Interview with Robert Swain
By Matthew Deleget

The following interview took place at Robert Swain’s Tribeca, NYC studio on May 14, 2010. Most of it was published in his retrospective exhibition catalogue Robert Swain: Visual Sensations, The Paintings, 1967-2010, Hunter College / Hunter College Times Square Gallery, New York, NY, 2010.

Matthew Deleget: Thank you for inviting me here to interview you for your upcoming exhibition at Hunter College. It’s a real honor and a personal privilege to have this opportunity to talk with you.

Robert Swain: I’m very grateful to be here with you.

MD: To get started then, your subject matter as a painter is color and I often think about how intricate your research into color has been over the years. So much so, that I think of you as a color researcher that makes paintings and not the other way around. My question for you is why is painting the best method for presenting your research?

RS: Well first of all, I never entered into it in a scientific way. I became interested in color in the late 1960s. Early to late 1960s, I started to try to understand something about color. There wasn’t a great deal written information, but a great deal of what I do is based on intuition. So I started to look at color and I started to do charts and experimental work trying to understand the phenomenology of color. I don’t look at the work as being objective. I simply look at it as a way of trying to get into the subject matter of color and try to understand through experience, through phenomenology, what color is about.

MD: And you entered this conversation not so much through a scientific background, but rather through a visual arts background. You didn’t really come into this as a scientist and I think what’s interesting is that a lot of people try to compare color to other fields of study, other disciplines, other areas including things like mathematics, music, flavors in terms of taste, etc. But I know you don’t think of color in its relationship to other things. You think of it in terms of what exactly?

RS: It’s kind of strange. I think in terms of color is about color. It’s not about music. There are some comparable things. For example, in music, there is a sense of modulation. There is a sense of structure. I actually studied with a man who based a lot of his work on the diatonic scale, which is the basis for all music.

MD: Who was that?

RS: Karl Knaths. He was an American Cubist who lived in Provincetown. The reason I don’t like comparing it to other things is that then it becomes about those things and about the association we have with those things. There are a lot of pioneers that started to define what color phenomenology was. It’s a wide-open field. It hasn’t been finished. But again, I throw my weight on the side of perception and phenomenology, trying to experience what it is and put that into a frame of reference.

MD: Who are some of those heavyweights in this field that you have been looking at, that have had an influence on your practice?

RS: I think that goes way back. At a certain point, my family moved to Arlington, Virginia, and I spent a lot of time in the National Gallery. There were certain paintings there that I used to look at very carefully. I was very involved and still am involved with Vermeer. I think that his sense of color is really remarkable. I look at a lot of the Impressionists and Post-Impressionists, a lot of people that came out of the Bauhaus, a lot of people like Albers. There is a whole host of people who have pioneered the idea of color and dealt with it and used it as their primary subject matter in painting.

MD: In framing your work, thinking about what your painting does and how it functions in terms of providing a viewer the opportunity to see pure color, I am trying to think of comparable examples in the real physical world, where one would have the opportunity to see pure color, unmitigated, uncompromised, uncontextualized in relation to objects or environment. I had a really hard time coming up with a list of things that are comparable to that experience. I flew recently on an airplane through a storm and we flew through very thick white clouds. There were instances of being in complete whiteness. I’ve been in caves before where I’ve been in complete darkness, completely black with absolutely no light. I’ve swum in very deep water, and I looked down into that water and there’s absolute blueness. There is nothing else and, in that case, you are devoid of any kind of sound. There are very few examples of places or experiences where you are able to see color firsthand, where it’s isolated and orchestrated in the way you are doing it. How does one experience color in your work? What is that experience like? Is this an affirmative experience? Can it be a negative experience? What kind of experience are you trying to elicit in the work?

RS: One thing that fascinates me about color is that each individual color has its own connotation, which can be perceived as emotional or can affect you in some particular way. One of things I strive for is to try to bring out the uniqueness of color itself as an expressive force. Color is involved with radiant energy. It’s not passive, and in that sense, when you look at color, it’s actually transferring energy into your physical self. So one of the things you try to do is to try to isolate some kind of vehicle, some kind of configuration that allows color to speak of itself and for itself. When I go to a paint store or a hardware store, I always stop by the paint chip section and I always marvel at the people who stand there are pull out chips and look them, saying “no this isn’t right…I like this…put these two together”. That’s one of the instances where color frees itself from its association, from its object, and people are looking at it for its own value. What would this be in my environment? I think that my painting over the years has been very much concerned with trying to find a format, a vehicle, a configuration that allows color itself to be its own sense of expression without being attached to other obligations or associations.

