The following is an edited version of a conversation between Raimundo Figueroa and William Stover that took place in the special exhibition galleries of the Art Gallery of Ontario on August 30 and 31, 2011.

On view was Abstract Expressionist New York: Masterpieces from the Museum of Modern Art.  The questions are not included to allow the artists answers to have a wider resonance.

Look at this de Kooning painting. He painted on paper, then he laid the paper down on canvas. I find this interesting in terms of the discussion that surrounds painting today. There are a lot of contemporary artists, like Neo Rausch, who paint on paper and attach it to canvas. There have been discussions about his work and whether you call it a painting or a work on paper, but for de Kooning it was not an issue. It’s a painting. But for Neo Rausch it becomes an issue. I think this is due to the acceptance of the public or the art community in the case of de Kooning, Wifredo Lam and others as to how they worked. They called it painting. A painting is a painting, regardless of the surface. There are some artists who like to use the surface of the paper because it is more absorbent and there is less resistance. The canvas gives a lot of resistance to the paint; it is not like paper, which is friendlier in the ways the paint interacts with the surface. When you work with canvas you have these limitations, it is less absorbent, and you need to make the solid more liquid.  If you take for instance this Richard Pousette-Dart panting, it is very solid. There is no watery feeling to it. Even in the drippings. But if this were paper, it would have a more raking feeling to it and then the underlay would be immense. I think this why de Kooning chose to work on paper, and I think he even said this many times. When I think of paper and the relation it has to my creativity I only think of a finished work of art. I have on many occasions used paper as the support of my work due to the intrinsic properties of the paper. The collages on canvas are an example of what I am talking about. I think there is a misconception in the market where the belief is that work on canvas is more valuable than a work on paper, but I don’t agree. A work on paper is a work.  In the case of Jean-Michel Basquiat we are seeing more and more respect for the works on paper.  I mentioned Lam, his work The Jungle, for instance; that work was made on paper and later on attached to canvas. That was a process that was popular at the beginning of the 1950s and I think artists want to work on paper because it is easier to apply layer after layer, not that you can’t do this on canvas, but it requires more patience, I guess. I associate work on paper more with spontaneity. If you look at these Franz Kline paintings, they seem to be spontaneous but they are not. This has to do with the material. If they were done on paper, the brush would drip and give an Asian feeling to it. You know, how in Asian art through the use of Sumi ink, when making the same kind of movements and gestures, you see the drips, you feel the drips, but in Kline’s paintings you can see how intentionally he covered the dripping. His movements are very rigid, and in some cases, I feel there is a problem with the form because they bring your eyes to certain areas of the canvas and then the tension that exists in the work disappears; it is dissipated. There are certain forms in the analysis of a structure that if you think about the repetitive patterns or how you can cancel the corner of a rectangle to bring that tension to the center, those are decisions to be made by the artist. This is something I think about all of the time. How do I want the viewer to enter the work? How do I attract them? How do I make them closer to the work?  Where do I want people to look into my paintings? I think that has to do with the form. This changes with each painting.  Each painting has its own tension, and intention.

During the period of the work in this show, many of the artists called their paintings, Untitled, so they did not direct the viewer toward a particular concept. Because once you put a title on a painting you provoke the viewer to think about the work in a certain way. My work that is intentionally untitled is done so to allow the philosophical, existential and psychological questions that I have to be put out there without making the viewer ask my questions, but to enable them to develop questions of their own. The things that I am interested in, these big, universal questions, I believe are also of interest to many others. I take the questions, the conversations, and the dialogues that happen in culture and put them in painting to make people aware of matters that we all think about. I believe that our general concerns, wherever where we are from in the world, are all the same. That is why I use symbols in my work, they communicate to the greatest number of people. Symbols are signs, representations, emblems, or codes that almost anyone can recognize and understand. When I do use titles, I do so with the idea of provoking the spectator to see if they can use their imagination to conclude the story. I believe there always has to be room for the spectator to build the story together with the object. If not it would be too evident, too clear, too simple. And in a way it will be a big mistake in the process of creativity. You would not leave room for the spectators to enjoy and to become part of the process, because you have to remember, an object is not finished without a spectator. The viewer has to become part of the object and there has to be a reaction, either positive or negative. I have had both. People have gotten very angry and people have fallen in love when looking at my paintings. But this is all in their imagination. I am happy to see that it incites anger or a romantic situation, because I talk very frequently in my paintings about the human relationship.

