#5: Microtonal Paintings and Music

Interview with George Mueller: 6/9/13

JMcW: It seems looking through reviews that Michael Lenson of the Newark News was a particular fan of your work. He wrote the Sunday “Realm of Art” column and you’re almost always featured there. He seems to have chronicled your career in a way. Was he a particularly good friend of yours?

Mueller: Michael Lenson, no. I think we probably met at one of my openings. He wrote for a Newark paper, I was from Newark. He may have come to a party or something like that, but no, he was just a really nice guy…kind of ebullient…and I think he genuinely liked my work. He was always very supportive of my painting.

JMcW: What would you care to tell me about your “Microtonal” paintings?

Mueller: I liked comparing what I did to the way I visualized light after reading about quantum physics. Before they had figured it out, it was just “ether,” which was just a word that meant no one really understood how light traveled: it traveled in “the ether” whatever that was. But then came the concepts of waves, and then particles/packets, and then wave/packets; how could it be both things? Now, I didn’t really care about the science of seeing. I just enjoyed being able to see but having read about quantum physics, it’s fun to think about those kinds of things like waves/particles and how they could be so different and the same simultaneously. The values in a painting like the black and white painting that I sold to Mike Gruber,[1] the values are so close that you almost can’t

determine a difference in value from light to dark. So the values are separate, like particles but they are also blended like waves.

I liked the idea that if I could make stripes 1/8 of an inch wide or even thinner than that, that I could do things with color that I couldn’t do with a brush by blending or mixing two or more colors, because if you blend seven or eight separate hues you end up with one hue. But if you keep each hue contained within itself, slightly suspended, you end up with an entirely different quality. It’s a little like paint manufacturers, keeping the pigment separated instead of blending them together, seeing each particle separately and yes, like Seurat, who wanted the human eye to do the mixing of color on the canvas; that’s what everyone’s eyes do anyway, the result is like a colored gas.

JMcW: How did you prepare for these kinds of paintings? Obviously you didn’t paint them with the same improvisational technique that you painted the Vivisection paintings.

Mueller: No, not anything like that. It was really the opposite way of working. A lot of planning went into each painting. Initially I did three paintings of just stripes, completely abstract, gaseous looking, but beautiful, just reveling in the weird color changes I could get. I began with large fields of just stripes that moved from one color into another. I did about three of those. One of the first I ever did was just of stripes, but the combination of vivid colors became so strange because of this technique that from a distance you could not really identify or describe precisely what color you were seeing.

            Then I began to work with forms in a composition which took even more planning. I would begin with literally dozens of drawings, sometimes shifting only one strand of color or one small shape. I used layers and layers of tracing paper to rework an original drawing until I felt that I had gotten it just right. I didn’t like the idea of having to work directly on the canvas anymore, it ruined the surface. I wanted these paintings to look machine made. I wanted a surface that looked untouched by human hands. Now Judd[2] would have approved of that. I had to develop specific tools for especially those very large canvases and most of them were large because I knew that this kind of technique would be very striking if they were worked large. There were problems with working on 8 foot canvas that spanned a stretcher. Just getting the bands of color uniform

and precise was hard to do on cloth, on stretched canvas.

diagram by J.McWilliams

 I made a large H shape that I could clamp onto either end of the frame; the horizontal girder in the middle spanned the 8 feet, supported in the middle with supports so that the girder, even though it was metal, couldn’t sag anywhere. A friend of mine, a painter, devised an A-shaped plexi-glass shape that could sit on top of the girder and slide horizontally back and forth, and he had someone drill very precise holes at 1/8th intervals

down the middle of the A-frame so that I could make tiny marks with a pencil on the canvas.

 I developed the colors and mixed them before hand. These colors were never quite right out of a tube. The colors I used I mixed and then stored in small plastic film canisters to keep them moist until I was ready for them (I would get batches of canisters from a photography store). I would have to have charts and plans for each color that were numbered and arranged before I began to apply paint, then I could go back in sometimes and change this or that one, but not too many. I had it figured out before beginning the painting, and I didn’t like that look of correcting things after the fact.

