ROTHENBERG: If you don't know what you're doing
out here in the Southwest in this kind of isolation,
if you don't understand that you're supposed to have work
and a purpose to every day,
you're going to float off into the stratosphere
or move very quickly back to an urban center.
[ scraping ]
The first year was a very hard adjustment just to light--
just to the amount of light here.
So I did make modifications in my studio plan
to cut out some light
and to reproduce the New York situation of floodlights.
I love red.
I use a lot of red.
I use innumerable tubes of white.
Uh, I try to dirty down most of the colors that I use
rather than use them in their pure form.
You squeeze a tube of color and you see this bright green
and it's just frightening.
You know, it's this pure color that somebody mixed up
and you just have to immediately get after it
[ laughs ]
and, uh, make it, you know, fight with orange or something.
I tend to make all my paintings looking down.
It's just a point of view that I've established
since living here.
I think you don't have that in the city,
but living on the hills and ups and downs and stuff.
And then being on a ladder so much,
I'm starting to have this kind of natural way
of not looking at something but down on it.
Say there was a dead cow in the creek once--
which there was-- mysteriously.
Um, I saw the cow from about 40 feet above.
And that painting became "Galisteo Creek."
So I've taken what I learned outside
and brought it into these interiors.
And now that's pretty much what I want to do with them.
And the studio painting became extremely green,
but that was out of the preceding body of work--
the "Domino" paintings--
where I felt free to take green right out of a landscape context
into any operation I cared to.
Green became a very exciting event.
It felt fresh.
Red-- red is just like part of my internal palette
a... a warm, warm tone.
And then my other favorite deal is dirty white,
because...
it would be too bright and colorful.
[ laughs ]
And it's not my nature.
There's got to be traces of 15-year-old turpentine
in those cans.
Every painting carries through the same brushes
and the same moves as the last painting.
But again, if I need a clear color
and I don't see that any of my cans are going to give me
anything but, you know, the dirty down,
I'll start a new can
and actually once in a while wash a brush...
so it will be free of old colors.
I was a very social kid up through college, past college.
And, uh, no, and I don't think anybody that knew me
in high school or college would ever have thought that I
would have been successful at anything
much less spending 80% of my life alone
in a white room...
[ laughs ]
making work. It's... it's odd.
It was a wonderful world in the early '70s.
Artists worked with dancers.
It was very mixed up.
It was very interdisciplinary.
I performed with Joan Jonas,
and that was so much fun.
And I had studied painting. I was interested in painting.
When I got a studio and first started painting
and then I started getting a little attention for my work
and I had a show and I sold a painting.
So then I started making more paintings,
trying to find out my identity.
And when I stumbled on the horse,
I went, "Okay, this can be my Jasper Johns Flag."
This can be nothing to me, because I don't like horses.
I can draw a line through it and make it flat.
I can take all the things that I've learned
in the last couple years
and negate painting as much as possible
in terms of illusionism and shadow
and composition and stuff,
and that was my run from '73 or '74 to '80.
And that's what I guess I made my reputation on, because they were acceptable
as paintings and acceptable as, um...
not going backwards.
But most artists really wish they had a series
where one painting would lead to the next painting,
and it would be a variation on it.
And that's what happened in my early career-- the horses.
But the paintings are more of a battle
to satisfy myself with now and I do not have a sense of series.
This, as you see here, these are two snake paintings.
Two paintings that are about
this idea I had called "meaningless gestures."
And two paintings that are a reflection
of my domestic situation in the house there.
And each of them, the second painting
seems to complete the series,
which is weird,
because I'd like to get a hold of something
and be on that idea for a couple of years at least.
But that's not happening at the moment.
I'm able to work through
periods when there's no real
important idea in my mind.
I can draw; I can learn to make a clay pot.
At least I find some reason to work just about every day.
Because the block is the terriblest.
It's just terrible.
It's terrible to have a couple of months where you can't...
You're disheartened, because you think everything stinks.
You just do.
It happens.
If you're not in your studio physically most every day,
you've denied the possibility of anything happening.
So even if you're reading a detective novel,
you should be there.
And then sometimes you just
throw your book down on the floor,
march off to a painting
and say,
"Ah, something's wrong here and I'm, you know... " Pull the table over,
throw my painting shirt on and get going.
And sometimes hours pass that I'm working.
But I almost always do something
before I go in the house to watch the news.
I mean, even if I put
a wrong stroke on something or change a contour,
and that's the only stroke I did, I do it
just to have done some work that day.
[ bird cawing ]
No, I think I'm remarkably lucky to be on this piece of land.
It's not that I think any special thoughts.
It's just...
I walk usually about 45 minutes.
It's just completely part of my pattern,
you know, and sometimes I walk fast with exercise in mind and sometimes I amble.
It's a wonderful place to walk.
There's three or four different terrains to walk in.
It's meditative.
I'm always looking at the ground to look for a beador an arrowhead
or what seems to be two pieces of the same pot.
If you see...
I think that piece goes there.
That one definitely goes there.
So it's a small piece of a
11th- or 12th-century pot.
I keep looking at this painting and thinking, why can't I just nail it--
just make it be whatever it's supposed to be and move on?
So it's constant reviewing
and I can't say what makes me say that's wrong,
that stays, that goes, this should be longer.
It's, uh, it's sitting there and looking,
and going, "Uh-uh,
I have to do something."
And it had to be done with color.
One's been bugging me for-- it's been around the studio for
four or five months on and off, reworked.
And I kept thinking, "Oh, it's okay.
I'm not interested any more in doing this, so it's okay."
But it simply... wasn't.
It's closer I think now to where I can leave it.
It's very few paintings that come fast and sharp,
like the small snake painting in there was two days, three days,
and I don't want to touch it.
It is what it is and it's... it...
It's, uh, I like it.
I'm not really a "less is more" person, but
I figure...
a hand on a table suggests a human being.
I don't want to get too literal about things.
I want the viewer to be able to do the work, too.
And I find a dragonfly beautiful
and a snake beautiful.
Yeah, and many things beautiful.
But it's not a... a...
a goal to try for it or expect to achieve it in my own work.
I'm trying for, let's take truth...
[ laughs ]
some kind of truth about some kind of thing.