Debbie Millman

Talk about the relationship that you had at this point in your work with a figure sort of embedded or participating or witnessing nature.

Susanna Coffey, a painter and your mentor from Columbia, once told you that when people see something they perceive as beautiful, it becomes difficult for them to unsee it.

She did say that.

Do you think that beauty can function as a veil, as something to sort of obscure?

The act of being beautiful obscures you from maybe what the topic matter is?

Yeah, cloak.

Yeah, it's amazing.

I've been to many studios where there's a whole staff of people.

So now you place the paint directly on the canvas or the medium that you're working on without a pre-drawing and without even a sense of necessarily what might occur?

It feels extremely dangerous.

It's not dangerous for you.

How do you navigate the tension between beauty and difficult histories in your work?

The exhibition, The Ecologies of Painting, invites us to look very closely at landscape, not as a backdrop, but as something alive and entangled with human history and labor and imagination.

And the paintings remind us that nature has never been neutral.

And it has been observed and shaped and idealized and controlled and sometimes resisted.

When you look at the images in the exhibition, what do you see beneath the idealization?

But the paintings, I think, in the exhibition, they ask us, I mean, they span centuries.

So they ask us to consider not only how artists have depicted the natural world, but how those depictions shape our understanding of our place within it.

How do you approach painting landscapes that have been mythologized as paradise?

Does that influence how you feel about a piece?