Conversation between Jeffrey Saletnik and Rebecca Partridge
Jeffrey Saletnik: I’d like to start with something that struck me about the body of work exhibited here in relation to your artistic practice more broadly—specifically the Sky Studies and the Sky Paintings, and how you see them as being related, or not related as the case may be?
Rebecca Partridge: Well, the first point would be that the Sky Studies, which are smaller, came first. They are entirely objective in the sense that they are based on my experience of being in a specific landscape, then made with reference to photographic records of those actual skies. They come from a period of 30 days I spent on the northwest coast of Norway. I was walking every day, observing changing experiences of light and recording the sky with my camera. I’m often also influenced by the history of the place that works come from; there, walking in Norway, I was thinking about JC Dahl and his small clouds studies which were made around Bergen.
JS: And the larger Sky Paintings?
RP: The Sky Paintings are about a different kind of objectivity. They also come from a sustained period of looking, in the Mojave Desert in 2015, just after we met during my residency at The Josef and Anni Albers Foundation. I got up every morning in the desert to watch the transition of dark to dawn, and then every evening I watched the dusk, just looking and looking. But I made the first Sky Paintings from my memory of these observations. This shifts the perceptual dynamic in the work—from the photographic record of an experience to the memory of it.
JS: I suspected this, that they were made separately, differently. You talk about how with the Sky Studies, you use the photographic image as a reference when you go to the studio to make a work. Whereas the Sky Paintings—which also are made with a different medium, in watercolour rather than oil, and are different in scale—are more internal, reflective. They seem to be about attention more generally, both attention to the external world, but also, to some extent, attention to a kind of inner sensation—something that accumulates and is carried within. If you’re using photographs to mediate something about visual experience in the Sky Studies, then, I wonder, are there further devices that you use to mediate other aspects of what becomes the sensation that’s brought forth in the Sky Paintings or other works?
RP: Well, to be clear, I’m not interested in personal expression. In fact, my use of photographs was meant, as far as is possible, to keep me away from any kind of gestural expression or personal experience of the sky. It’s as close to a kind of reality as I can possibly get, and the detail facilitated by the photograph then translates (I hope) some sense of my care and attention to the subject. The Sky Paintings are made in a very different way, where the scale of the action leads my attention to become more internal, so primarily that mediation is happening through memory and the body.
In other works, such as those in the Night Forest series, I have made detailed written descriptions of the colour in notebooks and then used the notes in the studio. I’ve also sung paintings! For Notes on the Sea (2014), a series of 12 paintings of the sea, both day and night, I wanted to connect a sense of exterior and embodied rhythm. The horizon line shifts rhythmically between the works, I then numbered the horizons and then sang them, but in a very direct way—three notes, three numbers (no flourishes)—which I recorded and played on headphones in the gallery, so listening to it became very internal and intimate.
JS: I like the idea of capturing the sea’s bodily rhythms rather than, as did Dahl and so many others, it’s immensity or force—and of singing paintings! Did you find ever that you were associating a kind of visual experience with the sound that you that your body was generating?
RP: Yes and no. The sound created a polarity between looking at something that feels distant or removed (they’re very minimal paintings) whilst hearing something embodied. I have synesthesia, so I do experience sounds as having visual correspondences, but every synesthete has their own particular corrolations which are stable and constant for you yet different to others. Again, I’m not interested in expressing any of my own particular visual responses to sound or the other way around; rather, I’m interested in synesthesia as a broader perceptual phenomenon; and moving from this into painting is not linear—the relationship is indirect. That said, synesthesia is essentially the map of what happens in the studio; it’s a framework of perceptual experience, of correlations and crossovers and I’m exploring what happens in the middle of that space. I think everybody has an intuitive understanding of this on some level, that there are connections between sounds and a felt or seen experience. In some ways it relates to what Josef Albers was exploring with colour: within a stable framework, there are almost endless variables which reveal a world of visual instability, an aliveness. So, I’m trying to map that in the studio in the small way that I am able.
JS: But even if not thinking in terms of personal expression, a circumstance still exists in which you somehow absorb sense data, work it over, and then bring it into painting. There’s a process of transformation. And, in that, I find it thought provoking that you seem to start with something concrete—yet also wholly abstract in its vastness, like sky or sea—and work to remove the referential without entirely losing the image.
RP: That’s interesting, because, up until around 2012, I was making geometric abstract paintings, which made no reference to the outside world. The paintings had become increasingly hermetic and I thought the way to break that was to explore abstraction through our visual experience of being in the world around us. Although the recent work is not referential to a fixed image, it is, as you say, to something concrete: ‘the sky’. For me, it’s not really about the sky in itself; it’s about translating a perceptual or sensory experience into something shareable and locatable. It felt like an act of generosity to do that, in a way.
JS: This reminds me of Agnes Martin, who also moved into non-representational work and who I know has been a figure of some significance to you. My understanding is that she sought a mechanism, a visual means to image emotional states for people to see.
RP: There are many resonances with Martin. To be honest, I think that some of the emotional states that she wanted to translate are things that I’m interested in too, but they’re challenging to talk about. If you look at what she was doing head on it can seem incredibly naïve—and I’ve got that in my work, too. This is what’s interesting to try and unpack: how do we talk about what Martin was really trying to do?
JS: I don’t know that I would use the word ‘naïve’ to describe the work, but it has a kind of essential or elemental quality.
RP: Not visually naive in any way, but it is in its emotional intention—she called one of her paintings ‘Little Children Loving Love’ for instance.
JS: Fair enough. My understanding is that Martin would ruminate on an idea until a rather precise image of it came to her, and then she would set to the task of translating that image onto canvas. If the technical execution of the idea didn’t work, she would start over, repeating herself until she manifest that image in the mind as an object in the world. The way that you describe making the Sky Paintings seems similar, and this is a compelling parallel because your practice seems to have so much to do with the tension between subjective experience and an objective reality.
RP: Absolutely. Martin talked about her work as being representations of inner states though they’re often named after nature like Night Sea (1963) and The Tree (1964)—subjects that I have painted, oddly.
JS: But you use more straightforward titles.
RP: I don’t want any interference or narrative to get in the way. It’s just the image, and then the way I translate the image through a physical process of making, which, similarly to Martin, aspires to an ease or a flow.
