Theodora Allen on finding poetry in ruin

Last Autumn, the artist Theodora Allen and her husband went on a self-guided tour of Ireland, climbing over fences and through cow pastures to find stone circles among the weeds. “It got me thinking about ruins,” she told me recently in her suburban Los Angeles studio, and the way she had seen them be ultimately overtaken by plantlife. “Nature is the thing that remains, that will always regenerate.”

In ‘Oak’, her upcoming show at Kasmin in New York, paintings the size of windows and doorways appear as portals through cracked slabs of stone, ruins engraved with the outlines of hearts and infinity symbols. Illuminated by the blue and silver of a moonlit evening, oak saplings push upward through the ruins like delicate white ghosts. The soft white light itself comes from beneath the paint; the surface of the canvas has been treated with a white ground, carefully exposed through a slow and subtractive method of gently wiping thin layers of oil paint off. “It has to go through this slow process of things added and taken out, and finding this place where it’s neither fully formed or fully dissolved; it can’t have just never been there,” she said.

In Alhambra, Allen’s studio is a modest storefront with frosted windows facing the street, obfuscating views to the interior while allowing a generous influx of natural light. Keeping regular hours between nine and seven, “I’m pretty regimented,” she said. “Because the paintings tend to take a long time, I spend a lot of time alone.” Solitary by nature, she appreciates “the resonant slowness and sense of privacy” inherent to living in LA “Always being in a car, always in your bubble, there’s a certain amount of control of your environment,” she said. You’re really only seen when you want to be.

Allen grew up in LA – Studio City to be exact, where both of her parents were painters. Her father was a photorealist while her mother dealt in abstraction, although their day jobs were production designer and arts educator, respectively. Following in their footsteps, she graduated from UCLA’s stalwart MFA program, where she worked under the mentorship of the late Silke Otto-Knapp. “Silke was an incredibly warm and thoughtful person, while also being very harsh and honest with her criticism,” Allen recalled. Where they “butted up against each other,” she added, was in the fluidity of Otto-Knapp’s process. “Where I’m always walking this line of the limits of control, she would say, ‘Oh, you just put a mark down and let it be.’”

Allen, as evident in the razor-sharp edges of her paintings, is a devotee to precision, very much of the ‘measure twice, cut once’ school of thought. For the ruins in her Oak series, she might have sketched “50 different versions of how things are falling on top of each other,” fully resolving the composition through drawings before laying down any paint. “Preserving the light in the painting as something that’s coming from underneath and not being applied on top, that precision, or that intentionality is necessary,” she said, because changes to the composition leave traces, or “ghost images” on the surface. She does however relinquish control in a few of the finer details, namely the hairline fractures that erupt across the stone slabs, made from the stains of watercolor left on the canvas to evaporate. “As it dries, the pigment brushes to the edges, so it creates these concentric circles,” Allen explained. “They’re working as both the illusion of the striations in the rock like a natural, organic form, and it’s also this thing that I can push up against as I’m painting, this thing that I have no control over that’s created its own mark.”

The recurring floral and celestial imagery in Allen’s work is often categorised under the banners of the spiritual or esoteric, but the bookshelves in her studio point to other points of reference. Enclosed behind art nouveau stained glass doors are titles on William Morris, Arthur Rackham and William Blake – 18th- and 19th-century designers and illustrators that, like Allen, were heavily influenced by medieval imagery. “For a lot of the work from this show, I was thinking about the Apocalypse Tapestry,” she said, pulling out a book on the monumental 14th-century French tapestry. She was less interested in recreating its biblical imagery than its iconographic, almost magical reduction of form. “These natural phenomena that are sort of ordinary”—stars, rainbows, flames—“become these wondrous events standing in for something much larger,” she explained. “I’m drawn to this search for meaning, where a shooting star becomes something you would step outside of logic to hang your hopes on.”