October 2024
Partial transcript of a studio conversation with author and musician Holly Nullmeyer held over a few days in the middle of October 2024. Part 1 (of 2, coming soon)

Nullmeyer: What brought you to Berlin? 

Shepard: I came here for 3 months for some work and unexpectedly met my partner - and stayed. I had very little knowledge of contemporary German painting beyond the marquee names.

Nullmeyer: How did you develop these paintings?

Shepard: This group intentionally took a long time to make - 6 years. They were begun in a different studio than the one I have now, so the wall situation was different. But the configurations were worked out first in cardboard and once locked in, swapped out for wood. Then the painting began. It was a more deliberate way of working. Almost like working out and applying the cartoon for a fresco before painting. The aim was to grow the work slowly.

One of the things about these paintings is they have no clear edge. The pieces activate the wall around them and you can’t really say where the painting begins or ends. The boundary is always moving depending on which piece you focus.

Nullmeyer: Can you talk about the shapes?

Shepard: Without the rectangle to measure by you have to come up with other ways. I need some simple geometry - a vertical or horizontal. The curves mainly relate to the edge of your eye - sometimes the edge of a hill, some water, a shoulder - and sometimes nothing at all. For this group of paintings I settled on a family of shapes. Generally, they work as moments of focus to build out with.

Nullmeyer: Some of them are really funky!

Shepard: Many are off somehow, and some really off. I cut them with a handheld jigsaw and sand the edges. My studio is in a residential area, so I have to make all of the cuts quickly in hopes of minimizing neighborly wrath.

Nullmeyer: How did you arrive at this way of working? 

Shepard: It was a long time ago, but there wasn’t any one clear moment. In my mid 20s I was working on these large wall sized paintings - 7’ x 12’, 6’ x 10’ etc oil on canvas backed with wood, and I lost my large studio. I had to move to a tiny, almost office space with a drop ceiling - but wanted to keep dealing with the wall. 

Growing up there was this increasing dislocation of an image from you: huge on a billboard, tiny in a pamphlet or newspaper coupon, everything in between, broadcast well or poorly. And I was starting to think about painting and place. Then suddenly everyone had a computer at home, pictures of everything were everywhere, and that dislocation compounded exponentially.

As a kid training in Italy, I had seen Leonardo's Last Supper in Milan and even though the paint was dark and mottled, the geometry in it locked the image to the whole room. You felt it right away. Fra Angelico only used a little paint on the walls in his cycle at San Marco, in Florence, and in some parts none at all, but he keyed his color to the tones of the building materials of the room - and Tuscan light infuses everything. So you can't tell where the painting starts, you’re already kind of in it when you approach -- it's mind-blowing. And, of course, the Sistine. Just a very different way of experiencing an image than we do today.

So all of this was going on inside me and the move to a smaller work space wasn’t the cause of this work, just the trigger. I was 27.

Nullmeyer: Now that you’ve been here a while, what do you notice that’s different / similar between European and American work? 

Shepard: Well it's certainly supported a lot more here than in the States. Governments spend tax money on art and not just tax cuts for billionaires and bombs. The support systems here aren't perfect, etc etc but their effect is to foster a sense of art, a model for art outside of being just a luxury item.

The pop-up gallery scene here is still thriving - people putting up shows for the week-end or 4 days - and pretty vital. It’s a great way to meet people and the community seems strong, but it’s not always a great way to see work.

As for abstraction here, a lot of work seems kind of constrained to me, polite. There’s a suspicion of abstraction, and people hedge their bets with concepts or a little figuration - which is weird since modern abstraction was invented in Europe. It feels like you have to explain what you're doing before you even start while in NY the validation is in the work itself - if it’s compelling to look at, it stands. But maybe I’m thinking only of an earlier time in NYC, - maybe a sort of visual conservatism is just an international condition right now.

Nullmeyer: What’s the migrant experience been like for you?

Shepard: It took me a while to get the light calibration in painting here. At first I thought German artists were color blind (!) It wasn’t until I saw a black and white photography show at the Berlinische Galerie that I understood the immense subtlety, nuance and just range in work here - hitting tones and microtones I’d never seen in photography. 

The light is very different than what I was used to on the East Coast. Northern European light has this silver in it which qualifies everything, and the sun is so low in the sky that it's often blinding. I finally understood why Beckmann put black lines around everything. The closest we have to light like that is in Maine - and Marsden Hartley - who, by the way, lived for a while here in Berlin. The light of a place forms your visual dialect.

I feel really lucky to have had the chance to move here, to live somewhere where my cultural assumptions aren’t reinforced - or worse: validated. It’s been great for the studio.

End of Part 1.