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Cindy Ingram: Hello and welcome to The Art Class Curator Podcast. I am Cindy Ingram, your host and the founder of Art Class Curator, and The Curated Connections Library. We’re here to talk about teaching art with purpose and inspiration from the daily delights of creativity to the messy mishaps that come with being a teacher. Whether you’re driving home from school or cleaning up your classroom for the 15th time today, take a second, take a deep breath, relax those shoulders, and let’s get started.. 

Hello, everybody. It’s Cindy Ingram. Thank you for joining me for The Art Class Curator Podcast. Today on the podcast, I have Madalyn Gregory with me again to talk about another work of art. I love talking about works of art with Madalyn, so we ended up talking for an hour and a half when we recorded this episode, so I decided to break the episode up into two parts. Today, we have part one, then join me next Monday for the second half of our conversation. Another thing that I wanted to bring up, I mentioned on last week’s episode that we are changing the name of the podcast. Right now, it is The Art Class Curator Podcast. Starting in January of 2022, it will be called You Need Art. I’ll explain a little bit more about the reason for the change on the first official episode of You Need Art but until then, just know that when you see it show up in your podcast subscriptions, you’ll see a new name starting in January. Just a warning there, we will be You Need Art. All right, here is my conversation with Madalyn Gregory about the artwork of the artist, Naudline Pierre.

Hello, everybody. Welcome back to The You Need Art Podcast, formerly The Art Class Curator Podcast. My name is Cindy Ingram. Here, I have with me Madalyn Gregory to have another art conversation. Hello, Madalyn.

Madalyn Gregory: Hello. 

Cindy Ingram: Before we start talking about the artwork that we’re going to talk about today, we have some awesome news that we want to share with you. We have been friends for a very long time, probably, how old is your youngest kid, 10? 

Madalyn Gregory: 11.

Cindy Ingram: We’ve been friends for 11 years.

Madalyn Gregory: I was pregnant with my youngest.

Cindy Ingram: Yeah, that’s how I always can easily know. We have really enjoyed working together the last few years and we’ve been enjoying doing these podcasts for you where we talk about art, so we have decided to branch off from this podcast and start our own podcast with just the two of us. We’re calling it More Wonder, Please.

Madalyn Gregory: Yes. I’m so excited because I just love having conversations with you and all the weird tangents that we go down, and connections that we make. It’s always such a delight to do that with art, but to be able to do that and jump off from other places is really exciting too. 

Cindy Ingram: She still will be a regular on this podcast. We talk about not just art over there. We’ve had a few episodes we’ve recorded already and more to come but we have what would we do if we were God for a day and stuff like that. Just random things we were wondering about. We got the name from when I was reading Big Magic by Elizabeth Gilbert. She was writing about wonder at one point in the book and she said, “More Wonder, Please,” in it. That line really stuck with me. We started to talk about podcast titles and that came up but I think it really does encapsulate everything that we want to achieve in that podcast, which is more wonder. 

Madalyn Gregory: It truly does. It feels very full circle life moment for me too, just because a word that I’ve used for years in my own writing is wanderlust, which is usually wander with an A for loving to travel and experiencing new places but I always used it with the O because I love wondering about things, and being excited and enchanted by the universe.

Cindy Ingram: You can check that out at any podcast player. Just type in More Wonder, Please and you will find us. Today, we are going to do another art conversation with you. We have decided to choose one that we recently saw in person. We were both just totally delighted by this exhibit that we happened upon and want to share with you. The artist is Naudline Pierre. Me and Madalyn go to the art museum almost every other week. Our plan, like last Friday, was to go to the Crow Museum, then Nasher in Dallas. We just happened to park at the Dallas Museum of Art and we just looked on our phones to see what they had. It wasn’t even the plan to go there. We saw this exhibit and decided we needed to go there too, so we did three art museums in one day. This was definitely the highlight for me. Actually, there was a lot of good art that day.

Madalyn Gregory: It really was. 

Cindy Ingram: Oh, really good. Let’s do it. We didn’t even pick one artwork. There was an exhibit room of probably maybe 10 paintings in that room.

Madalyn Gregory: Yeah, I think it was exactly 10.

Cindy Ingram: Then there was one in another area but really incredible. Do you want to just share your experience of walking in and what you noticed?

