Stephanie Pierce

“I use visual fragmentation as a way to re-order the observable world, to undo the veil of perception and recreate it.” – Stephanie Pierce

More of this, 2009. Oil on Canvas, 70″ x 54″
Please note: All images strictly copyrighted, Stephanie Pierce 2010.

In celebration of the new academic year at the JSS, a series of artist interviews have been lined up for the next several months, based on research by the JSS through a group of studio visits in September and subsequent conversations. All images have been chosen by the artist, and information has been provided on upcoming exhibitions, events or courses, updated whenever possible. Ranging from emerging to well established contemporary artists, comments and further questions for the artist are most welcome.

A recent graduate (2005) of The University of Washington, Seattle masters degree program, Stephanie Pierce has established intensive artistic focus in Arkansas, but the enthusiasm for her abstract perceptual paintings is mounting nationwide. Pierce has exhibited in solo and group shows in Annapolis, Boston, Berlin, Memphis and Seattle, currently teaches at the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville, and will be a visiting artist at the University of Kentucky in Louisville this winter. This past year, Stephanie’s works were selected for exhibition in “Oil and Water” by Steven Harvey Fine Art Projects, Gallery Schlesinger, NY, “Undercrowded” at 115 Gallery, University of Central Missouri, “Buoyant Gravity,” a 3 person show at Washington Art Association, Connecticut, and in “Site/Sight,” a 2 person group show at Argazzi Gallery, Lakeville, Connecticut. A much anticipated solo exhibition at Alpha Gallery in Boston will open in February, 2011.

Untitled (moth), 2009. Oil on Canvas, 37″ x 45″

RH: You received your BFA at The Art Institute of Boston (AIB) and your MFA at the University of Washington in Seattle. Can you talk about your development as a student from undergraduate to graduate school, and of the teachers who made a lasting impact on your process and thinking as an artist? And about the shift of living in Arkansas now as an artist, the challenges it brings to your life and work?

SP: I was really exposed to art for the first time by Bill Hicks, who was my mentor in high school. It was working with him that I first learned painting and drawing fundamentals working from observation and started taking art seriously. At AIB I worked closely with two people primarily, Michael David and Liza Folman, who were both incredibly supportive and taught me how to be a working artist. Michael David helped me apply to the Yale Norfolk program at the end of my third year, and luckily I was accepted. At Norfolk I worked with John Hull and Gideon Bok, working with them really opened my eyes about painting, but also the program as a whole, through conversations and seeing my peers work through problems and ideas as well.

As a student I was pretty much always a figurative painter. Being at Norfolk I had to face the question of what to paint out of my usual context; I had been working from urban landscape prior to being there. I couldn’t see beyond the pastoral aspect of the landscape, I kept trying to go out and paint from the side of the road or highway because I knew that I was interested in movement, but I didn’t know how to deal with that in a non-literal way. I was influenced by abstraction as much as figurative work; the force, color, gesture and structure of de Kooning was amazing to me. The last place I painted from while there was a fairground that had been hit by a tornado, it was a landscape of tangled color and form, left as if in the act of coming apart. It was exactly what I wanted to see in my work. I left Norfolk with a lot of important questions that stayed with me through my last year of undergrad and years beyond that. As I grew artistically in undergrad, at Norfolk, and in grad school, my process evolved and became more open to what a painting or drawing could be.

Untitled, 2006. Oil on panel, 4” x 4”

At The University of Washington I worked closely with Riley Brewster, Ann Gale, Helen O’Toole, and Denzil Hurley, each of them were incisive and thoughtful critics who challenged the way I think about making a painting. Grad school was such an important time; I can’t imagine how I would have come to develop my work without having that time of critical discussion, questioning, and clarification.

Being in Arkansas was helpful for working through things that had come up in grad school- I needed to feel like I was making work that no one would ever have to see in order to test new ideas and old ones that I had abandoned. The cost of living here is low and I have an amazing studio that I could never afford in a city. There are always things to miss about cities and wanting more access to seeing art in person, but I have a good network of friends and artists here and I travel to the east coast once or twice a year for exhibits. A difficult thing about living here is that I don’t show where I live; when I show it’s usually far away and involves shipping and travel.

