FP: When did you do the Large Clump of Moss? What were the circumstances?
SP: That was done in Austerlitz [New York] in 1988, it was actually the first straightforward still life I had done.
FP: You did abstract painting before that, right?
SP: More abstracted, more surreal, more fragmentary. This was influenced by being turned on to Raphael Peale, and that whole tradition of still life painting.
FP: How did you get interested in it?
SP: I don't really know, there was just something so beautiful, the straightforward character of it got me into this other way of looking. Prior to that I had done that one X Moss painting on a curved panel, but that didn't have the solidity of an actual tabletop.
FP: Was that aquarium with the triangular shape on top before this?
SP: Yes, that was in graduate school, the Native Aquarium.
FP: Were you working with [Mark] Greenwold [Perkins' advisor in graduate school] then?
SP: Yes.
FP: Did he like that kind of thing?
SP: Well, he did, he supported me in doing that. That era, that whole time in graduate school really grew of out of a very direct desire to pursue my interest in Giotto, the Siennese painters, the whole Renaissance surrealism, really, which I loved as an undergraduate and had never pursued. It was actually Greenwold's challenging, critical attitude, which I love. I'll forever love him, because he tells me, you know I'm doing these Philip Gustonesque abstractions and he said "what are you looking at?" And I said "Giotto". And he said "I don't see that, what are you talking about?" And I said "I love Giotto". And he said "I don't see that; paint like Giotto if you love Giotto". And I said "what do you mean?" And he said "go buy panels made of wood, change your brushes, start doing glazing" and he said "do this and you'll love me for it" and he was absolutely right. It changed my life as an artist.
FP: Did you know you were going to be a painter when you went to college?
SP: Not necessarily. When I got to Alfred, there was such a diverse situation there for an 18 year old kid from Herkimer. There was glassblowing, metal sculpture of the likes of Mark diSuvero, David Smith style work being made, huge work, neon art, video art, I mean, when I got there I was convinced I was going to be a glass blower or a metal sculptor. And I said I'd take some 2-D courses to get them out of the way, and of course I took 2-D courses and I never stopped. I made one little tiny ceramic nothing thing the whole time I was there.
FP: Did you have any idea, say, when you were 10, that you cared about painting?
SP: Oh yeah. You know, I didn't care about painting until later, but I cared about drawing from the time I was probably 3.
FP: What would draw, mostly tanks and ...?
SP: Army stuff, planes coming in and that whole thing. That was the major epiphany of 3 years old, I saw my brother, he was there in front of a whole bunch of cousins and other little kids and the oldest, and he was drawing an Army scene with people being blown up by planes from the sky and making the noises, and I was standing behind him and was enraptured that you could do that.
FP: And now you've made this transition to concern with living things and the preciousness of life and biology and botany and that all grew out of war pictures?
SP: War pictures, yeah!
FP: Did you ever draw animals when you were a kid?
SP: Oh constantly, when I graduated from the basic kind of war picture. After war pictures, my next thing, which actually probably was, when I think about it, what got me on the path of being an artist because it got me lots of praise, were pictures of underwater life, marine life. In fact I even have a slide of one, I won the first grade top prize for art in Catholic school with a picture of a lake bottom, with a turtle and a crayfish and a dock with a stick figure man fishing off a dock and a boat. Three quarters of the picture was under water with the bottom strip being the lake bottom and a little piece of sky and a boat. And I pretty much reproduced that, I wish I had them now when I think about it, in second, third grade, I might have changed them a little bit, every time it came time for the art competition I'd do another underwater picture, basically the same premise as the first, but more involved. As I grew and as I learned, I embellished it.
FP: Do you remember every picture you ever made?
SP: No! [laughs]
FP: Sounds like it.
SP: If I racked my brain ... I got in trouble too, because I drew dirty pictures of kids I didn't like. My friend Dick actually still has a picture of this mean fat bully kid who I drew with flies buzzing around his head ...
