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RJ: Elena,
the paintings in your recent one-woman show at Littlejohn Contemporary
in New York share certain of the formal and psychological concerns
of your earlier work, yet seem distinctly different. All the paintings
are roughly life-sized images of young women or girls, starting at
about 10, the age of your daughter, Clara. They have simple yet luminous
backgrounds. Could you share some thoughts about how you think about
them?
ES: I’m
trying to create a figure that has its own reality, not a reality
taken from life, and to make a painting that works as well on
an abstract level as on a content level. I want it to have the
sense of life and the weight of life, but not be a copy of life.I’m
not painting any person that I know. It’s about creating
a new being, almost, so the figure is alive, right there, but
suspended halfway between reality and imagination. You see a
young woman, in early adolescence, perhaps with blond hair and
blue eyes. She’s wearing a dress with a geometric design
that’s somewhat sporty looking. But there’s no information
given about exactly when she lived or how wealthy she is or precisely
what she’s feeling at the moment. I keep the backgrounds
very simple, and make the figures slightly larger than life.
It’s also about self-presentation—the construction
of an identity and the presentation of that identity in the world.
The figures are hovering between wanting to show themselves and
wanting to hide. At this age you suddenly realize how powerful
the outside is—outside the family. These characters are
just at the threshold of being part of a public world, coming
out of a private one. That brings into action all kinds of things
like sexuality and design. Clothes bring up issues about functionality
versus decorativeness, and the history of the female as a decorative
object.All these things are only subtly in the work. To go too
far in that direction would make them into narrative paintings.
My main focus is to bring you back to the existence of the painting,
to the existence of the character, and to the existence of the
paint. I want those three things to work perfectly together.
The paint should function on two levels, both creating the illusion
of space and at the same time reinforcing the reality of the
surface.
It’s a pretty tight package, and hard to do, because there
are so many ways to fall off the beam. The most obvious one is
that any extra detail, for instance in the clothing, makes it into
a portrait, and not a painting. Another problem can be making the
figure the wrong scale, or having the light not be convincing enough.
Often the light in these paintings is a light that dematerializes
the figure a little bit and meshes the figure with the space.If
you walked by the painting and the light was dim it might feel
as if a person was standing there. I want the background to fall
away so it seems as if there’s another being within your
context. The paintings are about the internal sense of the figure
and how it resonates with its environment and the viewer.RJ: Why
do you call the show “Daughters”? Do you think of all
these women as your daughters, in some way? ES: As
somebody’s daughter, not my daughter. I’m looking at
the characters with the eyes of a mother or father, more intimately
than you would look at a person you weren’t related to and
didn’t have hopes for--with all their hopes and fears and
potentials and desires. I’m thinking about Clara through
them or thinking about them through Clara. I’m also trying
to paint women of different cultural backgrounds in a way I would
love my own daughter. One of the paintings is of a young women
who might be a Native American, a Navaho. I want to portray her
not as a Navajo woman, but as somebody’s daughter. It happens
that my daughter has straight light brown hair and blue eyes, so
it brings in the WASP connotation, but some of the characters are
obviously Jewish. One is Black. RJ: Can you break
the paintings down formally? For instance, why the central figure?
Why is the background painted the way it is? Why is the space the
way it is? There is a formal aspect to these paintings--an underlying
abstract armature. You see it in the figure-ground relationship,
the compositional relationships, etc. For instance, the hand going
behind a figure compresses space. The horizontal bars on a dress
read almost as pure abstraction. It’s as if you can begin
to see a kind of logic that’s not dissimilar to some of the
plastic logic in Mondrian’s paintings. ES: I
think of these paintings as abstractions, not as people. I want
them to work unassailably on an abstract level—to be paintings,
not portraits. I think of it first of all as a light situation.
