This week, Mark welcomes good friend, colleague and artist, Jim Walsh, to "Paint Stories". Jim has been the director of the Sam and Adele Golden Gallery at Golden Artist Colors for the last 18 years. Listen in as Mark and Jim talk about the finer points of curating and mounting exhibits and share some of their favorites from over the years.
Mark Golden: Hi everyone, and welcome to my podcast I call Paint Stories.
I’m Mark Golden co-founder of Golden Artist colors with my folks Sam and Adele Golden and my wife Barbara.My family has had the delight and privilege to work with some of the worlds amazing artists, since my great-uncle Leonard Bocour began hand grinding oil colors in Manhattan in 1933.
Today I joined by a good friend, colleague and wonderful painter, James Walsh. Although I think it would be fair to say that most everyone calls him Jim. Welcome, Jim.
Jim Walsh: Hi, Mark, thanks, it’s great to be with you today. But before you ask a question if you’d let me just read one line from Leaves of Grass. ‘This hour I tell things in confidence — I might not tell everybody but I will tell you…’
Mark: Thanks, Jim.Actually does anyone ever call you James? Did your parents call you James?
Jim: No, they called me Jimmy. James is when I’m in trouble. Yeh know, a couple of Canadians have called me James…
Mark: Right…
Jim: They don’t abide the correction (to) call me Jim.
Mark: Seems very proper.
Jim: Larry for years used to call me Jimmy and then he stopped. So mostly it’s Jim.
Mark: Jim, let’s start off — what was your background that suggested that you would pursue a career as a painter?
Jim: Well, I remember the first drawing I ever made at age three and a half. I still have it. My mom gave me a little bit of newsprint and a green crayon. And I did a cow and a calf and the cow had in its mouth a bit as if it was a horse. Throughout school I was the class artist. You know, not untypical for folks who continue to work in art.Somewhere in high school I just got the bug. And everything was aimed towards making art of one kind or another
Mark: Was there a lot of art done in the house or were there a lot of paintings in the house?Were your parents painters or involved the arts?
Jim: Not at all. To the extent that they recognized that I could draw and didn’t disapprove of it, that was…that was really as far as it went. They took me to museums when I was little, only because I really wanted to.We went to the Newark Museum at some point later on. We went to the Expo 67 in Montreal — I remember I touched an Olmec head and the guard caught me. I saw maybe my first Picasso which was a very fractured Weeping Woman’. So, the curiosity was there but there wasn’t really a tremendous background at home to codify these things. Most of my early ‘art’ interaction would be from the Sunday comics and comic books. And that’s how I learned to draw just by copying them.
Mark: So it was in high school that you started taking art classes?
Jim: In high school we did have an actual art program that I would be in all the time (and) for the good fortune of some of the other teachers they would release me from class, like in algebra or sometimes in chemistry and let me go to the art class…yeh, it was to their benefit. So I stayed there a lot. I started really working towards the senior year in ceramics. And that was a big push. There was also a local ceramics school that taught wheel throwing and hand building. And I got over there and it was a commercial setting and just wouldn’t leave, so I learned a lot very quickly.
Mark: Any other art interests at that time?
Jim: Well, once the Beatles were on Ed Sullivan, like several million other kids, I was hooked so my folks bought me a very unplayable acoustic guitar from S.Kleins and I struggled with that for years…taking some lessons out of the Mel Bay books at one of these little studios that has a teacher for a half an hour and just was persistent. So to this day I still am inspired by music and still play the guitar.
Mark: At some point you continued with the music and the art…seriously right?
Jim: Yes, In college, I went to a division of Rutgers called Livingston College and really went there because of the strength of the ceramic department, they had a salt kiln, they had raku kilns, the electric kilns, of course, and it was a fairly free-wheeling time in the early Seventies, so you could really just dig in the concentration at that location it was really great.
I’d been accepted to Pratt and SVA but, it was just something they were….still to this day are not doing…the ceramic component at Livingston College was very strong at that time.And then the painting came out probably in the second year and these were old buildings at Camp Kilmer in Piscataway New Jersey and they were big buildings and you could use them and get paint all over the place and nobody cared. It was a pretty open situation. And the faculty mostly were from New York City, so they would be able to kinda look at what I was up to and send me in the right direction.
