[ MARY HEILMANN ] I always wanted a lot of attention.
I had taken ballet lessons as a child.
I wanted to be a famous ballerina doing Swan Lake.
I wanted everyone looking at me.
Then I wanted to be spinning, doing somersaults off the diving tower in Los Angeles.
And people look at you when you do that.
When I told my mother I wanted
to be an artist, she said, "You'll starve in a garret."
And in my mind, I thought, "Yes,
that's exactly what I wanted."
It turns out that it was really a mission I was on, and it was
just about the only thing I thought about: doing art.
While I was at San Francisco State, studying education,
I started doing ceramics.
So I'm doing my English, my literature, my writing,
And then started doing pottery, and I was very good at that.
In Southern California in the early '60s, big stuff was
happening in ceramics.
So I went up to Berkeley to graduate school, and then we're
doing sort of an abstract expressionist ceramic sculpture,
huge scale, tremendous amount of
craft involved in making these
things and firing them and glazing them.
Then I get to know Bruce Nauman, who's also in school at the same
time up at Davis, and the rest is history.
The teachers in the school hated the sculpture I made.
They almost kicked me out.
So then I went up to Davis to
work with William Wiley, who was Bruce's teacher, and then the
three of us spent time together talking about ideas, and that's
a really important part of my life.
It was just wonderful.
In the beginning, the art enterprise was doing something
important, beautiful, sort of all by yourself.
As I got into it and matured, I saw that the most important
thing about doing artwork was communicating and having
something like a conversation through the work.
I thought about making pieces
partly for their formal values but also very much for the kind
of a response I would get.
And often, the response that
I wanted was one of antagonism.
I wanted to cause trouble.
And that caused me trouble in graduate school, because by that
time, I had figured out that I wanted to be on the edge,
original, and that meant going against the status quo.
I decided to switch my practice
over to being a painter, and then I started making paintings,
which really evolved out of the sculpture.
The reason they're painted on the side is because, first,
they're objects, and then they're pictures of something.
Later on, it was the early '90s, and there was a big recession
on, and the art magazines would have artists write pieces,
and we didn't get paid, and so I started writing about my work,
and when people would see an
image and then read the writing, they started to like my work.
Then I started doing the titles, writing pieces for catalogs,
writing pieces for magazines, and the writing practice and the
art practice are really going hand in hand now.
Every piece of abstract art that I make has a backstory,
and now I started giving them these fanciful titles that related to
something that was going on with me.
So the titles are often like a three-word poem that is a part of the piece.
I do keep a diary, and I can
look back and see what was going on, and I like to do that.
And actually, remembering and then in the art expressing
emotion is something that I like to do.
The titles help with that.
The color helps.
And then the music metaphor is
something I think about when
I try to put emotion into abstract work.
Scale does it.
The relation of parts to the whole piece give a feeling of
feeling–loss, loneliness, claustrophobia, agoraphobia,
free, freedom, lifted spirit type of feeling,
melancholy and joy maybe in the same piece.
and the titles help.
Very post-modern here, mixing my double greens.
One thing that really interests me is—and it comes
out of Chinese and Japanese painting—is where you have
a number of different kinds of space in the same painting.
You have a kind of deep space, and then you have something like
right up on the surface.
This painting that we were painting on today has that.
It has the converging lines going off into space and then
the drip coming down the face of the painting, which is, like, flat.
- Now the fake drip.
So that there are two realities going on in the same painting.
Another thing that speaks to that is these paintings that are
on this double square shaped canvas,
and often I put a deep space kind of motif on a shaped canvas like that, and then the
two squares that are the empty space make the wall be part of the painting.
Of course, then you get real space and then the fake space
and then also the physical object that's the canvas.
So there you've got three kinds of space in the same painting.
The shaped canvas comes out of my own thinking about geometry.
Like, a lot of my figuring out what to make time is spent by
sort of doing some basic counting and measuring and
trying to figure out how big different elements of a piece should be.
This vanishing point painting that I've made, which is called, "Two-Lane Blacktop" —
I love it.
It's one black thing with two little lines on it.
- I think that's it.
- So let's see how that looks.
I've probably been thinking about it for four months, trying
to figure out how to get that just right, and I think I've got it.
- Two-Lane Blacktop.
And once I get that, I think
I'll make about 12 of those paintings.
[laughs]
These simple ideas become obsessions, almost like a meditation.
- Sit down here and think about how fabulous that is.
Maybe have to do a few little touch-ups on it,
but that's pretty much it.
I take pictures and they're just in the back of my mind.
I don't really look at 'em when I'm painting.
Now lately, I've been making some digital prints,
which I combine with etching.
And you get the idea of the two kinds of way of making images.
And I always have used a slideshow when I give artist talks.
The slideshow involves using
a lot of photographic imagery with the painting images.
I'm a very holy little Catholic girl at about six, seven, eight years old,
and what I wanted to do was to be a martyr.
And I would be in Rome in the Colosseum, and the lions would
come running out, and they'd get me, and the audience at the
Colosseum, the bad Romans that were killing the Catholics,
would be cheering, and then I'd just go flying up
straight to heaven.
Crazy as the martyrdom fantasy
is, it just made such a fabulous story, and the way you flew up
to Heaven was so fabulous.
Diving was not like that.
You didn't fly like that when you jumped off a 15-foot tower.
[laughs]
You went down really fast.
I loved the whole Catholic culture as a kid.
Growing up with those kinds of stories has carried on into my life,
the way I think and make up things now.
And the fact that an object of
art feels like an icon in the way icons were when I was little
is really a true thing.
Each thing almost works as an
icon or maybe an ideograph to say one idea which has resonance
and makes you have thoughts about other ideas.
And even talking about, like, say, the drip as an icon.
Color can be thought about in an iconographic way.
I did do a painting based on the Martyrdom of St. Sebastian.
It's called "Rosebud."
I have a tremendous love for the spiritual part of life,
and it's more ecumenical now.
It's not so specific.
My spiritual life is very important to me.
And I think the artworks are icons.
And what's great about an artwork is that you can sit
there and look at it and meditate and think and make it
and unmake it and remake it one's own or anyone else's.
This is the invisible painting,
and I'm hoping that when it hangs on the wall,
being just these two slightly different colors of white,
that it will look like a beautiful, magical hole in the wall.
Very bad to talk about it before it's finished.
I guess mostly the stories and the images is probably the main
way that this kind of thinking about work relates to my childhood.
An artwork can transport a person in a soulful, rich way
without having any fear of punishment or hell or sin or
any of those other good things.
I am gonna leave that Post-Modern drip there.
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