A TEI Project

Interview of Tony Delap

Contents

1. Transcript

1.1. TAPE NUMBER: I, SIDE ONE JANUARY 14, 1976

AUPING:
When and where were you born, Tony?
DELAP:
On November 4, 1927, at the old Merritt Hospital in Oakland, which is now Permanente, I believe. Kaiser Permanente is on the corner of Broadway and Arthur, in Oakland. When the hospital was torn down I'm not quite sure, but that's where I saw the light of day.
AUPING:
Are your parents native Californians also?
DELAP:
No. My father [Truman Henry Delap] was from Oregon, and then my mother [Catherine Yontz Delap] was from Ohio. My father came to California first, I think, to attend high school in Woodland, California. I remember him telling me that he was tossed out of bed by the great earthquake in San Francisco; he looked out the window, and he could see the sky all beautifully crimson. When was that? In 1906 or something like that. But my father attended high school at Woodland, and then I guess he went back to—he was from Klamath Falls, Oregon—the Klamath Falls area and did some odd jobs. I think he taught school for a year, and worked in the fields, and that kind of thing. And then, eventually, he headed back down to San Francisco and went to law school, which was Boalt Hall, but that was before Boalt Hall became a part of the University of California. And he graduated from law school in 1911. So he was one of the real old-timers, as far as the law profession in California was concerned. So he got in that many years of practicing law before World War I. Then he joined up in the United States Army in the artillery at the time of the outbreak of World War I, when we entered the war. He took his officer's training at the Presidio, was sent overseas, and was in a battle or two with the United States, as a first lieutenant in the United States artillery. And when the Armistice was signed, he came home and went back to practicing law. He settled in the town of Richmond, which as you probably know is across the bay, a little north from San Francisco, a little north from Berkeley. And he opened a law office there. My father died last year, just a few days after Christmas a year ago, at the age of eighty-nine. A few years before that, he had retired. I guess he retired at about the age of eighty-five, and he was, at that time, the oldest practicing attorney in Northern California. I need to qualify that: I'm not sure if that took in San Francisco, or just the East Bay side. But anyway, he was one of the real old-timers.
AUPING:
Were your parents at all art-oriented? Did they have any contact with the visual arts?
DELAP:
No, they did not. My mother is living. She's about twelve years younger than my father; I think she's seventy-seven now. And she is not art-oriented at all. She comes from an Ohio family. She had a couple brothers. And her mother, my grandmother, had several sisters, one of them [Rose Abbott] who, I guess you could say, was rather artistic. When I was a little boy, I used to love to go to their house because I always thought it was a much more interesting house than not only our own but [also] other people's that I knew in the neighborhood, because my aunt collected—a few of the things I have, as a matter of fact. She had, for example, a Maria pot—you know, the Southwest Indian lady? Yes, down here. I've got two of them. I don't know whether it's this one or—not that you're pointing to, but—
AUPING:
Maria Poveka. Right?
DELAP:
Yeah. And that pot, she must have gotten, oh, I would say maybe in the twenties or thirties. Her husband was a doctor, and he was the local physician for the Santa Fe Railroad. So they had an open ticket any time they wanted it and could take the Santa Fe Railroad to the country. And they would spend a fair amount of time in the Santa Fe, New Mexico, area. Anyway, she had things from that part of the country around the house, Navajo rugs, some pots—nothing extensive, nothing even I don't think very knowing from her standpoint. But she had what I think today we would think of as sort of—she had some unique tastes. And her house, to my way of thinking—it's all quite clear to me, really—was maybe more like what, at least for those days, you would find in, oh, maybe the East, or something of that sort. It showed an interest in aspects of archaeology and a certain amount of rather nice antiques from various periods, and so on and so forth. Plus the fact that she always had New Yorker magazines there. And I remember—I couldn't have been much more than eight or nine, maybe; I don't think I was even ten—I didn't understand what the magazines were about, but I was really attracted to them because of the drawings, the cartoons, and so on. So I used to love to go there because she always had a stack of New Yorkers. There were other things about her house that were interesting, the decor in the various rooms and so on—it's all very clear to me. I used to go down there and bum White King soap from her, which finally got to be a bit of a problem for my mother, who finally had to put a stop to it. My mother wouldn't give me any more White King soap, so I'd go down and bum it from my aunt, to carve. I'd make little figures out of this White King soap. That was the big thing with me. I couldn't have been very old: I was about eleven, I guess, or twelve. And finally my aunt, you know, just really had to do something about it; so she called my mother, and in a very nice way, she said, "You know, Tony has taken all my White King soap." I can't remember what I carved, but I carved—I tried to carve, anyway—the animals and stuff like that.
AUPING:
When you were at that age, did you ever consider yourself as an artist, or any kind of career as an artist?
DELAP:
Yeah, I think I really did. I think I was protective of art, and very defensive about art, as I think of it and try to answer your question, even at a very young age, because I did not have any real affirmation of that kind of interest really on any side of my family. My father was a marvelous man, and he was very, very good in the sense that never, ever did he try to impose any kind of profession, for example, on me. So whatever guilts or difficulties I had in growing up were by and large my own fantasies, which doesn't mean there wasn't maybe good reason for a lot of the difficulties that maybe younger kids who eventually become artists have because of similar backgrounds. At least it was not anything intentional on anybody's part. In other words, if I wanted to do this or do that, my father was—I wouldn't say overly indulgent, but he never complained. Nor my mother. And I never, like I guess is difficult for some kids, got that bit about, "Well, I'm an attorney, and I want you to be," or a professional man, or something of that sort. So whatever my father, in those early days, actually thought and felt was never really transferred to me, except what maybe I might have felt I should have been doing, which I must say caused difficulty because—not to be dramatic or overly dramatic about it, but I think every artist I know has gone through a similar problem of loneliness and confusion simply because that's the nature, it seems to be, of the game. Or it can be. So I had those kind of difficulties. But at the same time there was an awful lot of other things I was always interested in. I was interested in so many things, as I mull it all over, from a very young age on through. I remember very clearly drawing a boat in kindergarten, and how really amazed the teacher seemed to be because I put all the rigging in. I can almost remember that boat I drew, with the rigging; it was like the S. S. Constitution, or something like that, you know. That was when I was in kindergarten,. just one of the almost isolated experiences that has stuck in my mind. I wasn't a terrible student, but I was a poor student in most everything else. I was a poor math student, I was a poor language student, I was a lethargic history student, and so on down the line. Chemistry confused me, and so on and so forth. During those early years, I wanted to be a lot of things. I would see an acrobat, and I wanted to be an acrobat. I would see a magician; I would want to be a magician or a juggler. And I had fantasies about, you know—I would see Gene Krupa, or somebody, and I wanted to be a drummer. I never took drums, but I took trumpet lessons, and I was really not very good at that. And after I realized that it was probably an awful lot of hard work to really be good at it, I was off on some-thing else. I took tumbling, because I had a friend who—he was an older friend, but I was right at. that impressionable age of having heroes, older boy heroes, and he was a California state [champion] tumbler. And I wanted to be able to tumble like that. Well, of course, I never could; I didn't have the talent for it. But I took tumbling. And I remember I took—both my sister and I took elocution lessons, and we did dumb things like sing songs, and I could never sing, and it was just really silly. Piano lessons: I took piano lessons, and I was bad. No real interest or anything. I can't remember that I took anything else, in that sense. That was enough.
AUPING:
But you got a good feedback from the visual arts.
DELAP:
Yeah, I think I did. From a very early age, I was—the local teachers and all were impressed with what I did, my interest and that kind of thing. But I also was in an area in Richmond, a working man's town, a very unsophisticated area—and we're also talking forty-five years ago, forty-two, forty-three years ago. It was not a fertile climate for anyone who wanted to be an artist, or had inclinations toward being an artist, because there was really not the sophistication among the teachers and all, in those days, in that area, to give you any real—I mean, even if they were sympathetic to you, and I had some who were, they couldn't really make any kind of real decisions—I mean, good decisions. They couldn't give you any kind of real, positive help. I had a teacher in the sixth grade—or actually before I was in the sixth grade there was the principal of the grammar school [Mrs. Lancaster]. She was a marvelous lady. She was very impressed with my interests and the things I drew and painted. And I was at that time having such a bad time with my regular schooling that she gave me a little room behind her principal's office. I went in there and I did posters for the school and all that sort of thing. I felt a bit like a freak, but at the same time, it was like having my own studio. She let me do that in lieu of going to other classes. I was sort of a privileged kind of person in that sense. And that helped me. She was, I think, particularly—she obviously was sensitive to the whole thing. But she was more so than really any of the others that I met. Some of them were, I would say, just downright dumb about the whole thing. But anyway, during those years of grammar school and junior high school, I was, exclusive of liking to draw and make things—I probably liked to make things during all that more than I actually drew, I don't know. At least I spent more time making models and that, just everything. God, I made models of—I mean, I made model airplanes and model boats and model cars. But I also, like, made models of—I'd make models of gas stations and models of hot-dog stands. I mean, I designed them and built them. And that whole scale was impressive to me, that kind of fantasy of models. You know, there's that whole kind of quality a model has in reference to a scale, and all that can transport you into a whole other kind of world, and that was very attractive to me. So I spent just great amounts of time working on those kinds of things. But then I would flit around to other things, to drawing—and I liked guns at that time, because I had a boyfriend—I got a little older; now I'm speaking of like thirteen, fourteen, something like that—who I used to hunt and fish with. I had those interests, and then we had horses, horses as recreation. I have an older sister [Christine] who's almost three years older than I am, and she particularly enjoyed horses, really more than I did, but I, at a certain age, did, too. My father was a real fancier of horses and liked riding horses on weekends. I think that he mainly liked it because it gave him a chance to withdraw and get away from what he did in the field of law. I think he used it almost as a meditative situation, because he enjoyed riding with one of the family; but he would never ride, for example, with other people. He would either ride with a member of the family or by himself. And he would go off for all day on his horse and would take a little lunch, this kind of thing. He was a very—not a strange guy, but he was an interesting guy in that sense, because he—well, I can get off on that later, but what was your question? [laughter]
AUPING:
Well, what I'm thinking of now—when you got into high school and you started to have a choice of what classes you took, did you gravitate toward the art classes?
DELAP:
Yeah? I remember being very concerned about my art classes and all when I was in junior high school, and then of course, I mentioned a moment ago about my experience in grammar school with the principal, in my little room there, where I could work. When I was in junior high school, I took some shop courses, metal shop and wood shop, I guess. (I think I told this to Alan Solomon, as a matter of fact, at one time, which I believe he maybe even mentioned in that earlier catalog he did.) I had a problem trying to decide whether to take a particular metal shop class or an art class. I finally defected for the metal shop class, and then I felt guilty because I felt, you see, that I had let down art, and it really bothered me. I got over it, but then I remember the next year, or the next time when the classes changed, I went back and took the art class. It was a real—I mean, obviously it was my problem, but I remember at the time it was really a heavy problem, because I really felt badly.
AUPING:
Can you remember how you felt about art at that time, what your concept of art was?
DELAP:
Well, I don't know; it's hard to say. I remember I would copy things and I guess sort of do as so many people did who took those really quite awful, at least early or elementary and those sorts of drawing classes--people were simply ignorant of the problems. But I did so many things on my own. For example, I was very interested in printing—in other words, in lettering. And I remember that, from a very early age, I would print signs. I kind of thought maybe I wanted to be a sign painter or something. Then when I learned a little bit more about things, I realized that you could still deal in graphics but you didn't necessarily have to be a sign painter. You could be a graphic designer, or something like that. Well, that seemed interesting to me. I remember, one of my favorite books was that Speedball textbook, which when I was a kid was about twenty-five cents; I had Speedball pens. I would practice Old English, and I would practice various styles of lettering, and all that kind of thing. And when I was in high school, I had a part-time job at the YMCA, which was a terrific job, particularly in those days. I'd paint all their signs, and I got something like fifteen dollars a week or something of this sort, which was terrific: it was sixty dollars a month, which bought gas for my car, and that kind of thing. But that was sort of a nice job. And then I taught out in a predominantly black area, out around Point Richmond, for the recreation department, young black people—I taught a kind of an art workshop out there, and we did lots of posters and that kind of thing. I was in high school then.
AUPING:
This was at Richmond High?
DELAP:
This was at Richmond, yeah, when I was at Richmond High School.
AUPING:
Can you remember any teachers, or classes, specific classes, that had an effect on you that somehow stick out in your memory from Richmond?
DELAP:
Good or bad?
AUPING:
Either way.
DELAP:
I guess I could remember several that I wasn't very happy with. I remember that I took a French class with a really nice lady who said to me, after the end of about a year or so, "I'll make a deal with you." And I said, "Well, what is it?" She said, "I'll pass you, if you promise never to take another class from me." And I said, "Well, fine." We kind of shook hands, and she passed me. But most of my experiences were either okay—the situation was sort of passive—or it was a bit unpleasant because, as I say, I really kind of had a hard time with school. However, in high school the outstanding person of my time there was the track coach, who was a marvelous guy. I was a good track star: I was a track star, actually. That was very nice because it's always nice to be a star of anything. It was very good for me because it gave me a chance to release some ego that I had never at that time had a great chance to do, particularly in anything having to do with school. So I enjoyed high school, in a way, because I was very involved in track for pretty much the three years that I was there. I was captain of the track team and this kind of thing. I really did love it; as I say again, you like things, I guess, that you're fairly good at. And, Phil Hempler, who was the track coach, was just one of those really very marvelous men. It certainly didn't have anything to do with art, but maybe in a way it did, too. Again, there's something very meditative and marvelous about running. I used to love to run; I used to love to practice. I would practice hard almost every night, or at least when we started track training. Our home was, well, three or four miles from Richmond High School, and I often would choose to walk or run home from there. I was really a bear about all that. And I still run. I still go to the beach to try to run several days a week. I find it really sets me up and makes me feel very it tones you up. So that was a very important part of my early years, particularly the high school years. And I took an art class—I can't really remember the lady now—and I kind of liked that. I remember, I think, the art class was the period before I went out for track, which I believe was like after lunch or something, and I always felt from that point on I had the day made, because I went to my art class, and then I'd go out for track after the art class, and all that was very attractive to me. But in the morning I had chemistry and history, or whatever it was, and it was always, you know, a bit heavy and depressing. I was into cars, and all that stuff then too. I was a car addict.
AUPING:
You customized cars?
DELAP:
Well, yeah, I had a '36 Ford convertible that was in great shape, and I spent probably a good part of my waking hours working on that. I was a lousy mechanic but I could always make them look great. So cars were a real mistress to me, beginning in high school; it remained so for a long period of time. I had a great love affair, many love affairs with automobiles, and they were probably to me all the symbols that they are to everyone else. But I have had a fair amount of reasonably exotic automobiles, and I just love them.
AUPING:
Leaving high school you went to Menlo Junior College. Not having had that much of a good time in high school, what was your motivation and what was in your mind in attending Menlo? How did that come about?
DELAP:
Well, that's probably a good question. All right. I finished high school, I think, in 1945. It's kind of a funny thing. I always sort of—like I never really knew what I was going to do, but I always kind of never really worried about it. I worried about a hell of a lot of things, but I never really kind of worried about what I was going to do. I mean, I never felt desperate over what I was going to do. I always felt, or wondered often, how I was going to have the time to do what I wanted to do; and I think that I often felt maybe some fear or whatever that somebody was going to take that privilege away from me, that I couldn't do art any longer because I would have to do something else. I still in a sense feel that way a little bit. I mean, I still think that one of the greatest rewards an artist can have is to have the excuse to work. I mean, to find reasons to always engage himself in art. Probably one of the reasons that I did not have any real hang-ups about that was because I did have, in those early years, some help from home? I was always trying to make a buck, but when that didn't come in, I would get the help from my dad to get through, and so on and so forth. I was always, of course, very thankful that that situation was like it was. Well, anyway, I graduated from high school, and it was a very, very uncertain time for young men because of the war, World War II. I was always about six, seven or eight months younger than my peer group, simply because I started a few months earlier. So when I graduated from high school, many of my close friends were drafted because they were that little bit older. Or if they were not drafted, they were going to be very soon, so they just joined the Marine Corps or something of the sort. And because I was a little younger, I had just a little bit of time in there before I was really eligible, because I was still seventeen when I graduated from high school. This is all hazy to me, but I believe it was eighteen when you were drafted, you see. And the war with Japan was just at about that time; maybe the war with Japan was actually over before I graduated from high school. Anyways, it was all very close in there. Truman was president, and he still, of course, did not immediately lift the draft situation. Anyway, I went to Menlo Junior College because I thought, well, it's probably a good idea to get some college training, and my grades were not particularly great in the sense of getting into other places, I remember I came somewhat close to going to Dartmouth, which I probably could have gotten into simply because there was such a lack of male students in those days that the universities were—I remember the track coach from Stanford came over and was interested in the possibility of me coming to Stanford, but when he saw my grades in high school, he thought, "Christ almighty, you could be the fastest guy in the world and I don't think I could get you in." I was sort of flattered by that, and I didn't really have any particular interest in going to Stanford, anyway, although at the time my sister was there, in Stanford law school, of all things. But I knew a little bit about the art department at Stanford, and I just—I mean, even at that time, it was just a bit too conservative and uninteresting to me. Now, I was at Menlo, of course, where in a sense there was not even an art department. But trying to answer your question, why did I go to Menlo? Well, I could get in, for one reason.
AUPING:
But you were thinking art at the time.
DELAP:
I was thinking art at the time. I was thinking art at the time, but I also was thinking, well, I'll go to a junior college or someplace for a few years and learn some other things, get another experience. And Menlo was fascinating to me. It was a very interesting experience for me because I had grown up in the Richmond area, where I had been exposed primarily to sons and daughters of working people, and that kind of thing. I went down to Menlo, which really, I found, was kind of a rich boy's preparatory school for Stanford. There were really a few—not a lot, but a few—interesting peo-ple around there, the kinds of people I'd never met before. One of my closest, dearest friends, Conrad Hall, who is the son of the writer James Norman Hall (who wrote Mutiny on the Bounty and all that kind of thing), was at Menlo. And Conrad and I became lifelong friends. Conrad now— I see him occasionally—won an Academy Award for something, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, and he did [John] Huston's last film, Fat City (not the last one, the one before last). But he's one of the very fine commercial cinematographers. I came very close at one time—which is another story in itself—to going into the film business in the early days with Conrad and his partner, who at that time had a small film company. But I mentioned Conrad because he's the most outstanding example of an exposure to things that I had never really had before. Conrad's father, James Norman Hall, I knew very well, and I was always flattered that I had met him and conversed with him when I was that age. They would come in from Tahiti once or twice a year, his family, and they would have an apartment up in San Francisco. Conrad and I would go up on weekends, or he would stay at our house. And because of that, I got to spend time with his father, who was a marvelous man. But that kind of thing—so that was all a great experience for me. I was always impressed by that kind of exposure because I had always assumed, like when I was in Richmond when I was a kid, that there must be—I mean, my life was very comfortable, in a sense; my father was an upper-middle-class attorney and politician, well known in the community and all that kind of thing—a lot more out there than just what I was seeing in this immediate area. So I just kind of figured that the art in a way would sort of kind of take care of itself, I guess.
AUPING:
Did you take art classes at Menlo?
DELAP:
I took an art class from a man—I even remember his name; his name was Mr. Pool—just one of the most knowledgeable people I've ever known. [laughter] There was a little tiny room, and that was called the art room. I'd go in there, and I didn't really do very much, but what I was doing—I was a little sneaky about it, about my Menlo training, because actually when I was at Menlo, Menlo was a source of new experiences mainly because of the acquaintances, the new acquaintances. The educational part was just as drab to me and just about as uninteresting as school had been before, except that I took a psychology class from a Mr. [Paul] Herd, who was an inspiring teacher, and I liked that. It was an area that I knew nothing about. I started thinking a lot about all that, and I found it intriguing and interesting. I liked it quite a lot, and, as I say, I was impressed with him. But the other stuff—there was English and the language. I took (which is more of an amusement than anything else), a course in French from a Mr. Bonny, who was a Communist; he was on the Un-American Activities list in those days. And of course I was—I came from a Republican family, and I had never had the exposure of having sort of an out-and-out avowed Communist teaching a class. So he and I used to get into these terrible battles and rows about politics and so on. So one day, I remember, he got furious at me, and he went to the blackboard and he drew a triangle, like this, on the blackboard, big triangle, and he said, "Delap, this is a shit pile. That's you, right up there at the top." And I picked up this book, this big book, threw it at him, and I hit him right on the head. And I said, "You son of a bitch, I just will not take that." And I got up and I walked out of the classroom. I just walked right to the dean of men, who was a guy I really got along with, and I told him, "I just walked out of Bonny's class. I refuse to have that son of a bitch talk to me like that. I threw a book at him and hit him in the head." And this guy was a good guy, and he kind of smiled, and he said, "Well, don't let him get you down. He's okay; he has his viewpoints. We know what he's all about." And so on and so forth. And he calmed me down. Of course, in looking back on it, it was a marvelous experience. I never had had that kind of experience before; I thought all Communists should be put in jail, behind bars.
AUPING:
Around the same time, say around 1946-47, didn't you attend some classes at the [California] College of Arts and Crafts in Oakland?
DELAP:
Yeah. Well, I did attend a summer class at Arts and Crafts in Oakland. But I was going to say a few minutes ago that when I was at Menlo, I was taking a night class on Tuesday night, I believe, Tuesday and Thursday nights, at the Academy of Art [College] in San Francisco. It was a very kind of funny situation, in a way because I was living at Menlo, of course. My friends were there; I was socializing to the fullest extent with that environment. School was just something that I attended because I wanted to get it over with, and I had to do it to stay there. But my interest, of course, was these little night classes I was taking at the Academy of Art. It's moved several times over the years, but the old Academy of Art was up on Taylor Street in San Francisco, between Sutter and Bush, in a building, of course, that's still there—I think it's Benihana [of Tokyo] restaurant now. But anyway, in those days, the Academy of Art was there, and before that it had been the British Consulate or something of that sort—kind of an attractive building. And the man who owned it was an old guy by the name of Dick Stephens, Richard Stephens. I still remember the first day I went up there and signed in. He came in, and he was a gruff- talking kind of guy who had a much worse bark than he had bite. And to make somewhat of a short story, he and I became good friends. He really liked what I did, and he was one of the first guys that kind of really thought that maybe I would be a pretty good artist. He painted landscapes primarily; he had studied with Andre Lhote in Paris, and that kind of thing. As I say, he was kind of like what you would maybe call one of the last of the old San Francisco Bohemians. He had a wealthy wife, so he lived down in Atherton someplace. She didn't approve of him, and he was bored to death, by and large, with her. He kind of, I guess, a little bit operated his own life, suffered from that kind of situation. He realized, I guess, that this little school, maybe from time to time, needed some of her money, and that kind of thing. But Dick was really just kind of a real old-fashioned Bohemian. Anyway, I always really liked him; I got along very, very well with him. We used to pal around, so: to speak. He had a son my age who went to Stanford. And the son is running the school now. But the son is really kind of more like the mother, and I always had the feeling that Dick kind of liked me a lot better than he did his son, [laughter] which was really true. He just never really was comfortable around the other side of the fence. So anyway, I went there at night, taking commercial art classes. I took drawing, and I would take lettering and design, and so on and so forth. And maybe Dick would teach a class, and then, of course, maybe somebody else would. Those classes would start like at seven, and they would go three hours—so from seven to ten. So I would drive up from Menlo—and I'm quite sure now they were on Tuesday and Thursday nights—and I would drive up from Menlo, and I would go to classes. And then I was out at ten, and I would usually go—I had a real nightclub period in my life, when I was a nightclub freak, habitue. I would go to nightclubs to see entertainers and musicians.
AUPING:
In San Francisco?
DELAP:
In San Francisco. And I had a friend who was a Chinese magician, who played at the Chinese Sky Room—which was a hotel, and then there was a restaurant on top, a big nightclub. I used to go up there and have a beer or something, and then I'd watch the floor show. In those days it was great because they'd have open gambling; they were paying off the police, and it was really exciting. Those big blond broads would be raking in the dice. And I loved all that. And then I had a friend named Jimmy Casanova who was a wild comedian at Coffee Dan's. Coffee Dan's was terrific in those days—this is, what, the late forties?—because Coffee Dan's was down under the street, right next to the Stage Door Theatre, which I think is still there; it would be between Geary and Post Street, on the downhill street, which would be like—well, it's unimportant, but anyway—

