Carly Rae Jepsen's B-Side Life

Preconcert painting time with the pop star (and her mom).

- Jackson McHenry

ACCORDING TO OUR kindly painting instructor, Sabrina, Carly Rae Jepsen has chosen an unusual piece for us to replicate at our midafternoon BYOB paint-and-sip. We’re at the Painting Lounge on West 38th Street, hidden away on a second floor and highly airconditioned in the midst of a heat wave, listening to the Big Little Lies soundtrack, which was Sabrina’s choice, and trying to re-create Pablo Picasso’s 1932 portrait of a woman asleep and dreaming, Le Rêve, which was Jepsen’s. Sabrina has us working off stencils, so we don’t have to match the distorted outlines of Picasso’s woman on our own, but it’s still, in its relative way, ambitious. The Painting Lounge’s other templates tend toward the less pedigreed and more banal—sailboats and sunsets and city parks with bare trees—but Jepsen’s choice is arguably telling. She’s a pop star, yes, but she’ll work a little harder and wander in a direction you might not expect. Jepsen is surprised that people don’t choose this painting more often: “Who doesn’t want to pretend they’re Picasso for a second?”