Interview with painter Dan Talbot

Your work straddles the line between abstraction and figurative painting. You have made dense layered abstract doodle-like paintings as well as straight observational plein air paintings, and now your recent work combines the two. What does each approach offer you as a painter? Are the processes vastly different? Are you asking different things from each one? Can you talk about your process and how your current works fit into your overall work?

The two are related I suppose in the sense that any two things one does are related, but I think that they each take place in different parts of my brain. One I would call a drawing sensibility, which integrates lots of different ways of thinking (verbal, conceptual, sexual etc.), and the other I would call a color sensibility and seems more specific or discrete, an end in itself. I feel like my drawing sensibility prepared me for experiencing my color sensibility, brought me to a place where I was ready for it and wanted it. But they seem like separate things. And, yes, in my latest work I'm trying to integrate them somehow.
In my older work I would doodle a lot and then fuss over the doodles. I'd start out with a bunch of random thoughts spilling out onto the page and then spend a lot of time trying to hammer or distill that mess into something more substantial.... a sort of abstract expressionist process. I started getting more and more fussy about it and then getting irritated by my own fussiness and would need to do something stupid to the painting to try to fuck it up and save it. Sometimes this worked, sometimes it didn't. Guston describes this type of ab-ex process as like being stuck in a corner, smashing your head against a wall.

But I started to notice that after leaving the studio, say going for a walk or something, the world would look different to me, clearer. Like the chaos had an order to it. I could see all the particulars and how it all fit together. I started getting seduced by all this color around me, and all the random junk we have hanging around in the spaces we live in. I thought, "why not just paint that."

There's a description of a story I read once.... I can't remember whom it was by, but it was in reference to an Ingmar Bergman film.... an article in the New Yorker. The story's about a demon who is stuck in Hell but every hundred years or so he's allowed out onto the surface of the earth for a day. On one of these trips he sees a bowl of apples. It's just a bowl of apples but he sees it with the clarity that only one who's been stuck in Hell can see it. That's what I felt like when I started doing the landscape stuff. They are everything that the other work wasn't, so in a way they are obliquely referring to it, to that hell. Of course, you might not see that. You might just see the bowl of apples. Also, there's the whole Providence hipster thing from 10 years ago.... which is a type of Romanticism.... Caspar David Friedrich taken over by Saturday morning cartoons...where it's no longer the natural world we are confronted by/drowning in, but instead our own absurd culture. I wanted to show that that sense of "magic" or awe didn't need to be represented by rainbows, crystals, and people with animal heads, but could also be seen in the colors of your neighbors soffit, skylight, and fence.

So now I'm trying to combine these two ways of working. I'm trying to have that drama I was describing above take place within one painting, the soffit and the satyr side by each. Only, now the landscape stuff is what I start out with...those are the random things I put down first. Then I follow up with the abstract doodle stuff to try to tie it all together. Under the influence of the landscapes the doodles start to become more about color. And again I can get stuck in hell... an endless and open-ended process of fussy adjustments. It seems unavoidable. I'm not sure what I think of this work yet.... It's growing on me is all I can say. I try to focus on the sense of engagement I get when making the work, and not the result. It's still pretty thrilling to sit down in front of something and start making decisions. This is what I want the viewer to connect with.

Yah. The medium definitely influences what I'm saying if only because I'm to some extent responding to what is in front of me on the canvas when I'm making decisions. When I want to talk about color I prefer to use oil paint. It seems the best thing for mixing very particular colors. Also, you are placing yourself within a very particular history when you paint with oil on canvas. Maybe you want this, maybe not. I think that referring to this lineage is kind of trippy, like telling people you're Roman Catholic. Somehow it seems ancient and futuristic at the same time, which I like. I like having Manet and Bonnard in mind when I step up to make a mark and this doesn't seem incongruous with the feeling that I might get abducted by a U.F.O. at some point or that the twin towers were evaporated by an energy weapon. Sometimes I like doodling with any old medium on whatever scrap of paper I can find, but this seems a bit more conventionally modern to me, the Modern Primitive... but that's cool too. That's definitely me as well.

We talked recently about how you have been studying Mandarin Chinese. You mentioned how you thought that the nature of the language might enhance visual comprehension in the sense of apprehending an object and rendering it. Could you talk a little about that and the way you translate you observations into your plein air paintings.

Oh, that was just me speculating about something I don't really know about. First off, with me and mandarin, I'm learning the audible aspect of the language, and not the written form. And what does this have to do with my painting? Well, I try as a part of my personal mental maintenance to have a daily activity that compels me to focus on some type of new information. Both landscape painting and Mandarin are ways that I can do this. And I suppose that straining my ear to here the tone of a certain syllable is similar to trying to identify a certain color.

But more than this, learning Mandarin reminds me of teaching myself to play guitar when I was 13. It's very math-rocky. I keep hearing the sentences as these little esoteric combinations of sounds made up of smaller modular units. It seems more viral than visual language, more like music in that a particular combination of sounds will get stuck in my head and then will endlessly replay itself. I'm walking around now repeating phrases of Mandarin to myself all the time. I don't even know what I'm saying half the time. This sort of thing doesn't seem to happen with painting. We might be able to recognize something visually, but most people can't hold the discrete parts of a painting in their minds as clearly as they can with the sound of someone's voice or with music. At least I can't. I was thinking that as a species we seem to own our verbal and musical capacities to a greater extent than our visual ones. Visual language seems less codified, more formless. Pictures are dependent on a medium to be experienced or communicated, which might be why image-makers seem a bit like magicians and also a bit sordid. They seem to be pulling this language out of nothing and then turning it into something physical. Of course now we have technology to do this. It's not really the same thing though.

However - and this brings me back to your original question - perhaps this is to some extent a cultural thing. I spent a lot of time with someone who spoke and wrote Mandarin fluently from an early age. I was always amazed at her ability to succinctly break down and represent the stuff she was seeing when drawing. It seemed she had a more concrete sense of visual grammar than I did. I wondered if that sense could have been developed by learning to write with Chinese characters at an early age, which is apparently a very difficult thing to learn to do even for native speakers compared with learning to write with an alphabet. In any case this is all speculation based on my observations of one particular person. Maybe I was just trying to explain to myself why she could draw better than I could.

Incidentally, this artist I'm talking about, Elaine Wang, didn't have much interest in depicting particular colors like I do. And, I've noticed that in my landscape painting, the way I place colors down next to each other reminds me of the way I place words down next to each other to form a sentence. Maybe, what seemed in her field of vision like a word or character would seem like a phrase or paragraph to me. I don't know. These are all anecdotal observations. I like thinking about this stuff but I probably don't know what I'm talking about.

What artist have influenced your work? Are there any artists that you are looking at now that have inspired your current work on exhibit at AS220?

Al deCredico is a local, RISD person who influenced how I thought about my drawing. He encouraged me to take it seriously. In my 20's all I cared about was Picasso and Polke and then maybe Richard Tuttle. A friend of mine, Julian Kreimer, got me started on the landscape stuff and turned me on to Lois Dodd who is an interesting landscape painter. As far as local people, I think Ruth Deally is good and I always liked Matt Brinkman's drawing. Some people I like lately are Merlin James, Neal Tate and Peter Saul (his early work). I was looking at a book of Robert Ryman's paintings when making this current series, but of course they look nothing like mine do except maybe their size and that some are on linen. But I felt we shared a sense of what a painting is when it's in front of you.

I wish I had more time to look at stuff. I like to think about what other people are doing, not so I can like it, but in order to be able to better define what I'm doing.