Ridgewood

We visited Sarah Faux just as she was getting ready for her solo show at Stems Gallery in Brussels. Her studio, in the massive 17-17 Troutman building, we talked about her exploration in texture and color in her work and the analogous relationship between the body and paint.

In addition to her solo show, Sarah Faux’s work will also be shown at the Stems Gallery booth at NADA on May 5-8th.

I noticed that there are exposed parts of the painting where it seems that you dyed the ground and other parts where you left the canvas completely exposed. Can you talk about how you start a painting and how you determine what kind of ground you start with?

I try to work on a lot of paintings at once start each with different ground preparations like absorbent gesso that shows the texture of the canvas or slick, resistant oil ground or dyed fabric primed with something clear. I typically have an image in mind or at a minimum a color palette that functions as a jumping-off point for figuring out the ground. Lately, I’ve been drawn to brighter, more resistant surfaces, so that I can use paint more like watercolor, with the surface itself glowing through transparent layers. One thing I really get off on is watching a color change as a single brush mark passes from an impermeable surface onto an absorbent one. I prime most of my canvases with mixed surface preps so that the ground will shift beneath the image.

In several paintings, the same image is used with different color palettes. Do you start from sketches or is it more organic where one painting leads to the next?

Lately, I’ve been making pairs where I’ll use the same image twice. The pieces aren’t quite diptychs, but I do intend for them to be hung next to each other. I don’t think of this approach as switching palettes, although that’s part of it. My real aim is to complicate one sensory moment by depicting it with two different emotional tenors. Like in a recent pair, “Prickly Things” and “Blacklight”, someone is licking her own nipple, but each painting is a totally different recollection of the event. One’s bright, airy and dizzy, the other gritty, acidic and lurid. The image is conveyed in two different painting languages as well, with varying levels of legibility.

I think a lot in analogies between the substance of paint and bodily fluid. Like oil paint being a physical oily skin, or poured pigment reading as blood, urine, semen… The physicality of paint and the experience of living inside a fleshy mass are intertwined for me. And I experience the dichotomy of my own body as both an object and an agent when I’m in a state of heightened physical sensation. So, sexuality comes into play a lot.