Madalyn Gregory: Like a lot of exhibits that had the artist’s name and some text about the exhibit outside, which usually I might skim it and if I’m interested, I’ll come back to it because I don’t want to be influenced but I was so enraptured by what she had put, then also, we got a tiny preview of the art before, so I was like, “Yeah, I want to know.” The exhibit was called What Could Be Has Not Yet Appeared, which I could talk about that title for a long time. 

Cindy Ingram: Totally.

Madalyn Gregory: I don’t know if I necessarily want to read it even though it is really good. I took a picture of it.

Cindy Ingram: I think the first line is worth reading, which is, “What is it to be expansive, to be multiple, to be contradictory, to live in the fullness of possibility?” Oh, so good.

Madalyn Gregory: The right words in the right order. So good. Since we’re not talking about a specific artwork, all of the artworks feel, and I believe, were intended to be very narratively connected. There’s familiar faces in several of the paintings but there’s a lot of nudity, I will say that off the bat. But there’s one human figure in particular that appears in many of the paintings that is nude and in different colors. They’re all very bright. Some paintings were very bright, almost neon colors included and others were darker. Some had both.

Cindy Ingram: Dude, you’re doing a fabulous job here.

Madalyn Gregory: There was the human character but then there were also a lot of winged characters presented in these paintings. I guess I would say the closest analog for most of them were angels, though I feel like some of them looked more bird-like or perhaps like guardians. But her use of light is just fantastic. I feel like we’re going to have to at least zero in on the specifics to really talk about them but they all, maybe you can help me with the language here but all of the backgrounds or the settings were nondescript. Some of them were almost alien or otherworldly but it gave me a feeling of a spirit world I’d say.

Cindy Ingram: To me, they seem very much like a new version of a Baroque painting, like Italian Baroque, looking like Caravaggio or Gentileschi. They’re very close. That you don’t have a lot of background. They’re really intimate and cropped. They have really dramatic postures, emotions, and poses. They have a religious bent or a spiritual bent. I get more spiritual from this than God but the Baroque was all about Catholicism, then you also have, like in Baroque, a dramatic lighting, like highlights on some people. Some of the figures almost feel like they’re glowing, which is something that they did in Baroque, then the backgrounds are really dark and plain, which is what they did in Baroque too. I at the time did not see the Baroque thing at all but now that I guess because I have a computer monitor and I have six of the images all together, I’m like, “Oh shoot, these are Baroque but with neon colors and a little bit less detail. 

Madalyn Gregory: There’s some pieces too, whenever you’re talking about Baroque where around the angel figures or even around the human, on one of them, there’s like the golden halo effect happening.

Cindy Ingram: Another thing they did in Baroque, not to give you a full art history lesson here, but one of the reasons why Baroque art is the way it is, is because they had the protestant reformation. The Catholics were trying to pull people back in through the use of the art, so they would put everyday people into their paintings rather than beautiful renaissance people, like you would see before. That’s what I felt when I looked at these paintings. I felt like I was hurt. I felt like the main figure that was in all of them, I saw myself in there. That was one of the goals of Baroque painting too is to put the viewer into the painting and give the viewer these experiences to move them emotionally so that then they would be Catholic but that’s probably not the artist’s goal.

Madalyn Gregory: I think it might be related to not the religious aspect of it but the humanity aspect of it. Seeing everyday people, even I would say maybe marginalized people put in these spiritual settings where they’re being cared for when they’re going through trials and tribulations. That feels very relevant.

Cindy Ingram: They’re so cool. I think we probably should pick one because it’s really hard to talk about them as a whole.

Madalyn Gregory: It is.

Cindy Ingram: Do you have a favorite that you want to talk about?

Madalyn Gregory: That’s really hard because I think I have three, four favorites.

Cindy Ingram: Me too.

Madalyn Gregory: I think maybe the ones with more characters in them are a little more open for interpretation there. I think the one I was most initially drawn to was Closer Still but then I also was really drawn to Hold On, Hold Tight. I’m sorry these pictures are not in the correct order. I’m going to just describe them. The one where the figure is being carried by the completely black angel figure.

Cindy Ingram: That one is Hold On, Hold Tight.

