Project 6: Art History Video: Painters Painting

the problem of american painting had been a problem of subject matter painting kept getting entangled in the contradictions of america itself we made portraits of ourselves when we had no idea who we were we tried to find god in landscapes that we were destroying as fast as we could paint them we painted indians as fast as we could kill them and during the greatest technological jump in history we painted ourselves as a bunch of fiddling rustics by the time we became social realists we knew that american themes were not going to lead to a great national art not only because the themes themselves were hopelessly duplicitous but because the forms we used to embody them had become hopelessly obsolete against the consistent attack of mondrian and picasso we had only an art of half truths lacking all conviction the best artists began to yield rather than kick against the pricks and it is exactly at this moment when we finally abandon the hopeless constraint to create a national art that we succeed for the first time in doing just that by resolving a problem forced on painting by the history of french art we create for the first time a national art of genuine magnitude and if one finally had to say what it was that made american art great it was that american painters took hold of the issue of abstract art with a freedom they could get from no other subject matter and finally made high art out of it i think one of the big problems in american art is that it is american i mean what is america how can you be an artist not a provincial but still american after all you are here artists like de kooning and newman solve this with immense sophistication and moved into what i would call a cosmopolitan plane when pulling first came to the country late 20s early 30s there was practically no american art world law intense churches that didn't exist and cooney came over here as a european a trained european artist was caught in the the bind that all the other american moderns were trapped in well i felt a certain depression over there i mean i felt caught a small nation i went to belgium and worked for a while and then the american movies always being the paramount movies and all those movies warner brothers movies and uh seemed to be a very light place because i didn't know that the movies were all taken in california but everything seemed to be very light and bright and happy you know take a look at the comedians you know like uh howard lloyd and charlie chapman tom mix and and i always felt like wanted to come to america even when i was a boy and his first pictures were abstractions more or less geometric more or less hard edged more or less bright colors and from there he moved into a series of men and uh poetic sort of tattered romantic poor looking men tragic haunted men [Music] certainly there's an idea of the depression and of the bread lines and of the hobos and the buns and of the tragedy of the unemployed in these pictures roosevelt thought we should decorate all public buildings which was a marvelous idea and we should hire these artists by the week and which he did 23.90 and you hired a lot of artists and you had to have some background to be on it and we were all trained in school we i mean there weren't that many artists it was a very lonely profession at the time we decorated airports public schools terminals whatever you have that was a function of adorned to public buildings i felt the issue in those years was what can a painter do the problem of the subject became very clear to me as the crucial thing in painting not the technique not the plasticity not the look not the surface none of those things meant that much those things i suppose could find them their way at the issue for me and i think it existed for all the fellows that uh you know for pollock and for garlame and uh um why are we gonna paint if i think the best distinction has been made by professor maya shapiro who i'm talking about subject in painting may has made the distinction between what he calls the object matter for example people think that cezanne's subject to the apples well it's possible to argue that that's what it is and for a long time i was very antagonistic to those apples because they were like super apples they were like cannonballs i saw them as cannonballs but he does talk about the but maya in making the distinction between the subject of a work and the objects in the work i think makes a remarkable distinction that should help people understand that even though let's say my painting has developed did not have any of those objects that it did not necessarily mean therefore that there was no subject there america was a backwater uh paris was the center of modern art then the war intervened and paris was sealed off which turned the new york scene into a kind of pressure cooker out of which a number of american artists found their own way jackson pollock was one of the major american artists in the 30s who worked for the wpa pollock felt and said explicitly too that it was time for painting to go from the easel from the small picture which was within the confines of a window frame to the mural to the wall-sized picture he did a painting here on the floor working around it from all four sides of where the navajo indians did their sand paintings in the desert and pollock was from the west and knew about the indian tradition and he painted gesturally not just the brush stroke the wrist moving but the whole arm moving across the canvas you can see how the gesture encloses itself again and again to make the entire rhythmic design of the picture it isn't just harbour trip if you look at the corners at the bottoms and the sides of the picture you see that the design continues to close in and refer itself to itself it's a continuous gestural athletic design like choreography perhaps the painting the mural the canvas becomes a field of action in which the artist makes his gestures one has no conception of looking at the finished works um the you know the madness and risk and nerve and being under the edge of an abyss it seems to oneself when one's actually making them so they seem perfectly serene and ordered after they're done and i think all of my generation or certainly most of my generation to a great extent experienced it as such pollock is still taken for this example of far-outism the people who admire him most on the new york scene today uh don't take him as a painter they take him as an example of the a successor an artist in the line of duchon someone who knocked uh knocked you flat with his arbitrariness the whole power phenomenon is um a kind of symptomatic one um in that his position is um based on a certain idea of odd history uh an idea about history that the museum collecting criticism the art market is all geared to and that is what you might call the uh the heroism of the big breakthrough poet was a very intense personality but he wasn't a great artist um his work like the work of all the new york school is based on um well to put it in elegantly a kind of mopping up operation of the school of paris it puts together certain remnants of of cubism surrealism and attempts to charge them with another kind of energy which in turn uh requires a larger format and a bigger gesture because something is uh being drawn to an end i see uh the whole abstract expression is phenomenon and pollock in particular as a kind of last gasp of modern european modernism pollock's paintings live or die in the same context that rembrandts or titians or velazquez there's no interruption there's no mutation here pollen has to be tested by the same eye that could see how good raw phil was when he was good i feel that i'm an american painter in the sense that uh this is where i i grew up and lived was born and this is where i've developed my ideas and so on at the same time i hope that my work transcends the issue of being an american i recognize that i'm an american because i'm not a czechoslovak and my work was not painted in czechoslovakia or in hungary or in india but i hope that my work can be seen and understood on a universal basis that is that the language is uh of of a nature that it doesn't have the necessity for its american labels but all these issues in the end whether it's american or whether it's painterly or whether it's uh are false issues raised by esthetes i've expressed myself on this issue many many years ago when at a conference between athletes and the artists i said to these estates that even if they're right and even if they can build an aesthetic analysis or an aesthetic system that will explain art or painting or whatever it is it's of no value really because that aesthetics is for me like ornithology must be for the birds i don't think painters have particularly bright ideas what do they do i guess they're talented painting things it's a bright idea for monet to paint those different hours of the day i mean a series of women in the late 30s and early 40s seemed to be searching for this way out of the european crisis or the crisis he was trying to find forms but instead of finding them in abstractions like a circle for a clock he'd find an elbow or a shoulder and try and create his own elbow or his own shoulder or his own eyes and he moved from there into a series of abstractions and this was his really revolutionary move he got rid of color that in fact the abstractions were black and white to everyone's intense surprise as soon as he had mastered these black and white pictures he stopped them and began to paint women again i just wanted to make it easy for myself to put something right in the center of the canvas like i have two eyes and nose and mouth and arms and feet i uh had a lot of mod kiss out of magazines and i noticed that when i had something photographic image like this the mouth [Applause] it