David Row with Barbara MacAdam for the Brooklyn Rail

The work—in different sizes and mediums—from prints to acrylics, oils, and encaustics randomly arranged—made an ideal setting for a conversation that meandered from the consistency of the 68 year-old artist’s career trajectory to the inevitable differences between older and newer works. We wondered where he—and any contemporary abstract artist—fits in the scheme of things today; challenged, aided and even sometimes inspired by technology.

MacAdam (Rail): I wonder if you could talk about the trajectory of your art-making and the fact that you’re so instinctual and attracted to abstraction. It seems as though it’s not a choice.

Row: No, I don’t think it is in a way. Artists make images from all different processes or ways of thinking, and for me, there’s just a way that I allow myself to make drawings; to come up with images and then decide whether those images are interesting, whether or not I have a plan. But I think we all have our parameters. A plan usually messes things up for me. It’s better if I just allow myself to play around with new images until I find ones that are more interesting than others. And I guess I’m more attracted to images that seem a little slippery, that are harder to pin down, whether it’s spatially or in terms of content or symbology or whatever. The plan is to go in the studio and see what happens.

Rail: And so then how do you start on something?

Row: I guess it happens differently, but I remember somebody told me a long time ago, “You go in the studio, and you start sweeping the floor, and before you know it you’ll be working.”

“Start” is a funny word, I guess, because I’ve always got different things going on—things I’m starting, things that are in the middle. It’s a little bit of a different story right now because I’ve just finished six months of working on this show that’s in Philadelphia, so I’m kind of taking a week or two off to try to recharge. But I guess the process really does start with sketches that are in the realm of what I’m working with, but allowing myself to just work, and see what happens. Those little sketches turn into ideas that I can use as a base for a whole lot of variations. And that can be 20 things, and the final thing can have aspects of a bunch of those—more than any one thing being the model.

Rail: So one leads to another.

Row: Yes, as I’m working on the painting I’m kind of starting out with things from one that seem more interesting than the others, but there are aspects of the others that can kind of come into that. That’s something that’s evolved over the years, and that works well for me if I don’t force it—if I just allow myself to go through that process. Then the other thing is looking. You know, you’ve got a whole bunch of stuff and you put it up, and over a few weeks, it just kind of wears on you. Whether or not you’re really feeling as excited about it as you first were.

Rail: Well you have a very distinctive vocabulary—actually, very geometric. Have you ever done any figurative work?

Row: Oh yeah, I did. Very early on I did. I decided I was interested in painting pretty early on; maybe when I was 15 or 16 I started to get a little bit serious about it.

Rail: Where were you when you started painting?

Row: Well my family was living in India at the time. That was a big influence of course. You know, color in India is really something, and it had a huge influence on me. I was just interested in making things without an idea about what that might be. And I was working by myself, I didn’t have any good high-school art teacher or anything like that.

Rail: But you had materials?

Row: I had the materials, basically. I’m not sure exactly what my age was when Henry Geldzahler did that show at the Met, New York Painting and Sculpture: 1940-1970, I have the catalogue still. That was a big show—There were figurative things, there were abstract things. I had been making some figurative and some abstract paintings. In my stress at the moment I really had no idea what I was doing, but when I saw the Geldzahler show it changed me. That was the moment when I wanted to be an abstract painter. I saw the de Koonings and the Pollocks, the Klines and Newmans, and I thought, this is a whole world that I don’t know anything about, and it seems so interesting and exciting, and that was the first thing that made abstraction kind of a possibility. I was in school, in classes. I was an undergraduate at Yale, and they would say, “Make a still life or make a landscape.” So I did some of that. But I never knew what to do. You know, I’m not a storyteller.

Rail: That’s a good point.

Row: I like a lot of movies and I like a lot of pop songs that have a narrative, but my work is always more enigmatic. In a funny way, that enigma is what it’s about. I really think that is a kind of openness to the image being seen differently. I think that’s always been the thing about abstraction. I remember looking at Mondrians when I was in high school and thinking, “what the hell is this about?” You know, some work demands a kind of attention and a kind of thinking that seemed much more interesting than me telling a story.

