FP: When did you decide to become a painter?
TE: I think I decided to become an artist, an image maker of some sort, when I was a little kid, probably in grammar school. I used to always be drawing and drawing and drawing. Along with doing the schoolwork I would have along the borders of a lot of my papers, drawings of cars, planes. I used to draw images of the Second World War, and kind of react to all this stuff. I realized very young that this was a way I could communicate. I wasn't having a great deal of luck communicating other ways. It was a kind of power in a sense, my own world was there, I could work with it, no one else could enter it, no one else could tell me what to do about it. It was my kind of inner universe, which I could try and play out upon a canvas, drawing, or whatever. And as I went through the years I just wanted to take more and more art courses, find out more about painting and drawing, and just continue on with it, exploring.

FP: Did you have any instructor in a way that actually seemed helpful?
TE: Yeah, my high school art teacher James McDowell, who was fresh out of art school and a veteran from the second world war. He had the most up to date ideas, and he came to my hometown in Westfield, Massachusetts, and I was lucky enough to run into him, because I had him three years as a teacher. He allowed me full reign of all the materials and all different media -- woodcuts, and a little bit of etching; I did my first mural, my first oil painting and mural combination. It was about 18 feet long and about 4 and a half to 5 feet high, along the classroom wall, one end of it. I had to submit drawings to the principal and different people in the administration to get this OK, as to what subject matter I was going to deal with. And of course it was my nature I guess even way back there, my first concept was a big abstraction, pure geometry, color, that kind of thing. And that didn't go anywhere, they didn't want that, they didn't understand it. Instead I did a large painting of the Boston Tea Party.

FP: What year would this have been?
TE: 1948, 1949, 1950, in those years.

FP: Was the geometry anything like the way you paint now?
TE: Without the volume concept, yeah. At that time it was just broken up shapes that I liked that would go together and then I would throw some color in there and see what happens. I had not painted with oils, never had yet, what I really painted with first was watercolors. Learning to control watercolors of course is difficult for a lot of people because you have to be so spontaneous with it. Your concept of color has to be pretty clear, and the fresher you can keep the image, the way you use the medium, that all counts. Developing that whole discipline and then turning to oils was a remarkable kind of thing, it was like a catechism of how to control things quickly and get it together. I now use oil paint pretty much like watercolor, though you can't tell.

FP: Sounds like Turner.
TE: Turner's cool, right? [laughs] I think any good watercolorist would be a good oil painter.

FP: But the reverse is not always true.
TE: Right. You better believe it. [laughs]

FP: When did you decide to try to make a career out of painting?
TE: I had to make a decision about making a living, and doing my own work, keeping my own concept of aesthetics and art, my own originality. I had to keep that going and still had to make a living, so that's why I went on to get advanced degrees and become a teacher. And so I taught for 27 years in the higher education system, and kept my own vision and work going completely separate from the teaching. Much of my teaching had to do with basic concrete ideas of pure design and color, or had to do with drawing, how to look at reality and draw, how to see in a meaningful way without saying 'I copied nature', or imitated it, to allow emotion to get into the drawing. A lot of things I did, especially when I went to UMass in Boston, I found a tremendous lacking in basic things. A lot of faculty that were teaching painting were stressing fashionable images, images that already existed in New York City, and they taught students how to imitate that kind of stuff. No one knew how to draw. No one knew how to do any of the really interesting basic stuff, which was a discipline. So I took it upon myself. I had a lot of drawing classes, beginning, intermediate, advanced, so I had a chance to play with it, though I had never taught drawing before to such a degree where I could guide a group of the same students for as long as three semesters. I really kicked it around, to develop deeper concepts of how you look at nature and translate it into something emotionally meaningful. I took up a lot of slack in the curriculum in a whole area that was opposite to the way I painted, which was refreshing.

