Rail: Do you mean that in the sense of placement, or the specificity of the objects that you’re choosing?
Blair: The sculptures had a lot of paint on them, and I used directional sprays, so they were somewhat illusionistic. I liked that the concreteness of the abstract sculptures were paradoxically illusionistic. And conversely, the paintings employ illusionism, which is a very abstract notion.
Rail: Some of these conversations seem to be about illumination and outlets for illumination—sockets, electrical switches, and also surface patterns vaguely suggesting vegetation, like the veined green marble in what looks like the inside of an elevator.
Blair: It is an elevator to my dentist office. [Laughter]
Rail: So that’s why it’s slightly grim! You know, it’s beautiful, it’s polished. It’s meant to be elegant. It’s dark, a little scary, and it’s a little like a false landscape. Surfaces and images that are not quite what they seem are a recurring aspect of what you do. In an interview with Steel Stillman, you talked about televisual light and filmic light, and how that comes into even the paintings of the landscape. Can you expand on that a little?
Blair: I used to use film and paint still lifes from studio setups that I’d illuminate myself. I’d sometimes use lighting gels. Then I decided that that much manipulation may not be necessary. Just take a snapshot. And why not use a flash? Then digital happened, and then the iPhone happened. Despite the fact that I’m certainly not a photorealist, the manner of the photo does necessarily enter the painting, even though I’m not painting a photograph.
Rail: You mean you’re adapting the photograph—you’re not painting it straight?
Blair: I play with things, but not drastically, and I’m more likely to leave things out than to add things—for instance, in that wallpaper painting that I added a fly to. But I don’t really think of it as always about the question of the photograph. When I’m taking pictures, and when I’m painting things, I’m not painting a photograph. I’m there, as if I were there with a pencil and paper. All the sensations that I’m after are bodily experiences. Not the bodily experience of a photograph, but the bodily experience of sitting on a ferry boat or in a bar.
Rail: That’s a really interesting distinction.
Blair: Of course, the diaristic aspect of it is almost too obvious to be said. But they are diaristic.
Rail: In the sense of daily life: this is where I am, this is what I’m doing?
Blair: Yes, but also the travel. Initially, the paintings of paintings came from being a tourist. When you’re a tourist, you go to museums and look at paintings much more than you do when you’re at home in New York. So I started to think, “Well, as long as I’m going to bars and painting cocktails, and I’m going to museums to look at paintings, why not do paintings of paintings?” They’re almost always homages; they’re not critiques in any way.
Rail: As you were saying that, I was readjusting my thinking about your friendship with Richard Prince. His appropriation work, and his engagement with the “image world” and the glut of commercial imagery: that’s not where your present work is, even if, especially earlier in your career, there was—again, inevitably, for generational reasons—a link to it. There was a lot of lounge-lizard stuff. I think also that you were associated with artists like Steve Keister and Nancy Arlen and a short-lived Canal Street aesthetic of neon-colored acrylics. Is that part of your DNA?
Blair: I was tangential to that. But I like so many different kinds of art. Take Richard: I admire him. He’s a great artist. You know, we both smoked Marlboro cigarettes, and he did the spectacular, huge Marlboro Man series that addressed the whole culture; I was sitting at a little desk doing a delicately lit pack of Marlboros. The difference is just so self-evident.
Rail: Of course, Richard Prince’s work has been susceptible to charges of a certain kind of snarkiness, and also—to face the matter head-on—misogyny. You had a little dalliance with that, in your paintings of strippers. Do you want to talk about that at all? In the sense that a sort of irony and wit can also seem to shade into a certain kind of darkness. Admittedly, that work was a long time ago.
Blair: Well, it was also very transitional. I’ve only gone to the figure when I’ve been stumped. In 1991, I did an installation I thought was actually good about the EPCOT center—there were large glass photo pieces inside a Disney-esque pavilion, and I thought it was one of my strongest shows. Then the gallery closed, and I was somewhat lost. I went to the figure; in this case, I went to strippers and made a strip club simulacrum to house them. Back then, I defended the piece by noting that strippers are self-objectifying. So for me, it was more like painting still lifes than anything psychological. It wasn’t a great show. In fact I did three installation shows in the early nineties that I thought were “clever.” Clever is not my strong suit. Fifteen years later I got stuck again, and that’s when I started painting women’s eyes. Whenever I’m not finding it, I do the hardest thing for me to do, which is people. I’m going to show a bunch of those eyes at Catskill Art Space this summer.
Rail: To go back to the beginning: you grew up in New Castle, Pennsylvania; your mother was a painter; and you were really talented. Your parents thought you could be a court sketch artist, which I think is very sweet.
Blair: They were supportive, yeah.
Rail: What kind of painter was your mother?
Blair: She was regional, and she was good. Landscapes, still lifes, and stone sculpture. Actually, not unlike what I do, and my appreciation of what she did has grown with time. I have a feeling that if she’d been in a community where she was in greater dialogue with other artists, her work would have prospered.
