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TIM EBNER
M. What is the thing that makes that painting?
I don't know. I don't know if it's one thing. It's just like an accumulation of things. It's the pictorialness of it. I think what's interesting, what's really getting me now in this work is that the, you know the other stuff earlier on was great because there was a sense of the pictorial that was so rooted in its materials, and in certain notions of about how a painting can take on its form. And now I'm just 'okay, you stretch it on canvas, and you get oil paint and you paint a picture'. And how can you make that interesting? So there are all these different aspects of pictorialness that are now making themselves evident to me that are brand new ... Composition ... All these very traditional things.
M. Can I say something else though?
What are you alluding to? What do you think?
M. There's an overt play with psychology.
Psychology?
M. Signals of psychological content.
Well, maybe you're right. And that it could only happen because of its pictorialness? That's interesting. I like that.
M. This is where I make my case.
The eyes. Everybody says I'm good with the eyes.
M. It's not just the eye ...
It's how you surround it. You just sort of dab the damn thing on. It's just where you put it. This one is kind of hidden, but it looks out at you with an intent, with a knowledge that you're there and with its own sense of self. So I think that there is this kind of way that I'm sort of looking at myself while I'm making a painting. I'm sort of putting myself into it in a funny kind of way, in a ridiculously, but yet serious, kind of way. But there's a long tradition of that. That sort of keeps my interest there. That can kind of hold me there.
To have something absurd, but yet to put those areas in the painting that are very intense, too intense sometimes ... There's a relief in the absurd, from the kind of seriousness of your intentions. So you can look at it. If it was all heavy and serious, then it would be too much.
M. In relation to the other work ...
The earlier work? I think it was there but it wasn't quite as ... I guess it was just realizing itself.
M. I guess that's why I said that thing about psychology.
Yeah. Maybe it was about keeping yourself as an audience. Maybe it was about losing an audience, and then realizing that the only one you had left was yourself. And how do you keep your interest? Not like entertain you, like how can you entertain yourself? But how do you make the work compelling now that that vast sea of vicarious observers and collectors are not around ... It's not a question that you ask yourself. It's all of a sudden you find yourself doing different work. Different things become compelling.
M. Do you think that this work was behind the work that you were doing then?
I think that now I'm doing the work that I wanted to do back then and that the other work acted as a sort of ... there was a sense of it being a veneer covering something ... 'cause when I look back on all the work that I was influenced by, it was painting. It was very traditional, on canvas, painting. But for one reason ... or many reasons, I couldn't actually, really, stretch one up and load that brush up and do it – and start to make those mistakes in order to get to a certain place where I would have some consistency. But I couldn't really do that. I was too scared or it was not seen as the right thing, the proper thing to do at that time. And there was so much support for doing something other than that, that it just felt okay to just keep going on and doing that kind of stuff.
But when things ... when the smoke settled or whatever that saying is ... and you're there ... you're still standing there ... It's funny, you know the options sort of open up a little more for you. When those pressures are gone then you can kind of gravitate – not just right away – but gravitate toward things that seem more natural to you, or just something that you wanted to do, and it feels much better.
But the thing is that I don't know if I would have known that. I mean I don't know if I would have been at that place ten years or fifteen years ago. I don't know if I could have ... I don't know if there would have been anything there for me, working on canvas.
I mean ... Do you have the same kinds ... is it different for you?
M. Well, the reason that I asked that thing about 'behind' is because that was something that I felt too in my work. In my work, all of a sudden I went 'Oh'.
Yeah. It feels good.
M. Yeah. That thing before looked to me like the essential reductive minimal thing. Now I look back and I go, 'Yeah, it was reductive all right'. (laughs)
Reduced me down to this ...
M. Yes.
'I was that, that's for sure. Now I can get things really confusing.' and that feels great. Yeah, like that confusion is compelling now, isn't it? Yeah, that's beautiful.
I've always had the hardest time trying to be cool in terms of what is interesting now. I've always felt that I was twenty or thirty years behind. Like just, that reservoir of the rerun, or the throwaway, or the uninteresting, it's just like a great place for me. Same thing with going to museums and looking at incredible paintings. Oh yeah, this is, like, getting rooted in, feeling connected to some sort of tradition. But it is a tradition that is incredibly uninteresting.
See we're like craftsmen in a way. I'll go up and I'll stand in front of, like, Christ Entering Brussels and I'll go 'Oh, check it out. Look how much white ... how does he get away with it'. We're looking at these objects, these paintings, not only for having moving experiences just because of our expectations, but we're, like, what can I use? How can I better my own craft by what this person's done. So we have a real hands on ... It's really sensual. It's not based in ideas. It's more like the experience of white, or the experience of scale, or texture, or certain kinds of things that we can actually use for ourselves to make our own paintings better. And those paintings are just like food. It's like good food. You just consume it. You eat it up and you spit it out.
Why do you look at something? Why does it get you off? What is it? What happens? What the fuck happens to my brain? Why do I get so excited about these things? I don't know. Music I can understand because that really touches off my emotion, because it's sensual. Or other kinds of physical activities, because they will just completely engross me. I forget about everything else. But the same thing can happen while I'm painting too. I could say that I think about a lot of things when I'm painting, but when it's going really well, there's no time. It's just timeless. It's not a wonderful place. But there's a kind of intensity that I like, where you lose all self-consciousness, consciousness of what's going on around you.
But that kind of intense self-involvement, for me, puts everything in relationship to everything else. I know I can have a great time in the studio. Sometimes. Not all the time. Believe me, I mean it's boring. I don't wake up anxious to have that moment, wanting to have that. But the routine is mine. What comes with that routine of making those objects is mine, and no one can take that away from me. And I have that. And I know a lot of people want to have that. But I have that, and that gives me a great sense of confidence when it comes to the art world and all that kind of stuff. I think it used to make me a lot more crazy. I think I used to feel really insecure about who I was within the art world and things like that. Now, I still do, but I don't feel it as much. (laughs) I don't feel it as much, because I think there is more time spent actually making art. For some reason my whole life is now revolving around that preoccupation. And it is exactly the way I wanted it to be. And then everything else just falls into place after that.