VIJA CELMINS: I ended up doing this extremely detailed work
that I detest but I somehow worked myself into this space
and I’m hoping to work myself out.
But I hate to abandon a work that I have cared for so long.
I mean I’ve been working on this little tiny piece for over a year.
So you know, these two images go together
but I’m leaving out the comet because I can’t stand an event that exciting in there.
I mean I had the comet in there but now the comet is maybe,
I don’t know, millimeters under here.
I have redone the image many many times one on top of each other
and I paint it and then I sand it off.
This little photograph which I found someplace and which I’ve been dragging around.
I don’t know, it’s a kind of inspiration.
And a kind of a place to put your mind so that it allows me to
maybe focus more on the touch.
You know, my touch on an image that here is like found,
found by me and that’s, like, described in a touch, which remains part of the work.
This may be the ninth time I’m painting it.
But each time I try to articulate it however I’m able to at the time.
And if I lose it, which I often do, then I paint it again on top of itself.
I mean somehow I think that the image then begins to
have a sort of memory in it even if you can’t see it.
It can build up a kind of a dense feeling toward the end
and then it makes me happier.
I’m very suspicious of illusionism,
so the space is flat and I like that but,
you know, I have an image that what I’d like for it to do is to
like give a little so that it like makes you want to go in a little bit.
So you’re looking like maybe you can look in there.
And then, you know, be kept out.
For me this part is interesting cause this is the part
where I’m like building, you know?
I’m building the, the work from the beginning.
I kind of like the idea of laying a field out.
Then many times I begin like working with an image already on it.
This time I thought I would build more of a feel thinking of a feel
that begins to fill up some of the grain of the canvas itself.
This is all part of the work.
In fact I often now talk about building a painting instead of you know,
painting a painting.
Like I’m building a painting,
I’m making a structure that’s a painting cause it’s a two-dimensional object…
This painting has such an illusionistic space in it.
I think I remembered kind of feeling the joy of being able to paint anything.
At that time I painted a lot of uh different objects, things that turned on,
you know, like my hot plate and the lamps,
everything pretty much I had in the studio.
Then I started painting images of little clippings and this is one of them.
So I sort of liked the painting.
I’m trying to see whether it can sort of hold up to my having had you know,
maybe thirty five years of painting after it.
I think I painted this in the middle of the Vietnam War.
I was remembering the planes,
when I was in Europe myself in 1944, just a small child,
I remembered the airplanes.
They were, I’d never seen one of course but I, I heard them…
This is an invented thing, you know?
That it’s not like a copy of nature, or a copy of photograph.
It’s an invented thing that, that you have in front of you.
But see these. These are these little nuts that I found
that have this fantastic surface that’s like this surface.
I mean I have to say that I’ve always found it impossible
to go straight from nature,
although I did do that series of stones didn’t I?
Most of the changes in the work occur poking around my own life.
Like when I picked up those set of rocks in New Mexico,
never even occurred to me, I had them in the back of the car,
I put them out on the table and I just had this instinctive desire to make them myself
as if I was maybe a creator myself.
To make them myself to see how close I could get,
like a test or something like a discipline.
I had them cast in bronze and then I painted them.
And I decided the piece should be the found stone
and the one that is sort of translated by me.
But I have been liking these chalky, surfaces
and I’m attracted to these eye dazzling little things.
For a while I thought I would just repeat the one image my whole life.
When I, when I started going down
and taking a picture of the ocean I thought,
well I’ll just do this over and over
and maybe something will show up that is amazing.
And then of course I got tired of it
and then I moved on to some other things,
but not too many.
One of the things I did is I repeated the image in different materials.
Like first I started just with the pencil
and then when I was asked to do these prints,
the first image I did was a lithograph.
I have it like a dog with this bone.
I come on to these things and I maneuver a little bit
and this a little bit that way and a little bit this way.
It’s like something unconsciously seeps into the work.
Some subtlety that my brain was not capable of figuring out
by spending so much time with it.
I tell you these images just float through from my life,
they have no symbolic meaning.
I mean generally I, I pick images that are already surfaces.
I did the spider image the first time about 1992
and I think I like the image because it sort of held on to the edges
and made this flat plane which I’m so in love with.
This image has been drawn on a piece of paper with charcoal
and also with an eraser.
Just a plain eraser, Pink pearl,
then that was transferred onto the plate.
And then I went back in and I scraped.
I scraped the web once more, like bringing it into more of a focus.
And an image that is a corny image, right up my alley I guess.
An image that’s got a lot of associations with it,
but an image which I of course put in this very cold, scientific kind of dressing.
Because most of my images....
Well I guess they are pretty emotional images for some people.
It’s like one of the elements that I kind of neutralize.
Even though I’ve been sort of obsessed with this image you know,
that kind of describes a space, I’m not really,
I mean you know, I don’t really have a,
an agenda here where I line them up and do it one way.
Each one you know, develops how it wants to develop.
But I like being back in the studio,
sort of back in the, you know, working with this strange tedious surface.