A Conversation with David Wiesner

A CONVERSATION WITH DAVID WIESNER

On February 4, 2021, William Valerio, Woodmere’s Patricia Van Burgh Allison Director and Chief Executive Officer; Rick Ortwein, Deputy Director of Exhibitions; Rachel Hruszkewycz, Assistant Curator; and Hildy Tow, the Robert McNeil, Jr. Curator of Education, spoke with David Wiesner, the juror of the Museum’s 79th Annual Juried Exhibition.

WILLIAM VALERIO: When the Museum shut down on March 13, 2020, we thought we were facing a two-week closure. As we came to understand the severity of the pandemic, it became clear that the 79th Annual Juried Exhibition would have to be postponed. The disruption to exhibition schedules and museum activity was one of many upheavals. So much changed in life as we knew it.

The exhibition is the result of a process that evolves over the course of a year. As with previous iterations, the period from January to March was an important time in the annual cycle. We released the call to artists on January 13, 2020, with submissions closing about a month later, on February 10. Selections were made in the weeks that followed. Artists were notified of their acceptance on March 9. Then, everything changed. We postponed the show for a year, and here we are almost a year later recording this conversation via Zoom. The opening is now set for June 5, 2021.

It’s so interesting that looking at works selected for the show in a time before COVID-19, we perceive them now in new ways. The pandemic affected us all differently, but experiences of isolation, loss, and fear inevitably shape perspective, outlook, and, as a result, interpretation of art. David, we are thrilled to finally talk about and install your Annual. We are including a selection of your drawings for Spot, the app you developed, and Spot itself will be on a monitor. Tell us about this project.

Spot: Cat World, 2015, by David Wiesner (Courtesy of the artist)

DAVID WIESNER: When I began Spot, I was thinking about how I could use the tablet in a way that is inherent to the digital medium, a way that doesn’t just replicate the way a book works and looks. The main navigation tool is the pinch and zoom, which allows you to go deep into a picture, to go farther and farther into it. That’s an idea that has fascinated me for a long time. Fortunately when I mentioned this idea to my publisher, they said, “Oh, we were thinking about doing an original app and asking you.” And I said, “Well, I have an idea.”

Spot does everything I wanted it to. The key thing was I didn’t want any puzzles or games or activities to enter into the story, because that’s a narrative killer. It completely stops the story. In the middle of reading you go and do an activity or solve a puzzle, and then when you come back to the story it’s like, where were we? It just shuts the narrative down. So, for me the key was all story, all the time.

I don’t know if anybody remembers Myst, the computer game from the 1990s. It was all about problem solving to get to these different worlds, which were beautifully rendered in digital graphics of the time. I just wanted to go see those places. I didn’t want to unlock all the puzzles and look for the keys or any of that. The gaming stuff really didn’t interest me, but visiting the worlds did.

In creating Spot it had to be all narrative. Nothing could stand in your way. You can go anywhere you want, as fast or as slow as you want. You can go back and forth between worlds or you can go methodically from world to world, one at a time. I didn’t want any barriers between the viewer, the reader, and the experience.

It took us a year to do it. We had a developer and I was cranking out drawings and paintings and they were right behind me building the architecture. At the point I finished my art it was only about two weeks until the app was finished. That’s so unlike book publishing, where I finish and then a year later, after the production phase, the book comes out.

Spot doesn’t fit into a neat category. People ask, is it a game? It’s not a game; you don’t keep score. And it’s not a story in the traditional sense. It’s in that funny place where it doesn’t quite fit in anywhere, which is my favorite place to be. But an awful lot of people didn’t know what to do with it!

VALERIO: It’s a self-directed journey. You can go anywhere your curiosity takes you. It’s a story, but it’s not linear; it’s an exploration.

WIESNER: You read into it. You infer things. At some point you might say, hey, I saw something like that over in the outer space world, and maybe it was also in the cat world. Slowly but surely you pick up these connections. There’s a simple overarching story that’s going on, but the rest of it is what you make of it. From the moment you open it—particularly if there’s two people, a kid and an adult—all you’ve got to do is ask what’s going on, and you probably won’t stop talking through the rest of it, because it’s really whatever the viewer brings to it.

