In late April I spoke with artist Natalie Westbrook on the occasion of her current exhibition, “Faces” at Zynka Gallery in Pittsburgh. The show features a body of paintings and drawings made in the last two years that all feature human facial features, compressed down to only necessary elements. Subjects present themselves as curvilinear, cohesively raising tension
between the observable world and the incorporeal. I especially was curious to learn about the motivations and additional studio process details Westbrook was willing to share.
Brooke Bunte: In her catalogue essay, Larissa Pham describes seeing human faces in everything during the isolation of the pandemic and I was thinking about how that relates to the superego. Have you found yourself seeing faces in inanimate objects?
Natalie Westbrook: I’ve not experienced that exactly myself, but I’ve witnessed my young daughter do that often–especially when she was a toddler. She would find joy in seeing the backs of vehicles—recognizing the tail lights as eyes and bumper as mouth and taking joy in pointing out various personalities of cars. At her young age that observation she articulated so
enthusiastically would always strike me as silly and fun, but also there’s a psychological element at play to recognize the happy car versus the sad or angry car.
BB: I want to talk about Purple Gaze (2020) for a little bit. Could we relate it to the superego? I ask because of the erratic brushstrokes and rich variety of textures.
NW: The ground for this painting was actually made ten years ago when I was teaching at the Yale Norfolk summer program and working outside in a field on the campus. I was using grass and leaves like stencils—but in a very uncontrolled manner. Stencils are typically very precise tools, but I was throwing clumps of grass and dirt onto the canvas and using a can of spray paint to apply color.
BB: So the work was made entirely from imagination or did you have a form of reference?
NW: Well no specific reference like a photograph or still life, but memory and the experience of one’s own senses while painting serves as a wealth of internal references. The memory of a feeling or image, or the smell of the freshly cut grass in the field where I was painting and the sound of birds overhead, and the shifting shapes of the clouds… those are all welcome references. It was a very intuitive process to build the ground this way, and at the time I had no inkling of adding a figure. Years later when I revisited the canvas in 2020, I felt a sudden urge to add a face peering back at me from within the thicket of paint–from inside that chaotic environment.
BB: Okay, are most works of yours non-objective abstractions?
NW: No, I don’t really subscribe to the idea of a dichotomy between abstraction and figuration. One could say that everything is both an abstraction and a representation of itself.
BB: Got it. Has the isolation of the pandemic informed your work? Or, was it similar to the usual isolation of artist labor?
NW: At first, it felt similar—going to the studio alone is a painter’s experience. Isolation while working is normal… but after the first few weeks, there was definitely a shift in my work. The figurative elements became more pronounced, more urgent, and more clear… Some of the work came as an emotional response to music. There’s something very urgent and animalistic revealed in the collective experience of a global contagion.
BB: Have you always been more interested in producing works representative of emotional experience?
NW: I don’t really think of my work as representing an emotional experience—even though it comes from an emotional place. I think the work is psychological.
BB: Have you always worked in large-scale paintings? What made you gravitate towards working bigger?
NW: As long as I can remember, my preference is to work large. Ask any painter: it’s easier to work big. Less constraints, less pressure to get it right in such a limited space. As a teenager, I painted murals and did scenic painting at my high school, and scenic painting in NYC for years before graduate school. All of those hours spent working from floor to ceiling have given me a certain comfortability with a large scale. There’s theatricality in making murals and of course in scenic painting that envelops the body, or at least the peripheral vision—that makes viewing a painting become an active physical experience. For me, it imparts to a viewer a bit of the experience of being a painter—being absorbed in the materiality of the paint and also in the illusionistic world of a pictorial space.
BB: Practicality of working big and potentially your background in murals led to this decision.
NW: Not really a decision per se—it’s not an especially conscious choice—it’s just what happens naturally.
BB: Okay, I’m thinking about what you said about the urgency and animalistic aspect of humanity revealed, experiencing the biological threat of a global pandemic. I read a Harvard Review article about shared disasters leading to more social needs and reaching out and overall friendliness among strangers.
NW: It’s a collective human experience—to be cursed with the consciousness of our mortality. I’m interested in our human relationship to the natural world in this way.
