It’s been a few weeks since I’ve listened to some podcasts, but it’s been even longer since I’ve listened to Charline von Heyl talking about her process. So yesterday I got caught up on both, with her conversation with Ben Luke on The Art Newspaper’s podcast, A Brush With…
And she is still looking at your blog.
Asked by Ben Luke if she sometimes spends more time in the studio thinking about the painting she’s working on vs. doing something to it, she replied, [Here’s a podcast link, but I cribbed the quote below from the YouTube transcript]:
Yeah that’s basically all the time. I mean it’s just I’m probably like five hours or so —not much longer, actually my attention span is not the greatest in the studio—and of that time, the actual painting time will be maybe one hour or so. So most of the time is really looking.
And it’s not just making a painting in my head; it really is also literally looking at images, you know, like opening the computer and just going through really weird old blogs, or there are fantastic painters’ Tumblr accounts which I love because it’s not about personality it’s just really about finding idiosyncratic choices.
And so I just get stimulated by that, and then I will see this one weird little orange corner that triggers desire in me, and then I want to have something similar. It doesn’t have to be that orange corner, but it has to be something that renders me excited in the same way that that did. You’re like—and it might be a conventional move or it might be something bizarre doesn’t matter. But the time in the studio is really a time of visual manufacturing.
Further on, when asked what she has pinned to her studio wall, the answer turns out to be, again, your tumblr:
The funny thing is because I am so much in this whole world of looking through images on the computer—Tumblr and all that stuff—and of course, I’m not on social media at all so I do what all those spies do: I drag the images on my desktop, and then I used to just put them into folders that have monthly dates and basically forget them and never look at them again.
And then during the pandemic, when I was working on the Botticelli remake for Matt Haimowitz, I started to actually print out every single image that I dragged, and wrote on it what it exactly was, and date-stamped it. And I have done that ever since, so I’m actually pinning those things on the walls while I’m printing them out, and they become a slow sort of reference to, you know, like a mood I’m creating, and all the synchronicities that play out in that display.
And then there are some images that I print out over and over again. I see there are certain Beuys drawings that are just really important. and I think the most beautiful thing on earth. Right there are two postcards, actually, that travel from studio to studio, and that’s probably the question you asked. One is this weird Bonnard cat from the Musée d’Orsay, this white cat that’s
BL: Oh I know it it’s wonderful.
CvH: I even painted a little frame around it I just love it so much. It has— it’s so funny and has all the tenderness in the world and all the weirdness and it’s such good painting. I mean, Bonnard and Vuillard are so important to me, too. I love them so much.
Previously, related, from 2011: Charline von Heyl is Reading Your Blog