Inside Jay Stern’s Living Arrangements

Jay Stern has a knack for arrangements. Within a few days of contacting the artist about coming from Brooklyn to visit him and see his work, he found me a place to stay, collected me from the Portland International Jetport, and piloted me toward Hope, Maine. He wants to show me the “where” in his work, and to do this in the house he shares with his partner, Renny Sabina, and dog, Finnegan. “Home is a portal,” he says as we twist and turn down Route 1, thickets of trees secreting the granite crags beyond them and the coasts gradually getting licked to death by the ice-cold Atlantic. “It’s a capsule for information”—specifically, about the people who inhabit it.

His home joins a charming gray barn to a compact house; a new addition comprises a mudroom and an airy primary bedroom with vast sets of windows the couple lucked into when a contractor had extra. A wet room with a sunken tub looks onto the woods.

The guest toilet, tucked into a corner, was the seed for the extension. “When people come over for dinner, they tend to stay through the night,” Stern says. He blames it on the distance and weather, but I don’t think anyone in Maine does anything they don’t want to. People seem to feel at home in the home Stern has built for himself, for his work, for what and whom he loves. His reverence for domestic space as a site for living—real, raw, transformative, emotional and physical living—radiates through.

In the bright kitchen, a small table presents one green cereal bowl and a smaller, mottled, deeper bowl, both with a spoon sunk into it and glistening with the dehydrating remains of an oatmeal breakfast, a wood cutting board offering the timeline of an apple in aging between them. Someone has cut a piece into a surprisingly compact cube. Stern tells me he asked Sabina to leave these remnants for me to see. The whole thing is a painting. One of his, perhaps.

Take “Early Summer” (2024). Here, watermelon rinds sunbathe on a table, depleted. Someone has enjoyed them immensely. They’ve maybe used the nearby cloth to wipe the juices from their lips, or maybe it’s a shift they’ve pulled off in the heat. There, a Windsor-ish chair almost audibly scrapes against the floor. Chaotic shapes soon introduce themselves into these tranquil moments, as in reality.

In Stern’s work, someone has always just been here. Their daily activities leave what he calls “residue” all over the paintings, which urge viewers to consider the objects we use everyday—for cooking, cleaning, dining, dressing—and how they shape and reflect who we are. The stuff of life is life itself.

After a comfortable hour in the dappled light of an enclosed porch built for conversation, we go to Stern’s studio cum coworking space, which is in an old grange hall across the road from an unreconstructed general store. I nose around while he pulls a few shots of espresso. On the bookshelves, blue tape and The Erotic Films of Peter De Rome. On the desk, a copy of Sara Ahmed’s Queer Phenomenology. On the walls, a haphazard selection of various stages of his work, including the bravura “Forever Suspended in a Doorway (Self Portrait)” (2024), a kitchen scene with too many hands on the stove surrounded by a civilization’s worth of surfaces, textiles, produce, and timeframes, in balance all the time at the exact same time.

Stern passes me the coffee. “There’s one stark memory I have of growing up,” he says, decidedly. This was in Dublin, on a cul-de-sac near Columbus, Ohio, at the turn of the last century. “As a closeted person, all you have is your bedroom. Once a month, my mom would come in and be, like, ‘You rearranged your room again!’” he says, laughing. “I was never happy. It was never enough.” When you’re not sure if you can be at home in the world, it’s hard to feel at home.

He came out, earned a BFA in painting in Cincinnati, then moved to Seattle, where found work as an associate at the architecture and design firm Hoedemaker Pfeiffer while completing an MFA in arts leadership, in 2015. “At work, I was looking at plans, at moving walls, at placing furniture,” he says, “and thinking, This is just like painting.”

His paintings back then were chunky landscapes arranged not unlike blueprints and maps. He showed them here and there. Then the lockdown of 2020 arrived. Somewhat inevitably, those landscapes became domestic. In “SMS” (2020), for example, the quotidian contents of a painting tray become, in a grid of quick brushstrokes, someone’s whole world.

He soon met Maine native Sabina, and their worlds collided. “When we started dating, he came over and did a workout class at my house,” Stern says. “He left his sweaty underwear on the floor. I put them on the rack to dry and very quickly realized they started functioning as a portrait.”

He painted them draped like a flag around a spindly but monumental drying rack, forming “Laundry Day #1 ⁣(Blue Towels)” (2020) and spawning an ongoing series of “Laundry Day” portraits. I tell him I find the work tender. There’s no leering, no reliance on Biblical notions of washing away the dirt. It feels confidently like someone else’s boxers, unabashed proof of an intimate other. I ask if making it changed their relationship. “It was a solidification,” he says. “I’m gonna put you in my work.”

Sabina, meanwhile, put Stern into Maine. He had gone to Bowdoin College, in Brunswick, where he’d gotten to know one of Stern’s favorite artists, the famed figurative painter Katherine Bradford, who lives with her wife in an old farmhouse nearby. “Over the winter, while I’m away in New York,” Bradford later told me over the phone, “I give the house over to deserving artists so they can work and stay there for free.” In 2021, she offered it to Stern and Sabina. They spent their time stacking hay against the walls so the pipes didn’t freeze and stacking wood so it dried for the stove. “You get connected to the relationship between the natural world and the domestic,” Stern says of the place. That connection moved into his work, which blossomed.

He began a series of tabletop paintings, with water glasses shimmering like crystal balls into the past and tulips, collapsing in last gasps, captured in time lapse. If the “Laundry Day” paintings found emotional residue in domestic routines, the new work went existential. Without these little moments, they seem to say, without noticing the way a tree can move outside a window just like a curtain moves within it—are you even here?

Meanwhile, Stern was out in the world, at galleries and openings around town and always inviting people back. He befriended Grant Wahlquist, curator of the Center for Maine Contemporary Art, in Rockland. Wahlquist saw some of Stern’s tabletop paintings as part of a group show at the museum. “They [captured] that moment after a dinner party, or drinking beers in the afternoon, when everybody leaves and you sit there feeling happy but also a little sad,” he says. “I thought that was such an achievement.” Stern’s professional world is growing, too; just in the past year, he’s had a solo show and joined a group exhibition in Portland, and had solo shows in Los Angeles and Miami.

But he’s focused on home, and its powerful expressions of the beauty and the complexity of everyday domestic acts. “I’m interested in the moment before we agitate,” he once told an interviewer. “The moment before history comes in and changes the dishes on the table following a good meal. That moment is a symphony, a composition of objects that don’t move but are super active and charged. They have history and meaning, then they will be removed and cleaned, that’s when we start again.”

He recently painted the house Sabina’s family lives in. “It was the first home I ever went to in Maine,” Stern says, “a beautiful home on a pond in a village. I think it kind of helped his mom see Maine differently. I gravitate towards things in her space. She’s like, ‘That’s just a cup.’ And I’m like, ‘No no no. Let me pull you into the way I feel.’”