JS: And she worked serially, say, in a work like On a Clear Day (1973), which consists of 30 images.
RP: The title of which I have borrowed here, as a homage to her work. I particularly like the reference to looking and environment, whilst speaking of a quality of thought or a state of mind. The work itself is a collection of 30 prints as you say, variations on grids. There is a rigour that comes through seriality, from revisiting a subject matter so that you get to know it from many different angles. Repetition or variations on a theme can create a heightened sensory awareness to differences between things. It also brings attention to the quality of physical gestures. It’s quite interesting to compare Martin with Albers, actually, in terms of mark making because (and this is just my personal view) I find that any one individual of Albers’s Homages that you encounter can be a little bit underwhelming, the surface is marked as if made by a researcher who needs to get the colour data down. It’s subtly—yet very—different with Martin, whose surfaces are made with this incredible effortlessness. The mark isn’t serving another purpose: it is the purpose. It’s the ease and confidence with which each line is drawn which I find so affecting—she doesn’t grasp or hold on too tight. That’s what I’m looking for with the Sky Paintings—an effortlessness which is in fact very difficult to achieve. I often look at classical Chinese landscape painting or Zen brushwork when I need to remind myself of the quality I am after, which I think is what Martin could have been looking at as well. She was really interested in Zen.
JS: And in meditation.
RP: Indeed, there’s the Zen practice of painting the same circle, as a meditation, over and over again, and that act being representative of a state of mind. Most of the Sky Paintings get thrown away in my attempts to achieve what I want, which feels good actually—you don’t stop until you get it.
But that feeling of knowing exactly what I’m looking for before I begin a painting, which appeared to Martin, in her mind, that is what happens when I’m in the forest. I’m looking at the trees, and it’s that tree or that structure; it’s a physical response which leads to a precise image, somewhat differently to the Sky Paintings.
JS: I see; earlier, you made reference to one of Martin’s very first non-objective paintings, The Tree. Even if there’s no direct relationship there, between you and Martin, it’s a nice correspondence—don’t you think?
RP: Well, it’s funny isn’t it? I also painted the series of night sea paintings without consciously thinking of her painting Night Sea. Apparently, she titled that painting The Tree because she thought that trees were innocent.
JS: Yet what she painted had nothing really to do with the image of a tree. I wonder, since the Sky Studies are based upon something objective in the world, versus the Sky Paintings, which are based upon sense memory, is it important that the viewer understand this difference, or maybe it’s not a consideration for you? I’m trying to understand if the differences in how the works came into being matters for the viewer.
RP: I think it’s important, not that they’re told, but that it translates through the work. But this is where things can start to get a bit complicated because all of the paintings I make are entirely interdependent. As a practice it is all relational, and, actually, what’s really happening, happens in the gaps between the works, the space in the middle. Ideally, when the works are seen as a constellation of relational visual experiences, then I think it becomes self-explanatory.
JS: It’s almost as if the gallery space becomes a kind of landscape, then?
RP: Completely.
JS: I’ve had the experience of feeling within a landscape when visiting your studio and seeing your work as an ensemble. I wonder, is there something about the experience of the landscape—one we all have had in some way—that helps us to negotiate the gaps you describe? Because visiting your exhibition is akin to experiencing the weather, or the sea. We’re in it—part of it. The quality of experience may shift as conditions change but the framework never changes fundamentally. Is this fair to say?
RP: That’s a good way of putting it; I like the idea of connecting internal experiences to a kind of weather. Synesetheisa provides a framework of internal experience from which variables emerge but more immediately I’m offering landscape as something familiar—you can relate to it, you can locate yourself within it. Then if time is given to the work other things can emerge which are more internal or emotional.
JS: So the installation of a suite of your work creates the parameters in which someone can have an individual experience?
RP: Yes, and fundamentally, those states that I want to translate are states that are most easily accessible to me in landscape. I could use words like ‘expansive’, or ‘connected’, or even ‘calm’ … but again this is where things get tricky. Let’s say they’re internal perceptual states that happen in relation to visual experiences of landscape.
JS: Do you find this in paintings as well as in the actual landscape?
RP: Of course. I can’t escape the trajectory of Robert Rosenblum’s ‘romantic sublime’. I’m thinking of the lack of visual interruption (that we imagine is) being experienced by the figure in Caspar David Friedrich’s The Monk by the Sea (1808-10), then consider Mark Rothko’s later works as somehow a more direct experience of that within the painting. In both cases the lack of visual interruption facilitates certain states of mind. But as you said earlier, I am more interested in thinking about a connection to landscape in terms of rhythm rather than the immensity or force of the Sublime–which brings us to the precarious issue of beauty when painting a landscape; it’s so easy to fall into cliché or sentimental scenes. This is why it is important to open up the larger project and the relational nature of the works. It’s also why I anchor myself to objectivity, I am just painting something as it is in the world.
JS: It really is about a conceptual practice, then, as opposed to individual paintings or self-contained series. This brings me back to my motivation for starting to talk about the Sky Studies versus the Sky Paintings—about the way that they came to be and that kinds of processes and procedures you employed. I think what you say is absolutely right. They can’t necessarily be separated, because one can’t really see the Sky Paintings without the Sky Studies, or without The Albers Foundation pieces, the Night Forests, or the Desert Paintings. They are entwined, each part of working through ideas.
And it strikes me that they are tremendous distillations, especially in light of the scale of the ‘objects’ that you’re dealing with, like the sky, the sea, a forest or mountain—romantically sublime things that, in some instances, you fragment.
RP: I’m trying to think about somewhat essential ideas without being essentialist. The mountain in the Panel Paintingswas mirrored, fragmented, and then put back together so that you get a sense of it as coherent, yet you can’t quite work it out—it’s symmetrical and asymmetrical at the same time. So yeah, this speaks to a stable/instable dynamic, again, not unlike the visual dynamics that fascinated Albers.
JS: It’s in flux, as we are—constantly negotiating continuous sensory stimuli. And all we possess to navigate this landscape is our embodied experience. There’s something fundamental there in terms of how we relate to the world in which we live.
RP: Absolutely. That’s really the point, to explore how we relate to the world through our embodied experience and open that up in some way…whilst remembering to be present when looking and making, to pay attention to both our own sensations and our environment.
