The following interview from 2007 is by Dorothy Robinson and is reprinted from the Philadelphia Metro. Please click the image for a larger version.





The following interview from 2002 is by Jodi Werner and reprinted from generationj.com:

The viewer's inability to clearly see the subjects in your paintings creates an almost voyeuristic result--the ability to see but not see everything, or to see and not be seen back. As Giacometti uses scale manipulatively, you appear to use focus manipulatively. Though you "push the figure[s] to the forefront," "requiring confrontation," it appears as though true confrontation between the subject and viewer is prevented. Your thoughts?

Without the figure to hold onto, you'd have little value or time for the movement of paint. But without the paint you would quickly be bored by the simplicity of the image. It is the interaction of the two that should resonate.

I hope that we don't get stuck on the figure. I want you to see not only the figure but also the language and paint coalescing into the figure. And then back, of course. Getting caught up in the narrative is always dangerous. If you focus too much on any one part of the work, you will neglect the whole. I am forcing you, and myself for that matter, to look at the painting freshly every time you approach it. If you read Joyce, and somehow miss the sounds of the words, you have to reread the whole damn thing.

I leave the painting's surface raw and open because I want you to see how it was made. Like the Biblical creation story, I am telling you more than "And then there was Man." The whole process of making is recounted sequentially. Each painting tells its own history.

I want you to see more than the finished picture--you should be at my side through each decision I make. In order to really understand any language, you should understand how it has evolved.

Do you expect your paintings to be difficult for the viewer?
My paintings are actually very simple, what is difficult is that you first must become comfortable with the way that I see and dissect the world.

Once you start to see something familiar in the paint it leads you towards understanding the way that all of the paint is used. It is a coherent system, but a system of my own making. e.e. cummings is tough to read at first, because his language is so unique, but once you start to understand his rhythms and patterns, you discover that he is the most lovely and innocent of poets. He gets there, though, only by re-forming the language in a way that makes sense to him. He is not trying to be obtuse or opaque, but to use words, letters and sounds in the ways most urgent, subtle, concise and robust for his own message and temperament.

Do you use paintbrushes or your fingers? (Or both?)
Neither, actually. I used to use both. I stopped using my fingers when I found out it would probably give me cancer, and I stopped using brushes about 2 years ago when I found I was becoming too meticulous for my own good and my mind was beginning to atrophy.

I was so comfortable with the brushes that the paintings became over-refined and boring. Reintroducing French Academic painting seemed entirely meritless. Great art is not about technical mastery, it is about exploration and discovery.

So I got rid of all of my brushes, and when I started again with only knives it was revelatory. As if I were working in a new medium or speaking a new language. The basic vocabulary changed. I was incapable of anything resembling a detail because the knife was too awkward for that. So I had to create new ways of making a picture in order to achieve any kind of specificity.

In a new language, if you lack a certain word, you make compromises using the vocabulary you have or--as the grand old Humpty-Dumpty would do--you make the words mean what you want them to mean.

With a knife you cannot possibly make a line--the simplest piece of visual vocabulary. Instead you layer your paint, pushing colors back and forth until you are left with the idea that a line represents. You build relationships instead of simply delineating them.

What do you think about the art/work relationship and how do you find the balance?
Art doesn't really have boundaries. It just sucks up all of the information from everywhere and everything in your life. If you are an artist, you will find that art refuses to be balanced or restrained.

All of life is about decisions: how you make them, why you make them and what their consequences are. Art is the act of abstract decision-making. You filter the rest of your life through your art, and your art through the rest of your life. It is an arena in which you make all of these tough decisions, but in a consequenceless environment.

What are you working on now? What's on the horizon?
More abstract decision-making.

Do you consider yourself a Jewish artist?
Sure. Everything in my life influences everything else. At times my Judaism informs my painting and then other times my painting influences my religious life. But they are not entirely inextricable.

You say that your painted images raise the question, "What does it mean to name or to describe a thing with paint?" How would you answer this question? What does it mean to you?
A name is the way a person or object moves from the realm of Things to the realm of Ideas. You cannot discuss or think about a creation until you are able to first refer to it, and that means naming.

Naming or defining is entering into an enormous dialogue. It means that we are participating actively in the universe. Every act of creation increases the collective energy of existence--one more universal heartbeat.

The Jewish creation story and Giacometti appear to be two of your great influences. What is your relationship with both? (For those of us unfamiliar with Giacometti, can you tell us a bit about him?)
The Biblical creation story is fascinating to me because it so closely parallels my experience of what it is like to make art. The stepping back and evaluating, the gradual building, but most importantly the way that God makes thing by creating in pairs--defining by juxtaposition. Light only makes sense next to dark. All of this rings very, very true to my own simpler exercises in defining and creating.

Alberto Giacometti establishes that art is a quest rather than a pretty picture. Matisse famously teaches this to us in his Blue Nude, but Matisse is always, ultimately striving for an image, while Alberto is striving simply to strive. The quest is life, and must be bigger than his little rectangular frame. Set yourself impossible goals. The frustration and the pain are the impetus for the next line or the next drawing.

Giacometti lives by instinct, yet refuses his own inventions, continually refining. His first thought is never final, but it will not be lost either. He is a builder. Lines converge, coalesce and accumulate until the sum total tells a story more accurate and nuanced than any one elegantly clear chisel might produce. Beauty and grace are relegated to a secondary role. The accumulation remains to inform and moderate the facts.


Who or what are some of your other influences?
Everyone and everything is an influence, I hope.

Every painter, even the terrible ones like Renoir, has helped to define the language I use. Rembrandt and Velazquez and Vermeer were all amazing because they made the paint do things you never expected it could do. There are a few living painters who make my knees shake--Frank Auerbach, for one.

But a lot of my influences are in other media. I read voraciously--I've just finished a few Salman Rushdie books that I think are among the most wonderful things around. I've been reading Charles Simic's newest collection of poetry which is, I think, his best yet. And Wallace Stevens, who is really difficult for me, just takes the world apart and then puts it back together again.

I listen to a lot of music, The Smiths, Beethoven--they have a lot to teach us about structure and beauty.

Dave McKean's Cages is the graphic novel I wish I had made. Cages bursts with insight and rhythm--it makes me feel both incredibly happy and totally inadequate in its shadow.

Fellini, Kieslowski, Oliver Stone, Eisenstein and other filmmakers have done as much if not more to create and push our visual language as any painter. I could go on and on, but I've probably already listed too many.