Page 13 - the NOISE December 2012

Hidden Water by Steph D. Revering is among the landscape paintings featured at Mountain Oasis this December.
POLarOID PaSSION
At the time I am writing this, the cover for the December issue of the Noise is still being dreamed up. I ask Margeaux Bestard what she has brewing in her mind. “I am excited to be working with my Polaroid land camera,” she says. “It’s a tool I have been using for years and am looking forward to seeing the style blown up for a cover.”
A solid two years have passed since I last interviewed Ms. Bestard, and I ask her what she’s been doing. “I have been working fever- ishly to get hired on the river! Learning to row boats, work more efficiently and read water. From motor trips to row trips or just hiking, I have been fully captivated by the canyon. It’s a common happening around here! My hard work has paid off though; I work with Grand Canyon Youth, AZRA, and lots of hiking for Oars. I am still taking pictures and find myself more drawn to still life work.”
I ask Ms. Bestard how river running has influ- enced her work. “It has most certainly changed my art to not have as much new work so fre- quently. But perhaps what comes out is more special for that reason. Winter and shoulder seasons are my times to really push for photog- raphy.”
These days Ms. Bestard is focusing on photo- graphing still life and food. “I am such a foodie that great presentation just tantalizes my eyes. Odd shapes and props ... I have been recently inspired by a white beaded dress too. But Po- laroid, Polaroid, Polaroid, is my muse and me- dium. It has the same instant gratification as digital, but I don’t have to sit at the computer as long. Folks love it too.”
“I have been the regular contributor at the
Rendezvous now for a year,” she tells me. “So you can always look there for my most recent body if work.”
MargeauxBestard.com
INTErNaL TErraIN
“Currently I have two modes of doing art- work,” painter Steph Revering tells me. “One of the painting modes I’ve got right now are little sepia ink drawings of buildings. I’ve been doing house portraits for people. They’ll send me photographs, or I’ll go stand in front of their house and do some sketches, then I’ll take that back to my drawing table. I’ll do a little post card sized sepia ink painting of it. People have enjoyed doing this as anniversary, Christmas, and birthday presents. They’re relatively inex- pensive and they’re personal. It’s their house and they’re quite realistic.”
“The other mode is what I’ve been doing for a while, which is landscape paintings,” Mr. Rever- ing continues. “Mostly they’re places you can’t go and sit and see. A lot of the landscape geog- raphy in my paintings comes from where I live in the Southwest, but they’re really metaphori- cal and they’re about internal states and inter- nal places. I do yoga and I meditate, and a lot of my paintings are either places I go while I’m meditating, places I would like to be when I’m meditating or they are a reflection of internal states while I’m meditating or doing yoga. You could imagine that they are a vista you could go out and see somewhere, and some of them actually are amalgams of places around here.”
Mr. Revering tells me that his creative pro- cess is different for the two different modes he works in. “They’re both really different and they’re both really satisfying in different ways,”
he says. “I come up with a rough compositional sketch and I think about colors. But mostly it’s shapes, forms and contrast. When I work on the metaphorical paintings I will develop a rough sketch, transfer it to my canvas, usually lay down an under painting and just let it grow form there. Sometimes I have a really specific color idea and other times its more about the forms; the colors show up to support the forms. It’s largely about the feeling the painting has, the space. I’m hugely influenced by Chinese landscape painting. I took a class on it when I was at art school in Chicago. It was a turn- ing point because it really helped me under- stand the idea of entering into and wander- ing through a landscape as opposed to being presented with a landscape to view. Hopefully my paintings are ones you can enter into and become a part of.”
Mr. Revering is also a yoga teacher, and I ask him how his yoga practice weaves through his art. “Yoga philosophy, theory and history are part of what makes up my paintings. Usually my paintings have mountains, and that’s be- cause, usually, that’s the place yogis go to hang out to get away from the world. Historically yo- gis go to the Himalayas to reach elevated states. Mountains are symbolic of elevated states and spiritual states, and they’re often surrounded by plains and rolling hills. There’s this journey you have to go through in order to reach the mountains. You can’t just teleport up to the top of Everest, you have to get there. You have to plan and organize, then you have to do the hard work to get there. It’s really complicated. A lot of this kind of thinking goes into my paint- ings. It’s part of moving into the painting.”
“I draw a lot from Buddhist ideas and con-
cepts,” he says. “They’re universal, that’s the other thing. Hermits always go to the moun- tains. Spiritual seekers go to the mountains. They hardly ever hang out in the middle of the city. These days a lot of people are though, the deep spiritual seekers that choose to remain in the world. You see a lot of yoga teachers doing that, you see a lot of spiritual teachers in the United States. They may have gone off and lived in monastery or trekked through Ne- pal, but in order for them to share the benefits they’ve gotten, they have to come back into the hurly burly, so to speak. They have to go back to where the people are and that’s huge- ly challenging. I don’t like to put cities in my paintings. Because I don’t really like them that much,” the artist says, laughing.
“What I hope viewers get out of my paint- ings is a slightly altered state of understanding things. I kind of think of my paintings as Roth- ko field color paintings. I love his stuff. I love, love, love his stuff. There were a number of his paintings at the Art Institute of Chicago when I was there and I would just go sit in front of them for a long time. I tried to achieve through the language that I’m using in my paintings what I experienced in his paintings, which is a different language. It’s a place where you en- ter into and when you leave you’re different. Hopefully the paintings pull you in, take you somewhere else and when you leave you’re a little different. That’s the hope. My paintings are partly an attempt to share states of being that I know about, that I think would be a little different than what most people experience most of their days.”
The metaphorical, internal landscapes by Mr. Revering will be on display at Mountain Oasis
thenoise.us • the NOISE arts & news • DECEMBER 2012 • 13