MD: I like this idea you mentioned about color literally being energy and how that energy can affect someone’s emotional state, their mood, their thought process. When experiencing your work first-hand, I am always overwhelmed in my senses, emotionally, intellectually when I see your work at first glance. I often have a hard time remembering what your work looks like. Then I’ll see it and I’m immediately struck like a blow to the face by this color experience washing over me, taking over me. What’s interesting is that once that subsides, you have the chance to see the work. I don’t mean looking at the work. I mean seeing the work. The work then functions on a secondary level. The longer you let your rods and cones adjust, the more rewarding your works become. They start with a very quick hit and then they move into a sort of slower, smoldering quality. You have color functioning at these two different speeds. I would love to hear from you about the experience of seeing your work. What do you expect fro the viewer? What does the viewer bring to this?

RS: I think your description is pretty close to what I would like a viewer to experience. I like that initial impact. I think there are things that have been described, for example, in the idea or concepts of the sublime where you are confronted with something for which you have absolutely no explanation. It’s ineffable. It consumes you and in one particular moment, you are taken to some other place. The secondary experience is that, yes, there is some kind of relational idea behind it, that it carries you to another place. One thing I was fascinated with, I spent a time working in a museum and they had, for example, Renoir’s Boating Party. One of the amazing things about that painting is that when you look at it happens in real time. In other words, you’re looking at it at that moment and understanding it. It isn’t something you have to learn a language about or you have to know the iconography. It happens in that moment and it’s the radiant energy that does that. And I think one of the successes could be, and it’s a theory of mine, that Impressionism and Post-Impression is so popular is because people step up to it. It’s not an illustration of something, but it actually demands that the perceptual processes operate. And people have a rapport with it because, as the physicist Ogden Rood pointed out, that your rods and cones are very active and you’re engaged as a participant in this work of art. You are not a voyeur standing outside of it, but it requires you there to look at it. I think your description is quite adequate in what I would hope a viewer would get. The other problem in dealing with color is that it’s very illusive. It’s about sensation and it something that is very hard to describe or classify.

MD: Yes, that’s a very good segue into something that I wanted to talk to you about. It’s actually two-fold. I have a binder of images of your work. And in that binder, you state that it’s a binder of digital color printouts of the paintings. And you have a disclaimer in there that this is by no means representative of what the work actually looks like, which is true. It’s not anywhere near it, in terms of experience, of color, of saturation, all of that. Similarly, when I’ve seen your work in an exhibition, and I’m thinking of an exhibition that was at Pratt Institute a couple of years ago curated by Robert C. Morgan, I remember being absolutely overwhelmed by your painting. I can remember what that painting looked like structurally, in terms of how the surface was divided, but I can’t remember the color whatsoever. What is it about color that needs to be seen first-hand?

RS: I think that’s because it happens in real time. It requires you to see it in real time. It’s not something you can attach a memory to. You can say, well that’s red, but that’s an aspect of experience. To actually experience means that you confront it and allow it to operate physically and emotionally and so forth and so on, through a perceptual process. I think it’s very difficult to have a color memory. I devised a numerical system so that I would be able to sort of track what color relationships are, but there isn’t a clear descriptive way to say what happens when you put this blue next to this orange. One could say, well that’s complements or split complements. On the other hand, you could say these colors are harmonious, so they’re analogous. But it’s very difficult to understand that it’s something that happens in real time. You can describe a thunderstorm, but that’s much different than being in it or having an experience about it.

MD: That’s a great analogy actually, a thunderstorm. I thinking loosely about that statement that Albers wrote about red, the Coca-Cola red sign and how that would be interpreted in so many different ways by so many different people ultimately. I think that’s apropos of this experience. The idea of remembering what your paintings look like, they are very elusive. You can kind of describe the color range, but words are just as inaccurate as the memory of a painting. Red, orange, blue doesn’t really describe what you are seeing by any means. In terms of the trajectory of the work you’ve been making for the past forty, almost fifty years, you’ve been working in a lot of different formats to display color. I’m thinking of your sliced circles, square grids, and these triangular hexagonal pieces in the 1960s. I’m thinking of your grid progressions that happened in the 1970s, 1980s, 1990s, and into this past decade. Most recently you’ve been doing a lot of brushstroke paintings. I am wondering if color functions across all of these different formats in the same way? Does a red, say a cadmium red, function the same way as a triangle, as a red square, or as a brushstroke? How is red different or the same across these formats?

RS: Each configuration orchestrates color differently. The initial problem that happened in the 1960s was something that was culturally complicated. It was at the end of Abstract Expressionism. It was coming to the end of its heyday. A lot of younger artists who I associated with were looking for paradigms, that is ways of doing painting that did not depend on pictorial space and to break the association that high Modernism had with that. So you have a number of things happening. You have the Minimalists coming in trying to change the way that we deal with sculpture and space and painting. And I made some decisions that I was not going to pursue color through pictorial space. I wanted to have it be an object on a surface that had its own limits and own character. One of the first things I started to do was series of paintings, which were destroyed, but they were basically made out of linear grids that had spectral organizations to them. The spectrums themselves made the shapes, so I tried to get rid of the idea that I had to have a shape to rationalize the use of a color. So I started looking at circles, triangles, hexagons, equilateral triangles in individual components, units, modules. I wanted the color, a yellow, to be painted on a square module and connected to others, in some cases, a hundred other squares, but each one maintained its identity because this yellow was relegated to this square, which was next to an orange, which was next to a red.

