(gentle music) (gentle music continues) Where are those?

Photos of work.

Personal.

My mother happened to bring this album.

These are all formal pictures because nobody had cameras, you know?

This is a picture of us while we were still a couple of months, I think, before running.

That's me, a year old, also like in 1939.

And I only knew the rest of my family through pictures.

So I was thinking I came kind of natural to collecting a lot of imagery.

(gentle music) (gentle music continues) (footsteps approaching) (gentle music continues) I'd been in school a long time trying to be an abstract expressionist (Vija chuckling) and I was doing gestural big paintings like everybody else in school, admiring de Kooning, going through Hans Hofmann.

(Vija chuckling) I thought I had to face something about my own self.

I think I had too many ideas and too many influences.

The late fifties was the culmination of abstract expressionism and every young, serious artist wanted to make abstract paintings.

I think Vija wanted to really find her own voice as an artist, not to be working in a style that was inherited.

So, she started working by looking at just objects that were around her in her studio.

I like the lamp painting 'cause it does look like two eyes.

I painted all the food I ate.

I painted the refrigerator, hot plate.

These paintings are very quiet, the gesture is hidden.

They have just the facts sort of quality to them.

So they're all life-sized.

I love in those sort of still life compositions that there's a little cord always that comes off of the hot plate, comes off of the heater, and kind of dangles off of the edge of the canvas.

And the objects from her studio, they have a kind of personality to them.

Celmins talks about them as being things that kept her company in the studio.

They are also things that kind of sustained her.

They heated up the studio when it was cold.

VIJA: This is from the inside, 701 Venice Boulevard.

I did some of my best work in there.

This is one of my little houses.

I slept back there.

Very poor, I lived on about $2,000 a year.

Let me see what was here.

Here's my bed.

There's the table.

I had no bathroom, just a toilet.

Pitiful, this is how I lived.

Look at the Christmas tree.

GARY: And then she also started making objects that were familiar to her, using the tools of an artist.

So she made a couple of pencils out of wood and then painted them.

And probably the most ambitious sculpture was of a comb that she started with a piece of wood and that took her two or three years.

This is, to me, a humorous painting.

This was my TV set.

I had also been collecting a lot of clippings, sort of from my memory of being in World War II the last six months of the war, in Germany.

And I put one of the clippings in the TV set.

I was getting bored with the things; I painted everything in my studio, and I flipped over to painting the clippings.

This has the same image as the TV set, because I had a lot of little toy airplanes, loving things that moved...airplanes and cars.

This is another little house and it's on fire.

It's a kind of ominous but sort of childlike image, as if this might be a toy.

And I think maybe relating to some images from my childhood.

These are torn out of books and magazines.

They have this kind of wonderful, gray quality, and I really did fall in love with the grays.

These World War II era airplanes freeze at a moment where it almost seems as if they might drop.

And, in fact, there is one whose propellers seem to have stalled.

And so you imagine the precarity of that also reminds the artist of the days when she was little.

And the arrival of those planes often meant that a bomb would soon fall.

Latvia, of course, was in between Nazi Germany and Russia.

There was a period of respite.

But then, in 1944, Latvia was reinvaded.

The brutal last months of the war sent Vija, her older sister, and her parents on the road.

They spent some time in between Latvia and what was then Germany, in various refugee camps.

There was a lot of bombing and we were continually thinking "Where are the Americans?"

Everything was like rubble.

So, it's hard for me to look at Ukraine because of that kind of beginning.

And then when the war was over, the Americans did everything.

Organized food, collected all these different people that were refugees.

They set up schools.

Then I went to Latvian school, and in the Latvian school, I started reading, which was the savior in my life.

These are my ABCs that I brought with me on the ship.

(Vija chuckling) It says.

(Vija speaking Latvian) It says, "The children from your class wish you happy travels and meeting again back in our country," because we thought we would be returning.

And they all signed it.

And then in middle of '48, we went to Indiana and then they stuck me in school and I liked it.

This little boy liked me, chased me all around.

I ran and ran.

I was a good runner.

So I grew up kind of by myself and I started drawing things.

They let me draw 'cause I didn't understand anything.

She ended up at Herron Institute for Art at Indiana University, which is really where she blossomed first as an artist.

At Herron, she had the option as one of their star students to attend Yale Norfolk, which is a summer program.

She was part of an incredible class of students that summer.

Usually, the top students from Yale Norfolk gain admission.

While Vija was accepted, she was also accepted at UCLA.

And I think a combination of the financial compensation they promised her, a scholarship to attend there, as well, perhaps, as the attraction of going somewhere far away like California, are really what brought her there.

