Amanda Scuglia Transcript

Check out the video archive of our tour of her studio as well as a look at, and discussion of, some of her work.

Amanda uses traditional mediums of oil painting and printmaking to examine our intuitive and spiritual relationship to nature. Drawing from life and painting en-plein-air are integral parts of her practice. Amanda received her MFA in 2013 from the New York Academy of Art, where she studied anatomy and figurative art, and was given the David Kratz & Gregory Unis scholarship of merit. To learn more about the Artist, visit her online at https://www.amandascuglia.com

Lawrence Peryer:  We are all very much missing things like Art Walk and First Thursdays and going to galleries and openings and starting to really feel the effect of that as well.   And so this is just an attempt to see if we can – if we could bring some of that to the virtual world, the same way we’ve seen performing artists bring their stuff to people as well over Zoom.

                               So I think you and I, Amanda have figured out a way to make this work.  I'm going to chalk it up – I'm going to call it all a big experiment, but I'm pretty confident that we’re going to put together something good.  So with that preamble, I'm going to do something I don’t normally do, which I'm going to read from a little bit of a script that I have here because I want to introduce you.  And I want to introduce you properly and correctly.  And I want to make sure I don’t get any facts wrong, so I'm going to paraphrase some stuff from your website.

Amanda Scuglia:  OK, I hope that I updated my website in the parts that you looked in.   

LP:                        And if any of its factually incorrect, that’s your fault.  So Amanda uses traditional mediums of oil painting and print making to examine our intuitive and spiritual relationship to nature.  Drawing from life and painting en plein air are an integral parts of her practice.  Amanda received her MFA in 2013 from the New York Academy of Art where she studied anatomy and figurative art and was given the David Kratz and Gregory Unis Scholarship of Merit.  She’s been awarded a number of artists residencies, which I will not spell out because I don’t want to embarrass myself with the pronunciations.  Let’s just leave it at, a number of residencies.  She’s also a 2018 recipient of the Elizabeth Greensheilds Foundation Grant.  Amanda teaches figure drawing and public workshops and private lessons, has been interviewed by Sotheby’s for their blog.  

                              And has had her work featured in many shows, fairs, publications and exhibitions.   Amanda’s also been part of some very creative – some very interesting creative projects which we’re going to talk about a little bit later, so I won’t read those off here.  And Amanda and I met when we both lived in New York City, I own several of her works, which hang proudly and dominantly in my home and which I'm going to share later on.  So Amanda Scuglia, welcome to Light, thank you for making time to visit with us from your secure bunker art studio somewhere in Pittsburgh.   Welcome.

Amanda Scuglia:  Thank you.

LP:                        And a little bit more before we get started, I want to let everybody know that there’s a piece for sale right now on your website that I personally love and it’s available as part of a world wild life fundraiser related to the Australian wildfires, which unfortunately got lost in the news I think over the last month or two.  But there’s still a lot of suffering going on there.  I am going to take a second and post a link into the Zoom chat to that page and I just want everybody to know that they either have to buy that piece by the end of this conversation or I'm buying it.  So you can either defer to me in my wishes and let me have it or you can steal it out from under me, but either way that painting will be gone within the hour.  So with that said, how are you? 

Amanda Scuglia:  I'm great, that was a really good introduction; you definitely did your homework, I forgot some of those facts.  So – and thank you also for finding that piece on my website; the story with that is, yes it did get lost in the news, because of everything else that happened.  But also that was part of a colossal, which is this big company that was doing – kind of encouraging artists to create work and donate to the Australian wildfires.  What happened was, I did the painting, I put it up on the website and the – either that day or the next day, I went into the ER to get my appendix removed and I completely had a three week recovery and didn’t come back to that and then everything else happened.  So thank you for going back to that.

LP:                        Yeah, of course, of course.  So have you been working creatively during the lockdown?

Amanda Scuglia:  Yes, I found it – well first this is – so we are in my real actual studio that I normally paint in.  and then of course with everything else it got closed down and so what I did, was I just grabbed all of my paints and some paintings that were in progress and I took them home into my apartment.  And so I built a little corner in my apartment and proofed the wall, I put plastic up and stuff on the ground so that it didn’t get messed up and I’ve been painting in that space.  And I found it a little bit difficult when things started to first happen to be – to jump right back into the creative ideas that I had before, because I was so affected by what was going on.  And so I found that it was helpful to not paint for myself but to paint for my friend, whose on the phone actually, Nicholas Sanchez is a very – a great artist and one of my best friends and he was doing this movement of let’s paint and donate the money to these causes and let’s raise as much money as we can. 

                              And so he used his platform, which is much bigger than mine to encourage other artists to paint and so that’s what I did, I just painted things that – little paintings on paper and I sold – I did up – I did three of them and donated them to different charities in regards to the COVID, raising money.  And so that’s what I’ve been doing for the last few weeks. 

LP:                        That’s wonderful.  Is your current routine in terms of work, in terms of your creative work, is it different, has it been disrupted?  What's a normal work routine for you and is it different now?

Amanda Scuglia:  So yes, all – so normally I try to go every week it’s  more been like every few weeks, but I do like to go steadily to figure drawing, live figure drawing with a model.  And those sessions have been canceled so – and because of that drawing from life, that aspect, the only people I can draw are the people that I'm quarantining with, which is my boyfriend and so there’s not – I can’t go draw models.  And so there’s been a lot of changing so just the last week or just a few days ago, there were a group of friends that I used to draw with in New York who have now started to set up Zoom model sessions.  So these models are just modeling over Zoom and it’s very interesting and very strange experience to draw somebody that’s on a screen that’s really small but you're drawing them larger and you know that they’re larger in real life and it’s – yeah so it’s a little different.  

LP:                        That’s interesting.  Have you painted outside at all?

 Amanda Scuglia:  Have I painted outside since we – I haven’t painted outside just because it’s cold, it is so cold here.  But it is – the weather is starting to turn and I’ve already started to scout a few places that, on a warm day, I’ll get out there and paint.  I think the last time I painted outside was – what month is it?  It was like last month I went out to a picnic or with my boyfriend and we just laid out under the tree and I painted the trees and him and that was the last time I painted outside.  So that was actually during COVID, yeah so I did paint outside once.

LP:                        Yeah.  So want to show us a little bit around the studio?

Amanda Scuglia:  Oh, sure, yes. 

LP:                        Awesome.

Amanda Scuglia:  So it might be a little shaky or awkward, but I'm trying to show – this is the entire space and then when you walk in, staring over here, I have my – some of my figure drawings.  Here I have everything separated by medium and these are all charcoal.  And then here’s my work table where I have some protons but this is where I  mix paint, it’s all a mess right now.  

LP:                        Do you ever do open studio stuff, do people come in there?

Amanda Scuglia:  Yes we do open studios, I'm part of a collective, so there’s a lot of artists in here and we do open studios twice a year so once in the fall, once in the spring.  So I'm sure we’re not going to do that, maybe.  But yeah we’re open to the public and they all come in and people buy work and the last time I did an open studio I did for the first time live drawings, so I did – I had people just walk in and if they wanted their portrait drawn for 10 minutes, I did their portrait.  And it was like 20 bucks or something for a 10 minute portrait.  Here’s some monotypes, which I think you remember that show, I think you went to that show.   

