Amy Nelder scape CONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW Land 1 A.M.
scape CONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW Land Special Edition Honey, I’m Home!
darkness the lowest notes on the left side of a piano keyboard. My education has been varied, and as with everything else, one experience led to the next and they all continue to influence my process. Certainly the most unique educational experience I have had with my art was as the Forensic Artist for the San Francisco Police Department and local FBI in my late 20s and early 30s. I was a full-time painter simultaneous to my forensic work, working at the Hall of Justice 9-5, then coming home to paint until midnight, and often being woken up again at 2:00 in the morning to go back down to the Hall to interview a victim or witness for an urgent case, or sometimes work with the Medical Examiner’s Office to view decomposed or skeletonized human remains, then draw what the subject looked like in life so that they might be identified and put to rest. But the majority of my forensic art was working with survivors of sexual assault or other of the most violent crimes, and my own joyous fine art work quickly became an additional support for me, my meditation both in the making and in the seeing of it – I lined my office walls with my vibrant, colorful, exuberant works, and for half my waking hours I became an audience member as well as the maker of my own work, which had never happened before. I experienced the healing power of losing myself in the lookingat of the art, which had not happened to me so distinctly before, and certainly not with my own work, which to that point I had simply made to delight myself in the making and then share with collectors to really make the majority of my income. The consolation I received from my work was remarkable, and I learned to meditate on a painting when I Amy Nelder scape CONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW Land
needed it. My manner of interview with survivors of violent crime, especially sexual assault, was incredibly in-depth and empathetic, and therapeutic for many of my clients as we did a lot of healing dialogue around their experience of their/our sketch, with an added facet of their sometimes feeling able to “let go” of some of the experience by pouring out the face of their assailant through their words and my pencil, and it was a heavy wave to scape CONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW Land Special Edition Towards Eden / Build-Your-Own-Eden Series
Amy Nelder scape CONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW Land share. The majority of my clients were highly traumatized and raw, and my art became such a consolation and relief for me in multiple ways, and I take that with me through everything I do, always listening to myself and others with compassion and respect, listening to the painting itself with an open ear and mind. The body of works that we have selected for this special edition of LandEscape —and that Chocolate, Interrupted Again
scape CONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW Land Special Edition our readers have already had the chance to get to know in the introductory pages of this article — has at once captured our attention for the way you sapiently draw from ordinary experience and daily life, elevating the everyday domestic moments to expand the idea of familiarity: when walking our readers through your usual setup and process, would you tell us how does your daily life experiences fuel your creative process? Amy Nelder: There is no differentiation between my setup and my process - I feel very blessed that I am always making my art. So as a natural multi-tasker, not only am I painting as my lifestyle, I am nearly always thinking and planning other projects in my head no matter what else I am doing, it all overlaps - eating, driving, taking a bath, or already painting whatever is on one of my easels, I am often working on one thing in my head and painting another on my easel - so the conceptual setup of several projects is already happening either mentally, or narratively sketching or annotating into some random notebook I might never see again. I often jot down a quick note or sketch into whatever notebook or piece of paper I can get my hands on, stare at it for a while, then lose whatever piece of paper I found - but once the picture is in my head, I start working on it, whether that work continues to take place in the queue of ideas in my head for 5 years, or immediately on a canvas. I am always scratching away at different ideas, setting up objects on my props tables and then taking them down so I can work on something else. The physical process, on the other hand, is just another facet of the work: my day to day life affects my work intensely. Walking by the sparkle on an inspiring sheet of tinfoil, stopped in my tracks by the glint of light on a group of cans, bottles, or drips of syrup coming down the side of a stack of pancakes...once I see a mesmerizing object, I often grab it and whatever other objects have turned it into a painting in my head, bring all Bordeaux, What a Night!
