Stephen Maine has always been a favorite critic at Two Coats of Paint, and recently Gorky’s Grandaughter visited his Brooklyn studio to talk about his own paintings, in which accident and imperfection play an important role in the process. “For a while my process was very controlled, I was using a small number of variables….With the ones that I think of as successful, the relationships are unexpected or unusual. The good ones look impoverished. Like they are doing a lot with a little.” For Maine painting is a purely visual experience engaged with pictorial space and painterly concerns, not steeped in autobiography, feeling, or any sort of cryptic personal content. Using enlarged halftone screen dots, he eludes to images without depicting. “How much naming do I need to do to satisfy my longing [for imagery]?”
