CURTIS ANTHONY BOZIF

Interview with Judy Ledgerwood. A slightly different version of this interview first appeared in the catalog for my 2019 solo exhibition, Great Lakes, at the Evanston Art Center.

Judy Ledgerwood: While the subject matter is the Great Lakes, the meaning of the work resides in decisions you make in the painting process; the size of the canvas relative to the body of the viewer, the orientation of the image (horizontal or vertical), paint application, and color, etc. While the content of the paintings might be different for you than for every viewer, and I wouldn’t want to close down the various ways the paintings could be understood, what are these paintings about for you?

Curtis Anthony Bozif: These paintings are about a lot of things, but at the most basic level, they’re about the Great Lakes and they’re about painting. When I think of the Great Lakes, I think about scale and time. By scale, I mean their size relative to the human body, their time relative to human time. People often try to describe the Great Lakes by listing a bunch of figures like: they contain one-fifth of the liquid surface freshwater on the planet. This sounds like a lot, but of all the liquid water on the planet, only two and a half percent is freshwater. So what does one-fifth of two and a half percent mean? It means that the freshwater in the Great Lakes, as a natural resource, is both abundant and exceedingly rare. Similarly, we think of the Great Lakes as being very old; the result of the warming at the end of the last ice age, but that was 10,000 to 12,000 years ago. Earth is over 4.5 billion years old. On a geological time scale, the Great Lakes, like Homo sapiens, have just appeared. Reconciling these time scales is extremely difficult.

In terms of the paintings themselves, they’re about scale, texture, mark-making, and color, but also light. For me, abstraction is rooted in observation. Over the last year, I paid particular attention to the color of the lakes. I was fascinated by how the color would change relative to the clarity of the water and the weather. To begin with, clarity affects how much light passes through or is reflected by the water. So cloud cover, fog, humidity, air pollution, the time of day, and the brightness and angle of the sun, all affect the color. As does the strength and direction of the wind, which determines the size and strength of the waves which, in turn, churns up the sand and sediment on the lake bed, changing the clarity, and thus, its color. Industrial pollution also has a lot to do with water clarity. So does the biology of the lakes. I’m thinking of the algae blooms that have turned parts of Lake Erie, at times, a slime green. It’s important to remember this is caused by the runoff from industrial agriculture, i.e. pollution. The zebra and quagga mussel is another good example. They’re filter feeding invasive species that have greatly increased the water clarity over the last few decades, but have also been the cause of many cascading negative effects to the ecosystem and economy of the Great Lakes.

But to get back to the paintings, when I first started the series, I was thinking a lot about how I could make light interact with their surfaces and affect their color. I found that I could use iridescent paints and glazes to recreate some of the same effects I was seeing in the lakes. As a result, the paintings are always changing. They shimmer. As you move around them, the angle at which they absorb or reflect light changes. The color shifts. Certain parts of the paintings are obscured by a reflection while others appear to fall into shadow. In a sense, the paintings are hard to see. Like the lakes, they’re hard to know.

In a way that’s not easy to describe, I’ve always thought of painting as a way of thinking, a way of knowing. In that sense, these paintings have been a way for me to know the Great Lakes, but to know the Great Lakes often feels like an exercise in abstract thinking.

Ledgerwood: During our studio visit, I was struck by the vast sense of scale that you were able to achieve by the overall build-up of minutely-sized, seemingly random brushstrokes over the entire surface. For me, the mark-making suggested infinite unknowable space and time that felt geological, as if it has accrued over eons, not just weeks. What is the process that you used to develop this sense of scale and what is the significance of the scale?

Bozif: The size and volume of the marks relative to the larger surface area of the paintings, this kind of scale has been a prominent feature of my work since my undergraduate days at the Kansas City Art Institute. The first serious paintings I think I ever made were actually large ballpoint pen drawings on canvas; sometimes eight feet wide. I used a straightedge to draw countless horizontal lines parallel to one another. Slowly, the lines would build up and the dye would saturate the canvas so completely that it would create a strange, uncanny, iridescent surface. But, it was the repetitive intensity of the lines, the volume of marks, that gave the work its real power. That was a revelation for me. There’s something fundamental about repetition. It triggers a response—both physical and psychological—relative to two universal qualities of being: labor, what you do with your body, and time.

