1; Peter Walsh Interviews Clinton Adams

I don't know where I was supposed to be here, but I won't. That's where I was supposed to be here, that's where I was supposed to be. I'm Peter Walch, former director of the University of New Mexico Art Museum. It is my distinct pleasure to be visiting today with one of New Mexico's most distinguished artists, Clinton Adams.

I've known Mr. Adams for more than 30 years, so I hope it won't be a sign of any disrespect if sometimes I call him Clinton or even Clint. After World War II, what Tom Broca called in his book of that title, The Greatest Generation. Clinton in 1942 finished his graduate degree at UCLA, joined that university's art department faculty, and then joined the US Army Air Force. With the cessation of hostilities, but while still in the service and stationed on Long Island, late in 1945, Clinton began painting again. His work from that period, his first really mature work, shows his admiration for that great American cubist abstractionist Stuart Davis. Back in Los Angeles and back on the UCLA faculty, Clinton faithfully took up lithography in 1948. Over the 50 plus years since then, Clinton has made scores of lithographs.

He helped found and later brought to Albuquerque the world famous teaching and research workshop now known as Tamron Institute of lithography. He has written widely on the history and practice of this, the perhaps most artist friendly of the printmaking mediums. Clinton was a prominent and widely respected arts administrator, Dean of UNM's College of Fine Arts, Director of Tamron Institute for many years, both at the same time. He is also a wonderful artist. Our national academy of design not only elected him to membership, but proudly featured in Adams drawing on the cover of this recent exhibition catalog. In this his studio are works dated within the past few months that are as vibrant and as fresh as anything I've recently encountered. But setting them aside for a moment, let's talk about this little gem of a 1947 painting called Oilwell, Marina Del Rey.

Clinton, when you first pulled it out of your storage drawers, I didn't immediately recognize the subject matter. It's a painting that was at the end of a sequence in which the ideas had been distilled, which had begun with the paintings that were actually done down in the oil, whole oil fields near Venice, in Venice, California, where the old elaborate fake Venetian city had been built back in the 20s. And the canals had been given Venetian bridges and then someone discovered oil. And the oil wells went up and the canals turned into some poles. And I was teaching landscape painting at UCLA, all the trying to find places to take classes within a reasonable distance of the campus.

And without regard to all the little cookie cutter houses, of course, that had begun to fill in all of West Los Angeles. And there were still of these industrial districts in Venice and a few places nearby, which had some degree of character that we could use to make paintings. So I started going down there first with my friend, Jan Stussy, whose painting and mine was far apart stylistically. But we worked together and sometimes I would feel something that is the vitality of Stussy's work. He could finish seven paintings while I was doing my first drawing. It was almost impressive. But I went back by myself and looked at these strange shapes of the oil barracks, the tanks and the storage of the machinery that was necessary.

And I found in them some forms which could be abstracted so that a kind of essence of that kind of industrial shape was possible. And the colors that existed in the salt marshes and in the sky and in the water and in the painted elements of the oil rigs all came together. And it was one of a series of probably old 30 or 40 drawings first and then a group of 12, 15 paintings of which this one came toward the end. Most of the intermediate paintings I destroyed because they were too close to Stussy's vision of the place, rather than my own vision of it. No, no, but they were more representational in a kind of way that was related to the kind of use that he made of forms.

And so on my own and back in the studio, this was not painted in the oil field, back in the studio I was able to get the essential elements of the subject without the distractions of the elements which were irrelevant and produced a group of almost non figurative paintings in the sense that the subject matters not that evident. But nonetheless there, most of which unfortunately were lost in the art gallery that represented me. So what about this little drawing that you found? Was this on site or was this a studio? This was on site right in front of the subject matter. It was one of about 10 or 15 of them and it's one that I've always thought was perhaps the best of the drawings, which were done just on typing paper on a clipboard. And with the India ink and a sharp twig. And that on a pen. And I've always kept this drawing because I thought it was one of the ones that had been important in generating the whole series.

So this, to paraphrase, this is abstraction, peering down from or distilled concentrated essence of some stuff out there that is more unruly to begin with and you bring what to it? Reason, order. And one hopes to have gone and certainly what you say is the idea and the way in which I was working at that time. And have continued to work, right? I mean, all of a sudden if we can take a jump in time, I'm thinking of that 1985 series that you did out in the... Well, the making those series. Yes.

Yes, in which I was staying at a hotel across from a rocky hill in which somebody had put together the stones in such a way as to make a kind of built pen and that generated again through abstraction and entire series of works. Quite a long series of works. So we'll take a break here while we get out those drawings. Okay? Stop camera. Get intense seconds, supply seconds. So Clint, walk us through this small stack of drawings that were done on-site and I guess some in the studio afterwards? Oh, many of them in the studio. What I did in Greece was to stare out of the window every morning. We were staying in a little hotel rather remote from making those towns, which is, you know, it's an absolute zoo.

