episode eighteen | opal ecker deruvo

Published 23 December 2020

Miranda Metcalf  Hey print friends. Quick update before we start this episode: since it was first published in July 2019, my guest has chosen the name Opal DeRuvo. As you'll hear, they're referred to as their previous name in this recording. This has been left with the artist's consent. Okay, enjoy. Hello print friends, and welcome to the 18th episode of Pine Copper Lime (Hello, Print Friend), the internet's number one printmaking podcast. I'm your host, Miranda Metcalf. I release an episode every two weeks, and on the off weeks, I publish an article on the Pine Copper Lime website featuring images and maybe a bit more information about the artist I'm going to interview. Just a quick round of housekeeping before we jump in this week: I have a couple of exciting things on the horizon and I don't want you to miss out. First, I'm getting tantalizingly close to reaching 15,000 followers on Instagram, at which point I'm going to be doing another giveaway, and this time, it's a stunning etching by an as-yet-to-be-named but incredible Thai printmaker. You're not gonna want to miss this, so make sure you're following the PCL Instagram (@helloprintfriend) if you're not already. Second, on the 31st of this month - it's July 2019, for anyone who's counting - the call for the Megalo International Print Prize is going to close. Now, I don't know if you know about this call for entries yet, but Megalo is in a great print studio in Canberra, Australia, and every year they host a print prize for which first place gets... drumroll... $12,000. There are also four figure prizes for all other placements. I'll put a link in the show notes for how to enter. But prizes aside, just by getting accepted, you'll be exhibited among other incredible printmakers from around the world at their gallery. I gave a little tour of last year's exhibition over on Instagram, and it was a goddamn inspiration. Finally, a huge thank you to all the Patreon supporters who help bring this show to you every two weeks. Honest to goodness, I couldn't do it without you. You are the very best, my heroes, and thoughts of you are keeping me warm in these long, cold Sydney winters. So as always, printmaking forever, shun the non believers, join the party. Okay, print friends, do I have an episode for you. What you are about to treat your ears to is an excerpt from a five hour conversation I had with my guest, Paul de Ruvo. Paul has an incredible story to tell about being introduced to the Center for Contemporary Printmaking at the tender age of 14, and how from there, they've developed their practice into a diverse and beautiful body of work exploring critical queer moments with the reverence of an 18th century portrait. I don't even want to say more about it than that. You're just gonna have to go on this ride yourself. So sit back, relax, and prepare to fall madly in love with Paul de Ruvo. Hey, Paul, how's it going? 

Opal DeRuvo  Hi, Miranda. 

Miranda Metcalf  Good to see you. Thanks for joining me. 

Opal DeRuvo  Great to see you. I'm so excited to be here. 

Miranda Metcalf  I know. I feel like we have amazing things to chat about, and I'm really looking forward to it. But before we dive into all of the juicy questions, would you just introduce yourself for the audience?

Opal DeRuvo  My name is Paul DeRuvo. I'm a non-binary artist and printmaker working in Norwalk, Connecticut as a collaborative printer and studio manager at the Center for Contemporary Printmaking. The print shop that I work at, the Center for Contemporary Printmaking, is in my hometown, which led up to how at 14, I walked into my first print shop, the CCP, my jaw dropped, and I really fell in love with the environment and I started as an apprentice there. So it's really, the shop that I work at now is the first print studio I ever walked into.

Miranda Metcalf  So how did you come to even walk into the shop?

Opal DeRuvo  So I grew up pretty much in a family of artists. My mother's a preschool teacher and my father was a darkroom photographer and photography teacher. So I grew up around darkroom photography, and it had a real impact on my practice. There was just such an aesthetic to the work that he did and the way that he taught the process, which was deeply connected, as far as a really alchemical craft, which he was an amazing instructor for. I'd always been making artwork, as so many of us had, but I really struggled with translating things into two dimension. So I started drawing using wire and making sort of two dimensional wire sculptures that I could manipulate by hand. And so it was a short jump from there to start thinking about brushing ink over the wire, like oil based ink, and then running it through a cold mount press. That was this sort of spring loaded, low pressure printing press. And so I started using that to make these wire prints. And also I had heard about Degas's process for making reductive monotypes and tried to replicate that on dampened watercolor paper in my father's darkroom studio in our basement on a cold mount press, to varying degrees of success. And then, at the time, I went to a school that was focused on Japanese studies. And my grandmother saw a listing in the paper for a show of woodcuts by an artist, Randi Bull, who was having a retrospective. I thought it was just a gallery that I was walking into. But when I got there and started looking around, I realized that the Center for Contemporary Printmaking had 10 etching process, facilities for all of the traditional printmaking processes, and I just wanted to come back. And I pretty much told them that if they didn't find something for me to do, I was just going to follow them around. So they could either give me a broom, or I would just sort of come and walk around the studio. And at the time, the master printer there was Anthony Kirk, who is a master printer and etcher who had worked with Ken Tyler at Tyler Graphics. So he had 30, 40 years of experience by the time that I was there. And so I really got to see right away what level printmaking could be brought to. One of the things I loved about it was seeing that there was a profession, that printmaker had an -er at the end of it. It was something that you learned and you also could do. So I was always influenced by knowing that I wanted to learn the craft and the technique of it. And it meant that there was something that really left me with some creative freedom for the work that I wanted to make, knowing that it wasn't about what I wanted to make, it was about how well I could make it, as far as the profession was concerned. So I applied to schools looking exclusively at printmaking programs, and looking for the best set up print studio that I could find. I applied with a portfolio that had drypoint and mezzotint in it, coming out of high school. I had done etchings.

