UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN-MADISON ARCHIVES
ORAL HISTORY PROJECT

Interview #483
COLESCOTT, WARRINGTON

COLESCOTT, Warrington (1921- )
Professor of Art
At UW: 1949-1994

Interviewed: 1995	
Series: Printmaking
Interviewers: Arthur Hove and Barry Teicher
Length: 3.5 hours
Subject:  Colescott’s Career in the Art Department
Transcriptionist:  Maureen Gaber (May 23, 2008)
	[See Index for Key Words]

First Interview Session (1995): Tape 1
Tape 1, Side 1
00:00:00
BT:	This is Barry Teicher of the Oral History Project.  Today is January 27th, 1995.  I’m in the Oral History Project Office in the Red Gym and Art Hove and I are going to be interviewing Warrington Colescott today about his career in the art department at the University.  Warrington, I’ll ask the question that you generally start out the interviews asking:  
00:00:22
Could you talk a little bit about your childhood and your background and your early education and your eventual entrance into the art field, art world?
WC:	Fine.  Um, yeah I think that’s a logical place to start.  And I – O.K. – the – in a way, I’m very closely connected to the First World War and I think you’ll find glimpses of warfare and military idiom throughout my work.  Ah, my father was a citizen solider in World War I and he was a very successful one, a very good one.  He became a First Sergeant in the infantry so that he was more or less in command on the non-commissioned officer level of a company and his outfit went to France early in the war and they fought through most of the war in France, and it was trench warfare.  It was really, you know – it was the most terrible war that this country had taken part in, although some Civil War buffs would argue that point, but this particular war was terrible and it really left a mark on him which, in a way, was transferred to me.  
00:02:00
My mother and father married after my father came back from the war.  They were a New Orleans – they were both New Orleans families, and they had decided to move to California, where I was born.  I was born in 1921 in Oakland, California, where they settled.  He worked – he was a brakeman for the Southern Pacific Railroad, part of the train crew, and he was a heavy father.  Ah, he was a man of a temper and kind of a troubled man and a very tough father.  So I always had my problems with him.  As a child, I played with the things that he brought back from the war.  One of my childhood play objects was his gasmask.  For example, we used to – I would put on his gasmask on Halloween and go out and scare people; and his tin hat, which had a big dent in it and so forth.  The soldiers brought all of their gear home with them and that was down in the cellar and these were play things.  We played war.  
00:03:36
 The war was very much on the mind, I think, of the total population.  It took a long time for this country to come out of the effects of World War I and I think children in that period were marked by it.  Ah, you know, my – the reading that I did growing up had to do with war.  When I went into the Boy Scouts at 12 years old, we marched in military formations and we did close order drill and it seems to me I’ve been doing close order drill most of my life because in high school, I went into the ROTC.  Our high school, you had a choice between gym and ROTC and I think it shows my mindset -- that I opted for ROTC and I became a colonial in the ROTC.  That was the highest officer rank that we had in high school ROTC.  So I was the colonial of our little regiment and I can still do the sabre manual of arts because as a colonial, I carried a sabre and I can do that archaic bit.  
00:05:00
	And I enjoyed it.  I enjoyed the military stuff.  At the same time, in high school, I drew cartoons.  I think I’ve always been drawing pictures from the earliest period I can remember.  And in high school, I was the editor of the yearbook and we had a kind of a weekly newspaper.  I drew cartoons for that. 
00:05:31 
So those were my interests and then when I went – in 1938, I went to Berkeley as an undergraduate and, again, waiting for me was ROTC and you had no choice there.  You had to take two years of ROTC and you could be selected to take four and get your commission, but I took two and I made a bad mistake in that a friend of mine who was in the engineering college, he joined the – we could sort of pick what branch we wanted to go into and he went into the Coast Artillery and so I went into the Coast Artillery which we got to fool around on big guns and track coeds and it was fun.  It was kind of an interesting, fun thing.  But I don’t think I was really suited to it and because it really requires a great deal of mathematics and science and I think the people in artillery have a certain kind of head that I don’t have, and later when the real war occurred, I went – I was drafted and I reported with letters of recommendation from my art professors saying they thought I should go into camouflage or something like that.  I was very talented, and they should use me in the right way.  But they saw coast artillery on my record and so, of course, I went into the artillery and I think – I never really could advance very well in the artillery, and the coast artillery, which later became the anti-aircraft artillery, because of the mathematics and, you know, the elementary computers; the equipment which was terribly complicated, so that – in the army, there were things that I was very good at, but I was not good at trigonometry and triangulation and so forth.  
00:07:55
Ah, so in college, to go back to that period because I think it was very important, Berkeley was a wonderful institution; large and very fine.  It was very fine in school, still is.  Ah, my father wanted me to be a doctor, so I started in pre-med.  I lasted one semester due to problems in chemistry and German, primarily.  I had taken an art course as an elective and fortunately a five credit elective and I got an A in that which saved my bacon, or my college career would have stopped right there.  And so I switched and no one gave me any argument when I switched over to art and took my bachelors degree in art.
00:08:58
AH:	Did you live at home?
WC:	No.  I lived on campus. 
 00:09:07
Um, it – however, I was less interested in the art major and the formal artwork than in the university publications.  They had a daily newspaper which was quite a big deal and a humor magazine which was one of the best in the country.  I mean – and I worked for both.  On The Pelican, The California Pelican, we considered ourselves the best, although there was some argument about The Harvard Lampoon, but it was certainly one of the – at a time when campus humor magazines were very active and they had – people had graduated out of campus humor magazines and went into the publication fields into magazines, journalism, and – on a regular basis, and the people that I was associating with on The Pelican, there were at least five of them that went onto quite good careers in journalism and one of them, Roberta McDonald, was a staff cartoonist for The New Yorker for a long time.  Ah, so it was excellent training and it was really -- I think it was more important to me than the art major where I was somewhat confused, frankly.  
00:10:37
I – the professors were good.  They were an odd bunch and I appreciate them more now than I did then.  I worked with a Japanese professor, Chiura Obata.  He was practically non-verbal, but he taught things like oriental brush work and he would do these wonderful demonstrations with his brushes and with paint.  He could put four brushes into each hand, between the fingers.  He would have a brush and then he would ink up all of the brushes and then he would hold them up like this and he would say, “Now, you tell me what you want draw?  You want me draw a rabbit?  I draw rabbit,” and – fffllleebbtt [Making sounds with lips] – he would draw a rabbit [Laughing], you know, in eight colors.  It was a wonderful skill this guy had, who had started training when he was about eight.  So, and then on the other hand, we had Eugene Neuhaus who was a German and a great technician who had written the book on the material of the artist and so for him, we ground colors and ground lapis lazuli and we did true fresco out of doors and tempura paint; all kinds of exotic things.  So it was a pretty good department and I think I learned a lot.  I – conceptually, I really didn’t know where I was.  I was kind of young.  In other words, I was a certain year behind most people. I was in all of my schooling.  I was one year younger than most of the people in school, so I was – when I started college, I think I was 17.  Um, the – but the work, the publication work was very attractive and it appealed to my sense of humor and to the reading that I had done and to the political thinking which was really just beginning.  Now, this was the time of Roosevelt and essentially my politics were formed in that period and they haven’t changed very much.  I think, in a way, I’m still a Rooseveltian democrat, and, um, 
00:13:20
the paper – I became art editor, so I had a small staff and we could do – we did a daily piece on the editorial page and we also did things for the sports pages.  Our budget allowed us to do three drawings a week and then for two of the assignments during the week, someone had to cut a linoleum block, because that was cheaper to print, and so I did a number of linoleum blocks.  I learned to cut linoleum quite well and so those, really, are my first prints.  Although I’d just cut the blocks and then you give it to the printers and it appears in the paper, but – because otherwise, there was no print making at California at all.  It was a very classical department.  I think if I’d gone to an arts school in any of the cities, I would have studied print making.  But in the university, the art departments were somewhat experimental and California was quite limited.  The art department covered drawing and painting.  You could do sculpture if you went over to the architecture school and then there was a department of decorative art where you could do pottery and weaving and things, but all of these departments were very separate, so I drew and I painted.  
00:14:59
The art history courses were also in the art department, and that was one of my main interests.  I really enjoyed the artistry equally to the studio classes and we did have some fine art historians on the staff plus there were always visiting art historians to work with.  
00:15:22
Um, on The Pelican, I wrote as well as drew and I eventually became editor of The Pelican in my last year in 1942.  So, you know, you had, then, the experience of actually doing the dummies and making – putting the magazine together.  So it was very valuable experience and we were paid.  We were all on salary.  
00:15:53
The war started in December of 1941 and it had a large effect on California because we were pretty close there.  The Japanese had bombed Pearl Harbor and so in California, there were blackouts on a regular basis and there were ghost raids, they did.  No one actually came, but the anti-aircraft went off and, you know, you thought something was happening, you know, eventually.  But in the end, it turned out that it had been nothing.  It was just a scare, but – so the war was very close and the class of ’42, my class, we knew where we were going.  It was right there and so it was a funny time to be in school.  I did my part.  I did parodies and satires for the war effort [Laughing].  When you come out to the studio, I’ll show you some of these things.  How – for example, I had a spread on how to handle an incendiary bomb [Laughing] and some other things.  
00:17:22
Um, well, I graduated in the summer of 1942.  I was a little behind probably because the publications were – sort of took me an extra summer session.  Ah, I had a very good draft number, which – I, ah, my 21st birthday was in March and it was into the fall before I actually was called up and there I went down to Monterrey with letters of recommendations from my good professors which were ignored.  I went into the artillery.  I did basic training in the coast artillery and then I went to Officer Candidates School in North Carolina which was the anti-aircraft candidate school, and eventually realized that it was unfortunate that I had gone into the artillery because it was very difficult for me.  The amount of math and the quantity that you had thrown at you was very hard.  I really had to study hard, much harder than most of the other people who had engineering backgrounds or something like that.  But, still, I did manage and then I was assigned – when I was assigned to my unit, which was the 483rd Anti-Aircraft Battalion – I had to look that up – which was an independent battalion of anti-aircraft – 40 millimeter Bofors semi-automatic guns and some odd 50 caliber machine guns on multiple mounts.  
00:19:30
So, again, all very complicated stuff and I guess I go into this because I found that my job was to teach.  We started with raw recruits, you see.  We formed in Fort Bliss, El Paso, and the officers were responsible for teaching their men what to do, how to do it, and that included everything, even in some cases how to write their name.  
00:20:03
Ah, and so for most of the period – it took a long time to teach this group, and so I was a teacher and I found that all of the material was difficult for me, and often I was only a few hours ahead of the men I was teaching.  Um, but I was a very good teacher.  I found that I did have a teaching skill and I think I really learned how to teach in the army, because that’s basically what I did.  By the time our battalion was trained, the war had changed and we no longer needed the quantity of anti-aircraft and so our whole outfit was retreaded into infantry and I had to go to school again.  I went to Fort Benning to the infantry school and I found I was much better at the infantry, at the things that the infantry had to know.  The weapons were simpler and I really enjoyed tactics, but, I mean, tactics really consist of sneaking up on someone and doing them bodily harm [Laughing].  I could manage that.  
AH:	Life time career.
WC:	I had, to a certain extent, a sneaky nature and so I became very good at tactics.  I think if I’d gotten into that earlier, I might have gotten to be a higher rank.  Um, and from Benning, I went to Camp House in Texas again where essentially where we were cadre and we were training people that were being retrained.  Troops were – they were shaking down all of the people who had been clerks and who were – just what the Republicans are trying to do now.  They would feed them and run them through Camp House and in eight weeks we would send them over to the Battle of the Bulge and some of them would actually come back to the hospital on base all shot up which meant that, you know, we’d been successful.  And it was so horrific that I volunteered – I had to get out of it.  I volunteered for the parachute corps.  God help me if I – if I really had been successful [Laughing], but they saw that I was serious and that I wanted to get out and 
00:22:35
--so they sent me out to the Pacific and I got to Okinawa for just the last phases of the war there.  Really, what I participated in were skirmishes and because of my artillery background, I had mortars – I had 80 millimeter mortars and, again, that’s a perfect instrument for a sneaky person.  You sneak up behind a hill where no one can see you and you send a corporal way up to the top of the hill and then he spots where your shells are landing and so – but that didn’t last very long because the atomic – I was on Okinawa when the atomic bomb went – when the two atomic bombs were done in Japan and that quickly finished the war.  And the discussions of that time are interesting to me and my sons’ feelings about the, you know, the inhumanity of dropping these bombs on Japan are interesting to me because it’s my feeling that if they hadn’t been dropped, my sons would not exist because I was in the 7th division, and we were to be the lead troops in the landing in the Bay of Tokyo and we knew, you know, we knew where we were going and we were in training for that. 
00:24:15
 	Ah, so, you know, the war was over – thank God – but my part wasn’t finished because 7th division was moved into Korea as occupation troops and so I spent about another eight months in Korea, again doing everything.  I learned so many skills.  I was the transport officer in our move, so I learned how to fill a ship with troops and equipment – first on, last off.  And I actually – some of the – I did lose a tank in this loading operation.  It wasn’t really my fault, but [Laughing]  . . . 
00:25:02
BT:	How do you lose a tank? [Laughter.]
