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Interview with Vincent Longo (April 25-26, 2003)
by Michael Brenson
Reproduced with permission of the author.

Introduction
Born in Manhattan in 1923, Vincent Longo was 2 when his tubercular Italian parents orphaned him and his older brother Frank to a strict Catholic boarding school about an hour from the city. He returned to the city-to Brooklyn-when he was 14 and attended Textile High School, where he studied commercial art. At Cooper Union he learned about Cubism and oriental philosophy. At the Brooklyn Museum Art School, he took a class with Max Beckmann shortly before he died and later studied with Louis Schanker--according to the curator David Acton, a "tremendously influential printmaker who was at the center of the New York 'woodcut revival' of the late 1940s." In 1954 he became a regular at the Eighth Street Club and the Cedar Bar and Tavern where the Abstract Expressionists talked and drank. "We were all closely linked to de Kooning, Rothko, and Motherwell, as well as to Pollock," Longo told Judith Goldman. "Pollock was the force, in a way that other painters could not be." Like other first and second generation Abstract Expressionists, Longo was passionate about oriental calligraphy, Jung, Monet and jazz. Influenced as a young artist by early Kandinsky and by expressionist abstraction, he would be increasingly drawn to Mondrian, who he says, "had a more dominant influence on me than anyone else."

In 1957 Longo became a lynchpin in the soon-to-be-legendary art department of Bennington College that attracted Clement Greenberg and Color Field painters like Kenneth Noland and Jules Olitski. In his 10 years at this small woman's college, Longo helped give printmaking an academic seriousness and became friends with Peter Stroud and Tony Smith. His paintings became less gestural and more spare and frontal. He began working with grids and with centralized images, some inspired by the mandala--circle within a square and a dot in the middle. In 1967 Smith was instrumental in Longo's return to New York City to teach full-time, again mostly print-making, at another soon-to-be legendary art department, this one at the larger and grittier Hunter College, with which Longo would remain affiliated for 35 years. In the 70s he began exhibiting regularly, at the Susan Caldwell and Condesco Lawler Galleries in SoHo and at the Andrew Crispo Gallery uptown. His grids could now suggest any number of things, including ground plans, aerial reconnaissance photographs and forests. His prints could be experimental in their gestural expressiveness and freedom of technique, his paintings in the variety of applications of paint-pouring, splattering, blotting, throwing-and in their investigations of light and scale: Longo is equally comfortable working with a small, medium or large canvas.

With all its experimentation, Longo's work has tended to remain both regular and improvisational, immediate and indeterminate, agitated and calm. The light in his paintings is often distinctive in its warmth, radiating from the paint rather than reflected, physical, often tactile, yet elusive, sometimes with a pantheistic pervasiveness. Still today fascinated by the idea that Neolithic ornament could be the origin of abstraction, Longo has alluded to ornament in many ways, including a multitude of fabric- and textile-like patterns. His horizontal lines can suggest threads, his markings a myriad stitches. Longo was never interested in the idea of modernism as a sequence of superceding heroic developments. Even at its most confident and bold, his work does not covet the spotlight or claim a place in the world. At its most restless and anxious, it has a softness, even a gentleness. Longo's art seems part of everything and yet always a bit apart, defined by a search for equilibrium and inclusiveness through the pleasures and challenges of painting to which he has given himself for more than 50 years.

This interview took place in his SoHo loft on April 25 and 26, 2003.

I. Early Life: First Years, Education

Michael Brenson: Let's start at the beginning. Where were you born?

Vincent Longo: I was born in a coldwater tenement flat on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. My father died of tuberculosis at 30. My mother, who caught it from him, died a year later at 28. The year of her death my older brother - by one year - Frank, and I were placed by the Sisters of Charity in St. Agatha School in Nanuet, New York.

MB: Was it one of those nightmarish boarding schools, where a lot of scary stuff goes on in the dorms and kids get beat up?

VL: Life could be difficult in those days. At age 7, I started first grade and the playgrounds were always occupied by the entire school roster. Kids ranged in age from 1 to 16. When a new boy came he would have to undergo several fights to prove his toughness. Fights stopped only when a boy quit. I developed a fairly aggressive attitude, being small, I was picked on a lot - got into many little battles and lost most of them. St. Agatha was not terrible in most ways; the food was bad as it is in most institutions. It had some reform school aspects in that we were fenced in and watched by prefects, supervising guards who were not really overbearing or sadistic.

MB: How religious was St. Agatha? You once told me that you chose to go to communion every morning.

