Mernet Larsen Details Her Painting on the Cover of Art in America

Mernet Larsen, whose painting Getting Measured (1999) appears on the cover of the Winter 2025 issue of Art in America, is profiled in the magazine. From her home in Tampa, Florida, Larsen told A.i.A. the backstory of the canvas, shown here in full.

This painting was really a turning point for me. I had been working quite abstractly, but I got this longing to make old-fashioned paintings of people and places and ordinary things. I felt jealous of Piero della Francesca. I’d done representational paintings before, but I didn’t want to go back to conventional realist paintings. So, I thought: Well, what if I use one of my abstract paintings as a springboard?

I revisited a painting I did based on an unfinished 12th-centuryJapanese painting of the Katano Shrine. I just loved its composition. Then I thought: What would happen if I tried to turn this into a situation? I dealt with it sort of like a Rorschach, asking myself: What does the structure and that composition feel like to me? It seemed like somebody measuring someone else. Growing up, we made and altered all our own clothes, so we were always standing on something and getting measured. 

I decided to use parallel perspective, a technique used in 12th-century Japanese narrative painting and by architects, where parallel lines don’t recede or converge—they just stay parallel. I hewed as closely as I could to my 12th-century source, except I rotated everything, turning a frontal view into a three-quarter view. Then I wanted to make it solid, so I had to infer volume before filling it all in, coloring book style. I kept it as simple as possible, because you don’t actually need much information to know what something is. I wanted to keep the focus on the space I was creating and on the statement I was making about reality and realism and perception. But I thought it would be just a one-off; I didn’t know I was going to keep working this way for the next 25 years. 

I had just made Indecisive Woman, a self-portrait of me trying to decide what to do next. I painted myself—or really, a woman character, as I wasn’t trying to get a likeness—in three-quarter view, with geometric volumes and parallel perspective. But then I rendered the deep hallway in the background in one-point perspective. I wanted to have all these different kinds of perspective in one space, so that it became clear that perspective is just a gadget. It’s something that people use to make something happen, but it isn’t reality; it isn’t correct. I wasn’t interested in making an illusionistic kind of space. That’s partly why I leave about an eighth of an inch around the edges of my canvases, so it doesn’t feel like the image drops off a cliff. All this contributes to the sense that you don’t know where you, as a viewer, are positioned in the painting—so maybe you could stand in for those people.