The Team
Greetings readers of Wilson Warbles,
Last month I wrote about swimming through the awkward middle stages of a project. I’m trying to shape that project into a series of paintings, in anticipation of a small gallery show in the late summer/early fall! It’s very exciting and also totally overwhelming. Naturally, I’ve been wanting the work to be perfect and entirely thought out before I even start. I’ve spent months “researching,” taking notes, drawing literally hundreds of tiny thumbnails and sketches, and doing everything except starting any of the larger pieces. Over the past couple weeks I came to the uncomfortable realisation (for the thousandth time) that the true work and problem solving only starts once the paintings are in progress and they start talking to each other.
I’ve been struggling to find a form that I want to work within. I knew I didn't want to paint a straightforward landscape: I wanted to use flatness somehow, and juxtapose weird things together. The first thing that helped me was looking at a page in a children’s book! (PSA to artists and illustrators: don’t forget the goldmine of inspiration available to you in the children’s section of your public library). This is a spread from Júlia Sardà’s delightful and weird book, The Queen in the Cave:
I loved the way she illustrated a winding road in a flat and graphic style, with lots of detail crammed together.
I like to read the blog of illustrator Rebecca Green, and last month she wrote a post about decorative borders and flourishes, in which she shared the work of Louis David Saugy, a Swiss papercut artist who worked in the mid 20th century. Can you believe this was all created with a tiny pair of scissors?!
I’m not planning to try detailed papercut art any time soon - I don’t think my own brain tolerates that level of patience! However, I simply love the folk sense of design in these pieces: the way that Saugy plays with repetition, flatness, distorted scale, and mixing decorative details with scenes from everyday life. After I saw his work I couldn’t stop thinking about it, and wondered if I could apply that kind of design sensibility to my own visual language, using the scenes I’ve been collecting from Highway 16 in northern BC. That gave me a starting point and now I’ve been making a bunch of studies, with the intention of eventually working them up into bigger (20 x 30 inches ish) paintings. I have been working with black paper and I’m enjoying the way it forces me to think more about contrast, and also the way it naturally creates a more spooky mood:
The Team
Last year, I took a couple of long-form mentorship classes with artist Lindsay Stripling. (I will probably continue to sing Lindsay’s praises forever, because she’s been a pivotal part of my art community!) In class we talked about how inspiration comes from pulling on many different threads from your life and building a “team” - the who, the what, the where - that feeds your practice. When you’re making work, you get to remember all the artists, writers, movies, friends, and places that shape and inspire you. These are the things that give you the “feeling that you have infinite ideas, possibilities and excitement over what you can make,” as Lindsay writes. Whether you paint, knit, write, sing, or anything else, I’d love to know: who is a part of your team? What people/places/art give you that certain je ne sais quoi?
For myself, I keep lots of lists of these things, some of which inevitably change over time, but I thought I’d share some of the visual artists who never fail to give me that feeling. They have been on my “team” for a long time. I’m thinking about them while working on my new pieces, and getting specific about why I love them in relation to my new project.
Kim Dorland
I was introduced to Kim Dorland’s paintings at school and it was a moment of instant, instinctual connection for me. For the first time, I felt I saw the grunge of the place where I grew up represented in art (Dorland is from southern Alberta, but the world of his work looks so similar to my hometown): here were all these electrifying paintings of vinyl-sided suburban houses, gas stations, graffiti under bridges, dirtbag teenagers partying in the woods, and half-finished homes wrapped in Tyvek. These were all familiar facets of life in a small Canadian city, but Dorland made them eerie and horrifying too: his paintings were under-glazed with unnatural fluorescent colours, and he layered the oil paint on so thick that certain trees and faces seemed to emerge right out of the paintings. When I see Kim Dorland’s work I feel permission to make art about my own story, and to illuminate things that seem “ugly” and mundane.
Mamma Andersson
I felt a similarly strong pull the first time I encountered the melancholy mood of Mamma Andersson’s work. I imagined that this dark, slushy painting, Dead End, could've been a scene from the street of my first childhood home, and I knew I wanted to make something like that.
Mamma Andersson grew up in north-central Sweden and often incorporates those stark landscapes of her childhood into her work: birch trees, cabins, open forests, muted earthy colours, all of which are strikingly similar to the landscapes in northern BC where I have lived and worked for much of my life. What I love most in her paintings is the unsettling mood. Things feel subdued and always a bit “off.” There’s a sense of dystopia and foreboding. Andersson begins her process by referencing and collaging a large number of black and white photographs, collected from old magazines and books. As a result, the people and places in her work don’t feel bound to any specific time or place. You’re never quite sure what you are looking at: detailed figures melt into abstract areas of thick paint. You know there is a story, but not one that makes sense; things are just real enough to mirror your everyday life, but weird enough to be part of a bad dream.
I’m often trying to cultivate this slightly unsettled feeling in my own work - how can I talk about dark or dystopian topics, while still bringing in my own humour? While I’ve been painting swans in my own studies, I’ve been thinking about Mamma Andersson’s striking paintings of swans. They’re typically thought of as delicate and beautiful creatures, but in her world, they float on ominous black lakes beneath dripping red skies:
I highly recommend deep diving into Mamma Andersson’s catalogue, and watching these videos of her talking about art and her work:
Annie Pootoogook (1969-2016)
I’m often thinking about the contemporary drawing artists that have emerged from Kinngait, Nunavut (Cape Dorset), especially Annie Pootoogook. Annie’s work is deceptively simple. She was not concerned with making her drawings look “correct;” her mission was to record her life and personal memories, and talk about her Inuit culture within a contemporary world. She did not shy away from drawing the most difficult realities of domestic abuse and alcoholism, yet she also paid attention to small happy moments like grocery shopping in a re-stocked freezer, and camping on the land with her family.
I keep a copy of Annie Pootoogook’s self portrait pinned up on a bulletin board in my studio. She’s there to remind me to make work from the raw materials of my life, including the gritty and sad parts, or the mundane things in my kitchen. Her life was too short, and her work deserves your attention. The monograph of her work, Annie Pootoogook: Cutting Ice, is excellent and available to view online here.
On the lighter side: I’m trying to make time for little personal pieces that bring me joy to make. I’ve been experiencing wicked spring allergies, and lately my neti pot has become a twice-daily part of my routine. I’ll never cease to be amused by sticking a teapot up my nose (it does help a lot though!), and I decided to capture that moment of both silliness and struggle in a small gouache painting:
Book roundup: My friend and former co-worker Kyra started the virtual Sunday Night Book Club (join us on Instagram!), and I just finished her May selection, Hua Hsu’s Stay True, which I loved. It will make you ache for the first fledgling days of your adulthood, and love your friends a little harder. I also recently enjoyed Margo Jefferson’s Constructing a Nervous System, which, like Stay True, blends memoir with cultural and music criticism. Gwendoline Riley’s My Phantoms was one of the more plot-less books I have ever read, but wow did she pull that off: I turned the pages faster than with any book in recent memory.
Thanks for reading! Send me a note if there’s something you’re curious to know about in a future newsletter, related to having a creative practice or not! I hope you get to step onto a trail or into a garden this month - there are little treasures everywhere:
Love this, Emily! Really identifying with your highway paintings of interior BC and the frontage roads -- every time we visit Williams Lake, 100 Mile House etc. I gaze at these features as we drive. Also Lindsay’s team! I loved this activity. Been thinking of painter Michelle Morin, pastel artist Beya Rebai, the OA tv series...to name a few!
Really loved looking at all your influences. Excited to see your new work Emily.