Gail Rothschild is intimately familiar with the effects of time and decay on art. After graduating from Yale with a BA (cum laude), she embarked on a peripatetic career creating site-specific sculptural installations for colleges and museums. From Jeffrey Lord Amherst and Biological Warfare at the University of Massachusetts to Margaret Bourke White’s clandestine steel mill photographs for Cleveland, each one addressed an under-recognized aspect of local history. A few public sculptures such as Muted Belles for the University of Memphis were permanent, while her finalist design for a Boston Women’s Monument remains un-built. Most of these commissions for institutions such as the Bronx Museum, The Hudson River Museum, The DeCordova Museum, MOMA PS1 and the Socrates Sculpture Park were impermanent, or even destroyed by the artist at the end of installation, simply due to the cost of transporting and storing their elements.
Considering her role in the construction and destruction of her own work, and her interest in the ancient world led Rothschild to the Odyssey and Penelope’s cycle of weaving and un-weaving. By utilizing archaic textiles as the subjects of herPortrait of Ancient Linenseries, Rothschild alludes to her affinity with Penelope's struggle. These concisely rendered paintings illustrate the defabrication of textiles, capitalizing on an inescapable paradox – what is interwoven will ultimately unravel, and that which grows will inevitably decay. Employing her technical prowess, Rothschild harnesses painting methods rooted in the tradition of the Old Masters. She realizes her source material, actual pieces of linen discovered on archeological digs, as worthy subjects in their own rights, articulating the simultaneous strength and fragility of linen cloth. Rothschild charts the craftsmanship and skill associated with the making of each woven artifact, while simultaneously noting the un-making of each surviving fabric piece in the face of time. The resultingPortraits of Ancient Linenare held in numerous private collections as well as public collections such as the Mattatuck Museum, drawing the attention of antiquities scholars as well as textile curators and conservators.
For more information, please see: gailrothschild.com, and on Instagram @gailhelenrothschild.
Gail Rothschild, Unravellings, 2020. Acrylic on canvas, 70 x 62 inches (178 x 157.5 cm). Photo: Sam Monaco.
First, and most importantly, how are you doing? How are you navigating the highs and lows?
It all keeps changing. I’m re-reading how I first answered this question back in April and it seems far away. After nine roller-coaster months, I’m feeling cautiously optimistic about the future. At some point, I have to turn off NPR and survey the area I painted yesterday. It needs another transparent glaze of Phthalo Blue over that layered area of plain-weave brushstrokes, Payne’s Gray and Alizarin Crimson shadows where these warp threads are simultaneously unweaving and unraveling. Battling a chronic auto-immune disease in the midst of a pandemic seems like a bad joke. I am blessed to have this leafy retreat. Friends and family help enormously and I’m trying to learn to ask them for help. Yesterday, while trying a new problem on our little climbing wall, I banged my knee and fell flat onto the crash pad. My border terrier, Rennie, raced to me and began licking the hurt. Ups and downs and get-back-ups again.
Gail Rothschild, Yet-to-be-titled work in progress, 2020. Acrylic on canvas. 87 x 40 inches (221 x 101.5 cm). Photo: Sam Monaco.
It’s my experience that most artists engage with some level of self-isolation in their day to day art practice. Has this been your experience? And if so, have you found these innate rhythms to be helpful during this larger, world-wide experience of isolation.
I need a lot of studio time but I create that solitary space between me and the canvas. Dogs may lie at my feet, family may wander in and out, but it doesn’t stop me painting. I actually feel relief that I don’t have to go anywhere. I’m perfectly happy to stay right here. My work rhythms haven’t changed. My isolation during studio hours makes me appreciate social time around the dinner table and the joy of bringing good food to it and to the people I love. This doesn’t change.
Gail Rothschild, After Dubuffet, 2019. Acrylic on canvas, 79 x 45 inches (200.5 x 114.5 cm). Photo: Sam Monaco.
It would be great if you could briefly talk us through your practice. Understanding it is integral to appreciating the multivalence of your work.
I collaborate with museums to re-imagine small fragments of archaeological textiles in their collections as monumental painted portraits. I am currently working on a project with the Bode, Berlin’s State Museum devoted to Byzantine and Medieval Art. Over the past year I more or less completed the first six (of eight to ten) paintings for the exhibition that is still scheduled to open in October 2021. The subjects for the first three were all strange and figurative. The paintings reflected that. Each painting is a dialogue with an historical object. I peer intensely into high resolution, almost microscopic, images of the structure and physical interaction of the woven architecture, and then I shut off the iPad and paint. I work directly on the canvas, letting the brush marks become the threads. I went to Berlin in early March to meet with the curators and textile conservator hoping to discover some new fragments that I had overlooked in my first visit a year earlier. I was hunting for a more complex landscape of unraveling threads with only hints of the tapestry’s original iconography. I found exactly what I needed to keep me busy for many months and feel more grateful with every passing day that I managed to squeeze in that trip just days before the world shut down.
Reviewing source material for future paintings with curator Dr. Cäcilia Fluck and conservator Kathrin Mälck at the Bode-Museum, Berlin, March 2020. Photo: Sam Monaco.
