In the Studio with Shelley Adler
by Anna Kovler
Apr, 2020
Shelley Adler’s portraits of women are striking. With a deft economy of forms she captures the enigmatic quality of the human gaze, loaded as it is with the sorrows, pleasures, and hopes of individual experience. Working with figuration since completing her MFA in 1987, Adler has been devoted to her style and subject matter regardless of the fleeting trends of the art world, developing a vast and nuanced corpus. At a moment when the permeability of our physical bodies and sense of interconnectedness are inescapable, the painted likeness of a person - whether stranger or lover - gains a new gravity.
I spoke with Shelley about the intensity of her portraits, her approach to oil paint, and how her studio work is going during the quarantine.
Anna Kovler: Has the current quarantine affected your studio routine? Are you still able to make work?
Shelley Adler: At this moment I am still working and able to get to my studio. I have a routine in my studio that I follow daily. If I didn’t have it, it would be harder to get things done especially during times like now when there’s so much distraction. That said, I’m definitely working slower than I normally do, which I’m ok with given everything that’s going on.
Right now I’m drawing inspiration from people who’ve lived through terrible and challenging times but who managed to do incredible things. Reading about these people and using them as subjects helps ground me and keep me focused on my work. I just posted on my Instagram a painting I did of Henrietta Szold, a person who did amazing things during World War II.
AK: In many of your portraits, a woman’s gaze meets ours, and we wonder what she might be thinking. Do you associate each portrait with a specific psychological state or message?
SA: I like when you can’t tell what a person is thinking in one of my paintings or anyone else’s for that matter. The important thing is that they are thinking. It is what gives the figure life….when you know they have a mind. There are many paintings where I try to neutralize the expression so as not to be specific psychologically, but I’m not always successful. I mean, I know how to paint a smile on someone’s face….but it seems that no matter what, I cannot get rid of a mad or sad expression. Sometimes those emotional states do mirror my own. I think that the emotional state of the painter comes out despite our best intentions.
AK: There is something very mysterious about the gaze of another person.
SA: It is mysterious, I completely agree. My subjects are mostly women – women I know personally and women from history who are often looking directly at the viewer. I am interested in that direct gaze that can sometimes be challenging and a bit aggressive.
AK: What is your current favorite thing that oil paint can do?
SA: I’m just in the middle of experimenting with a new paint medium. I’ve been using Galkyd Slow Dry for a long time, but it’s been increasingly harder to get so I’m going back to the very traditional paint medium of linseed oil and spirits. It is thinner than the Galkyd that I’ve been using and seems to soak into the canvas in a different way. I usually use my paint fairly thickly so the slurpiness of the added oil is both hard and exciting right now. I’m enjoying some subtle changes in my work as a result.
AK: How do you make your color choices?
SA: My color choices are instinctive and ultimately depend upon what I’m working on. Sometimes I’ll randomly choose a starting color, which can be from anywhere, maybe from a Diebenkorn or Degas painting, and then I’ll build the rest of the color based on what is needed for the subject. Getting the color right is the key to making the painting work. The figure presents obvious restrictions, the biggest one being skin tone, so sometimes I start there and build on top of that. And then again, I might start with the colour of the shoes.
AK: I know that you paint both from life and from photographs, but the two are quite different experiences. Do you prefer one to the other?
SA: I like both, but they really are very different experiences. When you’re working with a model, you’re both looking at each other for hours on end and you have to think and figure things out while someone is there watching you. They’re waiting, and I’m staring. It’s an extremely intense experience, but it’s also amazing because all the information I need is right in front of me. Working from photographs, on the other hand, can also be very useful, because it allows me more freedom to play with the image.
Shelley Adler’s studio is in Toronto. Her paintings are part of the group exhibition This Sacred Vessel (pt. 2) at Arsenal Contemporary Art New York, which can be viewed online.
Shelley Adler, Katherine with a cigarette, 2019