How Can I Describe This To You: Painting & Recognition

In the internet age, after artists like Agnes Martin and Alice Neel, there is an ideological struggle that comes with the practice of figurative painting. I have searched for the rationalization of painting as a kind of contemporary radicality or poetic adornment or unrelenting tenderness; for the defense of painting as the quotient of the division of seeing and knowing or as the contemporary resurrection of humanity after its alienation by mechanical reproduction or even as a phenomenological commitment to the narrative arc of beauty. I long for a nuanced collocation that will succinctly defend my vocational obsession with painting that persists after the so-called death and re-death of itself — an answer I have realized can only materialize on an individual basis.

I spent the summer working as an intern at a relatively prestigious art institution — an unpaid position that I could not convince myself I deserved. There was an ethereal understanding of the sanctity of painting that I hoped and expected the more committed, practiced and polished artists by which I was acquainted would teach me; however, this understanding did not seem to exist within their minds any more than it did mine. Maybe what I was left with was more informative than any explanation of what painting should be — an assemblage of artists’ work and ideas that collectively build upon a framework for personal examination of what allures me as a surveyor and maker of art. When I returned to my normal life, to my own surprise, I felt relatively unchanged. I had not made the conceptual leaps nor gained the technical skills that I thought would signal to the world that I was ready to be an artist. I started my final year of my undergraduate fine arts degree and now I am here, halfway through, and it is only now that I have had the opportunity to create self-assigned work.It is starting to become clear that the defense of an art practice is inherently personal. There are fictional academic or philosophical myths that we prescribe to ourselves to hopefully better fit the world. I am realizing that the burden of my process belongs only to me and my explanation only needs to be understood on a personal level. This asks me to identify what I love about figurative painting, about decoration, about the feminine, about repetition and duality, about internal gaze, about the spectrum of my own perception. I imagine this kind of writing will never conclude so long as I keep making art.

It is easy to look outward in order to break down what you like about a painting. I believe that if painters only considered their own paintings, there would be no painters. I am initially drawn to look towards Alice Neel for guidance, an artist whose work I admire and whose character seems relatable at least from afar. Although this is just a singular example of my influences, Neel has profoundly impacted what I believe makes a figurative painting great. She said, “Whether I'm painting or not, I have this overweening interest in humanity. Even if I'm not working, I'm still analyzing people.” Neel has been one of my favorite painters since I started heavily pursuing the medium. The way she interprets likeness, what she chooses to be left under-rendered, the eyes, the lips, the concentration of pigment, the thick application —everything. In her recent retrospective Alice Neel: People Come First, the Metropolitan Museum of Art champions the work of Neel in an era when figurative painting is at its highest prominence in decades. “Neel’s greatness lies in the different levels of realism she combines in her art. They include social and economic inequities; the body’s deterioration through time; and the complex interior lives of her subjects. There’s a reality of Neel’s own personality, ever present in her work; her insatiable curiosity about people… And let’s not forget the dazzling reality of Neel’s paintings as objects, the insistence of her color, light and flattened compositions, the undisguised preliminaries, drawn in the blue, and her surface textures. Thick strokes of paint alternate with loosely brushed backgrounds, outlines and patches of empty canvas — all possibly absorbed from Abstract Expressionism.” (Smith) Neel’s management of her substrate relies on balancing the level of realism that must be required for the portrait to communicate recognition and humanity. The abstract elements in her work feel like a celebration of the journey that building up a composition with paint is. She claims, ““I don’t think there is any great painting that doesn’t have good abstract qualities.” Alice Neel emphasizes the loveliness of the convergence of truth on a canvas. I believe that all artistic translation is fictional, but there is a narrative arc that leaps toward truth that I can’t help but aim for. There is this vast spectrum of artists’ ability to notice or perceive, and an even larger spectrum in their ability to render truth. I am interested in the conversations, the movements and the decisions that dictate how those renderings appear. Paul Klee said, “The purpose of art is not to render as visible but to render visible.” What I think this means is that art is not to be a reproduction of what we perceive, but a construction of what we can perceive.

Decoration is something I keep turning back to, occupying the negative space in my compositions, or surrounding the painting of mine that I keep and hang on my walls. There is something so profound to me about the ways humans adorn their lives, their bodies, their spaces. I think this is really where my fascination with art began. I’ve been interested in fashion, interior design and makeup for as long as I can remember.I think often women are made to feel like this is an obligation but I have long been obsessed with this obligation, with making a home, curating my closet, designing a space that can carry me and accompany my life. To me, this perfectly converges my interest in people and space. In the context of a painting, I can begin to unravel the parts of our lives that we make up. I get to experience total control and loss of control in managing the elements on a two- dimensional surface. For once, the “decorating” that has been expected of me has become a privilege (to construct and reconstruct how I see humanity adorn itself).

A recurring theme in my work is repetition, duality and overlap. It is interesting to look back on the art that I’ve made in the last five years and see the development of these ideas. For a long time, I was unsure where my obsession with these ideas stemmed from. As I have had time to reflect and grow, I see that these ideas come from an innate place. My identity feels complex. I am mixed race, I am bisexual, I have been diagnosed with mental illnesses that allow me to experience high highs and low lows. I think the replication of figures in my work was a way to describe the ways in which I feel pulled apart. This is one of the scary things that I’ve avoided. I don’t want to make work that is accompanied by an intensely personal subtext about my own experience, but I think that the fact that it feels scary means that I should keep exploring. Additionally, I think I also am impacted by the pressures and expectations that I perceive are laid upon me. It feels like I am constantly surveying myself and also trying to not drown out my own perception of myself with the assumed perception of others.

Traditional ideas about femininity seem to find their way into my work, and I hope in some ways this inclusion is subversive. If nothing less, my incorporation of the female body, of feminine colors, of decoration feels like a celebration of the enclosures that I have been assigned. There is definitely an aspect of this desire that exists because of the way I have been nurtured. There is a level of recognition and reclamation of femininity that feels empowering, though I am not yet sure how.

This personal essay is just the beginning of a record of what inspires me to paint or make art. I aim to keep working on this as I grow, adding in inspiration when I find it, putting it into words so I can identify what it means. I will keep a record of the words that are spoken to me that change me. There is so much left to find out about my own process, but this is a start of my personal defense of painting.