Vija Celmins in "Time" - Season 2 - "Art in the Twenty-First Century" | Art21

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.