Angela Kallus: Waterloo is on view at The Reading Room in Dallas through December 9th, 2017.

I wanted to compare these drawings with your paintings. The paintings often have very strong, intense colors (for example, reds), even when compared to other types of painting, whereas these drawings have a more restrained palette, even when color is used. Also, the paintings often have a regularity or symmetry, whereas these drawings often show us uniqueness or irregularity (for example, unique markings or wear on each booklet). Also, these drawings include a lot of text (unlike the paintings). However, there are still some commonalities, for example: a very precise, disciplined kind of process. Is this valid?

Firstly, I think any way that you think about them is as valid as any other… The kind of obvious thing I can say about the palette of these drawings is that it’s the palette of the books, and they’re old and faded. They were printed on cheap paper, on newsprint. Thus, I use a lot of brown and yellow. But that’s not really what you’re asking.

I do use a lot of red and pink in my paintings, it’s true. Partly because, although they have really little to nothing to do with actual flowers qua flowers, or with the representation of “real” roses, they have a lot to do with “representation” and “roses” and a few other choice signifieds of “roses,” so red and pink is ultimately the right palette. It’s blushing. Or flushed. Etc. People tell me they look delicious. But I have made “rose” paintings in other colors, yes.

I have made many very colorful airbrushed paintings of fuzzy concentric circles, but I’m not even going to talk about those right now. Let’s stick with roses and books.

And thank you—“precise and disciplined” is a very nice way of saying that I’ve found a way to channel my compulsive behavior into ordered results. One might say that I crave order and beauty, and one might engage a cheap psychoanalysis into possible reasons why, but I’m not going to be the one. Also, I suspect that psychoanalysis is rarely cheap and is probably also bunk. Never tried it. (but I do have a few Little Blue Books that delve into how-to psychoanalysis—maybe I should give D.I.Y. psychoanalysis a go? Or is that just called “thinking?”)

But I digress. So—as far as similarities go, my various bodies of work may seem wildly different at first, and if you compared one drawing of one little book to one big painting, like, say, that sixteen-foot-wide eight-panel red and pink extravaganza of “roses” that I made in 2016, entitled American Beauty (last shown in Dallas at Circuit 12 Contemporary as part of a show that I organized called Union Pacific) then you might conclude that these things were not made by the same person. But if you look at the group of drawings as a whole then you will see many iterations of very similar things that point to, or indicate, external meaning but don’t necessarily show it.

They also echo, or quote, other images (Dutch vanitas, baroque portraits, Morandi, etc.). They’re units, in one way: the subject matter (they were mass-produced, mass-market paperbacks)—and they are very specific, in another way (some of the booklets have traces of their owners’ histories on their bodies, as it were). And the words lend all this extra content, which to me both is and isn’t a red herring—maybe it’s a bonus.

And then if you look at that huge painting, encrusted with over 8,000 rosettes (individually made! Each one unique in its sameness) you see the repetition of a single formal motif, over and over and over—so many signifiers of so many things, so many that it extends past your visual range if you stand close enough to get involved with one… Every one of them is individually made, never cast (people often assume that they are cast) and I make those in a mostly monochrome palette, on square or rectangular panels, so they’re not just paintings, they also “look like” other paintings.

And then if you look at everything I’ve done since the ’90s, then you would see that I’ve always done things in multiples—even as an undergraduate, and as a grad student. Why am I this way? That’s a hard question to answer. When you repeat a word over and over again until it is drained of meaning, it’s called semantic satiation (rose is a rose is a rose, etc) What kind of satiation is visual? Is there a term for that?

I think a lot about the way that these particular objects (roses, books) have multiple “signifieds”—and what my role is in choosing and making them. I realize that there is nothing new about this kind of thinking—I did read plenty (but not all) of those books as an undergrad/grad student (Barthes, Foucault, et al). Granted, I read them in translation, because I can’t read French.