LP:                        I have one.

Amanda Scuglia:  You have, you do, oh you do have one.  You had that one.

LP:                        I'm going to show it. 

Amanda Scuglia:  The better version of that one, that’s the bad version.  And then – so over here we have some plainer paintings that I’ve done in the past that I just keep in this little corner to look at for color reference.  And can everyone see, is it clear, it is crisp and not pixilated? 

LP:                        Yeah, it’s very clear, one thing I mention so everybody knows it, you can’t see the art itself that well right now, don’t worry because we’re going to look at some slides a little bit later and you’ll get to see some pictures – you’ll get to see some of the art in larger format and much more – just clearer –

Amanda Scuglia:  And I don’t know if – if you guys are used to Zoom but if you hit pin video, right click on my square and hit pin video, mine will stay large, so that you can see the – instead of looking at a smaller screen.

LP:                        Oh, yeah, why am I not doing that?  Oh yeah there it is, great, thank you.  

Amanda Scuglia:  So this is the last – my most recent body of work that I had – I think the last show I had was, I had a solar show in Pittsburgh in August and so these are some pieces from that show.  

LP:                        Yeah these are beautiful.

Amanda Scuglia:  Thank you.  This – and there –

LP:                        So you’re not working off any assumption, what’s the medium here? 

Amanda Scuglia:  Oh, sorry these are all oil paintings and some of them are on panel and some of them are on canvas, oh and there’s some up here too.  These guys and that’s the painting that you were talking about, so you can see for reference how small it is.

LP:                        You mean that’s the one I'm going to own soon.

Amanda Scuglia:  Yes.  And then over here I have the  new work, the most recent work that I’ve been – a lot of these are not done.  I think the only one that’s done is this one.  And so these are the newer work, so you get a little sneak peak before they’re done.

LP:                        Excellent.

Amanda Scuglia:  And then we have a little portrait right here.

LP:                        Who’s that handsome devil?

Amanda Scuglia:  That’s my boyfriend.

LP:                        Excellent.  And what – where did you start, was it drawing?

Amanda Scuglia:  In life or – I mean –

LP:                        Yeah, what was your way in, how did you come to art?

Amanda Scuglia:  It’s funny, I just – when I was very, very little, my father was a aspiring photographer, s he took pictures of every waking moment of our lives.  And so just very, very young, that’s just what I was drawn to, I have my parents kept everything I made when I was a kid, but that’s just what I really – kids ask for things for Christmas, toys and I always asked for a new kind of set of markers or paints or sand art or spin art.  And so it was the only thing that I really felt good at my whole life and then took it seriously – I started to get seriously in high school and then when I went to undergrad it was just like there was nothing else for me, it was just – that’s just the only – it’s just the way that I see the world and the way that I need to do it in order to exist.   

                              So, then after I graduated undergrad I took a long time to go to grad school, I traveled a lot, I did soul searching, I moved to new York City, I got my own studio, didn’t know what I was doing, I just started pushing the paint around because I did study art, but I was a graphic design major in college, so I only really took introductory classes.  And then when I started experimenting in my studio, I think it was – I think it took six years before I applied to grad school.  So I went to grad – I graduated from Edinburgh University in 2005 and I didn’t go to grad school until 2011.  

LP:                        What was in your portfolio for grad school, for your application?

 Amanda Scuglia:  That’s a good question.  It was a lot of drawings, bad drawings, now that I know how to draw, right, now that I'm technically trained how to draw.  But it was a lot of drawings, charcoal drawings of figures and a lot of landscaping things.  So pretty much the same thing that I'm doing now, but I didn’t have – I wanted it and I had the drive to do it, but it was like there was just that missing link of understanding the history and why I wanted to – what these paintings mean and also the technical training is absolutely that the school that I went to is the best school for technical training hands down.  So yeah.

LP:                        So when I met you and first started to see your work you were in a pretty heavy print making and doing the monotypes, I believe.  

Amanda Scuglia:  Yes.

LP:                        And that was – so my perception was that was the medium you worked in and then I came to see that you drew and that you painted.  But how did you come into print making and working in type?

Amanda Scuglia:  So when I went to Edinburgh, was it Edinburgh I got started?  Yes.  I took an introductory to print making class and print makers are very process oriented people, there’s a lot of chemicals involved, you have to treat the metal this way with this chemical and then you’ve got to burn it with this one.  And those things were really interesting to me but I'm a sloppy – I’m just a sloppy artist, I can’t keep up with the rules, I don’t like rules.  And so the teacher was like, “OK, you clearly can’t handle the structure, why don’t you try monotype?  Because a monotype is basically a painting but it’s a print.” And that just blew my mind, I did a lot of – I still have some technical regular prints from my college years, but when I learned to monotype I was like oh this is basically a painting but I could call it a print, it’s a one off and it’s paper and it was just a really interesting technique.  

                              And then when I got to grad school, the print making shop there, the teachers there were really – so it’s not a major at the school that I was offered.  So it was more an extra – this fun thing you could do to add to your practice, to add to your work.  And it gives you – it’s a completely different process of making, because you essentially – the process is you would take a piece of Plexiglas or metal and cover it with ink and then you remove it, you remove the ink with, let’s say a towel or a t-shirt or something and what you’re removing it’s a reductive process.  So you’re removing what would be the white of the paper.  And so – here I’ll show you here.  And so those plates were initially covered with all black and then I removed the parts that remain white and that's not really how painting is, painting is more additive, you put paint on the canvas.  

                              And so it’s just  a different muscle in your brain and it opens up a lot of possibilities and ideas.  I can go into the print shop and have a really bad art day, right, I can’t do anything right, I can’t think of anything, the paintings suck.  But I can go in the print shop and make something completely new that – unexpected and it just changes everything.   

LP:                        That’s interesting.  Do you still go to the print shop or have you left that behind or –? 

Amanda Scuglia:  So there is a print shop in Pittsburgh, it’s very small compared to the one that was in New York, so I was in New York for 10/12 years and that print shop is massive and I was able to go all the time.  And the one in Pittsburgh is much smaller and the hours are much more limited and so in order to get in there it’s like maybe one day a week I could get in there.  And it’s one tiny press with maybe five people and so just the accessibility is a little bit less in this area so that’s why I haven’t gone in as often.  But then I really – now I really can’t go, right, because it’s closed.  So – but I haven’t deserted it –

LP:                        It’s interesting for me, because when I look at the prints, you just described the process and you described it very well and I still can’t get my head around the fact that when I'm standing in front of one of them, I get the painting additive piece, I don’t get the reductive piece, it blows my mind that there’s – it’s like – it’s almost like a sculpture, like there were things taken away and then all of a sudden, this thing appeared there.  It’s really amazing to me and the level of detail and the – even the – I would expect it to be much more black and white and to get subtlety and nuance in it is really – it’s – I find it hypnotic to look at, it’s amazing.

Amanda Scuglia:  I have a few magic tricks, you know. 

LP:                        Special artist tricks.  Let’s look at a few pieces, let’s look at some – I'm going to share my screen, this is the part where probably I melt down the internet.  So hold on and bear with me for a second.  Let’s see, and if I did this right.  Can you see it?

