Area crystal embellished wool dress, crystal earrings
text by Evan Moffitt
photography by Jason Miller
styling by Erik Ziemba
hair by Sergio Estrada
makeup by Sena Murahashi @ MAGroup
photo assistance by Benjamin Jastremski
production design by Evan Jean
New York-based painter Emma Stern’s muses are digital avatars—buxom, sexually liberated, 3D-programmed and rendered machinations; some might also say alter egos. The relationship between artist and alter ego as a muse is what makes Stern’s paintings so fascinating, alluring, and psychologically titillating. Utilizing proprietary character design software to create digital sketches, Stern turns to formal oil-on-canvas painting methods to make her digital fantasies come to life. In a new body of work, Penny & The Dimes: Dimes 4Ever World Tour, which will be exhibited at Almine Rech in London, Stern’s new avatars are members of a fictional all-girl rock band. In an interview with Evan Moffitt, Stern expounds on her unique practice.
EVAN MOFFITT So, @lava_baby: what is “lava”?
EMMA STERN (laughs) Lava is like an amorphous blob of virtual clay. It’s the basic starting point of any 3D program. When I first started messing around with it years and years ago, I was reading one of the last books Carl Jung ever wrote—it was about UFOs. There’s a part in it where he's talking about quicksilver, this medieval, mythical material that can take the shape of anything. I realized that's kind of what I was dealing with in these 3D programs. So, I just started calling it “lava.” When I started doing these figures, I was calling them “lava babies,” and then it became my Instagram handle, and then it took on a life of its own. I've called my social media presence an extended performance piece—which wasn’t really intentional in the beginning, but that's where it is now.
MOFFITT Can you explain how that 3D rendering comes into your painterly process?
STERN Instead of doing a sketch with paper and pencil, I sketch in these programs and develop the compositions. Most of the decisions get made before I ever put brush to canvas. It's very akin to when I was learning how to paint formally, working from a live model: you set up a scene, fix the lighting, you have this person pose for you, and you can kind of move around 'em to understand them volumetrically. It's far preferable to painting from a photograph, which most painters would tell you tends to really flatten everything.
Emma Stern, Margot + Spike (venti), 2023. oil on canvas 72 x 60 inches. courtesy the artist and Half Gallery, photo: Daniel Terna
MOFFITT When did you first start painting? As someone who's super engaged with digital media, what about this very traditional, canonical form interests you?
STERN I've been doing some version of painting my whole life. I was always interested in the figure, and the female form specifically because it allows me a level of self-portraiture. But in general, female bodies are so much more fun. When I was learning to paint in this very formal, traditional way in art school, I felt quite stuck. All of my heroes, like Michelangelo and Caravaggio, were dead white guys, and I'm a female painter in the 21st century. So, it became a question of how I could add to this conversation rather than just carrying on a tradition that really is not super connected to my experience.
When I started working with 3D modeling, I realized I was building my own muses. I've long been interested in this relationship between the artist and the muse. When I was in art school, I was working at Cooper Union as a nude figure model. I was using that almost as research, you know? I enjoyed the experience of being a muse and thinking about what that meant for me on either side of the canvas.
People ask me all the time: “Why paint when it's already an image that exists on a computer?” I really want this work to exist in conversation or at least add continuity to the tradition of painting and portraiture. I like the idea that it's this very traditional way of making work, but a very non-traditional, contemporary subject matter.
MOFFITT You’ve described these avatars as self-portraits. Do they ever begin as your own image? Or do you think of them as more abstract representations—like expressions of yourself that the rest of us can’t see?
STERN Of course, there is some fantasy involved, but then an avatar is an idealized, virtual version of yourself. The cool thing about a virtual self is that it doesn't have to be static. Quicksilver is this constantly changing thing. There's an inherent drag element to it too. I’m using drag interchangeably with role-playing and cosplay because drag makes most people think of gender, but my show last year was all pirates, and that was like my pirate drag, you know?
Now, I’m working on rockstar paintings. It’s my rockstar cosplay, because as performative as I may come across, I actually have stage fright. I'd love to be a rockstar, but I hate to perform in front of a live audience. Making these rockstar avatars for the past five months is a way for me to live out the rockstar fantasy and offload my stage fright onto these proxies. Ultimately, that’s what these avatars are. They're vessels I can offload different parts of my personality onto.
Emma Stern, Ursula (Hindsight), 2023. oil on canvas 72 x 60 inches. courtesy the artist and Half Gallery, photo: Daniel Terna
MOFFITT It reminds me of something that Nash Glynn once told me: “Every painting is a wish.” You've been making digital avatars for computer games since you were a teenager, right?
STERN I'm actually using a character design software that is mostly used by people who make 3D porn. There's an online marketplace with a lot of user-generated assets for that. You can go buy genitalia and different kinds of pubic hair for the characters. Often people call my work pornographic, which is so interesting to me because I don't even really do nudes at all. My characters tend to be at least partially clothed, and there are never any depictions of sex.
MOFFITT In that respect, I see a lot of Lisa Yuskavage in your work. I'm curious if she's been an influence on you.
STERN Oh, yeah. I'm a huge fan. When I was in art school, I was going to all of her lectures. She probably thought I was stalking her. But I think she has a really different relationship with painting than I do. She's much more of a painter’s painter, whereas I spend a lot of time erasing my hands. There's really not a lot of brushwork. I also feel she's really focused on pain as a subject matter in a way that I'm not. The thing I've really taken from her is the psychology of color: the way different colors can elicit different emotions.
