Artist Talk: Brice Marden in Conversation with Menil Drawing Institute Curator Kelly Montana

thank you all for joining us we are so honored to welcome the brice marden here with us this evening for a conversation with our curator Kelly Montana on the occasion of his exhibition think of them as spaces Bryce Martin's drawings which is now on view in the mini old wrong Institute through June 14th tonight's program is a part of the Manila's ongoing artist talk series in which we invite artists whose works are a part of our permanent collection to speak at the Museum the series continues next month with Alison Jenna Hamilton and later this spring with Kate Shepherd Elora and calls Adia and Joseph kazoo as with all of our public programs these chocks are completely free and open to everyone thank you to Francine Ely for making our artist talks possible this season and to the Anchorage foundation of Texas for their very generous support of our public programs this year we would also like to thank those who have made think of them as spaces Bryce Martin's drawings possible major funding is provided by Jamie Seeley and Schlumberger and our other exhibition sponsors are Angela and William Kennedy Diane and Michael cannon Julie and John Cogan Carole and David Neuberger the Matthew and Ann Woolf drawings exhibition fund Eddie and chin we Allen Claire Casa de menthe and michael metz Barbra and Michael Gamson Diana and Russell Hawkins Janet and Paul hobby Linda and George Kelly Susan and Francoise demonio Suzanne and William Prichard Leslie and Shannon Sasser James William Stewart Marcie tab Wessel and the tab foundation Nina and Michael silca and the city of Houston this exhibition is accompanied by a beautifully illustrated catalogue thanks to the mini all's director of publishing Joseph Newland books are available sale in the mini old bookstore which is located just across the street and will stay open late this evening for anyone who may be interested in picking up a copy after the program and now before we begin please silence your cellphone's if you have not already done so we will have some time for your questions after the conversation if you do have a question at that time please raise your hand so we can come around with a microphone as we are recording this program thank you all for joining us a huge thank you to Brice Marden for being with us tonight and now I would like to turn it over for further remarks to the exhibition curator and our assistant curator of the Menil drawing Institute Cali Montana please join me in welcoming her in Brice Marden [Applause] thank you everyone for joining us this evening it's so thrilling to be with you this evening and celebration of our exhibition at the drawing Institute my name is Kelly Montana and I'm the assistant curator of the drawing Institute and the curator of the exhibition that's on view across the street it is my pleasure to introduce Brice Marden Brice was born in Bronxville New York and completed art degrees at the Boston University School of Fine Art and Yale University school of art and architecture gaining distinction in the mid 1960s with his solo exhibition at New York's peickert gallery Martin's work continues to chart a course investigating investigating color space and line the subject of numerous important exhibitions around the world including at the Guggenheim Museum in 1975 Documenta in 1992 the Whitney Museum in 1998 and MoMA organized a major retrospective of his work in 2006 not to mention that you've had three landmark shows in Houston Brice Marden drawings at the Contemporary Arts Museum Mardan Navarro's Rothko painting in the age of actuality at the rice Institute for the Arts and 75 and Brice Marden cold mountain at the Menil collection in 1992 his ongoing career as an artist is celebrated to say the least we're gathered here tonight to discuss Bryce's exhibition currently on view at the drawing Institute think of them as spaces Brice Martin's drawing I'm gonna go ahead and start with the text written by you Bryce in 1979 they gave the show its title and I'm gonna I'm gonna go ahead and read it here the hand touches more delicately and drawing there is less between the hand and the image in any other media drawing is fine and concise drawing is graceful think of them as spaces these are my drawings and I should comment on yeah how do we think of them as as spaces or what what was this so this was a note that you wrote to the curator of the exhibition is that right cloud stood at an exhibition somewhere house Curtis yeah and then you know they say will you write something you say yes and then the day comes when I do it you ready yeah but you know I do feel that I mean there is less between what you're drawing with and what actually becomes a jewelry certainly second I mean you just take a pencil and it barely has to touch the paper and you you know you just make that line and it just begins of something else mm-hmm does that relate to the idea of space somehow of becoming something or creating some kind of commune between you and the sheet or the viewer in the sheet yeah yeah I mean you after you get it going it's it's it's a collaboration hmm and I mean I don't sit down with it in mind this is specific exam which I guess is the matrix and I'm into some sort of structure beginning the structure but actually that's just something is you're allowing it it to lead you and then you it's a conversation so and and just to kind of set up this idea that a lot of your work starts with kind of parameters or rules or rubrics