Oral history interview with De Wain Valentine, 2013 September 4 and 5

Transcript

Preface

The following oral history transcript is the result of a recorded interview with De Wain Valentine on 2013 September 4 and 5. The interview took place at Valentine's studio in Torrance, CA, and was conducted by Robin Lee Clark for the Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.

This transcript has been lightly edited for readability by the Archives of American Art. The reader should bear in mind that they are reading a transcript of spoken, rather than written, prose.

Interview

ROBIN CLARK: Okay. So now we are recording.

DE WAIN VALENTINE: Good.

ROBIN CLARK: Okay. I'm just going to triple check that. That now we're recording, we absolutely are. [Microphone squeals.] Ouch. Okay.

So then I'm supposed to say, this is Robin Clark interviewing De Wain Valentine in his studio in Torrance, California, on September 4, 2013, for the Archives of American Art Smithsonian Institution, disk number one. So they like us to start at the beginning. So can you begin by telling me about your family, maybe even your grandparents?

DE WAIN VALENTINE: My grandparents, my great-grandfather came here from Copenhagen to Silver Plume, Colorado, to mine for gold, to prospect for gold. And all of my uncles were prospectors all their lives. And as a kid I grew up with them taking me around the tailing piles. They'd pick up samples of stones and spit on them and say, look how beautiful this is. And it got me fascinated with finding beautiful rocks.

ROBIN CLARK: So is that your grandfather on your mother's side or your father's side?

DE WAIN VALENTINE: On my mother's side, yeah.

ROBIN CLARK: And so they were Danish?

DE WAIN VALENTINE: They were Danish.

ROBIN CLARK: And then on your father's side?

DE WAIN VALENTINE: On my father's side, it's hard to know what they were. It was a big conglomerate family from Texas, and they were essentially sharecroppers in Texas. And then, doing cattle and things like that. That was kind of a cowboy, farmer, and when there were no more cows to round up they started—the old cowboys drove heavy equipment. So that's what my dad was doing when he was eight. He drove a Barber Greene ditching machine from Texas to Colorado laying a pipeline.

ROBIN CLARK: When he was eight?

DE WAIN VALENTINE: When he was eight, yep, when he was eight. All the kids went to work. There were 11 kids. There were 18 kids born and 11 lived. And I've heard such tales that reminds me of the Joads. At points they were living in tents and sleeping on the ground, and all these kids. And they all had to grow up going to work. None of them went to school. So my dad and mom—Mom finished high school, and they were both determined that I was going to get an education, which was very good for me.

ROBIN CLARK: So how did your parents meet?

DE WAIN VALENTINE: They met—my father, when he came up to Colorado that first time, loved Colorado. And so the next job a few years later, he got to come back on a construction crew to Colorado. He came back to Colorado and met my mother when she was in high school, and they fell in love and got married. And I don't remember how many years later they had me.

ROBIN CLARK: You were the first?

DE WAIN VALENTINE: I was the first and only, yes. I kind of ruined the plumbing, so I was the only spoiled brat.

ROBIN CLARK: That's interesting having come from such a large family.

DE WAIN VALENTINE: I know and my mother's family was large. My mother had a brother as well, and I always wanted brothers and sisters but wasn't fortunate enough. So at any rate, as a kid we started traveling in 1940 doing government construction jobs. And Dad had been selling cars at that time at the Ford garage in Fort Collins, Colorado where I was born.

ROBIN CLARK: Oh, and can you say your birthday?

DE WAIN VALENTINE: I was born August 27, 1936, Larimer County Hospital. And in 1940 we took off in a brand new '44 convertible and drove to Tallapoosa, Georgia.

ROBIN CLARK: Tallapoosa.

DE WAIN VALENTINE: Tallapoosa, Georgia. And in those days, the family didn't have any money, so I remember mom and dad knocked on doors to see if anybody would take us in because they had a job nearby. And this very dear black family took us in. Hard to believe my father, being a Texan, would live with a black family, but they were very, very dear people.

And Grandma boiled clothes on a wood fire in the back yard. And she'd say, "Oh Mrs. Valentine, this is the only way you can get your clothes white. You gotta boil 'em." And she was out there with a stick, Grandma was. And we used their kitchen and their outhouse, and cooked on a coal oil stove, as it was called then. Kerosene stove and kerosene was called coal oil, because it was burned instead of coal. And I well remember the smell of kerosene in the kitchen and the kerosene lamps. Because the house didn't have any electricity. But very sweet loving people.

After that, we found that that kind of searching around for a place to live was a little too much work, so the folks bought us a 10-foot trailer house. And we started parading around the country in a trailer house. My folks always joked they lived in 41 states, but I think we slept in 41, but we didn't live in 41. We just stopped by the side of the road, and go to sleep and get up the next day and drive wherever the job was.

ROBIN CLARK: So what kind of work was this?

DE WAIN VALENTINE: Dad was doing government priority construction work laying pipelines, still pipe-lining. And he was driving a side boom tractor. Our first big job was outside of Homestead, Florida, because the hurricane had washed the water line out, the one out to Key West.

ROBIN CLARK: And around what year was this maybe?

DE WAIN VALENTINE: This was 1942, I guess? Around then, '41, '42. I don't remember when that hurricane blew the water out. So we lived in Homestead, Florida, which I loved. I thought California was going to be like Florida. So I always had a dream of moving to California, because I thought it was going to be like Florida with the orange groves and the great smells in the air.

But we parked our car and trailer at a guy that owned a swimming pool. And he wanted to be a salvage diver. His name was Art McKee and he since became very famous, opened up a museum in Florida. Discovered a lot of pirate gold. And he's in the books.

ROBIN CLARK: That's great.

DE WAIN VALENTINE: He taught me to swim, and he taught me to deal with the toughness of the pipeline kids, who I was kind of sheltered at that time, because we moved from town to town to town. So I was the first one to get beat up. You know I had to go through the pecking order. But he taught me how to take a punch, give a punch. Nothing to do with art, but it was great. And I loved the swimming pool. There were some military guys playing, batting a ball around in the pool, batting with a board and it slipped in their hands and I got this.

ROBIN CLARK: Hmm. A scar over your lip.

DE WAIN VALENTINE: It hung down over my lower lip when I was, however old that was, four or five. And my first stitches, three stitches, which wasn't enough, but your lips are so sensitive anyway. It's all I could take. Somebody holding down my hands and holding down my feet and trying to keep me still while he was sewing me up. But anyway, that gave me the dream to move to California. I love that tropical air with the great smells of the blossoms and things.

ROBIN CLARK: So for how many years were you sort of traveling around like that, and when did you finally sort of settle down a little bit?

DE WAIN VALENTINE: We settled down in '45, August of '45. I had gone back, my first train ride from Riverton, Wyoming, to Fort Collins, Colorado, with my grandmother. I was staying with my grandmother and the war was declared over and the treaty was signed with Japan. And Dad said, enough government construction work, and Mom had saved—She was very good. She was very frugal. She saved every penny. So we moved back to the hometown in Fort Collins, and bought a little piece about 3 and 1/2 acres with a house and chicken coup on it for $3,500. And my mom and dad bought me my first horse.

ROBIN CLARK: And what kind of horse was it?

DE WAIN VALENTINE: It was a Palomino pony and a half Shetland, bigger than a Shetland but smaller than a pony. Great little horse. I rode her until I got too big for her, and she became too nasty in her old age. She became really, really bitchy. But at any rate, so I kind of grew up a cowboy. And I started out trying to draw horses, which I found were very, very difficult to draw without any training. And my mother was a very good draftsman, so she encouraged me.

At one point I was still trying to draw realistically and I was in junior high and I was at the public library in Fort Collins, and on one on the shelves in the art section was a book called Master Drawings. So I picked it up and looked at it, and saw the drawings of Renoir, and Ingres, and Rubens, Rembrandt, and these beautiful nudes. I said to hell with horses. I know what I'm going to do, so from that point further I tried to find out what art was.

My mother got me a mail order course from Art Instruction Incorporated in Chicago, which wasn't really helpful. It was too—It was too rote. They'd send you the lessons and once in a while they'd send somebody out to encourage you, but they just wanted to sell lessons. But nevertheless it got me really interested, and I was always building models and building airplanes and cars, always building something. And in 1945 we were stationed—Dad was working in Lander, Wyoming, which is like the semi-precious gem area of Wyoming. And there were lots of jade and agates, and they actually found a lot of beryl, rubies, and some emeralds, and sapphires. I met this one guy who had a curio shop. And in the back of his curio shop he had a lapidary system, cutting, polishing stones.

Dad at one point, was doing a back fill on a job that went right through a Air Force practice bombing range. And we'd go out there on Sundays, I'd go out with my dad while he was pushing the dirt back in the ditch—and the area was actually called Agate Flats.

ROBIN CLARK: Agate Flats.

DE WAIN VALENTINE: And there was moss agates everywhere you looked. It was just that bit of magic. I remember it was in August and the afternoon rains, and every afternoon it would rain and then you'd walk through and see all of these glistening stones and pick them up and look through them. It was what got me interested in that transparent colored space of the stone.

ROBIN CLARK: So what does a moss agate look like?

DE WAIN VALENTINE: When it's raw, it looks kind of—it's very easily discerned from the rest of the gravel, because it has a waxy look to it. And they'd all been washed out there in streams, so most of them had been kind of tumbled. And they had a worn surface, so you could pick them up and you could see right through them. And by the time we moved back to Fort Collins in '45, I had several dynamite boxes full of agates and jade and various and sundry rocks. And it was like magic to me to be out the woods or out in the plains and just find beautiful rocks, and you'd pick them up, they're yours. You own them.

When I went back to Fort Collins—I guess that was third grade—my third grade teacher had a lapidary system in her garage, so I would go over after school and watch her cut and polish stones. And in '46, '47, after the war, Plexiglas was declassified.

ROBIN CLARK: It had been military?

DE WAIN VALENTINE: It had been classified, yeah. Because the formula was stolen from the Germans. It was originally a German material made by two German's, Rohm and Haas, in Germany. And they brought the formula back and made the—Germany was making the cockpit windows out of fighter pilots [Plexiglas], because it didn't shatter and didn't send glass everywhere when it was hit with a bullet. So there were a lot of semi-military and/or military construction plants in and around Denver, because it was a big metropolis and they could have the employees. And they had the facilities there because it was far away from either coast.

And the plastic companies in Denver gave the surplus acrylic to the junior high, high school shops for kids to play around with. So my junior high shop teacher, Mr. Warner, he said, De Wain, look at this stuff. You can cut it on a table saw, you can sand it with sandpaper, you can polish it on the buffing wheel, and it's a lot easier than cutting and polishing stones. And I started working with Plexiglas.

ROBIN CLARK: Oh, you're bringing me a sample. Did you make these?

DE WAIN VALENTINE: Yeah.

ROBIN CLARK: So we're looking at—well you describe them. What's inside?

DE WAIN VALENTINE: Well they're cubes with, for the best imagination, with flowers carved inside of them and the flowers are dyed.

ROBIN CLARK: So these are pretty small. The one cube is about an inch square, like one of two dice.

DE WAIN VALENTINE: Right.

ROBIN CLARK: And then the other is a little bit more rectangular, really looking like the shape of an ice cube out of a tray almost.

DE WAIN VALENTINE: Slightly melted, yeah.

ROBIN CLARK: And inside them, there are yellow flower shapes and one also has leaves. And so did you make these when you were that age?

DE WAIN VALENTINE: Right.

ROBIN CLARK: In the shop class?

DE WAIN VALENTINE: Yes.

ROBIN CLARK: Oh, that's fantastic.

DE WAIN VALENTINE: And those shapes are made by removing the material inside and then dying the—

ROBIN CLARK: Oh, so the forms floating inside are not objects—

DE WAIN VALENTINE: No, they're carved.

ROBIN CLARK: —but actually material is removed and then dyed, so it looks like something is cast inside there, but it's actually removed. Oh, that's so great.

DE WAIN VALENTINE: It was also brought to my attention that Lucite Plexiglas with edge light.

ROBIN CLARK: And so, can you explain what you mean by edge lighting?

DE WAIN VALENTINE: Edge lighting, it would pick up the light from one side and transport it to the opposite edge. And this piece I made in my studio in the early '70s. This was 24 feet, 4 feet deep, and the acrylic was 4 inches I think, Robin. Yeah, 4 inches.

ROBIN CLARK: So we're looking at a big drawing for an installation piece made, I think from Plexiglas in the '70s. But let's get to the '70s and then we'll ask you about that. So right now, you're in junior high and you're working with Plexiglas in your shop class, and what else is going on around that time that relates to your later art in any way?

DE WAIN VALENTINE: The next year was when the navy declassified fiberglass and polyester. The navy was making PT boats.

ROBIN CLARK: What's a PT boat?

DE WAIN VALENTINE: A PT boat was like the torpedo boat that JFK was on when it got torpedoed.

ROBIN CLARK: Okay.

DE WAIN VALENTINE: They were super-fast. They had big—some of them had big Packards on them. They had big Caterpillars on them. They had Rolls-Royce engines, and they'd go like 60 miles an hour. It was very fast for like a boat that was 90 feet long. And they would go in and drop their torpedoes off the deck and make a big U-turn, and shoot them off at ships in the harbors, or submarines, or whatever they were trying to eliminate.

He said—this was Perry Knight was his name—and he said, De Wain, look at this stuff. You take a little of this and add a little of that, and add your own color, and you bake it in the oven and make your own jewels. And that started me on this whole bent of working with the polyester.

ROBIN CLARK: So, are you still talking about fiberglass or now?

DE WAIN VALENTINE: Well it was cast, but I used the resin, just the resin to cast polyester. Not the fiberglass, to make pieces at that point, but I did use fiberglass later to make pieces, the same way they made boats. Because later I knew how to use all this stuff, so I worked in the automobile shops and boat shops in Fort Collins. Painted my first car when I was 12, for money, twenty-five bucks.

ROBIN CLARK: Okay. What color?

DE WAIN VALENTINE: It was a cream. You can imagine a cream color. It was a really beat up old Jeep. Dad said, well if you clean this all up, and fill it, and prime it, and paint it, I'll pay you $25. I don't know how many weeks it took, but it took weeks. And the spray gun has been in my hand ever since, air pressure, whatever. It feels as natural as holding a brush.

ROBIN CLARK: So did you spend all your high school years in one school?

DE WAIN VALENTINE: Yes.

ROBIN CLARK: And where was that?

DE WAIN VALENTINE: That was in Fort Collins.

ROBIN CLARK: And any particularly strong memories of that, besides the kind of shop class?

DE WAIN VALENTINE: Exactly. And I from that point forward, I used to bake the polyester in Mom's oven, because she worked with my dad in the daytime. She did the bookkeeping, receptionist thing at the automobile dealership. And I was home every day after school and just—

ROBIN CLARK: Baking polyester in the oven?

DE WAIN VALENTINE: Doing all kinds of things, making models, baking polyester in the oven. My mother would come home and say, young man, you're going to kill yourself and all of us.

ROBIN CLARK: Well thank goodness that didn't happen.

DE WAIN VALENTINE: We'd open the doors, and didn't really realize how toxic it was at that point. I mean when we painted cars, we'd wear a little paper mask that didn't really fit. You'd paint a car, you'd maybe change masks once while you were painting, and when you'd take a breath afterwards, your nostrils would still stick together.

ROBIN CLARK: Oh.

DE WAIN VALENTINE: You know, it was just crazy. So at any rate, I grew up with all the nasty stuff. It never bothered me. Knock on wood. But this isn't fat, it's just liver. That's taking care of it, Robin. But later on, as soon as I was aware, when I was in college I started using a respirator, because I was working with a paint company in Denver. And I was trying to make my own paints, and I was doing all this stuff. I bought a ball mill to grind pigment. Just to hand grind it. I loved playing with materials. So if it was an oil paint, I wanted to make my own.

