Joan Semmel is a legend. At 91, she is still creating intimate art that is provocative and thoroughly her. She maps the relationship with her own body and self, and meets it with female representations of femininity and politics. She is as no-nonsense as any woman who has lived for nine decades and counting. She didn’t make it this far by chance.

Focused and candid, her ethos is all about the now. When we talk on the phone about what keeps her going, I suggest that perhaps meditation is part of her daily life. In response, she says “it’s not part of my practice to close my eyes”, surprised perhaps that this might be proposed. “I keep my eyes open most of the time. A connection to the world rather than a disconnect to the world.”

When Semmel connects to society, her thoughts are conceptual and drive the work. “We all have different ways of relating to the world, but I tend to be a person who is more involved in things like politics and realities than I am in that other kind of introspection. Introspection comes from making sense of my reality.”

Semmel’s reality is hard to dissect. She muses, “I am very involved politically, as much as I can be. There are certain aspects of politics as a feminist which drive my work. Conceptually, I have to find a way to express those thoughts without being pedantic and without being propagandist by finding imagery that will convey those messages for women.”

A survey of her work elicits a sense of fearlessness and vulnerability, such is its resonant rawness, but when she first started painting that wasn’t her intention. “I began as an abstract painter and as I became involved as a feminist, I wanted to connect those feelings to my work and not be doing something that was completely removed from my life,” she explains. “That was the beginning of my use of the body, so to speak. I didn’t think of it as work ‘about the body’. I thought of it as having the ability to affect the way women are seen in the world. And that’s what motivated me.” She was driven by trying to change her life in relation to pre-ordained imposed societal structures, in terms of “positions that we were permitted, the way we had to look, the way we had to act, a position of powerlessness in terms of control in our own lives. That’s what I was reaching for as an artist.”

These urgent themes have evolved exponentially and many have achieved acceptance today in contemporary art, though, as she says emphatically, “it’s taken a long time, but it seems to finally have arrived”. Since 1970, she’s been working on this kind of imagery. “For a very long time, I couldn’t get any traction at all. Now it’s like younger women have come to the place where I was 50 years ago. It’s a good thing for me, it makes me feel relevant still, which is very nice. But it’s also a little bit sad that those issues are still important and necessary for young people to resist.

Her form of visual realism has historically traced women’s sexuality, with its wrinkles, smile lines, folds, softness, the business of ageing, all of it, naturally encouraging self-acceptance. Although, she says, “I don’t think it’s because I paint so realistically… I imagine that might be helpful to people who can respond to something recognisable more than something more abstract. I think from that point of view it’s important, but the return to figuration has happened out of developments and the art community. [I think] it has to do with a shift from abstraction back towards more representation.”

Semmel embraced her identity a long time ago by railing against environments that always insist on conforming to certain norms, which she says “aren’t really normal. They’re manufactured and done for the cultural demands of maintaining women in a subservient situation where they’re the labour for producing babies and nothing else.”

Semmel believes “being a feminist in 2024 means that it’s perfectly okay to be a feminist. Back in 1970, it was not. We were looked upon as outcasts, essentially. It’s very gratifying that women today can take a position and maintain it without being seen as some sort of monster. I think that, today, as a feminist [you are] just seen as an independent person who has a mission.”

By 1970, the second wave of feminism in America was fiercely forging its way into the national consciousness due to women’s liberation. “I think we had some very good spokespeople; Gloria Steinem was so influential in the movement.” Semmel admires women who are functioning now in government positions. “I admire them enormously. I don’t have any particular idols that I work around in my head. It’s just people who are functioning out there in the world and taking on all of these difficult situations.”

Semmel’s process begins with “finding the image – and in order to find it I use a camera and it will move across many different places that I work, things that Ido, people that I know and myself.

And then, from that whole well of imagery, I will choose images that grab me, that excite me, that interest me, that I feel convey meanings from me to somebody else. That’s the first part.”

