In the Studio with Samantha Rosenwald

INTERVIEW

Published Jan 5, 2021

Samantha Rosenwald in her studio, 2020

You live and work in Los Angeles, where you were born and raised. You have mentioned before that many of your pieces are a reflection of your upbringing there, and that you use art as a way to react and comment on the specificity of Los Angeles culture. Would you mind elaborating on that?  

Los Angeles is a hot bed for beautiful people. And, even as a child, you start to pick up on your plastic-perfect surroundings — moms at school pick-up with fake boobs, trending starvation-centric diets, school hierarchies based on hotness and celebrity of the kids’ parents, thin adults talking about how fat they are. It’s hard to not, at least subconsciously, let these gold standards affect the way you see yourself, especially when you are not hot, or famous, or popular. When you’re just a chubby little Jewish kid with frizzy hair, I’ve learned, it’s best to stick to comedy. I have always been a comedian — in part because it comes naturally to me and in part because it’s a great deflection from not being a cool LA girl. I find that mocking the things that intimidate you is sometimes the only medicine for anxiety-producing situations. You can try all you want to be that golden combination of perfect and chill, but it feels much more empowering to just shit all over the whole system that made you feel like you need to behave or look a certain way. And that is what I’m thinking about when I choose the subject matter of my paintings.

You work primarily with color pencil, and your pieces have a painterly quality to them, despite being made with what is traditionally viewed as a “drawing tool”. What drew you to using colored pencils, and what is your process like in creating a piece with them? 

I love colored pencils. I’m pretty sure they were the first art tools I’ve ever used. I like them because they’re so meticulous. The tip is so small and you have to be really intentional about every thin line you make. I am drawn to this kind of rigorous specificity because I’ve always been anxious and organized and a little bit anal about everything I do. But the thought of putting this unconventional material that’s often looked at as crafty or child-like on a stretched canvas just seems to me like a funny paradox. I think the medium you use should mimic the message of the piece and when I think about the irony of colored pencils on canvas, it just fits with the anxious and surreal and mocking themes I choose to paint.

The process of using pencils on canvas is a little tricky and took a lot of different experiments to arrive at the right method. The most import part is priming the canvas smoothly and porously so that the dry medium can affix itself to the surface. After the canvas is primed and ready, it’s just a lot of drawing and a lot of sharpening, so the pencil tip is always pointy and specific. Once I’m done with the piece, I spray varnish the surface to make it impervious to light or water or smudging damage.

Humor is an important part of your work and your practice as a whole. Can you discuss the intersection of comedy and art, and how both can be used as a coping mechanism? 

Humor is definitely a defense mechanism for me, whether that’s healthy or unhealthy. I really just love making people laugh, and if I can protect my emotions by the same token, that’s even better. As for art, I’m not sure I’d consider art a coping mechanism. It’s more a way of expressing myself: expressing rage or mania or frustration and wrapping it into symbols or punchlines or a series of riddles. I use humor in my art just like I use it in real life — to knock things down a peg, to shield the more raw emotions, and to just remind myself and anyone that’s listening that everything in life is just an absolutely ridiculous sequence of events that we might as well try to find the humor in.

Your work has been included in This Sacred Vessel (Part 3), which is a group exhibition that focuses on contemporary manifestations of still life painting. Many of your pieces play on tropes of traditional still life painting, such as table settings of produce and wine, however you also incorporate more contemporary objects, such as Clorox bottles and Prada bags. Can you touch on how you choose objects to reference in your work? 

I choose the objects in my paintings for different reasons, depending on the piece. Sometimes I choose to include something because I want to be like it, sometimes because I want to mock it, and sometimes because its meaning is integral to a joke I put in the piece. But I will say, that everything always means something — often, more than one thing. I like to choose objects that have strong innate connotations, objects that draw to mind a lot of different memetic information. When every object in a composition can have a multitude of associations, the meaning of the piece is endless and can far exceed what even I was thinking about when I made it.

To build on that, do you have any art historical movements that you look at for inspiration? 

Hm that’s a tricky question. I was an art history major so I have a lot of conscious and subconscious art historical influence. Mostly, I don’t think about movements as a whole. I like to think about specific artists and what they intended or what was going on in their lives when they made a certain painting, what a specific object in their own painting meant to them. Or, I like to think about how specific artworks are glorified and some are not. Why are certain works held to such a high level of prestige? What do we choose to remember and revere, and why? It seems like the western history of art is one big circle jerk of old white men, so I guess to some degree, what we collectively remember is dictated by them. Which, of course, is ripe fodder for mocking the whole system in which I’m making art.

It’s the new year, and I am sure you are relieved (like all of us) to have 2020 behind us. Do you have any projects that you are looking forward to this year? 

Yes! I am beyond excited to end 2020, and I hope 2021 will bring us all some majorly overdue peace and goodness. In January, I have a solo show with Eve Leibe Gallery in London, which I just finished making. In May, I have a solo show with Steve Turner here in LA, which I’m working on currently, and then at the end of 2021 I’m showing with JDJ | The Ice House up in beautiful Garrison, NY! I’m grateful to be keeping pretty busy as we all try the shake the horrors off from this hellish year.

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