About

Mark Golden:             Hi everyone, and welcome to my podcast I call Paint Stories. I’m Mark Golden, Co-founder of Golden Artist Colors with my folks, Sam and Adele Golden, and my wife, Barbara. My family’s had the delight and privilege to be working with some of the most amazing artists since my Great Uncle Leonard Bocour began hand-grinding oil colors in Manhattan in 1933. Today I’m joined by the painter and my good friend, David Headley. Welcome, David.

David Headley:           Good morning, Mark.

Mark:                          I met David and his wife Jackie Battenfield, also a talented painter, after Jackie called me up to see if I’d make a studio visit. For the first ten years of our company, I’d be making paint during the beginning of the week and then making the three-hour trip to Manhattan, visiting artists’ studios on Friday and Saturday to meet new customers and to hand deliver paint. What started out as a studio visit ended up being a 35-year friendship.

                                    David, I’ve spoken to many artists who have shared their stories of meeting my Uncle Leonard and my Dad. You also had a much earlier connection to my Uncle. I was hoping you might share that story of meeting Leonard.

David:                         Sure. It’s very easy to remember when I met Lenny because it was in December of 1967 and I was on my honeymoon staying in Manhattan for a week or two. We visited relatives of my wife. I was explaining to them that I was in the process of applying to MFA programs and that I really wanted to get into the program at Yale University. They said, “We know someone in the art world. In fact, he and his wife are our best friends. We know Leonard Bocour and his wife Ruth.” Well, of course being a college senior, I’d never heard of Leonard Bocour. I hadn’t even heard of Bocour Paint at that time. So in a matter of a couple of seconds, a telephone receiver was thrust into my hand and they were saying, “Tell Mr. Bocour all about yourself” [laughs].

                                    How much does a college senior have to say about himself, especially if you’re a shy person like I was at that time? But he was very gracious and welcoming. I had a little conversation with him. He invited my wife and I to come to their apartment to see his collection of paintings and to go out to dinner with them.

So Lenny was very generous. He ended up writing letters of recommendation for me to the two painters at Yale who were overseeing the admissions – the painter, Lester Johnson, who would be described as a second-generation abstract expressionist figurative painter, and Bernard Chaet, who did landscape paintings pretty much in the manner of John Marin. These two guys of course were friends of Lenny’s going way back, probably to at least the 1940s. So Lenny wrote the letters of recommendation and I did not get accepted to the MFA program [laughs]. 

Mark:                          David, I’ve been asked by so many artists to write recommendations for colleges. I’m not sure any of ’em have actually worked. So you didn’t get into Yale.

David:                         I didn’t get into Yale.

Mark:                          Sorry.

David:                         But it became a moot point anyway because in 1968 I was drafted and spent the next two years in the US Army and in Vietnam.

Mark:                          Can you share the story about spray painting in Vietnam? 

David:                         This is going back to then the fall of 1968. Actually, it happened in basic training at Fort Jackson, South Carolina. In preparation for an IG inspection of the barracks, we had to spray paint all of the bunk beds. So all of the bunk beds were dragged outside and –

Mark:                          Did they do this knowing that you were an artist and asking you to –?

David:                         No. I volunteered because I had not yet seen a Jules Olitski spray painting in person but I had seen them in Artforum Magazine and read about them. So I was interested to learn how spray painting was done. So I volunteered to operate the spray paint gun to spray paint the four dozen bunk beds that were in the barracks. And the respirator that I used was obviously inadequate because at the end of the day I was rushed to the hospital in anaphylactic shock. My face had swollen up. My eyes had swollen shut. I couldn’t breathe. And so I was rushed to the hospital and I guess given shots to recover from that.

Mark:                          Right. Unfortunately it didn’t get you out of going to Vietnam.

David:                         No.

Mark:                          So you did learn not to volunteer again.

