In the midst of his preparation of the new one-person exhibit De-Classified: New Paintings at June Kelly Gallery, which will be on view from May 7 till June 9, 2009, the painter James Little took time to visit Rail Headquarters to talk to Managing Art Editor Benjamin La Rocco about his life and work.
Ben La Rocco (Rail): Let’s start with your background. You were born in Memphis.
james Little: Yes, I was born in Memphis, in 1952. I grew up in a working class family. Mother was a cook, father did construction and various other jobs. I wasn’t aware of it, of course, but it was segregated. Most of my people had migrated from Mississippi. My mother’s family was from that part of the country, and a lot of them were sharecroppers and she just got married and got out of there. My father’s side of the family was Native American, Irish, Black. So, that’s pretty much my ethnic makeup.
Rail: Were there any particular influences that you remember back then that you think might have contributed to your early interest in the arts?
Little: Well, I have an older brother who was the first person I ever saw draw, or make a picture, because he started school before I did and he was introduced to art before I was. He inspired me. But the thing that made a lasting impression on me was my father and my grandfather taking me to a construction site that they were working on. They were pouring cement—it should be done manually. You’ve got a guy to mix it, and you put it in a wheelbarrow, and you walk it down and pour it. And there were some other guys, masons, that would spread it out. So that had a strange influence on my sensibility toward surface, even to this day. I just like the idea of taking this medium, this material and transforming it—making it do something other than what it appeared to want to do. And that sort of stayed with me. They asked me to take the wheelbarrow. They loaded it up and said “take this, and roll it down, and dump it like your father did.” I picked it up on the wheel, and tried to do it, and it flipped over. So then I learned if you lift it up, you have to move. You can’t just lift it.
Rail: [Laughs.] You have to stay on the move.
Little: No, you can’t stay put, you have to lift it up, and you have to move it.
Rail: So, in 74, you went and got your BFA at the Memphis Academy of Art, right?
Little: Yeah.
Rail: And in 76, you went on to Syracuse University.
Little: Yeah, I went to Syracuse University on a fellowship, and earned an MFA there. While I was there I met Clement Greenberg and a number of other people, Hilton Kramer, Sol Lewitt, you name it. It was a pretty high-powered place. There were some serious things going on there, especially in the visual arts, and in painting in particular. It was like a beacon for abstract painting. The visiting artist program was fascinating. I didn’t know what I was getting into when I got up there.
Rail: Yeah, we talked a little bit about the presence of Greenberg there earlier. I want to come back to that, later. But first I’d like to talk about your paintings a little bit.
One of the things that’s always struck me about them is the type of surface you achieve. It’s always seemed both meticulous and free to me. I know that you’re using encaustic. So I was just wondering if you could talk a little bit about the process that gets you that surface.
Little: First of all, I’ve always had this interest in the properties of materials—how they work, and how things become what they are, like the cement. But my surface sensibility is something that evolved over a long time, and I made some sort of conscious, rational decisions about surface. People tend to think that surface always has to deal with texture. And it doesn’t. Surface can be smooth, it can be tactile, it can be rugged, it can be any number of things. I would mix oil and water. I would take paint and put it in a blender. I used knives, I’ve used spritzers, you name it. A lot of it came through experimentation. But I’ve always tried to grasp the essence of the material as it manifests itself. I’ve always tried to respect the integrity of the material. I go in 50-50. I see myself as an instrument. I’m here, the medium’s there, and the success of the painting is based on the marriage between the two of us. I’m never at a point where I’m in charge of anything. I’m always out there seeking something. It’s a delicate material, encaustic. It has its own properties, and all those different colors have their own properties, you’ve got cobalt, you’ve got cadmium, you’ve got umbers, each its own thing. Some of it is heavy, some of it is light. You’ve got titanium. When you mix that up it breaks down in certain ways. Its alchemy. And also you have to be careful with toxicity. I use coffee cans, and heat up the coffee cans. Stand oil and varnish and stir. I don’t take my eyes off it. I take chopsticks to stir it.
Rail: How many layers of paint on a canvas? Forty?
Little: Aw man, I use a bunch of layers. Not forty, but it’s a bunch of them.
Rail: Why chopsticks?
Little: I get them for free. When it’s melting, I stir it. I go to Planet Thailand and you get to keep them. It’s very convenient. I can see the color, I can match color with those sticks. So from start to finish, it must be about fifteen to twenty layers. So it’s like that for three months, three and a half months I’m working like that on just one big painting. Can’t work on two. It’s too much. It’s labor. Real labor. When it comes to painting, its as difficult, as taxing as anything. It’s like unbelievable. So when people say there’s something very unique about my surfaces and that kind of thing, yes there is. [Laughs.]
Rail: So it’s not systematic.
Little: No, it’s not systematic. It’s not formulaic. It really isn’t. A lot of what I do to make these paintings work is hard to quantify. You just know it. I can tell if the mixture is too thick or too thin as soon as I put the stick into it. Now that’s taken years, to learn that. Because before I was putting the paint on no matter what. If it’s too thin it causes cracking. If it’s too thick the paint curls. So to get the surface I’m after, it has to be just right, the right thickness and the right temperature. When its heated that paint is anywhere between 155 and 165 degrees, that’s pretty hot.
Rail: You must have lost a lot of painting while you were figuring this out.
Little: I once spilled a can of paint on my feet. I had on these comfortable shoes. Got wax underneath. Had my gloves on and my respirator on. Put the wax down, unplugged the hotplate, took the gloves off, and tried to get the shoe off while the encaustic is drying. By the time I got it off I had this huge blister on my instep. [Laughter.] So now what I do, I don’t concentrate on anything else. I’ve got four fire extinguishers in the studio because it’s very flammable stuff. It can take the skin right off you, but when you apply it, it sticks. Dry to the touch. You know, wax, wham—its there.
Rail: That’s cool.
Little: I like the painting to have a presence.
Rail: We’ve talked about the category of “hard edge” painting, and I know you shy away from using that in reference to your paintings. You do use tape and you work with diagonals sometimes, verticals, and no horizontals. Could you talk a little bit about the edges of forms in your paintings and how you think of achieving those edges and why you don’t like hard edge specifically as a term.
Little: Well, because when you say hard edge, there’s an objective there. I don’t say hard edge because I’m interested in geometry. And actually the edges aren’t hard, they’re just clean and they’re inviting. Hard edge was a style, a genre at one point, back in the 60s and 70s, when artists sought these hard, acrylic, pristine edges. The emphasis was placed there. In my work, that’s not the emphasis.
James Little, “Einstein” (2007). Acrylic on canvas, 78 × 96 inches. Photo: Bill Orcutt
Rail: Well, they’re oil paintings for one thing, right? The medium is different.
Little: That’s right, so it probably has something to do with the type of continuity, or rhythm that I’m trying to grasp in my paintings. And that’s just one of the ways I get there, if I could get there with a loose brush or a ballpoint pen I would do it that way, but hard edges—that just really doesn’t mean much to me.
Rail: I want to get back to this formative quality that Greenberg had on students at Syracuse, and also what his formalist doctrine might’ve meant to you. At certain times, you have associated yourself with formalism in painting.
Little: Yes.
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