For Gail Spaien (B.1958), a painting is a site of connection; an object that transmits emotion from one person to another. Spaien is of a lineage of artists who think craft and beauty shape and build a more relational world.
Spaien has been the recipient of numerous fellowships including the Ucross Foundation (2024), Varda Artist Residency Program, Djerassi Foundation Resident Artists Program, Millay Colony for the Arts and Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. She has received grant funding from the Lillian Orlowsky and William Freed Foundation, the Maine Arts Commission, and the New Hampshire Charitable Foundation. Spaien’s solo exhibitions include Taymour Grahne Projects, London, (2023); Ogunquit Museum of American Art, Ogunquit, ME; Nancy Margolis Gallery, NY; Ellen Miller Gallery, Boston, MA; Colby College Museum of Art, Waterville, ME; Group exhibitions include Taymour Grahne Projects, London; Center for Maine Contemporary Art, Rockland, ME; studio e, Seattle, WA; Provincetown Art Association and Museum, Provincetown, MA; University of New Hampshire Museum, Durham, NH; Institute of Contemporary Art, Portland, ME; Portland Museum of Art, Portland, ME; and the DeCordova Museum, Lincoln, MA. Spaien received her MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute and BFA from the University of Southern Maine. A recently retired professor at Maine College of Art and Design she is now full-time in her studio.
"My paintings are places and I approach them as such. As a painter, I turn my back to the external world and enter the world of the painting. I hope a viewer might do that too. When people say, “I want to go there” I feel I have hit the mark in some way.
Inspired by the geographic location and landscape I see daily, the images in my paintings are of observed and imagined places where one can be in relationship with others, the world, and the self. Made in a meticulous way, attentively composed, the paintings highlight actions of slowness and care. My use of scale, proportion, pattern and subtly shifting color are visual elements that create a slight perceptual and physical dislocation; similar to encountering a one-hundred-year-old bonsai, the places in my paintings are compact reductions of lived experience. My paintings are places where many kinds of time overlap. Concrete and ephemeral. There but not there. Phenomenon and mirage. Places at the intersection of time and timelessness."
Tell us a little about yourself (where you are from) and your background in the arts.
I grew up in a home with two parents who were visual people who loved art and culture. They got joy out of arranging their domestic world. My dad owned a department store… everything was ordered there. By color, by kind… and my mom was an elegant woman who liked her home and wardrobe to be put together. They loved to shop for the right object, the right fabric, the right color. I grew up in a project-centered home. My mom loved to make things. She made paintings, did needlepoint or crewel, and made very large, intricate collages. My dad was an amateur photographer. We had a dark room in the basement. He was always doing a building project with my uncles who were construction workers. And he had a place in the basement where he made inventions. They gardened.
Both my parents were artists, each in their way. They exposed me to culture. They took me to Broadway shows in NY. They listened to classical music and Broadway soundtracks like "Hair" and "Man of LaMancha" alongside Frank Sinatra and Sergio Mendez on the record player in the den. They brought me to museums. The Wadsworth Atheneaum in Hartford was my introduction to painting. They supported my formal development which began in high school when I took college-level courses at the Hartford Art School and supplemental instruction at the Hartford Art League. Later, as a declared art major at the University of Southern Maine, I learned about painting from a generation of teachers who philosophized. I learned that painting was a way to understand the world.
After receiving a BFA degree, I landed in Sausalito, CA at Galilee Harbor in a community of independent makers and thinkers. I worked for other artists while maintaining a studio practice. I pursued my MFA at the San Francisco Art Institute and was awarded a fellowship to attend Skowhegan. After graduation, I did several residencies. Then I began teaching at the Maine College of Art and Design. Fast-forward forty years. At sixty-five I have participated in many solo and group exhibitions in museums, contemporary art spaces, and commercial galleries. I have researched, traveled, and seen a lot of art. I reached the academic rank of professor. I decided to become an artist watching my parents and have spent my life studying, talking and thinking about art.
What kind of work are you currently making?
I view my studio practice as a continuum, each series feeding the next. I approach each exhibition opportunity as a site-specific project. I am currently working on a few different upcoming shows, and also on building my inventory.
