Paintings in Progress

Lots of new work in progress. Some details:

 
 Paper Towels are for Rich People (detail)

How do you Fix a Smelly Sponge? (detail)

Mom Dusted with our Old Underpants (detail)

Mural for Field Notes

In October I painted a mural for Coudal Partners, the makers of the very cute Field Notes notebooks. 

                              
       I found the image in the archives at the Chicago History Museum.

           My pal Kent and I projected it, and painted it with six shades of gray paint. 

It fit perfectly in the space thanks to Jim Coudal's excellent direction and vision. 

Here is a video about it:

So many idiots at the Louvre

Treasures from Paris

I went to Paris in October. Here are just three of the gems I saw:

(At the Louvre) a Study of Hands by Largillierre (1715)

Francois Biard, Magdalena Bay, 1841. One of my favorite paintings ever. These explorers are exhausted and near death, but get to see some of the most beautiful things in the world. Sort of like the experience of trudging through a museum for hours on end.

So modern for 1900! Felix Vallotton — at Musee D'orsay

Coping after November 8th

Interview with Kyle Staver

My interview with Kyle Staver is finally up on Figure/Ground. It was an honor to talk to her!

http://figureground.org/a-conversation-with-kyle-staver/

(Interviewed June 20, 2016, in Brooklyn, New York)

Kyle Staver: I was born in April in northern Minnesota and when I was sixteen I went to a boarding school outside of Chicago called Ferry Hall [now Lake Forest Academy].

Gwendolyn Zabicki: I went to Lake Forest Academy! It was magical.

KS: I wanted to get out of Minnesota and my best friend went to the academy. I grew up with him and he said, “you should go to Ferry Hall,” so I told my parents I wanted to go to boarding school. It was wonderful. I got a very different kind of education than I would have got in northern Minnesota. I had teachers that were extraordinary women and that wasn’t really true where I was before. They had a sense that you could achieve anything you wanted and I didn’t know that. So I’m really grateful for that. It was near Chicago and Chicago is a big city. The biggest city I grew up with was Deluth, so there wasn’t that sense of things happening. Then I went to a college in Missouri, because my parents said no to art school. They had no idea what it was, but I didn’t either. I went there for one year and then went to the Minneapolis College of Art and Design as a sculptor. After that I went to the Camberwell College of Art in London and then I was a sculptor for years. I moved to New Haven and made my first painting when I was 29 years old. When I make paintings I make them like a sculptor. I feel like I build them. I don’t feel like John Singer Sargent, I feel like a coal miner.

GZ: Was London part of a study abroad program?

KS: I fell madly in love with a British sculptor and ran off with him. I went to school at Camberwell while I was there. My parents completely had a fit. So I went there, came back, made my first painting, and then I was a baker. It’s fine and well to be an artist, but you need a way of making money, so I made money as a pastry chef and a bread baker. When I was in New Haven, I was in charge of the baking department and I only hired painters. They were mostly Yale painters and it was extraordinary. They taught me to paint. And then I thought, “I’ve got to go to Yale.” So I applied, got wait-listed, painted my brains out for a year, and then I got in at 31.

GZ: Who were your teachers at Yale?

KS: William Bailey, Lester Johnson, Mel Bochner. Probably the person who changed my life the most was Andrew Forge. I was there in the 80’s. John Currin and Lisa Yuskavage were the year ahead of me. There were a lot of painters there-- it was truly a painting school and it was intense. I stayed one year after I graduated. I was still baking, and then I came to Brooklyn. I came here in 1988. Then I just painted.

GZ: Chicago has these great art schools, but for the last five, six, seven years, I go to the MFA painting shows and there’s no painting in them. There are painters in the painting programs doing installation work or performance or making videos. Painting dried up to a trickle and then in the last year it all came back.