            Masking became problematic because no matter how much you burnish masking tape, paint will seep under and leave jagged little edges and I really wanted a clean edge. I didn’t like the look of going back to correct mistakes. So I developed a way of masking, then putting two coats of mat medium over the tape so that no seepage would occur, but it took a great deal of time. The tape also needed to be specially cut. I found I man who owned a tape factory. He had special machines that could slice off rolls of tape that were an 1/8th of an inch or thinner. And then I would work, but it was so tedious and very difficult physically. It was like waking up and thinking that you had a job in a factory that you hated. ‘I don’t want to go back to that place today’ but I did, and managed to complete about 1 to 3 inches of the painting in one day, sometimes an inch in one day, then maybe have to go back and redo a stripe to two, rearrange a color. I remember that I did a winter scene, it sold to someone, I can’t remember who, and it was comparatively small. I would love to see that painting again, it was very unique. A kind of abstract winter landscape, it was almost silver. But, even though it was hard to get through those paintings, it was like having a new paint box! If you used the paint box just right, it would yield something magical.

JMcW: So much planning, like building or construction or playing chess. And so completely different from what the Abstract Expressionists were doing. Was it always worth the effort? Eventually you changed direction again… why?

Mueller: I suppose some might question: ‘is it worth all this trouble, just to go from here to there?’ Well, that’s my business, isn’t it? I guess it was worth it to me or I wouldn’t have done as many of them as I did. I did a series of about twenty-five of those beautiful microtonal paintings and then Harold Wachtel [3] talked me into another batch and I did perhaps 5-7 more. These weren’t of nothing or a part of nothing. They almost always evoked the landscape in me, or its sensation or an experience or a combination of many experiences that were important to me. I felt I had, that I wanted (for lack of a better term) to capture something, like a photographer. The photographer takes a picture and rushes back to the darkroom to find out if they “got it.” I always felt afterward or near the end that I had “got it,” then I could change it, I could manage it.

JMcW: It’s clear that everyone who reviewed your stripe paintings, the microtonal paintings, has referred to the paintings relative to music. What is the relationship that you have to music? Can you describe that?

Mueller: I don’t know if I can describe that. A composer, when he listens to music, I suppose he is hearing a lot more than the average person, a lot more than me, I’m sure. But emotionally, I don’t know about that. I doubt that’s the case. I can squeeze just about all there is emotionally from music that I love and the same should happen with painting. I wanted to paint music, music is the art that all other art forms imitate, it is the queen of art forms: intangible, performed in time, gone the second it’s made, not made up of anything you can actually see, yet about as profound as is possible in this life. I aspired to get that close to music without being stupidly literal about it. I wanted it to be that abstract. Malevich tried to do things like that, but that bored me. I wanted it to be more complex than that; for concrete things to exist in a completely intangible territory. Music modulates from one key to another, and I found I could do that with color, from bright to somber. Each modulation means something different to the listener or to the viewer. If sounds or tones are blended, that has another kind of feeling altogether. The look of blended colors is just as opaque as if you’re sliding notes together. Neither is clean. If you’re playing an ascending scale quickly on the piano, the ear can distinguish each note even though they are played one close to the other and even though the harmonics are overlapping, glissando. But a blended group of colors or notes is more like portamento, or one of those sliding whistle things. It’s an entirely different feeling. Also separating bands of color, I could always place a completely different color in the middle of everything. I couldn’t do that if I blended paint together. It’s almost as though I could find other colors that didn’t exist before in a traditional sense. For me, it has a lighter, clarifying feel.

[1] Dr. Michael Gruber, Patron of the Arts

[2]  Donald Judd: Minimalist painter who reviewed Mueller’s Summit Street paintings.

[3] Harold Wachtel, Art Collector