Artist Interview with Jenny Kanzler
May 2011
Edited version appears in Bucks County Herald 5/19/11
Image: New Best Friend by Jenny Kanzler
A: It’s such a rare talent to edit a subject matter so that you have the majority of the scene happening outside the painting. You often have that sort of allusion. How do you qualify that sort of restraint?
J: I think that’s really important. It has to do with not telling people too much. And people don’t really want to know. They want to wonder about it. They want the room to do that. If you just tell them what happens it’s not the same as suggesting.
A: Right. And with your work you often have really nice foils or objects that seem to be the main focus but are actually the macguffin that hustle you towards something more interesting that isn’t seen. I’m thinking about the corn-cob that a girl is eating in one of your paintings. The corn itself and its consumption are rather interesting as icons. But it’s more of an entry into the world. Do you often think of the setting in your paintings as a consistent world?
J: I do. I actually really relate to some of your paintings that imagine through the lens of the first person. I started doing that with my work because I wanted to paint not what happened actually in a circumstance but what felt like what happened.
A: It’s very hard to come back to a painting consistently finding that viewpoint and be very dogmatic about describing experience, isn’t it?
J: You have to have something very ritualistic to get you in that mindset.
A: What rituals do you have?
J: : I have to start out doing some kind of play activity that makes me forget the last five things that happened before I came to the studio. Otherwise those things rattle around in my head when I work. A lot of those mixed media pieces I did came about in that way—going through stuff that I found and playing with objects. And while I’m working it helps to listen to music. Music quiets the talking part of my brain.
A: Absolutely and it lets you return to an emotional space quicker that you associate with a particular listening experience.
A: Do you feel like the place that you are painting from is a harkening back to your childhood or are those elements of a childhood narrative a jumping off point to another place entirely?
J: The latter. It’s a way of quickly getting to the heart of emotional experience because that’s the point when I learned everything… well I’m still learning.
A: It’s when your paradigms are formed.
J: Like the first time you learn what a cavity is—you come to take for granted what a cavity is later in life, but the first time you learn about it, it’s kind of horrifying. When I think back about my childhood there’s this blending between what happened, what I imagined happened based on stories people told me, and what is the equivalent of a memory that is the memory of a dream. It’s all intertwined.
A: And I wonder as you are now a parent, there’s a parent’s perspective too. Like you are thinking as a parent about your childhood self. You have to look out for your own wellbeing in those memories now.
J: That’s interesting. I don’t think that’s happened yet but I’m sure that will happen.
A: How do you look at your child from a painter’s perspective?
J: J: It’s hard to say because I’ve never done it not as a painter, but I am transfixed by him. I’m trying to memorize all these things he does because I can’t paint them while he’s doing them. I’m trying to save it to paint later.
A: Are you consciously trying to remember what he’s doing specifically for the sake of painting?
J: I am kind of stockpiling ideas. So, yeah, I am thinking about it in terms of painting. But since I’m not working right now I make little sketches in my notebook to access later so it’s not lost.
A: How diligent are you with your sketchbook?
A: Yes, It’s a very startling and uncomfortable phenomenon when you look in a sketchbook and find something that felt so necessary and exciting and true that you had to sketch or jot it down but then totally forgot.
J: And you’re excited about the discovery but it is disconcerting that you could be so interested and completely forget. I have a terrible memory and that happens all the time. A lot of what I’m doing is about the frailty of memory, the uncertainty..
A: Do you find that painting preserves the memory for you?
J: It’s an interesting question. I don’t think it helps preserve the memory, but it helps preserve the feeling associated with the memory. Starting with something concrete like that you can communicate the anxiety or whatever is contained in the center of that memory that makes it so palpable. Even if you don’t tell someone exactly what happened you can communicate how it felt with very different details.
A: Right. In some ways it’s what I love about looking at classical paintings. I’m usually not as interested with the narratives depicted, the religious or mythological tales. But a good painting has the feeling behind the story come forward especially when the story is forgotten or outdated.
A: Do you find your stories thread together in any larger narrative?
J: Yes, they do. It’s not so much about telling what happened as it is about gathering a personal mythology. I like how in a family you have these stories that everyone tells and over the years you don’t even have to tell the whole story, you just refer to them and everyone knows what your talking about.
