The Life of Objects with Painter Gwen Strahle

I Like Your Work: Conversations with Artists

Release Date: 11/07/2025

I Like Your Work: Conversations with Artists

In this episode, I'm diving into open calls including what jurors look for when reviewing applications, and why the description box is crucial for providing context about your artwork. I'm also sharing practical tips on how artists can use detailed descriptions to make their submissions stand out and highlighting resources for artists to improve their application process. I Like Your Work Links: Thank you to our sponsor, Sunlight Tax. Apply for our Winter Exhibition: Deadline is November 15: ...

The Life of Objects with Painter Gwen Strahle

I Like Your Work: Conversations with Artists

Gwen Strahle is a painter living and working in northeast CT. She teaches at the Rhode Island School of Design. She shows her work at Nancy Devine Gallery in RI. Strahle has received several awards including the Connecticut Artist Fellowship, the Purchase Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Guggenheim Fellowship, and an Honorarium from the Drawing Center. Strahle earned her MFA from Yale University in 1983. "I have been making paintings of objects arranged on my studio table for over forty years. Many of the objects in my work have been with me for the entirety of that...

Mystery and Philip Guston

I Like Your Work: Conversations with Artists

In this episode, I touch on mystery in art—the space between knowing and not knowing that drives us to create and share Philip Guston’s essay “Faith, Hope, and Impossibility”. Faith, Hope, and Impossibility- Philip Guston “There are so many things in the world—in the cities—so much to see. Does art need to represent this variety and contribute to its proliferation? Can art be that free? The difficulties begin when you understand what it is that the soul will not permit the hand to make. To paint is always to start at the beginning again, yet being unable to avoid the...

Exploring Cyanotype Printing and Mushrooms with Madge Evers

I Like Your Work: Conversations with Artists

Madge Evers (b. 1961, Norwalk, CT) explores the transformative cycles of dormancy, decay, and ecstatic growth in plant life. Her work combines alternative photography, mushroom spores, and painting to depict landscape details and imagined flora. Evers earned a BA from Suffolk University in Boston and an MA from the University of Rhode Island. Her work has been exhibited at the New Britain Museum of American Art (CT), Danforth Museum of Art (Framingham, MA), Brattleboro Museum and Art Center (VT), and the Zero Art Fair (New York, NY), among others. In 2024, she curated and exhibited in the...

Simplify Your Taxes as an Artist: Artist Tax Professional Hannah Cole

I Like Your Work: Conversations with Artists

Hannah Cole is a tax expert who specializes in working with self-employed people, especially creative and mission-driven ones. A long-time working artist herself, she’s helped tens of thousands of self-employed people skill up with accessible tax and money education, through her Money Bootcamp program, tax workshops from Florida to Alaska, and on the Sunlight Tax podcast. Her forthcoming book, Taxes for Humans: Simplify Your Taxes and Change the World When You’re Self-Employed, is the most funny and empowering tax guide you’ll ever read. Hannah is the founder of Sunlight Tax. LINKS:...

Say Yes: Painting, Printmaking and Murals with Artist Joseph Wardwell

I Like Your Work: Conversations with Artists

Joe Wardwell is currently a Professor of Painting at Brandeis University (Waltham, MA) and is the founder the Brandeis-in-Siena program. He received a Bachelor of Arts in Art History, and a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Painting from the University of Washington (Seattle, WA). He received a Master of Fine Arts in Painting from Boston University (Boston, MA). Currently on view, Wardwell has a large-scale wall drawing, “Hello America: 40 Hits from the 50 States,” commissioned for the renovation of building 6 at MASS MoCA in North Adams, MA. In 2022, he completed his first large scale public art...

Finding Stability as an Artist: Truths and Lies

I Like Your Work: Conversations with Artists

In this mini episode of I Like Your Work, I'm talking about the myths and limiting beliefs that often hold artists back. I'm also exploring the importance of building stability and confidence as an artist by challenging outdated tropes and taking small, proactive steps toward the life and practice you want. I Like Your Work Links: Thank you to our Sponsor, Rise and Repaint. Ever wish your biggest career questions actually had answers? Like — Am I pricing my art right? or What do galleries and curators really want to see? That’s exactly what you’ll...

Susan Klein on Collaboration, Color, and Creative Process

I Like Your Work: Conversations with Artists

Susan Klein is an artist living in Charleston, SC. Recent exhibitions include I Should Have Been a Pair of Ragged Claws at the Wassaic Project, A Window Scrubbed for the Moon at Asya Geisberg Gallery, NYC, and Volcano Lovers at Frontviews, Berlin. Klein is a 2020-2021 recipient of a Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant. Other awards include an Artist-in-Residence at the Dunedin School of Art in New Zealand, a Hambidge Center Residency, Watershed Center for Ceramics Art Residency, Wassaic Project Residency, residency at the International Studio and Curatorial Program, a full fellowship to the...

The Super Power We Have as Artists

I Like Your Work: Conversations with Artists

In this mini episode of I Like Your Work, I explore the superpower artists share: our ability to create alternative spaces and community. From non-traditional classrooms and DIY galleries to zines and podcasts, these platforms expand the art ecosystem. As artists, our superpower is creating the spaces we wish existed. When we act, we make room for others, build community, and keep the art world vibrant. I Like Your Work Links: Join the Works Membership! Watch our Youtube channel: Interviews Say “hi” on

Sam King on Painting and Process

I Like Your Work: Conversations with Artists

Sam King has exhibited at galleries, artist-run spaces, and universities across the country, including The Painting Center (NYC), Unrequited Leisure (Nashville), Manifest Gallery (Cincinnati), Oneoneone Gallery (Chapel Hill), Laconia Gallery (Boston), The Provincial (Kaleva, MI), Living Arts of Tulsa, MIXD (Rogers, AR), the University of North Carolina Greensboro, the University of Tulsa, Lower Columbia College, and Western Connecticut State University. In 2020, King was a resident of Hambidge Center, supported by the Lee and Margaret Echols fellowship for musicians (he records and performs...

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"I have been making paintings of objects arranged on my studio table for over forty years. Many of the objects in my work have been with me for the entirety of that time. The objects are painted both from life and from memory: bud vases, shells, pitchers, and glasses. Each of these objects is a kind of vessel, and I often think about what is inside of an object- the fullness of something empty in appearance.

The objects are personified in the paintings, and I have become emotionally invested in them; they are part of my family. Over the years, they have changed and aged with me as I paint them into each image. I have created a hierarchy of icons using these familiar objects that can grow and change depending on their arrangement from one painting to the next. That dynamic relationship between objects is important to me.

The covered table under the set-up serves as the canvas, or as the painting itself. Its flat surface is raised up for the viewer, with the malleability of a blank slate that allows objects to emerge from and be pushed back into the surface of the table—like a garden bed. It represents the painted world in which my objects can exist.

Twenty years ago, I began to add my own silhouette to the paintings, which has recently turned into a shadow, and it presides over the still-life, and is in turn embraced by it. It made sense for that figure to be my own body, or my own shadow, as I am the one experiencing my relationship to the still-life, with these objects. This transparent form can dissolve across the objects and the table.

My process involves moving the objects around the image, eliminating and adding as I work through each painting. My paintings come together slowly, sometimes over the course of months or years before I find resolution in the composition. In the practice of painting, I seek the feeling of being present in the world. The slowness allows for this."

LINKS:

gwenstrahle.com

@gwenpaints

I Like Your Work Links:

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