gave me a point of reference it was something to hold on to but you just cut it out of a newspaper ad be kind to your maybe and that was the area around which that was sort of the let's say it was the eye of the hurricane i placed it and it hit me it was just shocked that i knew where i had to go more or less and i also felt everything ought to have a mouth i mean i think it was very funny but i think a mouth is a very funny thing yes because you do everything with it but you hear you're only here your eyes are you don't push the spinners in your eye or instance and the mouth is a very strange thing to me and then of course a woman's mouth is very appealing it is interesting though that i could only do it with a woman [Music] i couldn't do it with men like the japanese that make those monsters growl and you know i mean i guess it's because i'm not a woman no i began with the woman because it's like a traditions like the venus is like olympia like monet made the olympia if you take a brush and pick up some paints make somebody's nose out of it it's kind of absurd but not doing it is just as absurd you you found it right on the paper and then yeah and then what happens then they place it on linen you know you know you make such a beautiful job because i think it's better than painting a canvas not that i do it for that reason i just like the paper you are you consider yourself a painterly painter very much yeah what does painterly mean well that you can see it's done with a brush i have only three sizes and i use those and they uh they have a certain awkwardness which i get used to which i like and when i make those large landscape pictures so-called landscapes i work with very bad brushes you know so there's kind of brushes that if your paint is ceiling it drips all over you but they seem they're made out of a fiber and very little hair and i kind of put them in boiling water until they get kind of blobbery you know what i mean and i uh gives me a great comfort to paint with them paint can get so thick that i uh intuitively took some newspapers and kind of flattered them out on the canvas you know to absorb the oil out of it then when i took it off i saw the back print of the papers and i thought it was nice that's about all it had no social significance that way you know like rauschenberg users or something it was just an accident [Music] 44. i had my first one-man show in 1950 i was 45 years old in 1943 hans hoffman had his first one-man show at peggy guggenheim's gallery the art of this century in new york it wasn't until he was 65 years old hoffman as he put it later spent all these decades sweating out cubism all the language and all the criticisms in american art came from the idea of the two-dimensional plane the push and the pull all these were huffman's words he gave to to his students hoffman has great i had a great responsibility in the fact that he kept uh let's say an artist like matisse uh up in the forefront of attention at a time when his stock was down hoffman had this sense of continuity with the past the whole past was there even when you didn't consciously know that aha was very unsure of himself the way everybody is uh he showed it he wrote it out because it worked but the way other people didn't uh i think hans b got in the high gear sometime around 54 53 though he painted some great pictures in 42-43 anticipations of pollock anticipations of steel as you know the movement is such as it is to the degree that the movement is usually called abstract expressionism i i think very few of the artists involved were really interested in expressionism and i think the so-called expressionist element has to do with a certain anxiety and a certain violence that i think is in the american situation would you say i'm saying expressionism was the first american art that was filmed with anger as well as beauty and from that standpoint when it appeared was the most baffling and alfred barr has told me the most hated expression ever to appear in this country by other artists we had no general public the only thing that we did have was the opportunity of seeing each other in shows and between 47 and 52 you might say betty parsons charlie eagan and to some extent sam cootes were the only places where any of us had an opportunity of presenting ourselves of showing the work it was not in that sense a true marketplace it was not in that sense even a showing place it was a primitive cultural situation in the sense that an artist we each lived a law in our studios and then there were just a few isolated places where somebody was willing to sit with the work and there was the open door and that's what and that's all that was my first year was under the most ideal circumstances would you say it was in peggy guggenheim's gallery called part of this century all the abstract pictures had the frames taken off and were hung on poles on universal joints so that you could actually take hold of the monreal and turn it swivel it into the light and so on and really i use it with the same familiarity um the one does a library rather than standing as one does in a museum at a distance awestruck before this all there and the only protestant is a result of um all kinds of revisions i mean it's what's left over after revising and revising and revising there was always meant to be a figure in it in my difficulty in finding a title for the picture in my despair and finding the title for the picture so i think titles are important i like titles that lead into the picture in this particular picture which puzzled me i wanted an accurate title could not find one i remember the surrealist device which i'd never used before of taking a book and it had to be a favorite book uh so i took joyce and opened it at random and without looking at it put my finger on the page and where my finger rested it said the homely protestant and i thought of course the picture is the homely protestant which is to say it is myself but why why do we seem to get involved bigger and bigger paintings i mean the scale of america is different we'd say most of american painters work in what were once small factories uh most european artists work in either apartments or studios that were designed in terms of easel painting but there's no doubt too this is a different experience in a large picture but i think it has more to do with a heroic impulse as compared with the intimacy of french painting my uh first painting the where i uh felt i had moved into a an area for myself that was uh completely my me i painted in on my birthday birthday in 1948 and it's you know it's a small red painting and i put a piece of tape in the middle and i put my so-called zip people which i prefer to call actually it's it's not a stripe now the thing i would like to say about that is that i did not decide either in 48 or 47 or 46 or whatever it was to say to myself i'm going to paint stripes i did not take an arbitrary abstract decision i suppose i thought of them as streaks of life when i painted this painting which i called one minute i stayed with that painting for about eight nine months wondering to my s so what had i done what was it and i realized that up until then whenever i used that attitude i was filling the canvas in order to make that thing very very viable and suddenly in this particular painting one month i realized that i had filled the surface it was full in that painting i got rid of atmosphere that stroke made the thing come to life chance is not a primary idea with me and nevertheless it is true that the open series i discovered entirely by chance one day i put a small vertical canvas against a large vertical canvas observing the smaller canvas against the larger one i thought what a beautiful proportion and without a second thought picked up a piece of charcoal and outlined it on the larger picture and the open paintings among other things are involved in scale and i've investigated the small scale large scale will make i've made some as small as five by seven inches and the largest so far 18 and 20 feet i have decided not deliberately but it's come out that way that um i would like to see line back in painting is starting with a whole surface and beginning to divide it rather than nice as i did with many years beginning with the image and integrating it onto the surface i feel that my zip does not divide my painting i feel it does the exact opposite it does not cut the format in half or in whatever parts that it unites the thing it creates a totality as you get you see it you look at it and you see it and if you don't and there's nothing to walk into it's not in a window leading you into a situation where you walk through some either interior or exterior world from which you then come to a conclusion the beginning and the end are there at once otherwise a painter is a kind of choreographer of space he creates kind of a dance of elements of forms and it becomes a you might say either attacked a lot or it becomes a narrative art instead of a visual art when you see a person you have an immediate impact you don't have to really start looking at details you your first reaction you see when you meet a person for the first time is immediate and it's a total reaction in which the entire personality of a person and your own personality make contact and to my mind that's almost a metaphysical event if you have to start examining the eyelashes and all that sort of thing it becomes a cosmetic situation which uh you remove yourself from the experience in some ways it's easier to say what i'm doing by saying what i'm refusing to do and if i look at one of the pictures of one of the open series now i see that i refuse to have it glossy rather than mouth there are no shadows there's very little representation the space is ambivalent in that the wine is clearly drawn on a flat surface nevertheless from a certain