Margaux Williamson

“It is so different putting your child in a painting than putting them on facebook. Even though it seems best to mostly let your children have their own lives, a photo of a child on facebook is one of billions, so it can be less noticeable or strange or vulnerable than putting them in a painting or a book. But if you make paintings or books, it is hard not to include what takes up so much of your view. When I paint anyone I love, I have an automatic tendency to both paint them without many defenses and then to protect them with superficial gestures; to darken a face that holds a tender expression to a point of illegibility, to cover wide-open eyes with sunglasses, to cover a very new sleeping baby with a plastic rain cover.

For me, I like better to paint what is more obviously locked in specific time and in relation to specific place than to pin down something isolated and eternal, especially for someone I am so close to and who still gets to change so much. It is nice especially to see a baby in relation to the world for a lot of different reasons. Painting is the best for seeing how disparate elements do or could fit together. To make a good painting that includes a table and a person, you have to love a table as much as you love the person, or you have to look at a person like you look at a table. It is a good game figuring out how to make what you see whole without having to melt the parts together.”