ROBIN CLARK: I'm just going to, at the risk of us having to hear a little feedback, I'm just going to make sure that I can hear us talking, because I don't want to lose anything. So I'm just plugging this in, and will you say something?

DE WAIN VALENTINE: Hello.

ROBIN CLARK: Perfect. Okay. Great. Okay. Perfect. All right then.

So we're talking about you going to college. I read in one of your bios that you did a bachelor's degree at the University of Colorado in Boulder, from which you graduated in 1958.

DE WAIN VALENTINE: Correct.

ROBIN CLARK: So did you focus on art as an undergraduate?

DE WAIN VALENTINE: I was an art major with a minor in philosophy of aesthetics. And I must say, I had no idea what philosophy was about, but it was really mind clearing for me. It was great. I had to start with Aristotle, and then Plato, and Hobbs, and Descartes, which I loved, was very helpful.

ROBIN CLARK: Do you remember who your professor was?

DE WAIN VALENTINE: One was—sounds like the same name, but it was Donald Sutherland. And another—I can't remember who my aesthetics professor was—Forrest? Almost. If I think about it I can remember his name.

ROBIN CLARK: Yeah, we can think of it later.

DE WAIN VALENTINE: The Aesthetics Department and the Art Department used to challenge each other on summer Sundays at softball.

ROBIN CLARK: So who was the better team?

DE WAIN VALENTINE: Actually, it was pretty evenly matched. Roland was my—Roland Reiss was my first painting teacher. And he was a very good ball player, actually. He was the bulwark of our team, but we would let the wives play. We'd let the kids play. We weren't serious. They were serious. They were quite serious about it.

And when we had visiting artists, they would—Diebenkorn was one of my teachers, and Richard would play on Sundays. And Clyfford Still would even take off his tie and his sport coat and play on Sundays. He's a very good ballplayer. He was very good for me, my most important influence probably. I had the good fortune to study a short time with Guston when I had a Yale fellowship.

ROBIN CLARK: Let's talk about that in just a minute. I want to make sure we cover everything to do with Boulder. If you can tell me a little bit about what the art classes were like, or what you responded to?

DE WAIN VALENTINE: Well, the art classes were—some of them were very good. I had a good freshman drawing teacher, very good life drawing teacher.

ROBIN CLARK: It sounds as if they had a good program of visiting artists.

DE WAIN VALENTINE: They had a very good program. The summer my father insisted that I would get no future help if I didn't take accounting, I took accounting. And Mark Rothko was the visiting artist that summer, which I always cursed myself.

ROBIN CLARK: Oh, so you didn't get to study with him?

DE WAIN VALENTINE: No, I didn't get to study with him.

ROBIN CLARK: Did you get to meet him?

DE WAIN VALENTINE: Didn't get to meet him.

ROBIN CLARK: Oh that's too bad.

DE WAIN VALENTINE: I was just in the wrong spot at the wrong time.

ROBIN CLARK: But you did meet Diebenkorn and Clyfford Still?

DE WAIN VALENTINE: Yeah, and they were both very good.

ROBIN CLARK: And were you making paintings then?

DE WAIN VALENTINE: I was making paintings and sculpture.

ROBIN CLARK: And can you describe them a little bit?

DE WAIN VALENTINE: Well, Richard was delightful, because he was the first one that was painting everyday subject matter, figures at the beach or sitting on the backyard. So that was very good to him. He suggested one day that maybe we should make a good painting of a grocery cart, which now, it would have been yes, why not? But he was very good. He got me very turned on to color, because he was such great colorist.

It was during that time, actually, I realized that I was dreaming in color when I was dreaming about my paintings. And I became completely involved with color and with Seurat and the pointillists, and later with Bonnard and of course Matisse. It was a wonderful learning experience for me because before I went to college, I had no idea really what art was. My only experience with it was commercial art. So it was all just a big wonderful eye-opening experience for me. I just loved school. It was great.

And between the sophomore and junior year, Yale, Norfolk had a summer program that was an invitational program. And I was invited the summer of '57—

ROBIN CLARK: Your bio says '58, but that could be a typo.

DE WAIN VALENTINE: Well, Robin, I think it was—Let's see, was it '58? No, it was between sophomore and senior year, so it had to be summer of '57 I think.

ROBIN CLARK: Okay, so 1957.

DE WAIN VALENTINE: But I'm not sure. I'd have to go back and—

ROBIN CLARK: We can have a look. We'll double check that. But either way, so how was it that you ended up even knowing about the program at Yale from Boulder?

DE WAIN VALENTINE: They were interested in what the department was doing in Boulder. And they picked me to go back and do that program.

Okay. Can I take a minute off?

ROBIN CLARK: Yes. I'm just figuring out how to stop this. So we'll take a break.

[END OF TRACK valent13_1of3_sd_track01.]

ROBIN CLARK: Okay, we're back from our break and we're going to start talking about your experience at Yale, I think?

DE WAIN VALENTINE: Yes.

ROBIN CLARK: How's that? Oh, sorry. I don't know how I'm supposed to do that.

DE WAIN VALENTINE: It's feeding off your other—

ROBIN CLARK: I'm sorry?

DE WAIN VALENTINE: It's feeding off the other earphone—feedback.

ROBIN CLARK: Well, I think we're recording. So you—

DE WAIN VALENTINE: It was an invitation thing that they—that people at Yale, Norfolk, Dowden who was head of—what's Raymond Dowden? He was head of a school—art school in New York City as well.

ROBIN CLARK: Raymond Dowden?

DE WAIN VALENTINE: Probably, yeah.

ROBIN CLARK: I don't know. We can look it up.

DE WAIN VALENTINE: At any rate, so he—Dowden, Dowden—D-O-W-D-E-N, I believe. He—

ROBIN CLARK: D-O-W-D-E-N?

DE WAIN VALENTINE: I believe so.

ROBIN CLARK: Okay. Was he the head of the—

DE WAIN VALENTINE: He was the Yale, Norfolk headmaster of that program. And, evidently, as near as I could figure out, they selected several colleges a year to pick students from to come to the summer program. Somebody else I know with there. I think Vija Celmins. I didn't know her then but I recently read about it in a bio. Or maybe it was Alexis Smith. At any rate—or Alexis Smith took our art course from Art Instructions Incorporated. I can't remember. I got some wires crossed in there.

But at any rate, so they chose a school, and the school picked me to go back for the summer quarter at Norfolk Connecticut. Which was great.

ROBIN CLARK: So what was the teaching like there?

DE WAIN VALENTINE: Bernard Chaet was head of the painting department.

ROBIN CLARK: And how do you think you spell the last name of Bernard?

DE WAIN VALENTINE: Chaet—C-H-A-E-T, I think. CHAET. He's been there for an age. I read about him still. And at any rate there was—John Ciardi was visiting poet, which was great for all those tongue-tied artists to hear someone speak in literary terms about form and on and on and on, being able to put words to what we were thinking. And they had a photography teacher there from Yale, who's name I don't recall. They had Edmond Casarella who was head of the print department.

ROBIN CLARK: Edmond Casarella?

DE WAIN VALENTINE: Casarella.

ROBIN CLARK: Casarella.

DE WAIN VALENTINE: Who was head of the photography? In the photography we had to start at the beginning, learn to develop, and print, and dodge and burn and all that stuff. Which is very good. And then Phillip Guston was one of the visiting painters that summer. And I loved Guston's work. At that particular time he was doing those really shimmering, abstract, atmospheric pieces, which I thought were just terrific, and I still think they're the best work of his.

ROBIN CLARK: So that was a summer program. And then you went back to Boulder for your senior year?

DE WAIN VALENTINE: Yeah, Bernard offered me a fellowship to Yale. And they gave me a double fellowship to come back to Colorado.

ROBIN CLARK: Well!

DE WAIN VALENTINE: Yeah. So I actually had time to work. Because I'd been working 40 hours a week, and I had kids already—one kid. So it actually gave me some time to work, which was great. I could work less—

ROBIN CLARK: You mean work in your studio?

DE WAIN VALENTINE: Yeah, work less at my—I had two janitor jobs, and one job selling clothes at a men's store when I could be there in the daytime. And then I did their janitor at night, and I did the janitor work at the sports car garage and the Ford dealership. Scrubbed about a dozen toilets every night, enough to last the rest of my life, did all the floors, the mopping, and the cleaning, and the vacuuming, and polishing, waxing, all of that. And I always tell young artists that if they think they're too good to sleep under their truck, they'll never amount to a shit. Because you're never too good to do whatever you have to do.

ROBIN CLARK: So you're back in Boulder, and did you go straight through from your bachelor's to your master's?

DE WAIN VALENTINE: I went straight through, yeah.

ROBIN CLARK: And did you think about going to other schools? Or did you—

DE WAIN VALENTINE: Well, I already had a kid.

ROBIN CLARK: When you got your double fellowship then, you had a very good reason to stay.

DE WAIN VALENTINE: I had reason to stay, and I already had one child. And then all of a sudden for reasons that nobody understood in those years, I had another one. But once we figured out if was the water, we quit drinking the water. It was BBC. Before birth control.

ROBIN CLARK: So you did your MFA in two years in spite of all your extracurricular responsibilities, and graduated in 1960. Did you think of yourself primarily as a sculptor by then? Or were you still—

DE WAIN VALENTINE: No, I was painting and I had a painting studio. I found an old grocery store in Boulder, and there was an apartment in the back. Actually, some art students that were in graduate school with me from Dartmouth had found the place, and they were living there. And then after they graduated, they were moving out. So I took the place over for ninety bucks a month. It had a space heater and the grocery store, space heater in the living room, and a space heater in the little room in the back where the kids slept in triple bunk beds. And I had a state range in my sculpture studio, which was the garage out back. Just throw some coal in that and it would keep it perfectly warm enough, especially with a little sake on the top of the stove.

ROBIN CLARK: So could you describe your paintings a little bit from that time?

DE WAIN VALENTINE: I can show you some pictures, Robin. There wasn’t any—to speak of—any polychrome sculpture. And I started painting the sculpture, and sculpting the paintings. And the paintings grew to be about this thick.

ROBIN CLARK: That's a foot thick.

DE WAIN VALENTINE: Not quite a—well, let's see. Nine inches, probably at least.

ROBIN CLARK: And what was the material that you built up?

DE WAIN VALENTINE: It was plastics. It was acrylic and Styrofoam and polyester and—

ROBIN CLARK: So you built it up, and then you painted over that?

DE WAIN VALENTINE: Yeah. And I bought pigments, and I bought thee acrylic in a 55-gallon drum, and started mixing it up myself. And at the same time I had been selling—buying paper from a big paper company. I'll probably think of the name of it. In the east coast they had—it was the source for Arches and Rives and handmade papers, beautiful papers, which I still have a batch of. And I would buy paper in the ream, and sell it at a discount to the art students cheaper than they would buy it at the regular art supply stores. And I was doing the same with oil paint—Bocour oil paint, Which I don't even think they make anymore.

ROBIN CLARK: I don't know.

DE WAIN VALENTINE: It was cheap. It came in a big tube, like a tube this long and that big around. And it was a lot of filler, but it was cheap, and the colors were good. It was all standard artist colors, cadmium and pthalos, and alizarins, and lampblacks, and zinc white, lead white.

ROBIN CLARK: So how long were you in that studio, the old supermarket studio?

DE WAIN VALENTINE: I was in there from 1960 to 1965 when I moved to California.

ROBIN CLARK: So what stimulated the move right then?

DE WAIN VALENTINE: There was an artist, guest summer artist from UCLA, Jack Hooper.

ROBIN CLARK: Hooper with an H?

DE WAIN VALENTINE: H-O-O-P-E-R.

ROBIN CLARK: Jack Hooper.

DE WAIN VALENTINE: And he was a buddy of Roland Reiss’s, because Roland had gone to UCLA. So Roland brought him out. And they both were fascinated with polyester. So they said would you—did it run out of tape or something?

ROBIN CLARK: No, it was my phone.

DE WAIN VALENTINE: Oh, would you show us how to use polyester? Sure, come on over. There's nothing to it. A little of that, a little of this, and stir it up, and you've got it.

ROBIN CLARK: So you came out to teach at UCLA?

DE WAIN VALENTINE: So Jack said, would you be interested if I can get you a course at extension to come out at UCLA, and move to LA? And I said, oh yeah. That was my dream. So at the same time there was an unfortunate, but fortunate for me—the head of the Denver campus of the University of Colorado art department suddenly passed away from a disease. And they were stuck with the spring semester. They said we need somebody to take over those courses, and teach down there, and take over the department. Would you do it? And I said, what's the remuneration? And they told me, and I sang, "California, here I come." So between that and—which is more money than I ever thought of—I don't remember how much it was, Robin, but it was enough to get the skids under me and off to California.

So I built—I bought an automobile moving trailer chassis, and built an 8 by 8 by 20-foot plywood container on top of it. And pulled it behind my pickup to California like the Joads. The mattress wasn't strapped on top. It was on the back of the station wagon with the kids. And in the daytime they would ride with me in the back of the truck, and at nighttime they would ride in the station wagon, and my parents lived in—my mother's stepfather lived in Albuquerque, so we made one stop there. And then drove straight through from there to Venice. Terrible driving, pulling that heavy trailer—it was crazy.

I had a trade going with a butcher in Denver. I would get all of the things you couldn't sell every day, which, unfortunately, was steaks and roasts. And so I would get all this great, aged meat, and the kids would say, oh, dad, no. Not steak again! Can you imagine? But he gave me a deep freeze. So I moved a deep freeze full of beef, backed up the trailer, stopped wherever it was plug in the freezer, keep it going. But it was in the summertime. It did make it, but it was barely fit to eat by the time we got out.

Jack Hooper and his wife had an apartment they were redoing. And the idea was that I could move into the apartment when they got it finished. Well, I moved out, and, of course, it wasn't finished. They were still working on it, actually, for another probably six months. So they very generously allowed me and the three kids and their mom and my Saint Bernard and the cat to live in their laundry room for six months while they finished the apartment house.

We'd just line up just like kindling—one, two, three, four, five, six, seven of us, or five of us. Seven is the cat and the dog. And I didn't think anything about sleeping on the floor, sleeping bag. It was a place to sleep in California. I thought, oh boy.

ROBIN CLARK: And what part of town was that in? Where in Los Angeles was that?

DE WAIN VALENTINE: In Venice.

ROBIN CLARK: In Venice, of course, right.

DE WAIN VALENTINE: It was on Avenue 27, 19 Avenue 27 in Venice.

ROBIN CLARK: And was the UCLA position full time?

DE WAIN VALENTINE: No, it was part time, Robin.

ROBIN CLARK: And so with the rest of your time were you able to make art? Or did you need to do something else after all?

DE WAIN VALENTINE: Well, I did all kinds of disgusting things like hold old ladies' hands, and teach them how to use polyester, and how to weld, and how to paint still lifes, and all that stuff. That was the hardest work I ever did, but it kept us going, and there was a job that came up at a school where one of Jack's wife's nieces was going to out in the valley—a private girl's school, Argyle Academy. And they needed an art teacher, so I—

ROBIN CLARK: Could you repeat that? What academy?

DE WAIN VALENTINE: Argyle.

ROBIN CLARK: Argyle, like the sock.

DE WAIN VALENTINE: Like the sock or the sweater.

ROBIN CLARK: Like the town in Scotland?

DE WAIN VALENTINE: Yeah.

ROBIN CLARK: Okay.

DE WAIN VALENTINE: So the job at UCLA, the part time job was $165 a month. The job at Argyle was $150, so $325 a month with three kids, a Saint Bernard and a cat. It was fun. And Jack, god love him, he had a studio he shared with a plastering contractor in Venice. And John would park his plaster trucks on one side, and his plaster all his plaster mess. And we have on the other side, it did have a skylight, a north skylight to work in.

