Rachael Catharine Anderson

Rachael Catharine Anderson makes oil paintings that explore the aesthetic dimension between human and non-human relationships. Her work, painted from close observation of things, displays elements of enchantment and nuance, uncertainty, wonder, and fascination for the drama of life. Her work has been shown in Italy, the U.S., and Canada at venues such as Jeffrey Deitch in New York. Her paintings are in major private collections in the U.S. and Europe. An MFA graduate from the Painting and Printmaking program of the Yale School of Art, Anderson lives and works between New Haven, Connecticut and central Ohio.

In Conversation with Friday Arts

Friday Arts

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?

Rachael Catharine Anderson

When I think of a second cutting it brings me to exactly what you described. Where I live, we till ground multiple times throughout the season and some plants that I am tracking come back later in the year completely fresh. I am really into certain plants that come from disturbing the soil like jimson weed and poke weed or milkweed. These plants come early in the Spring and then grow and grow so when I see them fresh again when everything else has started to wane in the late summer and fall it feels like I can hold on to the season longer or spend more time with these plants I love. Winter for me is horrific. So a second cutting feels like a second chance.

Do you always paint en plein air or do you take the canvas into the studio as well?

What I'm doing now, no. I do still traditional still life in the solitude of your studio, too. But it is important for me to be there. And the plants are changing all the time, not just getting older, but changing position, changing color, getting just destroyed, blooms are blossoming, and it's very time-sensitive. If I want to get a particular part of the plant recorded, I only have so much time, and then it's just over, and you have to move on.

How did you work with the dogwood for Are Not Flowers the Stars of Earth, Are Not Stars the Flowers of Heaven, included in this exhibition, given the limited time window?

I took some branches off of the tree a month and a half ago, and put them in a walk-in cooler, in some water, and then I cut the stem in a certain way to make sure that it efficiently still brought in water. And I can only take it out of the cooler so often, so I can paint it. It's pretty shredded now. So I'll be working with the things that I saved, but also now, since the things that I've saved are no longer usable, I will just go to the tree itself. So it is difficult to capture the time that the dogwood has, for sure.

Do you ever return to your memory of how the plant looked, or do you try to remain in direct observation?

I think it would be cool to have both. I prefer observation mode, because I actually have a lot of trouble just imagining things to paint. I either need a photograph, or I prefer the thing in the ground. Because when you're painting from life, it's more present-looking, and I feel like that's what painting's for. No other medium can get the presence. The shape, and the space, and the essence of the thing can be captured in paint like no other medium. This is going to sound kind of woo-woo, but it feels like being possessed by the object. It feels like doing the dance of the shape of the thing. Doing the language of it. That I just don't think would be the same from memory, or from photograph.

A photograph is like a fixed moment. And what you're talking about is more like a performance, or like a communion with the subject.

Yes.

Can you describe your process with the grounds, making baths, and how that shapes the painting?

I make a big, really shallow pool, and then you float the oil paint on that. Then you can make a print of the oil floating on water, like marbling, but it looks like the primordial soup of all time. I feel like it will look really celestial for the dogwood painting. I enjoy doing that, and then going back into the ground and messing with really thick paint on top of it.

There's this interesting idea of where things come from, and I'm really into the idea of emergence—things collecting together to create complex systems.

Can you explain what you mean by emergence?

I'm not a scientist, but I just dabble. The idea is that structure and patterns in nature emerge from simple things. I learned the other day that the saddle shape of the leaf, or the way that leaves are shaped and formed on the plant structures, emerge from the physical environment more than what is encoded in the DNA of the plant itself. This idea of primitive, the accumulation of stuff creating larger structure.

There's also this element of chance, too?

Yeah, and probability, or just possibility—infinite possibilities. That's the process.

Are you ever concerned the baths might lose something that exists on the canvas?

It's so sparse. It still fills space while leaving the space to be very wide open for whatever exists there, but no, I'm not precious with my work. I'm okay to erase stuff, move things around, it could change drastically. I really enjoy when things look labored, or when you can see the history of what you made and decided to discard. I love it when your eye, the viewer, is participating in . . .

Completing it?

In completing it, and when I see paintings that are too perfect and polished, and they look so precise, it makes me nervous. It feels like there's nothing to complete. It's not very satisfying.

Talk a little bit more about your relationship to time as you're creating a painting?

It's important for me that it does take time, because I really enjoy the patina of just things getting older. Movement is more visible if you're getting a lot of layers on the painting, and making a lot of decisions. Rerouting your decisions. It takes time to make a painting, and to make you want to look at it for a while.

And how does the plant’s own passage through time enter the work?

From newness to senescence.

You grew up on an orchard and tree farm, right?