the objects to my props table in the studio and stare at the idea a while, moving things around, staring some more, sometimes for days, sometimes for weeks, sometimes removing the scene completely for 3 more years before I get back it. But once I get painting, the objects go back onto the table and they usually stay there even after the perishables go rotten, until I get what I want for the painting. My poor family has gone without some beautiful produce or cupcake more than once because once I got it home from the store I discovered something about it I wanted to paint, grabbed the objects, and Amy Nelder scape CONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW Land
disappeared with them for so long they were no longer useful to eat! Your artworks are marked with such discerning combinations of a rigorous sense of geometry and a precise choice of tones, which provide your works with a recognizable visual identity: how does your own psychological make-up determine the nuances of tones that you decide to include in your artworks? Amy Nelder: Although I am a high realist, and consider myself a total servant to the realism scape CONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW Land Special Edition Dichotomy
of the objects as I am painting them, I am also simultaneously totally aware of shifting certain areas of the aesthetic to please deep needs I have to accentuate one thing or another in order to serve the narrative of the composition as well - it is important to me that whoever sees the painting sees it as I want them to see it, sees it as I see it - which is not always as it factually is. The objects tell a story, and I don’t paint any objects that do not tell a story - for me as a painter, the story is just as much a priority as the realism itself. In that way, although I enjoy painting in high realism, I also prioritize the emotional portraiture of the scene - I think a great portrait always tells a story and evokes emotion with lighting and expression. The great portrait painter chooses how much strength to give one expression or another, and can only see what she notices and decides to include. In that same way, I lend expression to the objects with every decision I make, either consciously or unconsciously, about what light and what darkness to accentuate. We could recognize such subtle humour in your Disinfecting Station and Scarcity/The King, from your @Covid19Art series, and we really appreciate the way you focus on human behaviour and our over-dependence on the historical and social moment we inhabit: do you think that artists can raise awareness to an ever-growing audience on topical issues that affect our globalised and everchanging society? In particular, does your artistic research respond to a particular cultural moment? Amy Nelder: Artists throughout history have created achingly beautiful and magnetic, and/or socially engaging and impactful networks of thought, either within the artmaking and art-speaking community alone, or, thankfully in the case of great positive stylistic or social movements, out into the bigger world. In many cases, artists raise awareness simply being seen, or by encouraging other artists to make new work, which eventually gets seen by non-artists who Amy Nelder scape CONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW Land
don’t know how to express themselves in these alternate languages of communication, see it and have their own a-ha moment. Art has become such an influential manner of communication and expression on the internet, it’s wondrous. In social media, visual communication can and does spread like wildfire in unprecedented ways - on top of which people all over the world are becoming more and more aware that “making art” is scape CONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW Land Special Edition Just the Right Red
not limited to traditional paintings and sculpture – speech can be art, presenting the body in a certain way can be art, even sharing others’ art can be art - and that feeling of empowerment simply over a manner of expressing oneself births a proliferation of confidence in the sharing of ideas. I think people are learning to see the world in frames, and learning that their opinions can count for something outside their own heads, scape CONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW Amy Nelder Land Sorry I can’t come to the phone right now, I’m Lysoling bananas
because they are learning to validate the freedom of thinking and seeing artistically. My own artistic way of thinking and being definitely responds to what’s going on in the world around me. Both my Covid19 Art and Build-Your-Own-Eden series are reactions to the cultural events going on around me and my small family. Disinfecting Station with Watermelon and Lysol and Scarcity, the King are ways of communicating my terrors and frustrations about the pandemic through the releasing experience of nervous laughter over one’s fears. Humor can be a great release, but the larger part of these paintings, for me, was communicating with others, trying to find some camaraderie about what was going on around us. These paintings are subtly humorous indeed, but they are also screaming, “Oh please, can we all just agree how crazy this all is?” My first painting in the series, Sorry I can’t come to the phone right now, I’m Lysoling my Bananas, was the perfect expression of my fears in that moment that also came out as a small, headshaking, reactionary guffaw - I really was washing the skin on my bananas, and a call had come in from a cousin, and I had texted back to his call, writing, “Sorry I can’t come to the phone right now, I’m Lysoling my bananas,” and took a photo of this gorgeous, glinting, glistening silver colander of dazzling yellow bananas, and there was indeed this ominous but beautiful Lysol bottle behind it, and it was a very “me-moment”: a striking combination of color and light that mesmerized me, combined with the narrative of the moment - sad, funny, and romantic in a way - and I can’t paint anything that is not both beautiful to my eyes and also tells some story. As it turned out, I became very fearful scape CONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW Land Special Edition
Amy Nelder scape CONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW Land Lemons with Blue and White Pottery and Lysol
scape CONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW Land Special Edition Pop!
