While living and working with artists for over three decades, it has been my privilege to interview many to further understand the communicative dialogue that exists between an artist and their intended audience. In capturing the voice of the art/picture as a written icon, I have pursued my interest in dialoguing with artists through publishing this magazine and related materials—books, catalogs, etc. Seeking to see and experience the voice behind the art, I desired to put into words the special flow of intent of the artist. I lent interpretations to their visuals as a translator of the artistic vision of those I spoke with through the common denominator of words. Not to critique the artist’s mind-set, but to weave into an easily understandable language the ideas contained in the common thread of creativity.
As a student and young artist, I learned to employ the techniques of color and composition to convey an intended message; to go beyond the visual statement and develop a discourse in the language of dreamscape and the keys to understanding the commonality of the basic visuals present to forge a dialogue between artist and audience. I needed to know what the artist was saying, not only what I saw. I already knew that the artist was presenting the extrapolation of a mood or a suggested vision through their employment in the delivery of imagery. You can see The Last Supper painted by twenty different stylists. A critic can debate compositional aspects of quality in describing each version and each picture will be different as the artist employs the lens of perspective and focus toward the end goal of their vision.
If this were not the case, artists would not have the impetus to offer a sustained dialogue through their work. If there were no philosophical need for expression, there would be no time spent to learn the skills required to produce such coherency. It is the internal view struggling to reach the outside that defines the artistic message in all artists.
Learning to dialogue with each individual has been an enduring effort on my behalf to understand the differences of the iconographic representation of the internal imagery within each of us. Color and compositional values become a spoken langue in which I could hear the inflections of voice. I saw that if the images of the art could be decoded in this way, the language of universal iconographic communication would be apparent for deployment universally.
Why did Robert Indiana use the word LOVE to communicate so much more than just “I love you?” How and why was this icon so successful in communicating the artist’s intent? What makes the universal value of the symbolic stream of consciousness of the viewer unite with simple genius of statement so it can take on so many aspected individual significant messages? I believe the definition is found in the term simile. An artist synthesizes the subliminal message of the moment, then delivers this message. It is the delivery of the intended space seen in universal terms and then communicated as the transmission as an experience to be seen individually by all as something to which they can relate.
Through my interviews and exposure to internationally known artists such as Will Barnet, Louise Nevelson, Richard Pousette-Dart, Mikhail Chemiakin, Alfred Van Loen, Erté, Keith Haring, Kenny Scharf, Mark Kostabi, Elaine de Kooning, Esteban Vicente, James Rizzi, Howard Berhens, Orlando Agudelo-Botero, Ting Shao Kuang and Hans Van De Bovenkamp (among many others), I began to notice the similarities that existed in their creative approaches. Among the many celebrity artists I interviewed were Count Basie, Kim Simmond, Billy Dee Williams, Tony Curtis and Carlos Santana. I noticed they all had an approach that was in common to one another. Whether they were realists, abstract expressionists, painters, sculptors, or multi-talented artists, in each interview I noticed that they were speaking in the same language—that of the visual metaphor. They just applied a myriad of complex and colorful artistic arrangements to make a composition for their particular point of view.
Starting in the mid to late nineteen seventies, I encountered Romare Bearden, Sri Chinmoy, and Francoise Gilot. Every artist I have ever spoken with has had to sacrifice something to get to where they wanted to be. Most have overcome tremendous barriers and hardship to their success. Poverty seemed to dominate the early part of their careers. A good deal of colorful stories of various debaucheries is always within the caches of their dialogue.
I learned that artists known or not so well-known only paint if they cannot do anything else. All would have chosen an easier avenue for making their way in the world if they could have. Each expressed this common thread of their personal outlook. After a while, I began to ask “Why an artist painted.” Some of the answers will be listed below.
Will Barnet was one of my first important interviews. At his invitation, we met at his home/studio in National Arts Club for lunch. Barnet related that he had been on the fringe of the New York School and had spent many years developing his print technique. The abstraction and color modules employed were reflective of his involvement in the Indian School of Painting. Will became suddenly in the mid-seventies, an important fine art print maker and artist. His flat stylistically simple figures that comprised his compositional impressions were so uniquely his they were very easy to recognize and branded the images. He worked hard to develop his art alphabet and the line of his approach stood alone as was his stated goal.
