Sophy Naess

In Conversation with Friday Arts

Friday Arts

Tell us about your creative practice.

Sophy Naess

I'm a painter. I also work with weaving, printmaking, bookbinding, writing. I do a lot of work from observation. My work has to do with various aspects of my life experience very broadly.

And how did it all start—what was the genesis of your artistic journey?

I'm someone who wanted to be an artist from a really young age. I think like most kids I loved drawing and painting. And luckily my family was very encouraging. I remember my dad bringing me some pastels as a present when I was probably three years old. I took classes at the Museum of Art in El Paso and my parents also made arrangements with two women who were the art teachers at my school to give me private lessons, Susan Klahr and then Coral Jensen.

It was very formative working alongside Susan in her studio. She did a lot of portraiture, and when I was nine she invited me to pose for my portrait. I remember finding it very pleasant to be able to sit and have this shared attention with someone. It's funny to think that posing for a portrait would somehow relieve your sense of self-consciousness. Nowadays people would say I felt seen. That kind of recalibration of social interaction at that age was very formative for me somehow. So later on in life, I really got into inviting people to sit for me. And again, just seeing what kind of intimacy or closeness could emerge from that process of spending two or three hours in this very concentrated situation.

Tell us more about your formal training, and how you became a teaching artist.

After my freshman year in high school, I went to a summer program at Skidmore College. It was a drawing class and a painting class. It was my first experience being with a group of kids my age that wanted to just be drawing all day long in the studio. And when I came back to El Paso, I was so disgruntled with the quality of my public school art classes, I managed to test into this Junior Scholars program so I could take a painting class at the university. I discovered Interlochen Arts Academy in Michigan and attended for two years; it was wonderful having serious studio art classes. Then I went to Cooper Union for undergrad, and Rutgers for my M.F.A.

I realized teaching was the place where I could have conversations I was interested in and it just seemed like the best way to continue to be involved in art in a way that felt socially good to me. I currently teach in the painting department at Yale. I’ve been there for nine years. I've taught at Cooper Union and St. Joseph's College’s in Brooklyn. Before that I lived in Sweden and taught graduates and undergraduates for four years. I’ve also taught kids a lot and did museum education at the Brooklyn Museum.

Aesthetically, your work can have a graphic quality and portray a kind of voluptuous beauty. You often grapple with big themes of humans: our bodies, sex, joy, sensory overload, vitality, mortality.

Those are themes that are most closely connected to the certainty of inhabiting a body. If I was to try to make any kind of universal claim, I guess it would be around experiences of embodiment. Yesterday, I was reading about the irrepressible quality of laughter. So I guess we're talking about things that also are sensorial and irrepressible in some way.

You’ve spoken about people describing your work as a kind of sketch book of life. Can you speak about that gestural immediacy in your work?

There’s an element of my work that is very related to a kind of diaristic process. I'm someone who always had a sketchbook on me in high school, was just constantly recording things in my environment through drawing and painting. Until pretty recently, I used to always travel around with gouache on me. I think it’s a tendency to want to document things somehow.

There's an autobiography by a Swedish filmmaker, Carl Johan De Geer, called, Med Kameran Som Trost. The camera, for him, was this mediating device that alleviated his social awkwardness. And I think it's probably the case that I just wanted to feel like I had something to do, a reason to be somewhere, that my occupation was making these paintings or sketches.

Looking at the full span of your career, what can we take away from your oeuvre?

My work reflects the range of experiences of a life lived with enthusiasm. It's very eclectic, of course, but I think that feels true to the roller coaster that is experience. I don't know . . . a lust for life. It's celebratory, I guess. When I look back through these collections of work that go back many years, I feel just very grateful to have had all these experiences, which I forget about. It's a long trail of life lived. Whatever my sense of the value of that is, I would relate to my enjoyment of literature. I think of someone like Henry Miller . . . just to be taken on this trip with someone who has such an exploratory relationship to life. That's a tradition that I would hope to participate in.

How do you think about your creative practice as something that's evolved over time?

Over many years, I’ve learned new ways of working. The impulses are probably the same as they always were, but they've expanded into different media in different ways. I've been feeling good lately about just letting up on the pressure to have a very legible practice, actually. That feels like a welcome kind of maturation to suddenly realize it's okay to be wide-ranging and have lots of different involvements. It's quite a relief to suddenly realize that at this point in my work.

You've worked with prints for a long time, starting at an early age, right?

In middle school, I would sell little greeting cards that I printed from linoleum blocks. That came from Susan Klahr, who was my kindergarten teacher and then later my painting teacher at University of Texas, El Paso. She encouraged me to make prints and that's how I tried it to begin with. I'm sure that this multiples feature was always part of my relationship to printmaking. Now I make these scarves that are printed and in that case, the idea was that I could produce many of these and circulate them widely and easily. And I've used printmaking to support myself in different ways over the years.

Some relationship to book arts has always been part of my involvement with printmaking. After graduating from Cooper Union, I worked there as the letterpress technician for a couple of years. When I moved to Sweden, I was mostly doing silkscreen. I made a lot of distributable stuff, like posters or invitations. There is this kind of social practice aspect of my work that has always had a kind of partner in the printed matter. Making books and zines and distributing stuff was kind of my first excitement about printmaking, even going back to elementary school.

