Sol LeWitt

Where did you see his work? The first time was at Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, because the Sidney and Francis Lewis collection, which had examples of Kiefer and Warhol and Twombly...

Alongside conceptual artists like Robert Morris and Sol LeWitt and minimal and conceptual artists like Donald Judd, my work is caught between the more expressive space and also the deliberateness, which is minimal or conceptual.

It's this articulation of both at once.

You also have printed out photos of graffiti on city walls here in your studio.

it's really quite beautiful.

And we have an uncanny number of abstract artists from the 60s and 70s, some really beautiful works, Ilya Bolotowsky and just so many others around that time period, Josef Albers and Annie Albers and Sol LeWitt.

And so all of these works are just, you know, really kind of I always say, being put to work like a piece of hospital equipment.

But the other story that I loved, I think that would be interesting for listeners to hear, and I've told this a lot of times, is about a year ago, I was in my dentist's office, and as I was sitting there, my dentist, who I've known for a while, so I was able to say this, she's kind of drilling or doing whatever she's doing, and she's like, what do you do again? And I was sort of trying to articulate what it was, and I said to her, for example, the piece of art in front of me right now is actually harming my experience here.

It's got all kinds of modern stuff.

Um, Sol LeWitt, who was a, you know, famous artist, um, he actually lived in Spoleto for a few years, and his final project in life was working on the Matare station.

So it has, um, a lot of his artwork, and it, it has a sculpture of his, and then there's, you know, other modern artists, the Domenico Bianchi and Sandra Chia, Chia, sorry.

They have, you know, modern floor mosaics and stuff, and it's, it's just phenomenal.

So informing and his relationship to the Giotto's and the Basilica at Assisi.

And he was informed Sol LeWitt was influenced by the colors of the Giotto's, which started a whole way of him thinking about color from 1973, 74 onwards.

And Kelly, because she really likes her research.

So we reenacted a walk from Solowitz's home.

Mm-hmm.

And I still thought of it sort of as a creative practice, so I came up with that term inspired by Sol LeWitt, uh, who had a quote that was something like, he makes the mach- machine that makes the art.

So I was kinda like, okay, well, uh, that was his definition for conceptual art.

Mm-hmm.