First published in 2012 in Geoform, a curatorial project by Julie Karabenick, and republished with permission.
Interview by Julie Karabenick
Julian Stanczak was born in Borownica, Poland in 1928. He attended the Borough Polytechnic Institute in London from 1949-50. He received a BFA in 1954 from the Cleveland Institute of Art in Cleveland, Ohio, and an MFA in 1956 from Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut where he studied with Josef Albers and Conrad Marca-Relli. In 1963 he married artist, Barbara M. Meerpohl. From 1957-64 Stanczak taught at the Art Academy of Cincinnati and the University of Cincinnati, Cincinnati, Ohio. From 1964-95 he held the position of Professor of Painting at the Cleveland Institute of Art. He retired in 1995 after 38 years of teaching. Stanczak has exhibited his work across the United States as well as in Japan, Canada, the UK, Kenya, Poland, and Spain. He has had over 100 solo exhibitions. His work is found in more than 90 museum collections, including: in New York City, the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum of Modern Art; in Washington, D.C., the National Gallery of Art and Sculpture Garden (Smithsonian Institution), the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the Corcoran Gallery of Art, and the Hirshhorn Museum; the Butler Museum of American Art, Youngstown, Ohio; the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, New York; the Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland, Ohio; the Detroit Institute of Art, Detroit, Michigan; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, California; the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Massachusetts; the RISD Museum, Providence, Rhode Island; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, California; the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, UK, and many others across the US. Stanczak is represented internationally by Mitchell-Innes & Nash of New York City. He lives and works in Seven Hills, Ohio with his wife, the sculptor Barbara Stanczak.
You have often said that color is the central concern of your art making.
Yes, my primary interest is color—the energy of the different wavelengths of light and their juxtapositions.
The primary drive of colors is to give birth to light. But light always changes; it is evasive. I use the energy of this flux because it offers me great plasticity of action on the canvas.
To capture the metamorphoses—the continuous changing of form and circumstance—is the eternal challenge and, when achieved, it offers a sense of totality, order, and repose.
Color is abstract, universal—yet personal and private in experience. It primarily affects us emotionally, not logically as do tangible things.
Color is non-referential. By itself, it cannot easily be measured or quantified.
For our sense of order and self-preservation, we grasp for measurements, fixed entities, and control in order to formulate our relationship with our environment.
Sizes and locations are scrupulously observed and remembered to satisfy the logic of the brain, which inquires, “What is it that I am looking at?” and “Where is it in space?”
So I ask, “How can I dish out colors—colors that create beautiful melodies—without forms that will contain them?” As a colorist, I have to have the means to measure the density of the actions of one color against another. I must have form.
Yet in the end, I do not want form for form’s sake. I want to shout or whisper through colorants acting against each other and create experiences that are more than they are factually. That is how visual poetry can be achieved.
How have you arrived at your preferred forms?
I have looked both inward and outward for shapes and defining boundaries. I have searched for the correct containers for my colors and for interactive relationships where one shape does not dominate another in order to fine-tune a particular psychic response for the viewer.
I freely explore shapes and boundaries as carriers for transformed memories and situations and give them new meanings in the pursuit of the color experiences I envision.
Thus in my work, known formal facts—shapes and boundaries—debate with emotional or psychological energies—colors—on the canvas as they do in life.
What sort of color experience do you wish to create for the viewer?I want to fuse many colorants and their gradations into a single color experience—a “color meltdown,” as I call it.
I am interested in the glow of colors as they interact and intermix, as they give to each other. And there are many factors I must consider to achieve the desired meltdown.
For example, I must ask, “How many containers do I need?” “How many opposing wavelengths must I use?” “What should their relative proportions be?” “Can I control a fused glow or color radiance toward the desired experience?”
So whether I am dealing with the individual containers and their multiplication into grids, or if I am employing straight or curved lines and their repetition, the aim is the same —an interactive fusion. In this fusion, multiple parts unite in a singular action.
Of course any interactive process involves change. In the process of change, visual elements lose their individuality for the sake of the totality.
And, as you know, unlimited actions are continuously entering our eyes. I am trying to find a way in this confusion of actions—this tsunami—to bring about order.
What types of forms or boundaries best allow you to achieve order?
Anything that possesses order appears to us to be controlled. Geometry, the primary color wavelengths and the primordial action of line and edge all play important roles in this ordering. I use geometry because of the clarity of its visual notes and divisions.
Any referential aspect of the shapes or lines is totally secondary to me. I am not painting them for that kind of information. Rather, I am interested in how I feel about and respond to these shapes and boundaries as a visual person. If their order is clear, it offers a clear response.
Lines and edges can form shapes with astonishing simplicity. The key is to be as economical as possible, as minimal, with the utmost clarity.
To be selective is the problem. How much is enough? What is too much? When do the divisions and elements melt down into a homogeneous experience? These are the questions!
As you know, Nature conceals its order, which under the microscope is mathematical or geometrical. In the process of change— transformation, permutation—Nature produces new physical forms. I try to melt geometry down and make it sing. I love the order inherent in all the sciences, and I admire the human capabilities involved, but that is not art to me. It is science for science’s sake first, while art should reflect the human spirit and responsiveness first.
I want to touch the real truth. Consider Malevich and his Suprematism. Why did he paint a black square and hang it in the corner of a room? Think about it. He took the balanced forces of the vertical and horizontal that define the measure of a field; it is monumental because of its reference to the totality of the world. By putting a square in the corner with its diagonals, he is forcing the horizontal and vertical to a standstill. But they are not dead, not dead at all! They are in momentary repose, going but not going.
Or take Mondrian. He would say that the relationship between the vertical and horizontal—not a curve or an organic wiggle, but these utmost energies of up and down—are colliding against one another, creating myriad variants of our life experiences.
You, too, make abundant use of verticals and horizontals in your work.
To find my own way, I had to pay attention to the physical world around me. For example, what makes me stand vertically? How can I lift my leg and still retain my balance? All these physical forces and their syntheses have preoccupied me.
I love the vertical line, perhaps because it brings me closer to my own experience in life, which is being erect. Understanding the dynamics of experience confirms the poignancy and power of the vertical. It affirms a position or placement: “I am here.” It compares itself with the left and right and right and left; it measures the interval.
And the vertical invites the horizontal—active looks for passive—in order to establish equilibrium. The vertical is “here”, the horizontal is “there”; the vertical is “now”, the horizontal is “later.”
Quite often you cross verticals and horizontals to form a great variety of grids.
The meeting of vertical and horizontal forces offers a standstill at the intersections. Because of this principle, I use the grid—the “hold/stop” in time.
And if the gridlines are unconnected or broken, we close them up visually—again for the sake of simplicity of reading and for identification, for the sense of “I know what it is.”
For many years, you’ve established rhythms across the canvas using repeating vertical lines.
Again, how do you arrive at a unified color experience—a color meltdown as I’ve called it? I can achieve this by using the rhythmic aspect—our heartbeat. Both grids and intervals provide this. We grasp the structure immediately through repetition and symmetry.