distance the shape also swings in an airy space i refuse to have the surface impersonally painted but my touch is on the surface everywhere there are enormous differences in the ground in terms of thickness thinness rhythm or flatness etc all of which i do i use large round window brushes all of which i do by the pressure of the brush bringing it modulating it back and forth in terms of thickness and thinner sometimes i let the brush stroke be very visible and other times it's very neutral there's no question that my work and the work of a man i respect took a revolutionary position you might say against the bourgeois notion of what a painting is as an object aside from what it is as a statement because in the end you can even contain it in the ordinary bourgeois home there's more to the problem it seems to me than any or any old-fashioned idea of what an easel painting is a painting can be bigger than anything that can go on an easel and still be in my opinion an easel painting and in the end in the end size doesn't count whether the easel painting is small or big is not the issue size doesn't count it's scale it counts it's human scale it counts and the only way you can achieve human scale is by the content there's a space for each artist and kandinsky said it's very good not here not that but somewhere there's a place where it happens like for instance now i'm very much influenced by the water here you know everything we are all surrounded here in this neighborhood by water i like to go to laos point and just look at whatever is you know i mean you have to be in that state of mind to do that i guess so i go on the bike and look at the water i try to get the light of this water i mean you know this or the light here and it helped me enormously because uh i felt in new york that i was using colors just spasmatically red yellow blue black white you know and i had no way of getting hold of a tone you know the light of a painting well i'm an eclectic artist and there seemed to be no time element no period in painting for me like last summer i wasn't italian and there was some early christian roman wall painting say just took me for a loop and i felt particularly if a brush does it you know i like painting with a brush the abstract expressionist and myself had what they had in common we had in common was touch i was never interested in their pessimism or editorializing you have to have time to feel sorry for yourself if you're going to be a good abstract expressionist and [Music] i think i always considered that a waste but what uh we did that you know like what i did that looks like abstract expressionism is that with their grief and art passion and action painting um there was they let the brush stroke show the idea that it come to me that um that i should have to mean what i did [Music] then accompanying that was that there was no reason to mean what other people did and so if i could tell that i was doing what someone else was doing then i would try not to do it because it seemed to me that de kooning did his work perfectly beautifully and there was no reason for me to help him with it well you know but everybody's influenced by everybody and i did not want a small gesture standing at the easel with a stable brush and having looked at cubism which can be very detailed and my new and fine and has that essence at times of the easel and the sable brush i literally wanted to break free put it on the floor throw the paint around i was more interested in the uh in the making at the making aspect of uh abstract expressionism than i was in the subject matter uh and i mean i mean by that that the fact that the uh the artists were handling the materials in a physical way the fact that they were making paintings but that handling aspect of the materials that both pollock and still used uh they didn't suppress the the tactile quality of the handling of materials to any other picture image the you never lost the sight of the touch [Music] of the making uh [Music] in their work the thing about picasso being such a big figure and uh particularly picasso and cubism was something that i just sort of passed around i suppose largely owing to the example of pollock and both pollock and hoffman seem to me to have it's i don't want to say solve the problem but at least they solve the problem in a sense for me i mean they came to terms in some kind of really concrete and accomplished way with what had happened uh with basically with 20th century modernism with european painting and uh i mean i don't want to be chauvinistic or sound but what can i can't say anything else but that they established american painting as a kind of real uh as a real thing for me simply uh something that uh i had confidence in something that uh you didn't have to i didn't have to go all the way back and worry again about where i stood in relation to metis and picasso i could worry about where i stood in relation to hoffman and paula for me learning cubism was the greatest freedom and exercise really analyzing what cubism was about why a guitar up here uh related to or didn't relate to the symbol of a base note down there how things pushed each other around in a pseudo or ambiguous space that's flat but i can make it if i do it right play around so that because of a color and a shape things go back miles or come forward yards hoffman called this push and pull and i think every bit of progress in the development of abstract painting goes back i painted mountains and sea in october of 52 and i had recently returned from a driving trip through nova scotia cape breton and i think i've had a summer of making small careful after nature watercolors and got into my own place on 23rd street and felt sort of let her rip i guess i'd ordered a lot of unsized unprimed cotton duck which we all bought from a sailing supply place so i left the stuff on the floor i poured the paint on and used very well relatively few brush strokes since i did not increasingly as i've been working i didn't want the sign of the brush or how the picture was made to appear that area not painted on didn't need paint because it had paint next to it so it operated as forcefully and the thing was to decide where to leave it and where to fill it and where to say this doesn't need another line or another pale color in other words the very ground was part of the medium red blue against the white of cotton duck or the beige of linen have the same play in space as the duck and every square inch of that surface is equally important in depth shallowness space so that it isn't as if background meant the background is a curtain or a drape in front of which there is a table on which there is a plate on which there are apples but the apples are as important as the drape and the drape is as important as the legs of the table if you just put drips down or circles or stripes or leaves that can become your goods but if you put that stripe with magic there against that particular background near that particular circle and you are involved in a whole ambiguity and play in depth knowing full well that it's all on that flat thing i mean you could just skate on it a picture that is beautiful or comes off or works looks as if it all was made in one stroke at once i myself don't like to see the trail of a brush stroke the drip of paint to me that's part of a kind of sentiment or clueing in that has nothing to do with how a picture hits you is it harder to want to be a painter [Music] well i think the first issue is being a painter clement greenberg included the work of both lewis and nolan in a show that he did at the coots gallery in the early 50s uh clem was the first to see their their uh potential and he invited them up to new york in 1953 i think it was to helen frankenthaler's studio to see a painting that she had just done called mountains and sea which was one of the first large field pictures in which the stain technique was used mars and i used to talk about what we call one shot painting if you were in touch with uh like what you were doing uh you only had to do it one time each thing that you did was just just done that one time with no uh afterthoughts and it had to stand we wanted to have this happen out of just the use of the material and everybody was assuming that the way you went about making art was to start out a drawing that had been in the western tradition and in order to imagine how to set set yourself up to work uh people would take artists we take a pencil a piece of paper and make sketches or to make plans about how pictures were the uh how this thing was going to be organized and like to imagine what the result was going to be most artists wouldn't just go out and get materials and start messing around with the materials and find some way out of handling materials and techniques to have the result of what they were making come out of that they were using uh drawing in order to structure where they put color shapes scales depths etc they didn't just start by handling materials which is uh a kind of drawing it's another aspect of drawing but it's not the aspect of planning it's not uh assuming drawing is a way of planning uh the result of art of making art you start with a roll of canvas and some some paint and it's a matter of getting uh those uh materials to together almost more in a tactile sense texture sensor than in a in a drawing sense or a diagramming sense [Music] just how you handle uh materials how thin or how thick the paint is what the weave of the canvas is colorfield curiously enough for perhaps not became a viable way of painting it about exactly the time that acrylic paint the new plastic paint came into into being oil paint would always leave a uh slick of oil a puddle of oil around the edge of the color whereas acrylic paint uh stops at the at its own edge i roll the camisole on the floor and staple it down