Ralph Pugays 9-by-12-inch acrylic painting Spiritual Microwave is on view at Seattle Art Museum.
  • All images courtesy of the artist and Upfor Gallery
  • Ralph Pugay's 9-by-12-inch acrylic painting Spiritual Microwave is on view at Seattle Art Museum.

Ralph Pugay, a painter who lives in Portland, is this year's Betty Bowen Award winner—and usually, we get to see about two works by the winner of this honor, hung awkwardly in an elevator lobby at Seattle Art Museum.

This time around for some reason, SAM allowed Pugay enough space to show 15 of his small paintings. It's a proper little show on the third floor of the museum, or in another sense a display of impropriety, Pugay's paintings' poky perversity adjacent to the grandiose landscapes of SAM's Hudson River School room.

This morning, I caught Pugay by phone. SAM's open all week if you want to catch the works during the holidays (there's no closing date listed yet on the exhibition, so I can't tell you how long it will be updetails).

Let’s talk about style. What do you think your style is? How would you describe it?

I try not to describe my aesthetic as much. I mean, there are moments when I’m like 'Oh, I fit into the faux-naïve category,' but really what I’m interested in is that I’m trying to create images that allow me to work fastidiously—just, like, work within the state of flow without having to overthink the aesthetic of the image. Does that make sense? ...A lot of my work has to do with the subversion of value.

Pugay, Gymnastics Bull Attack (2013), 18 by 24 inches.
  • Pugay, Gymnastics Bull Attack (2013), 18 by 24 inches.

There was another Betty Bowen winner, Josh Faught, whose work in queer craft has to do with the subversion of value. Very different look, but similar ideas?

It’s really about representing a lot of the things that filter through my experience. I moved here from the Philippines when I was 14, and it was through my grandfather petitioning my family to move here. So the way I started out into my career as an artist came from a place in which I had to deal with a lot of issues relating to assimilating, or thinking about how does my history converge into this Western canonized type of history of art.

In terms of thinking about visual images, I often think about the first things that I was exposed to, and those were religious reliquaries—having come from a predominantly Catholic culture—and television, which in the Philippines is one of the more dominant ways to conceive of being part of a global dialogue, because it’s all sorts of TV shows from across the world filtering into the culture.

That's where it starts from, making sense of everyday experience. But that has its own baggage... My upbringing has a very colonial type of influence, and not just my upbringing but my everyday. So it’s interesting for me to think about subversion, but it’s also just adding to the conversation, and filling gaps of representation.

What do you mean by that?

It’s about creating a collection of materials that are then put together as if they were pieces of a puzzle.

That's how you make individual paintings?

Yeah: the process. It goes through various ways of becoming. So when I was starting to paint, it was a lot about wordplay and these cognitive utterances. This idea that you would be walking down the street or something and an image or idea would just pop into your head, and the way that we consider those as daydreaming. I’m really interested in documenting that experience. That place in which you daydream, but that's informed by a lot of things in your life that are going on outside of that.

Pugay, Sad Shelf Items (2012), 14 by 18 inches.
  • Pugay, Sad Shelf Items (2012), 14 by 18 inches.

Your colors remind me of animated TV. How'd you develop your palette?

It started out really pragmatic. During graduate school, I was working in an art supply store. This is a really boring story, but I just collected a wide range of palette and I just employed that palette.

But I’m interested in the idea of how color can attract people. For me, the subject matter of the work is very loaded, so using color alludes to a certain type of sensationalism. It also alludes to going to back to video games, '90s lo-fi platform video games have a lot of those colors. Those video games have a lot to do with binaries and binary systems of thinking.

Like which ones?

Like Mario, for example. I mean, Mario would be the most basic one that uses those poppy colors. I think I was going through some sort of existential crisis in grad school, so I was interested in embedding really complicated issues in that environment.

And that was within having to react to the world so fastly.

Binaries are supposed to make our lives really simple, or maybe easier to decode. But then you add an element of time, and capitalist time, or I don’t know, maybe capitalism isn’t the right word for it, but maybe just the idea of hurrying over making decisions about things. So I feel like it’s a really nice contrast to use those colors.

Pugays All the Poor in the Same Place (2012), 18 by 24 inches.
  • Pugay's All the Poor in the Same Place (2012), 18 by 24 inches.

You see the colors working in contrast to the subject matter?

Yeah. And that was from the beginning. But I’m really interested in allowing not just the subject matter but also the colors to grow, and also my material handling to grow. If I just go through the same system all the time, I think that I get bored. Right now, my focus has been trying to engage with other things outside of color: transparency and medium and various binders and gradation.

Where I consider things changing in terms of color is if you look at images from between 2009 and 2010. The way those colors interact with each other have a particular type of emotional locationality.

You mean how they feel?

It's how they feel but... the one where the waterfall has a lot of faces, or the guy in the shower, or looking at the spiders eating popcorn—those come from a place that's a bit more serious. It's not just engaging you through color, but how you convey a particular type of affect through color.

There is such a contrast between the way you talk and the way your paintings look.

(Laughs) I’d like to know what you think the difference is. No one’s brought that up before.

Really? It seems basic, like these totally different vocabularies. One is graduate-school art-speak like 'emotional locationality' and the other is that faux-naive look. At SAM, people who were looking at your paintings were laughing out loud. Are they missing the other side?

I feel like it vacillates. For me, humor is a really important method for me to approach the work. I wouldn’t say that humor is a tool that I use like a hammer, I feel like it comes organically with the work. It comes from accessing a place in which I’m comfortable. Then I start feeling really super-vulnerable about it, so the way that I compensate for that is through humor.