GARY: I think from the very beginning, Vija has had incredible independence.

She's never really been part of a movement or a school.

She's just followed her own vision.

She's just a fierce, independent spirit.

I used to look for mushrooms here when I lived across the street.

It's always kind of quiet in here.

I guess that's sort of humorous to say, isn't it?

I used to play in cemeteries when I was little.

They weren't bombed.

Actually, it just occurred to me.

Hmm.

Very nice.

It's like a little sculpture park.

This letter was sent in 1966, from my mother.

I guess I was pretty lonely, actually, in Los Angeles, for the first couple of years.

She used to write me every two weeks, and I don't know what possessed me, but I did this letter and I put stamps on it.

These are stamps of a little war scene and this is her address from Indiana and her handwriting.

They're just little stamps.

They've been cut out, if you can believe this.

So this is really the end of this period, I think.

(water rippling) I lived in Venice, close to the ocean where I went usually every evening.

I was going to make a film.

I started taking pictures.

I mean, these are all my photos.

Nobody took the oceans for me.

I took all of these standing on the pier and they're all kind of similar.

Most of these I had worked with.

Sometimes I worked with a really tiny one like this.

You know?

I bought a movie camera because I think I was hearing a lot about the movie thing in UCLA, I was at UCLA.

I just didn't think I could do it.

I saw how you have to cut the film and everything and it was so tedious.

I said "not for me" immediately.

But I did get a good camera.

Look at this bitching camera.

Bitching is a word nobody uses anymore.

It's a terrific camera.

What I did is pretty major.

I dropped painting.

Painting is very, very different.

The pencil was like one point, you know?

And it was like, I thought I was like going to document and this would be the best way to document the space.

And these were all done with a pencil, but really sort of exploring the graphite.

And I wanted you to experience that kind of double reality that there is something that has been compressed and flattened, and yet, it is an image that is very big.

And I went to town.

I got married in that period and I started a whole set of works.

These are not scenes, they don't tell you about the time of day.

They don't tell you about boats or about the sun.

You're basically looking at the tone of graphite.

You don't roam over and get to go in the ocean, (Vija laughing) you have to stay.

GARY: With the ocean drawings, she gridded the photograph, but expanded it to a kind of medium scale in terms of a drawing.

She would start in the lower right corner and then she used a bridge to steady her hand so her hands wouldn't touch the drawing, so they wouldn't smear, and then work across it up to the top of the corner on the other side.

And she never erased.

She didn't correct.

You can see it as an ocean, but it really is the practice of mark making that is essential.

I really like this little graphite piece here, which is quite even.

Just a kind of a little ripple on the surface.

So, in the five years I went through this ocean thing and dropped it pretty much.

At the same time, there were images coming back from the moon, it was the most exciting thing.

I was beside myself with joy.

I thought while I was working on the work, I was like on the moon.

This is a image that I doubled up the moon.

You see there's two.

I was playing around a little bit.

I found a real connection to outer space, which set me off for another five or six years.

Similarly to the ocean drawings, they also have no horizon line.

They also have a very shallow depth of field that also prevents the viewer from traveling into them.

She begins to also record that surface.

With all of their incidents, little pebbles and rocks and divots in this strange lunar dust.

I did find a cache of great photographs at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, and it was like another whole world opened up to me.

These are also made without an eraser, with just the addition of the graphite, and letting the paper be the image.

(gentle music) At the same time, I had also been going out in the desert.

I had some really good friends who loved the desert.

Doug Wheeler, Jim Terrell.

I liked it because it had the far and the near, and I liked that kind of hallucinatory spatial thing.

This is from Panamint Valley, one of my favorite places in California, just before you hit Death Valley.

I had never been in atmospheres like that.

I was just in love.

GARY: So you've got the ocean, the desert and the sky as her primary subjects.

And these are all limitless and they're outside of any tangible human experience.

You see, I'm only visually interested in the thing.

It's how you make it that makes the work.

I don't learn things.

It's not about me telling you something about the image, it's me telling you something about what the pencil can do.

So, these two images preoccupied me probably for about seven years or so.

And this is the first one, 1973.

And this is also 1973.

Could be the moon, but it's Panamint Valley.

So these two things went on together.

I'll show you in the next room what happens here.

So this, for a long time, was my favorite piece.

It's kind of a schizophrenic piece where one side and the other, they're jammed together.

One is Coma Berenices that gets darker and darker as it goes.

And the other is part of the desert in Panamint Valley.

And I started playing with putting them together.

IAN: Celmins has taken the pencil right up to the edge of that star, filling in the blackness of the night sky just up until it lets the star shine through.

