Interview with Agnes Sioda
Eric Darton for Cable Street: What were some of the sense impressions and experiences that turned you from a observer to an observer/representer?
Agnes Sioda: I was practically born into my grandfather‘s heavenly garden, and from the age of one year I lived with my sister and parents on a seismographic station in a forest in the south of East-Germany, far away from the next road and other human beings. Nature was my cradle and the absence of other people than my immediate family made the forest my very first close friend. Big, strong, mysterious, wise and very generous. I do have very precise memory’s from the age of two-to-three about the light falling through the trees around the house, the little trail going up the hill, filled with wild straw- and blueberrys , foxglove and wood sorrel, soft flourishing moss… My sister and I sitting outside, eating ruby-red marmalade glowing in sunlight.
So I was not surprised that these images are what I found on the very few remaining childhood drawings an aunt of mine had kept and which found their way back to me when she died a couple of years ago.
CS: At what age did were you first drawn to making art? Was there a point that you realized this as a métier?
AS: My mum reports that I did not stopp asking for paper beginning at the age of three…
Then, in my early teens, our family moved to New York City for two years. My father had been engaged at the UN. My beloved sister had to stay home in East Germany as a kind of security deposit. As a GDR kid I was not allowed to take a single step alone on the streets, to have any contact with other people, least of all Americans or to speak about anything substantial in the car or at home because of listening bugs everywhere. I went to the Russian embassy school, learned Russian instead of English from people who considered any German a nazi, even little girls. I felt like a locked up gorilla in the Central Park Zoo.
What saved me really at that time and marked me for life were our weekend-long visits to the Metropolitan Museum. I stood in front of all those gorgeous paintings by Renoir, Chagall, Monet, and they were like doors into a free world, I could enter and feel at home again. I felt how, no matter where I am and in what circumstances, creating art would be a freedom no one could take from me. As the forest was far away and the friends even farther, I started to create what I missed and discovered, what I carried inside me. That’s when I began to paint differently and started to dream of making this my métier some time.
CS: Were there others who encouraged you?
AS: My parents loved art, but they did not encourage me to go for it. They kept saying: Only geniuses and kids of rich people become artists. You are neither. So forget it. They wanted me to be safe and I don’t blame them.
But there has been a painter in our village, who was painting the destroyed and forgotten Jewish cemetery instead of the obligatory happy-looking working-class people. He couldn’t publicly show or sell those paintings, but he kept painting them. His living he made with landscapes, teaching kids, little jobs… He did very much to encourage me, became my first teacher when I was about fourteen and stayed my mentor, until I got into art school. Thank you, dear Herbert Sander. You didn’t just teach me how to hold a brush.
CS: Who do you see as your direct influence(s) and / or lineage?
AS: Claude Monet, Paul Cezanne, Nicolas van Stael, Mark Rothko, Cy Twombly, Helen Frankenthaler, Lee Krassner, Louis Bourgeois, Joan Mitchell, Cecily Brown – they all very much impressed and influenced me.
CS: How has your process changed in the course of your practice, in terms both of the kinds of work you produce, and your relationship to its production?
AS: I started with painting a lot outside in nature or with models and there was a more direct translation of what I see, the impression I got, into the process of painting. Later on I have been more and more taking those impression and inspirations from nature, music, people home to my workshop to process it, to look inwards and work with memories.
Now the work on a painting always start with closed eyes. What is landing on my canvas is more an expression of how life has touched me, what it made me become, how it is constantly changing me, how it is flowing through me at the very moment. I have no plans for what I want to represent when I start. My paintings became something very musical, all about rhythm, movement, tonality, a form of meditation. The Drum Series shows this quite clearly.
CS: How do you see your relationship to your media?
AS: I do work with different media and love them for different reasons. Paper is fragile but light and very accessible and became the carrier for me journaling a lot with watercolor, ink, pencil, charcoal, dirt, coffee, blood, chalk, oily and watery liquids together. Paper gives me a beautiful freedom to not want or ask for much as a result. It allows me to just stay curious, be very spontanious, to experiment and try again and again, to leave things unfinished, start new…
Over the years I produced many different series of monotypes which are made with my ten fingers on the backside of the paper. I cannot see the development of the painting before I take it of the plate. So I have to feel it, keep memorizing in my fingers, where I went. Sometimes I use my feet. It is like a fast dance. I do love to paint with my body. Recently I started to paint on my body or others directly. Great fun.
The canvas is quiet stable and patient, can carry a lot of layers. Painting on it is a different story. My oil-paintings often grow very slowly, sometimes over many years. The canvas is like a skin on a drum, to play again and again until the song is done. The oil-paint stays moist and flexible for a while and invites this melting together of stages and time. Oil paintings are like buckets of lived time for me, filling up drop by drop. When they start living on their own, I know my job is done.
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