Erica Mendritzki is finishing her MFA at the University of Guelph, Ontario. She is the recipient of numerous awards, including a SSHRC Canada Graduate Scholarship. Her work has been exhibited in Canada, Germany and the UK. I spoke to her over gchat about her thesis project, a suite of four paintings titled “On Posing,” which I learned about when she presented them recently at a weekend of artist’s talks hosted by the Blackwood Gallery at the University of Toronto, Mississauga. – Sheila Heti
THE BELIEVER: First of all, what are we seeing here?
ERICA MENDRITZKI: These are four paintings that started with the idea of making a picture of a photographer’s backdrop—the kind you might find in a yearbook photo, or in a family portrait taken at Sears.
BLVR: How did the idea come to you?
EM: I honestly don’t know—as an idea, it suddenly appeared, I think while I was eating lunch at school! I remember asking my friend if she thought it sounded like it was a good idea, and she said, “yes? I don’t know?” which was basically good enough for me.
BLVR: What did you ask her? “Should I make pictures of backdrops?”
EM: Yes. I think I said, “What if I made a painting of a backdrop, like in a yearbook photo?” I was attracted to the idea that it would look like an abstract painting, but that it would sort of secretly be depicting something. At first there was just one of them.
BLVR: How did there come to be four?
EM: I made the first one, but I wasn’t totally happy with how it turned out, so then I made another one, and I liked how the two of them interacted. But they were different sizes, and both were too small, so I decided to make four more that were a little larger. Four seemed like the right number—it’s so stable. Two becomes about doubling; three is hierarchical; but four is just enough to suggest “many” or “multiple.”
BLVR: And the blue… do backdrops tend to be blue?
EM: They come in lots of colours, but blue is probably the most common… or at least it was when I was getting school pictures taken! I think that this particular kind of backdrop is starting to become nostalgic. From what I can tell, studio photographers now tend to favour solid black or white in the background, rather than the mottled effect of the hand-painted blue that I’m referencing. But that kind of backdrop isn’t totally obsolete yet—I still see it turning up occasionally when some of my friends post professional family portraits on Facebook.
BLVR: Do you get a feeling of familiarity or possessiveness or kinship when you see those photos posted?
EM: Yes… almost like the feeling I would have if I used to work as a school photographer. It’s part nostalgia, part professional interest; I pay a lot of attention to exactly how mottled the backdrop is, whether there is any creasing, whether there is a halo effect, exactly what the shade the blue is. Most backdrops are kind of beautiful and kind of dreadful. I think my paintings are beautiful, but I was prepared to go through with them even if they didn’t end up being beautiful. The beauty is almost an accident.
BLVR: Did you model your paintings on specific backdrops that you gathered for research?
EM: I did a little Googling, but the model is really my own mental picture of a backdrop, based on school photos. I didn’t have a specific source on hand as I was painting them—I worked towards a mental picture, I guess.
BLVR: Did you reach it?
EM: Yes, I think so. They do look like backdrops, to me, and I’ve taken photos of friends in front of them, just for fun, and they’re pretty effective as backdrops! They can totally pass as the real thing. But how an image exists in the mind and in the world is never quite the same. The physical presence of the paintings makes its own kinds of assertions, and influences space in a way that you can’t quite predict in advance.
BLVR: What would be the ideal reaction to these paintings?
EM: I think it would be for someone to enter a space and look at the work and think of them first as abstract paintings, but then have someone else walk in front of them and have a kind of “aha!” moment where they see the paintings turn into backdrops. I’m interested in the questions, ‘Are they abstract paintings, posing as pictures of a backdrop? Are they pictures of backdrops, posing as the real thing? Or are they actual backdrops, posing as abstract paintings?’
BLVR: Those were the questions that excited me, too! You mentioned the “muse” in your talk last weekend. Do you believe in the idea of the “muse”?