or some kind and then you apply that and then work from it or start that conversation or collaboration kind of see where the rules go and yeah yeah so I'm gonna go ahead and start with our slides here I'm gonna start this talk with something that is very present in the exhibition for those of you that has seen it but not actually in the exhibition across the street so what we're looking at here are four monumental canvases that are frequently on view here in this museum the seasons from 1974 to 1975 and these are works that are quite important to you they were made here in Houston yep well they were they were started in New York and exhibited in this that show Marty but before the show you know I you know I was not really happy with the paintings and so I'm talking mrs. ebony oh and we she said after the show you can just come back and rework them mm-hmm yeah well so this is I'll say so this is what this is you familiar this is what they look like now I think I have it in here this is what they look like then yeah no no I took a novice and I took a driving trip throughout the southwest and we went out to Chaco Canyon basically [Music] so a lot of my nature references in the painting come from that that trip that's right I remember thinking about cottonwood trees a lot you know being from New York I didn't really think cottonwood trees my idea of autumn but somehow it is so how did you how did you arrive at the palette for these once you're in the studio and you're kind of processing that experience or that memory where did where does it start where do you kind of begin these colors these I was like very conscious of what the shape should be how big it should be the the the idea that exhibition was in a kind of environmental situation I tend to make paintings that are more just focus on themselves and there's not a lot of outside well there can be a lot of outside reference but it varies from painting to painting but there was some sort of question about this there well I'm gonna go back to because you mentioned that you were really concerned in those paintings more about the size and scale and their relationship oh you know I did a lot of drawing trying to figure out what the shape should be and I'd also been coming to Houston to look at the Rothko's Chapel saintly so you're very you know and I was like very conscious of how he allowed his surface to to spread and you know these vertical strokes and I would come when I would come and stay at the Warwick and I you know go over like three different times a day just to catch it in different lights and do I think there was one time where I was getting is a strong vertical stroke which they're really related to the shape of the campus you know I just started and radiated in did you did you come to Houston that trip specifically for the roscoe chapel was it was it something somewhere alone I came specifically for the chapel okay so these I mean you know also at the same time I wasn't you're looking at Roman painting you know I was like say what we don't like it make a pilgrimage to the Rothko chapel I also made a pilgrimage to Pompeii and you know was looking at those paintings and this is something about the growth of the rent of a rectangle was fascinating but also there was a setup where I had small paintings on the side so it read right whoops well it goes in a cycle in a cycle yeah it goes in a circle so I want to ask briefly about these though because these are those studies that are on paper and so for these ones there's kind of scoring marks around each of these rectangles here and wax is laid down in them and then you worked graphite into those into the wax yeah and can you talk a little bit about what women was that graphite loose was it something that you had repair or was it can you just talk a little bit about what working graphite into the rods really looks like well basically you know like with these drawings I was I was turning white into black you and these are the early days of minimalism you know and just is that NSA I'm turning white and white into by but you know you know one of the you know primary pursuits is to how how you make your material reflect what you want to make and so I ended up because you apply so much pressure to the paper you know when you're put applying the graphite I had to use a very heavy paper so this is like a 400 pound or 300 pound weight paper and if I hadn't used it that heavy it just wrinkles up under the pressure so so use the heavy paper then I just scraped it down because I it was a bumpy paper and I wanted a smooth paper so I took the rectangle that I was working on scraped it down on the razor blade and [Music] then after I got the whole rectangle you know created then I put wax I just use about what be his white beeswax and rub that into the paper scrape that down so it was I was nice and even and then I would go in and start turning the white into black and I used a number four ever hard favored graphite stick and you know you just have to eat you just have to work it and work it and we're fine finally it's like and it was a such a pleasure to see these haven't seen him for years because they really do that in these in these drawings I think later on I get a little lazy they're incredibly they're physical as objects and I think maybe part of what you're what you're getting at is that they they seem to really be engaging with this concept that you're trying to work through at this kind of early Earth stage in your career where they are the kind of a physical embodiment of the