Video · Audio · Interviews · Essays

May 3, 2025 The Dreaming Machine n 16

What drives you to keep returning to the canvas each day?

When I’m painting, I like to think I’m trying to solve a problem and want to see something I haven’t seen before. It’s a kind of dance with my imagination, and I have to go along for the ride and see what emerges spontaneously without too much thinking or getting in the way of where my imagination is going. So, how do you create a different perspective on something you already know and show it in a new light? That search is always my starting point… Read More

Plato’s Academy

How would you introduce yourself and the work that you do to our readers? 

I’m an artist, writer, podcast host, and the founder of The Creative Process and One Planet Podcast. The Creative Process is a podcast, international educational initiative, and traveling exhibition. One Planet Podcast focuses on the environment and the kind of world we’re leaving for future generations. What’s important for me is to create experiences that ignite imaginative inquiry and help the next generation to find their vision. As an artist, I never made a decision based on making money. I did what made me happy. The arts and humanities have always been my passion and nourished me throughout my whole life. They are the glue that holds society together…Read More

Mia Funk, l’esprit et la vision

By Stéphane Laurent, Maître de conférences History of Art
Research Director, Université Panthéon-Sorbonne

Translated from French

The series of interviews with writers is the unprecedented part of this exhibition. Painted compositions and portraits further articulated by the conversations Mia Funk had with the writers. Their words interact with the scenes and atmosphere of their novels which have inspired the portraits. She writes and publishes texts, which implies a deep engagement with this "literary space" dear to Georges Blanchot. We understand why Mia Funk chose to call this new theme "The Creative Process." The symbiosis between reading and encounter, not as a journalistic one, that of an interview that would be just illustrated with images, but with the aim of a painter, that of allowing us to see the writing and the writer together.

It is for the profound originality of this approach that the Panthéon-Sorbonne University is pleased to showcase the inaugural exhibition. For once the collection of interviews and portraits of writers has been completed, a second exhibition will bring them together, before circulating in several major foreign universities, in Europe and in the United States. Our institution in the Latin Quarter has made a judicious choice: to present this award-winning artist who has been several times awarded by prestigious art salons, to whom several works have already been dedicated, well represented by galleries in the capital and regularly residing in France, whose museum collections and landscapes inspire many of her paintings. Read More


Mia Funk’s Creative Process

Interviewed by Khanh Dinh, University of Washington

KHANH DINH

What message would you like The Creative Process to convey to its collaborating artists, creative thinkers and viewers?

MIA FUNK

What is very important to me is to create work that is meaningful, not only a beautiful painting that’s aesthetically pleasing or a story about limited personal experiences, but to reach beyond my particular concerns to speak to others and their concerns and interests, to do something that inspires the next generation and which is larger than myself.

It’s very obvious that we’re living in critical times with the environment, with social unrest, and that creativity is crucial. To build a better future starts with imagining… Read More


What makes a good portrait?

Mia Funk in conversation with novelist Harriet Alida Lye

Mia Funk is known for her large-scale figurative works and intimate portraits of well-known figures, friends, and family. Her explorations and experimentations using oil paint diluted to produce images with the transience almost of watercolours, range from traditional to contemporary. I got to know Mia through my literary and arts journal, Her Royal Majesty. The following text is pieced together from a series of discussions we had in Paris during the summer of 2011.

Harriet Alida Lye: Though portraiture has existed essentially for as long as art has - in the Fertile Crescent, Egypt primarily, relics of portraits of gods and rulers proliferate - it was traditionally only used to memorialize the rich and powerful. Likeness mattered little. Now, portraiture is not only a genre, but an obligatory exercise for anyone who is training to become an artist. You focus almost exclusively on portraits and figurative work. Why?

Mia Funk: It's always seemed the most interesting subject. It's who we are. Portraits contain psychology, form, colour – it's everything that we're about and that interests us. I painted seascapes in the past and continue to paint water, but it's the human face, ultimately, that's the most challenging not only for painters, but for novelists, filmmakers. You don't find many books or films about inanimate objects or landscape, there always has to be some human connection. A portrait should feel present, alive. Read More


Inside the Artist's Studio

Essay by Prof. Patrick E. Healy, TU Delft

Funk has created from the ground up a direct means of story telling - on the other side of this immediacy is an intricate even witty matrix of menace - where what initially might seem a homage to great artistic personalities - Bacon,and Freud - contains elements of Grand Guignol, morbid sensitivity, demonic decay and atmospheres of surreal mutation which all underscore the layered reference and pointed compositions by which she communicates as much horror as delight.

In one sense the picture plane has become the 4th wall of a traditional space; the black box of this space which we look into from our illuminated view-point also acts as a magnet drawing us into places which have often been only available to the artist and their secrets - secrets of process and inertia - but predominantly in this narrative of Funk… Read More

Mia Funk: Meta Art

By Susie Kahlich, January 10, 2012. Published in VINGT Paris

Talking to the artist Mia Funk is a slightly unsettling experience, like being surprised by fizz in a drink you thought was flat.  It’s a bit of a shock at first, but then you realize it’s a pleasant shock and yes, you will have another glass of that, please.

And that’s how it is with Ms. Funk. Very direct and extremely articulate, she throws you right off balance the second she starts speaking, but leaves you wanting more.  An Irish-German Chinese-American, she physically resembles the Chinese side of her family but, although born and raised in Seattle, her 10 years in Ireland and over a decade in France has inflected her American vocabulary with a hybrid accent that comes across as vaguely German.

And for all her intensity and intelligent observations about art, history, film, pop culture and literature, there exists an underlying social satire that is dark and deliciously addictive yet playful, like a soda designed by Edward Gorey: exotic and mysterious, probably poisonous, but delightful nonetheless.  In other words, an unexpected fizzy drink…. Read More


Mia Funk: The Creative Process

November 11, 2021 by Kasey Pierce - Plato’s Academy

How would you introduce yourself and the work that you do to our readers? 

I’m an artist, writer, podcast host, and the founder of The Creative Process and One Planet Podcast. The Creative Process is a podcast, international educational initiative, and traveling exhibition. One Planet Podcast focuses on the environment and the kind of world we’re leaving for future generations. What’s important for me is to create experiences that ignite imaginative inquiry and help the next generation to find their vision. As an artist, I never made a decision based on making money. I did what made me happy. The arts and humanities have always been my passion and nourished me throughout my whole life. They are the glue that holds society together…Read More

How did you become a creative educator and come to launch The Creative Process?

After years of helping to launch cultural initiatives, founding magazines, and making arts documentaries alongside my painting and storytelling, I decided to found The Creative Process in 2016. It was launched at the Sorbonne, Panthéon-1 in Paris. While the Panthéon is a memorial to national heroes, The Creative Process celebrates living artists and creative thinkers from around the world who have made important contributions to society. It is designed to be a record of our time and through the collaboration of students and faculty, and the insights shared, we aim to inspire this and future generations on their creative journeys.

The Creative Process was born out of a desire to celebrate progressive intellectual and artistic practices that inspire human resilience and unlock potential in young people, encouraging their empathic imagination and an open mindset. We have promoted the humanities through art, literature, poetry, music, dance, film, podcasts, exhibitions, and conversations with well-known artists, writers, and creative thinkers. Through storytelling, we’ve celebrated culture, history, civic engagement, and shown the important legacy of the arts and humanities, how they provide spiritual and intellectual nourishment and enrich our lives. At a time when universities are increasingly prioritizing STEM, we say that both the humanities and sciences are essential elements of a well-rounded education and promote happier, more engaged global citizens.

What’s the most important concept or idea that you teach people?

We need to live a life larger than ourselves. Nurture your mind with nature and good company.

What do you think is the most important piece of practical advice that we can derive from your work?

It is important to remain curious. Learning is a lifelong process and everyone has the capacity for creativity.

Do you have a favorite quote that you use?

“Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited, whereas imagination embraces the entire world, stimulating progress, giving birth to evolution,” that people attribute to Albert Einstein. That’s really to say that knowledge is important, but what is of greater importance is what you do with that knowledge for that is really what you have contributed to society and our understanding of the world.

Working on this project, I am often reminded of what Antoine de Saint-Exupéry wrote:
When you want to build a ship, do not begin by gathering wood, cutting boards, and distributing work, but rather awaken within men the desire to long for the vast and endless sea.
And these really touch on the three pillars of our project, imagination, knowledge, and respect for the beauty and wonder of the natural world.

What advice would you give someone who wanted to learn more about what you do?

To learn more about our projects, visit www.creativeprocess.info, oneplanetpodcast.org, listen to The Creative Process and One Planet Podcast on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. There are many ways you can get involved in podcasts, exhibitions, or other initiatives. We’ve even had projects right here in Athens and conducted interviews with many museum directors, archeologists, artists, philosophers, and others.

Suppose you were able to give a talk or workshop at the original location of Plato’s Academy in Athens. How would you feel about that and what topics would you cover? 

Giving a talk or workshop at the location of Plato’s Academy in Athens would be a dream for me. I am in awe of Plato’s contribution to culture and learning, as well as Greece’s enormous cultural legacy, which I only grew to admire more through conversations with many artists and intellectuals in Athens. For my workshop or talk, I would like to draw on my experience as a creative educator, artist, and podcast host to discuss the importance of creativity and ways for unlocking our artistic voices.

Citing the many conversations with immensely talented and accomplished artists I’ve been honored to have, I would conduct open conversations that allow participants to understand that they are part of the process in order to help them realize their creative capacity. In honor of the important setting and the many Greek contributors to The Creative Process, from the directors of the Acropolis Museum, National Museum of Contemporary Art (EMST), Benaki Museums, Onassis Cultural Centre, founding director of Stavros Niarchos Foundation Cultural Centre, and other museums, to the choreographer for the Olympic Games, writers, musicians, philosophers, and many others have shared so much about their creative process and the importance of knowing history with us. My workshop would begin and end with Plato, whose teachings are the foundation of our Western culture. We may never fully know the extent of Plato’s influence on culture, but it is interesting to explore his impact on contemporary philosophers and the pursuit of this knowledge is perhaps the most important part of the journey.


Drowning in data and starved of knowledge

Mia Funk in conversation with Virginia Moscetti about painting and the process of creativity

May 3, 2025

The Dreaming Machine n 16

Cover image: Mia Funk at work on Portrait of Marie Darrieussecq. Bonus video with the artist talking about her creative process at the end of article.

What drives you to keep returning to the canvas each day?

When I’m painting, I like to think I’m trying to solve a problem and want to see something I haven’t seen before. It’s a kind of dance with my imagination, and I have to go along for the ride and see what emerges spontaneously without too much thinking or getting in the way of where my imagination is going. So, how do you create a different perspective on something you already know and show it in a new light? That search is always my starting point.

In a world filled with instant imagery, what value do you see in the deliberate pace of painting a portrait?

