201 East Magnolia

Date2011

MediumOil on canvas

Dimensions24 × 30 in. (61 × 76.2 cm)

ClassificationsOil Painting

Credit LineAnonymous gift, 2014

Object number2014.174

Description"201 East Magnolia, is a painting showing of an outdoor dining area of a food court, a particularly American kind of place, not really a destination in and of itself, the food court is designed and used to give its occupants a break from the main attraction of shopping at the mall. This food court happens to be in Burbank, but it could just as easily be in Kansas or New Jersey. This painting is showing us the middle ground as a type, the purgatory of the shared spaces of the everyday world of poured concrete, steel and glass we’ve made for ourselves. Overall, the locations in my paintings are non-destinations, particularly North American kinds of nowhere, at once ubiquitous and yet largely unseen. These places give me the slightly sinking feeling that I know I’m somewhere, but not really there, present in an absent sort of way. Auden said that ‘Poetry is the precise expression of mixed feelings’, which I think is true. As an American, I share some cultural shame about these places, but also enjoy them. The visual spectacle of these large expanses of concrete and steel is compelling to me in a way that makes me want to paint them. Two hundred yards of polished concrete gives me a chill that makes me want to paint it. One of the horrors of the modern world we’ve built for ourselves is being nowhere, being nobody. These are ideas that are hard to shake in our day to day lives, but when you’re in a crowded stadium and may think of yourself as just a face in a crowd, as soon as you make eye contact with someone you can’t have that idea about them, nor they about you. The specificity of these paintings is a sort of refutation of placelessness, of anonymity- to portray a place is to articulate a skepticism about placelessness. Nobody is really nowhere, and nobody is really nobody.

A lot of what painting is has been defined for me by the old masters and I make the paintings with these pictorial strategies and even techniques, like underpainting in what the Dutch called a dead color layer, which I’ve taken from these artists. Like Bierstadt and Cole, following these genealogies of influence, my painting is informed by the work that came before it, they come out of painters like Ruisdael and Claude Lorrain. The paintings themselves are the acid test for all of the ideas I have going into them. It is an ongoing process of investigation and distillation. 201 East Magnolia is built like a Hudson River School painting in a number of ways. Bierstadt and Cole both move you through areas of light and shadow as you navigate the space in their paintings. It was important to me to have this mix of light and shade in this painting, which is also a sort of landscape. For me, making is thinking. Like Bierstadt and Cole, my paintings are built on drawings as opposed to being painted from photographs. In order to convey what I’m experiencing in these spaces, I need to draw. This stage of constructing the painting is vital—building the set, casting the characters, lighting the scene. It is where I test the potential for painting a given situation— making sure to keep the deep space open in the food court, changing the proportions of the space, and leaving in only the elements that demonstrate my interest in the space and the figures that occupy it. An important part of my work is bringing this long, slow, careful way of looking to bear on these places we’ve built to pass through quickly, places like a food court that are designed for you to get what you need and go, as opposed the architecture of say, the Palazzo Pitti in Florence.

In 201 East Magnolia, the light happens to be all daylight. Light is particularly important for me. It is good subject matter for painting and also an important part of how you sell the fiction of the painting as a real moment. The artificial light in the spaces I paint is sometimes very different from the light in the Old Master paintings I admire, but my interest in conveying it clearly is the same.

Philosophically, my paintings address how we empty the moment we’re in by thinking about what we’re going to do or what we’ve already done. Dostoyevsky said that looking forward we die too soon and looking backward we die too late. The places I paint are largely architectural instantiations of this state of being." - Marc Trujilo

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