It got a great reaction in Europe, which was nice, and was reviewed very well. I created so much material, hundreds of drawings. I ended up taking some of the characters from one of the worlds and creating a whole new story for them, which is the book I just published this last fall, Robobaby.

VALERIO: Can you talk about the preparatory drawings?

WIESNER: I did the whole thing in pencil so we could make sure it worked. That’s exactly the way I work in my books. I draw it out, a mock version, and then make the real thing. So, it’s fun to show those pencil tests because they have a certain life to them and that’s different—they’re hand-drawn, just toned pencil drawings, and they have a very different feel than the more finished piece.

VALERIO: Let’s turn to your selections by other artists for the exhibition, which looks like it’s going to be a beautiful show.

WIESNER: It feels like we made these selections a million years ago. It was really interesting to open up the checklist and start looking at the work after almost a year. All of a sudden I was having this whole other reaction to a number of pieces, which started with Chenlin Cai. Filtering a lot of these through what’s happened over the last year gives them new meaning for me. When we made the selections in February 2020, COVID-19 was thought to only be spreading abroad.

HILDY TOW: The virus was soaring through China. In December, January, I remember hearing reports of people saying, I can’t get my father into the hospital. He has cancer, there’s no room in the hospital.

Identity & Masks, 2015-16, by Chenlin Cai (Courtesy of the artist)

Second Line, 2020, by Kate Samworth (Courtesy of LeMieux Galleries)

VALERIO: Prior to the pandemic, for most of us these sorts of masks were used in medical settings only and they were generally white or blue. He’s made them red.

RICK ORTWEIN: The one in the middle looks a bit like the virus itself.

VALERIO: I’ve had masks that tie in the back, I’ve had masks with elastic that goes around my ears, I’ve had masks with buttons on the side, I’ve had masks that are rectangles with the fanned-out elements. We can probably all relate to the array of mask types. It’s wild.

RACHEL HRUSZKEWYCZ: When I followed up with the artists to let them know about the rescheduled dates for the show, many said, “We’re really looking forward to it.” A few people told me: “This is going to be my return to normal—having work in a show is going to make me feel normal again.” Some said, “This is a sign of hopeful things.” VALERIO: That is great to hear. Let’s talk about Kate Samworth’s drawings—they are haunting.

WIESNER: They’re really extraordinary. This series depicts a time when animals take back the environment. She explores the relationship between humans and the natural world with humor and great sympathy. In Second Line, we see a procession of animals, like a New Orleans burial. The initial procession is very solemn and then the second half is boisterous. The animals have instruments, and the cart is drawing the body of a bear.

VALERIO: The virtuosity is incredible. What’s the scratchboard medium?

WIESNER: Scratchboard is a technique in which white clay-like material on a board is covered with black paint. You scratch into the black, which then leaves a white line. It’s painstaking and somewhat of a reverse way of working, from dark to light.

Page 173 from the graphic novel Trish Trash: Rollergirl of Mars, 2018, by Jessica Abel (Courtesy of the artist)

Above, left to right: Pages 160 and 143 from the graphic novel Trish Trash: Rollergirl of Mars, 2018, by Jessica Abel (Courtesy of the artist)

What connected me to the works chosen for the exhibition was the narrative quality, the element of story, no matter what form or medium the work was done in. Obviously the submissions that were sequential or included multiple images were things that I immediately responded to because that’s the way that I tend to look at things.

There were a number of comic artists who submitted to the show, and a number of picture book people who submitted to the show. Jessica Abel works in a very classic comics way, but she’s at the height of that tier of people who do this. It’s always a joy to see someone who can play with time, perspective, and point of view. Comics are all about the space in between the images, because that’s where the viewer is filling in parts of the story. The artist has to be able to make those jumps interesting, to create varied pacing. You don’t want the jumps between panels to be too similar or too incremental. The reader should have to make some effort to connect the images. Finding that balance can be a hard thing. Abel does it beautifully.

Her husband, Matt Madden, is also in the show. He works in a very different way stylistically, but also is doing some really interesting visual things in the way his story moves in and out of different types of storytelling and different places. The art shifts style

Above, left to right: Pages 69 and 70 from the graphic novel Ex Libris, 2020, by Matt Madden (Courtesy of the artist)

completely when it moves to different parts of the story, which is great. There are all these different visual signifiers to tell you what you’re seeing, to help you understand, “Oh, this is different, we’ve moved somewhere else.” The dialogue is telling you one thing but the pictures are really the things that are telling you what’s happening. It’s a wonderfully subtle medium in which you can do so much to communicate in visual terms what you’re trying to say.

