Dionisia Salas

Dionisia Salas

Interviewed by Elspeth Pitt

EP:

Could you say something about your work to date, and where you feel you are as an artist at this time?

DS:

My experience of becoming close to my work, and my understanding of myself as an artist, came later

than others I know. There were aspects of my childhood and family history that overwhelmed me. My

young person was completely searching. That search has occupied the last twenty years. I’ve been

looking for something, trying things, trying new materials, trying new ways of working. Painting is so slow,

it’s such an accumulated skill. I couldn’t just work towards a show, I had to work all of the time, because

having a show and working towards a show is not enough. You have to make more work than that to get

the skill.

Within that bracket of painting are all kinds of choices: acrylic, oil, the mediums you might use, the size of

brushes…All aiming to get towards that expansive vocabulary. And then of course there’s the internal.

You see that regardless. To allow that to come out of yourself and into the painting–for the world to see

that–for me, at times, it was too much.

So it’s been a long, slow process. When I began making these works, that process suddenly crystallised.

It was frightening. I didn’t know what the hell was happening with this painting, With spent mouths (2023).

I felt I was losing the whole time I was making it. I was unsure if I was skilled enough to resolve the

problems in it. The painting wanted to take over. I was unsure of what was happening compositionally.

There were parts of it that I found abject and that was confronting. I was really letting go of what might

make a successful painting and trying to see it through to completion regardless of its challenges to what

I thought a painting should be. It was the first painting that wasn’t made in a communal studio space.

Nobody was looking. I was just making.

It happened, too, with To fall in spring (2022). When I was making it, it was slipping out of my hands but

at the same time, there was something in there that I needed. When it resolved it was such a victory.

There was something there that had never been there before. There it was, and I got it, I grabbed it.

EP:

So you’ve reached a point in which the works you’re making are unfettered and feel substantial. Can you

articulate what happened? As an artist, how do you know you’ve accessed your language, so to speak?

DS:

When I went to art school, everyone was investigating abstraction. It was a big question, this huge thing,

abstraction and acrylic painting. I became really involved in that as a student. Maybe that says something

about me at that time. But working with abstraction gave me an ability to see paint as language. The body

is also important in abstraction, in relation to the materials you use, or the way you use them.

I had been using oil paint when I was at art school, then I stopped and was using acrylics…but I never

had knowledge of how to combine acrylic mediums with paint to make it work to its full capacity. I would

always to read about acrylic mediums and think, “That sounds better than when I experience it. I can’t

make them do what’s described here.”

Anyway, when I made the recent paintings we were just talking about, all of that left the room. I had

returned to oil paint. Maybe that was why these new works felt so slippery, because oil is more fluid, it

stays open for longer. It’s this open material that you can come back to and rework into. I was working

with the painting, and in the painting, in a way where I didn’t know what was happening, what was going

to happen, and how it was going to arrive or resolve. And this was strange. Maybe there was a part of me

that was thinking about internal worlds. When these paintings finished, they were complete, whole. And

when people saw them and talked to me about them, they were reflecting back to me in their language

the experiences I had in making them.

EP:

It was like closing a circuit.

DS:

Yes. When I had friends, fellow painters, in the studio, they were drawn to them over anything else on the

wall. They would comment on them, they would say, “That’s doing that thing, that’s working.” The

paintings were affirmed somehow.

EP:

What does it mean or entail to have viewers involved in your work? How How does the painting function?

DS:

When I make the work, I’m not thinking about the viewer at all. They’re not that important in a way, but in

another way they’re everything because without a viewer the whole art world crumbles.

If a work isn’t working, it’s often because I’m thinking of something that somebody else has said. Having

people I value, with experience, comment on my paintings, used to cripple me. It was my own psychology

tripping me up. Being older, I don’t hear that as much. I don’t hear it in my studio while I’m working

anymore. I don’t invite people into my studio until I’m ready.

EP:

Are you conscious that the forms and gestures you’re making are reminiscent of other things of this

world?

DS:

A little. I would say I’m an atheist. Maybe I lean into agnosticism but I’m not religious. And yet reading

about Hilma af Klint or the spiritual painters and the way that they made work is an experience that is not

far away from painting in general. Artists like Carroll Dunham talk about imagining an alien force entering

their body as they work. I acknowledge how narcissistic that sounds–the artist as ‘chosen’ conduit–but

sometimes that fantastical way of thinking gives you the power to do things that are prohibited if you’re

thinking, “I’m just a mortal on the earth making work with a brush.” I need to allow my mind to expand into

a place that’s as though I’m being controlled by something else. Why is a work ever right or wrong? But

we know it. We know it when we see it. We know it when we make it. We know all of those things–and

what is that feeling?