Mark: So were there instructors or faculty that were critical in terms of following this path in painting versus ceramics?
Jim: There were. Although the painting professors were not the ones I went to about my paintings. In fact, the drawing teacher who was also a musician, Lloyd McNeill, was just great. I would drag in all my paintings and drag in all my drawings after his class was over and before he had to run a and catch a bus back to NYC. He‘d go over them all with me and there was a screen printing teacher, Steven Procuniar, likewise…. did take a screen printing class and I did take figure drawing with Lloyd also but they were so available, they would take a look at the work and ‘….good, bad, indifferent…’ they would call it and really it was great interaction at that time.
Mark: It’s so important to have someone whose eye you can trust, especially as you’re trying to evolve as a painter. So any path that they suggested in terms of following this career?
Jim: Well by painting I mean that I jumped right into acrylic paint, I did not have an oil painting phase outside of high school. And this is the early Seventies, so it is still fairly at the infancy of the medium. But luckily because these instructors, these teachers were living in lofts next to people who were really pushing the medium, I would be able to — I would call Lloyd on his home phone and say,’ I’ve seen this painting by Helen Frankenthaler — how does she do that?’ And he luckily had a friend there who said, ’…oh, you know, the liquid paint can be soaked directly into the canvas…’. And I was like amazed. I still have the little prototype painting I made based on their suggestions. So that whole early phase for waterborne is pretty much linked up with the entirety of my beginning. I love oil paint, I love oil paintings but I really just didn’t go there.
Mark: Were there particular artists that were inspiration?
Jim: Well, I spent a lot of time at one of the other libraries at one of the other campuses, Douglass College Library which had an extensive backlog of Artforum and Art in America and I would just go through every issue and read as many articles…. but mostly looking at pictures. Finally I would go to NYC in those early Seventies days and understood that there was Soho and then understood that there was Madison Avenue by way of the suggestion of Steve Procuniar who was looking at my paintings one day and he says, ’OK, You’ve got to go up to Knoedler Gallery and see Larry Poons.’Now, I knew Poons images from those Artforum issues of the Dot Paintings of the Sixties. But by the Seventies Larry is fully engaged in the so-called ‘Throw Paintings’ and I got myself on the subway and went up to Knoedler Gallery and walked in as a scruffy nineteen year old and was just amazed. It was like walking into a cathedral to see this selection of Throw paintings. Somewhere I still have the xerox of the painting list, the walk-around, stuck somewhere in a file. But that was, sort of, the change, and similarly and at the other end of the spectrum, no pun intended, there was a show of Robert Motherwell, the prints and some paintings of his ‘Open’ Series that was down at the Princeton Museum and that was also a real eye-opener. Those two shows, between those two shows, it really put me on the abstraction track and really confirmed, painting was a place to keep going.
Mark: At some point these were a pivotal switch for you. Was it about the particular art scene? Or was it this connection and convergence of ceramics and painting? Or was it something else?
Jim: Well, the materiality of ceramics, the bodyness, of it has always mattered and you can see that in Poons even back then. You don’t see that in Motherwell. Motherwell it’s purely the ability of color to spread and make a statement and hold your attention — or not. So, to this day, I still love Robert Motherwell, but it’s not about materiality, it’s about another avenue for painting to go. But in my own work as we speak that element that still is a holdover, let’s say, from the ceramic intervention is still present, you know, there’s still a kind of a need to express the material as well as an image.
Mark: When I think about your work, some of the work might rise three to four inches above the surface. Relief drawing is obviously, I think, the first thing that provokes a response in the viewer but it seems to me that color is still the most important subject of your work versus the drawing.