David:                         Some things it’s good to volunteer for [laughs]. Others not. However, I never spray painted after that until I tried airbrush technique later in the 1980s. During the two years I was in the Army, my wife kindly sent me graph paper notebooks. So I had about 18 notebooks filled with painting studies. When I got back from Vietnam I found myself unable to execute any of the painting studies that I had done when I got back. But for some reason that I don’t understand to this day, I experienced a revulsion to all of those paintings and I really started from a totally different place than my studies had led me to.

                                    After I got back from Vietnam in the fall of 1970, moved back to the East Coast, and on our way driving to Cape Cod where we were gonna spend the first year back, we drove to Garnerville, New York to the Bocour factory to get paint. At that time, your dad, Sam, had left the business. And so we were introduced to a young man who had just become the paint chemist for the company, and Lenny made a point of saying that he had a master’s degree in chemistry. 

So when I lived on Cape Cod I decided that I wanted to focus my painting on value rather than interactive color. I went to the paint department of the Sears store in Hyannis on Cape Cod, picked out a couple of paint chips, which as you know have six values of the same hue on it, and I said I wanted a quart of each of those [laughs].

Mark:                          They were really pleased I’m sure.

David:                         After the clerk was finished scratching his head, he mixed up the six quarts of values of blue and six quarts of values of orange that I picked out. And I proceeded to do paintings then for the next several years that pretty much looked like color chips, emphasizing value over interactive color from 1970 to 1973. I think in some sense I was reacting to Frank Stella’s Protractor series that really were the pinnacle of interactive color beginning with _____ and Métisse. Stella’s Protractor paintings really took that to the nth degree. I didn’t see any way of going beyond the Protractor paintings, both in terms of their concept and their size. Those paintings were based upon a ten-foot increment. 

                                    Subsequently we moved to Ann Arbor, Michigan and continued to have a relationship with Lenny on and off over the next several years, and invited Lenny out to talk to a graduate seminar of art history students about New York School of art. Lenny came and spent a couple of days with us. That time I think it was common for him to do tours of colleges and universities promoting Bocour Paint.

Mark:                          I know a lot of his lectures were about the relationships and the connections that he had within the community of artists.

David:                         That was of course of primary interest to the art historians. Lenny had known artists from the 1930s on. Most importantly, he knew every artist who never became famous. And it’s very enlightening to learn about the hundreds of artists whose names we don’t know. But Lenny was such a gracious person that I would describe him as: he never met an artist he didn’t like. If you showed total commitment to your art, Lenny was there for you, come hell or high water. It didn’t matter to him that you had a pedigree, that you had galleries. He was able to zero in on your total commitment. And he appreciated that like few people do. He made you feel just as important as if you were Morris Louis. 

Mark:                          There are so many artists that shared stories of Lenny sending ’em paint. So it’s been wonderful to be around and still listen to those stories –

[Crosstalk]

David:                         Which he did consistently. I mean, before I met Lenny, I used Utrecht paint that I ordered through their mail catalogue. Of course, after I met Lenny I started using Aquatec. Lenny, let me emphasize, was very ordinary in his daily behavior. The thing that I remember about him staying with us is that every night he washed his socks and hung them up in the bathroom. I mean, that degree of humility, that he was traveling that light with those few pair of socks – I think he was going onto Chicago perhaps after he visited us. And so he would be in Chicago washing his socks the next night.

Mark:                          I know he was always on the road visiting schools, doing his lecture. He loved that connection. And was constantly writing artists letters of congratulations that he was able to see their last show.

David:                         So when I did move to Ann Arbor, I worked in a paint store for a brief period of time. One funny story about the paint store is that after I’d worked there a month or so a woman came in one morning and was buying a couple tubes of Liquitex paint and I took her aside and said to her, “If you go to the student bookstore, the Liquitex paint will only cost you half what it’s gonna cost you here” [laughs]. And 15 minutes later the telephone rang at the paint store and I answered and it was the owner of the paint store, and he said, “My niece was just in to buy some paint and you sent her to another store” [laughing]. But the owner of the paint store, Bob Anderson, was such a big-hearted guy that he didn’t fire me on the spot, which he definitely should’ve done.

