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.