The Validity of Paint in the Twenty-first Century: An interview with Jacqueline Ehlis

by Eva Lake, May 2005

 

I was at your studio and saw six separate bodies of work and yet they are all connected somehow. They all seem to address the question of if they function as sculpture or as painting.

 

I’m interested in what makes a painting work. Or what is a painting in the 21st century. I’m also interested in making sure the beholder has an interactive experience with the work. The beholder needs to engage with the paintings sometimes similarly to sculpture. It’s rare with my work that the viewer walks up, stands in one fixed position and stays with the work. There’s some sort of dance. Those are all sort of sculptural concerns.

 

And the paintings don’t always stay within the four borders of the painting.

 

That’s true. Since I’ve moved back to Portland from Las Vegas, I was concerned about the grey skies, and I knew I wanted to make paintings that were luminous. I wanted to make sure that I stayed light and was of the light, if you will. So I had an idea to create paintings that had their own energy source. I cut the edge of the painting at a 45 degree angle and there’s a luminosity that happens -- whether it is at a 90 degree angle to the wall or a 45 degree angle to the wall. The bright color will illuminate against that edge onto the wall. It was a theory in my head, but when it actually did it, it was awesome. It was exciting to see the experiment work out.

 

Was there a light or color in Vegas that you wanted to hold on to?

 

Absolutely. The sun there, the crazy neon lights are an amazing thing to see. When it rains in Vegas, it’s really confusing visually and it’s even brighter than in the sun... What I think is ironic and funny is that I am sometimes criticized for my super-florescence, or my super-bright, fully saturated colors and it’s spoken about as being unnatural. But it makes me laugh because –

 

It’s a natural phenomenon.

 

It’s a totally natural phenomenon. Bio-luminosity happens in fireflies and jellyfish and fungus. Even florescence happened in nature first. We live right next to a rain forest, where you can find bright pink, super bright oranges and chartreuse.

 

Let me ask you: what came first? All of the works sort of marry and question painting and sculpture. How did it all start?

 

I started with the photographs actually. I had done a bunch of airborne work with an air compressor and a paint gun and had learned how to use automotive spray paint, which takes a lot of work to make a flat surface appear perfectly flat. I was making those monochrome paintings and I felt like I had pretty good control over airborne medium. But I decided to do these new works based on pure paint, gestural and kind of loose -- with the hand or the touch. Mind, I never thought that my airbrush paintings don’t have my touch …

 

You work too hard for that.

 

Exactly. My hand is all over that object.

 

But people don’t always see that. They don’t always know that.

 

Plus to be honest, I was questioning the validity of paint in the twenty-first century. I mean I love paint, the process of painting and I can’t think of much that gets me more jones up than that. Being in the studio, pushing this paint around, I’m asking myself questions like is paint a legitimate 21st century medium. So I grab this digital camera and I don’t know Photoshop all that well -- I started experimenting with this huge mega-pixel camera and it was fun to see -- that actually the camera could not capture my drawing correctly. Because the eyeball is an amazing thing. I found it hilarious that no matter how I set the camera, I could not get chartreuse.

 

       Necessary Abstraction Green

 

 

You can’t match all the greens up from what I’ve heard. If you have ten greens, not all will be true.

 

Yes. It can’t even see ten necessarily, whereas our eyeballs might be able to see twenty-five. But the camera might be able to capture only five. So it was hilarious because the original question was ‘is paint still valid in the twenty-first century’ and it’s smarter than a camera. Just paint is able to show me more.

 

Then I decided to go ahead and push them in Photoshop as much as I could to get the color as true to the drawing as I could, and so what turns out to again to be fun is that the beholder doesn’t know exactly what they are looking at. They go up to touch the paint and it’s flat as a pancake.

 

But from some distance they look more like paintings than paintings do… so what was the next body of work?

 

 

     Laughy Taffy Cherry

 

 

I went to what you call the ‘cake paintings’ or what I call the ‘laughy taffy paintings.’ They are giant chunks of paint, just stripes of color, just layers and layers of paint that I poured and then peeled off and mounted on a birch panel. I wanted there to be an uncomfortable connection between the panel that they rest on and what they are, which is a solid chunk of paint, so that the actual painting is smaller than the mount. I look at them as trophy paintings as I define it, because after experimenting with the digital camera and technology, paint won. It’s an inside joke. And my parents will love this: my father was an avid hunter-fisherman and growing up, I had a bear rug on the wall…

 

So trophies are something you understand well!

 

Completely!

 

Both of these projects are investigating paint, how important is it, what can you do with it and when does a painting look like a painting.

 

Yes, I’ve been told that I’m good at goading myself, at pushing myself right along.

 

So what was the deal with the big paintings?

 

Well this whole body of work feels very light and up high. When I’m in a playful mood I describe it as marshmallow whip or fluff.

 

Maybe because white plays a part. You didn’t cover all of the white background.

