Danielle Orchard
Region: Northeast
Danielle Orchard’s paintings are about the interior worlds of
women. She focuses on narratives that are common to painters—
scenes like studio visits or the annual influx of institutional
rejection letters. These autobiographical details are blended with
Western painting history. Poses and gestures might originate
in analytical cubism, the Italian Renaissance, the Chicago
Imagists, the Bay Area Figure Painters—any moment when the
female figure has been used to indicate a hidden psychological
position. Her work is most closely aligned with a modern painting
language, one that uses faceted forms and Fauvist levels of
saturation to explore physical space and memory. The characters
she paints are ultimately proxies for herself, and she views the
whole endeavor as an opportunity for empathy, both with the
(mostly male) painters who were searching for themselves
in their female subjects, and with the women depicted, whose
voices and narratives have largely been omitted.