then tape off quantities of areas how do you how do you apply the paint sometimes with brushes sometimes with sponges sometimes with rollers any way that i can get it on where the tactile result is compatible with the the nature of the kind of color i'm going to use there one thing that people don't generally talk about is the fact that the experience of color is tactile i mean we talk about the relative coolness or warmth of colors or transparency or opacity and really all of those descriptive terms are tactile descriptions rather than to do with say the redness of red when the color is first laid down it doesn't have anything to do with the resulting size or shape really once you lay it down you can choose uh by by sight [Music] how to uh bring the total the total color in to a certain quantity deciding how much of that color is going to be left there will determine what the shape and size of the picture will be that's left to last you have a way of getting the color to take on a different degree of speed translucent transparency even warmth of coolness i'm interested in the pulse of each color finding its place in relation to pulses of other color if you get that combination into a certain kind of focus that focus itself dictates the size and shape so then this judgment comes in and i think uh judgment's crucial you know i mean you do decide and that has something to do with with taste uh taste is usually uh we use it in a negative sense but uh uh there is the best taste you know i mean there's the right taste there's a real taste there's the real thing the 50s saw the emergence of an avant-garde scene for the first time in this country the scene replaced academic art as a kind of category in which you place yourself by to some extent making fun of art as it is earnestly or seriously carried on duchamp is the scene he was the first artist to consciously realize of such a category as avant-garde and he became an avant-gardist in the most radical way yet he stated the most that you made yourself significant not by producing good art but by producing recognizably avant-garde art with uh shocks and surprises and uh puzzle mode built into it it is priced at forty thousand but uh actually i'll be satisfied if i get 35. i have a 15 000 uh profit on that you know i don't know no i'm not very busy i'm i have the antonio here and then making a film he's making me feel you know like the mccarthy film but without mccarthy about the artwork i always knew i was going to buy art it was simply a question of uh of uh having enough money for it with three boys to bring up with a house in the country and and and uh but i always knew art today is art for a very small number of people art in every period of history has been art for a very small number of people mostly the artists themselves and one or two dukes leo castelli take one but the great event of my career happened a little later just about one month after my opening and that was a show at the jewish museum and one painting that i stumbled upon that i surprised me very much and i was quite stunned by it into a fact it was a green painting i looked at the nameplate and it said just for john's never heard that name and i almost thought that it was an invented one but uh yes i also didn't understand what the painting was about uh it was a green painting squaring painting for me i didn't recognize it as i found out later that he was a target anyway three days later i went to rauschenberg's studio and i studied with hours and uh i don't know i'd like to say i learned humility but i was so uncertain and shy that i don't think that i could use more humility i went there for discipline however not humility i mean like what i learned from alberts that you had to have a good reason to decide one color over another but in the exercises seeing the clinical tricks it was involved in color i met a lot of nice colors i picked arbitrarily the most difficult color that i could work with and it was red because red goes black very quickly none of those early things were about negation or nihilism they were more like celebrating the abundance of color as opposed to the sphendle of color and then gradually it just opened up they found like you know like got a little closer to yellow it's made orange and and then you know nobody had understood rauschenberg i had been uh wildly uh entrusted about his uh show a few years before at eagan's it was the so-called red show which was a fantastic event that nobody understood he didn't send a single painting out of the show except perhaps to friends who gave him fifty dollars so that he could garn uh paying his rent for a painting that would be worth now forty fifty thousand one of the uh things i wanted to try was an all eraser drawing and um i did drawings myself and erased them but that seemed like 50 50. and so then i knew that i had to pull back farther and like it was going to be an all eraser drawing it had to be art uh in the beginning and i went to bell and then told him about it locked the door and it started with a portfolio of of of drawings and then no not those and then then went to another portfolio and he said these are drawings i would miss so he pulled out one he put that back and then he said um now i'm gonna give you one really hard to erase and he picked out another and he was right i spent i think nearly three weeks with no fewer than 15 different kinds of erasers and that that made it real i mean that wasn't uh i mean i wasn't just making a few marks and rubbing them out myself i may have said that painting relates as much to life as it does to art or vice versa but i don't think so i said that you couldn't make either and and you had to work in in that hole between what is that uh it's undefined that makes the adventure painting one of the key early pictures within the proto-pop movement perhaps the most important of all is rebus which is a word that means puzzle and in this single painting of rashenbergs as early as 1954 there's a veritable anthology of the possibilities that are going to uh take over during during the period that's coming up so i prepared a ground of of of newspapers but colored sections which happen to be the funnies so that i had an already going surface so there wouldn't be a beginning to the picture and so just i'll be additive i mean like like uh it doesn't really matter what's inside it's it's like when it stops because you're dealing with an object what can make you think of how it could continue you begin with the possibilities of the material and then you let them do what they can do so the artist is really almost a bystander while he's working i mean the hierarchy of materials completely broken down in my first year of russian books they were there was a curious couple called factum one infected truth i painted two identical pictures but only identical to the limits of the eye the hand the material adjusting to the differences from one to another neither one of them was painted first he wanted to show that nothing was really casual even the the slashes the brush strokes the drips were calculated and curiously enough it was in defense of a movement that that he was actually that he moved away from it was in defense of abstract expressionism my idea wasn't that uh about i wasn't involved in chance as much as i was that i felt isolated i wasn't interested in attaining a precious state of isolation i was interested in what was around me art doesn't come out of art and you don't work with one foot in the art book and no painter has ever really uh been able to help another and i had no interest in being better or worse than any other artist and we had enough self-respect to know that somehow we were different and my work when it functions celebrates that my paintings are invitations to look somewhere else and they have been for a long time like the the new piece is like how not to throw your newspaper away because that's where it is and if you are conscientious at all information there in one newspaper no matter where you pick it up blow your head if you pay fifteen thousand dollars for something you're not going to wrap the garbage in it right i don't and i don't know i don't know who buys newspapers but i know how they don't read them and take them seriously and it's the best working book in the world we might have one last drink on that shortly thereafter jasper jones appeared was a modest shy young man and i was so curious to see what his painting looked like that i told bob could i could we interrupt looking at these paintings and go down and see what justice paintings looked like so he you know how bob always was generous and friendly and he said of course let's go down and see jasper's paintings first and so down we went it had been my intention to be an artist since i was a child and in the place where i was a child there were no artists so i didn't and there was no art so i really didn't know what that meant and i think it meant that i would be able to be in a situation other than the one that i was in i think that was primarily the primary fantasy whereas the the society there seemed to accommodate [Music] every other thing i knew about but not but not not that possibility so i think that in part the idea of being an artist was was uh that kind of fantasy of being out of this then because there's none of this here so if you're going to be it you'll have to be somewhere else so i like that and plus i like to do things in my hands you know so i deliberately then tried to uh set up a new uh frame of mind for myself now whether that's how deliberately one can do that i don't know i mean it may just be that the thought occurs at the same time that you're ready to do this i don't i don't know so i worked in various ways and destroyed various things um i [Music] became perhaps too serious about what i did and then the first time