Miles down a desolate dirt road, Heather Day’s home-slash-studio emerges from the rocky expanse like a Zen mirage. Stylish and unobtrusive, the soft white stucco-modern sits against a postcard Mojave Desert vista. Early evening sun washes the giant granite boulders in a perfect Instagram filter, as the artist rushes out to greet me. Day, who relocated to Joshua Tree from San Francisco in 2020, relishes the solitude and harsh terrain that is now embedded in her artwork. “The more you live out here, the more you become attuned to the subtle shifts in the light,” she says, during our May visit. “You probably can’t look at this landscape without seeing what’s outside my studio in my paintings.” Although Day quickly clarifies: “I’m not interested in creating a cheap, abstract depiction of the landscape that is right outside my studio.” Instead, she describes her practice as conjuring the shifting colors that come with the passage of time. Her goal is to capture the sensation of taking in a sunset or clouds drifting across the sky. “I’m trying to synthesize that movement into one painting, or a series of paintings,” she explains, drawing inspiration from Monet’s Haystacks, which depict light on grain stacks across seasons and weather.
Day, by contrast, constructs large, dazzlingly rich abstractions of pooled acrylic washes that are cut from works made since 2020 and then stitched together, combining “past inventory” with the current pieces she continuously paints in her studio. The pandemic pushed Day to her new process of cutting and sewing. In the chaos of the moment, Day turned inward to her practice and began unstretching paintings. “I started building the library of past paintings around that time,” she tells me. “I felt I needed to break the formula I had developed and start fresh. The pandemic gave me the permission to break things apart.”
It’s an ingenious twist on Color Field artists like Helen Frankenthaler, and Sam Gilliam’s iconic drape paintings, where he suspended unstretched fabric from the wall and ceiling. Day meticulously assembles painted fragments on the floor within the rectangular window of a stretcher bar before sewing the panels into a final, lush composition. “I’m able to build a relationship between my past and present self, where I’m constantly pulling back and looking back,” she says of her signature technique. “I view the canvas as this stage where performance happens, and I’m able to use my body and [my] medium in a certain way—flick it or pour it or have it splash onto the canvas.” For example, she points to a new work comprising five different canvases, painted at different periods over the last four years, including a red-silver panel from a previous gallery show. “There’s a destructiveness to rearranging everything,” says Day, who relates her dyslexia to this way of thinking in puzzle pieces.
When we meet, she’s gearing up for a summer solo show, her debut at San Francisco’s Berggruen Gallery, Heather Day: Cut, Split, Horizon which opens August 1, on view through September 19. “I’ve noticed the female form starting to creep into my work,” she says of the show’s 14 new paintings. “There are a lot of forms in the natural world that rhyme with the human body.”
Demand for the 35-year-old’s work has surged since the pandemic and the building of her minimalist oasis, which she shares with her husband and small Terrier mix, Juno. The past year has been especially packed, from selling out an Armory Art Fair booth in the first few hours of the VIP opening last fall, to two major gallery exhibitions in Berlin and Paris this spring (which also sold out). But there is nothing frenetic about her. Day possesses a preternatural calm. In a frantic art world, Joshua Tree allows Day to take a wider perspective. On a practical level, her studio is six feet below the couple’s living room, affording a bird’s-eye view of works-in-progress. Most mornings, she arrives in her atelier by 8 (if she wasn’t working until 3 AM), where massive sliding glass doors survey a lunar-esque panorama of a mountain and boulders that geologists date to a million years ago. “Coming from San Francisco to the desert, I’m dealing with the humidity levels in the studio,” she says. “So, I’m not only looking out at the environment and that’s soaking into the paintings, but also how fast the water or the medium is evaporating, and how fast my paint dries.”
Born in Hawaii, Day describes her childhood as “a bit nomadic.” Her mother was a Marine, and Day lived in Japan and Washington D.C., before settling with her grandparents for the end of high school in Chicago. “The thing that really saved me was, I went to an arts high school. I was able to find my people and my community,” she says, drawing emotional parallels to her painting method. “I was about 14 or 15, and my family kind of fell apart. I actually ended up living on my own for a little while. It was a significant part of my life because I was able to become resilient. Art was a place where I could create my own rules.” Her discovery of sewing came as a BFA painting student at the Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore, where she worked for a local furniture company. Day started collecting their cast-off fabric samples, sewing and painting on them at home. “After undergrad, I left that and just went straight to canvases,” she recalls.
Today, she’s also known for stunningly saturated and seemingly incompatible color choices that define her visual language, as much as her deconstructed canvases. “It’s like a cast of characters,” she explains. “The main character could be a bright fuchsia with supporting actors of lavender and cobalt blue. But with that, there’s also an antagonist, like cadmium red.” Recently, she’s started bringing the desert grit into her paintings—literally. “I go on these walks, and I was thinking about this crunch beneath my feet,” she recounts. At first, Day started sampling the sand right outside her studio, “grabbing it off the ground and sifting it,” then combining it with pigment. “As far as the longevity of a painting, I wouldn’t recommend that,” Day admits with a laugh. Soon, she started ordering pumice online, introducing the texture to the surface of her paintings, including those in her current San Francisco show. “For me, a huge part of artmaking is constantly figuring out how to keep experimenting in the studio and create chaos, and then try to control it,” she says, as we head upstairs for drinks on her deck in the dry night air. “It’s constantly creating rules and breaking them over and over again.”
