Art Sync: Simultaneous Choices

Sharon Garbe: When I read the title of your painting exhibition, The Cost of Sleep, I felt shivers of recognition beyond its provenance as the title of a John Ashbery poem. Who hasn’t wondered if they are awake or asleep to experiences? What artist or deeply engaged person hasn’t felt the accounting quandary of trying to balance work and dream time? The title manages to be concise yet expansive, teetering on the edge of meaning, which is a very poetical place and one you seem to feel comfortable in. What drew you to Ashbery and to use this title for your show?

Elizabeth Johnson: I chose the title because it links a negative––cost––with the positive, restorative nature of sleep. Ashbery’s poems are a great model for painting because he's off-kilter and risks not connecting on several levels. Sleep is an escape from consciousness, and I am very interested in how my subconscious influences my art.

Because I work with distorted but recognizable images, seeking the "right" color, image, or texture, I want the mix of visual information to simultaneously hang together and pull apart to emphasize transitions. When it works, a painting reminds me of dream space, where events and objects are always changing, and there's a sense of cause and effect amidst constant flux of emotion. My dreams are often like construction sites: I witness them being hammered together.

EJ: "Precarious abstraction" captures the work's underlying air of danger, and hints that abstraction is undermined by realism. The mysterious forces that "bend, swirl and spiral" correspond to multiple, changing points of view. We watch a lot of movies, at least one a night, and moving images greatly influence my compositions. My recent work is like a snowball gathering all the things that I studied previously: figure drawing, plein air painting, drawing and painting ocean waves, and rendering figures in repeating wallpaper-like patterns. Every few years my approach to building a whole from parts has slightly changed. For example, in the Anti-Story series, I arranged details like a house of cards, stacking and overlapping images as if I were rendering an imaginary cubist sculpture. Current Dimensional paintings imagine wave interference as sculpture. The difference between Anti-Story and Dimensional paintings is that, in the latter, I suppress straight lines and gravity, but I continue to resist linear storytelling. The story becomes how parts are assembled rather than what happens to whom.

SG: I like the term “earthy” to describe how you use paint. Can you elaborate?

EJ: I paint more impressionistically than realistically. I grew up on a farm, so my palette reflects natural colors and textures: clouds, trees, grass, weeds, dirt, muck, and animals change daily within the pattern of seasons.

SG: To follow up on the importance of places, you’ve said you source images from periodicals like the New York Times and National Geographic. I see traces of personal history in your work, especially the influence of having lived on the Pacific Coast, in San Francisco, where you worked as a wallpaper hanger for years. Then you moved inland to Easton, Pennsylvania. Your painting Wallpaper In Cemetery seems to merge aspects of those two places. What is your process of image selection and how do you imbue those found places with your own experiences?

SG: So, you still don’t care for the David Salle piece, but it led you to figure out a strategy for how to combine disparate images in a way you do like?

EJ: Yes, I've come to terms with strong feelings of competing with him by integrating his willful liberties with my own. Salle built on Rauschenberg and cubism, and I've swallowed hook, line and sinker Salle's juxtaposition of subjects and ambiguous storytelling. But not his straight lines and rectangles: those are few and far between.

SG: Can you talk about your process and your manipulations after you’ve arrived at a source image or images? It seems more a kind of transmutation than a transformation. There is no going back to the original state. Do you know what you are going to include and what you are going to elide before you start painting?

EJ: I never know what the painting is going to look like except that there will be many parts. I try one possibility at a time and destroy quite a bit of good progress along the way. Stubborn wandering may be one way to put it. I use the Warp mode in Photoshop to distort images, but I haven't mastered it. As a perfectionist, I can say it's a relief not to always know your tools. I play around and print only what’s visually appealing on a gut level. People have asked me why I don't show the photoshopped images, but they’re a means to the end. I throw them away when I'm done.

SG: Animals and people appear in your work, but evidently not as characters that are part of a narrative. However, when you put things next to each other we can’t help but make associations. In The Moon Path, which is a beautiful and mysterious painting, the upper left corner features a looming orange cat who appears to be chomping down on a wild rabbit. There seems to be a story in that, or maybe a metaphor, and it colors how I see the rest of the painting. You’ve written about your strategy to combine unrelated subjects in a work. To quote from the Artist Statement on your website: “I call this work Anti-Story because it thwarts the urge to make sense of the world through storytelling.” Are you saying that you want to avoid depicting things with overt meaning for other connections to surface?

