ARTIST SPOTLIGHT: MAEVE D’ARCY

Caddisfly Project conducted a micro-interview with artist Maeve D’Arcy, whose work is featured in Vol 01: Transitions. Maeve is a painter based in Queens, New York.

We love the way Maeve’s work playfully explores the tedium and the musicality of hours spent in one’s thoughts. The dimensionality and complexity of the paint application double-crosses the graphicness that greets the viewer first. These paintings are accretions, unselfconscious, and seemingly accidental. They are as tectonic and archetypal as they are free-spirited and comical.

CP: What is your daily routine like?

MD: My daily routine starts with coffee! I listen to a lot of podcasts while I'm painting. If it's a weekday, I start out with Amy Goodman’s Democracy Now! to find out what's going on in the world and in this country. (Spoiler alert! It's pretty dire). I also listen to Sound and Vision with Brian Alfred, who talks to contemporary artists about their life and work. I like true crime and comedy, including Nicole Byer’s Why Won't You Date Me? She just interviewed Roxanne Gay—I highly recommend that episode. So I basically drink coffee, listen to podcasts, and paint! I've also been going through my sketchbooks and spending time reflecting on gestures and notes.

Of course my routine has changed over the course of the pandemic. I re-focused my studio time to making signs for the Black Lives Matter protests during the month of June. I made upwards of fifty signs and handed them out at marches in Queens, Brooklyn, and Manhattan. This became part of my artistic process and a way to engage with the movement and give visual representation to the ongoing fight for equality and justice. There is a lot more work to do and I think artists can and should play a major role.

CP: What’s the smallest thing that gets in your way (like a grain of sand in your shoe)?

MD: Doubt creeps in, even on the days when I'm feeling extremely confident and excited about whatever I'm working on. There's also a very real collective and personal grief right now. I'm learning to let those challenging feelings exist but not take over or overwhelm. I think artists are good at adapting and finding balance within moments of uncertainty—or at least we're good at winging it with as much grace as possible!

CP: What are you reading?

MD: Riding the subway has always been my reading time and it's something that I have really missed since everything shut down. There were days when I crashed, when all I could do was read the news and then get under the covers and watch Netflix. At the beginning of 2020 I attended Yaddo in Saratoga Springs and met some incredible people. I just finished reading Family of Origin by my dear Yaddo friend CJ Hauser! Next up on the Yaddo friend reading list is Evidence of V by Sheila O'Connor, and Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet by Jamie Ford. I'm also re-reading Sister Outsider by the late great Audre Lorde, as we need her wisdom now more than ever. I keep picking up and reading bits of Lovingly Georgia: The Complete Correspondence of Georgia O'Keeffe and Anita Pollitzer that I found at the Strand pre-quarantine. (Please open, Queens Library.)

CP: How would you title your autobiography?

MD: Oh My Fucking God: A Play in Three Acts

CP: How have you struggled to make work lately? 

MD: Loss. Grief. Personal and Collective. Outrage. Pandemic Funeral. Despair. Emptiness. Insomnia. Activism. Marching. Making signs. Making new work. Reading. Talking on the phone. Pagan prayers. Iced coffee. Sautéed Spinach. Aretha Franklin. Whiskey. Green Juice. Unemployment. Meditation. Medication. Motown.