Yes, I feel it’s important to be able to breathe. Anyone can see that we’re moving from a society driven by language and the written word to one propelled by images, video, and a return to the oral tradition. The amount of data being stored is now doubling every two years. The dominance of multimedia platforms like YouTube and TikTok, as well as AI-driven storytelling, means that every day we are bombarded with thousands of moving images. The inundation of these images makes us, at once, visually more advanced than previous generations, while simultaneously diminishing our ability to truly see and exercise our imaginations. What do we do when every picture has already been imagined and can be viewed at the click of a mouse? And it all flows by faster than the eye can see? We’re drowning in data and starved of knowledge. Deliberative seeing and critical thinking are essential skills that we need to teach and hold onto. And I think long-form immersive paintings, as well as in-depth conversations like we do in the podcasts, are paths back to slower ways of seeing and more reflective ways of thinking.

Your portraits often convey a sense of interiority—almost like memory captured on canvas. What guides your decision on how much to reveal and how much to obscure in a portrait?

I think that interior quality is important. The paintings are really journeys to the interior, and I am fascinated by the interior landscape, our memories, and the dreaming mind. I am always trying to paint from the inside out.

Laurent Le Bon, President of Centre Pompidou, Fmr. President of Musée Picasso

What inspired you to start The Creative Process?

After years of helping to launch cultural centers, conferences, founding magazines, and making arts documentaries alongside my painting and storytelling, I decided to build The Creative Process back in 2016. It was launched as an exhibition at the Sorbonne, Panthéon-1 in Paris, and has travelled to other universities and venues. It’s designed to be a record of our time and, through the insights shared, we aim to inspire this and future generations on their creative journeys. I’ve found that students just starting out are hungry for this interdisciplinary, intergenerational knowledge.

The Creative Process was born out of a desire to celebrate progressive intellectual and artistic practices that inspire human resilience and unlock potential in young people, encouraging their empathic imagination and an open mindset. The platform promotes the humanities through art, literature, poetry, music, dance, film, podcasts, exhibitions, and conversations with well-known artists, writers, and creative thinkers. Through this kind of storytelling, we’ve celebrated culture, history, civic engagement, and shown the important legacy of the arts and humanities, how they provide spiritual and intellectual nourishment, and enrich our lives. At a time when universities are increasingly prioritizing STEM, we say that both the humanities and sciences are essential elements of a well-rounded education and promote happier, more engaged global citizens.
Those collective insights can help young people find their voices, become the artists, leaders, and inventors of tomorrow who will find the solutions to today’s problems. I’ve found students are hungry for this interdisciplinary, intergenerational knowledge and want to know how to get to where they want to go, and we’re here to help them achieve that.

And I feel fortunate to always be learning from so many talented and passionate people sharing their insights with us and with students because it makes me hopeful for the future to be surrounded by so many who have devoted their lives to projects that are larger than themselves.

Inaugural exhibition of The Creative Process, Sorbonne, Panthéon-1, Paris pictured with her painting L’Heure Bleu

You’ve turned dialogue itself into a form of art. How do you prepare to interview someone? What are you listening for that might not be in their words?

For me, it all begins with conversation. Very few things are created without some form of dialogue, collaboration, curiosity, and engagement with other people. In the beginning, I conducted the interviews on my own. Now I share this experience with students and professors who often join as co-hosts to add a different perspective. We also co-produce podcasts with Stanford University, professors, and leaders in their field. One of the missions of our project is One Generation Inspiring Another. So the knowledge sharing goes both ways.

I think the skill of interviewing is important, but so is the art of listening as a life skill. I prefer the word conversation. The capacity to receive and to learn from what is in front of you, that’s the way you make connections with people. That’s how you get inspired, and listening is a very important part of the learning process.

We interviewed the portrait artist Jonathan Yeo together, and he said he thinks of each painting as a record of the evolving relationship between artist and sitter. Do you view your portraits as records of evolving relationships?

I am interested in the relationship between the artist and the subject, as well as the viewer and what goes on in their imagination. I try to take this further by immersing myself in the person’s body of work and life. I try to weave what I have learned about their creative process into the painting. It might be things they’ve said, motifs, symbols, or themes from their work. I did two portraits of Hilary Mantel, one with Thomas Cromwell, and a double portrait of George Saunders, and an artwork inspired by his collection, Tenth of December. Close readers of their works can find echoes of their writing woven into those portraits. After interviewing Paul Auster, I did a polyptych portrait inspired by his novel 4 3 2 1.

Marie Darrieussecq spoke to me of dreams and landscapes: “Take dreams, wild animals, and stars. These three things have something in common: they exist. Another common point: we forget them. Dreams exist in us. Wild animals exist beside us. We forget them because it would be chaotic if we thought about them. There are 20,000 lions and 5,000 tigers left on the planet. When the last elephant has disappeared, we will miss it. The Tasmanian tiger is already missed. We do not yet know how metaphysically desolate a planet without wild animals will feel to us.” And so I painted a double image of her, Marie and her double, with a white tiger in a kind of landscape reminiscent of her novel White.

At work on Portrait of Marie Darrieussecq

To your question, they are also literally evolving relationships where we’re now friends and we have gone on to collaborate on projects, such as the illustrations I’ve done and the short film I made of Etgar Keret’s stories. They come back as guest editors of The Creative Process Arts & Literary Journal, and I’ve also presented my art and stories at their events, so that is something interesting about our project, which goes beyond traditional journalism.

How do you think your subjects experience seeing themselves through your eyes—through your interpretation? Has anyone ever reacted in a surprising way?

Hilary Mantel said of her portrait, “It’s so intriguing, strange and ghostly, I really like it. It seems a very good account of what goes on during the creative process. When I worked with the stage production [of Wolf Hall] I had to work hard to remember the characters would be visible in the middle distance. My natural range is just as you paint it: a table top away. I see every breath and every blink. What a strange set of illusions we work with.”

In our interview, she told me, “Dreams are very important to me. I have good recall of them and I record them, and I know I am in a good place to write when my dreams become big and transpersonal.” And so, I tried to capture her preoccupation with dreams in the painting and included a ghostly, almost transparent Thomas Cromwell, the subject of her trilogy Wolf Hall.

Portraiture is ancient; podcasting is new media. What challenges and opportunities arise when you move between these media, and how do their differences shape what you hope to reveal about your guests? Why do you choose to paint some of the guests from your podcast?

The kind of conversations we have really harken back to radio broadcasting, so I think of it as a return to old media in a new light. I was just naturally drawn to make their portraits or art inspired by their work and our conversations. The way the interviews and artworks are in dialogue in exhibitions of The Creative Process and my environmental paintings is that they include projections, and an immersive soundscape experience with interview recordings and music. The soundscapes give the images weight and bring guests from different disciplines together, and we have hundreds of hours of recordings, so each visit to the exhibition provides a different aesthetic and educational experience. You can hear a soundscape about the arts here and an environmental one here.

Your portraits often reveal a sense of inner life. How do you decide what to reveal and what to obscure?

I want to paint from the inside out, not the outside in. To give an impression and share what I feel, almost the afterburn of experience, and it’s why I’m drawn to transparencies.

How has your visual perception influenced your artistic choices, particularly in capturing phenomena like floaters?

I suffer from myopia, and there was a period when I would see large sunspots. I still get these kinds of floaters, so these are motifs that come into my paintings. The style is also literally the way I see the world. I have a few different ways when I do portraits, sometimes it’s a bit more solid. But in terms of my oil paintings, I use semi-transparent washes inspired by some of the techniques I learned before I transitioned entirely to oil paint. I learned watercolor, which is dependent on washes, and I learned the old fresco technique as well, which gives off a kind of powdery light and lightness that’s not traditionally associated with oils. So some of these techniques I bring over into the technique of oil painting that may perhaps make it a little bit interesting, different, and surreal sometimes.

Do you approach painting well-known creatives differently than lesser-known voices? What remains consistent, and what changes?

When I am painting a portrait, I don’t think about their notability, but I try to absorb their body of work and life, and reflect on the things that have been important to them throughout their life. I want to paint more everyday heroes, like teachers and people behind the scenes, that I call the “invisible arts.” Something that John Steinbeck said in reference to teachers is “I have come to believe that a great teacher is a great artist and that there are as few as there are any other great artists. Teaching might even be the greatest of the arts since the medium is the human mind and spirit.” But also editors, librarians, producers, all these behind-the-scenes people who really help make things happen and nurture projects should be celebrated.

In your series The Audience, why did you invert the traditional viewer-subject relationship? How does this series relate to your podcast work and your responsibility to both historical and contemporary audiences?

I did not set out to create an inversion with the Audience paintings, which may feature over twenty people in one painting, where the people who would normally be on stage are now in the audience. First, I absolutely love painting faces. Faces tell stories. They allow you to discover a person. I think we’re our most fascinating when we are unaware of ourselves, when we are focused on something outside of ourselves. That’s why children and non-human animals are so endlessly captivating; they are just who they are. They are not presenting a mask to the world. The more famous a person becomes, the harder it is to capture these moments. One thing all these artists share is focus and a respect for the artists they’ve learned from and they’ve collaborated with. In the dark, with their faces illuminated, in the audience, I feel we can get an honest glimpse of who they are as artists before the veil of fame obscures the scene.

The Audience – 30th Anniversary of the Guinness Cork Jazz Festival

Some of your works echo past artistic movements or cultural icons. How do these references dialogue with the past and present?

Well, they are such fun to paint, but also a great challenge. It began by doing portraits in Ireland and for the Dublin Writers Museum, and then I painted musicians, and a commission for the 30th Anniversary of the Guinness Cork Jazz Festival. And I’ve since done even larger multi-panel portraits for The Creative Process. It’s fun and a challenge to bring all these great artists together in a painting so that they are in a kind of dialogue. It becomes a puzzle for viewers to name who each one was and find the threads of connection between each person in the painting.

In Memory of Water, you blend human forms with seascape. Do you see memory as intertwined with our connection to the world? What role does water play in your art and personal life?

I’ve always been inspired by the sea. I think we all are. It’s where we come from. It’s where the oceans meet and cool the Earth. When we’re out in nature, we feel more connected to who we are. All the colors and sounds and rhythms remind us this is what it is to be alive. This is where I want to be. This is who I am.

I’m interested in relationships. I think about sea level rise. Our warming oceans, humans’ relationship with nature. The beauty and fragility of this planet we call home. Some of those paintings are people balanced on a platform, floating in the sea. I see those paintings also as a metaphor for this stage of human life. We’re all connected. And so precariously balanced, and what we do in one place can affect those on the other side of the world.

The Island

How does your art intersect with your advocacy for the environment?

My paintings of nature are not all about climate change, but in order to take action, we must first make people care. When you understand that the Earth doesn’t belong to us, but in fact we belong to the Earth, when we can feel that awe and reverence for the beauty and wonder of the natural world, I try to communicate that through my work and the exhibitions that all feature immersive surround sound experience of conversations with climate scientists, leading environmentalists, activists, educators, politicians, and change makers working to make a meaningful difference. I aim for conscious engagement, and their message adds weight to the artworks themselves. At the beginning of collaborating with every student who takes part in our project, I ask them about their reflections on the environment and to affirm their commitment to this planet we call home.

Your work feels like it’s in conversation with time—moments suspended, layered, or blurred. How much of your creative process is intuitive versus deliberate?