Jim: Yeh, it goes back and forth. What do I think of myself as? A colorist?Or one who draws with the paint?I guess it depends on which day of the week. It’s important to me to not repeat myself. If I try to repeat myself — if I make a painting and say,’ Wow! Let’s do that again…’. Never works out. I don’t have that inclination to do work in series as so many people successfully do.So consequently in some respects color takes over, other times the drawing, you know, the thrust of the paint, the vectoring of the paint takes over. So there isn’t really a program…. It just kinda happens. I hope that it is an improvisatory process. For my own interest, the fact of materiality, again, hearkening back to those old days of ceramics and clay is made abundantly, no pun intended again, able by consequence of all of the advances in the technology and acrylic paint that y’all have shepherded over these decades.
Mark: Could we go back to just after college. Did you immediately apply to grad school after that?
Jim: I had this crazy idea that I had to go to Cranbrook. This was like my goal in life somehow. And I said, ‘…well, they’re only taking applications in either painting or ceramics — you know like a normal university would. So I wrote to them and said, ‘You know, I need to have a double major. In order to come to Cranbrook I need to have a major in painting and ceramics.’ And they wrote back and they said, ‘You know, we just don’t do that.’ And then, I think, I called them on the phone and told them how I needed to do that.And they said,’ You know, we just don’t do that.’ And that was the only place that I applied to. So they rejected me.
Mark: Rude!
Jim: Yeh, well, so I was a cook for two years. And parenthetically I really didn’t cook anything, I could make peanut butter and jelly, things that you do, but I learned….
Mark: So like a short order cook?
Jim: No, this was a proper restaurant that had steaks and bouillabaisse, coquille Ste. Jacque and onion soup and I just fell into it and they had a cook that was leaving to go to the Culinary Institute, he trained me for a couple of weeks and I took over. I muddled through. People loved my bouillabaisse — I never really tasted it, never sat down and had it, I followed the recipe. And the coquille Ste. Jacque — don’t really like scallops — people loved it, they’d say it’s the best thing they had. And I said, ‘Oh, that’s good.’
So I did that for a couple of years and decided as a consequence of just a tiny byline in a Craft Horizons magazine to apply to Syracuse University because I noticed that they had mentioned in this short article about that the Syracuse Clay Institute was up and running and the participants were folks who I had great respect for from the painting world and the sculpture world and they were having a show at the Everson by that time — up in Syracuse, the Everson Museum.There may have been an image of an Anthony Caro clay sculpture and I said, ‘…OK, I’ve got to go up here…’.
Mark: Were you painting?
Jim: I was painting. I had gotten a studio in somebody’s garage — one of these garages with a loft. I installed a heating system, it never worked.I said, ‘…oh, this is not working…’.I kinda’ think I knew I was going to re-apply to graduate school — I wasn’t going to be a cook. That was evident. I applied to Syracuse. I get in. They gave me a scholarship the first year, a fellowship the second year. I worked at the second phase of the Syracuse Clay Institute. Meeting, again, all these folks that I admired and had gone to see their shows in New York. So it’s there that I meet Tony Caro, Ken Noland. These folks were all coming in and out, looking at their ceramics after they’re fired. So the premise being at the Clay Institute that it was as if going to a print atelier and an artist making lithographs or etchings, there is somebody there to help you and do some of the technical work.
Mark: Jim, at this time you also had the opportunity to meet with Clem Greenberg visiting the Syracuse campus.
Jim: Yes, we’d met Clem. Annie and I had met Clem at Syracuse University. He was an alum at Syracuse.And when I met him he had accompanied Ken Noland to the Syracuse Clay Institute to have a look at Ken’s pieces that he’d made and had been fired. And later that day Clem and Ken came by to our graduate painting studio on the other side of the campus where Annie had her studio, I had mine. And they came in and looked at the work.This was not something that I had imagined in advance would ever happen. These were high powered individuals coming by.But from that visit we became friends and were in his apartment down in NYC numerous times a year. He was down at our studios down in lower Manhattan numerous times of the year. I was with Clem and his family when Clem was hospitalized and died. Knowing him for seventeen years from 1978 to 1994 — approximately seventeen years and it was incredibly important. He came in, he did the thing that he did, he looked at your art.
Mark: Several artists spoke about connecting with artists that they admired at Bennington. Were you able to connect in that way with Ken and Tony at Syracuse?