MOFFITT Your paintings have a distinct palette. Is that supposed to denote lava? Or, the spectrum that lava can reflect? What’s its mood?
STERN With the pirate paintings, I called the palette “tequila sunrise.” It was all very sunset, tropical. For this show, there are a lot of paintings that have stage lighting, so it's very cool, indoor, and artificial. I wanted it to look as fake as possible. Although, my palette is always kind of unnatural. These are not colors you see together in nature generally. That's something I started doing, however subconsciously, to emphasize that these aren't humans; this isn't real life. These are cyberspaces, not landscapes. Lava itself, or virtual clay, is actually a grey, plasticky material. I build and design the characters and then I import them into a program. It's an incredibly powerful piece of software.
MOFFITT Yuskavage was criticized in the ‘90s for painting hyper-sexualized women, as if a female artist couldn't determine the contours of her own desire. Given that people have made these comments about your work, do you think this attitude is still a problem? Historically, it’s come both from men and anti-porn, second-wave feminists.
STERN I got a lot of this criticism early on, and it seems to have really gone away. But I did notice it was almost always coming from straight men. They assigned a lot of irony to my painting. My definition of irony is a lack of authenticity and these are very authentic coming from me. Perhaps there's some humor, but I almost feel that for someone to call something ironically misogynistic, they’re just giving themselves permission to enjoy something. It's such a cop-out. People are scared to like things that appeal to base instinct, which again, is where porn comes in. But if you enjoy something, how can that be ironic? Enjoyment must be authentic on some level. I also don't see anything inherently problematic with hotness. It’s actually the most misogynistic thing to say that sexy women are offensive. To whom? I'm not offended.
Diesel sheepskin leather shirt, skirt and pant, leather boots; Jennifer Fisher plated brass earrings
MOFFITT What about your social media persona? You called it a performance. Do you consider that authentic or ironic?
STERN It's a character. I don't think I did it intentionally. My virtual self has become so much bigger than my actual self, in a way. Most people who know me and know my work are experiencing it through the filter of my social media persona. I think that persona functions the same way as the rockstar cosplay. “Lava Baby” was not supposed to be an alter ego. It was just supposed to be an Instagram handle. But then, everyone's social media presence is an alter ego. Even the most authentic feeds are hyper-curated. I'm very sassy and cheeky online, but I actually think I'm a pretty serious person (laughs). Sometimes, when people meet me in real life, they tell me I'm so much nicer than they thought I would be (laughs). I’m talking with my therapist, and she's like, this is a defense thing. You're offloading social anxiety onto this very confident, sexually conscious, strong-minded character, which contains a lot of me but is not me.
MOFFITT I think you're right to note that we all do it in some way or another. But then, aren’t the real and the virtual inseparable now? It’s like the old joke: a fish swims up to another fish and says, “Isn't the water nice?” And the other fish says, “What the hell is water?” Even the way that we process analog images, like paintings, has been conditioned by our engagement online.
STERN We all are internet artists. Everything is mediated by a screen. Anyone who makes art and posts it online, most people who see their work will only ever see it at the scale of a phone screen. You can choose to take that into account or not. I think about how my work is going to look on a phone. How elitist would it be for me to only think about how it's going to look hanging on the wall of a gallery somewhere in Europe or in someone's home? I feel guilty sometimes because I think like, my gosh, I'm in the business of luxury retail. That's what the art market is at the end of the day. And the thing that rescues me from that dark place is the realization that so many people are seeing this and connecting to it online. Social media is a way for people who will never be able to afford a piece of art in their life to experience and enjoy it.
MOFFITT You're bringing internet subcultures to a different context where they might not usually be taken so seriously.
STERN Right. Something that is really exciting to me is bringing what would be considered lowbrow, like fan fiction, and digital art, and all these weird niche subcultures that exist in the underbelly of the internet, and turning them into something that's considered capital “A” Art. You hang it on the wall of a gallery and someone writes a press release about it. Because now, there’s discourse, right? But that’s important because this is the visual culture of the masses. I love Russian minimalism, but it is not post-internet. You can't post a painting of a black canvas. It doesn't translate to Instagram. Color field painting does not work on the internet, either. Joseph Albers doesn't work on the internet. If you're making stuff that has to be seen in person today, I think it's actually quite elitist. So, recontextualizing what's considered lowbrow subject matter is super interesting to me. A decade ago, no one expected that suddenly, they’d see street artists in a gallery, and then become the highest-selling artists in the world—that graffiti works were going to be auctioned for millions of dollars. There was an opportunity to have some discourse.
MOFFITT You're not talking about elevating a low cultural form so much as you're talking about getting the art world's attention economy down to the level where everybody else’s has been.
STERN Yeah. I like to think of elevating it a little bit, but you're right. For a while, I was concerned, because a lot of the people who collected my work were men. And I think there's been a real switch lately. A lot of women are collecting my work now, which makes me super happy. I mean, I love that people are buying my work because they want a big-titty centaur girl in their home. But that's also a surface read. If you can get a little deeper than that and start thinking about the avatar aspect, the fantasy of the virtual self, you might want to spend more time with the work.
Emma Stern, Catherine (window licker), 2023. oil on canvas 72 x 60 inches. courtesy the artist and Half Gallery, photo: Daniel Terna