Interview with Bruce Gagnier

Christine Hughes
Donald Martineaw-Vega
November 2016

photo courtesy of Donald Martineaw-Vega

Interview with Bruce Gagnier, October 5, 2016

Donald Vega and I went together to visit Bruce Gagnier in his Brooklyn studio. My role as an interviewer, as I see it, is similar to Vega’s as a photographer. We are there mostly to witness and record. Vega’s photographs are only of Bruce and his studio, yet they embody Vega’s skill as a photographer and his eye as an artist. I hope my presence is as invisible and allows the reader to meet a very candid, soft spoken and generous artist.

Bruce Gagnier is perhaps the most dedicated artist I have ever met. He has crafted a life with single minded focus on his art. His studio is sparse, spare, Sanctum Sanctorium. His windows onto the Brooklyn street are papered to defuse light but seem to filter out time as well. The studio is populated with figures, life size and smaller, in bronze, in plaster, in clay. The walls are covered with paintings of figures. The flat files are full of drawings of figures, singular figures.

Bruce Gagnier: In the past I sometimes worked as a handyman. I could never afford the tools I wanted. Now that I can afford them, I buy them.

But you don’t have to do that work anymore?

I don’t do that kind of work, but I keep collecting tools.

That’s so funny. Are you going to buy a house someday and be your own handyman?

No.

This is a beautiful space. Have you been here a long time?

Twenty years. It takes very little upkeep.

Where are you from originally?

Williamstown, Massachusetts.

I was there recently to see the show “Nudes from the Prado” at the Clark.

There are two great museums there. I think they must have affected me.

You went to Williams College?

Yes, I went on a full scholarship because I was from town and Williams was a land grant school. That’s been discontinued.

My father was a painter when he was young. He took me to the museums, which was not always pleasant for a young boy, partly because he was always giving lessons. As you know there is a Piero della Francesca in Williamstown at the Clark. My father had a good eye and he had good teachers, he would say something like; “See Bruce, the back foot of the Saint on the right penetrates the plane of the altar.” I would say “Dad, that’s a Piero della Francesca.” He’d say “No, no, look! It’s a mistake.” Years later I found out that this part of the painting was badly restored. Perhaps this episode and others like it explain in part my obsession with plastic values. He also felt that the Renoir nudes did not “seat.”

Your father was a painter, where was he from?

He grew up in Williamstown. He had a grocery store / butcher’s market with his father. We were immersed in a very colorful French Canadian community near the Gaevert Mill.

And he quit painting?

I thought the reason he quit was because he had children and he had to work at the store every day. He said “No, I had plenty of strength; the reason I quit was because I couldn’t tell if what I was doing was any good or not.”

Interesting. That’s pretty heartfelt.

He told me that just before he died. I hoped he would take up painting again.

How old was he when he quit?

He was in his forties.

Did you always know you wanted to be an artist?

No. Partly because my family wanted me to be everything else.
I got sent away to school because I was doing poorly academically. My father and mother made this great effort and sacrifice. They put me into boarding school in Vermont. That was a big change in my life. The discipline suited me. I did well.

Were you painting then?

I painted and drew with my father sometimes — not seriously — only occasionally, in his studio. As a child I was the model for his drawing group — sometimes posing in the landscape.

What was the spark that brought you to making art?

At the end of college I felt that I wasn’t finding myself in the sciences. I became very aware that it is was time to decide who and what I wanted to be. Art emerged as something very compelling. I had been taking some art history and design classes at Williams. I was really drawn to the life that I imagined was lived by the people who had made such marvelous things in the past. Aside from the great Romanesque sculpture in the Williams College Museum, there was a marvelous painting by Matta titled Rain that hung in the hall of the art history building.

At the end of my time at Williams, I asked one of my professors if he could recommend something in the way of an art school to me for the summer. He said there’s a place called Skowhegan, maybe you could go there. What luck! And,  well, I did go. I think I was the only one there who paid.

So that was it!

Yes, that was it. And from then on it has been the same. At Skowhegan I knew I was in the environment I wanted to be in. I spent so much money on materials! I had good teachers and wonderful friends there. I won a prize. To show how naive I was: One day a teacher looking at my still life advised me to look at Morandi; an artist who later became a model for what I hoped to accomplish. I did go look and the next day he asked me what I thought. I said his brushwork was sloppy. He looked at me in total dismay. I learned better.

At Skowhegan did you study with anyone we would know?

