Grace Mattingly
E: How did you first get interested in art?
G: I had a bit of a wandering journey with art. I actually was interested in [art] as a kid but didn’t pursue it until was in college actually when I was sort of exploring different things- I was studying philosophy and I finished my major requirements and my senior year I just thought… I always enjoyed painting as a kid I’ll just take a painting class! So it was like an elective, it was my senior year of undergrad, and I just did it. It was just such a transformative experience- I had never been in an art class where people were taking it so seriously, it was my first time ever having a critique you know, where I was using oil paint, a palette, all of this, I had never done this before and I just remember people putting their work on a wall and just engaging with it and discussing it the same way they had in philosophy seminars. I think that was the first time it ever even occurred to me that art could be something that people would be seriously invested in and consider as something that could comment on larger questions. I think that really opened up my mind- it was an incredible course and I had so much fun, and I just kept taking courses after that. After I graduated, I moved back home to Chicago and the Art Institute is quite close to where my parents lived and so I was able to just take one class at a time, so I could get into it, keep dipping my toe in more and more until it just became clear this is what I really wanted to do. I was in enough of a place uncertainty of what I wanted and it just seemed like let’s do this! Let’s go for it.
Could you describe your practice/ what is an average day in the studio like for you?
My practice – I’m a painter, I work with oil but also acrylic and watercolors – I’m doing some experiments with ceramics now. My work really explores fantasy, pleasure with color at the center. My studio practice starts before I enter the studio, I do a lot of meditating before I come in. it’s this extended time of emptying out and often when I’m meditating I have visions and I draw them- pen on paper, just draw them. Sometimes I’ll have as many as six of these papers and I’ll bring them into the studio and turn them into paintings. I actually have a binder here of all these drawings so if there was a day where I didn’t draw I could just go to the binder and usually whatever I’m going to work on is dictated by that. When I actually get started I like to go to an in-body place. I put on music, I dance around it’s very silly and fun. Even if I’m sad its really about being in my body and having that experience.
It seems like your work has changed significantly from 2017-2019 – Your earlier work seems to concentrate on these near-studies of blocky figural painting of people in motion, in compressed spaces doing small tasks- this seems to be quite different from your work now. How did you find your style to develop and what influenced this change?
I was at Slade for a month and Lisa Milroy – one of the most incredible educators I’ve ever worked with in any subject ever, really encouraged me. [Previously] I was working with photographs of everyday life and kind of responding to them through painting. Lisa really encouraged me to consider the possibility that in diverting my attention to the photographs I wasn’t fully present with the materiality and color of my actual painting. She nudged me- what would happen if you stop using these photographs. Lisa is this person who has the capacity to say things that are so difficult to hear because you know they’re right, and I knew she was right so I went for it and I abandoned the photographs. It took me the whole year of experimenting and struggling through that to arrive at what I’ve now found. When I moved away from photographs I realized that I found certain kinds much more difficult to produce when I didn’t have a photograph to look at. What opened up to me was this realization, guided by Lisa that what’s interesting about drawing isn’t necessarily getting it right or representing [an object]. The things that you get wrong are usually so much more revealing about a certain psychic state or emotional state and that’s what we connect to in art and that’s what we’re doing, expressing ourselves. She just allowed me to get so much more present and aware of myself and my work and maybe even less fearful of what I’d discover in doing so. That’s really the journey of how I moved from working with the photographs to just complete imagination.
What does the female as figure mean within the context of your paintings?
I like to imagine the works are quite open and playful. Some of them are entitled “girl” or something but I like the idea of them speaking to a sort of feminine experience that’s more open and ambiguous. I’m exploring what might be considered a female figure as intersected with a horse or with these different creatures- my intention is to bend gender and play with gender like is she a girl or a horse!
Yeah and it’s funny because horses for women seem to connote this very masculine idea of female pleasure-
But then what happens if she is the horse, you know what I mean? *laughs * they’re supposed to be fun and silly but the intention is for them to do something else that’s unexpected. Especially with the treatment of the flowers- the dick flowers or dick butterflies because it’s like first of all the work is about a feminine expression that anyone can embody and second of all we’re not talking about men it’s a flower, a flower with a dick! It isn’t real. It’s interesting for me that sometimes people will project gender onto clearly just an imagined fantasy.
Yeah! I think that’s all very true. I guess especially since from the art historian side we get so caught up in very old Freudian readings of works that are not accurate but my next question is related!
Sexuality is a large part of your more recent work, you’ve even said your work shows the “transformative power of pleasure” how would you describe painting female sexuality and what do you believe its import to be both in your work, but also within the larger canon?
I don’t know if I would say my goal is so lofty as to speak to a sort of essentialized female sexuality, I see the works as like me exploring my own sexuality as a self-identified woman with the hope that maybe that would be something people hopefully could connect to. It’s significant to me and my experience to share my perspective because that’s been so absent from the canon, but I see my voice as one among many – I feel like so many artists are making so much exciting work in regards to their sexuality lately. I’m just so excited to be a part of that community and community of voices.
