| Faith: |
Let’s talk a little bit about your background
to start. |
| Maggie: |
I’m from Wisconsin, born in Milwaukee and grew up there.
I studied at the University of Wisconsin in Milwaukee. I graduated
in 1996 with a BFA and moved to California.
|
| F: |
What was it about California, in particular? |
| M: |
If you grew up in Wisconsin, you'd want to move to California,
too. It is very romanticized -- warm weather, temperate climate,
ocean, mountains. I lived there for about four years before
moving to DC for graduate school.
My husband (Dan
Steinhilber) and I liked the idea of living in Washington
with so many museums and the relative proximity to New York.
|
| F: |
So, you just finished your MFA at American University |
| M: |
In May.
|
| F: |
What was your focus on? |
| M: |
Painting.
|
| F: |
Which artists have inspired you? |
| M: |
Mainly sculptors and installation artists, and most often
female.
|
| F: |
That’s great. |
| M: |
I really like Ann Hamilton, Janine Antoni, Jessica Stockholder,
Noguchi (a man), Barbara Hepworth, and Louise Bourgeois.
When I began painting, Hepworth’s
work was very powerful to me. Her
forms with the strong ovals worked their way into my painting.
|
| F: |
The pieces that were at G Fine Art [3271 M St.] reflect
that somewhat. I can see that now that you point it out. |
| M: |
Even more so, the work that I did years ago was directly
related to repeated oval shapes.
Also, Louise
Bourgeois. I saw a number of her sculptures when I was in
high school. I was really taken back by them, rather abruptly
by her pink cast latex sculpture -- Mammilia, I think it was.
Her oeuvre is extremely powerful.
|
| F: |
I love her huge Spider.
Let’s talk a little bit about what your work is like at
this point. How did it evolve to where it is now? |
| M: |
My current body of work evolved as I began to think about
paint in a more material way, rather than a transcendental
way, with layers of oil and washes. I had a very formal approach
to making a painting or a composition, and became thoroughly
irritated with that kind of thinking and criteria. Coincidentally,
I became pregnant and chose to change mediums, because I didn’t
want to use solvents.
One of my options was to work with acrylic, one of which was
latex. With that, I had to familiarize myself with a new medium
and, subsequently, a new set of rules. I started thinking about
paint, literally, as fluid rather than the appearance of fluidity
or translucency. I liked working with actual paint pours that
veiled each other, or not even veiling, but obliterating. The
opacity of the latex is concrete and aggressive, some history
can be found beneath the pours, but it is blunt.
|
| F: |
Starting a family has affected the way you work. |
| M: |
Because I chose to switch mediums. I think things happen for
a reason. Maybe [the changes in] my work would have occurred,
on a less direct path, the long way around.
|
| F: |
Okay, three words to describe your artwork. |
| M: |
Two that go hand-in-hand are wet and dry. Wet because my
painting is so much about the wetness of things fluid and drying
stages. It is a location for responding to pours and spills
both physically and conceptually -- that it’s this fluid
that I’m trying to control. Wet, dry, control; that's
what it is.
|
| F: |
Very cool. You mentioned something -- that the work
can come from drawings? |
| M: |
|
No. My painting never directly
relates to the drawings. For a long time, almost my
entire time working, drawing and painting were very
separate processes for me. Actually, I didn’t
draw much after I finished my academic drawing classes.
I really wanted to paint…. I consider my drawings
finished pieces. I take them seriously. I’m now
thinking about how my painting can interact in ways
my drawings do.
|
Pointer No. 2 (Gonna Get You) |
| Going back to control,
the drawings are all about control. I use marker. The
control of the line. Thinking about the marker as if it
were a fluid. Trying to make it more substantial like
the paint. It’s sort of a backward dialog with the
painting. |
|
|
| F: |
That’s a fine way to lead into your technical
process. What kind of materials do you like to use? |
| M: |
Well, currently I usually use latex. I’ll ask, “What
do I want the paint to do? How wet does the paint need to be?”
