25 May 2025
More Aubrey Levinthal. A couple things in particular. Firstly, I read this on her Instagram from a February 2024 post that accompanies paintings of her partner and child:
“I’m careful to be too personal here usually, privacy feels important, the algorithms certainly don’t like it and I don’t often either. But so much of my work comes from this well of feeling and experience for and with them, and that should never be denied.”
Pretty much exactly how I feel. Despite having my boat rocked into self-doubting waters for a couple years, I'm back to allowing work about the people I care about. It just seems to be a natural thing, and it's nice to hear that echoed by an artist I admire.
Secondly, her words in a press release for an Ingleby Gallery group show she was in last year of artists responding to Bonnard: “And he described seeing from behind his eyes, of capturing the way a first glimpse of a room feels, and the urgency to get that down, the time between seeing it and painting it captured behind his eyelids. It was very freeing and wonderful to read and has stayed in my mind – his work has that authentic distorted response that memory so often has.”
That last bit, the “authentic distorted response,” is what I have been trying to say about what I like so much about Ground, why it feels like a step in a good direction. I never want my choices to feel random, so I think I'm subconsciously wary of that always, but the way representation is handled in that one feels playful and loose without it feeling like a guessing game. Still unforgiving.