| ART:21: |
I’m curious
about this old painting you have in the studio.
Have you been thinking about its qualities in terms of what
you’re working on now?
|
| CELMINS: |
Well I did this painting
in about 1965. I was going to do a show so I had it out and
somebody was writing something. I actually took it out about
a month ago to show this person from London an early work.
I think I painted this in the middle of the Vietnam War. I
was sort of remembering the planes when I was in Europe myself
in 1944, just a small child. I remembered the airplanes. I’d
never seen one of course but I heard them, you know? They
were this sound. There was something thrilling about it. I
always liked airplanes. And then, of course frightening. I’d
seen them in World War II and I painted it during the Vietnam
War. We have another war now. It’s sort of like an image
of a war machine image. It’s quite beautiful in some
ways and kind of a dramatic image. It came out of me painting
objects, single objects on the still life, and then I sort
of shifted, like I tend to do every now and then, I shifted
to painting objects that were found in photographs that were
no longer objects now but machines. Mostly airplanes. I think
of them as sort of a still life’s still.
What’s kind of amazing about this painting right here
now is that my recent work is so more intellectually mangled.
There’s something more intellectual in a way with a more
of a pressure of the mind on them. They’re so flat and
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 different objects.
Things that turned on, like my hotplate and the lamps. Things
that I had...pretty much everything I had in the studio. Then
I started painting images of little clippings and this is
one of them. So I liked the painting. I’m trying to see
whether it can hold up to my having had maybe thirty five
years of painting after it. I still like it...I don’t
know...maybe I like it. It still seems like a pretty strong
painting.
|
| ART:21: |
I’m interested
in the fact that you held onto it for so long. That you didn’t
let anyone snatch it away.
|
| CELMINS: |
Well I saw that some
people were beginning to buy these works and thank goodness
nobody wanted this one by the time I came around to valuing
it myself a little bit. I had a habit of painting and throwing
work away because I thought that the painting part was where
I learned things and went through things and I didn’t
pay that much attention to the painting afterwards sometimes.
I would throw away a lot of work and I kept this one, so that’s
nice. What can I say? I mean one of the things that it has
is that strange quality of being kind of flatish and also
illusionistic. Of course it’s more illusionistic than
the work I do now.
|
| ART:21: |
They both see to
have a complete stillness.
|
| CELMINS: |
One of the things
that I guess is sort of interesting is that the airplane is
moving of course, and is up in the air, and yet it has this
certain very still quality. Of course I think stillness is
one of the pleasures of painting. That it’s a surface
that doesn’t move and that is still.
|
| ART:21: |
What about time?
Your work seems to have something about time or timelessness.
|
| CELMINS: |
I don’t know.
I really can’t tell you about that. I don’t try
for things like this. Sometimes now that I’ve reflected
back on my work I see some of that in it, but it’s a
quality that seems to be maybe because the paintings are so
thoroughly realized. That’s not something that I ever
think about. |
| ART:21: |
In the making of
the paintings—the kind of brushes, the kind of concentration
and the amount of time it takes and the sanding—to me
it all has a quality of meditation. Is there something about
that that you like?
|
| CELMINS: |
Well I think I like
the reality of preparing the canvas. I like to make that reality
really real. I like the image coming and going. I like to
sand the image off and have it come again. I guess it’s
a kind of a futile attempt to put something in there that
is sort of dense. Maybe you could say there was time. It’s
certainly a record of time spent on one small surface, sort
of shaping it over and over in slightly different ways, different
days. In a way it’s a kind of composing without composing.
That’s what I can think of saying about it.
|
| ART:21: |
Do you think having
the airplane painting in the studio influences what you’re
doing now? You made art as a child...
|
| CELMINS: |
I did a lot of drawing
of course. You know we all did drawing, that’s how it
started. You know you’re little, you start drawing. Just
keep drawing. It sort of makes a certain kind of life. I guess
drawing and reading, I used to read a lot. I made a sort of
world. Read a lot, draw a lot, that’s what I used to
do.
|
| ART:21: |
Did you parents encourage
you?
|
| CELMINS: |
No, they did not.