RH: I wanted to ask you about the scale and process of your paintings, now having seen several of your paintings in person. Being generally large in scale, I was particularly enraptured by the sheer amount of work witnessed on the surface, the changes, adjustments, new layers. So many decisions rest there. Can you talk about your painting process, your palette, your tools?

SP: The paintings take months of accumulation to get to a point that I feel like it’s becoming a painting. Often the largest paintings take up to 6 months, and would span a year if there were no deadlines. I think I work best on paintings that are a little larger than I am, about six feet tall. I have a lot of trouble with medium scaled paintings- the trouble is with the scale of the mark to the form and the canvas. In the larger paintings there is a more direct relationship to the scale of the form to the paintings, and marks are seen more clearly. I’m currently working in a slightly smaller scale, just about my size at five feet.

Contract, 2009. Oil on Linen, 33″ x 29″

I work in layers, mostly opaque shapes of color, but also some transparency. As I establish the location and scale of forms I continually question how it works in the frame and reconsider things. As I move, the painting’s forms move, scale expands and contracts as I make decisions- the paintings show the result of that process, which appears as shifting, unsettling. I like what happens when there is an overlap, a shift, a collision of forms or marks to own a location in space. I use linseed and gamsol medium, and also an alkyd medium, which dries fast. I prefer the paint to be fluid enough that the brush stroke is leveled, but to hold a clear shape that is clearly it’s own entity with an edge. I often reduce shapes by shaping with a rag, clarifying edges or pushing them back by breaking through it and opening it to what was beneath so that layers are seen and contend for space. My palette at the moment is: Cadmium Yellow Light, Hansa Yellow, Cadmium Red Medium, Mono Orange, Pthalo Blue, Cobalt Blue, Ultramarine Blue, Titanium, Zinc, and Lead White. I also have out on the palette but use less often: Cerulean Blue, Cadmium Yellow Medium, Indian Yellow, Napthol Red, Indian Red, and Burnt Umber. Normally I mix greens but recently started to use pthalo green in what I’m working on at the moment.

Everything is Germinal, 2008. Oil on Canvas, 71″ x 54″

RH: On your website, you explain that three years ago you responded profoundly to the phrase by Gaston Bachelard. “Everything in the life of a poet is germinal.” Can you talk about that time, what happened, what it was like? What doors did it make you feel you could open?

SP: In grad school I had really come to question working from observation as a possibility, though it was how I had formed my relationship to painting. Forcing myself to work in other ways was healthy for my work, realizing how much habitual decision making was overriding the actual concerns. I worked for two years in grad school in a studio that had no window. Though it did have great natural light through a skylight, it was a room that was separate from the world. In the past I made work in response to looking, but it seemed that anything that I set up or brought into the studio seemed contrived. I couldn’t get around the problem of what to paint. At the end of grad school I began making work that used perception more selectively. One way I did that was by gridding off a mirror in my studio and making paintings in response to those fragmented spaces reflected in the mirror. This made me start to think about space, color, and light differently. The grid was a 2” spacing, so a very slight shift would move forms drastically to another location. The connection of looking was always important to me, but I was paralyzed with the fear of making painting that was academic or unchallenging, and I didn’t want to just make an image of something. It was a little while after leaving grad school that I started painting my bed. When I started working from that source I really didn’t have an end in sight and found out more as it progressed, it was really open as a painting. It was around this time that I was reading the Bachelard book. It’s a simple idea, your daily experience, or the things in your daily world, being your source material. It somehow gave me the permission to work perceptually again, realizing that I was surrounded by things which held potential as interesting subject matter so I started to bring things in slowly.

Untitled (something else), 2008. Oil on Canvas, 69″ x 54″

RH: Paintings can include so many different 2 dimensional roles – form, color, line, light, rhythm, tone, etc as well as decisions that go beyond the plane, such as perspective, narrative, personal response, aesthetics, and meaning. What issues preoccupy yourself the most as an artist?

