M Pettee Olsen

M Pettee Olsen’s sweeping brushstrokes are at once spontaneous and choreographed, suggesting a painter who confidently engages her whole body in the creative process. As a former dancer, she states that she’s painting the dance in her bones, infusing her large paintings with the grace and fluidity of motion that comes from years of disciplined training in ballet and modern dance. She uses a variety of paint media, including some with reflective properties, to play with luminosity, depth, and perception. Indeed, Pettee Olsen is interested in how we perceive the world, how we interpret it through our respective lenses, and finally, how we form narratives around our subjective experiences. These stories are passed on through oral tradition, dance, theater, and the myriad forms of storytelling through which humans tell their version of history. The discord arises when our narratives clash, often resulting in conflict and tragedy on a global scale. Pettee Olsen invites us to lose the stories that undermine meaningful connection and fuel dualistic thought. She superimposes value scales and geometric elements on her canvases, disrupting the painterly dance/narrative to introduce a more open-ended conversation. By letting go of self-serving storylines, we open ourselves to the common humanity that supersedes the desire for power, marginalization, and war. Pettee Olsen’s gestures are soulful and profound, but they can also be unsettling, as if reflecting our darkest self. The alternating shimmers and shadows in her paintings speak to the best and worst of who we are, as our stories realign to narrate a more faithful portrayal of ourselves and the human condition.

MH: You paint with acrylic on large canvases, using extra-wide brushes and bold, sweeping strokes. Has this always been your style, or did you just bust loose one day?
MPO: I’ve always worked on largish canvases because of the nature of how I paint, which comes out of dance. There’s a different kind of sensibility that happens when I’m making a sweeping gesture compared to when I’m working small. It moves from a kinesthetic level to a more intimate movement of the hand, and it comes from a different place in my head. But I also use smaller brushes when I get to the more detailed mark making in my paintings.
MH: How do you see your work in relationship to Abstract Expressionism? Does the comparison make you cringe, or is Ab Ex your tribe?
MPO: Obviously there are roots there, but anytime someone places you in the past is not a good thing, and yes, it can be cringeworthy. I don’t think about my work in the studio as Ab Ex because my intentions with my work are so different than what they were after. Also, I use reflective pigments that read differently from different points of view. That is not a tool set the Ab Ex artists used, and it distinguishes me and places me squarely in the forward-facing present.
MH: You were on track to become a professional dancer when you were younger but had to stop due to physical issues. Were you already a painter at that point? Or did you turn to painting when dance was no longer an option?
MPO: I was taking company classes with American Ballet Theater when I was in school and to me, this was the company to be with. My teacher was from Odessa, and I got so much from her, that sense of love and passion for the arts. Visual arts were also an important part of my life back then, and I had a portfolio of drawing and painting toward the end of high school. So when I got injured and the dance thing fell apart, I fell apart with it, and it was then that I knew that I’d go to art school.
MH: If you’d never studied dance, do you think your paintings would be what they are now?
MPO: Probably. There was always a part of me that was interested in going beyond the physical into the psyche, and on some level the dance took me there. But I always knew that I was searching for something else, a tool set that lived a lot longer than the brief career of a dancer.
MH: When you told me that you were a dancer, your paintings came to life for me. A dancer uses her body to make graceful, sweeping gestures, which is exactly what you do in your paintings. How do you regard your painting process in relationship to dance?
MPO: It’s funny, whether you’re a painter or a dancer, you go into your studio to engage in this physical process. People say that the body is in my painting, but I have more concerns with time and space, self and no-self, than I do about the body and dance. There are beautiful gestures in my paintings, but I also want there to be a foil against that, so I add rectilinear elements that are about thought and other interruptions. So I’m compressing spontaneous and choreographed moves into flat space, and in the process, I’m painting the dance in my bones, a choreography that’s 3.7 billion years in the making, and filtered through my distinct lens.

Falling Away, 2022, synthetic and luminous paint on canvas, 60 x 144 in. (triptych)