Miranda Metcalf  So where did you end up going?

Opal DeRuvo  Ultimately, Massachusetts College of Art had one of the best print shops that I had seen. I loved that it was in an old gymnasium with every technique adjacent to each other, which really lended itself to cross-process work, which I was definitely interested in. So the main thing that coming from an internship apprentice position gave me was I knew that I loved the work, that I knew that I loved the collaborating that the printer and artist were doing. I love the problem solving aspects of it. I loved that every day was different. Even as an intern, I didn't know walking in what I was going to be doing one day to the next. But you know, I approached everything trying to show that I could do more than that. So if it was sweeping, I would sweep every single corner and dust every baseboard. And I was just going to do that until someone told me not to, because that was the kind of thoroughness that I was hoping might take notice.

Miranda Metcalf  So you've touched on it a little bit, but you have your own practice, but you also are a collaborative printer as well. I'd love to hear you talk about that, and specifically kind of about that balance, because I feel like I hear these discussions that some people are saying, 'As a collaborative printer, you don't need to be an artist' or 'I'm a collaborative printer, I'm not an artist, I'm more of a technician,' and where, for you personally, where does that kind of fit?

Opal DeRuvo  So I've always put in any of my information about about myself that I was pursuing a career as an artist and a collaborative printer. Those were never in conflict for me. But you know, you ask people sort of thinking about their dream scenario as far as making their work, some people really would love to be in a cave, in a castle, whatever, left alone with their work 90% of the time. And I was just never that person. The work that I make is so fueled by my relationships, my interactions with other people. So the environment of a print studio, the sort of collaborative space, was deeply nourishing to my own practice. And I also always thought that today, this is a problem I'm trying to solve for you. But tomorrow, it's going to be my problem. You know? If I can't work through this for you, how am I going to work through this for my own work? And in some ways, we give ourselves so much more liberty with our own work, if we get three quarters of the way there and then think, this is a nightmare, let me just paste this on after, you know, we can find another solution. But when you work with an artist, the demands are much higher. You don't get to make the decision that maybe this is too hard. That's their decision. So I love that it really was more demanding of my craft as well. Having seen, going into it, that there was a whole art to it and a way of communicating about it, that was definitely very impactful. But the ways that it came into my education was in the form of taking on TA-ships, I was always in the studio, I work on my own work only when it's really quiet late at night when no one's there. So it would mean that any of the hours I was putting in the studio, I kind of was half focusing on what else was going on, easily distracted. And so if someone had an interesting problem that was happening, or a litho emergency, I was usually the one that was around and was very happy to put off my own work for a little longer while I took on some interesting problem for the next two hours that I probably should have been, you know, working on some drawing I was putting off. So those all sort of fed into my collaborative work. But there's, in my whole career path, and a project I'm still working on that was hugely influential, was an early collaboration with an artist, Emily Lombardo. And I went to Mass Art, across the street from Mass Art was the School of the Museum of Fine Arts. So Emily Lombardo was in the MFA program at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts. But we actually met in the year I had already been graduated. And I was working at a cafe and she worked at the bar across the street, so naturally, we saw each other twice a day. Before her shift, and after mine. We saw each other a lot, and it wasn't until I heard her having some challenges with the person that was assisting her as a printmaking helper that I was like, 'Emily, do you know what I do?' And she said, 'Oh, I thought you were a photographer.' I was like, 'No, Emily, I'm a printmaker. I've been doing this since I was 14. What are you working on?' And what she was working on was a series called "The Caprichos," which was a queer feminist take on Goya's "Los Caprichos," started from the very beginning and doing all 80 of the Caprichos. So she reimagined all of them and really extended the satire into a contemporary perspective. She was working on that for her thesis show and had made 40 plates and she was like, 'I can't print them all.' I was like, 'This is the opposite problem of like every other printmaker.' I was like, 'Usually we're swimming in prints and not making more plates than we can print.' So I started working with her. And within a year, the Childs Gallery saw the project - they're an old print dealer in Boston who is starting to show more contemporary work - and was interested in publishing it. So you know, I immediately thought, there's only one place I could possibly conduct a project like that. I couldn't really do that in a student shop. So I approached the CCP about bringing the project back home. So I moved back to Connecticut with 80 etching plates and started editioning them. And so we've worked sort of in sets, since it takes so long to print one series of 80 plates, and they're very particular, they have like a mirror finished bevel, rounded edge, and about a solid inch of border around the plate, which the artist wanted a very contemporary look to it. So they're printed with like a blind embossment around the edge of the etching. So each plate just has to be fastidiously wiped and then the whites just polished, completely white with no plate tone, and there's text in the bottom. So you also can't just solvent the whole borders out. So they've always been a labor intensive project and we've been working on it for a while, but it was incredible. I mean, talk about your 100,000 hours working. It just meant right off the bat, I had 1700 prints to make.

Miranda Metcalf  And it's ongoing? Did you say you're still in the process of printing it?

Opal DeRuvo  It's ongoing, yes, we're still printing it. But we unveiled it at IFPDA fair in 2016, I think, which was the election year, because they're very political. And there's some fascinating plates in it, including Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump. And I was so aware as I was working on them that I was like, 'Oh, this history is still being written. We don't know the half of what these images are going to mean to people looking back,' which carries a little bit of Goya's originals, as well, there's some elements that are so timeless, and other ones that are really kind of mystifying to us. But there was always a consistent narrative. Like the hobgoblins, you know, each character represented a class of society and had a lot of connotations. And while some of that's lost to us now, at least to the average viewer, the elements of human nature are very apparent. And those took on a little bit of an ominous significance shortly after the election, as we sort of saw what happened. But it was unveiled right before it and we were able to hang all 80 of them on one wall, which was the first time I ever saw that in front of me. So a lot of work.

