STEVE VOLL
Studio Visit / Interview by Alex Roth
I met Steve Voll in his sprawling, well-organized Brooklyn studio on Monday, October 25th, 2021. The replacement windows on the 5th floor of his Park Avenue woodshop overlook a construction site exposing imminent, rusted rebar, quickly diminished by a twinkling panorama of Manhattan’s skyline. The evening of my visit was misty and humid. The Empire State Building was cast in green light. My friend, Nao Matsumoto, also Steve’s friend, asked if I would interview Steve, whose current exhibition "Bad Plaid" is on view at Lorimoto Gallery, Nao’s space in Ridgewood, Queens.
Nao and I planned the visit the day before; this was after I'd stopped by the gallery. Short notice, however, was a lesser caveat to conversation than the fact there is so little public information about Steve. A prolific artist who’s been painting since the 1980s, who’s created over eighty large scale paintings during the pandemic-- more than he’s completed in the past twenty years-- Steve is relatively unconcerned about promoting his work. He just paints, and he paints a lot. Steve studied at Tyler School of Art and Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. He also leads a successful commercial fabrication business, Voll Inc., which has slowed during COVID, providing him more solo time in his studio. At one point in our conversation he alluded to the idea that the business allows him to maintain a living in New York City while preserving the purity of his painting practice (my words, not his). “Purity” came to mind often as I spoke with and wrote about Steve.
Steve, in a white t-shirt and paint-stained jeans, answered the door and welcomed us. I immediately sensed he was soft-spoken even from under his mask. We were invited to follow him past the dusty table saws and storage areas on the periphery, where Steve keeps many of his paintings neatly arranged. The sheer volume was impressive, including an entire room beyond the saws that stores finished, unframed canvases sandwiched at the top between thin strips of plywood, riveted together in a way so they may be slid in and out of each mobile rack.
Born in southern Minnesota, Steve is the son of artisans. His father was a farmer-turned-masonry contractor, and his mom owned a yarn and crafts store. He has one younger sister. As a kid he learned needlepoint, sewing, cross stitch, and how to make latch hook rugs. Later he worked for his father’s masonry business and defines this as the origin of his self-reliance. In the artist’s words, he gained “an understanding of a day’s work. Growing up, really there was no way for me to escape the intense labor ethic and it’s embedded in how I work and think about painting.”
Upon entering Steve’s studio with many works-in-progress, I felt an immediate impact. Symmetries seem at once whole and unraveled, not unlike the twisted, DNA-type imagery in some of the large scale works in his show. Shapes appear lit from behind as if observing them on a light table. There is constant movement, palpable vibrations due to Voll’s experimental use of color, which he credits to the digital portion of the process, where he begins designing each composition in Photoshop. During COVID he merged the computer process with painting in a new way, incorporating large scale prints on his canvases. Steve also creates animations and sometimes considers his paintings as stills in a sequence, referencing 60’s and 70’s experimental film including Stan Brakhage, Michael Snow, and Paul Sharits as inspiration. Regarding future work, he mentions plans for larger paintings, around 10' x 15’, a step up from his current 60" x 84” canvases, and prints with flocked black velvet.
On his process, the artist notes:
"Something that I think about often with visual software, is the ability to endlessly layer imagery and how that relates to painting. To show and hide imagery, change layers, depths, opacities, transfer modes. I have computer images that I started making in the late nineties which I will bring into something that I am currently working on. I had been making work in CAD, PS, AE, some special FX software. That older work looks to me now like sets for an imaginary space opera. I think when COVID started, and I found myself suddenly with a lot of time to work, I made a shift to thinking, well, how do I make computer images that are more about the stuff of painting? From there, I finally, after about twenty years of working separately on the computer, started being able to get those things into painting by making CNC templates, CAD cut vinyl stencils, printing, and printmaking."
