R.H. Quaytman

SS For “Ark, Chapter 10,” which was the three-person show you organized at the end of your time at Orchard, you made paintings that related to Orchard’s history, and displayed several of them on storage racks similar to ones you have here in your studio. The display of paintings became a sculpture [From One O to Another].

RHQ I felt I needed to acknowledge—within the structure of the pieces themselves—the fact that I would be showing my own works, becoming, in effect, my own dealer. The storage racks, like the racks in a typical gallery’s back room, enabled visitors to pull out the paintings the way a dealer might, when showing them to prospective clients.

SS The racks addressed the nightmare, which perhaps all artists have had, that their work will never be seen.

RHQ Making the storage-rack pieces reminded me of the trauma of putting my stepfather’s and father’s works in storage after they died. Those experiences and the questions they raised—about artists’ estates, and about the life of the work itself once the artist has gone—left a big impression on me.

SS In 2008, you made a book, allegorical Decoys, whose centerpiece is an essay you wrote about the development of your work. Having been your own dealer, you became, in effect, your own historian and publisher.

RHQ I realized instinctively that, in some sense, the paintings wouldn’t exist unless they were written about and collected. Otherwise, they would be like trees falling in the forest with nobody there to hear them. Writing that essay was an opportunity not just to reflect on my practice, but to locate my work within a larger critical conversation on my own terms.

SS Also in 2008, you used two exhibitions—a solo at Miguel Abreu in New York, and a two-person show, with Josef Strau, at Vilma Gold in London—as the basis for “iamb, Chapter 12.”

RHQ When I discovered the shows would happen concurrently, two ideas came to mind. The first was about light, because Josef often uses lamps in his work. Light, looking and being blinded all seemed good metaphors for painting. The second was about illustration. Josef and I had earlier talked about the idea of painting as illustration, and about how freeing it can be to operate in a supposedly degraded space. I decided to use the image of a print I’d bought years ago with my father, of a scene from Milton’s Paradise Lost by the 19th-century English artist John Martin. Then I began reading Paradise Lost—which is in iambic pentameter—and realized that the sound of the word iamb made it seem right for the title. I love words that have more than one meaning or association.

SS Vision is at the heart of “Chapter 12.”

RHQ The pattern I used for the Op-like paintings is called a scintillating grid, which was invented to show the blind spot at the center of visual perception. When you focus on it, your peripheral vision goes haywire.

SS The fact that “scintillating” means sparkling also seems to refer to the several paintings you coated in diamond dust.

RHQ Diamond dust introduces a different kind of optical experience. Unlike an Op pattern, which both blinds and repels vision, diamond dust blinds and attracts vision. And the combination of the two can create an interesting tension.

SS Dan Graham appears as a model in “Chapter 12.” In an image based on a photograph, we see him from the waist up and naked, in front of a scintillating grid painting in your studio, his eyes turned into the bright light of a lamp [iamb, Chapter 12 (blind smile), 2008].

RHQ I sometimes use other artists—or people in my life—as models, posing them in front of my own paintings to acknowledge their presence in my thinking and in my work. But a viewer doesn’t need to know who Dan Graham is to appreciate the symbol of an older man staring into the light like a blind visionary.

SS At the Whitney, you’ve installed “Distracting Distance, Chapter 16”in a north-facing room centered on one of Marcel Breuer’s trapezoidal windows.

RHQ “Chapter 16” is about the relationship of a window motif to the idea of distance. I wanted to work with one of Breuer’s windows because, for years, I’ve used that same shape in my paintings to refer to perspective. As I looked into the history of the Whitney, I discovered that Breuer hadn’t wanted windows in the first place—he thought air conditioning and electric light had rendered them obsolete. I’m sure he had the Guggenheim’s top-heavy, windowless form in mind.

As I was considering the window, my mind kept returning to one of the more iconic paintings in the Whitney’s collection, A Woman in the Sun, painted by Edward Hopper in 1961, the year I was born. I love how empowered that nude is; she’s like a film noir character. Realizing that my friend the artist K8 Hardy looks like the woman in the painting, I asked her if she would agree to model nude in the Whitney. She agreed immediately, saying she had lots of “nuditude.”

SS She shows up in two of the paintings. In them, you reimagine the Hopper, locating K8 not in a bedroom but in the very room at the Whitney where the viewer stands, with the window in the painting echoing the window on the wall.

RHQ And as in Hopper’s painting, K8 stands in profile, while the viewer passes by. My idea was to set up a series of reflections between the viewer, the space and history of the Whitney, and American painting.

SS How does the motif of the window relate to the Op paintings?

RHQ I wanted to create a sense of light that seemed colorless. I discovered that the RGB color model used for TV and computer screens—today’s windows onto other spaces—could be used to make paintings that would read from afar as light, or as a glowing grayness. When you approach these paintings, or look at them obliquely, their colorlessness shifts to red, green or blue, depending on your angle and the light in the room.

SS The title for “Distracting Distance,Chapter 16” is a variant of a phrase by the poet Osip Mandelstam. Many of your titles intimate a poetic approach to painting.

RHQ I find it helpful to think about painting as if it were poetry, and to focus on a given painting’s grammar and syntax, even on its vocabulary. In reading a poem, you notice particular words, and how each is not just that one word, but contains other words as well. The same is true for a painting.

I’ve always found it helpful to take other media and transpose their forms and ideas to painting. Early on, when I was feeling kind of lost as a painter, I’d read about other kinds of art-making—sculpture, video or conceptual art—and almost unconsciously twist the thinking around to make it be about painting.

SS It seems like you do a lot of reading. What is your work process like?

RHQ Much of my studio time is spent as if I were a writer: reading, thinking, looking at pictures, making notes. I also spend a long time on the little caption paintings, but once I’ve decided what to do, everything else happens quite rapidly.

SS Your painting system is really a set of rules. Why are rules so important?

RHQ They’ve been a way to confront what seemed problematic to me about painting—the overbearing authority of its long history, its exhaustion, its capitulation to capital and power. Taking color, dimension, medium, subject matter, even the choice to be a painter—things that might otherwise seem arbitrary—and applying rules to them has given me at least the illusion that I’m free to make something of my own. My rules are inventions—and they continue to generate new possibilities.

SS Do you know what you’ll do for SFMOMA?

RHQ Not yet, but I’ve been reading about the San Francisco poet Jack Spicer. I may not use anything related to him, but his approach to writing poems appeals to me. Spicer wrote them in sequences, believing that the single poem was like a one-night stand. His focus was on the book, not the poem, which exactly parallels my relationship to painting.

SS And after SFMOMA, you’ll be having a survey exhibition at the Neuberger.

RHQ I am interested in how thatkind of overview will fit into thearchitecture of my ongoing project. I’m also working on a companionvolume to Allegorical Decoys,featuring images of every painting from the first 17 chapters.

SS Is it too obvious to suppose that these chapters will one day add up to a book? What exactly would such a book be?

RHQ The book may be like a story or a long poem, but I don’t have a conclusion in mind. My plan is to go on painting with this system for the rest of my life—and my hope is that I won’t ever find out how it ends.

Steel Stillman is an artist and writer living in New York.