This month, LVH Art spoke with Casey Bolding, an artist from a suburban town near Denver, Colorado, who has been living in New York since 2013. His works create immersive environments through a harmonious blend of muted colors, where figures appear to emerge or fade away. Rather than relying on vivid hues, his pieces are subtle yet dynamic, featuring rich textures and balanced compositions. Casey discusses his exploration of plaster, his fascination with abandoned spaces and decaying walls, the artists who have influenced him, and more in our interview.
Casey has an upcoming show at Polina Berlin Gallery in New York in May 2025.
LVH Art: Your works often convey a sense of fragility or things on the verge of falling apart - are you actively thinking about these things when you paint?
Casey Bolding: I think it’s something that I'm sensitive to. When I'm outside, looking at other surfaces and gathering inspiration I’m attracted to things that are attritioning and fading away. My works are about the kind of wearing away of the current state of things and accepting that your life disperses in different ways. It’s about accepting the inevitability of people coming and going, how relationships change, and learning to be present with the way things fall apart.
LVH Art: Texture and using plaster are key features in the work - when did you discover the material and why do you think it is such a big part of your practice?
Casey Bolding: After high school, when I was trying to figure out my next move as an adult, I started working for my uncle. He was doing faux finishing on buildings—applying these kitschy, old-world techniques to homes in the suburbs of Colorado. I got to have my hands on a lot of really interesting stuff. I didn't really consider it as part of vocabulary or tools to use until the past couple years, where I started re-visiting some of those memories from working there. The physicality of plaster and the idea of plaster I think also came back to me in New York because I wanted to bring this physical outside world into my paintings. I grew up painting on trains in Colorado, like freight trains and painting walls outside. When I moved to New York it was a lot more competitive. I was still really interested in painting outside and doing graffiti and having opportunities where it wasn't so cutthroat to find a space. So I ended up in a lot of abandoned buildings in and around New York.
LVH Art: Can you elaborate on the idea of painting on abandoned or decaying buildings, and how this fits into your creative process?
Casey Bolding: I was painting on walls that were actually falling apart as I worked on them. I’m really drawn to those kinds of spaces, and I love doing the least amount possible to them, because they're so sound on their own. They’re beautiful spaces to me. I also connect with the idea that what I paint there isn’t for anyone else—it’s just for that space, just for that experience. It's like inserting yourself into a small moment of time where you can be creative and let the piece exist temporarily for that purpose alone. It’s incredibly spontaneous, which gives me the freedom to explore and often leads me to conclusions I never would have reached otherwise. A lot of it's also the adventure and the camaraderie of it. It’s almost like going out hunting—you’ve got the materials on your back, heading into the wild. The same goes for finding wood for some of my frames. Working in these abandoned spaces or with discarded objects—this is pure joy to me.
LVH Art: What attracts you to using reclaimed wood for framing your works?
Casey Bolding: The wood I use is lath and plaster, which was used to insulate homes before they started using the pink insulation material we have today. Every old house around here has these insulating planks of wood, so when places are being renovated and the houses are being demoed, I’ll usually go up to the guys doing the demolition and ask for those planks. I’ll go in and grab a bunch. There's often a language barrier there too which is interesting. I'm just saying, "I just want pieces of old wood," and they're like, "What are you talking about? What do you get out of this?" In general It’s difficult to communicate the excitement I feel about these ephemeral objects, things that are almost like dirt. The wooden frames, I think, fit into my practice in the sense that they convey this same idea of things falling apart. Depending on the house or the home, it's almost like adding one more layer or story to the work. It wasn’t intentional at first—I was just experimenting with what framing something would look like. Then I went out and bought brand new wood from Home Depot, but on my bike ride back, I came across the old wood. I ended up trying out that old wood too, and it just made sense. But the wood frame works for some of the works, but not all.
LVH Art: What’s your process when starting a painting? Do you work from reference, or is it more intuitive?
Casey Bolding: The paintings start without any clear reference or direction. Once shapes or positions begin to form, I start to see figures in them. Then I begin to dig into references, which come from all sorts of places—old family photos, pictures my sister sends me of her kids, or photos I’ve taken myself. Lately, I’ve even started intentionally taking photographs with the idea of how they might be used in a painting. But I really don’t know what I’ll paint until I’m doing it, and if I search too hard for it, it won’t show up. So sometimes, I need to be patient with the process.
LVH Art: How do you choose your colors, and what draws you to those more muted or mixed tones?
Casey Bolding: Yeah, I think I moved away from really high saturation colors because of graffiti. I used to paint with all these guys, and it was just bright glitter everywhere, really assaulting your eyes, especially in New York it’s everywhere. With these more mixed colors, though, there’s a subtle life to them that to me is more interesting than pure colors. It actually started when I went to the supply shop and found buckets of cheaper paint, ones where they’d made some kind of mistake. I’d end up designing the piece around that main material - the "shitty" paint. But even now that I can get better quality paint, I’m still drawn to these more mixed, muddy paints.
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LVH Art: I’d like to ask about your work Funnel Cake (2024). To me, it feels like traveling through time—reading from top to bottom, like an archaeological dig uncovering the truth. Is there a specific way you want viewers to engage with this piece or your work in general? And are there particular stories you intend to tell through your work?
Casey Bolding: I don't think it's that specific. There are certain paintings where memories definitely come up for me. But I'm not really driven by narrative, and I don't want my work to be interpreted in just one way. I mean, if people see Funnel Cake as a story read from top to bottom, that’s fine. For me, what’s most important is the composition—the way the piece is put together and how all the parts of it are resonating. Like the way you would listen to a song. Once that feels right, then I start looking at the big picture and start trying to have it congeal. A lot of subtraction can happen during this process. Often some of the most beautiful moments of a painting get wiped away because they serve no purpose in the larger image.
LVH Art: Are there any artists, creators, or individuals who have influenced your work?
Casey Bolding: There's a French graffiti artist who’s passed away, SAEIO, whose work still inspires me and reminds me of the ocean of possibilities in painting. RB Kitaj is another painter who does that for me. Then there’s guys like Arthur Okamura and Diebenkorn, whose deep sensibility of materials really resonates with me, as well as the way their works resemble expansive aerial landscapes, almost as if you're gazing down from a plane. When I was young, Robert Rauschenberg, especially in his collage works, was another major influence. His collage works gave me the feeling I could work with the materials in the same way he did — squeezing them into place, creating compositions from what’s available. Mamma Anderson stays nearby at all times too as well as Stanislava Kovalciova — two of the greatest in my lifetime. Brutal and abbreviated with just enough finesse to make you feel like you could be a painter too.
