There were a lot of learning experiences as Madsen searched for her artistic path. “When I came into the program, I didn’t have very strong painting chops,” Madsen says. “I ended up only drawing in my first year of my program because I only understood the principles that were being taught in my drawing classes. I shied away from painting on my own.”
When she did begin painting, Madsen moved away from using photographic references and towards the imagined spaces and characters in her head. “This is the stylistic language that emerged from that,” she says. “It’s the natural way that I draw.”
Ultimately, Madsen’s characters veered far from photorealism. Their proportions can be unusual—extremely long fingers have become one of the artist’s hallmarks—and they often contort and stretch across the canvas. These choices reflect the themes that Madsen handles in her work. The long fingers can represent idealized femininity. The way that the characters are positioned can speak to memories of childhood, of growing up and physically outgrowing some surroundings. “Obviously, they’re adult figures in spaces that are usually reserved for children,” she says. “When I think about that period of my life, it’s that time when I suddenly became aware of my body in a different way, like how my body exists in space, or how it might exist for other people in certain contexts.”
She adds, “The idea of growing and spilling and stretching and expanding, in a lot of my compositions I’m trying to amplify that.”
This is where drawing is a crucial part of Madsen’s process. All of her paintings begin as drawings, which she will often repeat until a scene visually reflects the emotions of the experience that inspired the work. “I’ll recreate it again and again to push how I can expand and position the body within the composition,” she says of her drawings.
That’s what I’m interested in with these pieces—a little bit more confusion, so you have to sit with the work more to figure out what’s happening.”
Take “Two Can Play” as an example of how images morph through repeated drawing. In the final painting, two characters are crawling through a tube as if they are in competition. One character climbs over the other, pressing the face of the other to the side. “I was thinking specifically about women existing in those spaces and competing with each other for those spaces,” says Madsen. “I’ve been thinking about my own internalized misogyny and the ideas around being both a victim and a perpetrator of certain misogynistic ideas.”
Initially, Madsen considered incorporating three characters into the painting. “I wanted it to both feel familiar and somewhat real, but there are spatial anomalies—things that don’t quite work in the pieces—sort of like discrepancies,” she says. “I guess when I was doing the drawings, three figures felt too much and two figures felt quite right.”
As Madsen refined her technical process, she also reconsidered what she was painting. “I wanted to make work that was personal, but I had a lot of false starts,” she says, adding that initially she thought that more generalized subject matter would appeal to a broader audience. “What I really needed was to get more specific about my experience in the details of my work,” she says.
She incorporates very personal details into the paintings. Madsen’s recurring main character has keratosis pilaris, a condition that manifests with small bumps at the hair follicles. “I had it really bad as a kid,” says Madsen. “I still have it.”
The clothing that characters wear in the paintings are often based on her own wardrobe and hand-me-downs that have gone through the family. She points to a painting in her studio during the interview, notes that the character is wearing a snowsuit that was passed down through her family. “That’s where I’ll bring in a photo reference,” she says. “I have one of my sister wearing that snow suit.”
Similarly, in “Watch Your Step,” two feet stand on a rug based on one that use to lay on the basement floor of Madsen’s family home.
As Madsen prepares for her solo show, her work is continuing to evolve. On a narrative level, she says, the primary character in her paintings is taking a more active role in the stories that unfold.
On a technical level, Madsen is playing with color and light in her work. “I’m really interested in how light and color can help add specificity to time and place,” she says. She mentions the piece “Play the Game,” where her character sits at a school desk, head laying down on it. There she finds the contrast between “cold desks” and “warm light” filtering into the classroom. These kind of details not only add specificity; Madsen says they also serve to add more ambiguity. “That’s what I’m interested in with these pieces—a little bit more confusion, so you have to sit with the work more to figure out what’s happening.”*
This article appears in Hi-Fructose issue 63. Get the full article and issue in print here.
