A Conversation in 1992 with Robert Stanley, painter

Good evening.  I'm James Carroll, and I'd like to welcome you to New Arts Alive.  Today we have as our guest, Robert Stanley, painter.  Bob, I'd like you to tell us about the show that you have going on right now.  I'm interested in starting off with what is most immediate, then we'll go back to see some of your early work.  As I understand, you have a show going on right now in Italy.

I'm having a show in Asiago, Italy, a skiing village in the Alps.  It's a show of paintings of all nudes.  This particular show is nudes that I've done in the past three years.  It's very beautiful, and at the end of the program we'll get to see some of those slides.

In other words, you're giving our viewers a sort of an enticement to see your most recent work (laughs).

Yes, and if your viewers don't want to see paintings of nudes, they can turn us off about 30 or 40 minutes into the show.

During our conversation before the show, you said you were quite fascinated by Giotto.  You said you had been in his chapel and became somewhat taken by his work.

Well, it was lovely.  We were there in the winter, and being cold and windy, there was nobody there.  We were able to go into the chapel, my wife and myself, and be completely surrounded by these wonderful frescos from the late 13th century.  The ceilings and the walls, it just totally enveloped you.  It was just like being enveloped by Bach.  Visually it gripped you.  I tried to do something like that in the scroll paintings in the 70's, but I didn't have the ceilings (laughs).

Let's go to the beginning, the first slide.

This is a Prince Valiant, a comic strip most people know.  I grew up in Yonkers, New York, in the 30's.  At that time each of the Sunday comics came in a very large format, a full page, about the size of The New York Times.  As a child, you became enveloped with these pictures when you laid them out on the floor.  It's from these pictures that I first started to draw.

This next one is Terry and the Pirates, done by Milton Caniff.  By the time I was nine or ten years old, I was doing comic strips, Caniff?]style drawings.  But I discovered, by the time I was 11 or 12 that I had no gift for storytelling.  I had a gift for pictures but not for doing the story, so I gave that up.  But I continued drawing and painting.

Next is a picture that I made in 1956, right after I got out of art school.  It's part collage.  There's some newspaper in it.  There's some white lead in it, which I believe is now banned in this country, a wonderful paint, poisonous as it is.  This particular painting is my response to the poetry of Garcia Lorca.  I believe the title of this is A los Cinco de la Tarde or five o'clock in the afternoon, when the bullfights begin.

This next one is a few years later, again with collage.  It's a response to Nathaniel West's Day of the Locust, a novel a friend of mine asked me to read and perhaps come up with an image for it.   This is what I came up with.  This was done about 1960.

Are there any tactile qualities to it, besides the collage?

Yes, the paint is quite tactile, opaque paint.  It's an oil painting.  If you look in the upper right, a lot of scraping was going on, and below that you can see razor marks and a yellow slab which is put on very opaquely.  You also can see, on the leg on the left, the painting was done with a razor blade, which made those lines, so there is quite a bit of difference in imagery found in this compared with the previous painting.

This is really my post-student phase.  When I came to New York in 1953, I had given myself approximately 10 years—which is what I figured it would take—to develop as a painter.  I figured it would take most anyone at least 10 years.  That's how long it took Matisse, and if it took him that long, I figured that's how long it would take me (laughs).

That's a good premise (laughs).  I can follow that.

Here's a reproduction of a drawing by Matisse, The Rape of Europa.  I decided—I don't know quite how to say this because, in retrospect, I knew exactly what I was doing but at the time I couldn't have put it into words—I decided to have a dialogue with Matisse.  So I took this drawing, and in free hand I translated it into a painting.  This was my interpretation of the Matisse drawing.  I had no idea that Matisse had ever made a painting of that.  Years and years later, about three years ago, I saw a reproduction of his painting from that drawing.  But at this time, in about 1961, I didn't know that.

So we're jumping up pretty quickly, from your work in 1953 to around 1961.

