Intervention / house paint and ink on canvas / 106 x 59 inches / 2020

Installation shot of the Locker Plant, Chinati Foundation Open Studio, 2020

Installation shot of the Locker Plant, Chinati Foundation Open Studio, 2020

En Plein Air, oil on paper, 9 x 12 inches, 2020

Untitled, oil on paper, 11 x 14 inches, 2020

Looking (at John Wesley), oil on paper, 9 x 12 inches, 2020

Mountain, oil on paper, 9 x 12 inches, 2020

Far West Texas, oil on paper, 11 x 14 inches, 2020

Concrete Works, oil on paper, 9 x 12 inches, 2020

Chinati Trees, oil on paper, 11 x 14 inches, 2020

Snakes, oil on paper, 14 x 11 inches, 2020

Flowers in a Football Field, oil on paper, 12 x 9 inches, 2020

Border Wall, oil on paper, 11 x 14 inches, 2020

Chinati landscape, oil on paper, 12 x 9 inches, 2020

I went to Marfa in September of 2020, in the midst of a global pandemic. I live in New York City, and teach at a girls’ school on the Upper East Side and have a studio in Midtown. In March and April, when Covid struck, I painted on the empty streets of Midtown Manhattan. From my apartment, I also made watercolors from the daily Zoom meetings occurring on my laptop. In my studio, I worked on a large oil painting of the McDonald’s outside of my window, and most recently, I made small paintings of the cash in my pocket. My artwork is personal, but in this moment of racial, political and economic reckoning, it feels political and urgent, too.

Although I had always imagined driving cross country to Chinati, because of the unique circumstances, flying seemed easier. I planned in terms of materials. I was less worried about what I would paint, as I knew that I wanted to let the place guide me. Texas is big, and I wanted to make big paintings. I had a roll of canvas and semi-transparent plastic tarp delivered to Chinati, along with ink and stencil film. I brought a small oil painting set-up: a hiking chair, tripod, small easel, paints and paper. After landing in Midland, I went to the hardware store to see what pre-mixed paint they were selling cheaply. They had neutrals and two gallons of slightly different shades of pink. I supplemented the pink by splurging on two shades of blue.

Midland and neighboring Odessa are wholly dependent on the energy industry, and I wondered
how the recent crash in oil prices might affect the towns. The traffic was lighter than I remembered. The selection at the Goodwill was sparse. I found a few fabrics, two shirts and some books. A lot of the literature was Bible related. I picked out a kids’ book from a series called Alice in Bibleland because I liked the illustrations. When I left Midland in my rental car, driving the three hours southwest to Marfa, I listened to some talk radio that claimed the worst two things to happen to the human race were the concept of evolution and Islam.

My dad’s side of the family is from Texas: Amarillo and Lubbock. I was born in Huntsville. I consider New York City to be my home, but I spent three years in graduate school in Albuquerque, New Mexico. I have connections to the Southwest and I love love love the expansive landscape, the big sky, the tough plants and animals. At Chinati, I worked at the Locker Plant, and I can easily say that it is my favorite studio that I have ever had: three huge rooms, a backyard, gorgeous heavy doors and lots of storage space. The facility’s history as a meat locker was overshadowed for me by its history as home to the Artist In Residence program. For almost thirty years, it has been the studio for the visiting artists.

I started by drawing. Limited materials gave me clear boundaries and structure, which is something that Donald Judd, the founder of Chinati, strongly believed in. As an artist in residence, one lives on the museum grounds, alongside art and the museum staff, in what was once an army base. The terrain, not far from the US border with Mexico, is Chihuahuan desert grassland. There are animals like javelinas, rattle snakes, spiders, and lizards with turquoise tails. Wildflowers were asters and rain sage: purple, yellow and pink. The weather was fantastic in September and October, cool in the mornings and evenings, hot during the day.

I started by drawing figurative images in a small sketchbook, based on the references that I had in front of me (Goodwill and some old art books that someone had left at the Locker Plant.) Two sketches stood out from the rest. One was a sketch of Leda and the Swan, based on a painting by Boucher. Two nude women are confronted by an aggressive and phallic swan. The other was a drawing of a shepherd exerting himself to lift a large boulder to save a cartoon lamb (from Alice in Bibleland.) Both images had physicality and a great deal of tension, which is probably what attracted me to them. My sketchbook is filled with drawings, doodles and frantically scribbled writing. My paintings come out of this tension, the urge to get what is on the inside outside.

I had four shades of blue and pink paint. One of the only painters in Chinati’s collection is a man
named John Wesley, and interestingly he used this particular palette almost exclusively throughout his whole career. My friend Adam and I walked through Chinati’s galleries, and we arrived at Wesley’s work, he proclaimed, “a breath of fresh air!” It is true. Wesley’s playful, sometimes erotic and often goofy figurative work offers a foil to the heavy abstraction. Wesley’s style is recognizable: flat and full of references to dated pop culture. He was married to a writer and a poet named Hannah Green and it is easy to compare his paintings to poems. He uses repetition, mirroring and empty space, like the music of poetry. Rather than developing a clear narrative structure, the images propose their own curious invented logic and space.