One of the teachers there I ended up studying with (later on Fourteenth Street and Sixth Avenue and also at Columbia) was Nicolas Carone. I studied drawing with him in that small studio on the second floor. The class was guided by a group that later were involved with founding the New York Studio school. It cost a dollar and a half a night with just the model and five dollars on Sunday when he came. On occasion, I was the model. But at Skowhegan I couldn’t study with Nic because he was so popular you couldn’t get in the room. I studied with Calvin Albert for sculpture. And also with Isabel Bishop. She and I stayed friends. Also Kenneth Callahan. Many other people came to the school who were well known, but these were the teachers. Once at Skowhegan I was rude to a painting that Isabel liked and she said I was destructive, not creative. There is some truth in that. Another famous teacher, having painted over my still life in a rather illustrative flat way, said I was too compulsive and should stay cool. I thought that perhaps he had been listening to Miles Davis. There is an element of danger from teacher’s criticism that is revealed early on, I think.

Nicolas Carone of the ISA in Umbria?

Yes, but it was much later he founded his marvelous school.

Going back in time, when I came back from Skowhegan I was faced with the fact that I was supposed to go to Harvard for graduate work. I said to my parents “You know, I don’t think I want to do that, I’d like to go to New York City and be a painter.” My father said, “Ok, come up to the studio and we’ll talk about it.” He didn’t give me any opposition at all, none whatsoever. He just said, “You know, Bruce, when you first start, it’s wonderful, you’ll learn something new every day. After awhile though, it’s hard work like anything else.” I knew I was going to get my way because I knew what kind of person he was. I thought — I am different. I want to get to the part where it is hard work. He said “So, if this is what you really want, I’ll have your brother drive you to NY tomorrow.” I said, “Tomorrow?” He said, “I’ll set up a checking account for you. Be careful.”

I think that was his way of testing me. So, my brother and I got to NY. We went up to a pub near Columbia because my father loved John Heliker’s paintings. He said go to Columbia, Heliker teaches there. It was, of course, too early in the year. Nobody was there. Heliker was still at his home in Maine. While we were in the bar, I found a notice for an apartment for rent. I said to my brother Grant, who was drinking quite a bit, we’ve got to go over and get this place now.

I knew if I didn’t find something right away, I was going to be taken back, sober or not. We went over. It was two opera singers and a very nice clean room, Central Park West where it meets Harlem. I felt comfortable with them, as my Aunt Rita and my sister Liane had been opera singers. I ruined that pretty little room. Covered it with paint.

I stayed for a while because I couldn’t get into the Columbia MFA right away. I didn’t have enough experience. I got to take some classes, though, and in one of them, I met Peter Agostini. I began to work as his assistant.

Did you have any friends when you came to NY?

I  had only one friend in NYC, and he soon found me an apartment for fifty dollars a month at Attorney Street on the Lower East Side. His name was Paul Spina. I had known him at Skowhegan. When I was still in the apartment room, we’d walk across the park and meet each other and drink a beer. That was social life. I had my allowance, a small job as assistant porter in a bar and a few odd jobs. Agostini bought breakfast at Ratner’s for us in the morning after an all night’s work — no pay.

photo courtesy of Donald Martineaw-Vega

Were you working from the figure then?

Yes, the classes had nude models and immediately I felt there was something to be understood in the figure beyond the mechanics of skill — something within the body. The figure in the nude was mysterious and captivating.

You still use a model?

I work from the model but I don’t work from a model in the studio. I draw from the model, make clay sketches from the model, but don’t bring the model in here. Here everything is from memory. That’s because of my experience with trying to find out who I was in relation to art. How I went about this was to always test myself in the museums where I was a lot of the time.

Test yourself how?

I would come back to my studio from the Metropolitan Museum or MoMA and try to remember what had affected me the most that day. Over time, I realized that in every situation, whether it was a painting or a sculpture, or even just being on the street, I was most affected by the humans. Of course in sculpture it’s much simpler because most of them were humans. That’s what I was drawn to. Perhaps this obsession with a single figure is why I am natural to sculpture and unnatural to painting.

It wasn’t that I was not attracted to other subjects and forms, that I didn’t immerse myself in them and desire to do them. I tried. There was something else in the relation to the people in the paintings or in the sculptures that mattered to me. I don’t know what a novelist does, but I have an instinct to look into a personality, to try and formulate how they live in the world, and how it affects them as a being, as a person on the earth, more importantly how it forms their appearance.