WC:	You drop it into the ocean [Laughter].  And I was responsible for a lot of damage here and there in my Korean trek because I did all kinds of things:  I was trial judge advocate; I had to actually prosecute soldiers who had killed people, raped people.  I remember we had a man who killed a woman over an egg, the price of an egg, he shot her.  These troops – that division had been in the Pacific for a long time.  That’s why, you know, as a replacement officer I was welcomed, because it meant that someone went home.  Ah, so it was really very easy to join this group, but they were partially insane.  They really, you know, neurotic at best, insane on the average.  And so we had a lot of crime and problems in Korea with the captive populace.  We were guarding equipment, Japanese equipment, that had been left over, and it had been a very cold winter and Japanese equipment consisted of fur coats and winter equipment and so forth.  For Koreans, would try to get in at night and steal things and our troops would shoot them if they had to.  You know, it wasn’t that heartless very often.  They let them go, too.  And, to a certain extent, it was kind of dangerous; there were dangers involved.  The greatest danger was bad liquor and one of the things I learned how to do -- I had to study a manual before taking a squad out and doing formal funerals, burial groups.  We had a fire squad where you fired into the air as the coffin is lowered down and this, and other things, I had to do.  But I did a lot and, anyway, finally I got back and I got out of the Army in 1945.  It was spring of 1946.  I see my notes.  I was shipped home and de-striped.
 00:27:40 
Um, so I started to write my novel at that point, and I decided if I got a publisher interested – this was in the spring of ’46 – and if I found some interest in this, then I’d maybe go back to grad school and go into the writing course. And if I didn’t, I’d go into art.  I’d go back and take a graduate degree.[Laughter.] Well, I didn’t find any interest.  I did show – I had, oh, maybe a half dozen chapters written and I made the mistake of showing it to a journalist friend who had been the editor of The Daily Cal when I worked there and she tore it apart.  She was unmerciful on it and probably very accurate and probably meaning to be constructive, but it crushed me.  I really – I turned against my own work.  I really – so I went into the graduate program in art.  
00:28:51
Um, and this time with no publications to distract me, I did very well, I did very well.  And I began to come alive as an artist at that point.  I guess I was older.  I had things to think about, things to make art out of.  I had had a great many experiences.  Um, and I began to work with a couple of people who were just right for me at that time and one was a woman, Margaret Peterson O’Hagen, a Canadian woman who was a very fine abstract painter and so my work, which had been figurative, became more abstract.  And she was very helpful in the color work.  She really had a fine sense of color and she had the design knowledge to be able to transfer her sensibility to a student.  
00:30:10
I got my masters – again, a year and a summer, which in my youth seems to be – I was always one summer session behind the world, but I did also – I got a teaching certificate – a junior college teaching certificate, which requires a minimum of education classes, but I did take the basic education classes. 
00:30:32	End of Tape 1, Side 1
Tape 1, Side 2
00:30:40
	Ah, I got three good letters from people I work with.  So I got a good job at a junior college in southern California, Long Beach Community College, two year college where we really had a two-pronged program.  They either had a terminal education of two years which put them into some kind of a job market, or they went two years with us and then transferred as juniors into UCLA and that was most of the thing, and I enjoyed teaching.  The department – there were four people in the department and I was teaching drawing and painting, and at that time I was exhibiting quite a bit.  I like to exhibit; I always have, and so I was exhibiting painting. 
00:31:43 
Ah, my colleague there, a person that I liked very much, Fred Heidel, who, he and his wife were there, Florence Heidel, and she did wood cuts and Fred did silk screen prints.  They had studied at the Art Institute of Chicago where they had a background in print making and they had known Dean Meeker there, as a matter of fact.  Later when I came here, I found that Meeker had been very friendly with Fred Heidel, particularly.  So Fred was a good colleague and he showed me – he got me interested in prints, and helped me build the screens and taught me how to make the silk screens work.  Ah, I didn’t know I would do anything with it, but when I began to play around with it, I got interested, and so it developed.  After – that was in ’48, and after about a year, I was showing screens in various exhibitions.  We had -- Fred and I and Florence and there were three other people, we had the opportunity to show, as a group, at the San Francisco Museum of Art in ’49 – ah, six artists from southern California and we had a very nice show there, got good reviews and so forth.  And all of this was encouraging, encouraging to the serious production of art and also once you produce it [Snaps fingers], get it out and use it.  Ah, so things seemed to be going well. 
00:33:45
 	Unfortunately, Fred and I got into a conflict with the other two members of the department.  There were only four people in the department and pretty soon it was split right down the middle.  There was a sort of design oriented pair:  a potter and the designer against the sort of painting/print making oriented pair, and it’s hard to think back over what we were fighting about, but at the time it was serious and since the potter was the chair of the department and really had the power, Fred quit first.  He had an offer to go to the University of Oregon, and I quit, too.  Ah, my plan was to go to Europe, but I did have – my wife and I had a good friend in Florence – ah, Marchella, and Marchella had found us an apartment that sounded nice and so I thought, “Well, we’ll go on the GI Bill and go to Florence, and to hell with teaching.”  
00:35:00
Um, which we would have done, except at the last minute, I had the offer from Wisconsin I had a phone call from Fred Logan, and he kind of interviewed me and I was tempted.  We were awfully broke to go to Europe.  I mean, my wife was willing to go, but it would have been a financial risk just to go.  We had no savings, no nothing.  And so it was a risky maneuver.  And, on the other hand, Wisconsin sounded good.  I knew its reputation and my long range plan was to get into a large university, to get into an art department in a large university, and so I decided to take the – so I accepted without ever having been to Wisconsin.  In those days, you know, money was tight.  It’s tight now, but they fly you in now.
BT:	Did Fred find out about you, or did you apply, or how did that work?
WC:	I had my papers into an agency in Chicago.  This was – you know, if you were looking for a job, this is one of things you did.  The private agencies were much more used than they are now, and so he had seen my papers there and had gotten the address, and so with a phone call, he hired me. 
 00:36:44
Of course, you know, I was being hired as an instructor which was a one year contract and when I got here, I found that there had been many instructors through and after a year, they were let go, so it was a very temporary job.  Ah, and so that’s how I got here and I never left.  Although when I came, I certainly didn’t think I would be here very long.  I came with a cut in salary and the salaries in California had been rather good and the salaries here were awful.  I think all of the people that came, the ones we interviewed, came at very, very low salaries.  They’re so low, I’ve forgotten them.  I’ve wasted them out of my mind. [Laughing.]  It’s unbelievable.  Um, and I don’t think the salaries, the upper salaries, were that much better, either.  People were working for peanuts.  
00:37:54
But the situation, of course, was that the universities were under tremendous pressure; students that wanted to get in, --you had the enormous field of GIs with the GI Bill paying their way and encouraging them to go, and so the universities were just expanding rapidly overnight.  Ah, I was hired along, I think there must have been three other people hired at the same time, all at the same level, instructors, and the people that were here had – most of them hadn’t been here very long, either.  There was this little core of people left over from the small department that it had been before the war:  Helen Annun and the potter, Doris . . . Dora . . . ah, anyway, she was about the same age as Annun.  Ah, George Dietrich had been off to war and he was back.  He was returning.  He wore his naval uniform while he taught his classes, which we thought was pretty odd, but then he was – he was an odd, a very cold, distant character.  I never did get to know him well.  
00:39:32
Ah, Fred Logan had been chair and had hired me, but when I got here, Helen Annun was chair at the beginning of the academic year, ‘49/’50 and so the department had changed.  The power structure had shifted, and I found that it had been doing that, sort of back and forth, for a number of years, and that there was an intense struggle going on between the old guard and the new people and Logan was the leader of the new group.  
00:40:10
He was an intelligent, hard working man, an art educator from Milwaukee and he had close ties to Sessler and to Zingale.   Ah, Arthur Vierthaler, who taught metal, had ties as well.  These people had all had some experience together in the art world in Milwaukee and during the depression, to a certain extent, and had backgrounds in the college in Milwaukee, the Milwaukee state college there.  
00:40:50
Um, the first – my first meeting with Sessler was interesting.  The, ah – Fred took me around a little and took me into the painting room and left me in the hands of Santos Zingale, and so Santos took me down to a Quonset hut that was on the library mall.  The library mall had about a half dozen Quonsets at that time.  They were left over from the military classes, and the art department faculty had a Quonset that was their studio and they had the little cubicles within the Quonset.  And we came quietly into the Quonset and then I realized that someone was sleeping on a stool in front of an easel.  The easel had a tiny, little picture on it and he was sleeping in a very precarious position.  He was leaning against his maul stick.  A maul stick has a little, round ball on one end and you put it on the easel and it has a cushion on the other end.  It’s a kind of flexible stick.  I’d never seen a maul stick before except in museums. [Laughter.]  Ah, anyway, so he was leaning against his maul stick which was on the easel and he was sound asleep, snoring a little.  So we woke Al up, and that was my first introduction to Sessler. [Laughter.]  And, ah – so I liked Sessler and Zingale a lot.  I liked Fred, too.  They were warm, friendly people and they really welcomed me into the department.  
00:42:45
The first few years I taught design and drawing, strictly basic courses, but the department was in the old journalism building, which fronted on the lake; wonderful view.  It was a beautiful room.  The design room, in particular, had a whole bank of windows facing the lake and the only interruption was you could see a little of the ski jump which was on the hill, there.  And I kept feeling I was in this exotic place.  Really – Madison was terribly exotic.  And at one point, I had a student -- students would leave class during the breaks and in the winter, they would go out and take a run down the ski jump and come back to class.  So during the break, one of my students went out, took a run down the ski jump, broke his leg, and came back to class a week later [Laughter] on crutches.  And, you know, I noted that down in my mental notebook.  Ah, so it was, you know, the pay was poor, but the company was good.  And, um, I found that I had a lot in common with Dean Meeker; that we were both doing serigraphs.  He – at this time, he had a class in serigraph which he had just started and the other thing that we had in common, that the whole group had in common, was the interest in exhibiting, and prints were particularly – they fit in this because they were easy to send off and prints were on an upswing all over the country.  There were a lot of shows – small shows, and some big shows, too.  Museums were interested in getting into this and forming important shows.  So Sessler was sending off his work and Dean and I -- Zingale would send off to painting shows… 
00:45:05
--and after a little bit, we would – we had a kind of lunch group.  We met in one of the offices and ate bag lunches, brown bag lunches, and just happened to have an entry blank that had come back, you know, with a note that “you’d won a prize,” or “you got in the show,” or something good, you know?  You just happened to take that out during lunch to kind of wave it around [Laughter] and maybe someone else, you know, had gotten a note that said they were rejected and so they had to admit, “yes, they had sent it in but hadn’t made it,” and someone else might have sold something, so there was friendly – a friendly competition developed, which was enjoyable.  I mean, I am a competitor, and I do like to compete and I like to win, but it doesn’t – I don’t take it too seriously if I lose, either.  And so the feeling was pretty general there.  And later when Harvey Littleton joined the staff, he was a part of the group, too, because he was exhibiting in pottery shows in the same way, and we – an amazing number of times, we did win.  I mean, this little group and far from where the shows were being, we developed quite a good record in these shows.  Um, well, what happened next? 
00:46:56
 	Ah, the, O.K. . . . a few words, I think, about the political situation in the department.  The Dean of the School of Education which we were in, our Dean, was Dean John Guy Fowlkes, who was an imposing person.  Ah, he was not to be taken lightly, and I think his policy was to keep the art department terrorized and we were all young and foolish enough to be terrorized. ([Laughing.]  Ah, but, you know, in retrospect, I think, and meeting him later, after he had left the deanship, he was, um, a very smart man.  He was something of a manipulator of people.  Ah, but he was trying to build the department and actually he was supporting the newer people that were being hired into the department and he was also protecting the people, some of the people, in the department, primarily the Milwaukee group, ah, from forces on the campus which were really out to get them because it was the time -- we’re sort of moving, now, into the time of McCarthy and so the anti-communist, anti-liberal, you know, anti-left, forces in the university were very organized and it was known that Zingale had been in the communist party, so he was a target.  Ah, and because of the closeness, I think, of Sessler and Logan and their activities in the WPA and their – Sessler had not joined anything, but he had sort of been along on it, so they were targeted and also they were targeted by the conservative elder group in the department, so the Annun – what was her name, the other woman?  I – 
BT:	Ah, Wilson.
WC:	Wilson – Della Wilson.  Annun and  Della – ah, kind of led the charge and put the finger on and so things that we – that I was unaware of were happening and from Zingale’s tape, I think if you see some of the incidents and – 
00:49:34
--but John Guy defended them and defended them very ably and so they were nervous, but nothing untoward happened.  I think it probably cost them some things in raises and so forth, but – and eventually Annun and Della retired.
00:49:59
And I – my feeling . . . I don’t know Della Wilson very well.  Again, she liked Dietrich.  She’s somewhat of a shadowy figure, but I knew Helen pretty well and I was somewhat sympathetic to her.  Ah, she was a strong woman.  The most negative take on Helen was that she was anti-Semitic and I do think you have to consider the time and the period and so forth, and a great deal of her personality had to do with her husband, who was – ah – he was a kind of low level – an electrical contractor, and if you went to a dinner party with Petey, you really had to still yourself for crude talk.  He was kind of a – his social graces were few and far between.  So that was something -- Helen had to deal with this all the time, and so she was with her friends and protecting her friends.  As an artist, she wasn’t that bad, it’s just that her work was polite and quiet.  She did rather nice, quiet water colors, decorative water colors.  And I think as a teacher, she wasn’t bad, either.  She was a little behind the sort of contemporary movements.  She wasn’t contemporary and she was rather anti-modern.  But she wasn’t a bad administrator and so when she was in, things ran fairly smoothly and in some ways, more smoothly than when Fred was in.  
00:52:07
Um, it was a department – when I came here, it was the Department of Art Education and then after a few years, it became the Department of Art and Education, and I think I might have had something to do with it, because I became a player, to a certain extent.  As a one year instructor, the amount that you can put into play is limited.  But on the other hand, you know, I was encouraged to play.  The people – the other – hardly anyone had tenure, you know?  We’re really talking – there were the instructors, and then there were the assistant professors.  So really it was a very lightly ranked group, so even an instructor could play a part in it.   And so I felt we really were an art department.  The art education part was a much smaller part and so at least get the art into it, and then gradually the art education was moved out of the title. It became the Department of Art, finally.  And I think the whole field of art education – it is interesting . . . it is the field that has been diminishing.  Initially, it had its literature and its people, its operator and its thinkers.  It was really a very strong movement and it has been diminishing and diminishing and until now it’s hardly a field at all.  I think in the department there are now essentially two people in that area, and I think it only exists here because we’re in the School of Education.  But, ah – so, but in the earlier days, Fred was very much into this.  He was active.  He was writing his book, which was finally published along the art education methods and a number of the visitors we’ve had were the thinkers and the writers.  They had their own magazine, so – it was an active field, but it was going nowhere.  