EJ: Yes, I linger on loose associations or metaphors, and it's completely optional for new connections to surface. I’m biased against overt meaning because growing up in a family of rabid self-mythologizers inspired a case of story fatigue. While painting, I'm attending to the color, pattern, and weight of subjects, and if I feel a story is starting to coalesce, I undo what I did and try something else. If a painting works visually, I feel liberated enough to experiment with each individual part. When I'm painting, I'm not thinking about narratives at all, more about building an interesting overall conglomerate of flimsy ideas.

EJ: So much relies on self-motivation; and yes, though entitlement and circumstance play big roles in outcomes, being active and setting the wheel in motion is a creative personal choice. Sometimes even change for the sake of change is better than doing nothing. Procrastination, laziness, and boredom irritate me. I’m not depicting radical change so much as pooling temporary imaginative fragments to justify their frivolous existence. Dealing in these bits and pieces feels like a positive, thought-provoking, backwater occupation. For instance, I dream often of terrifying tsunamis, but wake up feeling great. What does that mean? The dream sure doesn't tell me, and I want to have more dreams like it. My work echoes the mood of current events––climate change, political upheaval––by showing change as always dominant. Change is always coming.

SG: Who are some of your artistic influences? I keep coming back to the Delaunays, especially Sonia.

EJ: I love her and Robert Delaunay and relate to the dominant curves in their work. I see them working hard to reconcile early twentieth-century science and industry with innate feelings for natural beauty. I prefer Sonia's work because it gives the impression of switches turning on and off, mechanisms and systems that evolve and run on their own. Right now, I am excited about Rococo painters, Impressionist paintings of winter, and Ed Ruscha.

SG: Ruscha!?

EJ: He contrasts the flat and dimensional parallel to the way he gives multiple meanings to words. I never tire of the effect of his works. Like Magritte, Ruscha makes me consider using words in my painting, but I'm not ready yet.

SG: Your whirlwind works have no beginning or end. You put images, which are stand-ins for experience, through a battery of digital ocean waves and vortexes to see how they fare. Then you reclaim the pixels and submit them to a different kind of fluidity. You play with space, time, memory, repetition and change, possibilities, and meaning. Could a subtitle for your show be “We Are an Unfinished Story”?

EJ: Definitely. Humans have time and hope, and it's logical to pose indefinite, multiple endings. It's also logical to treat photographs as undulating surfaces or sculpture.

If I have anything to add to visual storytelling, it’s that I'm comfortable gathering random, transmuted subjects to make a dreamworld from simultaneous choices.

March 7 - 30, 2024

An artist and exhibition curator, Elizabeth Johnson began writing reviews for artpractical.com in San Francisco, California, and later covered exhibitions in New York City, Philadelphia, and the Lehigh Valley for Theartblog.org. She has written for Artcritical.com, PaintersonPainting.com, Artvoices Magazine, Figure/Ground.org, The Brooklyn Rail, and DeliciousLine.org. Currently she interviews artists for Gross McCleaf Gallery in Philadelphia, and Philadelphia gallerists for Theartblog.org. She curated The Big Painting Show at Workspace Limited in San Francisco’s Mission District and has since curated shows that mix local and visiting artists at Lafayette College, Cedar Crest College, Brick + Mortar Gallery and the Soft Machine Gallery, all in the Lehigh Valley. She co-curated Pathological Landscape for Marquee Projects in Bellport, New York, and Residential Tourist for Gross McCleaf Gallery in Philadelphia. Solo shows have been held at Café Museo, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA); Canada College, Redwood City, California; Fort Mason Center for Arts & Culture SFMOMA Artists Gallery, Cedar Crest College; and in 2024, Gross McCleaf Gallery. After receiving a BA in Fine Arts from Bard College in 1986, she lived in San Francisco, California for 25 years. She moved to Easton, Pennsylvania, in 2011. She makes oil paintings that suggest dimensional space using curved and warped images.