What the work has in common, besides the maker—have I answered that yet? Right, the patterns and the symmetry. I started ordering the rosettes in grid-like arrangements a few years ago. I have off-and-on used a structure, like a shape (a hexagon, a circle) or a grid to order the largest rosettes, and I have also used more fluid arrangements, that visually echo landforms, or rivers. It adds another reference, and I like that (or it could, anyway) I prefer to let the viewer choose their signified, so I hesitate to analyze my own work out loud.

The process that goes into all these things, both the drawings and the paintings, is very time-intensive, relatively precise. (I wouldn’t even know how to begin an abstract, gestural, brushy painting anymore…) Did I mention how much I love math? I was halfway to another degree in math when my total life melt-down occurred. That’s why I like teaching drawing so much, I think.  Drawing and math both order the visible world and represent ideas using formal systems that are both abstract and concrete (i.e. uncountable infinities vs. integers). And both math and drawing represent the world as we perceive it (“looks like”), but also create representations of things we cannot see (ex: infinitudes, loneliness). 

To ask a more detailed question about the process here: You described a whole series of steps using different techniques including ink, liquid mask, washes, watercolor, dry media, ink again, graphite… Kind of amazing! I think when someone looks at one of these, they can intuitively sense that a lot went into it, but they might not realize just how much. As with academic oil painting: the surface is immaculate, but at the same time, you can’t necessarily tell how it was done. Could you walk through the process a little bit for us?

It’s actually a very similar process as academic oil painting—nothing about it is improvisational. I draw it first—the lines, the text—with pencil. Then ink over that with a very fine liner pen, then mask the ground with liquid masking and tape. Then rub dry chalk pastels over the line drawing for a base color layer, and then wash it with a wet brush and sponges to set the color into the paper. Sometimes I do several layers of color this way—and it has to dry completely between layers. That’s why I work on four at a time, so I can switch to the next while one is drying, etc.

Then I work over the underdrawing with dry media on the surface, for value changes, shading, to describe the faded or stained edges, the spots and stains on the surfaces, the creases, etc. with additional wet brushing over some areas, with a tiny, barely-damp brush—I always have the booklet right there on the table in front of me, so I can look at it for as long and as carefully as I need to. I go over the text with another layer of ink if I have built up too much chalk or graphite on the surface and it looks too faded. Sometimes I use fixative between layers so there is no blending on the surface but rather a layering of colors and shades.

If this sounds just like the method of so-called “indirect painting”—that’s because it is just like it. I’m using dry media and ink and watercolor, but I’m using it like an oil painter—or, at any rate, like a particular kind of academic painter. No one could ever accuse me of being loose. Dave Hickey once called me a control freak, during a public lecture. He was actually talking about my circle paintings at the time—but, okay. Yes. One could reasonably accuse me of being controlled.

There were over a thousand titles in this series of Little Blue Books, selling hundreds of millions of copies. You have acquired a few hundred examples already, right? Here in this exhibition, there are sixteen of your works, and you are working on more. But you said that this whole series of work actually started with one booklet. Can you describe how you got started on this series?

You asked how many I have now—I don’t even know. Hundreds. Maybe 500, at this point? I haven’t counted them. I have multiple copies of some of them.

The first Little Blue Book I drew was Nietzsche’s Guilt and Bad Conscience, No. 1282, in early January, 2017. I liked it, so I did it again. And again: Why do something only once when you can do it five times? I liked the way that I could pose the booklet and imply content based on the pose and the title. Then I looked at the index number on the booklet: 1282. Wondered. Googled “little blue books”—and then the ballet ensued, as it were. Down the rabbit hole. But why the Nietzsche in the first instance, you ask? I have had that tiny, worn-out, fragile, old booklet in my boxes of things that I’ve held onto and moved around so many times that I didn’t really remember whence it came.

It had become totemic for me, part of my own history. For example, I conspicuously left it around my house in Vegas when my now ex-husband was busy packing his things and leaving me. I know, I know: Passive-aggressive. (And ineffective, anyway—it’s not like that man could feel guilt.) About three weeks ago I started thinking hard about whence came that patient zero, and have decided that I got it from Jeffrey Roddy, my friend since the eighties, who was, in one of his past lives, a great artist, and with whom I very briefly lived in Denton ca. 1989. It’s the kind of thing he would have had, and I asked him recently if I could have gotten it from him, and he confirmed that he had once had many of them, so I’m just going to say I got it from Jeff Roddy.

