<Begin Segment 29>
RS: And so it all of a sudden became clear the difference between being a fine artist and being a commercial artist. And over the course of the next year or two I began painting more and turning down commercial art jobs. And was also able to see for the first time with a new kind of clarity the kind of work that my three uncles did, the very reason -- I mean, these were the three people that inspired me to go into the commercial field. All of a sudden their work started to look different to me as well. And, not that it was without value, but it didn't contain the kind of value I guess that I was interested in. And so I decided to enroll in some painting courses at the University of Washington. I had saved up enough money to be able to do that, and...
AI: Excuse me, was this about 1965 --
RS: Yeah.
AI: -- or so?
RS: Right. It's about in 1965 and I went up there and enrolled in four painting courses with four different people, because I remember Boyer Gonzalez said, "Well, are you gonna want to go to graduate school in painting?" And I told him I really didn't know. I mean, to me that was just the most overwhelming thought at that point because I really hadn't taken a painting course seriously. And wasn't really sure whether or not I was good enough. And so I took these four courses by four different teachers and they had what was called a U-5 or unclassified fifth-year status. And I took all of these courses, Alden Mason, Fred Anderson, Boyer, and I think Hickson was the fourth person. And I had no idea what I was doing in these classes. I had absolutely no idea except that I was painting abstractly because I was very influenced by Alden Mason. Things about the way Alden taught painting that was just, made it so incredibly appealing. And he would talk about stopping at the Pike Place Market and picking up a particular fruit. And he could talk about that fruit like no one else. And then he'd talk about how he would touch and feel it and hold it up close to his face so it was out of focus and then he would do drawings and out of those drawings he would make paintings. And I wanted to be like that. And I remember he invited the class over to his house. And seeing his house and the things that were in it, I think to this day were very influential about the way I feel about my house, that it was just this sort of living organism that was just, it was an extension of who he was. And I never thought of a house in that way. And so he was this tremendous influence that just made the whole activity of painting so passionate and so personal, despite the fact that I was to reject abstract painting later on in my own life. But there was something extremely valuable about that experience.
AI: It sounds to me that, it sounds like you were almost surprised to find yourself so engaged in painting.
RS: I must have been incredibly vulnerable because I just sort of believed everybody in some ways. And I think that eventually sort of got me into trouble in that program. And of course now, I look back and I see that the University of Washington, as long as I've known it, and continues to this day as being a modernist school. And that's, that's the image that they tend to perpetuate, they're abstractionists. And it sort of, this kind of European-male-dominated program in its ideas and everything else. And if you look at all of the people that have been there that have sort of made that program what it is today, they all share, philosophically, something in common. And in fact, at the College Art Association, I remember when they were hiring two painting positions they were talking, one was a structuralist painter and one was a non-structuralist painter and people on a national level had no idea what they were talking about. What does that mean? And I knew immediately what they were talking about. And so anyway, it's interesting to sort of look back upon my experience and to see how that's affected, in many ways, how I felt about the painting program at Kansas, because the painting program at Kansas is actually, now is actually bigger than the one at the University of Washington. But I think there was a point that Washington was the only program that was bigger than ours so we had a luxury of looking at the breadth of what we had to offer and I always used Washington as a model of what we didn't want it to be, despite the fact that it was so important for me.
<End Segment 29> - Copyright © 2003 Densho. All Rights Reserved.