CS: Do you ever paint from a model?
PF: Yes and no. Having a model in my studio is intense and demanding, so when I’m working on my large paintings, I prefer to be alone. I have to sit with myself and manage the internal voices, listen to them, become impartial. I have to weather the tantrums, listen to the moments when I rise up and say: Enough.
CS: Would you say, then, that your preference is to paint from photographs rather than from life?
PF: The processes and results are so different, maybe too different to even compare. While I do draw and paint from life, it feels like an entirely separate body of work from what I’ve become known for. My work from life feels like another painting genre that is not as interesting to me. My large idea paintings require for me to create my own space and reality. I have to spend time with the painting and let it evolve. It isn’t a “look-and-put” situation.
CS: What happens when you feel that process stalling?
PF: Sometimes an idea will stay in my mind, but it remains unresolved because I haven’t found a way to make it work. I will draw it up and see the problems, the traps, the cliché. I need to sit with it for a while and see if I can find a way through. Paintings need to stay on track. Sometimes they can lose energy. Sometimes I see that I’ve been grappling with an idea for ten years and then, suddenly, I find a way to make it work as a painting.
CS: I’ve read that autobiography plays a big role in your process. Would you be open to describing a painting that has those roots?
PF: All my paintings are triggered by real-life experiences. A painting has to work on many levels. It has to talk to the paintings in history that have gone before. It has to contribute, and challenge known meaning in some way. The painting has to be self-aware. It has to be visually exciting to look at but maybe not in an overt or expected way. My painting “The Wake” comes to mind. My elderly mother recently died. I stood and watched her coffin get lowered into the ground. There is the obvious, literal reading of a funeral wake but also this urgent awakening to life passing. I’m sitting up, woken from a dream and it is quiet, daylight, intense—and I am alive.
‘Domestic’ has such dull connotations when it comes to women historically, as if all the freedom and eroticism has been leached out and stolen.”
CS: What happens when you feel that process stalling?
PF: Sometimes an idea will stay in my mind, but it remains unresolved because I haven’t found a way to make it work. I will draw it up and see the problems, the traps, the cliché. I need to sit with it for a while and see if I can find a way through. Paintings need to stay on track. Sometimes they can lose energy. Sometimes I see that I’ve been grappling with an idea for ten years and then, suddenly, I find a way to make it work as a painting.
CS: I’ve read that autobiography plays a big role in your process. Would you be open to describing a painting that has those roots?
PF: All my paintings are triggered by real-life experiences. A painting has to work on many levels. It has to talk to the paintings in history that have gone before. It has to contribute, and challenge known meaning in some way. The painting has to be self-aware. It has to be visually exciting to look at but maybe not in an overt or expected way. My painting “The Wake” comes to mind. My elderly mother recently died. I stood and watched her coffin get lowered into the ground. There is the obvious, literal reading of a funeral wake but also this urgent awakening to life passing. I’m sitting up, woken from a dream and it is quiet, daylight, intense—and I am alive.*
This article was first published in Hi-Fructose issue 50, which is sold out. Get our latest print issue by subscribing to Hi-Fructose here.