 

And those larger paintings came out of the love of paint. You can layer and layer it and have it be three inches thick, mounted like a trophy on a wall, like my Laughy Taffy. Or you could have these bigger works which I feel are really ethereal, where the paint rests on the surface but also where there are areas more concave, where there is deep space within the painting. So one could have the illusion of being able to go within but there are also technical devices that never let you get too deep inside.

 

 

 

You’re reminded of the surface.

 

You have things you can hold on to as you glide in there and there are also stripes coming toward, to hold on to. I always like to think that maybe the beholder will maybe forget where they are for a second, but they’re not going to forget who they are in front of my work. I just don’t want them to go that inward.

 

Also there was the element of chance with these works. I was interested in this sort of light-flow pigment idea, where the painting is wet on wet and I’m trying to get the pigment and binder to separate, have the pigment float on top. And here in Oregon, things dry pretty slow and I’d come in and things were settling down and I could manipulate that, get it to float in a new direction. Ultimately I’d have to leave the studio and I would come back and see the whole entire painting slide, glide into a different painting. There were some parts I could control with what I know about the viscosity of paint, but then the weather or the surface itself just does what it’s going to do. As it’s drying, it’s chance and that part is exciting, interesting.

 

I also wanted to ask you about these spheres that you make.

 

The thing with the spheres is that I’m really interested in rewarding my beholder, really interested in offering some sort of visual treat. I see a lot of things and I love vision and I love that I’m a creative person -- and so the idea originally started with the notion that what if I could give someone a visual pill – and they could see better? Just marvel in the delight of vision. And it wouldn’t have to mean a dang thing except it stopped you for that moment to be captivated by it. So I put the spheres in funky places, like up on the ceiling or in a corner, or down low, near your ankle, rewarding you for looking up or looking down. And I also have the philosophy and believe in the individual, so there might be a sphere just all by itself and you might wonder: “What is that thing doing, hung sort of precariously there all by itself?” but it might just be the one that needs to stand by itself.

 

So now, the beholder. I think it takes confidence to be able to stand away from rhetoric. You do mention in your artist statement that you want to give the beholder something independent of rhetoric. And how does the art world deal with that, when it thrives so much on it?

 

Well society demands a certain amount of rhetoric, it seems, that I am not necessarily agreeing with right now. I’m going back to this idea of a visual democracy. I mean, I paint abstract paintings because I’m interested in you as a beholder to have an opportunity to have choices, true choices. You’re looking at decisions about whether you want to spend time with the work. In this one-way culture that we’re creating, I can’t imagine not painting abstractly. There’s just not enough room. I’m definitely not a post-modernist because I am not a dictator to the beholder as to what they should see.

 

One thing I wanted to address, and this goes for the spheres but much of your other work, is car culture. Your surfaces are a homage to that, yes?

 

Yes, I use pearl in my spheres. And even in my monochromes are a homage… even my use of line, of the stripe, is to a certain degree an homage.

 

As is an interest in speed.

 

Yes, I feel that goes back to this notion of individuality and my love of change. I’m not interested in the big SUV type of drive… I’m more interested in the race car, even old school type of automobile homage. If I’m honest and ask myself, have I ever felt quote unquote free – when have I felt the freest ever? In my studio, painting, I feel totally free there -- but also driving. I drive an old car that doesn’t have the global monitoring system and I feel like somebody knows kind of where I am, but nobody knows exactly where I am.

 

You’re teaching too. So what is important to you on that level? What do you want to teach people?

 

I have to say I love teaching. I feel like the best thing I can do as a teacher is to again, gently remind you of you. It’s my job to bring forth the best of you, for whatever that might mean. It’s my job to acknowledge you as an individual and to nurture your imagination and your creativity. In this culture that is really not celebrated or validated, so as an educator it’s my job to have my students become visually aware – but also humanistically aware. What do they see? What are they paying attention to? How can I help them see what they’re not seeing?

 

Well, you know – you must have gotten that in Vegas.

 

I must have gotten that in Vegas! Yes, I picked that up directly from Vegas, I observed that in Vegas (laughter)…

 

Well I didn’t mean it quite like that, but it does sound good. But didn’t you have some hot mentors there – I mean let’s be real here.

 

Yeah, I did have a hot mentor: I studied with Dave Hickey in Vegas. I owe a lot to him -- mostly he taught me how to see and how to seek knowledge. He is someone more impassioned about art than I’ve ever seen in another human being. He’s a writer but he knows more about the making of an object than sometimes I did as the artist making the object. I also was mentored by his wife, Libby Lumpkin. And so my graduate school experience was beautiful – I mean I went in one person and I was completely changed. And yet I didn’t have anybody to kick out of the studio when I got back to Portland.

 

 

 

Eva Lake/ Artstar Radio

May 2005

 

Artwork images courtesy of Savage Art Resources

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