beer with a painter: josephine halvorson...josephine halvorson, “form (facing out)” (2013), oil...

Beer with a Painter: JosephineHalvorsonby Jennifer Samet on April 26, 2014

Josephine Halvorson, “Room 441″ (2012), oil on linen, 5 parts, 50 x 168 in overall (all images ©Josephine Halvorson and courtesy Sikkema Jenkins & Co., New York)

Josephine Halvorson and I met on a late winter day when the chill was starting to melt, andtalked over omelettes at the window of the Red Cat in Chelsea. It was early on a weekday, therestaurant felt quietly elegant, the light outdoors mellowed by cloud cover. As Halvorson noted,even the potatoes in our omelettes were perfectly soft.

The way she brought my attention to this subtle tactile sensation is a good metaphor for herwork. Halvorsonʼs subjects include traces of the American post-industrial landscape: woodsheddoors, pieces of machinery, shutters, façades marked by graffiti. These surfaces are softenedby time and weather, humanized, brought closer into our space: it is a meeting more than aconfrontation.

Beer with a Painter: Josephine Halvorson http://hyperallergic.com/122527/beer-with-a-painter-josephine-...

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Halvorson received her BFA from the Cooper Union in 2003 and her MFA from ColumbiaUniversity in 2007. She is the recipient of a Fulbright Fellowship to Vienna (2003–04), a LouisComfort Tiffany Foundation Grant (2009), and a New York Foundation for the Arts Award(2010). She currently serves as a critic in the MFA program in painting at Yale University, andlives and works in Brooklyn and western Massachusetts. She is represented by SikkemaJenkins & Co., New York, where she had a solo exhibition January–March 2014, and PeterFreeman, Inc., Paris, where she had a solo exhibition in November 2012–January 2013.

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Jennifer Samet: You grew up in Brewster, Massachusetts, on Cape Cod. You have describedyour work as a negotiation with specific places. I wonder how the landscape of your childhoodplays a role.

Josephine Halvorson: When I look at a group of images of my work online, it can lookthematically “New England.” But this is incidental; Iʼm not trying to illustrate a particulargeography.

I grew up on Cape Cod and then came to New York when I was eighteen. There had alwaysbeen New Yorkers who spent time on the Cape, specifically a concentration of artists inWellfleet and Provincetown. I have colleagues and former teachers who summer there. Andhistorically, Hans Hofmann, Milton Avery, Charles Hawthorne, and Edwin Dickinson, amongmany others, had spent time there. So even as a child I felt a proximity to a certain history ofpainting which had a foot in both urban modernism and regionalism.

When I moved to New York, I began to notice a cultural hierarchy with regionalism near thebottom. This was fifteen years ago before “local” started to be used as a positive cultural term. Ithink about the ways we define art in relation to landscape and culture. So, Cape Cod, for mywork, is not about the aesthetics of the place so much as it gave me a sensitivity to the local,and how it exists in relation to contemporary art.

JS: You mentioned to me your resistance to being labeled a painter, as it relates to the title ofthis column. Why do you have resistance to the term?


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Josephine Halvorson, “Form (Facing Out)” (2013), oilon linen, 60 x 24 in

JH: I think everyone who makes paintings is concerned with the term “painter” and what itmeans for them. Itʼs hard to use it and not conjure an overly-determined history. Of course I ammaking paintings, but I resist the tendency to label artists as it can sometimes characterize whattheyʼre going to do before they even do it.

Also, the distinction and relationship between material and medium is important to consider.There is integrity to every material and its history, but you can engage in other mediums througha particular material as well. Iʼm thinking of Matt Saunders, who has been making photographsand videos, which are clearly within the discourse of the medium of painting. I am making


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paintings, but I consider them sharing the medium of land art, for instance. To be called apainter can close the doors to other discourses, which are relevant and present in the work.

JS: Your parents were artists who worked across the mediums; perhaps that affected you?

JH: Yes, my parents both made paintings, and their work grew to be sculptural, and also moredecorative and utilitarian. The resistance to labels, an embrace of complexity and a healthycontrarian streak is within my familyʼs culture.

Painting in my childhood was very much encouraged, but also questioned, because it didnʼthave the physical permanence of other materials: metal was solid, meant to last, always useful,whereas painting was deemed somewhat flimsy by comparison. And that is, of course, thename of the game — painting can be so much and so little at the same time.

JS: Can you discuss the title for this show — Facings — which itself has multiple implicationsand meanings?


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Josephine Halvorson, “Form (Facing In)” (2013), oilon linen, 60 x 24 in

JH: “Facings” refers to my practice of looking at something, and something looking at me, beingwith, and engaging something else in the world. Iʼm interested in anthropomorphism andapophenia, as well as the flatness of a surface: a façade, which has the same root, of course,as “face.”

By exploring ideas of visage, face, and expression, I came across the word “countenance.” Acountenance is precisely what a painting is for me at the moment. It belies a temperament, animplicit expression. Iʼve become interested in the notion of liveliness: the way that paintings areneither dead nor alive; they are neither living beings, nor inert materials, but exist in that space


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in between.

JS: When you talk about the objects — the subjects of your paintings — looking back at you,what do you mean exactly?

JH: Certain things catch my eye, calling out to me in some way. In that moment something realand palpable, private and psychological happens. The subject can be a catalyst for me torealize a painting that I may have subconsciously wanted to make, but havenʼt yet realized.Often itʼs not until I make the painting that I see it and think, “Thatʼs because I once saw aMatisse painting and thought I wanted to use that kind of pink.” Those experiences in life aresubtle. Suddenly, you find yourself making a painting and it contains what you felt for anotherpiece of art, or an experience, or a person.

