Brooklyn Rail: Ron Gorchov with Nathlie Provosty
In his typically charming and laissez-faire manner, the artist Ron Gorchov, when asked to conduct a public presentation of his watercolor work within the container of his concurrent show at Lesley Heller Workspace, instead invited his friend Nathlie Provosty to spare him the preparation and engage in a conversation, which she did with great pleasure. The conversation took place on October 2, 2013, and what follows is an edited version that incorporates some of the robust audience participation.
Nathlie Provosty (Rail): On the occasion of a watercolor show I thought I would ask you about water, wetness, liquidity, and fluidity. When you moved to New York in 1953, your first job was as a lifeguard and swimming instructor, and it seems that you’ve had an affinity for wetness, in a way. Was there a certain point in your life when you wanted to make your life or your paint more fluid?
Gorchov: I never thought about that. [Laughter.] But it’s a very good theory. I do like very thin, wet paint. When I was young I worked through all the different ways to paint. I used pasty paint and built it up. I fell in love with Matisse’s way of using very little paint. I liked the elegance of using thin paint. When I was really young and painting, I really didn’t have a way that I knew I could put paint down. I hadn’t figured out what I liked. I didn’t want to lean towards subjective motivation, where the brush stroke is totally subjectively motivated. I wanted to be more like a sign painter, where it was objectively motivated. In other words, I wanted to know where the paint was going. I made a decision, I thought, that’s the kind of artist I wanted to be.
Rail: Did you make that decision off the bat?
Gorchov: Through a long amount of thought. I feel like the subjective element—where you have an impulse to put the paint down and you know where it’s going—that impulse, and the feeling you have when you’re putting it down, gives the work life. But I didn’t want to make that the main issue.
Rail: You say impulse creates life in the work, and you chose to be a lifeguard, which is an interesting position in that it’s a job that has pleasure and leisure, and a constant threat of life or death situations.
Gorchov: Oh there’s no leisure. We were always at the beach; we were always afraid of having a case we would lose. I have to say, I really feel like a big success as a lifeguard because I did it for a long time. I did it when I was 15 because the service men were still away for World War II so they were hiring younger: if you were over six feet tall and you were 15, you could get a job. So, we never said anything, but we were always happy at the end of the season and we didn’t lose a case. On the beach you have many cases where you have to pull people out.
Rail: Do you think there’s any parallel between that and making a painting?
Gorchov: I never thought of it. No, I don’t. I wasn’t a great swimmer, but I was an okay swimmer. I swam in competitions in high school. It was a job that I liked because I could stay in shape, and it was outdoors. I think people think that guys become lifeguards for the girls, but I didn’t do that.
Rail: Going into the idea of leisure, in the 2006 interview in the Rail that Rob Storr and Phong Bui conducted, you described a number of your friends who were hard workers and producers, and you said: “with all of their impressive ability to produce constantly, I don’t know how they tolerate my way of working, which is painting that comes out of leisure.” I just read Roland Barthes’s The Pleasure of the Text, and he talks about the difference between leisure and pleasure. He said leisure is a social activity and pleasure is a solitary activity. What do you mean when you say your painting comes out of leisure?
Gorchov: Well, I think you spend a lot of time, if you’re doing art, doing nothing but just kind of dreaming. I’ve never had an idea that I consciously tried to figure out; they would come to me for no reason when I was relaxed and at leisure—a thought, an impulse to work. And the idea of hanging around in your studio, having friends drop in, making coffee, reading a bit, and then you’re on your feet with a brush in your hand and you don’t remember how you got there, that’s great—where it just happens. I really think that we live 99 percent of our lives completely unconsciously.
Rail: Last night I saw the new Keanu Reeves movie called Man of Tai Chi. There was a certain point when the main character, played by the actor Tiger Hu Chen, is about to lose to his arch nemesis, which means his death. Tiger’s master had been telling him all along that he needed to slow down, but being so passionate he couldn’t. At a certain point his enemy, trying to provoke him, says, “You are nothing,” and Tiger closes his eyes and realizes that he was nothing, and he becomes very powerful and defeats his opponent. Your comment about not even realizing you stood up and had a paintbrush seems like this kind of non-being space.
Gorchov: Yeah. Also, one of the great things about painting is you can have a thing you’re working on and you sort of try to figure out what to do with it, yet you don’t have to show up on time. You can do it when you feel like it. Musicians, who have to make performance dates, can’t do that. And I’m sure that’s why they use drugs. [Laughter.]
Rail: You also mentioned in that Rail interview, that your paintings are made of reverie and luck. What does that mean in your case?
