American Painter Shanna Waddell
ISSUE 8 PREVIEW: This article can be found in EYES IN Magazine, Issue 8 available now on the EYES IN app currently available in the Apple market.
About her exhibition in the Thomas Erben Gallery: “Misshapen Chaos of Well-seeming Forms” titles a group of new paintings the artist created after receiving her MFA from Tyler School of Art, May 2010.
Playing impasto against splattered veils and contrasting urban colors with a new age palette, these works distort material flatness into a warped spatiality and combine figuration with abstract symbols and uninhibited brushwork, holding together a spectrum of sensibilities that precipitates early American modernism into an apocalyptic, prophetic hyperbole and personal vision.
“Woman peering into Atomic Nuclear Illusionistic Space” portrays a female figure, tube socked, with goggles and dressed in a period costume in the midst of a brushy, post-nuclear air. Rectangular boxes, coffins in the artist’s iconography, fall out of a pink, atmospheric sky whose expanse is made visible through volumetric lines. The geometry is redeemed by a continuously looping, floating shape while anchored by muddy coloration and wide variations in brushwork, which is the very ground the solitary woman stands upon.
“Harold Camping - False Prophet” presents to us a half figure with a hollowed-out face, on-stage, behind a see through pulpit, flanked by curtains and cheerfully colored balloons. His rib cage, intestines and pelvic bone, rendered as a loosely brushed organic mulch, pushes figuration into a partially ornamental abstraction. The subject of the religious leader –Titian’s half-veiled Pope in the Philadelphia Museum of Art served as a historical reference for Waddell, as it was Velazquez’s pope for Bacon – is presented here, uncovered and in its undisguised manifestation.
One of the most recently completed works, “Transient Exit,” is part of a series that houses abstraction within references to domestic space, such as the bathroom with its tub, medicine cabinet, faucet and mini blinds. Waddell likens these fixtures to conduits for transient experiences, which she renders through hyper-saturated color and mobilizing brushwork – placeholders for encompassing mental states.
Interview with Shanna Waddell
As a child, what did you want to become (profession-wise)?
As a teenager, I started to get a better idea of what I wanted to pursue as a profession: a painter. I was encouraged to pursue art education, started on this route then quickly changed to a BFA in painting; there were more studio classes available.
In which town did you grow up?
Long Beach, California.
What inspires you in the job of being an artist?
The ability to take a reference point of some sort – anything from a spider to a historical reference – and challenge it with the multiplicity of painting [is inspiring]. With this regard, in graduate school, I began researching cults such as Jonestown and Heaven’s Gate. I started with a painting of the Jonestown massacre, and I wanted the work to have a slow reveal when you approached it, the way beauty often manifests itself. At first, in the painting, you see saturated colored shapes, and then you start to see the mass suicide. Limbs and such objects start to become clearer to you. The interest [in the historical reference] for that particular work was my first inspiration, and the fascination of beauty turning to terror [was also inspiring].
My second inspiration was the human yearning for the betterment of a person’s current state. This specific idealism inspired me to paint the Jonestown event, where followers strove for a utopian agricultural religious living arrangement but instead went haywire. In other paintings, like “Heaven’s Gate, Harold Camping,” and the next series of works, I work(ed) with this similar theme in variations. I am interested in the general framework of the psychology: why people and groups of people take their lives – some to ride a comet to the next dimension – or how people can believe the end of the world will occur in just a couple of months, immediately upon learning of this so-called end from a man who creates a neat and tidy calculation.
Do you think your background has influenced your current art style? If so, what specific element in your background is most pervasive in influencing your current art style?
I have a small family unit. My grandmother on my father’s side was a model in the Hollywood scene; she got caught up in various understudy shots for Marilyn Monroe and was in Playboy Magazine. She never really settled and made a nest for herself, so when she was in her 60s, she lived in a motor home the latter part of her life. She plastered Jesus stickers all over her van and drove me to various Pentecostal churches in the Southern California area. This may explain my fascination with religious cults? I also fell in love with the hippie culture (although I don’t dress like one), commune living arrangements, and such things that revolve around that movement.
