Mary Weatherford

THE FLAYING OF MARSYAS. Mary Weatherford is known for her large paintings incorporating neon lighting tubes. The Flaying of Marsyas, the exhibition of her new paintings at the Museo di Palazzo Grimani in Venice, runs through the 59^th Biennale until November 27^th, 2022. These paintings examine the ways in which time has worked on Marsyas and on Titian’s famous painting of the same name.

You can listen to the podcat of this interview here.

Mary Weatherford, Titian did his painting The Flaying of Marsyas between 1570 and 1576. You were struck by it in 2013. What happened?

I was in Rome and the Titian exhibition and in the final room there was this painting. I was astonished.  It’s such a depiction of quiet and chaos simultaneously. The stillness of the scene combined with the violence of the terrible action impressed me. This angel playing the violin, and other characters that seem to be participating in the punishment of Marsyas.

What story does the painting depict?

Marsyas is a satyr who challenges the god Apollo to a music contest. This is a big moment of mistake, of hubris or ignorance. Apollo is a god. He knows that he will win the contest because he can play the lyre and sing at the same time, and the human voice is the most beautiful instrument. It’s pre-agreed that the victor will exact the punishment of their choosing upon the loser.

This story is told in the Metamorphoses of Ovid. Did you study widely before deciding to be an artist?

I decided to be an artist when I was 21 at Princeton. I continued to read and study at the same time that I was painting. I studied Venetian painting. The more you know about something, the more you like it. Bellini, Titian, Tintoretto are really extraordinary for me. I love Titian. I like forever painting.

Titian. The Flaying of Marsyas, c. 1570-1576. Oil on Canvas. 83 x 81 in. 210.8 x 205.7 cm

Mary Weatherford, do you work on special canvas?

It’s made in Belgium on a loom built by Mercedes Benz. The canvas is prepared with marble dust and chalk so that it absorbs the paint. It behaves a bit like a fresco and the paint is very flat, so I commissioned this linen because it’s very bumpy. When you look at the surface the paint breaks into little sparkling dots.

In The Flaying of Marsyas exhibition in Palazzo Grimani do you mainly use brown, black and gold colors because they are the colors of the Titian painting?

They’re inspired by the Titian. The fur of the dogs and the fur of the Satyr. And there’s gold. They are also very similar to Rembrandt’s colors.

At the end of the exhibition there are two more colored paintings that remind me of Gustav Klimt or other secessionist painters. Am I right?

I think that’s just by chance, because there is a blue sky in the Titian in the very background. Those pinks and blues are coming out of Venetian painting.

Why did you decide in 2012 to use neon lights, and mold and shape them to become part of your paintings?

I was invited to teach a class in Bakersfield, in many ways a disconnected American city in the Central Valley of California. It’s only an hour and a half to drive to Bakersfield from Los Angeles where I live, but you have to go up and over a mountain range. Bakersfield is the site of John Steinbeck’s great novel The Grapes of Wrath, and the culture there is very different. It has its own music, the Bakersfield sound, which came up in opposition to Nashville. As a child we would drive through there on the way up into the mountains for our camping trips. Once you get inside this big valley the sunsets are very beautiful, and then the lights of the city start to come on. Bakersfield has had a boom and bust of oil drilling and farming, and there are old neon signs that have not been replaced with new LEDs. As the sun set and as the lights of the city went on, I saw this color of the sky with the signs and it formed a kernel of an idea that didn’t come right away. It sank in. I thought about it more. I had already worked with collage in paintings. I’ve done paintings where I put on starfish and seashells which were very much inspired by Italian paintings like those by Lucio Fontana with his cut and pieces of Murano glass.

Is your use of neon light like the cut of Fontana?

Yes, exactly. It’s like the opposite of a cut. But I don’t always use them. The last exhibition I did in Los Angeles half the paintings had them and half the paintings didn’t. In the Train Yards work I began in 2016 some of them don’t have the light. It depends on the painting. First I do the painting, then I decide.

Mary Weatherford, where else have you recently shown your work?

I had a show at the Aspen Art Museum last year. In the last thirty years mostly I have exhibited in the United States. I had a show many years ago, in 1991, in Zurich, Switzerland. The next show I had in Europe was Train Yards in the Gagosian gallery in London in 2021.

You are based in Los Angeles, where there are now many artists. Is L.A. challenging New York?

Los Angeles is very hot. Some older and younger artists moved from New York to Los Angeles, but the influx is from the art schools that are in Los Angeles. Also for some time young artists were coming from the Chicago Art Institute, a great place.

Art is increasingly influential. Do you feel good about being a woman artist?

