Christopher Quirk
Image: In Medias Res 4, oil on canvas, 72 in. x 60 in., 2025
Zachary Lazar interviews Christopher Quirk, December 2025
Zachary Lazar: We have known each other for almost 30 years and have both maintained an artistic practice throughout those decades. If there was ever anything romantic about this, time has certainly brought us to a clearer understanding of what it actually means to keep making art. Part of the problem of making it always involves the question of why make it--and why keep making it? How has your thinking about that changed over the years?
Christopher Quirk: We have. I recall very well meeting on that shuttle bus to Hofstra when we were both teaching there. That was a good day, and I feel fortunate to have seen your work develop, expand, and change over the decades.
In my case, what has changed is a kind of arc of belief, skepticism with regard to what is possible in painting, working with that skepticism, and a return to belief.
I had a certain idealism back then that I held from when I began painting, that art and painting specifically were very capacious, and that art was a vessel that could hold almost anything you wanted to put into it in terms of ideas or experiences. Over time I began to question that, for good reasons, along with ideas about what was transmitted in painting, especially abstract painting.
I became an artist to get as close to the enigmas and mysteries in life as I could. The twin, shocking reality of being a human with both existence and consciousness. The impossible strangeness of the indeterminacy of the physical world at the quantum level, and the inconceivable scale of the universe in reference to our lives. The way we love, the way we operate in social spheres, all these and things of that nature I realized, if addressed at all, would have to be addressed from the oblique in abstract painting. In that way, I envy you as a writer and novelist, as you can speak very directly to human emotion, you can characterize thoughts, discuss ideas, and develop narratives, which are so central to human culture.
In recent years I have realized certain things about the way I work, and come to understand the process of what it means to bring work into the world and how it interacts with viewers that have galvanized my work and thinking.
In Medias Res 1, oil on canvas, 72 in. x 60 in., 2025
In Medias Res 3, oil on canvas, 32 in. x 28 in., 2025
ZL: You are calling your recent work "syncretic abstraction." Can you explain what you mean by that phrase?
CQ: Five or six years ago I began to think about my painting in a different way. I noticed that while I was painting there were a host of thoughts and sensations that were affecting my decisions and how I was creating paintings, and my thinking and feeling as I worked became more expansive. I realized things I thought about and cared about that I just described, including responses to poems or music that moved me, all these were part and parcel of the process of painting, and had sway on how I made the painting. Maybe I had been doing it all along, but it hit me very clearly at that time. I called it syncretic abstraction, and it was a concept that helped me understand my process. It also was an antidote to certain aspects of my skepticism, in that these aspects of life, feeling, thought, and conversation with other artists and writers were alive in the paintings, but not being transmitted in a direct way.
ZL: It sounds to me like you're using abstract painting to transmit on several frequencies. Thought and emotion are broad categories. I think we are trying to always play around with both and also question how separate, if at all, they are. As a writer, I am stuck with words, which often feels confining, too intellectual, so I try to make a kind of music with the words so that they aren't just carriers for a "message." Do you think of the elements of painting--form, color, texture, and so on--as a kind of language or vocabulary?
CQ: That is a very complicated question. I love words even though as an abstract painter my work takes place in the spaces between the words, and certain poems are often near to my thoughts as I work. I think in your writing—for example in “The Apartment on Calle Uruguay”—the way you use rhythm, and the pitch of your vocabulary for example, are all part of how I understand “message,” and as you say vital to the experience of your work.
In painting, I think you can describe these elements in lots of ways, as a language, or as way to a message or meaning. I also think it’s easy to get tripped up in painting by the words we use to describe how it works. Message, or content, for instance, indicates some kind of transfer, like the painting is conveying something from artist to viewer. Lyotard once warned about this, saying something like a painting is not a postcard. In abstract painting of course any message per se is fugitive at best, and over time I’ve come to think that the painting is best thought of as a catalyst, one that sparks something in a viewer where meaning is actually created. That activity in the viewer is guided by the technical decisions an artist makes with color, form, scale, etc., all our tools, but what happens in the viewer is not determined by it.
ZL: I like that word "catalyst" to describe what your work does. I think one of the things about painting that I most envy is that it is physical, made by the hand with actual materials. Was that ever part of the attraction for you? And can you talk about the physical process out of which a painting gradually emerges?
CQ: Making things was not a kind of innate propensity I had growing up. I began studying art history and filmmaking in college, but there was something about the immediacy and solitude of the process of painting that drew me in right away, and once I got started I never looked back, so I certainly understand the appeal you mention. The physical part of painting is inherently joyful for me, despite my inevitable wretched days in the studio. It’s the foundation of my work, and a kind of refuge. I’m thankful for it, especially since I tend to be overly cerebral at times, which has led to a long process of learning about myself and trying to bring the different things I have to offer into painting in the best way I can.
As you know from seeing them over the years and from our talks, very often my paintings follow a switchback course to completion. It’s a process of exploration and discovery for me, and so I’m trying to stay open and kind of see over the horizon. In physical terms that process might mean I’m working very intuitively and working from the shoulder, which gets your whole body into the act, or I might be sharpening an area and working from wrist or finger joints for detail. Everyone paints differently, but for me using the whole range of physical scales and using the body in different ways as part of my work is important.
Also, the making of paintings is physical obviously, but so is the viewing. Looking at a painting is an embodied activity. I could go on way too long about the neuroscience of mind and vision, which we are learning so much more about in recent years, but in short I think a really good painting can radiate a kind of charisma when you stand in front of it, a presence that goes beyond the purely visual. That perception, that experience I think, is a combination of body and mind working together. It’s kind of miraculous that painters can make that happen with a bit of fabric and pigment, but it happens.
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Zachary Lazar is the author of six books and a journalist. His most recent novel is The Apartment on Calle Uruguay. He teaches creative writing at Tulane University.
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Christopher Quirk is an artist whose work has been shown in venues nationwide since 1990. He divides his time between Brooklyn and the Northeast Kingdom in Vermont.
