dike blair

interview by JEFF RIAN
photography by OLIVER ZAHM

melancholia, addiction, boredom, solitude:
capturing mental states
through intimate gouache
and oil paintings of ordinary objects
or maybe simply painting a moment?

JEFF RIAN — You began painting gouaches in the early 1980s as a kind of side- line to your more complex electro-pop collage paintings on glass. For a while, you made sculptures with carpets, electric lights, and images, followed by plinths and shipping crates with lamps and images inside. The sculptures were always Zen-like, evoking ikebana flower arranging using DIY materials. The gouaches were something else. Were they a related but different part of your thinking?
DIKE BLAIR — The gouaches began as “Sunday painter” things, which I saw as a separate activity. Toward the end of the ’80s, I got interested in how some of the gouaches echoed the other work, especially as the sculpture became more sophisticated and…