of painting it, and was initially frozen when it came to working on it as I realized that putting it down on canvas would confirm that it had actually happened, that this was all really happening around us - but then I also realized that I was compelled to paint it exactly in order to cry out that yes, it’s happening, but let’s all confirm it together, so we can shake our heads together, comfort each other, communicate about it. All those Covid19 paintings have been about the same thing: looking each other in the eye and saying, “I’m here with you, too.” The Build-Your-Own-Eden paintings are also a reaction to more than one cultural shift. They began as a reaction to the interior domestic aesthetic of the lockdown - after months of being primarily inside our small home, I brought some flowers into the house one day, and realized how they transformed my psychology: I was aware of feeling I breathed more deeply, smelled the scent of these cut flowers and felt more connected to the earth, slipped more easily into meditative moments while in the same room as they were. It made me realize that many of us were trying as hard as we could to only bring things into the home right now that pleased us, whether that ranged from flowers all the way to movies or thoughts. The world was becoming more aware of its domestic interiors - some people liked their home spaces, and some didn’t. But beyond what our walls looked like, or how big or small our bedrooms are, we also began to be more aware of what we curated into our heads: What news did we allow into our homes, into our minds? Those becoming more and more mindful seemed to be aware of striving towards something, which I began to consider as each person’s individual Eden - manifesting scape CONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW Amy Nelder Land
either physically and aesthetically, or emotionally or psychologically. I, for one, became so conscious of trying to build a more beautiful and comfortable place to be in in my space; I also became aware of my space versus others’ space - the backyard I’m grateful for, the extra interior space I might wish I had. But I also couldn’t help but notice how many people seemed to be curating or building into their own spaces, but also minds as well. The George Floyd protests were an example of people building psychologically towards Eden in their minds, prioritizing what they wanted to work towards in their lives and the lives of others, constructing their personal time with the building blocks of thoughts and protest, studying or raising a fist or a sign - all these are acts of building one’s own Eden, as much as reinventing the structure of your physical home. Each of the Eden paintings features an apple with a bite out of it, representing the transitional moment of the bite being taken from the apple, the moment of gaining a knowledge of both good and evil and deciding what to do with that; it’s an informed free thought. Many of my Build-Your-Own-Eden paintings feature a small articulated Wonder Woman doll as a continued reflection on the theme of the work I paint with my daughter as well, the That’s NOT My Name series about bodily and psychic autonomy, your right to accept or reject the ways people call or treat you. The small doll might seem powerless, but she can light a fire - and you, the viewer, can decide if she is setting the world on fire and what that means, or just drawing a light for us all to see and learn as we all build our Edens, as I build mine. You often draw from popular culture, as in the interesting That's NOT My Name, and we really appreciate the way your Vitruvian Woman connects cultural heritage and contemporary scenarios: how do you consider the relationship between Past and Present playing within your artistic research? In particular, do you aim to create a bridge between Tradition and Contemporariness? Amy Nelder: I think I am always trying to create something new and surprising out of recognizably traditional images, to make the viewer take a double-look, thinking they are seeing one thing that is really another - but it’s less the sensation of “trying” than simple compulsion, it’s just how I see one idea or another. I especially love painting the gravitas sensations of tenebrism in high realism, then twisting the subject matter with unexpected domestic objects for my Pop Trompe L’oeil work, using the magnetism of high realism to draw the viewer in to discover my actual narrative messaging. But I also love using the whimsy of Pop Abstract Expressionism to convey the serious message of my That’s NOT my Name series in works like Vitruvian Woman. My daughter Chloe Lejnieks and I paint those together, and we originally made them in my reaction to the first wave of the #metoo movement, when I was inspired to communicate with my then-8-year-old about how to protect and prioritize her body and ownership of her sense of self. All new art is a reaction to something - whether it is a reaction that says either “I agree” or “I disagree,” or a reaction to one’s own unconscious psychology, memories, relationships or physical sensations, the scape CONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW Land Special Edition
bridges are invisible but ever-present between old and new from moment to moment and century to century. The question is whether the artist chooses to consciously reveal and comment on those instigators, inspirations, revelations or repulsions, or make part of their work and study to hide and keep those older messages and structures secret or Amy Nelder scape CONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW Land Sorry I’m late to Zoom, I was disinfencting my (organic) oranges