Inspired by Wesley’s technique and form, I had breakthroughs in Texas. I loosened up and had more fun painting than I usually do, related I am sure to the fact that I was able to work more intensely and in long, uninterrupted stretches. I broke up my day by working on big paintings in the Locker Plant and making small paintings outside, often in the late mornings and early afternoons. Sitting by Judd’s concrete works, I started out by depicting what I saw in front of me, but I developed confidence to improvise. I dabbed color and added pattern where it wasn’t. I added graphic snakes to another painting of his boxes. (I had actually seen a rattle snake on a walk the evening prior.) When I painted a fragment of a wall on the edge of the property, I wrote Mexico on it and then flipped the painting upside down and mirrored it on the opposite side of the page. The wall looks more like a train. These recent paintings are not particularly narrative, they represent associative thinking. The decisions that I made were as much about what was not there, as what was.

Intervention was the first large painting that I completed using a flat, Wesley-inspired style. It is 106 by 59 inches. At eye level, it depicts the shepherd saving the lamb from the boulder, which I mentioned before. Above this scene, the landscape turns into layers of sedimentary rock. The horizon line is at the very top of the painting and depicts an oil well piercing deep into the earth. Ingrid Shaffner, Chinati’s new curator, pressed me to talk about what the painting meant. I didn’t have a clear answer for her, but I think that it relates to the concept of tension, which drew me to the Biblical image in the first place. The painting combines multiple perspectives, and it is about that impossible relationship.

I keep coming back to Wesley’s painting entitled Jack Frost, which shows a man biting another man’s nose. Martin Hentschel writes that it depicts “A highly complex psychological relationship in which each partner reckons with both injury and sympathy from the other.” By calling the painting Jack Frost, Wesley conjures up feelings of coldness and winter. By calling my painting Intervention, I wanted to call to mind ideas of divine intervention, but also colonial history, and addiction.

In Marfa, there are many clay brick walls where the dirt is slowly disintegrating but the concrete lattice keeps its shape. The walls look like drawings of walls! The dry grass grows in clumps that remind me of cartoons from my childhood. In upstate New York, where my mom is from, cattails trigger the same response. I admit that I am a product of my childhood, influenced by Disney movies from the period of Snow White to Aladdin. As a figurative painter, I can’t help but think that that style of illustration must have been formative. It is interesting that some of my earliest childhood memories–of a Disney movie or a visit to McDonalds–are in the context of Sub-Saharan Africa, where I grew up. My parents met as volunteers in the Peace Corps. I wonder if Kenya and Senegal share elements of landscape with Marfa; they are both semi- desert, flattish, long horizon. I have not lived in Africa since I was thirteen and I consider myself very much American at this point. But I wonder if the perspective of an outsider, which I felt both in Africa and when visiting the US as a child, is related to painting, too. Sometimes the only way that one can see clearly is by taking a different perspective.

In many ways West Texas and Africa could not be further apart. The only connection that I have read about recently is that the US oil and gas industry has been lobbying hard for African countries to take on more of their plastic waste. Kenya, for example, has worked to get its plastic bag usage under control. Sending waste to another part of the world seems categorically unchristian, for what it’s worth.

Our world becomes more complicated and connected, but at Chinati, I learned to simplify. In terms of my paintings, I used a black line to draw, and I filled in flat color, like in a coloring book. I slept well, drank water when I felt sad and got into the habit of eating steel cut oatmeal every morning. In Marfa, one hears church bells every evening at 6 pm. Other than the train passing through town, things are quiet, empty and peaceful. You can see for ages, literally; weather systems are visible on the horizon. I went for walks at sunset, and I often went for long jogs in the morning. While it is dry and dusty today, the area was once a sea. The mountains on the horizon are ancient fossil reefs. The sense of scale and time is almost overwhelming. I thought a lot about Ana Mendieta when I first arrived in Marfa. Mendienta was an artist who tragically fell to her death at age 36. Carl Andre, an artist whose work is part of Chinati’s collection, was acquitted of her murder. Mendieta made a piece entitled Arbol de la Vida (Tree of Life) where her figure merges with a tree. She stands still, nude and vulnerable. Her arms are up, by her head at an angle. I drew this silhouette while I listened to news of the police officers acquitted in the murder trial of Breonna Taylor. I sketched out her silhouette, too. The space in between these two women spans decades. Judd was interested in the space between things, but he thought about the question on a material and concrete level, perhaps less in terms of history and time. I stenciled the silhouettes onto the plastic tarps and hung them from the rafters of the Locker Plant, letting light from the doors and windows stream through them.