Sophie van Haaren Interview | Respect the Artist Interview
I am an American-Italian artist. I moved to Paris when I was twenty in 1975 and ended up living for a year in the ex-stable of the same building as Dorothy Tanning and Max Ernst (a blast from - and reminder of - the past). I went on to complete my MFA studies at Yale in 1982 and won the dubious “Best ‘woman’ Painter'' award. I moved back to Paris in 1983 thanks to a Fulbright grant (to pursue my ‘visual research’ with Joan Mitchell and to study the work of Claude Monet). More by circumstance than choice, I moved to Verona, then to the UK to Woodbridge in Suffolk (‘Constable Country’) and in 1992 to Senigallia, Italy on what was once Turner’s route from Venice to Rome. Romans hated the foreignness of his work in the 19th century, writing things like '' pictum non est cacatum”. Even in Italy (today) I am cut-off from painters who were important influences on my practice, from how I express things and from my ‘cultural education or formation’ in general. This is a good thing. Since I don’t completely belong here or there, I inhabit a permanent in-between or borderline state like my paintings do.
How did you get your name?
From time to time I borrow different names from my ancestors.
How did you get into creating?
I was brought up in a strict Protestant family where no one ever raised their voice or did anything out of character. Fortunately for me reading and drawing were considered edifying activities and even encouraged, so I could escape into other worlds in books (especially picture books at first) in libraries, and in paintings in museums, and still do. Even in the Midwest in the middle of nowhere, the Indianapolis Museum of Art had a good collection. Among the first paintings I ever saw in person, there are several by artists who were to have a lifelong impact: before I was eight, Turner, Constable, and Monet.. Later when I was about fifteen I discovered Odilon Redon there.
As a single mother of three, I still managed to paint in spite of always having to work long hours: both as an independent teacher of English as a foreign language and a translator from French and Italian specializing in landscape architecture. Constantly moving back and forth from one language to the other, and the chore of switching around word order in seemingly unending Italian sentences to mean the same thing in stream-lined English is so ingrained that it has to be a determining factor in how I go about painting, constantly rearranging and unbuilding. There is though a world of difference in intention: the freedom to discover another order through metamorphosis in the latter, as opposed to making different things mean the same in the former. Anyway, when my children were older I had more time to paint and finally having only myself to answer to, it felt like a fresh start, from zero, but also like a return to the same artistic concerns of the 80s when the only thing I had to do was paint.
Where are you from?
I was born in Indianapolis, Indiana. I live in Senigallia, Italy on the Adriatic Sea.
Who inspires you? Why do they inspire you?
I take a lot of what I can visualize, but can’t verbalize myself, from literature, especially Ovid’s “Metamorphoses” with all those species-fluid and shape-shifting bodies, or from stories and fairy tales I read as a child ( Rapunzel for example), or poetry (Emily Dickinson). Magnolias or an apple tree left in waste ground, my dog’s gaze, the Queen of Sheba’s cloven hoof, the change of seasons, works of art I’ve seen, even images from the glut on the internet sometimes, or just a color I’m obsessed with can be the trigger and open up a world of possibilities too so the process is more related to a kind of dream logic where cause and effect get lost. I like titles that mirror the liminal and ambiguous qualities of my work, that play on words, and have double meanings (like Shrinking Violet or Adriatic Blues). A title is in fact important, some come afterward and can actually reveal the subject matter even to me.
I am more at home, or in intimate dialogue, with the dead (artists of the past). Hercules Segers, Alexander Cozens, Fragonard, Maria Lassnig, and Kokoshka or de Kooning come to mind but I like (too many to name really) contemporary artists such as Martha Jungwirth or Frank Bowling or Rona Ponic.
What is your goal when you create?
To get better?
Schopenhauer said something like - we may be free to DO as we want, but not control WHAT we want. I can say I paint because I don't know how to do anything else very well in the everyday reality sense of useful skills and so on. Art is a place where I don't even have to know what I'm doing or better still why, because the rules that work in concrete reality don't apply.
What's your go-to song right now and why is it important to you?: "Dark Gethsemane'' and CHEMZ by Burial. Dub (music) and in particular both Panoram (my son-in-law) and Burial's use of voice (inclusion of word imagery and not just sound), was really influential in my practice, especially from the mid-2000s as I moved further and further away from purer abstraction in my small, mixed media collages: for aspect perception to 'work' I needed elements of a minimum of identifiability and recognition, a figure or body (otherwise nothing could be upside down, there would be no switch, no RABBIT/DUCK, nothing to distort).
What is your dream as an artist and what steps are you taking to reach your dream?
To get better! I try to take my own advice! See below.
What is the best advice you would give someone with a dream?
Oh! Well resorting to platitudes and cliches is really unhelpful. But it is important to be able to keep working even without support, especially when there is nobody there to tell you what to do next. That can be very difficult if an artist doesn't know how to be alone, a lot. Consider work as experimental that maybe no one will ever see. What seems like nothing much might become something with time.
Tell us about your approach and practice
Like saying that Narcissus was not enamored with his reflection, he was in love with the water, I am in love with the paint and not the image.