Conversation between Jeffrey Saletnik and Rebecca Partridge
Jeffrey Saletnik: I’d like to start with something that struck me about the body of work exhibited here in relation to your artistic practice more broadly—specifically the Sky Studies and the Sky Paintings, and how you see them as being related, or not related as the case may be?
Rebecca Partridge: Well, the first point would be that the Sky Studies, which are smaller, came first. They are entirely objective in the sense that they are based on my experience of being in a specific landscape, then made with reference to photographic records of those actual skies. They come from a period of 30 days I spent on the northwest coast of Norway. I was walking every day, observing changing experiences of light and recording the sky with my camera. I’m often also influenced by the history of the place that works come from; there, walking in Norway, I was thinking about JC Dahl and his small clouds studies which were made around Bergen.
JS: And the larger Sky Paintings?
RP: The Sky Paintings are about a different kind of objectivity. They also come from a sustained period of looking, in the Mojave Desert in 2015, just after we met during my residency at The Josef and Anni Albers Foundation. I got up every morning in the desert to watch the transition of dark to dawn, and then every evening I watched the dusk, just looking and looking. But I made the first Sky Paintings from my memory of these observations. This shifts the perceptual dynamic in the work—from the photographic record of an experience to the memory of it.
JS: I suspected this, that they were made separately, differently. You talk about how with the Sky Studies, you use the photographic image as a reference when you go to the studio to make a work. Whereas the Sky Paintings—which also are made with a different medium, in watercolour rather than oil, and are different in scale—are more internal, reflective. They seem to be about attention more generally, both attention to the external world, but also, to some extent, attention to a kind of inner sensation—something that accumulates and is carried within. If you’re using photographs to mediate something about visual experience in the Sky Studies, then, I wonder, are there further devices that you use to mediate other aspects of what becomes the sensation that’s brought forth in the Sky Paintings or other works?
RP: Well, to be clear, I’m not interested in personal expression. In fact, my use of photographs was meant, as far as is possible, to keep me away from any kind of gestural expression or personal experience of the sky. It’s as close to a kind of reality as I can possibly get, and the detail facilitated by the photograph then translates (I hope) some sense of my care and attention to the subject. The Sky Paintings are made in a very different way, where the scale of the action leads my attention to become more internal, so primarily that mediation is happening through memory and the body.
In other works, such as those in the Night Forest series, I have made detailed written descriptions of the colour in notebooks and then used the notes in the studio. I’ve also sung paintings! For Notes on the Sea (2014), a series of 12 paintings of the sea, both day and night, I wanted to connect a sense of exterior and embodied rhythm. The horizon line shifts rhythmically between the works, I then numbered the horizons and then sang them, but in a very direct way—three notes, three numbers (no flourishes)—which I recorded and played on headphones in the gallery, so listening to it became very internal and intimate.
JS: I like the idea of capturing the sea’s bodily rhythms rather than, as did Dahl and so many others, it’s immensity or force—and of singing paintings! Did you find ever that you were associating a kind of visual experience with the sound that you that your body was generating?
RP: Yes and no. The sound created a polarity between looking at something that feels distant or removed (they’re very minimal paintings) whilst hearing something embodied. I have synesthesia, so I do experience sounds as having visual correspondences, but every synesthete has their own particular corrolations which are stable and constant for you yet different to others. Again, I’m not interested in expressing any of my own particular visual responses to sound or the other way around; rather, I’m interested in synesthesia as a broader perceptual phenomenon; and moving from this into painting is not linear—the relationship is indirect. That said, synesthesia is essentially the map of what happens in the studio; it’s a framework of perceptual experience, of correlations and crossovers and I’m exploring what happens in the middle of that space. I think everybody has an intuitive understanding of this on some level, that there are connections between sounds and a felt or seen experience. In some ways it relates to what Josef Albers was exploring with colour: within a stable framework, there are almost endless variables which reveal a world of visual instability, an aliveness. So, I’m trying to map that in the studio in the small way that I am able.
JS: But even if not thinking in terms of personal expression, a circumstance still exists in which you somehow absorb sense data, work it over, and then bring it into painting. There’s a process of transformation. And, in that, I find it thought provoking that you seem to start with something concrete—yet also wholly abstract in its vastness, like sky or sea—and work to remove the referential without entirely losing the image.
RP: That’s interesting, because, up until around 2012, I was making geometric abstract paintings, which made no reference to the outside world. The paintings had become increasingly hermetic and I thought the way to break that was to explore abstraction through our visual experience of being in the world around us. Although the recent work is not referential to a fixed image, it is, as you say, to something concrete: ‘the sky’. For me, it’s not really about the sky in itself; it’s about translating a perceptual or sensory experience into something shareable and locatable. It felt like an act of generosity to do that, in a way.
JS: This reminds me of Agnes Martin, who also moved into non-representational work and who I know has been a figure of some significance to you. My understanding is that she sought a mechanism, a visual means to image emotional states for people to see.
RP: There are many resonances with Martin. To be honest, I think that some of the emotional states that she wanted to translate are things that I’m interested in too, but they’re challenging to talk about. If you look at what she was doing head on it can seem incredibly naïve—and I’ve got that in my work, too. This is what’s interesting to try and unpack: how do we talk about what Martin was really trying to do?
JS: I don’t know that I would use the word ‘naïve’ to describe the work, but it has a kind of essential or elemental quality.
RP: Not visually naive in any way, but it is in its emotional intention—she called one of her paintings ‘Little Children Loving Love’ for instance.
JS: Fair enough. My understanding is that Martin would ruminate on an idea until a rather precise image of it came to her, and then she would set to the task of translating that image onto canvas. If the technical execution of the idea didn’t work, she would start over, repeating herself until she manifest that image in the mind as an object in the world. The way that you describe making the Sky Paintings seems similar, and this is a compelling parallel because your practice seems to have so much to do with the tension between subjective experience and an objective reality.
RP: Absolutely. Martin talked about her work as being representations of inner states though they’re often named after nature like Night Sea (1963) and The Tree (1964)—subjects that I have painted, oddly.
JS: But you use more straightforward titles.
RP: I don’t want any interference or narrative to get in the way. It’s just the image, and then the way I translate the image through a physical process of making, which, similarly to Martin, aspires to an ease or a flow.
