Juxtapoz Magazine
Marisa Solis
Jan/Feb 2003
The Return of Spider-Man Lady

With another show under her belt and others on the horizon, Isabel Samaras is moving full steam ahead. The original Devil Babe, Samaras continues to surprise with her interpretations of behind-the-scenes behavior – more naughty than nice – of TV characters from the’60s and 70s. Obsessed with tales of unrequited love and forbidden romance and with powerful women, the fiery-haired painter can’t get her fill of Greek and Roman mythology, which is the inspiration for much of her current work. Samaras also commits herself to traveling, raising a two-year-old, who refers reverently to his mom as “Spider-Man Lady”, watching Buffy the Vampire Slayer, cursing the President, and robbing the recently deceased of their unwanted wooden frames. Careful not to jinx her good fortune, Samaras hesitantly describes how positive things are. Marisa Solis wonders how it’s possible for her to live in California for so long and do so much – without a driver’s license.

Most of your paintings seem to have an underlying story. How do people respond to that?

I find that even when people enjoy my paintings at first glance, they enjoy them more when they hear about the works’ backgrounds. Which is funny, because I’ve always been on the attitude that you should be able to look at something and get it or not. You shouldn’t have to read a book to understand it.

This Michael Jackson painting, “Saint Michael,” is great.

That was the second oil painting I did for my CPOP solo show in Detroit. My new thing is all oil paintings, which I haven’t done since I was in art school. Honest to God, there really is something about Michael Jackson that is utterly fascinating and tragic, and that’s very compelling to me. I think there aren’t that many people who can be that powerfully sad.

What made you decide to do oils again?

I wanted to paint bigger, and I couldn’t get the kind of blends that I wanted with other mediums. I get really obsessive about smooth skin blending. I was a little scared about the transition, but it turned out to be exciting to have that freedom – everything gets to blendy and soft and candy coated. But then I thought, “What am I doing? I’m turning into my least favorite artist!” I hate Renoir’s big cotton-candy paintings. I painted Michael Jackson because I needed something sharp and pointy that I could prove to myself I could paint: Michael Jackson’s nose!

Tell me about your Venus-influenced paintings.

There’s one with Morticia Addams and one with Uhura (Star Trek). Originally I thought I might do a huge, all-Venus show. I was thinking along the lines of “I’m your Venus.” Uhura was just this incredible, achingly gorgeous woman of color on TV, positioned on the deck with the command crew. She wasn’t the chef and she wasn’t’ the maid. It was such a brilliant, shining role. And Morticia Addams is another fantastic character; I loved her whole witchy-woman thing.

This one, “Samantha and the Darrins,” strikes me as really different from many of your other pieces.

It’s based on the Biblical story of Susanna and the Elders. Susanna is this very chaste, pious woman, and one day when she’s bathing, these two lecherous old farts come along and try to proposition her to be un-chaste with them, and she’s like “No, no, but I will not! For I am a God-fearing, chaste woman!” They threaten to blackmail her and tell everyone she did it anyway. But she sticks to her guns.

It’s probably one of the only times I’ve painted a woman in any kind of peril since my early 20s. The truth is, I didn’t like “Bewitched”, and Samantha was never one of my idols. It seems to me that the entire premise of the show is how this utterly insecure guy is trying to keep this potentially strong woman in check. She’s got massive supernatural powers and she’s supposed to be a “normal” housewife.

I always thought it was freaky that they switched Darrins on “Bewitched” without ever explaining it. One minute Dick York is playing Darrin, and then suddenly he’s gone, and there’s this other guy playing Darrin, who’s also named Dick: Dick Sargent. So that painting’s about Samantha being harassed by a couple of Dicks.
 
Growing up, my idols were Catwoman and Emma Peel from “The Avengers”, women who were very much in control of their situations. I was not a big fan of “I Dream of Jeannie” either (beyond coveting her bottle). Jeannie’s level of subservience is horrifying.

“Diana the Huntress” is almost the opposite, then.

