The Conversation's website: http://theconversationpod.com/ Please subscribe to The Conversation on iTunes, and leave a positive review: https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/conversation-artist-podcast/id481461646 Brooklyn-based painter Stephen Westfall talks about: Living in Brooklyn (Red Hook), where the rent on his loft will soon be going up 18%, and how he's considering living elsewhere in the city, or possibly New Jersey (since he teaches at Rutgers); the crazy real estate market, via shell properties and so on, yet how their might be a tiny glimmer of hope; how his best year of sales, in 2011/12, allowed him the opportunity to purchase a cottage upstate, but since his income has dropped since then his margins are on the tight side (which is noteworthy considering something as basic as getting rid of a dying tree on that property could be a serious expense); his coming of age in San Francisco as an anxiety filled youth, and his subsequent emergence as an artist via UC Santa Barbara's College of Creative Studies, where he began as a literary major; and we launch into a spirited debate about abstraction, including Stephen riffing on the ambiguity between figuration and abstraction; the 'Big Bang' of painting, starting with representation and eventually leading to, after five centuries, being about painting itself, and abstraction as the next 'Big Bang'; that there's "abstract painting because there are more things to paint abstractly," also known as 'shark's teeth,' in which "the more things you have, the more spaces you have between things"; the willingness to have a suspension of belief, and how, unique to painting, it is both an imagined space and a thing at the same time; and how he didn't go to openings for 10 years after a painful breakup with a fellow artist, and how, in turn, he learned that legends in the art world can be created just by not going out to openings for a while. The Conversation on Stitcher (the alternative to iTunes): http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/wwwstitchercompodcasttheconversation/the-conversation-art-podcast?refid=stpr The Conversation on Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/pages/The-Conversation-An-Artist-Podcast/254884424579431 http://instagram.com/artistpodcast Twitter: @artistpodcast Your support of the podcast is very much appreciated- donations can be made via the website, and help keep the show going.