David Aipperspach

David Aipperspach is a painter and educator based in Philadelphia. He earned an MFA in Painting from the Rhode Island School of Design and a B.A. in Landscape Architecture from the University of California, Berkeley. He is currently an Assistant Professor at Ursinus College, where he teaches all levels of painting, printmaking, and drawing. His work has been shown in a variety of gallery and academic contexts in the Bay Area, New York, and Philadelphia.

Statement
I make representational paintings that prioritize the perceptual mechanics of painting and the capacity for paint to render illusory light. The paintings most often depict central, singular subjects that fit within established genre categories of portrait, landscape, and still life. Through efforts to crop, veil, multiply and iterate seemingly ubiquitous subjects, I hope to imbue the paintings with unexpected ambiance, drama, and potential for metaphor that rewards slow looking while drawing connections between painting, photography, and film.

Interview with David Aipperspach

Questions by Andreana Donahue

Hi David. What are some early memories of your introduction to art or art-making while growing up in Des Moines, Iowa?
My immediate family is not particularly involved in the arts.  But, I have a large extended family and many of them are farmers.  Not an artistic pursuit, per se, but, I do remember being fascinated by that sort of life, that sense of vocation, from a young age.  Maybe there is an analogy there—learning a specific set of material skills, using your hands and relying on visual analysis, watching things grow.

Des Moines has a great art center.  They have an Edward Hopper painting that I have vivid memories of seeing as a young kid, as well as one of my favorite Morandi paintings that I always visit when I go back to see family.

What motivated your transition to painting from an initial interest in environmental design at UC Berkeley?
I enjoyed the education in landscape architecture and think that it is a fascinating field, but I became increasingly interested in painting towards the end of my time at Berkeley.  The independence and immediacy of a studio-based creative practice was attractive to me, as an alternative to the more constrained and pragmatic process of design work. There is more room for architecture in painting than there is for painting in architecture.

Can you share specific artists who have influenced you, whose work you keep returning to? Are there certain aesthetics or ideas you tend to admire or are most drawn to?
Catherine Murphy, Sylvia Plimack Mangold, and Robert Bechtle are a few of my favorites from the past several decades.  I like how they employ the clarity and formal rigor of modernist painting, but corrupt the false purity and assert the value of closely observing the quotidian.  The images often hit you quickly, but their craft keeps you engaged and a rich potential for metaphor unfolds over time. I also like the accessibility of the their paintings.  I think it’s generous to make representational paintings of broadly familiar subjects.

I also have looked a lot at the 19th century Luminist landscape painters, particularly Martin Johnson Heade and John Frederick Kensett.  I am endlessly fascinated by the capacity for paint to render illusory light. I think there is a paradoxical magic in the way something so firmly material, like pigment, can be manipulated to capture the immaterial traits of light and temperature.  The Luminist painters exploited and celebrated this, without the hyperbole and grandiosity of some of the other Hudson River School painters.

You’re currently based in Philadelphia. What are the most valuable aspects of living and working as an artist in this community? 
Philadelphia is a great place to be an artist.  Studio space is still readily available and relatively affordable, and it’s easy to get to New York and other Mid-Atlantic cities.  It has some great museums and a friendly creative community, a lot of artist run galleries with active programming.  There are a handful of commercial galleries, though it would be nice to see a few more of them.

Can you tell us about your current studio and typical daily routine?
I rent a studio about a mile from my home.  It’s always been best for me to separate living and working space and to keep the studio activity contained and focused.  Typically, I have a few things going at once. The paintings are pretty slow and worked in layers, so I like to always have a painting in process that I can step out of and work on setting up for the next, preparing surfaces, generating drawings for new ideas, etc.

I also devour audiobooks in the studio, mostly contemporary fiction.  I love having something narrative to follow while I’m working.  Novels and short stories sort of mark the time of working through the paintings, and they occasionally inspire new painting ideas.

What source materials are you usually seeking out? Are you normally working from life, photos, or a combination of the two? Can you share some insight into your process, from conception to completion? 
All of my recent paintings are made from studio maquettes, or from little scenarios that I stage outdoors and then photograph.  I work from both direct observation and from photographs. Often I’ll need to observe the actual maquette to work out some of the details, but I like adopting some of the color distortions that happen with a digital camera—the warm/cool spectrum stretches out a bit.  I typically mix colors based on some of those distortions so that the paintings can take on more of a cinematic quality, a little more diffuse and saturated than observed reality.

Your subjects range from microwave interiors to jars of flowers to wisps of hair. Can you talk about these choices and their relationship to representational painting traditions?
My paintings often depict singular subjects.  I want the initial visual read to be immediate, the subject identifiable, and then, if they’re working, for the metaphorical implications and strangeness to percolate over time.  Painting can encourage us to examine something that we already know more closely, and I like the peculiar reverence and aura that a slow painting can imbue in its subject.