The repetition of similar actions offers a rhythmic effect, which we might call movement or vacillation. In any visually active, complex situation, we pick up the simplest element—it could be a line, position or shape—and immediately we look for similarities to the other elements. For the viewer, the drive for simplicity of actions is primordial. In the search for totality and mental satisfaction, we group and re-group pictorial elements, trying to order them.
We are compelled to enjoy repetitive action, the beat. It parallels the life around us; it is the heartbeat of our actions. And the power of repetition offers the viewer the awareness of time. Time and the registration of interval echo our involvement with Nature, our actions like walking or talking.
I like to compare this sensation of repetitive action to the Baroque music of Vivaldi, Bach, or Scarlatti—again, it is our heartbeat. Whether listening to a Bach cantata or a tam-tam drum in the jungle, repetition is in time and over time, and, as in perception, we human beings are drawn to it.
In order to evoke the comparison of lines and their colorants, I multiply them, and again, you get caught up in the staccato rhythm. Now you might compare this sensation to listening to a quartet, where one instrument—or colorant—gives itself up and becomes part of the other voices—or wavelengths. I am fascinated by this behavior, and I use the term “metamorphoses of actions”—elements fusing or changing their identities.
You have worked in black and white since quite early on.
The collision of black and white is so simple, yet so direct and rich at the same time.
What we remember primordially, we remember through shapes. Darkness and lightness in their simplest forms describe and sculpt the environment for us. When making a black and white painting, one depends on this clash of forms, this confrontation that screams at us.
Black and white are loaded with information and suggest, with their many cues and symbols, the world around us.
My love for black and white is no different than my love for red, green, blue, or yellow. One tries all sorts of ways to squeeze out the mysteries of the formal elements.
The whispers of dark and light are as rich as the modulations of sounds or colors. I am thinking of Picasso’s line drawings or Sumi painting, both enriching the experience of what is transpiring in front of you, the viewer, through the seductive use of black and white.
A shape’s position, form, edges, and size all have implications for its speed of reading and suggestions of space. It exerts power and has its own right to exist. The purity of line as edge needs very few cues before forming stories or familiar recognizable patterns. In order to understand the power and needs of form, I stayed with black and white paintings for quite a while, and I return to them from time to time.
Here I’d like to mention Ad Reinhardt’s black on black paintings. He was a quiet man who drowned in his philosophy of analysis. As I understand it, he said something like, “The perfect light exists in the absence of light.” I feel his black on black paintings embrace the temporal element by applying different dark mixtures over and over again on the surface. My own attitude toward the use of black and white— or color—is for the viewer to become submerged into its action.
Let’s talk a little about your working methods.
I have to be ordered in my painting because my life is not ordered. I strongly believe that a concept or idea can only be as good as its successful execution. So my art is not one of whim or trial and error. It is based on stored visual and technical information brought together into a new experience of totality.
Here are some of my challenges when I begin a work. First, will the canvas be horizontal or vertical? What will be its size? I determine its height and width, determine its measure by my own human measure. What type of color meltdown requires what size, density and placement of line? Do I want the painting to whisper or to shout?
Ideas about the work’s divisions—the number, density and placement of lines—will endlessly bombard my mind, and usually a couple of them will want to be executed now. I make brief notes in the form of sketches. By making this commitment, these notes become a protection against further interferences from my mind, which always wants to talk me out of this single possibility. So with a sketch, I commit myself.
When working on a sketch, it is like knowing a bunch of notes that you want to put into a composition, but what instruments will play them and to what end? A shape, line or edge calls for another. They call for distance and measure, and if there are several, they want to touch and complete themselves in the utmost simplicity of reading, as we ask, “What is it?”
So we reach for primordial visual clues that offer a sign or symbol—the way we read Nature. This grouping of actions has to work hand in hand with the colorants—like distant music, they have to be brought together on the canvas. So line looks for line for the sake of repetition, for rhythm, which also confers a temporal aspect to the viewing experience. During all of this, I hold onto the concept of the totality, and aim to make the painting correspond to it.
And the actual making of the work?
The canvas or panel gets three or four coats of gesso until it is as smooth as paper. My sketch guides the next steps as I attack the pristine canvas.
The sketch is now drawn to scale on the canvas or panel. The first coats of paint—often involving many colors—are applied freehand within the shapes outlined by the drawing until the paint is opaque and without texture. The shapes are then covered with the tape cut to achieve the proportional optical mixes I desire.
As I place the first sequence of lines of tape, the painting is committed. Only what is being covered with tape will maintain its original color after the next layer of paint is applied. This tape and paint application process might be repeated many times.
In this black and white painting, the paint application is now complete. The tape is carefully removed to reveal the underlying layer.
I am only content if my concept of totality is achieved exactly as I had anticipated. If I fall short, I have to obliterate everything in order to make adjustments, removing the canvas from the stretcher or overpainting everything with gesso, remixing the colors and beginning the taping again.
Turning to your childhood, you were born in Borownica, Poland in 1928. Were you exposed to the arts growing up?
As a young kid, I was by nature fascinated with what was going on around me. I remember I always fought the idea of going to sleep—I just might miss something! I was especially attracted to several members of my family who were interested in music and played in the village band. Since I was too young to participate, I simply enjoyed their playing greatly. I do not recall anyone around me making drawings, but I witnessed a lot of dexterous abilities such as building, construction, forming three-dimensional things as well as how to be totally efficient. In my family there were farmers, builders, cabinetmakers, and I was always eager to assist, let’s say, in making an axe or any other tool. I did not have to draw objects—I made them! Whatever was needed or desired I could figure out how to make it. So three-dimensional thinking and doing were dominant in both my exposure and performance. And the ability to be self-reliant, inventive and dexterous benefitted me well through all the difficulties and hardships of later life. I might have become a craftsman or a musician if life around me would have been more normal—instead of war.
The Germans invaded Poland in 1939, and the world you knew began to unravel.
My house was on a hill overlooking the city, and I remember the planes coming over. The sirens were blowing, and the two bridges over the San River as well as the railway station were bombed. Evening was coming, and in the distance we heard the approach of heavy artillery. Some hours later, gunfire was everywhere, and bullets were jumping across the unpaved road in front of my house, making a strange noise and leaving a trail of dust. It was fascinating to me. When the bullets began to come closer and were hitting our house, my mother dragged me inside. The Germans did not take the town; mainly Czechoslovakian units were engaged to do that job.
Next the German soldiers arrived wearing black uniforms and riding motorcycles and tricycles with machine guns mounted on the front, and they finished the attack. One soldier came to our property and shot my dog, which made me very sad. We continued to go to school and were told not to go to the basement because there was an unexploded bomb that had fallen through the roof, leaving a huge hole in the four story building. We were taught German.
Next the Russian army arrived, and you—at age 11—and your family were forced into a labor camp in Siberia where you lived from 1940 to 42. Why this deportation?
Why? That’s a good question! Perhaps because I was born a Pole! My father asked the Russian officers the same question, ”Why are you dragging us off to Siberia?” The answer was, ”To liberate you!” So in 1940 we were “liberated”—from everything! Before I could dream of a personal future, I found myself in a concentration camp.
