Louise Giddings

On Painting, Naked ladies, and Popes.

Louise Giddings is a NewYork based Swedish Painting major at RISD who welcomed The Looking Glass into her Point St. studio one sunny afternoon for an interview…

“I love objectifying. I think painting is all about objectifying things.”

WHAT SHE PAINTS:

“I’m a very figurative painter. I love portraits. I love girls. I’ve always loved painting girls and painting ladies — I like painting men too — but I’ve always felt that I can extract more from women. Also, I come from a big lady family: a big matriarchy.

Everything comes from random places. One of the nice things about not painting from a photo directly, but painting from the mind, is that you compile a lot of information visually throughout the day, and emotionally, and then you get to birth a very abstract physical entity of it all where you just mix it up.”

Louise tends to paint directly from her imagination or memory.

“I had just been looking at photos of puffins and penguins, looking at their eyes. I love bird eyes.

So the muse isn’t always directly translated, you wont’t always see it.”

“Here, I was thinking about my old driver’s ED teacher. When you’re sitting in the driver’s seat and you’re like 17, and he looks over to you like ‘*get it together.’ ”*

HER INFLUENCES:

“One of the things I get often is ‘Oh woah, you paint a lot of naked people,’ which is true. I paint a lot of nude people. It’s kind of neutral to me. I don’t have any connotations to the nakedness, it’s just is what it is.

I had a really big Lisa Yuskavage phase — she’s a woman who paints a lot of naked women, and often people read them as very sexual. But she also is very adamant about how she is just kind of painting without making a feminist or anti-feminist statement. These are simply made up people and there’s freedom in that. They’re not real people that exist — you can do whatever you want to them.”

“I’m also inspired by Nan Goldin photos and old renaissance paintings, especially Botticelli.”

How do you feel about people reading your work politically?

“I usually fight back at that, because I feel a little protective over the judgment of women — even fictional women. I also really like John Currin, who is very controversial, so I get a lot of criticism for liking his paintings (he is an old man that paints a lot of naked women.) My response is well, I’m a 21-year-old girl, I’m not an old man — so I do find a wonderful authority in saying, well, you can’t really judge the paintings because they’re kind of autobiographical. They could all be self-portraits. All the naked ladies…. but they’re not.”

**“I have focused on the gaze and creating confrontational characters where you feel like you are a voyeur looking at them when they don’t want to be seen.**
**Or they are looking at you in a kind of difficult way.”**

“I’m sneaky. I like secrets.
I also like Pope Francis.”

“I often return to the headspace of when you’re a child doing things you’re not supposed to. Spying. I enjoy the flirt in that way. Maybe that’s why I do kind of enjoy being criticized for my naked paintings, or I enjoy painting them because I sort of feel like I’m not allowed to.”

HER PAINTER ORIGIN STORY:

How did you first get into art?

"My Mom doesn’t call herself an artist, but she’s such a good one—she can etch incredibly well. And my sisters are both very artistic, so there was never an ‘I’m going to do art’ moment. That was always how it was at home: painting at the table as we watch a movie.

But I really started painting with oil paint and feeling pretty serious about it when I was a freshman in high school. When COVID started, I got to lose sense of time and space and just be in my room and paint. I think that was probably the most electric time artistically in my life — even today I’m trying to return to the unbothered magical little confinement that that was.”

THE PROCESS:

“These are all oil paintings. Usually what I’ll do is paint a thin layer of oiled down paint then wipe it off, which will leave a bit of a stain. Then on the stain I take a brown or whatever color and essentially draw with paint. The beauty of oil paint as opposed to acrylic paint is that it takes a while to dry, so you can erase and redo. Whereas acrylic dries a lot faster and is more stubborn once it settles.”

How long does it take to make a painting?

“I’m a fast painter. Larger paintings definitely take a few days, usually over a period of like two weeks, but I’ll also be working on something else within that. Smaller paintings take a few hours.”

What do you think of when you’re painting?

“I think and I don’t think. Painting is very physical, which is often the way you get out of your mind. But it’s an incredibly mentally involved physical action. When painting feels really good, it comes from such a deep place of empathy where I feel maternal almost towards figures as I create them.

Painting can be very lonely. It’s a one person sport. When you’re so alone so for long it can become kind of melancholic, and you have a very natural urgency to fill up that loneliness with some kind of reality. I find, when I’m sleeping really well, exercising, or being a very well-balanced person or whatever, I’m nowhere near as creative. But when I feel that urgency where I need to create something, I need to create other people, then it actually is pretty good. It is totally catharsis.

I’m very grateful to have found painting so early in my life.”

READING HER WORK:

Do you analyze your paintings?

“I analyze what other people say, what they feel, or what they would name my portraits for example… and then I take from what they think. It’s kind of like dreams.”

I guess I’m fascinated by human dynamics and the very quick moments in which they feel incredibly potent. As I progress I’d like to be able to concentrate on that and pull out an even wider variety of essences of people. It’s very emotional. (I cry in here all the time.)

*Do you want to be a painter forever?*
“I don’t think I can be anything else. I’ve never even considered being anything else. For now at least, I’m feel like I’ve just begun.”

“I’m really excited to paint for as long as I stay alive.”

On Painting, Naked ladies, and Popes.

Georgia Turman