Loribelle Spirovski
Harpy (2019)
Loribelle Spirovski
Exhibit:
Love Death and the Time I Knew You
On Display:
November 27th - December 11th, 2019
Gallery Information:
House of Fine Art, London
Hours:
Tu-Fr: 10am - 7pm
Sa: 11am - 7pm
Su: 11am - 5pm
Almost three years ago, my family and I took a monthlong trip to Australia and New Zealand. Up until then, I knew very little about the art world “down under” and realized quickly just how much I was missing out on. It was while there that I was first introduced to the intriguingly beautiful work of Loribelle Spirovski and have been a huge fan ever since.
Thus, I was thrilled when she agreed to an interview. And, while I would have loved to fly down to Sydney for a studio visit and face-to-face conversation, I am equally honored by the time she took to correspond with me. Below is the culmination of our emails as we discussed her upcoming exhibit with House of Fine Art in London, the artist/muse relation and how she turns to her five-year-old self for answers whenever she feels stuck. I love what Loribelle shared about the power of experimentation within one’s art and the joy that painting can bring when one gives themselves space. Oh, and her list of female artists that have inspired and impacted her art—so good!
Enjoy ;)
Elizabeth Mathis Cheatham: For people in the US who may not have come in contact with your work before, can you tell us a bit about yourself and your practice? Also, I will note that you will be showing at Context Art Miami in December, so it will be wonderful to have your work in the States!
Loribelle Spirovski: For as long as I can remember, I've always made things. As a child in the Philippines, I had a unique sort of perspective on the somewhat unusual mix of cultures that makes a place like Manila so distinctive. Despite not meeting my father until I was seven, I later came to see that much of my sense of aesthetic and love of art came from him. Later, when we were eventually living all together in Sydney, Australia, he bought me illustrated books and books of art that fueled my imagination early on. In high school I enjoyed the position of “most creative” student, and went on to attend the College of Fine Arts, graduating with a degree in Art Education, so that I could become an art teacher, like my own high school art teacher before me—a woman I admired deeply. However, when I realised that teaching was not the direction that I really wanted to follow, I began to paint, slowly teaching myself in a very intuitive way, inspired by the artists in my books, while I worked as a private English tutor. Soon after, people began to commission me for portraits and eventually I would enter and become shortlisted for art prizes. Before I knew it, I was working as a painter and in 2015 I decided to quit my tutoring job. Exhibitions followed, and gradually I learnt the value and impact of social media on my practice and career. It was through social media that I have been able to exhibit my work in the US and Europe as well as Australia and have my work collected by buyers on nearly every continent. It is a constant learning process, and I think that being self-taught has given me a great deal of leeway in terms of incorporating play into my practice, and being generally unafraid to always try different approaches to mark making and representing the human form. At the end of every working day, I always return to my childhood in the Philippines and those first 8 years of my life, where ultimately, all the meaning in my work originates.
Homme 115 (2018)
Loribelle Spirovski
Homme 103 (2018)
Loribelle Spirovski
EMC: At times, your paintings are incredibly realistic portraits while others have a surrealistic and dreamlike quality… Sometimes there are abstract, surrealist and realistic touches all within one painting. What is the thread that ties your art together, and also, how do you decide which style/tradition you are going to work within in any particular piece? Does changing between these worlds or seamlessly combining them ever feel overly challenging?
LS: I like a painting challenge. Because I taught myself to paint from the comfort of my old bedroom in my parents’ old house in Western Sydney, I never had to compare my work to anyone else's and could leap fearlessly from one style to the next without hesitation. When I started to live with Simon, I also continued to teach myself from the comfort of my own living room, and at the time didn't have much of a social media following, so didn't have my work viewed and judged as widely as it these days. Each style and technique has its own purpose and energy. For me, working as a painter in 2019 is all about reflecting on the past and understanding how we come from it and how it continues to make us, but also how we build from the past, communicating with it.