Conditions were harsh in the camp. There you suffered from serious illnesses and terrible abuse, and the latter would result in the permanent loss of the use of your right arm.
Yes, this loss ruled out the possibility of ever becoming a cellist.
How did your family manage to escape the camp?
In 1942 we received partial amnesty with the understanding that we were to stay within 100 kilometers of the camp and find work. The idea was to recruit able men to fight the German invasion. In the dead of night that winter with the temperature at minus 65 degrees Celsius, we escaped and managed to reach the railroad station in Perm, now Molotov. We headed south, jumping trains and walking. The cold and hunger were hard to bear.
In order to survive, we had to split up. My father joined the Second Corp of the Polish Army in Exile in Baku. With heavy heart my mother left my younger brother in an orphanage so he could get food. The British were trying to move all the refuges from the war zone to Teheran. Even though I wasn’t of legal age, I joined the Cadets—the youth organization of the Polish Army in Exile—because they had provisions. However, my right arm was deteriorating badly, and I was in great pain, so I deserted and followed my brother and the orphanage to Teheran by hiding in the engine room of the boat that was transporting them. My mother and sister traveled there separately. Reunited in Teheran we traveled to Karachi, Pakistan, from there to Mombasa, Kenya, and finally to a camp of Polish exiles in Masindi, Uganda where I would spend seven years at the equator.
You were detained in the camp from 1942 to 48. While in Masindi, you made drawings and watercolors.
Some of the people at the camp liked me, and some adults had money and the ability to get around. I was able to obtain some tubes of watercolors and a pad of cheap paper.
Your ability to draw at a young age was very impressive. You made the drawing below when you would have been only about 15 years old, having as yet received no instruction in art. Also remarkable is that, although you grew up right-handed, you drew this with your left hand, having by this time permanently lost the use of your right arm.
You did receive a few drawing and watercolor lessons while in the camp.
Let’s look at a few watercolors you made while in Africa.
I enjoyed observing the haze of the lifting dew and the fog of the rainy season.
In the watercolors you can see that detail was subordinated to the quality of the light that I observed.
Do you think that these activities served as a refuge for you during these difficult times?
Perhaps psychologically, yes, the drawings and watercolors were an escape in that they offered me time to be with myself, my worries and delights. Maybe no, as I pushed myself hard. I always had to test myself—how to survive without a right arm! As such, drawing was a test for survival. My feelings for my drawings and watercolors run very parallel to my feelings for music, which at that time I had to do without. It took a lot of patience and persistence, but I enjoyed it immensely when my marks and brushstrokes on paper would become a substitute for the reality.
In what ways do you feel that you were influenced by these two dramatically different environments—the harsh cold of the Siberian woods and the tropical jungles of Uganda?
Being an impressionable youth, both outside and inside influences form you for life. During my short “visit” to the gulag, I remember the weather—light glistening and reflecting everywhere, the aurora borealis, the colored haze embracing you. Then being dumped into the jungle in Uganda, I recall the sounds of the forest, the cry of the animals at night, the tam-tam drums in the distance, flowers in the tropical light. Of course, those experiences are unforgettable. They shaped me, but they also confounded me. With such extremes, it is hard to know who you are.
It’s rather remarkable that at such a young age, you already were so sensitive to the behavior of light and were intrigued by how atmospheric conditions such as fog or haze affect our perception of color and form, an interest that would continue as you matured.
Did you realize that you had artistic talent?
No, I had nobody and nothing to compare myself to. I did not even have books from which to study and admire the masters. What drove me on was my desire to do something about the wonders surrounding me and to satisfy—to a certain degree—the human need to be part of something greater and more meaningful.
Since your father had fought with the Polish Second Corps under British command, your family was allowed to settle in England. But before you left Africa, you had a solo exhibition of some of your watercolors and drawings.
I believe that officials at the Office of Resettlement of Refugees in Nairobi were responsible for arranging my show at the now famous Stanley Hotel before we flew to London. They must also have put an article about me in the Kenyan paper. I was so perturbed about the uncertainties of my future that I do not remember the details. The proceeds from the sale of my watercolors benefitted an orphanage.
In yet another dramatic change of surroundings, you would spend the years 1949 through 1950 in England.
I moved from one camp in Russia to another in Uganda to a third in Checkendon, England—from one forced, miserable situation to another. In England we lived in barracks that had been used by the British Air Force. Though free to move around, my exposure to life outside the camp was minimal. I did not know English well—I tried to learn a Polish-English dictionary by heart—and I had no money or connections. At 20 years old with 7 shillings of pocket money, I rode a bus to London to the Home Office, Division of Education. In my best English, I tried to find out how I could go to school as a “displaced person.” I had to take a two day college entrance examination and, to my surprise, I passed it. I chose the Slade School of Art, but after two months, I was kicked out, accused of being “too Continental,” and of having no respect for British tradition. I had no idea what they were referring to.
I managed to get into the Borough Polytechnic and was enrolled in the Department of National Teacher Certification majoring in Book Illustration. After the war, everything had to have a practical application in the interest of the national recovery. I enjoyed book illustration because it required scrutiny of observation, discipline and control.
This image of a church entrance was done on cardboard prepared with gesso, then black ink was applied and scratched through, creating a network of fine lines. While in London, I met the artist, Victor Passmore, and a Polish court artist, Felix Topolski, and they impressed me greatly with their technical abilities. I also visited the museums in London and was particularly fascinated by Francis Bacon’s Mad Dog. It touched me deeply with its powerful strokes and flamboyant gestures. These three artists were my major artistic stimuli during my time in England.
Your family moved to the US in 1950. How did this come about?
I found myself in a predicament. I could not go back to Poland because it was Communist and my father had served in the Polish Army under British command, which fought against the Russians and Communism. Even in England, my father was in the resistance to liberate Poland from Communism—the fight for him was not finished. But I did not want to stay in England either. We as a family had to find a place to live and work, and since we had close relatives in the US, the American Embassy in London offered us the possibility of joining them.
Your father found work in Cleveland where you enrolled in the Cleveland Institute of Art and would earn a BFA in 1954.
Yes. Roofs was my first painting done there. Having experienced one kind of jungle, I now saw in the belching factories and smokestacks another kind of jungle.
At the time, Abstract Expressionism was establishing itself as a leading art movement. It fascinated me for a while, but I abandoned it as my mode of expression. I began to feel more comfortable as I found I could begin with subject matter, but then abstract it by removing the illustrative information that was not essential. Geometry and Cubism showed a way to do this, as can be seen in Red Christ.
I was becoming more analytical in the early 50s; however, my four years at the Cleveland Institute of Art did not help me become clearer about what direction my art should take. I was rapidly drifting away from elements that had realistic or referential connotations. I was always testing, tasting, experimenting. My teachers accused me of having no personal style. I was advised to draw from my experience, something from which I wanted to escape! So it was mainly a long process of searching and self-analysis that brought me to my present convictions about my art. My teachers in Cleveland were excellent at facilitating my skills in drawing and painting, but they saw nothing in my geometric reductions and simplifications.
