Interview with Mercury Twenty artist Margaret Chavigny

MC: I’m working on all these now; there are about ten here. I tend to have some that are finishing up and then I get to a point where I have to generate from new again. This is in order to have the different rhythms of working. The finishing work is a different kind of work than at the beginning of the painting.

I tend to work in an intuitive kind of way. I have certain images I am drawn to that keep reemerging in the work, no matter what I do! I’ll get an idea from one, and I’ll try it out on another one, but then by the time I get around to finishing it, its come around full circle and transformed again.

This one here is one of the earliest ones. This one here is not finished and I’m not going to include it in the show. It’s going in a different direction.

I’m at the point now where I’m looking at how the different parts fit together in this group of paintings. Certainly color-wise there’s correlation. There are also these symmetrical plant forms that I put in some paintings, and are hidden underneath layers in others. There is a wave pattern that began to take over my focus and interest in this body of work.

This one is close to finished, and this one I literally just started.

KK: Really! You have a lot down for a painting that’s just started. Sounds like you work pretty fast at the beginning and it gets slower towards the end when you’re putting in detail.

MC: That’s right. A painting like this one has gotten too fussy for me. Too much detail.

KK: Can you come back and edit it?

MC: I have. I’ve come back in and opened it out again.

I start working fairly intuitively, at a certain point I’m also asking myself a lot of questions: what are the ideas in these paintings? Why am I making the choices that I am? I’m making all my own rules, as you do in abstract painting. Why do I gravitate towards certain forms? How much will is involved? How much is left open to chance? I want to balance back and forth between the two.

If it gets too controlled, I don’t like it, so I’ve introduced some of these dripped elements or random elements. Or these ink drawings that have splattered areas. I did a lot of these to cut up and collage on the paintings but I like some of them as drawings. On this painting, instead of cutting the drawings into a shape, I just put the whole drawing on. That presents a problem because it’s an element that completely different from everything around it. So how do I incorporate it in, and weave it all together.

KK: That contrast really adds to the interest and complexity of the painting. It’s a very free, twisted and dripped composition of ink lines in black and grey tones. And then there is this fascinating white on black calligraphic element that runs through a lot of your paintings. What is that?

MC: That is a yogic image of the Nadis. Within yogic thought, the Nadis are the energy channels of the body. The words here are in Sanskrit; naming the channels of energy. I thought it was a beautiful image of a map, reaching both inside and outside of the body. I’m very interested in the body but I don’t want to do traditional figurative work. I’ve been using the image of the Nadis collaged onto the paintings as a map to play off of. It’s not something that I’m doing because that’s my belief about how things work, necessarily, but I think it’s an interesting idea, a beautiful image, and I like the mapping aspect of it because it adds to the sense of searching within my work.

I really like hot and intense color but sometimes it can be too much. Over the years I’ve had a tendency to work in black and white, and then go back into color, as a way of sorting out ideas. In these paintings I’m using the white on black map of the Nadis and the black on white ink drawings I did as opposites; using the positive/negative. Then I’m just weaving the whole thing together. Playing, responding…

KK: Did you ever study any of the body arts? Are you a dancer?

MC: I danced when I was younger. I’ve studied yoga for 25 years now, and I’ve taught yoga. Yoga is an interesting practice -- not just physical, not just mental—it digs deep.

KK: You seem to be translating the energy aspect of yoga into the painting.

MC: They are pretty chaotic and loud for yogic paintings. (laughs)

KK: Well, everybody thinks that eastern spirituality is always so calm and quiet…

MC: If you’ve ever sat meditation you realize that things are not calm at all. You may get your body calm, but inside everything is ping-ponging around…

KK: In every artist’s studio they have inspirational material around, lots of books and things up on the walls, as you do. I see you’re looking at a piece by Steve Rodan, one of the painters in the Oakland Museum’s recent LA Paints show. Did you see that show? Wasn’t it great? His work is a lot like yours—concerning ideas about the body. And his work is also about music…

MC: Yes, music is another thread that runs through my life and comes out in my art. There is a sense of rhythm and pulse in my work, which can be a musical as well as physical. Just compositionally, I like to play, and do a repetition or variation on a theme.