Pattern and decoration, shifts in scale, and maximal opticality are part of every piece I make. My paintings celebrate time-intensive work, the quiet of home, and a tradition of craft that speaks to the possibility and wish for a kinder, gentler existence. Having said this, I am aware that in composing these domestic scenes I am also commenting on ideas of harmony and utopia that on the surface are desirable but that are ultimately not possible. Our human condition is not static and is inherently imperfect. I think home is where we observe and learn about the complexities.
I think a lot about the way a painting functions. This is really at the heart of my practice and what I am always working on. My formal and material expression is in service of understanding the activity and the object that we understand to be a painting. Each time I make a painting I am researching how to paint, what a painting is, and how it functions. The creative act is a human act, and a painting is an attempt to communicate something about our experience.
What is a day like in the studio for you?
My best typical day starts with a cup of coffee, looking at my calendar, looking through Hyperallergic, reading something that buoys me emotionally, staring out the window. Then I do administrative-type work. The morning is also a time when I write. It is my clearest time of day for any thinking that I have to do that is complex. Then I do something physical; walk the dog, swim, clean, garden… Around 1:30 I go to the studio. I paint until around 4:00 when I walk the dog again, make dinner, have dinner with my husband, then back to the studio until around 9:00 or so.
My studio has been in my home for the last 7 or 8 years. Painting is integrated into my daily routine. I cook, I clean, I go for a walk, I paint. Quoting Laurie Fendrich in an article she wrote for Two Coats of Paint (July 2020, “What Good is Abstract Painting Now”) she says, ” what goes on in my studio ….. is, in effect, an ordinary activity that has to do with arranging colored shapes.” For me this is also the case. Painting is an ordinary activity that is an integrated part of my daily life. Painting for me is a domestic, intellectual and spiritual activity. It allows me to think and is a place to put my mind.
I paint every day. I also schedule time throughout the year when I do not go into the studio and do not look at art.
What are you looking at right now and/or reading?
I stopped teaching a few years ago and am full time in the studio so the books I am reading tend to support my studio practice in some way, emotionally, intellectually and practically. Rick Rubin's book "The Creative Act: A Way of Being; Helen Molesworth, "Open Questions: Thirty Years of Writing About Art"; I just read "Get the Picture", Biana Bosker; "Somehow: Thoughts On Love", Anne Lamott: and Krista Tippet, "Becoming Wise: And Inquiry into the Mystery and Art of LIving"
Contemporary artists and inspriations that I look at: embroidery and paint by number – I did both as a young person and these activities still strongly affect how I use paint and color; Early American painting and furniture, Early American Samplers and textiles, Persian miniatures, Dutch still life, animation, including Walt Disney and Hayao Miyazaki, Fitz Henry Lane and Martin Johnson Heade, Henri Rousseau’s “The Sleeping Gypsy”, Japanese Ukioye prints, the artists of the Pattern and Decoration movement, botanical watercolors, Grandma Moses, Etel Adnan, Adrian Ghenie, Mathew Wong, Peter Doig, Maureen Gallace, April Gornik, Vija Celmins, Shirley Kandea, Jonathan Lasker and Thomas Noskowski, Enrique Martinez Celaya, Chris Ofili, Paula Modersohn-Becker and the Early American Modernists like Milton Avery, Helen Torr, Florene Stettheim and Arthur Dove, the Hudson River painters, and many of the works that are curated on Instagram. There is a system of sharing contemporary and historic visual language at play on Instagram that often sparks ideas. Repetitive handwork, genre painting, and the landscape I see daily are core sources of my work. I go for a lot of walks and look at my local landscape here in the Portland, Maine area.
Where can we find more of your work? (ex. website/insta/gallery/upcoming shows)
Website: www.gailspaien.com
Instagram: www.instagram/com/gailspaien
Gallery website: https://taymourgrahne.com/ and https://studioegallery.net/
Upcoming shows: October, Portland Maine; Seattle Art Fair (upcoming July);
Artsy Foundations Summer 2024 (upcoming July - August)
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