MD: These were literally painted on structural units that you bolted together.

RS: Structural units, either stretchers or plywood that was stretched with canvas, primed and painted with a paintbrush. In some instances, I left the brushstrokes in there. What I was trying to do is say that this color has its own boundaries, its own property. This is for this color. Several things happened. I found that the triangles and the hexagons worked beautifully. That being shaped, the points of the triangles where they came together created a different sensation than the adjoining one. So a single color could have many connotations because of its relationship with the edge. And this goes back to Michel Eugene Chevreul’s idea of simultaneous contrast and lot of technical words, but essentially it means that color is always seen within its relationship and its relationship changes its entire appearance. I went through a period where I tried a lot of different things. I finally settled on the square grid or rectilinear grid built of squares, a neutral format where color, not the shape, was given a voice.

MD: And you also moved away from these structural units because they became almost unwieldy from what I remember you telling me in an earlier studio visit. They became so large, so heavy. They became almost unmanageable.

RS: The individual units, yes. I did a very large painting for the Corcoran Museum in Washington, DC, and simply the physical weight of the entire piece was outrageous and difficult to deal with. So I started to move back to a single canvas.

MD: And you mentioned something earlier about some of the artists that you were working with and I mean this in the biggest possible sense during the 1960s. Who were you working with at the time? Who were you sharing studio visits, sharing ideas with? Who did you feel you had a critical relationship with? Who were you paling around with?

RS: There was a group of young people that came to New York about the same time I did in the mid-1960s, a lot of people from California. Everybody was trying to reestablish a new language, a new vocabulary, a new paradigm and there were several things that happened. The Primary Structures show at The Jewish Museum, which I was not in, which was primarily for sculptors, had a lot of new work that reestablished a different paradigm and a different relationship with the viewer. And there were people like Ronald Bladen, Tony Smith, Robert Grosvenor, and Forrest Myers. There was a whole group of younger people. There was also a non-profit gallery, Park Place Gallery, which I exhibited in, but I was not a member of. A lot of the work there was very experimental, using experimental materials. A lot of these materials were found on Canal Street. Plastic, fiberglass. I think Claes Oldenburg once said that Canal Street, with all its hardware stores and materials stores, plastic stores, electric stores, was the palette for artists in the 1960s. A lot of it was experimental. It was not produced to be something that one sold in the art market. Pieces were made out of cardboard. It was more experimental work trying to break into a new paradigm, organizing space and materials, and above all organizing experiences. Later in the 1960s, I became a friend and worked for Tony Smith and found a great deal of satisfaction in the conversations that Tony Smith and I would have about art.

MD: I want to go back to one thing you mentioned. The exhibition Primary Structures and the venue Park Place were both dealing with experimental materials. A lot of sculpture was being shown there, a lot of installation work. You were making paintings. And making paintings primarily about color experience. Were there any artists that you were sharing notes with about either painting, continuing painting, in spite of these new materials that were happening. Or in terms of color experience? Were there any relationships, people you were looking at, thinking about?

RS: There were a number of people that were close to me. There was David Novros, Robert Durand, and Gay Glading, who I was looking at, who were doing experimental work. I ran into some problems because my work became more and more about color. A lot of that movement at the time moved towards material substances, where the content was either inherent in the process or the materiality of what you were looking at. For example, something would be a shape painted with glitter. I wasn’t involved with those types of languages. I was more involved with the sensation of color.

MD: It was at about this time that you basically starting looking at color from scratch and the indexing of that color. And you spent many years mixing, measuring, mapping, and preparing to understand, for the next forty years, color and all its inherent qualities. From what I understand, you started that in the early 1970s and you’ve currently got about 4,000 color chip samples that you’ve personally mixed and painted. You maintain kind of a color index or library in your studio. What motivated you to start this process? A lot of other artists were working with materials qualities and new forms. How did you start indexing color?

RS: A lot of people think it is quite unusual that I did that. I don’t think it’s unusual at all. I was trained from the time I was about twelve years old, studying realism, studying anatomy, studying painting of that nature. When I started to work with non-representational concepts, one thing that came up in the mid-1960s was, I didn’t really understand anything about color. So what I started to do in a very primitive way was to start painting color charts to try to get some fundamental understanding of how colors related and contrast and things like that. Also, there were a couple of art stores in New York. One called David Davis, and David was a very eccentric individual. He would actually let me go in and take samples of all his oil paint and put it on a little piece of paper. There were paint brands that came from Europe, from the United States, and I became fascinated by color charts. I started to look at them. I started to try to understand what the experience was between this red produced in Germany and that red produced in France. And not unlike Albers collecting all these paint samples, at a certain point I started to think that this is like studying anatomy. You really have to know the entire muscle and bone structure. So I said, well, I’ll start to develop a hue circle. I started to look at a lot of different people who had built hue circles. They go back for centuries and based on that I thought, well if you’re going to deal with this as subject matter, you’d better start to develop some way to record it, index it, document it, analyze it. It seemed to be a natural thing. I started building a color system, which right now has 4,896 pieces and I’m hoping to add to it.

