07 Madison Warp: Painting Between Dream and Reality

By: Viivi Koistinen & Finnian Boyle | Photographs by ArtClvb

Madison Warp is a visual artist from Denver, Colorado. She currently studies painting at the Cranbrook Academy of Art.

Madison’s works straddle the territory between dream and lucidity, where both realities and fantasies are ambiguous. Her canvases are full-bodied, submerged in jeweled blues, reds and greens. Explicitly prompted by emotion and memory, they aim to steer chimeric narratives provoked by abrasion towards a sense of relief. 

This interview was conducted over video call in December. Madison phoned us from her studio at Cranbrook, where she was preparing to participate in ArtClvb’s Midwest Studio Deals. For about an hour, we circled around notions of memory, color and portraiture.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Do you recall any early aesthetic experiences from childhood?

I’ve always loved drawing - drawing for the most part. I’ve been doing it since I was four.

As a professional pursuit, it began around 2019: I started going to school for this and trying to turn it into a career. Before that, it was mostly these large-scale, extended doodles in a way. There were certain themes, ex boyfriends or friendship, things that were bothering me. I used this indigo blue paper. I guess that was the foundation for the professional practice.

What made you want to pursue art through formal studies?

Art is something I always wanted to make, something I found so much enjoyment in on a personal level.

In 2015, my dad passed away. After that personal tragedy, I went through a lapse of not really knowing what I was doing, just trying to go through the motions of life in a lot of senses. Then, it was my senior year of college and I had a job lined up, a job I didn’t really want - I was going to be a luxury travel agent or something, in Boston.

I was taking an art class, my first art class. I thought, this is my last chance to take it. I had a professor who pushed me to apply for their BFA program, he got me a full-ride scholarship to stay. It felt like a very obvious door.

I think I passed on it for a long time, because it was a path my family was against. It was pretty clear I was going to have no financial support going into this - I’d have to figure it out myself and to grow up pretty fast.

Then, with the pandemic, I had a lot of time to practice skills I wished I had been practicing earlier, to catch up.

You work with a pretty defined color palette. How did that come to be?

It’s really become more decided over the past year and a half.

It’s always been a pretty intuitive thing, especially since I started working at a photo-realistic level. It was never exact realism, I was always doing an underpainting with a specific color in mind, which came from a sense I had about the true nature of these scenes.

It started very simply: “Oh, am I moody? I’ll do a blue underpainting”, “I want the skin to be really sensual; I’ll do magenta”.

Then, when I started at Cranbrook, I wanted to step away from photographic reference into a more subconscious understanding of where my imagery was coming from. When you don’t have a photo to rely on, color is one of your main existing tools of communication. So, I found myself thinking a lot, putting a lot of attention towards my color choices, and then not thinking, letting it flow.

In a lot of my smaller paintings, I try to almost stick to one primary color, to see how far I can stretch it. It’s a subconscious charge that I haven’t found too much explanation for, but it’s been working.

You have an instinctual relationship to color.

Yeah. Especially the color green. I feel like that’s a line through a lot of my work. That’s the one that feels more obvious; like this life force that can be dimmed or heightened in the paintings. I think that has been really essential to the sense of connection I feel to my work.

In a past interview, you said: ”My practice is most rewarding when a piece finally starts to resemble the image that my imagination first conjured.” How do you negotiate the relationship between that pre-existing image and the actual process of creating it?

It’s really tricky. Trying to nail an image is a weird balance.

I’m trying not to overwork, which I find difficult. I’m a distance runner; I come from this mindset of more effort equates to better. In painting, it’s not necessarily like that. You have to find a sweet spot. Sometimes it takes a day or two, sometimes a month.

I guess trying to let your ego kind of fall away a bit, and to really notice, to understand the

image, to get to a space where your mind isn’t so concerned with this void of color and space. I think it comes down to what your imagination clings to, and how specific you get certain objects, and how vague and palatable you can get others.

How can you tell when a piece is finished?

I think it’s when enough information is being rendered on the picture plane. I don’t believe in over communication. I think once you get what an object is, why push it. At least that’s what I’m going for right now.

Once a thing feels like it’s close enough to something I believe a viewer could understand, I think my job as the artist is done. Being overly wordy, it’s almost like being a bad interpreter. I think the more concise you can get, the better.

Could you speak about portraiture as an art form?

A lot of my work is self-portraiture. To me, it has nothing to do with the audience per se. It’s more about how I personally connect with the piece.

My consideration of portraiture has shifted dramatically over the past two years. I remember, I used to make a lot of nightstand portraits - images that depicted what was on my nightstand at a given moment: a pill bottle, White Claws, cups -, those were probably some of my more honest work. I think it’s a really good snapshot of your mental state.

Now, it feels like I’m trying to capture something more intangible. A lot of it comes from specific memories of mine. Sometimes it can be eerie, sometimes it can be light.

Speaking of the series of paintings set in your bedroom and your home; you’ve described your bedroom as your ‘most revealing place’. How did you negotiate, day to day, working in an emotionally loaded atmosphere of your own past?

Honestly, that was a dark part of my life that I’m happy I’ve moved on from. I was working on my first show, in New York. It was my first year of doing this on my own.

