Jean Holabird

Interview with Jean Holabird, 3/4/91

Looking through a pile of watercolors, Jean Holabird sighs, drifting off for a moment in a nostalgia for the places where they were done-St. Ives, Menemsha, Kew Gardens in London. I'm admiring how her lines and wash on paper conjure a sense of place and project a mood. For Jean, the artwork is evidence of a moment spent serene in the activity of making an illusion.
   Depicted are scenes of leisure—the café view, the promenade, the tourist's target—in themselves, perhaps stale subject matter. But she creates a fresh beauty from this stimulus. A perception more concerned with interpretation than duplication is laid out on her paper or canvas. The fascination for her is in the way details converge and a composition arises from the confluence of elements.
   On the occasion of an upcoming show, "Standing Painted Screens and Palm Tree Studies," opening at Neo Persona on April 18 and running through May 18, 1991, we began a conversation discussing an earlier decade's incarnation as a color field abstractionist.

Greg Masters: How did you start out as a painter?
Jean Holabird: The first painter I ever saw was Toulouse-Lautrec and I thought: That looks like fun. A friend of my parents took me to the Art Institute [of Chicago] to see this big Lautrec show. I was about 12. I still remember thinking: Wow. I took art classes at the Art Institute and drew horses. I knew I could do better horses than he did. I drew horses constantly. I'd copy them out of books. Now I use plant life.
    My father went to the Instituto Allende [in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico] when he was in college, so when we were teenagers he took us all down to Mexico together. It was great. We rented a house. That's where I met Larry Rivers' son, Steve Rivers. I had such a crush on him. He was travelling with this friend and they had custom made leather pants. We had never been to NY. We just never saw anything so cool as these guys. I saw Steve years later and I said, "I was so in love with you, didn't you know?" He said, "What, you were in love with me? I thought we were just hanging out having fun." I spent so much time agonizing over him. At that point I hadn't heard of very many artists. I had heard of Larry Rivers. It was one of the things that made me absolutely sure that NY was where I was going.

GM: This guy's leather pants was your motivation to come to NY?
JH: Not exactly. Yeh, then I started making knot paintings. Other than that I'm completely normal.
   When you're a student you want to do something significant so [at Barnard, 1964–66] I was doing this painting of a monk down in a basement somewhere. I was showing my deep feelings. The teacher came up to me and said: "What the fuck is that. What are you interested in anyway?" I said, "I'm interested in light." He said, "Then you better go see the Hopper show and shape up." His name was Stephen Greene. He was the most fantastic teacher. He was scary. So scary that I went to the Hopper show and thought: Oh yeah, that's what I meant. I had him again at the Art Student's League. He's a good painter. He gave me this little shove in the right direction and all hell broke loose. It was wonderful. I was so lucky. Then Barnard wouldn't let me take any more art classes. They said I'd have to take art history so I left.
   When I went to Bennington [1969] color field abstraction was pretty much it. All the color field painters were like the seniors in high school and I was the freshman. We just thought that they were the greatest. They could do no wrong. All those guys.

GM: Was it just guys?
JH: Well, Helen Frankenthaler was the token woman. If you went to bed with Clem you could be Helen Frankenthaler. Clement Greenberg did our senior show and, oddly enough, I was making huge abstract paintings in flat colors that stood up and were hinged together to make shadows. At Bennington they gave you massive studios. It was pretty easy to make really neat abstract paintings. But it wasn't any fun. I never showed any of it. I always felt distanced from it. If you wanted figurative you were dropping out of this group you'd been brought up to revere. Dick Haas was there teaching print making. Bob Cronen was there. They were the figurative guys and they were treated with total contempt by the figure ground guys. It was the heyday of Clem and his boys. They were on top of the world.
   It's funny, because Tony was working at ULIE and he knew all the Pop artists, I guess they were called then—Rauschenberg, Johns—and the two worlds just never mixed at all. Max's Kansas City was the figure ground guys and that was it.
   We called ourselves the "art tarts" back in the Max's Kansas City days. We were trying to sleep with famous artists, me and a bunch of women who worked there as waitresses. Some were painters, some were just hanging out. I still know most of them. Max's was where you picked up famous artists. We weren't having a contest: Well, who did you end up with last night?

