Q & A with Melissa Oresky

GR2, Franklinite, 2009, acrylic on canvas, 14″x18″

What follows is a remarkably generous and thoughtful interview with painter Melissa Oresky.  We will just get right to her words without a lengthy introduction.  See more of her work at Western Exhibitions website.

Please give our readers a little bit of information about yourself.

I am originally from Maryland, near Washington D.C. I came to the Midwest in 1992 to go to the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and I stayed here to get my MFA at the University of Illinois at Chicago. I currently teach painting at Illinois State University in Normal, IL, and live and work between Bloomington-Normal and Chicago. I always feel a distinct pull back towards the east coast though I realize I have now lived in Illinois as long as I did in Maryland. I think that has as much to do with the physical landscape out east as the cultural one. I just can’t seem to get used to the flatlands of Illinois! It still feels oddly exotic and a bit desolate here.

Many of us don’t grow up with painting and art as part of our daily life, our routes into the fine arts are circuitous.  Was that your experience?  How and when did you say, ‘I’m going to do this’?

Well, visual art was not part of my daily life, though my dad is a musician and teaches music, so I was totally immersed in that as a kid.  It’s funny that I am so oriented toward color because I was surrounded by really drab, boring colors growing up. Everything in my family’s house was beige, brown or navy blue. There was a reproduction of a Chagall painting in the dining room and this really bad seascape over the fireplace but otherwise there was no art around at all. My interest in art was always encouraged and supported by my family even when my work wasn’t really understood.

Visiting museums in Washington DC made me interested in painting, the Gustons and DeKoonings in the Hirshhorn collection especially. Also, I was very drawn to German Expressionism. When I was 15 or 16 the “Degenerate Art” show was re-presented at the Freer or the Sackler gallery and I saw it 2 or 3 times. The semi-abstract, painterly, figurative aspects of that work were of interest to me as well as the historical conditions it came from, since my grandparents on my Mom’s side were holocaust survivors. I also remember being pleasantly irritated and perplexed by abstraction, it presented a knot of things I couldn’t really unravel at that age, still kind of can’t.

I also learned to do photography, shooting, developing and printing color and black &white, old school, from my grandfather in his basement darkroom when I was a teenager. My grandfather was as a forensic photographer so had a very methodical set of habits. Mine were a bit different from his. I was always playing with sandwiching negatives and intentionally printing things wrong to get them to look more interesting and strange. I loved the magic of photography, but even at 13 or 14 treated it as a painter would.  I took painting classes and was explicitly told by my teachers that I should consider pursuing art. I also just liked the way time fell away when I was painting and drawing, nothing else I did absorbed me that much.

To answer the last part of your question, I don’t ever really remember a moment when I consciously chose to be an artist. I think I just was one to begin with, and did the things that seemed most appealing to me without really thinking about where I was headed or what I was.

Mineral Tree, 2009, acrylic on canvas, 38″ x 46″

What is a day in the studio like for you?

My studio is basically an extension of my brain. It is messy and chaotic feeling, but logics and orders come out of it. The studio is an ongoing, pleasurable struggle. I used to be angst-y about it and want my process to be more consistent and predictable but that’s just not who I am.

So I really have no routine. I am sometimes completely undisciplined and unfocused and sometimes the exact opposite. When I do get involved in a piece or a project I work rapidly and single-mindedly. Having deadlines helps to focus me but I make work either way. I changed studios a lot when I was on sabbatical and traveling a lot last year. Now I have a space in Chicago that I also sleep in on weekends. Waking up in the studio is something I’m not used to yet. I’m not sure I like it…

Are you an improviser?

Yes, totally. But I’m also learning that I need a clear structure or set of formal and conceptual parameters to work inside of and to push against in order to improvise well. Once I choose that (and determining the framework is the hardest part of making each body of work) my process is extremely playful and immediate. I guess I would characterize it as mindful improvisation not totally chaotic wildness.

Tell us about one useful thing you were taught or told, and about one useful thing you learned for yourself.

