Paint a shaped, colorful canvas with Elizabeth Murray | Art21

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.