Included in the Artist publication: Evi Vingerling [2013]
The sky is grey and it’s raining when I arrive in Eindhoven. I hurry from the station toward Evi Vingerling’s studio. I have fond memories of the building in which her studio is located. In the late 1990s it was the temporary home of the Van Abbe Museum. I lived not far away, and as a student I would regularly go inside. I first saw Bruce Nauman’s videos there, and a disturbing Douglas Gordon exhibition. Evi’s modest studio is located at the back of the building, looking out onto a rather desolate car park. Several paintings are arranged along the walls that immediately provide a familiar impression of her work. Like the painter herself, they exude lightness; they give you a cleaned up feeling. As long as I’ve known Evi she has worked from the same, fairly simple premise. She paints things that catch her eye and distils them into a succinct, graphic image. The things that draw her attention are ordinary, everyday things; streetlights in a shopping street, the shape of a lamp, wisps of clouds in the sky or the curtains in front of a window. Recently natural forms seem to be playing a more prominent role: a snow-covered mountain landscape, the leaves of a houseplant or a row of trees alongside the road.
Do you already know what you want to show at the Stedelijk Museum Schiedam?
‘I actually only want to show new work in the exhibition; most of it still has to be made. Some works I want to do over again. I’m thinking of applying the paint to this painting with my fingers. I’m wondering whether that will make it better.’ Evi points to a painting in which a few star-like shapes have been created with a simple touch.
So the same image, but done in a different way?
‘Yes, I think it might be nice to be free of painting. Maybe if I’m free of the brush that will help a little. I’m just going to try it with my fingers and I’ll see. Maybe it won’t even be all that different.’
Is this acrylic or gouache?
‘Gouache with a little bit of binder.’
You also worked with oil and acrylic for a long time – why have you turned to gouache now?
‘It’s not so convenient, because it comes in really small tubes.’ She laughs. ‘A while ago I thought, “I’m going to make my own egg tempera”. But painters who work with egg tempera are always so busy with the paint; they spend so much time making it and then they paint with those flamboyant motions. Maybe in my work it’s better not to focus attention on that. I think it’s beautiful, but it isn’t particularly suited to my work.’
You think gouache suits your work better?
‘Yes, the pigments in it are very strong and it dries beautifully.’
How do you start on a work like this, for example?
Together we’re looking at a large painting leaning against the wall. Capricious, light-blue shapes have been painted with a quick touch on a white background. ‘Those are mountains photographed from above. I took photos from the airplane above the United States last year.’ Evi shows me a photograph – I try in vain to find the image in the painting. ‘The image comes from this photo – I zoomed in; it’s just a small detail.’
So you take a photo like this and then at some point you decide to do something with it?
‘Yes, I’d been wanting to paint mountains for a while, like this, from above. Mountains are these big obstacles. But I don’t know exactly why, you know.’ She laughs shyly. ‘I took this photo in October. In December, I think, I made the first sketch, and then I worked on it for at least another month, because I first made several sketches.’ She shows me some prints and drawings and presses a sheet of paper in my hands. ‘But in this sketch, for example, I thought the mountains were too literal, too obvious. So I zoomed in even more. By selecting specific proportions and a specific division of the surface you naturally end up with a good fragment.’
In the end you took even more out, but you also mirrored the image?
‘The image is mirrored because I work with transparent sheets and eventually projected the image like this. Sometimes I just turn the image around completely.’ Evi shows me a photo and turns it over. ‘This way it’s still mountains, but it looks a lot more positive, you see?’
Does it make a difference whether it’s projected?
‘I’ve only recently started using a projector, occasionally. In the past I sometimes spent days transferring a particular shape onto the canvas, when actually I want a painting to look like it’s been made very simply.’
With your work I can imagine that it comes more from you when you work without a projection. That, I think, is an extension of that form of reduction you use.
‘I actually don’t look at what I do as reduction. I paint what I see and nothing else. What I project is often a previously made sketch or a photo modified on the computer. In fact what I want most is for the work to be less personal, for it to be about what is represented.’ Together we look closely at the cloud-like shapes in the painting, which get progressively lighter toward the top; I try to see how it is all constructed. ‘I painted this painting in one go. The gradation is in the paint; I started at the top with light-blue, almost white paint, and then I kept adding more blue.’
Is it more difficult to stop with these more painterly works?
‘Usually I work with certain self-imposed rules. In this painting, for instance, I only painted the parts on which the sun was shining. This makes it fairly clear what I will and what I won’t paint.’
Do you really need rules like that?
‘Last year I did a painting of a snow-covered mountain. The painting was made up of several layers, which I projected over each other. After finishing with the projections I continued working on the painting. I find that rather difficult, because I have no rules then, and I’m just creating a painting that I hope will come out all right eventually. That makes it much more difficult to stop.’
How did this way of working actually start? For as long as I’ve known you, you’ve worked based on this same principle.
