EMILY WEINER | CONTEMPORARY ART ISSUE
A Conversation with Emily Weiner; Paradoxically Simple Symbols
12 February 2025
Emily Weiner, The Way Out is Through, 2024. Oil on linen in ceramic frame, 22 x 17.5 in. Courtesy of the artist.
Emily Weiner, Mulier Inversa, 2024. Oil on linen in terracotta frame, 21.5 x 18 x 2 in. Courtesy of the artist.
JD: You used to paint in a more painterly manner with looser and more visible brushwork before turning to more calculated, calm, and celestial brushwork and compositions. What initiated this shift in your technique, compositions, subjects, and visual language?
EW: Actually, when I try to render anything from a photograph or real-life source material, a looser, maybe more brushy, way of painting is my default style. I have not necessarily given up this style, but lately, most of my paintings have come from purely invented imagery—like surrealist landscapes with curtains or spirals. When subjects are invented, my technique is intuitively different. I think this is because without a detailed map of where to place each dab of paint, gradations of hue and value stand in for detail, which creates a smoother atmosphere overall. I go back to painting from source imagery on occasion, and I’m always open to technical detours if they can get me closer to the feeling and subject I’m trying to represent.
JD: Your paintings have a very strong sense of mysticism and ritual. A channeling of historical and spiritual narratives that seem to answer our longing for something supernatural in an era in which science and reason have demystified our world. Spirituality is perceived as inferior because of the absence of reason. It has no place in a secular and rational worldview—despite those irrational desires being an integral part and continuum of our existence. However, that sense of magic, mystery, and spirituality can be found in art without being renounced as quackery. From this perspective, what is your take on the role of art today? And, more specifically, what is the role or purpose of your art today?
Emily Weiner, Duality, 2024. Oil on MDF in wood frame, 15 x 12 x 1.75 in. Courtesy of the artist.
EW: Thank you—yes, there is definitely a ritual that goes into making my paintings. It does not begin as a spiritual practice, but it does involve an element of faith. I show up in my space with paints and brushes and force myself to work on a canvas. I have to have confidence that the painting will come together and make sense eventually if I follow my intuition. Most of the time, I am not sure who is driving the conversation. Usually, it’s only after I finish a body of work that I can step away and get some clarity about what the paintings are saying. I don’t think the process is supernatural in an external sense of receiving messages from beyond, though. I actually think that when it comes to art or any really good idea, intuition is more intelligent than the logical brain. So, it’s a constant process of getting out of my own way. Recently, I realized that as soon as I notice myself thinking, “This painting is amazing,” it’s definitely not going to be amazing.
I don’t think contemporary science has demystified the world at all; I’d argue the opposite. Look at the first deep-field photographs from the James Webb telescope, taken only three years ago. Is there anything more sublime? Science has always been my main entry into a sense of the mysterious. It opens up big-picture questions about nature and the human condition. But because quantifiable data can’t answer the big questions alone, artists—like philosophers, spiritual teachers, and mystics—will always be important. I think artists take the immeasurable experience of being human and rephrase the questions as existential ones. Like Bruce Nauman said, “The true artist helps the world by revealing mystic truths.”
JD: Now that’s a quote to remember. In this context, can you briefly expand on using eyes, hands, moons, and suns within your work?
Emily Weiner, Providence (Apparition), 2024. Oil on shaped MDF in walnut frame, 12 x 15 x 1.5 in. Courtesy of the artist.
EW: I’m drawn to these archetypal symbols because they are paradoxically simplistic in form but profound for their mutability. They have multiple associations: The eye I’ve been painting is at once the enigmatic gaze of Mona Lisa and the all-seeing Eye of Providence on the dollar bill. Hands can symbolize the usually hidden forces behind the scenes or, conversely, the performer stealing the show.The moon symbolizes cycles and eternal return; the sun sometimes has to do with shining light on something.
JD: It also seems as if you treat your artworks as relics, focusing not only on the painting as a picture but also on its objecthood in all its three-dimensionality. From wavey surfaces to terracotta and stoneware frames. How did this sculptural dimension enter your work, and why?
EW: The ceramics originated when I felt a need for a sculptural element in my paintings. The most recently shaped panels model some non-intuitive aspects of our physical surroundings, like space curvature (gravitational waves from binary stars) and wave-particle duality (interference patterns from the famous double-slit experiment that ushered in a new way of understanding reality through quantum theory). It’s been interesting to work on these panels and think about how artists have always tried to simulate extra dimensions in painting.
JD: Dimensionality also brings spatiality into the conversation. There seems to be an intriguing tension between the flatness of your smooth surfaces and absent brushwork, the actual depth of the frame or the wavey surfaces, the suggested depth of the gradients, and some of the selected motifs in the picture plane— for instance, the curtain, centripetal swirls, the atmospheric perspective of accumulating horizons, up to cracks reminiscent of Lucio Fontana’s (1899-1968) slashes and Spazialismo. Could you please elaborate on the notions of spatiality within your work?
EW: I’m sure that Lucio Fontana subconsciously had a significant influence on me. He was inspired by the scientific advancements of his time, including the first image of Earth from space, and his slash paintings were literal spatial breakthroughs. The execution is simple, but they have an aura. For a while, I have been painting curtains as a similar metaphor for what’s behind the veil of reality, as we understand it through our human senses and mythologies.
JD: Your work integrates symbolic imagery and historical references, from red-figure amphoras from Ancient Greece to the pathosformal of the hands of Leonardo DaVinci’s (1452-1519) La Gioconda (1503-1506). What draws you to these elements, and with what intention do you implement them?
EW: Aby Warburg and his ideas, such as pathosformal and the afterlife of antiquity, were game-changing for me! I loved that Warburg was an outlier kind of art historian, making associations (that were sometimes weird) in a valiant attempt to come up with a unified theory for a very fragmented visual history. For the reasons I’m drawn to Warburg, I am even more inspired by Carl Jung—and his more mystical, primordially-oriented explanations of why some images have a specific power and durability throughout cultures and periods.