Danielle Orchard

Region: Northeast

Danielle Orchard’s paintings are about the interior worlds of women. She focuses on narratives that are common to painters— scenes like studio visits or the annual influx of institutional rejection letters. These autobiographical details are blended with Western painting history. Poses and gestures might originate in analytical cubism, the Italian Renaissance, the Chicago Imagists, the Bay Area Figure Painters—any moment when the female figure has been used to indicate a hidden psychological position. Her work is most closely aligned with a modern painting language, one that uses faceted forms and Fauvist levels of saturation to explore physical space and memory. The characters she paints are ultimately proxies for herself, and she views the whole endeavor as an opportunity for empathy, both with the (mostly male) painters who were searching for themselves in their female subjects, and with the women depicted, whose voices and narratives have largely been omitted.