MD: Well that was my next question. Is your research into color complete at this point? It sounds like it’s not.

RS: No, I don’t think so because it’s kind of a domino effect. Once you start to look at something, it leads you right into something else. And you say, what does yellow look like in combination with blue and green and something else. It becomes a very compound problem.

MD: So tell me about the thirty-part hue circle? How did you arrive at a circular format? Why does it have thirty parts? How does this circle operate in terms of color?

RS: When you start to deal with color, you have to decide how many yellows, reds, oranges, violets, blues are going to be in your color system. So you start to look at the history of color and you find that certain color experts decided there should be ten or twelve or twenty-four. And I struggled with that for a long time. I actually did some 8-foot 6-inch paintings that were based on color circles. They looked like pie-shaped hue circles. After looking at some components, like Munsell, who’s a leading color theorist and artist himself, who built a color system, he used five primary colors. Other systems of color use six. So I was put in this awkward position where, are there six, three primaries and three secondaries? Or are there five? Like any good person, I combined both of them, decided there would be thirty. Also, I found the interval relationship moving from yellow to red to orange a very smooth one, where each color retained its identity, but it related to the one next to it. So I finally settled on my system, which would have thirty pieces, so many oranges, so many reds, violets, blues and greens. And all of this was down visually. It wasn’t done mathematically. It was not done in some kind of progression. It was simply done by painting color charts, looking at them, and deciding in that moment of looking at something, that this would be the correct component for that. It’s a little different. There are systems that are based on ratios or mathematical formulas.

MD: And long did you spend getting your brain wrapped around this system originally?

RS: Each step of it represents a certain group of paintings, but it’s still ongoing. It took me a couple of years just to decide on the hues.

MD: Your thirty-part hue circle includes only pure hues, right? I’ve seen color charts that you’ve created that map not just pure hues, but also saturation and value shifts as well. They tend to be these grided-out forms, mapping a yellow, mapping an orange, mapping a blue, mapping a violet. How many of those charts are there?

RS: There are supposed to be thirty of them, where you take an individual color like yellow and break it down into all its components by adding white to it, adding black to it, or gray. And color is three-dimensional. It has three dimensions to it, hue, value and saturation. These are technical things, which certainly I’m involved in, but for the normal viewer, you simply have to know that there are light colors, dark colors, colors which are unsaturated, and grays, things of that nature. I broke this down into thirty-three different steps, going from light to dark and up to nine different saturation steps, meaning that you could have a pure orange and then by adding gray to it, it eventually dissipates in its purity and becomes sort of a brown, a word I never use.

MD: The word brown.

RS: Yes.

MD: And why is that?

RS: I think a lot of words are not very accurate, not very descriptive, so if I said to you, gee, you’re in Italy, you have a brown house. What does that mean? Is it red brown, orange brown? I mean how can we define it? In the 1960s, a group of people came up with this idea that you describe color either by its hue, value or saturation, and by doing that, we have a more accurate idea of what that color is. I took that notion and assigned it to a number, which a lot of other people dealing with color did. So when you say to me #15, I know what color it is. And when you say to me, it’s #25, I know it’s kind of dark. And when you say, its saturation is #5, I know it’s not quite pure and it’s not quite impure either. There are ways that you can put and describe color with a numerical system that enables you to handle some of the relationships. It doesn’t give you the whole content, but it gives you an idea.

MD: One thing that really surprised me when I first visited your studio a few years ago was the fact that you have a lot of computer equipment in it. It was a surprise to me thinking of you as a painter. I know that you’ve been working with a color spectrometer to measure the light characteristics of the paint you’re mixing. I would love you to talk a little bit about how technology – I know you’re not thinking of this in terms of science or mathematics – but there is a bit of technological assistance going in to mixing and measuring the qualities of the paint you’re ultimately using in the paintings. What motivated you to get a spectrometer?

RS: One of the problems in working with color is constantly knowing what the color is and what its characteristics are. People who manufacture color for artists change a lot of times the quality of the color because of the pigment they buy on the open market. My quest was to keep the color consistent so that I could analyze the sensation that came out of the color. If you bought a yellow and it had a little more orange in it, it would change that consistency. Computer technology is very interesting. I’m sure that if Monet was alive today, he’d have five computers. I know Da Vinci would probably have ten computers. They’re instruments like drawing. People don’t realize that oil paint at a certain point, the revolution in it was that they figured out that they could put in tubes. Artists could go out in the field and you would have a tube of paint. It was a big learning curve for me to get into computers. I find them just an extension of the way to calibrate, to look at, to document color. The technology you’re talking about, a photo spectrometer, an instrument that measures the wavelength of color, back in the 1960s cost $500,000. You can buy one for your home computer these days for probably less than $1,000. It only measures wavelengths of color. It tells you what the color is, what the wavelength is and things of that nature. But it’s very helpful, when you’re handling 4,896 colors to keep them organized so you know, in looking at color, what these combinations will be and what they produce. Ultimately, my quest is to put into categories color sensation and that is what I’ve been working on for some time.

