Q & A Julian Schnabel

Q & A Julian Schnabel.

- Bill Powers

Bill Powers: We’re looking at new plate paintings in your outdoor studio. One narrative appears to be a woman on the beach wrestling a giant lobster.

Julian Schnabel: It’s from an image I found at the Fish Farm in Napeague taped up on their refrigerator.

BP: Two other paintings are cropped landscapes with flowers. Does working outside have a direct impact on the imagery?

JS: Well, I can turn around, and I’m confronted by nature. You see all the holes between the branches and the way the light hits the leaves. You realize it’s not just one green. It’s a million different versions of green and the organized chaos of nature.

BP: To me, your new flower paintings hover between the feeling of a Japanese garden and Monet’s water lilies.

JS: These flowers are in the graveyard where van Gogh is buried. The black and white marks are from the wall behind it, the little stones. You don’t see the sky, which is interesting, just the roses inside this enclosed space.

BP: Does that convey a sense of entrapment?

JS: I wouldn’t call it claustrophobia, but they are relentless in a way where there’s no escape.

BP: When you visit van Gogh’s grave, do you get a spirit hit from that proximity?

JS: I’ve been thinking about making a movie about van Gogh. I’ve got about sixty pages. I’m working with Jean-Claude Carrière. I think it’s interesting to see what van Gogh was thinking about. He would go into a museum and act as if no one else was there. He’d walk right up to a painting and block other people’s view. He didn’t care.

BP: Paintings by which artists?