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THE EAST HAMPTON STAR, EAST HAMPTON, N.Y., AUGUST 21, 1980

From The Studio
Phyllis Braff


Most would agree that there is considerable uncertainty for an artist during the process of first creating - since the challenge is really to see just what can be accomplished. With time, it is possible to assess what ideas meant in a career. What opened new thoughts, new steps, new directions, and what suggested additional uses for earlier experiments.

Such evaluations generate confidence in the sequence of decisions. They can also clarify relative significance and put developments in perspective for the public.

Lee Kramer is particularly articulate about her work, and on the occasion of her exhibition at the Tower Gallery, Southampton (through Aug. 29, and intended to be an adjunct to "Seventeen Abstract Artists of East Hampton: The Pollock Years 1946-56" at the Parrish Art Museum), she discussed these paintings from the '60s. Inevitably, the past became inseparable from the present. She is keenly aware of the continuity in her work.

L.K.: I don't really abandon one approach for another. "Adding-on" is closer to the way I think of new experiments. I will often go back to something and explore it in greater depth.

P.B.: This would be true then of the two 1965 "all-over" paintings now at the Tower Gallery -- works in which the dynamic surface tension pushes equally to all extremities?

L.K.: Yes. There would be a continuing link here with the "little image" paintings done much earlier. Many things are going on in my work, and these can be expanded infinitely. I feel it is an art of expansion and growth.

P.B.: The Gallery is showing a number of gouache paintings that range from 1932 to 1970. We saw the large, monumental  oils from 1959 to '62 at the Pace Gallery a year ago. How do the work periods relate?

L.K.: The work will go in cycles, with a period when I'm just using oil, or just using gouache. I tried acrylics and didn't like it at all. Gene Bare said in the catalogue for my exhibit at the Corcoran (1975) that I "tend to work in clusters." This is quite true.

P.B.: In the sense of "campaigns?"

L.K.: Yes. I am stimulated when I get something going, and want to push the medium as far as I can push it.

P.B.: Perhaps the pieces from the "Water" series now installed at the Tower would be good examples.

L.K.: This was a series using Douglas Howell papers. It took courage to take the gouache and bathe it. They were experiments in color and a tough paper was needed for what I wanted to try. The monotone is something I tend to do a lot. With the water dipping technique I could get great varieties - and effects that would hold my interest and that of an observer too. You might say I was pushing, with the fixed points just the gouache and the paper.

P.B.: "Seed," from the same year, 1969, shows swirling, boundless forms in thick paint.

L.K.: I would try one pigment technique, then the opposite -- there was such excitement with the paper, the pigment reaction, and my own.

P.B.: You associate definite mental states, then, with the inspiration?

L.K.: I become stimulated by the out-pouring, and keep reaching for different effects. There is a desire to see what will happen.

P.B.: It would seem that you have to