Art in the Genes - An interview with Amy Ernst

By J.Z. Holden

Amy Ernst is sitting with her ankles crossed, wearing a dark olive green cardigan over a black turtleneck sweater and matching wool slacks. It's impossible not to notice the delicate, feminine, Indian nose pin pierced through her right nostril. When asked whether piercing such a delicate part of her anatomy was painful, she smiles, says no, and recommends the best place to get it done.

Dawn Of New Millenium

She is sitting in a Mies van der Rohe chair, facing the same designer's Barcelona table, in the high-ceiled living-room of her parent's home over-looking the bay. The light bursts through the windows illuminating Jimmy Ernst's paintings hanging on the walls. Everywhere the eye looks, there is art.

Amy Ernst is a member of one of the world's most famous art families. The daughter of famous abstract painter, Jimmy Ernst, she is the granddaughter of the Dadaist and Surrealist Artist Max Ernst, and the sister of painter and art critic Eric Ernst of the Southampton Press.

JZH: Regardless of one's roots, each artist longs to be recognized and appreciated in his or her own right. However, exposure to some of the world's greatest art, observing great artists and their friends, must make an indelible impression.

AE: I don't think that way. My aesthetics, although they're back here in the subconscious, I rarely use imagery that comes out of my own family dynamics. My father listened to jazz or classical music while he worked, whereas, I listen to Indian or Renaissance music. He would wake up and do the N.Y. Times crossword puzzle in ink, whereas I listen to the radio and check my email.

JZH: What inspires you?

AE: I want the source of my creativity to be spontaneous. And that can take days to achieve. I can spend days in the studio just thinking. I take all my other work down off the walls. I focus and meditate on the energy, not the source. Somewhere, I may be incorporating a Fra Fillippo Lippi and combine it with a photograph I've taken in Barcelona.

JZH: Both your father and brother have written a great deal about art in addition to being artists, do you write as well?

AE: I've never been much of a reader. I'm more visually oriented. Some other energy or source is telling me to do this...People tell me, 'Don't you know this is a source from such and such?' No, I didn't! I have terrible eyesight. That's another reason I don't read a lot. And I'm afraid of losing my eyesight.

I have an innate ability to be open to material that selects me and to place it. I'm very tactile. I don't want to be influenced by others. And although my ideas may not be totally my ideas, that allows me to be much more a free thinker about things. I think it's the artist's prerogative to change his mind. I would prefer not to be commissioned to do something. That way, I might as well be working in someone else's workshop. I don't want people telling me what to do or how to work.

JZH: How did collage become your métier?

AE: To destroy, to deconstruct, and to cut up is violent. I don't see anger in my work. There is sadness. We all have sadness. The bottom line as a collage-ist is eventually you reconstruct and it becomes something else.

I did a painting that was OK. But everyone who looked at it said 'I like it but, I like it but...' Although I should have done what my father told me to do, which was to put it away and look at again in a year, I didn't do that. I have this innate spontaneity, so I cut it up. And suddenly, it was full of holes. OK. I put it on the floor and started gessoing the back of heavy duty rice paper and placing, weaving it under the support system of the canvas which was about 40" X 50". I had my hands in everything, on the floor and spreading the gesso with white oil paint. Same on the front and back. As I did that other images started to emerge from the landscape it was to become. I've been working on it for a year. It looks like a map of the South Pole, all shades of white for the snow and pale blue greens for the water.

Time Will Tell

There are times I think about other people's opinions, and then there are times when I don't. I rarely go to see other artist's work when I'm working on my own project. I try not to pay attention to politics. I don't pick up a paper once I'm in the studio. I'm lucky to have a studio, so that I can get away from it at the end of the day. In my home, I'm surrounded by my father's and friend's work, and one or two of my own pieces. I don't want to live and breathe my own work. I greet my studio each morning, I say, 'Good morning studio!' And I'm very private about where I work. I don't mind inviting people, but it's your own space, and outside energies and opinions linger. I burn sage to cleanse the area so that there is a new beginning. I see objects as living entities. That may be my own fantasia, but that's OK.

As a little girl, I used to make up stories. Now, I still do that and it comes out in my work. A lot of my work is theatrical. As a child, I worked at Guild Hall and then would get on my bicycle and ride home. In those days, you could do that.

I always had a problem with perspective. My professor at Emerson suggested I use collage to solve that problem and that's how I started doing collage. What works for me is taking something I have difficulty with and turn it into something else. I'm a hands-on person, and have to work at it to make it my own. I like breaking the rules.

JZH: I know that you are a Buddhist. How does that play into your work?
AE: Meditation plays a great role in my art. About 10 years ago I went through a change when I started questioning my life. I stopped having exhibitions. Every little thing seemed to disturb me. My mom offered me the apartment in Paris for my birthday. But I would still be alone. I had no one to share my birthday with. I needed to do something with my life. I ended up going to a Hindu meditation center called Ananda Ashram in Monroe, N.Y. When I walked in, I felt as if I'd come home.

When I was up there I discovered the pressures of being in New York, changes in life and my own family dynamics. I had to distance myself from everything that I knew, so that I could start fresh. I had to discover, what I already knew. There was nothing there to distract me. The peace and tranquility, the joy was always there. It's looking at things in a different way. Like many people, I realized they were not going to change, I had to change. Sometimes you have to reverse it. What's the solution? And how do I get there?

If you are the problem, you are the solution. It's allowed me to find peace and solace in the work I do, and I try not to be too harsh with myself. My family's acceptance means more to me than anything else. And the greatest joy is to see someone look at my work and smile. Everything I attempt to do is a positive. Meditation is the focus on my spiritual path and my family dynamic, not because of where I come from, but because we are all we've got. That's all there is. The love that is always there.

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Amy Ernst’s collages can be seen at The Gallery, 125 Main Street in Sag Harbor until December 31, 2006. For additional information, contact the artist at Reverse Renaissance Studio, amyernst2@verison.com.