The Brooklyn Rail

I visited artist Loie Hollowell at her bright Queens studio on a bristlingly cold February day. We were meeting to discuss her ten-year survey at the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum in Ridgefield, CT, and her solo exhibition of works on paper at Pace Gallery in Chelsea. Those works had already left the studio, and Hollowell, a painter with an active mind and practice, had begun working on her next series: enormous, vertically rectangular paintings with two circles inset into the top and bottom hemispheres, one convex and one concave, one fully late-term and the other postpartum.

At my visit, these paintings’ supports had been built, but the act of painting had not yet started; Hollowell was in the midst of conducting color studies for them before beginning the arduous process of applying their pigments. In a different room, another in-progress series was hanging on the wall: a spectrum of tiny, rectangular, three-dimensional images, each painted in a modulated jewel tone that arcs out from and curves around a peak centered in the top third or so of the panel. These peaks, which appear to be rounded triangles at a casual glance, are taken from molds of engorged third-trimester nipples built out of the surfaces; they cast not shadows but flips of color onto their supports. These new pieces prompted us to talk about color and colorists, the experiences of women artists, and a seasoned artistic practice. This interview is edited from our conversation.

Loie Hollowell: This is my work area.

Amanda Gluibizzi (Rail): It’s so clean!

Hollowell: We’ve had it for a year or so, so we’re still breaking it in. I also like things to be very clean. This was a butcher. Ridgewood was a German neighborhood that got built up around the turn of the century. They had their businesses below with their living quarters above. The slaughtering was done here. And then this was where they did all the smoking of the meat.

Rail: Oh my god. Wow.

Hollowell: This was covered in big hooks. And there was a huge walk-in oven. This was a bit like a hose-down shower area to wash the meat, with drains everywhere. We reused the tile. We wanted to keep some of the historic elements of the old history.

Rail: It makes the viscerality of your work seem even more immediate, like, oh, the flesh! You have good light.

Hollowell: These were original skylights. I didn’t really think about moving those. My husband is a sculptor, so we’re always thinking about making sculptures together. This was our vision of having a sculpture staging area and the viewing room here. One of the reasons we really wanted this building was for the garage access to the street.

Rail: These paintings look pretty big.

Hollowell: These are the biggest paintings I’ve ever made. They’re insane because they’re so heavy. I wanted to make a painting that included a convex and concave space that was equally matched. We made them deeper, and then they also are super elaborate on the back.

Rail: Wow, it’s totally cradled.

Hollowell: We just weighed it. It’s 150 pounds.

Rail: You’re making full-on old master paintings!

Hollowell: I just wanted a simple thing, but as we made it I realized, “Okay, this is turning out to be a very complex system.” I made this painting small many years ago, and I’ve always wanted to scale it up, and now that Pace has this space in LA it’s like, “Oh yeah: it’s very high ceilings, lots of skylights, and I can make some big LA paintings.”

Rail: I had read that your other biggest paintings were six feet—

Hollowell: That’s the biggest. These are eight feet by six.

Rail: The width of these is the height of your previous paintings. Why eight feet now?

Hollowell: I wanted to make them twelve feet, the height of the ceiling. But I’m very glad I didn’t, because I have no idea how I’m going to paint this. I mean, the whole element of my practice has been the work in relationship to my body. But I want these paintings to explore an out-of-body experience, specifically the moment when I was in the birthing tub with Juniper and seeing myself from above. Astronauts have reported experiencing this cognitive shift when seeing the earth from space and it’s been termed the overview effect. I thought, I’m going to make a series of work about that idea of the overview effect, the out-of-body experience of seeing myself from above, where I become a planetary system.

Rail: This is then a radical shifting of how you’ve thought about the approach to your paintings. Because of course if we’re thinking about for example, these works with the breasts and the nipples, then we would of course approach them upright. Now, we’re still going to presumably approach them upright, but we’re actually looking at them from above.

Hollowell: Most of the birthing paintings I’ve been making for the past five years I’ve approached from the front, but also from an interior mental space. I’m hoping that the overview effect paintings can help me process the totality of the experience of giving birth, from one day having a baby inside you and the next they are outside of you.

I’ve been doing studies on my iPad, and the work’s becoming more color based. There are so many ways I could expand on this cavity, the empty belly and the pregnant belly, the postpartum and pregnancy, and then that space in between. At the same time, I’m very excited about these nipple works, which
are the tiniest paintings I’ve ever made.

Rail: When you think about the colors that you’re working through on your iPad, are you still thinking about them in terms of the symbolism that you’ve felt color has had for you in the past?

Hollowell: Yes. For a few years I went through a Surrealist investigation by impregnating the canvas with these bellies and nipples and using very human colors, like bile green and browns and pinks and maroons. I think that got me to process a lot of the conceptual elements that I needed to get through surrounding my births, but ultimately, I’m a colorist. I’m like a Light and Space person. And one of the reasons I wanted to do these big is just to get back into finding color as experience. On one hand I create work to process what my body and mind have gone through, and on the other I’m simply dealing with color and space and trying to create new visual experiences.