KS: That’s what happens though, you know? I went into a shop the other day and they had elephant bell bottoms. They’re horrible. I remember when I was in northern Minnesota, drinking in the woods. You’d have to pee and so you’d go in the woods and you’d always pee on your elephant bell bottoms. It was horrible. It made no sense, but they’re back again. Things are cyclical.

GZ: I think now painters in MFA programs are looking to you. They are looking at your work, and they’re looking at Nicole Eisenman, Dana Schutz, Katherine Bradford-- all incredible painters who happen to be women. They want to do big, beautiful, figurative, exciting painting with movement and color.

KS: I think there is a huge need to communicate, to tell stories. It is primal. I’m not saying that installation pieces aren’t communicating, but there is such a long history of telling stories with paint. One can feel like a Neanderthal man discovering fire. We are making this transformation on canvas. We can also re-address the old stories from our current perspective, and add new interpretations.  

It is similar to reading books again and again. I have read Anna Karenina over and over. In my 20s, I thought she should’ve just left the guy. As I’ve read it in each decade of my life, it becomes a deeper and more confusing read. I realized there was no solution; she really was trapped.

Titian’s painting, “The Flaying of Marsyas” (c. 1575), was absolutely political. But, if someone were to paint that subject now, it would have a different meaning. I think of Angela Dufrense’s copy of the Courbet painting, “Woman with White Stockings” (1864), at the Barnes Foundation. Angela comes from a very different point of view, from a very different time. She turns it into something else, something more powerful for now, for this audience. Her version is so wonderfully raunchy.

If I paint the myth of Leda and the Swan, I can shift the story. In my version, it is consensual. It becomes about two teenagers in love. I can change the ending for her; I can protect her. I think that is really exciting, and I can still hat-tip to the greatest painters who ever lived.

I am much more interested in Titian or Courbet being present in my studio, than my peers. I look at my peers, but as Matisse said, “Stay away from the painters of your generation.” Picasso, on the other hand, went to every possible exhibition. He was so interested in his contemporaries and what they were doing. Matisse just didn’t want to let them in. I love all kinds of painters who are painting now, and yes, there is something in the air, which is available to all of us. But, I don’t take my contemporaries into the studio. I want to go to the source.

GZ: Is that part of your own teaching, or how you were taught as a painter?

KS: I ask students all the time, “Who is your favorite artist?” and they will mention a contemporary painter. I tell them to go to the source-– to look at who that artist is looking at. Teaching is tricky, though. I think of an experience I had with a recent painting. It includes the image of a dragon. I didn’t know how to paint a dragon. What if I’d taken a dragon class? Instead, I just sweated nickels over that dragon until it communicated dragon-ness to me and hopefully to you. It’s kind of how pornography works.

GZ: Pornography? How so?

KS: With pornography, there is an airbrushed picture of naked boys or girls. It’s put in front of you, and it makes you go into your own head, and page mentally through the things you think are erotic. In other words, it is just a trigger to stimulate you to think of your own images, to go through your own files. But, that is not how Rembrandt functions. He was not trying to remind you of something. He was trying to change the world for you.

I love Renoir, and the late work of Renoir is so sexy. They are the naughtiest paintings in the world. Some people don’t like his “cotton candy” fat women, but those were his women. Real sex is ugly and messy, and that is how I feel about Renoir’s paintings. You can feel him in there. He doesn’t care if you’re uncomfortable because he’s painting. The connections he has to his paintings are so intimate. He was an old man when he made that work in the 1890s and 1900s, and he wasn’t going to like the same things a 20-year-old thinks is sexy. He said, “When I’ve painted a woman’s bottom so that I want to touch it, then [the painting] is finished.” What is a better wish, really, than for a painter to find a way to fuck his paintings?

GZ: That’s kind of like re-reading Anna Karenina again and again. Sex changes as you mature. Have your interests changed over time, in terms of other art?

KS: When I saw the recent Degas monoprints exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, I couldn’t believe how much pleasure and information was in them. When I was younger, I had a shorter attention span and I couldn’t make that connection. I’ve been painting long enough that the excitement of looking at something is really fierce now. That might be the consolation prize for getting older. I have gotten much more open.