I’m very interested in the nature of time and the boundaries of our individual selves. I think that most of my paintings are about transitions and possibilities. Like the moment in cinema when one scene fades into the next. And I’m looking for the transcendent in the everyday. It’s kind of a way of looking, the way we see in our dreams and memories. I remember Kierkegaard said, “The self rests transparently on the spirit that gives it rise.” And how can we hold on to this sense of becoming? It’s like the idea of suspended time. There’s something about the passage of time in your mind, because in our memory, all time happens at once. Yesterday lives alongside 20 years ago, next to our dreams or memories of the future.


Garden of Remembrance – Blue

Some of your paintings have an almost referential quality; for instance, Garden of Remembrance echoes Monet’s Water Lilies.

The subject of the waterlilies is similar because they both come from nature. I want the scenes to be instantly recognizable. Monet painted water very thinly and was interested in the play of light. I want to paint from the inside out and express the impression of how water makes me feel. For the surfaces, I use broad, flat, luminous color fields, light powdery blue, celandon, pink, foggy yellow, and they are painted in thick impastos built up through the addition of Carrera marble powder to give the physicality of water. It’s less about external light and more about inner life and memory. Each of my Garden of Remembrance paintings are really two paintings in one. The first layer I paint is a completely realized painting of what lies beneath the surface, the underwater flora and submerged forms seem to flicker just below, creating a palimpsest effect. An Earth scientist told me that the Okavango wetlands in Botswana are where humans originally came from. So, for me, the paintings are about memory and water, where life first began.

You’ve lived and worked in multiple countries. How has cultural displacement—or cultural layering—influenced your view of language, image, and identity?

I think it’s definitely expanded my empathetic imagination. There is more than one way of seeing the world. When you have more than one language, when you’ve known more than one country, it makes you appreciate our smallness in the vast human story. The arts are ways of connecting us with each other and the arc of human history. I feel lucky that we celebrate so many disciplines, and through The Creative Process, we have contributors from over 70 countries. I don’t have a fixed sense of identity. I feel like we’re all in flux, and I hope that as I live in other countries that I will continue to learn and grow.

Manuela Lucá-Dazio, Exec. Director, Pritzker Architecture Prize
Fmr. Exec. Director, Venice Biennale, Dept. of Visual Arts & Architecture

You’ve created platforms that mentor and amplify other artists and students. What kind of mentorship did you wish for as a young artist?

I think of this project as a way is a way of continuing my education. I wish I had been taught more about the environment and civic engagement when I was growing up. I grew up surrounded by artists of all kinds. I had less exposure to the sciences, so that is something that I’m excited to learn about today. To those who feel daunted by exploring other fields, I think as long as you remain curious, there are no boundaries. The skills you learn in one field can give you insights into other disciplines.

Midway through each episode, you pause the conversation to let a student’s reflection slip in. I’ve always been interested in that pause, because it seems to punctuate the temporal fabric of the conversation, introducing a reflective voice that feels as if it comes from a different time and place.

The student interludes just came about naturally. Since I was responding to the conversations through artworks, I felt it was important that students had a space for reflection to share how it had inspired their own creative process. Knowledge is important, but what’s more important is what you do with that knowledge, for that is really what you have contributed to society and our understanding of the world.

Building on that, I’m curious about The Creative Process’s use of other media—the literary journal, exhibitions, and artwork. What continuity do you hope to create between these mediums and the podcast conversations?

Yes, all the iterations of the project are in conversation. I see them as a creative ecosystem and community. The exhibitions and journals give an immersive audiovisual experience and are fed by the podcasts and conversations that are the core of our project.

What do you hope younger creatives inherit from your work—not just in terms of content, but in the way you move through the world?

I want to challenge conventional thinking and look for insights into the human experience, so my work tries to delve deep into themes of existence, consciousness, and the intricate connections that bind us all. I want to encourage people to be fearless and discover new things about the world and themselves.

Virginia Moscetti reflects on her experience participating in The Creative Process:

I joined The Creative Process at a time when I felt deeply disillusioned with the current state of the humanities. Under pressure to justify their existence in economic terms, disciplines like literature and philosophy were being reduced to “soft-skill” factories – valuable only insofar as they could be folded back into the university’s career-preparation narrative. Even philosophy, my home discipline, seemed to be retreating into rigid conventions, drawing rigid lines around what counts as philosophical practice in an effort to package its “unique identity” as a marketable commodity.

Working on The Creative Process made clear just how limiting – and ultimately self-defeating – that framing is. Economics may be the language of kings and markets, but it cannot measure the value of the humanities: the ability to ask better questions, imagine alternative futures, and foster dialogue across differences. Again and again, I saw how philosophical, literary, and scientific insights could come together to confront today’s global crises, from climate change to political polarization. I realized that the humanities have a vital role to play – but only if we resist the impulse to reduce them to tools of economic utility and instead recognize their ability to help us shape and understand the world we’re in.

At the same time, The Creative Process showed me that when the humanities are broken down into marketable units, they don’t just lose their richness – they splinter into academic silos. Restoring their vitality, I realized, depends on breaking those barriers: allowing dialogue to move freely across different disciplines, generations, and mediums. After all, as the individuals I helped interview demonstrate, “Big questions” about freedom, justice, and moral responsibility can flourish just as vividly in public forums as they do in traditional lecture halls. Netflix dramas and portrait art can raise ethical questions that rival those contained in philosophical treatises. So, why do we try so hard to curtail the creative potential that comes from interdisciplinary thought? Why limit ourselves to a single, narrow corridor of scholarly views when the present state of our world so clearly demands we marshal all our creative and intellectual resources?

Thinking through these questions reinvigorated my commitment to a more public-facing, interdisciplinary future for the humanities. In an era of overlapping crises, we need forms of inquiry that transcend boundaries and reach the widest possible community of thinkers, artists, and citizens. While I’m excited to further that vision through my PhD studies, I also know that, at the end of the day, that work begins with dialogue. It begins with The Creative Process.

Wow, that’s very thoughtful and kind of you to say. That’s beautifully expressed and what our project aims to accomplish.

What haven’t you made yet that you still long to make? Is there a medium or subject that’s been calling to you, quietly waiting?

I’ve long wanted to take my environmental paintings to the next level. I’m now working on large-scale panoramic nature paintings. I want to convey that sense of wonder and remember that we live in a miracle that we are a part of, and that we have the ability to either nurture or destroy it. I would like to communicate some of that beauty and fragility, but on a more monumental scale than I have before. To say in one painting what I would normally say in a whole exhibition. I am writing another book, since writing is my first love. The podcasts still take up so much of my time, but I feel honored to learn from so many talented people and have the opportunity to share that knowledge with others.

Mia Funk is an artist, podcast host, writer, and creative educator. She founded The Creative Process, an international initiative encompassing a podcast, traveling exhibition, and educational initiative. Her varied work sees her leading workshops and mentoring students around creativity, critical thinking, environmental ethics, arts and humanities disciplines. Her art appears in public collections, including the U.S. Library of Congress and the Museum of Literature (Ireland). She has received awards and honors, including the Prix de Peinture from the Salon d’Automne and has exhibited in the Grand Palais. As a writer and interviewer, she has contributed to national publications and co-authored Jazz and Literature (Routledge). She’s served on the National Advisory Council of the American Writers Museum and the European Conference for the Humanities. She is the driving force behind The Creative Process podcast, platform, and journal.

Virginia Moscetti is an incoming PhD student in philosophy at Northwestern University. She holds an MSc from the London School of Economics and a BA, awarded with Highest Honors, from Swarthmore College. Beyond her work with The Creative Process, she co-edits “Current Events in Public Philosophy” for the American Philosophical Association’s blog.


Interviewed by Khanh Dinh, University of Washington

KHANH DINH

What message would you like The Creative Process to convey to its collaborating artists, creative thinkers and viewers?

MIA FUNK

What is very important to me is to create work that is meaningful, not only a beautiful painting that’s aesthetically pleasing or a story about limited personal experiences, but to reach beyond my particular concerns to speak to others and their concerns and interests, to do something that inspires the next generation and which is larger than myself.

It’s very obvious that we’re living in critical times with the environment, with social unrest, and that creativity is crucial. To build a better future starts with imagining a better tomorrow. Read More

And so I asked myself, what do I know as an artist? And how can I use what little I know to try to make the world a better place? Well, I have some skills. And I know a lot of people, passionate artists and creative thinkers who have collectively accomplished great things which are inspiring for students just starting out. And those collective insights can help young people find their voices, become the artists, leaders, inventors of tomorrow who will find the solutions to today’s problems. This is my hope.

And I feel so fortunate to be in a project where I always get to be learning from so many talented and passionate people and sharing those insights with students. Because it makes me very hopeful for the future to be surrounded by so many who have devoted their lives to projects that are larger than themselves.

KHANH DINH

As the founder of The Creative Process can you please let me and the audience know a little bit more about the non-profit and your role in it?


MIA FUNK

The Creative Process is a traveling exhibition and international educational initiative. And I've been involved with literary museums going back over 20 years. I'm an artist and writer and helped launch literary museums and cultural centers, so this interest in the creative process has been with me all my life. I painted portraits for the Dublin Writers Museum and I'm working on them for the American Writers Museum. As part of the research for this, I did interviews with American writers and asked them about books and writers that had been important to them. They spoke about being curious, interested and influenced by writers and other artists from not just America but all over the world. I realized at that stage that there was a need for a parallel international project that embraced many disciplines. It's a way of bringing people from a variety of backgrounds and experiences together. So it's been a really interesting learning process. When we started, it was launched at the Sorbonne, the inaugural exhibition was held there. And it's grown quite a lot to embrace–although it initially was writers and filmmakers and some other artists–creative thinkers across a variety of disciplines. I'm conducting a lot of these interviews, and I'm doing portraits inspired by the conversations and the works of the interviewees. I'm also liaising with students in universities and providing mentorship, so now students are involved in that process too. The Creative Process keeps on growing through the great input of students and faculty and the different people involved.


KHANH DINH

Can you elaborate a bit on what you mean when you say multidisciplinary? Do these creative thinkers come from mostly artistic or creative backgrounds, or would that also include scholars and thinkers of other disciplines as well?

MIA FUNK

Oh yes, definitely. It’s multidisciplinary. It's not just artists. We have a concentration of writers, but we have also published 20-page academic essays on our website. In the exhibitions, there's not room for that. Our online platform allows us to include work from all different kinds of people, and I think academic writing is creative since they're doing a lot of thinking about creativity, but through an academic lens.

I am on the advisory board of the European Conference for the Humanities, and we have worked with them as well. We had an exhibition in Belgium at K.U. Leuven in the Central Library and then also most recently in Athens at the Christian and Byzantine Museum. The European Conference for the Humanities is composed primarily of scholars, so that would be another element of our audience, but we're interested in the general public and undergraduate audiences as well.


KHANH DINH

Apart from being the one conducting most of the interviews, you also are the artist behind all of the portraits of your guests. You have received many awards, and your art has been displayed in notable public collections, just like you mentioned, the Dublin Writers Museum, the U.S. Library of Congress. You also have a very unique style, to me, it's more like a blend between realism and abstract, between portrait and landscape. How and when did you start establishing the style?