Miranda Metcalf  That must have been incredible, to see them all up like that.

Opal DeRuvo  Yeah, I remember seeing "The Disasters Of War" at the Yale University Art Gallery, and at the time, walking down the wall to the place that I had probably editioned up to and just looking down the wall to my left and my right and seeing how much was ahead of me and how much was behind me was certainly a moment. But then we switched up how we were doing them. Initially, we were releasing them in volumes of 15 plates. And then we started to just produce sets of the entire edition, the entire 80, which was much more sort of how collecting institutions were interested in it. So we've already placed a couple of those, which is exciting, and one set was shown alongside Goya's entire Caprichos at another museum who had the entire set. So that was very, very cool to see those installation shots of that as well. So that was my first contract job that I took on myself as the sole printer on. But it brought me back to CCP, and it was in a point of big transition. The master printer that I had worked under was no longer there, sort of just as I was coming back. And so there was a bit of a void as far as, there's a lot of work to be done. And so shortly after starting on the project part time, I moved to full time and started on as studio manager. Well, I started out as first as the associate printer and then later took on the studio managing as well. But it was a process of really sort of trial by fire. Working with artists right out of school, using every trick in favor I had to sort of work my way through each project, because there's such a gap between doing it for yourself and doing it for another artist. And you know, at the time I graduated just before turning 21. So I was very young. So I was coming back, I was 22, and working with artists as a collaborating printer. And then I've still been doing that for the last five years. So I definitely see a lot of growth for myself in that time. And looking back, it's just so cool to see all the different projects that have come through the door in that time.

Miranda Metcalf  Yeah, what an incredible experience to just kind of... you got thrown in the deep end, but it was like the pool that you'd practiced in.

Opal DeRuvo  And a really unique environment. The Center for Contemporary Printmaking is an arts nonprofit. So we have a print gallery, artist members who rent studio time, we have workshops, and we also have contract printing and collaborative bookings. So I'm one of two full time, three printers total, with Chris Shore and Meaghan Morrow are my two coworkers there. So you know, you're not alone in it. But we're also, in part, an educational facility. So there's a sort of different flavor to some of the work that we do since it's not solely publishing/production oriented. The studios are shared with artist members. So it's always maintaining kind of an educational role. So even while we're working on other projects, people are coming through the door just to see the galleries, to look at the studios, they might be working in the spaces, they might be working on their own projects. There's a lot of balls in the air when you're working on a project. It's not one of those sort of sterile print shops where you're able to close the door and work on just a single project for several weeks at a time and then that's over.

Miranda Metcalf  I feel like that's a wonderful introduction and overview for your collaborative practice. I'd love to talk to you about your personal practice as well.

Opal DeRuvo  Absolutely. So I mean technique wise, my two loves have mostly been etching, intaglio, and then litho have been equally engaging. My personal work has definitely been heavily influenced from growing up with a photographer in the family. Certain elements of just the aesthetic, the placement on the page, my father shot black and white square photographs. He sanded out the edge of the negative carrier, so there was always a black line around it. There was always a very formal look to them. And so my work, I think, really took on that in some formal elements of drawing, working with some color, but predominantly in black and white. Starting with this observational eye that I think I learned from photography, I still use my iPhone camera as my sort of visual sketchbook. And I'm constantly photographing. I have an 80,000+ photo archive that covers the last decade. And then my work generally is created drawing observationally from those photographs. The photography lens an honesty, I've always found, that there is... someone shows a side of themself in a 16th of a second that, in a longer setting, there's so much more ability to kind of control certain aspects of how you look. And it's impossible to not influence what's happening if you're there, drawing it from life. That becomes this editing process where what you're looking at never existed, there was no point in time when every element lined up just the way it is. Maybe it's done over three days, the model's always moving, you're making constant decisions from observation, but with this eye of an editor. Using photography, for me, was about capturing - I think it's Roy DeCarava that talked about - the decisive moment. An d you know, that there's a split second that, if you're looking for it, if you stay sensitive and open, there's these really honest moments around you all the time. And sometimes it's just about making yourself a little bit invisible and sensitive, as an observer, to not overpower that. And there's something about using even an informal camera, like a phone, that doesn't interrupt things as much, and maybe it's terrible that people are so used to seeing me holding my phone. But that archive forms the sketchbook in a lot of ways, which I pore over and look and I know when an image strikes me. And a lot of times, it's the sense that it already feels like my work, it feels like I've already made it. And I go, 'Oh, this is -' you know, either I have that experience in the moment or looking at the photograph and going, 'Oh, this is the world that I live in. This is the world that I'm trying to capture.' And that has so much to do with sort of elevating these moments of daily life, which I think are imbued with something really powerful, very human, something very sensitive about something so familiar, that they're mundane in some way but they're also very relatable, and they're honest. And I have a lot of devotion for my subjects, and I try and capture that. And so each step of the process of taking a photograph and moving from a photograph to a preparatory drawing that I usually do on mylar that I can keep erasing and things like that and flip back and forth and keep looking at, sit through a careful prepatory drawing, and then the transferring to the plate, and then the working on the plate, and printing it, that each step of this I really approach in a devotional manner where the labor that I'm putting into it, I hope, creates a sensitivity for the subject that maybe the viewer would have, maybe the viewer wouldn't, but it changes how you look at it from if it were just sort of something immediate. If it was presented as a photograph, if it was just an image that you encountered. You know, I think sometimes you would look right past them. But when you see what someone invested in them to bring this in front of you, it changes how you approach it.