A: It’s funny, it’s so shared and instantaneous, that everyone brings to mind that memory but I’m sure for each person that visual aspect is going to be so significantly different even though it’s having the same trigger response. Which is why it’s helpful to make that painting as testimony.
A: Do you talk a lot with your relatives about your paintings?
J: Yes with my mom especially. My mom’s a painter but she couldn’t really pursue her art for many years but she is an incredible artist and I often talk to her for advice and look up to her.
A: Are there some thematic similarities between your artwork?
J: Yes. I think there is a social awkwardness between the characters that my work mirrors. She has this amazing drawing of these boys in the bushes and they are naked and have a rash from the bushes… and that’s it! She calls it The Naked Boys in the Bushes. I love it. She did that when I was in high school and I think I’ve been chasing after it ever since.
A: That’s one of those well-edited visual statements that says so much with so little.
A: You do have such an affection for the foibles of childhood and the dicey experiences—are those the socially awkward experiences you are looking at— sort of like celebrating the underdog or the kid who throws up on the bus?
J: I was either the underdog or was in a situation where I had a lot of empathy for the underdog. When I wasn’t experiencing the pain myself I was experiencing it through the other person. So there were a lot of experiences. I mean it was epic. Childhood was epic, which is why it felt like it needed a mythology.
A: I’m curious about what aspects of childhood are poised for painting or are best translated by painting. Like you say, it’s epic, there’s a difference in the experience of time that I feel is similar to the act of painting, where your sense of time distorts. Are there other elements that are painterly?
J: Operating as an emotional being that hasn’t been fully socialized, everything has emotional content and the uncanny is all around you. You know you have a home but there are so many unfamiliar things in the home. Like you are in the bathroom and the shower curtain has butterflies that you look at one day and see as old mans' faces and suddenly it doesn’t feel like home anymore something has changed and it’s frightening.
A: That’s right, there is this immediate nostalgia for your environment when you are little and you are fascinated with what feels familiar as soon as it has any relationship to you, yet you know so little about it, so it has that capacity to become alienating.
J: And there’s so much you don’t understand that when something happens there’s a lot of potential to be frightened. We had a red carpet in our bedroom. When I was I kid I learned that red was associated with fire and hell so I thought this carpet was the portal to hell and I was terrified. And the carpet is also a comforting thing, but in the dark it’s blood red. Adults don’t really worry about that because they understand it’s just a carpet.
A: Are you ultra sensitive to Irving [Jenny’s son] having these mysteries?
J: YES. Because on the one hand it was so fascinating to live like that, that I want him to experience it but I want to save him from the fear part of it. I don’t really want him to have that kind of imagination.
A: It’s hard to reconcile those things that you live through which weren’t pleasurable or were even scarring, that in some ways you still cherish. How does painting negotiate that charming terror that comes up in your work?
J: I think the whole point is to understand it. It’s about examining the fear and the anxiety and also the beauty and fascination and to try to create a kind of teetering balance between too much of one and too much of the other so that it remains a question. Because it is unresolved and I’m interested in examining it but not in solving it. It’s a puzzle I want to keep playing with.
A: And regarding play, I love the little boxes you made with animals and dirt inside which you can shake into different postures. It’s a seemingly playful and innocuous game that, in your description, is a means for generating a randomly tragic or comic outcome or something in between. Are there similar metaphysical games that you find in the paintings?
J: Definitely.
A: Like the first painting of yours I encountered was the portrait of a deer’s head that flickers back and forth between comedic and a pretty horrific expression. Looking at it is almost like shaking the little box.
J: I did that before the boxes and in a way the boxes were an end game because they did It better than the painting.
A: Bacon talks about making these controlled but accidental marks. Like, he started throwing these big clumps of paint at the canvas and kept wanting the accident to be just so. It’s always a hard negotiation to get the look of spontaneity and also have it do your bidding.
J: That’s true. Actually having other people look at my work they’ve pointed out things that cause me to stop working on it. Suddenly I see it through their eyes and my inclination is to way overwork or never finish and other people realize that moment when I should have stopped.
A: I always think it must be tragic for abstract painters who will always have part of their audience recognizing a poodle in your painting and forever you have to try not to see a poodle in the painting.
J: Bacon did do a really good job at that. Like that show a met a couple of years ago, the pieces in the later rooms showed how good he was at that.
A: Yes those ones that are very specific graphic and poignant but have this grand sense of unpredictability in them.
