...CONTINUED
   

"Plain harmony is pretty boring"
David Brody continues his conversation with CLARE WEISS

Photographs of the artist by Clare Weiss

Is there a spiritual aspect to the process?

For me this is all the spiritual I have. I'm incredibly lucky to experience any part of it. In painting it's as close I'm going to get to acting on my spirituality.

What about music?

I'm very interested in musical structure. But I don't think it applies directly to my paintings. Some years ago I made a three-dimensional computer-animated film with simple geometric choreography to a movement from a Beethoven quartet, a simple quartet, not a dark complex dramatic one. I see the potential for deep analogies between music and visual forms but I don't think you can get at them through painting at all; the appropriate medium I think is probably 3-D computer animation. But that's sort of a side topic, except in so far as to say I really detest weak analogies between music and art.

Let's talk about your drawings a little bit. As a way in, is there a relationship between your painting and drawing?

I started doing drawings on isometric graph paper about five years ago. They began as simple experiments and now they're evolving into a parallel body of work. I'm taking the drawings and when I have the opportunity to, making wall drawings. In a way that work is more gallery-friendly than paintings. But I'm not interested in the philosophical aspects of wall drawings. Wall drawings are just ways to make bigger versions of works on paper. The works on paper are about some of the almost exact opposite ideas as the paintings. They're about symmetry and I guess you'd say there's no derangement in the drawings, at least not obviously.

They're spatially self-consistent and logical. Isometric graph paper consists of parallel intersecting diagonals and you can make 3-D representations showing the top and two sides. They're used in architecture and engineering. "Iso" means "same" and the key difference between isometric perspective and vanishing point perspective is that all of the diamond shapes in an isograph field are the same size, so you lose perspective diminution, but you do have a sense of spatial mapping. And because all of the diamonds are the same size you can play interesting games with repetition and variation that you can't play with perspective. In that sense I'd say it's kind of like a musical composition. You can really think in terms of rhythmic groupings.

That said, symmetry is a fluid concept. Just because something has a statement of symmetry doesn't mean it can't change or that the terms of the symmetry can't be changed. The example I've given is that people tend to have bilateral symmetry, although that doesn't really hold up - the heart's on the left side, other organs are on the right. But people are basically symmetrical. But what if you have a person and you cut off a leg? Then what if you found someone who cut off the other leg, and you brought them together? There would be a larger symmetry. That's what happens in my drawings: things are cut off, they're joined with larger things, and they might go off the page. There's always the assumption of symmetry somewhere in these drawings.

I think that's how a lot of music is composed. An overall formal order is changed and transmuted. I guess I'm talking about classical music by which I don't just mean Beethoven, Bach, Mozart but also most rock n' roll in the sense that its order is very clearly established. You're going to have a bridge, a theme and a chorus - you know what's coming. But variations and surprises keep it interesting.

So are the drawings harmonious?

Yes, but plain harmony is pretty boring. So you mix in momentary disharmonies that dissolve into harmonies, and surprising modulations and different harmonic regions that first seem strange, but then make sense.

You said the purpose of drawing on the wall was one of scale.

When I did the first large wall drawing, based on a small drawing which I liked a lot, the response was of a different order. I just did it because I had an opportunity to do it and wanted to see what it would look like. People who knew my work and liked the drawings liked the wall drawing a lot better; something about the delicacy of the surface of the wall, the thickness of the line, the density of color in relation to the larger wall surface, made for overall a more delicate, hovering presence. Part immaterial and part material. I always regarded the small drawings as having those qualities. Because I can always redo the drawings, my hand is in it in a way that I can't redo the painting. So to take it to another scale was a completely natural and inherent part of the drawing process. The drawings have a temporal presence that paintings don't have because paintings have a long life.

Do you feel reticent when the wall drawings come down?

There's a certain reticence but it's not that painful because I can redo them. It might take me another week of hard labor but theoretically the drawings still live, almost like music exists as notes on paper.

What projects that you're working on now?

I've been invited to do a month-long residency at Hallwalls in Buffalo. Hallwalls is an alternative art space in Buffalo, New York and it's been around for 20 years. They want me to do some wall drawings in a pretty large space. It's a nice opportunity to spend some time doing the wall drawings and thinking about that whole process. That's this summer.

Also, Cabinet magazine and the Sculpture Center are sponsoring a show of folding paper sculpture that will be a series of exhibitions and a book. A number of artists were given 3 pages each to create a sculpture that could be cut out and folded and put together. I made a piece that's a sort of miniature camera obscura of a U-Haul truck, based on an experience I had last fall. I don't have a venue yet for the new paintings and I'm looking to have a show of them.

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