For instance, I use phrases like “the kisses of your love,” or “joined by the mouth,” because everything that you bring out of your mouth is making it material.  If you say “I want,” this is becoming material. It’s a realization of what is in your mind. We have to be very careful of what we let out of our mouths, because when we throw it out into the universe, it gets together with other energies to attain what we want. And if it’s negative, it’s negative, if it’s positive, it’s positive. It’s going to happen, because you already opened the channel for this to happen. So this is a message I’m giving in my art.

The major concentration in my studies has been on the mind and the brain. How do they work?  How do we communicate? I have studied a lot of philosophy, as well as history and psychology. We go through life learning many subjects and how to become sophisticated in them. We recognize value, flavors, smells, literature, music and many other matters including insignificant ones. Yet we normally do not listen to our own minds and the emotions it dictates to us. In that sense, the selection of color in my work is not accidental. I work with a color palette that imparts the feeling of the emotion that I want in a particular work. How I portray an emotion is very important for me. Now we are standing in front of these Jackson Pollock paintings and for him, the activity of painting was portraying his emotions. I find it interesting that Pollock was an assistant to David Alfaro Siqueiros and the Mexican muralists were already practicing these dripping techniques that Pollock became so famous for. Is this where the idea came from? This brings me to something that I feel is important – there should be no divisions. Does it matter if an artist is from New York or from Mexico in terms of their work? We still have the tendency to talk about artists in terms of where they are from rather than so many other factors that are important for their work. I received a phone call from a curator a while back, who told me he was working on a Latin American show and he wanted to include masks and show primitive influences on contemporary paintings.  Why is this? It is very limiting. A mask can be Pollock’s Number 8.  It is a different kind of mask, but it is one. To me, it does not make sense to associate artists, writers, or anyone, with a particular place. In my case, because I have a Spanish name, I get associated with certain groups or places. This is something I have been fighting because I want people to see the work on its own terms, not through the lens of a certain culture. I am an artist, who happens to be American with Spanish roots. I am not a Spanish-American artist. Going back to emotions and colors, many artists from Leonardo da Vinci to Joseph Albers studied color – which colors vibrate more, which colors affect us in different ways and which colors you would use to portray certain emotions. Colors, like music, have properties and vibrations that can be measured. When we kiss someone we have an emotion. When we associate specific colors with particular emotions – red lips, red for passion, red paint – we do so because this is how it is structured in our society. It is something that we learn early on. And when we communicate, it is easier to do so through a way we already know; what has been established.  But if you break away from that and use yellow to represent passion, it would be totally new and unusual. But when you look at color itself and the purity of color you see that blue and yellow are the ones that vibrate the most. But we don’t use blue or yellow for passion, but they really should be the colors for passion. And when we talk about emotions, we talk about the heart.  This is just another part of the human body. We never say I love you with my brain. If you say that, it would be improper. We have adopted the heart to demonstrate an emotion. When you think about emotions, they are coming from an area of your mind, not from the heart. I am trying to break away from these conventional notions in my work. Through form, analysis and with creating tension when there seems to be no tension.

There is an eternal need to create. If you take, for instance, all the major sacred books, they all start with the process of creativity. The I-Ching; the first chapter, creativity. The Old Testament; the first chapter, creativity. The Bhagavad Gita; the first chapter, creativity. I could go on and on.  Creativity is the nature of the human being. It is the process by which we are ruled. Then comes talent. If one is responsive to it, you will discover that your talent will come to you naturally. I think we sometimes fail at this, because we are always in a hurry. And creativity has to have its own rhythm. If you can get connected with your superior mind, what Sigmund Freud calls the Subconscious and Carl Jung called the Collective Conscious, this is where creativity happens.  From the early stages of civilization, stimulants have been used to connect the inner mind with the universe. It is also done through meditation, yoga and other practices, but the question is how as artists do we achieve this? I believe in discipline. Discipline brings release from conventions and you become connected to the unconscious part of your brain. Think about when you learn how to ride a bicycle – after you learn to balance and learn how to pedal, you practice and practice and eventually you can jump on and start riding away without even thinking about it.  This is what discipline does. But there are limitations, which are the technical aspects of creativity. I believe in a formula like this – you think fully, you analyze what you have thought and you express it in the best way you know how.  But to arrive at a mind, that is totally free, you have to rid yourself of all the psychological and social concepts and aspects of society. If you work at it, there is no way you cannot get connected.  If you are not connected, you cannot achieve creativity. For me, painting is total freedom and there are no limits because creativity is chaotic.  It is the most chaotic process in the mind.