And that white is not applied color, it's not white paint or white pencil, it's just the white of the paper shining through that dense thicket of graphite strokes.

This was the last series that I did with graphite and I had just moved to New York when I finished this.

I think I was moving toward a kind of a density that the graphite was no longer able to hold.

And I think the thing about painting, of course, is that it's much more malleable.

This is just one point that has made this density, you know?

So the paint, of course, is fluid and alive in a totally different way.

And I knew then that I had to start really painting seriously because it wanted to be a painting.

(Vija chuckling) (paintbrushes rattling) (glass clinking) So I kind of said, no explaining with the art, no entertaining, no angst, no style, no story, no "see how well I can paint."

Right.

No sexual exploitation, no cute technique, no spectacular size.

I guess that takes care of today.

No graffiti, please.

No picturesque, no design.

No illustrated idea.

And then I have crass here.

I wonder when I wrote this.

Sometimes I have the date on there.

No personal fetishism.

No "I feel more than you do."

GARY: Mm.

VIJA: Tough, huh?

GARY: Mm.

(Gary laughing) VIJA: No irony.

No false modesty or raging ego.

No self-expression.

So, what does that leave?

In the seventies, Celmins has some personal changes in her life.

A long time relationship falls apart.

She begins to spend more and more time away from Los Angeles.

And this is sort of part and parcel with her explorations of the deserts of the southwest.

She's sort of wandering, in a way, exploring but also trying to think about what to do next.

Barbara Kruger is going to spend a year in LA teaching and they decide to swap spaces.

And so Celmins comes to New York.

Celmins's return to painting after a long spell is, in part, associated with her arrival in New York.

I mean, it has to do, I think, both with circumstances of having a studio in which to work, but also being in a place that she, in a way, I think associated a lot with painting.

There was also an extraordinary host of women artists here who were excelling in painting.

(gentle music) VIJA: About 1977, I had been picking up stones and things like everybody does.

I have stones and shells all over.

It was like an impulse to spend time really looking at nature.

It was like a constellation of stones that I had found near the Rio Grande in New Mexico.

I had 'em cast in bronze and painted.

I guess it was a little bit of a joke, like one of them is art and the other isn't.

GARY: She decided that she would replicate them, making a twin of each rock.

And that took years.

She finished that work in, I think, '82.

And there are 11 pairs.

There's no set arrangement for them.

Every time she shows them, they get arranged differently.

They're just entrancing.

And I never could figure out which was the real rock and which was the painted rock.

I now know how to do that, but I'm not going to tell.

(Gary laughing) Somebody was heard to say, "Where did she find two that look alike?"

'Cause they passed by not looking, of course.

(Vija chuckling) I had this in my first show in New York at David McKee.

And I was thinking, "What am I going to call this piece?

What is it about and does it mean anything?"

And I said, "Well, it was like I was fixing the image" "in my memory."

You look at it, you remember it, and you transfer it.

So, there you go.

GARY: Vija, when she was in art school in Indiana, studied printmaking.

And then when she went to UCLA, they had printmaking there as well.

So it was something she started working with very early.

And in 1982, '83, Gemini, which is a wonderful printmaking firm in Los Angeles, invited her to make prints there.

So I found this that I wrote.

I like the simple ways, making prints, wood block, metal, scraping, stone printed, not a big deal I said.

(Vija laughing) The way of making more than one thing.

I don't think much about it.

I thought it was like a technical thing that I had never tried and I was inspired.

So here we are in the study center.

So this was 1971, it was one of your first prints.

You were living in California, in Los Angeles, right?

VIJA: Right.

So this is probably the only image that I tinted.

This is not a black and white, this is a color.

STARR: Yeah.

VIJA: Usually I just print everything in black and white.

Right.

So it kind of has a deserty presence.

Yeah, it's a little dusty.

That gray is kind of dusty.

VIJA: Dusty.

I did these, I believe that this is dry point, right?

STARR: Yes.

I had this needle and it was kind of amazing because I had never done anything like this.

STARR: Oh really?

This was the first time you used a dry point needle?

VIJA: Yeah, yeah.

First time.

First time everything.

At a certain time, I brought these little things to Gemini, these little clippings.

And I thought I would try different ways of making them.

And Doris Simmelink was a fantastic printer.

She was able to print these in this extraordinary way.

So then I just sort of shoved them together and this is sort of like a little nod to Duchamp.

He kind of was a pointer, and opened up our ideas about what art might be.

And this is kind of close to the Duchamp.

This is an uccello chalice which has to do with perspective, which we don't use that much anymore.

STARR: Yeah.

VIJA: I drew this also from a reproduction.

