Tad Mike: The issue of touch or lack of touch in your work is of interest. You are dealing with something as fragile as soot. There is this issue of approach, namely, how you begin to approach a white sheet of paper and marry these two disparate elements together. Do you imagine and prepare for a number of variables and factors to create these pieces?

Kristin Holder: Yes, pain being the first thing, burning myself. (Laughter)

TM: Oh really?

KH: Yes, that’s genuine. The soot is not applied any other way rather than using fire and using a piece of paper large enough really to have a good distance.

TM: So you are not heating objects to place on the paper, only using fire directly?

KH: Using only fire. I have to hold the piece of paper while I am burning it. I guess I could choose a larger sheet of paper, but I don’t.

TM: Obviously you want a certain scale and a certain mark to fit the sheet, so it requires the paper to be a certain size.

KH: Yes, but I was interested in following the direction the fire took me as a one-shoot work, not making a series of marks.

TM: You were working alla prima, and what happened or what did not happen was the work?

KH: Yes.

TM: How did you arrive at using soot and burning the paper as a way of working?

KH: I had been exposed to and been thinking about Yves Klein, the burned pieces he did. They are much larger, obviously, and reveal an image, but I had seen those works and I was working up in a studio in rural Washington State. Part of my ritual every day, every morning, was to heat my studio by starting a fire in a wood stove. To make it accommodating for me to work, the experience was all about fire. So I had these materials around and was using dried pigment and some of it was very coarse. I was using dried pigments in gum arabic and was interested in making my own pigments from what I had there.

TM: I think the non-art-making experiences that occur before one works are very important. Building a fire is a gesture almost like a sketch for you.

KH: Yes, much of the time in the studio is not about making capital A-R-T.

TM: All of the works made with soot and fire have an oneiric or dreamlike quality to them. The French writer Gaston Bachelard wrote a book, Fragments of a Poetics of Fire, where he describes fire as something that entices the imagination.

KH: Yes…

TM: The work in the exhibition at the Katonah Museum of Art has a presence that speaks to something very specific, although I really don’t know what…what that is? It has a presence outside the time it took to create it.

KH: I would admit to a parallel conscious, but while I am working in the studio I am pretty pragmatic. I don’t want to discount any other states of awareness going on at once. At this point in my life I am really not drawn to that way of being or thinking. I really wasn’t then either. I don’t totally discount it because I admire it in other people, people who are able to speak clearly about it with a stated set of beliefs.

TM: For some artists being able to articulate what their work is about could destroy the work.

KH: I suppose so. I feel totally out of touch with that part of myself. My early influences from my early twenties were Chinese art and Japanese art. On the west coast there is more of an eye towards Eastern art. That is where I grew up and went to school. I like that so much hard work goes into something that appears, as you said, otherworldly.

Just as the needle threads in and out on both sides of the surface being sewn, so also the mind plunges down and reappears, tracing and linking with its strands the surface of things which is the world, the canvas of categories. It forms patterns on the latter, and their first outlines…Embroidery.¹
Paul Valéry

Falling upon the sheet, a touch germinates its presence on paper when a line takes on weight and mass greater than the obvious. Language is the house in which we live, perhaps, but the most beautiful moments of drawing, as in music, occur when a work leaves the constrictions of matter and resides elsewhere. Ideas of the imagination speak in art through means that leave language without its cord. Losing oneself in a work is always la petite mort that perpetuates this search.

Art does not always reveal the hand of its creator. Considering the drawings of Barry Le Va, the question is immaterial. His touch is personal. It is physical and direct, unapologetic for its resolutions on paper. Marks reside confidently: his embroidery, two-sided. One side we see, the other requires us to listen. These drawings form with a synthesis of marks that denote a beautiful drawing, but have elevated the invisible experience beyond the sheet of paper and retinal perception.

The mechanics of crafted sound or expression of music never feels distant from Le Va’s scores. He creates sound, silently. From the 1960s to present this music has evolved and shed an innocence of form to embrace what John Cage constructed throughout his œuvre: a compendium of moments in which Nature has a way and means of extolling her designs. Works created in a nonchalant, happenstance style feel perfect in completion. Accepting of gravity, liquid, air, and light, even Le Va’s darkest works have breath.

