024. Agnes Martin and Michelle & Ellen: Creative Risks, Process, and Balance

Summary

Podcast Summary: Women Designers You Should Know - Episode 024: Agnes Martin: Serenity Amidst Inner Turmoil

Host and Guests

• Host: Amber Asay
• Guests: Michelle and Ellen, co-founders of Nature, a design studio focused on human-centered design.

Introduction In Episode 024 of Women Designers You Should Know, host Amber Asay delves into the life and work of Agnes Martin, an enigmatic figure in abstract art. Joined by Michelle and Ellen, the co-founders of Nature, the discussion intertwines Agnes Martin's artistic journey with the personal and professional experiences of the guests, highlighting the profound impact Martin has had on contemporary design and creativity.

Guests' Backgrounds and Studio Formation Amber begins by exploring Michelle and Ellen’s personal histories, emphasizing their creative upbringings and the formation of their design studio.

• Michelle’s Creative Roots ([02:12]): Michelle recounts her childhood filled with frequent moves and a dogmatic religious upbringing, which fostered a deep-seated need for control and creativity. She describes how redesigning her room became a therapeutic outlet, a theme that resonates throughout her professional life.

  “My room became a safe haven and like an area to just explore like decorate... I felt this underlying sense of urgency to make friends quickly...” ([02:12])

• Ellen’s Free-Spirited Upbringing ([11:45]): Ellen shares her unconventional childhood living aboard a sailboat and traveling the world, which ingrained in her a strong sense of independence and creativity. This nomadic lifestyle significantly influences her collaborative approach in design.

  “We sailed around the world... creativity filled the space where organized activities or toys would have filled that space.” ([13:33])

Their shared experiences of transient and creative environments laid the foundation for Nature's ethos, which values curiosity, client relationships, and the beauty of imperfection.

Agnes Martin’s Early Life and Artistic Beginnings The conversation shifts to Agnes Martin’s early life, highlighting her formative years and initial forays into art.

• Early Influences ([34:30]): Born in 1912 in Saskatchewan, Canada, Agnes faced emotional distance from her mother but found solace in nature and her interactions with her grandfather. Her connection to the outdoors deeply influenced her artistic sensibility.

  “She did find refuge in frequent interactions with her grandfather... a quiet but profound influence.” ([35:56])

• Educational Pathway ([37:17]): Agnes initially pursued teaching at Columbia University, where she was first exposed to modern art. Her transition from teaching to painting was gradual, marked by years of experimentation and personal struggle.

Artistic Development and Style Agnes Martin’s unique style and dedication to her craft are central to her legacy.

• Abstract Expressionism and Minimalism ([38:29]): Although labeled an Abstract Expressionist, Martin’s work is distinguished by its minimalist aesthetic. She developed her iconic grids using graphite and colored pencils on large canvases, emphasizing simplicity and emotional resonance over personal expression.

  “Her philosophy strips away ego and ambition in favor of purity, simplicity, and a kind of transcendence that feels universal.” ([29:17])

• Creative Process and Discipline ([47:43]): Martin's meticulous approach involved using measuring tools to create precise grids, reflecting her desire to capture universal emotions rather than personal turmoil. Her commitment to perfection often led her to destroy works that did not meet her exacting standards.

  “If she made a mistake or a drip went wrong, she would destroy the whole canvas and start over.” ([61:13])

Challenges and Solitude Agnes Martin’s life was marked by significant challenges, including her struggle with schizophrenia and her retreat from the bustling art scene of New York.

• Mental Health Struggles ([50:03]): Martin faced severe mental health issues, including schizophrenic episodes that led to hospitalizations and electroshock therapy. Despite these challenges, she maintained that her art was not a reflection of her personal struggles but a channel for universal beauty and emotion.

  “Her paintings are about merging and about formlessness. A world without objects, without interruption.” ([70:24])

• Retreat to New Mexico ([53:47]): In 1967, at the height of her career, Martin withdrew from the New York art scene to live in isolation in the New Mexico desert. This move was both a response to her mental health struggles and a commitment to her artistic philosophy of solitude and simplicity.

  “She packed up her studio, gave away her materials, and hit the road in a pickup truck.” ([54:38])

Artistic Legacy and Influence Agnes Martin’s dedication to creating serene and meditative artwork left an enduring legacy in both the art and design worlds.

• Relationship with Pace Gallery ([63:08]): Martin maintained a long-standing relationship with Pace Gallery, which continued to exhibit her work throughout her life. Her approach of inviting the gallery owner to her remote studio underscored her preference for authenticity and simplicity.

  “She invited him to her quiet world in the desert, serving him a modest meal before revealing her new paintings.” ([61:13])

• Philosophical Impact ([68:01]): Martin’s work emphasizes the importance of process over result, mirroring her disciplined and regimented lifestyle. Her influence extends beyond visual arts into design and creativity, inspiring a focus on authenticity and connection over fame and commercial success.

  “True creativity was about channeling universal truth... not about expressing personal identity or leaving a mark.” ([70:41])

Guests' Reflections and Inspirations Michelle and Ellen reflect on how Agnes Martin’s life and work inspire their own design practices.

• Michelle’s Admiration ([29:17], [33:04]): Michelle highlights Martin’s dedication to beauty and structure, her rejection of ego, and her ability to create art that serves as universal experiences of calm and presence.

  “Her philosophy strips away ego... offers a quiet surrender to inspiration and an almost spiritual pursuit of beauty.” ([29:17])

• Ellen’s Connection ([73:06]): Ellen is inspired by Martin’s ability to create serene spaces through art, emphasizing presence and universal joy. She admires Martin’s unhurried approach and her focus on creating moments of peace for viewers.

  “Create something that brought this feeling of calm and just being... a break from everyday chaos.” ([73:06])

Conclusion The episode concludes with Amber expressing gratitude to Michelle and Ellen for sharing their insights and emphasizing Agnes Martin’s role in redefining simplicity and serenity in art and design. The discussion underscores the importance of authenticity, disciplined creativity, and the profound impact of women like Agnes Martin on the design world.

“Her work is this breath of fresh air and it's a reminder that you can find beauty and peace and simplicity.” ([71:14])

Key Takeaways

• Agnes Martin’s Artistic Philosophy: Emphasis on universal emotions, simplicity, and minimalism over personal expression.
• Impact of Solitude: Martin’s retreat to New Mexico facilitated her creation of serene and meditative artworks.
• Design Studio Collaboration: Michelle and Ellen’s studio, Nature, mirrors Martin’s collaborative and human-centered approach.
• Legacy in Design and Art: Martin’s work continues to inspire designers to prioritize authenticity and emotional resonance over commercial success.

Notable Quotes

• Michelle on Creativity as Control:

  “I have no idea, just make things. And I think looking back as I'm just now just reflecting on those years is that was a space where I could implement some sense of control in the world that felt really chaotic or unpredictable.” ([02:12])

• Ellen on Independent Path:

  “I think that's been really pivotal and really touched on how my many pronged career has unfolded.” ([15:17])

• Agnes Martin’s Perspective:

  “Nature is like parting a curtain. You go into it... a world without objects, without interruption.” ([72:27])

Further Exploration Listeners interested in exploring more about Nature’s design philosophy can visit their website at By Dash Nature Co and follow them on Instagram at @ellowearnature. Additionally, their new podcast Landline By Nature is available on Spotify, offering deeper insights into design and creative processes.

Final Thoughts Agnes Martin’s life and work exemplify the profound impact of dedication, simplicity, and authenticity in art and design. Her legacy serves as a beacon for designers seeking to create meaningful and serene experiences, celebrating the quiet power of minimalism and the universal search for beauty.

Transcript

[Amber A.C.]

Hello and welcome to another episode of Women Designers, you should know, the podcast where we admire the women who came before us. I'm your host, Amber A.C. and today we're diving into the life and work of Agnes Martin, a name you might not know, but one of the most unique voices in abstract art. Agnes Story is one of mystery, resilience and pure dedication to her craft. She's known for her serene paintings and her iconic grids and soft color bands, all created from her remote home in the New Mexico desert. Agnes left New York at the peak of her career to pursue a path of solitude, earning her the reputation of a desert mystique. Joining me for this conversation are two incredible guests, Michelle and Ellen, the co founders of Nature, a design studio with a truly human centered ethos. Their approach is all about curiosity, valuing client relationships and embracing the beauty of imperfection. Qualities that align with Agnes own approach to life and art. They believe in creating design that stands out by resonating deeply with the right people. I'm thrilled to have them here to share their insights and perspectives on Agnes's work and her influence on design. So let's dive in. Welcome to the podcast.

