the semi-finalist is: andrea borsuk

Silence and Revery
From The Virtues: Surviving a Pandemic
2020, mixed media on paper , 11’ x 15”​

From my first visit to her studio in the early 2000’s, I have felt that Andrea Borsuk’s core personality is being mirrored in the compositions that she builds from memory, photos and observation in her Santa Cruz studio. Borsuk is honest, open, and radiates a warmth that immediately makes anyone in her orbit feel like family. It shouldn't be a surprise, then, that she also approaches image making with a deep well of compassion for human relationships and a seasoned skill set that allows her to depict them. She understands that life’s big moments can often seem ordinary, even lonely. And with the keen eye of an illustrator and the sharp wit of an editorialist she’s also capable of showing us how simple gestures and the mundane can somehow feel monumental. Her depiction of a boy mowing a lawn has stuck with me since I first saw it a few years back. The scene is a small moment embedded within a larger composition (A Life Span), but in Borsuk’s adept hands the quirky adolescent doing his chores becomes an awkward sisyphus performing what to any young person feels like an eternal task. Striking a more serious tone, her 2016 paintings of embracing figures are more relevant than ever and are the perfect antidote to a world built around various forms of isolation. The small but tender gestures of consolation have an immensity of feeling that stretches far  beyond the modestly scaled surfaces they are painted on.

Andrea Borsuk’s gracious acceptance of both the joy and absurdity found in so much of life is infectious and ultimately up-lifting. Even at its most surreal, the work is often infused with the sense that the good gals (and occasionally guys) are winning. And when they’re not, they are depicted with the respect that they deserve. My personal theory about the optimistic tenor of Borsuk’s work is that it comes in part from the poses that her figures take. From the quotidian to the stylized, isolated or in groups, they always seem resilient enough to take on what life is offering up, which alternates between run of the mill malaise and the truly apocalyptic. But I also sense optimism in another part of Borsuk’s practice: her unapologetic embrace of decoration, flourish, pattern, design and all things beautiful. It’s as if the work itself is saying that no matter what sort of shit-show we’ve found ourselves in, we’re going to pull ourselves together, rise above our circumstances and build something wonderful for tomorrow and the tomorrow after that. 
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Well, today I am very pleased to have the opportunity to bring you my interview with Andrea Borsuk. In it she discusses her process, what inspires her and the never ending allure of Italy. 

Andrea Borsuk in her studio.
Santa Cruz, CA

The Semi-Finalist: Tell me about your formative years. How did this all get started and who influenced you early on?

Andrea Borsuk: I learned to how to appreciate art and paint while studying in Florence, Italy as an undergraduate almost forty years ago. Before leaving, I took a landscape watercolor class and I fell in love with painting outdoors. I discovered the work of artists, Piero della Francesco, Giotto, Caravaggio and Pontormo while studying and I traveled around a lot, painting small on-site watercolors. When I returned to California, I finished my art degree at UC Santa Cruz, then left for 20 years, and now I am back again in this beautiful town. 

Fighter
From The Virtues: Surviving a Pandemic
2020, mixed media on paper, 11’ x 15”

That pivotal year in Italy was when and where narrative painting was planted in my heart. Storytelling would continue to be meaningful to me. I discovered at a young age that paintings could be loaded with content and beauty  and it was the first time I was introduced to the power of allegory— people might not have been able to read words but they sure could read images! So I became a die-hard figurative/image- based painter all through graduate school and “allegory” was my middle name. When I attended Columbia University for my MFA in the late 80’s, the artists I was looking at were David Salle and Eric Fischl, Cindy Sherman, Nancy Spero, Ida Applebroog, Marlene Dumas, Annette Messager, Sigmar Polke as well as abstract artists, Terry Winters and Brice Marden. They were all my heroes in the art world.  While living in NYC for a number of years, needless to say, I drank up the art and devoured dance performances, in particular, Pina Bausch. Her poetic, dramatic and physically humorous stories on stage were riveting. I witnessed the popularity of video art, especially the work Bill Viola and his non-linear ways of story telling and his fondness for greater themes tied to human gestures. These influences confirmed my connection to the human body, performance, dance and narrative art.