the paintings that you were talking about start with the flag painting and [Music] that uh it's sometime scorned that uh the truth which is that one night i dreamed i painted a large american flag and the next morning i got up and i went out and bought materials to begin it but what is the collage material made out of paper and wraps newspaper uh any kind of paper i mean what is the order of application uh in that painting it would be hard to describe it would be very hard to describe because some things i stitched on to the on onto the canvas with thread i think we can i don't know what the canvas was probably i think it was a sheet and things were sewn on and it's very rotten painting because i began it in like uh house enamel paint and it wouldn't dry quick enough and then i had in my head this idea of something i had read i heard i don't know what about wax encaustic and i changed in the middle of the painting to that because the encaustic just has to cool and then it's hard and you don't we don't blur it again whereas the anomaly have to wait eight hours or something for it to you do that you have to wait eight hours before you do that whereas with the encaustic you can just keep on in a sense that's the precise opposite of drip and all that isn't it well it drips so far starves like each discreet movement is remains discreet say within an area of red you could still divide that into something else you could see a drip of something or that or a piece of paper or whatever even though it was all red then i thought well what is what difference does the color make then if what you're doing is not looking at the color but looking at these other things the combination of this new material and this for me new image or new idea about imagery made things very lively for me at that time and started my mind working and i and my arm and i always thought there was a connection between the american flag and the fact that you're from the south well my aunt gladdest once when she read the thing in the magazine wrote me a letter saying she was so proud of me because she had worked so hard to instill some respect for the american flag and her students and she was so glad that the mark had been left on me in thinking about the imagery of the flag and what what was trying to say what it was like then i thought of the target [Music] then i had i don't know why i had this idea but i had this idea that i would have the target with these wooden blocks above i i was concerned with with the approach and distance and contact with the painting so i had the idea that these blocks could become could be movable and they could be attached to something behind the target that would make noise so that each one would make a different sound that was the way it started then i didn't like the idea i don't know why maybe it was too difficult i don't remember but at any rate my studio had in it uh various plaster casts life that i had done from people like hands and feet and faces and things and so i simply thought of these wooden sections instead of moving back and back and forth and activating sounds as as being able to lift up and see something rather than hear something and then i saw these things i had and i decided to put them in it so i did [Music] what about dada what the question is that what about data [Laughter] when doucho uh made his cage of marble cubes that look just like sugar lumps representing or fashioning what could easily be duplicated and fashioning it in a traditionally artistic material like marble and making marble look like an industrial product like sugar cubes john's followed them by casting a flashlight or a beer can in bronze and then painting them in some cases to look identical or a can a coffee can fill with paint brushes the casting of the bronzer and carefully painting it so you couldn't tell the difference between the bronze version and the real version well all the point of all that is supposed to be the point i think all work has relationship to other work [Music] i think the idea is i think the idea i think an idea around what you're talking about is the possibility that i deliberately was behaved in a dada fashion in my work which is not true in that i because i didn't know anything about dada at that time and i only learned about dada by uh actually i didn't even know the term i must confess i didn't and bob rauschenberg did and when someone said that he explained to me what dad i was then i thought well i should find out firsthand what it was so uh bob and i went down to the irensberg collection in philadelphia to look at to look at uh primarily the duchamps and i didn't know how dushan's work though bob did to some extent [Music] and i found it very interesting and uh over the years i found it more and more interesting and [Music] any uh [Music] i don't know what to say i'm not embarrassed by any uh relationship that anyone could make between my work in myself my work is not imitative of his and i i'm entirely sympathetic to everything that he's ever done i believe but not in any uh [Music] i don't think there's any stylistic similarity and the thing the the dadas were daughters by being it was they were daughters by saying they were daughters if i'm goddess it was i'm certainly not the collectors have made an enormous contribution not only to the market but to painters themselves it seems to me that the fact of the skulls the fact that dr ludwig these people that buy that set standards make everyone else itch to emulate the itch to emulate the desire for status is certainly one of the main things in our society my first great purchase uh after the abstract expressionist was to buy out almost completely the 1958 show of jasper john's he did very poorly in that show and i couldn't understand why it wasn't selling i i thought it was so marvelous because he was using the technique of abstract expressionism but he was the hatchet man who really was the moment that abstract expressionism started to you know come to the realization that something new was happening i told castelli i wanted to buy the whole show and he said to me no no he's just uh that's very vulgar he says we can't do that so i bought about eight things prices of jasper hill have gone up in a fantastic way the target was plaster cast for instance it was in my first show i bought personally the price was 1200 the flag was the most expensive painting in the show and it was two thousand dollars now these two paintings would be i think 150 and 200 thousand dollars respectively i heard that bill de kooning had said about leo with whom he was annoyed over some something that son of a you could give him two beer cans and he could sell them and at that time i had made a couple of sculptures i'd made one or two flashlight and one or two of a light bulb there were small objects small sort of ordinary objects and when i heard this story i thought what a fantastic sculpture for me i mean really just absolutely perfect so uh i made this work i did it and uh frankly i think that frankly this accusation that's leveled against the dealers uh that they are responsible for shaping the armed market is a is a very silly one naturally we are there to do that the job and we are doing it now if people uh ourselves and the critics and the museums uh go along with us then there is a consensus there and therefore we are right and not wrong so i think that but what we are doing is merely doing our job i want to know if artists have any chance of being up there where the decisions are made instead of having to go through you to the rockefellers from now on you know mr harja that you had to go through the brothers rockefeller in order to get your job you know that's where the authority comes from you know that's where you have to go for any authority that you get in the future i want to know if we're really going to be up there in whatever role you want to call it where the policies are made whether we have to go through this indirect roundabout i'm saying the chances are probably pretty slim i became aware of the fact that collecting is just not going to a gallery and buying a painting suddenly i became very deeply involved with artists uh who later were to make up the group of pop artists but they didn't even know each other we had the parties up here and dinners up here where a lot of these pop artists met each other and my purchase of their pictures seemed to be crucial to the development you know what happens to a young artist when you buy a painting of his he looks at you like you're completely mad you know and then suddenly he starts painting like a maniac the skulls in their front hall have a double portrait of of themselves by george siegel i remember ethel calling me before she went out to seagulls to the farm to be cast wondering whether she would wear a real courage or a copy because it was going to be destroyed during the uh casting process and i think she wore a copy she didn't see the point in destroying a real quran i don't believe in anything but my own uh intuition and so um when i met olenburg i started to buy and then i heard uh someone mentioned to me about a fellow called andy warhol i went to see him in 61 early in 61 and he said to me i want to sell you some paintings and i said well what do you mean some paintings he says well he says i don't care how many you take but i need fourteen hundred dollars andy uh when i first knew you uh you weren't painting and then you did become a painter and i wonder if you could tell me why that happened and when it happened and something about it well um well you made me the painter no cod let's not no that's not the true things that was the truth wasn't it used to gossip about the art people and uh that's how i found out about art no then you thought it was chic that's how you started no no dee was making art commercial and since i was in