So, if you start from a model, at some point do you then let go of the idea of that model, like a fiction writer would, and let the character become its own person?

Yes, I do, but I interfere. They start out, and then I change them a lot. So, those two small figures there would be preliminary. The event that made the greatest change for me was when the figures became life size. Quite simply, I got outside myself, beyond the search for myself and into the being of another.

The studies are just to give me a start because I have to set the armature, but as I go along, they don’t seem alive if they are not changing. People say, “Your figures never feel finished.”

Let’s say you start from a model, you know the model’s name or in your head you know who the model is…

No, I don’t know at first. Later I might recognize a type or even the memory of a person. They change, they age.  They become different and may even change sex. Once I put the clay on the armature, I can move and shift everything, I’ll show you what I mean. If I don’t like this man’s head the way it is now.

((Here, Bruce raises a sculptor’s wire clay cutter and cuts from the cheek bone forward off the sculpture which is directly in front of us))

Oh, please don’t do that!!

So, I will move this over and shift it around and piece it together. As I do this, I have many chances to guess at a new person. Because I work like this, I make details often in the early stages of the sculpture.

There was a time when I felt that to break my bond with older formulas, and for me, and for me to be part of the dialogue, I should be inside the figure. To accommodate this idea, I made hollow figures and heads, and I worked from the inside as well as on the outside. Many distortions occurred, and it accomplished a clear break with the older formulas I had learned. These were my works in ceramic. Soon after, I felt I that the technique was somewhat falsifying — too instantaneous — too self— determining and the distortions could not be reconsidered enough. That series of work, though, had done its job and the mold was broken. New habits were internalized. The way I manipulate the clay into the form of the figure, even with the traditional approach I use now, had permanently changed.

Are you trying to capture the essence of anyone in particular?

No, but I do see a person here and there, and sometimes they change personalities and body types.

But this person is his own being as far as you’re concerned, then. He is evolving?

He’s trying to find himself, and I’m both preventing him and helping him.

(Referring to the altered head)

You see, I would choose that as better. It is improved by what I did. But, I did that by total accident and some instinct. Sometimes I just do things, especially in the evening when I come down after dinner, I’ll do things with just a slight impulse. I will change something, move something. Then I have to make a judgment. So, a lot of my figures have distortions and I accept that. In fact, it is necessary.

But, I don’t want arbitrary exaggeration and I don’t like fantasy. I do accept the distortions that confirm the struggle between the classical desire and the reality that there is a struggle between the inner life and the outer circumstances that meet and are resolved on the surface. People say why don’t you make them beautiful. Why don’t you look in a mirror!

There is an inner life of form, if you work in a metaphysical way; you search for the ineffable and are trying to put it into a form. Whether it’s an abstract form of the ineffable or a figure of the spirit. I just happen to be stuck with the problem of the human in the body as it came to me by trial and error through experience. The inner life doesn’t come to the surface in a classical resolution for me. These people (sculptures) want to be classical, noble, good, brave, calm, etc., but they are something else. Their inner nature is in not in conformity with their circumstance. I’m always testing them with Roman and Greek forms, and when they get too close, it’s a real question for me whether I can accept it or not, and usually I can’t. There is a falseness. I have to move them into a kind of chaos again, which represents reality for me.

photo courtesy of Donald Martineaw-Vega

How long do you typically work on a piece?

These two life size figures are now thirteen months. For most of my life, I worked on things smaller than this, about the size of those pieces on the bench.

Some people kept telling me to work bigger. It was so irritating. I felt that it was false to work big for its own sake. The fact is, once I worked life size, everything changed. It was like orienting myself to another human being, like you and me. And everything was happening between us and not in some deep space. I loved the little figures because the space was so deep, so far away. Now I realize what happened; history filled in the gap, so they had reference to older things, which was holding them back from being in the present.

When was the first time you did a piece life size?

Not that long ago, about nine years ago. It changed everything overnight. I exhibited the first life size figure in plaster at Lori Bookstein Gallery in 2010.

This piece is clay and that one is plasticine. You’re always an additive sculptor?

Only in theory am I additive. I change things so much that I am very subtractive. For me, to work in a hard material would not be possible. I am basically a modeler, but because I use some collage technique as well as other methods — hammering, cutting, moving, my additive or modeling process is very impure. When I work in clay, I am always aware of the result in bronze. I see the bronze through the clay.

I see how you work. What you have moved in the last ten minutes is terrifying.

Well, I did grow up in butcher shop. I might take the torso and cut it and have someone come in and help move it. I learned these things from looking at Rodin and Matisse.

