Date of event: June 18, 2011, 1:00 pm – 4:00 pm

Trevor Tubelle is a San Francisco-based artist who makes drawings, paintings, and prints. He was born in 1973 and grew up in Los Angeles. He received his BA in art from UC Berkeley and a MFA in painting from the San Francisco Art Institute and is currently teaching continuing education classes at Stanford University and California College of the Arts. His work is included in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Trevor believes that his artwork is about nothing, or, more specifically, “no-thing”. This notion of “no-thing” concerns the vicissitudes of everyday life. It is not about a particular idea, concept or thing that is concrete and definable. Rather, it is about the direct experiential flow of existing in one moment and then the next, from one drawing to the next, always changing, always new, yet bound together.

How the artist works- His process begins with a seductive sheet of soft paper. He gets a sturdy fountain pen or cheap ball point and methodically make marks on the page (curlicues, grids, zigzags, etc.). Often he moves fast in order to stay a step or two ahead of his brain. 

He’ll look in his sketchbook to find useful things: a jagged triangle, an odd combination of colors, a lumpy shape that could simultaneously be a mountain, a textile pattern and/or an alien asteroid. Then his judgmental brain will catch up and begin to discriminate, edit, and have preferences. Thinking will control and structure the drawing for a time, then his hand will spring loose and poke serendipitous holes in the structure. This back and forth continues for the duration of the drawing, between control and disorder, planning and intuition, with no perfectly balanced resolution. This tension keeps the process fresh and enjoyable.

Trevor’s past Live Painting experience at Flax was April 30, 2011.