But I can’t deny the fact that I came through academia, I am in academia, I teach at PSU now. I guess I’m trying to figure out if the work can exist as both because they do exist in my life as both. Maybe the way in which people approach the work within the lens of faux-naïve humorous lighthearted work is fine, but I think that that’s exactly what it’s about, it’s about this idea that something can look really mundane or really funny or use humor or shock at face value. But sometimes I look at my paintings for a really long time, and it exudes a particular type of energy for me that goes outside of a one-liner.

When I think about my work—like, Rothkos in Space, I’m really fascinated by the way that Rothko can create a particular type of emotional response in the viewer. And I’m interested in this idea that you can look at this thing, but maybe the forms, there’s a quality about it or the way in which the work is treated and approached can allow the viewer to linger and consider it for longer.

Pugay, Rothkos in Space (2013), 24 by 24 inches.
  • Pugay, Rothkos in Space (2013), 24 by 24 inches.

There’s something that I’ve been thinking a lot about—just looking at people looking at my work during my exhibitions—and it's if they’re looking at it as if it was a comic book or they’re looking at it as if they’re in a white-cube space. I feel like that’s sort of a really interesting place to work in because it hits that place that’s in between, you know.

Lots of artists work that space. All of Pop, you could say. Not far from where your work is at SAM, there's a great, big painting by Robert Colescott that I wondered if you related to. Or which other artists are you relating to?

Yeah, I saw the Colescott when I was there. At the Portland Art Museum, I think there’s one Robert Colescott that’s continuously on view.

I like thinking about other artists in pairs. Like, what type of dialogues are they having and, like, where's my dialogue? A couple of months ago I was really into Forrest Bess and Raymond Pettibon, thinking about where their crossovers are. Jim Nutt and Peter Saul, but also R. Crumb. I think about Manuel Ocampo a lot in terms of how he creates images from a particular psychological location, and then I think about Saul Steinberg in terms of fastidiousness. And then there’s this Philadelphia artist Sarah McEneaney...

You keep using the word 'fastidious,' but I don't get how you're using it.

It's that idea of allowing yourself to be in that state of flow, for lack of a better term, and allowing yourself to make as opposed to overthinking. I guess the reason why it keeps on coming up is my durational experience of making work keeps on shifting as various components of my life shift and change.

Fastidious usually means overly fussy, excessive care.

Along with that care, it has a lot to do with the self, the confidence you embody. If you’re in that place where you’re caring, you’re in between that place where you’re also not caring. The way you’re exuding yourself onto the work has a particular kind of confidence where you’re not even thinking about time.

A lot of artists I talk to have a double sense of time—the time of the real world, that hurried time, and then the time they create inside their studios, which is often slower. It seems like you want to bring in the speed or the hurry, though.

Yeah. There’s parts of it where I think I’m a painter and this is a solitary practice, so I should practice a sense of liberation about the work where I’m treating time the way that I want to. But I feel like I would be completely lying if I didn’t say that there are certain components of life that just interfere with your studio. And so rather than trying to figure out how to switch, like, I want my work to reflect how that’s part of your everyday experience as an artist.

It's not that I want to be like this forever. It’s not something that I’m doing intentionally. But it’s just something that’s just part of my experience.

Ralph Pugays Crochet N Control (2013), 12 by 16 inches.
  • All images courtesy of the artist and Upfor Gallery
  • Ralph Pugay's Crochet 'N Control (2013), 12 by 16 inches.

Talking about speed and flow reminds me of automatism, surrealism. Are you interested in those art histories or are they too loaded, or both?

I think it’s both. I think my process is basically I have a lot of ideas that filter in, and they kind of form into one body that is based on a visual cognition of [the ideas]. The part where it becomes fastidious is in the actual painting.

So in a painting like Gymnastics Bull Attack, is that original daydream idea visual or…

Textual?

Yeah.

I think it’s both. I think in this case it came from a cognitive utterance. I was really fascinated with catastrophes in the media—engaging the gestures of catastrophe, creating these mundane scenarios in which people are freaking out.

I'm not sure why this one took me four years to make it. The colors changed. ...It had more of a tropical sensibility about it when I started.

Now it's really psychologically off, like when I think about these colors together, I’m not sure if I’ve seen these colors together ever, because that red is completely ugly next to that pink. That red is also a little bit pinkish. And then that blue, that sort of light blue on the wall in relationship to the light pink becomes pretty dominant, the diffusement of color becomes prominent, it brings the figures to the fore more. I think that’s where the decision came from, this intuitive decision to make the figures more prominent because there are so many things going on.

Is winning the Betty Bowen, this particular award, different from any other award?

I think so. I’ve only shown my work in Seattle once, for an invitational at CoCA, I think, in 2012. I mean, for lack of a better term, it made me believe in myself more. This is the first time that I’ve had my work in a museum.

How’s it feel in a museum as opposed to a gallery?

It feels good in relation to the wing that it’s next to. The American wing?

What do you see as the context there?

They just look so ugly next to each other. On the opposite end of that, I’m excited that it’s right next to the Cai Guo-Qiang installation—those suspended cars. Because I feel like those two things, they resonate to me in opposite ways. When I look at the American wing, it represents a fascination with mastery, whereas when I look at the Cai, despite the fact that it’s masterful, there’s also this what's it mean, what’s it mean, and I feel like those two opposite poles are things that I think about with my work. I think about, how do you subvert these ideas of mastery that you’ve been ingrained in through school? How do you create engagement through excitement but also address the things you want to address in your work despite how they might feel so personal?

Is there anything else you want to leave people with?

I don't think so.

Thanks, Ralph. Ralph's a good name.

You know, it’s one of those 1950s names that nobody uses anymore, and I don’t think that I’ve actually met another Ralph in person. I used to hate it. But now I love it, too.