Past: Fat Over Lean: Joel Longenecker | Chuck Webster

"Fat over lean" is a centuries-old painter's proverb referring to best practices within oil painting. Joel Longenecker and Chuck Webster are enamored with the malleable qualities of oil paint. Within their work, they incidentally record the hours, days, months, and sometimes years they put into a single work—Joel more with the addition of paint and Chuck with subtraction. Figuratively speaking, Joel's are "fat," and Chuck's are "lean." Joel's accumulate paint, like sedimentary layers of the earth, while Chuck's show erosion with erasure and cover-up. They both create a complex depth within their work—like they could be part of a larger universe or things we find under intense scrutiny.

Joel Longenecker’s work looks like shovel-ripped sod containing layers of earth. Longenecker states that “they are constructed much like the earth’s strata, from the deepest layer (the bedrock) up to the surface (the soft topsoil). Each layer consumes and buries the preceding one”. The art critic Lilly Wei wrote that Longenecker “scrapes down [semi-dried paint] so the soft inside, like wet clay, remains. This scumbled field provides resistance for his next layers as he traverses his field, repeating the process, sparring with the grit and goo, the hard and the soft”.

Longenecker lives and works in New York and has been exhibiting for over thirty years and has been reviewed and written about extensively.

Chuck Webster is also deeply engaged with the creative process through layering, glazing, sanding, adding, and subtracting paint while blurring the lines between painting and drawing. Yet, this earnest approach is loosened by his sense of humor, nostalgia, mood, mystery, and pop culture awareness. This survey of paintings spanning over twenty-five years shows abstract compositions hinting at some other world. Through his meticulous approach to detail, we see something familiar that we think we know yet can’t quite put our finger on.

Art critic Roberta Smith of the New York Times described Webster’s work as “little big paintings,” stating that “they have a strange, irrepressible scale, a largeness that exceeds their size and creates a distinctive, slightly comedic sense of intimacy.”

Webster lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. His work is in numerous public and private collections, including the the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Whitney Museum of American Art, the Baltimore Museum of Art, and the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. Webster has been reviewed in the New York Times, Hyperallergic, The Brooklyn Rail, and Art in America.