We interviewed Vija Celmins in 2000 as part of our work on a major award she received that year.

Vija Celmins

Since the 1960s the Latvia-born American artist Vija Celmins has been refining her choice of subjects in order to focus attention away from the image and towards the physical act of making. Her purpose is not creating symbols, but the making of marks, layering graphite on paper or paint on canvas, exploring a surface through drawings. Her work deals with single images of familiar things - from everyday household objects to oceans and galaxies. We know what these look like but take them for granted being used to seeing them in a wider context. Celmins’ aesthetic approach and intense concentration give us a new perspective, allowing the subject to exist alone in its own right.

Interview

Looking at your work, which spans over thirty years, there is a great consistency about it. How did you begin?

When I first started painting at school I studied abstract expressionism. In the early ‘60s we were all excited by Pollock and de Kooning, by Rothko and Gorky. Then, at graduate school when I was alone in my own studio I started doing what I thought was more basic painting - as if I were starting again. I thought I would sit down without all my theories and aesthetics. I was going to start in a more primitive place with just my eyes and my hand. Also in the kind of grand tradition of ‘still life’, which is really only a vehicle for expressing your ideas about space - either fragmenting it or pulling it together. So that’s how I started painting all the things in my studio. Since I was throwing away my brain, or so I thought, I was not going to compose. I just painted the objects around me. I had done compositions of course, the still life with the table and the flowers and apples, but I wanted to go back to a basic sort of painting that was more straightforward. I was new in Los Angeles. I rented this great big empty studio and I had very few things. There was no kitchen, no bathroom, but I had my lamp, my heaters, a little hot plate, a television, and these were the things I painted. I also painted the food I ate and my refrigerator, and I painted them all life size. I didn’t want to change anything.

Even then, you used very little colour in your work.

Well, because there was not much colour around. Lamp is just a picture of your normal white lamp in a whitish grey studio. I wasn’t going to invent the colour, I was looking for form and I was trying to find my touch in the painting. My work is a lot about touch actually. I wanted to find something that seemed more in tune with my own nature, my own idea about painting, which is that it is essentially quiet. A painting is wordless, it is a space that’s animated, but the animation is an illusion. It’s basically a quiet, two dimensional plane. I was trying to find my relationship to it. So that’s why I toned everything way down, to try to find a place where I could begin again.
And at this time you began to paint from photographs?

Yes, and I started actually drawing photographs and leaving the edge so that they were still single objects except that they were removed by a veneer of being a ‘found’ photograph, of being flat, and by having a kind of more distanced memory.

At that time we were all very influenced by Andy Warhol and his use of the everyday. I never really went into commercial images, but the whole idea of using images that weren’t really part of the art world, that were new, opened up my imagination. And so I moved away from familiar objects to images that I liked. Truck, which I think I found in a magazine, was one of these - images that were part of the world and were, in a way, new to the art world.

At what stage did you move more towards drawing?

I had never lived in an exotic place like Los Angeles before, with palm trees and the ocean. I had been a city kid. So I used to go down to the ocean, walk my dog and take pictures. I thought that somehow in my time there, I was purging myself of things, throwing away things that I knew, that were part of my past life of painting. I thought I would throw away the brushes. I thought that the pencil was a finer instrument because every point where you touched was where you made a mark and you didn’t have to smudge and brush and kind of fake a light. It was a way of trying to be more precise, more clinical.

When I first started doing oceans I explored different pencil strengths and I did many, many images that went from H all the way down to B, and then when I got into the B’s, the images were darker and I fell in love with the pencil. I think that I really moved into the galaxies because I loved the pencil and I wanted more black. At this stage I gave up painting totally for a long, long time.

You describe your work as multi-dimensional and yet remaining ‘a small concentrated area that is essentially flat’. Please explain this.

I decided, probably from painting all the objects that were already in a photograph, that I would lose the background, and I would make the paper and the image unite, because it was a stronger structure and it would require less fakery and less illusion. So actually I have always played with an implied, illusionistic space which I think is part of the property of doing two dimensional work. You have an arena that has been historically used in an illusionistic manner, but the reality of that arena is that it is a little flat plain with an implied depth. There’s a possibility for a kind of magic to happen - it’s one thing, it’s another, it’s an illusion of a great impossible space to render, and it’s a tiny area that’s compressed and made real by somebody actually putting that image on bit by bit.

So those two realities are always there in my work, because I kept a recognisable image and did not become a totally abstract artist. The images are found here and there - from books, magazines, my own photos - and are re-described by my touch so they have a very tactile sort of feel. In many ways, the drawings are like paintings because they have been worked on so rigorously, have a painting’s weight and mass, and are so frontal.

I did a whole series of ocean and night sky pieces, and I was endeavouring to make the work flatter and flatter because it just seemed to want to lay down closer to the surface. It seemed as if the space wanted to mimic the space of the support, of the paper or canvas, so things got flatter, but the implied depth got bigger. These have less illusion in them than the earlier work, but they have a much greater implied depth.

Working in a two dimensional plane has a certain kind of strain because you have to fit things so they feel right in there. You have to make this so that the image doesn’t want to go out for ever but wants to stay on there, and there’s all these little adjustments in the image and the force of the image and how you come up to the edge. So these little tiny nuances became the subject matter of my art. The images are not symbolic, they kind of meander from one thing to another.

How did you come to your most recent work, the ‘Web’?

Around 1993 I found this little image of a spider’s web in a book somewhere and I thought that somehow this image was what I had been doing - this intricate surface that's flat and made out of little segments. I made a painting of it. It’s a new image for me. I’m not sure exactly if I’ve found my place in it or whether it’s maybe a little too charged for me. Because it’s a spider’s web, it has a lonely feeling that I’ve always liked in my images, but I like the images to be a little more restrained and less specific.

Then, recently, I did some webs in charcoal on paper, manoeuvring the image with my fingers and an eraser. They’re very tactile and also very fragile, because the dust just lays there, it barely hangs on to the surface of the paper. In a way, it celebrates the surface of the paper as well as itself. And then it makes an image to entice you to look at it.

Of course the spider’s web is really not the spider’s web, the lamp is not the lamp. It’s artifice, it’s invented. I like that part of working on a two-dimensional plane. It is a tiny, flat area in which the world can open and in which your imagination can take part. The area is maybe only fifteen by twenty inches, so there’s a magic in the formula and it’s a challenge. And it’s also a challenge because you relate to all the other works throughout history that have tried to face this problem in their own way. I like that part of it.



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