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AG: When you're having a conversation with somebody, you know, you look at them but you have to spend a lot of time around somebody before you start to see something. My friends used to make fun of me. They used to say, oh, she's looking at us again. But it usually wasn't true. And every now and then somebody would catch me looking at them. A woman with a red face in the room with bluish hair or something like that, or I'll have a memory of a kind of light and I'll want to rebuild that. And those things kind of come back into my paintings. EGG: Where do you find the people you paint? AG: Some people are family members and friends that I've painted over and over again. Other people are professional models that I see at school that I work with. And I see them year in and year out and eventually somebody will weave their way into my brain and I'll have to ask them to sit for me. But usually it's a little bit of trial and error at first. I'll ask them to sit for me for a couple of sittings before I break it to them that I want to do a large painting. And that's a real ... you know, they have to be kind of dedicated and be ready for that. EGG: How do you decide who to use? AG: They kind of just stick in my brain. Like I find myself just kind of thinking of them when I'm going to sleep or when I'm in my studio. Sometimes they might remind me of something else, they might remind me of something as silly as my mother. Or they might remind me of a certain situation or a memory or something. Sometimes it's very much them, their personality. Their presence might be really striking; have a certain power to it. I don't know what it is and it usually takes me quite a while of looking at them before I can figure it out. EGG: When did you start doing this? AG: When I was in graduate school there was a young girl named Minnette, and she kind of changed my paintings because, I think ... very interesting, her coloration. She was very pale and had light hair and had put bluing agent that old ladies put in their hair and her hair looked kind of grayish-blue. And she got a cold and her nose and her cheeks turned bright red and I would pass her in the halls every now and then. Eventually I sort of stalked her and I was like, "will you pose for me?" And it was just amazing. It changed my painting, because I started to look at people in terms of their color environment and the presence had to do a lot with not just the local color of themselves but what color they seemed in a certain situation. So she agreed to model for me, quite a bit. EGG: What sort of relationships have you had with your models? AG: It's ranged from people who were kind of wandering in constantly kind of hour after hour to people knocking on my door saying, "you're painting today, come on get up." So the sitters are very individual. You know, some people drag me out of bed and make me paint and other people are a little more defiant. Some poses are far less comfortable, too. I've had my husband painted in the tub in the water and believe me the water gets cold in that much time. EGG: Do you ever feel like a therapist or something, sitting with so many different people all day long? AG: Sometimes it feels like that. Sometimes the conversation goes in odd directions, and people are very open. They're sitting with me for hours and they start telling me all about themselves and I think those stories ... I don't know if they get in so directly in my present work. But certainly ... there was one point I was painting a friend of mine and she was going through chemotherapy at the time so her body was changing, her hair was falling out. But she had these strange ideas about things and there ended up being a knife in the painting, because she started bringing these things in and the imagery started evolving into the painting. Her fears and her strengths started like almost having physical manifestations in the painting. EGG: How do you fit into the contemporary painting world? AG: Yeah, the contemporary painting world is, well. The idea of painting as a practice, the form itself, has been broken down. It's sort of a current thing right now to be more conceptual, and, as you mentioned, clever. And I think that's sort of obviously the bad end of conceptual. You know, good conceptual work you would never say that about. And certainly that's one way to go. I consider myself really a formalist. Very concerned about the medium itself. And not just representational, but more the abstract issues. I think a lot of them. The more psychological things that come through my work have a lot to do with the formal decisions. Things that a colorist would decide. Or a minimalist, I look at a lot of minimalist work. And so I think that people are sort of very self-consciously contemporary right now. I think I'm just sort of this humanist. And I don't know if that's contemporary or not. I don't think I need to defend it. [laughs] EGG: So your artwork is about people ... AG: I think it begins with the people. And it turns into a bigger context. It's sort of about me translating my observation, that adding all the little bits of information up turns into a whole thing. So it's not about this person or that person, but what this process is. I think the paintings are -- you're very aware of the process when you're looking at them. And it may distort some things, and it may clarify other things, or hide other things. Even for the particular people in the paintings, I feel that the context is very important. What the light is like around them, what the color is like around them. What their color is like. I did a couple paintings of two different people in front of the same background, and the background was very neutral. But the background looked nearly purple in one painting and looked kind of golden in another painting, and it was because their skin tone was different. And I just loved working on those two paintings at the same time, because the whole feeling of the painting changed just because there was this nice color reaction. EGG: You're sort of trying to paint everything you see... AG: I'm not trying to paint everything that I see, which is a strange thing. I'm not, like, putting this person forward. I'm not going to paint everything about them. I'm trying to just sort of desperately say, well is it here? Is it this bit of color? Is it this gesture going through their face? This sort of pull of energy in one direction, this kind of glow of light off their forehead. You know, where is this, why does it feel this way? I'm not trying to draw a perfect likeness of the person. EGG: Do you ever paint a different person than the one sitting in front of you? AG: Yeah, yeah. Sometimes. That often happens. When I've been working on a painting for a while, it's almost like this other person starts to evolve in the painting. And then I start to have a certain allegiance to them, ha ha. Oh, well, this person doesn't look like that person anymore, but look at them. And I spend a lot of time with that painting without the other person in the room, and I'm like, oh. And then it starts to be more ... those decisions start to get hard, because then I have to say, which part of this do I need more information about, and then I'll go back to my model and try to get that information. EGG: Is it still a portrait then? AG: I think it's always a portrait. Maybe not of that person. A lot of times, a model might remind me of somebody else. And I think that stays through the painting a lot. Or I'll set up a certain light in the painting, and sometimes the painting will feel like that light is the portrait. And the person is sort of there showing me something about the light. But the light is where the emotion is. EGG: So the person is still important? AG: Yeah, they're very important. They're what gets the painting started to me. EGG: Are you a portrait artist? AG: Um. I just recently started using that word. Because they take that form. It's sort of a person sitting in a chair, and I think I'm more interested in the idea of a portrait than I used to be. But they are separate. I think I'm much more interested in the painting, and have more allegiances to that. What's going on in the painting. And the other person in the room with me is part of that process, but they're not the outcome. I'm not trying to reproduce them. I'm trying to understand something through the observation. You know, it's everything. All the associations you have about yourself and your family and your life and your world around you, you can sort of bring to your observation of somebody else. I think everybody does it different. I mean, you look at every self-portrait, look at Rembrandt's self-portrait, and you're looking at different people and you're looking through different eyes. You think the subjects are all different, well, the artists are all different too. Everybody has their own view. I teach classes, and you look around the class and everybody will be drawing the same person. And it's amazing to me. I walk from one person to the next. It's not like the technique is different, it's something they're bringing to it. Their point of view is extremely different from the person six inches from them. |
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