Attention Equals Love
November 2022
I’ve been inclined towards windows and their semiosis for a couple of months now (I even have one tattooed on the back of my left shoulder!). It feels absurd to write this due to its’ evident nature, but when one sees through them, the scenarios and the things that are there to observe might feel endless if one decides to look close enough; what is seen suddenly comes to exist. I hold close to me the idea that paintings function as windows too. During the 1860s, after the invention of photography, Impressionist painters freed themselves from stern compositions in painting, allowing them to incorporate cropped spaces and figures along with the exploration of light and asymmetry: invoking an organic, individual, and more personal feeling to their work. Additionally, due to the innovation of paint in tubes, artists were able to step outside and paint en plein air, but most importantly, they began to paint what they observed. Position yourself 162 years later: you’ve arranged a meet-up with an emerging artist, and you’re already running late but you decide to bring coffee for the two of you, she offered to bring donuts, how could you not bring coffee? There’s honey dripping from your cup, and a small amount of coffee leaks off the lid as you go up the stairs.
It’s November and it has already snowed, why are you feeling hot as you arrive to the room? There are easels with dry paint on them, a table at the back, stools, a few artists painting, and you see Lily Kapler on your left. She’s still setting herself in the space, she has boxes full of paints, brushes, clips, pins, oils, and rags. A folder made out of newsprint paper lies on top of the stool right next to her; this is where she keeps all the paintings she has done throughout the semester.
Lily Kapler is an emerging artist who is completing her university studies at Ontario’s College of Art and Design. Her work features a diverse range of subjects, from animals in their natural habitat, whether that be a rain forest for a hunting tiger or a gloomy meadow for a galloping horse, to people in intimate and vulnerable scenarios. Neither the animals nor people seem aware of the viewer’s presence. The public acts as a silent and omnipresent watcher, her paintings work as a window into these very intimate spaces. By addressing the Impressionists anew: Lily Kapler and artists such as Berthe Morisot, Edgar Degas, Auguste Renoir, Mary Cassatt, among others, have portrayed the observations of their environment in their work. Nonetheless, the camera is to the 1860s as the phone is to the 2010s. The digital life has had a vast impact on the art world too. What occurs when the everyday life that artists have depicted has now been displaced onto a screen? What if en plein air has now turned into en plein virtuel? Although this virtual life does not occupy the contemporary artist’s entire existence, it is important to acknowledge it as a tool. Artists can now find inspiration by opening a new tab, scrolling through their photos, clicking “next” on their phones, or by encountering a random picture that they might find endearing in their feed. Art historian and cultural analyst of International, Postcolonial Feminist Studies in Visual Arts and Visual Culture, Griselda Pollock, writes in her book Mary Cassatt, Painter of Modern Women (1998) that
Social histories of art have, however, also taught us that the what of painting, drawn from modern life, was made modern only because of the how: modern art is modern because of a self-conscious manipulation of paint and surface in order to bring out the ambivalence and complexity of the relations between painting as a fabricated representation and its referents in the social world. (39)
How distanced might Kapler’s work be from this definition? What I am suggesting will be better explained by contrasting the work and themes by Cassat and Kapler and highlighting how both artists have straightforwardly depicted their lived realities 160 years apart one from the other.Mary Cassatt, having been part of the Impressionist movement, has included lively and harmonious values, cropped compositions, and rapid brushstrokes in her work. The themes in her paintings lean towards the relationship between women and children, and in no way should we minimize or withdraw the power of her depictions. She portrayed her subjects with a caring hand, but “there is a danger, however, in sliding too swiftly from that which we see on the canvas, a pictorial analysis of human relations, to a sensibility ascribed to the artist, because she is a woman” (Pollock 36). One can infer the scenarios of her artworks by simply reading the chosen titles, e.g., Little Girl in a Blue Armchair (1878), In the Box (1879), Woman on a Striped Sofa with a Dog (1875), Offering the Panel to the Bullfighter (1872-1873), etc. These rich and descriptive labels push us to understand reality as an essential asset during this period. Pollock accentuates this by writing that “realism is indispensable; a scrupulous conception of artistic conscience, which demands that one transcribe only emotions that one has experienced sincerely; the obligation to work directly from nature” (Pollock 32).
