Later
I wanted to grow up and be like Carl Jung,
James Hillman, Wallace Stevens, William Carlos Williams. One
of my basic assumptions is that all creative careers begin by being moved
somehow in an encounter with the work of someone you want to 'be like,' and
that this resonates with the creative spirit that first shows itself autonomously
in early childhood. But in this interview, Bert wasn't going to make it
that easy or that obvious for me. Like most professional artists, he is
admirably resistant to psychologizing. Which is fine with me.
Bert: Nah. Cause see what I grew up seeing was little pictures,
ya know? And then when you go to art school or to college, unless you go
to a museum or something, all you're seeing is so more little pictures,
other than the projected size, you have no sense of anything, ya know.
Not that it's an excuse but ya know, I don't know, maybe I'll remember
something.
Jim: I remember when I was in college, Max Ernst and the
Surrealists just got all over me. I just kind of course you know, I had
absolutely no, no ability to make images except with language. Max Ernst
just drove me nuts. I was just kind of consumed with Max Ernst.
Bert shows where the eggs
will be in the new chicken house
when the free-rangers get penned up.
So, that's what I'm wondering about. Was there anybody like
that?
Bert: Well, ya know when you're growing up and you start
going to school and stuff, ya know, every year something's new and different.
I can't remember.
I liked everybody, I guess. Ya know, I think you remember
things that you don't like probably or there's a certain point in time you
really love Salvador Dali and then at some point in time you go man, this
is the sappiest stuff on earth, ya know. Anyway,
so I'll — nah, can't remember anymore now.
Jim: And Ann, you studied art in college too, didn't you?
But you studied art history, right?
Ann
Pritchett Scherbarth is
in her early thirties, has light blue eyes, and curly/kinky blond hair.
She has a gentle, open face, and a soft voice. A former college swimmer,
and now heavily involved in the sport of rowing, she is very athletic.
She is also very much an individual,
having declined all the ready-made notches the culture has available for
young women, preferring instead to always follow her own 'bliss’ as
Joe Campbell said. She has been my swim coach for three years now, and
a friend and fellow swimmer since the early nineties.
Ann: I was a double major, Art History and Painting.
Jim: And painting, right. And where was that?
Ann: College at Charleston in Charleston, South Carolina. The
college of knowledge. They were just B.A. degrees.
Jim: Uh-hum.
Ann: Very liberal art small college there. And it was great
though. I love that department. I took an art history class like 101 for
whatever, a credit you have to take when you're a freshman, and I just
was blown away. I thought it was so cool. I mean I was definitely going
to be an art history major and in order to graduate with art history, you
had to take a painting class. So when I took that, I—
Jim: You had to take a painting class in order to get a degree
in art history?
Ann: Yeah.
Jim: That's interesting. That is a good idea.
Ann: And then that freaked me out because
I was like the only double major there, which I
couldn't believe because it made so much sense to study it and understand
what you're doing.
Jim: Right.
Ann: So it was a good. I just walked down the hall and write
a paper and then walk down the hall and paint.
Jim: When I was at UD at Lyle's legendary art history course,
ya know, that really got me fired up. So then what happened? You know that
question I was asking you about, that I was asking Bert about, who'd you
want to be like when you grew up? Was there somebody you wanted to be like
when you grew up? Was there something that made you go, man that's pretty
cool.
Ann: That's such a, I don't know, not that I can think of.
Brushes and paint in the studio
This
really throws me for
a loop. In Bro. Kenneth's English class in 8th grade, we read a poem called
Cargoes, by John Masefield. The
first two lines:
Quinquireme of Ninevah from distant
Ophir
Rowing home to haven in sunny Palestine
were
enough
to throw me into a trance I almost could not recover from, and set
in motion a process that could be summed up as 'I Wanna Do Like That'
... and which
was made permanent when I encountered for the first time The
Domination of Black, by Wallace Stevens:
At night, by the fire,
The colors of
the
bushes
And of the fallen leaves,
Repeating themselves,
Turned in
the room,
Like the leaves themselves
peacocks.