Amanda Scuglia:  Yes and it’s big too.  

LP:                        Nice. So what do we have here?  If you don’t mind, if any of them are titled , if you want to start by telling us maybe the titles and the dimensions and just a thing or two about each piece.  

Amanda Scuglia:  So this one I have here and it is called – so I’ll just show you for scale how big it is, this is for scale how big it is, it is 20 by 20.  And this title of this one is Exposed and the process was – what did you ask me?  The process, is that what you said or what is it –?

LP:                        Yeah talk a little bit about – yeah the process or the inspiration or where it was created, anything you –

Amanda Scuglia:  OK, so this was one of the ones in the beginning, when I started this process of painting, I'm into [pire ? 00:24:50] painting on an already existing painting and then removing some of it.  And so there was an entire painting underneath – there was just a painting that I finished and I set it aside for a year, two years or whatever it was, because it wasn’t ready yet, there wasn’t a finished quality to it or it wasn’t a complete sentence, right.  And then I would take it and paint a whole other painting on top of it, but before I did that, I put something in between those two layers in order to remove some of that second painting to expose the painting underneath.  And so I really wanted to have two places that were existing at one time in the same place and then what happens with that, that was kind of the idea.  

                              It was like, well what happens if I put this place and this place at the same time?  And it was – my thought process behind doing that was when you’re standing in a place, when you’re experiencing, maybe it’s a landscape or just an experience with a person or – you can’t be – and you’re not fully present, it makes you think of something else, it reminds you of something from your childhood, you’re thinking about your relationship, you’re thinking about what’s happening to this landscape in 30 years because of global warming, anything.  You’re not fully experiencing just that, you’re experiencing all these other things that are interjecting and what does that create?  Is that a new experience?  Or is it two conflicting experiences?  

                              This – it’s kind of how I think about the world, is in a paradox kind of push and pull way; there is an area that I'm aiming for, there’s just enough of this and just enough of that together. 

LP:                        And when you put this aside, did you know what you were going to do with it; was the intention to paint over it or do you just think, I’ll revisit it at some point and do something?

Amanda Scuglia:  Not when I first painted the first painting, I didn’t know what would happen, because of, what, it had been like a year at least.  So sometimes I’ll paint something and I don’t want to throw it away because there is something there, but it just doesn’t – I don’t know what it is yet, I don’t know what it’s telling me yet and so I’ll hold on to some stuff.  I do throw some things away, but I didn’t know what that was until later on when I was trying this process out, so –

LP:                        OK.  Thank you for that.

Amanda Scuglia:  Mm-hmm.  

LP:                        This piece just is stunning.

Amanda Scuglia:  Oh, thank you. 

LP:                        What are we looking at?

Amanda Scuglia:  This one is called Three Places At Once, and it’s again, that same feeling of you’re in a place and you’re supposed to be present, but you have this – your mothers bitching at you about this thing that you haven’t done and you’re worried about, am I too old, I'm never going to get married and that’s what this was.  This was about there’s a friend’s wedding is some of the reference photos that I took for  this painting was from a friend’s wedding.  And then the other reference was from a friend who was married and was having marital issues.  And so I was kind of having these three thoughts and my process or my thought process with this was, those three places are indicated by the color.  

                              So we have the light pink and then we have the black and white and then the green weird blues, so those three different instances are identified by the color in this piece.

LP:                        And just for sense of scale, what are the dimensions of this?

 Amanda Scuglia:  This one is 30 by 40 and it is right there.  So you can kind of see for scale.

LP:                        Yeah.  Have you – have these exhibited anywhere?

 Amanda Scuglia:  This one was in my SoHo in Pittsburgh in August and I think that’s the only place that I’ve exhibited that one.  Oh and I forgot about this big one too, I don’t know if I sent you this picture but you’ve seen that one too.

 LP:                        Yeah, I love that one, that was in the –

Amanda Scuglia:  The show that you –

LP:                        Klein was it?

Amanda Scuglia:  The show that you entered with –

LP:                        Yeah, yeah, yup, that was a great show.  I love this piece, tell me about this.

Amanda Scuglia:  So this one is titled, I Learned There’s Beauty I Can’t Keep, and it’s a lyric from a song but I thought that that particular lyric was very apt for the thing that I was getting at.  I just sold this piece actually, I just shipped it yesterday and it’s quite large, it’s 40 by 44 inches.  So this one was made after my time in Iceland, so I was in Iceland for a job, for an art job, and it was a very demanding job, it was a lot of hours that were not  – it was just a lot of hours of working.  And so we ended up staying in this hotel that was in the middle of nowhere and I don’t know if you’ve been to Iceland, but it looks like Mars, it looks like not otherworldly, it’s crazy.  And there’s this hotel in the middle of nothing and so you’re looking out your window and it just is – it goes on forever.   

                              And I just remember this one moment that we got of not working, we got up at 3:00 in the morning to start working; this one moment of breath that we got to come up for air.  And the landscape almost is – you have like – not hallucinations, but it is very distorting to you, you’re like – your perspective and your size or something.  And – but it’s also so mesmerizing that you want to stare at it forever so that it burns into your brain and you never forget it.  And these orbs that I put in this painting were kind of my way – my mark making of me wanting to literally reach out and hold it or try to grab it and it’s not real and that was the thought behind that one.  

LP:                        Yeah we’re going to talk about Iceland in a few minutes, so we’ll come back to that.  

Amanda Scuglia:  OK.

LP:                        What do we have here? 

Amanda Scuglia:  You made a little collage.  

LP:                        I'm creative too.  

Amanda Scuglia:  OK, so these are – the one on the left is called Seasons Change and it was, oh God, OK.  Are these explanations boring, are you sure you want me to explain? 

LP:                        I don’t care, everybody else is on mute, so I don’t care what they think.

 Amanda Scuglia:  OK, so the one on the left it’s called Seasons Change and basically my – thank you Kaitlin.  Basically when I was a kid – so my father is an exterminator and when I was a kid I was really interested in moths and butterflies.  And – because I don’t know if it had to do with him being an exterminator but he would bring them home sometimes, like, “Oh look at this one that I found or this one that I had to” – whatever.  And I collected them as a kid, so I had a large collection of moths and butterflies in my room and I have books, exterminator books from my dad on moths and butterflies.   And I was really into the symmetry of them, but also symmetry bothers me in some ways and so I was doing a lot of paintings of butter – not butterflies, I guess, but just symmetry marks that could look – like Rorschach Paintings, right.  

                              So there was a lot of that happening in my studio and a lot of them are bad and you’ll never see them.  But this one turned out great, I think, it really got to what I was getting at with basically when seasons change, right, you have this new feeling of, like I'm going to start over, [unintelligible 00:33:18] going to get my hair done.  And I usually – these paintings are a lot about relationships with people, with friends, with lovers, whatever.  And so this one was very – I wanted it to feel very hot summery, like the hot summer and just before that happens, right – as that’s happening, it’s about to cool down and what that might mean with – and how that makes you feel in your psyche, how that makes you feel in relationships, and so that’s what that one is.