This is probably the biggest print I've ever done.

And this is a mezzotint.

This is a very big plate.

And I scratched out all those stars.

(gentle music) I had a drawing that I had just started and I liked the way that it was just a fragment.

At a certain point, this image was like this.

And then I decided that I wasn't going to continue and I was going to finish up by lightening the background.

So the print I ended up with is sort of like.

A little bit darker maybe.

It has a kind of lively character because, in a way, it's sort of unfinished but finished.

(Vija chuckling) Looks good.

LESLIE: Excellent.

In the late eighties, I was a little bit more ambitious.

I thought I would begin to do some bigger paintings.

These are surfaces that have been very compressed.

They have been painted over and over and over and sanded down so that the surface is really keeping you out.

The image invites you in, the surface keeps you out.

And that play is there.

I think of them as little hand grenades or something, not stars really.

And then they're blocked out with kind of a rubber cement.

Then I sometimes paint them back in over top, and then block them out again, and then paint the work again until it has this sort of very closed off surface.

Celmins begins to be drawn to images of spiderwebs, where she's using charcoal now.

So she smears this wonderfully soft and malleable medium, dusts it over the surface of the paper, and then she takes a variety of erasers and uses those to draw the image.

I like an image to be not that exciting.

If an image is too exciting, I don't want to deal with it.

And I don't want you to over read the imagery.

Even though people do that naturally.

They say, "Ocean, oh, I think I'll go for a swim."

I mean, you know.

Or they connect with it, and I always want to slow you down.

It's the painting, it's the work here.

That's why I like a kind of a more neutral image.

I've been expanding in different directions, sort of working between objects and painting and what is painted and what is found.

This is a shell that I have still sitting in my studio.

And it has all those same qualities, actually, of many of my paintings, like it's very kind of eye dazzling.

You can walk over the whole surface and it also unifies kind of like an object.

And here is another painting done at the same time, which is a cover of a book I found in Japan in a yard sale situation.

Then the painting itself is very close to the object.

GARY: It's almost an abstract painting.

Again, I think it's a translation of memory, a translation of these personal experiences and how time is embodied.

I found this picture of the Origin of the Species and I decided to paint it.

And this is also closer to being an object.

So along with this piece and my love affair with darkness, I did some pieces of sculpture, I don't know, painting, sculpture.

Painting and sculpture together.

And these also have to do with doubles.

One that is made and one that's found.

IAN: In Sag Harbor, Celmins discovers in an antique shop, a wonderful children's chalkboard.

And Celmins is always attracted to these little tablets, even the little books that might be like tablets, little notebooks.

I did some pieces of sculpture and these also have to do with doubles.

One that is made and one that's found.

And I think one of my favorites is this one over here.

I had this idea that it was like my painting, like my night sky paintings.

So I bought the tablet and like is my way, I wanted to paint it.

So I had a friend who was a carpenter make a copy of the tablet.

And it also like the stones, it's sort of like, there's no meaning to it, it's just about looking; the joy of looking and maybe discovering that somebody probably had a lot of fun painting the thing.

About 1985, I was thinking that I should try to do some paintings of the ocean image.

And this is one of them.

And this woman bought it, who was a wonderful person, and she died, maybe 10 years later.

And I happened to get the painting back, which is really great.

And I thought, "Wow, this is kind of this moody dark painting.

Do you think I could possibly paint this again?"

So over the next six years, every now and then, while I was working on other things, I painted this image, sort of like a test of my sanity, (Vija chuckling) and maybe just a test to see how time influences how I'm able to deal with the same image.

And then when I looked at them all together, I thought it looked terrific, so I thought I would make it one piece.

In these later paintings, I think I have let the paint be more of a participant.

And it has a range that you don't want to control and that you can't control.

It's a more emotional kind of quality because it's so malleable.

It's just dust and oil.

You can make anything out of it.

It's kind of a romantic way of thinking about a painting.

(gentle music) (birds chirping) GARY: Yeah, I think in the last probably 20 years, she's introduced more variety in subject.

It's very difficult to sustain a career over decades, and there has to be a constant discovery and challenge, I think, for the artist.

The National Gallery in Latvia wanted to do an exhibition with her.

And at the opening of the exhibition in Rega, I have never seen her more buoyant, a smile as big as could be.

She was so happy being there.

It was a very moving experience.

(gentle music) (door sliding shut) VIJA: It takes forever to orchestrate it so that everything stays in its place, and everything has a relationship to everything else, which has a relationship to the painting as an object itself.

(chair wheels rolling) Yes.

That way.

(gentle music) (gentle music continues) Okay, that's about it.

I quit.

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