MIA FUNK

I think that a lot of times when people talk about their voice, whether it's visual language or their writing voice, it's something that comes out of the way you see the world. And so I think that that style has probably been a part of me all my life because it's the way I see the world. In fact, I have a few different styles when I do portraits, sometimes it's a bit more solid. But in terms of my oil paintings, I use semi-transparent washes inspired by some of the techniques I learned before I transitioned entirely to oil paint. I learned watercolor, which is dependent on washes, and I learned the old fresco technique as well, which gives off a kind of powdery light and lightness that's not traditionally associated with oils. So some of these techniques that I had learned, I bring them over into the technique of oil painting that may perhaps make it a little bit interesting and different.

The style is also literally the way I see the world, I actually have had eye problems all my life. I have very bad myopia and there was a period where I would see large sunspots. I still get these kinds of floaters, so these are motifs that come into my paintings. That's why it's a little bit surreal sometimes.


KHANH DINH

So you came a long way in establishing this style. It's always been there but you have continuously made changes to it, would you say?

MIA FUNK

I think what’s really important is that you should keep your curiosity. So I really always would like to be open to receive new influences, though I may have a certain way of approaching a work of art. And because you can tend to repeat yourself, some people love that, right? They love to feel comfortable. But what I like about doing the interviews is that I can–I don't even think of them as interviews but rather conversations–have conversations inspired by the life and work of these great creative thinkers and that some things that they share find its way into the work. Sometimes they share things that make me look at the world in a new way, and then that can be added to my visual language.

And that's one thing I do like to share with students. Say, if I read a book, or see a film, or whatever I'm experiencing, I always ask myself what I learned. It's not enough to have passive intelligence where things pass through us, and we don't do something with it. And I feel like that's a kind of dead knowledge. It's what you do with it, whether you use it to try to make the world a better place or connect with others. You have to try to take it to the next level because, in some sense, if you don't then you haven't really learned from it. It just passes through you.

KHANH DINH

Speaking of art, while collaborating with you, a term I have heard you use is the invisible arts. Can you speak a bit more about what you mean by the invisible arts?

MIA FUNK

In this project, we're lucky to have more notable voices; people who have won Oscars or Emmys or Pulitzer Awards. They’re part of the more celebrated, more visible artistic community. But there are so many members of society who we don't see or don't honor as much as we should. We have so many teachers involved and I feel that they're one of the invisible arts. Something that John Steinbeck said in reference to teachers is “I have come to believe that a great teacher is a great artist and that there are as few as there are any other great artists. Teaching might even be the greatest of the arts since the medium is the human mind and spirit.” But also editors, librarians, producers, all these behind-the-scenes people who really help make things happen and nurture projects should be celebrated.

On a broader level, there are members of society who are not as visible. I recently did an interview with the curator of the Smithsonian's National Museum of the American Indian. I visited reservations and had conversations with their teachers and artists for our collaboration on a section of our projection elements celebrating Native American culture. That would be an example of another aspect of the invisible arts. So, it’s one of our missions is to value those communities that are less heard of, and I feel lucky that I have these connections to different communities. We now have, in our projection elements, creative works from people from over 70 countries.

I also believe strongly that everyone has a deep creative capacity, and that we are all born artists, in a way. And so I have these discussions with museum directors or curators and they’ll be quick to say, “but I am not an artist.” As though artist were a precious word that could not be applied to them. I don’t think that way. If you consider the word as not linked to product but meaning a passionate pursuit and deep engagement pursued with energy, creativity, and joy, then I think it’s clear that we were all born artists. Over time, we are taught or we teach ourselves to forget these dreams. And some of us become artists or scientists or explore our desire to create and discover in other ways. And so what gives me great happiness is the chance to invite people into this project who do not consider themselves artists, who would never ask the spotlight for themselves. And you can see the happiness it gives them to say “I did that” and just the pride when they allow themselves to see they too are part of this thing we call the creative process.

KHANH DINH

As a student at the University of Washington, I’m curious to know if there are any projects you are bringing to Seattle, or what the connection is between Seattle in general and the university in particular with TCP?


MIA FUNK

We haven't fixed the date for the exhibition yet. We're working on that now because I like to make things really comprehensive instead of just simply have one person or a small group of people represent a region. As the project travels, I realize it's really important to include and celebrate the local educational and creative community. I was lucky to do interviews with the dancers and the creative team behind the Pacific Northwest Ballet and others from the area, but we're still building that content. It’s something that you and I are working together on, and we have a few other students at University of Washington focusing on different areas. When we have something that's more comprehensive then we'll show it because I think that that's the most respectful and best way, instead of me just bringing all these national and international voices that have no connection to the region. I was born here, and my parents met at the University of Washington, but I’ve spent much of my life abroad in different cities, so I have always wanted to bring something back home. My earliest memories are on campus because my father used to take me to classes from the time I was a baby, so U of W was really my preschool. And early on this encouraged an idea that learning is fun. I saw no division between learning and work and a kind of play. I wonder how much this early exposure to university life and imaginative inquiry imprinted on me. I think it must have influenced me in some way and that’s why I’m now involved in a project with universities and learning at its core.


KHANH DINH

Since TCP contains a lot of interviews, I would love to learn more about the process. So, first of all, how would you describe the importance of interviews at TCP?

MIA FUNK

For this project and for my process, interviews form the core. For creative people generally, very few things are created without some form of conversation, collaboration, curiosity and engagement with other people. To date, I've done most of the interviews because I was there and I had connections to those people, but we're really broadening it out with the student involvement now, so I like nothing better than to share this. I think the skill of interviewing is so important, not just for the projects or the exhibitions. It’s part of our core content at TCP, but it’s also important as a life skill, whether you're in journalism or not. And again, I don't like to say interview, I like conversation because that would be the style of my approach, but everything is a kind of interview and negotiation. When you're meeting your fiancee's family or a job interview, those are situations where you have to know how to present yourself.

I don't know if it's an art of listening but just the capacity to receive and to learn from what is in front of you, and that's the way you make connections with people. That's how you get inspired. But if you're not listening and you don't know how to ask the questions that will give you the most information or inspiration, then you're really missing out in life.

And so I think of it as very important and a learning process. It also really operates in our project as a one-on-one mentorship where I will be mentoring students. When we are in the same city it will be side by side, I'll bring them along to interviews so they can observe and participate and ask questions. But if they’re not in the same city, then we'll share audio and do video conference calls. But then as they're getting a chance to meet and interview these notable creative thinkers, then they're also being mentored by them.

If you get a chance to meet people who have been very passionate and have done great things in their life and they inspire you, it’s important to learn how they did it and why they did it. These are important questions. These creative projects might have not come to them immediately, so knowing a little bit about their life story and the reasons behind what they created is just so fascinating. I think it is as fascinating or even more fascinating sometimes than the work itself.

KHANH DINH

You did mention that it’s important to have listening skills. Can you elaborate more on that?

MIA FUNK

I think that everyone knows how to listen. I think it should be natural. But I guess some people don't know how to listen because I've had conversations with some people where they weren't taking anything in. They were only talking. So it's just being able to absorb and then to show that you've learned, that you've heard what's been said. What I always ask students to do, and they’re part of the podcasts now, is to share what they learned and how they apply that to things they’ve done or things they’re planning on doing in their future career. So that would be a demonstration of deep learning. And listening is all kinds of things. I mean it's not just with the ears, it's with the eyes, it's picking up non-verbal cues, the tone, and the subtext.

Sometimes I do feel that with our technology-dominated world, in some ways, we have been inundated with so much information, and it comes to us already curated, already presented through a machine interface. So some of those older forms of listening and picking up non-verbal cues and tones can be lost if we’re not careful about it. We can forget how to take in that information, which is often just as rich and communicates quite a lot.

KHANH DINH

I’m currently taking a course on conducting interviews, and listening is one very big part that is commonly mentioned. Another very important part is preparation. So, how do you usually prepare for an interview and how is the preparation process different for different kinds of interviews, say, recorded or non-recorded, in-person or through phone and such?

MIA FUNK

My style might be different from other people's styles. I should say that because at this stage now I've done hundreds of interviews, so I can rely on a certain level of experience with people across a variety of disciplines, I can always call on insights that someone else in that discipline has shared. Or, if it's a discipline that I am actively involved in, the research is important, but then also having those life experiences means that we can, for instance, sit down and talk like an artist to artist.

If I'm doing an interview outside of my discipline, which sometimes happens, I’ve done interviews with astronomers and physicists, that's quite outside of my experience. So we have to find a common ground that I could relate to. In those cases, research is very important. I research a lot. Then after that, some people will feel less comfortable with this, but I memorize all my questions so that I feel like I've learned it deeply enough. And then, in the moment of the interview, we have this eye contact and there's a large element of spontaneity so I'm taking in what they're saying and not relying on notes. And, I used to be quite unconventional, I would have no notes at all. Now I have this tablet that I'll bring with me in case I need to consult it, but I don't look down. Also, I think I mentioned this, I have bad eyesight, so if I glanced down I'm not going to see anything, it would be too annoying for me to be squinting and looking down, and it would take them out of the moment. I do try to encourage that conversational style, and I'll just know the points that I want to hit, so it's a very prepared but spontaneous technique.

However, in others, I realize that that's not always possible. I have conducted shorter interviews where you have maybe just 5 or 10 minutes, and so you really should be so scripted because you just won't have the chance, whereas our average interview is at least an hour. Sometimes it goes on for hours, so I have a bit more room to indulge what interests me. But if you're doing, say, taking someone off the street or something that only allows five minutes of connection, I think you have to be really targeted and to make sure that you get what you want.

I'm just thinking now about a recent interview with the photographer Mark Seliger, and he is very notable. He worked a lot with Rolling Stone magazine, he's photographed all these actors and celebrities, and he also photographed President Obama and the Dalai Lama. He does interesting personal work too, dealing with the Holocaust and so on. He is a great photographer. But he has time limitations because these celebrities sometimes just don’t have the time. He shared as he was photographing Obama he only had five minutes so he had to know what he had to get that in five minutes so he couldn't be as loose with it. But I am lucky that the people involved, even though they're quite well known, give more of their time. And I think that it helps encourage them to relax and really share more of their lives.

KHANH DINH

You did mention that you use a lot of non-verbal cues to show them that you are engaged. You also mentioned that you maintain eye contact. So, I was wondering, how do you let your guests know that you’re engaged while conducting a non face-to-face interview?

MIA FUNK

We're now doing podcasts and prefer something that's recorded that has a human voice that we’ll then transcribe. However, I always believe you should accommodate the requests of the interviewee. And sometimes that can lead to misunderstandings, as you say, since people don't get all the cues on the phone, so sometimes it takes people a while to warm up. You really want to be thinking about what their discipline is because the way you communicate with a writer is different than with a visual artist, a scientist or a composer. These are all the different disciplines that have different ways of looking at the world.

