Art historian Simone Campbell-Scott interviews Brew contributor Francine Halvorsen about her new show, ” Untitled Radiance – Oil Paintings” at the Gallery die Botschaft, at 1623 Bolton Street.

S. So Francine why don’t we start by you telling me a little about this exhibition.

F. For me it’s about learning to trust the paint…A couple of years ago I decided to paint by playing with color for the first time in a long time and I didn’t understand why it wasn’t satisfying to me…I realized that I was looking for elements outside myself. With these paintings I started to trust the paint and by trusting the paint, the whole thing came in a rush.

S. What do you mean by trusting the paint?

F. What I mean by that…you always doubt .is that you look at the blank canvas – which has become a famous metaphor for doubt and possibilities. But once you start the physical work, that doubt goes away. Not because it isn’t part of the experience but because the paint starts something like a dialogue actually an interaction and you trust what you see and you trust what you are doing and you think now I’m making a painting and that takes over.

S. So it is when you start that the dialogue begins.

F. Yes

S. Do you think the painting talks back to you?

F. I don’t care for that phrase because it implies an intellectual process. It really is a visual process.

S. Well you used the word dialogue…

F. I did. I suppose interaction would be a bit clearer. As soon as I start painting I respond to what I see. Having done this it seems I need to do that. This needs to be here so the space will open. The light will be clearer. And in what is regarded as a minimalist tradition I do it all with paint. I’m not painting an apple because I am not interested in apples. The painting itself develops an immediacy

S. So you see yourself as a minimalist?

F. I guess so – I’ve also been described as a constructivist, an abstract painter. I don’t know because I am not very academic about it. I suppose it’s a distillation. Is Robert Ryman a minimalist? He’s one of my heroes

S. At first glance I would say your work is minimalist, but what strikes me is the gesture; your hand is very much evident in your work which isn’t very minimalist.

F. I agree. I regard myself as a traditional painter. But then I get blank stares. But If I were defining myself I would describe myself as a traditional painter. I stretch linen over wood stretchers I use rabbit skin glue, oil paint, bristle brushes… putting down paint with brushes is very traditional. I use old formulas. I think it’s how I identify myself very happily. I think it’s that tension between the emotive quality of the paint and the reductive sense of what it takes to make that visible. In many ways it’s quite a romantic I do have an aesthetic ideal

S. So in many ways they are closer to abstract expressionism although on the surface they may not look like it because of the importance of gestures.

F. I know what you are saying but I am not so sure.

S. In terms of the motive or what drives you

F. Yes. It is a love of painting. When you see a show of painting that you think is amazing – it’s the love of painting that you’re seeing. It’s just the notes and details are different.

S. So in this show you limited your palette to black, grey, white and gold.

F. Yes as well as elements of the structure, of the linen.

S. You mean showing the structure.

F. Absolutely it becomes an element, a color, a texture much as anything else. I bear it in mind when I size the canvases. Some are tight as a drum. I like that tension. The surface is sometimes smooth and sometimes worked with the brush as paint is. Always to maintain the primacy of the paint and brush. I joke that the work is error free. There are no mistakes.

S. What do you mean no mistakes?

F. For instance, in Luminous Quadrant IX, I thought to ditch it, but instead kept looking at it and thinking where can I get it to open to the light. It’s not a favorite but it’s still a valid painting in this group because it pushes on right angles.

S. it’s not the tightness of the line or shape that interests you.

F. My main interest is the painterlyness of the work. And the here and now of it – the immediacy and stillness of it –I used to have a fantasy of exhibiting one large work at which people would look for 20 minutes with pleasure. I like the idea of slowing down and looking.

S. So you see the paintings as meditative.

F. Yes. But not any kind of shutting down.

S. No. I don’t see that, in fact the meditative aspect should open them…

F. I’ve become skittish about language. I have used it in some of my work but have separated it out. If I am trusting the paint I want the viewer to trust the seeing. They may not have words for it but that fine with me.

