Dan’s Papers Cover Artist Sebastian Blanck Paints a ‘Cobalt Sky’ January 11, 2020 “Being an artist was never a choice for me,” says this week’s cover artist, Sebastian Blanck. “I can’t remember a time in my life when I wasn’t making things.” Having been exposed to art at a young age by his mother, Blanck has been creating his entire life. What was the inspiration for this piece? I am inspired by daily life and my work is loosely a journal. I show the quiet moments in life. Images that I think are beautiful and that I want to share with the world. This painting, “Cobalt Sky,” is based on a day I spent sledding with my two sons in the Hudson River Valley. It is one of the larger paintings in an ongoing series of snow scenes. It was part of a show I had in Aspen, Colorado a ...Read more

Ross Bleckner's Interview With Sebastian Blanck April 2002 at Ross's Studio Ross Bleckner: The reason you’ve chosen to use a kind of a pattern is you want it to be a guide rather than a barrier. Sebastian Blanck: Right R: You set up two ways to guide some one into the painting. One is a grid of dots over the figure that can be seen as an abstract pattern. That grid of dots also happens to represent a shower curtain. So it becomes a transparent veil that provides a way of looking into the painting. S: Right, so rather than working as a barrier it’s something that flattens everything and makes the image regular but allows you to go through what normally would be hiding the figure, it brings you in. It’s more like an invitation into the space as opposed to something that keeps you out. R: Well how ...Read more

A Conversation: Joe Bradley and Sebastian Blanck Fall 2007 Joe Bradley: These cut-out paintings have a different quality of light than your older canvases.  Is that one LA?  Is that a palm tree in the background? Sebastian Blanck: That's South Carolina, but it's evening light. And since they're in acrylic... JB: These are acrylic? SB: Yeah. I always painted with oil paint until this series – but oils aren’t immediate enough for these paintings. I need to see the color relationships that I am creating as I lay down the shapes.  Acrylic only takes a few minutes to dry, if I were using oils I would have to wait at least a week before each piece dried, which is too impractical. It is exciting how a change of material can open up new opportunities. For example, I started using some neon pinks and reds that are not available in oils. They ...Read more

Bathroom Weather   The once heated debate over the relevance of painting, or its ability to say anything critical at all, barely makes sense to contemporary audiences. But if the stakes around the question of painting’s “death” evaporated some time ago, what do we make of the lingering presence of these concerns in Sebastian Blanck’s current work? One of the major terms of this series would be the embrace of op-art surface effects to counteract the modernist impasse of material surface versus picture plane. In this case, such devices call to mind the artists of the 1980s who regenerated painting through their re-discovery of the painted surface as a lens or scrim where vision penetrated and could be assembled. By this route, figuration could gradually be reintroduced and yet remain, to the relief of many, “problematic.” Painting was thus restored to academic credibility while the new chief terms were swiftly ...Read more

Screen Around A Secret "It is not true that the more you love, the better you understand; all that the action of love obtains from me is merely this wisdom: that the other is not to be known; his opacity is not the screen around a secret, but, instead, a kind of evidence in which the game of reality and appearance is done away with. I am then seized with that exaltation of loving someone unknown, someone who will remain so forever: a mystic impulse: I know what I do not know." - from A Lover's Discourse: Fragments, 1978, by Roland Barthes American artist Sebastian Blanck (b. 1976) creates painted and collaged assemblages and oil paintings of the people he loves: his wife, two young sons, and close friends. The works in That’s Why We’re Running Away underscore our human desire to hold on to fleeting memories or moments, and the ...Read more