1.2. TAPE NUMBER: I, SIDE TWO JANUARY 14, 1976

DELAP:
I was talking about Coffee Dan's, I think, just before we changed reels. Coffee Dan's was down under the street, and I tried to describe about where it was. It was around the corner from the theater district, the Kearny and the Geary Theatre/and that area, right down in there, behind the St. Francis Hotel. And Coffee Dan's was just a great place in those days. You could go down there after hours. Not that we did it, but you could take a bottle in a brown paper bag; and then you could order egg foo yung or something, and drink your booze in your coffee from your brown paper bag, and eat your egg foo yung or whatever, and watch a floor show, which was free because in those days, before the unions cracked down, very good talent would come from the shows that were in town, or the nightclubs after hours, and give free performances. For example, Danny Kaye, I remember, was in one night. So you'd be down there at three in the morning or something, and Danny Kaye would be doing a number or whatever the case may be. And it was really exciting and great. There were, of course, lots of drunk sailors, you know, the whole scene. But anyway, that was really exciting; at least, to me it was. So some of my friends from Menlo would often come up with me, or I'd meet them there at Coffee Dan's after my art class, or we'd end up at Coffee Dan's. It was kind of a wild and woolly scene, and it was always a good time. But anyway, there was this house comedian, Jimmy Casanova—God knows whatever happened to him. He was like a guy out of burlesque. He was a second-rate comic, third-rate comic. But he was nice, and he kind of befriended three or four of us, and I remember on a couple of occasions when we'd meet him after he closed, which must have been four in the morning, and have ham and eggs or something, and then he told stories. Anyway, I did a couple of magic shows at Coffee Dan's in those days and played to drunk sailors and that kind of thing. I asked my friends to come up, which they did.
AUPING:
So you were quite involved in magic at that time?
DELAP:
Yeah. I was involved in magic sporadically at that time. I did one magic show at Menlo for the student body. God knows how good it was, but anyway, I did do it. And then, I think, twice I performed like probably three in the morning at Coffee Dan's; because my friend there, the emcee, let me do it. It was certainly no big deal, but it was kind of satisfying to me at the time. But other nightclubs around San Francisco I would go to. How many i can think of right now, I don't know, and it's probably unimportant, but I would go to see just all kinds of performers. And I guess I'd have a few drinks or couple beers or something. I never got heavy into alcohol or anything. I just sort of liked that whole sort of involvement. And then it just dissipated; I mean, I just lost interest in it totally, in a sense. But nightclubs at that time, first of all, were inexpensive. You could go out for three, four dollars, pay a dollar cover charge or something like that—particularly if you were by yourself or without a date, you know, a couple guys or something. Three or four of us would pay a dollar cover charge and drinks were seventy-five cents, or something like that. So for a couple bucks, you could go out and kind of see a first-rate floor show. Of course, the comparable thing now would be fivefold for the same kind of talent. And I had a more than a passing interest in jazz music, although i am really quite a layman when it comes to music. I respond in a very primitive way, very positively to jazz, and I saw a lot of jazz in San Francisco in those days, particularly a few years later, after the Menlo years, when I moved to San Francisco. But maybe I'm getting ahead of the story. Maybe you've got some other questions.
AUPING:
I'm interested in what kind of things you were making at the Academy of Art.
DELAP:
Yeah, well, I think at that time I was really building what later was to become a great difficulty, because I was building my allegiance to painting, and I was building my allegiance to the world of design. And that of course eventually became a monster. But I was primarily taking commercial art classes at the Academy of Art, although in later years, when I went back, I took other so-called "fine art" classes. And old Dick Stephens and I would go out painting, and occasionally we would be joined by Dong Kingman, the celebrated California water colorist who is sort of about as—he's sort of the Herb Caen of the art world. [laughter] A very enterprising Chinese man who was a very popular San Francisco artist in those days. Dick and I would go to simply marvelous places, like Hunter's Point, or we would go to like Third and Townsend, the train depot down in the industrial area of San Francisco. Those two places we were very heavy on. Or we would go to Fisherman's Wharf. I always liked Fisherman's Wharf because we always ended up at a fish restaurant there, you know, having steamed clams or something of that sort. But we'd paint the boats and did all that, and I loved those days. We'd be out maybe three, four, or five hours, and we'd paint like all afternoon or all morning; and if it was all morning, we'd have a couple of drinks at lunch; and if it was in the afternoon, we'd have a couple beers before we came home. And old Dick was always delighted to go with me because his wife didn't like him to drink, so he always would sneak a few in when he was with me, and she didn't know about it. But those were good years; we had fun. They were unsettling and anxious for me, but at the same time, in looking back, they were good years. They were still very difficult, emotionally difficult.
AUPING:
In what ways were they emotionally difficult?
DELAP:
Well, indecisions, about this, and art was always something—always something more had to be gotten out of it than was coming out of it, you know. Anxiety about that, and probably too much anxiety about wanting to succeed. I, like everybody—you always inherit things, and I think the American syndrome of succeeding was simply inherited. Although my father was very cool about that kind of thing outwardly, particularly to me, he was a very competitive fellow by nature. He was maybe even a great trial lawyer, and he just simply was—he was a little man; he came from a very, very humble background. He really was dedicated to his work; he was a perfectionist in the fine points of law. He was compulsive about his involvement with the practice of law. And I am afraid that I inherited a lot of those traits in reference to my altruistic views about art, and so on and so forth.
AUPING:
When you refer to the anxiety aspect of "making it," were you thinking of making it as an artist or making it as a person with; material things, things you could show and say, "Well, this is what art did for me."
DELAP:
I think I can honestly say that I was not concerned about that. Many times, I wanted to make more than I did, so I would not feel as guilty about the handouts from home; nobody was telling me that I was a bum, but at the same time, everyone has their pride. Particularly when you're young, you wish to be independent. Well, another thing I did inherit was that I've always been a bit abhorred by that sort of grandioseness, you know. And yet, at the same time, the artist is a complex individual. There are many, many things—not many things, there are a few things that I was always attracted to. As I mentioned, cars! I mean, I could today indulge in a Ferrari or a Maserati without any difficulty at all, but then again, it's another thing to worry about. It's the attraction of the object: I mean, it's the energy that manifests itself in that object — to me it's nothing really to do with possession particularly, or anything like that.
AUPING:
The College of Arts and Crafts in Oakland: that was close to the Academy of Art in San Francisco, right?
DELAP:
No, the College of Arts and Crafts is in Oakland, and the Academy of Art, as I said, was in San Francisco.
AUPING:
And were you attending them at the same time?
DELAP:
No, let me see. I was attending, the Academy of Art when I was at Menlo, and then I guess maybe at the end of my first year at Menlo, that first summer, I think, I went to summer school at Arts and Crafts.
AUPING:
What were you taking there?
DELAP:
I was taking a design class, I remember, from a guy by the name of Ralph Siegel; I think that was his name. It was a pretty good course. I learned some things about color, and some disciplines about—I can't remember really, now, but it was a pretty good class. I guess I probably took a drawing class, or maybe a painting class; I can't really remember.
AUPING:
It doesn't stick out in your mind.
DELAP:
It doesn't really stick out in my mind; I was not overly impressed. I remember the thing that impressed me the most was that I had a fantasy at that time about a girl for whom I was trying to write poetry. Unfortunately, she wasn't near as crazy about me as I was for her. But I remember I stayed at Menlo when school was out to work at Menlo to make enough money to buy her a Christmas present—which, looking back on it, was a bloody waste of time. I didn't think so then. And I remember that she spent the summers on the Russian River; so when the weekends finished at Arts and Crafts, I would jump in my car and speed to the Russian River so I could see her. And I remember we went camping that summer—I don't mean the girl and I, but some of my boyfriends and I went camping further up the Mendocino coast. Incidentally, I spent a fair amount of time [up there] during those early years, the Mendocino coast, camping and hunting and trying to hunt. We never really killed very much, which was a good thing. But we did catch some fish because there was some very good trout fishing in the Gualala. stream in those days. We would camp on the Gualala River. But anyway, that country was just to me—although it's still magnificent, it's not as removed as it once was, with things like Sea Ranch [Condominiums] and other influx of people and all coming into the area. But in those days it was just another world, and it was marvelous up there.
AUPING:
I'm trying to make a distinction here. When you attended the Academy of Art in San Francisco, was that the same thing as the Academy of Advertising Art in San Francisco that you attended in 1948?
DELAP:
That would be right, yeah. I possibly am even calling it by the wrong name. However, they have slightly altered their name over the years. I see an ad every now and then in an art magazine or two, and I think now they call it The San Francisco College of Art. I think that, however, you're correct. I think that when I was attending it, its official name was the Academy of Advertising Art.
AUPING:
Did you at this time have any idea, or make a distinction in your mind between, say, fine art and design, or did it all seem to blend together?
DELAP:
No, I don't think it did blend together. Now, let's see; this is before I went to Pomona. Is that what you're asking?
AUPING:
Um-hmm.
DELAP:
Yeah. No, I don't think that it really maybe blended together too terribly much, although I hoped it would. I wished that it would blend together because I think that even at that point, I had real difficulty in trying to figure out why some things, for example, in advertising art, were not as good or even better than aspects of, say, the fine arts. And I was always confused a bit as to why a fine artist, for example, was supposed to be better, in the hierarchy of things, than, say, a commercial artist. And I was always a bit bothered by that. I don't think I felt—I didn't have an anti-intellectual kind of thought about the thing; I wasn't trying to be purposely anti-intellectual. But I must say that probably I approached the fine arts with a bit of reservation about what I felt often was too heavy-handed—too often an automatic put-down in reference to the commercial arts that was not legitimate, that was not fair.
AUPING:
So at that time you hadn't really made a distinction between what you wanted to do, be—say, be a fine artist or—?
DELAP:
I think I kind of wanted to be a Renaissance man. [laughter] I guess I still have a tinge of—I think I always had a bit of a fear that there was going to be an area or something that I wasn't good in or didn't know something about. It's almost hard to describe. But I felt that it was important, that I wasn't doing justice to myself if I didn't know or find out as much as I could about all those areas. I didn't want to ignore one area, because it was just as important as another area. So consequently I just spread myself, as the old saying goes, very, very thin, which I'm not sorry I did. I was trying to find something out of architecture, painting, sculpture, and so on and so forth. Of course, now it's a little more difficult, maybe, to be all things to all people, as far as the arts are concerned, than maybe it was then, because — I mean, I'm talking about a very visual world of activity.
AUPING:
Did you have an idea or a definition in mind of what the function of fine art was at that time?
DELAP:
Yes, I think I did. Probably I always wanted to really just be a so-called "fine artist, " but just by the attraction to so many aspects of the other, I was involved with it all. I think that I had some fantasies about architecture, large-scale design, for example, environmental or graphic, or whatever it may be, that were really a bit of a fantasy in reference to myself. Maybe in the back of my mind I thought I was going to be—I don't know what, but something large and marvelous.
AUPING:
Can you remember any of the fantasies?
DELAP:
Well, the field, of course, that I was particularly interested in—now, we're still talking about before Southern California, aren't we?
AUPING:
Right.
DELAP:
Yeah. I don't think I ever really knew at that time, whether, for example, I wanted to be an illustrator, or whether I wanted to be a graphic designer, a package designer, an architect, an architectural designer—or what. I know in those early years, I went around with a portfolio to several art studios, and had a little encouragement—I was never offered a job. But then I would think about, well, if I'm going to be an illustrator, then I can't be a graphic designer, really, because they don't do it that way too much. And if I get involved in architecture, then I'm not going to be able to do this other kind of thing. And I always felt that I wanted to do it all. I always wanted to feel that I was in a position to be able to do it all. I wanted to be a generalist, in a sense. Well, generalists, I found out—it's a bit of cynicism, I guess—are suspect, to a great extent, because that means you're not a specialist. I think that one of the real unfortunate aspects of the commercial arts is that still today, there are not enough generalists and so many specialists, particularly on the East Coast. For example, it's unheard of for a package designer to design anything but packages, really. I mean, there are rare occasions, with a few people—but by and large, that's what you do. And anyway, that kind of thing always seemed terrible to me. So I thought—getting back to my fantasies—I think my fantasies were that I was going to be, maybe, or wanted to be, the guy who you came to for your art problem. I wanted to design your house, redesign the paint cans for your paint company, and paint the pictures in your house—you know, the whole bloody thing; that my feelings would be hurt if I could only do your house and somebody else was going to do your paint labels, or whatever the case may be. I mean, that's an exaggeration.
AUPING:
How did the move to Southern California come about?
DELAP:
Well, that's, to me, a reasonably interesting story, because Dick Stephens, the Academy of Advertising Art man, was going to Pomona College, through the invitation of Millard Sheets, to give a series of lectures on advertising art in the summer school. Of course, I was at that time attending Dick's school, and Dick said to me one night, when we were having a beer or out painting or something of the sort, "Do you want to go down to Claremont College and study with Millard Sheets?" And of course Millard Sheets was, mainly through Dick and the little bit I knew of the commercial world—I'm going off my train of thought here—Millard Sheets was one of my heroes because he came closer to being one of these guys that I was just speaking of, who sort of did everything. I mean, not only did he make a lot of money, he advised on technicolor films, he painted pictures, he designed buildings, he painted murals, and he did all this kind of stuff. And I thought, well, that's what I want to be. That's the kind of guy I want to be, you know—a dashing figure in the world of art. I want to do all those things. I had met Millard once or twice, a fine-looking guy, and he always was sort of dashing about here and there in airplanes and so on and so forth. And I thought that was just—at the time I thought the guy was pretty good anyway. And that's really what I wanted to be. So anyway, Dick Stephens said to me, "Do you want to do that?" He said, "I think that you should go down there instead of staying here at this crummy school of mine." That's exactly what he said. I laughed, and I said, "Well, gee, that sounds terrific." So I talked to my folks about it and all that kind of thing. And I did it. I went down. I can't remember if Dick and I drove down, or what. But anyway, we got to Pomona for the summer school and attended the class. Of course, he gave six lectures or something, and that took really no time at all on his part, and then he took classes himself. We took classes from—well, I guess I took a class from Millard Sheets, whom I never saw because he was never there. And then I took a painting class from Henry Lee McFee. And of course that was in a sense a turning point in my art career, because for the first time I had met a man of integrity, firsthand. I think maybe even to this day that the best art teacher I ever took from was Henry Lee McFee. One evening here, when Wayne Thiebaud was over for dinner, I told him this story. I was very amused and all because Wayne said, "You know, I'm very jealous of you." And I said, "Why is that?" He said, "Because you had the opportunity to study with Henry Lee McFee. He's always been one of my favorite American artists." But he was a marvelous man and a marvelous teacher. We painted still lifes, and I remember, I painted—you know, I had to start someplace, and the still life was there, so I was painting the still life. And Mr. McFee came up and looked at it and kind of shook his head, or maybe he didn't—I can't remember. But I do remember kind of vaguely what my painting was like, and it was sort of the colors of the commercial art painting, and so on and so forth. It showed some facility, I guess, and this kind of thing. But beginning there, Henry Lee McFee started to teach me [about] quality and [about] things beyond and in depth, far beyond anything I had ever learned in any art school before—what painting and all was about.
AUPING:
A sense of art history?
DELAP:
Yeah, up to a point. Because his experiences and his life—for example, he at one time had shared a studio with [Eugene] Speicher, the great American painter. He was a very good friend of George Bellows. He and Bellows palled around together, they and the other people in the Ash Can School. That kind of thing. So he had marvelous stories to tell. He was a great storyteller, drank Apple Jack brandy, I remember. We used to go up to his house on Friday evenings, and he would tell stories and serve everybody Apple Jack brandy. But he was a real inspiration. He taught me—I mean, without delving real deeply into art theory and all—basic form and color, all of this really in a sense coming through the tradition of Cezanne because Henry Lee McFee was really in a sense a disciple of Cezannian principles. I was not a wildly promising painter, although I did some competent paintings. I was certainly not—I didn't have a magic touch with color. My palette, for example, did not look like a Bonnard or something when I finished. But I structured things highly. My paintings were composed and they were solid, or the better ones were solid in their composition. The color was something that I always wanted to work, of course, but I never really got involved with color for color's sake. And that just follows through in my life. Color has always been to me something that is either right or wrong for what you're doing, but I never have been preoccupied with color per se. That's just part of my—just follows my aesthetic. Many of the students were very involved in color per se. And I was not. Even in that class with McFee, as I say, I was involved really to much more of an extent with form, image, so on and so forth. In other classes I took, in design, for example—I'm talking about that period at Claremont now—it's obvious to me in looking back that other things were so much more important to me. I took an architectural design class from Whitney Smith. It was really, in a way, kind of more of an architectural appreciation course, but we did make things, models and stuff. That was one of my favorite classes in my art training. Maybe in a lot of ways it was my favorite class, because that introduced me first-hand to Frank Lloyd Wright. I got a chance to go through four or five of his Los Angeles buildings. Whitney Smith was a very dedicated kind of architect, a man of really great, high moral principle, very idealistic about his approach to architecture. I liked that and I liked him. And I took a design course from Jean Ames, who is still out there, still teaching, I believe. I saw her about a year ago, the first time in twenty-five years, I guess. She was a very good design teacher. She introduced me to design theory, which I found very valuable—just kind of the basic approach to aspects of design, historically and otherwise. And those were good courses; they were good classes. And as I say, I took a painting class from Millard Sheets, who I never saw because he was always out whizzing around. I began to slowly lose my enamour of that kind of image and so on, particularly after having spent some time with Henry Lee McFee. And I got, then, more and more into painting, of course, and I wanted more and more to paint. But I still had this architectural thing, and this three-dimensional side to me. And I had a very close friend there, who I talked to for the first time the other night on the phone—I haven't talked to him in several years—Paul Darrow. He is a fairly well known artist and teacher and all. Paul's about seven years older than I am, but he was at Pomona when I was; we were both students. Paul has remarried since those days, but he had young children then, and I spent a great deal of my time at his house. Paul was a great, marvelous wit. and a bit of a hero of mine in those days. We palled around a lot together, and as I say, I spent just most all of my time at his house. He and I did a lot of harebrained crazy sort of things in the art world, or tried to. We tried painting murals and occasionally succeeded. We did various jobs for the Broadway stores, painting murals. We were hired actually by the Raymond Loewy people out of New York, who were contracted to the Broadway stores. Then they were not all that enchanted with Paul, but they were with me. I don't know if that's a blessing or not, but I made good money. This was in the fifties, the middle fifties, and even in those days, which is a long time ago now, we could make $100-150 a day. We got like $10 an hour. They had it pretty well fixed up with the unions: I guess the Broadway stores were paying off the unions or something, which we of course had to join (the Painters [Decorators] and Paperhangers union). But we would get paid $10 an hour, and we could work about as long as we wanted. So, often we would work—maybe we got even more than that. But I know that in like a ten-hour day, we would make well over $100 a day and sometimes we'd work seven days a week. So that was just kind of like more money than I had ever seen in my whole life. Sometimes—and these were in new stores going up—we would paint the murals in the lingerie department, and we would paint ribbons around it. Then it got so we could design these as well as paint them. At first they were designed on paper, and we kind of followed the design. I guess the designs came out of the Raymond Loewy office in New York. When I had gone back to Oakland and San Francisco, for many years I would get an occasional job, maybe one a year, or something like that, maybe two a year, to do murals in one of the stores they were opening. I remember one summer I went to Sacramento, stayed there a whole summer—damn near died, it was so hot—painting murals in their store up there, two stores. I must have worked for them for two or three months, and golly, I went, I believe, to San Jose, Sacramento, various stores in Los Angeles, Broadway stores. Off and on I would work for them.
AUPING:
When you were painting these, did you paint them just the way you felt your boss would like them? Or did you try and sort of put a sense of fine art into it?
DELAP:
Yeah, yeah. Well, probably kind of a combination of both. I tried to make them as competent as I could in reference to the problem. I mean, if you were going to do that kind of thing, you had to realize that there was a kind of professional style that was needed to make these things proper for that kind of a job. And I didn't mind that too much, I mean, in limited doses. I would now, God knows. But I didn't mind that too much. Because first of all, it was a job, and I was being paid for it. And I rather liked working at that. I've always liked working at that scale. I found that in that kind of thing, you can sort of get as interested in that as you can really in a lot of things. I mean, if you just kind of look at it in a certain way. So it was hard work and kind of rewarding, in the sense that you would work hard all day, you would be standing on ladders and scaffolding up high, so you'd be darn tired at the end of the day, and then it was satisfying to quit, stop, you know.
AUPING:
Did you ever relate this sense of professional style to there being a sense of style involved in art? You know what I mean?
DELAP:
You mean whether it's fine art or commercial art?
AUPING:
Right, or the sense that fine art is really related to commercial art, in that there are styles, there are formulas maybe, that people—
DELAP:
Yeah. Well, I think there can be, of course. I think that design is a very powerful word in so many ways because it's so many things to so many different people. I think that all great paintings are designed. I mean, [Willem] de Kooning is a marvelous designer; and Rembrandt is a marvelous designer; Leonardo is a marvelous designer; Vermeer is a marvelous designer. A painting is constructed and set up, and the elements of design are strong. But I think that the word "design": often is. thought of as - [merely] decorative design, or it is not design with the complexity of, say, a great painting, and so on and so forth. I don't know if this is at all near what your question is, but I would say that the visual arts are in a sense problems of design.
AUPING:
Yeah.
DELAP:
Now, where were we? We were still in Pomona, I guess.
AUPING:
At that time, did you get involved with the gallery scene in L.A. at all? Was there a gallery scene?
DELAP:
Well, there was not really much of a gallery scene, although about 19—I don't want to be quoted on this, but I would say about 1950, maybe '51, Felix Landau opened. And Felix at that time took on, showed—I guess he showed an awful lot of people, but I know that for a period of time, he did show some of my old acquaintances at Claremont. Doug McClellan comes to mind, who I believe now is chairman of the art department at [UC] Santa Cruz, a painter. And Roger Kuntz, who just recently died—it was very sad— here, about a month ago. Roger showed with Felix Landau. And Sueo Serisawa did, who I believe is an older Los Angeles artist, and very well known by name. And I think Paul Darrow showed there. I never did. I was still learning how to letter or something when all that was going on. I wasn't very active in those early days in that sense. But Jack Zajac, the well-known sculptor—who's really now spent most of his life, certainly his adult life, living living in Italy—was a contemporary of mine. In fact, we saw each other last summer because he had a show on at Santa Barbara when I had a show on, and we reminisced a bit about some of our early days. Jack was a very good friend, a few years younger than I am, but close in age. And Jack was, I would say, the prodigy of the group. He was just one of the early heroes of that Claremont group because, although we certainly would: not think of it now as being true, he was probably one of the more adventuresome artists of that group of that time—I mean, going back to 1951, something of that sort. He was really almost avant-garde as compared to the rest of the people. But I was back in Oakland then, and I was off with all my other kind of goings-on, trying to do all these things, and I had just left that scene by then. And that was about the time that early things were going on, or beginning to start in La Cienega, like the old Ferus Gallery, and so on. And of course some of my friends now were a part of that, like Craig Kauffman, for example, who got in there early, and all. But I am not a student of the history of that. I heard about it from Jim Newman, who started the Dilexi Gallery in San Francisco, and who handled me in the very early sixties, beginning about 1960. He was mixed up at an early time with Walter Hopps and Irving Blum, who started Ferus, and himself had a gallery or a partnership. But Jim left shortly after that, moved to San Francisco. He got his thing going and then opened a branch office in Los Angeles; it was the Dilexi Gallery in Los Angeles. It was being run by Ralph Nelson at that time, who later opened his own gallery on the same side that Felix Landau was on. It went broke, or got very overextended and all. But the Dilexi Gallery was open in Los Angeles for a year or more, and then Jim—I guess the distance and all was too much for him and he closed it down.
AUPING:
What instituted your move back to San Francisco after you attended Claremont?
DELAP:
Well, I don't know, really. It was probably as much financial as anything else. I really had no particular income. My roots were in San Francisco, and I think that I probably missed the area. It was my home, and I was very rooted in my growing up, because the old family home was in El Cerrito, a nice, old, fairly good-sized house that my folks built about the time I was born—