There is nothing static about any of Voll’s work yet there is a constant urge to know more and an understanding that you won't get there: concordant and harmonious, commanding but not cold. For example, a painting may feel endlessly spacious until the image and surface seem to collapse into a thin plane, precluding entry. Then suddenly the space is vast and endless again. The experience feels like seeing fog lift over The Grand Canyon or witnessing The Aurora Borealis. Often, within the same painting, there's relief from the tension of the minutiae of the surface, relief from the painstaking labor required to hand pick each vinyl stencil Voll applies and paints over by hand, to the plateau of cosmic insignificance elicited by the stillness within his tondos. The tondos are my favorite pieces in “Bad Plaid” and their stillness likely creates a sense of endlessness (despite a humble 28” in diameter) and literal reflection because Steve uses silver in the underpainting. In writing and rewriting these descriptions I realized I was talking about transcendence.
Labor intensity and intricate patterns are definitive themes in Voll’s work, at once unifying and jarring, spanning from his early work to his current exhibition. Connecting the aesthetic of plaid to the culture of his upbringing, Steve describes:
“I think of plaid (or grid patterns) as relating mostly to craft, home, flannel shirts, but also the promises of Modernism. Any physical grid will eventually break down. By ‘Bad Plaid’ I’m mostly thinking about how plaid/flannel was worn by people I grew up with. Almost like some kind of symbol of uniformity, goodness and purity? It was like mid-late 80’s that there seemed to be a shift in the way some of us wore those clothes. The working class uniform of Red Wing boots, Levis and flannel shirts became tattered and our hair long and ratty. The music expressed dissatisfaction and anger through screaming over delightful melodies created by (two forever faves) Hüsker Dü and Nirvana. With our appearance, we were saying we see where this (Reaganism, the culture, the economy and our financial future) is going and we don’t like it. I don’t paint specifically those ideas, but they are in there.”
Steve emanates the humility one might associate with impressions of “the working class.” He is deliberate and makes generous eye contact, speaks thoughtfully and quietly, so quietly at times I could barely hear him. As an artist, he seems unperturbed by outside influences, absorbed in his own process, and there is more to this process than just an homage to his background. The product induces something much more profound.
Steve mentioned the field during our studio visit and the term struck me because it sounded familiar, like I could have already known this place, or he thought I might. He described it as “sort of a dark ocean, sort of a calm ocean, it’s all kind of black and blank.” This is the field, the space he enters during transcendental meditation, which he continues to practice a few times a day for the past eight years. Steve also comparedthe field to memories of southern Minnesota as “just this landscape with the horizon and the roads, and the perspective points to nothing.” As a teenager Steve would run long distances on those roads, alone and with his cross country team in high school.
Running is still very much a part of Voll's life. He ran a 50 Mile Ultra in Tucson, Arizona about five years ago and there’s a treadmill at the other end of his studio. During the height of COVID, he could tally 20 or 30 miles in one day in Prospect Park. I noticed the connection between high-intensity, isolative training for running that compares to the way Steve approaches his studio work: most of each practice happens singularly, behind the scenes, involving both a tight structure and a degree of intentional self-forgetfulness, repetition with an occasional culmination.
Like many people during the pandemic, Steve rediscovered and spent time in early memories, when he would daydream. He said this was unusual for him. Embracing it seems partly what inspired him to become more structured and create more routine within his painting practice, roots which allow freedom to experiment, and to combine old processes with new ones. The field also relates to the landscape Steve associates with his father’s work as a farmer.
In his transcendental meditation, Steve told me he often forgets his mantra; this made me think he must be doing something right. When I asked if he was spiritual he told me not in any particular way, and that he wasn’t raised with any religion, either. Something seems to guide him naturally through his experiences. I could tell by the way he describes runner’s high as the dissolution of self (different from the “synthetic” experience of taking acid during high school) and that in painting “...I’m led by something.. I don’t know what it is.. I think of it as a very separate space to be in.” I believe he was referencing a contrast to his responsibilities as a fabricator, but it seems like for Steve, entering the painting process is like entering another world.
There is nothing pretentious or competitive about Steve Voll or the way he describes what he does. There is just a commitment to explore and to re-explore, and a drive to make beautiful work, which he does with abundance whether visible to the outside world or not. The result is that we are entranced: perhaps drawn in by color, a quivering pattern, and the fact the experience remains defying. We’re not left wanting a conclusion as much as we’re left contending with why we need one. This is an elusive opportunity for any viewer, or more broadly, anyone at all.
Interviewer / writer - Alex Roth is a professional therapist / welder / writer .