FP: So art was a weapon ...
SP: It was a weapon, and it was also a way, you know, I was such an uncoordinated kid, and generally atrocious at sports, I wouldn't say it saved me from getting beat up, but it gave me a certain level of respect among my peers as, I did something better than anyone else, in other words. That's got to be a common theme, a common experience for artists, or any people who do anything well.
FP: Did you cut things up, dissect things as a kid, or was it mostly observational?
SP: Mostly observational, I did ask my mother for a dissection kit when I was like 10 or something, and remember her even, she basically gave in. I wanted a microscope, a chemistry set, and all that science stuff, and I would get the stuff, but I would never really use it, I would just look at it.
FP: [laughs] So you had an observational approach to scientific things.
SP: I was in love with the way the chemistry set looked. I was in love with the way the dissection kit looked. I didn't dissect anything until high school.
FP: Did you like that?
SP: Not really.
FP: My interest in science was always both observational and theoretical, and I think the observational part has something to do with visual appreciation. Is something similar true for you?
SP: I was never big on the actual logical analysis. The scientific method didn't interest me, what interested me was illustration of it, or the objects. Like I loved Jacques Cousteau, as a matter of fact I wanted to be a marine biologist, and I pretty much kept the marine biologist up until high school. It was my goal, but once I got in high school I realized I would have to take calculus, statistics and probability, actually I didn't realize that until college, but I realized the science and math aspect was not an interest of mine. It was the beauty of nature I guess. I don't know. To be frank about it, I'm not actually absolutely sure what it is all about. I just know it has always been an obsession. I remember when I was a kid, very young, maybe 5, wading in a stream and finding a crayfish in the sand and being so enraptured by the crayfish for some reason, I don't know why, I had to have it, I had to possess it. And I put it in a bucket, a little plastic kid's bucket, I carried it up to this camp of friends' of my parents and I think I even took it home, but I don't know what happened to it there.
FP: Do you see painting things like this as a way of possessing them?
SP: Absolutely.
FP: A lot of these paintings are so closely observed, as a kid I was always interested in science, and what I see is a kind of careful observation and attention to detail as well as an inventiveness which to me is one of the things that attracted to me to scientific things, but that wasn't the image of science as a kid that you had. Did it seem sort of dry and non-inventive?
SP: Yeah, in a way, science always seemed to be concerned with the wrong thing, in my point of view. Stripping away the mystery, maybe, was another aspect of science I found troubling. Another kind of picture I drew repetitively as a kid was a kind of underground hole for animals, sort of a Wind in the Willows, but this was before I even knew about Wind in the Willows, it was before I was exposed to anything like that, fantasy about house, home, with a downward tunnel, and then a chamber, and the chamber had tables and lamps and things in it and little mice people sitting at this table. And I've never tried to figure out what that was about, but I think I've always had a fascination with what's hidden, what I can't see. The underwater picture, the underground picture, I'm not sure if that ties into the obsession with detail.
FP: I want to show you this quote from Einstein we have up on the [5points.com web] site: "The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious, it is the source of all true art and science".
SP: I would agree, I would second that.
FP: This is one of the things I find interesting, because the practice of science is very often different from people's perception of it, because the way they encounter it as kids isn't the way that people who do it, do it. In your concern with the hidden, the interest in the mysterious, while you talk about respecting the mystery, you're unveiling a lot of it with that close observation, but you're revealing it emotionally. Am I off base there?
SP: I think that's on target.
FP: Are you as interested in the way things look, or the way they make you feel, or do you even choose? Or are they the same?
SP: I think they are the same. I developed over the past couple years a really strong desire to record the complexity in nature, capture the way the lichen looks on the rock, or whatever. And it varies, it's all based in the challenge of realism, in a way, just from a technical standpoint. On the other hand, there's something about wanting other people to see what I see which motivates the attention to detail, because I have a feeling that people take the natural world for granted. I'm concerned with pointing out to people that there's really a lot there, and I think that's what painting does, it highlights what we see in the world, in a way, what's peculiar to our species.
