luke gray "deep skin & strokeworld paintings"

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LUKE GRay november 15 – december 11, 2010

deep skin & strokeworld paintings

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Cover and right:

strokeworld 0529, 2010

varnished acrylic on canvas

46” x 46”

luke gray november 15 – December 11, 2010

deep skin & strokeworld paintings

David Richard Contemporary130 Lincoln avenue, suite d, santa fe, nM 87501 | p (505) 983-9555 | f (505) 983-1284

www.davidrichardContemporary.com | [email protected]

GalleRy DirectoRs

david eichholtz & richard Barger

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L.G. (speaking of a personal library of

books on psychedelia, shamanism, and par-

adigm shifts…) i did all this reading, back

in the 80’s and early 90’s, when i was in my

twenties and early thirties. You try to situate

yourself in your culture, and you try to figure

out where you’re located, where your spirit

is located, where your thoughts are located,

and it’s a long process, and eventually your

work fuses with your thoughts, in the sense

that you don’t really need to think anymore,

beyond a certain point. and i think that’s

the whole intent, of the project, to get to

that point where your work fuses with your

thoughts. sometimes i feel dumb, because

i don’t read that much anymore toward my

work, but i don’t feel like i have to, until i

have a new crisis, and my work has to be re-

defined. it’s really just a question of getting

to that point where the work comes from, in

all the tumultuousness of my daily life. i’ve

always believed in speed of execution as a

way of short circuiting a certain analytical

process. i think it started with seeing Keith

haring in the subway in the early 80’s, just

do his thing in 15, 20 seconds, and just walk

away. and that was the work. there was

something about the immediacy of that and

the power of not looking analytically at what

you’ve done, and trying to figure out how

to make it better. i was really just trying to

cultivate a process inside myself where all

these things would work themselves out in-

ternally before the work was done.

G.S. daniel, Luke’s process of painting is

an extremely spontaneous one, very much

about being in the moment, and i always,

somewhat naively i see now, thought it was

about being in the moment, almost like a

jazz musician, but i’ve come to see that a lit-

tle differently now. i used to see it as a world

that was out there, like a weather system, or

a quantum field, but i now see it as a world

that he’s created, that is very diverse and

very complex and very meaningful, a world

that i don‘t quite know yet. What i do know

is that part of the power of the work is in its

daniel Pinchbeck is the editorial director of reality Sandwich (www.reality sandwich.com)

and the author of Breaking open the Head: A Psychedelic Journey Into the Heart of Con-

temporary Shamanism and 2012: the return of Quetzalcoatl.

LUKE GRAYDEEP SKIN & STROKEWORLD PAINTINGS

excerpts from a Studio Conversation with Artist luke Gray,

Author daniel Pinchbeck, and Gary Snyder of Gary Snyder

Project Space in NYC

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rapidity, and in its attempt to almost vibrate

on the same level as other things.

D.P. how quickly do you do these?

L.G. these paintings are done in…about 20

minutes…

D.P. Wow! (laughter)

L.G. When they’re done they’re done. i just

step away and never touch them again. i

think basically the thing is resolved inside

before it’s put out there, and obviously

i can’t work that way all the time, i have

months when i’m able to access that and i

have months, or even years, when i’m not

able to access it. for me paintings happen

in little moments. i’m not about to punch

the clock in my own studio…

G.S. Luke paints in series…and my observa-

tion is that there’s always been this build-up

of energy, which releases itself in a series

of paintings, then Luke may not paint for

a long time. he doesn’t paint again until

something builds up again and it releases,

and he’s very very tough on himself about

that. he’s not one of those guys who comes

into the studio every day and has to paint.

it’s much more of an intuitive, mysterious

process, and sometimes a deeply disturbing

process…you’ve gone through long periods

where you haven’t been able to paint.

