Conversation with Ruth Marten

Published in Figure/Ground Magazine

Ruth Marten was interviewed by Suzanne Unrein. February 7, 2020

Born and living in New York City, Ruth Marten has worn several hats, in spite of the hair. From 1972 to 1980 she was an important figure in the tattoo underground and, as one of the few women practicing the craft, influenced people’s ideas about body decoration, championing what came to be called Neo-Tribalism. Working during the Disco and Punk eras, she also tattooed in the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris during the 10th Biennale de Paris.

Hired by Jean-Paul Goude for her first illustration for Esquire, she had a 30 year career illustrating for many magazines, music and book covers and is most associated with the “Year in Provence” books of Peter Mayle, designed for A. A. Knopf by Carol Devine Carson. There was a brief stint as a fashion illustrator for Bergdorf Goodman, Salvatore Ferragamo, Barney’s and Vogue Magazine. That love of the printed image informs her current work: changing through overdrawing and collage the configuration and content of 18th century copper plate engraving prints. Personal work, principally on paper, has been a constant while working in these other fields.

Sine 1989 Marten has expressed herself exclusively through drawings, paintings and sculptures. Exploring the phenomenon of hair for its sexual, cultural and purely textural content, she exhibited work based on this obsession at Littlejohn Contemporary (NY), Adam Baumgold (NY), in the “Pop Surrealism” show at the Aldrich Museum (CT), “Hair, Untangling a Social History” at the Tang Museum (NY) and at the Halsey Institute in 2009 with “Hair on Fire”. In 2003 she embarked upon her current interest in reworking the images and historical content of mostly 18th century prints from engravings, which have been exhibited at Isis Gallery (London 2008) and Van der Grinten Galerie (Köln 2013) and have been collected by the De Young Collection (SF), Charles Saatchi, Don Ed Hardy, and others. In 2018-2019, Marten had a retrospective of her work at the Max Ernst Museum in Bruhl, Germany.  She also teaches Watercolor Technique at the School of Visual Arts.

You are a master draftsman.   Did you do a lot of drawing as a kid?

I did start making art very early.  My mother, who had incredible innate taste and sensibility, she encouraged it once she saw I could do certain things. She had an incredible eye for interior design. She took me to museums and galleries. She was a great dresser. She knew she had no reason to know these things, but she knew. She was intelligent but grew up extremely poor. She had no possibilities herself so I became a project and I was fine with it. And I suspect also it was a place I went to because I felt safe there. I got the feeling that this was my vocation.  It must have been because I never really looked further to do anything else.

Were you good at other subjects?

Penmanship.

Where were you living? Where did you grow up?

I was born in Manhattan and then we made the classic move to Long Island. We moved to Forest Hills in the 60s and then I went to the High School of Art and Design.  I went from a white, uptight Long Island high school to you know, gay kids, Chinese kids, rich kids, poor kids.  A total fabulous mix.  And it was the 60s, so high school was great. And then my parents divorced and my mother moved to Jamaica Estates which is where the Trumps lived actually.  But my goal in life was to live in New York and that’s the great irony because look at it now. There’s no there, there.

Did you move to the city right out of school?

I went to school in Boston and then I moved back to NY to start my grown-up life. I had to make a living. I had zero idea of how I was going to do that. I thought in my head that if I became a tattooist, I could draw, right. It’s what I like. So I got a little kit from Huck Spaulding up in Poughkeepsie and I started tattooing the burgeoning punk scene and especially the gay scene, and also women who were independent of their earlier, more domestic lives and wanted to assert themselves.  And at the same time I was doing illustration.

That must have been a crazy time. 

Well New York in the 70s was pretty interesting. There was a lot of crime, drug stuff, but when you’re a kid in your 20s, nothing’s ever going to hurt you. You just sort of move through it like you own it.

So you got jobs illustrating and jobs as a tattooist at the same time? 

Yeah, everything was cheap in those days. I had a loft on 16th Street and it was $200 a month. But, you know, it was $200 I had to come up with, that, and I had a kind of useless husband so he wasn’t making his share.

Was he an artist too?

He was a singer. He had a great voice, but there was something wrong with him. He thought he didn’t have to work as hard since I was working hard.

Do you have memories of specific tattoos that you created?  Were they always collaborations or did they ever let you go wild?

Yeah they did.  I wasn’t a very good technical tattooist because I didn’t train with anyone.  I was just sort of winging it, which I don’t recommend.  Well I wasn’t going to hang out with Spider Web and Big Joe and those people so, you know I did the best I could, but what I contributed to tattoo culture was to encourage people to think of tattooing as a verb not as a noun.  In the sense that anything could be a tattoo and if anything can be a tattoo you mine art from other cultures. It’s everything we think of today, but in the 70s, people didn’t think in those terms.  It was the kind of typical tattoo flash images that were on the walls of commercial parlors and they didn’t really extrapolate.  Artists did and Ed Hardy on the west coast of course.  That was a major accomplishment in terms of turning people’s ideas of tattooing around.  We’re good friends now. So he in his way and me in my little way. We were artists first and tattoo artists afterwards.

Would you come across your tattoos later, on the street?

Oh yeah.  I’m not going to name names.

Because there were famous people that you tattooed?

Yeah, yeah.

Were you simultaneously doing your own art at the time?

Yeah, I was doing that too. I was doing my first illustration for Esquire and the art director was Jean-Paul Goude.  And then I was also figuring out what the hell my art was at the time.  I was very interested in ceramics. I was drawing on ceramics.

Were you creating ceramics too?

Yeah, yeah. Well, those were my interests in school – ceramics and drawing. So eventually they got together. I made these slab drawing glaze pieces with very pop subject matter. Because they were clay and because the glazes were so weird, everything had a nice distortion to it. They were a little primitive, but they were also sophisticated. I enjoyed that. I remember going to Frumkin [Gallery] when it was uptown and showing my work, and they looked at me like I had three heads, walking around with my ceramic slabs.  As you know, it’s taken a long time for the art world to review, revalue, work made out of clay.

And now it’s more popular than ever.

Well it is because it’s been held back for 50 years. I think Ken Price was very instrumental in separating the craft, the boogie man title of craft from art.  I think the way he did that was by not glazing.  By coming up with that surface he did, which I’m not crazy about, but I understand it.   It reminds me of Italian handmade paper.  But the forms that he made.  People who don’t really know ceramics have no idea how insanely difficult and extraordinary those things are. Some of them have 10” walls and they build the kiln around the artwork.  I was in love with a group called the Funk Artists.  People like Ron Nagle and Ken Price. I’ve always liked the West Coast artists, even though I’m very Eurocentric, but I liked them because they were very pop culture and they have a sense of humor.  I find that to be a real necessity.

Your work seems to have a nod to surrealism, but then they are also incredibly funny. Downright comedic.

Well I’m not a very comedic person but I take it out on my work.  That’s how I entertain myself.

I outright laugh when I see some of your work.  Do you, when you are making them?

Yes.  If I don’t laugh, then it is probably not working.

“Canapés II”

I think about Max Ernst and to the darker places that his work goes.  They’re wonderful but without your humor.

Well, Ernst was an incredible, conceptual artist.  He had such a fecund imagination.  He was an amazing man and he had a difficult life.  He produced just a shitload of work. I don’t like all of it, but if he had only produced, “Une semaine de bonté,” those incredible collages, if he had only done that. That was just one of the things he did. Yeah. Those to me are so perfect. They’re steeped in psychological insight. They’re a product of the junk flea market material that was around when he was producing stuff because they were ahead of him. That was mid-19th century. And I love to go and find stuff too.  I started working with the old prints from stuff I found at the flea market because I fell in love with the paper. It’s like skin.  Just out of curiosity, I wondered what would happen if … and then I was off to the races.

When did you do your first piece?

2006.

What were you doing before that?

All those hair paintings. I did that for a long time. And then it got kind of popular so I didn’t want to do something that other people were also doing if I could avoid it.  Also it had run its course.  I actually spent about two years on this couch staring at the ceiling.  I didn’t know what to do after the hair pieces. I was so invested in that. So the flea market saved me.

You just happened to be at a flea market and thought, hmm..

Well I saw these card tables covered with 18th century book illustrations, and the guy, Arby, who was the salesman, a real slob and you know, like a lot of these print dealers, they cut them out of the books, right? But the truth is, that nobody wants the books. Individual pages had more promise. It was a fluke, but then it appealed to my sense of the absurd. And also, to the way I was raised.  My mother was, as I said, very encouraging, but she was also very proper. So a lot of this work is iconic, the way it sits on the page, and it purports to tell you how to live, what kind of furniture to live on, scientific inventions. It was a manual.  It was an education for people who were first able to buy books. You know, which after the Royals, it was the merchant class. And then by the late 18th century they would produce smaller books for the common man. And then of course, the 19th century with the printing innovations and the burgeoning middle class, then magazines. It was lithography. I wasn’t interested in lithography, and also the paper was really bad. But the 18th century was perfect. The paper is exquisite and it had these funny tutorials on social life, which you know, have all been shot down.  But I thought, well, I’ll be the one to shoot them down.

Do you look at these images and then something comes to you visually?

Yes.  And sometimes I held on to something for years that finally was the right thing, right? But mostly, I would never go near something of extraordinary value, aesthetic value, and I couldn’t afford to go near anything of financial value, like an Audubon.  They don’t need my two cents worth. But this other stuff can definitely use it.  Like Chippendale for example.  He was a very savvy businessman.  He hired an army of etchers, engravers, which were often in the same house, to draw up his furniture ideas.  Then he would bind them and send them to all the major cities in Europe and then to the colonies. So people would order Chippendale chairs and tables and what have you. Those were the first ones I did.  The furniture is for you to put something on the table or in a chair.  I’m actually doing something now that echos that. I just realized that as I told you.

Funny, I was just going to ask if you go back to certain themes.

Sometimes.  The show I just did in Cologne was photo-oriented.  I found antique photo postcards and I had them photographed at a high resolution and then printed archivally but made really large, really large for me, 30 x 22 inches.  For me that’s like a billboard, they’re like posters.  I had a show with those and I worked into those with gouache and sometimes watercolor.  Those were a lot of fun.  I’m also working on these that are 3 x 5 inches, for the Cologne Art Fair.  I have to produce 20 of them.

Do you use a magnifying glass?

No.  It’s stupid work, but I have a passion for stupid work.

I love the alligators.  I work with them too.  They mean so many things to me.

What do they mean to you?

Among other things, they symbolize for me the reptilian in other people and in myself.  They’re also so funny to me, funny-looking.

Don’t you have one where it’s embracing a human?  I have one of those too.  Well, there are certainly a lot of alligators out there.

What does it mean to you?

Danger, I think.  Fascinating because they’re so dangerous.

“4”

Did you see them when you were in Miami? 

When I was three years old, we went down to Florida, and apparently we saw alligator wrestling. I’m sure it probably traumatized me.  I never forgot about the alligators, they were my strange totem creature.

Is there an intention for you with your work in terms of subverting, or is it more fun and play for you?

I think subverting is very important.  I’m a glass half empty kind of girl.  I like when things are beautiful and I make things beautiful.  But I would never be happy with just prettiness.  There has to be dark side. And nowadays it’s so easy. The hard part is trying to find a bright side just so you can get through the day.  I’ll show you something I’m working on for my next show, the “Sex and Death” show.  That’s gouache on paper.  The idea of the decomposition.  Actually it was inspired by a piece I saw at the Cooper Hewitt Design Museum.  There was a Korean artist who made a cadaver suit. It was all black and buttoned up, very chic, actually.  It had diagonal buttons across the front with little covers.  On the sides, it had these white mushrooms.  I thought, that’s very interesting. So I did my own version of that.

“Sex and Death”

Do you know how it’s going to go before you start?

You have to allow yourself some leeway.  I’m so much of a control freak. I have to keep allowing my inner voice to tell me to do this or that. Not try to be in the straitjacket.

You have this printed out and then you begin.  So you could potentially screw up?

No, I would just paint another mushroom on top!  Well, I’m not a process painter. So I wouldn’t be messing with the paper. It’s just a straight gouache job.

Now that you are starting this series, it seems absolutely perfect for you – “Sex and Death.” I’m surprised you haven’t done it before. 

I’m surprised too.  How much longer am I going to live, so I better get to it.

How did your Mom react to your more subversive work?

It wasn’t her cup of tea but she knew me well enough to know she wasn’t going to be able to talk me out of it.  She opened my eyes to the world and I saw what I saw.  I’m the art director, I’m not re-inventing the wheel.  I like the collaboration part of it.  I don’t have the kind of ego where it’s necessary to create this whole world out of whole cloth.  I like working with ideas that have already come to be with centuries of life to them.  You come to yourself if you stay alive long enough.  You get to play them out.

What were you creating as a kid?  Were you subversive then?

I wish I could say I was, but no.  I liked pop culture, I liked comic books.  I liked books, illustrations.  Everything a kid in New York is exposed to.  The absurdity, the low end, the high end.  When I went to high school, there were so many kids from different walks of life.   We would go visit each other’s houses on the weekends and some of these kids were on Park Avenue and some were in Coney Island and I enjoyed it at the time, but I don’t think I completely realized how phenomenal an education I was experiencing by being able to move in and out of all those different worlds. Different classes, different ways of living.  That to me was always what New York would or should or could be about.

You mentioned that you think of the alligators as being a scary thing. Do you feel like your work is about making the scary visible? 

Maybe. I’m someone who’s kind of frightened about a lot of things. I don’t know.  At this point in my life, I guess I have some tried and true totems. I’m mostly scared of what’s going on politically in this dictatorship that’s kicking in, which is, you know, going to eclipse everything we know. That’s terrifying. So, I hole up in my room and try to stay calm, and I go swimming a lot. And I guess like a lot of us, I’m freaked out. So yeah it fits to have scary stuff arise at this time.

And the need as an artist to put it out there. 

Yeah.

Do you think the subversion in your work has more to do with the darker aspects of the human psyche or your psyche?

Yeah, it’s just my fucked up head.

Do you reflect on them after? 

No, I really don’t.  I’m not intellectual at all.

When you first discovered the surrealists did you feel a sense of kinship with them? 

Well especially the Weimar German artists.  I just thought they were so hip.  Then look at Man Ray, a New York artist.  He did so many things.   Other artists have run with just one of those things.  He was the first to cover that sewing machine.  I don’t know what the genesis of Christo’s involvement with that was but Man Ray did it once or twice and moved on to other things.

What are your dreams like?

