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PETE McCOMMONS
FP: Why the hell did you move to Brooklyn?
JH: Well, now, here in the last act I go to
Brooklyn. One of the things I thought would be
good for me... one of the things I thought would
be good, given that I was retiring, would be to
find some new experiential thing that would get
the synapses cooking again. And, you know, what
better than to face something sort of difficult?
And for me, New York would be about as difficult
as I could make. Because I had already done the
foreign thing with Italy; I knew how to live in
another country and pick up language and such.
But New York was really tough, on a lot of
grounds, because in fact you could see the reali
ty of whether you were an accepted artist or not.
You hide out in the hinterlands and you could
always think of yourself as a genius, because
you've never actually come up against the art
world, you know, in the most immediate sense,
because you didn't live in the store. I've always
maintained that when people go to New York,
they live in the store.
FP: So, was it a difficult move?
JH: I thought there are maybe a couple of
hundred people I know who have come from
Athens who live in New York now. I know a lot of
young people there; I don't know a lot of older
people. I know people who are successful; I know
people who are struggling and emerging, and I
said, well, you know, you're not going to be com
pletely alone there.
I also did another thing. I took a friend with
me who is an artist and a former student of mine
and another fellow is a former student of mine
who is married and lives around the corner from
the building. The two of them wanted studio
space, and they were up there, so I didn't do
it completely alone. I had some backup, some
bodyguards, some people to show me the stuff.
Both these guys had gone to Pratt, so they
knew the city. One of them loves New York and
Brooklyn and Bushwick and had his studio there
before he moved into mine. The other one was
more wary and didn't like New York and didn't
necessarily trust it or have such a good time with
it. Well, that's fine. We had both sides there.
FP: You found a good studio?
JH: I was able to find this wonderful space.
It was very expensive, actually the lease for one
year is about two and a half times the price I
paid for my entire studio over on Meigs Street.
But that's just New York prices. Everybody says I
got a good deal. This is New York, you know.
The main thing about having a big studio is
that I do large paintings: 12-and-a-half feet. It
was important to have a showplace for them,
something that gave a good context for these
large paintings. So when we have people from
galleries over, we can really do a nice spread
of work, and the light is beautiful in there; it's
almost like the light in Tuscany: clerestory win
dows, and it's very beautiful light.
But about New York, of course here I am
sort of a country boy at this point, or suburban
boy, man, old man, dropped down in this part of
Brooklyn, which many people would call a broken
down sort of thing. We live near five cement
plants; there's trash in the streets; there's empty
lots, and there's people hanging around, quite
a bit of crime with holdups and stuff, robberies,
and you, know it's got a little bit of a dangerous
thing to it. But what it did for me visually is in
credibly exciting and beautiful. Incredibly excit
ing. The textures, the mixed cultures all around
me; the people, the subways and the tempo: you
just feel energized all day long. I must say that
I've never had, since I've been here, a boring day.
FP: Has the move affected your painting?
JH: At first it was a struggle to paint in this
different environment, you know, different sense
of light and air; I thought that I was doing bad
paintings, because they weren't like the ones I
was doing here. I brought 30 paintings with me
that I thought were good to show galleries, and
here I was off on another tangent, and I was
devastated by this, and I said, these are crap,
but the other guys said, no, they're good; keep
going. Now I look back and there was an awk
wardness of not understanding, but I see that it
produced an edgy kind of art that relates more to
that environment. I didn't consciously, willfully
do that: quite the opposite, and the paintings I
did here look much more laid-back by comparison
and more meditative. There's a value to that,
too. One doesn't disown that experience. So the
paintings up there are much more jagged and
more irritating to look at, but I don't know, I
think that can be beautiful, too.
FP: But you're already well known as a painter?
* JH: No, I'm not well known. I'm known only
for film. Not for painting at all. I have no reputa
tion as a painter whatsoever: only in this region.
I showed in New York in the early '70s, showed
in two different galleries, had five shows in New
York and was reviewed favorably in the New York
Times and such as that. Then I left that gallery-
well the one I was in, called Poindexter, closed,
and so I never pursued it further and never
missed it So I got out of the loop, and nobody
knows that I've been painting all this time. And
filmmaking people aren't really interested in
painting. Painting people are more interested in
films than the other way around.
FP: That's hard to believe.
JH: I'm actually as much an emerging artist
as anybody. It's a huge uphill battle if you're old.
That is a very different thing. If I were in gradu
ate school and were painting halfway decently, I
would be much more attractive to them, because
they want to cultivate somebody through time.
And time's not on my side. On the other hand, I
think, art has never been about what age you are
to do it. The paintings have a useful life, hope
fully, and it doesn't matter what the age is: we're
looking at the paintings.
Pcta McCommons
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