The Bluebird's "Salon Series: Picture This Like This" featuring artists JC Steinbrunner and Mary Livoni

On a recent Sunday evening in November, Factio had the chance to indulge in a night of art and comfort food (pizza, mac and cheese, and savory green beans were all on the menu) at the chic winebar, The Bluebird, for "Salon Series: Picture This Like This" featuring artists John Coyle Steinbrunner and Mary Livoni. We enjoyed taking in, not only the artists' viewpoints, but also how guests viewed their work in a relaxed setting with great American faire with wine and beer pairings. We caught up with the artists and let them have their own conversation (similar to what you would find during a Salon Series) to get their own interpretations on each other’s work, the similarities of how they both work in black and white, albeit in different mediums and the key to selling artwork. The closing holiday party takes place on December 13th at 7 p.m.  For more information, click here. JOHN COYLE STEINBRUNNER: One thing that's really evident in our work is the sense of "editing," and by this I mean evidence in the painting of the choices we make in how we re-present our landscapes to the viewer. What I see in your work is a very vigorous treatment of not just the subject matter, but the negative space – the empty areas – around it. Smudge marks, erasures, rough edges all reflect signs of intense handling. In mine, drips, spills and spatters are incidental evidence of working on the subject.

MARY LIVONI: The drips, spills and spatters in your paintings enhance the enigmatic and weightless atmosphere that your land forms inhabit. For me, the drips reference gravity and a more predictable orientation of space and weight. I have found that to leave rough edges or fingerprints gives a mostly negative space a certain visual buzz. Now, it's somehow emptier!  I think you use the same construct in your paintings to great effect.

JC: Which leads me to think that what we're really editing toward is tensions. I feel like we're almost archeologists, digging then brushing then sifting away finer and finer bits to get to these core tensions: emptiness versus volume, polish versus rough edges. I love that by filling up space, you empty it out. It's that feeling isolation in the midst of a mob. For me those tensions add up and cross each other in different places, creating this whole that comes close to "analysis-paralysis." I always want to make a painting that is totally silent and reserved, yet overwhelms a room.

JC: What are your thoughts on the importance of editing in your work?

ML:  Editing is essential to me. All of my inspiration comes from very specific locations in Chicago, but I have never been interested in pure representation. To keep them based in reality - for instance, using some light and shadow references - but also to give them an element of mystery, to make scrap trucks, water towers and bridges suggestive of other things requires extreme tweaking and editing. This process is instinctive and really gratifying to me. Because I work with such basic elements -charcoal and paper - I have found over and over again that less is more. When it works, I'm telling a gothic urban fable in the simplest, strongest way.

JC: I agree about representation. It's what I gravitate toward, but the pitfall of trying to mimic photography is a loser's game – you end up relegating image-making to another medium. You disrespect it. Paintings and drawings – let's call it mark-making – are as fallible as their makers. What I like about what we do is that we invest our points-of-view into these things that refer to cities and countries, but really only as a point of departure to talk about something else entirely: your reflections and urban narratives, my exploration of the modern uneasy relationship we have with nature and ourselves.

In my work, I'm keenly aware of painting these huge, remote vistas. I've been working to take these awesome vantages and reduce them to an intimate and ambiguous object. One way I do this is by eschewing color to concentrate on form and volume in black and white. Another way is by referring to landscape-type forms without actually delineating them, which ends up creating a new topography over the picture of a mountainscape or landscape. I see the same kind of purpose in your work: a drawing-down, an effort to invest large, industrial, urban scenes with intimacy and emotion. What are your thoughts on the use of black and white in our work and the sense of scale we work with?

ML:  I have always been attracted to light and dark, as well as weightlessness and weight - both essential and always in opposition, always suggestive of other elemental ideas. Black and white was the only choice for me. What inspired me in this city was always going to be translated this way. I saw the great scrap piles on Elston Avenue as great hulking black forms or as ghostly white evaporating mirages - but with either version, this drama was unfolding in a cinematic film noir-ish universe of black and white. The materials I use -charcoal is so seductive, and like smoke it can be dense and impenetrable or ethereal and light. And like paper, it is limitless in its use and perfectly basic and simple. Regarding point of view and scale - I feel free to exploit in any way that suits me, as long as I can retain a thread of plausibility. For instance, I have tried unsuccessfully to draw a transparent scrap truck hanging upside down. I think I stretched the plausible too far that time. In contrast, your paintings offer an almost limitless (grounded by those drips and splashes) space in which you can toss about mountains and vast spaces, compressing and distorting land forms, easily shifting gears from a human scale to an omniscient vantage point. For me there is a grandeur - an operatic pitch - satisfyingly undercut by the very tactile representation of a crumpled object in your paintings.