MD: So your computer equipment and spectrometer is an organizational device, a mapping, charting, indexing device. Are you premixing all of those paints, all 4,896 of them?

RS: Sure.

MD: So you have tubes or jars that are ready to go that have been mapped and measured?

RS: I have a lot of jars of paint.

MD: In my career, both as an artist and as someone who runs a project space that shows abstract, geometric, conceptual-based work, I’ve seen that this kind of work is very difficult for people to understand. The point of entry is very difficult. A lot of people think that this work gets beamed in from outer space and that there isn’t an actual living, breathing, human being making this work. I would like to know about your process for making a painting. Where does the painting start in terms of your studio, your mindset, your worldview? Where does it begin?

RS: When I chose color as my subject matter, it begins with the idea that in looking at a lot of color, I’m fascinated by a certain green. And in that particular case, I am trying to find a place where this particular green, a size, could be placed in relationship with some other colors that would bring out its characteristics. The green might be placed next to its complement, a red, and it might also modulate to other colors that have some relationship to the red or green. Essentially what I am looking for is a window, an opportunity to use the special characteristics of a particular color and some of its other related relationships. For example, you might modulate from green into blue into violet and end up in red, but you are looking for ways that you can orchestrate the experience of looking at a particular color. It’s kind of like landscape painting where you would go to southern France and look at a mountain. And you would say, I’m going to paint under this light, under this circumstance, and I’m going to use the excuse, or the armature of the mountain to get at some of these colors or sensations. I just skip the landscape part and go right to the color.

MD: Right to the color. So a painting may begin with a specific color, a green you mentioned, and it is followed up with a question. What if? What if it’s combined with a violet or a blue, or juxtaposed with an orange? Do you work these out in your head, the structures of how that color sequencing is going to happen? Are you working with a computer? Are you working with paint chips? How do you go about laying out what ultimately become a painting?

RS: First, I think of it in my head and then I lay it out numerically with my color system. I jot down some relationships, numbers, and since there are a lot of colors involved, I’ve developed a kind of logic for dealing with numbers, like having a #3 next to a #17, so I know that that’s a type of relationship. And for a certain value, I have another number. If I think it’s going to work conceptually, then I will do a study of it on a computer and look at it very carefully and actually print out an inkjet print where you can see pretty much where the relationships are. In the 1960s, 1970s, and a lot of the 1980s, I would paint these studies by hand so it would take me maybe a month to mix up the paint to paint the study. Many times I wouldn’t like three of the colors in the study so I’d have to go back and redo the whole thing over and over again. Computers allow you to expedite decision-making. In one painting, I might make fifty or sixty studies. I can change them that quickly. It allows you to get access to the structural organization immediately. Ultimately, after I do that, I do paint a study and I look at the study. Sometimes I have to paint several studies because the pigment is not the same as an inkjet print, which I like a great deal. You can’t reproduce the aura of painting with inkjet mechanics. It has to be done in reality with pigment.

MD: Nor viewing it solely on a computer screen. It’s a very different experience. So the studies you’re painting, are they large? Are they small? Are they on paper? On canvas? What do they look like?

RS: Initially, they are inkjet prints and actually I paint different sizes. And if I think a small size, say a 24-inch painting, is going to work larger, I will move it up to seven or eight or nine feet. But it’s done in steps, so that every step is perceptually judged. If I think there is any flaw in it, then I’ll change it. In the past I would try to paint these things flat out in scale and a lot of them wouldn’t work at all.

MD: And then would you go back into it and repaint it? Or just scrap it and start over?

RS: Sometimes I go back repaint it, but this also comes out of my traditional background. I think everybody knows in classical painting, the artist does a drawing. He does a preliminary study. He does a small painting. Georges Seurat’s painting in the Met is a good example of an intermediate step that Seurat took for painting the final painting A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte. I’ve always done that. That’s kind of the tradition of painting.

MD: So there’s a very meticulous vetting process that goes into what ultimately is that finished painting?

RS: Yes.

MD: Although I tend to hate this question, what does the duration of that look like from start to finish? How long will you sit with a painting before you make the decision to paint it?

RS: I’ve worked on paintings for two years or fours years before I decided to paint it. A lot of this is done through color studies, which relate to the painting and they make take six months to a year. I don’t have a time schedule. I wish I did. I wish I had some way I could say, well do X, Y, and Z, and it’s finished. It seems that most paintings have their own particular durational life and they want to be served in a certain way. Some of the larger things I’ve done, ten by thirty feet, have taken me over a year to do, of just working on that single thing. It’s not a particularly productive process, but that’s what it takes to do it.