plain image if they are you know physically this image is on the same level as the sheet and it's something that you develop in different ways but here it's you know literal it's really it's really there the other question I'm interested in in these is that these are studies for the seasons we have a few more these are other drawings that are in the exhibition here and they're dated 75 so and the paintings are dated 74 to 75 so did you start working on these halfway through the painting was it something come up and you were wanted to move to something else or they're just I think they were just taking a long time I see yeah yeah and I also really really want to touch on so these are versions of the seasons that are paintings that are in our drawing exhibition across the street and as you can see they're there that's their oil and wax on paper mounted on four canvases and they're the same size they are the same paper that you made these drawings on you know the same paper mounted onto there so can you can you just talk a little bit about the status of these as paintings or drawings or their statuses studies and kind of how you were working them don't you they were just smaller I keep I keep thinking of their Donna I had so DG screams made and then we mounted the paper on the screens I don't know just seemed to be something I was doing I had done another kind of multiple panel hangs around the same time and the other thing I'll show is that these are that's what those look like the small ones that was the first version mm-hmm that was the first person so you had two and two on opposite opposing walls so this is yeah just putting them together in a kind of configuration of where they are now across the street so the next thing I want to turn to I mean it's a big deal this wasn't like it was a big yeah yeah make big paintings but I mean it was an environmental so gave you you had some sort of feeling of being surrounded by this thing yeah well I think that's a it's a good sag into this series the posts and lentils that are part of the the exhibition here they continue a few things we've talked about which is working with wax and graphite on arch very heavyweight arch paper and they're also about forms kind of coming together so these canvases that are they have a spacial relationship with each other and there's also spatial relationships happening here between positive and negative space is that I mean there's what if there's ten drawings mhm yeah one does it one way and one does it the other way I mean it's like you know or a real figure-ground situation yeah I it was very very difficult very difficult to do because of so many edges you know you gotta draw the edges and they have to be a certain way and I got had had these things going and finally just gave up and put him in a drawer and came back to them I guess a couple of years ago because the B decided to put him in this show mm-hmm and and and so there is a surprise for me it is although I finished a master day and then you know because they admit away for so long right exactly so they're there the post and lintel is one through ten the first one starts with the graphite just lynnie it it's all white the last one is you've done total blackout with this graphite delineation still there and so with they're mirror images of each other so four and seven except you know shown here mirror each other they were and you'll see if they're as well the day they were begun in 1984 which is kind of the last year you were working with these canvases abutting each other working with ideas of ancient architecture post and lintel and I'm really I am interested in what brought you back to them in 2019 what did it wouldn't it take to finish these last year no I just I just wanted to finish them I mean it was a yeah I didn't like the idea that I'm sitting in a drawer and also you you you want to see it yeah I mean I'm much more selfish about this I don't wanna I don't you know I'm not making them so everybody else can see him I'm basically making so I can see him and but also it was like I have been working with this post and lintel situation which you know I mean people have said they related to love you you know I go to Greece every summer and so they made it though it's you know this based on you know ancient Greek architecture you know and these things are around these kind of influences around and maybe they were based on ancient Greek I wasn't thinking about that but it's the same thing of like I you know look at look at look some book called mountain over the know the the windows of the studies for the seasons look at those interview know I tend to when you when you work it's almost like a mantra you're just you're thinking when I did the cold mountain paintings I was reading the cold mountain poem so you know like there's something that there's that kind of outside and inspiration and [Music] this is what I really consider my subject matter I wandered off a bit on that tournament well to have these just I mean so this exhibition is the first time you've really seen them all installed in their sequence framed was there something kind of revealed to you and seeing them or something that you you kind of discovered why you've returned to them what was kind of your first impressions of seeing them together and kind of being in that space I thought I they would have they would make a stronger impression on me and what surprises me is that the these groups and I don't really sort of plan groups instead of in that they evolve into being groups