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I.Notice
I.
Those paintings were mostly about backs, she said to me.
And I thought,Why are they turned away?
What are you hiding?
Maybe youre hiding their big tits.I decided to do the opposite of everything Id ever done.
She would get to those tits, but she began with the eyes.
Youre fucked up and Im watching you.
With every new painting at the time, I started with the eyes.
They were using whatever powers they had to get back at you, she said.
Its gonna hurt you as much as it hurts them to be looked at.
I wanted the viewer to be a little turned on, and then uncomfortable.
I have always been drawn to her paintings, though I couldnt have told you exactly why.
How can such an innocent gaze be so provocative?
And yet it is.
Yuskavage spends a lot of time staring down what she has applied to her canvas.
She is hypersensitive to what is working and not.
After she graduated from the Yale School of Art, she assembled all the work she had made.
I had a light table.
I laid out all the slides of my paintings and removed everything that sucked.
I free-associated what they had in common.
And then I took the words that kept showing up: light, luminosity of color particularly.
Light is the subject of my work.
In her case, subject and subject matter are inseparable.
She has a useful capacity to be highly emotional and analytical at the same time.
Her response is visceral, but leads her to action.
Nowhere was that more extreme than after her first professional art show.
I walked into the opening, she said.
Youre all dressed up.
Everybody shows up, everybodys excited.
Theres going to be a dinner afterward.
But I could barely get through the evening.
I said to my husband, Oh my God, I hate this, I hate it.
I said, Where am I in this?
Who made these paintings?
Theyre so uptight and precious and trying to prove something.
I said, I need to get the fuck out of here.
I was ashamed of it.
I had removed any sign of it from my work.
I felt very trashy there.
My trashy personality I have volumes of it.
Yuskavage knew she had to make a dramatic turn.
She had to reject much of what shed learned in school, maybe not be an artist at all.
She fell into a tortuous depression.
Central to them was sexuality.
She found porn, and was fascinated by it.
And she began to notice little signs of abuse around her.
Shed had a best friend whod been molested.
When she told me what was happening to her, I cried and cried and she sat there dry-eyed.
And I realized later shes the person who taught me empathy.
People think I am the molested person.
Well, there is a molested person in the mix here.
In a way she created my imagination, said Yuskavage.
She originated certain thoughts especially around vulnerability.
Yuskavages children have grown-up bodies and little-girl faces.
In a sense they are all set in a pubescent world.
In puberty, youre becoming sexual but youre not ready to get fucked.
What puberty was like reminded me of what my paintings were like they didnt want to be seen.
My paintings were like pubescent girls.
They wanted to hide, but they couldnt hide.
And then their eyes were looking at you.
The early work was where I was really cooking with gas, in the early 90s.
I was connecting, figuring shit out.
Most were painted in loud, garish colors putrid green, neon yellow unusual in contemporary painting.
Her palette was more confrontation, another way of flipping the bird at her viewers.
Its this Barbie-doll kind of aesthetic, a world of artifice.
This is not the world of Leonardo.
Leonardo didnt have hot-pink paint.
And if he did I dont know what he would have done with it.
I wanted to tell the truth about something gnarly.
I had never seen a painting that included a kind of vulgar experience of being a female.
My work was really hated.
And then people were intrigued.
I took a lot of shit for it, but it was okay.
I was like,All right, Im just going to make it more fucked up.
Now Im going to bring a pussy in a bald fat pussy.
But make it the most beautiful thing ever.
II.Listen
II.
Like most of her later work, its also about all her work, over the years.
Somebody might say, How long does it take you to make a painting?
I say, Well, where are we starting?
This isnt a phase; it is her work now.
On Yuskavages website, you will find 41 paintings under the keyword studio.
(You will also find 16 paintings by clicking masturbating.)
Before Yuskavage and I sat down to talk aboutPainter Painting, we first wandered around her studio.
Its airplane-hangar huge, divided into three rooms.
The first is an office.
There were two drawings of a girl without pants.
There is no smoking gun, she said.
Its lots of things.
You have to be an irreverent person in some way.
Be Catholic but not.
Have to have a certain kind of training and then you shit on that training.
And then are you willing to do this?
Reject the hand that feeds you?
We were looking at the table.
I had another friend, who was my roommate in school.
It was like boom, boom, boom.
She would walk around with a T-shirt on and no pants.