That ten years or so was a lot of struggle.  I would paint every day during those ten years, and at the end of the year maybe I would have one painting that I liked, and I would throw the rest away.  I made a lot of drawings, and I made a lot of collages.  This next slide is one of the collages I did in the late 50's.  You can see that it has a lot of Abstract Expressionist elements in it.  It's made up probably from the Sunday New York Times Magazine section.

What size is this?

It's very small, about 8 by 12 inches.  This next slide is another one that I did in the early 60's, about 1962.  It has to do with my response to what I felt was the horrible war going on in Algeria.  These are images from an article on that war, from the Sunday New York Times, that I just cut up and rearranged.

This third one is from a Playboy magazine, actually.  As I indicated, I was having problems with painting.  I didn't know exactly how to go about it, in painting, to get what I wanted.  A friend of mine who saw this said, "Why don't you paint like this."  But I didn't want to do that.  James Rosenquist had just had a show, and there were big paintings that looked very much like collage, and I didn't see any reason for me to do that.

When you speak of his collage, you mean the billboard size that had been cut, and they were still quite large, over life?]sized, right?

Yes.  They were quite large paintings.  They were essentially a collage esthetic.  I was trying to find a way to make very clear imagery that incorporated all my understanding of the abstract painting that had been going on in the 20th century, that took advantage of the return to a flat picture plane.  Incorporating drawing and painting is one thing - and it was not an easy thing for me to come up with in 1962—but one night, as we can see in the next slide, a friend of mine had brought back from Paris a catalog of a Poussin exhibition that took place there in 1960.   I had been studying Poussin on and off since art school, a great pregnant artist for other artists to study.  I think that's the right way to say it.

One time in 1962, at the end of 1962 perhaps, I was looking through the book, the catalog, and it hit me almost like:  "Eureka, that's the way to do it!"  There were the black masses, the line, the clear drawing, and at the same time it had a wonderful abstract quality, so I tried to incorporate that, and this is one of the first paintings that I came up with that I think successfully did it.  This was based on a Life magazine article where they did a story on Christine Keeler and the fall of Profumo.  In a way this painting was prophetic, because for some reason at the bottom I decided to put this executed person.  Or at least I felt they were executing him, Stephen Ward, and a few weeks later he died, committed suicide.

What's the size of this?  So that people looking at the slide of this can get a sense of the size relationship.

We're talking about 5-feet high.  From the black and white, I decided to see what it would be like to add color to the black areas, and in this next work, to the grey area.  Here I used a very popular image.  This was the New York Giants quarterback at the time, Y.A. Tittle, and the Playmate of the Year, and I just thought they made a very nice juxtaposition of male and female, reds and blues and whites, basic primary colors.

I don't know if it's clear, but I was sort of separating out the elements that before were integrated into collage—where they were intermingled.  I felt it was time to separate them out.  I loved the popular imagery, and so in that way my work associated for a while, for about a year?]and?]a?]half or so, with Pop Art, and I was promoted that way by dealers.  I went along with it, and in a way it was fine.  I got some shows for the first time, and I was able to quit doing other things to make money and just paint full time.

An opportunity came along to do a rock 'n roll show in early 1965 and I jumped at it.  This was the Beatles, and the next one, Mick Jagger.  The next two are of the Beach Boys.  I had that show, it was very successful, and afterwards I tried to figure out what else I wanted to paint.

I was very interested in the nude, but I wasn't that interested in Playboy nudes and those kind of nudes in particular.  This is an old movie still that I found of Hedy Lamar, which I think is fairly famous.  I made a large painting of that, of her running nude through the woods.

Here was one of my favorite actresses of the time, Monica Vitti, who starred in L'Aventura and L'Note.  I thought she had a wonderful, tragic quality to her face.  I like all the abstract shapes, the spots, the hair shapes.  About this time, the editor of Sports Illustrated, the art editor, saw my work and asked if I'd be interested in doing some paintings that they would reproduce.  I thought that was fun.  That was great.

I went to Indianapolis, and I took some photographs and made some paintings from them.  I think I left out the fact that I was working from photographs all this time, other people's photographs.  About this time I started working from my own photos.  They sent me to football games.  I got to see the great Johnny Unitas perform, and this next painting is Raymond Berry making a wonderful leaping catch in the air down in Baltimore.

