The Laws of Motion. In-Studio Interview with Alex Kanevsky

By Kim Power

An apple thrown in the air will fall downwards, obeying the laws of gravity. Its velocity will remain constant unless an outside force acts upon it. We rely on predictable laws of motion to navigate our daily world. However, in art, and more specifically in painting, these laws may be suspended, allowing us to see outside of our preconditioned perceptions into the realm of possibility. The works of Alex Kanevsky allow for that door to open wide. Using broken color and broken form through multiple permutations of imagery, applied in transparent and opaque layers of oil paint, manipulated with brush, squeegee, credit card and even household tools, Kanevsky breaks the rules of motion and, therefore the parameters of time itself. But these are my words. Kanevsky will tell you, “I don’t think a painting is a record of a conception or a perception for that matter. It is a free standing thing, an entity onto itself, not a documentation of anything.”

Kanevsky has had twenty-two solo shows and his paintings are included in the Achenbach Collection of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco in San Francisco, California as well as the Woodmere Museum Collection in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. His art works have been the subject of multiple publications including Art in America, Harper’s Magazine, Miroir de L’Art the Tianjin Yangliuqing Fine Arts Press, and Guernica, Magazine of Art & Politics. He has received fellowships from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, Pew Fellowship in the Arts as well as a grant from the Frantz and Virginia Bader Fund.

I sat down with Alex in his spacious schoolroom studio in Philadelphia to discuss his recent work in the exhibition “Alex Kanevsky: Some Paintings in No Particular Style” at the Hollis Taggart gallery in Manhattan.

Kim Power - So, you were born in Russia and studied in Lithuania, for your Bachelor’s Degree?

Alex Kanevsky - In Lithuania. That would have been a Bachelor of Science. I studied mathematics there at the Vilnius University but I didn’t finish that.

K.P. - And you’re teaching now?

A.K. - I teach one afternoon a week at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts.

K.P. - You had mentioned in your 2012 interview with Larry Groff for his blog Painting Perceptions that you made these “commutative wave paintings.” Does that relate to mathematics?

A.K. - I suppose you could look at it this way, but I wasn’t thinking of mathematics. The concept probably does come from some sort of laws of averages.

K.P. - I thought the commutative wave theory had to do with “the more it happens, the more it’s going to stay the same.” It’s going to keep returning to the same thing.

A.K. - It is, like a lot of things that are cyclical, they repeat themselves. There’s not a hell of a lot of deep theory behind it. Basically, the idea is that waves move, therefore they’re hard to paint, but they also repeat themselves, not precisely and exactly, but close enough. If you look at them with the same frequency, as I have, you will see different waves but at the same phase of their development. This way, you can treat it as a picture of a wave, but it’s not any particular waves that exist, it’s more like a cumulative image of many waves.

K.P. - Like an idea of-

A.K. - Yeah, like an average of many waves. This way, it allows you to paint things that move, change and mutate, as long as they repeat themselves.

K.P. - Do you find that that’s true with your models too, that they return to the same-well, you ask them, I guess, for a specific pose and then-

A.K. - Yeah, I tried that with the models as well. The drawing started from the idea of the waves. Or rather the waves started actually from the drawings. I didn’t draw really, since art school, so for 15 years I never did any drawings. I’m a painter. I like painting. Why would anybody draw, when you can paint?

K.P. - It’s clear that you love paint, so I understand that.

A.K. - But then I saw some Antonio López drawings in the Boston Museum and several other draftsmen, whose work I like very much, like Ann Gale in Seattle and Michael Rossman here in Philadelphia and I thought, “These are such beautiful drawings, maybe there is something to it. I should try.” I always had models coming in. So, the model came in and we thought we would try to do a drawing, which, if you think about it, is completely insane. You try to express space and volumes with line and line doesn’t exist, so you’re trying to express something that does exist with something that doesn’t. So, I thought, “That will be interesting,” so my drawings are going to be built around that craziness. If the line makes absolutely no sense and yet it’s possible to use, then I’m going to use it to make completely linear drawings and that’s what they are. They don’t have shading or anything. They’re just lines. So we tried that. I had a big piece of paper with some work on that so we used the other side. I did have a pencil in the studio. I had no eraser. So, I started working and I was out of practice with the lines, so I couldn’t get one shoulder on the model. I tried and I kept on redrawing it and because I had no eraser I had to redraw on the top of my previous efforts. So eventually there was a conglomeration of shoulders and arms growing out of that spot and it all worked out. I found it eventually and then I looked to that and the drawing itself was fine, it was ok, but there are lots of drawings of naked people in the world. The world doesn’t need another one. But that search for the shoulder, actually, was very interesting, because that gave the reason, the raison d’être for the drawing, because that search was very dramatic. It was a desperate search for the shoulder and you see all the wrong attempts and somehow, if you have enough wrong attempts, I apply one right, somewhere amongst them. And I thought, “This is interesting.” I can use lines as indications rather than stated fact, like this is here. So we started drawing like that, with the models here and I got better eventually, just from practice. I stopped making so many mistakes, and I also bought an eraser, so I had to come up with some other ways to derail the process so I would have something to struggle with.

