| Ann Wilson: You’re from New York. Would you call these nature paintings?
Jaime Dalglish: I would call them Unitarian paintings. AW: Why? JD: Because it’s my work, and I believe in work, you know? I believe in the work that I create and make available. I also listen to a lot of music, you know? |
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Jaime Dalglish interviewed by Ann Wilson
Ann Wilson: You’re from New York. Would you call these nature paintings?
Jaime Dalglish: I would call them Unitarian paintings.
AW: Why?
JD: Because it’s my work, and I believe in work, you know? I believe in the work that I create and make available. I also listen to a lot of music, you know?
AW: When making these?
JD: No, not when making these. But I have to think about something when I think of these. A very hard surface, out of which springs some music. These are hard surfaces and the, the morphoglyph is the experience.
AW: But going back to the experience…
JD: It’s the paint that I churn up, scrape up.
AW: So then the image comes on top of the hard surface?
JD: Like a photograph.
AW: Except that it’s a very abstract image.
JD: Right, it’s an impact, and then you get the image by scraping the paint off that you’ve drawn on there in such a way, like creating a photograph. And then the impact of that gets revealed by scraping it off and making available the image that is on the paint background. And that is the Santa Fe background.
AW: Would you say that the scraping is like the developing of the image that is growing out of the surface?
JD: Right, right.
AW: Now, the color choice of the surface image, is that intuitive? Or, is it related to what you’re seeing around?
JD: That’s pretty much what I’m thinking about, the Los Alamos aspect. And I didn’t realize it at the time, but as I talked to somebody who’d been there and also Mary? And the kids where she worked, the interns, to experience all of what’s available around Black Mountain, which are the aliens. And they were all standing outside Los Alamos and they bring the trucks in with the actual UFOs- the stuff that they found- and one time that the kid was standing there a big semi came barreling down at 60 MPH, didn’t wait for the guards to open the gate, I mean that guy must have been carrying some hot stuff.
Why do they call it UFOs? Is that a government name, for hiding what they’re really finding?
AW: They’re a lot of mutants out there, it’s scary.
JD: Out there, there is an Indian site, right past Las Alamos.
AW: Black Mountain?
JD: It’s a paleolithic site, with wallpapers. But I have the name, it’s not Black Mountain, it’s a… I’ll give you a postcard, I was there, the wallpapers that were done at that Indian site, they believe it was a spirit house or a sacred house, because there was one house in the back, very abstract, they were circles. And it looked like a fresco.
Well, that’s what this is. It’s a fresco, with circular textures, so when I throw the paint on top of it, the fresco, I mix it and it comes out…
AW: So the background mixes a sort of…
JD: A porous texture.
AW: Now would you call that texture like a grid? That background that’s mixing.
JD: Well they are squares, packaged squares. I guess they are. But they can sort of knock together carelessly, they don’t have to be perfect.
AW: Well, now the story, what you’re doing with the palettes is also a form of drawing, and talk about that drawing, the strokes.
JD: When I laid in my drawings, I used a template which was a street many years ago. It was a corner where they circled, you can kind of see it, like a boomerang. I just put it down and I scraped my paint- actually, I don’t really know how I did this – before I did that I did the pink and it maintained the idea of the pink and then when I used the template I used the red, I also used some tape. I don’t really know what I did, it became like a zone, I was buried in my unconscious.
AW: So you’re defining the minds from the palette knife.
JD: No, I’m throwing the paint, and in throwing the paint I’m creating some ares that resist, and will come out clear, and when I throw a color over that, I’m conscious of that maybe when I scrape it off those things will pop out like shapes.
AW: It itself in the act of blending on the surface, when it is scraped, leaves a mass mark? So you’ve got a surface ground and from throwing these marks you also leave some indication of the throwing, some things that you don’t scrape. So you actually have a round, when you throw the colors, I see one here, a dark blue and a green and a red, do you select those surface colors?
JD: Yes, I align them, those blues. This wasn’t there, indigo, glaze, and then I used an interference, they gave it to me for Christmas, but I had it leftover and I mixed it into this paint and you get what, yknow, quality. So I wanted it to come with a dry, deserty, something that would be wet, something that would be wet, like running water over the canyon wall and etching out the rock, yknow. And that kind of spin, that kind of torque that’s in the image.
AW: It’s in the image, it’s very vital, and you know when you make that stroke you know that you are going to get a blue area. There’s also a quality in each of them of a dance. In that way, so that the gesture of throwing gives you an active phyiscality, now this, what is the name of this painting?
JD: Well, they all commonize under the general title, 8 Days A Week, The Los Alamos… And 8 Days A Week is from the Beatles, and it’s also kind of like a torque, because it’s abstract in the week, abstract in time. Physicists who worked in Los Alamos were abstracting time, abstracting space, and they came up with dangerous things to be used.
AW: So you would say that these paintings are a metaphor for these paintings in Los Alamos?
JD: Yeah.
AW: Now these two on the wall here, and those four small ones.
JD: Well, they’re edited panels. Part of the frames per second, so to speak.
AW: So it might actually be.. working with video is giving you a cinematic continuity that, they’re coming in framed sequences. Do you feel that it is like film?
JD: My thought process has always been cinematic. I started in the video department, they kicked me out. I was always thinking about real time, and what you can extrapolate from real time. I used the video as a container.
AW: So that’s your painting.
JD: I wasn’t interested in editing them at all.
AW: So you’re painting in real time. And you don’t, other than the fact that as an artist and you make a stroke here and wait a few minutes and make a stroke there, editing that goes on in painting as you’re building an image. Are these acrylic?
JD: Whenever I’ve resold my work on the internet, or in catalogues, I say that these are oil. I always worked in oil, except for when I’ve used acrylic. I was using gel—these have gel on them too.
AW: Why do you use gel?
JD: The open area, you know, the resist. And also to liquify the color.
AW: Rather than turpentine.
JD: It’s a binder, yeah, but it glazes over the fresco because it’s shiny. It gives a sheen. It creates a contrast to the fresco.
AW: Do you work sequentially? In other words, do you do four of those at once, or one and then the next?
JD: These were 11 panels in all. First I did the pink in all eleven, and after looking out the window and being in the zone of that pink, and what came to me later was this alien, indian, ancient, a product of our DNA gets back.