Madalyn Gregory: Then the one where the human figure is falling and all of the creatures, it looks like perhaps a rescue.

Cindy Ingram: I love those two. I think they’re good to talk about. I think they’re the same picture at two different times. Let’s start with the one with our falling. The artwork that we’ve just chosen, then you’ve got to see our process there, it’s called Lest You Fall from 2019. Again, the artist is Naudline Pierre. In this painting, we have a woman who is like a bright orange woman who’s nude upside down but falling. Her head is at the bottom and her feet are in the air. She’s falling and at the bottom, there’s these black flames and also outlines of flames in a pink background, like a neon pink, neon yellow, orange, and green, then there are flying angels around her, what look like angels. They’re people’s bodies but with wings. It looks like they’re catching her. There are four different angels and of different colors, then there’s also a bird who is grabbing her hand as well. From the bird, there’s this little blue.

Madalyn Gregory: Almost like an upside down crown.

Cindy Ingram: It’s like light rays but they’re blue. Did I describe it good enough? Did I miss anything?

Madalyn Gregory: I think you did a grand job. I will say composition wise, I mean the human falling is definitely front and center but the angels are almost coming in as like a curve from the top left corner of the painting, and surrounding down the right side of her body.

Cindy Ingram: It’s like one big swoosh. It’s like she’s falling but you don’t get the feeling that she’s falling quickly. It feels like the state of her fall, it’s like a feather wafting down to the ground. It’s almost like she was falling but then they caught her and now, they’re gently escorting her to the ground. That’s what I feel.

Madalyn Gregory: I was going to ask you what you saw because I feel like if I look at different areas, I feel differently about how fast she’s going because the background colors feel like whenever you put a picture on Instagram—this is weird—but if you put it on the stories, it’ll spread whatever color is at the edge of the story. The angels are glowing off and that’s the background color. Whenever I look at the green into yellow area, it almost feels like the ground to me. Especially because the angel in the top left corner has a shadow beneath them, so it feels like they just caught her in the nick of time to me. But then looking more at the orange and the pink areas, it feels like she still has a long way to go. I do get that slow descent feeling from it.

Cindy Ingram: I can see that. I hadn’t thought of that as the ground but now I can see that.

Madalyn Gregory: It’s very nebulous because it really is just color. There’s no landmarks or anything. The only other thing going on is the flames. They clearly look like flames to me, the black in both the drawings but also, it reminds me of hair tendrils upside down. 

Cindy Ingram: Oh, yeah.

Madalyn Gregory: I am very curious. Is she falling toward danger? What is she falling toward? I want to know what happened.

Cindy Ingram: When I saw this at the museum, I don’t think I saw the flames. This feels like new information, the flames do, and I’m like, “Did I just completely miss that?” Another thing I just noticed too is some of the angels are blending into the background. They’re almost transparent. The leg of one of them, you can see the background behind it, then this other one too, it’s like they’re not there and they’re there at the same time, which is really cool. 

Madalyn Gregory: There’s a quality to it that almost looks unfinished I think too, because the angel that’s doing most of the catching, the whole body and wings are brown but then the face, like you said, is transparent and you see the orange coming through from the background underneath, then the flames that are not black, just look drawn there. I’m just in wonder of it all at the moment but I have a lot of theories about the benevolence or not of the winged creatures and of that bird especially.

Cindy Ingram: My initial feeling when I saw this was this feeling of the invisible support of the universe. It felt very woo to me. I had a coach one time who said, “Everything is fine, everything has always been fine, and everything will be fine.” He would say that and I would always take a lot of comfort from that because yes, bad things happened in the past or whatever but I’m fine. I ended up okay, then I’m going to be fine, but then it’s like–

Madalyn Gregory: It’s also not.

Cindy Ingram: That’s the thing. It’s like, “Yeah, but what if there are things that are not fine?” There are those stories that go untold, like the people who died because the things weren’t fine, what about them? They’re not fine. It won’t always be fine. In my head, when I was looking at this painting, I kept going back and forth, and fighting myself on that. It’s funny, I think that’s probably why I didn’t want to see the flames because I just wanted her to be fine.

