Corri-Lynn Tetz: Found Images and Female Identity

Hi everyone, welcome back to the Art-O-Log. Today I'm chatting with Cori Lynn Tietz, a Canadian figurative painter I've been following for a while. Tietz was born in Calgary, alberta, and now lives and works in Montreal. She studied painting at Brevedere College, emily Carr University and graduated from the MFA program at Concordia University. Tietz has received support from the Conseil des Arts et des Lettres du Québec, the Canada Council for the Arts, the Elizabeth Greenshield Foundation and in 2016, was awarded the Brucever Residency Fellowship in Gotland, sweden. Tita's paintings have been exhibited widely, including the Kasman Gallery, the Nino Meyer Gallery, arsenal Gallery, bloenda, vision, anabepki and Gallery 1226. Her first European solo show opened in June 2024 at Sims Smith Gallery in London, england.

In this episode, we talk about Corrie's journey to becoming an artist, her inspirations and get frank about what it's like to be a professional artist. I'm so excited for you to hear this episode, so, without further ado, welcome to the Art-O-Log. Kori, hi, thanks for having me. How are you doing today? I'm doing well. Yeah, I've just been puttering in the studio, organizing, cleaning brushes, stretching canvases, so it's all good.

Can you describe your practice for me? Yes, so I'm a painter living in Montreal. My work has largely been focused on the figure, primarily the female figure, in painting and the kind of history of that representation, my primary subject from the beginning of me painting, and I've just stubbornly stuck to it. So I think my practice, in my practice I'm really interested in ideas of femininity and representations of femininity and how we absorb or reject those representations and how those representations are impacted, dependent on where you grow up and how you grow up the kind of religious ideas or socioeconomic ideas. I'm thinking a lot about class and shame, and also just paint and how paint functions as a material. I'm interested in the kind of vast scope of what paint can do, how you can lay it down and you can give the sensation of flesh or it ignites in different ways. So that to me, is the thing that keeps me really excited about painting.

When did you know you wanted to be an artist? That's a good question. As a kid I was always drawing. My grandma was a painter and so she always had a room tucked away and she painted horses and mountains and she painted horses and mountains and the foothills of Alberta, and so I remembered learning, teaching myself how to draw a horse and looking at her paintings and drawing a horse, and then I just stuck with drawing in high school and I was good at it and I remember graduating and I took two years off and I was thinking about going to Red Deer College and I really had no idea what I wanted to take and there were other things that I had thought of doing, but really the only thing I could that I really felt like I wanted to do is study art. And I didn't know why I had never decided I wanted to be an artist, but I did it and I found out years later that my dad was quietly upset with this but that he he was really worried that I was deciding to study art, but he didn't ever say it, so he never deterred me from it and he was always very supportive. But I think that was it.

I think once I decided to study, I just knew that's what I wanted to do. I had a really passionate art history professor and he was also my painting instructor and he was just so excited about the history of painting and the way he taught it. I just was like just ate it up, like I just loved it, and I had this thought of, wow, paint, a painting can have so much power and there was something about that that it just stuck. And then recently we were talking about it, my brother was here visiting and he was saying to my friend he said, yeah, she just he said about me that I was I am the only person that he knows that really decided, they were going to do something and did it. There was never anything else. So that was interesting to me because I hadn't thought of myself in that way, but I guess he's right Like it really was a decision at 20. And that was it. Yeah, I think it gave me a practice, I think it formed this idea of. I had no examples of it in real life except for my grandma who did it as a hobby.

But art school really gave me the skills. I think the first few years of art school were at Red Deer College and it was really about painting and drawing, which is, I think, unique. Now, even going to Emily Carr, a lot of the students hadn't had that same kind of foundational emphasis and those arguments for and against that. I was really a fish out of water when it came to learning about more conceptual practices. But I think the foundation of drawing and painting and rigorous skill building I think was really helpful for me and it really shaped my approach to painting and art making. I feel like all of my teachers taught me one or two really important things. There was never one teacher that taught me everything. It was like I have very specific things that I learned from different people, and so art school was, at times, really challenging.