Miranda Metcalf  I think that's huge. Yeah, that people do instinctually, even if they don't fully understand it, get the aura of something that's been treated with reverence. And the way that a snapshot on a phone, even if it's an interesting image, you're so used to seeing it, we're so image-saturated with even candid moments, because photography is so omnipresent, that transferring that with purpose to a plate, to paper, really is part of what gives your work the aura that it has. 

Opal DeRuvo  And the next step of that was being able to do that. So I always felt very connected to representational work and the history of that, as a queer person, as a queer artist, and typically depicting my intimate relationships and the closeness to the subject matter that I have. I needed to sort of be able to approach that, and I wanted to elevate that. I wanted to see it in the way that you got to see a 17th century aristocrat, I wanted to see that craft applied to the subject. I had to have access to it, I felt like I was somehow left out a little bit from work which, in presenting itself visually as anti-establishment, really also rejected any elements that were academic as well. That to give a raw credit to the authenticity of the work, they did that through just expressing it with the tools that someone might have. And I think that there's a lot to be said for that, but I wasn't seeing the full range in that. So work that was political, work that was critical, relied so much on expediency and the ability of someone coming to it. And then there was this work that was reserved for people with access to training and academic background. And they got to be depicted in one way. And sort of everyone else had these other options, but not the same one. And so that felt imbalanced to me. And it was something that I was trying to address through my work, to get to see the subjects that I wanted to depict, the moments from my life, approached with that same reverence. So after studying at Massachusetts College of Art, I actually took six months of drawing instruction at the Boston Realist Academy. That's like a French academic drawing school. And learned that there's a whole craft. And I grew up hearing that anyone could learn to draw, but the operative word there is "learn." You actually have to be taught that. And seeing a school devoted just to teaching that, I realized it was the most practical things that I never thought to ask. Like, I walked in and I saw how they sharpen their pencils, which is like six inches of lead coming out of a wooden pencil, and then you sharpen the lead. So you could always make a mark that - no mark you ever made would ever - you couldn't erase the marks. You build in strength of mark making as you build in confidence with where something is. So you start really spidery and very, very light, and you control your hand through drawing with a six inch lead pencil, which, the first couple times, you break one and you're just like, 'Well, shit.' And you'd be sitting in the figure drawing class, and you'd just hear this pindrop "clink" noise. And you're just like, 'Oh no. Someone broke their lead.' And realizing the speed also is so different coming out of school where you're always on a deadline, maybe two weeks is the most you have for a project. And in my first six months there, I did a 14 week figure pose. And I was coming once a week, and half the people there came two or three times a week to the same pose. So realizing that that drawing that I thought someone was just so good that they made this angelic drawing, took an amount of work that I just hadn't conceived of to put into it. And realizing that that was sometimes what it took. And in time, that might become quicker. But your first couple Bargue drawings, you're copying drawings of, usually, marble casts. So you start out copying a two dimensional form. And in the drawing Academy, all of the beginning of it is learning drawing skills, which form the basis of painting. But for a printmaker, it was kind of amazing, because I got to absorb all of that. And, you know, I wasn't really interested in the indirect oil painting. I kind of took that process, and that sense of visual analysis that I had learned, and I just added it to the years that I was continuing to work representationally, even though that wasn't much of what was going on at the time in the program.

Miranda Metcalf  You know, hearing you say that, it kind of makes from what I've seen of your work kind of click and elements of it that I think I've engaged with kind of intuitively, it's sort of like, 'Okay, that's why.' Because there is, there's just this incredible kind of delicate tenderness in some of the images that you make of these fleeting or passing moments. And it does have that elevating quality to it. And there's one that I was thinking of particularly that I think encompasses a lot of what you were speaking, which came to mind, which is your piece that's called "Ritual." Do you want to talk to that piece? Because I feel like it's a good example of all of these elements coming together. 

Opal DeRuvo  No, I think that that was a really significant piece. It was the first etching that I finished out of school, I started working on it the last summer studio that I rented in Boston, and then coming back to CCP to finish it. And the image is one that actually my boyfriend had taken, which was a little bit of a departure because I was in it. But it ticked all the boxes of, the second that I saw it, I was like, 'Oh, this is part of my work. This looks already like it belongs in the body of work I've been making.' And so responding to it right away sort of put it in that place. And it's one that I'm putting my lipstick on one of my best friends. We were just getting dressed to go out. And you know, he's wearing my silk blouse. And I wear lipstick every day. And it was something that really, talking about things that clicked for me, it was when I put it on for the first time, it clicked. The first time that I put on a shade of lipstick  that was like classic red, and I put it on and I walked out and I just saw the impact that it had. And I went, 'This symbolizes something.' It made me feel really, really seen in a way that just sort of waking up unadorned in any way didn't necessarily feel as me as I did presenting more femme. And that's something that's sort of critical to that identity, that this is a chosen element, that it's not the sort of obligatory aspects of femininity that you're sort of pushed into, but something that you really make a conscious choice towards. And so it's significant for me on that level. And then in this moment, getting back to the piece "Ritual," in this moment, before we were going out, asked me to do his lipstick, and he just like, floated down onto one knee in this completely elegant, angelic gesture looking up at me, and my face is turned down and the light's coming from behind me. So it's shadowed in this sort of dark figure where I'm bestowing that onto him. And in this moment that really summed up so much about queerness and the community and these aspects that are so important to us, and seeing it, seeing my profile, it touched on all of these things. My mother's family's Jewish, you know, there's my full profile, and it just felt like this very religious sensibility to it. But it was this sort of queer baptismal moment. And so that image really struck me, and then I worked on it. It's a fairly large-ish format, like 17 x 26 inch copper plate, worked on it over at least a dozen proofs, and translating this type of drawing that I was learning and the same steps that I'd gone through of identifying the shadow line, suggesting it through the spit bite, and then building darker tones on and using China pencil and dry point and different types of stop out and things like that to build up the image. And then sort of finally getting it to the place where it felt like it sort of carried all of that. But it's been a great piece to have, because it sort of crammed a lot of that into it.

