Irene Pantelis

Matthew Robertson: Can you tell us a little bit about your background?

Irene Pantelis: Sure. I've been an artist my whole life. While I've always been drawing and painting, I wasn't always an artist by profession. I moved to the U. S. when I was 16 from Latin America. We had actually lived in New York when I was very little, from two to five. And then we lived in Bolivia, Uruguay and Brazil. I don't remember New York because I was too little. We moved to Maryland when I was 16 and I finished high school here and I went to college at the University of Maryland and got a degree in English and Spanish. I was trying to work as a reporter but that wasn't working out that well. I ended up going to law school and then I worked as a lawyer doing labor law for a while. Throughout this period, I was always making art. It was kind of my hobby, for lack of a better word.

During those years when I was working as a lawyer, I joined the studios of Micheline Klagsburn. She's a local painter in DC. She had a studio where people would meet on Tuesdays and hire a model collectively and we would draw from the model. I kind of taught myself how to draw and paint there. The sessions were 3 hours so it was great because the model would be in the same position for 3 hours, so it really gave you time to do something more in depth. Sometimes we would have the model come back the following week so that we could do really long drawings or paintings and it was great. I was able to teach myself how to draw and paint and try out all kinds of materials.

There was a group of about 10 to 12 people at the time and some had a lot of experience and some were established artists and so there was also a lot of feedback and just a really nice energy from that group. I stopped going there when my son was born because it was in the evenings and it was just too difficult to go, and then as it turned out I also decided to take time off from work.

Then my second child was born and my parents both went through really severe illnesses and I stayed home to take care of them. The whole law thing just became secondary, and all the while I had more and more time to draw and paint. Also, we moved to the suburbs because of the kids and we had more space. And it was interesting, too, by not having a regular job my art became a lot more abstracted and less representational.

Robertson: Okay, so you were doing more representational drawings based on the figure…

Pantelis: Yes. They were expressive for the most part. They were definitely much more representational. Later on, when I was home and I wasn’t drawing from the figure my art became a lot more abstracted. I started layering and playing with the thickness of the paint. Through collage I began using different materials. I think because I was working from home a lot, I naturally started using things that I would find in my home; from leaves to oils and paint... That became part of my practice.

I'm always using things from my house to ground my work in my daily life. It hasn't stopped, you know. Like even when I went back to get a BA and MFA… I guess daily life to me is both inspiring and kind of just a part of what the art is. I'm not talking about myself in my work. It’s not autobiographical. It's reflective of where I am but it's not about me. I think I use daily life as kind of a platform to then explore bigger things.

Robertson: Can you tell us about what you're interested in exploring through your art?

Pantelis: I think the work is about trying to connect my daily life with what I describe as the environment. Like, my consuming apples in my house is connected to a huge chain of events which I don't see but I am connected to them. I think my art is exploring the connection between myself and the environment. But the environment in its expansive meaning. Meaning all things, beings and peoples as they interconnect. It’s like using the quotidian to explore the universal.

Robertson: You're focusing on the environment that you inhabit in your day to day life to investigate the larger, greater environment.

Pantelis: Right. This idea that we are so interconnected, you know like through the internet, or through the global economy to this really huge thing that we humans have created. We don't see it or understand it, but we know that it’s there. So, it’s about where does this connect to and where does it not. It’s a connection with this larger environment but it's also a longing that I have to connect with time. I guess it’s because as I’m becoming older in my middle age, I'm really becoming aware of how small humanity is in the bigger scheme of things.

Robertson: Like in terms of geologic periods of time…

Pantelis: Exactly. How in daily life everything seems so huge, right? But if you look at it in scale it's really nothing. I play a lot with the hugeness of the universe and the smallness of our daily lives. But how in our mind it's always the opposite, like our daily life seems so huge. Those are the bigger ideas that I have in mind when I'm making work. I also try to connect to history. Even though I do think human history is very short, I'm always trying to connect to the history of this place.

Like here in Maryland, I was kind of surprised to find out that the neighborhood where I live used to be a tobacco plantation. A lot of the wealth that is here now came from there. And here I am, an immigrant living here now and I'm kind of the benefactor of this legacy. But I didn't really know until like two years ago. I guess at the end of the day my work is very process based. It’s through playing with the materials and seeing what they do that these ideas kind of percolate.

Robertson: Well, that's a great segue into this next question… In your artist statement on your website you describe your practice as balancing chance and chaos with control and order. Can you give us an example of how this approach might have that manifested one of your previous works?

Pantelis: When I think of about these bigger connections between daily life and these other things there's always a degree of exploring where it is that I have control or where it is that things just happen. For instance, I will use ink and I'll start with the paper. I'll cut the paper, and those cuts are very controlled, and I can decide exactly where they go. And then I’ll poor ink and the ink does what it's going to do, and it'll go into the cuts that I made but I don't really know how it's going to do that. So, I'm always playing with having some parts of the process be very controlled and then parts that I just let the material do what they're going to do. There's always an element of surprise in what turns out to be the art piece.

Matthew Robertson: I know you work with both like traditional media as well as digital media. Has your use of traditional media informed your use of digital media, or vice versa?

Pantelis: Yes, the sensitivities that I’ve develop through drawing and painting are translated into my digital art. Specifically, in terms of composition and flow and rhythms…. Even textures. I tend to layer a lot even digitally just to create a richness and ambiguity in the image.

Robertson: I know you recently received her MFA from university of Maryland can you tell us about your experience in graduate school?

Pantelis: For me it was a really good experience. It really helped to fine tune my sensitivity to what works and what doesn't. Having a big audience made me understand how people are seeing the works. Before the MFA I had shown my work in smaller circles and I think people don't really tell you that much, but in the program they really tell you what they’re seeing or not seeing. It sharpened my judgment and my sensitivity to what works and what doesn't and why things work a certain way. I think that's really valuable. Now when I go to see art, I can see more why they're doing what they're doing.

It also gave me more for direction. I went from being representational to being very abstracted. I was really trying for a while to work with narratives that are specific, and I realized during the MFA that that just doesn't work for me. It was too forced. Even though I think I'm more of an analytical person, when I do art it's very intuitive and if I just go with that then the work is a lot more sincere and powerful. The other thing I learned during the MFA was that before I wanted to control what the art said, and now I don't care as much. I think that it’s okay if you come in trying to say A and people see B. It's okay. A and B are related and it's actually more interesting when people can see more things in your work than what you anticipated.

Robertson: What was your favorite part of the experience?

Pantelis: The conversations I was able to have with other people in the program.

Robertson: Who are some of your biggest influences?

Pantelis: There are a number of artists. I've always looked at Eva Hesse a lot. Especially in terms of her use of materials. She would create these kind of sequences or repetitions of the same that are different. Very organic forms that have a logic or an order and I think that my work is very much about that. Systems that I create that are both partly created by the materials themselves but partly by my organizing them. She’s probably my biggest influence that I've always looked at. In my work there's longing for something that is very precarious and I think she had that as well. I don't mind if the work is not something that will last a long time. There’s something interesting about a work that has its own life.