Trend Report: Glop Art

Winsor&Newton must be happy.

Those of you who are contemporary painting nerds might have noticed a trend: one all about squeezing, slathering, scooping and smearing on the paint in generous piles. Great big gloopity gloops that, okay, might remind you of heaps of paint-poo. It’s messy, it’s visceral, but also it’s sculptural and silly and gosh dangit most of the time I find myself loving it. Why? What can I say: I’m a sucker for paint acting like paint.

So, as part of No Smarties‘ burgeoning fine arts coverage (ahem), I am here to bring you a trend report on what swank art bloggeur Joanne Mattera recently dubbed “Glop Art.” Hold onto your aprons kids!

Allison Shulnik's "White Visitor #2" (2006) says "what uuuup"

First up we’ve got current art darling Allison Shulnik’s winsome/creepy world populated by hobos, clowns, cats and skulls. She’s funny and colorful and her paintings get way gloopy and I happen to dig her a lot.

A painting like this will might make you go “Ewwww” or “Ooooo.” Or both at once. There’s something undeniably scatological going on here, but at the same time it’s kind of delicious. Part of what keeps Shulnik’s work looking so fresh and not “Eww” I think is due to the cleanliness of her colors: they are relatively bright, kept separate from one another, and decidedly not poopy.

Unless your diet consists solely of funfetti cake frosting. But that would just be so bad.

Fellow young contemporary Kim Dorland, however, does sometimes takes things a bit further in the “Ewww” direction.

Kim Dorland's portrait (title unknown) says "I don't feel so good, you guys. BLARF"

I think the success of this kind of work lies in its ability to teeter on the edge of disgust and lust (see what I did there?). The paint forgoes its traditionally smooth application by brush, goes even further than its smeary AbEx forefathers, and goes BALLS-OUT into semi-hideous piles that you’d usually discard in the corner of your palette and probably end up dumping in the trash. But seeing up there on the canvas instead, like a train wreck, you kinda can’t look away.

Allison Shulnik's "Long Haired Hobo #2 (detail)" (2008) says " :( "

But don’t let yourself be fooled into think that what Shulnik or Dorland is doing is easy just because the end result looks like a spectacular mess. All beginner painting-students know how maddeningly and homogeneously messy oil paint wants to be. That shit is hard to control. Your neatly organized palette crashes in on itself after about five minutes, creating one great big brownish-gray smear. Then you throw all your brushes on the floor and drown yourself in your Gamsol bucket. No? No. Maybe that’s just me.

There’s also something I really like about the fat, squeezed-straight-from-the-tube lines of paint. I like it because it references itself as exactly what it is: paint coming out of a paint tube.  It doesn’t let you forget the artificiality or illusionism of what you’re looking at, yadda yadda yadda. SEMIOTICS, BRO.

So I guess my point is that there’s something satisfying about going nuts with so much paint. In the same way that squeezing your toothpaste tube empty into the sink is satisfying. Or like, popping a zit is revoltingly satisfying. (Admit it. YOU’VE DONE IT BEFORE.)

But it’s not just the figurative/representational painters getting in on the Glop Art action. Check out some of these sweet abstracters:

Leslie's Wayne's "Minor Subtractions (detail)" (2009) says "Heeyyyy guys I'm here too"

I mean look at this broad Leslie Wayne up there. It is pretty badass that THAT is all only oil paint. Right? Right.

And one more fellow with a frustratingly un-googlable name, Peter Allen, to round us out:

Peter Allen's "Beezerspline" (2002) says "urp"

There’s something to be said for combining flatly painted colors with the paint poo piles (as I’m calling them from now on): it’s disparate and weird and it doesn’t really make any sense. BUT it also kinda feels like after you’re excavating through mud, and you’ve suddenly dug up something really surprising and beautiful (once you reach the clean flat shapes underneath). At first I thought that Allen seemed a little too twee, but I really liked it when Joanne Mattera called him “the love child of Thomas Nozkowski and Scott Richter.”  So consider me won over.

The truth is, I think these are all pretty different artists at work here.  Lumping them into a trend isn’t really going to stick.  But you gotta wonder: Why so much Glopping? Why now? And how much have paint sales spiked as a result?

At the end of the day, it just warms my painterly heart to see paint running raucous all over the canvas – behaving as all good little paint-tubes secretly want to behave, if only you let them:  gloopily.

Tatiana Berg is a painter living in Brooklyn, NY. She likes painting, thinking about painting, and talking about painting. Also popcorn.