Alex Hutton

ARTIST STATEMENT

The through line of my work is the effort to remain sensitive to the compression of histories layered on our cities, landscapes, and all manner of places in between and to engage with the culture of forms that grows out of this process. The goal is to slow down in order to focus and absorb what is there to be felt. This observing is some attempt to connect with and elucidate the sense of interdependence that permeates the world. In this vein, I want to pay mind to the way in which we envision ourselves in relation to other living beings and how that positioning shifts overtime with the folding in of new technologies, new capabilities, and new tools for seeing. And there is a crucial element of choice. What we choose to notice will shift the way we represent the world to ourselves.

Interview with Alex Hutton

Can you tell us a bit about your background and how you became interested in becoming an artist? Who or what were some of your most important early influences?

I lived in Jupiter, Florida until 2010, where I played outside on the unpaved roads and in the woods, learning how to catch lizards and bugs. The paintings on the walls in the house there must be lodged in my brain for good: a close-cropped watercolor of a flowering palm, a painting of great blue herons, and other pieces that took local scenes and wildlife for their subject. My mom has a background in art and encouraged me to apply for the arts middle school and high school that set me on that path. My family was sympathetic to it as a pursuit. The risks were understood in terms of trying to make a living of it, but it never felt like much of a conscious choice. I’ve always been comfortable working alone for long periods of time, and working with my hands. Having good teachers was important and very lucky. Knowing people that prioritized art in their own lives really made a difference.

Where are you currently based and what initially attracted you to working in this place? Are there any aspects of this specific location or community that have inspired aspects of your work?

Now I live and work in Brooklyn, NY. School was the reason for coming here. I stayed because I was able to find work, and because I sensed there were more opportunities here than back home during that part of my life. The extremes of the city are amazing; It’s as atrocious as it is beautiful. I think it’s a good place to work, to cut your teeth, to be disillusioned but also a little deluded. The air feels pressurized with everyone’s activity and you get the sense that if you’re not doing something at every moment then you’re wasting time, so that sense of urgency is good if it can be directing into the artwork, but it’s also possible to absorb too much. The imagery of city infrastructure found its way into my work fairly quickly, maybe because it was so new to me, having never lived in a big city before. I was adapting to a new situation and it showed up in the work. The bridges, the waterfronts like East River Park, and the birds in Prospect Park have been and still are fruitful places to find forms and ideas. My favorite places tend to be peripheral to the main activity of the neighborhood where the presence of the elements outside the human-made structures start to creep in.

Can you describe your studio space? What are some of the most crucial aspects of a studio that make it functional? Do any of these specific aspects directly affect your work?

A second bedroom that measures 11 feet by 11 feet functions as my current studio. The best part is the sunlight. The apartment building is situated on the corner of the block so it catches morning and mid-day light. A couple tracks of LED lights on the ceiling keep the room bright during the rest of the day. I made a work table on castors with a glass top that holds the brushes and paints. I have a bookshelf made to fit the corner of the room with small platforms for four small plants. There is one good wall for painting. Opposite is a small desk and chair under one window. The largest rolled canvases are suspended in a kind of makeshift hammock where the ceiling meets the wall, and the rest, including stretched canvases and panels, are stacked in the closet. I now work on un-stretched canvas with the edges taped off so that I can make a lot of work without the stretchers taking up space. And I do wonder if might have considered more sculpture and printmaking again if space wasn’t at such a premium. I can’t make too much noise or get too destructive and messy. But I’m quite happy with it; It’s the first studio that really feels comfortably like my own place.

What is a typical day like? If you don't have a typical day, what is an ideal day?

There’s something implausible about trying to describe a typical day. The best I can do is break it into three kinds of days. A typical work day involves some art handling work, sometimes driving to and from a pickup or drop-off, wrapping and unwrapping people’s paintings. Tape is typically involved at some point. Lifting things is typically part of it. Another typical day is the studio day. I try to treat the studio day like a job and make sure I do something productive for at least 8 hours. Here there is doubt but a lot of freedom because it is entirely self-directed. And the last kind of day is composed of everything else that is the rest of life.

What gets you in a creative mindset?

