A CONVERSATION IN MONTROUGE: PART II: ICONS, SELF-PORTRAITURE, AND DRAFTSMANSHIP
Photography by Matt Dine
French writer Brigitte Adés recently interviewed Jim Dine. The result is a deep and informative discussion, providing a comprehensive understanding of Jim’s work. The interview offers a profound exploration of Jim’s creative process, inspirations, and reflections on his remarkable career.
This is the second of a three part interview between Brigitte Adés and Jim Dine.
Photography: Matt Dine
PART II: ICONS, SELF-PORTRAITURE, AND DRAFTSMANSHIP
By Brigitte Adés, March 2024
BA: You have chosen to include several drawings in your show which form a striking contrast with your monumental canvases. Not only are they figurative but they could have been done by a Venetian artist of the Renaissance. More generally there is no sense of time in your drawings and they reach a kind of ideal perfection.
When did you start to draw? Did you always have a gift?
JD: I was born with a gift and I drew before I could write. But it took a lot of work to bring this skill to the level it is now. In 1975, I decided to spent two and a half years just working on my drawing abilities. I lived in Vermont then. Not much distraction and my neighbor who was an athlete and she accepted to pose for me. I educated my eye to really look hard about how the bone of her arms went into her shoulder to make movement possible. I wanted to be able to render that the way it exactly was, instead of struggling and make it sort of ok for you to believe it was right. My neighbor was able to sit very still and I created more than a thousand drawings of which I kept twelve, trying to celebrate the articulation and the miracle of the organism evolving in that beautiful way. It wasn’t unlike what Greeks celebrated, the beauty of the body and I don’t mean the flesh, I mean the flesh on top of the bone and on top of the muscles. The miracle of how we stand up and can work with this body…it is quite beautiful…
BA: How do you reconcile your drawing technique with your current approach to painting using thick paint in a very abstract manner almost like an Abstract Expressionist?
JD: All my work is infused by drawing. Everything I do comes from how I educated my hand and how my hand was born as an artist. And therefore the painting all reflects somewhere underneath my sense of drawing. I attach a great importance to drawing, but I don’t want to make it sound as if I made studies before I paint because I never do. I start immediately but what I meant is that everything is informed by my sense of drawing. It is informed by it, but it very much remains in the unconscious. I educated my hand and my brain to this. I let it be driven by my unconscious. Every painting has a drawing like a skeleton, even if I don’t draw it, it is in my head.
BA: Your self-portraits also are fascinating that way, not complacent, very real about the structure of your features.
JD: I am interested by the evolution of my features, aging. I am captivated by the idea of what has happened to the organisms, of how the flesh goes down, gravity has pulled, and you see the cells on that face, how it has all changed. Painting myself at different times of my life has been like writing a biography. It’s all there. This is another aspect of self-portraiture that’s the real thing. If you don’t bullshit yourself, you put down what you can put down, and get a picture of Jim.
BA: This explains why one of your favorite subject is yourself. But sometimes you only draw the contours of your head and then paint a lot of color inside it depicting your emotions again? Is this a more generic type of individual or is it you as well?
JD: There are two kind of self-portraits for me. A generic one expressing human beings in general and very personal portraits or myself. I have drawn so many pictures of myself because I am my best model because I stay still. So I am very familiar to it and fortunately, I have no hair and I haven’t had hair since I was 18. This is me and I got to know me and my ears and it became a little bit like these other icons I used.
BA: Talking about “icon”, in the early sixties you painted hearts, yet they were different from the purely pop symbols because you had added intricate colors inside and every heart you painted was different.
What made you decide to use hearts? Where did this idea of the heart come about?
JD: I never thought about doing it until I saw an exhibition in New York of the painter Norman Canter, I never knew who he was and never followed him afterwards. The show was in a small gallery in New York early 60’s, may be late 50’s and he had made small paintings about symbols. He had made a red cross, he had a diamond from a set of cards, and he had a red heart. All were red on white and I didn’t think any further. I thought I can use that, like something I found on the street. I saw this heart and thought, everyone relates to it. It was a universal sign. You could make a lot of things from it. And it’s once again an example of what I consider using an object I stumble on. Any thing is good to make art. When you make a heart the viewer begins to think it is like an icon, but for me it could have been anything.
People would tell me, “It’s a Valentine”—I never thought of that (Smile). One of my sons said when they were little boys, really little: “Daddy is in love.” (Laughter)
People bring to it what they think about what this icon is, what this symbol is.
BA: Although you chose universal symbols, they never seemed empty of human emotion which is a radically different approach from the pop culture. The paint you were putting inside the heart was very fascinating to me. I felt all your emotions were translated into the canvas. At first for us viewers at the time, we couldn’t help but putting it into play ...But looking further into the painting there was already a lot of intricate paint brushes and colors.
We could feel that it wasn’t at all an icon, but rather your own emotions transcribed on the canvas, your approach, your own means of expression about your inner self. At least that’s what it seemed like to me at the time.
JD: That’s true and I wanted it that way. It was very much my landscape already then…I guess I wasn’t brave enough to make a so called “non objective painting” so I was able to make my landscape within this sign that’s me. Signing the canvas Jim and underlying it.
BA: When you use the word “landscape” you mean something very different. You mean your inner self at this very moment of your life when you were in front of your canvas?
JD: Yes that’s right. It’s more my deep self, not what you would call in French ‘paysage’.
BA: And because your hearts were always different, it was yourself in the present moment and not only your emotions but also your state of mind that you were depicting?
JD: Yes, it was always different and yet I maintained “me”, you know, I didn’t lose myself I underlined JIM signing my paintings, to say, I am here. I am not invisible. It was very important considering my history, because it took me time not to lose myself.
BA: Why exactly?
JD: Well, I lost my mother at age twelve, and her death affected me greatly. It occurred in August and I had been accepted in a very good school, a very difficult one to get into and a very demanding one. But by September, I was unable to function properly to the point that some of the new teachers thought I was dumb. Besides I didn’t get along with my dad so I went to live with my grandparents. And for a long time, I was drawing in my room because it wasn’t really my family’s first choice of a career. I then got in an average university and by chance, a friend came in the hardware store one summer and asked me what I was doing.“You should transfer to my university,” he said. “They have an outstanding arts program.” So that’s what I did and I suddenly found great professors who encouraged me and taught me a lot. It was a game changer.
BA: So after the heart, even when you moved to other icons, it was always yourself inside you were interested to explore?
JD: Yes, very much so. For me the icons were only a support. I was mainly interested to depict my state of mind.
BA: Why did you choose the Venus? How did it come about for example?
JD: I used to go with my mother to the art museum in Cincinnati and they had many casts of Greek statues including the Venus de Milo. And then when I was an adult, I found a small cast in a painting equipment store, I bought it, cut its head off and begun painting on it. Again it was my emotions at the present moment, which I expressed with colors, my landscape which I translated into paint.
BA: Such an approach to express your inner feelings through colors is very different than the pop artists who were interested by the symbol only.
JD: I use the contours of these everyday and familiar objects as a “support”, as a means not an end. It is quite contrary to Warhol whom I knew at the time. Again, I didn’t want to disappear I wanted to be present in the work.