In which way do you consider yourself an innovative creator?
In painting, there are thousands of choices: the way you approach a painting; what type of stroke you will chose for making a specific remark; how you approach the painting with content, subject matter, style – it all references the deep history entangled within painting. I, like many painters, am interested in pushing the medium of painting to its current limits, which then allows for innovation in the modern era.
Do you have any other creative ambitions or dreams to which you aspire?
My dream has always been to live in a classic Volkswagen Van with a canoe on top, to travel/backpack around the US, and to paint – while on rivers, seeing mountains and surfing various shores.
How did you get the ideas for creating your artwork?
My ideas generally come from over-arching themes that I am currently thinking about for painting. As for the last show with Thomas Erben Gallery, “Harold Camping-False Prophet,” I was traveling the San Francisco Bay area last summer and was approached by one of his [Harold Camping’s] followers, whose track explained the end of the world would occur on May 21, 2011. I then did more research on Harold Camping and became interested in how he came about this conclusion.
Then, while painting “Harold Camping-False Prophet” on the East Coast, I visited the Pennsylvania Museum of Art and found myself correlating Titan’s Half Veiled Pope with Harold Camping. While painting “Harold Camping-False Prophe,” I found even more inspiration in Francis Bacon’s Study After Velazquez Portrait of Pope and the striated veiled strokes, and I decided to unveil – or pull up the curtain – that [hides] the projection of Harold Camping. Just as many other artists throughout history have referenced past artists, I wanted to reference Bacon’s Study After Velazquez Portrait of Pope in my own way, to show the true character of Camping.
Do you have a favorite artist yourself?
Oh, that is so hard to answer. I am attracted to various artists for different reasons: Gerhard Richter for his multiplicity of open-running approaches to painting genres; Francis Bacon for his remaking of the image as a state of the hand being correlated to his mind’s eye; and Thek’s work as it admits to raw, rough, compulsive gestures.
Are you ever afraid you will run out of inspiration and creativity in your job?
Absolutely not! Just take one subject like history, physics, or art. There is so much rooted in one subject or word. When you start to uncover or scratch its surface, it opens a world of possibilities.
What is the most difficult thing in your job?
Well, at this point, it’s hard for me to see painting as a job. I spend more money than I get back from painting, where as in most jobs, you gain in income. Although, I am starting to see some income roll in.
What is the most fun part of your job?
As a painter, you make your own hours and interact with a community of artists that you can bounce ideas off of. Going to shows and seeing how artist are commenting on the contemporary dialogue is always changing and exciting.
Do you expect your way of creating artwork to change in the future?
Most definitely. If your art isn’t evolving in some way, it becomes sterile and uninteresting, but when you change things up, you set up new challenges. I see my work as a running of multiple series, a collection of different limbs that grow into branches, and I never want to park it too long in one series. Also, I tend to bounce around anything from figuration to complete abstraction.
Could we feature your favorite artist, author, designer, architect, filmmaker, etc. in our magazine and/or online?
Sure. My favorites are: current artist – Lucas Samaras and his boxes; author – Marco Colbert, an unpublished novelist/ poet; and filmmaker – Brakhage.
Do you aspire to collaborate in your creations with an artist from another artistic discipline?
Lucas Samaras makes beautiful boxes and sculptures. As for collaborating with him, I would be happy being a fly in his room, spying in on him.
Do you have a favorite company or exciting other creator with whom you would like to work?
There are so many artists that it’s hard to choose. My current obsession is Charles Garabedian for his monumental canvas sizes, painterly play with the figure, and mythical literary references. I would like to work with him to find out how he manages such huge canvases and how he gets them in and out of his studio to the museums.
What is your favorite building in the world?
Teepees and tree houses are favorites.
What is your favorite hotel?
Camping in tents or teepees is ideal.
What would be your ideal home?
A teepee off the coast of Northern California would be perfect.
Do you have any dreams for the future?
I dream of Old Holland and Williamsburg sending me free samples of oil paint in the mail.