K.P. - That’s interesting. I was going to ask you about how you discover randomness in our work, because randomness is actually quite a difficult thing to do.

A.K. - Well, it’s also interesting. We tried to discover it with the models by not being perfect, I wasn’t being a stickler about the pose, if they moved, they moved. If they came back from a break and didn’t get in exactly the same pose, I was ok. I figured I would be able to accommodate all that because that’s what people are, they move. They are only still when they’re dead and I’m not interested in death.

K.P. - Right. (laughing)

A.K. - So, that worked for a while. Then I started asking them to move or to turn around. The two drawings in Rob Zeller’s book [The Figurative Artist's Handbook: A Contemporary Guide to Figure Drawing, Painting, and Composition (2017)] are a pose of my friends in New Hampshire who were turning at 10-degree increments without changing the pose.

K.P. - So they turn and then you draw and then they turn and then you draw?

A.K. - Yeah. But the things get confusing, once there are a lot of lines.

K.P. - I was thinking about that. How do you keep track of what’s essential?

A.K. - The whole idea is to eventually reach a situation where it’s impossible to keep track and then to function in that situation. That’s when things get interesting.

K.P. - Ok. Functioning within chaos.

A.K. - Yeah. You take liberties. You get a little bit better and a little bit better just from pure mileage and as you get better, you kind of want to take more liberties, because you can. So this was fun. Now I’m sort of at the point with these drawings where I need something else to struggle with, so they sort of slowed down but I’ve been thinking of maybe trying to introduce some color.

K.P. - I was noticing that you stick with particular themes in your work? You have multiple horses, you’ve got history paintings-

A.K. - Five horses.

K.P. - Five horses. You’ve got the women in the darkness in the water that you sent to Paris, smaller pieces, I think, the bathtubs-do you work on them in a series or do they just come back up again as a theme?

A.K. - It kind of happens like that, you do a painting and you think, “Oh, this is interesting, I didn’t get everything out of that thing, why don’t I do another painting-” and another and then you think, “This is enough here for a whole show,” so you do a whole show and then when it’s over, you say, “Ok, I’m done with this.” But then a few months later you think, “Oh, there’s a couple more things,” so you do a couple more paintings and then eventually it does work its way out of the system.

K.P. - Ok.

A.K. - Paintings in Paris of people in the darkness in the water have to do with my personal obsession with one little Rembrandt painting [A Woman Bathing in a Stream, 1654] His wife Saskia went for a swim-

K.P. - Could you talk about L.H. in the Dark Pond? I mean it’s dark but it’s-

A.K. - Yeah, so that was done directly last summer. Because of that obsession with the [Rembrandt] painting, I basically asked people to go in the pond for me. New Hampshire has a lot of ponds. There used to be one near the house and now our neighbor has three different ones and they’re in the woods and they’re small. Just to do laps or just to see and admire. It has frogs in it. First I asked-it’s a small village, I know everybody there-so I asked people if anybody had any nightshirts similar to that one that Saskia had and I was given a lot of nightshirts. They didn’t give me their best ones, of course.

K.P. - (laughing) Well, yeah, if you’re going to walk into a pond with it.

A.K. - Yeah. And then over the years I’ve had quite a few of the locals in that pond in those nightshirts or without them. It was quite a trying proposition for them. Those ponds are pretty mucky and god knows what lives in there.

