It's a really general question, but I was wondering if you could tell me about your personal background as an artist.
I was born and raised in North Dakota. I received a BFA from the University of North Dakota in 1996 and an MFA from the Rhode Island School of Design in 1998. I had a couple of residencies: one in Provincetown, MA from 1998-1999; the other in Houston, TX from 1999 - 2001. From Houston I moved to Los Angeles thinking it may be better for me to be poor in LA rather than Houston. Me and my fiancé Lillie have been here for three years now.
Basically I've been showing my work for 5 years.
How have you approached your work in the past and at the moment? How has it changed?
I've always approached my work with just that: WORK! It is definitely a practice
The appearance of the work has changed, but I think I've always been interested in creating a resonant situation, and more significantly, an image that stuck in your craw. In making pictures, sometimes I think if I keep the viewer there for longer than the 6 to 8 seconds, which is supposedly the average, I may be doing pretty good. I feel it's good to whittle things down to a manageable size.
How has process and language played a part in your works results?
I've always had a consistent drawing and painting practice. Through a lot of experimentation with process oriented work, primarily sculpture, I learned that the space in which I was most facile was in two-dimensions: in picture-making. I have a really conventional, almost classical approach: draw it and fill it in! It seems to be working out well.
I've always made lists of titles, and my practice involves keeping notes, notations and sketches in books. I have an ongoing list of titles and quotes in my studio. One of the quotes is from James Toney, a boxer recently suspended for alleged steroid use. He was asked what he thought of the whole ordeal, and he responded: "Man, I just wanna get this over with and get back to doing what I do best…and that's knockin' heads in!" Lately I've been thinking that all the big ideas I may try to articulate, or rely on in the work, don't mean anything unless I can make a lasting image, a good painting.
Accessibility has always been important to me. In grad school I'd match an icon with some personal story or anecdote. I think this just created a starting point. I started thinking this approach was too idiosyncratic, too esoteric, and got sick of having to explain it all the time. Granted, this was the Matthew, Matthew, Kara era: Ritchie, Barney and Walker. All artists of note for the time that dealt with elaborate, often convoluted, cosmologies. At some point I figured there were as many things that made people similar as made them different. I had some seasonal, holiday imagery in the work, some Americana, festive things really, so I began focusing on that.
That's one of the hard lessons: the work has to be functional and versatile socially. It has to be socialized. I think that's important.
For me, the work and imagery are accessible, permeable. I employ a familiar pictorial format, making it accessible to people from a variety of social, economic, educational backgrounds. I want to give the viewer some breathing room. That's the political dimension of art I'm interested in: not one of social opposition, but of possible social access and accord. Can I make something that is welcoming and accessible while retaining an edge or a rub of some sort? There has to be head scratching that is not about unlocking some code. I'd like people to come up to it and say: "Okay, I know what I'm looking at"; then, "I like this, it's well made"; then, "Wait, what the hell is going on here?" I like the work to have a congenial sort of edge.
Why owls, why coolers, and what brings you to present such perversely, obsessively perfect fuzzy images of ordinary objects?
During my residency in Provincetown, MA, I began to focus on things I shared with other people: sports, art, the holidays…commonalties. I also accomplished a lot with the airbrush: something I had tried in grad, liked the effects and have used ever since. I like it because it is a sort of drawing gesture that makes an atmosphere. Funny thing: in my last crit at RISD they said, "everything is great, but you gotta get rid of the airbrush!"
The drawings and paintings at that time were really Tim Burtonesque, very Nightmare Before Christmas. After awhile I started wondering why all the stuff was dark in tone. They seemed like remnants of some sophomoric ideal of what art was supposed to reflect. It wasn't even close to how I perceived these things, or how I wanted to be perceived. I began looking at what was there and how I was representing it.
There were always things in transmutation, in curious cycles of change: a raccoon into a basketball or a snowman into a scarecrow. I started thinking that just having the snowman or a basketball in a painting exhibited within the commercial fine art context, was a gesture, a transformation: one that was not illustrated, but embodied. That seemed to be a bigger, better idea to me. "Narrative" eventually fluttered off my radar.
I've become a lot more interested in what is actually going on in front of the viewer, and focusing on how the space is depicted can allude to the perception of the object/scene depicted. "How deep should I look into a 5 foot by 6 foot painting of a blurry cooler?"
The snowman is just an absurd, ridiculous image of a "man" (3 round balls of snow…a man?) crudely, and whimsically built from the immediate surroundings. This started as a culture/nature thing, and for some people that is interesting. But, I like that the snowman is a personage and an object at the same time. I hope that the smile is a welcoming gesture: a parallel to what I want the viewer to bring in seeing it. But the smile can either be scary or warm. It is an image of ambiguity and projection. I like that so many ideas and associations can be plugged into the image. I think coolers are similar: they keep things hot or cold.
Ambiguity is an important thing in picture making and can give an image a power and resonance. People have to remember what they saw. With this in mind, I've lowered the detail, up-ed the precision. I think I have enough detail for duration while retaining the power of the whole.
The airbrush technique used to create the out of focus condition can stamp an image mysterious, giving it an aura. I like how it is so actual, literal, and retinal. So, within the blur, the eye is constantly trying to close the image, give it definition, and in turn is always brought back to it. A sort of throb is created, sometimes moving the eye out towards the edges of the canvas and back to the center. It is a sign, and mechanism, of constant reconsideration. I think this is interesting when depicting imagery uncommon in a commercial fine art context.
Interview with Lupe Nunez-Fernandez, 2005: Part 1