With this particular painting I got more involved with the compositional elements of Poussin, as in The Rape of Europa, where there's a big mass of figures all intertwined.  Well, the football players reminded me somewhat of that:  the interplay of whites and darks, the abstract shapes of them, and creating the figures, which I think are reasonably clear.

These are, as I say, all from photos that I took at various football games.  There's the great Jim Brown running, and this next one was a wonderful player for Baltimore, Tom Matte.  He was a tough halfback, a runner.  Baltimore lost all their quarterbacks in one game, and Tom Matte had to come in and be their quarterback.  He'd never done it in his life, and they won the game.

He probably never did it again.

He never did it again, either.  These are a few more drawings that I made from the football series.  We all know pro football is very popular today.  This photo shows the stands at a game in San Francisco, but as you can see, they were empty, very empty.  There were a lot of seagulls at that game.

This next work harks back to auto racing.  There was actually a horrendous crash in the first lap of that race.  Automobiles, racing cars, went flying over my head.  I was kneeling near the edge of the racetrack when the crash took place right there, and somehow I did not get hit.

I've sort of glossed over the erotic paintings I was doing at this time, but this next work is one of them.  I did a whole series of them.  It started in 1964, and the series ended essentially in 1966 or 1967.  They proved to be very popular, both in New York City and all over Europe.  None of the erotic paintings were from my own photographs.  This was based, I think, on a photograph that was taken around 1910 or 1912 in a photographer's studio.  During the day you had the family come in and pose in front of this forest backdrop, and at night they would photograph people making love in front of the same backdrop.

After I did this and several others of these, I became fascinated with the backdrop, so I went out to Central Park with my camera and started taking photographs of trees.  These are huge paintings.  This one, for example, was 8 x 10 feet.  The next one is 8 x 5 feet, The Branches.  The slide is a view of an exhibition that I had in Cincinnati with Robert Ryman, who since has become very well known around the world.

From the trees, I turned my camera to the ground and got pictures of the ground.  I thought they made wonderful abstract patterns.  At the same time, they were very realistic.  I also felt that it harkened back to my student days, the late 50's, when Abstract Expressionism was the light of New York.  This was my way of finally dealing, I felt successfully, with that aesthetic, but in a very different way of going about it; that is, in a very careful, classical way, I got the abstract shapes.  In this next slide, here we have basically grass and leaves.  This was a quite large painting, about 100 inches high.

These next works, are these your garbage or trash paintings?

Yes.  I went to the country in 1969 to visit a friend in Massachusetts, and I thought what a wonderful opportunity to photograph some more trees, real trees, not Central Park trees (laughs).  What happened was I found all this garbage on the ground, and I thought it was more interesting than the leaves, so I started doing these paintings that were based on trash.

It was very nice, because whenever I needed pictures, I could walk out of my house, walk around the block, and come back with 36 or 72 photographs, most of which I could use.  They all made very interesting pictures.  In another way, different from the landscapes, they became still lives, in a sense.  There are cans and bags and labels.

They have a lot of similarity to the process you were using in your earlier works, which was the collage.  Very close similarities to what is probably one of the most significant 20th century movements, collage.

It certainly is one of the most original of the 20th century.  That was one of the things I liked about these.  They were nature's collages.  I didn't make the collage.  It was there on the ground.  This one is also a quite large painting, about 9 feet tall.  Here is another one.  This next one is also of a local milieu, as it were.  You could walk around and see it on the ground (laughs).  But I thought that they made very interesting paintings.

Now at this time I started doing them in a Flashe acrylic.  I did the one in black that you saw, and the one in blue and white.  Well, I decided to do one in yellow and white.  Now the drawing for these, just the drawing, took about a month, very intricate drawing, so I had all that work done on one painting, and when I put down the yellow, I hated it.  I didn't know what to do.  I didn't want to abandon the drawing.  It was a very good drawing, so I decided to white-out the yellow, and when I put the white over the yellow, it turned pink.  I thought that was magical, so I decided to do that deliberately with the rest of that painting and a few subsequent garbage paintings.