commercial art i thought well real art should be commercial because dee said so and that's how it all happened is that true no yes it is uh henry uh in talking about your works at the show said that you did the dick tracy who independently of liechtenstein and yet you stopped doing the dick tracy kind of painting i wonder why that happened oh because he did it so much better [Applause] i was just copying it from magazines and he sort of took took it and made something out of it what's your relationship [Music] the things which have interested me in in painting and in thinking are the things i will of course tell lies here but are the things which can't be located or are the things which turn into something else while you locate them or are things which are located so nicely that you know they can't survive but it's never interested me just the idea of forming uh a territory or a thought and and defending it [Music] so my idea of what pop art is is somewhere in that area of uh i don't like the idea that things are that you are sure what they are and it seems to me that paparazz suggests the i the term papa suggests that that everything is certain well here are hand-painted 32 campbell soup cans they're painted very flat very dead-on andy at the time said he used the campbell soup can because every day for lunch he had exactly the same thing a uh a sandwich and a can of camel soup you said uh all people are the same and that you wanted to be a machine in your painting is that true is it true bridgette no he just wishes it was all easier he said to me last week on the phone he said bridge it wouldn't it'd be nice if in the morning we could get up and at 10 o'clock go to all the movies and then all the galleries and just think it would be just like teeny and marcel used to do you know like then how would you get any art done now andy can do that but i can't because you know i've got to do my painting and my books and your hair get to my hair sit under the dryer that's a great art to come out with dry hair pop has the same something an attitude somewhat similar to the um that of the surrealist artists who deliberately used academic means to illustrate unconventional things with the pop artist there's uh the uh trick of saying well i'm gonna make it look just the way the cheapest art looks but with a difference and a twist and people like uh liechtenstein and uh warhol uh they take nice pictures all the same it's easy stuff yeah it is it's minor and the best of the pop artists don't succeed in being more than minor and it's seen art you know it's the kind of art that goes over on the scene uh the the best art of our time or any art within since carol not just since monet makes you a little more uncomfortable at first challenges you more it doesn't come that far to meet your taste or meet the established taste of the moment and the pop artist artists almost knowingly come more than halfway to meet your taste and uh you can almost tell if you can't see for yourself when something makes a scene too fast it's got to be mine how did you actually paint a painting when you started doing them six or seven years ago before bridget did them i mean could you tell me the whole process i mean tell me about the electric chair which is one of my favorite paintings by anybody i just uh found a picture and gave it to the man and he made a print and then i just took it and just began printing and he made a silk screen screen print yeah and i just then they came out all different because i guess i didn't know how to really screen but bridget does all my paintings but she doesn't know anything about them i know what's good what do you mean bridgette does all your paintings uh well bridget's been doing my paintings for the last three years how does she do them well i haven't done any work for almost three years well you see i just call mr golden and i just tell them the colors and i take polaroids of the four flowers and i switch the colors around and superimpose four cut out ones up on top of it take a picture and have mr golden do it then they remember instead no but it's the sun oh the reason we can say bridgette does it is because i haven't done any for three years so i mean when when i when the paper said that richard does all my pictures and bridges can say she does all my pictures what she can say because we haven't done any well you just talk about andy's well bob had asked andy warhol to do a portrait and which sort of frightened they naturally because one never knew what andy would do and so he said don't you worry everything would be splendid so he i had great visions of going to richard avidancing i have a pictures of me taking every photograph seemed to be photographed and then he would do the portrait so he came up for me that day and he's all right we're off and i said where are we going he says down to 42nd street and broadway i said what are we going to do there he says i want to take pictures of you i said for what he said for the portrait i said in those things i said my god i'll look terrible he said don't worry and he took out he had coins about a hundred dollars worth of silver coins and he said we'll take the high key and the low key and i'll push you inside and you watch the little red lights what are these automatically automatically yeah the only thing you do the passport or three four quarters something like that and he's just watched the red light and i froze i watched the red light and never did anything so andy would come in and poke me and make me do all kinds of things and i relaxed finally and you know and i think the whole place wherever we were with boy they had two nuts there you see we were running from one booth to the other and he took all these pictures and they were drawing all over the place and at the end of the thing he said now you want to see them and they were so sensational that you didn't need richard avedon you say oh they got the music how much did she pay you for your portrait oh it wasn't i don't know but it's really 5 000. this is so much fun to do but how much money did you pay 700 700 for that porsche i think they're fabulous so i really do every time i see another one i always flip it out when i see their picture in susie's country and they're written about when he delivered the portrait it came in pieces and uh bob said to him don't you want to sit down at this too because of all these beautiful colors and he said oh no let him do it any way he wants yeah and then he said to you but you could change it any way you want but if i ever piece it if you ever get bored my dear he said that we could always change that i've no more pictures he said but you can change them yourself but what i liked about it mostly was that it was a portrait of being alive and not like those candy box things which i detest you say i never ever wanted a portrait of myself and he was very clever because he knows i'm near-sighted i wear sunglasses and he said let's have him with the glasses and without the glasses and he directed me i tell you in those days he should already be in the movies you know or doing movies guys let's talk about politics all right let's talk about politics why do you choose your subject matter i mean why do you choose the subjects you choose or what led you to this series of you know the car crash and the electric chair no i think it was on july 4th and uh the radio kept saying you know 600 people were dead and then 700 are on highways i guess that's why we it that every holiday they did then that's for the car crash but what about all all the other paintings that have to do with i mean like the electric chair oh well and that was the time i think they were they stopped uh killing people in the electric chairs i wasn't there before so i thought it was an old uh image so that would be nice you uh you ran into some practical political problems uh at the world's fair right in flushing the nineteen it was 1964 wasn't it the story of andy and the most wanted men was the peculiar political event of 1963 we had at the world's fair at the pavilion that i did for new york state a space on the walls which i hired six that was a six great artist to i just gave him the space i do what you want to and andy did a dramatic sequence of uh the most wanted men yeah i guess they painted the most wanted men can you what does that mean can you tell me that uh the most wanted men of that year uh who wanted us oh the fbi it just happened though that in the research uh it turned out these men were not wanted were all well and happy and living with their dear families and perhaps more important politically they all had italian names they thought they might find them at the fair so how it got to the governor i don't know but he called me in anguish and uh we had to to drop the uh the uh the 13 most wanted men so we painted them out uh so i never looked into it whose fault whether they really were not wanted or wanted or anything we just dropped the idea oh that was awesome did you paint them out or they made it no they painted them on silver and then what did you do uh well then i thought i'd do a portrait of moses because i really liked him and then i didn't put it up so it stayed blind silver blank yeah what about politics are there any critics you like you know i like the kind of critics that uh when they write they just put people's names in like so and and you go through the article and you can't to see how many different names they dropped in the yard susie and so the more and susie is the best he's the best critic yeah i think she drops the morning because she just says everybody's name is at a party and then you feel happy that you've been mentioned that's the biggest art the art of publicity that's what we're all about uh the dominant direction since the heyday of abstract expressionism has not been abstract painting there were however