Ara Osterweil

BIO

Ara Osterweil is a self-taught abstract painter, as well as a writer, McGill University professor, Artforum critic, and mother. Although she originally hails from Brooklyn, New York, she has lived in Montreal for more than a decade, and spends summers with her family in New York.

ARTIST STATEMENT

I am an abstract painter. Until recently, nearly all my large-scale abstractions were catalyzed by my encounters with natural phenomena, such as landscape and weather. Eschewing source material, I began with the chance architectures offered by staining, before imposing other forms of delineation. The shifting terrains of color that emerged captured my drifting moods and impulses.

My approach has changed significantly in the last few years. Although I still approach painting as a field of precarious, embodied response, my former quest for an uncompromised encounter no longer suits the cut-up that my life has become. Working between painting and collage, I aim to capture the flood of intensities that seep between my many responsibilities and leave irrevocable stains in their wake.

Although my process still begins by pouring flows of color, it now involves the imposition of jagged shapes of varying opacity, which dialogue with the stained layers beneath them. The disintegrating edifices that float on the surfaces derive as much from chance operations as the stains beneath them: both index a body unreconciled to its constraints.

Interview with Ara Osterweil

Can you tell us a bit about your background and how you became interested in becoming an artist? Who or what were some of your most important early influences?

I’ve been painting since before I can remember. There is a photograph of me as a small child washing my brushes in the elementary school sink. I don’t know who took the picture, but every time I go to the studio, I still feel just like that girl. Despite everything, I have not changed all that much.

Nonetheless, I basically stopped painting when I started college. I thought I would double major in English Literature and Studio Art, but that was not possible at NYU at the time. I took a few figure painting classes at the Art Students League on 57th Street, but my schoolwork took up most of my time. I went on to graduate school, earning a MA at NYU in Cinema Studies and a Ph.D. in Rhetoric from the University of California, Berkeley. Though I didn’t have time to paint all throughout my graduate studies, I never stopped longing for it. When I moved back to New York City in 2002, I returned to the League and started Sunday painting classes with abstract painter Ronnie Landfield, who shared some of his immense wisdom about life and art with me during cigarette breaks. I soon gave up figure painting and started experimenting with abstraction. I discovered some formative influences at that time, including Joan Mitchell, Richard Diebenkorn, and Morris Louis. It took several years to discover my own voice as an artist.

Any stories you can share about early memories of how an aspect of the arts impacted you?

My father, who had studied for a single semester at the School of Visual Arts, taught me the basics of using oil paint when I was pretty young. He also took me to all the art museums in New York City, where I grew up. He had two jobs that took up most of his time, but he would take me to late nights at the museum whenever he had the chance. I couldn’t get enough. One night, when he was putting me to bed—I am guessing I must have been around eight years old—he asked me who my favorite 100 painters were. I could picture what I loved but couldn’t name more than a handful of artists. My father was an extraordinary teacher, and there was a lesson in there: learn everything you can about what you love. From then on, I made sure to study the names of the artists and the texts in addition to looking at the paintings. I recently took my five-year-old daughter to the Metropolitan Museum of Art for the first time since the pandemic began. She was enraptured by the kimonos in the Japanese wing. I couldn’t help thinking: “and so it begins….”

Where are you currently based and what initially brought you there? Are there any aspects of this specific location or community that have inspired your work?

I currently live in Montreal, although I still spend a lot of time in New York, where my family lives. I moved to Canada in 2009 when I became a professor—not of painting, but of Cultural Studies and World Cinema—at McGill University. Even after than thirteen years, I remain something of an outsider, but that suits me okay. I will always be a New Yorker at heart and find strange comfort in being a misfit. But I have found amazing community here, especially in my neighborhood of Mile End, with other artists and writers who feel equally estranged. Since moving to Canada, I’ve had the pleasure of visiting Nova Scotia a few times, and I hold that lonely, coastal landscape close to my heart.

Can you describe your studio space? What are some of the most crucial aspects of a studio that make it functional? Do any of these specific aspects directly affect your work?

I share an industrial studio space with two other artists in an old garment factory building in Montreal’s Mile End. We’re on the fifth floor and have a wall of windows through which I see great vistas of the city as well as illicit views of old convent hidden behind a high stone wall. Though I still love being there, it’s a relatively small space crammed with my stored work, and I’ve nearly outgrown it. I’m in the process of renovating an old barn in the Quebec countryside 1.5 hours outside of Montreal to be my new studio, although I’d love to find a way to hold onto the urban space as well.

