Once you’ve seen the work of Weston artist Leslie Giuliani, it’s difficult to stop thinking about the vibrant colors, hypnotic implied narratives, and intricacies of a process that wraps in monotype, painting, embroidery and more. In viewing pieces like “Traveler” and “World of Wonders,” anchored by often amusing, sometimes darker, cartoonish and anthropomorphic figures, it’s fun to imagine the story behind Giuliani’s lexicon of symbols, abstract shapes, glyphs, and primitive characters.

Giuliani has upped the interpretation ante by embracing more abstract shapes in her newest mixed media works like “It Works!” and “Phantasm.” But perhaps the real puzzle for the uninitiated is this: What kind of artist is Giuliani? Printmaker, painter, weaver, rug hooker?

Genre-hopping like the best artistic polymaths, Giuliani is all of the above, often in a single composition—and while her works can look a bit folksy and homespun, looks deceive. Giuliani passionately embraces digital age technology throughout her process.

Her embroidered encaustic paintings combine encaustic (hot wax) painting, digital machine embroidery, and printmaking processes that include monotypes and silkscreen—all of it on Encaustiflex, a cross between paper and fabric. The images begin as drawings, which are turned into stitch files on her computer. Sent to a sophisticated computerized sewing machine, they are then stitched directly onto the encaustic paintings and prints. The embroidery files are infinitely repeatable and color choices even trickle down to thread choice.

Giuliani assembles a corps of painted, printed, and stitched pieces, and then choreographs them into a final composition, not unlike quilting. “Nothing is pre-planned,” says the artist, who continues to work on a series  in a 20-by-16 inch format.

Lever (2017), 16” X 20”, sewn encaustic monotype

“I got an iPad and I’m working with one of these new [design] programs. It’s really fun to work with geometrics,” Giuliani says of the new shape-making magic. “These new works are more taking monotypes and using decorative stitching as line elements as I sew them together.”

Giuliani, who has been influenced by Louise Bourgeois’ textile works, Philip Guston’s cartoon imagery, and Byzantine icon paintings, has also been weaving lately, and has been rug hooking for 20 years. She’s the one who taught New Yorker cartoonist Roz Chast how to hook. They’ve become close friends and will be exhibiting together in June at the Guilford Arts Center.

“The hooking I did mostly when my daughter was growing up,” Giuliani says of the intensive process. “I really don’t have time to do them without a commission.”

It Works! (2017), 6” X 20”, sewn encaustic monotype

Notable past commissions include five rugs she hooked for Rolling Stones guitarist Keith Richards and his wife, model and actress. Patti Hansen. “They live in town. They’re wonderful people,” says Giuliani, who met the couple through their designer and worked for them for six or seven years, repairing all the textiles in their house as well as hooking rugs for the couple.

Giuliani’s work will be in a group show opening Jan. 18 at the Walter Wickiser Gallery in Chelsea, and she’s also in the Some Like It Hot: Works In Encaustic exhibit opening Jan. 13 at the Rye Arts Center in Rye, New York.

Leslie Giuliani
Weston, Connecticut
Website

Top image: Detail from “World of Wonders” (cropped), (2016) 45”x 32”
Sewn and Embroidered Encaustic Painting. All photos courtesy of Leslie Giuliani.

The post Leslie Giuliani: Genre-Defying Art appeared first on Take Magazine.

Contemporary artist and abstract projectionist painter are not often terms one associates with a 14- year-old, but prodigy artist Qua is painting against the grain. Beginning in June 2017, Qua began a 17-evening live painting performance in New Haven, Connecticut, that began during the International Festival of Arts & Ideas and stretches into September. Qua has been inhabiting a 500-square-foot storefront of a downtown commercial space and filling the walls with a single abstract expressionist composition.

His performance, like his name, is unique: it includes collaborations with local artists and live music, and is centered around his high speed painting style fused with “local narratives and surreal imagery.” “I am a self-taught painter,” Qua writes via email. His name, while originally an accidental misspelling of the word “prequel,” now seems more prescient, he says, referencing the use of the word in the Latin phrase art qua art, or that art can be judged by aesthetics only.

Originally drawn to realism, Qua began experimenting with large abstraction when he began working in an artist studio by the Mill River almost two years ago. The large walls of the studio entranced Qua as he was able to paint compositions that “dwarfed me in size” and required more physical exertion. “Painting on a large scale requires the use of my full body, a more physical process including intensive arm movements and the use of my body as medium to house paint supplies and tools.”

Canvas 14, 4 1/2′ x 5′ mixed oil and acrylic, 2017. Image courtesy of the artist.

