[Julie Mehretu: "Mural"] [New York City] --Okay, so then, what we're going to do is --we're going to make it two inches lower
than where it is, --and two inches shorter. There is a moment when the painting is completely
finished, where it just feels ultimately complete to
me. And I felt that way until I looked at the
painting from the exterior. --That hexagon is important. --Once you have the trees planted, --you won't see the top half of the painting... Certain shapes that were in the painting that I intended to operate a certain way from
the exterior-- it just seemed a little small. So that from a distance, you have one experience, and you have a different experience from up
close, but they don't battle each other. From the way the whole painting was structured
from the beginning, there was no part of it that was completely
determined ever. It was always just, like, the beginning lines, then the next shapes, then... So it's been this additive process with certain shapes that I wanted to include but not sure where, when, how. --Yeah, just the outline of it. --That's perfect. I put another layer of drawing in the computer. --Then you can at least just plot that. --And then I'm going to get the blue tape. And parts of it come onto the painting-- we move it around or change the shape on the painting. So there's always this kind of back-and-forth. So I think that there's a lot of meaning in
the painting that I would never want to articulate a direct statement. Maybe, also, that's a big reason that I work
with abstraction, so that you can't necessarily pinpoint a specific
narrative. But overall, whether it's just a plain square or a more anthropomorphic shape, I think that these all bring up something that means something more subconsciously or poetically within us. And that's it! These shapes we have to put in... Hopefully nothing else. Hopefully I won't... [LAUGHS] we won't come in tomorrow with another surprise! [LAUGHS] "Ah, it needs this!"
