Introducing... Maya Brodsky

Ahead of Moments of Being, our first exhibition of Brodsky’s paintings, we sat down with Maya to learn more about her beginnings as a painter, why she considers family a “worthy” subject and how painting her experiences helps her remember.

George Adams Gallery:    Let’s start with a little background: how did you start off as a painter, what brought you into art?

Maya Brodsky:    Well - going back to childhood - when I was little, my mom made me and my sister take piano. I was really lazy and didn't like to practice but she would try to motivate me, by getting me a present after the recital. One year I asked for an oil painting set, which she got for me, and I just loved the feel of it. I would like to stay up all night painting horrible paintings of flames and tears and leaves, I saw myself as an artist, I just was like, “yep that's what I am.” 
When my sister went to college she majored in art; I just didn't realize that was an option. My parents didn't seem upset by it or anything, they were supportive, so I thought, I guess I can do that too. It was the one thing that I could lose myself in.
I really enjoy processing things through art, to think and paint - to think of something and start painting it and then see how it changes.

GAG:    Your paintings have come along way from tears and leaves and rain! Is there an evolution that you can talk about? 

MB:    It was when I was in college when I started to figure out what was actually meaningful – worthy of being painted; what was interesting and genuine and not just an exercise or just beautiful, you know. I was always interested in old family photos, even before I was interested in painting, whenever I was at my grandmother's house I would flip through the old photo albums, the black and white photos. I liked that there were people from a long time ago, who weren't here now, I still had these images of them. So when I was thinking of what was meaningful, I knew it was somehow related to that, I started painting based on these old family photos. At some point I started going small and that was related to the old photographs too, but it allowed me to put a lot of time and energy into a small space and I realized I really liked that. I really enjoyed just sitting with something for a long time and really working it to death, you know? What ended up working for me was that kind of realist style.

GAG:    You say “worthy of painting”: What are your criteria for a subject being worthy? 

MB:    That’s a good question. Sometimes you just know it when you see it, but for me it's a feeling of when something is genuine. If I'm going to make a painting about death, which is a worthy subject, an interesting subject, I have to feel like it's not just this big idea with no individual form. It has to be interesting, something that's not just a one-liner. It has to have multiple facets, multiple ways that you can look at something and multiple feelings you can get. And it has to be somehow personal for me - I don't know why that is - it has to feel like it's coming from a personal place.

GAG:    You still work from photographs, but you're working from your own photographs. Tell me about your process, why photographs?

MB:    It probably started with me not feeling good enough to paint things from life when I was younger. I can paint things from life now, it’s just a really different process. Oftentimes, there are paintings I've started from life and I need the light to stay just like it is - and then I’ll take a photograph and go to town on that photograph. But I think part of it for me is I really like to get every single detail. There's some way of honoring something by really, fully reconstructing it in paint. It could be really interesting to do it differently, but for me, I don't know, I can't stop, I go all the way.
When there are situations that are beautiful, I want to capture them and work them into a painting, but I can't be there forever. Usually that's where the photography springs from; and then part of it is my old interest in these family photographs. Initially I wanted to combine these old family photographs in the new spaces somehow and have these people meet each other, do some weird stuff with space-time. Over time the old family photographs faded away in my paintings, the old characters went back and I was left with what was happening now. And I think about how that is going to become an old photograph eventually and an old painting.

GAG:    Your family is an important part of your paintings, particularly the birth of your daughter features strongly. How does your family relate to your work?

MB:    You know, it's weird because they're really separate. I'm painting about them, but they're outside the studio door, knocking, trying to come in all the time and I'm like, “leave me alone, I'm trying to paint this painting of you,” which feels odd. These paintings are what those moments in time with them are really like, it's really meaningful to me. But if you ask the kids to look at my paintings, they’d much rather look at a rainbow. They always look at my work and say, “that's nice.” One day I had a color wheel up and they were like, “that one is so beautiful!”
What I think about is that when they're all grown up, and maybe have better taste in art than now, I would love for them to look at these and see how much I love them. Thats what I would want.

GAG:    Not a bad thing to be painting about.

MB:    Yeah. Hopefully they'll figure it out someday. 

GAG:    Is there anything else about these subjects as being worthy of painting besides creating that relationship with your children across time?

MB:    Yeah, I think a lot are moments in time that I wanted to stay in. This desperate desire to stay within a moment and recognize that it's this - I don't know the right word - I don't want to be really grand and say there's infinity in it. There's something there beyond what is happening but time keeps going and you can't stop anywhere; but painting kind of can, a little bit, for awhile. 

GAG:    You chose the title ‘Moments of Being’ for the exhibition, which is from Virginia Woolf. What about Virginia Woolf’s writing, that personal set of essays the quote is from, how do you relate to that phrase? 

