Fei Jun Interviews Jenny Hyde, Fall 2004

I don’t know much about you. I have to ask you basic questions. Why are you making art?

That’s a question I’ve been asking myself a long time. I’m not sure if it’s a choice artists make. I’ve had lots of chances to make a choice not to make art and never did. I definitely could have done other things. I’m adaptable. Had I gone to business school…but I didn’t go to business school. Business school comes up because my father wanted me to go. He didn’t want me to go to art school. But then, okay…it was my parents. They are artists too. They made it completely available to be creative. I had no TV, I was very isolated…they would bring in a roll of butcher paper and pencils and that’s what we had. We would sit at the kitchen table after the dishes were done and draw hippies.

I say we, because it’s nearly impossible to talk about my childhood with out references to my siblings.

So that’s the only entertainment at the time?

Well, no, there were lots of things to do…being in a rural area. But the only time I remember being in the house was when I was drawing things or reading. Not just with my siblings either, I would draw on my own for hours. This comfort in this work was developed at a very early age. I had to draw everyday. I think when you learn or gain an emotional attachment to something when you’re young, that’s pretty much it. You’re always going to do it.

Even though you didn’t answer that question perfectly…(laughs) well maybe that’s why you make art because you can’t answer that question...

I will say that art has been a response to what ever is around me…it seems I have to keep responding. That’s one conclusion about making it that I’ve come to.

You come from the country, a poor family?

Extremely poor.

…What do you get from this experience of being poor and from the country, how does it effect your life and art?

I've always been on the edge of disaster with money …I’m in no physical harm of being poor, but it definitely…as far as art goes..Well… it’s easy to already be poor and be an artist…because then being poor because you’re an artist doesn’t really bother you …you’ve always been poor.

It’s an interesting question because it comes up so much in my life, this constant fight with the idea of money. Of needing it and wanting it. What does it mean to want it or need it? Of course it affects my work, there was a period of time when if I painted something, always in the back of my mind was the question, if you do this, will you be able to sell it? This is was unavoidable with making something so marketable as a painting, especially when I have had previous experience with being able to sell my work….this didn’t stop me from changing, or maybe it has. I really hate money. The needing it, the wanting it. Money and art is a complicated subject. It can get quite messy.

What else besides money does being poor…?

Well, I’ll say that being poor makes you resourceful. You have to come up with ways to fulfill your ideas, you use what you have, and you can’t just go and get what ever it is that you need. For a while only did work I could do with supplies that were either given to me or that I found. There ara lot of unused oil paints in people’s closets; one good thing about oils is that they can last a long time in a tube.

I think about being poor a lot. It was pointed out to me once that I was or am poor because I want to be. Because I romanticize it, it becomes a romantic theme, especially with being an artist. But I don’t think I’m poor because I want to be, but because I am comfortable being poor, its what I know. I can work within it, and perhaps it gives me some satisfaction to always say bad things about people who have money. But I would still like to know what its like to have money and to have people say bad things about me.(Laugh)

From pieces I saw, your paintings, it seems to me that the subject matter your using, these landscapes and horses…I was wondering why your so interested in landscape, what is the relationship between the paintings and your personal experience? I’m always interested in how your experience creates your views.

Well, I think being poor, or my experience of being poor in a rural area; you are linked in some way to your physical surroundings for your survival. You have to learn it, you have to know everything about it, not just how land flows but what certain cloud formations could mean. I think that’s why I use this idea of space, not just an idea of visual space but what our relationship with our environment is. And those pieces were definitely influenced by poverty. They are all from what I call rural slums, sort of structures on the outskirts of small towns, structural debris. And it’s about what this space means in terms of the people in it, on it or kicked off of it. They are all specifically American spaces.

What do you mean specific site?

They are specific in terms of geography, those images you saw are all from the Colville Indian reservation in Washington state.

So you are interested in specific sits to be subject of your paintings? Is that only because of the beauty of landscape?

The landscape holds it beauty in its layered meanings. At that time I was very interested in history, and the history of the American west. I was relearning history and this was a very powerful experience for me, it was like an unveiling. Suddenly the landscape meant so much more as I became more open to this new understanding of history. I would visit these places that once held one meaning but now meant something completely different. It’s more than the landscape itself, its what has happened on it.

There are lots of images of horses in your work, what is this reference?

There was a time when I had a symbol dictionary for my work, because I had such re-occurring images. The horse is a symbol of loss. And change. Most of the horses in my images are always standing still, very small, still…this stillness when they are creatures of movement. Once used for movement through space and a symbol of freedom and power, these horses only stand. There is nowhere for them to go.

Lonely

Yes, they can be. Sometimes I think their stationary bodies can represent an ongoing wait that links to hope, and the hoplessness of waiting around hoping for things.

I also had lots of personal experience with horses, if the inside of the house I grew up in links to drawing, the outside links with horses. They are a very romantic and nostalgic icon of the American west.  I see them as ironic and perfect for the West, because we (European settlers) made them part of this landscape, they were never there originally.

You use them interesting way. They are very realistic but the landscape around them is very abstract.

This goes back to using the representational imagery to depict a space rather than depicting an illusion of landscape with color or referencing landscape as real space.

I was more interested in spaces that are considered nothing.  The corner of where two fences meet and its just dirt with some taco bell trash stuck to the fence and on the other side of the fence is just dirt too. These spaces interest me a lot. I was thinking a lot about landscape, what is it, what is what you would typically call landscape and thinking a lot about space itself and how it really its just shapes.  Two brushstrokes can depict a space.

The way you talk reminds me of how traditional Chinese landscape painters’ talk about space. How the emptiness is an essential element and they would use this emptiness as much as images.

A lot of things I was thinking then was this relationship between what is there and what isn’t there. And how can one exist with out the other because each defines the other. So the horses or the fence or any imagery defines the space as landscape simply by being there, because we associate them with landscape or I place them as such to imply that it is landscape, but its also something else…its just space…and I don’t mean illusionary space but its just a canvas. It’s just a piece of space created and put on the wall. There is nothing there.

Eventually I stopped painting images and that abstract space took over, but anyway that came later.

You were a painter for many years, what is the motivation of learning digital media?

It’s a good question because I don’t have a ready answer for that yet. But I will say that I got to a place with painting where it wasn’t working for me. It was like I was going into the studio and answering the same question over and over and soon my answers were all the same too.

Tired?

Very tired. I just felt like I wanted something else. I would see new media work in shows and I would want it, you know how you want things…it was a yearning. I didn’t know how or why but I wanted it.

It’s like a new language.

it’s exactly like learning a new language.

I do believe your experience as a painter will benefit you.

I may keep saying the same things but I will have a new way to say it.