Practically speaking, I often paint with sticks in lieu of brushes. They have their own vocabulary of marks that I think helps short-circuit certain tropes of gestural abstraction. They do this because they can’t be loaded with a lot of paint. It’s a lot of repetitive mark-making: scratching, scraping, and pushing. This quickly builds texture. The more textured the surface becomes, the less control you have over the stick. The marks begin to look less human made and more natural. Through the accumulation of these kinds of marks into dense layers, I try to achieve an intensity that I hope makes the work compelling on both a physical and psychological level.

Another thing that I find interesting about this kind of scale is how it interacts with viewing distance. I read somewhere that Rothko’s recommended viewing distance to his paintings was eighteen inches. A strange optical sensation occurs when you look at his paintings this way. It reminds me of snow blindness, or color blindness, as it were. The edge of the paintings dissolve. It’s very disorienting. The point is that paintings can change depending on how and where you look at them. It’s not enough that a painting be interesting from a polite distance or from the other side of the room or on Instagram. So the sense of scale that I achieve in layers of seemingly random, minutely-sized marks creates a kind of depth that I hope draws a viewer closer. The closer you stand to them, the more the paintings reveal themselves. Like in sedimentation or deep space, the deeper you dig, the deeper you probe, the further back in time you can see. I think this may explain some of your associations with things like geological time and infinite unknowable space.

Ledgerwood: The surfaces of the paintings are mysterious. The build-up of pigment and textures in dense layers obscures the process, keeping it at a remove. Light reflects off the surface suggesting a flat reflective surface parallel to the viewer, but transparency within the network of paint application also reveals a shallow depth. Your paint application is both mechanical, by which I mean regular and repetitive, but also includes minimal, seemingly random visual incidents that creates an overall naturalistic impression. This effect is something like looking at a Monet water lily painting, both surface and depth. I’m curious to know how you determined that a “flat” surface focused treatment would be the best response to the subject matter when a perspectival response is a more traditional way to address landscape as subject. The shallow depth and the overall surface treatment situate the paintings alongside Modernist tropes of monochrome painting. What are you getting at by combining these tropes of representation?

Bozif: While I employ languages of abstraction and minimalism in my paintings, my work is deeply rooted in observation. I am not a landscape painter in the traditional sense. My interests lay not with the picturesque, but with the textures, patterns, and the fractal geometry of nature. To this end, erosion and sedimentation, growth and decay—geological and biological processes that help shape what we call landscape—greatly inform my work. In these natural processes—of increase and decrease, of concentration and dissipation, of transformation by repeated addition and subtraction—I find an analogue to the act of painting itself and a metaphor for incomprehensibly vast time scales and ecologies.

Thinking this way emphasizes materiality, texture, and surface. To achieve certain effects, I’ve embedded sand from the Lake Michigan beaches near my home into the surface of these paintings. Layers of thin glazes and iridescent paints enhance these textures. I’m interested in the tension between the depth created by these layers and the flatness that’s emphasized by their reflective surface. It’s not unlike looking at water.

The Monet reference is really interesting. What’s missing from most of those water lily paintings? A horizon; and any reference of a shoreline at all. The images are left without perspective, they’re flattened, and they explode laterally, they could go on forever. It’s probably why he kept increasing the size of those canvases. For the same reasons, I intentionally make no reference to the horizon or shoreline. I think this might have something to do with the qualities of vastness that you were describing earlier.

I’ve had the good fortune to spend some time in the deserts of the American Southwest; with their canyons, and hoodoos, and natural arches. Those landscapes are totally exposed, laid bare, obscene. In contrast, the Great Lakes, as landscape, though similarly vast, are hidden, concealed, repressed. So what are you left with? You’re left with unfathomable mammoths in scale. You’re left with natural wonders, unknowable depths, mysterious surfaces.