I put down a certain color and treat that as my light-space. Then
I start working with scale and placement, and gradually the figure
precipitates out of that abstract structure. The light tells me
who the character is and what sort of person she is. I ask myself “How
does she relate to the light?” The light is like the gaze
of the “other.” The way the characters move in and
out of the light reflects the degree to which they feel public
or private.The painters who are influencing me the most in this
work are Mondrian, Morandi, Piero della Francisco, Giacometti,
and Balthus. I see all of them as being related to each other.
All of them except Piero were influenced by Cezanne, the concept
of cubism, and the freedom that cubism gives to distort the integrity
of the figure for the sake of the integrity of the composition.
The emotional resonance that’s created by that distortion
becomes the fiction.My favorite artists are Mondrian, Morandi,
and Giacometti. All three have a singular focus, a limited set
of things they’re working with, and they’re deep on
an existential level. That existential experience is translated
to a plastic experience as opposed to a narrative one. All three
had similar feelings about moving from public to private, and needing
a very private and informal situation within which to be extremely
formal.I see Mondrian as a humanist--very funny and tender. I don’t
see his work as hard-edged geometry. He is wonderfully filled with
humor. He doesn’t paint flat surfaces. He paints a very buoyant
compressed space. All the brushstrokes count. And he keeps working
on the painting until it works plastically to give a message about
his experience of the world. Balthus is a consummately logical
painter. I love his balance between reality and irrationality.
The distortion in his work is created by the needs of the painting
rather than an emotional response to the subject that he’s
painting. In other words, he doesn’t look at a figure and
say, “Oh, she’s really smart, I think I’ll give
her a big head.” Most likely the reason the head turned out
big is because of the compositional needs of the painting. That’s
what makes it a fiction. Even when Balthus was working from life
he was creating fiction. I’m interested in fiction, in representing
reality in the form that I experience it, rather than in the form
that it already exists. As for Piero, I relate to the very simple,
direct, imposing but at the same time ethereal quality that his
figures have. He had an incredibly rigorous standard for what he
includes in the painting. Everything he puts in moves the space—even
an eyelash, or a decoration on a wall. Everything belongs in the
composition.I’m a pretty hard-core plastic painter. I can’t
retain my involvement in the painting unless it has some kind of
equivalency between the plastic action and my sense of reality
in the world.
So when I’m painting a dress, I don’t think about the
stripes on the dress, I think about the stripes of the painting.
I don’t think about the mouth of the girl, I think about
the mouth of the painting. Little distortions happen because of
that. I use the emotionally important fragments of the figure to
charge the abstract space. There’s gravity pulling those
fragments closer and closer together until the imagery almost resembles
a kind of naturalism, but they don’t make sense anatomically.
Many things are missing from the figures. They’re not faithfully
constructed. They’re only barely there. There’s only
enough information to make you believe there’s a figure.The
clothes end up being what they are for very abstract reasons. I
may know that I want a soft feeling. Once I start getting a clear
sense of the light then I find the colors and that gradually develops
into form and a style of clothing. The clothes develop simultaneously
with the figure.RJ: At what point does the painting
cease to be an abstraction so you can begin to project some kind
of personality or essence into the face or the body? When does
an interior life emerge and seem to be specific to the painted
individual? These are about Clara. But when I look at the figures
that you paint, I begin to see an awakening of consciousness in
whomever they happen to represent. ES: Yes. That’s
when the painting’s done. That’s the last moment. I
never hang onto a character. I’m never trying to make a certain
character.RJ: So when it begins to be that, it’s
finished.ES: Exactly. The moment that I recognize
that there’s someone there, that the person is alive, I stop.
If you go too far into defining who it is, it becomes narrative.RJ: So
what do you do with the viewer’s impulse to project into
the character?ES: Welcome it. As much as they
want.RJ: Do you project any of your consciousness
into them, or Clara’s consciousness, or is it just kind of
more floating or neutralized?ES: There’s
a lot of Clara in each one, there’s tons of me, and then
there’s somebody I never met before.RJ: How
much of that does the viewer have to receive? The viewer doesn’t
know you and doesn’t know Clara. But they might be able to
pick up on some of these qualities in the painting. Some figures
seem younger, and others a little bit older and more contemplative.
