Now I never mind the stretcher bars coming through. In fact, it can really add to the composition, and then you\u2019re not adding it with paint, you\u2019re adding it with the actual structure of the support, which is interesting to play around with.<\/p>\n
I also like the unexpected events\u2014like paw prints, footprints, handprints\u2014that sometimes go unrecognized until much later.<\/p>\n
Warnock: What role do your pastels play?<\/p>\n
Swavely: Until recently, I didn\u2019t show my works on paper. They were only for me. I\u2019m only now realizing that the more that I do them, the more they inform the paintings. It\u2019s something that I practice every day. After dinner, I\u2019ll sit down at my table and work on these pastels on colored paper. I also make leporellos, which I find lead to paintings. Not necessarily, but they get me in the mood. They\u2019ve gone from separate practices to joining together.<\/p>\n
Drawing is a way of staying engaged. If I\u2019m away from the studio, I like to have a sketchbook or a little set of watercolors.<\/p>\n
Warnock: Some of your paintings on canvas have special kinships. Can you tell me about the works you call \u201csister paintings\u201d?<\/p>\n
Swavely: When I say \u201csister paintings,\u201d they\u2019re often really worked on together, sometimes beginning as a diptych but then separated, like separated at birth. The first time that happened, the paintings were like fraternal twins. I saw that one represented me, and the other, my twin sister. And they did go their separate ways to two different places. That was kind of huge.<\/p>\n
Other times, they\u2019re paintings that are done in proximity, that have similarities. I used to shy away from that because I thought every painting had to be totally different, but I think it\u2019s fine to explore the same thing. It always ends up very differently anyway, in terms of the color and the way things move.<\/p>\n
The paintings unfold and they are quite a surprise by the time I\u2019m finished with them. It\u2019s a series of muscle memories, happy accidents, materials behaving in a way that you can\u2019t entirely control. A painting could look like it took me five minutes, and it doesn\u2019t bother me. People will say, \u201cWell, how long did it take you to make that?\u201d It took me years to come around to making that.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Now I never mind the stretcher bars coming through. In fact, it can really add to the composition,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":253456,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[36],"tags":[1149,3458,3457,3459,3456,2878,98,3461,3462,100,99,3455,17,1117,3465,749,2538,9,3463,24,63,3460,3464,905],"class_list":["post-253455","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-brooklyn","tag-art","tag-art-books","tag-art-critic","tag-art-reviews","tag-artists","tag-books","tag-brooklyn","tag-brooklyn-art","tag-brooklyn-culture","tag-brooklyn-headlines","tag-brooklyn-news","tag-contemporary-art","tag-culture","tag-dance","tag-fiction","tag-film","tag-music","tag-new-york","tag-new-york-art-scene","tag-new-york-city","tag-nyc","tag-phong-bui","tag-poetry","tag-theater"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/253455","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=253455"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/253455\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/253456"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=253455"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=253455"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=253455"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}