Viewing page 6 of 82

This transcription has been completed. Contact us with corrections.

6

Y: I don't know what their reasons for encouraging me were. Maybe it had to do with my somewhat negative attitudes about exhibition at that time. I always said "Oh, no," and I guess it was sort of like a joke that they would say, "Oh, yes."

G: (laughs) If some of the New York artists are very eagerly exhibitionistic you were kind of hiding your light under a bushel. Now you didn't bring anything from your earliest period as a professor there.

Y: No, I didn't.

G: It would be very interesting to see more of that. Can you describe a little bit some of the things you were doing?

Y: Let's see. Very abstract, colorful, active, lush. In a sense... I think that I kept thinking about my early environment at that time... somehow I kept wanting to evoke sensations of the tropics. I remember the first time I won a prize in a Chicago show, I did a painting called "Island Ritual" and it was very abstract and it had very rhythmic movements, lots of color. I guess it could be considered lush, sort of vegetal...

G: What year was that?

Y: It was in the early '60s.

G: I can go back and look up some of those catalogues.

Y: I think it was reproduced in Art News or something.

G: I can look it up. I have not done all your bibliography yet.

Y: And I did a lot of serigraphs that dealt with that sort of sensation of lushness...