[Ellen]

Hi.

[Michelle]

Thank you. We're so excited to be here.

[Amber A.C.]

I am so excited to talk to both of you. We've talked many a time before, but now we are going to dive into your careers and of course, Agnes Martin. Today I want to start with each of your backgrounds and talk about you both starting a studio together. Of course. So let's start with Michelle and let's go way back to your childhood. Were there any eye opening or pivotal moments that guided you to having a creative career?

[Michelle]

I think a lot of my conscious agency over my creativity came much later. But when I look back, there's always been this through line of experimenting with my space, specifically my bedroom. I'm only now connecting the dots to realize how deeply my early childhood has impacted my life. Growing up was super transient. We moved a lot. I think growing up in a dogmatic religion probably brings an extra layer of nuance that like, I'm still beginning to unpack right now, but I felt the temporariness of all of it and this underlying sense of urgency to make friends quickly and subconsciously. I knew it wouldn't last. And there was this always this feeling of the rug was about to be like pulled from under me, like any moment. But with all of that, I have these vivid memories of designing my room like my space and my room became a safe haven and like an area to just explore like Decorate. I have like vivid memories of just like changing my bedspread and just decorating my room to the point where it was like an obsession. And my mom gave me her sewing machine because I would be like, in bed bathroom, like, I want that. I want to change up to this. And so she just like gave me a sewing where she was like, michelle, you just go buck wild and do whatever you want. So I like, without any, like actual formal training of having a sewing machine, I would just stitch up bedspreads and like, wow, I don't know, just make things. And I think looking back as I'm just now just reflecting on those years is that was a space where I could implement some sense of control in the world that felt really chaotic or unpredictable. And it was like just where I could let my creativity fly.

[Amber A.C.]

Yeah, that's deep. I mean, that is some introspective work. That is definitely some therapy that you've done.

[Michelle]

We're definitely in it right now. Yeah, definitely in it.

[Amber A.C.]

That's such a great way of putting it is that your constant is creativity. And it's a really interesting perspective on having a creative childhood. And you received your BFA in graphic design from Auburn, which I hear was an amazing program. I think I've heard other designers coming out of there too. Can you tell me more about what that experience was like?

[Michelle]

Totally. So with that changing of the room all the time growing up, I thought I was going to be an interior designer and I actually started at Auburn in interior design. Oh yeah. So like for that program in specific, you have to put together a portfolio. And going to Catholic high school, I didn't have any formal art classes. All I had was those room DIY disaster experiments. So I pulled together a portfolio based on just taking pictures of those creations. One I remember, like it was like lime green and orange checkered, very of the times now and somehow got in. And I remember starting that program. It felt as if I was entering a varsity league and everyone had training and knew exactly what they were doing. And I was just like stepping in as like the beginning, very novice. And I so desperately wanted to catch up to the pace of everybody else and I just couldn't get there. And I felt extremely defeated and shameful and embarrassed and I flunked out. I purposely did not turn in my final project and like, almost like a self sabotaging way, like, I just cannot do this. Like, I literally cannot do this. Thankfully, my parents disowned me and I quickly had to just pull another major and or pull something like, my whole identity was on these rooms. It was my constant for much of my life. I didn't know of any other direction and landed on graphic design pretty arbitrarily and instantly fell in love. Like, instantly. Auburn was really great in that, had an emphasis on the critique and the process. They didn't teach you the programs, which I think that autonomy over the creation part of just figuring out what worked for me to bring ideas to life and the focus beyond the process and the critique and the final result allowed me to experiment in my own terms. Whereas interior design was extremely rigid. And it's like in its structure to get to the end product was very regimented. So I think that freedom to create on my own terms was something really special about Auburn. I also just loved the curiosity of graphic design. You could do anything. I remember doing projects. We have a shared project on the Neon Museum because I loved the Neon Museum. So I've got a project on that. We should pull my sides. I remember doing, like, a meat project. Amnesty International, like, against gun violence. But I love that it piqued so many interests versus just what I thought it was. Well, I didn't really have any idea of what I was actually getting myself into, so I fell madly in love with it. And, yeah, the rest is kind of history.

[Amber A.C.]

Yeah. And you're still good at interior design. You have a full circle moment where your home and your second property and everything are just like, stunning. And it shocked me when I saw what you created. And now it makes so much sense because you've always had that within you, even though you do obviously design professionally, graphic design. But there's definitely a lot of crossover within design industries. Anyways.

[Michelle]

I agree. Yeah, for sure.

[Amber A.C.]

And so you've worked at a couple of agencies before going out on your own. What kinds of things did you gain from working there?

[Michelle]

Yeah, so I graduated during the Great Recession in 2009. So I actually had a really hard time finding a job. And I landed at a small boutique firm called Gotcha in Georgia. And it was actually an internship. I remember feeling pretty defeated because my husband also graduated that time as an advertising major and he got a job pretty quickly. I think I applied to probably over a hundred agencies and felt, yeah, very defeated that I didn't get something. But then landed at Gotcha. And it was. I think it was a really big confidence builder. Cheryl was a mentor. She was the owner, and she let me lead and run a lot of projects. I had a lot of freedom and autonomy, which was great. It actually was just the Two of us, and we had another person come in very small. And then during that time I was still like putting my feelers out and I had done my best friend's wedding invitations and it caught the eye of a entertainment agency in New York City. And I came on as their graphic designer. I did their press kits for like, sports people, semi celebrities. And it was extremely toxic. But I didn't really know at the time because I didn't know anything different. And then during that time I got pregnant. And I remember quitting when I was about 30 weeks with my first son. You know, it's so funny at a perseverance for your child that you will make the hard decision where, like, this job isn't going to suit me because I'm just protecting the health of my baby growing inside of me versus, like, I knew it was bad and wouldn't have quit if it wasn't for being pregnant. So I got out of that job and we moved to California and I didn't work for a while. And then that group of mom friends encouraged me to start sharing work or help them with work. All the women in LA when I moved there were mothers and also had passions, so I would help them with graphic design. I helped a friend lay out her children's book, another friend do a nutritional program. I started sharing some of my work on Instagram and then that sort of just built upon itself. Then I just started Romico and it just slowly incrementally blossomed into what it was. And I really hit my peak during COVID and it was one of the busiest times of my career. And also had another child. And I think I went back to work like two weeks in just because I was just so excited. Like I was filled with passion again and was getting projects that really resonated with me, sharing work and it just created more work and. Yeah, and then that kind of.

[Amber A.C.]

I love that.

[Michelle]

Yes.

[Amber A.C.]

That's so interesting. You went from basically like small studio to small studio, which I imagine that really set you up for creating your own studio because you got to see all of the behind the scenes and you wore a lot of hats and you probably got used to those environments, would you say?

[Michelle]

Oh, yeah, totally. Yeah. Even at that age, working from home already and having that autonomy, that's really hard to give up. So at that point, the question of working at another, bigger agency was out the window and sharing work and going that backstreet road of friends, of friends and word of mouth and building it that way felt normal to me.

[Amber A.C.]

Yeah. And like A very natural way of getting back into creativity and finding the balance that you crave so much and that you really set up for a career, which we'll get into even more with both of you. Thank you so much for sharing all of that. And then Ellen, of course, I want to hear about you and what your upbringing was like. Tell us more about that.

[Ellen]

Let's see if I can get as deep as Michelle.

[Amber A.C.]

No pressure.

[Ellen]

Yeah, for real. Similarly to Michelle, my upbringing was really transient. I was born in North Florida, and when I was about five years old, we moved onto a sailboat. My parents just sold most of their stuff, moved us onto a boat. It had been their dream to just kind of do things their own way and sail around the world. So we trialed it for a year and lived in a marina. When I was about 6 or 7, we left the country and we circumnavigated. So we sailed around the world. And so I grew up completely abroad until I was 14. And because of that, among other things, creativity was part of the function of every day. So it was kind of all I knew. There was, like, the obvious things from, like, doing a lot of drawing and doing a lot of writing and a lot of painting once I got my first watercolor set. But when you don't have a lot of things, you have to go the extra mile with your imagination to make up toys. So imagination for me, when I was growing up, it really filled the space where, like, had I been living in the States, organized activities or toys that would have filled that space. But instead we had to be really creative because we didn't have a lot of stuff. There just wasn't room for it. So, yeah, most of my upbringing was, like, far flung across the world on a boat, really heavy in imagination. And then I had a pretty, I'd say, standard high school experience when we moved back to the States. And creativity was honestly a little bit less of a priority then. Like, I remember taking some painting classes, but most of the stuff I made is gone. I have no idea.

