Claire Zakiewicz‘s solo exhibition Tintoretto’s Daughter opens on Thursday October 27 at ARTEATELIER, San Marco 3209/A, Salizada Malipiero, Venice, Italy.
Her area of practice is painting, performance, video and installation art. She practices the Meisner acting technique and contact improvisation which inform her painting and drawing processes. Her essay The Aesthetics of Failure was published by Bloomsbury in The Aesthetics of Imperfection in Music and the Arts; Spontaneity, Flaws and the Unfinished, 2020.
Chris Freeman: Have you always wanted to be an artist or did you set out on another path to start?
CZ: I’ve wanted to be an artist for as long as I can remember. I’ve done a lot of jobs to earn money to fund my art career: I’ve waited tables, built websites, played saxophone, DJed, worked in galleries and taught English at a community college. But they were all side jobs to help pay for my studies, studios, materials and time.
Chris Freeman: Tell us about your experiences at the La Biennale Di Venezia
CZ: I’ve been going to the Contemporary Art Biennale in Venice for almost 15 years. I’m always inspired by the interplay between the deep history of the city, the Renaissance art and architecture and the best contemporary art exhibition in the world. In that time I have befriended and collaborated with artists and gallerists who live in Venice. I was looking for a studio to rent during the 2017 Biennale but I was offered an exhibition at Anita Cerpelloni’s gallery and chose to exhibit there instead.
My fifth exhibition at Anita’s gallery, which opens on October 27, 2022 is inspired by the story of Marietta Robusti, the daughter of Tintoretto, who was nicknamed La Tintoretta (the little dyer girl). The exhibition coincides with the closing month of the 2022 Biennale of Contemporary Art.
The inspiration comes from a chance encounter in 2019 that provided the opportunity to stay overnight at Tintoretto’s house, where I imagined a conversation with the legendary painter in the liminal state between waking and sleep. My unexpected dream dialogue with Tintoretto inspired my investigation into his relationship with his daughter Marietta and her contribution to his work, her visibility as an artist and the secrets she kept.
The window of the gallery will provide the audience a lens onto my performance between 6 – 7pm daily, as I channel Tintoretta, blindfolded, through an improvisational performance painting, accompanied by a musical composition produced in collaboration with two of my young assistants Ruby and Flora. The soundtrack will filter through the public walkway, echoing 15th Century Venetian music, field recordings from streets of Venice, text, music and lyrics. I will create a large-scale performance painting which embodies the flow of time, inspired by the work produced by Marietta in the sixteenth century: expressive portraits in which the dramatic lighting conjures her pioneering spirit. For me, Marietta represents the forgotten and intentionally obscured histories of women artists and their contributions.
From 7:15pm to 11:00pm daily there will also be a screening of my 2018 performance Perspectives In Motion, a collaboration with Venetian dancer Laura Colomban and Venezuelan performer Mariana Alviarez.
When I was doing the performance captured in the video there was an exhibition of Tintoretto’s work on the other side of Accademia bridge. As I was drawing with my eyes closed I invoked Tintoretto and wondered how I could make art that still inspires 500 years later. The mark-making is a visual expression of movement-based active listening, imagination and attunement to the environment and objects. It’s an inquiry into how our movements continuously and subconsciously change, depending on what we hear, see, imagine, touch and interact with.
Chris Freeman: I have photographed you with Ruby tell me about her
CZ: Ruby Drew is the daughter of a very old friend. She’s a very talented young actor, performer, dancer, singer, etc. and we always have a lot of fun working together. She’s developing into a really talented artist in her own right. At the moment we’re working on the musical piece for the Venice exhibition.
Chris Freeman: Which artists influenced you?
CZ: I grew up with a lot of culture around me. My 3 siblings all went to art school, we painted and drew at home all the time and often went to museums and galleries. Here’s a list of my early influencers in terms of visual art… Andy Warhol, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Paula Rego, Frida Kharlo, Tracey Emin, Quentin Blake, Cy Twombly, Christian Marclay, Francis Bacon, Robert Rauschenberg. Then I’ve always had s sonic side to my practice so I’ve been influenced by Sun Ra, John Cage, Steve Reich, Laurie Anderson, Kenneth Goldsmith and maybe Janet Cardiff. Performance artists who have influenced me include Marina Abramovich and Yoko Ono There are really too many to keep naming and many artists have influenced me in small but crucial ways.
Chris Freeman: When did you start to paint blindfold and what influenced you to do so?
CZ: I started painting with a blindfold while working on my Masters of Fine Art around 2009. I was researching the physical and metaphorical relationships between sound and drawing. Rather than drawing through observation by sight I developed methods of drawing in response to sound to explore how I could express what I perceived in my mind’s eye while focusing only on sound, movement and touch. I find being able to see is a distraction when my aim is to respond in a spontaneous, intuitive way through improvised gestural drawing.
Chris Freeman: When you paint to music, how does this affect the way you paint and does it influence the choice of colours you select before you start?
CZ: There are so many relationships between sounds and colours that I’m currently experimenting with.