While Qua does not consider himself a “professional artist”—yet—the breadth and intensity of his work demonstrates raw skill. Moving between sharp details and abstract movement of color and cascading images, Qua’s work is dreamlike and poignant, capturing the emotion of his paintings as well as the viewer. He also brings a unique force of performance to his painting process.

Canvas 3, 4 1/2′ x 5′ mixed oil and acrylic, 2015. Image courtesy of Qua.

Originally a “private performance,” Qua began to invite viewers into the grandiose exercise of his painting technique. Adorned in costume and immersed in choreography, Qua paints to music, and uses light and video projection—and sometimes darkness—to “create a private space for me to be with my shadow self.”

Due to the generous sponsorship of a commercial realtor in downtown New Haven, Qua has been making live performance paintings at 817 Chapel Street since early June. He performs there at sundown 4-5 nights a week on the second floor and then displays his work during the day. The show is scheduled to end September 15th.

Qua
Deep River, Connecticut
Website

All images courtesy of Qua

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Casey Spectacular’s art breathes with the stained humanity of a life pulled through cigarette filters: the works cry, wrinkle, cough, and pustulate, occasionally smiling with lopsided lips and browned teeth. The characters who appear in his work are varied, often very old or very young, and usually suburban: in the collection I Used to Be a Dancer it is a friend from art school—a first generation Chinese immigrant depicted as a child in a series of awkward dance costumes; in “Suburban Dreams,” from the collection Connecticut, they are three white men in athletic gear embracing one another and giving a thumbs up in the parking lot of a Cumberland Farms. In others, they are distorted babies, female serial killers, and drag queens.

Wanda Jean Allen, These Women Are Dead series | Photo courtesy the artist’s website

“I think I am a visual artist, but they’re more illustrations,” he says of his work. “I’m really into storytelling, I think that’s where it’s at. Humans create drama, and that’s really cool to me.” Spectacular produces paintings most frequently but also outputs video and performance, as well as an upcoming novel.

Frequent motifs across mediums include parents, bodily fluids, and bad skin. Some works elicit embarrassment, often humor, sometimes fear, and all bare grossness as an ever present qualifier to life rather than an infrequent extreme. It never feels vulgar, nor do the gross details ever mock their subject. Their inclusion feels presented as an act of love for these sorts of characters, a way of presenting people as they are, unfiltered.

When Spectacular shows his paintings in galleries, many viewers respond with repulsion. “I don’t think there’s anything shocking about them,” he says. “People hate seeing crying babies or an old person’s veiny hand but it’s important to see these things as beautiful. They’re real stories.” Teenagers in particular, he says, seem to really relate to it.

Poor Casey

Spectacular’s art is largely concerned with themes of growing up, and the dynamics of the families we are born into as well as the families we find through culture. The youngest of four siblings in Norwich, Connecticut, Casey’s youth was spent surrounded by the teenage drama of his older family members, a facet of adolescence he has come to embrace as humorous and human. When he went to MassArt, he found familiars among the artists and goofballs in Boston’s punk and drag scenes. Though never feeling fully a part of either, these cultures exposed him to creative communities as well as ideas of performance and rethinking cultural symbolism.

Although many of the motifs in his work reflect those of his life, Spectacular says that the art is never really about him, but rather that the stories serve as a personal mythology: he is less interested in exploring the specifics of his own experiences than he is in a grander arc parallel not only to his life but to the lives of others. He says there is an element of folk art in how he focuses on the ways people from this area construct their worldview and how different lives react to living here.

Confusion

“When I was a kid I had a way easier time connecting with mythology than church. That was the only way I understood religion,” he says. “The idea that gods had personal drama that shaped everything – It made sense to me.”

Casey’s next project, Queef: A Novel, follows a young person in southern Connecticut as he grows out of an unwanted youth and begins to find value through his first encounters with queerness, drug use, and meeting the kinds of people they tell you not to spend time with.

On August 12th, a show will open to coincide with the completion of the book at the Hygienic Gallery in New London. It is a presentation of moments and details from the novel featuring stylized excerpts and illustrations from Casey and 26 other artists.

A painting of the novel’s main character wears a secondhand gym uniform with the collar torn so that it hangs of the teenager’s shoulder. “The shirt was real. If we couldn’t afford new ones the school gave us secondhand ones, and of course I’m like the only gay kid in the school and I got the one that hangs halfway off my chest.”

Casey likens the shirt to a natural symbol of New England outsider mythology, “It was perfect, I had to put it in the writing,” before adding, “but the face came out too pretty and I don’t know how I feel about it. I’m not sure I like it.”

Casey Spectacular–Artist
New London, Connecticut
Website
Facebook

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