Sometimes it’s a nonverbal skill, but you're using the tone of your voice. I found it interesting that some people said to me that it's difficult when you're interviewing on the phone, but if I compare interviews I've done on the phone, although I always prefer face to face because you have all that information, the responses and the depth of interview has been just as good. Sometimes you could say even better, for it might suit some people better. Strangely enough, I've done interviews with people on the phone often when I've known them or met them. They may be friends in person, but because they live in another city and when I saw them there wasn't a chance to do an in-depth interview. And so we reconnected for the interview by phone. That's happened.

So some people will prefer a different format, and I would always do the kind of interviews that they prefer. And I understand, as someone who cares deeply about language, that some writers will prefer to do a written exchange. But then I always prefer a back and forth exchange where I send a question and they respond so it's like a conversation because they're almost their truest self when they're writing. They can be very spontaneous of course and they're great talkers, but language for them operates on a poetic symbolical level more so than with most people. So if we've spoken many times but for the interview they say, “Oh let's do it in writing,” then that's fine. Through email, I'll make my questions longer. They say that, journalistically, you should actually have short questions. But I do that because I do want them to know the depths of my research, and because I can't communicate that nonverbally or communicate that before as you would do in an audio interview, I really have to show them that I'm really fascinated in their body of work. So those questions will be a bit longer, whereas in the recorded exchange, often I won't even finish my sentence, once they know where the question is going, then I don't need to be so word perfect. I’ll just get out of the way and let them answer it

KHANH DINH

What information or what type of information do you usually like to get from these interviews. Do you usually focus on, maybe, their personal lives, their inspirations, or do you usually focus on their artwork?

MIA FUNK

Well, for TCP, because it's an educational initiative, it’s about body of work, life, and creative process. So obviously I'm interested in their process and how and why they've done their work.

And I don't generally focus just on their latest work, which would be the focus of a lot of interviews when they're promoting something. I like to see that within the context of what they've done before. What the director of the curator of the Dublin Writers Museum and the James Joyce Museum has said is that The Creative Process is really like a portrait in words. It's a portrait of them in words that we collaborate on and not just their latest project which will only give you a slice.

Since I'm interested in the intellectual or educational benefits, I'll touch on their life, but I wouldn't be looking for a confessional interview or to make them uncomfortable. Because I respect their work so much, we could discuss how their life may have inspired their work, or how their journey brought them to certain themes that they have in their work, but I wouldn't want to focus entirely on that. That’s something that they may share, but I wouldn't be pressing for that. That might make our focus a little bit different because a lot of journalism might want a scoop in that way, but our interviews are intimate too because as our project deals primarily with a lot of people in the arts, of course, that personal life comes to bear, even if they're not doing work that's strictly autobiographical.

KHANH DINH

Next, I would love to talk about the social impact of TCP. Considering the rapid growth of the project itself, does it have any direct impact on the surrounding community?

MIA FUNK

I don't know how you measure it, but I feel like the fact that we could talk within universities, which are of course a microcosm of the community, is very impactful. We also have a lot of different strands that go out of the university, outside of what you might think of as the elite sector of society. I had a project in New York in the Hamptons, it was an immersive project, and I lived in the community. And of course The Hamptons is a very elite community, very talented creative people live there, very wealthy people live there, and that's generally what we view it as. It was important when I went there and that I had the chance to engage and learn and do interviews across many disciplines, but I also knew historically, The Hamptons was not always a wealthy enclave. There’d been an artist colony when people like Jackson Pollock were starting off, before he had any money. Going further back, and there still are although it's not recognized as much, there are a tribe of Indians who lived in The Hamptons: the Shinnecock. There were other tribes as well, and these places were also named after Indian tribes, some of which now have vanished. So, I thought it was very important in terms of reaching out to the communities to visit those reservations and to have conversations with them, with educators and community leaders and artists there to hear their stories. I didn't get to focus on underrepresented communities as much in The Hamptons, so I think it's very important. I would think I was missing out by going to The Hamptons to just focus on more elite communities.

Another part of our project is the Inner City & High School program. Although we are collaborating with a lot of universities, because again that's where so much creativity takes place and many social movements get started, we also want to include those from both ends of the educational spectrum. We have an Inner City & High School project that we're expanding right now, and that's including after school writing clubs, open mic events. We have a number those pieces in our projection elements and on our web site, and some pieces have been adapted for their university applications. I’m always amazed by the resilience of the students who I'm lucky to work with, that great team teachers and young artists and writers mentors who, really, they're my heroes because they're not paid very well at all. Just the joy of teaching is so important. Anyway, the schools where we were doing this project in, they've noticed a reduction of out of school suspensions by over 50 percent. So, we know that the arts are not just for decoration, it's a chance for people to be heard and to keep them on their educational track. The healing power of the stories and arts is really important. So I try to do what I can to include and embrace different elements of society, but I am one person, so sometimes I get torn in too many directions. I'm lucky to work with great people.

KHANH DINH

Since you are traveling a lot, and we are a non-profit, so how did you get funding? Or how do you accommodate the traveling or the collaboration with these different organizations?

MIA FUNK

That's important too. Sometimes it's difficult, since I'm not a professional fundraiser. So, initially, I didn't know that the project would grow so much and so quickly. It was difficult in the beginning. I thought it would go to just a few universities, and every university I wrote to said yes. When it was launched at the Sorbonne, they held it only three months after I had contacted them, but luckily I'd had content for that.

Sometimes I came across wonderful interviewees that were giving their time, so I didn't want to lose these opportunities by focusing fundraising. So I give 100 percent of my time to this project, which was founded on giving.

I self-funded the project through the sale of my paintings just because I didn't have time to stop and fundraise, and now we've had a little sustaining finance. And that then allowed us to do some more traveling and go to places like Greece or America. Now I'm taking a little bit of time out to do some of that fundraising because exhibitions do cost money, even though we're lucky to have the universities give their exhibition spaces. For instance, where we started, it was in the main hall of the original Panthéon Sorbonne building with ironwork beams that were the inspiration for the Eiffel Tower. We had a great space there that we filled with interviews and artworks. 5,000 square feet. That's all given, but there are other expenses. So I'm taking a little bit of time out to do that.

I would also like to be also to give stipends to those involved and get more support to make sure that the exhibitions are the best that they can be in terms of display. Large folio editions are given to the archives of participating museums, and those are unique hand-drawn portraits. The exhibition changes as it goes from university to university, so no one exhibition is alike because it’s a celebration of people from the region. So it’s given as this large hand-embellished folio edition, gifted to the archive of the university so it can be shown for however long they want. That does take a little bit of money, so we are looking for supporting finance just so that we can complete the tour of exhibitions to bring it to all the places who want to take part.

KHANH DINH

So TCP is going to Seattle and other states in America?

MIA FUNK

Yes. So we're working now with the experiential learning departments of over 70 universities. I'm not sure that we can, I mean I would love to but of course, we're talking about the expense of things, bring it to all 70 of those universities. We're actively working with them, we're sharing interviews and working with their faculty and students. So what's nice with projection is you can bring the projection elements there and also to the high schools and places that we could not afford to offer a full physical exhibition. Yes, we’re working towards bringing the physical exhibition to University of Washington since they're in our network of leading universities who are taking part.

We're lucky that we're also working with collaborating curators who are students, or like you, who are working on interviews and podcasts, and that really helps because you have so much local knowledge, while I may just know something from a distance or I know some people I'm friends with. We'll have students, say, who are studying astrophysics and so they'll say “Oh, there's this scientist teaching at my university ” or they know different people in the faculty and make recommendations.

KHANH DINH

Is there anything else you would like to mention?

MIA FUNK

Well, I’m looking forward to the chapter and collaborating at the University of Washington. We haven’t focused a lot on people involved in business. I think that one of the natural resources of the community in Seattle is that it has great creative innovators in terms of business and technology. So some of those voices would be interesting to include, and that's something that we can collaborate on.

But alongside that, I do also always like to focus on our common humanity. We see now a lot of movements to do with preserving nature, that’s very important, but I also believe in preserving how we care for others. Something I say often with this project is:

The nature of learning is changing. Culture is not a routine matter. We all live on one planet we call home. We’re all human and have only one earth and one life. And what is evident is that traditional values and culture are relevant not just in society but throughout the world. It's not the money you earn that gets respect. It's not knowledge alone. It's only when they're combined with human values: integrity, responsibility, consideration for others, can we become a better person, a better human being, and of course respected by society. We should never forget the importance of the humanities and individualism and our own creativity. We were not put on this earth to be consumer slaves connected to everything except ourselves.


What makes a good portrait?

Mia Funk in conversation with novelist Harriet Alida Lye

Mia Funk is known for her large-scale figurative works and intimate portraits of well-known figures, friends, and family. Her explorations and experimentations using oil paint diluted to produce images with the transience almost of watercolours, range from traditional to contemporary. I got to know Mia through my literary and arts journal, Her Royal Majesty. The following text is pieced together from a series of discussions we had in Paris during the summer of 2011.

Harriet Alida Lye: Though portraiture has existed essentially for as long as art has - in the Fertile Crescent, Egypt primarily, relics of portraits of gods and rulers proliferate - it was traditionally only used to memorialize the rich and powerful. Likeness mattered little. Now, portraiture is not only a genre, but an obligatory exercise for anyone who is training to become an artist. You focus almost exclusively on portraits and figurative work. Why?

Mia Funk: It's always seemed the most interesting subject. It's who we are. Portraits contain psychology, form, colour – it's everything that we're about and that interests us. I painted seascapes in the past and continue to paint water, but it's the human face, ultimately, that's the most challenging not only for painters, but for novelists, filmmakers. You don't find many books or films about inanimate objects or landscape, there always has to be some human connection. A portrait should feel present, alive. Read More

Lye: For you, is that what makes a good portrait? That it should feel real?

Funk: Yes, a portrait should feel real. That's not to say it should be realistically painted, but real.

Lye: It's the same with writing...Being an editor is a little like curating. I read many submissions a year and choose only the ones that best tell the story or the theme for each issue. This goes for both text and visual work: I have to feel drawn to the story, the characters, the scene. It seems to me the portrait artist is also a kind of storyteller, that they must go beyond the simple act of drawing a face in order to depict their subject. They are telling a story and must portray the personality and the history of the person.

Funk: Faces tell stories. They allow you to discover a person. There is nothing more satisfying in painting than looking at the face and building up its complexity line by line.

Lye: When you are painting a portrait, where do you begin?

Funk: I always begin with the face. It's the most recognisable part of our anatomy, more than stance, height, or the way we walk. Everyone has their own way of working. I start with the eyes because they're the truth of the picture. You can get a lot of things wrong, but if the eyes are just a little too close together or far apart, your picture is ruined. Sometimes, mouths are difficult to find an expression that's not contrived or frozen. There are so many things to get right when you're painting faces. It's the most challenging from the artist's perspective.

Lye: They say that an artist steals another's visage to represent his own. I find some of your portraits incredibly personal.

Funk: It's difficult to avoid when you spend hours painting, something of you will always slip into the picture.

