Today we’d like to introduce you to Emily Marie Miller Coan.
Hi Emily Marie Miller, thanks for joining us today. We’d love for you to start by introducing yourself.
I’m a painter originally from St. Petersburg, Florida. I graduated with a sculpture degree from the University of Florida in 2013 and moved to New York City as a painter in 2015.
I moved to the city because I was serious about my painting work and wanted to be in the heart of the art world. For the first couple of years, I worked as an assistant to multiple artists – stretching canvases, doing their under-painting, and working on their social media and studio archives – all while maintaining and upgrading my own studio practice. When I got to New York, seeing paintings in person for the first time on a regular basis taught me how much I needed to learn, so I focused on learning & painting, making the work better & better until it was good enough to be shown next to the incredible caliber of art I was seeing in New York. Around this time, I also began going to openings multiple times a week. I didn’t know anyone, but I wore all red every time I went out so that people would remember me. My business cards were all red, too, with just my name, Instagram, and email address.
At a certain point, I was working full-time at a company that made artistic window displays for storefronts. I was feeling so burnt out working 40 hours a week & going to the studio most nights. I was asked to be in my first group show and then was unceremoniously dropped from it. I was ignored by the curator online and at the opening. I was feeling lower than ever. I felt like nobody was going to see my paintings. I was having my first full ego death: a dark night of the soul.
At the studio, I translated this darkness into oil paint. I was seeking to translate the mystical experience that I was having within. I felt like I had nothing to lose. I would have never guessed at the time that the work I was making during this dark, low period in my life was the very work that would help me break into the art world.
In early 2018, while working an admin job for another artist, I received the studio visit that would change my life. Danny Moynihan, a longtime friend & associate of Paul Kasmin (founder of Kasmin Gallery, a prestigious gallery in New York), visited my studio and encouraged me to keep going with my work. Not long after, he and curator Yvonne Force Villareal chose a painting of mine to be included in a group show with some of the biggest female artists of our time: Yoko Ono, Lisa Yuskavage, and Cecily Brown, among others. The show was called Seed, and it featured 29 women artists. The concept of the show was tied to cycles, mystery, and femininity. I was the youngest person in the show at 26 years old, and I felt like I was a heroine in a fairy tale.
The success of that show threw me down the rabbit hole. You always hear about the exciting, generative parts of success, but people rarely share the flip side. The show was very talked about in the art world. People started to treat me differently, and I was afraid, unsure about how to cope with the success, how to keep it going. I entered another dark night of the soul, or perhaps I just kept the last one going. The success forced me to face the darkest parts of myself, the shadows that told me I couldn’t succeed, the skeletons in my closet dragging me down. Thus began a period of darkness and healing in my life and practice. Out of the harsh spotlight of that big show in 2018, in the softer light of smaller galleries, I began to cultivate a deeper understanding of both my paintings and myself. As I began to understand my inner world, I began to cultivate a world within my paintings: a fairy-tale like world filled with women working, weaving, healing, washing, and creating.
Fast forward to five years later – I am living in the Hudson Valley, New York. I am creating a world within my paintings. I know myself. The skeletons have been lovingly swept out of the closet, and the door is wide open. The spotlight feels warm and balmy instead of harsh and intrusive.
I have a show up at De Boer Gallery in Los Angeles. The show is called Oracle – it’s a group show with eight women artists united by themes of femininity and mysticism. The women in my paintings weave a tapestry together, make daisy chains, and are reborn through the portal of a pond. The paintings mirror my own life, swimming in the lakes and watering holes of the Hudson Valley, weaving the tableaux of my visionary world, one painting at a time.
We all face challenges, but looking back would you describe it as a relatively smooth road?
There have been a lot of challenges. Although I’ve been very lucky to have had my work noticed by the art world at a young age, the obstacles have been more or less constant, whether coming from within or without. Navigating the world of business and art is complex: you have to keep your eyes & ears open and be ready to shift to a new strategy when the old paradigm stops working. I’ve intuited that no matter how high my career soars, there will always be snags that need teasing out. There is no point where you reach a stage of perfection and rest on your laurels. So often, we project only the highlights, but I’ve found that highs & lows go hand & hand. Everything’s a spiral.
Alright, so let’s switch gears a bit and talk business. What should we know about your work?
I’m an artist who makes figurative oil paintings. I’m known for making paintings with avatars of myself multiplied, interacting with each other in fairy-tale type landscapes, usually in nature. They often wear the trappings of femininity – lingerie, stockings, ballet shoes, veils, etc. One thing that is compelling about my work is that the scenes are very complicated and highly detailed – there are many groupings of figures and the compositions are complex. Another thing that makes my work compelling is the jewel-like quality of the surface of my paintings that comes from the process of glazing or applying oil paint in thin layers to give the appearance of depth.
The figures within the paintings are engaging with traditional women’s work: healing, weaving, spinning, witchcraft. Sometimes the figures engage in self-destruction through drinking and harming one another. Sometimes the work deals with shame, sometimes with healing, and sometimes there is a mixture of the two. The paintings grapple with womanhood, femininity, labor practices, and the mystical.
How can people work with you, collaborate with you or support you?
People can support me by following me on Instagram, @emilymariemillercoan, or visiting my website at emilycoan.com.
They can also support me by going to see the show De Boer Gallery, provided that the show is still up during the time of publication:
Oracle
April 22 – June 10, 2023
Alison Blickle, Emily Marie Miller Coan, Renée Estée, Liza Jo Eilers, Kat Lowish, Ivana Štulić, Yuwei Tu, Caroline Zurmely
de boer, Los Angeles
Contact Info:
- Website: emilycoan.com
- Instagram: instagram.com/emilymariemillercoan
Image Credits
Image credits in order of upload: 1. The film image of me in a white jumpsuit in front of a large red/orange painting in the studio holding a jug of Gamsol mineral spirits – Credit: Elizabeth Celeste Ibarra 2. The image of me in a red outfit in front of two paintings – Credit: The Artist, Caption: The artist with her work at the opening of Oracle, De Boer gallery, Los Angeles. 3. Image of the gallery storefront with lots of foliage and one of my paintings – Credit: De Boer Gallery. 4. An installation shot of Oracle at De Boer Gallery (featuring my pantings and a painting by Renée Estée) – Credit: De Boer Gallery. 5. A monochromatic blue painting of two women, one woman is pulling a veil off of the other – Credit: De Boer Gallery. 6. A painting of many figure in a field. The left foreground figure has a flaming sword, there is a flowering tree in the middle. Credit: Monya Rowe Gallery 7. An detail of a painting with a woman pulling up her stocking. Credit: The Artist 8. Me in my studio surrounded by various paintings. Credit: The Artist 9. A monochromatic blue painting with many figures by the water. There are flowers and a snake in the right foreground. Credit: Monya Rowe Gallery
