Dana Schutz

How
We Would
Give Birth 

This is the painting How We Would Give Birth. This was one of the paintings trying to represent something wrong to the future. And, for me, it was a real question of if I could make this painting at the time, because the subject seemed so intense, and I didn’t know how I would represent it. So I thought: OK, there has to be an escape route, not just for me the painter, but also for her the subject, and the viewer. There is a landscape in the painting, and it is one of these sort of Hudson River school romantic landscapes. Those landscapes to me always felt very “science-fictiony” and they are almost about this kind of future and past coming together, but also a place that was sort of unattainable. There are always mountains, or hills, to get to the centre of the painting and they felt like this kind of idealized version of either the past or the future. And so I was interested in that space contrasting with the space of the bed, which I wanted to be very much just kind of what it was, and also more raw. There is more staining going on, on the bed, and then a bit of landscape on the Kleenex box. I just had a baby recently, so way after the fact of this… I don’t know, I think I would totally paint it differently now. But also I am not sure if I would paint it, right now! I don’t know. Because I think that part of the interest in that at the time was not knowing how that would be. So there was this space for imagination. But I think when you have a baby, anyway, you forget it so quickly. Because it is so… insane, that you just forget it. Maybe it could be worth approaching again, I don’t know.