MD: In looking at the trajectory of your work over the last forty years, it’s pretty clear to me that your exploration hasn’t been linear. It hasn’t been a narrative. This develops into that. That develops into the next thing and so on and so on. Your investigation has been more helix-shaped or coiled spring-shaped where you are looking at something in the 1960s, and returning to it again in 1970s, and then tweaking it again in the 1980s and 1990s. What are your key concerns, in addition to color, that keep you going back into the studio, going back into earlier work? Are you consciously thinking about the work you made in the 1960s and 1970s? Does your earlier work play a role in the work you’re making now?

RS: I think there’s a main thread that runs through all of it. I think it’s influenced by a lot of different things. I think, for example, that there is a general cultural paradigm, which all artists are influenced by. Back in the 1980s, I did this large piece, which was never built, a light piece in Texas that was supposed to be on the outside of a building and controlled by a computer that displayed color to people driving by in trucks and cars. My influence at that time was a kind of cultural influence where people were getting out the studio, people were building earthworks, building pieces outside of the frame of conventional art. Mainly what I am driven by is what color can present in a new way to people. There are inherent problems in that. People are still struggling to understand non-representational art, abstract art. But I’m trying to get at a position where I can give greater access to the viewer about what this subject matter is about. It’s governed by a lot of factors.

MD: I want to look specifically at the works you made during the 1960s and 1970s, and I think there is something really interesting in terms of one of those factors that came up in the work. A lot of your earlier work, and I think it is still present in the work you’re making know, has these shifts in saturation that basically go from one edge to the opposite edge or from one corner to the opposite corner, where you have a pure color running along one side and then it dissipates. I’ve really only seen one example of your work, the Johnson & Johnson commission, where the work is organized down the middle and is bilaterally symmetrical. I remember you referring to this as dynamic equilibrium, which is about organizing things asymmetrically. Tell me a little bit about it.

RS: Dynamic equilibrium is a concept that has been used since the Renaissance. It simply is a way of describing a type of internal tension in a work of art. And that tension is such that is gives a presence to the work of art and the viewer acknowledges that presence. It distinguishes itself from pure design, so instead of having everything just in terms of harmonies, it talks about establishing a tension. The Johnson & Johnson painting is symmetrical. It does have on opposite sides of the painting this kind of saturated and unsaturated colors, so the symmetry, in a way, is kind of challenged and torn apart. It’s at a point where there’s some tension there. A lot of my work, as with other artists, has this quality of striving to get a kind of tension through dynamic equilibrium, either through spatial relationships or through color relationships. I’ve always admired, for example, Pierre Bonnard, who will put two hues together, put orange and blue, but he’ll add white to both. The orange and blue are complements, but the white is a unifier pulling the two hues back together. And he will also add the same amount of saturation to two hues, so you have an interesting relationship. You have things that disagree because they’re complements, but you have the white pulling the two hues back into a relationship. The saturation is also pulling the two hues back. So, in a sense, he is creating the perfect relationship, a certain amount of tension and a certain amount of relationship. I’ve worked asymmetrically having large against small. I’ve worked having harmonies or things that are analogous against contrast. The idea is to strive for some type of dynamic equilibrium. Piet Mondrian is another good example of a person who talked about disturbing the symmetry of something through spatial relationships.

MD: I think that quality is why your work, even when it’s forty or fifty years old, seems so current right now, so dynamic. It’s not staid or stable or set in any way. It’s in a state of being, a state of transforming, which I find really compelling.

RS: That’s what I strive for. I think all artists strive for that.

MD: In the structuring of the paintings themselves, in particular the grid-based paintings, you are using square grids. In those grids, I know you are zeroing in on a couple of different sized squares in those paintings. I know you’ve mentioned to me in the past. 7 x 7-inch squares, 9 x 9-inch squares, and 13.75 x 13.75-inch squares. I’m assuming color functions pretty differently in each of those sizes.

RS: Yes.

MD: A critical question for me. Is it about the square area of that color, say a red of a certain size in terms of square inches, or is it about the length of the side of that square and its relationship to the other colors adjacent to it? Is there an ideal size that you’ve determined that works best for color interaction?

RS: It’s kind of strange. For years, I tried to figure out when you put a group of colors together in a grid, and they’re next to each other, I wanted to the viewer to see the original color in the middle of the square. But that square also has on four sides other squares. When those colors interact, they create different color sensations. Initially I thought if I made 9-inch squares, that would be good, but it seemed that the colors relationships of the other squares dominated that one square, so I started increasing the size of the square. The larger I made the square, the more the initial color retained its identity. And the colors adjacent, the colors on each side, created other colors. I simply started to look at them from a certain viewing distance and changed the size of the square over and over again. I finally ended up with what I thought was the ideal square simply by sitting and looking at it. I got up off my chair and I measured the square. It wasn’t 13 inches. It wasn’t 9 inches. It turned out to be 12 inches, I don’t know why.