                                                      Photos by Cathy Sunu www.cathysunu.com

JC: That noir is a nice touch, because what were those movies except this sense of the city as vast, unknowable and possibly menacing, peopled with ambiguous citizens desperate for some kind of human connection? I think those movies act out a lot of malaise and fear of the times. I see you delving into this but taking a more feminine perspective – less tough and guarded, more interrogative and sensual. I'd think scale to be so important with that: to respect the city, but bend it to your needs.

JC: I also think that creating a sense of intimacy in our work reflects the purpose of this Salon Series, which is to forego institutional constructs like the gallery, the sommelier, the Michelin three-star restaurant – to strip down these walls and create a more immediate and familiar experience that is not about status or expertise, but about sharing an evening with strangers in a relaxing but engaging and welcoming environment, to have a real, unmediated conversation with other human beings about beautiful things.

ML: It's been very liberating to change from showing artwork in a traditional context to a fairly undefined one. To engage a group of people and successfully open a public discussion by talking first about our own work has been a fantastic experience. Each one of the four salon dinners has been unique - characterized by the great variety of people.

JC: But it's a room where we, and the audience, get to define it for ourselves. I think that's very liberating and slightly befuddling at times. How often do you have the opportunity to sit down and just have great food and conversation with a motley crew of friends and strangers? An immediate, un-mediated conversation? No texting, Facebook, phones or computers. No opportunity to "present" yourself, no editing! Perhaps one of the exciting things is how spontaneous it can get in light of our work which is so sensitive to presenting, to editing.

JC: During one dinner, the group engaged in a vigorous discussion about artmaking and patronage – how does one survive as an artist? In this day, I feel the artist needs to navigate between the reach and authority of the gallery and an entrepreneurial toolbag of self-promotion (such as this Series), marketing and salesmanship. And do you paint for money or for yourself, or both? What do you think is the role of an artist in pushing their own work? And what is this concept of "selling out"? Does it really exist? How do you go about this in your own practice?

ML: As you so beautifully phrase it "the entrepreneurial bag of self promotion" can't be used enough. If you have your creative house in order and you have a clear head about why you make the work that you make, then self promotion should come pretty naturally.

JC: Being invested in yourself is fairly easy to handle, but when I talk about the Salon, I go out of my way to not present it as an alternative to galleries and museums. What we're doing isn't supplanting the establishment. It's ... is it even enhancing it? I don't know. I know that the power of the Salon is peeking under the sheets of art making and art marketing and art selling and looking at the raucous, rough-and-tumble, error-prone quotidian beauty of making and talking about these things. Because in the end paintings and drawings and food and wine are all things; it takes people to activate them. The Salon is about people talking to people, hatching ideas, starting arguments, engaging their senses. Once you get people excited and draw lines of personal connection ... they pretty much sell the work to themselves. But I think getting people past that initial insecurity is key to selling artwork to people who may not be active collectors.

JC: Both of us are often asked about forms and/or feminine aspects of our paintings. I almost never see the things people see in my work and I think the feminine quality of your work is equally unconscious, or at least not the primary purpose of the work. Is this a pitfall of abstracting representational things? Scott McCloud in his seminal book, "Understanding Comics," posits that we as humans are hardwired to find ourselves in our environment. Hence, an electrical outlet looks like a face and we construct a new, emotional vocabulary solely out of punctuation :-) What is your take on this and does it color how you work?

ML:  I never create my drawings out of total certainty. What they mean, other than what they literally depict, and what they suggest, often reveals itself to me much later. Having the feedback of a whole room of people over four different occasions has been a great luxury. Like you, I have been surprised by what people see or infer regarding content.

JC: Luxury is a good word for it. It really is something to be thankful for. At several dinners I've felt like the one who doesn't know what the paintings are about! At our very first dinner, recent transplants from Miami invoked Russian philosophies of disassociation; I was left scratching my head, but looking at my own work with new eyes with a word I didn't know but a concept I worked with instinctually. Painting for me really is an exploration, and I think a successful painting always departs from the intentions you had when you started it. People ask me when a painting is done. When is it done? Fuck if I know. It's done when the ideas it has started to express outgrow the picture I'm making and I need to make another picture to contain them. 

Learn more about JC Steinbrunner, click here. Learn more about Mary Livoni, click here.