Q & A with Clare Grill and sculptor Elsa Sahal

ELSA SAHAL: When I look at your paintings, they have a strong feeling of “craft”. Do you use craft as a source of inspiration or as an iconographical starting point?

CLARE GRILL: I’m very drawn to folk art and antique documents made to commemorate: birth and baptismal certificates, marriage certificates, love tokens, fraktur drawings, book plates. The time and care that was spent making and decorating is so heartbreakingly beautiful to me. I also love antique textiles: quilts, lace, clothing, homespun linen, curtains, napkins, and especially embroidery samplers which are small pieces of fabric embroidered with little pictures of animals and trees, houses, figures, alphabets and numbers. Most include a prayer or a verse about obedience to God with a strikingly acute awareness of death. These are striking because they were made by little girls, some as young as 5. They were made as part of a girl’s schooling (if she was wealthy enough to be educated) and passed down as family heirlooms, hung in the home to display her virtues and talents. They are gorgeous and worn, touched all over, and so detailed, real labors of love. I find them compelling as handmade objects and as artifacts of women’s history. They have been a rich starting point for me for nearly 10 years. 

My series of “Sampler” drawings which began in 2012 is inspired by the craft of embroidery samplers. Each small, oil-on-paper work is a response to a singular sampler: not a transcription, but an interpretation and an homage. They are named for the girl who made the source object. These drawings are individual works, not sketches, and they also serve as a database of shapes, colors, marks, and little pictures that generate my paintings on linen.

ES: And the reverse question: Do you think about painting as craft?

CG: In graduate school, one of my professors talked about how our little cohort of painters was very attentive to “craft” in our work. We were obsessed with every bit of making a painting: making our own supports out of wood, gluing, sanding, buffing, building a painting from the ground up. We all had chop saws and c-clamps and strap clamps and we’d compare different grits of sandpaper. I think this experience taught me that careful attention to craft, the handmade, is a foundational element for my work. The nuance and personality that’s inherent in linen stretched by hand — sized, sanded, primed and wiped— is just as important as the paint that gets rubbed into it.

Q & A Continued

ES: The texture of your paintings is really unique. It is like oil shifting to wool, or wood shifting to mineral; it appears to metamorphosize. This texture seems to hold many different properties that don’t usually come together. It catches and rejects light in a sweet and sour way, or an attraction-repulsion way. How do you achieve this texture? What was the process that led you to this texture?

CG: It was certainly a making process as opposed to a thinking one. I like to paint my paintings flat on a tabletop so that I can move around them and see them from every perspective. I like them to be made near a window so the raking light that falls on the surface serves as an element which reveals texture, sometimes guiding my touches. It simultaneously obscures colors and shapes, opening up new possibilities for both, so that the painting can keep “becoming” as it gets painted. It is kind of an improvisational way of painting, I guess, orchestrated by the little raised textures catching light or casting shadows depending on where I’m standing. Also, I paint with my face rather close to the surface, like a kid coloring or a person quilting. I suppose all this relates very much to textile and how embroidery is made, but it certainly wasn’t something I thought up beforehand. The process was much more bodily and intuitive.

Painting this way helps me to “not think” about what the painting as a whole is, but rather it allows me to “just look” at tiny shifts in color and texture, which for me are an endless well of richness in painting. I put them on the wall too, when I can’t see anything else to do, and there I begin to notice formal relationships and shapes to pull forward or bury down. This part is more challenging for me; it is much more cerebral and less intuitive, which creates opportunity for me to second-guess myself.

Sometimes a piece gets painted to death though, gets choked up and breathless and I’ve found that the way to best breathe life back in, for me, is to lay it back down and cover over it with thin color. New color reveals different things about the painting to me, which is very exciting. I don’t think of these layers as destructions but more like muscles or blood or skin over a skeleton: the bones are underneath forming the body even though you can’t see them. Or maybe they are like sheets of sediment shifted slowly by time and cracked in places, revealing their history. I pick at them with my fingers or with dry brushes or rags to uncover what’s below, creating new texture, new color, and weaving the layers together. Sometimes my paintings have many, many “lives” or color identities before they arrive as finished works.