Tula Telfair

Tell us a little about your background.

I grew up on four continents, but spent most of my early childhood in the rainforests of Gabon with the Fang and Pigmy peoples and where weather and nature were impossible to ignore. I paint remembered and invented monumental landscapes and employ varied painterly techniques to create epic-scale vistas that I hope will be simultaneously awe-inspiring and intimate, fictitious, and familiar.

I received a BFA as a W.W. Smith foundation Fellow from Moore College of Art in 1984 and earned an MFA in 1986 as a Graduate Fellow from Syracuse University. I’m represented by Forum Gallery in New York City and Jerald Melberg Gallery in Charlotte, NC. I’m also Chair of the Department of Art and Art History and a Professor of Environmental Studies in the College of the Environment at Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut.

When did you know you were an artist? 

In my sophomore year of college, I decided to major in painting instead of becoming a medical illustrator after taking my first art–for–hire job with the VA hospital in Philadelphia. I made a pamphlet that involved lots of line work with ink, no light source, and no color. I wasn’t intellectually or expressively satisfied or challenged and realized that to be happy in life, I would need to experience those things in my studio practice. Painting offered that then and still does.

Was there a pivotal moment for you?

Ever since I was 19, I secretly made landscape paintings as color studies for my “real” hyper-realistic art. They were invented and looked like fluid shapes of color–think Rothko mixed with Avery–very abstract. I loved school and my teachers, but they were modernist and performance artists who told me I would never be respected as an artist if I made landscapes because landscapes are “dumb.” Years later, a gallery director walked into my studio unannounced and saw a group of these paintings on paper drying on the floor and invited me to be part of an exhibition of four landscape painters in NYC. In that moment I accepted the fact that I could make work that I wanted to make, instead of work for art critics. Ironically, landscapes like mine are now considered environmental and political as well as poetic. I no longer feel like my work is a secret guilty pleasure.

Where do you find inspiration?

My relationship with the Wilderness began as an infant, when my parents took me into the jungle to live when I was two weeks old. For years, the primary stimulation and concern for our family was how the nature surrounding us could help us or put us at risk. In this pristine place, we thought about how we could survive. As soon as you build a shelter, find a water supply, or try to keep warm, you begin “landscaping” the terrain to make it safe and hospitable so you can survive.

We approached everything we did with a desire to respect the environment and do as little as possible to put our stamp on the land. Today, most people–even in remote lands–depend on computers and cellphones, and don’t realize how much damage is done to the planet in order to extract the raw materials needed to live a modern and connected life. While we enjoy these wonderful conveniences, everything we do impacts the well-being of this planet.  Still, I came to landscape painting instinctively and am drawn to its sublime beauty and the almost religious feeling it triggers in me.

My work comes out of a profoundly inspired awe I feel in the presence of landscape. Today, everyone is aware of the impact devastating weather events have unleashed on this planet. All landscape painting today is necessarily about climate change, even if that is not the first impulse of the artist. Visions of Nature and Wilderness can be soothing or warn of the fragility of a place, they can offer peace and an escape from daily stresses, or they can frighten. In the end, I find solace in Nature and it reminds me that I am small and transitory and that this planet is the one thing I have directly in common with all life that has come before me and will come after me. I paint landscapes out of respect and awe for their beauty and power to inform feelings about life, but now I guess I’m also making political art. Life is complex and I hope that the work I make can serve many needs for many different people. I am on an endless journey to make a portrait of Nature through lived experience and memory.

What is your favorite medium?

Oil Paint–you can do so much with it!!! It’s yummy!!!!

Can you describe your process?

The vivid yet visceral memories I have of places I’ve been or seen inform the technical decisions I make. Starting with a blank canvas, I work intuitively and the image changes countless times until the piece triggers a déjà vu experience. The surface of each painting is extremely varied and heavily layered. Some paintings conceal more than 10 different images below the final one. I use a multitude of painting techniques, picking and choosing where and when the paint will be smooth or rough or creamy or thick or thin in order to facilitate a corporal reaction from the viewer. These works appear to be photographs from a distance, but as one approaches, the landscape image dissolves into an abstract, physically varied and fully material surface that also becomes a site for investigation, serving as an archive of my actions and decisions and a record of my intellectual and emotional explorations.

Is there anything else you’d like us to know about your work?

The remote locations I paint are inspired by areas where physical change is rapidly occurring on this planet. My recent work is informed by visits to active volcanoes, locations where tectonic plates meet and earthquakes occur daily, the solitary Arctic and Antarctic regions, and isolated areas in Africa.  As I paint, I try to capture what it felt like moving through a location, recalling how the terrain shifted, how soft or hard it was under my feet, how the sun or wind felt coming into contact with my skin, and the smells and sounds I experienced navigating the area. Ultimately, I am fascinated by the subjectivity of perception and the power of memory to anchor our place in the world.

Read about other artists on the Meet the Artists page.