J: I learned at that show how obsessed he was with the through the eyeglass shot from Battleship Potempkin and it’s interesting to see how that relates to the controlled explosion he’s trying to make on the canvas.
A: Yes he was so good at taking imagery from both pop cultural and classical and finding that irreverent truth that was specific to either one.
J: I wasn’t a huge fan of his for a while but after seeing that show it completely changed my mind.
A: It’s funny I relate your work to his.
J: I get that a lot. For a long time I didn’t get it but now I do.
A: There’s that strong sense of place of an event that you share. Like those mattress paintings you did. You said there are only two but in my mind I feel like I’ve seen a larger series of them.
J: Ha, I don’t think so.
A: Because it feels like that bed is such a location of an event that you imagine a range of occurrences on it.
J: Yes Bacon was interested in dirty mattresses too.
A: Well they carry the stories of all the people who’ve been on them.
J: You know what I found out on Friday? The pieces that I exhibited in the Academy’s Annual Student Exhibition caused a real flap. They became known as the dead baby series and were almost not shown. Which is odd because in my mind they are not dead, and they are not a series. There’s that painting of the girl running away with a baby in her teeth… that baby isn’t dead. I’m surprised and kind of entertained by the idea that they were all up in arms about this and I had no aim to be controversial.
A: I’m sure it flickered in my mind that these might be dead babies but I think there are enough questions in the piece that don’t allow you be of a certainty.
J: What’s always interesting to me is the range of responses I get. To one person it’s funny to another it is horrifying. Sometimes I’m disappointed when I take a great care to include or avoid something that is completely disregarded.
A: Well it often has to deal with how a painting fits into an onlookers’ personal narrative. Most folks need to conclude a painting in their mind before they move on. If it resonates they will feel it needs to be solved. Which I guess is a good sign that at least it’s resonating. What do you think you’ll be working on next when you have the time to get back to painting?
J: Well I rarely do what I plan to. I’ve focused so much on images of children, I’m interested on doing images of adults but I cant’ just jump into it, I have to work my way to it. I’m interested in doing pictures of parents and counselors and adults from the perspective of children.
A: That’s fascinating—to invert the equation and to not lose the connection but reverse the charges. That’s exciting.
J: Well there’s the danger of becoming seen as the person who does the pictures of children. I don’t want to be put in a category like that and I’m very close to that if not already there.
A: It’s hard to step back and encapsulate your work, but for me the world that the characters inhabit is stronger than the individual characters. Do some of your characters reoccur or reoccur in the service that they are characters?
J: Absolutely. There are kids who have had a real impact on me. Not necessarily friends but kids I remember well. There was this girl that I was sometimes friends with and sometimes I didn’t see for a long while. She had a terrible story. She had the most tragic childhood I’ve known. She lived nearby, close enough that she was always coming over. There was this evil boy who was also close by. One time my sister and I found her completely naked on the playground just sitting on the swing crying. We asked her what happened and she said this boy had stolen her clothes and had hid them in the woods. He wouldn’t tell her where they were. And the boy was sitting on the playground laughing sadistically, enjoying that the girl was so vulnerable. In the middle of a Sunday afternoon having to sit naked in a playground, and she couldn’t go home because her father beat her and her grandfather beat her. The girl would go into this fantasy world where she was this very powerful horse and made horse noises. Of course the other kids were so entertained by that and teased her relentlessly. She’d come to school in her nightgown because nobody was taking care of her. She wet herself constantly because she was so emotionally damaged. She had this dog named Daisy who was the only thing in the world that loved her and that she loved. She would lead Daisy around on a rope because she didn’t have a leash. One day she brought Daisy around and all the kids made fun of her for leading her on a rope. Then they made fun of the dog. This kid grew up with so much, but the pain that welled up in her eyes when they made fun of her dog was…
A: It’s so strange how creepily observant kids are of that pain in both empathic and sickeningly aggressive ways. Kids are able to find the weak spot so easily.
J: That’s exactly true.
A: I remember those feelings of recognizing the situation as if from afar and seeing the tragedy of it and either feeling helpless to it or even chiming in against better judgment. There’s a strange sense of tragedy when you’re a kid.
J: I feel like people forget what it was like. Or like you’d have to forget in order to overlook children the way they get overlooked. I was almost afraid to have kids because there’s so much going on there. And parents have so much power and affect on their kids. That’s a lot, having someone else’s life so dependant on you and not just dependent for sustenance but everything you do has a strong impact.
