Contortion Artist: An Interview With Don Christensen
Thursday, September 30, 2010 at 02:37PM 
SIENA CLOSING, 2010, 60" x 100", acrylic on canvas
So you have a show up now at Sideshow gallery in Williamsburg in Brooklyn. How many years of work are in that show?
D: It’s mostly 2009 and 2010. It’s the first paint on canvas type show that I’ve done. In the past my shows have been paint on wood. The first paintings that I did were on small pieces of wood.
L: When was that? When did you start painting?
D: I started painting in 1990. I feel like I have more experience as a musician than as a painter but I have spent the last 20 pretty much seriously painting.
L: I love the paintings in the show. It’s a lot of hard edge abstraction. You assisted Kenneth Noland, one of my favorite artists, do you feel like you were influenced by him or were you drawn to him in the first place? How did that start?
D: I think definitely influenced by him, and not just him. I went to art school in 1969, 1970 and I remember seeing Artforum. And the first things that really struck me were Frank Stella paintings in magazines. Even though I was going to art school at Kansas City Art Institute and had a really traditional Beaux Arts kind of education. At that time New York City was the art center of the world. I mean I was barely aware of anything happening anywhere else. Maybe LA, Juan Davis or Billy Al Bengston or a few people there. I’m not sure exactly why I was so drawn to these Stella paintings and geometric abstraction. Because, like I say, I was figure painting. I could draw and I loved drawing so I don’t know exactly where that came from other than the fact that those are important paintings. Those are beautiful, beautiful paintings.
And then shortly after that, the big Noland horizontal striped paintings, I discovered those. And those, to this day those are some of my favorite abstract color paintings. I dropped out of school. I came to New York. I got to meet Ken Noland. I actually went to work in his studio for a while, so of course, he had an influence. But after a few years of working with Noland and then Jules Olitski, like in the early 70’s, I dropped out of the whole scene and started playing music, which I did until 1985.
L: And you’re a drummer. So whom were you playing with?
D: There were a whole lot of bands, but when it really started happening I was playing with a band called the Contortions and they were a notorious downtown New York noise band. The era has since been known as No Wave.
L: No Wave. Was that between punk and New Wave?
D: After New Wave. It was partially a reaction to the Ramones and Blondie and all these bands who had “made it”, you know, out of CBGB’s.
L: Yeah.
D: The Contortions had a lead singer named James Chance who was just this really aggressive personality on stage. I mean he would actually assault audience members and he would be assaulted. I remember one show where he was actually hospitalized from getting struck during the show.
L: Sounds like punk. Like punk rock but at a different time.
D: It was like punk. It had the punk attitudes but the music was, I think, much more sophisticated than punk.
L: Yeah.
D: Punk rhythmically had very little going on. They were all like fast eight notes.
And the Contortions were actually kind of like an ultra sped up, ragged version of James Brown music.
And then I went into another band called the Raybeats. We actually got some record deals and sold some records and I did a lot of touring with that band and another band the Bush Tetras. And at a certain point I just sort of burned out on all that physically, mentally, emotionally.
L: Yeah. And were you thinking about art or painting at all during that time?
D: I was thinking about art. Because we were touring so much, we were in every major city in the states it seemed like, and several in Europe. During the days I would go visit the art museums. So yes, I was thinking about art. And it’s curious, I wasn’t thinking of myself as an artist, I just liked it and I liked doing that and I saw that I was having an opportunity here, travelling all around and so, yeah, the idea of art, I didn’t really abandon that or leave that behind at all.
L: So then you started really painting in 1990, 91?
D: I’d always been picking stuff up off the street because I came to New York in the 70’s and lived in a loft.
L: That’s what you’re supposed to do.