You seem to have carried the classical into the twenty first century in a way that makes these very contemporary pieces. There is nothing academic about them.

Thank you. I think being like a real person is what makes them part of our world instead of being seen as a residue or a reflection of the past. That change came from the reduction of distance due to the size.

What informs your work, your thinking?

I am more influenced by the writing of poets and novelists or philosophers than I am by art writing. I’m now reading and trying to understand Heidegger. He seems to be speaking directly to me, as was Hegel at one point. But, I am not an intellectual and can’t spend much time doing things like that because I have to keep my mind clear — almost empty — for when I work. You asked me about plaster. When I’m finished I have to cast in plaster.

You don’t do that yourself, do you?

I do. I decided to do it for myself as a personal challenge. I was having people do it. They can do it in a day and a half and it takes me six days for a life size figure. I do it out of a sense of pride and also I do a better job. The plasters I make are very lightweight. I can carry them around. Then those plaster casts get sent to a foundry, if I have the money, to be cast in bronze.

When I last saw you, you mentioned that a group of your work just came from China. Were they on exhibit there?

No, that’s where the plasters often get sent to be cast. I’ve never been there, but the plasters stay there in a huge foundry. They are guided over and back by a friend of mine, Weixian Jiang, who went to Central Academy in Bejing and worked with us in the MFA program at the Studio School. He goes over and stays with them until they are cast. I’m not the only sculptor whose work he takes over and back. He makes part of his living doing that.

These two here were made down the street at Bedi-Makky Foundry, one of the oldest foundries in NY. They made the Wall Street Bull and the Iwo Jima Monument.

How do these come by their titles if they’re not based on the name of a model? Where do the names come from?

My wife, the painter Tine Lundsfryd, gives me names sometimes and I write them on the wall. Then when we get a new sculpture, we try and find a name that suits them. Some of them are Danish in origin (as is Tine), but I often misspell them!

That’s great though, your names are very exotic sounding.  I saw one piece called “The Boxer.”

The title might have been a bit too casual, but I’ve always been interested in boxers. I would watch boxing if I had the time. I’m fascinated by their personalities — by what kind of human would be so brave, take so much punishment and be willing to hurt someone else as well. In many ways, they are not as interesting outside the ring, but when they’re in the ring, they become so exceptional. I wonder what their bodies mean to them in light of this ferocious courage. They are not bodies that I’m interested in making, as they lack a certain reflection of the softer side of human nature.

How do your drawing and painting inform the sculpture?

I make two kinds of drawings. I draw for sculpture in a rhythmic, tactile way that mimics my primary movements as a modeler of clay. I am trying to make the figures in the paintings seem round and full. So, I draw with tones, trying to use light.

I am somewhat aware of the light on my sculpture, especially with bronze. It’s not always natural for a sculptor to look at light. For me, it has to do with the relative strength of the hills and valleys, the undulations. I think of sculpture as an illusion. It exists in my mind because of the way light falls on it.

Perhaps I’m a painterly sculptor. Clay work is very painterly. It’s like moving paint and it refers directly to the tactile sensation. If the light is used in a certain way, it can illuminate and spatialize the sculpture. I think of having light in my hands. However I’m less interested in the deep recesses and hollow valleys today than I used to be. Something like that — I learned from Donatello, especially the bronze David. It’s so illusionistic that you can’t get a grip on it.

Were you in Umbria with Nicolas Carone?

Yes, for thirteen years for the three months of summer. I did teach. I had responsibilities. I got to know a lot about Italian art and met other teacher — artists that I would have never known otherwise. Italy changed me very much. I can say it cleared the way between myself and the reality of the figure.

Then, I’m sure you went on the Piero Trail?

Yes, many times.

And you still teach?

One day a week. Two classes. Evening drawing and sculpture and afternoon life size figure.

How do you like teaching? How does it impact you?

I can’t say I get much pleasure from the act of saying things — from the projecting of knowledge. I come out of the class feeling somewhat guilty.

Guilty? I thought you might say depleted, but guilty?

Well yes, you are right — depleted also.