Yeah, it's a small farm, and it has gone through many variations, but it's just a small family farm, and we first had 5,000 apple trees, and so I grew up picking apples, and dealing with that, and we did cider, we did wine on the side of the road. Then it grew into cut flowers, and we did sunflowers for most of my life. And we do peonies, and mixed bouquets, and wild forage stuff. Plants are a part of my identity.

Did the way you preserved the dogwood come from your experience working with cut flowers?

Oh, for sure. That is a skill I got from doing cut flowers. We would sell our wares at farmers' markets every weekend, bouquets for the longest time. And I was involved in the making and growing, selling, maintaining.

What did it feel like when a bouquet you made goes to someone else?

I loved it. Because for me, it was art. It was like, this person wants to buy my art. This person's going to take this magical spell into their home that I so tenderly created. But now I'm a painter, so . . .

And when someone lives with one of your paintings? Does it have that similar feel of giving them a spell?

Yes, although I find painting to be so difficult. I don't know how to explain it. Nature is perfect, you know? We can't get better than that.

Can you elaborate on that?

I'm just always . . . find it to be confusing, and very final.

How do you know when a piece is done, then?

Oftentimes it'll be that I ran out of time because whatever plant I was working with is totally obliterated and changed. To be unrecognizable from the beginning. Or my body will just say, no, I just don't want to work on this anymore, I need to move on. Something about it—it won't make any sense to go any further. Because you might lose something that really pulled at you before. So it's a risk.

When you’re working, how much of the process is painting versus just truly looking?

It is both memory, and it has to be memory, and actually recording, looking at the thing. I used to not look at the canvas and just look at the object. But mostly it is me just studying the thing more than laboring, for sure.

Do you think about your work being in conversation with art history, or people making work now?

Maybe Ambera Wellman . . . and Lois Dodd. She's reached that kind of effortlessness. I know I like the labored process, but I think I like to mix the really labored stuff with the effortlessness. But mostly, I like to cruise through art history. I'm always enamored with certain things, and then you kind of fall out of love with it, and move on to something else. I did a show, and I was really into Dutch still life, and what it meant about being alive, and so I became a Dutch still life painter, and then I got tired of that, and then now I'm into William Blake, or maybe I made a Monet show. So I love art history. And I'm very confused about what's happening now. Art history gives you a nice package to get to know it, and it's well worn, in retrospect. I think now people are working from projections. Most people are not outside.

When you talk about Monet, I think of the haystacks and the physical act of taking a big canvas out into the field. Is that scale and directness part of what matters to you?

Or, like, David Hockney does this. It's really informed by photography and painting, or film, and he's working from observation. I love how heroic Monet is, though. I love how heroic it is to take a giant canvas out to a field somewhere and paint something one-to-one.

How do you think about color and your palette?

It depends. I'll go through phases. A couple summers ago, I was obsessed with green. You can mix one green from two colors, but there's so many shades of green you can buy from the store that can't be mixed easily. And they vary so widely, between looking like toxic sludge, not natural at all, and looking like something that could be believable, that might match what you're seeing outside.

And then I love monochrome paintings, I love to just use one color, and see how far I can push one color. And I really love complementary colors—somehow just two colors and some white paint can get you a full rainbow spectrum, almost. You can really make a lot out of not very much. So it's definitely a limited palette for me right now, but it hasn't necessarily always been that way.

The two smaller works are essentially blue, green, and white. How did you arrive at that palette?

If I really were to be honest, blue is my favorite color. I'm really interested in the sky and water currently, and I really like the nighttime. I really like the idea of cool space versus hot space. You don't really see blue out in nature too much, as far as plants go.

Tell us about the elderberry painting?

That is the skeleton of the elderberry after the berries fall off. I really like the geometry of that. I'm really into geometry and repeating patterns. And what's cool with paintings that are mostly monochrome is, if you introduce just a speck of another color, it really stands out.

Who are some of your creative heroes?

I love Andrei Tarkovsky, Frida Kahlo, Tacita Dean, Björk, and Charles Burchfield paintings.

What do you want people to experience when they see your work?

Maybe the empathy of it—you know when you see a really good drawing and you feel like you were drawing it, too? The touch of it. The sensuality of making a mark.

What larger questions or ideas guide your work?

I like Paul Gauguin's question of, Who are we? Where do we come from? Where are we going? I think also it's about experiencing life. What about enjoyment of life? And wonder, in awe. And paying attention to things that are pretty much overlooked most of the time. Contemplating what it means to feel the experience of being alive.

I think it's trying to access being in the present moment without thinking about the future or the past. Or carrying the past. But it's about becoming. I think it's about changing. And it's about doing. It's because it's impossible to be present all the time.

What does Friday mean to you?

Fun times. Relaxation. Getting off your shift. Enjoying the weekend.