Dana Schutz

Boy
with
Bubble

The most recent painting in the show is a painting of a boy and a soap bubble, in the mountains. I was thinking the Alps, but maybe the Alps in springtime. I was interested in this distorted view of the world through the soap bubble and this sort of moment or instant where it could all disappear. Sometimes when I am starting a painting, I’ll make a really rough sketch. In this case, I really liked the shape of the boy’s head and the bubble. They were so totally round, but also the feeling that the boy’s head could roll off of him, or that he could topple. I also like these older paintings of science experiments, where they are trying to make a painting about oxygen; they have a bird trapped in a glass jar, and I always think those are really interesting, doing something that a painting can’t quite totally encapsulate. Sometimes I think narrative is one of those things. It is really hard to make a narrative painting, and I am not sure if I make narrative paintings, but I use narrative information to make the paintings.