I would make the very careful drawing, put arbitrary colors around the canvas, then put this white over it to see what would happen.  They made very beautiful, luminous paintings, though they were nearly invisible for photographing.  I decided then, however, to go back to the figure, because now I had done the landscapes, and I had done the still lifes.  I could go back to the figure with this approach in mind, so I did a series of nude paintings, of my family and friends, done this way with these very pale colors.

Did you take slides of them and then work from those?

I took black and white photographs of them.

And continue that process?

Yes, continuing that process.  I would then add color, erase the color with the white paint, add color, erase, and in this instance, as you can see in the right hand corner, I left some of the color just sitting there.  This is one of the drawings for that set.  A writer, curator, friend, Mario Amaya, posed for this one. He was the curator, director of the New York Cultural Center at the time.

This next work is my stepson.  I made a whole set of them.  I think I made about 20 paintings, and I showed them at the New York Cultural Center, and it made a very nice show, a very luminous show.

A lot of these look very much like there is shadow—or the dark areas where the color was is shadow.

Yes, the darker area here is where the shadow is.  There's no halftone. 

And then the color is sort of tactile underneath it, or it's impasto.  Isn't it somewhat?  And then do you put the white over it?  Is the white impasto too?

Well, the white is supposed to, but because it was this acrylic, it was also slightly transparent, and so it allowed tonalities to not exactly bleed through, but you could see them.  We have a word in painting, pentimento, which means that you can see what's underneath.

In other words, it wasn't a complete cancellation.  That was part of it, to let it breath or germinate.

That's a good way to put it.  Okay, so I got through this series, and I was invited to go down to Louisiana. I had now worked in this way, or in a variety of ways, but essentially this way, for about 12 years—we're now up to 1975—and I felt I was getting a little stale, and I wanted to do something different.  I didn't know what it was, but I was invited to go to Louisiana.  I had to have an exhibition down there at the end of the time, so I decided when I got there, with my wife and daughter, to document our stay in Baton Rouge.

Well, the apartment was a furnished apartment, and we decided the first day we were there not to rent a television for at least the first week. In New York, our television set, with two children, was on 24 hours a day, year in and year out, so we thought it would be fun to see what it would be like to not have television for a little while.  We did not rent a set the whole time we were there.  The apartment filled up with coloring books and crossword puzzles and pictures and all kinds of magnificent stuff.  After a little while, I decided that that's what I would do for my show:  I would document this apartment, in a sense.

I got a hold of a 33-foot piece of canvas, linear length, 7?]feet high, and first I did the window of the apartment.  To contradict myself, I decided to go back to 1963 and start the painting the way I started that whole 12?]year period.  Not just to do it exactly the same way but to see where it would lead this time.

The second image in the painting, which has all those little squares on it, is from a crossword puzzle book that I found in the apartment.  My wife bought it or my daughter bought it.  It's a skill-o-gram, and it looked to me like almost a history of abstract art.  The instructions for the diagram were to take the numbered squares, fill them in on a diagram, and when you got all through, you'd have a genuine artist picture.  I thought that was just too good to resist.  We never saw this whole painting done, by the way, until I hung it up in the gallery, because I did the entire thing on a tube, on a roll.  I only had a six-foot wall to work with.

Almost like a scroll.

It was a scroll.  I unrolled a six-foot section, did a part of the painting, then unrolled the next section, so that the skill-o-gram, which is about 12 foot section, had to be done in two parts.  Because this was an oil-based canvas, I had to use an oil-based acrylic.  I can't remember the name of it now, but there is one acrylic that you can mix with turpentine, and it would stay on the oil-based canvas.

It's called Magna paint.  Bocour makes it.

I didn't like it very much, but it worked for this particular painting.  This next slide shows you the diagram piece in front on the floor, where you would fill in the painting.