I use ink washes, too. The paintings, when I do washes, are
on canvas. I also do a lot of painting on acrylic that I get
from industrial sources.
|
| F: |
Chose a piece of art or a style of art you’d
be happy never to encounter ever again and why. |
| M: |
[laughs] I absolutely know the right answer
[pause]: Thomas
Kinkade.
|
| F: |
Okay. That’s a great answer. |
| M: |
[laughs] I loathe his work.
|
| F: |
It’s the strangest phenomenon. |
| M: |
I’ve thought about him. I’ve tried to decide what
is it that people like. It’s the sentiment. It’s
about the calm. It’s about a dream. This make-believe
of happiness that’s really very American. I think that’s
why he’s so popular here. It’s because people have
a myth about what life should be, or what life could be, and
what they want their life to be. He epitomizes that.
|
| F: |
Do you consider your work abstract now? |
| M: |
Yes, I do. Actually, in the last six months, I’ve started
to associate figurativeness with the pours, because they’re
animated. Figurative in the sense that the paint is becoming
a figure -- not referencing human figures the way we think of
people. It’s anatomical or embodiment. There’s something
comical in how they hold a certain amount of quirkiness or whimsicalness
or personality.
|
| F: |
How did you end up working with Annie Gawlak? |
| M: |
Luis Silva introduced us, and we had a delightful conversation.
A few months later, Annie saw my work and liked it. And there
I was with paintings at G Fine Art.
|
| F: |
The paintings looked really amazing in that space. |
| M: |
Thank you. The light there is really wonderful for those
paintings.
|
| F: |
What other influences do you have? Might it be nature? |
|
|
| M: |
| Japanese screen painting.
I started to look at those very seriously this past year.
There’s something about the structure -- it’s
so economical. It’s very elegant. And then the attentiveness
to detail. There’s also that idea of fluid lines,
which is such an important part of my work. I think they
[the artists of Japanese screen painting] fully understand
that, in the media and in composition. I find them very
evocative and profoundly beautiful. The Ukiyo-e paintings
[http://www.jinjapan.org/kidsweb/japan/d/q4.html] have
been informing a lot of the decisions I make. I’ll
study a certain painting, and try to figure out what the
hierarchies are and what it is that appeals to me….
|
Extended Clone |
|
| F: |
Do you come with a color palette ahead of time? |
| M: |
No, not entirely. I’ll start out with a few colors
in mind. Then from there, I go. I cannot predetermine what my
paintings will end as -- that’s not the way I work. I
have an intention. I’m also very intuitive. I go back
and forth. It fluctuates. I’ll have the paint doing what
it does when it’s still wet. I’ll try to control
that, and as it dries, I come back to it. I make a decision
from that decision. I respond again. Intent and intuition.
|
| F: |
What we haven’t talked about yet is that Dan,
your husband, is also an artist. How does that work -- sharing
a creative life? Or do you keep that separate? |
| M: |
We both thought that our work was independent from each other.
Since
we’ve had a child together, we’ve noticed that our
work has similarities. His work, of course, has a lot to do
with fluidness, obviously, with water. My paintings are skeletons
of water. His have water, or the work he’s shown here
does. We met as undergraduates, and the focus of our relationship
has always been on our development as artists. We fell in love
and married with that on the table. Our expectation is that
we will continue our work and support each other.
|
| F: |
And now you have the stellar art baby. |
| M: |
[laughs] That’s right. His name is Clay.
|
| F: |
How long have you lived in DC? |
| M: |
We moved here in August of 2000.
|
| F: |
So, you’ve been here a little over two years.
Any comments on the state of the arts here? Have you found it
to be supportive? |
| M: |
I think it’s a very supportive community. Dan and I,
we really enjoy being here in Washington. We’ve decided
to stay. We feel that we’ve developed some wonderful relationships
here. It’s a nice community and very welcoming. And the
museums are so wonderful.
|
| F: |
So, what’s next? Is there anything we should
be watching for? |
| M: |
Well, I’m working on Clone paintings, and the Extended
Clone series [laughs]. Because my work isn’t
predetermined, I can’t tell you exactly what’s
next, but probably similar [work] to the smaller of the two
big paintings that were at G Fine Art. That would be Floating
World Series II [laughs]. That’s what's in
store.
|
| |
|
