Lives of the Artists: Petra Cortright (Part I)
How art after motherhood is like crawling back from a complete loss of self
Petra Cortright is a pioneer of two distinct strands of contemporary art that have come to define the visual culture of the twenty-first century: the webcam video and the digital painting. Her 69-channel installation of webcam videos (sapphire cinnamon viper fairy, 2007-2022) was a highlight of Unlimited at Art Basel in June, while her layered digital paintings will be on view in exhibitions at 1301PE, Interval Clerkenwell, and Almine Rech this fall. Petra is also a mother of two and a member of a prodigiously artistic family. I caught her at a perfectly inopportune moment as she was balancing these professional and personal commitments while also dealing with being displaced by the LA fires early this year. Our conversation focuses on the logistics and rewards of fitting it all together.
Petra Cortright: I’m using a really old webcam. I have a funny setup right now. It’s been seven months and we’re still out of the house. Maybe it’s the internet here, it’s a rental house, a Spanish house so the walls are thick. I don’t have my usual studio setup. I’m on a Costco folding table, Otto [the almost-six-year-old] and I sleep in this bed, Marc’s downstairs with the baby. We’re just still in evacuee mode.
How long until you’re re-settled and able to return?
We literally just finally found the people that we want to use for remediating in the last couple weeks, and it’s taken so long with the insurance and the contracts and getting everything approved. I don’t want to come off sounding like I’m complaining, because we’re very lucky that our house didn’t burn down, but the situation right now is a bit special. I’m in my hometown now, in Santa Barbara, it’s like two hours north of Los Angeles. They don’t want the ugly cell towers so in half the town you can’t even make a phone call. It’s driving me nuts. But we had close family and friends so it made the most sense to be here. There’s only a few people in the world you can call when you have to ask, “Hey, can the whole family come to your house right now, because our house is about to burn down.”
Last time we met must have been at your house the Altadena right before Covid.
That was also right around the time that I had Otto. I have such weird brain damage from having my first baby. All the memory loss. Really, children give you brain damage, but in the best ways. It takes time to get your bearings as a parent. Jack just turned one at the end of May, and Otto will be six in October. Second time around, so much easier, just because you know everything to expect, and nothing is so shocking. I really enjoyed it more the second time, because I know it goes so quickly. I really appreciate all the baby phases because you just know that none of it lasts forever. With the first you’re just trying to get to the next mental checkpoint.
We’ve been in Santa Barbara for seven months, and it’s very psychedelic for me because Otto is going to my old school, and it hasn’t changed at all. It’s good for me from an artistic standpoint, because every day feels like there’s deep core memories being stirred up in weird ways, especially parenting here, because last time I levied here I was in my peak webcam e-girl phase, drinking, doing drugs, being crazy around town, and now I’m back as a calm parent. I was having very intense dreams and am having good ideas for videos and paintings.
Everything is very makeshift. We don’t have studios. I have all my hard drives and my computer set up, but I’ve only been getting everything done by force. And feeling like I have one foot in the grave, so tired every day because I don’t have my normal setup. At our house I had all my systems so I could be a mom and an artist, and then that all got taken away and I’ve been working with my hands tied behind my back since January. It’s a challenging, complicated year. An uncomfortable growth period. It will be so nice to get my little studio back, my room with all my computers where I can just close the door and get to work.
Parenting and working in the art world, it’s just constantly navigating all of that. Marc is doing the majority of the work for the insurance and everything, which is a new full-time job in itself, and there’s no protocol to navigate that. Our house got poisoned by all the houses that burned around it, and eventually it will be fine, but we’re in a strange, upside-down world right now.
It’s sort of a perfect framework for this conversation. So many friends and people we work with in the art world have kids, and obviously it becomes a central part of your life, but it also becomes a part of your life that we don’t really talk about in professional settings. The idea is to take some of those private conversations and make them public where they might be helpful or useful to share.
I’ve been over-sharing on the internet for 25 years now. These dynamics are so magnified now that we’re out of our setup. Marc had his studio on the back property of our house in Altadena, and then I had my little studio room with a closed door and a table with all my computers and hard drives. I don’t need that much, which is a big aspect of me being able to be a mom and be an artist. Working digitally, you really enjoy the speed and efficiency. For Marc, as a traditional oil painter, you can’t be pregnant around those chemicals and fumes. That’s a whole other conversation for people who do that. If I have 25 minutes I can get to work on something, which I wouldn’t be able to do working on sculpture or something physical. If I need to I can make a couple paintings in 20 minutes. It’s gotten extreme, how fast I can do something.
