#1: Methods of Working

Interview with George Mueller 2/13/12

J. McWilliams: I would like to begin by asking you something about how you develop a painting, your process. Earlier you mentioned something about Pragmatism. Do you consider yourself a pragmatist?

Mueller : Well, I don’t know what I would call myself. I am a painter. I don’t generally apply words to the painting, I just do them. I have read Dewey and Wittgenstein and I like to read philosophy, but I don’t get bogged down in all that. I guess what I mean by pragmatism is that I put in whatever works best in a painting. Whatever works best is what I use. That has nothing to do with formal rules established by aestheticians.

JMcW: Then how do you know what works best?

Mueller: I can sometimes see it, especially lately, even while I’m doing it, making a change, before I even stand back to take a look, I know I’ve done the right thing. And you might well ask, how can it be right if there isn’t anything real? It is an inner knowledge that applies to any act of creativity and especially to pictures with parts of a whole that do not appear to fit...throw it away and put something else in that does fit. Roosevelt said about the U.S., “I don’t believe it is finished, we’re still inventing it.” Making a picture is a process that needs to be fluid. You can’t be stubborn about sticking in things that don’t work.

JMcW: Yes, but how do you know what works best?

Mueller: A student once asked me what it was like for me to see something that I really found fault with and the nearest that I can describe it is that it makes me feel slightly sea-sick. Joyce said that a great work of art had to have “harmony, wholeness, and radiance.” Whatever that meant, but you’re making decisions in the outer world based on your inner knowledge of how space, color, line, “fit”… should fit. And Greenberg said something like “the difference between traditional painting and modern painting is the difference between painting what’s on the outside and painting what’s on the inside.”

JMcW: This inside, is that based on memory?

Mueller: The visual world--inside--could be memory. My mother once told a story about when I was a very small boy, after an enormous snowstorm in Newark where I grew up, she lifted me up to the window. I vaguely remember that scene, looking out over these fantastic white hulking forms that enclosed our street. She said that while we were watching, our neighbor came out to shovel his walk and I became inconsolable...I threw a tantrum. She said that I kept saying: “He’s ruining it.” Ruining what? Well, ruining the organization, the what: aesthetic?? The way it fit together in my eye--certainly not the neighbor’s… It was my first memory that the world could be beautiful and perfect or truly wrong and ugly. We lived on 5th street then, in Newark, and the street was made of soft red brick, covered with a canopy of green tall trees. One day the WPA workers came and covered the entire street with black tar! Same thing, I was distraught for a long while. Life was all wrong on that street. Something that had been so perfect was now lost, changed, wrong. On another day the same crew came back and scraped the tar off again! I have no idea why, but it made all the difference to my well-being as a little kid. No one else really noticed, I believe.

JMcW: Do you remember anything else that held that sense of aesthetic for you as a young boy?

Mueller: Music. Music most certainly even before I became aware of art. Music was on the radio, and I was immediately enthralled by music but also to skip around the dial and hear Stravinsky, Berg, and so on...the sound was a revelation and later film certainly and books, buildings, architecture, almost everything.

The wrong or the right in music is very similar to painting. Music either makes sense or not, feelings arise: unsettling, exciting, by the placement of sounds in relation to one another, is completely an abstraction. Shopenhauer said, “Music takes over when philosophy leaves off.” And that’s true. I never learned to play an instrument, never wanted to. For me, it was enough to listen. Beecham once said about the English, “They don’t really like music, they only like the noise it makes.” Maybe that’s how I am. Notes in relation to one another are exactly like color, like color put together. They make sense or not. The first time I heard Debussy live, not a recording, it was a revelation to me! I actually heard the individual notes coming out to the audience in separate spaces, they floated, suspended separately. For the first time, I truly understood Impressionism. It was transparent. I heard Impressionism. Sounds are like color.

JMcW: Do you know the artist Stanton MacDonald?

Mueller: Oh, Christ no! I never in my life wanted to do anything like that! What was it?

JMcW: Synchromism? I think?

Mueller: What horseshit…no, I mean what does a Mozart piano sonata say to you? because the sounds are nothing, they are not any things--they are an abstraction--abstract forms, collected in the same space. I like abstraction in painting because I do not have the urge to spell it out, actually an aversion to spelling it out.

JMcW: Not spelling it out?

Mueller: Well, you’re back to the old warhorse: form and content, not spelling it out opens greater possibilities for the listener/viewer. If you paint recognizable objects in a picture, they could be magnificent but they pose a limitation, they confine you to what they’re portraying, you can appreciate how it’s done technically but you can’t get around it. In an abstraction you’re engaging my dream and yours, my memory and yours. The content can be broadened; can reverberate in an almost limitless way, can’t it? Well, ambiguity in painting is for another day.

JMcW: And people? People in paintings?

Mueller: No. I’ve never had any real interest in painting or drawing people. I have done. I know that I can draw; I can draw accurately, logically, realistically, but, it was always about space, color, organizing those elements for me. Organization still seems to be what interests me. Braque said that he welcomed Cubism because he could finally do something really well. In other words, he couldn’t have “done” Delacroix, but he could do Cubism. He was able to speak a certain dialect, and I feel that way about drawing figures. Beethoven struggled to make melodies while Mozart’s melodies flowed like water. So for me, I wouldn’t have been considered an artist at all in the sixteenth century.

JMcW: For you and the generation of painters when you first began, were you intimidated by the Renaissance?

