#6: Later Paintings: Working

Interview with George Mueller: 7/29/13

JMcW: Tell me about the titles of your paintings? Are they arbitrary? Are they important for the viewer to know in order to better understand your work?

Mueller: No, they are not arbitrary, though I hope anyone could look at a painting and react to it without knowing its title. Some paintings I really don’t know what they’re about and I then call them: Untitled. Most of the paintings begin to talk to me as I am doing them. Certainly by the time I’ve finished, I recognize what I’ve been trying to do. Like the painting Stokes…it really is about the feel of that place, Stokes Forest, in dim light, having gone there and often seen the quiet pieces of the landscape there. I’m not a Regionalist painter but part of my physical environment, the “George Mueller environment” is usually right there in the painting. It’s not as if I set up to “capture” a place the way the regionalists did, but it is just there. Down Neck is about Newark but it’s the sense of the place not an actual address. Homeless Holiday was named by a friend of mine when he saw the painting and saw the same thing I was trying to get in there, the dingy, hopeless, scattered way a homeless person feels who has no place in the world. Bennington Fire, I saw in the sun setting in factory windows while strolling around Bennington, Vermont, and Industrial Park is about the look that those places have, the unreal, suburban look, not any one place in particular, nor did I ever sit down to “capture” that look, it was just there under the surface when I began.

JMcW: So, a person unaware of your trip to Bennington, Vermont could not draw much of a conclusion from the title, but hopefully they would sense,  “fire” and pull it into their own experience?

Mueller: Exactly.

JMcW: When you begin a painting, do you begin with a subject in mind?

Mueller: When I begin a painting, I begin with the drawing, always. I begin with forms that fit together, or not. I sometimes use overlays of tissue paper so that I can push shapes together and try them out, what I call “legitimate cheating” because they are my forms but I can push two things together that I wouldn’t have come up with on my own by thinking it out. Suggestions really come from the interaction of two or more forms in space. Someone, I can’t remember who said, “Work your material,” meaning that each of us has our own material. It’s like a basic hand print, like your handwriting that will be with you your entire life. Picasso had said that you always paint the same picture your whole life; he was saying the same thing. So, you “re-work” your own material over and over. I don’t think I’m ever aware of that while I’m actually working though. I just work and at some point I realize that in order to continue I may need to resort to some special kind of factory-like technique if I’m going to realize that handprint. It’s hard to be cogent about this.

JMcW: So the drawings always come first and they are carefully worked out before you begin painting?

Mueller: Drawings come first. They interest me or inspire me to continue exploring places. They begin with large open forms with a look that I wouldn’t want to do anything to, they sit in a way that is anchored and they are just right. Sometimes it’s about a place I want to be in and other times, a place I wouldn’t feel secure in at all. Places are real or unreal but that doesn’t concern me.

JMcW: Sometimes while drawing, you’re in a place of your own making?

Mueller: Sometimes I almost have the feeling that something else is really leading the life I should be leading, a parallel universe, like something else is going on at the same time that I’m doing what I’m doing. I like painting places like that, I like to think there are these places somewhere; they do exist somewhere.

JMCW: Do you ever think that they do exist, but that they are filtered through your own imagination to look like the things you’ve just created that are original things?

Mueller: Of course it’s like dream interpretation, it stands in real experience, what you’ve lived and seen. I never have placed much credibility in things I haven’t seen and I don’t really care what could be literal or not literal. I just know how things sit with one another.

JMcW: But while you’re working, are you aware of general “rules?” Are you trying to stay within a larger framework, like abstraction or representation?

Mueller: I’m not concerned about representation or abstraction. I’m just constructing something that feels secure to me, things that are not recognizable things but that sit well on the page and suggest something real. And I like working with symmetry, a square canvas for example, no one side calls attention to itself. It ties in with the symmetry in nature. I find it stable, unifying rather than decorative, as some people might. I like balance… sometimes.

Now, I recognize the look of something and that tells me if it’s right. Some paintings I know are finished because I wouldn’t want to do a thing more to those, they sit in a way that is anchored, it’s just right. But I never wanted to lose the connection with emotion. I’ve always believed that abstraction can be about something and still be abstraction. Music does that, certainly; why not painting?

JMcW: You remind me of Morandi, in a way. He began with representational little bottles and jars, but the bottles became representative not of bottles but of people perhaps in situations. You begin with shapes that are nothing real but then they may acquire human qualities because of their relationships to one another.

Mueller: Yes, and Morandi was almost a magician when it came to being able to do that. He didn’t do it all of the time, but some of those little insignificant pieces pack a big punch.

JMcW: You have favorite paintings, you must. Of the paintings that you did in the 1970s, which ones are closest to you?

Mueller: I find more satisfaction looking at the flat paintings rather than those three dimensional looking ones, I find them more intriguing, more ambiguous.

JMCW: More abstract?

Mueller: Yes. It’s like listening to Liszt: more busy, more dimensional, deep portentous spaces that make suggestions, or listening to Bach, sparser, more intellectual. The flat paintings are all in the foreground, only suggestions of other space behind.

JMcW: And that makes you feel like…?

Mueller: Well, it gives you more to ponder…what’s back there? Ambiguity again, the puzzle is a little more intriguing, that’s all.

JMcW: You didn’t paint very much in the 1980s and 90s.

Mueller: No.

JMCW: A lot of finished drawings though.

Mueller: I wasn’t really keeping track. I suppose I did do a lot of drawings during those years. Now, I seldom draw, except of course in preparation for a painting. I don’t know why.