obscure. Louise Nevelson made old new and recommunicated with objects simply by painting over them monochromatically - I love how her black crates full of objects both reveal and obscure the shapes and messaging within, completely transforming them into something new as we stare at the otherwise recognizable shapes stripped of their original purpose and messaging - I find them totally meditative. Helen Frankenthaler took nature and obscured, reshaped, twisted and reinvented our way of seeing the world as a figure in the revolutionary Mountains and Sea - but the title itself revealed the purpose of that abstract - Abstract Expressionism often allows us to “see” in personal reactions to color or the visceral experience of emotional sensation alone. In that way I am often very abstruse in what I paint, which is funny to think because on the face of it what I do is so immediately recognizable and concrete in so many ways, in labeled, romantic or nostalgic objects or figures, but those objects are in many ways simply members of my alphabet of communication. Still life has always had a beautiful language in iconography - the 16th and 17th century still life artists developed a language of objects with incredibly specific meanings now studied, memorized and interpreted. I am also conscious of my objects having an iconography of meaning, but it is often personal to me and secret, and I make it up as I go along. Much outwardly uplifting or colorful symbolism has historically obscured darker secrets or messaging: A Lysol bottle is now a morbid reminder of our concise mortality ahead; a disinfectant wipe represents striving to seize and still see what joyous moments of life we can in the ongoing habits of the pandemic, as well as being a nod indeed to the luxuriously realistic and intricate lacey napkins celebrated in Dutch still lifes of old; chocolate may represent either indulgent sensuality or a whimsically happy healthy family for me; Wonder Woman is the vigilant scape CONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW Land Special Edition Look Mommy, a Beautiful Rainbow!
warrior-mother of the apocalypse, the source of the collective power, protecting a sacred individuality of language and one’s rights to self-actualization, self-control over bodily and psychic autonomy, and the right to say yes or no to others’ interactions with our bodies, our names or our sense of selfhood. Here, she is the Vitruvian Woman, of course as a play on the Vitruvian Man, but she is also a multiarmed and powerful goddess, protecting the Honeys, Babies, Sugars and Sweeties. Even the presence of the Abstract Expressionism in the negative space of these works is narrative in this particular series, bridging between the scape CONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW Amy Nelder Land
captivating beauty of the colors themselves, and the idea that our figurative world is simply trying to make sense and language out of physical and emotional experiences, and the foundations of this world are different for everyone who sees and interprets it, just like the abstract space itself. Updating the concept of still life in the logic of a contemporary scene, your artistic production features such an unconventional sense of beauty that challenges the sense of ordinary perception, through a unique visual scape CONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW Land Special Edition Party of Two
vocabulary able to trigger the viewers' imagination: how important is it for you to invite the viewers to form personal interpretations? And how open would you like your works to be understood? Amy Nelder: Painting my sometimes unconventional sense of beauty is my inescapable obsession, but it is also my delight to force the viewer to see what I see: the breathtaking beauty of the prisms of light shooting up from the crisscrossed folds sparkling across the crimped corner of the tinfoil on the cookie sheet; the sensual, glistening, luxurious drips of icing and nuanced tones of blood red in the jelly oozing out the glazed jelly donut; the striking and powerful juxtaposition of the huge yellow cereal box towering over the rest of the objects on the table. Sometimes I want them to hear the delightful clinking of glassware, sometimes I want them to taste the salt on the popcorn and feel the slick buttery texture in their fingertips. All these things are so beautiful to me - I want the viewer to experience my joy in these otherwise uncelebrated objects - but by drawing them in with my skill at painting the objects, it is also important to me to allow the viewer to find their own interpretations of the scenes. I love it when a collector sees my story and understands it. Of course it is important to me to feel understood and “seen,” I think all humans want that - but I am also open to viewers adding their interpretation to the provenance of the piece. The painting itself has its own life once it leaves my easel; it will always be more mine than anyone else’s, but it also takes on a life of its own and with every layer of interpretation it grows more alive in the telling. We definitely love the way your artistic production features such stunning realism that you cleverly combine with such an emotional gaze on reality. Scottish artist Peter Doig once remarked that even the most realistic work of art is derived more Amy Nelder scape CONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW Land
Wordplay
from within the head than from what's out there in front of us. How do you consider the relationship between reality and imagination playing within your artistic production? Amy Nelder: I love this question! It’s like the question of defining value - it can be considered in so many ways. From different perspectives, reality can be so subjective, especially when we are talking about the assumption of some factual reality in a realistic still life - the reality painted is the painter’s reality. What the painter notices, the painter paints, accentuating what inspires her and working from her deity-like perspective, only telling the stories her brain wants or allows her to tell of the light, the shapes, the color. As for my own process, when I am painting a still life, I work from life, all my objects on the table before me, and I work as hard as my eyes and fingers will let me, trying to bring the