00:54:35
Um, I became chair strangely, I guess.  Um, I got more interested in the department.  I had – things that I was more interested in teaching came my way.  I began to teach painting and that for me was a big deal and I think one of the nice things about the people in the department . . . they did share.  We had a lot of enrollment.  We had a lot of graduate students, and that was expanding, and so we needed new sections and there wasn’t this thing of trying to corner the classes that you were interested in and keeping people out.  So I really was invited in and so I soon had the classes in painting to teach.  And – so I had really decided, then, that I was staying here for awhile, and I was promoted and . .  . I’ve lost my notes . . . in ’58, I was up to full professor.  Promotions came faster than they do nowadays.  I think I was an instructor for three years and an assistant professor for three years, or maybe even less.  Um, and –
AH:	You were an assistant professor two and I think only – associate only one.
WC:	Yeah.
AH:	And then full professor.
WC:	Full professor in 1958.
AH:	Yeah.
WC:	So after a relatively short time, and I didn’t realize it, but they were grooming me to be chair.  Fred, I guess – and I’m not sure . . . Zingale would probably talk to this better – why Fred – Fred had been chair.  He had been chair initially; Annun came back and then Fred resumed as chair.  Now, why he didn’t keep it longer, why he groomed me to be chair, I really – I’m not sure.  Ah, I got along tolerably well with Helen.  I guess I was the peace candidate, but I didn’t seek the chairmanship.  As a matter of fact, I only took it for two years.  I took it because I was elected to it, and we had a house rule that if you were elected, you do it.  You really can’t say no, although later on, people did say no.  But, ah, I didn’t have any feel for administration.  Ah, I felt that I was a classroom teacher.  I was happy teaching painting, drawing, design, all of those things.  
00:57:41
There – my interest in prints was not heavy enough to really want a print class at that point in time.  Ah, so painting – painting was still my main thrust, and I was exhibiting in painting steadily and doing well.  I did have – I had a painting show in New York.  I was in Two Whitneys, and so forth.  So paintings, my paintings, were still more major to me than the prints, although I was doing a lot of serigraphs.  Um, we had moved into the education building out of journalism, which was an expansion for us.  We had more space.  Ah, we had some new very well equipped studios in education.  The basement level with art metal had particularly fine facility there, and pottery – it looked good then, and the print studio was an improvement, and painting – sculpture did very well.  I think by this time, we had Leo Steppat or possibly when I was chair – I think I may have had something to do with the hiring of Leo.  As a matter of fact, I know I did.  Um . . . because I remember going to New York to see his – he had a show at the Forum Gallery in New York.  I went there to see that exhibit, because I’d heard about him, and my – if I had any ideas about being chair, it was to try to strengthen the arts side of the staff, and I’m not sure if I hired Harvey, but while I was chair or not, but I had a lot to do with the hiring of Harvey. It could have been earlier –
BT:	It was earlier.
00:59:45
WC:	It was earlier, but I – essentially I was on the committee that hired Harvey.  I almost personally hired Marjorie Kreilick with great opposition.  It was a male chauvinist staff of – I think because of the difficulty they had had with Della and Helen, but there definitely was an anti-woman bias and I wanted Marjorie for that reason, and then also I was very impressed by her work at Toledo, and she was a real designer.  We had – everybody else had been playing at design.  See, I had been playing at design.  Essentially I was teaching a painter’s course in designs, really kind of an elaborate course in composition.  But Marjorie had a background in textiles and, you know, she came out of the design market and the design industry and she had been in the Toledo Museum of Art School teaching design and had a fine reputation.  So I was happy to get her and, again, I’m not sure if Leo came while I was chair, but I remember that I was on the committee.  
01:01:17	End of Tape 1, Side 2
Tape 2, Side 1
00:00:01
WC:	So the – being chair, I can’t remember what were the issues at that time, they really disappeared.  John Guy was still the Dean, so I had a lot to do with him.  I liked him.  He was not seeking to be liked, but you began to understand him after awhile.  The terror was bluff and it was there to sort of make sure that he got his way, and he had a loud way, and underneath, he was a rather humorous man and, occasionally, at a moment when he was being very serious and shouting and ranting and raving, he would break up into laughter. [Laughing.]  He would amuse himself and when I first came and was introduced to John Guy, he took me into his office and we had a session just one on one and he was reading my resume and he said, “Colescott, I see that you were a First Lieutenant in the Army,” and, “O.K., well, nothing much has changed.  Just think of me as the Colonel and you’re still a First Lieutenant.” [Laughter.]  And it’s true – I always had that reaction with him.  I felt like saluting.  When I was chair, it was in the – our office was right up the stairs one floor above the Dean’s office, and so if something came up, rather than ring me up or anything, he’d come pounding up the stairs and fling himself into my office, shouting, “COLESCOTT, COLESCOTT, WHERE ARE YOU?”  I’d be hiding behind the desk.  [Laughter.]  Ah, but actually we got on pretty well.  
00:02:10
At that period, I don’t think there were big problems.  I think – the money was good.  The purse strings had loosened up because of the enrollment pressure and I think probably John Guy was pretty good at getting money.  Ah, and so we were in a hiring mode and in an opening new sections mode.  So the few things that I remember about my two years was that we made some interesting hires that I thought made the department stronger.  I think we very much needed Steppat because sculpture had been poor.  Dietrich was really a bad sculptor and he left a residue there and I think there were some temporary people between Dietrich and Steppat, but Steppat was a very strong – he was a very fine teacher; authoritarian and he knew his stuff and he was very good on the committee – kind of a fine, arrogant Austrian.  Ah, and the culture – he was a cultured person, which we also needed.  So we were getting better as a group.  We were getting more diversified and stronger and the people we were getting were performers.  The – initially, here, the state shows which were important to us – the Wisconsin Painters and Sculptors’ Show which was then at the Museum, the Milwaukee Art Institute, and then there was --- there was a show at the Union, the Wisconsin Salon, which was really an important show for the region and people in the state and there was quite a bit of money to be won…
00:04:08
-- and so the department began to dominate these shows; whereas before, the Milwaukee group of painters and sculptors had dominated the show.  So, ah, Madison began a takeover.  Meeker was doing very well.  I was doing well, and we had – there were a number of people who came, stayed a few years, and then left, went on to better jobs, usually, who were strong performers.  
00:04:45
Um, the thing I remember about being chair, the most interesting things were the near scandals that we had, which made the job pretty lively and I found myself solving marital problems.  There were a couple of interesting – ah, problems of artists and their models, which were resolved and I played a certain part in – we would have in-office, closed door conferences and discussions and my talents as a psychiatrist came into play.  But, so these things all were smoothed over without it going any further within the department, so that was interesting.  Even though, you know, it was sort of “out” all over the department, these things were known and they could have gone further very easily, but we managed to keep the lid on them.   But after two years, I’d had enough.
00:06:06
And also, I was beginning to get the opportunities to go to Europe.  I had in the – ’56, ’57, I believe, I had a Fulbright grant to go to London and I had had research grants in the grad school.  I had two research grants from the grad school, a summer and a semester which I’d gone to Paris.  I’d gone to Paris once on my own under the GI Bill and so I had this period where I disentangled myself from the department quite a bit with the grant opportunities; not to travel, but to go to either London or Paris and to study.  The Fulbright grant was particularly excellent for me.  I was reaching the limits of serigraphy, I felt.  Um, I wanted a material.  I liked prints.  I liked print making, but the silk screens have certain limits and I felt I wanted something I could get a greater density of effect and Sessler had interested me in etching, and I did a couple of small etches down in his shop, and he was a very good teacher, and so I did a couple of prints with him and I applied for a Fulbright grant to London.  I had heard that the Slade School was excellent and I got it and spent a year in London.  
00:07:56
It was a wonderful year.  I couldn’t have asked for a better person to work with than Anthony Gross, who was the instructor in etching at the Slade School.  He was a very mature person.  We got along very well and have similar personalities:  as fine artist, painter and print maker and he showed me in a year everything that you can do with copper plates.  He was really an impressive -- he was a friend of Hayter’s, so he used all of the color experiments that Hayter was doing in Paris.  And I had a chance to visit in Paris, too.  I had a chance to go over and visit Hayter’s studio and to meet him and he showed me the color work that they were doing there.  
00:08:54
Ah, I had – I got a gallery in Paris.  Now, I’m not sure whether it was on this trip . . . I think it wasn’t on this trip.  I think it was on my Guggenheim year in the ‘60’s and I became associated with the Gallerie des Peinteurs Graveurs and with Jacque Frapier who ran the gallery and who became a very big figure in French – the sort of printmaking establishment.  Ah, but that was later.  
00:09:35
At this point, I learned how to do etchings.  I learned enough so that I could take where I was with serigraphy and to carry that into color etching, to transfer the color serigraphs into color etchings, and – so that – I came back after this year with the tools and the knowledge that I needed, so you really couldn’t ask for more than that, plus a wide acquaintanceship with the artists in London.  
00:10:19
The other foreigner at the Slade School had been this Portuguese, Bartella Mayu Del Santos and he and I became friendly.  We were the two foreigners.  We were there on grants who were working with Tony Gross, and there wasn’t that much interest among the regular students in prints.  They had to do a certain minimum print project, so they would come -- the students would come dashing in and they’d spend a half an hour and do a little something and then they’d leave; whereas Del Santos and I, we’d be there all day, two days a week, during Tony’s classes.  And so he gave us very special attention.  Ah, there was a workshop nearby run by a Swedish woman, Birgit . . .  Birgit Skiold, and it was a place where the artists in London who were interested in prints, they would pay a little fee and they would get time to work, and Birgit was a very sociable person and she loved to give little “dues” she called them and so Birgit’s “dues” about once a month, you know?  Everybody would come and drink Algerian wine and have a good time [Laughing], you know, sitting on the pressed beds and, you know, trying to get off when in front of these beautiful, Arabian women, and so – it was a very exotic crew there.  Ah, and David Hockney would come to these and a lot of people who were in print, so it was a chance to meet a lot of people, and I worked at Birgit’s.  
00:12:14
I did a little teaching myself.  Ah, Tony found that at a place called the Workingman’s College, the Workingman’s College not too far from the Slade, it was an old Fabian place, school -- Fabian school.  And they had a huge press down in the basement which no one was using, and so I got the use of the room and the press to work there and I taught a class of adults upstairs in a room that had a small press once a week, so I taught for them just to get the use of the facilities; nice deal.  	
00:13:00
	So I came back after that period.  I guess I was working in Madison.  I think I didn’t really open – no, I guess I did open a section of etching um, alongside of Sessler’s.  When I got back from my Fulbright year in London with the etching skills, Sessler approached me and asked me if I wanted to run an etching class in his studio.  See, we just had the one print studio, and there really weren’t – there was not another room available.  But he would teach on Tuesdays and Thursdays, you know, all day and a night class, so the room was available Monday, Wednesday, Friday.  And so I – he wanted to know if I would like to teach etching, and then he would narrow his offerings – his beginning offerings – to lithography and woodcut, relief printing.  So, of course, I did, because by now I was very interested in etching and – so that worked quite well.  Ah, we didn’t get in one another’s way because we were there on separate days.  We shared the office.  
00:14:42
Ah, and then in ’65, ’66, I believe, I got a Guggenheim to go back to London, and at that time, I didn’t work at Slade, but I was over there quite a bit.  I had two studios.  Oh, I know . . . I had the studio in Angel Alley, which was on the east side of town.  Angel Alley was the scene of one of Jack the Ripper’s most famous killings.  As a matter of fact, on the sidewalk they have the outline of just where the body was.  And, ah, every day there would be tourists that would come over to tour – the “Jack the Ripper” tour.
AH:	[Laughing.] See where the body was.
WC:	Yeah.  But I found this old schoolhouse there that was not being used and I think there was a printing firm on the ground floor, and the two top floors were in pretty bad shape, but unused, so I was able to rent the top floor.  And it was a wonderful studio, and I had that all during the Guggenheim year, and with the Guggenheim funds, I bought a big press over there and really had an awfully nice setup.  Ah, the following year, because I was so close to Rome, it was cheaper to bring me to Rome than to bring someone from the States.  I was invited to teach the next year at the Tyler School in Rome, and I bought my press and moved to Rome, so the period, then – it really – it expanded to a fairly long period in Europe – two years.  
00:16:40
And I got back at the end of that and Sessler had died and so I think it was at that time that Meeker and I primarily really sat down and began to plan what to do with the print area and the building.  The new building was in the works, and so we had a chance to bring in Gloeckler and Damer, and to plan to have a print area where each specialty, each medium -- medium would have a person who performed in that medium and would be in charge of the teaching of that, and so I think, really, our great period began at that time.  I mean, it would have been a greater period with Sessler, but that’s the way it went.
BT:	So this was about 1968 or so?
WC:	Yeah – it was – in my notes, it’s when I got back from Europe, and I was -- ’66/ ’67, I was in Rome and my note here is that Sessler dies during that period, I think it was.  So that – then the next teaching year was ’66, ’67, ’68, and at that point, as I remember it, that was when we hired Jack and Ray and the expansion of the print making classes, and then in ’68, ’69, I think we got the new building.  
00:18:45
Now, also at this point, I think that’s when Littleton was chair and he was a very good chair.  He was very aggressive and, um, I don’t remember who was the Dean of School of Education at this point.