GM: Was it hard for you as a woman artist breaking into the NY scene?
JH: No. I despise the term woman artist. I had woman friends saying, "What are you doing going out and sleeping with male artists?" But some of these guys are my best friends now. They always come to my shows. In a way, in the 70s that was how you made friends, by spending the night together. I never felt a lack of respect. Maybe I'm just dumb. But I'm not a feminist at all. You either not wash the dishes or you wash them. If you resent washing the dishes then don't. Who cares whether the dishes get washed, not me. I think now women artists are doing pretty well. I know they're not in the museums enough. Actually, one of my high school friend's husband is the new head of the Whitney. But I was brought up not to use stuff like that. But sometimes the work speaks to you and says you got to do this. I hate making those phone calls.

GM: You couldn't even stumble over to Richard Haas's studio?
JH: Well, later on, actually, he was great. After my college days I printed etchings for him for awhile. He was very encouraging about painting figuratively, of course. When I saw his prints I thought: "Well, he's doing fine. Maybe I can survive outside in the world." I know all these guys still. They're my friends now. Clem himself does landscapes that are very figurative. It took me ten years to paint Bennington out of my system, to get to where I wanted to. I just said to hell with this. I guess I can do anything I want to do and that's the thing that surprises me everytime I get a piece of blank paper. You can make anything you want.
   Then I lived in Maine for two years. Living in Maine you didn't have to make art because everything was so beautiful. So I never did any art. I was out in the woods with a chainsaw clearing the forest making paths. That was kind of like art, conceptual. I did a lot of macrame when I was living in Maine, there was nothing else to do. And I started doing these drawings of knots because I liked the way they intertwined. They always had this overlying kinkiness. If I ever showed them, people would have thought I was really strange. I have some friends with one of them over their bed and I think they must do some very weird things. The palm fronds I'm doing now give me the same satisfaction as the knots without the worry about kinkiness. There's no sex in my pictures. The way everything folds over in all these mysterious ways. Palm trees are so banal. I started doing them from a distance and then I saw that there was all this neat stuff going on. That you could take any bit of that and blow it up huge. Now I see palm trees everywhere. There's one in the Trump building.
   From Maine I moved to England for a year and became a conceptual artist because I couldn't afford any materials. I did all sorts of weird things like signing the lower left hand corner of England. You know how when you're driving somewhere you fill in the lines on the map. I figured out how to spell Jean by driving on these roads. So we drove out Jean. Then I realized I had to come back to NY. It was ridiculous. I was working for some sculptor for 4 pounds a week.
   So I came back to NY and was trying to find a loft and started goofing on these Maine postcards. They were so funny by themselves that I was doing little etchings of them. When I met Tony it turned out that he'd always liked postcards, too, and we thought: "We can make up our own messages on the back, make up our own postcards." It started out as fun.
   We had all these extra copies of the Larry Rivers cover for Tony's book [Works on Paper, 1978] and we started fooling around with that, painting it different colors and putting different hats on him and stuff. From there we just said let's really try something. I'd worked printing etchings on and off for Cathy Mosely, editioning, so I had access to an etching press which made all the difference. If we'd had to pay to do all these we never would have done it. So I did the etchings there and then we'd bring them home and I'd paint them. They're hand-colored etchings. Tony wrote these funny things on them. We did four different editions. They got more and more elaborate. The hand-coloring became a chore and not fun anymore. We're showing the whole downtown series at Brooke Alexander [for a benefit for the Poetry Project, "Poets/Painters Collaborations," March 1991]. We've shown them before at two other charity events and they're our surefire seller. The last ones we did were in 1981.

GM: Looking at your work now, I can see the color field influence.
JH: The formalist thing is there. Look at the stripes coming down here.

GM: And in that Deibenkorn post card hanging up there.
JH: I love Deibenkorn. When people see my work they think Matisse right away and that's fine with me. I only wish I were.

GM: But it's a lot different, too. I think your watercolor concentration has made them . . .
JH: Yeh, I call it wishy-washy. But the formal training in figure ground was great for basic composition. When you're working abstractly, how you put it together is the whole shebang. Composition is it. One of the things about the screens is that when I travel I do watercolors. They're all from watercolers I've done travelling that never seemed enough for a whole real painting. Somehow, cut up and put in this context they are enough. In a way, the composition is enforced on it by the three-arc shape.