painted object to such a high realism that it looks like you can grab it right out of the canvas, or make you want to taste the luscious strawberries or swipe your fingers across the chocolate icing so badly - but I am also conscious of making the objects appear as I “see” them, not only with my eyes, but also with my mind - I accentuate some areas, light some areas, darken some others, highlight a certain color to make it “better” or more musical, balanced, or magical to my instinct. One might call it my “imagination” - but I call it seeing it as I see it. My brain will always see it slightly differently than the objects really look in fact - but that is what makes my work my work, and others’ work theirs. One can’t help but make the painting within the cropping of one’s own brain - what we are calling “a relationship between reality and imagination.” Trompe L’oeil still life artists centuries ago might have a painting celebrated for its phenomenally life-like realism of a vase of flowers - and then you find out that the canvas was painted on over the course of months or years, different flowers from different seasons that never would have been able to live cut in a vase together scape CONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW Land Special Edition The Weekend
because one could never grow or find them at the same time in those days - those artists created a work that was both fake and real, and in the making, created a moment in a world that did not exist except within the cropping of the framed canvas, but it looks so real, tricks the eye, but also the mind and heart if one is attached to the idea of whether the original subject was ever factually there in its entirety, in the entirety that it lives on forever in the canvas. In my painting Your Kitchen or Mine?, for instance, I accentuate the spotty white flour fingerprints on the glasses and bottle, because it is important to me that you see scape CONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW Amy Nelder Land
them, they are an important part of that story - they tell a part of the story that you can feel with your own fingertips when you look at it, adding an additional sensory dimension to the viewer’s experience taking in the scene - but me accentuating them doesn’t mean they weren’t really there, it just represents my need to make the painting show what I saw, and I still paint them as realistically as if they were indeed that physically prominent, allowing a seamless experience with the rest of the more factual realism of the image. During the first year of the pandemic my work was selected for an incredible and moving scape CONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW Land Special Edition Your Kitchen or Mine?
exhibition called The Garzoni Challenge, with the Medici Archive Project and Advancing Women Artists in partnership with the Uffizi Galleries in Florence, Italy. Giovanna Garzoni, the 17th century master still life painter, was so inspiring, and I found myself feeling her a sort of spiritual mentor - she seemed to create her own iconography and way of being as an artist. One of the celebrated innovations of her work was placing subjects from different geographical locations into her still lifes, or putting other objects together that would not normally have found themselves together in a painting. Her work was considered remarkable for her prowess, her pristine detail and balance of the work, but then the subject matter itself had meaning, as did the way she selected the objects themselves. I was inspired by her invention, and, as always, by the fascinating fact that so many of us look at paintings from past eras without knowing perhaps much about the meaning of what we are seeing, but then, upon learning, can appreciate and understand the painting so much more - the trick of trompe l’oeil from one century to the next is that well-done realism always seems so valid and amazing all by itself, but it’s even more compelling when you speak it’s language. Over the years your works have been showcased on many occasions, and it's important to mention that you also created stimulating street murals, as the one that celebrates Chinese Railroad Workers: how do you consider the nature of your relationship with your audience? By the way, as the move of Art from traditional gallery spaces to street and especially to online platforms — as Instagram — increases, how does this, in your opinion, change the relationship with a globalised audience? Amy Nelder: I have always been a very outward artist - I communicate with myself through my art, and then I communicate with others via my art. Painting murals was a wonderful way to create dialogue between myself, a community, and the story within the artwork itself. I like to feel my art is generous Amy Nelder scape CONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW Land
Build-Your-Own-Eden Series
and respectful, that it gives something joyous, healing, or otherwise necessary to those who see it and appreciate it, and that it might make those who don’t appreciate it at least stop to think and have a dialogue with themselves and the art. The way the world has grown its ability to communicate with art is wonderful, scape CONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW Land Special Edition Vitruvian Woman
creating more artists who feel validated to create, and spreading the gospel of one art or another by way of being proliferated - most currently, on social media. Centuries ago, when the first printing press was invented, the culture of reproduction exploded and mode after mode of new ways of mechanical reproducing were born. Online platforms like scape CONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW Amy Nelder Land That's Not My Name
