Conversation with Perky Edgerton
by Elizabeth Johnson, edited by Matthew Crain
Art Sync: Journeyed Surface
Conversation with Perky Edgerton
October 2024
Art Sync: Journeyed Surface
Head-Image
View From Studio #2, oil on board, 6" x 6"
Elizabeth Johnson: In John Thornton’s video Listening for Monkeys you describe living amidst and painting the menacing local monkeys of Sri Lanka. ––Sounds scary! Were you there on sabbatical? Teaching? Collaborating on a book? (I gather that you illustrate your husband’s children's stories?) In the video you say that you "evolve from mistakes, make spontaneous decisions, scrape paint off and start over––change until the very end." Your upcoming show at Gross McCleaf includes three small 6 by 6-inch pieces from your View from the Studio series. Are they quick studies apart from longer evolving works? They appear to be painted faster and thicker than previous pieces, and there seems to be less scraping back. Do you consider scraping back and layering and building up a physical surface a richer way to tell a story than speaking or writing?
Perky Edgerton: My time in Sri Lanka was an immersive experience, but it wasn’t for sabbatical or collaboration. It was more about the chance to live and work in a completely different environment, which significantly influenced my art. As for the paintings, those three smaller pieces are indeed more immediate studies. They were painted with a sense of urgency, spontaneity, and desire to catch a fleeting moment: a warm-up in my studio of the daytime view from my window with little editing and some later glazing.
View From Studio #1, oil on board, 6" x 6"
PE: By late afternoon a shadow slices my mountain view in half. (Herman Melville wrote Moby Dick from the other side of this same mountain, and what he saw was his whale––or so the story goes.)
I am not a writer, but I read a ton of books. I admire how writers craft fiction, what is observed from life and what is left out, and how those chosen details mold the mood of the story. Recently, I read a memorable novel called North Woods by Daniel Mason. It brings touches of marvelous magic realism to scientific facts. The protagonist is the Berkshires, a piece of land in my backyard: people, animals, insects, and plants come and go over the span of decades, working up finally to the present. I want to paint narrative landscape as if seen from both sides of a frame of film and capture the larger story that continues into the past and present.
I used to say that I tortured a painting to the finish. Now I have come to embrace the way I make a painting as a bridge to intimacy and trust with the image.
PE: Scraping, sanding, and painting things back in, and then scraping again lets me think slowly, change my mind, lose myself in a tactile, painted skin rich with variations of texture and speed. Engagement with the surface allows me to peel back layers of a story to reveal its core. Each layer in the painting becomes part of its history, making the final work a multidimensional story itself.
This journeyed surface makes me happy because it feels honest.
Green River, oil, collage, and acrylic interference on board, 14" x 22"
EJ: In the same video, you talk about Early Renaissance painting influences and staying at Bernard Berenson's Villa I Tatti with your dad, art historian Samuel Y. Edgerton, when you were seventeen. You said that you organize your paintings frontally, with foreground and background, not seeking to depict an expanding, long view perspective. Can you share some of the discussions about perspective or surface treatment that you remember having with your dad? Were you starting to paint at seventeen? It is rare for an artist to have such early, direct, and focused contact with art history. Besides frontal perspective and stage-like storytelling Renaissance influence, would you say that current attention to color, texture, and surface allows you to keep realism magical, perhaps more like Sassetta, one of the artists you admired in Italy?
PE: My discussions with my father about perspective were profoundly influential. We talked about how linear perspective transitioned from a spiritual tool to a means of depicting realistic space. At seventeen, I was beginning to explore painting, but it was these conversations and experiences that deeply shaped my approach. While I do favor a frontal perspective that emphasizes a stage-like quality, I believe that my focus on color and texture helps maintain a sense of magic and realism.
Bayou Sauvage, gouache, oil, and collage on paper mounted on board, 29" x 22"
PE: Sassetta’s use of exaggerated storytelling elements, and medieval patterning mixed with observational details resonates with my approach of combining flatness and depth in the same picture plane.
EJ: Do you prefer working with photos or working from life? Have you ever made abstract paintings or work that doesn’t tell a story?
PE: I am now using photos as a first step in designing a landscape painting. Printing out a bunch of pictures, I piece them together into a dizzy shifting combo of foreground and background to simulate walking in the woods. I'll often next make a tonal drawing that rearranges shape and detail into an emotional, subjective, and stage-like space. But because I start layering, scraping, and moving everything around again, I am never obedient to the original drawing.
Tiny Monster #3, oil, collage, and mushroom spoors on board, 8" x 8"
EJ: I love the six monster paintings that detour dramatically from interior, figure, and landscape as subject. Fun! Good and risky! How did these creatures come about? Are they imaginary characters that generate narratives? In your opinion, would knowing a backstory enhance or take away from their delightful mystery? Do you relate them to gargoyles or capriccios?
PE: The monster paintings were a playful and adventurous departure from my usual subjects. They emerged from a desire to explore new imaginative realms and inject some whimsy into my work. These creatures are indeed imaginary and open-ended, allowing viewers to project their own narratives onto them. I think knowing a specific backstory might limit their mystery, as part of their charm lies in their ambiguity. They do share some thematic similarities with gargoyles and capriccios, since they provoke curiosity, but they are more about exploring playful, fantastical elements rather than serving a purely architectural or decorative purpose. I started making these for my grandsons during the dark days of COVID.
Swamp Lafitte, oil and collage on canvas, 48" x 48"
EJ: Swamp Lafitte uses hyper-saturated almost cartoon-like color, a big departure from the warm beige ground based of twelfth-century Chinese painting that you described in the John Thornton video, For the Love of Paint. How or why did chroma become so much brighter and bolder in this piece?
