ROBERT RYMAN: The real purpose of painting is…
is to give pleasure.
I mean that’s really uh the…
the main thing that it’s about.
I mean there can be the story,
you know there can be a lot of history behind it,
there can be…
but when it, you know when it…
you don’t have to know all of those things uh to…
to receive the pleasure from a painting.
Uh, it’s like listening to some music.
You don’t have to know the score of a symphony in order to appreciate the symphony.
You can just listen to the sounds.
In Nashville when I was growing up,
you didn’t hear anything but country music on the radio
and juke boxes at that time and I was never really interested in that.
I was more interested in uh jazz.
I would hunt around late at night on the radio trying to find
a New York station or something where I could hear something else.
It was the music really that was more interesting for me than…
than painting which I’d never seen.
So when I came to New York,
it was the music that was the most important thing.
I was playing bop...bebop. (LAUGHS)
You know I was...Charlie Parker and Zoot Sims,
(LAUGHS)
and I think that had an influence on
my approach to painting because
you played on a structure and you learned your instrument
and then you played within the structure.
Well, it seemed like a logical thing to begin painting that way.
You know I would learn about paint and then
I would learn about what you could do with the paint.
In painting, something has to look easy even though it might not be easy.
That’s an important part of painting,
that it has to have that feeling of…
like it just happened.
It used to be when I was playing,
we would say tunes, no one uses the term tunes anymore,
you know it’s songs.
If someone is singing something and telling a story
and it’s very similar to representational painting where,
you know, you tell a story with the paint and with symbols.
I wasn’t interested in painting a narrative,
telling a story with a painting.
I thought the painting should just be about what it’s about and not (LAUGHS)
not about other things.
One thing that I learned from music that I’ve carried over to painting was
if you are an entertainer, you have to entertain.
I didn’t want to do that.
The other way was to just to do whatever you wanted
and the audience had to come to you or not.
And uh that’s...that was my approach right from the beginning.
Uh I wasn’t going to be an entertainer.
In all of my paintings, I discover things.
Sometimes I’m surprised at the result, but I know what I’m doing.
(LAUGHS) Even though I let...even though I don’t know what I’m doing.
(LAUGHS)
Always...my approach uh tends to be uh from experiments.
I generally do a lot of tests before I do paintings.
Tests on paints to see which is the best thing to use on a certain material,
how fastening is going to work, how the light is going to work, things like that.
I’m not involved with any kind of art movement or…
or I’m not a scholar and I’m not a historian.
I just look at it as solving problems
and working on the painting and a visual experience.
I don’t have any assistants.
I like to do it all myself.
I like to know what’s going on all the time.
It’s coming along. (LAUGHS)
When I was just beginning to paint, I…
I thought I have to become not afraid of the paint.
Not afraid of the cost of the paint, you know,
not afraid of wasting it and I would…
I smeared some on my hand and just put it down on…
just…
wasted some paint so to speak, so that I would not be afraid of it.
I like to do something that I don’t know exactly how to do.
When I finish the problem, I don’t have to go on with it.
I’m more interested in finding what else I can do that…
that’s more of a challenge for me.
I would never show a painting that I didn’t feel right about.
I would never let it out.
There might have been a few paintings that I’ve destroyed through the years that…
some I’ve wish I hadn’t but it wasn’t that the paintings maybe were not good,
but they weren’t what I wanted at the moment and so I…
you know I rejected them.
But usually I work them through so that they are okay.
RYMAN: Could you get the hot spots, kind of move…
move the hot spots down so the wall is more even and not so hot at the top?
SPEAKER: That’s easy.
RYMAN: I work with real light.
I mean the light is not really painted into the painting in an illusionistic way,
as you would paint a landscape or something,
but my paintings work with real light.
It’s not just a matter of daylight or incandescent light,
it’s also the quality of the light.
But sometimes, you want a softer light to bring it alive.
I think of my painting as not really as abstract,
because I don’t abstract from anything.
It’s involved with real visual aspects of what you really are looking at,
whether it’s wood or...or you see the paint and the metal
and how it’s put together and how it works with the wall
and how it works with the light.
I use real light and I use real surface.
I don’t use any illusion.
It’s the real thing that you see.
It’s a real experience. (LAUGHS)
The paintings move outward in a sense, aesthetically.
They...they go out into the space of the room
and they certainly involve the wall itself that it’s on.
What you’re seeing is really what it is.
Anything else will dilute it or you know disturb it.
I never thought of white as being a color.
White could do things that other colors could not do.
White has a tendency to make things visible.
You can see more of the nuance.
It’s been only recently where I actually did some white paintings and…
which I call white.
I began with that square in the ‘50s actually and I…
somehow it’s become so natural to me that I just don’t think of it any other way.
A square has always been, you know,
just an equal sided space that you could work with
and it didn’t have the feeling of a landscape or,
you know, some kind of a window or a doorway that we usually associate with rectangles.
It’s just a very neutral kind of a space.
Sometimes after I finish a group of paintings,
I’m not sure what to do next.
And it may be I have to wait a while, you know maybe a month or...or so.
Two months.
You know I don’t worry about it…
and then slowly things fall into place and I try a few things and…
and then I realize that what else could be done
and what interests me at the moment.
It’s...it’s called PHILADELPHIA PROTO…
well, actually it’s called THIRD PHILADELPHIA PROTOTYPE.
The panels are not really the painting.
The painting consists of the two walls.
The original surface of the panels are the same.
Even from the first showing.
The only thing that changes is the…
is the edge which goes onto the wall itself.
Some of the tape is going off of the panel onto the wall,
and others seem to just appear on the wall.
Which tells you that it’s…
it was not really the first time it was done.
That’s done on purpose because I don’t want it to be the exact same each time.
The light is extremely important in the way it affects the panels.
In the afternoon, later when the sun moves around to this side the…
the panels will look very different.
The softer light brings out the nuances and you can see the…
the panels have a glow which would be wiped out in a strong straight on light.
Yesterday was the first time I actually saw the space.
It should be a soft, quiet experience.
It’s nice to look at.
I like this.