Interview with Nora Sturges

Georgia Review: What drew you to Calvino’s work, and what suggested the idea of a series of paintings based on Invisible Cities?

Nora Sturges: Several years ago I did a painting called Marco Polo Bringing Back Spaghetti from China. I thought the painting would be a one off, but a friend who saw it told me about Invisible Cities, which I read immediately. I loved many things about the book, but what interested me most as a painter was its narrative structure, the way it consists primarily of descriptions of cities, from which the reader constructs a loose narrative. This gave me the idea to do a series of paintings with individual narratives contained in each painting as well as a larger narrative created by the group. And why not just go ahead and use Marco Polo? I saw him as a sort of empty vessel—everybody knows that he is a traveler, so I didn’t have to explain that, yet nobody knows very much specific information about him (and indeed he is known for being an untrustworthy source)—so I didn’t feel constrained by historical facts. I felt free to paint any place, any situation, that I could imagine.
    My original idea was simply to do a series of paintings linked by Marco Polo. I didn’t anticipate how using this type of narrative structure would enable me to develop my Marco Polo character over time, or how that character would become my focus in the series. I came to see my role as like that of a writer—inventing situations that would reveal my protagonist—and using multiple paintings enabled me to describe a much more complex and contradictory character then I ever could have done with one painting.
    I wouldn’t say my series is based on Invisible Cities but, rather, inspired by it. The paintings have actually drawn more literally from the Travels of Marco Polo and, of course, personal experience. In the end, I think that Invisible Cities offered me spiritual or conceptual guidance rather than anything very concrete—other than narrative structure. Interestingly, rereading the book now, I’m struck by how directly Calvino was also inspired by the Travels of Marco Polo.

GR: While other visual artists have responded to Calvino’s work by focusing primarily on the architecture of the cities that Marco Polo describes, your cityscapes generally comprise plain backdrops for people and customs. Was this your intention from the beginning, or did the series evolve this way?

NS: I came to this project as a painter who painted people doing things in landscapes, and it would have been strange to me to conceive of a painting that wasn’t built around a person. However, while focused on the protagonists in these paintings, I grew to enjoy the task of fleshing out the place, inventing objects and architecture to support the more overt narrative the figures created.
    What I learned from doing the series, and am applying to current work, is that one doesn’t need a person to create a narrative—the place can hold the narrative. The place can imply human presence, describe its history and situation of human inhabitation.

GR: Since you describe the Marco Polo of your paintings as the “quintessential tourist,” it seems fair to ask what kind of tourist you are. Do you share in any way some of the experiences that you depict?

NS: Yes, usually, though of course they’re exaggerated in the paintings. The start of the series coincided with my move to Baltimore, where I am a racial minority—so I think about issues of race and class and culture every day—and also with a period of lots of foreign travel. Most of the paintings are very much rooted in personal experience and form an exploration of my own conscious and unconscious feelings about cultural difference. The question I keep coming back to is: when do we find a foreign culture to be exciting, interesting, and attractive, and when do we find it discomforting?

GR: There seem to be hints of Giorgio de Chirico in some of your paintings, particularly in the architecture and the cast shadows. These references suggest more than mere quotation or homage because of a general cryptic sense that is also strongly reminiscent of that artist. Do you count him among your influences in this series and in your work overall?

NS: Actually, no. The resemblance is coincidental. The English visionary artist Stanley Spencer has perhaps had the biggest influence on this work for the way literary/imaginary narratives (often biblical stories) coexist or merge with his real-life experiences of wartime work or village life.

GR: Your palette could be described as vivid or unsettling or even idiosyncratic. Would you explain how it figures into Marco Polo’s stories?

NS: I use photographic references for the figures and some of the props and details, but most of each painting is invented. I try to imagine a certain kind of real-light light, or color, but it’s always a bit beyond me to paint it naturalistically. In the end, though, I think the paintings benefit from the disconnect between the more and less realistically painted elements. And the empty, awkward, or unsettled feeling of some of the areas painted from imagination keeps them from looking illustrative.

GR: Marco Polo seems most uneasy in the natural world outside the city walls; how does nature fit into your work thematically?

NS: Some of the ideas in the paintings of Marco Polo in nature are a carry-over from a previous body of work, depicting people in landscapes. Thematically, that work explored situations when nature ceases to be desirable and becomes, well, disgusting, or threatening, or turns against us in some way.

GR: At one point, Calvino has Marco Polo suggest to Kublai Khan that a traveler lost in an unfamiliar city comes to a better understanding of the cities already passed through. “Elsewhere,” he writes, “is a negative mirror.” As your audience, are we invited to understand our own narratives better by participating in your depictions?

NS: That is my hope. When I embarked on the series, I was simply interested in its literary and storytelling aspects, but as the work developed, larger social and political ideas emerged. Making paintings about an imaginary Marco Polo has been fun and interesting, but what’s important to me is that the viewer connect the paintings to real-life experience, as a tourist or at home, and reflect on his/her own attitudes toward the foreign, and his/her degree of comfort, or discomfort, when immersed in another culture.
    I’ve used four different models for Marco Polo during the eight years this series spans. The first couple of changes in model were not by choice, but I liked the effect the change had on the narrative—with his changing physical appearance, my Marco Polo ends up being a sort of everyman character and (I hope) all the easier to identify with.

GR: Your new series, Quiet Cities, features cities empty of people and seems to emphasize what might be called the surrealistic elements of Marco Polo’s Travels. Are these recent paintings extensions of the narratives from your earlier work, or are new themes and ideas emerging?

NS: The first several Quiet Cities paintings were really me not knowing quite what to do after Marco Polo. Generally, they explore the theme of human inhabitation of the environment and the process of urban growth and decline, which began, in a minor way, in some of the Polo paintings. Without the anchor of people and their obvious narrative, the new paintings are quite different in feel.
    Toward the end of Invisible Cities, Kublai Khan asks Marco Polo why he never speaks of Venice, and Polo replies, “Every time I describe a city I am saying something about Venice.” As the Quiet Cities series develops, and the paintings get denser, more elaborate, and I approach them with more direction, I’ve discovered a similar thing—they’re all about Baltimore.

See more of Nora Sturges’ work at http://pages.towson.edu/nsturges/index.htm and http://www.bacheliercardonsky.com/gallery20.htm