Gabrielle Garland

“The house, even more than the landscape, is a "psychic state," even when reproduced as it
appears from the outside, it bespeaks intimacy,” wrote Gaston Bachelard in The Poetics of
Space. When I recall the quote to painter Gabrielle Garland, she’s quick to tell me that she, like
Bachelard, is “definitely a phenomenologist. That’s me!” To view her luminous oil paint
portraits of technicolor houses is to understand precisely what Bachelard meant by the “psychic
state” of a home. Though many of the buildings feature ubiquitous American gabled roofs and
prototypical facades, under Garland’s gaze, the houses are rendered anew, distinctive, and alive
with the aspirations of the people just inside. “When the image is new, the world is new,” wrote
Bachelard.

Garland first learned to make it new from her mother, who ran a decorative painting firm that
specialized in the restoration of historical buildings. For years, she watched her mother
assiduously peel layer after layer of paint to reveal the original work, however impartial,
beneath. The subjects of Garland’s painting undergo similar denudations, exposing, beneath the
conventional architecture and customary materials, exhilarating color combinations, fanciful
accents, illusory light fixtures, and myriad other manifestations of the inhabitant’s vision. “I just
love all the ways people claim and define their domestic space. Whether we realize it
consciously or not, it’s such a huge part of our lives; we all work so hard to make our homes.”

Through masterful distortions of perspective and extravagant exaggerations of color, Garland
accentuates the idiosyncrasies that first attracted her eye and evoked the eye of the designer.
While she sometimes paints from found imagery, more often than not, Garland works from her
own photographs, frequently taken on walks around her neighborhood in New York City, during
visits to Los Angeles, or while running errands in New Jersey, where she’ll pull to the side of the
road, familiarize herself with the layout of the house, and then take as many photos as she can
without rousing too much suspicion. “It’s usually light and shade or a really joyful color
combination,” she said of the aspects of a house that most often inspire her to stop the car.

In certain paintings, Garland draws the viewer’s attention to an enduring feature by representing
it in uncanny detail, as with Untitled (GG0021), wherein a light fixture takes on an illusory,
lucent quality thanks to the careful rendering of the hardware’s iridescent finish, the glimmer of
dappled light in the glass lantern, and the shifting shadow of an out of frame tree branch cast
across the siding. Elsewhere, she distorts the perspective, shrinking one side of the building’s
frame to enlarge another, as with Untitled (GG0019), where the front door all but disappears. In
others, she uses super-saturated hues—a color palette she inherited from her father, who, like her mother, was also an artist—to attend to aesthetically appealing color combinations, as with
Untitled (GG0023), where the fluorescent orange trim recalls the house’s brick visage, and Untitled (GG0022), where aquamarine siding matches the flower box, the overhang, and the
front and back steps.

While her parents may have influenced her interest in architecture and penchant for chromatics,
it’s abundantly clear that Garland has developed an entirely novel way of seeing and attending to
the world that’s as rarefied as it is generous. Still, more remarkable than the ability to see
beneath the mundane surface to the heart of things is her capacity to render it visible to others sowe, too, can see our neighborhoods, homes, and maybe even ourselves anew.

–Tara Anne Dalbow