1.3. TAPE NUMBER: XI, SIDE ONE JANUARY 14, 1976

AUPING:
You just moved back to San Francisco from Claremont. What was the motivating factor?
DELAP:
Well, yeah, I think I maybe just started to get into that when we stopped the last tape. I moved back, I guess, for economics, in one sense. I really didn't have at least any regular kind of income, and I would get a little help from homes And my ties were certainly still at that time in the Bay Area. I liked San Francisco. Although I was not living there then, right at that moment, it was in close proximity. There were not any particular reasons for me staying in Southern California. There were no real job offers, so to speak, and as I say, my roots were north. So I went back. I was at that period of time living at the old home, the old family house in El Cerrito, which location-wise was in a little suburb they called Mira Vista, although it was in the El Cerrito, city limits; that was above the city of Richmond, up on the hill above Richmond. Anyhow, I was hanging my hat there, and I got myself a studio in Oakland, at Thirty-first and Grove Street, in the old Allen Building. And there was kind of a marvelous lady, Mrs. Allen, who without exaggeration weighed, oh, I would say between 3 and 400 pounds. I rented the top floor, and she had never been up there before—never—because there was no elevator in the building and she couldn't make the stairs. I rented it from her for fifty dollars a month, like half of the whole top floor. It had north skylights. There were no windows on any of the walls because it was in the peaked roof part of the structure, but there were marvelous skylights and some ventilation and heat. There must have been, all told up there, I guess, oh, 1,000 square feet or more. And there were bathrooms down the hall. And it was a place that was kept up. She had had a son or something that had wanted to be an artist and had died at a young age. So she apparently had this kind of tender spot in her heart for artists. Anyway, we got along all right, and she never bothered me in any way. interestingly enough, she was later indicted on income tax evasion or something, arid I'm not sure if she went to jail or not. But it was kind of a handsome old wood-structure building. There were some commercial artists next door to me, on that same floor, real down-the-line commercial artists—nice fellows, two partners, and then they had other people working there in their shop for them. We all had coffee in the morning together and occasionally we'd go to lunch. Every now and then they would give me a little commercial art job. I remember that—the only thing, as a matter of fact, that I do remember at the moment is that I would occasionally draw or. do architectural renderings of houses for brochures they were doing for tract builders and that kind of thing. I would make the line drawings of the houses. I did a few other things for them, too, but that kind of thing comes to mind. So they were good company to me. But I was mainly painting when I was at that studio in Oakland. I say "mainly" because I didn't have that much commercial work. I kind of always wanted to do commercial work, but I never really liked to go get it; I didn't really like the client-artist relationship because they always wanted to modify something, or they always wanted to change something after I had done it. Emotionally, I wasn't really cut out for that sort of business. If they didn't like what I did, well, then it was always sort of taken as a kind of personal insult. I would often get very moral about my position on the whole thing, and it was difficult, in a sense. But anyway, I did a lot of things when I was at the studio in Oakland, a lot of diversity. I'd come and consult on houses, tract houses, mainly. I had a friend who was in the advertising business down below, the floor below. He was a freelance advertising—I can't really say "agency" because it was about a one-man operation. But one of his clients was—I believe it was called the East Bay Homebuilders Association, something like that. He would get me a little work through them, mainly color consulting. And that, for those days and for me, paid pretty well. They'd give me a plan of maybe 25 houses or maybe 150 houses or something like that, which they were going to build or had built in Fremont or Sacramento or someplace. Then I guess they would tell me how many colors we could work with, six or eight colors, or something of the sort. There were always, of course, economic factors involved. But after the number of colors we could use in these projects was determined, then I would take the plot plan and I would figure out the color combinations of each individual house; and then, using the same colors, I would switch the colors around from one house to the other. In other words, although two houses might be next to each other that were the same plan, I'd make them kind of look different by adjusting the color. But anyway, it was something like that. And then I would get paid like ten dollars a house for color consulting, which was a pretty good deal. I could do the whole thing in a couple of days, and if I had 200 houses to do, well, that was really pretty good money. And then, of course, I had to go out on the job and often see how these things looked; I did some field work. But that was kind of fun. So I did that kind of thing, and then I would do occasional graphic brochures for this or that. We did the Oakland Home Show through my friend Paul Mills—who now, incidentally, is the director of the Santa Barbara Museum. Paul is the guy who eventually, of course, became pretty much the leading light in getting the new Oakland Art Museum launched. But when I first went to Oakland and had my studio there on Grove Street, Paul was the first person in the whole East Bay that I knew, just about, that was involved in the art world. And he had come down recently from Portland, where he had, for a year or so, run the Henri Gallery, or worked in the Henri Gallery. And he got the job as director of the Oakland Art Museum. I think that in those days, he made eighty dollars a month less than a rookie policeman on the Oakland police force. That sticks in my mind because it seemed a little unfair. But Paul and I became good friends. In those days, he was much closer to art and artists than he is these days; over the years he got more and more involved with the administration area and all of museum work. But in those days he was really a terribly knowledgeable person, particularly about Bay Area art. Matter of fact, he did his thesis at Berkeley on the figurative painters, [Richard] Diebenkorn, [David] Park, and [Elmer] Bischoff, that area of activity. But anyway, he was a godsend to me, because he was a guy who was very much involved in what I was interested in. So I became active in the Oakland Art Museum, and I had a—it was kind of a collage-drawing show there; I guess it must have been. I'd have to look it up, but it was in those early years [1960]. What flashes through my mind was that my show, was up just about the time that Richard Diebenkorn had just returned to the figure; and I remember the Diebenkorns, like the painting July Fourth, the marvelous painting of the person on the park bench, and so on. I liked the paintings quite a lot, and in looking back on it, I was telling somebody not too long ago that it's really too bad that I didn't snap one up because I think they were $600. That just is something that flashed through my mind. But anyway, I became active in the Oakland Art Museum, and Paul and I would have lunch and occasionally dinner and that kind of thing. And so he was instrumental to my art interests.
AUPING:
What kind of paintings were you doing when you had this studio above the lady? Were you picking up any information for your art from this color consulting?
DELAP:
Well, yeah, color consulting was just one of the things I was doing. I mentioned about this home show. I don't know if I sold the idea or what to Paul Mills, but Paul Mills, representing the Oakland Art Museum, co-sponsored a home show with the builders, the East Bay builders at the Oakland Home Show. Anyway, I became the designer of this home show. And it was really quite nice considering the time we. did it, because it brought to the area, to the home show, a really very tasteful, quite elegantly presented new design show kind of situation. We got all kinds of contemporary furniture people to contribute to it, and it was really done on quite a high plane. In fact, I saw some photographs that I have of that not too long ago, I mean, just in looking back through some stuff, and it still looks really quite good. So that was one of the things I was doing—designing exhibits, doing occasional exhibit work, exhibit design. But as far as my painting was concerned, that was a separate thing; that was another little world. I was painting in oil paints primarily. I was doing some collage. I remember one painting where I used a metallic kind of paint, gold and silver, but it was collage, a fairly good sized painting. Then I was also still painting still lifes, in my own way. But the paintings were becoming more collagelike, more oriented towards—well, to pull some names out of a hat of artists who I respected in those days, really more by osmosis, certainly, than by first firsthand knowledge, because I was getting most of my information out of art magazines and so on—people like [Conrad] Marca-Relli and Esteban Vicente come to mind, both of them being collage makers. Painting was always difficult for me in the sense that I never could get what I really wanted out of painting, at least in those days. I never could get an immediacy out of painting, that I later found with, for example, collage. There was always something about it that I found constricting and restricting. Occasionally I would get off a painting that I could accept—at least at that time I could accept—but it wasn't often. So I was really just struggling constantly with painting and repainting and destroying and so on and so forth. But I was also going out still in those days painting the landscape. I would go down to the docks in Oakland—what do they call that area?—well, it would be out East Fourteenth Street, I guess. It's East Oakland, but it would be east of like what is now Jack London Square. And the docks down there were—I've always been attracted to docks and that kind of environment. And even later, when I started teaching at Arts and Crafts, I would very often—weather permitting—take my drawing class down to the docks in Oakland. Often we would even take a model down. Anyway, I've always felt very comfortable around that sort of environment. But anyway, I used to go down and draw and paint and so on, for the most part, I guess, by myself. I would do watercolors, or gouaches, or something of the sort. I guess I was pretty eclectic in those days. One day, the paintings would be a little this way, and maybe the next day a little that way, but sometimes they would be a little bit more me than at other times.
AUPING:
After exhibition design, you were an interior designer also, weren't you?
DELAP:
Well, I did do some interiors? most of the interiors were industrial interiors. We did a mural, for example, for Convair Aircraft [now part of General Dynamics Corporation] in San Diego. And very possibly, we did some minor interior work. I say "we"—this was Paul Darrow and myself in those days, because Paul and I did some murals together. And very possibly we did some minor interior design, refurbishing—maybe it was not refurbishing. Maybe it was a new structure: I can't remember. What I do remember is doing the mural. It was a rather cut-and-dried kind of thing, with symbols of various aircraft factories or companies, airlines throughout the world. Rather dull and institutional-looking, thinking back on it. One project we did that was quite a lot of fun was in Oakland, on Grand Lake Avenue, a cocktail lounge that before we did the job had been called the Burma Lounge. And that was where Dave Brubeck got his start. And the Burma Lounge, when we went into this place to start our redesign, had a hideous purple kind of interior. Anyway, I think the story was that—I don't know—Dave Brubeck's piano was there, or had been there, or that was the first one he had. I can't remember exactly. But anyway, he had played there, and it was about the first place that he ever played commercially. I had a friend who was in the glass business; his partner was also of course in the glass business, and this fellow's brother-in-law and my friend's partner wanted to open this bar. And through my friend, they engaged Paul and me to do the design for this new bar they were doing. And that was really a lot of fun, because we did the whole interior. There were just walls of murals, mainly kind of cartoonlike—which sounds worse than it really was—[Saul] Steinberg-like kind of drawings, black lines on white walls. Paul did most of all that, and it was really quite handsome. And I did really the architecture of the space. Anyway, that was a little job we got, and we saw it through, and did a good amount of the physical work our self. When it opened, it was called the Irv Comstock's Open House. That was the name of the bar. It survived there in Oakland for many years and was really a reasonably popular place. That would have been—I'm just guessing, of course—I would say that must have been around '55 to '56.
AUPING:
Also at about that same time, about '55 or '56, you attended a number of design conferences in Aspen.
DELAP:
Yeah. I'm not sure of the first one I went to, but it was somewhere in the middle fifties. But my friend Robert Henry (who I see now during the summer often in Canada because he has a fishing camp up on the coast of British Columbia, which is one of the great places to catch salmon)—at that time, he had a design business; first, It was Pasadena, but then they moved to El Monte. He had a partner named Roger Tierney. They started originally in Pasadena, designing floats for the Rose Parade? they got very large business-wise by doing this and expanded into other areas. They thought they'd class themselves up a little bit and see if they couldn't get some" other business. So they expanded their enterprise and they got into exhibition design and a certain amount of graphic design, that kind of thing. Well, this was the time when advertising, particularly by the aircraft companies, was extremely heavy—Convair, Aerospace, Douglas, and so on were spending large sums of money; large parts of their profits were going into advertising. It was a terribly competitive period for all these companies. These people—I guess I just mentioned it was called Floats, Incorporated. My friend Henry and his partner, Roger, owned the business, and they were loaded down with designing exhibition design for these aircraft companies. Well, I got involved through a friend in meeting Henry and doing some occasional design work for that company. Your question was about the Aspen design conferences. Henry and I became good friends, and I went to the first design conference—I don't think I went up with him, but I met Henry up there—and we went I think probably for about four consecutive years to the design conference. I was very much into aspects of design then on what I think was a reasonably high plane because I, of course, took this [as a] very serious sort of business. And the design conferences were an eye-opener to me—in many ways, I think, maybe the most important part of my art education. For the first time, I met some very impressive people, many of them from other parts of the world, who were not just designers, not just painters, or whatever, but were architects, psychologists, or whatever they were there for—philosophers. At one design conference I attended [Jacob] Bronowski was one of the panelists, and of course that was very impressive. Bronowski died recently. And I can think of another person, [Roman] Vishniac—I think that's the correct pronunciation—the Russian, who, among so many other things, was so very famous for his micro-photography, pioneered the field. But people like Saul Bass, the designer, and Charlie Eames, the designer. Richard Neutra was there one year. And Frank Lloyd Wright was there one year (and, of course, it was one I missed, which looking back on it, has been a great disappointment to me). But Ernesto Rogers, the Italian architect, and the list would go on and on, names that I would really have to think about to discuss now. But it was a very important, very impressive thing to me, and a very good time for me. It expanded my thoughts and brought into focus a great many things to me, one of them being how really important design could be, and really should be, in the sense of making the world a better place to live, a better place to be. I'm interested in that.
AUPING:
You mentioned Frank Lloyd Wright. You've mentioned him a number of times since we've been talking. Did he have a big influence on you as an art student?
DELAP:
Yeah. Not particularly because of any teaching, because I never had a teacher who went into any great depth about Frank Lloyd Wright, although Whitney Smith, the architect who I had at Pomona, talked about Wright and of course admired Wright tremendously. He had been invited, I remember clearly, to Taliesin when Wright was there. And his story about that was impressive to me at the time. But Wright was, in a sense, my own discovery. He was probably the only artist that I ever really accepted in total, I mean, unequivocally. I mean, I don't have any reservations about Wright. I don't have any reservations about his work. I have reservations about isolated things that he did and that kind of thing, but I think Wright is the monumental creative genius in the plastic arts that America has produced. I don't think there's anything that has reached that level, anyone else that has reached that level.
AUPING:
Did you see architecture as part of the fine arts at that time, or what was your definition?
DELAP:
Yeah, I think I did. I think that I was bothered, for example, that —why was it that fine artists, so to speak, didn't take aspects of architecture as seriously as they did painting, or something of the sort? I still feel that way today. When I saw John Coplans a month or so ago, I don't know how we got on it, but he said something about how he was going the next day to interview some architectural critics for writing for Artforum. And I kidded him, and I said, "Well, I tried to tell you ten years ago." Of course, he wasn't running Artforum then, but II tried] to talk Phil Leider and those people into getting more art criticism in that area of activity because it was vitally important and interesting, and it was just dumb to write constantly about painting and sculpture and so forth. The area should be written about, discussed; it should be a part of all art magazines, and so on and so forth, because it's vitally important to, God knows, our daily life, a lot more so than isolated examples of most art. And I feel that very strongly. So I am very socially conscious about that responsibility and have great interest in that area of activity.
AUPING:
Did you feel this way before or after you were an architect for two buildings in the fifties?
DELAP:
Oh, no. I felt this way much before that. The buildings were an opportunity to do something. One was the building that I did for my father's law firm, which is now (my brother-in-law is an attorney) my brother-in-law's office. He severed himself from that law firm but then bought the building—that just happened to be the way it worked out. The other was a house that I designed in Aspen, Colorado, which was "spec-ed" by a friend of mine who is a licensed architect; in other words, I am not capable of "spec-ing" a plan, simply because, first of all, I'm not knowledgeable enough to make the working drawings, and so on. So I basically designed the house in Aspen, and then in working with my friend who was an architect, he did the working drawing. I did the same thing with the office building, but it was through another fellow. But I don't have any illusions about being an architect. Those were interesting projects at the time for me, but again, I don't feel qualified to design professionally, really to design a structure. And I'm not really interested in it in that sense, at least not anymore.
AUPING:
Do you feel that there are any qualities in your work that could relate to architecture or could relate to your attraction to architecture?
DELAP:
Oh, yeah, I think very definitely.
AUPING:
At that time also?
DELAP:
At that time? Now let's see, what time are we talking about? The middle fifties?
AUPING:
Yeah.
DELAP:
Well, yeah, I think all the way through. I think, as I mentioned earlier in our conversation, the more highly structured—whatever it was—was always apparent in my work for the most part. There was certainly something architectural or architectonic about it, whether it's my two-dimensional work or my three-dimensional work. And in the middle fifties, when I was doing a lot of design work, the severity of certainly—commercial design, I think, is somewhat architectural in itself, in its highly structured form—at least in the kind of design I was interested in, which was a very contemporary graphic kind of concern. A lot of my imagery, which later went into the so-called fine art, the later sculptures and paintings and so on, I think in many ways owes a kind of sensibility to that same kind of sensibility which I felt critical to aspects of the commercial design. It doesn't mean that they come out looking exactly the same, but I think there is the same kind of responsibility to the success of the end result, whether it be one or the other. It doesn't mean that one is the less important or the less complex. But the responsibilities are apparent. And that's one of the things that always bothered me because things can be deadly serious on many levels.
AUPING:
What was your reaction to the Bauhaus movement at this time? Considering your sensibility—
DELAP:
Well, I don't know how much, in all honesty, I knew in detail about the Bauhaus in the fifties, although I remember very clearly, just very clearly, going to one of the bookstores in San Francisco that, of course, is now long since gone (they're not gone—they moved from where I'm telling about). But I remember going up to the second floor, and it was a round room there. And I remember finding the book Vision in Motion by [László] Moholy-Nagy—not [The New] Vision, which is really probably the most famous, but Vision in Motion—and buying it, and being just out of my mind with delight by this book. Having a bit of it difficult for me to really understand, but just absolutely enthralled with that book—I still have the same book. And I wasn't too old then; I was in my twenties. Maybe not—maybe I wasn't actually. I doubt if I was, because I was probably still at Menlo; and I was out of Menlo before I was even twenty, because I was only there two years. I was nineteen, I guess, so I was probably about that age. But—getting back to the Bauhaus. That is not necessarily the Bauhaus, but it touches upon it. Then I came across something else, the life of Moholy-Nagy by his wife or something. I knew a little bit about the Bauhaus, but particularly in those days, I didn't have much working knowledge about art history. I did have, strangely enough, a little working knowledge about some of the American painters, some of the regionalists, the Thomas Hart Benton people, John Steuart Curry—just so many names on the tip of my tongue—that whole group of social realists. In my mind I see the paintings of people of that kind of vintage, but it's been so long since I've thought about so many of them that the names escape me. Well, anyway, I had really quite a good working knowledge of a lot of those people because when I was very young, they were really still in vogue. And they were well-known American artists. But as far as earlier history, American history, as far as the modern movement is concerned, the beginnings of twentieth-century art history and so forth, I knew very little about it. I knew very little in particular about the Renaissance, the primitives, and most any other school of history you could come up with.
AUPING:
When did you first start exhibiting professionally, so to speak, or really get serious about the fine art end of your career?
DELAP:
Well, let's see. I'm trying to think of the first show I had. One of the first shows I had, I guess, was at the old Gump's Gallery in San Francisco. That was a two-man show that I shared with my old friend Paul Darrow. Some of the paintings I had in that were landscapes that I had done on the spot around San Francisco and Oakland, a lot of them around the docks and stuff like that. I'd have to consult my own biography to find out when that was? I don't remember. But then I had a show at the Richmond Art Center at a pretty early time [1954]? I remember that. But there were a few other shows earlier than that. Gee, I remember one was at a place called the Fenner-Fuller Restaurant, which was up on Grand Lake Avenue in Oakland, or something; it was an Armenian restaurant, I believe. The reason I had a show there was because the wife of the owner was active in the Oakland Art Museum, and she sort of gave little shows to people. So she gave me a little show, and I had some paintings there. And I know about when that would have been, because I had gone to Europe in 1954, and I had that show—I think that probably would have been about 1955.
AUPING:
What did you pick up in Europe? How did that trip affect you?
DELAP:
Well, that was of course exciting for me. I had never been to Europe before 1954, and I went over with an old friend of mine [Jay Rutledge]—I haven't seen him in many years; I guess he's still in business—who is a stockbroker in Oakland. I must say that he wasn't that wildly interested in art. We got along all right, but he finally had to get back early, so—I'm not quite sure—we were in Germany or someplace, and he upped and had to get on back to work. So I stayed on by myself and went to Italy from wherever I left my friend and paid a call on Jack Zajac, who was at the American Academy in Rome. And Jack and I had a marvelous time. He of course even then knew Italy so well, and Jack and I took some time and went to southern Italy, then went north into Italy. I guess I was there about six weeks and, oh, then another friend, mutual friend of ours came into Naples? in fact, two friends came into Naples, and the four of us palled around for a while. That was great fun. And we had a marvelous time, all four of us. Then I left Jack and flew to Spain. I spent some time in Spain, and went to Mallorca because I had an old high school friend and his wife who were living way out on the eastern tip of Mallorca. And I spent a couple of weeks with them. And they were in a little fishing village there, Cala Ratjada. So all that was very exotic and romantic and inspirational to me. But then I came home.
AUPING:
That would have been around 1955.
DELAP:
In '54.
AUPING:
In '54. Around 1963, jumping ahead a little bit, John Coplans began writing about your work a lot. In one of the catalogs I read, Alan Solomon mentioned that you were very close to John Coplans and that you were—

