Fluidity and focus: Carlton Scott Sturgill's new work, Current Local Time, currently at the Ferrara Showman Gallery
Current Local Time: Carlton Scott Sturgill, Artist
Interview by Paul Oswell
Preparation for a solo show can be stressful for artists at the best of times, but for Carlton Scott Sturgill’s new opening - Current Local Time at Ferrara Showman Gallery - that process came into sharp relief.
“Before the opening, someone above the gallery hired a plumber - not a good one! - and a cut pipe meant that the gallery had a foot of water in it. Now, although the eleven paintings in my show had been created over three years and were made to be displayed together, this seriously threw out the timeline. The show was planned a year in advance, but we suddenly had to prepare at 24 hours’ notice! I literally found out the morning before the reception that we were doing it. The work was still in my studio. They came and picked it up that day, installed it, and then we opened the show the next day. So, it was very last minute. I had to email blast people!”
Thankfully, people rallied and the show was a success. “It was actually great,” says Sturgill. “We had a fantastic time. A lot of people that I know showed up and also other people that I didn't, so that was good.”
Supportive friends, some sales, some interest from larger collectors - for a show done at a day’s notice, that’s not too shabby. The work has also caught the eye of exhibitors in London, so that’s a satisfying slice of public demand for Sturgill despite the surprise start.
“It feels good because it's been a while since I started as a painter,” Sturgill says. “My degree work was two dimensional, and then I started to do mosaics. I kind of steered away from painting for a while and every once in a while I bounced back to it, and then I started to do flower sculptures, and that's a whole different thing. I hadn't really painted seriously since 2017.”
What prompted the return, a shift away from three-dimensional work of mosaics and sculpting? “So with the flowers, I like the final product and I don't mind the work ethic at all,” he says, “But the process can be laborious and mechanical. I have to listen to a lot of podcasts. Painting is like constant problem solving. It’s more intuitive.” Sturgill also loves the chromatic liberation of painting, the ability mix any colour he wants to, not being tied down by the properties of physical objects.
The paintings in Current Local Time depict somewhat recognizable scenes - landscapes, portraiture, still life - but there’s a dreamlike distortion, and in boiling down the subjects to their elemental colours, there’s a new fluidity of perception. They’re familiar but abstract at the same time, and by viewing them, people can float between that abstraction and reality, with their brains filling in blank spots.
“Right from when I was doing my BA in the early two thousands, I always liked having this kind of lateral movement for the viewer," he says. "If they’re looking at the work from up close, they get certain things and if they're looking at it from far away, they're getting other things. It's like a puzzle for the viewer, but then it gives you an opportunity to fill in your own adventure a little.”
There’s also the distortion of time. With inspirations sometimes coming from the Renaissance or early American landscapes, there’s an opportunity for new, personal interpretations.
“I ended up going hundreds of years into the past to find something that was relevant,” Sturgill says. “In, say, northern Renaissance paintings, there's a pictorial language that people at the time knew. You knew what a yellow rose or a chrysanthemum symbolized - they could be an insult, or professions of love, or whatever. But people understood that. Right now we still see the paintings and we can appreciate them aesthetically, but the meaning has gone and it's changed. So it got me interested in looking at older art from a variety of places.”
“The original meaning has shifted, or we look at it now and we're looking at it through our own individual lens - one that’s created from everything about us; our identity, our gender, our nationality - so, all the things that dictate how we look at the world as individuals. We look at these works very differently than the people who painted them.”
The unclouded subjectivity of the viewer is of high importance to Sturgill, who likes people to go in and experience the work without any of his own pointers or biases, no matter how unintentional those might be. “I want to leave things as ambiguous as possible so that my read isn't any more important than anyone else's,” he says.
He tells me that one of the paintings is based on a recognizable work of a woman on a swing, but that people are having other interpretations, seeing her as a rose in a green garden. “I purposely went more abstract with that one,” he says, “And so I really like it when that happens with some of the pieces.”
Sturgill says that artists who experiment with perception in this way, such as Chuck Close, are an influence. There’s also a modern trick that artists who play with the changing perspective of lateral movement need to be aware of. If you can’t actually stand back 50 feet from the canvas, then you can use technology to simulate that. “If you're in the gallery and you can't get a great enough distance from a painting to shrink it down to a thumbnail size, then you can look at it through your phone,” he says. “People at the opening were doing that.”
“At the beginning of my career, when phone cameras were less sophisticated, these kinds of views were happy accidents,” says Sturgill. “But now you kind of create with that possibility at the back of your mind. With paintings like these new ones, I’m kind of doing pixelated work that's not squares.”
The show has re-energized Sturgill’s love of painting. “I'm probably going to paint on canvas for the first time in over a decade, because I want to get bigger. I've painted these works on wood panel or aluminium, but the next series is going to be painting, it's going to be a lot more landscapes and portraiture and it has a theme, but I'm kind of keeping that to myself.”
Current Local Time works well as a title - it’s utilitarian and somewhat generic, again leaving meaning to be created in the minds of visitors to the gallery. But it’s also a reckoning of Sturgill’s work up until now, and how he’s seeing the world around him.
“This is where I am right now. This is my filter,” he says. “Everything that's in the show in the style that I'm painting right now is my current filter. It is how I'm viewing the world right now and I'm curious to see how that changes over time. It’s allowing me to sit back and look at where I want this to go. But here is where it starts to really crystallize. That's how it feels with this now.”
Current Local Time is showing at the Ferrara Showman Gallery through April 23rd, with a further reception on April 5th, 2025 @ 5pm-9pm.