I think the most difficult thing to do as an artist is to find a language you like and are comfortable with and continue to explore it to the limits. When you read something like Shakespeare or even a more contemporary writer like Patrick Süskind, you see the intellectuality of the writer. But I believe that painting, and art in general is subjugated to writing. I believe that you have to have a sophisticated mind to read a painting.  Sophisticated in the sense that one needs to have the sensibility to confront a painting and read it. It is different when an interpreter comes and gives you a hand by talking about the painting, then the viewer looks at the painting through the interpreter’s eyes and not their own. But generally in society, we are not taught how to read paintings. We need interpreters because for many, symbolism and the ability to read symbols has died out. You need to have a more complete education to be able to read paintings. In the case of Basquiat, it is a language that is easier to understand in its rawness, emotion, and immediacy but it is very complex in the language itself and the depth of what he was portraying but at the same time, it attracts a larger audience. His symbols are understood by a larger number of people. It is naive and childlike in a way; it is like the way we all drew when we were young, and so it is attractive in that way. But it also addresses a lot of difficult issues in our society. It is work that in some cases are easy to live with because you can hang them on your wall and they will always talk to you. This makes me think about Walt Whitman and a poem that was inspired by watching a young boy swim. He is basically devouring this boy with his eyes, and he writes this down on paper, and society at the time does not understand or approve of these desires, but because of his wonderful way of using words, it became a popular poem. I think the same is true for Basquiat. He is portraying a difficult reality but because the language he uses is one we understand, we can live with his work. It is similar with my work. Because I am so involved with the intellect and these large questions, I have tried to make the work look spontaneous and open by using a language most can understand. This is why I have made monochrome paintings. To try and get away from everything, expect the one thing. From that one color, and how it evolves as the viewer looks at it. Even though a painting may be yellow, at the end, it is not yellow, but that is the whole idea behind it. It becomes a language that calls and attracts the viewer and invites them into the work. A number of art writers have said that one color paintings are difficult for the public to interpret, because activity in a painting brings engagement.

In looking at artists’ work, we talk about “mature” “development” “strong period” and when we go to school, we learn how to write letters, the basics of mathematics, and history, etc., but school is limited in helping the human being to understand their own brain. It is not part of the curriculum in our society. When you go to art school, you learn all these things about how to navigate the art world, but we do not pay attention to the inner mind that is provoking us to create. In my opinion paying attention to our inner mind is very important for every creator.  There is an emotional part to all of this. How do you portray sadness or happiness; all those simple, and not so simple things we live through? In my work, my drive is to show inner matters.

What I want to achieve is for my paintings to talk to the viewer’s themselves, without me or without an interpreter. For me, when a work of art stands by itself and no one has to explain it, that is a good painting. Whether people like it, or hate it, or even have an indifferent emotion toward it, the painting should stand on its own; in the sense that it portrays what emotion you selected it to portray. I saw an exhibition at the Prado in Madrid a few years ago which contrasted the work of Picasso with Velasquez and Goya works from the collection. In the show, you had the Velasquez, Las Meninas and a Picasso Las Meninas, one in front of the other. You can see that some artists use history to inspire their own work. They are engaged with the memory of what we know. As human beings we need associations with history and those associations give credibility to the new material, the new work. This new material needs a base of history to give it support. I find it totally unnecessary, but it makes art what it is.  I think is an unavoidable relationship.

