Russell Floersch
Region: Northeast
City / State: New York, NY
My paintings favor the physical over the visual. Labor serves as
a thematic narrative. The painting and repainting of a specific
architectural feature, by an unknown tradesperson, repeated over
a period of many years, often results in an unintentional painterly
incident...the consequence of painting expressed more as a
simple desire to cover or protect.
When I was a child, my grandfather proudly showed me how
he had repainted his stairwell wainscoting in two fields of gray
and white, and separated them with a stripe of red. But what I
remember most is the faint line of pencil he had drawn to act as a
guide. While on the NYC subway, I watched a woman use makeup
to conceal her eyebrows, only to redraw them with a pencil.
On the second-floor landing of the former Castelli Gallery in
SoHo, where the exhibiting artist’s name would be applied to
the wall, an oval mound of flat white paint had accumulated
after twenty plus years of shows, only to be sanded, painted, and
lettered once again.