Lye: I have been looking at your early paintings, the nudes, audience paintings, your playful abstracts, and comparing them to the solitary figures you are painting today. You're always experimenting. Do you feel more comfortable in either? Or do you think you are still evolving as an artist, or have you found a single place you would like to evolve within?

Funk: I think I'm naturally restless, curious about things. I think it's important to always remain curious, and so I'm a traveller in different styles and subjects...I think a lot of artists are restless or curious. I was never the kind of person who wanted to find one belle formule and to follow that path forever. I paint portraits and figurative works because 1 am fascinated by people, by their mystery and the games they play.

But that work is demanding because its power derives from resembling what it's representing, so when I'm done with a series, I'll hopscotch over to abstracts, which are a real love of mine. The strange patterns made by the shape of things. Colour and shadow, pure line. So the figuratives, they are all about meaning, and the abstracts are the opposite of meaning. For me, all my art is an escape from boredom - an escape from constraints.

Unfortunately, a lot of artists can't follow their curiosity on account of commercial constraints. I've been fortunate. Exhibiting in different countries allows me some freedom to follow different themes, and when I feel I'm growing stale or want to try something new, I set a series aside and begin a new one. That way I can return to it when I feel like it, when my eyes are fresh.

It's important for me to feel excited about what I'm painting, and I think that communicates itself to people when they see a painting, they can tell whether it was something an artist had to do, or if it was what she wanted to do. Also, some of my series, like the audience paintings, are incredibly demanding. I just completed one, a commission celebrating the Guinness Cork Jazz Festival. The painting features over twenty well-known jazz musicians, all of whom had to have a convincing likeness and be realistic as a whole; this group of people who were actually never assembled together. Paintings like that take a lot out of me, and then I have to retreat for a while and do something else.

Lye: Is that why you began this series of solitary portraits staring out to sea?

Funk: I've always been drawn to water and painted it in one form or another - the Aquarium paintings, the seascapes - I've been painting it for over fifteen years. Because I've always lived near water, it seems completely natural to me, even my abstracts and to an extent my desert paintings depicting the complete absence of water are an expression of that...the solace that comes from being near the sea.

Lye: Yes, your desert pictures.

Funk: I call them Heat. You know, painters are simple, we like reducing things to elements, lines, archetypes. (laughs) In that way I guess we're the opposite of

writers.

Lye: The Sea, and now these paintings in the desert... they are much more quiet than your other portraits.

Funk: It's hard to paint quiet when you are painting crowds. The noise of a piece becomes visible, group portraits are like symphonies, you have to harmonise everything and yet at the same time put across a single image, otherwise the painting won't work. Whereas portraits of the individual sitter are like listening to a soloist.

Lye: It's interesting that you should mention music. I'm not usually aware of noise when I'm looking at a painting, but it's true that pictures can make noise.

Funk: A lot of the expressions we use when talking about pictures come from music. It's the first sense that we develop, although we're not aware of it most of the time. In the womb, the first sound we hear is our mother's heartbeat. When we discuss loud patterns or images we find striking, or talk about harmonious or clashing colors, we’re using terms we’ve borrowed from music. Expressionists aimed for a loudness and dissonance in their pictures, intentionally choosing colours that contrasted violently with each other, and that's why it's hard to look at some of them. Perhaps the most famous of Expressionist pictures, Edvard Munch's The Scream, aimed at inducing that kind of reaction. But you are right, I was going for something quieter in these paintings.

Lye: There is an evocation of inwardness. The compositions are direct, but there's a psychic depth that allows viewers to project themselves into the painting.

Funk: If they've achieved that, I'm happy. I liked the idea of working with the primary colours of childhood, providing a lacework of external cues that evoke feeling and memory in the viewer.

Lye: That's what struck me about them. There's this division between the inward condition, which is, of course, unrepresentable, and the outward being which can be seen and depicted but for that reason seems inessential. Your figures are deeply absorbed in what they are doing, thinking, and feeling, so deeply that the viewer is often made to feel that they are unaware of anything else.

To me, they feel more personal.

Funk: Yes, anytime you're painting a portrait of a famous person, viewers come to the painting with so many expectations. Everyone feels like they know the person already. And when you are working from photos or videos, which I do, there is a layer of familiarity which is hard to escape. With my sea and desert paintings I wanted to paint figures who could be anyone.

Lye: I want to talk to you about your portraits. Photography has pushed the envelope so far, yet I feel there is still a huge appetite for the handmade portrait. Although today the focus is less on perfection. - Is realism still relevant?

Funk: Realist techniques are still our most immediate means of expressing the human condition in contemporary life..But I prefer to think of my paintings of well-known personalities as expressive portraits. People call those kind of paintings Pop, but I've always been interested in creating work that has relevance of my own time. Because I build up my painting using the old techniques, it has the effect of casting contemporary situations within a historical perspective.

Lye: They're very different from the Sea paintings, which seem to exist outside of reference to time.

Funk: I wanted to blur the boundaries between viewer and those portrayed to give a quality, almost like a mirror, so that when you look at it, you could be stepping into the painting. That's why the figures are often transparent, the edges blurred or bleeding into the surrounding landscape.

Lye: On the one hand, they are like your other realist work; on the other, they seem surreal. You can see right through some figures.

Funk: I like the idea that the figures are fluid and translucent, like water itself.

I don't often think of titles first, but at the back of my mind, I had this Portuguese word saudade. It means a vague and constant desire for something that does not and cannot exist. And that line from the Eliot poem - We are the hollow men. Although I don't think he meant what I want it to mean. He was interested in wastelands and was talking about people detached from nature, cut off from one another. But I mean that thing that happens when you're walking on the beach or in the desert, caught in a fierce wind, when you and the landscape sort of blend. haunting.

I always thought it was a strange expression, quite haunting.

Published in La Mer, Éditions Maisonneuve 2011

Harriet Alida Lye is the award-winning author of two novels, one memoir, and one children’s picture book. Her essays and reporting have been published in The Globe & Mail, The New York Times, and other publications.


Mia Funk: Meta Art

By Susie Kahlich, January 10, 2012. Published in VINGT Paris

Talking to the artist Mia Funk is a slightly unsettling experience, like being surprised by fizz in a drink you thought was flat.  It’s a bit of a shock at first, but then you realize it’s a pleasant shock and yes, you will have another glass of that, please.

And that’s how it is with Ms. Funk. Very direct and extremely articulate, she throws you right off balance the second she starts speaking, but leaves you wanting more.  An Irish-German Chinese-American, she physically resembles the Chinese side of her family but, although born and raised in Seattle, her 10 years in Ireland and over a decade in France has inflected her American vocabulary with a hybrid accent that comes across as vaguely German.

And for all her intensity and intelligent observations about art, history, film, pop culture and literature, there exists an underlying social satire that is dark and deliciously addictive yet playful, like a soda designed by Edward Gorey: exotic and mysterious, probably poisonous, but delightful nonetheless.  In other words, an unexpected fizzy drink.


It’s this heady mix of playful intelligence and social commentary that runs through her work. Trained at the Ateliers Beaux-Arts, Paris, Ms. Funk’s work has garnered numerous awards and recognition.  Winner of the 2009 Prix de Peinture at the Salon d’Automne Paris, she was also a finalist in Sky Television’s Art Competition London 2010, shortlisted in The Guardian Newspaper’s London Lives Competition 2010, nominated for the Celeste Prize 2010, a finalist in Aesthetica Magazine’s 2010 Creative Works Competition, and was specially commissioned to create a piece for the 2011 Guinness Cork Jazz Festival.

Her work is almost meta in nature: art about art, paintings about painting: the artistic process, inspiration, the artist as brand, artist as both destroyer and giver of life.  She wonders on canvas what might have transpired between Lucien Freud and Queen Elizabeth II when HRM sat for Freud’s portrait of her; or Bacon’s process of consuming his own subjects in his work; or the fever dreams of Tennyson’s lamenting mariners in his poem The Lotus Eaters.

These are clever visual puns, told with a classically-trained hand.  Older works feature primarily oil on canvas, but her Lotus Eaters series incorporates a technique that predates oil painting called succhi d’erba, used originally for applying pigments to tapestries and for dying kimonos, while her newer works feature a mixed technique using antique wallpaper and artisan paper with acrylic and gouache.

Ranging from outright funny (Lucien Freud and Queen Elizabeth II sit naked on a couch, watching TV together), often macabre (Francis Bacon’s studio transformed into a slaughter house), and always incisive, and contemplating everything from the pitfalls of artistic fame (Andy Warhol wearing a “visitor” badge), to artistic persona (she’s looking at you, Jeff Koons!), Funk’s work encompasses every aspect of the artistic process, from artist to art appreciator:  her “audience” series features English authors, the members of JFK’s Camelot, or famous artists seated together in a darkened theatre, watching you watching them watch you; for what is an artist but an observer of observers observing art?

But what these works are not is celebrity worship.  About her portraits of Bacon and Freud, Funk explains “Here are these two artists with an almost violent relationship to their subjects, where they practically cannibalized the subject in the act of painting them; I was interested in the idea that something must die in the creative process for something new to be born.  But if they [Bacon and Freud] didn’t have interesting faces, I wouldn’t have painted them anyway.”

Funks’ paintings, like her conversation, are interactive, all-inclusive.  A response to the response to art, a pleasantly shocking, surprisingly tasty experience that draws you in, gets you thinking and stays with you… long after you’ve swallowed the last drop of that fizzy drink and, before you know it, you’re hooked.


Mia Funk, l’esprit et la vision

By Stéphane Laurent, Maître de conférences History of Art
Research Director, Université Panthéon-Sorbonne

Translated from French

The series of interviews with writers is the unprecedented part of this exhibition. Painted compositions and portraits further articulated by the conversations Mia Funk had with the writers. Their words interact with the scenes and atmosphere of their novels which have inspired the portraits. She writes and publishes texts, which implies a deep engagement with this "literary space" dear to Georges Blanchot. We understand why Mia Funk chose to call this new theme "The Creative Process." The symbiosis between reading and encounter, not as a journalistic one, that of an interview that would be just illustrated with images, but with the aim of a painter, that of allowing us to see the writing and the writer together.

It is for the profound originality of this approach that the Panthéon-Sorbonne University is pleased to showcase the inaugural exhibition. For once the collection of interviews and portraits of writers has been completed, a second exhibition will bring them together, before circulating in several major foreign universities, in Europe and in the United States. Our institution in the Latin Quarter has made a judicious choice: to present this award-winning artist who has been several times awarded by prestigious art salons, to whom several works have already been dedicated, well represented by galleries in the capital and regularly residing in France, whose museum collections and landscapes inspire many of her paintings.

Seemingly Dual

Seemingly dual—at times direct, at times sensitive and elusive—Mia Funk’s painting is in fact shaped by the visible and by literature. It is also interactive, in the sense that it offers up its inner images to better involve the viewer.

The Acidity of the Other

Mia Funk gained recognition through sophisticated, almost cinematic compositions that depict figures in enclosed environments. Her Audiences series presents imaginary galleries of celebrities transformed into onlookers caught in a candid, somewhat disconcerted state.

