(soft music) - I am one of those people that started drawing when I was before I can remember.

And my, my folks encouraged me.

They thought it was wonderful.

And that's, you know, that's a terrific thing for, for a kid to have his parents who encouraged them.

(soft music continues) All I knew about art was magazine illustration.

I mean, that's all I saw.

I didn't know anything about any other kind of art.

When I came to the art school, that was my goal, was to be an illustrator.

And I had the luck the first year to, to have as my painting teacher, Louis Buns, and Jack McLarty taught life drawing and Bill Gibbler taught printmaking.

They didn't persuade me to become an artist, but their example did.

And by the end of the first term, my goal had completely changed to wanting to be a fine artist.

There wasn't any particular reason to stay a full four years because I thought I had gotten what I needed out of the school in three years.

And by the end of that time, I wanted to go to New York and see what that experience was like.

That was considered the, the finishing school for artists at the time, since there was no degree, you didn't go on to a, a university and get a master's or something, you went to New York and got in the swim of it.

When I went to New York, was 1950, boy, what a time that was.

I was attending an etching workshop, Atelier 17, in the evenings, and looking for a part-time job, which I found in a, in a frame shop so I could make a living.

But after classes in the evening, we would, we would walk six blocks down to the Cedar Tavern, and that's, that's where De Kooning and Klein and, and Pollock, and all these guys were, were drinking every night.

(soft music continues) Even the best artists around were not making any money at art.

So it was a kind of a, almost like a religious vocation to become an artist.

You were resigned to the fact that you were never going to make any money at it or any fame.

I mean, there was none of that was in the cards in those days.

I had a lot of personal reservations about abstract expressionism in that I've still had a, a very strong inclination to do the figure.

And so I resisted becoming an abstractionist, but there was all kinds of wonderful stuff in the paid handling and an attitude toward painting that I absorbed.

And that became very important later, I think, (orchestral music) I guess I have a kind of renaissance artist attitude toward the figure in that I think the figure is so expressive in itself.

It's a complete vehicle for talking about everything, feelings and attitudes and everything that I want out of painting can come through the figure.

(orchestral music continues) For a, oh, a good 20 years or so, I've been working on a kind of series called Waiting for the Parade, which was also started from the idea of people waiting along a curbside.

It gave me a device for working with people and lining them up almost like a still life.

- [Interviewer] How many drawings like this might you do before you attack the canvas?

- Sometimes it's a very, very sketchy drawing.

When it's a very complete, like drawing like this, then it's just one drawing.

In many cases, it's not that complete.

And I just, I'd make a, a very rudimentary sort of sketch and then it becomes much more specific in the painting.

This was actually from a DVD I was watching, a movie, and in the movie was an angry crowd that was hooting at somebody, and the camera passed by them for a few seconds, but I thought it was very interesting as a subject matter.

(tense music) So I stopped the DVD and took photographs off the screen.

So then that becomes a-- - Your source material.

- The source for this, yeah.

(soft music) Photographs have a metamorphosis that happens when you take them from photographs into painting, at least the way I work with it.

But I find the camera more and more useful as source material.

When one gets into painting, there's a kind of a flow that takes place, you know, maybe after 15 minutes or something into it where you're, you're on a kind of automatic, I mean, you're doing it from all your experience, but you're not thinking everything out.

It's, it's going, it's just doing its thing and you're mixing and you're following it and directing it, but not, not as a director either.

If I'm on vacation somewhere and don't paint for a few weeks, I start wondering who I am in a sense until I get back to the studio and, and get back into it.

So there's that, that kind of mystical connection with the studio, I think I, I often think when I'm away from it that that the studio itself has a kind of, a kind of personality and it's saying, I wonder where George is.

Look at that.

Isn't that delicious?

God, I've made prints right along with painting ever since art school.

And so it's an important part of my thinking and my, just my creativity I guess.

And I find that I create differently with prints than I do with, with painting, because of the nature of the material and of the medium itself, it begins to dictate certain things that it wants.

(soft music) (soft music continues) And so I might make a print and then make a painting from the same theme of the same, even the same composition, but I'm not just copying it because I'm reinterpreting it because of changing it into another medium.

Sometimes I talk to, talk to someone who's just sort of taken up painting or, and likes it very much, and then they, they'll say to me, well, but I don't know whether I can sell this.

And I think, well, why worry about that?

You've already got a, you know, this other vocation.

And don't worry about selling it.

I mean, you want, you're doing it because you like doing it, that's enough.

And show it to your friends, give it away, whatever.

You know, the fact that it might sell has so little relationship to why you're doing it.

- [Interviewer] So then I have to ask, why do you paint?

- Well, probably for the same reason that I got interested in my first year in art school.

And that was, it had a meaning for me in, in what I was doing and a feedback maybe, and it ultimately has a lot to do with finding out about yourself, I think.

You know, who am I as a person?

Everyone needs to find that out about themselves.

Who are you?

Well, art is one way to really find that out.

(orchestral music) One of the real gratifications about being an artist is that if you do something that someone purchases and takes to their house, or even that a museum keeps, is the idea that a hundred years from now, someone is going to look at that and get one's point of view about something.

And if it means something to them, I'm making a connection with 'em.

And it's, it's quite mystical in a way because I'm going to be making a connection with people I've never met and who are not born yet.

And that's kind of a nice idea, isn't it?

(soft music) After 60 years of painting, I can't tell you exactly what art is.

I can't define it, and I can't even define it for myself.

But what I know about it is that it's tremendously important.

I think it's the most important thing in the world.

And that's, that's in including everything else.

The other things are, besides art, are just maintenance.

I mean, you're just maintaining yourself, your job, your nice car and your distractions of certain, certain kinds.

That's just, just getting by while you're alive.

But art, appreciating it and doing it, gives you a touch of the divine, I think in some way that I can't, I don't know what it is, I can't define it, but I know it's there.

And it's extremely important to human beings that there is such a thing as art.

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