Nella Lush, painter, and Steve Lush, painter and sculptor: part 2
The challenge of switching from representational to abstract painting, knowing when a painting is finished, an approach to art prices, and so much more.
Here’s part two of the Palate & Palette interview with Nella and Steve Lush. Part one is here.
Nella, we were talking recently about how you found your unique style, and that previously, when you were living in Spain and painting representational marine subjects, you wanted to move away from that way of painting.
NELLA: You know why I wanted to move away from it? Because I was tired of him [Steve] telling me how to do things [laughs].
STEVE: I wasn’t telling her how to do things. I was telling her about the details.
NELLA: Steve is an engineer by trade. He would be looking at the perspective and the shrouds in the boat I had painted and he would say it needs to be this way. You need to change it. I was doing detailed work that was objectively good, but it was very painful for me because I didn’t really want to do it that way.
STEVE: Her paintings were very large: 48” wide by 36” high and the centerpiece could be a schooner with fisherman hanging over the side, for example. It required detail.
NELLA: I didn’t paint for a couple years when we came back to the states. I wanted to explore other things and abstract painting was really calling me. I didn’t really like abstract when I was in my 20s and I thought it would be easy to do. Little did I know.
STEVE: We were both Winslow Homer fans and we still are.
NELLA: When we came back to the states, I said to Steven, continue with the marine work because you know it well and you like it. Little by little I started to explore abstract work. I started that in the late 1980s.
You said you thought abstract would be easy and it wasn’t.
NELLA: It was very difficult. I had to put aside my thinking because the moment I thought, I would make a shape look like something. My tendency out of habit was to go toward the representational. It was tough to work on a background of color and texture and monochromatic work because I always wanted to see something specific. Little did I know that in that monochromatic work I was ultimately going to see things in a different way. And I did.
I still wanted to do marine work [for example, beaches and sailboats], but it needed to be on my terms. People from outside would say they didn’t know how successful I would be with my marine work and my abstract work because it would be confusing to people. That’s why I have two websites: nellalush.com and mymarineimpressions.com. My marine work is the same as my abstract work in that I start them exactly the same way.
STEVE: You could put her marine work and her abstract or figurative work together and you would see it was by the same artist. What she is doing now looks like her work and is cohesive, no matter the subject or level of abstraction.
NELLA: Once I saw that people were reacting positively to my abstract marine work, it validated me even more. They don’t need to see all the details in a boat or ocean. They need to feel the essence of the sky, the moving clouds, the ocean, the air, the wind.
Picture an old street in Italy made of cobblestones forming large arcs like an open fan. The arc is determined by the person placing the stones at an arm’s reach. I noticed that when you were demonstrating painting to me in your Boston studio you were applying paint with a full arm sweep. Tell me about the physicality of your painting.
NELLA: I like the freedom that comes with working on larger canvases because I can put my whole body in it. I don’t do small wrist movements. I do this movement with my whole arm [motions a wide sweep].
STEVE: It’s tough to do that on a small canvas.
NELLA: Small work is painful to me. It takes me longer. It has to do with the freedom.
Nella, when you are working in oils, do you tend to come back to the canvas when what you’ve put down is dry? Or do you like to work on it when it’s still fluid?
NELLA: I do both. When it’s dry, it’s a little bit better because I can add another layer of paint without it blending in. If it’s tacky, it’s also good because I can scrape better. I use my canvas as a sculpting tool, almost. I dig in with a knife and take some layers off and then add more. I do it with total freedom.
When others ask me how I know when I am done with a painting, it makes me realize that it is through the application of layers that a certain feeling develops. It is an interaction and collaboration among the paint, the surface, and my soul. I marvel when figures, objects, and forms emerge. Through observation, a feeling will let me know whether to outline and bring forward what I see. I feel that in traditional art, the composition is first, and in abstract art the process will dictate the composition toward the end. The same process applies to all of my work, including the seascapes. They all come from within, from places unknown to me, yet part of my existence.
Nella, do you ever think about writing about your art?
I’m writing about the creative process, what it means to be a woman artist, and what I’ve learned from creating abstract art. I mentor people who want to express themselves through art, move in a new direction, or work though fear or other barriers to making art. I want to share these techniques and my thoughts about creativity, and plan to publish a book soon.
Nella, you were doing a podcast for a while with Celia Hemken. What was that like? As soon as I mentioned her name, your face lit up.
NELLA: We are soulmates. We can finish each other’s sentences and we feel the same way about most things.
STEVE: Did you listen to any of them?
I did! It felt like I was eavesdropping on a personal conversation, and I learned a lot.
NELLA: It was great to do because it was two friends meeting and talking.