GM: Have you ever done screens before? What made you do screens?
JH: I was bored with just painting things to stick on the wall. I show watercolors one year, then I'm showing boxes. Bored is the wrong word to use. I get burned out doing one thing so I take it on to something else. I did these boxes which was a way of getting three dimensional. They all lit up.

GM: How is your life reflected in your work?
JH: These painting are all autobiographical. Everything I paint is something I've seen. I suppose I could make something up if I wanted to but I don't see the necessity. It's all out there. You walk down the street and you see the composition. I take photographs a lot if I can't sit down and do a drawing. I hate drawing in public places. I hate it when people come behind me, I just can't stand it. So I take photographs and then I pretty much made the composition already. I know you're not supposed to admit painting from photographs but I don't see any problem with that. You've made the choice and change the scale. If I did a watercolor the same size as that it would come out completely different from an oil.

GM: Scale is interesting in your work for that flatness.
JH: It's very graphic. This one is not from a photograph. There's a restaurant there and I went out and did some sketches. Also I've been looking out over the Hudson River ever since I came to New York. This is Battery Park City. I've always been looking towards New Jersey. At sunset it always looks great and makes me want to go there. [Poet] Paul Violi's teenage son wants clothes made out of this painting.

GM: This screen is the most artificial looking view I've seen you do.
JH: I must have been nuts that day.

GM: Ok, for this show coming up at Neo Persona . . .
JH: There's going to be four screens. This one is done from watercolors I did at Persepolis in Persia [now Iran]. I've had these watercolors since 1977 and never could figure out what to do with them. It's where the Shah had the 1,000th birthday party. I wasn't there for that. I was on an archaeological dig. I was right near the Iraq border, near Basra. If you travel in Europe alone you're never afraid. You wake up in sleeping cars with guys that if you saw them in the streets in New York you'd run. But in Europe it's never a problem. The moment we got to Iran you could tell that the rules had changed. That there weren't any rules. You could just disappear into the desert forever with no recourse whatsoever. I was travelling with another woman, neither of us spoke Farsi, we just had a note to hand to the cab driver to take us to this place called the Expedition House. She was going and she wanted a travel companion. My job was supposedly to help piece together shards and then draw them. I wasn't very good at that. So I did a lot of watercolors and sort of sat in the shard heap with all the shard boys with a sweater over my head. I'd been in Italy so I was wearing cowboy boots and I had this mink coat I was dragging around with me. It was so weird. All the people there were wonderful. We were living in this mud-brick village. The children would follow me around everywhere I went to watch me paint and that's hard. Children do that in Mexico, too. That's why taking photographs is great. I always like the pictures I do on the spot because you're actually using the water from the place. When I work on the spot I work a lot faster. Sometimes it comes out better, sometimes it comes out worse. You're uncomfortable. You're sitting out in the middle of the sun, so you do it a lot faster. It's a lot freer. When you're working from a photograph at home, you can get balled up in all sorts of details that you would otherwise just imply. I can tell at a glance which ones I did on the spot. They're harder to translate into an oil because I've left out all the details. But if you get too many details it's a mess, too. These [pointing at a screen] are from watercolors I did in France.
   By the time I get to the canvas I pretty much know what it'll be. I've done thousands of drawings to prepare. [pulls down a couple of sketchbooks] I did these in Kew Gardens outside of London where they have every palm tree on earth. I was going crazy. There's this wonderful old Victorian glass house built there. I'd love to show my drawings. I think drawing is the basis of everything. Once you get it firmly in mind then you get up and the painting itself doesn't take that long, once you've got it solidly in mind from drawing. Composition comes out of drawing. With abstract art you can tell whether the person can draw or not. If you can't draw you can't make any kind of formal composition.
   For years I've been wanting to do a series based on the nine Muses. The screens are based loosely on the nine Muses. There's all this iconography that goes along with the Muses and when I'm naming my pieces it's pretty much because the name goes with the screen. I named this one Urania, that's the Muse of astronomy, because there's all this sky. The palms on the other side doesn't matter. I consider them decoration. This one is Polyhymnia, I forget what she's the Muse of [sacred poetry], but she's often pictured seated so since this one has some chairs...it's very loose. This one is Melpomene. This is my only political statement. She's the Muse of tragedy. I don't consider this tragic at all but I was working on this when the Gulf War broke out so I decided to name it Melpomene. Also, it's got that Ozymandias thing, "Look on these works you mighty..." so that's it. This one is going to be Calliope.