JS: And she worked serially, say, in a work like On a Clear Day (1973), which consists of 30 images.
RP: The title of which I have borrowed here, as a homage to her work. I particularly like the reference to looking and environment, whilst speaking of a quality of thought or a state of mind. The work itself is a collection of 30 prints as you say, variations on grids. There is a rigour that comes through seriality, from revisiting a subject matter so that you get to know it from many different angles. Repetition or variations on a theme can create a heightened sensory awareness to differences between things. It also brings attention to the quality of physical gestures. It’s quite interesting to compare Martin with Albers, actually, in terms of mark making because (and this is just my personal view) I find that any one individual of Albers’s Homages that you encounter can be a little bit underwhelming, the surface is marked as if made by a researcher who needs to get the colour data down. It’s subtly—yet very—different with Martin, whose surfaces are made with this incredible effortlessness. The mark isn’t serving another purpose: it is the purpose. It’s the ease and confidence with which each line is drawn which I find so affecting—she doesn’t grasp or hold on too tight. That’s what I’m looking for with the Sky Paintings—an effortlessness which is in fact very difficult to achieve. I often look at classical Chinese landscape painting or Zen brushwork when I need to remind myself of the quality I am after, which I think is what Martin could have been looking at as well. She was really interested in Zen.
JS: And in meditation.
RP: Indeed, there’s the Zen practice of painting the same circle, as a meditation, over and over again, and that act being representative of a state of mind. Most of the Sky Paintings get thrown away in my attempts to achieve what I want, which feels good actually—you don’t stop until you get it.
But that feeling of knowing exactly what I’m looking for before I begin a painting, which appeared to Martin, in her mind, that is what happens when I’m in the forest. I’m looking at the trees, and it’s that tree or that structure; it’s a physical response which leads to a precise image, somewhat differently to the Sky Paintings.
JS: I see; earlier, you made reference to one of Martin’s very first non-objective paintings, The Tree. Even if there’s no direct relationship there, between you and Martin, it’s a nice correspondence—don’t you think?
RP: Well, it’s funny isn’t it? I also painted the series of night sea paintings without consciously thinking of her painting Night Sea. Apparently, she titled that painting The Tree because she thought that trees were innocent.
JS: Yet what she painted had nothing really to do with the image of a tree. I wonder, since the Sky Studies are based upon something objective in the world, versus the Sky Paintings, which are based upon sense memory, is it important that the viewer understand this difference, or maybe it’s not a consideration for you? I’m trying to understand if the differences in how the works came into being matters for the viewer.
RP: I think it’s important, not that they’re told, but that it translates through the work. But this is where things can start to get a bit complicated because all of the paintings I make are entirely interdependent. As a practice it is all relational, and, actually, what’s really happening, happens in the gaps between the works, the space in the middle. Ideally, when the works are seen as a constellation of relational visual experiences, then I think it becomes self-explanatory.
JS: It’s almost as if the gallery space becomes a kind of landscape, then?
RP: Completely.
JS: I’ve had the experience of feeling within a landscape when visiting your studio and seeing your work as an ensemble. I wonder, is there something about the experience of the landscape—one we all have had in some way—that helps us to negotiate the gaps you describe? Because visiting your exhibition is akin to experiencing the weather, or the sea. We’re in it—part of it. The quality of experience may shift as conditions change but the framework never changes fundamentally. Is this fair to say?
RP: That’s a good way of putting it; I like the idea of connecting internal experiences to a kind of weather. Synesetheisa provides a framework of internal experience from which variables emerge but more immediately I’m offering landscape as something familiar—you can relate to it, you can locate yourself within it. Then if time is given to the work other things can emerge which are more internal or emotional.
JS: So the installation of a suite of your work creates the parameters in which someone can have an individual experience?
RP: Yes, and fundamentally, those states that I want to translate are states that are most easily accessible to me in landscape. I could use words like ‘expansive’, or ‘connected’, or even ‘calm’ … but again this is where things get tricky. Let’s say they’re internal perceptual states that happen in relation to visual experiences of landscape.
JS: Do you find this in paintings as well as in the actual landscape?
RP: Of course. I can’t escape the trajectory of Robert Rosenblum’s ‘romantic sublime’. I’m thinking of the lack of visual interruption (that we imagine is) being experienced by the figure in Caspar David Friedrich’s The Monk by the Sea (1808-10), then consider Mark Rothko’s later works as somehow a more direct experience of that within the painting. In both cases the lack of visual interruption facilitates certain states of mind. But as you said earlier, I am more interested in thinking about a connection to landscape in terms of rhythm rather than the immensity or force of the Sublime–which brings us to the precarious issue of beauty when painting a landscape; it’s so easy to fall into cliché or sentimental scenes. This is why it is important to open up the larger project and the relational nature of the works. It’s also why I anchor myself to objectivity, I am just painting something as it is in the world.
JS: It really is about a conceptual practice, then, as opposed to individual paintings or self-contained series. This brings me back to my motivation for starting to talk about the Sky Studies versus the Sky Paintings—about the way that they came to be and that kinds of processes and procedures you employed. I think what you say is absolutely right. They can’t necessarily be separated, because one can’t really see the Sky Paintings without the Sky Studies, or without The Albers Foundation pieces, the Night Forests, or the Desert Paintings. They are entwined, each part of working through ideas.
And it strikes me that they are tremendous distillations, especially in light of the scale of the ‘objects’ that you’re dealing with, like the sky, the sea, a forest or mountain—romantically sublime things that, in some instances, you fragment.
RP: I’m trying to think about somewhat essential ideas without being essentialist. The mountain in the Panel Paintingswas mirrored, fragmented, and then put back together so that you get a sense of it as coherent, yet you can’t quite work it out—it’s symmetrical and asymmetrical at the same time. So yeah, this speaks to a stable/instable dynamic, again, not unlike the visual dynamics that fascinated Albers.
JS: It’s in flux, as we are—constantly negotiating continuous sensory stimuli. And all we possess to navigate this landscape is our embodied experience. There’s something fundamental there in terms of how we relate to the world in which we live.
RP: Absolutely. That’s really the point, to explore how we relate to the world through our embodied experience and open that up in some way…whilst remembering to be present when looking and making, to pay attention to both our own sensations and our environment.