AH:	Stiles.
WC:	It was Stiles, and Harvey would by-pass Stiles.  Harvey had people that he knew in Bascom Hall so he was – and he didn’t like Stiles.  Stiles was a thoroughly unlikable person, as much – my reactions to him, and I think he generally was not liked on campus.  He had a radio program, a weekly radio program, which was terrible.  You know, it was an embarrassing program.  He thought he was aiming at the ordinary people to explain educational policy to them, and so it had, ah, popular music and it was just uncomfortable and it was false.  It was as if he was – he was kind of pandering, pretending to be one of some – and yet this eliteness came through, too.  And I know it was embarrassing to the campus.  
00:20:12
So Harvey, really, was getting us a lot of attention.  Harvey had taken an apartment near campus, a private apartment, that he used as a club for the department and he would have weekly luncheon groups where he would invite the chancellor in and people from various departments and a certain number of people from our department, you know?  And I think it did us a lot of good.  We had been a kind of a secret, and suddenly we were getting a play, you know, that he was making the university aware that they had an art department of some consequence and that it was growing.  So I think our support from the university really strengthened in this period, and this was the period when we were getting into the end, the sort of final touches on the Humanities Building.  Ah, so that was a nice period, and maybe that’s the high point.  Harvey took the chair twice.  Ah, he later – he was chair for three years and then he dropped it for awhile and then he came back later and took it again for another three years.   Um . . . is there – at this point, I’m beginning to run out of my material, but if you’ve got any questions, or if there’s something that you want me to talk a little more . . .
00:22:02
AH:	Let’s go back to your Oakland youth, and you talk about when you got to high school, you started drawing.
WC:	Um-hmm.
AH:	Had you been doing anything before that?
WC:	Oh, yeah.
AH:	At home, and how did you pick this up?
WC:	Yeah, I just – I liked to draw.  I drew as a child.  I would send – I drew cartoons; I drew comic strips and I’d send them off to my cousins in New Orleans.  And, as a matter of fact, I think I still have some of those.  They eventually all came back to me.  Ah, O.K. . . Where did this come from?  I think it came from newspaper, mostly, you know, comic strips.  Ah, the comics were very attractive to me.  Comics were very funny in this period, you know – Cats ‘N Jammer Kids and Jake and Maggie – there were some wonderful comics:  Crazy Cat.  Ah, our newspaper, The Oakland Tribune - -we took The Oakland Tribune, which was a very conservative paper and so the editorial page of cartoons were terribly conservative.  They were very anti-Roosevelt for a long period – he was there for a long period.  Ah, but the cartoonist was a wonderful cartoonist, and I think he definitely influenced me.  I know when I’m doing cartoons now for The Progressive, that often some of the little tricks that – Jay Darling was his name – 
BT:	Ding.
WC:	Ding – Ding Darling, yeah.  Ah, he was out of Des Moines.  He drew for them and was syndicated and I always – the thing he always did was to have – to show carelessness, he would have everything littered, you know?  There would always be all this junk all over the floor and if you look at my prints, you’ll see often I do the same thing: an empty tire or something; tin cans; bottles scattered around. Ah, you know, he was a very lively drawer as I, and although no one in my family liked his politics, I got a lot out of it.  And later on, I found that he was a man of some substance, and he was an early environmentalist.  
00:24:48
He was a duck hunter and as most of the early naturalists, of course, they were hunters and they did -- their movements really started because they wanted to save the hunting, so he was trying to save the ducks so that he would have good shooting, and he did a great deal.  There – near Fort Myers, there is a park, a national park, or a national monument or something, the Jay Darling National Monument, that is given over to its place for ducks, the conservation of ducks.  And there’s a book on him, Darling, that when I was in Des Moines, somehow I got on this with one of the people from the museum there and the museum has done a great deal with Darling, and they had – there’s a book on him with a lot of information.
00:25:38
AH:	How did your father respond to this drawing?
WC:	Well [Deep breath in] . . . my father was a man who was difficult to communicate with.  I mean, you know, he was a railroad man, O.K., which meant that his run was to Ogden, Utah, usually, so he would be gone about three days, you know, and then he’d be back for two or three days, so he was – the fortunate time was when he was out of the house. [Laughter.]  You know, he wasn’t cruel or bad or anything, but he was a heavy.  He had a short temper and, you know, he would knock you around, you know, not break anything, but, again, that’s the nature of child rearing in those days, too, and occasionally there would be this very formal walk to the chicken coop with a big strap [Laughing] and I think it probably worked and I probably deserved it, but art, he – well, I don’t think he paid much attention to art, but he was very literate in music, and he played the violin very well and, you know, classical violin, and he had friends in and they’d play quartets and trios.  My mother played the piano, so music was the art in the house, and I played the violin. I played the violin until I was 14 and while he didn’t want me necessarily to be a visual artist, he would have been overjoyed if I had been a musical artist.
AH:	Siblings, talk about –
WC:	Robert.
AH:	Just – you have a brother, that’s –
WC:	Just a brother, yeah.  Ah, well Robert . . . he’s five years younger than I am, and I was always his protector and he was always my drag.
AH:	Still?
WC:	Ah, yeah. [Laughing.]  We don’t get along very well, frankly.  Ah, for one thing, the war really separated us.  I was away for a long time.  When I came back, Robert was still in the army.  He had – he was, I think, in the 81st Division.  It was the one division that had fought in Europe.
AH:	101st – the Screaming Eagles?
WC:	Well, ah –
AH:	82nd Airborne?
WC:	No.  He was in – they were motorized.  They weren’t tanks -- motorized combat vehicles of some kind, and they were in the Battle of the Bulge in Europe and then they got sent to the Philippines.  I think that’s the only division that fought on both fronts, and so he was – when I came back, he was still in the Philippines and they had to stay for occupation.  I don’t know . . .  it was a long period when we were separated and . . . I don’t know . . . we kind of lost it.  He’s a difficult person.
00:29:14
AH:	You mentioned painting.  You were doing a lot of painting early on.  What style was that?  Abstract?
WC:	Well, it was on the verge of being abstract.  I’ll show you some old paintings. I have a few still of that period.  I started being fairly realistic and then I went until I was completely abstract and then I began to come back and, of course, the work I do now is just like the prints.  The prints and the paints are –
00:30:02
AH:	So when you went to print making, was that stylistic?
WC:	I started doing prints very much like the paintings, so that the early serigraphs or abstract figures --
BT:	Semi.
WC:	Yeah, semi-abstract, and that’s about the way the paintings were.  The paintings and the serigraphs were quite the same.  The concept is the same.  Ah, it was the etching.  The etching began --
00:30:32	End of Tape 2, Side 1
Tape 2, Side 2
00:30:34	
WC:	You could see a figurative idea in the paintings, and the etchings began in the same way, so that the initial etchings in London were abstract.  But they began to change pretty rapidly as I got onto the difference in the material.  What I’d been looking for, really, was something more linear, and once I got into line, you know, the line began to add up to figures and to events and that influenced the painting.  So the change for me was in etching, and it pulled the painting along with it, and it just took – ah, it ended the serigraphs for me.  I did – after getting into etching, you know, maybe a half dozen, and less and less.  
00:31:25
And it’s interesting  . . . you know, Meeker was talking about combining and that, of course, is what I did.  Initially I was combining, and my way of combining silk screen and etching was to print on the plate, which I found not that difficult and so I had maybe half dozen additions where there’s an element of silk screen combine with the etching and the – I have simply screened directly on the inked, copper plate, and screened to the silk screen image on it and taken it through the press.  Ah, the only problem with that – I mean, I found no difficulty in actually doing that and getting the work into paper, but the cleanup is awful, in that you’ve got to – after each copy, you have to stop and clean your screens completely, or the ink will dry on the screen.  So, I – and then I found that I could get the same effect, more or less the same effect, by cutting a simple paper stencil, you see, and putting the thing on with a roller; in other words, really going to a relief technique, moving from silk screen to relief.  
00:32:43
AH:	One last question:  you are the Leo Steppat Professor of Art.
WC:	Yeah, there’s – yeah.
AH:	Or, you chose that name?
WC:	Yes I did, yeah.  We – you know, for the chair of professorship, you get to chose a name.  It is a named professorship.  And so – Wilde, for example, who had a named professorship, he chose Alfred Sessler.  
AH:	Yeah.
WC:	And I chose someone who I respected as an artist and as a human being, and Leo, I think poor Leo, was cut off, like Sessler, really, before his time.
BT:	His wife was also an artist.  Is that right?
WC:	She was a textile artist, yes.  And as far as I know, I think she lives in San Diego.  I haven’t had any contact with her.
BT:	Did she do anything when she was here with the department?
WC:	Not with the department, no.  But she was active in Madison.  She showed her work and I think she – ah, she was with – there were groups of artists working in textiles and, um . . . I’ve forgotten her name.
BT:	Anneliese.
WC:	Anneliese, yeah, Anneliese.  Ah, and they were good company, very, you know, they were real human beings, with all of that that that implies.  Leo would get into awful fights with people.  He and Italo Scanga had a knockdown, drag out political fight and Leo got rid of Italo.
BT:	How long was he here?
WC:	He was here two years.  First he came as an assistant professor.  He was right out of grad school and he was too successful for Leo’s taste and, ah, Leo’s taste was a little conservative when it came to human activity, too.   And Scanga was kind of a rascal, you know.
00:34:56
AH:	He comes back periodically?
WC:	He’s been doing prints at Tandem.
AH:	Tandem.
WC:	Yeah.  And, ah – yeah, oh, he’s a very fine artist.  He was competing with Leo, and winning the prizes away from Leo. [Laughing.]
BT:	And he lost the big one, didn’t he?
WC:	[Laughing.] He lost the big one.
BT:	I have just a few questions.
WC:	Sure.
BT:	And then we can wrap it up.
WC:	Sure.
00:35:20
BT:	You talked about your evolution: drawing, etching, print making.
WC:	Yeah.
BT:	Um . . . were there any – who were the major influences on you?  Other artists who influenced you and your thought about the direction of where it was taking you?
WC:	Ah . . . well, I liked the pop artists a lot.  You know, initially the big influence was, of course, Picasso, and when I was a student, that was the big figure.  Um, the – people have come and gone that I like.  I like a lot of art, frankly.  I think that’s the way I teach.  I really try to get into the sensibility of the student and to try to bring out what is natural to them.  And I can work with someone who is abstract or figurative or decorative, really, because I like a lot of things.  I like a product that’s pretty well made.  Ah, although Rausenberg – of the moderns, there were Rausenberg for a period.  I think he has slipped somewhat.  You know, people do change.  Oldenberg – I liked him a lot.  I liked his thinking and, you know, his quirky humor, his deadpan humor.  Um, in the painting – that really is a hard question, because there are so many painters and I don’t know that I’m really looking much at anyone at the moment.  Um . . . I like Red Grooms.  There are – I feel Red Grooms is very close to sort of what I’m trying to do.
AH:	[Inaudible.]
WC:	Yeah, yeah, but there aren’t very many people who are working in this slot.  Um . . . so I find that difficult. I don’t like constructivism very much.  I really like it to be on the painterly expressionist side.  I like the Germans, in general, the German painters:  ah . . . Otto Dix, of course, and –
AH:	What about George Gross?
WC:	[Laughing.]  I like him.  I like him fine.  Ah, yeah, oh, he had a terrible period, you know.  He came over here and he really lost it for awhile, and then he kind of got with it again during the war.  He got some things that are not as well known, but they’re pretty good.  Ah, there was a fellow in town who studied with Gross.  I’m trying to think of his name . . . he is – ah – he’s a good friend of John Wilde – ah, Marshall somebody – ah, who talked a lot about Gross because he really knew him well.  He had been in his class in the art students’ league.  He’s mentioned in Gross’s – one of Gross’s books and so I feel I have some insight into really the personal characteristics of Gross as well as just the – there’s been so much written about him.  But, ah, Otto Dix is really something.  I think there is a very courageous man and a terrific painter.
00:39:12
BT:	One final question for me:  Um, when you came into the department, the couple of years right after the war, you look at – I have a roster of the art department here.  You look at the people who came.  It’s really pretty amazing:  Fred Logan; Robert Grilley; Dean Meeker; Albert Sessler;  Santos came; Donald Anderson;  John Wilde; you; Harvey Littleton; all within, like, a two or four year period.
WC:	Yeah.
BT:	Now, was that just sort of good luck on the part of – is there anybody who can really kind of take credit for bringing in this unbelievably productive group of artists, or was that just sort of serendipitous? 
00:39:46
WC:	Well, I think probably Fred Logan can take a lot of credit for it; um, and the fact that he would certainly take advice from Sessler and Zingale and then Anderson, so that you had artists playing a big part in the selection of artists -- and I think for awhile – and then it grew even more so than that.  I think Meeker began to take part in it, where you really had artists looking at the candidates and they were looking at the work and they were looking at the record and understanding the record, so they were really doing a much better job than, say, an administrator would do who didn’t have that closeness.
BT:	So Fred was sort of the catalyst –
WC:	Fred was kind of the head.
BT:	And the administrator –
WC:	Yeah.
BT:	And all that, as well as an artist himself.
WC:	Fred was an artist, yes, who without much in the way of pretensions of art.  I mean, he accepted the fact that what he was doing was very minor and almost on a hobby level.
BT:	Yeah.
WC:	I mean he didn’t – he was not puffed up about what he did.  I think he was pretty realistic.
BT:	Wasn’t it Ray Gloeckner who said he was really interested in art education?
WC:	Yes.
