Now I never mind the stretcher bars coming through. In fact, it can really add to the composition, and then you’re not adding it with paint, you’re adding it with the actual structure of the support, which is interesting to play around with.
I also like the unexpected events—like paw prints, footprints, handprints—that sometimes go unrecognized until much later.
Warnock: What role do your pastels play?
Swavely: Until recently, I didn’t show my works on paper. They were only for me. I’m only now realizing that the more that I do them, the more they inform the paintings. It’s something that I practice every day. After dinner, I’ll sit down at my table and work on these pastels on colored paper. I also make leporellos, which I find lead to paintings. Not necessarily, but they get me in the mood. They’ve gone from separate practices to joining together.
Drawing is a way of staying engaged. If I’m away from the studio, I like to have a sketchbook or a little set of watercolors.
Warnock: Some of your paintings on canvas have special kinships. Can you tell me about the works you call “sister paintings”?
Swavely: When I say “sister paintings,” they’re often really worked on together, sometimes beginning as a diptych but then separated, like separated at birth. The first time that happened, the paintings were like fraternal twins. I saw that one represented me, and the other, my twin sister. And they did go their separate ways to two different places. That was kind of huge.
Other times, they’re paintings that are done in proximity, that have similarities. I used to shy away from that because I thought every painting had to be totally different, but I think it’s fine to explore the same thing. It always ends up very differently anyway, in terms of the color and the way things move.
The paintings unfold and they are quite a surprise by the time I’m finished with them. It’s a series of muscle memories, happy accidents, materials behaving in a way that you can’t entirely control. A painting could look like it took me five minutes, and it doesn’t bother me. People will say, “Well, how long did it take you to make that?” It took me years to come around to making that.