Been pondering art and Hedda Sterne a lot lately. Hedda Sterne I feel was one of the best kept secrets of the art world. Along with one of my all time favorite artists, the beautiful Jane Frank... [love her work] The only woman in a group of abstract expressionists, Sterne, along with Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Barnett Newman and Mark Rothko called themselves 'The Irascibles.'

Whether be it a poet writing a novel in three nights, men painted blue making music with Cap’n Crunch cereal, or a painter using the floor as her canvas, something unites the artists in these BOMB interviews. It seems that several artists allude to a similar phenomenon in their work: an acknowledgement of the unknown. The unknown can be a scary and confusing space, but all these artists dive into the mystery—into the void—sit with it, and grapple with questions of objectivity and subjectivity. Definitely take the time to check out these interviews!

Li Young Lee: Making art opposes dying, but at the same time, it gets all its energy from this downward momentum, this art into the abyss that all of us are a part of, that’s the tension we feel in art which we enjoy.

Art serves as an effort to understand life, yet also as recognition that complete understanding is impossible. By attempting to express the incommunicable, art can find the miracle in the complexity, the inexplicable, and the absurd. Many of these interviews offer insights into how these artists don’t allow the unknown to hold them down; they find beauty in the mystery by embracing the present moment. By letting go of rational thought and admitting that things often don’t make sense, kernels of truth are found.

Hedda Sterne: Artists are inclined to believe that art is like honey, the product of their own subconcsiouses, their own minds, and I do not. I see myself as a well-working lens, a perceiver of something that exists independently of me: don’t look at me, look at what I’ve found.

Phil Hartman: I’m one of the lucky people who gets to do something silly, and that’s the way I like to hold my life, because that state of mind allows me to be closer to that creative wellspring which comes out of looseness and freedom.

Many of these artists I noticed don't want to be pinned down to a categorized identity. In defying being defined, the artists address that humans are multi-faceted and constantly changing, and create multiple perspectives in their art to portray this. 

Darrell Larson: That’s what I love—contradictory situations. That’s the normal human state, really.

Simon Lane on Gregory Crane’s paintings: As with all art of integrity, the innovation lies not in the process but in the execution, in the ability not to fancify the visual world but to completely reinvent it.

Jill Baroff: Part of what interests me is creating something that evokes a similar experience to what sometimes happens to me in the midst of a broad landscape, where my eyes no longer take in what I see. As though the picture disappears and some other experience takes over.

Lauren Szold: A painting seemed like a wound: why do the edges end where they end? I wanted the boundaries of the “image” to find their own destination, not be arbitrarily determined by this frame.

Ida Applebroog: Depending upon where the viewer is standing, the work can tell entirely different stories.