VL: My brother and I were unusually devout. But I began having doubts of faith at age 12 and had trouble finishing night prayers. I couldn't accept the image of a living God in heaven looking down on us. Despite the doubting, I did experience an acute sort of religious ecstatic feeling once in the chapel during a spontaneous visit at Vespers, joining the sisters at their evening prayers.

MB: Can you describe that?

VL: Occurrences of that kind are not really describable. It was a kind of quiet uplifting elation I have never since come close to.

MB: Did you leave school during the year?

VL: I left St. Agatha only a few times in the twelve years I was there. The first time, at age 7, I had a tonsillectomy and remember being driven from St. Agatha to a hospital in Spring Valley. I remember being just fascinated by gas stations, seeing gas pumps from the car. The next time was an outing to West Point - I was much older - and that was great. Sometimes we went to Bear Mountain for the day. We always referred to these days as "the outing."

MB: So when Aunt Rose, your mother's cousin, adopted you when you were 14, it wasn't just entering a different environment. You really had never been in the world.

VL: True. We underwent severe culture chock trying to fit into a large outspoken Italian family in Gravesend, Brooklyn. There were always at least thirteen people at meals served in the basement kitchen. We anticipated an upper middle class life but were faced with New York during the Depression. Food was not always plentiful but it was always delicious, and it was great fun there during holidays and feasts.

MB: How many of the thirteen were kids?

VL: Rose had two daughters about our age. Her mother and father were still alive and living in the house, but she, being their oldest daughter - then 42 - was the real matriarch over her siblings who ranged in age from 18 to 32. The house was large and we had our own room. Dominic, the oldest brother, was in his thirties and a prominent photographer in advertising. He was very supportive of my interest in art.

MB: Did you feel at home there?

VL: Yes and no. It was too late to be adopted. We always felt we were second-class citizens there.

MB: When did your interest in art begin?

VL: I decided I would be an artist when I was 12 but had no idea what that really meant. During my stay with the Ferrari's, I became friendly with a student who went to Textile High School earlier and was already studying at Cooper Union. Edmond Cassarella became my mentor and I followed him to Cooper Union. We became close friends and later exhibited together in numerous exhibitions. For a short time we worked at Creative Printmakers Group, a silkscreen studio that was an offshoot of WPA. I was there during 1942. Jackson Pollock was there as well but he worked on the night shift so we didn't have any real contact. At any rate I decided I had to be a painter during my first year at Cooper Union after having enrolled in the advertising design program. I attended night school.

MB: What led you to that decision?

VL: I just had the urge to paint. I copied Leonardo and Michelangelo. I looked at Redon a lot. My work always had mystic overtones. They were already there in my first one-man show, in 1949, three years after I graduated from Cooper Union, where all the paintings were abstract except for three Christ heads.

MB: What was the education like at Cooper?

VL: We worked from the model and did still life set-ups. Design courses were mandatory. One of these, taught by a Mrs. Harrison, led me directly into Cubism, which was not officially taught or even referred to. The most telling influence on my development was Leo Katz, a Viennese painter, engraver, photographer - he wrote a lengthy treatise on photography for the Encylopedia Brittanica in a thirties edition. He was also a horse trainer and an assistant to Orozco on a number of murals. At Cooper he lectured on the philosophy of art and was such a magnetic speaker that students would cut classes to hear his talks which would go on as long as someone had a question - often they went from morning to night. I skipped work on the days he lectured in order to attend as many as I could. He referenced Cubism in terms of multi-dimensions and breaking the seeming solidity of external objects, which he believed could be read as infinite microcosmic inner spaces. He talked of global communication long before McCluhan. He introduced me to Jung, Lao-Tso, Buddism. I was reading Asian material at the time as well as some varieties of Theosophy - the Rosicrucians, Steiner, Blavatsky - I had no idea then that either Kandinsky or Mondrian had at another time had similar interests; another similarity with Mondrian is an interest in jazz. I started collecting 78s in the forties, went on to long playing vinyl and to CDs - more often than not the standard tunes by the same New Orleans and Chicago groups.

MB: Were your first paintings abstract?

VL: For the most part, yes. I graduated Cooper Union in 1946, sought out my own subjects, did some bad Holocaust figures after some sketches Casarella had mailed to me from Germany during the last year of World War II. I soon turned to Kandinsky for inspiration and started to make small paintings of radiating and bursting centers and points. I've recently made three silkscreen enlargements of three studies printed by Sally Goodman for this exhibition. The original drawings are thumbnail sketches for a painting for my first solo show in 1949: it was called Creation, a small canvas accidentally destroyed by my first dealer, a retired nurse from Canada who opened a small gallery on 46th street. Those early attempts at abstract painting soon became more linear, casually geometrical and structural. I was trying to deal with space and volume in terms of line. I looked at churches and bridges and tried to get ascending motion.

