NEW YORK, April 17, 2006—Colette Calascione received a good deal of attention for her mysterious, exquisitely detailed paintings when Nancy Hoffman included her work in a group show called “Eve” at her gallery last year. Hoffman showed her again at this year’s ADAA Art Show and at the Scope fair—and is presenting Calascione’s first solo show at her Soho gallery at the end of this month. Almost the entire show has sold in advance. Calascione spoke to ArtInfo in her Harlem studio.

Colette, yours is a remarkably assured and consistent style of painting. How long have you been painting with the sort of technique that you use in Self Portrait with Internal Landscape, which is from 2004?

Since I started actually, 16 years ago. I got into painting tightly pretty early on. I was lucky that I had a teacher who intuitively gave me a smooth surface to work on and he gave me the idea of the glazing technique. It worked out pretty well for me.

But where does an artist learn such traditional techniques nowadays?

Oh, I read some books. I taught myself. I was at the Art Institute in San Francisco, and I had one professor there who was working in traditional techniques. She helped me, but for draftsmanship and the rest of the training, I’m self-taught.

So how do you actually make a painting like Persephone?

The first stage is the drawing, getting the drawing together. That’s always my favorite part, that’s the best. I’m actually not that good at drawing—I trace everything, with no shame. So I generally start with everything on tracing paper. Then I do lots of Xeroxing and enlarging. And then things happen, changes happen, and I get to play around with things. Everything comes together like a collage. Persephone was from a photograph—I love those old erotic photographs—and I had the mask, so it just worked out that way.

Then I draw everything on a white panel with a watercolor pencil. I’ll do that until I get the drawing how I like it. Then I’ll do the various layers. It’s mostly for the flesh that I’ll do all of this, because I have so much flesh in my painting! Over the drawing, I do a coat of Caput Mortem—which is an old-time technique, an earth red—and over that I’ll put three layers of white and a layer of green which neutralizes the red. All that creates an optical gray, a grisaille. Then the color starts happening and that’s the tortuous stuff. That’s the hard part.

Why is it hard?

Because I’m so particular. It has to be perfect. The color has to set a mood, and be just right. I’ll redo a color 10 times sometimes until I get it right. In Illumination, the figure was also from a photograph. But I changed the face and gave her flowers. For the tattoos themselves, I went through manuscripts and old paintings looking for the botanical references. I worked on outlining the tattoos for a couple of months. I did all kinds of different versions, and then the colors were too strong so I did another coat of flesh color over it. I put a lot of work into her.

And like most of your paintings, the final result is enigmatic. I can’t quite decide what her expression is.

Yes, I always paint these faces. I’m always trying to do the Mona Lisa smile.

And these dark, piercing eyes?

I do like eye contact. I try to seduce the viewer, but I also have to keep myself entranced. They have to look at me and say, "You want to work on me. You want to love me."

But it’s more than that. You weave these strange, often erotic stories around them. Where do they come from?

Sometimes they are narratives, but more often they are just visions and I don't usually know what they are about until years later. Sometimes they foretell things in a strange way. It's sort of metaphysical. I don't think I can give you an example.

Well, let me take an example, then. Tell me about Dream of the Hungry Ghost.

That one is my favorite painting. It's based on my favorite Max Ernst collage. I just the loved the image. I had it hanging on my wall for years. That's me in the painting looking like Mary Poppins. Recently I've been painting me a lot. The sculpture on the table is a Picasso drawing. Then look at the wallpaper. The roses are insane. There are five hundred roses in there, and I painted each one in detail, and they are so thick that there are bumps on the surface of the paint. You can feel them. I worked on it for two years. I think it probably looked finished after a year, but I had it here on my studio wall, and though I'd be working on something else, there’d always be some little thing I could do to make it look more illuminated. I really like that, to keep a painting around and I’ll think, "Maybe I could just add a little highlight here," and then it gets this really nice polished look.

And even in these long drawn-out working processes you don’t discover what the paintings mean?

I spend a huge amount of time on my own. I'm a hermit. I really enjoy revisiting my paintings, redoing my paintings again. But as to their meanings, I hope that people are able to look at my work and come away with their own interpretations.