D: Yeah, we lived in a loft with furniture off the street and I’d been collecting these pieces of wood out of dumpsters from renovations, small pieces of wood, an average size of maybe 10 by 15 inches or 8 inches by 11 inches. And I didn’t really think of why I was even collecting these pieces of wood. So in 1990 I decided I was going to spend the summer and take it easy at the beach, actually out in Long Island. My brother lived out there and he had a studio, and I was staying with him part of the time and I had these pieces of wood and it just seemed natural. He let me use some of his paints and I started painting on them. And I went like “God this is great! This is really fun!” But I didn’t take it much further than that. I was at this stage in my life where I was trying to do things over and do things new in a different way and I didn’t have a lot of expectations about it. I came back to New York and thought well, this is great I have a nice little hobby here. I’ll keep collecting these little pieces of wood.
L: And what were you painting on them?
D: I started out drawing on them with pencil. Drawings of interior spaces like corners and furniture. And then I would color in these pencil drawings and they were… they weren’t very good. I mean they weren’t very satisfying is what I should say because it was like coloring something in. Which is funny because that’s kind of what I do now but back then… And I realized that what was happening was I really loved color.
And then that brings me back to Noland or Morris Louis or any number of guys, even Jules Olitski. I always felt that standing in front of a Noland painting was just like being sort of washed over. An emotional feeling of being just flooded by this color and so I was really interested in color and I discovered that the way to get the color on the little pieces of wood was just to make brush strokes and so they ended up being crosses.
And usually the pieces of wood would have some old painted finish, because they were old pieces of wood usually, and I would either doctor that or leave that as it is and take these other two colors to put over. So I’d set up all these color relationships, and what was fascinating to me was that I’d mix a color, I’d make a color and I’d put it on there and it’d be different because automatically colors only exist in relation to the other colors, right?
L: Yeah.
D: And then at some point while I’m doing them I go like “Oh my god! I’m painting crosses!”
L: Then you burned all of them.
D: No. And so then I was doing weekly visits uptown to museums, but the Met was my favorite. And I started looking at all kinds of crosses, medieval crosses made out of silver, just really trying to focus in on it.
L: So you weren’t horrified by the fact that you were making crosses. You were like, “this is kind of interesting.”
D: I was shocked. I wasn’t horrified but I was shocked. I was like, why not stars? Why not six pointed stars? So anyway, it was kind of fun.
D: So after doing that for a while…and I showed a bunch of those paintings…on 57th street was my first show. I think it was 1992. And I also got an NEA grant.
L: Oh wow!
One of the last individual artist NEA grants that they gave away. After a while I was feeling like they were getting almost too easy to make. I was missing something and I realized what I was missing was drawing.
L: Were you at thinking about Albers, using two colors?
D: I was thinking about Albers. There was a big Albers show around then at the Whitney. And I’ve got Albers’ book. I guess I actually used some of Albers’ color combinations.
L: Hey they’re good!
D: That’s a good one, let’s try that!
Anyway, I had started psychotherapy for what, the third or fourth time, with not a lot of optimism about it. So the therapist said “OK. I want you to make a drawing everyday and bring them to me.” And he was into imagery and stuff and I’m going like, he doesn’t know I’m not into like imagery, right? What am I going to do! So I started drawing this “thingy”, which I call these things you see on the wall.
L: Oh that’s cool.
D: It’s one continuous line, almost like an infinity thing, and usually there’d be eight loops that would return on itself.
And I’d do at least one of those a day and it was actually fun because I started noticing they were really different from day to day because your hand changes. You know, your hand is so connected to your emotions, I mean if you let it be, right?
That led to a bunch of small paintings. And so then what came next…well there was a big jump. I wanted to go larger. This is when I first went to canvas, I started making “thingys”.
D: I started doing them on canvas, bigger, and thinking “I can’t just go make them on a big canvas, I gotta like, work my way up, right? So it was excruciating. I’d go up to like two feet or eighteen inches and that would be all kinds of problems and I’d pull my hair out because they didn’t have what the smaller ones had.
The canvases were difficult and weren’t satisfying and I finally got up to oh five by seven, maybe eight foot high was the biggest one. I showed them to this one artist whom I really liked who was a respected artist and she looked at them, she says, “Looks to me like you’re making big boy paintings.”
L: Oh wow.