We also see you moving toward abstraction and geometric form in the woodcut, African Village.
This woodcut might be a reflection on my past, but not a realistic illustration. My recollection focused on the structure, the physical construction of our straw huts made out of elephant grass. The wood cutting tools—not easy to handle with one hand—also influenced me by making it easy to make groups of simple lines and thus offering me answers where I did not even consciously look.
I knew deep in my soul that art exists in the ordering of our responses to what we experience.
Your painting, Memory of an Ancient City from 1952, is reminiscent of the work of Paul Klee.
I had acquainted myself with Paul Klee through books years before I would actually go to Washington D.C. to see a Klee exhibition. I felt that Klee was the artist who could walk that fine line between external references and universal abstraction.
After completing your studies at the Cleveland Institute of Art, you attended graduate school at Yale from 1955 to 1956. During that period you continued to explore and experiment widely, searching for your own voice.
Yes. During this time I was torn between organic forms—though at times they seemed romantic or sentimental—and the purely abstract rhythms of verticals or horizontals. Indian and Pharaoh were painted in 1955, and they felt very liberating from my undergraduate art training. There was something wonderful about these empty, denuded forms.
In Self-Portrait and The Flute Soloist, I painted and overpainted the panels many times. I was playing around with verticality and applying the paint very thickly. I was confused as hell!
Why did you choose Yale for your graduate studies?
I specifically wanted to go where Josef Albers was teaching and learn from his vision and his sensitivity to color. Also several teachers at the Cleveland Institute of Art had graduated from Yale and promoted it strongly; however, they thought that I did not have what it took to succeed there. Yale was the top program, so I tried for the best, and was surprised and delighted to be accepted.
Naturally, Albers’ work influenced me as I searched for the clarity of absolute abstraction. At Yale one of the first lessons I heard from Albers was, “I cannot teach you your art!” Albers used destruction as a method of construction in his teaching. Anything you thought you knew was taken away. The principle was not to get attached to anything too early, but to keep looking, searching, and thinking. Albers made endless demands for you to be better, to be a more observant participant in life.
Albers’ color course was mysterious. I learned about the structure behind the behavior of the eye, about perception and the connection between eye and mind, about the difference between reaction and interpretation. I liked Albers’ exercises, which documented for me the power of color, and I admired his ability to see color and note its multiple and complex changes through interaction with neighboring colors. I felt I had to know more about color and learn to use it with clarity and effectiveness. That is what I wanted for my art.
Let’s look at some work you did while at Yale.
White City was abstractly conceived, no longer painted through recollection, but purely as abstract relationships. I tried to use abstraction and geometry to carry the rhythm and clarity of action. When painting Composition in White, I remember that I was listening to harpsichord music by Wanda Landowska, all sweet and soft with few harsh intervals, clear in time and spatial position.
Works like Hot Summer, Prevailing Horizontal, and Harmony in Light were painted with repeating horizontals. Hot Summer, with its horizontals running edge to edge, became a landscape, the horizon line.
Consistent with your inclinations toward Nature and more organic shapes was the work of Conrad Marca-Relli, another of your teachers at Yale.
I admired the work of Marca-Relli, and this is reflected in a number of paintings done while at Yale or shortly thereafter. Seeing Marca-Relli’s work gave me confidence in the shapes that I chose from Nature and then simplified.
In some of these paintings, you filled discrete shapes with small colored dots, often of related hues.
Divisions are extremely important. With the dots, I disturbed the spatial locations on the surface. Looking at Monet, Seurat, Pollock or walking on the sand, I saw similar actions and I enjoyed the beat.
Throughout your early development as an artist, you showed a great deal of independence. Do you think the extreme challenges of your youth contributed to your tenacity?
I think that might be true. Since I was never part of anything—country, school system, ideology—someone else’s answers had no relevance for me. I had no choice but to be independent.
In 1959, we see you experimenting with simple geometric forms painted in black and white.
Looking back, some of your very early work clearly anticipates work from the 60s and beyond.
Martha Jackson titled your 1964 exhibition Julian Stanczak: Optical Paintings. How did you feel about being identified as an Op artist?
My feelings were mixed, but primarily negative. “Optical” refers to the response and sensitivity of the eyes—it is physiological. “Perceptual” refers to being perceived by the eye’s mind—it is a personal interpretation of what the eye registers. I would have been less upset if the movement had been described as “Perceptual Painting”.
Your painting, Ulterior Images from 1962, was included in a landmark exhibition, The Responsive Eye, at MoMA in 1965.
I became reconciled to the fact that in relative isolation, I could be more in touch with myself as a creative person. Today, I love the obscurity of my typical “Americana” environment. And in my mind, I can transfer myself to New York or anywhere else.
During this period, I found out just how important the vertical beat was for me. I was mesmerized by the verticals I noticed everywhere like visual melodies—fog condensing and running down my window, the rhythm of a picket fence, light hitting a stand of trees. I could not get away from verticals!
The geometry in Modulations in Red feels quite organic.
Yes. I was attracted to geometric systems for their great clarity and beauty, yet at that time, I was still not entirely comfortable with organizing paintings into precise geometric systems because of the lack of a felt connection to emotion and Nature. I wanted to achieve in my painting an emotional impact parallel to that which Nature has on the human psyche. But I had to find a visual language that could echo my response in a more universal way. At this point, I felt I had to mix organic and geometric aspects together. Paul Klee did it—why couldn’t I?
The undulations and stacking of space in Modulations in Red was attained by varying the widths of lines. I wondered if I could obtain a sense of movement by thickening and thinning lines in a rhythmic progression. I aimed to make the surface swell and depress using only straight lines. So this painting that I made free-hand uses geometric means and logical positioning, but it retains an organic feeling.
In other paintings from 1965, you used curvilinear forms, which, though organic, appear to have been painted with great precision.
Yes. For example, compared to Modulations in Red, a painting like Obsession II seems controlled and systematized. There is no layering to indicate distant space; the space here is more shallow and subordinated to the hypnotic rhythm of the beat of repeating lines. The viewer may feel that the space is sculpted solidly, that the undulations are almost touchable, until the color hits him or her. Suddenly there is no space—only the fight for survival of one line or color over another.
Constant Return appears to strongly anticipate some of your very recent work with its parallel lines, lines that bend and curve, thrusting toward and away from the viewer as they sculpt space. This work also seems quite precise in its lines and line spacings.
This painting is based on the same principle as Obsession II. It was also painted freehand. It is more complex, as the straight lines transform into curves that seem to eject the central diamond. And yes, I continue to be fascinated by the struggle between the power of line to bend and create shapes and space and the power of color to transform and create atmosphere.
In the painting Anywhere-Everywhere, one system of lines passes over another at an angle, producing a moiré pattern—an intangible haze and a flickering pulsation. Depending on the proximity of line to line, I achieve at least three different kinds of intermixtures from stark black and white to dark gray to a light haze.
