Peanut Butter and Glitter

The Italians have such wonderful things: La Dolce Vita!, gelato, language that tastes like candy, wines that make EVERYTHING taste like candy, birthplace of the Renaissance, and many, many, many, of art history’s most effusive terms. Everyone learns, in Art History 101, about contrapposto, a positioning of the legs as if one were mid-stride, found in sculpture dating as early as Ancient Greece all the way to modern-day, which serves to both create a dynamism of movement and also as a subtle balancing-tool. Italian can also claim chiaroscuro (a quality of light and dark in paintings), sfumato (a filmy, smoky-like atmosphere in other paintings), and finally, my favorite, impasto. Impasto describes the way that paint is built up, the texture of visible brushstrokes, the physical shape the paint takes as it is layered and scraped and piled onto a canvas. Impasto reminds me of taffy. Of delicate peaks of whipped cream. Of peanut butter plopped onto a piece of bread. Impasto proves that paint is not only a vehicle for imagery, but also a tool to shape that imagery in a tangible, three-dimensional way.

Simone Gad, detail

Painter cum performance artist cum actor, Simone Gad, understands impasto better than most and spreads layer after layer of acrylic paint (and glitter! Oh my god, glitter!), to give her paintings real heft and depth. The canvases are alive with color and shape that make me want to reach out and stick my hand in it to see what that world might feel like. She captures the kitsch and the neons and the vibrant textures of LA’s Chinatown with vivid and fearless abandon. Simone’s painting, Black Dragon Society, delights me, and it’s my pick of the week.

Victoria Morton

Spoken Yeahs From A Distance, 2016, Oil on canvas, 98 x 86 inches | Image courtesy of Victoria Morton and Sadie Coles HQ

There is something about the tactile surface of a painting that I love. Something so tangible and sexy in the way paint is built up, layered, made to stand out from its surface, as if it cannot be contained within the boundaries of two dimensional space. It feels almost like watching the artist work in front of you, watching them make decisions and marks and erasures, watching their arm arc to create a shape, it is positively intimate. Impasto. Im-PAS-to. Im-pas-TO. IM-pas-to. Even the word feels bouncy, like bubblegum in my mouth, like taffy-pulling, like peaks of whipped cream. That’s what that is called, the paint that has physical shape in which brushstrokes and palette knife scratches are visible. The word “impasto” is derived from the Italian word for “paste”, you get the idea. The Italians got it right. The Italians always get it right.

I think this appreciation has a great deal to do with the fact that I am utterly incapable of putting brush to canvas and creating anything I like more than the blank, unmarked canvas itself. It’s true. I agonize over every brushstroke, dislike every gesture, am intrinsically unsuited to painting a picture. My inability to experiment, to get out of my own way and out of my head has engendered within me an awe of those who are able.

I stumbled–I like the idea of stumbling, I feel like that’s how I learn about a number of artists these days, by forming no set itinerary or intention and just wandering until I literally trip on something that makes me pause–on Victoria Morton’s work at an art fair last year and immediately fell for her brushwork and for the large swaths and washes of rich color laid to suggest volume and shape. Some pictures are geometric, unstudied and unpracticed, others bear faint hints of figures and pointillist dots. I simultaneously admire and envy her ease with a brush.

Check out some of my favorites below, and be sure to visit her Insta for the latest. Victoria Morton is currently represented by Sadie Coles HQ in London.

Memory Boy, 2015, Oil on canvas, 95 x 86 inches | Image courtesy of Victoria Morton and Sadie Coles HQ

Back Stroke, 2017, Oil on linen, 6 x 8 inches | Image courtesy of Victoria Morton and Sadie Coles HQ