1.4. TAPE NUMBER: II, SIDE TWO JANUARY 14, 1976

AUPING:
Around 1963, John Coplans became very interested in your work and wrote about it a lot. Alan Solomon had mentioned in a catalog that you were close friends. What was your relationship with John Coplans? How did you come to meet, and what was the situation at the time for you?
DELAP:
Well, it was about 1962 or '63, and John and I were teaching. I'm not absolutely sure where I first met John, but I have a feeling it was probably at Arts and Crafts, because we were both teaching over there. One thing I do remember is I had a show at the San Francisco art museum with—there were four of us involved. There was Fred Martin, and a lady by the name of—a fine friend of ours—Nell Sinton, and Roy Do Forest, and myself. And they were all small format paintings, and we had a show at the San Francisco art museum, and John reviewed the show for Artforum. Before: I saw the review, I saw John — I think it was at Arts and Crafts—and he told me how much he liked this show of ours and how much he liked my work and so forth. And I was enthralled because I never had really been written about or whatever, in any kind of real sense. Actually, I had, but it seemed more important to me at that particular time. Anyway, when I read the review, it was all kind of fine except the last sentence, which was a bit snide; it said something about—well, I can't remember now—somebody else having done it first, or something of the sort, which I thought was really a rather dumb remark. But at any rate, I saw John later, and I kidded him; I said that he would be sorry that he said that, or something of the sort. I don't really quite remember what I said. But anyway, John and I became friends. For one thing, I was living at 3410 California Street, out a bit in the avenues close to the Presidio. Had a terrific place there—tell you about it later if you'd like to know. And John was not too far away. Let's see—what was he on? I don't remember now, but anyway not more than five minutes away by car. He was with his wife at that time, Pat, who was finishing up her architecture—she's now a licensed architect. Of course Pat and John are no longer together, but at that time they were, and they had a nice house there. So I would be over there on occasion to dinner. Or John would be over. John would come over in the evening, and we would talk. I had never really been exposed to anyone as potent as John. John had kind of befriended me. Although I had not done at that time the work that so excited him, we still had sort of become friends and got along rather well. In different ways, we were both outsiders to the San Francisco art world. John was new from England and very critical of what was going on in San Francisco at that time. And I was a bit naive as to what he was being critical of because I really didn't, fit into what was happening in San Francisco at that time either. So anyway, then for some reason—I mean, there are reasons, of course, but it just sort of happened—I put together my first two-sided glass boxes, which merged very, very important thoughts to me of aspects of the commercial design thing and all that I had been very close to for many years, with of course very strong thoughts about painting, sculpture, and architecture that I was also involved in. And when John saw those first boxes, he was enraptured. And we very quickly got along very well. It was just a short time after that that he started writing about that work. Of course, I was working very hard in those days, and also it was right at that time in my life when, to keep from going totally insane, I finally had to decide what I was going to do. Either I was going to just quickly go crazy trying to pray to my god Design, and to pray to my god Fine Art, or I'd evaporate, or do something. What in a sense I think kind of helped save me was Fred Martin, who at that time was teaching at California School of Fine Arts, which is now the San Francisco Art Institute—I sometimes call it by its old name. Fred was my friend. As a matter of fact, I owe a lot to Fred because he not only introduced me to much of the art scene in San Francisco—he was very supportive in those years. And I have felt for a long time that his friendship and his help were very important to me. But I forgot what I was going to say—
AUPING:
You were in the crisis of—
DELAP:
Oh, yeah, right. Fred suggested to a lady who was in administration at Arts and Crafts that I might do some teaching there. I can't remember her name now. But she called me and asked me if I wanted to teach. I was of course overjoyed, because nobody had asked me that. Well, I taught off and on at the Academy of Art, but that was never taken too terribly seriously by me. It was a little school there, and at that time when I taught at the Academy of Art, I was working for young Dick Stephens, not the old man, because he had kind of semi-retired. But anyway, Arts and Crafts called me and asked me if I would teach. I said, "Well, what do you want me to teach?" And they said, "What do you want to teach?" I said, "Well, I don't know; what can I teach?" They said, "You can teach as much as you want. " So I said, "You mean, I can teach a whole lot of classes?" And they said, "Yes. " So I taught design and painting and drawing. I guess I taught three classes, maybe even four—I don't know. Terrible money. By the time I went across the bridge and bought my lunch and came back home and paid the bridge fare, I think by the end of the month it cost me money or something. It was just terrible pay. But anyway, that job sort of picked up my morale. And then I was crazed about the work I was doing—I mean, getting it done. Not because of John Coplans, necessarily—just because I was really into my new work. And that, in a sense, was my break, because I said to myself then, I'm just going to let the design thing just pass. I mean, as far as taking off my dirty clothes and putting on my clean clothes to go see a client—not that I had any really to speak of, but you know. So I thought, well, I will teach. It gives me a fair income, and it's respectable, and I can do my work. That's what I want to do. So that schizophrenic bit of being a designer and a painter began to move into one sort of alignment, or into alignment. Getting back to John, things went terribly quickly. I mean, looking back on it, it was almost hard to believe how quickly it went, the pace of things in those days, at that time. I remember John put together a sculpture show on the roof of the Kaiser building in Oakland, something like "California Sculpture Today"—it was a very important, big show. And John included me in that. I remember he called me one day and said, would I have a piece ready? And I said, "Yeah, but I'm not a sculptor. " He said, "Well, don't worry about that. Just do. the thing, and let somebody else worry about what it is. ". I said, "All right, fine. " And it dawned on me:. I remember I walked around thinking for about a day, "God, I'm a sculptor! You know, that's really kind of exciting. I've never been a sculptor before. " And it was true. I mean, I'd never been a sculptor before, thought of myself as a sculptor before. So from that point on, things moved at just an incredible pace. I taught—I don't know—a year at Arts and Crafts, and then I taught at night school. Wally Hedrick, a San Francisco artist, was running the night program at the San Francisco Art Institute (what else is it called?), and asked me to teach there. So I taught a painting class at night there for 3: guess a year. And then somewhere along the line, Dick Nelson—who died recently, I guess last year, as a matter of fact; he was chairman at the University of California, Davis—called me and asked me if I would be interested in teaching at Davis. And of course I felt the gods had come down and kissed me. So I started teaching at Davis, and I taught at Davis—I guess it was the full year. And about my first graduate student there at Davis was Bruce Nauman, as a matter of fact. But I don't know—you want me to just go on?
AUPING:
Well, yeah. What kind of things did you experience at Davis? Is there anything particular that sticks out in your memory about your experiences there, any kind of information?
DELAP:
Well, I was living in San Francisco, and I was driving to Davis twice a week. The thing that sticks out in my mind—I had a new Porsche, as a matter of fact, at that time. And I kind of enjoyed the drive because it gave me a chance to drive my Porsche, and a lot of time to sort of think, and I always like that anyway. By the time I got there, I always felt that I had sort of done my job: I mean, it was the effort of driving up there. After I got there, I felt, you know, it was a breeze. And then I would turn around when my classes were over and drive all the way back. Gee, it was close to 100 miles each way. So by the time you did that twice a week, you were a little tired. I certainly wouldn't want to be doing that these days, but I didn't mind it then. But as far as Davis is concerned—well, I met some more artists. Wayne Thiebaud was there. Bill Wiley was there? Roland Petersen was there—I guess he's still there. And who else? Tio Giambruni was there, a very nice man, my age or younger, I guess—died a number of years ago. He was the head of sculpture—it was very sad. But there were nice people. I never really have known whether I should have stayed there or not—not a matter of "should have," but whether I would like to have stayed on at Davis. They asked me at the end of the year if I wanted to stay, and of course I was very flattered. But then John had come down here, was the first person really hired at Irvine. He was not really hired as chairman; he was hired as gallery director. And to do that, he also had to, I guess, do classes. But he was the first person hired in the art department. So John called me and asked me to come down. Of course, part of John's nature is that, like, in our relationship at that time, when John moved to Los Angeles, he turned against San Francisco. In other words, his excuse for leaving San Francisco was that it was nowhere, it was a dead end, and everything was happening in Los Angeles. So when he came to Los Angeles, he wanted to make sure I left San Francisco also because he really respected what I was doing and he liked it and he didn't want to think there was somebody there that he liked. [laughter] That's really true. But at any rate, that was not my reason for moving down. Kathy and I were recently married. I had, of course, always been around the Bay Area, and it was a new thing here. So it just seemed like a new adventure.
AUPING:
Did you come down here cold turkey?
DELAP:
Came down for an interview with the dean, who is still the dean, Dean [E. Clayton] Garrison. Kathy and I flew to Los Angeles, and John drove us down from L.A.—it was all a mud field out here then. I mean, when we came down, there was a dirt road from the [Pacific] Coast Highway into Irvine. There was just about one building on the campus then, and the administration was all up in the trailer or something. So I went up for my interview. Usually I'm not terribly cool about those things, but I was pretty cool about all that because I really didn't care that much. I didn't feel that it was a matter of life and death as to whether I got the job or not. Anyway, we had our interview, and we all went back into Los Angeles and had a Chinese dinner, and Kathy and I flew back to San Francisco. And then—I don't know—a month later, two weeks later, the dean called me and said that if I wanted to take the job, I could have it. So Kathy and I talked about it and thought about it, and we thought, "Well, we'll go down. " So we came down here, and here we are.
AUPING:
That was in—about what?—1964?
DELAP:
Well, '64. I guess I came down actually with my friend John McCracken, who at that time did: not have a teaching job. He had been helping me periodically with my own work in my studio in San Francisco, although John was just beginning to really kind of emerge in his own work. But John came down here to this house, when it was the old house, and helped me paint the inside of the house to get it ready for Kathy and me when we moved down. So John and I made a couple of trips back and forth, painting and doing all that sort of stuff. Then I guess it was—I kind of forget a little now, but it was over summer that we moved down. John was married to his wife Joan then—he's not now, but he was then—and they came down and got a place up in Costa Mesa. But John Coplans and myself, a short time later, got a teaching job for John at Irvine. So there was at that time Coplans and John McCracken and myself at Irvine. I think those were the first three people employed.
AUPING:
This is a pretty broad question, but how, at first, do you think Southern California affected you and your work—or did it at all? Did you just continue with the; same momentum you had? Or did things change when you came here?
DELAP:
Yeah. I think I did continue with the same momentum. Of course, it's always hard to tell what geographically affected your work. Even in hindsight, it's hard to tell, because you don't really know, do you? I mean, you weren't two places at the same time, or three places at the same time; so, of course, all you can do is speculate. What, over the years, I would have done, say, if I'd stayed in the Bay Area, or gone to New York, as opposed to having been here—I can't answer that, of course. Whether it would have been better or worse or larger or of different areas, it's hard to say. I'm sure that it affected my work. I would like to think that not just Southern California but my new lifestyle, being married—and then a short time later, having children, and so on—was beneficial because it gave me some stability in my life that I hadn't really had before, in that sense, some emotional stability in the sense of responsibility and all. I felt that I could just sort of work with a lot more freedom and ease and delight than in the more frantic years. So I think that I was a great deal more consistent in my time about my work, and that sort of thing. It's awfully hard to say. Except for a few people, I never was terribly close to many of the L.A. artists who were here, which in a sense is more my doing than theirs because they extended the hospitality, and so on. But I've always been—which I'm certainly not bragging about—a bit shy when it comes to that kind of thing. So although I guess over the years I have met and known a lot of artists, I never have been very good at searching that thing out. I've never been able to sort of go knock on somebody's door. Not that I had to do that, because invitations were extended, but I've just never been really good at that.
AUPING:
What was your reaction to the [Southern] California art scene when you first came here?
DELAP:
Well, I knew it a bit, because the tail end of my stay in San Francisco, I knew what was happening here. John Coplans has, on occasion, annoyed me, in the sense that he has inferred that—I'm not quoting him at all—not just myself, but people like John McCracken and Ron Davis were affected by Southern California, you see. I don't particularly resent that, but I find it an untruth, because the work that I put together in '62, and so on and so forth, that John was so enamored with, was not influenced in any way that I know of by artists in Southern California. John McCracken was influenced, which he admits readily, by that work that I had done, particularly that work that I had done like two years before he became influenced. For example, he did paintings at that time, two-dimensional paintings, really kind of based on my imagery of my two-sided boxes; and he admits that readily. So his influence was out of that involvement that I was in. Ron Davis, of course, I had no influence on that I know of, although I did know him and gave him a prize—his first prize, in fact—at the Richmond Art Center, in a show there. It was an open competition that I was asked to jury, and I got very criticized by some of the more well known artists around the Bay Area that I either threw out or didn't respond to prize-wise. Anyway, Ron Davis, I gave the first prize to. So he came and saw me, because he was having a very difficult time at the San Francisco Art Institute because they just weren't interested in looking at his work. So he said, "Would you look at it?" And I said, "Well, yeah, I'd like to. " So we became a little friendly that way. But anyway, getting back to John and Southern California: John has mentioned here or there that there was this playback, in a sense, from Southern California, like in reference to myself and a few other people—and that was not true. I think it's important in the sense that you—I mean, those kind of things often make things too simplistic, make things too simple. I may have mentioned this to you one time, but when I was in my studio working in San Francisco and putting together the first step-down pieces, I can remember seeing the back of a current Art International, and there was a full-page ad for Frank Stella and [Leo] Castelli. It was a line drawing, like a blueprint drawing, of an octagon or something stuck down, a concentric form. I looked at it, and for a split second, I thought it was one of my drawings lying in the studio. Of course, I instantly saw it was the back of this magazine. And I thought, "Well, this is the damndest thing I've ever seen. Why would somebody else be doing that?" And of course, [there were] superficial references, because they were paintings, and they were flat, and so on and so forth. But the line drawing was, in a sense, the line drawings that I had in the studio, you know. But that was my first introduction, really, to Stella. And Alan Solomon asked me at that time, he said, "Well, were you influenced by [Kenneth] Noland and Stella and Barnett Newman?" And I said, "No, I was not. Because I didn't know who Stella was until after I had put that imagery together, nor did I know who Noland was." And that kind of thing. Of course, then I, in very quick order, did.
AUPING:
He mentioned, in one of his catalogs, that Barnett Newman had a large influence—
DELAP:
Did he? Maybe he did. I honestly can't remember. I really can't. You know, maybe he did. I remember seeing one of the Ben Heller, or maybe it was two Ben Heller paintings of Barnett Newman's at the [California] Palace of the Legion [of Honor] in San Francisco? and I can't quite remember when it was, so I don't know where it would fall in the history of my work. I just remember being very impressed by it and seeing it.
AUPING:
When you were in Southern California, did you recognize at that time a Southern California aesthetic? Could you put one together?
DELAP:
A Southern California aesthetic? Did I recognize one?
AUPING:
At that time.
DELAP:
Well, I think I recognized one. Do you mean when I came down here to live?
AUPING:
Yes. Because you were an outsider in—
DELAP:
Because slightly before that, I mean, when I was still in San Francisco, I would be led around by John when I would come down, you see. I think there's something interesting here in the sense that Irving Blum, who had the Ferus Gallery—John was always trying to get Irving to handle my work. Irving didn't know; he just couldn't make up his mind. Well, finally Irving decided that he wanted me in his gallery. So he sent me a check in the mail, to cover my air fare, round trip, from San Francisco down here, to see him and make all the arrangements for this. Well, in the meantime, Felix Landau had come up from San Francisco and asked me if I would have a show, and I said I would. And there was still a bit of distance, in my mind, in reference to where I was in San Francisco to L.A., and I was involved at the Dilexi Gallery. I was working very hard on my art, and I wasn't working out my political problems very well, in reference to Southern California. Plus the fact that I had made my commitment to Felix Landau, and I have always been timid about those kind of things. I thought, "Well, I told him I would do it, so then I'll do it." Anyway, Irving, of course, is a very determined person, and so I just wrote Irving a nice note and sent his check back. I said, "Thanks very much, but I'm already—" Well, I know deep down underneath that Irving never really got over that. You see, first of all, he had the sanction of [Billy Al] Bengston and [Robert] Irwin and Larry Bell, and so on and so forth, who he was representing then. He got their okay after he'd made up his mind to take me on. And what I did offended him. I mean, I was a punk kid from San Francisco, and I offended him. I didn't mean to. I was totally innocent. But I did. So I had my show with Felix. Irving and I have always gotten along socially very well, but I know there's always been that distance, because he never—now, it was an entirely different thing, with Nick [Nicholas] Wilder, although that did not happen to me in those days. Nick asked me to show with him when he moved his gallery to Southern California. And I just told him the same thing—that I'd made my commitment to Felix Landau. And Nick—which is a credit to Nick—whatever he may have thought (he may have thought, "You know, you're a Goddamn fool"), but that was my business, and that shouldn't have anything to do with art, and so on and so forth. So when Felix Landau closed down, and then that was over, Nick just came and saw me and asked if I would show with him. He assumed that I was wrong for eight years, but it wasn't for him to say.
AUPING:
When I mentioned the Southern California aesthetic, I think of the stereotype that the New York magazines talk about, the flashy finish, the cool California look. As an outsider from San Francisco, did you pick up on that?
DELAP:
Well, of course I was [into] the cool look in San Francisco and all before I came to Southern California. So in a sense, I fit in pretty well at that time with that so-called look. I think one of my problems, if it was a problem, or is a problem, is that I was still an ex-San Franciscan in Southern California. I think maybe even more subconsciously than even what my desires may have been at the time in the sense of recognition, I think that I've always been very opposed to generalizing, geographical aesthetics. I used to argue this all the time, sometimes just desperately, with John Coplans; because John in those days was, "San Francisco is all bad; Los Angeles is fantastic." New York—that was, at the moment, something else. But when John moved from Los Angeles to New York, then he just wiped off Los Angeles. He's pretty much that way today. And that's just all nonsense—I mean, I think. As I say, I think that I have been, in a sense, a bit of a displaced person in Southern California. But I don't maybe think that's particularly bad either. I think that in some ways—going back to what I was talking about earlier in reference to one of your questions, "Did Southern California affect your art?"—I think that probably in some ways I instinctively have really more of an Eastern aesthetic than I do a West Coast aesthetic, in the sense that I think I probably would—I mean, if we're just talking about recognition, selling work and so on, I think I would always have been better in New York than I would by remaining here. I do now, as a matter of fact. I mean, over the years, I have always, in a sense, done better on the East Coast with my work than I have on the West Coast. And now, for example, that's true.
AUPING:
You've traditionally sold more in New York than you have here?
DELAP:
Yeah. And I do now. Even more. I think maybe even my interests—I think that if I lived in New York, or had lived in New York, it would be a more compatible kind of a situation. There's an edge to Southern California that I get a bit bored with. I don't mean it's prevalent in maybe younger artists now, but in so many of my con temporaries. It was a certain kind of ignoring of aspects of our history, and so on and so forth. I almost think of it as a dumb hippieness. I mean, playing dumb is fine, but when you carry it to the point where you actually pass over things that you should know about, then I think it gets to be not really all that interesting. I don't think I put that particularly well, but—
AUPING:
Could that be why you weren't as close to West Coast artists, possibly, as you might have been?
DELAP:
Possibly it is. Then—gee, it's awfully hard to say. I think I moved, not always maybe—well, as far as I'm concerned, the moves were proper, but I think I moved rapidly during those years. It's, interesting how so much imagery of that time was almost the imagery of extended perception, or something, I mean prolonged perception, where an artist did not move or at least appear to move by leaps and bounds in his work. For example, I showed my first boxes and all with Dilexi Gallery, I guess, about 1963, in San Francisco. Then when I came to Los Angeles shortly after that, or a year later or something, I never showed any more boxes. I showed the twisted sculptures, the systemic pieces of sculpture and all. I'd showed boxes in New York and various places, and I had moved on to those new twisted pieces. In looking back on it, I should have had a show of boxes in Southern California because I had all that work and I never showed it here. Then I moved from that to the glass metal walls, and that kind of thing; I did show a piece of that in Maurice Tuchman's show, "[American] Sculpture of the Sixties" [1967]. And I showed a piece in the Whitney [Museum of American Art in New York], and so on. But I never did a gallery exhibition of that work. I went from that into other new work, and so on. Well, I think that kind of thing is—as far as I'm concerned, it's fine. But I think that there's almost a price to pay, often, for moving too quickly, as far as the art world is concerned, unless you are at such stature that they are waiting for you to do that. I mean, it's one way or the other. It's kind of interesting.
AUPING:
When you moved to Southern California—I don't want to harp on this, but there is one question I did want to get in—the aerospace industry was pretty much booming at that time. A lot of materials in your work could seemingly be related to the aerospace industry in certain ways. Did that affect you at all? Were you picking up from that the technology that was booming in Southern California?
DELAP:
Oh, you mean when I was doing exhibits and stuff like that?
AUPING:
Through your work.
DELAP:
Well, I guess I was affected. I don't think I was—well, I don't know, maybe I was. I don't think I was affected too much by that technology outside of a superficial kind of look, you know, a kind of a cleanliness and industrial design kind of quality. But I think one of the strange things about my work, particularly at that time, is that although it kind of superficially made reference to that, there was always a kind of kinky edge to it. If it really got too precise and all, to my taste it always lost a kind of strength or power. I mean, I would [use] maybe burnished metal or something of the sort, but if it got too machined, too much like that tape recorder, then it suddenly got into an area that I find difficult to accept and deal with—not because it loses the handcrafted quality or anything, but it seems to lose a certain kind of energy. But to answer your question, I guess that aspects of that sort of thing maybe did impress me, maybe even more subconsciously than I might think. But I think that a lot of my aesthetic in that sense came out of, for example, oh, my early days, when I was younger, like painting cars, and things of that sort. I had an MG once which when I bought it, it was blue. But I rented a paint sprayer from a guy down the street, I remember, got some beautiful red lacquer, and sprayed it red. And all things considered, I did really a great job. And the aesthetics of just laying that lacquer paint on was really a marvelous experience. And then also having worked, just as long as I can remember, with almost every conceivable kind of model, this and that and making things. I had a pretty wide exposure to surfaces and materials and that kind of thing, although I have never—I mean, I am not a metal worker in any way. Basically, my aesthetic really relates more, probably in a lot of ways, to that of the pattern maker, probably has more to do with that kind of craft.

1.5. TAPE NUMBER: III, SIDE ONE JANUARY 22, 1976

AUPING:
Alan Solomon mentioned that in the early sixties, you were making some flat, smooth, symmetrical, abstract, hard-edge paintings, but you never showed them because you felt rather uneasy about painting as an activity in those days. Could you tell me a little bit about those paintings and how you felt about painting at that time?
DELAP:
Well, it's true that in the early sixties, I did paint some, I guess what you would call hard-edge paintings. I did one painting—as a matter of fact, I think I still have it—called Gherkin. It was a painting with a black field, and there were green circles, and some white. I believe that it was a painting that is illustrated in a catalog or two. That painting was done probably, I guess, around '63. I'm not sure exactly, but I'm pretty close, if I say '63 [actually 1962]. I know John Coplans saw the painting, because at the time it was hanging in my apartment in San Francisco, when I was out on California Street. John was very taken with the painting, and I was pleased, but had not maybe thought great things about it, probably because I felt that the painting maybe was not fine art enough. What I mean by that is the painting came out of very strong thoughts about aspects of design and so on that have always of course played a prominent role in at least a part of my aesthetics. At any rate, I guess the painting was rather private, in the sense that I did have it there in my house. I felt inwardly rather strong about it, but maybe at the time I thought there were other things that I should have been doing, you see, that would be more fine art or something. At the same time, as a matter of fact, I was doing collages. The collages were, strangely enough, still abstract expressionist oriented. They were small format. The collages [used] materials such as found objects. Some, I remember, for example, [used] those little puzzle boxes that you buy in Chinatown or wherever that have little steel beads in them, and you try to get the steal bead into a little slot or hole or something of that sort. I would take those little puzzle boxes apart, do all kinds of things to them, and then maybe put them back together. I'd embed those or in one way or other use them in the architecture of the paintings I was doing at that time. And there are still some of those around, a couple in San Francisco collections. They have a kind of superficial reference to Joseph Cornell in a funny way, although I didn't know who Joseph Cornell was at that time. The thing that I think is interesting here about those pieces is that they were quite physical in sense of space. They were not totally two-dimensional? they were not a collage in the sense of just paper pasted on paper, but they had actual physical depth. They often had a glass front, and often there were little bits and pieces of things inside these little compartments or boxes. So I was doing that kind of thing. I was doing collages with actual coins—a nickel, a quarter, a dime—embedded in them. I was doing collages that used cut-up Johnson and Smith catalogs. I remember Fred Martin from the San Francisco Art Institute brought me one day, as a present, a catalog he had, an old catalog from the Johnson and Smith catalog, that marvelous company that was in Chicago for so many, many years and was a treasure trove for young kids, myself included. You would send away and get your magic trick, or your magic ring, or your water pistol, or your whoopee cushion or whatever the case. But their catalogs were beautifully illustrated with those kinds of funny, funky drawings; and anyway, some of the collages used that kind of thing. And I didn't really [keep] many of those things. Fortunately, the artists of the Bay Area at that time got away with most of them. I traded work for those collages. We showed at the San Francisco Museum of Art, I guess about 1963—I may have mentioned this before? stop me if I have—the format show at the San Francisco Museum, with Roy De Forest and Nell Sinton and myself and Fred Martin. I believe the show was called "The Corridor" because it was in that long corridor at the San Francisco Museum of Art. It was all small format work, not just mine, but the other three people who were included. And that show was a bit of a turning point for me, because it gave me a little recognition—certainly more than I really had before in the San Francisco environment, and gave me some encouragement and some courage to pursue my painting and my work. But getting back to the hard-edge pieces, it was true that occasionally a painting such as Gherkin would come forth. There was another painting that's since been destroyed which was similar to Gherkin which I remember I did about that time. I knew I submitted it to an art show and it was rejected. It was a two-part painting, and it was the same color; it was black and white with green circles. And the green circles worked in the four corners of the two parts, so there was eight green circles, total—I guess, a lot like a domino or a die, or a pair of dice, actually, in that sense. And I kind of liked that painting; I remember I was disappointed that it didn't get into the show that I sent it to.
AUPING:
What was your intention with these paintings? What were you trying to do visually?
DELAP:
In the hard-edge paintings?
AUPING:
Yes.
DELAP:
Well, I think probably what I was trying to do with any painting that I ever made, and that was to give them substance, to try to have them come across as a strong, concise composite, in the imagery and in the composition. I always had a kind of total fear, almost, of being decorative, or being called decorative. It was, I guess, a bit of paranoia in that sense. I'm really not sure why. I think I probably ruined more paintings with the thought that they might be decorative than about anything else I've ever done. I always had that fear when I was even doing a piece of commercial design. I always wanted the work to be a commitment to a kind of idealized form, I guess, with that kind of inner strength. And the thought of it not being that, and the thought of it being superficial, decorative, pretty, or whatever, was something that I always abhorred and felt haunted by. If I thought that it in any way touched upon that—I mean, it's a little hard to talk about, but—
AUPING:
What about color in those early paintings? How were you feeling about color in those days?
DELAP:
Well, I've always thought in a way that I was really a colorist. I think that I have really very acute sensitivity to color, although I don't think that I use color, or feel a need to use color, as one thinks of a so-called typical painter using color. And by that I mean that putting a color next to another color and playing the scale of color, the nuances of color, one to the other, and so on, is something that is not of any real importance to me. At the same time, I think that everything that I pretty much have done has been critical in reference to color. I remember when I had my first show in New York, of the early boxes, the slit sculpture pieces, and so on. I was at a party a few nights after my show, and I remember Henry Geldzahler was there. I was flattered to meet Henry Geldzahler. He had seen my show, and he said he liked the work very much, and he said, "The color is so right." And I was very pleased, because I agreed With him. I think that there's something that in reference to—I will speak first of sculpture. I think that in a piece of sculpture, form dictates the color. The size dictates the color. And so on. And there is a color that is proper for a particular piece. And that's something that is difficult to talk about, but when you're making the piece, when you're painting the piece, you sense through trial and error, often, the proper color for solving that problem. And sometimes you, of course, will put on a color and think, or try to kid yourself into trying to think, that it's proper. And that may go for a few days, but eventually, if it's not proper, you'll talk yourself out of it, and go back and repaint it, and so on and so forth. And I would hate to think of how many haunting experiences I have had with that kind of thing, trying to convince myself that something is correct when it's not. I guess mainly because you don't want to work on it any longer, or you want a relief from it. But you always come back to it, if it's not right, and repaint it and redo it, and then you know when it's okay. But getting back to color, I think that the early paintings, the painting you first asked about, the hard-edge paintings of the early sixties—I'm thinking now again of Gherkin, black, green, and white—I think that that painting shows a kind of concern for anonymous color, in other words, to see the painting but not necessarily record color per se. I guess obviously imagery is more important. I think that I've always been concerned about specifics, whether it's in form, or in color, or reaction to specifics. And specific color is to me color that when you look at it, you say, "Gee, there's a red painting," or "There is a blue painting," or "There's a green painting," or something of that sort. And I find that a distraction. I find that an immediate turn-off, because it's an annoyance in getting to what, hopefully, the painting is about, which is not, as I see it, about calling attention to a color or something of that sort. So I don't want a red painting or a green painting or a blue painting, I want a painting. But I don't want the color to be that discernible.
AUPING:
Is that how you feel about your; recent paintings, the monochromatic or near-monochromatic painting that you're doing now?
DELAP:
Yeah, I feel that way very much. I feel that way probably more than I feel about work that I have painted for a long time. I think that the color on the recent work, the paintings that you asked about, are the most inviting, because they are, color-wise, the most difficult to pin down. They also have been the most fun for me to have done, and also the most difficult because I really wrestled, really thought about and worked very hard to find colors that—and it's a very strange thing—have a body, a strength, a life, a kind of quality of energy, for example, and yet do not again pinpoint a particular color. It may be a musty purple, or it might be a funny green or—Craig Kauffman was in my studio yesterday and saw one of the new paintings, and I liked his comment. He said, "It looks like the color on one of those old Chevrolets." And I thought, "Well, that's really kind of neat." But he didn't say what the color was. He just said it looks like a color. And the color that we were looking at was a funny color because it was—it looked kind of brown at one time, and yet it was leaded with gold, and when you Kind of moved into another position, it had a tremendous amount of blue in it. And that ambiguity, of color I like very much. Alchemist's colors—they're alchemist's colors, I like to think of them.
AUPING:
Then, although superficially the paintings might look monochromatic, they're really far from monochromatic. They're just the opposite.
DELAP:
Well, I think I see what you mean by saying "just the opposite." I think, however, they are technically monochromatic, aren't they? But to me, they don't seem particularly that way because of other things taking place within the format. Now we're speaking of the new paintings. The new paintings have only one color per painting, but there is, for example, a physical edge between the canvas surface and the wood edge, where the wood is, and part of that wood is painted the same color as the canvas field. So you have the colored surface of the canvas, and then you have the physical line, where the wood meets the canvas. Then you have color on the wood edge, and then you have approximately a half-inch of raw wood before you reach the extremity of the surface or the edge of the painting. Now, that's an awful lot of visual activity going on. To me it is. What I've done is I have packed the energy at the limits of the painting—in other words, at the edge of the painting: the physical line, the same color that's on the canvas carried onto the wood, and then the raw wood. So I have the one color of paint against a dark line or a light line, depending upon how the light hits it, and then the raw wood, which is another color, although it's not another paint color. So there is an introduction there of, again, an awful lot of visual activity taking place. There is no room in the particular paintings—there is no way to introduce, for example, a second color. Now, when you return around the edge of the painting, the raw wood, depending upon the particular size of the painting, the edge takes a particular cut or shape which adds to this visual complication—on edge as well as on surface. So again, there is that much more complication because of the diversity or the change in the edge or the return plane of the painting. I don't know if I've made that clear, but—
AUPING:
It's coming across to me. If they are monochromatic then, and you see them as monochromatic paintings, have you thought about any relationship that might exist between your monochromatic paintings and other monochromatic paintings that have been done over the last couple of decades—Yves Klein, Robert Rauschenberg, or Ad Reinhardt? Have you ever thought about any relationship that might exist there?
DELAP:
Yeah, I guess I have. I see those paintings, though, approaching the problem really differently because it seems to me that Yves Klein and Rauschenberg, for example, approached the problem from a particularly painterly format. And I think that what I'm involved with is really something quite a bit different, in the sense that I really am quite blatantly throwing together painting and sculpture. I'm paying tribute, I hope—and I think I am—to the painting surface, which I find very important, by somewhat subtly carrying my color on over to the wood. Now if I did not do that, I think that we would be so object-oriented that I would fail in reference to what I'm working with here. But when I return to—when I leave the surface and go around the edge of the painting, any edge, then I enter an area of sculptural concern because, as I see it, I'm really ganging up the content, all of the content of the painting, all of the energy of the painting, on the edge plane, and on that littles area of activity on the surface of the painting before it comes around. It's right in there where everything is taking place. Now, I think that this, for example, is a much different situation than, say, a relief painting. Now, Frank Stella, in his recent work, to my thinking, has been involved in a very traditional format, in the sense that his paintings are sculptural reliefs. And I don't feel that what I'm doing are reliefs, in that traditional sense, because I am not interested in tinkering with or changing physically the surface of the painting. The only indication I make of disruption, and I still don't change elevation, is in the physical slit where the wood meets the canvas. But those are still on the same plane, so we can almost say, for all general purposes, that it's a smooth plane from one part of that picture-plane to the other.
AUPING:
Speaking of the surfaces, in much of the work I've seen that you've done, both in painting and sculpture, your surfaces have involved metallics. In paintings, there's a lot of gold and silver, as you mentioned. In the sculpture, there always seemed to be a lot of contrast, black with silver or gold metallics. What is it that fascinates you about the metallic colors?
DELAP:
Well, I think that metallic colors gets back again to the alchemist quality. The metallic colors seem to me to give an ambiguity, a strangeness, a difficulty in pinning down specific color, at least in the way I have found lately to use them. The earlier paintings—the same paintings we're talking about here—were not metallic. And I found them kind of a bit too specific, and not—I think what I mean by that is not evasive enough: a little too there, a bit too heavy in feeling. So I came across some metallic acrylic paint? I didn't even know there was any until I had run into it, although one can make up their own by using an acrylic base and adding a dry, metallic base to it. I had at any rate not done that. But I came across the silver first, and I added some small amounts, started experimenting with colors, and found interesting results. I also found that you cannot predict—you can predict it, of course, if you know from experience. But if you don't know from experience, it's very hard to predict the color you're going to get when you add, for example, silver. Because if, for example, you add black to silver, it's going to put it into a brown cast, into a brown range. If you take the silver paint and add orange to it, you may think that you're going to get a beautiful metallic orange, but you're not. You're going to get brown; you're going to get a metallic brown, and so on and so forth. So I found that there was, although a wide range in many ways, in other ways a somewhat narrow range of colors that I would accept in using the silver base paint. When I extended to the gold paint, then that, of course, gave me a bit more flexibility. When I start mixing paint, it's like making soup, I think, a bit. I don't often know what I'm doing—really, I just sense it. I start putting color together: I add a little of this, I add a little of that. Sometimes I've made too much, and I am, in other words, wasteful; I will even pour out half and in a sense start over, or almost over, by adding new color. (But if I didn't pour out half, I would have to add so much new color that it would be ridiculous.) I get the color to where I think it might be pretty good, and I may then even start painting a canvas. And I will know, maybe even after the first coat dries, I will sense whether that color is proper; and I may adjust that color two, three times before the painting's finished. I may feel it needs a lot more blue, or it needs a lot more gold. Or if I put in more gold, I can get a quality to it that makes it read differently in one light than in another light. And so on. Those are the kind of things that are hard to talk about, but you just—again, it's very much like cooking. It's like making a sauce. Anybody who's made, for example, a salad dressing over a period of a long time, doesn't need a recipe. If they're making a mustard sauce or a Hollandaise sauce, they don't need a recipe. They just sort of feel their way through it. You're watching it closely, and you're giving it your attention, your full attention, and you make little subtle adjustments—and that's the way making color is.
AUPING:
How do you apply the paint to the canvas, and is that an important part of [the process]?
DELAP:
Probably there's lots of ways that, for example, I could do it, and it would always come but satisfactory. But it seems that all painters make a ritual out of the way they paint. A fetish, I guess, is even a better way of saying it. And I certainly do. And for the paintings I've been doing recently, I have arrived at my own method. I brush on four coats of acrylic paint. I let it dry, of course, between coats. I have a great big electric fan in the studio, and I find that's marvelous, because it speeds the drying time up, probably cuts it, oh, way in half. So I lay on a coat of paint with—I use a great big, like a six-inch brush or a five-inch brush, I guess. And I paint fast. I don't put color on too thick, and I don't put it on too thin. Again, it's just right. So it's not too thin and it's not too thick. So I lay the color on, and then I turn the fan on, and in about fifteen minutes, twenty minutes maybe at the most, it's set enough for a second coat. I do this four times, and then I take a look. And if things look pretty good, I try, if I have the patience, to let things then set for maybe a couple hours, if possible. And then I very lightly sand the canvas, just with some very, very fine sandpaper, to take off the little nodules and whatever might be on the surface. And then comes the real difficult part, the real crucial test. And that's rolling on the metallic. That can be tricky. Because I try to roll on not more than two coats over these four coats that I've already got down. And I don't want to roll on more than two coats because I've found that the six coats total—sometimes I'll go seven if things don't work out, but I don't like many coats more than that because then the canvas starts to fill and you begin to get into a different surface, and I don't want that. So I find that there's that critical point in there. There's that surface where it's not quite right there if it doesn't have the number of coats I'm speaking of, and yet if you get many more than that, it gets too many. So it's critical, very critical, to me. But as I say, or as I started to say a minute ago, rolling the metallic is a bit of a bear. [You need] a real lightness of touch, because you can easily pick up a streak mark or a line, and that's something that I am always, of course, worried about. But I'm getting pretty good at it.
AUPING:
What about the way you beveled the edges in on these new paintings? Could you tell me what instituted that and what your intention is behind beveling the edges like that?
DELAP:
Yeah. I'm not quite sure what specifically got me going on that parabolic, which is a very fancy word that I like to say—hyperbolic parabola, I guess it is. I'm not even quite sure, in the engineering sense, what it is. I think it's a form, or a structure, or a shape that is made up of straight lines? and I believe it has amazing structural qualities when used on an architectural, engineering level. But what I do is just very simply take the back edge of those side pieces and draw a straight line from the inner top corner to the outer lower corner. And then I have a grinder—which is really a: metal grinder, but I put a heavy sandpaper disc on it, and I grind down almost to the line with this electric grinder. I then finish it off with a hand plane. And that sounds all kind of, I guess, very Old World, like the Swedish carpenter or something. But I enjoy doing that, and I can do it amazingly fast—which is neither here nor there, but I can. And I never make a mistake. I've never ruined a side since I've made a painting, and I can cut those things right down to the line perfectly. When I get it down almost to the line, well, then I have an orbital sander, electric sander, and in five minutes I can just take the whole thing down. If there's any little discrepancy, I'll just finish it off by hand, with a piece of sandpaper. And that's about it. As I say, it's a straight line from the back of the board and the top plane. What happens is that when you face that edge front on, nothing has been apparently touched. It's only when you return around to the side do you see anything that's taking place there. But where this came from is difficult for me to say. I feel, without trying to in any way fabricate my thoughts here, that I was very, very influenced by the Northwest Coast totem art that over the years I have seen. And I think probably for this reason, I have always liked and always tried to find an excuse to use that relationship between raw wood and painted wood that is so predominant in that Indian culture. And if I go back a couple of years, I did some pieces, for lack of a better word, that a friend of mine called Bendos. They were strips of wood weighted on the end; they were only about one inch square, and they balanced on a kind of knife like bar that was driven—well; what I did was I just drove it into the wall, like you drive in a nail. And then this wood strip that had the embedded weights at the end—they were hidden, so you didn't see the weights. So it just looked like a piece of wood strip that was arced, balanced on this knifelike blade. Those were raw wood to start with, and then there was some paint applied, like in stripes and so on to what I call Bendos. And I really like those pieces very much. I still do, to a great degree. I found them very satisfying, in the sense that they were a line in space; and if I ganged up three of them on a wall, which on occasion I have done in exhibit, the wall became kind of the negative space or the ground, like in a painting, you know. These strips would kind of really visually eat up a wall, and I liked that thinking very much. But anyway, those first pieces, with the raw wood and the painted stripes, were influenced, I think quite directly, by my experiences somewhat prior to that in the Northwest Coast country. And those Bendos in turn were very influential on the current work.
AUPING:
The shapes of the recent paintings, or say the paintings of the last couple of years, in which the top edges are rounded and capped by the fine pieces of wood—do you see those as totemic in nature also? How did you arrive at the shapes of your paintings? That's what I'm getting at.
DELAP:
Well, I think they have, of course, slowly evolved out of the earlier work. The first paintings that we're thinking of were the square format paintings with the top corners rounded off, and those paintings came out of the sectional drawings of the twisted sculpture pieces, which I did in the middle sixties. The first ones, I guess I did in '65—something like that. But the somewhat more sophisticated versions of those twisted pieces, pieces like Tango Tangles and Modern Times—I can't remember all the names; those were all titles of Charlie Chaplin films—those pieces, if you look at the end view, are the shape of the first of the paintings. And they were taken from a square format with rounded corners. I also said to somebody one day that asked about why the shape is like that, I said it's because when I look out through, my glasses, that's what the world looks like to me. In other words, I can't help it: if you wear glasses, you really see that little round corner right there. I mean, that's the way I see it. I'm not sure that that's true, but anyway, that's where the first paintings came from. And the first paintings I made, I made just like that. I made just as something to see, in other words, to observe the picture plane. You look at the painting and you see the surface, like you look at any traditional paintings. You look at the surface? you don't look (well, you can, but there's not much there to see) at the edge, particularly. So I did one of these paintings, just like that, and I felt that it was a disaster. I felt like I had made a table, or something of the sort. I had it around for a while and tried to convince myself that it was of some interest, and I couldn't really muster that. And then—and I don't really know why—I thought, what would happen if I did this to the edge? What would happen if I disturbed that edge? What would happen if I took the edge and made it, in a sense, out of whack to the rest of the painting, but still did not disturb, physically or visually, the painting from the front on? What would happen? And so I thought, there's a dichotomy that has got to do something, because physically—

