Why would I want to make a documentary about myself?
It's a good question.
Thank you for watching.
I think it has something to do with playing and power.
The playing part is obvious.
You just enjoy yourself the way colors and textures and figures work
and how your imagination runs loose on you.
Power is a visual grip on your mind.
It's a power over yourself. It's a power that keeps you centered and focused in your essential being, whatever that is.
Finding that unique part in yourself is something that a painting did for me.
I would say it's human beings.
I guess it would be the central subject of the Renaissance.
That's probably why that period in art speaks to me so much.
I think one of the very top experiences in my life was seeing the paintings of Giotto.
That's powerful.
I don't feel influenced by a fellow artist anymore, apart from the fact that it interests me to see technique,
how certain effects are done which I don't know about and I would like to know.
But I don't feel the need to imitate anyone.
As a young artist, I think everyone does that.
You begin by copying Picasso did it, Jackson Pollock did it, everyone was copying each other.
That's the way you learn by the movements and lines.
When you become part of your own gesture and body movements, you learn the wisdom of a line.
When I was very young, I had these really small books that my parents had of modern artists.
The ones that spoke to me a lot were Picasso, Matisse, Chagall, Giacometti, Paul Clay, Miro.
I kind of imitated them. I made little drawings and sketches and one was in the style of one artist
and the other was in the style of another artist.
Like I said, imitating you learn.
By the time I was 13, I saw a book by a friend of my parents about Emil Nolde.
These are, if you don't know, they're expressionistic paintings.
Very expressionistic.
When I saw those, I was so excited about.
I didn't know that an artist could work in that kind of way.
Be that free, that expressive.
At that point, when I was 13, I decided I'm going to become an artist.
Then later in art school, my big heroes were Paltus, Wyndham Lewis.
Picasso kind of stayed with me all the years.
Matisse.
I loved looking at old paintings and I liked the work of Goya very much.
The early Renaissance painters.
Am I leaving anyone out? Probably.
I'll think about that later.
But these artists, I think, had a big influence on me until I was, I guess, 35 or so.
When I was 35, I was struggling so hard to get the figure down the way I thought it should be.
I kept looking academic.
Essentially, I could do what any reasonable artist was expected to do with a figure,
but that's not what I wanted to do.
I wanted to do something special.
Like I said, I wanted to be myself.
Instead of drawing from the figure, instead of using a reference point of finding something out there and interpreting it,
I went into myself and said, you know, just draw without any model, let it come from inside you.
That was a very long, difficult process.
I think it took me at least two years before I began to feel I'm getting somewhere.
But really, at that moment, when I got as far as feeling that this is my own work,
I felt it was worth the effort.
I had my own style.
I had my own way of looking.
Since then, I've more or less kept that style going in different phases, ways.
I'll never stay the same for longer than three or four years, because it gets boring.
Always looking for something new.
But there's a part of me which will always be myself, and I think people will recognize that in my work.
I was a very energetic kid.
Always thinking up new games and ideas.
Pretty dominant.
I had my own little club called the National Beavers Club, because of our big buck Keith.
I always had something going.
Always thinking of something, I was going to make a newspaper, or I was going to have an election,
or I was rigged in my favor.
I was pretty outgoing and enjoying life until about 12 or 13.
Then I became very introverted, completely closed off, certainly to my family.
I found a lot of books that interested me, and paintings and art.
Somehow I got through high school and went on to art school.
Art school was like a complete lunatic asylum for me.
I loved it.
All these crazy people, something that I had missed in a kind of bourgeois high school,
living in the Midwest, where everything is rigid and closed.
When I got to art school, I saw I wasn't so crazy after all.
I made contacts with a lot of friends of whom I still have contact.
It was fantastic. One of the great things about the art school that I went to,
Minneapolis College of Art and Design, was that there was a junior year abroad program,
which meant that I could be in my third year, when I was around 20, 21, I could go to Holland.
That was an amazing experience, and one of the reasons that I'm here right now.
At art school, I had one teacher that made a particular impression on me, Michael O'Neill.
He made it a point that we learned how to draw in the classical way.
He came from the School of Painting of Bailey in Philadelphia.
He was a student of his.
Our first lesson was we had to look at a corner, just an empty corner in a room,
and draw that, which means you have just two planes and some structure,
and make it an interesting drawing.
After that, we graduated to eggs.
Eggs are very difficult to draw also.
Continuing on to other more difficult assignments,
I learned a lot about classical drawing,
but I think what I learned even more from Michael was dedication to art.
He always used to say, make art as if you were going to die tomorrow.
I took that to heart.
In Holland, in the art school there, Atelier 63,
the situation in the art school was different than the classical art school,
because we got a studio to work in five days a week,
and on Friday, instead of teachers coming,
well-known artists would come and give us a criticism of their work.
And they did a good job, I think.
I had a wonderful teacher being Ferenhout, Edgar Ferenhout,
Kovestrik,
and Reinhard Lukasen.
Lukasen was a funny guy.
He was a real small guy, always had this huge cigar in his mouth,
big glasses and short hair, and he'd come in and look around.