BT:	He was an educator and he was an –
WC:	He thought of himself as an art educator – that was his profession and, you know, I think he felt that he should have had a doctorate, you know?  He felt that he was injured by not having a doctorate, and yet he couldn’t bring himself to go back and start over again, or start it up again.  Ah, so he was in this kind of in-between.  I think he paid a price for not having a doctorate in the University.  And, um . . . but I have, yeah, I’ve read that list, because those are all the people that I feel made the situation that made the department so comfortable and such a good place to operate in and work in, and Anderson, for example, was certainly someone – you know, we had a lot of social interaction in the early days.  A whole group of us lived out on the east side.  We didn’t live very far from one another.  There was a lot of partying and sort of casual dropping by and so forth, and it was very comfortable group.  I mean, it was – it was a male group, but, you know, there were the wives, who were wives, but in the working group, it was in the department work, it was very male at this point.  You know, we were – we liked to watch games and football and stuff.  It was fun.  It was fun, yeah, and beer parties and so forth.
BT:	Thank you.
00:43:00	End of Tape 2, Side 2  

Second interview session at studio (August 10, 1995): Tape 3
Tape 3, Side 1
00:00:03
BT:	This is Barry Teicher of the Oral History Project.  Today is August 10th, 1995.  We’re at the studio of Warrington Colescott in Iowa County.  The “we” include Art Hove and myself, and Warrington is going to talk about his print making.
WC:	O.K.  Ah, so I’ve got a great many prints scattered around the room here, and actually somewhat organized and from front to rear, from the early days of my work in prints up to the present.  So it’s a long period.  I did my first formal print in 1948 in California.  I had actually done some linoleum cuts as an undergraduate student at the University at Berkeley, doing political cartoons for the daily paper, but my first prints that had, or that were attempting to have, art quality were done in Long Beach, California in 1948.  The colleague at Long Beach Community College where I was working had studied at the Art Institute and had done silk screens.  He was doing silk screens – Fred Heidel and his wife, Florence.  Ah, they showed me – I was interested, looking at their work, I had done no prints at all.  I had not studied prints at Berkeley and so it was a really new area for me.  I was a painter.  I was an exhibiting painter at that time, but the silk screens were quite interesting, and I made my own equipment and began to experiment.  This is probably my second or third attempt at silk screen, and already I was aware of the field, and that there were a lot of exhibitions, and I, very quickly as I completed these little prints, I did send some of them off to shows and they were successful at getting in the shows.  
00:02:33
The – one of the print makers who was getting a lot of attention at this time was Leonard Baskin.  This was after the war, of course, and Baskin was someone who had been in the war and became very active immediately thereafter with his wood cuts and relief prints, dwelling on the effect of the bombing in the late stages of the war.  He had a famous print called “Hydrogen Man” showing a victim of the new -- the hydrogen bomb.  And this print was shown widely, and so in my print which I called “Atom Boy”, it was a little – very small satire takeoff on Baskin’s “Hydrogen Man.” 
00:03:38
 Ah, I first silk screened entirely on my own – no instruction, not working with any group at all, just my own studio with my own equipment, and so I approached it very much in the way that I took paintings; color was very important. It was a wonderful print medium for color, and in those days, too, the equipment was simple.  You could make it in your basement.  You could put it—stretch silk, real silk, on wooden frames and buy squeegees and the necessary equipment in commercial art stores and so I built these small screens. And I did a number of things on this size and then as I got more ambitious in it, my size began to go up and I would try larger pieces.  
00:04:55
At the university, I was teaching – I came there in 1949, O.K.  I had been doing silk screens, but I thought of myself primarily as a painter.  The silk screens were very much a secondary thing, although I was exhibiting some of them.  Ah, it was very interesting that there was so much going in prints at the university.  Ah, the staff was very congenial and I got along well.  I enjoyed Dean Meeker, for example.  He was a flamboyant character, as you know, and a man of great wit and humor and good, good company.  There were a number of us in the department felt that we had a lot in common. We came within two or three years of one another.  We had come out of some kind of experience in the war.  In other words, our lives had been interrupted by the war and then we’d come back and we were kind of in a “hurry up” mode to get on with it and so we had had more life experiences, I think, than people in a similar situation today, and I spent four years in the army after undergraduate work and then gone back to school for graduate work.  Um, I felt my work was going well.  
00:06:55
Um, the painting – I was a dedicated, young artist.  I – the first thing that I did when I got a place to live was to take over the main bedroom and make that into a painting studio or the garage or so forth.  In other words, the life that I lived was around the place to make art.  Ah, at the university, I taught design and drawing.  Along with the rest of the younger staff, we felt that we were outrageously underpaid, and we were.  Ah, so that we were – as a group, I think, under pressure to try to have some income from the art work that we did and, again, that’s a situation that I think has changed in the department today.  But to live in Madison was a pretty expensive town, with no financial resources and with this miserly salary that a starting staff had, you had to get out and hustle.  Just to pay for the materials to make your art out of, you had to have some sales.  I don’t think selling ever influenced the quality of the work that I did, or what I attempted to do, but I was out, or getting contacts in galleries.  I was trying to arrange shows and I would go to New York and Chicago regularly bringing my portfolio and my work and to build up an apparatus where I would have some income from the work.  And I was successful and I had quite a decent gallery in New York with the Serigraph Gallery.  It was a gallery that was founded on the artists that were interested in this relatively new print material, and the woman that ran it, Doris Meltzer, was really a pioneer in putting together a gallery to show the work of artists that were working in serigraphy, as it was more formally called.
00:09:45
Um . . . so I continued the work in painting and serigraphy.  Serigraphy was secondary to the painting.  The painting – I had quite a bit of success with the painting.  I was in a Whitney annual and I showed regularly at the competitive shows in Madison.  I had galleries in Milwaukee and in Chicago, and so the paintings were really the main thrust of my art, and at the university, I was very interested in – not in teaching prints, but in teaching painting, and that took a little doing.   The painting courses were pretty much dominated by people that had been there for awhile:  Robert Grilley and Santos Zingale and others, so that painting was hard to wedge your way into, but eventually, I had a chance to get a section and so after awhile, I taught less design and the bulk of my teaching was in painting.  
00:11:10
I was pretty interested in working with graduate students, with the older, more experienced people that I could approach really on adult to adult level.  The undergraduate students were often difficult because they came to us with so little background, so little knowledge, of the visual arts.  They would come with a very vacant idea of – they wanted to work in art, they wanted to make pictures, but they had seen only a handful of pictures in their lives, and they had seen Saturday Evening Post covers and Grandma Moses and so forth, so that they were really starting from zero, and you could – I could work with them, but it was hard work.  It was really foot slogging work.  Another more enjoyable level were the people of my age or older that were coming back, veterans, for example; GI students, and we had a lot of them, and they had a lot on their mind.  Their lives had been interrupted; they had been doing something far from art, but they were full of things that they wanted to try, and they had this hunger for art learning and so they were wonderful to work with.  I enjoyed it.  And so my way of sort of working into the painting side was to take students as independents; grad students as independents, and to work with them, going to their studios.  I didn’t have a teaching studio in painting, but I could go to their studios and confer with them and work on a one to one basis, and that was marvelous teaching.  And out of that, I worked with people like John Colt, for example, and Richard Callner.  I think Callner was my first graduate student.  He had been working with Bob Grilley, and Grilley had demanded that he leave the class because Callner was – his work had a certain primitive fire to it that was far removed from Grilley’s interests.  And Callner had seen my work and he came and asked me to take him on as an independent, and that was the beginning of a friendship that has lasted until this very day.  And actually, in the 60’s, I worked for him when he was the chairman of the School of Art in Rome that -- the Tyler School of Art ran a school, an art school, in Rome that Dick was the chair of and he invited me to come over and to teach printing in that school, and he ended up as the chair at SUNY Albany, the State University of New York, at Albany and has recently retired after a very distinguished career.  
00:14:56
Um, so I think many of the people from those early days went onto considerable careers of various kinds.  Not all of them stayed in art.  Some of them drifted into things that had an art relationship, but were removed from actually the things that they had studied.  Don Kaufman, for example, is a very famous designer in New York.  I think he just recently redesigned the Royalton Hotel and there are many, many others that I could go into.  
00:15:36
We’re looking now at an etching.  It’s probably my first etching and this was a big shift for me.   I had gotten more and more interested in prints through serigraphy, but at some point, I began to see the limitations of the median – for me, you know, someone else might have gone on with serigraphy forever, as Meeker did, for example, but I – there was a difficulty with drawing in line with -- through the screens.  Screens were just a little crude.  I had been pushing and trying to achieve linear effects – I had been pushing to achieve more of a density, more of an openness in the screens.  Instead of making very neat, tight screens, often I would do a screen and I’d dunk it in water and had the glue melt and dissolve and I tried to make my screens leak, for example.  You get more texture.  I like to get more open.  Ah, we were not making screens photographically in those days, of course.  It was hard work.  You took a crayon and essentially you drew on the raw silk with the crayon and then you covered the crayon with a resist glue and then you took out your crayon with mineral spirits, essentially, and so you started with a crayon-like drawing.  The line essentially was crayon, litho crayon, type of line.  Or you drew in brush with glue or tusche, with liquid tusche, with brush, but I always liked to draw in kind of a – I like a point to draw with and so that’s the most difficult thing to do on a silk screen.  
00:17:49
Um, the association with Sessler was influential.  Sessler was a terrific workman and we were all friends.  We went to one another’s openings and shows and there were a lot of art shows in those days for the people in the region.  There was a big show every year at the Wisconsin Union; big show at the Milwaukee Art Institute.  There were shows at the Art Institute in Chicago.  The museums loved to have big, juried or invitational shows, something which is really a thing of the past, and it’s unfortunate so that the communities don’t know the artists who are working in their midst.  But in the 40’s and 50’s, they did. The artists all knew one another.  You knew the people who ran the museums and the curators so there was a closeness to them.  So I knew Al very well and he was a very generous man, too, who was – he was dedicated to his craft and he loved to show, to bring people into it.  And so he tried to get me hooked on etching, and I was interested, and I did a couple of little etchings under Al’s tutelage.  And I remember coming to the point that all people who approach etching come to and you ask THE question, and that is, after you’ve printed your print, you say, “Now, to get another copy, do I have to go through all of that again?” [Laughter.] And I asked Al that question and he said, “Unfortunately, yes.”  But still it was – I was beginning to get – I think you had to get clues as to what you could do with an etching plate, and—
00:20:12
--so that year, I applied for a Fulbright.  I had heard very good things about England and I’d see a lot of the prints that were coming out of England and I had been to France a number of times as a painter, and I thought that England looked attractive.  I thought I could really get deeper into the scene there because of the language.  I had struggled with French, and I had made progress, but it was always a little bit rough.  So I got my Fulbright and it was to the Slade School and it was ‘56/’57 and I really lucked out because the instructor in etching there was just like the head of the etching department instructor is -- like a full professor -- who was Anthony Gross, a fine artist and a gentleman and a very warm person who – he loved his foreign students because they came to work, and etching at Slade was a peripheral subject.  It essentially was a painting and sculpture school, as Berkeley had been, so that was familiar to me, but they did have a course in lithography and in etching, and Gross taught the etching.  Um, it was very frustrating for him because the students with their major in painting or sculpture would dance into his studio for 15 minutes and work on their wretched, little two inch squares of copper and then they’d find a reason to go back to the painting studio and work on their painting.  So it was very frustrating to a guy who was a first rate, highly experienced man, but he didn’t know how to deal with it.  Ah, so he would have – there would be a few scholarship students from other countries, or there’d be a few adults who were coming in for special work, and so we were his group.  We were there all the time, and I really wanted to learn etching, and I liked my work.  I liked London, and I liked Tony Gross.   He was a humorous man, and a very shrewd man, and just the kind of person that I needed to work with.  He was an older man, so there was a kind of maturity there.  He was highly experienced.  He had been – he was a close friend of Hayter and he had spent time at Hayter’s studio.  He had taught in Madrid.  He had been associated with the academy in Madrid and had spent a lot of time in Spain.  His wife was a French woman and they had property in southern France that they would go to quite often.  Ah . . . he was up on all of the most recent developments in etching so that instead of the kind of black and white, small, crabbed etchings that one saw in the States, a Joseph Pinnell sort of thing, he showed us the work of the French painters who spent a lot of time in the print studios.  We saw Picasso’s prints.  We saw Jacques Villon and we saw wonderful things that because, of course, Slade didn’t have an enormous slide library, but they were next door to the British Museum, and the British Museum’s print room was chock-a-block with the actual prints.  I remember going over there and getting out the Goyas at one time and, you know, this wealth – it’s not just one set of The Disasters of War, but three sets, each printed at a different time; one under Goya’s supervision and one, a much finer printer, after he was dead and so forth.  So it was a wonderful print education and it was very fine supervision.  And, again, Tony remained.  He became a friend and a mentor and remained so really until his death.  I did get back to London several times.
00:25:27
I was back on my Guggenheim, so I had a full year there in the 60’s and at that time, I really got to know him very well and went over and spent some time in France with him at his chateau which was the remnants of a Romanesque chateau that had really been destroyed.  What he really owned was the cellar of a Romanesque chateau in the middle of a vineyard, but it was still pretty nice.  