EMC: Since visiting the National Gallery of Victoria (NGV) and seeing Paulina Olowska’s The Painter, I have found myself rather fascinated (sometimes a bit obsessed) with the artist/muse relationship. I was hoping you might share a bit about Simon: how he inspires your work and how y’all find balance within that paradigm.
LS: Simon is a renowned concert pianist and was already in my life before I even knew his name; in my senior year of high school, I studied a portrait of him by the artist Cherry Hood (it was awarded the prestigious Archibald Prize in 2002) and used it as one of the principal artworks that inspired my own body of work that year. Our paths eventually crossed in a more tangible way when, as part of an 'Art Lovers' group on Facebook, he reached out and messaged me, commenting on how drawn he was to my paintings. This instigated a series of conversations that resulted in a life-changing few months involving the turbulent cessation of an increasingly toxic decade-long relationship (with my then-boyfriend), and our lives immediately becoming entwined. He proposed to me 9 months later.
My first portrait of Simon is entitled Vers la flamme—after the haunting piece by Alexander Scriabin—and was my entry into the 2016 Archibald Prize. It was my most ambitious work to date and the last truly photorealistic painting I have completed. Painted over a month in our second bedroom, it depicted Simon as a phoenix rising from the ashes of childhood trauma and existential anxiety and was just as much a portrait of me, as it was of him. So, when it was rejected by the judges that year, I was forced to take a huge step back and reconsider my entire approach to painting and art. What followed and what continues to be the driving force behind my practice is a series of experimental portraits (of Simon) in which I played with any and every style that I had landed on. This process became a way of getting an idea out of my system, even if it didn't result in a successful work. Experiment after experiment brought me closer to a kind of visual language that I didn't even know I was looking for, and most of all, taught me how I could enjoy the act of painting; how it could be fun. Whenever I am playing around with an idea, I almost always test it out with a study of Simon. To this day, I have created upwards of 150 paintings and drawings of him. I almost never paint myself, with my last self-portrait painted in a frenzy the day my dad had his stroke. More often than not, I see myself in my portraits of Simon, because I know that they are imbued with my feelings at the time, and that he is sitting or posing in a way that was shaped by me and what I needed from him while he sat. We have (as I have come to understand) quite a unique life as a couple. Both artists in different ways, both with pasts that continue to shape who we are as artists, both happily obsessed with each other (and our cat). He is me.
Vers la Flamme (2016)
Loribelle Spirovski
Momento Mori - Janus (2015)
Loribelle Spirovski
EMC: I grew up visiting museums that were filled with paintings of women. It wasn’t until decades later that it dawned on me that while the female form was represented on the wall, female artists were not. I find it interesting and refreshing that so many of your paintings are of men and very much enjoy the gaze shift. Has this always been the case with your art? Why do you think that is?
LS: I generally paint what is closest to me and when I first started painting, I did a lot more self-portraits and they were often very confronting involving some kind of violence or nudity, but I soon felt that doing direct self-portraits was less authentic and more put-on than if I were to represent myself in more indirect ways (through a conduit like my husband). These days, I actually paint more nebulous figures, often beginning with a male or female model and reversing or blending genders that creates more ambiguity. This wasn't a political statement by any means, just a natural tendency that I found myself doing time and again.
EMC: In your interview with Talking with Painters, you spoke beautifully about a time when you realized you were ‘painting your own insecurities.’ Can you speak to this a bit more and to how your practice shifted once you had that realization?
LS: I definitely still paint my insecurities, whether I am explicitly acknowledging them or not. This may relate to general anxieties, personal history, or existential doubt. I think I intuitively followed this direction when I first started to teach myself to paint. I created this early series called Memento Mori, that dealt explicitly with my anxieties and depression during the time immediately after graduating university and not knowing what to do with my life and career. So, in this way, I guess there wasn't really a shift necessarily in my practice, as this has always been either a conscious or unconscious driving force in my choice of subject matter and composition.
