Slices of Emily Wolfe’s life experiences, as a painter, part-time archaeologist and quiet observer, have translated harmoniously into her layered, realistic yet obscure paintings, to create a visual language that is strangely and beautifully her own.
The mid-career oil painter lives with her husband — who has a chair in the history faculty at Oxford — and their teenage daughter in the picturesque, medieval town of Oxford.
Emily has resided in the United Kingdom since completing graduate school at the Slade School of Fine Art in London in 1998.
The body of work she has prepared for her New Zealand audience is a continuation of her exploration of still-life painting, this time by piecing together old reproductions of landscape scenes and layering over segments of tracing paper and tape — referencing her experiences practising archaeology in Rome — into a collage.
“I’ll often visit flea markets and pick up cheap reproductions or old posters, a few are landscapes by French landscape painter Claude Lorrain. He would observe elements of the landscape closely and then reconstruct them in-studio — like a collage of landscapes, I suppose. I like the idea that they’re not specific or obvious,” says the artist on a chilly Oxford morning.
Emily’s process begins with a physical collage; she tapes the elements to the wall, piecing together cut-outs of classical landscape scenes, then layers over them with tracing paper, tape and sometimes photocopy papers in sharp greens, yellows or pinks.
“The colours in the reproductions are mostly quite off — a pink sky will be really pink and I like the way they tone in with the cheap photocopy colours — they’re all a bit artificial-looking.”
Emily will sit with the collage for a while then photograph it; she prefers to work from the digital photograph, as the light is constantly changing in her studio.
“I tend to work from a screen, as the less information I have to refer to is better for the painting somehow. I like the idea that a mechanical reproduction of the original painting turns into a photocopy, then a photograph, then a painting again,” she muses.
Although most of the works include elements of the landscape, Emily considers them more as “paintings of objects” or “interior landscapes”.
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A period of time living in Rome has also filtered into the work. Emily was trained as a field archeologist by the Museum of London, along with a few other interested artists, which led her to stand for hours in the rain in a muddy pit on a Roman riverbank.
“It was such an extraordinary experience, I remember it being so cold, wearing a hard hat, gloves and steel-capped wellies. We found all sorts of objects like bits of Roman pottery — what I found really fascinating was wondering who might have lived here and what the narrative behind each object might be. If I hadn’t gone to art school, I think I would have studied archeology.”
Part of her task list as an archaeologist was to record an area of landscape for excavation, which involved plotting it out by drawing up what was beneath her feet on permatrace paper in a technical drawing, to record the layers beneath.
“I suppose it’s like looking into the landscape through layers and deposits of time. It took me a long time to figure out what to do with the drawings.”
While in Rome she also spent time studying pieces of interior frescoes that were sourced from Roman villas, then reconstructed in museums.
“They seemed to me like a jigsaw puzzle or a collage — that piecing together is also part of the archeology process.”
The amalgamation of Emily’s experiences has resulted in exquisite paintings, with their delicate palettes; so hyper-real, the viewer could almost peel a piece of tape or a layer of paper off the canvas — testament to Emily’s mastery of oil paint — the thin layers creating stratas of depth and the illusion of three-dimensionality.
Does it get easier to paint like this, I ask? “Every painting is a challenge, it’s always difficult and problematic. I sometimes get anxious — it might not go the way I think, but therein lies the interest.”