GZ: In your work, you use the whole arena of the canvas. The movement in the paintings is so active. It goes all the way up through the edges. Can you talk about that?

KS: In some early Italian Renaissance painting, like Piero della Francesca, it is like the painting is happening purely on intellectual level. It happens in the mind, from the neck up. It is like church; it’s always contemplative. You see the moment before or after something has happened -- not the act. But with someone like Rubens, he paints the moment. You are in the action. Even if Rubens is painting something horrible, there is so much joy in it. He doesn’t have the capacity to be without joy.

GZ: Yes, I just saw the Rubens painting, “The Banquet of Tereus” (1636-38), at the Prado.  There is a severed head in that painting, but it is still joyful.

KS: In the Rubens painting, “Rubens, His Wife Helena Fourment, and Their Son Frans,” (c. 1635), at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, he shows his second wife, who had been his mistress. He was about 56, and she was 16 and also his niece. It’s not permissible in our culture today, but I believe he loved her. Do you know the best part about that painting? In the painting, he has taken off one glove, so he can pinch the little fatty mound at the base of her thumb. It is so perfect. It’s so hot. There is a macaw in the background and a statue with protruding breasts. It is a wild, passionate love letter to a girl who he adored.

GZ: Are you joyful when you work?

KS: I have to be neutral when I work. I have a fairly rigid schedule. I paint every day. I have to keep the drama from my life out of my studio. I have wonderful friends and great support. I don’t do crazy things anymore. I did when I was young. Now that I am older, I need to just paint.

GZ: What is your daily routine?

KS: I wake up at 5 AM, feed my cats, and have coffee. I work on my Facebook project, where I post albums of three related paintings, from three different artists. So, I album hunt for about an hour in the morning, and then I go to the gym. I come back and start painting at about 9:30. I paint until 2:30.  Then I read,and go back in the studio and mess around.

GZ: That sounds like a dream.

KS: It is a dream.

GZ: And your studio is in your home. Do you ever go up there at midnight get something out that just came to you?

KS: I don’t like painting at night. I don’t like how I feel in the studio at night.

GZ: Do you only use natural light? The light in your painting is so special. Everyone is back-lit. Does it relate to other painting, like Rembrandt?

KS: The light in Rembrandt painting kills me. Goya kills me. As for my studio, I only have crappy light. I always thought it was fine, but, over the years, friends and family told me it was awful. I have a big skylight, but it is facing the wrong direction. It was in the house when I got here. I’ve been here for 22 years, in the same studio. It’s small, but it is mine. I don’t ever want to leave. I don’t have many people come to my studio. I can be mercurial, so this way, I can come out of my studio Attila the Hun or Sarah Bernhardt.

GZ: Can you tell me about a piece of advice or a recent breakthrough that just blew your socks off?

KS: I was working on an annunciation painting. I had painted the angel and putti, and there was something wrong with it. I was thinking, “Maybe I just can’t paint. Or, maybe the Bible just isn’t humane enough.” I was working on the angel, and I did something to it that made me laugh out loud. I thought, “Well, if it’s not funny, it is bad.” It made me think of the Rembrandt drawing of a naked woman rolling down her sock. There’s a red indentation on her leg from the sock. There’s no woman in the world that can’t relate to that. I am instantly connected, because it is something I have lived. It is such an observed thing, so seen and perfect. That makes it funny.

GZ: Yes, it is a piece of humanity, an insight into a character.

KS: That is really important to me. Animals can also function as signifiers that way. Animals act like a chorus. If you don’t know what is going on in a painting, just look at the animals. The animals will cue you into how you are supposed to be responding. Sometimes the animals in my paintings are the only things that are making eye contact with the viewer.

