Now Featuring Alex Heilbron

Alex Heilbron’s imagery is based on a foundation of fun that flirts between objective images and sensual abstractions. Alex uses bold colors and an insistent visual language that is borrowed from an adolescent spirit. Starting with an image or a moment around her, she creates her own world. Both, the nostalgic and the intuitive facilitate an experience as well as starting an open ended narrative.

Alex and artist, Peter Hurley have been brainstorming and working together since attending the San Francisco Art Institute in 2005. In this interview Peter gets inside Alex’s head so we can know more about Alex as an artist. In mid January, Alex will be interviewing Peter, so check back then for the second segment.

PH: What is your favorite painting right now?

AH: Well this guy I met in Vancouver makes really great paintings. His name is Les Ramsay and he has a studio that my boyfriend likes to hang out at. He is always making new things. He made this one painting recently that is of a rug or a blanket and the colours really move and dance around the canvas. I know the subject matter seems kind of played but he painted this quilt so perfectly. It was very simple but  very complex at the same time. I don’t even know if it has a title. I wish I made that painting!

PH: What is the last memorable image you saw?

AH: I can’t think about an image that I saw that really changed something in me but I saw a moment last night: I was crossing the street and this person was running toward me. His hair was really long; waving and flapping around his head. He was running with his head down and in small steps but he was going pretty fast. It was raining pretty hard and the only light on the block was from the street lights. He was coming in and out of the light. He cut a diagonal through the bushes right in front of my house and into the woods. I think the whole thing lasted about five seconds, but I think about this moment a lot. It gave me the same feeling I would have when I would watch the X-Files when I was young.

PH: Yeah, I love those moment that seem significant for no apparent reason. They’re just magnificent enough while remaining completely pedestrian and mundane. I’m kind of obsessed with them. They’re a big reason why I’m compelled to make things.

AH: It’s like believing in something that doesn’t exist. Holding onto a moment that passed but sticks in your mind. As the moment has aged I have also started to question whether it was real or not. When stuff like that happens I start to think maybe I’m dreaming.

PH: I smoked the stuff Salvia a month or two ago and ended up realizing that everything in my life was a trap. I turned into the child of Mickey Mouse and Bart Simpson and ran out of my friends apartment totally convinced I was escaping a concentration camp where they were trying to lock me up in the refrigerator. It was a horrifying five minutes and for weeks afterwords I couldn’t shake that feeling, that at any moment that realization would reappear as reality. Drugs are fucked.

AH: Just give hugs!

PH: No duh

PH: Both of us make images that flirt between subjective and objective imagery. What do you think?

AH: I think that when something is mysterious or vague enough the viewer can make up their own mind about the object. Is it a person? Or is it a puppy sitting in the corner. Both of those things have very different connotations and can change how you think about an image as a whole. It will make the meaning of the painting so different. I like how Henri Rousseau did this in a lot of his paintings. Shadows in the forest – making you feel really uneasy.

PH: Totally. It’s a balance though. If something is too ambiguous I feel like a jerk, but if it’s too specific it doesn’t seem like the viewer can relate. It feels like airing dirty laundry which is gross.

AH: Ya for sure – I think that an image that is completely abstract or non objective is the hardest thing to create. For instance, how can you make two squares together interesting? A square is the most boring thing in the world. But at the same time I don’t care about your perfectly painted nude reclining on a chair. I can get my boyfriend to do that in real life!

PH: Do you think it’s dumb to make work about your feelings?

AH: No. I think that’s what art is. Making a gesture that comes from an emotion in you. Whether that emotion be happy, sad, frustrated etc…plus all memory is so intertwined with emotion.

PH: Describe your favorite pair of shoes.

AH: I am a shoe freak but I really like my flower pattern doc martens they are so comfy and no matter what I wear with them it makes everything else look weird.

PH: What songs are you into?

AH: I just had a Nirvana Christmas. It was so cool. I think I just fell in love with the nasty Nirvana truth. That band kind of spews it and really beautifully. Although my favorite song of all time is Judy is Punk by The Ramones. It’s to the point, short, and very rhythmic.

PH: My friend Manny has in Utero on vinyl. I never knew how good “All Apologies” was until I heard it that way. You can here the different instruments so perfectly. It slays.

AH: But how could Nirvana exist without The Ramones?

PH: If we were the Ramones, I would be Dee Dee and you would be Joey.

AH: Yes, I am the tall freak with the shitty haircut.

PH: What gets you through the day?

AH:I just moved to Vancouver and it’s really lonely and its been hard integrating myself into this really tiny community of people. It really helps talking to you on the phone and those small humbling moments in my day. Or if I turn on my old 415 cell phone and I got a nice text message from an old friend.

PH: How do you decide what to paint?

AH: Right now I like to take pictures and look at them and draw and draw and draw and draw and from all of that drawing comes good images that I can finally work on. I guess the first step is just observing my surroundings.

PH: Where do you get your colors?

AH: My first painting teacher said that when you learn about color theory, you need to be intuitive with your choices and not just copy the color theory manual from a text book. I feel like I’ve applied this theory not only to my color choices but to everything I make. Is it lame to say that it just comes to me?

PH: No.

PH: Your work is very bold and immediate. Why?

AH: I like to make work quickly. I get really bored if I have to wait for something – the idea starts to wilt. I will also spend a lot of time within a certain part of an image perfecting it. Not in detail but in its shape and color and the space it takes up. I used to be really into adding but I like subtracting more and more.

PH: Your work always seems to deal with flatness. What makes flatness so important to your work?

AH: I think that for one I was a really lazy painter when I started painting. I didn’t want to learn three point perspective. I wanted to get it all out, barf out all my emotions. As I got older and started understanding my process. I liked how flat things could be. I like creating depth not with lines but with color. I always freaked myself out when I would look at a pale yellow and then at a prussian blue right next to each other. The yellow would be in front and the blue would be behind. The only thing doing that was light! I’ve just stuck with what I’ve mastered and its helped me so much. I believe in the flatness and I’m ok with it now – I used to feel guilty about it. Plus we see in 3D, its so much more fun to dream in 2D.

PH: Picasso once wrote Matisse that he (Picasso) always had drawing and was looking for color while Matisse always had color and was looking for drawing. If we were Picasso and Matisse, I think I’d be Picasso and You would be Matisse.

AH: I think that is a totally accurate description of us. What a team. Your work starts in a delicate place and moves in a bolder direction whereas my work does the opposite. Its as if our first thoughts are each others afterthoughts.  

PH: Have you seen any cool movies lately? I saw this punk movie called Jubille from the seventies the other day and it was great.

AH: I saw this movie called House by Nobuhiko Obayashi. Its about this group of girls who are really good friends who go to one of the girl’s aunt’s house for summer break. The house eats all of the girls one by one! It’s so visually weird. Reminded me of a George Kuchar movie but one that he made this year with some SFAI kids. Contemporary video editing techniques done in film. So awesome!  

PH: Does creating imagery make sense in your life?

AH: Yes it does. I think that even though there are so many things to look at in this world its important to have your own say in the imagery you put out into the world. Even if no one cares or ever looks at what I want to make I would keep on making it all because there is this crazy desire in me to create images.

PH: Shoutouts?

AH: Bruce McGaw, Shalo P, Kurtis Wilson, Chris Lux, Danny Espinosa, Cortney Cassidy, Natasha Loewy and Homero Hidalgo. And Tal R – can I be your studio assistant yet?