Interview with Katie Bonadies, March 2024
Corinne Phelan-Wolfe is an artist working with watercolor and ink. She has been a member of RWS since September 2023.
Phelan-Wolfe builds worlds that feel both organic and mechanical in which ‘one movement affects the movement of all.’ She says her works are not pieces you step back from to consider the whole; they are worlds that invite the viewer to move closer and follow the interactions between color and line, which requires the viewer's focus. Each line is influenced by the watercolor’s shape and the watercolor is defined by the lines. Though the work is abstract, rock, roots, and light are the three main natural elements from which Phelan-Wolfe draws inspiration and she sees the mechanical elements as cogs that move the composition forward. She believes these worlds are what the inside of her brain looks like and how it functions.
Inspired by the same process in which Kandinsky started painting abstractly, Phelan-Wolfe will listen to an entire album on repeat while working on some of her pieces. There isn’t a particular artist or style of music that inspires her most, but listening to the full album is key–it allows her to submerge herself into one thing and it requires restraint. It allows Phelan-Wolfe to step away from active thought and let the music translate into the work. Each piece takes a very long time, and the experience gives her a sense of peace that she only otherwise gets from being in nature. The piece she is currently working on is 16x16", a larger format for her and she has already put thirty hours into it. She estimates that it will take another ten hours to complete. Creating these works is important to her becuase it is a practice in patience. When she enters the studio to paint her process is a blend of starting with an intention and seeing what happens. Sometimes the lines are more fluid and organic shapes form and sometimes she uses a ruler to get straight lines. Sometimes she has a color palette in mind that she will work out beforehand and sometimes she doesn't. Sometimes she just starts painting and lays a bit of ground work and line if there's a certain shape or flow she wants to create. It all depends on the day and the piece.
She prefers making abstract art because the process feels like a mental safe space for Phelan-Wolfe, a combination of meditation and intentional thought. She likens it to mindless doodling, which she does when she’s stressed or overstimulated. Abstract work lacks an immediately recognizable subject that brings with it inherent meaning and can therefore be more open to interpretation than other styles of art. She started making the transition to abstraction during a residency at a gallery in Beijing right out of art school. Phelan-Wolfe experienced multiple traumatic events in her twenties and making art helped her process those experiences. It also acted as an escape, where she could go into her pieces for hours and hours, a place to put her feelings.
Phelan-Wolfe had been poised to emerge as an artist a couple of years after the residency in Beijing; she had had a couple of small shows at coffee shops and other non-traditional art spaces, and was being put forth for consideration in a small group show in Boston by a college professor who is a world-renowned artist who had mentored her in college and supported her application to the residency program. When they met to discuss the show the mentor made an advance at Phelan-Wolfe. At first she tried to pretend that nothing had happened, but when she was forced to deny him a second time she knew it meant that the show wasn't going to happen. She never spoke to the mentor again, and the experience made a profound impact on her: it caused her to question her ability as an artist and it destroyed her self confidence.
Phelan-Wolfe stopped practicing for most of a decade. She had never questioned her need to make art and it wasn’t until this period that she realized how important it was to her, “I couldn’t sleep at night sometimes, for hours, and it would hit me all of a sudden: one year goes by and I haven’t made art, two years, three years. It compounds.” She experienced an overwhelming feeling of anxiety and loss as a result. Eventually she realized the part of herself she was missing was painting.
The experience with her former mentor is now a driving force for Phelan-Wolfe; she wants to do great things without that kind of power. She knows it is part of her story as an artist and what has brought her to where she is today. Now that she has a studio space outside of her home she is able to create and she sleeps well. When she comes to the studios, Phelan-Wolfe wants to put as little pressure on herself as possible. The pressure to know what you're doing in art still sometimes holds her back, but she feels it’s okay to give it time, that eventually she will understand her intuition and that not having an answer can be an important tool.
The series she is working on now started in 2020 and was inspired by the upheaval of the early years of the pandemic. She didn’t know where the work was taking her and the series doesn’t yet have a name. The originals are not currently for sale because one of her goals this year is to have a body of work large enough to show. Contact Phelan-Wolfe through her website corinneart.com where prints of her work can also be purchased. Follow @corinne_inkandwater on Instagram.
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