One might ask why I chose the title Anywhere-Everywhere. The answer is because this type of visual action is here and there, anywhere and everywhere around us. Thank you, God, for these enticing visual phenomena that are all around us. Perhaps we should accuse God of painting Op!?
Once again, we see yet another painting that anticipates much later work, in this case involving the interaction of opposing systems of lines.
Yes, the visual tools I investigate at one point in time tend to reemerge in a transformed manner years later. I am not the kind of individual who selects a particular visual process and pursues it for the rest of my creative life. I continue to test and reinvent my tools and processes to discover the secret of where the purity of my art might exist. I am compelled to reach for this, and the search requires that I have at my command the ability to create all kinds of different visual experiences.
The harsh geometry in Contortion is softened by the fusion of lines and the dissolving of contrast. The clear reading of geometry is no longer a priority as we observe the visual effects of “lighting up” and diffusing form, and the underlying system becomes elusive.
After painting freehand for many years, by 1966 you began—intermittently at first—to use tape in order to achieve very precise lines and neat edges.
Actually the most vital reasons for initially using tape were the need for an accumulation of paint and its stability over time. I was grinding my own colors to be economical, and oxidation in one of my paintings led me to investigate my practice more scrupulously. In a freehand application, one must dilute the density of the paint in order to brush it on cleanly several times in the same place. So the accumulation of paint is very tedious, and thin layers result in faster deterioration due to little suspended pigment.
With tape it became easier to apply thicker layers of paint accurately, producing clean edges and creating clear contrasts of adjoining colors. The interaction of line to line and color to color could be very finely controlled using tape.
How did your use of tape contribute to satisfying your aesthetic goals?
By this time, I felt that I could give up the sensitivities and individuality of “handwriting” found in Modulations in Red and other paintings like it. The use of tape produced clarity of shapes and colors, and the economical use of these elements helped me become more aware of the kind of abstraction I wanted.
For example, I was challenging myself to see how different degrees of condensation of lines could produce sensations of measured space and transparency-like effects. The use of tape greatly facilitated this exploration. I also liked how the tape allowed me to make one visual element clash against another.
Varying line densities helped you to create spatial ambiguities.
Yes. For example in Introvert/Extrovert, I’m dealing with multiple overlapping planes with an economy of means. The clean shapes overlap each other in a seemingly logical sequence—front, middle, back—teasing the viewer to accept the accuracy of a geometric progression.
Turning to your lifelong interest in color, ever since your inspiring study with Albers at Yale, you’ve also been experimenting with and developing great proficiency at using and mixing color, orchestrating color to achieve a wide range of visual effects. You often combine many color mixing and juxtaposition techniques within a single painting. Thus it’s often nearly impossible for the viewer to parse the various strategies used—as I expect you would prefer as you seek a unified “color meltdown” for the viewer.
Over the years, I have challenged myself to acquire very precise control over color and color mixing because through colors dished out in the right proportions, I could locate objects in space with consistency and control. I could direct the viewer’s attention by making shapes stand still, move, or fluctuate.
And this reminds us that we are always looking at color embodied in form—that envisioning how you want colors to behave in your paintings involves a highly complex consideration of factors. These factors include the nature of the colors selected and mixed together and in what proportions, as well as how they take their places on the canvas with respect to shape, size, position and distribution.
You have developed great skill at creating visual effects that don’t bear simple correspondences to the visual facts or givens on the canvas. Let’s examine how you might do this with what you refer to as “additive” and “subtractive” color mixing. You use these terms to refer to the visual effects you achieve with color rather than to the processes involved in achieving them.
When I talk about “additive” and “subtractive” color mixing, I’m referring to deception regarding the actual colors used. Painters from the past might have referred to this as “visual plasticity.”
Referential Circle and Early Red are good examples of what I call additive color mixing. In this painting, I did not mix all the different colorants that you observe. Rather, we see them because of how I distributed identically colored lines over a colored ground and shapes.
To be specific, first I painted green circles on a blue ground. Then I applied vertical lines of tape, varying their spacing from 1/16 to 1 inch apart. Thus tightly condensed lines of tape in the center open up to a wider spacing at the vertical edges. After laying the tape, I covered the canvas with a single red. When the tape was removed, the varying densities of red lines over the blue and green below them mix in our eyes—optical mixing—so we see different reds ranging from orange to purple. Thus the painting appears to involve many more colors than the three I actually used—so I call this an “additive” effect.
You also manipulate how the circles behave by varying the spacing of the vertical lines.
Looking at any circle, we travel along its closed edge, feeling its contained, bulging activity within and the relative passivity outside it. Through the optical mixing of colors, I “melt” the edges of the circles, thus reducing their dominance and merging them into the lines as we move toward the vertical edges of the canvas. I make the circle give itself up in favor of what you might call the negative space or the background. This change from one kind of visual behavior to a different one—this lie—is my aim and the challenge in all my work.
Proud Green relies solely on two colors: red and green. Due to the proportional spacing of the lines—tight toward the vertical edges, wider in the center—there appear to be more colors than just red and green. A deception occurs as a warmish brown is created, again from the optical mixing of the actual colors applied. And the eye registers what appear to be semi-transparent, overlapping planes that seem to float in space and that are ambiguous in their relative spatial positions.
Let’s look at what you call “subtractive” mixing.
With subtractive mixing, the viewer is unable to single out all of the individual colors used. Instead, colors interact and often, in the process, create a haze or glow.
We can see such a glow in Desert Hue.
Desert Hue contains 45 colors, yet they do not attract attention individually. Together, they create the sensation of light or a glow emerging from the center. This “chiaroscuro” mixing functions through the interaction of opposing wavelengths of warm and cool colors in close proximity. The central yellows are framed by yellow-greens of equal lightness, oranges are surrounded by blue-greens, and reds have blues of equal value as their partners. The changes in color mixtures happen very subtly—they sort of sneak up on the viewer who is amazed only at the effect of the changes, but not at the process of changing.
Determining the proportions of color to color throughout is very critical. Because we fail to recognize that 45 individual colors have been used to achieve a single color sensation—a central glow—I call this “subtractive” mixing.
Again in these Lumina works, the identities of individual color mixtures are subordinated to the desired effect achieved by the totality.
In the very large painting, Pulsating, we see what you refer to as a “haze,” one way in which individual colors often interact in subtractive color mixing.
In Pulsating the lie or plasticity of actions occurs because you can’t single out the individual colors—in this case a record 144 mixtures! Each color was mixed separately and applied in the desired distribution. It was a very lengthy procedure, but my obsession with the ultimate vision—a singular response of rippling light changing from warm to cool—made me feel that this was time well spent.
In this work, the lines are spaced equidistantly across the canvas. The beat is established through repetition, and there is an illusion of space and a curvy linearity—though all the lines are actually straight. The colors do not lose their brilliance, but appear to vibrate through rapid optical registration.
The apparent vibration and haze are the result of the eye and brain struggling to see or identify individual colors, but in the effort, they get, in a sense, “overwhelmed?”
Correct.