My roommate must have been on my mind.
I made that scratchy drawing when I was still making more reticent work.
I literally just took out a ballpoint pen and started drawing her.
It was me thinking about something I wasnt brave enough to do for another two years.
Also on the table was a drawing of one of theBad Habitssculptures, calledMotherfucker.
Theywouldboth play featured roles inPainter Painting.
You could roller-skate in it.
There were acres of opened paint tubes, acres of brushes.
One had a preliminary drawing in charcoal.
Yuskavage is famous for these small paintings.
She is an artist of extremes.
Some are final works in themselves; many are studies for larger paintings.
The scale does ask for more planning.
I think the small ones might resemble what most people imagine painting to be like finding things in paint.
Whereas I think the larger ones are more like building a house or sculpture.
I would miss one without the other.
We settled down into two little chairs in this vast space, facing each other.
The easel held a canvas empty but for the ground.
A small iteration of this painting was right beside her.
She is calling the paintingPainter Crouchingfor the time being, and it too is a studio painting.
People used to say, Why dont you paint something else besides a girl?
But I was like, These are my stories.
This is what moves me.
For her, the studio paintings present nearly infinite possibility.
In them she works out versions of herself, revisits her own corpus of work.
Flowers are a motif.
And then theres that art history, her forebears, with whom these paintings are communing.
Outside is hubbub; here it is quiet.
She used to have two assistants; now she has none, because the silence is crucial to her.
It is where she can notice and listen.
It is not all that different from registering her reaction to her own work.
In a sense, the studio is where she can talk to herself.
Here, theres a lot of summoning.
I see something and then I decide to pull it out.
I dont really think about my subconscious, or of dreams.
I think more in terms of seance.
It feels very supernatural to me.
This translates different ways, depending on the artist.
I dont want to go down in history as a total fucking flake, she said.
I realizeIm probably going to go over peoples heads talking about sacred conversationsand seances and stuff.
But two or three people will get it, thats fine.
Because I dont always know how Im doing this.
And thats what the studio is for.
But its here in the studio where these little messages will pop into my head.
Its almost like a sexual urge, to do something in a painting.
That urge told her to cover the painting in a red-purple scumble.
Then it told her to create a path of light in the painting.
She followed the order.Suddenly, the painting worked.Her nausea disappeared.
I trust it because its never failed.
Im not saying the voice is outside me.
I know how to create luminosity in a painting.
But some of it comes from fucking nowhere, and Im grateful to be able to hear it.
And thats why you should probably be in a studio by yourself.
You cant fake a life.
Youve got to take advantage of what youve got.
This is the accumulation of a life of exploration and study.
Theres even a prompt from theNight Classespainting you saw above.
But while looking at the archive, she also noticed photographs shed saved of herself.
And I realizedIam material.
Theres a whole file in the database of Lisa posing for people in her studio.
Thats what makes this painting so singular: she is the protagonist.
Its probably true what they say that all work is self-portrait.
But here it is the literal truth.
It was huge 94 inches tall awesome in every sense of the word.
III.Paint
III.
I thought it was funny.
I wasnt any kind of sexy woman painter.
I looked dumpy, almost troll-like.
Hard at work wearing glasses.
And I remembered that that painting was in progress when Jason photographed me.
He took the picture of me in front of it, pretending to paint the picture.
And I just loved the picture.
I thought it was funny.
I wanted to paint a painting inside the painting with me painting it.
So thats what I did in a painting calledFlesh Studio.
The question I get asked a lot is, When are you going to put yourself into a picture?
That was the first time.
But I was sort of timid about it.
Im very subsumed Im red and you dont see me.
InFlesh Studio, I was kind of hidden.
The idea was how do I reapproach the troll-looking girl.
So I painted a small painting.
In this painting, the artist is dwarfed by these big tits.
And in the small painting, Im making a painting from that drawing.
Id had it floating in my studio a photo of it.
And the small painting was good.
But I thought to approach the big painting with a different energy.
It takes a while of looking and thinking.
I wanted to take everything to the extreme.
One of the big decisions I made was what size canvas.
I wanted it big human scale, like the real scale of a room.
The decision was, how big these tits had to be.
They had to be really overwhelming in person.
Now this painting is also a study in color and contrast.
I start with the ground.
The ground is a mixture of colors.
Heres how I got to that mixture.
