Keith Haring Journals (11 page)

Actually, in varied situations all of these are probably interchangeable.

These thoughts are derivative of my personal quest for the source of my image/object making.

In questioning the reason “why” I make art and “what” I want to achieve by making “art,” the question inevitably arises:

“What is the effect of my creation on the viewer?” and then, “What do people respond to, and how do you induce a specific response within these guidelines?” or “Am I seeking a conditioned response?”

This comes at a time when I have had to stop and ask myself a lot of questions, because it has become very important to me to know why I’m doing what I’m doing, for fear of not knowing, and continuing to make objects/images without any basis for their existence. I am aware that I cannot hope to fully understand what I am doing at the present because I am still in the present. Things make sense in time. However, it has been a pressing issue because I feel that if my ideas were clearer, then there would be no limits to what I could do with those ideas.

Today I awoke early, felt somewhat restless and decided to walk. When I got outside it was still dark. I decided to take a bus uptown to watch the city wake up. I got off the bus at 42nd Street and walked behind the U.N. to the river. I spent a long time walking and thinking and found I really do have a pretty good idea about what I’m trying to do. I don’t know where it will lead, but that is impossible to know.

I do think, however, that no matter how many ways I try to break away from it, I am still basically a painter.

My attempts at sculpture (if there is any need for distinction) have been through very painterly methods and concerns. I believed that my video, music, and movement endeavors are all stemming from my obsessive need to paint or to work with issues that have in the past been attributed to painting.

I think somewhere I lost sight of the fact that I am already working in ways that are new to painting. Although others have explored many of the same ideas, there is much left untouched. My painting at this point is mostly experimenting with limitations, or the destruction of accepted limitations. I do not wish to limit my personal exploration by following one direction. I have been working on the floor on paper in a number of different sizes. Each painting I do is different in that it has a different set of limitations and outlines. I do not repeat the same set of influences/reference points in more than one painting. I have explored using three-foot-long brushes and using two hands simultaneously. I paint from different directions within or without a border. The speed of execution varies with each environment it is created in, and is in that sense representational. It represents a specific time, place, and set of influences.

I believe that I am totally influenced by my immediate environment at any given time. One of my main interests has continued to be the viewer.

Although the act of painting itself is ultimately personal and private (unless there is an audience) and the result of only
my
own intentions and actions, as soon as another person has seen the painting there is an association and inevitable interchange of thought. The painting is then no longer in my hands. My interest in it is gone for the most part.

Although I believe that it is unimportant to consider the viewer at all when working on an individual piece, when a body of work is being produced that is being viewed by others, I feel there is some responsibility for the artist to consider the viewer. How much that encompasses is not important, but some thought should be given to it.

I am intrigued by what people see as the function of art in their own lives. And as a creator or supplier of their art, it is necessary to consider their lives as well as my own.

That depends, I suppose, on what you personally believe the function of “art” is in our society. If you are uninterested in public interaction with your art, then there is no need to consider the public.

I find myself walking a thin line between doing what I think is important, personally, and what I think is important to stay in touch with the public, or wondering whether the public understands their own need for art or even has a function for art in their lives.

I think art is a necessary part of our environment, our society.

It is an idea, a way of life, of seeing and being, an attitude toward life, a respect and understanding of order. Physical attempts at communicating this idea result in what we call “art.”

My attempts are mere records of my existence, records of my interaction within any given space and time. The result is just a result and alludes only to the idea. The result is not the idea. The idea is the idea.

My obsessiveness in creating images and objects has led me through many variations on image making. My most current work has been to dissect my paintings to derive essential forms and shapes that are interesting individually. Working with shapes, physical and painted, allows me to explore their characters and symbolism in depth. Trying to understand shapes or form. Exploring structure. Variations on any given idea.

Last night I painted over three paintings hanging in my room with more black ink so that the entire surface became black. There is, however, a lot going on within and underneath the black ink. They were very interesting for me and also somewhat liberating.

Finally breaking away from my strong inclination to be obvious.

I am interested in reacting to my environment, either my immediate surroundings or the influences that I pick up and carry along in my memory.

I saw beautiful Egyptian drawings today. There is a lot to be learned from Egyptian design concepts and their use of symbols.

I am intrigued with the shapes people choose as their symbols to create a language. There were several drawings showing how the symbols were derived from their previous forms, all the way back to picture symbolism. There is within all forms a basic structure, an indication of the entire object with a minimum of lines, that becomes a symbol. This is common to all languages, all people, all times. Possibly that is why I am so inclined to use calligraphic images, hieroglyphic forms, basic structures that are common to all people of all times and, therefore, interesting to us as well.

There is possibly within my paintings more meaning representationally than I would care to admit.

