An American artist in France - Sarah Essex
SARAH ESSEX
THE CELEBRATION OF THE STORY EDITION CONTINUES.
WE CAUGHT UP WITH THE ARTIST SARAH ESSEX AFTER A MOVE FROM LOS ANGELES TO THE COUNTRYSIDE IN FRANCE TO FIND OUT HER STORY. HERE’S OUR CONVERSATION.
Where do you live and how did your relationship with France begin?
At the moment, living right on the Gironde just above Bordeaux, in the most beautiful stone manor I had ever seen. Every morning, I wave hello to the most magnificent grapes across the water - Pauillac, Margaux, Le Haut-Medoc, my kind of wine country. It wasn't on purpose, but I bought this abandoned 17th-century pile of rocks with a big enclosed courtyard on top of the estuary about 25 years ago, and for peanuts. I threw myself body and soul into restoration, doing much of the heavy work myself, not having a clue of what I was doing. I just knew I was supposed to bring life back into this place. The plan is to turn it into a foundation for artists to come and thrive - paint, record, and write. It is a party house by birth, you see. No one actually lived here when it was built. It was always for showing off the view and wild parties by wealthy noblemen. I love the link I feel between the historical past and the present need for indulging in the name of mental health!
Chenac Manorhouse with Romeo, the family’s Great Dane
I had been married in my early twenties to a Parisian filmmaker from a family of prominent art patrons. His father created ArtCurial when no one was thinking of additional platforms for artists as we do now. ArtCurial was making editions of an artist's work to wear or to live on and with. It was revolutionary at the time. So, even though we lived in LA, I would spend months in France and drink up the culture like a thirsty puppy.
Our marriage didn't last, but the idea of living in and with art did. Years later, I happened upon this house on the back of a motorcycle. Like it was just sitting there waiting for me. Then, famously, getting local artisans to show up for the work wasn't easy. My broken French went from charming to excellent as I bribed the team with beer, cooking and jokes. Finally, I began to watch and imitate the artisans and do some of the work myself. Plastering with lime, masonry, carpentry, laying stone, copper plumbing... I even bought my own 'petite' handheld jackhammer. This is how I finally gained their respect and became an honorary French compagnarde.
That crew, a gang seasoned in every sense of the word, taught me everything I use today in my art. The way they handled their heavy tools like extensions of their fingers, smelling the massive wood beams to see where they might bend, or the excitement over a perfect batch of lime plaster will forever thrill me. To this day, I'm still chipping away as the restoration never ends in an old French house. It's impossible, really. Just when I think it's too much work and I've had enough, I walk out through the courtyard, look out at the Atlantic sea and witness the most extraordinary sunsets I've ever seen. Most evenings, the skies in my nook of France have a profound knowing about them, and everything else falls away. It's like a drug. I wish the artisans could come back around for a beer, but they're all dead now.
The Essex home in Los Angeles, 2019. Featuring The Truth by Sarah Essex. Courtesy of the artist.
You were born in Los Angeles, tell us about your childhood?
My childhood was a steady diet of 'pretend' and premature maturity. It felt like putting on a series of face masks made out of real skin. I was always an old soul and too sensitive to take in the rollercoaster that life was, so I became a skillful actress at an early age. The highs were high, and the lows were low. I am a true Angeleno, but I was raised between NYC and Southern California in my early years. I love my New Yorker roots by birthright and have always felt that is probably the keel to my stormy ship.
I am a love child of the 60s. My parents were a sort of Marilyn Monroe and Arthur Miller affair that met in a nightclub in Manhattan in 1964. My father, Harry Essex, was a devout New Yorker from Coney Island, a playwright who wrote The Creature from the Black Lagoon and Mickey Spillane TV crime shows; inventing the swinging light bulb in and out of the interrogation scenes. He wrote John Wayne movies, and so much more. He was as good at telling stories as he was at writing them.
Sarah Comstock, my mother, could sing like Billie Holliday and looked like a beautiful cube of sugar but was what they used to call "kooky". She was from a holler in West Virginia and referred to everyone else as "damn Yankees". Both were incredibly talented painters and sculptors and lived in a theatrically dramatic style, with or without money and a lot of booze. My mother and I flipped from coast to coast, sometimes following, sometimes dodging my father - who was sometimes following and sometimes dodging his wife. Growing up as an only child (there are half-siblings, but we didn't really get a chance to know each other), I spent much of my childhood feeling alone. Just making it all up. That wide Santa Monica beach by the pier was my babysitter for what seemed like days at a time.
Sarah Comstock and Harry Essex Courtesy of Sarah Essex
I've never been sure why, but my mother was an exceptionally devoted devotée of transcendental meditation and the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, and followed him across the earth; so, of course, I became the first "child initiator" in the program at nine years old. We had spent a year with him in Belgium (who needs school when you're young), and then back to California.