Will Barnet was a quiet man who was very happy for his success. He had worked hard and was deriving the benefits. He was not a fancy speaker or verbal at all. He did engender a certain persistent interest in himself and his career during the luncheon. His contained simple approach toward his art and himself stuck with me. Not memorable, but not forgettable. Will’s impression lodged in the back of my mind and I used it to gauge in the future any incisive depth I could pull from an artist about themselves. If he had spent late nights talking to Bill de Kooning, Pollock and others, he did not relate these sojourns in the taverns of Greenwich Village to me.
Later on, I spoke with other artists from the New York School. Richard Pousettte-Dart, Balcomb Greene, Esteban Vicente and Sid Solomon. Each was well established in collections by reputation by the time I dialogued with them about their art. They were serious about their art and the importance of their statements. Each of these artists had lived as painters during the Second World War. Many from the United States worked for the WPA in the 1930s Great Depression. Their styles and statements spoke of the visual implications of the atomic bomb and the dialectal avenues they drove down. All were incredibly mentally active on their own thread of thought, winding their styles around the social topics and internal dialogues they had. Each artist I spoke to from this era related an inner panorama of conceptual art dialogue they developed as their unique style.
Ivan Karp, an early sales director in Leo Castelli’s and Madame Sonnabend’s NYC gallery referred Esteban to SunStorm Arts magazine. Ivan was credited as being the person who first sold art to the taxi fleet owner who began collecting the NY School Pop painters. Ivan owned O.K.Harris when I first met him. He spoke of Esteban Vicente, who was a friend of Castelli’s who was doing very sensitive collages during that time (1950s) and for a brief period I know had quite a following around this very sensitive, intelligent work.
Harriet Vicente, Esteban’s wife, called us to arrange an interview of Esteban through a magazine she had seen at Ivan’s gallery. The Berry Hill Gallery in NYC represented Esteban during those years.
Speaking with Harriet was like receiving the gospel of the early days of the New York City movement and Pop painters. She knew the key and essential information about the art world of her time. Harriet knew who had purchased what from whom and for how much. She remembered who had lived with, drank with and slept with who over a large period of time. Her relating of these activities was as crucial as the art that was painted. She and Esteban were friends with an entire circle of art Who’s Who—de Kooning, Pollock, Kurt Vonnegut his friend Sid Solomon—anyone who lived on the East End of Long Island during the late forties through the eighties when I met her was in the mix of her recall. I found Harriet’s insight and background illuminating to the understanding of the developing movement of the artists. She transmitted quite a feel for the atmosphere, which broadened the fabric of my art experience. I knew and had spoken with many of these artists who were still alive at that time. Her insights gave me background into the emerging East End artists of the day as they pertained to the current art market and developing careers. I learned how they fit in the scheme of things to become the next generation of East End artists. Harriet explained the role of Elaine Benson and Dan Ratiner as cohesive glue to an art scene on the East End. The esteem Harriet held for Esteban and his art was more than personal. It was founded in her experience as an art collector and social leader during this time.
Esteban Vicente was a Spaniard who knew Picasso, and was befriended by Joan Miro. He made his last major art expressionistic statement in color field school of painting based on his internal expression through his Paris school of art background. As great a color field painter as he may have been, Rothko was better known and over-shadowed Esteban’s work and public acknowledgement of his career. This was always troubling to Esteban and Harriet. During my lengthy interviews with him at their Water Mill, Long Island home, Esteban was age eighty- nine and ninety-six or seven. He spoke in a thick Spanish accent in a very slow cadence. He was difficult to understand.
In our first interview, Esteban stated he loved to paint and had transitioned by choice into the life-style after diplomatic service to Spain earlier in his life. He had a supplicated aristocratic background and was well educated. He was searching for the holy grail of painting and found it in color field expression. His large monochromatic works were being executed in his studio during our first lengthy dialogue. The subtle colors and their undulating minimal change of hue gave the works great depth. They were ethereal, cloud-like and out of reach at his intention. The imagery, I learned through interviewing Estaban, were expressions of his sublime understanding of an internal plane and the visions he recorded in his paintings. He believed that the painting must be used to reach the viewer and speak to his soul. From Esteban, I learned to respect my own internal path and dedication to the Holy Grail of art.
My later interview brought me to a studio where many abstracted works with slashes of black were interspersed with yellow and white. Gone was the subtlety of a large color field oil palette. A pronounced abstract expression of emotional immediacy was painted in this very primary palette now occupying the artist’s studio and creative space. Esteban had changed due to advanced age and illness. I came to see him the second time at Harriet’s invitation just because he liked talking with me.