You see more of an interior thought process going on. She’s
aware of being looked at, and this creates a self-consciousness.
How much of that is what it felt like for you at this age, or what
Clara may feel now, as she’s beginning to get some sense
of her own presence as a public figure.ES: I want
to construct a painting that you move in and out of both emotionally
and plastically. I am inviting and hoping for projection from the
viewer. I see a painting as being like a mirror for someone to
use, so that every time they look it changes according to how they
feel. One time they may look at this painting and think she looks
wistful, and another that she looks shy or haughty, or whatever.
I try not to make any of those emotions complete—I want the
traces of emotion without it gelling into anything that would take
you off, again, in a narrative direction.A narrative inhibits the
use of my painting by the viewer. To me the use of the painting
is projection. You look at the painting and you see how you feel
that day. It’s almost as if I use Clara not as a template
but as something to direct my meditation. They’re very much
filled with Clara, although none of them are her, per se. They’re
filled with a sense of her developing individuality that I am observing.
They’re a meditation on my past, on how I felt around this
age, and how Clara feels, and how so many things have come to make
sense to me that didn’t make sense before having her.Having
a child gives me a chance to grow up in new ways. As a parent you
actually hitch onto the child’s process, and see through
their eyes what might have been a better way for yourself. It’s
all about framing and perspective. That’s another reason
why I have to keep the paintings extremely simple. If they were
any more complex I couldn’t keep my relationship to the subject
matter. What I hope for is that the way that the paint moves will
give some of the sense of the emotional power of the situation. RJ:What
you’re saying is that paint itself can convey emotional content,
regardless of what form it’s in. ES: With
paint you make light, which is very functional in terms of mood.
And form on the most abstract level has its own emotional content.
For instance in one painting there is a band of color across the
chest--stripes in the dress—that has an emotional tone all
of its own. She’s wearing a striped jersey, but there’s
a boldness to the way those stripes project, which has to do with
the light that they create, the fact that the orange moves forwards
and the blue moves backwards. They’re translucent not opaque,
set horizontally, above the vertical center of the canvas. All
of that has emotional or you could say semiotic meaning. Stripes
like that at the bottom of the canvas would give a totally different
feeling than those stripes just above center. At the bottom they
might give a sense of heaviness or of informality and abruptness.
But here they say something more like, “OK, this is who I
am, I think. I’m going to try it in the world.” One
figure is wearing a dress with little tiny points of red in the
shoulders. That says something about the person who would pick
that dress, and also something about the painter who would paint
the dress. They are a component of the character in the painting.
It’s like painting a person backwards. I paint them and find
out who they are instead of knowing who they are and then painting
a picture of that. I’m not saying I won’t do that at
some point in my life, but to me right now that’s backwards.
What I’m doing is based on an abstract expressionist ethos
of throwing yourself into the chaos and finding order, as opposed
to finding order and representing it. In that same painting the
legs are together and black because she has black tights on. The
bottom stripe on the dress is black. There’s a form that’s
created by the black legs and the black stripe. The dress is almost
the same color as the background, so it can disappear and the black
can become a positive, like a little pedestal or cake stand presenting
the figure.All of those things are in Morandi. The way that he
uses the light situation to take a bottle and break it in half.
He configures the dark part with some other object and the light
part with another object or with the background. You look at the
painting and say, “Oh, that’s a collection of bottles,”
but the more you look at it the more you realize that it’s
hardly there. It’s just light and imagination.
Morandi’s
bottles were all chosen very carefully. He pulled so much personality
out of them. He used to move objects around his studio on a spatula
or a dustpan. He never disturbed the dust, because the dust was
the space of the room coming onto the bottle and making part
of the bottle disappear. The dust was part of the light. It’s
as if the light settled on the surface of the objects. I am interested
in that light—that metaphysical, very heavy, palpable light.
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