LP:                        That’s not boring.

Amanda Scuglia:                             Another Iceland painting.          

LP:                        OK, from that –

 Amanda Scuglia:  Brand new.

LP:                        So talk about that, though, so did you work from reference photos for that?

Amanda Scuglia:  For which one?

LP:                        For the center piece?

 Amanda Scuglia:  Yes, so the center piece one is photos that I took on top of a glacier that I hiked; it was like 4:00 in the morning and it was – again there was a very disorienting feeling of not completely off balance, but it was just very – and it’s supposed to be like the cleanest air that you’re breathing up there or something.  And it was just so – it’s like nothing you’ve ever seen, it’s so beautiful, but at the same time, you’re kind of dizzy and you know the glacier’s are melting and you have – it’s just this very conflicted feeling.  And its’ just a little baby painting, that one is, but one of my personal favorite ones, I was thinking about not selling it.  

LP:                        What’s the last one on this slide?

Amanda Scuglia:  Last one is brand new, it’s back here middle, so I – at the beginning of COVID lockdown, I had a friend reach out and say – right before it started, she wants me to – she’s a collector of mine also, but she wanted me to paint her woods that she lives on, that she’s building this house on in New York.  And I said, “Great, let’s plan a trip, I’ll come to your house, I will paint out in your woods and ten we’ll decide on what size or what kind of painting you want of your woods.”  And she was like, “Oh, here’s a bunch of photos, does any of this speak to you?”  and one of them was, but it wasn’t her backyard, it was a place that she had hiked and she said, “I love these type of images, this is the kind of image that I want you to paint.”  And I was like, “OK, can I just paint this for me though? 

                              I'm going to paint your woods, but I need to paint this image that you just sent me, I'm not going to be able to go out, it’s cold outside, COVID’s happening.  Can I just paint this?”  And she said, yeah and it basically – the image that she sent is very – it’s like a forest, it looks similar to the painting, but what I was trying to do was get into a mindset of balancing abstract and reality.  Like a representation of a forest, but my – in my language, my abstract language, which is mark making, is more of a spiritual experience of a landscape than what it actually looks like.  Those aren’t what really leaves look like, they’re just paint splooches that kind of represent leaves, if that makes sense.

LP:                        Say that again, mark making, what do you mean by that?

Amanda Scuglia:  So my particular way of painting, mark making, is really important too, so the way that I put the brush to the canvas, the way that that mark looks, there’s a word for it in art making, it’s called economy of a brush.  Like you want to make it – for me, painters have different techniques, right, or things that they want, but for me, I need to paint it in a way that looks like it was – that it’s not too fussed over, it’s almost like it just  happened, instead of me fussing and rendering it, it needs to be a little bit more effortless and I guess just – it’s my hand in there.  I want you to be able to tell that my hand made that mark, it’s kind of like a signature, I don’t know.

LP:                        OK, that’s fine.  I don’t know if you can see the question, but there’s a great question here, so how do you make yourself sell things when you love them?  Let me add to that question, is there a line you can’t cross where you create something and you say, no that one’s staying with mama? 

Amanda Scuglia:  So, over – just speaking with other artists and learning from artists and going to school and meeting artists, there’s just been the general conversation like it’s just kind of a thing that comes up every once in a while that maybe one thing from every large series of work that you make, you might want to keep for yourself.  Maybe people treat it as an investment to say, maybe these paintings might be valuable some day, but for me, it’s more like a part of me, these paintings are a part of me, they’re my babies and so I want to keep one of them for each large growth spurt that I have.  Or –

LP:                        Each litter?

Amanda Scuglia:  Yeah, it would be with each litter, yeah.  But I don’t always keep them.  I guess, I think the ones that I want to keep are very often the ones that no one wants to buy anyway, so – 

LP:                        That’s great, that’s great, so it works out for everybody.  

Amanda Scuglia:  Yeah I think Terry Salts whose this famous art critic says, he always says, “That one piece that you think – if you ever ask an artist what their best piece is, it’s the piece that you think is the worst.”  

LP:                        That’s funny.  OK, we saw these on the wall, right.  Can you talk about these a little bit?

Amanda Scuglia:  Yes, so that’s funny that you paired these two together, so both of them are titled Predator, one is Predator Two and one is Predator Three, and the title comes from the movie, from the eighties movie.  And so visually when I saw that movie as a child, the fact that a human is being seen visually by a heat map was very interesting to me and it stuck with me and I always think about that.  And I think that I’ve made multiples of this painting because I can’t get enough of it, I'm not even getting it right, there’s so much more to make with that, but yeah just the thought of – it’s really a play on words, right.  Because these paintings were more of a statement about whose the real predator, is it the human, you know?  Or towards nature.  

                              And so this was part of that series doing the Rorschach symmetry in my paintings and also the removing process of painting one whole painting on top of another one and then removing some of it to expose what’s underneath  while combining that thermal sort of heat map of a human in nature from the predator to feed.

LP:                        And again, what’s the scale of these?

Amanda Scuglia:  Oh, the one on the left is another 20 by 20, that’s my most common size or most popular size, so you can see that.  And then this one is ooh, I have to measure this one, this one’s an odd size, I want to say 36 by 40, 36 by 42, something like that.

LP:                        OK.  Is there – when you said most popular size, you just mean about for you that you paint with or is that a commercial distinction?

Amanda Scuglia:  Both.  I – that’s my – that’s like one of my – I would say if I had a confront zone as far as sizes, I love painting that size, I don’t know if it’s the size of paint brush ratio scale to the size of the canvas, but it just really works out for me.  I think maybe my – sometimes I use my finger to remove paint and I think it’s just a good size for my hands, but I do paint a lot of large paintings too.  But that is my most popularly sold size, also, I would say probably.

LP:                        When you first showed the painting on top of another painting, a few slides back, you said that there’s a layer that you put over the original painting before you paint on again, did I get that right?

Amanda Scuglia:  Mm-hmm. 

LP:                        What’s the layer, is it a substance, a chemical, what – can you talk about – can you just walk us through what do you do?

Amanda Scuglia:  That’s a secret.  I'm just kidding, I'm just kidding.  So it’s basically you can do it many different ways, one way for example, would be to use a lot of painters who use geometric shape and straight lines would use tape, right.  So they would put a piece of tape down, paint a color next to it and then pull the tape back so that they have that crisp edge and so I just use a form of masking that gives me an organic shape.

LP:                        OK.  So it’s not a chemical?

 Amanda Scuglia:  It’s not a chemical. 

LP:                        Gotcha.  OK.  Oh this is a great question.  Have you ever painted on top of someone else’s painting? 

Amanda Scuglia:  Ooh, that is a good question.  Have I?  I don’t know.  I have collaborated with friends that are artists before, but I don’t know that I’ve done that, but that would be a fun experiment, that would be a really cool collaboration experiment project.

LP:                        What does a collaboration for you take, do you work off the same canvas?