Jim: Oh absolutely. After Ken had visited the studio with Clem we just saw him a lot in New York City. He would come by the loft, look at what we were doing, he would bring people. Once Ken had brought Lee Konitz the world famous saxophonist to the studio. Ken would just call up and he would appear. He would say I’m in the neighborhood I’m going to come over. We would go to music with Ken occasionally, we would go down to some jazz club. It was great. And Tony when we first met him he was there because his wife Sheila Girling was having a small show at the Everson and she was also was also going to be doing some pictorial clay work up at the Syracuse Clay Institute. So we got on. And by this time at Syracuse as a student I meet Annie — Ann Igelsrud at the time — now Ann Walsh. She had been there, she pre-dated me at school and graduated a year before I did but she was pretty much of the same level of interest of all these folks as I was.So we became life partners and she has steered me for the last number of decades – in more than one direction. So together, she and I and the other folks that were students would be helping in the clay area, or finally, there was an invitation for Caro to make sculpture with Rodger Mack, who was the sculpture professor there. When Tony came back to do his bronze workshop, Annie and I were pretty much the rock steady crew that were there all the time.
Mark: Can you describe some of the work that you did for Tony?
Jim: Yes, not only was his visit to do with using the casting facilities but also there was bronze and brass sheet to fabricate so among the things we did, we would cut up Fomcor and make fundamental shapes, articulations with a hot glue gun, and put them all around the room. Tony would come in and start moving them around, and stacking them up and taking some wax that was made into sheets and folding it up and stuffing them in.So we were really kind of in the mindset of what Tony was all about and kind of pushing things in his direction. As if he was back in his studio in England where he had a mountain of steel out in the courtyard where he would go out and they would drag pieces of steel in for him to chop up, edit, weld, turn upside down, make backwards, and finally end up with a sculpture.
Mark: So that must have been thrilling for you and Annie to be collaborating in this kind of way.
Jim: Yeh, it was great times, really, really great. Tony was an incredibly buoyant ‘new style genius’. And new style genius, in the parlance, means that he is willing to take criticism from people, he doesn’t have the old Abstract Expressionist sensibility that, ‘…what I’ve done, is my inner soul, and it cannot be tampered with…’.
So working with Tony was like something that you really couldn’t imagine. You could say, ‘…hey, turn that upside down, let’s see it!’And he would do it and if he liked it he would still work it through and that would become the sculpture.
We were students, we weren’t getting paid to help him. It was just what we did. We just said, hey this was a great opportunity. He was very kind in that he arranged for us to attend the Emma Lake Workshop up in Saskatchewan that following summer.Essentially what he did was he paid for our trip up there and back. And we drove Annie’s Bobcat station wagon all the way across Canada to get to this workshop.So the Emma Lake Workshop on this tiny little campus in the midst of the pine trees out in Saskatchewan where over the course of some decades starting in the Fifties many luminaries had come for a two week or three week session of about thirty participants, most of whom from western Canada but people did travel up from the states. And the likes of Frank Stella, John Cage, Barnett Newman, Donald Judd, Jules Olitski had been up there in the Sixties. And Tony had gone up there in 1977 and made these giant sculptures in the parking lot of this facility and had an incredibly good time.So he felt that that would be a great thing for Annie and me to do, which it was because between that and the Triangle Workshop of several years later it comprises probably sixty per cent of our friends for life. But we went up there at the 1980 session and the leaders were Darryl Hughto, painter and Ken Moffett, at the Boston Museum. It was a two week session of intense painting and group criticism and avoiding the bears that came through the camp and eating strange foods prepared by Chicken Ed, the on site chef. So, yeh, this was terrific.
Mark: Beyond an intensive immersion into painting that you both had for two weeks it was also the value of many of the relationships that were spawned from this workshop.
Jim: Absolutely. We have many friends in western Canada, we’ve been back, I’ve had museum shows in western Canada. It’s been a great introduction.
Mark: So this was the summer of 1980.
Jim: It was. And then upon return in late August we headed down to NYC and stayed there for forty years.
Mark: Hey, describe the trip down to the city when you guys moved in.
