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Exploring the mind and habits of an artist in twenty-five questions.
I always liked art and making things as a kid, but I had no idea that you could grow up to be an artist. I imagined that I would do something “creative-ish,” like graphic design. The summer after my sophomore year in college, I had an internship at an advertising agency. I also had a studio in the art building on campus that I was able to keep using over the summer. I would go there after I finished work and paint on my own. Experiencing the difference between how I felt in those two places was a revelation. The excitement and aliveness I felt in the studio were such a contrast to the feelings of boredom and confinement I had in a corporate office. That was when I understood that art was going to be my life’s pursuit.
They were skeptical. But I also told them that I’d figure out a way to support myself, which I did—first by doing web design and later by teaching. Over the years, as they’ve seen my painting career grow, that skepticism had turned into admiration and pride.
Agnes Martin, Jake Bertot, and Andrew Forge have been three of my most important touchstones for many years. They each developed a personal language of abstraction that also maintained a connection to the natural world. I see their work as combining strength of structure with tenderness of emotion. These elements all have resonance for me and are qualities I strive for in my own work.
The Shape of a Pocket by John Berger.
Commitment to a personal vision that continually evolves through the work.
Yes, I’m always drawing alongside my paintings. My sketchbook contains mostly diagrammatic pencil drawings that explore different possibilities for the structures of the paintings. I experience drawing as a way of thinking without words.
There are so many amazing ones I haven’t been to (yet!) but of the ones I have seen, I’d say The Met in NYC and the Museo Morandi in Bologna.
When I was an undergrad at the University of Pennsylvania, there was a Cézanne retrospective at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. All these years later, it still stands out as one of the most moving exhibits I’ve ever seen. The evolution of his work helped me understand what the trajectory of life as an artist might look like — what it means to spend your whole life doggedly chasing an idea through paint, and how by doing that the work keeps opening up.
I wish I could say chef, but more realistically I’d be a computer programmer, since I gravitate towards a particular way of thinking that combines logic and creativity, and I’m interested in recombining repeating variables in new ways.
My years in graduate school at the University of Washington were very formative, and my classmates from that time are still some of my closest friends and the ones I trust most to talk about my work with.
I wish I had taken more classes in materials and processes other than painting while those resources were available.
There’s a Rembrandt self-portrait at the Met that I’ve been looking at since high school. I visit it whenever I’m at the museum, to look into those eyes that seem to carry both the wisdom and the weight of the world. The brushstrokes are at once paint and flesh, embracing and transcending their materiality — and when I sit in front of the painting for long enough, I almost feel like I’m talking to Rembrandt himself.
Maybe not such a secret, but I love looking at nature, its colors and forms.
I used to listen to both music and podcasts in the studio but realized a few years ago that I concentrate and work better when I’m not listening to anything. So now I mostly work in quiet, and only put on headphones with music if there’s something noisy going on in my studio building that I want to block out.
I just saw the Brice Marden show Let the painting make you at Gagosian.
My good friend Mia Pearlman makes incredible sculptures, installations, and public art projects. One of her recent pieces, DIGEST, is an interactive monumental sculpture dealing with the prison industrial complex, made in collaboration with jazz pianist Albert Marques and prison inmate Keith Lamar. I wish this work were receiving more attention.
Oil paint!
This changes based on work and family obligations. Right now I feel lucky that I’m able to be in the studio four or five days a week.
At the beginning of the pandemic I wasn’t able to go to my studio for about four months. When I finally got back there, I was exploding with ideas and the need to get them onto canvas. That sense of urgency has been with me in the studio ever since.
I don’t put much stock in inspiration. There are many days that I work in the studio and feel like I’m plodding along, without being particularly inspired. Sometimes, through painting, I’ll start to feel that spark again, sometimes not. For the times that I am really blocked and can’t work at all, a change of scenery is usually a good idea – I’ll go for a long walk or drive with no particular destination, just to clear my head and look at the world.
How can my paintings capture the physical and phenomenological sensations of being in nature, without necessarily looking like any particular place? How do I balance geometry, structure, order, and planning with color, space, randomness, and intuition? How can I make the forest and walk through it at the same time?
Persistence.
I often think that freedom is the final and most elusive ingredient in making art. When you shake off the outer voices as well as the self-imposed rules, and listen only to the work you’re making. My sense is that this kind of freedom comes with age, after many years of working. I’ve caught glimpses of it, but haven’t yet achieved it in any kind of sustained way.
Being able to see the work of so many different artists from all over the world. And the ability to make connections with artists I never would have met otherwise.
RACHAEL WREN (@rachaelwren) will teach the two-day workshop “Moving Towards Abstraction,” March 23 and 24, 2024, at the Art Students League of New York.
Selection of stories, guides, and more from the League.
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