Anne Sassoon Interview with Eva Odrischinsky, Finnish Radio Broadcaster

Where does your work come from? What is your inspiration?

It could be from my sketchbooks, or piles of photographs and rough photocopies that I keep adding to, drawings from the internet, or something I remember seeing.

You say you try to get away from cognitive thinking, but apparently you don’t even start with it. What do you do, faced with a white canvas?

Cognitive thinking is good for other people but it doesn’t get me anywhere in painting. I start with a kernel of a feeling or thought rather than a clear idea. It may just be the physical or psychological relationship between two or more figures, people approaching or turning away from each other. It sounds vague but if I could put it into words, there’d be no point in doing the painting. I do have a strong basic sense of what I’m aiming at, and this is my compass. If you can imagine feeling your way around a dark room trying to find a cuddly cat, it’s a bit like that. You know it’s somewhere in there and that if you keep looking, eventually you will find it.

There’s a lot of depth in your work that seems to come from different layers. Can you speak about this?

There are different layers of experience in painting. I put down my original ideas and allow them to develop, working intuitively in a process of hit or miss which can take the painting into wildly unexpected directions, creating new layers all the time. This is great as long as I remain faithful to that first concept - however abstract. I’d like my work to have transparency, meaning that these layers of painting experience will be visible in the finished work, because it is the journey itself that I would like to share.  

You can’t really pin down the characters, and you don’t know which realm they exist in. It’s not clear if it’s a dream, or fantasy – they seem to live in many dimensions of reality at once. They can come from a different time or culture, yet they live on today. 

It's true that I prefer ambiguity and avoid the characters becoming too obvious. It’s as if I don’t want to label or judge them, and neither do I want to trap them in a specific narrative. For me it is much more interesting, enjoyable and simply worthwhile to let them emerge on their own as far as possible, always trying to capture what feels authentic and human.  

You often work in themes. I’d be interested to see a list of some of the titles of your exhibitions.

I don’t decide on a theme but quite often themes do seem to land on me, and they can preoccupy me for years, hopefully ending with a body of work and an exhibition. This is the pleasure of being self-employed. In 2013, my exhibition at Artspace was entitled Exiles and was about people on boats; I saw them as floating islands isolated by the sea, with disparate people on board, who were in close proximity yet hardly knew each other.  The themes that I’ve worked with tend to lead into each other like a relay race, where each runner has to pass on the baton. Paintings of lost boys and political conflict led me to paintings of men on stage attempting, but always failing, to shake hands.  

I once looked through the window of your studio and it seemed to be invaded by men in suits coming towards you. I couldn’t understand how you could even breathe in there. This went on for years. Women have come back into your recent work, but you keep a clear distinction between the men and the women in paintings. Can you explain why?

It was difficult with those men in suits taking over, and I’m delighted to have finally shaken them off! But not managing to put men and women into the same painting is a new thing for me – I’ve never had this problem before. I only know that in my current work, as soon as I bring them together, the men seem predatory and the women seem uncomfortable. Perhaps it relates to the constant news about badly behaved men…

What is your interest in twins and doubles? 

It is a visual, pictorial interest rather than to do with the idea of twins. I’m interested in what happens when you put two similar figures together on a page – whether they copy or oppose each other, or even just stand next to each other, they can’t help creating a dynamic. They animate each other, like a Walt Disney cartoon. I have sometimes made a double self-portrait where I had two easels in front of the mirror so that there was a slight disconnect between the two.

How do you know when a painting is really finished?

Almost anybody knows better than the painter when painting is finished. This is partly for obvious reasons – the artist is too close to it and can’t really see it anymore. But it’s also because painting is a continuing process, going on from canvas to canvas without a definite starting or finishing point. On the other hand, there definitely is a right place to put the full stop, and it’s too bad when artists miss it and painting becomes like flogging a dead horse.