Rail: Is New Castle a small town?
Blair: I think it’s more of a small city. Now it has a population of about twenty thousand: about half of what it was when I grew up there. It is also the hometown of the sculptor Thaddeus Mosley, who shows here at Karma. This guy is a genius. He lives and works in Pittsburgh. Last year he did an installation of bronze sculptures in City Hall Park. He’s remarkable; he’s ninety-nine years old. He’s going to do a show of small glass sculptures at Karma alongside my show. I really think he’s a giant. But that’s because he is from New Castle. [Laughter]
Rail: Going back to sketch artists: that implies skill and speed. Are you a fast painter?
Blair: I paint pretty slowly. I started drawing again, and part of that was that I can do a drawing in a couple of hours, and that’s not the case with the oils. I used to paint mostly in gouache, now mostly in oil. One thing I love about gouache is that it dries quickly on paper. Each oil painting takes a different amount of time, but none of them are terribly fast, and I work on a half a dozen or so at a time. Because of the time they take to dry, I really have to teach myself to be patient; it’s so tempting to touch something, and then you set yourself back two days.
Rail: Yeah, patience is a discipline, especially if you’ve got that kind of facility. Being really skilled can sometimes be a handicap. Do you find yourself working against that—setting up obstacles?
Blair: I really never particularly thought of myself as skilled. Every time I start, I think, “Can I do that? Not sure. Can I pull that off?” I’m sure you do the same thing in writing, like, “that paragraph—I don’t think I can ever get that paragraph right.”
Rail: Yeah, less and less can I get that paragraph right!
Blair: But yeah, it’s never not a huge challenge.
Rail: It looks like it was done with great confidence.
Blair: You’ve got to make it look that way. I don’t think there’s any artist that doesn’t want it to look easy. The range in technique in these paintings is limited. But in all of them, there’s a way in which the painting starts to talk to itself and decides how it needs to be painted. The peony really had to be painted in with much more impasto than the other paintings. They lead themselves at some point.
Rail: It must feel fantastic when that happens. It’s a thing that people who write fiction talk about—that their characters, after a while, tell them what they want to do. And sometimes they’re surprised. Have you had that kind of surprise about the painting’s resolution?
Blair: I think not nearly as much as a writer would experience, or maybe other painters. Again, my parameters are kind of self-imposed before I pick up the brush. I print the image out and I live with it for at least two weeks before I consider starting it. Sometimes it’s not worth starting. And there’s the editorial process, like with an art editor, when I think, “Okay, this image goes with that image. And if you make it this size, you need one this other size.” That’s really where much of the creative stuff happens, as much as when the application of paint is happening. I think.
Rail: I have just a few more questions. I read that you had eye trouble when you were a kid and you had to train your eyes, which was probably a very uncomfortable process. But I also thought what a great metaphor—or maybe exercise—for becoming a painter, an artist.
Blair: It certainly had something to do with it. Probably also had something to do with why my mother and I didn’t get along, because she was the enforcer. But yeah, that was pretty constant. One of the exercises was that we had a polarized screen suction-cupped to the television, which at that point was black and white, and then I put on clip-on polarized glasses, and there was a little sliding gizmo. If you weren’t fusing with both eyes, one side of the screen would go black. If you’re watching The Lone Ranger, and it’s getting toward the end and starts to black out, it was just … my poor brother and sister weren’t allowed to complain about it, but you really don’t want to watch TV through a gray plastic screen.
Rail: And you also certainly don’t want to miss the end of the chase!
Blair: There was no rewind.
Rail: You had to see it in the moment.
Blair: Then there was another little bar that I held over the book when I was reading, so that my eyes would focus around the bar.
Rail: And it all succeeded.
Blair: Yeah. Subsequently, I had corrective surgery, but I used to have the proverbial Coke-bottle glasses.
Rail: My last question is about working in the city versus the country. You mostly paint upstate. Does that make a difference?
Blair: Well, we’ve been there almost twenty-five years. My Sullivan County studios were better than my studio here in the city. That’s really the main reason more work gets done up there. I’d spent summers up there all the time before my wife Marie retired, but with COVID and Marie retiring kind of at the same time, the city started to make much less sense. Subjects like the skies, in the last show at Karma, were all taken from right outside my studio. And the footprints in snow, those are all up there. So subjects occasionally reflect the city/country context, or there’ll be the paintings out of the cab window on 23rd Street. But I feel those would exist in some form. I don’t elevate one over the other.
Rail: You’re not still teaching, are you?
Blair: No, it’s been almost seven or eight years.
Rail: Do you miss it?
Blair: Well, the commute was pretty long.
Rail: It was RISD?
Blair: Yeah, it was a hard commute. You know, the one thing I miss is talking about art, which I don’t do with my peers. You talk about the art world; you don’t talk about art. I mean, I don’t with my peers. I know there are probably some sophisticates who read the Rail and talk about art all the time. [Laughter] So, yeah, that’s the only thing I miss.