A: Curating for a Painter is Like Cross Training

You ask: Has your recent curating experience prompted any ideas or feelings about your own art that reinforces or challenges what you're doing?

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The simple answer is that curating (as with writing) gives me an opportunity to think about art in ways that I don’t think about, or address, when I’m in the studio. It’s like sculpture—thinking and working three dimensionally instead of on a flat surface.

Does curating challenge what I’m doing in the studio? No, but it does challenge me to think about art using a different part of my brain.

When I’m painting initially, the work kind of flows out, and it’s only after the fact that I stand back and look at it and think about it in a critical way. Then there’s a conversation between the intuitive and the rational that continues—sort of a creative alternating current—as a work or works come to completion. (I often work on several paintings at the same time.)

In the studio, above: I don't get this rational until the right brain has run some miles and the work is underway

Curating, on the other hand, is a much more rational enterprise. I have to be moved in some intuitive, emotional, maybe visceral way by an artist’s work, but I do a lot more linear, left-brain thinking about how a particular work it fits into a curatorial theme.

In the gallery, above and below: I start out with the left brain in high gear. The work has to fit into, indeed expand, the theme--which in "Luxe, Calme et Volupte" is visual pleasure: beauty (of sumptuousness, order and sensuality). Above: Tim McFarlane, Rainer Gross, Robert Sagerman. Below: Julie Gross, you, Maureen Mullarkey. The marble sculptures on the floor are by Julia Venske and Gregor Spanle. Exhibition at the Marcia Wood Gallery, Atlanta (through August 25)

As an artist I paint primarily in encaustic. I love the medium, to the point that using feels as if it’s just flowing out of my hand. But I’m interested in other mediums and other modes of expression. And I’m interested in other artists’ work besides mine. Curating a show that’s not medium specific, but rather, about a theme—beauty, in the case of Luxe, Calme et Volupte—is a way to explore the ideas and artists whose work interests me.

So I guess curating, for me, is like cross training.

You also ask: Related to this, I'm wondering if there is other work you're messing around with in your studio? ... You recently mentioned getting a lot of nice heavy paper. What's cooking?

May I take a raincheck on this question? As you know, I had a very busy spring with the "Luxe, Calme et Volupte" show. And I also organized the first National Conference of Encaustic Painting at Montserrat College of Art. (Many people were involved in the conference, of course, but I conceived it and developed the panels and themes.) I hadn’t intended to take on two large projects at the same time, but life has a different sense of timing than my own. I also did some teaching and a lot of traveling (my blog is part travelog, part critical writing, part self promotion). Oh, and did I mention two solo shows?

So to be honest there’s not much in my studio at the moment. There is a lot of paper—gorgeous 300 lb, hot-press Fabriano that’s just waiting to become a series of gouache grids and another series of graphite grids (graphite powder suspended in alcohol that gets painted as if it were watercolor). But at the moment I’m recuperating from all that activity earlier in the year. I will answer this question visually as soon as I have some new work to show you—which will be soon.

Question for you: What's in your studio right now?