KK: I know in some of your work of the recent past, you’ve used images of nerve pathways that undulated through the painting. Is this wave pattern that is appearing in your new work a variation on that?

MC: It’s new, but also something that has recurred from past themes. I have worked with the image of a spiral staircase or a ribbon turning in space. Also, I’ve used a DNA strand. It also reminds me of the sinews of musculature. It’s a pleasing form that has all those references in it.

KK: I also see some reproductions of Philip Taaffe’s work. He’s a painter I love—he does a lot of pattern, and pattern overlay.

MC: He also collages, as I do. He has this symmetry thing going on which I’m experimenting with. Bilateral symmetry--like in the body—based on the spine, which then reflects side to side. In these paintings, even with the random material like the splatters and drips, I’ve reiterated them on both sides so there is a symmetrical patterning.

I have a tendency to use a lot of elements in my paintings and the challenge is how to bring them together and make them whole. That’s both the struggle and the process that I enjoy. That relates to the idea of coming out of a chaotic beginning and finding wholeness and integrity of form, which also relates to me personally and things that have happened in my life. My early life and upbringing was quite unconventional and chaotic. Not normal. Then, wanting to have my own family, it didn’t happen the normal way either. We had to travel all the way around the world to adopt our children. There’s a sense of wholeness that came out of all that. In the painting, this image of the Blossom developed, and I definitely relate that to my kids.

KK: I think it’s great that you are showing it all—the chaos, the variety of form, the symmetry. And you came to the image of the Blossom with its poetic reference to you and your family. That’s how painting works. You’re trying to show as much as you can, and find coherence. Something just comes up that has the right balance.

MC: It wasn’t anything that I thought about. It just came out. I had been searching for ways to incorporate the Russian aspect of my world—our children are adopted from Russia-- into the paintings and hadn’t been able to figure out a way to do it that felt honest. When I started to realize that random events were coming around into a symmetry it felt right and--in a metaphorical way--to reflect what I was searching for.

In some of the paintings, there are flower images that have Cyrillic text that are from some of the adoption papers. They are hidden in the layers of the painting. It reminds me of earlier work where I used journal writing and even started a painting by writing on the canvas.

KK: So you have Sanskrit and Cyrillic in the paintings. That gives the work a multicultural aspect that is compelling to me—even though I may not know its specific meaning to you.

MC: There are influences from many places that come through.

KK: Along with the Blossom form you are using an abstracted plant form repeated.

MC: I’m using a stencil there to repeat that form. It looks like a leaf or even a puzzle piece. Like the wave form, it’s a fun, undulating thing to draw. Relating to the yoga and the movement, there is a rhythm to it. Like the Blossom, it’s a growing, transforming, morphing image.

KK: That’s what’s going on in your life right now. You’re growing two people.

MC: Definitely.

KK: It’s a mixed media process that you’re using—collage, also stencil. Tell me about your process.

MC: I work on wood panel, starting off by collaging down areas of color and pattern, playing off that with various drips and random marks. Next, I coat the whole thing with beeswax to seal it all in and unify the surface. Then I’m painting on top of that.

I’m building a process for myself that allows a certain kind of time between the steps. The collaging is often fast and intuitive; I can lay things out, look at them, rearrange over and over, then I set it all down. The beeswax step is slow; it takes a long time to put down, to iron down and seal it with the heat gun. So that’s a meditative time. Finally, I paint on top of that with oil-based alkyd, responding to the layers I have built up.

