In her paintings of the human body, CHRISTINA QUARLES champions ambiguity to get to the heart of what it means to be alive
Writer ALLIE BISWAS
American painter Christina Quarles is known for her lyrical compositions of the human figure, where bodies and limbs intersect across the canvas to create complex, abstract forms. These brightly coloured body parts deliberately defy any definition and are reflective of Quarles’ own life experiences of being misread or misrepresented, as a queer woman born to a black father and white mother. The Los Angeles-based artist has used painting and drawing to explore what it means to inhabit one’s own body, focusing on the contradictions
at play with regard to identity, appearance and perspective. Challenging the physical limits of the human figure, Quarles’ enigmatic works suggest an alternative space for bodies, one that is often heavy with ambiguity, where pleasure and pain are synonymous. The artist recently received her first major show in the US, at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago (on until September 5), and this summer a solo exhibition of her work, Christina Quarles: In Likeness, opens at South London Gallery.
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We would spend the first couple of minutes of a 20-minute pose just drawing with nothing but our thumbs, with no actual charcoal” 130
CHRISTINA QUARLES (2019) Pour Over Acrylic on canvas, 152.4 × 121.9cm, 60 × 48in
Image courtesy of Courtesy of the artist, Regen Projects LA and Pilar Corrias, London.
HIDDEN FIGURES
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Image courtesy of Courtesy of the artist, Regen Projects LA and Pilar Corrias, London.
How did the human figure become such a critical part of your work? A lot of it comes from having an early education in drawing – figure drawing classes as an adolescent. I went to an art school where I took figure-drawing classes with a live model. There was a teacher who really gave me a lot of time to think about the kind of figure that has gone on to influence my practice. His way of teaching drawing was about muscle memory. We would spend the first couple of minutes of a 20-minute pose just drawing with nothing but our thumbs, with no actual charcoal. If he caught you drawing before that with a pencil, he would throw you out the classroom. It was a method of training your hand and your arm, to trace the figure and really practice looking at everything, laying down marks. In that same vein, if we made a mistake, we wouldn’t erase that mistake, because that would just emphasise that incorrect mark in our muscle memory. We would just draw the correct mark next to that mistake and erase it later. A lot of that physicality in drawing, that physical connection to looking, is one that has carried through my entire life of making art. That same professor was very much about looking at the model and trying to pinpoint moments in the body where there would be a point of tension and thinking about how to render that in your drawing. You wouldn’t draw a relaxed arm the same way you would
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draw a strained leg. You wouldn’t draw hair the same way you draw skin – they feel different. It was this kind of empathy with the figure I was rendering, and that has driven my practice to ultimately be this project of trying to paint what it is to be in your own body, rather than what it is to look at another person’s body. That includes what it is to be in your own body while looking at another person’s body, and the disconnect of how we see ourselves with how we see everything else. When speaking about your experiences of growing up, you have said that you were often made to feel as though having mixed parentage couldn't make something whole. You bring these experiences into your paintings, to make something that is indeterminate. It was always a challenge for me because I definitely felt like I didn’t have as much of a connection with this idea of a hybrid identity. I’d never really felt that sense of cohesion with my identity. I always felt like I grew up identifying with the black people in my family and the white people in my family, but I didn’t grow up with any siblings, any mixed-race family members ... And so, in that sense, that informed my identity. I think of whiteness as something that is this sort of universal standard upon which identities and races can happen. There’s just not as much of a comfort
Image courtesy of Courtesy of the artist and Pilar Corrias, London.
