Artist Eloise Hess Is Leaving Her Mark on a Centuries-Long Dialectical Conundrum: Photograph, or Painting?

AGE: 30
BASED IN: Los Angeles

The difference between a photograph and a painting has been well-trodden dialectical terrain among artists, critics, and historians alike over the past two centuries. In the case of Eloise Hess, it’s impossible to tell in which bucket the work belongs. The 2024 Yale Painting/Printmaking MFA grad developed a distinctive image-making process that involves transferring photographs wet onto absorbent paper, embedding the print in an encaustic surface, and painting, carving, and otherwise manipulating the resulting image to create records of passing landscapes, shadows, gestures, and, above all, time.

Describe one work you’ve made that captures who you are as an artist.

Early Morning Tomorrow was important for me, and I’m happy to move forward from it. The paintings are screenprints of photographs I took with my dad. He pointed one camera, and I shot through its viewfinder with another. Each photograph is encircled by a shadowy frame that is the tunnel of the viewfinder, equally occupied by the space photographed and the space of the camera. It’s about the attempt to hold onto and the attempt of translation.

Describe your work in three words.

Time, resonance, capacity—capacity, resonance, time.

Imagine someone gives you $150,000 to make anything you want—no strings. What are you making?

I would use it to live—to be able to make whatever comes, without worry about making a living. And if worried, as I have been, it’s important to live, to be able to make whatever comes, anyway.

What’s an artwork you didn’t make, but wish you had?

It’s not possible, nor should be wished, but can be a lesson. Liz Deschenes assigned us that lesson, to make a version of another artist’s artwork. I made a version of an R.H. Quaytman painting of a Katarzyna Kobro sculpture. I don’t wish I’d made it, but sometimes I do wish for a system like hers, perfectly open and closed, lifelong.

What’s an underrated studio tool you can’t live without?

A microwave and a mini-fridge. I don’t leave the studio during the day.

What art-world trend would you like to see die out?

Less gossip (it will never die), more belief (let live).

Is there a studio rule you live by?

Go to it. Also, walk, take in the sun.

See CULTURED’s full 2025 Young Artists list and access other individual artist profiles here.