Jim: What a day. It was Labor Day? We had a twenty foot Ryder truck full of our stuff, Annie’s little Mercury Bobcat full of more stuff. We drove down. I had friends in the city who helped us unload. We parked the truck on the street overnight so that we could return it the following day. And came down and found out that it was gone. So our first night in New York, they stole a twenty foot Ryder truck from us.When I went down to the truck depot, nah, they weren’t really that surprised or concerned. And about a week later I saw the same truck driving down the street. One of the truck guys explained to us that every weekend they’re missing a truck and they know where to pick it up. They pick it up at a subway stop out in Brooklyn. So somebody just hotwires them and takes them home. Hops on the subway. So, welcome to New York.
Mark: Right.So Jim, how did you hear about the opportunity to run the Clayworks program in New York.
Jim: The board members needed somebody to run the program. And I believe they contacted Margie Hughto, who had been running the Syracuse Clay institute and she said these people need somebody to go down and run this program. So I went down and had an interview that would have maybe been in the spring of 1980.And said,’ Well, I can come down here and takeover after I’m back from Emma Lake. And Annie arrived with me and it was just prior to the National Endowment cutbacks that really took their toll on non-profits in the early Eighties.So the scramble for fund raising and for keeping a situation that was not really disposed to an urban setting: having kilns and smoky kiln firings and all that was not really the thing that New York City was happy about.
Mark: Clayworks continued...
Jim: We struggled along for several years trying to scrape together the funding to continue. The New York State Council, which also had been a funder had also started pulling back.The notion of private funding was very hard to come by for this program.
Mark: But the idea was the same as the atelier to invite artists who weren’t familiar in working in…
Jim: That’s the way we approached it, prior to there have been ceramic artists who had worked in universities and had some recognition in the ceramic world. They would come in and do a project.
Mark: So what artists did you invite to participate during the time that you were running it?
Jim: Mostly they were New Yorkers immediately within the sphere of commuting.Kikuo Saito, Jim Wolfe, Sherron Francis, Bill Noland, Ronnie Landfield, John Griefen and Tony Caro worked there with us and Ken Noland worked with us a little bit there as well.
Mark: So you also got involved in the genesis of the new Triangle Workshop which was spawned from Tony’s excitement with the Emma Lake Workshop.
Jim: That’s right. I mean we were still young enough, Annie and I, to take on things like this. Tony had again been to Emma Lake in 1979 and loved the experience and wanted to do something that would as a ‘geometric’ shape — a triangle — from New York City, to pretty much London, to western Canada to bring all these people together that he knew because there were a lot of painters and sculptors, young painters and sculptors in England that were in his orbit. So Robert Loder, his partner in this endeavor had property up in Dutchess County, so in the February of 1982 Tony and Robert and Sheila Girling, Tony’s wife, they came over from England and we piled into a Rent-A- Wreck Cadillac. Drove up after there’d been a big snowfall and looked at the Triangle barns up in Pine Plains which were part of the Mashomack Fish and Game Club and they looked like they would work. This was, there was snow everywhere these barns were raw. There weren’t animals in them, but they hadn’t been used in years. I think they’d stored tobacco in them, big rolls of tobacco for some reason. And between February and August of ‘82 through the efforts of lots of folks who are unheralded for doing so the barns and the sculpture building, which was an old cheese factory were made right for about forty folks to come up and make art under that pressure cooker environment that Tony wanted to see.Today Triangle exists, not up there but in Brooklyn, you know, it’s a long time ago. So they’re heading for their fortieth anniversary.
Mark: We were invited to provide the paint for the Triangle artists and it was a thrill to be invited to set up a store with you guys. And I remember dragging in canvas with these hundred yard rolls. I was much younger and could lift…
Jim: Yeh, we could do all that. Of course, coincidental with the efforts that you were mounting back in those days in the early Eighties that everybody that was coming over from England and coming in from western Canada and the folks, of course, from New York, they all wanted to use Golden. So you were the paint supplier and all of the paper that we got, we got from David Davis.
Mark: I haven’t thought of David Davis in a long time…
Jim: I’m glad to refresh your memory!
Mark: What, what a character, I remember going in early Eighties trying to convince him to carry the paint in the store. And at first he was excited about doing it. At some point he got mad at me and threw me out of the store.