1.6. TAPE NUMBER: III, SIDE TWO JANUARY 22, 1976

DELAP:
I think I left off trying to explain the edge. So I thought, what would happen if I physically changed this edge, so that it did something different and in a sense did not line up, as we would normally think it should, with the picture plane? And so I cut it the way I've already said, and I found that in a sense it didn't line up visually, that it was kind of going one way and the surface of the painting was going another way. It was like they were almost independent. But they had to be in some kind of continuity or some kind of totality, because physically they were a reality. It was not a two-dimensional illusion; it was a physical illusion. So I mean I really liked that, and I liked the fact that when I see the painting other than dead on, this conflict between edge and surface, or picture plane, interacts with the wall. So although the work is, I would imagine, quite obviously objectified, because of its very nature, it also interrelates, up to a degree, with the wall. So it's maybe not quite that hermetic; it's maybe not quite that self-contained, because there's that kind of funny quality of like, well, maybe there's a hole in the wall, or the thing's sinking into the wall, or whatever the case may be. There's a couple of small paintings that I have done recently that have eliminated the wood edge. The canvas just goes right on around, but the edge just does the same thing that the wood did. And I find that they're even funnier in this sense I'm speaking of, and wackier in that way. But the shadow that takes place on the edge, which of course goes onto the wall, seems to almost fill in and make proper what physically doesn't take place
AUPING:
Over the past five years or so, a lot of people have said that painting is dead. What are your thoughts on the state of contemporary painting right now?
DELAP:
Well, I think I can see in so many ways why people have said that. I think it's very hard to think that anything is dead if you're highly involved in it. And maybe I would think it was dead if I wasn't interested in what, at the moment, I'm doing. I'm also interested in other things, so I don't feel that I have to be overwhelmingly protective, for example, of painting per se. I feel that I can be and am defensive, in a sense, of supporting my own interests in painting. I also feel that in any traditional sense, I'm not doing painting—although I because they hang on walls and they are highly frontal. But my earlier sculpture for the most part was highly frontal, great frontality, often the same on both sides (so if you'd seen one side, in a sense, you'd seen the other). I think that in the current paintings, the shape, the structure in a sense, is the excuse for the image. Or the image is the content. Because of that, I'm not interested in putting one color against another color, putting imagery within the format and within the restrictions or boundaries of the shape. The shape, whatever it might be, is the content, and particularly the edge is, as I've said before, the energies and the meat, really, of the whole problem. And I like the fact that the edge, which is for the most part hidden—or if not hidden, not paid a great deal of attention to—has been in my paintings the meat of the problem.
AUPING:
Has the advancement of video, film, and performance art into the critical arena made you reevaluate your painting in any way, or has it affected the way you look at painting now?
DELAP:
I think it has. I'm very fond of a lot of video that I've seen. There's a lot that I'm not fond of. And other things, other areas of activity. I've done a little video, I don't think of any great consequence, but I've enjoyed flirting with the media. And I would like to do more. I do not want to think, certainly, that I am bound to, just forever, making paintings, or making sculpture, or really, I guess, doing anything for any great length of time, or permanently, or whatever the case may be. And yet at the same time, I think that my work, since the early years, has been amazingly progressive, although I will often dart off into all kinds of new things. But that's good, too, I think, because that feeds the latter, and I think that's got to be done.
AUPING:
Do you draw more of your information—the kind of information that reverts into your paintings—from the history of art, or do you tend to draw more information from your immediate environment? Or is there a ratio there that you think about?
DELAP:
Well, that's a very hard question to answer. I think probably I draw more from my immediate environment, because I think that—well, I don't have any license on being an intuitive artist, but I certainly feel that so much of all my decisions are intuition, based upon [my] sensory—how do I wish to say it?—antennas: being in touch with the immediate. But I certainly am impressed with a great deal of art history, and I think that I owe an awful lot to it. I'm not sure when one needs more of it, and when they need less of it. I think it's a very hard thing to say. Sometimes I go back and I'll see maybe a marvelous book on, say, twentieth-century sculpture? I'll sit down for an evening or a day and read it, look through it, and think, "I should pay more attention to this kind of thing; look at all this marvelous stuff." And then, on another occasion, if I've done that too long, I'll think, "Well, I've got to get away from this." And I do. I do other things, go through the daily experience and so on, and think that things should be found other places. It's hard to say. In fact, I think it's a combination of it all, really. I think that the difficult thing about art, or one of the difficult things about art, is dissecting all that information that you get. As far as art history is concerned, I think you have to know and, I feel, be convinced as to why the great things are great. But at the same time, you can't be a slave to them because they are, you know. It's all easy treading.
AUPING:
Michael Walls, in the catalog State of California Painting, said that, "Painting is not merely an area within the visual arts; it is a way of life, a noble cause, almost a religion." Do you feel that way about painting at all, as if there is something especially endearing about painting that separates it from sculpture and other media within the arts?
DELAP:
Oh, I see, specifically, you mean. Well, I don't know. I would find it hard, I think, to differentiate it from, say, sculpture. I think that I would maybe think about differences—if it was media, for example, that brought you into contact with people, or took you, say, outside of the studio. But I think any activity where you're working by yourself in the studio, if it's seriously undertaken and all, it seems to me is somewhat similar.
AUPING:
Well, let me ask you this: how would you define painting? What would your definition of painting be?
DELAP:
For me?
AUPING:
For you.
DELAP:
[long silence] That's very, very difficult. I'll come back to it. [laughter]
AUPING:
Okay. We'll come back to it. Maybe this is along the same lines. Do you prefer sculpture over painting or painting over sculpture? Or how do you relate the two activities? Because you've done so much of both.
DELAP:
Well, I've always wondered what I was, whether I was a painter or a probably in some ways neither one. I remember when I first did the early box pieces, and John Coplans invited me to the Oakland sculpture show, the Kaiser sculpture show (1963), somebody saw the piece I did or something, and made some comment about it. I guess they'd said they liked it or something, and this other person was there, and he said, "Well, that may be, but don't call it sculpture." He was a kind of older, more traditional sculptor, you see, and he was a bit incensed by the fact—that this person liked the work but that this person had referred to it as sculpture, because this certainly was not sculpture to him. I've never to my face been accused of one of the so-called paintings not being painting, but I'm sure that to a lot of people, they're not: "You may like them, but don't call them painting." And I don't know; in a way, I guess I find that kind of flattering. I mean, if you're in an area that somebody likes and they still can't pin it down, you know, well, I think that's fine—or maybe even if they don't like it. So it seems to me that I have flirted and fluctuated, functioned within the area of painting and sculpture, and I think that I owe a lot to both areas, or both areas owe a lot to me. I like to draw and I draw a lot, and I think that the very fact that I'm that concerned with the two-dimensional is a strong indication of affinity and an interest in the two-dimensional in painting. But I also have that strong structural concern, working with my hands on occasion, shaping and feeling and fondling and manipulating form. That's the sculptor's concern, the tactile. I like very much, of course, to work with large-scale form. So it's a combination of both.
AUPING:
The series that included Nesbitt, the round, half-circled, free-standing sculptures, or—not necessarily sculptures—did you consider those sculptures, or did you consider those paintings?
DELAP:
No, I considered them sculptures because I consider anything that exists in real space as sculpture.
AUPING:
Real space meaning off the wall?
DELAP:
Off the wall, yeah. Anything that you can move around is sculpture.
AUPING:
How important is color to your sculpture? You mentioned before that the form dictated the color. Then is color almost an after-the-fact activity with your sculpture?
DELAP:
No. It never has been. I think that color with sculpture is, however, a very difficult problem. And I don't know of any sculptor who ever used color that was not intrinsically a part of the material who resolved it. In the earlier sculpture I did, most of them, so much of the work were objects, small-scale work. There was no real problem with color because the work was indoors and there was not a weather problem and so on. So you could have a piece of any color that your heart desired. But we're talking about—and I don't really know now if I'm answering your question, but I'll go on anyway—if we're talking about outdoor sculpture, large-scale sculpture, then I think color is equally critical, but I think you're much more limited as to what your alternatives are, what your possibilities are, because there really is just not color (in the sense of the wide range of pigment) that anybody really has developed, that is enduring without maintenance, without repainting and so on and so forth, in outdoor sculpture. In other words, things that are hit by the elements. You can impregnate fiberglass, and so on, but then that bleaches out and has its problems. And metal, of course, can be painted, and so on and so forth, and that can last for a fair period of time, but it chips, or can chip. I think an interesting story, in reference to that, is David Smith, who for such a good part of his life tried to solve his sculpture by polychrome, by paint, and as we all know, painted so many pieces; and yet really the most successful work he did was, of course, his late work, or last work, the Cubi pieces, and they were stainless steel. And probably the other really good pieces were the rusted pieces, the Spoletto pieces, and so on—at least to me, they were. So it's a difficult problem in sculpture.
AUPING:
Still dealing with the surface, then, how important is the surface in the sculptures, either speaking in terms of color, or noncolor, or colors that are intrinsic to the materials? What qualities are you after on the surfaces with your sculpture?
DELAP:
You're talking about early sculpture now?
AUPING:
Okay, I'm sorry. The early sculptures. For instance, Nesbitt.
DELAP:
Well, in that piece I was really playing just the colored surface against clear plastic, and really in all of those early pieces except for a very few,: the color was very flat, matte flat. I almost never used a glossy color. I mean, I can think of the two pieces I used a glossy color on. So what I would do, I mean in the technical sense, is that I would mix the lacquer, and then I would put in that proportion of flattening agent into the paint that I would need to give it that matte color. So as far as surface was concerned, that particular matte kind of quality was what was to me very important. And then if you put glass in front of that, well, then there was kind of a new ambiguity, because the glass made it different than if the glass, of course, was not there, and yet the color was still flat. So it was sort of a combination between the two, sort of a new illusion took place. But in some of the other earlier sculptures, where there would be paint and raw metal, for example, and glass, maybe, then each particular surface was handled in the way that I felt was correct. It's very funny; in many of those early pieces, I know if I would polish or grind or put a kind of sanded finish on the raw wood, where there was color played against it, I would maybe spend a lot of time just getting the swirl marks the right scale in reference to the piece. I mean, sometimes they would seem to me to get too busy, and other times there would maybe be this or that; and to get it just right, so that they weren't too busy and they weren't too this or too that, was again always, something that took experimenting and trial and error. And the painted part was, again, usually flat, the matte color lacquer. And I guess surfaces, to be more specific, were always just incredibly critical to me, but I always felt that the surfaces had to in some way, whatever they did or didn't do, transcend the material, sort of get outside themselves.
AUPING:
Could you tell me something about the reflective walls you did in 1967? I haven't been able to see a photograph of them, so I don't even know what they look like.
DELAP:
Sure. I have slides of those, so one day you can take a look. Well, let's see, the reflective walls were, I believe, started in '66. I'd had a show in New York of the twisted pieces. And I'd come back, of course, to the area and was working in the studio. And working on the same principle of modular units, which the twisted pieces were, I evolved a right angle of metal with each side being a square, and then rectangular or square units of glass as the other elements. And of course I did these first in model stage and was intrigued not only with the modular quality—that set-up, in the sense that I could put them in various positions and rearrange them, as I could the other pieces—but that I also had this illusionistic quality, the reflectivity available through the introduction of the glass (of acrylic, actually). And so I was intrigued with the models. I remember John Coplans was down about that time, and John was then, very involved with Walter Hopps at the old Pasadena Museum [of Art], and John asked me if I wanted to show the work there when I got them ready. I thought that was a pretty good idea, but Maurice Tuchman was about ready to do his "[American] Sculpture of the Sixties" show [at the County Museum], which I believe was 1967. So I mentioned that to John, and John thought, "Well, that was probably even a better thing to do anyway, so why don't you go ahead and plan on that?" So anyway, the right-angle pieces were large pieces of quarter-inch aluminum plate—well one piece I did was 5; in other words, each return was 5X5 feet—welded on edge, and then that was of course cleaned and primed and lacquered. And the lacquer was—well, the one piece I did, I did them both in highly polished surfaces, and also in flat. Come to think about it, the first piece I did was 4X4 in 2 units, 4X4. And then there was glass in between, or as the other component. And the first time we showed that piece, Houdin's House, or Houdin's House One, the first time I showed that was at the old Dilexi Gallery in San Francisco. And it was a kind of funny scale, because only being 4 feet high it wasn't large enough to involve a spectator, and it was not really so small that it looked like a model for something larger. It was kind of a strange scale. And I kind of liked that piece. It was well received, I remember, at the show. And then I did something that was 5X5. And that was silver, kind of a flat, matte silver, with not glass but acrylic, clear acrylic. And that version, or that piece, I guess, is the one that went into the "Sculpture of the Sixties" show.
AUPING:
I've noticed that the surfaces of your recent sculptures are raw pine, which is a whole other pole, it seems, from the reflective quality of your older sculptures. How did that change come about?
DELAP:
Well, I guess several things. One was rethinking the position of sculpture—not just mine, but I guess the condition of sculpture. Being as many other people were a bit disenchanted with, I guess, the object—at least if not disenchanted trying to evolve other areas of activity. Also I think a natural love of working with wood. Again, my visits to the Northwest Coast. I remember that—oh, and I think also getting much more into relating my work to magic and aspects of magic. I remember going through a big stockpile of drawings that I had accumulated over the years, and I came to one drawing—I can still remember the drawing—where I had kind of a diagram on how to make a piece, in other words, how I was going to lay out the wood and so on. I looked at that drawing, and I thought, "God, that drawing's maybe more interesting than the finished piece, just looking at the way the piece was put together." So I thought it would be kind of interesting to just use raw wood and kind of make something similar to that. I have a pattern maker [Bill Fish] around the corner from my studio who is now an old friend because I've known him for so long, and although when he would do something for me he charged me money, he was always reasonably fair about it. On occasion he would do things that I just could not do myself, either technically or because he had the tools. So I engaged him to make this little piece for me, and of course he always does marvelous work. I kind of liked it. There was a little plaque, actually, that hung on the wall. It was about fifteen inches square or something of that sort and about, maybe, two inches deep. Very cut-and-dried object, but it was just raw wood. And it had a little square in the center of it, and—I don't quite know why—a little sliding piece of Plexiglas that you could slip in and out. I did a couple of those; they kind of reminded me of—I don't know—passageways through the pyramids or something like that, you know. You could pull out this little slit, and there'd be a slit of glass out there, sort of hanging off the frame. And I sort of liked those. I don't think anyone else particularly did, but I did. Anyway, I did those—I kind of liked the feel of them and the way they looked. And then that instigated some drawings that were kind of wood-grain oriented, drawings I did in pastel and silver line. And I got kind of hung up and involved in some of that kind o f thing. But probably the most memorable thing to me about that time—this was about 1970, I guess—was that I took a great big board I had, and again I had my friend the pattern maker chop all this board up to my design, and he made a great big block for me, just a square block. It also had a little square hole running all the way through, and then it also had, in the center, coming in the other way, a little piece of clear plastic that you could pull in and out—I still have the block somewhere. You could hide this thing so it would line up perfectly, or you could push it out. Kind of hard to describe, but I'll show you one day what I'm speaking of. So this was a raw wood block, about 12 inches square, and I did the outlandish thing of suspending this from the ceiling on a very kind of nice light steel cable which went from the center of the block up to a pulley on both sides of the block to the ceiling, and then the line came back down and there were steel weights on the end of the line. The steel weights were weighted just right, so that the block would hover above the floor, but the steel weights would not touch the ground—you got me? It was like a V—or more like an M, went in the shape of an M, the steel weights on the end, and then the cord up to the pulley, and then the V down to the bar. So what I kind of did was, I floated this block in space. It was weird, really a weird, nutty thing. And I certainly didn't think much of it. But I liked the fact that I had kind of at least attempted to free the object or get the object outside its more normal confines. And I thought it looked very magical. As a matter of fact, I think the thing that instigated all of this was drawings that I had seen for an illusion where there was a cage suspended from the stage, and the girl vanished or appeared up there in the cage or something like that, and this kind of reminded me of it. So I think that was one of the beginnings of the Floating Lady series that I did, in raw wood and glass, the first one. Then I went on from there and did other versions of the Floating Lady, and so on.
AUPING:
Do you see these works, your shapes and your forms, the blocks of wood and Floating Lady series and the shapes in your paintings, as being iconic in any way, iconographic?
DELAP:
I don't think so much of the Floating Lady series being so, but the early work certainly was, I believe. The very early work was very mandala-oriented. And I must say, which I think in a way is a compliment to the work, I didn't really know very much about any kind of occult history at that time. Certainly the mandala, which of course is so common, in so many cultures—but I didn't really realize, in a sense, the magical implications of. that sort of centralized, stepped-down image until many years later, in whatever reference it may have made to the occult, that kind of thing. I've always been kind of fascinated with them in retrospect, now that I know more about that area than I did then. But in the very first boxes, for example, the center unit—whether it was circular or square or whatever it was—appeared to visually float inside the outer frame because it was sandwiched—I mean the two sides of the two forms, one on either side, sandwiched a piece of glass in the center. That piece of glass fit the frame, and so it appeared that this thing you were looking at in the frame floated in the space, simply because visually it did not touch any edge. So certainly illusion is something that was there from the very beginning.