Rail: When I’m looking at this spectrum from the purple to the warmer end, I was thinking actually a lot about James Turrell.

Hollowell: This is my Ellsworth Kelly Spectrum V (1969).

Rail: Love it.

Hollowell: I think it was with Brice Marden’s death that I started thinking about all the male artists who we associate with exploring color and specifically flat color spaces. Like Josef Albers, Ad Reinhardt, and Kelly.

Rail: I can see why you would, of course.

Hollowell: I thought it would be fun to impregnate these historically flat masculine painting spaces with a nipple. So I’m trying that out for these; I have a series of them in the Aldrich show as well.

They’re small enough that I can do many different color studies at once and riff off a Marden one day and an Albers the next. I can just think about color for color’s sake and not imbue it with some kind of feminist thinking, because the color itself exists on an engorged third-trimester nipple. I’m always trying to match color to experience, which I think is good. But what if I just let myself have color be experience, its own experience within the presence of the making. So cheesy, but that’s the question that many, many, many male artists have given themselves. And I’d like to give myself for a little bit. I just want to make some color field paintings.

Rail: Why can’t a woman do that, right? It is, in fact, a feminist gesture to say, if I’m going to explore color, it can be color.

Hollowell: Women: we’re always put into that label, right? Because it’s the market that wants to attach itself to meaning. It’s harder to have, like, a nuanced experience with your work. Recently I’ve been sharing how my work was shaped by my experience having an abortion, which previously I hadn’t discussed because it seemed too forward and would turn collectors off, but now, people are like, that is important. So I talk about it now.

But it’s funny because that’s only part of my experience. There’s also being a product of an upbringing in California and the Light and Space movement and pictures of Rothko paintings hanging on my Dad’s studio wall. And beauty, you know; beauty is such a constant issue for me.

Rail: Yes, how do we, especially again, as women, talk about these questions?

Hollowell: We don’t talk about those Ellsworth Kelly spectrum paintings as being beautiful, but they’re really beautiful. Is it because they’re men that they can explore beauty and not have it be sidelined? Whereas for me, I feel like I have to always be thinking about if I’m playing into a female trope or not being feminist enough because I want to make something beautiful.

Rail: It’s interesting to think about color art-historically. In the Renaissance, color was female. Design and drawing, that was male. And then, color was female.

Hollowell: Like the act of coloring?

Rail: You could think about Michelangelo. He thought of himself, of course, as a sculptor and a drawer; therefore, he was the designer. The people who then created color for him weren’t women, but they were subservient to him, because they were his studio. If you think about the infusion or the flush of color, the inflection of a painting with color: all of that is female.

Hollowell: Oh, interesting. My son’s been really into comics, and we’ve gone to antique stores and collected old comic books. And you’ll look through the names of people that have produced these comic books in the eighties, or nineties. And it’s like, man, man, man, and then colorist: woman. .

Rail: Yeah, I mean, isn’t that a fascinating way of gendering that work? And so, if you think of it like, okay, I’m going to make this painting for color, that is, in fact, a feminist stance, because if you are then engaging with color as an active move, and as a decisive move, then that is a feminist stance.

Hollowell: Right.

Rail: At least art historically.

Hollowell: And, you know, I think we will hopefully get to a place where even that does not have to be defensible.

Rail: It’s true, too, though, when you think about the artists who are talked about as colorists, so few of them are women.

Hollowell: Oh, yeah. It’s really interesting. I just looked up when Kelly made his “Spectrum.” His original “Spectrum” was made in 1953. All the colors were in one painting. And then I was thinking, when did Judy Chicago do hers, that little table piece she made with the twelve-color spectrum and the cubes on top? She did that piece in, I think it was 1965 or something. And then Kelly picked his “Spectrum” up again in like 1966. It was really interesting. I would love to ask her if she was referencing his painting, and if he picked it up again because of hers? But you’re right, I couldn’t think of anyone else aside from Judy, who was making flat fields and blocks of solid color.

Rail: In terms of breaking it out like that, and a woman? That, I’m not sure. I can think of women painters who we would now call colorists, like Joan Mitchell we could safely say, or Helen Frankenthaler I think we can call a colorist, but in terms of who might have been called a colorist as she was doing it? Rare.

Hollowell: That’s where my thinking is at now that I have this work fleshed out with my gallerist, Jessica. The drawings for those paintings are going to be at Pace in March.

Rail: And how big are those?

Hollowell: The studies are life size. I took the cast of my belly and traced it on the paper and then expanded the energy rings out to thirty by twenty-eight inches or something. And in each drawing, the cervix effacement is life size.

Rail: And the increasing effacement seen in these drawings will be hung in a spectrum?

Hollowell: Yeah, it’s a spectrum. It goes from yellow to orange to red to purple and ends with blue, and we’re going to build a round wall.

Rail: And the wall will be concave or convex?

Hollowell: That’s a good question. It depends on what position you’re in. It’s a freestanding wall. If you’re standing in the space, you’re looking at the concave wall of the belly in front of you. And then my husband and I collaborated on making a birthing stool together that we’re going to have milled out of wood, like a communal birthing stool.

