All Maria’s acrylic canvases are stunning portraits of women. When I walked through the exhibition, “Glamorous Fugue,” the ladies talked to me with their eyes. Maria explains the eyes as showing how the people in the paintings are disassociated and have created a space for themselves. “When you don’t fit in, you create your own space.” Their luminous eyes haunted me, devoured me, but what got me thinking was “Emberface.”

American painter Susan Rothenberg, famous for the energy she poured into her horse figures, is one of Maria’s favorite artists. The first attraction to Rothenberg came when she saw a video of her smoking cigarettes. “I would really love to be a smoker or a junkie because I have this desire to go somewhere else, which is what I saw in her [Rothenberg’s] eyes.” The idea of creating your own space, whether you distance yourself or go to a place you can only reach by shooting up, fascinates Maria. She also admires Frida Kahlo, whose best work, in my opinion, is her self-portraits.

She focuses on painting women because, “I’m trying to communicate with a part of myself. In college all the nudes were female, but once there was a male and after I drew him, he ended up looking like a woman.”

There was no eureka moment, when Maria Scavullo decided to be an artist. Drawing and painting just sorta came to her. “It was just something I could do, I could do by myself. I could communicate with people through it.” When I asked Maria who her hero or heroine was, “Nana,” she responded without skipping a beat. When she was a child, Nana, her grandmother who was also a sculptor sent her paint in the mail.

For Maria, being an artist or a space creator for women is challenging, “It’s difficult just to paint the paint on the damn painting,” but for the ladies in question it’s purely liberating.

Glamorous Fugue
Paintings by Maria Scavullo
December 9, 2005 – February 9, 2006
LOLITA
266 Broome Street (@Allen)
New York, NY 10012