Selina Trieff

COVER FEATURE Selina Trieff “I’m on a Quest” By André van der Wende 36 PROVINCETOWNARTS 2012 volleys of productive activity despite her considerable physical disability. A recent rogue fall resulted in a broken ankle and six weeks of convalescence at Provincetown’s Seashore Point Wellness and Rehab Center. She took it in stride, bringing her drawing materials along and filling volumes of sketchbooks with her muscular drawings of heads. “I did a whole book after book of these strange drawings and that was fine,” she says with typically dry understatement. The accident has necessitated a move from her spacious ground-floor studio, where she produced her large paintings, up to the smaller confines of the second floor. “I miss working big, really big,” she admits, referring to her large six-by-five-foot drawings and paintings, but concedes that the light up here is far superior—“just terrific.” So is the view, beyond the lum- beryard onto the teeming petri dish of Wellfleet’s Duck Creek. One of her sketchbooks is propped open at the drawing table, where she sits in an arm- chair surrounded on both sides by an arsenal of black Sharpies. She has only recently returned to painting, able to stand at her easel with minimal assis- tance, her brushes and paints pulled in close for easy access. An audience with Trieff is to bask in her sanguine presence while sharing in the benefits of her lifelong exploration of what makes a good painting. A direct line to art history, the inside of the large, white triple-decker house is like a trapezium museum of multiple rooms and hidden corners crammed A necessary tool in the creative act, articulation is an aggressive, expressive act in defiance of death itself. — Anne Bogart, And Then, You Act HIS PAST WINTER, unfettered by increasing fragility, Selina Trieff remained active as always. When we first meet in early Novem- ber, Trieff and her husband, the artist Robert Henry, have been preparing for a joint show at the local Wellfleet library. “I’ve always felt that whenever you’re invited to show, you show,” Trieff explains. T“That’s my theory.” She also exhibited at the Addison Art Gallery in Orleans; was one half of a two-person show at the Cape Cod Museum of Art with her good friend, sculptor Del Filardi; and showed her work in two exhibitions at the Provincetown Art Association and Museum, one of which featured her remark- able portrait of Quentin Crisp, the English raconteur and gay icon, a painting that reveals this artist’s interest in the assertive articulation of portraiture. This summer a large cache of her work, recently pulled from storage in New York, will be on exhibit at the Berta Walker Gallery in Province- town, marking the return of work not seen for years. Transcending the Now: A Prophet Paints is the exhibition’s incisive title, indicating the presentient nature of Trieff’s imagery. In her seventy-eighth year, Trieff continues to fire with paintings, framed drawings, sculpture, assemblages, photographs, and prints from an ever-increasing historical span of colleagues and friends. Here, the art is alive and meant to be lived with—shared as a vested living history that still buzzes with prodigious activity. Henry’s studio occupies the top floor, the patter of music and construction punctuating our conversa- tion like an ambient murmur. Clearly, Trieff’s capacity is diminished, but she continues to draw and paint every day, hit the gym thrsee times a week, and maintain an active teaching schedule of critiques and figure-drawing classes through PAAM. Now entering her seventh decade of artistic commitment, Trieff’s story continues to evolve and multiply. To know Selina is to know her unsullied warmth, grace, and good humor in the face of adversity, with a snappy and dry, topical wit that could only have come from being born and raised in Brooklyn. Today Trieff’s art is most synonymous with her by-now classic signature style of slim-line andro gyny: stylized figures with pale mask-like faces; silent, nameless clones or sentient beings draped in heavy robes or sheathed in leotards while consorting with a menagerie of domestic animals and death FACING PAGE: SELINA TRIEFF; CLOCKWISE FROM TOP: PILGRIM, 2008, OIL ON CANVAS, 24 BY 24 INCHES; itself. When John Russell called Trieff “an American original” in the New York QUENTIN CRISP, 1981, OIL ON CANVAS, 36 BY 36 INCHES PHOTO BY CHRISTOPHER DUFF; Times, he wasn’t resorting to a tidy cliché; he meant it with all the generosity SELINA IN HER STUDIO WITH HER SKETCHBOOKS PHOTOS OF THE ARTIST BY PHIL SMITH PROVINCETOWNARTS.ORG 37 the more involved I become, falling under their cool come-hither and restless melancholy. Soon, the viewer becomes inured to the familial