I also have more of a monotype practice, which feels very related to painting in the sense that it's not something that can be replicated, but still there's this appeal of the machine. There's something about making a painting on a plate of plexiglass and then having it mediated by the pressure of the press, like relinquishing some control. That's always been really seductive to me, but I can't explain exactly why.

Do you have a mantra or philosophy that guides you?

I don't really, but something that I think about is a visit I had with Rochelle Feinstein when I was in grad school. Just as she was leaving my studio, she turned around and said, "Remember, they're going to hate you no matter what you do, so you might as well have fun.”

And I once got a fortune cookie fortune that said, "We're here to create, not merely survive."

You work across different media. Is there a lot of cross-pollination? And how do you decide something will be a painting versus a weaving?

Certain subjects or motifs traverse these different media. Stuff that I've made weavings about has occurred in different kinds of prints and paintings. Sometimes it has to do with the qualities that are particular to that medium. For example, the traditional canvas stretched on a frame is supposed to sort of be autonomous, right? It's not contingent. You could put it anywhere because it has its own structure, its own limits, very defined.

The thing that weaving offers that seems so exciting by contrast to that is that it is contingent. It can move, it can suddenly open a space or close it. What are the physical characteristics of these things and how does that allow them to kind of move through the world differently?

Are there themes that you find yourself returning to?

Balancing acts. I find myself returning to problems of balance. That could mean in relation to a technical approach to making a painting—how certain dynamics of the space are counterbalanced or offset, thinking of different axes. In some very formal way, there are questions of balance that always interest me. I try to connect those more broadly to things that I'm trying to balance as a person in the world.

How do you want people to experience your work?

In the broadest sense, I want to elicit enough curiosity that someone wants to return to it and feels compelled to give it time out of whatever else they're doing. I hope that all the years that I've spent experimenting with ways of making amounts to something visually compelling.

Does this change when a collector lives with your art in their home?

I would hope that its visual qualities can be something to meditate on and will deliver different meanings over time. The artworks that I live with, I feel like they become invested with all the things happening in my life as I'm familiar with them and revisit them. For an artwork to be compelling enough to continue looking at over time, I think means that it becomes a receptacle for things that keep us going.

When AI comes for us all, how will it describe Sophy Naess's work?

Colorful . . . Stephen Westfall, my professor at Rutgers, always said "Oh, your work is so oxygenated."

What does that mean, "oxygenated"?

I feel like it's referring to an aspect of my relationship to color that I'm not really able to theorize because it's intuitive. But he was, I think, just remarking on a sense of buoyancy that comes out of the color sensibility.

What do you do when you're not making art?

I remember Aki Sasamoto saying she was jealous of artists who have hobbies because any time she's cultivating a hobby, it just turns into her work. I feel like whatever I might call a hobby is related to my studio practice somehow. But I do I like to walk around a lot. I would identify as some kind of flaneur. I really like observing the city so I do a lot of that, just kind of strolling around.

What is something surprising we might find in your studio?

I have this big jar of my brother's urine back there somewhere. I was learning about a kind of dye that's made from lichen, where the ammonia in urine causes the lichen to create this beautiful purple. So I filled this jar with lichen and had my brother fill it up with pee, because I had read that men's urine has proven to work better for this purpose, something hormonal, I guess.

My point of reference is the Norwegian weaver Hannah Ryggen, who made these really beautiful tapestries out of wool that she dyed with plants. She had this big pot of blue made from woad that apparently she kept behind the door in her kitchen. She found that when her husband's friends had been drinking, this was the best pee for making the blue that she wanted. Something about the alcohol and testosterone in the urine. We were trying to replicate that effect, but it didn't work. It's still here. It's just kind of brown.

What does the word "Friday" mean to you?

Part of my desire to be an artist was to not have the kind of relationship to a conventional work week where Friday would be, you know, TGIF or something. But I do think of it as the beginning of Shabbos, which is of course related to the work week. That's probably the nicest association I have with Friday. It's like the idea of having some challah with some friends on a Friday night.

Shabbos is close to my heart somehow, in the sense that I do lament a lack of kind of socialized spirituality. I really appreciate people wanting to come together just to mark time and honor a belief system, even if they're more or less secular. It feels anachronistic, but I always am very grateful to be able to participate.

About the Artist

Sophy Naess (b. 1982, Chicago, Illinois) is based in New York and received her B.F.A. from Cooper Union in 2004 and M.F.A. from Rutgers University in 2013. Recent exhibitions include solo shows at Veda (2023); April in Paris (2021); 17 Essex (2018); The Middler (2017) and 321 Gallery (2016). Her work has appeared in group shows at Kerry Schuss, Heroes Gallery, The New School, Chapter NY, Matthew Marks and Greene Naftali galleries in New York City, as well as institutional shows at Växjö Konsthall in Sweden and the Albuqerque Museum in the US. She has been artist in residence at the International Studio and Curatorial Program (ISCP), NY; The Shandaken Project, NY; Southern Oregon University; The Brooklyn Arts Council's SU CASA program at the Bay Ridge Senior Center in Brooklyn; Gael Roots Community Farm, NY; The Range, Colorado; and Sikås Art Center, Sweden. Naess is a Senior Critic in Painting and Printmaking at the Yale School of Art.