Will you pick it back up again?
NELLA: Yes, probably by the beginning of next year.
You listen to art podcasts. Which ones do you like? What have you learned from them?
NELLA: I listen to the Savvy Painter and Inspirational Living podcasts as well as others about self-improvement. I also listen to audio books. It’s nice to hear about different processes and that we are all the same at a basic level.
We are all searching for something. I think that is what art is all about and that is why I don’t do traditional art, because I’m searching through my art for something that I don’t even know. Art exposes itself and gives me the message afterwards. Art is the paintings guiding me rather than me guiding the paintings.
STEVE: She’s more of a heartfelt painter than a cerebral painter.
NELLA: The series we are watching, The Missing Links with Gregg Braden is about art and the brain. The heart has a bigger level of energy than the brain. You need to have harmony between the heart and the brain. The heart is the most important thing in everything we do. The intuition comes from the heart. The analytical part comes from the brain, so when you paint you have to consider, is it coming from my brain or my heart?
You were very encouraging when I told you I make naïve art that looks like an 11-year-old painted it.
I love it when I hear that someone is self-taught. Their work is sincere, unaltered by rules and techniques, and raw. They are ready to find that link from the brain to the heart. It’s like going back to the childlike. Some of the most seasoned artists want to be like that and they don’t know how to do it. I know several from Cape Ann who are very detailed painters and they tell me “I really would like to do that but I’m afraid of doing so.”
STEVE: A lot of it is fear. Some artists think if they did something outlandish and it was shown somewhere people would question it.
You must put a price tag on your pieces. Do you determine price based on size? Or do you consider the quality of the painting and the value of it?
NELLA: When I first started in the 1980s and 1990s I was pricing my work according to its emotional value to me. That was wrong because its emotional value to me has very little to do with people being attracted to the work. I have some work I don’t particularly care about and people are attracted to it. Imagine if it had a very low price because I didn’t have that emotional attachment to it. I price them by the inches. I know the price of a 36” x 36” and I keep a price list in the studio. It’s the same price you would pay in a gallery.
That’s the difference when you become a professional artist. The work is going to be expensive and it’s going to be an investment for people. They want to know that your work is not inconsistently valued and that it will keep its value.
Shifting gears, I know you like to cook. Are there parallels between how you approach cooking and painting?
NELLA: 100% [laughs]. I like to mix things together and sometimes you think maybe they don’t go together.
STEVE: She’s a really good cook. [Her kitchen “speaks” cook, with an expansive kitchen island workspace, a handsome set of hanging pots and pans, a serious industrial stove, and shelves of stacked and colorful cups and bowls.]
What are some of your favorites?
STEVE: The baccalà. And pickled peppers and eggplant with olive oil.
NELLA: I’m not a gourmet cook. I’m from Italy so I cook what I saw my mother and grandmothers cook, and I add my own touches to it.
STEVE: Nella makes a great salad.
NELLA: It’s very simple! I don’t understand why they go crazy about my salad. It’s olive oil, and white balsamic vinegar with tomatoes, spring mix lettuce, and that’s it. Sometimes I’ll add pieces of smoked salmon, some olives, avocado, cheese. I’m just a simple cook. My cooking is similar to my painting because I don’t prepare ahead, I don’t think about it. Whatever I have, I put it together and it will take me 20 minutes [it’s safe to say that making a painting takes much longer!].
If you could have a dream museum show, what museum would you want it to be?
NELLA: MOMA. An exhibit would include a mix of my pieces because it’s my story.
I’m preparing for a solo show in January at the Robert Lehman Art Center at the Brooks School in North Andover. During my previous show at the school, I taught the kids for a week about art. That was fun. That show had a mix of my pieces and showed the students the range of my work.
Sometimes a piece is mostly about color. When my mother wasn’t well and she passed away, for a year I was painting all Prussian blue. I couldn’t get out of that blue period. You see through the years of my paintings, the color changes.
Was there a connection of the Prussian blue to your mother?
NELLA: What I didn’t realize was that the blue is the water (as in the amniotic fluid) that’s the connection to mother and child. The blue is also sadness and tears.
I’ve read that Steve produces a series of paintings that are related. Do you do that too?
NELLA: It’s not necessarily wanting to do something in a series but I work on several paintings at the same time. I can have a marine piece and a seascape and an abstract landscape in progress at the same time, and I’m using the same colors. But after a while you see there is a series of marine seascapes or abstracts using the same values. It happens naturally not because I want to make a series.
STEVE: I’m different. With me, my personality is obsessive compulsive, or overinvolved.
NELLA: You get very obsessed.
