So, you don't even know who or where you are looking in on them, I am thinking of.īN: The man sleeping on the cot at the industrial farm.ĪC: Yes, right! So, it’s coming upon people, spying on them somehow, or catching them off-guard. And even the perspective that you're seeing them from isn't a normal perspective. That's still life, that's painting, a rendering of the world in two dimensions.ĪC: Just last night I was thinking how, in some of my older paintings, I've painted people viewing other people when they're vulnerable seeing them when they don't want to be seen, or don't expect to be seen. There's a kind of un-peopled world that you often picture, and it's related to, predominantly, a stillness-holding things still to look at them. Maybe it's the middle of the night, nobody's there, the only figures are toys. You've painted imaginary and abandoned places before. And the pyramids-it's a lost civilization. We see the boat in the storm-tossed sea, but there's no sailor. And then seeing the tops of the Easter Island statues-for a long time, it was, ‘Who made them? How did they get there?’ It was a mystery. And then when we look to the right, at the whale hunt, the whalers aren't there. The image is really frontal is the cliff dwellers from the Southwest, and that's basically an abandoned place, the people are gone. You immediately said, 'Oh, look, you've painted your own paintings.' And it took me a long second to realize that you were right.īN: Well, they are and they aren’t. There are so many vignettes in that sort of imaginary museum that relate to many paintings you've done up until now.ĪC: I was a little bit stunned honestly when you pointed that out.

Photography courtesy of Anna Conway.īN: Ark? That's not one painting, it’s more like seven! A retrospective-as if seven of your paintings come back in one work.

As you know, I don’t make preparatory studies for my paintings, I have tried, but the painting takes over. And it felt less like a short story, more like a novel, but it also surprised me as it became more and more populated as I painted. And it certainly happens in your paintings.ĪC: Sometimes they do get crowded. You go through a book of stories, from one to the next, and certain things overlap. When you said there's never a series, you're not writing or painting a novel. Each painting in some way is its own character or story.īN: That's something writers often say-that the characters reveal themselves as they write them I think of your paintings as more like short stories. For me, the impetus behind my painting is the painting itself, it gains momentum as I'm working on it, and the painting itself ultimately reveals a story that is often surprising to me. One thing I’ve never done is make a “body of work” or thought of paintings as projects. So, I wonder if you can address that idea of being a kind of visual storyteller in painting.Īnna Conway: I think you are absolutely right. They're characters in some sort of story. This really relates to inventing the visual worlds and characters that we see in your paintings, the people who inhabit them. Bob Nickas: I'm aware that writing and books, the writers in your family are important to you, and form a big part of your mind.

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