[Amber A.C.]

Oh, yeah, that's so unique, so different. Are your parents nomads or, like, what were they doing with all of that?

[Ellen]

It'd been my dad's dream from when he was a child growing up in Jacksonville in North Florida. There's, like, a big boating culture. And so, like, early on in his life, he was like, this is what I want to do. I want to sail around the world. And then he met my mom, and she was like, I'm game. That sounds fun. And, yeah, they Planned it like as much as they could. I think it was supposed to be a three year trip initially, but they just hustled really hard and worked and saved up money. And then their plan was, while we're doing this, while we're young, while our kids are young, we'll take like an early retirement and then come back and work again. So while we are physically capable, let's go see the world. So they were pretty like strategic, obviously about their planning, like working really hard, saving, sold our house, sold like a bunch of our stuff, put everything else in storage, and it ended up being a lot longer than it was supposed to be. And we lived in Australia and in New Zealand for a while and my mom got a job for a year while we were fixing up the boat. But they're just free spirits.

[Amber A.C.]

Yeah. That's amazing. How many kids were in your family?

[Ellen]

Two of us. I have an older sister. Yeah.

[Amber A.C.]

Oh, that's manageable then.

[Ellen]

Yeah.

[Amber A.C.]

Family of four kids on a boat. Yeah.

[Ellen]

You would be surprised. There is like a whole culture of people who do this and a lot of them had three or four kids.

[Amber A.C.]

Wow. Yeah, that's impressive. It's funny because that probably did lead to a free spirited childhood too. And I imagine. Do you see that coming through even today in your work and in your career? What are some of those standout moments that have like really been ingrained in you, would you say?

[Ellen]

I think that seeing such a broad spectrum of life experience so young had a pretty profound effect on us. We weren't just being exposed to what we would be exposed to in our small suburban neighborhood. We were seeing kind of everything. And I think it was really nice for me to be able to see like, this is how you would grow up normally. This is how you grow up if you live in a hut with your entire family and then like every cross section in between. So I think that just seeing so many different ways of living has been really pivotal. And I think another thing that's been really nice is also just being able to grow up in a culture and a scenario in which I saw my parents be like, yeah, this is something we want to do when we're going to do it. It's not like the normal route and it's not something that anybody in our family even thinks is a good idea. Like they got a lot of kickback from everybody they knew that were like, this is irresponsible, this is crazy. And they did it anyways and they had so much fun doing it. So I think as an adult, for Me in everything I've done. It's not been like a throw caution to the wind type thing, but I'm, I think, a lot less risk averse if I'm really driven to get to something. Like, I'm less attached to doing things like a quote unquote traditional way, because I think a lot of the fun is taking like the path less traveled and charting your own course, because that's exactly what they did. And I think that's been really pivotal and really touched on how my many pronged career has unfolded.

[Amber A.C.]

I agree. It seems like it would do a lot for where you are now and would like you're saying, give you that risk averse life and the like, why not try it kind of a mentality. So then you went to Georgia University and studied painting and drawing. What was your transition like going from an art background into design?

[Ellen]

When I went to college, I wasn't like Michelle, I didn't have this, like, thing that I knew I would study. I swirled around and looked at a bunch of different things, which is a whole other story I won't get into. But it finally occurred to me, like, I'm just going to study what I want to study, which was painting. And so I put in a portfolio without telling my parents. And I switched my major because I was a journalism major to start, because it's what I really wanted to do. And it was kind of the perfect place to do it as well. I was like perfectly positioned again. I didn't go to UGA thinking I was going to go into their art program. I knew about it. It was never really set up for me that that was something that I was going to study. But Athens, Georgia, which is where UGA is, which is where I live now as an adult too, they have this incredible art school, this incredible music scene, and it's this hotbed of creative activity and they really feed off of each other. They're like super symbiotic. And the Lamar Dodd School of Art, which is the art school here, it wasn't until I was in it that I realized how good it was or like how big it was. And we were able to do so many things in that school. We had so many tools. There was this museum on campus that's incredible that has like so many incredible, still some of my favorite pieces of art and yeah, like, incredible study abroad programs. Like, I went to Italy my junior or senior year, I can't remember, and studied like painting and sculpture there. So again, I fell sideways into studying art. And then I also Studied music business. So I'll say that, like, the music scene and the art scene are really inextricably connected within the town. So when I graduated, I moved to New York and was working in the music industry and following the free spirited way. I just continued to follow my curiosity and move around a little bit. I moved to Nashville, still working in music, and then ended up moving to North Carolina and was working in music there. And then just one day decided I wanted to start painting and try and do that professionally for a while. So I was doing that. And then the pandemic hit and I was also waiting tables simultaneously. And it all kind of teed itself up for me to try something different. I had no thought of design at all until I started designing websites and I took an online program right before the pandemic hit. And then I was like, all right, I guess this is fate. I've got all this time, I might as well keep studying it. Started to do website design for people and then started to do brands to back it up. And then I fell in love with designing brands. So I like snuck in through the side door into doing design and it just stuck. Like it was something where every day I woke up and I was like, all right, this is it. This feels totally right. It pulls in all the creativity I want. And then I also really like the business side of it. So I kind of was able to scratch two itches.

[Amber A.C.]

Yeah, I love that. That's so cool that you can like really navigate your way through such a really different career and find your way here too. And I think it's a really good reminder, especially for listeners who might have always been interested in design but have never really gotten into it, that like, it's never too late to start. And I think it's a reminder, especially from some of the other episodes we've gone over, is this idea of being an interdisciplinary designer or like a multi hyphenate designer and that you can go from one design discipline to another, or one creative discipline to another, and that it all kind of bridges together too. And it's so telling with us talking about Agnes Martin today too, is that when you step back and look at the world of creation, creativity, you really can bridge things together and take different meanings out of different things too, and all of that. So now you guys have to tell me how you two met. How did that, how did that begin this partnership kind of a thing?

[Ellen]

So I guess this is about two and a half years ago. Michelle and I were both running our own design studios and without realizing it, I think both of us were feeling a little bit isolated. I think we both have, as most people do, again, coming into this industry. There's like a lone wolf aspect, especially with so many people coming in and starting, like, their own solo design studio. And I don't think I was consciously aware of it. Like, things were going really well for both of us, I think, in our separate studios. Like, this isn't. It really wouldn't have been the best time to be like, nah, let's shut these down. But we had a third partner when we began, and she was really the catalyst where this was her idea, where she was like, why don't the three of us join forces? There was nothing in me before that conversation began that was like, I think I want to start a studio with somebody else. Like, my brain was in a place where I was like, I love this. I can do everything really independently. I can do it on my own terms. But I think in the background, I was feeling lonely or just feeling like I wasn't able to stretch my wings or push my creativity to the fullest extent, because you have a client, obviously. But in all the other ways, I was operating within an echo chamber and just like, working from home every day. Michelle, I'll let you take the rest.

[Michelle]

Yeah, I mean, at that point at Romeco, I've been doing this for, I think, over 10 years. And our third partner, she's amazing. And she was the catalyst, like Ellen said. And I would like to call her the tip of the triangle, because there was Ellen, I. And she was our connecting point. And I feel like both of us didn't really know why we were saying yes. And I don't think at the time I really knew why. I just knew I wanted something a little bit more than what I had at that moment. And it was like a blind trust fall of like, hey, I know these women peripherally, but I want to get to know them more. And it's incredible. Once we open the veil of letting someone into your design process, which is extremely intimate, and the vulnerability of what that entails, letting someone into your world and letting ego go. And then just like, coming together and merging. What worked best at Low Tide, what worked best at Romico, blending these ideas, coming up with new ideas together, and building this ideal studio that maybe is not the typical studio. It's definitely not what I knew of running a studio is. And coming about it in our own way, which is like, understanding of ourselves, like, what is our signs? How does our human design play in this coaching like, mindset work, like, going into all these other things that putting us as humans first and then coming together as humans, and then it was just really serendipitous in how we came together. And as we continue to grow together, I just can't even imagine my life without Ellen. And we're definitely married, you know, business marriage and pulling this idea. I think running a studio, I never really felt comfortable as being the boss. I've had junior designers and other people working for me, but this idea of running the show solely by myself was really scary. As a studio owner, a lot of onus and responsibility falls onto your shoulders, and it can feel like the weight of the world. And I remember a lot of times during my career, I was like, I'm not cut out for this. And so I think that knock on the door of this invitation to be in this studio that wasn't just me as the hierarchy chain felt really appealing. And this interconnection of us as two equal partners felt really safe. And it continues to be an incredible journey and a mirror to not only our creative world, but also life too. Like, Ellen is more than a business partner. She's family now. Like, this is a very intimate process as running a studio. It's extremely vulnerable and hard.