Jim: David got mad at everybody eventually. And I think being kicked out of the store is part of the honor of knowing him. Usually you’d go in and you’d try to find Milt and Milt would take care of you.
Mark: I wasn’t smart enough to do that. I got kicked out twice.
Jim: Oh, wow, that’s great, that’s good!
Mark: Thank you.But we met a bit earlier and I thought it was from a list that Paula Poons or Paula DeLuccia made for me of artists…
Jim: I think, our awareness of you and Barbara and Sam and Adele pre-dates that list, I believe it was Susan Roth who was up at the Emma Lake Workshop with Darryl and I think she was the one who clued us in. So this was big doins’ back in the day when there wasn’t that much available on the store shelves of any great variety or of any great color spread.So, you know, that was all good news.So we would have met, I think, sometime in 1980.
Mark: You reminded me that your first order was just two gallons of gel.
Jim: Yeh, sorry about that Mark but…
Mark: Thanks, Jim.
Jim: …but those days were those days.
Mark: I guess you still had a lot of Aqua-Tec?
Jim: I did.Yes. I would go down to Pearl Paint and buy Aqua-Tec in those old steel cans.And somewhere along the line they’d had a student show at Rutgers over at the Zimmerli Art Gallery and I won one of the prizes, and maybe it was a hundred bucks and I ran to Pearl Paint and bought as much Aqua-Tec as I possibly could. I think I got a parking ticket at the same time because I parked on Canal. I ran in, I was in there like ten minutes putting all this paint together and dragging it out. But that was the standard thing you’ve got to get in and out fast in New York.
Mark: That was Pearl. It had six floors. It was unlike any other store I ever saw and they would carry literally gallons of material.
Jim: Oh yeah, I still remember how they were lined up on the floor. All these brand new steel containers with the Aqua-Tec label on them, and you know, it’s just great. And the stuff in those days from that venue they could probably barely keep it in stock. You know, there were so many painters in the early Eighties using acrylics, working it out and using lots of product.
Mark: Right.Yeh, it was a unique store that was known around the world. When artists would come to the city they would take the pilgrimage to Pearl on Camal Street. For me, Jim, one of the things about your studio on Great Jones was being able to stop and rest for just a little bit during the days I was making deliveries and Annie would always have a Diet Coke in the fridge. During the Eighties after Clayworks closed you were obviously still painting but you were also doing a bit of work up at Tony Caro’s studio — right?
Jim: Yes, Tony eventually built a studio up in Ancramdale which was just north of Pine Plains and I did a lot of installations via Emmerich Gallery or Acquavella Gallery of Caro sculptures. And that morphed into doing things for some of their other artists.So I would do work for Tony, moving, putting sculptures together, building backgrounds for macquettes, things like that. And do a lot of work for Andre Emmerich on his farm which was over on the other side of Dutchess County, Pawling New York. And I have to say between being in the gallery setting erecting shows with Tony and with Andre out at his farm is where I really got my education in installation of a show — an exhibition. With Tony a two ton sculpture might have to move an inch to the left, so a team of eight riggers would be in the gallery, up at Emmerich Gallery and it would get moved two inches to the left and then maybe two inches back or three inches to the right. And that’s just what he needed. And it was an amazing thing to watch and to understand about what it really took to make an exhibition absolutely what it wanted to be, what it needed to be.
Mark: Some of the most important lessons for me, Jim, was learning from you about mounting a show. For the last eighteen years you’ve been the director of the Sam and Adele Golden Gallery at Golden Artist Colors. Actually, you designed the Gallery at Golden Artist Colors to my chagrin, ‘because I had this great idea to put a huge staircase in the middle of the gallery which you suggested would be difficult to hang paintings from a staircase.
Jim: Yes…
Mark: …but it would have looked really cool.
Jim: Yes, It would have been cool but the gallery, the SAGG, Sam and Adele Golden Gallery is a world class space that has a floor the envy of any gallery in Chelsea, it’s so wonderful. And the walls can take a thirty foot painting. So I’m happy that the staircase didn’t get installed. I’m sorry that the staircase didn’t get installed at the same time. But, to be a world class space, I think, which it is, it’s doing what it needs to do.You could be anywhere, you could be in a gallery in Berlin, in London and you walk outside and there goes a woodchuck.