I attended an all-girls college prep high school in Glendora which was a continuation of the Catholic education that a brief stepfather had started when I was ten, which infuriated my Jewish father. I vividly remember shouty phone calls between the so-called grown-ups. School was a raft for me. I knew how to "do" school and what answers they wanted to get an A. And I rather liked their idea of Jesus at Catholic school, but more like he was the one friend of mine with a moral compass, an uncle who wanted the best out of me. I never subscribed to the punishing act of confession or the rest of it, but the comfort was real. The other girls at the prep school started talking about college applications, so I filled one out too. ONE... to UCLA. I graciously signed all the papers for my sleeping mom, got accepted, and went. My childhood was a reflection of my parent's passionate tempers and my naive burning desire for more.
Working on The Surrender by Sarah Essex
How did you become an artist?
I actually tried pretty hard NOT to become an artist. On any level. But I already was. Poisoned at the well. Drawing like it was a job, publishing books, oil pastels, and acting onstage before age ten. I didn't have any other examples of what life was. In my childhood, it was normal to step over famous musicians crashed out on the couch and all over the floor from the night before, eating breakfast toast that might have an accidental dab of plum-coloured oil paint from the same table as the butter and jam, or jumping in the car to catch the sunset at the beach, but dinner for the kid - a far away thought. I had been living the cliché boho art life ever since I could remember.
When it came time to choose for myself, I was ready for something else. I was reaching for what I thought was more elegant, classy, and moneyed. I ended up with an International Relations pre-major at UCLA and followed my boyfriend to England. It was early July, Stratford-upon-Avon, and I witnessed Antony Sher play Richard the III. My entire being split in two. The real me revealed. Weeks before, I had promised my playwright father that I wouldn't pursue acting. (He used corny phrases like the "casting couch"; in retrospect, I am certain his director hat had first-hand knowledge.) But that production and that actor! I was all in and graduated college as an accomplished theatre major, skipping off to Hollywood. I've been an actor, a director, and a writer riding various waves ever since. But painting has been the constant. My dear friend, always there. Always with inviting open arms and nothing but room to grow. Painting is such a dirty flirt.
Opportunities and commissions started appearing. I mixed handmade organic pigments from 16th Century recipes. It all seemed to find a quiet place when I discovered the process of Gold Leaf. I was immediately seduced and still am. I produced my first art show in an old tire garage covered in grease with concrete walls. We threw hay on the floor, hung the paintings fromrusty chains, and had an oyster bar with great wine. It was theatrical and effective. I like going outside the box and cutting holes to get in. Most of the time, I paint and play with arty chemicals because it's just so intoxicating (pun intended). Like being an explorer of land or sea, you don't personally know about. Doesn't matter if someone else has already been there. It will be new to you when you go there. You will see it in your way. Always different. Always new. Art.
Tell us about your process?
My process is long and short. The long is, every day that I am not actually painting, I am imbibing. It all goes into the soup. I walk the woods, scrape the sand on the beach, smell the intense 'green' of the freshly cut wet grass, and see bright colours when Bowie hits a high note. I cook with a certain palate in mind, and when I read about "the perfume of her breath conjured a colour that I had never seen", it makes me want to create that hue. Mostly I study many sunsets and skies.
These skies and specific drifts of barely colour, luminous beyond measure, have intense colours with no names that begin to create movement in me. I long to capture a feeling. A wildness. A swelling.
And the short of it is, being prepared to capture this inspiration. I have several supports primed and ready so that I can do light, easy, oily washes to find the rhythm and line to the piece. Sometimes, I will lightly sketch in charcoal for something I think is going to go dark. Once I have that initial abstract "dance" of the landscape, I use a fast-drying glaze with my oils so that I can layer up as many flights as I can and create that elusive luminous quality of nature.
Some paintings just fall out of me quickly, without a lot of thought, it’s very intuitive, and only takes the time for the paint to dry, and some paintings make me bleed - never knowing when to stop. Using powdered stone and carving into the heavy bases are taking up more of my time lately. It's always a balance between raw and polished. Classical beauty and dirty unearthed poetry living hand in hand is where I'm at today. I love it when something really ugly and unformed becomes a pearl, shimmering like something naive.
A New Road by Sarah Essex. Work in progress
Living between continents, what inspires you about being in France?