When you started doing the paintings, you could spend a really long time with them, right?
I used to, yeah. I wouldn’t work every day, and then I’d have these really long painting days. I’ve never been able to do that since I became a mom. Your time is so fractured as a parent. That was a really scary part for me, realizing that I just didn’t have that endless time. It’s so bratty now to look back, before kids. You were so spoiled with your time, you just worked when you felt like it. You can stay up all night or sleep in. You can be a caricature of an artist, working at your own whimsical timeline. You can’t do that with children. I had to relearn how to be really efficient. It’s frustrating when you really want to work and you can’t, because I do still have that feeling sometimes, this inner voice where I just really want to get out that idea that I had, but then it’s time to go pick up from school or something, or drop-off, and by the time I’m able to sit down and get in focus I don’t have the same spark. That can be frustrating. It’s a lot of discipline and willpower at this point. I’ll just sit down and do something until it starts working. I don’t even know how to describe it really. I think of anything that I could possibly do. I have to be in a pretty good mood for brush strokes and hand work with a Wacom, and sometimes I’m too tired for that. If I’m not in a good mood for that I don’t like the brush strokes. There’s a certain energy to it. If I’m really tired or don’t have a lot of time, I’ll do research or download source images I want to use. Doing a little thing like that to make yourself feel better, at least you did a bit of something. The worst feeling is when the inspiration isn’t there and you’re trying to force something and you can see it in the work, and it just looks like shit.
I have so much respect now for artist parents, or anyone with kids in the art world. Sadly I’ve become really judgmental of artists who don’t have children. What is their excuse? They have all the time in the world. They have every possible resource available. They get sleep. I’m not jealous of people who don’t have kids. I’m just slightly jealous of their sleep. When the kids are sick, you’re not going to have a good night. There’s nothing that can be done about that. Lilli is older now, right? And she’s a girl. The brain chemistry of these boys, they’re just insane. The crashing and the explosions and the loudness, there’s so much. It’s hard to even have one thought when they’re around. Otto is so loud, and he talks so much. He’s an amazing child, children in general are amazing, and it feels so good, rereading children’s books, Narnia, I get so many ideas for my work. I’m a huge fan of children’s books and literature, so it’s nice to have a bit of an excuse to revisit that stuff. I find it’s incredibly enriching for my work. There are children’s books that shaped my aesthetic life and understanding of the world. When you revisit it, you realize the impact that it had.
What do you find was the most influential for you?
Narnia. I’ve been reading those with Otto. I reread them first myself, and I’ve been reading them aloud to Otto. But also even random children’s books, certain illustrations, I’ll look at them and see certain brush strokes from my own work, stuff that formatively shapes you in aesthetic ways. It’s not just the stories, it’s certain color palettes. Contemporary children’s books I have a really hard time with. They’re very ugly. It’s almost like screen time in book form. The colors are bad, there’s no moral or ethical point to them. There’s so much fluff. Older children’s things are slightly scary, too. They were meant to scare the children into behaving well, and they’re more about real life. Some of it’s a bit hardcore. Stuff from the 1800s is straight up scary.
What’s your approach to screen time when we’re talking about books?
I just gave Otto the iPad so I could come and talk to you. I would love to say we do zero screen time, but I do have some tricks. He basically gets it if I have a meeting or something really important. I don’t like to do it out in the world. That’s my least favorite, an iPad at a restaurant. I would rather not go to a restaurant than do that. But when we do screen time, Otto is fluent in Spanish, he picked it up from a nanny who we had when he was little, he picked it up like it was nothing. The school that he was going to in Pasadena before the fire, which he’ll go back to, is 90% Mandarin immersion. He seems to be really good at language. We were the only double white parents at that school. It’s a public school, and it was a hack for us to use the public school system in California as an a la carte language course. It’s so targeted and intentional. The only people that are going to this school are Chinese families who have aspirations for their children. Nobody’s accidentally going to the 90% Mandarin school. The parents are really high quality. They were so funny about it. In the nicest possible way, “Why are you guys here?” It has the best test scores of all the public schools in the area. The private school thing in California is more of a social thing for parents. In LA, it gets really nasty really fast. At the Waldorf, people are paying $50,000 a year so the kids can feed chickens and bake bread. We can fucking do that at home.