JS: You speak of the objects in your paintings in a way that humanizes them. What is thisabout?


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Josephine Halvorson, “Woodshed Door” (2013), oil on linen, 70 x 35 in

JH: All of the subjects of the paintings in my recent show are familiar, part of my daily life.Woodshed Door is a good example. I see the actual door almost every day. Since making thatpainting, the painting feels like the door, but the door also feels like the painting. And oddlyenough both feel like me.

In other cases, the objects are others: they are like friends or lovers or acquaintances aroundthe world. I believe that objects have their own agency in the relations they have, not just withme, but also with the painting, and with other objects and conditions that surround them. Makinga painting is a manifestation — a physical metaphor — for experiencing what the object iswilling to reveal to me and what it withholds, as well as what I reveal to it.

Josephine Halvorson, “Drops” (2012), oil on linen, 20x 15 in

Many objects I have painted have since vanished: a wooden window casement got ripped outand replaced by vinyl siding. A mural in Brooklyn Iʼve worked with numerous times is now on abuilding due to be demolished. Things change.

JS: In this way, do your subjects have a political dimension? You have written about the phrase“memento mori.” Are the paintings about environmental or technological hubris?

JH: I donʼt want my work to be mere reminders of mortality, warning signs, or pointing the fingerat failure. But I am aware those narratives go hand-in-hand with still life. When exploring whatmakes something alive, itʼs important to consider the opposite. This is something I think aboutwhen working on site, especially in our post-industrial landscape.


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For my 2012 show “Side By Side,” for instance, I spent several months working in Thomaston,Connecticut, a town named after Seth Thomas and the site of the once largest clock factory inAmerica. Some of the architecture from that time is still intact, but the jobs are not. When I wasthere, several former workers came up to talk with me, sharing their memories of working in thefactories. Itʼs a meaningful experience to give attention to something that is on the verge ofbeing forgotten.


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Josephine Halvorson, “Patented” (2012), oil on linen, 25 x 18 in


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JS: In an article you wrote, you tell the story of returning to a site where you had seen an oldpiece of machinery with the word “Shame” spray-painted on it, only to find the machine gone.You were devastated. Yet you had taken a photograph of it on a previous visit. Why not workfrom the photograph? Why do you work outdoors and on site?

JH: I tried. At the mining site I made a painting of another piece of machinery and then when Iwas back in my studio in Brooklyn, I decided to paint the word “Shame” on it. But because theword wasnʼt integral, it looked cosmetic, and the painting felt phony.

Iʼm trying to make paintings out of experiences, of sensations, of the perceptible. If I were towork from a photograph in my studio, I would likely make a painting of the experience of lookingat a photograph in my studio.

I want to paint that which is perceptible but not necessarily visible, such as history, time,emotion, memory. In preparing for this recent exhibition, “Facings,” I made several paintings offire before realizing I was trying to interpret the effects of heat. At the opening on a very coldnight in January, a few people said they were going to warm their hands up by my heatpaintings. That was a big compliment!

Josephine Halvorson, “Heat 2″ (2014), oil on linen, 16 x 19 in


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Thereʼs also a practical impulse to working outside. You have to know how to pack a lunch,where to go to the bathroom, to always bring sunscreen and bug spray. You have to learn whattemperature your paint will melt at, how to cast a shadow over your palette. You have to doeverything in your power to have control over a situation that you have no control over. I likehaving to fight for it. I have a facility with paint, so I need resistance to make art. Otherwise Iwould unintentionally squeeze the life out of anything I made. Working outdoors seems to bringout the best in me. I never get bored. Iʼm always attentive.

JS: The term trompe lʼoeil has also come up in reference to your work. What are your thoughtson trompe lʼoeil?

JH: Trompe lʼoeil refuses allegory in an interesting way, which I like, because then you can dealwith other things like phenomenology. Trompe lʼoeil also is a helpful analogy for how paintingcan define itself: as surface, as illusion, as daily life, as the wall. But Iʼm suspicious of itsone-liner status as illusionism alone. Iʼm not at all interested in trickery.

I love how color can almost magically transform into something: it can become wood, it canbecome concrete, it can become heat. I wouldnʼt understand the object if I were just meditatingon it. It has to go through this empathetic medium of paint.

JS: Have you always been a “one-session” painter?

JH: When I was younger I felt guilty about my love for working in a single session. I wanted tomake a painting that took a long time. Yet I felt connected to artists like Lois Dodd, Robert Henri,and Roman frescoes and Chinese ink paintings. I had to come to terms with my own sensibility.


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Josephine Halvorson, “Foundation” (2013), oil on linen, 7 parts, 40 x 149.75 in

Now I think of my work more as castings. That is why the paintings of concrete surfaces arequite important in this recent show: how fluidity can be formed in a continuous, unbroken act.This is where Rachel Whitereadʼs work has been important to me.

This is how Iʼve come to think of the making of my own work. We all have our own distinctphysical and personal relationships to this medium, this oily substance. And thatʼs why paintingremains so diverse and infinite.

Related

Forensic Observer: The Recent Paintings of Josephine HalvorsonIn "Galleries"

Closely Watched Trains: Josephine Halvorson and Charles DemuthIn "Essays"

Art RxIn "Events"


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beer with a painter: josephine halvorson...josephine halvorson, “form (facing out)” (2013), oil...

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