Orange Geraniums. Oil on linen, 46” x 38”, 2023.

Greta Berman: How did you choose a subject when you first started painting? Or are the women in the paintings truly your subjects?

Barbara Grossman: I first got interested in this at Cooper Union, towards my fourth year. I had a teacher, Nicholas Marsicano (1908–1991), who basically let you do whatever you wanted. I’d had Angelo Ippolito (1922–2001) the year before. He was into pure abstraction, but I just wanted to paint people. There was a woman in the class who hated painting; she didn’t want to paint, so she posed. And she wore dresses all the time, which was kind of unusual. And she was perfect. So, when I left school, the only thing I wanted to do was to paint from the figure.

But I’d paint anything that didn’t move, that was still, because the whole point was to keep painting. When you’re by yourself, you don’t have somebody around all the time to comment, and it’s a big adjustment. So I would hire models, mostly nude. Then one day, I asked myself, Why am I painting nude models?  I like the way women look, but I don’t have that kind of relationship. I’m not gay. It isn’t meaningful to me. So then I started dressing them, and I started making them up; I went back and forth between invention and working directly.

GB:  The back and forth is fascinating. When you work now, do you just paint from memory?

BG:  They’re all invented; everything’s invented. That’s generally been true since the ‘80s.

GB:  So, it’s from memory?

BG: It’s memory, but it’s also kinesthetic. I’ll draw someone, for instance while sitting in a meeting, and I’ll catch somebody’s gesture or the way they’re leaning; but I may not draw the whole figure. I’m only interested in that moment, that direction, that dynamic. You see, that’s what I mean when I [discussed] perception versus perspective. Everything I do is really related to perception.

As a teacher I often discussed that when you’re drawing from life—say you’re using an easel or you’re looking at a piece of paper with charcoal—and you turn your head and study the figure, and then you turn back to the paper to draw: during that second or two seconds, you’re working entirely from memory. You’re no longer looking at the subject. A lot of what people do is from memory.

GB:  So when people work from life and work from a model, they’re still working from memory.

BG:  Exactly. And, that’s hard to accept. “But I’m looking,” they say. “No, you’re not right now. You’re looking at a piece of paper.”

GB:  I saw an interview from 1988 with Charles Cajori, in which you participated. Charles was asked how an artist keeps work from being repetitive. And you jumped in. You said that things are not repetitive because you’re constantly inventing them.

BG:  That’s right. Things are always changing before your eyes. There’s nothing stable out there—which is true when you’re looking at things, assessing them. You yourself can’t see or feel the eyes moving, but they’re constantly measuring where you are, and how far, and how deep, and how thick, and so on. It’s always changing; it’s never the same. Cezanne was the perfect example of that—assessing things where they would never be the same.

GB:  Being an art historian, it’s very clear to me that your sources were Cezanne and Matisse as well as prints, patterns, Turkish rugs, and Persian miniatures.

BG:  Yes. Also, in one painting class, I copied Piero della Francesca for a couple of months, which was kind of nice; what a perfect source that was for all of the other things that followed. The Queen of Sheba, that whole series, was my focus.

Piero della Francesca. Procession of the Queen of Sheba; Meeting between the Queen of Sheba and King Solomon. Fresco. Between 1452 and 1466.

GB:  That’s interesting because there’s a flatness in the space in your paintings, and there is in Piero’s too!

BG:  Yes. He talked about perspective all the time, refining the rules of linear perspective, even though his paintings were flat as pancakes. And as to the flatness in my paintings: When people ask and I have to give a concise but simple answer, I say I’m interested in near and far at the same time. That brings the compression into the experience.

GB:  It all has to do with the way you see, in a sense. If you go back to the Renaissance, for instance, artists then wanted to create a kind of perspective that looks as if they are looking through a window and into a distance. But you’re not doing that.

BG:  That’s absolutely correct. Perspective is a concept. I think that what you see is just what you allow.  And it’s also a point of view that one has. Someone may tell you, “That isn’t the way this or that goes.” But you respond, “It’s the way I see it.” It’s a decision you make. It may not be conscious, but it is a decision.

GB:  What about landscapes, still life, or pure abstraction? Have you done all of those things and sort of tinkered with them?

BG:  I didn’t do much pure abstraction. I did it for a year, maybe, attending Yale Norfolk during a summer program, when we worked upstairs in a barn. Everybody went out there to do landscapes. I had never been in the country, never mind done landscapes. My family were really poor; we didn’t have a car. It’s like some of the immigrants we have today, who don’t have much going on except their families; that’s their big deal.

Anyway, at Yale Norfolk I did all these landscapes. But being a New York kid, I was not going to schlep all my equipment out into the field. There was a long stairway on one side of the building with a platform at the top, and I just painted from there—one step outside of the studio.

