We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Ada Goldfeld. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Ada below.

Alright, Ada thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. We’d love to hear about the things you feel your parents did right and how those things have impacted your career and life.

My parents are both mathematicians. From afar, their path might seem like the total opposite of my own career as a painter. But on a day-to-day level, being a mathematician means working through abstract ideas, alone, which in many ways is similar to a studio practice. My parents modeled what it means to fully immerse yourself in a project and to dedicate unending time trying to resolve a problem at hand.

My parents also realized my love of art from a young age, and I am extremely grateful that they made a concerted effort to visit museums with me. I now realize how lucky I was, having grown up in northern New Jersey, to have been able to frequent museums around New York City throughout my childhood. But the real luck was having parents who encouraged and facilitated these trips—and who waited patiently while I spent hours drawing in museum galleries!

Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers.

I am a painter, currently working out of a studio in Ridgewood, New York. As an undergraduate, I studied painting, as well as art history and religious studies. I took several years after college to figure out what to do next. During this time, I considered pursuing academic graduate programs, but I realized that if I were to go in this direction, my art practice would become a hobby, or a side project, and I couldn’t imagine a future in which painting was not my focus. I decided to apply to MFA programs and fully immerse myself in my studio.

Since graduating, I have also dedicated myself to teaching college and graduate level painting and drawing classes. I enjoy teaching for many reasons. Overall, it is a joy to getting to watch and help others figure out their own approaches as artists. I also feel fortunate to be surrounded by people—both students and colleagues—who are constantly thinking critically about art. My own work benefits from being a part of this environment.

Can you share a story from your journey that illustrates your resilience?

That’s a good question! Let’s see…historically, painting has “died” many times. Critics have questioned the relevancy of the age-old medium over and over again. When I was in college, representational painting was especially dead. There was a push in the art world against representational and figurative painting, which were deemed less interesting than more complicated, abstract visual languages. Nevertheless, I was interested in painting people and objects, so I kept doing it, no matter how many people told me I shouldn’t.

Over the last decade, representational painting has been reborn. Painting figures, still lifes, interiors—it’s all trendy again. It has been so invigorating to watch the art world shift, and to feel like my interests are now taken seriously. I’m glad that I held true to my own convictions as a student, rather than bending to what was considered relevant at the time.

Is there mission driving your creative journey?

In my paintings, I’m interested in depicting quiet, mundane moments that appear banal, but are emotionally, and often politically, charged. Over the past few years, I have been painting scenes from domestic spaces—books splayed out on a desk, windowsills inhabited by plants, a box of crayons threatening to fall off of a table. I am interested in how these spaces teeter between very different emotional states. They can at once feel ordered and unkempt, spacious and cramped, warm and cold, or secure and on edge. I am concerned by how women find themselves relegated to these spaces, perhaps as comfortable here as they are burdened or trapped. I hope for my paintings to reveal these complicated feelings.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.adagoldfeld.com
• Instagram: www.instagram.com/agoldfeld