Alan Axelrod: So, what are you working on in your studio right now?

 

Anita Arliss: I’ve been painting a series of flowers in a glass vase. The vase is often a simple, thick, clear rectangular vase. All the paintings start as photographs, which I print with the inkjet on canvas and then paint over completely. The current flower paintings are inspired by Manet, because some of my favorite flower paintings were done by Manet when he was old and sick. Some were even done from his deathbed. What’s remarkable about these is that they are very life-affirming, not elegiac or mournful.

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Sick as he was, Manet could paint on small canvases and summon all his interests and powers in seeing just how beautifully he could paint a very intimate and simple subject. In fact, his subjects were often given to him by close friends who brought him flowers. So, he felt emotionally close to them. I consider them some of his best paintings.

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Plus, the vase was a clear glass vase. There is something wonderful about showing all the tangled-up stems in water, in a clear vase: how the light comes through and how the water magnifies and refracts the stems. The flowers, the light, the refractive geometry—all of these are formal elements in painting, and Manet used them brilliantly in depicting this seemingly simple subject in a seemingly effortless way. The key word here is seemingly. I don’t know and no viewer knows the amount of “effort” these flower paintings “cost” Manet. I, for one, certainly don’t care. To me, the measure of effort—whatever that is—is absolutely insignificant. I don’t want to know how much of an image is a photograph and how much is an oil painting. I agree with Alice Neel when she said, “I hate pictures that make you think of all the work that was done to create them.”

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By the way, Manet also painted over his paintings a lot. He would take an existing painting, scrape it down, and paint over large areas. I believe he deliberately used this underpainting as a jumping-off point. This is not apparent to the viewer, of course, but it nevertheless adds a layer of depth, of vitality—life—to his work.

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Alan Axelrod: Did he incorporate actual elements of those underpaintings?

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Anita Arliss: No, I don’t think so. He just painted over it, completely. But, of course, it is still there, a hidden part of the painting. For me, this is the attraction. Naturally, there is his line, his exquisite use of line and color, but there is also a certain life to his work, an animation to his work that draws me in, and I find that when you use an underpainting, when you use something underneath, but layer over it completely, that underpainting still has an effect on the final, visible work. It’s another reality.

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Alan Axelrod: Is there a new direction that your work is taking you?

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Anita Arliss: Well, when I was painting these flowers, I realized what I liked about them. Their colors are so beautiful and saturated, and they are intensely organic, especially if you use the same kind of flower in an arrangement, a composition—if you just use roses or peonies or whatever. I found myself sculpting the bouquet in the vase. I was able to arrange these organic shapes, flowers that were basically all the same, but each one also different, so that they could almost form a singular plane, and have hundreds of different values and shades and lines to them—even if they are the same color. Their simplicity is only apparent, because they have all the necessary elements to create a beautiful picture.

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I started my still-life paintings just by photographing tableaus of different inanimate objects that were close at hand in my studio. Then I started to arrange them in a certain way. In a painting I call Flowers at My Feet, I suddenly put my foot right into the painting, and what had been a tableau became a tableau vivant. I liked being an intervening viewer. That led me to think about paring down the picture’s elements by painting just one type of flower, which I would arrange in a dramatic, sculptural way.