Interview: Terry Winters

NP You’re working with a fairly limited palette, and the mixing goes on on the surface of the painting?
TW Yes, there are a number of Lake pigments but the three primaries give especially rich transparencies. I ended up using those as the key to developing these recent paintings. A lot of the mixing takes place right on the painting, either painting wet into wet or through glazing, the development of layers. Color plays a big role in these paintings. It’s one of the variables that help determine the subject and meaning of the work. But the choices are intuitive and generally tied into my overall concerns at the moment. Right now I’m working on a group of paintings that use a big variety of color, the full spectrum.
NP What do you know when you’re starting a painting? What do you have already established as a framework for the painting, and what happens on the surface?
TW Well, I start with a set of reference materials, in this case topological and acoustic imagery. I’ve determined the size of the paintings, plus the range of pigments. I’m setting up parameters within which to improvise. So I have a general notion of what form the painting will take but I’m pushing—or, really, following—the painting along to the point where it builds mass or takes on a meaning that gives it specificity.
NP Drawing and printmaking are still key to your practice. Do the drawings ever precede the paintings? Are there prints that are somehow generative for the paintings?
TW All three of those avenues are ways into the territory for me. Each is a different instrument that I utilize. They’re tools to experiment or explore and play, and each one influences or helps illuminate the other; there’s no hierarchy.
NP So the paintings can lead to the drawings, as well as the other way around?
TW Yes, absolutely.
NP Are you involved in any printmaking projects now?
TW Yes, I’m working on a group of etchings. And I’ve just finished a number of print projects that I had been working on for the past couple of years.
NP When you work in the studio you work alone?
TW Pretty much.
NP So is there a huge difference in how the work feels when you’re working in a printshop?
TW Not in terms of the difficulty for me to actually get something that feels acceptable! It’s just another level of energy that’s nice to have. To have input from other people who are also invested—printers tend to be very interested in how things are made. It’s nice to bounce ideas off other people. I appreciate their observations.
NP Are you doing other collaborations like the Ben Marcus project [a suite of 42 offset lithographs titled “Turbulence Skins,” 2004, its text-and-image composites the result of a series of exchanges between the artist and Marcus, a writer of experimental fiction], or the one with Trisha Brown [Winters designed sets and costumes for the dance El Trilogy, 1999/2000]?
TW No. Although this year I published a portfolio of relief prints called “In Blue” with Grenfell Press, and Eliot Weinberger contributed a text. Leslie Miller suggested Eliot, whose work I’ve admired. [Weinberger is an essayist and translator associated with Latin American literature.] We gave him a set of proofs and sometime later he delivered his text. It was a good fit. I’m not really thinking in terms of collaboration at the moment. There’s something going on with the new drawings and paintings, and I feel I need to spend a lot of time with them. The paintings in this show seem the beginning of another way that I could explore building these images.
NP How so?
TW Just in terms of being more declarative.
NP Wasn’t the computer used for developing some of the imagery in the work of the 1990s?
TW Yes, especially in the printmaking. And some of the source material comes from digital imagery.
NP Are you still involved with computers in that way?
TW Yes, to some extent. It’s a huge source for reference material. And printmaking lends itself to using many of these digital technologies. The whole field has changed in terms of using computers to generate images. Painting shares those concerns, so it seems like a logical extension to address the mechanics of those media. I’m interested in how painting can make virtual places actual.
NP You’re working with a brush, and . . .
TW And with the logics of gesture and touch. And physical material. It’s very easy to see the paintings as raw material and bodily gesture, just in terms of how they’re made.
NP In the sense that a Brice Marden painting, for instance, is related to arm span and gesture?
TW Every painting is measured that way.
NP Do you start with drawing on the canvas?
TW My approach is through drawing. Painting has more dimensions, it’s layered and the ground is constantly shifting. But my approach is very basic; it’s like drawing and writing.
NP Is there a relationship between the mark of writing and the mark of depiction in the drawing?
TW I think so. There’s something about the pragmatics of just getting something down. A nonesthetic directness of transcription. The abstraction of the pictures is a development of signs that are a kind of writing.
NP How long does each painting take, roughly, from beginning to end?
TW They each have their own life span, so there’s no determining factor. They tend to be around a while in the studio before they’re ready to leave. And I need to have them around to figure out whether I’m done with them—or whether they’re done with me.
NP One thing that’s been characteristic of your work from the beginning is that you’ve attracted some of the most interesting writers in the business, who have engaged in dialogues with you about an incredibly wide range of materials: Richard Shiff’s analogy with basic physical elements in unstable states, John Rajchman’s “brain city” and his concept of ungrounding. So how much does a viewer need to know?
TW Nothing! But at the same time, the more you bring to the experience the more you can get back. I’m grateful to have the benefit of any thoughtful take on my work.
NP Well, what would you like viewers to bring to the work, given that some of those ideas—topology, for instance . . .
TW I don’t think any of that is necessary. The paintings come out of painting, my own connection to painting’s story or history and a desire on my part to paint. On one level, I think the paintings are self-evident. It’s part of why I’ve embraced this notion of abstraction. Abstraction is a category of work and thought that is easily accessible to everybody now. Everybody understands abstract painting. Now that 20th-century painting is finally over, everybody gets it.
NP That’s an optimistic thought! Do you believe that abstraction has a big, friendly audience?
TW I think it’s run a certain course and become part of the lexicon of what it means to be contemporary. I’m interested in how that language can be extended, and distended or torqued to address something beyond the rhetoric. To make something new, to project it into a new place.
NP Are you encouraged by what seems to be a renaissance of painting in the new generation?
TW Yes, absolutely. I think it’s an exciting time for painting. Things have opened up in a number of ways, there’s a very freestyle mixture of abstraction and representation going on now and it’s helping to build a new pictorial narrative.

“Terry Winters: Knotted Graphs” was at Matthew Marks, New York, Nov. 6, 2008-Jan. 24, 2009.