Conversation between Jeffrey Saletnik and Rebecca Partridge
Jeffrey Saletnik: I’d like to start with something that struck me about the body of work exhibited here in relation to your artistic practice more broadly—specifically the Sky Studies and the Sky Paintings, and how you see them as being related, or not related as the case may be?
Rebecca Partridge: Well, the first point would be that the Sky Studies, which are smaller, came first. They are entirely objective in the sense that they are based on my experience of being in a specific landscape, then made with reference to photographic records of those actual skies. They come from a period of 30 days I spent on the northwest coast of Norway. I was walking every day, observing changing experiences of light and recording the sky with my camera. I’m often also influenced by the history of the place that works come from; there, walking in Norway, I was thinking about JC Dahl and his small clouds studies which were made around Bergen.
JS: And the larger Sky Paintings?
RP: The Sky Paintings are about a different kind of objectivity. They also come from a sustained period of looking, in the Mojave Desert in 2015, just after we met during my residency at The Josef and Anni Albers Foundation. I got up every morning in the desert to watch the transition of dark to dawn, and then every evening I watched the dusk, just looking and looking. But I made the first Sky Paintings from my memory of these observations. This shifts the perceptual dynamic in the work—from the photographic record of an experience to the memory of it.
JS: I suspected this, that they were made separately, differently. You talk about how with the Sky Studies, you use the photographic image as a reference when you go to the studio to make a work. Whereas the Sky Paintings—which also are made with a different medium, in watercolour rather than oil, and are different in scale—are more internal, reflective. They seem to be about attention more generally, both attention to the external world, but also, to some extent, attention to a kind of inner sensation—something that accumulates and is carried within. If you’re using photographs to mediate something about visual experience in the Sky Studies, then, I wonder, are there further devices that you use to mediate other aspects of what becomes the sensation that’s brought forth in the Sky Paintings or other works?
RP: Well, to be clear, I’m not interested in personal expression. In fact, my use of photographs was meant, as far as is possible, to keep me away from any kind of gestural expression or personal experience of the sky. It’s as close to a kind of reality as I can possibly get, and the detail facilitated by the photograph then translates (I hope) some sense of my care and attention to the subject. The Sky Paintings are made in a very different way, where the scale of the action leads my attention to become more internal, so primarily that mediation is happening through memory and the body.
In other works, such as those in the Night Forest series, I have made detailed written descriptions of the colour in notebooks and then used the notes in the studio. I’ve also sung paintings! For Notes on the Sea (2014), a series of 12 paintings of the sea, both day and night, I wanted to connect a sense of exterior and embodied rhythm. The horizon line shifts rhythmically between the works, I then numbered the horizons and then sang them, but in a very direct way—three notes, three numbers (no flourishes)—which I recorded and played on headphones in the gallery, so listening to it became very internal and intimate.
JS: I like the idea of capturing the sea’s bodily rhythms rather than, as did Dahl and so many others, it’s immensity or force—and of singing paintings! Did you find ever that you were associating a kind of visual experience with the sound that you that your body was generating?
RP: Yes and no. The sound created a polarity between looking at something that feels distant or removed (they’re very minimal paintings) whilst hearing something embodied. I have synesthesia, so I do experience sounds as having visual correspondences, but every synesthete has their own particular corrolations which are stable and constant for you yet different to others. Again, I’m not interested in expressing any of my own particular visual responses to sound or the other way around; rather, I’m interested in synesthesia as a broader perceptual phenomenon; and moving from this into painting is not linear—the relationship is indirect. That said, synesthesia is essentially the map of what happens in the studio; it’s a framework of perceptual experience, of correlations and crossovers and I’m exploring what happens in the middle of that space. I think everybody has an intuitive understanding of this on some level, that there are connections between sounds and a felt or seen experience. In some ways it relates to what Josef Albers was exploring with colour: within a stable framework, there are almost endless variables which reveal a world of visual instability, an aliveness. So, I’m trying to map that in the studio in the small way that I am able.
JS: But even if not thinking in terms of personal expression, a circumstance still exists in which you somehow absorb sense data, work it over, and then bring it into painting. There’s a process of transformation. And, in that, I find it thought provoking that you seem to start with something concrete—yet also wholly abstract in its vastness, like sky or sea—and work to remove the referential without entirely losing the image.
RP: That’s interesting, because, up until around 2012, I was making geometric abstract paintings, which made no reference to the outside world. The paintings had become increasingly hermetic and I thought the way to break that was to explore abstraction through our visual experience of being in the world around us. Although the recent work is not referential to a fixed image, it is, as you say, to something concrete: ‘the sky’. For me, it’s not really about the sky in itself; it’s about translating a perceptual or sensory experience into something shareable and locatable. It felt like an act of generosity to do that, in a way.
JS: This reminds me of Agnes Martin, who also moved into non-representational work and who I know has been a figure of some significance to you. My understanding is that she sought a mechanism, a visual means to image emotional states for people to see.
RP: There are many resonances with Martin. To be honest, I think that some of the emotional states that she wanted to translate are things that I’m interested in too, but they’re challenging to talk about. If you look at what she was doing head on it can seem incredibly naïve—and I’ve got that in my work, too. This is what’s interesting to try and unpack: how do we talk about what Martin was really trying to do?
JS: I don’t know that I would use the word ‘naïve’ to describe the work, but it has a kind of essential or elemental quality.
RP: Not visually naive in any way, but it is in its emotional intention—she called one of her paintings ‘Little Children Loving Love’ for instance.
JS: Fair enough. My understanding is that Martin would ruminate on an idea until a rather precise image of it came to her, and then she would set to the task of translating that image onto canvas. If the technical execution of the idea didn’t work, she would start over, repeating herself until she manifest that image in the mind as an object in the world. The way that you describe making the Sky Paintings seems similar, and this is a compelling parallel because your practice seems to have so much to do with the tension between subjective experience and an objective reality.
RP: Absolutely. Martin talked about her work as being representations of inner states though they’re often named after nature like Night Sea (1963) and The Tree (1964)—subjects that I have painted, oddly.
JS: But you use more straightforward titles.
RP: I don’t want any interference or narrative to get in the way. It’s just the image, and then the way I translate the image through a physical process of making, which, similarly to Martin, aspires to an ease or a flow.