SP: Right now, the most important formal concerns are color, light, and space. Aesthetics and meaning are mutually supportive. If I can’t find a connection or meaning to the subject or find a way to renew a subject then it won’t hold my interest. If there is an idea I want to get across, like disappearing, then I formally talk about things in relation to that idea. Another important thing that needs to happen in the paintings is realizing some underlying abstract event that reiterates that the painting is abstract as much as image. Often this can be something like a visual ripple that moves through several passages. Last year, after painting for a while I eventually saw a diamond shape implied among the folds and echoed throughout other forms, it counter anchored the main shape and was echoed throughout by how the marks were positioned. Diamond shapes then started to come up a lot. Other times a few things may start to shift and break up, there is an opening in the reality, it appears as if they are at a point of either breaking down or forming. As I start to see those connections I let the paintings become about that more.

With the imagery I try to be selective in choosing visual things that trigger an idea or response. Right now I am working with this patterned bed sheet that was probably made during the time I was growing up. It’s a flat floral pattern, the color relationships feel of that time. Last fall I was thinking a lot about a period of time where I defined myself through music and how that felt, so the imagery started to include a radio.

Current, compass, radio, static, 2009. Oil on Linen, 50″ x 40″

RH: Prior to your most recent works, you spent a great amount of time focusing on abstraction. In your recent paintings, you have returned to direct observation with “healthy” interruptions of abstract rearrangement. The subject is your bed, in constantly changing light and perspective. Why would you feel a painting would need or not need a figure? Why would it need a plant, or a book? How much is personally sourced, and how much is a reaction to the painting as it stands in front of you?

SP: In order for me to paint anything I have to figure out a way to see it as if I’ve never seen it before. The bed feels open for doing that. I’ve been concerned with a space that holds the absence of a figure, the space of a bed or a room is a place you expect to find a figure, and when you don’t you are immediately reminded of the absence. Without the figure you might put yourself in that space more than thinking about another figure’s experience there. The emptiness of the subject allows a broader read of it and for me to bring ideas to it. When I do bring in the figure, or objects, I think a lot about what it will convey as an image. I spend a lot of time determining its relation to the frame and to the viewer. Sometimes I try to give something more or less power depending on what seems to be the expectation (I might neutralize a figure, but might overplay how a radio or plant could be a presence).

Untitled, 2009. Oil on Canvas, 43″ x 57″

With imagery I’m trying to make a connection between things as ideas to create a synthesis, like a song; it can bring separate references together to create a larger idea and hopefully changes them into something meaningful. The images are taken from personal experience and narrative but I want them to also speak to a more universal idea. I initially started painting the plant in relation to the idea of growth and of hope. The book that showed up in one painting was Borges, because his writing reveals layered and opening realities, and also because of a personal reference. A radio is a source of communication. It’s a way that the external world can enter or transform your internal state of mind and it’s also part of personal narrative of a memory of a time that music was a route of self-discovery and escape. I’ve recently started to think about visual static as a theme, that the radio could visually alter something in the painting, it can read as an interference of communication, and visually start to break down what you see.

April and May, 2009. Oil on Canvas, 84″ x 71″

The work is balanced between looking and returning to something that I want the painting to do. `As I see how I want it to develop I look for information that I can use to make that happen. If the painting is becoming a dead end then I have to do something to shock the whole thing and take it away from the source and push some abstract direction that I think it needs to take. It usually takes a long time into a painting to find the specific thing that is happening that is interesting to it, separate from the source or initial idea.

Untitled, 2009. Transparent paper, collage (image shown with light passing through drawing), 30 3/4″ x 21 1/2″

RH: In your artist statement you talk about the meaning behind the vertical division that happens in your paintings, which can allude to the contrasts of morning and night, light and shade, you and your husband, and to the “difficulty and precariousness of coexisting parallel worlds and their point of contact. Visual collisions result when forms or events battle for location in a painting and become charged occurrences.” In dealing with this tension, how much do you think your process and reaction is scientific? How would you describe your process of observation and decision-making?

SP: I have a love for the material and for responding to perception; I’m not all that scientific about my process. I often make a decision impulsively, and may not be sure about why I had to do it until after the fact. I change my mind during the painting, I might try to stick to one constraint to work within but often find that the painting later reveals something else that I can’t ignore and will follow. I can’t repeat intentions- I might find an interesting problem in one painting, like the division I used in a painting titled “Everything is Germinal”, but in trying to readdress it in a new painting it usually won’t work. It’s like having a conversation where once you’ve said something you meant you couldn’t reproduce the sincerity you felt the first time you understood it because it’s part of a dialogue that can’t be repeated. I like the idea of a painting being a cosmos, and that each decision made is a mark of time. All of the decisions made do interact in a way that can seem charged or passive.

