maeve billings
on the easel
Title TBD but in my head I call this one "Blue Chicken Wings"
This painting has been on the back burner since 2020. At the time, I didn't like the direction the painting was heading. I'll be introducing some more mixed media elements over the next few weeks to shake things up.
artist statement
My paintings explore the body: its decay, its beauty, its grotesque truth. Some forms are rendered in pristine bone and exposed flesh, while others sprawl in viscera, smeared across glowing asphalt. Instead of flat greys, roads shimmer in turquoise, hot pink, and phthalo blue. Shadows gleam, and flesh becomes abstracted, radiant, and gooey. This tension between attraction and repulsion compels me. I aim to draw viewers in, to make the awful beautiful, and to challenge our cultural instinct to look away from death and the animal nature of our own bodies.
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Using oils, I paint various depictions of flesh, equalizing human bodies, roadkill, hairless cats, and meat like poultry and beef, transforming them into contemporary memento mori. The physicality of the oil paint points back to its own fleshy nature in that way that it sweats, drips, or scabs across the canvas. I’m drawn to what is abject and often dismissed: rot, guts, meat, reminders that we are bodies too. There is a peculiar intimacy in this confrontation. I have a body, and I’m upset about it. I am making peace with that fact, waging war against it, and painting through it.
recent events
What We Hold
Gallery East, 4250 Richmond Road Highland Hills, OH 44122
What We Hold - An Observation of Contemporary Still Life highlights the various forms that still life can take across differing perspectives and mediums. From the small traces of life that grace the things we interact with day to day, to objects that become uncanny or completely animated in their rendering, this exhibition will examine the historical genre of still life through a contemporary lens. How do objects make us consider our bodies in space? How might objects and objective art challenge traditional boundaries and hierarchies in relation to individual and collective identities? How connected do we become to what we hold?
about the artist
Maeve Billings is an emerging painter from Cleveland (OH) with a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from the Cleveland Institute of Art. They had their first two-person show at Waterloo Arts in Cleveland, collaborating with Bex Fuller to put on Collective Spaces in January 2019. Maeve has participated in group shows including Rotten Keepsakes, Are We There Yet?, and the Front International CAN Triennial: You Are Here. They have been in various group shows in Illinois, Ohio, and Missouri. Maeve acted as the committee chair for both the 74th and 75th Student Independent Exhibition. They have received awards including the First Agnes Gund Memorial Traveling Award, the Victoria Welling Award, Cleveland Institute of Art Gund Family Scholarship, the Governor’s Show Scholarship, the Ted Frost ‘88 Travel Scholarship, and the Cleveland Women’s Club Scholarship.