If I could 'do' like that, I thought, what else would I need
to do? But both Scherbarths throw my ideas under
the bus. For them, it was different.
The urge to
create simply began.
Jim: Really?
Ann: I know, that doesn't sound normal, but I was not trying
to build a case for 'normal' in the interview but.
I also
realize that as I go on in the interview, I have my preconceptions,
and I am not
giving them up easily. I keep trying to get Ann and Bert to tell me who
the influences were.
Jim: I don't know if it doesn't sound normal or not, but
it's so completely my experience, I can remember thinking you know if they
can grow up to be like — start off, you may know who this is, Bob
Sardello. I wanted to grow up and be like Bob Sardello.
Ann: I didn't
grow up thinking I was gonna be artistic or anything like that.
Jim: You did not grow up that way?
Ann: Uh-uh. I mean I was always doing arty things and I was
pretty, I guess, creative. But it [was] never in my plan to be [an] artist.
Jim: What was in your plan?
Ann: I didn't really have a plan, so I was really excited
when it came to me.
Jim: So nobody could have been more shocked than you when
you went to college and registered and.
Ann: Yeah, exactly (laughing). I was like oh, it makes sense. It
was like ah, this is easy: art, but this is hard.
Bert: I think Ann got into art like a lot of us smart people
who went up against something that was just like fascinating. They can't
really understand it but it's simply to understand, making that picture
something to understand.
Ann: Yeah.
Bert: You've said that before.
Ann: Yeah, that's for sure.
Bert: So, it was like.
Jim: So, say that again.
Bert: I think Ann and I come from different spaces. I was
always the artist, ya know, I'd go back home and my parents would go are
you still making artwork? I'd go yeah, but I didn't know any difference,
ya know, cause I always wanted to be the artist, so coming at it from that
direction, I think Ann felt till I came around, cause she's real smart,
it's such a challenge, it's our framework to understand structures, some
kind of structure.
Ann: Yeah.
Bert: What does it mean to paint a picture and to have someone
say well, ya know, when the guy was going like that, what they're doing
is they're measuring scale, so that can go on the page and then to replicate
something.
Bert talking about plans for his recently cleared wood
shop
Wow! Fascinating, I mean, I don't
know.
Ann: Well, and then questions are already there, like you
go to biology and obviously I'm not, I would go to biology class and like
this is really hard, but if I just study what they tell me, I can spit
it back out, ya know?
Jim: Yeah.
Ann: And with art, I was like I bet I don't even, they say
you figure it out in the question and in the answer.
Jim: (Chuckling)
Ann: So I was like, oh — so. That's what I found interesting.
I loved being in school. I loved being ya know, a student, like it was
cool.
top
Jim: So when you were a kid, Bert, when did you start making
plans to be an art person? When did it start happening?
Bert: I was always the artist. Just, you know—
Jim: You mean you were always the kid who could really draw
well, and do really accurate representations?
Bert: I
was always the artist, the creative one.
Jim: in your family?
Bert: Well actually, my sisters could draw a lot better.
They were always drawing stuff. As a matter of fact, I just found all this
old stuff of my Mother's. All these old drawings in a portfolio. So, it
was like, all this stuff was just always hangin' around, kinda thing, yeah.
I just figured I'd go to college, and then I figured out
what art school was, and you know what art school is. Just sorta by accident,
and you know what art school is, it's all the art students, all together,
it's concentrated, and it's hard to be a — distinct, in 500 distinct
personalities. So, like, when I was in art school, I wanted to be like
my professor — seemed like a great job, teach art, you've got your
summers off.
Jim: that's where I was coming from with Bob Sardello.
Bert: but, by the time I got out of college, I wanted to
have nothing to do with that profession. So I graduated in 1977, and I
got a job with the Nebraska Arts Council, and
I hate kids, and the first thing that happens, you know,
is they put me in there with a buncha kids — in charge of all these
2nd and 3rd grade kids — imagining things to do
Jim: Projects?