One of my teachers complained to me once that when students find a way of making art that feels easy they immediately abandon it for something hard or more complicated. I think the “easiness” he referred to wasn’t laziness but a clarity of intention that lets work unfold without an artificial shell of obscurity or pretension around it. And that’s not to say, either, that the resulting work is simple or “easy”. I tend to make things too complicated for myself, so I am always looking for simpler, or more elegant ways to make work.  I need to remind myself that things should feel easy sometimes.

I’ve learned that my paintings are particular and specific, and the ideas around them are broad. I am continually trying to resist a compulsion to explain everything I possibly can verbally. It is such a contradiction! I spend all this time to try to get at something that happens outside of language and then feel I am supposed to apply analytic language in this heavy-handed way. So I am trying to learn to attach language to the work that can serve as an entry point or placemarker, language that can give some context to the work and afford the viewer the same kinds of discoveries I have in the studio. I think the recent Rock Garden paintings let me do this because the spaces the work makes are so little like conventional landscapes, though they have space, volume, materiality, atmosphere, light, etc. and were made with that content and subject in mind.

G2, Diospide, 2009, acrylic on linen, 14″ x 18″

What is the hard part of painting for you?

I have too many things I want to make, so deciding which ones to follow through on is very tricky. Also it is very hard for me to be restrained and not crowd my paintings, to keep them sparse and open. I have a bit of horror vacui. Sometimes I indulge it and sometimes I resist.

What is the fun part?

When I am completely inside my process, and can see things that I didn’t anticipate happening in the work, but these things confirm earlier ideas and desires for the work. When my work surprises me. When I feel completely open and unselfconscious.

What are you getting better at?

Being loose, not that my work is very loose compared to what it could be.

How important is authority in painting?

The painting I respond to has an intensity that comes from a particular fascination with some thing that can be conveyed to the viewer with an unrelenting sense of purpose. This could be defined as a kind of authority. This quality, however, always comes off as questioning, contingent, and decidedly non-authoritarian, more likely modest. The word confidence would be more apt than authority. I like work that exposes its belly, feels vulnerable. I am increasingly drawn to artists that have prolific practices, and who sometimes make works that could be called failures. It takes a fair measure of authority or confidence to be willing to question oneself, and to show that process of questioning in the work. So yes, I suppose authority is important, but it is a deep thing not a surface thing.

How important is authenticity?
I am kind of gullible so I don’t always know what is authentic and what isn’t, even in myself.  I will entertain anything. I don’t like overly jokey, one liner art (though I like humor, irony, self-consciousness). If something provokes an experience, or if I can offer someone else an experience through my work, that couldn’t possibly be inauthentic.

GR1, Magnetite, 2009, acrylic on linen, 14″ x 18″

What is drawing for you?   How do you prepare for paintings?

Drawing functions in the same way as painting for me, but with a slightly different set of material and image concerns, and at a different speed. I don’t normally make direct studies for paintings, though sometimes I work through ideas rapidly in a body of drawings before I understand how they need to manifest as paintings. I love the practice of collage, piecing things together, and working with paper and glue. I had a brief career as a book conservator and a love for folding, cutting, and gluing came out of that. I also adore line drawings, just plain contour drawings; the kinds that are used in science textbooks. I collect these images and have used them as raw materials in my work for years. I like the exercise of drawing from observation but my own drawing practice is more materially based and closer to painting.

What was appealing about working in pairs on the Rock Garden paintings?
I am invested in the dialectic, and in the idea of opposition and tension being a way to ground paintings. This is something I have been thinking about and practicing in my work since I was in graduate school. Binary oppositions expand and ultimately undo themselves. Any pair of opposites is necessarily based on a common condition, and that condition is a continuum, with infinite degrees of likeness or difference possible. So the dialectic is a framework for infinite subtlety.

The paired format of the Rock Gardens was a really explicit way to construct and then examine certain specific oppositions: atmospheric landscape vs. abstract, hard edge design, painterliness vs. repetitive, controlled mark making, flatness vs. depth, etc. I could list a million things, formal things and other broader content like wildness vs. cultivation. Some oppositions are umbrellas for others. The fact that the paintings were all the same size and began with the same color provided a conversational structure for me to think inside of and to push at the boundaries of.