VALERIO: They’re both dealing with the concept of outer space.

WIESNER: Madden’s following a more regular layout, but within the panels a lot is happening visually. Abel is telling a very active story: rollerblading, roller skating, roller derby outer space action adventure. She’s breaking that up into some really interesting page layouts that are very kinetic. Panel layouts can vary wildly. There are people who like the more formal, regular layout. What Madden’s doing within that regular layout, though, by shifting stylistically is kind of a trade off. He’s leaving the general design roughly the same, but creating more variation within the panels themselves.

HRUSZKEWYCZ: Madden explained that the main character is showing us some of her favorite comics. As the stories change, the settings change. She’s going from story to story. He says, “It’s a book about books about comics.”

WIESNER: I did something like this with my book The Three Pigs, having characters leave one story and enter different stories, and as they go into the other stories they suddenly become part of the illustration styles of the stories.

Page 71 from the graphic novel Ex Libris, 2020, by Matt Madden (Courtesy of the artist)

Harry Potter’s Last Chapter, 2019, by Eliza Auth (Courtesy of the artist)

VALERIO: A work that caught my attention was Eliza Auth’s Harry Potter’s Last Chapter. Having read the Harry Potter books over a roughly ten-year period with my own son, who’s now twenty-five, I felt a pang of nostalgia. The stylization is soft-focus and softly lit. I don’t want to place it in the 1950s or anything, but there’s something Norman Rockwelllike about it. And that fits with the sentiment of the subject. My son was a little boy at the start of the Harry Potter phenomenon, as were the characters in the books, and he grew up reading the stories, cutting his teeth as a reader, so to speak, and seeing the movies. Like the girl in the painting, he was a teenager when he finished the last chapter of the last book, which I recall as being dark, Deathly Hallows. WIESNER: This is the opposite of the sequential pieces; it’s the single painting that encompasses the storytelling. On a formal level I love the way the artist works your eye around the canvas. It is really beautiful, expertly done. Your eye starts with the arm that comes up to the book then moves to the character at the top, to her bent arm, back down to the head. Auth creates a circular movement through the painting. I’d love to see Harry Potter’s First Chapter. How old were the characters when they started reading?

HRUSZKEWYCZ: She explained that when she saw your title, Seeing the Story, she immediately thought about this painting, because these are her daughters. It’s very much like your experience, Bill: they read Harry Potter to each other throughout

Wave Sequence I, 2020, by Christopher Houston (Courtesy of the artist)

their childhood. She’s “seeing the story” as her sister reads to her.

WIESNER: That’s great. I also responded to Christopher Houston’s work Wave Sequence I. It feels like some kind of story to me. There’s some narrative, some relationship between all the pieces of paper. I love that there’s no color; it’s just texture, shape, line to a certain extent, and there’s something very pure about those basic elements. In different settings the shadows alone can set up very different experiences.

ORTWEIN: The changes suggest the time passage, and the time passage automatically then leads you into some kind of development or story, which is consistent throughout a lot of the selections. WIESNER: I agree. I also want to discuss Hanna Vogel’s sculpture. In the description she included with her submission, Vogel posited that these are abodes, potential places where someone or something lives. I’ve read enough science fiction/ fantasy that I had instant associations with this very otherworldly kind of living situation.

VALERIO: There’s also something scary about the cocoon-like entities; they remind me of Invasion of the Body Snatchers.

WIESNER: Yeah, there’s an element of that. They have a relationship to the natural world, too. They’re also just beautiful shapes. I love that the light and shadow become part of the environment they create. It’s its own world. Anyone seeing it can formulate whatever interpretation they’d like.

Elsewhere, 2017, by Hanna Vogel (Courtesy of the artist)

Top: Weathering the Storm, 2019, by Chris Cox (Courtesy of the artist); bottom: NYP18 what’s going on out there #2?, 2017, by John Costanza (Courtesy of the artist) VALERIO: This is another work that seems so relevant to our current moment: a creature emerges from a cocoon in a new form. Hopefully we are on the verge of being able to do that as well.