Miranda Metcalf  It's so well named, too, because that kind of passing of secret knowledge, the secret feminine knowledge, right? It's so ancient, it's in human DNA so far back. And it also is such a deep sort of bonding. I didn't really grow up with any particularly feminine female friends. Like I didn't really have that, basically. And when I come across it every now and then in my adult life, I'm so touched by it. It's so moving. Like, I just was at a wedding a few weeks ago. And I didn't know anyone besides the bride, and I was an attendant. And I hadn't painted my toenails, and I was wearing open toed shoes. And I asked, 'Does anyone have any nail polish?' And someone was like, 'Oh, I have some.' And I was like, 'Okay, great. Thanks.' And I went to take it from her, and she just was like, 'Oh, I'll put it on you.' And I was like, 'Aahhh! Are we best friends now?'

Opal DeRuvo  And you are, you are in that moment. They could be a complete stranger and there's so much - and I've seen how much it's changed through these years, you know, my identity has also evolved and how I think of it and how I understand that. And those elements of my presentation became more and more crucial to who I was in a way that I, in the beginning, just viewed it as broadening the scope of masculinity. And then in time, while that was an important conversation for me to have, and I think that there was something significant about that, but in time, that felt less and less accurate and less and less honest, because it didn't seem... it wasn't like a political statement. I mean, it was, but I wouldn't stop doing it if the politics changed. I could be somewhere completely different and that might not be important at all, or, you know, sort of that same question, you're like, oh, if you're the last person... or if tomorrow, you woke up and you had to get dressed for the next eternity, what would you put on? And there was no sense that I'd be like, 'Oh, if I have to wear this forever, I wouldn't look like myself,' you know, this was completely, totally beyond skin deep. And so that really changed how I thought about my own gender, I'm just recently changing how I name that and understanding that as a non-binary experience, and an aspect of trans identity that is really important to me. But it's so layered with what you're talking about, because I started to see how much my presence shifted, and how people engaged with me, this sort of sisterhood that even the piece is about because - it was very funny, just being two visibly queer people, people would think that they understood that we were together. And the response was always like, 'No, no, no. IThat's just my sister.' Like, this is not the relationship, and sometimes from the outside, people just really had no context for seeing that, to see that bond. And the power that that had as two people embracing something feminine about them. And then in the world at large, when I have that moment with someone, and you just know that you're sharing this moment of sisterhood with someone, who in that moment, you know you would do anything for them. If they were in trouble, if they needed something, you would follow them home, you would walk them somewhere. If they feel like they could trust you and show you that, that's so powerful. And it was a totally different world that when I felt like I had access to that, I was really privileged. I felt like I was being let into something.

Miranda Metcalf  Yeah, well, I think there's such an interesting and fluid space between sort of gender as performance, right? So this idea of the other and how do I want to be perceived? And then that idea, I love what you said that, you know, if you were dressing this way for eternity, or if you were the last human being on Earth, if no one's seeing this red lipstick, or this hair, or whatever it is, besides you. And I think that a lot of people get kind of tripped up in that and in the weeds in it in a way that is just not necessary, because it is so much more in a gray area. It can be, I choose to present this way for me and for you, and it doesn't need to have this kind of distinction. 

Opal DeRuvo  And there's definitely a trap of authenticity in that where you're like, 'Oh, if you wouldn't do this everyday forever, then it's not you.' And the reality is, no, we absolutely live in a very complicated world. And I feel deeply privileged that I'm in a space and have a sense of safety in my daily life that I can move through the world this way. But you know, every other headline, and looking at the work shared by other femmes, specifically non-binary femme people of color and trans women presenting along the same spectrum, you know, absolutely in a similar way, but experiencing absolute violence every day for that and either choosing to go out this way is coming at a great cost to their safety and well being. So it's never to make it about like, oh, this authenticity test of doing it every day or something like that. And that comes up a lot with visibility and things like that, where you're like, well, it's this double edged sword where you're more visible, but that can be a target. But I also don't shy away from it at all, that my experience of it has been so different and it's really given me a lens to view that privilege, because it isn't... I see reflected constantly that I have experiences that are very different from other people sharing a similar experience. And so, you know, looking to make space for both of those and hoping that in time, the conversation that I can have through my work and the platform that it can create can continue to work on those sorts of topics, even while, at times, there's always that risk of being like, well, do you make it too subtle? Do you make it too on the nose? Do you step outside your experience and risk it feeling inauthentic, or do you make only within your experience, and then are you addressing everything that you'd hoped to in your work? And so I've definitely shifted towards just at least an understanding of it as a body of work, as the meaning of each image is sequential and narrative and builds over time, so that they're not in isolation. And that's how we consume images now, like you're saying, we're super saturated with them. So someone can see my entire body of work. And, you know, not each image needs to go out there to try and tackle every challenge or every identity or anyone who might share this, but I hope that being honest and authentic in sharing what my experiences are, that people who have similar ones, or don't, but find that they're surprised at how much they share in that, is something that has been empowering to me.

