Jay DeFeo's first toy was a pencil, or so her mother was fond of telling people. As a young girl, DeFeo drew constantly, and the arrival of each new coloring book was a monumental event. While she was in elementary school, a neighbor gave her a "how-to-draw" book, and she spent hours practicing her favorite exercise, how to draw the perfect circle. As a mature artist, the circle, along with the triangle, the cross, the square, the spiral, and the oval, became the basis of her formal iconography. DeFeo returned to these shapes again and again (she eventually bought a compass to help her with the perfect circle), although the wide variety of media she employed often belies the consistency of her vision. "I liken certain symbol shapes to what I call 'my visual vocabulary' and these shapes I respond to, wherever I find them, regardless of subject matter," DeFeo wrote.¹ In many cases these symbol shapes formed the central imagery of her works, functioning as apertures into the two-dimensional pictorial space. In providing an opening, the apertures reaffirmed the perception of depth, real or illusionary, in her work. For much of her career DeFeo was haunted by a William Blake poem, which seems a fitting touchstone for viewers of this exhibition as well: "If you have formed a Circle to go into, go into it yourself & see how you would do."²

DeFeo's first mature body of work was made while traveling through Europe on a fellowship from 1951 to 1953, the majority created during a sojourn in Florence. She was fascinated by the buildings and the "crumbly walls" she observed there, and her color palette consisted of dusty, earthen colors, which she ascribed to the "worn look" of European towns.³ Cy Twombly, another American artist in Italy at about the same time as DeFeo, responded in much the same way to the architectural surfaces of postwar Europe. In 1956 he applied for a grant to return to Europe, explaining, "Generally speaking my art has evolved out of the interest in symbols abstracted, but never the less humanistic; formal as most arts are in their archaic and classic stages, and a deeply aesthetic sense of eroded or ancient surfaces of time."⁴ DeFeo studied cave paintings, primitive art forms, and Renaissance architecture while in Europe, and her tempera on paper works from that time seemed to draw on their archetypal forms, or as Twombly articulated, their "symbols abstracted."

DeFeo returned to the United States in 1953 and the following year settled in San Francisco. During the next five years her approach to her art was dictated in part by the financial and spatial constraints of her circumstances. In 1958, three years after finding a large studio space on Fillmore Street, DeFeo began two of her hallmark works, The Rose and The Jewel. DeFeo finished The Jewel in 1959, and until 1966 she worked almost exclusively on The Rose. No known drawings exist from this time except for preparatory works related to The Rose. The surfaces of both massive works feature deep crevices and accretions, particularly The Rose, which projects almost a foot off the canvas support. Physically and emotionally exhausted after completing The Rose, DeFeo ceased making art for approximately three years. When she finally summoned the strength to work again in 1970, she began with an intimate mixed-media work on paper that she titled After Image. She also began using acrylic paint for the first time, experimenting with the illusion of volume and depth, rather than building actual volume and depth as she had with oil. For DeFeo, the physical properties of her materials directed her approach. "I can't separate 'concept and technique' because the medium does indeed become the message."⁵

Despite the wide variety of materials and techniques, DeFeo's method always included a labor-intensive process of addition and subtraction, building up and breaking down. As museum director Henry Hopkins once wrote about DeFeo, "The primary ingredient in her work method is time."⁶ In creating The Rose, the sharpened knives that she used to carve and hack away at the accreted paint were as important as the multitude of tools she used to apply the paint. For many of her works on paper, the eraser became as crucial as the pencil, charcoal, or paintbrush. Before beginning a drawing, DeFeo often sprayed an acrylic fixative onto the paper support so that she could go over the surface numerous times without creating tears. Like Michelangelo, who believed that his role was merely to set free the preexisting statue hidden within the raw marble before him, DeFeo needed to remove portions of her composition before the finished image revealed itself to her. Knowing that her spontaneous marks would be given a disciplined, self-conscious appraisal afterward, DeFeo could unleash her expressionistic impulses. "When the work is final, I have to feel I have pushed it as far as I possibly can (short of self-destructing) and very important, I can't abide a single mark that strikes me as arbitrary."⁷ The eraser was her way of reconciling her Apollonian and Dionysian tendencies. The eraser also was psychologically important for DeFeo, who was convinced that she lacked talent as a draftsman. In a handwritten postscript in a 1978 letter to Hopkins, DeFeo wrote, "Admittedly, the construct-destruct feature is also largely due to my ineptitude as a draftsman (recall the eraser collection—I'm still saving them)."⁸