And out in Plotty Elements. Nice little town with a nice beach and one hotel and a tavern or two. And we have a room, one of those white washed rooms where you open the window in the morning and across the way nice and clear and bright. Because this was, of course, summer, the light is on that distant hill in such a way as a more or less cross-light of an early morning that would define the individual rock forms on the bomb. I became absolutely intrigued with it. I didn't exactly know why I was intrigued with it. There was this irregular shape of the, think of this as a hill across the way. And it was this irregular shape of the rock wall that had been built up to hold the goats and down at the bottom and opening where the goats could be taken into toward the house where the goat herd must have lived.

And I also became aware of the shapes and patterns within the area, some of which were natural and some of which were probably historic in the sense that the cyclades, of course, have been inhabited since very ancient times when no one knows when, probably, by the mesonians before the Greeks are there. And so I began to do little small sketches with a pencil, with a little note pad that I always carried, which is smaller than the ordinary 8-11 type written sheet. And I had a pen and ink along and relatively little paper, and as you see, not very good paper. And I did some of these little drawings on the spot, the smallest types. All of the rest of them are done in the studio later after we came home, and I was quite intrigued with the possibility here and extended it in various ways, some of them quite abstractly, some of them losing sight of the subject a little bit.

But probably something like this represents where I was headed then this notion of a kind of cross division and of the kind of labyrinth of rocks. I could imagine the notes, but actually I could see the goats on occasion finding the little ledge that they would walk on and cross down and had to be the same little ledge because this was a fairly steep slope. No one but a goat could have walked across some of these places. So I went on with a series of drawings. These were all sort of sketch drawings, these little ones, but the larger drawings were intended to be drawings as drawings. That is an exhibitable finish to works because drawings can do that as well as service studies. But I made it quite a ton of them. The number that is here is perhaps a third of them.

And then extended them into paintings, which the one on the wall is one of the first. The one that probably represents the end of the series is the most complex and I think probably the finest of them is in the Albuquerque Museum. And that is an oil painting. No, there are watercolors. I never extended the idea into oil. I never felt that it would gain by that. And I didn't think it would gain by larger sizes either. Something you said intrigued me. What intrigued you in this was in part the irregularity of this goat pen across the way. And one of the things that had absolutely persistent motif as I began to turn it into drawings, I felt it needed some stable bottom line, which more or less could represent the sea coast, or the coast was much rockier than that.

There was a small sandy beach at one point. But it was opening at the bottom. The fact that it wasn't finished, it wasn't complete. And that it had all kinds of irregularities within it. Well, as true I was making a kind of order out of the irregularities. I wanted nonetheless to retain the irregularity, which I thought was an essential character of the subject. Years back when we collaborated on your retrospective painting exhibition at the museum, you pointed out to me a critical passage, I guess, about your first major gallery exhibition way back in 1952 or 3 in Los Angeles when the critic jewels Langstern. And I got it out and said in his response to your paintings at that time, one's response might have been warmer, more involved at the delicate serene equilibrium of this work been marred by an irregularity of some kind.

The Japanese have good reason for cherishing the flaw in a ceramic or the deliberately unfinished part of a picture. Is this coming home to roost here 20 years later? That was the first serious critical article about my work that had been published. I had lots of reviews in the Los Angeles Times and the other newspapers. This was the first serious critical article. Jewellins was a superb critic. If he had been writing in New York, he would be up there, I think, with Greenberg and Roasterburg. But he was in Los Angeles and artists who are quotes away from the center are somehow not received as well, and that's even more true I think of critics. But Jewellins published this same sentiment in both the review that he wrote for our news and also another review that he wrote for our international, which was a bit different wording, which was the same idea.

And I talked with him and length about that because he came out to the studio to see the work before it was actually hung in order to get his review to the magazine when the show was still up so that it came out in the April issue of our news and the show was still up in April. And so we had a chance for a lot of conversation. I had known Jewellins not terribly well. Later became very good friends and worked together on several projects. But I really respected that review and I really felt, hey, he's got something. That's right. And the picture that he specifically wrote this about, which was called Reflections in Red, was a picture that I had later, not right away, but later looked at it and said, this is exactly what Layne's never said about it years ago. Well, that's bringing your regularity.

I've tried, and I don't think successfully for a while, to encompass Jewell's idea into all of my work. Certainly I managed to do it in considerable degree in this Mickey Mouse series. But I'm not an expressionist. I work essentially in a kind of classic order. But even within a classic order, there's a possibility of irregularities. And it's that for which I hunt. That's a good introduction. Let's look at one of those paintings that probably wasn't in that retrospective, that 1952 retrospective, but of that period and of the period when you are at your most perfectionist, maybe, the cabinet. Yes, much earlier painting, much earlier painting. These Mickey Mouse series was done in 1985 and 1986, and the cabinet was done in 1953.

So just about the year after the land out. Right. So we'll swap out our picture on the wall now. Give us a second. Nice and quiet. We'll roll for about five seconds. I'll count it out here, 36, 22, 23, 24, 25, 6. So Clinton, I think if you primarily as an abstract painter, and the images we've been talking about so far, have clearly moved to such a degree away from the normal visual world that most people would be excused not to, if they didn't recognize what you had started with.

