Ellen Altfest
Thomas Jefferson famously instructed, 'In matters of style, swim with the current; in matters of principle, stand like a rock.' Yet for New York-based painter Ellen Altfest, style has been a manner of principle and her refusal to flow with fashion has made her rock-hard style into a virtue. While the New York scene was lauding grungy, neo-fauvist, slap-dash painting techniques and far-out-fantasy imagery as cool, Altfest was devoting months and months to meticulously rendering the objects she painted from life in her studio.
Ellen Alfest was raised in Manhattan and completed her undergraduate study at Cornell University, one of America's prestigious Ivy League universities located in rural Ithaca, New York, before she received an M.F.A degree from Yale University in 1997. At Yale, Alfest interviewed Becky Smith, now director of Manhattan's aptly named Bellwether gallery. She had her debut solo show at the then Brooklyn-based Bellwether gallery in 2002 and has been represented by Smith ever since.
The fifteen oil-on-canvas paintings in her 2006 solo exhibition at Bellwether's current Chelsea location included shockingly precise images of driftwood, a potted houseplant, cacti, and a haggard-looking tumble-weed propped up in Alfest's studio. The contrast between her industrial work-space and the tumble-weed's wild tangle poetically illustrated how far the object was from home, and by extension, how far urbanites, even urban artists who paint from life, are from nature. Despite the visceral impact of her subject matter, her work is particularly powerful because the seriousness of her execution speaks of a dedication to getting technique right without shortcuts. Smith describes Alfest as 'the embodiment of the kind of confidence in oneself necessary to define one's long-term goals and stick to them regardless of how easy it is it to get blown around by the winds of fashion, in the art world.'
In July 2006, Alfest curated an exhibit simply titled 'Men' for the I-20 gallery in Manhattan's Chelsea. The show presented ten paintings of men by women artists, including Alfest's arrestingly realistic painting of a man's flaccid penis propped on a paint-splattered stool, a glittering, bejewelled painting by Chie Fueki of two bodybuilders reminiscent of Chris Offili's richly ornate canvases, Clare Rojas's painting of two Victorian wrestlers, with erections, fist-fighting in front of a bemused woman, and a painting by Hilary Harkness, known for her magnificent paintings of impossibly lithe, leggy and long female figures in sadistic, hyper-sexual, single-sex societies. Also on view was Marina Kappos' streamlined painting Josh in which the artist achieves a woman's wish-fulfillment fantasy by snapping black-tape over a cocky-looking man's mouth.
In addition to having two of her startling still-lives and Penis‚ included in the 'USA Today,' exhibition, which opens on 6 October at the Royal Academy, London, Alfest will also be part of a new group of international artists working with the currently expanding White Cube gallery.
ANA FINEL HONIGMAN: Do contemporary concepts of coolness‚ matter to you, as an artist?
ELLEN ALTFEST: I wouldn't be making still-life paintings if cool was at the top of my list of things to be. But I have always wanted my work to have a dialogue with contemporary art. It's a good time to be a realist painter because right now an artist can do anything and if it's done in an interesting way it will be accepted or at least considered. Of course there is pressure here, in New York, to be cool by doing something that looks new. Newness is very important, even if it's ultimately a fallacy. I look closely at what's going on in the contemporary gallery scene but I'm also reverent of the past, and I like to take from it what I can.
AFH: What eras influence you the most?
EA: There are two eras I feel most strongly connected to: the seventies and the thirties. I was a child in the seventies and I think everyone harbours nostalgia for the decade when they were children. I connect to seventies sensibilities and I feel an affinity with the realist painters of that time. I also appreciate 70s minimalism. I realize my interest in that genre is difficult to justify, but, as a viewer, I appreciate people like Dan Flavin for producing direct and understated work. The representational paintings of the thirties fascinate me. I feel an affinity with painters from that era and later, like Stanley Spencer, Georgia O'Keeffe, Ivan Albright and also early Lucian Freud. These artists painted from life and had a strong psychological component to their work.
AFH: Skillful realist painting is arguably the genre most universally recognized as 'good art' or as 'art' outside fashionable art centres, like London or Manhattan, which have other priorities. Are you intending to produce art that is universal?
EA: I'm from New York, so I can't say what people outside the city are likely to expect from or in the art they like. I can say that I think people in New York always want art with something of an edge to it. A sophisticated audience will always want something with an edge, regardless of where they're from, so perhaps I am just working from the premise that New Yorkers are sophisticated enough to always want something a little 'off.' What I do know is that they are not happy with just a pretty picture.
AFH: Where do you see the 'edge' in your imagery? Your work might not be decorative but as representational painting, it is still more universally accessible than most of the art currently on view in Manhattan galleries.
EA: It is true that my work involves recognizable imagery and a particular degree of technical fluency, so people can relate to it. I think part of the tension in my work is that it hovers between something traditional and something else that is less defined. I'm making very realistic paintings but I'm after something abstract, something that transcends realism. The paintings are so heavy with detail they are on the brink of collapse. There is no distinction between foreground and background. The objects exist in a shallow and confined space. When you stand in front of them it's difficult to focus on any one thing. That's not just seeing and identifying the thing but, hopefully, experiencing it.
