The First Stop

This is a quick preview of upcoming episodes. The host David Livingston also reports that there will be seven more episodes in the fall season.

To view works discussed in the currently available episodes with Jeff Ostergren, Cat Balco, Jacquelyn Gleisner, and Polly Shindler, visit us at FirstStopArt.com

Cat Balco's colorful mandala-like paintings suggest centripetal motion and radiate energy. They’re thrilling to look at as beautiful abstractions, and at closer viewing her expressive paint strokes appear to have depth due to her subtle use of shadow—a skill she developed from her time as a tromp l’oeil painter—and they start to feel like depictions of objects or environments that can’t quite be placed. Her paintings call to mind a disparate array of associations that seem somehow to be connected such as stars, suns, industrial machinery, instruments of torture, carnival wheels, female genitalia, and religious iconography. Go to http://firststopart.com to view the discussed work.

Follow Cat on Instagram: @catbalco

And visit her website: catbalco.com

Jacquelyn is fascinated by textile patterns, the expansive and cyclical nature of time and space, and the relationship between fragility, vulnerability, and strength—especially in the context of feminism. She works primarily with gouache, creating colorful repeating designs on 30-foot-long rolls of paper which she calls “scrolls.” More recently she’s been painting depictions of detailed multicolored knots on small sheets of paper. Her large scale painted scrolls reference weaving patterns that in the mind’s eye could continue into space forever. All of her scrolls have been removed from the gallery setting and placed into outdoor environments—some of them hung like banners or flags from the sides of buildings, others left on the ground. Many of the scrolls have been cannibalized and metamorphosed into new works of art.

Jacquelyn’s detailed knot drawings, with no beginning or end, are also tied to her interest in the infinite, while also exploring the longstanding importance of the knot both as a universal symbol and a word containing multiple meanings.

You can follow Jackie on Instagram @jacquelyn.gleisner

In this podcast, David Livingston Interviews the artist Polly Shindler. Polly is a prolific painter, who over the years has toggled between abstraction and realism. She has always been a collector of objects, images, textures and ideas. In the past couple of years, Polly has become fascinated by furniture, interior design, and imagined domestic spaces decorated with objects she finds both in the real world and on the internet. Her paintings deal with myriad subjects, a few of which are the human yearning for privacy, the push and pull between real and imaginary, as well as the complex history of painting. Go to http://firststopart.com to view the discussed artworks.

An interview with the Jeff Ostergren, an artist who makes art using crushed pharmaceuticals and processed "food." Go to https://www.firststopart.com to view accompanying images.

Jeff is a multimedia artist working in sculpture, painting, performance, and digital video. His work tackles addiction, desire, corporate greed, legal drug abuse, philosophy, and gender among other things. In much of his work Jeff examines the ways in which our bodies absorb and are altered by pharmaceuticals and processed food, as well as the way in which the corporate messaging for these products leads us into a dependency for these substances while also becoming its own kind of mind altering drug.