Madalyn Gregory: I think perspective matters a lot whenever you’re talking about something like that because we have such a limited scope of perception in our lives as humans, which is something we talked about on More Wonder, Please. It does, like on a cosmic level, “Is everything okay?” We get to see such a snapshot if even that. I feel that incongruity with you because it both feels true and feels like an incredibly privileged cop-out.

Cindy Ingram: It’s like, “Where do you draw the line?” I think probably the answer is that I just allow myself to be comforted by the notion that the universe has my back and maybe try not to think about it too hard, then it’s like, “I don’t know. That’s not good either.”

Madalyn Gregory: Goodness knows, complacency can be a dangerous thing. It’s interesting to me that is where you went. Just proving again that art meets you where you are. To me, this very much felt like somebody that her body is relaxed, almost looking. Even though she’s upside down, her legs are flying, and there’s even flames coming off of her foot, there’s a gracefulness to it and almost like an acceptance to her position.

Cindy Ingram: Like a surrender.

Madalyn Gregory: Yeah, like a surrender. We always have this conversation every time we look at art with the person of some sort in it. I’m not entirely convinced it’s a woman. They have I guess the pubic area that you would most closely associate with cis women but then also, the chest is flat and the haircut is short. I think especially whenever you’re playing with themes of the divine, the universe, and guardian angels, if you want to call them that, I feel like I just see the personhood of this person.

Cindy Ingram: Because when I said woman, in my head, I was battling back and forth because I was like, “Well, I don’t know.” But I think what I was responding to, especially as all of her paintings feel like they’re about the same person, it looks like the same person is on all of them. In some of them, her chest isn’t flat but then some of them, it is. Her hair is short in all of them.

Madalyn Gregory: But I think it also gets back to what you were saying about inserting everyday people into celestial settings. I feel like I connect with that person, so it feels more like me. I’m a woman but I feel like if a man was standing in front of this and they were open to it, they could see themselves in that person too.

Cindy Ingram: That gives me a whole other side conversation, which we probably don’t have to have right now, but how women in society are used to putting themselves into the role of the man because for a long time, men were always protagonists in movies, TV shows, and books. We’re used to doing that. I think that’s one of the reasons why movies keep being put out toward men are the main characters because men can’t imagine seeing themselves as a woman but then women are just used to it the other way because we were forced to.

Madalyn Gregory: I think that definitely happens with race too and why the conversations around representation are so important. I think that’s definitely a piece of the art too based on what the exhibit said. It is really interesting just to go into pop culture for a minute. Like whenever the new Star Wars movies came out, that was a big thing on the internet. A lot of fans of The Originals, let’s just say they were men for the most part, were very upset that it was a female-led story that was going to come out. I see that over and over again. The people that want to get upset about that do seem to just have a failure of imagination in putting themselves in the role of what it might be like not to be you.

Cindy Ingram: I feel like that could be a whole other thing. Maybe that’s our part two on More Wonder, Please. We’ll let you know if that happens.

Madalyn Gregory: I want to talk about the bird.

Cindy Ingram: Yeah.

Madalyn Gregory: To me, I don’t know a lot about birds but it looks like a dove.

Cindy Ingram: I don’t either but I agree with you.

Madalyn Gregory: Doves are represented in a lot of art and things. That looks like a dove to me. I could be wrong. They’re usually symbols of peace, purity, and stuff like that. I really don’t know how to read what this bird is doing because it’s not sitting on her hand. It’s floating down with her. The wings are outstretched. To me, I almost wonder if the blue streaks underneath the bird are representing that it’s not flying. It’s coming down. It’s captured as well but the beak is on one of her fingers. There’s like a little spark. It’s lighter than the rest of her skin tone. I just have the picture and I’m having to zoom in quite a lot.

Cindy Ingram: I didn’t notice that.

Madalyn Gregory: But it almost looks like a cross or maybe a cut. The skin tone is different from the rest of the orange, yellow that is happening. Part of me wants to interpret that as almost like a gift or something that the bird is giving to her. Part of me feels like it’s a wound. I keep going back to that scene in Harry Potter & The Chamber Of Secrets where Fawkes, the phoenix flies down, cries on his knees, so he gets healed like, “Is this a healing thing?” I see a lot of duality in the entire artwork really. I feel like maybe that is representing whatever wound put her into free fall and the bird is coming to heal it maybe.