I do believe that the art of the future is painting. Many curators think otherwise, promoting video art and installation art, and more ephemeral kinds of work, which, of course, I respect. But I believe painting will continue to have relevance forever. In the 1970s I was a performance artist. I did actions, dealt with smells, silence, and other things. I also assembled constructions of garbage, and in one piece I purchased the cups or cans that junkies on the street used to beg for money and made installations with them. Although performance is very engaging and people like it, I decided to shift my focus because all of this was ephemeral and I wanted to make objects that were permanent. I began to believe that painting had more to offer. It offers the portrait of an emotion that will live on forever. That was, and still is my desire. Whether the painting is abstract or figurative if there is a vibration, that work is going to live. If a painting is well done and has all these properties of vibration, it will continue vibrating forever. I don’t think museum walls are dead. We are in a museum now and these paintings, most from the 1950s, are vibrating.  This certainly continues today. Look at Brice Marden. He is a good painter. He knows what he is doing. You walk into the gallery and those paintings talk to you. Whether you like them or not, I am not talking about taste. I am not talking about the images or aesthetics, but his paintings were well constructed and they talk. They vibrate and the viewer is obliged to feel them. When you enter a room and you see a painting, you can say “I don’t like that,” but the work occupies a space and it vibrates.  Diana Ad Hadid, her drawings are alive as are Jenny Saville’s paintings. Elizabeth Peyton, too, has found a language that is not gimmicky and her little works vibrate. There is a huge spectrum of interesting work that resonates. Painting that communicates something, whether it is contemplation or an emotion, this has presence. I could not live with a Jenny Saville painting, but they do vibrate and the work is unavoidable.  Look at the number of people around us in these galleries. It tells you about the resonance these paintings have and they will continue to have and draw different generations to come and look at them and be inspired by them.  That is the power of painting.

Jacob Bronowski concludes in The Ascent of Man by Means of Natural Selection, that we are looking into another universe and that universe is the mind. He writes that the most important thing we are missing is the understanding of the mind, the energy of the mind.  It is all very abstract to us, but remember Freud made his discoveries in the late 1800s, already over 100 years ago, but still his work remains the basis for the study of the mind. His colleagues like Richard Wilhem and Carl Jung and even till recently Muriel James and Stephen Karman all say that eventually we will be able to communicate the energy of the mind. Even though the human is very evolved, we are still very primitive. Painting is the most sophisticated way of communicating that energy. That is why viewers contemplate paintings in silence, because the painting is making the noise. It is an artist’s responsibility to figure out how to explore this. My paintings come from the exercise of thinking and thinking and thinking and eventually they emerge and evolve. In the execution of my paintings, there is room for accident. But the challenge, in my case, is to make something look very spontaneous though I have been working and working on it. To make it look fresh and unplanned is a real challenge for me. That responsibility is also a challenge. As I always say, once you make a successful painting, the establishment wants you to make more of them. That is why you find many successful painters making unsuccessful paintings.

The use of the skull as a symbol is prevalent in many cultures. In Mexico, for instance, there are all these ceremonies for the dead which use the skull. In the history of art the skull has also been used by many cultures to symbolize the transience of life, and death. But when something dies, there is a mutation of energy that is going to revert back to life. I used the death symbol in my art, because for me, it is not death but life. Because the process of death or decay is a natural process through which things grow again; so death and new energies are attached to one another.  We are not taught this as children and are not aware of how important it is for us to understand this cycle.  We are kept away from it even to the point that people suffer so much because of the concept of loss – in relationships, in material objects, and in loosing someone. I had used the skull in works such as St Augustine Says (1969), and Mambru Se Fue a la Guerra, but stopped using it when it became a reactionary symbol in New York of 1980s. In this sense, my paintings are reflective of our society, yet they are about larger things. The ways my paintings are constructed and what is included in the paintings come from interactions with the world, and reaction to situations in the world. My Mia exhibition was a reaction to the war in the Middle East and the black and white paintings, although I brought them from Tao Tai Ching, they are a reaction to the current moment in our world. Anatomy of Love that includes many skulls, it’s a reaction to the use of the skull as just a death symbol. To make us understand that life and love are in continuous change and movements – it lives and it dies.

Although many believe that the process of creativity is a process of acting in disorder, for me, chaos is equal to order.  When looking at nature, a simple example of this is when a drop of water falls into a leaf, runs down the leaf and hits the ground where there are some spores and those spores are fecundated. This happens randomly. Nature didn’t say okay this drop has to fall here or there. There are millions of spores and maybe only one gets the drop of water on it, and that creates life. So…the chaos in the universe is ordered.  It is order in which the universe organizes itself randomly. We don’t usually think about it in this way, because we believe order and not randomness or chaos is what generates life and creativity.  I believe that creativity is attached to chaos. A lot of people think that artists create under crisis. I believe that artists create the best when they are under the process of having a discipline. It is like the athlete, you stretch your muscles, you run every day, you are ready. A dancer’s muscles have to be ready for a leap, or a violinist’s fingers need to be nimble. The relationship between the mind and the body has to be ready. In the same way I believe that the artist, the painter, has to be ready to execute, but with discipline. This discipline may include drawing, may include reading stories, and also includes exercising the mind and understanding the language that you want to portray in the work. Creativity is not a process that comes in one moment. I believe it’s a continuous process. I think it is necessary for the artist to continuously reinvent and to re-organize.  We continually move and change and this is very important to understanding.