1.7. TAPE NUMBER: IV, SIDE ONE JANUARY 28, 1976

AUPING:
Tony, do you look at sculpture in terms of its being an object-making activity, or do you look at it more in terms of creating a situation?
DELAP:
Well, I think it can of course be both, or many things within that wide range of activity. The first sculpture that I made, or at least the first things that I made that were called sculpture, go back to about 1961, and they were double-sided, for the most part, glass boxes, with contained form of one kind or the other. And they very definitely were objects. They were handleable, in the sense that they could be picked up, and they were table-top size, pedestal size. I've often thought that they were probably less object to me than they were to other people, probably because to me each piece was the working out of a kind of space that I was naturally involved with and concerned with, and in some ways I don't think I really thought of them as being at any particular scale. As I believe I said in the past, I think that they were a convenient size to work out, at least at that time, my own particular problems, what I felt about painting, sculpture—a combination of those events, at a convenient sort of scale, both cost-wise, time-wise, and so on. To go from one piece to the next, however close in appearance they may have been to the layman, there was always a transition that was very important to me. And I. think that within my world of activity, those pieces could have been much larger in scale, that they did not necessarily have to be the object scale that they were, because my nature has always been to really have interest in and concern for scale beyond and often far exceeding the object.
AUPING:
Then, given any scale, you know, your choice of any scale you could work in, is there a particular scale you feel most comfortable with in your work, generally?
DELAP:
No, not really. I think that this whole conversation of scale is a fascinating one, and it's something that I was preoccupied with myself, both in my studio and as a teacher. I think that when we talk of scale, we have to first of all determine what kind of scale we're speaking of. For example, there's inherent scale and there's physical scale. Inherent scale, it seems to me, is for example the relationships of the parts to the whole, intrinsic to that particular problem. It might be a building; it might be a sculptural environment; it might be an object. But each or all of those and others all have their inherent scale. Then there's physical scale, which means, are we talking about the object, or are we talking about the large-scale architectural format? And so on and so; forth. As far as which one do I feel the most comfortable in, I don't think in a lot o f ways, of one being particularly different from the other as far as a problem-solving situation is concerned. There's certainly, of course, a great difference between meandering through a space and an observer looking upon or looking into a situation. As a creator and manipulator of physical form, I don't find and never have found great differences in the act of creation between those situations.
AUPING:
Did you run into any problems, or did you approach that large-scale work that you did for the city of Inglewood, say, differently than you might have approached another piece? What was your intention with that piece?
DELAP:
Well, I think the situation there was one of, first of all, limitation. And I'm really a very strong believer in limitations, either imposed or self-imposed. I think that some of the best work, maybe the best work, historically, has been one or the other: the painting, for example, imposed by royalty on the artist; the artist imposing strict limitations, in a sense, on his own creativity, after, of course, exploring in great depth the problem at hand. But it always comes down eventually, I think, to quite narrow limitations. And the problem in Inglewood was, I think, just really very much that. [tape stopped]
AUPING:
Let's see, you were talking about the Inglewood piece.
DELAP:
Yeah. So in Inglewood, the situation was basically somewhat this: they had several sites available to me that they were willing to let me do something with, and I chose in some ways, I guess, the most difficult situation, because it was a space of limiting possibilities simply because the area had already been designed and planned by the architect. There were other areas that were, I guess, to some artists more open and less limiting, in the sense that they could, for example, design a piece on the outside that would not necessarily have any reference to that particular site, that could be brought in, and that was it. In other words, it could be independent of the environment. I chose the site that I chose because I liked not so much the plan as a whole but the fact of the reality of the space and the thought [of being limited in] what can I do here, knowing that this is what it's going to be, and that there's not really too much I can change. In the plan they had on paper a fountainlike area in the cavity that I was involved with. So I told them, or asked them, if they would consider scrapping the concept of the fountain, and just giving me the space within the architecture to work with? and that was, after a short period of time, agreed upon. And then I went to work developing my concept. I think that what the end result, or at least what I like to think has been the result, is an integration of my concept with the architecture, to the extent that it does not read as an afterthought. It becomes an integral part of. the architectural totality. One can always think of it maybe being something less than they had hoped for, or they could maybe think of it as being something better than their original wildest imagination. This is, of course, almost something else again. But I think that if something of this kind is going to be successful, it has to be initiated in the beginning stages. I don't think that public sculpture, for example, for the most part, is particularly successful as an afterthought. I don't think that an object of any physical scale brought into a site is, at least in my way of thinking, a very satisfactory solution to this kind of a problem, regardless of who did it, regardless of the caliber of the artist concerned. So it's sort of treacherous, almost dangerous ground. Maybe it's a little bit—and I'm just thinking here a bit off the top of my head—like theater design, in the sense that it's possible in public sculpture, for example, to maybe overstep your bounds. Maybe, for example, the best set designers are the set designers that know and recognize their limitations. In other words, they have things to consider other than just the physicality of what they present on the stage. They have the actors to consider, the presentation of this play every evening, whatever it may be. Where is the line drawn, as to how much they should give, how much they should present, of some sort? And I'm not sure but what public sculpture, for example, is not something that in its own kind of way faces that, or maybe should face that problem. I think that—again, just sort of thinking here very spontaneously—one of the difficulties with the artist and architect is that the architect, at least historically, in the past, has often gotten stuck with the artist, in the sense that he maybe has been proud of his building, and the artist, for whatever reasons, has been sold and his work is moved in. And it's maybe a hideous thing, particularly in reference to the architecture. So the architect becomes gun-shy to the artist per se. I'm not speaking of anyone specific, or of a particular case. So kind of traditionally, the architect has moved away often from the artist, where of course the very opposite should have taken place. The artist should be someone—or some artists should be the people that are integrating their work with the architect. And this is again partly the architect's fault, the client's fault, the artist's fault. But whatever and whoever is to blame, in my opinion, the success, if it's going to be successful, of the integration of sculpture and architecture is something that should be planned and initiated in the beginning stages; that's the only way it can be successful. I can cite an example of a piece I did in Northern California a number of years ago. I was fortunate in through the years having known the architect [Robert Marquis]. He knew my work—as a matter of fact, owned a piece of my work. We were not the closest of friends, but we were friends. I was familiar with his work, and he was familiar with mine. My real point is this: that he was doing a building in San Rafael, and in the center, or really the hub or the nucleus of this edifice that he was building, which was a good-sized commercial structure, there was the thought of some kind of sculptural involvement. And I was called in at the initial stage, in other words, before the building went up, or I guess, maybe ground had been broken. But it was right at that stage. And I had meetings with client and architect, after, of course, the initial plan that I had submitted was approved. And I think this was a very marvelous and a very unusual and a very unique situation, because, although we did not fight and argue, questions were raised, situations, thoughts were brought up, and during a period of time, after having had so many meetings, and so on and so forth, of client and architect, the architects actually changed aspects of the interior of this structure to conform to my basic concept, or sculptural concept, because they approved of what I had presented. They seem to have understood it, and because of that, they made concessions in reference to their architectural program for that kind of a situation. Now, that was flattering from my standpoint, but I think it could easily have been the other way around, where maybe what I had presented would be in one way or the other modified to the architectural program. But I think what I'm basically getting at is that the artist working in that kind of an arena had best understand and know what he's working in, because it seems to me that the contribution that the artist is going to make and can make is to only understand thoroughly and completely the architectural problem and so many other things that are, or appear to be, maybe, outside his immediate involvement.
AUPING:
When you're working on an architectural scale like that, does that not involve employing outside commercial fabricators to help you with the work? How does this affect your way of working? Do you develop your ideas totally before you bring them in, or do your ideas evolve with the actual making of the piece?
DELAP:
I didn't understand the last part of the question.
AUPING:
In the fact that you'll have to hire out commercial fabricators to do some of the work: does this disturb your way of working? In other words, do you generally work by developing a piece totally and then making it, or do you start making a piece and let that piece develop as you're making it, changing nuances, shading down a bit more, or painting a bit more?
DELAP:
Yeah, well, I think I'd go back to what I was saying earlier. That I have found, over the years, often much to my chagrin, except as hindsight, that I welcome the limitations. I think that this is something that again—and I'm not going to play teacher here for too long a period—but I think this is something that is very hard to instill, particularly in the novice student: that limitations are often a blessing. Hopefully, they're for the most part self-imposed. For example, if you're doing a large piece of sculpture, and you consult with an engineer or a fabricator or an architect, or whoever it may be, and you have a serious discussion about, let us say, the fabrication of the work—if you can keep an open mind, not only change your concept, but because of the realities of certain materials, structure, and so on, they often change it for the better. And I think that this is the thing that often the artist fights to the point of losing his perspective about what the possibilities can be. I think that all we have to do, for example, is to see historically what the Chinese developed as a cuisine out of necessity, what the Japanese developed architecturally out of necessity—limitation of material, and so on and so forth—to realize that limitations are very often a godsend. I mean, they are a blessing. They are a door to creativity. We of course don't want them shoved down our throat. But in some way, sooner or later, they have to be zeroed in on. Whether as the creator we come to that limitation, or whether the realities—I'm speaking of public sculpture—impose them upon us.
AUPING:
What role do your drawings play, then, in developing one of your paintings or sculptures?
DELAP:
Well, of course, I think that drawing is one of the really marvelous tools. The availability and ease of drawing is so necessary to the artist that, to me, the thought of really not having that availability is just difficult to imagine. What was the original question?
AUPING:
The role of your drawing. Let me inject this: in the catalog for your show at [California State University at] Long Beach, you said, "In review, I find that they"— the drawings—"are basically diagrams helping me to perceive my own personal space. This is a continuing problem, which never fails to involve me." Could you elaborate on that a little bit, what you mean by helping you to diagram your personal space?
DELAP:
Well, I think probably when I say what it means to diagram my own personal space, I guess I really, probably as much as anything, am using an expression, in a sense, to say that drawing is for me a way of finding my way to various solutions, aesthetic solutions. I think to me it's like saying I use personal space as a way of finding content to my work, because I guess I would assume, or can assume, that personal space is, in a sense, my own particular way of finding content and meaning in my work. Because space is to me a major problem in the development of the aesthetic act, and God knows, I find it not unusual because I think that in one way or the other, it's maybe most artists' plight or concern.
AUPING:
Do you see your drawings as preparatory sketches or rather as independent pieces which exist by themselves, with their own aesthetic value?
DELAP:
Well, I can answer that question, I think, quite conclusively. I think that there are several kinds of drawings. I think there are those drawings that are information to oneself, like making notes on your cuff if you're a writer, or on the backs of envelopes, or something of that sort. I think drawings are often notations of things to come. And without trying to be particularly dramatic about it, I have often gotten up late at night to make drawing notes which I would later take into the studio. I don't think that there is anything for the visual artist really more spontaneous, more completely involving the aesthetic act from beginning to end, than the act of drawing. Or there's nothing that can be. In other words, you can make laborious drawings and mechanical drawings, but there are also drawings that can be made totally spontaneously, totally creative, let's say, from beginning to end. And I think that the drawing that is a note about an idea, a thought, is a drawing that is that kind of a drawing. In other words, it is or can be a pure aesthetic statement. Yes, because there is not, from beginning to end, a laborious craftsman-oriented involvement, so the drawing is, or can be, a marvelous instrument to touch off what one wishes to do at a later date, or simply what one feels terribly strong about at the moment. What was the original question? [laughter]
AUPING:
So in other words, you feel that a drawing is both a preparatory sketch and an end in itself.
DELAP:
Oh. So there are those drawings that are in a sense preparatory sketches, or notes, information; and they can be an end to themselves. I think the thing about drawings is that—which is not an original thought, but I think it's a very true one—drawings have the ability of giving great insight about the artist. They probably are the most incisive about the artist, because they present great truth. And because of that, the drawing that sets out to be a drawing as an end result often tells the lie—and that is easily recognized—that that kind of premeditation is all that it's about. So I find drawing, because of that, theeasiest kind of aesthetic activity—and also the most difficult kind of activity because it depends upon the frame of mind. It depends upon how honest you are to yourself at the particular time you're making a drawing. If you're making a drawing when the time is ripe and correct and honest and straightforward for you to make a drawing, then that's what it is. But if you're saying to yourself, "Well, dealer I wants a drawing like the one I sent him that was an honest, straightforward drawing, but he wants another one," [laughter] then it's hard, you see. And I have had those kind of things happen—I can flatter myself by saying often. But the catch is that I can't always make a drawing like that one he wants because that was maybe one of those, in a sense, good, honest, straightforward drawings. And to sit down and try to recapture that is like trying to recapture, very often, anything that is spontaneous and magnificent and beautiful, however we put it down. It usually doesn't work exactly that way. I mean, you can hopefully always do it again, but you're not quite sure when, and you're not quite sure how the results are going to come out, what the paper's going to be or the image is going to be, and so on and so forth. And it's so common, I think, with art. It's like any artist, almost, that we can think of. Wayne Thiebaud was speaking at Irvine a week ago, and he touched upon in his experiences a very similar thing, when he said that the dealer would call and say, "Well, paint me another pie." "And I can paint him a pie, but it's just not going to be like the pie that I painted when I was painting pies, you know, and I can't help it. It just doesn't have the ring to it." And I think that was aptly put, and that's the way I feel about drawing in particular. You're not trying to make anything funny out of it; you can't—here we're talking about a certain kind of drawing. Now there's another kind of drawing that is not necessarily that way. If it's a diagrammatic kind of drawing, if it's maybe a drawing that does not need the kind of spontaneity and all that I've been speaking of, maybe purely an intellectualization of thought, or something of that sort, maybe it will work— maybe it will work.
AUPING:
Since I haven't seen them, I was wondering if you could tell me about the Queen Charlotte [Island] drawings which you've done recently.
DELAP:
Oh, yeah. Yeah, those drawings were—see, I really kind of started from very early years, as I guess probably so many artists did, going out and drawing from the landscape. I took painting classes—we've talked about that in earlier tapes, the Academy of Art, and Arts and Crafts, the art schools and all that I had gone to—and then I would go off, just regularly on my own, and draw from the landscape, and that kind of thing, often not really appreciating it as a lover of what maybe I was facing and all but recognizing many intrinsically beautiful aspects of the thing. In those early years, man-made objects were more appealing to me, maybe because I found them easier to draw—for example, railroad cars and buildings falling down, and those kind of things. In other words, a kind of rigidity of the man-made object, the geometric kind of handling of form and light and dark and all that sort of thing, I think was, in the earlier years, more appealing to me. I was not terribly interested or did not really know what to do with a tree, or grass, or that kind of thing, that more pastoral, natural sort of landscape. But I reacted to it in, I think, a sensitive way. So getting back to the Queen Charlotte Island drawings: after having spent a good number of years in the Northwest Coast of the country, and after having spent, oh, now a total of three summers in the Queen Charlotte Islands, it seems that last summer [1975], I attacked a short but very worthwhile trip to the Queen Charlotte Islands with a real vengeance, in reference to drawing. And I'm not quite sure why that is—I think probably for several reasons: one, a confidence in myself after many years, in reference to not really giving a damn about what I drew or didn't draw? and probably most important of all, the realization that I absolutely really related to and felt a strong need to try to do something with that unbelievable country that I have really grown to have a profound respect and love for, and all that kind of thing. And, oh, I could name other reasons—time on my hands. In reference to the trip, we were on a very small chartered boat for all the time we were gone, except when we would of course tie up and were able to go onto shore. And one of the really interesting things about being an artist is that when you're in that kind of a situation, you have a tremendous advantage. Other people often don't know what to do with themselves after a while, you know? particularly if the seas get rough, they get a little seasick. And this happens and that happens. But for myself, I would just go up on deck and I would draw, and it was marvelous because there was always—kind of like the more boring it got for everybody else, sort of like the more interesting it was for me. And I just really poured out these drawings. I think I threw away as many as I saved. I guess I ended up with about roughly eighty that I would accept, and as I say, I'm sure I threw away that same number. So I really was drawing a good part of all the time I was gone. And it's, just like so many things, you know? After a while, you are attacking things on so many levels that it becomes a scenario. And you're producer, writer, set designer—you know, you're everything. And that's what, in a sense, I really love about all that, because it's all your fantasies. You have total control over the whole thing. And I would of course, at the end of the day, carefully go through my drawings, which I took great delight in doing, and I would carefully file them away. And after so many drawings done a day, maybe out of twenty drawings done a day, I would edit that down—I'd throw away four, five, six, or whatever the case may be, just crumple them up and throw them away. And then anyway, whatever you end up with, whatever you save, maybe it's only a couple of drawings, but whatever you end up with, it's very satisfying, you know. That's been your day's work, and then, you know, you cook your fresh abalone or whatever and open a good bottle of wine, and it's terrific—it's really terrific. And I have grown to relate more and more to that kind of experience. I think that it's very strengthening to my other pursuits, which hopefully are also of some kind of importance. Maybe I can pursue those other interests with more importance after counteracting it with that kind of activity. I think it's very good for me.
AUPING:
The Queen Charlotte drawings are landscapes, aren't they?
DELAP:
Yes, yeah. I really didn't tell you what they were. The Queen Charlotte Island drawings are landscapes. They're mostly in sepia. What I really did was put some black ink and some standard sepia, so they're kind of a dirty black kind of ink, and I guess sort of technically they would be between a so-called pure sepia drawing and a watercolor. A small format: some of them quite small, some are slightly larger, but I don't think any were over, say 10X8 inches, something of that sort. It's a very intimate scale, obviously. It's a scale that's easily transportable, and I drew a high percentage of all of them at sea when the boat was often really pitching to a great degree. My only excuse for that is it was often technically a little difficult to maneuver the drawing instrument. But I find that working on the spot like that is, for the kind of thing I was doing, the only way it would work. I could not really recreate anything and feel proper about it. It was something that I had to kind of do at the time, and I was immersed in that reality, that experience. And although I did some little watercolors of shells and all that related to the trip, the drawings were all done on the spot. And it's nothing that I've returned to as a daily activity in my art since I have left. I mean, the whole thing was too strong for me, and it all took place then and there, and I like that aspect of it.

1.8. TAPE NUMBER: IV, SIDE TWO JANUARY 28, 1976

AUPING:
How do you know when a piece is done, Tony? How does that decision come about? What dictates when a piece is complete?
DELAP:
You mean a painting or a sculpture or anything?
AUPING:
Anything, either—generally.
DELAP:
Well, I guess the answer to that's probably easier to decipher, for example, in a lot of my work than it is in the work of other artists, or some other artists—[although it's] harder to decipher in some drawings, of course, than others. But my work, I guess, always again went back to a kind of rational business, had a kind of predictability to it, in the sense that when, for example, the form is there, it's there. But to be more specific in the answer to your question: putting on a color, for example, in a painting, now I start with raw canvas. I give it one coat of gesso, because I want to keep it as open and as porous as possible. And then I put on approximately six coats of acrylic paint. I find that within a coat or two, one way or the other—well, if it's less than six, the paint quality visually has not quite arrived. And I think I mentioned in a tape a week ago, there's the possibility of too much color getting on, and then it's unsatisfactory to me because it's, in a sense, been overpainted. So from a standpoint of the application of paint, you know when it's arrived, when it feels right, in reference to what I'm speaking about now, the coats of paint that you put on. And that's the kind of thing you sense. It's very intuitive; very intuitive. It doesn't always mean you're right. A lot of times you think you're being intuitive; you could have been just as well off with maybe less paint. But you have to go on something. So you assume you're right.
AUPING:
To change the subject a little bit, how big a role do you feel modern technology has played, or has affected your art or your way of approaching art?
DELAP:
Well, I don't know, to answer the question, how much it has affected my art and how little it has affected my art. But I think that by osmosis the essence of technology has affected my art. I don't think that I have directly used any super streamlined, incredible methods of making art, technological ways of making art, that have particularly affected it. But I think, hopefully, that a lot of my work, maybe even the earlier work, made references to aspects of the technological age that were apparent. But I am not really, in a sense, too technologically oriented, really. I mean, outside of my time and place, I don't have any aspirations, particularly, towards technology saving the world, or anything of that sort. As a matter of fact, I maybe think that they're not doing a terribly good job of it.
AUPING:
Have you experimented with video?
DELAP:
I've experimented with video, and I like it very much. I wish to date that I had done more. I think I wish that maybe I knew more about it or felt more secure in my thoughts about it. I feel very much that way also about film. I feel quite insecure in what I think of film, but I like it very much. I have always thought that I would like to have done more in that medium, too. But video particularly interests me. But apparently it doesn't consume me, or I would be working with it to a greater extent than I have been.
AUPING:
What possibilities do you think video offers the artist that excite you the most, that you see inherent in video?
DELAP:
Well, I think a real kind of freedom. See, I always feel about the time I finished one episode, I'm obligated almost to indulge in another. And by that I mean—well, really almost the way I feel today, tonight, sitting here. I have a studio full of recent work, which are wall pieces, paintings for the most part, and they're going to be shown shortly at Wilder's in Los Angeles. I have that pretty much but of my system now, that work. And I feel fine about it. I am pleased with the results. They're what they are, and they're there, and so on. So now I feel, in a sense, almost obligated, and interested;, in other activities. So I'm now particularly primed, for example, to indulge my time, at least momentarily, in other activities: video, photography, performance, practicing my magic, reading—a whole variety of activity. To get back to your question of video, I think that video offers a wealth of material, and for my interests, it's just about unlimited.
AUPING:
The video that you have done, the one that we talked about earlier, was basically a documentary video. Why did you do a documentary video?
DELAP:
Well, I think it was out of adulation of the individual that I videoed. I think one of the things that makes that video tape particularly interesting is the fact that it's very unpremeditated from my standpoint as an artist, [not] having done it as any kind of presentation of my work, you see. In other words, its interest is really the fact that it doesn't have anything to do with me particularly, outside of the fact that I was interested enough in doing it. And I think that says a lot in a way for art per se. But I think one of the difficulties with video is the fact that it's so—I'm not speaking for all of it, of course, but so much of it, to me, is so self-conscious, so awesomely tedious, that it's just almost unbearable. And I find that if video is—beyond whatever one does with it—if it's a kind of honest presentation, whatever it might be, without all of those overtones, as I see it, it's coming much closer to its possibility. So you know—how do I want to say it?—I don't really want to particularly compete with it. I want to just let—to me, video, film, and so on and so forth, it should sort of just roll along by itself. It should sort of do it all, kind of on its own. I mean, it's hard for me to explain it, but there are some creative activities, indulgences, that I like to feel distant from. Okay, I maneuvered them, I did them—but I like to stay a certain distance from them. And other things, obviously, one feels more maniacal about, I guess. But I don't seem to have that problem with other media. I guess it's because I feel that because that's not what's so sacred to me, I can be casual about the indulgence. And that might be a blessing.
AUPING:
What was the name of the gentleman you interviewed for your video tape?
DELAP:
Oh, the Magic Man, as my daughter calls him, was Dai Vernon, who is an elderly magician living in Southern California, who is now approaching eighty-two. That was who we videotaped.
AUPING:
Talking about television, how do you feel about Marshall McLuhan's quote, "The medium is the message," putting it in an art context? And in putting it in an art context, maybe we're talking about process art.
DELAP:
I don't know. [laughter] Pretty evasive answer, isn't it? I kind of like Marshall McLuhan, actually, which is all beside the point. One of his daughters was here in Corona Del Mar for a number of years, Mary McLuhan. I've not seen her recently. She used to, a number of years ago, come over quite often. And we talked, of course, at great lengths about her father. She wrote her father once about me and my interest in magic and all, and had a letter back. He was coming down, and we were going to get together and spend an evening, that kind of thing, but it didn't materialize. I mean, I think Marshall McLuhan's really quite an interesting person. But in answer to your question, I don't—you know, ask me some more questions, maybe I'll give you an answer. [laughter]
AUPING:
Just the opposite from technological information you might pick up, have you picked up much information from primitive cultures? I was talking to someone the other day who mentioned you had discussed Mitla-Monte Alban in ancient Mexico.
DELAP:
Yeah, I feel strongly about so much of that area of activity. I think I probably get inwardly the greatest kind of charge out of looking, for example, at reproductions of so much of antiquity, more so than contemporary art, recent art history, and so on. I'm. really not quite sure why, and there's no reason that I should dissect it to the point of, I guess, answering that question either. But I do. I have seen not a lot of it. I've made a few trips to Mexico. I have seen Monte Alban? I've seen Teotihuacan. But, for example, I have not yet been to Yucatan. I've seen a handful of other archaeological sites in Mexico, a few in the United States. I think it's just all absolutely mindbending, what I've seen. I've seen and know fairly intimately aspects of the Northwest Coast culture, the totem culture. Two years ago, I was on a University of California at Irvine grant to go into the Queen Charlotte Islands and photograph the remaining Indian sites of that country, which is, of course, the Haida Indian. And that was, of course, a revelation and something that was terribly important to me. But I do think that the primitive influences have had a profound influence on particularly my recent work. I think that the whole mystical, magical—I'm speaking now more about the Northwest Coast, because I know more about it—shamanistic influences, which are so heavy, historically speaking, at any rate, in all of that country, have prevailed upon my work. [There is] an energy, a lack of pretension, and an affirmation of man in so much of all that kind of involvement that to me is just so marvelous.
AUPING:
When you say mysticism—you've mentioned during our conversations a number of times "rational mysticism"—what are you speaking of? Are you talking about form, or—?
DELAP:
I think I'm talking about intent. The Egyptians, I think, had a very controlled, very rational, very beautiful presentation of mystical, cult, magical, visual information, that was pretty much a part of the everyday of that culture. It seems to me that there was not superfluous, for example, visual information, superfluous googahs that cluttered that environment. In other words, everything was sort of pared down, stripped down, minimalized to the kind of essence of what those people were about. There were not, for example, great decorative, nonsensical goings-on. There was not art for just the sake of decoration in the street, or whatever the case may be. Everything was, again, pared down to its minimal kind of rational level for the carrying out of the daily activity. I can't think of other, better ways to say it than that.
AUPING:
I don't think you need to. That's pretty good.
DELAP:
That's the best I can think of: the believability of form and image. It seems to me that so much art is just all about clutter. It's just all about things that don't have any particular reason for doing all that and being all that. And I don't understand it. You know, I don't know—go back to somebody like Le Corbusier, for example, and say, well, it's better that they all look like ocean liners than like a department store window, or whatever the case may be, because God knows the ocean liner has a rational approach to living and was certainly closer to solving the problem than the average upper-middle-class Frenchman's home. It's like here in Newport Beach, these people live in all of these ticky-tacky houses, which are really—I mean, they'll give you a nightmare if you go in them, most of them. But then, out in front, there's a magnificent boat. Why don't they live on the boat and give up the house? [laughter] I mean, it's crazy; I mean, it just is crazy. It's something that I never have been able to understand. It's a schizophrenic kind of an aesthetic participation, because you live in a holy horror, and yet you could, you know—it's strange; it's really strange.
AUPING:
Changing the subject here again a little bit, you were one of the first full-time faculty members at UCI, so you've pretty much experienced its development, the art department there. What was the atmosphere like at UCI for you when you first arrived there and began teaching, in terms of an art context? What kind of energies were going on there at that time?
DELAP:
Well, of course, we had everything to gain and not a lot to lose in those days. We were very new. We were in some ways in a difficult area of Southern California, from the standpoint of the area being extremely conservative and not in really any way receptive to art, particularly so-called advanced art. But maybe all that was a blessing. John Coplans and myself were the very first two people who were hired in the studio art department. Actually, John Coplans was the director of the gallery. Actually, I was, come to think about it, the only person, the very first person hired in the studio arts, because John was the director of the gallery and he was obligated to teach two classes in art history. But the school opened with, I recall, myself teaching studio classes. And John McCracken. He came down from San Francisco with me at that time and did not have a job. But he remained in the area and shared my studio, and I think John and I got him the job for the opening year at Irvine. So it seems to me that when Irvine first started, myself and John McCracken and an invited outsider—I'd have to look at the record to find out who that was—started off. But it was really very easy at that time and all, because we first of all didn't really know anybody; the school was very small. There was lots of activity going on in Los Angeles, and John Coplans was energetic. He was in touch, of course, with what was going on in town, and it was kind of like we really were existing at that uptown sort of pace, or we were involved with an uptown sort of pace and were just kind of living down here. I mean, it was about like that, really, for that period of time. The classes were, of course, small * And there was no real static, as far as the community was concerned. Nobody seemed to bother us. I don't think anybody knew what the hell we were doing, mainly. I don't think anybody really cared, [laughter] To be frank about it.
AUPING:
Do you think it's important for an artist to have formal training?
DELAP:
Oh, that's a very hard question, I think, to answer, because it might be very important for one and not particularly important for another. I think [a person's] being an artist is a very elusive, very, very difficult thing to in any way at all endow in reference to his training, his or her training. It seems historically that some marvelous artists have had quite good training, in the sense that they went to art school or that they maybe came from parents that were very involved in the arts. Then, as we all know, there were those artists who were marvelous artists who in that sense had everything against them: they had parents who would disown them if they were going to be artists, or did, if they decided they were? who for whatever reasons had virtually no art schooling, or: maybe no art schooling at all. And it's hard to say. I think, however, to voice an opinion, that generally speaking, I would say yes, it's like jazz. I mean, American jazz produced Louis Armstrong and a few others of that caliber who had no formal training, but particularly today, you'd best have it. I'm speaking there of jazz, but I think that art training is the same, that it's a great advantage. And it may be a great deal more difficult today than it was before. I think that it seems to me it would be very difficult to make one's mark in the so-called fine arts without an art education.
AUPING:
Do you think that education-wise or politically? In other words, what I'm wondering is how important is the theoretical enclave of the school to your success or failure as an artist today?
DELAP:
You mean, like what school you go to, and that kind of thing?
AUPING:
Right.
DELAP:
I don't know about that. I think about it a lot because Irvine has been blessed and criticized, of course, in reference to that situation. I would like to think that it doesn't make much difference. But, you see, I think it's very hard to tell when a climate draws—a climate can draw, as I guess we all know, certain talent. Now, does the climate draw the talent, you know, or does the climate politically produce recognizable people? I would like to think, and I think I'm right, that the climate draws specific people that are of exceptional talent who go on to do things. But maybe what happens is that they do that for a period of time; and then people think, somewhat rightfully so, that that's a political kind of thing; and they start going for that reason, thinking that if they do, that's going to happen to them, too. But for the wrong reasons, you see. Maybe that's the history of any kind of success in the sense of schools.
AUPING:
Along the same lines, transferring that situation to the art scene, period, outside of the educational context, do you think that, realistically, a man or woman producing art on the West Coast has as much chance of making it into the history books as a man or woman producing art on the East Coast?
DELAP:
No. But again I would say that there are exceptions. But generally speaking, if you're talking about numbers, I would say no. And I think that that's just a fact. I think it's a fact because you have the distance from the periodical popular press on the West Coast. I think that's really the main difference. I think that if, for example, all of the major art magazines plus the few weeklies—Newsweek and Time, for example—and so on and so forth, all decided that they were going to come to bask in the southern sun or the western sun, the whole situation would reverse itself. Plus 350 galleries—that they would move out West, too. I think it only makes sense that the action is going to by and large be controlled where the action is. It's silly to think that it's not. But at the same time, it doesn't mean that a certain uniqueness for some individuals cannot have that situation work to great advantage for them, too. I think it can.
AUPING:
Well, an artist of your caliber would obviously have found greater visibility on the East Coast, then. What has kept you in Southern California?
DELAP:
Oh, I don't know. I just am, I guess, West Coast-oriented, for one thing. And you know, maybe I could say I never knew any better. [laughter] Probably be the most honest answer. But having started in Northern California and then having come to Southern California, and liking so much of the West Coast and what it has to offer for not just myself but my family—a kind of openness and climate, low profile, a teaching job that I enjoy and have in a sense worked hard at to gain my own rewards, the effort spent, that kind of thing—I have really a lot, and not to be corny about it, really a lot to be very thankful for. I don't think I ever in some ways had the courage or the interest in giving up so much of all these things I've been speaking about to pursue the Eastern Establishment. And probably as much as I may feel it occasionally and complain about it, I don't think I probably ever wanted what the rewards might possibly be up and above from what I've got at that expense, you know. And I think [it was] not out of any lack of drive, but I think out of really a very deep belief that eventually if you do a good job, it'll work out—you know. And at times I feel that is a bit naive, but I still like to believe that there's that possibility. When I was really young, I used to think that all you had to do if you were going to be an artist was maybe be a little bit more interesting than the next person, and everybody would know about it. I've found that to be a touch naive. But I never have felt at the same time that was impossible. And I still really kind of feel that.
AUPING:
Was there ever a time in your career where you seriously considered moving to New York?
DELAP:
Not in my earlier years, because I was just, in a sense, too struggling in my own environment personally and professionally, and the times that it crossed my mind, it was too far removed. In later years, it entered my mind. In some ways, it enters my mind almost more now. But I know that even if I was to move to New York at this time in my career, I would only want to do it for a period of the year. I would not want to do it full time. Career-wise, I think it's less important than it was.
AUPING:
Do you think then that California is as conducive to making art as New York? Do you think you could make a general statement like that?
DELAP:
Well, I think anyplace is conducive to making art if you really want to make art bad enough, up to a point. I think you can make art anyplace if you feel in touch with or loved by, available to, so on and so forth, those areas of activity that promote and understand art—in this country, New York and Los Angeles, let's say. I don't think that it makes a great deal of difference, if you have those kind of contacts and you function in those areas, where you make it. But I think that if you're removed from that availability, then it's something else. So if we're talking about the people between the East and the West who do not have contacts on the West Coast or on the East Coast—then I think it's a different situation. And that takes nothing away from them, except that it's a reality of the situation that you're faced with.

