(Guest Interviewer Maria Owen)..... A Minute with Sarah D'Ambrosio.
Hi! This is a newsletter about artists I like.
I began acquiring art through some friends that worked in galleries. I started small, working on a limited budget, for stuff I could afford. As time passed, my collection grew, and it was exciting to watch many of the artists I'd collected go on to bigger shows and critical acclaim. My goal with this newsletter is to make a digestible resource for anyone interested in artists that are making great (and still affordable!) work, whom you haven't heard about... yet.
I’ve had the chance to get to know Maria Owen a bit, gallery director for March, and she has always been patient with me and my very annoying questions and emails. You can read our chat with Maria HERE. Maria’s interviews with artists are always great and she is better at this than me so why not have her on and talk it up with a great artist.
With a show happening in 2024 at March, Maria got the chance to send over some questions to Sarah D’Ambrosio. Sarah’s work is beautiful and I am thrilled she took the time to do this and please follow her as well.
MO: Your work was just included in a show at the New York Studio School. Can you tell us a little about those paintings and what you're working on at the moment?
SD: Those two paintings are products of my homesickness. I have been doing lots of drawings and paintings of memories growing up in Coney Island. I don't have any real physical references for those paintings, just some drawings, so there's lots of invention. I'm also using memory for clues on how to move forward, but not necessarily for answers.
Coney Island is a public place with private moments. One of the compositions is of two figures changing under towels, which my siblings and I had to do all the time. It provided a great opportunity for figures to be pushed and pulled from under and over the shapes of cloth––creating passages between the forms until they became almost inseparable.
Another painting is of three figures, the central one plunging his head into the water. I almost gave up on that painting. First, it had more figures, then less figures. It had become too literal and self aware. I put it aside for a while until one day that central figure appeared. As I worked on the central figure out he started to keep getting more and more compressed, then expanding, then back again. It had become a mound of flesh in the middle of the panel which kept building up, his back more exposed above the water. The surrounding figures had become more subtle. They were finally playing the appropriate content role for their form in the painting.
MO: What is a day in the studio like for you at the moment? What are you thinking about?
SD: The studio can be a confrontational experience for me, but it's equally an act of self preservation. There's also a lot of waiting for the right thing to happen at the right time, so it's a matter of showing up often enough to make sure I don't miss that moment. It usually involves making an absolute mess, backing myself into a corner and then fighting my way out of it.
I have noticed these past few years I have a tendency to get locked into a sort of “analysis paralysis,” which causes me to get stuck and quickly become counterproductive. In response, I'm slowly learning to detach while trying to still maintain control of the composition. That's why I draw substantially more than I paint. In drawing, there are less variables and more intuitive movements; it circumvents some of that overthinking. However, form itself is always what is on the forefront and what excites me most. Successful form is much more gratifying in paint. My hope is always to get two ideas to co-exist in the same place. Overall, I want to allow the foundation of my visual vocabulary and sense of plasticity to organically slip through my subconscious in order to develop the forms I believe to be most true.
MO: You have a lot of very insightful painters in your life. How does your community inform your practice?
SD: I feel incredibly lucky to have so many painters in my life. But I can't say I'd have any of them without having gone to Brooklyn college where I met Diana Horowitz. I was a very anxious person at the time and I wasn't actively pursuing much in the way of a community. Mainly, I was just painting on my own. After graduating, Horowitz got me doing some studio assistant work for her and a few great painters in New York. In 2013, she insisted that I go to this new art program in Pennsylvania to study landscape painting, but also to build a circle of painters. I was reluctant, but I trusted her.
Mount Gretna School of Art had just begun and was founded by a great and overly generous painter named Jay Noble. There, I found lots of like-minded painters. After my first year, it really built my confidence for communicating with other artists––mainly because I was able to develop the ability to read the language of painting in a way that truly resonated with me. It pushed me into being more engaged in the art world when I returned back to New York. I found going into museums and galleries to be completely different than in the past. That experience changed everything for me.
I require lots of isolation in the studio but it's so difficult to perceive my own work all the time. Developing relationships and conversations with other painters is essential to feel like I'm doing the act of painting justice.
MO: What do you hope or imagine people see in your paintings? Or perhaps you aren't thinking about the viewer?
SD: Truthfully, I have no idea what people see in the work, that doesn’t concern me. If I thought about it too much, I’d become too self conscious anyway. I do generally think of it as being a conversation with other painters.
I like to believe the work is very human and speaks to the experience of what it’s like to describe some notion of what it means to be alive in a physical way. I hope that it’s apparent that the mark marking is coming from the gut––something more from my nervous system than my actual conscious brain.
MO: What's a painting or exhibition that you've been thinking about recently? Something that's been on your mind...
SD: Bonnard at Acquavella has been on my mind the past few weeks. Obviously, you can’t talk about Bonnard without talking about color. I'm always most attracted to work that's functioning in a very different way than mine. My palette is pretty limited and color isn't something I prioritize. But Bonnard’s color is an absolute workhorse and takes on so many roles. Creating abstract passages, building form, developing mood, light and atmosphere while never becoming a distraction from the painting as a whole. Even when those color choices are strong or strange. Yet they manage to remain quiet and open up slowly layer by layer. You never question the oddness because he convinces you this is the actual experience of seeing. He is just balancing all of these contradictions and has so much trust in paint. He is full of surprises. Sometimes I spend time with them in hopes that if I stare long enough , through some sort of photosynthesis, I’ll gain some of that magic.
MO: Who should Artstuff interview next?
SD: Grace Colletta! She's based in California, a great painter and person!