Mueller: Painters are still intimidated by the Renaissance. If they’re not they certainly should be, which is right. If you can’t do what Raphael did in the Renaissance then you can’t be a Renaissance painter. Fortunately I wasn’t born in the sixteenth century. I can be a twentieth century painter.

JMcW: So, let’s get back to your process. How do you begin a painting? Is there one process?  Does it differ from one painting to another?

Mueller: Sure it differs. It differs even while I’m working on the same painting.

JMcW: Well, OK. I know that you begin with careful drawings that are then transferred to a canvas by a whole method of string and rules and craziness that gives me a headache, so I won’t go there now, but then, you have the drawing on the canvas, and then what?

Mueller: Beats me!

JMcW: Do you begin with, say, the “juiciest” form? And then work on one piece at a time? Is it an overall process?

Mueller: Honestly it varies each time I begin a painting. It’s never the same. It’s always a problem and I’m always working for ways to solve the problem. It always has to do with space and color. In the old days when I worked that early painterly style there was no drawing, I just started with paint on the canvas. I felt it was too easy in some ways. I needed to slow it down. Then I decided to draw. I began those stripe paintings: Cape Cod, Grand Canyon, the Photographist, etc. I had a definite goal; I had a sense of what they would look like. I didn’t want areas to be harsh, and the objects:  I wanted them to gleam, like objects you could meditate on. I felt that by placing (like notes) one small stripe next to another, like Seurat, that the paint would have life, it would glow, it would move on the canvas, and I think I was right in doing that, I felt it was right. It was successful. I have never seen anyone do anything like those paintings before; I felt it was completely mine. They were “microtonal color”: that was mine. It was like breaking down an octave into more than eight notes. And you can’t get color like that in any other way. The stripe paintings were torture, but I could work on subtleties then. And each had to be carefully planned because those striped areas fight with each other and can ruin the whole composition. They have to be resolved before putting the paint down or the canvas is left too scarred.

You can move from one color to another in a painting, like going from blue to tan in a graded way, a gradient; that idea repelled me: the soupy look. So, I knew I just had to grit my teeth and rule 1/8th inch lines and tape them and work with them, and the results were like colored gas. Enormous amount of work! I painted a lot of those, I can’t even remember how many and most sold, because I have only a few left. I became tired of the labor involved.

I always begin a drawing sensing like a musician, what key this is going to be in. What does this key say? This is going to have a certain look about it. There is always the adjustment of one color to another, keying up certain colors; drowning others. What to do first? Where to start? Maybe I should start with an area because I know it’s going to be the most difficult, then, if I can get through that, I know I can handle the rest of this thing. That’s technical stuff but, it’s what I remember.

I sometimes imagine colors while I’m drawing. I’m trying to get a sense of what “key” it’s in, what is the tonality? A-tonal or tonal? Is this going to be an eye-bender? Or is it going to make me grit my teeth?

After the porch paintings, the paintings based on architectural forms, old Newark buildings, I settled into the stripe paintings, then the large blocks of color pictures that I have been doing for the past ten years or so. I guess they are now a sort of ragged series, not like the party line, but they are connected somehow, digressions/excursions, into something that hopefully doesn’t look too much like the one before it.

It is…it is like Morandi…filtered experience, like poets who somehow filter their own lives, their own life experience into some form. The titles of paintings always come later after they are there; I can see them; I can recognize something, like the paintings: Southern Redoubt, or Downeck Newark, as soon as I saw them, I knew that I knew them, but I never have any intention or subject matter in mind when I begin. And of course, it would all be delightful if the whole thing weren’t so fraught with doubt and suspicion.

JMcW: What? Suspicion?

Mueller: Yeah, the whole thing, the whole endeavor, the whole shift into modernity...when you’re midway through a painting and think...Oh man, maybe we all went down the wrong road! You know maybe we never should have come this way! And how are we getting out? And even in this realm, maybe I’m not that good.

JMcW: Too late now. I had a teacher who used to say about “ifs,” “Yes, and if my grandmother had wheels she’d be a baby carriage. So what?”

Mueller: That’s right! Best to stay away from that thinking. I’ve done what I’ve done and I can’t stop doing it now. Though I wonder sometimes what it would be like to have lived doing something without the cloud of doubt over my head my whole life.

JMcW: If your work had enjoyed more notoriety in your lifetime, would you feel differently about the “road” you’re on now?

Mueller: It would have been nice to have had more notoriety, more money and all that, but I’m convinced that even if I had, it wouldn’t have changed the doubt. I always felt connected to Kline, because it was seeing his work, in his studio, as a young man, that I first felt charged with this…what? Life? This need to paint this way? Whatever, it was life changing for me. Years ago, Catherine Kuh either wrote or said about Franz Kline that she was on the Cape one afternoon with friends, and they saw a car on the dunes, and someone said, “Hey, that looks like Franz Kline’s car,” and they went over; it was. Kline was sitting with his car door open watching the sea and he said, “I don’t know, I don’t know if what I’m doing has any meaning. I’m selling pictures, maybe this is all too easy. Everything I’m painting, I’m selling…what’s this all about?” But you know, he died very young and then Rothko. Why did he commit suicide?

Anyway, I’m about to begin another painting: no idea why or what it will be about. These paintings aren’t related like those in the earlier series, it’s not as if I can’t wait to begin another, not an urge; more like a weird “need” to begin something, work on something, finish something…something.

JMcW: Begin, work, finish?

Mueller: Well, perhaps, that’s about it…

.