If one has a special talent, and I believe there is such a thing as a special talent, whether it’s for hitting a ball with the racquet or playing the violin or drawing or painting, there comes a responsibility for the individual who has it to develop it. Then comes the sensibility of creating objects from the special talent that individual may have. We believe in our society that we can make artists, even though I believe that you can teach certain things to a person, skills like how to carve a piece of wood, or how to use a camera, etc., there is an inner natural talent that you cannot teach. You cannot teach a person to understand the balance of colors or the demands on the universe. Yes, you can explain this and there are theories about it, but for me, this is within the nature of the person.  That is why we use the word style, the style of A artist or B artist. The same exists in sports. When you look at a sport like tennis, you see the different tennis personalities. The way they hit the forehand, the way they bring the racquet back, the way they finish the shot, etc. It’s their style of playing.  Traditionally speaking, we have had in the past, the formation of schools, and rules. If we go back to the Renaissance or the Baroque, for instance, there were certain patterns that were accepted and they became rules. Then the masters taught rules. This is what you can do; this is what you cannot do. Students learned the rules, specific processes, and then many broke away from them. The creative mind is daring – “I’m going to challenge these rules and I’m going to do what my mind is telling me to do.”  This is a process of education. So yes, you can teach the rules, the methods, but in the end it is the chaotic mind of the artist that provokes their ideas into being.

An artist needs to evolve with time. You cannot remain doing the same thing you were doing ten or twenty years ago because society evolves; the whole world evolves. It is like going to see a concert – the singer comes on stage and the audience wants him to sing the same songs he was singing in the 1960s and 1970s, but he has a bunch of new compositions, but the audience does not want to hear those.  And this is the same story, I believe, with art. The audience has a memory. For example, look at Cy Twombly, who died earlier this year. When you talk to a specialist, they want a particular period or kind of painting, a 1960s blackboard painting. But the guy evolved, he did extraordinary things. In my point of view, if the artist is genuine, is working honestly, the work becomes better and better. That’s the way I see it. And in some cases, you can see it extremely clearly. I’ve been working in the arts since I was very little and I am now 54 years old. I started showing my work when I was 13 or 14 and in that time my work and my ideas have constantly evolved and become better.

The success factor is also something that one has to confront. This is why I believe it’s so important to have a certain privacy and time to create; otherwise artists are asked to make more and more of the same work.  Going back to my Mia series, they are 52 paintings related to love and the war. Mia is short for the names Maria, Isabella and Andrea, but at the same time it is also refers to “missing in action.” I portrayed this situation in two ways. Each work consisted of two panels – a frenetic painting and a selected flower – representing beauty and chaos. It was a very successful show. Sold out the night it opened, maybe before it opened. Later on, when I was making paintings that were very different, the dealer and other people asked me: “You’re not painting flowers?” And I said, “I have never painted flowers.” Because those are not flowers. They look like flowers, to some people, but they are an emotion related to the situation of the war in Iraq. Each painting had a poem on it, but most people saw flowers. They liked the flowers, they thought the flowers were very beautiful, but the flowers were carrying heaviness of the death happening there. I painted the flowers extremely beautiful because they needed to be that beautiful. I wanted them to carry that duality.  In a sense, all of my work carries that duality.  I want that. I have struggled to try and put the dualities that exist in life in my paintings; to share this with the public. There are stories inside the paintings and between the paintings. For instance, there is a painting called In a Battle Between Two Roses a Princess Has Died. Roses are symbols – a red rose means love, a white rose means purity and a pink means appreciation. All positive associations, but roses have thorns!

I believe in nature, I like to be in touch with nature.  In a way, that is portrayed in the work.  I am in touch with the basic energy of earth.  I am not a mystic person, but the energy that fresh air, sunlight and dirt contain is a source and is important for my work. I also question a lot of philosophical matters. Such as, what is beauty? Is beauty something that we create or resist? I think a lot of people have misinterpreted that, thinking that I am a searcher of beauty. I’m not searching for beauty; that’s not the point. I’m searching for answers. The point is the question. I am an artist who developed myself in the 1970s and 1980s and many of my colleagues of the time were reactionaries against beauty. My reaction was, ok, so what are you reacting to or against? Yes, it’s their reaction to society, but because of the different concepts in different cultures, the interpretations of those reactions could be totally different.  Take tattoos. I don’t have any tattoos, but I do use them in my paintings.  In some cultures tattoos are frowned upon, while in others you have to be tattooed.  Even in our culture you have a whole spectrum of how people are tattooing themselves – from primitive tattoos to Marine tattoos. My reaction to my time in New York, when I was living and working there, was not to be a punk, a rascal, but to have a reaction to that reaction.

