Artist Tiffany Calvert, OC ’98, blends traditional and modern techniques to create stunning pieces in her own distinct style. Utilizing a diverse arsenal of methods, including fresco painting, digital painting, digital modeling, and artificial intelligence, Calvert’s approach to art is refreshing, original, and experimental. She is currently associate professor and chair of the MFA in Visual Arts Program at Sam Fox School of Art at Washington University in St. Louis. She gave a talk on her career to Studio Art students Nov. 11. The Review contacted Calvert via email to learn more about her process.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity. 

For those who did not attend the talk, could you speak on your research area and practices?

My work integrates diverse technologies into oil painting, from historical buon fresco to 3D modeling to data manipulation. I explore the intersection of media theory and painting’s ongoing project of examining perception. My current work directly addresses our relationship to digital media, and more specifically proposes that living with and within digital screens fundamentally has shifted our perception of the world. Modern painters as far back as Cézanne have principally concerned themselves with the nature of perception, which gives the medium of painting — still life specifically — the historical grounding and language for this work. In fact, rather than being at odds with technological invention, painting has historically been invested in other technologies to further its aims — even in mechanical reproduction technologies, so often framed as threatening handmade imagemaking, such as the camera obscura.

My most recent paintings use artificial intelligence to generate imagery using a dataset I have collected of historical still life paintings. I print these images large and paint thickly onto them. Because my dataset is relatively small for the AI to learn from, it is insufficient — this causes distortions and failure in the imagery, which is both productive to my painterly aims and reflective of the implications of AI.

Could you speak on your journey from aspiring artist to an established professional? What are some expected and unexpected challenges you overcame?

The most challenging thing is to keep making more money through various jobs. The best piece of advice I ever received was from the painter Elizabeth Murray, who gave a lecture at Rutgers University where I was at graduate school. To an admiring undergraduate who asked how she’d made it, she said: “You just have to be the last one standing. Just keep working, and others will drop away and stop making art. Some for good reasons — they’ve gone on to do other great work in nonprofits or curating for museums. But if you can just keep making art, no matter what, you’ll get there.”

Your work has been described as a unique connection of both traditional and contemporary approaches to art — when did you begin developing this methodology?

I have always been compelled to use old and new media together; I began my artistic journey at the genesis of the internet and Photoshop 1. In fact, while I was at Oberlin in the mid-1990s, the art students collaborated down in Mudd Center A-Level and taught each other primitive versions of Photoshop and web coding in HTML for tables and animated GIFs. It’s for this reason the digital has always accompanied my art concerns; I grew up alongside the internet. At that time, it was totally possible to learn enough coding to make a funky website. At its inception, understanding coding was relatively accessible. It’s much harder now, and I need to employ the help of computer engineers. I remember thinking back then that there would be a proliferation of avant garde websites full of bizarre navigation structures and even weirder content. That largely didn’t happen for some obvious art market reasons and other, harder to pin down reasons.

Art is an ancient practice that has had an important part in human history with constantly evolving methodologies. Do you have any thoughts on how new technologies will develop and change the art scene?

Art is not separate but rather always a part of the time in which it is made. So really, the question I consider is how do new technologies change us? As I suggest by integrating old and new methods in my own work, I aim to call attention to the fact that all artistic methods are technologies — including ancient frescoes. When viewed this way, the origin stories of technologies are opened up to be more inclusive. Artists are often the ones stretching or misusing new technologies as they come along. This is an important way they question their use and their place in our lives. 

What is a realistic piece of advice aspiring artists about to jump into a competitive art industry should hear? 

I try to share everything I can with my students — out of a wish that academia and the art world be a more level playing field. But one thing I would say is: you’re closer than you think to having an assistant to help you create, and you should start thinking about it now. It’s really important for an artist to contemplate how much of the work they need to make themselves — because it’s important to the ideas and understanding of the medium and how much can be done for you, so you can concentrate on advancing your work and ideas.