I paint images that are derivative of my personal exploration. I leave it up to others to decipher them, to understand their symbolism and implications. I am merely the middleman. I gather information, or
receive
information that comes from other sources. I translate that information through the use of images and objects into a physical form. The duty is then out of my hands. It is the responsibility of the viewer or interpreter who will receive my information to derive their own ideas or meanings from it.

In this way, I suppose, I am in constant contact with the viewer—the “viewer” as he feeds me information previous to the work, and after, when he becomes the “actual viewer,” and responds to it with his own unique interpretation.

Now after all these words I want to work. I wanted to recopy some of these ideas by Matisse and then experiment with some paper cut-outs. I quote from Mark Stevens’s article “Earthly Paradise” in
Newsweek
, September 19, 1977:

I suppose that the reverse is also true, that if you create a spontaneous sign that comes from your accumulated subconscious collection of objects, then one must study that sign for a long time to know what object it represents.

With this in mind, I proceed.

My room is in a constant state of change. Three days ago I had done two paintings, one of which was black ink on top of a “red tempera on brown wrapping paper” painting. The black ink covered everything on the original paper except one small triangle (red). Also I painted a small bristol board black with only a triangle left white.

There was also a black-on-white 9ʹ × 5ʹ painting done with two three-foot brushes and much black area. I was unable to adjust to this painting except without glasses. A day later I painted all three of these paintings with black ink so that none of the “images” remained obvious.

These “black” paintings hung on my walls for another day. I then had the idea for Matisse-inspired paper cut-outs. You must understand first of all that my room is very small and the only things in it are my clothes, stereo, supplies, etc., carefully arranged in one small section of the room. The rest of the space is white with huge sheets of clear plastic on two of the walls. One of the walls has a window covered with three layers of plastic. There are no permanent pieces in my room. The walls can be tacked into easily, and masking tape can be used on the plastic. When I hang art in the room it works as a unit. For instance, the three black paintings.

The entire room now operates as one unit since all the pieces come from the same four sheets of painted paper. The reason I first wanted to write about this was to show the relationship between the room yesterday and the room today. The mood is strikingly different. Now as I sit here it seems as though the cut-outs are a direct reaction against the black paintings.

Plastics allow you to use multiple planes as one unit, therefore creating actual depth and perspective—in real space—physical space—the logic of layers, without being an illusion.

Recent exhibitions of what is termed “Abstract Illusionist” paintings make use of shadows to make surface images float. The effect of clear plastic with paper cut-out images taped to the surface has the same effect if the plastic is hung inches in front of the wall. The shadows add interesting “logical depth.”

This journal is, for me, most helpful if it can portray a reasonably accurate account of the work I am doing and why I think I am doing it.

After the cut-outs, I spent a day with a tube of red gouache. I did one 9ʹ × 7ʹ painting on the floor, which was begun by drawing four or five red forms (similar to the cut-outs) with gouache. While these were drying I did a drawing on a set of four sheets of bristol board with gouache.

After this and the large painting had several coats of gouache, I returned to the large painting with black ink. Using a quarter-inch-wide brush I started out semi-controlled, but after becoming more influenced by the music (classical station on radio) I worked faster and used my hands as well as my brush. At that point I had lost control of the painting and it was painting itself. After that painting, I ran out of ink. However, I still had a quarter-cup of gouache (red). I began to paint 7ʺ × 9¼ʺ pieces of sketchbook paper with one form on each piece of paper. I painted until I ran out of gouache. Approximately 25 pieces.

At this point I had started reading parts of Kandinsky’s
Concerning the Spiritual in Art
and found that the part of the book I opened to was dealing with information directly related to these drawings and specifically dealing with the effect of the color red and color embodied in form, etc.

It is “coincidences” like this that make me continue in the face of prevailing doubt. I was constantly doubting the relevance of these drawings as I did them. They seemed at some points to be nothing more than stylized symbols from the English alphabet.

Another problem was: Am I painting or drawing? I don’t think the distinction is necessary any longer. I use the terms interchangeably. I am, however, currently more concerned with form than color, although it is impossible to deal with them as completely separate concerns.

After these drawings I went to buy more ink. I also bought a jar of opaque red ink. When I returned to the “red form” drawings I thought I wanted to add a black form to each red. However, after doing three of these I didn’t like the effect and proceeded to paint the remaining areas black: leaving three red-on-black drawings. The obvious next step was red ink on tar paper. I cut out several pieces of tar paper to 7ʹʹ × 9¼ʹʹ and painted with red ink on them, similar in scale and form to the “red on white” drawings. There were 10 of them. The next day I laid them out (black and white) to create a kind of checkerboard-floor piece (just another variation).