Elizabeth Murray: The whole thing is so scatological.
When you’re painting, it’s like so physical.
It’s really physical.
You’re squeezing the paint out of the tube which is fun.
You’re mixing up the paint.
It’s making something happen with a very
sort of fluid material that is constantly somewhat out of control,
harnessing it somehow, harnessing that energy of the paint.
I think that’s the primary thing that painting is about.
For a couple of years I've been working with cutting out shapes
and kind of glomming them together.
You know, like basically making a zigzag shape
and making a sort of rectangular shape
and a circular bloopy fat cloudy shape
and just putting them all together and sort of
letting the cards fall where they may.
I know the shapes are always referred to as cartoony.
And they are cartoony and blumpy and rounded
and inflated and sort of wacky.
All of these shapes are stuck on to each other in some kind of way.
Sort of like a weird fence or a weird lattice.
Another part of it for me is to use very intense color.
With the color and with the shape
and with the drawing inside of the shape really it's just simply
trying to make it work somehow.
There are so many different combinations of things.
It's like being a safe breaker and you're listening to the -
those movies where they've got their ear up against the safe
and you are listening for the right click for the right cylinders to like drop down.
Sometimes it's felt really like that,
like I'm just like painting and painting and painting
until the right thing happens.
I want there to be conflict and I want there to be tension.
And yet somehow I want to make these very conflicting things live together,
and not just butt up against each other but really live together.
I do drawings inside the book.
And they’re just kind of like warm-up to get my mind into it.
You know like to give myself some, some place to start from,
that’s really all they are.
It all starts with drawing.
I think the thing I remember the most is, when I was little was,
the excitement of being able to draw something.
I loved to draw, and I did obsessively.
I guess I kind of realized that it was a skill that made me feel good about myself.
The Art Institute in Chicago totally changed my life.
There were people there,
the likes of whom I’d never seen before,
in little Bloomington, Illinois.
I absolutely fell in love with that world.
But I think as much as I wanted to be an artist,
I wanted to be different the way they were different.
Because it felt like freedom.
Instead of being trapped in your little Pendleton skirt and your bobbysocks,
and your saddle shoes, you could wear big heavy black boots
and put blue makeup on and just, you know, say what you thought.
You didn't have to be a nice lady anymore.
But the teachers seemed to be there to teach you that
you had no hopes and no prospects,
and being an artist was one of the most impossible things in the world.
And you'd better realize that this was a life of suffering, struggle,
and you weren't going to be any good anyway.
I had to really find a way to believe in myself.
You know, I think I did it by looking at
the paintings in the galleries in Chicago.
I would go everyday and I would look at
this particular DeKooning painting called Excavation,
and I would almost like do a dance with it.
Like, oh, he went this way and oh he went that way,
and oh he smudged this and feeling like the depth of that painting.
When you look at it from a distance it looks like
this roiling boiling pot of paint kind of.
Except the order is in that paint.
And when you go up to it you begin to see like the layers of it,
and I sort of deconstructed the painting
and I would go back down to my painting and I would try to do it.
I never got that good, but it made me start to feel my body and my mind.
My mind letting my arm make the decision.
And when you start to get the control then your feelings can start to flow.
And once that starts to happen, it's like you know,
you get on the track and the train starts moving.
I just realized this was going to be my life.
I really need time by myself, and I always have.
And I think when I was a kid I actually liked to play by myself a lot.
And that’s not saying I don’t need people because I do.
I love the quiet of walking into my studio
and looking at my work and then painting,
and it just feels like of a piece with my whole life in a way.
Having my kids has made me part of the world as an artist
and as someone who works in a lot if isolation
it's really made me deal with life in a way that I absolutely wouldn't have.
It's made me have a life, and take my mind off myself.
That's what they've done for me.
They'll be more honest with me than anybody else will.
They'll tell me how they feel.
And not everybody does that.
DAISY: Which one do you want to talk about?