                                    Working in the paint store enabled me to perfect my color mixing by just turning myself into the color machines like they have in the paint store based upon very specific formulas: three drops of this, three drops of that in a particular tint base. And it became almost a magical way of achieving flawless changes in value.

Mark:                          David, at that time they didn’t have the sophisticated spectrometers or equipment that would aid in color matching.

David:                         No. The color matching was done subjectively. The customer would bring in the paint swatch that they wanted to match. And of course it rarely does because when you get it home in a different lighting condition, it doesn’t look like it did in the paint store. So many people would come back and complain that you had mixed the wrong colors.

Mark:                          You gained quite a bit of experience.

David:                         Yeah. The paint store was a tremendous education for me. And I’m sure that I learned more in working there a couple of months than I would’ve learned in two years of an MFA program [laughs], which I never did end up going to an MFA program. Even though when I did get back from Vietnam I applied a second time to Yale.

Mark:                          And did Leonard write –

David:                         I assume that he once again wrote letters to Lester Johnson and Bernard Chaet. And that time I did get to the on-campus interview. But did not matriculate beyond the on-campus interview. I think at that time I had quite an attitude that may’ve turned off the selection committee. 

                                    So until 1973 I was doing the so-called color chip paintings. Then in ’73 the paintings took more of a turn to greater complication. Instead of having let’s say four or five dozen different values of a number of hues, I decided to do paintings that had a couple thousand different values and hues. So I reduced the size of my imagery. It became what you would typically think of as geometric style painting: tiny geometric facets across the surface. And painted in these thousands of different values of a particular hue. I would make a transition based upon what I learned at the paint store, being able to go from a green to a blue-green very incrementally, and then break each of those particular hues down into three additional values.

                                    So when you looked at the paintings – the paintings were about 6 feet by 13 feet wide – you would see almost a light shift from the left side to the right side and from the top to the bottom. The paintings were as if you were watching a cloud pass across a variegated surface of changing color. There was no one color that you could point to. You were really seeing the connections between all the colors instead of the interactive contrasting: a black against a red.

Mark:                          You would describe these as geometric but they were not hard edge, right?

David:                         They were hard edge. But because of the subtlety of the values, they read as very soft.

Mark:                          Yes.

David:                         Yeah. So the paintings did not looked like a Vasarely. They looked quite different than that. But because of the values, the closeness in values, it was a very atmospheric-looking surface. 

                                    Subsequently we moved to Washington, DC for a year or so. And so the curator from the Corcoran came to see the paintings and put them in an exhibition.

Mark:                          David, can I read a section out of an essay? It was written by Jane Livingston for your work exhibited at the Corcoran Gallery?

David:                         Mm-hmm.

Mark:                          1976. “One cannot find a more psychologically well-equipped, systematically organized, and determined color field painter than David Headley. His beginning assumption is that highly refined technical expertise and knowledge of the physical possibilities for obtaining an elaborate vocabulary of painterly know-how are fundamental tools for ultimate achievement.” David, to me, this captures why my relationship with you has been so meaningful, and hoped that you might share some of those insights. You had the occasion to look closely at the work of many painters, especially many color field painters. In fact, you’ve had the intimate knowledge of Morris Louis paintings and the opportunity to meet with his wife, Marcella Brenner.

David:                         Once again, Lenny Bocour provided an introduction to Morris Louis’ widow that I was in casual contact with for several years. And I got to know a little bit about the Louis oeuvre in depth because of that relationship. At a certain point in the early 1970s, there became pretty much a big bruhaha about the condition of contemporary paintings from a conservation standpoint. The art materials that artists began using in the abstract expressionist period were usually not the typical art supplies that previous artist had used. Because the paintings had gotten so big, artists could not afford the paint. I mean, this point is driven home in Mary Gabriel’s book, Ninth Street Women, particularly in relationship to Grace Hartigan, who scrounged the streets for discarded canvas to use, discarded stretchers, and probably used more house paint than she should have. 