FP: Did it help your painting?
TE: Yeah, because I kept it separate [laughs]. I grew because I was dealing with looking at things, I had to figure out an order, a way to teach these students to look at things, and actually that order started in design classes. I broke down design into a way of looking; I mean how basic can you get? When you look at something, what do you see? Do you see color first? Value first? Pattern first? What kind of pattern do you see? And I began to get them to look at different things. At the same time at UMass you had to teach basic photography along with basic visual design and beginning painting and color, and I tried to find a balance between them. So when I had them look at things I broke it down so they would have to go out and take photographs. And can you find a certain pattern in nature? Or can you find line in nature? If you can, how did that get there? Can you prove it visually? The student would come in with abstract, pretty much, answers to some of these basic questions. At the same time I could begin to have them look out at things and have them tell me which comes first visually. Do you see value first, color in nature first, or motion, which is another whole thing? I put it to the test, and you can see value, probably, before color, and movement before either one of them. And if you're looking at patterns, what kind of patterns are you looking at? All the things, well, especially in the city, they ran into all kinds of man-made patterns, lines, stuff like that. I wanted them to distinguish between them. All of a sudden I had a following around my basic courses and classes, they began to grow in terms of the Asian attendance. The whole group of people from that area responded to the order of the way I presented things.

FP: Did Asian traditions influence your thinking as an artist?
TE: Yeah, years ago I used to study a lot, dig around in the Asian section of the Museum of Fine Arts. I was getting bombarded with all the European stuff; I knew all that, what I didn't know was the Asian, the Far East.

FP: Did you find any particular traditions either interesting or attractive or influential on your work, Japanese versus Chinese, different other types?
TE: The philosophy of Zen, the whole thing influenced my work in graduate school. I began to realize I could apply a lot of the attitudes of Zen, Buddhism, the attitude of man and nature and nature overpowering man, man getting adjusted to the cosmos and energy, and spontaneity. All that I could apply to painting.

FP: Two things that I have seen in your painting, and what I hear as an undercurrent in what you are saying in part, are notions of clarity and notions of purity. Are those conscious considerations of yours while you are painting? Or do you see them as underpinnings of the way that you paint?
TE: They have to do with what I believe abstraction is. There is a whole misunderstanding now. I hear curators, art dealers, and museum directors talking about abstraction, and they take a distorted piece of painting of reality, like say an early Kandinsky, and call it abstract. Or they call Soutine abstract, or all these imagists who even though it's distorted, it means it's distorted, or it means it's expressionistic, but it's not abstract. A pure abstractionist, like the journey Mondrian took from painting nature, from really recording specifically flowers, his iris drawings, and then he went into, there was a special series where he did apple trees, and that's where he began to look positively and negatively, between the branches, the sky and whatever, and got the push and pull deal going, of which there's where maybe even my roots are a little bit in terms of these dynamics. Anyway the journey for Mondrian into his rectangles and pure color is a true journey from a person dealing with distortion and expression and all that, into pure abstraction. Ellsworth Kelly went into pure abstraction. Al Held went into pure abstraction. Malevich and a few of those Russian school painters got into pure abstraction. Andre Masson and of course Pollock got into and got out of it. De Koening got into it and got out of it. But to stay then as a purist and ending up with geometry and color, this enabled me to deal with color, color that has nothing to do with the color in nature, but color that has to do with my emotions and also translating color into the concrete image of simplicity and beauty. That's all I'm doing. [laughs]

FP: Just something modest like that. [laughs] Do you view color and geometry as being on an equal footing in their importance in creating abstraction?
TE: In my case, yes.

FP: What about the general case? Could you view abstraction that didn't care about, would you feel a lacking in abstraction that didn't care about color, and could you even conceive of it that didn't care about geometry?
TE: You mean like a random fragmental abstraction, a monochromatic kind of...

FP: I'm not sure I have a picture of it, I'm just dealing with the ideas. And I'm not sure I would view random and fragmented as non-geometric...
TE: Right...

FP: And actually they're in your own paintings...
TE: The fractals, right...