JMcW: Conversely, you’ve painted approximately 50 paintings since the year 2000! Can we talk about some of the recent paintings? Still Life with Africa, 1990.

Mueller: I was getting back into painting again after a kind of dry season. I felt intimidated by art history. Everyone’s got to do a still life, or still life is where everyone begins when they begin. So I began there. It seemed to be something to do. I was having difficulty with it at some point and nearly gave up; the pieces weren’t coming together as they should. I think I would have given that one up but Carmen  Cicero  came over one night and said he thought I should keep going with it and I’m glad now that I took his advice. I happen to like that one now, very much, a kind of Cubist still-life, using that microtonal thing that I did, and it’s sitting in front of a widow or opening.

JMcW: Loose Piece?

Mueller: That’s my bedroom again. And there are canvases in the painting, one with a loose piece, and Beast in Fredon, kind of my alter ego, the way you feel when you’ve had to chew your way out of a situation and then there is this coming up for air; you can finally breathe again. Nacht und Nabel (Night and Fog) I thought the German words sounded better. And Missing Glenn Gould; there are times when I truly miss Glenn Gould. I mean his music is always there, but I felt better knowing that he was in the world. Now he isn’t, I don’t really know what the shapes have to do with him; they just came of my missing the person.

JMcW: Some of your paintings describe huge historical events: The Holocaust, OPs, Enron, Breakfast at Alamogordo, Southern Redoubt or Swiss ? Gold? But you don’t consider yourself a political painter or a historical one, do you?

Mueller: Well, I am influenced by history. I am influenced by what has gone into me. Everything up until now ends up in my painting, an emotional response to being alive in this nuthouse world and my intent is to make something pleasing to look at, even if the subject is not a pleasing one. The painting Kitty Hawk was like that. I was thinking a lot about the Wright Brothers. I painted Kitty Hawk; it’s not a literal plane, but it is my concept of being inside the plane looking out over the dunes and the sea. I so admire the Wright Brothers as examples of simple and incorruptible mechanical genius. And the photographs taken of them and their work were so evocative that I wanted to make a tribute to them, but not in any literal way; an abstract concept of their plane heading over the land out to sea. Braque and Picasso used to call each other Orville and Wilbur, they were all so pivotal in getting the twentieth century started, and the sense of poetry in their “taking off,” changing paradigms, changing perceptions forever, from their beat-up old garage; Bell, Ford, all of them literally hatching out of that tin-type nineteenth century? It was beautiful wasn’t it? When raw invention could take place in humble surroundings, not owned by anyone other than the inventor, done innocently to begin powerful surges that changed history, changed everything forever. Beginnings have an intensity and beauty that is powerful all on its own.

JMcW: Do you think that these shifting, powerful events are aesthetic?

Mueller: Oh, they are. I often think about Oppenheimer and Alamogordo and World War II…just knowing that there was a shift in collective consciousness then at that very moment that affects everything we do right now. It has to be in the painting too. I thought of how sinister it would have been to have breakfast at Alamogordo that morning after testing the bomb in the desert.

JMcW: Like having a meal after a murder, knowing that you had changed everything, irrevocably.

Mueller: Or perhaps there are tours of children now in school busses, brought to the spot in New Mexico to buy souvenirs and have breakfast and drink their chocolate milk at Alamogordo. I like to think of myself as an abstract impressionist, setting up an ambiance, and the minute I began to gravitate towards certain blues and yellows, I was mixing very specific colors for Swiss? Gold, I recognized the colors of a German officer’s uniform. Probably not the same colors literally, but I felt them as being very real.

JMcW: How do you see yourself in all of this? This life? The part you’ve played in it? Being an artist in this age?

Mueller: I’ve always had the feeling in this culture that to most people, creating art was almost like being a thief or an idiot. The paintings are viewed like crimes that you don’t want anyone to know about. If you lived anywhere else, there might be a feeling of belonging. I’m not angry about it; this is just what it is here. Art and artists are marginal.

JMcW: And people who look at art?

GM: People don’t know how to look at paintings anymore.

JMcW: And did they used to? Were they taught how to look at paintings?

Mueller: I don’t know if they were taught, but people were encouraged in the past to be moved by imagery. Now the imagery moves them to the Mall. Peasants during the Middle Ages must have really appreciated those huge murals in cathedrals, they must have spent time really looking at them, yes, reading them literally, but in doing that, they must have become sensitized to the formalistic qualities that the artist put there as well, and they must have applied that sensitivity to other areas in their lives. They were really seeing. Seeing is an intrinsic part of the human experience and I don’t for a moment believe that it’s going on in the same way that it used to.

JMcW: You’ve completed a lot of paintings in the last ten years? What has the last ten years meant to you?

Mueller: Am I running out of steam and would there be anything wrong with that anyway? Have I been wasting my life? Has it all been a big mistake? The only consolation is that I have never felt any need to substitute anything else for painting. I mean, I have never said, “Gee, I wish I had been the owner of a corporation.” Or “I should have been a dictator.” No inclination to do anything other than what I’ve done. I like creating loudspeakers, sound systems because they reflect the music that I listen to, but I couldn’t have been a musician. I couldn’t have done both things well. Painting took over my life and I’ve never craved anything else. I’ve just always been grateful that there have been great people who were making music, music that I could listen to. Music can really send you off to somewhere else, and I’ve always thought that it would be an admirable thing for a painting to be able to do that same thing.