Alice Carrière: Bartlett as an Artist and Mother by The Phillips Collection published on 2024-02-14T20:33:41Z Narrator: The following is an excerpt from our interview with Jennifer Bartlett's daughter, acclaimed author, Alice Carrière. We began with the question of when she first understood what it was for her mother to be an artist. Alice Carrière: The ideas of mom and artist were always inextricably related. There was no moment where I could ever differentiate between the two. The way that she metabolized the world and her experiences was through her work. So I mean, part of the lore of my family is her unwavering knowledge that she would be an artist. When she was five years old, she stood on the shore, gazed out at the ocean, and declared to the expanse that she would be a famous artist. And, she made it look so effortless and she achieved so much with such humor and such glamor and such devotion to the work. She had an extraordinary ability to see the potential in a space. She could look at a dark, dingy, ramshackle, poorly designed space, and she could transform it and see beyond in a way that permeated not only her work, but how she transformed living into a work of art. And I can totally picture her arriving in this villa in Nice with these quixotic fantasies of, I'm in France and I'm going to do my art. And then she's confronted with this empty dry pool, and she's like, I'm going to obsessively render this over and over and over again. To me, it's almost x-Ray vision in constructing these rules for herself and her work. I feel like she's creating an entire cosmos where only she knows the rules. So she knows things at an atomic level and a celestial level almost, where she's looking at this pool and she's telling us simultaneously, I can see the nuclei bopping around. I can also elaborate the entire galaxy that this moment is that this image is. So, I think it goes beyond a photographic or a cinematic aesthetic. To me, it's like an X-ray. I dunno. It's like a magic trick. Genre Learning