LO-B

I love hearing stories about Sunnyside during its leftist heyday in the 1940s and ’50s. What can you tell me about your childhood there?

SPM

I have to say it was wonderful growing up in Sunnyside. I knew everybody, and we played in the street. There was not traffic like you have now. I would ride my bike from Sunnyside to Rockaway Beach. I would take my brother and sister and we'd go down Queens Boulevard to Woodhaven Boulevard to Rockaway Boulevard. There was a lot of freedom for us in the city then. And yes, the neighborhood was very leftist, socialist, communist, and working class.

I also took art lessons in the city as a kid. I went to the Museum of Modern Art for an art class. I went with a friend of mine who I am still friends with. We were very young—nine or ten years old. The lessons at MoMA had all these trays of sequins and colored paper and all different kinds of material. And I loved it. I had never been exposed to that kind of play. It was a very creative experience.

LO-B

Did your parents encourage you to study art?

SPM

My mother was a brilliant knitter, an excellent secretary, and a bookkeeper. Everything she did, she did with such expertise. My sister and I are living with this strong memory of her all the time, and her influence, even though it was sometimes very hard because she was such a task master. But it was great. I mean, just those lessons at MoMA—not many young people had that. When I was in the fourth grade, we put on a play of the Wizard of Oz, and I was responsible for making the Emerald City. I made it at the back of the classroom with pastels. So, I would say from early on I loved art. And I had a rounded childhood in Sunnyside.

LO-B

When it came time to go to college, you chose Cooper Union over studying nursing at Hunter College?

SPM

Yes, my parents said to me, “You can live at home, but if you want to go to college, you have to go to a free college.” I thought I was going to be a nurse, but my mother said, “Apply to Cooper Union.” She must have known someone; she worked at Bryant High School and likely knew the people who taught art there, and they probably told her about Cooper Union. The interesting thing is—and this is speeding ahead—when I was applying for Yale, Annalee Newman gave my mother some advice for my application. So, that's a small world.

When I was at Cooper Union, I was failing architecture. And if you failed one course, you would be dropped out from the school. I couldn't do single point perspective drawing. I kept making mistakes. And I kept taking books out to learn. I had no sense of scale, windows, doors, people. For me, art always had this personal or expressive or abstract root, not some . . .

LO-B

Analytical sense?

SPM

I did make a lot of realistic drawings, but those weren’t about architecture. I remember I had a final project to complete, and if I did it right, I would pass the course. So, this one professor said to the class, “Who are the architecture students here? Take Sylvia. Help her.” And so, they helped me to make a floor plan. A student named Franny Cohen came home with me one night to build the model. And I brought it into school, and then I passed the course. So, I would say my early paintings of floors was me getting back to this problem with architecture. it was also a grid that I could use to measure three-dimensional space and strengthen my confidence. Because I felt so stupid that I couldn't do it before—that I had this block.

LO-B

You wanted to figure it out.

SPM

That's how I learn. And that is why I paint.

LO-B

So, then you go to Yale—how many women were in your classes at that time?

SPM

Oh, quite a few. Good painters too. I don't remember their names. I do remember Victoria Barr because her father was Alfred Barr. And we were good friends. I mean, Eva Hesse went there two years before me. But I never had a woman teacher.

LO-B

Okay. There we go. [Laughs.] That's the question I should have asked you.

SPM

That was a big thing. The male teachers I had for specific disciplines like printmaking or sculpture, or two-dimensional design were okay, they were good, but the painting teachers were also men, and they didn't take me seriously until I went to Yale. Still, I learned a lot about painting when I left Yale. I had a child, and I became really disciplined. I mean, I was always disciplined as an art student, but you know what it's like.

LO-B

I'm very curious about this moment in 1963.

SPM

When Jim was born.

LO-B

Right, and there’s this change in your work. But of course, there's a lot going on in the world at that time.

SPM

Well, Kennedy was shot.

LO-B

Kennedy was shot. I just imagine you in Central Park with the baby carriage and trying to make sense of the world by making watercolors and gouaches.

SPM

Yes, it had to be something that dried quickly.

LO-B

Right, and you start to realize that there are certain parameters on your life now—time restrictions on when you can work, for example. It seems like your response was to start painting what was directly in front of you.

SPM

Well, I worked very slowly and over short spans. Jim would take long naps and I would just do my work. At that time, Bob and I were superintendents of an apartment building, so there was that work as well. It was on 72nd Street between Park and Madison. The building is still there. Before Jim came, we each had part-time jobs. After he was born, I got very depressed. I remember there was a period when I wasn't working at all. We had a loft down on the Bowery for our studios. At night we would go down there. But then after Jim was born, I couldn't go anymore. Bob would, because he needed to build his big structures. But I have to say that for me it was fine not to go.

LO-B

Did you worry that painting was “outmoded” as some of the minimalists would say?

SPM

You know, I've never been someone who could be influenced very easily. So no, that was Bob's world. But I don't know that he's really a minimalist. He was just in love with and inspired by New York City—trucks and signs and everything that I grew up with. And I didn't think that was very interesting. He grew up in western New York.

LO-B

Right. [Laughs.]

SPM

The truth is that he wanted to come to New York, and I wanted to go to the country. We lived in New York because that's where the jobs were. That's where the stimulation was. When Jim was born, we were very poor. My mother would give me her Charge-A-Plate if I needed shoes for my son. But I also got focused and started thinking about what I wanted from my work. And because I didn't have a classical art training, I had to establish a way of figuring things out for myself.

LO-B

Yes. As an example of that "figuring things out," let's speed forward a little bit to the “Laundry” paintings—some critics read those as feminist. How did that feel to you? Did you see them that way?

