Juliette Hayt is not only a trained oil painter, but she recently completed a Masters in Art Therapy from the School of Visual Arts. Her lifelong practice has always been engaged with the female experience, and her thick, warm-toned painting style is immediately recognizable, whether she’s painting peonies in the south of France or posting sketch updates on her Instagram story. This week, Juliette and I talked about her practice and how it changed throughout the quarantine, remaining engaged with physical and mental well-being as well as the mysteries of the unconscious. 

Emily Conklin: How has your relationship to place changed with your art practice throughout the quarantine? 

Juliette Hayt: During lockdown, I had the opportunity to escape New York City and live and work in both Massachusetts and Connecticut, basically out in the middle of nowhere amidst nature and farmland. My favorite setup was on a friend’s farm in Connecticut, where I was given a space in a barn to transform into a temporary studio. My work most definitely absorbed the changes in place — though I am still working within my medium, oil paint, and with similar iconographies, the compositions have this natural injection in them, and an intensely self-reflective tone that stemmed from the isolation I was experiencing during these months. 

EC: In what ways could you see your work morphing or changing during those months?

JH: Many of the figures I painted focused on growth and rebirth. Just before the lockdown, I was immersed in research into female hormones, and the menstrual cycle. While my work has engaged with female health and reproductive health specifically for a while now, this scientific engagement opened so many doors for me into the complexity of hormones within the female system, and spiritually, it opened a lot of mental doors, too. Each month, we have this potential to be reborn, with the menstrual cycle and its rhythms. I feel like the paintings I made this spring, especially a triptych of “angels,” as I call them, tracks the growth of my own self as a person and an artist, recording the multiplicity of inner selves I’ve grown to know and love. It is a celebration of bodily change, the dissolution each month of the physical into something new and rich.

EC: What was your process like, creating this triptych? Are the figures self-referential?

JH: While a lot of my work springs forth from myself and my own experiences, I never refer to the female figures I paint as self-portraits. Rather, I see them as a universal portrait of the femininity I’ve experienced in my life, and the birth of many versions of myself. This specific process dealt a lot with upwards emotion and joy in a time of darkness and isolation, which was a powerful response that I did not expect to experience so unconsciously. While I doubt I’ll ever be able to answer the question of how I engineer my paintings, I do know that I am very serious about following my intuition, and letting that guide the decisions that I can then examine. 

Really, I focused a lot on gratitude during the making of these. It’s so easy during this quarantine to fixate on all the things we can’t do. But when I was able to take a step back and think, I am so grateful that I can make a painting. That I am safe, that I am able to have this creative expression. That was a powerful guide for me, meditating on privilege. I feel the paint itself forced me to slow down, in its subtle ways of not really working or gelling until I really gave myself the correct time and space for thinking and healing. That’s when the work was done.