[Amber A.C.]

You two are the first co owners that I've interviewed on the podcast too. And talking about all of this and hearing it, it really is interesting that you have to come together and be one, but then you also are two separate people too. And so I'm really curious to know, like, does it feel like you've duplicated your person? There's that idea of, oh, I wish there was two of me that can get all of this work done. Or do you feel like you're like a yin and Yang scenario? When you come together, then all of your skills create, like, this bigger whole kind of a thing.

[Michelle]

The latter, for sure.

[Ellen]

Yeah, I'd say definitely the latter. And we get a lot of questions about, like, how we run the studio. And again, we've really charted our own course here. We do a lot of things that I think are counter to what would be expected when you start a business with somebody. And I'd say we're like, definitely yin and yang. We definitely both have different life experiences, different strengths. We both bring different things to the table. But there's also a lot of things we do together. A lot of the early advice we got was, like, one of you should have one thing, and the other person should have one thing, and then that's gonna be the Most quote unquote, like, efficient way to use your time because there are two of you. And we tried everything under the sun as far as, like, how to run like a traditional agency. And we got a lot of great advice and we've used some of it. You've given us some great advice, Amber. We came to you early and then we talked to a bunch of people, but we took what worked for us. And then our creative process is extremely collaborative. Even some of the drawings we make are like, one of us will get started, then we'll pass it off to the other person, and then we'll pass it back. And so it's really this complete joint force. And Which I think is a little bit untraditional. But when it comes down to it, like, what we really want to do at the end of the day is be creating together.

[Michelle]

Yeah.

[Ellen]

So that's what we do.

[Michelle]

Our design processes together. Obviously, there's parts where Ellen takes and I take. Ellen is the voice of our brand. She leads all of, like, our loom presentations. But the heart of the design, that's always a collaboration. And I think it's made our design better and bigger than what we could have imagined because we are bringing those two unique views. And yeah, two heads are better than one. There's yin and yang in other parts of the business, but the core of our business, the creative part, is a collaborative. And we don't. One person takes a project, the other person takes a project. Obviously, as the project evolves, there's some. We let go a little bit, but that core nebulous phase is always a joint venture.

[Amber A.C.]

Yeah. I keep imagining, like, that Venn diagram thing where maybe it's like, even more crossover than a typical one kind of a thing.

[Michelle]

Totally. That's a great visual.

[Amber A.C.]

Yeah. And I think I've even seen on Instagram that you guys talk to each other through your files or have little notes or messages to each other, which I love.

[Michelle]

Yes, yes.

[Ellen]

We're in constant.

[Michelle]

We're in constant context.

[Ellen]

If it's not us leaving notes to each other in Adobe xd, it's us voice noting one another or slacking or it's constant, which is really great because we are across the country from one another. So it really does make it feel like we're next to each other or working from the same space. Like sometimes we'll get on a huddle in slack and just sit in silence while we're designing. Just so it's like we're co working.

[Amber A.C.]

This is such a unique scenario. I have to Say, like, I've never heard of anything like this. And especially the, like, going back and forth through the creative process that is very unique. There's usually hierarchy of some sort or separation of some sort. And so it's really beautiful to think about this. Like the fact that each of your projects now, I'll look at them even differently now that there's really these like two, like this, like two beings coming together and creating this one thing.

[Michelle]

And.

[Amber A.C.]

Yeah, I think there's just something very poetic about that.

[Michelle]

I love that. Yeah. Thank you.

[Amber A.C.]

That's beautiful.

[Michelle]

Yeah.

[Amber A.C.]

And of course, we're talking about Agnes Martin today. We're changing things up today too, because she's more of an artist than a designer. But I'd love to know why you chose Agnes or what about her inspires you.

[Michelle]

Yeah. Oh, my God. We're both really obsessed with her and became even more obsessed with her during this process. I know. Her dedication to beauty and structure really inspires me. Her philosophy strips away ego and ambition in favor of purity, simplicity, and a kind of transcendence that feels universal. She offers, like, a counter narrative to the pervasive culture of self promotion and individual achievement that's really predominant in our society right now. And instead, like, offers this, like, quiet surrender to inspiration and an almost spiritual pursuit of beauty. And I know that's something that Ellen and I are very much into this, like, abolishment of the ego coming together in interconnectivity.

[Ellen]

Yeah. Also echoing a lot of what Michelle said, the sort of stripping away ego in pursuit of beauty and almost like transmission of something that's more universal is something that we aspire to as designers. And like, there is no such thing as ego if you're co creating with somebody at the level we do. So that really hit and was resonant. I remember that the first time I saw an Agnes Martin piece in person was at the Guggenheim in New York in 2016. And I was just bowled over by the transcendental nature of her work. And I love Abstract expressionism. That was like, one of the main things I was focusing on when I was studying painting. And there's a museum on campus at UGA and they have some incredible pieces, and the school itself is tied to some incredible women, Abstract expressionist artists. And as a movement, I think it's incredible. But the thing I love about Agnes so much is that a lot of the work can seem simpler than it is if you look at it. But then if you look a little closer, there's so much nuance in There. And there's so many layers. And if you, like, crack the surface a little bit more, there's just like so much in there. And she can explain and express so much with her work, which is why I think that she's somebody that everybody should know about. And then even as I was like, riffing and got into, like a creative flow, trying to think about the connections even between Agnes Martin and design, I started to think about that. Dieter Rahms quote, the good design is as little design as possible. And I think that's not exactly what I'm not going to call Agnes Martin's work essentialism, because it's not. But there is something where she just was trying to have a really clear transmission. She wasn't overdoing anything. Nothing was overdone at all. And I think that's why it's so resonant to so many people.

[Amber A.C.]

That's so interesting. I have to ask before we start, too. So you majored in fine art, right? Did you learn about Agnes Martin in school?

[Ellen]

Oh, yeah, absolutely. I had a lot of professors who were also really into abstract expressionism. So whether they're talking about, like, Agnes Martin or Joan Mitchell or anybody like that, it came up a lot. There was a program, it's like a fellowship program where there was a. They would pull in a famous artist and they would really, like, ensconce themselves in the culture and they would be like visiting faculty. And the first person to do that was Elaine de Kooning, who was also an incredible abstract expressionistic artist in her own right, but also like Willem de Kooning, who's her husband, she mostly put her career on the back burner to help propel him forward. Wow. So he's much more well known than she is.

[Amber A.C.]

But, yeah, one of. I didn't even know about her. Yeah, she's incredible. Okay.

[Ellen]

Yes, she's incredible. And so she was the first person to have that fellowship. And she started one of her favorite series in Athens, like, while she was doing that. And there's a piece at the museum at the school.

[Michelle]

So cool.

[Amber A.C.]

Wow.

[Michelle]

I should note that I didn't know about Agnes until I took a block shop textiles workshop. And the three women that own that studio introduced me to her. And if you look at Agnes work, you can see Blockshop's influence of Agnes in their textiles. And that was one of their biggest inspirations. And so that's how I found out about her. And now you can see Agnes inspiration in, like, everything. And a lot of artists.

[Amber A.C.]

Yeah, that's true. In our Generation.

[Michelle]

Yeah.

[Amber A.C.]

To kind of preface who Agnes Martin is to our listeners. She may not be a name that you know, but she's one of the most unique voices in abstract art. While her male contemporaries like Ellsworth Kelly and Piet Mondrian became household names, Agnes crafted serene, minimalist paintings that capture pure joy and inner calm, all from her remote home in the New Mexico desert. She's known for her iconic grids and soft color bands. But her work wasn't about fame. She left New York at the height of her career, earning the title of desert mystique for her reclusive lifestyle. If you're ready to discover an artist who broke all the rules to follow her vision, sit tight. You're about to meet a legend. So let's start with Agnes Martin's beginnings, which set the tone for the kind of solitude she embraced in her art. Michelle, take it away.

