These days, the walls of Envoy Enterprises gallery in New York's Lower East Side are exploding with color and sensuality, courtesy of the artist Winston Chmielinski. I caught up with the Boston-based, world traveling, whip-smart, and ever-smiling quirkster after the recent opening of his show, titled Ecstatic Skin, below. Catch it before it closes on December 31, 2012!
Sofia Cavallo: Congrats on your first solo show! Tell me about the body of work on display.
Winston Chmielinski: Thank you Sofia! I’m very biased when it comes to evaluating my own work, so I decided about a year ago to paint copiously and let the title and the final selection arise out of edits. Relatively all the work is recent—done within the past year or so—and what comes through is a lived sincerity, which I believe is only achievable through painting every day. My hands and fingernails are perpetually green. I use a lot of pthalo and it stains the worst.
SC: Your work is distinctive in its über-sensual use of color, but also in its partial representation. Certain features in the faces and bodies you paint will often be blurred by swaths or clouds of color. What are you obscuring?
WC: When I used to paint almost solely from found photos of people, which are full of narrative hooks, I would obscure anything that stopped me short of a direct experience with the figure, its gaze, or its posturing. What I discovered is that fragmentation in a reference photo can elicit beautiful accidentals, but if it’s too artificial or formulaic then my hand feels inhibited within hard lines and around graphic blocks of color. It’s refreshing to hear that my new work has spiraled back atop the old, since I’ve had to wrestle the process onto its back in order to achieve a more spontaneous commingling of painted and implicated spaces, through the variability of color and brush stroke rather than measured delineations.
SC: What's your favorite piece in the show and why?
WC: I always come away with two favorites, one for its visual success and the other because, within the intimate process of painting it, I brushed up on something new or cached. Respectively then they are Pause and The Canopy Is Falling.
SC: Remember when you were involved in Dr. Vaginal Davis’s talk show Speaking from the Diaphragm? Tell me everything!
WC: How could I forget? It was a chance opportunity through NYU that awakened the exhibitionist inside of me: opening night I was all abuzz in my tighty whities, gyrating for the audience and a slew of shocked and disturbed faces on ChatRoulette… And Ms. Davis is a gravitational force, a giant heart. The people who came out for her support, and whom I got to meet through the run of the show, are role models for just doing despite everything. Performing may not be my professional call, but personal expression is a coalescence and transposition of all our parts, so it’s important to exercise those that are in need of developing.
SC: What do you get up to when you're not painting?
WC: I can only paint for stretches of up to three hours before I need a short break, not just from the fumes but also the athleticism of full-arm and upper-body gestures, so I try to get outside and snap up more pictures for my running image banks. I do shop a lot for clothing too, more for the experience of touching textiles and sartorial self-education… Someday I’d love to work with fabrics. I’m also an avid eater, and will stop multiple times at a café so I can browse and sample edibles twice. Guilty pleasure is dining while watching TV. I will plan a meal around ease of ingestion and refill-ability, so that I can just fixate on the screen. <
Sofia Cavallo: Congrats on your first solo show! Tell me about the body of work on display.
Winston Chmielinski: Thank you Sofia! I’m very biased when it comes to evaluating my own work, so I decided about a year ago to paint copiously and let the title and the final selection arise out of edits. Relatively all the work is recent—done within the past year or so—and what comes through is a lived sincerity, which I believe is only achievable through painting every day. My hands and fingernails are perpetually green. I use a lot of pthalo and it stains the worst.
SC: Your work is distinctive in its über-sensual use of color, but also in its partial representation. Certain features in the faces and bodies you paint will often be blurred by swaths or clouds of color. What are you obscuring?
WC: When I used to paint almost solely from found photos of people, which are full of narrative hooks, I would obscure anything that stopped me short of a direct experience with the figure, its gaze, or its posturing. What I discovered is that fragmentation in a reference photo can elicit beautiful accidentals, but if it’s too artificial or formulaic then my hand feels inhibited within hard lines and around graphic blocks of color. It’s refreshing to hear that my new work has spiraled back atop the old, since I’ve had to wrestle the process onto its back in order to achieve a more spontaneous commingling of painted and implicated spaces, through the variability of color and brush stroke rather than measured delineations.
SC: What's your favorite piece in the show and why?
WC: I always come away with two favorites, one for its visual success and the other because, within the intimate process of painting it, I brushed up on something new or cached. Respectively then they are Pause and The Canopy Is Falling.
SC: Remember when you were involved in Dr. Vaginal Davis’s talk show Speaking from the Diaphragm? Tell me everything!
WC: How could I forget? It was a chance opportunity through NYU that awakened the exhibitionist inside of me: opening night I was all abuzz in my tighty whities, gyrating for the audience and a slew of shocked and disturbed faces on ChatRoulette… And Ms. Davis is a gravitational force, a giant heart. The people who came out for her support, and whom I got to meet through the run of the show, are role models for just doing despite everything. Performing may not be my professional call, but personal expression is a coalescence and transposition of all our parts, so it’s important to exercise those that are in need of developing.
SC: What do you get up to when you're not painting?
WC: I can only paint for stretches of up to three hours before I need a short break, not just from the fumes but also the athleticism of full-arm and upper-body gestures, so I try to get outside and snap up more pictures for my running image banks. I do shop a lot for clothing too, more for the experience of touching textiles and sartorial self-education… Someday I’d love to work with fabrics. I’m also an avid eater, and will stop multiple times at a café so I can browse and sample edibles twice. Guilty pleasure is dining while watching TV. I will plan a meal around ease of ingestion and refill-ability, so that I can just fixate on the screen. <