L.G. Basically daniel, what i’m trying to do

in these paintings is create extremely asso-

ciative spaces that every viewer will bring

their own history to, they’re own vision to,

it’s all about a world in flux, a world that is

mutating and isn’t static in any way. there

are a lot of things that are just on the cusp

of being, but they’re not solidified. each

painting is almost like a frame in a never-

ending film, which is all about transforma-

tion and change, which is what i feel our

world is about. so it’s about trying to cap-

ture that…that fleeting moment and make it

solid for a second, and then to make it an

object of contemplation. another one of

the foundational thoughts is the idea of the

brushstroke as a kind of pixel, or building

block, of all painting. and then, trying to

re-imagine a world where that brushstroke

is set free to do what it wishes to do. not in

the service of describing something, neces-

sarily, but just being unleashed to become

almost like an actor on its own stage…fly-

ing through the space, stopping, build-

ing structures, dismantling structures, this

whole notion was very important to me.

i wanted this world i was imagining to be

a very illusionist one also, not the two-di-

mensional space of greenberg’s new York

school. i still believe that illusionism is the

holy grail of painting, and always will be.

D.P. Luke, we’re both sons of painters.

What kind of a dialogue did you have with

your dad about painting?

L.G. We actually didn’t talk so much about

painting in general, although we were very

supportive of each other. i think an artist of

our generation has to me more self-aware.

an artist of my dad’s generation was able

to just dissolve themselves into their work,

but we have to straddle both sides of the

line between the conscious and the uncon-

scious because we’re post-modern. it’s a

completely different relationship to paint-

ing. What was required of my generation

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was to be both inside and outside of the

painting at the same time.

D.P. a job i had in my late twenties was

writing for art magazines, for example, the

art newspaper of London, and then i got

into, you know, psychedelic shamanism, i

went to the Burning Man festival, and i got

less interested in the traditional containers

of the art world, and everything that’s in-

volved and associated with them, and what

i loved about Burning Man is that the art

that’s made there is kind of anonymous,

you can look it up, but it’s mostly sculptural,

and it’s mostly made to solicit the maxi-

mum amount of enjoyment and community

interaction…

L.G. …and be a spark for ritual…

D.P. exactly, exactly, the construct of the

art world is so much more involved with

making this object that’s going to have

an archival life…one of the most liberating

things about Burning Man is that a lot of the

stuff gets burned at the end of the festival…

it’s like a release of one’s attachments…to

this idea that it’s going to be something

permanent…

L.G. Like a tibetan sand painting…

D.P. exactly, it’s like a ceremony that our

culture has constituted, like a Lakota sun

dance…

L.G. the fact that you mention anonym-

ity is very important to me because i think

really from the very beginning my great-

est influences were always tribal, whether

it was Mayan, egyptian, or australian ab-

original painting, which first came to new

York in the early 80’s at the asia society, i

remember that really opened my eyes, and

i was always trying to develop a language

that had the anonymity that tribal art has.

it’s not the anonymity of a technological so-

ciety, which is a very cold and isolative one,

it’s the opposite of that…it’s the anonym-

ity of an artist in a group of people where

individuality is not celebrated to a certain

extent, and painting is a vehicle for ritual, so

there are certain types of marks and certain

ways of producing work that can be individ-

ually interpreted by each artist, but it’s pret-

ty much all subsumed in a common vision,

and one that‘s very familiar to the tribe. in

my work, by reducing the painting stroke to

this kind of unit, this dna-like building block,

it becomes a neutral, anonymous structure,

it’s not my brushstroke, not my signature,

it’s the brushstroke.

D.P. My question is this: could the creative

impulse that goes into making beautiful

works such as these, be shaped into a tool

that helps bring about a different kind of en-

gagement? how can that be harnessed at a

time of species-level crisis to bring about a

transformation in practice and habits?

G.S. one could argue that being moved by

a work of art, the feeling of humanity, the

touching of something real, is working in it’s

own way toward that goal.

L.G. daniel, in some of the discussions on

your website and in your writing you’re talk-

ing about alchemy, and the transformation

of matter. this is important, and i’d like to

talk about it. When i’m doing paintings, i

want the work to be about paint, and the

essential language of painting - the brush-

stroke. When i’m doing drawings, i want it

to be about the essential language of draw-

ing, which is the line. and there’s always

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been this attempt to make the narrative in