Mark: I’ve been so grateful for your expertise and that curatorial eye for making for making these shows happen and I’ve learned so much from you, Jim, about also seeing art. So for many of these shows you’ve also written the essays for the artist’s work.Can you share a bit about your writing?
Jim: Yes, for me writing is painful. It does not flow. It’s something that I think about a lot and I jot down ideas and I put them somewhere.But, you know, there’s a lot of criticism and there’s a lot of art writing that precedes us. I mean, it’s everywhere, everybody is an art writer.But I’m happy when I can do it about work that I believe in and if I can try to find some aspect of that work that hasn’t already been explicated by another author. You know, one hopes to have your own ideas that they are not echoes from what you’ve read ten years ago.
Mark: You’ve curated and managed some amazing exhibitions at our gallery. I’ve been so proud to have been able to host them including shows of Darryl Hughto, Larry Poons, Kikuo Saito, Knox Martin, Susan Roth, Judith Linhares and Friedel Dzubas as well as your partner in all things Annie Walsh. Additionally, you’ve curated all of exhibitions as gallery director for our Residency artists, our Made In Paint shows. I know I’ve learned a great deal from your example.
I did want to share some of our paint stories as you’ve joined us as one of our first technical consultants in 1992 and later sales consultant for Golden Artist Colors. Can we share some of that?
Jim: More than twenty five years of a lot of different eras within the art materials industry going through the whole internet transition. Going through the transition of mom and pop stores to larger entities. So there was never a dull moment.
Mark: I was really grateful to be able to see some of the lectures that you did. One of my favorite trips was our tour through San Francisco that was in 1993. We were just outside the Flax store, we were in our hotel, there was a commotion downstairs in the parking lot…
Jim: Right, I remember it well. There was a local denizen of the streets who had a knife and he was having an interaction with a tourist. I knew he was a tourist because he had a fanny pack and I think I ran into the Flax store and said, ‘…call the police…’ cause within days we were good friends with all the folks at Flax, we were going down to the biker bar with them for a beer. Later that afternoon I saw that same guy who had the knife getting ice out of our ice chest at hotel or motel or whatever we were in. Obviously he didn’t get arrested. He was up on top of a car at some point, I mean he got up on top of the roof of a car — it was a great afternoon for street theater because nobody got hurt.
Mark: But I do remember you chasing after him…..
Jim: Well I quickly ran past him to get into Flax because we didn’t have cell phones, we didn’t know those things were coming, and I ran in and said, ‘….you’ve got to call the police there’s a guy out there that’s going to kill a tourist!’
Mark: Right.Your ability to provide that kind wealth of reference to artists and art movements and with great humor as well.I think it was in San Jose at the Art store and it was early in the morning and I think there were a lot of students there and clearly you were throwing out your best stuff and everything was just going right over their head….
Jim: Yeh, that was…I think it was a Saturday morning, so everyone had really enjoyed their Friday night. And you could just tell this was a room — that you weren’t going to get through to this room. It was just one of those things. On balance we hit more than we lost.
Mark: It was… I truly enjoyed the lecture because people would be rapt in attention because of the references that you were able to share and the information that you were able to share this was the first time and only time there was no way with this group.
The next favorite trip was our trip to Japan together. We had convinced them finally, our partners at the time Turner Color Works. And we convinced them that we could do lectures in colleges. That it was something we regularly around the world and we’d like to do that for them in Japan. During that trip they took us to the Ohara Museum in…
Jim: Kurashiki
Mark: Kurashiki, right. Very good, Jim. It was the first museum for western art in Japan and I remember you touring the folks from Turner who really weren’t that familiar with western art or I believe actually even eastern art. They were really talented manufacturers of materials.
Jim: Right.I remember from that visit to the Ohara Museum there were Shoji Hamada ceramic vessels which were immediately clear to me who made them and he was a Living National Treasure in Japan.
