Andie Dinkin: Slippers Gold, Oysters Cold
Half Gallery, New York
From October 4th until November 2nd, 2024
Andie Dinkin in conversation with Bill Powers
Since graduating from RISD in 2014, you have operated largely outside the gallery system until we did a solo show in Los Angeles in May 2023.
AD I recently heard a quote from Jenny Saville talking about when she first met Cy Twombly. He told her to stay ignored as long as possible so that she could develop her own personal style without people interfering. She said that was the best advice she’d been given.
Someone asked Ed Ruscha recently if he had any advice for young artists to which he jokingly replied, “Cut off your ear”.
AD You don’t want too many voices in your head.
We met thru Grace Carney who was assisting painter Kyle Staver when I personally made her acquaintance. Funny how these art world connections come about.
AD Grace and I went to RISD together and have stayed great friends. She’s been showing with PPOW the last couple years and it’s been nice to have someone you trust to bounce questions and ideas off of. I remember Grace would have the most beautiful dinner parties when we were in school. She lived in downtown Providence.
Do you talk about painting?
AD Being an artist is a lot about self-reflection and a lot of time alone working. When you’re stuck or being hyper-critical of your own work, it’s nice to have a friend struggling with the same issues. It can be daunting at times.
opening image: Disasters in Central Park, 2024. Acrylic, gouache, ink, charcoal on canvas.
Is it better that she’s an abstract painter since you do figurative work?
AD I’m not a competitive person. RISD helped create an environment where artists could collaborate and root for each other. At least that was my experience. It was a cozy nook before going out into the art world and it gave me a foundation I can continuously return to.
Are people surprised when they find out that you grew up in California? Because your personality and mannerisms do not read as an Angelino. I’m not getting beach vibes from you.
AD Most people think I’m from New York. I only applied to art schools on the East Coast. Honestly, I’m more comfortable in New York. Even in high school I never felt like I was from here. People in New York have more of a tendency to tell it like it is. I find in LA that people couch their true feelings.
Were you always painting group scenes?
AD At RISD I first started painting and drawing animals, distorted animals mixed with plants, which was a reaction to my anxiety surrounding the degrading environment/climate change. I generally used different types of inks and charcoal in a very loose way.
Before you started painting party animals? Apologies for the dad joke.
AD I actually kind of did start drawing anthropomorphic figures, animals in suits and dresses partying. Then my friend Xavier Donnelly who is the creative director at Ash showed me the archive of old LIFE magazines online and I began bringing collage into my work which evolved from there to my current style you could say. Even now, I think of my painting conceptually as a collage because I’m pulling from so many sources to make my flattened world. I think of my paintings as a tapestry on canvas sometimes.
Why crowd scenes?
AD Well, I love a good party. I am pro-debauchery. I like seeing the energy between people and how you can render them differently without signaling to their viewer about the particulars of the conversation. That feeling of shared and communicative energies bouncing off each other maybe led me to my interest in ghosts, dreams, and my lure to surrealist painters, particularly historic female surrealists.
Glenn O’Brien said that atmosphere is the term we use to contextualize the invisible. Like when a party has atmosphere. Your paintings tap into that experience.
AD I’ve always been drawn to the era of F.Scott Fitzgerald or more specifically a time before plastic. I hate plastic. I love a sense of humor in art, weird dream-like creatures. I want to create a world which I can enter into which isn’t always available to me.
Before I went to see Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights in Madrid, I had never heard it was sometimes referred to then as the strawberry painting. Maybe the forbidden fruit shouldn’t be an apple but a strawberry which is so much more delicate in its ripeness.
AD With Bosch’s work he provides himself and the audience with a detachment from the real world. Maybe I should do a strawberry tree with a snake in my next painting. I paint a lot of lemons and peaches and cherries. Peaches are so sensual and supple. I think of them as little cupid butts. Or you think of the peach in Call Me By Your Name.
I don’t remember the peach scene.
AD Timothée Chalamet is dreaming of Armie Hammer so he takes the peach and masturbates with it, then they eat it together.
I must have gone for more popcorn during that part. Okay, so does a lemon only exist in your compositions to be squeezed over oysters?
AD I think of fruit in my paintings as punctuation: a cherry might be a comma, a lemon as an exclamation point. I usually start with food and then build around that with creatures and characters. I never plan out my paintings.
I interviewed Richard Tuttle once and he said if you ever get stuck making art, your only option is to ask the work.
AD The painting tells me where it wants to go. I think Picasso said something about you have to listen to the painting. The less thinking while painting, the better. You have to be patient for those moments of inspiration.
