“Three Questions”

Sarah D’Ambrosio

June 30, 2025Volume 2
Issue 4

Gideon’s Bakery: What do you like about painting?

Sarah D’Ambrosio: I love how problem solving occurs in painting. I love tackling why paintings do work and why they don’t. I love being part of something that has been a human activity for thousands of years and indulging in something we absolutely do not need to survive (in the life/death literal sense). I love the mysterious poetry and language of formal painting. Oil paints fleshy ,sexy like material and trying to intuitively make work that seems tethered and sincere to me as a person.

GB: The figures in your show Brooklyn, Berlin at March in the East Village have an unusual relationship other the edges of the canvas, to filling up the space of the pictures, unusual in that it feels unique to you, a new take on this kind of imagery, and deeply connected to painters like Marsden Hartley, Neo-classical Picasso, and especially Bay Area painter David Park. Does the oil paint itself aid in determining a composition? How do you decide where the body is in space, in relation to other bodies? Could you guide us through one of the problems that needed solving, maybe in a specific painting in the show? While oil paint itself may be fleshy/sexy as you say, in these paintings I think it does something different though I don't know what that something is yet. It offers a kind of solidity, a wax figure, a vulnerable moment captured in wax but still very much alive.

SD’A: SD’A: The figures expand over time. Their parts are sometimes Frankensteined together from multiple memories of different male bodies. Haptic memory or invented fantasy. I prefer my boys large and in charge—gravity, form and weight are very important to me. They don’t always start so big but they get bigger and bigger every time I trace the memory of an edge of chest or leg over again in my mind. Sometimes they really suffocate the canvas and then I have to release a pressure valve somewhere—I do feel deeply connected to Hartley, Avery, Beckmann and definitely Park. Park being the stand out only that I always felt David Park was so gutturally responsive in a way that other Bay Area painters weren’t. That’s how I paint, from the gut, and try and shoot straight from the hip. I used to paint with just my eyes and head— intense observation. I still draw from observation but now I work primarily from my central nervous system, which is how I experience human beings anyway. There’s an energy to them I’m trying to capture or remember. So it seems fitting and more important, truthful. As far as problem solving, the paintings change so much throughout the process. At the end of the day the painting itself is the priority. I am a formalist. Shape and form are the gears that keep the machine spinning. If limbs and environments have to change or a head has to be completely lobbed off to suit the needs of the life of the painting. Then so be it. There’s nothing worse or more useless than a stagnant painting. You can’t fall in love with small moments and sacrifice the whole.

GB: What is your dream response to your work?

SD’A:Oh, that’s tough I think about this quote often: "I am Me, and I hope to become Me more and more," wrote Paula Modersohn-Becker in a letter to her close friend Rainer Maria Rilke, following her split from her husband Otto Modersohn.

I just want the work to feel like it comes from me. Connected to other painters and filtered through all of my experiences and understanding of paint but me nonetheless.

Sarah D’Ambrosio’s solo show “Brooklyn, Berlin” at March is up through July 25th.

A studio shot from a few months ago.

Left: A Boy from Munich, oil on canvas, 60 x 48 inches , 2025 (not on view)

Right: Bathhouse Beefcake , oil on canvas, 60x 48 inches , 2025 (currently up at MARCH gallery)

Limerance, 2025
Oil on canvas
12x9 inches

Bathhouse Beefcake, 2025
Oil on canvas
60x48 inches

Vol 1. (May 2024—March 2025) Vol 2. (June 2025—?) About Contributors EmailInstagram ©2025 Gideon’s Bakery

Vol 1. (May 2024—March 2025)
Vol 2. (June 2025—?)

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