Prudence Flint’s Paintings Capture Moments of repose that are ripe for interruption
The women portrayed in Prudence Flint’s paintings are caught in moments of quiet, reflection, and impermanence. They appear fixed in a moment of repose ripe for interruption. Perhaps they are lying on the grass, or changing an infant’s diaper, or awash in warm water mid-shower. Regardless, there is a certain mood shared among her works.
Every one of Flint’s figures is adorned with the same stare. Their gaze is far from vacant. Their look is internal, not absent. She is a fan of cinema so it might be that her figures are imbued with the Kuleshov effect—a holdover from early Soviet montage theory—which suggests, in part, that an audience will derive great meaning from shots of an expressionless face intercut with an event. The same principle can be found in Mona Lisa’s unchanging and inscrutable smile. Blank faces turn figures into an avatar of the viewer. The mood in Flint’s paintings, then, is contemplative, soliciting the viewer to submit their own topic of contemplation.
Here is Prudence Flint in her own words, on the origins and scope of her artmaking:
Clayton Schuster (CS): I understand that you started your career in the ‘80s at a fashion magazine. What brought you to pursue that?
Prudence Flint (PF): In my early twenties, I graduated with a degree in design, majoring in illustration. My dream as a teenager was to work for Vogue Australia. It was a beautiful magazine in the ‘80s. I caught the overnight train up to Sydney for an interview. The chief editor was very nice to me. I did a few small illustration jobs but found it difficult to fulfill the briefs.
CS: Why difficult?
PF: It was quickly apparent that I was way too much of a dreamer and I wanted to do my own pictures.
CS: Why did being a dreamer make it difficult to continue at Vogue?
PF: I slowly realized I do good work when my imagination is free. It has taken many decades to find a way to do my own work so that it is satisfying.
CS: Then what brought you to painting, in particular?
PF: I started to acquaint and educate myself in art. I was living in inner-city Melbourne near the National Gallery of Victoria and Melbourne University, which offered free entry. I became interested in the contemporary paintings by women artists—powerful works that took up space on the gallery wall. So I went back to school and studied fine art. When I started painting with oils, I loved the solidity of it. Oil paintings create their own world and have their own parameters. I enjoy what it demands of you physically. You have to have yourself set up and committed. It has a history you have to push up against. An oil painting is a physical, unruly object in the world that demands reverence and space. Nothing quite compares.
CS: Your work is so very intimate and private. Can we talk about the reasons you keep returning to these intensely personal scenes focused on domestic spaces?
PF: The word “interiors” is more open ended. I prefer that word. “Domestic” has such dull connotations when it comes to women historically, as if all the freedom and eroticism has been leached out and stolen. Historically, female experience has been misrepresented, diminished and elided. I want to give this experience a voice. I read a lot of fiction and watch a lot of films. My favorite narratives are the ones where a female protagonist leaves the group to find her own way. My paintings are of familiar scenes—bedrooms, bathrooms, parks, and shops—all places that are loaded with sensory memories and significance. I try to open up an atmosphere where there is at once an intimacy and the unexpected.
CS: Does that idea tie-in with the idiosyncratic way you consistently depict physiognomy? I’m thinking of the small proportions of the heads and extremities.
PF: I’m not interested in tracing or projecting images to get any kind of visual accuracy. The bodies have to have weight and express a feeling. I don’t set out to do small feet and heads. Those evolve while I’m working on each painting until it feels risky and laden.
CS: What do those distorted features say?
PF: Distortion is how our experiences are formed. The everyday part of our thinking and visual memory is connected to fluid proportion. I draw everything free hand, in part to allow room for the unexpected and the wrongness. Sometimes I look back on an older work and wonder at some strange proportion I couldn’t see in the moment it was created. That interests me. Our perception of our bodies is not stable. Body dysmorphia is on a spectrum. We have a heightened awareness to largeness and smallness in bodies.
CS: And exactness or precision, then, sounds like a veneer.