I have a lot of dreams.  They are important to me.

Do you write them down?

I used to.  I did some Jungian dream therapy for a couple of years.  I always had trouble finding a place I could afford.  Even 30 years after getting this apartment, my dreams tend to have to do with real estate, places. Who’s there? What’s left behind? Do I belong there? That’s a recurring theme.  Yeah, I like dreams. I like the randomness. It is not random when your unconscious picks certain things out in what happened that day.  It’s very well chosen by our unconscious.  But because your unconscious is so indecipherable to your conscious, it seems random and strange.  I think I have a real love for serendipity and finding things you’re not looking for. Yeah, I think that’s kind of a drive of mine.  And that’s why living in New York is a great place to gather material.

“Industry,” 2019, gouache, cut paper collage and watercolor on archival print, 27 x 20 inches

When did the art world start paying attention to your work?

Not until the Germans did when I was 65 years old.  That’s when I had my first show there and they sold my show out.  I remember sitting on the plane going over to Germany, to my opening at the Van der Grinten Galerie, and thinking, I blew it, it’s too late, I’m too old.  Nothing is going to come out of this, what’s wrong with me.  Boo hoo. Then I get there, change my clothes, I go to the opening and watch people buying five and six at a time.  After spending half an hour looking at something.  Yeah, it’s all about timing and luck and finding the love.

How did you end up in Germany to begin with?

I was in a drawing show at the Carrousel du Louvre in Paris in 2010 and I had way too much time to kill.  My English dealer at the time, had gotten a booth and I realized I hadn’t been to Paris in a very long time so I went over there.  I was bored out of my skull, walking around and taking cards when I liked the work. But of course no one wants the artist coming toward them. I always had this very old fashioned idea that the work would speak for itself. Right.  So I found this gallery in Cologne and unbeknownst to me the two partners were splitting.  Also unbeknownst to me they were crazy about history there because Cologne is a Roman town.  Cologne means “colony” and it dates back to something like 300 AD.  So it was a complete accident.  Back in New York, I sent Xeroxes to them and it just so happened that because the partners were splitting, the partners I ended up with were looking for artists because they were opening a new gallery.

How great.

Yeah, when does that ever happen?

Do you ever do work that isn’t a collaboration?

I do watercolors.  I would like to do something with writing.  I always have something on the stove.

There’s so many things to do.

I know, that’s why I need to stay healthy.

Do you know and think about why you are creating?

No.  I never thought about the why.  I had problems in the past with the what. Definitely. I think, in a way, I coalesced quite late. Having been an illustrator, the what was always somebody else’s what. When I stopped illustrating it took me quite some time to learn how to move away from that. And maybe in a sense, I’m still doing that. But the story is so obscure and arcane that if what I’m doing is in fact an illustration, nobody knows the text so it doesn’t matter.

Susan Rothenberg at Sperone Westwater

Reviewed by Suzanne Unrein

Published in Delicious Line

Since the 1970s, Susan Rothenberg has been feeling her way through her paintings with ambiguous gestures that become a road map to her intense and obsessive process. She creates and erases, leaving an aftermath of urgency and hesitation through assured, fleeting, and palimpsestic marks. This show of paintings and drawings were influenced by her New Mexico surroundings and include recurring motifs of hands, birds, and figures.

In Pack Rat Fall (2016-19), the rat could be dead but is painted vertically with splayed arms in a pinkish glow that suggests movement, even dancing. Its tenderly painted feet seem to stand on its tail. The hint of an eye in its raised head appears to be either closed to life or in ecstasy from it. In Four Red Birds (2017), the glowing creatures hover on the upper left corner of the mostly gray canvas, depicting the essence of bird-ness with little detail. Both canvases magnify Rothenberg's devotion to keen observation and a relentless questioning of form - an intense focus that produces a magical uncertainty.

Conversation with Betty Tompkins

Published in Figure/Ground magazine

Betty Tompkins was interviewed by Suzanne Unrein. November 19, 2019

In a career spanning five decades, Betty Tompkins (b.1945) has been celebrated and scorned for her provocative feminist iconography. By appropriating imagery created for male self-pleasure, Tompkins has reframed long-held taboos by challenging critical discourses around content, style and scale. Her large-scale, sfumato paintings highlight a particular tension with patriarchal conventions that continues to both stymie and stimulate Tompkins. In 1973, two significant paintings from her Fuck Paintings series were seized by French customs and, in April 2019, Tompkins’ Instagram account was deleted after she posted an image of a catalog reproduction of Fuck Painting #1, 1969, which is now in the permanent collection of the Centre Pompidou. In a 2017 New York Times article, Rachel Corbett wrote, “Part of what makes Tompkins’ work so enduringly potent today, and what made it too shocking for its time, is not just its frank sexuality: It’s that the art […] seethes with lust, ego, wisecracks and profanity. [She] demanded attention the way men did — through shock and awe.” Tompkins’ recent solo exhibitions include Talking, Talking Talking, Freehouse, London, U.K. (2019);  Fuck Paintings, etc, J Hammond Projects, London, U.K. (2019); Will She Ever Shut Up?, P·P·O·W (2018); and Betty Tompkins, Ribordy Contemporary, Geneva, Switzerland (2018). Her work has been featured in numerous group exhibitions, including Half the Picture: A Feminist Look at the Collection, The Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn, NY (2018); Histórias da sexualidade, Museu de Arte de São Paulo (MASP), São Paolo, Brazil (2018); Black Sheep Feminism: The Art of Sexual Politics, Dallas Contemporary, Dallas, Texas (2016) and Elles, Centre Pompidou, Paris (2011), among others.

Photo credit by Grace Roselli 

What were you painting when you were in college?

My senior thesis was on paintings of sinks.  Everyone was very hoity-toity. They would talk about philosophy and theories and I would say, “but what about the paintings.  It’s the painting that counts.”  So one of my professors had attacked me for my attitude about subject matter, which is that how you painted it was more important than what you painted and after that discussion, I said, “I’m going to paint sinks.” It was so pedestrian.  So I did it.  Each one in a different style.

Like pop and realism and?

Yeah and I had seen a Robert Ryman so I did a white-on-white one.  It was a great riff.  And as a student, a great learning experience.  Then I got more into graduate school.  I started off with AE [Abstract Expressionism] because it was what I knew. I was in a totally foreign environment, so I went with my strong point.  The imagery thing came up really fast.  So I just stopped and began embracing imagery. I didn’t think very much about the content.  I didn’t have much of an idea about what content was in the painting.  When I would be studying Hans Hoffman and DeKooning and then Johns and Rauschenberg, the idea of what is the content of this painting became something that I couldn’t totally escape, so gradually I had to address it. And when I look back and thought about the sink paintings, I realized that was sort of brilliant because you make the content the process and not the subject.  And then I realized I have been pushing this idea around since I was a student – in one way or another.  I thought that was interesting.

Yeah, it is interesting.  Which leads me to when you came to NY.

Yes in 1969, right after graduate school.

Did you get married in grad school? 

No, in between undergrad and graduate.

That’s so young.

Yes, I was so young.  Someone should have arrested me.  I was the second wife of a professor.  I was a walking cliché.  I actually told him that “The odds of this marriage working out are very low.” I said, “You are twelve years older and fully formed and have a doctorate. “  I was 21, three days before, and not fully formed.

But you did it anyway.

Oh sure. My father always said he would cut me off as soon as I turned 21 so I skipped up in high school in order to graduate a little early.

Wow, that was very forward thinking of you.

Oh yeah.  I was a good survivor.  I’m very proud of myself for being a good survivor.

So, after this, you’re now in New York, and you are finding subject matter as process.  You are living here and you come across your ex-husband’s pornography.

Well I knew about the porn collection.  It came with him.

Right, but were you intrigued by it before you even thought to do anything with it?

No. To me it was porn.  You use it to get excited.

But nobody had it back then.

Right.  He would find ads when he lived in Washington State.  He would find these ads, probably in girly magazines.  He would rent a P.O. box in Vancouver, British Columbia, and send off these checks. And then he would wait a couple of months until he figured they must be there and he drove across the border to pick them up.  He would hide them under the cushions of the car and drive back.  At that time, it was 100% illegal to send that kind of stuff through the U.S. mail.

Oh, interesting. I was just reading this morning about when it became legal to have pornography here.

When was that?

Well it’s very sketchy.

It is very sketchy.  I can tell you that when he got them it was probably 1960 – 1962.

That was very, very early. 1969 was when it became legal in Denmark which was the first country to formally legalize it.

Well he got his from Southeast Asia.

I read that in 1968, the U.S. Congress formed a Commission that was supposed to look into the pornography situation because the industry was becoming so huge so fast and they were getting nervous.  The Commission came back with the unexpected result that the problem isn’t with pornography but is with the people.

That’s right.

But many people were unhappy with this, including Nixon, because they had a much more puritan view of the situation.  So this is when you were getting started!

Well ever since I met my then-husband I knew this stuff was around.

It would just be sitting around?

Yes, sometimes.  And I knew where they were.  And that first year in New York, I was learning how to use an airbrush.  And in the meantime I was going around to tons of galleries, because here I was finally in New York.  The whole art scene was Madison Avenue from 57th street up to 86th street, where the Allan Stone Gallery was. Occasionally there were galleries on the side streets and that was basically it, and the museums.  It was small enough that you could do it in one Saturday. My problem was I didn’t like most of the shows.  I would say to myself that this guy, and it was generally a guy, worked two years on this show, and you couldn’t give it five minutes. I can’t force myself.  It made me think about things and the only thing that I knew about the art world was that there was a social aspect to it.  Where I went, which was Syracuse University and then Central Washington State College, you were there to learn the basics and when you leave, you ditch all this stuff, and reinvent yourself from scratch. So, I didn’t have the expectation that dealers would be waiting for me with open arms. And I did know the history of many of the artists, and I knew they didn’t have their first show until they were in their mid-40s or 50s.  They had all gone through this process of developing, which they could do in private.  Unlike graduates today who have to do it in public, and that’s a nightmare.   I didn’t have any expectations. I was unaware that I was the wrong age and gender, and perhaps I was interested in the totally wrong subject matter.  But I was good at going around and talking to people on a superficial level.  I was good at going out on a really rainy or snowy day when nobody else was around and when it was empty, and people would talk to you.  Then I started to make a push, out of curiosity, to have people see them. I mean nobody had seen them.

Can we go back to when you started making them. Why you started making them?

Yes.  Well I’m going around and I’m bored as shit. And I have dealers telling me to come back in 10 years.  My response to this was that nobody gives a shit as to what you do.  So just do what you want and I found that incredibly liberating.  Because I could see that the other alternative as a reaction to this situation was to be crushed. And that wasn’t my nature, So I said, You are free Betty.  You are finally out of school and nobody gives a crap whether you work or what you do. I hadn’t articulated what I was doing yet, it was a non-verbal process, and then one day I’m riffing through the porn photos and I took one out and I began thinking, Now, if you take that part out, and you take those feet out, what’s left? And bingo, it’s what I was looking for. Because here was an image that in abstract terms, was beautiful. I mean, to this day, how the painting works abstractly, is one of my main concerns.  And I said, Okay, this works. This is gorgeous.  It should be big. And the other thing was, this image has charge.  If I walked into a gallery, and I saw a painting of this, that is big, I would stand there for a really, really long time. And one of my reasons for starting to use this was, I felt that the image would grab the audience by the throat and make them stand there -this is probably very egotistical- and they could, if they stood there long enough, they could see what I had done as a painter to a painted surface.  And that was it. I had the most absolute conviction. So the next day after school, I went to the lumber yard and had them cut the wood.  We had a van. And the biggest, you could fit into it at an angle was something like 7’ x 5’ And so I made them all the same size.  I was painting in the bedroom of our apartment in this little room where I would have to jump over the bed to get far enough away to see the paintings.  For two years I was in that room.  And the first person that I had come over to see the paintings walked in and ran out into the living room where I was, and then backed into the room.  And I thought, my, my, my, what have I done.

Betty Tompkins, Fuck Painting #4, 1972, acrylic on canvas, 84 x 60 inches, Courtesy of Betty Tompkins and P·P·O·W, New York

So until that moment where you not really aware of how these paintings might affect an audience?

Not at all.  I never paint with an audience in mind.  I paint with myself in mind and I still do.  It’s a really good habit to get into.

So you were really thinking about it as a painter in terms of composition and forms. In other words, how political was it for you?

Not really.  Of course I knew what they were.  When I originally titled these paintings I called them Joined Forms and things like that.  But I always called them the Fuck Paintings to myself.  When I started to show them again, in 2003, I then called them the Fuck Paintings.

Oh, so they weren’t originally titled that back in the day?

Well no, when I would talk to Don, my then-husband about them I would say something like “This is the 5th Fuck Painting I’ve made” and he would roll his eyes. He was a budding academic and he was like “Look who I’m married to?”

But of course the images came from him originally. You might think he would be fascinated by what you were doing.

No, he didn’t make that connection.  He was totally horrified that people would find out and and he would get fired.

Really.

Yes.  And in the mid-70’s I couldn’t get into a group show and I couldn’t get anything going, the days of slides. And I said to him, “I’m going to relabel the slides, and just put Tompkins. You’re a Tompkins. Take them around.” And he refused to do it.  So I have no idea. I was starting to have a glimmer of an idea, that my age and my gender were working against me but he wouldn’t do it.

So you were able to show them a few times and then nothing? 

I was in two groups shows. One at the Warren Benedict Gallery.  The other at the LoGuiduce Gallery. I would get recommended to go see people but it was a 99% rejection. I did get into those two shows. It was famous people and me.  Nobody bought anything, of course they didn’t.  So I’m very happy that I managed to hold on to them for another 30 to 40 years.

So what were you doing during those 30 to 40 years?

I got really discouraged. And I was young.  Young people are ambitious.  While I had no expectation for a career, I was ambitious.  Which is the only way you can survive in this art world.  It is cutthroat.  So, I just started to do other things.  I made word pieces. I did animals and seascapes and law pieces.  I wanted to watch the Winter Olympics, so I would spend the time making grids on these papers and painted a base color, and, wrote the word “law” in each square. And after the Olympics were over I went back in with the letters. So all words.  When you take those tests that are right brain or left brain I always end up exactly in the middle.

So it doesn’t sound like you were particularly political in the beginning, when you first started working as a painter. You mentioned that you weren’t invited to the feminist groups, that they didn’t accept you. Did you think of yourself as a feminist?

Of course.

Did you think of your work as feminist work?