‘I started making paintings this way back at the academy in The Hague. When I was in school there the teachers kept saying that I should find a theme and that I had to make a statement with my work. But I couldn’t think of a theme that was personal enough for me. It all felt so imposed from the outside, and in fact I said this one-day to the teachers. I’d decided for myself that everything could be a subject. Then I started, very deliberately, to paint things I’d seen and remembered. From the car, for instance, I had seen a ditch in which the water was a little bit frozen, so that it reflected the blue sky like a mirror. That’s what I started painting in this way.’ Evi draws a quick sketch on a sheet of paper. ‘The green of the grass was really very precisely chosen, and so that ditch got the colour of the blue sky. Then I suddenly saw more things that I thought were worth painting: a cloud, a pile of leaves against a tree, the bathtub stopper. From the beginning those paintings were a little bit out of the ordinary.’
Have you since become more sensitized in order to identify these things?
‘I don’t think that anything has really changed. I think that from a young age I have looked at things in that sort of way. At the academy I knew, for myself, what I wanted to paint, but I still couldn’t find a name for it. I also find this difficult now that I teach; often what it’s really about cannot be put into words. So I now try to explain to my students early on that the work is already in them. That you have to look for it by paying close attention to what you love and what you look at. You’re the only one who can decide how you prefer to deal with things.’
I notice that there are a lot of plants and trees in your latest paintings.
We focus on a painting with a golden-yellow background onto which a black organic shape is painted. ‘That’s a plant from Seinfeld, the American sitcom.’ Evi shows me a print in which the contours of a plant are vaguely visible in large pixels. ‘At the bottom you can still just make out the head of one of the actors. It was just such a stupid scene, but at the back of the shot there was a really beautiful plant.’
When you see something like that on TV and you take a photo of it, do you know right then at that moment that you’re going to use it, that you want to turn it into a painting?
‘Well, I don’t know right off whether I’m going to do something with it. In this case it took years. The plant in that scene just really caught my eye. It had such a specific shape and seems to move upward like that. I found it bizarre that such a living thing was standing there in that room. I thought that the plant deserved more attention.’ She laughs.
Do you take more than one photo, or is one picture enough to capture it?
‘Sometimes I do take a lot of photos, and most of them are no good. The best moments are those when I’m just walking around or waiting somewhere, not looking for anything and something really draws my attention in a big way, then I try to take only one or two photos of it.’
So that’s a fairly conscious moment?
‘Yes, very conscious.’
How important is it that I still be able to identify that shape as a plant?
‘In the past I would not have been pleased if it could still be identifiable as a plant. Now, however, it doesn’t really matter much to me anymore. I hope that people see how special the thing actually is, that they can look at it again with an open mind. I think the most beautiful thing about it is that this whole shape seems to flow upward like that, and the heavy dark part hanging under it. I applied the paint to this painting very quickly, in one go. Before you know it, it’s done.’
And is it right in one go?
‘For this work it was; for something like this I practice a couple of times with a dry brush. Of course I had been looking at that photo for quite a long time and thought about how I would do it. Sometimes it doesn’t work and I have to start all over again.’
You could say that for every painting you look for a different painting solution.
‘That is why so much time passes between the moment I get an idea and the painting itself; in that period I don’t yet know how I’m going to do it. I always have to work out how to put it together in my mind first. It does feel as though I have to resolve a specific problem each time. The work has become a bit looser in the last few years, and with that it’s become clearer what it’s all about for me.’
Your previous work was cleaner, whereas now you show a lot more how it was made.
‘Yes, I want it to look very easy, like it was no trouble. When I was doing more of those geometric works for a while, my work was often interpreted as a sort of fundamental painting. My work was compared to that of other painters who are primarily focused on the painting as an object. They feel that the object should be perfect. In that they manifest themselves as the maker, show how well they put something together. For me it was not at all about the object. But people are quick to look at such a painting like they would an object with pretty colours; they don’t think of something that also exists in reality in the world. When I realized that, my work changed; my idea became clearer. It’s never been about the painting itself, but about the association. I love that the painting is a link to something else that is wonderful. I want you to think, “that thing out there is really beautiful”.’
Does it also have to do with accessibility? Does that precision or that sort of virtuosity get in the way of this?
‘Sometimes a certain brush stroke is applied masterfully, and it feels as though it happened almost by itself. I do like that. What I think does not fit in so well with my work is spending two days sanding something, for example. For me the two dimensions of a painting are what matter. The fact that the image is there, and what it evokes. Sometimes, of course, something does take a long time to achieve, but I don’t find that interesting to show.’
We’ve occasionally talked about the titles of your paintings, through which you can communicate something to the audience. Sometimes they used to refer to the subject of the painting itself, but once in a while you would link somewhat more poetic phrases to your work. In recent years your works are all ‘untitled’.