ROBIN CLARK: So did you share that studio with him?

DE WAIN VALENTINE: Jack shared that studio with me, god love him. And He was such a great supporter, just—

ROBIN CLARK: Sounds that way.

DE WAIN VALENTINE: Yeah, he was a really great supporter.

ROBIN CLARK: So what kind of work were you making in that studio?

DE WAIN VALENTINE: I was painting, and I as making a piece of polyester fiberglass sculpture that was a commission work that  was going back to Colorado that I later finished. And when I got the apartment finished, I moved in there and then I worked in the backyard on that. And the apartment had one bedroom. I parked the big trailer diagonally across the parking lot in back. And the kids slept in the trailer, and their mom and I slept in the house. And the dog slept where he wanted to, but not in the house. He could sleep in the trailer or the backyard. God love him.

ROBIN CLARK: So it's 1965 still when you were there in 1966?

DE WAIN VALENTINE: 1965, '66.

ROBIN CLARK: And thinking about your work, the first work maybe that people are familiar with—when did you start making the big—

DE WAIN VALENTINE: Disks?

ROBIN CLARK: What do you call those sculptures?

DE WAIN VALENTINE: Disks.

ROBIN CLARK: So it's really—

DE WAIN VALENTINE: Double disks.

ROBIN CLARK: It's a double disk. It's almost like the shape of a contact lens, two of them put circle to circle so that they make a shell form. And then there are several of those elements usually, and then they're connected on a diagonal.

DE WAIN VALENTINE: Or just like this one's connected.

ROBIN CLARK: Or standing perpendicular. So how did you hit on that form?

DE WAIN VALENTINE: I made a maquette in 1967. I was invited to be an artist in residence at the Aspen Institute for Humanistic Studies by Bob Anderson, who was head of Arco, who liked my work.

ROBIN CLARK: Who liked your work.

DE WAIN VALENTINE: The piece at the National Gallery in DC was a piece of that he bought. It was in his building in DC that the National took over.

ROBIN CLARK: And is that fiberglass over some kind of armature?

DE WAIN VALENTINE: No, that's cast, that piece. The circle that's at the National is a cast six-foot circle.

ROBIN CLARK: Oh, I'm sorry, but I'm still thinking of the disks.

DE WAIN VALENTINE: Yes, okay. So back to the disks. So that summer in Aspen I made a maquette of a work I liked. I'll show you one. They used to have one sitting right here.

ROBIN CLARK: Okay. Okay, so this is a maquette for—

DE WAIN VALENTINE: For that.

ROBIN CLARK: The disk pieces. But the maquette is cast resin.

DE WAIN VALENTINE: And I wanted to make the big pieces cast, Robin.

ROBIN CLARK: Oh, Okay. It's so great. It looks like a flying saucer. You've set in on the tabletop, and it's a pale, yellowish green, and it's—

DE WAIN VALENTINE: This one's full of bubbles.

ROBIN CLARK: It's convex on both sides. And what would you say that color is?

DE WAIN VALENTINE: Fluorescent green.

ROBIN CLARK: Fluorescent, Okay. And so you wanted to make the big disk pieces out of cast resin, but I'm guessing the technology wasn't there yet.

DE WAIN VALENTINE: Wasn't there at all. This was about the maximum size, in fact this was.

ROBIN CLARK: And what we're looking at is about 12 inches in diameter, right? But how big did you want the disk sculptures to be in diameter?

DE WAIN VALENTINE: I made a proposal, thank god, didn't happen, to Xerox to do a series that were some ridiculous proportion—30 feet high or something.

ROBIN CLARK: 30 feet high? But the pieces you did end up making in fiberglass are more like what would you say? Four feet or five?

DE WAIN VALENTINE: That's 54 inches.

ROBIN CLARK: 54 inches?

DE WAIN VALENTINE: Mm-hmm. But I hadn't invented that material yet to do it. And the alternative was to do it—which I really wanted to do also—was to do it like Craig Kauffman's vacuum form Plexiglas. But I couldn't afford to do that or this.

ROBIN CLARK: And by this you mean casting in resin. So can you tell me how you did end up making the fiberglass disks?

DE WAIN VALENTINE: What I could afford.

ROBIN CLARK: Pardon?

DE WAIN VALENTINE: What I could afford to make was to make fiberglass shells and put them together.

ROBIN CLARK: So fiberglass is woven glass fiber?

DE WAIN VALENTINE: It's either woven or stranded glass fiber.

ROBIN CLARK: And then it gets coated and hardened?

DE WAIN VALENTINE: Saturated.

ROBIN CLARK: Saturated.

DE WAIN VALENTINE: Saturated with polyester.

ROBIN CLARK: With polyester resin.

DE WAIN VALENTINE: Yes, which hardens.

ROBIN CLARK: So—sorry?

DE WAIN VALENTINE: The same material that Corvettes are still made from, boats are still made from.

ROBIN CLARK: And then did you spray paint that series?

DE WAIN VALENTINE: Darn it. We need to take a short break.

ROBIN CLARK: Okay, we'll take a break.

DE WAIN VALENTINE: Yes, dear?

The paper when we flipped it over, the paper on the other side is sticking out from the bubbles. [inaudible].

[END OF TRACK valent13_1of3_sd_track02.]

ROBIN CLARK: Okay, I think we're going forward. I'm just going to test it. Oh, why does it do that?

DE WAIN VALENTINE: Here you go.

ROBIN CLARK: Okay. So De Wain, you say something.

DE WAIN VALENTINE: Okay, are you recording?

ROBIN CLARK: Perfect, Okay.

DE WAIN VALENTINE: So at any rate, I had been making some large fiberglass and polyester shell pieces in Colorado. So it was just a natural progression for me to do it this way to make a shell. And I became even more conscious that almost all sculpture, in fact, all you were aware of was the exterior shell. Which prompted me even more to delve into the cast polyester and be involved with not only the color of the intercepting surface, but the color of the surface and the transparent color inside and then the space beyond, which the cast polyester gave me the opportunity to do that.

And I started working with Hastings Plastic in Santa Monica. And one day, the owner of Hastings, Norry Hastings, introduced me to a salesman from PPG Resins Division. Pittsburgh Plate Glass, and they made paint and they made fiberglass and polyester. And Ed Revay became interested in what I was doing.

So he helped me with the factory put together this material and he would give me a barrel to do R&D on from time to time. And I formulated by keeping very accurate records. You've seen from the Getty records, a complete daily record of temperature and the volume of the resin, which is all measured out gram by gram.

ROBIN CLARK: And this is all in service of coming up with a formula that will allow you to cast on a larger scale?

DE WAIN VALENTINE: That's right. And finally, after a couple tons going out to the dump that all cracked up, hit a few that were right. And from then on, I mean, it was strictly all empiric. And the people at Caltech were very excited about it, because I did it like a scientist. I kept track of everything and they were very excited. And they invited me out there, Tom and I, to do our dog and pony show.

ROBIN CLARK: Right. Well we'll talk about that when we get up to it. But so when was this? Around what year were you working with them?

DE WAIN VALENTINE: This was '67 and I made the first ones of these in Aspen in '67.

ROBIN CLARK: And when you say it, you're indicating—

DE WAIN VALENTINE: The cast pieces.

ROBIN CLARK: This cast piece that's about 12 inches across. And so when you were making works in Aspen, were they about the same size?

DE WAIN VALENTINE: This was the first of the cast pieces, Robin.

ROBIN CLARK: And when did you start going up in size?

DE WAIN VALENTINE: As soon as I could. In fact, there's one piece next there I can show you. There's a—and Kiana sent me a photo of one from the Honolulu Museum, which had come over here, he said. The larger pieces were maybe 30 by 30 by 24 inches thick.

Then they started in '68, which is the second year I was at the Aspen Institute for Humanistic Studies. And it was an absolutely wonderful opportunity for me, because the first year, there were Roy Lichtenstein and Claes Oldenburg, Robert Morris—whose work I really liked. But what's not to like about Oldenburg and Lichtenstein? They were all heroes.

ROBIN CLARK: All those people were there in your first year?

DE WAIN VALENTINE: Yeah.

ROBIN CLARK: And then in your second year, who was there?

DE WAIN VALENTINE: In the second year was Carl Andre, Robert Indiana, Stanley Landsman—

ROBIN CLARK: Were you the only person who was coming from California?

DE WAIN VALENTINE: Mm-hmm, only West Coast guy. Again, it was great, because they had poets in residence, writers in residence, Physics Institute, and the music school at the same time, so all the disciplines were all in close proximity. We got along well with the physics people.

ROBIN CLARK: So did they give you a studio there?

DE WAIN VALENTINE: They gave us studios, they gave us wonderful places to live, and a very generous stipend.

ROBIN CLARK: Ah, I like the sound of that.

DE WAIN VALENTINE: It was great. So for the first year there, and with the kids and their mom, they gave us a two-story house and a big studio. I was the only one really interested in making works.

So studios were on the second floor, so we would roll up barrels of resin up the steps up to the second floor. The second year I took my California crew. The first year I just grabbed people to help me push things up the steps. And I made a whole series of those pieces the first year.

ROBIN CLARK: Of the fiberglass double disks?

DE WAIN VALENTINE: Mm-hmm.

ROBIN CLARK: And you made those in Aspen.

DE WAIN VALENTINE: I made them in Aspen. I also made them in a studio in Venice.

ROBIN CLARK: And when did you end up transitioning away from the fiberglass pieces?

DE WAIN VALENTINE: In '68, as soon as I was able to perfect the large castings, I was very happy to give up fiberglass, because it's nasty, itchy stuff. It was always down your collar, in your bed, and every place. Polyester is nasty enough, but the fiberglass was really nasty. Dealing with both of them—ugh.

ROBIN CLARK: So in terms of your interest in resin, I think you talked about even baking resin as a child to make things and then wanting to cast it larger. One time when we were speaking, you said that for the larger cast pieces, you saw poetry in the combined bulk and fragility of the big pieces. Could you talk about those qualities a little bit in your larger cast resin pieces?

DE WAIN VALENTINE: I didn't talk very much about it, because I didn't want to scare people to death. Because it is true, Robin. But I was very excited about that. It is true about the tension created between something that was very fragile and yet very solid.

ROBIN CLARK: Right. Well, we learned that—well you knew it, but I learned it when we were installing your piece in La Jolla.

DE WAIN VALENTINE: That first time?

ROBIN CLARK: The first—the large Diamond Column piece.

DE WAIN VALENTINE: I know. Yeah, it's so easy to—

ROBIN CLARK: It's so heavy, but also so fragile.

DE WAIN VALENTINE: That bottom edge.

ROBIN CLARK: It's a worrisome combination when you're moving something around, but anyway, the effect is stunning. I'm wondering if you could talk a little bit more about the properties of this material. What really attracts you to it and why you keep using it.

DE WAIN VALENTINE: Well, what attracted me to the cast stuff was that transparent quality that agates had been able to—or any transparent stone, being able to hold it up and look at it. I did later make some pieces that are more Baroque—that I actually cast shapes in and maneuvered the colors together in a more painterly way. But I just had to figure out how to make it work, and that was the first big challenge.

So how to make it work, and of course, I kept wanting to make bigger pieces and bigger pieces and bigger pieces. And the piece that was at the Getty was the largest physical piece. It wasn't the heaviest. It was equal in weight to the piece at the Norton Simon Museum.

ROBIN CLARK: So you're talking about the piece that was shown recently at the Getty called Gray Column.

DE WAIN VALENTINE: Gray Column.

ROBIN CLARK: And also a piece that's at the Norton Simon Museum right now, still. At least, I saw it recently. And that one is called what?

DE WAIN VALENTINE: Wall.

ROBIN CLARK: Gray Wall. So the difference between Column and Wall is horizontal and vertical orientation?

DE WAIN VALENTINE: Exactly, yeah.

ROBIN CLARK: And what are the dates on those pieces—around?

DE WAIN VALENTINE: '68 on the piece at Norton Simon and '75 on the piece that was at the Getty—the Gray Column. So I made those until 1975 and 1976. My buddy, I just mentioned his name, Stanley Landsman, who was at The Aspen Institute in '68, had a bad heart attack and it was killing him. And the winter in New York City—

And I said, Stanley, get your ass out here and I'll give you my studio. I'll come back to New York and use your studio, because he had a great studio. He had a kind of old parking garage with a car elevator in it. And it was one, two, three—three stories above ground, one full story below.

ROBIN CLARK: In what part of New York?

DE WAIN VALENTINE: It was on Downing Street in the West Village, between Ninth and the West Side Highway. Perfect neighborhood. It was real quiet. This Downing Street only was about, I don't know, four or five blocks long.

ROBIN CLARK: I don't even know that street, and I lived in the West Village.

DE WAIN VALENTINE: It was 14 Downing.

ROBIN CLARK: Nice.

DE WAIN VALENTINE: It's the same address as Margaret Thatcher, right?

ROBIN CLARK: Yeah, it was sounding a little bit British.

DE WAIN VALENTINE: Yeah. So I was there in '76. It was not really physically possible to deal with the polyester in Stanley's studio. And that's when I did the first glass pieces at—

ROBIN CLARK: Okay. That's a good place to start, because I want to change this chip. And then we can start talking about the glass pieces.

[END OF TRACK valent13_1of3_sd_track03.]

DE WAIN VALENTINE: Are we recording?

ROBIN CLARK: Yes.

DE WAIN VALENTINE: Good, then.

ROBIN CLARK: I'll double check. Yes, we are indeed recording. Okie dokie. So we left off where you decided you would try working in glass for a while.

DE WAIN VALENTINE: Right.

ROBIN CLARK: Partly because you'd moved, you traded studios with your friend.

DE WAIN VALENTINE: Right.

ROBIN CLARK: And his studio that you were using in New York on Downing Street was more amenable to working with glass. But there must have been other reasons why you wanted to work with glass.

DE WAIN VALENTINE: Well, I really wanted to work with glass for a long time because I wanted to make pieces that would go out of doors, that were transparent. And with glass on every building and every climate in the world from one pole to the other pole. And it's one of the most permanent synthesized material that humanity has come up with. Lasts longer than bronze.

ROBIN CLARK: So what year is this?

DE WAIN VALENTINE: '76.

ROBIN CLARK: 1976. So maybe we should go back one step because we also wanted to talk about a show that you did in La Jolla, which was in 1975.

DE WAIN VALENTINE: '75.

ROBIN CLARK: And that was a show which I've brought the catalog for. But we can't just rely on pictures because people will be reading this as a transcript. But I'm wondering if you could describe it to me. I see that it involves Plexiglas pieces and also an installation piece with acrylic tube.

DE WAIN VALENTINE: Rod. Does it say tube? It should say rod.

ROBIN CLARK: It says, "A piece called V-Line from 1975." The medium is listed as 1-inch diameter acrylic tube.

DE WAIN VALENTINE: No.

ROBIN CLARK: Looks kind of like tubing.

DE WAIN VALENTINE: Mistake. Yeah, it's a solid rod.

ROBIN CLARK: It's a rod . It's a solid rod.

DE WAIN VALENTINE: Solid rod.

ROBIN CLARK: Okay.

DE WAIN VALENTINE: And that works on the edge lighting principle. We drilled holes in the ceiling in the museum and stuck each end outside. And it picks up the daylight from outside and brings it into the room. All of my pieces were daylight pieces. I didn't use any artificial light in them because I wanted them all just to be about the daylight.

ROBIN CLARK: So this is a piece in a rectangular gallery. And there are no artificial lights on in the gallery.

DE WAIN VALENTINE: No.

ROBIN CLARK: And there is no access to natural light in the gallery except through this hole that you've drilled and run the acrylic rod through.

