Mary Heilmann in "Fantasy" - Season 5 - "Art in the Twenty-First Century" | Art21

[ 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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