[Michelle]

Yeah. She was born in 1912 on a farm in Saskatchewan, Canada. Her father actually passed away when she was 2. They bobbed around a bit in Canada before landing in Vancouver in 1912. Her mother, Margaret, supported the family by renovating and selling houses, which is, I think, really interesting, too. And because she was focused on that career aspect, she kind of neglected the kids in the process. Agnes describes her as being hated by her mother, and I think she internalized that hatred a lot and described her as emotionally distanced. She did find refuge in frequent interactions with her grandfather, and he served as, like, this unspoken counterpoint to her mother's just harsh rigidity. He represented a model of autonomy and simplicity for her, and I think Agnes really latched on to that. She did find a lot of refuge in nature. She described her connection to nature in her early life as something instinctual and deeply grounding, a quiet but profound influence that offered her solace and understanding in ways that human relationships at that time just didn't. She loved nature so much. She was extremely physical. She hiked, she swam, she cycled. She was really influenced by nature, not just in what it felt, but just in the activities that it provided to. Yeah, her home life wasn't very peaceful, and her mother was tough and just working, providing for their family, too.

[Ellen]

So, yeah, to Michelle's point, like, she really loved being outdoors. And she moved from Saskatchewan to Vancouver when I think she was in her teens. And during those early days, she spent a lot of time in the outdoors. And so I think to her, it wasn't lonely. That was just her experience of being alone and in nature. So it really cultivated, like, an early sense of being able to depend on that solitude. And that continued to be a theme throughout the rest of her life. And then in the 1930s, she moved to the States, and that was the first step in her career towards art, although it would be so long until she actually fell into that. So she moved to Washington State, which is right across the border from Vancouver, because her sister had married an American, and she fell ill, and so Agnes moved to help take care of her. And she fell so in love with American culture that she was like, it's not enough for me to live in America, like, I want to become an American. She had already graduated high school, and she retook her senior year in a high school in Washington just so she could go to college, so that she could then have a career and get a visa. And when she was in college in Washington, that is when she first met Mildred Cain, who would be her first rumored romantic partner for many years, off and on, and somebody who also would support her financially off and on. When she did move into that stage.

[Amber A.C.]

Of becoming an artist, what's interesting about her, too, she didn't jump straight into art. She spent her twenties doing all kinds of things, from teaching to swimming competitively. She eventually made her way to New York City and studied at Columbia University to become a teacher, not an artist. And it was at Columbia where things clicked. She took studio classes that pulled her into the world of modern art. And her art was even more traditional at first, too. But at least she was realizing that's what her passion really was. And if you do the math, painting didn't really come into the picture until she was nearly 30. But slowly but surely, teaching took a backseat as painting became her main focus. And it took years of experimenting and studying and even destroying her own work before she found her style.

[Michelle]

What's crazy is during that time, I think she produced 100 pieces of art. And that kind of caught the attention of Betty Parson. And I want to note at that time, when she was asked to come into New York at 1950s, she was 45 years old already. So she had been painting all that time in New Mexico before getting the attention of the New York scene, which I think is just crazy. How much New Mexico at that time was also like this epicenter of this bohemian art writing philosophy playground that Betty Parson in New York had her eye on. And a lot of people had their eye on. Yeah. So after that, Betty Parson was like, hey, your work is amazing. I need you to be in New York. I can't have you there. And Doing shows here. You need to come here. And so at that point, Agnes had to make the decision to go to New York. Yeah. So she was 45 and she fully immersed herself in the co nt slip where Betty put them. And it was like this unique artist community, much like Taos, where she joined other minimalist and abstract artists. Her peers were Ellsworth, Kelly, Robert, Indiana, Lenore, Tawney, Chrissa, another great artist. She also supposedly had relationships with both of those women. Also supposedly had a relationship with Betty Parson too. Oh yeah, this is all hearsay, but she never was outward with her sexuality. She was very much in the closet. But what's so interesting during that time, because she considers herself an Abstract Expressionist, although her work is very minimal. But I think she really resonated with the Abstract Expressionist mentality, which is more on this idea of philosophy, of the search for universal truths and emotional intensity through abstraction. You can see that in Marth Rockosworth. He was a very influential person to Agnes. You can see that in her work, no doubt. But also during this time you have Andy Warhol and the Pop art scene, Roy Lichtenstein and others who are celebrating like celebrity culture and consumerism also simultaneously happening in New York at that time. So you have these two scenes happening that were very counter to one another. The Konente Slip artists practiced art as a spiritual, ego, free exploration of the self, while the Factory, like Andy Warhol scene, celebrated art's potential to merge with popular culture. Martin's choice to stay in this quieter area underscored her dedication to the contemplative approach while contrasting the Factory's embrace of this mass appeal celebrity culture. So it's so interesting to see that this is happening during that same time as Warhol and all these other pop artists, that this other scene was just quietly in the back corner too.

[Ellen]

The fact that those two scenes were coming up side by side is really interesting because they do have completely different ideologies. But yeah, I love that. So you mentioned Coenty Slip, so let's go there for a minute because there could be an entire podcast on this. But. So by the time Betty Parsons convinced Agnes Martin to move to New York, she was really starting to hit her stride in having some more like, commercial success with her art. There was no such thing as immediate success for her. This was a path and she stayed on it and it took her a while.

[Amber A.C.]

Yeah. In fact, as I understand it too, she was one of the older ones of Coente's Slip. They were all young, in their 20s, artists and she was like an older woman painting at the time.

[Michelle]

Yeah, she was a decade older than her counterparts at that time, 100%.

[Ellen]

And she didn't let that hold her back. Okay, so Quenty Slip is so cool. So again, she became friends with Ellsworth Kelly, who then hooked her up with a loft in Quenty Slip. So Quenty Slip was this super vibrant, really unconventional art community located in what's now the financial district. So it was three square blocks in Lower Manhattan. And during the 1950s and early 1960s, it was all these converted sail making and shipping channelries, which is shops that sold supplies or equipments for ships. I get really excited thinking about this because I'm like, I grew up like that too. But it was like a really cool, like, abandoned warehouse scene. Definitely an artist's refuge. It was not only people who were in the visual arts, but it was also writers and just other creatives who wanted to escape a more like, quote unquote, mainstream art scene to move there. And there was another group of abstract expressionists who also had their own sort of artist community a little bit further uptown. But it was a lot more male, a lot more, like, heteronormative. There was no queerness at all. So anybody who was like a little bit off the beaten path was attracted to Koenti Slip. Anyways, so she lived in this huge, bare bones, giant, a hundred foot loft. It had no running water. It was just this giant room, essentially. It used to be a sailmaker's workshop. And she had these windows that looked right out onto the East River. There's this quote too, that said that she was so close to the harbor that she could see the expressions of the faces of the sailors when they passed by. Which is such an incredible thought to think of her in that environment, surrounded by all of these incredible people. And that's the kind of space that she was creating in. And again, the people that she was surrounded by are now considered pioneers in the art world. Because what Michelle was saying, it's like Jasper Johns, Ellsworth Kelly, Robert Indiana, Barnett Newman, Ad Reinhardt. Like, they were all there and they were all working in this small community. But the thing that brought them together was a shared love of independence, even though they had this really wonderful community. And Agnes had these really close relationship with women as well, like Lenore, Tawny and Chrissa, some of them romantic, some of them not. She really describes this as being a lonely period for her. She wanted to underscore that they were all brought together by the same thing, but they all were brought together also to kind of mind their own business, which I thought was interesting that even though they were all friends, they weren't like spending all their time together. They had this shared commitment to independence. So I think that's also important. And that's like the whole contradiction of her experience there. So she had this thriving professional career, but she was also struggling personally with like a little bit of loneliness and then some of the mental health stuff too, that we will talk about. But regardless, she had all these deeply private relationships with women as well. She never fully openly identified as a lesbian. There were connections that suggested she was part of the queer community. But it was extremely dangerous and definitely, possibly career ending to be openly out in that time. But her really quiet and somewhat mysterious personal life led some to see her as a quote unquote, closeted figure. And that's really a term that resonates given that her preference was for these spaces of solitude and introspection.