Miranda Metcalf  That's significant when any work is being made about, you know, anyone outside of the human gold standard of the straight white male, like straight white cis male, right? I think the work often is, and again, I think this is something that gets lost a little bit, is that it can be about the inherent otherness, at the same time, it is about the inherent humanness. So I'm doing this ritual, let's say, that you're gonna see. You're gonna see this in your own way, and maybe you're gonna say, 'Oh, I see my wife and daughter doing that,' or you're gonna say, 'Oh, I do that with my sister.' But it also can be a statement of, 'This is who I am,' you know, it's the artist saying that this is also how I exist as well, which is different from you, but also the same. And that's part of what makes work about identities really, uniquely beautiful, because they can exist in that space.

Opal DeRuvo  And something that I've definitely looked to share and at least sort of to be generous in my own experience with is that early in my work, some of the images that I was responding to had a lot to do with watching one partner struggle through his coming out process, his accessing transition related services, and presenting in the way that he needed to be seen in the world. But what I kept finding over and over again is that the steps taken were so common, and you had mentioned the performative aspects of gender earlier. What I saw over and over again and I focused on in my sort of earlier work were moments like haircuts, like there's a piece, "Buzzing," that's a 30 x 40 silk aquatint. So it's a fairly large print, and the process gives it a sort of really deep, velvety black. But the image is of my partner shaving his head in the bathroom sink, which got at so many little moments in it, because on one hand, we make a lot of decisions every day about our hair, our presentation, every time we get a haircut, such an important aspect of our identity that we make a decision on constantly to either maintain or reaffirm or change. And also, frequently that's accessed in really gendered ways where, when I had a short haircut, trying to convince the hairdressers to leave the little sort of pixie length bits above my ear, which they would just cut off over and over again. It didn't matter what I said, they sort of just cut them off, because that was not the haircut that I was supposed to be getting. These little gendered aspects would come out over and over again, the barber shop being a very male dominated space. And so it was a challenging environment to sort of acces something that you need every week or two. And I don't cut hair, and all I would end up doing in these moments is photographing, kind of powerless to help but also as an observer or a voyeur, and watching these sort of contortions that he would go through to shave the back of his head in the mirror. Which were always fascinating for me on a formal figurative basis, but also that they're critical moments of identity creation. Also the ones that were so relatable, so there's that one, there's another one where he's picking his clothes out in the morning, and I was always waking up in bed and kind of staring dreamily up at him, backlit, picking out his clothes. But being like, this is something everyone does. I'm not sharing something that's so different, that's about only other trans people have in common, but something that everybody is going through with their gender, but they are allowed to view it as something invisible or something wrote and sort of prescribed that queer people don't have that roadmap for, so everything's intentional. How many partners you have, what you call them, who you're committed to, in what ways, how you look, how you present yourself, all of these are things that over and over again, we don't have a roadmap for, so we're kind of making up as we go.

Miranda Metcalf  And I wonder if that kind of ties back into the question we were fooling around with a little bit earlier, before we started recording, about communication in queer communities and how there is a shared language that at least I recognize across the states, it is very self observant and understanding, and maybe because, as you say, there's not a roadmap. You don't grow up seeing movies, you know, like every single movie ever made, which is about two straight people getting together. Like, you don't have a culture, it's not there. So maybe that's part of that communication, because without a roadmap, the need to find your way forward is so inherent and important. And the only access is other queer people. You don't have a playbook, you know? Yeah, something like that. 

Opal DeRuvo  You're talking about the communication and the language, you know, each element of that is also deliberate. And something that often is fought for in different ways. So I think there's a lot of awareness of that, and also awareness, especially in terms of communication and then visual culture, that's related to that. It's steeped in its own reservoir of artists working and sharing work on the margins. And I think that photography was also sort of instrumental, because I saw more confessional ways of making images that were related to Nan Goldin and Mark Morrisroe, having more connection, in some ways, to my process and the ways that I make images than, say, another studio artist or a Lucian Freud or something like that. Maybe they're getting at something that's kind of raw, kind of honest, but in very, very different ways. And that ability to capture something on the fly and something fleeting has a lot to do with this intimacy and codedness, and there's not really a lot of promise that you're always, you know, let's say you meet out one night, that if you met the next day that you'd be looking the same way, that you wouldn't necessarily be in the same space of this moment, this exchange that's so important, but also a little bit fleeting, and a little bit fraught, maybe. So I think that that way of making images and communicating visually, through partially coded, partially overt ways is something that is important in that I'm trying to, certainly not always succeeding, but looking to give something to... that there's parts of my work that are overt and those parts that are just more subtle, that maybe have a special significance to another queer viewer, but that there's a feeling that supersedes that so that, you know, people are able to connect, for that split second, with desire, with intimacy, with longing, before they ever connect another element of it. Because they're having that experience with the subject. Not what I'm thinking about, necessarily, who it is, but they have their own narrative. The fineness, the detail of that line work you're able to convey, communicates that. It's a very intuitive line that it follows, that people can absorb and read.

