Artist Statement

Julie Mehretu

doi:10.1353/cal.2014.0180

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Artist Statement
Julie Mehretu (bio)

In his interview with Julie Mehretu in this issue of Callaloo Art, Dagmawi Woubshet asks, “when you are making large pieces … like Cairo or a piece like Mural, I wonder how your own body relates to something that you are making that outsizes you?” Julie Mehretu responds, It is so performative, it really is improv. And usually to get into that state, I need that super loud music, so loud that I disassociate with my physical self. I am moving and working and not thinking when I get into that groove. Usually in paintings of that scale I work on sections. Sometimes I’ll jump from one side to another, one place to another, working the whole range. Usually in my process I come into the studio and spend the first half hour, hour, sometimes three, oftentimes longer (days) just sitting in front of the painting, looking, looking, just looking, until I am able to feel the engagement where I can dive in and draw. When it becomes inevitable, when the painting is yearning, when I cannot resist. When I am there, in that place, engaged, it is an almost disembodied experience where my head doesn’t get in the way of what I can do. That is not to say that I am making out of nothing, purely expressionistically, on the contrary, it comes from a very informed understanding and fluency of my language. However I can’t let my head lead, I need to be able to free myself to access that furtive place; otherwise what I make is repetitive, boring, and something else can’t happen, something new can’t arrive. Which is what I want and need for every painting—these new forms have to continue to develop and emerge and I feel like that can only happen when I get into that strange, fecund, sensual space. But it is very performative and very physical. Working on those scales I have to be careful, because I’m going up and down these lifts every few minutes, constantly moving around and if I’m working on high parts of the paintings, especially Mural, I go up and I draw a section and I come down within five minutes to see it from the ground, and then I go back up. So there is this constant back and forth—it’s pretty physical, exhausting. [End Page 777]