                                    So by the early 1970s, there actually had become articles in The New York Times criticizing the poor condition of artist materials from that period. And Morris Louis unfortunately fell into this category not because of using poor art materials – he had used Magna paint – but all of the bare canvas that he left was deemed to be a conservation issue. Louis’ widow tried to come up with a solution to that.

After Louis died she married a man who was a chemist, Abner Brenner. And she had him develop a coating to put on the bare canvas that would be removable. So he developed a product called CMC, carboxymethyl cellulose. And this had been given to the man who was building the stretchers and stretching Louis’ paintings here in New York, James Lebron. His assistants were then brushing this all over the bare canvas as well as the painted areas, which did cause a sort of unpleasant look much like rabbit-skin glue looks on raw canvas. 

Mark:                          Did it create a veil on top of the painted surface?

David:                         Because the brush strokes were overlapping, it created a surface that gave you a different refractive index. Instead of the sort of soft, nappy surface that raw cotton duck is, which in Louis’ paintings is so sexy, it seemed to me that the cure was worse than the disease for the bare canvas, which is so important in Louis’ paintings. So I’ve spent a lot of time at the Clyfford Still Museum in Denver studying Still’s paintings. And to my astonishment, Still himself sized all of his bare canvas areas with rabbit-skin glue. So his paintings do have those brush lap marks. Which were acceptable in Still’s paintings because his treatment of the pigment itself is much rougher than it is in Louis. It’s built up on the surface. As I say, with the Stills it works because it is a part of his sensibility. But with Louis’ I think not.

                                    As it’s been reported in all of the writing about Morris Louis, he worked in a studio that was originally a dining room or a side porch of the house in Washington, DC. And it’s measurements were 14 feet by 12 feet 2 inches. I’d like to flesh out just what that meant. Twelve feet by 14 feet is only 170 square feet. That’s the size of a large walk-in closet. By comparison, the average studio that the abstract expressionists were using in downtown Manhattan would be between 1,000 square feet and 1,500 square feet. So Louis was actually working in a studio that was ten times smaller than the studios that Grace Hartigan would’ve been working in, than Frankenthaler would’ve been working in. And the fact that he produced during that 10 years probably nearly 1,000 canvases, each one measuring anywhere from 8 feet, 8 feet by up to 22 feet just boggles my mind. 

It’s really like trying to paint in a submarine. In addition to the fact that, to get in and out of the room, the door was into the kitchen. And so the painting, the stretched canvas would’ve been resting against the wall that that door was on. So to enter and exit the studio, he would have to lift the painting away from the wall and then put it back there. And he would be going in and out many times a day because, as his widow described at the one time she spoke in public about his work at the Painters’ Forum, he arranged his paint tins on the stair steps going down to the basement where the canvases were stored rolled up. So each step had a paint tin and each paint tin was for a particular color. So he would mix the paint up, it would be there on the stair step. And so throughout the day he would be going back and forth moving this canvas to and fro from that wall. 

The physical exertion of creating what they have calculated to be approximately three paintings a week is just something I can’t imagine doing in that small of a space. I mean, his studio was at least ten times smaller than Jackson Pollock’s studio.

Mark:                          Just managing the drying time of the materials must’ve been quite an ordeal as well.

David:                         That I’ve often wondered about. The studio had windows on two sides and a door to the exterior on one side. So he did have good ventilation. It’s said that he was able to dry the paintings over one night. In some cases I find that hard to believe but it must be the case to have been able to create three canvases a week. So not only was Morris Louis working in this very cramped, difficult space, but he was working with Magna paint, which I’ve observed, from my own experiments, the most difficult paint to work with but the most brilliant in terms of color of any paint that was ever produced. But it was surprisingly used by the fewest number of artists.

Mark:                          Still is.