Miranda Metcalf  In a way, the more finely rendered the actual bodies are, almost the more universal they become. Because when you see, you're going to have an intuitive reaction just from seeing something that's very, you know, just the shape, the gesture, the body language that's going on, before you start to kind of decode the social cues that then may allow you to fix identity to the figures. 

Opal DeRuvo  I had some really interesting responses. I mean, there's so much to cover. But I was doing a residency in Germany near the Swiss Austrian border in a town called Sigmaringen. And I was staying there, and one of the pieces I made, this monotype of my partner Enoch, who's a performance artist, and their body is very much a part of their work and their narrative and their artistic presence. When they had top surgery, they didn't have nipple reconstruction in the process. So they just have two scars that run parallel across their chest. And what people attach to that, because there's several pieces that those scars are visible, and again, I talk a lot in thinking and writing about their own work about healing and the way that a scar is representative of so much. So that type of surgery, which I never actually, I'd seen so few that I didn't actually realize that often it looks like a mastectomy scar from cancer. And so sometimes people were looking at these images, and they were thinking maybe this was my mother or something like that. Which really made no sense in the context, but at the same time, I had no problem with because I was like, 'Wow, if I don't know that that looks like a mastectomy scar, then why haven't I seen more mastectomy scars?' In the same way that this person, of course they wouldn't necessarily know, inherently, that this is a specific decision that my partner made when they were having their surgery, something that was so visual and significant but sort of connected across very different identities, but on a very human physical body, in a way that related so much to the body. And, you know, human processes of healing and things like that.

Miranda Metcalf  And again, that identity and the way we attribute that, what is male, what is female? And all that. And that's interesting, I think there'd be an interesting exploration there of kind of what exists in that space too of having the choice versus not having a choice, right, because that's a huge difference. 

Opal DeRuvo  But both being necessary for survival in their own way. 

Miranda Metcalf  Exactly. Yeah.

Opal DeRuvo  And the process of healing a scar is deeply related to the sort of trauma associated with it, and then a really powerful process of stitching someone back together, you know, mentally, emotionally, physically, and healing through that. So, I think that that's another narrative that I sort of hope comes into the work even though, if you ask someone to necessarily pull all of that out of it, I don't know that they would have that. But it doesn't change how we respond when we see something really physical like that.

Miranda Metcalf  Yeah, and that human response, whether it's empathy or wanting to care, or maybe, I think people sometimes have like a natural inborn kind of pulled back almost fear sometimes of like, 'What happened to you?' 

Opal DeRuvo  And also that mirror neuron response that's actually producing an echo of that, you know, it shoots down your leg, you see that, and it gives you a jolt that so much of human empathy is built on. That ability of our brains, that they've evolved the ability to see something that someone else is experiencing and experience a physical mimicry of it and understand something about what would happen because it'd be impossible to learn. You know, if you had to touch the same stove that you just watched someone burn themselves on to know why they're yelling, you know, you'd burn yourself a lot more.

Miranda Metcalf  Yeah. And then all of those social questions that's like, you know, why weren't you as familiar with a mastectomy scar? Mastectomies are so common, right? And why isn't this woman familiar with the top surgery scar? Top surgeries are so common. But again, it has to do with what we see, the communities we're in, what we associate being appropriate to show. It's all really interesting,

Opal DeRuvo  What I've always driven towards, anytime I saw an image that I'd created, or that was some moment, when I got the sense that I was like, 'I don't think I've seen this image before.' And we've got millennia of like, all the entire, like, human history of image making, we have such a visual saturation of digital culture now. So any image that I haven't seen, I'm like, 'Oh, there's a reason. There's a social pressure for this image to not come across my gaze.' Whether it exists and I haven't seen it, it doesn't exist, which is probably rare. But more often, it's just that this is not being allowed into public space. And even down to the Facebook algorithms censoring some binary gendered sense of what is a female presenting nipple, which is an absurd term to begin with. It's a nipple, it doesn't have a gender identity. But yeah, that these are very real, very programmed ways that we're limiting the number of images, the types of images, that we're able to see. And so that visual artists have a way to kind of push back against that, because our life is the images we make.

Miranda Metcalf  Yeah, and visual artists are the creators of visual culture. Kind of going back to this idea of what we're allowed to see and what we're not, or what we're shown and what we're not, one of the things that I think about when I look at your work is this idea of like tenderness as protest, in its own way. Because it's so against the masculine narrative, which is the narrative that we get, and that to show vulnerability, to show intimacy, is in and of itself an act of resistance to what we're fed we're supposed to value, which is strength, independence, knocking each other down, competition, all of those toxic masculinity, capitalistic values that is what we're born into. So I guess, I wonder if you ever think about your work in those terms? Or if you have thoughts in general of that idea of resisting through gentleness or tenderness? 

