Looking Ahead in 2025

New Works in Progress, Studio View, 2025

I know, the timing feels off to be writing a ‘looking ahead’ post when it’s already April, but things have been moving slowly this year. If I could only kick my addiction to running, I would have more energy to studio. Thing is, I love to be outside and physically active. It clears my mind and makes me strong and healthy. Painting is a lifelong journey for me, so every time I exercise, I feel that I am ensuring I’ll be well enough to continue painting for many years to come. Hopefully this year I will find greater balance in what is important.

From a technical standpoint I’ve been experimenting with a new color palette that is rooted in primary colors plus the all-important depth and connective tissue that black brings to my work. I’ve been trying to get used to being increasingly okay with sloppy, messy, whatever else comes out of me and onto the canvas. Letting that chaos inform the next step forward to the next discovery. I’m finding joy in playful moments with graphite sticks and China markers and scraping out paint with pointy things that are laying around the studio, kitchen, laundry room, and outside.

I also decided to use up the rest of the prefab canvases in my studio, to make room for custom sizes. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with prefabricated surfaces. They are a huge time-saver and many are well-made. I am sure I will go back to using them when it makes sense to do so, but this year I want to feel more invested in my work in a more meaningful way. I am finding that by preparing the surfaces myself, a certain level of prior commitment is established that will help push me to new places. I am thinking holistically about the pieces—their proportions, their edges, the personalization of their format—which allows them to become a complete expression as opposed to a painting of specifically this or that. As Matisse wrote in his Essay “Notes of a Painter” (1908), “What I am after, above all, is expression.”

Blue Floral Dress (detail), oil on canvas, 2025

Line and quality of line are becoming my subject matter. While I still intend to explore the figure, because it is such an important aspect of my ideas on the value of self-portraiture in art, there is something very freeing about allowing the marks and decisions themselves to become the subject. To add, something very hidden and innate is revealed about myself when I place an abstract work next to one of my figurative pieces. I can make visual associations that I never knew existed, and I learn from this. I was never very comfortable with abstract approaches in the past, but for some reason this year things are clicking into place.

The images in this post include a group shot of some of my recent paintings in the studio and a detail of a figurative painting. The figures were started in 2019/2020 and recently reworked. The abstract pieces are my way of building upon my visual vocabulary through authentic experimentation and risk taking. I rarely feel comfortable about anything I am making, and it feels strange to present you with a staged group shot, but I am growing to understand that my total lack of equilibrium and not knowing where I am headed is actually the preferred state of being.

Memory Rewritten

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Brunch, 2024, oil on canvas, 40×30in
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Dementia creates a strange new sense of memory. It erodes the fabric of recollection, revealing how the mind hangs onto some memories more securely than others and without a lot of logic behind its selection. Like bony landmarks protruding from the overgrowth of a life no longer regenerating, fixed memories are rewoven with the confusion and muddling of past events to form new truths. Fiction moves in and stands firm that it is non-fiction. On bad days, it cannot be convinced otherwise. On good days, it recites memorized answers in an effort to convince us that everything is fine. To see this ruin of memory protruding from the sands is proof enough that it existed like this long before the problem was even a problem. The fixation on what was is persistent. The person we once knew still in there, somewhere, returning in glimmers like fireflies in the grass or a film reel with cells omitted.

The disease is a dream stuck on repeat—we never make it to the bus stop, the bags can never be packed, the crucial item never located, time always slipping away in a never-ending predicament. We try to run, but we are in quicksand. We try to fly but never get more than a few inches off the ground. We want to swim but there are shadows moving around deep below. In dementia, the mind dies first while the body remains able—a permanent and devastating disconnection of flesh and spirit.

What is the purpose of memory if it can let us down in such big ways? How does memory shape our perception of ourselves? Consciously or subconsciously I have altered, even omitted certain memories to adapt and survive—scraping out past impressions of my personal history and going over them with new layers of wisdom, regret, acceptance, and resolution. True memory loss is much different. It is a prime example of the persistence of human nature to hang onto the familiar against the current of inevitable aging.

In the years following my father’s death, my stepmother genuinely tried to move past the loss of her husband and life partner. She was scared, at times floundering, but she was putting in obvious effort to build a new life and make it work. Still in its infancy, her new normal was swiftly choked out by the shutdown and anti-social guidelines of the pandemic. Despite being a strong and often stubborn woman, even she cracked under the pressure. In isolation her memory began to fracture in tiny hairline ways. Her disease was almost undetectable at first but ever-growing, getting closer, accelerating. Silent yet progressing. As many of us would and do, she tried to hide her condition. She looked over shoulder to see and understand what was headed her way, but it was at best a momentary glimpse into a future from which she will never recover.