a small group of painters that came along in the later 50s and early 60s that created an abstract painting of equal force an equal power to that of the best of abstract expressionism but which is very different in character uh its posture is not romantic its method is not improvisational uh it's a kind of uh more classical more controlled art that in a certain sense reacted against the action conception of abstract expressionism and against what by the late 50s had come to be a great deal a very bad painting made in abstract expressionism's name it seemed to me that the the basically that the action painters and particularly the second generation action painters uh adopted an attitude uh towards painting which was based a lot on uh an idea of all over attack but that they didn't basically they were inconsistent they didn't really carry it out in other words it was supposed to be an all-over painting but it ended up in working with a kind of uh it seemed to me too much of a conventional push pull the other big thing was as far as i was concerned that uh they almost all seemed to get in trouble in the corners they always started out with a big expansive gesture and then they ended up fiddling around or uh trying to make that uh one explosive gesture work on the canvas in some kind of way and it seemed to me basically in sort of painting and energy terms are finally compromised by all of the fixing up that went around the uh supposedly uh loose and free explosive images i mean we've got to be more an illustration of energy than an establishment of real pictorial energy i didn't want that i wanted uh i wanted to be able to have what i think were some of the virtues of abstract expressionism but still have them under a kind of control but not control for its own sake a kind of uh conceptual painly control that i felt made the pictures uh or would make even stronger pictures i wanted to make my pictures at least stronger what i was doing the business about my work being unfeeling and being cold and intellectual uh i mean i can't quite explain it uh i mean i think and uh you know the only explanation i can make is a is a biographical one uh certainly no one would see the black paintings now as kind of cold and calculating are very logical but they they seem to seem that way in the context of 59 and 60. they were lean compared to some paintings about but uh the general look of them i mean if you really looked at it seemed to me that they had an awful lot to do with somebody like rothko and the general feeling of it and no one accused rothko of being cold and intellectual there were certain literary things that were in the air that uh corresponded to it i mean uh at the time i was going into uh the school uh for example beckett was very popular and uh i mean it's not i mean beckett is pretty lean i guess you might say but also slightly repetitive to me in the sense that uh certain very simple situations in which not much in which not much happens are a lot like uh repetition through the use of a kind of flat regulated pattern i could make a painting a situation that was that read or seen flatter and i felt that uh that flatness was a kind of uh just an absolute necessity for modernist painting at the time and i mean i felt the black paintings were uh really right i mean there were a lot of things in those paintings that were not in anybody else's paintings at the time and it seemed to me that they were you know concerns that painting in a way had to address them had to address itself too i got very involved at that time at the with the black paintings with pattern and uh i began making little drawings and sketches and in some of the sketches i got involved with uh patterns that traveled they would move and make a jog in them and i had this kind of slightly shaped or notched format and the more i looked at it the more i liked it and that's the way i built the stretches and painted the series and that was the beginning i guess of of shaping for me at least then i already had an idea for the kind of paint that i wanted to use i was interested in this metallic paint particularly aluminum paint something that would sort of seize the surface it would be also probably fairly repellent i like the idea of thinking about flatness and depth that these would be very hard paintings to penetrate all of the action would be on the surface the idea was to keep the viewer from reading a painting i mean it seemed to me that you had to have some kind of way of addressing yourself to the viewer which wasn't so much of an invitation as it was a presentation in other words uh i made something and then it was available for people to look at but uh it wasn't uh an invitation for them to explore and it wasn't an invitation for them to read a record of what i had done exactly uh in fact i think one of the things you could say about my paintings which i think is probably a good thing it's not immediately apparent how they're done in a way i mean you can say that uh it's finely brushed or it's sprayed or this that any other but the first thing you do is see it i think and not see uh how it was done and uh it's not a particular record of anything i mean it uh and that may have to that may explain in some kind of way that on par it's unpopularity with the critics when i said uh make it hard for the critics to write about i mean there's not that much for them to describe first of all it's a basically it's a simple situation visually and the painting doesn't do that much in conventional terms they can't explain to you how one part relates to another i mean basically what they're after is that it's too easy for me so therefore it couldn't be any good he's saying there's no suffering there's no this there you know there's no feeling uh there's no questioning i just keep doing it and i don't uh i don't have trouble periods i don't have crises and anxiety and all that that are documented on the canvas there's a tremendous assumption of artistic humility which i didn't seem to have one too much success and also being essentially too uh smug about it in some kind of way uh you know they there's nothing uh in descriptive terms uh for them to to to say i mean or to uh to point out uh something that you might you the viewer might have missed if you were slightly untrained uh or not so used to looking at paintings uh that critical function is uh subverted i mean i don't think that that's a big accomplishment but i think that on the positive side uh and this again becomes suddenly uh or not so suddenly become but does become very subjective but has to do with finally the uh both the quality and the value of the painting if this presents a kind of visual experience to you that's really convincing i think it can also be a moving experience in other words that uh apprehension confrontation with the picture that kind of a visual impact that kind of stamping out of an image and that kind of uh sense of uh painted surface being really its own surface and i think it was a kind of attempt to give the painting a particular life of its own uh in relationship to the viewer i've always uh i guess thought in terms of pictorial structure or organization later on with the more eccentric eccentrically shaped pictures color uh just became i don't know inevitable in a certain kind of way if they weren't uh multicolored then they'd have to be uh monochromatic and that would leave only a linear structure and that's not what those paintings were about i mean they weren't conceived to be that way this is uh this is one of the recent paintings and uh it i mean uh the edges here are actually fairly hard i mean they're not soft at all there's not much bleed in this uh in a combination of a fluorescent uh water-soluble fluorescent and uh lenny boku's aquatech and uh you probably can't see the uh pencil line but it's the same that it's drawn out on the canvas first and then taped over the line this is part of the saskatchewan series the circular that protractors are made to fit into rectangular format this is one going up here but you don't see the other half another one coming through from the outside one you see pretty much the whole blue one there and then one coming up from the other way i start with a drawing usually a rough drawing in which i uh plot out mainly how the bands are going to intersect once i know the width of the band once i've decided that then everything else falls into place yeah the drawing is done with the drawing is done from uh points and it's done with a beam compass which i make myself out of lattice and i punch a hole in the wooden lattice and use a pencil and a nail at the other end and i draw the pencil lines on the on the unsized canvas i then use masking tape which i tape over the line once the tape is down it's ready to paint and the tape is pulled afterwards uh and the color here is uh well it's uh intuitive or arbitrary or a combination of both and uh what i'm really interested in terms of the color here is not so much in the uh in the interlacing but rather i'm interested in uh using the curve to make uh the color travel with the interlacing particularly in a picture like this there's no question that you have some illusionism and some kind of figure ground relationships what keeps the push pull from defeating the picture what i think keeps it on the surface is the feeling that the colors move uh that they follow the bands that they have a sense of direction and it's the directional sense of the color i think that uh holds the surface for the painting i have learned from many people who seem to be taken with the fact that uh my uh purchasing art has changed the lives of uh quite a few of these artists and of course i'm aware of just a few of them uh one of j is john chamberlain who was a hairdresser when i met him big fellow long mustache and i couldn't imagine him being a hairdresser