In the early 1980s DeFeo used that collection of worn erasers as the basis for a series of drawings that she initially referred to as "the eraser series" and later titled the Eternal Triangle series, including two untitled works in this exhibition (E1509, E1379). DeFeo photographed her old erasers, collapsing one stretched-out, kneaded eraser in upon itself to create a sculptural form of triangular folds not unlike a fortune cookie. For an artist who often chose to work with a grisaille palette, the black-and-white photographs presented certain advantages as models. DeFeo could manipulate her photographs to alter tonalities, emphasize contrast, and heighten shadows. These elements could then be employed as a means for guiding both the tonal and perspectival aspects of her drawings and paintings. The eraser photographs also possess a sense of ambiguous, artificially compressed space, an aspect of her paintings and drawings of this time.

Perhaps equally important, DeFeo employed the camera lens as a means for sharpening and shaping her vision, using it to locate certain pictorial phrases created from her visual vocabulary. Minor White once said that his goal was "to photograph some things for what they are, and others for what else they are." That seems to be much the same spirit with which DeFeo used the camera. In several instances she extracted her "symbol shapes" from places where they were not readily visible, such as finding triangular crevices in a spent eraser. In 1981 DeFeo began a series of drawings using a 9H pencil (E1374, E1380), which were inspired by a plowlike piece of farming equipment that she also photographed. 9H is the hardest pencil available, one that has a high ratio of clay to graphite and is therefore closer in color to gray than black. Typically used for mechanical drawing, the pencils leave a hard, fine line that seems appropriate for a series that DeFeo described as very "refined and careful." For DeFeo, such a rigid material naturally resulted in a highly illusionistic image, an architecture of triangular forms. And yet, despite its schematic, steel-edged precision, the drawing coalesces into a dreamlike image, an explicit but nonspecific mechanical apparatus hurtling through indefinite space. They "may appear to be more 'cerebral,'" DeFeo wrote about the 9H Pencil series, "but they can be just as expressionistic, but not in the 'obvious sense.'"⁹

In 1982 DeFeo reintroduced oil paint to her arsenal of tools after a hiatus of more than fifteen years. When she returned to oil, her experimentation and newly acquired facility with other materials allowed her to approach the paint differently. As she explained, "I don't enjoy the use of acrylic. Presently my return to oil is an effort to use old familiar materials in new ways."¹⁰ And when starting afresh with a new material or returning to an old one after a long break, DeFeo often cycled back to her set of favorite symbols. The triangular apertures at the heart of both 1982 Summer Landscape drawings (E1012, E1369) echo an early oil on canvas titled Easter Lily from 1956. DeFeo knew that a single, familiar icon from her visual alphabet could provide new statements "given a different time, emotional climate, new materials to explore."¹¹ In works such as Homage to Thomas Albright No. 3 (1983) and Untitled (1984), one can intuit DeFeo's sensual enjoyment of the physicality of oil paint. She seems to be reveling in its tactile qualities after so many years of deprivation, playing with surface differentiation. By 1986 DeFeo was working with great confidence on large-scale works on paper, such as Pearl II Oahu, which are more appropriately described as paintings on paper. And in 1987, in works such as Samurai No. 8, DeFeo went back even further into her history, reintroducing the tempera that had characterized her work in Florence.