This was a positive reassuring complement regarding my conversational abilities. We continued a dialogue started nearly a decade earlier. Esteban related the change in his motif to expressionism, which, he said, lent definitional accent to his internal feelings.
I was given a piece of art personally from Esteban. Harriet was working on the summation and final catalogue raisonné detailing Esteban’s art during his life Though he was in the process of dying. everything he said and felt, working and dialoguing with his creative spirit, brought a great sense of opportunity and freshness to him.
Richard Pousette-Dart was an important New York artist who was willing to turn down a one man show at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. According to him, as we ate apple pie in his upstate New York home and studio, the banner that was to hang outside the Museum was not going to be as large as the one hung for Picasso, therefore he declined the show. This story was told with great bravado. I believed him. The museum directors later acquiesced and made the banner exactly as large as Picasso’s. Richard was an original like no other I have ever met. I ran into him at an ACA gallery opening on 57th Street. I walked up to him not knowing who he was and said “Are you the artist? This is wild stuff. You are one of the last cowboys of the frontier of the universe. What a ride.” I guess he liked what I said, we became friends. From there, we developed a rapport.
While touring his studio, he would pull out flat drawer after flat drawer and display various paintings in the making. Some of these paintings were started fifty years earlier. Mounds of paint carefully built up in colorful concentric rings emerging one into the next, created the artist’s intended vision. The pure rhythm of the universe was felt pulsating off the paintings. Richard explained that each work had a voice of it’s own and when the vibrations of the universe moved him, he would add paint. This was the reason some of his works took as long as they did. The vibrations were all different and he knew when the impressions were finished. Therefore, he waited until the right moment to call them complete.
Richard’s textural works have gained importance since his death. His art was displayed at a major posthumous exhibition at the Met. I have spoken to his widow several times while I visited with her over a cup of tea and some nice sweet rolls. She related to me their interest in Eastern Philosophy and the search for the universal langue of art to be the compulsive drive behind his art. Richard’s unique view of the common thread was founded in the inner eye’s dispersion of colorful light according. Pulsations that are kindred to Kundalini Yoga and are symbolically discussed in the Kabala were reviewed by Richard in his readings. His artistic intention was to reveal his dialogue with this philosophical reading through his art.
The New York artists I met were interspersed with the Pop artists who emerged with great popularity in the mid sixties. Andy Warhol, Larry Rivers, Lichtenstein, Jim Dine, Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns, Helen Frankenthaler and Robert Indiana were all artists I encountered to some degree or another at museum opening, parties and for interviews. The art of differing schools of thought blurred in this social context.
They were not New York school artists— they were leading artists in New York. Some were Pop, some were Expressionists others were just famous.
I met Robert Indiana for lunch one day with his art publisher, an old friend of mine, Ron Segal, over Oysters Rockefeller in the Palm court at the Plaza in NYC. Ron wanted an interview on Robert for our magazine to accompany the publishing of the prints he was about to release. Robert, an almost reclusive figure, gave us two hours of discussion. What I found most fascinating was his humility. He knew his works were stellar and iconographically important. He just did not know why. Robert had painted the LOVE symbol and the tenor of its importance is as important as the Campbell soup can of Andy Warhol. Like Warhol, he had worked in advertising. He knew the value of a logo. That day, Indiana spoke of Timothy Leary and the love generation, peace and rock and roll as having given him his durability of fame.
The LOVE logo used at Woodstock in 1969 and emulated in clothing and other consumer goods, Indiana felt, was primary to his long lasting impact. I observed in our conversation that Robert Indiana, unlike the New York school artists who were internal dialogue and mission driven, was simply making an art statement through words. He delivered before his time. Word art, such as Barbara Kruger’s, had since come into its own as a symbolic sociological totem, which Indiana was one of the first to use to emphasize and emblazon the message of his projected concept, adding color and form to fundamentally deliver his basic and most simple idea. Transition in art and its impact summarized Robert Indiana for me. As simple as it looks, it is ingenious to deliver the art message in the artist’s vision and form.
Contemporary Pop artists Mark Kostabi, James Rizzi and Keith Haring had a very similar visual approach to the methodology of their works. This group of artists was seeking the comic book icon in order to tell their stories to an audience. Each of these men related to me independently of each other they had actively sought to break down their personal art alphabet to a character or group of symbolic characters in order to achieve a readily recognizable quality to their works. They wanted a simplistic pop culture entrance to the world of fine art through the stream of consciousness, giving a voice to the icon each elected to employ in their compositions.
