18 Questions With...
Nora Sturges

Definitely day. It used to be late night, but somehow I’ve turned into a person who starts thinking about bed at 9:30 pm.

I just sit and look at whatever I’m working on. I have a home studio so I can go in whenever I like. I often wander in while brushing my teeth.

A #1 round Winsor and Newton Cotman watercolor brush. Probably 95% of the painting I’ve done over the past 25 years has been with one of them. It’s not very efficient.

The blooming primroses in my back yard!

I’ve been listening to old music that transports me to another time and place—stuff I listened to in high school, like Talking Heads and Joe Jackson, and a great playlist the BBC made of mainly British music from 1979. Given the state of the world, it’s a welcome escape.

I’d be really curious to work with a prehistoric artist and have a hunch we’d have a lot in common as fellow artists, but I’d pick Sassetta, who I think is the weirdest and greatest artist from my favorite art historical time/place, late medieval Siena.

I’m going to cheat on this-- my dream project is a different version of a real project. During the early pandemic, deprived of travel, I looked at a lot foreign places in Google Street View and wanted to paint some of the amazing stuff I found there. I started a project following the route Darwin travelled with the Beagle, using Street View to explore the places he went in South America, taking screenshots and making tiny, postcard-sized paintings of what I discovered. This is a side project, a kind of hobby within my practice, and I never have enough time to devote to it—although I’ve made more than 30 paintings, I’ve barely scratched the surface. My dream is to take five years (the amount of time Darwin was away with the Beagle) and focus on the project. It’s been fascinating, and I’ve completely fallen in love with Darwin!

A lot of people think painting is fun.

I think a lot about the common advice to work all over the surface at the start of a drawing or painting. While I think it’s good advice, doing the opposite (getting lost in developing a tiny detail to an insane level) can be a better entry point into the spirit of the work and often yields less predictable, less designed-looking results.

My favorite exhibition spaces in New York are smaller galleries where there is a friendly person excited to talk about the art! This is a hard question because the art exhibited is such a big part of making someplace a favorite, and how could I compare a small gallery to a museum, with much more art? I do love unique exhibition spaces, where the space itself is part of the artwork, places like Olana, Frederick Church’s house upstate on the Hudson, or Giotto’s Scrovegni Chapel. English artist Stanley Spencer’s Sandham Memorial Chapel, inspired by Giotto, but based on Spencer’s memories of WWI and just outside the tiny village of Burghclere, is very special.

Whether or not they smile.

A cover for the couch my dog sleeps on.

Any kind of coffee/milkshake combo, even from a gas station.

Night Studio, a memoir of Philip Guston by his daughter Musa Mayer, is a great book if you have either art problems or parent problems.

Time travel.

Naps.

Just being somewhere unfamiliar inspires me, and anywhere with art is even better. Rome is perhaps the most inspirational city to walk around because so much art and history are right there on the surface.

I’ve often thought that if I’d been born a few hundred years earlier, in a lower-tech world, I would have liked to have been a scientist, observing the natural world and trying to figure out how it works.