Viewing page 5 of 10

This transcription has been completed. Contact us with corrections.

5

EV I wanted to ask you something about what [[strikethrough]] you [[/strikethrough]] is said here and see whether you feel the same way. "On one level the introduction.....(quote from book) ....with newspaper". Now this is in the past and I know you did a lot of experimenting in the past but are you doing any of this now. There were some drawings that you did with dry pigments and something else, I've forgotten what it is you liked, and they were really very beautiful, and that was experimenting what was that liquid you were using..oh! Tintex and dry powder and something else, what was the third.

JB Well I don't remember the dry powder although I have used but you're not speaking of the same series are you. I think that just had a dry look. They came out quite well. They had a peculiar quality of doing what paint shouldn't do ... traditionally which is to bleed through, as you apply something over it, if you applied white over the tintex certain colors would bleed through, but nevertheless it became a beautiful change in the grey which was desirable. So those things can happen. I think the modern painters have been attacked by restoreres very harshly because they have given the restorers a terrible time, the paintings haven't lasted the way they like them to last. But it should be apparent to the restorers and everyone else that that those paintings would never have been done if those qualities hadn't been _______the artist hadn't reacted to an impulse to do something when he had the impulse because if you're painting and picking up your paints and things, closing the jars and it's getting dark, then you have anidea that's terrific you haven't got time to do all those things and reset your paints you just go and do something you have to if you want to act you know because painting is being able to act at a certain time when the impulse and the intuition is there, and you have to be careful because if you're looking at a painting and if you're not careful and you have an idea you want to try something, it's a flash of something really happy if you're not careful by the time you go and mix your paint if you mix it too carefully by the time you'ver got the things you forgot what it is completely. It is that ________. It may be a very important intuition to you, a very important change in the canvas but you haven't the slightest idea what part of the canvas you were thinking about [[strikethrough]] either [[/strikethrough]] even. So I retain that part, I have to you know [[strikethrough]] whati [[/strikethrough]] which is part of the thing we were talking about you know.

EV Experimenting, and you're still continuing to experiment in various things.

JK That almost like giving the painting a means of expression. I think that's what you're saying. It's again the identity and the painting is taking over and you're the mechanic that is feeding it the material, but the materials are working for themselves.

JB I feel that very importantly. I think that's one of the things. I don't know if most painters feel that way, I think a good many do, I think most people have to really, but I shouldn't speak for other people but I do. I just ran across a Kurt Wanikin book, which I told him, I feel very strongly about it, I just put the first strokes on the canvas and it's up to the canvas to do at least half the rest of the work in it. And I think it is true that you have to feel that the canvas does have an ego that is at least as important as yours. You can't violate it, you have to be sympathetic with it, you have to take its suggestions you have to treat it like a real thing, you know like a real person, like a real entity unless you do you kill it of course. If you force it, or you're too wilful you force the style of it, you force it into something that has nothing to do with you and so it has nothing to do with itself either. A very strange situation I believe, but I do agree with you that a painting does paint itself. Insists on itself.

JK It's a syntax for painting. Picasso did that. He worked with the language of painting rather than the forms.

JB Yes I think so. He let it develope itself. I don't know any other way to paint, but I don't know any-other way to live fruitfully, than to cooperate with circumstance and and with the environment and [[strikethrough]] with [[/strikethrough]] be frustrated by it, like and let it act also