Actually, the whole piece, because of its segmenting, it's almost like a film in a way because when you look at a film it's also segmented.  So it becomes a panoramic view that I would associate in one way with a filmstrip or a motion picture film, which has each picture segmented.

That's an absolutely correct observation, a very good point, because part of the idea—and you mentioned collage earlier and how important it was in the 20th century—was that I felt we were now 75 years into doing collage, and it might be time to move beyond it.  That was one part of the idea.  The second part was, there was an artist who does collage who came down to Baton Rouge and gave a lecture on it.  One of the themes of his lecture was that collage is so successful because the 20th century audience is receptive to it because of movies and television and newspapers and all of that.  And so the audience makes collages in their brains, all the time, and I thought, well, if the audience makes it, why should I make it?  So I will lay out all the information and let the audience make their own collage in their own heads.

You make them go through the process of putting it into one unit.

That's correct.  They could get what they wanted to.  It could trigger whatever imagery that would trigger in their brains.  In fact, that is what happened.  In this exhibition back at P.S. 1, where I had a 99-foot section of the painting, two people very specifically said that was what was happening to them.  It was triggering all kinds of things in their brains, other imagery.  Then a reviewer, in Art in America, he actually included something in his review that wasn't in the painting at all.  The painting had triggered that part, which I thought was one thing that made it very successful.

This whole section is about the Baton Rouge apartment—and being there and teaching—and later I continued this back in my studio in New York, where I am going on with the Baton Rouge idea because I felt I hadn't finished the imagery.

Could you tell us a little about the images?  The motorcycle, for example, or the bowl of strawberries.

Every morning outside the apartment, a motorcycle would start up.  The strawberries were from a coloring book, and I tried to do them exactly as they were done in the coloring book.  Somebody, my daughter or her friends, had colored them, and I found them there.  I made no inventions in this painting.  These were all found images.  But at this point in time, I decided to try to translate the feeling of the coloring book, at least partly, into oil paint. So part of it is painted in oil, but the bowl is done with Crayola in exactly the way—or as close as I could come—to the way it was done originally.  But the feeling of the colors of the strawberries, I tried to translate into paint.  On either side of these images, next to the motorcycle and strawberries, we have Connie Gordon's color wheel, which I thought made wonderful bookends, as it were, for that little segment of the painting.  Abstract geometry, beautiful color.

We had a pool outside and two or three times a week my wife and daughter would say, "I feel green.  Let's go out and get a tan."  There in the coloring book was this picture of somebody sunbathing and the caption underneath it, "I'm going to work on my tan."  It had been colored green, I guess by Lori or Marilyn.

Now as I understand it, those coloring books had already been translated with crayon by a child or somebody, and so when you were going to use that, you were going to literally translate those markings that were in the coloring book, and you used those in your paintings.

That's right.

Anyway, that's my understanding, because I've seen a couple of these that you've done and it looks almost like a child's work, I mean, you've captured the literal translation of that.

That's right.  Anyway, I tried hard (laughs).

Well, the child does it with such relaxed freedom, I don't know how anybody could do it in a painting, or at least as relaxed as a child would do it.  There also has to be an element of being very frugal, in a way, because if you put too much paint on it's gone.

Well, they threw away very few of the coloring books.  Those books were full, and I tried really as close as possible to translate what they had done, and most of them were beautiful.  I could have picked others, other imagery, but I picked the imagery that I used here because it really related to other things that were happening in our lives.  Like the pool outside.  Like the strawberries.  Like the sign outside of an ice cream store that said "Tin Roof Ice Cream."   Somebody had tried to color it to make it look like metal, for the tin roof ice cream.  Things like that.  It was a lot of fun to do.

In this other section, near the end of the scrolling painting, there's a logic problem there that Lori and Marilyn worked on all night, and when I woke up in the morning, I found it scribbled all over with red ballpoint pen, crumbled up and thrown on the floor.  I thought it made a great image. So when I got back to New York—it took me a long time to do this—I tried to duplicate first of all the diagram and then how they had filled it in and scribbled over it because they had made a mistake in solving the problem.   They had actually punched holes in the paper, so I ripped holes in the canvas to duplicate that.