The real issue for me ultimately is space for the viewer. I think that’s what it was for me. When I was in that Geldzahler show, I felt like I was involved in those paintings. I wasn’t being told something, or I was being told so many things that I had to sort out what I was being told. And for me, the important experience of painting is being a viewer, and what it is to be interested as a viewer. And I think that’s obviously a very personal thing. Everyone has their experience of being a viewer, and of what they want to see.

Rail: Or what they can see. You think of all those factors too, what their color sense is, whether they’re color-blind, what their vision is.

Row: Vision may be the big word. It is interesting that you should mention it, because I’ve met a number of artists who have said to me, “I’m color blind in this way, I’m color blind in that way,” and I find this kind of interesting, too.

But where were we?

Rail: The different ways of seeing and how the audience partakes of what you do, which you can’t control.

Row: Which you can’t control. And I’m talking about this first experience with American Modernist paintings, and all of that. It took me till later to work back into cubism or fauvism. So I grew up on modernism. That was the thing. And went from all the things I’m talking about right up through minimalism and conceptualism and a lot of other things. But there were qualities of modernism that I slowly began to have problems with. And I think the larger culture kind of did, too—you know, the utopian aspect that it could actually change society. I do believe that it can change individuals, by the way, but I don’t know whether you can change a whole society. But I’m just also nervous about utopia. Utopia is always someone else’s utopia.

Rail: There’s sort of no such thing.

Row: Yeah, and also if somebody imposes it on other people . . .

Rail: Then it’s not a utopia.

Row: Right, and I think the progress thing was always also something that, in my experience… painters move all over the place, but I think it’s really a rare artist that has a beeline from where they start to where they end up. It’s not linear.

Rail: No, but in a funny way your work is quite consistent.

Row: Well it is at a certain point.

Rail: Your vocabulary is firm, that’s what it is.

Row: Well it’s interesting, because, even talking about the later work, the curvilinear work, it’s clear to me now that it’s harder for people to see what’s going on. I think the turning point for me in terms of vocabulary and what I wanted to deal with was re-investigating Brancusi at some time in the mid to late ‘70s. I saw him talking about something in the work that wasn’t just limited to the work; but also somehow he talked about this much larger vision, and I thought, “Well, that’s just a fantastic idea.” And then I started to think a lot about what painting had been historically, and there are an awful lot of situations you can point to where painting seemed fated or determined to try to deal with what it can’t do—like, depict an angel. So painting’s a funny thing. We think of it as two-dimensional, not three-dimensional, but it’s more of a psychological space. I think that it happens formally in that two-dimensional plane, but it’s so much more than that; it’s almost like entering into some 100 percent totally different world.

And that Brancusi idea connected me with painting. And the kind of problem of painting. I think it was part of the way I was formed as an artist, where painting had actually been declared dead a few years earlier. And that worked into this thing about what’s possible and what’s not possible. But Brancusi was the turning point. That was when I realized I could have a vocabulary that talked about certain things and didn’t have to change the vocabulary all the time.

I think there’s something to the idea that you work on something for a long time… I don’t even like to think about the fact that it’s been 40 years since I started working on these things, but I’m very slow; I need a lot of time. And I think maybe that’s true for a lot of visual artists?

When I got out of grad school and came to New York, I didn’t have people in my studio for a long time, like maybe two years.

Rail: Really?

Row: Nobody in the studio. At first I was showing a little bit in group shows, but I was really not showing, and was trying to get myself into a position where I was trying to see exactly what I wanted. I spent those years in a very high-profile grad school situation with people like [Brice] Marden and [Larry] Poons coming to the graduate school and kind of being in the studios, and it was very intimidating. They had a kind of authority that you didn’t have. And I think that what I needed to do in that sort of super-slow period afterwards was to be alone with the work and to figure out what that work was. So the first one-person show I had in New York was literally eight years after I got here.