FP: Let's talk about this in relation to some specific paintings. How about the lichen, the Candyland painting?
SP: In a way, not a wholly successful painting in my mind, but not as I bad as I thought it was either.
FP: Why this little critter here?
SP: That's the Candyland man, I'm not sure about that, that might have been overstating things.
FP: Well, why did you put it in?
SP: Just underlining that all this stuff is candy, eye candy. And also the gesture of the little man and, sure, I'm going for a little innocence metaphor, child like enjoyment, and the open arms gesture.
FP: It gets back to the idea that all that detail, and the lichen, is a way of bringing it back to yourself. The next thing after opening your arms is bringing them in back to you. Were you doing these sticks all the time too? Because these sticks run through a lot of them.
SP: I like sticks. Sticks are everywhere. Trees are sticks.
FP: Didn't you just tell me that painting could be just about looking at rotted logs?
SP: Yeah. Decay. That's been a recent thing. Decay and regeneration. It's a metaphor for my age, I'm starting to decay and hoping I regenerate [laughs].
FP: What's the most recent painting here?
SP:Pond Life might be the most recent.
FP: Does Pond Life have its roots in the underwater kid's ...
SP: Absolutely. And it has its direct roots in that painting that Bruce [A. Stiglich, a painter and friend] has.
FP: Also it's interesting because you were talking about seeing what's underneath, and you've taken what you would expect to see in water and pulled it out and put it on display in an aquarium right front and center, and ...
SP: That's exactly what it is, it's a chunk. But it's a fancified chunk. I actually set up an aquarium next to my painting, and I bought some little cheap garishly colored aquarium plants and stuck them in there, so it's an embellished version of nature.
FP: You paint with these little tchotchkas, plastic things, to make things real. A lot of people start with real things and then spin off from that, whereas I've seen you use the artificial as a conduit to the natural. Is that just your perverse logic?
SP: I'm not sure, you've made me think. Maybe it's, real isn't good enough? But that's not true though. I'm not certain what that's about.
FP: Is it more a question of jogging your memory?
SP: It's also this artifice, those little plants that some designer somewhere, some artist, made fake underwater plants, he's made them up. There's something about that I just find fascinating, and when placed in conjunction with the real thing, it's one of those weird ambiguous searching motifs I get caught up in.
FP: Was Getting to Know the States done that way? Plastic things ...
SP: Yes, well, no, everything pretty much in there, hmmm, the angel wing was fake ...
FP: That's not a real angel wing? Geez, and here I thought ...
SP: [laughs] It's a little ceramic thing, and the tree coming out the bottom of Texas is a little fake plastic thing. But the seeds, all the little seeds and the stick sort of where Mississippi would be, those are all little pods and things I collected. And here again, this is still one of my favorite paintings ever I think. The idea for this painting was just to mimic those kinds of kids schoolroom maps that have the state's product on it, the little oil tower for Texas, and orange for Florida, and the maple syrup bucket for Vermont, it's mimicking that kind of symbol for geographic location but in a way that's kind of unknowable. And I sometimes get ideas that are just totally ambiguous but are so attractive to me I have to follow through on them.
FP: Is there any idea of travel in this as well? Whenever I look at maps I think of travel, and you were just talking about searching ...
SP: Interior travel. Travel in the mind, intellectual or emotional travel, not any kind of physical travel. Aesthetic travel. It's funny, when I'm making my paintings I don't often know what the hell they're about, I just know that I have to make them, I have to see what this combination of images or things is going to do. And sometimes they don't do anything.
FP: Things like Dream of an Unknown Species sort of have a location, but I know you've talked about Southeast Asia, Borneo ...
SP: The title explains this. I didn't have an actual dream, but this is totally a fantasy based painting. I collect orchids, my favorite genus is the paphiopedilum, the Asiatic slipper orchid, and I wanted to make one up. If I could embellish the title it would be Dream of an Unknown Species (Paphiopedilum Perkinsii).