Part two is about the canvas and scaling or transforming the image. “I project the image and fool around with the composition by moving it until I find the right composition. I transform it with a crayon, pencil, whatever, and then move into paint. After that the painting develops from a back and forth between me and the canvas. [It’s about] how I put the colour down, how the colour hits the canvas, what kind of a mark it makes. It’s always a surprise. It’s a conversation that happens between me, the canvas and the brush. If I have to take it off or start again, it’s a back and forth conversation. And that’s always engaging and surprising and fun. It’s intense and totally engrossing.”

Her morning ritual starts with making “my cup of black coffee with a little milk – I’m not alive until I do that!” she says with a laugh. “I like music while I paint, just because it blocks out the rest of the room. It’s an envelope of sound that is removed from the sounds of everyday life. I’m very directed in one direction only and that’s the visual. The music is whatever happens to be available at the time. It’ll be the radio, I don’t want to have to fuss with it. I don’t want to have to go to a record player, so whatever is coming on – classical, opera, folk music, jazz – it’s a way of clearing the space.”

The physicality of starting to paint is the release point. “That’s when you get to the real business of painting, when you’re making those choices. What colour do I start with? Where do I begin? You’re making choices almost automatically but they’re very important as to how the painting evolves finally.”

Her guiding principle is “simply to trust myself, to trust my own feelings in regard to what the work is about and how it looks. It’s not to follow anyone or anything. It’s more important to follow your own vision and believe in it. That, in the end, will be what’s important in the work.”

Semmel was born in the Bronx to a Jewish family and still lives in New York; “when it gets hot and awful” she escapes and spends the summer in East Hampton. New York is important, she says, as “a crossroads of the world. There are all kinds of people here, all kinds of exciting things to see. There’s a heavy, very large art community, lots of images, people, parties, exhibitions. It’s a remarkable, exciting, wonderful place. I love it. I wouldn’t be anywhere else.” (Semmel got married in 1952, aged 19, and had a son and daughter; she lived in Spain for seven years, returning to NYC in 1970, the year of her divorce.) If she hadn’t become an artist, she says she might have been a psychiatrist. “I like people and I like a kind of analytic attitude, what makes people who they are. I probably would have gone in that direction, maybe. Or else politics.

She has been the subject of countless one-person exhibitions, including, in recent years, An Other View at Xavier Hufkens’s gallery in Brussels; Joan Semmel: Against the Wall at Alexander Gray Associates in New York; and she was also part of the group show of 150 artists in Day for Night: New American Realism at the Palazzo Barberini in Rome. “Right now, I’m recovering from all of that and working on whatever’s going to happen next, though I’m not quite sure what it’ll be. I have four new paintings, but I don’t know how it’s all going to come together.” She doesn’t like to do a show more often than once every two years. “You need to space it out so that you have time to develop whatever new thing is coming along. And it’s hard to speak about whatever new thing it’s going to be because it hasn’t become yet.”

One of her proudest moments was Joan Semmel: Skin in the Game, the comprehensive retrospective of her work held at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, Philadelphia, which ran from October 2021 to April 2022. “It covered the abstract period all the way through and it was a really important experience for me to see my work that way and see the connections between one group and the other [Semmel’s series of paintings started with First Erotic Series, 1970-71], and the development and the movement. It made total sense as a complete career and I don’t think one often has the possibility of that… a summation of your work in quite that way while you are still alive. That was a really important moment.”

Overwhelmingly, the feeling was one of surprise. “I said to myself, ‘I think I really did something that was real.’ One of my friends told me that she came out of the show crying. It was very moving to see the work that way. I felt moved myself. Yes, I really did do something…”

Artworks courtesy of Alexander Gray Associates, New York © 2024 Joan Semmel / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Taken from Issue 24 of 10 Magazine Australia – RISING, RENEW, RENAISSANCE – out NOW.

Top image: ‘Self-Portrait’ 2, 2010, oil on canvas

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