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Alison Stewart: This is All Of It on WNYC. I'm Alison Stewart. We continue our fall gallery stroll, the Landmark Arts Building, with Hearne Pardee, whose work is on view at Bowery Gallery on the fifth floor at 547 West 27th Street. The show is called Just Looking. Pardee spent some of his formative creative years here in New York City. After graduating from Yale University, he attended this New York Studio school and got his MFA at Columbia.

Pardee became an educator, spending time on the West Coast as an art's professor at UC Davis for more than 20 years. Pardee also writes about art. You may have seen his work in the Brooklyn Rail. His current New York City exhibition called Just Looking is on view until the end of the month. It's colorful, a little abstract, a little representational. His art will also be part of an onsite interactive dance performance at the gallery featuring Dance Theater Works on September 23rd at 4:00 PM. We'll talk to him about his career, writing, and all of it, as we say around here. Welcome to the studio, Hearne.

Hearne Pardee: Thank you so much.

Alison Stewart: In your artist statement, you wrote, "As a painter, writer, and educator, my principal concern is painting, seeking its basis in perception, attention, and awareness of the visual field within the expanded field of photography and digital culture." When did you begin painting?

Hearne Pardee: I started painting, well, when I was an undergraduate in college. I had painted a little bit here and there, but I really began getting serious about it when I was an undergraduate. Started taking some art classes, which shocked my parents, who didn't think I was going to be an artist. I didn't think so either at that point. [laughs]

Alison Stewart: When did you really realize that this is what you were going to do?

Hearne Pardee: Well, I wonder if I ever really realized that I got-- I just kind of got into it. I was told to go to the New York Studio School because at Yale as an undergrad, then everybody was painting with rollers on big pieces of canvas and abstract field paintings. They said, "You seem to want to work from observation, so you go to the New York Studio School." That's where I went. I had some great teachers there who cultivated a lot of different ideas about looking at things.

Alison Stewart: I was going to ask, how did that time at New York Studio School influence your practice?

Hearne Pardee: Oh, well, I hadn't really painted from looking at models. We didn't do that as an undergrad at Yale. It was all very abstract. I had to learn that what I was drawing didn't look at anything at all like the model that was in front of me. That came as a revelation. It was a long process. I learned a lot at the Studio School about transitioning from representation to abstraction. Hans Hofmann, the great teacher had influenceda lot of the teachers at the Studio School. We learned about space and composition with rhythmic spaces, but always looking at a model of some sort.

Alison Stewart: When did you realize that you might want to be an educator?

Hearne Pardee: Well, that just came. I found it came naturally because I wanted to share my ideas. It seemed quite logical to work with students and to try and get them to see what I was seeing and to try communicate my enthusiasm for artists that I was interested in. It evolved over the years. I finally got a full-time teaching job [laughs], regular teaching job at UC Davis. I was very happy to be there and do a lot of different things. Davis is an interesting place.

Alison Stewart: Say more.

Hearne Pardee: Well, like you were just talking about the climate issues and everything. I don't know if you know, but Kim Stanley Robinson, the science fiction writer who wrote the book, the thing of the future, he's in Davis. He refers to Davis as the factory floor, meaning the industrial agriculture of the Sacramento Valley, where we're located. There's a great deal. Davis is very integrated with that.

They're training all the people who are going out to do industrial agriculture. Also, on the other side, there are a lot of people doing interesting studies of alternative ways of doing things. The art department has always been very multidisciplinary, but also not with any particular structure. It was up to us to decide what we wanted to teach. I was able to get people to look at things. We went out and painted a landscape around Davis, which gets very hot sometimes.

It was a good way to think about the American landscape. I had always thought about the American landscape, going back to the William Carlos Williams and Alfred Stieglitz, and their ideas that American artists should look at the things they were most familiar with, which is where your psychological engagement really is, and not try and make something that look like a European landscape. I spent some time in Maine during my earlier career, tried figuring out how to paint things in the American landscape.

I taught the students about thinking of California, where most of them lived in suburban subdivisions that were all very new. They didn't have a home in the sense that I had a grandmother who lived in Florida. We went down there and that was the home. You knew where you came from. California, everybody moves around and everything is built fairly recently. How do you become at home and find a sense of place in your, whatever you happen to find yourself in. That was the idea. Looking and working perceptually, I found was a good way to try and get people to observe what there was.

Alison Stewart: My guest is Hearne Pardee. The name of the show is Just Looking at Bowery Gallery. It is up until the end of this month. Where's the title from, Just Looking?

Hearne Pardee: I just came up with that. [chuckles].

Alison Stewart: Just looking.