A good drawing, like a good performance, reveals the essence of things. I translate speech, sound, beats, poetry and silence – empty space – into drawing using gestures and motifs. The relationship between the image and the source may be very clear; for example, a high-pitched sound might be represented by a high mark on page, or the response may be more complex, abstract or random.
I leave a lot to chance and I often find that randomness produces the most natural and surprising results. I have boxes of oil sticks, pastel and paints of almost every colour, which I often select while blindfolded. Otherwise I might have my eyes open and work intuitively during the performance and pick out colours that I can see quickly and without thinking. There are also times when I select colours in advance and sometimes I work with musicians who respond to my colours through their use of music.
Chris Freeman: As you add musicians and dancers etc, what impact does this have?
CZ: Adding other musicians and dancers can expand my whole practice and it brings attunement into the process. Painting is generally a solitary practice but my own approach is often collaborative. My practice consists of artists from multiple disciplines – including musicians, visual artists, poets and dancers – who focus primarily on improvisation. Communication between modes of perception is the main focus.
My work has always involved a synthesis of art forms. Music and dance have been central to my life but drawing and painting have always been the base. I have played saxophone since I was twelve and I have DJed professionally since my mid-twenties. I began to work with acting techniques while working with other performers on a project about 15 years ago. The Meisner Technique has been particularly useful in order to influence the character of my gestures while maintaining a level of conviction or truthfulness to how my body responds to a situation in the moment. The basis of the technique is to respond impulsively within a set of crafted or imagined circumstances and to tap into universal human qualities without conscious thought. Contact improvisation is another practice that helps me to move in continuous motion using the walls, floor, maybe other dancers, or anything with which I am in contact – with my attention on balance, gravity and movement.
Painting in collaboration with talented musicians or dancers has a positive impact on the quality of the painting and mark making – and it can also be a beautiful experience, especially when we really connect.
Oil, acrylic, pastel and graphite on canvas
82.5 ” x 98″ (210 x 248cm)
Chris Freeman: I have been amazed that at some performances the musicians have never met each other or you, but it still works. What do you put this down to?
CZ: Musical improvisers often prefer not to practice a performance in advance because not knowing what to expect can help a performer be more present and to respond more spontaneously. Not having even met the other musicians can allow us to tap into that aspect even more! A good improviser responds to their environment without thinking about what they are doing or knowing what they are going to do. There is quite a lot of risk involved but that’s an important part of the creative process.
Chris Freeman: How do you judge if a work is a success or failure?
CZ: Traditionally, the public doesn’t see creative failure, but failure is an important part of my studio practice and performances, which entail a constant emotional navigation through anticipation, tension, struggle, striving, surrender, submission, resolution, abandonment and so on. Improvisation in drawing embraces the aesthetics of failure, the unfinished and uncontrolled – the accidental and the incidental. Improvisation involves letting go, acting intuitively, allowing for and embracing disruptions and mistakes, taking risks. And a good performance involves moving past one’s identity and persona, being willing to look bad, to fail and to lose control.
I have learnt that allowing ways of being that we naturally prefer to hide – weakness, nervousness, wobbliness – can be the ingredients for the most compelling performances. Psychoanalyst Thomas Moore has written about the need to ‘carry the fool’ as an essential ingredient in the creative process. With that in mind, unexpected challenges are embraced. I sometimes even try to make ‘bad’ drawings as a means to make myself think differently or to create new patterns of behaviour. Surprisingly often, ‘bad’ ideas and situations have turned out to be ‘good’ in one way or another.
My work is both the performance and the resulting painting or drawing. However, the process of drawing has increasingly become the subject of my practice. I’ve directed my focus on the tension between failure and perfection – struggle and resolution – using mistakes as material, and exploring the balance between the unfinished and ambiguous. Failure, disruption, intentionality, control, chance happenings, chaos, entropy, emergence and degrees of letting go are important elements in the flow of time. Failure creates new pathways; it disrupts prescribed patterns.
So for me the performance is successful if I allowed myself to go somewhere very truthful. With the paintings it can take longer to recognise if they are successful. Resolution in painting isn’t as physical as resolution in music and sometimes I don’t see it until it’s too late and I have pushed the painting too far. But even then, the work isn’t necessarily a failure. Resolution often usually comes out of a period of tension, disruption, failure and assertion.
This is one of the reasons why I edit and analyse separately from the painting process. It often seems that the harder I try while painting, the less compelling the painting and performance is.
Acrylic, pastel and graphite on canvas
83.8 ” x 103.1″ (213 x 262cm)
ABOUT THE INTERVIEWER AND PHOTOGRAPHER
Chris Freeman’s forthcoming exhibition ‘New Beginnings’ is from November 25 to December 2 at Boos Closet Gallery, 198 Kensington Park Road, London W11 1NR.
Over the past few years Chris Freeman has photographed visual artists, dancers and musicians, particularly those involved in the London improv scene at venues such as Ikletic, Hundred Years Gallery, Cafe Oto, The Vortex Jazz Club and inside artists studios and homes.