Then the final image on this particular piece, that came from Connie Gordon's You Can Learn to Color in Minutes book, which I had bought as a joke and brought over to show to my graduate students.  When they would have trouble mixing paint, I would say, "Look here."  When you mastered Connie's method, this is what you could paint, Jean Jean the Clown.  I thought it was such an awful painting that I felt I had to end my own painting with this image.

So actually, when you spoke about what you were unable to do in your cartoons, the narrative part, the written part, the script, yet here you were creating a narrative, but you're not using words.

That's true.  I don't think I mentioned this, but when the idea first occurred to me to do this painting, the thing that popped directly into my mind was Bayou Tapestry, that wonderful tapestry that records the Norman invasion and conquest of England.  I had several books of art, and it seemed to me that was a wonderful way to do a narrative painting, so that was also part of the idea of doing this painting.

In this slide, that's you in front of the logic problem.

There's the young artist.  Ah, the old days (laughs).  Anyway, this shot gives you a sense of the scale of the painting.  Actually, I did show it at P.S. 1 in Long Island City the following year, 1977.

That was with Bart Wasserman.  That was the first show that they had in the auditorium.

That's correct.  We built the gallery.  They tore it down later, but we built a wonderful gallery there.  This next painting, this is a little trickier in a sense, I had the idea to focus a painting on one moment of my life, the way James Joyce and Ulysses focused on one day in the life of Leopold Bloom in Dublin, in 1905, I think it was.  In a sense, I was focused on essentially one minute of my life in Baton Rouge in 1976.  Now, over a year later, I'm still focused there, and I would get up every morning and my mind, in a way, would be thrown backwards in time, and I began to feel that I was living science fiction.  I had never read science fiction, so I got some books, almost at random, and discovered that yes, I was (laughs).

So the first image in this particular scroll was colored in when we first got back to New York, the very first night, in fact.  A bunch of people came over, and they said, "Coloring books!"  They all started coloring, and here we have a cyborg.  I thought that it would be interesting to tie it in with this time warp thing, because this next image is from a 1938 coloring book that I found in a barn somewhere.  It shows a little boy and a dirigible.  I was at my uncle's place in southwest Yonkers when the Hindenburg came over in 1938, and I remember seeing it directly overhead.  It was the same image I found in the coloring book, colored by some kid back in 1938 or 1939.  Then I found a thing in a bin on Broadway, the third image in the painting, clearly a circus poster from the 40's, so I thought, ah, this brings me up to the 40's.

Then the last image, this big black thing, brings us up to date.  This was out of Scientific American magazine.  It purported to show the largest known object in the universe, which was 18.6 million light years across.  But you couldn't see it.  You could only hear it.  So I tried to convey that image here.  It was very difficult to do it.  As you can see there's a lot of paint on that canvas.  It's sagging.  If you notice, almost in the middle, there is a cross, which the computer decided was in the middle of this huge, unseen object out in space.  This next painting depicts the same object in another way.  To me it looks like Bullwinkle in the cartoons, so I decided to use that to augment the other painting.  This is fairly large, about 9 x 12 feet.

I then continued on with the scrolls for a number of years, not focusing on Baton Rouge so much, but on different themes.  We'll zip through these.  This is two states, two states of different things:  two states of diagrams, a crossword puzzle, and that's supposed to be a picture of our galaxy.  Here's two states of the nude, both clothed and unclothed at  the same time.  This came from some picture magazine, and this is a diagram that I got from the Times which showed what went wrong at Three Mile Island.  I thought I'd like to do that because it doesn't show us anything, of course (laughs).  I also did some single and double image paintings:  a science theme and large head themes.  So now we come up to about 1983.

Now the paintings that you were showing there, that's where the poster for the New Arts Program came from.  In those you had little states.  The state of Louisiana and the others were quite small, but in the one that you made for the Program became a very large state, Pennsylvania.