MH: You also talk about your work in relationship to poetry and allude to “the collapse of absolute meaning.” Would you elaborate on that?
MPO: Whenever we speak or write, we dial down experience and eliminate all these other choices and perspectives. But I compare my work to poetry because it has this multivalence about it: the word blue may be a color or it may be a mood. We’re living in a time when we need to be more open to multiple ways of seeing things, and I think abstraction lends itself to that wide openness. My sensibility of the world feels Buddhist in a way, and I resonate with a lot of insight that comes from that practice.
MH: I’m quoting you here: “Some people say that painting can take you to the places that writing can’t. But to me what painting can do (…) is put you in five places at once, collapsing time and space.” Would you say that your paintings are anti-narrative?
MPO: Well, yes. Our brains naturally make up stories. I’m particularly aware of this because my father was a neurologist, and I was brought up with science rather than religion. I was taught that the world is a changeable place, depending on what’s happening in your brain. An injury to the brain can cause you to perceive the world very differently. And yet the brain tries to cobble together a sense of the world, whether real or not.
MH: I’m curious why you see this as a negative? You talk about the desire to “implode narratives”, so you clearly think they’re damaging.
MPO: I love stories as much as the next person as a way to connect with people, but I think there’s something missing when all we’re doing is telling our little stories. I associate stories with wars, so the more you cling to your story, the more you’re gearing up for dualism. Us against them. The balm I can bring through my work is an alternative way of looking at narratives. It’s not so much that I’m anti-narrative, I’m just against clinging to our stories.
MH: That’s interesting to think about stories as the initiator of wars. There’s a lot of truth to that. Stories and myths are also the birthplace of religion. I mean, what is religion if not a story?
MPO: Exactly! And people think their religion is a sacred thing, but how do they think their religion was spread? It wasn’t through some great love of humanity! It was spread by telling stories that were created by a few men who wanted power, and who were willing to go to war over it.
MH: Is it possible that instead of no-narrative, your paintings express a narrative from multiple points of view? A hyper-narrative, as it were, in which the various perspectives are equally true?
MPO: I agree with that up to the “equally true” part. I don’t think about them being true or false; they’re perspectives. One of the ways that I express this in my paintings is by superimposing value scales that disrupt relative truths and narratives. I don’t mean to say that there are no relative truths, and I have my stories as well. But I think the further back you step when looking at things, the less you hold onto a singular lens through which you approach something. You don’t cling to it in the same way. So I suppose you could say they’re equally true, but it feels more like a question of values.
MH: I think you’re talking about value from two different angles, as chiaroscuro or gray scales as well as values in terms of shared morality.
MPO: Right. The gray scale is a metaphor for ethics, morality, and even critical thinking. I think critical thinking is important and there’s not enough of it in general, but that’s not what my work is about. It’s about letting go of certainties. I’m interested in what’s beyond critical thinking. To me the unknown is more fascinating than the known.
MH: What’s beyond critical thinking?
MPO: The whirling dervishes, or Thelonius Monk spinning to music. Sometimes he spun around slowly on stage to another’s solo, sometimes in a parking lot, to some internal song. Dervishes whirling, and even my own dancing early on, have common roots in this sort of centering and expansive feeling state. They’re not thinking, they’re connecting with something that makes them feel integrated with everything else. I'm interested in the relationship between unbounded awareness, perception, and categorical thinking.
MH: Back to the idea of narrative, I think a hyper-narrative painting would be apropos in our current culture. There are so many conflicting stories that objectivity and truth are like so many relics from a bygone era. But instead of jettisoning narratives altogether, do you think there would be a benefit in giving them space to exist simultaneously?
MPO: I would suggest a meta-approach that transcends and includes the narratives that came before it. It doesn’t devalue or dismiss human experience and perspective, it just recontextualizes the story.
MH: I see parallels in your work with Cézanne and the Cubists, who shattered single point perspective and portrayed multiple views at once. Would you say that your paintings shatter one-point narratives in a similar way?
MPO: Yes, but what it means now to shatter perspectives is something different than when Cézanne was working. The shifting planes in his paintings are interruptions that ask us to look at the physical world in a different way. But the territory I’m going into is more conceptual, a shift in perception but also a letting go of narratives.
MH: So Margaret, all this is fun and compelling to talk about, but you know and I know that when someone stands in front of one of your paintings, they’re not going to be thinking about imploding or exploding narratives. How important is it that someone understands the conceptual nature of your work?
MPO: Roberta Smith wrote a while back that artists have to understand that they do not own the meaning of their own work. Does that mean that writers and authors and critics don’t own the meaning of their work either? I have a little beef around that, but I understand that the completion of an artist’s work is when an audience views the piece and responds to it, and of course people see different things. I’ve imbedded my concerns for time, perception, and movement into the piece, and that’s all I can do.
MH: As artists, we’re infatuated with our concepts, which give deeper levels of meaning to what we do. But to everyone else, does it matter what the work is about? In other words, is the conceptual nature of our work mostly for our own inspiration and fancy?
MPO: I don’t think of it in that way. Maybe in reality I have to understand that someone will interpret my work differently than I’d intended. But this is my contribution, my gift, and it’s important to me that the intention is there. At the end of the day, I have to be okay with it and hope that a few people get it. We all have these moments when people connect with our work and it’s very meaningful.
MH: Last question: what’s the best part about being an artist?
MPO: Being alive! As an artist I’m alive to the world and really looking, not just living a rote life. I’m the sanest and most centered when I’m in the studio, and if I’m not making work, everything else seems pointless. Honestly, I can’t imagine not being an artist.

www.petteeolsen.com

IMAGE LIST
  All images are synthetic polymer and reflective pigment on canvas unless otherwise noted
  1. Twists and Turn with Value Scale, 2018, 40 x 60 in. (diptych)
  2. Truest Blue, 2020, 48 x 60 in.
  3. Centered, 2021, 52 x 48 in.
  4. Flash, 2023, (WIP), 60 x 48 in.
  5. Red Turn with Value Scales, 2019, 60 x 48 in.
  6. Flagged for Content, 2020, 48 x 60 in.
  7. Distraction with Orange Redaction (Orange Turn), 2018, 60 x 56 in.
  8. In the Thick of It, 2023, (WIP), 60 x 48 in.
  9. Blue Black Green Turn, 2023, 48 x 68 in.
10. Flash Reflect, 2019, 60 x 48 in.
11. Complicated, 2023, (WIP), detail
12. Return to Raw, 2023, synthetic polymer with interference and reflective pigment on canvas, 60 x 48 in.
13. Dark Light Turn, 2022, detail
14. Flip and Shine, 2023
15. Getting Someplace, 2022, 48 x 48 in.
16. Value Scale, 2018, 60 x 80 in.
17. Yellow Slip, 2019, synthetic and luminous paint on canvas, 60 x 48 in.
18. Revolution Still, 2022, synthetic and luminous paint on canvas, 60 x 48 in.
19. Studio shot.
20, 21. The artist in her studio.