Minimizing distractions is the most reliable approach for me when it comes to getting into a creative mindset. Managing anxious tendencies, eating well, sleeping well, and exercising all while I’m not trying to be creative makes it more possible to finally make things when I would like to be creative. A level of persistent self-awareness is needed but it’s also about playfulness. Accessing the right mindset is tricky but I don’t think of creativity itself as being very mysterious. I think we all have a baseline of general openness and playfulness that facilitates abstract thinking, but that drive can be easily suppressed by the realities of life. Just like there is a natural impulse toward experimentation and play, there is a drive toward rigid thinking and a reliance on what has already been proven as sufficient. Recognizing the two tendencies and considering when and where to consciously employ them is the trick.

What criteria do you follow for selecting materials? How long have you worked with this particular media or method?

Currently my paintings are oil, thinly painted often on a canvas or linen surface that has been prepared with some combination of gesso, acrylic titanium white, and sometimes a colored acrylic ground. For the last few years I’ve used this approach: thinly painted, with few layers on a smooth surface, and quickly. I try to finish a painting in one session, in one day. This way of working gives me a lot of freedom. I can change anything or completely wipe away what I’ve done and start from scratch because everything is set up to be fluid and flexible. This also removes a lot of second guessing I would have done given an unspecified amount of time to finish something, and I come up with solutions in the moment because I have to. If it falls short, I can try again another day. I’ve chosen the medium first because I feel most fluent with it. But this decision means that I ought to seek territory that is unique to painting, or why paint? Finding that niche is perhaps one of the most interesting challenges, especially when each new medium comes into use and shifts the territory of other mediums and breathes new possibilities into those mediums, as photography did with painting. So while I don’t want to be a purist about mediums and imply that they can only have a specific use in a specific context, I do think it’s wise to keep an eye on the landscape of media and their unique capabilities at all times.

Can you walk us through your overall process? How long has this approach been a part of your practice?

Photography is often a starting point. Usually I will go out with the idea of taking my own photographs but recently I’ve started watching video feeds of animals and landscapes from other locations and pulling still images from those scenes. The goal is to simply compile a lot of images that work as input for the imagination. I don’t have strict criteria for what makes the cut and I consciously resist putting words and overt conceptual frameworks around this part of the process. The motive to begin with must be simply to respond openly and honestly, to record without judgement any moment that feels significant. The “why” is more often grappled with in the consideration after the fact, and in the space between paintings. The timing of these steps is always flexible, and they will create a sort of feedback with each other. For instance, if I don’t work with images immediately, I’ll often come back to them years later after an experience with the medium produced a new idea for how to tackle the images. I don’t want to be thinking while I’m painting, but I don’t want to be going through the motions either. There is some other mode of working which feels like neither: purely responding to the present situation. It must be related to the feeling of intuition or insight and maybe I only get 30 seconds of that state in each painting, but that’s what I’m trying to get to. I’ve worked more or less like this for a few years, but that will probably change. I never want to be very prescriptive, even with my own work.

Can you talk about some of the ongoing interests, imagery, and concepts that have informed your process and body of work over time? How do you anticipate your work progressing in the future?

A lot of recent imagery comes from a fascination with the way animals move through a field, especially those animals that are not directly interacting with people but are in some way alert to danger. They have a different movement and sensibility. I’m impressed with their graceful way of dealing with vulnerability. On another level, our own anthropomorphizing of them is important to me as it seems to say as much about ourselves as our understanding of their behavior. I often conceive of them in the work as a model for either ourselves or some generic consciousness. Alongside this perception of behavior is their shifting formal composition as a group in a field that works as a compositional framework to play with. I also think of their capacity for camouflage as a means of augmenting the figure-ground relationship in paintings. I had removed the human figure from my work because the literal presence of the figure seemed to be too psychologically heavy and specific for my purposes. But I anticipate the reintroduction of the figure may happen at some point, which might involve this idea camouflage, applying it to the social dynamics between people, in a metaphorical sense.

I’m interested in connections between poetry and painting. They seem to grapple with similar formal problems such as how to access, embody, and communicate essential qualities of experience. And they both touch on broader questions about the limits of subjective experience and perception. I’m interested in the areas where language and analogies break down - what seems to be fundamentally untranslatable and why. More specifically I look at themes involving the continual reconceptualization of “nature”, and the individual confronting the city. I’ve started with some of the well-known American poets like William Carlos Williams, Mary Oliver, and Wallace Stevens, to start piecing together a lineage of ideas with which I might feel some affinity for.

I used to have an eye toward a more traditional realism, so one ongoing personal project is to give more credence to memory and imagination, and my subjective experience. Paying more attention to the performative aspects of painting helps as well. I want source images to be a tool but I don’t want to depend on them as a source of authority or else I feel like the paintings will never be fully paintings. I also like to think of it by analogy as a move from prose to poetry - a less is more approach. That being said I don’t have a particular endpoint in mind as an ideal approach. For me it may be more important to be able to move from one approach to another.

