Steir Gazing - Pat Steir - Brief Article

Interview, Dec, 1999 by Brooks Adams

The painter Pat Steir has always been one step ahead. She was a book designer and art director in buzzing mid-'60s New York, and a militant feminist and conceptual artist in the burgeoning Los Angeles art scene of the early '70s. Then she escaped to cozy Amsterdam, where she became an arch appropriator of old master painting in the '80s. Now she's creating ravishing landscape abstractions in Manhattan's meatpacking district. "I'm having a renaissance," quips this glamorous fifty-nine-year-old, her long tresses flowing as she leads the way around her West 14th Street studio, where shimmering nine-foot-square canvases are being readied for a show at Marlborough Chelsea in New York City (through January 1).

Inspired by Chinese landscape painting, calligraphy, and Whistler's nocturnes, these new works comprise a suite called "Moon Mountain Ghost Water." "Actually, I'm having a second renaissance," she says, beaming over the fact that her 1973 painting Line Lima has a place of honor in "The American Century Part 2: 1950-2000," now on view at the Whitney Museum of American Art. With a concurrent show at the Baldwin Gallery in Aspen, Colorado (through December 24), Steir's star is shining bright.