 Amanda Scuglia:  I collaborated with two artists that are on this call and I cannot remember what we – oh it was – so one collaboration that I did with two people that are actually on the call, there was, I forget what the project was, but I think it was just a call for work from artists that were collaborating.  And it was an installation piece, it had to be an installation piece, which is a completely different kind of artwork than I make and so what we did was, we had this – it was a site specific installation, so it was in a building in New York, the area that we chose was this very church looking area of this building, almost like people would pray in this little – I don’t know what you call it, it’s like a round cutout of a wall.  And so what we did was, and the three artists who were, we’re all really good friends but our work all looks different. 

                              So what we did was, we came up with the idea of a stained glass window and we – I had one, Nikko Sanchez had another and Megan Ewart, who had another piece and all three of us made our own work on three pieces of Millar and then hung them all together to create – and so that’s an example of a collaboration that I’ve done.

 LP:                        Gotcha.  Kaitlin had a question, I'm going to ask her to un-mute herself because I don’t want to pronounce the artist’s last name wrong.  She wanted to ask you about an artist.

Amanda Scuglia:  OK.

 Kaitlin:                  Hi, unfortunately I'm uncertain on how to pronounce his last name, but he had an installation recently at the SF MoMa a few months ago and he used a lot of – he did action camera work.  So I just found –

Amanda Scuglia:  A lot of heat what?

 LP:                        Heat detecting camera work. 

Amanda Scuglia:  Heat detecting camera work, that’s fascinating.  I have not heard of that show, but I will look that up.  Thank you for –

LP:                        The artist’s last name is M-O-S-S-E, so it’s either Mosse or Mosse or Mosse.

Amanda Scuglia:  Hmm-mm, I don’t know it.  

LP:                        Sorry Kaitlin.  

Amanda Scuglia:  I'm sorry, but I’ll look it up, I love learning new artists.

LP:                        Woops, let’s go back one.  So you showed these on the wall, talk about this again, what were these done off – well it looks clearly – one of them was done en plein air, were the others off reference photos or also outside?

Amanda Scuglia:  So the one in the top left is actually the only one on their that’s not water-based paint, that’s an oil painting on paper.  And that’s one of the ones that I  just did this week, because last week for one of the COVID charities.  So that one is from a photo, the one on the bottom left, I did from Life, the ones that are in a pile, the one in the middle, those are – that’s from Life, the one on the top right is from Life.  The one on the top – I'm sorry, the right bottom, the blue tree is from a combination of a photo and memory, so I painted that when I came home from the Sequoia National Park in California.  So –

LP:                        Could you just go around the circle or around the loop again and say where each one is, if you remember?

Amanda Scuglia:  Yes.  Top left is from a sunrise hike in – oh I'm not going to remember.  Mount – it’s whenever the eclipse happened, I hiked up this – Grand Titan, that’s where it’s from.  Bottom left is San Diego, that’s the – that point where all those seals are, I don’t remember what that’s called, but it’s in San Diego.  The middle one is Thailand, the top right is Erie, Pennsylvania, one of my best friends woods.  And the bottom right is Sequoia National Park in California.

LP:                        One in the woods –

Amanda Scuglia:  [unintelligible 00:48:00] Woods, sorry, Shamir Woods.

 LP:                        – that where some of the other pieces are that were in the show in New York, the larger pieces when you went out into the woods, was that – is that the same landscape? 

Amanda Scuglia:  Yes, same landscape, same people, mm-hmm.

LP:                        OK, gotcha.  

Amanda Scuglia:  Good eye.

LP:                        Told you I'm a fan.  What do we have here? 

Amanda Scuglia:  These are some more recent figure drawings, so as a practice, right, as a person whose an athlete who goes to the gym, I draw for – to keep my muscles strong, my observation muscles and my drawing muscles.  And so I was using a lot of paper for these drawings, a model gets up there, they pose for five minutes, they change a pose, you change your paper.  And one day I was running low on paper and I was like, well I'm just going to draw the same – on the same paper, just over and over again.  And it was apt, it was an apt move because there was a lot – if you look at my older work, I don’t think I have any in here, but some older work from grad school, I did a lot of figure motoin, figure as in motion, multiple figures.  

                              And so this was just a live way of doing that, of recording a person in motion, in different stages and I started to think about, well that’s kind of what I'm doing with paint, right.  I'm having this experience on the first layer of painting and having another experience on the next painting that I put on top of it, but showing all of the process and all of the stages in between.  And so – yeah that’s what I’ve been doing with the charcoal. 

LP:                        It’s really a great affect, isn’t it, it’s very special.

Amanda Scuglia:  Thank you. 

LP:                        They look great on the screen too.  Let’s see what we have next.  This is my little collection.  

Amanda Scuglia:  OK, we have to get you a better picture of the pink figure drawing in the middle.

LP:                        Yeah, listen, I just took that last night when I was setting this up, it’s actually very hard to shoot, it washes out very easily because the – I don’t know if you remember, but it’s actually a fairly light drawing.

Amanda Scuglia:  It is, yeah. 

LP:                        And it’s against white, it’s against a light wall and if you turn a light on anywhere within 500 feet of it, it completely washes out.  It’s a very difficult one to capture, but that was my first Amanda and I love it so much although it makes my 15 year old uncomfortable.

Amanda Scuglia:  It is pretending it makes him uncomfortable.

 LP:                        Exactly, exactly.  Talk through these, because I think each one of these has an interesting story?

 Amanda Scuglia:  OK, do the middle one is a figure drawing from one of my sessions and I think I had an open studio, right, and you saw the – I have hundreds of these drawings in a drawer and sometimes I’ll just bring them – a selection of them out.  So that’s pretty straight forward.  The top right is a monotype from the show of my monotypes where I went to Thailand and was looking at the roots that grow over structures there, so that they let these tree roots grow over the churches and they don’t cut them, they just let them – these roots come out of the ground and they encapsulate the structures there.  And so I did a whole series of work based on those – based on that and I was trying to make them figurative, trying to pull figures out of these root-like structures and so that’s from that show.  The one underneath it is called Interlude.

LP:                        Oh, I love that.

Amanda Scuglia:  And that painting was – that’s the title of the show that it was in and that was, I think, the only nonfigurative piece, nonfigurative, there’s not a figure in that piece.  But those two plants, to me, it was a portrait of a relationship between the two plants that could be figurative depending on how you look at it.  But the idea behind that painting was and the reason that it’s called Interlude is that sometimes there’s a moment in between other things, these big moments, that we don’t think are as important, or maybe we just treat it as an introduction to something else, or the thing that comes before something or the thing that comes after something.  But that in between is also really significant and means something. 

                              And so that’s when I was painting these paintings with the figures in the woods, that was a moment that happened right before the sun went down that didn’t have figures and we weren’t posing or anything, but that was still – it still meant something to the rest of the paintings.  The top left is a book cover for Frankenstein, I was commissioned with another artist on the call, Jessica Usiate to do prints of famous book covers.  And I did a lot of them, but I think you really like the Frankenstein one and asked me to do one for you privately as – this obviously wasn’t their Frankenstein but you were like that’s a cool thing, I want that.  

LP:                        Well and actually I have one of Jess’s as well, because she gave me the Great Gatsby, which is one of my favorite books and that’s also hanging downstairs and it’s similarly beautiful and maybe everybody can see that one when I have Jessica some talk.  But –

Amanda Scuglia:  Ooh, yeah.