and that's why I really like seeing that whole aspect I mean any one of those drawings can be taken totally out of the context that's in here and still as far as I'm concerned remain valid absolutely I think one of the one of the challenges and and pleasures of installing your art is when you're working with drawings and drawings that emerge as series you know I remember you telling me that they you know they are remarkable works in and of themselves they're independent they're forceful they're valid but in series you told me they need each other and I really you know it was that that was important to you that nothing could be arbitrarily taken out their number they're meant to stay together even though they're you know unique and an individual oh but I thought I just said the opposite I mean I mean it's it's so it's what I think it's both I mean they're they're both of those things yeah so one thing that I found interesting in the exhibition coming together is the post and lintels share a gallery with these works the Nira Bell addenda and these are works that you made while caring for your daughter and they're named after her and can you tell me can you talk a little bit about why they're addenda yeah I've been good first daughter and Mirabelle would wake up for two o'clock feeding she would get fed and then I would take it we had a big closet I would take her into the closet and I had a rocking chair and a stepladder and a little pad and I just would hold her and like the football grip and Allen and and I drew these drawings and and as I worked them the drawings like you start you start the first drawing and then you get it as far as you feel like going and then you go to the second drawing and I mean I had this someone had given me a pad of Indian handmade paper and that you know like you go to all this yeah you know you talk about getting the black waxy surface this the paper demanded a certain kind of touch and I was drawing with these Atlantis sticks and you know so and that's there there's another difficult is the Mirabelle drawings and these are all the addenda are the drawings that never fit into the first group and I you know took them out and reworked them and they became this good Rothko situation happening in these as well particularly that middle one that's what's shown up yeah yeah I didn't realize that these were in that you said it was a pad they were all together yeah well I do them with each guy yeah out of the pan I think because you because you do some of them you keep together like some pads or notebooks you keep together while you're working and then you take them apart later is there is there a certain moment when notebooks come apart of workbooks as you call them come apart those are these horrible stories in her like I have a book that I just took apart because it has nothing to do with like making a show and it was it was quite recently and not near the show with Santoro show I always carry a book with me so wherever you are you can draw and then you know that yeah that book I had this one book I had been working on it for about three years I figured it's finished and then this opportunity came up to show it so I took it apart and showed it and taking it apart was like like traumatic you're carrying this thing around and it begins to do is almost attached - you know and so take it apart then I remember I showed why am i because I was asking about when when you decide to pull notebooks apart or when you decide to kind of Commission them we got them made or a lot you know some yeah I mean is I I worked I guess I work a lot that way you know is one after another after another after another they stay together there come from a certain time or place and you know is this is sort of part of the reference of the of the drawing it's fascinating to see them apart and think that for three years that you couldn't have had that experience of seeing them together in that way you couldn't have that whole yeah it's always one after another you know and you know you know you have no idea what they're gonna look like side by side yeah and that's what I did with the book I took apart I had them make we we've published a facsimile edition so it's because they reproduce perfectly kissing you know they're the books is a big and you just photograph it nowadays you have a number of similar books that you put out is that part of kind of dealing with the trauma of taking them all apart that you have them kind of made and put out in the world together because you've done it with your you doing it with notebooks and this recent one with your gallery and really outstanding version that's actual workbook that's just wrong no no no what was the first one of those that you did a facsimile notebook that you have been working in it goes way back yeah I mean - you know monochromatic drawings I've never really you know I've never really considered it like the thing well we're gonna move to a group that you've made mention of already in this talk and these are the cold mountain studies that were first seen here in the 1992 exhibition that we made mention of and these are drawings that you made based off of poems by han-shan and you kind of borrowed the structure of the poems to begin these drawings so I have I do have an image in here so you can see that's a version of a cold mountain poem by han-shan which translates as cold mountain with the Chinese on the left and the English translation on the right so you can get a sense of that under structure that begins these drawings with the