[Amber A.C.]

Yeah. In fact, this privacy allowed her to avoid labels both in her work and her personal life, and instead focus on her art as a path to self expression and calm. And this was also the era where she developed her grids. Her grids were drawn with graphite and colored pencils on large painted canvases. She said her first grid painting was called the Tree. It came about because she was thinking about the innocence of trees. That's how you know someone is so artistically minded. They just look at a tree and then can visualize something completely different. But this piece is a large 6 foot by 6 foot square canvas and it's made up of a linear grid. And from far away you'd see gray horizontal bands, like a slightly darker gray, slightly lighter gray. But then when you go up close, these bands reveal themselves to be closely spaced, vertical, parallel pencil lines. Agnes used measuring tape or string stretched across the canvas to guide her pencil as she drew her grids. She's also used rulers and other straight edges to create these. But her philosophy in these was to find something so calming and grounding in a design as simple as a grid. When you look at it far away, it does. There is an exactness that you can see in it. And so she must have gotten really meticulous about spacing and everything because this was long before designing on a computer. And then, yeah, as you get up closer, you see that it's drawn by hand and that it's graphite and stuff like that. So it's really cool to imagine that.

[Michelle]

I know, it's so cool. She was obsessed with this idea of perfection, just like how nature is perfectly imperfect, so were her pieces. And I know that you said this word innocence. And in interviews, Martin expressed how nature gave her a sense of absolute happiness and innocence, words she used frequently when discussing her work. She saw nature's patterns as perfect without needing any alterations, an idea that aligned with her artistic philosophy of simplicity and purity. Rather than replicating nature visually, she sought to capture the emotional resonance of being within it. The calm, the silence, the space for contemplation. The influence of nature was less about depicting the physical world and more about evoking the psychology and emotional landscape that it inspired. The sensibility found expression in her use of grids, muted colors and those variations in lines and that hand gesture to invoke this visual sense of tranquility. Her work, like, just so quiet and meditative. And she actually had to get into that meditative stance while doing all that repetitive work. She used unprimed canvases, really large, like you said, sometimes six foot wide. She didn't start in these bigger scales. She actually started really small. Later she did start using some colors. Like, even in her later work, she even played with even more colors. But even those colors, and if we call them color, like, we're still very natural in nature and almost sometimes translucent in how they, like, appeared underneath. She became known for these grids, and it's really funny that they looked minimalistic, but she never saw herself as a minimalist. And I think that has to do with just the expressionist philosophy. I think she just really resonated with the philosophy of their approach to art and the purity of it. She would wait for inspiration, and I know this was really important to her, to almost turn her back to the world and come from, like, a really pure, honest state. She really was, like, against the ego, against anything that the pop culture was doing, and was really trying to come from a place of purity and honesty that I think really reflects in her work. It's not very bombastic. It's very, very quiet. It's very meditative. It's almost like you're in a song, in a line of sheet music or something is just so transportive.

[Ellen]

That's really beautiful. So she was creating these grids. They were capturing attention. She was finding her footing in the art world. And with this first, this, like, okay, this is going to be it for a while, sort of expression of her creativity. And it was while she was finding her footing that it started to become more and more apparent that she was struggling with schizophrenia. So this was something that she rarely talked about openly. But likely she was struggling with this her entire adult life. It was just something that was really documented for the first time in the early 60s. There are several documented cases of her having pretty acute schizophrenic attacks. But she would hear voices and then she would also go into really intense trances. And there were several experiences where she forgot who she was or where she was. There's a story, I think this is one of the first times she was ever actually committed into a hospital for it, that she was found wandering the street having an acute episode. She didn't know where she was, she didn't know who she was. And Robert in Indiana was the person who found her. There is another story that she went on like a solo cruise trip around the world on a steamer. It was supposed to be like a holiday thing. And she got as far as India and fell into a really deep trance. And they, her friends had to come and get her and bring her back to the States. During this time she was hospitalized multiple times. And so Bellevue, which is a hospital in New York that became really known for administering electroshock therapy around this time. Like she went through several rounds of electroshock therapy as well, which is pretty controversial. Yeah, but the thing is that she never wanted her art connected to any of these struggles. She was very private, like you said, Amber. She didn't want people to know much about her life and definitely not have people associate her paintings with that. She was super clear the entire time that the paintings were never about her personal life or her personal emotions. While she was working and like commenting on her work, she said that her work is about emotion, but it's like abstract emotion. Right. It's not her personal emotion. These spaces that she created, she was focusing instead on creating these moments of calm. They're almost like these little like pockets of peace for people to escape into, which tracks because she was super into like Zen Buddhism, which is also something that was coming up in New York in that time. So it's like all these really interesting cultural moments. And clearly she had her own process. There's all these anecdotes that she would have visions of her paintings coming to her fully formed and small postage stamp sized paintings. And she felt that it was her duty to then perfectly bring them up to scale, this like 6 foot by 6 foot scale. So it really to me feels like it was definitely less of a like inner exploration experience while creating art, but more of like a channeling, which is kind of how she saw it. So Whether that has to do with a function of her mental health, that she was seeing these small squares and she felt such a, like, rabid duty to make them full size, like, down to, like, mathematics sketching. Like, she was wild about making sure that it was like, the truest representation of them. Large scale. It did definitely factor into her art. These. And there's an art critic who talked a little bit about the function of her mental health and how she painted too, that she says that she thinks that the work she did reflected a way to establish the sense of order in her visual world and emotional world where she wasn't getting it elsewhere.

[Amber A.C.]

Yeah. I wonder if a lot of these schizophrenic episodes and the probably trauma associated with electroshock therapy and being in these, like, mental hospitals and all of that. I wonder if a lot of that pushed her to take a sabbatical. Because it was in 1967, after she was in New York for a decade, that she just vanished from the art scene. She packed up her studio, gave away her materials, and hit the road in a pickup truck. She traveled across Canada and the US For a year and a half per before finally settling in New Mexico. This wasn't like moving to the suburbs. She went totally off the grid. No electricity, no phone, no neighbors. Just her and the desert.

[Michelle]

Yeah. I want to note because there's so many factors, and I love how when Ellen and I were discussing Agnes ad nauseam the other day, and there's a lot of counter. Differing stories as I love Ellen, Ellen position. Never trust the artists. But during that time before she left, I want to note that Ed Renhardt did die suddenly. And I don't. I didn't research how he died, but I know it was a sudden death and they were really close. And she left really shortly after that. And just that other scene was coming up and she was becoming really popular. And I think that she had this idea that pride was sinful. She was really against the ego. She was really against commercialism in her work. And she was getting a lot of attention. Also battling mental illness. And I don't know if she had. With the schizophrenia with all of these therapies trying to help her. I don't think she could stay true to herself in that environment with all that notoriety. She said that she was done painting, that all the paintings came out of her at that point and it was time for her to leave. And as we know, like, she still painted later on in her life, but this was one of her longest episodes of falling off the Grid. And I think it was seven years. Yeah. So like you said, she. In 1967, she took the Airstream, she traveled along, she went to her old stomping grounds, she went to where she was born, she did a lot of hiking. And then she found and built that house from scratch in the beginning, really living that monastic life, which is just complete solitary lifestyle. And I do think that in a way helped her mental health to turn out that noise of New York City. And again, the famous quote of her I paint with my back against the world. She quite literally did that. And just a testament to staying true to her values too. As culture was changing around her, she knew that she couldn't separate those and she needed to get back to the roots where she found comfort in nature and really living a simple life. She paint and meditated, took long walks. Her art again was that meditative practice. She also found peace in that isolation. So she did finally land in Cuba, New Mexico, right outside of Taos. But it's crazy. She was at the top of her game and she just left so wild to think about and left into kind.

