Interviews

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 This interview with artist Fern T. Apfel took place on April 15th in her home studio located in Kinderhook NY.  

Erin: I’m curious as to how you start a piece? I’m aware you collect a lot of paper, notes, etc., so can you give me an overview of how you began working?  

Fern: I think of myself as a still life painter always, and I like to say that I’m just painting pictures of paper, because people think that it’s collage. So, it's not traditional still life but it is in a sense if you think of it that way, and it's easier to understand.  Years ago, I gradually got into collage and cutting up the words to create my own stories with them. At some point, with some guidance, because everything of mine was collaged on glass I was told to come out from under the glass. So then instead of collaging the words I began writing them myself and its huge freedom because I don’t have to worry about the type, the color, anything. So now I use a lot of tape and I tape called Nitchie bon tape from Japan and do a lot of measuring to make sure it's even because that’s important to me. There's a lot of text artists who have stuff all over the place. In a sense it's very geometric, very color focused, and much more abstract and much more minimal. 

I have a solo show in Woodstock in June which I’m now getting ready for and there's some big pieces in that show which are all based in illuminated manuscripts and Persian miniatures. It's just something I've always loved, and they have a lot of text so it's kind of a perfect pairing, anyways all this stuff has been in boxes for years until I came back from my show in Lake George, and I got involved in collaging on this museum board and working on grammar and language all things like that.  

E: So, would you say the text in this case the manuscripts are informing your color choices? 

F: So, I start with thinking about what I want to do and mostly the writing is the last thing I do unless I get it all done “I don’t like it I'm going to change everything now”. And I try hard to not have to rewrite and to work around the writing part and maybe change the color which I’ve done quite a bit, just recently I had to totally paint over one and change the color underneath the writing, so I had to rewrite everything. It was a real pain. It just depends some things just sort of work out more easily than others, so mostly I first decide on the geometry of what I’m doing and how I want it to do and then I do the color and most of the colors are done over and over and over again to get the kind of look I want it's all acrylic paint so the more layers I put on the paint collects at the edges and that’s what I want. I like to say the higher the ridge the more you know that I struggled to get the right color.  

*While this is happening, Fern takes out some paintings and shows me the ridges with the tape as mentioned*  

F: So, I’m definitely a reworker. 

E: Yes a reworker, but I can see that the text is near perfect though I know you hand write everything. Is that something that you had studied such as different text types, how did you get to this point with text?  

F: Actually, of course I measure it and then I take the tape and I’ll have tape on the bottom line, decide how fat I want the line, then I'll tape the top of the line. But you can still easily get off because even the point of your pencil changes and there's so many things so I’m constantly measuring and remeasuring, so it takes a lot to do that. Other than that, I just look at it and copy it. Like anything it’s practice so I have gotten better at it but I can't lose my concentration when I’m doing it. Like I can't start letting my mind wander about what I’m going to have for dinner or something. I could easily go off, when I’m really into it it gets really meditative, but you really have to stay on track.  

E: When you mess up on one little letter do you go in and fix it with a little paint? Or would you have to start the entire line over?  

F: I use pen to do the writing. I use all kinds of archival pens. *Shows me* It would be almost impossible to do all that with a brush even a 000. So, I use pens, sometimes I can scratch it out and sometimes I leave them in. Like if it’s a mistake in spelling, like if I'm copying a letter from somebody and the letter itself has mistakes in it, I’m like “should I keep the mistakes?” like I want it to be authentic and it feels like that would be the right thing to do. Like just before you came, I was reading what I just got this new letter and its so illiterate and I’m not sure if the person was illiterate or if the person was a kid, it doesn’t seem like they were, I don’t know. It was really amazing.  

E: That’s cool, you kind of get to learn other people's life stories and then archive them.  

F: Yeah, yeah, it's kind of fascinating sometimes you get so into the letter and the people that I start googling them. Like what happened to them did they survive WW2?, it's kind of fascinating.  

E: How would you say that lockdown and Covid 19 changed your perspective on art?  

F: Well, just so you know, I worked in a library for many years full time. I did my art early in the morning, late at night, holidays, you know. Pushed it all over the place because it's hard to make a living. And so, I had retired just before Covid started maybe it was a year, so I love and feel like it’s a gift that I can spend all day in my studio. And to be honest, I was fine going to work every day. I was very invested in my job, but I love being home in the studio. I think it was the hardest on young people who want to be out but for me I’m so happy to finally not have any pressure to go anywhere. It so suited me. But it did affect how I was thinking because I had started this series which I had been working on for quite a while, a year or two years. I called it “Dear Nobody” it was letters and envelopes I wanted it to be anonymous I wasn’t interested in letters for famous people or things like that. I just wanted all this mundane stuff. It morphed the way I was thinking. It started because I have this cousin she was on Instagram, and she started posting ‘day one this is how I feel” “day two” and goes on. She was documenting thinking it would be over and at some point, abandoned her counting because it seemed endless. But it made me really think about how we track our days. So, it started a new group of paintings that had a lot of diaries in them and people tracking their days. I call that section “tracking the days” and there was one painting that was just called that, which was the first one that I did. So that started a thought process about what day it is, what did I do today, and I had some anyway, but I started getting the journals of people and thinking about that. That was the biggest thing that affected me. It was very personal because it affected my art.  

E: Where are you getting all of your information? I'm sure there is a plethora of places.  

F: I started with two boxes of stuff from my parents who had died years before, so I had my own stuff and then I had my husband's stuff he had some boxes. I started there. I used to love to go to antique stores and bookstores pre covid. Flea markets, sometimes you would find a letter, sometimes it was just this really old book that spoke to me about what it was saying. And then I was cutting up this stuff too, so it was very different. And some still life objects, old game instructions. Once Covid hit I discovered e-bay and Esty. Now it's all a lot cheaper than when I went to book fares, I can get it cheaper online. It's fun.  

E: It's definitely a lot of research. Are you ever running out of ideas? I can't imagine.  

F: I have so many. Right now, I want to finish up what I’m working on because I have a dozen more ideas of things I would like to do. You have to pick and choose what idea you think you might be the most successful with because somethings I look at and I go Im not sure. Even this morning I have been playing with ideas for a while and I’m trying to figure out what to write on it and how I want to do the writing and what color the writing will be. Sometimes I know but not always.  

E: I can totally relate to that. Do you have any advice for young artists? What do you wish you would have known?  

F: Well I think first of all, I think I was clueless as a young person. And I had no idea how to have a career. I spent a couple years trying to do good work trying to save the world and that didn’t work out. *We laugh* Anyway um so now I see young people and I don’t have an MFA, but I wish I had. I was naïve. I wish I had been more focused on how to go about that in a more realistic way. And I would have gone back to get the MFA, I know somebody here who an art student was, and she's represented by a gallery, she's very young, she decided now, she's doing well but she's decided to go back and get her MFA. When I saw her at her opening, she said she was unsure if she should gp back. I told her “I think it’s a great idea”. It may help your art, but you can make really good connections with the other students that may last a lifetime and on paper the art world is its own business. It opens things up to you. I think it might be a great idea to take a few years off to work for an art organization and there are some places you might make better connections with than others so look into who you would be studying with.  

E: Well, you show that not everyone needs to go the traditional route in order to have a successful art career. And that brings me to the end as those were all my questions, so thank you.  

F: Of course.