And I said, ‘…Oh, Hamada!’ And that really made them look…our hosts….
Mark: Jim and I did karaoke in Japan and he had people crying it was so thrilling….
Jim: It was my finest hour.
Mark: It was a trip to remember. We ate really well.
Jim: Oh yeah, we didn’t know what it was a lot but it was great.
Mark: Since you had direct connection obviously with all the things happening in the lab and responsible for the insights in terms of materials that were being made at the time… how that effected your work?
Jim: Well, fortunate me, I was able to take a peek at what was coming down the pike in the Lab prior to the eventual release to the world and, you know, that was great. That enabled me to see that by the Nineties there was going to be more and more ability to just challenge the surface that we knew to be a painting. I think we’re safe in our understanding that oil paint does not really want to do what the waterborne acrylics and acrylic gels and molding pastes allowed for….
If I were to look at the available products list at the end of the Eighties and what they are today, it’s almost as if it was just made for me — if I could be immodest, of course it wasn’t, but, you know, I just felt, wow, I can keep going and going. The end goal is not to paint with thick paint, it really isn’t, it’s just not to have the hampering parameters that other materials put forth. I want to stop and I want to start and I want to move things and I want to peel them off. You know, I want to think of the grammar of paint, you know, what are the nouns and the verbs. What pushes and what sits. What are the syntaxes, not a word syntaxes probably, but what is available today in the 21st century that we just didn’t have in the 20th. So for me it’s just been a great ride.
Mark: What would you describe now as some of your biggest influences?
Jim: Well, more and more…well, they change….I mean there’s a coterie living folks at the beginning of my painting interest, you know, Poons, Bannard, Olitski, Noland, Frankenthaler obviously. But these days I’d be looking more at Cezanne and Hans Hofmann to see where I want to be at. And, you know, digging further back into a painting that as an eighteen year old that I would walk past in a museum and now finding in it the amazingness of it.You learn in public. You learn to reassess. Well, we’re in the midst, we hope we’re midway through this crisis when we can really go back to museums. You know, it will be great to see some of those old friends. Just prior to, maybe the last time I was at the Modern, they had Barnett Newman’s Vir Heroicus Sublimis out and you know, it looked like it was painted the day before. You know, fresh and real and resonant. We’ll see it the next time…whenever.
Mark: Jim, when we started the Golden Foundation in 1997 after my dad passed away you were a seminal member of our advisory group and what continues to stand out to me today was your comment that as we thought about awarding resources to artists that you thought for us, the quality of the work should be a primary consideration.
Jim: You know, there are ever more painters and sculptors out there and the process of looking at the work, to me it’s the same as it’s always been, and you really have to go with the work. It’s as simple as that, I think.
Mark: Jim, you spoke to me when we talked about the gallery and looking at work your relationship with Clem.
Jim: There are certain things that Clem would say that were kind of carryovers that you could repeat. And this is one of them…it was….and it’s verbatim. He said that,’…it’s axiomatic when you go in (that is to see a show, go into an exhibition) that you go in wanting to like.’ ‘It’s axiomatic that you go in wanting to like…’. Thereby you give it the benefit of the doubt, even if you’ve seen a show by that artist the year before and you didn’t like it, you go in with the attitude that I could like this. And that’s a great thought.
Mark: Thank you, Jim.
Jim: Well, Mark, thank you, and you know, it’s been almost forty years, just a drop in the bucket. And it’s been fabulous. It’s been fabulous knowing you and the family and watching all of the things that you’ve done and keeping it all together and pressing on the medium for the benefit of all the artists.
And if I may another outro from Leaves of Grass. This is line 953: ‘Somehow I have been stunned — Stand back — Give me a little time beyond meycuffed head and slumbers and dreams and gaping — I discover myself on the verge of the usual mistake…’
So thank you, Mark.
Mark: Thank you.
Jim is currently represented by the Berry Campbell Gallery at 530 W 24th Street. And I must say that the partners Christine Berry and Martha Campbell are two of the most gracious and supportive gallery owners I have ever met. The space is a treat not to be missed and you’ll be able to see Jim’s work there.
Thank you, Jim.