I didn’t think about that context, because if you were one that was enough. The politics went along with your belief. Since the choice was between being a misogynist and a feminist there was just no question, so yeah of course I was a feminist. Yeah, but totally rejected by the feminist movement and never invited to attend anything.

So when you were rejected by them – –

I was so rejected I didn’t even know I was rejected.  That’s how rejected I was.  I found out in 2016 that they didn’t like my subject or my source.  They were polite enough, but they were also older than I am. I put it down to the youth factor.  I didn’t really pay attention, I had other things to do. The feminists in New York were a tight and very small group. They perceived the world as being so against them, that they had to protect their territory.  They would help their few friends with teaching jobs and exhibition opportunities but they didn’t let people in. Every new voice was a threat, because they perceived their situation as being so tenuous. I always do it and to this day. Because, to this day, I have never heard of anybody getting thrown out of a show because they recommended someone else for the show.  I don’t know how I had this spirit, this generosity, but I did from the beginning.

No, you’re right.  No one has ever gotten thrown out of a show for recommending someone else.

Their perception, was probably more real, and they riffed off of that.

Were the people that were looking at your work back in the 70’s saying very different things about it than they did 30 years later?   

I can see that they look at it differently.  People actually didn’t say very much to me about it back then.

What about the guy who ran out of the room?

Well his mouth was so open and I kept thinking, What have I done?

Did you ask him, “What have I done?”

No, I was too stunned and too surprised.  When he went back in ass first, he did spend a fair enough time in there.  Since that’s what I wanted, for people to spend time with those paintings, to me that was a huge success.  He was looking at them seriously.  He clearly did not want to engage in a critical conversation.  Which was probably just as well. I was so young. I was still in my 20s.  I was so inexperienced about talking about my work, what would I have said, “Yeah. You like it?

So then you were doing these word pieces that weren’t sexual at all.

Right.  I crawled back into my work in a circle.  When I was finished with the word pieces I wanted to just paint. So I stretched big canvases.  I was a body builder at the time and I was painting body builders with animal heads and I found out later as I find out most things – later – that that’s an incredibly old tradition of animal heads on human figures.  Mythology.  But I found that out later.  I would do dog heads.  I love to paint dogs.

Me too!

Good!  I would paint dog-headed figures and they were all body builders.  For the first three I put the word “man”. And I would paint the bodies with the word “man” on top of the figure.

And were they bodies of men?

Yes, they were men.  And one day, I looked at the painting without the words on it and I thought that’s a nice painting.  I’m not going to put words on it. And I didn’t. And so I never did again.  And then I got really involved in mythology.  I have tons of books on mythology, symbolism. My favorite book was “The Woman’s Encyclopedia of Myths and Secrets.” Oh, if you haven’t seen it, it’s a wonderful book.  I did a lot of pieces with mythology.  At a certain point I split what I had been doing into two things.  So then there could be a whole animal and a figure or statue.  I did that for quite a few years.

Are any of those here?

I kept them on stretchers for years, but then one day Bob Nickas came over and said, “You know Betty, people are starting to want to come to your studio.  They aren’t coming to see that.  They are coming to see this.”  So immediately I took them off the stretchers.

Let’s talk about the Women Words series. So in 2002 and then 2013, you started this new body of work.  How did that come into your head?  Do you know?

Oh yeah.  I went into this period where I was tired of being the only one in on the piece.  It must have been 2002, and at that time a lot of artists were doing collaborations. I made an email saying, “I’d like to do another series using language,” to which I was referring to the cows and horses and the sea.   I decided I wanted people to send me words and phrases about women, and if it’s in foreign language, please give me an accurate translation. I got 1500 separate words with a lot of repetition, and I organized it all in a list alphabetically. When I would have repeats, instead of retyping it, I would put another asterisk against the original word. And I was surprised at the number of pejorative terms.

I was too!  You didn’t go into it asking for pejorative terms you only asked neutrally for a description, right?

Yeah, just tell me your words and phrases about women. Right. And when I did it again in 2013, I also added to the email, “Anonymity guaranteed.” And that opened up a lot of interesting avenues.  Incredibly insulting.

Were the insults from both men and women?

Yes.

In equal amounts?

I didn’t track it but my impression was it didn’t make any difference.

And you used these for the 1,000 Paintings piece.  Did you keep the same percentages of pejorative to nice that you had received from the emails?

No I didn’t try to do that but every once in a while I would say to myself, It’s been a little sweet around here Betty.  It’s time to get a little nasty.  I would make sure that there were positive things in there, but if it stayed sweet it got boring. What’s interesting about the language is the insults.

Installation view of Betty Tompkins: WOMEN Words, Phrases, and Stories at The FLAG Art Foundation, 2016. Photography by Genevieve Hanson, ArtEcho LLC. Courtesy of Betty Tompkins and P·P·O·W, New York

Were you surprised?

Yep!  I was surprised by the whole thing.

What did you think was going to happen? Did you have any sort of idea?

No idea.  I wanted to use language and I wanted it to be about women and I had no preconception.  I would do a group of pieces and then the next pieces would be in reaction to those so it was like an interior monologue.  That was really interesting to me. I would say, These are the most dangerous paintings you’ve ever done. Because it’s language. And we all know what all this means, right, and the hair on the back of my neck would stand up.  I would get chills. This is really offensive.  But at a certain point, because I’m doing it for part of the day, for hours every day, you get insensitive to it and I would have to push it away.  I couldn’t stay that freaked out forever. Right?

Right.  How many years did it take?

Two and a half years of working a couple of hours a day on it every day.  At a certain point, I saw the [Gerhard] Richter documentary where he was doing the paintings with the squeegees. It looked like a tremendous amount of fun. It was clearly very arbitrary. He would decide after each layer if he needed another layer.  I really absorbed what he did.  I thought, This is a nice idea to take over some of these big boys and feminize them.  My next was Jackson Pollock. I did 100 Jacksons.  And I loved doing them. I don’t know how he maintained an alcoholic depression, because I found the gesture totally joyous. I mean, I loved it. I would do them to wake myself up for the day, it’s such an upper. Then somebody on Twitter was posting Barnett Newman and I did a bunch of his.

So you were having fun with the painting part, even though you’re adding some words that possibly could be disturbing.

Well, I had decided to do this because the words in just a painted field would have looked boring.

Were you interested in having them talk to each other in terms of what they were saying as well as visually?

Yes, both.  From then on to the end of the series it got very interesting to me because I had to think about two things at the same time.

It’s interesting to me that back in the early 70’s, the feminists would not include you and now, based on this project alone, I think you’re very much in the forefront of feminist art.

Right!

Did you realize it when you were doing it?

No, not when it first started, but then yeah, as soon as I started to see it. I said there’s no getting away from it. There is no rationale for not saying, yes, this is 100%, political.  Look what it’s saying.  I liked that it came from out there to me, and I did something to it and gave it right back out there. I was like a channeler.  There was no way to say this is not political work, it would have just undermined the whole piece.

Right, and the same with your pornographic work.  That was also already out there.

Absolutely.

When you are painting, do you ever think about the people behind the images?

Not in the sense that I think you mean it. I wouldn’t use an uncropped raw image where I thought the people weren’t having a good time. The first time I ran into the exploitative argument, which had to do with my sources, and that those models are being exploited, I said they look like they’re having fun to me.

What about with Women Words.  Do you think about the people that wrote those words?

Yes, I do.  In 2018 I did a series of what I called Insults and Laments because that’s what they are, no middle ground here for sure. I was in the inaugural show for the University of Virginia Art Center.  The first couple of times I showed it I wanted it to play forward.  I wanted people to participate in it.  We would put the signage on the wall where I actually gave a little history, and a table with a thing of markers, index cards and push pins and invited people to add, you know, which they could and nobody signed them. They were anonymous.  It was actually really hostile stuff that came out.

More than before?

More overtly misogynistic.  But at the University of Virginia, they didn’t have empty space for me to do this trick, and they said well would you set up a Gmail account. And we’ll post that. So I said sure. So, you know that takes five minutes. And I got the account set up, and I started posting pieces that were in that show. I said, I’d love to see your words, phrases and stories, send them to me at WomenWords1000@gmail.com. So people started sending me things. And, you know, I promised anonymity.  I would basically transfer what they sent me to an index card or a list. I would trash the emails.  That guaranteed it. I have no idea who these people are.  This one came through that.  This basically just scratches the surface of their anger, and their experience. And I did the piece. I knew right away I was going to do that piece and I did it, and I posted it up on Instagram. And the woman who sent it got in touch with me and I wrote her back. I said, “You’re very fortunate. You lived.”

Betty Tompkins, My ex’s favorite…, 2018, acrylic on canvas, 42 x 54 inches, Courtesy of Betty Tompkins and P·P·O·W, New York

I have to read it now… Wow, that makes me sad.

It’s really horrifying.  And I said, “You survived and I don’t know how you did it. Congratulations.”  And she said, “Do you ever do prints. I’d love to have a print like this.”  So, I thought well I have no idea what this woman has been been through, but I know where she came from and she’s still here, right.  So, I did two digital prints. And I just sent it to her as a gift. And what’s really interesting about this one is, and pretty similar with the other one is that when men are looking at this, they start out smiling.  There’s something that they think is light and so they smile.  Then they get to the part that says “Well he had hobbies too.” And their smile starts to get away.  And I’ve seen enough men read this and they have had second to second the same reaction.

Really. 

Yeah.

What about the women?

They do just what you did.  They know from the beginning,

Yeah, you know it’s not going to go well. 

Yeah, and I sent it to her, and she wrote to me that she had managed to get back to school. Despite this. That she had just graduated with her undergraduate and she was going to England for graduate school.

Hopefully she left the man.

Oh, totally.  You can’t write something like this, if you’re still in it.  For one thing, it’s too dangerous, he’ll kill you.  For another thing, to be able to at least say what you had been in makes the environment for you untenable.  You have to leave. And fortunately she didn’t have children.

Wow, what a strong piece.  You probably didn’t realize something like this was ever going to come from this whole thing.

Yeah. Who knew.  I had people write me emails saying all these are nasty, when are you going to do a nice one.  One of them says “I’m going to Jackson Pollock all over her face.”  People have been incredibly supportive of this series.  One of the early ones said, “Stop telling me to fucking smile”.

I know, I hate that!  It’s so insulting and men don’t get it and women get it, of course. The men don’t know why you are insulted.

Part of the insult is you are walking down the street minding your own business and some guy gets in your face and says “Smile.”

Right, as if you’re there to make him happy or please him or look good for him.

Yeah, right.

It’s beyond me.

And me.

I love that you started doing the series with the old master paintings.

Oh yeah.   I started with using pages from old, very soft-core photo books.  This one on top of the guy peeking from behind the tree is really creepy.  And creepy is my friend.  I really like that.

It reminds me of Fragonard’s “The Swing”.  Did you do that one?  

Of course.  And Bouchers. I still had those books and the remnants from them.  I took out maybe 15 pages.  From there I went to Weegee who I recently discovered.

I love Weegee.  If you like creepy that’s a good one to work with.

Yeah, absolutely.  I realized I didn’t know anything about photography.  And it seemed to me I was writing on top of photographs.  I thought to myself, okay, this is a fun series, you get to do maybe 40 or 50 and that will be it. For me as an artist if I’m not pushing an idea then I’m done.  I really like not know what I’m doing.  I was beginning to think, Well, okay, we’ve done a couple of these and I like all the photographs, but don’t really personally relate to them except for the creepiness. Then one day I woke up and I said, Art history!  I just got so happy because I opened up, thousands and thousands of images.

That you love! 

That I love!  And the only criteria was I had to find them in a book because part of what I like about the series is that I’m not taking a photograph. I’m not taking a painting and defacing it. I’m taking a page from a book and that context is totally different.  So, that’s what I’ve been doing. I’ve done about 180.

Betty Tompkins, Apologia (Caravaggio #3), 2018, Signed, titled and dated recto., acrylic on book page, Framed, 12 x 17 5/8 inches, Courtesy of Betty Tompkins and P·P·O·W, New York

Do you ever wonder what those artists would think if they saw this series?

I specialize in dead people.  At a certain point I did wonder.

I think they might be so fascinated actually.

I think they would, if they’re generous in spirit.  Artists come in all types. Some would probably say I was defacing their work. In fact, what I think is I am disrupting their work. And I’m changing the work, entirely into something that’s mine. What I say is if you want a short definition of me as an artist, it’s that I like to take something that exists in the world, do something to it and put it back out.

© Excerpts and links may be used, provided full and clear credit is given to Betty Tompkins and Figure/Ground with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.

Suzanne Unrein on Henri Rousseau

Published in Painters on Paintings

Written by Suzanne Unrein

Rousseau’s The Sleeping Gypsy is a dream that will never wake up.  A fairy tale of time, as in Eternity. Done in the style of post-impressionist, gothic regionalism, but like a cockeyed Egyptian painting, Rousseau’s Gypsy is a bust-out, an anachronism, a mystical misfit.

Seemingly grander than its 51 x 79 inches, the lion appears like a hallucination hovering over the somnolent gypsy and her accoutrements. His mane strangely blows forward on a windless night, while his eye appears as a mesmerizing orb that plays off the moon and mandolin. The vast sky makes a silent impact with its indigo hues that hint at the coming day. Wondrous patterns mimic and undulate in surreal poetry: his mane radiates towards her garments; her foot reaches out to his hind legs; the eternal waters glide behind them and in front of a flat, wind-swept backdrop of a desert. All of these sumptuous oddities keep me coming back to this painting, along with the glistening of the gypsy’s zipper-like teeth.

Rousseau once said to Picasso, “You and I are the two most important artists of the age – you in the Egyptian style, and I in the modern one.” He was ridiculed for that and other conceits, but I can’t help thinking that illusions help us all to continue. Rousseau was a self-taught outsider and inspired to paint like William-Adolphe Bouguereau and Jean-Léon Gérôme. Wonderful that he never forced himself into the framework of academia. His fantastical visions may have been a fool’s paradise but what a grand one it was: a tiger running through the rain in a tropical forest, a lion devouring a leopard among impossibly outsized lotuses and banana trees, serpents slithering out of lushness toward the ancient calls of a snake charmer.

Rousseau never left France, which may have secured his singular vision. He was outspoken about working with disparate source material to create unified worlds of his own making. Illustrations from children’s books and department stores helped create his impossible and enchanted beasts. Sketches of plants at Paris’ botanical gardens galvanized his terrain.