EM: I guess I do, in a very loose sense. I think of it as operating in the realm of aesthetics in a way that’s somewhat parallel to how your conscience functions in relation to ethical decisions—it’s part of you, but it is also informed by culture, by your upbringing, and I think in practice it feels almost like an external judge to whom you can privately turn and say, “What if I do this? Or this? Which is better? What is the right thing?” Then it also sometimes spontaneously grants you ideas, like the idea of painting a backdrop that appeared to come out of nowhere. You can also look towards it for the sense of tone when you’re creating something—is the tone right, does it need to be harsher, smoother, crasser, whatever. I used to be suspicious of making work that was too grand or minimal or pure—the first backdrop that I made had these weird patches on it that I put in to try to subvert the simplicity of the image. But the paintings seemed to desire that simplicity, that minimalism. Now that I’ve broken my taboo against minimal elegance, I’m finding that I kind of don’t know what to do in the studio. I think that every time you re-invent yourself as an artist, even in a minor way, it’s both liberating but also strangely paralyzing, because you have to re-learn how to be this new kind of artist.
![Edvard Munch’s ”The Scream” sold for $119.9 million at a Sotheby’s auction on Wednesday.
Munch once wrote, “But can they [great works] get rid of the worm that lies gnawing at the roots of my heart? No, never.”
What will having this painting do for the worm that lies gnawing at the roots of the owner’s heart? If the new owner even has a worm…](http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m3i6e2MDrW1qzh8wko1_500.jpg)
![Painter Wayne Thiebaud (b. 1920) speaks here about Drink. Thiebaud has been at the forefront of American realist painting since his first show at the Allan Stone Gallery in 1961. He is best known for his paintings of everyday American objects like cakes, pies and deli counters. In 1994, President Bill Clinton presented him with the National Medal of Arts. He lives in California. - Rick Slater
THE BELIEVER: The subject matter of Drink is quite different — less tangible – from the cakes, yo-yos and deli counters you are famous for. Why did you decide to deal with such a different subject matter in this painting?
WAYNE THIEBAUD: I’m an old teacher. I’ve been teaching for 108 years or so [laughs] and I’m very committed to teaching because I’m also always trying to learn about my own self and my own works. This actually was a class project. On the one hand, it’s a rather simple project, and on the other, it has its complications. The students are asked to make a diorama with a flat plain in the back and a receding, diminishing plain in front, with a plastic glass of water under a single light source. The painting had to use all the colors of the rainbow, so it has to engage a spectral character; two yellows, two blues, two reds. It should be realistic, but still maintain itself as a painting. So that’s the real origin of it.
BLVR: Did you and the students paint this from memory? I’ve seen a million glasses of water and I have a good memory, but…
WT: I think artists, painters, have various issues with memory. To be able to hang onto a perceptual instant and be able to reproduce it is astounding, and a probably rare condition. While you often work from direct observation, you’re developing your memory so you are not only using direct observations, but using perceptual and conceptual attitudes about what painting is. Representation must include memory as well as perceptual nuances. This back-and-forth is what enriches painting and makes it a kind of small miracle of adjusted responses.
BLVR: So memory is an intangible part of the painting, not just an element you use in the act of applying paint to a surface?
WT: Yes.
BLVR: No matter what the subject matter is of your paintings, I think many if not most paintings are really about the way light plays off an object, but in Drink, more so than any other of your works, the light seems even more the subject than the object.
WT: That’s the thing. It’s a dialogue between substance and shadow. If you notice… if you make a kind of cross-hair, the object is slightly to the side of a series of shadows. The substance of shadows should in some ways be equal in terms of interest to the glass of water. This is something which is the hallmark of the tradition of painting…how you introduce elements like light, all kinds of light. For instance, there is direct light, but there is also a light that is simply a kind of glean, there’s a group light, a glaring light. You try to collate enough types of light as you can in order to build interest in the painting.
BLVR: Many of your earlier still life paintings from the 1960s were very carefully structured, brightly colored, and set against very monochromatic backgrounds. But along with Drink and similar works like Glass of Wine & Olives, and Jelly Rolls – all paintings from the last 15 years – you use more subdued surroundings. How come?