A friend of mine said it’s a bit like writing a check when you have no money in the bank. (Laughter) It’s not that I don’t try to do a good job. At the Studio School you can invent yourself. You are not presented a program, which you have to carry out. So for me all the years I’ve been there (since 1978 off and on), it’s been interesting as a form of self education, and perhaps one reason I don’t get a form of ego pleasure from it is because I feel I should be working in my studio whatever the consequences. That might be part of the guilt as well. Because of the situation, I could invent myself as teacher and I have taken the work of teaching seriously. Combining my own ideas in relation to those of my teachers, which I have developed by writing two texts for past eight years. One text is an attempt to clarify — to write down, theorize and remember what I say in the class on the subject of the plastic idea. The other text is based on about one hundred and fifty diagrams (related to those I draw for the students) to explain the abstractions of forming. I only work on the writing in the library in Nykobing, Falster, Denmark when we are there for two weeks in the summer.

Will you say more about your writing? Are the texts treatises? Will you publish them?

What I try to convey in class and what I am writing about is the plastic idea to alter the consciousness of the eye / mind to project depth through the abstractions of drawing. I try to install a plastic consciousness in the student. At least that is the stated goal. To replace the normative mind to eye coordination that comes with each person with the one that is needed when one picks up a tool or a pencil.

I do not feel the need to publish them. It is more a formulation of myself in teaching — in relation to plasticity that I am after. Anyway, I can’t write well enough to consider publishing. It is more of an act of clarifying.

Are you disappointed with the way art is going. Is that why teaching is not so interesting?

Well, yes. It has changed a great deal, and I might be a bit of an anomaly at this point, or perhaps isolated. I don’t argue with the changes. I’m not sure what I do is helpful today.
Almost all the work of students done in their studios is made through collage/construction, but I teach clay modeling.

It’s hard to teach someone how to make art, though. Isn’t it?

Well, in my classes, I am not a teacher of how to make art. I am instructional. But during what are called crits, which I do occasionally, art teachers, including myself, attempt to force art into the foreground mainly in terms of style.

I read that you were self-taught?

I’m more or less self-taught in relation to certain very important aspects of my work. The museums taught me and continue to teach me. However, I was exposed to many vital and fundamental ideas from many teachers. I was given clues as well as fundamentals. I stayed at Columbia for three and a half years getting the two—year MFA. As for the time I studied with Nic drawing, perhaps I didn’t stay long enough. His teaching was complex and very effective. But, it was very dominating. I felt I might lose myself to it. Peter Agostini, who was my other teacher, taught very basic simple things — looking off the edge — finding positions in space. When I worked for him in the studio, it was a learning experience of what a professional artist did, but I was not interested in his approach of knowing the work beforehand — of working from a beginning to an end.

Self taught is not derogatory, at least in my opinion. I don’t think an academic painter is necessarily better than someone who is self taught. Do you?

I’m a bit romantic about the idea of an academy. I didn’t have that opportunity, and as a result, I feel I never learned enough — that my education as an artist was not structured.

I feel in part, because of this sense of a lack of well—formulated education, that I have to keep studying all the time. Every day I do some drawing. I still work from the model. I never felt that I was properly taught in a classical way because some of the teachers of my age, maybe of your age too, were rather free and liberal about it.

I learned more about mixing a color by being a house painter than I ever did in art school.

(Laughing) That’s what I’m talking about. That’s where the discipline is. When I was studying, I moved naturally toward anatomy. I was very attracted to anatomy. All the teachers said, “Don’t learn it. It’ll kill you.” What we learned was modern, liberal, and personal to each individual teacher but also, often, or at least sometimes, important and universal.

photo courtesy of Donald Martineaw-Vega

Do you want to talk about any of the work you have here?

If you mean the life size figures in clay, I am going backward in time in terms of the way the forms are being made right now. It could change and go the other way. In a sense I’m going toward my most original instincts, which were more connected to a simpler way of connecting the forms. This is tied in for the moment with a desire to keep testing the number of aberrations I can leave out and still have a believable person of our time before me. But it is really a seesaw, a back and forth.

How is that impacting the work?

All these momentums forth and back change the work. It is a winding path with a goal that is not quite visible or knowable but which requires a changing approach. Despite the changes and the back and forth, I don’t stray very far from the trail which is based on a content. When I first started I was trying to find myself. This was very important to me. I guess I have a religious nature, although I’m not religious in a usual way. I have a spiritual feeling about experience.

In the beginning, I felt that there was something about me that could distill experience and that I might discover it through painting and sculpture. So, when I see my earlier work coming into the sculpture now, I feel I’m getting closer to myself in my original instincts. This might not look so good in a day or so. It might not last. And all these changes in the mind of an artist are not so great or important as we think they are and probably are imperceptible to the viewer. More importantly, it’s not about me anymore. I think I have advanced, gotten outside myself somewhat. I like to think it’s about them at this point. It’s not at all a self-portrait; it’s a somebody else that I’m relating to. That was an advance toward freedom when it happened.

