Painting

Robert Ryman 1979: An Interview

Robert Ryman first moved to New York City with the intention of becoming a jazz musician. After working for several years as a gallery attendant at the Museum of Modern Art and a brief assignment in the Art Division of the Public Library comprised his “art education.” From the outset, Ryman was not interested in realistic representation. In his first paintings and collages from the mid-1950s, he experimented with material, color and brushwork, eventually reducing the painting to its barest elements. Eventually, he settled on a square with white paint as the basis of his investigation.

Blumenthal/Horsfield

Robert Irwin: An Interview

Robert Irwin’s early art followed in the Abstract Expressionist tradition until he shifted his focus onto installation projects that play upon site-specific uses of light. Since the 1980s, he has created large-scale public space designs that use natural light, plants, and garden architecture; his monumental garden at the Getty Center in Los Angeles, opened in 1997, ranks as perhaps his most famous public project to date. In this interview, he discusses his work as a painter and uses of light in an art historical context.

Blumenthal/Horsfield

Rackstraw Downes: An Interview

Rackstraw Downes’s “observation” paintings, executed on-site at ponds, intersections, and baseball parks, began as a mischievous response to the dogma of style and modernist criticism. “There was a tremendous intellectual back-up, essentially against a lot of the figurative painting being done in the ’60s,” Downes says in this interview with Robert Storr. “If I show my slides in an art school I’ll get, 'Your paintings are very nice but how can you go backwards from Cézanne?’”

A historical interview originally recorded in 1980 and re-edited in 2004.

Blumenthal/Horsfield

Phyllis Bramson: An Interview

Phyllis Bramson is a Chicago painter whose post-imagist style emphasizes content and the deeply personal. Bramson’s paintings are private scenarios that include figures (or performers) who carry out highly charged activities with strong psychological meaning. They perform in highly theatrical, Oriental settings of almost cubist space and acid greens, yellows, and reds.

Blumenthal/Horsfield

Philip Pearlstein: An Interview

Philip Pearlstein began painting figures in the 1960s and is known as a leading figure in American Realism. His paintings evolved from an expressionistic style to a meticulously analytical vision. He attempts to present the model as a documentation of the painting session, and his paintings are closely rendered under the existing studio lighting.

"I made up my mind that I was not a good existentialist. I'm not concerned with what’s going on in other people's minds. I'm happiest when I can just paint what I see," he says in this interview with Kate Horsfield.

University of Colorado

Peter Saul: What Follows...

Painter Peter Saul’s iconoclastic paintings parody various aspects of contemporary American life, from politics to sex to violence. He has been an inspiration to several generations of American painters and is retired from the Department of Fine Arts at University of Texas-Austin. Interview by Jim Johnson.

University of Colorado

Sylvia Snowden: What Follows...

Washington, D.C.-based African-American artist Sylvia Snowden paints what she calls “figural or structural abstract expressionist” works. Three years after this tape was produced, her son was shot to death, and she spent the next three years producing 87 works in a variety of media.

Blumenthal/Horsfield

Susan Rothenberg: An Interview

Susan Rothenberg’s poetic images—from her well-known early horse paintings to her more recent paintings of athletes and dancers—have always been subservient to the flatness and objectivity of her gesturally dense surfaces. Ultimately, though, image and surface combine in a private symbolism and restrained drama that is physically and emotionally intrusive. Rothenberg currently lives and works in New Mexico.

A historical interview originally recorded in 1984 and re-edited in 2004.

Harun Farocki

Still Life

According to Harun Farocki, today's photographers working in advertising are, in a way, continuing the tradition of 17th century Flemish painters in that they depict objects from everyday life - the "still life". The filmmaker illustrates this intriguing hypothesis with three documentary sequences which show the photographers at work creating a contemporary "still life": a cheese-board, beer glasses and an expensive watch.

Blumenthal/Horsfield

William T. Wiley: An Interview

William T. Wiley combines a variety of materials (found objects, wood, animal hides, rope, paint) with poetry, puns, hearsay, and legends to present a very complex and enigmatic personal vision. Besides making sculpture, he also does prints, drawings, and paintings. His witty and often ironic work emphasizes both the commonality and impenetrability of everyday life and its contents. Wiley continues to live and work in the San Francisco Bay area.

George Kuchar

Vacant Viewables

A series of portraits either stroked on canvas or snapped on photo emulsions becomes the theme of this travelette as the viewer relives the visions that confronted me during a hop and skip excursion over state lines and bodily curvatures.

Blumenthal/Horsfield

Barbara Kruger: An Interview

At 19 Kruger worked as a commercial artist designing for Conde Nast. The risky combination of contemporary art and social critique runs throughout Kruger’s photography, readings, poetry, collages, and conversation. Her works uses advertising both as a foil and a format. Language and image work together, referencing the manipulations of the advertising media. Kruger is internationally recognized for her signature black, white, and red photomurals, which have been displayed internationally on billboards and posters as well as in galleries and museums.

Painting

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