my work about genesis, which is transfor-

mation of matter, so in the paintings you

have these kind of building blocks, or brush-

strokes, which are in the process of build-

ing something. the drawings are all about

the line, which is in the process of creating

something. it’s animist, you know, which

again betrays my deep relation to the tribal,

to tribal art. speaking of animism, Jose ar-

guelles, in his book the transformative Vi-

sion, showed a very intuitive understanding

of painting. he spoke about the watercol-

ors of turner (JMW) in the same terms i’ve

always thought of them. especially at the

end of turner’s life, he did paintings on pa-

per where it appeared that the watercolors

had become the very elements that he was

describing in his paintings. the watercolor

became the clouds, became the ocean, so

there’s this very animist thing also happen-

ing there, a one-to-one correspondence be-

tween paint and phenomena. this relates

to what i’m talking about because it‘s con-

nected to a post-modern way of thinking

and working. While you’re creating, while

you’re in the moment of creation, you have

to have this kind of hyper level of awareness

of the significance of the tools that you’re

using. this is what focused my efforts on

trying to question, at the beginning, what

the building blocks of the language were,

be it painting or drawing, and using that as

a kind of animistic tool that took on it’s own

life, almost as if it were happening by itself,

building itself, as opposed to being con-

trolled by an external force. there is also an

aspect to post-modernism where it is break-

ing through the illusion of the utopian dream

of modernism, accepting its failure. never

again dissolving oneself in a kind of abso-

lute vision which would not allow any type

of self-criticism. Clearly i felt that i couldn’t

just paint. You couldn’t just paint and lose

yourself in the painting the way Pollock or

deKooning did. You had first to go through

a certain amount of deconstruction of the

tradition that you were involved in, and take

responsibility for your choice, and some-

how work another level of awareness into it

all. this often took a purely intellectual turn

at that time, but the deconstruction taking

place was absolutely necessary. drawing

had been deconstructed to the line, paint-

ing had been deconstructed to the brush-

stroke, and i thought, let’s now take those

elements and build a whole new world out

of them. and i think that’s very much what

happens daniel, when you have a shamanic

experience of the type you‘ve written about,

you do go through a kind of deconstructive

experience, where the reality that existed

for you before is no longer, and it‘s then up

to you to piece it back together again. i re-

ally felt, by the late eighties, that analysis

and deconstruction had just sapped the art

of any life force whatsoever. i felt the only

way i could take up the brush with meaning

would be to take the work that had been

done and use it to build a new world. that’s

what postmodernism meant to me. it was

a period of severe analytical thinking where

things were stripped of their meaning and

historical context.

D.P. What comes next?

L.G. Well that’s exactly it. for a lot of peo-

ple it was the end of something. for my

dad’s generation it was the death of some-

thing, like an ice pick in the heart. for my

generation it was an opportunity to remake

art.

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Strokeworld 0907, 2010

42” x 40” varnished acrylic on canvas

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deeP SkIN 0825, 2009


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Luke GrayLives and works in Brooklyn, nY

artist’s Birthdate: 1961

Education:

B.a. in fine arts and Literature, University of Pennsylvania, 1982, Philadelphia, Pa.

skowhegan school of Painting and sculpture, 1979, skowhegan, Me.

rhode island school of design, summer session 1978, Providence, r.i.

Selected Solo Exhibitions:

“Luke gray: strokeworld and deep skin Paintings”, david richard Contemporary,

santa fe, n.M., 2010

“deep skins”, gary snyder Project space, nYC, nY, 2009

“Luke gray: syncMasters and gestureglyphs“, gary snyder fine art, nYC, nY, 2002

hunter gallery at the William h. drury and richard grosvenor Center for the arts,

newport, r.i., 2001

addison-ripley fine art, Washington d.C., 2000

david Klein gallery, Birmingham, Mi., 1999

snyder fine art, nYC, 1998

addison-ripley fine art, Washington d.C., 1997

snyder fine art, nYC, 1996

galerie Ludwig, Krefeld, germany, 1996

thomas erben gallery, nYC, 1996

Selected Group Exhibitions:

“?abstraction”, gary snyder Project space, nYC, nY, 2008

“Contemporary new York” (curated by nabil nahas), J. Johnson gallery,

Jacksonville Beach, fla., 2004

“onLine”, feigen Contemporary, nYC, nY, 2003

“500 Works on Paper“, gary snyder fine art, nYC, nY, 2002

“drawings and Photographs”, Matthew Marks gallery, nYC, nY, 2000

“dorke Poelz and Luke gray: ort-Place”, Carmen oberst Kunstraum,

hamburg, germany, 2000

“Photographic Postcards”, Museum für Kommunikation, hamburg, germany, 2000

“der fliegende robert”, collaboration with dorke Poelz, Künstlerhaus Moorfleet,


“three: alex de fluvia, Luke gray, Pablo rey”, holland tunnel art Projects,

Brooklyn, nY, 1998

“a new naturalism”, snyder fine art, nYC, 1997

“in the garden room: Just the Way You Like it”, archibald arts, nYC, 1997

“Unresolved: drawings and Paintings according to... Chakaia Booker, Keith duncan,

Luke gray”, archibald arts, nYC, 1997

“Pentiment academy guest Professors 1997”, hamburg Museum für Kunst und gewerbe,


“affinities”, snyder fine art, nYC, 1996

“gallery artists”, thomas erben gallery, nYC, 1996

“vibology”, White Columns, nYC, 1992

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“Premio internazionale fiar” (nYC entry curated by dan Cameron), Museum of science

and technology, Milan, italy. traveled to rome, Paris, London, Los angeles,

new York, 1991-1993.

“in the Black”, PnYK gallery, Kent, Ct., 1990

“guillaume Bijl, Luke gray, robert hamon, Karen Kilimnik”, nicole Klagsbrun gallery,

nYC, 1989

Commissions:

350 West 51st. st., nYC, nY commissioned by rossrock LLC in collaboration with

Philip Babb architect to paint mural “traveler” in building’s lobby. Project

completed July, 2002

the robert Wood Johnson foundation, Princeton, n.J., commissioned to paint 30 ft. long

mural entitled Universal health” for new corporate headquarters. Project

completed July, 2001.

1500 Broadway at times square, nYC, nY commissioned by intertech to paint ceiling

mural, “transMission 1998” in building’s lobby. Project completed february 1998.

artist’s Books:

“neogenesis”, 1995, 662 driggs editions, Brooklyn, nY

“alien space invaders’ Book of days”, 1994, Black dog editions, nYC

“recent observations”, 1993, Black dog editions, nYC

“invisible Culture”, 1993, Black dog editions, nYC

“Musee Picasso”, 1992, Black dog editions, nYC

all books distributed by Printed Matter at dia, nY

Bibliography:

Chapman, frances (artburger), Waterfront Week, 1996-97, various.

diehl, Carol, art in america, november 1998, “Luke gray at snyder fine art”, review.

Janis, stefan, the Litchfield County times, april 16 1993, “Warren-Born artist’s Work

at Kent gallery”.

Johnson, Ken, the new York times, May 22 1998, review of snyder show.

Johnson, Ken, the new York times, June 13, 2003, review of “online” at

feigen Contemporary.

Kino, Carol, time out, august 1997, “Unresolved”, review of show at archibald arts.

Kino, Carol, art news, april 1997, “Luke gray at snyder”, review.

Kenny, Kay, Cover, July 1997, “organizing non-hierarchal space: Color is Key in

Luke gray’s transitional gestures”.

Maine, stephen, the new York sun, “a delicious Paradox”, June 2008, review of

“?abstraction” at gary snyder Project space .

Protzman, ferdinand, the Washington Post, January 2000, “Luke gray at

addison-ripley”, review.

smith, roberta, the new York times, august 2 1996, “across the generations,

side by side”, review of “affinities” show at snyder fine art.

smith, roberta, the new York times, January 8th, 2002, “frank stella Pops Up all over”

mention of exhibition at gary snyder fine art in relation to concept of “complexity”.

vogel, Carol, the new York times, March 6 1998, “the spirit of the square”, inside art

Column about “transMission 1998”, times square mural commission.

von Buchholtz, annegret, Westdeutsche Zeitung, september 12 1996, “Brushstrokes and

the self-organization of Chaos”, review of galerie Ludwig show.

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130 Lincoln avenue, suite d, santa fe, nM 87501 | p (505) 983-9555 | f (505) 983-1284

www.davidrichardContemporary.com | [email protected]

isBn 978-0-9827872-5-0

PriCe $15.00

© 2010 david riChard ConteMPorarY, LLC

luke gray "deep skin & strokeworld paintings"

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