WT: That came from changing mediums, even types of paint. I experiment a lot. I sort of see myself as a research-type painter. I’m trying to find out more about painting itself, rather than just painting as an applied process.
BLVR: How do you feel your experience as a commercial artist contributed to making you into a research-type painter?
WT: The difference is essentially one of practicality. Painting doesn’t have to be practical, it doesn’t have to be logical, it only has to discover its own logic, and its own sense of purpose and direction. In applied art, that can’t necessarily operate — it has to end, it has to resolve itself, so that the great skills and great craft of commercial art and graphic design give you an expectation of goodness, of fineness, of resolvedness. When I finally tried to become a painter, this split was — and continues to be — a very difficult challenge. You can never be good enough, you can never rise to the level you’d like to. You make your condition of expectation not too high, and try to do the best damn thing you can.
BLVR: Along those lines, I noticed this painting is dated 1999-2002. What was it about this image that took you so long to complete?
WT: Well, you never quite really accept who you are. When you keep things around, because of your awareness and your growth, or lack thereof, you see things differently.
BLVR: How different do you think that the original 1999 painting would have been from a possible 2003 version?
WT: One never knows. There probably is no progress in the thing we call art. Since the cave period, there hasn’t been an awful lot that can top that. Rembrandt is no less a painter than Picasso, and is maybe even a better painter. Who knows about these things? The horrible thing is that art doesn’t have to be progressive; it has to be sustained on its own verifiability as a precious object. And that’s what painters do: they give us other worlds to enter. I mean, think how wonderfully beneficial we are for having the world of Van Gogh. He’s created an alternate world. And that’s quite magical to me. It is a verifiable thing, a concrete example of human achievement.
BLVR: How do you think you would change this painting now?
WT: I don’t know, because I can no longer interact with it. I was privileged to watch De Kooning paint. We were having a cup of tea, actually, way back on 10th street in his studio. We had a pleasant lazy conversation and he stood up and said, “Excuse me.” And he got up and went to a stack of newspapers and pulled out a page of funny papers, looked at the painting that was wet on the easel…looked at it for a while, and cut or tore a shape and pressed it into the moist paint. He said, suddenly, “Ah, that’s better.” And all he did was re-establish the plane or surface of his canvas in order to judge problems he was having around the perimeter of the painting. In other words, you participate with the painting. You use your body as a guide. For a while, the painting will tell you what it needs to have, or how it would like to be. Painting is just a series of lines. It’s always flat no matter what you do to it. Into the painting you have to build time, movement, space, color, light… it’s an enormous challenge. And that’s why painting never dies.
BLVR: Given your appreciation of artists such as De Kooning, Edward Hopper, Richard Diebenkorn, how do you judge your own work now that it is part of art history, as well?
WT: I can only judge my work through the formal conditions of the thing that’s in front of me. Is the space working? Is the color out of key? Does the color fit into its matrix? Is it comfortable? Does it need tension?
BLVR: I’m sorry, I meant how do you judge your work in relation to the work of your idols and peers?
WT: You mean I should have the temerity to judge myself in terms of historical importance?
BLVR: I don’t know if you can, but when one reads about you, you’re mentioned in the context of such significant painters as Morandi, Hopper, and Diebenkorn. That has to be gratifying.
WT: You just really want to be taken seriously. You just want to have contended with that aspect of challenge…to be sure you’re not ignobling the tradition, that you’re not cheapening it. It’s wise to remember we don’t know what art is. It’s still an abstraction, there’s not a concrete thing there. Chasing after art…it’s astounding. Better to just work for excellence, a sense of real achievement in comparison with a lexicon of great achievements.
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Wayne Thiebaud (b.1920), Drink, oil on panel, 10½ x 11¾ in. (26.6 x 29.8 cm.) 1999-2002.](http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m31kyfpR5f1qzh8wko1_400.jpg)
