Madsen had many learning experiences while searching for her artistic path. “When I came into this program, I didn’t have strong drawing skills,” Madsen said. “I ended up just drawing in the first year of the program because I only understood the principles taught in drawing classes. I avoided drawing myself.”
When she began painting, Madsen moved away from photographic references and turned to imagined spaces and people in her mind. “That’s the stylistic language that came out of it,” she said. “It’s my natural way of painting.”
Ultimately, Madsen’s characters moved away from photorealism. Their proportions can be unusual—extremely long fingers have become one of the artist’s trademarks—and they often twist and stretch across the canvas. These choices reflect the themes Madsen deals with in her work. Long fingers can represent idealized femininity. The characters are positioned in a way that tells the story of childhood, growing up, and the memory of the body beyond certain environments. “Obviously they are adult figures in a space usually reserved for children,” she said. “When I think back to that period in my life, I’m suddenly aware of my body in a different way, like how my body exists in space, or how it might exist for other people in some situations.”
She adds, “In a lot of my work, I try to amplify the idea of growth, overflow, stretching, and expansion.”
This is where drawing is a crucial part of Madsen’s process. All of her paintings begin with drawings, which she often repeats until a scene visually reflects the emotion of the experience that inspired the work. “I would re-create it again and again to push how I expand and position the body in the composition,” she says of her paintings.
That’s what’s interesting to me about these pieces – a little more chaos, so you have to sit with the piece more to figure out what’s going on. “
Take “Two Can Play” as an example of how an image can be transformed through repeated drawing. In the final panel, two characters crawl through a pipe, as if they are competing. One character climbs on top of another, pushing the other’s face aside. “I was thinking specifically about the women who exist in and compete with each other for these spaces,” Madsen said. “I’ve been thinking a lot about my own internalized misogyny and the idea of being both a victim and a perpetrator of certain misogynistic thoughts.”
Initially, Madsen considered incorporating three characters into the painting. “I wanted it to feel familiar and somewhat real, but there were spatial anomalies—things that didn’t quite work in the debris—kind of like differences,” she said. “I think when I was painting, three characters felt like too much, and two characters felt fine.”
As Madsen refined her technical process, she also reconsidered what she was painting. “I wanted to do something personal, but I had a lot of false starts,” she said, adding that initially she thought more universal themes would appeal to a wider audience. “What I really needed was a more concrete understanding of my experience in the specifics of the job,” she said.
She incorporates very personal details into her paintings. Madsen’s recurring protagonist suffers from keratosis pilaris, a disease that manifests as small bumps at hair follicles. “I had a bad time as a kid,” Madsen said. “I still have it.”
The clothes worn by the characters in the paintings were often adapted from her own wardrobe and old clothes at home. During the interview, she pointed to a painting in her studio, noting that the figures in it were wearing snowsuits passed down from her family. “That’s where I’ll provide the photo reference,” she said. “One of my sisters was wearing that snowsuit.”
Likewise, in “Watch Your Step,” two feet stand on a rug based on the rug on the floor of Madsen’s basement.
As Madsen prepares for her solo exhibition, her work continues to evolve. On a narrative level, she says, the main characters in her paintings play a more active role in the unfolding story.
On a technical level, Madsen plays with color and light in her work. “I’m really interested in how light and color can help add specificity to time and place,” she said. She mentioned the piece “Playing Games,” in which her character sits on a school desk with her head resting on it. There, she discovered that the contrast between “cold desks” and “warm lights” seeped into the classroom. These details not only add specialness but also detail. They also add more ambiguity, Madsen said. “That’s what interests me about these pieces—a little more chaos, so you have to sit with the piece more to figure out what’s going on.”*
This article was published in Issue 63 of “High Fructose”. Get the full article and print version here.