BR2, Goethite, 2009, acrylic on linen, 14″ x 18″

Susan Sontag once wrote, “Art is not only about something; it is something.”  Is this differentiation still meaningful to you, as an artist working today?  If so, are you more comfortable thinking about what your work is about, or what your work is?

This is absolutely right, but I don’t find it useful to differentiate the “about” and “is”, in a brain/body kind of way. I mean, a painting is always an object, and it is also an illusion, and that illusion is about some content in the world, and also is a demonstration of the body’s perceptual relationship to a picture space while also being a bunch of very literal chunks of material and recorded mark, all at the same time.  The “about” and “is” are merged in all that simultaneity. I guess I think more about what art does in the mind of the viewer; its cognitive dimension.

How do you approach color?  How and when does the palette get determined for any specific painting?  The paintings are often dominated by a lot of soft, subtle chromatic variations, but then there is usually some amount of jarring, demanding color combination—yellow and black come up a lot.  Yours is a unique palette and I’m just curious how you are making these color decisions.

My use of color is probably the most intuitive aspect of my work. I work with color tonally, and rarely use a lot of hues together in a painting, with one recent notable exception, “Mineral Tree” from my Rock Garden series, which was intended to be an index to the rest of the work in the group, so it necessarily had to include moments of color, as well as shapes, marks, and moves from all the other paintings. I have strong color affinities and allergies, and I always am looking for color combinations to do things that feel completely unique. I guess I work in a palette that engages some of the oppositions I look for in other aspects of my work- things that feel simultaneously synthetic and natural, aggressive and calm, loud and quiet. But those things are not really enough to explain what color does. Each color grouping has the particularity and specificity of a smell, or a taste.

My color use has become more intense over the last few years. I think I used to be afraid of how powerful color is, so I kept the work very toned down, with only small moments of intense color, that I wanted to be felt very strongly.

Untitled (Particle), 2007, acrylic, ink and collage on paper

In the recent Rock Garden series, there’s a small thrill just in how much sync there is between the subject and the painting process itself—each is a metaphor for a happy equilibrium for control and chance, for the exercise of will and the acceptance of physical circumstance.  It makes me wonder when in the working process do these sorts of ideas come up?  I’m assuming it all just falls into place, but at what point, and what sort of work does it take to get there?

This is a great response to the work. The ideas about landscape and metaphors for scientific or exterior content, like geology and gardening/garden design come from things I am interested in totally independently of my art practice. They filter into the work in ways I can’t really track or anticipate. Usually I spend time laboriously trying to force a metaphor to yield interesting work for awhile before things sync up. During these periods I make a lot of work that I hide or destroy. Then when it starts to make sense, it just does, and the work almost feels like it makes itself.

What are you looking lately?  What are you listening to?  What are you reading?

My tastes in art are always changing and new things are always being considered. I know what I like but it is hard to categorize it. I was introduced to Charles Burchfield’s painting last winter in New York and was absolutely taken. A perennial favorite painter is Yves Tanguy and I rediscovered Joan Miro recently, though I unfortunately missed the Miro show at MOMA. I look at a lot of contemporary art but the work that sticks with me is always semi-abstract modern painting. I have trouble picking certain things out of my filter and identifying them as really especially influential sometimes, but lots passes through and gets caught for moments here and there.

I’ve been reading Octavia Butler lately, the Earthseed books, and am in the middle of Doris Lessing’s Shikasta trilogy. I am a big Science fiction fan, but am very picky about what I like within that genre. I also like to read non-fiction about science, and particularly ones that tie it up with historical narratives. John McPhee’s Basin and Range and Rising from the Plains got me interested in Geology. I also read Michael Pollan’s Second Nature when I started thinking about the space of the garden. Before I spent 3 months at a residency in New Mexico last year I read Rebecca Solnit’s Savage Dreams: Landscape Wars of the American West, which strongly influenced the way I thought about being out there. I am not a big reader of theory but am very sympathetic to Deleuze and Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus is a book I was introduced to in graduate school and is one that I keep coming back to and rediscovering in new ways.

That was great.  Thanks so much, Melissa!