ASG interview with Roberta Paul,
10/27/00 3:20 p.m.

Allston Skirt Gallery (ASG): There is a mysterious puddle-like, palette-like circular image on your new canvases -- where does this imagery come from?

Roberta Paul (RP): One morning ten years ago, I brought my father to the neurologist and he was given a diagnostic test called "draw a clock," a test in which he was asked to just draw a clock and put the time in. I remember he didn’t have difficulty doing this, but that I thought it was a bizarre test to give him. I found out from the doctor that this is a diagnostic tool used to determine neurological problems.

May 30, 1999, I was sitting in Florida with my father, who does suffer from a neurological brain disorder, and I asked him to draw a clock. It was striking and beautiful and frightening at the same time. I continued this exploration by having him draw me at least a clock a day, which he has done and is still doing. I put these tiny little drawings in a folder and, at the time, had no intention of using them in my artwork.

Six months later, these little drawings appeared and haunted me and still haunt me and I decided to use them in my work. Since my work has been based on autobiographical imagery for the past ten years, this was the next step, to collaborate with my father.

ASG: So let's talk about how you see these clocks in your new work, for example, describe your process in creating a particular work -- say, May 30, 1999 4:10 pm (2000) - both the intellectual process and the physical process.

RP: Since this was the first clock drawing of this series, that's a great one to comment on. In this piece, I've used an image of me as a child dressed like the Pierrot figure (Pierrot was the tragic clown whose image was popularized by French painter Antoine Watteau) holding up the world. Technically, there are quite a lot of layers of paper in this piece. There is a layer that is made up of reproduction maps from the fifteenth century, another layer on which I laser-copied pictures of me when I was seven, and several layers of tissue paper that I painted. It sat in my studio for four months, thinking it was done, but wasn't fully resolved until I put the clock on top of the piece in watercolor. The clock I chose -- the first one in the series drawn by my father -- was drawn on May 30, which happens to be my birthday. That seemed an appropriate way to solve the painting. Emotionally, it united the childlike quality of his recent drawing to my own childhood, using the clock as a metaphor for time. The clock refers to personal biography as well as the universal experience of aging and the uncertainty with which we regard the passage of time.

ASG: Let's talk about your earlier work, which this is clearly related to. You have worked with issues surrounding time and memory in the past, incorporating autobiographical snapshots and swatches of toile -- 18th century fabric printed with scenes of bucolic daily domestic life -- and i see the recurrence of the toile imagery in this body of work. How did that come to be part of your visual vocabulary, and how does it fit it to your new work?

RP: In my earlier work, the toile came from my sister's bedroom. My mother was an interior decorator, and so I was surrounded by these fabrics as a child. A curator has remarked that the toile seems very comforting in my work. It is also pertinent that the toile themselves represent images of childhood from a different historical period -- the 18th century -- and so the concept of family and memory and time and history and sociology all converge in these fabrics. The way that families entertain or play is represented in the images in some of these fabrics, and I am interested in how these subjects have changed and how they have stayed the same. Family values!

I also like the movement depicted in the fabrics -- my work is concerned with rhythm and movement. I seem to be drawn to those images that that incorporate movement, including dancers and other figures in motion.

Part of my process in these new works has to do with slowing down, and also with learning to stop. I have always layered my work to create more space within it, now I'm figuring out how to put the space I want in without veiling the process in so many layers. So that is about time in a metaphorical and an actual way... learning to slow down in this fast paced world, which I started by slowly tracing over enlargements of my father's small clocks, taking hours to accomplish what he had done in under a minute.

ASG: Your work evinces a fascination with time and with the (hu)man-made construct of time, often weaving together images of childhood and art history with scientific structures like the double helix of DNA. Talk to us about time.

RP: The new works are often literally centered on the very real, representational image of a clock, which I chose to enlarge so that it became both an abstract and a recognizable figure.

Besides the personal aspect, I started thinking that in the year 2000, with everybody's frantic pace that they are working and living at, my father had managed to deal with time better than anyone I know. With the new millennium, I started questioning the whole 24 hour clock, who determined it, and about our first experience with time and trying to organize it into the conventions of "telling time" as children.

In fact, in a photographic image that I have incorporated into one of my new paintings, you see my mother teaching me how to tell time on a huge clock that she holds on her lap.

ASG: Who is your favorite artist?

RP: I love the fifteenth century artists Fra Angelico, Van Der Weyden, and Masaccio because of their use of space -- it's both totally flat and three-dimensional at the same time. I also have to talk about Jasper Johns here: his concept of perception and cognition has influenced my work since I saw his map series. And Alice Neel, because her concept that the soul radiates through the eyes influenced me. My earliest work was almost entirely portraiture, in a funny way, these clocks are portraits, too.