His English was terrible.
Every sentence that he made was actually half Dutch,
at least the grammar for sure.
If you got a compliment from Lukasen, you should be happy,
because he was at that time, and maybe still is,
a very well-known artist in Holland.
So he came into my studio at one point, and he hadn't said much before then,
and he looked at the paintings, and he spent a long time puffing his cigar.
He said,
I think,
I think,
I think I like it.
Not.
That's a very difficult question to answer.
Of course, it plays some kind of role,
but I would find it very difficult to understand it,
although at times I make a painting,
and I don't know what it's about,
and after weeks, and sometimes even after years,
I'll look at it and say,
oh, that had something to do with a certain point in my life.
I would say it's not a conscious process,
but in some way, your personal life is always going to affect your paintings.
I like to think that I work objectively,
but to be honest, it does affect it.
I would divide that answer into two parts.
One part is a technical part.
That is a lesson that I had at the very beginning of art school,
and the second part would be something that I learned myself.
Begin with the first part was one of the first days at art school.
We had a visiting teacher, Roberto Mata,
who was a Chilean, one of the last,
he was the last real original surrealist from the surrealist movement.
He gave a demonstration of how he went about making a painting.
What he did was he took a charcoal and started gesturing on the canvas.
It was just making lines and forms, almost while they were abstract.
He said, at one point, you think about it and look at it and you begin to see things.
They just came.
He had his own personal symbolic system, which he worked with.
It was a kind of automatic writing idea applied to painting.
When I saw that lesson, I was kind of amazed at how he did it,
but I didn't think that that was the method for me.
Years later, when I had a sort of blockade of what was working,
I thought, because I used to paint or draw in the old-fashioned way,
I would make sketches, many sketches ahead of time,
and then I would transfer them with lines and pencil or charcoal onto the canvas
and then, more or less, fill in the blanks,
which is fine, I guess, for people who want to paint that way,
but that was not the way I wanted to paint.
I remember that lesson and I started thinking,
well, let me try it that way.
I did.
I just let myself go.
There were forms, gestures, and I began to see things in it.
What happened is the painting that came out of it was my own.
It had its strengths and its faults, but it was all for me.
I think that was a great lesson for me,
because it was the origin of my own style.
The second thing that I learned,
and this was kind of in combination at that moment of discovery
through this method of painting, was if you want to be a painter,
and actually for any creative artist, literature, music, film, whatever,
if you want to be a real, authentic, unique artist,
and you want to convince people of what you are doing,
you have to be yourself.
Whatever faults you have,
those faults you can use as your strengths,
as long as you're willing to be yourself and to let yourself be seen.
And those were my lessons, my big lessons in art.
I've spoken a little bit about the amazing lesson that I had from Roberto Mata about painting,
and that technique is more or less the way I do things.
I make gestures and lines and colors.
I look at the painting for a while.
I go and sit down, sometimes I turn it halfway or all the way around.
I begin to see things, an arm or a face or a cloud, whatever,
and it comes together by itself.
What I also do in a lot of my recent paintings is I put a structure behind it,
using a certain kind of plastic modeling paste.
It's acrylics, and I use acrylic as water-based paint so that it dries very quickly.
I can work quickly, and as soon as something is wrong within 10 minutes, I can correct it.
I use crazy tools.
Here's some paint roller, and I can go around and work on that quickly
and scrape things away with the old mess.
Wow!
And this is another favorite one.
Look at those little teeth.
So, I use anything I can find.
See how that leg is beginning to come up there?
It's part of the way I see things, just coming out of the structure.
This is the world I live in.
Isn't it weird?
About preconceived ideas, I would say I don't really have a preconceived idea.
I have a small plan in my head before I start, and that has more to do with an atmosphere,
a feeling that I have, that I want to keep things calm or be very dynamic.
Use harsh contrasts or less, a certain color scheme.
All these things are restrictions that help me actually become free later.
There's no preconceived idea, and the end result of what I make is always a surprise to me.
Look at the studio, look at all these paintings.
I think I've done about more than a thousand paintings.
My personal favorites.
Well, there's a lot of them out there.
If I had to say which paintings I like of my own, I'm sure in most reflections this one would be one of them.
This made quite early 1991.
Something that I caught in her expression just haunts me.
Paper moon. This was a tremendous experience to make this painting.
I used all kinds of modeling paste and paper.
If you look closely, you'll see how I really got into the paper and was struggling with it.
I like this painting, the Hermetic, because it's got so much dynamic in it.
It's very free. I'm daring to take steps and do things without worrying about the fact that if I've been doing it right or not.
The result is, in my opinion, okay. Not okay. Good.
And look, I'm using green. I don't like using green.
Russian Summer is a deep and intimate painting, which I consider one of my best works.
For some reason, it goes further than most things I've done. It's really a deep painting.
I have the feeling, that's why I call it Russian Summer. It has something to do with my roots, the Russian blood in me, the warmth, and the feeling of being close.
The Gathering Storm was one of a series of triptychs, which is an ongoing project of mine this last two or three years.
This was one of the triptychs that I feel is really most succeeded.
