New York City is impossible it's a very uncivilised City
What was it like in the in terms of being in New York in the early 1950s?
You went to school and the was Cooper Union and it was one of the three
or four Bauhaus schools and they had a real edge. Cooper Union was the capital
of provincial Modern Art. So I started provincial modern art really: cubism and
Bauhaus and the same time Jackson Pollock had. New York changed
completely. When I started to paint full time at the end of six or seven
years I could really handle paint real well you know.
But I had to work hard.
For me the surface is where the whole thing is.
The thing it that I have
accomplished is I put a new surface. The actual surface of paint is different and
I think that's the maybe might be the major thing in my work
I think style is the content of my painting really is what I say. And I think style
belongs to fashion and fashion is in the immediate present. That's really where I
was after, the immediate present.
And this is a painting that I know you've just
finished and that we're hoping to bring to the show in Tate St Ives.
Paintings are like wine sometimes it travels and sometimes it doesn't.
But in general
I think my paintings travel to England quite well
Now they say I think are 1951- 1952
And they are paintings from photographs
I had no idea if the
paintings would be any good but I knew they weren't too conventional that was the
big thing
I just felt connected to what I was doing by the way it felt
Realistic painters never got what I was doing and the abstract people didn't get
it either so I was someplace in between
I was moving away from content
The grammar of my paintings is abstract but
basically the idea is to make something that seems like it's realistic.
This is realistic, it's not flight you can see right into it.
The lights are on top of this transparent water
When I decided to do compositions I realised that
compositions are pre-planned and paintings like
Picasso's were constructions. Were the guy paints and scrapes and paints and
scrapes and Bonnie Newman and Monet are like arrangements. You have arrangement
when they keep painting the same arrangement but a composition has more
moving parts and I had to go into [???] and Rembrandt to see how to make them and
use references and then the rest of it's all contemporary
Which was what was in front of me.
Martin came in I think three or four days after I painted it.
It's different than anything I've done and at that time people liked
I was showing to people because I couldn't figure out whether it
made any sense to anybody and people went nuts over it so I thought it'd be great
to have a new painting
Most painters when they get older they get worse and the real good ones get better
And this is like my way I was saying I got better