Le Va works in the two-dimensional plane with self-correcting momentum. His investigations are visible and working through them causes something essential to emerge. No matter the fundamental starting point – an elemental chart of chemical compounds, a schematic voltage diagram – the resulting investigation is full of feeling and arrives at that juncture known as art. The painter Joan Mitchell said, “It’s sort of like the more you listen to a chord the more you understand its parts.”² Those parts for Le Va, charts of isotopes or spatial resonances created by a single dowel pivoting ink on paper, specify a specific feeling for form and its contrapuntal relationships.

Referring to works in his Accumulated Visions series, Le Va states:

They are almost too complicated to talk about because their compounded perspectives form a maze of information – a maze of thought. Though it’s simple enough information that’s being presented, you can’t retain it because the concepts overlap and cancel each other out. So what is in the space is the residue of an activity that you haven’t seen performed, so you can only guess what it was from the residue. You have to be able to imagine that you can see through walls of those sculptures. They are about being inside and projecting beyond the room.³

As if speaking about the overtone series in music (a chain reaction of sound in which the sounding of one pitch on a piano or in an orchestra activates identical and different pitch in a higher and lower register), Le Va proposes a fundamental principal of the physics of sound. His choice of the word residue is telling. His embroidery requires the viewer to participate with his sculpture as well as his drawings; the reverse side always situating itself in the invisible.

In BWV 1061, one of Johann Sebastian Bach’s most thrilling concerto works for two pianos and four hands, the premise Le Va expresses is demonstrated by way of point and line. Music accumulates in the fugue. The listener comprehends emotionally and subconsciously, following the overlapping sounds, but it is impossible to separate the strands of musical thought completely and with certainty. It is the harmonic residue moving forward that enthralls.

As within the music of Bach, the forms Le Va postulates contract with an emotional resonance while remaining upright in their character. There are no grandiose empty gestures in Le Va’s drawings. Each line or atmospheric ambiance functions in unison with the whole. Le Va searches for an accountable sensation, the body, its geometry and formalities of reach, counting and flex all form armatures which position man’s shifting relationships to the tangible forms life sits astride.

1. Valéry, Paul. Cahiers/Notebooks I. Ed. Brian Stimpson. Trans. Rachel Killick. Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 2000. 45.
2. Mitchell, Joan. Joan Mitchell: Portrait of an Abstract Painter. Dir. Marion Cajori. New York: Art Kaleidoscope Foundation, 1993, 54 minutes.
3. Le Va, Barry. “A Conversation: Saul Ostrow and Barry Le Va.” Barry Le Va: A Survey of Drawing 1966-2003 and Two New Sculptures. Zurich: Edition & Verlag Judin, 2003, 28.

Tad Mike walks in wooded areas, such as the Maine woods and Florida forests. He picks up bits of organic matter as he walks. Using what he finds, these accumulations become mark-making tools. He likens his selection to combing a beach for shells – one shell sparkles, sings out, is swooped up. What impulse determines this particular selection?

Bonyon Preserve #1 and Bonyon Preserve #7 are part of a series of ink drawings executed in Maine on Westport Island, “a beautiful preserve,” during an artist’s residency in 2007. In these works Mike’s hand guides the tool in a continuous sweep from left
to right across the page. The marks form a thick
horizontal band, like a progression, movement, or
musical score of sorts.

In Bonyon Preserve #7, a hemlock branch was dipped and re-dipped in walnut-colored ink and slid across the paper. There is a slow curve in the band – a hump, a lazy rise, an elevation – then it descends again before leading you off the page. Two contrapuntal paths are recorded as a hand’s steady sweep, and the tools’ evolution and decay become evident.

In Bonyon Preserve #1, the marks are denser, with a heavier ink concentration in the central core suggesting a spine – prone, supple, with a crescendo in the middle. Tidbits, fragments of the action, leave traces; spits above and below elucidate verticals like a conductor’s wild motion, or like embers ascending, snapping as they ride the summer night’s air.