October 29, 2024

Artist to Watch

ELIZABETH SCHWAIGER

 

Elizabeth Schwaiger in her studio. Photo by Martyna Szczesna. Courtesy of the artist and Nicola Vassell Gallery.

NB: What are some of your earliest memories of making art and how does this relate to what you’re making now?  

ES: I went to the zoo when I was four years old and squirreled away some of the animal food pellets in my pocket. When I got home I tried to glue them onto a piece of pink construction paper to varying degrees of success, trying to make forms and patterns with them, and that was the first moment that I thought I could spend my life being an artist — that this is what artists do and it was a worthwhile thing.

I didn’t really think I was destined for art again until a semester in Beijing under a language pledge. There was something about the rigor of the writing system in particular that rewired my brain so when I came back to the states I found that I could draw representationally without the same sort of struggle I had in the past, and that realization along with just a different sense of image balance and composition opened the door to a very different path than I had imagined up unto that point. 

Elizabeth Schwaiger, Now & Now & Now, 2023. 48 x 36 in. Photo by Lance Brewer. Courtesy of the artist and Nicola Vassell Gallery.

NB: So can you tell us about your creative process and how you choose the spaces that are the subjects in your painting?   

ES: Yes. So I think of the spaces more as the setting instead of the subject. The subject is something unseen, an absent protagonist, a universal force, or sometimes the viewer itself. I like to think of these scenes as malleable, amorphous places, like in dreams where things are always sort of shifting. 

When you’re in a dream, you know some things, you know the background story and what might happen and you receive that knowledge effortlessly, all at once, without even feeling it. I want to convey spaces like that — ones that are heavy with knowledge, history and potential — weighty with things that are happening and things that will happen. In my paintings you have this kind of time that’s condensed or collapsed: the past, present, and future depicted all at once. 

That’s why I find resonance with and depict artist’s studios, writer’s desks, or museum display cabinets; because these are things that speak of what might have been and what could be. It’s fertile ground for layered experience that exists across multiple times at once. These things all speak to impermanence, the fragility of culture, and our strange attempts at stabilizing what will, despite our best efforts, always remain in a state of flux. 

Elizabeth Schwaiger, Diving into the Wreck, 2023. 72 x 72 in. Photo by Lance Brewer. Courtesy of the artist and Nicola Vassell Gallery.

NB: How would you describe the relationship between architecture and nature? How do you see this relationship resonate with human emotion and behavior?  

ES: I see architecture as trying to reign in, to create boundaries around our space, to protect us, to keep the wild world at bay in some way and to demarcate things. After I had my own little girl, I started feeling like, wait “I am nature, we are all nature”. We are all this kind of chaotic force and so the demarcation is basically just completely fake. I think that maybe we need more architects who have experienced pregnancy. We’d have a very different built environment. 

I love the way that we already have hints of the porousness of those boundaries in the ways we choose to live in architecture, you know, with houseplants or with pets: we’re bringing nature inside and we’re trying to control it and keep it tidy when really it has a much bigger presence.

One of the plants that I often paint is the Monstera plant. I have one in the corner of my studio, and inside they’re like a small or regular size, but if you see pictures of them in the wild, they are these enormous, massive things that live up to their name. Somehow I think our personal sense of expansiveness can be stunted as well into something that hungers for control, so there’s always the dichotomy of creating boundaries and order within this kind of entropy, chaos, and wildness. When architecture is bad, you feel the hostility of that boundary, and when architecture is at its worst, it creates spaces that make you feel dissociated from the nature within yourself.

Elizabeth Schwaiger, Thinking Like a Monster, 2023. 54 x 72 in. Photo by Lance Brewer. Courtesy of the artist and Nicola Vassell Gallery.

NB: So given you’re the one in control, how do you let go of it?  How do you work within the boundaries of order and chaos?   

ES: In painting there’s always the dance between gaining control and letting go, and I find that I do my best work when I’m right on the balance between those two. Earlier we were talking about how if I go into a painting and I know exactly what I want it to look like when it’s finished, then the constraints of that – even if I can make that happen, makes the process lose some of its presence. Instead, if I go in with a bit of a road map, but am willing to veer off into the wilderness if needed, it may lead down a long precarious path, but the result is always better. There is something more genuine and lithe in the paintings when I approach them with more freedom.

So there’s a flow between letting myself off the hook and kind of letting things just develop as they’re developing, and responding to each new puzzle that the composition or the colors present. I follow the painting and it leads me along until it eventually reaches a point when there’s nothing left to change, which feels like discovering something rather than forcing something into existence.

NB: When as a viewer I look at your paintings, the reveal and disappearance of the setting really kind of speaks to that order and chaos. I’m looking, for example, at a painting and the sculptures are appearing and then I’m losing them again — nature is appearing and I’m losing it again. So it’s really a beautiful dance for the viewer that I’m sure as the artist, is a process that you have to kind of allow to develop and materialize very organically.   

ES: Yes, one hundred percent. I love that you said that too, because that’s my experience when I’m producing the work, and it’s always my hope that the viewer mirrors that dynamic, alongside any specific personal interpretations they bring to the art.   

Elizabeth Schwaiger, Captiva, 2019. 47 x 39 in. Photo by Luis Corso. Courtesy of the artist and Nicola Vassell Gallery.

NB: Could you expand on your use of color and what the different palettes represent or symbolize?  

ES: Sometimes I feel that if I force my use of color into some sort of strict system of logic or reason then the magic drops out of it, so I’m resistant to look too closely or explain exactly what the colors I use mean, but I can say this: color for me is linked with time. Perhaps as an outgrowth of that, color can very much code experience as homelike or uncanny, familiar or alien. It also might be surprising to some, that the palette of many of my works is one of the last things to finally firm up, often changing dramatically in the final moments through allover glazing or last minute additions of unexpected hues.

There’s one orange painting that comes to my mind, which is an interior night scene from my apartment. Looking out the window I could see both the reflection of the interior of the room, and the buildings and lights of my neighborhood filtered through the trees outside and the houseplants on the window sill. I think of orange as a nighttime color because of the lamps in my apartment, and I also think of orange as a color that gives kind of a warm feeling of coziness, or being at home, a sort of safe energized feeling. 

Sometimes my blue paintings are night ones too, but they are something exterior or outside of the self, something potentially sharper or ominous. It’s possible that with a handful of exceptions all my paintings are night paintings — I guess that’s just evidence of how slippery and subtle color play can be and how tied it is to time, memory, emotion, and our own gauges of safety and vigilance.

NB: It reminds me how at night the human eye sort of adapts to reveal things as you adapt to the light around you. I feel like that is something that also happens here with your paintings, as I’m seeing it and I adapt to it. Your paintings you have to spend time with. 

ES: Yes, I want them to continually reveal themselves. It’s like a good album that even when you’ve been hearing it for years you pick up something layered in that you hadn’t noticed before. That’s the goal. A flash and then a slow burn. 

NB: Lastly, do you have any upcoming projects or exhibitions that you’d like to share?   

ES: I just donated work to Artists for Kamala Harris, and I feel like I’m in great company there along with 165 respected artists donating work, and before the year is out I’ll be showing with Nicola Vassell at Art Basel Miami.