When you were working on the woodcut of Singular Image did you sense that using that medium was in a way related to what the image was about?

I can only explain it in terms of why I took up woodcuts. Maybe that’ll answer it a little bit. This goes back to the thirties, because I took up woodcut early. It won’t answer your question but it will answer some questions related to the medium: why I take up these new mediums, why I took up the medium of woodcut. I was doing a lot of lithographs when I was young. Lithography is using a point, a crayon point. You’re drawing on stone. It lends itself to a certain kind of line and detail. Even in my painting I wasn’t breaking away. So I said — I’ve got to do something. So I began to look over the mediums, and woodcut began to show me that it has broad planes and masses, and you’re cutting out big shapes. I said — this is what I need to fulfill my development as a painter. I wanted my paintings to become bigger and stronger and broader in view. So in that sense a medium was done for aesthetic reason. Now as far as… maybe you’re thinking of spiritual reasons for doing a medium.

I’m thinking of metaphorically. In those abstract pieces such as Singular Image, you had an image that was being pressured and you used a medium that pressured the image into its being.

That’s very possible. I don’t think I could have done Singular Image (other than in painting) any other way but with a woodcut. I think you’re right. I can’t picture it any other way.

There seems to be a consistency across your use of different media. You deal with the canvas with a certain respect; you push the paint back in and take dry brushes to absorb the paint so the linen shows through. Similarly, in woodcut, you respect the natural wood. You use ink in such a way that the wood grain comes through.

That’s right. I’m using the wood like I’m using the canvas almost.

Could you talk about the consistency and what that is — the respect for the medium itself?

Well, I would say so. I think the first thing I try to do in graphic (let’s use the word “graphic,” which means lithography, etching, woodcut and silkscreen) is that I’m going to translate my idea onto paper. I have to think that it’s no longer a painting. It’s now something in another medium and another material, which is paper. So the paper has become more important. And one of the things I try to do in my best work is to make the paper become form and breathe. So the paper is important.

For instance, one of my most important prints of the thirties was Early Morning, 1943. A woman is lying in a bed awakened at a very eerie hour, in a lot of black and white. There I felt I’d made a breakthrough because my white areas became forms, and so I achieved something which I’d been trying for years to get to — that white would become a shape and form against the black. Because before, when you modeled and you did a lot of tones, you could achieve a certain amount of background and foreground weight and so forth by the way you toned and modeled it, which to me was not the right way because that was a past experience. It was a tradition that I wanted to break away from.

…one of the things I try to do in my best work is to make the paper become form and breathe. So the paper is important.

I loved the wood. I worked on this a whole summer. It’s the only thing I did that summer. And I just looked at the wood. And I had no drawing. And the whole thing was created on the block, which is a terrific experience. In a strange way the block became like a family member. It became part of me. The block really became part of me: the wood, the smell of it, everything about it. And so I had a knife and a gouge and a chisel and I spent the whole summer just living with that block until I got this thing realized. It’s really one of the nicest things. As a matter of fact, Paul Sachs, who was famous at one time at Harvard, said it was one of the great prints of the twentieth century.

When I did Singular Image, I had similar feelings. When I did that woodcut I wasn’t painting much at that moment. I had to just work with that block. And so the block became my whole life: cutting it, feeling it. You’re right, it does become in a sense, you might say, part of my family of experience, the block itself. Then when I feel that I’ve done it and I no longer have the same feeling, I’ll change my environment. I move on to something else. But while I’m doing it, it’s real. Also, I never try to repeat it. When I did those early lithographs, I was influenced by Daumier. When I look at them, they’re very good pieces of work. I’m proud of them. Now that’s a fifty year span, sixty year span and I see them objectively, like a stranger maybe had done them, but then I realize the experience I went through when I did them. I believed in it and I gave my life to it. What I’m trying to say is that it isn’t a question of being a painter, it’s a question of experiencing something and then it becomes a painting. But it isn’t a painting until the experience develops over a period of time.