Has any of your imagery shifted in a reflection of what’s currently happening? Or are you considering using coronavirus related imagery for future projects? Do you find it necessary to make work about the pandemic? And why or why not?
I began a new painting as soon as I returned from Berlin in mid-March and set up in the Connecticut studio. I knew that I would be staying put for a good while and that I would have all the time that I needed to explore deeper. Archaeological textile fragments are preserved by mounting on archival conservation cloth called buckram. In the earlier paintings, I had considered and then rejected as too insanely labor-intensive the idea of actually painting the tightly woven grid of the buckram mounting cloth. Suddenly, there was no reason not to. Over the last months I have discovered a whole new depth in my work. Although the marks the brush makes may be similar, they are never actually repetitive. The process of painting these plain-weave sections feels like a needed meditation in these uneasy times. The source textile represents layers of repair over the ages—attempts to stop the inevitable unraveling of time. They feel like geological strata. My paintings speak of their - and our - fragility, materiality and transience. I often think about my Portraits of Ancient Linen in the tradition of vanitas paintings—reminders of our mortality. This is even more true in the face of COVID-19, and with the seemingly endless reports of unnecessary deaths at the hands of law enforcement.
Captivated by a 2,000-year-old textile fragment from the collection of the Bode-Museum, which would inspire the painting, “Adoration” – one of ten to be featured in a solo exhibition scheduled to open in October 2021. Photo: Sam Monaco.
Are you thinking differently? Coping differently? Inspired differently?
I am fortunate to be in a physically amazing place. Our little house and studio adjoin 20 acres of protected wetland. In the years when I was making big public sculptures, many projects involved landscapes. In recent years my museum projects and large paintings have precluded getting much dirt under my fingernails. Suddenly, I find myself with the time to focus on this fascinating and unusual part of the Hudson Valley. I am trying to be a good land steward, removing invasive plants like phragmites and leaving piles of brush for the cottontails to make their home. We are planting edible natives for us and for wildlife: elderberries, black cherries, persimmons and hazelnut trees. It seems a hopeful act in the midst of so much uncertainty to plan(t) for the future. Immune-compromised, I’m not supposed to go out much. But the closer I look, the bigger my little five-acre world gets. I no longer snicker at Henry Thoreau saying, “I have traveled a good deal in Concord.”
Gail Rothschild, Adoration, 2019. Acrylic on canvas, 56-1/2 x 71 inches (143.5 x 180 cm). Photo: Sam Monaco.
What do you think or hope will be different after this crisis has passed?
I hope that we may come out the other side of this painful time with a better appreciation of our resourcefulness but also of our interdependency. That goes for both social and political relationships. No man is an island, as John Donne so succinctly put it.
What is bringing you solace or even joy in this moment?
So many things. I found an unexpected apple tree growing wild amidst the shrubby dogwoods and have been watching closely as pink buds turn to ripening green fruit. We are all exploring the gifts of video chatting – sharing cocktails, laughs, news and tears with my nephew in Copenhagen and friends in far off Manhattan. I paddle quiet lakes and hike with the dogs along the Appalachian Trail.
Gail Rothschild, Leviathan, 2019. Acrylic on canvas, 70 x 105 inches (178 x 266.75 cm). Photo: Sam Monaco.
What research or writing are you doing that you find compelling?
I’m a bit old school. My social media posting may be sporadic, but I write a lot of e-mails to keep up with collectors, curators, and critics. I’m going through notes from the conference in Copenhagen I presented at in March—The Color Blue in Ancient Egypt and Sudan. Since no one is coming to the studio now, and there are no serendipitous meetings, I figured what better time to reach out and make new connections? As a result, perhaps of everyone being hunkered down, I now have exciting new correspondents in Israel, Italy, Sudan and China. Invitations to visit and work together—when that is possible—inevitably lead to new research and discoveries. I can get lost in arcana like the commandment in the Torah that describes the brilliant blue of tekhelet – the fringes that observant Jews wear--but how was that color synthesized from murex snails? And what was the connection between the textiles found in the Qumran Caves outside Jerusalem and the texts they protected, such as the Dead Sea Scrolls? “I have been thinking about the Silk Road, both historically and metaphorically,” I wrote to a museum director in China, “and hoping for an opportunity to respond to it with my art. I firmly believe that celebrating the Silk Road and the movement and intermingling of knowledge, cultures and beliefs is particularly crucial and apt in this time of pandemic. It should serve as an antidote to the dangerous diseases of fear and xenophobia.”
Gail Rothschild, Renpet, 2019. Acrylic on canvas, 79-1/2 x 34 inches (202 x 86.5 cm). Photo: Sam Monaco.
What are you reading?
I don’t always have time to sit and actually put my eyeballs on the page; so, I’m a big consumer of audiobooks. I am listening/reading Circe by Madeline Miller, The Golden Thread by Kassia St. Clair, Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer, The Silk. Road: A New History by Valerie Hansen, also the Autobiography of Rosa Bonheur. I have to include my YouTube obsession with the Art History videos by Beth Harris and Steven Zucker (@smarthistory_official).
Gail Rothschild, Vanitas, 2020. Acrylic on canvas, 63 x 55 inches (160 x 140 cm). Photo: Sam Monaco.