Above: Wind Has A Mind of Its Own
2011, oil on wood panel, 36" x 72"

Below:
​Instructions Not Included
2010, oil on wood panel, 30" x 40"

My work developed using concepts of seriality and multiple styles. I wanted to paint the figure, but not in a traditional narrative way. I was interested in exploring the female body,  but with an acknowledgment of feminist discourse and the complex history of its portrayal in art.  What I really wanted to do was stage performances but I loved painting, so I stuck with that. I have continued to be intrigued by possibilities of imbuing a painting with signs and messages about psychological and social issues concerning mortality, love, and what is it to be human. I also love abstraction about as much as I love figuration, so the combination of all of these things continue to be important to my work.

Above: A Life Span
2016, oil on wood panel, 24" x 30"

Below: Life Graph
2016, oil on wood panel, 24" x 30" ​

S-F: I know that Italy is a big part of your life. Can you talk a bit about how traveling and periodically working there has impacted your painting?

AB: The food is better in Italy… and a well-fed artist is a happy artist! I have been traveling back and forth to Italy for many years, mostly out of a pure love for the culture, the landscape, the museums and churches, and the improvisational “dance" that I observe on the cobbled-stone streets and piazzas. Talk about inspiration! I am fortunate that I also teach there in the summers, so it’s a good excuse to spend time in a place that is so dear to my heart. I can’t walk by a church without stepping inside in order to surprise myself with so much beauty. I feel like a tiny person in a HUGE jewelry box! The architecture and its ornamentation, the site -specific artwork, those in-situ narrative paintings and sculptures (REAL LIFE installation projects) have certainly had a big impact on me, despite the fact that I am Jewish and had never set foot in a church until I was 20 years old! I never knew the biblical stories and, no surprise, I am way more attracted to the formal aspects of pattern and ornamentation, pictorial structure, color and light, than religious messaging.

Frustrated
From The Virtues: Surviving a Pandemic
2020, mixed media on paper, 11’ x 15”

I’ve looked at a lot of Renaissance and Baroque painting and so many amazing ancient relics throughout the years. I realize that everything I am attracted to eventually finds its way into my work, even if it is not intentional.  For example, the predellas in Renaissance altarpieces, which are usually a series of small- scale narrative paintings depicting events from various lives (usually in a horizontal format on the bottom or side of paintings) have found their way into my work. I have been drawn to this format and aspect of storytelling, which is often intimate, forcing the viewer to come close and read the work like a scroll or like story boards that show sequencing and a disruption of pictorial hierarchies.The figures are usually small and the backdrops are dramatic. I am nuts for the over-the-top embrace of elaborate, decorative, frescoed or tiled walls, artifice and embellishment surrounding beautifully painted images AND, of course, the flowers, candles and sacred objects that dangle like jewelry in every nook and cranny, the beautiful altars, cameos and charms, the sacramental ornaments and the overabundance of memento mori, reminders of our fragility— all of these symbols of mortality have become part of my vocabulary.  I am fascinated with the rituals and talismans that are regularly used in quiet places of prayer, but I also love the fact that we wear good luck charms, rosary/prayer beads, or animal teeth (!) on our bodies as personal prayers for the health and safety of those we love.

To Console/Consolare
2016, oil on wood panel, 18" x 18"

Museums in Italy and the Venice Bienalle are also a bonus for learning and inspiration and I can say that viewing so much art informs and inspires me on multiple levels. I love looking at art probably as much as making it and I see it as a gift, especially as a teacher and as an artist. I can’t remember dates or times, but I can recall an artist’s name and their work!
When spending time in Italy, I treasure the details of life with the streets as  “backdrops”, observing daily life as people who go about their routines like an improvisational dance or play. There is a quality of life that is so PUBLIC and essential— the eating and socializing, kissing in random places, putting laundry on the line, or watching elderly couples holding hands while taking an evening pasegiatta— these human gestures don’t seem to have changed much in all the years. Yes, it feels like I am in a Fellini movie- I love the ritual of parades and all ages walking and eating together, the piazzas filled with so many generations. There are not as many places to watch this where I live, and certainly being in travel /observer mode while in Italy makes me more aware of life cycles and family rituals— essential actives within a life span. I sketch a lot when I am there, but mostly as an excuse to sit quietly and observe. I  am happy that I got to grow up in LA in the 70’s, but in an alternate universe I would have loved to have grown up in small Italian town. I am super fortunate that I can spend time there and I also love coming home to the studio to process it all.

