FAILE Studio

Patrick McNeil and Patrick Miller (2)

You can’t think about New York City and not think about the incredible history of artists that have defined and redefined art through the ages. This year Kevin and I are cohosting the Brooklyn Artists Ball after-party, so the rest of this week we will be doing studio tours here of a few of the artists, all based in Brooklyn, who are creating special pieces to be on exhibition at each of the guests’ tables for the museum’s annual fundraising event.

Walking through Brooklyn’s Greenpoint neighborhood you pass food truck restaurants,  junk stores that remind me of my childhood, and unremarkable doors with blacked out windows covered in rusted old bars… but then this unremarkable door opens and you walk into an absolute paradise of creative vision, color, passion, history, friendship and projects that begin here and reach the far corners of the globe: gracing the halls of Lincoln Center,  parks in Mongolia, temples in Portugal, and in art galleries and on sidewalk walls all over the city.

Patrick McNeil and Patrick Miller, the creative duo behind FAILE Studio, met in high school in Arizona. Their collaborations began with trading sketch books, which eventually led them to creating art on the street and ultimately to New York and this studio, where, on this afternoon, Tuba Skinny plays over the speakers as a handful of assistants help them work on ongoing projects, including their installation for the Brooklyn Artists Ball.

Patrick McNeil and Patrick Miller (3)

Patrick McNeil and Patrick Miller (4)

One thing inspires another in this space – an accident or how something is stored will manifest in a new body of work. Their works constantly evolves into itself.

Patrick McNeil and Patrick Miller (5)

Patrick McNeil and Patrick Miller (6)

Images are repeated like a universal thread in their work – a ballet dancer appears on large scale murals and smaller objects, like a story retold over time but worded differently.

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José Parlá

Artist Sketches

Jose Parla sketch book (2)

You can’t think about New York City and not think about the incredible history of artists that have defined and redefined art through the ages. This year Kevin and I are cohosting the Brooklyn Artists Ball after-party, so the rest of this week we will be doing studio tours here of a few of the artists, all based in Brooklyn, who are creating special pieces to be on exhibition at each of the guests’ tables for the museum’s annual fundraising event.

José Parlá‘s studio is currently under renovation, so we instead opt to take a walk through Brooklyn’s Fort Greene Park, which sits just outside. It’s one of those typically cold New York spring days as we chat about his Cuban parents, childhood growing up in Florida, and his talent and passion for art which took him to SCAD before he even graduated high school.

He shows us his latest book, Broken Language, where the artist, who is more well known for his calligraphy-meets-street-style mural paintings, has a series of photographs in print. Why photography? I ask him. “It’s a memory record. I take the color, the hand, the textures, and I memorize it and I start making paintings from the palettes. You can look at a photo like a poem, that’s why I chose to do the front of the book with photographs so you can see the palate that is going to inform the rest of the work.”

Jose Parla sketch book (3)

Jose Parla sketch book (4)

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Alison Elizabeth Taylor

You can’t think about New York City and not think about the incredible history of artists that have defined and redefined art through the ages. This year Kevin and I are cohosting the Brooklyn Artists Ball after-party, so the rest of this week we will be doing studio tours here of a few of the artists, all based in Brooklyn, who are creating special pieces to be on exhibition at each of the guests’ tables for the museum’s annual fundraising event.

When Alison Elizabeth Taylor opened the door to her studio in Brooklyn’s East Williamsburg neighborhood, you couldn’t help but first notice her burgeoning baby bump. This is an important thing to point out only because, once familiar with her work, you quickly understand how labor intensive it is. The end product, an intricate collection of wood pieces, starts from a sketch, then a wash painting, on to a graphite drawing, followed by an ink drawing, until finally the actual textile piece begins.

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Emily Noelle Lambert

You can’t think about New York City and not think about the incredible history of artists that have defined and redefined art through the ages. This year Kevin and I are cohosting the Brooklyn Artists Ball after-party, so the rest of this week we will be doing studio tours here of a few of the artists, all based in Brooklyn, who are creating special pieces to be on exhibition at each of the guests’ tables for the museum’s annual fundraising event.

When you walk into Emily Noelle Lambert‘s studio in Greenpoint you instantly feel happier from the colors, the freedom of paint, and the joy of the artist. The walls explode with pieces ranging from paintings to found wooden structures to metal works, the result of collaborations with her brother, who is a blacksmith. The center of the room is filled with one long descending table with a beautiful range of height, texture, and saturations of color, where all the sculptures seem to dance with each other. She talks to us about her creation for the Brooklyn Artist Ball and her life as an artist…

Emily on her sculptures being “small gestures that turn into little moments that could live in a larger painting. I like to look at the texture and the history of each object and what each of the forms do and try to begin to have another conversation with what I pair them with. Once I started painting them them it really starts to feel like they are brush strokes themselves.”

On her centerpieces she is creating for the ball: “I really want the table to have more of a landscape feel. That is where I’m at now…I have all the pieces but I need to figure out the space between them, how they are going to speak to each other. ”

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