Later, Cajori and I moved to Northwest Connecticut, to Litchfield County, because we needed big studios. At that point I don’t think we were aware, savvy, or had money enough to buy space in Soho. So we bought this old Connecticut farmhouse. At first, it was just the two of us; then we had a kid. But there was a barn; then I occupied a large bedroom; and eventually, maybe ten years later, Cajori’s dad died, and we built a passive solar building. We had these magnificent studios with amazing light. So, here I am in the country in about 1972, and I’m thinking I’ve got to paint the landscape. We had a lot of land, seven acres, including an orchard, woods, and a meadow. Basically, I did the same thing I did at Yale Norfolk: I painted from the window of my studio; I never went outside to paint. I did go out and garden. I had these huge vegetable gardens, but somehow, I didn’t connect the two.

At some point, I felt I was solving a problem when I painted landscapes: here are the interstices between the branches; the sky comes forward… Then I realized that’s really not what I’m interested in, though the importance of interstices is still very much part of my world.  Right around that time, I started working directly from the model—again clothed models, always women, and they were mostly friends, though occasionally I’d pay somebody. I really struggled because I never was that interested in conventional portraiture with modeling and likeness and so on. But the setups were a little bit different. They were a little torqued, you know, where the space in the back would come forward; but then the figures looked very conventional.

GB:  Like Louise in the Rocker. It’s a portrait, but you’re playing around with the space.

Louise in the Rocker. Oil on Linen, 48” x 36”, 1976.

BG:  Right. I painted that in 1976, about four years before I finally stopped doing landscapes. I had a model. I couldn’t afford to have her four times a week, but I still really wanted to work on this painting, even if she wasn’t there. I asked myself, “Am I cheating? Can I do this?” That was a very big breakthrough in a way, though I didn’t know it at the time. I think I pretty much finished it without her presence. Later, in the early ‘80s, I’d only work with oil on paper, because I just wanted to get it done really fast. I didn’t really want to commit to a long term painting.

GB:  And is that when you started using oil sticks also — late ‘70s, early ‘80s?

BG:  No, I started using oil pastels when we went to Greece to teach in late 1986. I knew I couldn’t take paint through customs, plus it’s just too much work to clean your brushes. So I used oil pastels. They were pretty awful in the beginning; they were heavy, you couldn’t get a lot of action out of them. But when they started taking oil paint and compressing it into sticks, that really made the difference.

GB:  Tell me a bit about your 1987 painting Mariposa 1.

Mariposa 1. Oil on linen, 32” x 24”, 1987.

BG:  Like most of my paintings, it’s oil on linen. Mariposa was a cat, and she’s sitting on the lap of that figure. The painting is all invented. But Mariposa was real; she lived to be 19. She was given to us by our friend Lois Dodd, who just turned 99. We had Mariposa in the city, on Tenth Street, but we’d take her to the country in the summers; she was terrified of every blade of grass— this was an urban kitty. She seemed to move like a butterfly—in fact, Mariposa means butterfly in Spanish. It’s a memorial to her.

GB:  If we talk about something key to your paintings, it’s that the subjects seem to be women, pets, settings, patterns, and so on. But those are not truly your subjects.

BG: You’re absolutely right. My subjects are space, color, patterns, light.

The Park. Oil on linen, 36”x 30”, 2009-10.

GB: I wouldn’t say you’re unique in this; it’s what abstract artists talk about. Yet you’re not using the usual visible abstraction to reflect these subjects.

BG:  I recently was teaching in a summer program in Pennsylvania, which I helped start, and they provided the faculty a work space. I decided to make my life simple in the studio. I don’t do things that have to be set up and broken down and boxed, and so I decided to try making collage, which I had never done before. I used one of the nature calendars that a Fulbright friend of mine makes as a hobby; they’re beautiful and very high end. I combined that with ColorAid paper, which is like lithograph color. I used the remnants of packets we had to buy when we were freshman at Cooper Union. I combined all these things to make some abstract collages, which are actually pretty interesting. And they do relate to what I’m doing with all the recognizable things.

GB:  Absolutely. I can see your paintings of women in domestic interiors as abstract collages. It really follows.

Red Peonies. Oil on linen, 54”x 46”, 2025-26.

BG:  I name all my pictures neutrally, like “Blue Shoes,” “Red Peonies,” “Mariposa” (the name of the cat) because I don’t want to imbue ideas in people.

There was a period you may see on my website—it would have been the ‘90s—when I did a lot of piano players. And the reason I did them is very bizarre, I think. I was obsessed about the grid. I decided that I had to find a diagonal. I was at Yale Norfolk to listen to music at their summer program. There, I noticed this big diagonal holding up the piano lid, and I focused on that. So, I started painting all these piano players—some of them were really silly because I hadn’t examined the piano carefully. Then I discovered all the inner workings of the piano, which were so much fun to play with. I painted those piano players for quite a while.

GB:  Your paintings are so colorful. What kind of color theory do you have, or how do you think about color?