[Ellen]

Of like a dream life. But yeah, to piggyback of what you said, Michelle, so she did finally start to paint again after the sabbatical in the 70s. But she like made sure she was ready first. And that's one of my favorite things about Agnes is she's never stuck to anybody else's timeline. Like, she wanted to come back to doing things on her own terms. When she decided she wanted to start painting again, she started by building a 35 foot square log cabin style studio so that she could paint again. She was. It wasn't just, I think I'm going to do it. She was like, first I'm going to build this studio. When she did start to paint again, her style was definitely a little bit softer. So instead of the grids, she started to experiment working with these like horizontal or vertical bands of color. She wasn't working in those layers of gray like she was in New York anymore. She shifted to these more like pastel shades. So it was like ochres and pale pinks and blues. And throughout all this, though, I will say she maintained that 6 foot by 6 foot square. But the colors that she was painting with were like such a huge departure. There was one art critic that called them like sippy cup colors because they are so light and childlike. They feel super atmospheric. They're just like washes of really diluted color. And a lot of the paintings have these more like whimsical titles. So they're like Lovely Life and Little Children of Loving Life. But theme wise. Like, obviously these paintings and her whole life were not light hearted, but her whole thing was about trying to capture innocence and joy and beauty in this like, universal experience. So I think it's really beautiful that the titles of those paintings do reflect that, especially in an era of like Untitled Number One.

[Amber A.C.]

I think I heard just the other day too that she didn't actually name her paintings. They were named by a friend at one point and someone else at another, I think, or one of her partners that she had dated. So like she just let other people name them, which is really interesting because she didn't feel attached enough to name it herself. And maybe that was just the perspective of an outsider naming it. But yeah, I thought that was interesting that there were all these like Untitled and all of these number one, number two stuff. And I think someone really felt like her paintings needed names for some reason.

[Ellen]

Yeah, 100%. And I think that also speaks to the idea that she wanted these to be about universal emotion. And she probably thought it would have felt too egotistical for her to like, it was channeled through her in a way. True. So I do get that and I think that's beautiful. But yeah, these paintings were really about creating this space for joy and calm amidst her more chaotic life, just like her move to New Mexico in general. And a lot of her work was again about creating an environment that she could have control over. And Amber, you touched on this earlier about like the lines and how she would use tape and stuff. The level of control that are in these paintings. I just think it's really interesting that the reason she chose 6ft by 6ft is because 72, the number of inches in 6ft is divisible by almost every digit. So then she was able to have this endless variety of rhythm, like regular mathematic rhythm that she could use. So she had that level of control. So nothing was random. And I do think that's interesting too note as well in this whole level of control, because she did have a really large level of control here. Her process in painting was pretty intense. If she made a mistake or a drip went wrong, she would destroy the whole canvas and start over. There's like multiple stories of her taking box cutters to paintings or throwing them off the mesa. And again, this might be because she felt such an immense responsibility that she was channeling like universal emotion, not just her experience in something that she would routinely destroy her art. This was something she did in the beginning and throughout. And yeah, I love the idea that these paintings are something. They're like a story that she felt like she needed to recount an exact detail. And if she got one detail wrong, she was like, nope. And would start over.

[Amber A.C.]

Yeah. So, like you guys are mentioning, she returned to painting on her own terms while she was in New Mexico. And then it was in 1974 that she contacted Arn Glimcher, the founder of Pace Gallery in New York, and invited him to New Mexico to see her latest work. And so not by bringing it to him in New York, but by having him come out and view it in person. And when that gallery owner arrived, it wasn't to a typical gallery or even a conventional studio. She lived very simply and practically in the New Mexico desert. And to help him find her, she mailed him a hand drawn map of the route to her home and added a note that read, bring ice. Thanks, Agnes. And so this note obviously captures her straightforward, unpretentious personality. She wasn't interested in formalities or grand displays. She just sounds like such a artist, like, living in solitude kind of an artist. And once he arrived, Agnes served him a modest meal of mutton chops and apple pie before finally revealing her new paintings. These works had evolved from her earlier grids into softer horizontal and vertical bands of pastel colors, as we were saying. But by this point, she developed a new style that felt calm, almost spiritual, reflecting her years of solitude in New Mexico. And he loved the paintings that they became. The beginning of her long standing relationship with Pace Gallery, which exhibited her work for the rest of her life. This really shows how eschewing New York's formal art scene and instead inviting it into her quiet world in the desert.

[Michelle]

I love that. I love that you touched on Arnie. And I actually have this book right here, which he got permission to write her memoir. Her autobiography. But she was so particular. She was like, you better not write it until I'm dead, because if you do something I don't like, we're not friends anymore. So in this book, it's really great. It has a lot of her personal writings because he would take notes, like when he was around her and she's complicated woman, and having him ushered in is a testament that she knew she needed to get this work out into the world and she wanted people to see it. Also, I want to note during this time she was writing pretty prolifically. And one of these essays was one called what is Real. And she wrote about beauty as an awareness of the mind. She felt that what we see is not beautiful in and of itself, but rather a catalyst to the awareness of the beauty that already exists within what she calls the inner mind. And one time, Arnie brought his granddaughter Isabel, and I love this story. And he brought her to the studio in the 1990s. And Agnes took a rose from a vase and holding it out towards Isabel, and she asked if the rose was beautiful, and Isabel said yes. And Agnes put the rose behind her back and asked if the rose was still beautiful. And Isabelle said yes. And this illustrated that concept that beauty was in the mind and not in the object. And a lot of that was represented in her writings and her paintings. And she was trying to get that idea across. And then she still continued that isolated life. She did eventually have a generator, but she still would like, have well water and put water in her bathtub at 10am and then hope by 4pm it would heat up from the sun. And then, you know, during those harsh winter months, she would just eat tomatoes that she had pickled and walnuts and like a hunk of cheese. And she would eat the same things while she was painting, not as to distract herself, because she was just such a perfectionist. And she wanted to get these paintings out into the world when she got these downloads or these inspirations and she would stop at nothing to produce them. It's just wild to think how she just devoted herself to her art practice. There was really no separation and, like.

[Ellen]

She had this life of solitude. And I think that some people would see it as her having this, like, bohemian, like, free wheel in life where, like, I'll wake up but the sun type moment. But to Michelle's point, like, this lifestyle came with very intense discipline and rules. She followed these, like, super specific routines, essentially, like listening to the voices that she said came to her and guided her actions. Again, whether this was a function of schizophrenia or just the fact that she's a cuspy Pisces Aries and just can make shit happen.

[Amber A.C.]

Who knows? Wait, you know her signs?

[Ellen]

Oh, yes. Yeah, I do. I looked it up. She's a very cuss Pisces Aries, which is like all the determination in the fire with all the inspirations affected by their atmosphere. Yeah, exactly. I honestly think it makes sense if we're gonna lean into astrology. But either way, she was extremely disciplined and regimented. So again, one of the things that these voices really underscored for her was that she should avoid anything that felt like an indulgence because it would distract her from making her art. So that's like music, tv, pets, nothing like that. And to Michelle's point, the reason she would repeat these meals that were so spartan, like tomatoes, walnuts and hard cheese, like for an entire winter sounds wild. But she really believed that living within these restrictions kept her mind clear. So, right. This was this idea that she was like a channel and it was keeping it really clear. There's this quote that she said to a friend that illustrates how seriously she took this. And in her words, she said, when you give up on the idea of right and wrong, you don't get anything. What you get rid of is everything. Freedom from ideas and responsibilities. Which I read like 19 times. Cause I was like, this is so stringent. But her art is also prolific, so it clearly served her. But again, these rules, she didn't see them as harsh. She saw them as necessary. She saw them as really necessary in staying present and staying focused and staying open to this creative inspiration. And again, it's really intense that this discipline was part of what made her art so unique and made her such a prolific creator. And it really does feel like she was just creating structure so that she could then tap in to inspiration. And she was really lit up by it. Like, she got excited when things would break and she'd be like, I guess it has to be easier.

[Amber A.C.]

Yeah, that's so true. That's. It's so funny that like rigidity sometimes I, at least in the design world, I think we thrive off of rigidity because we need a creative brief. We need rules and guides to stay within, to come up with solutions for those problems. And so it's. It is interesting to think of an artist defining their own rules too, and rules that you're not necessarily seeing on their, in their artwork, but rules that are part of the process. And so she lived to be 92. She painted all the way up to the end of her life. She moved to a retirement community in taos in the 90s. And I thought this was funny, but she drive to her studio every day in a white BMW, which is quite a contrast to her off grid, no frills lifestyle. And she started incorporating some geometric shapes back into her work towards the end of her career, like triangles and squares.

