Schwarz
View current page
...more recent posts
I'd been making spin paintings on the boardwalk in Ocean City, N.J. ever since the mid-1950s -- some forgotten entrepreneur, inspired by Abstract Expressionism, devised a little machine so that tourists could make themselves an automatic abstract artwork -- and somehow I'd gotten a kid's toy spin-art machine, and was making little paintings on cardboard using housepainter's enamel, which you could buy in small half-pint sizes.
I wanted to make them larger, but didn't know how to make a big spin-art machine. So my girlfriend (who I later married) went down to Canal Street and bought a fan motor and a pulley and rigged up a little spin-art machine. It sat in a wire base and had a three-foot-wide arm made of wood, with little L-angles on the ends to hold the canvases on. That was that.
At Pearl Paint, I bought three-foot-square Fredrix prepared canvases, five to a box. I would set the spin machine up on the floor of a borrowed studio, and build a kind of corral around it with scrap lumber and plastic dropcloths. This would catch the paint as it spun off. I put a on-off switch in the wire, and controlled the machine by turning it on and off.
I used One Step sign-painter's enamel, and poured it straight out of the can onto the spinning canvas. The paint is high in lead content, and gives bright colors. It was very heavy. I made the paintings so fast that I had to build a rack to dry them in, not unlike the racks that bakers have for their loaves of bread.
The idea of the spin paintings was to have a machine that would take all the subjective, arbitrary decisions out of making abstractions -- decisions that always seemed so trivial. The machine would make the artworks automatically. But in the end I subverted my own plan for subversion, and struggled to use the machine as a tool.
Instead of random abstractions, I made "target" paintings, after Kenneth Noland, and tried to make imagistic spin paintings as well, like "exploding hearts" and "volcanic eruptions." I made Op Art paintings with bright blue and red, and "composed with the entire palette" like Hans Hofmann. I made "rose window" paintings by first using oil enamels to make a multicolored image and then pouring black water-based enamel on top of it, with the resulting "resist" creating a latticework and stained-glass effect.
I had two shows of spin paintings at Metro Pictures in SoHo in 1986 and 1987 -- and no one paid any attention. No reviews and only a few sales. I got all 50 spin paintings back. I was kind of happy about that. My plan was to have a show every year, and every year make the spin paintings bigger. I did in fact make some paintings that measured 4 x 4 feet, but a little math will tell you that even though it's only a foot larger to the side, it's almost twice as much area. To make a spin painting that large takes a lot of paint, and a lot of power to spin the canvas fast enough.
Then other things began to happen, and the spin paintings went into storage. I'd spun enough canvases, at least for the time being.
This story is to be continued.
-- Walter Robinson, 4/27/05
and then theres the other guy