The microwaves presented the opportunity to get multiple temperatures of light in a single, contained image.  I like that it’s immediately recognizable, domestic, but because they’re scaled up and isolated they can also read as glowing interiors or tombs. The jars of flowers started as homages to Albert York’s flower paintings.  I made small diorama models of a few of his works and then painted from the models.  Flowers are familiar subjects for still life paintings, but I like that within that familiar framework I can push on some of the variables and find subtle visual cues that allude to the artifice of the diorama stage set.  I’m also attracted to the melodrama of setting them in the landscape, that they could indicate graves, or function metaphorically as representations of containment. The paintings of cropped wisps of hair, as well as a new series of closely-cropped torsos, are motifs to introduce a sort of lingering human presence across the larger sequence of recent works.

Can you talk about the significance of the “Double Sun” landscapes that recur throughout your work?
The “Double Sun” paintings are of distant views that are hybrids of my own photographs and and parts of other paintings—mostly John Frederick Kensett and Martin Johnson Heade.  They set up a context, a generalized site for the other paintings, similar to the way a filmmaker might use a panoramic establishing shot to open a film.  I like the deadpan drama in them. It’s also a recurring motif in some science fiction books and movies—characters looking up and noticing multiple suns or moons to signal an extraterrestrial environment.

Do you see your creative practice as one, ongoing body of work or is it broken down into series? If the latter, how do you know when a series is finished?
I see my current paintings as an ongoing body of work comprised of several series.  I like to iterate the various motifs, so that naturally generates some seriality. But, I want the different subjects to lean on and complicate each other across series. I don’t really see a series as ever being finished, I just work on paintings that I’m excited to work on, occasionally opening up new serial ideas, while knowing there is still more to discover in a prior motif.

How would you describe your approach to editing? What happens to work that you determine is unsuccessful?
Most of my editing process occurs in the drawing phase.  Often I’ll start a studio session at a drawing table where I’ll jot down ideas, make lists, and sketch small thumbnails that get curated and may evolve as more developed preparatory drawings.  The ideas and drawings that don’t stick move to the bottom of the stack.  Usually I am fairly committed to a painting when I start it.  Everything is carefully scaled, so by the time I build and prep the painting surface and start painting, I work steadily towards resolution.  There is a lot of anxiety in the initial planning phases, but once I get though that and am ready to commit, I enjoy the actual painting process quite a lot.  Once the image is established on the surface of the painting, the final steps are building up colored glazes to get the light to read convincingly.

You’ve been an educator at Ursinus College in Pennsylvania since 2015. Has your experience as an educator shifted your perspective or way of working? 
Yes, I’ve been in my current teaching position at Ursinus College for nearly five years.  It’s a liberal arts college and much of my contact is with students coming to introductory courses with varying ranges of experience and broad academic interests.  It’s a productive challenge to introduce painting to students who may not be well-versed in discipline-specific vocabulary.  It forces me to explain concepts in straightforward terms, and I really enjoy introducing the fundamental mechanics of making and viewing paintings.  Perhaps that effort is reflected in my work. I am not a total luddite, but I am faithfully engaged with the formal building blocks of painting—scale, speed, space, point of view, etc.

Who are some contemporary painters you’re excited about right now?
Josephine Halvorson and Roger White come to mind.  Like Catherine Murphy and Sylvia Plimack Mangold mentioned above, both share an attentiveness to looking and recording the strangeness of the ordinary in very direct pictorial form. I liked Michelle Grabner’s 2017 curatorial effort, American Genre: Contemporary Painting, at the Maine College of Art.  Also, Helen Molesworth’s exhibition at Los Angeles MOCA earlier this year:  One Day at a Time: Manny Farber and Termite Art.  I respect the gestures made in both of those exhibitions, and I like a lot of the painters that were included in each.

Can you talk about some non-visual works of art that are important to you - from film, music, or literature?
The opening sequence of Tarkovsky’s Solaris.  I feel compelled to watch that every few weeks or so in the studio.  I am also a big fan of Jim Jarmusch and David Lynch. As I mentioned above, I also read a lot of contemporary fiction.  Recently, I’ve been moving through work by George Saunders and Richard Powers. I also love Don DeLillo’s writing.  He may be a closer stylistic influence.  I admire his sparse, concrete prose and severe sense of humor.  He can weave straightforward language and dialogue in to vast and dramatic webs of metaphor and consequence.  I aspire to hit a similar quality in my paintings.

What are you working on right now? Do you have any upcoming projects, exhibitions, residencies, or other news you’d like to share?
Currently, I am working on a curatorial project with my partner, Sarah Pater.  We are putting together a show that will open at West Chester University in February.  The exhibition is titled Slow Burn, and consists of painting, sculpture, and lens-based work that is difficult to capture with documenting photographs—work with an optical density that rewards slow looking and restores a more embodied experience to viewing artworks.  It’s a mix of Philadelphia and New York-based artists that we admire—friends, former teachers, and a few others we are just getting to know now.  I am excited to see it all come together.

To find out more about Chris and his work, check out his website.