EMC: You have mentioned Francis Bacon, Lucian Freud, John Singer Sargent and Diego Velasquez as major influencers. All such incredible artists! Can you also speak to some female artists who have inspired you and shaped your work?
LS: Paula Rego is an obsession of mine. Though we are quite different stylistically (which is why I generally don't list her among my artistic influences), never before has a painter captured my inner world like her. Her paintings of children and women and their relationship with sex and the world around them, buoys my soul in a way I've never experienced with any other artist.
Cecilia Beaux is another. An absolute master of portraiture, with a timeless elegance and finesse that makes her one of my artistic heroes. I would also be nowhere without Artemisia Gentileschi, that monolith of the Italian baroque era. Tamara Lempicka is another absolute favourite; such style; such control.
Some contemporary artists who I always turn to for inspiration are Avery Singer, Genieve Figgis, Emil Ferris, Anastasia Lisitsyna and Chloe Wise.
Iconoclast (2019)
Loribelle Spirovski
EMC: You have an exhibit with House of Fine Art Gallery in London opening November 27th. What should we expect from Love, Death and the Time I Knew You? What were you thinking about, listening to, working through as you put this exhibit together?
LS: This is a very special body of work for me. It was also one of the hardest to bring about, because it followed an earlier Sydney solo show and various group shows in between. I'm used to working on a deadline, but this one pushed me physically, creatively and existentially, in a way that I hadn't yet experienced. Generally, I like to treat every body of work as its own self-contained thing, with much time and soul put into developing ideas and getting the aesthetic just as I like. But when it came to starting the series, I found that I was completely fatigued from the nonstop work that this year has been. I genuinely considered pulling out. But we had bought the tickets already.
So, I gave myself a week, while waiting for my canvases to arrive, to just sit and write and cry and stare at my bookshelf and eat chocolate and chips and take my metaphorical shovel and dig; dig into the same hole that I had found myself in. On the other side, I found a garden. The garden that I would rather be in than my studio. So, I painted it. This was the first time I had ever painted a landscape purely from my imagination. It was a revelation.
But, I did not yet know what I wanted to fill the landscape with, so I turned back to the last time I felt inspired, which was during my brief artist residency at Palazzo Monti in Brescia. That residency resulted in a series of works depicting architectural backgrounds that I enjoyed tremendously. So, I created another background inspired by the otherworldly house designed by Xavier Corbero. I placed the two backgrounds side by side, and as I do every time I have an artistic block, I ask myself what my 5-year-old self would do. That brought me to Santa Ana church in Manila—one of the most vivid images of my childhood. Though I am not religious now, my experiences with Catholicism as a young girl are something that I constantly refer to in my work (though often very indirectly). But as I looked at what had ostensibly become a diptych in front of me, I remembered the garden and the church, and my move to Australia, a land so old and vast and beautiful and deadly. So, I worked on the two paintings simultaneously (something I never do) and created the two pieces, We have always lived here and Beneath the arches. These went on to inform the direction of the body of work as a whole.
We Have Always Lived Here (2019)
Loribelle Spirovski
Beneath the Arches (2019)
Loribelle Spirovski
Donna Cattiva (2019)
Loribelle Spirovski
EMC: What are you most excited about right now within your art/your world?
LS: To be honest, I'm excited that I get to keep doing this as a job. It's a tremendous privilege to have come from where I have and to be able to build a career in this field. On a more technical level, I've really been loosening my brushstrokes and being more decisive with colour, and it makes me so excited that I almost feel giddy. I'm also very excited about a new partnership with May Space in Sydney, who has just taken me on as a represented artist.
EMC: What continues to challenge you/serve as an opportunity for growth?
LS: Egon Schiele died when he was 28. I'm 29 now and I remember breathing a sigh of relief when I crossed that temporal threshold. He was so prolific, so experimental, so driven to grow and tell his story. I challenge myself with my own mortality every day. Just when I begin to feel comfortable, I just have to look at one of the many hands painted by Sargent, and I happily go back to the drawing board.