The exhibition Visionary: William Blake is on view through January 14 at the Getty Center. Hear more from Pierre as part of the exhibition’s audio guide.
Kindred Spirits
Naudline Pierre on her connection with William Blake
Topics
The Only Way Out Is In, 2023, Naudline Pierre. Oil and oil stick on canvas. Image courtesy of the artist and James Cohan, New York.
Photo: Dan Bradica
Body Content
Contemporary American artist Naudline Pierre creates colorful paintings that feature floating, celestial figures.
They’re often winged and intimate, interacting with other hovering forms. Her subjects seem mythological and personal at the same time. They sometimes look as if they’re referencing Christian iconography, though interpreted through Pierre’s distinctive lens. Her work also shows a surprising creative influence: the British poet and artist William Blake.
Pierre, who was interviewed as part of the audio tour accompanying William Blake: Visionary, first discovered William Blake in grad school. “I remember thinking, ‘Oh my God, this is so weird,’” she says. “I felt really connected to the imagery.”
Beatrice Addressing Dante from the Car, 1824–27, William Blake. Ink and watercolor. Tate, London. Purchased with the assistance of a special grant from the National Gallery and donations from the Art Fund, Lord Duveen, and others, and presented through the Art Fund 1919. Photo © Tate
I think [with] a truly good image, you can approach it with no understanding at all and get what you need to get from it. I don’t think that you have to know anything about these figures or the symbols behind them to understand that this is an interpretation of some sort of paradise. You can understand that there’s joy here and there’s magic.—Naudline Pierre (Listen to Pierre talk about the artwork here.)
Pierre is a Black female artist living and working in Brooklyn. Blake was a white male artist who worked in England 200 years ago. Across the centuries, and despite cultural, gender, and racial differences, Pierre feels their creative practices are connected. In Blake’s work she found inspiration as she developed her own way as a artist. Blake was a figurative artist and prioritized his own imaginative vision over the naturalistic representation of the physical world. This was something Pierre could relate to.
“I felt really happy when I found his work. It felt comforting to find imagery that felt rooted in fantasy and myth. I think people were like, ‘Why are you so interested in this man?’ You would think we have nothing in common. But I feel a sort of kindred spirit with him and his work.”
Plate 25 from Jerusalem: The Emanation of the Giant Albion, Bentley Copy E, 1804–20, William Blake. Relief etching printed in orange ink, with watercolor, pen and black ink, and gold. Yale Center for British Art, New Haven. Paul Mellon Collection
Blake created recurring figures in what literary scholar Saree Makdisi calls “imaginary lifeworlds” that take us beyond the individual self. “I think perhaps the artist to him was a sort of prophet and a way to speak about the future and the past and connect it to the present,” says Pierre. “Exploring the human condition through mystical imagery is something I felt really connected to when I was trying to figure out what my language was going to be, how I was going to be making work.”
As the daughter of a Haitian minister, Pierre was steeped in a spiritual world where faith in the unseen was a given and community was ever-present. In her canvases, figures are never alone but are positioned, entwined, and cared for in relation to one another. Pierre has said they reveal themselves to her as she is making the work, including a main female figure she’s called her alter ego or protagonist.
Like Blake, Pierre was raised within a Christian tradition, and she remains attracted to religious depictions. “I was always drawn to work that inspired beauty for me, and that happens to be sort of allegorical religious painting, image making from a certain time period. And in that time period, it’s very hard to find people who look like me in those sort of works.” So Pierre made her own. “I wanted to see something different and make it real for me and create celestial beings that I felt connected to that weren’t just European and male. I wanted to add my perspective to what I was seeing and what I was attracted to.”
Transfiguration, 2023, Naudline Pierre. Oil on panel. Image courtesy of the artist and James Cohan, New York.
Photo: Dan Bradica
In some of her paintings, like Transfiguration, which echoes an altarpiece triptych, Pierre creates her own iconography. “I can’t change history, but what I can do is add to it and sort of reframe it in a way that makes sense to me, and hopefully to other people who look like me or can identify with what I’m going through.”
