Day 3565: Allies.

 

 

"Allies": junk mail collage.

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2GN2S ... (longer than usual, but I couldn't edit)

In the Studio With Sarah Miska, the Painter

 

When Night Gallery, in Los Angeles, selected Miska as the first artist to exhibit at its new space in 2022, the 39-year-old was assisting other artists and getting accustomed to the “pretty gnarly” experience of being a mom. The show sold out on opening night, and Miska went on to her first art fair presentation at Night Gallery’s booth during the Dallas Art Fair. Now she is opening her second prominent solo show to date, at Friends Indeed gallery in San Francisco. The title, “Tidy,” is both a nod to the rigor of the riding world and the painstakingly meticulous line work that characterizes the paintings.

Champion

Details of Champion (2022)

Even though it has only one layer of brush work, the painting of a horse could easily be mistaken for a photograph. The artist will go on to add five or so more layers of thin lines; no painting of hers is complete until the edges are perfectly clean. “‘Control’ is the word I keep going back to,” Miska says. “I control every element of the image.” 

She spends most nights scrutinizing equine photos she finds on Google or takes herself at stables in L.A., carefully selecting crops that are so tight, they border on discomfiting. Part of it is because she doesn’t want to steal a photographer’s image, and part of it is because of Miska's deep reverence for the late Domenico Gnoli, who also painted rigorously detailed closeups of fabric and hair. In fact, she has a book at the ready by her laptop to show me some of Gnoli’s most “epic” paintings.

Miska works from an iPhone; and rather than zeroing in on the details in her source material, she chooses to invent her own. It’s not lost on Miska that there’s an unmistakable parallel between her approach to painting and the rigors of the sport she captures: “Equestrian riding has everything to do with control, both of yourself and movement. It’s truly all about presentation—just this perfect, precise thing.” And behind the scenes, it can often be far from glamorous. Miska’s paintings of manure and urine bags, as well as the close crops of horses’ behinds, are partly a nod to the stable hands who do the labor that allows the showjumpers to appear without flaws. The images stand in stark contrast to those of the riders’ neat jackets and the riders and horses’ perfectly styled hair.   

Diamond Braid, 2022.

Blue Hair Net, 2022

Right around the time when Miska graduated from grad school, in 2014, her mother, who has since passed away, fell ill with brain cancer. The hair loss that accompanied her mother’s chemotherapy treatments prompted the artist to start thinking about hair, which is now a defining feature of her work. “It was so much a part of her identity,” Miska says of her mother. “She got a full wig that looked amazing on her, and I made an art piece out of it when she finally grew all her hair back. She thought it was hilarious—because I turned it into a merkin.” Miska now regards the work as “such a grad school piece—so bad,” but in retrospect, the cheekily titled Mama’s Wig was a hint of what was to come. “I love the idea of this unruly thing being controlled,” she says, as she discusses how deeply hair is connected to identity. “We’re always trying to tame our hair or maintain our hair, and I’ve always been interested in that.”

 

Miska’s next solo exhibition, at Lyles & King in New York, slated for October, will also center on horses, this time with a focus on the tail ribbons that are color coded to signal a horse’s temperament or propensity to kick, and can serve as warning signs for anyone around them. “It’s just a fascinating sport, and I’m going to keep painting about it until I grow weary of it,” she says. And yet, Miska hasn’t gotten back in the saddle since she was a tween, and the more she immerses herself in equestrianism from afar, the more she’s starting to feel like a voyeur. That may change soon; she’s hoping to go trail riding in the near future. But resuming lessons is off the table. “I don’t want to relive those traumas,” she jokes, noting that riding can be physically painful. She’s sticking with the motorcycle that she and her husband have christened “the iron horse.”

 

 

A fun 3+minute video, Pete Davidson/SNL, here.

 

Just because ...

 

Azure-breasted Pitta

 

 

Smiles for Tuesday ...

 

 

 

 

   

 

 

                                                               Thanks for coming by today.