Last week Los Angeles based artist Bryan de Roo interviewed Gina Borg, who’s show Elements of Day is currently up here at K Imperial Fine Art. Borg and de Roo became friends during their graduate years at Boston University — here, they discuss the accumulation of marks, the nuts of bolts of painting, and the space between light and dark.
Gina Borg, oil and wax on canvas, 48x48 inches, 2012
BdR: I’m curious about the dark and lightness in your work, especially this most recent work. The dark is very dark. The light is very light. Are there specific emotional or psychological states you feel that guide you as you work? I suppose I sense a kind of “slipping into darkness” that you sometimes try to break free of and at other times are willing to face full on.
GB: Light and dark. Yes, I was surprised the dark ones were included in the show. I’m actually more interested in the range between light and dark, the penumbra, or liminal space. It is not this and it is not yet that. But you have to begin somewhere to have movement, however slow. I don’t set out to describe emotions, although some people perceive the paintings as emotional. It kind of gets in there because I work on them so long, I think. I think of it more as psychic weather, but the accumulation of little mutations just seems to feel like something. Each painting is just an experiment in color and tone. But I work on them a long time, and they morph into slightly stranger creatures. I am guided by a desire to see the pile up of pieces become an organism.
BdR: The title of your exhibition, “Elements of Day” suggests to me that each painting is representative of a time of day. Is the title meant that literally?
GB: I mean elements as in particles, or cells, or building blocks, and using them to study light, day… as in a 24 day, which includes all range of light. And light is everything.
BdR: You’re quoted in the press release of having said, “my years of studying nature through paint.” Are you specifically referring to plein air painting or the way paint is a natural material that you are studying?
GB: The nature bit refers to representational painting in general. The way I use paint completely comes out of my history of painting to try and see more, be it a landscape or a naked stranger in art class. The way light falls on objects. I just don’t paint the objects anymore. Water imagery came in accidentally; I didn’t do it on purpose. But I love love love your idea of studying paint as a natural material. Like a scientist studying blood plasma or something. I wish I’d meant it that way.
BdR: Hearing that I have a couple different responses. One, you are interested in merging a scientific method into the creative act – or perhaps some pseudo version. And, that as a painter you are interested in the parts of a painting; the nuts and bolts. What do these ”elements” mean to you? Why are they important?
GB: It’s not scientific method, but it is a method. Science knows it has found what it’s looking for when it has reproducible answers. I think paintings, no matter how methodically constructed, create more mysterious questions, and could never be reproduced. So there is a false comfort in beginning a painting with strict parameters, as a study in color. Stripped of “meaning” other than color, without any emotional or political baggage at all. Impersonal. Then it’s such a surprise when your pieces of purple sitting next to your pieces of orange start firing off all these connections, sensations, memories. It’s befuddling and exciting and addictive, as you know. What’s left, the painting, ought to seem a little bit strange. I’m not too interested in “ideas” clearly articulated in paint. That could be done more efficiently with words. I don’t look at paintings to be taught how I should feel about the issues of the day. I go to look at paintings to receive a heightened sensibility of being here, and how strange it is, and how to see it all. Color, tone, brushstrokes, lines, pieces of paint are the elements. What can be built with such limited means? I have become more of the bricklayer type.
