Emissaries

Poet Courtney Bush in conversation with Painter Brittany Miller

“I was just the woman seeing the messages in garbage at that point.”

I love the painter Brittany Miller. I love her as a painter. I love her as a person. I love her as a thinker and a reader and a teacher, which is the context in which I met her. In one meeting with my bosses at the Manhattan preschool where we worked, I said that my relationship with my co-teacher Brittany was complicated in that… My bosses finished my sentence, "You are hopelessly in love with one another?" Yes, that was the complication.

As co-teachers, we spent eight hours a day together, the only adults in a room with fifteen brilliant and energetic four-year olds. I once wrote that a preschool classroom was like every radio station playing at once. Across the room full of high-octane radio waves, there was always Brittany, the one steady point I could focus on. When I woke up at 5:00am to sit quietly in my living room before work, I spent the hour texting Brittany. When I left school, I started texting her before I even got on the train back to Brooklyn. That year was cut short by the pandemic, when we moved to teaching four-year olds on Zoom.

This experience was basically hallucinogenic. To process the new reality, we took turns sending an email to each other every night, detailing our day. We were inspired by May Sarton's Journal of a Solitude. We were writing a journal of our parallel solitudes. Three years later, we still send nightly emails about the coffee we drink, the oatmeal we eat, the books we are reading and writing, the paintings we are making.

She still makes all her paintings of me (a very slight exaggeration) and I put her in all of my poems. I was so excited to visit Brittany to have a conversation about her work before her group show at Steve Turner Gallery’s New York space (507 W 27th St) running from June 8 to June 30 and also featuring works by Ania Hobson and Natalia Gonzalez Martin.

When I got to her apartment in the Bronx, she was half-watching a reality show about streetwear designers and half-studying for a math exam. Her very large cat Billy writhed around in a pile of catnip. To record the following, I sat on the floor with Billy, among Brittany's formidable piles of art books, and faced her three new paintings of poets: Jameson Fitzpatrick, Tawanda Mulalu, and me.

C: I wanted to start our conversation by asking, for the official record, why do you make so many paintings of me?

B: Oh yeah, we've been talking about this. I've been thinking about it. And actually my gallerist was here the other day and I asked him, hey, do you think about why I paint Courtney so much? Have you ever wondered about that? And he said, No, never, not once. He immediately knew the answer to the question. Without a pause he was like, First of all she is your stand-in, she's like an emissary. You put her into these situations that are a reflection of yourself.

C: I was kind of joking because I love to joke about you being obsessed with me and me getting a restraining order against you but I felt so emotional when you were just telling me that. The word emissary. And the idea of sending me into these situations for you. And speaking of the situations, looking at the paintings in this room now, there's wormwood, there's fire, there are angels. We talk about angels a lot. The hands of God are in one of the paintings. And the idea that you would be sending me into these situations in your stead makes me feel…

B: Seems unfair, no?

C: But I think that's so beautiful. Because you are one of my closest friends. And I do feel like our closest friends are kind of like our other selves. A friend can be like another you that is going into the world and experiencing things, but a you that is stronger in some ways.

B: Definitely.

C: And more legible because they are someone else.

B: Also, at a formal level I understood how to paint your face better than anyone else's because when I started painting, we were teaching on Zoom. And I would record you. Because you were always doing interesting things with your hands and body. I would take screenshots and I would start to learn how to paint from those. And we do have a connection that is a real knowing. I do see you as fighting the same battle as me, and as better equipped to do so.

C: I see us as fighting similar battles.

B: Christianity…

C: God or whatever, but approaching it from really different directions. You are a painter. I am not a painter but I feel like I understand, and I can see in your work the same questions and the same spaces that I do want to inhabit in poetry. I wanted you to talk more about the battles waged. And how. There's an angelic battle here in the book in this painting.

B: So things I'm thinking about a lot – I'm thinking of not the first time we met but the first time we really talked to each other. I don't know if you remember.

C: In the school? In the break room?

B: No. After that.

C: In the playground?