Untitled (listening to the anarchy hour), 2009. Oil on Canvas, 39″ x 48″

RH: On your website, you cite De Kooning and Guston as primary influences, as well as Morandi, Cezanne, El Greco, Gwen John. Given the difficulties facing perceptual painters today in creating art that is meaningful, which contemporary artists do you find stimulating? What in their work is of important meaning for you? And beyond artists, what aspects in your life contribute to the canvas?

SP: I’m excited by work that finds a way into an ongoing conversation about art and the infinite possibilities of being alive and responding to the world. It can often be non-objective and non-painting, as much as figurative painting. Contemporary painters whose work continually renews my excitement for possibilities within figuration: Antonio Lopez Garcia, Gideon Bok, and Ann Gale, each for how they individually approach issues of painting, perception, and the question of time. I like Ellen Altfest in how she locates the living surfaces of things. Lucien Freud and Frank Auerbach in the gravity of their contribution to figurative painting. I love the surprising associations and conversation between sculpture, drawing and painting found in Whiting Tennis’s work, which can be intuitive, inventive, strange, poetic, and oblique. I appreciate how William Kentridge and BLU work out of drawing, BLU’s playful, stream of conscious inventiveness, and Kentridge’s exploration of the personal, political, and human condition. I’ve been surprised and excited by the various approaches to abstraction in the work of Tine Lundsfryd, Meghan Brady, Chie Fueki, and Matt Phillips. I love Dana Schutz’s sense of existential humor and fiction, the inventiveness of her paintings and connections she makes to history. Leonardo Drew and Rachel Whiteread both interest me in their response to mundane things that surround us- Leonardo Drew in his use of cast off material and it’s transformation into something sublime, and Rachel Whiteread in how she responds to and makes meaning of absence and the spaces we inhabit daily.

Pierce’s studio with painting in progress

Beyond art, the things that contribute to my work changes all the time- earlier I talked about how literature, my relationship with my husband, and music have been part of the paintings. I pay attention to a broad range of music as much as art and continually come back to early punk music as an influence in how I want to think about painting. It’s been inspiration for being so direct, energetic, driven, and human. Music influences my paintings when it’s a kind of beautiful chaos, when it’s dissonant and strange, with moments that verge on the point of breaking down yet hold together, I’m always after something that touches on that kind of moment in my paintings.

Untitled, 2009. Oil on Canvas, 43″ x 57″

Born in Memphis, Tennessee, Stephanie Pierce attended Yale’s summer program, completed her BFA at The Art Institute of Boston and received her MFA at the University of Washington, Seattle. She began teaching in 2005 as an MFA assistant in Ann Gale’s Drawing I class at the University of Washington in Seattle. Since then, she has taught drawing and painting courses as an adjunct professor at the University of Arkansas, Fayetteville, where she is “most at home teaching from observation and what can evolve out of that,” as well as working independently with graduate students. She has been a visiting artist at the Art Institute of Boston and Western Carolina University and will be a visiting artist at the University of Kentucky in Louisville this winter. This past year, Stephanie’s works were selected for exhibition in “Oil and Water” by Steven Harvey Fine Art Projects, Gallery Schlesinger, NY, “Undercrowded” at 115 Gallery, University of Central Missouri, “Buoyant Gravity” at Washington Art Association, Connecticut, and in “Site/Sight”, a 2 person show at Argazzi Gallery, Lakeville, Connecticut. Pierce has exhibited in solo and group shows in Seattle, Memphis, Berlin, Boston, Portland, and Annapolis, as well as in Arkansas. She is affiliated with Argazzi Art Gallery and Wynn Bone Gallery and has her next solo exhibition slated for February, 2011 at Alpha Gallery, Boston.

For a complete look at Pierce’s works, statement and cv, please visit her website. MW Capacity‘s Sam King also conducted an in-depth interview with Pierce: click here to read the full text.

Untitled (March), 2009. Oil on Canvas, 36″ x 36″