Emily Kraus
Photography by Jacob Lillis for Plus Magazine.
Emily Kraus makes paintings that look like an immensely powerful force has recorded its movement onto canvas. On the one hand, these predominantly large-format works resemble the kind of early motion-picture projections in the photographs of Eadweard Muybridge, which tracked movement in successive frames; on the other, they look and feel like gestural abstractions, as paint is splattered, hurled, dripped, and poured. Or, to put it another way, Kraus’ paintings seem borne out of a methodical process of successive logic and, at the very same moment, the spontaneity of an action painter lost in reverie. What is so extraordinary about her practice is that these two forces are not held in opposition to one another, as they often are in a culture that pits the makers of art and the producers of things in two distinct categories, but rather a synthesis that finds poetry in mathematical predictability and order in the artistic dispersal of pigments.
When I visit Kraus’ two studios in nearly adjacent units in an old industrial complex in Bow, a working-class district of east London, I see how she contains two wolves, a little like her paintings themselves. In the first space, the entire far wall is populated by early summer flowers, coffee table books on the Old Masters, and beloved postcards from places she has visited. It’s ordered and bright. In the second space, her laboratory. This is where Kraus has constructed a whole world within a world to make her dynamic paintings. There are more tools on the walls than one might expect in Tim Taylor’s workshop; pigments are neatly arranged in gradated colors; and giant interior scaffolding blocks most of the light.
Kraus’ process is technically fascinating. The scaffolding is really a frame, a kind of skeleton steel cube with steel poles that form its armature. As straight as possible, the canvases are stitched in a loop and affixed as the desired size of the painting. This means that they manage to feel at a human scale, especially in terms of their height, but have expanded out horizontally. This is all pre-planned: Kraus knows exactly what the size of the stretched painting will be before stitching, and she always uses the entire canvas on each painting and so never crops. The bearings are bolted onto the structure, and then she puts four poles through the canvas and mounts them onto the bearings. Kraus mounts three poles in place, and with the fourth, she tensions the canvas into a cube.
If you see Kraus’ work once, you’ll recognize it every time. Characteristic of Kraus’s work is a contrast between the orchestral dun-dun-der of rhythmic consistency on the one hand (in the vertical lines that order and define space) and the chaotic sprawl of artistic intervention on the other (the spaces where the pigment disperses, like red bleeding in an autumn sky). It is this tension between order and chaos, freedom and restraint, which Kraus calls “the human element.” For the artist, the human element refers to the use of tools, which is often said to be intrinsic to the success of the species. “Humans (and chimpanzees, as Jane Goodall proved) can use tools,” Kraus tells me, and “this is theorized to be why our species has risen above other animals in our evolution of civilization.” Not one to shy away from the big questions, Kraus asks why tools exist and why we were able to make them in the first place. “I would say that this is the first sign of creativity: to see a problem and figure out how to solve it in an innovative way.”
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