An Interview with Peter Young

Leslie Rothenberg: Tell us about the origins of your “Stick” paintings.

Peter Young: Besides the strange shapes and physicality of the paintings, how they were made, and why they were made, I would like to talk about the imagery first.

Each painting has a rectangular space, and a linear image is painted there. They are very simple, pared-down symbols; and my idea was that they should be a symbol.

LR: But what would you say was represented?

PY: They were after drawings that I would make on whatever, typewriter paper, scrap paper, etc. Some were drawn from nature, not exact imitations of an object but inspired by parts of nature, for instance, the wing of an insect, or a crystal, or a leaf pattern, or cracked mud. Others were not quite so directly connected. There would be a linear arrangement in my little drawing that I found satisfying, something verging on geometrical thinking. I would playfully make seven-pointed stars, or nine-pointed figures like the enneagram. Others could just be the simplest thing: like two hillsides, one in front of the other, that were the same but different and had a kind of rhythm; or like a line of little sprouts coming out of the ground. They were logos in a way–symbols that vaguely stand for something. There’s thirty of them.

LR: Was thirty a representative number, or you just stopped at thirty?

PY: I just stopped at thirty. There may be a few more, a few less; I'm a little vague about it. But I remember three groups of about ten each. Those groups were dispersed: Richard Bellamy and Noah Goldowsky had the first group in New York. Joe LoGiudice had the second group, and they were shown at his art space in Chicago. And Rolf Ricke had the third, which he showed in his gallery in Cologne, Germany.

All of them had that same premise, trying to find a very simple series of lines that seemed to suggest something but not so explicit; and the same family of colors, that is red, yellow, black and white. Those are the southwestern tribes’ colors for the four directions, among other things.

The making of these paintings took place in the mountains of Utah. After a decade in New York, the need to leave struck me, and I lived in Spain, I lived in Mexico. I bounced around, but then I bought land in southern Utah, forty acres in the mountains with a spring in the middle. I began to spend half a year up there.

LR: And what year about is this?

PY: This would be the very early 70s.

Then I discovered Bisbee and started living between Bisbee, Arizona, and Hurricane or Orderville Gulch, Utah in Washington County near Kanab. I was living out there: I had my dog in a tent with my partner, Carmen, and I had paint with me, and canvas, but no support.

In the past, in the early 60s, I had always made all my own stretchers. It is a slow process, but I made a large number of rather accurate wooden stretchers. But it was a pain and very hard to get wood of any quality. So, when in the late 60s, I began all of a sudden to sell a lot of large paintings, it became a problem. My friends and I then began to hire Tex Wray to make stretchers for us. It was great. He had power tools and could knock them out real nice. Tex Wray, he was the brother of Link Wray, a famous country rock guitar player. So, in New York, Tex Wray started making stretchers, and that was wonderful. And when I traveled, I found both that in Oaxaca or in Toledo, Spain, I could just walk into any carpenter shop, and they could quite easily make stretchers for me.

But here I am in the mountains of Utah with no lumber, no nice boards. And I realize I'm surrounded by a ponderosa pine forest. The most lovely, fine, workable lumber is made from pine wood. I began to find nice, small branches that had been cured by time. And à la what I had learned in the Boy Scouts of America, lashing rounded branches together by notching out half of each one. In the Scouts, we actually made a backpack rack. There is something I know I had already done in my life that consisted of notching out pine and fitting it together and making corners.

I was influenced for sure by the fact that my great teacher Luchita Hurtado had several Plains Indian leather shields in her home. And I loved those shields. They were rounded and fairly small, the kind of shield you would hold in one hand–the kind that, if you put over your head, would save you from a rain of arrows.

Mine were shields really for the fun of it. I realized that with a structure that was not round but rectilinear, I could take the canvas, stretch it around and tie it off at the back, not with rawhide, but with twine, making it tight on the front. The edges were nicely rounded and still read as branches. I always allowed a little bit of waver, a little bit of knothole, a movement, rather than making them just like a plain piece of lumber. I liked that they had a shapeliness of their own.

When I realized that they still looked like branches, I mixed up a brush load of acrylic paint involving maybe brown, white, gray, and a few other colors, and drew the branches along the edge, making a fake wood grain. The paintings look like they have real wood framing them, but it is just trompe l'oeil wood grain. I am left with a more or less rectilinear area that becomes, ultimately, the canvas for my little symbol. I think I always painted a thin line of color around the rectangle between the framing device and the painted area itself. And as I said, the whole series was made with red, black, white, and yellow.

LR: And how were they received when you first showed them at your galleries?

PY: I have no idea... I was out of New York by then. I am a westerner. I mean Dick Bellamy sold them to excellent collectors, no doubt. And a few of the ones that have now finally come back around are being offered to Craig for this current show.

LR: Was there anything else you would like us to know about the “Stick” paintings?

PY: Dick Bellamy always called them birch paintings. I think it was because when he visited me in southern Utah in the mountains, my spring had beautiful red birch trees growing all around it. I don't know whether you know what white birch or red birch looks like. They are beautiful trees. They used to make canoes out of birch bark, out of giant birches. They had a way to remove the whole bark and sew it together at each end. My red birch was smaller, but very beautiful.

LR: But they are all pine wood, right? Was that just his marketing ploy?

PY: No, I think it was a real confusion. Though I am not sure. You're to some degree right. Because “birch” is an awful lot sweeter than “ponderosa pine.” Which they, in fact, are.

My career is made up of discrete groups of works: where I would find something, discover it, execute it, stop, and then move on to something often quite different. I'm trying to look see but I think the stick paintings might be the series number twenty or something. Or series number twelve. I am not sure.

LR: You've had quite the life.

PY: Well, I have a lot of series.