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Danielle Orchard’s Indescribable Yearning

In "Borrowed Chord" at Perrotin Paris, she immerses the viewer in a world of female subjectivity rendered with the cool authority of a classicist and the instincts of a modernist.

Painter Danielle Orchard’s female figures evoke a particular tenderness, despite her protagonists’ aloof demeanors, which she cultivates by implementing a classical remove. Her new works in “Borrowed Chord” at Perrotin in Paris, are—as ever—ruminative in nature and soothing in tone, articulated primarily in oil stick on rough linen. They immerse the viewer in a world of female subjectivity, be it through experiences of early motherhood, the act of disrobing, gazing fixedly at one’s naked body, wrangling with creative choices, enjoying close sorority or embracing occasions of solitude.

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“Orchard’s engagement with the figurative tradition treats the language of modernism not as a set of exhausted forms, but as a living system,” writes Max Weintraub in the exhibition text, astutely describing the work as having a “quiet authority.” Her skewed proportions and quixotic silhouettes purposefully eschew realism for something lively, shapely and imaginative.

We spoke to Orchard in Paris about her awe of Greek caryatids, how leaving New York City changed her practice and the celebrity she accidentally but repeatedly conjured.

Let’s start with the exhibition’s title. Where did it come from?

“Borrowed Chord” is this concept my husband—who’s a musician—was explaining to me in relation to a Simon & Garfunkel song that we were listening to. I asked him: how do you make something sound like indescribable yearning? And he was like, there’s actually a term for it. You take a traditional chord, and then you move in parallel to it, and then you return to it. The subtle departure from the familiar has this emotional effect on the listener. I feel like there’s a similar effect in painting with color, where you adjust the temperature slightly. I thought it had this really great color cognate.

I painted a guitar lesson [Borrowed Chord (2026)]. One woman is nude, one woman is clothed, so there’s this strange play with who’s the vulnerable party and who’s the confident one, which changes when you’re in any sort of situation where someone is imparting knowledge.

Did you envision a particular piece that they were playing?

That’s a really good question. I hadn’t thought about that at all. I was thinking of it as very rudimentary. I’m trying to learn a little bit of piano, and that kind of humility, starting at toddler level… It’s foundational, yet there’s that inherent vulnerability in learning anything new.

The nudity in your paintings is often a shared state among multiple figures.

In Frieze I and Frieze II, I was really just thinking about low-relief Greek and Roman friezes, and how they’re these intentionally decorative objects that are so beautifully ornate, but tucked into the highest corner, nearly impossible to view. I went to Greece, to the archeological museums, and spent a lot of time in Athens looking at that stuff. When you bring them down [to eye-level], everything’s kind of squat and strange. It felt like there was an inherent modernist painting idea.

When you’re painting multiple figures, do you know ahead of time how they are going to be in relation to each other? Or is that something that you work out in the moment?

Definitely in the moment. I use a lot of oil stick—it’s compressed oil paint, which is more like a drawing tool—and it’s a little bit unwieldy, because it kind of breaks apart as you’re drawing. It’s intentionally less controlled. As I’m working, I’m thinking about these fairly rigid stone forms, but then using this really loose, playful paint. [In Frieze I and Frieze II], there was this dissonance, but I guess the idea is mostly just to let the form build in a way that isn’t premeditated. I really wanted to let color dictate the form.

Are there other referential moments from your Greek visit?

In Greece, it was the first time I saw caryatids—the women who function as columns—in person. I’ve had this idea that some of the women in my paintings are kind of propping up canvas edges. I loved seeing them in person. This is just an incredible artistic convention that I wish would come back—archaeologically necessary things that are in the form of women. It’s the height of objectification, but it’s also so powerful: you’re literally holding up a temple.

What’s your relationship to sculpture?

I think about sculpture all the time with these paintings. I don’t sculpt at all, but I do think of reductive versus additive. I did some sculpture while studying, using it as a drawing tool. Traditional painting programs use clay to force you to think through the form and its surroundings, the idea being that it helps you visualize things when you’re drawing. You wouldn’t fire the clay; it just goes back into the pile. That visceral idea of carving space is stuck in my memory.

Tell me about your implementation of color. The Goldfish (2025) is especially saturated.

I’ve been trying to use unpleasant ground colors. This one was a milky orange, not a beautiful color. That’s a through line for this idea: start with something a little bit off, and when you add color relationships, you can push the color in different directions. When you use blue on top of orange, you’re going to get some very strange results because they’re complementary; they react very strongly. I’m trying to find these strange neutrals that exist in the skin. I included the goldfish as this Matisse quote, but in this version, in the bag…

…they have a short lifespan.

