ARTS
‘‘The studio is alive with the tools of Tell me about your process. Do you start with sketches? I’m more interested in the rawness of the thinking process than the final product. You create something and you maybe don’t like it and paint over it, but then something juicy pops into your mind and you write something else. The messiness, second-guessing and overthinking… that’s the interesting part!
Is your studio as blissfully alive as your art, or is it organized to a T? The studio is alive with the tools of creativity, and creativity is messy! Every time I make a painting or a book, my studio explodes into a disaster area. My workspace bends and changes with each project—I’m forever making space for new experiments and commissions.
Did you develop that spirit in school? I’ve always been a fearless creator. I say that I learned how to think, not draw. My creativity reared its head in unconventional ways—I often turned in elaborate books instead of just papers—and I found that creativity lived everywhere. “Art” class ended up being the least creative place for me. The biggest thing school taught me was creative problem-solving—how to question the parameters of a project so I could bend the rules accordingly. There’s a structured, educated brain underneath the apparent craziness of my pieces. My work is not wallpaper; each piece has depth.
Some of your pieces are huge, too! Most of my works are very large. They have And just like New York City, your evolved to be big because people want them canvases are packed with visual stimuli. big. My work is usually the focal point of a room— I love rich colors and rollers and used paper see it, feel it. and old cardboard—physical materials that did some living before I found them. A friend You moved to Princeton, New Jersey a made me huge wooden letters, which I use as few years ago. Is NYC still in your bones? giant stamps. I love letters of all shapes and I will always make NYC-centric paintings, sizes, and especially my old Remington type- but my output lately has become about more writer, which my husband proposed to me on. universal human themes close to my heart, like I love different viscosities of paint, from liq- “hustle,” “strong,” “sunshine,” and “THE ANuids that splat and ooze and spill to really CESTORS.” These share some visceral qualithick caked-on sludge. ties with other works, but they’re more about
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