Amy Pachowicz with HereIn
Aurora Consurgens, 2009, acrylic and ink on paper, 60 x 96 in.
[Image description: A painting divided into three sections. The section on the left is a washy, black-and-gray rendering of an animal in a landscape, inspired by traditional Asian painting. On the right, two images stacked on top of each other, portray medieval-looking figures wrestling a dragon and jousting while riding mythical creatures, all against an orange background.]
Artist Amy Pachowicz deftly combines references to art history, vernacular material, and the natural environment in lyrical paintings that present an ethereal—and at times unsettling—vision of the image world. She spoke with HereIn Editor Elizabeth Rooklidge about her process, the practice of harvesting, and an exciting new collage project.
HereIn: Amy, your paintings seem to come from some other place and time, and it's as if they have appeared on the canvas magically. Which, of course, can’t really be the case. Will you start by telling me about your process?
Amy Pachowicz: For a long time I worked reproducing things from an encyclopedia. I have a 1967 encyclopedia that is from my family when I was growing up. My dad actually used to be an encyclopedia salesman, so I was fascinated with it when I was a kid. And then I started just painting things from it, and I still use it in the collages. There is a sort of nostalgic look to any of that imagery that I am reproducing because it's from that time when those photographs were a little bit different than the color photos that are produced today.
Macedonian Empire, 2006, acrylic and ink on paper, 60 x 120 in.
[Image description: A collage-like painting of a map of the Macedonian empire, diagrams, old-fashioned machine guns, and patterns in blue, red, and orange.]
In the beginning, when I was working from the encyclopedia, I just wanted to entertain myself and keep myself out of trouble. And so I gave myself this big project to reproduce all of the images from the “M”— just start from the first one and go all the way to the end. I never was able to do it. It was just too big of a project, but it was kind of a fun thing to do and I worked on it for a lot of years.
Sage Brown, 2024, oil stick on paper, 58 x 42 in.
[Image description: A bundle of sage, drawn in white and gray, hangs against a brown background.]
I really still like working with that imagery from the encyclopedia, but some things have shifted and I've started working from nature. Over the years I’ve been collecting weeds and herbs and things, and I dry them in bundles. I've been doing that for many years and after a while I just started drawing and painting them. It's different than working from a photograph, and I’m also doing the nature pieces in oil stick instead of acrylics. I’m not a hundred percent sure why I'm doing them, but they're so satisfying. I tend to do them really, really big, and I like to do a lot of negative space around the plant that has a lot of emphasis.
Spanish Castle, 2023, acrylic on canvas, 48 x 36 in.
[Image description: A dream-like scene of a castle against a blue sky, with a brushy rendering of trees and buildings below.]
HereIn: What would you say are the artistic questions that drive your practice?
Pachowicz: Well, I think about stuff like that a lot. I had a class with Jean Lowe and she would talk to us about thinking about the materials that we're using and how you're actually using resources. When you're building a canvas, you're using wood, and every time you're washing out your brush, your paint residue is going down the drain. It's not so great for the environment, so why are you doing it? And then I'm sometimes just stuck with a whole bunch of work sitting around, and I hate that feeling. I keep having too much stuff. So I think about why I am bothering to reproduce anything.
When I was younger, I painted because I was very frustrated and I did a lot of work from some pornography stuff, and it helped me get over some of my angst in regards to the sex industry and how I had to function as a woman in Southern California. But I am 56 years old and I don't feel any of that stuff anymore. And so I am happiest when I'm working in my studio and there's just an absorption that I feel that I enjoy when I'm involved in my work.
La Corona, 2004, acrylic ink on paper, 48 x 36 in.
[Image description: A group of images combined in a collage-like style over a mauve background. The images include a monkey, a chapel, a nun’s head, and a card with a crown on it that reads, “La Corona.”]
HereIn: It seems that collecting and collage are two fundamental parts of your work, whether you’re literally collaging or painting images you’ve collected.
Pachowicz: It's funny because when I am taking apart encyclopedias—I cut out the imagery, it takes forever but it's fun—I call that harvesting. And then I walk around and I actually cut plants, and that's also harvesting. But all of the cutting the imagery out of the books, It's kind of like playing the game Concentration. I remember all the images and they have different categories— there are small ones, there are round ones, there’s color, there's black and white.
And so when I'm doing the collage, I cover the whole floor and have a theme I'm working on. I’m sorting out the imagery and then I fit it all together. A lot of that has to do with my childhood and, I think, growing up before the digital age. Maybe even the whole thing with collecting plants also has to do with that, where it's just really being in nature and being present. It started when my husband and I would take walks and I would gather plants from the walks, trying to keep that memory of the natural world.
Girl, 2024, collage on panel, 24 x 30 in.
[Image description: A dense collage of images, which depict nude women, flowers, animals, celebrities, skeletons, natural landscapes, handicrafts, and historical pieces of art, among other subjects.]
HereIn: I understand that you are now working on a very large scale collage. I’d love to hear about that piece.
Pachowicz: I am. I've wanted to do this for many years, and I'm so happy that I've finally got it started. When I was a little girl, I was totally obsessed with Charlie's Angels and I had all the posters. I've kept that stuff for many years. The first collage I'm doing is five feet tall by nine feet across. That one's the Farrah Fawcett poster, so it has reds and drama. The second one is the Jaclyn Smith poster, which has a lot of whites it, and I want that one to be primarily whites and this icy blue. And then the next collage I'd like to do would be the Kate Jackson one, which is more neutrals. I also use pornography from the eighties—it’s my father's pornography that I grew up looking at. I use the encyclopedia. I also have a Victorian encyclopedia, that's one-hundred-year-old imagery. I have been putting some of my own drawings and sketches in. And I really like these photos that we did when we were in school, our class pictures, so I have my mom's 1960 class picture in there.
I am interested in this thing of how we store stuff. We keep stuff, and then when we're aging, we don't really need it anymore. And then we pass it down to our kids. Sometimes the kids don't really want it. Sometimes they love it and fetishize it, and it's like—there’s all of this stuff and what do you do with it? So I'm putting all that stuff into collage right now, to just do something with it. I love the idea of things that are one of-a-kind things, that are supposedly precious, and then sort of destroying it by putting it into a collage. So that's the collage I'm working on right now. And it's just so much fun—it feels like when you're reading a good book and you just can't wait to get back to it.
This conversation has been edited by HereIn and the artist for length and clarity.