A: You are their compass.
J: Their universe is so small and everything that happens is so powerful.
A: The hunger is strong for the mind to make relationships with everything around them and come up with conclusions for things even if they are just placeholders. Do you want to say a little more about the comedic aspect in your work? In a way you find just in the nature of childhood a comedy in their awkwardness.
J: Well I definitely don’t want to make fun of anyone.
A: But you are interested in the folks who would have been made fun of.
J: Absolutely. I guess I’m disturbed by the way that there is something funny in tragedy, that there is something pathetic about the human condition. I don’t want to see it that way but it’s hard not to when you step back and you are surprised that there is humor in it. So it’s about probing. But the comedy is also relief. When you are overwhelmed by the tragic parts of it, the comedy is a relief even if it’s an uncomfortable relief it saves you from being drenched in sorrow.
A: It reconciles absurdity.
J: Yeah, and it’s like admitting the futility.
A: I think painting is good at getting at those emotions and definitions that are hard to describe with language. It does seem though that art doesn’t commonly look at comedy as a theme in an earnest way.
J: Because it’s not seen as serious. Goya does a great job of that with his Follies, even though the Disasters of War are more well-known. But they go together.
A: That’s true. You say that comedy isn’t seen as a serious subject for painting but I think that the artifact of painting is what can make it serious. Painting can hold a gaze that undoes comedic timing and allows it to find a serious foothold. I’m curious to hear how you’d describe the comedic element in your New Best Friend painting?
J: I think I was kind of making fun of myself in that painting. I was thinking about the friend triangle. There was this sought after friend and I was battling with this other friend for her approval and I was caught up in that trial. Every morning one summer that friend would come in and say, “you’re my best friend,” and the next day Janet was her best friend. And she used to bring sweettarts, the ones that come in a package of three. Two were always two for her but whoever was that friend for the day would get that third sweettart. And we put up with it and I was devastated when it wasn’t my day. It was awful. But when it was my day I was very proud of myself. That image is of when it was my day, and I have my dodge ball because I feel very powerful.
A: Do you ever eat that kind of candy now?
J: No I haven’t had one of those giant sweet tarts since then.
A: I wonder if you tried it now if all those feelings of competition for love would come rushing back and be palpable again. I imagine that the friend triangle is a more common childhood experience that it seems.
J: Actually the one thing I love is when people start telling me stories. They’ll see a painting and then start telling me this amazing story. Like this one woman saw a painting I did of a purse with bugs in it and she told me about moving into this beautiful Victorian house with a mansford roof. They moved in and it was completely vacant but all the blinds were closed. They had those big heavy drapes that serve a purpose and keep a draft out and the thin drapes behind for diffusing the light. And they opened up the heavy drapes and there were these clear clothing bags hanging in the window, but moths had infested the bags so they were filled with these beautiful clothes but they were completely covered with dead moths.
A: It’s funny, you’re describing someone else’s story but I can hear you visualizing it just as much as I am now too.
J: I wanted to paint it, it was so extraordinary. But I would never steal someone’s story like that. But they definitely influence me.
A: You feel like there is a propriety to stories like that?
J: Yes I do. I’d have to come by that story honestly. I couldn’t just take it.
A: Is that more for your sake or for theirs? You wouldn’t feel like it was your painting or you wouldn’t want to rob them of that memory?
J: It’s a moral dilemma for me. It would be false to present it as if it’s my story. It’s like telling someone else’s story but inserting “I” in their place.
A: Even if the point is to get at the vision of someone else’s vision?
J: If I thought about it that way I might be able to do that but I would have to somehow make it known that that’s what I was doing.
A: Cause certainly the image that comes to your mind is not her image, it’s coming from her story but it’s your image.
J: But I feel like she painted that image in my head.
A: But I imagine that her image and yours are still wildly different. Just in the same way that when you are traveling to a place you build up a specific image in advance that is quite different from what you arrive to.
J: That reminds me of these silly brain teaser books that asks you to poll a bunch of people what they visualize when they think of the word blue. Abe [Jenny’s husband] actually pictures the word blue, which is so bizarre to me. And some people picture the sky, some the ocean, my mom pictures a teacup full of blue.
A: That’s funny, it makes me visualize a group of people trying to visualize blue.
J: There’s such variety in what people imagine.