These artists looped through repetition of an on-going dialogue of their visual comic imagery to hook the viewer into the idea they chose to develop and the mental process they were in search of. In the way that Hanna Barbara used the Flintstones in simple repeat patterns in the early versions of their cartoon scenarios, these new pop artists used their own template forms. The colors and background choices were flat and bright, for the most part allowing the viewers to mentally develop their own interpretation of the movement. Much in the way Will Barnet grew his images and their visual rhythm out of the New York’s Indian School of Art. The art of this new Pop movement had the backdrop of an emerging electronic and digital game industry to fuel the public’s interest in their artistic interpretations and spin. The intention of these artists was for their art to be interactive. Intentional marketing was a key part of their milieu.
Keith Haring was attending an installation of his sculpture in Stamford, CT, sponsored by the Whitney Museum of art when we were introduced to him. This I recall as being the first purchase by the Whitney of a Haring artwork. It was cold and damp that day and no one besides myself and a couple of others were at the site. I had never heard of Keith and the attending museum curator/spokeswoman assured me he was going to be great. I asked her the basis of her interpretation. She said the simplicity of his icon. We spoke briefly with him. Keith was shy and arrogant at the same time, just a kid and very boyish. He said little I felt to be of any importance.
Later, I communicated with the Guggenheim Learning Center when we at SunStorm Arts Corp. Inc. produced a fund-raising original lithograph for their organization. The images were the same. Flat color and cartoon-like. Keith Haring, I know, personally worked on the maquette of his art twenty-four hours prior to his death. This act of courage explained the simplicity of the work, his dedication and depth an artist. Never be an artist of any kind, if you can be anything else. Keith Haring could not be any thing other than what he was —an artist of his time, a creative soul dialoguing with the universe, weaving a common thread.
I originally met Kostabi in Los Angeles during the mid-1908s. I went to his parents’ house in Whittier California while I was in town visiting my family to meet him. It was very average and suburban. During this meeting, he spoke of his intense desire to be the most recognizable painter emerging into the neo-Pop era. Mark Kostabi related he wanted to be seen as the “Boy Genius,” a title he awarded himself. As we spoke again at a luncheon in New York City later that year, he repeated the same mantra. I began to see the seriousness of his drive. During our conversations, he stated that all the works he did were reflective of his breaking down the icon in his imagination to the simplistic Gumby-like player he still features in his works. Mark’s color palette was chosen to emphasize the simplicity.
James Rizzi was the most interesting of the new pop painters to me personally. I met him many times socially and did not respect his work which was glittery and three-dimensional. The day glow colors were similar to the palette used by Kenny Scarf and Keith Haring and seemed less organized and defined than Haring or Kostabi. All were reflective of the various Pop schools and painters that preceded them in dialogue with viewers. Will Barnet’s flat color, Warhol’s simplicity if icon, Indiana’s Pop logos, Peter Max’s derivative analysis of the works of Egon Schiele and Klimpt, can be seen in his beautiful women, Peter Max related to me in an interview his source of inspiration. All of these artists were all part and parcel of the building of an art dialogue through their synthesis of individual language in a visual medium. I was privileged to participate in conversation on a very personal level with all of these artists and discern the common thread of their visions, to investigate their subtle differences and put to words and in commerce the envisioned meaning the artists had in mine.
Rizzi’s departure was in the use or the 3–D effect with cut-outs and panorama of the subject matter. Repetitious and almost chaotic, James was very popular at the time as official painter of the Olympic Committee and there was a very large installation to be completed in Germany as part of a building site during 1997.
We sat for over two hours, as I listened to James sum up the dialogue I had with the other Pop artists excepting the fact that he loved what he did and had stumbled into his media. James Rizzi related to me, as Louise Nevelson did twenty years earlier, “The art had just happened.” James incorporated the same found-object tactile inner feel of establishing his composition that Louise had related in my interview with her in 1978. I was astounded. I stopped to think and saw both artists related in a raised 3D effect the message of their art. James with, color Louise in black, sometimes with an accent. Louise used abstraction of object. James made the cartoon idiom his structural context. Both artists engineered a raised braile-like effect in their artistic compositions. In conversation with these two vastly differing artists, I heard the same resonance in their differing conversations. James and Louise shared a dialogue with me that revealed their mutual approach to the formation each was conveying artistically. In addition, the instigating factors for their involvement in art.