Certainly, nobody would have recognized the fact that I was looking at a rocky slope on my Greek island. Absolutely. Possibly they might have seen the oil well sketch recognize the oil well. They are abstracted to the point that what remains is essentially the picture as itself. The picture as Dene described it, Marie Stene back in 1890. Remember that a picture is essentially a plain surface covered with color assembled in a certain order, and essentially that kind of a description would apply to these abstract paintings. But all of those early works, and remember not now the Mickey Mouse work, which is much later, but all of the early works, such as the oil well, were essentially based upon a kind of cubus to vocabulary of forms, sometimes fairly close to Stuart Davis, sometimes moving away, sometimes tilting a little bit toward Picasso, but basically a kind of cubus to vocabulary.

And I began to feel that I needed to find a different kind of abstraction, I think, and perhaps one route to that was to return to the object and study the object to a greater degree. I think it also was the media in which I was working. I was teaching the course at UCLA in the history of the materials of the artist, the egg temper of medium that had been used, the early Renaissance, and the egg oil medium that attitched that used, which is the medium I used for the cabinet. And I was working in lithography with a crayon, which tends to build up a certain kind of surface, and it beautifully adapted to the delineation of forms.

So as a combination of those drawings, which started during a trip to New York City in the summer of 1949, we spent the whole summer in there, and I did a number of drawings, particularly down in the financial district on Sundays, when I could set up an easel, work in the streets, and there was nobody in the financial district on Sundays. And so when I came back to Los Angeles, my work became for about three years more representational. And it was some of those representational paintings that Jill Langsner wrote about in the 1952 exhibition, some of which I think he was completely right about, that they were overworked, over-refined, over-pollaged, and hence it sort of lost the spirit with which they started. The cabinet is the direct outcome of that sequence, but in a different medium, and I think while it has quite representational terms, it also has a lot of things going on that are very abstract.

The space is, in many cases, not sufficient to accommodate the volume of the objects. The shadows that they cast are not the shadows that every object would cast. The cabinet itself is not deep enough to hold them, lines that start and appear to go under the objects suddenly shift up or down a little bit, which create a kind of sense of movement, which is utterly unrealistic, of which collectively can be affected in describing the character of the objects. And the egg oil tempera medium, in which one works with white on a colored ground, and then glazes, and then adds white, and then goes back and forth, which is the same technique that Titian and Tinterevo, Georgie only used.

It lent itself to a kind of subtly and richness, without suppressing totally that quality of reality. And I always felt it was a quite successful painting. It was the first painting that I did, which was invited to a major national show, in which it was shown alongside Bach, Bach, and Picasso, and Matisse, and Ernst, et cetera, at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts. So you mentioned this group of European artists. You never felt the necessity as some American artists of your generation did. We read Sheeler and Hopper, and William and various others were also represented in that show, which was called Reality and Fantasy, and which included a number of realist works.

Were you on the reality side or the fantasy side? I think that was pretty well bridging the two. It would seem as if the curator could put you either side of the aisle. Harvey Arnayson, the later director of the movement, who invited the paintings. The first glance to be more on the classic realism side, is that? Yes, I think that's true of this series. There were two lithographs in drawing. I've always prized the drawing. I've always thought it was one of the better drawings that I did in my youth, let's say.

49. So 50, 52 years ago. So it does have a sort of a feeling of ancient history, but it's still alive. And those apples and the cut plain of the apples, reinforced by the cubist device of the vertical line in the apples, was the most successful there, which was really fine. I should have made a lithograph just of that as it is. This one is, however, I think, caught a lot of the same qualities, less so that, which is the third of the series, and perhaps one too many. The drawing technique seems heavily influenced by your involvement with lithography at that time. Because among the really great works of art, the ten to the uns and underestimated our surah's wonderful drawings, the public knows about the big paintings, the ground shot and others.

But the surah drawings are masterpieces. And they look as if he could have done them on stone, or, well, they used the bite of the paper. But I worked on a late paper, and the drawings have some of that same character. They were influenced to a degree by the work I was doing in lithography, and also by the fact that I was going to, I thought, extend the drawings in many cases into paintings, and that, therefore, they should be related to the kind of egg temper that I was going to be using in the paintings. There were a series of paintings. I don't have any of them now, there if they've all gone into private collections or museums. Did you have any sense of willfully swimming against the current of abstract and expressionist art that was involved? It was always out of phase. Just when abstract expressionism gained its peak, here I began doing these things which were more realist and more confined and more delicate and more classic in spirit.

Los Angeles County Museum did a large national contemporary American art show. And it had Jackson Pollock and Becooning and Rothko and so on and so forth. And one of my paintings in this vein was accepted by the jury, which was really quite remarkable given the content, given the number of very fine artists. Here it was this little representational painting with all these big canvases, and not only was I not working abstractly or expressionistically, but I was also working small. So, hold that for a moment.