S. I particularly see in the areas of gold and in the white areas, if you look at the paint on the surface there is an almost landscape quality.

F. Yes, yes in part. What I am depicting and reflecting though isn’t a specific landscape but the experience of seeing. And mainly what we see is indeed a landscape, a skyscape, a seascape. It’s how we see.

S. Of course in the experience of the black areas, the grey areas too, you almost see the gold, you’re not clear whether you are seeing gold reflected in them is real or reflected from somewhere else, from the light.

F. Well, that is my intention. What gives us pleasure to look at? I am shamelessly looking for an aesthetic wow. I am unembarrassed by that. If someone looks at the work and gives it a moment to have whatever sensation they have. I kind of trust that most people will have a sensation.

S. And do you have any sense of content with it.

F. I think the content is looking for intensity. I think fundamentally I am a serious person. And I paint the way I paint – that’s all you can do – I can’t paint somebody else’s paintings.

S. If you look at some of Rothko’s late paintings or for that matter even some of the mature paintings he says at one point that they are about tragedy.

F. Well, I understand that, sometimes I feel I am serious to a fault but I think the playfulness is in the brush, is in the light.

S. Well in my mind, as a group, as you look at all of them, they stand in a group that has a lot to do with the intention of the artist, that’s why I’m bringing up They stand in a group that includes the Rothko chapel in Houston and the Barnett Newman stations of the cross at the National Gallery and I wonder if that has anything to do with your intention or not..

F. I thank you for the good company. I hugely admire those painters. I used to half jokingly say I was a religious painter. If I go back to the earliest painting that knocked my socks off they were Giotto and Duccio, the flatness and the expressiveness. Contrary to popular belief people knew about perspective a long time ago, look at the Pompeii murals – they had tons of perspective. In this case it was an aesthetic choice. I was early on interested in Malevich, because I thought he always had a jarring element that was like a mote in the eye and serious interruption in whatever else is going on in the work… So sure there is a sense of darkness in my work.

S. Do you see them as spiritual?

F. I’m reluctant to answer that question.

S. I ask because I am interested.

F. Sure, of course I do, I just think it’s hard to say about oneself. It’s great if someone looking had a spiritual experience looking at a work of mine. But the work has to stand on its own. It is either captivating or not. My concern is about the actual looking. The Buddhists say if someone is bored looking at something for 10 minutes look at it for an hour. In a way it is an arrogant thing for a painter to say. My secret self thinks, if you don’t like it right away keep looking

S. Well but that’s true of painting – the more you look at painting the more it reveals itself. Sometimes it doesn’t…but looking deeply is necessary.

F. So I think then that if you’re looking the deeper that experience is going to be. The light and dark will affect you. It’s like laughing until you cry. Or you’re crying and then some silly thing makes you laugh. Visual activity is closely related to emotional activity.

S. Is it spiritual in the sense that Jung would say the spiritual quest is the quest for meaning? Does it fit in there?

F. Yes. I don’t have a full answer. In the sense of …If you think in the beginning was the word – No. In the beginning was light and dark. In the beginning was space. What about this incredible space

S. So space is important

F. Yes

S. Well see it’s interesting because you talk about the flatness of Giotto and Duccio.

F. Ah but it is painting. When we see the stars we see them two-dimensionally. I would love to actually take a trip through space – If only NASA had reached that point. I was a New York City kid and at ‘the beach’ in the summer I used to lie down and stare at the stars till it made me dizzy. That was the only time I sensed their motion. I tried I’d look through telescopes, I took an astronomy course at Columbia and the instructor said in Babylonia I would have been a fine astronomer because I could draw what I could see.

S. These paintings are still but they also in places have feeling of clouds moving.

F. Sure some look clouded, some watery but to me I feel most things we see have a…The finest nudes are like a landscape of the body.

S. I think Giorgione is a good example of that.

S. Ok so Francine I thought I’d ask a little bit about your background in painting. I know you spent most of your life painting in New York. With some forays in Italy, and Baltimore. Is that mainly it?