There are allusions to body…Having kids, reading comics and cartoons with them where anything can

happen. Heads can fall off and roll away. All of that has affected my painting because I think, “Well, why

not? Why not lean into this looking like a bum or a nose or an eye or whatever and pull back from that?”

But I don’t want the paintings to be too descriptive. I don’t want them to fall in and out of that world of

figuration too easily. The most important part is the imaginary. It’s not representational.

EP:

Do you think of your work as abstract?

DS:

No. I wouldn’t say I think of my work as abstract.

EP:

In the past you’ve spoken of your work in terms of ambiguity and in-betweenness. Is that the crux?

DS:

That’s become so important. And maybe that’s something like the search, that thing I was talking about. I

used to think, “What am I doing? What is this? Why did I make this?” Now I know the answer to those

questions was always there. That’s it. That’ the thing, that’s the drive. The point of making the work is the

not knowing and searching. It’s keeping that unknowing and expansive approach, like, “What happens

here and what happens here?” and, “Whoa, that thing happened again...” I used to freak out about things

happening in the paintings. I tried to cover them up and squash them and make them nice. But I just don’t

have that in me at the moment at all. Because the question is about being in between. The work isn’t

abstracted or abstraction, it’s not figurative, not spiritual, not cosmic and not from the body. It’s all of those

things.

EP:

I wonder about that term ambiguity. For me ambiguity connotes uncertainty, whereas these are such

confident works.

DS:

Maybe I have the wrong word. But yes, there is that element in making them–confusion and uncertainty.

It’s part of the allure in a way, in the process of painting them, where it might feel as though the painting

has a force of its own, that it completes itself (with me as part of that). Then it stands on its own, resolved

in whatever form it has taken. Doubt is an important element of a good painting, as is allowing myself to

be there with that and work it through to resolution. Ambiguity has an openness that I find important,

particularly in the earlier stages of a painting.

EP:

As you become more technically adept the painting begins to acquire greater agency, and you, in turn

have to respond. You were talking about To swim inside and how it closed itself off to you when it was

complete?

DS:

Yes. I was going to be quite happy to fill and tweak that painting for longer than I was allowed. I liked

being with it, there were so many things happening in that work. The last time we spoke we talked about

the colour yellow, and the yellow ground, but I began to think, “Okay. I’m going to change the ground

colour because I feel all my paintings are yellow.” I was struggling a bit. My palette was shifting

drastically. I felt like I was starting to lose it.

I was talking to my friend, the artist Joel Arthur, about ground colours. He changes his ground a lot. We

were talking about old master painting and using Vermilion red as a ground. This was interesting to me

because I was not taught any of this traditional stuff at art school.

I opened my tube of Vermilion, and thought, “I don’t know if I can do this, the colour is so saturated, it’s a

big leap.” But I put it on thin and mixed it with some white, and all of a sudden I thought, “This is the

ground for flesh, right?” It’s like everything I paint from this colour forms into a bulbous thing.

But it’s also a colour of contrasts, so I couldn’t see what I was mixing. What I mean is…whenever I mixed

a beige colour or added any blue to a colour on the palette it would turn green on the red ground of the

painting. I was suddenly a bit at sea. And in an immediate way, experiencing colour as relational. I was

really enjoying making the work and having these new experiences. So enjoyable. So enjoyable! It was

quite a full painting. It had lots of things going on. There were areas I felt needed more work. I stepped

back and suddenly the painting closed. It was not a feeling of it being finished, but of, “This no longer

belongs to you. You cannot touch it.” It was like looking at somebody else’s work.

I know it’s a painting, it’s not a relationship, or a loved one, but there was that essence in it of ending, of

the finishing, of a closing.

EP:

Are the paintings ‘alive’ or is that too precise a term? What is the quality of their apparent ‘life’?

DS:

Yeah. I think that’s probably a little literal. When it’s good, it’s closer to being alive. It’s funny because

some paintings happen where there’s absolutely no struggle in them and everything forms as you want it

to form. That painting, To swim inside, probably more so than any painting, felt like that a lot, that living

something.

Every painting throws up its own set of problems or its own character, its own way, its own thing that can

be prickly or gentle–or both!