David:                         Only a handful of well-known artists used it extensively in the 1950s. The so-called Washington Color School painters – Morris Louis, Kenneth Noland, Gene Davis, Howard Mehring, Thomas Downing, and in New York, Friedel Dzubas and Jules Olitski, used it in a major way. Barnett Newman, Clyfford Still, Jackson Pollack experimented with Magna in a cursory way but didn’t do anything to exploit its potential as those other artists did. And only Morris Louis I think created a painting style which optimized the range and viscosities of Magna paint while retaining full saturation of color.

Mark:                          Other person using it in a very different way was Roy Lichtenstein. But obviously a very different use of the Magna. Many were mixing it with their oils ’cause Lenny touted it about its mixability with oil paint as well. Never really achieved any kind of commercial success. 

David:                         There are those artists who used it as a substitute for oil paint. But they missed the point of it. Morris Louis really discovered the magic of Magna in a way that the other artists simply didn’t because he didn’t use it like an oil paint. And he explored the possibilities of stain painting in it that’re way beyond the achievement of any of the other artists that used it. I would say the number two artist who used it successfully was Friedel Dzubas. Even though he used it quite differently. Whereas Louis worked on raw canvas and stained it into the textile, Friedel Dzubas still worked in the old-school European tradition of sizing the canvas and then putting two coats of heavy gesso on it. In spite of that fact, Friedel Dzubas achieved I would say the second most luminous paintings. 

                                    I would put the third painter in that pantheon, Magna achievers, was the Washington School painter Howard Mehring, who in the mid-to-late 1950s did a stunning series of drip paintings. It looks to me like his technique was to essentially create a watering can, a bunch of holes in the bottom of a gallon can, and then sprinkle these tiny drops all over the surface. And with Magna, because it soaked in so beautifully and created halos, the paintings become a beautiful shimmering, scintillating dazzle. 

Mark:                          You got to see these paintings up close.

David:                         At one point I was involved with stretching a group of Howard Mehring paintings. And as I unrolled them, each painting became lighter in value. And the idea occurred to me that the possibility existed with Magna paint, since it soaked through so thoroughly, that he could’ve executed some of these paintings several at a time by laying one canvas on top of another, essentially using the canvases underneath as a drop cloth to absorb the paint that soaked through. I think it would’ve been possible for him to do three or four canvases at one time so that the canvas on the bottom, which in this titled was called White Across, is like a ghost image. It’s mostly bare canvas with very few very lightly valued dribbles of paint on the surface.

Mark:                          Story of the Magna is unique but a lot of what they were trying to achieve was to create a simulation of oil paint. So to be able to thicken up this material so it would feel like something familiar to artists working with oils.

David:                         And Marcella Brenner, when she spoke at the Painters’ Forum, emphasized that Louis always complained about having to work his fingers to the bone to break down those tube colors into a usable form. He would spend vast amounts of time stirring and stirring and stirring, trying to break that formulation of Magna down, which of course led to the request in 1960 for Sam to develop a more portable Magna paint without the thickener in it.

Mark:                          Right. Making custom paint was something that was always a thrill for Sam. It never was a way to make money. It was just a way to be able to connect with the artists that they were working with. But there’s a letter that’s posted from Louis to Lenny: “I hate to reopen the complaint department because I know this whole deal is not likely to buy you any real estate. But will you please see fit to it that the colors are made fresh each time? I have a gallon of green earth and raw sienna which are solid pigment. You couldn’t cut it with a knife because they were kept too long at your place till I ordered. Sam is doing me no good by making more than I need and that I asked for and keeping it until I reorder. The stuff is then no good at all.” In the letter to dad he says, “Sam, I can tell that they’re old because there’s dust on the top of the can.”

David:                         No good deed goes unpunished.

Mark:                          [Laughs].

David:                         And in the 12 years between 1947 when Louis started to use the Magna paint and 1960 when this custom formulation was produced – 

Mark:                          We continue a lot of custom colors at the factory of Golden Artist Colors. And that engagement is always exciting. Even when we’re asked to make just a few ounces. And certainly it is not an area of profit of the company but it gives us, just as it gave Sam and Leonard, that vicarious thrill of being able to feel like we’re working with every artist that is working with the paint. So I do need to tell you that we are a bit more rigorous than Sam was. No dust on the lids. 

