Their Own Kind of Presence

Interview with Painter Cait Porter

Newest York spoke with Ridgewood-based painter Cait Porter at Marinaro, while her May 2024 solo exhibition was on view.

I know you're from Austin. 

I was born in Austin, and actually I have a twin brother, but we moved with my parents when we were three, to Santa Fe, New Mexico. So that's where I grew up, but it gets lost in the biography.

When did you start with art?

Santa Fe is a very artistic community. My dad, he wasn't a practicing artist, but he was the artistic one. I remember he was always drawing, and I inherited that ability. There are two public schools in Santa Fe. I went to one of them, and I was fortunate enough to get into this art class with one of the best art teachers at the school. It was his last year. He was retiring, and his name was Gary Myers. I was super nervous. I had never made a painting.

The first painting I made, he was like, “This is great.” And, you know, I was like, What? Cool. He actually had a retirement bonus that he put into a scholarship for a small number of students. I was one of the students that was chosen. What he did was provide funding for art supplies for each student to set up a studio in their home. I started working out of my mom and stepdad's sun room. That really changed the trajectory of my life, because before that, I was like, this isn't a viable thing, I'm going to be a scientist or something. So that was pivotal, pivotal for me.

I went to Vassar for college. I was actually going to study art history, because again, this thing in the back of my mind, like: that's better as a career path. I had this experience in college where I was becoming depressed and anxious and I didn't really know what was happening. But the one thing that I was able to push through with was art. I decided to switch gears and become an art major, because it was the one thing that was making me feel okay at the time. Of course, I had to take other classes and make it through school because Vassar is very strict about their curriculum. It's just been this constant thread in my life that's become more and more apparent. “This is what you should be doing.”

After I graduated, I thought, I'm going to move back to Santa Fe because a lot of my friends there were artists. I was like, I can make this work. And I don't know if you've heard of Meow Wolf Art Collective. That was just starting, and my friends were part of the original group based in Santa Fe. Now it's much bigger. I was doing some work with them, and it was great, but I realized I'm more of a solitary artist. I was there for about a year in Santa Fe and I just had this feeling like I need to move back to New York. I was dating someone at the time who got into Parsons for fashion design, so we moved back to New York. I started assisting another artist, a sculptor from Santa Fe. I was doing more administrative work, and at this time, I wasn't making my own work.

I did that for about a year. Then somehow I got very lucky, through a mutual friend, to start working for an established painter and actually started helping him make his paintings. I remember just having a period of time where I hadn't been making paintings, and then going and starting to work for him. I was like, oh, there's that part of my brain that's supposed to be doing what it's doing. It's clicking. 

I don't have family money. That was one of the reasons I wasn't making art. Working for him was another pivotal moment where I saw how you can make painting work as a career. That had never been shown to me exactly. It was really cool for me, just in practical working manner, to see okay, you have to make a lot of work in order to make a good painting. My younger brain was like, each piece has to be a masterpiece. I would get really frustrated with myself. 

Can you say more about having to make a lot of work in order to make a good painting?

Well, I have to make a lot of bad work. I have a room in my house that's just filled with rolled up canvases. Maybe one day I’ll pull those out and be like, these aren't as bad as I thought. But I think I had a lot to work through just on my own to get to this point even. I could feel that internally. You can't skip the steps. I hadn't been painting for myself for about five years. When I started working for the painter, that's all I did. I worked for him, and I was really set on just making his work, which is cool, but then I realized, I have to start my own work. You have to work through the mental and emotional muck to get to a place where you're making work that is the work you're supposed to be making.

There's a photographer who said something about how the ratio is like 600 to 1 before you find the magical photograph that you've made, sort of inadvertently. What ratio tends to emerge for you?

I think I've fine tuned it to a way that's more sustainable, because I realized I can't afford to do that. When I was making paintings that were super small and pretty cheap, it would be maybe 20 paintings to 1 at first, but now I have a process where I work from photos. I don't need to be true to the photograph when I make the actual painting. But I have files and files of photos where I'm pretty selective about what I choose as the image, the way I crop it. That becomes the editing process. In that way, I don't really have to, hopefully, make 100 paintings to get to these paintings [here in the gallery]. 

I've been doing this seriously since around 2010. Fifteen years. I went to grad school in 2017. There was some time between undergrad and grad school. I'm grateful for that now, because at the time, I was like, I'm going to be one of the older people there. I'd had some people tell me before going that I probably waited too long. 

But I realized the first semester that I was able to work through things in a way that brought me to the vein of work I'm doing now, like, Oh, this really is the more mature body of work I've been trying to get to. I feel like that was a reflection of my past experiences, my own ability as a person to look at those experiences and understand what it takes to be a working artist. And understanding my own views on art, my own impulse to make art. It was still hard in grad school. It wasn't just my finishing school program. It was intense, and I'm really grateful for it. 

What do you feel that you were able to bring to the grad school experience, having had time between undergrad and entering the program?

When I entered, I was making completely abstract work. 

Can you describe that work?

I think it starts way back from growing up in Santa Fe and mostly being exposed to either touristy Southwestern art or abstract art. Even the touristy Southwestern art is sort of abstract in its pattern. Something about the light and the mountains, and I was very drawn to the shadows.

