Interview

GO: I remember when you were in Bridgehampton, New York, in the barn in the cornfield, and you were trying to suspend yourself over the canvas.

JN: Yeah. All those things have been invention based on necessity. I couldn't make a big painting using the paint that I'd use . . . I couldn't do it vertically. It had to be horizontal because of the drip. And a big painting, I couldn't reach the whole surface. So that was one of my many attempts at a solution, to reach the middle of a large painting without making it stand vertically. I remember forgetting to hook myself into the rig one time, and I launched myself at the canvas and just fell face-first into the painting.

GO: Your painting rig evolved out of the necessity to be above the painting?

JN: I needed to be above the painting because the paint is so liquid that it will drip, and I never want any sign of gravity to show in the paintings. They work only if they are kind of antigravity, like they have sort of been blown onto the canvas like some sort of Tiepolo figure up in the sky or something. If there's any orientation like a drip, it kills the effect. A lot of the early work was on paper, and with a piece of paper you have access to the rectangle at any point of entrance or exit. And you can move outside of the rectangle or come back in. There's complete freedom of access to any part of the rectangle. But when I made it bigger, I couldn't reach in the same way. Which is why I made this rig so I could paint as if I were working on a piece of paper.

GO: In your earlier brushstroke paintings, you were deliberately letting the residue of the failed figures accumulate on the white, so there was this very, very subtle, kind of ghostly underpainting.

JN: I liked to feel that the work that I put into the painting was somehow visible. I liked the patina of the history of the painting. But after a while it became unnecessary. And then I ended up taking that out, too. I found by taking any event out of the ground, I was left with an infinite space, because the painting is about the brushstroke really-it's not about anything else.

GO: To me, the ones that are on the pure white or pure background are a lot more three-dimensional-they really are kind of gravity-defying. They're really floating in space.

JN: I think I always wanted to fly. Flight has always been a preoccupation of mine. Like the little old painting in your guest room, Yaw, Pitch and Roll: That has a picture of Louis Blériot and one of his flying machines in the background. My grandmother once flew with Blériot.

GO: Really?

JN: Yeah, strapped to the wing in a big hat. Blériot was the first to fly the English Channel. She was there when he landed and he gave her a ride. She was 18, and she put on a big hat, and in a long white dress, she went up, strapped tight to the wing of a biplane. Maybe flight is in my genes.

GO: With your big brushstroke paintings-you're in your rig making strokes and your assistant is there squeegeeing off the paint when you aren't satisfied with the result, which is most of the time. How many strokes do you do before you have a keeper?

JN: It depends. I liken it to playing baseball and trying to hit a home run. Sometimes you get lucky and the first pop it goes out of the ballpark. Other times you go quite a few games before anything happens. I can do hundreds of attempts and not get a keeper. And I've got it on the first attempt.

GO: How long does it take you to decide if a stroke has got it or not?

JN: I kind of know it immediately. Sometimes I'll keep it in spite of myself, because there's something about it. Maybe I don't like it, but there's something about it that makes it difficult to erase-and quite often that'll be a particularly good painting. I guess that's because what I'm after is to surprise myself somehow, to kind of step out of the picture and let it surprise me. I guess that's what all artists do, in a way. I do feel that I've reduced my painting work to this one thing, but there's a kind of endless range of expression within that very simple structure that I've given myself. It's like there's an element of music, there's an element of movie, there's a beginning, a middle, and an end-there's a little narrative there. It's like writing telegrams or something.

GO: Do you feel a connection with the abstract expressionists?

JN: I think the connection is there-that's very obvious-but what I do is sort of anti-that, in that it's very repetitive. I'm doing the same thing over and over and over. Everything in my studio goes in circles. I move in circles, the paint goes on and the paint goes off, and it goes down and it comes off, and it's very repetitive-like a lot of my short movies, which are taking a repetitive gesture and celebrating that.

GO: But are you going for an automatic thing? How conscious are you? You know, like Yogi Berra said, "You can't think and hit . . . "

JN: It's right there, right on that line between thinking and hitting. You've got to be aware of it, but not too aware. It's a search for that perfect place right down the middle, where neither rules.

GO: So you started making brushes because you couldn't buy brushes that worked?

JN: Yeah. And I found that brushes are like characters in a way: Each one does a different dance. I started gathering different brush-making materials and putting them together-synthetics, naturals . . .

GO: Did you know anything about brushes?

JN: No, I didn't. I just figured it out. I did some reading. And I did some looking. And I took brushes apart and examined them, and then reconfigured them in different ways, and talked to people in the brush-making industry and the bristle-importing business, and I kind of put it all together with a lot of five-minute epoxy and fishing rods and anything that seemed like it might work as a brush. The first one I made looked like a space rocket, and it took me about two weeks to make. It was big, and it was clumpy, and I shaped it using a pair of thinning scissors that you give someone a haircut with. And a few days and several large blisters on my fingers later, I had a brush.