BB: Like natural disasters, I think art is a reminder of humanity and the two coincide often. In isolation, artwork can be a reminder that we are still alive but can also be a virtual stand-in for dialogue. Referring back to Larissa Pham’s text, your works stand large and have literal facial expressions on them. In a way, they seemed to have kept me company during my solo walkthroughs at Wönzimer.
NW: Painting in particular can be a reflection or projection.
BB: Like you said, and it’s also mentioned in the catalogue, art can be an inner dialogue, a reflection of the self. Were these themes on your mind when you made the work or were they discussed?
NW: These themes weren’t on my mind but more ‘in’ my mind—more unconscious. Similarly, I think of the faces in the paintings as being in the paintings.
BB: Two Together (grey) (2021), among other paintings in the show, have a sculptural element to them. The right eye’s shadow nearly tricks the eye like a trompe l’oeil. The light logic is impressive. Were you thinking about depth, in a sculptural sense, within a picture space or did that come spontaneously as well?
NW: The earliest cut-out shapes happened spontaneously one day in the studio with a work on paper I was making in 2020. In previous years I had worked with cutting up paintings on paper and collaging them into new works. I was experimenting with that technique one day and something illusionistic happened by mistake. I sat with it and eventually followed a path into creating figurative elements by way of this trompe l’oeil technique with larger works on canvas. The real world had started wearing masks, and the cut-out motif for me had a kinship to that notion of something hidden just underneath—a literal masking.
BB: That is really interesting.
NW: I primarily made trompe l’oeil still life paintings when I was an undergrad at Cooper Union. At the time I was fascinated with Dutch vanitas painters. The seriousness of those paintings with skulls and coins feels a bit performative nowadays, and also a bit humorous.
BB: Wow, perhaps I was reading that. I also love Dutch masterworks. I have always thought about collage as an abstraction technique, and to see the result as illusionistic struck me too.
NW: All of painting is just so old. It’s a funny thing to be a contemporary painter–to be a person in 2022 and go to a room alone day in and day out and push goop around on fabric hoping to surprise yourself.
BB: Ha-ha yes, artistic lineage goes back so far it is almost absurd and magical—maybe primal too.
NW: Yes, exactly. Absurd, primal, and magical. Those are the elements of painting that keep me up late at night and wake me up early each morning. For me that’s what connects to the themes of humanity within the natural world.
BB: I couldn’t agree more. Artistic necessity is in our DNA. To think someone made a cave painting thousands of years ago in isolation can communicate with a viewer, also in isolation in 2022. It’s like we never changed much.
NW: Yes! My studio is my cave. And technically, it’s in a basement of a church so there’s that too.
BB: Yes! And age-old spirituality and how it relates to artwork, in the loosest way possible is still relevant.
BB: Do you think there will be more phases in physical, tangible artwork or a continuation of the dialogue we’re in now?
NW: Well there will always be painting of course. It’s a continuum of sorts.
BB: Yes, I see that happening too.
NW: A roller coaster to stay on. A ride of a lifetime ha.
BB: Ha-ha yes. I’ve always been interested in the connection artists have with one another, even after death. Time and art-historical context is less important than the ideas and aesthetic choices. I think with art-making, time seems less important. So this continuous suspension of time definitely applies here.
BB: I was thinking about background noise, do you usually listen to music in your process? Have you ever worked in silence, if so, was it awful?
NW: Ha-ha yes painting in silence would be awful. I absolutely have to have loud music while painting. But I often work in silence at the studio if I’m doing any work other than painting. I reserve music for painting and savor silence for menial labor like stretching canvases and cleaning brushes. My experience of sound is very compartmentalized in that way. I can listen to the news or a podcast while doing non-painting work but would never listen to speaking while painting.
BB: I like that answer a lot. Painting can take hours or days at a time, so it makes sense that you would save music for this. It also puts you into a specific work mode which is helpful when you work alone, there isn’t anyone structuring your day.
NW: Yes, it’s a mode—it’s a mood a zone. I almost think of certain songs as soundtracks to certain paintings—songs I listened to on repeat while making a particular work.
BB: Do you have specific tracks or podcasts for a reason?
NW: Definitely. A podcast would be to help occupy my mind while cleaning or building canvases on autopilot. I can multitask and get my thoughts involved with a story or conversation then. But while painting I rely on music to help escape conscious thought.
