Scrumdiddleyumptious....

I really do love this new batch of Caleb Weintraub's work. He has a show currently up at Peter Miller Gallery (Chicago) till October 17th. His new work seems to employ an array of interesting plays with texture. He's using both acrylic and oil, achieving a luscious struggle that pops and melts, punches and oozes. This new body replaces harsher neon schemes with richer sensual palettes and, if you can believe it, less violence.

Something Caleb said in an interview last January reminded of an experience in undergrad that I have never shaken.
As a junior, I was somehow able to get into, although I didn't know it at the time, a graduate level figure painting class with one of the most coveted faculty of the department. (which, for anyone that knows anything about the school, knows what kind of inflection comes with the utterance of "the painting department at SAIC) Anyway, from the moment I walked into the immaculately windowed studio in the back corner of the Museum, which overlooked Grant Park, my presence immediately garnered both respect and suspicion. I knew then that I had just walked into something that was, at the very least, going to be very interesting. Coming from a background of absolutely no formal painting training, I spent most of my time at the Art Institute consistently and achingly intimidated by my peers. Add that to the snootiest of snoots of the art studio world and you've got a recipe for paralyzing performance anxiety. I, admittedly, made some of the worst art of my career during those years. This professor, in particular though, was renowned for his uncanny ability to induce tears in even the most adept of painters. He was, of course, an amazing artist. One night we were working very large, it was the third session of a four week model set. I had yet to endure a formal critique, which is an entirely different rant, but was just beginning to adjust to the professor's teaching method. He came over looked at my canvas and laughed. "What color is that wall?" he asked. It was, in reality, a white wall. In the studio, as the sun was setting, the color manifested as a pink and orange lit surface in the painting, so I said - orange. "Are you mad?" He took my brush, mixed all of the colors laid out on my palette into one disgusting green and proceeding to paint, not only the 'wall' in my painting, but also about 3/4 of the entire canvas in this hue. "If you can't tell green from orange, you should probably just go get a business degree."
Fifteen minutes later, he returned and asked again....."What the hell kind of color is that?" I had not touched the wall that he repainted for me. "It's the green wall that you painted fifteen minutes ago," I responded. "Well," he said "that was fifteen minutes ago, when the wall was green."

Sometimes people are inclined, out of comfort, to accept certainties. It is, no doubt, less tiresome to comply with our circumstances. I've recently decided that I do, however, believe there to be two types of people in the world: Those who believe themselves to be who they are in perpetuity, and those who believe themselves and the world to be in constant metamorphosis. The sun set, the wall changed.

MWC: Tell us about one useful thing you were taught or told.
Caleb Weintraub: Not to be precious. To always be willing to change.