Do you pursue any collaborations, projects, or careers in addition to your studio practice? If so, can you tell us more about those projects, and are there connections between your studio practice and these endeavors?

Aside from building things when I get the chance, most of my free time is taken up by painting now. Every pursuit is really tangential to the studio practice but it all affects my approach to art; I don’t think they can be untangled even though the connections are not obvious to me. Lately I get the most out of reading nonfiction. I’m definitely more interested in history now than I ever was. The book “1491” was a good read about the state of the Americas before European intrusion. Older civilizations are fascinating, especially the structures they have built. Recently I’ve tried to understand some basics of media theory as I learned that the idea of new media changing people’s behavior had been a concern for a long time. It looks like there was already some literature on the subject by the 1970’s, so that’s been interesting to dip into, considering the present focus on the problems with social media. A couple books on cave art have helped me think about the whole project of art theory from a different angle. The problem is everything is interesting and every field seems to have relevance to every other field. And the more I look into something the more I’m aware of how little I will ever actually know or understand any subject because the complexity seems bottomless. But it’s usually more exciting than it is depressing.

As a result of the pandemic, many artists have experienced limited access to their studios or loss of exhibitions, income, or other opportunities. Has your way of working (or not working) shifted significantly during this time? Are there unexpected insights or particular challenges you’ve experienced?

Things did change for me, but somewhat for the better. I did give up my studio that was outside of my apartment, but it was finally a good opportunity for my partner and I to live together rather than each of us living separately with roommates. With the lack of pressure to go hang out with groups of people I was much more comfortable in my own skin as an introvert. Focusing on what I wanted to make for long stretches of time became more possible, more forgivable. But even that was really only possible because my work situation didn’t get too disrupted. Most other art handling and artist assistant work must have taken quite a hit but I was really fortunate to have a great employer. When it came to painting, I worked with more urgency and felt more determined. There were not many exhibition opportunities or similar things on the horizon before the pandemic so there wasn’t much to lose career-wise.

Can you share some of your recent influences? Are there specific works—from visual art, literature, film, or music—that are important to you?

I recently re-watched Ken Burn’s “The West”, and the series “How To” by John Wilson. The former is still powerful and sad, and the latter is cathartic for an NYC resident. My favorite song at the moment is “No One Lives Forever” by Oingo Boingo. There’s a good YouTube and podcast series called “Fall of Civilizations” by Paul Cooper which can really put things in perspective. I’m really excited about what the James Webb telescope will be able to see. I loosely pay attention to things happening in astronomy and physics which I find inspiring, since they offer new ways of seeing on different scales. The fact that we can move around individual atoms one at a time is insane. At the same time, we can’t seem to find a way to house everyone and get people proper healthcare. I like most things that touch on that absurdity of the human experience.

Who are some contemporary artists you’re excited about? What are the best exhibitions you’ve seen in recent memory and why do they stand out?

This is one of the hardest questions. I hesitate to name names for fear of leaving out anyone. Ask your friends what they’re working on. Ask to see the work. This is something I need to do more of myself. The work that makes it into galleries is just a thin sliver of the work out there. Some of the best work might be sitting in your friend’s studio, or hasn’t been made yet if we haven’t invested in that person’s potential.

Do you have any tips or advice that someone has shared with you that you have found particularly helpful?

One piece of wisdom I heard in school was that young artists have a tendency to cram too many ideas into one piece, and I think that is generally true. The other piece of advice I draw on often is the idea that the editing process is really important. Choosing what survives to be seen is a unique aspect of control and influence that the artist has over their own work. I think some progress for myself has come from learning to shift the editing from the realm of making work to the realm of presenting work. In other words, I closed myself off to making certain things at the outset without truly knowing what they would have been. There is probably more self-discovery to be made in letting through the full range of impulses by producing more and then editing afterwards.

What are you working on in the studio right now? What’s coming up next for you?

In terms of subject, I haven’t tired of birds, water, and grass. The other day, however, the thought that I should try something completely different came to the forefront very loudly, but I have no idea what that would look like. That turn is an exciting place to be. I guess it comes from feeling myself fall into a pattern where the stakes are too low. There are more variations to try and I could stick with theses current series indefinitely but I need to keep it interesting for myself.

To find out more about Alex Hutton check out his website.