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SH Okay, I’ll ask you these short questions to begin. Medium?
MW Painting
SH Aesthetic?
MW I don't know.
SH Aesthetic horror?
MW Actual horror and flesh.
SH What do you wear when you're painting?
MW This winter, I wore a navy-blue snowsuit the whole time. But mostly I just wear what always wear. Sometimes I wear giant windbreakers with hoods as a kind of smock. I can't stand things that go around my neck like an apron.
SH The elements by which you judge your work?
MW: If it takes me somewhere.
SH Same! Exactly the same with me. I told a friend recently about her book that the reason the end wasn’t working was because it was clear the book hadn’t taken her anywhere. She had no idea what I meant, and she kept trying to rewrite the end. I was like, “it doesn’t work like that! It has to be real!”
MW Ha! Exactly.
SH The basic unit of your work?
MW Seeing. When I started, I wanted art to be everything, to be able to do everything, to mean everything. But after awhile I realized, I am just a painter, and my job is to see.
SH The most astonishing thing you’ve seen recently?
MW Two nights ago, I was sitting outside when it was getting dark, and all of these tree seeds were falling everywhere, they were brown and it looked like ashes falling out of the sky. There’s a very large tree nearby that is dying. Dying trees can produce a lot of seeds at the end. And then the sound of fireworks, which I could see a little bit between the trees and the school across the street. I have never really understood fireworks. But the sparkle and sound of them on that night with all these "ashes" falling down was a bit overwhelming. I turned on my camera to take a video but the video wouldn't turn on for some reason. But last night, I went outside again and sat down and then the same thing happened all over again, the seed ashes, the fireworks. Such an odd repetition on my ordinary stoop made me feel a bit dizzy about time.
SH You’ve thought a lot about space and time. After all your research, reading and living, what do you think time is? How do you understand it? And how does this understanding shape how you compose your paintings or what you think is important to paint?
MW The more you look at time, the more you can’t see it at all. To me it’s incredibly grounding to find meaning and order in things like the laws of physics, even if one of the laws is that the law can suddenly bend backwards or prove itself to be untrue. But that’s also a kind of consistent order, because it will always do that. I still find it strange that there is so much order in the world, and not the cruel kind.
Every series I do seems to scream its own different laws. Like, I tried to put a person in one of the early paintings for this last series and it was just wrong. I wasn’t even really sure why. But of course a person in a painting is more of a frozen thing than a tree, as we’re used to people moving and we’re used to trees being still. A person in a painting makes for a smaller unit of time, a snapshot, you know, unless you’re Duchamp painting Nude Descending a Staircase. But even that is still a moment. And for me, what I get from painting is I get more space and I get more time. I can’t think of anything better.
SH It's interesting to hear you say that you think of people as being a relatively frozen subject matter for paintings. I think that's why I like writing about the inside of a person's head—consciousness—because that seems to me the most mobile, active thing in life, in contrast, say, to houses and scenery, which are more static.
MW Yes! We have our different boundaries when it comes to time.
SH And what does the latest physics say about time?
MW Boy, it's hard to say. The physicists are getting kind of woo-woo and the psychics are getting kind of scientific. But everyone seems to agree we don't know much.
SH What's the best thing a psychic ever told you?
MW “Something is already here but you don't see it yet.”
SH I admire the way you often tailor your own clothes. You also build furniture. You seem very engaged in making your environment something comfortable for you, and yet you aren’t fussy. But every place you have ever lived in has looked exactly the same. Your aesthetic—if only I could say what it is!—seems to be in how you cook, your spaces, your clothes. It's nothing you do consciously, though, and you seem to have time to make your world appropriate for you, and also to paint and engage in friendships and all of life.
MW That’s flattering. I am always chastising myself—like if I suddenly notice I am sewing a T-shirt or planting a tree or building a shelf, I have to tell myself to get back to work. I love my hands, I love fixing things and building things. I save time by being more interested in function than beauty—by, for instance, never painting a room a better colour. I hate too much control, I hate too much perfection. I think it would then make the spaces you can’t control too difficult to be in. The spaces I live in still seem like they have a lot to do with the people that came before me.