MB: When did you go to the Brooklyn Museum School?

VL: Fall of 1950, spring of 1951. During the years at Cooper Union after 1949, I had a small studio on Forsyth Street on the Lower East Side. When I gave it up, I had no place to work and thought further study might be interesting - a lot of former servicemen were taking advantage of the G.I. bill by studying in places like the Art Students League and the Brooklyn Museum Art School where Rufino Tamayo was attracting a number of professional artists. When he left, Max Beckmann was hired and Augustus Peck, the director of the school, invited me to take his class, free of any fees. He knew my work and thought I might be a good influence there.

MB: What was Beckmann like?

VL: The only way he could teach was by working on a person's canvas, actually painting on the work. No one really enjoyed it but they put up with it because he was a great man. He had little English, so his wife, Quappi, would follow him around and translate his remarks. But he would say one sentence and she would go on for a whole paragraph. She did a lot of her own teaching. But she knew his work so well that it wasn't much of an interference.

MB: Were you working from the model in that class?

VL: He ran it that way - models, still-lifes, whatever.

MB: It doesn't sound like Beckmann's class was much use to you.

VL: It wasn't but I needed a place to work and learned things from some of the professionals in the class like Robert Conover and Mark Samenfeld. Beckmann died over the Christmas holiday and was replaced by Ben Shahn for the spring term. He was more helpful and expressed some interest in my use of line. That year I married Pat Adams, an abstract painter from California who was in John Ferren's class. In the fall we went to Florence on my Fulbright grant. Upon our return we went back to the BMAS, I to take a course in woodcut with Louis Schanker, an Abstract Expressionist painter who made large bold prints in black and white. The following term I took over his class and thus started my teaching career. I was also substituting in the painting classes of Edwin Dickinson, Isaac Soyer and Reuben Tam.

MB: When did you start going to The Club?

VL: I first heard about the Artist's Club when it started in 1948, I was already reading Greenberg, but I was afraid of undue influences and avoided contact until 1954. I regretted the delay later because my times there were always intriguing, illuminating and thoroughly satisfying.

MB: What was it like living through the Abstract Expressionist moment? What impact did Rothko, Pollock, De Kooning, Smith and the others, and their high-stakes absoluteness, have on your generation?

VL: You could not help but be affected by it - by that dedication, by that determination, by the inevitability of it; and even by some of the negative aspects of it. We all drank a lot in those days. We all smoked a lot. I would have been an alcoholic if alcohol didn't make me sick. I could never have an easy drunk. I stopped drinking because my hangovers got too bad. I went from Bourbon to scotch over the years and used to nip at it all day long. I was a habitual drinker. We all were, and part of it was that everybody did it. It wasn't just artists, writers, too. That was part of our culture. But I feel really privileged to have been a young artist during those years, in New York. They were as exciting as you can imagine - going to The Club or the Cedar Bar and all that. We had our own levels of it. You didn't have to be trailing around looking for Pollock or Kline. They were always very good to us. They would show with us in group shows and took an interest in our work. I talked a lot with, rather than listened to, Ludwig Sander's critical banter about the New York art scene. He said, "Madam, there is no vanguard. The troops have moved up!"

MB: How did you get to Bennington?

VL: I wrote some articles for Arts in '56 that were noticed by Ray Dowden at Cooper Union. He invited me to assist him at the Yale Summer School, which I did, between '56 and '59. I did a lot of unofficial teaching there, too. During those years a job at Bennington came open, in the print shop, and he recommended me for it. He actually drove me up for the interview. I went up and thought it was for one term, because there was a vacancy for one term. For some reason Bennington and I hit it off in a way that was unique. I stayed for ten years.

MB: How so?

VL: I took to it with a certain ease despite a shyness in front of groups. I found that I was able to impart information and give direct criticism in a positive manner. I didn't proselytize or refer to my own work, but I did share technical innovations when I made them. An eye-opener at Bennington was its directive to learn by doing. By exploring a few educational interests, in depth, rather than being introduced to a number of areas, or pursuing laterally spread out studies, a more profound and lasting education could be realized. Tony Smith, of course, fit right in with such an environment and inspired the move away from a Beaux-Arts approach -- the master-to-apprentice approach we all came out of -- to teaching studio art. He wanted art courses that had to do with the overall intellectual development of the individual and thought studio art should be taught like other humanities, as a critical factor in one's intellectual growth.

MB: Why was Bennington a revelation to you?

