#4: The Summit Street Paintings

Interview with George Mueller: 6/4/13

JMcW: You left the New York metropolitan area in 1959, after marrying Juliana. You had already gone through two phases of painting by that time: what I call the Noumena Series and then the Vivisection Paintings, when you began to suddenly paint porches realistically.

Mueller: We moved to #9 Summit Street in East Orange, New Jersey when I began the Porch Paintings. I was also painting the Vivisection paintings, but I naturally began to drift into something else. I don’t know why. We had rented this house with big rooms, nothing much in them because we couldn’t afford nice things; furniture. The house was probably built before World War I; the workmanship was beautiful, curved leaded glass in wide windows, with window seats looking out onto a porch, a huge marble fireplace. The marble was a soft sort of orange color that went up to the ceiling and the living room was sunken; I could sit on the floor of the living room and look out on the floor of this wide porch. On every side were parking lots and square brick red apartment buildings. So there was nothing really made up about those paintings. They began as realistic portrayals of what I actually saw everyday: a kind of understanding of the way people had lived compared with the stark and ugly way people were living. There was one tree.

I just got the feeling one day to draw the razor sharp light that was coming onto the porch. I hadn’t drawn in a while and I drew the porch very carefully. When I showed the

drawing to Carmen Cicero[1], he seemed kind of impressed by it, so I decided to make a painting of the drawing. The first painting was very difficult and took forever because I was still working in oils then. I knew that if I painted this realistic image of a plain ordinary porch, it couldn’t be a little dinky kind of easel painting, it had to be meticulous and big…to get the sharp edges I had to mask and the drying took forever. Frank Roth[2] came by one day and told me about this new stuff: acrylic paint, and it was amazing. The stuff dried in minutes and I could get quite a lot done in one day! Using acrylics also changed slightly the quality of color and chiascuro so the overall effect was very sharp, crackly. And then I just went for that theme. I did a few, then began to fool around with rhythm of the verticals, doubling over porches, adding musical scores, changing colors, they eventually became abstract, hard edged, geometric paintings but I hadn’t started out to paint porches, it just happened.

JMcW: Were you not concerned at all with your “career,” with the fact that you had already built an audience and buyers and were favorably impressing galleries and critics? Didn’t you think at all about continuing the work that appealed to them, or that you might be jeopardizing your future by changing directions so often?

Mueller: No. I mean who are you working for anyway? If you’re a painter you’re working for yourself. You’re self-employed, you’re responsible for what you do. I did paint a “commission” for Harold Wachtel because he asked me to but also because what

he wanted was something that I wanted to do anyway. I don’t think I would have been willing to paint something out of character, just for the money.

 I never cared what was going on in the art world, about what so and so wrote about which gallery show, I only cared about what was going on in my own head and what pleased me. I wasn’t afraid to switch to realistic painting and I always admired realistic painting, like I love and admire abstract painting. What’s the difference, really? That sort of thing appeals to critics but not to painters. I think it was Charles Ives who said that if a man likes the ocean and the mountains, can’t he live somewhere where he can see both? Eventually painting the porch realistically began to bore me so I played with the same motif in other ways until eventually the verticals became horizontal stripes and I was painting those “microtonal” paintings and I had worked my way back to abstraction again. I suppose they suggested landscapes to me, but most people don’t see that in them. I never wanted to annoy people with painting. My work was never political. It didn’t have a statement or agenda. It wasn’t about bugging the bourgeoisie. I wanted to make things that looked good to me, like a movie that I might want to see again. When I go back now, a painting of mine turns up that I haven’t seen in years, I never cringe and think, “Man, I would like to be able to change that, or I wish I hadn’t done that.” No, it holds up pretty well for me and I feel good about that.

JMcW: Didn’t Joseph Albers once offer you a job teaching at Yale??

Mueller: According to Grace Borgenicht, he was very excited about my work, came into

the gallery to see it and had her call me up. He wanted me to go up there with him and teach. Well, you know, it’s been my experience that people are always either soft-soaping you or ignoring you. When they have a reason for complimenting you that’s fine, but then they forget your existence. It’s better not to get side tracked from painting. I suppose I should have called him, at least to explain that I just don’t have the personality for that sort of thing.

JMcW: What did the paintings of a porch represent for you? Did they bring up nostalgia for your childhood? Was it only about the geometric possibilities?

Mueller: Nostalgia. There can be nostalgia there, warm light, suffused light. I wasn’t thinking that at the time. I wasn’t trying to make a statement. I’m always working for something that makes me feel good, feelings that don’t unsettle me. I wanted peace in my life... I always have.