Yeah! I find that your work is the perfect amalgam of a very soft femininity that’s also subversive and playful and I think a lot of other work I’ve seen of female sexuality veers off in a different direction. in terms of the canon I always think of Georgia O’Keeffe’s flowers and the way we think about them as representations of female sexuality- those are real objects but they take on, contextually, a very specific meaning which they might not have taken on originally.
– I think the playfulness feels important to me and it’s a playfulness that hopefully is perceived as a self-aware playfulness. We all know of and are aware of patriarchy, we all know how much it sucks. We’re still having fun- creating a different reality- which is why I see the works are for everyone and that’s why I love to hear when the works speak to different sorts of people because I feel like it’s true to the feminist vision that everyone gets liberated not just, “oh we just reversed things”
That that’s the thing- art that’s female in its creation and intonation shouldn’t just speak to women it should speak to everybody, and hopefully everyone is open-minded enough that it does speak to everyone.
Could you tell me a little more about your current color scheme?
Color is the first intention of the work. It’s the most immediate thing. There’s usually just a color inside of me and I need to get it out and play around with it- that’s the mysterious part There’s something about these warm colors that kind of reminds me of the warmth of the sunshine and the sun being a life -giving force, also of the chakras and in yoga philosophy, the root, sacral and solar plexus chakras are the chakras that are the lowest , around your belly button. They’re the seat of your creative energy, your sexual energy, yourself, your relation to the earth. While I don’t go into the works with this sort of like, intention of illustrating that idea, I feel the idea is effective in thinking about the work.
How has your Master’s degree changed how you view painting and academic painting and study?
One of the really cool things I’ve experienced about Slade is that the emphasis I’ve experienced is almost un-academic, it’s really about getting into your body and out of your inhibitions and opening up. Developing awareness of your inner eye and your unconscious. They really encourage you to get into that and I think that that’s really what I needed because my background is in these really intense academic cerebral spaces so it was quite an adjustment for me at first so I think that’s what I really needed to tap into. I think that you can really see the shift in how my work has changed.
Do you perceive a difference in opportunity in the US markets and UK markets? The UK really celebrates and nurtures young and emerging artists.
That’s tricky because I don’t really know how the US markets perceive me because I just started making this work and I’m making it in the UK so I don’t really know! We’ll just have to find out- but I do think that when you make work that’s probably the work you’re supposed to make there’s often some fear. It’s very exciting to me that people around me, women, men, whatever, get it- they get what I’m trying to say.
I unconsciously felt [that the UK nurtured young artists] that when I first visited here and it played a role in me wanting to start my career here. I didn’t really have concrete evidence but even the studio space I’m in right now - we’re in Bank which is the New York equivalent to Wall Street. Can you imagine like, affordable artist studios there? So there’s something going on- I don’t know the details, but there’s some kind of support and respect for emerging artists.
Who are some of your artistic influences?
Oh my goodness! I feel like that is something that’s just like, constantly evolving. It depends on the week really, but I feel like lately, this work has been really influenced by Japanese
Shunga prints and the way that like in these prints I feel like there’s just such a range of sexual experience that’s explored – some of them are humorous, some of them are educational (how to pleasure yourself, how to pleasure your partner) they’re just so lacking in shame around sex and I think that engaging with these works has really really helped me imagine that erotic art can be something I could make that wouldn’t just be pornographic, so that’s been a huge influences. I also think that the way that line is used so effectively in the Shunga prints has helped me surrender to that too, that I don’t have to fully describe a space, I can just use line. I think Joan Mitchell is an artist I’m constantly returning to because of her explosive use of color. I think there’s a lot of contemporary artists that are making work about sexuality and the body that I’m really interested in- Elizabeth Glaessner, Naudline Pierre, Sarah Anstis, Jenna Gribbon- there’s just so many people and I feel so excited to be in the same world. I’m also getting really interested in James Turrell- I’m interested in the intersections between the sexual and the spiritual and I’m exploring with taking transparent material and putting it near a window so I’m starting to move into that direction a little more. I feel like I could just go on and on. Hilma Af Klimt and tantric art – in thinking about intersections between the erotic and the spiritual and how that intersects with the body and yoga.
What projects are you working on currently that you’re excited about? What is your favorite work of yours right now and why?
I’m opening a show at Arusha gallery – what’s fun about it is the opportunity to make a playlist and put together quotes and offer my own writing and media to contextualize my work so I think that that’s a really exciting project. I’m also excited about a project I have coming up with White Crypt gallery where a bunch of artists are working together to create an oracle deck influenced by our dreams. Later on in the year I’m going to be showing at a church that has stained glass windows which I can’t wait to respond to, I’m very excited about that. In terms of my favorite piece- gosh I was going to say the Horse but I think I changed my mind and I’m going to say the Vagina Candle painting because I love it when I can find a simple way to nail the things I’m interested in and there’s something about the way that that work is about the meditative, it’s about the body- the paint is really thick and juicy and shiny and has its own bodily presence- I like the way you look at it can see one thing or the other thing and there’s something philosophical about that – can you see them both at the same time what do your eyes see first? It’s the perfect intersection between conceptual work and physical work.