Several months ago, on a beautiful fall afternoon, I met artist Sophie Matisse (the great-granddaughter of Henri Matisse) in her inspiring studio in downtown Manhattan. While the conversation started with me professing my love for the iPhone, it quickly moved onto her paintings and recent collaboration with Kilian Hennessey.

I was immediately drawn to this stunning piece of hers and asked about it…

“The original painting by [George] Washington’s biographer was a portrait of [Washington's] two sons – and I thought it would be interesting to take them out,” Sophie explains to me. “It ended up being very 3-dimensional, virtually 3-dimensional, which is what I was going for. And now with the bottles for Killian, I am actually working with 3-dimensional objects for the first time.

“I did some sculptures, but really just one or two objects – I can’t really say that I’ve done a lot of 3D really sculptural type things. I love [the project with Kilian because] the transparency of the bottle creates a space inward where you know, you can swim around. I keep looking at this bottle…” Sophie says as she walks across to her desk and picks up a beautiful glass bottle about 4 inches tall and maybe 3 inches wide. “They’re up at Bergdorf’s right now in the window.”

“I heard it was a gorgeous window,” I say.

“Oh it is a beautiful window,” Sophie gushes while reaching for a very special bottle. “This is a black and white one that I’m making just for [Kilian]. And you can’t say anything to him about this – He thinks it is all strickly black and white, but there is actually a lot of color mixed into the black and a lot color mixed into the white, so even if it looks more or less black and white, if you look carefully, you can see all the subtleties.” And when she turned the bottle in the light of her desk lamp, you could see the slight variations – a little green here, slightly yellow there.

“Anyway, it’s drying right now, it’s still a work in progress, but it’s a lot of fun” says Sophie.

Setting down the bottle, she moves over to the black lacquered box, which all of the bottles come in and are absolutely beautiful. “Kilian made the boxes as well. Notice the detail on the side, and,” Sophie says flipping over the box, “here is where I’ll include my signature, the number, date – you know.”

“How long does it take to create each bottle?” I ask.

“I would work on like 10 at a time. Once you put a color down, you really have to let it sit a little bit so that it doesn’t interfere with other colors that you might later paint on top – sometimes it can do very nasty things if you go too fast with the paint. So I do, yeah, ten at a time. Pick one up, do a little thing, set it down, let it dry, do the next one – so I’m always rotating them.”

“You’re your own assembly line,” I say. She laughs. “Exactly!”

“For the bottles, I was inspired by these paintings that I did earlier…I actually cut prints of those paintings up into pieces and thought they were really beautiful and whole in and of themselves. They have this integrity to them, and plus this way they’re less chosen by me, so it’s less of me and more of what happens. I like that aspect of it all.

“And this,” Sophie says as she walks over to another area of the studio, “was the first bottle and I took inspiration from this image. I might try to rework this; strip it down…this was another kind of paint that I never used…”

“It’s sort of a mix of being inspired by these and these being inspired by…I think I might have some of my husband’s work,” she says referring to her late husband Alain Jacquet as she walks back over to the sitting area, searching for a book. “He did a lot of camouflage paintings in the sixties. Like 20 years before Warhol even picked up a brush! This here is a Lichtenstein and you can see that he too picked up other painting from other artists and sort of put his camouflage on it.

“The colors are just brilliant. Fantastic. I’ve always loved all of those paintings and they have had a huge influence on what I’m doing right now.”

“When Kilian and I first met, I just hadn’t a clue as to what I was going to do on these bottles before he said (which was really a key to this whole thing) ‘oh you know – you could just take a bottle and eh, you know, you could just paint and leave little parts undone if you want.’ It might not sound so profound, and he just said it so casually, but that ended up being so important – leaving a transparency…so not only do you see the level of perfume, but you see the lighter quality – an air quality – and then you get to see the perfume. The color of the perfume that one chooses has a definite interplay with the colors of the bottle – now it won’t really change the colors because they are opaque, but it will add an element to it. It will be really interesting. I haven’t seen any filled with perfume yet.

“Some of [Hennessy’s fragrances] are dark green…and then there are ones that look like cognac, ones that look almost like water…”

“Did you go through all of Hennessy’s fragrances before designing the bottles?” I ask.

“Yes, we met another time at Bergdorf’s and at the times he had six scents. I thought they were incredible; intricate, with a lot of depth, and also very provocative. Scents trigger certain memories, which I think is a beautiful thing. You can really travel quite a distance when you smell certain fragrances.”

“Do you have a favorite bottle?”

“Not really, but I have to say, I did like #47,” Sophie admits. “Sometimes it would change day-to-day. Where did 47 go?” she asks referring to her boutique sheet. “Hmm…is there some fancy place in Toronto?”

“Perhaps Holt Renfrew?” I volunteered.

“YES!! That’s where it went!” She exclaimed.

“Well,” I said, “some lucky Canadian will get lucky 47!”

“Lucky 47, exactly! But you know they all have different meanings,” she muses. “They are all part of the family and so I love them all. What’s nice is also that when Kilian cam over once, I presented 3 (and he came with Amanda Smeel, who is with the PR agency), and she liked this one, he liked that one, and of course I like the other one! So it’s really great – even the ones that are not personal favorites of mine, they are the favorites of others.”

“Well,” I say. “It is funny that you’re working on this black and white one here because even with all of the other vibrantly colored bottles, this is the one I gravitate towards the most. There’s something about black and white that just does it for me…also looks so classy and simple to me.”

