Nicole Eisenman is an American artist celebrated for their inventive, often irreverent, figurative painting and sculptures. As the fall 2024 guest speaker for the John A. Cooper Visiting Artist Lecture Series at AAP, Eisenman will give a public artist talk on October 29. The series was created with a gift from alumnus John A. Cooper (B.F.A. '97) to bring distinguished artists of particular renown to the Ithaca campus to engage art students and the art community through lectures, studio visits, seminars, and individual critiques with B.F.A. students.

Paul Ramírez Jonas: Even though you have a lot of work featuring a single figure, your narratives are like a party. There are a lot of things happening — maybe not related, but at the same time and in the same place. I think of you as the big storyteller of our time.

Nicole Eisenman: You could leave out the "of our time" part; there are a lot of people who are storytellers. I like the fact that it feels like a party in your head. I like narrative. I come from a tradition of storytellers. My father was an analyst and a biblical scholar. His job was listening and interpreting stories. My grandfather was a rabbi, and that's storytelling, too, so I come from a lineage of storytellers. I studied in Rome for a year, and I was interested in grand scale narrative Italian fresco paintings, more stories.

PRJ: You know, that explains a lot because the first painting I saw of yours was at the Tilton Gallery. Initially I thought, "Oh, is this like a Cezanne, The Bathers?" But no! These bodies were not just little excuses to put paint on the canvas. It felt more like I was looking at a Daumier or a Max Beckmann. Every person was doing something unique.

NE: I think there's a part of my practice where I feel aligned with novelists in the early stages of painting, where I have to sit at my desk and think of stories and construct narratives. It's really the hardest part of my process. 

PRJ: I'm always jealous of writers because I feel like being an artist is such a pain in the ass. If you imagine an artwork, you have to make it. If you're a writer, you can create a character and that character is an artist, and then you just describe the work your character made.

NE: It's true. I'm jealous of writers, too. Our culture gives primacy to narrative, to words, and they're just useful in a way that painting is utterly unuseful and in fact, probably clutters the landscape more than anything.

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