Chie Fueki Art

Chie Fueki, "Nikko," acrylic and colored pencil on mulberry paper on wood, 72 x 72 in.

My favorite ongoing art feature is Jennifer Samet's "Beer With a Painter" interview series at Hyperallergic. Here's a tip. If you want to understand art, no, make that enjoy art, read interviews with the artists themselves. If much of the critical writing on art tends to be jargon-riddled and heavy on the theory, most artists don't really talk about their art that way. This is not to say that they are all a bunch of primitives. It's that instead of "theory" you get discussions of the specific purposes and questions the artist is pursuing, in words that make that quest come alive, especially when spurred on by a skilled interlocutor such as Samet, since it's so personal for them. 

And they talk about methods, about what needs to be done to make an idea or emotion or intuition become a reality, a thing in this world, a thing which, if it's any good can't be confined even the by intentions of the artists themselves, a fact most artists value. This means they get into talk of materials and processes and technique, which I love, since these these practices usually resonate with practices across all the arts. Anyway, I was really enjoyed the work of Chie Fueki, the subject of Samet's most recent interview. It strikes me as "very now," as we are all navigating our way through a storm of information.