Maddie Dunn
AQ is our series of hardcover catalogs celebrating extraordinary women artists. Available on Amazon. Visit the AQ Catalog Webpage to learn more.
Maddie Dunn, featured in AQ Volume VI, is a California-based artist whose work explores the tension between internal experience and external expectations. By drawing from historical portraiture, her work invites reflection about societal roles, conformity, and anxiety. Influenced by expressive figurative painters like Egon Schiele and Paula Rego for their emotional use of distortion, and baroque classics like Caravaggio and Rembrandt for their dramatic tenebrism and idealism, she blends these two worlds together in her work. Though she has practiced portraiture and drawing from a very young age, she began her extensive study of oil painting during the COVID-19 lockdowns, which has now developed into a dedicated practice and love for the medium. Formerly a psychology major, she has always maintained an interest in human emotion, experience, and cognitive distortion, and these interests are evident in much of her work. Currently pursuing her Master of Fine Arts at California State University, Sacramento, Maddie continues to deepen her engagement with art history, critical theory, and contemporary painting practices.
maddiedunn.com
What inspired you to become an artist, and how did you decide to commit to this path?
I have always felt the need to create, and throughout my life this has taken many different forms, but I started seriously studying self-portraiture and oil painting during the COVID-19 lockdowns. This happened to also coincide with when I entered sobriety after struggling for several years with addiction, and I discovered that dedicating myself to this passion gave me the fulfillment and self-expression in life I was previously missing.
Could you share the story or concept behind your recent work?
I have become really interested in this idea of "self-fashioning" that many of us do — the idea that we carefully construct an image of ourselves to present to others. We might feel the need to act a certain way based on society’s expectations of us, perhaps because of our identity or a given social role we are occupying. This can be a source of discomfort and anxiety for some, and this tension is what I aim to show in my work.
What role does experimentation and exploration play in your artistic practice?
Finding my artistic voice has been a long road of experimentation that has included trying new mediums, techniques, and expressions of several different ideas. Many of these experiments resulted in things I wasn’t happy with at the time, but I have learned from each and every one of them to arrive at the point I am currently at.
What message do you hope your art conveys to the world?
I hope that my art invites reflection on what social roles the viewer may inhabit and what that means to them. Do they feel expected to behave a certain way due to external forces imposed on them? Is this something they are comfortable with or something that they want to push up against?
Share a mantra or favorite quote that keeps you going.
“In the act of painting herself she makes clear that she is someone worth looking at, someone worth acknowledging. Her paintings assume shapes that she does not always predict. Against all odds, she discovers what she is capable of.” — The Mirror and the Palette by Jennifer Higgie