GM: How are you going to mount these drawings?
JH: I don't know. Tony thinks it's cool to just stick them on the wall with pins. They're sexier if they're framed. My oil paintings are sexier if they're framed. The screens, before I put the slabbing around, seemed sort of naked. Then you put that black piece on and it holds the whole thing together. This is obviously home-made. Everyone says why don't you get someone else to make the screens for you but that's part of the thing. I've been watching Norm Abrams on This Old House so I learned how to make dado. And I've learned the chisel, this wonderful tool. So you can put the pieces of wood in like this. This is a big step for me. Now I can make really tall thin ones, seven feet tall. Or short squat ones, different sizes. I think I'm going to keep doing this or I'll get burn out. They're actually practical. I use them to block out Tony's workroom. We thought that at the opening we should fling stockings over them. And we could change them by turning them around. They're playful. I don't think art should be that serious. Isn't it supposed to be fun? I guess what I'm saying is if it isn't fun to be making it then I'm doing something wrong. Nobody asked me to make it and that's the existential problem, and yet I want them to love it and maybe even buy it. What kind of nerve do I have anyway. So if you're going to go that far you may as well make sure you're having fun doing it.

GM: What is your intention in making art?
JH: I want to make beautiful things. I really don't see where sturm-und-drang comes into art.

GM: For you.
JH: For anybody. If you're that angry you should go out and march and get it out of your system. I can't paint when I'm angry. It's kind of blissful. Sometimes you have to go in there and do something to a painting, get up in the morning knowing you have to do something really brave and strong to a piece, get in there and attack it and make it right. Sometimes it comes out perfect. If you have to work too hard on it then I think there's something wrong and you should just scrap it and start all over again. That comes from doing watercolors because with watercolors you have to get it right the first time. There's no going back and working on it. You can make some shadows or something but basically you have to be right on. I try to bring that to the oil paintings, too. I see a thing that's beautiful and want to make my own version of it. Or I could do something with that, I could show the parts that I notice. I notice how the frame and the door make a little picture.
   If you don't have any beauty around, just make some. Depressed feelings belong in a bar at 4 in the morning when no one will remember what you said. They belong at the shrink.

GM: Your oils are thinned.
JH: I want to get it right on the first time like the watercolors. Because if I go back and work on any of that too much it starts to get thick and it's all out of kilter with the rest of it. That's something I learned from looking at Larry Rivers. He's such an incredible draftsman and you can see his process of getting the line right and I've always admired that. There's smudges and a sense of: I didn't mean this line but I'll leave it there anyway.

GM: But your work doesn't show the process.
JH: But I don't mind the process being evident. I couldn't go back and white out those extra lines in the chairs. Then there'd be this big white spot that'd be different from the white of the canvas. Rob [Mango, director of Neo Persona] loves that. He's a painter. For a painter to run a gallery is a strange thing. He has extremely eclectic taste. My stuff doesn't seem to go that many places. I showed with him 3 years ago and when I did a couple of these I thought I really ought to show them someplace. He came up and said ok, when do you want to show them.