What is a typical day like? If you don't have a typical day, what is an ideal day?

A typical day is caring for others from the moment I wake up until the moment I go to sleep. I have a young daughter, two aging dogs, a teaching job at a major research university, a side gig as an art critic, and a mammoth book to finish. In other words, I don’t get to the studio on most days-- although I never stop dreaming of how to change my life so that I can. An ideal day would involve getting up at dawn to write for a few hours with no interruptions, having coffee outside in the garden, getting to the studio for a few hours in the afternoon, and then spending the evening with family and friends—with someone else cooking dinner! Even though life has been especially chaotic and difficult for the last few years, I feel blessed to have to have so many critters to love, despite the endless care they need.

What gets you in a creative groove or flow? Are snacks involved? ☺

I’ve shared a studio with one of my studio mates for about ten years and find it hard to imagine painting without his off-colors comments and brackish tea. He has an old record player and listens to an eclectic mix of death metal when I’m not there, but curates the perfect folk and opera soundtrack on the days I make it in. We don’t agree on everything—I love Dylan and Cohen, whom he resists—but find common ground in Sandy Denny, Vashti Bunyan, and Donovan. La Force (Ariel Engle) and Frazey Ford are other current favorites of mine. I have such an intense, impulsive relation to painting that I try to listen to calming music to help balance things out. To the chagrin of everyone, I can listen to the same song over and over for hours to try to stay in the mood of a particular painting. Computers are verboten and there is no internet signal at the studio. I wouldn’t have it any other way.

Is there anything that interrupts and stagnates your creative energy?

The rich chaos of life is both the source of and the impediment to my creative energy. I love teaching but find it increasingly difficult to get to the studio during the semester as the papers pile up. Nonetheless, I am determined to continue my practice. Time to paint is extremely hard won that I treasure every second of it. I think my paintings reflect this sense of urgency.

How do you select materials? How long have you worked with this particular media or method?

Golden acrylics and Jameson whiskey are studio essentials, and have been for as long as I’ve been painting seriously. Who needs anything else?

Can you walk us through your overall process? How long has this approach been a part of your practice?

Wake up dreaming of the freedoms you long for and don’t have.

Claw your way to the studio.

Place large swath of raw canvas on floor—either stretched or unstretched.

Mix acrylic paints with lots of water in old yogurt containers.

Following nothing but instincts and impulses, start pouring pigments.

Strive to find the balance between wetting the canvas enough for the colors to react with each other and not making it so wet that everything turns to mud.

Sit down. Look and think for a long time.

Work on another canvas if you have extra space on the floor.

Leave on a high note, before ruining it.

No matter what, do NOT try to use up all your leftover paint before you go. (Even after all these years, exerting such discipline is extremely difficult for me. I always want more!! But I no longer have space on the floor to work on several canvases at the same time.)

Tell yourself you’re coming back to the studio tomorrow even if might not make it back for a week or two. Hope springs eternal.

Can you talk about some of the ongoing interests, imagery, and concepts that have informed your process and body of work over time? How do you anticipate your work progressing in the future?

Landscape has been my main inspiration for many years. When I can get away, I crave and seek out wide, lonely vistas: the high deserts of the Southwest, the rugged coastlines of Eastern shores, the farmlands and rolling hills of the Hudson Valley and now the Eastern Townships. Although I love city life, I love travelling to remote locations to supply my mind with the images and sense of freedom that I need to paint from a place of real emotion and deep spiritual connection. Coming back to my urban studio, I draw upon these landscapes of the mind and allow the feelings they inspired to infuse the abstract, billowing forms of my paintings.

Nonetheless, the convergence of the pandemic and the intensification of my own caretaking responsibilities over the last five years have made it nearly impossible for me to travel. Although my paintings have changed significantly as a result, I still retain many of my basic principles of working, along with some outdated illusions about the purity of process that I cherish despite the problems they create.