Exactly. Like short-duration moments in paintings. That’s why I use burning cigarettes because, to me, they denote duration. I recently went to a lecture about a botanist writing a book about Emily Dickinson. The thesis of this book was that there’s a tendency to anthropomorphize plants, but she was botanicalizing humans. She was going the other way in her poetry. That’s something I find very fascinating, when the objects in paintings carry more human presence than the humans do.

Tell me about Metaphysical Muse (2025). It seems like a placeless dreamscape.

The collapsing of space is something that’s very familiar to painters when they’re in the studio. You’re pulling from memory, art history, the stuff that’s directly in front of you… you’re pulling from every flower that’s been painted. When you cast light on a model, you’re creating these artificial environments, and then you try to ignore all the external information around it. I wanted it to still feel like an art studio, like an interior and an exterior in one, in the way that Giorgio de Chirico and some of the other metaphysical painters were interested in symbolic spaces.

Do you use models in real life?

I have… I actually did for a long time. I also was one, too, for art classes. And those dynamics have always been really interesting to me. I did it because I needed money in school, but I was fascinated by that relationship of being drawn and also being someone who draws—kind of thinking through form as it pertains to your own body. That experience did set me on a certain course with my subjects.

When you’re without a model, do you have a cast of characters in your head? Or are your figures totally untethered to a point of reference?

I don’t use anything consistently or with any kind of intention—there’s no reference to real people. I just pull from memory, which I think ends up being a mix of art historical references, but also my body and the people I’m around, like my friends and other painters I know. Sometimes they’ll kind of look like a person, but never intentionally. And sometimes I’ll change it if I think it’s bordering too close. I’m looking for almost a classical remove.

I went to the Louvre right when I landed in Paris for my show. It’s really fascinating to see the transition from Etruscan to Roman bronzes. The Etruscan work is rougher, but they look like a guy you could see on the street. Then there was this movement toward erasing recognizability or definitive identity. I think that is a quandary that artists throughout history have grappled with: stylization versus the reality of what they’re depicting.

In modern painting, faces are kind of like a mask. Sometimes they look like celebrities, and I have to change it. For a good six months, I felt like everything I was painting looked like Jennifer Aniston. I wasn’t actively watching Friends… it’s almost like your brain gets into some loop, and you can’t break it. When that happens, to break that loop, I’ll have my husband come in. I’ll paint him just to sort of force my hand. But I don’t know if anyone else would think that it looked like her.

You mentioned other painters—who do you spend time with?

My closest painter friends are Nikki Maloof, another painter represented by Perrotin who lives near me—we met when we were like, 18, so we’ve been friends a long time—and Louis Fratino. We’re always sending pictures of what we’re working on, trying to get feedback. Just like, does this look like shit? It’s not extremely specific.

Can you be truly candid with each other?

I think so. No feelings are hurt because I think all our tastes are pretty aligned. Artists are the hardest on themselves, and then the people around them are like, I actually think that that’s really beautiful. Or, I do think you could push that.

It sounds like a gentle group.

We also talk about different paints—it’s a lot of material support. There’s a whole New York crew. I don’t live in New York anymore, but I’m a few hours outside, so I’m back and forth all the time. There are a lot of cool painters there. I’m glad that I got to ingratiate myself before I left.

What’s it like to be outside of New York? Was the move related to your practice?

Definitely. I was just so sound-sensitive. I lived in New York for 15 years, or approaching 15, and I moved studios so many times because I was always trying to find something peaceful, and it’s hard to do. It’ll work out for a while, and then you get a new neighbor and hear their podcasts. I don’t like listening with headphones in the studio; I have music on, but I don’t like anything that takes me out of the environment too much. When I moved to my 12th studio or something, I was like, I can’t do this anymore.

We found an old ceramics building that was for sale that we could afford. We could just buy a little building. I can spill paint, not care and not have somebody take it out of my deposit. It’s been really freeing. It finally feels like a space I never have to leave. Everything carries this temporary feeling in New York, like, “I’m not gonna get too used to this, because…”

…disaster could strike!

Like the landlord raises the rent 100 percent, and then you have to move. So this is just really nice. I could leave if I want. Above all, it’s quiet; it’s just birds and the trees. I like being in nature. It makes me feel better about everything, and it just clears my head. I feel like it’s changed some of my color usage, as well.

Your relationship to light must be so different!