CHRISTINA QUARLES (2017) Tha Color of Tha Sky (Magic Hour) Acrylic on canvas, 139.7 × 203.2cm, 55 × 80in
CHRISTINA QUARLES (2018) Meet in tha Middle Acrylic on canvas, 152.4 × 121.9cm, 60 × 48in
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You wouldn’t draw a relaxed arm the same way you would draw a strained leg. You wouldn’t draw hair the same way you draw skin – they feel different” 133
in white communities when talking about race or understanding whiteness as an identity in itself. In that sense, that’s meant I’ve also been alienated from my identity, because I always think about my race. So it’s at the forefront of your daily life? It depends on what my set of circumstances are. My experience is not completely integrated into being someone who’s black or somebody who is a person of colour because I’m aware of my race in a lot of situations, or I’ll be hypersensitive to things. White people will say what they think when they are around other white people. I’m aware that in those situations, I’m seen as not being a person of colour. But I’m also aware of my invisibility in those situations. I guess with the work in graduate school, my objective was to find a way to clearly and explicitly make paintings that were ambiguous. I wanted to talk about ambiguity but not in an ambiguous way. That was always the challenge – how to create this image and representation of something that isn’t really static or easy to represent. That always comes across formally in your work – there are so many things happening in the paintings. Definitely. I think that’s one of the things that I always gravitated towards. One of the things I love about art is that it can be so mediumspecific and you can use formal ideas to see
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Do you have the composition planned out in your head? No, I don’t know what it’s going to look like. I really just start off with some marks and then it’s a process of stepping back and looking at those marks and using a combination of this physical laying down of paint. I have to stop myself from completing the form, and instead take a step back and really look at what I’ve painted; what happens from just observing my painting and making decisions based on what’s actually happening in the painting. It’s not looking back at any plan or composition or anything like that. Maybe I’ve drawn a leg but it makes much more sense for that to become an arm. Around halfway around painting, as a figure starts to emerge, I’ll photograph the work and bring it onto the computer. That’s a way for me to play around with it in Adobe Illustrator, that’s another program that I know really well from years of being a graphic designer. It’s a way for me to add a mark that’s not so physical. Oftentimes, I’ll mimic the digital drawing on canvas through stencils. The sketching kind of happens halfway through, so I initiate the painting and then I’ll bring it onto the computer to actually finish the composition. A lot of that planning and sketching only occurs once the painting is already on its way to being done. What are your bodies doing? What do you want them to do? I don’t know that they do any one thing. It changes from canvas to canvas. Each canvas
Image courtesy of Courtesy of the artist and Pilar Corrias, London. Photo: Evan Bedford
CHRISTINA QUARLES (2019) Carefully Taut Acrylic on canvas, 213.4 × 243.8cm, 84 × 96in
Can you tell me about the process – how do you make each painting? I still take figure-drawing classes whenever I can, to practise my hand and that muscle memory. But I don’t use sketches or reference material when I’m painting. All the time outside the studio, I’m just absorbing information – a lot of the patterns and environments and the poses of the figures. I spend a lot of time outside of the studio observing and taking a mental note of things that interest me, that I’ll want to incorporate into a painting. But when I’m making a work, I’m not using any of that source inspiration, I’m not referencing it. It comes from a much more gestural place when I start painting. I’ll lay down some marks which, sort of, relate to this gesture that I’ve done throughout my years of figure drawing. Maybe I’ll start off with a line that I’ll typically do for a back or a leg.
Image courtesy of Courtesy of the artist and Pilar Corrias, London. Photo: Fredrik Nilsen Studio
and read imagery. You can really play with that to help embody an idea.
CHRISTINA QUARLES (2019) Sumday (We Gunna Rest on) Sunday Acrylic on canvas, 182.9 × 243.8cm, 72 × 96in
tends to have a tone or potential narrative that gets weaved into it and anchored with the title. In general, the work is not meant to be strictly narrative, so it’s less about describing what they’re doing and more describing how a narrative can arise and then shift and change and alter the longer you look at the work. I like playing with a quick, easy read of a painting and then hopefully having enough stimuli within the work that can keep the viewer engaged long enough to sort of question those initial assumptions. The way into the painting is invariably the figure, even though there are various other things taking place. I think when you look at something from an outside perspective, it’s easy to attach maybe a singular emotion to it, like “oh that must be great for them” or “that’s so terrible, I can’t imagine”. But there’s always a combination of different emotions. I often think of race or gender and what it is to be in a gendered body, what it is to be in a racialised body. All of those instances in my paintings drive the composition and the moments of containment or being within these sort of boxes within the frame of the canvas. Once you know the limits of legibility and the limits of identity, you also have a lot of free-
dom to play with that. I find that the paintings are, for me at least, somewhere I can turn to, to see myself when I otherwise feel like there aren’t many other resources for how I would describe my identity. So, in that way, I don’t want it to just be some painful, dreary experience. It’s also something that has a lot of potential and joy and experimentation and agency within it. Has there been a development in terms of what you think about when you’re painting? Yeah, I’m more open to an idea. I think in the past few years, especially in the country that I live in, with the Trump presidency and everything, it has heightened awareness around these current events that were so awful and severe. My work exists in a way that’s sort of outside the narrative – it’s not necessary for it to be connected to specific current events. But I have been more open to allowing that influence to channel its way into the work. Just being more open to these umbrella ideas but also specific things that influence each piece – that is something that has really changed in my work over the past few years. Christina Quarles: In Likeness is at South London Gallery until August 29, 2021 southlondongallery.org
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