Twenty-four of his twenty-five jungle mashups were painted at the end of his life as if his quote “Beauty is the promise of happiness,” became the impetus for his grand finale, his trip down the rabbit hole, his adventure towards the unconditionally exotic. To me, Rousseau’s savagery in these last Edens was powerful yet delicate, simple and pure as a tune.

Henri Rousseau, The Sleeping Gypsy, 1897, Oil on canvas, 51 x 79 inches

Conversation with Elliott Green

Published in Figure/Ground Magazine

Elliott Green was interviewed by Suzanne Unrein. October 16, 2019

Elliott Green was born in Detroit, Michigan in 1960 and has been making paintings in New York since 1981.

After spending a year in Rome in 2012, his work developed a new sense of space and landscape, characterized by panoramic, far-reaching vistas, and geophysical features like mountains, reservoirs and skies that seem to melt impossibly into pure gesture. In his recent work, the conventions of landscape are upended to produce a visual experience of equal parts gestural energy, emotion, memory, and metaphor.

Green currently has a solo exhibition at the Pierogi Gallery, NYC and has had numerous past solo exhibits in NYC at the Pierogi Gallery, Tibor de Nagy Gallery, Postmasters and Hirschl & Adler Modern.  Other solo shows include The Center for Visual Art + Culture, University of Connecticut, the Krannert Art Museum, I-Space, The University of Illinois, Chicago, IL among others.  He was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1993, the Pollock-Krasner Grant in 2005 & 2018 and the Jules Guerin Rome Prize in 2011.  He lives and works in Athens, NY.

Photo credit by Tim Thayer

Your earlier work was very much about drawing.  Do you use drawing in these current landscapes? Do you start by drawing out the structure? 

I do. But instead of a pencil, I use graphite paint and a pointed brush and my fingers, making a variety of marks directly on the fresh canvas. It’s like a warm-up exercise. I begin without plans and with an open mind. There’s a lot of wiping away, which is really easy at that point. I make big sweeping gestures, with a freedom of flow, and just being there without anticipating anything, let alone how it ends. Then, almost effortlessly, this process of improvisation gives birth to a sinuous compositional structure and a theme of shapes. Whatever I end up finally doing clings to that established pathway. The essence of the painting is born there and remains in the shadows. It occurred to me recently that maybe I had conditioned myself, having been hunched over a drawing table for decades, to relax into a moving sleep-state at the sight and feel of graphite, because when I do it standing in front of the canvas, I’m able to float along in a stream of consciousness.

So you have this overall non-structure and then you go into it with the paint? 

The wet sketching sets a tone. The more abstract, the better, and the more the gestures span the width and length of the canvas, the better. Then I modify it, adding something sky-like and markings of ascending scale, and it adapts into something more scenic. It’s best for this type of painting to start with small elements at the top of the picture and move downward, overlapping with successively larger shapes, and moving across laterally, usually. But even these basic rules can be undermined, and I do that wherever possible. Then I make adjustments for balance and dynamics later. Deciding on the finishing touches takes the most deliberation and mental energy.

Do you bounce around or are you traveling through it from one end to another like a journey?

My friend, Gary Lucidon, wrote in my new book something to this effect – that there aren’t any figures in the paintings — instead there’s the journey of the artist and materials. The hand and the paint move across the canvas, searching and making connections between sections until the surface has been fully explored and mapped.  The viewer’s journeying happens when his eyes follow the large gestures that circulate through the terrain and atmosphere. Along the way, the viewer can stop to focus on smaller abstractly painted zones niched within the larger framework. When the painting is finished, I become a viewer too, and We the viewers are like bodiless spirits gliding through the space and riding its airstreams. There’s a flowing undercurrent that transports you around.

Dirty Gravity, 2019, oil on canvas, 20 x 16 inches

Let’s talk about your earlier work.  In the last few years that you were living in the city you were making drawings of figures that were very crowded together.  How did you end up going from those images to these?  What were you thinking back then?

I didn’t know then how much I’m affected by my environment. In my studio in Tribeca, I believed that I was constructing a pictorial language of behaviors and personality types acting out relationships, like in a play at the theater. But I was just echoing the humanity that was around me. When I moved upstate, away from the dense population, the people morphed into abstracted shapes that evoked characters – roundish and friendly or sharp and guarded or just standoffish. Then they became surrounded by a little more space and pockets of light blue air or sky. They were still very concentrated with tight layers, but that decompression relaxed immediately with the first landscape.

Crowd Drawing, 2003, pencil on paper, 8.5 x 11 inches

What are these drawings or are they paintings on paper?

I used to love the satisfying feeling of pressure and release that you get making a tapered line, and then rubbing it for instant shadows. Now, as I said, I begin each painting with a mixture of graphite powder and oil paint that I combine, and don’t feel any need to draw with pencil on paper. Anyway, these are drawings. Most were left unfinished or unappreciated. They are between 12-and 30-years-old.  Just this last year I found a way to work over them by putting oil paint on top and leaving certain areas of the pencil underneath to poke through. I take the graduated color on the palette that’s left over from making my painting. I comb away some paint and then put the paper face down on it and press down. It’s basically a monotype. Hopefully the best parts will be visible and the parts I like less will be covered. Then, if I think it needs it, I add on top of that with more leftover paint, usually grabbed with a putty knife from the other palette of tube squeezed dollops. Complex and unpredictable things happen in this way. You get rich marbled slathers with deep color blendings. Impossible to plan and easy to look at.  The drawings, like a diary, retain the psychological and emotional moments from earlier stages in my life. But now I’ve brought my older self into them, and that gives them wholeness and balance. They benefit from my years of experience. I’ve partnered with my younger self, and we seem to get along.

These are cool.  Do you think you are going to do something with them in terms of painting?

Right now, it’s just a parallel project, but something from these might be seeping back into my larger work, like reverb from an amplifier. But I can’t say how it will turn out, or what, if any of this, would enter the landscapes. I first began to break down my figures into abstract parts in these drawings from 2005 to 2007. Here I was using the sulci pattern of brains, squeezing and stretching them into all different malleable shapes, as if it was modeling clay or clumps of macaroni. fMRI scans were just beginning to map the brain, and that was fascinating to learn about. These figures transitioned into abstraction when I moved out here. I did so many hands and feet when I was in the city, and now I have no desire to put people in my work anymore. I’ve totally lost interest in depicting the outward appearance of people.

Pressing Man, 2006, oil paint on pencil on paper, 11 x 8.5 inches

Did you ever go back before and look at these drawings and decide to use them or part of them in a painting?

No. it doesn’t work for me to consciously prescribe subject matter. If I consciously interject even the best conceived element or idea – it always fails. Feels clumsy, belabored, and obvious. I’m not aware of what I’m doing most of the time, and that seems to get the best results.

That’s so refreshing!  Interestingly when you were living in the city that you were not only doing figures but they were fighting for space in your compositions.  Now you are doing landscapes and they are very expansive. 

Yeah, my drawings got really overcrowded, like the dense plant roots in an undersized pot. I just had to get out of there. That was 2004, around the same time my parents died. The cast of characters that emerged in the drawings was an inventory of all the people I knew way back when — elementary school teachers, my parents’ friends, my friend’s parents. And hundreds of strangers, and famous actors too. Thousands of characters, and curiously, all of them different. They would arrive on the page totally without my anticipating them. My unconscious brought them to me. The pencil moved right, left or straight ahead. Kind of like the way an ant seeks new food sources – walking left or right or straight, sniffing scents.  My hand made millions of micro-decisions, and suddenly a familiar face would appear. Suddenly there’s our old family pediatrician! To me that’s the most fun thing in the world.  What was I was thinking about? I wasn’t thinking about anything, but crafted memory – subject matter and symbols-are coming purely out of the personal system. It’s amazing!  And it was definitely therapeutic. I needed some way to sum up my life’s events and influences at that crucial point in time.

Sure, if you had to give a reason for why you were painting this or that would you have done those things? Maybe it would have stopped you from exploring what came out of you. 

 My early work was very intimate and honest, and a lot of it was kind of embarrassing, sometimes obnoxious, frankly. If an idea came up, I drew it. I didn’t censor myself, because discovering deeply stored unconscious feelings and truths was my main objective. It was cathartic! And If I had to explain or defend myself to a lot of people, say in an art school crit, I would have had to be more self-protective and self-editing. And if I inhibited myself, I would have robbed myself of the motivation and would have stopped making my pictures, period.

Since you didn’t go to school for painting, how did that evolve into you starting to paint?

I was studying literature. I thought I wanted to be a writer, and during this one lecture course dedicated exclusively to Henry James, I started drawing in my notebooks. The drawings took up more and more space on the page, and soon became even more alluring and revealing to me than the words. Then I began to take art history courses. Mostly I liked art of the late 19th and 20th century. Stuff before that really didn’t appeal to me. I liked German Expressionism.

Me too!  Who were you interested in the most?

Kirschner.  Max Beckmann.

Did you like Otto Dix?  Some of your earlier figurative works remind me of some of his drawings. 

Yes. and Georg Grosz.

Oh yes. I can see that. 

Yes, so I guess coming from literature, I wanted to express those characterizations. To show them was so much more effective, rather than to describe them in words.

The Red Jello Steps, oil on canvas, 18 x 14 inches

And you’ve spoken about these different abstract forms in your current work as being characters.  When you have one mass of abstraction butting up against another do you see those as two groups of characters?

Yeah. They are like personality zones. The behavior of organisms in the Arctic are of course different than in the equatorial jungle or the desert, right? The abstractions show different temperaments, but share the same atmosphere, the same light, and airspace.

Do you ever set out to make a painting that’s joyful or sad or tumultuous or?

No, but I probably try to balance it out. I would say to myself, that painting’s too happy. Yeah, okay. It needs a little pain and darkness there. The complete self I’d like to portray has that depth and range of experience. It needs to be balanced, with ups and downs, like life.

You’ve mentioned you often don’t know why you are doing what you are doing.  Do you like contemplating what you’ve done later on or do you keep moving forward without reflecting on the past work? 

Here’s a good example of doing and having faith. Over many years my figures had swollen hands and feet, and I couldn’t have told you exactly why. Then I learned about ten years ago that when a person is confronted with a threat that they have three choices – fight, flight, or freeze. In milliseconds, large quantities of blood flush into the hands and feet to maximize speed and force. I was showing what I was feeling without knowing it. And then also there were times when I’ve looked at some period of work and thought, Oh, yeah, I guess I was having a hard time. About six years ago I was making these very dark-black graphite paintings, and some people were asking if I was depressed, and I said, no, I feel fine. But later, I realized I must have been depressed after all. Because those heavy paintings were made not too long before my divorce, which I didn’t consciously anticipate.  But I don’t know. I get so involved with what I’m doing that I’m not sure. I’m a strange combination of oblivious and astute.

Do you see a big difference in what your younger self was doing compared to your older self? 

 I think mostly my younger self was trying to figure out what was going on inside me, and now I’m trying to maybe see what’s going on outside of me.

That’s interesting. What year did you start with the landscapes?

In January of 2012 in Rome.

What happened at that time?

I was in Sicily at this site called Segesta, where there is a Roman temple still in excellent condition.  And from this high vantage point you can see an array of stunning elements – the Mediterranean, various farmlands where lines made by rows that were plowed by oxen for centuries enhance the perspective. Olive trees gripping rock at higher elevations.  I looked out and there was so much beautiful distance and depth in this particular vista, I thought: Wow, if I could bring this expansive feeling into a painting, it would be incredible. It seemed like just a fleeting thought. Because I had no idea how I would manage it, and I never thought of making landscapes, because there seemed to be enough of them already. I knew for certain that I wasn’t going to be making plein air paintings.  But I was just awed to see so much, and so much evidence of time having happened, right there, all at once. That’s why those temples were built up high – so you could see for miles and miles and know the awe. That panorama was so open and viscerally moving. Being cooped up for so much of my life in studios might have made that experience seem especially sensational.

When you are painting something do you believe it is coming from you or something else?  It seems very intuitive.

I’m not sure. When it’s working, it feels inspired. It feels like I’m not there. Or that I’m tapping into something bigger than me, some force that’s guiding and moving me. I have assumed that it was my unconscious, which can to me be equipped with intuitions and instincts shaped by my ancestors, all the way back to the fish. Ancestors speak through me. However it works — I like it.

Jill Mulleady at Swiss Institute

Published in Delicious Line

Written by Suzanne Unrein

Jill Mulleady: Fight-or-Flight at Swiss Institute

A Fantasy of Transcendence and a Preoccupation with Downfall and Ruin (2019) is the tour-de-force in Jill Mulleady's exhibition at Swiss Institute. Elements inspired by Bruegel's The Land of Cockaigne surround an artificially intelligent colossus, reclining in a dystopian landscape afloat in a horizonless sea lit by an acidic sky. A bald eagle rides on the body of a headless seagull as a forlorn pig stares out from behind an industrial gate. Dead fish lie belly up, a vulvic cave hovers over an old man and his pet pig, and a desolate, orange-eyed bird appears like a mute oracle. Everything is half-dead or in crisis, except for the tablet that sings with bright pop-up charts and floating numbers.

Other works draw inspiration from the space's origin as a bank and add to the alarm, depicting an industrial pipeline with a deranged mouse, and a mysterious vault in the back of a dark room. Upstairs, four woodcuts portray a crazed rat riding a pair of terrorized horses across an apocalyptic cityscape, reminding the viewer of time's passing and erasures.

Jill Mulleady, A Fantasy of Transcendence and a Preoccupation with Downfall and Ruin, 2019, oil on linen, 138 x 177 inches

Conversation with JoAnne Carson

Published in Figure/Ground Magazine

Interview by Suzanne Unrein
JoAnne Carson was interviewed by Suzanne Unrein. June 20, 2019

JoAnne Carson was born in New York City and currently splits her time between Brooklyn, New York and Shoreham, Vermont. She received her MFA degree from the University of Chicago and attended the University of Illinois for undergraduate school.

Her work can be found in various public collections including the Brooklyn Museum of Art, The Fort Worth Art Museum, Joslyn Art Museum, Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, and the Frederick Weisman Art Foundation in Los Angeles.

She has received many awards including a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Rome Prize from the American Academy in Rome, an Award in the Visual Arts, a Purchase Prize from The American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Louise Bourgeois Residency from Yaddo, and an individual artist grant from the National Endowment for the Arts.

Her sculptures, paintings and drawings have been shown in numerous solo and two-person exhibitions including The Fort Worth Art Museum, The Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, and commercial galleries in New York City most recently Black and White Gallery.

