[INAUDIBLE] BRICE MARDEN: Twigs, yeah. I draw with sticks, so it's basically-- HARRY COOPER: Dip, draw? BRICE MARDEN: Yeah. I do all of my drawing, basically, with sticks now. I don't paint with sticks, because you can't get paint on a stick and get it off onto the canvas. HARRY COOPER: Is this a collection of sticks that you've had for years, or that you carefully cull and preserve, or-- BRICE MARDEN: No. They work. Some of them don't work, so you've just got to get rid of them. And also, it's a matter of all you have to do is carry ink around with you. You don't have to carry brushes and all that kind of stuff. Wherever you are, you build with the bricks at hand. You just develop a vocabulary with these. And every once in a while, I try doing something with a brush, but it's just too foreign. HARRY COOPER: You know, we have the Meyerhoff show up at the National Gallery right now, and I thought one thing we could do is to look through the works as a way of seeing where you've been, and maybe where you're going to go, if you know. So I think the first work I have is one of the early drawings. Charcoal on paper. I think '64 or so, right after you graduate from Yale. BRICE MARDEN: It looks early. There's a certain tentativeness to it that I like, but I'm not really on top of it. HARRY COOPER: That's interesting you that it's early, because my thought was almost everything is there, in a way. BRICE MARDEN: Yeah. I mean, it's a little less fluid or maybe more fluid. I think the drawings get tightened up. The whole relation to the plane got tighter. HARRY COOPER: After this. BRICE MARDEN: Yeah. And this is still really very strongly influenced by Jasper. And in the show, Jasper-- there is this really great drawing of Jasper's called the <i>Night Driver.</i> HARRY COOPER: <i>NIght</i> Driver is on the right, and then there's the charcoal drawing on the left. BRICE MARDEN: And it just kind of makes my drawing look little bit silly. [LAUGHS] I feel quite embarrassed. Probably when I was making this drawing, I was working at the Jewish Museum guarding Jasper's retrospective up there. HARRY COOPER: Did you meet him in the course of that? BRICE MARDEN: And I, you know, we had some little conversation about encaustic or something. But there was no big conversation. HARRY COOPER: Bob Dylan. Was he part of the scene? BRICE MARDEN: When I first came to New York, my wife was Pauline Baez. HARRY COOPER: Joan's sister? BRICE MARDEN: Joan's oldest sister. I wanted to do a painting about Bob Dylan, or dedicated to Bob Dylan, and I wasn't going to make anything more specific about Dylan than the title. I was just going to make a painting. Our social life was with folk music. I moved to New York, I didn't know any artists in New York. And we would go to Gerde's Folk City, and I said, well, I'm making this painting, and I wanted to show him the things in the studio. It took me years to finally get it done, because I thought, oh, I'll make this painting and put it out in the world, and people will know about Bob Dylan. But by the time the painting got done-- [LAUGHS] HARRY COOPER: It was too late. BRICE MARDEN: Well, it wasn't too late. I mean, they knew about it. And I wasn't going to be any help. But I offered him the painting. I don't even know whether he got the letter. HARRY COOPER: Really? And that's when you went to work for Rauschenberg. BRICE MARDEN: I went to work for Rauschenberg after I had my first show. And the first show at Bykert in whatever. I forget when it was. '67 or something like that. HARRY COOPER: We think of your work in relation to John's more, but I guess at that point, you had the close relationship with Rauschenberg. And maybe it didn't stay that way, or-- BRICE MARDEN: Well, I always thought it was better I went to work for Bob than with Jasper. Jasper, you know, would've been, I mean, I was so influenced by the work. HARRY COOPER: It would've been like working for Cezanne or something. BRICE MARDEN: Yeah. I mean, Bob was a very, very powerful personality and brain. Just incredibly smart. I mean, you're right there, and your job basically was to have the coffee ready when he woke up in the morning and answer the phone fast so it didn't wake him up and all that kind of thing. But every once in a while, he'd really get going, and he's like the most naturally brilliant person. It was never anything bookish about