Artist Spotlight: Mythra Schwartz

Images have become constant. Constantly produced, constantly edited, constantly viewed, constantly idealised, constantly irrelevant, constantly forgotten.  

Artist Mythra Schwartz’s practice slows the image back down. Through depicting digital images through oil painting, she is forced to examine them closely and for long periods of time. This is particularly poignant given her tendency to collect references from social media platforms, which generally promote an antithetical relationship with images. We visited her in her Fitzroy North studio, a ceiling-less room in a large buzzing warehouse full of fellow young artists of assorted disciplines. From Mythra’s studio, which is painted top-to-bottom white, aromatic with fresh lilies and endearingly tidy, we can hear chatting, drilling and mellow house music from the surrounding rooms. One can spy six-packs tucked away for when 5pm strikes and the artists converge in the cushy shared space or nearby park. 

Here, Mythra shares her process for creating her hyper-realistic, yet hypnagogic works of art. First, she decides on a conceptual framework, a loose format through which to select the groups of images she then paints so meticulously. One such collection was images from her teenage Tumblr account, another selected from the influx of deceitfully candid advertisements which flood Instagram. Once a formula is instated, she relies on intuition to guide her choice of specific images. For the Tumblr series: red lips, cigarettes, touching bodies. The Instagram advertisement collection: flash-photos of oysters, candle holders, wine glasses. Why she lands on the handful of images she ends up depicting—out of the countless available—only becomes clear to her throughout the practice of rendering them through paint. 

Mythra selects images fuelled by desire, churned out mechanically, viewed in excess, and then completely recontextualises them. Through the arduous process of hand painting, she reimbues the images with the very rigour and thoughtfulness they have been stripped of through their online saturation. To further extricate the images from their original desirous role, she intentionally paints them with a certain haze, a slight blurriness which creates a sense of unease. They are no longer advertisements or enticing photos, but now examinations of these very concepts.  

Mythra conveyed the pressure from institutions and the wider Melbourne art scene to focus on abstract painting, denying her intrinsic connection with rendering images. It was only when she undertook her Honours at the Victorian College of the Arts, with the unwavering support of her mentor Lisa Radford, that she began to resume her innate draw toward realism. The transition actualised through a preoccupation with shadows—their abstract mimicry of real-life objects allowing a fusing of both techniques.   

I did a lot of shadow painting and that was this kind of transition between feeling like I should be making abstract work but really enjoying rendering form and this allowed me to render something where the outcome was still something abstract. 

Mythra’s distinctive painting style requires a range of specific brushes. She took us through her process of using various da Vinci brushes, starting by putting down initial sketches with Hog’s hair, which are great for laying down paint, but quite rough. She then goes in with synthetic filberts for detail followed by the sable version to establish a softer, more diffused finish. She states this mild blurriness is integral to her works, transforming charged advertisements or desirous photos into vehicles of mild unease, encouraging viewers to reflect on their conflicting feelings of desire and discomfort.  

Products used by Mythra include a broad range of da Vinci brushes. 

Find Mythra on instagram.