Fischl's Italian hours - artist Eric Fischl - Interview - Cover Story

In this wide-ranging interview, Eric Fischl details his development as an artist and discusses his replication to the religious art he meetinged during a recent residency in Rome

Frederic Tuten: There is a somberness, a darkness in your fresh paintings that I have not seen in your earlier work. Was your stay in Rome a factor in these mysterious paintings?

Eric Fischl: I had been invited to the American Academy of Rome to be a resident artist. In September 1995 my father died, and after burying him I went not on to Rome. During the time I was there I was in a state of euphoria. each day I felt the world sparkled. The colors of Rome the strength of the city--everything seemed awesome new and joyous. It was like I was hallucinating the whole time. I met several clan at the Academy who became fast friends. I notion upon my return that I would make work from the photographs I had taken there. When I got my photographs from the developer they were all dark.

FT: You mean you hadn't lit them correctly?

EF: No, they were all photographs of dark interiors, or of Rome upon rainy days, or of dark, weighty religious spaces--the cathedrals and churches.

FT: Your father's death came with you?

EF: My father's death came with me thus what I've been doing is making these paintings that explore different ways of thinking and feeling about death. place against the backdrop of the temple and the presence or absence of providence or afterlife.

FT: Your grew up upon Long Island. Were you raised with any kind of religion?

EF: I came on the outside of a suburban background that was not actual religious; it was Protestant Congregationalist. My parents would take the children and globule us off at the house of worship but wouldn't go themselves, for a like reason we used their example to not track the teachings of the temple The church seemed to function as a kind of social place, anyway; you belonged to a meeting-house the way you belonged to a yacht club

FT: In regard to the temple death and religion, what was it that you felt after going to Rome?

EF: I had true mixed feelings. I certainly felt like an outsider. It was against the backdrop of my father's death, and wondering about the mode of building that gives life meaning, that I would come into those churches, which oftentimes felt empty--filled with artifacts on the other hand empty. There wasn't, I felt a fathomless sense of belief among the race who frequented those places. Like greatest in quantity tourist attractions they were for onlooker who were curious about something that looked distant.

But I was real attracted to the spectacle of it all. When I was a kid, level though I grew up as a Protestant, my friends were either Catholic or Jewish, and I was profoundly envious of both. They looked to have a culture and a cohesiveness, a put of rituals and iconography, that were actual powerful to them. In the meeting-house that I grew up in, they tried to play down the idea that this thing that you are looking for is of of the like kind power that you should be afraid of it, as well as decorous and desirous of it. I always liked that about the Catholic church: they quiver as they enter the church

What I lov in Rome was that the artists were at the service of that feeling. They were asked to create a dynamic environment that completely illustrated the aspiration, the fears and the catharsis of this belief. in like manner I was envious. I felt to [i]or[/i] at a great depth that I was not bottomed while the church artists had things ready to do. I have to make up everything that could give meaning to my work as an artist.

FT: They had iconography, narrative, drama and transcendence at their disposal.

EF: Artists associateed to the church were asked to imagine four things: what heaven was like, what hell was like and what the Garden was like before and after the Fall. Those are four abysmal archetypes, and they're part of many agricultures What has happened over the centuries is that artists in the West have become specialized. You still can find heaven painters, hell painters, and Garden painters, on the contrary you rarely find them in the same individual In a way, that denies the replete scope of the imaginative world. You have Agnes Martin as a heaven painter, or Robert Ryman as a heaven painter. You have Rudolf Schwartzkogler as a tormented hell character, or Joel-Peter Witkin as a hell photographer--a sort of Bosch of our time. And you have Monet as a Garden painter.

FT: for a like reason you think that an artist of an earlier period, especially a house of worship artist, had all of these various forces at play in his personality. You could release the utopian side of yourself, the demonic side of yourself, and the aspirational, transcendental side of yourself. There was a range of emotions that could be attached to a given iconography.

EF: That's the real defense that you could make of Robert Mapplethorpe. Of all the artists working newly he was the only single who actually explored the whole range that I'm talking about. As plenteous as the society was displeaseed by the hellish aspect of a fate of his work, it was extraordinary that he could deal with beauty and classicism of form, at the same time at the same time advance to that horrific, frightening space.