Z....How do you start a painting? Where do you begin?
K....Because any one painting can so easily spark the beginning of another, I guess there is an actual beginning only when I start a series of paintings. My working habit is to paint in a concentrated way, six to eight hours a day, for, maybe, two years and then to knock off for several months. I get burned out easily. And I look forward to getting burned out as much as I do to getting charged up. Anyway, how do I begin? I suppose I have a plan or idea, something that might come out of my sketchbooks, a new image or configuration, say. And I am usually dissatisfied with some aspect of the last group of work, something which I now feel was overly fussy to have done. I guess that that is a healthy condition. Sometimes I find a configuration or even an entire composition from the Magic Cards. This is a deck I make by gathering together fifty-two small notecards, most of them formed by chance and containing writing, signs, watercolor images and color notes, etc. I made them over the last few years when I needed notes to myself regarding the watercolors I was painting. Here is how I use them. As I play one of my solitaire games, I make identical moves with the Magic Cards, play a companion game, so to speak. The overlaps can create new meaningful configurations, all formed by a game of chance.
Z....As I look around your studio I see what might be considered two categories of paintings: there are the rather simple ones and there are others that are quite complex.
K....Yes, all the small ones are rather simple, concentrated units. They are intense and tight in the good sort of way - as Morandi can be. I love them. Probably none is larger than twenty by twenty-four inches, most smaller. I don't seem to be able to get them larger; it may have something to do with scale. A larger format acquires more things, more configurations which interact; so, suddenly there is a story line.
Z....Wait a minute. You say story line! How do I gain access to the story line? It seems so personal, so private.
K....Well, these configurations have a life of their own so, when they are randomly put together, a kind of narrative tension develops. Their names will suggest that: there is the Dreamer, the Red Cave, Poet's place, the Right and the Left Shoe Fetishes, the Duck of Knowledge, La Tuta, Fistface, the Voyeur, Birdog, the Verona Oracle, the Oracle's Sweetums, and many others. The titles are ridiculous and worthwhile; perhaps that's the way I think of myself. The small paintings usually deal with one configuration; each small painting is like a single sounding chord. But, the larger paintings...
Z....And the story line?
K....Well, maybe you write your own ticket. Is that an expression? Since I do like the configurations to be multi-associational, I guess there can be more than one story; so, my telling one of them will not dilute the visual richness. For instance, in the painting called Double Agent the Voyeur configuration (that mooner, already defined in anotherpainting) sets the mystery. He is spying on the history of the earth. He sees that distant and unique fish who struggled ashore and flew away to evolution. The re-realization of all this blows the socks off the Dreamer at the bottom of the canvas. The little figure in the lower right is the witness. Now, what amazes me is the fact that this story came to me; I didn't put it there.
Z....I'd like to know about the writing in some of the paintings, the numbers and the words. Is it something like the configurations that must come together for you to see the picture? I'm curious as to when you actually see your painting.
K....I am not sure I can answer that, and I am not completely sure I understand the role of the numbers and writing. The direct sources of the writing are the sketchbooks and the note cards, the Magic Cards, and the numerical scores from solitaire card games; I play a lot of solitaire when the painting isn't going well. I have invented a few games (one called "Cheat" - I'll have to teach it to you) with elaborate scoring systems. And these get into the paintings as do many other things around me. You know, Frank, when I am working very hard and very well everything around me is alive - and much of it useful. Also, in a formal way the letters and numbers create a neutral field, solving large passages in the same way as choosing the right color can. They also help to foreground, to keep everything up front and active; they are quite at home with the more gestural paint handling I am using at the moment. They wouldn't work in that deep space I employed in the seventies. So, now that I have said this, perhaps I do understand the role of the letters and the numbers; of course, this conscious understanding of something, the saying of it is not necessarily the same as a visual understanding.
Z.... ...and the coming together, when do you see some realization, a picture forming?
K....Yes, you keep asking that...
Z...Well, sure...because in your , at first unrecognizable, universe what continues to unfold for me are images that I know. You seem to be pulling images out of yourself that I know about but hadn't recognized until you painted them.
K...That's wonderful, something extrapainterly!
Z....And the paintings seem to be born full-blown, as though you see them that way from the start.
K....Without a struggle?
Z....Yes.
K....No, it is more complex. Some paintings, usually the smaller ones, come easily. I see them in a flash (or the solution in a flash) - sometimes out of the corner of my eye. And these pictures are gifts. I almost feel as though I had nothing to do with the painting of them. The rest are a struggle. But when they are resolved they may look like they were conceived effortlessly; they justy have the clarity of my intentions, that's all. It is odd that, when I have finished a group of paintings after a couple of years work, it all looks like me. You get gifts or you struggle but it all looks like one's work. It makes me think that we are limited at any time in our lives as to what we accept and how we proceed, you know, what we go for in life - there is that limitation, that anchor.
Z....Anne d'Harnoncourt writes about one of your earlier paintings as "an eccentric picture for mid-1960's, especially in its marriage of conflicting modes of surreal representation and abstract, expressive painterliness". (note1) This description would not quite apply now, would it?
K.... Not quite. Those earlier paintings are more surreal, in a pictorial sense, because of that very deep, luminous space I created. I painted very steady, closly modulated fields of color; there were color changes and value changes. Dennis Adrian called it "suppressing the hand". (note 2) I got thirty miles of space sometimes!
Z....There was something else you got: an edge, a clearly articulated edge. It is something I can be sure about in those paintings and it matters what shifts when we move across that edge, across the edge of one form to another.
K....I guess I don't need that now (I know that I got very tired of painting all that color modulation). Instead I now have a looser, a more painterly surface. And it looks more abstract.
Z....What was certain about those earlier paintings is that we did enter into them, into that space world and we stayed inside. With the recent work we go in and out of shallower spaces, slide across the surface and encounter disorderly images, something else is connecting all the pieces; it's an expanding universe.
K....Well, it might be, but it is something that I don't believe I can talk about. I don't think about it that way.
Z....How about the configurations themselves, the shapes? What turns you on to them? How do you find them?
K....Most of them are from that world of gifts; they fall out of the sky. I am alert to them now. They fall away when I am cutting some other template, drop out onto my work table; they are seen on the backs of poor Xeroxings of my drawings and fuzzy color prints of my work; a nervous pantograph can lead me to them. They come to me by chance, and I am amazed at how significant and meaningful they are, how useful, how just-what-the-doctor-ordered. They are little personages marching in. And the cast of characters is growing; someday I will be confronted with an epic to service.
Z....The thought has just come to me... that seeing has a mind.
K....Are you using mind in some mystical, mumbo-jumbo way?
Z....No. I mean that seeing has its own structure which creates visual recognition - and that that underlies your choices.
K....I wouldn't know; I use them when they move me and that usually means that I don't understand them fully. I realize that they can represent several different things ... (this word, thing, isn't serving too well). I know that I use the paired configurations, the Left and Right Shoe Fetishes for example, so often because I don't quite understand them. I am constantly intrigued by them. It is curious, held apart they look identical, but when you bring them together, overlap them, they don't coincide - like left and right shoes. They take on an heraldic import ... emblems searching for a society.
Z...Birdog is that for me and is very much shared.
K...That's nice. I wouldn't paint if no one liked it.
Philadelphia, 1987
(1) Anne d'Harnoncourt, Three Centuries of American Art, Phila Museum of Art, 1976, p 593.
(2) Dennis Adrian, New York, Artforum, May 1966, p 53.Copyright 1987 by Frank Zadlo
Used by permission of Frank Zadlo