We talk about “reading a painting.” There’s a tradition of reading painting in a certain way and I am interested in how viewers “read” a painting. When you look at my paintings, they look extremely simple visually, but they are intellectually complex. There are many symbols that I use that I pick up not only from written language but from the language of our ancestors. I use rectangles, triangles circles, boxes, numbers and letters. And the way the numbers are placed in some of the paintings have to do with astrology and numerology. I don’t talk too much about that because I believe that when you start explaining certain things of the universe, one has to be ready to receive these messages. If I talk about certain things and someone is not ready, then the conversation will go in a difficult direction – people will think I am weird or talking nonsense, but these are very deep things that can only be understood when one is receptive.  A lot of numerological formulas can be found in my paintings. They have to do with the alienation of planets and ancestral knowledge. So the titles of the paintings, the numbers and the symbols are related. For me, they are very deep philosophical paintings.  But I always try to make them very beautiful so people can live with them.

I try to make everything that I use in my work.  If I want to have photos on collage, what I do is take the photos and process them the way I want.  When you see my collages, it looks as if they are composed of found objects, but I spend periods of time making everything. I may find some old comics, so I copy them, draw them, cut them and then put them together. The erotic photos on my collages, I made them and then incorporated them into the work. I use the camera as an instrument. I don’t use it to take a photo like most people would.  I use it because I have a process in my mind.  I want the model to sit like this, then do this, etc., then I take the photo, develop it and use it for the collage. It’s not accidental. I’m thinking about it all the time. I use natural glue that I make. And I make all those inks used in the drawings. I also use coffee, made from different kinds of beans. And these materials last forever.  It’s easy to go and buy material. There is a lot of really good material out there that one can buy, but making everything that goes into my work makes the work unique in itself. There can also be symbolic reasons to use certain materials. I started making the coffee drawings when I was in New York and had a lack of resources. I made coffee, like anyone, to drink in the morning and looking at it I realized that it can also be used as a material for my work.  So I started studying it and experimenting with it. Something that started out of necessity has become a very good medium. It became something that evolved, and in the end, it’s interesting because the coffee is preventing the paper from getting fungus.

We need to study a lot because there are so many things that have been already discovered by other people. And we hit ourselves against the wall trying to discover new ways of communications or theories, but those things do exist already. One needs to have the knowledge and adapt it in order to have our language – we save time and energy and we are able to bring up front what we want to say in an easier way. But it takes time, and discipline. I believe in discipline. It would be very difficult for me to knock out paintings. I cannot work like that. Not physically or intellectually. It’s an involved process. I think about the work, and write about the work, and sleep with the work, and wake up with the work on my mind.  I look at what I have painted the day before, study it, think about it, and this takes time. Some of the paintings in which I confront three or four people, require a lot of thinking and study of the people that I’m confronting. One painting called Secret Dialogue with Krishnamurti, Gustav Mahler, and Sigmund Freud, is a visual testimony of the confrontation of three important thinkers with me. Each of these three is a great thinker with very complex theories and demanding ideas.  I have to try and get to know each of the three; their philosophies, their histories, etc. in order to confront them.  This is one painting and it is very complex and takes a long time for me to weave all those ideas together, confront them, lay them down on canvas and make that canvas come alive. In more recent paintings like the black and white series, they are also confrontational situations of existence. Visually they are very simple because the symbols used have grown into taking over the action of the whole canvas.  They are confrontations of achievement, of happiness, of knowledge, of understanding. This is the basic principle of Lao Tse who wrote the book Tao Te Ching.  He tried to understand the same process I’m trying to portray in the paintings.