For me, paint is the material vehicle, and painting is the access to uncharted territory, an un-real, inner terrain vague - another dimension that I do not completely control, not leading but being led by painting, where I un-pattern and create other possibilities. Looking back over years of how I would describe my practice there are two buzz phrases that still remain:firstly the paintings are ‘UNplanned’ (there is no clear purpose when I set out, I find the subject in the activity) and secondly they ‘lie somewhere between something and nothing’. I can work on and unbuild a painting over years, or re/work into the traces of what i-ve discarded…Not unlike Edward Soja’s description of Thirdspace where "everything comes together… subjectivity and objectivity, the abstract and the concrete, the real and the imagined, the knowable and the unimaginable, the repetitive and the differential, structure and agency, mind and body, consciousness and the unconscious, the disciplined and the transdisciplinary, everyday life and unending history."
The switch is the jolt that interrupts one way of seeing (in my paintings I keep half-formed shape-shifting and morphing body-like forms fluid and in the progressive tense), to suddenly turn around into another way (or multiple ways) of seeing. This relates to what happens when you move back from up close to a painting and see something has formed into more than a hodgepodge of marks. It is a disconnect, a total rearrangement of one ‘recognition’ or aspect into another, yet you cannot actually see it happening. The Rabbit/Duck illusion is my favorite illustration of the switch, known as aspect perception - it is at the core of my practice and has been since I came across it as an art student.
Though my work doesn’t look like something done in the 1920s, there are many shared Surrealist concerns such as their interest in the unconscious, and borrowed strategies or methods that question, and explore new alternant perceptions of, reality including the paranoid critical method, using phantom and multiple images and automatism, action before reflection, and so on (via Max Ernst and Salvador Dali), which are key influences. Whilst working I often change the orientation of paintings to find hidden secondary images emerging, like Mr Hyde is to Dr Jekyll. My paintings are characterized by traumatized, fragmented, disjointed, damaged, and irregular surfaces integrating accidents, rips, tears, scratches and cuts. In fact, if my body of work were a personality it would probably be diagnosed as PTSD, delirious, disconnected, apophenic, obsessive, borderline, and as DID (dissociative identity disorder) more commonly known as schizophrenic and finally hysterical and insane. It’s true that I find the jargon that best fits my practice is also used to describe and identify symptoms of persons with disturbed patterns of thinking and psychosis who are all in all stigmatized as being deviant because of unacceptable negative and unpleasant behaviors that are exceptions to the (societal) norm that, it seems, come from a (dark) unknown place within, and in that way there is a correspondence of this underside to modern art. Yet, painting (art) is accepted as the place for beauty, and exceptions, the experience of exceptional beauty (whether in the world around me, dreams, or art), is what I want to reflect, what I’m looking for.
The following three paintings are representative of my most recent work
THE QUEEN OF SHEBA, 300x200cm 4 panels, Oil, soft pastels, and spike oil on canvas.
Since I need time for 'the mud to sink and settle to see things clearly' and this painting is so recent, I almost hesitate to call it finished. The story goes that the Queen of Sheba was tricked into revealing her cloven hoof when stepping onto a floor so shiny she believed it to be water and hitched up her dress to keep it from getting wet. What I liked most though was that the reflection was a way to put the face at the bottom right hand of the painting and keep it out on the top right.
APHRODITE (MAGNOLIA). 150x100 Mixed media, oil. beeswax, soft pastels, spike oil on canvas.
I am fascinated by a Giuseppe Maria Crespi Atropos figure (in particular her face) from the ceiling painting,"The Three Fates", in the Palazzo Pepoli in Bologna, and I putatively based the painting on that even though there’s a magnolia form instead of a head, which in turn reminded me of a Greek sculpture of Aphrodite lifting up her dress to reveal her penis (similar to my painting 'The Queen of Sheba', pulling up her skirts from what she thought was water, exposing her cloven hoof and hairy goat’s leg - her ‘animal nature’ and flawed beauty, hirsute being considered as unfeminine). Furthermore, the magnolia trees were in some sort of deranged and obsessive flowering mode during the dog days this summer such that I became obsessed with them. What is uncanny is that the flowers are bi-sexual with both female pistils and male stamens. So, even though associating magnolias, Aphrodites, and queens of Shebas by their gender-fluidity is not entirely factitious or apophenic (unmotivated seeing of connections), and I lost the original source or reference in the process of painting, I am really uninterested in realism or logic and normal meaningfulness.
MAGNOLIAS 100x150cm
I worked back and forth from this to "Aphrodite" during this past summer. By working on several larger paintings together (as many as I can afford anyway), I can open up, keeping up a flow from one painting to the next. I think this comes from Giacometti: early on in the course of my development, as an art student, I was influenced by the 'graphic' quality of his painting and how the traditional distinction between drawing and painting is undermined. There is a visible process of undoing or making absence presence, at play that goes beyond mere pentimenti. Almost as if everything left and visible is pentimenti, letting what has been abandoned show (in my case).
As Shelley wrote,
“From all we hear and all we see
Doubt, chance, and mutability”.
Connect
Instagram: http://Studiosophievanhaaren
Facebook.com: https://www.facebook.com/lynnyaw.boling
Stereotype Co’s mission is to shine light on dreamers around the world.
Your support helps us continue make a difference.