(Untitled, 2013, Oil, acrylic, and Flashe on canvas, 137.5 x 120")

THE BELIEVER: Can you talk about technique? I heard once that you told a class that at a certain point you figured out that most of the time, if a painting wasn’t working out, its problems could be worked out technically—in other words, that problems and solutions are both most likely technical, and not questions of content, or underlying concept.

LAURA OWENS: In art school, they teach you to struggle through the process: If you have your image down, you’ve painted it, and it’s not looking the way you wanted it to, you can do wet on wet—you just keep moving the image around, like the way de Kooning worked. You just keep painting over and over and over. For me, at some point, the idea of struggling through the process was not as interesting as doing tests and executing the painting after I figured out all of its elements and how they were going to work together. I have a really pragmatic approach to making the paintings—it’s a process of doing lots of tests on small canvases, trying out different materials, or rearranging things until what I have coalesces with my original intention of how I wanted it to look. And a lot of times the first three or four tries will be just terrible, but they won’t be the actual object—just the preliminary sketches—so I keep going until I get it right.

BLVR: So once you’ve come to your conception of the painting you stick to it and just try to find a way to realize that conception. You don’t discard it and try to find something else, or modify it depending on where your process takes you.

LO: Right. It’s really different than just diving in, which is how a lot of painters work. They throw something on the canvas, respond, throw something else on the canvas, respond, or they have a preconceived way of working that has to do with the materials and the steps you go through with the materials until you’re finished with a painting. I don’t use either of those methods; some people have commented that it’s more of an old-fashioned way of working, through sketches and studies, maybe like the way fresco painters used preliminary cartoons. I get to a point with the sketches and tests where I know about three-quarters of what the painting will look like, and then I make it. At that point, I’ll look at it and ask, “What else needs to happen?” Which is a sort of no man’s land where you can either go too far or do too...