My thesis in college actually was abstract paintings, but then I was putting birds in them, bird stickers, dead birds. I was painting the birds. But after that I started just working abstractly. I was painting, I had a studio in Ridgewood. This was around 2015. I was painting the architecture that I would see on my daily commute, but very abstract. A window would just be a square with a gradient in the middle. Just two colors, maybe purple and green. I was trying to convey these glimpses of my daily life. This is what I saw when I was walking to school. The trees. I would be painting, you know, green and yellow, kind of abstract, not color field. 

One painting was green on one side and then a yellow and green pattern on the other. The actual experience of making the walk.

Were you working from photography at that time? 

No. From paying attention. It was the memory in my mind translated abstractly. I was trying to speak to this feeling of the fleeting moments in life, this fragility. You know, it's passing quickly. That led me to make very monochromatic paintings. I was working mostly on paper. So like a blue, mostly blue composition with a lighter blue orb in the center. For me, that's a spot on the wall while I'm resting and looking at this and feeling kind of melancholy. But I realized that that conversation I was having with myself wasn't really translating out into the world. And it's like, okay, well, you're not really engaging in the broader context of minimalism or abstraction. Where do you want your paintings to go from here? Because this is kind of the end of painting, right? You're starting at the end. Do you want to do like, light installations now? In my brain, I was like, No, not at all. I love painting. 

So then I went backwards, and was trying to pull out these forms because these are specific to moments in my life. It started becoming clear, pulling representational objects into those abstract compositions. I was looking at artists. Catherine Murphy: the way that she incorporates form and subject on this equal level where they support each other, I found very freeing. To still make an abstract composition, but also point to something very specific. That was another exciting turning point for me. 

It feels like you are doing that in your own way now in the current project. I did see some interesting landscapes from when you were in Italy. How did you come to start focusing so specifically on the very close-up view that we see here? 

That was something that I came to realize when I was in Italy. It was a residency through VCU [Virginia Commonwealth University]. I had all these great views and access to wonderful art. But I realized what I'm most interested in is the things nearest to me, these kind of everyday objects, the relationship I have with them, where I'm imparting my perception onto them, but then they also have their own kind of presence.   

I was staying in a studio workspace, so it wasn't my home, but did feel like a closeness with those objects helped me translate my experience of being there in Italy that was that was more intimate than, say, if I had made a copy of a painting in the Uffizi or even the landscape out the window. 

But to tie that back a little bit, I was realizing why in general I'm drawn to everyday kind of intimate objects. This kind of weight that they can carry of things within our daily lives that are avoided, or pushed away, or left unsaid. My father died by suicide when I was 13, and I remember it seemed that nobody talked about it. So then everything was permeated with that absence. Suddenly these objects… I felt them carrying this weight. There's so much meaning that I personally can impart to objects. That we all do. 

So much of the time our interaction with the real world is distracted or somehow less real or secondary to the world on the screen. That world is a very poor substitute, but is nevertheless primary, or is emerging as a primary reality. Paying close attention to objects, as a lived experience, is not super accessible without much effort if you didn't grow up before the digital became overwhelming. Today, you have to really pay attention. When you're spending time with these objects and with these images of objects, how much does it feel like an earlier time, or almost a tradition from an earlier moment? Do you feel that your work and attention to these things has allowed you to still retain a connection to that real world off of the screen?

I do remember being younger before I had a cell phone. I'd always just stare at the ceiling, counting the tiles, or just zoning out. I have my own issues with anxiety and depression, and I had a friend in high school who was going through it as well. He mentioned when I was kind of panicking one day to, you know, if you look around the room and you focus on an object like, Okay, here's the outline of like, say, here's the light switch, here's the cord, watch the light changing, and you can kind of see time passing. 

I feel fortunate to have had that life off of the phone before, because it does still carry over. One of the things I'm grateful for with the phone is the ability to capture a moment faster that later I can go back and paint and bring in my own subjectivity, my own empathy, feelings, or memories of anxiety into the situation. But I do observe the moment before [taking the picture]. It has to come first from me observing and slowing down, trying to relate a feeling that's outside of the phone or outside of the pace of social media. Like grief or like [anything] these objects still carry. It started with this childhood trauma but then it continues through my life. How can I impart this kind of experience of being alive, of experiencing? 

I think this show in particular is a little bit more positive. You know, the title is suggesting moving towards demise, but I'm thinking of that in the broader sense of moving towards death. So I'm thinking of these as reminders that time is fleeting.

I was struck by the tip or the strategy that your friend gave you about paying attention and also about the decision to turn to art making in college, rather than art history, which you said was making maybe you feel anxious. I wonder if the art making itself is almost an extension of looking at the wall and watching the light change.

It's a way of becoming involved in that process, and trying to translate an experience that's not so easy to articulate. In my own practice, you know, it's important that I think about theory in the broader context of the art world, but it’s a very intuitive, personal, almost poetic process. This friend, he was one of my best friends. Almost a year and a half ago, he overdosed, and he passed away. He was also an artist. That has really affected this show on a personal level too, just being aware that I'm still here in the world. These objects are here in the world.