Is it possible for you to get work done with all of your active community engagements and the current unsettling times?

Truth be told, getting work done has been a challenge at the moment. Not only because of my ridiculous amount of community engagement, but also because, I think like many people, I have been hit so hard emotionally by the pandemic. I am lucky to have a great many friends, but more friends means more worries. At first as we went into lockdown all I could think about was what suddenly seemed like necessities, like finding PPE supplies, learning how to make masks, and googling the latest covid developments. Then came redoing my vegetable garden, so...

What has been your life long interest in the landscape?

I’ve had an abiding interest in light and open space since I was a kid—I always felt better being outside than inside. I seem to have a deep impulse to reach out spiritually and emotionally to what’s furthest from me. I still can’t believe how amazing it is that we humans can conjure deep space on a two dimensional plane, which puts me squarely in opposition to the direction of painting and art in my birth century towards flat, flatter, flattest, and more and more literal. For whatever reason I try to recognize and locate myself in what is least like me. But that’s not the “subject matter” of the work, I’m not interested in proportion per se. I’m interested in letting my soul spread out in space. 

How does time influence your current art making? 

You mean at this time of endless Blursdays? Seriously, I never have enough time for my commitments or for my studio, is what it feels like. If the huge projects I’ve been working on in the community here [chair of rebuilding the Sag Harbor Cinema and making The Church, a new creativity center, with husband Eric Fischl] were able to be completed in the late spring as anticipated before Covid, I’d be looking at a different situation now, but construction was stopped by the state government, delivery is slowed, and there are still a million concerns to deal with before each can be finished and operating. So that interrupts me constantly because I must honor my commitment to them. But enough complaining! It will be a joy to see them finished.

What is the key source of inspiration for your drawings and paintings?

I guess it’s seeking power, disturbance and resonance in an image and then seeing that germ of an inspiration through to its resolution as a work of art. Of course no work of art fully satisfies that impulse by itself. Over all these years of art I’m gradually making my world and the outside world more dimensional to myself. I also have no delusions about my “direction”. I’m a very digressive, unsystematic artist, and it still feels like I have a great depth of imagery yet to plumb.

Do you render drawings before making paintings? Or are they parallel and independent modes of work?

Sometimes I will use a drawing as a basis for a painting, and I think parallel is a better description than independent. So I occasionally “see” how a drawing could or needs to become a painting, but they’re usually separate. 

How has your art making evolved in the past few years? 

I’m really not sure, to be honest. At my last show this past February, a lot of people told me they saw a very specific change in the work, and I knew what they meant because I felt it, but in all honesty I’ve had a long long conversation in my art making that’s a discourse between naturalism and supernaturalism, reality and dreams, abstraction and depiction that is ongoing and meandering, and whatever direction it’s presently taking, that conversation hasn’t settled enough yet to really describe to you. I don’t feel I’ve ever had a particular trajectory. 

Has living in Sag Harbor influenced your work? Living near the water?

There’s a bridge here that leads from where we live into the village that is just the right height for a flying dream, and I take a lot of photos from it that I work into painting and drawing. Generally I love being at the edge of land, and being near a harbor is very very satisfying to me. I’m not a mountain or inland person by disposition. I’ve done very specific work from things I’ve seen here, and we live by a forest, not in Sag Harbor village itself, and I’ve learned to look at woods and not see confusion and feel aversion, which is an achievement, ha ha. That’s something that was hard, having grown up in suburbia and then spending so much of my life in the city. Woods always seemed dark and deep but not lovely. They present a very complicated, enticing architectural situation for composition.

Is the day light different in Sag Harbor than in New York City?

Oh yes and so is the night sky of course! Very different, although NYC has had some spectacular light and weather conditions. I remember in the late ‘80s snow falling late one spring morning with pink lightning above, walking down Church Street near City Hall. I don’t know how I’d paint that but that moment was hard to beat. 

Which other artists do you find kinship with?

Well Charles Burchfield for sure, I so wish I painted like him… Love Kerry James Marshall, his show at Met Breuer was revelatory. I know they’re not strictly landscapes but those surfaces! So flat and so full of depth and so smart. The Northern European Renaissance painters. Matisse, Vermeer, Kiefer, Rodin—I’m kind of all over the place and it’s not always about kinship, but again I like things that “oppose” my sensibility as well as extend it. And I’m lucky to live with a great artist. 

What do you like reading during your “down time?”

My favorite thing to read is great fiction, but I haven’t read a really killer book for a while. I did just read Rachel Carson’s The Sea Around Us, and loved it, and I’m ashamed to say it’s the first time I’ve read her work. She’s a beautiful writer. I’m also a fan of Rachel Cusk, just to cut a wide swath between two Rachels! Reading a book I’m enjoying is one of the very great pleasures and I yearn to be in that state. It’s always been my go-to release and stimulation since I was a child, and great writing also means a lot. Cormac McCarthy. Robert Stone. Anne Carson. Rimbaud. Hurston. I could go on and on.

about april gornik

April Gornik is an American painter whose atmospheric landscape painter. Born in 1953, she studied at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design in Halifax, Canada, receiving her BFA. Strongly referencing American Luminist painters, the Gornik's work has gained significant attention and critical acclaim since her first solo exhibition. Gornik lives and works in Sag Harbor, New York. Her works are presently held in the collections of institutions such as The Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Museum of Fine Arts Houston; the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, D.C.; National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington, DC; Cincinnati Museum, Ohio; the High Museum of Art, Atlanta, Georgia; the Modern Art Museum of Art, Fort Worth, Texas; Orlando Museum of Art, Florida; and other major public and private collections. She has shown extensively, in one-person and group shows, in the United States and abroad.