Excited to drop the 11th Episode of the Steve Sas Schwartz Podcast. In this installment I discuss my Sentinels series from 2015 - 2019.

The Sentinels are about alchemical magic, using prosaic materials and converting them to something utterly different, hopefully riveting. The concept, in essence, is product lust. What makes something so desirable we crave it? What is the value of art? Why does anything beyond its utility have value? Beauty. Fun. The promise of something challenging to have. These are some answers. I wanted to create something mystical, futuristic - sort of - something banal yet unexpectedly oblique. A charged presence from the future though built with components from the past.

In this lecture I dig into this to a degree. Hopefully it’s interesting and worth your time.

Thank you for watching and/or listening.

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Steve

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Welcome to the 10th episode of the Steve Sas Schwartz Podcast (More Notes From The Underground). Tonight I talk about my Timemarker paintings.

The Timemarkers are shaped canvas paintings, as they say, although canvas is a stretch applied to these, I did from 1987-1993. They are actually more like relief paintings, or dioramas, but we can get into that later. These pieces were based upon my sense of inherited history, how we stand on the shoulders or are crushed by the feet of what came before us, individually and as a culture. They are industrial landscape-based, and somewhat reflect my view of Manhattan from my DUMBO, BKLYN loft circa 1985, although I would have denied that at the time. They are built out of roofing material I found on my roof and later tracked down the vendor somewhere in Queens, a kind of corrugated aluminum that was really malleable, and a papier-mâché and plaster combo and inks I came up w for the frames which I wanted to resemble old stone, as well as acrylic and patched cotton duck canvas. So they are really tactile, dimensional pieces, as people seemed more fascinated by dioramas than paintings I reasoned.

The frames are based upon Puritan tombstones I was fascinated by at the time, they seemed so relevant to the early - mid 80’s East Village, NYC w the flying skulls and coffins and African-like masks and all kinds of icons of dread, and many I lifted directly and carved into my frames, others I made up, extending the inherited vocabulary. These pieces conflate time. Within these so-called 400 yr old frames were versions of our world today, kind of a dark post-apocalyptic version, sort of a warning of kinds, or sort of intimating America atone for its sins. Thus the interiors are all built landscapes, high-rises, bridges, hi-tension wires, roller coasters, boxcars ... I selected to define these things in the silver aluminum because it’s glossy and shiny and bounced from the matte skyline backdrops. Thus they’re reflective in low light at night; it extends the life of the paintings. I love the contrasts like this throughout these pieces, formally with the materials, and conceptually with the conflation of time.

The flavor of my world then was Delta Blues like Robert Johnson played obsessively, Blind Lemon Jefferson, etc., blended w punk, Husker Du, X, The Minutemen, crossed w Hank Williams, Sr., skateboarding, and fine art. I was possessed and would crank out a painting or two a day at times. Embracing folk art traditions like tombstone carving, and contemporary techniques like collage, seeking a blend of so called high art and low art, fine art and street art/pop art, folk art and what’s considered sophisticated art. And reading a ton of Philip K. Dick (literally everything), and J.G. Ballard (as much as pos.).

I think these pieces hit their mark and still look fresh today. I certainly hope they have that evergreen quality and yet carve out a space for themselves in the period they came from. My aim was to make them unique — indeed there’s nothing else like them — and meditative, something you could live with and sit with and reflect about our world, kinda like a church bell struck.

Hope you enjoy this installment, and please subscribe!

Thank you,

Steve

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Welcome to the 9th episode of the Steve Sas Schwartz Podcast (more notes from the underground). Tonight I talk about - or rather complain, ha - about the LA art scene, but then take a deep dive into my Wagon Wheel Mandala, an upgraded, intensely painted vintage wagon wheel.

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Thank you,

Steve

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Welcome to the Steve Sas Schwartz Podcast, where we discuss all things related to contemporary art. In Episode 8, I talk about what I call my Nitrocels, a cool word that describes this series of paintings and references the materials used.