DE WAIN VALENTINE: Correct.

ROBIN CLARK: So the light is, would you say, transmitting itself through the rod?

DE WAIN VALENTINE: It transmitted by the fiber optic, which is the acrylic rod.

ROBIN CLARK: And so is this V shape, which is traversing the gallery diagonally, runs from a top corner of the room?

DE WAIN VALENTINE: Each corner, opposite corner. Yeah.

ROBIN CLARK: And then down diagonally to a—

DE WAIN VALENTINE: A point. Yeah.

ROBIN CLARK: A lower point on the other side. The dimensions given here for this piece are 108 by 360 by 288 inches. So are those the dimensions—

DE WAIN VALENTINE: Of the room.

ROBIN CLARK: —of the room?

DE WAIN VALENTINE: Exactly. Right.

ROBIN CLARK: So you understand the whole room—

DE WAIN VALENTINE: Right. Is the piece.

ROBIN CLARK: —to be the piece. And actually, well, let's stay on that for a minute. I think now would also be a time when we could talk about the drawing that you mentioned earlier in our conversation, which is for a Plexiglas piece installed—maybe you can describe it.

DE WAIN VALENTINE: It was a piece of Plexiglas 24 feet by 4 feet by 4 inches thick that was installed through the front wall of my studio in Venice.

ROBIN CLARK: Through the wall. What do you mean by that?

DE WAIN VALENTINE: Through the wall. I built the piece through the wall. And there was a wall of windows on the other side. And it picked up the daylight from the outside and brought it in. And I had a transparent film behind the piece that I had sprayed with transparent colors of the spectrum, because I was interested in the thing that happened on the horizon line from the infrared color in the south to the ultraviolet color in the north, which presents a natural spectrum. And as I did spend a lot of time with the beach, looking at the horizon line. And that became an inspiration for years of pieces.

ROBIN CLARK: So is that series called Cantilevered Planes?

DE WAIN VALENTINE: This is Cantilevered Plane, yeah.

ROBIN CLARK: Is this drawing that you have right now here a drawing for the La Jolla show?

DE WAIN VALENTINE: No. That's a drawing for the pieces in the studio.

ROBIN CLARK: Okay, right.

DE WAIN VALENTINE: That piece wasn't done in La Jolla. It was done once in my studio in Venice.

ROBIN CLARK: So there was a piece in the La Jolla show from 1975 also called Cantilevered Planes.

DE WAIN VALENTINE: Cantilevered Planes, yes.

ROBIN CLARK: That was made from Plexiglas.

DE WAIN VALENTINE: Yes.

ROBIN CLARK: Would you describe them?

DE WAIN VALENTINE: That one went through the wall. A wall was built in front of the wall of windows at the museum. There was a east-facing wall at that time in a room. It's all been reconfigured now. And then a wall was built in front of it. There was a slit in the wall that the Plexiglas slid through. And it was suspended and cantilevered into the room.

ROBIN CLARK: And then was that Plexiglas also treated with film so that it would have the spectrum colors?

DE WAIN VALENTINE: No. It was just the natural light color.

ROBIN CLARK: So it was on the same principle as the V-Line—

DE WAIN VALENTINE: Exactly.

ROBIN CLARK: —where light would be transmitted through that material—

DE WAIN VALENTINE: Exactly.

ROBIN CLARK: —from the outside and into the gallery? Great.

DE WAIN VALENTINE: The piece I want to do at Ace is in there too. That's that one.

ROBIN CLARK: Okay.

DE WAIN VALENTINE: That Catenary Curve.

ROBIN CLARK: Also in the La Jolla show, there was a piece that is tied—

DE WAIN VALENTINE: It wasn't in the show. It's in the catalog.

ROBIN CLARK: Okay. I'm looking at—

DE WAIN VALENTINE: But it was done in my studio in Venice in 1972.

ROBIN CLARK: Here it's dated '71.

DE WAIN VALENTINE: '71? Probably '71.

ROBIN CLARK: And then the piece was titled Catenary Lights.

DE WAIN VALENTINE: Right.

ROBIN CLARK: And catenary refers to the kind of—

DE WAIN VALENTINE: Geometric curve.

ROBIN CLARK: —curving shape that's being made by—is this again that kind of acrylic rod?

DE WAIN VALENTINE: Rod. Solid rod.

ROBIN CLARK: This kind of drooping in the way from hanging from one corner of the ceiling, occupying most of the gallery, and then coming up—

DE WAIN VALENTINE: Diagonally.

ROBIN CLARK: Diagonally coming up to the ceiling again, almost like a jump rope kind of shape.

DE WAIN VALENTINE: Exactly.

ROBIN CLARK: And then I'm guessing that this piece as well is transmitting light from the outside and through.

DE WAIN VALENTINE: That's right.

ROBIN CLARK: So something that these works all share, besides an interest in light and an engagement of the complete space of the gallery, is a true intervention in the architecture as well.

DE WAIN VALENTINE: Exactly.

ROBIN CLARK: And you're actually boring through the building. So you made this kind of work in your studio in Venice. And you made this work for this show in La Jolla. Were there other times when you did these kinds of pieces?

DE WAIN VALENTINE: Yes. There was a big piece made at the Santa Barbara Museum. And I've got photographs of that someplace, but lord knows where. This piece was also reconstructed at PS 1 in Queens.

ROBIN CLARK: When was that?

DE WAIN VALENTINE: Oh..

ROBIN CLARK: Was is it a solo or a group exhibition?

DE WAIN VALENTINE: No, it was a group show. It was Turrell, and me, and Irwin.

ROBIN CLARK: Probably in the '70s? Or later on?

DE WAIN VALENTINE: '70s.

ROBIN CLARK: Okay. Well, we can find that a little bit later.

DE WAIN VALENTINE: I think it was later in the '70s. My youngest kid came back to New York to help me install that, put it together. Trying to remember where we were staying at that time. I don't remember where we stayed. I usually pinpoint dates by where it was I was staying in New York.

ROBIN CLARK: Where you were living, yes. Well, we can find that later. And you would like to do a version of one of these pieces at Ace Gallery coming up?

DE WAIN VALENTINE: At Ace, yes.

ROBIN CLARK: Okay. Well, we'll talk about plans for that show a little bit later since it's to come. We've already started to talk about this idea about engaging the whole space of the room. You've talked about it in two different ways. One is when you start casting in resin, you're dealing not just with the kind of membrane surface, but you're also dealing with the total interior of the piece and the way that it is handling light. But also the total surround, the environment around the piece—

DE WAIN VALENTINE: Exactly.

ROBIN CLARK: —since it's also channeling the light and color.

DE WAIN VALENTINE: Yes.

ROBIN CLARK: And then with these catenary pieces and the cantilevered pieces, you are dealing with the complete space of the room as well, and giving the dimensions of the room as the dimensions of piece because they are transmitting light from the outside—

DE WAIN VALENTINE: Yes.

ROBIN CLARK: —to the inside, filling the whole space. We were speaking a few years ago when I wrote this down, and I ran across it recently, where you said that Robert Irwin was one of the first artists you were really conscious of, who you said, "demanded a specific situation which became a total consideration of the work, one in which the work wasn't just the piece."

DE WAIN VALENTINE: Right.

ROBIN CLARK: So was Irwin's influence significant in your thinking about the relationship of art and architecture?

DE WAIN VALENTINE: I'm sure it was, because Bob was doing that, the disc pieces then. And he wanted that the shape of the wall that happened on the walls to be part of the piece, which I think now the piece looks better without that complication.

ROBIN CLARK: Irwin's pieces?

DE WAIN VALENTINE: Yeah.

ROBIN CLARK: Look better in natural light maybe than with the kind of strong spotlighting that he did at one time?

DE WAIN VALENTINE: Yes, exactly. The more set up. There was a piece at the Pasadena Museum when they were setting up the translucency, the transparency show.

ROBIN CLARK: I think Translucence was the name of that show.

DE WAIN VALENTINE: Yeah. Translucence. Yeah. And there was a piece that was at the far end of the galleries, on the wall. You could see it when you entered the galleries. And it actually gets so much more with just the light. The room wasn't even illuminated. But that piece was just floating in an undefinable space. I called Bob immediately and told him how wonderful it was with no light. And subsequently Jack said, well, he was thinking about doing pieces with no additional light. But the framing projectors worked so that the piece he did at Zwirner's with the framing projectors, that works well too.

ROBIN CLARK: Yeah. Let's see. Where are we? Okay. So now maybe we can talk a bit about your adventures in working with glass. As a material, you mentioned that one attraction of glass was that it could stand up to outdoor weather.

DE WAIN VALENTINE: Right.

ROBIN CLARK: What kinds of pieces were you wanting to make for outdoors?

DE WAIN VALENTINE: I was wanting to make pieces which were really extensions of the polyester pieces, but laminated thick pieces of glass. And my assistant that worked with me, one of them, on the column, the Gray Column, Chris D'Arcangelo, who was the son of my friend Allan D'Arcangelo—who I had known in Aspen, knew him when he was a little kid—had moved back to New York. And so he helped me with the first glass pieces at Stanley Landman's studio. And I wanted to laminate the glass together, but I couldn't. It's always a case of couldn't afford to do it the commercial way, like they laminate glass for cars and things because it was too expensive. And at that time, there wasn't anybody who would even consider doing it that thick.

So I was trying to formulate a way to do it using materials that I knew were confined. So I started using silicone rubber as a sealant to put it together. So I had gone through a lot of the heavier glass trying to put that piece together so that it would be a big, solid piece of glass. And I was really wasting a lot of glass. And I was down to a few crates of picture frame glass.

So I told my guys in Venice, I said, Okay, we're going to cut this up into 1-inch strips and just start trying to find ways to glue it together that makes some sense. And started putting those strips together. And they became a whole series. This is the series, is that series.

ROBIN CLARK: So what you're showing me, it's the series of triangles, really.

DE WAIN VALENTINE: That's triangles, yeah.

ROBIN CLARK: These are strips of maybe a foot long and an inch wide and whatever the thickness of the glass is.

DE WAIN VALENTINE: Right.

ROBIN CLARK: An eighth of an inch. And you've made many of these kind of flat triangles. And then kind of spiraled them into—

DE WAIN VALENTINE: Laminated them together, yeah.

ROBIN CLARK: Laminated them in kind of arcing shape. And did you end up making outdoor pieces from that?

DE WAIN VALENTINE: I did, Robin. I made two large pieces. They were each 18—I mean, 16 feet wide by 8 feet by 8 feet thick. One that I still own and one that's at the state office building now in the Valley that—

ROBIN CLARK: In San Fernando Valley?

DE WAIN VALENTINE: Yeah.

ROBIN CLARK: Here in California?

DE WAIN VALENTINE: It's at Van Nuys, in Calvert, in Van Nuys, on a busy street corner. I told them they couldn't put it there because they had this beautiful atrium inside the building That's where I thought they were going to put it. And they ended up putting it right next to the sidewalk. And it's still there. It survived the earthquake. And that was 1980.

ROBIN CLARK: Wow, that's extraordinary.

DE WAIN VALENTINE: Yeah.

ROBIN CLARK: There's been a lot of earthquakes since then.

DE WAIN VALENTINE: Oh my gosh.

ROBIN CLARK: Is it clear glass? Or is it pigmented?

DE WAIN VALENTINE: That's a green glass. A smoked green glass. Smoky green. I have a picture of it in the back. But there was a 6 by 6 foot fountain that was a commissioned work for Encino. And after the earthquake, the house was red tagged and torn down. And the fountain stayed together. The guys that owned it had a house in Sun Valley. Bob was a skier. I used to go skiing with him. And he blew his knees out skiing in Sun Valley, so they moved to Fiji. Not Fiji. To New Zealand. Started a bed and breakfast, and moved it to New Zealand.

ROBIN CLARK: So that piece went from Encino. Did it go to Sun Valley?

DE WAIN VALENTINE: Yes, it went to Sun Valley.

ROBIN CLARK: And now to New Zealand.

DE WAIN VALENTINE: It went to New Zealand. Now it came back. It was sold in an auction last year.

ROBIN CLARK: Do you know where it is now?

DE WAIN VALENTINE: I don't know where it is now.

ROBIN CLARK: Mystery buyer.

DE WAIN VALENTINE: Mystery buyer. Well, I'm sure I could find out. It sold for exactly the same price that the commission was at the time. So they didn't lose anything. I think Bob passed away and Sally moved out of—I tried to find her. I tried to see her and left messages for her with her son, who has a factory for making sculpture out in Ontario, I think it is.

ROBIN CLARK: Ontario, California?

DE WAIN VALENTINE: California, yeah.

ROBIN CLARK: And what was the name of those collectors?

DE WAIN VALENTINE: Hunt.

ROBIN CLARK: Hunt.

DE WAIN VALENTINE: Robert and Sally Hunt.

ROBIN CLARK: It's extraordinary that a big glass sculpture can be so durable.

DE WAIN VALENTINE: It's, of course, rebuilt several times, I'm sure. But the glass maintains.

ROBIN CLARK: So I noticed that you did a show of glass work at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art—

DE WAIN VALENTINE: At the County Museum.

ROBIN CLARK: —in 1979.

DE WAIN VALENTINE: And that was the result of those first pieces of gluing strips together. And they started looking like something. At that point, we could never photograph them. We could photograph them now, I think.

ROBIN CLARK: I think so too. I'm looking at these photos and I can't understand what's going on at all. But it looks as if you made kind of architectonic shapes.

DE WAIN VALENTINE: Yeah, exactly.

ROBIN CLARK: I looks almost like kind of scaffolding that they use in rock and roll shows to mount lights.

DE WAIN VALENTINE: Yeah. It's all triangulated truss beams, yeah.

ROBIN CLARK: Trusses, right. That's what I was trying to say. So how big were these things?

DE WAIN VALENTINE: Well, the biggest was—

ROBIN CLARK: Here are some dimensions, actually.

DE WAIN VALENTINE: About 20 feet long. The one on the cover, I think, was a 19 by, 19 by—you'd have to look it up. I'm sorry about that.

ROBIN CLARK: Sure.

DE WAIN VALENTINE: About 9 feet high. But it's made out of sections that fit together. But I had a dream, Robin, when I was working on the glass pieces about a glass spider web. And that started them.

ROBIN CLARK: So the glass spider web dream started this whole series.

DE WAIN VALENTINE: And the first piece I made was too heavy. It just collapsed off the wall. It was a wall-hung piece. But they were so almost there that it was almost impossible to photograph. That was the third or fourth photographer. And he was a product photographer, did catalogs. And he was the one that figured out how to shoot it. We put gray paper on the floor and gray paper on the back two walls. And then bounced the flash off the white corner of the room and ceiling to bring it up.

ROBIN CLARK: Right. I mean, otherwise a transparent thing. It's pretty hard to photograph.

DE WAIN VALENTINE: Yes. Well, all of this stuff, especially some of the glass pieces. They work like color filters on the photo emulsion. When you take a photograph of a piece, it might be violet and it comes out blue. There's nothing you can do with it, except now Photoshop, you can change it back to blue.

ROBIN CLARK: So how long were you working with glass?

DE WAIN VALENTINE: I worked with glass—well, still I'm working with glass. I might get a commission, I work with glass. The last commission I had was in India, New Delhi.

ROBIN CLARK: And when was that?

DE WAIN VALENTINE: It was, I guess, '04.

ROBIN CLARK: 2004?

DE WAIN VALENTINE: Because when I first met Kiana [Sasaki], I was working on it.

ROBIN CLARK: So we sort of covered the forms and materials you were using in the '60s and '70s. Would you say you were working primarily in glass in the '80s? Or did you bounce around?

DE WAIN VALENTINE: No. Primarily in glass.

ROBIN CLARK: And at a certain point—

DE WAIN VALENTINE: And still painting.