JS: And she worked serially, say, in a work like On a Clear Day (1973), which consists of 30 images.
RP: The title of which I have borrowed here, as a homage to her work. I particularly like the reference to looking and environment, whilst speaking of a quality of thought or a state of mind. The work itself is a collection of 30 prints as you say, variations on grids. There is a rigour that comes through seriality, from revisiting a subject matter so that you get to know it from many different angles. Repetition or variations on a theme can create a heightened sensory awareness to differences between things. It also brings attention to the quality of physical gestures. It’s quite interesting to compare Martin with Albers, actually, in terms of mark making because (and this is just my personal view) I find that any one individual of Albers’s Homages that you encounter can be a little bit underwhelming, the surface is marked as if made by a researcher who needs to get the colour data down. It’s subtly—yet very—different with Martin, whose surfaces are made with this incredible effortlessness. The mark isn’t serving another purpose: it is the purpose. It’s the ease and confidence with which each line is drawn which I find so affecting—she doesn’t grasp or hold on too tight. That’s what I’m looking for with the Sky Paintings—an effortlessness which is in fact very difficult to achieve. I often look at classical Chinese landscape painting or Zen brushwork when I need to remind myself of the quality I am after, which I think is what Martin could have been looking at as well. She was really interested in Zen.
JS: And in meditation.
RP: Indeed, there’s the Zen practice of painting the same circle, as a meditation, over and over again, and that act being representative of a state of mind. Most of the Sky Paintings get thrown away in my attempts to achieve what I want, which feels good actually—you don’t stop until you get it.
But that feeling of knowing exactly what I’m looking for before I begin a painting, which appeared to Martin, in her mind, that is what happens when I’m in the forest. I’m looking at the trees, and it’s that tree or that structure; it’s a physical response which leads to a precise image, somewhat differently to the Sky Paintings.
JS: I see; earlier, you made reference to one of Martin’s very first non-objective paintings, The Tree. Even if there’s no direct relationship there, between you and Martin, it’s a nice correspondence—don’t you think?
RP: Well, it’s funny isn’t it? I also painted the series of night sea paintings without consciously thinking of her painting Night Sea. Apparently, she titled that painting The Tree because she thought that trees were innocent.
JS: Yet what she painted had nothing really to do with the image of a tree. I wonder, since the Sky Studies are based upon something objective in the world, versus the Sky Paintings, which are based upon sense memory, is it important that the viewer understand this difference, or maybe it’s not a consideration for you? I’m trying to understand if the differences in how the works came into being matters for the viewer.
RP: I think it’s important, not that they’re told, but that it translates through the work. But this is where things can start to get a bit complicated because all of the paintings I make are entirely interdependent. As a practice it is all relational, and, actually, what’s really happening, happens in the gaps between the works, the space in the middle. Ideally, when the works are seen as a constellation of relational visual experiences, then I think it becomes self-explanatory.
JS: It’s almost as if the gallery space becomes a kind of landscape, then?
RP: Completely.
JS: I’ve had the experience of feeling within a landscape when visiting your studio and seeing your work as an ensemble. I wonder, is there something about the experience of the landscape—one we all have had in some way—that helps us to negotiate the gaps you describe? Because visiting your exhibition is akin to experiencing the weather, or the sea. We’re in it—part of it. The quality of experience may shift as conditions change but the framework never changes fundamentally. Is this fair to say?
RP: That’s a good way of putting it; I like the idea of connecting internal experiences to a kind of weather. Synesetheisa provides a framework of internal experience from which variables emerge but more immediately I’m offering landscape as something familiar—you can relate to it, you can locate yourself within it. Then if time is given to the work other things can emerge which are more internal or emotional.
JS: So the installation of a suite of your work creates the parameters in which someone can have an individual experience?
RP: Yes, and fundamentally, those states that I want to translate are states that are most easily accessible to me in landscape. I could use words like ‘expansive’, or ‘connected’, or even ‘calm’ … but again this is where things get tricky. Let’s say they’re internal perceptual states that happen in relation to visual experiences of landscape.
JS: Do you find this in paintings as well as in the actual landscape?
RP: Of course. I can’t escape the trajectory of Robert Rosenblum’s ‘romantic sublime’. I’m thinking of the lack of visual interruption (that we imagine is) being experienced by the figure in Caspar David Friedrich’s The Monk by the Sea (1808-10), then consider Mark Rothko’s later works as somehow a more direct experience of that within the painting. In both cases the lack of visual interruption facilitates certain states of mind. But as you said earlier, I am more interested in thinking about a connection to landscape in terms of rhythm rather than the immensity or force of the Sublime–which brings us to the precarious issue of beauty when painting a landscape; it’s so easy to fall into cliché or sentimental scenes. This is why it is important to open up the larger project and the relational nature of the works. It’s also why I anchor myself to objectivity, I am just painting something as it is in the world.
JS: It really is about a conceptual practice, then, as opposed to individual paintings or self-contained series. This brings me back to my motivation for starting to talk about the Sky Studies versus the Sky Paintings—about the way that they came to be and that kinds of processes and procedures you employed. I think what you say is absolutely right. They can’t necessarily be separated, because one can’t really see the Sky Paintings without the Sky Studies, or without The Albers Foundation pieces, the Night Forests, or the Desert Paintings. They are entwined, each part of working through ideas.
And it strikes me that they are tremendous distillations, especially in light of the scale of the ‘objects’ that you’re dealing with, like the sky, the sea, a forest or mountain—romantically sublime things that, in some instances, you fragment.
RP: I’m trying to think about somewhat essential ideas without being essentialist. The mountain in the Panel Paintingswas mirrored, fragmented, and then put back together so that you get a sense of it as coherent, yet you can’t quite work it out—it’s symmetrical and asymmetrical at the same time. So yeah, this speaks to a stable/instable dynamic, again, not unlike the visual dynamics that fascinated Albers.
JS: It’s in flux, as we are—constantly negotiating continuous sensory stimuli. And all we possess to navigate this landscape is our embodied experience. There’s something fundamental there in terms of how we relate to the world in which we live.
RP: Absolutely. That’s really the point, to explore how we relate to the world through our embodied experience and open that up in some way…whilst remembering to be present when looking and making, to pay attention to both our own sensations and our environment.