1.9.

TAPE NUMBER: V, SIDE ONE FEBRUARY 4, 1976
AUPING:
Why don't we start with these notes you wrote down, Tony? Where you say, "What do you think about the state of sculpture today?" I'd be very interested in that.
DELAP:
Well, okay. I was interested in writing down the question. I hope I have something interesting to say about it. The last sculptures that I did, a couple of the pieces were large freestanding wall plywood pieces, like the Floating Lady pieces. And since I completed those pieces, particularly since having completed the piece I did for John Berggruen—the one that went across the room, and appeared basically not to touch the sides—since I completed that piece and installed it for a show (when was it? it was just about a year and a half ago), I seem to have calmed on sculpture. The statement that I made in that series of work, the piece for Berggruen and a few pieces just prior to that which were all called the Floating Lady series—those pieces seem to me to have momentarily brought to a halt any really burning desire to manufacture more sculpture. I'm not entirely sure just why, but I have a suspicion that I have come—or came, at least, at the time—to a bit of an impasse in my thinking about the sculpture and what meaning sculpture had for me. I seem to have become more and more disenchanted with the freestanding sculpture, the isolated object, the isolated form in space, whether it be in a gallery or an environmental setting. And it seems to me that I've always wanted more—which I guess may be the truth for most artists—out of sculpture, both for myself and just for sculpture in general, than I have ever really either done myself or seen other places, the exception being aspects of antiquity. It seems to me that I am very interested, and have always been. quite interested, in sculpture that functions as a very integral part of the social structure, maybe more as a daily activity in the lives of the people, in other words, something integrated more to the daily activity. For example, of course, the classic example is the pyramids. There are certainly many other, thousands of examples of earlier societies, the great sculpture of ancient Mexico, the architecture of ancient Mexico—I think it's that I've always had this very strong interest in architecture or aspects of architecture and, of course, sculpture. And I've always sort of felt that architecture really—I'm talking now about contemporary art, which I think I'm quite right about—has never really properly supported nor understood sculpture and sculptors; and the sculptor often has not paid the proper respect—[phone rings; tape stopped]
AUPING:
We were talking about the relationship.
DELAP:
I thought if we came to the studio, we'd find more peace and quiet, but telephones are interrupting it. God knows what's next; probably a knock on the door. Yeah, I was talking about sculpture and architecture, and complaining, I guess, in a sense, that contemporary architects have never really understood the sculptor, and the sculptor has often not really understood or cared enough about the architectural problem. And it seems to me that this is one of the great difficulties. Of course, I'm looking at it from the sculptor's, artist's standpoint, so I can say that I think architects have to not only become more knowledgeable about art—I think they've got to become better architects, which is a step in the right direction. I'm not sure that sculptors need to do anything differently than pursuing their own honest efforts, and then hopefully that finds its place. But there have definitely been a lot of things wrong. One of them is that—which I think is rather common knowledge—the architect finishes a building, and then, for whatever reasons, he has an artist place a piece of work on his design. And it usually and often is an afterthought, and the sculpture becomes something sort of tacked onto or dropped into an architectural setting, often just getting lost, and so on and so forth.
AUPING:
Where do you think sculpture is going today? What direction do you see most progressive for sculpture to move in?
DELAP:
Just one second.
AUPING:
I'm sorry.
DELAP:
No, that's okay. I just wanted to add one thing to what I was saying, and that is that I think the sculptor has to get in on the ground floor with the architect at the beginning stages of the building or complex or whatever, for this whole thing to be practical. I think that when the architect recognizes the great possibilities for the project that certain sculptors can give him and help him with and collaborate with him on, then we will maybe see the day when sculpture begins to enter back into its proper perspective in reference to the merger, in a sense, of the utilitarian—meaning architecture—and the aesthetic fulfillment that hopefully the sculptor brings.
AUPING:
Then you feel that sculpture will inevitably—or should—move in a public direction rather than an isolated art context?
DELAP:
Well, I think it should move in a direction where the architects, or whoever is responsible for building things, bring the sculptor into the situation at an earlier stage and think of him contributing to the situation as a whole, and not just as an isolated part, as it often is. I'm talking now about the possibilities of sculptural complexity and the out-of-doors, this kind of thing: in other words, instead of being treated as a monument or simply an edifice or an object, that [sculpture] should be thought of as something not only, of course, to enhance, but to be really integrated into the architect's plan at an early stage.
AUPING:
Speaking of architecture, is there not an architectural aspect to your paintings?
DELAP:
Oh, I think so. I think that they are quite architectural in the severity of form, for example, the clarity of image, the cleanliness of shape, attention to detail, the perfection of surface—this kind of thing is all very architectural. Particularly the recent work, I think, is architectural in the sense that, in reference to a more typical painting, it is of course quite sculptural; and by being in some ways as sculptural as it is painterly, or maybe almost as sculptural as it is painterly, it approaches and comes very close to aspects of architecture.
AUPING:
And yet it still recognizes the wall with—right?— in a very—
DELAP:
Yeah, it still recognizes the wall. However, as I think I mentioned once before, or maybe I didn't—I'll mention it again, or I'll mention it if I didn't—it brings into focus the wall by an interplay that I don't believe the isolated object or painting does, to the degree I'm involved with. There's a certain isolation and a certain closed quality to the recent paintings, and yet at the same time, they do form an interaction with the wall because of this goofy handling of twisted form and the fact that the edge, does not always visually, in a sense, align itself with the front projection or the frontal plane. Because of that, because of the dichotomy between the side and the front of the painting, that interaction often causes a strangeness or visual kind of quirk in reference to the wall itself—like the paintings are coming through the wall. In any case, whatever they may or not appear to be doing, there is some kind of an energy build-up there with the wall itself. So again it's a combination of them both, the paintings being very hermetic, very contained, and yet at the same time interplaying with the wall. And that's obviously a quality that I'm intrigued with.
AUPING:
I'm interested in some of the shapes of the new work that I've never seen in your past work—the geometry. The circle with a side cut off, or a pie section of a circle—I haven't noticed that, at least I haven't noticed it blatantly, in your past work. How did that develop?
DELAP:
Well, I think that's true. I think that the circle with the side cut off [such as in Le Voyage Dans La Lune (1976)] is one of the more radical departures for me because it's an arbitrary decision, and so much of my work in the past, as far as the basic geometry of the work, was not really an arbitrary decision. Or it was less arbitrary, most of the early work. However. occasionally eccentric a form may look, it had a kind of stronger rationale, geometrically, in the way it was arrived at. But when I chopped the piece off the circle as in the circle painting you're making reference to, I just kind of decided, "Well, that's about how much I will take off in reference to the circle." I did not base it on any particular kind of calculation other than an aesthetic one, just in reference to the circle. And I had thought that this was for me a bit of a departure, because I never really had been quite that radical in the decisions of my shapes? I have become more interested in not only thinking about my work in that sense, but I think I am more interested in doing future work with those, in a sense, arbitrary decisions. And yet at the same time, after I did the circle with the piece chopped off, I returned back to the square and did a couple of small paintings with a twisted edge. In other words, I think it's interesting that I returned to the square instead of having done something as arbitrary as a rectangle, which could have been long and skinny or short and fat or whatever the case may be. So I did return again to the positive form of the square.
AUPING:
But although the section off the circle is somewhat arbitrary, the circle itself isn't an arbitrary decision, is it? Or was it?
DELAP:
I don't quite understand.
AUPING:
In other words, all the work I've seen in the past has either been rectangular, square, or cubular, and this is circular.
DELAP:
Yes, that's correct. You see, I guess I'm like so many artists, so many people: I have often been critical of things I haven't done at the time I was being critical of them. I've always, in a sense, been a bit critical of the circle as an art form, which is my privilege and my problem. Maybe that's one reason that I chopped off the corner, because I thought, "Well, I'll do a circle painting, but I'll be damned if I'll make it a full circle." [laughter] But I've always thought that a circle was the least abstract of the pure shapes. For example, a circle to me is less abstract than a square, because a square, depending upon the specifics, does not really remind me of anything other than itself. I mean, it can remind you of a lot of things, but I don't think specifically of anything when I see a square. I may think of a lot of things, but I don't think of anything specific. But when I see a circle, like a circle painting or something of that sort, then often—in the past anyway—I've had thoughts of, it reminds me of the moon, or the earth, or a tire, or something of this sort. And because it's obviously such a powerful, strong, universal form, associated with so much—or so little—it's always been very referential to me, as compared to a square. Anyway, maybe that's all a bit beside the point. I've never really used it very much. I've always been very partial to the square.
AUPING:
This section around the edges is actually a small canvas in itself, almost. How much difference do you think it would make if that were not there and it went to the edge of the wood? In other words, how important is this little slit?
DELAP:
Yeah, you mean, how important is it that the paint is carried over onto the wood?
AUPING:
Right. And the whole aspect of the different sections building.
DELAP:
Well, that's of course a relationship that I find very important, because to me, the carrying of the paint (which is of course the same color as on the canvas) over onto the wood is what gives a hint to the, in a sense, traditional painter's surface, or the illusionistic quality, really, of two-dimensional reference, by carrying that over. And if the color did not come out from on over in that way, then it seems to me that the wood edge becomes a very physical kind of frame, or it becomes something that makes or could make the painting terribly object-oriented in a way that I'm not really interested in. So what I am interested in is what I like to think takes place on the edge, where there is, of course, strong physical involvement. There is the canvas, and then of course the physical line, and then there is the same color getting back onto the wood, and then there is the raw wood, and then there's the return plane, which often twists. That's really, to me, an awful lot that's going on, visually. There's also a lot of color, because there's the dark value of the wood on the return plane, and there's the light side in the front plane, and then there always is a dark line and the reflection of the edge, in outline, particularly with the metallic paintings. The physical edge or line will, as you move around, kind of come and go. Sometimes it's the lightest value; sometimes it's the darkest value. So, again, there is, to me, a great amount happening at the edge, where I like to think, for my interests, it should be. And then of course the field of the painting is a solid color; and that is visually as quiet and as flat, up to a point, as I can make it, because I want it to be that empty anonymous void or—
AUPING:
Did you feel that void is a part of it, to have that void sink into the wall? Do you feel that makes it become more a part of the wall, the anonymous aspect of the color of canvas? In the sense of a cut-out window in the wall.
DELAP:
Yes, I see. In other words, by being almost tunnellike in its vision. That reference has been made before, and I certainly do not disagree with it. I think that when I first did these paintings and saw—they've actually—the color has become lighter than they were at first. At first I thought they had to be very dark; they were quite cavernlike in their value and even almost in their color, because it really was like dark purples and blues. I think that the paintings did have a tendency, a strong tendency, to maybe almost punch a hole in the wall or the surface, instead of, as modern painting is supposed to do, be very flat and shallow in space. I think that they really did very much the opposite, that they made great holes in the surface. And that has been called to my attention. I really pretty much thought that myself, and that doesn't bother me. I mean, if that's what they do, that's okay. But I have found that for the paintings to work, it does not seem that they can be too light. Except there is this one here in the room—the little, small silver painting (it's covered up, over there)—and that's the lightest value painting I've done. It seems to be fine for a painting that size, but it's maybe a bit more difficult for one of the large paintings to be that light in value. I have tried to make a large painting light in value and not been successful at it. But again, the larger paintings that are here are still lighter in value than the earlier paintings. So they have gotten lighter, in that sense.
AUPING:
In looking at all the pieces, some have wood banding and some don't. How do you decide which are to have the—?
DELAP:
Well, a lot of that is the progression of the work. The earliest work had the wood wrapping around on three sides, and then the work went to where it wrapped around maybe on one side, or on one plane, as it does in the pie-shaped piece: there are two edges there where just the canvas wraps around. It was also a radical piece in the sense that the canvas wraps around on one return plane which is 90 degrees to its surface, and then it wraps around on the warped plane. So there, each edge is doing something differently. And in the small paintings that follow what were here in the room, there is no wood showing at all. That doesn't mean I have given up that raw wood edge, but it means that I still am hopefully pushing along. And the almost quiet simplicity of that very unified form of just the canvas, this is of interest to me, obviously. The circle piece I like very much as one of the recent pieces, and it has the raw wood on it. And I think that maybe the future work will be a bit as it is here. It will be somewhat mixed-up; maybe one will have wood and another will not.
AUPING:
Was this a technical decision to make this large piece with this line this way?
DELAP:
You mean with the line down the center?
AUPING:
Yes, was that a technical decision?
DELAP:
No, that was an aesthetic decision. Because as you can see, if you come on down, it zigs out, or notches out, close to the bottom, exactly in line with where the wood stops on the side. And of course I; planned on that visually. I like to think, and at least it does for me, that when I look at the painting and think about it, it helps that invisible line carry through from one point to the next, at the bottom. In other words, from the two sides of the painting, where the wood stops, I can pick up the jog there, in the center of the painting, and I can sort of visually follow that through. And that changes, for me, the spatial relationships: within the painting. It's quite subtle, but it still does that for me. And that was one of the bases, or the basis, for thinking about making, in this case, the diptych, the two-part painting. Then also I liked the fact that when it jogs like that, although the pieces are symmetrical to the total shape, it makes the individual divisions asymmetrical, just simply by that little zig—because naturally one of the sides of the painting (in this case the left side of the painting) becomes a positive because the little notch comes out, and the right part of the diptych becomes the negative, the zig goes in, at the bottom. So I like that fact, was intrigued by that fact, that the two parts make a symmetrical total. But as individual parts, they are asymmetrical.
AUPING:
The paintings with the wood bands all have a very puzzlelike quality, a very tightly fitting, putting-together quality. Is that a reference to architecture, do you think?
DELAP:
No. It's in reference to me, I guess. [laughter] More than anything else. Obviously, live always liked that kind of attention to a certain aspect of detail, where—I guess it's really more an attention to visual relationships that are part of my aesthetic concern. For example, just simple actual distances from expansive canvas to line to where the zig or the zag comes and so on: those proximities of one kind of element or one sort of happening to the next are all things that constitute some of the kinds of things that, aesthetically, I enjoy working with. And I like the thought that when they seem to all be properly decided upon, they have a kind of rightness or aesthetic correctness to them. It's the kind of thing that you really work awfully hard at all the time and all the time is what you're doing in the sense that you know when you've done it, but it's hard to talk about. I mean, they are aesthetic judgments that you can talk about, you can say, "Well, this one failed or that one failed on the drawing board because this was too big, or that was too small, or the line was too wide, or something of the sort." You can talk about it in that sense. But you can't really talk about the process very intelligently. It's an intuitive kind of process.
AUPING:
What are your thoughts on the direction of contemporary painting?
DELAP:
Well, I think a lot about that. I'm sure everybody does who is involved in painting. I sometimes feel hypocritical when I talk about painting or sculpture or whatever the case may be because, I'm not unlike most artists, in that I'm excited about what I'm now doing. So if I'm doing sculpture—or in the past when I was doing sculpture, I probably was being a great deal more critical of painting than I would be now. However, my position now is that I'm supportive of painting, at least the concept of painting. I don't believe that painting is dead; I think that's rather ridiculous. I think a lot of it, certainly, is very tired. But I think—as I mentioned earlier on this tape; I don't, know if I said it in these same words—a lot of sculpture is tired. And probably what I really meant to say earlier, when I was asked about what I thought the position of sculpture was, probably the most direct [answer] for me would be that so much sculpture is tired; and I think that not just of what my own thoughts on it might be, but just generally speaking: I find it a bit tired. Particularly when I think of so many things that conceptualists have been working with and doing and so on, I must say that, not talking specifics but just some of the more successful attempts and more successful solutions, I think that that's a very interesting area of activity, and I find it in many ways more interesting than great big things that are made out of stuff.
AUPING:
Assuming that no art comes out of a vacuum, are there any painters who you have admired in the past who you feel have moved in a direction that is progressive for painting, rather than rehashing old issues?
DELAP:
You mean contemporary painting?
AUPING:
Or any painters, anyone who just comes to your mind when you think of painting.
DELAP:
Well, of course, many have. I'm not in any way, shape, or form a great art historian. I couldn't give you dates on artists, so many that I respect; I couldn't come very close on historical dates and all. on the many artists that I respect in the history of painting, or even, as far as that goes, the styles that have evolved, and so on. There's so much that I respond to, a few periods I know a bit about, but most of it is recent painting—late-nineteenth-century painting, and of course, twentieth-century painting. Early twentieth-century painting I guess I know the most about. But to try to answer your question, I, you know, adore Rembrandt. And, as popular as he is, I have always been very fond of van Gogh, particularly his drawings. He's always [been for me], as he is to so much of the world, a kind of classic case, the most extreme case, of the evolving of an artist. I mean, when we see his very early drawings and how hard he struggled, it's always, you know, it's a marvelously romantic—tragic as it was—kind of development. And other artists, of course, also. But as far as the work is concerned, I've always been very responsive to van Gogh and to Rembrandt, and of course Vermeer and Velazquez, and just so many of the people that I guess many other people like today, too. As far as twentieth-century artists are concerned, I've always been very charmed and excited about the period just before and then of course bringing in the discovery of cubism, the artists that took part in that; I enjoy reading about that period of art history very much, the whole milieu, the poets and the whole bit. I think it was an exciting and marvelous adventure. They did really an incredible job in the sense of really reshaping the art history that was to come. As far as contemporary artists and painters are concerned, I guess I again like so many that so many others like. I have always been fond of people like [Willem] de Kooning—in particular de Kooning— and I was always very fond of his teacher and friend, John Graham, who a lot of people even still don't seem to know too much about. He was kind of a mystic. You look at early Grahams, which I have done, and you really see the incredible influence that he had on de Kooning. As far as my own personal contacts are concerned, they have never been too widely scattered in reference to any of the great contemporary people. Locally, John McLaughlin is a very close friend of mine and a man that I naturally have great respect for. It's said that he possibly has been influential on my work, and I would not get uptight over that at all, because I have, you know, high respect for him. I'm not sure if that's true. I think that as a person he's been very influential on me, and there's no reason that as a person being influential on my thinking, his work would not be, too—because we have talked at great lengths for a number of years about art, and I, of course, learned a great amount from John in reference to his own philosophy of art, how his work comes out of particularly Oriental philosophy, this kind of thing. And so I think that all of that has obviously been—maybe not obviously, but certainly been an influence, because it's been knowledge.
AUPING:
Still keeping in tune with the new work, the new paintings you're doing: How did the style or period or movement known as minimalism affect you? Do you feel that your paintings are in a sense minimalistic?
DELAP:
Oh, I'm sure. I'm a minimalist; I mean, there's no doubt about that. As far as how pure I am, and so on, I don't really know. I don't think that I am in that sense. I think that the paintings which would be partly funny to certain people but not funny to me are very romantic, as compared to what I think minimal art often can be and is. But back in the early 1960s, when minimal art was really getting under way, I was a part of it—and I'm quite sure for the better, because it included me in shows and so on—not in any great, large way, but still a part of the minimal movement. And particularly from the West Coast, I was, you know, considered as part of the finish fetish school of art. But I'm proud to say that the aesthetic that I put together at that time took place in San Francisco, and not after my involvement with Southern California. I think often, not just in my case, but in the case of a few other people, too, lit has been] misconstrued as having been something they did the second they hit Los Angeles. But usually that was done by critics in Los Angeles, you know. And that always has annoyed me a bit because my cleanliness and industrial forms, or whatever one wishes to call them, my constructivist outlook on things, was put together when I was still in San Francisco. I started in late 1961, early 1962, and I did not know about Frank Stella or certainly the Southern California artists, and particularly those that are younger than I am, until I had already gotten well into what I was doing and had even had my opening show at the Dilexi Gallery in 1963. Larry Bell came up to San Francisco at that time to see my show, and I met him, and of course he was very nice. We had dinner together and so on. And then I met a few other people at that time from Southern California. But, as I say, I had already started the work that I was doing. So I think all of this—what I'm really doing, I guess, is flattering myself in saying that I did not discover technology and all of this kind of thing by coming to Los Angeles. I did it before I arrived/and that's not always understood. To me, it's always been in a sense a lesson that art often is a spontaneous kind of thing happening in many places at the same time. I think I mentioned in an earlier tape that I saw the drawing of a Frank Stella piece when I was in San Francisco, working in my studio there, just having done one which on paper looked like an almost identical piece, and I couldn't believe it, you know; it was so surprising to me. But this happened in pop art. There were people like [Phil] Hefferton and Ed Ruscha and so on here on the West Coast, and then there were, of course, [Hoy] Lichtenstein and [Claes] Oldenburg and all in New York, and there was a split second in time in there when, in some cases, without one or the other knowing what was going on, they came up—not with similar imagery but with similar philosophy. And this is no big deal: it happens in science all the time, and in literature, and so on. So there's no reason to assume it doesn't happen in art. So I always felt that I was just being reflective of my time and place as a Westerner, as others were as Easterners.
AUPING:
I wanted to talk a little bit about the scale of the new paintings and what decisions dictate the scale. Except for the diptych, they seem very human in scale, very—
DELAP:
—friendly?
AUPING:
Yes.
DELAP:
John McCracken said once, many years ago, when, as a matter of fact, he was helping me in my studio in San Francisco that he thought of my work as being very friendly. I never knew quite how to take that, but I'm sure he meant it as a compliment. But I never thought of—I don't think, particularly at that time, one thought of rigid geometry and all as being really friendly, you know. But your question, your statement, is what I like to think my work, or a part of it, is about, [as] when I said I think it's really very romantic, within the area that it's in. You see. And the fact that you might think that it's very human in scale and all, I think is an indication that it might be true.
AUPING:
Romantic—in what way? Do you mean the romanticism of painting itself?
DELAP:
Well, I think romantic in the sense that maybe what I mean by romantic is not wholly intellectual in its content. Hopefully, partially so. I think all art wants to be partially so. But I think it shares more [of its] end result by aspects of intuition and emotion than just an intellectualizing process. So that's one of the reasons that I have the dual nature of being able to, or wanting to go make my drawings of the Queen Charlotte Islands, as well as crafting what I've crafted here, in a sense, in my studio. The art act, and so on, at that level, in that way, is very important to me. I think I react and respond in a very kind of traditionally romantic fashion about art, in that sense. The scale of the largest painting here, of course, gets into 3 scale physically where it becomes a wall, or whatever, and really almost eliminates the painting as an object out of its very physicalness. And yet it's really still doing what the smaller ones, do because of the fact that it's made or manufactured the same way. I think what's interesting about that is that physical size in itself does always—or can, anyway—radically change the way we view content, or the way we react to a painting. Some paintings seem too big; some seem too small. I think that a lot of art is unsuccessful simply because maybe not simply because, but often because it's either too big or too small or in between or something of the sort. And one of the really big decisions about art and all is the decision of actual physical size. To me, it seems that physical size can, as I say, even if it's the same image or the same color and made the same way and so on and so forth—it can be something much different small and something much different large, or some thing much different in between.

