TM: There is currently an exhibition of Abstract Expressionism at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, including the early paintings of Phillip Guston.
KH: The shimmering field works?
TM: Yes. Speaking about refraction of light, I never noticed the quality of paint or thought about that until I saw those works from the fifties juxtaposed with the works from the sixties. Guston made the paint himself in the fifties. It is actually very matte. The longer I spent looking at these early paintings the more I realized how the materials did in fact enhance the art-making. Rilke wrote of “hand-work” in relation to Cézanne’s painting. The same sentiment is true with Guston. The works do shimmer as you described, but not because they reflect light from the surface. The materials produce this sensation by the nature of the composition of the paint and his touch.
KH: Yes. I agree. The shimmering red field paintings with all their cross hatching seem to glow.
TM: Considering “hand-work,” how were your experiences growing up in the rural Northwest?
KH: It was very different. My parents owned a ten-acre piece of property in Washington State.
TM: How do you imagine it affected you artistically? You said earlier that you had much more exposure to Asian art. What was the environment like?
KH: My Dad left Los Angeles to escape the city, so when we moved we kind of stopped…we did not drop out totally, but we were pretty isolated. We had a farm with animals. We were not a big producing farm or anything like that, but we were self-sustaining. That affected me in terms of my work. I think about not wasting things. I think about economy. I guess when you grow up that way you start to realize that everything you do has to be as good as possible. If it’s not, you may not have enough food or enough food for the animals, enough food for the winter. You grow to appreciate things differently. That’s probably the most fundamental way growing up there affected me. I grew up doing everything by hand. I did not have many outside influences. We had a television, but we did not sit around and watch it much. It was different. We canned all our own food.
TM: That experience sounds enriching on many levels.
KH: It still sounds wonderful to me too. It is an extreme amount of work. It is almost an environment where there is no room for art. I didn’t grow up with books. I studied the piano, but I never went to a museum until I was in my twenties. There is not much room for that.
TM: Because time is taken by labor?
KH: Yes. I can’t overstate how much work it is. It is rewarding, very rewarding.
TM: There is something very beautiful about the labor of “making.” When you become comfortable baking bread, making yogurt, jarring preserves, there is a feeling of accomplishment that I find similar to art-making. Baking boules of bread requires a temperament that is the same for drawing, paying attention to all different factors while progressing horizontally at the same time. The seasons affect everything.
KH: Yes, especially the cyclical nature of things. It must. I know for me it does; the active and dormant aspects of it in relation to my work.
TM: Explain what you mean by active and dormant.
KH: Well, there is definitely an on-time. It’s called the summer. You are living that kind of life and in the autumn you have to get everything out of the ground and jammed. It’s every day, all day. Then there is the winter time when it is really cold and you can’t really do anything but keep snow off the ground. It makes me more comfortable now that I have a child. I don’t feel hurried by my work. It’s easier for me to step back. There are times when I work and times when I can’t.
TM: The cyclical nature of working can lead to making better work for some artists.
KH: Yes, that’s true. Even if you aren’t actively thinking about art, you are brewing things in your mind.
TM: It was a surprise to learn that half of Washington State is arid like a desert.
KH: There are parts that are like that. We call it high prairie. Much of it is wheat growing and alfalfa growing. You fly over it and you feel like you are flying over the Midwest. Did you drive across?
TM: I drove two hours east from Seattle.