And I add the drawing on top of the ground.
And Ive decided with this big painting to really blow the scale up.
I look like a lump, and I really liked that.
I like that shes painting these really obnoxious tits that are unreal.
The point is these obnoxious breasts.
And it speaks to my history.
Does she have big tits?
But by setting myself against these giant breasts Im saying, No tits and ass here.
Its all work, which is pretty much the way I am.
The scale was important.
Its another way of saying, what the fuck are you trying to do here, spit it out.
I go back in freehand because I like what happens in freehand.
I like the contrast of the black and white against the color.
So then I have to let it dry, 100 percent dry, which probably took two weeks.
Drying is a very big part of this and its really fortunate.
You get to consider the painting.
It allows you time to look it and think.
There wastoo muchcontrast I have to pull it back.
I m trying to bring it back together.
I go in there and really work it, wipe away certain areas.
I can still see my drawing underneath.
Then it sits there, dries, dries, dries.
And it really looks like shit.
But a painting has to go through some very doggy-dog stages.
Otherwise, theres no raising Lazarus from the dead.
So then I start putting more information in.
The silhouette stops being a silhouette.
And then I start painting other things darker.
Oh, and see the step stool?
Its what do they call it in the movies?
And you see at this point, it looks like this giant work in progress.
When I look at this stage, I think its fabulous.
I could have stopped right there, but I didnt see it then.
I dont think it was a mistake not to have but its useful for another painting.
Now this, its almost my favorite stage of the painting, when I bring light in.
Its in an arc notice this tiny bit of yellow on the canvas where the arc lands?
Its a circle, an ellipse.
When I do shit like that, I do a little dance.
In the small painting, you may have seen that yellow page I put on the left.
I love legal paper.
My rational brain needs legal pads.
Why did I want a gray?
Its to contrast with this yellow rectangle, which I also put in the small painting.
And I just brought that idea intothis picture.
Okay, now Im going to get to what makes this painting really cool.
That was real, I was using it as reference to paint the giantMotherfucker.
I had to go to the store to get black paint because I didnt have any.
So I did a lot of planning and I came in and did it.
And I did it in an hour.
And I even said to myself,Good job, you didnt fuck it up.
I had a paintbrush in my hand so it was like there were two skewers.
And then finally I wondered whether I should paint Post-its in there, too, on the canvas.
But I thought before I fuck this up, maybe I should paint it on plastic just to see.
I was like,Okay, no, Im out.
Heres the finished painting.
Theres not an ice cubes chance in hell that I could make that painting again.
I called itPainter Painting.
And I know they wouldnt have taken me seriously at all, and I dont care.
And thats what the title was for, right?
Appendix:SomeAdviceforArtistsfromLisaYuskavage
1.Dont crush the birdie.
I had never heard that term before.
I had no choice.
Youre not going to catch up with someone who studied painting for 20 years.
Its those moments that are the most critical in painting when you notice something.
Noticing is the summoning to be a good painter.
You cant plow through.
Yuskavages mother paints dogs, and Yuskavage said shes a good painter.
But what my mom does wrong is that she doesnt notice things.
She wants it to look just like the dog.
you gotta notice things that you didnt intend that might be smarter than you.
you should probably take note that something was better.
Dont crush the birdie when the birdie lands.
Just squeeze it gently and see what happens.
Much of the actual time it took to makePainter Paintingwas watching paint dry.
She resisted the temptation to go in and rework the wet paint, which takes a lot of willpower.
Being impatient is a rookie move.
And I have done rookie moves and I say, What a rookie move.
3.Dont leave your brushes in turpentine.
If you include that one, youll change art students lives.
4.Tube your paint.
If you make a complicated mixture, make a lot more and put it aside in a tube.
Youll probably need it, and its nearly impossible to re-create a mixed color.
5.Use your art history.
The second is art itself sculpture, film, paintings and its history.
And the third is points of nature landscape, the world outside of the art.
6.Be wary of the art world.
I am not crazy about the art world.
Im very glad I didnt get a lot of love early.
I kept thinking,When is it going to happen?They werent buying what I was selling.
I never got so much love and attention while I was forming.
So I had to keep doubling down believing that I was right, pushing ahead to make it clear.
I think thats why Im so grateful to the naysayers.
But I worry for those who get early adulation.
How do you disappoint?
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