Can we talk a little more about your painting process? The blue is so mesmerizing and it's cool to see the paintings in progress behind you. You use the color blue to do your underpainting?

I have a weird philosophy in my mind about color. Blue is one of the coolest colors in terms of human history because it's obviously been around….The ocean is blue, the sky is blue… but the Greeks and the Romans never wrote down the color blue. They've always described it as something else. Which is something I find so cool because it seems like a mystery.

What would they describe blue things as then?

In the Odyssey, I think they just describe the ocean as a wine color. Then in the Medieval and Renaissance period, the color blue was the most expensive color you could make. So when you see an old European painting with blue in it, you know the patron had a lot of money. Usually the most important figures were blue. So Mary or Jesus would have blue. For me to use the color blue makes me like Mary or Jesus….I’m that important. And the viewers are that important!

Picasso had his blue period… That’s the one thing that really bothers me is that when people see I use blue, they say I’m like Picasso…. And I fucking hate that guy. He called women doormats. He made some cool drawings and now everyone thinks he's a genius, but he was a horrible person. Then there's Yves Klein who painted women in his patented Yves Klein Blue, and then made them roll on the floor and called it Art….which is cool but I still find it weird that he never used men or anyone else. So for me to take this color that has been dominated by men and put it in my own lens is really empowering. It’s pretty but also I have this really personal attachment to it.

There are so many shades, but right now I'm using Ultramarine Blue. And yeah, I use it for the underpainting and sometimes as a background or I have the blue peek through. We teach kids blue means sad and red means angry… but blue isn't a sad color. To me, it can be, but I think it's also calm. We see blue in the sky every day, and when you're stuck in your head all the time and then look up and you're just in this blue marble…it's just so comforting to me that there's this blue blanket, kind of holding us in. So the comforting qualities of blue is why I like to use it in all my paintings. I like to do the blue underpainting, but do you know what glazing is?

No, what is glazing?

it's the technique that Renaissance painters use. You basically thin down the oil paint until it's kind of transparent and you put it on the painting so that the underpainting can show through. Renaissance painters usually did brown because it works better with the skin tones, but I like to see the blue pop through the skin because it's there. When painting people, you have to use every color in the rainbow to paint any skin tone. I think that's so cool. The rainbow is in us. We’re so colorful and we don't even know it.

Adam & Eve with Purity & Love, oil on panel, 18x24”, 2020.

Leda and the Swan, oil on loose canvas, 24x50”, 2020.

Yeah, I love to think about that! All this blue talk reminds me of some books I’ve read… Bluets and On Being Blue!

Yeah, if I'm honest, I'm a really bad reader. So, I haven't even read through all of Bluets, but knowing that someone wrote a whole book on the color blue just really pushes me to keep diving into it because I'm not sick of the color yet. I don't think I will be anytime soon, especially because there are whole books written on it. Also, when I was on the East Coast a month ago, I regret not buying this, but I found a book that was on the history of gray and painting. I thought that was so cool because some people find gray to be a boring color, but I think it holds a lot to it.

ink on 18x24” paper

ink on 18x24” paper

Everything interesting comes from gray tones. It has such a large range, and without it we would only have the extremes, total black and white.

Absolutely. And even when I'm painting, I always have to dull down a color. The best way to tone down a color is adding gray or adding the complement of the color… the term is graying it out. I'm so glad we can see the colors. Dogs can’t see, I forget, maybe red or blue? But then there's the mantis shrimp that has about 16 receptors… humans only have 3 or 4…

Can you even imagine what their vision is like?!

That goes back into my fascination with the relationship with humans and animals… I have in my mind when I'm painting, “why do I want to leave this Earth now when there's so much to absorb?”. I don't believe that humans were put on Earth for any reason, but it's still really such a privilege to be here at the same time as a fucking mantis shrimp that can see things in such a cool way.

Yeah, we can learn so much from animals and nature. There's so many ways that we can grow from making space to observe our surroundings. It’s so rewarding and powerful… it can parallel and also give so many metaphors for how society could be. I think it’s important to simplify our mind a little bit to see the complex world humans have constructed in new ways.

My mom got a dog a year ago… and I’ve been telling her that her dog can teach her so much because he's carefree. He's happy whenever his parents come home…. He does his own thing. My mom definitely has depression too, but a lot of boomers don't believe in that. It’s really cool to take what’s around us and use it as a tool to simplify our minds. I don’t think humans were built to think this complicated and here we are... we made stocks, like why the fuck did we make stocks?

ink on 18x24” paper

So true! So, we've talked about the blue, some themes, and what inspires your compositions… Are you a sketcher? Do you have a sketchbook? Is that how you flush out compositions? Or how do you go about starting a painting?

I used to just paint on the canvas, but now, my diary is my sketchbook. Lately, I've been taking sketches out of my diary and just putting them on the canvas. [Avia points to canvas behind her]. So this was from a sketch when I was sad…this unicorn coming out of me and comforting me. I like to turn this very closed in feeling into an epic, holy-like painting. but yeah, I get a lot of my compositions that way. Or if I see a cool Renaissance painting, I’ll take from it, or find photos of animals that I relate to. I found this photo a few years ago of a sheep that got attacked by a coyote and it had its guts hanging out of its stomach but it was somehow still standing. The article the photo was attached to said that it lived like that for another day or two before eventually succumbing to its injuries. I thought that was like a great metaphor for how I was feeling… Even seeing photos of animals cleaning themselves...how horses clean themselves is so precious to me. They just come up next to each other and start cleaning each other's necks. That’s what I want. I want someone to care for me and tend to me that way. So that's how I get a lot of my ideas. My process is just observing and then taking, And then painting.

So what do you have going on right now in your studio? Are these all new paintings?

Right now I'm working on two paintings for San Diego State University. It's a cool experience because it’s my alma mater. So I've been doing a lot of client work and I'm moving to Los Angeles next week. At the moment I'm not doing any personal work, which is kind of lame, but I have all these ideas that I want to pursue in LA… I want to make a whole animated film. I've never done that before and I think that'd be super cool. I’ve had this film idea in my mind for over a year, where I really want to make a short film about how we cope in the bathroom. The bathroom is both this public but private space where you can cry comfortably. You can turn the shower on and no one will hear you. Or sit on the toilet for like 15 minutes just to be on your phone instead of working. Yeah, so that's something I'm really looking forward to finally diving in and working on. It's exciting to have something to look forward to working on when I move.

Time will heal time will heal time will heal time, acrylic on panel, 8x10”, 2020.

Spotlights