To learn to paint abstractly, I had to give up a great deal of control. This was not easy to do. But I had lost interest in pre-meditated methods of representational painting: "I’m going to paint this object in this manner.” Painting is perpetual experiment. Of course, it is guided by those who have gone before, but it is also a journey into the unknown. For me, it is a way of getting underneath the intentionality of language, which is something that I have cultivated as a writer.

To access this other, more intuitive dimension of my creativity, I have had to develop methods that allowed me to court chance and unpredictability. By pouring paint before ever intervening with brushes, I learned how to create the conditions for unpredictable encounters or events. My goal is never to create a premeditated composition characterized by novelty or harmony, but to react in real time to the changing “weather conditions” on the canvas. In this way, my painting is about immediacy and process. If I don’t really feel what I’m doing, or if there is no real risk involved, painting doesn’t seem worth doing—even if the results might be visually pleasing. For me, there is no adventure of painting if one Photoshops their ideas on a computer first. I see a lot of art that looks good the way a pair of tight pants look good on a model, but I’m not interested in that kind of pre-packaged beauty, which is just another form of commodity fetishism. Even on Instagram, you can tell just by looking which artworks were genuinely felt rather than merely executed. In addition to being a Luddite, I suppose I’m both a Romantic and a purist. I recognize that these are unfashionable and perhaps even absurd things to be, but I cannot change my nature.

Do you pursue any collaborations, projects, or careers in addition to your studio practice? If so, can you tell us more about those projects, and are there connections between your studio practice and these endeavors?

David

Ariel

Ha. I laughed when I read this question because I try to live so many lives simultaneously. In addition to being a painter, I am a professor of World Cinema at McGill University. Though trained as a film scholar, I’m also an art critic on the side—for Artforum and other publications--and a creative writer. I am on sabbatical this year and in addition to painting, I’m trying to finish two books that I’ve been working on for years: The first is a controversial revision of American film history called The Pedophilic Imagination (forthcoming, Duke University Press). The other, tentatively titled Between Her Body and the Stain, is an experimental memoir that entwines the grief of losing my mother to cancer, with the difficulty of being both an artist and a mother.

Other people often fail to understand how all my pursuits are connected. For a long time, I tried to keep them separate for the sake of appearances. As my friend Carolee Schneemann once warned me, “They’ll never let you be both [an artist and a writer].” In the end, however all these aspects of my creative life ARE connected—including being a mother. I refuse to hide my multiplicity just to convince someone else that I’m a “real” intellectual or a “real” artist. I do not believe that the contemplative life of a thinker and the sensual life of an artist must be opposed. For as long as I can remember, I’ve been obsessed with the visual and the history of aesthetics, in art, film, and literature. Although I don’t want to tell stories in my paintings or portray the world as it objectively appears, I am compelled to find ways to express what it feels like to be an embodied, perceiving subject. I could discourse until the end of time, but painting allows me to express what cannot be conveyed through words alone.

My partner in all of this is my husband, David Baumflek, a sculptor and moving image maker. We work separately and our styles and practices are very distinct. He’s a minimalist and I’m something of a maximalist; he thrives in 3-D formats, while I love a flat picture plane. Yet our life together often feels like a profound collaboration of artmaking and caregiving. We both love to make and build everything ourselves. Yet what unites us even more deeply is our shared vision of a life devoted to the integration of creative exploration and ethical community. For years, we’ve been hosting a salon in which artist and writer friends share work in progress, but our big collaborative project of the next decade is working together on converting an 1880s farmhouse in the country into our studios, as well as an artist residency and writers retreat for other caregivers. David is doing all the building himself, and I’m raising the money by… ahem… selling paintings.

Have you had any epiphanies recently that have changed the course of your work or caused you to shift directions?

Until recently, nearly all my large-scale abstractions were catalyzed by my encounters with natural phenomena, such as landscape and weather. Eschewing source material, I began with the chance architectures offered by staining, before imposing other forms of delineation. The shifting terrains of color that emerged captured my drifting moods and impulses. My approach has changed significantly in the last few years. Although I still approach painting as a field of precarious, embodied response, my former quest for an uncompromised encounter no longer suits the cut-up that my life has become. Becoming a mother, and then facing the challenge of raising our daughter without childcare during the pandemic while maintaining full time jobs, necessitated that our artistic processes undergo significant transformation. Desperate to do something artistic but having very little time to get to the studio, I began making collages in the wee hours of the night on the dining room table. Although these collages were never intended as sketches, a cut up aesthetic began making its way into my paintings, and inspiring new paths of experimentation. I found that the disjointed forms and hard-edged juxtapositions of collaged forms had a way of puncturing through the fog of motherhood and evoking the harried fragmentation that my life had become.