Griselda Pollock expresses how Cassatt selected models that did not disseminate an erotic gaze. I can argue that times have changed, and it is understandable that women painting women during the 1870s have chosen to detach the female figure from the eroticized male gaze. However, in our day and age, a nude body does not equal eroticism. I see freedom in Lily’s paintings. While chatting with her, she has mentioned how she likes to paint bodies in their total movement splendor. It is not whether Lily is objectifying these figures (or herself), she’s painting what she observes and has decided to depict the beauty and rawness of the human body.
I’ve described and given sufficient context for you, the reader, to imagine Kapler’s imagery that I might as well delve into her work; I’ve teased enough; I’ll open the curtains of the window now: Nude torsos, especially from the back; a disruptive moment, as if the viewer might have accidentally walked in a very intimate moment. The bodies are released, they’re comfortable with themselves; the viewer is an intruder.
Kapler’s practice is influenced by her everyday life: strangers she has seen on the internet, the restaurant she works at, animals, people on the news, herself, a guy whose hobby is to build things from scratch without using modern tools, her physical pain (her shoulder was hurting from painting too much and then she ironically painted an image that came up on google when she searched for “shoulder pain”), etc. Despite having a few paintings of her relatives, such as her niece and her dad, she does not feel comfortable painting about her emotions or people close to her; “it’s embarrassing” Lily announced while holding 4 different brushes in her left hand and one on her right, which she was using to paint. Her unique lens is consistently being materialized and brought to life. By consuming online media, she has successfully transmitted a different narrative only from watching, pausing, observing, and translating her interests into Yupo paper.
I’m certain if Lily were to paint a portrait of you, dear reader, she would end up knowing your face better than yourself. I want to make an emphasis on the artist’s interest in strangers, there's a certain poetry in “getting to know someone’s face without actually personally knowing them, you kind of fall in love with people as you paint their face.” (Kapler). Children, strangers, and animals are “safe” for her to paint. She doesn’t want to get too close to her emotions; perhaps they don’t lie in the subjects of her paintings, but in her technique: images emerge from the canvas from a quick hand movement that translates into elongated brushstrokes that are short in height. There’s palpable care in her work, from her rapid mannerisms to the amount of time she takes to observe her subjects. This characteristic in Kapler’s work appears in our Impressionist painter: Pollock points out Mary Cassatt’s differentiations from some of the Impressionists, she emphasizes “the intellectual quality of her feelings, and by a sort of emotional lyricism that is revealed in her work, through faces, gestures, and movements alone.” (32). Lily Kapler has expressed how, for her, “attention equals love, the idea that the amount of attention you pay to things equals the love you have for them -– It’s a Lady Bird quote!” The artist only hopes to communicate what she sees, she does not have the public in mind, she only hopes to explore the things she can get from looking very, very, closely; she's a painter that paints for the love of painting.
The intimacy of not only having to deeply observe the subject, but to create a window into the subject’s life is notable in Kapler and Cassatt’s paintings. Funny and interestingly enough, I had written about Cassatt’s titles even before seeing Lily’s. They both share that realism essence.
Kapler, as well as Cassatt, is not interested in conveying a deeper meaning with her labels, she is presenting what is: Tired Benjamin (2022), Big Evan (2022), Small Evan (2002), Night After Johnny (2022), Lily in Yellow and Pink (2022), etc. Both artists have achieved to portray the things they have closely observed, nonetheless, it seems important to address their distinctive contexts; their paintings as the reflection of their minds and their interests; what would Lily Kapler have depicted if she had been a living artist in the 1870s? Or what would Mary Cassatt have observed if she had access to social media? Although we will never have a definite answer, we can imagine the outcome by considering the work of these two women who paint for the sake of painting.
Kapler lures me into her mind,
I feel impelled.
Written by KR.