Recently I was watching a video clip of a dressage horse, and I realized it was a good analogy for painting. The rider was completely attached to the horse; there was no separation between him and the horse. The rider was in complete control, with no hint of struggle. It was the most incredible thing, and I thought, “That is what I want from painting.”

I used to be a one-session painter. I was a cowgirl painter. If I didn’t get the painting done in one session, I would start again. There might be a tiny corner of the painting that worked, but I couldn’t do anything with it. If I touched it, it was like it died. It was so fragile. I don’t feel paintings are fragile anymore.

Mel Bochner said to me once, “There is no such thing as an overworked painting. It’s just not done.” When I was making those fast and furious paintings, he asked me, “Who’s in charge here – you, or the painting?” I felt like I wasn’t in charge. Now, I take advantage of the elements and passages that surprise me, but I am in charge.

When I was young, I wanted the whole act of painting to be a rodeo. You open the gate and here I come! My horse would go wild, and I would try and hang on. The primary, underlying force was fear. Somehow I believed that being in control was wrong.

Now, being in control, and feeling my painting in every possible way, is what I want. I want more and more from my painting as I get older. In the dressage video, the only part of the horse that wasn’t completely under control was its tail, which was swishing. It was just joy, delight, and connection. That is what I want in painting.

My favorite photo from Expo Chicago last night

New Business-- group show at the Hyde Park Art Center

I have some paintings in a group show at the Hyde Park Art Center until October (up in the second floor Jackman-Goldwasser gallery). "Two Adults Rubbing Their Butts Together," is perhaps my most sophisticated work to date. 

A Good Foundation, oil on canvas, 20in x 36in, 2016

Erotic Puzzle, oil on canvas, 16in x 20in, 2016

When I was in kindergarten I used to go to Joshua’s house after school. They were strange people, Joshua’s family. I knew this because they had a large bowl of loose candy cigarettes sitting on their dining room table as a centerpiece. Candy cigarettes are pretty bottom rung candy and without the packaging, they’re hardly any fun at all. One day Joshua said to me, “I want to show you something.” We went into his parents room and he pulled back the quilt. Underneath their bed was a large erotic puzzle. We just stood there and stared at it. I thought some day when I’m older this will make sense to me, but still even today I have questions that will never be answered. Was the puzzle something they worked on together? Was this some kind of slow-paced, boring foreplay? Was this what I had to look forward to later in life? 

Two Adults Rubbing Their Butts Together, 16in x 20in, oil on canvas, 2016

from Hyperallergic: The Two Faces of Grace Jane

• by John Yau on July 24, 2016

Margot Bergman, “Grace Jane” (2012), acrylic on found canvas, 24 x 18 inches (all images courtesy Anton Kern Gallery, New York)

Margot Bergman paints boldly simplified portraits of women on top of found paintings, which she salvages from flea markets. The found paintings typically contain a portrait done in a conventionally realist style. By the time Bergman has finished, she has made a larger portrait of a woman that almost completely absorbs the smaller, earlier faces, leaving only the eyes and occasionally nose and mouth peering through the layers of paint. Think of the process as digestive, one painting methodically devouring another. The premise is simple, but the results are not.

Bergman’s style has been called neo-expressionist, child-like, and primitive. You get the idea; she takes a direct approach to applying the paint, and often uses a loaded brush to make flattened, simplified faces. However, look again at the areas of blue peering through the layers of pink, and the way the colors hint at modeling and volume. In a painting like “Auntie Gladyce” (2012), Bergman employs a variety of oranges (for hair) to frame a face, which is rendered in different shades of pink and red (the large scarlet lips are especially striking), while the blouse and background are rendered in a range of greens. Clearly, she is neither primitive nor child-like when it comes to color.