K.P. - (laughing)

A.K. - But it was endlessly fascinating. For me, it looks absolutely beautiful and there’s that sense of not knowing what’s down there in this water.

K.P. - Right. Actually, that’s something I was going to ask. Do you see it as some sort of primordial darkness?

A.K. - Something like that, or Persephone’s story, where she’s partially in the underworld and partially here with us. So, that was a more abstract version of those people in the water, where the tops of the bodies were done very realistically, but as you progressed further down, you kind of go down into just pure paint, with no reference to reality.

K.P. - Also, C.B. with Darkness was kind of reminding me of the Helga pictures of Andrew Wyeth. I don’t know if that’s an interest of yours at all.

A.K. - Of course I admire them and hold an interest. This particular model I suppose looked a lot like Helga because she’s this country girl, healthy like Helga, and with the blond hair and that sort of cool demeanor.

K.P. - Yeah, and also just the way he did paintings of her inside in the barn and where you had the darkness and the window-the light seemed to be emanating from her body. I’m also seeing something similar in yours, like she is, her skin is, the light. She’s in this, again, primordial darkness.

A.K. - You don’t really think about primordial darkness or metaphors or anything like that, that comes later when people try to explain or ask you questions about it. You just think it would be really nice to have some darkness and the light emanating from the body just happens from the way ponds are usually situated in the forest.

K.P. - Ok.

A.K. - In the morning or in the afternoon, during the sunset, in the evening, rather, the forest looks dark, almost black and the water looks almost black, but if you can get it at the right time when the person in the water would be hit by that setting sun and they come out very bright and make everything else around them even darker. It’s a situation that if you happen to be there you would look at and just think, “That looks like Caravaggio or Rembrandt,” right there, without any special effort.

K.P. - It also seems like you’re very interested in movement and the kinetic energy in your work. I read this wonderful article by Carla Gottlieb called Movement in Painting [1958] and she said, ” Movement draws the attention. It may hold in store the danger of collision or attack as well as the pleasure of an unsuspected site, of a chance encounter. Movement in art results in a more active participation of the spectator.”

A.K. - I don’t have a lot of response to it because it goes back to how to engage the spectator. If you are producing something for people, you want them to be engaged. I think that’s what she’s talking about, but I’m having my own private games here. I mean, don’t get me wrong, I’m very happy that they’re engaged. The movement was there because things move. I’m interested mostly in people. That’s one big overarching theme, not so much people in water, but people doing something, just people.

K.P. - Ok.

A.K. - People are defined by their movements, they’re not defined by their shape, place-it changes all the time, so if you want to paint people you have to somehow incorporate the movement into your paintings, otherwise they look like mannequins.

K.P. - Right, and I’ve seen that so often that paintings are in stasis. That’s something that I enjoy, that I’m able to breathe when I see your work. I feel this sense of atmosphere, I don’t feel stifled, I feel like “Ok, this is more like how I see,” not like photography which stops everything. Life is not still, so that doesn’t make sense.

A.K. - Yeah, well photography is not at all how we see. I heard something about it once that is very interesting, about how perception works, visual perception-it’s very similar to the way that digital video operates now, where only what changes and moves is actually perceived. Like I’m talking to you and you move your head, right now, you’re nodding and I see that but at the same time I’m seeing the stuff around and that stuff is not moving, you know, the furniture, the floor, everything, so apparently what happens is, I don’t really see what’s going on. What I have is the memory of what was there maybe a second ago or so. It gets sampled with less frequency so to speak.

K.P. - That’s interesting.

A.K. - That’s the way our eyes, apparently, and brain works. So, if it stays still, then the brain thinks it’s going to continue staying still and there’s no need to pay attention.

K.P. - So, it turns the channel off.

A.K. - Yeah, it continues to sample it but really most of the attention goes to the moving part, which right now happens to be you, so I get a lot more visual information from your face than I get from, let’s say, this flat file.

K.P. - I guess because you walk into a room and you are, yourself, moving so of course you’re paying attention to where you are because those things are not in stasis because you are moving, but then they become still because you’ve already become still yourself.

A.K. - More or less. But then you know, the completely frozen moments, they’re also interesting. You know, I love Uccello paintings and you can’t think of anything more frozen than Uccello.

K.P. - You made that painting after Uccello-

A.K. - Yeah and it’s very frozen because it’s based on one single very sharp photograph.