scape CONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW Land Special Edition successfully within a different scale and with different goals for their life and art. We have really appreciated the multifaceted Lucky Penny Instagram are morphing and changing at exponential rates, constantly adding new highways for artists to convey messages, divulge secrets, share images with multiple meanings - I think of it very much like the history of the reproductive space in the art world. Reproductions have been used not only to spread images just because they are attractive, but also to share political, religious, mythic or historical views, in the same way that visual social media platforms like Instagram are being used now - artists are able to put their work out into the world to see what the reaction will be - some of them to sell for the sake of making their living, and some to display and promote a narrative ideal, to spread an idea, to ask for agreement, to make some change. In the 1800s, the illiterate in Mexico could gratefully appreciate political lithographer Jose-Guadalupe Posada’s illustrations telling them the news of the day through posters of magnetic and satirical images, and news was able to spread like wildfire among the masses through those able to view his cartoons on a public wall, and then share the ideas by talking from ear to ear. Today, a cartoon telling a political or social story can spread like wildfire around the globe due to viral sharing - it is a similar act but on a grander scale, and it allows global communication of art like never before. The proliferation of art to the applause of “likes” and sharing can also encourage other artists to validate their own creations and try to communicate them. In that sense, it’s genuinely amazing. But I don’t think art on social media negates the brick and mortar experience of either the traditional gallery space, the street space, or the art fair - it’s just one more medium of communication, and there will always be ones who communicate more quietly, but also
Amy Nelder scape CONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW Land nature of your artistic work and before leaving this stimulating conversation we would like to thank you for chatting with us and for sharing your thoughts, Amy. What projects are you currently working on, and what are some of the ideas that you hope to explore in the future? Amy Nelder: It took a lot for me to bifurcate
between so many different series these past two years, and I was certainly forced into it by way of the pandemic lockdown in California first sending me back into my home studio full-time, where I had to kit out a space I had only been using part time for many years, and which was not quite big enough to work on anything but smaller canvases, and scape CONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW Land Special Edition Sunday Morning Donut Run
then my need to paint while not being logistically able to paint many projects and commissions I had had lined up in my downtown, larger, exponentially more beautifully appointed studio full of supplies organically accumulated over the course of 25 years. But I continue to develop new multipainting series now, while needing to meet deadlines on current exhibition projects and commissioned works - I am grateful that I now have two fully-activated and robust studios so that I can set up multiple easels and just move back and forth between all these multiple works simultaneously! I am also mother to my incredible daughter and painting partner Chloe, who is also an incredible artist in her own right and a heroine in my own life, and we continue to work on the That’s NOT My Name paintings we do together, as well as sharing both studios so she can make her own abstract-figurative works, which makes the studio alternately a solitary space and then an even livelier partner space when she is in it with me. While continuing both my Build-Your-Own-Eden series and my main body of more romantic works celebrating the quieter moments of my domestic life, I am also working on a Pop Trompe L’oeil series meditating on gun control, as well as finally allowing myself to expound in pure color on some completely abstract visual thoughts that have been pouring out of me the past few years as well. Strangely, although all those paintings sound divergent from each other, they feel also incredibly holistic and complementary as companionable images, both visually and philosophically. The main through line is that they all keep me feeling balanced, as I need to paint them all. scape CONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW Amy Nelder Land An interview by Josh Ryder, curator and Melissa C. Hilborn, curator [email protected]
Hello Pnina and welcome to LandEscape. Before starting to elaborate about your artistic production and we would like to invite our readers to visit I have been occupied for many years with the issue of man within limits and frameworks (social, political, family etc.) Questions I have been asking myself have leaded me to paint people within a frame work within the canvas/wood panel. After numerous years of painting this subject, I felt that the figures in my paintings should be freed from the inner frame, and so I started the series of "Little People". This series shows tiny figures walking on a floating surface, an imaginary landscape, maybe even surrealistic. In the process of work I try to find the adequate place for the figures in this unusual landscape, sometimes on the top, in some cases at the bottom of the canvas, in the middle, on the side, and every chosen location derives a different meaning for the scene. The colors I choose reflect an emotional state of mind; In some paintings I choose dramatic colors such as dark (almost black) aside red, and in others I choose soft, calm whitish colors. Questions to be asked remain with no answers, but the viewer is entitled to his own interpretation: Who are these people? Where are they going? What is this landscape? Etc. I believe that an art work is interesting when it arises questions, lack of clarity or pondering. An interview by Josh Ryder, curator and Barbara Scott, curator [email protected] Land scape CONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW LandEscape meets Pnina Afik