PE: My daughter and her family live in New Orleans, and we visit often. Responding to the different mood and atmosphere there, I shifted to brighter, more saturated colors to capture the vibrant and sometimes surreal quality of the swamp environment. This departure from a more muted, traditional palette delivers dynamic, vivid impact that experiments with how color can alter perception and convey an exaggerated sense of place.
EJ: I would group together Queen Anne’s Lace, Lilies and Ladybugs, Pods del Parto, Green River, Wahconah Falls, Bayou Sauvage, and Interior Life for balancing color with imbedded, textural design.
Wahconah Falls, oil and collage on canvas, 42" x 42"
Detail of Wahconah Falls, oil and collage on canvas, 42" x 42"
EJ: For example, detail of Wahconah Falls represents water as concentric ovals within realistic perspective. Merging color, design, and texture as landscape evokes the look and feel of fabric, such as moiré silk. Does being in nature inspire you to unite perspective with luxurious surface and immediate feeling? Or can you conjure the upfront and personal connection to nature without being there? Is resisting the long view of Renaissance perspective in favor of improvisation and/or imagination important drivers for these works?
PE: Being in nature profoundly inspires my work, and I find that the immediate sensations and textures of the natural world significantly influence how I merge perspective with surface design. While I often draw upon my experiences in nature, there’s also a significant element of improvisation and imagination in my process. The resistance to a long expansive view allows me to focus on creating feelings of intimacy, a sense of immediacy, and personal connection to the landscape.
Gloaming, charcoal, acrylic interference, and wax on paper mounted on board, 30" x 39"
EJ: A quieter palette, such as in Gloaming and Northwoods, feels more like Northern Renaissance. Does your palette fall in line with mood, seasons, and/or where you travel? Is layering slow-reveal patterns into the work the natural next step after thinking so many years about layering texture? Do you draw patterns from source materials?
PE: My palette does indeed often reflect mood, seasons, and the environments where I’m working. For pieces like Gloaming and Northwoods, the quieter, more subdued palette captures the specific atmospheric qualities of the Berkshires, a big contrast with Swamp Lafitte's response to Southern landscape. When I'm traveling, I make prints of various collected plants from the area. I often start with collaging these print cut-outs on a beginning canvas before working over with oil colors. Collaging, printing, and stenciling patterns have become a natural progression in my work, adding a visual complexity that enhances the emotional and tactile qualities I so enjoy building.
Northwoods, charcoal and acrylic interference on paper mounted on board, 42" x 60"
PE: I also employ a trove of decorative papers, all sorts of handheld printing tools, and stencils big and small. I love exploring new materials. During my Golden residency, I discovered a Golden paint product called "Interference," that becomes iridescent when painted on a dark surface.
EJ: I am especially fond of Gloaming because you capture the dusky forest atmosphere as swirling design. How did you get this effect in paint? Which did you paint first? Northwoods? Gloaming? So much happens by suggestion in these works. Would you call this a sfumato technique that includes Pattern and Decoration sensibility?
PE: Northwoods and Gloaming capture the elusive, dusky, quality of the forest.
PE: The swirling design was achieved through a combination of layering translucent glazes and softly blending to create the atmospheric effect. Northwoods was made before Gloaming: both pieces share a suggestive mood and were made in response to having gotten lost in the woods for several hours.
Queen Anne's Lace, Lilies, and Lady Bug, oil and acrylic interference on canvas, 26" x 38"
Winter Crows, oil on canvas, 42" x 31"
EJ: Winter Crows feels like a compromise between bright and subdued color. I especially like color embedded in or below snow: I can breathe in the fresh cold air, and surprisingly, the painting does include an expansive view. Is there a story behind joining “a murder of crows," prismatic, fresh snow, and timeworn, fresco-like surfaces?
PE: Winter Crows does indeed strike a balance between bright and subdued colors, aiming to capture the stark, invigorating essence of winter. The "murder of crows" adds a dynamic element to the scene, while the prismatic snow and textured surfaces contribute to a sense of depth and history. Crows represent life and movement against the stillness of the snow, a dead tree and broken fence, as the fresco-like surfaces suggest historical depth, almost as if the scene has been etched into time. The narrative comes through reading these elements together as you reflect both on the harshness and beauty of a winter landscape.
–– Elizabeth Johnson
(elizabethjohnsonart.com)
edited by Matthew Crain
(@sarcastapics)
September 2024
Perky Edgerton Studio Room
Perky Edgerton: Lost In The Woods
Oct 4 - Nov 9, 2024
Opening Reception:
Saturday, Oct 5, 1-4pm
Artist Talk with Perky Edgerton (POST event): Saturday, Oct 19 @ 2pm
Perky Edgerton received her Bachelor of Fine Arts from Boston University and her Masters of Fine Arts from Tyler School of Art. She taught in the University of Pennsylvania for several years, retiring in 2019. She now lives in the northern Berkshire of western Massachusetts. She has been the recipient of numerous fellowships and grants, notably, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, two Pennsylvania Council for the Arts, the Walter Murch Scholarship to Skowhegan, and the Skowhegan Drawing Purchase Prize. Edgerton has been working in painting and drawing for nearly 50 years. She has exhibited her works through numerous one person and group exhibition throughout the United States. Edgerton has traveled extensively, circumnavigating the globe on the Semester at Sea program, a year living in Sri Lanka, two years in Italy, and three separate years living in Mexico. In addition to her work in painting, Perky Edgerton is also the illustrator of two books of children’s fiction, published by Duttons Childrens Division of Penguin/Puttnam, entitled “Pipiolo and The Roof Dogs” and “Bravo, Tavo”. This is Edgerton's fourth solo exhibition with Gross McCleaf Gallery, by which she is represented.