Opal DeRuvo  I mean, I think that pretty much sums up what I try and do with my artwork in general. There's something that I wrote for my artist statement, and the first line of it, which I sort of used a lot to try and sum up some ideas about that, just starts that within the divine halo of an embrace, there exists a tenderness so powerful, it overwhelms the coded markers of otherness around us. And the idea really sitting right in there about using that and really feeling like, again, like what I talked about, what I have to bring, like the air sign thing, I don't bring the real fiery energy to the work that I do, but it doesn't mean any less to me. And I think that honestly, there's so much more strength that sits underneath that. And you find that all around you. You find that in mothership, in the way that we're talking about that people protect each other, that they work through some of the most difficult things imaginable with so much care, with so much tenderness, and the people that you kind of come to in your life that you think of as the strongest are the ones that have really been able to do all that and, on top of it, not become bitter. Which, that seems like so much, and then when you encounter bitterness, you go, 'Oh, this is also an expression of really having been through something and being really vulnerable.' I see it in that bitterness as well. So it's not that that's like, 'Oh, that's a sign of weakness,' but it's just that you see that this is something fragile and worth protecting, and that there's not that much more I would hope to do. But it's also funny in the way that you just framed it. In a very literal way, I had the wonderful opportunity just last weekend to lead a workshop at the Goethe Institut, which is a German language bridge in New York City focused on teaching language to people who might one day pursue citizenship or something like that. But they had an exhibition curated by the Schwules Museum, one of only a couple of museums in the whole world solely dedicated to the art and history of LGBT people. And they have a whole archive of that in Germany. So on behalf of Stonewall 50, the 50th anniversary of the Stonewall uprising, which is happening right now, this month is Pride Month and it's the 50th anniversary of that. I was asked to be one of two artists who presented a youth workshop to students to try and bring that narrative around and update it because the exhibition is going to travel all over the world, from literally Dubai to Helsinki and very different cultural contexts, to try and explain the history of the LGBT movement, especially in America, and as told through this German visual culture that was curated for the show. And we ended up approaching it via collage and allowed the students to take these copies of the work and just cut them up and recontextualize them into their own work. And then I introduced using rubylith as an overlay film and citrasolve transfers and some other processes that sort of come from a printmaking perspective. But the work that I made while I was in the workshop with them to talk about what perspective I brought to it ended up taking all of the pieces where people were holding protest signs, which were also in German that I don't read, and replacing the image in the sign with the moments in which there were queer people touching from the other artworks. And so it was maybe a much more literal version of it that I wouldn't have made if I wasn't doing collage with a group of high schoolers. But it was also sweet to just sort of think about this visual narrative of what I'm trying to stamp my feet about in my work, which is just that intimacy is political, that sharing our personal lives is political, and that there's never going to be a point where talking about those stories is going to get less necessary. Because whether or not the context that it's in changes so much over time, and you see that in the work that was presented. And when I did the residence in Germany, I was asked a lot about my identity as a Jewish person, which, growing up in the northeast, it's part of it, my grandmother survived the Holocaust. And so it's been a part of my identity for a long time. But does it affect me on a daily basis? Not at all, in the way that being a visibly queer person influences every sort of interaction that I have. And so I was going to Germany and talking to people who had never met a Jewish person, because it's so isolated in the south there, and there's so few people that came back, but conveying a narrative that had to do with my experience as a queer person in America but also identified a relationship between them. And another piece that I shared for the youth workshop involved being situated in a room in the artist in residence that was converted, it was a beautiful old cedar room, but it had once been army barracks. And it was two weeks into the residence that I looked above my bed and saw that in the old beam, there was still a swastika carved into it. And it was the first time I was just so struck by seeing this original record that had nothing to do with some little shit teenagers, but knowing that this was in the heart of Nazi territory in Germany, was so different. And knowing immediately that I wanted to do something about it, but I also felt such an urge to document it and for there to be a process around it existing. And so I ended up making this piece that was made up of seven long, pink strips of paper that had a frottage rubbing of the swastika on it. And each rubbing, I sanded 50 strokes of sandpaper, and slowly the swastika disappears. And my initial gut had been I wanted to just carve a triangle into it, but I didn't want to make the symbols sharing an equivalency, that like, now, for the next 100 years, whatever, as long as this building's here, that exists. But I was so much more struck by the ability of one symbol to erase another, and to rewrite that narrative. So the last panel of it is just a small upside down triangle of the black sandpaper that's still embedded with the sawdust from the sanding stuck on it. And it was sort of... one, it carries with it the physical residue of it, and two, really spoke to the ability of symbols to erase and change. And by this delicate, slow process, just erode a really hateful history embedded in a visual culture. So, there's something that I got to bring and physically show the students at the collage workshop where we were talking about a lot of symbolism, and then also had as part of the culmination of my residency there to talk about overlapping identities and have some sort of accountability process for that as well.

Miranda Metcalf  Yeah. And just that act of the 50 strokes of the sandpaper, like, it's so gentle. Well, you will have to keep all of us up to date on what you're doing. Where can people find you and follow you and learn more about your work?

Opal DeRuvo  So my Instagram is @sayyoudo. My website is opaleckerderuvo.com. You can find my portfolio and projects there.

Miranda Metcalf  Well, I will definitely put all of that in the show notes. And thank you so much for coming on. I'm so glad we got to have this chat.

Opal DeRuvo  Absolutely. And I definitely plan on sharing my process during the residency. And I've been loving using my stories to give little windows into everything from my experiments steel facing stuff and other areas that I've been doing research into. So definitely stay tuned for updates there.

Miranda Metcalf  Wonderful. Well, we will definitely be in touch so thank you again. 

Opal DeRuvo  Thank you so much. 

Miranda Metcalf  Well, that's our show for this week. Join me again in two weeks' time when my guest will be Ben Munoz. We talk about his incredible undertaking of creating six wood cuts, eight feet high by four feet wide, all which chronicle his family's history of immigrating to the United States from Mexico, beginning with his grandfather all the way through to Ben's own two daughters. You won't want to miss it. This episode, like all episodes, was written and produced by me, Miranda Metcalf, with editing help from Timothy Pauszek and music - new, remastered, sexed up, and incredible music - by Joshua Webber. You're the very best, Webber. I'll see you in two weeks.