Forty years into a working life spent in the same Brooklyn studio, Vera Castellanos no longer paints what she wants. She paints, she says, what she has outlived. Her recent canvases — three of which were acquired this year by a museum she will not name — are larger, simpler, and more difficult to describe than anything she has made in a decade. She would like to be remembered, she tells me, for being uncertain.
You have been in this studio since 1986. What has stayed the same?
The light. The brick. The radiator does not work in the way radiators are supposed to. None of these things will be renovated, because nobody is in charge of renovating them, which is the only reason the studio is still here.
You have stopped fixing certain things in the paintings. When did that change?
About six years ago. I had a piece I knew was finished except for one spot in the upper left I kept wanting to repaint. I left it for a week. Then a month. Then a year. Now that spot is the part the painting is about. I have stopped trying to be smarter than the canvas.
Has the work gotten easier or harder?
Harder. Easier in the hands. Harder in the deciding. When you are young you make decisions in a hurry because you have so many of them in front of you. Now I have fewer decisions, but each one is heavier. I move slower. I do less. I am told this looks like wisdom. I am not certain.
You said color is autobiography. What did you mean?
I meant the same yellow I have been mixing for forty years means something different now. The yellow has not changed. I have. The paintings record that, if anyone is listening.
How do you feel about the museum acquisitions?
Pleased and slightly suspicious. Pleased for obvious reasons. Suspicious because the only people who know what a painting is for are the painter and, occasionally, one collector who has lived with it for a long time. The museum will have to learn what the painting is for. They will not always be patient.
What would your younger self think of the current work?
She would not understand it. That is fine. I did not understand her either.