VL: Until Bennington I had the idea that art was mainly about talent, energy and need. It was very basic. At Bennington I was awakened to the fact that it had more to do with concepts, and philosophy and motivation. Paul Feeley and Tony Smith had a real influence on my thinking about art.

MB: What is the difference between your set of terms - talent, energy and need, and concepts, philosophy and motivation?

VL: One is more visceral, having more to do with an expressionist attitude about making art. Something less conscious, perhaps? Tony always stressed ideas and concepts and motivations - why you did what you did - and it made me think more about my work that way. Paul Feeley always said to me: "Your problem is you can do anything." Which led me to believe my work had to take a more specific direction, a more concentrated and focused commitment.

MB: And it did?

VL: It did. Work became more centered, less gestural and seemed to gain a kind of serenity and balance as it explored minimal form: centers, circles, squares and gridded layout. This happened in the prints and gradually in the paintings as well.

MB: You and Tony were friends.

VL: The affinity I had with him had a lot to do with the similarities in our backgrounds. He had gone to a Catholic school as a kid, and so did I. Tony wasn't religious in the ordinary sense, but if something bad happened, he would always say "Jesus, Mary and Joseph!" - with an Irish brogue - a bit of nostalgia, also. I think he appreciated an introverted life in ways other artists didn't talk about.

MB: When was he there?

VL: Tony came the spring term of 1958, a term after me. His emphasis on modular construction in his architecture course led him directly into his spectacular development as a sculpture. In his class, students tended to combine sculpture and architecture. He spoke of Corbusier's "modulor" and Alexander Graham Bell's contributions to geodesic structuring, which predated those of Buckminster Fuller.

MB: You always taught printmaking there?

VL: Yes, mostly by my own choice. I always felt the casual free-flowing exchange of ideas and techniques that seems to take place in all print shops was a relief from the rigors and anxiety inherent in modern painting.

MB: When did you begin at Hunter?

VL: Gene Goosen and Tony were always trying to get me down from Bennington where they thought I was being stifled professionally. Tony told me later he once told Gene, "If we don't get him out of there he's going to die." He loved that kind of dramatic exaggeration. Goossen suggested that I teach a graduate class on Fridays. I gave it a try in 1965, but found the commute to and from Vermont taxing and said I'd do it every two weeks. We did that for two years. I began teaching full time in the fall 1967 and stayed until my retirement two years ago.

MB: Was teaching at Bennington different from teaching at Hunter?

VL: Cooper Union was a typical art school of the forties even though it had an unusually high degree of creative energy and excitement. Classes proceeded along academic tracks -- learning skills and techniques practiced by artist-teachers. Bennington was one of the first colleges to offer a studio-oriented art major - one that permitted students ample time and concentration in their chosen direction. Hunter, under the direction of Motherwell and Baziotes at first, followed by Gene Goosen and Tony Smith, attracted a large faculty of practicing professionals with a view to finding those teachers and graduate students who had a tendency to think and communicate in terms of the more advanced ideas and developments evident in the art world.

MB: Was it different teaching men and women rather than teaching just women?

VL: Yes, but Hunter had started as a female normal school (teacher training). I don't know when it became co-ed, and it still attracts a lot of women. Hunter was more challenging in a different way. It was tougher. Bennington is such a small place, seemingly free of big city pressures.

MB: Did you prefer one place to the other?

VL: I was ready for Hunter, but at first I didn't enjoy it. I was hired just to teach graduate students. It was large and impersonal until I readjusted to the city.

MB: You were hired to teach just printmaking?

VL: Just printmaking. I taught painting on the basis of tutorials only. One of the reasons teaching has not been an interruption to my work is that I only taught printmaking. Printmaking teaches itself in that it's so process-oriented, and techniques-oriented. Once you get through that, it carries itself. You can't teach printmaking and not teach how to do it.

MB: Did it feel like it was a slap at your painting that you were considered a first-rate printmaker but had to stay away from teaching painting? Or did that keep painting a more private preserve?

VL: It tended to type me into a kind of categorical exclusiveness that started many years before - in the fifties I became known for my prints. Most of my early prints were winning prizes and being purchased all over the country. The only thing that prevented me from being a more nationally-known figure was that I didn't get the work out, or print in large editions. Galleries were calling me to send them prints, not knowing that I was really a painter who loved to print. No one seemed to want to accept that. I remember meeting a prominent San Francisco dealer, who had come to New York and someone introduced us. She said, "Oh, I know you. You're a printer." I said, "Well, I hope I'm something more than that."

MB: You feel you're still known better as a printer than as a painter?