EP:

What about colour? What is your relationship to that?

DS:

I love colour. It’s magic. It’s the reason I’m a painter, maybe more so than a drawer as such. In painting

you can move colour, shift it so easily and subtly.

That’s the other thing that I’ve been noticing since the discoveries in these paintings that were very much

out of my control. I would set up, spend ages mixing the initial colours, put down the ground and tweak

tone until I felt, “That’s a good colour to start with.”

No tongue bitter she began with purple. It also had a very red ground. I did this mark that was a ‘hero’

mark. It was too much, it was too big, too soon, and I spent the rest of the painting, painting around that

mark, trying to get that mark into the painting. Rather than accepting, “This happened within the painting.”

I think it worked in the end, but it was so much about that hero move. So the next painting that I came to, I

came at as though it was a horse–softly, quietly, with a gentle brush. And I started using a square format,

to feel as though I could conjure what was in the surface, it was all within my perception. And if my touch

was gentle I could start to bring things out of it, and push things back in, and move things in and out of the

ground. I could start to build energy within the painting, which is also very much what happened in To

swim inside. So it was softly, softly, softly bringing this painting out. That was the first time I became

conscious that, I don’t have to come at a painting using big gestures, big movements.

There was also a new sense or realisation that, “Oh, I’m not a fast painter.” I had always felt I was a fast

painter, fast in general. I talk fast. I love languages. But these paintings are deconstructing me. It’s taken

me a month, six weeks, longer to make this work and every one since. It’s like I have to fully disappear

into the painting. I have to be in it, thinking about it at night, thinking about the process entirely. It can’t

happen quickly. Those big gestures were interruptive.

EP:

Why are you a painter? You’ve already talked a little bit about this in terms of your love of colour…

DS:

I think I’m a painter. But I actually got into art school with a drawing portfolio. Drawing for me has always

been this thing of, "Here’s this world that I’m in and nobody else is in it.” I think what drew me to painting

was initially the teachers in the painting department. And then once I was in that, I felt so invested in it in

terms of discovery. I’m always on the brink of something.

Drawing is very easy for me. I love drawing. It’s low investment, small and intimate. But maybe now I am

approaching the paintings as drawings more than I ever have before.

At art school, I used to ask myself, “How come I paint when I can draw? This is so hard. This is so

difficult.” Lots of crits with my supervisor there, Ruth Waller, were about how difficult it was to paint.

The North American artist and writer Amy Sillman talks a lot about drawing and painting and being a

drawer or being a painter. When you draw, you’re very much of the thing in your hand. Your hand and

body are one. The painting is in the ground, the vision, the building up. A painting might not necessarily

look like what it will be until the last moment. Once I read her essays and started thinking about painting

and drawing like that, I thought, “There is no way it matters if this is a drawing or a painting.” I can

approach my painting with my body, or with my hand, and think about what I want from it.

EP:

Do you have a community?

DS:

At ANCA (Australian National Capital Artists Inc.) I definitely felt that having Joel Arthur, Emma Beer,

Peter Alwast and that little group was nice, because we were all battling the same problems in a way. We

were respectful of each other’s space. You could invite people in, but they wouldn’t just pop in. My studio

in Braidwood is the first place I’ve ever worked where I don’t have any of that.

I don’t have much feedback now. The first year I was here, I was very uncertain of what I was doing and

was desperate for it. I kept thinking, “Where are they all? I need them.” I’m okay now. It’s lovely. I feel as

though my voice is getting stronger.

EP:

In the past, you’ve spoken about the importance of thought-forms to your work. Do they still figure?

DS:

Thought-forms as described by the British Theosophist Annie Bessant were a great leaping off point. Part

of me when I saw them thought, “What is it like to be in there?” It’s not how I would describe these

paintings, but they were important.

Did you ever watch Russian Ark, the Sokurov film? It’s so beautiful. There’s this part where a woman is

looking at a painting in the Hermitage Museum when she just reaches out and over it, and it pulls her

towards it. That was what I felt when I was looking at these thought-forms, these watercolour and

devotional images, trying to nut out what those shapes and colours meant. It was a good spot to allow

oneself to be in, to make those things that come from an inner sense. That was their importance. But I’ve

moved on. I feel excited, like there’s so much more to make and to find.

–This interview took place in Braidwood on Walbanga Country on 19 July 2024. It has been edited for

length and clarity.