MD: 12 inches was the ideal.

RS: Yes, at a certain viewing distance.

MD: Is there a size where that breaks down, either a square being too small where it almost becoming pixilated or too large where it becomes a field?

RS: Yes, but that led me also to move away from a symmetrical grid and start to have big blocks of color next to small blocks of color.

MD: And that started in the 1980s, right? The mid-1980s?

RS: Yes.

MD: And what motivated you to do that?

RS: I wanted that one big block of color to remain and have its own identity. So, there was a big block of violet and the smaller colors had a phenomenological interaction that created different sensations. On one hand, you have a passive large violet square next to the small, interactive one. It’s a perfect description of dynamic equilibrium where you have something that is very passive and something that is very interactive.

MD: A lot of those painting you made in the 1980s were divided into quadrants with two-thirds of the space at the top and a third at the bottom. I may be mistaken on the exact proportions, but it seemed there were different activities happening in each of those quadrants. You’ve almost got four paintings working in concert within the same painting structure. A big area of color, a quadrant next to it where there may be a value shift, another quadrant where there may be a saturation shift. What was your motivation for having multiple things happening at the same time in a single painting?

RS: That kind of goes back to the statement you said before. You want a painting to be durational. So it starts out looking one way and then it modulates or changes its configuration through a relationship to have a different experience. So you have a large passive violet square that leads in through modulation to other sizes, but its relational. It steps up and down.

MD: Absolutely. And I think that the color decisions you made in these paintings from the 1980s have bigger, broader steps. They tend to be less spectral and use much more disparate colors. In some cases, almost discordant color. I find that really interesting.

RS: That’s really a marvelous statement because that’s what I ran up against when I was dealing with only the grid paintings. There was a lot of phenomenology in the color, but we weren’t seeing the individual color itself. We weren’t seeing its characteristics. We were seeing a lot of fluctuation of light, radiant energy. So I decided part of the painting should be static, and it should be about a particular color. The other part should have this phenomenology within it. That was the rationale.

MD: Moving on to the work you’ve been making for the past decade, the brushstroke paintings. I felt this was another new and radical step forward for your work, where for the past thirty or forty years you were doing solely hard edge-based painting with taped, hard, straight, rectilinear edges. To move into visible brushstrokes where the surface was also no longer flat but rather built up depending on how the brushstrokes were laid down. A lot of these works have this grid-based progression where they’ll go from the very, very small, almost Pointillist dot, for lack of a better term, to these larger, very expressive kind of brushstrokes. How did you arrive at this new strategy? How did you make the decision that the brush needed to come into it in a more visible way? That the surface needed to be built up?

RS: One thing that I’m constantly concerned with is just releasing the energy of color because it is about energy. I started to think about the grid paintings as being a little too passive. They released some of the energy. I had done some brushstroke paintings back in the 1960s that got destroyed. They didn’t really work that well because I didn’t understand color that well. But I took up the brushstroke and I started to make parts of the paintings big and parts very small so that when you scan the surface of the painting, you had access to the radiant energy. But that energy changed as you made the brushstrokes smaller, so when the brushstrokes became almost Pointillist, the colors mixed and combined in a completely way than they did when the brushstrokes were larger. I really wanted to get down to releasing the energy so that the painting was very much about being in the same environment with the viewer and the energy was radiating off the surface, as well as looking at the painting itself. I also became fascinated with the electronic age where you are bombarded with energy. A great deal of the content is inherent in how this energy is released to you as the viewer.

MD: So tell me about your approach to making a brushstroke painting.

RS: I have a painting upstairs that I’m working on where the brushstroke is kind of decorative. It’s like Baroque. And then what I did is I took all my art brushes and I got rid of them. I went out and bought these very cheap horsehair brushes. I use them once and throw them away. The mark you make with it, you can’t make a good a mark. The brush is made so crudely. I remember this thing that Frank Stella and Willem de Kooning were talking about. They were having a big dialogue with each other. De Kooning was talking about how he took such good care of his brushes and he’d soak them in lye. He tried to shape them and make them. And at the other end of the table, somebody said to Stella, “well what do you do?” He said, “I don’t know. I just hire a bunch of guys and get some paintbrushes.” But I’ve been struggling to figure out whether I should use a more subjective brushstroke or whether it should be more be mechanical. I painted a couple that were more mechanical and I didn’t like them. It’s very hard to figure out.

MD: Have you ever used studio assistants to make your work?

RS: They’ve never painted on a final painting. They’ve helped me paint preparatory stuff.

MD: But never worked on the final pieces?

RS: No. I’ve been thinking about asking Shawn who works for me now to help me underpaint some stuff. To paint one of these is just hours and hours.

MD: So the impact of the brushstroke and its format on color itself, what I find really interesting about them is the stroke itself. The paint is put on relatively thickly. The very top edge of a stroke has a highlighted edge and the bottom edge has a shadow, which again throws the color into a few different directions. What that your intention?