In everybody’s mind, there is a memory on the ending of words, or the beginning of words. Freud studied this to the limit. And he wrote a book called The Psychopathology of Daily Life. This is a book everybody should read before they go on to Interpretation of Dreams or any other of his writings. Psychopathology of daily life is the memory that we have – our emotional memories. We may be talking and I say something, it could be just a little thing, like the word “haste.” and the end of the word is similar to “hate”. The ending of the word provokes a trigger in your memory, some emotion of the past and that’s what I’m trying to elicit with the titles of the paintings. Bring the person to that emotion, and see if they can understand it.  It is not necessarily the emotion that I am thinking when I’m painting the painting. One of the things we don’t totally understand is that that the mind is hermetic, totally hermetic. What I have in my mind, or what another has in their mind, nobody knows. And thoughts cannot kill, or damage anybody. It’s the energy that is produced with the word. When it remains in the mind it’s private. In my case it’s more evident because I put them on the canvas. I move myself to do that. One becomes nude when you are creating. Completely nude because painting is a private event. When you perform in front of an audience this is an interaction because it is meant to be done in front of people, when you are painting, it’s done alone. It’s just you, with your own turmoil, demons, angels, whatever is around you. Some of that aloneness or turmoil is then put down on the canvas. Even if the work is minimal, everything is there. The same way I believe in alchemy although the painting is white, it’s actually not white because the colors are symbols.

I believe that the beauty of my white paintings lies in when you look at them they start evolving and the viewer starts seeing the reds and the yellows and the blues and everything that is there – the layering. I achieve this out of necessity, because I have the need to put down one layer, then another layer, and another layer and not to make them flat. This is something that I have a need to do, to create the depth in the paintings; to create three-dimensionality. Remember painting is a two-dimensional object. It’s not a sculpture that you can move around and look at from different sides, so one needs to keep that in mind and create the dimensions in the picture plane. You can create an illusion of dimension by creating perspective, but also through the layering paint and having the colors interact with each other so when finished, you have an object that looks three-dimensional, although it has just two dimensions. I like the idea of creating an object that has that energy. And it doesn’t have to have anything to do with the size, because you can make a small painting of one foot square that carries the energy of a ten foot square painting. That is the challenge. To create an object that has energy, regardless of the size. Sometimes I make little paintings and they occupy the room. I also like to make the paintings glow. To do that, I paint the top edge of the canvas so when the light hits it, a glow is created. The luminescence of that particular color occupies the space, and it looks like it has an aura. This is most noticeable in a proper installation with the proper lighting. The whole idea is to make an object that has its own light. It is very subtle, but important. That’s why my work is not something that I can crank out. The seeming simplicity of them overtakes the real technicality of them, and the details within them. It is like listening to Mozart’s late quartets, the Hayden quartets or compositions like that, which are really technically difficult to perform. But when they are played properly they sound like child music, very simple, and that’s the beauty of it. Or when you go to the ballet, and you see a brilliant ballet dancer performing, and everything looks effortless – it looks like she’s floating in the air.  That’s the beauty of it. That is what I try to achieve in my painting.

I feel that there should be something called the “School of New York of 1980s.” Maybe we need someone to organize this in a way to understand it more clearly, but there were a group of painters who influenced each other in numerous ways – the conversations, the market, the relationships. I was part of that time and as good as much of it was, I had to leave. I needed to be in a more secluded place, so I could think and grow. Staying in New York would have stopped me from evolving the way I have. Some people believe I lost by leaving New York. Because I was showing with galleries and artists who became very well-known, they think I lost my career. But I didn’t because I had the opportunity to show in some major exhibitions around the world and have my work seen by different audiences in different contexts.  To me, that’s more important than having a specific person selling my work. On the contrary. I’ve been the problem because I want to take my time and do what I need to do and have my poetry, so to speak, in the paintings, and that takes time. That is what I needed; time to not be in a hurry. For a period of time I preferred to do museum shows only, not commercial galleries. Even 10 years ago I wanted to present my work without having a commercial attachment to it. But, the reality is that one has to live and pay the rent and water and electricity and all that. Still the same, having an environment where the spectator can go freely without having any indication of commercial relationships is the ideal situation to enjoy the work. Where a person can stand in front of a work that’s talking to them and nobody is telling them to buy this painting. That’s what I have always wanted. So in the last years I’ve been doing shows in spaces that I find, such as an old church, or an old barn; places where people can go and there is no relation to a commercial thing. It gives people a different context in which to place the work, and a different context in which to think about it. This is why museum shows are important. People can go and enjoy the paintings over and over again and they have a relationship with the work.  Museums are a much better place to see the art. That’s my point of view. Shall we go?