K.P. - The Battle of San Romano (2017). That painting that you made is based on a photograph?

A.K. - It’s a photograph of one of my university friends who is a computer programmer or something like that and all the other men there are some sort of mathematicians or programmers or-they work in some office anyway. My friend, Albert, got into some sort of martial arts, I think it’s called Daito Ryu, where they hit each other with wooden sticks. This was a photograph of the practice they had in some very nice forest with this kind of very strong raking light. Their formalized poses, and that light and the flatness of the perspective, and that light in the forest, and the lens used, were a little like an Uccello painting to me. I loved it for that and I thought, “I want to do a painting.” I also liked the contrast between their militaristic postures and-they’re all middle aged men, they’re developing a little belly, so the softness of that and-

K.P. - The softness of their forms in contrast with the brutality or strength of their poses?

A.K. - Yeah, the implications of what’s going on. Uccello paintings are usually-there’s usually some horrible brutality going on in them. He’s not doing anything peaceful.

K.P. - Yeah, there’s some crazy stuff going on in his paintings for sure. But also, it has that feeling of possible movement again. They’re frozen in the process of-

A.K. - Yeah, they stand completely frozen. I always want to try the other side. I’m usually more interested in the movement, but this time I was interested in their frozen poses, very formal.

K.P. - That’s not the only history painting though. You have that other painting, The Dinner on the Battlefield (2017).

A.K. - Oh, yes.

K.P. - You have more than one of those too.

A.K. - I have three.

K.P. - I’ve seen one online and one in the gallery of the Dinner on the Battlefield- Is that in reference to another painter as well, or-

A.K. - Usually I use reality, models, landscapes, and interiors directly or take photographs for my paintings. Very rarely, I use (other people’s) photographs. I try to avoid doing that because it’s not my imagery and then I’m relating to the photograph and not to reality. So that’s already handicapping the relationship.

K.P. - Right, then you’re painting about the photograph-

A.K. - I’m painting what’s been digested for me. I don’t like that, but sometimes the photographs happen that kind of ring true now. You look at it and you feel like, “I recognize this place, I recognize what’s going on.” I don’t have a memory or anything like that but this photograph was one of a series of five or six that were put up on Facebook, by a man who likes to collect photographs, mostly from Russian history. This particular photograph had French and Serbian soldiers having this dinner party during WWI. Probably because it has nothing to do with Russian history, there was no explanation of where they came from and what exactly went on, but one of the pictures was of these soldiers, just what you see in those paintings. They’re sitting there and they’re trying to have a civilized dinner with napkins and tablecloths and a nicely little laid out spread. They put on clean uniforms but then there’s dirt and snow and everything around. They got some soldiers to be their waiters. They’re trying to have a civilized experience together. At the same time you can see it on them, it’s WWI, and they have bayonets attached to their rifles. They were probably poking holes in each other.

K.P. - (laughing)

A.K. - The weird contrast between that impulse towards civilization, they turn to civilization and the brutality of what really goes on and the facial expressions of those soldiers, because they surrounded their dinner table but the two closest to the camera have parted their way a little bit so you can see onto the table and you can see their dinner, of which they’re proud, so that’s kind of a welcoming gesture-opening up the circle-but their facial expressions are anything but welcoming. They look like they might just shoot you, or the photographer. I just liked this ambiguous quality of the proceedings. It doesn’t matter to me what the story is. I just like that it sort of implies all sorts of stories, but really remains mysterious. It kind of encourages people to bring their own narratives in.

K.P. - Yeah, definitely.

A.K. - So, I did a painting of that and I was quite happy with it. It was a little smaller and somebody came and bought it, which was very nice for me but I didn’t get a chance to spend any time with this painting. Usually I do before the show. I always had a feeling that maybe I could have done more to it. So I said, “I’ll do another version. I’ll to try to make it different and I’ll make it bigger.” I did a second version and the same thing happened, somebody came in and bought it. Somebody else. Anyway the other one is someplace else and again I never got a chance to spend time with that painting. A year later I thought, “People are going to start asking me, why are you doing these soldiers, I have to lay off this photograph,” but I felt like I wasn’t done. Then a friend, Karen Reynolds, came to visit and she gave me a present. She gave me this Indian postcard of Vishnu or Krishna, I’m not sure which, I think both of them are in there, and I really liked the hallucinogenic quality of those multiple faces that Krishna has, the multiple arms, and I thought, “Perhaps I could mix that with the picture of the soldiers and give them a slightly more, not exactly surreal, but that kind of hallucinogenic reality. “

K.P. - I’m glad you said that word because that’s the word that came to my mind with that painting in the gallery. Maybe it’s the wavy lines, but it just felt very hallucinogenic. So, that was your third version of the painting.