WIESNER: I agree. Looking next at John Costanza’s painting, it’s a brick wall with a window at the top and a big shadow nearly across the entire surface. An elderly figure is looking out of it. I remember initially wondering what was going on from that story standpoint. But when I looked at it the other day for the first time since last year, it had a whole different meaning. Isolated from the world behind a wall, it’s like, “Don’t come near me.” These are now horrifying. Having watched my wife’s mother where she’s living and suddenly at her age cut off from others gave this image a whole new meaning. I’ve been hearing stories from other people talking about their parents, where they’re safe physically, but the isolation has been a roller coaster for them. This painting is exactly the visual representation of that feeling, which I didn’t think about or feel when I selected this work last year.

VALERIO: Our minds are in such a specific kind of place. I felt similarly when I looked again at the painting by Chris Cox called Weathering the Storm. It’s hard not to read those forms as figures that are isolated.

Blue Boy, 2019, by Robert Beck (Courtesy of Morpeth Contemporary, Hopewell, NJ)

WIESNER: I had that reaction when I looked at this as well. There was always that quality to it, but it was even more pronounced.

VALERIO: One work that’s different in spirit is Robert Beck’s painting of a whale.

WIESNER: You read into that face, and it’s weathered and massive. There’s something about the weight of it just hanging there. It also has a humorous side.

VALERIO: The title made me laugh too, Blue Boy, of course, is one of Thomas Gainsborough’s great masterpieces. And that “blue boy” is of course, an English aristocrat. So is Beck’s painting a comment on social hierarchy? At the same time, the whale is isolated, alone in the vast ocean. An important element of the composition is the view upward to the patches of light on the surface of the water. The suggestion of the sky above conveys a sense of the ocean’s immensity. Here’s an enormous animal in a vast space, but floating alone.

HRUSZKEWYCZ: There are two big fish in this show! David, you also selected Jeff Brown’s painting Swim: Locust Street.

WIESNER: When I saw this I was reminded of photographer Jerry Uelsmann, who was one of the first people I was aware of who was combining images in a dark room without the computer, making transformational kinds of things, impossible situations. Computer software now makes it possible to create a more seamless alteration of reality than older methods. The fish, of course, is near and dear to my heart. Fish are a big part of my work, especially fish where they shouldn’t be. There’s a surrealist connotation, a Magritte-esque quality. Again, it’s an empty environment.

TOW: The other thing about the whale painting is that whales are social. They travel in groups, and that whale is alone, whereas the surreal quality of Swim: Locust Street suggests a different kind of ironic humor. The fish isn’t distressed, but why is it so large and traveling through Philadelphia?

WIESNER: Yes, the humor in Brown’s piece is a big part of its appeal to me. It’s literally a fish out of water!

VALERIO: We know the work of Lynne Campbell at Woodmere. We’ve shown her paintings of cats before in other contexts. She’s always got this lone cat on a journey. The cat takes on human characteristics the way the whale did.

WIESNER: The cat appears almost frozen, not because of snow, but immobilized, and you recognize that feeling of, what do I do? How do I cope with everything?

Top: Swim: Locust Street, 2020, by Jeff Brown (Courtesy of the artist); bottom: Winter (Ginger Cat), 2020, by Lynne Campbell (Courtesy of the artist) VALERIO: If you know cats, it’s all conveyed in the stance of the tail, the head, the ears. Again, it’s astonishing how we can’t help but apply our pandemic sensibility to the interpretation of art. I know and admire Lynne’s work, and I’ve always had a sense that her cats were on a journey, but now I do not see it in the same way.

WIESNER: Matthew Borgen uses a classic ligne claire (“clear line”) approach to standalone images that intentionally reference the comic book style. All the disparate elements seem to signify different tropes from pulp novels and movies.

VALERIO: For me, Borgen’s work asks questions about traditional gender assignments that were reinforced by popular illustration. The figure of the

The Letter, 2020, by Matthew Borgen (Courtesy of the artist)

Gas Phase Orbiter, 2019, by Charles Emlen (Courtesy of the Mutherland Collection)

woman is not just repeated in the lamp, but she’s tied to it. Is the guy going to rescue her, or is he the villain?