pull of the figures, touching upon the need for one to accept unconditionally the strength of character required to maintain family and the self simultaneously. We are not sure where we are or if we belong in Trieff’s world—an alternate plane, an afterlife per- haps? Her figures are theatrical, minimally staged, often in pairs or small clusters of threes or fours, dressed in a timeless vaguely medieval costum- ing that trades in stock characters. Reprising the sixteenth-century commedia dell’arte of roving performers for the late twentieth century, Trieff acts out her own improvisations of figures consorting, conspiring, huddling, and embracing. The solitude of the figures, the heavy burden of mortality that pervades Trieff’s classic work, is like a Technicolor still from The Seventh Seal. The star- tling apparition of Death in Ingmar Bergman’s classic film must have had a profound impres- sion upon the young Trieff when she first saw it at Amos Vogel’s Cinema 16, so uncanny is the hooded mask-like resemblance of Death to Trieff’s own incarnations. Squaring off with mortality, Trieff makes friends with death, knowing full well we all face its inevita- bility. Without it, there is no life. Yet there’s nothing morose in her acquaintance with death, its mel- THE CARDINAL AND THE PIGS, 1987, OIL ON CANVAS, 60 BY 60 INCHES ancholy certainty, its pervasive current; instead, the mood sustains us with comforting strength. In that the label commands. You can spot a Selina retreat. A distinctive and inherent push and pull in With a Yellow Skeleton (1985), the skeleton in ques- Trieff painting immediately. Trieff’s paintings cause them to exist in a middle tion seems almost happy, not with sinister intention, At times uncomfortable, with their punished bul- space that actively involves the viewer in a response but as a presence to administer comfort, not fears, bous noses and an unnervingly deep, direct gaze, that can be as aversive as it is compelling; one is over the plateau of life. “A very dear friend of mine Trieff’s figures capitalize on the viewer’s disquiet, uncertain how to regard them, unsure whether one died a long time ago now,” Trieff explains. “We were poised, as they are, in a nether state of allure and has walked in intrusively or is being invited into an very close—if I ever had a sister, she would be that inner circle of protective embrace or person—and I got involved with painting the skel- cultish enslavement. eton as an honor to her. The idea of mortality got Much has been made of their andro- into a lot of my paintings.” gynous nature, something that to Trieff Trieff was born to Jewish parents. Her mother “just happens, and that’s fine.” Her fig- was Polish; her father was a London-born dentist; ures are not about gender per se, even yet when we touch upon religion, spirituality, and if they ultimately appear more feminine the influence of her ethnic background, she denies than masculine. They are stoic, author- any overt connection to the faith she abandoned itarian, sometimes blank and bleak, long ago: “There was a synagogue near where we but with a strident bearing such that lived in Brooklyn, and my father stopped going after the longer I engage and consort with his mother died. My father decided ‘It’s not for her skeletons, cardinals, jokers, and me,’ and I myself said, ‘Well if he doesn’t have to clowns with their attendant animals, go, I don’t have to go.’” FAR LEFT: SELINA WITH GOAT PHOTO BY NORMA HOLT LEFT: RED GOAT ON YELLOW, 2001, OIL ON HYPRO, 18 BY 24 INCHES 38 PROVINCETOWNARTS 2012 Does she consider herself an atheist? Pondering, she says, “Pretty much so. At best an agnostic.” Nonetheless, Trieff’s work is rooted in a quasi- religious spirituality, a personal, nondenominational exploration of the self. While Trieff herself appears resolutely secular, her paintings transcend her “real world” persona for a parallel, devoutly spiritual one with strong autobiographical and familial connec- tions. She says she is able to reconcile this inherent contradiction between her public persona and her private spirituality: “There’s a deeper quality of what being religious is.” Her generous humanity squares with her passion for the transcendental power of the religious art of the early Renaissance. Trieff finds release from the noble quest for spiritual transcendence in her wonderfully energetic, often hilarious, and moving portraits of animals; the yang to her yin, the silly to her serious. “That’s why I decided to do all those chickens,” she says, “because you could be absurd. I can do that with the animals, play around and have that kind of fun with a reclining pig, where I couldn’t with a nude.

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