Nikki Maloof

NIKKI MALOOF:

After living in New York for a long time, I decided to go back to having a quieter, more domestic life, so my family and I moved to Western Massachusetts, which is a couple of hours outside of New York. I built a studio behind my house, so naturally, my work became rooted in the domestic world because I’m immersed in it the whole time. 

With this show, I thought of organising each painting as if it were a room in a house. It was also a way of getting my thoughts to make sense of how I envision the ensemble of the paintings and where to begin. The rooms of a house function as a metaphor for painting itself. It’s the place where I put all the things that make up my life, all the thoughts and anxieties but also things I love, patterns, and people…. which I arrange in this way creating a sort of psychological space.

NIKKI MALOOF:

I wasn’t anticipating it, but it just happened. This past couple of years I have been tiptoeing back into the world of figuration. I was trying to find a way to include figures without really painting entire ones. What would happen if I just added an element? Maybe just a hand? Would that be enough to tell a story? So that’s what I did in the very first painting of this series, it was the first time I painted a hand in over a decade…

I was inspired by a visit to the MET, where they had just built a brand-new wing of European painting featuring some amazing Renaissance paintings. I noticed the expressiveness of the hands depicted, and how much they conveyed as elements on their own. I took those as inspiration and tried to rearrange them in my way.

NIKKI MALOOF:

They do feel a lot like self-portraits but not necessarily.

NIKKI MALOOF:

Yes, absolutely, that was a deliberate choice, because I bought those shoes and they were terribly uncomfortable, so I had to get my money’s worth (laughs). I also bought them because I loved the way they looked. That’s another example of how the painted world is the world you want to inhabit, so it is often constructed from things from your actual life and things that you love. You could say painting is also a way of collecting things, like this plate, it’s a replica of one saw at the MET. Not all elements have the same function, however, some are there to add drama or tension, something that amplifies the feeling of the painting. 

NIKKI MALOOF:

Tension is such a big subject for me. I am equally drawn to the beauty of every day but also the profound strangeness of being human and the difficulty of trying to balance everything in your life. I want my paintings to invite you to look, to bring you in, yet to reveal themselves as different from what you think they are going to be right away. 

They are often brightly coloured so they seem very cheerful, but then, as you keep looking, things become a little bit off. I really like that in an image, in art in general. I don’t necessarily want to look at art that is only one thing, I want it to somehow speak of all things that we experience all the time.

NIKKI MALOOF:

I was thinking about this poem by Sylvia Plath, “Morning Song”, which she wrote after she had a child. The opening line goes “Love sets you going like a fat gold watch”. It was really profound to read that poem because it encapsulates this feeling of giving birth, and suddenly seeing this new person begin their life. It feels disorienting because you realize they are also mysterious clocks in themselves, which is kind of horrifying? (laughs) and interesting, and strange. 

In addition to that, as an artist and a parent, time is one of the things that changes the most the moment you have a child. It was important for me to include something that speaks of how time is constantly around the corner, that’s where the title came from. It’s a nod to the fact that, as a parent, you’re always on the clock, but also about the things we do around time and trying to capture those moments, to slow down a moment that is otherwise fleeting.

NIKKI MALOOF:

Yes, the watches are a direct reference and there are many other allusive elements. For instance, in “The First Supper”, the composition is also a sort of clock, it has a circular arrangement and the objects and hands are positioned almost as the hands of a clock.

This painting is also quite funny because it is my own rendition of “The Last Supper”, only that inverted. It depicts the first time you go out with your friends after having a child. You think it’s going to be very fun but it ends up being quite chaotic. Ultimately, it’s about expectations, the expectations of motherhood. So there’s a woman in a Christ-like position, all wholly, but then there are kids crying, spilt wine, barking dogs…

NIKKI MALOOF:

You need to inject humour to make the image work, I don’t want it to ever be too dark or too gloomy or creepy. And that’s exactly what I like, in all art, a touch of dark humour. 

NIKKI MALOOF:

I have to be extremely regimented. I know I have set hours to do work and need to organise the rest of the stuff around. There’s a balancing act between being an artist and being a parent, which I think is a subject of the show. You are being pulled in different directions all the time, which can be quite stressful. This is also a topic that I discuss a lot with my friends who are in a similar position. There are a lot of expectations of a mother, and striving for perfection feels impossible.

NIKKI MALOOF:

These were the last pieces I made. All the big paintings were finished so I was pretty much done with the show. I think it was a natural response to my feelings towards everything that has been going on politically in America. Picasso’s “The Weeping Woman” came to mind, so I thought of repurposing that motif and allowing myself to indulge in these really intense, emotional portraits.

NIKKI MALOOF:

While I don’t necessarily need politics to be part of my art, this time it just happened naturally. Especially dealing with things that affect motherhood, I found it important to bring forth the perspective of a woman. Motherhood isn’t something that I ever would have thought I would paint in the past because it sort of felt a little bit taboo or just not interesting. So it was exciting painting these! Take a look at “Tired Mother”, she’s kind of monstrous yet she is tender, she’s also just exhausted, probably woken up all night… But she’s trying her best! I don’t think that there’s enough of that in art, so it was cathartic, to say the least. 

NIKKI MALOOF:

I’ve been attracted to painting these bouquets. A nod to the still life tradition that I’ve been focused on for a long time and also those beautiful Dutch bouquets, which are impossible because those flowers could never be blooming at the same time. It just sounded incredibly inviting to try and paint these over-the-top flowers, and by adding that face hidden amongst them I sort of made it my way. 

Flowers also signify time, the bouquets only last a couple of days, so the painting is, once more, about time being fleeting. The little girl in the bouquet looks through as if she is aware of it for the first time. She’s kind of caught in that bouquet, caught in time.

NIKKI MALOOF:

I think the bedroom (“Cosleep at Dawn”) is my favourite. It captures a lot of things that were on my mind when I was making the show. And I really like how the colours and patterns mismatch, like they shouldn’t actually be together. I would never want a room like that, but, somehow, in my painted world, I do. In a painted world, it makes sense to me.

It also kind of contains all rooms, because you can see other parts of the house. There’s a couple in the centre but you can also see me painting in the back and the garden through the window. I also placed this drawing of a caterpillar, a reference to a famous children’s book about a caterpillar turning into a butterfly, which ultimately speaks of life cycles.

NIKKI MALOOF:

I usually start with something very simple, like a table, which is what gave birth to the first painting of the series (“Dinner Discussion”) and then I start thinking about composition around it. Sometimes it’s a reaction to another artist or something that just gives you the fuel to begin your own way of doing it. I start with one element, which leads to the next thing, and so forth. I always make one painting at a time, so once it is done, I have gained something from it that is going to inform the next one. Every painting is a reaction to the former.

I also don’t want to overlook paint as an important subject and motivating force for my work. Often, a paint gesture or colour can be enough of a catalyst to start a work going. I follow my intuition for manipulating this material and it somehow always leads the way. I almost never start with a fully formed “idea” of what the subject of a show will be. It isn’t until I’ve excavated my thoughts through the paint that I see what it is that I was after.

NIKKI MALOOF:

That’s great, I want people to want to look at them. I think it’s fun to draw people in, to make it exciting for them to look at. Every painting has its own sort of sensation that tells you it’s done. Sometimes I have to fight my desire to keep on adding because, when it’s going well, I’m enjoying painting and don’t want it to be over, but I also don’t want them to become too cluttered. Often, I just ask my painting friends, the ones who are like my editors, if a piece needs anything else and they’ll tell me. Because painters also need editors, not just writers. 

NIKKI MALOOF:

That’s true! That will be the next show, thank you for that.