ROBIN CLARK: And still painting. In 1985, you had a show in Honolulu in two locations—at the Honolulu Academy of Fine Arts and also at the Contemporary Art Center.

DE WAIN VALENTINE: Right.

ROBIN CLARK: And was that show primarily glass pieces? Or a range?

DE WAIN VALENTINE: That was all glass pieces.

ROBIN CLARK: It was all glass pieces.

DE WAIN VALENTINE: Do you have that catalog? I'll get one for you.

ROBIN CLARK: Yeah. So at a certain point, you decided to leave LA and move to Hawaii. What year did you move to Hawaii?

DE WAIN VALENTINE: Well, I first went there New Year's in 1979.

ROBIN CLARK: 1979.

DE WAIN VALENTINE: I was begged to go there by the son of a girlfriend of mine. He said, De Wain, if you won't, mom won't do this, mom won't do that, we won't have any fun. Because it was a holiday and that they were going there for Christmas. And I said, I'm not going. [inaudible].

But I went to Maui and I thought, gosh, this place isn't anything like I thought it would be. It's not just a big tourist tent, even though it kind of is. But it still felt much calmer than that to me. Not like a Las Vegas or something. I guess that's their Atlantic City, which is kind of what I was—or Palm Beach. It was really much quieter. I thought, gee, I'd like to work here.

So then I went to Honolulu first. Well, on Maui first, and then on to Honolulu the next trip. Billy Al had a studio there, which we shared.

ROBIN CLARK: Billy Al Bengston?

DE WAIN VALENTINE: Yeah, which we shared for years.

ROBIN CLARK: You shared for years? And what years were those?

DE WAIN VALENTINE: That would be '80 through—

ROBIN CLARK: The Honolulu show was '85, if that helps.

DE WAIN VALENTINE: Well, I already had my own studio by the time of the Honolulu show. But it was until about 19 —when I'd get my first place in Honolulu. We rented a studio on the North Shore for years. I used to rent it for the—had a real estate guy that I bought my property from, first piece of property over there in 1980. And he would go back to Brooklyn to see his folks in the month of August. And I would take his house, which worked out well for a long time.

ROBIN CLARK: So you got to Hawaii in 1980 and had your big show in '85. And how much longer were you living there?

DE WAIN VALENTINE: Until '90.

ROBIN CLARK: 1990. So that solid decade.

DE WAIN VALENTINE: Wait a minute. Until 1999.

ROBIN CLARK: 20 years?

DE WAIN VALENTINE: Yeah.

ROBIN CLARK: Wow, I didn't realize that. Okay. So can you talk a little bit about the trajectory of your work while you were there?

DE WAIN VALENTINE: Well, I made a pact that since I liked what I felt like and I wanted to go there, made a pact with myself that I would just go there and work. So it was studio 24/7 until friends from the mainland came over. And then I felt perfectly at ease taking time off, doing whatever I wanted to do. And I also spent a lot of time in the ocean and went surfing. I'm a water bug and so is Kiana. And I love, love the ocean. Just love it. The ocean there is so much more welcoming—

ROBIN CLARK: Than here?

DE WAIN VALENTINE: —than the ocean here, yeah.

ROBIN CLARK: It's warmer.

DE WAIN VALENTINE: Yes, it is warmer. The water's always cold here, which didn't bother me the first however many years it was. I went swimming all year long. I would go swimming for lunch instead of going for lunch. And I'd come back and eat a couple apples or a couple pears or peaches or whatever and go back to work.

ROBIN CLARK: So you were in Hawaii for nearly 20 years.

DE WAIN VALENTINE: Back and forth, Robin.

ROBIN CLARK: Back and forth?

DE WAIN VALENTINE: I always had my studio in Venice.

ROBIN CLARK: Okay. You always had the Venice studio here.

DE WAIN VALENTINE: Yeah.

ROBIN CLARK: You would be back and forth.

DE WAIN VALENTINE: Back and forth.

ROBIN CLARK: Where exactly were you in Hawaii most of that time?

DE WAIN VALENTINE: Most of time I was on the North Shore.

ROBIN CLARK: Of?

DE WAIN VALENTINE: In Oahu.

ROBIN CLARK: Of Oahu.

DE WAIN VALENTINE: Up in Pupukea Islands. I leased a house with a downstairs large master bedroom, which I used for a studio. And I would go there and do drawings for projects. When I'd get a project, I'd go there and do the drawings. And I would also do small paintings and watercolors. All the watercolors in here were all done there, because I could roll them up and take them home.

ROBIN CLARK: And so that was kind of 19, 20 years of your life?

DE WAIN VALENTINE: Yeah.

ROBIN CLARK: And while you were there, you met Kiana?

DE WAIN VALENTINE: No.

ROBIN CLARK: Or did you meet her here?

DE WAIN VALENTINE: I didn't meet Kiana until after I was divorced, actually. I had a very good dentist there. So in '04, I was over seeing my dentist. And I had a dumb accident.

In the summertimes, I would always go Christmas shopping for my boys—young men then—because really good clothing would be on sale for 10% on the dollar. They'd have these winter clothes that they'd just off in the summertime. You know when I say winter clothes, like long-sleeved shirts, right? It was good stuff. You couldn't put it down. It was so reasonable. You could buy beautiful polo dress shirts for fifteen bucks in the summertime over there. I always took a little rolling luggage cart when I went shopping. And I'd just get stuff for the kids when I was out and about, and put it in the roller, and then take it back.

So anyway, I backed this cart up to the wall, waiting for my car in front of the hotel. And I put my right leg over my left leg to tie my running shoe. I was still running six days a week. And the damn cart, it got back on the wheels and rolled out from under me. And I went down flat on my back on top of the cart. Screwed my back all up. It's still screwed up.

So I ended up staying there for much too long in this very expensive hotel. But I thought, to hell. I'm just going to spoil myself and indulge. So I did. And I was going up for breakfast one day. They stopped serving breakfast at 10:30, but that was about the time I'd go up because they start serving lunch at 11:00. So I'd get the best of both at the same time.

And I was going up the escalator, and these two Japanese women were coming down. And they were laughing and carrying on something fierce.

The older one was on the escalator as I was. And the younger one was literally bouncing down the stairs. And they were laughing and giggling. And I just put out my hand at the landing. And to the older one, I said, You guys are having too much fun.

And we started joking and laughing. And pretty soon she just said, What do you do? And I said, I'm an artist. And she said, you have to meet my daughter—which is what I wanted to do anyway. And you've heard this story? No?

So anyway, she called her daughter over. And we joked around and had some giggles and continued on with the levity. And I looked at her mother and I said, Is she up for adoption? And her mother said, Oh yes. We've been trying to cut the apron strings for years. But I assumed that she'd already been married and had kids because she had some white hair. Looked like a baby, but still had some white hairs.

I said, Don't you need a sugar daddy to adopt you and your children? Support you and your children? And of course, that led to another big giggle. But we became friends. And the friendship led to phone calls. And the phone calls led to a romance. And our first six dates were with Kiana and her mother up here.

Seventh date, she brought up her father to meet me. I'd recommended a hotel and we were going go to the restaurant at the hotel for dinner. And I said, Okay. I'll meet you guys there. And her father said, Oh no, I'm riding with you. And so we became fast friends, very fast.

And went down for a dinner date. And Kiana had a house, still has a house in San Juan Capistrano. So I took a change of clothes and my toilette kit. A one-night stand ended up being two weeks and beginning of a great romance.

ROBIN CLARK: So that was in 2004?

DE WAIN VALENTINE: That was in 2004.

ROBIN CLARK: So what led to you leaving Hawaii in—

DE WAIN VALENTINE: Divorce.

ROBIN CLARK: In 1999.

DE WAIN VALENTINE: Yeah. Yeah, divorce.

ROBIN CLARK: And so then you moved back to Los Angeles full time?

DE WAIN VALENTINE: Moved back to LA. And I was living in my storage unit at a warehouse in the Marina del Rey. Sleeping on the top of a stack of crates full of art. And totally miserable. They were doing an earthquake retrofit and I was trying to live there. And I had to vacuum the bed off every night before I went to bed. But that was it. I was stranded at the time.

So I had very little money left after the divorce. I sold my property in Hawaii and was looking for a place to lease. And I ran into this real estate guy who was looking for places to list for lease in the industrial area, in the Marina area.

ROBIN CLARK: Marina del Rey?

DE WAIN VALENTINE: Marina del Rey. That's where my storage area was, right next to Peter Alexander's studio. And he showed me a couple places. And he showed me this place. And I thought, Torrance, that's the ends of the earth. I'd only been down to Torrance once and found the Old Town, which I thought was really charming. But I was never even able to find it again. It's very quaint. Have you ever been through the Old Town?

ROBIN CLARK: No, I have not.

DE WAIN VALENTINE: It's unbelievable. It's just like you step right—

ROBIN CLARK: Old Town in Torrance?

DE WAIN VALENTINE: -back into the '50s. It's diagonal parking on either side of the street, and these little shops, and little restaurants, and little drugstores here, and the little market there. It's a little hardware store here. It's just like the '50s, I swear. So at any rate, he showed me this place.

ROBIN CLARK: This place where we are now, which is your studio, where you also live.

DE WAIN VALENTINE: Yes. And it had 7 and 1/2-foot drop ceiling. Behind that wall, behind that black painting. There were two 6 foot high by 2-foot-wide windows. And that was the only light in the whole joint.

ROBIN CLARK: So what you're telling me is you've done a very substantial renovation on this place, which now has high ceilings, and beautiful skylights, and all kinds of great light.

DE WAIN VALENTINE: I don't know how many skylights I put in, but several to many. But once I cut the first hole in the roof, I realized I was going to live. It was going to be all right. Let the light in. Let there be light, because it was a cave. It was miserable.

ROBIN CLARK: Sure.

DE WAIN VALENTINE: Did have the back door that opened, but it was a—

ROBIN CLARK: So did moving to this studio change your work at all?

DE WAIN VALENTINE: Well yes, Robin, because I was still making the paintings, the continuing paintings of the floating horizon line. And I just decided I couldn't keep pursuing that same interest continually.

ROBIN CLARK: And were those acrylic on canvas?

DE WAIN VALENTINE: Yeah, they were acrylic on canvas.

ROBIN CLARK: And did you also put resin on those canvas paintings?

DE WAIN VALENTINE: No. No resin involved in them.

ROBIN CLARK: Okay.

DE WAIN VALENTINE: Just acrylic on canvas. Airbrush, spray paint. So I decided that I wanted to make some that were really transparent. So the only way to get there was to use Plexiglas, I thought. Did you ever see any of those?

ROBIN CLARK: But why don't you describe them so that—

DE WAIN VALENTINE: Yeah. Anyway, they were 4 by 6-foot panels. And they floated 4 inches off the wall. The back support was indented 6 inches on all four sides. And the back of the indentation was painted as well, as are the edges of these paintings, which, if properly lit, they halo off the wall. You can barely see the rosy color off the bottom shadow.

ROBIN CLARK: So you're showing me paintings here in the studio—

DE WAIN VALENTINE: Yeah.

ROBIN CLARK: —that are quite large. And they project out from the wall a bit.

DE WAIN VALENTINE: A bit.

ROBIN CLARK: And it's kind of an atmospheric composition that looks almost like it could be clouds.

DE WAIN VALENTINE: All about the sky and the sea, yeah.

ROBIN CLARK: And there is a kind of a horizon line imposed on top of it, which is made out of something else.

DE WAIN VALENTINE: Acrylic.

ROBIN CLARK: Acrylic.

DE WAIN VALENTINE: And I was working on some things. I wanted to float paintings in the sky, which of course—or float objects in the sky I should say, which wasn't likely. So I was trying to get this line to float. And I decided that I was just going not laminate a line on. I was just going to remove the line. And once I removed the line, that surface, the line floated.

ROBIN CLARK: So the line is floating a bit. You have a piece that has a kind of acrylic face. And then a line cut out of it.

DE WAIN VALENTINE: Yes.

ROBIN CLARK: And then behind it, is it more acrylic? Or is it canvas?

DE WAIN VALENTINE: More acrylic.

ROBIN CLARK: Okay.

DE WAIN VALENTINE: All acrylic.

ROBIN CLARK: And is it spray painted in parts?

DE WAIN VALENTINE: It's spray painted all over. I found that the acrylic in that application was a little too delicate. So I switched to a stronger plastic polycarbonate, which is transparent. Trade name, Lexan.

ROBIN CLARK: Lexan.

DE WAIN VALENTINE: Was the first trade name. And it was a very difficult material to try to laminate to make the structure. And found one company down here—

ROBIN CLARK: In Torrance?

DE WAIN VALENTINE: Yes, within a few miles. And they said, we can do it.

ROBIN CLARK: Fantastic.

DE WAIN VALENTINE: I said, well, make me something. Let me see. Make me a sample. And so they made me a sample and we jumped on it. We did everything. And they're still sticking together.

ROBIN CLARK: And did you have a name for that series? That kind of group of works? Or are they mostly untitled?

DE WAIN VALENTINE: Just untitled as Skyline Series.

ROBIN CLARK: Skyline Series?

DE WAIN VALENTINE: It's all about that line, even though I turned the line vertically, which does a total different thing. Some of them are float horizontally and some of them are vertical. And they go through very different things.

And I was thinking about the time I was doing all the horizons, that there was a very feminine formal idea, whereas the vertical was the more masculine idea. And I remember the writings of Mondrian, that Mondrian said the strongest line were the lines perpendicular to the surface of the Earth. So I started turning them on vertical. And they became a whole different series. I'm still working on that series.

ROBIN CLARK: You started that around—

DE WAIN VALENTINE: '04.

ROBIN CLARK: 2004. And you're still working on that.

DE WAIN VALENTINE: Yes.

ROBIN CLARK: 10 years later.

DE WAIN VALENTINE: Yes.

ROBIN CLARK: During that period, the last 10 years, kind of 2004 to now, have you been doing other kinds of pieces as well? Or has that been your main focus?

DE WAIN VALENTINE: I did the large glass piece as a commission for New Delhi.

ROBIN CLARK: Right.

DE WAIN VALENTINE: And since then, been a combination of making this place workable, livable.

ROBIN CLARK: Your studio?

DE WAIN VALENTINE: Yeah, the studio, which is now perfectly livable, workable. Still in progress, but nevertheless. That giant backyard was going to be a sculpture garden.

ROBIN CLARK: It's a good place for parties.

DE WAIN VALENTINE: That is a good place for parties too, Robin.

ROBIN CLARK: Yes.

DE WAIN VALENTINE: Yes indeed.

ROBIN CLARK: So I wanted to ask you a little bit—this is both a contemporary and historical question, I guess—circling back to Gray Column, which you did in the late '60s, as we discussed. But also it was the focus of an exhibition at the Getty in 2011 that was part of the Pacific Standard Time initiative.

DE WAIN VALENTINE: Yes.

ROBIN CLARK: And could you describe that experience? What was involved in getting the piece ready for exhibition and how you felt about it once the show was up.

DE WAIN VALENTINE: Well, my first idea was I had one piece that had never been finished. The piece is cast, but not finished. So I thought there was an opportunity to use the Getty funding to finish the piece. But when we got several months into it, we discovered that Getty would pay for restoration, but not any completion work.

So I actually set everything up to work on that unfinished piece, to do it. And then it became totally overpowering. I mean, the idea from the Getty show came up, I felt like I was 25. But when I started into that protection, I realized I was not 25 anymore. That was part of the reason I was struggling, because I really bit off a big hunk and realized I couldn't chew it. And Tom Learner said, well, would you like to revisit that and have Jack polish this piece and get it ready to show.

ROBIN CLARK: So Tom Learner, who's head of modern and contemporary art research at the Getty Conservation Institute?