They were all from The 50 States Coloring Book.  Whatever was in there I did exactly the way it was.  Now here we have New York State.  This is the last scroll, actually.  There's the quarks, and the previous one was a Penthouse picture.

Here we have a picture that kicked off all the paintings that I have been doing since, again with a found object.  It was a postcard that my wife found on the street.  A little postcard of this semi-nude young lady in white face picking her nose.  I had it pinned up on my wall for a number of years, and one day I decided to curate it, as it were—to translate it into paint, so I made a 7?]foot painting of it, and here's the same painting stretched.  In the previous slide, the painting was unstretched.  About this time, 1983, friends of my daughter, who were very familiar with this painting, were over for dinner, and they volunteered to pose in similar poses.  I thought that would be interesting.  I would do a few of these paintings in black and white.

These are done from photographs?

These are done from photographs that I took.  Now I've gone back to photographs that I've taken, the models all doing things with their hands.  I realized in the way I was painting that I was essentially having a conversation with Matisse and with Cimabue, whose works I have included here to illustrate this.  If we can zoom in on the slide, you can see a lot of quality that relates to their paintings.  By the way, it's getting harder  for me to talk about them because we're getting closer to the present.  The idea here was essentially, I realized fairly quickly, to talk to Giotto, Ducci, and Cimabue about the Madonnas that they did with the black abstract shapes for the clothing and the mottled areas for the skin areas.  That's what they really started doing, and in my mind, these paintings clearly related to those.

They're almost icons in a way.  In other words it has very little to do with the subject.  In many ways, it has more to do with how you applied paint.  What you were doing here was basically working with grays.

Blacks, whites, and grays.  The difference between these and the earlier ones in 1963 and so forth is that I went into tonality.  I went into gray tones.

Also, I notice on the edges of the paintings, in this case it's on both sides, the right and the left, are marks of paint, almost like you were dabbing, so to speak, with your brush.  Kind of pointing the brush in some ways, not necessarily that this is what you were doing, but they became visible on your finished product, the way that you framed it.

Well, I decided to leave them in.  They were tests, paint tests, because paint on a horizontal palette takes the light differently than when you're working on a vertical surface, on the canvas itself.  I just decided it looked all right, so I left it in.  I could have cut it off.

Also, the element of your surface quality, the plane of the surface becomes very prevalent, as opposed to a dimensional quality.  In other words, it doesn't look like you're looking out a window at the image. So your work here has very much to do with the surface.

The flat surface is what I'm after all the time.  I believe that this is one of the great things that we finally got back to with Manet and Cezanne.  We finally went back to Cimabue and the power of the picture frame.

In this next painting I've slipped back into using color.  About 1987 or so I started painting not just in grays and tones but in as full a range of color as I could get, still keeping the same idea of the black flat area, the flat plane, and the mottled upper torso and face.  This particular model was doing things with her hand, thinking about the Diana painting where the girl was picking her nose.  She's scratching her cheek and doing things like that.  All these models, by the way, are friends of my daughter.  They all volunteered to pose, and they loved the paintings.

Now we get to one of the most interesting models here.  I don't know if people are aware of this, but the camera has a certain kind of magic with some people.  This model looks different almost from second to second.  One minute she'll look like a Madonna, another minute she'll look like a high fashion model, and in a third moment, she'll just be something entirely different.  It's quite amazing.

That's Andrea?

This is Andrea, and in this last one, she looks like a prostitute.  About this time—I had been doing these for several years—I decided to do some horizontal paintings.  This is where we're in Italy, which brings us totally up to date.  These are the paintings that are being shown in Italy now, the ones you asked me about much earlier.  In these, I'm going both horizontal and vertical.

They're very...surface.  It's hard to explain this to anyone who's seeing the works on the screen, but they have nothing to do with penetration into the space as far as a Renaissance space is concerned.  It has nothing to do with that at all.

Bob, I want to thank you for being with us and sharing your insights into your work.  To all of you at home, thank you for tuning in and good night.

transcribed and edited by Geoffrey N. Chambers

Robert Stanley, born in 1932 in Yonker, New York, died  of cancer on November, 1997.