00:26:01
Well, anyway, that brings me back to this print, which I think was the best print that I did there.  It really wasn’t the first print that I did.  I went through a long series of prints, but my work at this time had become abstract, from the sort of figuration of the earlier work.  You can, if you really look in a certain way, you can see that it is based on the head and it’s called “Mach 5” and my idea was – I had always been interested in flying, and the idea of flying and speed and breaking the sound barrier and sort of the disintegration, the kind of somewhat disintegration of the body under the force of speed, so there is the nose, and there are eyes and so forth, so it is roughly a discordant figuration and this proved to be a very good exhibition print.  I think I did exhibit this for a few years and it got lots of exposure.  I’m still doing silk screens.  I had – in London, I had a separate studio.  Besides working at Slade, I had my own studio where I did silk screens and painting and this is from roughly the same period.  I think this is actually a little later and it’s the same idea, really, only here it’s the head, and now you see a little bit of the cockpit and the exhaust fire but working with the same thing of the effect of speed on a human shape.  And, ah, the – you can see, too, I was pushing the median.  I was trying to open it up.  I was – instead of brushing on my tusche, I would dribble my tusche, and I would drop splatters.  I would use a sponge underneath the screen and wipe off the glue and you can tell how leaky the screen is by looking at the borders.  You can see that this is a fine screen-like residue on the margins because my screen was so leaky that it was – the ink was getting through at all points.  And this was shown at the Brooklyn Museum that year.  I don’t see the date on it.  I think it was about ’57. I guess I mention that because Mauricio Lasansky was juror that year and so that – I had the feeling that that was kind of a coup that Lasansky – we – we admired him, really, he had put Iowa on the map with [Brief interruption in tape.] We’re getting to the end of my silk screen career.  Um, and I think the tendencies, you can see, are pushing.  I – after reaching the beginnings of abstraction, I then began to recoil away from it, and I think my natural tendencies which are narrative and much more specific and idea oriented – 
00:30:20	End of Tape 3, Side 1
Tape 3, Side 2
00:30:21
WC:	My painting was similar.  There really is – I’m concentrating on the prints, because I think that’s our issue, but the painting and the prints have always been hand in hand.  Um, I still tend to evolve ideas in painting, or painting and drawing.  Ah, and then with the idea begins to formulate, to then transfer to – in these days – the screens and now onto the plate.  So this is “Interior Morning,” the idea of light on figures, a studio with mobiles and furniture and back lit and just playing with vision, with very loose, open screens and carrying into – carrying the work into lots of screens; there are probably 12 screens on this, and I would work with – I might have two or three screens that I would get an image, print it up, gamble on it, wash out the screen, put more work on that screen and so forth, so that you could end up with a print, or you could end up with nothing.  There were certainly times when I ended up with nothing.  Now my last screen print, and it is actually my last copy.  It was – I did it in a small edition.  I’m becoming less and less interested in editions, although I always did editions and I still do.  I think that’s part of the hustling that really you wanted to get back, you wanted to get income from your work.  I felt that was a professional attitude and so I cultivated it.  Now . . . is this upside down?  No.  It’s right side up.  And it’s a little more open than the others.  I call it “Tidepool,” and it’s just working with the movement of the tide and the shallow rock pools that are full of movement and life and so it’s very open, expressionist statement piece.  A friend who was an importer of oriental goods, Bob Frye in Chicago, got the last shipment of Chinese tea chest paper, the gilden paper that they used to line the tea chests, and so he gave me ten sheets and I thought it would be wonderful stuff.  It’s actually real leaf.  In this case, it’s silver leaf onto tissue in a big, fragile looking sheet, but actually this is done in ’57 or ’58 and, um, I think it’s in mint condition.  I reframed it for the circulation show and the paper is as fresh as when I did it, and with all the screening on it and with that the light, the force of light from the silver leaf through the inks, I think, makes a very effective piece.  But at the same time, I really had lost interest in the medium because of my new interest in etching.  And I was also beginning to realize that etching, of course, is very time-consuming.  It’s very slow and as the involvement with the university and my teaching was growing, too, so that something had to give, and it was the painting, as it turned out, that gave way and so I began to paint much less.
00:34:58
	I’ve got two prints here that show attempts to combine silk screen with etching -- ah, just as Meeker did, as he began to go over into calligraph.  Ah, we really were very independent of one another.  I would, you know, I’d see his work occasionally, but I don’t think there was an influence, and vice versa.  Now, in this case, the – I had gotten more interested in dry point, and this really is practically a pure dry point.  It’s a dry point on two plates, a black plate and on a green plate so that the join, then, is done on both plates and the plates are printed in sequence so the image, then, contains the reading of both plates and the blue is silk screen and in my case, I thought that I could print directly on one of the plates and then simply print it; that the ink would remain wet long enough  to be printed onto the paper along with the material etched, or joined into the plate and it did. I really had no trouble with getting these to print.  I think maybe the difference is that I was more into transparent inks than Dean was and so my inks, which had a lot of transparent base in them; the blue is very transparent and it would tend to soak into the paper and it wouldn’t work on the [inaudible] work, but it was a lot of trouble.  Ah, to get one color, to get this extra color, you had to – one color into each plate, that’s two colors, and then on top of one of the plates, the third color.  So to get a three color print, it was an enormous effort because, you know, the old point of, “Do I have to do all of that again to get another copy?” and, “Yes,” you had to clean all three plates.  You had to clean your screen, or else the ink would dry in the screen, so there was this enormous spent time after you got your print where you had to clean up and get ready to print another one, and since I was doing editions, I began to look for other ways.  I liked what was happening, but I began to look for easier ways to do it.  But I kept doing it for awhile, and I think I began to get – things got more closely integrated.  This one is kind of modern day “Medusa.”  And you can see the plates are getting – in this case, the dry point is on the black plate only, and the under plate – I was using my children’s toys and pressing them into soft ground.  My son had little cars, little plastic cars and he was delighted to bring his toys to me and I’d put them into the press and grind them through and ruin them before his very eyes [Laughter] and he loved it.  So, but the orange, the luminous yellow orange in here, that is silk screen and, again, requiring the big clean up.
00:39:34
	Ah, now my pictures really are more and more, they reflect things that happen to me and things that I experience, that I might put together and this actually was the sculpture studio in the education building which was next to the etching room.  By this time, I was teaching etching, but when I got back from my Fulbright year, Sessler proposed that he would separate the print making classes.  He wanted to specialize more in lithography and relief printing, and the part that interested him the least and that he did the least himself was the etching, and I was full of fire and brimstone and enthusiastically agreed and so we shared etching studio.  I taught on Monday and Wednesday and he taught on Tuesday and Thursday, so we would – it worked out very well.  He would – we shared the same office, the same desk, but on different days.  Ah, next door was very busy, active sculpture studio of Leo Steppat and he also had a mate in there, Italo Scanga and so this was actually pretty much from life.  This is Italo Scanga in the sculpture studio.  He was a kind of wild man, young Italian guy; a very exuberant, outgoing and a terrific worker and so – and in those days, sculpture meant welding.  They were welding night and day and the piece in the center is kind of interesting, too.  It really – it all relates because I shared a lot of sculpture students.  They would, you know, etching and sculpture have a lot in common; the use of tools and so forth, and so I had a young guy who was a sculptor and he was pretty good in print making, too, and he would get into trouble with his plates, so that he would have to go through this long, slow process of erasing, which is a big negative to anybody, and so he had this choice of erasing and I looked at it and I went away and when I came back, I found that he had simply cut out the part that wasn’t working.  He had gone over to sculpture and he’d taken a cutting torch and he had removed that whole section and I looked at it and I thought, “This is brilliant.  This is brilliant,” and it began to – it became incorporated into the studio’s technique – not necessarily with a cutting torch, but you could do it with shears or anything, and so here you have a plate where there’s a lot of cutting, I mean, this is somebody’s old worn out plate that I cut into – kind of a rough, sculptor figure, cut out the window so that the under plate, then comes through in a pure form, you know, it’s not mixed with the over plate.  It is also “a la poupre” [?] that is, the under plate is inked in several colors rather than one color.   And I think this is a good plate to show as, you know, what was happening to technique; that I was really sort of – the process was being altered and being worked on and being changed.  And, of course, teaching helps this, you know, you really are a part of a group when you take this kind of technical subject and work together.  
00:44:26
	So, let’s see . . . a date . . . this is ’66.  Ah, so it is actually -- this was done in London during my Guggenheim year, which was ’65 to ’66, and so it is a collection of a different kind of social scene.  Ah, my wife and I had been taken to a very luxurious restaurant, an opulent restaurant that seemed to me smacked of decadence and I’d been told by someone that this restaurant where we went to, it was where the upper class men that worked in the city, they’d bring their girlfriends to before going home to their home in the country.  And so looking around, you know, I saw sin. [Laughing.]  It probably was all very innocent, but that’s what I saw.  We had a very well-heeled relative who came to London pretty regularly and had taken us out to this and so we had – and this print did very well, indeed. It was a -- every now and then you do a print that would win prizes and sell quite well and sort of catch on, and “Ziggy” was a notable print in that regard and, again, I was pretty regularly cutting the plates.  I liked the idea of cutting the key plate and letting the bottom plate come through and in this case, cutting out a little figure of a man and having him coming out through the floor.  This was a little, separate piece that’s cut out and laid on top and then printed.  And, but still the main drawing element is dry point, and I really was so enamored with drawing directly with a diamond point onto the copper.  
00:47:27
	So . . . subject matter . . . subject matter . . . ah, this – the date, I guess, this is signed on the rear because it’s a [bleed?] print and so I’m not really sure of the date, but it is during the Vietnam War, which was very much up front in this period in Madison.  Ah, the war had a tremendous effect on the university, on the students and on the faculty.  We were all drawn into it to one degree or another, and at one point, of course, we had the National Guard.  We had the National Guard snipers on the roof of the Humanities Building and we had teargas within our controlled ventilation system and so for days, we had watery eyes.  I remember our visiting artist, Jack Beal, who attended a meeting up on the hill that turned into a riot, and he came staggering – this sort of big, heavy man, came staggering into the etching room collapsing and leaping copiously. [Laughing.]  He had been gassed out; famous artist gassed out on campus.  So it was on my mind, on my mind and, you know, this struggle and it seemed as if everyone was in conflict.  So this is a print I like.  I – it’s a strange print.  I never have sold many of these, but to me it is a Vietnam War print where I have them in a dance, you know; all the opposites; all the forces that hated one another and were at odds and a hawk and a dove.  I had locked in a dance which I have always seen dancing as something of a struggle and prim and proper people with very unproper people, but age – opposites in age; opposites in gender; opposites in race; opposites in economics; opposites in race; opposites in battle and so forth, but I had been reading Arthur Schnitzler, and I was reading La Ronde and I was thinking that he was saying much the same thing, and so – and with the idea of watchers.  I do like a chorus, a chorus, watching.  And so I would get these old newspaper plates, zinc or copper plates from the daily Wisconsin paper and ink them up and work them in, so that you have – these are Rotarians [?] or businessmen and they’re watching in a neutral way.  
00:50:49
	Etching is so slow that you have a lot of time to think while you work on your plates, and so you’re often – I find myself thinking ahead to the next plate and I think that leads very naturally into a portfolio of prints, or prints that are related to one another, the kind of sequence of prints.  
00:51:25
Ah, so it’s natural for me, then, to do prints in groups and so this is a part of a group that I called “Histories,” or “Colescott’s USA: Histories,” taking historic events, American history events, and portraying them as, basically, as comedies.  And so the print from the set that really got the most attention was in a lot of important shows and recently was at the Smithsonian in Washington. They own a copy of it, and so it’s really gotten around a lot, and this is the only copy that I have that’s my exhibition copy.  It’s a 1973.  Vietnam has been solved, so one could go back to history and this is Secretary Steward buying Alaska in the middle of a good, Wisconsin snowstorm.  One from the same set:  George Washington meets Betsy Ross, but too late.  Betsy Ross was a very comely woman, if you had ever seen her picture, which is what started me on this and there is this painting of Washington meeting with Betsy Ross.  She’s sewing up the flag and so forth and they’re sort of glancing at one another, so I saw it as more contemporary activity.  And then about the Puritans, who are always with us, and a nice picnic:  the first Thanksgiving.  There is a popular painter . . .   I think he was popular in the 20’s and I had seen his pictures of the first Thanksgiving.  For example, all the very lavish, sort of patriotic moments in history, and that was behind a number of the prints that I did -- sort of had to do a takeoff on his approach, and so this is the first Thanksgiving, a little more the way it might have really been, with the meeting of all the diverse groups and in the background, the witches being pilloried and actually spouting out, “Witch.”
00:55:25
	For awhile, I had been interested in Dillinger and in the bank robbing period.  Um, I guess coming to the Midwest from California, you became aware of the myth and the stories in the states where he operated.  It’s all faded away a little now, but visiting the Biograph Theater where he was finally shot by the FBI and so I worked that in as one of the histories of my series and this is J. Edgar Hoover at the Biograph Theater and at that time, the time that I did this, this was in ’73, no one else really had that take on J. Edgar Hoover, so I think this – I was a little ahead of my time in the portrayal of Hoover.  I think he is more generally looked at the way I was looking at him in ’73.  I did a group of five paintings in Dillinger.  He had operated in five Midwestern states, so I did each state – I did an Iowa incident, an Illinois incident, an Indiana incident and a Wisconsin incident.  And we’re actually – next week, we’re going up to Little Bohemia and we’re going to go up to Minocqua and we’re going to have dinner at Little Bohemia, which is still going as a restaurant.  Ah, this dry point with lots of editions – it’s a dry point on two plates; actually, it’s a dry point on one plate and it’s inked twice so the plate, the same plate, goes through the press twice:  once with a red ink and once with a black ink, so you get this kind of tunnel variation in it.  With stencilings, which I was using instead of – I mean, instead of the difficulty of working with silk screens to get additional color, I found that it was just as simple to cut a simple paper stencil than to roll with a small roller, to roll the ink through, as you would in inking up a wood cut or a linoleum cut and using for photo editions on newspaper zinc, letter press kind of switch.  I would gather up from friendly printers and I’d keep a big cardboard box of these things and as I needed them, I’d select – just as you would make a collage, and cut them and fit them in and try to give a little here a spirit of the time and the bombast and the indoor and outdoor effect of this rowdy, rowdy battle which really was a very strange affair in which no one got hurt except two bystanders who were killed by the FBI. [Laughing.]
BT:	I’m going to end tape one, side –
00:59:33	End of Tape 3, Side 2
Tape 4, Side 1
00:00:07
BT:	O.K.  It’s back on again.