“See that’s great! I really do want it to be even more subtle, the colors, but when you go from where I’m coming from – with bright colors everywhere – it is hard to go all the way to the other side,” Sophie explains referring back again to my favorite, the one she’s currently working on for Kilian. “I want [the color] to be so subtle that you can barely tell. I want you to feel the color, instead of seeing it – that is a very interesting kind of experience.”

“What kind of paint do you use?” I ask.

“These are called Acquacoat, they’re for painting signs – it’s great stuff. And then,” Sophie says with her eyes lighting up, “the magic wand is this stuff! It’s Aquathane and it give everything a high gloss. The colors all have different levels of glossiness to them, but just one coat of that and everything looks the same. It looks like its been cooked – it has a very smooth quality and looks super shiny and just looks really nice. It brings everything together.”

“And do you just put one coat on at the end?”

“Yes,” she says. “Although I try to not get any on the glass so you can shine that as you wish.”

“And where did you find these beautiful glass bottles?”

“Oh Kilian made them. It took him a while. These bottles are so beautiful and I think creating them was quite a feat.”

“I love the design on the side – does that mirror the design on the side of the box?” I ask.

“Yes it does. Just the quality of the glass alone is amazing. There are no mold marks. It’s just super luxurious, really nice. And that I was very sensitive to in the beginning, the quality. But everything he does is very nice. Even feel the weight of the top…” She says as she drops the heavy black perfume cap into my hand. “I mean that’s just really nice – really reassuring, and we could all use a little reassurance these days.

“Also the colors,” Sophie muses. “They really have an effect – I believe that they have an effect on the people who are open to them, that they affect our moods.” She lifts off the cap of vivid lilac and asks, “How can you look at that and not be affected somehow by it? And you know there are a lot of colors like that. Look at this red,” she says opening a can tomato-red. “It’s a beautiful orange-y red and it’s phenomenal, I just love that. That’s a part of it too.

“You know, when I was doing these,” Sophie says referring to the bottles, “I was also thinking of my husband’s work. And also obviously thinking about him because it was his last stretch. [note: Sophie’s husband Alain died just this year of esophageal cancer] This project became a sort of a conversation or a last moment of doing something together – and I feel like that has come through in the bottles as well. A lot of love. I hope that when people use their bottles that it will bring some sort of good feeling, a special feeling. Perfume bottles can be exquisite, or they can be sort of mediocre. And I hope these will be nice for people.

“It must be so hard to let your work go,” I say.

“No. For me, it is the way I communicate,” Sophie explains. “To have my work stay is kind of pointless. I’m happy when it goes out. Some paintings from certain series go out really quickly and sometimes it’s a little bit of a painful thing. There are really only certain times when I wish I had more time with my work, but as the weeks go on. It’s a wonderful, refreshing thing to know that things are going out and being seen.”

And then Sophie began to tell me a bit about her paintngs…

“This one is from the Zebra Stripe series. The zebra pattern is used to represent the opposing images and how they interact; what reseeds, what comes forward…

“I just love opposites, just as you do, with your love of black and white. This is done with oil paints, this part with acrylics. On many levels there are juxtaposing ideas and questions and personal things mixed with non-personal things.

“Yes, I really like that one,” she says.

Moving on to another, Sophie says, “this is an interesting painting, very different from the others. This is part of the ribbon series.

“This is a painting with a couple of letters that create a poem; the letters are U, R, I…U, B, U, R, which sounds to me, very much like, ‘You or I, You Be You Are –Be Who You Are; Me or you, just be who you are.’ This image is an image that is upside down, the painting is one I took of Matisse’s called The Conversation – yes, you know, you definitely know one which one it is – so it’s a conversation with my own family, could be anybody else’s family, but it is a letting go – it’s a cutting of the ribbon, of the umbilical cord I guess you could say, although maybe that sounds corny, although it does sort of come to that.

“Its something nice to think about, not something to be trapped by, you know, thoughts of ‘will I ever be as good?’ It just doesn’t matter so there is really no point in wasting so much energy in it. It’s fun to be free – It’s a nice experience to feel the freedom – the disattachment – because life is really just too short for anything else. I love that one.

“This is another Zebra – this was very first Zebra and was the first time I worked with acrylic and so in certain parts it really thick! I used industrial pigments from this place called Waera and also picked up all sort of paints from different places – sometimes they were intended for cars, sometimes they were meant to paint boats – so the pigment level of this painting is extremely high. You get these bright colors that are great when the light goes on.

“I did a Guernica in full colors with these pigments and I showed it in Flint, in the Flint Institute. Well they ended up buying the piece, and with the natural light they had in their space it looked as if the painting was plugged into the wall! Unbelievable – at Francis’ gallery, it looked nice, but it never looked as electric as it did in Flint. They were just meant to have the piece. It looked phenomenal in their space, their big beautiful sun-lit space.”

“Do you still use all sorts of paint in your work now? The car paints and whatnot?”

“Yeah, I love that!” Sophie says. “Those I’m using with these ribbon stripe paintings too.”

“I was just going to say that I really liked this one,” I say referring to the blue/yellow ribbon one.

“I painted this when I was listening to a lot of jazz. I just love how when you hear a note you somehow hear it’s magic. Certain things are magical and you can’t explain why it moves you so much, whether it’s something a kid says to you, or whether it’s a voice or a painting or color or something else you just can’t let go of. This is sort of just a note in the air…and I was really happy with it and I was happy that Alain liked it as well.”