MURRAY: What, honey?
MURRAY: This one, yeah.
So, what I want to know is, I'm trying to decide whether to put this in the show.
And I want to know, just tell me exactly what you think of it.
I just made some big changes in it.
The drawings are different but this is what sort of comes out from the drawings.
SOPHIE: I like it. And I think if you –
MURRAY: Of course what I wanted you to say was it's great,
it's good, don't touch it, put it in the show.
DAISY: But Mom, even if you couldn't, even if you were going to
leave everything the way it was you couldn't
because it's not like nothing except for that and the chair and the door,
it's nothing, and the sun, none of it is done.
I think, I think that it all just - it isn't a bad thing you just,
the surfaces aren't finished.
SOPHIE: Are you bored with it?
MURRAY: No, I'm very interested in it.
DAISY: Because you don't ever leave things like this.
MURRAY: Yeah, no, I'm going to just keep working on it.
SOPHIE: But maybe that would be interesting not, just leaving it.
MURRAY: No, I can’t do that. Daisy's right. You're right, You're right, You're right.
MURRAY: I think what I have to do is take out the bloopy forms and re -
and just, maybe they will come back and maybe they won't, but -
MURRAY: I think I got to take these out for awhile.
SOPHIE: It might just be nice to see what it looks like when it is just,
you know, blank.
DAISY: It might be that they are too much like the curves in the smoke.
SOPHIE: Oh, yeah!
MURRAY: Yeah but then, yeah.
SOPHIE: I love the smoke.
I think the smoke is my favorite thing. I think I like this red and the pink.
MURRAY: But what about the marks inside the roof tops, the triangles.
It just feels like, it's very descriptive.
The triangle then becomes the roof, you know what I mean?
It's a representation.
SOPHIE: I mean that's what it is.
MURRAY: Yeah, ah-hah.
SOPHIE: That's the chimney, that's the smoke coming out of it,
that's you know, the little people inside of it –
MURRAY: Be quiet!
SOPHIE: Of course there is room for interpretation I mean that's what your work does,
but you know there is the little people inside that are talking,
and that is what they are saying inside I little speech bubbles.
MURRAY: Cartoons, speech bubbles. Ohh, ok. DAISY: I thought it was a path.
SOPHIE: You thought it was a path?
DAISY: Hmm-mmm.
SOPHIE: Oh, it could be a path. See Mom? We still don't know what it is!
MURRAY: Ok, that's really good. That's really helpful.
I think every artist has this, you leave it at night
and you come back and you think,
wow I've got it, I've got it.
And then you come back in the morning and it's gone, like it looks awful.
And that's sort of when I think, "Why did I go on this journey in the first place?
What am I doing this for? It's just, it's so painful."
And then you know, the next morning you’re back at it bright-eyed and bushy-tailed
like trying again.
MURRAY (SOT): OK, so let’s move this painting over here.
MURRAY (SOT): No, don’t even hang it up.
My fantasy is that I would get to a certain point where
I would know what I wanted to say,
where you were either on this straight line or a road,
you would never swerve.
You would just do your work then.
And that’s not the way it is at all.
You know, get off the path and then get back on again for a while
and you trip along and suddenly you stumble
and then you’re back on again.
And I don’t think that process ever ends.
MURRAY (SOT): And that height is good. More over to the right, center it on the wall.
MURRAY (SOT): Let’s switch this with this.
MURRAY: When I really know certain things are working for me,
they make me laugh.
Like oh, this is really silly.
And I just enjoy that.
And I think for myself it’s part of what gets me through.
I think it's really very similar to how a kid plays.
You know, it's like you are in your playroom
and you are just picking up these different shapes
and throwing them on the wall and then putting them together
and seeing what kind of a game you can make out of them.
I think that's pretty explanatory of what it feels like to make them,
and very close to the kind of feeling that I want to get out of them,
and I think I want you to get out of them too.