In this particular exhibition, the arrangement of works on the wall tells a certain story, if one pays attention. It’s not obvious from the individual drawings’ titles, but sometimes several of the drawings use the same book as a model. For example, on the left-hand exposed brick wall, as you walk into the Reading Room, you see an arrangement of four drawings: on the left is Shaped Canvas; Single Blue Monochrome #025 – Recto; at top center is The Application; bottom center is The Proper Length, and at right is Shaped Canvas; Single Blue Monochrome #027 – Verso. All four of these drawings are based on one specific copy of one book in your collection—Edgar Allan Poe, How I Wrote “The Raven,”—a copy that has a clue to its ownership on the cover. Can you tell us about your copy of this book, how you made each of these four drawings, and how they are hung together here?

That was among the first ones I bought, around February, when my now ongoing, compulsive, L.B.B.s-buying spree was in its infancy. I bought it for the title: How I Wrote The Raven. That promised riches. When it arrived, I realized that it had been carelessly trimmed. (this was a DIY publishing outfit, when it started.) It had been cut off bias, so the booklet is not rectangular, but more trapezoidal. It was… a shaped canvas! And, on the cover (another reason I bought this particular copy) was narrative. History. The former owner had stamped her name—with one of those script-like rubber stamps that one could order back in the day to stamp one’s name on all one’s books, notebooks, papers, clothes for summer camp (indelible ink!) etc.

Her father had been a professor of biology and viticulture in fin-de-siecle California, thus a public figure, thus a record—Dorothea got married. She was born Bioletti, and married a Kauffman.

In fact, she had stamped her name many times—on the cover, the inside leaf, on the back—and then she stamped it again—her name had changed, and she got a new stamp. The history, the mystery. Did Dorothea get married? Was she adopted? Was she an immigrant? I googled her name on the weekend the show opened, and I found a result. Her father had been a professor of biology and viticulture in fin-de-siecle California, thus a public figure, thus a record—Dorothea got married. She was born Bioletti, and married a Kauffman. I think it’s weird that I know this. I also think it’s weird that I have (possibly) her fingerprints.

But I started drawing that one booklet over and over again because it was not a regular shape—it started as a cheap art—history joke, a visual pun, quoting the autocratic shaped canvases and monochromes of the 20th—century (mostly male) painters, which I do with my acrylic “roses” as well—revisiting the reductionist declarations of Clement Greenberg—and it is a booklet written by Poe, specifically about writing his poem The Raven, which uses a motif that, while formally repetitive, becomes increasingly associative for the narrator of the poem, and he slowly becomes unhinged while the inscrutable autocratic Raven croaks “Nevermore…” It just seemed so rich. So much there, in such a tiny little package. (obvs. the latter-day equivalent to so-much-there-in-a-tiny-little-package is the internet meme…) I had to choose but a few of the raven drawings for this show, but I’ve done more than fourteen—I say more than because they’re not all good enough to rate. Fourteen of them may be.

Your drawings show all the little details that make that copy of each book unique (although each one was printed in so many thousands of copies): pages wrinkled from water damage or otherwise, ink fading irregularly; inscriptions or random notes in pen or pencil; ink stains and other stains; irregularly cut edges of the pages (not strictly horizontal). From a book collector’s perspective, I suppose those things would be problems, but for these drawings as works of art, it’s amazing! It seems to convey a sense of uniqueness in a context of mass production. What are your thoughts about all that?

