Painting With Jeanine Brito
I meet with the German-Canadian artist as she gets ready for The Armory Show
I’ve decided to do a few interviews here and there, why not? This coming week paid subscribers will get a new advice column, so now is the time to upgrade! Also, I have put both embedded links AND links cited at the bottom of the page because I am hearing people prefer one or the other, so let’s just do both for now.
Artist studios are disappearing in the city, with few holdouts left. Often, property developers will buy the building and evict everyone, leaving it empty and waiting years to be demolished. One such instance was the studio I shared in 2017 in the old Coffin Factory1 on Niagara Street. All this hubbub about getting everyone out and yet the building is still boarded up with no movement on its plans. It’s the same story with 888 Dupont2, where the artist and milliner-extraordinaire Maryam Keyhani3 had a studio before moving to Berlin. For the buildings that are still around, it’s heartening, if not a touch precarious, to be in the midst of a dying breed.
I walked to Jeanine Brito4’s studio on a very hot August afternoon while bringing Figgy (my Pomeranian) along for the stroll—he has a keen interest in the arts. The building that houses Jeanine’s studio is an old warehouse on the same stretch of Dupont as the gallery Cooper Cole. She tells me that many artists have their studios here and even an “antique collector.” The hallways are dusty and grey, with a maze of stairs and unmarked doors. There’s no AC, and Jeanine rushes to open the windows.
Full disclosure, I am an early collector of Jeanine’s work. I have two pieces, one from 2020 and a diptych I commissioned from 2021. Even still, I wasn’t one hundred percent sure of her practice, and I was curious. Artnet News called her a “Fast-Rising Artist”5 after her first U.S. solo show earlier this summer—Jeanine is now represented by Nicodim Gallery in L.A. Fast-rising is correct. For most of her twenties, Jeanine worked as a graphic designer, having gone to fashion school for her Bachelors. It’s something that I must remember as an anecdote for my advice column for those looking to pivot to another career. With regards to Jeanine, it’s been like magic. My meme-addled brain immediately translates “Don’t let your boyfriend stop you from finding your husband” to “Don’t let your career stand in the way of your art.”
It was only in 2020 that she really began painting. I asked her how could that be, didn’t she know? She painted as a child, but through fashion and her graphic work she did not have the time to experiment. The pandemic created an opportunity to shift her focus.
“I think for a long time I was just like, I don't know what to paint. I knew that I wanted to paint but I wasn’t able to paint at the level of technical skill that I wanted. So the only way to get better is to paint more. For a while I was painting similar to this but on a much smaller scale where I would paint from the imagination and see what would happen. These little figures and little food scenes were kind of a way to do that in a safe way. I progressed to larger canvases and also at the same time found my visual language a bit more.”
What initially drew me to her work was her sense of scene. The 2020 piece I own—now that I know it is such an early piece I will protect it at all costs—is just a hand holding a glass of wine, yet feels in some way ominous with its rich red tones and dark, sultry lighting. In 2021 as a present to myself, I commissioned Jeanine to paint whatever came up in her mind after reading my novel. I didn’t know what to expect exactly, but when she sent it to me I was… stunned. It was a diptych, one side featuring my book and a plate of oysters, and the other, a portrait of me.
There was something deeply uncanny in the portrait. I remember hanging it and feeling the eyes following me. It was beautiful but besides that, the eerie quality of it could not be explained. There was nothing obvious to pin it on, and it had its own life separate to its subject (me) and its painter (Jeanine). I wouldn’t say I am some kind of scout for talent, but this feeling cemented Jeanine’s quality of work beyond being technically skilled. Since having it up on the wall, I’ve been clowned by guests who ask, “What kind of person has a painting of themselves?” as though it is the greatest mark of vanity. They don’t know that whenever I look at it I feel an element of Dorian Gray but in the opposite direction (the painting sucks the beauty out of living me).
“In the last year, I would say I’ve been narrowing into this fairytale, surreal, bodily thing. And, now I'm researching taxidermy. I just like things that are a little bit unsettling and uncomfortable. But I also like things that are really beautiful. I like how those things fit together.”
We agree that there is something grotesque about femininity, and that it is always enmeshed with some kind of gore. “I’ve been thinking about that a lot, the way that a femme person has to manipulate their body to be perceived as femme, and the pain that you sometimes endure to achieve that.”
It’s the weeks leading up to The Armory Show in New York and Jeanine is working on a single painting to be shown with her gallery. Sketches of previous versions of the work are scattered on a nearby table. The work is large, like most of her newer paintings. Jeanine’s most frequently painted subject is a version of herself. In this work, her figure is sat holding a taxidermied cat in what seems like a German vista, with garlands of sausage framing her. Jeanine began with the idea of the cat to pay homage to a family pet that had recently passed. It was her first contact with grief, and it surprised her, having previously thought losing a pet wouldn’t be as painful.
“It’s interesting when you lose a pet or lose anyone really it feels like such a singular experience. Grief is really so universal, but when you're in it, you're like, no one has known this grief. I like the idea preservation and marrying that with the sausages. This idea of stuffing—the body is stuffed into this corset.”
At the time of first visiting, the figure was positioned as kissing the cat. A week later she had scratched the idea and started with her initial composition present in her sketches that ended up being the final form. Working with acrylic is easier for making those kinds of shifts. At this stage, there were only a few days before she’d have to ship the work to New York.
Jeanine takes her studio practice seriously, she comes every day during the week. Her one requirement to paint being, “I need to be wearing shoes.” She’ll pull a tarot card from a deck she keeps by the windowsill, leading with the question, “What do I need to know about today?” A book of Leonora Carrington’s6 Tarot deck lies on the shelf, and medieval fairytales. We talk about the importance of having time to experiment, and setting our own pace as artists. She’s been spending a disproportionate time reading about how taxidermy works. On the Tuesday the painting is supposed to ship, Jeanine posts the final work. I reply, “She did it!!!” She responds, “Only barely.” For some reason, I don’t believe her.
Things you may have missed! I was quoted in two pieces last week, one in the NYTimes about the Girlies “Why Girls Rule the Internet” by Marie Solis7 and in Byline “Beauty In The Book Business: What Does It Take To Be Taken Seriously?” by Allie Rowbottom8
love this.