Emma Rose Schwartz: “I start with whatever is irking me most”

Emma Rose Schwartz’s latest solo exhibition, ‘Old Mortality’ at Brunette Coleman, takes its name from a short novel by Katherine Anne Porter. But don’t let the literary reference fool you – these paintings are anything but stuck in the past. Instead, Schwartz dives into her childhood in Nashville and brings it into the present through layered works that capture moments of her own life mixed with influences from art history, pop culture and even old family photos. The houses in her paintings, for example, reflect the ranch-style architecture she saw as a kid in the American South. But rather than just nostalgic memories, Schwartz sees them more as tools for exploring who she is. Her protagonists – whom she describes as “fractals” of herself – are blended with references from cartoons to literature, making each scene feel both familiar and new.

A standout feature of Schwartz’s work is how hands-on it is. She rarely uses brushes; instead, she prefers getting messy with her gloved fingers, rags and even knives. Every layer of paint becomes a part of the story, revealing fragments of the past through her unique technique inspired by pentimento, where older decisions peek through the final surface.

The exhibition draws its name from Katherine Anne Porter’s short novel Old Mortality. In the story, the Rhea family’s collective memory is steeped in idealised versions of the past, particularly around figures like Aunt Amy, whose beauty, romance and tragedy are mythologised. The family, as Gary Ciuba notes, “desire the past that they remember yet remember the past that they desire.” This selective memory allows the family to maintain an idealised and often false narrative. Is this romanticised identity and the differences between myth and reality also something you interrogate in your work?

Absolutely. I think about the discrepancies we use to formulate identity. I think fiction, distorted truth, facts – consciously or otherwise – are all tools we use to create a self. And as the individual does, so does the family, community, neighborhood and so forth. This is perhaps the root cause of my interest in how time operates in images. I do not think of my paintings as nostalgic or longing for another time or place, but rather as operating on a less straightforward time plane where past and future selves or relatives, parallel and perpendicular, meet to generate a distorted picture.

Apart from the exhibition’s title, is literature important to you?

Yes, definitely. I basically only read novels and I am fascinated by fiction. But in terms of narrative, plot isn’t what draws me to novels – it is inner dialogue and the way an environment entwines with a person. I tend to think of my paintings using literary techniques like first and third person perspectives. Setting as a character is commonplace in American gothic novels. I am definitely influenced by that–how the ground is inseparable from what happens upon it.

Was there a specific experience that inspired you to start painting? 

I started to draw and paint more when I was 15. I grew up in Nashville, Tennessee. and my best friend’s parents had a lot of regional southern artists’ work in their house. It was very inspiring. There was an urgency and a disregard for perceptual perspective. To me, it felt like these artists painted people, places and things as they thought they looked, not as they actually looked like, which is sort of the opposite of what they teach you in art class.

Could you give us a glimpse into your studio and walk us through a typical day? What essential tools or objects are always present in your workspace?

I guess a typical day starts with having a coffee with my dog, Shoe. then go to the studio and look at whatever I am working on. Looking goes on for a while, I usually work on about five to eight paintings at a time. I then start with whatever is irking me the most, and I try to get rid of it or fix it. My method evolves seasonally I would say – every three months or so I shift my technique a bit. But essentially I always need a pink rubber eraser. The process of making the paintings is as much additive as it is subtractive for me. I am always removing what I did the day before.

In a conversation with Amy Stober, you discussed your appreciation for faux distressing, a “fake old” technique where objects or surfaces are made to look aged or worn. You made an interesting distinction between memory and familiarity in your paintings, as if you’re trying to evoke a feeling of them being seen before, even if they haven’t. Your description of them being “parallel to a memory” suggests that they feel like memories but aren’t true memories, more like a familiar echo. Can you elaborate on that idea of “fake old”?

My obsession with getting a painting right has led me to constant adjustments, and that process of erasure and destruction can create an imitation of aged material. It was not the original goal, but it is the effect. It is an act of convergent evolution. As I reflect on my impulses and processes, I see how my paintings have this effect at times and it then becomes part of my visual language.

Your palette is distinctive and consistent throughout your work. Could you talk about the role of colour in your practice?

My colour choices come from personal superstitions and associations. For example, Sanguine Conté crayons happened to mimic the colour of my hair when I was a child. Generally, I think of my work as an extension of my body, like something that fell out of my ear, so it tends to stay within that arena.

In your work, there’s a recurring tension between self and double, which can be found in paintings such as TV Sunrise, Certain Planet and Fortunate Relative. This ancient and universal concept of the doppelgängerhas roots in Greek and Roman mythology and is deeply connected to both psychology and German Romanticism. In Egon Schiele’s work, the concept of the double plays a central role, evolving throughout his career and culminating in pieces like Two Squatting Men (1918). Schiele’s doubles often symbolise a unity of opposites, such as life and death, inner and outer worlds, and reflect his Monist belief that death is not a threat but a renewal. What are you trying to mediate with your tension of the double?

I am very glad you brought this up and mentioned Schiele’s belief that “death is not a threat but a renewal”. The title of my show, from Porter’s work, points toward this. I associate mortality with painting, because it is defined by its edge or end, and of course, because the image is forever locked inside a box. The phrase ‘Old Mortality’ acknowledges how mortality becomes old, or irrelevant when you die. Essentially the idea is that the burden of mortality is only relieved in death. Of course, this irony is meant to comfort the grieving. For me, it epitomises a picture as the state in which something is being freed of mortality and defined by it all at once. I think it is the elephant in the room of any painting, the awkward inevitability that its boundaries cannot be separated from itself, and it is trapped.

The doubling that happens in my paintings is also meant to suggest the multi-bodied organism. The position that selfhood is synthetic because our lives are linked to our past and future bodies. Different eras of personal existence but also that of our ancestral lineage. I suppose this ties the living to the dead and unborn, to create a chain. When you think of death as a necessary link in the chain, it does reinforce Schiele’s stance that death is a beginning.

What do you love about painting?

I love painting because of how quickly one can conjure an image from a thought. There is an immediacy to it. I also find the edges of a quadrilateral painting to be endlessly maddening and relieving. The containment is ultimately the thing I am working with and against. There is something very silly about wrestling with a box.

Are there any artists who hold special significance for you?

Shaker drawings from the 18th and 19th centuries; Joan Brown, Pearl Blauvelt, and Egon Schiele were big influences on me. Brown’s paintings you have to see in person though because they are a lot more than the image. Louise Bourgeois had an impact on me too, to the point where her superstitions became my own for a while. Also Robert Gober.