Carlton Scott Sturgill's website
Ferrara Showman Gallery website
READ: EVERYBODY'S IN LA: RAMONA NORDAL, ARTIST
MORE CULTURE
Interview by Paul Oswell
Preparation for a solo show can be stressful for artists at the best of times, but for Carlton Scott Sturgill’s new opening - Current Local Time at Ferrara Showman Gallery - that process came into sharp relief.
“Before the opening, someone above the gallery hired a plumber - not a good one! - and a cut pipe meant that the gallery had a foot of water in it. Now, although the eleven paintings in my show had been created over three years and were made to be displayed together, this seriously threw out the timeline. The show was planned a year in advance, but we suddenly had to prepare at 24 hours’ notice! I literally found out the morning before the reception that we were doing it. The work was still in my studio. They came and picked it up that day, installed it, and then we opened the show the next day. So, it was very last minute. I had to email blast people!”
Thankfully, people rallied and the show was a success. “It was actually great,” says Sturgill. “We had a fantastic time. A lot of people that I know showed up and also other people that I didn't, so that was good.”
Supportive friends, some sales, some interest from larger collectors - for a show done at a day’s notice, that’s not too shabby. The work has also caught the eye of exhibitors in London, so that’s a satisfying slice of public demand for Sturgill despite the surprise start.
“It feels good because it's been a while since I started as a painter,” Sturgill says. “My degree work was two dimensional, and then I started to do mosaics. I kind of steered away from painting for a while and every once in a while I bounced back to it, and then I started to do flower sculptures, and that's a whole different thing. I hadn't really painted seriously since 2017.”
What prompted the return, a shift away from three-dimensional work of mosaics and sculpting? “So with the flowers, I like the final product and I don't mind the work ethic at all,” he says, “But the process can be laborious and mechanical. I have to listen to a lot of podcasts. Painting is like constant problem solving. It’s more intuitive.” Sturgill also loves the chromatic liberation of painting, the ability mix any colour he wants to, not being tied down by the properties of physical objects.
The paintings in Current Local Time depict somewhat recognizable scenes - landscapes, portraiture, still life - but there’s a dreamlike distortion, and in boiling down the subjects to their elemental colours, there’s a new fluidity of perception. They’re familiar but abstract at the same time, and by viewing them, people can float between that abstraction and reality, with their brains filling in blank spots.
“Right from when I was doing my BA in the early two thousands, I always liked having this kind of lateral movement for the viewer," he says. "If they’re looking at the work from up close, they get certain things and if they're looking at it from far away, they're getting other things. It's like a puzzle for the viewer, but then it gives you an opportunity to fill in your own adventure a little.”
There’s also the distortion of time. With inspirations sometimes coming from the Renaissance or early American landscapes, there’s an opportunity for new, personal interpretations.
“I ended up going hundreds of years into the past to find something that was relevant,” Sturgill says. “In, say, northern Renaissance paintings, there's a pictorial language that people at the time knew. You knew what a yellow rose or a chrysanthemum symbolized - they could be an insult, or professions of love, or whatever. But people understood that. Right now we still see the paintings and we can appreciate them aesthetically, but the meaning has gone and it's changed. So it got me interested in looking at older art from a variety of places.”
“The original meaning has shifted, or we look at it now and we're looking at it through our own individual lens - one that’s created from everything about us; our identity, our gender, our nationality - so, all the things that dictate how we look at the world as individuals. We look at these works very differently than the people who painted them.”
The unclouded subjectivity of the viewer is of high importance to Sturgill, who likes people to go in and experience the work without any of his own pointers or biases, no matter how unintentional those might be. “I want to leave things as ambiguous as possible so that my read isn't any more important than anyone else's,” he says.
He tells me that one of the paintings is based on a recognizable work of a woman on a swing, but that people are having other interpretations, seeing her as a rose in a green garden. “I purposely went more abstract with that one,” he says, “And so I really like it when that happens with some of the pieces.”
Sturgill says that artists who experiment with perception in this way, such as Chuck Close, are an influence. There’s also a modern trick that artists who play with the changing perspective of lateral movement need to be aware of. If you can’t actually stand back 50 feet from the canvas, then you can use technology to simulate that. “If you're in the gallery and you can't get a great enough distance from a painting to shrink it down to a thumbnail size, then you can look at it through your phone,” he says. “People at the opening were doing that.”
“At the beginning of my career, when phone cameras were less sophisticated, these kinds of views were happy accidents,” says Sturgill. “But now you kind of create with that possibility at the back of your mind. With paintings like these new ones, I’m kind of doing pixelated work that's not squares.”
The show has re-energized Sturgill’s love of painting. “I'm probably going to paint on canvas for the first time in over a decade, because I want to get bigger. I've painted these works on wood panel or aluminium, but the next series is going to be painting, it's going to be a lot more landscapes and portraiture and it has a theme, but I'm kind of keeping that to myself.”
Current Local Time works well as a title - it’s utilitarian and somewhat generic, again leaving meaning to be created in the minds of visitors to the gallery. But it’s also a reckoning of Sturgill’s work up until now, and how he’s seeing the world around him.
“This is where I am right now. This is my filter,” he says. “Everything that's in the show in the style that I'm painting right now is my current filter. It is how I'm viewing the world right now and I'm curious to see how that changes over time. It’s allowing me to sit back and look at where I want this to go. But here is where it starts to really crystallize. That's how it feels with this now.”
Current Local Time is showing at the Ferrara Showman Gallery through April 23rd, with a further reception on April 5th, 2025 @ 5pm-9pm.
Carlton Scott Sturgill's website
Ferrara Showman Gallery website
READ: EVERYBODY'S IN LA: RAMONA NORDAL, ARTIST
MORE CULTURE