STEVE: I’ll do something until I burn out. That’s what has happened in a big way as I moved from marine watercolors to oils to collage to sculpture. I just pour everything into a particular subject and medium, and then I burn out and want to move on.
What would be your dream museum show, Steve?
STEVE: The museum that’s impressed me the most, and where I would love to have a show of paintings and or sculpture, would be The Clark in Western Mass.
NELLA: And I go high, I go for MOMA [they both laugh].
You get to choose one painting created by either Rembrandt, Picasso, Rothko, or Diebenkorn, for artistic value, not monetary value. Which would you choose?
STEVE: Picasso. I love all of his work, even the crazy stuff.
NELLA: Diebenkorn. A landscape painting. I can relate to the way he painted. He used color and light to create a sense of a place. The ability to move back and forth between abstract and figural paintings is something that I enjoy doing.
Lightning-round questions: People often bond over food and art, and here are quick questions about both.
Favorite breakfast.
NELLA: Just cappuccino for me [she makes a fantastic cappuccino].
STEVE: Definitely bacon and eggs but that’s not something we have very often.
If tomorrow was your birthday and I was baking you a cake, what kind should it be?
STEVE: Devil’s food cake with chocolate frosting.
NELLA: Italian rum cake.
Most memorable meal you’ve had.
STEVE: We were living in Algorta, Spain, a suburb of Bilbao. Our landlords, a Basque couple, invited us over one evening and they served fresh seabass and tripe—never thought I would like it and I loved it. That was maybe 1978 or 1979.
NELLA: Angulas, which are little eels we had in Spain. They look like spaghetti, and they are cooked with olive oil, garlic, and hot pepper.
STEVE: They come in 2”-deep ceramic dishes, and when they deliver it to you it’s still sizzling and popping with the oil. That with a good bottle of wine and some bread…
NELLA: That was my meal, why are you talking about it? [laughs]. For you tripe, huh?
You are hosting a dinner party and get to invite six people living or dead. Who is coming and what are you serving?
NELLA: My friend Celia, my mother and father, and my grandparents. I would make an Italian fish dinner.
STEVE: We would stick with family. They are the people we know the best.
Who are the people who inspire you the most?
NELLA: When people ask who inspired me the most in art, I can’t think of any artists, but I think of the history that I have with my family and my life in Italy: the countryside, the influence that my grandmothers had because they weren’t teaching me art, but they were teaching me so much more: crochet, embroidering, so many other things. That’s carried through my life.
STEVE: My mother initially, Nella, Winslow Homer, Picasso, an unknown artist Hank Virgona. His work is a lot like Joseph Solman, who was a contemporary of his. Also Saul Steinberg. I love his work and I used to do cartoons when I was young.
Do you think drawing for The New Yorker might be in your future?
STEVE: You never know.
Favorite piece of your art.
NELLA: It’s called Primavera. I could have sold it a few times and I never sold it.
STEVE: Mine is a marine painting called The Tramp Gets an Overhaul. I sold it to a guy from London. It’s a Tramp freighter on a marine railway up out of the water and it came out really well.
Most captivating museum visit.
NELLA: The Louvre. I was pregnant, and we were young and in Paris.
STEVE: When we went to Mass MOCA, we went through a building called The Boiler House. I love that! There were birds flying through it and music in the background. Also Anselm Kiefer’s exhibit there.
Palate and Palette menu for Steve and Nella
Here’s what I would cook if Nella and Steve came to dinner, which they are invited to do:
Carta di musica with roasted eggplant spread, herbs, and ricotta salad
Kale salad with pecorino, walnuts, and grapefruit
Chermoula shrimp and orzo
Italian rum cake and Huckleberry’s chocolate chocolate tea cake
Where to find Nella and Steve Lush (and you should!)
www.nellalush.com and www.mymarineimpressions.com
www.stevenlush.com
Their SOWA gallery at 450 Harrison Ave, #227, Boston, on the first Friday of the month
Rockport Art Association and North Shore Arts
Their work is in these galleries:
Steve:
Cortile Gallery, 230 Commercial St, Provincetown, MA
The Gallery at Four India, 4 India St 2nd Floor, Nantucket, MA
Nella:
Cortile Gallery, 230 Commercial St, Provincetown, MA
The White Room Gallery, 2415 Main St, Bridgehampton, NY
Thomas Henry, 15 Centre Street, Nantucket, MA and Cornwall, UK
Totally enjoyed this two part interview…it was very interesting and I loved the wide ranging scope of the questions. Great job to all!
There are so many things I like about this interview. The art, of course, but also Steve and Nilla’s interactions and self awareness, the knowledge and preparation reflected in your questions, and your continuing linkage of art and food. Well done!