Notable group exhibitions in public institutions include the American Academy of Arts and Letters Ceremonial Exhibition, The Whitney Biennial Exhibition, The New Orleans Museum Frederick Weisman Collection, the Albright Knox Gallery in Buffalo, Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia, The Sheldon Art Museum in Lincoln, Nebraska and the Fleming Museum in Burlington, Vermont.

Reviews of her work have appeared in many publications including
The New York Times, Art Forum, Art News, Arts Magazine, Art on Paper, Art in America, The New York Observer, Art and Antiques, The Nation, The Christian Science Monitor, and Galerie Magazine.

I was reading a statement you wrote about your work, “At once whimsical and monstrous, my work is a salutation to the resourcefulness of living beings and my own delight in playing the role of artist/god in creating new things at which to marvel. My subject is the instability of life, its changeability in a widening world, the purpose being to inspire a fresh but not always entirely comforting sense of possibility and wonderment.” I’m taken by your optimism.

I am an optimist.  I think even to be an artist, is somewhat optimistic.  You’re trying to make something you can’t see that hasn’t been made before, out of sheer energy and excitement about making something.  I have always loved dueling forces.  In my earlier work I had Cezanne and Cubist Masters being painted over wooden fences and broken furniture.  One voice is saying “This is impossible.”  And then another is saying, “Oh yeah, well watch this. I’m going to paint a Braque on top of an old TV set.” So there’s a battle between something that seems like you can’t go forward and then something else that says, “Yes you can.”  My latest painting is called “Nonetheless.”   It comes from this article I read about a writer who was talking about his father who was a very elderly man and had dementia.  He was dying. He went to bed one night and the next morning he said to his wife “I saw Uncle Joe last night.”  And she said, “Uncle Joe has been dead for thirty years.”  And he said, “Nonetheless…”  It sums it up.  Everything is impossible and wrong and the world is going to end, but nonetheless, something is going to continue.

You should have a show titled “Nonetheless.”

Wouldn’t that be great?!

Tell me about this new painting, “Nonetheless.”

Ok, I’m going to tell you about my new post-bad-boyfriend relationship with my work because it has allowed me to unveil layer after layer of narrative meaning in a way that none of my work has been able to get to until this point. I’ve always been trying to solve formal issues but now I’m working with several sources – three-dimensional models, paintings, and drawings, manipulated and contained using Photoshop.  With “Nonetheless,” I started with a Japanese print of figures in a boat and an octopus.  I probably have fifty versions of it as it was too recognizable.  Step by step the octopus became a log floating in the water.  The figures in the boat were flower creatures taken from an old drawing of mine.  The boat became more specific, more Italian.  Then I put this oasis in the background.  I wasn’t just trying to figure it out spatially but also those figures in the boat are like guardians.  I don’t think I ever thought that before.  That this is like that.  I might think this figure is more aggressive or trying to get under the shadow of this one.  But I thought more about a peaceful place to be which is what that little oasis in the middle of the painting is.  And then there is the catastrophe of the fire which is the part that activates “Nonetheless.”  This is an exciting place for me to be.  Back in September I had brain surgery to remove a non-malignant tumor and that was followed by months of recovery. So I’ve only made two paintings since then.

JoAnne Carson, “Nonetheless”

Would you like to talk about that?

For the first three or four months that I was recuperating I wasn’t able to make paintings but only small drawings.  I didn’t have the energy for the paintings.  But I had a revelation that had to do with being resourceful and understanding I could solve some of the problems I was having while preserving the problem.  I think every artist has a problem that they are working with.  They aren’t trying to solve the problem but illuminate it.  You try to make it bigger.  So things that are distracting you from that are an admirable goal to get rid of.

What is your problem?

I think mine has to do with, and this is going to sound very grand, the energy of life forces.  And not unlike your work, the idea of vanitas.  Something that is beautiful and abundant and very alive.  But it also reminds you there’s a little skull or a mouse lurking underneath.

A little death around.

Yes, and that balance is the most vivid portrayal of what it feels like to be a person and to be able to make something that has energy and beauty but also isn’t gratuitous.  That has the energies of how we are afraid, but “nonetheless.”  Sometimes people think my work is very joyful but I think of it as very dark.

I think it’s both.  Your work always seems both to me.  You bring out the strength and wildness of nature.  They aren’t pretty little flowers in a vase.

There is that notion of wildness.  We think of it as being untouched by human beings.  That’s not what wildness is anymore.  Wildness is what takes over after things have been deforested.  It isn’t wild anymore but also not completely contained by human beings.  It’s the dandelion in the crack in the sidewalk.  Like Alan Weisman’s book, “The World Without Us.”  How long would it take, if we weren’t here, for things we made to break down?  I think that every era has lived with that thought that we are on the brink of destruction.

I bet you are right.  I’ve thought that too.

One of my favorite quotes is from my friend who says, “How do you get an English lawn?  You get a piece of grass and you mow it for three hundred years.”  So even the idea of the picturesque is our notion of what nature should look like.  In Stefano Mancuso’s “The Revolutionary Genius of Plants”, he talks about how we are prejudiced against the idea that plants have intelligence.  We think that they live and then they die.  But he talks about a plant that lives among other plants and how its leaf imitates the leaf of a different plant species that it comes into contact with.  That its epidural layer has these convex or concave cells and it behaves like an insect’s eye and possibly the leaf can see, not the way we think of it, but enough to figure out what’s around it.  I think about that and how porous this moment in time is.  What’s natural, what’s synthetic, what’s organic, what’s a person, what’s A.I.  All these things are overlapping and things are breaking down in significant ways.  We are having to reestablish what we believe we are and it’s an opportunity as an artist to project this onto all sorts of creatures.  I look at Disney-era artists because they were looking at Picasso, Braque and Dufy.  They were looking at graphic art from Japan, Asia.  You start to see this thread, the simplification of forms.  In minimizing a form, you have to make decisions about the main features.

Are you thinking about this in terms of your plants and their personalities?

I am.  I do a ton of drawings.

JoAnne Carson, Drawing, “Orange Sun”

I wanted to ask you about that in terms of “Nonetheless.”  Are you doing drawings and revising directly on the canvas or are you making the drawings ahead of time before you begin the canvas?

It goes back and forth.  I do a million drawings.  Some are schematic, some more finished.  Sometimes I’ll make objects and I’ll draw pictures of them.

JoAnne Carson, Drawing, “Vortex Spin”

So most of these drawings are from your head, you aren’t looking at anything.

Correct.  And I’ll draw these whole worlds in the drawings but then when I start to paint I realize I don’t have enough information to paint it.    I think should I look at a tree?  Another painting?  What I’m really after is trying to make a world, and this is an event in the world with these monsters.  I’ve always made monsters.  When I was an undergraduate in the mid-70s, I made this great big puppet for a video class and it did this herky-jerky dance.  It was part comic and part monstrous.  And the people in the class didn’t like it because it wasn’t cool.  And I’ve been doing this same thing for forty years.  So I learned not to listen to people who weren’t empathetic to what I was trying to do.

That’s a great lesson to learn.

It is.  Sometimes what people think is cool will overlap with what you are doing and with the time you are in.  But then also that time will change.  I think the key is to recognize what you are drawn to and to continue to value that.

From way back then, were you able to stick with your vision or did you ever get out of step?

I think I have had periods where I’ve gotten lost.  Maybe I was trying to make the work more refined.  Because my work isn’t refined.  Also, when I started out painting I was making paintings using images by artists of the past – Cezanne, the Old Masters – and it was an Oedipal struggle with the past.  I wanted to make room for myself.  The figures from those paintings didn’t belong to me, I borrowed them.  What took me so long to make the paintings I wanted to, was I had to invent a whole world in which I invented these characters.  And they came from a many different places.  From pop culture, to paintings, to sculptures I had made.  I just now feel that I own them for the first time because of this new development in my work that is more visually informed by sources.

You make sculptures, drawings, paintings and gardens.  How has that evolved?

Early on I was making very three-dimensional paintings until I finally took them off the wall to make three-dimensional objects.  I’m still making sculpture as well.  I’m doing both.  My mother was a sculptor and then a jeweler and she made large flowers.  This was an early model for me.  When I first set out to make stand-alone sculptures I had to try to figure out how to make them.

So how did you do it?

Oh, every way that was wrong.

How did you start?

I wanted to make things that didn’t have a lot of process.  I didn’t want to weld or pour bronze.  No offense to sculptors, but most sculptors know how to make things one or two ways.  If you want to know how to make something, it’s great to look at prop builders because they don’t have any loyalty to a single material or technique.

Did you seek them out?

Yes, a friend of mine who is a costumer would say, “Do you know this stuff called Thermoplastic?  Do you know this or that?  She introduced me to prop builders in Red Hook and I saw how they they think about making things, using a wide variety of materials and processes. This was before the Internet so it wasn’t easy to find out about new materials unless someone showed you. I would think “How do I go about making a great big flower?”  One of my early works, Yellow Flower, is made out of metal and plaster bandaging.  It’s really heavy and fragile, a terrible combination.  It’s the first thing I made.

How do you sculpt it?

The sculptures are made in different ways.  Sometimes I will make a mold.  Like the piece Argyle, that has scales and each scale has to fit with another scale, like four hundred of them.  I would have to make a mold of it.

JoAnne Carson, “Chlorophylia 2”

That seems really time-consuming.

Yes, I would never do that now.  First you have to make it with clay.  Then I made a rubber mold.  Then I filled it with aqua resin.  Then I flocked them.  The thing is it was so wrong.  Now I can make things a lot of different ways.  Now I have a versatility.  That’s where my optimism comes in.  One thing I don’t know how to do is weld.  You should know how to make it stand up.

So how do you?

I pay somebody.  I pay them to make the base.  The biggest piece I’ve done, Bouquet  The Brooklyn Museum owns.  It’s aqua resin and fiberglass and then the leaves are Thermoplastic.

Do you paint it at the end?

It is actually the color of the material.  After I did a lot of these sculptures and saw them installed together they started to suggest this fictional world, like the worlds that exist in paintings.

So that’s how you found your way back to painting?

Yes, when I had bunch of these sculpture figures grouped in my studio.  With sculpture you have to negotiate it physically.  It’s factual.  It asserts itself.  When I started to see that they had relationships among themselves, I wanted to put them in a world.  I didn’t know if it was flat, a painting of a world.  I’m interested now in making a hybrid world that is dimensional and flat.  It’s under consideration.  For three years I struggled to make any kind of painting that made sense.  I did collages, a million things.  It was the drawings that lead me out of it.  They had a spirit, a life.  That’s what the paintings borrowed from the drawings.  I’ve been making art for forty years and now I have this actual live garden too.

I was going to ask about that.  How does the garden fit in relation to these other things you are creating?

Now everything is overlapping.  I’m using elements from the garden and stylizing and plunking them in the painting.  Having the garden is very much like my early work.  When I’m in the kitchen looking out at the garden through the rectangular window, it’s like a painting.  I would buy a tree.  I’d plant it.  And then I would go back into the kitchen and look at it through the window.  We have twelve acres but I would only work in the area that I could see through the window.

That is fascinating.

People would come over and wonder why I wasn’t working in other areas.  It was just like making a painting.  I would have the topiaries and I would see the spaces between.

JoAnne Carson, Garden

Does it work all the way around or just from the kitchen window?

Good question but I think it works all the way around.  It’s not that I thought I wanted to be a gardener but I felt impelled.  Give me a shovel.  This first year I made an elaborate blueprint of the garden and now, seven years later, I realize I have moved every plant since that beginning.  I planted and then took things out.

So it’s just like making a painting!

Yes, just like making a painting.  For a long time, I thought my gardening wasn’t making art but now I realize how much it was like making a painting.  And now the trees make it into the paintings.  The garden has given me an understanding of how you can move through space and how to think about it.

Is your process, waking up and deciding what you want to do today – gardening or painting or sculpture or drawing?

The first two years I was gardening I was possessed.  I would get up at 4:30am and look over volumes of books and spreadsheets, memorizing the plants’ Latin names.  My journals would be “I worked 16 hours in the garden today.” Over and over.  I would do nothing but work in the garden.  That’s all I did.  All I wanted to do.

Does your intimacy with plants make you want to be more true to their details when re-creating them?

No, I’ve never looked at a plant and thought “That’s so beautiful, I want to make a sculpture of that.”  I sort of want it to look like that but I also want it to say, “Fuck you!”  To fight back.  The last sculpture – I made three in the last year – was a lot of work for me.  I wanted to make it feel like a plant but to be intensely decorative.  Decoration is a riff on something from the natural world.  I think about creating something that looks like it’s from nature but I don’t hide the seams. So it feels like a kit.  When I was trying to make paintings it felt like I didn’t know what I was doing.

When was this?

In 2010.  I made so many bad paintings. When I would do a lecture, I would show all the paintings that I would try to make that I thought were really bad, and later realize they weren’t bad at all.  They were just not what I was trying to make.

What every artist struggles with.

Right.  Where you realize yes, I could have done that instead.  But instead, you feel lost.

Yes, I feel lost every time I start a painting and I wonder why everyone doesn’t feel that way.

Well I wonder if everyone does feel that way.  I think maybe artists do.  But yes, that was what I was trying to get through.  I was thinking “What can I rely on?”

And how did you go about figuring that out?

Well I would make a list.  I would say “I can rely on the drawings, but the drawings have limitations.”  “Maybe I can get this from the sculptures.”  This takes years.  My biggest mistake, which I think is true for a lot of artists, is that I thought one thing was going to solve the problem.  So you need to be resourceful.  You need to have a more well-rounded vocabulary.  Rather than say, I don’t like to use photographs because photographs do this.  Well realize that photographs don’t do anything.   You can look at it and simplify it and have it more in accordance with a drawing.  I think it has to do with developing a methodology in working with an image.  And listening to moments of inspiration.  I think I’m a little unusual in that I do so many different things.  Now I can use my garden in my paintings.  Things that are lurking around and now I see them adding to each other.  It’s like what Ralph Waldo Emerson said, “The years show us what the days never know.”  When you are in the days and you are trying to do this and that and then you track back 20 years and you can see the trajectory, your way of thinking.  And that’s the thing ultimately that gives us authenticity instead of thinking you are inventing from scratch every day.  It’s simply not true.

What did you make as a kid?

I remember at six or maybe earlier, falling in love with the sculptures of Bob’s Big Boy and the Planter’s Peanut Man.  They were both painted sculpture.  When I was a kid, I was just the same.  I would do things that were really ambitious, really elaborate, that I had no skill for.  I made a Pueblo village that looked fantastic but when I picked it up it crumbled because I didn’t know how to make it properly.  What about you?