Also, I think being a figurative painter in art school, there were a lot of times where it was like a dirty secret. You had to hide the fact that you were interested in painting the female figure, had to hide the fact that you were interested in painting the female figure, the new, the paintings that I loved had to be a secret, and so it just made me more resolute. I think it made me more stubborn and it made me, it made me more certain of what I wanted to paint and how I wanted to do it. So I think I had a lot of grad school. There's a lot of a lot of pressure not pressure that you put on yourself, I think, but that environment I wasn't. It was hard. I really had to think about what I was doing and why I was doing it, and I wasn't doing anything good for a long time in grad school. So I think that experience the difficulty of it, the fact that you have to talk about what you're doing all the time, I think gave me the ability to talk about painting and to talk about my work. Yeah, and I don't. I wouldn't have this practice if I didn't have this very wide ranging experience in art school. What makes a good painting for you? That's a good question.

I think one thing in painting that's really important for me when I was reading the Logic of Sensation by Deleuze, he talks about Francis Bacon's painting and this idea of sensation and how paint has the ability to bypass the viewer's logical brain and go straight to their body logical brain and go straight to their body. And I think there's something about having that response to a painting and having that resonance in your body and that kind of affective resonance. And that can be subtle. It doesn't mean it has to be heavy-handed expressionism, because I'm not even sure I'm that interested in that, but there's a kind of subtle paint handling that really excites me and this kind of use of colors that just sing together unlikely colors. Yeah, it's a really hard.

I thought about this a lot, like it's a really hard thing to put your finger on, but I think that there's also there's something about the painter's hand in it too, like there's so many paintings right now I feel like that are so well done and so excellent, but very much like people planning an image out on it on an iPad or a digital format and then transcribing that onto a canvas and there's so much invention and this kind of great use of fantasy and all of these things. But there for me, is a lack of that kind of materiality that I'm so connected to. Like if I go to the Met, if I'm in New York and I go to the Met, I go to the John Singer Sargent room and I look at the bottoms of his dresses and I'm just totally obsessed by these moments in the paintings where everything falls apart. You have this perfectly rendered, beautifully rendered skin and face and this dress, and then everything falls apart and I think it's that mix for me of this very amazing rendering and then places where there's a confidence. The painter has a confidence and is just letting things be. Can you tell me more about your paintings and what you're interested in exploring in them? Yeah, it's shifting.

For many years I've really been using found images and so I was interested in working with archives or found photos and recontextualizing them and seeing how the meaning transforms when it's painted as opposed to the photographic image. Years ago I was going to do a bandAMF residency and my brother texted me and said do you want? I just found two giant bags of porn like penthouse magazines behind like a Salvation Army drop bin. Do you want them? I was like yes. So I went to the BAMF center and then had no idea how I was going to use these images. I was really like, oh my God, this is ridiculous, like I can't use these.

But I started making these paintings and realized how, as I had people into the studio to look at the paintings I was making, I could see how the meaning just completely shifted in these images. Like you, look at the magazines and this is completely. They're images that are made for consumption, for male consumption, primarily for the male gaze, and they're just cold and they serve this function. And yet when I was making the painting, all of a sudden the painting became about the subject and the person in the painting and your relationship with that person. And certainly maybe for straight men they have a different relationship for my paintings, but I'm not really interested in that dynamic and I don't care really, so I think that's always a thing is the transformation of meaning, in using a found photo and working in between abstraction and figuration to have that meaning open up.

I try not to plan out my paintings too much beforehand, which kind of adds for a lot of failure. You have a lot of things that don't work out because you don't start with a plan. But I'm really interested in having kind of discovery along the way and having that meaning kind of surface or events in the painting. Like, I think a lot about light and how light was in Renaissance painting. It was a symbol of an experience with the divine, like a divine presence, and I think about that a lot in my work. I think I grew up very Christian and in my adult life have spent a lot of time thinking about how that has impacted me Now walking away from that, but I like to include those ideas in my paintings. So, yeah, and it's shifting, like I'm now starting to take my own photos and trying to come up with these images on my own and start from there, which is a whole other way to work. Yeah, I'm interested in this idea of failing that you've mentioned.