marks and five down and couplets across yeah and I I had this situation where I was with one gallery and left and went to another one and the one I went to friended me some money so I just took money and started doing these drawings you know which is not what I was doing when they originally gave him the money and but it was also a chance for me to I was had become very interested in Chinese calligraphy and but at a very early point I thought if I got gonna be interested in this but I'm not going to try to learn how to do it I want to know to know more about that other aspects rather than what it says as words and you know like the energy that goes into the actual performance of the drawing and this was another book and I carried this book yeah and then if it down oh it was the the coal mine the shows that came here yeah take it apart and these these were in it part of what you were talking about is when you're talking what kind of the energy is that calligraphy is really one thing that makes a calligrapher successful is being able to endow the strokes with kind of the thing it represents so it kind of has this sense of you know nature in them really it's that part of what attracted you to calligraphic mark-making what I really liked was to get the more you learn about it the more complex it really gets and you know it and it's it's very broad you know so it's like very spiritual what's our this is there that and you know these are just I was just as I trying to work it out how can I do it what am i doing yeah and because these are drawings that are often talked about as being this seismic shift in your career you know we looked at these more monitor dramatic earlier and that this was this moment where you really took a leap of faith and tried this new kind of mark making and put it out in the world getting back to my switching galleries basically I would you know and I took this time where I had money to figure out what I was doing and it took me about the year two years to get something that was close to what I thought I wanted and this was part of it I was doing this you know and then when then when it got it to that point I felt a certain kind of confidence I thought you know I'll try it on a bigger scale so these paintings or these turn do we have that you made into paintings yeah and so these paintings but you have to get the size I don't think we have that you don't have the dimensions up there but they're pretty big yeah and but what's fascinating about these of the you you've talked about them before that you wanted to get that fluidity that improvisational quality of the drawing into the painting and I think what's interesting about this this series new taken together taking the drawings and the paintings together is that you have work like this take the drawing on the right for example where you've made all these you've made these black marks and you've gone back in with this white that kind of subtracts or races and lets air back into the sheet and you do that as well and in the paintings to some degree so I'm really interested in this kind of slippage or elision in your vocabulary between between drawing and painting and can you can you talk a little bit more how the drawing finds its way in the painted form well I was starting with the basic grid that we were showing you the other drawings in the little drawing I would start it like that and then you just work back into it and what I what I would do is I had a kind of skeleton and then I would start joining different parts of the skeleton into a more unified less of linear thing and then the white came in basically you notice as correction and but then at a certain point I never said that the correction was really making it a ghost image so so it was sort of the beginning of the kind of complexity I I was looking for in the paintings was there any moment for you in making these where you had any concern about you know we made mention earlier of this concept of the plain image about how the image always refers to the plane and here you're making lines that in some instances do have this figure-ground relationship so at what point did you feel like you were kind of on a on a path that brokered that synthesis well the first one on the Left left that's called path and that was the first painting in the group the you know I have this idea about the plane and in the image that's what painting is I mean you have this flat plane you create something spatial but is that I am interested in the magic that occurs between the plane and the image and I used to vociferously object to situations whether that's violated and now that I'm older I feel I wasted a lot of time worrying about this but the but but I have a lot of trouble with collage because collage it a lot of its space comes from structuring space and that's it's usually it's a physical structure so you don't have that flat that flat thing and I keep thinking somewhere in the image in between these two things the plane and the image is where I want to be or I'm I think it's some sort of territory yeah but you know like there's a paintings dead you know how I think this is this is where it can go or this is one of the things that can do and and you know I'm still sort of hacking away at it I'm gonna get four paintings of just starting and I keep thinking it well I want more it more intuition I want to get some human thing out there but then again you know just got to do it so these are works in the exhibition the 15 by 15 and they start with the same kind of grid that or