Who are some of your art heroes?
AD One of my favorite artists is Florine Stettheimer who was a contemporary of Marcel Duchamp. I first came across her paintings at the Met, and I instantly fell in love with them. I felt so connected, almost as if she was some sort of long lost relative. She is able to capture the entire lifespan of a party – hours beyond hours – in a single frame. Florine was a genius at conflating time, depicting drawn out space, a continuous afternoon. Her paintings have this feeling of lounging.
Tell me about an iconic Florine painting.
AD Florine made a painting about a beauty pageant which I find hilarious, called Beauty Contest: To the Memory of P.T. Barnumin 1924. She included art historical references, and at the same time, perhaps reflected her own friends and fond experiences, which I strive to create in my paintings.
Florine just seemed so kooky.
AD Florine and her sisters were part of New York society at the time. And was from a fairly well-off family. You can feel some of that extravagance in the work.
I remember in the Fran Lebowitz documentary, she was saying the uniqueness of Edith Warton’s writing was that she came from those elite circles when mostly someone chronicling that slice of society has their face pressed up against the glass. Florine did that with painting, as an insider amongst the privileged.
AD Florine also engaged in a lot of satire, lovingly mocking her own world. You look at her Spring Sale at Bendel’s painting. You can feel the chaos. I love that after her first gallery exhibition didn’t do well, she never had another show. And it was Duchamp who convinced her to keep painting regardless.
And then you painted her great niece into a recent work almost as an homage to Florine and a time conflation for these two relative who could never meet. I mean no one would know unless you pointed it out.
AD Yes, Lily Mortimer who works as a director at Gagosian now.
What books have you been reading?
AD I’m reading The Hearing Trumpet by Leonora Carrington. It’s a fantastical book about an old lady who goes to a nursing home and all the crazy things that start happening. One of the characters was inspired by her friend and fellow painting Remedy Varo who is another big inspiration. I love her women draped with leaves, how they become part of nature, the flattened pattern scene which I can relate to. Sometimes my own works speak to the satire inherent in excess.
You depict smoke in a very unique way. I like how Danielle Orchard talks about smoking or drinks as durational in her work. So you don’t know what the exact date or time is, but you know where you are in the movie of the scene. She does the same with wilting flowers.
AD I might have candelabras with all the wax dripped off. I think of my paintings the way time exists in a dream, sporadic moments, events without chronology. Also, you are having these visions while you’re asleep at 2am, but in your dream it’s noon in the park.
Do you remember your dreams?
AD Last night I had a dream about my bedroom being really cluttered which I think was about me being nervous to do this interview today. I have one character who reoccurs in my dreams: a man with three eyes who is in the mural I did at Gigi’s, the restaurant in Hollywood. A lot of my dreams are outside by a river. I only remember snippets.
My mom is a therapist and she’ll say it doesn’t matter what happens in your dream, but how you felt in it.
AD How I want to feel and how I want the viewer to feel. My paintings feel like people talking without eagerness to get some place else. That’s the whole 1920s thing and a world without plastic. To me the invention of plastic made everything disposable in the name of convenience. Think about what it took to get from New York to Los Angeles a hundred years ago. It was a week-long train trip. Or crossing The Atlantic. There’s a romanticism in spending that kind of time to reach your destination.
It might be a projection, but the people in your paintings seem less overtly transactional than so many conversations I have today. It’s almost scenes of group contemplation.
AD I am a planner and an itinerizer, but when I’m painting I don’t have that urgency to get some place else. That rushing around we all engage in is such a distraction from our own feelings.
You don’t do self-portraits, but you do have an alter-ego present in much of your work.
AD I call her Beatrice. She is my painting demon. Beatrice came about when I was drawing in my sketchbook in Paris while my husband was sleeping. I think I was angry about something stupid, Like we had a bad airbnb. Or like when I horribly failed at line dancing at Stud Country haha. I started painting Beatrice and she stuck as my alter-ego. I can put my demon out on the table for everyone to see rather than hide her away. My family even talks about it. “Uh, oh, Beatrice is here.”
I remember John Currin bemoaning the fact that he can’t use anxiety or frustration as inspiration. For him, he only draws energy from humor and beauty and thwarted joy.
AD For me, anger can create some of my best paintings. I made one recent work called, “Rage at the Party.” The picture roared out of me.
Do you go to therapy?
AD Every week, yes. She even does hypnotism which I haven’t tried yet. But I’m open to it. I feel like being an artist is going back to being a child. I think hypnotism activates your subconscious so it could be good for my work. I think Leonora Fini made a hypnotist painting.