‘In general I know exactly what I want in my work. I keep a very tight rein on everything in the painting, then and still today, really, but to me a title was a loose end, an undefined area. It could go in any direction. For a long time, therefore, I was just trying all sorts of things out. But now it’s suddenly very clear that my work has to be untitled. It’s not so that you can think anything you want when looking at it – I do try to make it as specific as possible. But I want you to see those shapes and not influence your thoughts otherwise.’
In 2011 you were seriously ill for a while and therefore unable to paint. You’ve said that in the first paintings you produced afterwards you had the feeling that the work was more merciless – what changed?
‘When I was ill I realized that I was living within these regimented lines. I thought I was limiting myself too much and failing to enjoy everything enough. But also that the world can be complex and that there is actually nothing you can explain in one way. And that it’s not just beautiful – it can also be all over just like that. That life is indeed merciless. It might sound naïve, but I didn’t use to see things like that at all. The feeling that led me toward painting was a feeling of immense openness and lightness and an awareness of how light and free we are. That feeling, in itself, is not gone, but now there is something more. Something I actually don’t understand all that well. A realization, perhaps, that this same freedom is connected to a sort of callous in the world. A callousness that is just as omnipresent and impossible to describe.’
Can you explain exactly what became more merciless?
‘I think that the difference with the past is that the things that would catch my eye then were sort of clear, bright and simple things. The things that draw my attention now are more difficult for me to capture as shapes. They are shapes that, in my perception, come apart a little, are less tangible. This began with that plant I painted.’
By painting that plant you realized that something in your work had changed?
‘The work is not about me. But the things I paint are of course things that I notice. It also has to do with how I would start on a painting in the past. I used to dissect how something was constructed, would draw my conclusions and put it back together on the canvas. At that moment I thought I understood it. Understand is perhaps not the right word, but I had the feeling that I had at least got to the bottom of the thing and captured it. But take this new work, for example – I don’t know how it’s constructed; now I tend to let it be what it is. I think that all my work is headed that way. I now have more feeling for what I don’t understand, you see? The subject, a house-plant like this, can seem trivial, but if I can paint it in a very powerful way you’ve got something you can’t ignore. I try to trust in that every time.’
When you’re working you’re not plagued by doubt?
‘Well, I paint rather fast. As I paint I try to maintain the same kind of energy throughout the whole thing. When I’m three-quarters of the way into the painting I often think, “Oh, what am I doing!” and then I keep telling myself, “No, just finish it, just finish it. Let’s see.”’
Could you imagine working on the same subject in a different medium?
‘I don’t know; ultimately I think that painting is best suited to my ideas. But I have made several short videos now that I think are good. They’re on my phone. I’m not sure whether I should show something like this, whether they are of sufficient quality in themselves. Recently I saw a photo hung up by a student at the academy where I teach. Just a sharp and well-lit photo. Probably I recognized something of my own work in it. At that point it suddenly occurred to me that this dividing line with other media is probably mainly in my own mind, but in the end each time I find that painting is the best solution.’
Does it also have something to do with the fact that every so often the medium of painting comes under fire?
‘Yes, it does sometimes feel stupid to be a painter. In my mind I often justify why I’m painting. But on the other hand I think it’s very interesting, you know. It’s about something very essential. You are a human being, you see something, you want to show what you see and then you make it. That is painting to me. It’s almost the simplest thing you can do. You take a colour from something and then spread it on a flat surface.’
When you put it like that, it sounds very archaic. Don’t you believe in a certain evolution of art?
‘I often think of the paintings discovered in those caves in Spain and France. The fact that there, at that time, people saw a bison and then went inside and drew the animal. Seeing something, trying to understand it and making a image of it. I think this is still a relevant starting point.’
JCJ Vanderheyden once wrote, ‘Science progresses, art does not – art always starts afresh.’
‘Yes, that’s right. From a certain standpoint we don’t move forward at all. It’s like that with my work too: it’s not that I really discover something, that in a subsequent work I know better what constitutes reality.’
The subjects of your paintings are conspicuously everyday things. It would be difficult, for instance, to find areference to art history in your work. Is that very deliberate?
‘I’m not really concerned with art as a source of inspiration, but I don’t rule it out. I think I find the experience of life itself more interesting. Art is, of course, a part of that, but it interests me more, to show things that are not necessary meant to be looked at. If I were to bring art into my work, I would be looking at something that someone else has already seen. So I might be seeing a very lovely interpretation. But for what I do, it’s more interesting to deal with the original things.’
That everyday aspect is truly the crux of your work; it’s separate from everything else that happens in the world?
‘In a certain sense it is. Do you know Walt Whitman’s poem Leaves of Grass? It contains a passage I often re-read.’ Evi slides a creased little book toward me. She’s marked the fragment in question in red pencil. ‘All the things happening in the world, all that news – it’s there anyway. It comes and it goes away again. With my paintings I want to express something else. I believe that art, at its core, is about everyday things, things, which are at the same time ordinary and essential. I’m curious about what I’ve really seen.’