David:                         A major difference is that you have a dedicated custom mill. Louis must’ve been a guinea pig for Sam and Lenny to explore the potentials of Magna paint in a way that – other artists who were still using it as a substitute for oil paint were making no such demands. Louis himself exploited the properties, the textural properties of Magna paint, between 1955 and ’58 in the over 300 paintings that he eventually destroyed because they were what Clement Greenberg referred to as lowest common denominator abstract expressionism, fusions of Pollack and de Kooning that were not particularly innovative. 

                                    Beginning with Louis’ second series The Veils in 1958, he once again became interested in having a more thinned-down paint to work with that would flow across the canvas easily and stain into the canvas thoroughly. So with the formulation beginning in April of 1960 that we see from the letter Sam developed for Louis, the paint is a totally different material. It’s a material that Louis obviously enjoys working with because the paint itself I think is responsible for making possible the Unfurled series, the major works that Louis himself thought to be the best works that he had produced throughout his career.

Mark:                          David, you’re one of the few people who actually have had an experience working in the cow barn during the early days of Golden Artist Colors, as you joined us in the summer of 1986. So while Jackie got to paint in Mr. Hager’s chicken barn, you helped us with quality control but also investigating new colors, including the interference colors, micaceous iron oxide. 

There’s an arc in your history, David, that’s pretty clear. From working in the paint store, doing color matching, developing your own color series of paint, and then working with us, and the ambition in ’86 to come on up and work with us in the factory, being able to have that conversation around things that interested you in terms of materials and different materials and different ways to play with materials. That’s always been part of your history but your interest really was: “I want to know what I can do and how I can extend these things, how I can make more of these things, how I can explore different ways of working with paint.” I think that is also explored in the way you go about painting. 

David:                         Serendipity plays a big role in all of this. In fact, that particular summer I was trying to lose weight. So my dessert would be Cool Whip. And at that time, my studio was in Brooklyn. It was so expensive I couldn’t afford to heat the studio. I was using a lot of molding paste in my paintings at that time, large globs that would be a couple of inches thick, but it would never dry in the wintertime because I couldn’t keep the studio above 36 degrees [laughs]. And so I begged you to make a molding paste that was more lightweight and wouldn’t run down the canvas. And so I showed you the container of Cool Whip. That’s how you came up with the idea of light molding paste. 

Mark:                          It was during that summer that we had a visit from an engineer who was working on creating lightweight materials for aeronautics. And they were using hollow ceramic fills to be able to create structural integrity. And so I guess a lot of serendipity allows for these kinds of opportunities; from an idea, how does it then evolve into something that you actually can make? Did the diet work?

David:                         No. That phenomenon is the perfect demonstration of what was so important about the beginnings of Bocour and the way that Bocour’s practice bled over into Golden. Because you very much took off where Lenny had left off. This conversation with artists – I mean, Lenny’s life from the 1930s until he died in 1993 was an ongoing conversation with artists. It’s such a sad thing that that wonderful book, Ninth Street Women, by Mary Gabriel is just now published. Because reading that book, of course Lenny is mentioned in it briefly. For both your dad and for Lenny, reading that book would’ve been a tour down memory lane. They had known all of those artists. 

And more so than the five artists who were talked about that everyone knows about, they knew the hundreds of artists who are not written about. And yet they served them well every day throughout the 1930s, ’40s, ’50s, actually well into the ’80s. The last time that I saw Lenny was – I believe that it was the late 1980s or early 1990s, he did a talk one evening at Artists Space in downtown Manhattan. I went to hear him talk. By that point I think there were maybe only 25 or 30 people in the audience who came to hear him that night. But he was still the same old Lenny, the ultimate raconteur. 

Mark:                          Oh, absolutely. After reading the book, I wish I was just a bit more curious about all of that. We took it in stride as a family, not really asking Lenny or Sam about –

David:                         I feel the same way.