F. I did spend a year in Spain, but with a young child. I’m just one of those people who just paint. Started out as a kid who thought crayons weren’t interesting until I discovered you could melt them on the radiator and paint with them. I was very lucky I asked for and got my first set of oils when I was 8.

S. You grew up in the city, right.
Yes I grew up in the city, and went through a peri0d in my teens when I wished I had grown up on a farm in Ohio, because it is very hard to find your own voice in the midst of such abundance. The Whitney, The Modern, The Frick, to say nothing of the Met. I mean I got to see everything up close. All the artists and paintings that I later got to know were reproduced in books I saw a foot away. I still go look everywhere at art in person.
I was an only child, and happily whatever else my parent’s problems were they were thrilled that I loved ‘classes’. I took drawing classes at the Lycée Français on Saturdays, because I could take the cross-town bus there. I also went to the Victor D’Amico School of Art, where I began to learn how to look and see. (He was education director of MoMA and an innovator in teaching art to children). I went to the Art Students League while I was in high school. I did a lot of drawing and even studied Chinese calligraphy to develop a steady hand drawing with a brush…something about the vibrancy of paint, its radiance or its dark depths.

S. When did you start working abstractly – was that at the beginning or…

F. I started out with whatever was in front of me. I still have an oil on canvas paper, that I did as a child, of lilacs in a silver pitcher on a mirrored table. But there are elements of abstraction because I always got distracted by the way the light hit the silver and glass and the way it would change the shape and tone of what I was looking at. As an adolescent I was interested in Rouault – The deep thoughts and the heavy black outlines fragmenting everything. I remember I started to divide the surface of what I was doing with black. So there was still a figurativeness but I loved isolating the elements.

S. Like stained glass.

F. Yes. Very early on abstraction was interesting to me. I think because my interest was always more in painting than depiction.

S. so was it non-objective or abstract with figurative elements?

F. It started out with figurative elements and then it was just color but my first real ‘grown-up work was achromatic basically.

S. So Just black and white.

F. Yes and tones of grey…trying to find something there. I also did some very large work with language. And in a way treated words as though they were part of a landscape. I did an installation at PS I in NY that was a room you could walk into that was entirely drawn words, A poem that was everywhere you looked and made linguistic sense. You could read it and hopefully it was a pleasure to be in the middle of.

S. So you were always interested in words.

F. Oh, I studied calligraphy at the China Institute. Now, is that an interest in words, in language, in drawing, in control? After bachelors from Columbia I went back to school in Asian Studies and for a while had ‘doctoral dropout’ on my resume. At the end of the day the academic side of my interests was less riveting than the aesthetic.

S. So you didn’t stay there with your Eastern Studies but stayed with painting

F. It was as though I thought I had to prove something. And then it seemed like- why? I’m a painter at the end of the day. I am interested also in Asian art – Ad Reinhardt talks about Islamic art and its relationship to language. It’s another form and for all the talking I don’t really have a vocabulary for it. I still write some poetry but it’s very separate from painting.

S. So has your work changed since you moved to Baltimore?

F. It did briefly. I think because I didn’t paint for almost 2 years. I felt quite dislocated. I dabbled because I had all the ‘material’. And then it took a turn and I started really working. I think that why I talk about trusting the paint. I mean that literally. Once I could count on the paint – it was like Oh OK now I’m really doing it again.

S. So you see it as your way into your earlier work.

F. Absolutely. It’s a funny thing always being between great doubt and that sureness that’s necessary to start making the marks. And then I start trusting the marks.

S. Thank You.

Simone Campbell-Scott is an art historian and Jungian analyst in private practice in Baltimore. She has written on the Rothko Chapel in Houston Texas, and on Giacometti and Louise Bourgeois in connection with insomnia. She is a founding member of the Art & Psyche conference on art and Jungian psychoanalysis in San Francisco in 2007.