It was painted in black, white, and silver, and perhaps a few, a little bit of ochre, so it's very monochromatic.
There's a lot of structure in the painting, a lot of use of certain materials that I ordinarily wouldn't use.
I like it because I don't understand it, but it seems as if it's on the brink of being understood.
It's got a whole story in itself. What it does is, it does what I've always wanted a painting to do, what I call an open story.
It gives you an idea that something's happened, and then you, as a viewer, should fill in the rest.
Innovators, I love, and why it seems to be as if it's been painted on a wall, and as if it's in a forgotten world of William Blake,
or some fantasist showing two people, what are they innovating? What are they constructing?
What is it they see? What is that feeling of a universal structure that they are making or are part of?
In my opinion, meaning is often confused with literal meanings, while visual meanings have a whole different world and way of explaining themselves.
An image stands by itself. Its power is in itself.
While relating sometimes to literary and symbolic ideas, the power is within your eyes and the connections that you make in your brain,
which I feel are different, or at least in a different way related than literary meanings.
I don't think that art has very much deep meaning, probably because I don't feel or understand much of anything in the world or in my life or in anybody's life.
I would even venture to say that art is a very nice form of entertainment.
What I think of the art world now? Oh, please.
I know a few artists with which I have very good contact, and they become good friends of mine.
Ubaldo Siki and Marc Fiziona, to name two, which are really close to me.
They have a vision which is close to mine in as far as we're both from different nationalities living in a country that's foreign to us,
so that combination of cultures generates a kind of art which is pretty unique.
It's not country-oriented. I like to think of it as in some way global, taking the best of both or more cultures.
My contacts with galleries are fine. I don't have as many shows as I used to.
I used to have a show once a month, and that didn't seem to be what I wanted to do at a certain point.
It was a long time when I first came to Holland in 1973. There was about a period of 15 years in which I did not have any exhibits.
When I got back into it, I found a gallery called Double Tray, and the gallery owner was Leo Ardianzen.
He was a great help in getting me started to exhibit again.
After that, I had shows with Annalisa Ney, who's been my most important gallery here in my local city.
In other places, a gallery at Wave House, really good contact with Corey Hagenar's. More places. I've been to Spain, had shows in Germany.
As of yet, I have not got my foot into America. I don't know if I want to or not. I'm still thinking about it.
I've participated in many art fairs, but the whole thing about exhibiting is kind of up in the air right now.
At the moment, there's a show in Amsterdam in Khaaldi Rudolph, which I'm very happy about.
But there's something in me that just questions the whole process.
Well, that happened about a year ago. It was a big surprise to myself.
I always wanted to do something with film. Way back in high school days, when I made a film together with my old friend Dennis Lang, I just loved it.
But I didn't have the time or technique, and I really had made the decision to become a painter.
And in those days, it just was too expensive to really get into serious filmmaking.
Now, cameras are made, the ones that I use, where you can take pictures as well as videos, and they have really great quality.
This one is being done by Lumix GH2, and it's just fantastic what it can do.
So, I got into it because I wanted to do something that I really liked.
Music, that's something that's always interested in me. I had a wonderful musical family background with a special grandmother of whom I made a documentary about, Olga Averino.
Her whole family, the Russian side of my family, was connected with many well-known artists and composers.
It's just been a part of my life. So, actually, before I became an artist, I was seriously thinking of becoming a musician.
But I'm just too afraid to go up on stage.
So, I like doing things in my studio, working on it, and then having an opening, I can take that.
But I'm not a performing artist. As a matter of fact, this whole interview is a performance, and I really don't know what to think of it.
We will see.
In any case, that move to film and music is something that just is something I wanted to do, and I feel a life is short.
You should do everything, anything that you wanted to do or dreamt of doing. You should do it in that period of time, because you won't get a second chance.
I'm content for myself, yes. I feel as if I've made a large body of work, which looks good to me.
I'm not objective. Nobody can be objective about their own work.
But I enjoy looking at my own paintings, and I think that's the best test.
And I'm pretty critical. So, it's okay.
Three days now, and quite intensively, I've been talking to myself or talking to this camera, it's one of the strangest things I've ever done.
I interview with myself, and actually, here I am, nowhere, and I'm just talking to this piece of machinery in front of me.
But on the other hand, I'm talking to myself, and talking to myself and asking questions for myself has got me into a sort of perspective about my life as an artist.
What I represent, what I do, and who I am.
When I look back on the video machines, on the editing machines, and you see yourself, I see myself sweating, scratching, wiping my nose,
and I think, my God, what disguise a slob. Which I guess maybe I've always been, I don't know. I'm 63, I'll have to accept myself as I am, but this age you have to.
On the other hand, I see things in myself which are very positive, which I never really realized until this moment that I had.
I'm happy with the character that I have, the way I think. Sometimes I have to laugh at myself, but it's not painful, it's very good for me.
So if you would ask me and say, well, would you be your overall evaluation of this whole project or whatever you feel about it, I would say, since it's almost near completion, it feels like I'm just a little higher in my shoes.
It's been good.