AFH: Do you expect viewers to be fluent in the vocabulary of traditional still life, where objects carry specific symbolic meanings?
EA: No, I don't like being that literal. I make every decision, from the subject matter to the final presentation, very deliberately but I want to keep things open. I like to defy what is traditionally considered a still life. My still lifes take things that might not be obviously pleasing or carry a clear symbolic meaning. I bring things together that don't normally relate, like a piece of driftwood on a windowsill in front of some buildings. I am not interested in painting, say, a bowl of peaches with a knife on a table or in portraying a scene of domestic harmony.
AFH: Yet you are aware that your style and your subject matter lead viewers to wonder whether there is a specific narrative or meaning you intend to express?
EA: Not really. I'm not looking to make something that is easily defined.
AFH: Do you anthropomorphize your still-life subjects or are they just objects to you?
EA: I fluctuate between the two. I represent things as they are but I do sometimes think of the objects as characters with personalities. To me the tumbleweed is a very psychological painting. A bowl of fruit is very matter of fact but the tumbleweed, which is a huge tangle, represents some sort of anxiety. Making that painting was certainly anxiety provoking.
AFH: How does being used to ascribing physiological attributes and personalities to objects affect your current series of figure paintings when the intense, precise attention you give a model's body is so different from the way people usually relate to each other or try and understand each other's personalities?
EA: I treat my still life objects like human subjects and my human subjects as still life objects. With the way I crop things, what I include and what I exclude, I think I'm saying something more about myself as a viewer than about the subject as a person.
AFH: Do you see your still-lifes as in opposition to your figurative paintings, or are these all part of something you consider to be connected?
EA: That's a complex issue for me. For example, I had some trepidation when I learned my 2006 painting Penis would be included in the Saatchi Gallery's 'USA Today' show because I was concerned about how it would relate to my other work in the show. The tumbleweed and two logs were part of a separate series that was exhibited at the Bellwether gallery in December 2005, as part of a unified body of work. The completion of that series marked the beginning of this next body of work.
AFH: How does Penis relate to your previous bodies of work?
EA: The Penis painting is a transition between the two groups of work. I was interested in making a small painting, in part, because I wanted to see whether I could paint the figure. Men were something I've known I wanted to paint for a long, long time when I was working on the still-life series but
I knew I needed to finish one body of work first before starting another.
AFH: Why men?
EA: I feel like I have a complicated relation to men, in terms of their being different. It is not dissimilar to me being a New Yorker going to California to make paintings of cactus plants. I am a woman looking at a
man's penis, trying to understand it, but also trying to contain and control it.
AFH: You realize that if you were a male painter saying exactly what you just said about wanting to paint women in order to 'control' and 'contain' them, or were painting them as if they were objects, that you'd be considered a misogynist?
EA: I can see that. I look at the spirit in which some male painters objectify their female models and I find something fascinating there. Maybe if I was in love right now, the work or my thinking about it would be
different. Still, many of my non-human subjects are contained or controlled. A tumbleweed is usually blowing around the desert, not confined in an artist's studio.
AFH: Do you think a feminist interpretation of this painting, or of your 'Men' show, is legitimate? Would you say either was, maybe, retribution for the way male artists have historically treated their female models?
EA: I organized 'Men' to create a dialogue about how women artists represent men. However, I am not an expert on feminism. I paint what I want to see.
AFH: But, as it is, the penis clearly belongs to a model, not a man you love. Were you intending it to appear impersonal?
EA: I was after a straightforward, direct observation of the penis. People (men especially) ask me why I didn't paint an erection. I think I wouldn't paint an erection because I want something a little more ordinary. Still, this series is a work in progress.
AFH: Who was the model you used and how were you introduced to him?
EA: When I started this process, I wasn't sure whether I wanted to paint men I was attracted to, or had a personal connection to, but in the end I decided to start with a man who I thought was good-looking but didn't know. I met my current model through Becky [Smith] my dealer [at Bellwether Gallery]. He is a younger artist.
AFH: What is his work like?
EA: I am lucky because he is also a figurative painter and he really knows how to position the body, and to pose with the final image in mind as I've described it to him. He is really helpful.
AFH: Wouldn't it be easier to work with someone who you could pose and position, as if they were a still-life?
EA: I do pose him, but having a dialogue works well. We talk a lot, especially about figurative painting and new music. We're spending a lot of time together, so it's actually pretty great that we can get along.
AFH: Now that you and your model are closer to collaborators, will your friendship with him influence the way you paint him? Will you include his face in future images in the series?
EA: The next painting I'm doing of him actually does show his face. It is a painting of him sleeping naked.
AFH: How does he respond to having his penis receive so much public attention?
EA: He is a bit daunted. He didn't realize when he got involved that his penis would get so much exposure.