On a Clear Day
Conversation between Jeffrey Saletnik and Rebecca Partridge
Jeffrey Saletnik: I was wondering, to start our conversation, if we could discuss something that struck me about the body of work exhibited here in relation to your artistic practice more broadly—specifically the Sky Studies and the Sky Paintings, and how you see them as being related, or not related as the case may be?
Rebecca Partridge: Well, the first point would be that the Sky Studies, which are smaller, came first. They are entirely objective in the sense that they are based on my experience of being in a specific landscape, then made with reference to photographic records of those actual skies. They are based on a period of 30 days I spent on the northwest coast of Norway. I was walking every day, both observing changing experiences of light and recording the sky with my camera. I’m often also influenced by the history of the place that works come from; there, walking in Norway, I was thinking about JC Dahl and his small clouds studies which were made around Bergen.
JS: And the larger Sky Paintings?
RP: The Sky Paintings are about a different kind of objectivity. They also come from a sustained period of looking, in the Mojave Desert in 2015, just after we met during my residency at The Josef and Anni Albers Foundation. I got up every morning in the desert to watch the transition of dark to dawn, and then every evening I watched the dusk, just looking and looking. But I made the Sky Paintings from my memory of these observations. This shifts the perceptual dynamic in the work—from the photographic record of an experience to the memory of it.
JS: I suspected this, that they were made separately, differently. You talk about how with the Sky Studies, you use the photographic image as a reference when you go to the studio to make a work. Whereas the Sky Paintings—which also are made with a different medium, in watercolour rather than oil, and are different in scale—are more internal, reflective. They seem to be about attention more generally, both attention to the external world, but also, to some extent, attention to a kind of inner sensation—something that accumulates and is carried with one. If you’re using photographs to mediate something about visual experience in the Sky Studies, then, I wonder, are there further devices that you use to mediate other aspects of what becomes the sensation that’s brought forth in the Sky Paintings or other works?
RP: Well, to be clear, I’m not interested in personal expression. In fact, my use of photographs was meant, as far as is possible, to keep me away from any kind of gestural expression or personal experience of the sky. It’s as close to a kind of reality as I can possibly get, and the detail facilitated by the photograph then translates (I hope) some sense of my care and attention to the subject. The Sky Paintings, due to their scale, are made in a very different way. The physically embodied action leads my attention to become more internal.
But to answer your question about forms of mediation—in other works, such as those in the Night Forest series, I have made detailed written descriptions of the colour in notebooks and then used the notes in the studio. I’ve also sung paintings! For Notes on the Sea, a series of 12 paintings of the sea in the day and the sea at night, where the horizon line shifts rhythmically between the works, I wanted to connect a sense of exterior and embodied rhythm. I numbered the horizon lines and then sang them, but in a very direct way—three notes, three numbers (no flourishes)—which I recorded and played on headphones in the gallery, so it became very internal and intimate.
JS: I like the idea of capturing the sea’s bodily rhythms rather than, as did Dahl and so many others, it’s immensity or force—and of singing paintings! Did you find ever that you were associating a kind of visual experience with the sound that you that your body was generating?
RP: Yes and no. The sound created a polarity between looking at something that feels distant or removed (they’re very minimal paintings) whilst hearing something embodied. I have synesthesia, so I do experience sounds as having visual stimulus, but every synesthete has their own particular alphabet which is stable and constant for you yet different to others. Again, I’m not interested in expressing any of my own particular visual responses to sound or the other way around; rather, I’m interested in synesthesia as a broader perceptual phenomenon; and moving from this into painting is not linear—the relationship is indirect. That said, synesthesia is essentially the map of what happens in the studio; it’s a framework of sensory experience, of correlations and crossovers where I’m exploring what happens in the middle of that space. I think everybody has an intuitive understanding of this on some level, that there are connections between sounds and a felt or seen experience. In some ways it relates to what Josef Albers was exploring with colour: within a stable framework, there are almost endless variables which reveal a world of visual instability, an aliveness. So, I’m trying to map that in the studio in the tiny way that I possibly can.
JS: But even if not thinking in terms of personal expression, a circumstance still exists in which you somehow absorb sense data, work it over, and then bring it into painting. There’s a process of transformation. And, in that, I find it thought provoking that you seem to start with something concrete—yet also wholly abstract in its vastness, like sky or sea—and work to remove the referential without entirely losing the image.
RP: That’s interesting, because, up until around 2012, I was making geometric abstract paintings, then I flipped it the other way. The paintings had become increasingly hermetic and I thought the way to break that was to explore abstraction through our visual experience of being in the world around us. Although the recent work is not referential to a fixed image, it is, as you say, to something concrete: ‘the sky’. For me, it’s not really about the sky in itself; it’s about translating a visual or sensory experience into something shareable and locatable. It felt like an act of generosity to do that, in a way.
JS: This reminds me of Agnes Martin, who also moved into non-representational work and who I know has been a figure of some significance to you. My understanding is that she sought a mechanism, a visual means to image emotional states for people to see.
RP: There are many resonances with Martin. To be honest, I think that some of the emotional states that she wanted to translate are things that I’m interested in too, but they’re challenging to talk about. If you look at what she was doing head on it can seem incredibly naïve—and I’ve got that in my work, too. This is what’s interesting to try and unpack: how we talk about what Martin was really trying to do?
JS: I don’t know that I would use the word, naïve to describe the work, but it has a kind of essential or elemental quality.
RP: Not visually naive in any way, but it is in its emotional intention—she called one of her paintings ‘Little Children Loving Love’ for instance.
JS: Fair enough. My understanding is that Martin would ruminate on an idea until a rather precise image of it came to her, and then she would set to the task of translating that image onto canvas. If the technical execution of the idea didn’t work, she would start over, repeating herself until she manifest that image in the mind as an object in the world. The way that you describe making the Sky Paintings seems similar, and this is a compelling parallel because your practice seems to have so much to do with the tension between subjective experience and an objective reality.
RP: Absolutely. Martin talked about her work as being representations of inner states though they’re often named after nature like Night Sea (1963) and The Tree (1964)—subjects that I have painted, oddly.
JS: But you use more straightforward titles.