FP: Discovery of a New Species you did as a precursor to ...
SP: Yes. Same thing.
FP: It was three years earlier.
SP: That painting is about travel. If I could pick up and go to Borneo, get a trustworthy guide to rappel me into the chasm that man has never set foot in and discover the new species of orchid, it would be better than heroin.
FP: What is an epiphyte?
SP: An epiphyte is a plant that uses generally another plant as a host, it's not a parasitic relationship but it's a support relationship. There's no symbiosis, it's just using another plant as a host. I may be wrong. Got a dictionary?
FP: Yeah, but not right here, we don't need accuracy. [laughs]
SP: Hey, if orchid people, that's the one thing, I don't want any orchid people calling me on my orchid science.
FP: They will. [laughs] I know you've said that you like spatial transition, and things like the landscape in the background of paintings like Lowii are a direct nod to that. Do you look at the Hudson River School painters at all?
SP: A lot.
FP: Got favorites?
SP: Bierstadt. David Johnson. It varies.
FP: Do you see any of it in your paintings? Because actually I don't see this so much as Hudson River School, it is landscape, but your stuff really is lodged back in the 15th century.
SP: I think I see more in recent stuff.
FP: Again going back to Pond Life, I see more Hudson River School in the way that that's handled. The panorama is bigger than when it gets intimate, when there's a passageway to a space in the distance, even in Dream of an Unknown Species, although this looks almost like a Sung dynasty painting ...
SP: I look at the Hudson River School, but I also spent a good part of the summer looking at Rubens' landscapes. I just keep jumping all around. The other day I spent an hour looking at Millais' Ophelia, the woman floating with the water... Hudson River is an ongoing influence for sure, along with Dutch painting and Italian painting.
FP: What about the still life tradition? There are several paintings that are rather pure, like the Pitcher Plant, which is really a botanical.
SP: It is exactly a botanical, it's a study. That is probably the most scientific image I've ever made.
FP: What prompted it?
SP: The desire to do a botanical, the pitcher plant being such a sensual shape, so brightly colored, and I had just found a bunch of them in the Adirondacks.
FP: What about these other still lifes, the Hyacinth, sitting on a plate, like food.
SP: That's just to do something simple.
FP: Did it turn out to be simple?
SP: No [laughs]. In a way it did. It is like food. I've done that a few times, like putting it on a plate. Nature as, natural objects as, sensual objects, and that's how it relates specially to food in my mind.
FP: Plus food is another way of taking things in?
SP: Yeah.
FP: I didn't realize the level of possessiveness that was involved in your paintings before, I hadn't really focused on that component. That's another thing that does strike me as similar to certain of the observational, biological scientific processes, like the people who would collect butterflies, and botanicals and a lot of that. Even look at the Field Guides ...
SP: That's about collection...
FP: Is it about knowledge? Are any of these paintings explicitly about knowledge? They also involve knowing, but they're not necessarily about knowledge. You can't not know things and really approach your paintings ...
SP: I don't know how to break that down, or how to explain that. It is about possessing knowledge, and about knowing, but it's a special kind of knowing. I agree with some artists who talk about painting as incantation, summoning knowledge, just like you'd summon a genie or a spirit. Still life is like setting up a ritual altar and seeing what knowledge arrives from it, what knowledge percolates out of it. A lot of things are arrived at intuitively. It's that old cliche about being more interested in the question than the answer.
FP: Are you more interested in the question or the questioning?
SP: The questioning. It's about the making and what the making reveals, which generally tends to be more questioning, or it reveals another level of questioning.
FP: Is that what's in Field Guides, or was that something different. It looks like it's about getting knowledge, but it has to be about inquiry.