Cindy Ingram: Wow, I did not see that spark thing at all or the little white thing on her finger. That’s really cool. I zoomed way in. As a reminder, we will put the image of this artwork up in the show notes, so you can see it for yourself but don’t look at it while you’re driving, if you’re listening to it while you’re driving. To me, it looks like the bird is grabbing her finger with its beak and helping keep her from falling.

Madalyn Gregory: Oh, I like that too.

Cindy Ingram: I think that the blue under the bird, to me, gives it a holier look. It’s like a divine bird but also I think you’re right. It creates a little bit of an upward momentum. It shows that the bird is trying to pull up rather than go down. I think it’s also just balanced. There’s blue there, then there’s blue on the other side of the painting. There was no blue on the left side of the painting. It looks weird. There’s also a functional thing to it, which I love about art too. It’s just like if that blue wasn’t there,  the whole painting would be thrown off balance. 

Madalyn Gregory: I love that interpretation that the bird is trying to pull her up. I think it’s twofold. It’s because here are these four other winged creatures coming in to grab her and to hold her, then this little bird is not going to make that much of a difference but is still doing what it can. That is incredibly powerful to me because we’re all just one person in this world but also, if that is what the bird is doing, then the bird is cutting her hand. Again, I’m seeing duality because it’s so easy in life when you’re trying to help to end up hurting.

Cindy Ingram: Then what level of hurting is acceptable, you do have to get hurt to save yourself. To be human is to have pain.

Madalyn Gregory: To love is to give someone the ability to hurt you, I mean the other thing too but it is that.

Cindy Ingram: I think it’s a trade-off. The person doesn’t get saved or the person gets a little painful finger, a scar from the situation, then they’ll have a scar on their finger.

Madalyn Gregory: Part of the reason that I think we were drawn to these images on the whole was because that is a universal experience to feel like you are in free fall to be hurt even by someone you love. It’s a beautiful thought that there are these creatures or the universe or God or whoever is out there to help you and to be there for you but at the same time, can she see them? Can she feel them catching her? I think there’s a beauty in that but that is really lonely. If that is all you have, that is not enough. We still need each other. We still need the real world or the physical world I guess.

Cindy Ingram: I think that she doesn’t see them because I’m looking at some of the other ones, which I’ll again put on the show notes on artclasscurator.com. She’s not looking at them. They’re interacting with her and she’s not necessarily interacting with them in most cases I think. 

Madalyn Gregory: She is being held, several of them, but the only ones were at least to me, it looks like the only one that I feel like she’s knowingly holding on, the other person doesn’t have wings.

Cindy Ingram: What I’m doing in my head right now, and I don’t know how to just say this or ask this or anything, but I guess what I’m trying to do is put myself into the position of someone in this situation who is falling. I’m trying to remember times in my life or whatever that I felt this way, like what I imagine that to feel like.

Madalyn Gregory: It’s hard to surrender.

Cindy Ingram: It feels so lonely. This is one of those times where my body can feel it but I can’t explain it. It’s like I’m having a hard time getting these words out because that just happens to me sometimes where it’s just like, “Oh, I can feel this but I can’t put words to it.” But to me, it’s like when you’re in that that state, when things are collapsing and things are really hard, and maybe you’re going through a depression or just something really hard in your life and it feels so isolating but then it’s really hard to me personally to feel like I am being supported. But I see other people. The guy that keeps popping in my head is one of my friends from high school who died of cancer when he was in his late 20s. Before he passed, we were Facebook friends and I would see he posted a lot of religious things. He was really deeply connected to his faith during that time in his life. He always was a religious person but during his cancer, that was such something that kept him going. That’s what I see in this situation is you’re looking for something outside of yourself to hold on to. It’s like a grasping but then she doesn’t look like she’s grasping. I don’t know.

Madalyn Gregory: I think maybe faith has always been a difficult concept for me for a variety of reasons, but looking at it through that lens, I do think that if I had to imagine what faith looked like, what good, deep, true faith feels like, maybe that’s what it feels like. It’s just being able to surrender, being able to trust, and not being attached or not supposing you already know what the outcome is going to be. Maybe you get caught, maybe you smash into the ground but be at peace with that.