DE WAIN VALENTINE: Yes.

ROBIN CLARK: And who curated and organized that show for you.

DE WAIN VALENTINE: Yes.

ROBIN CLARK: And he was suggesting, asking whether you wanted to collaborate with Jack Brogan, who was a fabricator that you've worked with many times before.

DE WAIN VALENTINE: Yes. So Tom really uncapped the pressure container I had put myself in. And from there in, it was easier, but very busy because we had at least two or three meetings a week, which were several hours long. And then when they did the filming and the interviewing, that was a—

ROBIN CLARK: You're talking about the documentary film.

DE WAIN VALENTINE: A documentary, yeah, yeah. The DVD.

ROBIN CLARK: Let's talk about that in a second.

DE WAIN VALENTINE: Okay.

ROBIN CLARK: What were the challenges associated with getting the piece ready to show? Why was it such a big job?

DE WAIN VALENTINE: It was stored in one of my transoceanic containers with a lot of other artist detritus. And there were three of those stored in that one container. So the one that I thought I was going to refinish—or finish, as it was—was in there. And at the same time, there were two that had been finished that were never shown vertically. They were designed to be shown vertically as a pair for a commission that Skidmore, Owings & Merrill building in Deerfield, Connecticut for Baxter Travenol Laboratories that Bruce Graham had set up the commission for me.

And at some point, the head of Baxter decided that high ceilings would be too uncomfortable for people. He wanted it to have a kind of a lower, kind of cozier feeling. So the columns would no longer be able to be stood upright. So they were lying down and they became two gray walls instead of two gray columns, to my chagrin. But we already had everything invested in them. Several years, and tons of money, and time, and blood, sweat, and tears.

So we shipped them there and installed them horizontally. The short is, they didn't really like them that much. The good thing for me, they gave them back to me.

ROBIN CLARK: Okay.

DE WAIN VALENTINE: I had them in storage for years and years.

ROBIN CLARK: Then it was decided that just one would be—

DE WAIN VALENTINE: Yeah. The Getty decided that because of the support of the flooring, that the load bearing would only support one. And actually, as it turned out, one in that room was the perfect combination. Two would have been one too many.

ROBIN CLARK: Because it commands a lot of space.

DE WAIN VALENTINE: Yeah, it does command a lot of space.

ROBIN CLARK: It's a piece that you need to be able to walk around. How tall is the gray column?

DE WAIN VALENTINE: 12 feet.

ROBIN CLARK: 12 feet. And 8 feet wide, maybe?

DE WAIN VALENTINE: 8 feet.

ROBIN CLARK: Yeah. And a foot deep?

DE WAIN VALENTINE: Foot deep at the bottom.

ROBIN CLARK: At the bottom.

DE WAIN VALENTINE: 2 inches at the top.

ROBIN CLARK: And it tapers toward the top.

DE WAIN VALENTINE: Yeah.

ROBIN CLARK: Yeah. Fantastic. So that's the piece. And then the Getty Conservation Institute did a documentary about the work.

DE WAIN VALENTINE: Right.

ROBIN CLARK: They interviewed a number of people for it. And there's great footage of you installing the piece on site at the museum. And what were your thoughts about that whole process of making the movie?

DE WAIN VALENTINE: Oh gosh. I really didn't have an idea what it was going to be. I don't know that they had a complete idea of what it was going to be. But what they brought ought I thought was really, really special and such good work. I mean, it's put together so well. And I was very fortunate that I had wonderful people speak on behalf of it.

ROBIN CLARK: So you worked on that project with Tom Learner, and also with some of the members on his staff, maybe?

DE WAIN VALENTINE: Rochelle Revenik [ph] and—

ROBIN CLARK: Emily Richardson?

DE WAIN VALENTINE: Emily Richardson. Yeah, they were the big troika on the project.

ROBIN CLARK: How did that unfold? Did they sort of come here and interview?

DE WAIN VALENTINE: Yes. Well, we had one, or two, or three meetings here a week. And then the meetings would last until 6:00, 7:00. And then we'd open a bottle of wine and have cocktails. And then half the time, we'd go out for dinner together, so it became like a family affair, which it still is. They were absolutely wonderful people to deal with. Everybody that we dealt with at the Getty was so down to earth.

ROBIN CLARK: So the Getty show happened in 2011. And the film then too, which is on DVD and bound into the catalog. And it's been screened in a number of places. You were traveling recently with Tom Learner, screening the film and doing question and answer kind of thing.

DE WAIN VALENTINE: Yeah, Q&A.

ROBIN CLARK: So what was that like? And what kind of people came?

DE WAIN VALENTINE: Well, we did it at the Guggenheim in New York City and at the National Gallery. And it was their conservation teams that came for the most part. But there was also people from the art world that came as well. It was very, very well done.

ROBIN CLARK: So I guess one thing we haven't really mentioned about it is that the reason that it was organized by the Conservation Institute is that part of it was that they wanted to ask some questions about conservation of resin materials.

DE WAIN VALENTINE: Exactly.

ROBIN CLARK: So that was the big part of the approach. I'm wondering if your ideas about conservation and restoration, preservation of your work, changed at all in the process.

DE WAIN VALENTINE: It did, Robin. I mean, I didn't understand conservation as you understand conservation. I thought conservation was more of just a making it over the way you might have made it when you were making it, but didn't know how to make it. But I learned quickly from you and from them, the Getty people, that that's not conservation. That's redoing, which is a different thing. So I've come to respect that viewpoint greatly.

ROBIN CLARK: So one of the kind of sticking points where that needed to be negotiated, I think, is a relatively pristine surface is important in your resin pieces so that you can get the kind of light effects and sense of depth.

DE WAIN VALENTINE: And so you don't get hung up on the surface, so the surface doesn't become over attractive for some extraneous or wrong reason. It should disappear enough that you're able to go through it freely. You could see it, you can go through it, and beyond it.

ROBIN CLARK: So whereas earlier in your career, you might not have thought twice about removing some significant part of the surface if it became scratched to get it back to a kind of a pristine?

DE WAIN VALENTINE: No. It was just to keep it looking fresh.

ROBIN CLARK: So how do you think about it now, if a piece becomes scratched? What are your criteria for conservation?

DE WAIN VALENTINE: I prefer it not to be scratched because what you really notice is the scratches, which is a screw-up, instead of the way it was intended. And so I think there's a balance between the artist intention and the conservation people, I've learned.

ROBIN CLARK: So I think we have covered a lot of material. Maybe we can start to wrap up today with you telling me about your upcoming projects. I think you have quite a few shows in the works in the next year or so.

DE WAIN VALENTINE: Yes. Next year, I'm having a one man show in Paris, at the Almine Rech Gallery. And she's had several Jim Turrell exhibitions and some more American people. And she's interested in what's happening on the West Coast, fortunately for me. So that's going to be in February.

ROBIN CLARK: Of 2014?

DE WAIN VALENTINE: 14, yes. And in the fall of 2014 is a one man show at David Zwirner Gallery in New York City.

ROBIN CLARK: And have you figured out what kinds of work you'll have in those two shows?

DE WAIN VALENTINE: I figured out what kind of work is going to be in the Zwirner show. The show in Paris has come up in the middle of things. And I haven't had time. That's happened so recently, I haven't had time to figure out what is going to go in that.

ROBIN CLARK: And I think you have something opening in Seattle very soon.

DE WAIN VALENTINE: In Seattle, yeah.

ROBIN CLARK: What is that project?

DE WAIN VALENTINE: That's the end of this month September 25.

ROBIN CLARK: 2013. And what's in that show?

DE WAIN VALENTINE: That's in the same exhibition that was at the Getty.

ROBIN CLARK: So the Getty—

DE WAIN VALENTINE: Yes.

ROBIN CLARK: —Gray Column piece is travelling up there.

DE WAIN VALENTINE: And Bagley and Virginia Wright foundation, she bought a blue circle, a 6-foot blue circle, that's also in that show.

ROBIN CLARK: A 6-foot—

DE WAIN VALENTINE: A 6-foot blue—

ROBIN CLARK: —cast—

DE WAIN VALENTINE: Cast polyester

ROBIN CLARK: —polyester blue piece. Would you call it a disc or you call it a circle?

DE WAIN VALENTINE: A circle.

ROBIN CLARK: Okay.

DE WAIN VALENTINE: The discs are this shape. The circles are flat sides.

ROBIN CLARK: So the discs are convex.

DE WAIN VALENTINE: Right.

ROBIN CLARK: And the circles are flat.

DE WAIN VALENTINE: Flat.

ROBIN CLARK: But they still have a depth.

[END OF TRACK valent13_2of3_sd_track01.]

ROBIN CLARK: It's just that they're regular in their depth from top to bottom.

DE WAIN VALENTINE: Yes.

ROBIN CLARK: So if it's 6 feet in diameter, how thick is it?

DE WAIN VALENTINE: It's 6 inches thick at the bottom. 6, 6 and 1/2, and an inch and a half at the top.

ROBIN CLARK: Okay.

DE WAIN VALENTINE: And there's a color change from top to bottom. In some of them, it's more pronounced than others. At the National Gallery, it goes from a blue at the bottom to a purple at the top.

ROBIN CLARK: And those pieces date from the late '60s? The circles?

DE WAIN VALENTINE: The late '60s, yes. The first concave circle was done in 1969. The first large one was a six foot one that's at the Milwaukee Art Museum.

ROBIN CLARK: Okay. So that's a couple of big shows happening soon. And then you mentioned that you were hoping to revisit the cantilevered pieces maybe?

DE WAIN VALENTINE: Mm-hmm.

ROBIN CLARK: And would that be the same way that you did them before so that they're piercing through a wall and transmitting that external daylight into a room?

DE WAIN VALENTINE: Yes. Those pieces, I want to do it at Ace.

ROBIN CLARK: At Ace Gallery in Beverly Hills. So would they partly face the street? The sidewalk on the outside?

DE WAIN VALENTINE: I tentatively plan for one to face the street and be about the street traffic, sidewalk traffic. And the other one to pierce the roof. And the Catenary Light piece, fiber optic rod.

ROBIN CLARK: Like we discussed that was in La Jolla? Something like that?

DE WAIN VALENTINE: Well, it was in the La Jolla catalogue.

ROBIN CLARK: In the La Jolla catalogue. I keep getting that wrong.

DE WAIN VALENTINE: It's all right.

ROBIN CLARK: The La Jolla catalogue, but it was in your Venice studio.

DE WAIN VALENTINE: The Venice studio, and at PS1.

ROBIN CLARK: And at PS1.

DE WAIN VALENTINE: In New York.

ROBIN CLARK: Wow, full circle in a way.

DE WAIN VALENTINE: There's another part of the puzzle I'd like to put together for you. And that was another Jack Hooper story. When I first moved to Venice, Jack wanted to help me get some architectural commissions, because I'd been working on some in Colorado with architects. And it was the first few weeks I was here, he had David O'Malley, who was head of the architectural office, and Frank Gehry, who was the junior partner at that office, over for dinner. These guys were so helpful. They have to be given great credit—Jack and Nancy Hooper.

And then at the second dinner party—I may have it mixed up. One was first and the other was second. They had Bob Irwin and his wife over, and Ed Moses and his wife over for dinner. So it was really a heady start.

ROBIN CLARK: And when was that? Oh, '66 when you came?

DE WAIN VALENTINE: Yeah, 1965.

ROBIN CLARK: Oh, '65. So the Hooper's introduced you to a lot of artists who were working in Los Angeles. And especially artists who were also interested in light, I suppose, as a medium.

DE WAIN VALENTINE: Well, no, Robin. There wasn't that in particular. And just Bob Irwin was still making abstract paintings at that time. Maybe he was doing the line paintings.

ROBIN CLARK: '65? Yeah.

DE WAIN VALENTINE: Yeah, I guess it was the line paintings that preceded the dot paintings. And Jack Brogan sought out Bob Irwin, because he thought it was so strong that an artist could make a painting about three lines on a canvas. And I met Jack through Irwin.

ROBIN CLARK: So we didn't really touch on that. Could you describe what the scene was like when you first got here, and your first year or two, in terms of meeting people and your impression of Los Angeles as a place where people were making art?

DE WAIN VALENTINE: Well, gosh, for me, it was coming literally from the outlands, it was so exciting, to real life galleries where people were buying art. And they had the Monday night art walks down La Cienega and all the galleries were open, and it was just very festive. And if one was fortunate enough, you'd get picked up and invited to dinner here, or drinks there, and meet more artists. And Frank Gehry was very helpful. And Frank wanted to meet all the artists. He kept me busy trying to meet the artists so he could meet the artists. It was a really good time.

At UCLA, I got fired twice for teaching kids how to use a new material. And Oliver Andrews, who became my mentor there, he would say, those SOBs, they can't fire you. He said, I'll just write a new course for you to teach. So the next semester would just be the same course by a new name, and I'd be doing the same thing—teaching students how to use polyester.

Acrylic was relatively new then. And I was sculpting the paintings. And that was new. And the first time I saw the [Antoni] Tápie's exhibition, that was really a powerful influence on me. I saw an exhibition in Colorado from 16 Americans, and the first time I saw Stella, and Rauschenberg, and Johns, and Jay DeFeo, and Wallace Berman. Not Wallace Berman, Wally—

ROBIN CLARK: Hedrick?

DE WAIN VALENTINE: Yeah, Wally Hedrick, yeah.

ROBIN CLARK: Who was married to Jay DeFeo.

DE WAIN VALENTINE: Hmm?

ROBIN CLARK: He was married to Jay DeFeo.

DE WAIN VALENTINE: Married to Jay, yeah. Great guy. Just that show was… just to see it. It was at the Colorado Springs Fine Art Center. It would get really good art things.

ROBIN CLARK: Yeah, it sounds like Colorado was a really good place for you to develop as an artist.

DE WAIN VALENTINE: It was. It was a good place, and the university had very good programs. Bucky Fuller was there a lot, usually a couple times a year lecturing. And he would give these very, very long three-hour lectures. They were scattered in a million directions. And in the last five minutes, he'd tie them up into a bow knot. Hand them to you. It was a totally amazing, mind-stretching experience.

And the head of the Physics Department was Joe Oppenheimer. And one of the big guns at the Physics Department was—his name was there a second ago—one of the Big Bang guys who I always argued with about what started the Bang, if there was a Big Bang, saying it's total nonsense. It's just another answer for something they don't know. He was a great guy, and he had Saint Bernards also. What was his name? Oh, I have to look it up. Because he's very well known in the world of physics. Gamow was his name.

ROBIN CLARK: Did you take classes in the Physics Department?

DE WAIN VALENTINE: I didn't take classes, but I had friends. So I would go to these different departments and I'd be introduced to people just by my friends at the school there. It was such a interesting place, really. It was always something exciting.

Stan Brakhage was there. And he started a foreign film thing every Saturday night at the theater building. Twenty-five cents for foreign movies. They had all the greats—Satyajit Ray, and Kurosawa, and Dali, and Cocteau. Who's that other great Spanish filmmaker? And anyway, Stan brought a lot of stuff.

And there were a lot of poets that lived in Boulder at the time. There was a lot of intermix, which I really missed out here. There was only one poet I ever met out here. That was Jack Hirschman. And he and I opined the fact that there was no contact with the writer's world here and the art world. But I think it was largely due—later happened because of Hollywood. But not because of an aesthetic reason. It's just because of money.

And Venice was so small. Until Larry Bell moved in next door to my studio.

ROBIN CLARK: Was this on Market Street in Venice?

DE WAIN VALENTINE: On Market, yeah. Same place he is right now. And then Irwin was always in a building that Billy Al had the master lease on. And Moses was in there. And Kenny Price was in there. And several other artists were in there. And Tony Berlant was on Pacific. Not very far.

ROBIN CLARK: And I think Doug Wheeler was near you.