A.K. - Third and hopefully the final, yes.

K.P. - So you don’t go about just thinking, “Ok, I feel like making a history painting now,” it’s just that you saw something and you were inspired by that and it happened.

A.K. - Whatever interests me. You need a reason to start to painting. The reasons come from outside often. I could totally understand, let’s say, Morandi, painting bottles all your life or being Euan Uglow and painting those female models and nothing else all his life. That’s fine. That’s like what Diebenkorn meant when he said, “Don’t discover any subject of any kind.” Subject doesn’t matter.

K.P. - So, concept, that’s not part of it at all.

A.K. - No, not terribly interested. I mean there are concepts. They float about. Some of them are more compelling than others but it’s something that happens afterwards. You can sit here and talk about conceptual, Persephone and six pomegranate seeds, or concept of underworld or concept of hidden versus revealed, whatever, but all of that is extraneous afterwards, sort of like, you know-you have a Christmas tree and you hang all sorts of things on it, it’s still the same tree and once you’re done, you take the things off and you have the same tree, so the ornaments don’t really change anything. They just embellish and sometimes embellishment is very interesting and exciting and I enjoy embellishments as much as anybody else, but it’s not part of what I do or not something that interests me in connection to painting.

K.P. - The concept pretty much comes afterwards.

A.K. - Yeah, because you have to explain to people. People who read things into-

K.P. - They want to define it.

A.K. - Yeah. And I like to provoke them with pseudo-narratives so they always look for hidden meaning or hidden story or hidden concept, so that stuff comes up. I know it’s my fault because I provoked that, but I didn’t build any of that. I’m more interested in sort of like the reflection. You know, this unstable equilibrium idea that comes from mathematics. I mean equilibrium, everybody knows what that is, it’s when everything is in balance. Mathematics differentiates between stable and unstable. If you imagine a perfectly round salad bowl and an apple, you could throw an apple into the salad bowl and it will roll around and eventually settle down in the bottom and it would want to stay there. It would go right back. That’s a stable equilibrium. Now, if you flip the salad bowl upside down, you can balance the apple on the top but if you push, it will fall off the bowl and onto the table. That’s unstable equilibrium. Unstable equilibrium is interesting for a painting. In other words, you do something that seems to be balanced and harmonious but people from the outside, you know, when you come and look at my painting, you’re bringing yourself, your life, your everything, all your memories, all your likes and dislikes to my painting. You act as that finger that is pushing the apple on the upside down bowl. My painting is built like an unstable equilibrium, a small impact from your gaze produces dramatic results, like an apple falling off the dinner table and falling on the ground. So that’s really what I want from it.

K.P. - In trying to understand your paintings, I thought about 1950’s ‘action painting’-especially with that red stripe that you had in Three Views of a Bathroom (2016). I’m in love with that red stripe.

A.K. - I am in love with it too, because this is so difficult to do and so unpleasant to fail because it goes back over something carefully constructed. And it’s fast so it’s not terribly controlled, so if it doesn’t work then it’s bad. You just ruined something that you spent a lot of time on.

K.P. - So you build up and then you construct and then you deconstruct?

A.K. - No, I don’t deconstruct, I just add something that’s a little more dangerous but more fun. And it does carry this possibility of failure with it. It makes it more interesting and more exciting, because there’s an adrenaline reward.

K.P. - It’s so beautiful in the way it directs you right into the painting. It’s an entrance and an exit at the same time and it has a certain speed to it. Also, there’s this concept of time, with Three Views of a Bathroom and also in the longer narrow painting-Lulu in Madrid (Twice) (2017).