Gorchov: It’s extremely abstract. It’s what they tell kids not to do: spacing out. Just not thinking of anything. And then when you get an impulse, and you feel like you know what color or what form, or you see how a line should be different—when you can see that, it almost feels like luck. Whenever you can grasp something and really be sure about it, it feels to me like luck.
Rail: Does chance have a role? Perhaps luck is an offshoot of chance. I spent a period of time reading what different artists had said about chance, and Pollock said there’s absolutely no chance in his work, period. [Laughter.] And Jasper Johns had said: yes, there’s always chance. Yes, there’s sometimes chance. And then he said: yes, there’s seldom chance. And then he said: yes, there’s never chance.
Gorchov: Jasper said all those things?
Rail: Well, that’s a paraphrase. But he covered all of his bases. Is the element of chance part of the process of putting the paint down?
Gorchov: When you’re mixing paint—which I think all painters love to do—mixing paint in a pot to get the right color, and you’re looking at it, you have to test it every now and then. I also mix paint very simply, so that I can remember what I put in it. In other words, I don’t want to have to figure out a complicated picture. I use at least some white lead, and a pigment, and I may use another color to tint it more warm or more cool, something like that. I feel really lucky if I get it right the first time. And I don’t all the time, so I have to take that off.
Rail: And when you put it on, it’s often very translucent, or the edges have glimpses of what’s beneath, and it never folds across the sides. There’s certainly pleasure. I’ve noticed looking at your paintings and these watercolors, I always feel as if I’m getting a massage. Or even as if I’m watching someone else receive a massage.
Gorchov: That’s great! What a compliment.
Rail: Barthes also describes that the moments of pleasure happen at the seam, or the fault line, and pleasure is very close to Eros, the erotic moment. Do you think the erotic is an important element in painting and why, or what, that might be?
Gorchov: Yeah. I think that painting is definitely related to that kind of pleasure. The edges of anyone’s work are really an important issue. How the edges are done.
Rail: You once said how difficult it is for a painter to have a hard edge and a soft edge in the same painting. Is that something that you’ve tried to create?
Gorchov: I like making very close edges. But sometimes when drips run into the other colors, it is better.
Rail: At the opening of this show, one of these sheets of paper had a little fault in it, and you said you did that on purpose, as though you absorbed the so-called accident or the mistake.
Gorchov: I didn’t do it on purpose. I don’t want to be the kind of artist that feels he has to make perfect work. Work doesn’t need to be perfect. I like the illusion of perfection. Brancusi’s work looks so pristine but has all kinds of bronze bits where he’s fixed it not so well.
Rail: “Noli Me Tangere,” (2011) one of my all time favorite paintings of yours, is an exquisite, medium size, pale painting with two shapes, a little low—they’re beneath the middle, which is surprising. That story “Don’t Touch Me,” is biblical.
Gorchov: Christ appears and Mary sees him for the first time after he’s risen. My interpretation is that she is about to embrace him but he says, “Don’t touch me.” No one has given a good answer for what that means in the scriptures. I don’t know what it means. He says, “I have to go to my father.” The mystery of Him saying that makes the situation very electric.
Rail: In one interview you said that you think it means that the skin is the place between coming and going.
Gorchov: I said that? [Laughter.]
Rail: You did! So I wonder, what is it about the skin? Where is a person’s edge?
Gorchov: Well, paint-film or painting is about surface, not about mass, like sculpture; that’s like skin.
Rail: And your naming your pieces seems so important. How did you come up with the name “Brother”?
Gorchov: When I was making the paintings with the stretcher I used in the early ’70s, “Brother” was the third one I did. I called the first one “The Art,” and the second one “Promise.” This one was a red and blue painting, a hundred inches high. And, you know I’m an only child who never had a brother but I thought, gee, I’m going to call it “Brother.” An impulse. And the painting was bought right away by James Duffy who was a big collector, a very nice man—who has died since then—in Detroit. He owned a plumbing supply company. He was wealthy, supported the arts in Detroit, came to New York to buy paintings, and put his paintings in the factory, which made me happy—I liked the way his art looked. This was 1975 and he gave it to the Detroit Institute of Fine Arts, but they never put it up. Museums have work of mine but they’ve never put it up, and I’m upset about that. Now I’m worried about Detroit’s collection, with their bankruptcy, and I thought well, maybe I’ll see that painting again. So I’ve been doing a lot of studies, sort of renditions of it in different sizes. Old photographs make it easy to get the form. I found it was a painting I could make in any scale. Most of my paintings only work in a certain scale.