D: And she knew my past and she knew some of those guys that I knew from back in the modernist days. And it just kind of deflated me. But she was right in a way. They did look like that you know. Anyway, so I let that go and I went back to wood but I didn’t want to go small so…
L: Wait. I want to go back to the big boy paintings for a second. What’s wrong with making the big boy paintings?
D: Nothing, Absolutely nothing.
L: Yeah.
D: I should’ve had more confidence about it. I mean because they weren’t bad. It’s just, I needed to probably do it for a year or two and make a whole bunch of them.
I mean they weren’t bad it’s just they…I don’t know. This is the stuff that’s really hard to explain. Like the one that I’m looking at on the wall now, especially the middle one or the pink one on the right there….that to me is really successful because it sort of feels like it just appeared there.
L: Right.
D: There was a sort of a natural “here’s this image” and when it got bigger, when it got onto canvas, I couldn’t get that. It had more of that like I’M A PAINTING.
L: Do you think it had something to do with confidence too? I just think about confidence a lot.
D: You know I didn’t have any confidence problems at all at that point but I think the reason I didn’t paint from age 22 to age 42 was a confidence problem. But its because I had been exposed to some really competitive, high-powered artists and was privy to a very serious big dollar art scene, right?. And I don’t remember going like “oh I’m intimidated” but I just found myself gravitating out of that scene into the music scene. Which was an area I always felt a little more confident in, at least in terms of knowing what I was doing.
So I went back to wood. I guess it’s back to wood. I really didn’t think of it that way. But what I wanted to do was I wanted to make larger pieces with the wood. And that was when I started cutting the wood up and gluing it together.
Generally, a lot of it was found wood. Some of it was wood I bought. I would paint the lumber and then cut it up and then stick it together. They’re blocks of wood that are all glued together.
L: Why did you think about gluing the wood together in the first place?
D: Some of the smaller pieces of found lumber that I had were boards, you know like one by three or one by four and so they weren’t the right size for painting. So if I glued two or three of them together I’d have a big enough surface, a nice enough rectangle, a pleasing enough shape of rectangle for me to work on.
But then it became kind of a thing of finding the different colors of wood and painting the different colors of wood and then cutting them all up and then scattering them on the floor or on the table and creating a composition.
L: Oh wow. Ok.
D: And that was challenging in the sense of it’s like a puzzle. They were really labor intensive both in making it come together as a picture and also gluing it together and doing all the work. But I did it for a long time. I had two shows of them and I thought a lot of them were really, really successful…the paintings…the shows did ok too.
At one point I saw this really cool show at the Newark museum on African weaving. The weavers would make strips of cloth that are three, four inches wide that had this pattern that would repeat over that had a lot of colors on it. And they’d take all the strips together and sew them together to get one big piece of cloth.
L: Oh, OK. Yeah.
D: And that gave me the idea to really string these things together, really put them together.
L: Yeah
D: And of course, there was the big Gee’s Bend show at the Whitney which was just a knock out, killer…
L: Gee’s Bend?
D: Gee’s Bend was near or had a big corduroy plant. So mostly women, I think exclusively women in that area, and probably mostly African American women who worked in the plant, would bring home these remnants and cutoffs from this corduroy, brightly colored corduroys and they’d make these quilts. And they were like that African Kente cloth. They were strips that were sewn together.
L: Oh that sounds great.
D: And they’re just absolutely beautiful and the Whitney had a big show of them. It caused kind of a big sensation.
D: And of course there’s the whole American tradition of quilting which my mother and my grandmother and probably my great grandmother… I don’t have any of my great grandmother’s quilts but I have quilts from my grandmother and my mother.
L: Oh really. So you grew up around quilting.
D: Yeah. I was doing these wooden pieces and then I see the quilts and I go like “oh this is great.” I had a reference and I felt tied to some tradition. And I sometimes think of these wooden block paintings as quilted wood paintings.
L: Yeah.