Entanglements 3
2021, water media on paper, 22” x 15”

S-F: I think of you as a storyteller that loves to hint at a narrative through your paintings rather than spell things out. You often present a fragment of someone’s ordinary day, a moment of stylized dance, or a quick peek at a surreal fever dream. Can you talk about these glimpses into the lives of your subjects? 

AB: I have often thought that if I weren’t a painter, I’d be a fiction writer or a film maker. I love observing people and I am equally keen on human interest stories. All of the figures I choose to insert into my paintings are significant to me for one reason or the other. In every work I usually incorporate some aspect of human representation, trying to connect to a common thread in the long history of storytelling in art. The dance of human movement throughout the world, it seems, is a type of pre-verbal or primordial gesture. I see the figure as a hieroglyph or part of an alphabet of human emotions, like symbols from ancient calligraphy. I was recently looking at Egyptian drawings at the Met and I was amazed at the relevancy and universality of the human form. We are still eating, touching, fighting, dancing, and making love (ok, we weren’t using our phones yet).  I am continually searching for ways to paint or draw a gesture showing how a person can be doing something with a simple posture or how an interaction with another figure or an object begins a story. My figures are often de-personalized or “generic” and often dislocated from the rest of the space. Generally, these are not portraits of specific people. They are instead archetypes of people or an action that might reference a psychological state of being —like an adjective or an expression.

Gestures and postures on Borsuk's studio walls (2020).

 In my search for the essential postures of being human, I wonder how a gesture can communicate meaning that is open- ended, timeless and possibly universal, like movements that evoke a state-of- mind, like love and sorrow or what it feels like to be a baby (comfort), a toddler who is just learning to walk (precarious balance, growth and confidence), teenagers and how they stand while talking to each other (posture and rebellion), a parent or grandparent holding their first grandchild (pride, aging, love), people embracing (empathy, passion), or someone who is sick and being cared for (fragility, mortality). These are some of the characteristics that I am interested in depicting— humanistic symbols of our emotional connections as well as stages in life and how we age together. The figures that float in and out of my work often refer to themes that address mortality and fate, perhaps a direct reference to my own life (and middle age), parenting and watching my own family evolve, or references to current events that affect all of our lives, such as climate change, personal survival, and where we happen to live in the world. I do think of the evolution of my paintings and mixed media works are like ancient frescoes, where there are representations of the human form that have survived the elements of weather and time.  What we are left with are fragments of people, landscape, color, textures and patterns. And we are left with the mystery of the message. As a painter using imagery and the figure, it is difficult to avoid being didactic, which is why I try to avoid more traditional narrative painting devices like putting figures in a specific place and spelling out a storyline. European classical tradition would be only one strand in my work, which feels constrictive to me. I certainly use images to tell parts of a story and by adding things and taking things away- a process of covering and uncovering- a new story is invented. The choices of what I bring into a painting (all of the elements) are very cloudy until they interact with a brush stroke, a color, a pattern or a drip. There are certain characters I use again and again, because they are like a word or a mark that needs repeating.  The “story’ or content is not what it is all about for me— representation of the human figure is just one of many elements that I can use within the structure of a painting. I approach painting like a collage, with many disparate ingredients that could be read as surreal by the fact that there is disjuncture and an irrationality to the order of things, but I like to have open-ended conversations with paint. 