The wax is a very malleable surface, so I can paint on top and wipe it way if I choose. I can scrape back into it. I can make lots of changes. That’s important to me because it allows me to work spontaneously and not worry about how “right” the move is. I can act as though it’s right, and then respond to it, and if it’s not right, I can work with it. Very often there are days where I feel like I’ve just trashed all my paintings. The next day, I’ll come back and what I thought of as mistakes have helped me to leap forward into something new. That was certainly the case with the Wave paintings. I felt like I’d gotten stuck in a corner, and the Waves allowed me to move into and around the painting again.

KK: The paintings are well crafted; they are technically complex and built up through a sometimes laborious process. How do you court the spontaneity? How do you get in the space to make the more loose and chaotic elements of the painting?

MC: It just comes naturally to me. For me, when a painting is too predictable or under control, I don’t like it! Then I’ll pour something on it, or do something random to break it back open. There’s always a process of opening the paintings up, then reining them in, then opening them back up, then reining them in. They are done when the surface has a satisfying quality to it. When I feel that the disparate elements are relating to one another in a way that is pleasing to me; when I’ve found the balance.

KK: At some point I always ask people about where they are from, what was it like growing up there, how they developed as an artist. So this is that point! Tell me a little about your background, Margaret.

MC: I grew up in Portland, Oregon. I was the youngest of four kids with a single mom. Music was the art in our family; everyone was very musical. My mom was gone most of the time so we kids basically raised ourselves. It was a wild and chaotic upbringing and I got into lots of trouble; my brothers and sisters got into even more trouble. But I learned a little bit from them about what to avoid. (Laughs)

I constantly made art as a kid. I was always sitting in the floor in the living room drawing with my crayons and markers while things flew over my head; the huge, volatile arguments. Art has always been a haven from all that for me.

I also loved science, and I started college as chemistry major. I studied all kinds of different things before I realized that I should focus on art. I transferred to UC Berkeley and did the art program. My biggest influence there was Stan Whitney, a visiting professor from the Tyler School of Art in Philadelphia, which is where I ended up going to graduate school. I worked in a lot of different media at that time: painting, printmaking, sculpture. My thesis show consisted of mixed-media objects on the wall. After graduation, I showed installation work in San Francisco. But then I slowly worked my way back to painting.

KK: And you have taught painting and drawing?

MC: Yes, at Laney College and at community centers like Studio One in Oakland.

KK: You are now finishing up the paintings for your show in April at Mercury 20. Do you work towards exhibition, trying to create a total body of work? After you show your work do you feel drained, like a lot of artists do? It looks like you have some threads of future directions here that you could go in…

MC: It can be a problem, picking up after a show. It’s almost like I want to have a couple of paintings in progress but not finished, to come back to. There’s a loss and an end to the process of making the work. But there is a lot of stuff generated in this body of work that I feel excited about. I’m not sure I’ll have that same issue this time.

KK: Do you have a favorite painting from this body of work?

MC: The one called Blossom is one of my favorites, and I finished it early on. Also, I love the gray Wave painting (Floodtide). As I keep going I’m attracted to some of the unfinished ones, like this one here.

KK: Yes! That’s my favorite. I can’t wait to see how that one turns out. So, how do you title the paintings?

MC: It’s hard. As I’m working on my statement, I’m coming up with a lot of ideas for titles. Strangely enough, many of the words that are coming up have to do with water. Which makes sense with the fluidity, but not the hot color.

KK: I see the huge dictionary on your table. I’ve known many artists who comb the dictionary looking for interesting and appropriate words. I often jot down words or phrases that come up throughout the day.

MC: Me, too. Here is my pile of post-it notes that I have scribbled on as I go about my daily business. I have always collected words. My old journals are filled with lists of words and definitions. I will tend to name pieces within a show—the titles for this show for example will probably all inter-relate.

Titles are tricky for abstract paintings. You want to open up another little window to what someone is looking at, but you don’t want to close it by being too specific.

KK: I look forward to checking it all out—finished paintings, titles and all. Thanks so much for speaking with me today, Margaret!