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PW: Well, explain it for everybody. So in 1967, '68 was when you did this?

RO: Yeah, around that period.

PW: This was your first major solo show?

RO: Yeah.

PW: And where was it held?

RO: This was held in a little place called the Fig Tree Gallery, and at that time then, there were somehow a small group of people, like-minded people, they were housewives, there were Fresno State art instructors, there were other high school teachers. And there was no place to show, and somehow we kind of connected. And so we got together in the early stages and said, "Hey, let's start a gallery." At that time, cooperative galleries in San Francisco and other places were booming, because I think everybody was searching for the very same thing. So eventually we rented a little house that was just right off of Divisadero and Van Ness, in this little house we rented, and said, "Now, what do we do? Who do we call?" and so on. And so it happened that one of the members was then, her husband was teaching at the college, and they had a fig orchard that they owned. So they came up and they said, "Let's call it the Fig Tree Gallery of all things, and that would become the name based on her suggestion. And this small group of about six people, we had so much fun, because we were very instrumental in experimentation and having parties just for parties' sake. And trying to get the city of Fresno to understand that we exist, and that this is what's happening, because it wasn't happening at the college. Eventually it was, later on and so on, so as a result, it was a very, very interesting business.

PW: Well, tell me, since we got to see the paintings today, tell me a little bit about, they're so clean, they're so vibrant, they're so playful, their color is such a presence, such about surface, but there's also... talk to me about that.

RO: This is, I think, what happens with the adoption of acrylic paint, because if you're working with oil paints, you see the limitations that you have with that, which is the fact because oil paint is an oil-based paint, and it's very slow-drying. And so then if you're trying to paint a very large area, which I wanted to do, other than smaller canvases. And you had to go ahead and apply that whether you apply it with a wide brush or you thin the paint down and you do it over and over and over again, and you had this paint called acrylic, with one stroke, because it levels itself out as you're brushing, so it doesn't show any brush strokes at all. And so you can mix, and the colors were very, very vibrant and came in large quantities. So it was a perfect medium to find yourselves in, this is what I want to do. So I thought, well, as imagery, how do I deal with all this? That the idea then, because you're thinking about where you lived before, but now you're thinking about new work, the influence of the Art U.S.A. Now show and so on. So when you take a piece of paper and you're making marks, eventually all the marks eventually have... if you look at them and you synthesize something specific about a particular mark you make with a brush, and you just clean it up to a point where it becomes a particular shape that you can define for yourself. I said, "Well, that's kind of an interesting shape. I don't know what that shape is or where it comes from, but it's like doodling." So I started to use that and using brush strokes, and I think at the same time, I was probably a little bit aware of calligraphy especially, and traditional Japanese calligraphy and so on, the kind of brush strokes, the things that they did, and yet I did not understand that or know what they were doing. But then it's kind of in the back of your mind about your own heritage and about where you are.

So then I started doing these little markings, and I would just simplify the marks the way they are. And that became then the illusionary effects of what I want to do to change shapes and so. Then at the same time, because I'm working with large panels of color, I wanted the work then to show some dimension this way instead of all being flat. Because at that time, anytime that you show something, when you're working on a flat surface, you're using applied texture with the paint that gave you some limited dimension, but I was using this flat paint that had no dimension. So I said I'm going to go and make it artificially. That's when I started stretching the canvas and so on, one-by-four pieces of wood, and stretching it so it's thicker. And one-by-two, so I had all these dimensions in which I could go ahead and prepare the canvas. Then I realized that you take this, and you put them together, then you can alter the dimension however you want to. If you want the one-by-four to be here or here, there's a one-by-two here, so on, and also depends on where the color stops and the next color begins. And the shape that you put in and how that shape follows you around. So it became very, it became an obvious direction at that time. This is what I want to do, this is what's exciting for me.

PW: A little like an alphabet. Was this a huge departure in terms of, were you painting figurative stuff before, were you doing...

RO: Oh, yeah. You're doing the kind of things that were influenced by your teacher in college. So you were doing a still life and trying to do it as conventionally as possible, about light and shade and showing the dimension of the form, flower, vase or whatever, so on. And then you started to go ahead and move beyond that, and I think that you still, you're using subject matter, whether it be the landscape or whatever, as information. So then this show that changed everything about that, do you need that? Can you take them and make paintings based on shapes? And this was also a period in which there was a lot of non-objective work that was being done in the United States, the idea that people were moving away from objectified forms and objectified imagery. And this is how abstraction was moving along from where it was before, and the influence of traditional forms of art making at that time, whether it'd be from Europe or from early American 1940s and so on. So then all of a sudden there was this tremendous change in the way people were, a lot of experimentation going on, and I felt that, wow, this is where it's happening. Trying to fit yourself in someplace where that might fit for you, and this was one of those things where, again, it was the idea, we moved back to Fresno, acrylic paint, and just one of these things that changes the way I thought about work.

PW: How was the show received?

RO: Well, I think that the Fig Tree Gallery had been in existence for a few years while we were gone. And they had developed a clientele, and they were people like architects and other people that were in the design industry. But still, Fresno was very limited at that time, they basically had, the Fresno Art Center became, moved over and became the Fresno Art Center which is now the museum, because it's transformed itself into that. And so there was very little activity, there were not any galleries or commercial galleries or cooperative galleries in town whatsoever. So basically we were the only ones. So as a result, we were kind of the forerunners about commercial or cooperative galleries in Fresno. So then all these years, we can kind of look at ourselves and say we probably are the longest cooperative gallery in the state of California that has been in operation for all these years.

PW: Longest running.

RO: Because it's been up and down, there were times in which we had five members, and next time there were fifteen members, and next time it was twelve members, and we were reliant on membership to pay for the rent, for the space we were occupying, and then the electricity and all of that, so we need income coming in, and some people were now starting to look at us and say, "Well, there's some interesting work done at this place called the Fig Tree Gallery. And architect had purchased one of the paintings in the show that was part of this show that you saw next door. And that was very encouraging for me to have someone that, an architect who was art related-minded to be able to buy a piece. But sales were few and hard to come by. People in Fresno don't do that. [Laughs]

PW: So this was a big moment for you because of the development of the stuff?

RO: Yeah, right.

<End Segment 24> - Copyright © 2023 Densho. All Rights Reserved.