PF: I’m not interested in visual precision because it isn’t how we exist or inhabit a body. I want to see what my unconscious does to the bodies I paint. I’m after some other kind accuracy to a feeling or an atmosphere.
CS: Do you have any tools that aid in searching for or uncovering that atmosphere?
PF: Photographs help. I might have an idea for a composition in my head, but I need to put myself in the pose to see how it feels and if it’s possible. I need to see how light hits all the parts of the body describing the form. I then get a friend to model for me. I’m in control, but it’s always enriching to see what another person brings to my idea. I avoid using the photos literally, I will use what interests me and make up the remainder. A face, for example, can take over a painting and a clear expression will bully and dictate to the viewer. Overblown expressions are like loud music. I want to turn it down and create room for other volumes, so other aspects of the painting can take effect.
Overblown expressions are like loud music. I want to turn it down and create room for other volumes, so other aspects of the painting can take effect.”
CS: Do you ever paint from a model?
PF: Yes and no. Having a model in my studio is intense and demanding, so when I’m working on my large paintings, I prefer to be alone. I have to sit with myself and manage the internal voices, listen to them, become impartial. I have to weather the tantrums, listen to the moments when I rise up and say: Enough.
CS: Would you say, then, that your preference is to paint from photographs rather than from life?
PF: The processes and results are so different, maybe too different to even compare. While I do draw and paint from life, it feels like an entirely separate body of work from what I’ve become known for. My work from life feels like another painting genre that is not as interesting to me. My large idea paintings require for me to create my own space and reality. I have to spend time with the painting and let it evolve. It isn’t a “look-and-put” situation.
CS: What happens when you feel that process stalling?
PF: Sometimes an idea will stay in my mind, but it remains unresolved because I haven’t found a way to make it work. I will draw it up and see the problems, the traps, the cliché. I need to sit with it for a while and see if I can find a way through. Paintings need to stay on track. Sometimes they can lose energy. Sometimes I see that I’ve been grappling with an idea for ten years and then, suddenly, I find a way to make it work as a painting.
CS: I’ve read that autobiography plays a big role in your process. Would you be open to describing a painting that has those roots?
PF: All my paintings are triggered by real-life experiences. A painting has to work on many levels. It has to talk to the paintings in history that have gone before. It has to contribute, and challenge known meaning in some way. The painting has to be self-aware. It has to be visually exciting to look at but maybe not in an overt or expected way. My painting “The Wake” comes to mind. My elderly mother recently died. I stood and watched her coffin get lowered into the ground. There is the obvious, literal reading of a funeral wake but also this urgent awakening to life passing. I’m sitting up, woken from a dream and it is quiet, daylight, intense—and I am alive.
‘Domestic’ has such dull connotations when it comes to women historically, as if all the freedom and eroticism has been leached out and stolen.”
CS: What happens when you feel that process stalling?
PF: Sometimes an idea will stay in my mind, but it remains unresolved because I haven’t found a way to make it work. I will draw it up and see the problems, the traps, the cliché. I need to sit with it for a while and see if I can find a way through. Paintings need to stay on track. Sometimes they can lose energy. Sometimes I see that I’ve been grappling with an idea for ten years and then, suddenly, I find a way to make it work as a painting.
CS: I’ve read that autobiography plays a big role in your process. Would you be open to describing a painting that has those roots?
PF: All my paintings are triggered by real-life experiences. A painting has to work on many levels. It has to talk to the paintings in history that have gone before. It has to contribute, and challenge known meaning in some way. The painting has to be self-aware. It has to be visually exciting to look at but maybe not in an overt or expected way. My painting “The Wake” comes to mind. My elderly mother recently died. I stood and watched her coffin get lowered into the ground. There is the obvious, literal reading of a funeral wake but also this urgent awakening to life passing. I’m sitting up, woken from a dream and it is quiet, daylight, intense—and I am alive.*
This article was first published in Hi-Fructose issue 50, which is sold out. Get our latest print issue by subscribing to Hi-Fructose here.
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