It Comes In Waves

Breanna Cee Martins

Interview by L. Valena
May 11, 2023

Can you please describe the prompt that you responded to?

It was a piece of music. It was very evocative, almost as if I had heard it before, but I hadn't. I'm Portuguese, and we have a term, saudade, which is nostalgia for a place you've never been or something you've never experienced. Nostalgia for imaginary experiences. I started thinking about that as I started to play with paint.

What a beautiful word that is! That's one of those words that should have a counterpart in English. Where did you go from there?

It was actually an experiment -- it was my first time working with watercolor on unstretched canvas. So I cut off a piece, and I really like that some of the strings were coming off the sides, it was kind of unraveling itself. I started by really thinking about the idea of something that never was. I work from found photographs, so I was picking out a face from an old-timey class portrait. There were like 20-something faces in this portrait, so I was pulling from a lot of different sources.

I started by kind of roughing out the shape, and then getting more and more specific as I went. I kept trying to put it aside and work on other projects, but I just kept coming back to it. I was just so addicted to the way that it really wasn't controllable. It was kind of doing its own thing, and I just kept thinking about what I wanted to do to it. So it kind of got stuck in my head, like the music prompt.

Are you picking up the watercolor with a towel to lighten it after you put it down? How did this happen?

It was interesting seeing the way that it was getting darker because the fabric would get wet. I would never really be sure how dark it would be in between it drying. That day was a little bit chillier, so I had a heater going in my studio. I'd put it next to the heater and go do something else and come back to it, and all of the sudden it would be completely different. So I did do a little blotting with a towel. But mostly it was painting, letting the paint sit into the fabric, and then adding more or trying to push it around a little bit as I went.

So this little kid was from a class portrait. Do you have any more information about her? Where did this picture come from?

For my own practice, I find photographs at estate sales, flea markets, tag sales. Sometimes I get submissions from people who follow me on Instagram. This one I picked up at a flea market. I don't really ever get the context for them. The picture didn't have an inscription on the back, which is surprising. Usually I'll get a little jot with the year or something like that. But this was a completely out of time photograph, which is why I chose it.

I love this idea of nostalgia for something you've never experienced, and then translating that into this very intimate portrait of a stranger. How does this relate to the rest of your work?

So pieces are orphaned afterimages of the American dream. I use pictures from the 30s, 40s and 50s, pull them out of context and create phantoms out of them. It's very much in line with my work, but also a very exciting new branch to explore, using watercolor on canvas. I never really would have thought to do that before, but it just came together in this instance, and now I'm kind of obsessed with it.

Oh wow -- so that idea of putting watercolor on raw canvas really came from the prompt?

Yeah, and the idea of impermanence. I wasn't sure if the paint would even stick to the canvas, or what the resulting image, if I got an image, would be. I really enjoyed documenting the process, because each of the process shots almost felt like its own finished piece. I'd look at it and think, "I like how this looks." And then five minutes later I'd decide to work on it some more. It probably took five hours to paint, and it's really cool to see all of the stages of it. Almost like growing up or something.

I can be kind of fussy sometimes with painting. It's funny, I'm more fussy with the smaller pieces and less fussy with the big pieces. I finished one last week that was eleven feet tall, watercolor on paper.

Wait, you made a watercolor painting that's eleven feet tall?! Jesus, that's wild.

Yeah. It's called Monument. I've been doing a lot of large scale work lately, and those ones I'm a little less precious with, because it's a very physical activity. But the smaller ones I can be fussy with. There have been times when I've worked on a painting, and then decide that I don't love how it looks. And if I've taken process shots, then I can go back and see if there was a point where I liked it more, then try to bring that back. At the same time, kicking myself because honestly, I could have just left it. But I never get out of my own way.

Jerry Saltz did a talk at the grad school I went to recently. He was talking about how, for painters, the painting is done when you send it out. You have to call it finished at some point, because there's always something to fix. At some point, you have to put your baby up for adoption. I gave myself an artificial deadline of finishing this piece in a certain session, so that it wouldn't be something I'd just be fussing with for days, and changing my mind. There's always the risk of overworking it and ruining it. I was glad that I stopped where I stopped. I hung it up on a bulletin board in my apartment so I wouldn't touch it again for a while.

Sometimes the flaws that only I see aren't that big of a deal, but in the moment all I'm seeing is the things I think I've done wrong. Just putting it aside for a while puts things into perspective. I'm lucky that my subject matter is found photos, so there's never an absence of things to paint, even when painting is hard and I just have to fight through it. Sometimes I go back and look at things that I thought were unsuccessful, and they're really not that bad. I don't hate it.

Time really does give us perspective, doesn't it? Especially since we're always changing and so are our processes! A mistake in the moment can feel like an exciting development later.

Yeah. I did my very first film project this past weekend, for a 48-hour film festival in Boston. We had to write, record and edit a movie in 48 hours. That was very interesting, in terms of it being a very big collaboration. As a painter in the studio, you're on your own most of the time. But also, it was very interesting to just know that it had to be done. We lost the light, and we had to get the editing done in order to submit it by a certain time. As an artist, you never have someone over your shoulder saying, "It's time to be done." Unless there's a deadline, but I'm not that good with those either. There comes a point where the paintings just have to leave the studio. And it's like: "Alright, if you say so."

Can you tell me about the title of this piece?

"It Comes In Waves" was one of the lyrics from the prompt. I don't know if I heard it right, but I also didn't go back to double-check. I was thinking about how the painting came over, went backwards, and came over. Then I was thinking about the process, and working with water, and that crystallized it for me.

It was very interesting to work from an outside prompt. I love titles for artwork. I feel kind of underwhelmed when I go to a show and there's a lot of pieces called, like, "Untitled No. 43". I'm always like, ugh, give me something! I have like fifteen thousand notes on my notes app on my phone, but I keep little snippets of an audio book. A line or a turn of phrase I really like. Right now I'm working on a painting called It's Mourning In America, of two kids who are dressed up for church. In my head, they've just buried a pet and are holding a little funeral for it. Sometimes the title will come later, but in this instance the idea of the painting coming in waves really dovetailed with the process as I started working with this new untried medium. I was just really excited to participate in this, and I thought if there's any chance to get to experiment, this is it! This has opened up a whole new avenue in my art, so I'm really grateful to be included in this.

Fantastic! I love to hear that! Do you have any advice for another artist approaching this project for the first time?

Let the process guide you. I had been overthinking it, trying to plan something ahead of time. Instead, it just really became about letting the whole thing wash over me.

Like waves.

Exactly!

Call Number: Y103MU | Y104VA.maIt

Breanna Cee Martins paints the mirage of an America that never existed, for people like her and entire swaths of the population of this country. The artist’s watercolor paintings fall away from the viewer like a half-remembered dream; images of ghostly and phantom children, coming together to explode in kaleidoscopic colors. Working from found black and white photos, the images metamorphose into Technicolor nightmares, the old made new.