TRANSCRIPT: Let me tell you about the time I really began to paint abstractly and why I had to.
I was working in the Aquatic Park Building in San Francisco, where I had charge of the decoration of the interior of the building. There were house painters working there and I found out that they knew a lot more about their trade than most artists know about theirs.
We talked a lot about color. One day I saw a couple of them eating their lunch. They’d been painting a wall which was about half finished and putting on the second coat and hadn’t finished a great deal of that. The first coat was white: the second coat was whiter. As you know, they dress in white overalls and wear white caps. They had a white drop cloth spread out under them to protect the floor. Two or three buckets of white paint were standing on the white drop cloth, where they were sitting on a couple of boxes and very unhygienically eating sandwiches. The paper these lunches had been wrapped in was lying where they’d thrown it on the drop cloth.
This is the thing that I got such a kick out of.
These two painters were all in white and surrounded by white and all these whites were different! The first coat on the wall was not as white as was the white of the second coat. The overalls were a different white from the drop cloth, the white paint was the whitest where it was still in the pot or running down the sides of it. The paper was a little, not much, on the cream side. The drop cloth was a little on the gray side.
If you catch the picture you’ll see how delicate and how interesting it was and what a problem for an artist it presented.
I went home as soon as I could and tried to paint it. I painted the whole thing just as I described it here and naturally put in the two house painters. They spoiled it. The thing about them that spoiled it was the natural color of their hands and faces.
Flesh color is not by any means white. The little areas of it broke up my color sequence and relationship. They had nothing to do with the particular thing I was interested in putting over. When I took the most obvious solution and painted the hands and faces white also, that was even more disturbing.
People who saw the picture with the house painters sitting there eating their lunch with their white hands and faces said:
“The poor men contracted painters’ colic from not washing their hands before eating lunch. Very informative!”
“He’s making out the proletariat as clowns!”
“Modern working conditions lead to T.B.”
In short, I found out in the long run that the only way I could use these different whites and not completely distract attention from what I considered and still consider their beautiful and subtle relationship to one another, was to leave out the hands and faces, and the painters, and there I was – as abstract as hell!