VL: Yes, I think so, but my task is to do the work, not determine how I'm identified by others.

MB: What is the mix of paintings and prints in the Hunter show?

VL: Mostly paintings but prints will be included; they've always informed and affected the paintings and vice versa. Some of the things I've done in printmaking have been fulfilling and I think uniquely mine.

MB: Such as?

VL: First, I think I brought freshness, spontaneity, and directness to woodcuts which tended to still be limited by a restrictive technical rigor. I developed the reduction woodcut, which is a way of dealing with multicolor printing from a single surface done in successive states of carving. I helped change the look of etching in the early 60's by introducing masking tape as an acid resist, experimented with open-bite layers and various types of soft grounds and lift grounds - etching no longer merely mimicked pen drawing. I didn't trace images nor did I work from studies but attacked block or plate directly.

MB: What was the comparative amount of time that you spent with both mediums?

VL: I always did more painting. I thought of myself as a painter who made prints, like Morandi. That was one of the reasons I admired him, or Matisse, or Picasso, or Rembrandt. All great printmakers are painters. I think we only type them as one or the other in the U.S.

III. Art and Aesthetics

MB: How long have you been interested in the origins of abstraction?

VL: Probably from my early attempts to come to terms with modernist art. My Fulbright project outlined a program of looking into archetypal motifs like triangles, circles, and certain enclosing layout and ground plans that seemed to support and fortify religious content: physical orientations toward ritual activity. Or so it seemed to me.

MB: When you went to Malta in 1962, you went because of a belief that abstraction was rooted in ornament, geometry and spirituality. So that trip, too, was driven by a search for the roots of abstraction.

VL: In 1956, during a year in France, Pat's Fulbright gave us the opportunity to follow our interest in Neolithic art, an art that seemed to me to have been born of an urgency to carve signs, spiral rhythms and concentric repetitions in tumuli and barrows under man-made mounds. I saw this as a powerful form of symbol making; so did Pat. Brittany offered a concentration of Neolithic sites, including the alignments at Carnac. The stone pathways of ritual procession included the famous tumulus at Gavrinis. The visits confirmed for me that abstraction is a powerful means of symbol making. To see it carved in monumental effort like that was inspiring as well as challenging. Didn't knowledge of such sites have an impact on artists like Smithson, Morris and De Maria in the 60s and 70s?

In the early 60s I read Gertrude Levy's Gate of Horn, a treatise on proto-church building in Neolithic cultures that featured the megalithic architecture on the island of Malta. Following her lead we spent six months there in 1962-63. The ruins we studied were deeply moving. The most mysterious and intriguing was the hypogeum, an underground enclosure carved out of limestone. Its streamlined interior reminded me of Frederick Kiesler's architectural sculpture, Endless House. The hypogeum is thought to be the first oracular center dating back more than four thousand years. Creating these monuments required tremendous effort with flint being the chief instrument, if not the only means of carving or decorating rock.

MB: So you see abstraction as a return to the elemental?

VL: Yes. To a direct connection with source. In Wilhelm Worringer's terms abstract art is essentially introverted and alienated while imitative or descriptive art reflects love of self and empathy with nature. Abstract art has to do with satisfying inner needs of an existential nature. Its function as design and decoration can be misleading. The early modernist move to abstraction had to do almost exclusively with essence and first causes. To how something can exist this side of nothing -- a different sort of life-confirming act in abstract terms - work as an act of being.

MB: Do you see abstraction as a form of writing?

VL: Yes. The action of the hand making symbolic gestures, marks becoming forms. In the mid-fifties a Buddhist monk named Sabro Hasegawa, a great calligrapher from Japan, was participating in an exhibition at MoMA of large works on paper. He gave a lecture - which I attended - at The Club, sitting on a table in close to a lotus position and speaking to us for three hours. He talked of abstract painting in Japan - he called it writing. Two weeks earlier at a print show opening at the Oakland Museum, he gave me an indirect compliment by standing before my woodcut Imago for a half hour looking at it. He didn't know me, of course.

MB: The way you spoke of it in terms of those markings suggested a form of script.

VL: It's indexical in its tendency to track and leave traces. I think leaving your mark is one of the main reasons people need to make art.

MB: Is there a connection in the way you think between the Neolithic belief in abstraction in its relation to ornament, and calligraphy, as in Oriental calligraphy? Is there a point where the power of writing and of Oriental cultures links up with the power of the ornamental symbol in Neolithic times and all of this comes together in pictorial language?

VL: I think so. I think that's apparent, even in some Western examples, like Celtic book illustration, including some early gospels, the Lindesfarne Gospel, for example. I think it's definitely there in Arabic writing.

