learning also is about being quiet and having the patience to learn techniques or craft or maybe just in general observation.

I have always said that an idea is like a green shoot popping out of the soil, delicate and deeply ephemeral. Taking time to cultivate those little shoots and not clutter them with other people's suggestions or vision, so as to not trample them, is half the battle. At some point I realized, for me, I needed to know how to work from front to back on a project or exhibition. Then I could in a sense provide a safe space for those little thoughts, and do the work properly. So, to be in control and to support some of my more technically challenging ideas, I took up woodworking – for instance – and started to learn how to mill my own stretcher bars and build everything from scratch. I now start with the craft, then end with the concept. This may seem obvious and overly simple but it took me quite a bit of time to realize and through the process of learning craft traditions, I realized how many more ideas I could unlock.

2. What inspires your work? Your technique and your color palettes?

Lately I’ve been working on this red oval series, which marks a transition in my painting. Incrementally, I'm moving away from my monochromatic system. I’ve been introducing these hovering graphic devices over the landscape, thinking about Baldessari’s dot painting, with his device of anonymity. Sort of an amendment or indemnification of the original. Lately I’ve been thinking about how we halve the landscape into smaller and smaller parts and use linear architectures that interrupt vanishing-points.

In my studio in Los Angeles, I have a big west facing picture window. There are two wooden Pylons in the frame and telephone wires. I think about that vantage point as if it was a painting on my wall. Green space, interrupted by the lines we’ve drawn on it, sort of a latent pervasiveness that we stop seeing some times. I’m interested in objects or histories that fall away from view even if they are clearly present. I use the device of my vignettes similarly, narrative flotsam that move in and out of focus. The monochromatic technique flattens the work almost like a newspaper, it knocks back all of the headlines, therefore creating more subtlety or simplicity in the composition. I’ve been using this technique for 6 years and a part of the labor has been sticking to these limitations of color but I feel a change coming.

3. What’s next for you? Any fun exhibitions we should keep an eye on? Any launches or collaborations?

I’m excited for what’s to come in 2025. Some of the highlights will be a solo exhibition in London at Public Gallery alongside Dottie Attie, a legend who will be running a solo adjacent. Public is expanding into the neighboring shop and the space was once a textile manufacturer and they have decidedly left some of the shop's shelving etc. I'm looking forward to developing an exhibition that responds with the remaining commercial architecture, something that I find my work does well with. I also am releasing an artist monograph in June with Era Editions in Minneapolis. Era Editions received the Visual Artist Fund grant through Midway Contemporary and I will be one of two initial books produced by this publishing company. Otherwise, this gal is learning how to surf and getting married in the Spring, so 2025 will be a very exciting year.

ISIS HOCKENOS

Isis Hockenos is a California based artist whose paintings present dynamic relationships between people, creating strange, yet deeply familiar, mythologies. Working with oil paint, India ink and gouache, Isis’ paintings are mesmerizing–the vivid colors, eye-catching patterns, and tangible textures draw you into worlds you never want to leave. But I think what I really love about Isis’ works are how they’re not so easily definable. They’re dreamlike, yet real; distant, yet intimate; simple, yet complex. I guess what I’m trying to say is that her paintings are timeless, and there’s truly nothing more you can ask for from a work of art.

1. What is your process? How do you begin a project?

When I’m between paintings or after completing a series, I’ll spend some time in my sketchbook exploring shapes and ideas without too much of an agenda. From there several motifs might emerge that I will explore further. I start by playing with those ideas or images and paying closer attention to their origins, what their significance is and by what means (palette, composition etc) the ideas will best be conveyed. Then, as the sketches evolve into what the painting will actually look like, I research relevant references, often from my personal photo collection but sometimes from art history and literature. Once I’m sure of the painting’s scale, I assemble and prep my surface. Right now I’m working with this gorgeous linen. For smaller paintings I assemble pre-cut wood stretcher bars and for larger pieces I order custom pre-assembled aluminum bars. After sizing and gessoing, I’ll often apply several layers of tinted cold wax medium, to build up a smooth and translucent surface. In these finished paintings, the highlights are actually places where I’ve wiped away the paint, letting the wax underpainting glow. Once I have the bones of the composition sketched in and a light first pass of diluted color, the details and features of the painting begin to emerge and the piece takes on a life and personality of its own. Many of the figures and locations begin as people and places that I know intimately, but as the painting evolves, the familiarity recedes into memory. My favorite moment (and perhaps the thing that brings me back to the studio day after day) is when the painting surprises me; when it teaches me something in the process.

2. What inspires your work? Your technique and your color palettes?

I grew up with a library of exquisitely illustrated children’s books, both antique, having belonged to my grandmother and new. I poured over them, getting to know by heart the lush strokes that made up the fold in a gown or three minimal lines that perfectly rendered the expression of surprise. My mother was a photographer and fiber artist, and my father is an oil painter, so our house was full of texture and color. As an only child raised in rural Northern CA, the wilds of the forest, pasture and bay brought stories and folklore to life. I feel that I’m making my best work when I let my environment and studio practice melt into one. My home contains as many colors as my paintings do, including decorative painted accents and texture galore. The candles on my table might appear in a painting and the braid along the hem of a skirt might become the repetition in a landscape.

3. What’s next for you? Any fun exhibitions we should keep an eye on? Any launches or collaborations?

I’ll be participating in a group show up in Inverness (in West Marin, just north of SF) in June. As for LA, I love welcoming folks into my studio in Chinatown and am excited for more exhibition opportunities in 2025.

TAYLOR MAKI

You all know how I love a good rug, but the Kelowna, British Columbia-based textile artist Taylor Maki is making wool rugs on another level–there really isn’t anyone else doing it quite like her. Each rug is designed with intricate geometric patterns and bold, rich colors, reminiscent of something out of science fiction, or maybe even an ancient ritual. While at first glance the rugs might come across as busy, further inspection reveals that each rug operates under its own, unique logic: some spiral, others ripple, and still others fold in on themselves to reveal something else entirely. It takes a lot of skill to make something as stagnant as a rug feel so fluid, but Taylor seems to do so effortlessly.

1. What is your process? How do you begin a project?

I’m often driven by colour combinations and what volume I want to see each colour in. I’ll go in and trace some shapes from my sketchbook on to Procreate, and then just kinda move things around and try different colours until something feels right. I’ll screen shot to save potential combos as I go, and then go back later and narrow them down and continue to work on them to avoid being overwhelmed with options. But even when I have a design digitized I’ll free hand it on to my canvas and try to include the shaky imperfections when I tuft it. If I’m not making a custom order for someone, sometimes I’ll come up with something on the spot with the materials I have on hand, a lot of the time I’m very pleased with the results of having to work with limited supplies.

2. What inspires your work? Your technique and your color palettes?

Colour comes before anything when it comes to my rug designs and I just have to figure out a way to balance them out. find it hard to pick out colours directly from a colour wheel, so I often pull colours from real life images I see online or pictures I take on my phone, and try to bring life to subdued tones by placing them next to each other, and then pretty much depend on the small details to push it to a complete design. I also will take a design I’ve used before and take elements from it and evolve it. 

3. What’s next for you? Any fun exhibitions we should keep an eye on? Any launches or collaborations?

I don’t have an exhibition to look forward to at the moment, but always happy to participate ;)!! I plan to collaborate with some friends in 2025, and will continue to accept custom orders and put out small collections as much as possible :)

KATE’S PAINT COLOR OF THE WEEK

Benjamin Moore: Chopped Dill

Finish: Any

Room Light Level: Mid to low

Check out Kate’s paint consultation business here!

xx,
P