This may be a two-parter, but loosely, these paintings reflect my interest in natural history or what you might call the natural world, Japanese woodblocks by artists such as Hokusai, Hiroshige, etc., and my obsession w exploring different materials.

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Steve

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a bit before covid i was fortunate enough to go to Africa and do philanthropic work w hope chest international. my role was the social media guy, but i ended up drawing portraits of swaziland aids and civil war orphans, and rwandan genocide survivors. i would draw them and give them the drawings, and in some cases it was collaborative and the kids colored them in. it was incredibly satisfying. these are from the first leg, and later went to sierra leone to draw ebola virus orphans.

In this installment I discuss my series of figure-based paintings, the Black Holes series.

These are large-scaled, textured paintings of silhouetted figures immersed abstracted environments. Here I share my thought and development process, and the why.

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Thank you so much,

Steve

Summary —

Welcome to the Steve Sas Schwartz Podcast — Episode 7, where we discuss all things related to contemporary art.

In this installment I talk about my Black Holes series, which is a figure-based series of paintings. As mentioned before I work in different genres simultaneously, which loosely are abstract, conceptual, and in this case, figurative.

These works evolved from my fascination w the human form and working directly from life, working up line drawings from someone posing. Then I like to abstract and re-contextualize them.

Regarding the drawing, I love the immediacy of line, black charcoal on a light surface. At best, the line at once describes the form and personality of the model. Line cuts to the chase, pairs away everything irrelevant, often shows the soul of the sitter albeit blended w that of the artist. But then I wanted the line to have volumetric life, not just have flat character, but dimensional personality too. So then I redraw the drawing w thick, transparent plastics that reveal the line but gives it physical depth as well. These lines are tactile and liven up the surface of the painting. In a sense, the figure exists to hang a painting on.

At this stage of the process these figures are still personalized, individuals. However, I wanted them specific yet general, and so I silhouetted them, which makes them more universal as it conceals particulars, and yet the line’s not camouflaged because it has three dimensional weight. So the silhouettes still have structure, a kind of scaffolding, unique but general.

I then like to set them in a spare yet somewhat active and lively environment, but w a restricted palette. These areas can be completely abstract w portions built up w thick ropes of plastics and other materials which adds a layered, archaeological aspect to the paintings.

Ideally, I’d like these pieces to feel at once iconic yet also somewhat everyday, a moment somehow caught and analyzed. And they should convey a physical, spiritual presence, something that resonates far beyond the materials and content, hopefully something transcendent.\\\

In this installment, Holden Fuller, contemporary painter, joins us for an in depth chat about his work.

Holden's work inhabits a space that combines abstract shapes and process with figurative components parsed from today's world.

Enjoy!

In Episode 5 of The Steve Sas Schwartz Podcast I discuss my Soul Kitchen series. This is a conceptual / sculptural series loosely based upon the Japanese tradition of Kintsugi, where broken crockery is repaired with gold leaf, tracing the history of the break and fix.

For those that don't know, I work in different genres at the same time, abstract, figurative, and conceptual. This is the conceptual leg.

Hope it's interesting and provocative.

Steve

In this series I want to speak a bit about my Soul Kitchen series. Some of the source materials are upgraded found relics or artifacts that I’ve reappropriated and 'fixed,’ somewhat like the Japanese tradition of Kintsugi, where broken crockery is reassembled with gold to both repair, enhance and acknowledge the wound. In my case I use blood red to emphasize and set the breaks.

In these pieces and through developing this series I got in touch with a profound sense of form, the essence of sculpture. I would argue one cannot sculpt without having a deep feeling for volume, space, weight, materials, and what they suggest. I, anyway, only had my ‘a ha’ moment while sculpting, like an avalanche realization, “Oh!”