I suppose the porch represents an older, quieter time. The architecture represented the same kind of mood that Ives’ music represented for me…American, reflective, regretful, in a way…homesick against this unrelenting machine outside…This was the stuff that I listened to all the time. The music was abstract but it was also clearly something about an earlier time in our history. Ives was constantly on my mind, and I was in a state of feeling things like they used to be and I identified with people like Ives, who worked for an insurance company, and Wallace Stevens, also insurance or William Carlos Williams, a doctor, but they were working people who were in the world dealing with the machinery every day. And I was too in those days. From the time I married Juliana, she and I both worked, we both taught. I taught a lot and all over the place: Summit, Morristown, Englewood, Bloomfield, Oklahoma, Rhode Island, East Orange, but I also worked in the audio business, modifying audio equipment, designing sound systems and speakers. Those were the easy ways of making money; the hard way was painting houses or crawling around on rooftops and through attics, but we both wanted to live in the country, we had to pay rent.

JMcW: But you were still represented by a gallery?

Mueller: Yes, and selling work, but that needed to be supplemented. I went from Borgenicht Gallery to Grippi Gallery. I really liked Joe Grippi very much. His gallery merged with Wadell and I was represented by Grippi-Wadell until Wadell formed his own gallery, and after that I was with him and then with Straley briefly. I had shows regularly. My work always sold…the porch paintings sold well. The Whitney has one, there is another one, the largest one was for the town hall in Trenton, but I also spent thirty years as a laborer in addition to being an “artist” with “colleagues” who had no idea what I really did for a living or who I was much of the time. 

I was still doing the porch paintings when we moved out of the city altogether in 1961. We moved to Drakestown Road in Long Valley, New Jersey, really out in farmland. I had always wanted to live in the country from the time I was a child spending summers at Greenwood Lake. All of those images were soaked in and I always knew that I wanted to get back to them on some level. I’ve managed to remain out of the city for the rest of my life. Never wanted to live in Rome/Paris/ New York, now I hate even going into the city. It doesn’t feel right. I spend hours watching leaves, makes me feel good.

JMcW: You also began to draw small landscape drawings when you moved out of the city. You were still painting abstract, geometric shapes based on the porch, but you began to draw wonderfully romantic, carefully rendered landscapes.

Mueller: Balance. I was drawing landscapes at the same time that I was painting geometric porch paintings. I was just bowled over by the land when I first moved to Long Valley. I had this almost compulsive need to draw scenes, carefully, to record, to caress, and slow everything down. I was so awed by the land and those drawings very nearly all sold and I made many, many of them. I continued to want to draw like that for years. I was so in love with doing them. I never wanted to paint like that, but I loved doing small- scale articulate drawings of the land. I would go out walking at night and wander around by myself until daybreak. We rented a house on a farm on Schooley’s Mountain, a huge farm, 350 acres, Idle Hour Farm which was a joke because there were precious few “idle hours” for the owner. I would clear brush and create paths and hike for miles at all hours. I would wander around in the dark with a full moon, come home and draw. Most of the drawings, although from memory, were of real places. I seldom just made those things up. I think it established a sort of balance with abstract painting that I was so involved in at the time. People from the city bought all of those drawings of the landscape.

JMcW: So, what is that about, this feeling “good” or balanced or the reason why city people would want those country drawings, or the reason why you want or feel the need to do them?

Mueller: It’s always easier to talk about how than why. At a certain point I stopped doing those drawings. A friend asked me why I just didn’t do more drawings for money. I can’t just turn them out. They’re not table legs! It took a lot of time and I was seeing something at that time that I felt I had to do, not like taking snap shots. Why? I would feel excited by the thought that, “this is going to make a good drawing if I do it right.”About grabbing a piece of something and holding it fast. All the writers, everyone has tried to penetrate the mystery of “why.” It is a mystery because it is something more than just owning it in a way, knowing it, but of course there is that too.

JMcW: OK: How?

Mueller: Simplify, organize, find your way through it, to take down and keep it forever...keep it intact...like Kurt Schwitters…forever nailing things down so they wouldn’t change. All other art moves: reading, continuum and film and music, but painting is a static art and allows the painter to hold onto something in an intimate way, stopping time and slowing the message up, so that anyone seeing it may hop on board and get it too.

The culture in this country makes you feel uncomfortable if you’re a painter. “The business of America is business,” whereas in other European countries perhaps, there was, perhaps still is, a tolerance and understanding on the part of the masses, people who think artists are like priests, they’re advising you, giving you advice about what you look at, standing outside of life and observing, doing the business of observing for the business man.  You’ve got a different kind of job if you’re an artist, in a way...you point things out to people and you make them see something that they won’t notice otherwise.

[1] Carmen Cicero, painter and close friend

[2] Frank Roth, painter, close friend, and former brother-in-law