Rail: This is actually really interesting, because when I read the press release, I was envisioning it bulging out, like a pregnant belly.

Hollowell: And you would come and sit on the outside of the belly?

Rail: Right.

Hollowell: Instead of being on the inside?

Rail: So I’m both the pregnant woman, pressing my belly up against the wall, but also I could, essentially, I guess, be the baby too, right? Seeing the wall.

Hollowell: Yeah.

Rail: And then what about your shows at non-profit spaces?

Hollowell: The Aldrich show is going to travel to the Institute for Contemporary Art (ICA) in Richmond, Virginia, and I’m very excited about that.

Rail: It’s exciting.

Hollowell: I’m excited. I love the ICA and the Aldrich. This is my dream space to hang work.

Rail: How does it feel doing it in a non-profit, non-sales space versus a gallery?

Hollowell: Oh awesome. So much is mine, my work from my collection. They’re either works that I’ve saved or haven’t sold. And what I’ve decided to keep—because I’ve tried to keep stuff from every show. I think that’s the only way this non-profit show could have happened, was by loaning my own works and that of very solid and trusted collectors. I’m just realizing how important it is to keep work for yourself. It is also a luxury, because up until recently I’ve needed the money from the sale more than the long term rewards that come with keeping work.

Rail: Yeah. Because what are you going to do? How do you mark your life and the decisions you made? And this moment of your practice?

Hollowell: I’ve had all these works stored at Pace over the years, so this is the first time I’m seeing them in a long time. I feel like some of them are so much better than what I’m doing now. Or like, I was working with something really interesting that I shouldn’t have let go of so quickly. I can come back to that. Isn’t that nice? I thought it wasn’t very good, but now I feel it works.

Rail: It’s nice to think, too, about an early retrospective. When you’re referencing yourself to the degree that you are able to in your work, then you really are seeing a self-portrait of yourself as you’re developing.

Hollowell: I feel so honored to have a mini retrospective at forty. It’s crazy. It’s so cool.

Rail: When you think then about moving forward in your work, how do you see yourself then? Are you interested in staying with the childbearing body? Or are you interested in moving into the moment when the body starts to shift again?

Hollowell: When I was younger, when I first started making this work, I was like, how am I going to keep this up, because I feel like I’ve just explored sex for five years and wondered, is this too long, do I need to try something else? But I think getting pregnant, having kids, realizing the true cyclical nature of the body, not just the period cycles but the actual cellular changing, and then the postpartum repercussions. It just made it so clear that this is a subject matter for me that’s just going to keep going on and on. And also, I think I really felt a shift when I turned forty. It’s a real shift in my body, in terms of energy and momentum. This is like the beginning elements of aging. But I’m very excited to explore menopause. Hopefully by looking forward to getting to explore it as a subject matter I can counteract the fear I have of it. The more I do research into menopause, it seems like a very terrifying and painful thing for some people.

Rail: It’s just interesting to think about this practice then not aging necessarily, but aging with you.

Hollowell: Yeah?

Rail: And to think about things like, what does the body do? And then what does the painting do?

Hollowell: One of the reasons that I wanted to make these large paintings now is because I feel good, you know, energy-wise. I want to see how big I can push it. Because I know I can always go back down. But despite having learned how to incorporate help into my practice, like with the sculptural fabrication and the underpainting and some of the sponging elements, I still do most of the painting myself. And painting gets physically exhausting, so this question of age is a new one. I mean, I haven’t thought of myself as older.

Rail: Well, you’re not older.

Hollowell: But in the contemporary realm of hyping up the ultra-young. I too got attention relatively young. I felt like that was a new kind of thing that was happening, the glorification of the younger artist, the emerging artist. But it feels like I’ve been doing it for a while. And maybe that causes me to think, am I getting older? I don’t feel like I’m older. Yes, right. I’m not old.

Rail: It’s interesting to think about the practice as the thing that perhaps keeps you young. That’s the gift of having a practice, whatever it is, an artistic practice or writerly practice: the discipline and the commitment that’s required of that does, in fact, keep you within yourself but also outside of yourself.

Hollowell: That makes me think of my dad, who had a very severe brain injury from falling off the roof while trying to clean the gutter. He’s an avid time-commitment painter, like he’ll spend two years on a painting. And one of the only things that has kept him alive has been his painting practice. Even though his injuries include sight and hearing impairment and the inability to talk or write, he still keeps painting almost every day. When we make our practice really integral to our life, it is life-sustaining.

I’ve been trying to walk around in the city and think of everyone as a kid. Because I was thinking we’re all of the same generation. When historians look back, they’re going to say, oh, they’re only twenty, fifty, ninety years apart, they were contemporaries. Because I’ve been feeling older, I’ve now been thinking, what if we think of all of us, even this old lady walking down the street, as a baby? Because whether we like it or not, we are all going to be lumped together in time. In New York City, you’re just assaulted with so many personalities. I think having kids makes it easier to see everyone as a baby. And behaviors they learned as a child have not been modified in adulthood. But if you analyze everyone like they’re children, maybe it’s easier to take in the world and what’s happening in it right now?