I did it in spite of my parents. They were busy working. They
worked very hard and they didn’t pay any attention to
me. I mean they didn’t say stop drawing, they didn’t
say start drawing. They left me alone, you know, it was the
old fashioned way. They didn’t pay any attention to it.
I must have just gravitated that way.
I remember once though of asking my mother to draw a flower
for me when I was maybe about seven in the kitchen. This was
in Germany. What was so wonderful is I thought that she could
do something that was really magical. And she drew this little
pansy, which I’ve now planted around. I sort of like
the pansy, it makes me remember my mother. And she was not
a draftsman but she drew this little pansy, you know, two
little ears and one down and then a little face. Like pansies
have a little face. I thought it was the greatest thing I’d
ever seen, I loved it. I mean who knows, maybe somehow I thought
to myself I’m going to be able to do this sometime. But
I didn’t want to do it, I wanted her to do it. And my
sister I think also drew. And my father also drew. We just
did whatever, he drew plans for houses and he built houses
and did all that stuff. Nobody every talked about anything
like that and we just left each other alone.
|
| ART:21: |
Were there people
along the way who encouraged you?
|
| CELMINS: |
Oh yeah, when I went
to school in the United States I really couldn’t speak
English. And I couldn’t speak German either... But I
didn’t go to German school, I went to Latvian school.
I started drawing in Latvian school, but I don’t think
they really encouraged drawing. I think they encouraged drawing
and creativity much more here. They have a lot of rules about
what children should do in Europe, if I remember correctly.
I used to have to stay after school all the time. I was testing
those rules. I sometimes used to stay till the night classes
came in. And they’d say what are you doing there? You
had to face the wall you know. And I had done something...like
who knows what I did, throw things.
In America I used to draw all the time because I couldn’t
really understand what they were talking about. So I used
to draw things and then teachers were always encouraging me.
But I guess that was something, I think teachers encouraged
me to draw and paint and I suppose that was something, because
we didn’t have the habit of doing that in our house,
encouraging each other to do things like that.
|
| ART:21: |
And art school?
|
| CELMINS: |
Yeah, and then gong
to art school, I mean it turned out that maybe I had some
gifts in that area, so I had a lot of encouragement, but I
was also very rebellious and inward. I don’t know how
to talk about it you know. Something I suppose that many artists
felt. Sort of outside of society a little bit. Then when you
go to art school you feel like maybe you’ve found some
place where you can feel a little better.
|
| ART:21: |
When you could speak
English?
|
| CELMINS: |
Let me see, I came
when I was nine so probably a couple of years later. I mean
I don’t express myself well, I never judged myself that
way. I think I could speak English, I played with kids. When
I came they put me in the fourth grade. I think by the sixth
grade I was trucking right along.
|
| ART:21: |
Are there visual
things that inspired you early on?
|
| CELMINS: |
Let’s see. I
think I remember there was a picture of the opera house in
my house in Latvia. And when I was about twelve I had a photograph
of it on the wall and I did a copy of it.
|
| ART:21: |
Is there an early
painting that affected you?
|
| CELMINS: |
No. I was sort of
awed and scared of museums. It takes a long time to learn
how to look at paintings. I didn’t know how to look at
paintings. And it took a long time to learn how to sort of
figure out what it was about and to see them. I don’t
remember one painting that really totally knocked me over
until I went to Europe and I saw the Giotto chapel in Padua.
That really knocked me over. Maybe all that glorious blue
or something. And just those little compartments with these
extraordinary scenes in it. It was really a great work. I
got turned on by a lot of art then.
Before that when I was already in art school, but very early,
what did I draw? You know I drew things that girls draw you
know. I used to draw movie star pictures out of movie magazines.
I used to draw horses, heads, and faces. I tried the really
amateur stuff. Dopey kind of stuff that children do. I guess
a lot of kids now draw comics; I never really drew comics.
I don’t know why—I love comics. I think I learned
English from comics, looking at comics. I used to look at
Nancy. She didn’t speak much, did she? Was it Tubby and
Nancy? Or Lucy? Lucy had the head like a bean, remember? And
Nancy had the hair, the round head with the little spikes
in it. |