MB: Is it there in your own work?

VL: I think it's there especially in the printmaking, when I get to carving wood. And I try to keep it alive in some of the geometric work, but it always gets painted over for some reason, as the things change. But I feel even my geometry is spontaneous, and that's what it's about -- putting the first marks down. I don't know how else to say it. I think at that time when, when I was doing those things, the calligraphy in the gesture was very active. And very strong in the woodcuts, for some reason. I don't know why that is.

MB: You have identified immanence with abstraction, and empathy with representational art. I gather you feel closer to immanence than to empathy?

VL: My adaption to living tends toward introversion. I'm uncomfortable in group situations, especially new ones. Tony Smith always said he couldn't talk to more than one person at a time yet he could be a very dynamic and entertaining speaker. Having a propensity to aloneness need not be a question of dysfunction when it comes to societal demands. Abstraction comes out of a more isolated creative engagement but the results are offered out to be shared. The work of a Newman or Rothko wants to deal with immanent forces. At its best it tends to calm and enlighten a knowing beholder. My work tends to reflect similar attitudes toward art making.

MB: What happens to get the viewer engaged with your forms if it's not related to empathy?

VL: The viewer can feel empathy with the sheer beauty of rightness of a piece. Some may look at my work and say, "That would make a nice quilt." But those who understand painting know that I'm not really exercising a decorative flair, that connectedness to ornament is not necessarily an obstacle to painting -- to finding another way of inventing with form, spreading light, investigating color - working and reworking with these primary means to abstraction. For me it's finding in the process what's uniquely mine, what comes out of my experience.

In the early fifties, I lived in a loft on 22nd Street. The ceiling angled up to twenty feet and a large skylight facing north was framed and protected by a thick steel lattice creating a kind of constant hypnagogic image that stayed in the back of my mind. The early morning and late evening light emanating from behind the lattice was subtle at times and must have stayed in the back of my mind in the following years, perhaps affecting the early grid etchings of the 60s and the first grid paintings, which actually were one-inch lattices. It could also - now that I think of it - have to do with the way I'm dealing with light and color in the recent paintings.

MB: In discussing your work, you have used terms like "psychic wholeness" and "integration." I know you use them personally, in terms of your needs for yourself, but they suggest to me that what you were hoping to make available through your paintings, to other people, had something to so with what those terms suggest...I'm trying to get from the ornament and the basic structures and the experience of "rightness" to this other aim, or hope for the work.

VL: I would say that, basically, I think of them mainly as something made for myself, for my own development, release and artistic resolution. I wouldn't presume to have other people find the same meanings in them. Some do and some don't. I try not to say, or put it out as, "This is what it is," because I don't completely know what it is. But I have always been involved with trying to find my own sense of individuation; my own process of individuation; being more conscious of that, and more aware of it. After all, the mandala itself is a wholeness figure. It has to do with finding spiritual fulfillment, which is represented by the circle in the center, and the balance and ease with the world, represented by the square. But mandalas were also meditative instruments, and I do sometimes mean painting to be that. I want people to look at them, not just enjoy them for their aesthetic interest--which is there, I hope, but they could also point to realities, to ways of being something other.

MB: You have also used the term "look into." You must have the sense that by looking into your work that something can happen -- something profound, transformative, or whatever. Or is that just a faith or hope that if you make these paintings in such a way that they link up with enduring patterns and sources and have that meaning for you that they will probably also have substantial meaning for others?

VL: I don't set out to have that specific a purpose in mind.

MB: That's different from the Abstract Expressionists, isn't it? Many of those guys, like Rothko, Newman, or Still, had pretty clear ideas that if you participated in their rectangles or spaces that a particular kind of transformative process would be set in motion. They really believed it would take place.

VL: Yes.

MB: I know that for many artists who came after them that those claims came to seem--

VL: Well, they were a little arrogant. I never felt that. I mean, in front of a good Clyfford Still, a good Newman, a good Rothko, you do have a sense of transcendence and an uplifting quality. Part of that is the scale. You get into them. I'm comfortable with any scale, so I'm not trying to overwhelm the viewer, at any time. That is never my intent. And I'm not trying to be monumental, or monolithic in any way. I always feel that it's done mainly for my own sense of finding something.

MB: Do you have anything of the sense of this existential drama that was part of the making and experiencing of their work?

VL: I do think among those painters, Newman reflects Heidegger's thought of standing forth; of being there; that whole existential thing of being aware that you're here and you're not sure why, but you damn well want to talk about it. I think Newman, in his best work, reflects that in the most conscious way, because it's less emotional. It's more a stance that he's taking, which is really what Heidegger meant.

