Photo by Carmen Troesser
This is how an artist sees: an elegant living room with a wingback chair, a fireplace, the beige light of late afternoon glowing through curtains—and, on the piano bench, a white plastic basket filled with tousled laundry.
Sole Van Emden has a master’s degree in architecture, but she’s always painted. Her father’s gift to her on her high school graduation was a wooden easel. After having her kids, she pulled that easel out and began painting again. Her breakthrough came in 2013, at the St. Louis Artists’ Guild and Galleries, with the solo show Light/Dark, a series of paintings exploring highway underpasses.
Last year, she started working on a series of small canvases, studies of interior spaces. She painted a marble bathroom, bottles lined up on a ledge, the reflection of light caught in the stone; a hallway so dark it feels like a tunnel, a series of hastily opened doors at the end of it; a view into a living room through an archway, with a tiny figure caught in the mirror hanging above the fireplace. Light is paramount. And though she paints the mundane spaces where we live our everyday lives, her aim is to imbue them with a sense of surprise.
Photo by Carmen Troesser
Photo by Carmen Troesser
“These relate to my bridge series,” she says. “It’s about light and dark. With the bridges, the viewer was underneath the bridge, looking into a scene beyond—they have the feeling of interior space—so I was thinking about that. You’re standing back from the scene, looking out into this space.”
Van Emden works hard to ensure that she paints for at least one hour a day. She rises early, gets the kids ready for their day, exercises, and is in her home studio by 10 a.m.
Before she picks up a brush, she does extensive preparatory work. She takes hundreds of photographs and edits them, then manipulates her images in Photoshop.
“There’s always a strong source of light,” she says. “I play with rendering them in black-and-white, or cropping them in different ways. About 10 years ago, I began using a Photoshop filter called Cutout because I was trying to reduce the amount of information in the photograph.”
Sometimes she tapes sheets together and paints a panorama. “Langton,” the painting with the laundry basket, is a panorama, placing the viewer between the dining room/kitchen and the living room.
Once she’s happy with her working image, she sketches the scene on the board. Then, because acrylic is so unforgiving in how quickly it dries, she works in layers, first blocking out the white, black, and neutral grays and then slowly adding warmer and cooler shades. She begins “looking at adjacencies, tonal differences and the edges between two planes. Finally, I revisit the entire painting.”
In many ways, these paintings spring from Van Emden’s logical architect self. But the work is also emotional.
“With the bridge scenes, I started thinking about the sensation of being by yourself and asking, ‘What is this world you’re looking at?’” she says. “I pulled that idea into the interior scenes so that most of the time in the foreground there’s something that separates you from what you’re looking at. That’s to create a sense of solitude.”