Margot Bergman, “Auntie Gladyce” (2012), acrylic on found canvas, 23 3/4 x 17 3/4 inches (click to enlarge)

The juxtaposition of the found painting’s conventional realism with Bergman’s broadly applied additions calls into question the critical division between realist and primitivist art. Is the earlier painting – which we see evidence of in Bergman’s work – more sophisticated and deft than what the artist does? By dissolving the border between these styles, Bergman gently nudges us to reconsider portraiture. Is it about surface appearance, or brand name recognition, or something else less nameable? While Bergman’s paintings are apt to initially strike viewers as benign and friendly, there is something strange and disturbing about seeing four eyes lined up, like ships on the horizon, as they are in “Auntie Gladyce.” Which face are we supposed to look at, because it is hard to look at them simultaneously? “Auntie Gladyce” is the relative that scared you as a child, or that you tolerate during the holidays. She is the black sheep of the family.

Once you acknowledge there is something off about these determinedly cheerful faces and their big red lips, then you might begin to see them differently. It seems as if Auntie Gladyce has put on too much lipstick. Why are her eyes – three of the four – rimmed in red? Is that a real smile I see, or just a façade? Bergman’s women are outlandish, haggard, theatrical, overbearing and annoying. Do we really want a portrait of someone staring at us like that, with two sets of eyes? Well, actually we do, because there is also something sympathetic, tender, and gentle about these wonderful paintings. Although it is not immediately apparent, these are portraits of stalwart women who have been deeply damaged and perhaps even broken by the world, and yet they persist. Their resiliency is heroic, a testament to their grit.

Margot Bergman, “Jo” (2015), acrylic on canvas, 34 x 28 inches

Amazingly – and perhaps not so surprising – the artist, who is in her early 80s, is having her first New York exhibition, Margot Bergman at Anton Kern (June 30 – August 19, 2016). A long-time resident of Chicago, where she has exhibited her work, Bergman’s paintings possess a psychological depth that is rare in contemporary portraiture, which emphasizes surface appearance over almost all else. Bergan’s portraits are about containing multitudes. The four eyes – the smaller face both emerging and partially submerged in the larger portrait – becomes a site for all kinds of speculation; they literally and metaphorically open our eyes to all kinds of unlikely possibilities.

Margot Bergman, “Kelly” (2015), acrylic on canvas, 34 x 28 inches (click to enlarge)

One of the found faces weirdly reminded me of George Washington, as if the original artist were channeling Gilbert Stuart’s unfinished portrait of George Washington, also known as “The Athanaeum” (1796). But Bergman doesn’t always work on found canvases, as with the sparely linear “Jo” (2015), which challenges our notions of finished and unfinished. Bergman’s preoccupation with eyes calls to mind the fascinating modernist painter John D. Graham (1886-1961), whose portraits of cross-eyed women constitute a body of work that has yet to be fully reckoned with, even though he was an important and influential friend to Arshile Gorky and Willem de Kooning, among others. It is wrong to think of Graham’s portraits as the bizarre curiosities of a lesser painter (as one writer has mistakenly characterized him), unless you really believe in hierarchical thinking and status tracking. Let’s not make a similar mistake with Bergman, whose portraits are deserving of more attention.

I don’t think of Bergman’s portraits as eccentric; rather, they are necessary reminders of the perils of being alive. They remind us that we are made up of more than one being, that we all hear voices – be they our parents, or our friends, or people we want to smother, not necessarily with love. Bergman uses a synthetic visual language that is all her own. Her unpolished style is not another manifestation of parody, but a means of trying to get at something we all experience yet inevitably seek a way to avoid or forget: the nameless, unrelenting pain that accompanies a consciousness with any degree of sensitivity. You know, the kind that jolts you awake in the middle of the night before sleep mercifully returns to overtake you.

Margot Bergman, “Audrey Ray” (2012), acrylic on found canvas, 23 3/4 x 18 inches

By painting on salvaged works and making portraits that come across as unfinished and raw, Bergman reminds us that the surface is the least interesting aspect of a portrait, that recognizing someone, or someone’s stylishness, is really about what magazines you subscribe to, and what mass media you attach yourself to, like an octopus. There is nothing smooth or slick about Bergman’s portraits. They don’t go down like honey. They are enigmatic and distressing, mysterious and funny. More importantly, they are disturbing and true.