Cindy Ingram: I prickled a little bit when you were talking because my anxiety got triggered a little bit because I tend to want to control everything. I want to control all the outcomes. I want to control my part in it. I feel like my part is bigger than it actually is. I feel like I’m responsible for a lot of things that I’m not actually responsible for. The idea of just surrendering and being supported fully, that feels impossible to me to even fathom.

Madalyn Gregory: I 1000% understand everything you just said because even the thought of it was a bit like, “Ahh,” but what I actually thought of whenever I looked at this artwork and especially now looking at it again, I feel is related to that, which is that I’ve been doing a lot of work on—depending on who you are listening, this is either going to sound like the best thing or the worst thing—but I have been doing a lot of work, trying to heal my inner child and get at those core wounds. A lot of the time, whenever you look into stuff like that, people will talk about your shadow self, which I think came from Jung, I don’t remember, but I see a lot of those elements here. I think maybe that’s why I saw so much duality because I think that idea is around us all the time; the good and the bad, the yin and the yang, the light and the dark. Even in science, there’s matter and antimatter. There’s all of these things that happen.

Whenever I looked at her, the far more comfortable idea rather than it being about faith or about religion, it was the idea of surrendering to what you actually need and who you actually are. Now, the black flame tendrils, it does feel like that’s the shadow. That’s what you could fall into. There’s something too about being raised up and the whole idea of a higher being, and these angels and all of that, of recognizing deeper truths about yourself, not even your potential but just the better angels of your nature. I think it’s much easier for me to imagine the creatures and the angels being almost parts of her or parts of her story that she’s finally letting in. That’s what’s going to save her from the shadow.

Cindy Ingram: Oh, Madalyn, that was beautiful. Better angels of ourselves, I think that’s what you said. It was so good. I don’t remember but it was so good. When you look at it through those lenses, then all of a sudden, I was like, “Well, what if this one angel looks like the same hair as her?” But it looks younger, so maybe that’s a younger version of her or them or maybe it’s like an ancestor or it’s like a grandmother or it is all of the parts of her. One of the things I’ve been studying recently with just this new program I’m in is internal family solutions and how within you, you have multiple selves and there’s like one higher self but then I’ve got this perfectionist self that’s in there that I have to talk down sometimes when she gets upset. There’s all the different parts of me. I like seeing that. But then I also, as you were talking, started to think again because we asked this question at the beginning but we haven’t really talked about it, which was where is she falling from, where is she falling to, and what’s the story. I started to think, what if her falling is not a bad thing? What if she is falling into her greatness, into something better, good, and exciting but it’s scary? Like you take a leap and you take a risk, and it’s really scary but then on the other side, really amazing things happen. Maybe that’s happening.

Madalyn Gregory: It’s like a trust fall. You’re trusting yourself. You’re trusting the universe. I think that’s one thing that I strive for in my life is to get to a place and be in a place as often as I can because I don’t think it’s ever possible to do it all the time but where I am truly listening to my body, and to my intuition and trusting that process that’s both scary, and freeing. 

Cindy Ingram: Yeah, 100%. That’s really a main focus of my life too is doing the same thing because I think for many, many years, I let other people’s thoughts, feelings, and opinions be the guiding force, then I always would second guess or overthink any opinion that I had or any goal I had, I would talk myself out of but then every time I’ve fully listened to my intuition and fully trusted what came out of me, those are the times in my life that were the most full, successful, and soul-filling. I’m learning to do that more.

Alright, that is all for today. Like I said in the intro, we are breaking up our conversation into two parts because we ended up talking for a full hour and a half about her artwork. We will resume our conversation next Monday on The Art Class Curator Podcast. Another reminder that the podcast will soon be called You Need Art, starting in January. I’ll see you again next week.

When was the last time you did something only for you, something that put you in touch with your innermost thoughts and feelings, something that filled your bucket and inspired your spirit? Too many of us can’t remember the last time we took the time to do something like that. A lot of people have never done it at all, but that’s exactly what the Art Connection Circle is all about. If you want to seek a deeper connection with yourself and with the human spirit, the Circle is for you. Learn more about what the Art Connection Circle has to offer you and how to join at artclasscurator.com/circle.