RS: Yes. I was trying to get at different characteristics of color by using an active brushstroke. Also, the brushstroke is, in some instances, very material, so there’s a kind of dialectic between something that is sensation and something that is very material, but again it goes back to that idea of dynamic equilibrium. The metaphysics of having something that looks very material or visceral, and then something that’s about light, something that’s very illusive and kind of flickers across the edge. And then the changing of the scale also helps, having things that are small versus things that are large. The durational process of comprehending it requires you to sort of scan it. The painting also exists as an object, as a physical object, where it has a kind of radiance about it simply by being in the space with you.

MD: Do you feel that these paintings are more physical than your prior grid-based paintings?

RS: Yes.

MD: And how did you develop the specific brushstroke you are using in these paintings because it is very particular to just this body of work? I know you have a pre-planning underlying progression in terms of the scale of the stroke where if goes from very small to very large within the same painting. You have the opportunity to see the color in multiple ways.

RS: First of all, I grid off the paintings. I start up at the top with very large squares and then go down to very small squares. I use a series of brushes, some large, some small. I don’t necessarily adhere to the grid. I simply use it as a point of orientation. But it’s just my brushstroke. It’s just the best I can do to put on the paint. I am trying to not have uniform brushstrokes, but have what would be, not a really random brushstroke, but one that would not bring a great deal of attention to itself. This problem of the brushstroke I haven’t really resolved. I started back in the 1960s using brushstrokes in these grid paintings, but it got to the point where I didn’t thing it worked well.

MD: The brushstrokes themselves are not ordinary. They retain the hard edges around them and they’re not transparent or painterly in any way. They are almost like monochrome blobs of color. How are you putting the paint down?

RS: Initially, when I started using fine art brushes, they seemed to create a kind of very reserved brushstroke, so I got rid of all of those and started to buy very inexpensive, cheap brushes. They made a mark that didn’t allow me to put a lot of aesthetic emphasis into and I liked that better. But keeping the edges clean is important. That’s then where the colors then can interact. If the edges aren’t clean, then the color becomes muddled a little bit. There is, during this transformation from one spot in the painting to another, where the color does change quite a deal in terms of its appearance. One the one hand, you’ll see colors emanating one kind of energy and then as you move towards the bottom another. I’ve also always had this idea that the upper right and lower left, or the top and bottom of the painting, should be different. They should constitute some kind of context wherein the activity occurs.

MD: How did you arrive at that? Why the upper right and the bottom left, or the top versus bottom?

RS: I started out with the idea that color has three dimensions and I thought if I’m going to use color, it should have an element of black in it and an element of white. So it kind of contextually shows the three dimensions of color. There is dark and light. There is saturated and unsaturated. And there is a different type of hue relationship. It came out of that idea.

MD: I’m going to assume that a good number of visitors to the survey show you’re having at Hunter College this fall are going to see a vast difference between the more grid-based paintings and the brushstroke paintings. I am wondering if you want to offer a few words about the relationship between the two of those strategies.

RS: I think initially a lot of the grid paintings were involved in trying to understand and develop a knowledge of color and how color actually had the ability to be expressive. And I think the brushstroke paintings represent an approach where color assumes a completely different posture. It’s not passive. It’s active. I think that’s an important aspect of color, that it can actually generate all this energy out of this brushstroke.

MD: That’s a really great description about how they relate. And finally, you are going to be showing at Hunter College forty or fifty years’ worth of work. A huge span of time, a huge body of work. A lot of ambitious paintings, a lot of ambitious projects. But I don’t really think of this as being a capstone in your career. This is no retrospective. This is a mid-career survey and I’m wondering where you’re going with the work over the next few years. What projects are you planning for the next three to five years? What’s piquing your interest? Where are there opportunities for exploration?

RS: You know I’ve been working a lot with these brushstroke ideas and I have some conceptual ideas about expanding it to include more aspects of the phenomenology that comes out of the spectrum. So it would require larger scales. I think probably different configurations. I’m kind of shocked that I ended up with forty or forty-five years’ worth of painting. I never looked at it in retrospect that way. I think most painters pursue their work as a type of educational experience. I’m adding language, vocabulary. I’m trying to define more my logic. I’m trying to let my intuition determine more of how my paintings should be developed. I think intuition is a very strange thing. It operates independently of your intellect. You may think you know something, but at some point, your intuition will let you see some other aspect of it. I have depended most of these years on my intuition to lead me to the next body of work, to the next thing I might do, simply out of the fact that you are working with certain variables and then all of a sudden it says to you, well, there is this opportunity. Why don’t you look into this? I’m not worried about that. I’m worried about the ability to try to understand what my intuition is conceptually forming for me and how it’s going to lead me to the next step.

MD: I would like to thank you for taking the time to speak to me about your work and practice. I look forward to seeing your exhibition at Hunter College in October.