ARTIST SPOTLIGHT

Litro: Can you tell us about what you’re currently working on?

Erica Keck: I’m currently in between bodies of work right now. For the past year I was primarily focused on a series of flower and vase drawings. These are slowly evolving into a new body of paintings and other objects that will be part of a bigger exhibition being planned for the near future. These recent drawings had more of a representational image within them that had been missing from some of my previous work. I’m excited to see how I can pull that forward.

Litro: Although many of the materials you use are traditional, their employment in your work is often not. Can you tell us a little bit about your creative process, namely how tradition and experimentation affect your work? EK: I like to think of tradition as the karmic circumstances and parameters we inherit in any situation, form, or practice. To be merely traditional is to just blindly subscribe and stay within the borders someone else decided was historically the right way to approach or do something. Being locked in tradition is stagnant and oppressive. To just rail against tradition is reactionary and blindly nihilistic. Both approaches are overly moralizing and yield lousy results. Between

Above left: EK_DRAWING_2022_044, Ink & oil pastel on construction paper (unframed), 2022, 9 x 12 in. Above right: EK_DRAWING_2022_017, Ink on Japanese paper (unframed), 2022, 9 x 12 in.

@ Keck

those two binaries lies a sweet spot where I’m forced to engage with the past but also expected to look forward to the future. That continuity is always full of possibilities and joy where fresh and unpredictable things are created. Even if those experiments fail in some way, the process of staying curious and engaged gives us the tools and inspiration to create a world we want to be in rather than a world where we're subject to oppressive and exploitative forces.

Litro: Despite largely not using overt figuration, your paintings still manage to evoke a sense of place or the body. Are these evocations always planned or do they sometimes happen by chance? EK: These evocations are distantly conscious at this point in my work. While I’ve pushed more towards a materialist approach rather than an imagist approach in creating paintings the human body has always been my primary object. At some point I did consciously start thinking about paintings as a surrogate body. This allowed for a more playful approach in creating abstract art while also not becoming locked into traditional ways of representing the human form or the trappings of identity politics.

Litro: Your oeuvre, on the whole, plays with the real and/ or perceived distinctions between painting and sculpture. Are these experiments in genre conscious interrogations or more intuitively based?

EK: I wasn’t consciously trying to make a painting that jumped genre simply for the sake of doing so. That said, genre-nonconforming artworks or paintings behaving badly resonates deeply with me. For a long time, I was very interested in creating situations with paint and paintings that pushed all the materials and boundaries to a point where everything oozed, spilled over, and fell apart under its own weight. Maybe that makes me a painter trapped in a sculptor’s body, or would it be the other way around? Either way, it’s all just formalism that's probably gone too far.

Litro: What role, if any, does narrative play in your paintings?

EK: I’m not sure it plays an obvious role to the viewer. However, it probably plays a prominent role in my inner voice while creating. As I mentioned before I see painting as a surrogate form of my body/physical form. I’m not so interested in sharing my personal stories with people, largely because they’re probably boring to other people. I do aspire though to touch into the texture of those stories and share that with the viewer which I see as being more relatable.

Litro: Your artistic style has drawn many comparisons with the work of painters like Francis Bacon and Chaïm Soutine. Are there any specific artists or movements that you can cite as influences? Have they changed over the course of your career?

EK: My influences have absolutely changed over the course of my artistic practice. And there're countless amazing artists who have influenced me in different ways, including Bacon & Soutine. Currently I’ve been thinking a lot about holes. Holes, voids, portals, and passageways. Donald Moffett and Lee Bontecu are masters of this. In particular, I've been interested a lot in the relationship between Bontecu's sculptures and drawings.

Litro: Do you have any advice for new artists today?

EK: I think we exist in a moment where there’s an overabundance of certainty and small mindedness which is breeding unnecessary hostility. I think artists have a responsibility to overcome those impulses. Stay curious, sensitive, and engaged with the world by trying to listen a little more and talk a little less. ●

EK_DRAWING_2022_017, Ink on Japanese paper (unframed), 2022, 9 x 12 in.