A Conversation with Greg Piwonka
Part One
The last time I saw Greg Piwonka’s paintings, they were filled with zany, rainbow-colored dogs that pranced around highly-patterned domestic interiors. Four years later, the quirky dogs and home scenes have been replaced by brightly jostling block-like forms. These abstractions, which the critic Ian Etter recently called “a microworld of configurations perfectly out of sync,” do in fact have a lot to do with music: Piwonka largely attributes his move away from the figure to his work as a drummer. Since 2018 the artist has been a member of Water Damage, and the band’s “sheer torrents of noise” and time-bending spirit have propelled his thinking in the studio.
I caught up with Piwonka on a trip to Austin, Texas last week. We met at Shapeshifters, his two-person show with Payton McGowan at Martha’s, and talked about the major changes in his work. All of his abstract paintings are titled “T.P.B.O.T.W.C.” followed by a number based on the order in which they’re made. The acronym stands for the phrase “The Precarious Balance of Things We Create,” hinting at the weighty ideas behind these energetic, jewel-like canvases. In this first half of our conversation, we discuss the evolution of Piwonka’s way of working and the ways that music has influenced his painting.
Lauren Moya Ford: The last time I saw an exhibition of yours, you were making figurative paintings. How did this new abstract body of work come about?
Greg Piwonka: When I went back to abstraction I was making the album art for my band’s records. I was thinking about the way that we make songs and I knew that what I was doing before with funky domestic scenes wasn't going to really serve what I thought the band needed. So that caused a dip back into abstraction.
And I thought, This is actually kind of fun and freeing for me to take out the narrative that I was working with before and just focus on color and form again. The colors and the patterns in the previous paintings were really important, so I was like, Let's eliminate something and see what happens.
“T.P.B.O.T.W.C. #2” was the second big painting that I made after I had done a ton of little sketches with acrylic on yupo and the band album covers. That painting was really fast. Maybe you saw, but actually I started putting abstract paintings into my domestic scene paintings before. I made one painting that was of my living room with a big painting in it, and I was like, Why am I putting these abstract paintings in these domestic scenes? Why don't I just make the fucking abstract painting? And so this is very similar to the painting that was inside that painting, and it's big like that one would be.
I guess I just wanted to get back into more intuitive, gestural, big brushstrokes and not think about it too much. I still was working from sketches and a basic idea, they just weren't domestic things.
But back to the band. The way that we make songs is that they're really long, like 20 to 30 minutes or one side of a record. Shows are like 30 or 45 minutes long of this repetitive same musical journey thing over and over again. All of our songs are very similar. It's the same basic idea, but not the same song every time. In the band we're also using sound and volume and time really intentionally. So I was asking myself, Can I try to figure out how to make paintings that function in the way that Water Damage makes songs? How could I approach that in painting?
LMF: So the same piece will have various layers, and you'll come back to it at different points as it dries?
GP: Yeah. Some of them are really fast, but often they have multiple layers and changes. They're not very planned, but I do the sketches with my phone. I take a picture of the canvas and start with one basic color and then draw with my phone until I find something that I like or colors that are really crazy and make me wonder, Can I even mix this with oil paint?
So the aspect of the time involves the time of sitting with it and thinking about it, changing it on my phone and then thinking about that, waiting for things to dry or not waiting for them to dry. And then when it’s actually finished, I'm living with the thing and witnessing how much it changes over the course of the day through the way the light interacts with the piece, or just my own perception of the painting.
LMF: And they’re oil paints, so you always have to have time in mind unless you want to mix all the marks together somehow.
GP: Totally. Making those figurative pieces in the past let me understand how to make an oil painting without making a huge mess or muddy disaster. I think these are the first paintings where I figured out how to actually use my medium in the way that oil painters typically do, and to actually care about that and pay attention to it and think about it in terms of the way that it dries and as an end result.
LMF: Between the first painting in the series and the more recent ones, the shapes have changed. The older piece features curved, outlined forms, whereas the newer ones feel less defined and less rigid. They're not as stationary because they don't have those solid lines bounding them.
GP: Yeah, that one definitely has way more drawing in it. I've been thinking about an in-betweenness in them where the ones that work the best are the ones where the background color and the foreground color seem to shift as the light changes or the longer that you sit with it.
The in-betweenness also has to do with them seeming both fast and being slow. In the initial reaction to them, they feel really loud and bright. But the more time you spend with them there are actually a lot of different things happening that are more subtle.
LMF: To me they have a tenuous sense of grace and balance. There's a rhythm to them, but I don't know if loud is the word I'd use. The color palettes are really consistent, though, and it's a curious set of tones. They’re not stark or austere at all. I remember that when I went to your studio back in March of 2023 your tubes of paint looked so bold and tangy. What guides your color choices?
GP: It’s intuition at first, then drawing with my phone and picking iPhone colors that are really bright and hard to recreate. I don't know why I'm drawn to them, but I realized I’m having fun when I paint with really vibrant colors.
I’ve also started mixing colors a lot, because lately I haven’t had the money to buy all the paint that I was buying before. But my friend Thor, who's one of my bandmates in Water Damage, gave me a ton of oil paint recently. He was like, I have all this paint — like a lot — Do you want it? And I was like, Yes, I want it! Then I was like, Holy shit, this is so much paint! So I've been using all of that. My previous solution had been to just go to the store and buy a certain color, but now I've been relying on mixing a lot more, which has made the color choices more interesting.
My studio is also so small that the paintings can start to look the same in terms of color choices. But when I take them out of the studio and look at them, they shift a whole lot depending on what else is happening around them. Like, all these paintings felt really purple in my studio, and now I get them here and they don't feel purple anymore.
LMF: The older painting is filled with flowing, organic forms, while the newer ones seem to contain interlocking components. They’ve become more structural.
GP: When I first started making them, they were just grids; I made a ton of grid paintings. There's even a Water Damage album cover that's a grid painting. They felt like Stanley Whitney. I was like, Can I make a Stanley Whitney painting that isn't a Stanley Whitney painting? I can't. It's been done.
But in these pieces there’s a sense of stacking. They feel like puzzles. Things are getting fit together. I always think about the way that the bottom of this canvas is a horizon, and that we're aware of gravity when we look at these paintings. Or at least I'm aware of it. There's a weight that's pushing everything down.
Shapeshifters is on view at Martha’s in Austin, Texas through September 7, 2025.