GM: I want to get back to draftsmanship. You've cited Matisse and Manet as influences...
JH: Manet, sure. And Piero della Francesco. Piero does this amazing thing. It's pretty evident. The space between everything is just as important as everything else. Every space between every person or horse is thought about, is a shape in itself instead of just something filling in between the forms, to keep the surface static, to hold down the surface. There's not a background. The shape that the sky makes is of equal value to the shape of the mountain. They're all shapes unto themselves and that gets back to the formal. I was more influenced by color field than I usually would admit. My paintings are not about a scene. They're about how that window cuts into that and how the chair cuts into that. It's about how it all falls together. What attracts me is the way the shapes are cutting into each other and then I can go from there.
   I love the American painters from the 30s—John Marin, Marsden Hartley, Charles Demuth. Demuth does the most exquisite flowers [Jean retrieves a Demuth book from another room]. I love when he does stuff like this [flowers and still lifes]. I stare at this stuff for hours. The way he gets these little variations in color and uses empty spaces. There's some stuff here that really grabs me. I love all those 30s American guys, there's something about them before Jackson Pollock hit and stirred everybody up. I just read the "bad" biography of Jackson Pollock, the one where they try to prove he's a homosexual. I couldn't put it down. It's so weird to read biographies of painters. There's a recent biography of Georgia O'Keeffe, she's such a bitch. I came across the most amazing statement in it. I don't know where this woman's mind was but Georgia O'Keeffe had a sister who was a painter that no one really ever heard of. This woman had this whole paragraph implying the reason the sister didn't become a famous painter was that she was too fat and she had a hairdo and wore nice clothes and she wasn't a persona like Georgia. Does this woman know what she's saying?
    I always thought that if I lived in the country I'd probably paint city scenes. There's something about painting my way out of the city. I get real joy out of doing the palm trees because...I don't know if it's because you're actually there while you're doing them, you can kind of remember. When I'm doing this I'm remembering being in France on the barge [her mother lived on a barge for five years, Jean visited every year] and what it was like. The barge would stop and this window and doorway would just cut out this little scene. The barge moved very slowly and you'd go threw these locks every kilometer or so. I was there with my mother and her boyfriend and I had my bottle of wine. The boat moved so slowly, that I could take a bike off the barge, work, then catch up with the barge anytime. I did a lot of on-site work in France. Sometimes I purposely don't take a camera so I have to draw.

GM: How come there's no people in your work?
JH: Ah. Well, I can draw people if I want, I'm pretty good at them. I'm really good at horses. I have one stock phrase which is: I'm making scenes where either someone is just about to arrive or someone has just left. People are too psychologically complicated. They make great shapes but not the shapes I'm interested in. I've tried. I've often thought it would be fun. I've tried to fit people into drawings before I do a painting. How do you flatten out a person? If I could figure out a way to put them in I probably would. Maybe someday they will just show up. Now, I don't want them in because then you have the problem: Am I making portraits, is it going to be someone you know. Since the scenes are all of places I know it would stand to reason that I'd use people I know. Then you're getting into a whole other thing. If I ever put people in, it'd probably just be self-portraits. That would be boring to everybody else.

GM: You've never had a show of drawings.
JH: I'm not very aggressive about showing. Up until the last couple of years I've always had a job. There's a point when the pictures say show me, when you just have to do something about them. I don't feel I have a show at certain points. It's nice having them around. They're like babies. I sold a bunch of work this summer and I really miss them. Those were all my best ones. They took all my best watercolors and went to Germany. This is the first year I've shown a profit selling paintings. I went to the accountant and he told me I'd actually have to pay taxes. I said, you're kidding, right? Cause with the deductions it's always worked out just fine.

GM: Have you shown in Europe?
JH: No, I'm so lazy. It's this dumb woman thing. I always thought successful artists had this mentor helping them out, showing them where to go, and I think a lot of people do. I just never got one. Or maybe it was there and I didn't recognize it.

GM: But the work is there.
JH: Oh yeh. Obscurity doesn't stop me. Living with a poet helps. You live with a poet you see they have no hope [for wide recognition] and it kind of comes down to: If I'm not famous by thirty I'm dead. As a painter you get better and better if you keep doing it. I always thought that I can be in jail or some horrible place and if I had a piece of paper and a pencil I'd be alright. Three years ago I had four shows running simultaneously and I thought: "This is it, I'll be discovered now." Actually, I'd hate to be famous. No, I think I'd love it. But I'd go out every night and I wouldn't get any work done. I have to work in the morning.

GM: How do you respond to poetry?
JH: Yuk. I like poets as long as I don't have to go to their readings. Poets make better mates than rock musicians. They talk. Poets are intrinsically interested in art and artists respond to that. You have to learn how to listen at a poetry reading the same way you have to learn to listen to classical music. You have to learn to let it flow into you and stop thinking about how many pages does he have left to read. There's so much of it that's completely self-serving. A lot of art is that way too but I'm not making someone stand in front of a painting for 45 minutes

GM: Well, I think I've covered what I wanted to. Anything else?
JH: Just make me sound beautiful and witty.