Here is another studio visit I did while in LA, where there is no snow unless you want snow and go to the mountains for it. Michael’s studio was in the Downtown area of LA, right around the corner from the “Buy Your Loud Stereos Here” district, the “Flowers for Funerals” district, and the “Shinny Shinny Shinny Rims” district (seriously there were about 15-20 each of these stores right next to each other).

Michael’s palette

Funnel Pages: How do you start a painting?
Michael Dopp: I think of them as a series of approximations, working on them in stages. In the first stage I don’t know what the last stage is going to be. So I come up with an approximate guess of a symmetry- a balance of shapes. And then I will think of a method of application, usually doing it over the entire surface. I think of them as approximations because they lack a certain amount of precision but they aspire toward it. I don’t ever measure out centers, I just start in what I think is the middle and work my way out, eyeballing it in the hopes that it will fit. Each stage or layer becomes a distinct application or process and I have to work with the interaction of these layers as the painting progresses.

FP: Do you ever go back to a layer?
MD: No, once it’s done it’s done. When I start with a layer, I do it until the end, even if I see it’s not working. And then deal with that by putting another layer on top. So there is the sense of constantly covering up. So the end products become about a revealing of a process.

painting in progress

FP: What are you working on now?
MD: I have these canvas paintings stretched on the wall right now, they are in their very early stages. They are a bit of a departure, since most of my other work is on panel. I liked the panel because they were architectural, and relating to the imagery. I think of the images often as interiors or rooms that I am building out. Rooms in a building, but I don’t know the shape of the building until the end. The panels are more conducive to the surface that I am working toward, the hard wood surface lends itself to my method of working with palette knives, to sand it and stress it. It made the paintings like walls too. Something about my materiality is often dry, plaster-like, and concrete; often I work in grays because I like to think of it as a color in transition- it could go cool, or warm, or be made of different colors. Like oil- it could look black or it could look like a rainbow. And all that seems conducive to the imagery.

two more paintings in progress

FP: Do you see your paintings as being in the formalist tradition? Meaning the paintings are just being about the surface and mark making- no metaphysical aspects, narrative, or specific imagery?
MD: I think of them first and foremost as formal and about process. But I think of both of those things as keyholes to other sorts of questions. They become about making these spaces, not just about paint and being flat. I like to tweak it so that there is a play of plains floating in space, where that space becomes metaphysical or uncanny.

a finished painting on panel

FP: Where are your shapes and forms coming from?
MD: When I was living in Chicago, about 10 years ago, I started painting these interior spaces in a very literal way. Slowly the idea of making these interior architectures and spaces through creating space with patterns came up. By painting the floorboards and runner boards along the wall I saw these two opposing planes- the vertical and horizontal planes, and this certain psychological space it was creating.
It eventually evolved into this Baroque idea of a room in flux or upheaval, and the event. I see my work during graduate school as a further reduction of this, maybe in a formal way by simplifying it. I think of some of the forms as organic expanding shapes that are trying to be closed in by the architectural shapes. So in that way it becomes a bit more narrative. Some are more illustrations of this idea while others are more experiential.
But since then the relationships have become more convoluted; I’ve been really interested in fabric design, textiles, patterns of all sorts, lines in concrete, and other visual rhythms.

FP: It seems like these have a real sense of aura.
MD: It goes back to this love and appreciation of work by people like Emma Kunz, Hilma af Klint, and Agnes Martin- all work that goes between being just a formal exercise and into something that becomes transfigured somehow.  Kunz talked about her work as being maps of a psychic space, I like to talk about my work as a map of a process and through that mapping there are traces of emotional and psychological states as well. In that sense it becomes more than a painting of an architectural space. The collection of paintings becomes the building of many rooms. Its like Kafka’s “The Castle”, where he is trying to get to a person that is in this other building, there is a constant unfolding of the narrative and the problems while also becoming an unfolding of the internal and external space.
In my own work, I think the better pieces are the ones that becomes more introspective, stranger, and vulnerable. It doesn’t so much flirt with ideas of spirituality but metaphysical seems like a more appropriate term. This idea of a certain sense of absorption and encounter in the work becomes a meditation of something unworldly or unseen. Kunz talked about a place to project one’s self into and it being a healing experience. I think about that a lot in my own work.

painting on panel, leaning against the back of another panel

FP: What are you excited for?
MD: There is this rim store down the street that I am pretty in to. I have a show coming up I am excited for. American Idol, I don’t know about Ellen DeGeneres though. I’ve been really into Robert Fludd’s etchings. And Roberto Bolano- this Chilean novelist and poet I have been reading lately.

To see more (and much better pictures) of Michael’s work check out his website here.