I made this world out of clay with seals and sea lions.  And now today, of course, I’m painting animals.  You are talking dirt and earth and Bob’s Big Boy.

Yes, he was monstrous.  I don’t remember thinking when I was growing up that I was influenced by those things but clearly I was.  It’s interesting to think about what one’s aesthetic is.  I don’t think about it so much as what I was influenced by, as much as an innate aesthetic.  That when I saw it, I recognized it rather than it acting on me as an animated force.  I’ve asked a lot of artists what their first aesthetic experience was and you really see that connection to their mature work.  For me is was the monster thing (if you accept that the Planter’s Peanut Man was a monster).  Funny and horrifying appeal to me.  Even when I try and make something joyful I find that something horrifying seeps in.

Me too.  I recently found an illustrated story that I made when I was young.  I was frolicking in the forest with some deer when out of nowhere helicopters flew over and killed all of them.  Every story I wrote had that beauty and then destruction.

I think they are signals you are receiving.  If you talk to an art historian they will ask you why are you using this color or this subject matter and often I think, sometimes you are choosing but a lot of it you aren’t choosing.  It’s what I call sensibility, which is so deeply imbedded that you are regurgitating whether you are aware of it or not.  And that’s why I think you benefit from having a big sweeping amount of time to look back.  It gives you a certain amount of courage when you realize you’ve been doing this a long time.  It helps to squash the self-doubt.  It’s the well you keep going back to and it’s full of disguises.

After seeing Bob’s Big Boy and the Peanut Man did you try and create anything similar?

I was doing a lot of what I’m doing now.  I would try and make something I didn’t know how to make.  I would try and make a doll’s dress and I couldn’t figure out the seams and couldn’t get the dress on.  I would make a boat with my sister and we would put it in the water and it would sink.  Another thing I would do with my sister is we would create plays.   One time we did the Three Little Pigs and I made this tree that was six or seven feet tall.

It’s interesting you made a lot of sculpture back then.  I wonder if making three-dimensional objects was an innate interest for you.

I think so.  It’s in my genetic pool.  My mother was an artist and my father was an engineer and I’ve always liked to puzzle things out.  I learned that from him. I get pleasure out of the do-it-yourself.

So what are you working on currently?

Now it’s revolving around exhibitions.   I have two shows coming up.  One of them is at the University of Maine’s Museum of Art in Orono.  I’d like to have a combination of sculpture and paintings.  It’s going to depend on the place and how they work together.

Do you show drawings too?

Yes, I do.  I show a lot of drawings and smaller paintings too.  I am now really occupied with this multi-layered way of working.  I’m referencing photographs of my garden, photographs of the sculptures, and unfinished paintings.  Now it all seems like they all come from the same world.  I’m a trier.  I try this and think “That didn’t work.”  And then I’ll try this other thing and “That didn’t work.”  But really what’s working is that things start to overlap.  Trying is a resource.  That’s what I think is great about being an artist.  Either you have a plan and you work from that or you work in a more improvisational way.  For me, I’m a collagist and improviser.  I’m collaging and those changes and developments are telling a story.

Is that how you see life?

I think so.  Trying things and then recently I’ve sped it up with Photoshop.  Instead of thinking what do I do now, I will just drop different things into Photoshop.  I’m collaging in Photoshop before painting it and not liking it.  It’s a quicker way of making work.  It really suits me.  And this all happened after my brain surgery.

Interesting.  In what ways did the brain surgery change you.  Was it all about speeding up time?

Partially that.  It was also about not wanting to have the same relationship with my painting.  Not wanting to feel like it’s my bad boyfriend.  I want a more supportive partner.  I want a wife!  As artists, we get attached to things.  There’s drama in being lost.  It’s pretty compelling.  There’s drama in the suffering of “I don’t know what I’m doing.”  I decided I did not want to do that anymore.  It was a conscious decision and quite dramatic.  I evaluated without prejudice what resources I had at my disposal.  I would think I’m not a technical person so I can’t do Photoshop.  Or I’m a sculptor I’m not a painter.  All these prejudices of keeping things separate that I wasn’t aware of.  I was thinking of finding a single way of doing something instead of using the richness of all my resources of everything I’ve done.

Interesting that this happened after the brain surgery.

I have what I call the exhaustion theory.  You just wear yourself out.  Once you’ve exhausted yourself out, you have this peaceful mind.  This really came about also because I had not been working aside from small drawings.  I had this fresh place to see myself and to see my work.  And not think “You can’t do it this way.”

Allowing yourself to make art that isn’t necessarily making “JoAnne Carson art.”

That’s a really good point.  You see yourself getting to the end and needing to have produced a body of work.  I think it’s about confidence.  About the confidence to know you are going to see yourself to the end.  It’s not easy to learn how to draw and to use a photograph and to move past them.  It’s not the system but the vision behind the system that’s so important. You have to be open to that.  I think there’s a couple of crossroads. First having enough experience as an artist to develop that road.  Then you can make moves within it where you don’t think if I work this way then I can’t do that.  More like a banquet where you can have cuisine from all over.

Well I think it’s what you said about have the confidence to know you can figure it out.  You’ll get it done.

And allow yourself to stay in this moment of being uncertain.  Not judging every little thing.  Allow yourself the pleasure of curiosity and just seeing it.  Photoshop lets me go through that process so much faster so I can keep up with my imagination.  It’s like dreaming.  You need the equipment in order to do it.  It’s like the stories you wrote and what you are doing now.  We really don’t change that much.

Yes, every artist knows somewhere they are going to be able to do it or they wouldn’t keep trying but they also have that uncertainty.

I also think “What do I know?”  I know that things happen in certain moments.  Years ago I was talking to my therapist and every time I expressed being disgruntled and then apologized he said “stop doing that and say what you want.”  I thought I was doing that but I really wasn’t.  When I thought about what I really wanted to be doing I realized so clearly that I wanted to be doing sculpture.  I learned bravery after the brain surgery.  Patience and bravery.  Those are good things to know as an artist. Those were elements that enabled me to have a new charge.  I don’t have to keep being lost at this point.  The patience and bravery are about trying something different or trying something tomorrow.  I don’t know if someone could have told me this 10 years ago.  But the sense of confidence of knowing you have a distinctive voice is key to being an artist.  But you can’t be prejudiced against yourself.  You can’t undermine your own best interests.

Conversation with Marie Thiebault

Published in Figure/Ground

Interview by Suzanne Unrein

Marie Thibeault’s large-scale oil paintings address the tension of urban landscape and the natural world. The imagery is informed by the immediate experience of living near the expansive industrial Port of Los Angeles. While referencing the surrounding landscape with atmospheric color fields, the work contrasts industrial structures with organic forms to suggest the ideas of flux, change and instability in our environment.

Her work has recently been featured in exhibitions such as The Feminine Sublime at the Pasadena Museum of California Art, and Color Vision, at the Huntington Beach Art Center. Recent solo exhibitions include Conveyance, at the Long Beach Museum of Art, Illuminations at Von Fraunberg Gallery in Dusseldorf, Neon Babylon, at Elena Shchukina Gallery in London, Engineering at George Lawson Gallery in  San Francisco, and Broken Symmetries, Torrance Art Museum in  Torrance, CA. She has recently completed residencies at L’AIR Arts, Paris France, the Two Coats of Paint residency  in New York, and the US Thai Exchange Program at Silpakorn University in Bangkok, Thailand. Her work has been reviewed in several publications, including Artillery Magazine, the Los Angeles Times, L.A. Weekly, and Art in America.

Thibeault received her BFA in painting from Rhode Island School of Design and an MFA from UC Berkeley. She is currently a Professor of Art at California State University Long Beach where she teaches painting and color theory.

Photo credit: Cynthia Lujan

When did you know you were an artist?

It happened early for me.  I grew up in Baltic, Connecticut, and in eighth grade I started to realize I wanted to paint.  As kids we would explore around town and one day we came across this building, an old train station that had burnt down.  In it was a room that an artist had made into his painting studio.  I went in and smelled the paint and saw his paintings and it was an epiphany.  The whole thing was an overwhelming vision.

Had you painted anything before that time?

Some watercolor and drawings.  I think I started painting with oil in high school.

What were you painting?

Landscapes.  I’ve always done landscapes.

Do you know why the landscape was speaking to you more than other genres?

It came from living and being immersed in my surroundings and living near the Slater Museum that had a collection of New England landscape paintings.  Amazing traditional American paintings.  And I also fell in love with Cezanne.  The art teachers at my high school would show us Cezanne and Giacometti.  I learned to draw like Giacometti and paint like Cezanne.  With Cezanne’s planes.  I still kind of do that.

Amazing you had that early on.

Yes, my destiny was clear from the beginning.  The way my life suffered was the lack of ability to do anything else.  Where I went to high school you could major in art and then I went to college at the Rhode Island School of Design.  I did not know about history or finances or any of the other subjects.

Did you continue with landscape at RISD (Rhode Island School of Design)?

Yes and no, I had to go through the foundation program and start all over.  I had already had that in high school but I took 2-D design, 3-D design, enormous amounts of figure drawing.  My sophomore year I was in a residency at the Delaware Water Gap.  It was a really seminal time because I was painting plein air in the woods by myself.  I would find these abandoned shacks and sit there and listen to the rain.  It was really a deep experience.

Was it a spiritual experience for you?

Yes.  I felt one with it.  And that’s a very American tradition.  Arthur Dove, Georgia O’Keefe, pantheism, the transcendentalists.

You were inspired by Cezanne early on.  Were there any landscape painters you were thinking about in college?

I was really trained to paint abstractly.  Two different things were pulling at me at that point.

The Pattern and Decoration movement was big then, and the other was my teacher, Lorna Ritz a student of Hans Hoffmann.  Lorna would teach us about push and pull, no dead spots – formal concerns.  She was very spirited.  I pattern my own teaching after her.  That’s when I decided to be a teacher because I wanted to pass that along.  I planned on being an education major and that same year they dropped education as a major.  It was a life saver because I was thinking I was going to be a high school art teacher but instead became a painting major, and eventually got my masters.  MA and MFA both in painting.  MFA is where I studied with Elmor Bischoff and Joan Brown.  That’s where the atmosphere and expressionistic aspect came in. Not from direct teaching but looking at the art.

Oracle, 48″ x 46″

Do you remember anything that Bischoff or Brown said that was a real eye opener?

Well, Bischoff was our graduate teacher.  He was in a jazz band, drove a motorcycle and wore a leather jacket.  We all went to his studio which was a real garret. When he first knew who I was he said “Oh, you are Marie Thibeault. You paint disasters.  Well so do I.  But mine are happy disasters.”  He made figurative work and then abstractions.  The painters then were looking at Krazy Kat and other comic strips and the marks they were using were bringing humor into painting.  It was the late 70s and humor in painting was big then in the Bay area.  Bischoff said “Everyone loved my figurate paintings of the lone person among the romantic sky and they wanted to know why I wasn’t still making those paintings.  I told them because it’s like going to church.  And I’m sick of it.  I just want to go to the gym and workout and have fun.”  I always think of that, if you aren’t really having fun then it’s too reverent, too pious.

And I wonder if you’re just boring yourself.

Yes, exactly.

So when did you start painting disasters?

That started with these painting from RISD which were patterned.  I started looking at landscape and then Wayne Thiebaud. In his aerial views you can see the patterned landscape from a distance, mapping.  I was really into that.  I did these trees with patterns and natural landscapes with ruptures.  I was looking at George Inness too.  Then in 1979 I moved to San Francisco where a lot of turbulence was going on.  Looking at their newspapers was very different than on the East Coast because they published everything – a plane crash, a nuclear disaster, Three Mile Island – and everything had a picture.  I wasn’t used to that so I started drawing from those photographs. For my MA I set about making one large scale drawing each day.  If I found a disaster, I would make a big drawing of it.  With charcoal and ink.  Pretty realistic.  For two years.

Why do you think you were drawn to disasters?

I think it’s about rupture and it’s about life.  You try to make a pattern, you try to make things consistent but there’s always rupture and breakage.  I almost died when I was twenty-one.  The scarred landscape became a metaphor for my body at a very deep level.  Consciously, I didn’t know that but now I do.  I think it’s a deep structure that happened from a profound experience.

Your paintings feel that way to me.  That they are working on a personal and environmental level.

Yeah, I started seeing this in landscape painting.  These spots that are like tombs or windows into something else.  Inness had it and Van Gogh.

Do you think they were aware of that too?

Inness, yes.  Maybe Van Gogh.  Corot too.  Portals where you go to the other side.  The idea that the portal portrays the human.  That you can’t really portray nature without portraying the human.

Do you think that’s true?

No, I don’t, but it does form some need I have to have a mirror in my work.  A mirror for the body or psyche.

I was thinking about your paintings that deal with Hurricane Katrina and Sandy.  They have an added power to them because you capture the objects that once belonged to humans.  The viewer can’t help but think about the humans and their experience.  Was that one of the reasons you were interested in those disasters as subject matter?

I was interested in the epic flood theme.  It affected me on so many levels.  With Katrina there are portals. There’s a lot of pool shapes which is also a key hole and a guitar in painting.  But it’s also the feminine to me. Now I’m interested in bird forms.  They are negative spaces.  I put a stencil down and paint over it.  The removal of it is the absence of the species.  It’s an empty spot.  To me that’s also what’s going on. Now instead of honoring the human experience, I’m more interested in honoring the situation that the other species are having to cope with.

The birds also remind me of bird strikes and the disasters that occur when birds fly into glass buildings.

Right. I’m concerned with migratory paths.  There’s a beautiful movie, Messenger, about song birds and their migratory paths.  It’s beautiful and heartbreaking.  About how the building and light pollution is changing.  And cell towers are not having a good time.  There’s an interruption there.  There’s also loads of communication going on in the world that we don’t have an appreciation for so I was putting those images together.  Like Siren from my show at the Long Beach Museum of Art.  It has three cell towers and the birds are trying to navigate. The cell towers are how we are communicating, invisible lines of communication.  And the birds are the pre-technology communication and the interruption of the paths.

Siren, 78” x 116”

I wonder if the birds are affected by the microwaves of the cell tower.  Do you know if they are?