MB: The miracle of being.

VL: Yes. And then standing forth, and acknowledging it. Which, to me, is very Germanic. I don't think an Italian would ever say that. An Italian might feel it. In my case, feeling has always been more important than anything, in work, and feeling into something as a kind of thinking -- which is a Jungian notion, that there is no real dichotomy between thinking and feeling, except in functions of adaptation; one either adapts well in life as a thinker or one tends to feel out situations, but feeling is also rational. It's not mere emotion, and I've always considered that my task as an artist was to make art without too much thinking it out, or over-intellectualizing the process.

MB: Do you consciously make room for the unconscious in your work?

VL: Yes. The art I've done in the last thirty or forty years has mostly to do with improvising around a few formal givens. I never, or rarely ever, make a maquette. I set out, maybe with an idea, and then whether it's totally geometric or gestural, it's always an improvisation.

MB: When most people think of grids, they don't think of improvisation.

VL: Grids and lattices can have almost limitless varieties. The rhythms and repetitions built into them have offered me a lot of ways of dealing with automatic composing, dividing spaces vertically, horizontally, and diagonally...exploring permutations and at times breaking their regularity.

MB: So why use the word unconscious? What makes you feel that, somehow, something is getting tapped, or revealing itself, in the course of making it?

VL: I don't know whether I can answer that, because it's not like getting into a "zone" of unconscious flow or automatic action. I want to leave room for spontaneous change as the painting develops. It has something to do with attitude before the act. Kenneth Burke, who taught at Bennington, spoke a lot about attitude as incipient action - it sets the tone of what is about to take place.

MB: And the painting surprise is also a self-surprise?

VL: Sometimes, as a delight in what has taken place, especially if it seems to be leading to another development - work coming out of work. A lot of that has happened for me in printmaking, because printmaking tends to be more automatic than painting -- surprising, but it is.

MB: I can understand better what you're saying in terms of printmaking, because it is more automatic. And also, as you've described it, there is a tension, or resistance, in the material that you don't have with painting.

VL: Also, it's a less anxiety-producing medium. You're more relaxed. You're thinking of just drawing, in a sense, and playing around more. I think a terrific artist like Yves Klein always had that sense of play. He was able to have that in his work, as conceptual as it ever got. It was more about playing at something. Like Picasso and Duchamp.

MB: What about the speed of the paintings? Although they may look slow, they're all done relatively quickly. Why is speed important?

VL: I don't know. It's just the way I work. The states of painting are very quick. But the painting itself, especially now, in later years, often doesn't get resolved until I look at it months later and approach it once more. So it can slow down that way. But each step I take it through, each series, each state, is always quick. It's always fast.

MB: When you say quick, you mean the painting gets done in one session?

VL: It could be a day. It could be two days. It could be three sessions.

MB: But now you can work on a painting for one or more sessions, and some time later come back and rework what's there. Has that always been the case?

VL: No. We had a kind of dictum in the old days, and this comes out of Abstract Expressionism, that painting had to be a direct response, that building up paintings is academic; it's old-hat. One thing they were always trying to avoid was what they called the masterpiece complex, that -- "this is going to be my masterpiece, so I have to really work carefully on it." We resisted that kind of thinking, for decades, really.

MB: Is the idea of the masterpiece completely peripheral to the way you work?

VL: I wouldn't mind working back on this painting - Springs -- when I look at it now. It looks dark in some light - acrylics do tend to dry darker. It tempts me to pick up that particular confrontation with the canvas.

MB: Whether we use the word masterpiece, or greatness or whatever, I'm sure that in certain works you have an ambition to do something really significant that's different from your ambition in other works. Or am I wrong?

VL: It's generally not true with me. But if I worked large, it might become more true. I find when a big painting comes off, I'm always more satisfied. A large painting can seem more complete. But one of my favorite paintings is the orange one over there [Orange Yantra, 1967], that little grid.

MB: The smaller ones, like that one, have a concentrated radiance that's hard to get in a large painting. That's an interesting painting, because it's intimate, it's very physical, and there is a sense almost of a painting giving itself to the viewer. A painting the size of Springs has more to do with absorption than with gift. That one feels a little bit more like a gift.

VL: That's true. I always put the paintings up or leave them up when they affect me that way.

MB: I want to come back, more directly, to the issue of audience. You've suggested that you were primarily working for yourself and for people who would understand the work. So you don't have much sense of an encounter with a larger public.

VL: I don't feel that way totally but more as a motivating factor -- that I do them first for myself. And I'm always pleased if somebody gets something out of it. I'm always glad if my work connects with an audience, or with a viewer, whether it's one person or more.