I set the colors up in a repetitive multiplication of bars, which prioritizes the rhythmic beat while the colors blend or fuse, no longer of individual significance.
In most of your paintings, many types of color interaction are simultaneously at work, and it’s difficult—if not impossible—for viewers to identify them all precisely. In Chase, we see both subtractive and additive mixing.
The ground was painted with bold blue and green shapes. Then 1/16 inch wide tape was laid regularly at 1/8 inch intervals across the entire ground. About 15 different mixtures of red were applied over the tape. When the tape is removed, we see that the reds give up their individual identities and transform into sculptural modulations suggesting highlights and shadows—subtractive mixing. At the same time, the reds that optically mix with the blue ground look cooler than the reds that do so with the green ground, the latter reds appearing more frontal and “juicy”—additive mixing.
Do you ever rely on transparent or semi-transparent paints to achieve transparency-like effects?
No, I use opaque acrylics and thus speak of “apparent” transparencies. I use the mixing of paint in very precise gradations of hue or value to achieve these effects. For example, a group of colors might change in value from light to dark in equal value steps, as shown here.
The possibilities for creating such graded steps seem virtually endless. For example, you consider which hues to use and which to mix. When you create gradations, you might vary or hold constant hue, value, intensity, and so on.
Let’s look at Unfolding and the Light, a very large painting—6 by 10 feet— that once again involves the apparent transparency of overlapping planes.
In Unfolding and the Light, the primary invitation is color. I used both optical mixing that occurs due to the interactions of closely spaced lines of different colors as well as the actual mixing of paint into step-by-step, equal value gradations.
I began with 10 graded color mixtures—5 yellow/greens and 5 yellow/orange/reds distributed in thin vertical lines. It is difficult to focus on the lines because the colors produce agitation due to their proximities and equal intensities. Opposing wavelengths interact and tire the receptors in the eye, which have to rapidly switch from the green to the red receptor and back again. The eye compromises and relieves the pain by producing optical mixtures of the two—here perceived as a yellow haze that lays over the surface of the painting.
The agitation prevents either color mixture from receding into space and thereby stabilizing the spatial relations. Instead the shapes seem to float in a nebulous, intangible space, appearing neither green nor red.
Let’s look at another line-based group of paintings where diagonal lines float and dance in an ambiguous space in front of thinner vertical or diagonal lines.
Here I am experimenting with a different visual solution to my fascination with illusionary overlapping, again primarily manifested through lines. What changes in each of these paintings are the color atmosphere and the suggested linear structure.
In some cases, the ground might consist of two opposing colors or black and white, both of which offer the illusion of an active “spongy” surface created by the friction of each color or value fighting for dominance and the viewer’s attention. The eye is forced to fluctuate between them. Onto this activated surface, I superimpose linear pathways that suggest overlapping geometric shapes. These linear enclosures tend to offer a sense of solid shapes suspended in space.
I play with this illusion of solidity by manipulating the value or intensity of a color progression within the linear pathway, creating not one, but multiple ways of reading these shapes in space.
So once again, the logic of what the line describes is called into question by our almost subconscious reaction to lightness or brightness and spatial positioning.
In Unbounded I divided the ground with black and yellow diagonals very tightly spaced. The linear walkways are painted yellow, blue and their intermixtures. Even though these colors are complementary and their mixtures usually turn a neutral gray, I kept the mixtures bright throughout their individual color and value progressions.
Unbounded is quite large—almost eight feet tall.
I wanted a cheerful painting rising up vertically with singular power and eloquence. Only two diagonal paths offer the illusion of planes interpenetrating one another in space. The vertical lines end at different elevations, helping to solidify the space they embrace. The lines elicit our desire to visually connect their ends and thereby satisfy the brain’s search for understanding and closure. The mind’s desire to complete what is incomplete reflects the normal drive for making a shape sovereign against a ground.
In Within the Green Diagonal, thin green and purple lines fuse to create an unusual gray haze that provides both atmosphere and time in which to attend to the provocative linear activities in front of them. Line rather than color creates the primary visual invitation to this painting. Line offers both active and passive areas. The enclosed or nearly enclosed spaces become active, the open areas become passive, in what would historically be described as positive and negative space. Yet how can you have active space without passive receiving areas?
Provocative Movement was first painted in 1988, and I made some color adjustments in 1991. What is unusual in this work are the jazzy, broken diagonals. Doubling the lines into pairs reinforces their specific behavior and directs attention to their diverse angles. Breaking the lines creates visual stops and hesitations, and the diagonal thrusts terminate as if hitting a solid wall.
When the painting is seen in person, these abrupt stops at different elevations make the eye solidify the space into round solid shapes – though there are no round lines, no shadows or changes in value. This phenomenon is reinforced by the lighter blue in the center of the diagonals, which we want to interpret as highlights, thereby reinforcing the dimensionality of the units. I think the title, Provocative Movement, is appropriate for this painting. It is the only work of its kind that I have made.
You have another line-based series composed of dynamically interacting vertical and diagonal lines.
These paintings continue my interest in patterns of intersecting lines with which I was preoccupied in the late 90s. Works like Wandering Line, Many Notes, and Late Desert Hue were inspired by experiences like walking in the woods. What is happening around you in the woods? Not only are you moving, but also everything around you appears to change with every step you take. Changing positions opens up and closes the space around you.
I have always been interested in the flux of actions. This flux is not always intellectually controllable or visually predictable. It does not make for analytical decision-making, but rather for playful participation in the visual action in front of you. Nature seems to tease us with such ever-changing and mutating relationships. As I matured as an artist, I dared to allow myself the freedom to be romantic, to experience my art free from analysis—in pure awareness of the moment and its momentary visual action.
Let’s look more closely at the dynamics of one of these paintings.
In Many Notes I distributed red and green lines of slightly varying values in a tight spacing of 1/8 inch intervals across a 6 by 8 foot canvas. These thin, repeating lineal divisions produce a grayish haze as their complementary colors mix in a subtractive manner. On top of this field, I scattered multi-colored lines at varied angles to the vertical lines beneath. Where the two systems of lines collide, they light up and they fade out, causing their reading in time and space to be unstable. It is the repetitive beat of the totality—like the flickering of fireflies—that I was after.
You extended this body of work to wall-mounted constructions and to a very large public installation.
An architect in Cincinnati was interested in covering a large downtown building front with a visually exciting piece of art. I made several proposals for the five-story garage, which is 50 feet high and 400 feet long. In order to develop some visual and technical clarity and to test my idea for scale and impact, I made a variety of works using wooden strips.
In these dimensional paintings a system of vertically oriented wooden bars is evenly distributed across a ground plane. The right and left sides and top edges of the bars may be painted in different colors. At the bottom they are glued onto a stable base. This system of colored bars is then crossed by bars of different sizes and colors, their varying angles and groupings altering their apparent speeds.
Depending on which colors intersect, a variety of optical mixings occurs at the points of overlap, making the intersections appear lighter and more intense—again like fireflies.
The Cincinnati mural was executed in 2006. Each vertical beam is 50 feet long and fabricated out of aluminum.