I think, yes, in some cases.  I started researching it.  I think as a visual symbol, the hubris of these cell towers is popping up in the landscape everywhere.  That we can’t leave anything without being touched is very tragic.  The black painting in the show, Oracle, is like a Geodesic dome.  A black web.  The Geodesic dome is a utopian structure, the highest thing we can do, optimism.  But it’s a faltering one as it doesn’t hold together.  It’s also a bird cage and the birds are stuck in there and can’t fly out.  It’s about constructing a symbolic relationship between us and nature.

Are your paintings commenting on what is happening, or trying to find a futuristic solution?

I get that question a lot.  It’s very interesting.  I think it’s about witnessing the moment, but I want the paintings to be at the moment of change.  When it could go either way.  They aren’t dystopian or utopian. They’re a hybrid mutation.  It’s about co-existing – a little humorous, a little dark, a little strange.  That’s what I’m going for.

Is that how you see the world?  Is that a kinetic experience for you?

Oh yeah.  But it’s also an ecstatic energy.  Like High Tide.  The water coming over the flood wall with the birds flying through it.  There’s also a reflective plane acting as a mirror for what is happening behind you.  I’m thinking less about how we are affected by the environment and more about how we are affecting it.

High Tide, 48″ x 46″

What’s next?

I’m interested in the ocean.  In the tide pools.  But I think I’m going to concentrate on migratory patterns first.  And the geodesic dome form.   A lot of the things I explore in the drawings I may play with.  I’m experimenting with the idea of smaller forms among bigger shapes.

Where is that coming from?

Thinking of the intimacy among the grandeur and complexity of nature.  What I want the paintings to convey.  I think they have the resolved, big impact – an aesthetic arrest – but when you come up close and you don’t have the intimacy.  I’m trying to figure out how to do that like the drawings because they are more clear.  The paintings have so much more going on.  Most people don’t want to deal with that in painting anymore.  The drawings are a collage of many drawings.  Bigger moves and smaller, refined moves. I think that’s coming from the collage process more than the drawing process.  I can draw and paint similarly, but the big chunks and separations come with collage.

Drawing wall, Long Beach Museum of Art, 2019

Have you tried to reproduce your collaged drawings as paintings?

I’d be bored in thirty seconds.  I’m not a technician. Some people love that methodology, but for me there’s no excitement.

Why are you drawn to abstraction?

The process and my history of painting.  I think it would be great if I were just starting to paint now.  I’d like to rethink it.  I don’t want to keep doing this same process, but I fall into it.  I want to experiment more than I have in the past.  Maybe switching materials or experimenting with collage.  In the past my motivation was to make the best epic painting ever.  My motivation isn’t that anymore.

As we mature we change our thinking about painting.

Yes, what we value.  I also want to shrink it down.  Making big paintings doesn’t seem as interesting anymore.

Is there anything you’ve lost along the way that you would like to put back in the paintings?

Yeah, I’m looking again for the hook.  What I can believe in and that the audience can believe in.  The question of drawing and representation.  I don’t want to do it because I love abstraction, but perhaps it might be necessary.  So I’m trying to figure that out.

Conveyance #1, 20” x 17″

Do you think people’s interest in representation or abstraction is how they see the world?

Yeah, and I know abstraction fairly well.  I know about  analyzing painting and the vocabulary of formalism.  I’m really a formalist.  But I also like what doesn’t make sense.  I want more of that. More enchantment.  More intrigue.  I’m trying to figure out where the payoff is in the experience.  The general vs specific.  They happen on a different plane.  The drawings have started to do that, and I have to figure out how to get the paintings to do that.

Your paintings are more integrated than your drawings.

Yes, I agree.  And I think that’s problematic.  That they are too integrates perhaps.

Do you think it’s your skill that is hindering you from what you are trying to do?

I think so.  It’s the chess moves.  I know how to do this.  But why?

In all these forty-something years of painting is there anything you wish you knew then that you know now. Not technically but philosophically?

When I was young I tried to become strong in myself and that took a really long time.  To be independent and to learn to be alone.  To cultivate the discipline.  That’s where I was focused and maybe now I have that too much.  I wish when I was younger I had been more open, been able to travel more, taken more risks.

Risks in life?

Yes, variety in experiences.  I was shut in my studio for years.  Building the skills and discipline to keep me going.  I understand the painting process really well and it continues to interest me, but I also wish I had experienced life more.  I wish I had let more of it in.  The life experiences are more lasting, although I still believe in painting even though it doesn’t make sense.

Do you ever wonder why painters become painters?  They aren’t just artists they are specifically painters.

I think it’s how you identify.  It’s a calling to be an artist but specifically to be a painter.  I think it has to do with the limitation of the means and the vastness of the possibilities.  I really love the potential of pictorial space.  A distinct meditative object in the world.  A portal that can transport and be mysterious.

I read somewhere that painters are more inspired by painting than the real world.  Do you think that’s true?

Yeah, I would say so.  Painting is so nuanced and so complex.  It’s infinite.  You paint to the future and the past and the present.  There are sensibilities that run through.  You look at Michelangelo and Jim Dine and there are through lines.  The seminal paintings that inspired me when I was younger still inspire me.  A Monet painting of a big tree still floors me every time I see it.  Certain Cezannes, some Bonnards.  Some images that are burned into your brain carry you through life.

Do you ever think it could happen in the reverse?  If Cezanne came back and saw your paintings that he could see that through line?

I think so!  He’d have to decode it, but yeah.  I think he would be interested in painting today.  I wish more people could read abstraction today.

Why do you think they can’t?

Well when I come to New York it’s different.  There’s more abstraction.  But I think because we are in the information age everything is more literal.  People want stories.  Especially on the west coast.  My theory is because on the west coast we are aware of Hollywood and everyone responds to   story.  So the question is how can you make that accessible without diminishing the power of your work?

How can you?

Some painters do it.  There’s some German painters.  Maybe Per Kirkeby and Albert Oehlen.  Many contemporary painters such as Amy Sillman, Elizabeth Murray, Joan Snyder have been inspiring in this way.

Do you think about the future in terms of painting?

I like that innovation happens simultaneously all over the world.  People are evolving together both stylistically and conceptually.

© Excerpts and links may be used, provided full and clear credit is given to Marie Thibeault and Figure/Ground with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.

Conversation with Hampton Fancher

Published in Figure/Ground
Interviewed by Suzanne Unrein

CONVERSATION WITH HAMPTON FANCHER

© Hampton Fancher and Figure/Ground
Hampton Fancher was interview by Suzanne Unrein. March 24, 2019

Hampton Fancher was born in East Los Angeles in 1938 to a Mexican-Danish mother and an American father.  At the age of fifteen, he went to Spain to pursue a career as a Flamenco dancer.  After returning to Los Angeles, Fancher began acting in the late 1950s appearing in films such as The Naughty Cheerleader with Broderick Crawford and Klaus Kinski, as well as a number of classic TV shows such as Bonanza, Perry Mason, and The Fugitive. In the 1970s Fancher began focusing on directing and screenwriting.  He would go on to write the screen play for Blade Runner (1982) and 35 years later its sequel, Blade Runner 2049 (2017).  He wrote and directed the Owen Wilson film, The Minus Man (1999).  In addition to teaching screenwriting at New York University and Columbia University, Fancher has published a collection of stories entitled The Shape of the Final Dog, and most recently, The Wall Will Tell You: The Forensics of Screenwriting. Described by the Los Angeles Times as “a world-class raconteur,” Fancher was the subject of the recent, highly praised documentary Escapes directed by Michael Almereyda.

photo credit: Nesa Azimi

Your life has been a work of art, so much so, that Michael Almereyda made a film about it.    When everyone else set out to become a doctor or a lawyer, did you intentionally go in a different direction?  

No I set out to be a doctor and a lawyer and wanted to do it.  The difference is that when other kids start to integrate with school at a certain age, I never did.  I couldn’t do it.  I was stuck.  I had learning disabilities. Consequently I missed the brainwash.  You have to decide to become a doctor or lawyer.  You can’t do both.   I didn’t care about choosing because I was always pretending and in a way that’s never stopped.  I’m still pretending.  Still living in a fantasy because I’ve had the good fortune of living in a way where I don’t have to report to the commander every day and do the commander’s work.  I’m a bum but with the good fortune of having a rug and a couch and clean sheets.

If you didn’t have the ability to learn the way other people did how did you become a writer?

It comes from reading and the impulse.  Those things were simultaneous.  Reading and writing happened at the same time. My mother and father and sister read.  I didn’t. I drew in the pages of books. No one ever said “Don’t do that.”  I never heard that.  I didn’t read until a buddy of mine’s older sister who hated my guts said “You are an asshole.  A worse asshole than all of them.  But you could be saved if you read.”  She gave me this book at the height of the Korean war that was called Conscientious Objector, and I read it because she gave it to me.  There was sex in it.  I didn’t know books had those things. I read it and liked it enough to read some more.  The next book I read changed my life.  I went to the library and stole one because I didn’t know how to check it out. It was Hemingway’s Death in the Afternoon.

You just happened to get that book?

Well that’s just how life has been.  I’ve been lucky.  I read that and I was already a dancer.  And those things went hand in hand.  Bullfighting and Spain and Flamenco. I went to Mexico and studied bullfighting – one lesson maybe two.  So that book was very important and then another, Matador by Barnaby Conrad.

Is that something that continuously happened to you, that reading informed choices you made in your life? 

Oh yeah.  I think that happens to a lot of people.  That and the movies.  Movies, music, books.

You became a writer and a filmmaker and not a painter or musician and I know you love all those things.  What made you become a writer and filmmaker?

People follow their capacities maybe and I don’t think I had enough talent as a painter.  I drew and I tried to paint.  Never went to school for it and never identified myself as one, but I did dream myself as a director and an actor and at nineteen or so as a writer. I identified myself as a poet because the romance of it suited me.  I was reading Villon and Rimbaud.  I wanted to be like that so I pretended to be that.  I think those things informed what I became.

Was poetry the first writing that you did?

Yeah. Because I met a poet when I was a teenager and he was spouting poetry and I learned that poetry.  I loved it.  It was because of him that I started memorizing Shakespeare and Rimbaud.  And started reading and writing bad, bad poetry.

Did you know it was bad at the time?

No, no, I was crazy.  It coincided with not only being a bit of a drug addict and an alcoholic. It was also that my brain wasn’t formed yet.  I was doing crazy things.  This was in my early twenties.  By the time I was thirty I was a little more stabilized.

When did you go from writing poetry to writing screenplays?

When I was nineteen or so I met a screenwriter through that poet I mentioned.  He took me to a guy’s house.  A guest house in Los Feliz and he’s smoking and he’s drinking out of a half pint of whiskey.  He’s got a typewriter and a desk and photos pinned on the wall, civil war things. I was just soaking it up because I wanted to be like him.  Researching and making money and writing a movie.  I didn’t even know what that meant but I loved movies and he can smoke and drink and pay for this wonderful place.  They’re paying him to do this.  From then on I said I was a writer.

A screenwriter?

No, a writer.  I never said I was a screenwriter.  I still don’t.

You went from poet to writer?

Yeah, I went from poet to writer and then shortly after I was making my living as an actor but I still said I was a writer.  Acting to me was all provisional, temporary.  The acting thing was to not collect unemployment this week.  If I had taken acting more seriously it would have been different.  I didn’t have a clue.  I was afraid.

Afraid of what?

I was afraid of exposing myself.  Afraid of showing anything that was real, yet finally I was even teaching acting.  I was telling people to do what I wouldn’t do myself.

So you weren’t any good?

I didn’t think I was any good but when I look at it now I can see why they were hiring me.  I had ideas.  I was studying but not sincerely doing the work that creates honest acting, that makes an art of it. I understood it.  I could talk the talk.  I could act like I was doing it and directors and other actors believed me, but I was pretending to do it.  I wouldn’t go all the way.

When did that change?

It never changed.

You still don’t think you are authentic?

No, I don’t think so.

Really?

No, I stumble into things that aren’t bad sometimes.  Basically I dabble. I’ve never had a genuine abiding grip on anything.  I feel completely inauthentic at anything, everything.  I feel like it’s all a charade.  And if you take off all the packaging of the charade, then what is left?  It would be a very tiny little whimper.  I’m not being cute.  Really, that’s what I think.  Something frightened and agonized and crawling and crying and wants to go to sleep sucking its thumb.  And that’s it.

Do you think everyone feels that way?

I hope not.

Do you see other’s acting and writing and feel that they are much more genuine than you are?

Oh yeah.  The actors are great.  They’re brilliant.  That’s the beauty of it.  To see a great movie or great plays.

Well some people say that Blade Runner was their favorite movie of all time.

It is a great movie.

And you wrote that.

No I didn’t.  There’s a lot of great people involved in Blade Runner.  The most salient of which is Ridley.  Usually that’s what it is, it’s the director.  He stood on the shoulders of a lot of slaves and I was one of them and there were others.

Well you have to have an authentic voice with the screenplay to make it believable.

The origin of it, yeah, that’s me but then came David Peoples and what he did became a lot of Blade Runner.   Then you get the graphic design, production design, and then we’re back to Ridley.  Plus the music and the editing. So there’s that.

And you’re the one that thought the book would make a good movie.

I didn’t love the book but I saw a through-line that would make an interesting movie. And then I had the good fortune to get a wonderful producer, Michael Deeley.

You also made The Minus Man.  How do you think about that in terms of authenticity.

Well, that was pretty good.  I’ve done two things in my life, this part of my life.  The early part of my life was about the dancing.  And that’s what I feel the best about.  The dancing.  But since I was 21, there were two things that were really terrific for me.  One of them was writing and directing The Minus Man.  Still is when I indulge in the memories.  And it’s really sad too.  Because that’s what I really wanted to do, wanted to continue that experience.  I was 60 when I made it so that’s a bit late maybe.  I think if I had done it when I was 30 I’m sure my life would have been very different.  The other was a play I directed, Beckett’s Endgame.  That was the other triumph of the spirit for me.

Do you have specific memories from those two things where you felt like, “Yes, I really did something here.”

Well there are memories I have that are learning curve memories.  Where I messed up.  I still think about those all the time.  Why didn’t I do this instead of that?  Let me do it again and I’ll know what to do.  I remember the fun and the beauty of it.  The affirmation of it I guess.  It was a different world when I was doing that.  It wasn’t the same old world. With Endgame I was never satisfied, but with The Minus Man I was very satisfied.  I thrived.  I was old enough then to integrate with everybody.  And the things I wanted to do that everyone said you couldn’t do – social things, simple things – “Don’t ever show your vulnerability” – screw that.  “Stay off your feet.” That was another one I got from other directors, more experienced than I.  But finally I just did what I wanted to do and it was really compatible, except for a couple of moments here and there.