How do you move on from that failure in painting? I usually rip the painting off the canvas and or cover it up, flip it around Like I really have a. I really have some days. I'll come into the studio and if I feel like I've made a few paintings that are just not working, if I'm feeling frustrated, I'll just have a day where I tear off a bunch of canvases and I just restart. I clean up, I clean my brushes and I just restart and I think it is so much a regular part. You know it's always slightly devastating when it doesn't work out, but then the new beginning. I've come to really love that part. It's like starting again and eventually you'll hit it, eventually it will click, but there's almost sometimes there's a real.

If it's a, if it's an idea or an image that you're really attached to and it doesn't work. It becomes like a grieving, really attached to and it doesn't work. It becomes like a grieving like you grieve, and it can be so devastating. It's so funny to me how painting can make me feel like life is so great, everything's going so well, I'm so happy, and then this failure of a painting can just completely devastate me. But it's almost like I have this little ritual of restart that works for me and I think in the last two years I've had such a busy schedule like I've had back-to-back exhibitions and there hasn't been a lot of room for failure, and that freaks me out more than the actual failures. I'd rather have space for them so that I can just get over them and start something new. I think I make more interesting work when I have space for failure. You can take more risks if you're constantly trying to be productive and there's such a like a tension in that that that really impacts. It impacts the way I paint, for sure.

Yeah, can you tell me more about your recent shows? And thinking of the one in London at Sin Smith. Yeah, so that show. Yes, the show was called Tender Buttons. It's one of the one of the projects. So I had a show in Dallas when was it last winter, I think, and it was one of the projects. So I had a show in Dallas when was it Last winter, I think, and it was one of the first shows. I did a bunch of small paintings for it and it was one of the first shows where I only used photos that I took. So I've had friends model for me and using this still the same ideas of this kind of theatricality of sexuality and costuming and posing and playing around with those things, and so Tender Buttons was still kind of part of this exploration of using my own photos and friends. But it was me more.

Me trying to think of how I don't know I feel like I'm moving into a more open and poetic. I want my paintings to be a little more open and poetic and I don't quite know how that will come to fruition, but it's a start. It's also a show that I did when I was. I made half the work when I was doing a residency in New York, a residency in New York. So it was. It felt like a lot of pressure because I was going to try and get this whole show done during this residency. And yet I had this experience of being in New York and taking part of this in this residency with other people and you want to be present at the same time You're like, oh shit, I have my first show in Europe and I had. This has to be great, and so it was a weird. It was a weird time period and I think my anxiety, I think just with everything that's happening in the world and economically and all of these things and war and just a lot of anxiety, and so I think there's a really restrained quality to this, to the the show that the brush marks and everything are really subtle and pared down.

With your paintings, do you see them as engaging or interrogating the Western art history, ken, or art history in general? I do really look at art history and the history of the figure and the kind of tropes of the female figure and painting. I grew up in small town, alberta, and culturally have zero connection to this kind of grand history of painting and culture. The first paintings I saw were very like Western horses, cowboys I saw were very like Western horses, cowboys, all of these things, and so I've always felt like kind of a misfit or outsider and I loved the idea of making paintings now that were seen as classless or felt like I was taking these subjects and as a painter who's been through undergrad, gone to grad school, has all of this art education that is supposed to be making more intellectual paintings, and yet the work I was making were these images from porn and I felt like I wanted to challenge that class issue and the kind of idea that, to be taken seriously, your subject matter should be fit within this framework and the aesthetic should fit within this framework, because it is funny to me to think about the theatricality of gender and how we're supposed to be as women, identifying, and to put that in the context of this very serious art history. For me is playful and fun, so I see it engaging that way. I'm also using these tropes all the time, like the reclining nude and all these things and porn really does that also uses kind of tropes from art history.