and working on sculpture was such a horrible situation for him to suddenly make a shift from being a hairdresser to working this powerful iron and tin and so he said to me if he only had 10 or 15 weeks of a steady income of i think it was 100 a week why he said i would be able to tell my boss to go to the devil and really do this work and i was so impressed by his work that i said go ahead and of course right after that uh summer he never uh right after that summer he never was a uh hairdresser again sorry uh he became a full-time sculptor uh with larry poons uh with larry poons i found out he was a uh was a short order cook and i said well how much you make a week he said uh 25 so i said what are you talking about nobody makes 25 a week anymore he says well what i mean is i only work two hours a day and that gives me enough uh to um to uh i said well i said i'll give you uh eight weeks worth of salary uh i'll buy a painting from you and he looked at me very suspiciously you know he said uh well i'm willing to quit my job but i want the eight weeks in advance because if you change your mind he says i'm out of a job robert skull never walked up to me and gave i said here larry i want you to i want to help you he did it through dick and i was a dealer and it was business no i mean if he wants to think of himself in that way i've got nothing against it you know i might say the first major influential painter for me uh was probably uh mondrian i mean i was never a student of painting in any kind of normal sense of the word that i went to school and studied art history and seen a lot of paintings but i'd say mondrian was the first uh that time first moving painting experience for me that i can remember the paintings were always based on very accurately plotted drawings and what happened was the dots appeared at the points on an invisible grid where lines had crossed in the earlier compositions the grid was completely suppressed and what you were left with were the dots uh indicated in the in the key pattern but the pattern became something that was difficult to read and uh the entire thing became a color field the way frank stella's paintings of a few years previously had been what happened to larry poons during the 60s was he moved more and more toward a sensuality where he began mixing the colors the backgrounds became more subtle the dots slipped into ellipses and then from ellipses slipped even further into slipped brush strokes and the influence of some of greenberg's uh principles and the influence particularly i think of the work of george zolitsky i changed prunes from a rather hard and cold painter to a painter of beautiful pictures i decided to be a tanker when my grandmother died and there was something about that that made a number of things clear to me you know i was a kid uh i'm 14 15 16. and uh i got it i had loved her very much and i in some way feel she was one of those few people who supported me or that is she loved me and uh i got nonetheless a sense of uh an absolutely wasted thrown away life like a dead cat on a garbage pail heat yeah and it made me get a very clear look on all the people around me you know family their friends and the one thing that got through to me was the notion of if there's anything that you want to do that's meaningful in my case it was painting do it do it if i could just get a spray of color in the air and somehow it could stay there that would be it so the straight painting or using a spray gun suddenly seen the way of achieving a look that i wanted to get painting is among other things one of its essentials is color otherwise it's drawn but there is an area or there is that aspect of painting that is inescapable or drawing is inevitable to it and for me the one place that drawing is inescapable in the making of the painting is its edge the line that the where you've decided the painting ends this is where it's going to be stretched to it's drawing it's a drawn line it's an edge for me if you made this line within the painting it's introducing drawing into an area where it is not essential but my feeling is that color is essential is of the in the sense of the essence of pen art historians talk about color and about shape and about form it's obvious uh to anybody who's thought about it that you cannot have pure color in a picture because the color has to be a shape has to have a color color can't exist on its own but what the color field painters have done to a more successful extent than anybody previously is to make color of the subject by completely denying notational references completely denying illustration uh and and having the color itself expand and billow and and rest on the surface so that it's color which is the subject of the picture not color describing something that's familiar but color invented by the artist well look to begin with uh it's almost impossible to say what a painting is about i don't think uh one really knows what the experience of making a painting is one of the things that this painting is about is uh i would call it a flood of surface flood of surface and of trying to introduce drawing within the painting or more within in here there is a kind of a flowing almost flowing lump of paint uh which which introduces some drawing within uh i want a painting in which the structure he develops out of uh its color uh something to do with the expansion of the painting and the uh bearing on where the painting is of that kind of decision uh i tend to work from the inside out so beginning from the inside and by the enzyme pretty much in the center here uh with color and the relationships of other colors to it and its expansion outward and then the decision of well where does it end where does it begin to taper off where is its life still in it you know where is it still alive and now it may develop up to here you know and there and here and there you know or it may not uh i may decide well it's really this uh two or three feet of color it's the it's also the the uh taking the chance to play and to wreck to destroy i find that uh very exciting and irresistible to go that further or try to go that further step see will what will happen you know you get the thought of your head if over this i put this or i you know change this in that way uh spray some more varnish on it spray a whole pool of glop over it or over part of it or any of the number of things that you can do uh what would happen what would it look like uh the paint is uh acrylic aqua type and how is the paint applied well point i've been pouring for about a year now sort of a combination of pouring muscle sometimes you know i can get a an effect by you know doing it hard or just laying it down soft and uh a lot of it's a lot of it has come to uh knowing the slight shifts in the floor you know that i'm working on because gravity does pull the paint around and i've kind of gotten used to this floor it's taking a little while and then what happens the paint uh how long does it take for paint this thick to dry well this is actually pretty thin compared to some of them uh uh say paintings uh up to a couple of months ago were much thicker and i used a great deal more pigment and they would take up to three weeks to dry do you feel there's drawing in these paddings yeah i think there's probably a lot of drawing in it yeah oh well as much as that you know color stop forms appear you know some kind of imagery is suggested i guess it's more a point of discovering the drawing rather than making the drawing you know which we'll kind of get into you know when i start cropping a picture what happens to this painting now well i take it off the floor roll it up and take it upstairs and put it on the wall and uh shape it [Music] so [Music] wow [Music] i've only had about four hours [Music] [Applause] so [Applause] [Applause] [Music] don't believe beautiful paintings [Music] so [Music] me it's hung up over here okay pull it tight down down up a little bit okay and move the ladder up danny let's let's take an inch off uh the left side [Music] yeah it's that kind of thing that gets exciting you know dee [Music] like this excited me uh yeah that pink little area suddenly and this this came out that that purple uh start to come out well i i thought it looked real groovy and tossed out on the wall uh down a little bit down well yeah i had a feeling i looked a little you know a little too slick good i'll stay up there danny and put about uh two tapes two tapes in on the left side you know the right side there you know where the tape is now that's two and we can even go one more you know when you're up there put the two on and then put one more for the top too [Music] down down down down down down down down [Music] down well i mean when i'm putting color down and i'm thinking of what color am i going to put down next i'm making the same kind of decision as i'm doing now saying there's too much of that color or there's not enough of that color except i'm not pouring it i am uh dealing in a in a quantity of color at this point rather than a specific color that you know specific color is there now i'm dealing with the quantity how much of it [Music] uh you know or saying now if i do this i wonder what this will look like which is the same process i wonder what purple would look like here do you see what i mean there's more to the problem it seems to me than any or any old-fashioned idea of what an easel painting is a painting can be bigger than anything that can go on an easel and still be in my opinion an easel painting and in the end in the end size doesn't count the size doesn't count it's scale it counts it's human scale it counts and the only way you can achieve human scale is by the content [Music] like [Music] my [Music] you

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Length: 116min 50sec (7010 seconds)

Published: Fri Nov 20 2020