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Pierre Picot: No, I work in spurts. The bird project was in 1987 and I worked on it for fourteen months. That was the first time I thought I was obsessed. I had a shopping bag filled with wood and would be going from one shop cutting and grinding them down and then I would be in the back room of my house sanding and staining them.
V5- Courtney Gregg: Do you look back on that as a very happy time?
PP: Well, I was on automatic pilot and it was really quite amazing. Yes it is fascinating when nothing else seems to exist. I have these spurts and then some downtime. Wendy would say I am obsessive about certain foods like chocolate and peanuts. Nice little things you can nibble on from a bag. But I think when it comes to art I am more moderate. Once I get into a rhythm, I can harness that habit.
V5: I think ebb and flow is the way it goes, working and not working.
PP: My studio is real quiet and very cool for the most part and warms in the winter. It has great light, as you can see, it is a little small, but it works. All the big paintings that I do now are all the same size and dictated by the height of the ceiling, which is seven feet. So with a little trim for the edges, as it gets bent over the stretcher bars, they become six and half foot tall paintings. I am sure now that all the big paintings I have done in this house have been that way.
V5: How does one grow out of that? (pointing to a smaller painting of a maze-like group of buildings)
PP: These are all little paintings that follow the doodles that precede the big painting. This is a pattern on pattern on pattern. I have always wanted to do a painting inside a square of a compound without any kind of perspective, but still creating a sense of depth and envelopment of a yard inside of a wall. So I did these two paintings and, talk about obsession, I did not know I had it in me to make a painting that had thousands of separate brush marks. I have tried to count these, and there are thousands of them. I really got into the fact that I was going to make a painting with thousands of brush strokes. I was listening to the music and radio and just doing it. A lot of things happen because, one, I do not want to do the same painting over and over again and two, I do not want to do the same painting as the sketch. This became a painting into a painting inside a painting ... I was reading a French book that deals with labyrinth, the idea of a labyrinth being a stand in for the meaning of life, because the labyrinth has existed since prehistoric man. I was thinking of this idea of a labyrinth and getting lost with houses because houses and architecture pop up every so often in my work. So I was going to make this labyrinth painting with all these patterns and marks.
V5: Will this go as much like these other ones with tons of color and paintings inside paintings inside paintings? (pointing to a larger unfinished monochromatic labyrinth painting)
PP: Yes, or it might go with no color, or just be limited to one kind of color, and have it be subtle changes between this roof line and that wall. About three years ago I came across a rag doll with a wooden head, hands and feet. It had a round head with a goofy face painted on and I would throw it on the floor and every time it landed, it had this incredible pathetic quality about it. This poor doll was just sprawled out on the floor and I was very touched by that emotion. I had a friend who said at the time that he did not want to see it because it was so tragic and pathetic. I wanted to make my own.
V5: I think it's interesting you have a hero and a labyrinth going at the same time.
PP: (Laughs) I really thought it was great, it is not Astroman or Superman, it is One Man, not every man but one man. Everything happens to this guy and so just today I started drawing this One Man Down, I have yet to do the shadows, but I painted him from life. My friend, Dan Mcleary came over and saw this and suggested that if I painted them from life they might be life like and less cartoonish. It has been really interesting for me to do these and find some kind of meaning to them. Because they are so simple, basically stick figures. I have doubts about their validity .... or should I say sometimes I have doubts about their validity, and that other times I feel fine about them.
V5: I like that feeling of discomfort. I always think that I should pursue it if I feel uncomfortable about what they do with it in the real world.
PP: Yes, it's rare that you experience that. Often times we experience comfort and then seek out the comfort zone and ideally we want to not do that when we are trying to make discoveries in our work. We don't want to have to go through the doubt of finding something strange; we stay with something safe that we already know we can control.
I don't want to just do one big painting of one stick person on a painting, but I want to paint the Battle of Waterloo or The Great Struggle of Good and Evil. I don't want it to be just a stick figure because I'm still trying to figure out, where does this go and what happens when it gets bigger. I'm going to make one of these bigger, but what is happening now is that it does have a wonderful flip floppy quality that I want to keep. What I want to do is get some flexible metal and use round wood, about an inch and half in diameter, and just cut it in little chunks and have it so comes across the canvas about two feet high. I would like to get some posts eventually and make it even bigger. (laughs) But it might suffer from being that big; it might make it too refined with either not all the same quirks or lacking the handmade quality, which I like.
V5: But your furniture and your building pieces are very minimal and
iconographic, polished.
PP: The furniture does and again it doesn't to me. It's not like I can
refine it in my head as to what it does. But I know that if I keep going on these, by the time I do two or three of them it will become very refined and will have lost the energy that the original had. I like the Picasso quote when they asked him about the difference between him as a cubist and his followers and said, "What's the difference?" He said, "Well when I did my stuff, it was very dirty, but when they came after me, they did everything clean." That's the difference. Actually that's what I am trying to do all the time by changing gears and directions, I try to be inquisitive all the time. (laughs) The desire to discover new things.
I remember that I did this piece as a gift for a fellow at an estate in New York, and since he liked boats, I decided to make a little painting of a boat. Since I didn't have a canvas available at the time, I painted a boat on cardboard, and the cardboard was three-dimensional. The moment I did it, I made a steamer, and there were waves in the foreground and the boat was in the middle ground and the sky was in the background, so that it was three layers deep. I thought, "Oh my god, this is really great and I like it and want to keep it." I did another and wanted to keep it too. (laughs) So finally I told myself to make it for him and then send it to him, you can do yours whenever you want! I ended up doing about thirty pieces and those were the first ones that I had shown and they are gone, I don't have any of them. So from then on it was really nice. I remember stopping the cardboard because someone came up to me and said, "Oh, Pierre Picot, you are the guy who does cardboard." That was the kiss of death for me and I just stopped. So I asked myself, "What do I do next?" I realized what I was going to do next was not going to be sitting down and figuring out the next thing, the next was going to declare itself in some way. I remember doing something for my wife as a birthday present, it was a wood carving of a Heron. I liked it and it started to grow and I ended up making a lot of woodcarvings of this god like things. They became drawings, and then paintings, then sculptures and they ran their course. I realized what I was waiting for was not inspiration at all.
Incidentally, I don't like that word too much. It speaks of unconscious, and I'm not unconscious and I don't believe in that. Being ready for what was going to happen next, just living and doing things normally. What I want to say about that is that it makes sense after the fact. If I were try to make sense of them during the fact, then I think they would lose their importance, their dynamic quality. I don't know where to place them in the context of what's going on in art today.
V5: Is that a relevant question?
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