Q&A With Jordan Casteel

This painter tells Scholastic Art how and why she makes portraits

September 2023

Photo of an artist with paint supplies in background

Aundre Larrow

Jordan Casteel

Personal connection might be the defining feature of Jordan Casteel’s portraits. The artist was born in Denver in 1989 and lives and works in New York today. Her portraits feature friends, family, and people in her community—often those who wouldn’t otherwise appear on a museum wall. Through many layers of paint, Casteel shows great respect for and understanding of her subjects.

Scholastic Art: When did you first start making portraits? Why?

Jordan Casteel: In high school, I got put in a drawing class that terrified me. I thought it was going to ruin my GPA. But I found that I really loved being in the studio and drawing. I would pull pictures of my family from photo albums and then replicate those pictures as drawings. By the time I got to college, I was doing little cartoon portraits of my friends for their dorm room doors. My junior year, I studied abroad in Italy and started painting portraits of the groundskeeping staff and my classmates. Through graduate school, I just kept coming back to the human form.

SA: What do you hope to learn by painting portraits?

JC: Portrait painting is an opportunity for me to slow down and really investigate and engage with the person and their environment. I can get out of my head and my assumptions about who I’m painting and really get into the nuance of what makes that person who they are. It could be the subtlety of the way they hold their hands, or it could be the environment that I capture them in. It’s different than just taking a photograph.

SA: How do you think about color?

JC: My process begins with a tool called Color-aids, which are basically expensive paint chips. I use them to determine the colors in a painting. I throw hundreds of them on the floor, and I just begin to play. I pick up one color that captures the energy of the person I’m getting ready to paint. That first color goes on the background as a wash. It becomes a source of light for the painting. Once I’ve made that initial decision, I begin to pick out the rest of the colors. I put the Color-aids on the wall next to the canvas I’m working on, using them as a guide. It all comes together much more easily when I’ve prepared myself for the moments when real freedom can exist—when I’m actually painting.

SA: In a painting like Lean, above, which takes place on the New York City subway, why do you choose not to include the subjects’ faces?

JC: It is the only circumstance in my practice where the gaze is not direct, because I am not directly engaging with them. I use my cell phone to capture a moment when someone has captured my attention. It’s about seeing and being seen. The engagement is just different than in my big portraits, where they’re all people I know and have asked to participate in the process. [In the subway paintings,] I’m interested in color, composition, and the subtlety of how people carry themselves.

SA: What advice do you have for aspiring young artists?

JS: Always apply for everything. Even a rejection brings you one step closer to your goal. The number of times that I thought I wasn’t good enough and didn’t throw my hat in the ring for opportunities is something that I deeply regret. The times that changed my life or got me closer to my dreams have been when I took a leap of faith and had to trust that either something would rise up to meet me or that I would learn to fly.