BG:  I think that paintings, as a whole, should have a signature color. For example, the painting can be either warm or cool. When I see paintings in which the artist has a warm, and then answers it with a cool, and another warm, and another cool, it’s sort of like confetti, and you grab whatever you want. It doesn’t have a direction. It doesn’t have a voice. The color has to have a voice.

I don’t have theories. One hears other artists expound on rules that may seem to help achieve certain aspects of making a picture. For example saying that red goes back, blue goes forward—or something like that. I really believe that’s bullshit; it really depends on the space you construct. I think color has its own life in a way. And light is powerful, in a way. I do like light, but I believe very strongly that color and light are one.

I’ve been drawing heads from memory of people I see at the gym, and they’re very diverse. The gym is almost in the Bronx, and a lot of the people are black or brown. So I’ve been trying to paint brown and black people. It’s really hard to get those multiple colors that exist inside of a black skin. I put blue in it sometimes; sometimes orange. I try to achieve a density. But I’m also interested in how the figure exudes or absorbs light. Some colors suck up light, others hold it. It’s all about what I see and feel in my life.

Mitzi. Oil on linen, 30”x 28”, 2024.

GB:  Which colors absorb light and which colors hold it?

BG:  That depends on how you mix the color. That’s one of the things about oil paint: you can do absolutely anything.

GB:  Maybe it depends on the context?

BG:  Yes, absolutely right. I think color, at least for me, is intuitive. You can’t bake it. It has to just sort of happen.

GB:  Would it be fair to say that the colors in your paintings are not necessarily representative of what you saw, but more what you feel?

BG:  Yes. I think that’s what makes a picture cohesive. What I feel is what I choose out of what I see. There is a personal equivalency.

GB:  Obviously we’re seeing selectively. Looking at my room now, I see many different colors. I could emphasize some of them. I like to think that, in this way, painting is a bit like music—in that key; in that tonality.

BG:  It’s something like that, I guess. I’ve never had any lessons in music, I don’t play an instrument, and I can’t sing because I can’t hear myself.  But I listen to music—assiduously.

After Cajori died, I stopped listening to music for a while. It was just something that seemed OK, the right thing to do. When I let music back in, I was much more precise about what I needed at a particular time— Bach or Aretha Franklin. I like things like Iannis Xenakis and Philip Glass. I just discovered Kris Davis! That kind of music interests me; I find it very stimulating. And I agree with you that painting has that kind of dynamic, if you allow it to; and color is the thing that talks about rhythm, and movement.

Audition. Oil on linen, 56”x 48”, 1997.

GB:  That’s what’s quite wonderful about your painting, Barbara: You’re able to encapsulate a lot of these instincts and feeling into one painting. You look at it, and you say, there’s the music, there’s the space, there’s my model, there’s the imagination. It’s all there.

BG:  Thank you. I’ve never stopped [working on my art]. Even after I had my daughter. She slept in my studio. Little did I know turpentine wasn’t good for you, but she survived. Now she’s a musician who plays a bass; and she’s an American sign language interpreter, which is an interesting profession because it requires a lot of movement and expression.

GB:  Tell me a little bit about your upcoming exhibition. Where will it be?

BG:  It’s opening at the Washington Art Association in Washington Depot, Connecticut, on June 27 and will run through August 8. The association was formed by a group of artists in 1952.

At that time, a number of prominent intellectuals lived in the area, including the Styrons, the Millers, and Francine du Plessix Gray. Many people interested in culture helped establish this art association.

I want to mention one other thing I believe is important. I’ve always been interested in patterns, and, as you know, in Indian and Persian miniatures. I even have a few that I live with. I also became really interested in Islamic images. In fact, I began making up Islamic scenes and places. I finally visited Morocco and Turkey. Istanbul has some extraordinary mosques; I don’t mean the huge ones that are famous, such as Hagia Sophia. There are some small ones that are absolute gems behind the Egyptian bazaar. They really had a profound effect on me because all the things I’ve been thinking about were there. To see them just blew my mind. The small mosques are great because you can stay in them a long time. Even if they’re praying, you can step back and be there. I created the first paintings stemming from my experiences there in the early 2000s.

GB:  I felt that they fit what you had already seen in a way. You didn’t need them to influence you.

BG: No, they didn’t influence my work. They magnified it in a way. To be in those spaces was something very special.

I have a fifteen-year-old grandson who is completely engaged in jazz. He plays drums and taught himself the trumpet. He’s listening to Monk; you know, he’s all into it. On his last birthday, he asked for a keyboard, and I gave him one. Of course, that meant he had to have lessons. There’s a school nearby and he picked a teacher; the two of them seemed to get along. When I asked him what he was studying, he said, classical. Nobody told him to do that. It was his idea.

The point is, he understands that music, like any of the arts, is a big round thing, and you’ve got to learn all the different parts, you know, do everything. It’s pretty exciting.

The artist at work in her studio.

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