From the Little People series
www.pninaafik.com in order to get a wide idea about your mulifaceted artistic production, and we would start this interview with a couple of questions about your background. You have a solid formal training and you hold a BA in Art, that you received from the Haifa University: how did those formative years influence your evolution as an artist? Moreover, how does your cultural substratum direct the trajectory of your current artistic research? Pnina Afik: As previously mentioned, I have completed my education at Haifa University, majoring in fine art, experiencing various disciplines such as painting, drawing, photographing, sculpture, print, ceramic etc., all of which expanded my knowledge and limits. Haifa University's excellent educators (top Israeli artists) teach the students abstract aside figurative art, and this is probably the reason I explore the fascinating relationship between them, looking for what is beyond reality. I was born and raised in Israel, but had lived in New York City as a teenager until the age of 18, when I have decided to leave my family behind and return to Israel to join the army. Israel has been my base and home ever since. As I understand, being exposed to both American and Israeli cultures have widened my perspective and enriched my inner intellectual and emotional world. The body of works that we have selected for this special edition of LandEscape and that our readers have already started to get to know in the introductory pages of this article has at once captured our attention for the way it unveils the interstitial point between the abstract and the figurative, providing the viewers with such multilayered visual experience. When walking our readers through your usual setup and process, would you tell us how does representation and a tendency towards abstraction find their balance in your work? Pnina Afik Land scape CONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW
Pnina Afik: The abstraction provides the viewer with an unknown, mystical, surrealistic landscape/ environment. The figures walking on top of the floating surface encourage the viewer to ask questions such as: who are these people? Where are they going? Why are they going there? What is this surface they are walking on? Where is this landscape? And so on. I do believe that in order for an artwork to be interesting it should stimulate the imagination and the interpretation, rather than provide the viewer with clear, certain and unambiguous scenery. We have really appreciated the vibrancy of thoughtful nuances that mark out your artworks, and we like the way splashes of color and delicate lines create tension and dynamics: how did you come about settling on your color palette? And how does your own psychological make-up determine the nuances of tones that you decide to include in your works in order to provide the viewers with such immersive visual experience? Pnina Afik: I start my painting with a basic color palette. scape Special Edition CONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW Land From the Little People series
Pnina Afik Land scape CONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW From the Little People series
scape CONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW Land Special Edition From the Little People series
I then continue with a composition I think would suite the subject of the art work. From this moment I am involved in a meditative process, half conscious yet fully aware of my work. During Pnina Afik Land scape CONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW From the Little People series
scape CONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW Land Special Edition From the Little People series
Pnina Afik Land scape CONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW
From the Little People series
this process, adding on layers of color one after the other, I decide to uncover parts of the previous layer. Pnina Afik Land scape CONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW From the Little People series
scape CONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW Land Special Edition As I approach the final stage of work, I become fully conscious, my training and knowledge overcome the previous meditative stage, and this is when I review the outcome. Then I decide which of the tones are in place, which should be changed, where the right places to add lines are etc. If I find the outcome satisfactory, I declare the work complete. If not, I start all over again. I feel that I am a strict critic of my own work, for better and for worse. With their unique visual identity, your artworks challenges the viewers' perceptual parameters: we daresay that your artistic practice seems to aim to look inside of what appear to be seen, rather than its surface, providing the spectatorship with freedom to realize their own perception. Austrian Art historian Ernst Gombrich once remarked the importance of providing a space for the viewers to project onto, so that they can actively participate in the creation of the illusion: how important is for you to trigger the viewers' imagination in order to address them to elaborate personal interpretations? In particular, how open would you like your works to be understood? Pnina Afik: I start my painting with a basic color palette. I then continue with a composition I think would suite the subject of the art work. From this moment I am involved in a meditative process, half conscious yet fully aware of my work. During this process, adding on layers of color one after the other, I decide to uncover parts of the previous layer. As I approach the final stage of work, I become fully conscious, my training and knowledge overcome the previous meditative stage, and this is when I review the outcome. Then I decide which of the tones are in place, which should be changed, where the right places to add lines are etc.
From the Veil of Light series
From the Veil of Light series