Well, I always was, I decided to be an artist so long ago. I have always had a job and painted. I was a full time bookkeeper because I like maths and I had to make a living. I wasn’t able to quit my job until I was 50, when I started being successful as an artist. For young women artists there are many opportunities. It’s very different now than when I was in my 20s.

Did your life really change economically?

Now I could travel, and make very big paintings as I had always wanted. Like the two very big paintings for my show at David Kordansky Gallery. 

How come Larry Gagosian took you up?

It was a gradual thing. He heard about me from Mark Grotjahn, who’s an artist of the Gagosian Gallery. Mark has been a great supporter of my life for a long time. He owns my work, he has a beautiful painting called Blue Cut Fire.

Is there a movement of L.A. artists, like for instance Arte Povera? 

I don’t think you can identify a movement until later. Well, maybe that’s not true. The only reason there’s not a movement is because we have postmodernism. The art in Los Angeles is very diverse.

How would you define your work?

I work in two different ways: the Train Yards are an imagined scene, night paintings with sounds and lighting and temperature and weather. Whereas The Flaying of Marsyas paintings are all based on the Titian painting.

Do you suddenly have an obsession?

I wouldn’t call it an obsession, but a feeling, an observation, or an inspiration that comes from an experience. A show that I did in Los Angeles was about the island of Kauai in Hawaii, in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. I went to Kauai and I swam the waters and looked at the turtles and looked at the birds and experienced the weather, all the time making mental notes of the color, sometimes writing the color down. When I get back to the studio I use all of the notes on all the colors and the sights and the sounds of Kauai. They have rainbows, and when I was painting I was using many very bright colours and trying to make it break into rainbows. Or I go on a walk in Los Angeles and then I come back and I paint the walk. So it’s different experiences. I like working in themes.

Do people prefer your paintings if they have neon?  

It doesn’t matter. This last show some people preferred the ones without. About half of them have and half do not.

Mary Weatherford. The Flaying of Marsyas – Natural White and Satin, 2021-2022, detail. Flashe and neon on linen. 93 x 79 in. 236.2 x 200.7 cm.

Mary Weatherford. The Flaying of Marsyas. Installation view, Museo di Palazzo Grimani. Photo: Matteo De Fina. Courtesy: Gagosian

Mary Weatherford. The Flaying of Marsyas – 4500 Triphosphor, 2021-2022. Flashe and neon on linen, detail. 93 x 79 in. 236.2 x 200.7 cm.

Mary Weatherford, did you conceive this exhibition before the Covid-19 pandemic?  

No, I did it in the middle of the pandemic when the vaccines were in trial and it wasn’t even clear if they were coming. We had a polarized electorate in the United States, a cliff-hanger election. Nobody knew what was going to happen. So I said, “Time for The Flaying of Marsyas paintings!”

How long did it take to do them?

I did it in two parts. The first part, the painting, took maybe six weeks to two months, but then there was the second part with the lights which takes another long time. Most of the paintings came out all at once, very inspired, but the small ones were painted at the end, for the Grimani. When I came and saw the spaces I knew I needed punctuation in the exhibition and I wanted to make these small works.

Is this time of a terrible war going to inspire your next exhibition?  

Current events always affect or inspire my paintings but I haven’t started working on anything new yet, I’ve been concentrating on this. I didn’t know we would be experiencing this war when I made these paintings, but the theme of the Titian painting and then of these paintings is hubris and violence and ignorance and the madness of the crowd.

Do you work every day?

The paintings are physically taxing because I work on the floor. I’m so tired afterwards. I can’t work every day because it’s too hard on my body.

Do you work by yourself?

I have people working for me, but not to make the painting. They stretch the canvas and help to put the lights on.

How is your studio?

Beautiful. It’s the big old Weatherford and Wendt screw factory that my great-uncle built in Glendale. He drank himself to death and lost the factory, and then I bought it.

Are you going straight back to L.A. after Venice?

No, I’ve never been to the South of France so I’m going to Arles, where many artists are inspired, to see my friend Laura Owens’ show at LUMA, and I am going to travel around a bit. Then I’m going back to New York City, where I lived for many years.

Is New York still the center of the arts?

I think so, because of the museums. Because of the Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. But Los Angeles is where the young artists are. New York is too expensive.

Images courtesy of Gagosian and the artist. Mary Weatherford. THE FLAYING OF MARSYAS. April 20 to 27 November, 2022. Museo di Palazzo Grimani, Castello 4858/a, Venice, Italy.

Portrait of Mary Weatherford. The artist in her studio with “The Flaying of Marsyas – 3500 Spectra” (2021 – 2022).

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