With these works I play with elemental materials, stone, steel, and wood. Here, the pedestal is part of the piece, I don't buy the conspiracy we're supposed to ignore the giant blocky white cubed things supporting the sculptures, willful blindness, today re-coined as mass formation psychosis. Those pedestals are a great argument for the adage “sculpture only exists to trip over as you back up to see a painting.” For me, anyway, all should be considered in the field of view. In these pieces, the element of wood, solid, dense blocks of hardwoods such as black walnut, mahogany, spalted maple, and others, you can feel the weight, volume, and solidity, as well as yes, the value of the chunk, and appreciate the color, grain, polished-cubed shape as it supports the stone, doctored relics on steel spindles. Each segment respects the material, and complements each other like yin and yang, cube, sphere, and line, fundamental components of art making, all the noise stripped to the barest of essences, a core language.

The stones' color, texture, and matte quality contrasts with the glossy, polished wood mid-sections, which support and define each other. The height's determined by the linear spindles, a profile that suggests both elegance and sturdiness, levity and weight.

The stone is where things deepen. They are volumetric, rounded, and carved. In two cases they were utilitarian objects, metates or Native American grinding bowls, worn through and discarded. They possess a wonderful worked, handled, carved quality. This one seems faceted as if it was shaped to be held by some frame or something. These things would look amazing blown up to enormous proportions. Here I’ve high-lighted and treated the wounds by painting them a glossy, fire-engine red.

The amputated buddha head is of course it’s own thing, a carved stone buddha head flea-market find, meant to indicate an old statue where the head was lopped off. Perfect. Here I’ve changed up the narrative and made it a beheading, painting the severed portion a blood red with glowing nitrocellulose (a juicy form of lacquer commonly used in nail polish). The same foundational rules apply here: sphere, cube, and line, tools in the toolkit.

Presentation and materials unite the Soul Kitchen series, though conceptually each piece is distinct.

Steve discusses his bister pack paintings.

Notes from the underground : Today i'm going to talk about my blister pack paintings, what they're about, why I do them, compulsion and components:

The aggravated surfaces of these works are made from recycled materials, blister packs, arranged into compelling arrangements, sometimes linear strands, sometimes layouts that recall architectural urban planning. For me they serve two purposes. One, repurposing found or discarded materials has been a theme in my work for decades. I think if u repurpose the past and make it new again u acknowledge history, responsibility, and can then look forward as well as appreciate the present. The second is about the presence of painting, the living vitality of the material. The alchemical powers of the artist. I used to make lavishly brushy oil paintings w a thick textural surface that distinguished the pieces from a printed poster, for example. The surface was alive and lively, active, had a personality unto itself. It also emphasizes the uniqueness of each piece of art. Ideally the piece would have a riveting, commanding presence. Now the collaged items help make this lively surface.

The recycled materials in these pieces, blister packs, are transparent plastic packaging that many consumer products come in, from medicine to tools to toys and so on. They r an ingenius piece of technology. Designed to showcase a product while protecting it from shoplifting and destruction by compression. A nearly invisible object that both protects and reveals, discarded upon purchase. These transparent plastic casings have their own volume and tensile strength. They are an architecture of the product. Combined and arranged with their cousins they create what evokes a community, a city scape if you will, inventive urban planning, which makes sense when u consider that we all live within the products we make. These pieces are maps of our world or future worlds. And that's just the surface.

Superimposed over the surface are geometric abstractions in primary colors, a vocabulary of clarity, solidity, the world pared down to geometry. These shapes are defined by primary colors because primaries are a shorthand for every color, as u can make every color from them. That really speaks to me, a concise abbreviation for everything, simple yet complex. All anchored by black and white, the DeStijl movement palette a la Mondrian and his pals.

They are also all roughly the same dimensions square in order to hold a space well. And the frames are artist made and colorized to enhance the pieces, are in fact part of the piece.

And for all the artists out there there's a real figure to ground relationship present ...

Of course this is just the components, the vocabulary of the works, which has nothing to do with the aggregate total. Ideally, the presented painting transcends all. I want them to exist like Rothkos, something that's moving and transports you somewhere else, a deep evocative space. I would like the levity of the palette to impart joy and hope, as that is what I feel in those colors. I would love to create an immersive room of these w my Zamboni Totems you could walk amongst and experience, seemingly, a portal of positivity.

In this episode we discuss many facets of Cybele Rowe’s work.