D: There are two pieces like this in the show out in Williamsburg. As I say they’re labor intensive since I’ve got to actually find the wood if I’m using found colors. I fill up these cardboard boxes and different boxes sort of get different things tossed into them and at a certain point I feel like, ok there’s probably enough here to make one. I’ll dump it out and try to make one out of it.
L: Oh that’s cool.
D: Well, you know I think my work, and I think your work too, a whole big part of it is process.
L: Yeah.
D: And you know, that’s something that I share with the modernists. It’s abstract and it’s process oriented.
L: Yeah.
L: I was very struck by the difference between the flat, hard-edged paintings and the wood collage paintings that had a lot of a depth to them. What was the jump there or what’s going on? We talked a little bit about your interest in flat versus spatial relationships and lets just talk a little bit about that.
D: Ok. Well. I don’t like to talk about that.
L: Oh! You don’t like to talk about that! Alright…
D: No, no, no. It’s OK. The reason I don’t like to is because you when I was in my early twenties I was hanging around those guys that we’ve talked about. That’s what they talked about.
L: Well and it was almost like a religion for those guys. It was dogma.
D: It was dogma. It was just dogma.
L: Yeah.
D: So I don’t want to fall into that kind of dogma. See when illusion happens in these things I like it, especially if it’s ambiguous. I don’t think I ever really set out to say “OK. I want this thing way up here in your face and I want this stuff way up in the background.”
D: All the paintings start as line drawings. I have to carry small sketch books around with me and I draw in them all the time and one or two drawings out of, I don’t know, twenty to fifty will be interesting enough to me to follow up on, right?
L: Yeah.
D: And I take the painting, the drawing, and I scan it into my computer. And at first I was really frustrated because I would color it in Photoshop and it’d be looking good and then you try to make a painting of something that’s on a monitor… Forget it.
L: You can’t get that luminosity.
D: So I was discouraged by that but I found that it was still helpful for me to do that so I started thinking well, the thing that I’m making in the computer is a thing in itself.
L: Yeah.
D: And they’re like little mockups for the paintings but they’re not exactly the painting. I don’t try and totally re-create it.
And so once that’s been done on the computer I’ll stretch out the canvas, draw on the canvas with a pencil very lightly and start mixing up the colors and putting the colors in. Like I say, what really bugged me at the beginning of this thing, of like painting inside the lines, is something now that I really like to do. Partly because they’re bigger now so you have some nice real estate that you can put color down on.
L: And you’re not taping, right?
D: No. That was another learning experience. When I tape them up they become tight. I just freehand the line and then paint it by hand.
L: Yeah.
D: I’m not trying to make an even, flat, perfect surface you know, none of these things. Anything I’ve made, I’ve always tried to keep it not slick. For these wooden block paintings it would be so easy to make them into furniture if you really cleaned them up. They’d have another kind of beauty but it’d be craft beauty. The craft would override the imagery. And I feel the same way about the canvases when I, you know, if I tape them out…
L: Yeah. It can kill the life of the painting. It just made me think that figurative painters have always talked about how they could make a great oil sketch or pencil sketch of a subject but then when you take that and make it into the bigger painting it’s very tricky to keep the level of life that the sketch has.
D: Yeah, I think it’s probably akin to that.
L: I love the colors in the show. I was taken back to the 60’s and Laugh In colors. I almost felt the one on the left when you walk in, that big one, was like a set for Laugh In.
SOUTH OF THE PARK, 2009, oil on canvas, 59" x 116"
D: Oh. That’s good. The pictures that people have taken, of people standing in front of the paintings…the paintings are great backdrops for photographs you know.
L: I bet. I love that about big paintings.
D: And TV? I love TV color. Even, from back in the cross paintings, my color ideas really come from everyday, whether it’s TV or you see a sign on a truck or a Joseph Albers painting in a museum. I see color combinations and they strike me and I often will make notes. You know, stuff like pale lemon yellow, dark gray with a reddish tint in it.
L: I loved in the show, that you just weren’t afraid to lay down this kind of cool color, like the green and yellow painting was just… I had the experience of “yeah, of course those colors look fucking awesome together!” There is something great, which I really love and I think is the mark of a great painting…there’s something very obvious, like “oh yeah, of course!”