FP: The fact that geometries possess structure at many different scales, so that when you look closely you find more rich structure and when you look within that you find more, that's not a non-geometric approach. In some sense it's extremely geometric in the same way that the geometries in your work are extreme geometries, either tremendously simple and pure, in the one sense, or tremendously complex and purely structured, on the other extreme. There's nothing in the middle.
TE: This goes on to, we were talking about abstraction and I gave you examples of Mondrian and a few of the others. But that definition and span of abstraction is what is known as a modern aesthetic thinking about abstraction, and what you're talking about in the cosmos, is I want people to know that the abstraction I'm dealing with maybe goes back to the abstraction of nature and the universe. To me abstraction is the deep space of order in aesthetics, whether it was created in this century or way back in the Egyptian times. There is an innate nature of man to have created pure, beautiful things. And it was through abstraction they understood chaos, and abstraction has the order to handle that, whether it's in my field or in math or whatever.

FP: Your concept of abstraction is parallel to the way that a mathematician thinks about what abstract things are. When people think about mathematics they think about numbers. And mathematics is certainly about numbers. In the same way that when most people think about painting, they think about painting real things. But contemporary mathematics at its deepest levels very rarely discusses numbers. It's really about relationships...
TE: And dimensions...

FP: And when it comes to concepts of space, all those spatial relationships create this rich geometric language. It is similar with abstraction in relation to painting. Your original input of what color may be about, is by looking at things in nature -- or things you make, it doesn't really matter -- but real things. The abstraction comes from removing the thingness and you're no longer talking about that particular concrete thing, but you are using the elements to create new things. And it may be about color, and it may be about structure just as it's revealed through black and whites, or through luminosity or whatever other features are related to how you see. But it's not ultimately about seeing any particular thing any more than mathematics is about adding up a couple of numbers. It's all about generalization from those ideas, and talking about relationship and talking about how things are connected and how things are ordered and how they're put together and how you can remake things that way. There's this longstanding issue in mathematics. About whether or not the order that mathematicians create is in a sense truly their own creation, or whether it is all ultimately just a reflection of a natural order out there, even if they're not things that are immediately perceivable, like a shoe or a sock, or...
TE: I got to that point too. Are we really creating our things that will fit? I think it's both, there's still that interplay. It's like astronomy; you can't make too much progress unless there's something new to make it towards...

FP: But at the same time concepts of what you're looking for come from ...
TE: Accident [laughs]...

FP: Or from creations of the mind. For instance, black holes were purely a deduction, a consequence of certain mathematical equations which were considered to be probably right descriptions on a certain level about what gravity does with space. And then you go look for them, and lo and behold it looks like you find some. Would you have found them without that theoretical approach initially that lead you to look for them? Or would you have missed them? And in that sense, yeah, the mathematics and geometrical structure in general relativity theory reflects the way things are, at least we think it does. and yet what we find out that things are, our process of exploration, is shaped by these objects of pure imagination, which weren't experimentally discovered but theoretically created. Is painting about parallel things in exploration and discovery, or is it about personal revelation?
TE: Both. I cannot arrive at this kind of handling of color in a simple way without having tremendous emotional input. Back a ways where I wasn't mixing what I would call good color, I was making mistakes or the blend wouldn't be right. Things would go wrong and I would have to learn physically to do these blends, so that they fit my emotional as well as my intellectual concept of what I was dealing with at the time. This particular one [points to a canvas propped against a wall] is just a variation on a theme of paintings I had done back at Bleecker Street. It just handled the color a little bit differently, and this is only one section of Bleecker Street painting, but handled in a completely different color range. And it goes back to, I just wanted to take a simple diagonal down through there and have two spaces, two areas of color and a line. This is what people misunderstand about my painting. I have reduced my style so much that they completely miss how difficult it is to make these things. [laughs] Or that this is innovation in handling paint as well as color, that gets reduced to just two or three things, I've reduced it to such a simple order.