Above: Waiting to Breathe
2020, oil on wood panel, 24” x 30”

Below: Trouble In Paradise: The Covid Gates
2021, gouache on paper, 11” x 18”

S-F: One of the things I really respond to in your painting and drawing is your confidence with a broad range of techniques. It’s almost like you’re continually trying to coax these distinct modes of expression into living together on a single surface when many artists would rather be searching for one coherent, singular style. Talk about that.

AB: I want to have it all in my work. I am greedy. As I approach a painting, it is always with an awareness of paint application and how many choices I get to use with paint. I am equally compelled to look at and create formalist, decorative, expressive, systems-based AND representational, narrative work. I don’t want to have to choose.  Paint can do so many things and I know that I am never satisfied painting “consistently” within one frame (and one frame is often limiting to me as well!). It's a great challenge for me to figure out how the different approaches and applications with paint can coexist in one space. From a drip to a gestural mark with the brush, allowing accidents, creating  contrasts with patterns and textures, introducing extraneous collage bits, and also rendering highly articulated forms— these are on my menu of options from the grand smorgasbord of painting techniques.  

The Bargain
From The Virtues: Surviving a Pandemic
2021, mixed media on paper, 11" x 15”​

I want to create disjuncture AND harmony — how can these marks coexist to create beauty and meaning? The ingredients of the painting can consist of references to the ordinary, every- day life, or broader mythical stories, but these are also about using paint and celebrating its properties. Ultimately, I ask, how can these events —brush marks, stains, drips, and gestures, create a new order of existence and conversation? My painterly challenge is to utilize contradictory elements that speak to each other within a space. I am aware that ultimately, painting is an activity that can also have a life after it is created— to be read and interpreted — that there is not just one message. This aspect of forcing the viewer to do some of the work, to make connections between, for example, a brushmark that can mimic the human gesture or that stylization and repetition via paint can also be a metaphor for our own patterns of behavior, is what interests me.

The Perseverance of Chance
2020, oil on wood panel, 24” x 30”

The S-F: Who are you looking at (living or dead)?

AB: I’ve seen a lot of shows this past year— between New York, San Francisco and Italy, there was a lot of see, post-pandemic. Recently (as in the last month) Gustav Klimt—the influences of Byzantine and Renaissance art within his work are so obvious, but it didn’t occur to me how much abstraction co-exists with the figure. Bruce Nauman— talk about using such simple ideas with gesture, seriality, format and symbolism! Hands down, he understands and delivers. I’ve always cherished the decorative and symbolic with Shazia Sikkander, Wangetchi Mutu, Leonora Carrington, Nick Cave, Nicole Eisenman, Firelei Baez, Inka Essinhigh, Etyl Adan, Jennifer Packer, Marcel Dzama, Salmon Toor, Hannah Hoch, Joan Mitchell, David Park, Piero Da Francesco, the ceilings at the Uffizi, The Giorgio Vasari House in Arezzo and Cy Twombly… to name just a few!

Materials and inspiration.

S-F: ​Whats next for you (shows, collaborations, teaching, etc.)?

AB: I’m in a group show right now, called “Don’t Shut Up” at the Newhouse Cultural Center in New York. That was supposed to follow the election cycle, but was postponed 2 years because of Covid. I love the concept of participating in interesting- themed shows because I cover lots of topics in my work and usually something relates to something else.   I am collaborating with a lighting designer and metal artist who have a beautiful new gallery in downtown Santa Cruz, which makes me excited to create more public work. During Covid, I have loved the time and space in my studio to create small works on paper, lots of experiments and also works that reflect what we have been through these past few years.  Not having the pressure to produce for a show has actually been a good opportunity to re-evaluate my goals and to play with new topics as they arise. I will be teaching my Mixed Media Art (and yoga) workshop in Tuscany this summer, which will coincide with the 2022 Venice Bienalle —the exhibit this year is called, “The Milk of Dreams” and will focus on humanity and the body, so I will be curious to see that show.

Emerge 2
2021, watercolor, graphite and collage, 11" x 15"​

You can see more of Andrea Borsuk's work:
- on her website
-on instagram as @andreabelcruz