BA: M. Dine, in your upcoming exhibition in Venice entitled “Dog on the forge”, your canvases are different and very remarkable, your paint is thicker and more densely applied, and it seems you even add pieces of material into it. Is this a new approach? Can you describe the process?
JD: I feel more like a blacksmith than a painter sometimes hence the title of the show. As for the thickness of the paint, I now use a mixture of acrylic and sand with which I make the impasto to which I include cellulose and polyvinyl which is also a very powerful glue. I let it dry until it becomes very hard, then It gives a very hard surface which I can then patina, correct and even erase with grinders
BA: And what about the insertions of cloth or even small floor pieces? How do you decide to add them?
JD: I am a great believer in the “Objet trouvé” a found objet you stumble upon which inspires you. It is a great metaphor about life itself
In my studio, I have a vocabulary of materials at my disposal. The material is very important to me. I let it speak to me. I consider this added material such as pieces of carpet or floor I have lived on as a personal mosaic. It feels like it corresponds to my own life, layers after layers of lived experiences and impressions. Materials, for me, are like tools. They're the tools with which I can express myself.
BA: Speaking about tools, new features also appear for the first time, spirals of copper are sticking out and cascading from your canvasses… What was the impetus behind this radical choice?
JD: Copper tubes have always exerted a fascination on me, ever since I was a child as my grand father had a hardware store and I liked watching plumbers manipulating and soldering them. I recently found a way to twist and bend them myself. I feel they add a new plane to my work. I think it energizes the surface and brings movement, like a dance, which is taking place. It is also like a line of paint; it relates to my hand in three dimension. The whole point is to have found this simple material that can really mirror my hand and use it like drawing on top of the staticness of paint. It’s like calligraphy.
BA: You have also inserted real tools on some of your canvases…
JD: Again I hope to transform the picture plane adding these objects which I found or bought. For me they become like a mark with my brush.
In the case of the tools, I greatly respect men working with their hands and using tools. These have a past and a history; they are the result of hundreds of year of thinking of optimizing how they could be used. I mean it is not a question of good design. The tools I am interested in like a hammer comes from work, not from Charlotte Perriand or from Le Corbusier. It comes from a carpenter. It has a history. We have a collective unconscious so does the hammer. You know it has this history of work. By this I mean it comes to you now in 2024, with thousands of years of somebody trying to make it work, it comes from that and you can’t throw that away…It is something to be celebrated and kept.
BA: Does this explain why you have created very big bronze sculptures such as the “Bolt Cutter”, in order to erect a useful tool into a work of art?
JD: Exactly. All of these come from my own vocabulary about tools; at two years old I was already playing in the garden with a hammer, my father took a film. But more importantly, I wanted to give people to think about their meaning for humanity, in order to force people to reflect on these aspects of their life and what we owe to these tools and to workers who know how to use them. They are charged with a memory; I deeply respect this. They are not to be discarded or disrespected. Quite the contrary in fact.
BA: You have included many such sculptures in your Venice show, huge in size, bigger in fact than what you have done in the past. Does this monumentality correspond to a personal evolution?
JD: To be frank, increasing the size of my sculptures is something that I have always wanted to do but I hadn’t found the right foundry for it. For some forty years I used a foundry near my country home in Walla Walla, Washington state and they didn’t have the equipment for these grand works. I am now sculpting at the Kunstgiesserei St Gallen, St Gallen Switzerland. They have allocated a studio just for me where I can create freely and supervise the work of my big statues in the making. There, I am the only old fashion artist who doesn’t use a computer to aid in my design. The young artisans respect this way of working with my hands.
BA: In Venice your show has many more sculptures than paintings. Is that a shift of interest? What made you change your usual balance?
JD: This is a solo exhibition in a 16th century palazzo and we have chosen with the curator, to respect the space and use the alcoves to install the paintings and adapted their size. There will also be a big painting standing on its own. We do not want to touch the walls. There are more spaces including the garden well adapted for the sculptures. Nonetheless it is also true that I am particularly interested by sculptures lately and I would like to make more of them … I have a whole program in my mind for the next few years.
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 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 paintings 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 but also my brain to this. I let it be driven by my unconscious but 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 organism, of how the flesh goes down, gravity has pulled it, 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 an autobiography. 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 stay still. So I am very familiar with me and fortunately, I have no hair and I have never had hair since I was 18 and 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. Anything 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. The first time I literally used the heart was working on the set design for “A Midsummer night’s dream” in 1966 in San Francisco for John Hancock. The heart represented Puck.
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 every time 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 of 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.
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BA: Following your work all those years, I realize that you have always kept telling us about yourself, you still do even on your huge canvas, with such a variety of colors. Again, focusing on them gives us many indications about yourself, as if each inch was in fact a juxtaposition of your “landscapes”. Each part has a story, a specific narrative, telling something about yourself.
