Annika Tucksmith

Annika Tucksmith’s work has been featured in Harper’s Art Desk, New American Paintings, Hyperallergic, Architectural Digest, and Times Union’s article “30 Artists Under 30 in the Hudson Valley.” A two-time recipient of the Elizabeth Greenshields Grant, her work has recently been shown at Fredericks & Freiser in New York City and Steven Zevitas Gallery in Boston, Massachusets, and she is represented by Carrie Haddad Gallery in Hudson, New York. Tucksmith received her MFA from Columbia University and lives and works in Stuyvesant, New York.

In Conversation with Friday Arts

Friday Arts

Tell us about your practice broadly and your journey as a painter.

Annika Tucksmith

I never really saw myself as becoming an artist, probably because the career of artist felt just as fantastical as astronaut. I didn’t discover oil painting until college, and even as I fell in love with it I didn’t expect it to turn it into my career. I don’t know what I thought happened to adults—that one day I would wake up at 30 and be a dental hygienist, or a mechanical engineer, or a landscape architect. I am somehow still surprised that after all of these years of painting, I am a painter.

Are there themes or subjects you find yourself returning to repeatedly?

I always find myself looking to get into the woods. Maybe getting myself into the woods in the paint gets me out of it in my head.

Second Cutting refers to the second harvest of a field after it has been worked, harvested, and allowed to regenerate. Does that theme of return—and looking again at familiar ground to discover something new—connect to your practice?

Yes; tenfold. I paint the same places over and over again. Even the most steadfast of subjects will feel different upon return, because I’ll be older, in a different mood, of a different experience.

Children and adolescents recur in your work. To what extent are these figures drawn from your own childhood memories and where does invention begin?

They are me and not me. Things that have happened, things that could happen, I’ve always loved stories.

You grew up in the Hudson Valley, a landscape already deeply shaped by the legacy of the Hudson River School. What does it mean to return to that terrain through your own memories and transform its tradition of reverence into something more uncanny?

I love looking at the Hudson River School paintings, it’s impossible to not get entranced by that light. Maybe because the region feels so intertwined with feelings of my own identity, reverence is a little too tidy of a bow on the land. I grew up here, and I think my feelings about it are simply more complicated and that ends up bleeding into the paint.

The figures in your paintings suggest open-ended narratives, but the landscape often feels like a character in its own right. How do you think about the relationship between the figures and the worlds they inhabit?

I think of them existing in the same realm but speaking different languages. There may be some degree of understanding, or belief of understanding, but at the end of the day the landscape will always have something to say that eludes anything our language is capable of.

Animals appear throughout the paintings as companions, witnesses, or even participants in the action. What role do they play in the psychological and narrative life of the work?

I think of them as witnesses. The first animals I started painting were deer. Driving around here it’s impossible to go too long without your headlights flashing in their eyes, and then they freeze. It’s almost like a hiccup in time, and their eerie lit up eyes are seeing multiple possibilities at once.

Who are your creative heroes, in or out of the artworld?

Lemony Snicket did a lot for me in creating worlds full of danger and delight in a way that sought to illuminate rather than instruct.

What does Friday mean to you?

It’s almost, and it’s here.