Again, I think it might come back to scale. If you zoom in on a landscape, at what point does it stop being a landscape? At what point does it start to look like something under a microscope? Conversely, if you zoom out, eventually you’d be left with astronomy. The same is true of time scales. How does one approach landscape on a geological timescale, which is to say, from the landscape’s perspective? Or, take it a step further, how does one approach landscape from a human perspective that’s not positioned outside or apart from nature, but as a part of nature. Nature painting itself. I don’t think this is an easy thing to do, but at this time in history, in the midst of climate change and ecological crises, artists who are interested in landscape as a subject have to take these things into account.

Ledgerwood: I see tropes of The Sublime in both landscape and abstract painting. Care to comment? Why is this idea of importance now?

Bozif: I couldn't place my work across the various meanings of that term over the years, at least not in a way that is both brief and respectful of your question. I'll just say I am fascinated by the sublime and think, for reasons I just mentioned, it might have more currency today than ever before.

Ledgerwood: In addition to the aforementioned Monet, your paintings also put me in mind of Whistler nocturne paintings and J.M.W. Turner, but only flatter, with a Late Modernist attention to overall surface like the paintings of Larry Poons or Milton Resnick. Do you situate your concerns as an artist making paintings alongside these artists or any others?

Bozif: I’ve only ever seen Resnick’s work in reproduction, but I’ve studied his work closely. He’s certainly someone with whom I share some concerns. In terms of scale, the mark, repetition, and the materiality of paint.

Even though he’s known primarily as a sculptor, Richard Serra’s work has had a big impact on me; the way he employs weight, mass, and balance to engage the viewer's body, even in his drawings. In terms of my own work, the accumulation of marks and the dense surfaces function similarly to the way weight, at least in my mind, functions in Serra’s work.

Two other painters that I have an affinity with include Rothko, who I mentioned before, and Adolph Gottlieb, whose burst paintings have an immediacy and focused intensity that I really love. Gottlieb also had some interesting ideas about nature which I won’t go into here.

Ledgerwood: What is it about painting itself as an art form and in particular the language of your paintings, which draws on tropes of both landscape and Modernist painting, that is of significance in this social/political moment? Because for me the contemplation of something vast, overwhelming, and mysterious completely tracks the way I feel about what's going on in the current political moment, but I’m curious to know how you arrived at a decision to paint these particular works once you returned to making art.

Bozif: Timothy Morton is a philosopher whose work I’ve been reading a lot of recently. He writes about ecology and climate change. He’s developed the term, hyperobject, which I find as compelling as I do useful. He describes hyperobjects as, “massively distributed entities in both time and space” that can be “thought and computed, but not directly touched or seen.” Examples include global warming, nuclear radiation, tectonic plates, the biosphere, and evolution. Morton writes that, “we realize, after we discover hyperobjects, that non-human entities exist that are incomparably vaster and more powerful than us, and that our reality is caught in them.”

To my ears, this sounds a lot like how you’re feeling about the current state of things. And, to go back to your earlier question, it also sounds a lot like the sublime. I discovered Morton’s writing only after I’d finished many of these paintings, but I was struck by how much his theorizing about hyperobjects resembled the way I had come to think about my art. The vast layers of minutely-sized, seemingly random marks, in my mind, recall the “disturbingly entangled […] opened-ended mesh” of interconnections that you discover when you attempt to plumb the depths of a hyperobject. To take the analogy a step further, you’ve described the shallow depth and reflective surface of the paintings as mysterious, I’ve gone so far as to say they’re hard to know. Like hyperobjects, the paintings are, to quote Morton again, “both vivid and slightly unreal […] uncanny and intimate at the same time.”

It’s not always easy to identify what it is that you’re painting. You’re living in a world and responding to it. The Great Lakes are just a point of departure. What I’ve tried to engage with is a kind of background feeling that also extends into my foreground, a sense which I suspect many people today can identify with, that there are inexpressibly large and powerful entities that permeate the fabric of our reality, yet defy our engagement.

June, 2019