LP:                        I really loved when you guys were working on that project; I thought it was so cool that you were getting paid to do what you do.  That to me, was – that’s the very definition of success in my mind is that you were – you had this commercial project, but you were – if I remember correctly, and you have to slap me in the head if I'm wrong, you were given  pretty free rein to – you were constrained in – had to be famous books, but you guys just went to town and went into the print shop and did your interpretations.

Amanda Scuglia:  I think there was a list, so it had to be – or there was a requirement, it had to be a classic novel, it had to have so many – it had to be certain popularity to it; it couldn’t be an obscured thing.  So I did Dracula, I did Robinson Crusoe, Little Women, so there was a lot – we did a lot, I think I did nine in there or something and she did even more than – probably double what I did.  And – oh Peter Pan, she said, Peter Pan, that’s right.  I can’t believe she remembers this, this was a long time ago, so I think you saw this because we didn’t post them because they were a private commission for a hotel or somebody’s house or something –

LP:                        Now in an apartment building or something. 

Amanda Scuglia:  Yeah and so we weren’t supposed to post them, but somehow you saw this  probably because we’re friends and you’re like hey I want one.  And so –

LP:                        No, you know how I think I knew about it, the two of you were complaining about how much work it was.

 Amanda Scuglia:  It was a lot of work, it was, it was a lot of books.

LP:                        And the last piece down in the  lower left, I think people will find fascinating, just because the size of it and what the materials are.

Amanda Scuglia:  OK, so there was a show in New York which was called – what was it called?  It’s the name of the fair of the Metrocard, one of my artists will probably write in there.  But it was the show of Metrocard paintings, so these Metrocards they run out, they expire and then you what, you just throw them away, there’s no recycling for them.  And so there was an artist by the name of John Puroyo was one of our professors, who came up with the idea of why don’t we just prime these Metrocards and make paintings on them?  And he started a show.  And it grew, there was three – I think three iterations of that show, Single Fair thank you.  He typed it privately, but it’s called Single Fair.  

                              And it grew from a group of maybe a hundred artists to a few hundred artists the last time that they did it; I think there was 6,000 pieces or something crazy in the show.  And they don’t limit to how many you can put in, so you can put 10 in if you want.  And so it’s basically just a primed Metrocard and every – the cool thing about that show is that no matter who painted on that Metrocard, whether they’re famous, whether they’re just a struggling artist, every single Metrocard is a $100.  And so if you buy one, that money – so it completely is different from this gallery, like you want to invest in someone or this one’s more expensive or this one’s not as successful or whatever, it doesn’t matter who you are, it was anonymous.  

                              And so, for example, that’s how I got one of my – a famous artist, but also one of my favorite painters Megan [Eward ? 00:57:36] whose on the call, bought me, as a surprise, bought an Alex Kanevsky Metrocard painting and gifted it to me, which I cried because how in the world would I ever own an Alex Kanevsky painting.  Other than if he painted on a Metrocard and it was a 100 bucks.  So it was just a really cool thing to be part of in New York, it was a really cool show and that one was one that probably didn’t sell and I think you liked it, you expressed that you liked it, I put it online.  And I think I gifted it to you, did I gift it to you?  I should’ve gifted, OK good.   

LP:                        It’s on my fireplace right now, across the room from Interlude.  So there are some great questions that have stacked up, I'm going to answer them and then I still have a couple of my own and then I know it’s late where you are, so I don’t want to tie you up too much longer.  But some of these questions are too good to pass up.  I'm going to start with the last one,  can you see the questions?  Or do you want me to read them to you? 

Amanda Scuglia:  Oh, sorry, –

LP:                        I'm fine to read them to you.  The question has to do with the level of detail in Interlude.  Well I’ll just read it verbatim and then we can bat it around.  He says, hard to figure out how to articulate this question, in Interlude, I'm struck by the detail of every individual leaf, as am I.  What was the process like focusing on each individual leaf on one little sapling?

Amanda Scuglia:  Painstaking, no I'm just kidding.  So for me, that’s the moment, right, that’s the moment that I was getting was that each leaf has a different color and has a different temperature and has a different direction that it’s facing and that was so interesting to me.  Like limbs of a human body, there’s like each one is so interesting and so – that was probably one of the first non-figurative pieces that I painted.  But it was more – it was more difficult than I thought it would be, but I love it.

LP:                        Yeah, I love it, yup, I love it too.  The great thing about that is you told the same story here that you told me in the gallery, because I would’ve been very angry if there had been a different story about the painting.  Nikko asked a couple of great questions, but I'm going to come back to his.  One of our friends [Shanshunk ? 01:00:07] do you ever start a piece and then get the equivalent of writer’s block?  And you kind of eluded to that with the paint over painting, although I don’t think it was writer’s block so much as you weren’t satisfied with where it was at.  So do you ever get the equivalent of writer’s block and if so, what are the different techniques you use to get over that or do you just start all over with the same concept?  You  just call a do over.

Amanda Scuglia:  So the equivalent of writer’s block would be artist block, right and I have used that term before and it does happen occasionally I’ve had it – memorable times, a few times.  Where you’re just in your studio and you don’t – nothing – it’s weird, it’s not like you – it’s like you don’t feel like doing it, or you just don’t know what you were doing.  You lose what your purpose was.  Or you try something and it sucks and you’re  like I'm just the worst artist, I'm such a fraud, what am I doing here?  And the best way for me – everyone has their own process I'm sure, is for just – I just need to leave.  Because if I already am recognizing that that’s happening, I know it’s not my day to paint, because whatever I paint’s not going to be good anyway.  

                              And so maybe I’ll go outside and look at something I might want to paint at some point.  I can – there’s different ways of making art, there’s – you can scout where you’re going to paint next, you can take photo references, you can read other artist books or look at pictures that other artists have made and then get inspired that way.  Sometimes when I have artist block it’s for a particular medium, so oil paint is not agreeing with me today, so I'm going to go to the print shop.  Print shop is the best answer to artist block.  Some days I –

LP:                        you eluded to that earlier that you could go and there’s – what is it, is it that there’s no failure or what’s the – is it just the steaks are lower for you?  What’s the –

Amanda Scuglia:  I don’t know what it is if there’s – because you lose a control, there’s s little bit less control with it, so you aren’t – I think it’s even a shitty print is still not ugly.  It’s like – yeah I think that the print shop is very good for painting sucks today, I'm going to go in the print shop.  Or just OK, today’s just – I'm going to do something different and just wait for it to be better.  Because sometimes it’s affected – for me, it’s like if I didn’t eat a good enough meal that day or I'm thinking about work or some other distraction and I just need to OK, well9 today’s – right now is not my best use of my time; I should just exercise and get that out of the way and then when I come back I’ll be better suited to paint. 

LP:                        There’s a couple of – leave it to Nikko and Megan to ask some of the nerdy questions, but these are great.  So I'm excited to hear your answer to some of these.  The first one, what tape do you use?

Amanda Scuglia:  Tell Nikko he can go to hell.  

LP:                        Oh, is this an ongoing thing; he’s trying to get your secrets?

Amanda Scuglia:  He is trying to get my secrets.  Yeah it’s an ongoing joke, yeah.  Yeah.