Margot Bergman continues at Anton Kern (532 West 20th Street, Chelsea, Manhattan) through August 19.

T. J. Clark on Poussin

In 2008, T.J. Clark wrote about his changing views of two Poussin paintings at the Getty in a book titled The Sight of Death: An Experiment in Art Writing. In this podcast he talks about how is thoughts have changed since then. It's worth a listen:

http://blogs.getty.edu/iris/audio-t-j-clark-on-poussin/

Saw these men working... thought of this shepherd in a Boccaccio painting

 

Interview with Eleanor Ray

My interview with painter, Eleanor Ray is on Figure/Ground: figureground.org/a-conversation-with-eleanor-ray/
Also on Painter's Table: painters-table.com/link/figureground-communication/conversation-eleanor-ray
Eleanor Ray is one of my favorite painters working today. 

Eleanor Ray is a painter living and working in Brooklyn, New York. She has an MFA from the New York Studio School and a BA from Amherst College. Her work has been shown in three solo exhibitions at Steven Harvey Fine Art Projects, NY, and in recent group exhibitions at the College of William and Mary, Williamsburg, VA; The Center for Contemporary Art, Bedminster, NJ; Rothschild Fine Art, Tel Aviv; the American Academy of Arts and Letters, New York; Interstate Projects, Brooklyn; and BRIC House, Brooklyn. Her awards include a NYFA Fellowship in painting, residency fellowships at the BAU Institute in France and the Dumfries House in Scotland, and an American Academy of Arts and Letters Purchase Award.

You often have a window or a doorway in your work, which is part of a tradition in painting. Sabine Rewald wrote that the window is a motif that has been used by nineteenth century Romantic painters to represent unfulfilled longing by showing us the very close and the far away. Painting often acts like a window, but in your work, the windows act in the painting to make it seem bigger. Your paintings are tiny, maybe six inches by eight inches on average, but that window creates a larger mental space. Can you expand on that?

I like the idea that the small painting is kind of monumental rather than miniature – that it can contain a bigger space, like the imaginative space of a book, and that you can get back from a smaller painting more easily. So you can see more quickly how it operates on an abstract level when you’re not quite reading the imagery.

Of course many painters have been drawn to the image of windows because of their natural relationship to paintings themselves, with the framing of an organized, distinct visual field. But the relationship there isn’t quite fixed. It’s shifting. That can be especially interesting to see in places where painted space is competing with or surrounding a window, or maybe the real window serves as the light source in the painting, as in Leonardo’s ‘Last Supper’. Or where a painting and a window live side by side, as if offering two options, as in the monk’s cells at the San Marco Monastery in Florence. Each cell there has one painting and one window, on the same wall, and the shape of the fresco mimics the shape of the window. The window is actually recessed from the wall, making the larger and closer painting appear to come forward into real space. Different relationships like that emerge when you see a single rectangular Donald Judd work surrounded on two sides by large-scale windows in his Spring Street building. I’m not deliberately thinking of the window as a representation of one thing; I don’t think it’s so definite. It’s something we live with, an organizing principle like the calendar. The window is always there as part of our visual experience, unless perhaps you lived outdoors.

© Eleanor Ray Mercer Street, 2015, oil on panel, 6 1/2 x 7 3/4 in

I’ve seen your work mostly on the internet. When I look at your work on the 13inch screen of my computer, I am looking at an image of your work in real size. What I love about your work is that it is perfectly formatted to viewing on a computer, to being seen in the 21st century. I can see all the marks and brushstrokes that would be visible in person and I can see all of it at once. Working out of your apartment in Brooklyn, from many images you have collected, there is something that makes sense about the efficiency and scale of these paintings. I noticed most of your paintings at Steven Harvey Fine Art Projects sold. Your work is scaled to being made and sold in dense, urban settings. Those Romantic painters who made tiny en plein air paintings of Italy glorified nature. I can’t help but think that yourwork glorifies urban spaces and modernity, yet values the importance of real, in-person experience.

