Welcome back to BOMB in the Building, where each week weâ€™re featuring a vintage BOMB interview with a Season 5 artist. This week, we head back ten years to revisit a classic conversation with Mary Heilmann, conducted by Ross Bleckner. â€œHeilmannâ€™s style defies the fashionable,â€ Bleckner writes, â€œher paintings contain a joy so contagious one smiles upon seeing them…[they] sing with a life force hard to match.â€ In this interview excerpt from BOMB Issue 67, Spring 1999, these old friends and peers discuss memory, nostalgia, and a body of work that was 40 years in the making. Read the full interview here.
Ross Bleckner: What do you consider yourself?
Mary Heilmann: Sometimes Iâ€™m a light artist and sometimes Iâ€™m a heavy artist. Significantly, in the making of our work, we artists channel the artists that worked before us.
RB: Naturally, but I think youâ€™re a light artist. Thatâ€™s what Iâ€™ve always liked about your work, the casual attitude. Iâ€™ve known you for a long time but I donâ€™t know you that well. I think youâ€™re very serious and something of a formalist. But itâ€™s the character of your abstraction thatâ€™s always interested me. I canâ€™t really say whether itâ€™s backhandedâ€”but it seems to beâ€”which is now equated with ironic, but wasnâ€™t back when I first saw your work. Thatâ€™s what I mean by light. I donâ€™t mean that as good or badâ€”I actually think itâ€™s very interesting in your case. I remember seeing your paintings when I was a little pup.
MH: When you first showed up here in New York, you mean?
RB: Yeah. You were showing at Holly Solomon Gallery. And what was funny about your paintings is that they were simpleâ€”squares within squares, kind of quasi-minimalist, brightly coloredâ€”everything was slightly off register, even the shape of the canvas itself, right? The square would be lopsided.
MH: I donâ€™t think so, not on purpose anyway. The interior squareâ€”
RB: Well maybe the interior square set up a perception that made me think of it as being slightlyâ€¦goofy.
MH: Yeah, itâ€™s true. It had that.
RB: Youâ€™ve managed to maintain that character for 30 or more years and it always seems very fresh to me. Itâ€™s actually what younger artists respond to in your work. What comes around goes aroundâ€”that freshness, your approach to abstraction, seems very unencumbered. It gives the paintings a lightness. You could translate it emotionally or spiritually, but itâ€™s like air. The paintings have a lot of air in them.
Anyway, take us back and give us an idea of the book youâ€™ve been working on and what it means to you to go back over these 30 yearsâ€”finding yourself with some new popularity.
MH: The book goes back to when I was born; itâ€™s the story of my whole life. Itâ€™s to show that the paintings reflect events and visual events that I experienced ever since I was a little child. I put this book together because it was an opportunity to make something about my work that wasnâ€™t just another art catalog. I wanted to make my own biographical book. And in it Iâ€™ve told some stories from my life, some little anecdotes, and Iâ€™ve chosen things that the paintings recalled. The painting Rio Nido has little spots of lightâ€”in the â€˜40s we went to a summer vacation spot where it was common to put colored lights around the porches.
RB: Theyâ€™re very popular. Pool motif.
MH: This was a working-class resort where teachers, nurses and policemen went. The memory of this place is just fantastic to me and that picture reminds me of it; that happens all along.
RB: Is that how you enter into your pictures?
MH: Itâ€™s not always the way I enter them. But sometimes I go there from a memory placeâ€¦
RB: Can you look at all the paintings in your studio and recall specific memories?
MH: No, but sometimes I look at one and I can start mentally and verbally riffing on it, and come up with something. They often do clock a style from some period, like this mint green is very â€˜40s and itâ€™s fashionable right now as well. People get that. You see chartreuse, you see an old and a current fashion.
RB: So youâ€™re trying through your use of colors to create a doubleness of meaning.
MH: Yes, a nuance or an undertone of meaning. Thereâ€™s a 40s-style drawing in this Calder painting and in Ice, this big curvilinear, open piece, a â€˜50s/â€™60s style, color field painting that was fashionable.
RB: Is there something a little retro about these ideas?
MH: Yes, a little sentimental and a little nostalgic, as well. When you speak of this work as being lightâ€”Iâ€™m walking on thin ice hereâ€”you could go towards corny, hackneyed and familiar. I like to tread on the edge of that. Iâ€™ve said this before, I like to get at deep sentiments through sentimentality.
RB: What do you mean, through sentimentality?
MH: Like notating abstract imagery from the past, that kind of nostalgia. Or you can have a sentimentality of scale where I have a small event in the painting, a lot of empty space, and another small event which might give you a feeling of angst or longing.
RB: Do you think that anything has that capacity?
MH: I look at paintings and try to sort them outâ€”mine and other peopleâ€™sâ€”I get a feeling from a painting and then I try to figure out how it made me feel that way.
RB: Do you always get feelings from paintings?
MH: Well, if Iâ€™m passing one and I happen to get a rush from it, then I spend some time with it. I try to figure out how it works. It helps me with my work.
RB: One of the things I like about your work is thereâ€™s an anonymity to the imagery. You take boxes or squares or balls or stripesâ€”basically you keep the vocabulary pretty elementary.
RB: Thereâ€™s a brushiness and a layered transparency to the painting quality itself that gives it its free spiritedness. Youâ€™ve been doing the same thing for a long time. Do you ever get tired of that free spiritedness or that sentiment, those memories? I mean, personally I canâ€™t bear memories. (laughter) To make memories into anecdotes sometimes gets a little tired.
MH: I hope it isnâ€™t tired. I can see how it could be.
RB: But what Iâ€™m saying is that when I look at your paintings, they donâ€™t look tired. If that method is tired, you manage to make it look fresh even if youâ€™re doing the same old thing, again and again.
MH: If you were to look at my work that you saw back in the â€˜70s and at what you saw in the â€˜80s and at what you see now, there has been quite a change. It seems the same but the brushy thing, that looseness and ease was not in the work way back when.
RB: You know what? Weâ€™ll just have to put them together at some point in your future. My opinion is youâ€™re one of the most underrated painters in New York.