Although my process still begins by pouring flows of color, it now involves the imposition of jagged shapes of varying opacity, which dialogue with the stained layers beneath them. The disintegrating edifices that float on the surfaces of my canvases derive as much from chance operations as the stains beneath them: both index a body unreconciled to its constraints. Working between painting and collage, I aim to capture the sense of effacement that I have experienced as a mother, and the flood of intensities that seep between the responsibilities and leave irrevocable stains in their wake.

As a result of the pandemic, many artists have experienced limited access to their studios or loss of exhibitions, income, or other opportunities. Has your way of working (or not working) shifted significantly during this time? Are there unexpected insights or particular challenges you’ve experienced?

See my answer above.

Can you share some of your recent influences? Are there specific works—from visual art, literature, film, or music—that are important to you?

I’m constantly looking and learning about new art, films, and literature, but I tend to be most inspired by the work of the people I know, not only because they happen to be brilliant, but because I get to witness their practices close-up. In the studio, I’ve been listening to my friend Ariel Engle’s first album (2018) on repeat for a few months, along with some extraordinary new tracks from her forthcoming one. I’m so moved by the way she merges the grief of losing a parent with the awe of being one in her recent songs. Avant-garde film, which I teach and write about, has also been essential to me for decades. Pioneering filmmaker and organizer Jonas Mekas, who died a few years ago, is probably the greatest model for how to integrate a life devoted to many different creative and organizational pursuits, although Carolee Schneemann is right up there as well. Recent, eye-popping experimental films by Montreal-based artists Malena Szlam (Altiplano) and Daichi Saito (earthearthearth) have quenched my desire for the mystical visions afforded by sublime landscapes at a time when I haven’t been able to leave my neighborhood. Ho-Chunk filmmaker Sky Hopinka’s work has also been a revelation; what a pleasure that it’s accessible on the Criterion Channel these days.

I also have been gravitating towards poetry for the last few years. Rediscovering a poem called “Morning Song” by Sylvia Plath about the early days of motherhood inspired a suite of paintings when I first had my daughter. Reading Wallace Stevens with the help of my friend P. Adams Sitney has also had a tremendous influence on the way I conceive of “representing” the feelings inspired by landscape. He has a deceptively simple poem called “The Poem that Took the Place of a Mountain” that pretty much sums up the intellectual process of how we use form to mediate what we perceive.

Who are some contemporary artists you’re excited about? What are the best exhibitions you’ve seen in recent memory and why do they stand out?

Lately, I am particularly excited about the intersection between textile arts and painting. Although my own sewing skills are rudimentary, I come from a long line of working-class tailors and seamstresses. Canvas is, after all, just another kind of fabric. I like to handle it in ways that reflect its materiality. There are a lot of terrific artists working in this intersection; some favorites are the recently deceased master Sam Gilliam and the contemporary artist Sanford Biggers.

I used to pilgrimage to New York City every month to get my fix of new work. Since the pandemic began, I don’t get to go there as often, but the best exhibitions I’ve seen in the last few years are Ruth Asawa at David Zwirner, Alice Neel at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Norwegian painter Nikolai Astrup at the Clark Institute, Sophie Taeuber-Arp at MoMA, Amy Sillman’s curated show, The Shape of Shape, also at MoMA, Noah Landfield’s otherworldy landscape paintings at Findlay Galleries on 57th Street, and the exhibition Feedback, curated by Helen Molesworth, at Jack Shainman Gallery’s The School in Kinderhook, New York.

Do you have any tips or advice that someone has shared with you that you have found particularly helpful?

You can sleep when you’re dead. In the meantime, get to work.

What are you working on in the studio right now? What’s coming up next for you?

I’m just beginning my sabbatical as I write this and know that the time away from teaching will send my work soaring in some new directions. At the moment, I have no idea where that may be! Only time in the studio will tell.

Anything else you would like to share?

Thank you for including my work in this fabulous magazine. It’s a great honor.

To find out more about Ara Osterwell check out her Instagram and website.