It’s nice that images are so accessible online. But having the work seen in person is very important to me. Images seen on a screen tend to exist without any particular scale, and people might actually imagine that the painting is much bigger than it is. I remember myself being surprised many times to see how small a painting, with which I had been familiar only in reproduction, was in reality. I was surprised at first by how relatively small Morandi’s paintings were and Vermeer’s. Piero’s ‘Flagellation’ was also a surprise.

I definitely have a love for urban spaces, but I’m not really interested in glorifying them. I don’t think they need to be.

                                                                          © Eleanor Ray Ground Floor, 101 Spring Street, 2015 oil on panel, 6 x 8 in

There aren’t a lot of hard lines in your work. When two things meet it’s a soft line. I don’t know how to describe it. It’s a soft atmospheric line that you couldn’t do in a larger painting, like a shuffling of cards.

Having a soft meeting of colors feels more tactile and spatial to me; you can imagine feeling around the edges that way, rather than making a sharp line that kills the space. I’m not consciously thinking about how to do that while I work though. It’s more intuitive.

                                                                                 © Eleanor Ray San Marco Stairs, 2014 oil on panel, 6 x 5 1/2 in

It’s such a grad school idea to make a huge work. For a lot of students it’s the first time they’ve had access to that much space. They have to make something big because they feel they are never going to have that much space again.

Yeah, I did get some crap from classmates about that. Make it bigger! But my studio in grad school was smaller than the one I have now. It was called the Guston Kitchen — apparently it was part of Philip Guston’s apartment when he stayed at the Studio School as a visiting artist. It was a narrow space with lots of cabinets and not much free wall space. Maybe it was nice in a way that it gave me permission to work smaller. At the Studio School we’d been encouraged to do a lot of really large painting. It felt like a part of the culture there. But I wanted to keep moving rather than work on one large painting for a long time. When you’re making small paintings, you can keep trying out more images and get more momentum. And something about the size of the mark in relation to the image on the smaller scale started to click for me. Still, it’s sort of mysterious what scale works for different people, and maybe you have to stumble onto it.

Is your work a reaction to the big painting? Is it the more mature, next step?

There are good reasons to work big too, of course, but I don’t think big has to be the default scale for serious painting.

                                                                        © Eleanor Ray Atelier Cézanne, Aix, 2015 oil on panel, 5 1/4 x 5 3/4 in

How do you choose an image? Do you do sketches at the site or do you take photos or work from memory?

I do all of those things. I take pictures and make drawings. What to paint and what to keep involves a slow editing process that happens over time. The images usually come from specific experiences with places, from what’s been memorable or moving for me. Like the experience of first seeing certain artworks: when something can surprise you although you did not expect to be too engaged with it, or when what seems at first like a disappointing aspect of a place can actually become more interesting. Painting is a way to look more closely at those things – to bring different places or subjects into contact with each other in the context of a group of paintings, without those relationships having to be too overly determined. But choosing an image is a mysterious process, like scale… I like what Anne Truitt described as recognizing her own experience, finding external equivalents for her intuitions.

© Eleanor Ray Villa di Livia II, 2015 oil on panel, 6 x 4 in

I can’t pinpoint an Eleanor Ray formula, but when I see a painting I know it’s yours.

That’s good to hear.

You have a painting of Cezanne’s studio with a ladder casting a shadow, which is also reflected in a mirror. It’s like a copy of a copy of a copy contained in a painting. I need to look at it to search for the origin. Where is the source? There is no real ladder, at least not in this painting. The way you mix colour is so particular and precise. That is maybe why they are small, because that is the limit of how focused a maker could be while holding all the variables together at once. The size of the brush, the direction of the mark, the colour choice, everything is carefully considered, and you seem to be aware of everything during every single moment of construction. If they were bigger, you’d get tired and lose focus. There would be moments you were paying more attention to the podcast you’re listening to or just filling in space.