The Audience by Mia Funk
Oil on canvas, 68 x 105 cm — Painting Prize, Salon d’Automne, Paris

Since the 1960s, thanks to movements like Figuration Narrative in France, painting and cinema have entered into dialogue. It wasn’t always this way: painters trained in working from life once accused cinema of acculturation, of stealing the depiction of reality. But for newer generations, motivated by the hand and raised on audiovisual media, these are no longer incompatible—just different tools and languages to explore.
“I’ve always been fascinated by film,” explains Mia Funk, “especially the moments at the beginning or end of a scene when you can still see traces of the previous one. Transitions. You can see this even in early silent films, when a burn from the preceding scene lingers on the next. It all stems from an interest in memory and the creative process itself. The moment you try to remember something, to pin it down, it begins to disappear.”

Armed with flawless technique—partly developed at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris—she employs a narrative realism, where the greatest challenge beyond technical skill is asserting a unique style or “signature.” She did not hesitate to use a sharply defined brushstroke to undress the Queen of England, painting her nude having tea in good company—a biting image that garnered significant media attention and was recently shown at Galerie Olympe de Gouges in Paris.

L’Heure Bleue by Mia Funk
Oil on canvas, 315 x 200 cm

The Memory of Water

Gradually, aquatic elements infiltrated this acidic fiction. In her Aquariums series—still claustrophobic and disturbing at first—then more broadly in her Sea series (also known as Memory of Water), serenity emerged in an unexpected wave. Finally, in the Lotus Eaters series, the treatment became poetic and symbolic. Through these works, Mia Funk reveals a profound connection to water. Whether in Ireland or the French Riviera, where she often resides, water has become a key muse.

Even the medium reflects this affinity: all of her compositions now begin with gouache or watercolor studies, executed spontaneously and without correction ("one try"), to capture the fleeting images of memory that haunt her.

The figures, often female and anonymous—even repetitive—dissolve into ghostly forms, blurring the boundary between the world around them and their own identities. Mia Funk admires Magritte, whose retrospective in New York deeply moved her as a teenager. She discovered in his work not just the erasure of borders between things—like when the sky blends into a figure—but also how to remain figurative while evoking imagination and mystery.

In this “floating world,” as she calls it—a nod to Chinese painting, to which she feels a kinship through her heritage—the violence of interpersonal relationships gives way to emotional peace. “At most, you might perceive one figure overlapping another,” she says, referring to the difficulty of communication between people, whether close or distant—an issue that forms one of the central threads in her work.

The Island by Mia Funk
Oil on canvas (diptych), 2 x 162 x 130 cm

Visions of the Floating World

Since Impressionism, painters have explored the nature of vision.

Mia Funk recalls a childhood experience of temporary blindness. “In my youth,” she explains, “I had vision problems like large solar flares that erased my sight. In English, they’re called ‘floaters.’ It was frightening, but there was also this intense color. Everything I looked at disappeared behind these fields of light. I try to reproduce that effect in painting. Even now, I have severe myopia that lets me see detail but leaves huge blinding spots. I struggle to focus on moving objects and even to recognize people I know well—unless I get very close to their faces. Once, I experienced temporary total blindness where everything turned white, and when I paint, I try to recreate that experience of disappearance—or the return to vision.”

Thus, the act of seeing became central to her art. It’s both the gaze she casts and the one that transforms perception. Cézanne refused to paint nature using learned methods, insisting on seeing with his own eyes, even if it meant distorting what he saw. Similarly, Mia Funk lets her vision speak—with lingering light spots that dapple bodies, blurred vegetation as if seen speeding past from a train, and brushstrokes that distill overlooked details.

The Creative Process: Between Image and Writing

The interview series with writers is a unique element of this exhibition. Paintings and portraits are presented alongside the questions Mia Funk has posed to her favorite authors—and their answers. Their words resonate with scenes and moods from the novels that influenced her. Funk writes and publishes stories herself, engaging in a deeply physical interaction with the “literary space” so dear to Maurice Blanchot.

This explains why she chose to title this new series The Creative Process.

There’s a symbiosis between reading and encounter—not in a journalistic sense, as in an illustrated interview, but with a painter’s aim: to make both the writing and the writer visible together.

This is the deeply original approach that the University of Panthéon-Sorbonne is proud to introduce. And it is only a preview—an introduction to Mia Funk’s art to whet our curiosity. Once the full collection of interviews and portraits is complete, a second exhibition will bring them together before traveling to major universities across Europe and the U.S. The Latin Quarter’s institution has made a wise choice in showcasing this multi-award-winning artist, whose work has inspired books, is represented by leading galleries, and who regularly resides in France—where the museums and landscapes continue to shape her paintings.

Version Française

En apparence duale, c’est-à-dire parfois directe, parfois sensible et évanescente, la peinture de Mia Funk est en réalité modelée par le visible et la littérature. Elle est aussi interactive, en ce sens qu’elle nous tend ses images intérieures pour mieux nous faire participer.

L’acidité de l’autre

Mia Funk s’est rendue célèbre par des compositions savantes, presque cinématographiques, qui mettent en scène des personnalités dans des environnements clos. Sa série des Publics (Audiences) déroule des galeries imaginaires de célébrités transformées en spectateurs pris sur le vif, quelque peu troublés. 

L'AUDIENCE BY MIA FUNK
OIL ON CANVAS, 68 X 105CM
PRIX DE PEINTURE, SALON D'AUTOMNE DE PARIS

Réconciliés depuis les années soixante grâce à des mouvements comme la Figuration narrative en France, peinture et cinéma s’interpellent ici mutuellement. Il n’en a pas toujours été ainsi, lorsque les peintres, formés au travail d’après nature, accusaient le cinéma d’acculturation et de lui voler la figuration du réel. Mais pour les jeunes générations, motivées par la main et sevrées à l’audiovisuel, il n’est plus d’incompatibilités, juste un dialogue et des moyens différents dont il faut tirer parti. « J’ai toujours été fascinée par le film, explique Mia Funk, par le moment à la fin ou au début d'une scène, quand vous voyez les traces de la scène d’avant.  Transitions. Vous voyez ça même dans les premiers films muets, lorsque la scène précédente laisse une brûlure sur la suivante. Cela remonte à un intérêt pour la mémoire et le processus de création lui-même. Au moment où vous essayez de vous rappeler quelque chose, d’épingler la chose, elle commence à disparaître. »

Servie par une technique impeccable, fruit d’un métier savant acquis pour partie à l’Ecole des Beaux-arts de Paris, elle use d’un réalisme narratif, où n’est rien n’est plus difficile, outre l’habileté, que d’affirmer sa différence, sa « facture » propre. Et c’est avec un coup de pinceau pointu qu’elle n’a pas hésité à déshabiller la reine d’Angleterre, la représentant nue prenant le thé en bonne compagnie, un tableau grinçant qui lui a valu de nombreux articles dans la presse et que la galerie Olympe de Gouge a présenté récemment à Paris.

 

L'HEURE BLEUE BY MIA FUNK
OIL ON CANVAS, 315 X 200 CM

La mémoire de l’eau

Puis l’élément aquatique a progressivement envahi cette fiction noire ou acide. Dans la série des Aquariums, d’une façon encore confinée et inquiétante, puis plus largement dans celle de la Mer, (appelée aussi Mémoire de l’eau) avec une vague de sérénité inattendue, et enfin de manière poétique et symboliste dans la série des Mangeurs de lotus. Mia Funk a ainsi entrepris de révéler sa proximité avec l’élément liquide. En Irlande ou sur la Côte d’Azur, où elle réside souvent, la présence de l’eau s’est affirmée comme une muse essentielle. Le médium lui-même en est pétri puisque toutes ses compostions sont désormais élaborées au préalable à la gouache ou à l’aquarelle afin de saisir dans l’instant, sans repentir (« one try »), les images fugaces des souvenirs qui l’obsèdent.

Les personnages devenus des silhouettes le plus souvent anonymes, volontiers féminines, voire répétitives, s’abolissent elles-mêmes, fantomatiques, confondant le monde environnant avec leur propre personne. Mia Funk apprécie Magritte, dont une rétrospective donnée à New York l’avait bouleversée adolescente. Elle avait découvert non seulement la possibilité de faire disparaître les frontières entre les choses, comme lorsque le ciel se mêle aux personnages, mais également de rester dans la figuration tout en évoquant l’imaginaire et le mystère.

Dans ce « monde flottant », tel qu’elle le définit elle-même, en hommage à la peinture chinoise dont elle se sent proche par ses origines, et que dont on perçoit pleinement l’inspiration dans les Mangeurs de Lotus, la violence des rapports à autrui a cédé la place à l’apaisement relationnel. « Tout juste peut-on percevoir un personnage recouvrant l’autre », explique-t-elle, pour rappeler la difficulté de communication entre les êtres, qu’ils soient proches ou non, une problématique qui constitue l’un des fils directeurs de sa démarche picturale.

 

THE ISLAND BY MIA FUNK
OIL ON CANVAS (DIPTYCH), 2 X 162 X 130CM

La vision comme un flotteur

Les peintres, depuis l’impressionnisme, ont interrogé la vision. 

Mia Funk se souvient, qu’enfant, elle a connu une cécité temporaire. « Dans ma jeunesse, explique-t-elle, j'ai eu des problèmes avec ma vision comme de grandes taches solaires qui effaçaient ma vue. En anglais, on les appelle des « flotteurs ». C’était effrayant, mais il y avait aussi une intensité de couleur. Et tout ce que je regardais disparaissait derrière ces champs de la lumière. J’essaye de reproduire cet effet dans la peinture. A ce jour, j’ai une myopie sévère qui me permet de voir les détails, mais laisse d'énormes taches aveuglantes. J’éprouve de la difficulté à me concentrer sur des objets en mouvement et à reconnaître même les gens que je connais bien, à moins que je me rapproche très près de leurs visages. Une fois, j’ai vécu une cécité temporaire où tout est devenu blanc, et lorsque je peins je tente de reproduire cette expérience d’effacement ou de retour à la vision. »

Le regard dès lors est devenu un acteur déterminant de son art. C’est celui avec lequel elle observe et celui qui modifie la perception. Cézanne refusait de peindre la nature suivant des procédés appris mais en la voyant avec ses propres yeux, au point de déformer les choses si ces derniers le lui disaient. Mia Funk laisse aussi parler la vision avec ces tâches de lumière rémanentes qui constellent parfois les corps, ces massifs végétaux floutés comme s’ils étaient vus à toute vitesse d’un train, ces coups de pinceau synthétisant des détails qu’on ne prend pas la peine d’observer attentivement.

Le processus créatif : entre image et écriture

La série d’entretiens avec les écrivains constitue la partie inédite de cette exposition. Des compositions et des portraits peints s’articulent avec les questions que Mia Funk a choisi de poser à ses chers auteurs, et avec leurs réponses. Les dires interagissent avec les scènes et l’atmosphère des romans qui l’ont marquée. Elle-même écrit et publie des textes, ce qui l’implique dans un corps à corps avec cet « espace littéraire » cher à Georges Blanchot. On comprend alors pourquoi Mia Funk a choisi d’appeler ce nouveau thème « le processus créatif ».