FP: Isn't that a problem with simplicity? You see that whenever anything is done so well that it looks simple. You can only have something look simple when it isn't, when you work at it for a long time to accomplish that. To be able to see the effort that led up to doing things in so concise a manner that it looks simple to the outside, unfortunately leads often to its not being appreciated, because you don't see the process, the struggle, all the different components of the mechanism that led up to it. Looked at that way it makes sense but its frustrating.
TE: It's like the old film of Picasso when they filmed him in his living room making variations on a drawing, variations on a theme. People were always amazed at how spontaneously he could come up with an image. And that's the way art should go, that way of flowing out.

FP: If it looks labored it's clearly not working, yet if it doesn't look labored, it is very hard for people to see the labor that went into it. I don't mean that labor in terms of actual manual labor, but understanding and emotion and everything else that has to be invested in a work of art that is meaningful.
TE: You're going to be surprised but I'm going to tell you something. You know the painters that appreciate what I do the best and understand it? House painters. People who paint walls, enamel, people who cover big areas. They look at what I do and just completely freak out...

FP: How you can control the paint like that...
TE: They understand where to get to it, even though they don't know anything about art [laughs]...

FP: They do but in a different way...
TE: That's the only place I get anyone kind of bowing down a little bit, because they can't conceive of the fact that one could do that.

FP: But recently you've moved to these very fragmented components in the geometry. As I said before, they take extremes of geometry and it makes sense to play one extreme off the other.
TE: You get more power that way. Too many similarities is boring. So what I try to do is to take an extreme. A lot of my work has to do with opposites, opposites in temperature, opposites in the way the luminism is handled in space, the way the sculptural feeling of the color works usually is in opposites. And then this allows me to get really into an area with not only opposites in form but that can be built up slowly. I can start, stop, start, stop. The other, the more smooth areas of my work, have to be done pretty fast, they have to be done like watercolor, spontaneously. Blocked in, I have usually a lesser window to paint, if I can get an hour to do a blend, even in a simple way, that's it.

FP: Do you find it satisfying to be able to do these more densely structured things without the same constraints of time as you have in the smooth?
TE: Yeah I like it, because it lets me get into different patterns and textures. Visually, I painted nearly 18 years of highly blended areas of color, and I guess I wanted people to know I could do this other whole kind of thing. The idea here is however, brushstrokes, you don't see them. Not in the blended areas, nor do you see any in the fragmented areas. I don't believe much in brushstrokes. All through my painting that's one of the things I stand for, another kind of simplicity.

FP: Why?
TE: There was an old aesthetic theory I learned way back in graduate school, that one of the greatest aesthetic accomplishments is to achieve a maximum experience out of a minimal kind of structure. I thought this in itself is opposite.

FP: You really could have become a theoretical physicist [laughs], because the parallels are remarkable in terms of the motivation for why one works, what one seeks in the best work. Actually I put that the wrong way. The more I hear you talk the more I see parallels between the way mathematicians and physicists work and they way someone like you works as an abstract painter, and that would be equally true for someone who sculpted or worked in any medium with a similar aesthetic. Probably the essential mathematical tool used in theoretical physics now to try to explain nature, is to try to write the underlying principle that governs some phenomenon as what's called an 'extremum principle'. That nature tries to make some property that describes a system, either the most or the least it can be, to make it the greatest value or the smallest value it can be. That nature seeks an extreme, and that in seeking that extreme, it creates all of the dynamics and all of the phenomena and everything that it is you see. One of the principal concepts is the principle of least action, that nature tries to minimize a certain quantity to make it as small as possible. But in other cases it looks to maximize some quantity. This is where these geometries, why the types of things I see in your painting, so resonate with the geometries that one sees in the use of mathematics to explain physical phenomena in contemporary theoretical physics. The mathematical principles are all about how does nature behave most extremely, and how do these principles account for what you see. The geometries are all extreme. They're either all as smooth as can be or as rough and irregular as can be, just like your painting. And that tension, that contrast, in turbulent phenomena you see that, you look in water and you see perfect smooth flowing areas until you get to the regions where there's turbulence and chaos and then it's as broken up and as whirly and as densely structured as you can imagine. And I am struck by the parallels. It gets at another issue, that people tend to think of abstraction as not being very emotional.
TE: That's right.