B: After that. Until this time, we'd see each other and we'd say something but this night we met up in a bar in Bed-Stuy.

C: Yes.

B: That night… well, first of all, we were talking so intensely. And you had left to go walk your dog and come back and when you were walking your dog the bartender walked over to me and was like, Is everything okay? Because it was so intense that it looked like either you were breaking up with me or blackmailing me.

C: Uh-huh.

B: But then you walked me, after hours of whatever we talked about, you walked me to the C train and we were right in front of it and I was describing to you the books I love, the ones like Wittgenstein's Mistress. Books about women who are losing their mind and seeing things that aren't there.

C: Yeah, the unreliable narrator – but we were both like, Why is that unreliable?

B: Exactly, exactly. And you said, in a less pretentious way than this sounds, I'm writing a book like that. It's about this woman who sees messages in garbage. That was so much of what I was interested in and what I was thinking about and what I wanted to pursue but I wasn't painting then. I was just like the woman seeing the messages in garbage at that point. So then, cut to now, I feel like I'm making paintings of those people who are seeing the messages in the garbage.

C: Yeahhhh.

B: But the messages are there. It's not that this person doesn't know what's going on. It's actually that they do know what's going on.

C: Right. They see something and are willing to record it or commit enough to it to say they see it. Yes. So when I met you, you were making art but it was really different. You were doing cyanotypes on deer hides.

B: Hides I got from eBay, my favorite website.

C: You were using all these strange materials and you were not painting, but you were always talking about painters. When we talked about artists it was like Katherine Bradford and Philip Guston. People who are very much painters. But you were working with these materials and I thought, Oh, it's so odd that Brittany isn't making paintings. You were procuring strange materials and doing weird things with them.

B: I was like a bird who was selecting shiny things.

C: Yes and doing weird stuff and making shit on your scary roof.

B: Which was what ended up in that movie with Jason Biggs, like, crying in front of it. And then I stopped. Which was a perfect ending for that.

C: Yes, oh yes. I'll fill in the readers on that. The Jason Biggs thing. [Brittany's work from this time was used in a film called THE SUBJECT starring Jason Biggs, representing the work that Jason Biggs' character made as an artist.]

B: Yeah. The Jason Biggs thing. But the end goal was always to be a painter. The way I approach everything is research. My big question was like, What do painters do? I understood paintings. I had seen a million paintings. I look at paintings all the time. But how do they live? I think that's honestly why I ended up dating and getting to know painters because I just needed to understand the other part of it that I did not see – which was just the logistics of it. I was like, I will figure out painting later. I'm not concerned. 

C: What was your first painting?

B: It was a storm painting. I was making a big tornado and a house. It would be a good painting if I did it now.

C: It took a while for people to come into the paintings. First there were only storms and houses.

B: There were limitations to what I was able to do. Like how well I was able to paint and draw, so it started from the drawings I was making at the time. Right before I started painting I was making the same kinds of drawings with charcoal on linen I got from the Met's garbage. Speaking of garbage, the Met throws out their linen after each exhibition and I had bunches of that I would draw on. So I thought, if I just use paint instead, then I'll be painting. Then you were coming into them. I started painting the screenshots from Zoom. Then I would tell you to do things and you would. I'd be like, Hey, can you like…

C: Sit on the floor and cross your legs in some weird way and let me see your feet.

B: Yes or make praying hands and look straight at the camera. You'd send me whatever I asked you to send and I'd stick you into these situations.

C: About those poses: you would ask for these really specific gestures and often they would come from paintings or photographs or other narratives.

B: There's one from my Bible coloring book.

C: Yeah. And this one of Tawanda that I'm looking at is a reference to the positioning in a religious–

B: It's the Conversion of Saint Paul. The funny thing about those paintings is that every single one has a startled horse and God's hands coming from the clouds and a person who has fallen down. I thought it was funny to have those elements and mix them up. Everyone has seen this. There is no startled horse in the Bible story, but every person who painted it has included a startled horse. Because horses are romantic is what I'm thinking. As a former horse girl, horses are romantic. If you can put a horse in a painting, you should. All the elements are there and I was aware of it when I was posing him but the full idea came as I was looking at it later. It was in my mind and then I understood what was happening in my subconscious. Like, oh, that's what you're doing. It's the Conversion of Saint Paul.