Yeah, that’s Diana Rigg, who played Emma Peel. She’s Diana, the Goddess of the Hunt. All the paintings of Diana are great because, despite the fact that I think a lot of them are just excuses to paint naked ladies, it shows that she’s strong and very purposeful, striding through the forest with her hounds and her arrows.
 
How much TV do you watch? A lot?

I don’t actually watch very much. Thanks to stations like TV Land, “Bewitched” is on six times a day on different channels. I just set the VCR, tape the show for a couple days, and then fast-forward until I find the perfect scene. I did watch a great deal of TV when I was younger, though. As the child of a single, working mom, I was a typical latchkey kid: at home, planted in front of the TV, eating SpaghettiOs.

How do you decide when to change your painting surface? You’ve painted on lunch boxes, TV trays, game boards, and now on wood.

I tried canvas, and I hated it. It’s too bumpy. Mark Ryden told me you just put the gesso on and sand it, but the reason I loved the trays so much was that they were just glass-smooth. It took a lot of sanding and priming to get them that way, but the resulting surface was totally resistant and hard and smooth and perfect.
 
One of the things I realized when I was in Italy recently was that I loved all the stuff that was big, and I loved all the stuff was really little. But everything that was about 16 x 20 inches – the size of my work – I hated. They didn’t have the impact of the big stuff, and they didn’t have the intimacy of the small stuff. Those pieces made me wonder, “That’s what my work looks like?” So it was incredibly liberating to begin to work with any size or shape. Every time I increase the size of my painting surface I look back on the surface I’ve left and I think, “Go back? It doesn’t look very comfortable back there. It looks cramped and uninviting.”

How has having a child influenced you?

First of all, I couldn’t paint an oil painting for a really long time. I couldn’t use any of those toxic things. Now I don’t know if Nico specifically, or just the act of being a parent, has really goaded me into overdrive. Parenthood has given me a desire to shake things up a bit and change and grow. I grew three feet forward from the rest of my body – now I want to grow the other way. When your body changes so much, it also changes the way you perceive yourself and rewires your impressions of what you can do. You get a rush, like “I can do anything!”
Since I’ve had a child, I’ve heard through the grapevine that I was kind of expected to fall off the face of the earth artistically, which I thought was absurd. I had a child, not a lobotomy. I still have all the same obsessions. I didn’t have a personality transplant or anything. I’m still me.
I should probably ‘fess that my work would be one-tenth what it is if I didn’t have Marcos’ input. I dread it ‘cause he’ll point out some flaw that I was hoping to gloss over. He used to just say “Make the tits bigger!” but now he’s pushing me to take things further. He hasn’t been wrong yet – much to my total and complete irritation.

How do you feel about the fact that there are so few women in Juxtapoz?

This is something that’s come up not specifically with Juxtapoz but with gallery curators several times in the past. They say, “We’re putting together a show of women artists. Would you be interested in being in the show?” And I say “Absolutely!” Then a few months will go by with no word. I’ll call back and ask, “What’s the deal?” and they say, “We couldn’t find enough women artists.” Then I get depressed for a month.

I think men are better at promoting themselves, and I think men are maybe naturally more able to focus on their own careers. I tend to put my lifestyle issues first. That’s fine, because it’s the choice I made. I think there are probably tons of great women artists out there, but they haven’t been able to put the work first.

Do you ever think about teaching classes?

I would love to. Maybe I’ll be able to in another couple of years, when Nico is in school. There were certain teachers that I had who were incredibly integral to who I became and where my work went; they were the people who were really trying to introduce new ideas and encouraging people to go their own way and explore.

Is there anything you want to address or add?

Aside from how incredibly fabulous and gorgeous the new work is? Well, I’ve learned that I don’t have to be the most beloved artist in the world; I just have to be at a level where the people who are supposed to find and like my art, do. I hate the idea of artists dying for their work. Van Gogh is great, and I love his stuff, but I feel like he did a disservice to all artists everywhere by making it seem like artists are supposed to be miserable and suffering. We should be happy. Art can generate out of a completely serene and fabulous place. I’m happiest when I’m painting. The fact that I have the luxury to be a painting means that I can’t complain. I complain all the time about millions of things, but painting is one thing I can’t complain about. It’s all good.