Mark:                          – all of those stories that we could’ve asked and we could’ve recorded.

David:                         We were so remiss. The summer that I spent working up in the lab at the factory, on Saturday afternoon after Sam took a nap he would meander over to the lab, and I would put the radio on a station called the Music of Your Life station. They played music from the 1940s and ’50s, all of the popular music. And when Sam would walk in and that would be on, it would take him back and he would reminisce easily about these periods of time. And I wish that I had a better recollection of what Sam – the stories he told at that time. Unfortunately I don’t. 

                                    The one story in particular that I do remember was about Barnett Newman. And when the shop was at 15th street, Sam said that Newman would order the paint and that he would specify that Sam bring it down to the subway station at 14th Street and hand it across the turnstile to him so that Newman did not have to get off the subway, come up, pay another nickel for the subway fair. Sam had to carry the paint down to him [laughs]. 

Mark:                          You know, we weren’t more attentive in terms of recording those event and journaling those things.

David:                         We simply did not know the questions to ask.

Mark:                          No.

David:                         I guess we must’ve been in our own little worlds, sadly enough. 

Mark:                          Yeah.

David:                         The artists that you read about in Ninth Street Women, he interacted with all of those people. He interacted with de Kooning. These conversations are so important but it is a conversation that’s been ongoing for almost 100 years now with Bocour and then with Golden. It’s a dialogue that bears fruit because of the density of the network interactions between the artists and you at the factory.

Mark:                          It has been and continues to be a delight to be connected into this art world and to appreciate that we are invited in. And, as we think about making new materials, that an idea – whether it’s Cool Whip or diamond dust – the opportunity to be able to kind of work alongside you in the studio, as if we could’ve worked alongside Morris Louis in his studio.

                                    David, we had another opportunity to collaborate around materials in 1996 – or was it 1997? – to put together a program for artists, the Painters’ Forum. 

David:                         I realized sometime in the late 1990s that artists had a thirst for knowledge about the art materials. So the idea crossed my mind of having panel discussions with an artist on the panel, with an art material manufacturer on the panel, and with an art conservator on the panel. So I got that notion, ran it by you. So we were able to rent the Art in General space in Tribeca to have the lectures. And I assembled an audience of about 75 people. We had the audience before we had the lecture series [laughing]. I was smart enough to do that so that we had a good turnout. 

And the first speaker that I had was Morris Louis’ widow, Marcella Brenner, who agreed to come and talk publicly about Morris’ work for the first time ever. She was a remarkable person. She had received a PhD in education and had founded a museum and MFA program at George Washington University. She had never spoken publicly about Louis’ work because she didn’t wanna be one of those artists’ widows who seemed to know everything [laughs]. So she was very happy to say that she knew nothing about Louis’ work. But as I explained to her, this was gonna be an audience of artists, not the general public, and they would be very interested in hearing what she had to say. So, kindly, she agreed to come and speak. It was a great occasion.

So the Painters’ Forum developed over the subsequent several years. We had three or four a year, quarterly. And it lasted until 9/11 2001. In that three or four-year period we had seminars also at The Art Students League and at the Munson-Williams-Proctor museum upstate. The artists really loved being able to hear the nitty-gritty of art materials.

Mark:                          It was a really exciting opportunity to understand that we could gather folks who were also of that same ilk that really wanted to hear from the folks in the field, from conservators, from paint makers. I think it’s about conversations. I think that’s probably the most important thing that we can do. I think that’s what Paint Stories has been for me: having those conversations and kinda remembering how those things came about and what gave life to so many of these opportunities. 

                                    David, I wanted to thank you for sharing your insights today and for sharing your stories. And especially for our friendship for all these years. I also wanted to invite folks to visit your website at DavidHeadley.com to see the earlier work that you shared today, as well as to see the most recent work, including a major series you began 7 years ago including over 200 triptychs measuring 7 by 36 feet. 

                                    Again, thank you David for being part of our Paint Stories.

David:                         You’re welcome, Mark.

[End of Audio]