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V5 - Courtney Gregg: Pierre, you make furniture, objects and paintings. The aesthetics of which are all very different. The way you make objects seems much closer to the way you make furniture. Is there a common process?
Pierre Picot : Yes, the process of making the objects seems to be so predefined. That is, as I am making them, I am thinking about how they are going to end up looking. I am thinking ahead to how I am going to line up the wood this way or fill in these cracks that way. Whereas, when I am making paintings, even though I might start off with either a casual or real self-conscious attitude, I usually end up with something that surprises me.
V5: Since you start with small drawings and work up to medium size
drawings, I would think that by the time you started big paintings,
they would be very well formed... are there still surprises?
PP: They are well formed, but in terms how they are painted, there are still surprises. I will consciously say to myself have some things going from dark to light and the previous ones have been thickly painted and they are goofy. That is the effect that I am looking for, a handmade look. Today I thought, why not go for something more blended, smooth and old-fashioned, simply to redefine the image by changing the finish. It also expands because I am using another vocabulary, one that has been formed before in some other projects. So I am juggling with various vocabularies that I have learned over time. I am really interested, and I think that is why I am at times all over the place, in developing more vocabularies, as opposed to refining a single one that would then become my trademark.
V5: With the paintings, do you tend to shy away from more romantic ideas of patina and age and those kinds of things.
PP: I know there are some painters who create that or apply that to their work.
V5: It is a very seductive path.
PP: I know there might be some paintings that I might be working on that have just the right colors such as golden, Indian yellow or olive green. I love olive green. I then get to the point that I am thinking, "Oh, it's got that old fashioned look, let's put a gold frame around it, stick it on a nice, dark oak wall and get an instant antique, even though it was made just two hours ago." At that point I will turn around and use contemporary and hip colors that you find in fashion, such as orange and greens that were the color of choice two years ago.
V5: Would you amend a painting because you thought it was too pretty?
PP: Oh no, but I must say that there are paintings that are very pretty that I have done that I have been embarrassed about. This friend of mine came over and I showed him this painting and he said, "Oh, that is really exaggerated to the point of being so sentimental and pretty." He asked what I thought about that and I said I had doubts about it, but that I have gone ahead and finished it. He said, "I think that is a good idea and that you should show it. You should not care about the fact that you are very conscious that it is so saccharine." In a time when any kind of sentiment is squeezed out of all art. It is obvious in this piece that it is not about sentiment. But you have really got to go out of your way to make it that way. So that you make a pretty thing with pretty colors of pinks and pastels, almost to the point that it hurts. It is not painful, but almost hurts to think that I have reverted to this most basic hook to get a viewer, but that is not the point.
V5: One thing I love about your body of work is the apparently boundless curiosity you have for anything and everything. Why do you think you have so many passionate interests, and which do you consider art projects and which are not.
PP: I was just reading about the artist Frank Auerbach and he was saying that all he does is paint, seven days a week, morning till night he paints and draws. Everyday there is a model. On Monday it is this person. On Saturday afternoon, it is that person, it has been like this his whole life. A woman, who he has been painting every Saturday morning for the past forty years, is now retiring. She is getting old and she can not do that anymore. Forty years! I do not know if I would have the patience for doing one thing all the time. I think it has to do with curiosity born out of participating and wanting to discover and know about things that are strange. When I was a kid, my father traveled a great deal and he would always send postcards and letters back, which I would take the stamps off and travel to these places through the stamps, places such as Africa, Asia and Australia and Japan. When I came here, the first thing I wanted to do was travel and the first thing I realized when I became somewhat conscious, was that art offered the possibility of experiencing many things at the same time. It dawned on me about twenty years ago that art was absolutely the best vehicle for doing what I really wanted. Somehow you can manage to indulge the things you want
to participate in and this is the best vehicle to do it with. So I have
always been curious about traveling and curious about things one encounters when traveling and I realize there is a time to do a painting and a time to look at a painting. Instead of reading books, why can't I write a book or instead of looking at furniture, maybe I should make furniture. Why not?
Certainly making furniture was a way of thinking and acting in a different way but still somehow in a creative manner. It is a way of exploring a different way of coming to terms with subjective, unknown questions that keep popping up all the time. But the hardest thing is the unknown and making it into some focal point.
V5: So you would consider the furniture making a type of research for your art?
PP: Yes, in a way. But, I can say that driving in my car and going to the beach is part of the art making process because in a way that is the luxury that art offers you. It offers you the time to indulge whatever it is that guides you and comes back and is reinvested in you. You need some sort of life to bring towards your art making,
otherwise your art does not grow in any way, or it has no subject matter. I do not mean literal subject matter; it just does not have the experience of life to make it grow. That is one of the things I have always felt is important, and one of the reasons I have never understood how certain artists can only make their art from other art. I have always felt that life is the meaning of art.
V5: When I was a student of yours, you showed the class a slide of a house in France where a woman built a barricade out of her home, by hand, in response to the hardships of the war, and I have never forgotten that slide. What was interesting to me was that along with empathy, I felt envy for her obsession or.. sense of purpose. Was it that idea of obsession or the political history that made you show it to the class?
PP: I remember the slide well and come across it every so often. The house is gone now. When the woman died they destroyed it; it was terrible. The first thing that struck me was how eccentric this building was and how it was in the middle of all these other perfect houses, how this person had held out and built this strange house. The reason that I photographed it was for it's appearance, for one, and then in my imagination I could see the woman building it. There were sacks of concrete and sand, people would drop off bricks and tools, and it was all outside with a barrier and men working. I think there were a lot of people in sympathy for this woman. My friends had seen her walking home with bags. Only afterwards did I understand what an obsessive madness it was, building this protection. In a way I do agree with you, I envy people who have that kind of obsession.
V5: So, you don't see yourself as obsessive? I see all your research and
what you surround yourself with...
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