LP:                        All right, smart ass, trolling my interview.  Couple of questions here that I think could be grouped in the same vein, so I'm going to read them together from Nikko and Megan.  Is there a piece that really centralizes all of your concepts?  Is there one that really hits the nail on the head for you?  And then is there one that’s your favorite painting and why? 

Amanda Scuglia:  Ooh, coming in with hard questions.  OK, so I think with each series there are definitely paintings that really get it, that are like that’s what I was going for and it’s a good outcome.  I'm trying to think out of this grouping, I think the Predator one and it took me a long – it took me four times to get it right, I have painted it a lot.  And I painted on top of this one a lot.  And I think that that really – when it happened, I was like yes, that’s what I was getting at and that’s what I wanted to happen. Even though I could still do the Predator paintings and I feel like I could still keep doing them because there is just so much in that for  me.  So I think with this series, the Predator painting does that.   

                              But other series of course there is – I mean I didn’t send you this painting but there was a painting that I did with the last series with all the figures of a bunch of women laying in the grass on top of each other in a pile and – yeah and so that one, for that series was really like, oh, OK, like there was no sacrifice in –  Because sometimes you do a painting and there’s like, well it’s 90% or 95% there and now I'm – that was a 100%, so – 

LP:                        Do you mostly have the technique to achieve the things you visualize?

Amanda Scuglia:  What was the question, sorry?

LP:                        You have the technique and the technical capability to execute things you see in your mind’s eye?

Amanda Scuglia:  Oh, yes, mm-hmm. 

LP:                        At this point you do.  Yeah.

Amanda Scuglia:  Yeah the problem is that the technique for me, my perfection of technique is a effortlessness and so there is a possibility of overwork and when you do that it’s shit.  Right?  So you have to get – you’ve got to like, OK I'm going to put this brush on the thing and I’d better get it right, the first time I put that mark down.  So that’s – yeah.

LP:                        Yeah.  Similar concept with musicians, the idea of too many notes or overplaying or – yeah.  So this question may have been answered but also from Nikko.  What’s the last painting or piece of work that you’ve done or art making experience that helped you – unexpectedly helped you reach another level in your work or how you view your work in a way that elevated it?  I like that question; it’s a little – 

Amanda Scuglia:  Read it one more time again? 

LP:                        Yeah, I’ll read it verbatim.  What is the last painting, drawing, print or art making experience that unexpected helped you reach another level in your work or how you view your work in a way that elevated it?

Amanda Scuglia:  So, I would say – so experimenting with the masking and the painting on top of paintings, that was a newer – I’ve always kind of painted on top of other painting and maybe left a little bit.  But I hid that, I didn’t really want you to know it – that I was doing that and this – with this last series it’s in your face, you can tell, like oh there’s a painting underneath that painting and it looks like tape or something was blocking it.  And so it’s a little bit more owned and in your face and obvious.  And I do credit that experimentation period to getting the grant, that grant was extremely helpful for me.  Because of course with money and stuff there’s – you don’t want to waste materials, you don’t want to waste a canvas, there’s this nervousness of well if I don’t – there’s a precious – you treat your materials preciously. 

                              But when you have OK well there’s somebody whose giving me money to make artwork, so I can experiment and I can try new things, I think that was really transformative for my work and – or being braver in experimenting and not having to worry about saving materials or – I don’t know if that answers the question, but –

LP:                        That’s OK, it’s your answer.  There’s a more in the chat and then I have a couple of quick other ones that I'm trying to be sensitive to the fact that it’s getting late for you.  [Arthy ? 01:09:10] on our team asked, do you continue to paint in a medium or a concept because that is what makes you happy or are you trying to get it right and then you move on once you get it right?

Amanda Scuglia:  Get it right.  That’s an interesting question.  I paint things I don’t think because they make me happy, I think I paint things because I need to.  So there’s – it’s almost like an itch or a – it’s  like someone’s tapping you and you’re if you don’t paint it, they’re never going to stop tapping you.  You know what I mean?  And so once you paint it, then you’re like, OK the tapping’s going to stop or it’s going to open up a new thing, once you make one painting that says something to you and you’re like, oh I’ve got to do this other thing now and then I’ve got to do this other thing.  And so of course painting makes me happy, but I don’t do it for happiness is kind of like a side effect.  

LP:                        Yeah, that makes sense.  I used to feel that way about playing music, so I understand that – that happy curse.  Megan has a couple other questions which are all fun.  If you could collaborate with any artist, living, I like that she qualified it that way, who would it be? 

Amanda Scuglia:  You baby.  

LP:                        Not me, OK.

Amanda Scuglia:  Living artist collaborate.  God there’s so many.  The queen of queens Cecily Brown would be a dream, yeah I think Cecily Brown would be a dream or – yeah I don’t know.  I have to collaborate more, I don’t – I haven’t really.  Artists are weird, they kind of stay in their box and they just are by themselves and stuff and we should really collaborate more.  

LP:                        Yeah it’s funny you say that; I’ve talked to so many people lately in more of a business context, who have said, “Oh, yeah I work alone or I'm an independent business person or –“ all these different people that self identify as people who are alone because of their trade who have all said, oh I really should be doing more with other people.  And I think that there wasn’t – clearly it’s boring of everybody having to be isolated right now and either craving more or realizing that they actually did collaborate in even small subtle ways back in the old days, six weeks ago than they do now.  But it’s funny that you specifically said that, because I could transplant that comment to so many different conversations.  All right, this one – I don’t know if this is a joke question or not, but I can imagine it being a joke question and not being a joke question.  How is Instagram influenced your studio?

Amanda Scuglia:  Influenced my studio?  

LP:                        I'm assuming – about the way you present it, – 

Amanda Scuglia:  OK.  How has my Instagram influences my studio or the other way around? 

LP:                        How does Instagram influence your studio?  Do you think about how you present yourself?

Amanda Scuglia:  I don’t think about Instagram when I'm in the studio; I think about Instagram – so basically for me, my Instagram is a documentation, it’s like a journal entry, like a documentation of what I'm doing or what I'm making.  So sometimes I put – I will say this, sometimes I’ve put paintings on Instagram that are not finished yet and I say that, I say they’re not finished yet, because there is something interesting about seeing something that’s not finished yet and where it’s going to go, I think.  When I follow other artists I'm like, ooh look at that and then I see two weeks later what it turns into, it’s interesting.  

LP:                        Yeah that’s great 

Amanda Scuglia:  But I would say that sometimes it messes with your head when you put something that’s not finished and people have some that are like, don’t touch it.  And you’re like I'm going to touch it, I'm going to change it, but you remember it when you touch it and I wish I don’t, I wish not to remember it.

LP:                        You have to turn off comments.

Amanda Scuglia:  That’s true, that’s true.

LP:                        I'm going to combine two questions, one from Megan and one from me.  She said, what’s your favorite studio wine and I want to know if you listen to music while you work.

Amanda Scuglia:  Favorite studio wine is always red and it’s always in a box.  And yes, I cannot paint without music, all of my mark making, all of  – I'm constantly dancing when I'm painting.  I was a dancer as a child and so I learned that you take a sound, a piece of  music and you interpret that into a gesture, into a movement and how that translates emotion.  So I do the same thing when I paint, it’s like I hear a sound and I translate that into an image, or a mark or – you have to listen to music, yeah. 