[Michelle]

And despite her reclusiveness, Agnes work had a huge impact. She inspired artists like Eva Hess and even musicians and writers. And I just want to know. She would have hated the word influence just because she's especially in the context of ego and has and like the individual impact of her work, she would hate that her philosophy centered around concepts of humility, purity and an unmeditated connection with life and inspiration. Martin believed that true creativity was about channeling universal truth, like Ellen said in beauty, rather than expressing personal identity or leaving a mark. And her view, art was about influencing others. But wasn't about influencing others, but about opening oneself up to the presence of beauty and truth in the simplest, most direct way. She thought that external influences, whether from artists, trends or societal experiences, could interfere with the authentic expression or an individual's own vision. Her paintings still though, are in major museums around the world, including the MoMA, the Whitney, the Tate, the Guggenheim. Plus her work sells for millions today, which she would also hate. She even told Arnie she was like when he was of course, selling her art because she just really wanted people to see it and have an experience with it. She's like, you cannot sell it, but if they buy it, it's okay. Just like Agnes.

[Ellen]

So specific.

[Michelle]

Yeah, but she never cared about fame or money. It really wasn't her M.O. obviously, we can tell by just how frugally she lived. It wasn't about that. But what mattered to Agnes was the people could feel something real when they looked at her paintings. That they could take a moment of peace and quiet out of their busy lives.

[Ellen]

She never wanted the art to be about her. It was all a universal experience. And she didn't really gain the same amount of fame or notoriety as like the male counterparts in the time. It was at that point a largely male dominated field anyways. But also the fact that she really de centered herself and didn't play into the machine may have had something to do with that too, in retrospect. And even a lot of people were appreciating it while she was still alive. But there's just something incredibly freeing about her work. She created these really wonderful spaces where you can just exist without having to understand or interpret again, that universal experience. She had a quote that I'm going to say right now because I think it's really beautiful. That kind of sums everything up. She said nature is like parting a curtain. You go into it. I want to draw a certain response like this, that quality of response from people when they leave themselves behind. Often experienced in nature an experience of simple joy. My paintings are about merging and about formlessness. A world without objects, without interruption, which is so unbelievably beautiful. And yeah, in a world that was just totally full of noise. Her work is this breath of fresh air and it's a reminder that you can find beauty and peace and simplicity.

[Amber A.C.]

Yeah, I Love that. It's like she's so good with her words that I feel like those should be on display next to her paintings at galleries. I wonder if they are this book.

[Michelle]

He has out them all. Yeah. That's her original writings too. So, like, with her handwriting and everything are inside the book, and they're fabulous.

[Ellen]

Her penmanship is, like, out of this world.

[Amber A.C.]

Good. Of course.

[Michelle]

We're incredible.

[Ellen]

Yeah. Can you imagine that? She would have bad handwriting. That would be unheard of.

[Amber A.C.]

Wow. It's so beautiful to really reflect on her whole life and to really gain inspiration from it. And what a force she was, too. And all of the challenges that she faced. I do not envy any of that. That sounds horrible and miserable. And yet the work that she created, that really is like the output of her life. And. Yeah. I'm curious to know what inspires you the most now, reflecting back on her life.

[Ellen]

She's so incredible. But I think what inspires me the most is, like, she was just seeking to create something that brought this feeling of calm and just being. It's not even introspection. It's just like presence into the world just by people experiencing her work. And that's really hugely resonant to me in my own art making. Again, I'm not comparing myself to Agnes Martin at all, but that's something that's really important to me. And anything I create, too, is that it could spark something that could be universally good or joyful or just be a break from everyday chaos. And her work is, again, these beautiful little pockets of serenity. And then I think another thing that I really love is she was never in a hurry. Like, she really did things at her own pace. To Michelle's point, she did things with her back to the world. And that's really inspiring to me now in 2024, that there's such a sense of urgency. There's all so much information and inspiration that it's really beautiful to sit back and think, okay, what if there was no timeline here? And what if I just created from self?

[Michelle]

I love that.

[Amber A.C.]

Yeah. And, Michelle, you're in the desert, right?

[Michelle]

I am.

[Amber A.C.]

Does it inspire you?

[Michelle]

Yes and no. I mean, nature in itself inspires me tremendously, and I do appreciate her totality and immersiveness in the feeling of that and this idea of being like a speck of dust and finding beauty and a speck of dust. But what I love most about Agnes and I think, like, this relates to just the world that we live in, of ego and notoriety and fame and fortune. And all of that. Sometimes that can cloud, like, the purest intent of why we do what we do, which is, like, connection with self, connection with other people and our dependency of, like, Ellen and I coming together and how we come together with clients and. And a lot of the times when we work with clients, too, we're living in this world of gray with them, and there's no. I don't know, there's no. We are also conduits to their vision, and we have to remain really pure and open and come from a sense of honesty as well. And we had to put a lot of stuff aside, a lot of that noise, to connect with somebody in that way. So I really appreciate her idea of just bashing the ego and just, I don't know, valuing beauty as an inspiration that just comes deeply from within versus outside. That makes any sense?

[Amber A.C.]

Yeah, yeah, It's. There's so many layers to her story, and I think there's so many different inspirations you can draw from her life, too. And I loved hearing both of your perspectives, and I loved having both of you on the podcast today, too. I think it's been so fun to hear your stories that I didn't fully know all of those details and to really dive into Agnes because you were the ones who brought her up or chose to talk about her today. And I've never. I didn't really know her before, and so it's been fun to really dive into her story myself, having never really heard of her before. So. Thank you for joining us.

[Ellen]

Thank you for having us.

[Michelle]

This is gonna be, like, your longest episode. I don't know how you're gonna come.

[Amber A.C.]

Or people will just have to sit through it, but.

[Ellen]

Hey, Amber, before you go, I'd like to ask you the same question.

[Michelle]

So now that we talked about it.

[Ellen]

What inspires you most about her journey and work?

[Amber A.C.]

I think it's really interesting that at the end of the day, it comes down to process for her and that it's not necessarily what the painting is. It's what went into the painting that is really. I don't know. But the thing is, I don't know if she intended it to be that way because Was she very vocal about her process? I'm not really sure. Maybe some of this was eventually found out after the fact in her writings and all of that. But it is really interesting that the process of needing to live in solitude and the rules that she lived by and that her work is all about repetition and about that meditative process of creating and designing and so it's a really interesting take on creativity, too. That creativity doesn't have to be about thinking, like something new and, wow, how did they do that? But that it can be a much more quieter process where it is about meditation and it's about really just walking through that and being with that. And I wonder if it's written somewhere how long some of these drawings or paintings took her, because it was quite a process. And, like, you probably wouldn't know that Maybe one took eight hours or something like that, or 20 hours, who knows? But, yeah, it's really interesting to think about what really goes into that process and into creativity.

[Michelle]

And then, I mean, we're all in it for the process. If we didn't value the process, I don't think any of us would be sitting here right now, because that is the bulk of what we do. It's not about the end result. The end result is a happy byproduct of the process.

[Amber A.C.]

And how many paintings or designs have we thrown out or have been on the chopping block that. That never sees the light of day? It's true. Like, what everyone sees, even in our own work is very curated. It's very like the 20% of the 100% that's been created kind of a thing.

[Ellen]

Absolutely 100%. We throw a lot of designs off the mesa.

[Amber A.C.]

Yeah. Some not by choice. It's just not what the client wanted. And you might have loved that. And. And that's what's nice about being a painter, is you get to choose that for yourself.

[Michelle]

Yeah. Yeah, totally.

[Amber A.C.]

Thank you.

[Michelle]

Thank you, Amber. Thank you. Obviously, we could talk about her all night, all day.

[Amber A.C.]

I know.

[Ellen]

Thank you so much for having us.

[Amber A.C.]

Yeah, of course. Here's to Agnes.

[Michelle]

Here's to Agnes. She would hate this.

[Amber A.C.]

Yeah.

[Ellen]

She will haunt us or she's gonna haunt us all.

[Michelle]

So we love you, Agnes.

[Amber A.C.]

Thank you for joining us on this journey into the world of Agnes Martin. Her dedication to solitude and pure meditative art reminds us of the power in simplicity and focus. A huge thank you to my guests, Michelle and Ellen, the co founders of Nature, for bringing their unique perspectives on design and sharing how they've built a studio that values human connection and authenticity as much as craftsmanship. You can learn more about nature and explore their work at By Dash Nature Co and on Instagram ellowearnature. And be sure to check out their new podcast Landline By Nature, available on Spotify, where they dive even deeper into the world of design and process. If you enjoyed this episode, don't forget to leave us a review, and stay tuned for more conversations celebrating the power of design and the stories behind it. As always, let's redesign history by celebrating women.