The mural succeeded in bringing color to a drab city center. It is very active and invites participation. As cars and pedestrians move, the colors that can be seen change, and the experience of new colors appearing as if by magic is intriguing. My challenge was to create a piece of public art that is uplifting, one that affects people’s daily lives while retaining its soul despite its large scale.
You continued to explore interacting systems of vertical lines at a far smaller scale.
I worked for two years to siphon all the obtainable visual possibilities out of this seemingly simple phenomenon of intersecting lines. For the huge public art piece, I had stepped outside the flatness of the canvas—I had to. In smaller panels, Holding Secrets, I vary the color atmospheres and the amount and density of the “fireflies.”
Another group of line-based works is composed of graceful lines that run parallel to one another and hint at some unseen and mysterious underlying terrain.
In my most recent work, the line is more graphic, recalling topographic contours and leaving it to line to suggest elusive space.
The behaviors of line, border and edge are very important to me in these panels. Here the eye walks on the line, gazing to the right and left, measuring the space traversed. I wanted to create solely with line a field that swells and contracts like contours of the earth.
Each line runs continuously from one edge diagonally to the opposing edge—no breaks, no hesitations. I can make a field of lines rise and fall, activate passive areas, allude to peaks and valleys, describe shapes that are stacked up or interlocked. I am testing myself as to how many visual cues I need to realize the vision in my mind.
In Smile of Ra I was less fascinated by the distribution of lines than by this weird yellow in which the whole of Egypt is drowning. I do not discriminate against any color I see. Seeking art, I always ask, “Where is it?” My experience is that it sneaks in while we are working. I wish it would do this more frequently.
Many of these line works have a strong organic quality.
In recent years, I have reconnected with the organic quality of the curve.
Geometry satisfies logic first—and it is almost timeless. The organic distribution of lines in these paintings is a departure for me from mental acrobatics.
Moving on from your various groups of line-based paintings and reliefs, we see that you have frequently explored the behavior of color and apparent transparencies of overlapping shapes in formats where small divisions—dots, squares, windows—cover the painting’s surface in grid-like fashion.
My paintings with small surface divisions fuse in the mind’s eye differently from works composed of rhythmically repeating lines. The small divisions offer me the interactive play of a screen to look through or fight with, allowing different shimmers, a different pulsation of the surface.
I like the tiny shapes and marks because they are lively and engaging. The visual action takes place in a more staccato, punctuated way than in the line-based works—more like snare drums.
These paintings are sometimes relatively small.
There are many reasons for painting smaller canvases. For practical reasons as well as for an aesthetic challenge, I force myself to translate my vision to different scales. I have discovered that many of my ideas cannot be contained in a small format, so I explore break-ups of smaller visual elements—tiny squares, dots, dashes—to see if I can make them work.
When working at a smaller scale, the viewer comes in close, and viewing becomes a personal experience that demands detail to hold our attention. Smaller canvases demand more complex, diverse divisions—intrigue instead of simplicity. Observing this reaction to smaller works, I tried to involve the element of time in the viewing experience by holding and prolonging the viewer’s attention through intricacies and detail.
In Fall you can see a dramatic division by a frontal diagonal that runs from corner to corner—instead of a central pull inward that I might use in a larger work.
In Centered Duality, Blue II the diagonal works similarly, but the break-up into multiple color modulations slows down the strict diagonal division. In some of these small works, I got so involved in surface patterns that I forgot that I was making a painting!
Some of your paintings that contain many divisions are made at a much larger scale.
Yes, and the divisions can be observed at a greater distance—thus shape reading will dominate. In small paintings with these divisions and surface break-ups, the viewing experience will be primarily one of fusion. And of course scale affects us psychologically. Facing a large piece, the viewer may feel intimidated or distanced, while a small painting feels intimate and comforting. When I make my stretchers or panels, I have in mind what I want to have happen on them: shape or fusion, clash or whisper.
In Asteroid M and its counterpart, Asteroid F, the hues and proportions of dark to light are very similar; however, the paintings have very different visual dynamics.
Yes. Filled with small, repeating circles, Asteroid F—short for female—feels exuberant. The colors are bunched into circles that pulse and spin and separate from the ground, calling attention to themselves. The color of each circle repeats that of its square framing window, boosting its brillance. Asteroid M—or male—is divided into square windows whose centers are filled with black that grounds them to the surface. Its colors are confined to the thin outlines of the squares, thus subduing the color effects. Asteroid M feels stable, almost stoic.
Regardless of size, my goal is to create color mixtures that fuse into a singular, unified experience that occurs despite all the surface action that may occur. Looking, for example, at Fusion, Yellow and Inward Blue, both paintings are squares, a symmetrical shape in which tensions are balanced. Both have a central gradation of colors and produce the experience of inward and outward sculpting of space.
In Fusion, Yellow the color mixtures are painted from light to dark, yellow to magenta, from the center outward. This painting is multi-layered in its technical and visual complexity, yet its depth of color action produces a restful cushion in a unified atmosphere of light and sparkle.
With Inward Blue the color gradation goes from dark blue in the center to light green at the outside. The cool colors appear to fall to the center rather than to spread outward, as in the case of Fusion, Yellow. The imposition of a grid of intense, tiny red squares gives the viewer time to observe while provoking the sensation of suspension, tactility or embroidery.
You often work at a large scale and have done so from quite early on.
The visualization of the actions I want in my paintings endlessly calls for a large scale. The size must exceed the proportions of a man in order to block out the environment while looking at a painting.
Such a confrontation with the work forces the viewer to be more “in” the painting, to be more “denuded” from outside detracting activities in order to be fully in contact with the visual activities set up in the particular work.
Think about it—the volume of Nature is enormous. So I ask, “Where do I begin?” “What do I include or exclude?” “How do I paint a tiny sunset?” “What territory do I carve out for a particular impression or experience?”
The size of my forms, in turn, helps determine how I choose from my reservoir of visual actions, selecting certain intervals and beats. I also have to reconcile with the fact that the size of doors is about 6 1/2 feet or that my van has an opening of a certain size. For me it always seems to be a problem of accommodation.
In recent years you’ve made some of your largest works, often composed of multiple panels.
It is strange that the older one gets, one sees one’s work in a large format. In one of my meetings with Jacques Lipchitz, he was at Columbia University making a very large piece. I asked him, “Why?” His answer was, “As one gets older, one is compelled to do a monumental piece.”
Windows to the Past is certainly monumental.
In the last decade, I challenged myself with what I call “constellations”—small panels grouped together to form one large work. The first one, Windows To The Past, was painted in 2000 and consists of 50 unique 16 x 16 inch panels installed in five rows of 10 panels each. The illusionary see-through in each panel is composed of four different shapes overlapping in space like transparent folding planes. I mixed five cool colors and five warm colors for each see-though, resulting in 10 color mixtures per panel, or 500 different color mixtures in all.
