In one way, it feels fitting that Tess McMillan, a model so often exalted for her Pre-Raphaelite beauty, should also be a talented artist. The shock of that red hair against her skin is downright painterly. Yet McMillan’s canvases – on view this month in her first solo exhibition, Find Me Where You Left Me, at Laurence Esnol’s gallery in Paris – stray from any obvious art-historical references. Her figures – variously crouched in strange rooms, sprawled in burning fields, and stranded in the snow or surf – appear alone, their expressions coloured by a vague distress. And speaking of colour, McMillan’s handling of it is striking, almost fauvist. Faces are tinged with greens and blues and oranges; bodies glow an otherworldly blue.
But where did all of this begin? In middle school – the sixth grade, specifically – with a great teacher. “I enjoyed drawing in the way that I think a lot of kids do,” the 23-year-old recalls on a recent Zoom call from Milan. (Her parents were creative people in the general sense, her mother a wonderful cook and her father an amateur photographer.) But at school, one Mrs Hoover “taught actual painting technique”, McMillan explains. “She helped me to refine the coordination that it takes to look at an image and really sort of understand, what are you seeing? As opposed to just freewheeling.”
That rigour lit a spark, and when her family eventually moved from East Texas to Upstate New York, McMillan enrolled in the fine arts programme at her public high school. But there she was somewhat less inspired by the instruction, finding her art teachers’ standards frustratingly limiting. A painting wasn’t finished until it had a background, for example, and she was discouraged from mixing a little water into her acrylics the way she liked to do.
Asked what kind of art she was looking at and responding to at the time – which artists were informing her fledgling creative vision – McMillan pauses. “I wouldn’t say that I was particularly tapped into art history or culture at large in high school, but I do remember I loved Lucian Freud,” she replies at last. “I’m trying to think if there’s anybody else. As much as I want to say that – I don’t know – I loved Andrew Wyeth, I didn’t know who the fuck anybody was. When I was in high school and middle school, I just lived and died by Rookie Yearbook.”
Needless to say, she blithely flouts all of those old conventions now – but after dropping out of high school and beginning to model, McMillan stopped painting for a while. (In the interim, her medium of choice was graphite pencil.) “I think it took a couple of years to come back to the idea that I can make art truly for myself,” she says. “If other people like it, fantastic – that’s incredibly meaningful to me – but if nobody in the world liked it, I would still do it and I would still love it.”
Now, she regularly whiles away entire afternoons at her intimate, north-facing studio in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, mixing colours and dreaming up narratives. (She’s always been drawn to the portrait form: “I’m really not interested in painting anything that doesn’t have a person in it,” McMillan avers.) The thematic through line for the 10 paintings that make up Find Me Where You Left Me is loneliness and a longing for connection – ideas related to the psychological toll of the pandemic, sure, but also broader social and ideological shifts. “I remember realising, ‘Oh, I can’t think of a single person I know that’s just doing 100 per cent well. There’s nobody I know that is a beacon of mental health and is doing phenomenally. And I think a lot of that stems from loneliness, in some way,’” McMillan says. “Human beings across cultures used to think of themselves as an amalgamation of every single person who had come before them, and as a culture, we’ve evolved away from that into thinking of ourselves as ourselves. We don’t think of ourselves as our ancestors, and we certainly do not think of ourselves as anybody who’s going to come after us, because nobody feels secure in their future. And so I think that that’s one of many reasons that people feel so isolated.”
The show’s title channels the voice of her inner child, one reaching out for love, belonging, understanding. “This feeling of wanting somebody to come back to you, of feeling left [behind], it’s really heavy and powerful to me,” McMillan reflects. “And I feel like it’s something that guides everybody.”
Growing up, McMillan never imagined painting for a living – it would be a stretch to call this new show a dream long deferred, delighted as she is that it’s happening – but she also had “absolutely no idea” what she wanted to do after high school. “Even to this day, it’s still kind of crazy that I did anything,” McMillan remarks wryly. And yet, here she is, flitting around the world for fashion month, appearing in films – she has a role in Sean Price Williams’s forthcoming fantasy-drama The Sweet East, which premiered at Cannes this year – and exhibiting her extraordinary paintings.
“I was pretty convinced that I was going to have to wing it,” McMillan continues, “and I did wing it… but in a way that’s super fun.”
Tess McMillan: Find Me Where You Left Me is on view at Laurence Esnol Gallery from 5 October to 10 November.