Hearne Pardee: Well, I thought--

Alison Stewart: Just what you were talking about. "Look up, see what's around you."

Hearne Pardee: Sometimes, you come up with the most obvious thing and say, "Well, why didn't I think of that?" That just came up.

[laughter]

Alison Stewart: There's a piece I particularly liked called Studio Landscape with Stones from this year, it's oil on canvas, 30 by 40. I wanted to know more about this piece. I'm going to describe it a little bit. It's a stool with a small fishbowl on it, some rocks around it. It's a very colorful room. In the back looks a bit like your less representational works around it. I think there's some rocks on the floor, maybe even like a butterfly diorama.

Hearne Pardee: Right. Well, I put it together as-- I'm very influenced by Matisse. I was a little bit thinking of his red studio, where he put a lot of his previous work and other things in his overall painting of his studio. The rocks and water come out of assignment I gave to my class, which was so many Asian students. I thought we talked about Asian landscape painting and the importance of mountains and water in Chinese painting.

I set up a little thing for them with the water and the rocks, and then they were painting. I thought, well, that's actually pretty nice. I like working with water and reflections. I put it in front of these paintings, as you said, these are abstracted landscapes. I think about being in the landscape, not so much as-- I say, just looking rather than just seeing, because looking involves your body. Looking is an active thing.

We're aware of what we're looking at in terms of our feet, the pull of gravity, and standing in one place. We're aware that space is all around us that way, as we think of ourselves as like a vertical pole centered somewhere. I made these abstracted colored verticals. I put them in the background. I'm thinking, well, that's the landscape. As I'm sitting there painting my paintings, I'm painting the landscape.

It was a tricky way of getting myself to think, I'm actually outdoors painting, but I'm actually painting from my painting. Then I put the Asian landscape, as I call it, in front of it. The transparency also links to the idea of the overall, seeing through and around. You want to be, well, I guess Emerson says the transparent eyeball. That's what you want to become in the front of the landscape. It brought together a lot of different things.

I put the rocks down. The old butterfly collection. I used to collect butterflies when I was a kid. That was my experience of going out and wandering in fields around where I grew up in Pittsburgh, which was not a particularly great natural environment, but it was interesting to me. I try to incorporate all these different things into this thing. I've been thinking about Matisse a lot because he had this sense, like with the Red Studio and with the dance, the idea of art being very expansive and incorporating everything in color and light in particular.

Because just like space surrounds us, light fills our total space. A lot of the little abstract color pieces that I put in my paintings are just tokens to represent the fact that there's stuff out there we're not necessarily attending to, but it's there. We're aware of the light, we're aware of the light, and we know we're in this landscape and we're seeing it, even if we're not able to remember everything that we're looking at at that moment. The camera can do that. The camera can take a picture, but we have to do it step by step.

Alison Stewart: What we see isn't necessarily what the camera captures.

Hearne Pardee: Oh, yes, definitely. I'm very frustrated. I did some photos that are in the show there, which I deliberately didn't make good photos, and then I collaged on top of them, because I don't really like idealizing the image that my phone gives me. I notice a lot of things now where it enhances the contrasts because it thinks that's what I want to see. I like putting the photograph next to the painting and making people think then, well, "How do we see this? How do I know it's a photograph? How do I know it's a painting? What difference does that make in terms of the visual experience?"

Alison Stewart: You were talking about light earlier. What is the light like in your studio where you work?

Hearne Pardee: I had a great studio. Since we retired, we had to get out of the studio, but I had a studio with huge skylights. It was the best studio I think I'll ever have. I didn't have to turn on the lights. The light was always there. It was north-facing skylights. When I walked in, I was just happy. Even a cloudy day, you didn't have to turn on a light.

Alison Stewart: When you were working on the art for this show, where were you? Did you have a thesis going in?

Hearne Pardee: No, it accumulated. It's been four years since I had a previous show, and this has developed out of that. Some of things come more directly out of stuff in the last show, and other things are newer, like these photographs with collage. It evolved. Then, with COVID, I was working at home. That's fine. I could go out and paint. I was allowed to go into the studio because I was all by myself and nobody was in the building.

I kept going pretty much in the studio and I began working more on the floor. I guess, that's where some of these pieces that you notice in the gallery on the floor came out of my conversations with a choreographer, David Grenke, who's also just recently retired as a professor at UC Davis. We shared an interest in space and the way that we move through space.

I think dance and visual art are very closely connected in that sense. If you don't think of dance as ballet, like Swan Lake or something, if you think about just moving and your body being in relation to other bodies in space, then there's a lot of connections where artists have collaborated with dancers for a long time.