FP: In the same way that they tend to think of mathematics as not emotional. It's all dry; it's almost like it's non-human. And for anybody who does it, especially has devoted their lives to it, that notion is incomprehensible. It is intensely human. It is difficult, it is a different type of endeavor than most people engage in, but it is an intensely human endeavor. And you're full of feeling when you're doing what you're doing, when it works and when it doesn't work and everything in between. And I would imagine it is a very parallel situation for you, I can tell from the way that you're talking about it.
TE: It's the same thing. But you have to really believe in pure abstraction and that's why I get very angry at all the jargon and real babble that people are talking when they mention something is abstract when it isn't. The true understanding of abstraction, way back into deep space or whatever, is what people are missing.

FP: Do you still find in painting the same things in terms of personal experience that led you to want to do it when you first started?
TE: I do, yes. Because I'm still in my own world. I'm still creating an innovation that I can believe in, an order. I have a whole area of icons or a theme and variation. I can go in one direction and if I get tired of that I can extend my concept of space and order into a different direction. And all these directions are mine anyway. I suppose that I went into these different directions because they allowed me some sort of freedom, where I could build up other ideas, especially in terms of complete contrast, and still have complete simplicity. If I were affluent enough, I would have loved to do sculpture, to make my own architecture, to do all these other things in three dimensions, because I have a lot of ideas that were never answered there.

FP: Did you ever do any small scale three-dimensional stuff?
TE: Back in art school, structures and pure things, like you think of out of the Bauhaus, things like that. We did clay, wood. But I'm talking more about metal...

FP: ...the big stuff. [laughs] Some people that I've known who've seen your paintings, and this comes up more with things like the Bear Bars series, they figure that if there is such a discernible shape that looks like it's something, there must be some symbolic role that it is playing. Does symbolism play any role in your painting? Do these forms stand for anything else? If they do is it just personal but not really relevant for the effect you're creating in the painting?
TE: The Bear Bar title stands for something, but it goes back to when I was young, a teenager. That story is an instance of personal symbolism, and I suppose I better tell the story now. [laughs] In southern Massachusetts you can go across the border into Connecticut and down hidden in the woods there's a place called the Newgate prison, an old Revolutionary prison that George Washington used, and it's all collapsed pretty much, but there's a big prison yard with a wall around it. When I first discovered it and went there it was the late '40s and early '50s, and not many people knew about it. But if you did go there, you went into a gate, and in the middle of the compound before you went into what little structures there were that were left, was a round circle of maybe twelve to fourteen feet in diameter. This was a caged area with a little roof over it. And inside that was this big bear, and he was in this cage and he was on display there and you could tell he wasn't very happy. I just couldn't, I freaked out over that thing, I couldn't understand this horrible way to do this, to treat this bear like that. I don't know if he ever got out of that thing or what. So years later when I was creating these columns in the painting, to me were like bars. They started out less, kind of metallic, I investigated an area of color which no one investigates, that was back when I started the bear bars, it was metallic color. Who paints metallic color? This is really where luminism comes in, true intuitive chromatic understanding of light and dark and values. If you don't understand value in color you won't understand how to get good luminism. Anyway, back to the bars. I began to paint these bars and I said I could paint these stronger, and I could darken these edges, and pull out the middle of them more with light, more luminism and higher keyed color, and I said what could I call these? And I just thought of that bear. It was like looking at the bear, that this is my prison. And that's kind of symbolism, maybe that's there. [laughs] These aren't phallic symbols or vertical columns like an obelisk, it's not that kind of symbolism, but I thought back to the bear.

FP: Is there something similar in the Keystone series? Or is that just an issue of pure geometry that led to those?
TE: Yeah, I just wanted to keep the concept simple, no questions, I liked the name keystone, half keystone.

FP: Bleecker too?
TE: Bleecker was where I was at the time. That's where I started that series.