JD: Thank you for detecting this. Yes that’s what I do and want to convey. I try to be precise and to tell my emotion and to express my exact state of mind at the time I stand in front of part of the canvas. And I do it through colors.
I am a great admirer of Morandi and the very close level of colors he uses is beautiful and modulated. But I am never like that. To me it’s what I pick up and it’s usually similar colors. My favorite color is red, and I use it often. I never asked for it, it came to me. It was a gift to me unconsciously.
BA: So your work is fascinatingly instinctive, you are projecting your soul on the canvas, your hand is guided by your unconscious without preconceptions or ideas.
JD: There is a structure in my mind yes, but I mainly trust my unconscious. I have such trust in my unconscious. It is what was given to me, like a higher being. They have given me a gift of such richness. It s like a load of gold; it’s like mining. I feel like an alchemist that is what I do, what artists do. We turn shit into gold. And that is my unconscious. If I lived to be three hundred it would never let me down. There is so much material, so much there I trust, it I think it is a shame when people waste it when people deny it. I think it’s ridiculous in fact.
BA: Another facet of your creativity is expressed through your poems. As soon as we enter your studio, we are surrounded by your poems. You write on doors, on the wall. They seem very much part of yourself and your art too…
JD: I heard poetry the first time thanks to a university professor at the great arts program. He was teaching me sculpture but one evening some of his friends came in the studio. They read Dylan Thomas and I thought to myself: “I can do that”. It was a revelation to me. After the loss of my mother I had become dyslexic and couldn’t read the letters correctly. I guess it was psychological too but I had a hard time at school. And it wasn’t until then with this great university professor that I realized I could write. And that’s when I began to write poetry too.
BA: How do you get your inspiration to compose poems? Is it different than for your paintings?
JD: A lot of my inspiration whether for poetry, painting, drawing or sculpture, comes from my experiences, from my observing, from my listening, from my childhood, and from my unconscious... I don’t see a difference between the poetry and the painting. They both participate in my creation. Both stem from a study of my inner self except that I am a better painter than a poet. First of all I started later and then, I just am.
BA: How do you get inspired to pick a specific theme? Do you ever use your dreams as inspiration?
JD: Again more like paintings where I trust the objet trouvé or a color, I read a page and I come upon a phrase in a poem and I tear the page out of the book.
I tell myself: “I can use that line, like I use the color red for painting for example, I know that it can be starting point to make the whole poem so the poem is not necessarily a dream, I rarely use dreams in fact.
BA: Do you see poetry as another way to depict and celebrate your life?
JD: Luckily, I still have a very good memory and I use the past as raw material at my disposal.
Lately these days, I have been enjoying thinking about my youth and about the friends I had or experiences I had as a child, recalling my meetings with neighbors, and then making it into a kind of mysterious poetry. I had for example, a neighbor who collected butterflies and I never knew people collected butterflies and he would take me to his basement and show me all these butterflies which were pinned and had names. That was so fantastic for me that I never was appalled by the fact that he killed all these poor butterfly”, instead I thought it was an amazing collection. Writing a poem, I recreate the mysteriousness about all these discoveries and experiences as it was then for me.
Other poems recall worrying moments still vivid in my mind. We lived near an insane asylum which was very frightening for me as as a young boy. You would go by the place which was very 19th century and the inmates would be outside watching us, acting strange. With my playmates, we all talked about it. This is more powerful than a dream because you bring to it something so amazing about your perception at this early stage of your life. I convert also past trauma into poems.
BA: Apart from the introspections of your past life, do you also get inspired by digging into your unconscious to write poetry?
JD: All my inspiration comes from my unconscious. I dig into my inner self and use even past trauma and convert them into art.
BA: In your poem entitled ‘resolutely happy’, you actually reflect on the death of your mother and how the family didn’t understand your needs, making sure you wouldn’t talk about it when it was the only thing in your mind. How it resonated with you. A beautiful poem in fact.
Do you feel the need to have processed your traumas before you can write a poem about them?
JD: It is often the case yes but not always. It took me years to get over the loss of my mother but when I finally did, I was able to use the material and emotion for my work as an artist. It became a vein of gold.
BA: With your bright colors, the energy and the brightness of your art, you appear as an optimist. Is it your real state of mind to be resolutely optimistic or is it a conscious decision?
JD: My state of mind is absolutely optimistic. I am grateful every day for being allowed to do what I love and to practice my art as a painter. My life consists now in working constantly, All I ever do is work, transcribing my state of mind through painting, and I am enjoying every minute of the process. I have no interest in anything else anymore. I used to like going to museums or socialize but I want to go forward because the future for me is now, so there is just so much time and I don’t waste it and my pleasure is to work. Through colors, I express the exuberance I feel about what I do and how fortunate I am to be born with this gift. It’s my way of respecting that gift, of celebrating it…
par
Brigitte Ades
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