Emma Fineman Starts Every Painting With Nothing. That's the Serious Part.

♦ ♦ ♦ JUNE 02, 2026 | 4 MIN READ Emma Fineman Starts Every Painting With Nothing. That's the Serious Part. At a Glance This week Cultured ran a very funny conversation between painter Emma Fineman and her SNL-comedian sister, Chloe. The joke is the sibling act. The serious thing, at the bench, is that Emma builds each painting with no drawing and no plan, which is improvisation in the hardest medium there is to improvise in. The surface gives it away before the jokes do. In the images running with this week’s Cultured conversation, Emma Fineman’s paintings are built from oil, encaustic, oil stick, charcoal, even newsprint and hessian worked into the linen, marks laid down at the speed of handwriting. Cultured published the piece on May 20, a loose and genuinely funny back-and-forth between Fineman and her sister, the SNL comedian Chloe Fineman, timed to Emma’s first New York solo, “Devotion,” at Alexander Berggruen on Madison Avenue, up through June 24. The headline is about prosthetic boobs and late-life lesbianism. The painting underneath is doing something I take completely seriously. Here is the line that stopped me, from her own account of how she works: she starts “with nothing, no drawing, no plan, just an empty canvas, and every decision is built on the last.” Read past the interview charm and that is a confession of method, and it is close to the hardest way to paint there is. What “starting with nothing” actually demands at the bench Most figurative painting has a net under it. You work from a photograph, or a drawing squared up onto the canvas, or at least a composition settled in advance. The image exists before the paint does, and the job is to deliver it. Fineman throws the net away. No underdrawing means no plan to fall back on when a passage goes wrong, no correct answer the surface is quietly creeping toward. Every mark has to answer the mark before it, in real time, with the whole thing able to collapse. That is why the comedian-sister framing, which reads as a cute hook, is actually the truest thing in the piece. Improvisation in painting is not looseness. It is the opposite. It asks the painter to read her own surface live and respond before the paint sets, exactly the way a performer reads a room and answers it without a script. The Finemans are doing the same job in two mediums. One of them just gets to hear the laugh. Improvisation in painting is not looseness. It is the opposite. Why oil stick, charcoal and hot wax are an improviser’s kit Look at the materials again and the logic clicks. Oil stick and charcoal are drawing tools, and Fineman has said she reaches for them because the act “feels more similar to writing, like jotting down an idea.” A mark made with a stick records the speed and pressure of the decision in a way a loaded brush smooths over. She is painting with handwriting, and handwriting cannot be faked after the fact. The encaustic matters for the same reason. Hot pigmented wax sets fast, which means a gestu