The moment I started running around Paris alone, I felt a knowing. It was heady, like perfume. I felt as though I had come home after a long time away. I was so thirsty for it, and I was only nine years old. I am not French, but I slipped right in. I had never fantasized about old-world Europe in my make-believe childhood, but it seemed to unfold before my eyes and swallow me up. Kings, Queens, castles and daggers, Brigitte Bardot, Serge Gainsborough, cigarettes, cinéma, all of it. France, her elegance, the food, the music, the discipline, the arrogance, the sex, the naughtiness, the stone and wood soaked in beeswax and untold stories embraced me like a long-lost secret Auntie from the other side of the family.
Now, as an artist, I am here for the light. And, the long stretches of big sky in the countryside, horizons sliced up by the random white dirt roads connecting the crops and fields. It makes an emotional patchwork. You know, "till the soil dawn til dusk", hardship and reward. You can actually hear it on the wind.
Inspiration is free and abundant on the coast where I am. There is very little to physically get in the way of having your own conversation with the land, sea, and skyscapes. So often, it's as though I am looking at the real 18th Century painting that I have seen in the museum. I love bathing in the past lives of these European spirits. I've had my suspicions since the early visits to France, but, Im certain now. I need both continents to feel balanced. As an American wildcard, raised without many boundaries or structure and so much T.V., France calms me down with her culture, tradition, and that famous subtlety of grey and pale yellow light. There is a duality of excess and restraint here that Americans don't practice. Full blown Bacchanalian "joie de vivre" but -absolutely no snacking between meals! (Don't be vulgar.) I need life in France so that I can explore my own limits as an artist. France loves artists and values what we try to do.
Over The Aga by Sarah Essex
And what inspires you about living in Los Angeles?
The topic of beauty has churned in my brain for as long as I can remember. It is not unique to Los Angeles, but the underbelly and the primitive darkness that creates alluring beauty, in my opinion, is everywhere in this tiny part of the world. I'm not talking about the obvious, but more of a subconscious human need for beauty. My mind feels stimulated observing the juxtapositions of land, people, and climate - the melting pot.
Also, It is exciting without being overwhelming. I never knew how deep the Cali gal lived in my heart until I moved to France. I have a history with LA; it is in my bones. Southern California has a legendary warmth and absolute entitlement to ease and flow. It is hilarious, mockable, and serious all at once. As much as I adore and crave the tempo of walking at a good clip through the streets in NYC, rushing to an appointment, I love the smell of a lazy Sunday morning in LA. I've lived on the top of magical Laurel Canyon, the hills above the streets of Los Angeles, most of my adult life. There is a walk we do at night along the crest on a little dirt road that has dominion over the whole city - you see downtown on your left and all the way to the beach on your right. It's like a blanket of shimmering diamonds, emeralds, and rubies - the lights. It fills me with a confidence and a desire to be and give more. Despite its very real and urgent problems, Los Angeles is still relatively the ‘land of good and plenty, milk and honey’. If you have a business or creative idea and want to develop that, you can.
Feu by Sarah Essex
Oil and 24k gold leaf on Birch panel 120cm x 56cm
What's the best and worst advice you've ever been given?
BEST - Everything you do is a valuable experience.... either you lived through it and you're stronger for it, or it killed you. But you're dead, so what the fuck do YOU care. - Harry Essex
WORST- Go to bed, go sleep and finish in the morning when you are fresh. NO! all the good stuff happens when you're exhausted; when you are about to give up, you surrender.
What motto do you live by?
You never know if THIS is THE day.
When you woke up, the day happened, you didn't know it was going to happen, so every day could be THAT day that the thing you've been conjuring comes to find you! It's the eternal optimist firmly planted in me. That, and "Champagne is for breakfast".
The Surrender (again) by Sarah Essex
What are you currently working on?
My mother passed away unexpectedly last year. She used to always snap her fingers and say "Damn it!" and wished she had bought whatever painting I had just sold. She was sorry we couldn't all have one. So, it occurred to me I should finally listen to my mother and all the others. So, the plan is a limited series of signed prints, hand embellished with 23K gold leaf, which will roll off the presses in Paris this spring.
I've also started preparing an exhibition for summer/fall 2023 that is a road map of navigating loss and thriving because of it. So far, it is a mixed media of a traditional nature, but I'm falling toward digital work and playing with chemicals.
Who knows. Maybe today is that day!
EXCLUSIVE LIMITED EDITION PRINT
ON SALE NOW
$200
FEU BY SARAH ESSEX
An exclusive limited edition of 100 fine art giclée prints on archival paper
Signed & numbered by the artist.
Each print hand finished with 24k gold leaf by Sarah Essex.
Paper size is A3 (13.8” x 16.5” or 35 cm x 42 cm)
Image size is A4 (11.7” x 8.27” or 21 cm x 29 cm)
Printed in France.
Ships within Europe usually in 1-2 weeks. Ships to US and other continents in 2- 3 weeks.