That’s how I used to feel making larger paintings – I had to cover the surface. Some people must get a lot of pleasure out of that physical gesture of filling a big expanse. But for me that wasn’t it.

                                                                       © Eleanor Ray Squash Court II, 2015 oil on panel, 6 3/4 x 9 in

How long do you work on a painting?

Most of them are done in one sitting of three or four hours, but not as a rule. Sometimes I do go back and rework paintings and I often make second and third attempts at the same idea or image.

Do you draw it out in pencil on the masonite surface?

I usually draw a little bit before I start painting.

That’s what I’ve found out about painting, that I can only do it for three or four hours at most at a time before I lose focus.

It’s important for me to have other kinds of work that I do around the painting. To read, look at other art and go see shows, and just get out of the studio. I don’t believe you have to work any certain number of hours.

Do you have other jobs aside from painting?

No, only painting right now. It’s really luxurious.

It’s clear from just looking around your apartment at the number of books that you have and your subject matter that you know painting and its history well.

Art history is so accessible. You don’t have to study Latin to look at ancient Roman paintings. I love that. It’s a great luxury for painters that they can look at a recorded history for so much longer than artists in literature or music.

© Eleanor Ray Matisse Chapel, Venice, 2015 oil on panel, 6 1/4 x 7 in

How did you end up painting on panel?

I started painting more on panel around the same time I started painting smaller. I like the way the paint sits on the surface and stays where you put it. I’m working on a machine-sanded surface so there’s no grain. I get panels cut to a variety of specific dimensions because I want a lot of choice. I end up with a stack of panels and I choose a size for the particular image, or maybe the reverse. Maybe that introduces a little randomness. If I favor a certain dimension more for a while, say I use up all the squarish ones, then I’m left with some odder shapes and I end up having to use them. I don’t want to use the same dimensions over and over right now.

 Who do you look to? Who are your favourite painters, living or dead?

Seeing the Morandi and Bonnard shows at the Met in 2008 and 2009 made a big impression on me. That was such a great pair of shows to see back-to-back and in the same space — two painters taking ordinary imagery to such different extremes, and both clearly in love with painting in different ways. And then I’ve always loved Vermeer and Matisse as well as Giotto, Duccio, Piero, Gwen John, James Castle, ancient wall paintings. I love Giorgione’s ‘Tempest’, and Piero’s pregnant Madonna, painted in his mother’s home town. I like the way Guston put it, that ‘the art of the past is a hidden art’. I think partly he meant that in a Piero fresco, say, the abstraction is masked by the imagery, and therefore revealed more slowly than in a Mondrian. But older art can also seem unavailable to us when we know we’re missing so many period associations, or the meanings of the iconography. But maybe, depending on your temperament, that problem can also make things more interesting. To me those things are almost red herrings, and everything there is actually visible — Giotto feels so straightforward in a way. It’s a grand narrative that still feels down to earth. To see things like that in person where they were made can be so raw. Giotto in Padua and Masaccio in Florence were especially powerful that way.

That seems like the perspective one has as an adult. You couldn’t see those things when you were younger and looking at a book.

 More recent art helps you see those things too. You see things going backwards almost through what’s closer to your own time. But it goes both ways, of course. Now Vermeer’s interiors feel like Annunciations to me: a woman receiving a letter or waiting for news. Or, you can see Matisse in the black outline that comes and goes around Empress Theodora’s attendants in a 6th-century Byzantine mosaic. Also, I understood Morandi’s colors differently after seeing Italian fresco paintings. So, in painting everything is so visible in one way, but then it’s not communicating something reducible or definitive. A painting is both fixed, seen in an instant, and always shifting, open to being reseen.

Those are beautiful ideas, that as you put it, ‘everything there is actually visible’ and that seeing goes both ways. That, to me, is the crux of what your paintings do.