DE WAIN VALENTINE: And Doug Wheeler was, yeah. Exactly on the next block. He was 69 Windward, I was 69 Market Street. We spent a lot of time together. I had traded for a color television. And I remember Doug Chrismas and Doug Wheeler were in my funny little underground bedroom, and under a floor, and in Venice watching the moon landing.

ROBIN CLARK: So you saw that in?

DE WAIN VALENTINE: Whatever year it was, Robin.

ROBIN CLARK: All right. Then that's great.

DE WAIN VALENTINE: Am I—

ROBIN CLARK: And John McCracken was nearby in Venice?

DE WAIN VALENTINE: John wasn't in Venice. He was in Santa Monica.

ROBIN CLARK: Oh.

DE WAIN VALENTINE: So when I was making those pieces, the disk pieces in Santa Monica, John was having trouble with the lacquer cracking on the wood. I said, John, come on over. I made some pieces last summer in Aspen. I did a commission on some tabletops that were polished polyester. And I said, why don't you look at this stuff, John. You do it. This, this, this. And it's as easy as doing lacquer, and you don't have to worry about the cracking. I remember the first polyester piece that John made. Because he could afford it. He had a dealer showing it. Nick Wilder, I think.

ROBIN CLARK: Yes, Nicholas Wilder.

DE WAIN VALENTINE: And I said, buy some polyurethane foam, a big block of it, and fiberglass it, and cover it with polyester. And I had always wanted to work with polyethylene foam, but it was really expensive for me. I had tried to use Styrofoam and isolate it from the polyester, but it was always dissolving the Styrofoam. But it was interesting. Didn't do what I envisioned it to do, which is what John did. But it was fun. All those guys wanted to learn. Not all of them, but many of them wanted to learn. Moses wanted to learn.

ROBIN CLARK: How to use polyester?

DE WAIN VALENTINE: Hmm?

ROBIN CLARK: They wanted to learn how to use polyester?

DE WAIN VALENTINE: And it's so easy. I said, come on, let's do it. Mix it up. So Ed did all those polyester paintings on canvas, like the base on the Indian blankets, chief's blankets, which I thought were terrific. Yeah, it was really a fun time. Everybody was in and out of each others' studio at that time. Yeah, Wheeler, Doug was really far out. I really loved his ideas because it was so close in many ways to what I was thinking. And Turrell certainly picked up on it. Did well. Did you see his show at the Guggenheim?

ROBIN CLARK: I haven't yet, but I will.

DE WAIN VALENTINE: Oh yeah, it could still be there. Ah, I won't say anything. It's a beautiful piece. Beautiful piece. I didn't see any show at the County.

ROBIN CLARK: Well, those shows are up for a while.

DE WAIN VALENTINE: Yeah. What about the one that's at Corcoran?

ROBIN CLARK: That's not up anymore.

DE WAIN VALENTINE: I missed that. It's just I'm swamped.

ROBIN CLARK: Well, maybe we should stop for today, at least the recording. Do you think?

DE WAIN VALENTINE: Sure.

[END OF TRACK valent13_2of3_sd_track02.]

DE WAIN VALENTINE: Did it cut off for a minute?

ROBIN CLARK: I don't think—I think we should start over. I'm sorry but, I think—Okay. In the event that this wasn't recording before, I'm going to say again that this is Robin Clark interviewing De Wain Valentine time at his studio in Torrance, California, on Thursday, September 5. This is the first disc we're recording today and the third in the total interview, and we've been talking about De Wain's ongoing interest in glass as a material, and then also a series of forms that he began developing in the early '90s that would become larger, metal sculptures. So this is the series that you've called The Square Romancing the Ring, or The Ring Romancing the Square. Either way.

DE WAIN VALENTINE: Either one.

ROBIN CLARK: And is basically a ring form intersected by a square, on a diagonal, and they can roll, almost like a top. And so how do you—could you talk more about how you are thinking about the material, and the surface, and the color, and what kind of a context you'd like to see them in—inside or outside.

DE WAIN VALENTINE: They could go either inside or outside. The ring I project to be 8 feet in diameter, so the piece would be slightly over 6 feet tall. And they could be—they could be put together in a number of ways. The manners in which they could be constructed and executed are really as variable as any way these could be put together. They're originally conceived of to be a support system for pieces of glass, but the bronze edges, as it were to be, started looking like something more than that, so it became a whole series, and I taught myself how to use CAD/CAM to design them, because the simple thing—they were so simple, but the joinery was very complicated.

So I first taught myself to use CADKEY which is an engineering program for making gears and—and drives, and things of that sort. And later on found CADKEY, which was a program that Macromodel put together, or Micromedia. And it was the same software they used to do the dinosaurs in Jurassic Park, and it ported out—it ported excellently to RenderMan, so they could be rendered in to look like any material. And I would—also taught myself Photoshop, so I could import these into Photoshop—these three-dimensional imaginary objects—and place them in imaginary places to see what they would look like outside on a yardscape, or a sculpture garden, or what have you.

I thought I was going to be able to start executing these in the early '90s but it was the case that I had something else to do when I had the money, and when I didn't have the money and have the time, I didn't have the money, and so they're still—none of them have been executed. The largest ones are 3 feet in diameter.

ROBIN CLARK: The largest ones you've realized, you mean?

DE WAIN VALENTINE: Yes.

ROBIN CLARK: And what is the material? Is it bronze?

DE WAIN VALENTINE: The initial ones were bronze. And I envisioned the larger pieces to be—to be painted steel with a high finish surface in polychrome. Whatever colors seem to fit the shapes. I've projected them to be rough ground, and rusted, and—and painted reds, and blues, and yellows. And with Photoshop that's all fun. Photoshop and—yeah, Photoshop and RenderMan to do all that. One can even make it look like glass, which is fun, but not possible to do anything in that kind of volume.

I did some projections for some big pieces—volumetric pieces—but they're all developed out of the truss system. There was a big piece that I proposed to do for Skidmore, Owings and Merrill in Chicago. They were doing a redesign of Lincoln Park in Chicago, and it was set at that time to be a sculpture garden. And this ring piece that I projected was 60 feet in diameter and 8 feet high made of triangular trusses, joined together in a circular form.

ROBIN CLARK: And what's the material for that?

DE WAIN VALENTINE: Glass.

ROBIN CLARK: Glass?

DE WAIN VALENTINE: Mm-hmm. And I still have done very few of those large glass pieces, which I still would like to do. So my ambition is long and time is short. And money is always the shortest, so it depends on how that all fits together when they can be executed.

ROBIN CLARK: Well you're very busy now. That's for sure.

DE WAIN VALENTINE: I'm going to take some of these to my gallery in New York—David Zwirner gallery—and see if I can get some assistance executing them.

ROBIN CLARK: Well the—as we're looking right now at two of these models, which are more or less identical, and the—the circles and the squares are kind of nesting and leaning together, it's reminding me of—a little bit of the form of the fiberglass disks from the '60s. I mean those don't have the square. They're only the round elements, but the doubling of the shape and the leaning of it is similar.

DE WAIN VALENTINE: Suggesting movement. In fact when I was at the—I was teasing the guards at the Museum of Modern Art about the triple disk that is there, and I asked one of them if they'd taken it out for a drive yet. They got a kick out of it. They said, we always wanted to do that. And people do move it around there.

ROBIN CLARK: Well I've seen them peak around it and move around it. I've—I haven't seen them move it, fortunately.

DE WAIN VALENTINE: Well, every time I've gone there it's been a slightly different position. So somebody's having fun rolling it around at night, or whenever. When nobody's looking. But the guards are very—they're right on it. They're there all the time.

ROBIN CLARK: Yeah, that's a good thing.

DE WAIN VALENTINE: And they're very, very seductive in that you really want to touch them. You really want to play with them.

ROBIN CLARK: Do you think that's the—well it's both the form and the color, right? The form suggests that they can roll, and so maybe you feel like you'd like to play with them. And then the colors are very—

DE WAIN VALENTINE: And especially the relativity to car colors. Which they're, you know, very much out of that car industry, boat industry feeling, because I was dealing with those materials for years.

ROBIN CLARK: That piece at the Modern is a kind of a candy apple red.

DE WAIN VALENTINE: Yes, that's a candy apple. This piece—the yellow with the red edge was first one.

ROBIN CLARK: So in your studio right now we're looking at two disks—two disks. What did you call it? They're paired together.

DE WAIN VALENTINE: Disk paired.

ROBIN CLARK: And the yellow is a kind of deep, egg yolk yellow. It's a kind of orangey yellow. And then where they meet, in their kind of center, and also around the edges, they're a brighter kind of red.

DE WAIN VALENTINE: Cadmium red.

ROBIN CLARK: Cadmium red. And that's the first one from that series?

DE WAIN VALENTINE: The first one. So I kept that.

ROBIN CLARK: And that one stands straight up?

DE WAIN VALENTINE: That one stands straight up. There were two of them in the Dwan show in '66. There was this yellow, with the red edge, and there was a candy apple blue double disk that leaned with a black edge. And the black—the candy apple blue, with the black edge, was selected by William Agee to be in the initial Whitney Annual in 1966.

ROBIN CLARK: Okay. So looking at your CV to help us with the dates—

DE WAIN VALENTINE: When was that first Whitney annual?

ROBIN CLARK: I'm looking. So in 1966 was the annual sculpture exhibition at the Whitney.

DE WAIN VALENTINE: Yes.

ROBIN CLARK: And you're saying that previous to that—

DE WAIN VALENTINE: No that was like—the blue piece was the blue metal flake. But the black edge was selected for that initial exhibition.

ROBIN CLARK: In '66 And that was a double disk?

DE WAIN VALENTINE: That was a double disk.

ROBIN CLARK: And it was at the Whitney?

DE WAIN VALENTINE: Yes.

ROBIN CLARK: And then—

DE WAIN VALENTINE: Subsequently the Lipman Foundation purchased a piece—a five disk piece—for the Whitney.

ROBIN CLARK: Was that in their collection? A five-disk piece? I haven't seen that.

DE WAIN VALENTINE: It was in the moat for years, and years, and years down in front.

ROBIN CLARK: In the moat.

DE WAIN VALENTINE: Yeah it was there for probably—I don't know—four years or so.

ROBIN CLARK: That space that you see from the ground floor when you look out?

DE WAIN VALENTINE: —from the sidewalk.

ROBIN CLARK: And outdoors?

DE WAIN VALENTINE: Yeah, outdoors.

ROBIN CLARK: And how did it hold up outdoors?

DE WAIN VALENTINE: Well, it holds up like fiberglass cars hold up outside, or fiberglass boats hold up outside.

ROBIN CLARK: Oh yeah. Good point.

DE WAIN VALENTINE: Yeah, I'm sure. There's always maintenance and—And any kind of painted surface—if it's a house, or a car, or a boat, there's always maintenance.

ROBIN CLARK: So since we are talking a little bit about early work again, I wonder if we could talk a little bit about your experimenting with color in resin, because I'm so intrigued by your use of color in resin, and the variety of it, and the different kinds of effects that you get, where sometimes it's very crisp, and sometimes it's very kind of atmospheric and hazy, and sometimes it's kind of uniform in its, in its color, and sometimes you have kind of floating it seems—I'm thinking especially of the diamond column piece that's so wonderful in La Jolla where there's a kind of floating form in the center, like a lozenge form, and then that kind of fuzzy edged form is playing against the very crisp edges of the outside of the column.

DE WAIN VALENTINE: That's my—one of my favorite pieces. If I have two or three favorite pieces, that's one for sure.

ROBIN CLARK: So can you talk about how you sort of worked on that or developed those?

DE WAIN VALENTINE: It was a result of doing different things, trying different things all the time, and certainly everything affects it. The ambient temperature effects it, and the humidity affects it. So even if you try to do the—a series of exactly the same pieces they wouldn't be exactly the same, because there's too many variables, wonderful variables which make each piece unique. And I would—I've tried to duplicate certain things at certain times, and it's very difficult to duplicate.

It's a—Dan Flavin was always telling me that I had to do editions. But each piece was such an endeavor there was no way that I could think about doing editions. I'd have been smart to think about it, now that I reflect back on it. But at the time, I told Dan, I said these pieces are so much work to make, I said I don't want to make more than one of each. It's a—Did I mention about Dan in the first tapes?

ROBIN CLARK: No.

DE WAIN VALENTINE: Because Dan and I ended up—he was doing a show at the Moderna Museet in Stockholm, and I had a dealer in Stockholm, Ava Aufburen [ph], and I was over to visit Ava and see the gallery about doing an exhibition. And as it happened, Dan Flavin and his wife Sonja were staying at the same hotel that I was. This was in '60—oh gosh, must have been '66 or so. And Dan was one of the artists on the East Coast that really understood my work and what I was doing with the color and the space. And we became lifelong friends.

ROBIN CLARK: Did he have any other comments for you besides maybe making edition pieces?

DE WAIN VALENTINE: Well we talked about the light and the space and the color. I wanted to use only daylight, and of course Dan wanted to use only fluorescent, which gives us a nice, separate bit to chew on. I refused to use artificial light because it was artificial. It's even though some—to redo some of those pieces I'll probably have to use artificial light, because at night, unless there's a full moon. When there's a full moon they work. It's a completely eerie blue, greenie light that's almost not there in a full moon. I installed a piece—a catenary light piece in my studio—I had a skylight right over my bed, and I was in bed to go to sleep, and turned the lights out, there was that big moon up there, and I jumped out of bed, and went downstairs and went into the room where the catenary light piece was, and shut the door, and there it was. It was glowing in the moonlight.

ROBIN CLARK: So that was one of the acrylic two pieces that—the one acrylic rod that you had installed in your studio, and so was there any natural light coming into the studio besides—

DE WAIN VALENTINE: No.

ROBIN CLARK: —the points of contact? So we talked about this yesterday, but basically you drilled holes in the ceiling.

DE WAIN VALENTINE: The roof.

ROBIN CLARK: Actually went through the roof. And then this acrylic rod was kind of looped through those holes, and it went through the room, and it had two points of connection with the roof. And then moonlight—on the case of this evening you're talking about—was transmitted through those apertures where the rod was outside.

DE WAIN VALENTINE: Pointing at the sky, yeah.

ROBIN CLARK: Pointing at the sky, and so then it sounds like it was glowing a little bit—

DE WAIN VALENTINE: It was

ROBIN CLARK: —in the room.

DE WAIN VALENTINE: Yeah. Very, very exciting.

ROBIN CLARK: So that would be so hard to photograph.

DE WAIN VALENTINE: Oh well it was—now with digital cameras it'd be more easily photographed. What I had to do, Robin, was sit in there with the lens open, you know, and start with one minute, two minutes, three minutes, four minutes, five minutes. Do a roll of film. Run it over to the—there wasn't one-hour developing in those days. I wait for the next day to get the images back from Kodak, because if I drove them in to Hollywood and dropped them off with Kodak processing, they would have them the next day. So it was—photographing the pieces was a very interesting challenge in itself. I think that the photographs that were reproduced in the La Jolla catalog—I think that was almost an hour exposure.

ROBIN CLARK: Was that at daytime or nighttime?

DE WAIN VALENTINE: That was at daytime, but that was to get the whole room filled out, because I could get the line, but then I couldn't get the room. And on Ektachrome the light—the particular light that was filtered through turned the room blue in Ektachrome. So the room looks like it's a blue light, but it's actually just a indescribable color light. But on film, I did like it that it turned the room blue on the film. And what I had wanted to do, too, was to do a—I think I touched on it yesterday—a camera obscura piece that would have a projection of each wall of the sky from the opposite direction. And I went up to the Exploratorium to Frank Oppenheimer—did I talk about that yesterday?

ROBIN CLARK: Little bit.

