James Rosenquist Interview (page: 6 / 8) Pop Art Master	Print Interview

Could you tell us a little bit about your billboard painting days? You once described painting the saliva on Kirk Douglas's tooth.

Get the Flash Player to see this video. James Rosenquist: My audition for Artkraft Strauss was to paint Kirk Douglas's picture about eight feet high. So I thought, "I want the job, so I am going to show them." So I put tears in his eyes, the number five makeup on, saliva on his lips, I mean, he looked great, fabulous. And Mr. Strauss came by and he said, "Hire that young man!" He was 80 years old. "Hire him!" So I got the job. And the interesting things about painting signs is that the amount of paint you use is incredible. The people you work with are really incredible, because they have tons of experience painting. They know how to wrap the brushes, they are very practical. They know all the tricks of the trade of doing all sorts of funny things. And for instance, painting a clock on the Astor Victoria Theater, one of my helpers who was about 70 years old said, "Hey kid, do this." And he tied a string on a gallon can of mineral spirit, and he started swinging it. And we are up seven stories and this can is swinging back and forth like this. And he says, "Now it's four o'clock! Blam!" And he snaps the line, and I've got a line going that way, a big diagonal for one of the hands, so we can paint it. But all sorts of color mixing, too. And in volume. You know, like making big gallons and gallons of color. One time, we were going to paint Separate Tables, I think it was. And the background was all orange on the Astor Victoria Theater. And we mixed up all this paint in the truck. And we all jumped in the back of this flatbed truck. And the truck lurched on 11th Avenue, and all the paint spilled out of the truck onto Eleventh Avenue like a huge pancake. And I said -- all these old men are afraid they are going to get fired -- and I said, "Shovel some sand on it, and let's get the hell out of here." And the truck driver backed in with the four wheels in the back, and took off and left these four orange stripes right down to 45th and Broadway. We didn't get caught, but it was funny. We dropped a gallon of purple paint off the Mayfair Theater, ten stories, and it went Pow! like a light bulb, with purple, right at lunchtime. No one got hurt. It was just miraculous.

[ Key to Success ] Preparation

Did you have any close calls up there? It seems like pretty dangerous work.

James Rosenquist: A couple. I fell a few feet, so I decided to quit.

It's hard not to make parallels between your life as a billboard painter and your life as an artist. How would you say the one influenced the other?

James Rosenquist: Well, I was fortunate.

Get the Flash Player to see this video. I was being forced to work very hard. I painted the equivalent of 14 one-man shows a year when I was painting signs. It had nothing up here. I mean it was just a lot of imagery. Then, when it comes to making art... So it was like training for the Olympics, and when the Olympics -- when art -- came along, it was really a pleasure. It was so easy. That was the thing, except the thinking, I mean, that's important. But to be able to do it, I could do it. No problem. Very easy. But the hard thing is the idea, having an idea that you had never seen before, a reason that no one has ever seen. Not being afraid of showing it when everything else looks different and looks very acceptable. That's hard to do.

[ Key to Success ] Courage

I think in the 1980s, the audience grew larger and larger, and a lot of youngsters -- what I call youngsters, they are about 35 to 45 years old -- had a much easier time than I did when I began. They sold their works for high prices quite easily. They're good artists, too. They're good, but that seemed to come to an abrupt end at the end of the '80s and the beginning of the '90s.

Get the Flash Player to see this video. I remember the pure -- just the feeling of having things around in my studio that I liked, and I really didn't want to sell them, back in 1960 and '61. That was my environment that I made, and it didn't take much money to live, but I never thought that I could ever have enough money to get married, to own a car. Maybe a car, but not a house or anything like that. I know there was a question that I thought you were going to ask me about. Did I think that I would as successful as I am, or whatever? And I certainly didn't think so, because I didn't know how to qualify success. I didn't know. Success to me was just to be able to understand. Success was a very, very private matter, of having the wherewithal to very simply express an idea.

[ Key to Success ] Passion

So this show that I had recently in Moscow, all the work there was really done with a paintbrush and paint. I didn't bring laser beams. I didn't bring film, or anything electric there. I only brought things that the Russians could have done. The Russians paint with oil paint on canvas, so they could have made paintings like mine if they wanted to. That was the dialogue there. I wanted to keep it like that. I didn't want it to be chauvinistic, and show them a lot of highfalutin' things from the West that they could never have had. So saying, "If a person doesn't have any money, it's still possible to do something quite nice, quite simply." Because after all, you can make a beautiful charcoal drawing with burnt wood!

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