Rizzi has become internationally acclaimed for colorful cartoons of urban smiling landscapes, grinning suns and everyday bright people. James states. “I draw from life I try to use universal subject matter, things that most people can relate to. I come from a very simple middle class family in Brooklyn and I always thought art should not only be for the for rich, but for the masses.”
James related his sympathy for his collection of imagery in a similar fashion that Louise Nevelson had about her use of found object art. James and Louise had sensitivity for the discarded in life. Their art was a counterpoint to possible hopelessness that can be seen on the streets and was executed to uplift and offer another possible dialogue using one’s imagination.
James collects the pieces of material visually for his art walking the streets. Louise had done the same as a poor child escaping the civil war in Russia. She transformed her memories to bits and pieces of objects seen that were assembled into her sculptures. Louise had no money for material. Her father, who discouraged her art, felt Louise could or should have been a music teacher so she could make a living. She was told, as Rizzi surmised, art was only for the wealthy. Rizzi reached a mass appeal. Louise reached a stellar position in contemporary art history. Their art comprised the same internal identification yet they are considered opposite and one hundred per cent divergent in their artistic approach though their unity of ideas was and is quite evident Each loved what they did and found success and joy in their creativity.
Kenny Scharf was an artist I saw filled with wonder. His images were bright and colorful. He was showing at the Gagosian Gallery and I persisted in an interview. His drive was to become a major success in his field and he did so.
I experienced through these and other artists that they were carving out their visions through their various media and were doing so from a common point or view. I learned to see the dreamscape window of the mind they were communicating from to drive home their individual artistic visions. My technique honed from just questioning; to cutting to the chase and dialoguing the common ground of perspective demonstrated in the use of line that had evolved in each of their various works. A simple method of identifying concepts and theme the artists most need to discuss through their works gave me the ability to derive from my conversations an artist’s internal impression and purpose for carving out their imagery in art as a gift for the viewer as a reader. All artists have an internal identity; the means of talking to themselves, in speaking into existence the visuals they were presenting their mind’s eye perspective to the viewer as art landscape. I learned how to decode the dialogue as a listener with the possibility of writing or simply enriching my personal understanding of the common thread expressed through art.
Edouard Nakhamkin invited me into the world of Russian art in early 1983. The time coincides approximately when I began to meet the New Pop artists. They were radically different in their approach to a personal internal dialogue and visual language. These Russian and Eastern European artists had a repressed subliminal art dialogue, which to my eye was most in common with Latin American art. The only Pop artists I knew with an Eastern European background was Mark Kostabi, who was born in Whittier, California to Estonian immigrant parents. In color balance, Mark’s work could easily have related to Oleg Tselkov works. In the beginning, this was the only link I found in common.
One of my favorite conversations was with Erté. It was my great pleasure to accompany the renowned artist to dinner one fall evening in the late 1980s. Erté was in his nineties at the time. Leslee Rogath, co-founder and co-owner of Chalk and Vermilion and Martin Lawrence Galleries was our hostess for dinner and seated me next to Erté.
“Read me the menu,” commanded Erté.
“I don’t speak French well,” I responded
“It doesn’t matter,” replied the artist as he commenced his rhythmic corrections of my pronunciation with his hands beating out the metronome of time in the style of my Russian dancing instructress, resonating in my being.
The same artistic need for discipline in art was shared by both of these listed tutors. Erté being a Russian aristocrat, my dancing teacher, a prima ballerina taught by the last impresario of the Belsoile Ballet. I remembered my daily practice at that moment in time.
Later in the meal, I inquired of Erté how had stayed so active. “To what do you attribute the longevity of your creative spirit?” I asked.
“I exercise for thirty minutes at the same time daily. And have done this since I was a small boy in Russia. I enjoy two cocktails at dinner nightly,” added the master.
Most people believe art to be an accident of inspiration. Few realize that the discipline of daily experience and practice is one key to artistic success. I saw this in my conversations with Will Barnet, Robert Indiana, Esteban Vicente, Keith Haring, Kostabi, and Chemiakan among others. These artists worked in art because they could not do any other kind of work. They worked being old or young, sick or well. The volume of the works I saw in studios over time relayed the fact that the drive necessary to create was not enough. The discipline to work — refining a creative voice to form an expertise and precise message of creative result — was satisfied in success. Their art process was the result of their internal dialogues which, when collected, transformed and became notable bodies of artistic accomplishment. I was privileged to have conversations with many artistic notables and hope to learn continually why I need to do this.