This interview appears in the December 2012 issue of Modern Painters magazine.

Strange things happen in her pictures: Fluorescent Founding Fathers melt into trippy patterns; Michael Jackson’s corpse (painted before his death) rots on an autopsy table; a woman sneezes a ferocious burst of pigment onto the corner of a canvas. Pleasure and perversity and just a tiny bit of terror coexist. Yet Dana Schutz’s figurative paintings have earned comparisons to James Ensor and Thomas Eakins, John Singleton Copley, and William Copley, all the while defying simple explanation. An exhibition of 40 of her works spanning 10 years, which originated at the Neuberger Museum of Art, in Purchase, New York, and opens in January at the Miami Art Museum, provides an opportunity to examine her artistic evolution. Andrew Russeth visited Schutz at her new studio in the Gowanus neighborhood of Brooklyn.

How did you pick paintings to cover a decade of work? Did Helaine Posner, the curator at the Neuberger, have specific ideas?

Helaine chose a few paintings from each body of work that I’ve made. A lot of the paintings that I personally liked depicted people reclining. I worried for a second that it would be a show only of people lying down! Normally, I would never put two autopsy paintings in the same room — it would just be too heavy. But in a show like this, it seemed okay to have them together.

Were there surprises when you were seeing some works again?

Yes. There was one painting I did in 2004 — I thought that the palette and the space were completely different. You forget the surface of the paintings. My process was a lot different then. There was more chance involved in the earlier work, so it was interesting to see. I remember making those paintings: They would go off the rails, and it was a big struggle to get them back. I kind of miss that, so it was cool to see those.

Do you still try to introduce chance into your work?

It always happens, just in different ways. I know this might sound obnoxious, but I remember that earlier on I would actually throw paint at the canvas. There was a kind of chance in where it would land, and if it didn’t land in the right way, I would scrape it off. I stopped doing it because I thought, “This could get really mannered.”

But those paintings don’t read like paint was thrown. You were making decisions after the element of chance.

Yeah, I’m really controlled. The tension between chance and control is really important to the making of them. There was always a feeling that the paintings could fall apart at any moment if they weren’t structured in a particular way.

What is your process like today?

I work from drawings to begin with. They usually start with thumbnail sketches on newsprint just to get a feel for the composition and scale within the painting. I have been wanting the paintings to have more of a drawing quality recently. Sometimes I will draw for a few days, mostly with ink and brush, and an idea will catch for a painting.

You got your MFA from Columbia in 2002. Who was there? What was that like?

Jon Kessler was teaching there, and Charline von Heyl, Rachael Harrison, and Kara Walker. It was amazing. There were so many people visiting the school, and I think the most shocking thing was realizing that all these artists you read about are real people. It sort of made it feel possible that you could be an artist.

What was it like being a painter in that program?

New York was different then. There weren’t a lot of painters in Columbia my first year, but in my class a lot of people made paintings. It was a permissive time for painting, but how to make a painterly painting that wasn’t a quote of painterly painting was a difficult question.

So that was what you were trying to do?

It was something I was interested in. I remember the first time I ever showed paintings. It was at a museum in New York, and the director thought they were just awful; she told me I was the worst painter she’d ever met. I didn’t know what to say, so I said, “Oh, thank you.” But I remember walking around the museum and thinking, “Well, why would she say that?” Looking at other paintings, I realized mine were kind of — I don’t want to say scuzzy, but at the time I thought they were scuzzy. I just thought that I should have painted the edges or cleaned up the sides, because they were all pocked up. It was a question of what would happen if you made a painterly painting. Would it seem really regressive and out of it, just some Neo-Expressionist stuff? It’s so different now.

People say that women, like Carrie Moyer or Charline von Heyl, are the ones making the most interesting paintings today.

I heard somewhere that women see color differently. I think it’s less of an issue for women to paint that way. When I first moved to New York, if a guy made a huge painterly painting.... Maybe you could be more macho as a woman, and it just was not a problem.

In an interview last year you said that you wanted to paint “questionable pictures [that] maybe shouldn’t be pictures.” Could you explain?

I think some paintings can step outside themselves. In the Musée d’Orsay, in Paris, there are these great Degas paintings. There’s one painting of, I think, a pedicure. It’s just such a strange painting, and it really jumps out next to the others. It’s such a mundane subject, yet oddly it’s a beautiful, deadpan painting. It’s a peculiar choice. It don’t mean strange as in sick or willfully weird. I’m not interested in overly sensational subjects for the sake of it.

I think Peter Schjeldahl has said that a major moment in his developing an interest in art was seeing a Manet painting of asparagus.

That’s great! There is a kind of intimacy with certain paintings, like maybe only you know them. With these paintings the subject is usually unassuming, just slightly off or not in itself worth mentioning. The “questionable pictures” that I was referring to were these paintings that I had been making recently that were often of awkward situations that could be very physical, I wanted these paintings to be somehow contagious.

“Dana Schutz: If the Face Had Wheels” will be on view at the Miami Art Museum from January 15 through February 26, 2012, when it travels to the Denver Art Museum.