Caitlin MacBride

DE: What is your favorite time of day to paint and why?

CM: Evening into nighttime. Specifically about 6/7pm till 1/2am. I’ve always been this way and I really wish I was someone who did best with a 9 to 5 schedule but I can focus so much better when the world has quieted down and my brain feels on. Props to the therapist about 6 years ago who told me to just trust my body and roll with it. I can pretty much only get to a flow state with painting after 9pm.

DE: Has having a young child made it harder schedule to maintain this schedule or in a way easier because he is usually asleep?

CM: Ha, well i guess both!   Every kind of schedule feels much harder. Luckily Dave and I are pretty good at creating space for each others creative life. He's a morning person and I'm a night person so usually I do mornings with our son and he mostly does bedtime. Sometimes I go back to the studio after we all have dinner together. I'm planning on setting up a space at home soon so i can get more done after bedtime without that trek back to the studio. My dream has always been based on the old footage of Elizabeth Murray with her kids riding bikes around her studio or giving her painting feedback as teenagers. I really like the idea of having it all integrated. Though obviously still alone time to be able to really focus.

DE: What color are you currently obsessed with?

CM: Blue always - cobalt blue, lapis blue, indigo, all the blues But also green and pink - chrome oxide green and Persian rose or a light warm salmon color

DE: Why blue?

CM: I think color is the most intuitive part of my paintings. So much of the imagery comes from appropriated documentation and archive photography and a lot of the conceptual part is based on research but color is the place where I really listen to the painting and my own intuition. To me Blue feels like the color thats able to contain a lot of depth and mystery. Maggie Nelson's "Bluets" is one of my favorite books because its about the color blue as an obsession and I think its writing that reads like an artists mind. There's also a Rebecca Solnit essay called "The Blue of Distance" thats about blue as the color of desire... the space between things. She talks about how atmosphere is viewed as blue... like when you see things receding in the distance they appear blue, like mountains. She makes the case that the space of desire, the space between two things, is more powerful than attaining the thing itself. I think about this all the time now that I live in the Hudson Valley. I drive over the Rip Van Winkle Bridge to get to my studio and I always think about the blue of the mountains when I do that drive.

Caitlin MacBride (b. 1983, Norwich, CT)  engages with material culture and artifacts in an exploration of labor, desire, and history. MacBride’s oil paintings balance various languages of painting history with the structures of utilitarian objects sourced from museum archives. These paintings depict objects, specifically tools, furniture, and clothing from Early-American histories as a way of examining the influence of necessity and dogma on object-making. The connections between materiality, motivation, and cultural narratives emerge as MacBride explores the tension between form and function. A variety of painting approaches are employed to combine the language of modernism with craft and design practices.  The role of institutional acquisition, documentation, and display inform the composition. The process of painting is influenced by a relationship to a puritan work ethic and the concept that labor might innately be tied to salvation.  Feminist and working-class traditions of making are harnessed to examine structural memory and cultural beliefs about worth. And she just recently had a solo exhibition with the Shaker Museum, From Palm to Poplar: Devotional Labor, in Kinderhook, NY in 2024.

EXHIBITIONS WITH DEP:

The Floor Below The Floor, 2026
Interstitial, 2026
NADA MIAMI, solo presentation, 2024
A Cup is a Cup, a Tree is a Tree, 2024
Caitlin MacBride: Dyeing Notes, 2022

DE: Do you prefer podcasts, music or neither in the studio? What are you currently listening to?

CM: I like music when I’m getting set up or working on something where I’m moving around the painting quickly. Usually fast fun stuff to get the blood flowing. But for the most part I’m a total podcast junkie. Most of my paintings are very time consuming and the podcasts help me focus. I used to do a lot of political podcast but I’ve switched to only about 20% political to keep the existential dread at bay. These days I listen to a ton of true crime and history podcasts and some art ones. I’m also getting more into audiobooks. “Worn” by Sofi Thanhauser and “Fewer, Better Things” by Glenn Adamson were important ones I listened to while making this show.

DE: What was your most recent solo show that has stuck with you?

CM: The Domenico Gnoli show at Lévy Gorvy Dayan and the Isa Genzken show at 52 Walker.  I’ve always loved Gnoli but rarely seen them in person. The sand mixed in with the painter, the fact that he made those so young, and died so young, and honestly the way he saw things…. The cropping, the detail, the techniques and decisions, it was incredible. Also that space was perfect. It felt like Europe and not New York and that felt important to the work. Obviously important to me because I’m interested in having a resonant experience with the mundane or every day.

And the Genzken show really stayed with me. It’s so physical and psychological at the same time which is one of my favorite experiences with art. . I love the combination of material in this recent show: photos, rubbings, cement. She was one of the first artists I fell in love with when I moved to NYC at 21 and I spent a lot of time on the subway reading books and essays about her work. And yet it will always remain mysterious.