Character Study

For the Toronto artist Shelley Adler, the slow track is what it’s all about. The psychologically charged self-portrait Turning Away is arguably her most important work yet. To chart Adler’s progress, one need only compare the revised version of Untitled (boy looking down) (2007), a painting of her son Ruben, with an earlier version from 2006. In January, Adler asked for the painting back from her dealer, Nicholas Metivier.

After five months of on-and-off reworking, Adler produced a painting that is light-years beyond its pallid predecessor in confidence and expression. “Finding an image slowly allows the paint to speak,” she says. “The time it takes to make a painting is revealed in the work. Painting the human face has been Adler’s obsession for as long as she can remember. Adler’s own appreciation of art is generous and eclectic. As a fine-art student at York University, she was frustrated by the lack of support there for figurative painting, a situation common in North American art schools at the time. At Boston University, there was a non-judgmental embrace of representational art, historical and contemporary. The contrast with Toronto, where the tiny, progressive art community has never been particularly hospitable to figuration, was instructive. “Putting your life together as an artist after you finish school is really hard,” she recalls. I never stopped working, but I didn’t know how to deal with the gallery world. Adler married Paul Cohen in 1990 and worked as a courtroom illustrator for Global TV until the birth of their daughter, Zoe, in 1991.

The acquisition of her own studio in 2002 and the growing independence of her children have allowed Adler to paint more regularly and in a more focused manner. An ongoing project has been a series of fictional women with gigantic faces painted like close-ups of film stars; a newer body of work originated in casual snapshots of her children and herself around the house.

The imaginary women are derived from Adler’s image bank of faces from the 1960s, ranging from that of her mother to Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis. Riffing off the French Pop artist Martial Raysse’s 1963 painting of a dark-haired beauty with heavily made-up eyes, Adler invented her own characters in works such as High Tension Magenta (2006) and Untitled (blue woman) (2007). For years, she shied away from painting her young children, unwilling to air her ambivalence about motherhood. Although Freud, too, began by painting imaginary faces, he has long preferred to paint people he cares about, family members in particular. An artist in love with her medium, Adler handles paint like a living force. “Ultimately, that’s what painting is,” she says, “a network of relationships.”
At the Richter retrospective at the MOMA in 2002, Adler was riveted by the grim, blurry black-and-white painting, which was based on forensic photographs. Adler’s purpose was not to deconstruct or appropriate Richter or Dumas. That fine looking at your children, the space between a mother and child.”
“I’m coming from life.”

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