Roni Feldman

Roni Feldman skyped into Northwestern Oklahoma State University to do a guest artist lecture. He is currently working as a lecturer at Otis College of Art and Design. His website is http://www.ronifeldmanfineart.com/ .

At the beginning of the lecture, Roni Feldman listed some of his art influences as: baroque artists (As pertaining to the figure), mark Rothko's color-field painting, and James Turrell. I didn't see the influence of baroque art or Turrell as well when I looked at his art, but he does point out where color-field painting influences his work.

Roni paints with an airbrush! He does airbrushed acrylic on wood panel. In the beginning, he masked off part of the wood to get sharp lines using tape cut out with an x-acto knife. However, very quickly he began to transition to using the airbrush by itself, leaving softer edges.

He wanted to react towards political art, so he began documenting protests in San Francisco and Los Angeles that he saw - trying to hit on the anger and non-peace of antiwar protests. He wanted to talk about how violent anti-violent protests can be. From there, his work gets hazier (first as he stopped using tape to create hard lines) and he begins to focus on crowds rather than protests - his work gets more colorful and the people begin to dissolve, touching on the Rothko color-fields that he loves. He also brings in more abstract and geometric shapes, adding grids or lines over the work: in his words, giving himself more freedom.

My favorite of Feldman's work are his black paintings! These are done in glossy black and matte black paintings, so that they looks completely black until the light hits it in a certain way. He said he was interested in how light interacts, and he wanted to make viewers interact with his work. He touched on the meditative experience of art: that art is not instantly gratifying and the viewer has to take it in slowly and think about what it means. I was impressed with how well Feldman's concepts interact with his methods: because he wants viewers to spend time with his work, he purposely uses materials that require people to take the time to view his work from different angles. It cannot simply be glanced at and passed over, because the viewer needs to work to see it.

I also felt that I could never do work like Roni Feldman does. He mentioned several times how his medium is unforgiving - that it is impossible to correct mistakes with an airbrush, (Specifically in his white paint on white fabric works) and how when he messes up, he has to start over. This is definitely not how I want to work, but Feldman is all about how precise his work is, so it makes sense why he does that. I thought it was ironic that his works are so precise, but he works in a blurry medium of airbrushing.


Watch the Lecture Here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IRCsz861G7g