Alison Stewart: That's what's going to happen on September 23rd at 4:00 PM?

Hearne Pardee: That's right. We were putting paper on the floor and then realized that's a difficult thing to do, so we took pictures and printed it on vinyl. We have these big sheets of vinyl, which are very easy to move and very easy to clean up. They're on the floor of the gallery and the dancers are going to come in. There'll be three dancers and one narrator. I'm not sure what he's going to narrate. Dave hasn't shared all that with me. The gallery will be the stage. There won't be a set of chairs for the audience or anything. Everybody will be in the total performance space. We'll see how it goes. I hope it doesn't get too crowded. That's the only thing I'm worried about now.

Alison Stewart: How did this combination come to? Was it through the friendship? Was it through--?

Hearne Pardee: I've always had an interest in dance. I actually took dance lessons at one point with Mary Anthony, who was a great dance teacher, and she liked my ankles. That was about as far as I got with being a dancer. I especially like Merce Cunningham for all his collaborations and the multimedia things that he and Robert Rauschenberg and others did.

When we got to know Dave Grenke, who had been with Paul Taylor, he still worked with the Paul Taylor company. They, of course, collaborated with Alex Katz and other visual artists. It was great to get to talk to him. We shared a lot of ideas.

Alison Stewart: Have you gotten to see how people react to art on the floor?

Hearne Pardee: They like it. I said, "I know as I put this on the floor, they're going to like this a lot more. They're going to look at the floor, not the walls." [laughs] It's striking, of course, because you don't normally see the art displayed that way, although a lot of people do that. It's been very positive. It's bright colors. It's fun. A woman was saying, "This would be nice in our living room." I thought, "What does she mean? On the floor of her living room or--?"

Alison Stewart: I found myself wanting to skirt around it. I couldn't bring myself to walk on it.

Hearne Pardee: Some people are oblivious and just walk right over it, but most people try and stay off it. We're going to go in and wash the floor and clean it up before the dancers get in there.

Alison Stewart: My guest is Hearne Pardee. The name of the show is Just Looking at Bowery Gallery in the Landmark Arts building at 547 West 27th Street. It's up until the end of September. This dance performance we've been discussing with the art is happening on September 23rd at 4:00 PM. I mentioned that you work as a writer.

Hearne Pardee: Yes, I've always. I've never really given up on the academic basis. Like I said, I didn't start out to be an artist. I took a lot of art history and literature and been interested in poetry. I flirted with the idea of trying to get a master's degree in art history along with the MFA, and then I realized that was really going to be too much.

Writing art criticism came as a very useful compromise, where if I knew an artist's work and I felt like I could say something about it. Sometimes it's good for me. I've learned a lot from writing about artists that challenge me a little bit and I think, "I don't know. I don't quite understand this." I go in writing about it. It definitely is a way to extend my-- Although writing drives you nuts too, and it takes so much time.

[laughter]

Alison Stewart: I was going to ask you, what do you get out of interviewing someone like Wayne Thiebaud?

Hearne Pardee: We had known Wayne Thiebaud for many years. He was around at UC Davis for 20 years until he died at the age of 101. He was always very articulate, always interested. It's funny, after he died, we would have friends who say, "I still keep thinking I should go talk to Wayne about this," because he was somebody, you see something and you share it with him. The interview was just very natural, but it was also very intimidating because he reads philosophy and he knew a great deal and thought so much about art overall, his years of work, that it was a challenge, but very rewarding. I enjoyed that.

Alison Stewart: What would you advice, guidance would you give to a young artist starting out?

Hearne Pardee: Just look.

Alison Stewart: Just look.

Hearne Pardee: Pay attention. It's interesting, Bruce Nauman, the conceptual artist, was at Davis. He was Wayne Thiebaud's teaching assistant.

Alison Stewart: Oh my gosh.

Hearne Pardee: They didn't get along very well because [laughs] Bruce did not draw and everything. Somebody asked him recently, "What did Wayne Thiebaud teach you?" He said, "He taught me to pay attention." There's a famous sign he put up called Pay Attention MFers in one of his shows. Bruce is very dedicated to that, so it was an important lesson, I think. What can you do? There's so much now to look at that. It's very difficult to know how to direct someone. You need to be paying attention. That's the thing.

Alison Stewart: Just looking, pay attention, subtitle, that's what we'll call it, at Bowery Gallery. That is through the end of this month. The special dance performance will happen on September 23rd at 4:00 PM. My guest has been Hearne Pardee. Hearne, thank you for coming to the studio.

Hearne Pardee: Thank you. I've enjoyed this.

 

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