Bert: Yeah, 'projects.' Yeah, boy, they loved me up there.
It was so cold up there, we were like 12 miles from Wyoming, up there in
the late 70s. It was some of the coldest—
Jim: Yeah, I was up in Pittsburgh during that same period,
unbelievably cold
Bert: Sick cold, snow on the ground for weeks, months.
Bert goes on at this point to describe
the process of applying to every grad school in the Sun Belt, except for
Yale, because it is so prestigious. He was accepted to Yale, but was offered
no scholarship, which left him in the lurch as to how to pay the gigantic
tuition.
Bert's Interview drawings — note larger
figure near
upper right.
He
also was not attracted to New Haven, Connecticut, because it was
a 'shithole.’
Bert: so, University of Dallas had this fabulous reputation
back then. You get tons of space, you get to do whatever you want to do,
pretty self paced program.
Jim: When you were there, was Lyle still doing his suede
assemblages?
Bert: Yeah, I think he was phasing that out and getting into
ecclesiastical furniture.
Jim: Yeah, yeah, I remember that.
Bert: — Which
I thought was the stupidest thing on earth, but now that I think about
it was really brilliant.
Jim: Those pieces were so 70s.
We are referring to a signature style
of image-making that Lyle Novinski became known for in
the 70s, in which he built up abstract images on wooden frames using
color fields created with segments of salvaged dyed suede leather.
Jim: Ann, did you know Lyle?
Ann: I've met Lyle. I applied to UD, so I'm sure I had some
conversations with him, but I didn't get in.
Jim: Yeah, I wrote you some glowing recommends, but they
prob'ly said, Oh, this is Dolan, so uh, the hell with that.
Bert: You got accepted to this really cool program in Maine.
Ann: It was a summer-only program, and I just closed on my
condo here, and it was just impossible.
Bert: Yeah,
it was a
funky monkey....
Jim: So, Ann, were you always the 'art kid'?
Ann: Like in my family and stuff? my brothers could always
do perfect spaceships and planes and stuff, and mine was always more design
stuff, putting colors together and Bert's a really good draftsman.
Jim: My daughter got frustrated at Booker T. with her draftsmanship
skills. She lived under a rock, the rock being this other kid who had astounding
draftsmanship skills, and he got all the attention, and it just sucked
the life out of her.
Do you think kids who grow up to be artists are going to
show that kind of skill in early life? It seems like art hardly even depends
anymore on those kinds of abilities.
Bert: Yeah, it's all, like who can understand it? It may
have seemed like it was important to draw, but when you think that these
guys were using camera obscura and rules of perspective.
I thought I was a really good drawer until I went to art
school and I was just blown away. But a person gets better, you learn to
compensate and deal with stuff. You
match your art to your abilities, it becomes less and less about someone's
abilities and more and more about what's in your brain.
Jim: it's what gets your attention, and causes pleasure in
your brain.
Bert: It is a pleasure thing, I am always going back to what
makes me feel good — I do something, and that makes me feel good,
so I do some more.
Jim: I've been working on fiction the last five or six years,
and there's this feeling of entering into the process and letting things
happen, and when it does, its very pleasurable.
Bert: Do you have a lot of little note cards up, and keep
track of who's gonna see who?
top
Jim: no, I don't, I just get in there and let the people
start talking to each other, and I keep asking myself, Well, what happens
next? and then, and then?
Ann: Yeah, I love that, that's what I like about painting. I
could never plan a painting, when
I did try, it just came out this contrived and stiff thing, but when
I just let it flow, I'd stand back and go, Yow! that came out of me?
But I don't have the drawing skills.
Jim: so have you done any more painting since the show at
the Continental Gin Building?
Ann: No, not really. I drew a picture of the chickens the
other day, though, that was —
Continued in Part 3
