Lise Soskolne

I can make three or four paintings over nine hours on an average sized stretcher and end up with nothing. A mound of low life green paint is the only thing left after a long day spent purging bad ideas.

The worst of my bad ideas happen when I try to make a good painting. Being good in painting has nothing to do with being virtuous, like it does in life. It has to do with virtuosity, as in being able to make something look convincing or precise, or to make meaning intelligently, or to be cunning about it. In my experience, there is neither virtue nor value in that kind of good painting. This is not to say that trying to make a bad painting yields good ideas either, for they always end up being just as bad.

This is all to be expected because painting is a struggle. Helping others is a struggle too, but it is a virtuous one and without question a necessary and righteous pursuit. I believe people should help one another. I believe in virtuous struggle. I also believe in struggle without virtue, in owing nothing and in having nothing to prove. Take what you need. Help yourself.

Lise Soskolne (b. Toronto, CA, 1971) has lived and worked in New York since the late 1990s. Among many others, she is a co-founder of Working Artists and the Greater Economy (W.A.G.E.) and has been its core organizer since 2012. Founded in 2008, W.A.G.E. is a New York–based activist organization whose mission is to establish sustainable economic relationships between artists and the institutions that contract their labor, and to introduce mechanisms for self-regulation into the art field that collectively bring about a more equitable distribution of its economy. Prior solo exhibitions include Ulrik, New York (2022); Kunstverein Nürnberg, Nürnberg (2020); Svetlana, New York (2020); Mishkin Gallery at Baruch College, New York (2019); The Middler, New York (2018); Diorama, Oslo (2015); Modern Culture, New York (2001); Artists Space, New York (1999).