Grand allusion: James Meyer talks with Anne Truitt - Interview

ArtForum, May, 2002 by James Meyer

AT: I worked in between carpools and buying food and cooking and whatever else I had to do. I lived an outside life, but really I was living an inside life.

JM: Yet you were a personal friend of the people running the country. A lot of your friends were in the CIA.

AT: I've always thought it was peculiar, too. I was floating around in that world...I didn't pay attention to what was going on. And remember, much was secret. People were covert. It was interesting really, looking back on it. But my private feelings about it were that it was just very strange. I don't understand why fate led me to be in such a situation.

JM: There doesn't seem to be a clear-cut relation between your work and that situation--which doesn't mean there isn't one.

AT: I don't really see it. But that's exactly the way it was.

JM: You turned eighty last year. Has age, in some way, affected your work?

AT: I don't think age makes any difference except that it endows a person with freedom. Age cuts you off, untethers you. It's a great feeling. The other thing is, when you get to be eighty, you're looking back and down, out from a peak. I can look down and see my life from my own little hill; I see this plain, all the years of experience.

JM: Does that mean making the work is somehow easier?

AT: No, it's harder. It costs me much more; I have all those years that I have to face and it takes a certain amount of courage. It's not a light and foolish thing. Color is getting more complex and harder and harder to mix. There are more complexities in it because my own experience is much more complex.

JM: Is it physically more difficult to work?

AT: It's not more difficult to be faithful, but I have to be faithful to more and more. And I have less psychic energy as I get older. Heaven knows I have less physical energy!

JM: But it has not changed the fundamental process or ambition of the work. If anything, the ambition has increased.

AT: Yes, I would say, by leaps and bounds.

JM: And the laborious process you use--painting the wood support in layer after layer of crosshatched color--hasn't changed. What happens if you're not pleased with the result?

AT: I take the color off and begin again.

JM: All the color? The white undercoats?

AT: Take them all off. Go back to the wood and come forth again. You never make the same mistake twice. Next time I will have learned.

JM: How do you get rid of the twenty or so coats?

AT: It's a horrible job. You have to wear a mask and rubber gloves and use newspaper and paint remover to take off all the paint. And sand.

JM: To the bare wood.

AT: It's a patient business. Sometimes you can be on that very last coat and it'll go wrong. All of a sudden it just won't do anymore: My hand goes out. So it's always a question of attention, of waiting.

JM: Do you put the sculpture away?

AT: I take the color off it and begin again. Or I go in the house and wait. Or I move on to another sculpture and look at it out of the corner of my eye. At a certain point I'll go back to it. I don't exactly fix it. I just pick up where I am.