Conversations: Eric Ruschman & Squeak Carnwath
SQUEAK CARNWATH
Squeak Carnwath is an Oakland based artist exhibiting with RUSCHMAN. She is interviewed below by Eric Ruschman.
Squeak Carnwath in her studio.
ERIC RUSCHMAN: For over 40 years, your paintings and constructions (in my opinion) have explored a kind of strength in vulnerability. When I was last in your studio, the word “sentimentality” kept coming up, and we both agreed the term gets a bad wrap in art circles. Can you speak to the power of sentimentality within your work?
SQUEAK CARNWATH: Sentimentality is the language of feeling. Art is about touch and feeling as well as ideas. Often though the driver of those ideas is through emotional intelligence. One of the great things about art is that it can be simultaneously tender and tough.
Will It, 2020, Oil and alkyd on canvas over panel, 77 × 77 in, 195.6 × 195.6 cm, Courtesy of Squeak Cornwath and Ruschman.
ER: As mentioned in my first question, you’ve been making paintings and exhibiting extensively since the early 1970’s. And over four decades, the work has maintained an openness and engagement that lacks the draw of cynicism (or, at least addresses cynicism and frustration honestly when need be). How do maintain such receptivity to the world when you are in the studio?
SC: I am very angry! And I have made anger my friend. It is more fun than being angry. Anger can be funny. Anger can be serious.and one thing I learned how to do was to give myself permission to do whatever I want to do. Art is the place where you can make your own world. A world you can share with others. It has helped me survived and given me a great sense of humor as well. The other thing is that art making is an act of generosity, to let the viewer beholder see who you are and to see themselves as well.
Squeak Carnwath, Courtesy of the Artist and Ruschman.
ER: Inevitably, many people will be seeing images of your paintings online and on their phones. And speaking currently from Quarantine, USA, this is how we are experiencing all of our art objects. Your paintings not only beg for closer inspection in their detail and myriad masterful executions of paint (troupe l’oeil faux collage, for instance), but also in how you engage the sides of the canvases with text. While your paintings contain images, to me they always assert themselves as objects. How do you think about painting as a three-dimensional object while you are in the process of working on a canvas?
SC: On of the things I love about paintings is that they really can’t be photographed. A photo loses all the nuance of touch and makes the surface seem all the same and on a screen it makes everything shiny and smooth. Reproduction changes everything. It changes the physical interaction with the painting, it changes the scale, it changes the colour. Everything is different. A painting experienced in person keeps giving off information, new things to see and notice. Paintings can be slow to reveal themselves and photographs interrupt the gifts paintings hold. For me paintings are real objects in so far as they are on canvas and wood and stretcher bars. I like mine to sit off the wall a few inches.
The thing is painting itself is not a physical object. And I love that about it. Only the materials and carriers are physical things The painting itself is really just an idea, a thing that lives in the mind. A thing that does not live or exist in real space (we can’t bump into painting or trip over it)
It is however something real to us we believe in it. If it is a picture of something we think it is that thing but it is not that thing. So painting is really philosophy or maybe even quantum physics because it exist in more than one world and exists most fully in our minds. And that makes it very sexy.
Chair with Box, 2017, Wooden chair, cigar box with recycled paint, straw, and pencil, 33 × 19 × 14 in, 83.8 × 48.3 × 35.6 cm, Courtesy of Squeak Cornwath and Ruschman.