Viewing page 17 of 48

This transcription has been completed. Contact us with corrections.

17

...it's very hard to say why I started to do cartooning.  I began again in 1960-61 to paint...cartoons ...still involved in a kind of abstract expressionist form of painting, using a ...humorous or animated...animal cartoons like Mickey Mouse and Bugs Bunny and things.  The paintings I don't think the painting were successful at all and I've destroyed most of those them paintings.  But in '61 I got the idea of trying, of doing one fairly straight where the...where the painterliness which had been in my abstract expressionist paintings was no longer part of it, the painting and the kind of texture that I would use would be the commercial texture of...half tone dots and flat printed areas.  I, when I did it I had no idea that anyone would be interested.  In fact, I, I really felt as though no one in the world would look at these because they, they were certainly humorous and I was serious about them as [ap] paintings, but certainly recognized the kind of ...oh, recognized how other people would see these works. A lot of people were very encouraging about it.  Allan Kaprow was very interested in them and George Segal liked them, Bob Watts came over and saw them, and various people who were living in New Jersey at the time I was doing these were interested in them.  And I was positive though that no [gl] gallery would want to see them,...possibly with the exception of Leo Costelli, and when I did take them there he was...very receptive to them.  I kind of doubt that anyone else would have been.  He had apparently also, or within a very short time was to see, (I'm not sure whose he saw first, it was all within a matter of weeks) he saw Andy Warhol's and Jim Rosenquist's work. does that answer....   Probably went too far into the