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This is a transscription of a lecture that was given at the Skowhegan School of Painting & Sculpture, an artist's residency program in Skowhegan, Maine (www.skowheganart.org). It is part of an Archive of lectures recorded from 1952 to the present, which are arrival in audio form on CD at this institution. It is important to note that most of these lectures incorporated visuals, which are not available. However, the Skowhegan School of Painting & Sculpture does have a limited number of slides from a selection of lectures in the Archive. You may contact Skowhegan to find out if they exist for a specific lecture.

These lectures are not edited. Please be advised that there will be typos, misspellings and occasional "breaks" in the audio. It would be prudent to listen to the audio to help determine the lecture's intent. You must obtain permission from the artists or their representative to publish any material contained herrein. The contact information is available from the institution.

SKOWHEGAN SCHOOL
OF PAINTING & SCULPTURE
Skowhegan, Maine

Lecture by Roy DeForest
1985

RD: Here you see two sisters, they attend an Eastern school, Wellesley College, and they're majoring in mathmematics and I'm trying to develop a metaphor for their more intimate thoughts. [laughter]

OK. Now I'm introducing a series of drawing known as the "Girls School Drawings." These young ladies attend a Midwestern girls finishing school, and of course they're taking their summer vacation in Norway. They're taking a local cruise boat, they've been up to look at some of the northern fjords. They're about home, and the captain is telling them that they'll arrive in Oslo at 7:30 in the evening, and of course they're thunking about the ball which is about 10:30 that evening at the American ambassador's residence. And of course the lengthy Arctic sun is slowly setting and it's a beautiful day. Serveral years later the girls leave Council Bluffs Iowa, and they're flying at about 625 miles an hout over the vast white waste of Greenland. The captain says young ladies, in two and a half hours we'll be at Orly Airport, and they're all a flutter, they've never seen Paris before. The idea here is that drawing is in a sense like a diagram, or a chart. I thunk I perhaps in some of these drawing still influenced by quadratic equations; you set up a kind of logic, and many of the drawings in Scientific American Magazine influenced. The idea of charts and musical scales and so forth, I attempt to give the plane speed [laughter].

Next drawing. The young ladies that left Council Bluff and they're up in Chicago. Peculiarly enough, this drawing is from a show in Chicago and the man I met that brought the drawing was at that time a major stock holder in checker cab company.

Against we have some of the girls school ladies, and they're out for a sail on Lake Machigan. My former Department Chairmann owns this drawing, which I think is very nice. OK, here of course this drawing is self evident. The girls have left Juarez Mexuci and they're on their way to Mexico City. In those days, this happened a few years ago, people took buses