Do you see your works as political? I think the personal is political. I think that typically anything that has been seen as feminine has been disregarded. Been seen as feminine has been disregarded. Again, where I grew up was very much a culture that was focused on boy, boy culture and sports and hockey and it's like the sons of families were the ones that the families would rally around and if you're a girl it was okay but it wasn't as good and I think that is also a thing in painting that some people could dismiss my work because of the subject matter and in that sense I do think it is political.

What were your career expectations leaving art school and has your experience more or less matched. Going to grad school, I really was like, okay, I'm going to have to teach. I got to go to grad school Like I had been. I'd taken a break from painting. I got to go to grad school Like I had been. I'd taken a break from painting, I hadn't painted that much in between and I had done a bunch of other things that I hadn't painted. And so I really was like, ok, I need to get a real job, I'm going to teach. And that was the impetus for going to grad school and then graduating. Oh, there's no teaching jobs. Or oh, it's so hard to get a teaching job. So no, it hasn't lined up at all. But I feel like I've worked really hard and made a ton of paintings and have figured out how to make this work. I worked at Concordia doing admin for a few years after grad school and just focused on getting grants and getting shows. Yeah, I have much more of a career than I had anticipated. I really thought that I would find a full-time teaching job and then that would be the course that I would take.

What was the first moment that made you feel like you quote-unquote made it? As an artist, I constantly feel like I still haven't made it. So there's that part of it. But I think there's this funny moment when I had a show. I had a solo show at Contemporary Calgary. It was a new institutional exhibition that I got to have and it's in this big space and when the show opened it was this huge event and the mayor was there and it was just massive and all my family was there and it was pretty huge. And then I had my cousin sending me photos of my name plastered on the side of a bus with an image of my painting. And then, at the Calgary airport, come down and it's just in Calgary, but it really was. I was like, oh my God, this is amazing. And thinking about how I really hope my ex-husband's family sees that, like just thinking about people seeing this bus with my name and an image of my painting. I think that was the first moment I was like, oh yes, this is great, I've done it. I did it.

What have been some more tougher moments in your career and how did you overcome them? I still, it's tough, it's really hard. It's a really difficult, economically, very difficult path to take. If you don't have family money. It's really precarious and I think just when you feel like you're doing okay, there will be something and the market is by there will be something in there. The market is by politics and war and all of these things that it should be impacted by, but it also means that's our. This is how we're making a living and how I deal with it is just coming to the studio, I think, and trying to focus on, refocus on why I'm doing what I'm doing, and just coming to the studio and starting a new painting, I think for me, has really helped me work through a lot of those stressful moments. For sure. Yeah, where do you see your practice going in the future? I'm in it for the long haul. This is a lifelong thing that I'm doing and you know I can't think of anything else I would do at this point and I don't know like. I know that I'm never satisfied and I think that works to my benefit because I think it keeps me hungry for wanting something new in my work and I just want to maintain that feeling of staying hungry for exploration and seeing where it goes. So there's already so many I feel like I've had. You know, exciting and unexpected things happen in the last five or six years, and so I'm just moving forward, believing that there will be more exciting and interesting things that will happen.

What fun piece of advice that you give to someone looking to become a painter. My advice would be you have to do the work, you have to paint, and that has to be the driving force. And don't get too far into debt. That would be another one when you're starting out. But I think, really being stubborn and really making the decision to do it. And everyone has to work. Everyone has to find jobs at the beginning and you gradually figure out how to spend more time in your studio and less time at your job. So don't be afraid of or disheartened that you have to work somewhere that you don't want to. But, yeah, you just have to stick with it. You have to be stubborn.

Thank you so much for the advice, corey, and thanks again for being on the podcast. This has been a great conversation. Oh, my pleasure. It was great to talk with you. Do you have anything that you want to let us know about before we close up? No, I don't think I do right now. I have some shows down the road, but it's a bit too soon to talk about them. You can always see what I'm working on Instagram, for sure, or on my website, where I just updated it. So yeah, but stay tuned for more. Thanks again for listening to this week's episode of the Artilogue. Be sure to listen in and follow us on Instagram and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.