BOULDERS

Anjuli Morse’s debut show, BOULDERS, is a vibrant abstract series inspired by the photography of Laura Aguilar

This collection explores the relationship between the human form and the desert landscape. While Aguilar’s muted, monochromatic self-portraits depict the artist merging with nature, Anjuli takes a vibrant, abstract approach — reinterpreting Aguilar’s images through gestural mark-making and bold expressions of color. Each painting in this series tells a story of self-discovery, influenced by Anjuli’s return to art after a long hiatus. The vulnerability and creative tension she found in Aguilar’s work resonate deeply in her own pieces, making BOULDERS a fresh take on how art connects and inspires

We are in landscapes, we are landscapes. Laura Aguilar’s work has challenged me to reconsider what I consider self-portraiture, and what expressions of self can look like.

INTERVIEW WITH THE ARTIST

Anjuli, this is going to be your first exhibition and the majority of the pieces have been inspired by the work of one particular artist, the photographer Laura Aguilar. Her photos feature herself, nude, alone or with other nude subjects, in the natural landscapes of Southern California, usually posed in ways that express mimic or move toward being subsumed in the landscapes. Could you explain why this artist’s body of work has stimulated your own work?

Before I saw the exhibit of Aguilar’s “Nature Self Portraits” series at the Phoenix Art Museum I had planned on skipping it, the truth is photography isn’t a medium I’m typically drawn to – but I ended up spending hours soaking up her images, to say I was inspired would be a huge understatement. 

At first glance her work and mine are so different. Aguilar’s compositions are muted and monochromatic, whereas I gravitate toward bold expressions of color. Her photos are self portraits whereas my paintings, at least my recent work, is abstract and based on landscapes.

Oh, absolutely. I mean, on paper, we’re still very different, but when you get beyond description to experience there’s a lot more resonance. My first ever series was based on Camelback Mountain. I had just completed my first painting in literally twenty years and was excited to be painting again, but what I’d painted was so unlike my work from when I was younger that I wasn’t sure where to go next with it. Then I found myself stopped at a red light, looking up at Camelback and I started thinking about all the highs and lows in my life that have happened on or while orbiting that mountain. Camelback is such a prominent feature of our community, whether as something we’re interacting with or as a kind of background vignette. So I decided to start painting all the significant perspectives mountain to me and the whole series became expressions from the landscape of my life as something that included Camelback as well as my life experience in relation to this feature of landscape.

So going back to Aguilar, you see her trying to push herself into the landscape, trying to harmonize the human form with the natural landscape. It’s easy to see the human body is a natural landscape. Likewise, human experience happens in landscapes, and experience itself becomes a kind of landscape. I spent a lot of time trying to imagine her experience of creating those images. She’s nude in the photos, and the desert is harsh and hot—so while she’s posing and positioning herself within the frame, she’s contending with the heat, and the dirt, and rocks biting into her flesh. Model, technician, artist, explorer, all laid bare. We are in landscapes, we are landscapes. Her work has challenged me to reconsider what I consider self-portraiture, and what expressions of self can look like.

You mentioned that you get really inspired and absorbed in learning about the artistic process of other creatives. Have you thought about your own process as intently? 

You know we’re all black boxes in a way, even to ourselves, and sometimes the work just tumbles out of me and I’m sitting there later wondering where it came from. But usually it’s much more effortful. I think if there’s a method to the madness, for me, there are a few key elements. The first is photo reference, and the second is iteration. 

My paintings are almost always landscapes that I have personally encountered and photographed, especially my Camelback and beach series. My ideal painting environment is always plein air. But I take photographs and sketch and paint from them whether I’m outside or in my studio (or on windy beach, with sometimes disastrous results) It helps me find my perspective within the landscape as well as being a useful tool for further abstraction. I also take pictures of my paintings over and over throughout the process. When I’m not with the painting, I’m often in bed staring at it in photos, weighing decisions and thinking about new directions I can take. But I’ve got to be careful. It’s very easy to get lost in that kind of rumination which can really kill the gestural, improvisational energy that I want to express in my work. All the iteration, the whole narrative of my decisions,

Earlier you mentioned you hadn’t painted in twenty years and that what you produced was really different. Why the hiatus? What brought you back and how was the work different?

Well, I started painting very young. I’m a third generation artist, so art has always been a family thing. Some of my earliest and most fond memories are of making art —from the kitchen table to visiting my aunt in New York and going to live figure drawing sessions with her. I ended up completing a portfolio of figure studies for college but I had this other side of me that is very entrepreneurial so I decided to follow that path instead and painting kind of fell away for me. 

Years later, pandemic lockdown was ending and I had just inherited my grandmother’s entire art studio, I really felt called back to painting. So I bought two big canvasses and stared at them for six months. I truly didn’t have a clue where to start. But I have this tattoo that’s a bit abstract and I would jokingly tell people it was the world’s oldest recipe for bread and one day I started wondering what actually is the oldest recipe for bread. I looked it up and found this Egyptian hieroglyphic from the reign of Ramses II, apparently it was his favorite bread, so I painted a diptych based on the alchemy of breadmaking, “Bread I + Bread II”. 

It was really surprising how loose and abstract and gestural it was, a vastly different aesthetic from what I painted when I was younger. It’s been a bumpy ride back into painting but I am so proud of how far I have come in the last few years, and I think if my grandmother was still alive she would be thrilled by my return to art.

So why did you decide it was time for an exhibition?

I think right now, this body of work is the closest I’ve ever been to my own style. I feel like I have something I want to share, and I am really ready for the work to have an audience. As much as I make art for me, I am endlessly fascinated by other people's opinions and interpretations of my work. When someone else views the work and gets something from it that I had never expected, I learn something about my art and since my art is an expression of me, I learn something about myself.