PIn your artist statement, you wrote, “painting is the language I needed when words failed” and that your motivation behind being an artist is to “continually make stabs at communication to engage in social discourse.” Talk a little about how visual art can be a language. How do you think it can initiate and respond to the world?
I’m no semiotician, but I know that visual art transcends language as the symbols and content within are imbued with their own meaning. Art initiates and responds to the world by asking questions rather than providing answers, much like Anton Chekhov and Leonard Bernstein have suggested. It provokes thought, evokes emotions, and challenges perceptions. Art will rarely, if it’s any good, answer its own question neatly—probably due to the subjectiveness around seeing. Art making is a way of pointing at things.
Personally, though, there have been times where I very literally needed visuals to communicate, as I bounced around so much in my early years that language was hard for me to rely on. Funnily enough, my first word in Spanish was “mira”. As I got older, though, painting became a way for me to encapsulate complicated emotions in a more digestible way. A sad painting is probably easier to spend time understanding than a snotty, blubbering outburst.
Homing Pigeons features scenes with symbolic juxtapositions that, to this viewer, seem to call out the fragility or damage—literally in Fluff—of domesticity. Talk a little about bringing a collection like this to life.
Usually, a painting for me begins with words. I start by writing a bit in my sketchbook, creating a literary trail of ideas around a feeling, little metaphors in the margins. In the case of Homing Pigeons, I have been writing a lot about the point of my life that I am in; I am married but still childless, and I’m fearful to leap into the domestic lifestyle around motherhood. I find that stringing together nonsense nouns and adjectives helps stimulate a visual, and once I have this visual so clear in my head, it’s easy to build the scene, decide the scale, the color palette, etc. I have known other artists that rebel in the surprises of artmaking, but for me, I labor over the idea of an image until it is totally rendered. Totally exhausted.
Your biography mentions being a “third culture kid” and living in a major metropolitan city. How have these experiences shaped you and your art?
Though I was born to American parents in New York, we moved to Madrid when I was two, only to move again to rural Pennsylvania by age 12. While this is an exciting way to live, I think it can also distort one’s sense of belonging; I was too pale for the Spanish sun and too secular for the cornfields. Being a third culture kid can make it complicated to build an origin story as a foundation for a personal identity.
I think this shows up in my work as a fascination with the interior environments I create—a desire to zoom in from the outside. This experience draws me to be fascinated with the idea of home. It’s as though home should be a temple of belonging, but I feel myself more as a homing pigeon in the search.
How has a formal fine arts education affected your art and you as an artist?
I think my formal education has informed every aspect of my work to such an extent that it is difficult to tease out the difference between intuitive artmaking in me and training.
From ages 4-10, I was enrolled in afterschool art class where our hungover 26-year-old teacher would have us paint using a box of museum postcards from Prado as references, and summers were spent in LA with eccentric tutors. By 13, I was enrolling myself in nude figure drawing and pottery at a local college in Pennsylvania. Lastly, the pinnacle of my education has been my graduating from Hunter college.
Certainly, my early years informed my stylistic preference towards representational work, but in contrast, Hunter broadened my tastes by exposing me to conceptual ideas and experimental color. Without that duality maybe I’d still be painting postcards. What a bore.
Share a few artists whose creations inspire or excite you and why.
I’m a bit like a magpie here:
The Guerrilla Girls are great—they’re an absolute hoot and yet their message is deadly serious.
Jenna Gribbon’s last show left me with my jaw on the floor. And Cait Porter’s. And Jesse Mockrin’s. My copy of Meditations in an Emergency by Frank O’Hara has been so thoroughly annotated that some parts are (sadly) illegible. My copy of My Misspent Youth by Meghan Daum has (also sadly) suffered the same fate.
I am also deeply inspired by the conversations I have with my dear friend and fierce artist, Jason Birmingham; I pick his brain for answers like a petulant child, and it pays in dividends to be in his company.
It’s a sort of inspo-soup, I guess, but the common thread is that I find inspiration in things that remind me of the experience of being a person bound by an environment and the significance of really looking. But almost anything is game, really.
What are you working on now?
There are always irons in the fire.
I just finished up one painting, which is always a pretty exciting feeling. I find it impossible to split my attention between multiple canvases like so many people do, so this one has really consumed me a little while. For this painting, the image is visually split in three panes on one canvas to make the stills inseparable, and the process was a great brain tease. I had to take what I learned from Constraints I and II and try to bring it.
I also just started preparing another canvas which will be my biggest yet: 72” x 48”. I am still working out the details of the scene itself, but I am convinced that the scale is going to be fantastic to work with.
Lastly, I am going to be participating in an upcoming group show at Westbeth Gallery called “Up Close from Afar” in the fall, the details on which are still being ironed out. Exciting, though!