What advice would you give?

Don’t let it end until you like it.  And that’s really hard to do.  I don’t know how to do that but Wes Anderson does, and did, and right off the bat.  He’s a sweetie pie guy, full of warmth and understanding but he’s also steel when the shit comes down. You have to be smart as hell too.

Let’s go back to the dancing.  I didn’t realize you felt this was the greatest thing you did.  

When I was doing that, the romance with it, the connection to it was so deep and so voluptuous, gratifying.  I lived it. I was living The Minus Man but I was living other things too.  I was grown up.  But when I was a dancer, it was just me.  Young stupid me and I thought I walked alone.  The love of it, my adoration of it, like a child’s imagination, I could smell it.  I could sense it everywhere. I was the center of it.  It was Spain, it was me, another time, other clothes, it was all consuming.  I was too dumb to take advantage of my talent and to learn. I didn’t take advantage of it but I pretended to.  I’ve never had that experience again.  I was thirteen.  Thirteen to seventeen.

Why did you stop?

I really don’t know.  I know the superficial reasons.  I think fear had something to do with it.  And stupidity.  Not knowing how to proceed.  Pretending to know how to proceed.  Fighting to proceed but doing it wrong.  Fear of not being able to walk in and do things.  At the same time I was kind of crazy at seventeen, living in New York without anything, in love with a girl who has this thing called schizophrenia.  She’s a model and she’s beautiful and I’m living with her and I don’t dance anymore because I’m so messed up and enamored with her and she’s so crazy and kicks me out and I have no place to go and nothing to do.  I don’t want dancing or insecurity anymore.  Let me go home and get a job and get married and be safe.  So I hitchhiked back to LA and met a girl, got married, had a child.  And then I’m not a dancer. I’m a writer.  I retired at eighteen from dancing.  I was anguished, like a romance, that I didn’t do it anymore.  Until I was thirty I thought I would. I’m not good at knowing the score.

Any lessons learned in life you want to pass on?

Keep it physical.  Take it all in.  What I saw from kids is that they stopped being and doing that at a certain point.  The animal part of ourselves gets diminished and gets replaced by something more conformist and pragmatic.  So I guess in a word it would be “Play.”  And then watch out because when you get older there’s no room for it anymore.  Find the room.  The big challenge I guess is understanding another person.  To understand their experience.  Maybe we are too self-involved.  We are animals.  A bunch of monkeys don’t care that an alligator is getting killed over there.  The monkeys don’t give a shit.  But we do to some degree.  Our fear teaches us something.  Our abhorrence.  So if you are open to knowing the fear of others and know how they feel.  That’s a good idea.

What do you think is your biggest failure that lead to better things?

I think it all started when I stopped going to school.  I started stopping when I was six or seven.  By the time I was thirteen I wasn’t going much at all.  When I was fourteen I was in juvenile hall. No school would take me at that point.  So then I ended up in a private, theatrical school.  No one really showed up there because they had gigs. I went there until I left the country at fifteen. I got a freighter to Spain.  My family understood and said ok.  It also got me out of their hair.  Hard for them in a way.

So failure started you on this wonderful adventure?

No it wasn’t failure. That just sounded funny. No, what it really was, was doing what the dream told me to do.

—

© Excerpts and links may be used, provided full and clear credit is given to Hampton Fancher and Figure/Ground with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.

Suggested citation:

Unrein, Suzanne (2019). “Conversation with Hampton Fancher,” Figure/Ground
< http://figureground.org/conversation-with-hampton-fancher/ >
Questions? Contact Laureano Ralón at ralonlaureano@gmail.com

Verne Dawson at Gavin Brown's Enterprise

Published by Delicious Line
Written by Suzanne Unrein

Bucolic landscapes give way to mysterious narratives, myths, and rituals in these latest grand and intimate paintings by Verne Dawson. A bound Prometheus, an alluring mermaid, and a crucified Jesus are instantly recognizable. Other subjects arouse only a fleeting memory.

In the show-stopping The Theft of Fire (2019), a couple steals fire from a prehistoric era while others go about their ceremonial solemnities, holding unidentifiable objects among modern architecture in the same expansive setting. Time and space are a continuum as the pleased skeleton in the foreground holds court over the contemplative characters. Dawson paints the rhythm of the natural world swiftly and fluidly, laying thick marks over thin gestures in a no-fuss manner. Rough-hewn lines and smudges create the narrative, magically conveying the turn of a foot or the terror of a duck with seemingly little effort.

A concurrent exhibition of Dawson's work is at Galerie Eva Presenhuber, with an emphasis on numerology and astronomy, and an elegy to a most likely extinct bird.

Lynette Yiadom-Boakye at Jack Shainman Gallery

Published by Delicious Line
Written by Suzanne Unrein

Lynette Yiadom-Boakye's contemplative works, fictitious black figures painted life-size and larger in minimal spaces, make up this two-gallery exhibition at Jack Shainman.

Thin bright whites, yellows, lime greens, and peaches are sparingly covered up by a dance of deep umbers, blue-blacks, and grays. The underpaint highlights the whites of eyes, the contours of facial features, and the outline of clothing. The figures appear silent even with outward smiles. An insistent inward gaze complements their elegant postures. Their essence is depicted with such timelessness of clothing and spaces that it produces a hologram-like remoteness.

In The Ever Exacting (2018), a man looks skeptically at an owl that looks equally suspicious of the viewer. His white-socked foot reaches out as if to move while mimicking the owl's threat to fly. Both sock and owl are painted in rich white-grays. Yiadom-Boakye is at her best here - hinting at forms with virtuoso brushstrokes, playing vibrant hues off ochres and browns - while conjuring the mysteries of paint and her imaginary subjects.

Shari Mendelson at UrbanGlass

Published by Delicious Line
Written by Suzanne Unrein

Bar codes emerge out of filmy surfaces that recall ancient Roman and Islamic glass vessels in the form of animals and mythical figures. Blending observation, memory, and invention, Shari Mendelson creates spin-offs that charm and delight while conjuring histories and collective memories. She constructs them from repurposed plastic, lending a contemporary, disquieting edge.

In Deer Askos (2018), the hoofed mammal becomes an ancient vessel with inward gaze and legs sensitively tucked under a curved torso. A "best by" date is branded on its rear end, a reminder of the environmentally hazardous material that formed it.

A feline appears more house cat than lion in Sphinx with Bar Code (2018). Its human face looks wary. Its wings are clipped. With fragile front legs and a heavy top, this mythical creature seems both vulnerable and heroic in its modern form.

"Glasslike" is a reminder of objects left behind, from the artifacts of ancient civilizations to plastics that refuse to break down.

Jane Fine at Pierogi Gallery, NYC

Published by Delicious Line
Written by Suzanne Unrein

Rendered in the style of pre-tech, 1970s cartoons, Jane Fine's paintings of groovy symbols, political imagery, and abstract doodling are a disquieting mix of innocent fun and a darker, Trump-era subversion.

The smaller works evoke 4-color pens with red, blue, brown, and black playing over metallic backgrounds. Flat, rounded planes break up the space while black shapes block out messages. "Sad," "Secrets," and "No" multiply and frolic in puffy lettering. Crossed out swastikas and money signs float among flowers and nonsensical speech bubbles.

In the larger So Much Winning (2018), flags tear and melt while their white stars freed from their confines shine brightly. A torn-apart fence hovers. (Good fences make good neighbors?) A partially concealed Statue of Liberty crown is smeared with red and blue. Missiles and toppled buildings pop out of abstractions. The imagery creates an ominous message amid a dynamic composition of exuberant paint on a powdery pink background.

Dr. Lakra and Mezcal Los Dos Amigos at kurimanzutto, Mexico City

Published by Delicious Line
Written by Suzanne Unrein

Mexican surrealism meets sumi-e ink washes in 77 mashups by the artist and tattooist Jeronimo Lopez Ramirez, aka Dr. Lakra.

Lakra's fluid and masterful drawings combine Japanese iconography with mythical dream states. They skillfully traverse cultures and emotions in a singular vision. A monkey sees, hears, and speaks no evil while a dubious skull lies underfoot. An argyle sweater-clad fusion of snake and shriveled penis portrays the absurdity of impotency. In the poignant Yoru no hotaru (2018), an oni clutches a club in the existential darkness while peering out at fireflies bathed in their hopeful yet minuscule light.

Accompanying the exhibit is Lakra's collaboration with Abraham Cruzvillegas, Mezcal Los dos Amigos. Labels on mezcal-filled recycled liquor bottles become the canvases for the artists to conduct a dialogue through sketches and appropriated images. The project provides a wonderfully homegrown, expanded context for the sumi-e drawings.

Angela Dufresne & Louis Fratino at Monya Rowe Gallery

Written by Suzanne Unrein
Published by Delicious Line

"Glazed" combines salacious pleasures with robust sensuality in this exhibit of fresh, modestly sized paintings by Angela Dufresne and Louis Fratino.

Dufresne tantalizes and summons with comic, crazed faces that look out from brilliant, abstract backgrounds with erotic familiarity. Enticing body parts and facial features are accentuated with swaths of surprising hues while restless fingers play at sexual diddling. The rousing compositions are unified in a masterful partnering of frenetic movement and rhythmic color.

Fratino's portraits are stylized, languorous, and romantic with solid, sculptural forms that are reduced and simplified. A slow dance of flat planes and undulating forms surround geometric, contented faces rendered in deep lilacs, rusts, and grays. When not delighting in his decorative patterning of blankets, tilted picture frames and personal objects, his doodles and scratches offer a visual playground for more abstract delectations.

Marlene Dumas at David Zwirner Gallery

Written by Suzanne Unrein
Published by Delicious Line

Marlene Dumas is at the top of her game at Zwirner with pictures, some of them monumental, of voyeuristic intimacies. Painted thinly in oil, they are ephemeral and disturbing.

The large-scale canvases are around 118 x 39 inches, creating confined, coffin-like spaces for full-length figures. These portraits of vulnerability throw a gut punch. In Spring (2017) a woman, her face in shadow, pours liquid down her crotch. Her black panties cut into her rust-red legs as she balances over a lime-green stage in front of a bleak background.

In Awkward (2017) a couple stands uncomfortably toe-to-toe. Red edges force them together while the white negative space between them creates compositional tension. Their blue color makes the encounter feel powerful but fleeting.

Near the back of the show are wet-on-wet ink washes illustrating a recent edition of Shakespeare's Venus & Adonis. Dumas is in her element with the tragedy and tenderness of unrequited love.

Ursula von Rydingsvard at Galerie Lelong

Written by Suzanne Unrein
Published by Delicious Line

Ursula von Rydingsvard's new, fierce, undulating sculptures take on a courageous vulnerability in these towering works (and a few smaller ones) in cedar, bronze, paper, and resin.

The cedar works are carved, sliced, bruised, and then re-constructed into ferocious pieces that haunt with fragility. In Nester (2016), eleven feet high, the wood inherently recalls the landscape. Yet its formation conjures up a caterpillar's measured crawl or an animal's tail raised in fright. The gaping holes utter silent chatter, as the rhythmic motion of the carved details relieve the overpowering mass.

The majestic, tree-like bronze of Z Boku (2017), with its lacy tendrils, appears to timidly reach for the sky, projecting strength and tenderness in equal measure.

Burrows begin tentatively at the top of Oziksien (2016), while becoming larger and seemingly louder as they plummet downward, reaching an all-out crescendo at the floor. It offers reverence to nature's power.

Ursula von Rydingsvard
Nester, 2016
cedar
131 x 55 x 54 inches
 

Trude Viken at Fortnight Institute

Written by Suzanne Unrein
Published in Delicious Line

Through virtuoso brushstrokes, scrapes, and smears in Trude Viken's exhibit of self-portraits and couples, hidden emotional states ooze externally. Thick pigments sculpt monstrous faces in unearthly, ashen umbers with shocks of yellows, reds, and pinks. The paint is urgent and frenetic in Ensor-esque proportions.

A hundred twelve-inch canvases make up the Diary Notes series, a visual daybook of the clandestine side of the human psyche. Painted with deftness, the horrific and impotent connect through tantalizing smirks and penetrating stares. Slits of human eyes beckon for understanding as whirls of thick paint obliterate surrounding features. A head slips down a picture frame, losing its footing among a sea of acidic, calamitous, green-gray marks that offer a lifeline.

In Couples and Ghosts, anxiety is heightened with twosomes melding together in otherwise roomy compositions. Only their dissolution offers a respite from their neediness and angst.

Angelina Gualdoni at Asya Geisberg Gallery

Written by Suzanne Unrein
Published in Delicious Line

Angelina Gualdoni's "House of the New Witch" revels in the power of the female mystique, the roles of sorceress and creator, while constructing compositional disorders through spatial mashups. Interiors and still lifes mingle with shapes from the works of female artists of the past that are painted on the back of unprimed canvases and seep through as an inherited visual language. Bewitching worlds turn seemingly ordinary household objects into tools for secret ceremonies, and ancient Peruvian ceramics into magical anthropomorphic creatures.

In Cabinet Painting (2018) the stains ooze out of the walls and floor, creating an eerie and dominating lineage. A cabinet of curiosities is dimly lit in a box of emerald, blue, and violet while its doors have a warped perspective that lends form and confuses. A flattened female Moche figurine is freed from the architectural concerns and the secret world of the human-like objects, appearing as a feminist rebellion to the ancestral spirits.

Mary DeVincentis: Dwellers on the Threshold at David & Schweitzer Gallery

Art review by Suzanne Unrein
Published in Delicious Line

Mary DeVincentis's paintings percolate at their own speed. Her cosmos gives a virtuoso performance while its enchantment sweeps up diminutive creatures. Its static effervescence rouses and intoxicates, drawing the viewer into various scenes. In one, an artist wields a paintbrush under electric currents. In another a zebra contemplates existence at the edge of a cliff. Elsewhere a tiger tries to touch the sky.

The slick Yupo surface and fluid acrylic brushstrokes of Day Dreamer (2017) create an otherworldly luminosity. The dreamer hovers between conscious and subconscious states, in a bed of lilac flowers or aqueous reflections, the heavens overhead summoning the earth. Blankets of supernatural yellows and greens seduce with their acidic tranquility while suggesting clouds and sea. Pink ears hear the calling of a distant flowering tree, while arms and legs signal death and resurrection.

In DeVincentis's worlds, dreams and personal myths spark a universal recognition.