• By
  • Ellen Gamerman
Richard Serra

Richard Serra’s monumental sculptures have made him famous—works that sell into the millions of dollars—but drawing has been a constant in his life ever since his childhood, when his mother brought rolls of white paper from the butcher shop for his drawings of boats, planes and zoo animals.

This week, the Metropolitan Museum of Art opened the first retrospective of the 71-year-old contemporary artist’s drawings, an exhibit of works that span the last 40 years. He drew some pieces on a huge scale, and the physical effort it took to make them is clear: one drawing, “out-of-round X,” features the artist’s footprints and hand prints as he labored over the paper.

Though work on paper is more portable than steel sculpture, to Mr. Serra, the subject of drawing is just as weighty. He recently spoke with The Wall Street Journal about solitude, mothers and meat grinders.

Do you have to be in good physical shape to do your drawings?

I’ve been doing this since I was a student, when I was very, very young. I was an athlete and I swim every day, and other than having a new knee, a new hip and a spinal operation, I’m in very good shape.

Can you describe the process of creating a drawing?

Drawing is I would think the most concentrated area that I work in continuously because in sculpture there’s always a delay between the inception and the completion, because it has to go through computer manipulation and then it has to go to forging or it has to go to a factory, and it has to be built, and you have to go for setting it and you have to go for readjustment. So a sculpture what happens is between the inception and completion could be anywhere from a year to three years, whereas in drawing you get an immediate feedback for your participation.

Is your drawing much more solitary?

It’s much more, for me, nourishing and solitary. And it’s a place where I can give my total concentration and it’s a place I’ve always gone to for reaffirmation of my sensibility.

Why do you sometimes put paintstick, your drawing material, through a meat grinder?

When I was a student at Yale, they were very interested in the fact that matter imposes its own form on form, so they’d have the students try to invent ways of making form. As a student, I just took a meat grinder and I started passing cement through it. They looked like abstract cannolis. I wasn’t interested in making sculpture, but I was interested in trying to find my own procedures and my own tools. I think it’s probably important for younger artists in particular to invent their own procedures and their own tools, because you’re not going to dismantle the master’s house by using his tools and his procedures. I think people fall into an academic trap of working out of the art store or working out of Canal Street.

How did your mother encourage your drawing when you were little?

When I was about in the third grade the teacher called my mother into the class, and they had all my drawings up around the top wall of the room, around the entire periphery, and the teacher pointed them out and said to my mother, “You have to take this student to museums, you really have to encourage this.” And my mother took it very seriously. And thereupon whenever she introduced me she introduced me as “Richard Serra the artist,” from a very young age. That pretty much determined what I was going to be and I enjoyed it. I thought, “Fine, that’s what I’m going to be.”

I wonder how many mothers have heard that story and right now are introducing their children the same way.

If you have a Jewish mother, you’re lucky. I think one of the things that was really great about my parents is no matter how I would draw, they would always be supportive. They were never saying, “Oh, you should correct it,” or “Do it this way or that way.” They were totally supportive.

How do you fight the perception some people have that artists create their best work when they’re young?

If you look at late Matisse, late Picasso, late Cézanne, there are a lot of people who had their best work in their late years. Some people in their later work spiral back down to their early work and bring it back new. I try to, if I can, extend myself in every opportunity I have to work. Here at the Met, the last work in the show (“Union,” dated 2011) I think is one of the best works, to tell you the truth.

For the latest entertainment news