WC:	O.K.  Yeah, this is a little print done in 1975 in conjunction with a group of artists.  We were invited up to the University of South Dakota by Lloyd Menard and so we each did a print.  I think there were half dozen of us and then Lloyd and his students printed them and we worked with the students in the printing so it was a kind of a nice, educational program, bringing the students and the artists together, and it was issued in a quite fancy box and I think it sold quite well.  It sold for – to benefit something or another up there.  And I guess, you know, I have always been interested in flying, the idea of flight and so forth.  Ah, I don’t know whether I can show this today or not, but actually the symbols of Fly United [Laughter] -- Fly United was a great advertising campaign that United had run.  I don’t think – I took their slogan literally, but, in other words, that kind of humorous takeoff.  This was Gerald Ford, Air Force One was his at that point, so just a, you know, light hearted look at life.  
00:02:20
Well, this is London.  This is one of the prints I did during the Guggenheim period, yeah, in ’67, I was still there.  Or, I might have, by that time, moved to Rome.  I went – after the year in London, I had a chance to go down and work for Dick Palner at the Tyler School of Art in Rome for a year, taking my press along with me.  Ah, and, anyway, this was – I shared a studio in London with Fran Myers and it was in Aldgate East, a very raucous, busy section; it was the garment district.  It was – the studio looked out on Angel Alley where one of the famous crimes of Jack the Ripper had occurred.  As a matter of fact, at 11:00 every day, a tour group came through and they pointed to the spot where the unfortunate woman had ended up.  And, so I was – I did a group of prints around the different tube stations that I had something to do with.  So Aldgate East was the tube stop for this district.  So, the tube here – and there were a great many homeless people in this district.  It had been badly bombed in the war, so there were large areas of just empty, rubble-strewn lots and so the homeless people would have camp out there and they’d have fires at night.  And, of course, in London, you saw a homeless person because they’re wearing somebody else’s overcoat and shuffling along and at the same time, there was this kind of lavish, lower class life that was going on.  So it was a very – it was a fascinating district:  flea markets and thieves markets and things like that, too.  So, little bits and pieces, even maybe a little bit of Fran there.  
00:05:18
	I think the ones with the silver frames were from a retrospective that I sent out and so I picked prints for this that I particularly liked, and this is one that I like because I think it’s really tied up to events that were very upsetting and very close.  This is my assassination print.  This was the time of assassinations and of the Kennedys getting wiped out; Martin Luther King getting wiped out, and it was just one political assassination after another, and then not only the assassins, but the very things around the assassination, you know . . . the plots, the rumors, the – and, with the Kennedys, still going on.  I can tell you probably all of these, none of these assassinations has really been put to rest.  There’s just a new book out on – I think Norman Mailer has just come out with a new book on Oswald, and I was thinking about what I wanted to show you and talk about, and there is a print that I don’t have, unfortunately.  It’s a very interesting print, but I did it in a very small edition, and they’re all gone.  Usually I can manage to hang onto a print; I try to hang onto a print, but I did one on the death of Oswald, which was in this period, but it was a lithograph and, you know, I think about it every now and then.  I don’t even have a slide of this print.  They’re just all gone, but it was, I think, a very interesting take on Oswald, and in this period, I was really influenced by television, which was new to me.  We had finally gotten a set and the news was covered so thoroughly in those days – much better than it is now, you know, with the sound bytes and everything just read from the teleprompter, but in those days, the people were taking their cameras out and, you know, you were seeing Oswald being shot down before your very eyes in the Dallas police station, and I think I did a litho very directly from what I had seen.  
00:08:18
So maybe all of these from this period, ah, late 60’s, early 70’s, are really about war and struggle.  Ah . . . I think I had these things on my mind – very serious.  Vietnam was something that was with you daily and, again, the cameras were in on it, you know.  Today, of course, the military has ended all that.  You don’t see anything in Bosnia except the scene outside the hospitals doors.  You see nothing of the action -- and this is Verdun.  I did two on Verdun:  I did “Verdun Defense” and “Verdun Attack.”  And, ah, my father had been in World War I and so I heard a lot about it, and he had been in a lot of trench warfare.  I don’t think he was at Verdun, but that was the great battle.  That was the most terrible battle with an immense loss of life.
00:09:50
	And, so, for one reason or another, I think it was just the spirit of the times, I did these two prints.  They are exactly the same size.  I find it – it probably is difficult – I showed this one in the retrospective at the Elvehjem.  I didn’t show the other because I probably would have been attacked for it, because the second “Verdun Defense,” they’re holding out here against their attackers, but in the “Verdun Attack,” the women are coming out and they’re absolutely destroying the men. [Laughing.]  But, unfortunately, they’re all nude. [Laughter.]
BT:	Probably a wise choice on your part.
WC:	[Laughing.] Well, in that show, too, you know Russell picked that out and we curators, the three of us, picking the show out and I think we passed by the nude attacking women.  
00:11:05
Ah . . . so, then this is another one from those days, and this is right out of personal experience.  I had picked up Michael Rothenstein, the English printmaker who was visiting artist.  I picked him up at the bus station because he doesn’t fly and we drove toward campus and we drove right into the worst riot of the season [Laughing] – what is it?  Williamson Street?  I don’t know . . . it’s the street that’s near campus which used to be – it still is – you know, lots of these kind of shaggy, two story apartments, flats.  And, ah, everyone was there, so I tried to put every man – every man was in here, you know:  the cook, and the baker and the candlestick maker, and the students all being taken off to jail; the FBI just checking things out and the student being spread eagle on the car and beaten up a little and so forth.  But it all happened right where we were stalled.  We couldn’t move.  Everything was tear gas.  Rothenstein was crying buckets and laughing, saying, “Wait until I get back to London.  What a wonderful story!!” [Laughing.]  So, that’s – and it’s just interesting art – Chief Justice Shirley  --
BT:	Abrahamson.
WC:	Abrahamson.  She has a copy of this.  She bought a copy of it, and I don’t – I think this might be the last one.  O.K., let’s see . . . that’s getting us through the 60’s and 70’s.  
00:13:25
Ah – I think you can see a change in my work, but it hasn’t been drastic.  I think it’s a kind of evolution.  I think the – I worked my way through dry point and then began to use line etching much more, and then in the recent prints, I’m using soft ground etching much more.  Ah, color to much the same degree, and I – for a long time, I’ve been mixing straight inks with day glow inks – high quality day glow inks, but they have certainly been lightfast.  You know, day glow has the rumor that it’s not lightfast, but I found I really don’t like to use day glow by itself.  It has that kind of raw quality, commercial quality to it, but then when it’s softened and mixed with related colors, I don’t know whether the finer artist colors protect it and encase it, I have found it to be very lightfast, and I’ve used it in some of these that are 25, 30 years old. 
00:15:00
And this one, which is done in ’80, I think, this is 15 years old, and the day glow is still warm.  We’ve made a – this was used as a poster for – they did a poster from this print which my son did, actually -- he was a graphic designer – for the Elvehjem show, and for some reason, the posters that they put out along State Street quickly turned to black.  The day glow faded away.  It absolutely disappeared itself.  But in the print, I really haven’t had that trouble.  So, I think, you know, I do all sorts of things:  sometimes they are political satires, and sometimes they’re just comedies.  I think that up front, my tendency is to be funny and sometimes it’s funny, but with a barb in it or a big hook in it and sometimes it’s just by itself.  I think – I did hunting things where I was making fun of the hunters, although I have been, at times, a hunter myself and I don’t see anything wrong with it as long as you don’t use an assault rifle to shoot a rabbit. But this is part of the country, here.  Again, this is as – that one is out my garden window and this is out my living room window in the fall, here, and it’s visually pretty fascinating to see a lot of day glow people come wandering across your land in a snowstorm, with these huge rifles, and then you get someone who’s too close to the house and you go up there and you give them hell and you see it’s a ten year old boy with this big, huge rifle. [Laughing.] O.K. – silver frame, meaning one that I selected because I like it..
00:17:56
--and I like to do things about the military.  You really – I was in the army when I was 21 years old, and so I kind of grew up in four intense years in the military and I didn’t dislike it.  Sometimes it was a really fascinating period, and I enjoyed a great deal of it, so there’s a lot of the army in this.  This is “Poker Night at Pentagon.”  I was doing – I wanted to do a print about various governmental bureaus, or institutions, so the Pentagon – and Ronald Reagan was president, so there was a lot of material and so this is, you know, “test drive our new Honda M5,” is listed on this one, and a poker game is going on and this is the “New Army,” which is men and women together and, of course the men – they’re playing strip poker and the men are losing.  This one has really lost [Laughing], but she has a very good hand, obviously, and this one is beginning to play dirty.  So this is – you know, a lot of times, I’m just amusing myself, and one hopes that some of it – you know, what amuses me will amuse some other people, too.  I always hope for an audience.  
00:19:45
And, anyway, here are the generals – the high brass, here, one of which is a woman.  I think, you know, from an early point, I accepted feminism, and I’ve tried to have equal representation [inaudible] a fashion show and this navy officer playing Aliens from Outer Space and then this is the failsafe system.  This is the doomsday board.  Fortunately, there is a second balk button and this is the red phone – “If you get a recorded message, dial again.”  [Laughing.]  The State Department person is saying, “Speak English, you.”  So, it’s a little review, a little humorous review.  But it’s a print I like.  And then another similar piece – another military.  This time it’s in a silo “Boo-boo in Silo 16,” and, again, I couldn’t – no one could do this piece without intimate knowledge of the military and so actually it’s kind of a letter that someone’s writing home:  “Dear Mom:  It is nice here.  We go to class, sing while we march.  Have short arm inspection on Mondays.  Today I made a boo-boo,” and actually it is the guard dog who has managed to press the button, the red alert button, in the hard hat, [inaudible] hat, and the peacemaker, peace keeper, is leaving. [Laughing.]  Anyway . . . 
AH:	What’s the date on that . . . ’84 is it?
WC:	What?
AH:	Date?
WC:	Date – ’84, yes.
BT:	Appropriated in 1984.
WC:	[Laughing.]  So, O.K. . . . now we get more serious.  
00:22:49
Ah, I think you’ve probably seen these.  These are ’88 and it’s a little religious comedy.  Ah, “The Last Judgment Update,” “Update on the Last Judgment.”  I did a series of drawings for a little magazine called Whitewalls in Chicago and then carried that into the prints.  Oh, we’re working from the triptych idea.  It was very popular in the northern Renaissance of the doomed, the dead souls, the dead, being carried to judgment one way or another, being brought to the place of judgment; being judged, and being sent.  I mean, in the Renaissance idea, everyone loved the idea of all of the rich people going to hell.  I mean, there was very little focus on the ones that went to heaven, but there’s great detail and sometimes there was a separate panel of them all being in hell, being anally bothered by – and so forth.  But this – for a contemporary look at it, it is on Air Death, and the stewardess is saying, “Thank you for flying Air Death,” and they’re giving free cigarettes and free drinks.  
00:24:40
	And then this is the place of judgment.  They’re being judged.  This is the debarkation from Air Death on some dark air field, dark, mysterious air field.  They’re met by a cadre of demons and angels.  They’re putting – put into jogging suits and carried to the grand stairway where they go to be judged, except there’s an express bus for Episcopalians. [Laughter.]  And there’s God, dealing out the sentences. He’s fully computerized.  The entire life is immediately exposed and so judgment is instantaneous.  This is someone who does get a good berth in Heaven, where she gets a bungalow and an economy car, fishing lights and so forth.  And here we have a monster waiting for this man.
AH:	Well, I think you’ve sealed your own fate – [Laughter.]
WC:	You never know, I might – there might be a big change in my life.   Ah . . . these are, maybe ‘80’s, mostly ‘80’s.  
00:26:48
I joined – I did a group of three on the future, I think the best of which is this one – “The Work in the Future.”  Perhaps my work has gotten – the attempt is a little more at humor recently.  Ah, although this is somewhat serious, too.  Um, so we see that humans have taken a very minor place on this work line and they are kind of the gophers and they’re shining up the robots and taking care of the robots who are in control and on the coffee machine, there’s a warning:  “Human grade coffee.”  [Laughter.]
AH:	Is that a part of the series?
WC:	Yeah, there are – well, it’s a rough series.  There are three related prints.  Ah, the other two prints are both large, and this one’s small, so they weren’t really like portfolio prints, where they’re all the same size.  
00:28:31
So this is an ambitious print, and a kind of strange print.  The reasoning behind the print is that I had been looking at salon painting of the 19th century.  And these big painting machines that were put into the competition at the Louvre every year in France, um where the painters would knock themselves out and they did kind of journalistic paintings were popular, and they were of battles; things that everyone knew about, but they hadn’t seen it, and disasters were very great.  And so Gericault did this enormous painting that is now in the Louvre of the “Raft of the Medusa,” detailing the terrible happenings on board this raft by the survivors of a sinking sea.  And so it’s such a serious subject, that it awakens my inclination to not handle it seriously, so I was really looking for comedy, and yet it’s not entirely comic, either.  Um . . . but it’s material for narrative and action and drama.
00:30:20
AH:	Have you ever read the Julian Barnes piece on this?
WC:	No, no I haven’t.
AH:	I’ll have to get you a copy.  It’s a marvelous essay.  It uses it as a background.
