Lately I’ve been thinking about how much of a person we actually see when we look at a portrait. I’ve been painting people a lot, and the more I do it, the less straightforward likeness feels.

This came up unexpectedly after my artist talk about Attenuation at Berkeley Art Center. What was especially important to me was listening afterward to how other people perceived the work. Some responses echoed things I had been thinking about: not feeling particularly festive at Christmas and the way doing what we are supposed to do can slowly make us fade. Someone described a claustrophobic feeling in the scene.

One person said the figure looked as if she were in space. I had always read the setting as the interior of a car, so that comment made me notice how ambiguous the space actually is.

With Love

She Doesn’t Know Yet is now on view in With Love: Examining Attachments and Emotion at Santa Cruz Art League.

I enjoyed the opening reception and getting to meet some of the people behind the exhibition in person.

Unlike most of my work, this painting didn’t start from a reference. It began with a color combination I noticed at a nail salon, the furniture against the curtain. The colors stayed in my mind, and the painting grew from there.

In the studio

I’ve been developing a new group of figurative works. Usually something in a reference catches my attention before I know what the painting will become.

With Falling Up, it was the unusual shape created by the figure and her hair. The hair formed a dark, solid vertical shape, almost like a tree trunk or pillar.

A portrait commission unexpectedly turned into three very different paintings. Trying several approaches to the same person became a kind of experiment, giving me a chance to change the color and composition while still keeping the sitter recognizable.

I’m still figuring out what connects these works, but the question of how much we can actually know from someone’s appearance keeps coming back.

Reading

I’ve learned a lot from Claire Bishop’s Disordered Attention, though I’m still making my way through it. The book looks at how our ways of paying attention to art have changed, and her idea of attention as something relational has been especially useful to me.

It connects to something I’ve been thinking about in my own work: the distance between being visible to another person and actually feeling seen. My figures often seem present and elsewhere at the same time, and I want to explore that tension more deliberately.

Around the Bay Area

A few of my paintings are on view at Grant Park Community Center in Los Altos through October, through the Los Altos Art Club.

I went to the opening of Paper Works at 3rd Street Creative Artery in San Francisco. I was especially moved by Pantea Karimi’s poetic Suspended Healing Garden and enjoyed encountering Silvi Alcivar’s The Poetry Store. The exhibition is on view through December.

Back in the studio now, with several paintings in progress. I’ll share more next month.

Best,
Anna