SPM

I didn't, but it was true, they were feminist—but that wasn't why I did them. I am a woman, and I oversaw the laundry. I just had a problem with putting things in relationship in a three-dimensional space on a canvas. So, I started getting more involved with the floors and I began painting the floor by itself and the walls and corners. I also looked at Edward Hopper. I've always liked Hopper. Anyway, I thought, “How am I going to get color into this painting?” I thought of dropping laundry on the floor, as I liked the contrast of randomly dropped laundry with color on the ordered grid of the floor. Up until the time we moved upstate the apartment was my studio.

LO-B

That's so interesting, and it speaks to the many hats you were wearing at the time.

SPM

But, if I could paint, then everything else in my life was fine.

LO-B

So, these laundry paintings, did they feel diaristic?

SPM

No. It's really about the paint and loving the material. And I must say growing up, I loved art materials and what they can do. Now I feel like this magician—as you get more skilled and able to let go—and have your mind in your hand working without directing—it is so much more exciting.

LO-B

In another interview, you mentioned that "all really interesting painting has a conceptual element to it," and that the conceptual part could be “a memory or a relationship or a system.” Then you added: “whatever it may be, it needs to be intrinsic, not applied.” What did you mean by intrinsic? Perhaps you can tell me how one of your works works in this way?

SPM

I guess what I mean by intrinsic is that it’s coming from some directive in your experience of life that you're letting go of or that you're using.

LO-B

As in your 1976 painting In Memory of My Father?

SPM

Yes, exactly. I like to think of that one as my family. But you can see that in the laundry paintings, too—and in my trees. I’m always trying to define space and define different realities. I mean, with the ruler paintings, I was just measuring the canvas and measuring space, I was playing with the illusion of space and the reality of the surface.

For In Memory of My Father, I used the ruler as a symbol of a life shortened—he was sixty-six years old when he died. The base of the canvas is 72 inches, so the ruler ending at about sixty-six suggests that something was incomplete. I also would use my age as a vanishing point since that would be the perspective I had at that time in my life.

LO-B

1977 is another big year in your work, when landscape becomes more central. You’re still painting the spaces that are familiar to you—the ones that you're surrounding yourself in. But your process begins to change.

SPM

Yeah, the big changes began when I started not having a preliminary drawing.

LO-B

Right. So, just to be clear: with the floor and mirror paintings you began with a drawing to figure out the size of the canvas and then enlarged the drawing to scale. With your ruler pieces, you planned out the composition in a meticulous way. With the landscapes you begin to make in the later 1970s, you paint masking tape in trompe l’oeil, as a metaphor for the artistic process and masking itself. But these were less planned than your earlier works, right?

SPM

Well, I was still editing. I used the tape to edit because I could start off with a big canvas and not know what I was going to do. You'd have to get these relationships right, for example, of where the horizon is. So, you know, you can't just paint a landscape and think it'll be right. So, I had this device with the tape, and I could bring the paint over the tape, which was flat. What the tape helped to do was set up a foreground. And that was how I did those big paintings.

LO-B

I’m curious to hear more about your decision to paint specific trees later, such as the pin oak. There seems to be a return, in a way, to your earlier work and this very focused situation.

SPM

That's true, it is. But also, the tree as a form became interesting to me. The sense of growth and the sense of expansion . . . that's what excites me if I can get that in the painting. I’m interested in motion too and getting up close. I like painting growth, just like I like painting wind. I like that sense of movement. And it's not easy. Because once you change one thing, then you have to change all the others. And then of course you can't put the painting off till next year because it's changing.

I'm just thinking about my mother—how she would knit a sweater and if there was something wrong, she'd rip it out. And my sister, if she bakes 50 cookies and there's something wrong, she throws them out. So, we talk about these traits that me and my sister have.

LO-B

Yeah. Is it something in the experience of the making though that you're drawn to?

SPM

Well, you have this idea of what you're aiming at.

LO-B

Right. Just like with knitting or baking the cookies?

SPM

Yeah. [Laughs.]

LO-B

I can’t help but wonder if the trees in Sunnyside influenced you. They’re mostly London planes, right?

SPM

Aren’t they Sycamores? We had a cat named Sycamore. But yeah, I have a crayon drawing I did in my bedroom window of the Sycamore tree right outside our window.

LO-B

So, in the same way with the laundry—do you think that the tree paintings feel diaristic or autobiographical?

SPM

Yes and no.

LO-B

[Laughs.] Fair enough. Did you ever think you'd be painting them this long?

SPM

I have no idea what I thought about. No, they change all the time, and my work changes all the time. My life changes. I can't paint outside anymore. I can't take the cold. I used to paint anytime over 40 degrees; I could go outside. And now I can't even walk out there. So, everything has to be made from here in the studio.

LO-B

But that goes back to the restrictions we were talking about earlier of being a mother and making work. Anyway, this is Earth Week. Does climate change come to mind for you with these works?

SPM

Yes. I'm very protective of this land. I want to keep it from being developed. I don't know what people are thinking of when they develop; there's a problem of water, there's a problem of traffic on these country roads. And it makes me very angry when I see Elon Musk saying that if we don't get to Mars, we're doomed. This is a great planet. Mars is not.

LO-B

Right. And it's very cold.

SPM

It has nothing that this planet has. I think people need to have less noise and they need quiet, slower time.

LO-B

Is there some kind of armor that we can put on to get us through in these times of deluge, spiritual or not?

SPM

I would say don't pay attention to all the noise out there because it's suffocating. Television, the media, emails—it's all very distracting. You need to have the ability to make your own mistakes . . . and vote!