Lisa Yuskavage has the skill of an old master, the imagination of a manga illustrator, the naughtiness of a Catholic schoolgirl, and a serious art school education from Yale. Her color-drenched world of hyper-erotic female nudes defies all conventions of beauty, repression, power, and surrender. Amid such paradoxes, Lisa’s paintings resist simple interpretation. I met Lisa at her studio in Red Hook, Brooklyn.
SABINE HELLER — How would you describe your paintings? LISA YUSKAVAGE — Every aspect is imbued with mood or psychological importance. It's not just the figures. Each character and each element add characteristics. In Stanley Kubrick's film The Shining, when the camera follows the little boy down the hall and he stops, the camera keeps going. The camera isn't tracking the boy–it's got a mind of its own, which is spooky. In The Shining, a choice creates a psychic experience, and something jumps out of the film into the viewer, in a magical transition. The realization of this opened me up to the idea that everything you do can shift the way things are seen–that formal elements can be rich in their ability to overpower what's normal. I want an intense experience when I look at art. There's a difference between a figurative painting that's illustrative and one that has codes. All paintings illustrate something, but there's a way to go beyond the picture and add a psychic quality.