AFH: Along with Inka Essenhigh, you attended the artist Will Cotton's private figure drawing salons, before he stopped hosting them when they became too crowded. How has drawing from the figure in that environment influenced your work?
EA: Before I started going to Will's sessions, I hadn't drawn the figure since college. Will's sessions were, in part, how I developed the confidence to work with the figure again. But Will always used female models and I wasn't one hundred percent engaged during those sessions. It was an exercise for me but it also confirmed that I want to paint men.
AFH: I ask about the figure drawing salon, in part, because you didn't just extrapolate from those sessions and use the skills and information you learned at Will's in fantasy settings, but you explicitly pose your model in your studio. Is it very important to you that the viewer know you're painting the man from life, not a photograph or from memory?
EA: I feel more engaged painting from direct observation rather than from a photograph. There is a lot more information to work with and the result is much more intense.
I placed the model on a paint-splattered stool because I wanted to connect the penis to my previous paintings, which were all set in my studio. When I paint natural objects in urban spaces, it's kind of a metaphor for the artist in the studio: a living thing existing in a small industrial setting.
AFH: What was your initial interest in the tumbleweed?
EA: I was fascinated with the southwest. I was looking at the iconic desert images of Georgia O'Keeffe and the paintings of Marsden Hartley and loved them. I wanted to go out there and see what it was like because, it was something so American, and, at the same time, completely unfamiliar to me.
AFH: I know. We New York kids are always confused by what 'American' means.
EA: That's why I chose the tumbleweed to paint. If you grow up someplace like New York, which is so different from other parts of the country, you have a very unique idea of what being American means. New York is part of America, and New Yorkers are American, but maybe differently than how it is defined in less urban parts of the country. It's very cosmopolitan here.
AFH: While the rest of the country is Cosmopolitan magazine's version of cosmopolitan?
EA: I'm not sure about that. I had made a group of paintings after graduate school inspired by 1950s National Geographic's images of the southwest. In 2000, I curated a show called, 'All American' at Bellwether. It was about artists who love America. It was a little backwards, but I liked that.
AFH: Would you curate a show of artists who love America today?
EA: That was pre-9/11, so the whole idea of being patriotic or even curious about national identity has changed so much that I don't think I would curate that show today. That show came from a point when we were just leaving the Clinton era and still felt a lingering sense of being happy and comfortable with what America was and where it was going. There is too much angst attached to that notion now.
AFH: How did curating that show influence your understanding of America and being American?
EA: For 'All American', I included a photograph by Roe Etheridge of a red barn. It was completely straightforward and deadpan which I connected with. It was the quintessential Kodak moment. I wanted to paint something quintessentially American. When got to Southern California I saw these tumbleweeds blowing around town. So I shipped three back to my studio to paint.
AFH: Was a tumbleweed what you expected it to be from seeing them roll down ghost-towns and plains in films?
EA: It's unreal to see a tumbleweed rolling by the local Home Depot. The landscape there is nothing like our experience over here. It looks like a movie-set interrupted with strip-malls. There are huge cactus plants, mountains and desert everywhere. The light is unbelievable. You get a feeling of euphoria just being there because the sunlight is so intense.
AFH: How does that environment shape the culture?
EA: People there really are friendlier; I even became friendlier when I was there.
AFH: How important is it for artists to socialize with other artists?
EA: I think very. If I was living in seclusion, or even just outside New York, then I think I would really miss a lot. I wouldn't be able to go see shows. What is going on always enters the work, regardless of whether those traces are clear or not. One experience I found interesting was when I went to one of my collector's houses and discovered he was also collecting work by many of my closest artist friends. I was really surprised, because none of our work looks the same, but clearly we're doing something that resonates
similarly to some people.
AFH: Well, I'd imagine that as friends, you share a sensibility, even if that's not evident in your style or theirs.
EA: I often feel a shared sensibility with work I like, even if its video or sculpture. In this case I'd be surprised if you could make clear comparisons. I choose my friends because I like super-intelligent,
interesting and ambitious people but I found a space for myself by doing something other people aren't. Seven months for a single painting is a commitment many artists wouldn't want to make.
AFH: Your work seems timeless. How does contemporary art or culture influence your paintings?
EA: One of the most difficult things to do, as a representational artist, is make representational paintings that have a real dialogue with contemporary art. I couldn't give an artist a secret to know, or a set of rules to follow, in order for them to achieve that goal but they need to make good decisions. The most important thing is to always know what is good, what is tacky, what is melodramatic and avoid it. If you try to make something 'of the moment,' the moment passes. The ambition all artists need to have is to make something that can transcend the present moment. You might seem to be abandoning cool, and I realize this way of thinking might have made it harder for me to 'emerge' than some other artists, but I hope I've made paintings that are longer lasting.
ANA FINEL HONIGMAN is a critic and PhD candidate in art history at Oxford University.
Ellen Altfest, Tumbleweed, 2005
Ellen Altfest, Penis, 2006
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