Each panel is really an individual painting with its own atmosphere and visual experience of seeing into and through veiled forms in space. I painted these 50 paintings to produce together a visual “sound” not unlike that of a symphony orchestra where different sounds unite into one new experience of “sound color.” I liked that. I called them Windows to the Past because they are reflections on my efforts over the past 50 years, variations on my idea of “see throughs.” In one way I was also celebrating 50 years as an artist in the United States, in another I was realizing that I was still outside the window—looking in.
Given the enormous number of panels in this work, systematic or exhaustive panel to panel comparisons are extremely difficult. We want to discover the similarities and differences among the panels, yet this type of comparative visual exploration is overwhelmed by their sheer number.
Yes, I agree. The sense of time in repetition has always fascinated me. It is not the individual unit that is responsible for the totality, but the accumulation and layering of actions and impressions that are embraced into one new totality.
I made another large constellation of the same size and similar shape distribution called Parade of Reds.
This constellation has a tighter line spacing than Windows to the Past, intensifying its color and making all the shapes appear to float in warm space. All the panels are a variation of reds, which reduces our focus on panel to panel comparisons of the individual folded shapes as we become submerged in red—500 or so reds. The overall atmosphere of a pure wavelength —warm red—is a key aspect of Parade of Reds. In this painting, the viewer can bathe himself in redness—a monochromatic experience of warmth. By contrast the viewing experience of Windows of the Past feels faster, jumpier as the viewer looks to identify relationships among colors, values and overlapping shapes.
In some of your works in the Constellation series, the panels are arranged into square formats.
It is important to me whether I distribute the panels in a horizontal format or a square. Constellation in Red is presented in a square, which gives a sense of balance and security, predictability and peace. It is very frontal in its squareness. Each panel is a square within the larger square, and each panel is composed of little squares—its own grid of squares. The beauty of the grid is its familiarity, its feeling of constancy and stability within the work’s visual actions. I call this arrangement the beat of a surface, a breathing in and out.
Also of interest is the illusion of dimensionality, the advancing or protruding of colors out of their actual physical spaces into an almost tactile dimensional space. Some panels form illusive pyramids, others flatten out or stretch to their edges, some panels read slowly, while others attract our attention quickly and want to dominate.
In Constellation in Red I am after a response to many actions—like sounds coming at you from all sides. It’s a visual bombardment not unlike sunlight falling through foliage and scattering light fragments at my feet. As always, I am not paying attention to individual actions, but to actions coming together to give birth to a new experience in time and space.
In both Continuous Line Plus White and Continuous Line Plus Black, I am also involved with the idea of repetition and its hypnotic effects. Repetition has a magic that fulfills a need for our nervous systems. We function physiologically through systems of repetition: walking, talking, breathing, and so on. The beat of repetition is soothing since it parallels our breathing in and out. The cultures of so-called “primitive” peoples have recognized this primordial drive and have used repetition in the beat of their drums, their pattern-making, the collision of dots on surfaces made by Aborigines. I am trying to rekindle a universal experience, and I wanted to capture it in one embrace.
In Continuous Line Plus White I wanted to register a parallel to the experience of taking a stroll in the sand at the water’s edge where the water sculpts wave contours on the sand beneath my feet. Ripples and splashes corrugate the surface, reflecting the light and creating shadows and highlights.
In Continuous Line Plus Black I used the same colors, changing the receiving ground from white to black. As with its white counterpart, the constellation is stretched out horizontally to parallel Nature. Both paintings have continuous vertical lines from top to bottom. These pass across the individual panels to form linear crests and depressions until they reach the opposite edge. Since the lines condense in their spacing at points where they turn, the color intensifies at these points although the color mixtures remain constant.
Do you feel that through works like these that you have satisfied your quest to achieve with color and geometry a response in viewers that parallels your response to Nature?
I do not want to compete with the miracle of Nature. It already exists, and it is perfect! I can observe it, indulge in it, learn from it, but I cannot claim it. Nature becomes a provocation for me to get up and get to work.
In the beginning, geometry seemed brutal to me. When I first used it, it was as if I was removing personal responses and emotion, and I missed the connection to Nature and to life. However, I concentrated on my geometry, my clean edged divisions, without allowing the recollective aspect to dominate. Gradually I found that in a clear and clean environment, I could give my colors the emotive element without direct references to Nature.
Yet even in my current work, I am still torn between emotion and Nature—fluency and geometry. When people ask me, ”What are you painting?” I might say, ”Sunsets!” For over 60 years I have been trying to analyze myself and echo in my paintings the world around me. But since I have matured, I have stopped worrying about it. Now I just paint!
Throughout your career, you have always explored, questioned, and experimented.
I am endlessly unveiling secrets in a new visual embrace, and with age, these discoveries are less confounding to me because I have overcome the fear of the unknown. So my colors are all colors, and I am open to all types of visual behaviors—I am not prejudiced against any of them, and favoritism enters only when I am making particular choices in search of a particular visual response. So I reach into the reservoir of my already developed tools to realize that visual MUST that stands before me.
As I have learned step by step the behavior of color, I have observed that the softer and more similar in value the colors of different wavelength are, the more they create an atmosphere in which they exchange their insides, their true characters. Boundaries become insignificant—we experience color instead of edge and form. This atmosphere becomes even more important to me than the sense of space or figure/ground fluctuation. Yet there is always the temptation to explore the whole gamut of visual activities that I have investigated so scrupulously—so I permit myself to experiment.
Do you feel the viewer’s experience of your work is fairly effortless—that it washes over her, so to speak?
Let me answer by example. When I had an exhibition at the Butler Institute of American Art, a nun approached me and said, referring to Unfolding and the Light: “It feels very spiritual, like being in church.” And somebody else, I think Mondrian, said, “He who has art, even religion has he. He who has not art, let him religious be!”
These examples illustrate how I desire my art to affect others. I am always seeking the human touch, the human response. Viewers do not need to be aware of my principles or workshop decisions in order to react freely to my paintings. My work might be an echo or confirmation of their own individual searches, but I am happy as long as people’s reactions to my work are absolutely honest. I do not care if the reactions are positive or negative.
The key for me is order! I cherish the fact that viewers respond strongly to the order within my work. I want viewers to be open to the impact of totality and its effects on their own psyches. I want viewers to tune in to their own private needs and aspirations. Since the artist is free to choose what to paint, I feel that viewers are free to take from my work whatever inspires their personal searches. I am only a trigger for opening them up to themselves.
Color has been my obsession from the very beginning, and it continues to be so now. Only now my mind gets tired and easily frustrated, and I am less optimistic. I feel like cleaning my mental house of garbage that I have accumulated over the years. I hope that in the process of elimination, I will find myself without the clutter of anxieties. Perhaps this offers the time to grasp more clearly what art is all about and where it might be found.
I do not believe that one finds art in the object, but that one finds art within oneself by being confronted with an object of motivation. I do not cater to any public wish. Social modes and styles are changing; I am not catering to that chaos and unrest. I am no longer obsessed with “Who shall I be?” I am who I am! I have spent a lifetime trying to understand my own search, so how can I assume to know the wishes or needs of others? Yet we create for others, not for ourselves, because we want to share the experience of life!
