WEBVTT

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[ MARY HEILMANN ] 
I always wanted a lotof attention.

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I had taken ballet lessons
as a child.

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I wanted to be a famous ballerina doing Swan Lake.

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I wanted everyone looking at me.

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Then I wanted to be spinning, doing somersaults 
off the diving tower in Los Angeles.

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And people look at you when you
do that.

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When I told my mother I wanted

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to be an artist, she said,
"You'll starve in a garret."

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And in my mind, I thought, "Yes,

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that's exactly what I wanted."

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It turns out that it was really
a mission I was on, and it was

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just about the only thing
I thought about: doing art.

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While I was at San Francisco
State, studying education,

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I started doing ceramics.

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So I'm doing my English,
my literature, my writing,

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And then started doing pottery,
and I was very good at that.

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In Southern California in the
early '60s, big stuff was

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happening in ceramics.

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So I went up to Berkeley to
graduate school, and then we're

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doing sort of an abstract
expressionist ceramic sculpture,

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huge scale, tremendous amount of

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craft involved in making these

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things and firing them and
glazing them.

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Then I get to know Bruce Nauman,
who's also in school at the same

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time up at Davis, and the rest
is history.

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The teachers in the school hated
the sculpture I made.

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They almost kicked me out.

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So then I went up to Davis to

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work with William Wiley, who was
Bruce's teacher, and then the

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three of us spent time together
talking about ideas, and that's

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a really important part of my life.

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It was just wonderful.

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In the beginning, the art
enterprise was doing something

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important, beautiful, sort of
all by yourself.

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As I got into it and matured,
I saw that the most important

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thing about doing artwork was
communicating and having

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something like a conversation
through the work.

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I thought about making pieces

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partly for their formal values
but also very much for the kind

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of a response I would get.

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And often, the response that

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I wanted was one of antagonism.

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I wanted to cause trouble.

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And that caused me trouble in
graduate school, because by that

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time, I had figured out that
I wanted to be on the edge,

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original, and that meant going
against the status quo.

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I decided to switch my practice

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over to being a painter, and
then I started making paintings,

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which really evolved out of the
sculpture.

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The reason they're painted on
the side is because, first,

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they're objects, and then
they're pictures of something.

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Later on, it was the early '90s,
and there was a big recession

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on, and the art magazines would
have artists write pieces,

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and we didn't get paid, and so I
started writing about my work,

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and when people would see an

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image and then read the writing,
they started to like my work.

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Then I started doing the titles,
writing pieces for catalogs,

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writing pieces for magazines,
and the writing practice and the

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art practice are really going
hand in hand now.

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Every piece of abstract art that
I make has a backstory,

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and now I started giving them these
fanciful titles that related to

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something that was going on
with me.

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So the titles are often like
a three-word poem that is a part of the piece.

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I do keep a diary, and I can

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look back and see what was going
on, and I like to do that.

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And actually, remembering and
then in the art expressing

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emotion is something that I like
to do.

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The titles help with that.

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The color helps.

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And then the music metaphor is

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something I think about when

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I try to put emotion into
abstract work.

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Scale does it.

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The relation of parts to the
whole piece give a feeling of

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feeling–loss, loneliness,
claustrophobia, agoraphobia,

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free, freedom, lifted spirit type of feeling,

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melancholy and
joy maybe in the same piece.

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and the titles help.

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Very post-modern here, mixing my
double greens.

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One thing that really
interests me is—and it comes

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out of Chinese and Japanese
painting—is where you have

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a number of different kinds of
space in the same painting.

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You have a kind of deep space,
and then you have something like

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right up on the surface.

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This painting that we were
painting on today has that.

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It has the converging lines
going off into space and then

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the drip coming down the face of
the painting, which is, like, flat.

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- Now the fake drip.

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So that there are two realities
going on in the same painting.

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Another thing that speaks to
that is these paintings that are

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on this double square shaped
canvas,

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and often I put a deep space kind of motif on a shaped
canvas like that, and then the

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two squares that are the empty
space make the wall be part of the painting.

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Of course, then you get real
space and then the fake space

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and then also the physical
object that's the canvas.

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So there you've got three kinds
of space in the same painting.

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The shaped canvas comes out of
my own thinking about geometry.

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Like, a lot of my figuring out
what to make time is spent by

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sort of doing some basic
counting and measuring and

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trying to figure out how big
different elements of a piece should be.

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This vanishing point painting
that I've made, which is called, "Two-Lane Blacktop" —

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I love it.

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It's one black thing with two
little lines on it.

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- I think that's it.

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- So let's see how that looks.

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I've probably been thinking
about it for four months, trying

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to figure out how to get that
just right, and I think I've got it.

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- Two-Lane Blacktop.

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And once I get that, I think

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I'll make about 12 of those
paintings.

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[laughs]

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These simple ideas become
obsessions, almost like a meditation.

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- Sit down here and think about
how fabulous that is.

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Maybe have to do a few little
touch-ups on it,

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but that's pretty much it.

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I take pictures and they're just
in the back of my mind.

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I don't really look at 'em when
I'm painting.

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Now lately, I've been making some
digital prints,

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which
I combine with etching.

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And you get the idea of the two
kinds of way of making images.

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And I always have used
a slideshow when I give artist talks.

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The slideshow involves using

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a lot of photographic imagery
with the painting images.

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I'm a very holy little Catholic
girl at about six, seven, eight years old,

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and what I wanted to
do was to be a martyr.

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And I would be in Rome in the
Colosseum, and the lions would

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come running out, and they'd get
me, and the audience at the

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Colosseum, the bad Romans that
were killing the Catholics,

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would be cheering,
and then I'd just go flying up

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straight to heaven.

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Crazy as the martyrdom fantasy

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is, it just made such a fabulous
story, and the way you flew up

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to Heaven was so fabulous.

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Diving was not like that.

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You didn't fly like that when
you jumped off a 15-foot tower.

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[laughs]

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You went down really fast.

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I loved the whole Catholic
culture as a kid.

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Growing up with those kinds of
stories has carried on into my life,

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the way I think and make
up things now.

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And the fact that an object of

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art feels like an icon in the
way icons were when I was little

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is really a true thing.

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Each thing almost works as an

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icon or maybe an ideograph to
say one idea which has resonance

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and makes you have thoughts
about other ideas.

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And even talking about, like,
say, the drip as an icon.

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Color can be thought about in an
iconographic way.

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I did do a painting based on the
Martyrdom of St. Sebastian.

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It's called "Rosebud."

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I have a tremendous love for the
spiritual part of life,

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and it's more ecumenical now.

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It's not so specific.

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My spiritual life is very
important to me.

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And I think the artworks
are icons.

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And what's great about an
artwork is that you can sit

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there and look at it and
meditate and think and make it

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and unmake it and remake it
one's own or anyone else's.

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This is the invisible painting,

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and I'm hoping that when it hangs on the wall,

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being just
these two slightly different colors of white,

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that it will
look like a beautiful, magical hole in the wall.

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Very bad to talk about it before
it's finished.

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I guess mostly the stories and
the images is probably the main

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way that this kind of thinking
about work relates to my childhood.

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An artwork can transport
a person in a soulful, rich way

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without having any fear of
punishment or hell or sin or

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any of those other good things.

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I am gonna leave that
Post-Modern drip there.

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