Interview: Terry Winters

View Slideshow Terry Winters in his New York studio, 2008. Photo Martien Mulder.; Point, 1985, oil on linen, 1021⁄8 by 69 inches. All photos this article, unless otherwise noted, courtesy Matthew Marks Gallery, New York.;

Nancy Princenthal Let’s start with the new studio in Columbia County. How has being in the country affected the work?
Terry Winters I’ve been working in these classical New York loft spaces for a while, the 25-by-90-foot buildings. I wanted to get a space that was wider so I could work across the paintings in a different way, and have a different sense of how they’re developed. Not in terms of working larger, but of being able to have more work around, living with it more.
NP Does the light in your upstate studio and the landscape in general play a part in the recent work?
TW I think what I’m most affected by is the relentless change in the weather—clouds, light, wind. And also the ceaseless activity of insects and animals. There’s a lot of activity, a literal kind of buzz, a pulse that happens. It happens in the city, too, and it’s not that I think the city is any less alive and pulsing. But there’s a lot less noise up there.
NP Maybe spending more time in a rural area has some relevance to one question I wanted to ask, which is: over the course of the three decades or so you’ve been painting, there seems to have been a development from organic space to conceptual space, or organic science to inorganic science as sources of metaphor. Does that sound right to you?
TW That’s one way you could track it, but it hasn’t really been the approach I’ve taken. My interest has been in architecture, how form reflects ideas about life. Those notions could be organic or not.
NP In your early paintings, there were often elements that were recognizable biological forms—cells, plant life.
TW I was surprised that the paintings developed such clear imagery, that they had images, like plants and flowers.
NP There’s been a lot of water under the bridge since that work. Is there still the same thread, the same tension, between describing things in the world and . . . 
TW Yes, that’s the tension, that’s where the traction is. Between image and organizing principle.
NP As I understand it, one guiding concept for the new paintings is knot theory.
TW Knots are devices I use to develop folds in the surface—they become a series of abstract events. The paintings involve a family of knotted forms that have interested me, along with a wider range of topological structures or phase diagrams. [In simple examples, these diagrams chart the pressure and temperature conditions under which a basic substance like water changes states from gas to liquid to solid.—ed.] Just like in earlier work, I’m taking preexisting imagery and respecifying it through the painting process. I’m reluctant to reduce the subject to what the source materials or references are, because that’s something I want to be as wide open as possible.
NP But these works have to do, in part, with the kinds of spaces that are described by science, or that are revealed by digital technology?
TW There’s been a development in all the sciences of new spatial landscapes that are open to an investigation through painting. I was looking for a way to address an expanded idea of nature. That expanded idea includes the wide variety of spaces available through computer visualization.
NP In the catalogue essay for the show at Matthew Marks [by art historian Kathryn Tuma] there’s a discussion of knot theory as having been developed in part as a way to describe the structure of an atom. Is there that kind of energy, that kind of engine-of-the-world thing inside of each of the units in those paintings?
TW I hope so! I’m trying to build those qualities into my own work. But it’s not as if I’m trying to paint a molecular painting, or illustrate that molecular phenomenon.
NP But are we invited to see the paintings that way?
TW Definitely—I would welcome it. But the scale isn’t specific. I’d welcome a cosmological reading, or even a social reading. I’m interested in how the paintings open up to those different kinds of things. I’m trying to engineer them to the point where it’s difficult to locate one meaning and they open up to other possibilities.
NP Who do you feel yourself to be in dialogue with, in terms of abstraction? The context you began painting in, 30 years ago, was very different from the one that exists now.
TW I grew up in New York and had a very classical art education—I took figure-drawing classes. But by the time I went to Pratt, the work that really interested me was being done by the so-called Post-Minimalists, and it focused on methods and materials. Most of that work wasn’t painting. But of that group, Marden and Ryman both found ways to extend painting while still addressing some of those same concerns. How the paintings were made was very important. That’s what I identified as being the most adventurous, experimental.
NP You’re talking about work that was driven by process.
TW Yes, that pushed an idea about what abstraction was, in term of its literalness, in terms of how material and form were generated and even in terms of metaphor. In some way I wanted to connect process and picture-making. I wanted to figure out a way to reconcile those interests. And to figure out a way to paint pictures that didn’t seem like a fallback to representational imagery.
NP Speaking of materials, what exactly are Lake pigments? What role do they play in the new work?
TW They’re transparent dyes that have been precipitated on an inert base, like white clay. Basically it’s pigment that carries the coloring of a dye. They’re transparent paints and they’re very ancient. The Egyptians used them but they are still being synthesized.