it's the same type of way of thinking that the cold mountains start with would be start with 15 marks across and 15 marks down and for me these drawings are a unification of sorts over a lot of different things that are happening in the exhibition you have the calligraphic line you're very bold color you have this lovely green and you have this predella of sorts across the bottom of each of these sheets where the page is left the sheets left blank but you can see the drips the smudges the timekeeping of of the drawing can you talk a little bit about finding your way back into all of these different ways of working across your career in this moment in the recent past I started working you I had always avoided this square because it was perfect and so easily made use worked with slightly off square shapes and stuff like that and then I said well why don't you try a square or her baton what to do I was working out a situation and I took a shape I think was just like a canvas a head around or some arbitrary situation and I just measured you know across the top then measured down and made the square out of the rectangle I was working on and I've been doing that ever since this is about maybe some of those green paintings here the first memories oh oh that was 2017 yeah I did it all good with paintings at you know well and these these are basically studies for the paintings that I'm just about ready to start in the studio and I'm painting them on canvases that I had prepared to be part of Commission the glens dog oh yeah I did it's a big pain for Glenn stoned and yeah Martin marked office Oh what I had done was I had done these two prepared these canvases as optional canvases for this commission and I never got around to doing these because I had to concentrate on the big one and so now this is what's next so also I like the fact that there was a photograph of the Sun in front of the times couple a couple of weeks ago and they looked a lot of like this I should say what's notable about the Glenn stone Commission is that they also really pull from the seasons they really are a return to that the canvases that we that we have here yeah what it's called oh the moss Sutra with the seasons I love it was and I really like this situation you have here with the the rocks and trees absolutely beautiful would you take Europe but you you're kind of a you arrange rocks and things in your garden is there anything that we should adjust here on the campus [Laughter] now I collect scholars rocks and that all comes out of the whole calligraphy thing in there right well actually I just I'll pause on this one this one is one that's related to this set that we just looked at that's 15 by 15 zero and this one is it's not in the exhibition because it's for you serves as kind of this index of sorts or kind of wave of motive under standing the series I'll and with just like I'll end on this actually on this slide with just a couple questions about this so a couple more the way this is installed and the exhibition is that we do create this grid so it becomes all these sheets come together to become this very large work in the show that becomes you have to have an interaction with it that's an interaction that is at the scale of painting I would say so you've talked previously in other and other interviews about your ideas for how one should view a painting which is you take how tall the canvas is and you stay that far you stand that far away and look at it you double that you look at it and then you be sure to get in close look at the side so all these sorts of things so it's this it's this interesting moment where you kind of have to do that with drawings in the show but I say all that to set up what what's your recommended method for viewing a drawing I don't [Music] number one get as close to it as possible I mean it's just wonderful people seeing people dealing with drawings and you've got a drawing thing here that sort of promotes it like you get up and you're right on top of it and that's it gets you back to almost to that experience of being made people say oh you know about my stuff that guy said well I don't know but I look for and I just pick align and yeah and hopefully you know hopefully you begin to disappear or you begin to you know so that's my suggestion about looking at drawings and with that if we're gonna take a few questions from the audience so if you have if anyone has a question we're just gonna take a few here and please again wait for the microphone as it comes around just raise your hand thank you Kelly and Bryce for a beautiful exhibition and a very generous conversation Bryce you mentioned about the Mirabelle addendum drawings that the paper demanded a certain touch and you've also talked about your relationship of drawing to painting but I was curious to hear about your relationship of drawing to printmaking because I know you're one of our the the great print makers of our time and I wonder if as you approach drawing on a print matrix if that sort of dictates the way that a line is drawn if there's some quality about making a mark that interests you about printmaking particularly oh yeah I used to think of printing as I'd start like a project or a group usually started out somehow with like a small drawing an idea you know then you'd make it a little bit bigger and then made it bigger and then you finally work it up to some very finish to the situation which then goes on to become a painting edging used to be my place between you know drawing and painting I liked it because it