A.K. - Well, in the longer paintings the composition idea is the same as in the Chinese scrolls, which are the ancient, sort of proto-comic books, which try to introduce a concept of the passage of time, the narrative into static medium. They didn’t think of breaking it into frames, like comic books do. They just used very long composition to have some sort of narrative going, so the same characters could reappear several times in the same landscape or interior as they progressed through the story. The importance of the events would be expressed by how much space they allowed. I did a whole project with this once a few years ago when I was really into the scroll painting. I thought I could do a painting of somebody’s whole entire day. Well, I tried and I failed like Tolstoy failed when he tried to describe somebody’s day. It’s so complex.

K.P. - I was thinking specifically of Virginia Woolf. In Mrs. Dalloway [1925] she does achieve that. Have you ever read it?

A.K. - I have not read Mrs. Dalloway.

K.P. - You might enjoy it. She’s very visual.  So-you were trying to but failed?

A.K. - Well, the idea was simple. The way Chinese scroll is made is that you kind of stitch a panorama out of separate things. For example, a person wakes up in a bedroom and goes to brush their teeth in the bathroom, then off to the kitchen to have coffee. So you stitch those rooms as they appear in reality together into one panorama and then have the person reappear in different places. That’s what I wanted to do and I actually put it out there. I asked if anybody wanted to be a subject and a friend of mine, Kara Crombie, who is a performance artist here (she did a lot of media and performance) volunteered. She gave me her keys, so at 7:00 in the morning I was in her bedroom, with my camera, ready to begin, because I knew when the alarm clock would ring. The alarm clock rang and she had to get up and get ready for work. Her boyfriend was in bed because he was unemployed at the time. She proceeded to go to the bathroom, brush her teeth, do the make-up, go to the kitchen, get some coffee-. The kitchen was much bigger than the bathroom but she spent more time in front of the mirror in the bathroom, so the bathroom became bigger than the kitchen. Meanwhile, her boyfriend woke up and started watching Korean television on the television set that was in the bedroom. He was pretty much there for the rest of the thing. She just came in to kiss him goodbye and then left. I thought I would be there for the rest of the day and halfway through I thought, “This is overwhelming.”

K.P. - Ah, too much information.

A.K. - Well, too much and too interconnected, too many things. You would have to build three-dimensional panoramas. I did make some paintings but that thing would have been endless, so that was a failure. I did make a wonderful painting, for me anyway, of her morning that came out of this project. It was called, Big Bed (2010), It was a bed that was the size of a city square and she appeared in this bed many different times as she was waking up, getting up, then coming back to kiss the boyfriend goodbye-and I just kind of imagined this big bed that so many people-

K.P. - All the events that-

A.K. - Yeah, all the events that ever occurred in bed, all of them occurred in the same bed, it’s just a big bed. That’s the only painting that came out of that, but a lot of scroll-like panoramas were done because it’s very interesting composition to work with.

K.P. - I also think of this word flow, when I think of your work. I was thinking about how you are painting these different subjects, but they all relate, in my mind, because it feels like it is a river flowing and how a river changes, sometimes it’s calmer, sometimes it’s more frenetic. It feels like this ongoing flow that seems to be coming from you.

A.K. - I think that pretty well defines what interests me, yes. Subjects, again, don’t matter, but the flow does. It’s interesting. You know, everything is in motion and-I remember when I was in grade school and they told us that, those little electrons and protons and all those atoms, nothing is just sitting there. They are all rushing around, buzzing and vibrating. So, if you were to see what this chair is made out of (it’s not like atoms that are sitting in their places) it’s everything going every which way and buzzing and vibrating.

K.P. - So, everything is connected.

A.K. - Everything is connected, everything is moving. We sort of, for our own convenience, assume that we know where everything is and it’s going to stay there, but it doesn’t necessarily. It’s just maybe that it doesn’t move as fast as we do.

K.P. - Do you think it’s because we’re comforted by stability?

A.K. - Yeah, stability is predictable, people like predictable. It’s comfortable. You know what you’re going to find there. I’m ok with it moving.

K.P. - Excellent. Thank you again for so very generously sharing your time and for your honest and thoughtful answers.

A.K. - I’m looking forward to reading it.

Kim Power is an international artist and writer currently residing in The Bronx. She holds a B.S. in Art Education from James Madison University and a Master in Fine Arts in painting from the New York Academy of Art. Her reviews have been published through The Brooklyn Rail, Arte Fuse, and Quantum Art Review.