Page 39 - Studio International - February 1968

Flower garden 1961 Capillary action no. 2
oil on canvas mixed media
711 x 96 in. tree: 102 x 77 x 55 in.
Coll: Mr Richard Brown painting: 36 x 52 in.
Baker, New York The National Gallery of
Canada, Ottawa

It's like a feedback to geography: where are you, where would feel impressed. But they didn't know....
do you stand, where do you change your mind ? How I have this idea about solid appreciation—realizing
important is where are you ? I really don't know. things but not really being attached, like renting every-
With a habit, for instance. Most people do business thing I'm involved with, and so depersonalizing things.
from an office. They get themselves mentally ready. They Solid appreciation would be : a mass of things around you,
put on a suit and a collar and a manicure; they put on a mass that you've been involved with that passes you by.
their business attitude and a cigar and a business hat. Although you were told in a ledger that you owned
They're salesmen and they go do something in a certain them—it's like a stockbroker realizing what he is doing.
environment where they like to work. I thought that that I know stockbrokers who are like dreams, who take on
was the way it should be for a while. Then I found myself that breath of fantasy. Some people appear very much in
phoning people; and either I would be covered with doubt.... You never see stocks. Seeing and not seeing....
grease or dirt, or I'd need a shave. And I'd put on a I'm not a realistic painter. I'm a realist. I don't think
business posture over the phone because I knew I was in terms of fantasy. Like, I'm fixed on the floor and I'm
calling a fancy office. I knew what they looked like, really here with you. That's the way I feel.
sitting down at their desks; but they didn't know what I 0, I am poetically involved, partially. Part of my
looked like. So I found myself having the most success reality has been dented by being taught to appreciate
being in the weirdest places. I would be making business objects, material things, a progression of appreciation of
arrangements and appointments from a phone booth in material things: Blue Socialism, I call it. It's like U-
Brooklyn, or I would be down in the basement shower Rent-It, an analogy of everyone being filed into a huge
room of the Rivoli theatre. Sometimes I would be dressed hall, and someone with a great ledger in a vast giveaway
up, and it would be even more paradoxical. With that contest saying, 'Now, which one of these things do you
kind of funny feeling, sometimes, I'd assume a voice and want?' It's marked in the ledger and you have a sense of
the posture of being in an office, somewhere so that they owning it, but you never use it.
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