D: Yeah. I know totally what you mean. When you see a piece that you like there’s that big “ah ha” moment. But the other thing about some work like that is to me it looks like it just appeared. I don’t like to be aware of the artistic struggle to get it there.
When we were hanging the show, I brought a lot of stuff over there that didn’t get hung and we were taking stuff in and bringing stuff out and really trying not to overhang it. And finally we got to a point where I stood in the corner of the front gallery and I could see some of the back gallery and see the front gallery and it had this vibe that felt really good, felt like it was up. It’s like, yeah, there’s something happening here that happens in my studio. I’ll have a bunch of paintings out and some wood pieces I’m working on and like a set of drums I’ve painted on, and stools and tables hanging on the wall. And every once in a while there will be a random installation in my studio and I’ll step back and I’ll look around and go like wow, this is really cool in here. And I was really trying to get that in the gallery and I sort of got that. It can’t be quite that cool because you can’t leave stuff lying around on the floor.
L: You also had the wooden pieces. I’m assuming you’re making these all at the same time.
D: Two of the wooden pieces were made within the last year, maybe a little bit past. One of them was definitely six months ago.
L: And some of them, they’re tables but they’re hanging on the wall sideways.
D: They are. There are tables and stools and stuff. And that came about because I had bought some stools in yard sales thinking that I would make some of my wooden paintings out of them. And I started painting on them before I took them apart, hung one on the wall and was “hmmm that’s kind of cool”, you know?
2 STEPS, 2008, oil on wood construction, 20" hi x 30" wide x 18" depth
L: Didn’t some have wooden and then metal legs or did I just make that up?
D: Yeah. They are hung from wires and sometimes I’ll wire them together and sometimes there will be two or three tables and stools together. It’s something that I’m just starting to really play with and have some fun with. It opens up a whole new territory. It’s really like sculpture in a way.
L: Right. It’s like taking those spatial relationships…they become literal.
D: You know, there’s some color and I’m painting on these things. I put them on the wall I guess because I’m a painter. I’m not a sculptor and I’ve never really consciously made sculpture and so I guess I’m starting to investigate or learn about this three dimensional space. But for right now I want to keep it on the wall. Though now that I say that…
L: They’re starting small but you’re going to have, like huge picnic tables on the wall at the next show.
D: Well, actually in my studio I have one.
L: You do?! Well I think we’ve kind of…is there anything else…
D: Here’s what I was saying earlier…sometimes it’s easier for me to make an analogy to music.
L: Oh good, give me an ending for this.
D: Ok. Representational or narrative or painting has a lot of references to it. I kind of think of that as like they’re like songs. Songs are music with lyrics and the lyric is poetic or maybe has some kind of meaning or it’s using language to evoke another response along with the musical backdrop.
And abstract painting is like music that doesn’t have words, like non-songwriter music, instrumental music, it could be classical music, jazz, which I really think is important to this conversation, because music in itself is abstract. The emotionality that may come out of a piece of music may strike a lot of people the same way or similar ways but nobody could say exactly what it is because it is abstract. And I think that’s what abstract painting is like, you know, it’s like there’s no language there. There’s no object there or there’s no figure there or no referential thing that’s telling you…informing you in another way, about what you’re looking at.
What you’re looking at is more the elements. Like the elements of music: pitch, rhythm, loudness, softness, dynamics. And it’s the same way. You’re looking at color, you’re looking at shapes, you’re looking at drawing, you’re looking at relationships between the colors and that’s kind of the analogy that I make. Jazz musicians do this all the time, improvise. There’ll be chord structures and there’ll be harmony and stuff that’s very structured yet there’s a freedom around it and it’s just pure music and you’re listening to it and you have an emotional response to it. You enjoy it or not enjoy it. It can evoke strong emotions. And that’s my analogy to abstract art.
L: Thank you very much.
D: You’re welcome. Thank you.
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