RP: I don’t want any interference or narrative to get in the way. It’s just the image, and then the way I translate the image through a physical process of making, which, similarly to Martin, aspires to an ease or a flow.
JS: And she worked serially, say, in a work like On a Clear Day (1973), which consists of 30 images.
RP: Yes. There is a rigour that comes through seriality, from revisiting a subject matter so that you get to know it from many different angles. Repetition or variations on a theme can create a heightened sensory awareness to differences between things. It also brings attention to the quality of physical gestures. It’s quite interesting to compare Martin with Albers, actually, in terms of mark making because (and this is just my personal view) I find that any one individual of Albers’s Homages that you encounter can be a little bit underwhelming, the surface is marked as if made by a researcher who needs to get the colour data down. It’s subtly—yet very—different with Martin, whose surfaces are made with this incredible effortlessness. The mark isn’t serving another purpose: it is the purpose. It’s the ease and confidence with which each line is drawn which I find so affecting—she doesn’t grasp or hold on too tight. That’s what I’m looking for with the Sky Paintings—an effortlessness which is in fact very difficult to achieve. I often look at classical Chinese landscape painting or Zen brushwork when I need to remind myself of the quality I am after, which I think is what Martin could have been looking at as well. She was really interested in Zen.
JS: And in meditation.
RP: Indeed, there’s the Zen practice of painting the same circle, as a meditation, over and over again, and that act being representative of a state of mind. Most of the Sky Paintings get thrown away in my attempts to achieve what I want, which feels good actually—you don’t stop until you get it.
But that feeling of knowing exactly what I’m looking for before I begin a painting, which appeared to Martin, in her mind, that is what happens when I’m in the forest. I’m looking at the trees, and it’s that tree or that structure; it’s a physical response which leads to a precise image, somewhat differently to the Sky Paintings.
JS: I see; earlier, you made reference to one of Martin’s very first non-objective paintings, The Tree. Even if there’s no direct relationship there, between you and Martin, it’s a nice correspondence—don’t you think?
RP: Well, it’s funny, isn’t it? And then I painted the series of night seas without consciously thinking of her painting Night Sea. Apparently, she titled that painting The Tree because she thought that trees were innocent.
JS: Yet what she painted had nothing really to do with the image of a tree. I wonder, since the Sky Studies are based upon something objective in the world, versus the Sky Paintings, which are based upon sense memory, is it important that the viewer understand this difference, or maybe it’s not a consideration for you? I’m trying to understand if the differences in how the works came into being matters for the viewer.
RP: I think it’s important, not that they’re told, but that it translates through the work. But this is where things can start to get a bit complicated because all of the paintings I make are entirely interdependent. As a practice it is all relational, and, actually, what’s really happening, happens in the gaps between the works, the space in the middle. Ideally, when the works are seen as a constellation of relational visual experiences, then I think it becomes self-explanatory.
JS: It’s almost as if the gallery space becomes a kind of landscape, then?
RP: Completely.
JS: I’ve had the experience of feeling within a landscape when visiting your studio and seeing your work as an ensemble. I wonder, is there something about the experience of the landscape—one we all have had in some way—that helps us to negotiate the gaps you describe? Because visiting your exhibition is akin to experiencing the weather, or the sea. We’re in it—part of it. The quality of experience may shift as conditions change but the framework never changes fundamentally. Is this fair to say?
RP: That’s a good way of putting it; I like the idea of connecting our internal experiences to a kind of weather… The thinking underlying the work is more abstract in terms of synesetheisa providing a framework from which variables emerge. More immediately, I’m offering landscape as something familiar—you can relate to it, you can locate yourself within it. But then if time is given to the work other things start to happen which are more internal or emotional.
JS: So the installation of a suite of your work creates the parameters in which someone can have an individual experience?
RP: Yes, and fundamentally, those states that I want to translate are states that are most easily accessible to me in landscape. I could use words like ‘expansive’, or ‘connected’, or even ‘calm’ … but again this is where things get tricky. Let’s say they’re internal perceptual states that happen in relation to visual experiences of landscape.
JS: Do you find this in paintings as well as in the actual landscape?
RP: Of course. I can’t escape the trajectory of Robert Rosenblum’s ‘romantic sublime’. I’m thinking of the lack of visual interruption (that we imagine is) being experienced by the figure in Caspar David Friedrich’s the The Monk by the Sea(1808-10), then consider Mark Rothko’s later works as somehow a more direct experience of that within the painting. In both cases the lack of visual interruption facilitates certain states of mind. But as you said earlier, I am more interested in thinking about a connection to landscape in terms of rhythm rather the immensity or force of the Sublime–which brings us to the precarious issue of beauty when painting a landscape; it’s so easy to fall into cliché, sentimental scenes. This is why it is important to open up the larger project and the relational nature of the works. It’s also why I anchor myself to objectivity, I am just painting something as it is in the world.
JS: It really is about a conceptual practice, then, as opposed to individual paintings or self-contained series. This brings me back to my motivation for starting to talk about the Sky Studies versus the Sky Paintings—about the way that they came to be and that kinds of processes and procedures you employed. I think what you say is absolutely right. They can’t necessarily be separated, because one can’t really see the Sky Paintings without the Sky Studies, or without The Albers Foundation pieces, the Night Forests, or the Desert Paintings. They are entwined, each part of working through ideas.
And it strikes me that they are tremendous distillations, especially in light of the scale of the ‘objects’ that you’re dealing with, like the sky, the sea, a forest or mountain—romantically sublime things that, in some instances, you fragment.
RP: I’m trying to think about somewhat essential ideas without being essentialist. The mountain in the Panel Paintingswas mirrored, chopped up, and then put back together so that you get a sense of it as coherent, yet you can’t quite work it out—it’s symmetrical and asymmetrical at the same time. So yeah, this speaks a little bit to a stable/instable dynamic, again, not unlike the visual dynamics that fascinated Albers.
JS: It’s in flux, as we are—constantly negotiating continuous sensory stimuli. And all we possess to navigate this landscape is our embodied experience. There’s something fundamental there in terms of how we relate to the world in which we live.
RP: Absolutely. That’s really the point, to explore how we relate to the world through our embodied experience and open that up in some way…whilst remembering to be present when looking and making, to pay attention to both our own sensations and our environment.