MB: Does it follow from what you're saying that if you do a painting and you're completely satisfied with it, and no one else saw it, or responded to it, that it would be okay with you?

VL: I might regret it a little bit, but it would be okay, yes. I might question my own motives and ask myself: "am I wasting my time?" I think a lot of artists get totally discouraged and quit because of that. They don't have an audience, so they stop. I can see why they might.

MB: But it sounds like you never expected one. You might have hoped for one, but you didn't expect it.

VL: Well, I think I did expect it, because I got some attention early. I think I did expect recognition of some sort, but from a knowledgeable audience, let's put it that way. I don't think I was that concerned about a large public audience. Few artists in our time have any kind of central role in our culture.

MB: What would you say about the criticism that's been leveled by many people for quite some time, which is that abstract art and a lot of modern art really wasn't made for the public. The public doesn't like it because they don't feel it was made for them; or they feel it was made to some degree against them.

VL: Beyond superficial appreciation, understanding any important work of art requires sophistication, knowledge, study and a need to experience it ... even when some works are not readily accessible. As a young painter I always had difficulty appreciating a Leger, a Malevich. We all had more trouble with Pollock at the beginning before learning how to accept his terms...and to this day even artists don't automatically accept or take Newman with the seriousness his work demands.

MB: What about the idea that what matters is that people can take something from what they're looking at, that means something to them. Maybe they don't really understand Malevich or Newman, but if they're moved by it, and can use their response in some way, that's enough.

VL: I think that's fine.

MB: You mentioned to me the last time we spoke that when you work for shows it's different. You spent quite a few years at Bennington, painting for yourself, without an idea of a show in mind. Then the dealer Susan Caldwell came along in 1974 and you made paintings for exhibitions. Can you define the difference between working on paintings for shows and working on paintings without them.

VL: I've found, over the years, that I work better under pressure. Although it produces a lot of anxiety in the process, what comes out is more urgent and more meaningful. I don't know why that is.

MB: Is that because other people want it?

VL: Yes. The audience is built in. I think that's true.

MB: One last question. A couple of weeks ago when we were talking about your recent paintings, you described them as getting a little bit crazy. And then you said, "At my age, I feel I can use any syntax I ever used, but almost arbitrarily." And it did suggest to me that you now feel a kind of freedom to do whatever you want.

VL: I feel it strongly now. I don't mind going back even to an early painting and redoing it. I haven't done that, really, except to some more recent work, where I find certain things I'm no longer comfortable with; I might then redo it. If I put it away and then I take it out, I find out what it is, and I redo it. But what I meant also is that I feel that if I did gestural work once, I don't see why I can't still do it even if I'm doing geometrical work at the same time. What I'm trying to do is again find a way of combining those opposites visually: expressionist agitation and contemplative serenity: spontaneous creation and suspended action.

MB: Why wouldn't you have felt that freedom 10, 20 or 30 years ago?

VL: Earlier in my career I felt constrained to put out a product that might be readily identifiable as mine. Now I don't think about that. I have confidence that whatever I do in whatever context is mine, at least some viewers would know it to be mine. At the moment I'm mostly concerned with layering bands that indicate light and space but I still want to demonstrate that a key metaphor of painting is brushing color across a plane as a kind of essence of leaving a personal mark, a lingering trace. I'm now hoping to make that brushing factor more activated.

MB: When you talk about light and space, what do you mean, since you're talking about them, and their combination, as something different?

VL: In recent paintings - Piet's Door, Piet's Gate - I use a wider lattice but I still want to suggest a kind of pause or stasis or suspended action. I want light to be a key factor and divisions to be there and not there - suggesting transparency. They're like blunt casements - spaces between - unattainable states? They remain symmetrical and still reference ornament and Mondrian's late work but I want to play with spaces coming from layers of color brushed across a plane, I want them to be effortless, spontaneous, put down as a matter of course and then see if they are to remain as stated or dealt with another time. I think of most of my work now as simply ongoing.

MB: But these are portals and windows that one can't pass though, or enter? They're thresholds you can sense but you can't cross.

VL: Yes they're barred. I wonder, in terms of the subject of the painting, whether that's a negative or not. Another metaphor could be the front page of a missal, or gospel. That's a medieval aspect they have about them. What I've been calling triple layers, triple grids. Because most of them are double or triple grids. They're lattices, with a colon; and then there's some kind of descriptive word to go with that. This series started about four years ago. I'm still at the beginnings of finding something in the lattices; as armature and syntax, not as subject.