I am always kind of amazed by your curiosity and engagement with the world. I think of those great interviews you did for The Believer back in the early 2010s. I know you are a genius novelist, but those interviews were pretty wild too. It’s just something I've never had so much of, an ability to know what I don't know, or that clarity to cut away to the true thing someone is saying. I remember one interview where you met Frank Stella at a Toronto gym and he seemed to dismiss you as if you were a high school student. I'm sure it was really irritating for you, but it was hilarious how bad he looked without you having to lift a finger. We've both changed so much, is it still interesting asking people questions? Is it still interesting asking me questions?
SH Yes, it will always be interesting! I feel like you keep changing, and I do, too, and so there’s no end to the things we have to talk about. Also—it’s strange—but this is the first time I’ve ever formally interviewed you. Despite the fact that there may be nobody in the world I have talked to more, I’m alway curious about what you’re thinking, and my mind is always being changed by the things you say. I feel this makes it possible for me to move forward in life. Even last night, in your studio—I woke up today feeling that I was in a slightly new place. That always happens when we spend time together.
And also last night you said some things about how my transcripts of our conversations—some of my work for How Should a Person Be?—taught you something about the structure of language when you read them.
MW Yes. You always had a strong sense of meaning and so much faith in art. Whereas I had always thought the best thing I could do as a painter was to create meaning or pretend that there was meaning, and that maybe creating or pretending was the best thing one could do. When you had me read some of those conversations that you transcribed in—was it 2005? It was really strange for me. To me, they were just common, random, even embarrassing conversations we had, but because you made me read them over and over again, I started to see the innate order in them. Especially in the things that weren’t said but were indicated—the unspoken shared assumptions, the heart of disagreements not discussed directly. I started to see that there was a lot of order and information in a fragment, in a specific person, or on a table. It was time slowing down and repeating itself enough to allow me to sense a deeper world beneath these small surface elements of speech. So I went from being an artist who tried to create meaning, to one who tried to find meaning. I suddenly—or slowly, after a thousand hours of conversation with you— had faith that there were things to find.
SH Other artists—especially writers and poets—have always been very important for you. What do you think you get from being friends with writers that’s distinct from what you have gotten from friendships with visual artist? Or why do you tend not to associate as much with other painters?
MW With great books or poems, I can get really terrifically lost. I can feel better about what humans can do. I can see better. I need words a lot, I need writers a lot! If you had been a visual artist, I’m sure we would have still had an amazing connection and depth with each other, but there is something so clear and fruitful about you having words and me having images. We were always straining to find the place in between us, rather than looking out and talking about which path ahead of us would be best. I love the space in between things; it feels like the best place to make new things.
So I need words, especially other people’s words, but, a lot of the time, words can seem really oppressive to me, or even overused or overvalued: words on T-shirts, conversations, speeches, so much talking. It makes sense that I am a painter. And it seems like a lot of people still don’t quite understand how valuable it is—the kind of intelligence, presence and attention one can have without words.
It’s funny that we probably worked together quietly in the same room for a long time before we even really started talking, you coming over and editing Ticknor, in my studio, and me painting. It has always been a bit of magic— us together not talking.
SH The composition of your Fire painting gives me a very deep and dizzy sort of feeling, almost like I’ve gone into a tunnel. Perhaps it’s because I recognize it from our evenings together at our writers’ group—that fire, those chairs, the streetlight at night. Did you have a feeling of wanting to capture those evenings the six of us spent together, or was it less emotional and personal; was it more about wanting to paint the fire? Were you looking at all those elements when we were sitting together? The Fire painting makes me think about how little I actually see the world. How I try to not look at the world, perhaps out of fear.
MW Yeah, I was looking every time we had writing group—though maybe not more than usual? But because there is something quiet and present about the group, it’s easier to really look around than when I’m in other places with people in them, which feel more overwhelming or more about all the talk and the people there. So it seemed natural to paint it with the other paintings; it’s as quiet a space as the kitchen and the bedroom.
It’s funny—during our last writing group, I was sitting in a different spot than where I normally sit, and everything looked so unbelievably different to me, I guess also because the nights were getting shorter. I really saw the pine tree that is there, this beautiful small pine tree that had been there the whole time but that I somehow never really saw. It felt completely electric to me, so charged and alive, about the same size as everyone else. I more consciously felt myself staring at everything: the whole scene, at all of you, the pine tree. It was almost distracting and was honestly about fifty percent of my experience that night. Or I guess it was the opposite of distracting. I felt like I was really there, seeing everything. But I didn’t mention it. Can you imagine, if instead of painting I just said to everyone, “Look at that tree, really, look at that tree. It’s electric, and it has always been here!”