Studio Visits: Spring Breakers at NYSS

by Paul D'Agostino

David Gayle’s studio.

Over the course of the semester thus far, we’ve discussed and workshopped many artists’ statements, brief critical texts and, most recently, MFA thesis outlines and drafts during our writing sessions at the New York Studio School of Drawing, Painting and Sculpture.

Following one of our recent gatherings, a small group of us took advantage of the school’s relatively calm corridors and tranquil airs—it was spring break, otherwise the premises would’ve been far more abustle, especially as students are now gearing up for final shows—to do a round of studio visits.

Lenka Curtin’s studio.

We went to Lenka Curtin’s studio to see the newest pieces in her family of ethereally inspired yet materially robust, indeed almost perplexingly multi-media sculptures, the collective of which is becoming increasingly suggestive of things Nature herself might see, perhaps, when she dreams. We also looked at Rachel Rickert’s new sequence of paintings, most of them still in-process, that at once capture, expand, re-delineate and sympathetically document most every corner of her current living quarters to question notions of home, safety and comfort as they relate to body, light and space.

Rachel Rickert’s studio.

Tightly tethered, as well, to notions of space and home, interiors and exteriors, inside-self and outside-self—albeit due to, and sometimes placed within, quite differently restrictive, constricted contexts—are David Gayle’s pensively figurative, nimble works in various styles and mediums, a mere handful of which we had a chance to look at. We also went to the studio of Katelynn Mills, whose mixed media paintings, many of them generously textured with strata of sparely chromatic encaustic, pertain to breaking up or tearing into ideas of composition within two-dimensional spaces—so as to then find formal means for mending them.

Spring break is over, so I’m sure the studios and halls over at NYSS are anything but tranquil these days.

And that’s good, they shouldn’t be.

At least not all too often.

Katelynn Mills’s studio.