You can be alone, with a camera in your hand, and you can walk. In that moment, the medium sheds the expectations attached to narrative production. You don't need to have something specific in your mind. You don't need to have in mind that you have to do something with it at some point. This is freedom.
Glass demands immediacy. Working at temperatures above 2,000°F leaves little room for overthinking, so the process becomes a kind of live dialogue between material, colour and chance. That same immediacy informs what I'm drawn to as a collector: works that carry a decisive gesture, a tactile presence, and the feeling that they could only exist in one form.
Countering the passive consumption of today's social, political, ecological and informational debacle, artist and designer Jerszy Seymour proposes a necessarily utopian alternative, grounded in cooperative creativity. His interdisciplinary practice engages the transformative potentials of art, design and activism through instinctual and embodied energies.
When I was a kid, I was painting, as a few of my classmates were, because my teacher was a painter. We were making paintings and different things as well - silkscreens for dances or basketball games, mobiles ... It was around 1963, so a lot of different types of artistic endeavours were happening, which played into what he was teaching us. That was kind of where I started.
Blue became my favorite color as soon as I laid eyes upon that most reproduced of artworks: Hokusai's "The Great Wave off Kanagawa," a framed poster of which still hangs in my grandmother's room. Maybe you grew up with a print of this piece somewhere in your home, too. Over the last 12 months though, as blue as they've been, I find myself drawn more and more to the green that hooks my eye: the brushstrokes behind enthralled ballet dancers in British artist Lynette Yiadom-Boakye's " Harp-Strum" (2016), the shifting fabric in Art Deco painter Tamara de Lempicka's 1931 "Young Woman in Green" and the candy paint of the Bugatti in her 1929 self-portrait, the phthalo green skin of Byron Kim's '90s Belly Painting series.
When we were children, my father, the painter David Gentleman, never offered much advice to me or my siblings. If we wanted to draw, he would hand out pencils and let us get on with it. He was encouraging, but never gave us instructions. If we were enjoying ourselves, more paper was available; but if we wanted to go and do something else, that was fine too.