That’s why I buy many of them. I have multiple copies of many of these booklets. Some of them wear the traces of their history: Dorothea got married. Someone (possibly her, but who really knows? ) left inky fingerprints on both the front and back cover of that booklet (The Raven). I have drawn many pictures of her booklet, but all of the drawings have my fingerprints on them. I am her surrogate. Josephine drew hearts and a triangle doodle on her copy of Oscar Wilde’s Salome. She filled in the O’s, underlined names. And she drew the most perfect doodle of a walking (chicken? pigeon?) bird. That bird just kills me. The pathos of it. I wonder if Josephine ever read the play. It would make the hearts on the cover even better, but I’ll never know. One of my copies of The Maxims of Napoleon has stains all through it that look like Rorschach blots… maybe someone spilled their coffee on it, almost 100 years ago—but the results of this accident are so poignant, to my eyes.

And then there is that punchline in search of a joke—“head so soft, wears a flatiron…” I searched in vain in that booklet (Broadway Wisecracks) for the joke for which that obvious punchline served as the answer—but it isn’t in there. Must have been in another book. But also, someone (presumably the same person who wrote that mysterious line on the back cover) scrawled LAWMEN (all caps) on the front cover. When I opened the book to pose it in order to draw that back cover—I had fortuitously propped it open on some random page—all I could see on that open page were the first few words from each line and paragraph—and I saw “the new slow, slower” and “we have dethroned America…” I can honestly say that I could never make this stuff up, as good as I find it. It’s too weird, random yet perfect. It’s all there, all that extra, the content—I just have to see it—and that comes from compulsive looking. And that I am willing to do.

Some other very subtle aspects of the drawings: The scale is somewhat over life-size (which you wouldn’t necessarily realize at first, but it’s clear once you realize it). They are shown in all kinds of different angles and positions, too: flat or upright, seen from the front, side, three-quarter view… Can you discuss how you approach these decisions?

I pose them. Take photos of them with my phone, to quickly see what they would look like as a composition, framed within a rectangular space. Find the ones that look promising. The I prop the books up and light them accordingly—meaning sometimes I have to put them up on a raised surface, so I have them at eye-level, etc. I have done more than 60 of these drawings—some of the poses, compositions, combinations, choices, etc—work out better than others. Sometimes I finish a drawing and decide that it’s kind of lame. Yes, they are slightly larger than life-size. Does that make them heroic? 😉 Lol.

Practically speaking, any smaller and I wouldn’t be able to write those tiny letters. Any bigger and they would be over-sized, and all wrong. (Karen thinks one of the drawings in the show has a book that is scaled too big.) Generally speaking, this scale is book-scale, not pocket-sized (like the real things), but library-book-sized. But the Little Blue Books aren’t really books, you know, they’re more like chapters of books. Collections of pithy phrases. Helpful hints. Occasional screed. They’re appropriate for the attention span of today—they can be read in one sitting—and that, as a matter of fact, is what Poe describes as “the proper length” for a poem. (See: How I Wrote The Raven.)

And I pose some of them like figures in baroque portraits, with no context. (The white table in my studio, my lamps—all the environmental information is gone, except for the cast shadows so they don’t look like cut-and-paste clip art, so they’re grounded.)

I have all these booklets that look very much alike in many ways—same size, same basic color scheme (faded old newsprint)—although Little Blue Books is a bit of a misnomer—they weren’t all blue, and in fact I found one trove (229 books from one seller) that appears to have been kept in a dry, dark place for many decades—many of them almost look brand new—and they were printed in all colors (red, yellow, green, blue, white, etc) and some had illustrated covers. I haven’t gotten tired of looking at (or for) them yet. The way they fuel my compulsive behavior is also a thing, but probably not a thing to go into here…

I have a very limited set of formal props (like Morandi) but the titles, the words, lend so much extra, all the textual associations, the “meaning” (yeah, yeah, whatever, meaning…) like the props in a Dutch vanitas.

And I pose some of them like figures in baroque portraits, with no context. (The white table in my studio, my lamps—all the environmental information is gone, except for the cast shadows so they don’t look like cut-and-paste clip art, so they’re grounded.) I think this collection of drawings has more to do with the history of painting and picturing than it has to do with literature qua literature, but I’m using models that come from an era when people (maybe?) had a more literary than cinematic imagination, not as saturated with imagery as we are now.