White Columns Online #28: Lookers

Curated by Marie Catalano

Megan Mi-Ai Lee
Ingrid Lu
Lisa Armstrong Noble
Lise Soskolne

June 4–July 16, 2024

https://whitecolumns.org/exhibitions/white-columns-online-28-curated-by-marie-catalano/#participating-artists

In Renaissance depictions of St. Lucy, the virgin martyr offers a powerful attribute: a plate of eyeballs sunny-side up to symbolize her devotion to the protection of sight. The disembodied eye was also notably the emblem of contemporaneous artist and theorist Leon Battista Alberti: on coinage bearing his profile, one can make out a tiny eye floating below his chin outlined in wavy eyelashes—rays, in fact— illustrating the Renaissance belief that eyes could grab or possess whoever they gaze upon. The Surrealists often isolated eyes in their work to represent sexuality and the disassociation from subjectivity and self-consciousness. Following this long lineage of symbolism, Lise Sosklone’s seductive and uncanny grayscale painting of Eyeballs/Eggs flatly harnesses the allure of vacancy. The four makers in this exhibition are similarly engaged with plucking artifacts from popular culture that entice and embody the act of looking. Wedding gowns, shoes, ribbons, sequins, the female form and other symbols and icons that promise magic or transcendence through commercial means are offered up in the works collected here.

Like eyes without a face, the items depicted exhibit a literal or figurative hollowness and desubjectification. In Megan Mi-Ai Lee’s So No One May Enter (After Howard Hughes), a silver shoe covered in lightbulbs replicates a hotel sign on the Vegas Strip that tormented the film producer who believed he was being spied on from the shoe’s empty interior. The ghostly wedding gowns conjured by Lisa Armstrong Noble articulate bodily forms but float devoid of brides. In Ingrid Lu’s Disco Lamp, a delicately tied ribbon marks what might be the waist of her painting: a field of colorful cosmological light flares that resemble the hazy glow of a nightclub or galactic expanse. While flaunting commercialized trappings of desire, the artists present their romanticized and codified subjects at a stark remove. By leaving the body behind, the works cast light on an amorphous realm of fantasy and projection. Marie Catalano is a curator and writer based in Brooklyn, New York. She was most recently a partner at JTT, a contemporary art gallery in New York, where she worked from 2015-2023. Catalano holds an MA in Art History from Hunter College where she produced a master’s thesis on Art Across the Park (1980 and 1982), an outdoor exhibition of ephemeral installations and performances in New York City parks. She is currently an adjunct professor at NYU and an associate at Adams and Ollman in Portland, OR.

This exhibition is the twenty-eighth in a series of online exhibitions curated exclusively from White Columns’ Curated Artist Registry.

Studio Exercise & Visual Analysis

Studio Exercise, 2024

oil, charcoal, graphite, oil pastel, and grease pencil on canvas
22x28in.

I chose to observe Willem de Kooning in this studio exercise because I struggle with spontaneity in my art. I also wanted to explore action painting, using my whole body to achieve a range of motion and gestural style different than what I am used to. From the get-go I tried to allow the energy of my movements to come through my body to vary the pressure and speed of my brushstrokes and mark making on the painting surface.

I began with a primed, unsanded canvas so that I could utilize its rough texture throughout the various stages of my process. I loaded my palette with generous amounts of Cadmium Red Hue, French Ultramarine, Cadmium Yellow Hue, Alizarin Crimson, Burnt Umber and Titanium White. I used water miscible oil paints to achieve a fluidity that would be somewhat similar to the way de Kooning mixed varnish, spirits, and other vehicles into his pigments. This gave me a good range of viscosity from fast (i.e., liquid), to medium-speed and impasto paint textures. Having my palette ready ahead of time allowed one set of decisions to quickly guide and inform the next.

I started by roughing in a series of gestural lines with graphite and charcoal. I worked quickly, trying not to think about what I was putting down, but knowing it would serve as the framework for what would follow. From there, I brushed in a fluid wash of paint around and over the lines, followed by the addition of colors to overlap, cancel out, and directly mix with other colors on the canvas.

I stood back to observe these first marks and to begin assessing what was working and what was not. I continued to paint in this manner of stopping and starting, scraping out areas that weren’t working and also to achieve a Sgraffito effect. I continued drawing new lines and going over previous lines with oil pastel and charcoal. Often drawing into the wet paint resulted in no line, but rather the suggestion of line. I then let the painting sit for a few days. Because I used water miscible oils, my painting dried relatively quickly. In this second session, I scraped out areas that were feeling overworked and continued to apply more paint and draw more lines.

This was a successful exercise for me because I find it very freeing to know that I can go back into my work at any time and continue the decision-making process. There doesn’t need to be a finite moment when a painting is considered finished. I also see now how it is important to paint with the whole body to achieve a highly visceral and authentic experience.

Interview: Conversations with Artists

In my studio, Summer 2023

Recently, I was interviewed for the Conversations with Artists blog. It was a great opportunity to put new words around my artistic process and my perspective on what it means to be an artist and art maker. Check out the article here.

Excerpt: What Inspires you?

“Inspiration implies that there is a distinct moment when I feel the creative spark, but for me this has never been the case. My art has always been there for me in my life, on the worst of days and best of days. It is my companion and a place I go to when I need to work things out. In order to gain momentum in the studio, I must force myself to get to work. Once I am warmed up, my focus dials into what I’m doing and time is suspended. That mode of tunnel vision is when I can tune everything out and I begin to break ground."