WC:	Yeah.  You know, it was much written about and much a part of dramatic incidents, movies and so forth.  I guess that – but, the – I have a lot of information about it, and I also – you know, in the early days, in the 50’s, I did a lot of crossing the North Sea in small boats and – I mean, the inexpensive way to go to Europe for students and young faculty was to go on the Greek Line, which came out of Montreal, going up the Saint Lawrence, and it took the northern route over, where you --
00:31:30	End of Tape 4, Side 1
Tape 4, Side 2
00:31:32
WC:	And you did see, you know, it was a very active scene.  You saw whales, porpoises, dolphins.  You saw all kinds of things in that violent ocean there at sea, and the boats that passed you, you know, they looked just like that.  You’re standing on their front or standing on their rear, and the dining table, you know, had this little railing around it as the food would go down.   So, I think that it is a lot of that, and you still had a lot of kind of silly, social life hanging over from the days of the Titanic.  You did have tea dance at 4:00, and the poor, little trio sawing away up there were swaying one way and swaying [Laughing] . . . I did two of these.  I’ll bring out the other.  This one came first, and was a little simpler.  Um . . . basically, it had, you know, a lot in common, and of late, I have been resisting, getting too involved in really tendentious use of color.  In other words, I could have another plate, you know, and make these little spots of color, or I could simply paint them, and these days, I am tending to paint them.  Um, but this is – it’s a color etching.  It’s on two plates, but the additional small spots of bright color are put in with the water color.  This is kind of an interesting thing . . . this is actually – I found that by dropping whiting, the powdered whiting talc onto the plate, it prints dead white where you do that, so I was using that to have little highlights in the glaciers and, of course, all the portholes are done with my drill set.  It’s great for doing portholes.  
00:34:45
I think I’ll just show the “NEA” and maybe that’s a good place to stop.  This was an ambitious piece.  I had done versions of this – paintings, versions – oh, about five years ago, six years ago, and then the NEA which has been very helpful to me.  I had, I guess, three artist fellowships and one print making fellowship.  Um, and it’s been at very good times when I needed the time off to really concentrate.  And so I’m very sympathetic to them, I think as any artist should be.  So this is in support of the NEA, but I approach it by making a comedy, a comic incident, to try to draw people into the NEA and it’s an incident that I’ve seen happen in any jury that is during a big competition, and I’ve been on two of their regional juries, and they have their carousels all arranged and sometimes something is upside down, but you never go back at any jury.  You know, you get one – you get your look at it, and you get your chance to vote it in or out, and if it’s upside down, you go upside down to look at it if you’re that curious [Laughter], so in this incident, there is one who’s going upside down and then, you know, as having a little fun with the idea of the NEA and what their headquarters building would look like, and using that as an excuse to do a beautiful job of marbling on the column here, and that marbling work, that’s –
AH:	Is that pinpoint?
WC:	No, no.  That is – you use a big tank of water, and you put some tarry stuff in the water and you use a spatula and a whisk to get it going, get it shaped up, and you take your plate upside down so it will face toward the water, and you smack it and pull it up, so then you can etch it and so it’s a lovely technique.  It’s hard to do, but it’s fun to do, and students love to do it.  They make the most ungodly mess you’ve ever seen, so I’m always looking for an excuse to do some marbling, so marbling is in all the columns.  
AH:	These textures . . . 
WC:	Yeah, that’s –
AH:	How did you get those in?
WC:	I guess the basic is marbling, yeah.  There’s marbling behind the texture and then there’s aquatint soft ground; there’s soft ground over – the little pebbling kind of textures.
BT:	That’s the texture of the ceiling you’re referring to.
WC:	Right, the gild – the gilded ceiling and a proper palace for the NEA with their peacocks and so forth, but, of course then, the basic – the point of the print is the surrounding watchers and the vicious attackers; the Jesse Helms, here, with his bundles of tobacco and the tobacco workers who are turning out Jesses and the religious figure, the military figure who’s eating Art News and the woman who is cross-eyed.  She’s reading Robert Mapplethorpe as a southern figure, and there is the clansman and floggers saying, “War, not sex.”  Anyway, the enemies of the NEA, which are – so, it’s a statement to try to help them along. I did send in a slide of this with my last NEA application and I received a grant [Laughter] in ’93.   
00:40:45
So . . . um, well – the last one, let’s take a look at one of the prints I did for the last faculty show.   So this is as large as I can work, as large as I will work.  I don’t know how often I will go to this size, but I have now the equipment to handle prints this size.  It is – ah, let’s see . . . it’s 32 by 48 and beyond that, you have to go to another kind of paper.  You use paper on a roll and –
AH:	Is this a sealed, copper plate?
WC:	Two, two, two copper plates, so it’s an effort.  It was – I had a very good assistant, Ann Gratch, was working with me, and she’s very skillful, so she could – really she inked the color plate, and I inked the key plate and she did the roller work, so it was a good time to work on this.  It did get my equipment – it required getting special tanks built and I made a special acid closet which we can look at – the stuff in the studio after this.  
00:42:50
Ah, so I guess that’s a pretty comprehensive look at my work.  I think I have done close to 225 prints.  It was – give or take, that’s not an exact count, but it’s in the neighborhood of that, and all of them are printed in edition, which is another factor.  I think a lot of people do prints and they do one or two, but the kind of prints I do, I think it’s a great waste if you only do one or two, so my editions are anywhere from ten to 25 these days, that’s the usual figure, and at times, I have done editions of 75, 50 and so forth.  I really like to be in control of the printing.  I have a number of times worked with printers, and it’s been frustrating.  I’m not a natural collaborator.  I liked to be in charge.  I think it comes from teaching; it comes from being opinionated and stubborn and from being able to do all the technical stuff.  I mean, I am an excellent printer.  I have printed all my life, ever since turning to etching, and I am very skillful.  But first and foremost, I’m an idea person.  I’m a storyteller, you know?  These are narrative prints.  I’m dealing with all kinds of ideas.  They’re usually humorous ideas or they are kind of double-headed ideas where there’s humor and there’s a political point; there’s something that’s seeking a kind of awareness – it might be an educational thing or I’m selling a point of view, perhaps, but it’s a various kind of thing.  I spend more time on prints than on painting, but I do paint steadily.  We haven’t looked at any paintings.  There is a body of paintings.  I don’t have – you know, with prints, you have a pretty complete treasury of prints in the shop that you can pull out.  With paintings, they go and that’s it, they’re gone.  I would really be very – you know, I can do a retrospective show with prints.  It would be very hard to do a retrospective in painting.  And I don’t really have the records telling where they are in most cases.  Private individuals buy them and the galleries keep a record, but I don’t – that’s not really of great importance to me.
AH:	Are any of your paintings in museum collections?
WC:	Yeah.  One was just bought out of the last Chicago show I had by the Arkansas Center, Art Center. The Chicago Art Institute, that’s a big painting.  Ah, my paintings are on paper and they’re done with water soluble materials and they’re done with drawing tools, too.  So they are as much drawings as paintings.  They’re drawings with color.  Milwaukee Art Institute, Art Museum, has probably about three. They’ve got one of the paintings of the Titanic, for example.  I did two paintings of the Titanic and they have one of them, and they also have the print.  
BT:	When you spoke of your painting at Berkeley, was that the same kind or was that oil?
WC:	It was oil.  It was both.
BT:	Early on you were painting in oil.
WC:	I was painting in oil, yeah, and I’ve still got a few of the oil paintings.  I was going to bring one down to show you, but it’s in the attic and it’s big and our stairs are difficult and I think there’s enough to see here.  Um, I was really a pretty good painter in oil.  I, you know, I picked them up – every now and then, I give it another try, but [Sigh] it’s so slow; you really have to build.  There are other materials now that are much faster.  I still – I like oil paintings, you know, the paintings that I see that I like are the oil.  They’re much richer, I think, than acrylics and, um, but my painting in water soluble materials on paper – and you can get such great papers, you know.  You can get big papers, wonderful, handmade shapes, and I just prefer it, so I go with my preference at this point.
00:49:10
BT:	Let me ask about your color in later works.  It seems to have modified substantially.  I think you referred to it a little bit earlier from the somewhat garish, noisy loudness earlier to the sort of northern European softening of the shades and so forth.  Is that a conscious transformation?
WC:	Not conscious, no.
BT:	It’s a lot mellower.
WC:	Yeah.  I think it comes and goes, maybe with the subject matter.  These three – they got a little darker than I wanted, you know, these last three big ones.  I think they read – will read O.K., but I don’t think it’s a big tendency.  You know, I would agree with you that there’s a certain – that these are dark and the black plate tends to dominate and the color is – in this one, it’s kind of a pleasant color, secondary to the figuration.
BT:	Could you talk a little bit more about color and what it means, and everything?
WC:	Yeah.  Well, I like color.  I feel at home in using color.  I feel I have a lot of knowledge about color.  I have no fear of it.  Um . . . I – you know, I taught design for quite awhile.  I started teaching – I never studied design, you know.  Cal is a very strange school; really kind of a class academy.  We drew from the cast, you know, and we drew from the model, and I think that’s one reason I always had a tendency to draw nudes, because I’d drawn so many nudes.  From age 17, I was drawing and painting nude women and either that or still life:  fruit and bottles and so forth, but we had no design – no – we had something called composition, and that wasn’t very much.  So I really – when I – my first teaching job, I taught design and the faculty there had come out of really design oriented schools, so they wanted a hard-nose design thing, course, and so I did a lot of reading and working and I found that I could translate what I was doing in painting into a more – into a structured design course and I could analyze what I was doing and so I looked at color very analytically and read a great many books on it and then taught for four years.  I retained a design course here, and so I feel I know everything about color.  I know how to use it.  Um . . . I’m always thinking about the work.  For example, I just did a painting, and that painting was influenced by seeing the Whistler show at the National Gallery in Washington recently.  And Whistler had been studying Japanese prints and it was very good critique of this show by someone – the curators had it, and it was very helpful to look at the Japanese paintings they had and that had influenced Whistler and then they had Whistler’s things, and he used – he picked up on the use of color of the Japanese, where they would essentially have very neutral coloration and then they’d pick out little bits of brightness, often in the clothing and so forth.  And you could see that for awhile, Whistler picked up on that, and he was doing that.  And so when I got home, I did it [Laughing] and I made a painting and in a way, it’s a little different than what I was doing, because it is – I redid the battlefield as a painting and this time, the battlefield is very neutral, very warm, neutral and everything is very bright; all of the uniforms are very bright.  It’s complicated and it’s interesting to do different things with color.  
00:54:44
I feel I have a lot of tools to put down what I want, and perhaps why etching still fascinates me is that the material, the process, has a mind of its own.  It doesn’t always go where you want it to go.  You know, you work with acid, which is very unpredictable.  It changes with temperature; it changes with the mix; it changes as the water evaporates off – it gets stronger, so that you’ll invest in this big plate of something and it comes out of the acid and it’s not what you thought you would have.  You have something entirely different, and my tendency, then, is to go along with it, and to try to angle it toward what I had in mind, but to accept what the process has done to it, but to control it like a wild horse.
AH:	How much preliminary drawing do you do before you start working on plate?
WC:	Ah, it varies, it varies.  Ah, I don’t like to do too much, though.  I really like to have a certain amount of the exploration in the final piece.  Um, I will – my tendency is to do the idea over several times, and I have played with the idea of Audubon, and I did a litho on Audubon and I did two small prints on Audubon and so I had the ideas pretty much the same:  he’s studying the birds and painting while the place, all of these exotic places in Florida and Louisiana where he worked, and glimpse of the life there.  I did a lot of reading; I did a lot of collecting of books, pamphlets and things.  Ah, you know, I go into the situation.  We drove around a lot in this area, which is a fascinating area – probably one of the least changed areas in the United States.
AH:	Take pictures as you go?
WC:	No, I don’t really do photographs.  Fran takes some. I collect postcards, for one thing, and sometimes I’ll do a sketch of something, or I try to find pamphlets, you know, you stop at a restaurant or a gas station and they have pamphlets on the area, so that’s enough just to see – for example, how the houses are structured, you know.  They’re up on posts and they had usually a little stairway up to the attic where somebody would be up here, the kids and so forth, but they had – because all these areas flooded regularly and – but I have a pretty retentive eye, and so that’s  . . . 
00:58:48
I guess, you know, the main thing is to enjoy your work, and I do, I do.
AH:	And so does the world.
WC:	Well, that’s – I like that very much, you know.  I really do.  I like to have an audience or the thought that there will be people who are receptive and I like other people’s art, too.  I really – the Whistler show was a terrific thing.  I think it’s going to come down to Chicago and it’s certainly the best show I’ve seen in awhile.  I mean, he was kind of a flawed person and a flawed artist.  At his best, he was very good.
BT:	Do you ever have that in the back of your mind -- to say you do what you enjoy.  Is there a sense of the audience in what you do? How would somebody react to this?
WC:	Ah . . .sure, that’s in the back of my mind.
BT:	Yeah.
00:59:53
WC:	I’m aware – for example, now, I look at some of the things that I’ve done, and I know if I exhibit the work, there will be complaints.  It might be the nude women soldiers.  Ah, but a lot of people will simply find it humorous and find nothing to object, but there will be objections, and the museums are so sensitive now.  They really are running scared, and so, you know, I’m not really looking for a big brouhaha.  You know, the Elvehjem had trouble with Otto Dix and George Gross a couple of years ago in a show they ran, so it really has nothing to do with the quality of the artist, but there are very sensitive areas.  Ah, I mean, I do what I want to do.  I’m certainly aware, you know, since I deal with the times that I live in, I deal with the ideas that are current.  I am – I get a lot of enjoyment out of drawing straight political drawings; political satires, for The Progressive, and they have taken everything I’ve given, and run it, even though a couple of times they’ve had nasty letters, and there, you know, really, I feel that if you’re going to have that kind of a magazine, then they can publish anything, and so when I did – I did “The Militias” a couple of months, now, and I had the militia, you know, they’re out reading Soldier of Fortune and they’re sitting in the slip trench because they’re [Laughing] . . . I feel, you know, it’s an adult magazine for intelligent people, and that’s basically what I do.  I do adult pieces and I think my audience, they have to have a certain kind of mindset and intelligence, and people vary a lot, so it’s not always the case.  There are people that like what I do, and I’m very surprised that they do, but I’m not about to change it.
AH:	Good place to end.
BT:	I think we should end it right there.
WC:	Alright.  
01:03:00	End of Tape 4, Side 2

End of Oral History #483