DE WAIN VALENTINE: Yeah, little bit. Okay. But then Frank said, well you'd have to have a—you had a 30-foot-wide room, you'd have to have a 30-foot-wide lens. And so at any rate. And I subsequently was doing an exhibition, as you can see in the La Jolla catalog, right where that piece comes through the ceiling there's a flare. And also on the catenary plane—cantilevered plane—there's a flare when it comes through the wall, and I wanted to do a piece like that up at Barnsdall Park. And I had a room, and we built a wall in front of the windows. And I had a series of Plexiglas rods. I was just interested in what the flare did. So I had 10 or 12 rods, and I drilled the holes and put the rods in, and there was a roof over—so I didn't get the direct sun—and it did nothing. Just nothing.

So I took the—a rod out, and I was sitting there in the dark, my back to the holes, and on the opposite wall there was this, this blue image. So I took another one out, and the image continued, and I took another one out, the image continued. I drilled the rest of the holes, and I had the whole camera obscura of the sky outside between the two roof overhangs, and I had that Frank Lloyd Wright detail with the kind of the dentals, the beams. And so here was this—this space, which was—I was, you know, using myself at this part. Frank Lloyd Wright and part me. And as people walked down the sidewalk in between the buildings when there was full sun, you could see them walking upside down.

ROBIN CLARK: So you did get to do a camera obscura piece?

DE WAIN VALENTINE: Got to do it. And that started a series of those, and I did that one, and then I did a big one at the Long Beach Museum in whatever year that was. I don't remember. I'd have to show you the catalog. I built a—like a—

ROBIN CLARK: Maybe it was '75. You had a show at Long Beach Museum of Art in 1975.

DE WAIN VALENTINE: Yeah, yeah. And I stretched a piece of polyethylene sheeting like a rear projection television screen and frosted it. And I covered the walls, and back—the windows in back of the room with Masonite. And drilled a hole where I wanted the images to come through, and it projected the images on the screen much larger, much clearer. They were the oil islands out in the harbor there upside down.

ROBIN CLARK: The oil islands? Like drilling rigs?

DE WAIN VALENTINE: Yeah, those are drilling rigs out there in Long Beach.

ROBIN CLARK: And they projected upside down onto the wall?

DE WAIN VALENTINE: Upside down, yeah, on the wall. Yeah, on the scrim. And then I did another piece in that series at the a—in Northridge at the university with Jean-Luc Bordeaux. And—

ROBIN CLARK: Also in '75.

DE WAIN VALENTINE: Also in '75. And then in '72, I think I did one of the first ones at the San Jose Museum. Was that '70—What year was that? San Jose Museum?

ROBIN CLARK: I'm having a look.

DE WAIN VALENTINE: It was—

ROBIN CLARK: 1974.

DE WAIN VALENTINE: —Curved Wall Spectrum. And I built a curved wall that came out—almost an exact semicircle—and behind each slot behind where the, the corners of that wall would theoretically meet the back wall, I left a slot, and then I put a transparent film across the back—No, I didn't. So I—I know what I did. So I sprayed the color floor to ceiling in a spectrum on each side.

ROBIN CLARK: On each side of which?

DE WAIN VALENTINE: On the back side where the windows were. So that the spectrum reflected around the curve and dissipated—

ROBIN CLARK: Do you have a curved wall? And then are you saying closing off that semicircle is a bank of windows?

DE WAIN VALENTINE: On the backside, yeah. You didn't see. All you saw was the curved wall. There's a print of it right in Kiana’s office. Yeah, I know. We have to describe it. It's a—and that was one of the early daylight pieces was actually done in a museum, and then subsequently to that I did a piece at the Santa Barbara Museum where we drilled through the walls and the ceilings of the old museum, which were about—I don't know—two feet thick. Had to get a concrete driller to go through the walls ‘cause it was so thick.

ROBIN CLARK: Well, that was adventurous of them to agree to.

DE WAIN VALENTINE: It was. It was. The director was an artist. Bill—Bill Dole. And Bill did very, very sensitive collages. A little Schwitters-ish, but not really. They were definitely just Bill's, because there were definitely Santa Barbara muted colors. I think of Richard Diebenkorn's Ocean Park series when I think of Bill Dole's collages. But he was very generous. It was a good—a good project.

ROBIN CLARK: So you mentioned a few minutes ago that the Diamond Column in La Jolla is one of your—kind of one of the highlights for you, and I wonder if you wanted to mention a couple of other pieces that are in your, in your top list.

DE WAIN VALENTINE: A couple of the others are the six-foot circle that's at the Milwaukee Museum.

ROBIN CLARK: What color is that one again?

DE WAIN VALENTINE: It is kind of a violet. It goes—depending on the light—it can go from kind of a pink at the thicker edge. It's 2 feet thick at the bottom and 18 inches thick at the top and an inch and a half in the center. So it goes from that more densely colored edge to a almost completely disappearing center. That was 1969. That was the first large concave circle. And in '70 I showed three of them at the Pasadena Art Museum.

ROBIN CLARK: Yeah, I wanted to ask you about that show. I—the little catalog for that show is wonderful. I wondered if you could talk about making that exhibition.

DE WAIN VALENTINE: That was—that was a really, really, really productive time for me, that was. And I was able to cast the pieces larger and larger, which I was really excited about. And that was a fabricated steel mold out of quarter inch steel. And cast in my studio in Venice. And I don't remember how many drums of resin those pieces took. But it was—And they were 12 inches thick at the bottom, and 6 inches thick at the top and an inch and a half at the center. So the—got that color variation from the density of the plastic again. And I was interested in the same kind of three-dimensional color fields. And the variation of thickness, which varied the color, and the lighting also varies the color.

ROBIN CLARK: So was there not any natural might in that show? Or?

DE WAIN VALENTINE: No natural light.

ROBIN CLARK: Was it in the lower level of the museum?

DE WAIN VALENTINE: No, it was on the first floor.

ROBIN CLARK: But it just didn't have outside windows?

DE WAIN VALENTINE: Yeah, there was a—it was two one-man shows. It was a Andy Warhol retrospective, and my circles, and one 8 by 8-foot curved wall was in that exhibition. The curved walls were done just before the concave circle. The concave circles were '69.

ROBIN CLARK: So was the curved wall maybe '68?

DE WAIN VALENTINE: '69, too, I think, Robin. Yeah, about '69 also.

ROBIN CLARK: So did you make all those pieces in just that year before the show?

DE WAIN VALENTINE: It was—had a lot of guys working.

ROBIN CLARK: How many people maybe were helping you out, roughly?

DE WAIN VALENTINE: Robin, a the—at the—It was, you know, like—what's that called? Like a swing schedule or whatever. Everybody could come in and work, because everybody else was—maybe they were even a musician, or maybe they did light shows, or maybe they did porno movies, or whatever. They would work, you know, the time that they could work that they weren't doing something else. They worked for me, and I think about 15 people circulating around.

ROBIN CLARK: Helping make those big pieces in Venice.

DE WAIN VALENTINE: Yes. Because logistics were very, very problematic. I built a—about a 8-and-a-half-foot wheel out of three layers of laminated—four layers of laminated 3/4-inch plywood and put big casters underneath it, or on a circular pattern. And I had a big U channel built in the circle that the wheels would go in to, to guide it. I had a central axle to hold in the center, and I had a part of an old ball mill, which I had for milling color, from Colorado. And it had rubber rollers about 12 inches long, and it was a chain drive, electric, and I used that to power the edge of the—of the wheel to keep it from spinning around.

I built a platform on the forks of my forklift that was long enough for me to hang over the end, and I would have an assistant move it slightly back and forth as I was sanding over the center. Nothing ever quit going around. It was, you know, you take a break and the whole room was going around. Everything was in a circle, because as one was trying to view it, you're trying to stop it. So when the physical thing stops moving your head keeps swirling. So it's really—And I was the only one that would, would even consider doing that. So that was a solo job for me. At least it was a job—I could lie down on the job. So it was—

I came out of the front of the studio once with a—and there was an art consultant walking down the sidewalk, and she said, oh, thank god. You finally got a job. Because I was driving my forklift down the sidewalk. Jill Haley, she was an art consultant. Did you ever run into her name? She used to work, initially, with Tamara Thomas.

ROBIN CLARK: With whom?

DE WAIN VALENTINE: Tamara Thomas.

ROBIN CLARK: Tamara Thomas.

DE WAIN VALENTINE: Who was a great supporter of my work. She sold two of those concave circles. The [inaudible] ones.

ROBIN CLARK: Concave walls?

DE WAIN VALENTINE: Concave circles.

ROBIN CLARK: Oh no, concave circles. Right. Well, I'm wondering what else I might ask you about. Maybe we can talk a little bit about your kind of involvement developing arts organizations in LA, because on your CV it shows you a trustee at MOCA, for example, from 1982 to '89. And also your involvement with the board of directors at the Los Angeles Institute of Contemporary Art from 1974 to '78. Could you tell us what those places were like in the '70s and the '80s?

DE WAIN VALENTINE: Well, the first board I was involved with was—my buddy Bob Anderson at ARCO started the ARCO Center for Contemporary Art. It was on the lower level in the ARCO building. And Betty Gold was the first director.

ROBIN CLARK: Is that in downtown Los Angeles?

DE WAIN VALENTINE: Downtown LA. And Bob had selected me for the board, and I don't recall exactly who else was on that board. It was quite small.

ROBIN CLARK: And what kinds of things did you work on there? I mean, what—what were the projects that were needing board review?

DE WAIN VALENTINE: It was, you know—of course it didn't, wasn't the typical board. It was just an advisory board to suggest artists. And I did a Guy Dill show because I liked what Guy was doing. And I think I did a Bernard Venet show. And Fritz Frauchiger was the assistant in the gallery, and he later—I supported him for the—he became director of the Honolulu Museum of Contemporary Art. And then he became director at the Palm Springs Desert Museum.

ROBIN CLARK: But he started as—as an assistant at the ARCO gallery?

DE WAIN VALENTINE: Yeah. With Betty Gold, who had a—she was originally an art dealer at a gallery on La Cienaga.

ROBIN CLARK: So Betty Gold, was she director of the gallery? Curator?

DE WAIN VALENTINE: She was the director.

ROBIN CLARK: And how about—how about MOCA in the early days?

DE WAIN VALENTINE: Well, MOCA at the first meetings, which were at Marcia Weisman's house, and of course Eli was there and the mayor was there.

ROBIN CLARK: Eli Broad?

DE WAIN VALENTINE: Mm-hmm.

ROBIN CLARK: And who was the mayor?

DE WAIN VALENTINE: Tom Bradley. And Tom was very supportive. And Marcia of course was a real—she could really get things done. And she discovered that the city had that one percent for public art on the city projects. And she said, why don't you put that one percent into a contemporary museum, which we had all longed for. So Marcia invited me to invite all the artists to a meeting, so we could get the artists' input. And the first meeting was at my—my studio in Venice.

And the next meeting was at Tony Bill's screening room. Tony is a director, actor, who gained initial fame when he did The Sting.

ROBIN CLARK: Oh, did he direct The Sting?

DE WAIN VALENTINE: Yeah.

ROBIN CLARK: Oh fantastic.

DE WAIN VALENTINE: Produced, directed. Yeah. And the second meeting was at his screening room, because I wanted to be off my territory. But then subsequently I was elected chairman of the group, so all the meetings were at my studio because that was just easier. And we did have a few meetings at some other places—at other board members' houses. I remember we had a few meetings at the Grinsteins.

ROBIN CLARK: Stanley and Elyse Grinstein.

DE WAIN VALENTINE: And we may have had—we had a couple of meetings, I know, at Vija Celmins’s studio. And the artist committee was kind of ad hoc—it kind of put itself together. And we tried to get a broad range of—of various and sundry endeavors involved. Bob—the photography teacher at UCLA who later became very well known. Bob Heineken.

ROBIN CLARK: Robert Heineken. Yeah. Was he—he was in the group?

DE WAIN VALENTINE: Yes. And Coy Howard was the architect.

ROBIN CLARK: What's the first name?

DE WAIN VALENTINE: Coy.

ROBIN CLARK: How is that spell—

DE WAIN VALENTINE: C-O-Y.

ROBIN CLARK: Okay. Coy Howard.

DE WAIN VALENTINE: And he was Alexis Smith's boyfriend. So he was appointed by Alexis to be the architectural advisor. And early on Ed Moses, and Robert Graham, and Tony Berlant, and Sam Francis decided that they were going to be the designers of the museum.

ROBIN CLARK: How did that work out?

DE WAIN VALENTINE: It didn't. So when they—they discovered they—You know, nobody really knew the endeavor that it would take to get the architectural plan going. But so when they weren't given the go-ahead to design the museum, they pulled out. They quit. Tony did come to some meetings after that, but Sam and Ed pulled out.

ROBIN CLARK: And who else was involved? Other artists around that time?

DE WAIN VALENTINE: Yes. Lita Albuquerque, Peter Alexander, Alexis Smith, as I mentioned. Vija Celmins, Fred Eversley, Tom Wudl [ph], Guy Dill. I've got all the files.

ROBIN CLARK: Well that—just gives a flavor.

DE WAIN VALENTINE: Yeah.

ROBIN CLARK: Oh that's good to know that you have the files, actually.

DE WAIN VALENTINE: We met every Monday night at my house, initially, because there were so many things we were—we really did the initial program for the planning of the museum for the—so that we could have a loading dock that we could get large pieces in and out. Elevator doors would be sufficient to get large pieces up and down, and wherever. And we wrote the program for a variety of exhibition spaces, not just one kind of space. So that we had the rooms like the Rothko rooms for a really large, spacious kind of feeling, and then some intimate spaces—intimate spaces for showing prints, drawings, et cetera. And one of the things this came out of was that early on Judy Gerowitz and John McCracken, and I—Lloyd Hamrol, who was Judy's boyfriend—formed a committee called the Aesthetic Research committee—ARC—because we were trying to induce industrial people to give us support and doing our artwork, because it was too expensive to do things, to mess with stuff, without help.

ROBIN CLARK: Couldn't afford to experiment with industrial materials without—yeah.

DE WAIN VALENTINE: So we started this, and it kind of—Maurice Tuchman came to the house. The meetings were either at Judy and Lloyd's or—or my house in Santa Monica at the time.

ROBIN CLARK: Is this is the same time that—

DE WAIN VALENTINE: Before MOCA.

ROBIN CLARK: Okay. So if MOCA was '82 to '89, then around what time was this aesthetic research?

DE WAIN VALENTINE: This was just before the machine show at MOCA. What was that called? It was after sculpture of the '60s. So it was the next big contemporary blockbuster. And I remember Maurice came to the house and—

ROBIN CLARK: Oh, are you thinking of the LACMA Art and Technology Show?

DE WAIN VALENTINE: The which?

ROBIN CLARK: Art and Technology.

DE WAIN VALENTINE: Art and Technology. Yes, thank you.

ROBIN CLARK: Okay. So the Los Angeles County Museum. Around '68 maybe?

DE WAIN VALENTINE: Yeah. So—and we got letters from Maurice that he wanted to do this show and have all of us involved. We got these for-your-eyes-only letters inviting us to be in the show, which none of us were included.

ROBIN CLARK: As part of his process, I think, he tried to pair artists with different—you know, and make introductions with different kind of industrial, and corporate, and the science companies.

DE WAIN VALENTINE: Exactly.

ROBIN CLARK: Did you—

DE WAIN VALENTINE: Plastic companies.

ROBIN CLARK: —meet with any of those people?

DE WAIN VALENTINE: Well, I think, you know, part of my involvement in that led up to the involvement with Pittsburgh Plate Glass that ended up making the resin for me. I have to stop.

ROBIN CLARK: Okay. We'll stop.

[END OF TRACK valent13_3of3_sd_track01.]

[END OF INTERVIEW.]