WIESNER: The woman on the floor feels like she’s out of Mary Worth or one of those 1950s comics. It also feels like film noir. Borgen is using a lot of the archetypes of that sort of classic comic presentation.

VALERIO: It feels like a story inside the story. She’s reading a letter, and perhaps what we’re seeing is a manifestation of what’s on her mind. I look forward to seeing it so I can puzzle it out.

WIESNER: Me too. I keep coming back to thinking I can’t wait to see all of these in person.

HRUSZKEWYCZ: There’s not a lot of sculpture, but you did choose Gas Phase Orbiter by Charles Emlen.

WIESNER: I smiled as soon as I saw it. Now of course I look at it and I think, hey, it’s coronavirus. I thought of Flash Gordon, Buck Rogers. It’s got a steampunk, retro, Sputnik wonderful summation of a lot of iconography of old science fiction, and Jules Verne type things, stories from the past.

HRUSZKEWYCZ: It also seems like it could move.

WIESNER: Yeah, I want to launch the thing and see it take off.

HRUSZKEWYCZ: There’s a work that caught my attention by Mikel Elam. When he submitted his painting, he explained, “Suits is a narrative about our culture at large. We’re consumed with buying, selling. While making I thought of three artists: Robert Longo, because of his large-scale men in suits drawings; Romare Bearden, who utilizes collage in way that speaks to me; and Francis Bacon, who took figurative art into abstraction by means of dragging, smearing, and smudging.”

WIESNER: That’s a great triumvirate.

VALERIO: They’re expressionistic figures. I love the figure with the huge ear and the figure on the left with the intense gaze. He’s looking off at something,

Suits, 2020, by Mikel Elam (Courtesy of the artist)

but what’s he seeing out in the world? Each figure represents a different sensory relationship.

WIESNER: I love the blurring, the smearing of the figures. You’re right, there seems to be something very different going on with each of them that’s hard to pinpoint—and maybe that’s the point.

VALERIO: The historic placement is also important; the dark suits and ties suggest the late 1960s and the civil rights era, and so do the bright, graphic colors. That the figures are connected from shoulder to shoulder suggests a unity in the face of external threat. That an artist today wants us to look back in this way speaks to the degree to which so much hasn’t changed with regard to the struggle for racial equality.

History also plays a role in the work you selected by Paul DuSold, who is a friend and a teacher in Woodmere’s studio program. In terms of storytelling, it’s probably the most ancient narrative in the show, coming from Greek mythology: the Judgment of Paris. On the face of it, there couldn’t be a more sexist story, and we have to ask why an artist like DuSold, whose sensibility is forward looking, would focus our attention on it today. Forced to select that most beautiful of the Olympian goddesses, the mortal, Paris, chooses Aphrodite, who is of course the goddess of beauty. I presume she is the figure at right in shadow, emerging from the water. But in this rendering, the goddesses do not seem to need Paris’s approval. They seem confident. The reclining figure in the lower left even seems self-absorbed. And the process was corrupt to begin with. In exchange for the prize, Aphrodite had promised Paris to arrange his marriage to Helen of Troy, thereby setting in motion the Trojan Wars and the violent upheaval of the Greek world. Again, I can’t help but interpret the painting somewhat darkly, despite the rococo

The Judgment of Paris, 2019, by Paul DuSold (Courtesy of the artist)

colorations and DuSold’s creamy handling of paint and sensual sensibility: what are the temptations and flawed decisions that we imperfect humans make with regard to nature and social structure, such that water and fire are destroying large swaths of the planet, and diseases travel from bats to humans? The question at the heart of the ancient narrative remains important.

Embark Discovery, 2018, by Arthur Haywood (Courtesy of the artist)

Kingdom, May 2019, by Adelyne Rizzo (Courtesy of Kim and Mike King)

WIESNER: I agree that DuSold’s painting feels very classical, but the figures also strike me as contemporary individuals. It’s the mix of modern and ancient, new and old that I like so much. He’s trying to push this forward into current times. There are other pieces that have a strong classical feel to them and it was interesting to see this group begin to form as I was going through the submissions. The dichotomy between the contemporary and the ancient world we were just talking about is what is so striking. Arthur Haywood’s Embark Discovery feels like it’s in Alpha Centauri. There’s something about the setting that relates to science fiction and film, almost futuristic. Haywood uses both a very classical presentation with elements that are strange and otherworldly. I think these paintings will be an interesting juxtaposition in the show.