LP:                        Awesome.  And is it always Beyonce?

Amanda Scuglia:  It is never Beyonce, I only listen to very specific music when I paint and so it’s – I don’t allow other kinds of music in my – I have a painting playlist and in the future I would love to – I’ve tried it a few times, to reach out to different musicians because there are certain – James Blake is one of them, where just he is – if I could make my paintings sound like something it would be his music.  And I think that it would be really interesting.  There are artists like Bon Iver, however you say his name, I don’t think he collaborates with this one painter, but he definitely always has the same artist make his cover art.  And it’s interesting because then you identify that painting as having that kind of Bon Iver sound and so that’s – I'm really interested in that and I would love to collaborate with a musician to see, OK, well you make these sounds, what do those sounds look like?

                              What does it look like coming out of – into paint?  You know what I mean.

LP:                        I remember going to shows at the Kitchen in Manhattan in the late eighties, early nineties and Ramel Z would be spray painting or Deejaying and there’d be a deejay and a spray painter teamed together with a big curtain canvas on the wall and that would be the evening show, would be a deejay and a spray paint artist.  

Amanda Scuglia:  Love that.

LP:                        Yeah really cool stuff.  All right, I have two last questions for you.  If anybody else chimes in with questions I’ll make sure we get theirs done.  But can you tell us a little bit about the Bjork project you worked on? 

Amanda Scuglia:  That’s old.  Bjork project, yes, so when I was in New York as a young’un I was like early twenties, looking for jobs, whatever on Craigslist at 2:00 in the morning or something, I came across a Craigslist ad that said, looking for artists that can draw and paint from observation.  Or can take a picture and then draw it how it looks.  So I was like well I can do that.  And so I applied to this Craigslist post; I had no idea what it was for.  And so I just sent them really crappy drawings I did in college and it was like 4:00 in the morning and I would say within an hour thyme replied.  I'm like, why are these people up?   You know what I mean?  And they said, come to this address tomorrow to see if you get the job.  

                              And then it said, in the address, Matthew Barney’s Studio and I almost peed my pants because Matthew Barney is a super famous artist and I studied him in art history and I wrote a thesis paper on him and I was like there’s no way.  And so I get there and sure enough, it’s Matthew Barney’s massive warehouse studio and it’s a team of people from San Francisco, it’s like a production company and they’re there, they’re staffed there to make a Bjork music video and Bjork was married or whatever, partners with Matthew Barney, they have a child together.  And so they were using his massive warehouse because he had the space and because they’re married.  So I got the job, and then we created the entire – it was the Wanderlust Music Video. 

                              And everything in that music video is made from scratch, from hands, from an artist except for the water, I think it’s CG.  It was a 3-D, very experimental process of a 3-D music video, so if you wear those red and blue glasses, and you get the right copy of that video, they built – this production company built this camera so that you could watch it in 3-D.  And I got to meet Bjork and hold her up, so that she didn’t fall and it was only two days, we only filmed with her for two days, but it took three months to build the whole set.  I was a sculptor, I was a painter, did all the kinds of things.  

LP:                        That’s fucking amazing.  

Amanda Scuglia:  I forgot about that.  

LP:                        I love that story.  I love that story.  All right, so we had some foreshadowing early on about Iceland.  And it oddly enough was not about Bjork.  You seem to have an Icelandic thread through your work.   

Amanda Scuglia:  I do – making connections.  

LP:                        I'm smart like that.  Tell us about the Iceland project.  I was going to show the video, but it’s two or three minutes long. 

Amanda Scuglia:  It’s long, yeah and we – everyone’s getting bored by now.

LP:                        I'm going to – into the chat at the end.

Amanda Scuglia:  OK, so Liu Bolin is an artist, a Chinese artist who paints – he’s known as the invisible man, and he paints himself, his own body to match the background in which he’s standing so that he looks like he’s not there and it’s a really interesting process.  And he has a lot of politically driven work and he’s just a very cool guy, very great art.  But he needs people to paint him, right, because he can’t do it himself.  So it’s a lot of performance and then there’s a photo being taken of him doing it and so it’s like performance art, it’s painting, it’s photography.  So he needs assistants to paint him into his backgrounds and those painters have to be observational painters, not abstract painters or whatever.   

                              And so he worked with the gallery, Eli Klein Gallery in New York City, and one of the women who was there, who was responsible for recruiting basically put out a call to our grad school and said, “If you want this job, come on down,” and we did a few projects with Liu Bolin prior to the Iceland one.  And the Iceland one just happened to – they just happened to ask me and four of us painters went – it was a secret.  So she basically texted me and she said, “Do you have a passport?” Said, “Yes,” she said, “Can you take off work for two weeks and travel internationally, if I don’t tell you where it is?”  Yup, you’re damn sure, so I did that, I said yes and I didn’t know where I was going until a week before.  So I packed all my stuff we went to Iceland and I'm thinking it’s a Liu Bolin project, which it was, until we get to the airport and she’s like, “By the way, Annie Leibovitz is part of the collaboration.” 

                              Or whatever, it was like three days before, something like that, I don’t remember the timeline. But it was very – I had no idea, I was like Annie Leibovitz.  And we had worked with her one other time, with a Liu Bolin project, but I didn’t know that we were going to be chilling with her in Iceland.  So it was a secret because they didn’t want the Iceland news to report that she was coming because they didn’t want everyone to know about the project until it was done.  So we get to Iceland and we [get to ? 01:22:25] hike a glacier, we go out on the water and he’s like standing in these crazy places and there’s a storm that’s happening, it was crazy.  But basically Annie Leibovitz sets up her shot and then we have 10 minutes to get a full body painted to match the background and he jumps in there and we take the picture.  

                              So it was one of the coolest things I’ve ever done, Bjork was a really cool thing too.  Bjork was one of the coolest things to, so –

LP:                        Those are both great stories, thank you for sharing them.  That’s really amazing stuff.  

Amanda Scuglia:  Stay muted and watch this, you’re so bossy. 

LP:                        Thank you for your time.  You’ve been very generous, we went over by about a half hour. 

Amanda Scuglia:  Oh, I'm so sorry, everyone, thank you for staying on. 

LP:                        Now what I'm worried about is that the painting’s no longer there waiting for me, so I'm going to have to hang up in a minute and go see if it’s still there.  Thank you, thank you.  I'm glad that you’re safe, I'm glad that everybody that – around you is safe and healthy and yeah it might do great things for the value of my collection if you were to get COVID, but I'm – I’ll put myself second for once.  

Amanda Scuglia:  Thank you so much for having me and inviting me and always supporting me over the years.  And I miss you and when COVID’s over I want to come visit.   

LP:                        Yes, please, I’ll look forward to you painting some landscapes out here, I love not too far from some things that I think you’ll find pretty inspirational, so –  I’ll see you soon.

Amanda Scuglia:  Thank you everybody.  

LP:                        All right, take care.

Amanda Scuglia:  Great questions.

LP:                        Bye.

Amanda Scuglia:  Bye, bye.

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