Back to the screen time, if Otto is going to watch, I switch the language to Spanish or Mandarin, so he picks up some vocabulary. He has Duolinguo for Mandarin and Spanish. But he’s in a better mood when he doesn’t have screen time. In my ideal world, we’re living on a farm and I’m homeschooling, even though I probably wouldn’t even like that. The reality is I have to work. It’s funny to call art work. I have much more flexibility than other people do in many ways, but in other ways it’s also harder, because I’m always working in a way that other people aren’t. You’re never not working as an artist, or thinking about work, or preparing for something, or just making things for no reason, which is my most ideal way of working. I still have three more solo shows this year, in September, October, and November, and then I’m going to Miami in December because I’m curating part of the Untitled fair. They asked me to be a guest curator for a section, which I thought was so funny, I had to tell them that I was going to suggest a bunch of digital art and outsider art things that are hard for fairs, but they seem to be okay with that. It’s not something I’ve done before, and it’s a lot of Zoom meetings, which is not my favorite, but fine.
To what extent is Otto aware of your work? Does he understand that when you’re in the studio it means you’re working and making art? Because obviously it looks different from Marc going to the studio with his paints and brushes.
He’s very aware that both of us are artists. He tells people that his parents are both artists. Then he’ll say that he wants to be an artist. I knew I had to put a stop to that, so I took him to Frieze LA two years ago or so. I thought I could beat it out of him, he could see the art fairs and see how horrible it is. But there was a booth giving away free worms, so he had the best time and it totally backfired. Like Picasso said, all children are artists. You’re already an artist, you don’t have to be one when you grow up. Maybe be a doctor. We’re the weirdos at the Chinese school, for sure. Before that he was at a private preschool where there were a lot of creative parents, people in Hollywood or the music industry, and some of them worked a typical nine-to-five and others didn’t, so he’s aware of everything. He loves painting with me in Photoshop. I’ll keep teaching him everything I know, which isn’t that much, just stupid Photoshop stuff. Marc has made videos with him. They’ve done some funny stuff. He loves that. We don’t always have time every single day, and I would never go so far as to call it a collaboration.
I remember before he was born, I did have this feeling, and still do, that overall the art world is very anti-natal, or maybe this whole country is. It doesn’t feel pro-children. There’s not a lot of support. The art world is such a weird place because it’s such a mixture of money and resources but then there’s no way to get childcare. You’re just responsible for all these things yourself. If I have to travel for a show, a gallery isn’t going to provide a babysitter. It’s not part of it. I have heard that certain women artists ask for that. With galleries everyone’s just trying to make it work. In the last couple years the art market has changed so much, and it’s been really brutal for a lot of people. A lot of galleries closing. It’s not easy to make a living this way. But the other part of it is I feel so lucky to be a working artist. The percentage of artists in the world who are able to make a living off of their work is very small. It’s a dream for so many people, and I never expected it to turn out this way. I just failed at doing every other thing in my life. Not like I could hold some other job or something. It’s almost an affliction. I should have been a pro soccer player but I didn’t have the aggressive tunnel vision that you need to be a pro athlete.
Now it feels like even being able to have children is a privilege. They’re almost a luxury good at this point, you’re showing that you can afford to do this, because a lot of people can’t. The most annoying thing about pregnancy for me was feeling so tired and not having the energy that I would normally have to fuel the work. You’re pregnant for almost a whole year, nine months but it might as well be a year, and then the year after with a baby you’re recovering, and I’m just coming out of it now. The first couple months, you’re not sleeping so much and your brain doesn’t work the same. With Otto that really scared me, because I thought I would never feel the same ever again, and then the second time around, with Jack, I surprised myself, I was able to snap out of it more quickly, I understood that I was going to feel like myself and be able to work again.
The learning curve was so steep for me. It was like walking through fire. It was so hard. It was the hardest. It was so scary. Complete loss of self. Which is good, because you crawl back from that new, it ends up making you very, very, very strong.
Check back next week for Part II of this conversation, when we dig into Petra’s studio setup, talk about marriage and creative partnership, and get a special cameo from Otto.