Shirley Irons is New York City based painter that I had the honor of studying under at SVA. The way she captures transient spaces - in flowers, highways, institutions, domestic spaces, and landscapes - has greatly influenced my work and the way I think about what gets left behind. She describes painting as a way to slow down the constant flood of information we receive at every moment, “[looking] for the permanence in the transitory, which is really about hope”.

I am so excited to share more of her insights here. Thank you, Shirley!

IR: Tell me about your practice, and how your environment manifests itself in your work.

SI: For a few years after art school (late ‘70’s) I made mixed media paintings and some dog clocks, hair gel sculptures, turkey breast bone sconces and a tree lamp. As my thinking became my thinking, I worked from photographs taken on hikes, projected on large canvases on the studio wall. I overlapped the images, trying to get a sense of an enclosed nature, branches in my face and stumbling over rocks and fallen trees. Clearly I did not stick to trails. When these looked too naturalistic, I began working on two-panel paintings, pulling the sky out of one panel to exist as a separate piece, trying for the disjuncture that I thought necessary to make the viewer slow down. Several art writers convinced me that this was a dead end (I’m still not sure about that) and I began to make stand-alone paintings of my immediate environment, photo-images that were highly under the influence of the New Topographics photographers. I aimed for images with a low level of information, empty hospital corridors, airports, highways, thinking about institutional spaces. With the isolation of COVID, I began to paint dead flowers from observation. This is a long way of saying that where I am definitely influences what I make.

*Second Black Highway*, 2003, oil on wood, 41” x 48”

IR: Is there a particular neighborhood, street, or space that continues to inspire or haunt you?

SI: I grew up in Staten Island just as it was changing from rural to suburban and tract housing took over the woods I used to play in. Along with that came a new standard of taste. This is the house across the street from mine.

IR: A taste of your taste?

SI: Too many books to name but required reading should include “The Way We Live Now,” Anthony Trollope’s prescient novel about financial scandals. Augustus Melmotte is a shifty, greedy, charming financier, portrayed with humor and generosity for his faults. And I’m a big fan of The Raincoats and The Pixies.

IR: What are you working on now?

SI: I just wrote a review of Alex Kwartler’s show at Magenta Plains for Two Coats of Paint. I’m working on several large (4’x5’) slightly abstracted dead tulips and several small (4”x5”) portraits of carnations.