FP: Do you see much connection between your painting and 19th century luminist painting?
TE: Other then the fact that they knew how to understand value. Church really kicked around some sense when he began to make those wild paintings with palm tress and bright, powerful clouds all fiery red. And then you had Kensett. Just great concepts, you could do a whole painting low key and then you get the color to glow, and that's good luminism.

FP: Did that shape any of your own approach, looking at those paintings? Or does it just happen that there are these connections?
TE: It just happens that I go back now and see that those guys did what I'm doing only I'm doing it abstractly. The problem with my whole journey with color up to the '60's, 1970, is no one's ever seen it. I need a retrospective, I need to really show the journey I've taken, in color itself, never mind the evolution of the edge kill and even back a ways in the 70s where I used extreme opposites to control paint, bands of color, accident. I always dealt with opposites as much as possible, because as I said if everything is similar it gets awful boring.

FP: Art historically, even if they don't paint similarly to the way you paint, are there any artists you feel more at home with, feel more in sympathy with the way they seemed to be looking at things, or is there any such resonance?
TE: Most of the people dealing with abstraction are still painting fragments of the New York school. They're painting pieces of de Koening, they're taking innovations other people have done and made them into their own paintings, and to me they still don't have their own personality or imagery down to much of anything. As far as pure abstractionists, there are not many that can handle the discipline and stay pure.

FP: I don't mean just contemporaries.
TE: I've got to think about it, you've got to go back, [laughs] the Egyptians...

FP: [laughs] the makers of the pyramids... [laughs] maybe we can find someone in the Renaissance or later? [laughs]...
TE: Right, maybe we could. [laughs] Utrillo, and Poussin...

FP: I was more thinking in terms of how people would care about color, maybe even the passages they would make, where there was a similar quality.
TE: I mentioned Poussin because he was more ordered. I was thinking of the geometry, the kind of imagery these people really put a classical order behind what they were doing, and that's another reason or justification for why I believe in abstraction. [laughs]

FP: Initially the impulse for abstraction was, and I'm reminded of this because I'm thinking of your remarks about no brushstrokes, was to remove the obviously personal from painting, and then ultimately to remove the personal in a sense altogether. It's problematical whether you can ever remove the personal from painting because you are an individual person making it. You always bring your vision.
TE: Those were the two theories back then, with Clement Greenberg and other critics...

FP: And then what it became was the triumph of the individual vision and the most intensely personal, and in some sense by removing reference to the outside world you made it more personal than if you were trying to paint a thing. Whereas originally it was sort of a rejection of impressionism, with all of this gushy, obvious, in your face sentimentality, let's get rid of that.
TE: There were two criticisms of pure abstractionists when I was coming up through the ranks. One was, you can't draw, you can't do any representational work, you must be horrible at that, no wonder you do this other kind of thing. Then the other was that if you painted pure concepts without reference to nature you were impersonal, that you did not like humanity, that you could not even understand or empathize with pain or other aspects that go on around you of a highly emotional kind of thing. And you've already said that with this freedom that one does get from pure abstraction, you can get further into yourself. Or at least I feel, into my emotions, and let what I do not only be an intellectual answer as much as possible but also an emotional and honest concept of what I think is an ordered and wonderful painting.

FP: When people think about luminism they're thinking of Heade and they're thinking of some Hudson River School, mid-nineteenth century landscape painting. I don't know of a discussion of luminism in relation to abstraction.
TE: There isn't any.

FP: And that is in some sense, if you wanted to pigeon hole things in terms of historical categories, that is one of the easier ways to see the originality of your work. It's that here we've got these two well-known concepts, and do you know of work that combines them? And the answer is, other than yours, I don't know. But I don't think that's all they're about either.
TE: Michaelangelo's Sistine Chapel, the new color that they cleaned is luminism. He is the first luminist. And certainly it's geometric and you go back to hard edges and simple lines, yeah, he's key. [laughs]

FP: So we did find someone from the Renaissance. [laughs]
TE: [laughs] I had forgotten that. And of course, what does the work stand for? Tremendous power! Because he dealt with opposites as well. But he had such a fantastic human vision, and could he draw, man, could he draw. [laughs]