SP: It's about inquiry, it's about exploration, it's about artifice and reality, and the maps, other than being beautiful visual objects, they're guideposts. And there are actual field guides telling you what to expect. But the maps are field guides too, telling you where to go, or give you a choice of where to go. It's interesting, you know, I've never sat in front of one of my paintings and dissected it before.
FP: Seems appropriate.
SP: [laughs] The other things are just little favorite objects, purely aesthetic, the chunk of feldspar ...
FP: Favorite objects are in your paintings a lot.
SP: Yeah, the birch bark, little aesthetic ...
FP: Treats, candy.
SP: Exactly, candy. Field Guides is another painting that is one of my all time favorites. Actually, Field Guides, States and Spring Salamander are in my top ten.
FP: Why is Spring Salamander one of your favorites?
SP: Simply for beauty. Beauty and the power of the metaphor, which is my own little personal metaphor, though I'm surprised very few people pick up on it, perhaps have never heard about it. The salamander in medieval times was often used in crests or war banners because salamanders were known as fire lizards and were symbols of endurance. Because when people would throw a log in the fire, salamanders would crawl out of them once the heat got to them, and they were seen as magic animals sprung from the fire, able to withstand fire. And so, warlords started using salamanders as symbols of endurance. And I see that as both endurance as an artist and it speaks also to other aspects of my personal life.
FP: Do those aspects play a big role in the way you paint now?
SP: Yes. Huge. The whole psycho-spiritual side of things has always been there but has become more prominent recently, because painting can be a way to work through emotional issues, spiritual issues.
FP: Do you call your paintings spiritual?
SP: I don't know if I can say that publicly.
FP: Too late.
SP: [laughs] Yeah. I've always felt a little reticent.
FP: Does the moss mean anything, like the salamander, or is it just a favorite?
SP: Walker's Moss is a better rendering than the Large Clump of Moss even though this is existing in some strange slab of sedimentary rock, I don't know what that's about.
FP: But does the moss have any meaning for you that is metaphorical? Some of the objects you paint are about metaphor, but some seem to be just about the interesting form.
SP: I think the moss is mainly about the interesting form, whereas the salamander is definitely both.
FP: Do you grow moss?
SP: Yes. You need shade and lots of rocks.
FP: What is the moss in, in Walker's Moss?
SP: It's a clump of hemlock needles. It's growing on top of a little hemlock forest.
FP: But you made it into a bed...
SP: A pad. A chunk. Plus both of these are takeoffs on Durer's study of a clump of turf or whatever it is, which I love.
FP: When you say takeoff it makes it sound like a parody, and yet there's no parody.
SP: Homage is better.
FP: That gets into this whole thing about how people hate to be seen engaged in a simple act of respect these days, it always has to have an attitude.
SP: Yeah.
FP: There's a general respectful quality to all of your paintings ...
SP: Reverence.
FP: That's stronger than respect.
SP: Reverential.
FP: Do you think curiosity is a dishonoring thing or is apart from the issue of reverence?
SP: Curiosity is reverence. Wanting to know someone or something is only honoring it, it is another form of honoring it. If I want to know you, then I'm honoring you.
FP: Are you concerned with issues of immortality in your painting?
SP: I don't care about that at all.
FP: What about this decay business then? Aging?
SP: Decay has to do with acceptance of the human condition. It's a metaphor for suffering. Suffering is part of being human. So get over it. [laughs] There's some level of seriousness there. [laughs] Get over it and start regenerating. From suffering can come grace.
FP: But there's nothing suffering in these paintings. These are joyful paintings.
SP: These are joyful paintings. Even the more recent ones, even ones that are about suffering probably don't look like suffering.
FP: You have a positive, buoyant approach to reality in these paintings. Probably the least buoyant are these still lifes, because it's in the nature of a still, life.
SP: They're very still, very quiet.
FP: Do you have a sense of a still point when you're painting these, I mean emotionally? Or are you ever still?
SP: See the Hyacinth, it's like a torch in stop action. Well, that's a little much. But I don't think I'm ever still.