In the summer of 1987 DeFeo traveled to Africa, where she climbed Mount Kenya, fulfilling a lifelong dream of scaling a major mountain. The impact of that journey is registered in titles such as Mbili (1987) and Nane (1987), the Swahili words for "two" and "eight," respectively. Nane, a lyrical work of oil and graphite, seems to slip back and forth between the figurative and the abstract, between the depiction of rugged mountain peaks and a texture study of jagged forms. DeFeo enjoyed exploring the gaps and the overlaps between the figurative and the abstract, taking recognizable, inorganic objects and making them organic and indistinct. Sometimes her titles provided clues to her inspiration or source imagery, sometimes they revealed nothing; DeFeo used black-and-white cardboard tissue boxes as a source for her Reflections of Africa series (1987-89). The Seven Pillars of Wisdom series (1989, E1272, E1275) was derived from a pink ceramic cup given to her as a sixtieth birthday present by her ceramicist friend Ron Nagle, the R.N. in Pink Cup at Sea (for R.N.) from 1989 .

In The Tissue of Falling Columns No. 8 and No. 9 (1988), DeFeo combined hard-edged passages with soft, wispy strokes, using both oil and graphite. The fragile marks seem to be dispersing on a gust of air or dissolving into a stream of water, an effect that is amplified when the two drawings are viewed sequentially. The delicate portions hark back to her early drawings in the 1950s that she referred to as "the grass period," including Apparition (1956), Persephone (1957), and The Eyes (1958). In those works, accumulated strokes of graphite take on the organic, pliable quality of hair, tentacles, or grass.

The source imagery for The Tissue of Falling Columns series may have been the same as for the Reflections of Africa series, but the title comes from a piece of prose by John Muir, which reads in part: "My first ramble on spirit-wings would not be among the volcanoes of the moon. . . . I should go to the very center of our globe and read the whole splendid page from the beginning."¹² The writings of Blake and Muir resonated with DeFeo because they spoke of finding a way into the center. DeFeo sought to provide an opening for a viewer to enter the depths of her created world, to enter the two-dimensional picture plane. In , Reflections of Africa No. 9 and No. 10 (1989), the strong horizontal bar at the right seems to disappear into a laceration in the paper, located at the heart of the triangular fold, or the mountain peak, just to the left. One half-expects to lift the drawing and find the other side of the black bar beneath. But the opening DeFeo sought was as much for herself as for the viewer. Once she found an entrance into her own created world, she would be able to look outside from within or, as Muir wrote, "move about in the very tissue of falling columns, and in the very birthplace of their heavenly harmonies looking outward as from windows of ever-varying transparency and staining."<sup>13



1</sup> Jay DeFeo, letter to Henry Hopkins, 21 June 1978, archives of Estate of Jay DeFeo.

² William Blake, "To God," from "Notebook Epigrams and Satiric Verses" (c. 1808­12), in Alicia Ostriker, ed., The Complete Poems of William Blake (London: Penguin Books, 2004), p. 628.

³ Paul Karlstrom, interview with Jay DeFeo, 18 July 1975, transcript of audiotaped interview, in Archives of American Art, San Francisco, part 2, pp. 2, 9.

⁴ Cy Twombly, 1956 application for Catherwood Foundation Fellowship grant for European travel, in Kirk Varnedoe, Cy Twombly: A Retrospective, exh. cat. (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1994), p. 61.

⁵ DeFeo, letter to Hopkins, 21 June 1978.

⁶ Henry Hopkins, MATRIX 11: Jay DeFeo, exh. cat. (Berkeley: University Art Museum, University of California, 1978), p. 1.

⁷ DeFeo, letter to Hopkins, 21 June 1978.

⁸ Ibid.

⁹ Jay DeFeo, "Visual Concerns," n.d. (probably 1983), hand-written notes, in archives of Estate of Jay DeFeo, p. 5.

¹⁰ Ibid., p. 3.

¹¹ Ibid., p. 7.

¹² John Muir, A Thousand Mile Walk to the Gulf (Boston and New York: Riverside Press for Houghton Mifflin, 1916), pp. 41­42.

¹³ Ibid.

© 2006 Dana Miller

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