La symbiose s’opère entre la lecture et la rencontre, non comme un propos journalistique, celui d’une interview qui serait juste illustréed’images, mais avec l’objectif d’un peintre, celui de donner à voir l’écrit et l’écrivain ensemble. 

C’est la profonde originalité de cette démarche, que l’Université Panthéon-Sorbonne a le plaisir d’initier. Encore ne s’agit-il que d’un avant-goût, destiné à nous faire découvrir l’art de Mia Funk et à nous faire patienter. Car une fois la collection des entretiens et portraits d’écrivains achevé, une seconde exposition les rassemblera, avant de circuler dans plusieurs grandes universités étrangères, en Europe et aux Etats-Unis. Notre institution du Quartier latin a fait là un choix judicieux, celui de présenter une artiste plusieurs fois primée dans des salons de peinture prestigieux, à qui plusieurs ouvrages ont été déjà consacrés, bien représentée par des galeries de la capitale et résidant régulièrement en France, dont le collections des musées et les paysages inspirent nombre de ses peintures.

Stéphane LAURENT
Associate professor, Faculté d’Histoire de l’art & d’archéologie,
Université Panthéon-Sorbonne


Inside the Artist's Studio

Essay by Prof. Patrick E. Healy, TU Delft

Funk has created from the ground up a direct means of story telling - on the other side of this immediacy is an intricate even witty matrix of menace - where what initially might seem a homage to great artistic personalities - Bacon,and Freud - contains elements of Grand Guignol, morbid sensitivity, demonic decay and atmospheres of surreal mutation which all underscore the layered reference and pointed compositions by which she communicates as much horror as delight.

In one sense the picture plane has become the 4th wall of a traditional space; the black box of this space which we look into from our illuminated view-point also acts as a magnet drawing us into places which have often been only available to the artist and their secrets - secrets of process and inertia - but predominantly in this narrative of Funk, scopic cruelty.

This cruelty belongs to the first moment of sensation, and becomes distributed in every decision made by the artist. Pain is said to have no representational possibility - Funk makes of representation in fact the essence not only of pain but of suffering. The large canvas of Bacon and his studio captures perfectly her strategy one wing of her triptych - art as a scene of a crime, a laboratory and theatre where the vivisection of the gaze is the active wrenching from reality of the artist’s precise concerns; the first extraction and reduction. The second wing of Bacon in a suit is an almost emblematic figuring of the artist: as public salesman, a prostitute, the purveyor from his or her will of blue chip investment - and the central panel becomes the slaughterhouse - becomes the knacker’s yard of auction and sales pitch; a flawless theatre of the grotesque where the apotheosis of art and the artist is translated to the great abstraction - the great leveller, money which takes all of life, suffering, beauty, joy and soul, and says “how much”?

Karel Teige* states this latter situation perfectly in his Le Marché de l’Art, where the liberty of artists to deepen the question of human-existence in all its forms and where the artist is not simply to be considered in terms only of sales. In one sense the question of the artist's will and creation was not possible where the middle classes took control of style, production, evaluation and ultimately pushed artists to equate art = business.

Turning to one part of the triptych of Funk’s narration it is helpful to see where this excoriating satire is heading. The parting is a phantasmagoria of the studio of Francis Bacon. This is no longer the studio of the romantic artist’s fantasy - a ‘cave of making’ in Auden’s words - full of memento mori - a private wunderkammer of the studious artist / collector / connoisseur - rather it is the exploded shell behind the fourth wall of a stage on which the fantasies and life of the artist have been projected. Funk creates literally a scene of pandemonium

- she references eerily the interior of the studio of Bacon, which has itself become a vast cult object installed in Hugh Lane Gallery of Contemporary Art - as the creative and chaotic cock-pit of the demented artist creator. And old myth is re-issued chaos/creation - the artist finally brings order to everything, and so all is well with the world and investments are safe.

Funk marries the precise, detached observer as artist with a cruel indifference - not only to the viewers outside the space - now in a darkened auditorium while the space is illuminated. Bacon is placed standing at the threshold where the passage of movement and change, that wrestle and dislocate nervous sensibility and feeling is most spatially marked - marked however as what is mobile and changing. The doorway is like an old arch in Augustan Rome - bifacial and allowing penetration - but the bulbousshape of the artist seems stuck like a large seal on wet basalt rocks - trapped as it were in the gaze of his own making. Only blindness could release an artist from such captivation.

In Funk’s painting of the studio of Freud the same arrested movement is given to the artist – the entry is soundless and has the sinister soft contrast of those marionettes who take over the life of the ventriloquist – as one would become only that which one mimics. After all if the object is of a value of fetish then the ‘sex-appeal of the inorganic’ results, as in Benjamin’s phrase, in a draining of all vitality - this is what the vampire extraction of blood suggests all circulation is removed - the body becomes a transparent sheath, not of bones or structure - but of an eternal, inanimate compulsion - when matter is so sexed it too becomes an escape from time.

THEATRE OF PANIC, oil on canvas, 118 x 158cm / 46.5 x 62.2 in

The space of the picture also belongs to a triptychal organisation - the door akimbo and the back of the the stretched canvas on the left also function like theatre props. There is no doubt, as in old pictures of saints about the identity of the artist - he has brushes and rags in the right hand - and on the wall behind, Funk has placed small pictures, the Muybridge wrestlers - the source for the models in the centre and for the painting of the models behind the simple electric light. (This refers to Picasso or the electrical light in Van Gogh’s paintings.) We have here so many layers that the referencing becomes not an act of erudition, or canny awareness of art research - but a very complex ploy in which between figured source, referential artist - looking at the tangled wrestlers - which is re-represented in a painting framed by the emerald of a velvet curtain - the whole space seems to be tightly wrought - even a photographic moment of stasis but instead is spiralingout of control in the shifting thresholds that the whole illusion expresses. There is a mise en abîme, the looking that is figures, looks at the models that are represented and they are negated to the left third division of the canvas by the demonic decay of an inverted narcissus where theribcage of the body echoes the barrel shape of the twisted contraposto figures and receives in return the glare of a vampiric ghoul - worthy of German expressionist cinema, where the power of hypnosis – magic interiors, magic boxes was the vast self-protecting illusion of a middle class which sought to defend itself from mesmeric violence by retreating into fantasia and the unreal.

“In fact, in Bacon's cruxifictions, the onlookers typically have the more well-defined faces, yet they seem more horrific that the disasters of flesh and blood in the room with them.[...] There is no sacrifice. We do not have to understand or get to know Bacon's figures to feel their pain, nor do they need to represent the pitifully massacred children of God. They are animals on their way down, as are we; that's enough.”

– Maggie Nelson

excerpt from The Art of Cruelty - a Reckoning
courtesy of Maggie Nelson

 

FREUD CARRYING MODEL, oil on canvas, 118.7x163 / 46.7 x 64.2 in

Every mise-en-scène is a mise en abîme. The satire itself feeds on what it depicts. This is not an external scripture of Bacon as an artist - the satirist is primarily one who absorbs by ingestion. The object of satire to a glance where the holes of the self presentation have grown larger and larger. This we can sense is where the look of Bacon has been directed - almost through the hollows and voids of all the figurations which saturate the work - in the bulb of his left eye a glimmer of recognition seems no more than a twitch of intelligence - like a nervous tick which joins the emptiness and anguish. This may very well be what Funk meant in interview when she spoke of an “existentialist crime scene”.2

Even being aware of the void - or the weight of just being there as a pressure or weight - another force among forces - seems to belong to nothing - an abyss where things show themselves as being - there - but with only the necessity that the ground of that appearance is at least in this work no-thing -- it is no-thing because the artist has loosened even the most rigorous and contrived composition into two significant vectors - one the disappearance of viewing of the figure into a virtual suspension - and secondly the mutant anatomy of a flesh dripping in formaldehyde - which looks back into the olive green stare of melancholy. Here instead of the + cruciform composition, or the triptych arrangement - like boxes within boxes - the incontestable presences of something unheimlich –which Freud read in stories of Kleist and Hoffmann – the ‘uncanny’ occurs as an event in the transversal of two gazes that do not meet or interpret but are sovereign and thus indifferent to each other. From this, the flos oculi of Bacon to the carnal narcissism of a living death – a threshold which only the inorganic organisation of material; woven linen, pigments, paints, dust could fully communicate. Subtending the organisation is a precise narrative of belief - although it too is a fiction. Funk uses the metaphor literally - it is an act of analogy and mutation - a metamorphosis - and just as experience for Bacon lies in the passage, the threshold even of body crushing on body – what is emphasised is a kind of ascetic withdrawal - the artist is only naked in the hands and face– the layers of oily clothing however seems like fleshy outcrops taking on some sluggish, dense, viscous flow – the moment is disarticulated and meshed in a hollowmannerist look where the looming musculature and hula hoop swirl into a high resolve varnish and ropey erotic. The bodies have been skewed from perspective and return like anamorphic negatives back to the single source of light – as if the naked bulb is the only condition of exposure and lighting condition of illumination where everything is seen in a homogenous way.

...art as a scene of a crime, a laboratory and theatre where the vivisection of the gaze is the active wrenching from reality of the artist’s precise concerns; the first extraction and reduction.

The brushes have the blue of this painting - it may well be that the artist is drained - and what is read as an entrance is a last look before his own disappearance - after all the eyes of the figure of melancholia look out into the space of the viewer - shrouded by the weighty green that gives the figure a demonic viridian slightly poisonous shadow - and the upturned eyeballs look like the sockets of antique marble - such a gaze is made of stone and places the viewer who will be turned also in a moment of arrest and capture.

That the force comes from Fuseli or Fritz Lang is as irrelevant as the fact that Muybridge uses a pair of wrestlers thought in the Renaissance to be a work based on a copy of a Greek original. After all, this art history is also a game of – traces - a bad detective in search of an unknown crime.

Here again we can see the way in which the composition and all the references become themselves like the bands that encage the figures - where the erotic seizure is properly the love bite of the vampire - the torsion of the lower figure draining out in surrender - the body image is not in the bodies but in the vestigia of the painter’s rags on the floor. The erotic charge is hinted as in the dense symbolism of Dutch still lifes by further photographs from Muybridge on the floor.

Turning to the work with Lucian Freud as its apparent main subject - we find again the use of knowing detail to disarticulate the way the propaganda of the market – relying so much on the image of the artist - fails to understand the problem of creative liberty and intelligence and even what Funk once entitled for her novel ‘Beauty and Cunning’. Degas once suggested that a well made picture is a crime. What Funk emphasises through the composition is the detailed planning in the whole work. It is clear that she wants to break with what in fact was always an ideological invention ‘creation out of nothing’ - instead her work delights in making it clear that creating comes from creating - the will of the maker is paramount, only these traces, gestures, make the work. The criminal is only a trope of free intelligence – this takes on a vast romantic repertory - but Freud is neither a robber baron or a Robin Hood. He is a crafty manipulator of energy and material, and in some way the primal predator with paint - who drains the life of the model to create illusion.