When you speak of going back in the work, would we see it?

No, probably not. But, It’s quite simple, really. I’m taking the depth out of the valleys in the sculpture and making the forms butt up to one another closely as in the paintings. Taking the valleys out. It simplifies. I simply do not have the skills to paint a painting where there are valleys and hollows in the form of the figure.

Maybe it wouldn’t make as much sense in a painting.

No, I think you are right. It probably wouldn’t. You asked me about the contemporary art world. I enjoy it very much. I like to be close to it in NYC. Some is not at all related to what I do. But all painting and sculpture in a traditional form interests me. Other things might interest me more than art. I’m not alienated, but one’s own interests can easily slip away into the force of the flux of the world. I do protect myself. If there is something that separates me from most contemporary painters and sculptors, it’s the problem of depth.

Visual depth?

Yes. Visual depth, which means to me internal depth. I look at paintings and sculpture in terms of spatial depth. Flat images imply a shallow thought to me — a surface of representation that is outside — is normal.

What would be successful then with the idea of depth in mind? Whose work do you feel has depth?

Depth in painting and sculpture has many driving forces and, in some cases, is not easy to recognize without a fully developed plastic consciousness. Mondrian has depth for me because it has such a great system of proportion. And I don’t mean just internal depth to Mondrian, but depth in the painting because of the exquisite divisions he can make. I think of how Morandi can invoke the ambiance of an entire peninsula through the painterly spatialization of objects on a table, of Medardo Rosso’s attempt to physicalize atmosphere and de Kooning’s tactile erotic realization in the late painting. Giacometti achieved both time and spatial depth by entering physically into the object. Not surprisingly, the creation of space through plastic resolution and meaning must walk hand in hand. Trying to make good forms alone is like dancing in too tight a suit. Without profound content, the original invention of spatial form has no driving force. Forms determining their own content literalize themselves. Flatness as a destiny for painting and sculpture involved perhaps unknowingly a surrender to the normative mind. Projecting depth into a figure depends on articulation of the parts and the organization of negative to positive — the valleys and the mountains, the bumps and hollows, movement in and out and the activation of the limits to the space surrounding.

Often the effect of the work is most important in terms of what is remembered, in what one takes away from the object after one leaves it behind. The sense of how life has been changed. This very much echoes my own education with works through memory of experience. Time (relative time) is not, and has never been, a criteria for me in terms of evaluating a work. I don’t adjust my experience with a work of art based on when it was made. If I have a profound experience with Donatello, say, with the Mary Magdalen, I don’t then emerge from The Museo del Duomo thinking that this experience should be tempered with the fact that the work was made in the Quattrocento and now, getting coffee, I am in my time. That was my time I think and, simply put, it was experience.

What hours do you work?

I work in the studio normally every day except the afternoon I teach. I start when I get up. I work until we have dinner at seven or eight, then, after dinner, I most always come down here and stay till eleven or so. When I talk to my mother and she asks what I am doing and I say I am working. She says: “I thought you only work on Thursday.” I say: “I mean I am working in the studio,” and she says: “You call that work?”

Do you work on different things at given times?

I have so many things to do. I could come down and I might just draw.

You have so many drawings. When are you going to show the works on paper? Or have you already?

I showed a large number of drawings with Rich Temperio at Sideshow in Williamsburg. John Davis has shown some drawings, as has Lori Bookstein. I don’t know if John (Davis) will ever do a show entirely of drawings. He’s very specific about what he wants to show. He’s forceful and very definite about choosing, and he has an uncanny skill at hanging a show.

Yes he does. I was amazed to find that he runs his gallery single handedly. I think some drawings would be a wonderful addition to a show of yours.

Yes, I’d like to do that.

They are another whole aspect of your work. Do you work round robin or do you finish a piece entirely and put it away?

No, Sometimes after putting them in the file, I take them out and work on them again. Sometimes after I have finished them and look at them later, they just don’t look so good. I might be in an entirely different frame of mind and have the illusion I have learned something new and take them out and rework them. Sometimes if I get a new idea, I will go through and rework a lot of them. The drawings are an attempt to understand how to paint or to visualize, or work through a figure. My feeling is that all my work is as much a mechanism to change myself — as an end in itself.

photo courtesy of Donald Martineaw-Vega