BB: So podcasts are mind/body energy conservation and music is introspective?
NW: Hmmm… Something like that, I think. News, podcasts, or preferably silence is the conscious mind at work—thinking, absorbing, and processing information, whereas music is more of a sensory experience like a necessary companion to dance.
BB: Got it. Do the larger gestures to render larger images feel like a dance? I see a lot of movement in all of your works.
NW: Definitely. I love painting from the wrist—it’s probably what comes most naturally for me, but engaging the whole body in gesture is therapeutic. When I was a teenager I wanted to go to dance school and become a professional dancer, but I never had any talent. As an undergraduate student in New York I spent hours every week at a ballet studio on 14th street near Union Square and dreamed of dropping out of art school to go to Tisch at NYU.
BB: The movement is so necessary too, I think because physical engagement with painting takes up all your time and headspace.
NW: I just grew up in dance classes and it was always a passion, a way to escape into music.
BB: Same here! I was in and out of dance classes so I never got any good, but that wasn’t my biggest concern.
NW: I love that dance requires nothing but the body to exist. That and singing are the ultimate artforms as they require no tools or materials or instruments. The body is the instrument and the art.
BB: You have to move more to stay focused I think.
NW: Yes, I love being fully immersed in movement and gesture and music and painting all at once.
BB: I think the energy produced translates well on the canvas, a still of tumult.
NW: Thank you.
BB: You’re welcome. Is narrative on your mind at all while you work?
NW: No. I don’t think in terms of narrative whatsoever. I’m not a good storyteller. I tend to think in terms of a psychological state or state of being.
BB: I think that’s better anyway because as spectators we cannot divorce ourselves from our ego. We definitely want to see ourselves in literally everything, conscious or not ha-ha.
NW: Ha-ha, yes. I think paintings can be mirrors in that way: a space for reflection or projection of the self. It’s for that reason in part, that my figures are sometimes flat and painted to emphasize the surface of the canvas, and sometimes painted more sculpturally.
BB: These concepts are hard to avoid, and I did like how they were explored in the catalogue a lot. Our psyches have everything to do with making or reading work.
NW: Of course. I like that to ‘read’ a painting one simply experiences this static object. For me, painting isn’t just about looking— it’s all of the sense—which goes back to my interest in dance and music.
BB: Art is definitely a dichotomy in that way—I would also argue emotional experience in most cases can be more valuable in communication/art to me than communication. We remember feeling better than details.
NW: Ah, yes.
BB: I like the porousness of Onlookers (2020) a lot. It reminds me of bone cartilage.
NW: Thanks. Onlookers (2020) was a key work for me—a work that was extremely intuitive and surprised even me with how it came into being. That painting started as a distillation of a hunting scene by Peter Paul Rubens, but somewhere along the way it transformed.
BB: Your works are sensory experiences: Purple Gaze (2020) is one of my favorites because the different surface textures, colors, and directional lines light up different parts of the brain.
NW: I think I enjoy making paintings as a sensory experience for myself, and love that I can impart an experience like that to anyone else who might encounter the work.
BB: It’s like a nice pause from other engagements we have going on. Paintings, I think, will become more prevalent the more technology advances because we’re missing that primal part of ourselves
NW: I couldn’t agree more.
I assert the show reflects human interior life. We see the facial expressions of human forms but Westbrook masterfully omitted unnecessary visual information, so we are not too solely hung up on objective human anatomy. Instead, we experience the uncapturable: thoughts and feelings we take with us when we die. This is a depiction of non-material life matter.
The body of work is cohesive in subject and scale. However, each composition stands on its own. Purple Gaze, 2020 for example, has recognizably planned and intentional linework in its consistency, yet it appears gestural, and expressionistic in its execution. Rich textures and sgraffito-style line work reminds us of ourselves. Two Together (grey), 2021 pushes the possibility between the internal and external reality further with trompe-l’œil level observation and internal stir of feeling in its illusionistic movement through diagonal line.
Remember to see Natalie Westbrook’s solo exhibition, “FACES” before its wrap-up on July 3rd, 2022.
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Love You Back (2019) oil on canvas 63″ x 89″ $6,500; Source: Wönzimer
Is This How You Art 