Interview by Jasmine Kozak-Gilroy
Megan Bailey is an Evergreen State College student who utilizes house paint in their eerie still lifes that play with perspective. We sat down with them to talk about what they’re currently working on. You can see some of their work in person at Allsorts Gallery during Spring Arts Walk.
MB: Since Spring Break, so for the past three weeks I have been painting every day and I have painted about 13 new pieces and a couple works in progress and I’ve been painting between two and eight hours a day, it’s Arts Walk and then a private house show. I’ve made a website, a business facebook page and instagram page, I’ve also sent out business cards to get made and done a lot of the business side of things. Designing flyers and then handing them out to galleries downtown and around campus. & these paintings are pretty big, they’re all lifesize. I’ve also been doing some really tiny paintings of strawberries and tangerines and cigarettes. The business side took a lot of time, building a website took four hours. I have been kind of hustling every single day trying to get stuff done.
CPJ: That sounds exhausting.
MB: I’ve been doing a lot of flowers and a lot of fruit and a lot of these style of still lifes, and they’ve been getting a lot faster as well. Usually they take like, well it depends how big the painting is. Something like this [larger piece] took like five hours to do. The smaller ones, like this strawberry, took 45 minutes. And they are all very colorful.
CPJ: Do you almost exclusively paint still lifes? Is that a newer phase in your painting?
MB: It’s actually something I have been developing for the past six years. I just wrote my artist statement and it is talking about how there is this artist names Manny Farber who, I feel like I am in dialogue with his still lifes because he does a similar style that I was inspired by because I didn’t really like doing still lifes until I saw his work. [Gesturing to painting] Can you see the ring on the canvas? The vase of flowers was sitting there and the canvas was on the floor and I was painting sitting on the floor rather than [having the painting] on a table and sitting at it. And for this one it is two feet by four feet so I have a yard stick with a paint brush attached to it so I can have a bunch of extension and you can kind of see the charcoal outline of mapping out where it goes. And then my water cup would be here and you can see the paint dripping onto the canvas from where I was sitting.
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