Issue link: https://read.dmtmag.com/i/566702
172 CULTURED
D
o you want to stand in a bucket?" painter Mary
Weatherford asks as she greets me in her new
studio in the quiet northeast corner of Los
Angeles. It's a sweltering day, and Weatherford
has made micro-pools from an array of buckets,
which she normally uses to create her
soak-stained, rhythmical abstractions.
Cooling off with her feet in a bucket is New
York-based painter Katherine Bernhardt, who has
just unveiled a mural in L.A., and sitting almost
completely submerged in another bucket is her
4-year-old son, Khalifa. Bernhardt and
Weatherford met in 2003, when Bernhardt
curated a group show called "Girls Gone Wild" at
Bronwyn Keenan Gallery in New York. "I
remember exactly what I was wearing," says
Weatherford, who lived in New York for years
before returning to Southern California, where she
grew up.
If Weatherford's paintings are her pyramids,
her memories are the sandstone blocks that
makes them whole. Each of her paintings depicts
an experience Weatherford has had—from the
sunsets of Bakersfield to the waterways of Red
Hook to the cool blue waves of Windansea Beach,
a stretch of coastline located in La Jolla,
California, where her parents have lived since the
'70s. These new wave paintings are mammoths,
to the point that when you stand in front of them,
you are completely immersed. "I went in during a
big swell and got womped," Weatherford says.
"But it was fun."
Apart from the colorfully gauzy landscapes
and skyscapes, perhaps the most striking part of
Weatherford's work since moving from New York
back to L.A. is her propensity to lacerate her
paintings with neon slashes.
"How did you start working with neon
anyway?" Bernhardt asks her. "What happened?"
She began working with neon in January
2012, while a visiting artist at California State
University, Bakersfield. Interested in the oil fields,
Weatherford went to photograph the area (she
notes that a sheriff was worried she might be
there to set the fields ablaze and detained her
that evening). Struck by the color of the sky—and
thinking about a kitschy painting with a neon
add-on she had seen at a friend's parents'
house—Weatherford carried the seeds of the
paintings with her on a trip to New York. She had
an epiphany: add neon "like a drawn line" to the
paintings. "I was on the Crosstown Bus, thinking,
'This is a great idea… or this is a really bad
idea,'" she says.
Many years had gone by since her last big
solo exhibition, so in September 2012,
Weatherford went all in on the "Bakersfield
Project," an exhibition at Todd Madigan Gallery in
Bakersfield. She created seven large paintings—
79 inches wide and as big as she could fit
through her studio door—inspired by the city, past
and present. The show was a smashing success,
and Weatherford parlayed that into fawned over
shows at LA>