C: I was wondering about pulling postures and poses from narratives. Not just written narratives, paintings too. I want to know about your connection to the positions you ask people to get in. You're very particular.

B: I keep notebooks where I print out all the paintings that I'm looking at and I'll mark them. I have one notebook that is just poses that I want to do. They all communicate different things so the pose is crucial to the narrative. For example, I've thinking a lot about holding hands as a gesture. Louise Bourgeois was the first "holding hands" influence I thought about. She's always doing clasped hands. And Clarice Lispector has all these… Take my hand. She's always saying, Take my hand. It goes back to preschool too. I had a boy who was really upset and who told another teacher, "I'm gonna cut off your hands and take them home with me." And it didn't seem violent. It seemed like it was what he needed to feel okay. Her hands.

C: Yeah, yeah.

B: In the painting of you and Jameson, obviously there are threats of some kind, but also there is so much peace in it because of a few things. One is the hands being held.

C: Thinking about the meaning of these gestures makes me think of more classical things, like sculpture. I'm not an art history expert but you go into a museum and read like the placard and it says, like, hands held in this position is a reference to some random Bible story. These postures can have really specific historical meanings.

B: I studied Netherlandish painting, where there are so many really specific symbols that everyone recognized. Now we've lost our understanding of what the different pictures mean. But that's where my love of painting comes from, the idea that you could communicate all these things that are accessible by just looking at it.

C: Or not. That's really interesting to me too. Like, wormwood in this painting. I know that's wormwood because you told me that's what it is. I kind of know what wormwood is, but if I looked at that I wouldn't know that that image was wormwood. I don't know exactly what it is, actually. One of the stars from Revelation.

B: The third.

C: The third? I know wormwood is a harbinger of doom. But other people know both more and less than I would. Still the painting has wormwood. And if I don't recognize it, the painting still has wormwood.

B: It poisons the ocean and so on. That's exactly it, and it depends on the cultural understanding. In the Netherlandish work from the Renaissance, back then everyone would have an understanding of what the symbols meant. I think about that with poetry too. You're providing an amount of information and everyone's access points are going to be different.

C: Yes – providing a number of guideposts while being aware of the varying levels of recognition. Hopefully it's all activated by the viewer or reader having their own personal points of entry.

B: Guidepost is a good word.

C: You're working in lines. Why do you paint in these lines?

B: It's funny. I was at dinner with a German man and he was like, You paint the stripes. And then I was interested in the idea of when does a line become a stripe.

C: I don't see the lines as stripes. 

B: Right, he was just trying to figure out a way to say lines that are longer than you would expect them to be. I did a deep dive into stripes because I'm interested. When I do include stripes as stripes, I think there's a biological response to them. When we see something like a hornet, there's an alarm. There's a noticing. Stripes call for attention. There are also some very dark pieces of art history that include stripes – but also, you'd put stripes on the clown. It would be someone who is being othered.

C: It signifies…

B: A fool…

C: Or a break from the norm.

B: Yes, and also in these Medieval paintings, Lucifer would have striped clothes to be like, Uh-oh. He fell from heaven, he's…

C: Now he's dressed in stripes!

B: It came to me all at once, what I was trying to achieve with the lines. In elementary school I got a book of optical illusions that were in black and white. There was one that I was obsessed with that spun. I've been trying to recreate that feeling. The way you can make something move by putting white in between two lines that are close to each other. It's gesso showing between the lines in the work. It creates this movement, this flickering.

Courtney Bush’s first full-length poetry book, Every Book Is About The Same Thing, was published by Newest York Arts Press in 2022 which is available for purchase. Courtney was later selected as a winner of the National Poetry Series for her second book, I Love Information, which will be published by Milkweed Editions in August 2023 and is available for pre-order today.