1.10. TAPE NUMBER: VI [video session] MAY 20, 1976

DELAP:
[NOTE: The video tape opens with Delap performing a long card trick in silence.] And so on and so forth. [laughter] I think they are some of the things that magicians do to amuse themselves as much as occasionally maybe try to fool the spectators.
AUPING:
Sure. My name is Michael Auping, and we're at the University of California, Irvine, talking with contemporary artist Tony Delap about some of the concepts that his work has dealt with over the past twenty years of his career. Tony, one of the things that particularly strikes me about your work is your frequent reference to magic. When did you first get interested in magic?
DELAP:
I really started as a kid when I was in the San Francisco Bay Area, where I grew up, and I think I probably got bitten by the magic bug about the age of nine or ten, or something of that sort. My father had a friend who, I remember, worked in the bank in Richmond, California, who was an amateur magician; and he had the old Tarbell Course in Magic, which in those days came to you weekly over a period of, I guess, a couple of years. And he told me that if I studied hard each lesson and brought that lesson back to him every week, he'd give me another one. So that was the beginning of my interest and education in magic. I worked harder studying the Tarbell Course in Magic than I ever did anything in school, which was probably part of my problem.
AUPING:
And then you continued with magic when you went to school in San Francisco, went to college?
DELAP:
I started, as I say, in those early days, and kept at it pretty well. I was very undisciplined, I never really had any proper instruction in magic. I didn't really know, for example, any really good magicians. So my habits were bad in learning how to be a magician. But I went through a lot of material and I built a lot of equipment. I liked the craft end of constructing tricks, [like] things to make a rabbit vanish and (I had some birds at that time) things that would make the birds vanish. I never was a very good magician, but I spent a lot of time making all the tricks.
AUPING:
And how far did the magic aspect go back in terms of your art? When did it first start to seep in there?
DELAP:
Well, I think that the magic goes maybe all the way back to some degree, but I don't think that until maybe the tail end of the fifties, the early sixties, did it become somewhat conscious to me and maybe to a few other people who saw the work at that time. I'm thinking now of the early boxes, where I finally took my thoughts: of design and fine arts, so to speak, and put them together. And that was, again, roughly around 1960, '61 maybe at the latest. So some of the first early boxes I did about 1962—something of that sort, when they started—I think very clearly had this magical flavor to them. I'm looking at one over here now that we have on the screen, a piece called Time Bomb. Time Bomb was one of the very early pieces, and these pieces were word oriented. There was a four-letter word on each side of the box; this one, T-l-M-E [spells out] on one side, "Bomb" on the other side. And I did many pieces with that wordplay; I was very into words as well as visual aspects of this work at that time. These were small objects. I was working out my own space at that time, and although the format was small, I thought at the time—and I like to think now—that I pretty much always thought of these pieces on maybe a different scale than just the small format. Here is the other side of Time Bomb. These pieces were glassed front and back. There was, in this particular piece, an actual open hole in the center, dots on either side of the glass, so the whole thing became quite a spatial illusion. The inside frame or form was visually free-floating in the outside frame. And I think that this was probably the earliest real introduction to the levitation, or the defying of gravity that made them particularly magical. Plus the fact that the quality of the pieces had a kind of magical feeling to them. Here's another piece, slightly later, executed in stepped down aluminum sheets, painted in a circular fashion on the front, the same on the back. This was the beginning of a sequential kind of series where the pieces would be identical but the color would change, very much like the automobile assembly line. I got very into that, into that whole kind of system. This is, I guess, around 1963, and during all this time I'm still in San Francisco.
AUPING:
Now what did your early work look like before Ping: Pong and Mona Lisa? There were some pieces before that.
DELAP:
Well, it looked like an awful lot of things, and often it looked like a lot of other people. I was living in San Francisco, and I think a lot of my art was really art by correspondence, in the sense that I took the art periodicals. I would see de Kooning and Marca-Relli and all these people, and I would sort of pick out my hero for the month, or whatever it maybe, and then I would go at it. I think because of always [seeing them in] reproductions, my format, even in working with abstract expressionism, was physically small. I worked my way, the best I could, through most of that period. The collage that we're looking at now is an example of, I think, some of the better results: of the late fifties when the expressionist quality of the collages began to take on a much more physical format. This particular piece on the screen was composed of four of those little puzzle boxes where you shake and try to get the ball inside the thing. I would take those apart and muck them all up and scrounge around with them, and then I would reassemble them and do what I felt was going to be the proper results to finish the piece. And this is one of those, but the space kept getting deeper and deeper. And even in this piece, it's beginning to get somewhat symmetrical in its expressionist tendencies: the two compartments, top and bottom; the section equidistant to the center; the hole in the center of the overall format—that kind of thing. So it was a precursor really to so much of the work to come later.
AUPING:
So we go from some somewhat abstract expressionist collages to your boxes. And then where do we go from there? Where does your work develop after that?
DELAP:
Well, I did many of the box pieces, variations on a theme or on several themes. Then I made what I thought was quite a healthy departure: I really broke out of the square rectangular format. This slide that I see here now is a slide [of a bronze piece] from the Alan Solomon retrospective in 1969. These pieces are canvassed front and back, a wood frame or membrane, open slits; sometimes the slits have the insertion of glass with lines on the glass, that kind of thing. But I think what is most important for me at that time was the fact that I did break out of this square rectangular format and got into other geometric shapes, for the most part pure, like octagons and pentagons and things like that, although I did do some sort of non-pure geometric shapes, like arcs, fan-shaped pieces, and that kind of thing. But I felt that was the big departure, because for one reason I had a lot of technical problems in just crafting that kind of form.
AUPING:
The work that I was really introduced to you with and through are the twisted sculptures, the variations on a specific, sort of linear theme. Are they directly out of these works here, or is there a jump in time there?
DELAP:
Yes, they do come out of this continuation of events. The first twisted piece was done when I was still in San Francisco, and I took a form, a particular form—it would be a little hard for me to explain it without being able to view it here—I took the form and I really split it. I had made the form, and I cut it on a band saw, just through, so that when I was finished, I ended up with two parts. And I thought how interesting it would be to maybe have those two parts be, in a certain sense, the single piece of sculpture op the total form—although it would be more than one part if you get me. And an example of one of those forms is the one illustrated. [Three pieces typical of this genre are Triple Trouble, Tango Tangles, and Modern Times It is unclear which piece this is.] It's a two-part piece, but closed up it makes really one form. This kind of thing brings me back really, for example, to the playing cards. This was a deck of cards that I did a number of years ago, a bit of amusement in that sense but something that I guess was inevitable for me to do. This pattern here on front and back goes back to those early boxes, some of which we have just seen. (I'm kind of going back here for a minute, but we'll just pick up again in a second.) The design, the slits, although here they're two-dimensional, certainly relate to the early boxes where the slits were real, open physical openings. And then there's the deck of cards themselves, which is composed of fifty-two or fifty-three separate elements or units—really planes, but all closed up as such, they're a volume. And I thought that the case in particular, when freestanding, made a very nice reference to that early work, being double-sided, same on front and back, and so on and so forth. And so the cards themselves, in a symbolical sense for me, represent so many of my thoughts in not only the work preceding the slide now on the screen but that work itself, because of the sequential kind of qualities. In other words, here, for example, are two cards. One, two. Those two cards together make a single unit as the piece illustrated does. But if we separate them; we have with the same components a new complex. And we cannot really help but relate differently to that new relationship. It may not be an overwhelming new attitude, but at the same time, it's different. That has always intrigued me, and I think it's one of the things that intrigues me to a great extent about magic of the hands, magic with cards, and so on. But getting back maybe more specifically to the piece here on the board, here's the piece all closed up? and then I believe the next slide shows it as pulled apart, as I illustrated a moment ago with the cards. And then the third slide shows it even in a different rearrangement. Here the interval, or the actual space, the negative space, becomes, I think, particularly important. So those are the kinds of things that I was playing around with in these twisted pieces. Here's a slide of—there were three or four I believe basic forms, and all those forms interrelated, so it was a series of infinite positioning, again, as the playing cards are really infinite. There are standard components, but what we do with them is an endless series of whatever.
AUPING:
From these works, your work seems to have changed direction rather radically, or at least it seemed to me that it did. I'm thinking about the piece Houdin's House, where a direct reference to magic is made. How did Houdin's House develop out of these works?
DELAP:
Well, I think about 1966—I had in 1965 moved to Southern California—I had just finished a show in New York of the twisted pieces, and I think that I had become conscious of the physical size that I was working. In other words, I wanted to break away, at least momentarily, from the more object-oriented small physical format. Although I had done some larger floor-standing twisted pieces for that New York show, I was still, and had been for a fair bit of time, thinking more and more about full-blown, really more environmental work. And my interests have always been partially in a kind of environmental space anyway. I've been involved with architecture and the kind and size of physical scale that man can maneuver through and so on. So I thought, well, maybe this Houdin's House will get me back to those thoughts that I feel so strongly about. So I put together this piece, which was two right-angle aluminum forms, 5 feet X 5 feet, making a right angle 5X5X5, and then sheets of acrylic that would span—again a little bit hard to describe—but would extend the diagonal of that unit. So what I'm really doing is bringing into an environmental scale a carry-over of the twisted pieces because Houdin's House becomes also a multiple form or something that can be set up differently each time as one wishes to. In other words, it. does not have a fixed sensibility. This, of course, intrigued me. Illustrated here is the way it was set up in the "[American] Sculpture of the Sixties" show at the County Museum. I believe that show was in '67. But the next slide shows the same piece set up differently. Here it is more formally introduced. The piece, obviously because of its formality, is more symmetrical. It's hard to read, I realize, from the slide, but the glass going to the center of the form creates a right angle, and that right angle, of course, is reflecting back into itself the piece itself. And that also is the principle of so many of the illusions, in magic, particularly the large stage illusions, where mirrors or glass at right angles reflect their immediate environment and therefore can, for example, if somebody is behind that area, obliterate anything or anyone that is concealed. It's a very standard basic concept. Some of the great illusions in the history of magic are just really based on that very simple principle that the angle of reflection is equal to the angle of incidence, a very basic formula.
AUPING:
Is that your approach to magic, when you deal with magic in your work? Is it that pragmatic approach in which a specific movement will create a specific illusion, or do you deal with it more on a spiritual or, quote-unquote, "supernatural" level?
DELAP:
Well, if we're talking about magic, of course, the doing of magic, the hopeful end result of entertaining with magic is a very pragmatic business. I'll, just for our amusement here, see if I can show you something that illustrates what I mean. I'm not a three-card monte expert, but I'll do my best to illustrate how pragmatic, in a sense, magic can be. Three-card monte is an old trick where the operator, which in this case would be me, never gives a sucker an even break. Three-card monte was often referred to as a game, and of course it's not a game at all—you never lost. You take the ace and put it on the bottom, like this, and then you take the queen and put it on the bottom. Now logic tells you that the ace is in the center, so you would lay that down and tap it, but, of course, it comes up a queen. So there's the ace, you tap the ace, turn over the queen, turn over the ace, and of course they're both queens; and the operator has the ace, so you lose. Now, somebody would say, well, they didn't follow, that too closely, so they'd do it again. Well, the next time the operator would take and put the ace just simply on the top, lay it down and tap it. It would be a queen, and there would be the ace. He would again turn over the queen, turn over the ace; there are the two queens, and the ace is back in his hand. Now, anybody, of course, would know that they were swindled if they were betting money. What the operator would do then would be to see if he couldn't really make all this even more clear. He'd take a simple little paper clip, and he'd put the paper clip right there on the ace. Then he would say, "Now I'll show you that it's on the ace. There it is; you can see it unmistakably." And he would lay down the ace, you see. Now, he would just simply tap the ace and it would be a queen, you see, and he would come over here, turn over the other card—it's a queen; they're both queens—and naturally the ace is back in his hand With the paper clip. Well, the operator would say, "Maybe you didn't see that too clearly." So he'd say, "Now, look, I'm going to do this very, very clearly, and I want you to see with particular care." He turns over the ace very carefully and shows it. Again he lays them down, taps the ace, turns it over, it's a queen; taps the other card, it's a queen; and again the ace is back in his hand. So those are really—I mean, it kind of goes on and on, but I think I can, by illustrating that, show you how pragmatic, in a sense, magic is. Now, there is no way that you are going to fleece the unsuspecting for money unless you can do that very well. If you can't, you're going to get un out of town or beaten up or something of the sort. So if you were doing that kind of thing you'd better do it well.
AUPING:
Right. Your concentration on magic, though—is there no sense of the spiritual, do you think, in your reference to magic?
DELAP:
Well, I think there, of course, we have something else again, and I like to think that there's a lot of spiritual—I guess that's as good a name for it as any—in my work. But I think that all things in art that we react to have that spiritual quality. I certainly would not want to think that only I had license to that. I think of it really more in terms of an energy field than I do a spiritual field. I think that energy fields in art, painting, sculpture, arid so on, they're somewhat unexplainable; and yet maybe if we're talking about specific works, they're not all that unexplainable. But to me it has always, in a sense, been an energy field that one reacts to when they view the particular work. I'm getting a bit off the track here, but I'll say it anyway: I think that so much of it is really trying to complicate one's work instead of, in a sense, minimalizing it. I think it's a very difficult thing, for example, to make art complex and still walk away from it—in other words, live with it. And I think that when one gets all of the things out of art that shouldn't be there and yet holds on to those things that in a sense give us that energy and that kind of whatever it may be, there's going to be a conflict. I mean, there's going to be something there in conflict to make it work. And that's what T find in a sense is really one of the intriguing aspects of art? it's also one of the things that I think makes it very difficult. It's that paradox of getting rid of everything and yet holding on to a lot. Well, I can stop there. [laughter]
AUPING:
It seems to me that in the earlier works—and this is just from my point of view—the way you dealt with magic was more on an unconscious level than on a conscious one, and in the later works it becomes much more blatant and you seem to deal with it directly. At what point do you think your work really approaches magic to the most intense degree?
DELAP:
In the most blatant sense.
AUPING:
Yeah, in the most blatant sense, right.
DELAP:
Well, I guess that probably in the early seventies I became more directly blatantly influenced by magic, I think probably for many reasons. I had gone all out there for a long period of time making work and working out what were my problems and so on. I also took a leave from the university, I think in 1970, and during that year I devoted more time to my pursuit of magic, actually practicing magic, the triviality of, magic. I really enjoy the history of magic. I like all of the triviality, in a sense, of the whole thing. I'm a magic buff. And so in pursuing that kind of thing, I found that I was getting deeper and deeper into not only magic, but I think finding the license to do even more and more of just what I wanted to do in reference to my work. I always thought that I had felt that way, but I felt that way even more so when I maybe relaxed a bit and realized that the most an artist really has to offer is his own interests, when you really come right down to it. With all of the other things that are important, and all of the other situations that are demanded, hopefully the energy field has to come from what individually we are interested in. And my interest was magic; for somebody else, it's something else. So anyway, beginning in the seventies, I think I pursued all that with even more vengeance. Barbara Rose was one of the main key people in a festival of [Marcel] Duchamp, a Duchamp festival at the University [of California] at Irvine. And I was asked at that time if I would in some way contribute. And being in a rather loose frame of mind and all, I thought, well, maybe I will do a levitation. And so we did levitate a girl (illustrated here is a young lady suspended). There is a difference, talking again about magic trivia, between a suspension and a levitation. A suspension is as you see the girl here on the chair, and a levitation is when you take and actually float that person in air. So technically there is a difference? to a lot of people it's the same. But anyway, here the girl is suspended. And we also levitated her. This was, I think, a very good thing for me because it got me working with people. It got me again back into an environmental kind of situation, and I liked the whole flavor of it. I began doing a fair amount of photography. I did some video tapes and all those things that led to new things for me which I have continued to pursue. And I find that it has all helped my thinking and my interest to a great extent. Then I did some inanimate levitation. There was a floating beam in a show at Hick Wilder's. back in the early 1970s [Floating Lady]? it was sort of a floating beam very much as I have illustrated here. But what I'm going to do now is just something to break the—are you ready for this, Michael?
AUPING:
I'm ready. [laughter]
DELAP:
I saw this red pencil sitting here, so I thought probably I'd better do a trick with it, if I can. I hope the camera can pick all this up, because what I'm going to do, if I can get it off the ground, I'm going to show you—see, now this [pauses] pencil is—we have to be very quiet—trying to rise. Now I do this, actually, just simply out of the power of the mind. Let me show you that there are no threads or strings or wires or loops or anything of the sort. Now, as long as I concentrate, that pencil will stay right there? but if I start talking, as I'm doing now to you, the energy field of that pencil will begin to diminish, and the pencil will, as it's doing now, return back down to my hand. But that's an example, really, of something between a levitation and a suspension. So whether it's done with the pencil, or whether it's done with a beam as long as this room, as I did at the Wilder show, is immaterial? the effect, as they say, is really the same. But anyway, getting back to the sculpture, I was very interested in seeing if I could not formulate, think of sculpture in a context other than the object somewhat isolated in space, or so hermetic that it did not have a lot to do with, let's say, the environment. I was also interested in a sense almost of getting it out of the way physically, where it could exist without being run into, where you had to deal with it, again, other than as something separate, just a closed entity. The piece on the screen [Untitled] is also at the Wilder Gallery a year and a half later. Here two beams come off the wall and do not touch in the center. And here tensions set themselves up—again getting back to that magnetic [field] or that energy field, I think, in quite a blatant way. We have talked about this earlier.
AUPING:
I know that when I saw that show, it was very evident to me the way the Plexiglas suspended the beams. I didn't feel that I was in a sense being tricked in any way. Do you think about that when you're. doing that, how blatant you want to make the illusion?
DELAP:
Yes, I'm really very interested in having you see the trick, if that's what we wish to—when I think of it, I almost don't think in a sense it's a trick. I'm very interested in having one see the structure of how it's done and so on. What I find that I want to do and wanted to do in that kind of work was to have the viewer work out for himself, really, in his proximity to the work, where he had to go, where he had to be, to have the illusion work for him, knowing perfectly well that this glass, or whatever it was, was holding this thing up. So he had to move around in his own time, so to speak, to align himself with the work. That kind of a situation has been very important to me. And it continues to be, even in the current paintings, in the current work. I am concerned with people exploring and finding out these things really as much on their own as hopefully the work has inherently in itself—I mean, from a fixed position.
AUPING:
How did you come to these paintings? I mean, it seems you had been so intensely involved with sculpture for a while, and then all of a sudden everything was on the wall. How did you come to that decision?
DELAP:
Well, on the screen here we have one of the paintings [Magick] and also I think probably the last of the floating beams, so maybe I can just touch upon the beams first before we go to the paintings, although there is a painting there on the back wall. This was the last of the Floating Lady series which was executed at the John Berggruen Gallery in San Francisco, two years ago now, or just about a year and a half ago, really. This beam spans the room, and I think, as you can see illustrated in the slide, does not appear to quite hit the sides of the wall; so, in other words, it really hovers there. It's very architectural, but again, it's out of the way. It's up there Where you can walk under it; you can, in a sense, deal with it or just pass under it and forget about it. The glass that came from the beam went into the wall, which made a little slit, that slit being, I guess, in a certain kind of sense, a bit of a trademark of mine, anyway (I always seem one way or the other to kind of end up with it). And so that momentarily shelved the Floating Lady series, the scale of sculpture, at least sculpture as I was enjoying it at the time—it pretty much shelved that series.
AUPING:
I see, And from that you went to—
DELAP:
From that I began to rethink some of the earlier thoughts, the later ones, too. Getting back again now to your question of a moment ago on the wall pieces, the paintings, or whatever we wish to call them, I think they are pretty much a product of having come somewhat full cycle from that late-fifties, early-sixties period when, starting with the collages, going to the first freestanding boxlike forms (the first ones were canvas and wood? they were free in space, but they had come from paintings), they then went maybe more into a sculptural kind of context. But I think that my work for the most part has pretty much always had some kind of a painterly concern. For one thing, there's always been considerable frontality in the work. At any rate, it's now come back to where it's again on the wall, but it has taken, I think, somewhat of a hybrid position between painting and sculpture. And there is now what I like to think of as a dichotomy, in a sense, between the edge of the painting and the two-dimensional or the painterly surface. So that the two never really get together, although they have to get together physically because they create each other. But the back of the wall, for example—the form on the back of the wall delineates that wall and conforms it differently than does the two-dimensional surface on the' front of the paintings. So to: see what is happening, you really have to read the edges of the painting as well as the painting front on. And normally speaking, of course, when we look at a painting, we face it and we look into it, or we can read it from a fixed position. But I like to think that there's a time element here in what I'm doing now with the wall pieces, where we have to move around and find the experience hopefully enjoy the experience, of that changing of edge and eventually relate all of that to a totality instead of just looking into the painting. The color goes over to the wood edge, which in my way of thinking is just enough to give a certain kind of respect to the painterly format—not so much respect to, but to indicate that real illusionism almost of a two-dimensional surface. And I think I feel a little bit of that in that.
AUPING:
One of the things that strikes me about them particularly is the color—I'm not even sure if I should call it color—or noncolor or exactly what it is you've put on the surface there. It is definitely not a distinct flavor, if you will, that I can pin down. How do you feel about the color in your paintings?
DELAP:
Well,. I find the color very difficult. I try to find a color that is a color but not a color. I've thought that the alchemist was maybe a good example of what I've tried to arrive at color-wise, those funny colors of metal that those guys played around with where they tried to make gold out of lead and so on. Those kind of colors, I think, are really nifty, and I've been sort of inspired by thinking of those kind of colors. So a green is sort of a green, but maybe if you move a bit it also becomes brown or gold. And the colors have a lot of silver and they have a lot of gold in them; and I think, depending upon the condition of the light and where you are in reference to the work, the color does often change considerably. But I never have really been particularly interested in color-color, although I would admit that a lot of the early work was colorful in the sense that there were bright reds, bright greens; but I've always tried to give them a kind of something that knocks the edge off of them being a red-red, or a blue-blue, or something of that sort.
AUPING:
Talking about the edge as you were a moment ago: in the new paintings they slant in from the wall; they have that twist on the edge as you look around. How did you decide to cut that edge that way rather than make it your typical, traditional stretched canvas?
DELAP:
Well, the edge ends up being, I guess, in architectural parlance, a hyperbolic paraboloid—and I'm not quite sure what that is. Except that it's, a series of really straight lines making up a warped plane. So the surface of the edge is a warped plane, but there are no curved lines (except, of course, where there is a radius in itself, like the circle painting or the rounded top of the other paintings). But the twist that sets itself up on a straight edge is a warped surface between two straight lines. And that I think has a physical form and energy field in itself. I don't know if I'm answering this question.
AUPING:
Yes, you are, definitely. The surface of the paintings is also very smooth and very—it has a lot of give and take in it for me. Do you think about the surface of your paintings and how you want to lay the paint on?
DELAP:
It took me a while to work out the formula, really, for laying on color. I finally came to find, which is just a bit of technical information, I guess—that by brushing on the color, four or five coats first and then rolling on the last two coats, I could achieve what I wanted. The reason I just don't brush the color on all the way through is because the metallic paint just forbids that because of reflectivity. I've noticed of late that several people have mentioned that the paintings have been sprayed. That—although it's neither here nor there, I guess—is not correct. The paintings are brushed and then just rolled. In the bid days I did use spray guns, but I gave all that up. I'm back to organic materials now, wood and canvas. Frank Lloyd Wright's right. [laughter]
AUPING:
Well, I think that pretty much brings us up to date. Before we knock off, would you mind doing one more trick for me?
DELAP:
Oh, I'll maybe do a couple here. I've got one that I don't think that I've even mentioned to you, but I'm going to ask you to think of a card. Okay, now that you've thought of the card, will you go through there and take it out?
AUPING:
Sure.
DELAP:
And, as the old saying goes, show it to everybody. (Now that we've got all that other stuff out of the way, we can play.) Now, would you take and write something on there. Just write something on the card. You've done that? Now we just set it on there. Now, I'm sure everybody's seen the card, right? Okay, so we'll just let them see it again. Put some more marks on there, Mike, so that—
AUPING:
How's that? That ought to cover it.
DELAP:
That's terrific. That's great. Okay, now I want everybody to see that. All right, now, there's your ace of spades, okay, and there's the joker. Now, if I took and put the joker down on the top of your card, I could close up the deck, just like that, go through the deck and just simply find your card—wait a minute, I've got a reversed card in here that I don't, like—go through there and find your card, couldn't I? Well, that's not what I want to do. What I want to do is—first of all, I want to be fair about this; I want to give the cards a shuffle. Now, I'm going to need an indicator card for myself, and to do that I've got to take a card here. There's the queen of hearts—that's the one I need. I'm going to take the queen of hearts, and I'm going to take it and drop it right here in my pocket. Now, you put your hand over there on the deck, just put your hand on the deck. That's fine. Now, in doing that, I have to put my wallet down here.
AUPING:
That's it.
DELAP:
No, the trick's not over yet. Just don't take your hands off the cards. Now, this wallet hasn't been opened for years, [laughter] but we're going to open it right here on the program. It's got a lot of masking tape on it here. You can take your hand off the deck now; I think the indicator card has already gone through. I don't think Houdini would be very popular today because people wouldn't wait that long in an audience for him to get out of all those things. Okay, how about that? Isn't that terrific? Now I'll hand you that. Would you take and open it up.
AUPING:
Open it? Take all the rubber bands off?
DELAP:
Take all the rubber bands off. I hope the camera can catch all that. While you're doing that, I'll get set up here for—as I say, it's sort of the boring part of the trick because you—
AUPING:
You don't expect the ace to be in here, do you?
DELAP:
Okay, now, would you let the camera get on that so they can see it, and would you open it up very carefully? How about that? Can you believe that? [laughter] Okay, this is our little finale here. This is probably the oldest trick that they know about. I think there's a slide actually on this trick. There it is, right there now. The cups and balls, which originates probably from Egypt or before. You simply start with three cups and three balls. And if the camera can hopefully follow, I'm going to just see what I can do here to create some illusion. The last one is hard to get. The balls come right on down and through. Now, we're going to put one here, and we're going to put one here, and we're going to put one here. Now, if Michael, for example, was to choose this cup or this one, it wouldn't make any difference, I'd reach under here invisibly, and I'd take out a ball, and I'd put it over here, and you'd see that there it is. Now, we'll start over, put this one back here and this one back here. Nov?, if you, for example, had chosen this cup, I would have reached oyer there, and there it would have been? and, of course, there's a ball here. Now, this ball will go down through—one, two, three. One, two, three. Now the three balls are down on the table. Watch carefully. The end one goes in the end, the center one goes in the center, and the end one goes in the end. Now just by hitting these two cups, watch what happens. There they are. They all come back to the centers—one, two, three. Now, one, two, unmistakably three cups on three balls. All right, now, once again, this one goes here, but this time it goes in my pocket. This one goes here, but into my pocket. Now watch what happens with the center. There's the ball, and when we come over here, there's the ball. This ball goes into my pocket. Now, when we come over here something very strange happens: there's another ball again. And this ball, openly, this time, into my pocket. Now, watch the center, watch the center. There's all three balls again—one, two, three. Now, this is the hard part: one, two, three, the balls into my pocket. Now, do you believe they could come back into that center cup? No, but we could get a peach, and possibly if we tap this one, we can get a peach there, and we can get a peach here, and then we stack these cups, and if we're really good, you see, we can get a ball. [laughter] So, with that I leave you.
AUPING:
That's great. Thanks a lot Tony.
DELAP:
So Bobo the Clown is finished now.


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