VALERIO: Also Adelyne Rizzo’s Kingdom is authentically romantic, but the realism of the figures makes them feel contemporary. I wanted to ask you to talk about your selection from Woodmere’s collection. You are including Rob Matthews series Knoxville Girl. Why did you select this?

WIESNER: How fortuitous that this work from Rob Matthews came to Woodmere in time for this exhibition given that narrative and sequence are essential to its presentation. I’m reminded of the satirical morality sequences that William Hogarth created in his series of prints, A Rake’s Progress and A Harlot’s Progress.

I also connected the final image, The Park, with Michelangelo Antonioni’s film, Blow-Up, with its obsessive examination of a landscape—a park—and whether a murder had happened there. Matthews’

image of the park asks the viewer to consider the violent events of the story in the idyll of the wider, seemingly peaceful, world.

Matthews uses the sequence of images in the way comics do, by having the spaces between the images as places for the viewer to fill in their own narrative connections and in his choices of what and what not to show in telling his story.

I want to mention two artists in particular, Matt Phelan and Judy Schachner. They’re both remarkable storytellers. Phelan is a fabulous draftsman, and Schachner uses collage and paint and pencil and all sorts of stuff. An amalgam of disciplines go into book making, including typography, graphic design, drawing, and painting. Often when people see the original paintings or process work for a picture book they go, oh, I had no idea so much work went into it! I think many people think these books just magically appear, or it takes a couple of weeks to make one. The picture book is as deeply considered as any other art form, at least in the hands of a good artist. I’m delighted to be able to showcase a couple of the best.

VALERIO: In our activities and exhibitions at Woodmere, we are always exploring what is it that distinguishes art in Philadelphia from art in New York or Chicago or California or anyplace else. Something that distinguishes the culture of Philadelphia going back to Benjamin Franklin’s time and up through Curtis Publishing is the illustration arts. Storytelling is part of the DNA of the arts in our city, and I’m thrilled with this exhibition for that reason.

WIESNER: More power to you for the continuous focus on illustration! For many museums, showing the work of illustrators is a one-time thing. At

Top to bottom: Knoxville Girl: Approval; Knoxville Girl: Retrieval; Knoxville Girl: The Deposition, 2007, by Rob Matthews (Gift of the artist and Rebecca Kerlin in honor of Joe Yohlin, 2020)

Knoxville Girl: The Park, 2007, by Rob Matthews (Gift of the artist and Rebecca Kerlin in honor of Joe Yohlin, 2020)

Portrait of Frederick Douglass, 1973, by Jerry Pinkney (Woodmere Art Museum: Museum purchase, 2020)

Woodmere, it’s wonderful to see that Jerry Pinkney and Charlie Santore are part of the family, and their work is given the exposure and serious consideration it deserves. I’m thrilled that I’m part of this community and can access it, and that illustration is part of the mix of things that you present.

VALERIO: It’s a big part of what the Philadelphia art community is about, but there’s also something very satisfying about art that tells a story. Reading an image like Schachner’s Stretchy McHandsome, with the cat’s two different color eyes and heartshaped nose is a magically sweet experience. There’s so much about it that’s warming, and that’s an important function of art.

TOW: So, this work isn’t about isolation? WIESNER: It is about community and connection.

TOW: It is, and it’s playful. It shows that the world is also a sweet place.

VALERIO: Thank you, David! On behalf of everyone at Woodmere, we’re grateful to you for putting such thoughtfulness into the selections, and I can’t wait to see the show.

Sesame Street, for TV Guide, 1980, by Charles Santore (Woodmere Art Museum: Gift of the artist, 2017)

Clockwise from top right: From the book Little Robot Alone by Patricia MacLachlan and Emily MacLachlan Charest, 2018, illustrations by Matt Phelan (Courtesy of the artist); Spot: Robots, 2015, by David Wiesner (Courtesy of the artist); Stretchy McHandsome, 2019, from Stretchy McHandsome, by Judy Schachner (Courtesy of the artist)