Today we’d like to introduce you to Dana Saulnier.
Every artist has a unique story. Can you briefly walk us through yours?
As a young mid-western person in the seventies, it was difficult to make a commitment to making art. At age 18, I began working in construction trades. During winter months when such work was unavailable, I made art. Then at age 25, realizing that I was never going to be happy without trying to find a way forward with art, I entered a very good art and design program at the University of Cincinnati. After finally making this commitment I got a lot of help and support. I completed my BFA degree and was offered a research assistantship at Cornell University where I completed my graduate degree.
I then began teaching and have taught drawing and painting ever since. My formal education was really just the beginning of my evolution and my work went through big changes afterward. Seven years later I finally began to make work that I thought was my own. Now, more than thirty years since that initial leap of faith, my art continues to teach me. It keeps expanding my options; my understanding continually deepens. I would stress to young artists that it has been both highly challenging and totally gratifying to pursue a life in art. Art has taught me to think differently again and again and it has taught me to truly trust my feelings as witness to our fleeting and complex situation. It is a way to live.
Please tell us about your art.
I am a painter who unabashedly loves the history of painting even as my career has coincided with a long series of ‘death of painting’ narratives. If one was going to continue to paint one develops a highly layered genealogy. I work from Renaissance, Modern, and Post-Modern beginnings. Perversely, it was postmodern critiques of painting that led me to a deeper engagement with painting. I think this was because for some of us it made painting ‘history’ possible again. I do not practice history painting by memorializing events. I am interested in recurrent themes of tragedy and comedy and how we orient ourselves to historical understanding. I hope to engender aesthetic experiences that complicate our experience of time as an emotional investment. I want us to be present to our emotions while also finding ourselves beyond ourselves in the vast event of being. In a sense, this is our being as historical within what is more than historical.
Art mediums fuse time in form while interpretation is always liquidating form through language. I am interested in how art calls to language but is never completed by language. Paradoxically, a singular work is both endless and profoundly limited. This gives an art work a life of its own and as an artist I must also move with this life. I become an intimate of the art, never its master. My practice of figuring self-conscious modes of painting, their ‘genetic’ mixing of different historical frameworks, is an attempt to locate a more fluid and contingent sense of deeply felt historical understanding.
I draw a lot. I work from sets of drawings that divide and gather up my sensations. I find some impulse in a drawing that, though not quite visible, seems to have promise. It is like finding some nascent potential that wants to become something more. I then have to go searching for it. What is it? Where is it? What does it need to be? There is a lot of not seeing and not knowing that accompanies my seeing.
Working like this constantly destabilizes categories. The ‘Figure in Landscape’ is always a nominal subject in my work. Even though ‘figure in landscape’ describes the content of our immediate experience, theorizing the relationship is always contentious. For me the distinction between these two categories is emotional, fraught and fragile. We live this relation emotionally, life comes at us even as we project ourselves into its potentials. This same sentence describes painting. As a painter, figure and landscape, figure and ground, become and collapse over and over. A painting is an attempt to feel alive to this event.
What do you think is the biggest challenge facing artists today?
Artists exist within our larger culture and it may make more sense to ask what are the biggest challenges constraining creativity within our culture in general? I think that the concentration of wealth and power we see today comes with a steady increase of administrative rationality that subjects all forms of work to managerial patterns of thinking. Much administrative rationality is now channeled towards patterns of thinking that process data. This is becoming a dominant form of thinking and working.
The practices of management might find increased agency using data driven analysis, but such practices often undermine the imperatives of creative processes. Creative work, whether in the arts, sciences, or business, deploys multiple, overlapping, and often incongruent procedures that unfold alongside each other guided in part by pure chance. The creative process is a kind of feedback loop of inefficiency that generates new thinking. It prepares intuition. In short, it is a managerial nightmare. Given the increasing omnipresence of managerial rationality in our culture, are we losing our capacity to imagine ways of working that are independent, experimental, and creative? In a creative society, different ways of working and different ways of thinking are not only possible but complementary. Currently, the intuitive, aesthetic-emotional, and practical agency of the artist becomes less relatable as a model of dignified work. The processes of creativity as work become increasingly distant from how more and more people work. This flattens the potentials of our culture, as well as our personal potentials to work meaningfully.
How or where can people see your work? How can people support your work?
I am represented by First Street Gallery in New York City. My next solo exhibition at the gallery is scheduled for fall 2020. I frequently show work in academic settings across the country, and am happy to send people email announcements of upcoming shows. My website is www.danasaulnier.com.
Philosophically, I trust the idea that an artwork creates its audience one viewer at a time. Support my work by paying attention to what I make and talking about it to others. The best support is to see the work in person and take the time to let it find you.
Contact Info:
- Website: www.danasaulnier.com
- Email: danasaulnier@danasaulnier.com
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/dana_saulnier/
“Companion”, 2017, oil on linen, 54 x 72′′
“Plexus”, 2018, oil on linen, 88 x 77′′.
Surrender, 2016, oil on linen, 78 x 104′′
“Silent Reading”, 2015, oil on linen, 74 x 92.5′′
‘Trap’, 2015, oil on linen, 84 x 73.5′′
Untitled, 2016, oil on canvas, 52 x 75′′
Untitled (516), 2016, oil on canvas, 32.5 x 40.5′′
Day in studio – drawings and studies for a painting in progress.
Image Credit:
Dana Saulnier
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