MB:    I think she's a great. I read Mrs. Dalloway and To the Lighthouse and such, I remember reading and really loving them. She talks about how poets edit things out in order to reveal something and she wanted to put everything in. How the mundane, the day-to-day stuff was also this beautiful spiritual thing and I think about that sometimes when I paint all these details. I'm like, “why does this pink piece of paper have to be in it? what does it mean? How is that related to what I'm trying to say? I feel like the details of the moment, everything as it was, as faithfully, beautifully recreated as I can, is a reference to that moment. With the moments of being, the way she uses it, is they are moments where you are really intensely aware of having a conscious experience of the world. That is roughly what I'm getting at, there are these moments where – it can be any moment, you can make any moment like that. 
In these particular moments of Eda, when she was little and her birth, I relate those to my grandmother because it made me think about her a lot. When Eda was born I thought a lot about the feel of holding her and it made me think across time, this feeling that my grandmother must have had when she held my mom or her own kids, or me. The kind of sensations we share that are at the same time these very mammalian instincts, also very animalistic, also somehow deeply spiritual.

GAG:    We've talked about this, how touch is such an essential part of the subjects you're painting, but also the painting itself. Why is that? 

MB:    It's funny because touch is one of the senses that you can't transcribe through a painting - it’s one of those feelings that’s so temporal. All the senses are, obviously, but you touch something it's in this moment of space and time. I was thinking about that a lot and that's probably why hands featured heavily in this body of work. I was trying to figure out how to get that feeling across and that's why I like those two big hospital paintings. I put myself as the viewer, or at least the viewer as me. I'm holding Eda in one of them or just looking across the room where she is; it's this fleeting, precious thing that's hard to capture, especially with this precise painting technique.
To go back to Virginia Woolf, in one of her diaries she writes if you're trying to capture the soul or write about the soul, you can't just write about the soul. But you can write about looking at the ceiling and you can write about feeling this and that; you can see it out of the side of your eye, you can reference something by describing the things around it. With touch, I’m trying to show all these things around it because there's no way to actually let someone put you back in that moment and that feeling again.

GAG:    You talk about presenting these paintings essentially from your own viewpoint as you've experienced them, you're the one painting them and sharing them. Do you want your audience to relate to your experience, or is there something else that you want people to be seeing? 

MB:    I see these moments from my perspective and that's the memory that feels the most truthful to me. So it would be hard to paint it outside of myself or my viewpoint.
Almost all of them are just from my point of view except for one old family photograph based on my grandmother. Everything is photos I took myself that I tried to take just how I saw it - oh no, Hava took one of them, so one of those is from Hava’s point of view.
Somehow that felt the most truthful way to portray things, so in terms of the viewer, I figured that if it was interesting to me, would be interesting for you. 

GAG:    Through the process of painting these, do you feel like your memories of these events have evolved? 

MB:    I don't know. I think about that sometimes: the more you think of a memory, the more it gets distorted, right? I forget everything if I don't write it down or paint it, I just wouldn't have those memories, they would not be there anymore. With a lot of those paintings surrounding Eda’s birth and the time right before and the time right after, it was an unusual thing that I was taking photographs all the time. I knew that I wanted to remember it, but it was going by so quickly I almost wasn't processing it. Taking photographs all the time was also taking myself out of my mind; I have tons of photographs  from every single day but stitching together these panoramic views, I realized there are huge gaps, so I had to figure out.
I don't know if my memories have evolved. I look at the details really closely because I'm trying to recreate them in paint, so I really appreciate like, wow, the details of a chair, the patterns of all these things that I would have never noticed in the moment. Then I have to somehow figure out a way to paint it, so now I know exactly what the hospital room chair looked like. In some ways I examined it in greater detail, but I don't think it changes the core memory of the feeling of just being there; it is nice to hang out in that moment every day, though.

GAG:    Interesting, and you're still finding new things?

MB:    Oh yeah. I'm finding new things. As time passes you start to see these little patterns or symbols. Your brain looks for patterns and symbols - like this is a symbol of what's to come. But that's just hindsight.

GAG:    This series has taken up most of the past four years. Do you feel like your next step is to move away from this into something new, or is there still more to do?

MB:    Well, I have about five more days of this hospital stay that I could work with, but I think the next body of work is going to be based on when we were packing up my grandmother's apartment, when she moved into her nursing home. I took a lot of photographs and there are a lot of interesting memories and details. I spent 30 years in that apartment, roughly, and she had a lot of her personality in that place. So I think that will be my next focus.

GAG:    Is there anything you want to add as context for any of these paintings? Anything you want to elaborate on, that speaks to your state of mind -

MB:    The only other thing I think about is this connection that really came up for me. I've always been interested in painting my grandmothers, but somehow when I had my own kids, it was interesting to see how my relationship with my grandmothers changed. One of them had passed away already, but my relationship even with her kept evolving. She used to always to stuff that really annoyed me when I was little; now that I have kids, I'm exactly like her and I just see it from a different perspective. There is a moment in Wave II where she's touching my foot, she's trying to warm it with her hands and I remember letting her do that because I thought, oh, this brings her happiness. But only when I had kids did I realize how that felt.