That was the space I felt safe in, and I didn’t have money for a studio either. It’s hard to see when you’re in it, but it became a cocoon of creativity and life, simultaneously. The work felt really pent up and emotionally charged.

Then, when it got room to breathe in the gallery space, something really profound happened; it was so emotional. I have a lot of empathy and sadness for that situation. I’ll never regret that body of work. It’s very precious to me and documented a real state of, honestly, me suffering.

Having an active divide between your life and your studio is probably healthier overall. Being in a better space now, and making what I believe to be better work, makes me happy.

It’s a learned balance.

I think that there was a lot of angst with that whole situation. At the time, I thought I needed to make this work and nothing was going to stop me from getting this opportunity and having this thing. Looking back now, I never want to do that again.

Can you think of a portrait by another artist that has really stunned you?

Off the top of my head, right now I’m really interested in Amanda Ba’s practice. The show she did in 2021, with PM/AM, consisted of these gigantic women that could be her, but also weren’t.

That was when I was first thinking of self-portraiture in a way that didn’t have to do with nailing me as an artist, how I look, super staged scenes that I had my friend photograph or something.

It became a practice of capturing the essence of something without having to specifically capture yourself. Ba’s work was really inspirational in that sense, and in looking for that in my own practice.

Now, I have this femme character that I feel is sort of based on me. None of my recent figures have been very highly rendered at all. They’re kind of a step above a stick figure in my mind. I’ve really tried to get away from the ideal of strict resemblance.

Your work converses with ideas of gender. How do you retell your own relationship with gender within it?

A lot of my major experiences have to do with my gender and my position in society.

I grew up in this divide of different lives, with divorced parents. One life was with my dad. We spent a lot of time on his family's ranch in Montana. Gender roles were stricter there. Life at my mom's house in Denver was more laid back; she didn't really impose any sort of gendered aesthetic or roles. She gave us a lot of freedom to play as we wished, to look the way we wanted to look.

So, very early on, I got hip to this idea of these different ways to act around gender.

Growing up, I realized you can, to an extent, create worlds for yourself, and communities where people don’t abide.

ArtClvb is attempting to challenge the demands of a traditional gallery system. You shared a post on Instagram, recently, that positioned patronage as an alternative to the prevailing compulsion of immense productivity.

How do you feel about the mechanics of art distribution?

It’s funny you bring that up. I’ve gotten some push back on sharing that  - more so in a challenging way. I think with that, I was underlining this current system, which I don’t think is very sustainable for most artists.

I see so many people getting so burnt out.

I don’t think the industry is producing in a way that is beneficial for art. Often, you become known for a thing and then that’s what is continuously demanded from you. From the business side of it, you’re not allowed to think too much about what you want to communicate.

Surviving in this industry is a really delicate dance. It’s very expensive to be an artist. I wouldn’t want to do anything else. I chose this life and I find it endlessly fascinating.

I’m trying to stay away from the commodification of my practice as much as humanly possible. I think that benefits the work and the audience.

Waiting Room / Suspended Offering

2023

Do you collect anything?

I collect photos. I used to have this job at a library where we were donated a lot of negatives.

I also collect clippings from high fashion magazines. I love the ad campaigns. I find them inspirational color-palette-wise. Sometimes I’ll mix color palettes based off of something I found in a W from 2010.

I collect personal ephemera: I keep a file of bus passes and plane tickets. That comes into my paper-based work. I don’t show too much of that, but I am about to. I spend a lot of time on it, it’s kind of this busy-work activity. It’s what I’ll do if I want to, I don’t know, have a chill night drinking, to not have to be super focused.

And, Newport cigarette boxes, especially from my mom. The design of that box is very - that is how she comes up in my work. She’s been a pack-a-day-smoker since, forever. So I grew up kind of fascinated by that object. I’m still not a smoker, but I collect them and use them in small works.

Devour To Release

2024

Where do you find them? Are they from your mom’s house, do you look for them on the streets?

Ideally they’re from her, because I love that emotional charge. It’s this weird thing, this weird relationship, as for any kid with a parent’s self-destructive tendency. You want them to quit but they won’t.

And now, I kind of accept her in a way. I don’t know, there is something wrong, something morbid about it, but it gives me peace.

But, I have so many that they’re not always hers. A lot of people smoke at Cranbrook, so sometimes friends will give me boxes. Right now I’m actually trying to make these origami fish out of this box of Capri cigarettes.

Tobacco really does nail their packaging. American cigarette boxes are especially good.

Hot Snack 3 / Stary Night

2024

Can you name a space that makes you excited to leave the house?

My studio. Or going for a run. I love running.

Favorite place to eat?

Honestly, a very fancy sushi restaurant. That’s always fun.

Is there a recent experience with art that impacted you?

Sun-Jae Park. He made this installation, a video piece. It was a dark room with a projector and a video of his grandfather’s birthday, and a piece of fabric with holes over it, so it looked like a starry night sky. There were these weird fabric lumps in front of it that kind of resembled a mountain at night. I don’t know what it was, but I was so moved. Maybe because I missed home a little. I sat in that installation for a while; I miss my mountains at night.