Among the countless Little Blue Books, there are some that sound pretty academic, such as, to take a random example, Carroll Lane Fenton, Facts You Should Know About Animal Life: An Introduction to Zoology. However, a good number of them also seem to suggest some degree of psychodrama, a level of passion that maybe had to be suppressed in early 20th-century Girard, Kansas, especially about sex. What is your take on this aspect of the books, and how do you approach it in your drawings?

Oh, there’s so much there. Some of the titles really crack me up: The Gist Of Burton’s Melancholy, by Charles J. Finger. For the busy man who hasn’t time to linger over melancholy, Charles J. Finger could give you the gist… Also, some of them are awful. Sexism, eugenics, social Darwinism… It wasn’t just a liberal, socialist, free-love heaven in Kansas. But it was still such an American endeavor: so good, in so many ways. The juxtaposition of the titles (thus the subjects) in the indices is so leveling, as well—from the banal to the practical to the lofty to the controversial to the bawdy to the dry, etc. He was selling books, you see—a little something for everyone.

Both practical and philosophical education for the masses. and yes, lots of titles about sex. Birth control. Marriage. Divorce. Homosexuality. “Greenwich village” as the signifier of beatnik sex. Confessions of a Gold-Digger, The Loves of Clement Wood… Yes, that’s a real name, as much as it sounds like a pen name or a porn-star name—and he was a southern lawman with a Yale degree, and he writes, among other things that he was born to be a philanderer, because his mother loved him too much. See The Loves Of Clement Wood, No. 1370. Like I said before, I couldn’t make this stuff up.

You have been able to study with some brilliant art critics and historians (which not every artist is able to do, or is interested in doing), including Fran Colpitt and Dave Hickey. Do you think it’s possible to say how talking with them has affected the development of your work?

It certainly has affected me, but I don’t know how to even begin to quantify or qualify it. I am happy to say they are both personal friends. I went to grad school at UNLV for Dave Hickey—I arrived there a ready-made acolyte. I read his books as an undergraduate—after I read an article in Harper’s magazine titled “Frivolity and Unction,” which, as it turned out, was a chapter in Air Guitar. Then I bought a copy of The Invisible Dragon and it kind of blew my mind. At the same time, David Q was showing the work of some UNLV students at Angstrom in the late 90’s, and it impressed me, so that was where I wanted to be. Dave Hickey was talking about beauty. This seems like old news, now, but it was important to me at the time, and it still is. I moved to Vegas in August, 2000.

It occurs to me that you said “study with”—you do realize that I was never a student of Fran Colpitt’s, right? We were colleagues. I met Fran when I moved back to Texas in 2012—I worked for one year as a sabbatical replacement for Jim Woodson at TCU, the year my former life melted down (got divorced, lost the house, the house with the address of 1815—my Waterloo, etc.) and she and I started hanging around. I drag her out to galleries and museums in Dallas whenever I get the chance, and to the Dallas Art Fair, which is always fun, with Fran. Of course, it takes all day (last year, it took two days), because Fran knows everyone, and they all want to talk to her, because she’s such a badass.

She knows so much about abstract art, and the whole California scene, the birthplace of “conceptual” art—I lived in Vegas for 12 years, and I went to California all the time—and I love talking to Fran about painting. I remember Dave declaiming one day, in seminar (although I can’t remember what provoked his declaration): “Because I’m a fucking authority, that’s why…” I accused him at the time of speaking ex cathedra, but, yeah, he is an authority. So is Fran (although she isn’t going to announce it). I don’t really understand why artists wouldn’t want to know art critics and historians—I mean, I guess there are plenty of self-described “art critics” or historians that I wouldn’t care to know or talk to—but those two are gems. In fact, most of my friends are artists or writers, even a few curators and gallerists in that list.

I love gallerists, by the way—people who are willing to risk their time, money, and reputation on me—because it is a risk, for a gallerist. They stake their name on an artist’s work because they believe in something about it. I think it matters to have skin in the game, as it were.