Page 3 - Conversation: Natalie Edgar .... / November

whereas his could be seen as �feminine�.  This  exposes the whole ridiculous notion of gender-based painting for what it is.  And that supports what you were just saying.

I understand that you did a lot of critical writing during that period.

NE: Yes, I did.

JW: What are some of similarities and differences of the writing done then compared to criticism today?

NE: It�s very simple. We worked for an editor who had a philosophy that the artist was the leader and his name was Thomas B. Hess. He didn�t annunciate his philosophy but his assignment to you would be to make a show� well, to visualize it so someone from another planet, or from Minnesota, could see it and understand it.

JW: Yes Minnesota (laughs). My original home state, which you�re right, is like another planet.

NE: The idea was to resurrect the experience of a show in words without too many comparisons to other artists.  So the real challenge to your writing ability was to make it interesting. But that also forced you to think as an artist and to make the artist the leader; to let the idea come out of the art. And that�s very opposite of what you see today because, for example, I�ve seen people say in reviews these days, �When you really look at this painting, you�ll notice��, well, you�re not supposed to read it yourself, you�re just supposed to catch the idea instantaneously.

JW: Right, and not spend any more time with it.

NE: Yeah. So the experience of painting and the language of painting, the sensibility of space, color, rhythm, all these elements that people like Roger Fry used to write about as the abstract experience are longer part of the language of critics.  Criticism these days has to do with meaning, what something stands   

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Natalie Edgar, oil on canvas

for or maybe symbolism.  There�s no surprise if you�re doing a painting that somehow objectifies philosophy, you know? Where�s the surprise?  It has to come, I think, through sensibility. You do a painting and there�s some sort of tremendous experience there which is where I think the future is.

JW: Well that�s what I try to do with my writing. Although a painting may hold personal meaning for me as an individual, the ultimate goal is to recreate the experience of seeing a work of art as an artist would see it. What you�re saying is that most writing today does not view the art as an artist would.   

NE: Yeah, they�re sort of looking at it as epistemology; like it�s full of meanings and substrata of meanings.

JW: What that really says is that a specific interpretation is applied, which is a very confining way of looking at it. Incidentally, when did you write and whom for?

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