was physical but I just haven't been making etchings where is living the country its to so complicated yeah yeah so I've got a whole bunch of unfinished edgings sitting in a room I call the etching room yeah no I yeah Yale you know you didn't major in painting you major in painting printmaking and something else so eggs always been a apart until kind of recently they're another question so this one I'm asking advice for other artists as as you moved through your career and people started to like your stuff and give you attention for it how did you figure out how to not let that ruin the process for you like how did you figure out how to constantly reinvent yourself and it seems like you enjoy it like that's what it looks like so how did you do that and what kind of advice would you give to artists who are starting to get attention that they're not asking for I didn't really hear here too much I find it a constant struggle and from the minute I started wanting to be an artist I always felt there was a threat from the outside because you're involved in things that the basically our society just isn't involved with and it you know your job to keep it clean and to deal with truth even though yeah I mean it sounds so Pollyannish but I'm gonna strip you you what do you make you're responsible for and yet at the same time it's not yours and it always seems to me first firstly try to starve you yeah and they you know then there's you know it a certain kind of acceptance can be very dull to find no I mean I think I think about it too much but you know part of the gig you know I'm curious about the increased use of color in your work which seems to give the work more weight more substance I'm sorry I'm curious about the increased use of color yeah in your work which seems to give the work more more more weight more substance can you talk about that at a certain point you know like you know I was I did a lot of monochromatic you know near grey paintings and then I thought well this needs more complexity so I added another color and it's like that thing about turning white into black you know like you know if you're painting monochromatic paintings and then suddenly you add another color that's a huge step yeah and but you're always pushing yourself you know so then you know I I got onto this thing about pushing the color eliminating ye eliminating black you know only having straight color you know mixes and I'm out right now I'm not worrying about that too much a man I'm you know still pushing in color we'll take a couple more questions mr. Martin um mrs. de Menil once told me she asked Victor Brauner how he knew when a painting was totally finished and he replied you feel it in the hand and I'm wondering how you know that you can release yourself from it I'm sorry I didn't hear the question she she's asking how you know when a work is finished in her lovely words when you can release yourself from it I don't I don't know I mean it just you know I used to say it's finished when the truck pulls up and it's not that far from nobodies I'm working on a painting now that I've been working out for I don't know how many years and it's in in our house it's referred to with the nemesis and I'm you know I think I'm on to it I'm getting close you know it just it happens and it's not necessarily because you can't figure out anything more to do to it is more complicated than that I mean it gets to the point where like you can't forget anything more to do to do it so you do more to it and then you I mean it's it's part of the working process and it very rarely comes up and just says I am finished you know very rarely these didn't have to sit around for a long time and it declared then it declares itself what motivates you to paint and draw and did that motivation change over the course of your life I think you know I wanted to become a painter because I like the bohemian ISM and a certain point is decided that it was not my my thing to play football and I just you know I decided I wanted to become a painter and set it set out about it you know and you know we assisted staying around art school our desert boots and Louden coats you know like anything you use anything you do to make you feel more like like being a painter because you didn't know what it was and and but but then then you did and at a certain point you're stuck in it you know I'm sorry you're stuck in to pick your legs because you know you're just always learning stuff and they're the essentials and you know I think we're gonna take if I if I may one last question can you hear me yes yeah just just one last question in an unfair one in a way is there a last word so the competition between delaqua and Angra once said it is painting the other one said it is the line do you have a willingness to make such a statement like that to that audience or am I being premature and unfair thank you I you know I'm not thinking that way right now yeah I mean I I get nervous when I think I've made too many sort of absolute decisions and so I wouldn't answer your question thank you so much Bryce thank you everyone for joining us this evening the bookstore is going to stay open its open now if anyone's interested in taking a look at the catalog for the show or seeing some of these beautiful facsimile books Bryce and I made mention of so please enjoy the rest of your evening thank you

Channel: The Menil Collection

Views: 6,115

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Id: J_VWWgV3lSU

Length: 61min 40sec (3700 seconds)

Published: Tue Mar 17 2020