Joan Semmel, Resident Artist Lecture 1991

Artist Joan Semmel gives a lecture of her work talking about her personal, political and aesthetic influences. Semmel also goes into detail talking about her painting practice which ranges from still life, landscape, and portraiture as well as her time living in Spain and the United States. Semmel is specifically interested in sexual fantasies and experiences to express her feminist identity which had not been seen in the art history she studied. Semmel is also interested in the non-idealized body from one’s own body and one’s own point of view. Semmel uses this as a jumping off point to explore separateness and intimacy in her painting practice in order to imbue it with a surreal quality. Another source of imagery that Semmel works with is black and photographs and colour xerox machines. Semmel talks about the process of projecting an image to get across an idea through an image. For Semmel, photography communicates images that allows her to accept distortions and take those sources to make it her own when painting it. Semmel ends the lecture by urging the participants if there is a skill they want to acquire, they have to put in the work to go out there and figure out how to learn it.