A few weeks ago, I discovered the work of Vanessa McKernan. There was something about the dreamlike quality of her paintings that immediately stayed with me.
Originally from Toronto and now based in the Ottawa Valley, Vanessa creates intuitive works that weave together themes of memory, motherhood, and the complexities of the feminine psyche.
I was able to visit Abbozzo Gallery to see the exhibition in person and had the chance to ask Vanessa a few questions about her process and the recurring themes that appear throughout her work.
*This text has been lightly edited for clarity.
Carla | Artifier:
Hello Vanessa! I love all the layers and details in your paintings. I read that part of your technique involves turning a finished painting 180 degrees and beginning again. What first led you to experiment with that gesture?
Vanessa McKernan:
When you’re working on large paintings over days, weeks, or even months, it’s very easy to lose perspective on what you’re doing. At a certain point, you can’t really see the painting objectively anymore. Turning the canvas upside down is actually a fairly common technique painters use to gain a fresh perspective. Sometimes you leave the room and come back, or simply walk to the other side of the studio, and suddenly you can immediately see what isn’t working, whether it’s proportion, contrast, or composition.
For me, it also became a way of discovering something new within the painting itself. I’d start to notice another composition emerging, and sometimes it felt more interesting than the one I had originally been working on. Eventually, I just decided to follow that instinct and see where it would lead.
Painting over older works also became part of the process. I don’t like holding onto a lot of old paintings, so I began reusing them, often turning them 180 degrees and starting again on top of them. Most of the time, the second or third version ends up becoming a more interesting painting. Something opens up for me in the process.
I think part of this also comes from wanting to push against my own tendency toward harmony or beauty in a composition. Sometimes a painting can start to feel too resolved, too precious, or too perfect. Reworking and flipping the canvas became a way of disrupting that impulse and moving beyond the feeling that I needed to protect what I had already made.
CA:
Many artists seek distance between home life and studio life, yet your home studio appears to nourish your work. How has that proximity been meaningful for you?
VM:
I don’t know if I would have been able to work in a home studio before now. Especially when my children were quite young, I really needed separation to focus properly on my work.
At this point in my life with a 20-year painting practice behind me the “habit” of going into the studio and working is so ingrained it doesn’t matter as much where I am. My home studio is attached to the main house by a long hallway and only shares walls with the garage, so it feels separate enough in the sense that I can’t hear or see what’s happening in the house. The studio space itself it quite special. It used to be an indoor pool—the room is large and wide open with a cathedral style window and large glass sliding doors. It has good energy and lots of natural light.
The proximity to the life of my family is nice in some ways but still has its challenges. When we have people over, they often want to see the studio which I get uncomfortable with. It feels like that stereotypical dream where you are naked in a crowd of people! I’ve learned to set limits around this and protect the privacy of the space.
CA:
You’ve said the paintings often begin with something personal (a memory, a dream) and move toward something universal. How do you know when a work has made that shift?
VM:
I think this shift is happening gradually throughout the entire process of making the painting but if I had to put it into words, it probably goes something like, Oh, this isn’t about me anymore. There is content in this painting that is different from, greater than or more mysterious than my own subjective reality.
The personal narrative or feeling I begin with acts as a starting point for the painting, it gives me a way in. But as I work, I start to think more about the general symbology, or archetypical nature of the subject—which feels conceptually more universal than personal.
I also revisit certain subjects or themes in my work (the sleeping figure, lovers in the garden etc.), and a second, third or fourth painting of a subject that may have begun as personal, is now about something else entirely.
CA:
Are there emotions or experiences that consistently transform into imagery in your paintings?
VM:
Painting is really the place where I ask existential questions about life, love, mortality and the nature of the self. Though I am not religious or maybe even very spiritual, the studio is where I connect to both the numinous and the unconscious. I think a lot of the imagery in my work is representative of an interior world and this probably comes from the state I am in when I make them. I feel deeply reflective in the studio, in a way that is hard to name.
Though I am not trying to paint the representational realties of my life, my experiences and my relationships do inform the imagery in my work to some degree. I am a woman, a partner, a mother and a lover of nature. I also have 8 siblings that I am quite close to, and I think the psychic reality of growing up in a pack, comes up when I paint groups of figures.
CA:
What about dreams? Do dreams provide images, moods, or simply permission to think differently?
VM:
All of the above! Dreams, like painting, are their own language and they are ungoverned by the conscious, more restrictive parts of our mind. Their narratives are non-linear and the content of dreams lives in this beautiful, liminal space between something felt and something visual. And yet the visual is always vague or fuzzy. When I work with dreams, they are usually a way into a painting. They give me something interesting to start with.
CA:
When you’re away from the studio, how do you “wander” in your own life to reconnect with yourself?
VM:
I go outside and see what’s happening in the garden. Right now, it’s spring and things are changing rapidly. I love nothing more that walking around, just looking at what is coming up from the ground, or what tree is starting to bud. Nature is so unpredictable, it pulls you outside of your head and into the realm of your senses; what you see, hear, smell and touch. These “wanderings” are a kind of meditation—a way to connect to the most fundamental, or animal, parts of being a human.
Learn more about Vanessa's work:
Website | Instagram
All images courtesy of the artist.
