Mernet Larsen's painting Getting Measured landed on the cover of Art in America's Winter 2025 issue—a recognition that feels particularly fitting, because this 1999 canvas was the moment everything changed for her.
Working from her home in Tampa, Florida, Larsen describes a deliberate turn away from abstraction. She wanted to paint people, places, ordinary things again, but not in the conventional realist way she'd trained in. So she did something unexpected: she took one of her own abstract paintings and asked it to become narrative.
The abstract work had started with a 12th-century Japanese painting of the Katano Shrine—a composition she loved so much she kept returning to it. This time, instead of leaving it abstract, she sat with the structure and asked: what story lives here? The answer came from her hands. Growing up, she'd made and altered clothes, learning how fabric meets body, how measurement precedes transformation. That became the painting's subject—one figure measuring another.
We're a new kind of news feed.
Regular news is designed to drain you. We're a non-profit built to restore you. Every story we publish is scored for impact, progress, and hope.
Start Your News DetoxTo bring this off, Larsen borrowed a technique from those same medieval Japanese painters: parallel perspective, where lines don't recede or converge the way Western painting trained us to expect. She rotated the view, shifted it from head-on to three-quarter, then built volume and solidity the way you'd fill in a coloring book—methodical, intentional, focused on the space itself rather than the illusion of depth.
But she didn't stop there. Larsen layered in one-point perspective too, especially in the background. The effect was deliberate dissonance—multiple perspective systems occupying the same canvas, each one revealing that perspective isn't truth. It's a tool. A gadget. She even left a small gap around the edges so the image wouldn't feel like it fell away from the viewer, keeping the uncertainty alive.
Larsen didn't know, when she finished Getting Measured, that she'd just mapped out the next 25 years of her work. But that's what happened. A single painting became a method, a question she'd keep asking: how do we see, and what does it mean when we change the rules of sight?
The painting's appearance on Art in America's cover suggests the art world is finally catching up to what Larsen understood decades ago—that the most interesting realism might be the one that admits perspective is negotiable.
