Page 59 - Studio International - December 1969

Supplement December 1969 Any wider it takes over. So you do have to

decide on things like that. That's what I like
Lithographs and original prints about the step-up business: you know you're
really painting something flat. Lichtenstein
has done as much as anyone in getting rid of a
lot of sham about how you articulate things,
the fine-arts crap behind how the fine artist
Robert Gord discusses THE FOLLOWING STATEMENT DERIVES FROM should make things do what they're supposed
y
his work JOSEPH MASHECK to do. I think he's quite important for en­
A CONVERSATION RECORDED BY
couraging other people to find a new simple
non-fine-arts way of articulating forms.
I first thought of working with the figure had already been done and they would change I have a much bigger audience now, say, than
when I was in college and everyone was the colours. In other words, if they had a I did four years ago, although I'm essentially
painting like de Kooning. And when I started Spring line of textiles they might want to use doing the same thing. So it's not really a
with the figure it was in a sort of a West Coast the same patterns but with a Fall feeling; we matter of imagery it's a matter of the way
way, until I went out to the West Coast and would do the colour changes on the textiles. you articulate the form. It's the way you
became very disenchanted with that whole Well, when I went to work for them I told paint it. It has suddenly made the images
approach. The thing that really started me them that I wouldn't work with colour, I acceptable with a larger public. Not that the
was that I was doing some drawings of the didn't want to work with dyes and colour and public is that large but now it's much easier
College of Fine Arts, the exhibition building, watercolour, but that I would do all the nasty to take in the imagery than it was before. A
from some fair that they'd had in San work, the tracings and that kind of thing, lot of people who know nothing about art
Francisco down on the Marina, designed by getting things ready to paint the new colours admire the fact that I paint neatly-they're
Maybeck. He was a Frank Lloyd Wright sort in. I had never really realized what to me has quite impressed by the fact that I can paint a
of guy, around the early part of the century. become one of the most important things; the straight line, something so simple as that, and
Anyway he had this incredible building, a way you distribute things across a surface. that everything looks very kind of crisp and
sort of neo-classicai pavilion made out of When you trace a textile design or something neat. I think that's great-I think that's one
stucco and with urns at the entrance. I had you begin to see the way the things are reason the public has such a horrible time
been doing some drawings of these very distributed. There's a whole new way of look­ with Abstract Expressionism. They can never
ornamental-looking urns, and I was thinking ing at things. accept the kind of freedom of the way the
that they were like women, they were in some Then I started tracing 'everything-Michel­ painter works. Neither could I actually! I was
way a kind of metaphor for the function of a angelo, Botticelli-and it was a great help a most miserable and unhappy Abstract
woman -full or empty and so on. And so I because I began to understand the different Expressionist! There are some forms that I
started doing a series of paintings in which ways things were distributed. You are taught enjoy working with, that I feel relaxed with,
I simplified the woman and did women and to look at a painting in a pictorial way; you and there are certain things that really irritate
urns together, and then started trying to add look at a painting and you analyse it as me to try to do. My work is really very boring
other objects which would support the female though it was a Poussin. If you look at a girl to do, because there are lots of little patterned
form and yet allow me to do a lot of pictorial you could analyse her as though she was a things. But some things I do that are really
things that maybe an urn wouldn't allow me Poussin. It's the same thing when you look at tedious I enjoy doing, and there are other
to do, like fruit, flowers, vegetable forms. a Cezanne or you're told how to analyse it. things that I have to do because I need them
Sometimes they're meant to be metaphors for We have a certain way of looking at paintings; that I just loathe doing.
the female, sometimes they're meant to be we're educated to look at them a certain way, I've been toying with the idea of doing my
phallic. And then I· had a concern with the so it's very hard as painters not to compose in own silkscreens for about four years, because
problem that everyone else is concerned with: the same way. And I wonder if you can com­ the way I'm working lends itself so much to
how to paint on a flat surface after Cezanne. pose that way any more? silkscreen. When I thought of working on
For a long time I tried to paint these things Matisse is, I guess, the biggest influence on this flat-on-flat thing, I realized this is a way
like Cezanne-like Cezanne through Jasper me. But I wish I understood Matisse's colour. of composing which is just made for silk­
Johns-you know how he'll handle the paint I love it but I don't really understand it, screens. But I knew that to really learn to do
in that almost Cezannesque way. Of course it because I don't really think I'm an interesting these things the way I wanted to do them
was impossible, it was just a ridiculous way to or profound colourist at all. I wish I was. But would mean maybe a year's effort on my part
paint. So about three years ago I started doing Matisse's way of putting things together is the and I'm so busy making things that I just
this business of step up of values-step up, step thing that excites me so much. The way he don't have a year to spend learning how to
down, either in intensity of colour or in light/ puts things together is more exciting than do silkscreening. Particularly in the United
dark, in value. All of a sudden I found a way the way, say, Picasso puts things together. States graphics has been in the hands of print
to fit everything in. This is like you're It's very hard to get everything so that it falls cultists, William Stanley Hayter, that sort of
decorating the top of a cake and you're into place-like the almonds on the cake. stuff, everyone 'oohing' and 'aahing' over the
placing all the almonds and glazed fruit. So They have to be pressed in or they'll just fall print techniques and the kind of paper you
all of a sudden it was very easy to place things off the top of the cake or something. I think use and the little raggedy edges, and everyone
around, which it hadn't been before. Before I it's mostly a problem of value. But it's also a coming up with all sorts of technical ideas.
was always seeing them in pictorial terms, and problem of intensity of colour too. Now for But they're horrible things, most of them, like
once I found a way to articulate the things instance it's very important in things like how washed-out Picasso by way of four or five
and set them down, all the images I'd been narrow a line-a magenta line-like shape-can other people. And the subject matter can get
working with for eight years or so, but I use and have it read as colour, and not as so murky and turgid. So I think it's very
couldn't really make anything out of, fell into lines, because the main function of this thing important for painters to be working with
place. is to give colour to the whole thing, to craftsmen and exploring the possibilities of a
When I was living in New York about 1960 I give a kind of movement. And yet I wanted it medium that you couldn't really do on your
had a job working for a small company called as narrow as I could get it, but any narrower own, either financially or technically, without
Studio Service. They took textile designs that than that and you began to read it as lines. a great expenditure of time or money. D
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