it at all. He was a natural. I have never seen that level of concentration ever again. It's unbelievable. Unbelievable. HARRY COOPER: So maybe we can move to the early '70s, and we have one of the great Grove Group paintings. Tell me a little bit about these. BRICE MARDEN: By that time, we were going to Greece regularly, to this island called Hydra. And I mean, say if you go to Epidaurus or Delphi-- I mean, you go to Delphi, you drive in and down below Delphi there's this place called Etea and it's just covered with olive trees. And it's just amazing. It's absolutely amazing. HARRY COOPER: It's interesting that you responded to the color of the trees, and not, I guess, so much the Van Gogh gnarled branches and that. And you certainly get interested in that later. Were you doing drawings at this point? BRICE MARDEN: No, no. This was all very-- I mean, there's a group of drawings, and basically, they're just black graphite with these structural divisions. The divisions of the rectangle. HARRY COOPER: Moving through the '70s to the Annunciation series, and Myerhoff's have <i>Cogtatio</i> from '78. And this series came out of your wife's pregnancy, in a way? BRICE MARDEN: Well, Michael Baxandall wrote this book about the Renaissance, and he had this thing about the stages of the Annunciation. And I just basically used that as the basis for a group of paintings. What I did was I wanted to move the light through in a series of paintings, from the left to the right. And then I wanted the first painting to be like the alpha, and the last painting to be the omega. So it's about balance, and so it's these opposites balancing. HARRY COOPER: You know, a lot happened in the '80s. You visited Asia for the first time. '83, I think. And you saw the show of Japanese calligraphy that John Rosenfeld did in '84. BRICE MARDEN: I mean, I was trying to work get more drawing into the painting, and then this calligraphy thing came up, and I got very interested in that, and I started doing drawings based on calligraphy, using structural elements of calligraphy. Basically, it's like a grid. So it wasn't that far removed from what I was already doing. But then we would go to the Caribbean, and I'd do a lot of drawing of palm trees and stuff like that, but I would take things from the palm trees and arrange it in a calligraphic way, top to bottom, right to left. HARRY COOPER: And at the same time as the calligraphy, which exists in columns, you started joining those columns together. BRICE MARDEN: Yeah. HARRY COOPER: So there's a nice crossing between the trees and calligraphy. BRICE MARDEN: Well, I read one book, and it talked about how you read Chinese poetry. And say if you have a couplet, you don't just read the top to the bottom. You read the top across. I mean, there's a real mixture of the way you read it. And I did these things called diagrammed couplets, where I did my own loose fake calligraphy, and then started joining elements of it. And so that became a working thing. And then I came across these Cold Mountain poems by Han-shan, this Tang dynasty poet. And I found a translation that had it written in Chinese and in English. And so I used the structure, the way it was written in Chinese as the basic structure for the layout for the paintings, and then I did these paintings based on that. HARRY COOPER: The last major work the Meyerhoffs have is from the Red Rock series of the early 2000s. BRICE MARDEN: I mean, on these, I was using scholar's rocks as a kind of basis. Since getting involved with the calligraphy, I've become much more involved with looking at Chinese painting. You find out more about the whole philosophy of it. And so I got involved with these scholar's rocks. HARRY COOPER: Did you draw directly from the scholar's rocks? BRICE MARDEN: No, never. HARRY COOPER: Just in your head. In your eyes. BRICE MARDEN: Well, it started out, when I didn't have rocks, I would draw imaginary collections. So these things go from being in the beginning sort of gestural, and then the more resolved they get, and you start resolving the color, reworking the line. The more you repaint a line, the slower it gets. It's like reference. I like to think of myself as an abstract painter, and I don't like to mislead. But then I think well, what the hell. It's happening. I'll do it. HARRY COOPER: Now here, we've got an idea of how these paintings