Totally. There are a lot of windows in the studio, but you can just go outside and paint. I don’t paint from nature exactly, but I’m out there sometimes working on stuff. It does get boring, though; the winters are kind of rough. Cabin fever.

I love Clasp (2026); it’s such a deeply feminine gesture. Tell me about it.

I’ve used that gesture before in the past, of unhooking or hooking a bra. When I first started painting it, it was just, to me, such a funny incongruity between the sexuality of undoing the bra, but then its reality, which is awkward—you’re just like [here, she arches backwards and contorts herself].

Yes! It’s these crazy acrobatics.

It’s so funny to have it be portrayed as being very sensual, but it has ideas of proprioception built in. It’s a thing you’ve done a thousand times to your own body, but sometimes it can still, you know, throw you—which, to me, has a relationship to painting. You can return to the same thing that you do all the time in the studio, but it can just feel so foreign, depending on the day, or so awkward. As in, I just can’t quite get to that movement that I had yesterday or that rhythm. That’s the root of the gesture. I think that painting the contours of backs is really beautiful.

I’m sort of playing with surface here. I started working on this pretty rough linen that I had never used before, and I loved it so much. It sort of disperses the paint differently, so the brush or palette knife will catch on this texture. It’s not a portrait linen, which is super fine. It was very fun for me to contend with this outside complication—to deal with this weird area of fabric.

The title, Clasp, makes you look at her neck rather than the main gesture; I love that redirection. By contrast, Studio Annunciation (2025) is more overt.

I think that when inspiration strikes, it is kind of an uncanny sensation. Like, the day before, you had no ideas, and then the next day, a thousand ideas. You can’t dictate the cadence: it can be six months of nothing, and then two weeks of rapid creativity. It’d be great if you could schedule it out, but it doesn’t work that way.

I really just wanted to paint an angel. I was looking at that time at so much Fra Angelico, just like the floating figures. It was a familiar motif that gave the artist so much space to experiment. I’m not a religious person, but I do look to these icons from painting history as inspiration for the work that I’m making. She’s a woman sculptor, and then the annunciation’s coming in, helping to actually sculpt. But because the sculpture is pregnant, I was like, Oh, I should have her doing a C-section.

I didn’t get that right away!

It could be red clay or blood.

I love this idea of a “morning practice,” which is the title of the neighboring work. Do you have any rituals?

I was trying to get into meditation. I haven’t had much success with consistency, but I do love it as an idea. That was definitely baked into this idea that discipline results in a freer mind. I have a hard time doing things that aren’t in support of the other stuff that I do. I view it as a distraction, which is not a healthy way to live.

I can relate. If you’re working towards something, all the parts have to fit. Otherwise, you’re just like, ‘What is this outlier?’

Yeah, exactly—even if it makes you feel better.

Escape (2026) is a very New York piece.

This is the first time I’ve been away from my kid and my husband since I had a kid. So it’s been almost two years of constant companionship. I’m alone in my studio all day, but I also love solo travel more than anything. There’s a fire escape… but I was also just thinking about the notion of ‘escape’ from what you’re used to, the things that are idealized about that. It can be kind of melancholy, I think, when you’re traveling alone. It’s fun but, yeah, dinner for one. She’s also smoking indoors, like Parisians do. The curtain is kind of from Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, where it’s almost part of the figure, like she’s emerging or disappearing into it.

Is she the only smoker in the show?

She is. I quit smoking. It’s not trying to be autobiographical, but I think stuff like that happens when it’s just not on my mind anymore. Like wine glasses.

The way space feels in your paintings is often willfully wonky. Can you talk about that?

The objects are there to function spatially, but they’re also working symbolically. In that way, you can manipulate them at your leisure to aid in the general construction of the painting. It’s just making them subject to the demands of the square or the rectangle. I think that was popularized in modernist painting, but if you look at even Neolithic art, you can see that there was always this idea that you can change the shape to make it work for the constraints of the canvas. Sometimes I want it to be a little physically disorienting—an instability—so the figures can be more monumental. Kind of like this caryatid idea. And then the things around them are, like, swimming. It’s almost a cartooning impulse sometimes. My husband is really into graphic novels and comics. Each artist has their own sort of spatial logic, and it’s really on display in comic books. They even exaggerate it. It’s their signature.

I sometimes feel like that can be true of life, as well. There’s that weird drift feeling, like art-making as a living and how unstable that can feel, you know? Not financially, I mean, just like literally going in the studio and trying to make things out of nothing.

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