Agnes Walden
Where are you from and where do you reside?
I grew up in Illinois and Minnesota and I live in Providence, Rhode Island.
What’s your favorite part of living in Providence?
I like that I can bike everywhere, and the ocean air is nice too.
How much planning do you put into an individual painting?
It depends. I create detailed, preparatory drawings pretty consistently. I make strict rules for myself as an arbitrary way of changing the approach to each painting, and I stick to them closely until the painting has enough bones and internal logic that I can mess around with those rules or contradict them.
How has your work developed in the past few years, and how do you see it evolving in the future?
I used to be a very wet-on-wet painter. I channeled Alice Neel and John Singer Sargent and always tried to finish everything in one sitting. When I look back at those paintings they feel forced or insecure, like I was trying to paint while holding my breath. That’s how most alla prima painting surfaces look to me now. In the last couple years I’ve started to be more satisfied by letting paint layers stew on the studio wall and letting the image resolve slowly, forcing me to be more deliberate in my decisions. I still use wet-on-wet occasionally as part of a larger vocabulary.
Are you formally trained?
I was an art major in a small but nurturing art department at Colorado College. It was a pretty old school drawing curriculum - all observational, strictly live models and still life setups or landscapes, always utilizing charcoal; I loved it. I went to grad school at Rhode Island School of Design.
Do you admire or draw inspiration from any of your peers who are also working now? Have you ever collaborated, or would you?
My friend Josh Meier. He’s thinking about portraiture as much as I am, but our work looks very different. He uses molds of his and other peoples’ bodies as supports for the painted surface and the work is very - to borrow his terminology - spooky-sexy. We’ve never worked on the same thing, but I’ve drawn and painted him a lot.
Do you remember the first work of art that captured your attention?
Window Overlooking the Woods by Édouard Vuillard at the Art Institute of Chicago is a painting that I used to visit a lot, years before I ever made a painting. It’s still one of my favorites; his touch is so soft but so crusty. A few years later in college, I remember I saw it for the first time in a while and I looked at the three flowers dotted on the left of the painting and thought “oh that’s cadmium red,” and I felt like a cool kid for recognizing what it was made of and having the same pigment in my paint box.
The drying of paint isn’t a metaphor for time and history, it’s a consequence of it, and that idea gets me really excited.
Agnes Walden
Why do/did you choose to work with painting?
I love the accumulation. I like how all the things that seem like metaphors in painting become much more literal and real when you start to scrutinize the physical processesthings like the translation of a subject from observation that occupied the same room as the painting, or the physical and political contexts that had to be in place for a particular painting to be 50 feet wide and able to dry in a thousand slow layers. The drying of paint isn’t a metaphor for time and history, it’s a consequence of it, and that idea gets me really excited.
How do you know when a painting is complete?
I try to get to a point when adding more paint would feel redundant, or even damaging. I see the ending as something fragile that you can mess up, or a window that you can miss. I still get easily overwhelmed by some of the basic facts of painting; how everything you do to a surface forecloses every other possibility for the painting’s future and ending. I think good painters are always a little freaked out about that.
What’s next for you?
I teach at RISD now, so I’ll be sticking around Providence for a while and taking my time with the next set of paintings.
What’s one of your favorite objects you own? What’s the story?
I own a Chicago Common Brick that I really love, which is the cheap, pinkish brick that most of the historic buildings in Chicago are made of, formed and fired from the clay beds that surround Lake Michigan. The story is just that I like bricks, especially the brickwork in Chicago architecture, and I wanted a little piece of Chicago to move around the country with me.
Is there any artwork on display in your home/studio? Whose is it?
Above my studio door there is a small Catholic icon painting that my brother gave me, copied from a 17th century Russian Orthodox church. When I tried to find a source for the original painting, all I could find was that it was used as the cover of a book called “Catholic Sexuality for Adolescents” which I find very funny. I’m not a practicing Catholic, but I think I owe a lot of my aesthetic sensibilities and knowledge of art history to my Catholic upbringing, so I still find the imagery familiar and strangely kind of cozy. I also have this theory that lapsed Catholic queer kids disproportionately grow up to be painters.
Are you influenced by any author or non-visual artist? Are you influenced by any artist that does something completely different than you?
I particularly love the writing of Anne Boyer.