start off. BRICE MARDEN: Yeah. HARRY COOPER: Where we really see the calligraphic source underneath. BRICE MARDEN: Yeah. And this is actually the first hit. This probably takes about an hour. HARRY COOPER: This whole grid? BRICE MARDEN: Yeah. And then when I go back, I'll just start something sort of-- you go there, and you go there, and you start joining things. But it's all intuitive, free association kind of thing. HARRY COOPER: This is something of a return to Cold Mountain. BRICE MARDEN: Yeah. And I find, it wasn't intended. HARRY COOPER: And in a way, looking at this is a little misleading, because this is more calligraphic but then when you get- BRICE MARDEN: Yeah, then it ends up-- HARRY COOPER: Over here. And how many hours are we talking from there to over here? BRICE MARDEN: Physically, it's not a lot of painting time. It's not hours and hours. I mean, it's hours and hours and hours, but it's not weeks and months, because basically, I work all the paintings at the same time. HARRY COOPER: And another feature of this work in the '90s, too, is the way the lines start to push out against the frame and begin to outline the frame. BRICE MARDEN: Well, I don't like the things to go outside the frame. I mean, it would make a whole different reference, you know? And in that way, it becomes some sort of detail of some larger cosmic-- HARRY COOPER: Although, in a painting like Cold Mountain, you obey the frame, but you don't actually mark the frame in the same way. So the frame gets even stronger, and the sense of the rectangle, I guess, gets even stronger. When did you come up with the phrase "plane image," which has become an alter ego for you? What does that mean? BRICE MARDEN: Well, basically, it's the idea of the plane of the painting-- the plane being this sort of imaginary surface that goes across the whole rectangle, and everything operates on that plane. The whole thing about modernist painting is like, bringing the plane closer and closer to the actual surface of the painting, flattening it out. And then when I was doing this plane image thing, I was into monochromatic painting, so the plane was the image. HARRY COOPER: So it goes all the way back. BRICE MARDEN: Yeah. So it goes back to that. And I like the idea-- like, a lot of these Chinese guys, they hadn't used lots of names, and they adopted different sort of- for a while, I went through this whole thing of thinking I was plane image. HARRY COOPER: You also said at one point, and I quoted this on the wall of the show, you said the rectangle is a great human invention. BRICE MARDEN: It is. I mean, it's a great human invention. HARRY COOPER: What's so great about it? BRICE MARDEN: Well, just look at it. Look around us, you know? All these rectangles. It works quite well. And it is human. HARRY COOPER: It's not natural. BRICE MARDEN: Yeah. I mean, there's a lot of natural reference, but, I mean-- and also, in the '60s, there was a lot of this painting going on. A lot of shaped canvas, and-- HARRY COOPER: A lot of people were unhappy with the rectangle. BRICE MARDEN: Oh yeah. They didn't like the rectangle. And I really liked the rectangle. And I had this whole idea, especially with the monochromatic paintings, of you could get the exact perfect right color for that shape. And if you did, if you really got it right-- say, if you had absolute correctness of form, god knows what the painting was capable of doing. Because people were saying painting was dead. And this was my way of thinking, well, the things that haven't been done. You can make a painting that can cure cancer. Yeah. Well, this is-- I had this painting. I thought it was finished, but there was too much fluctuation in the surface, and I thought it was making it too complicated to read. So I just painted over the whole thing to unify it, and I'm going to work back into it. HARRY COOPER: Over the top of this-- BRICE MARDEN: Yeah. And probably what I'll do is just put a color on the black [INAUDIBLE]. HARRY COOPER: [INAUDIBLE]. BRICE MARDEN: No, this is a terpineol. One of the things that happens with the terpineol is the more you layer it, the shinier it gets. HARRY COOPER: Would you take photographs to-- BRICE MARDEN: I take photographs. I mean, I took a reference photograph of this yesterday before I painted over it, so I know what I have here. I usually don't really use them. [LAUGHTER]
