Together: New Works by Roz Karol Ablow & Joseph Albow PUCKER GALLERY•BOSTON DW: Roz, when you first met Joe you were a cellist and he was a painter. What made you decide to leave music to pursue painting? And what happened from there? RKA: When we met I had taken a year off from Together: Bennington College to study the cello at the Longy School (in Cambridge, Massachusetts) New Works by and Joe had just returned from Europe. He had been on a painting fellowship. I had always been Roz Karol Ablow curious about painting and when I was in college many of my good friends were painters. After & Joseph Albow Joe and I had been married for a few years - and after a year in Paris when Joe had a Fulbright - An interview with the artists by David Winkler we settled in Cambridge. Some artists we knew met regularly to draw from the model and I asked if I could join them. JA: By that time, Roz had stopped studying the cello. RKA: But I wasn't drawing in any serious way then. I was just curious. As a child, I never even owned a coloring book. I continued with draw- ing for about six months and after each session I would ask Joe questions - lots of questions. After a while he got tired of answering them and he suggested that I go over to Boston University to see about taking some classes in the art school. Joe didn't start teaching there until later, but we knew some of the faculty. So, I went to see David Aronson, who was Chairman of the School then and he looked at my drawings and was encouraging. David and another friend, Reed Kay, told me what to take and this is what got me going. I took a number of classes during the following two years, but since I had a degree already I never went through the full program. JA: For a while Roz and I shared a studio in our Cambridge apartment. After we moved to our present house in Brookline, we ripped out a large space on the top floor; a totally open space with only a screen between us. It was a very large screen, but it transmitted a lot of sound which made for a bit of tension - maybe even more than a bit. We had a five-year plan to build real studios with fixed walls and sound proofing and after thirteen years we finally created two separate but equal spaces with a heavy door between them. During this time I was showing at the Pucker Gallery and in a few years Roz began to show at Impressions Gallery, which was just across the street. Her medium at RA49 • Evening Interior Acrylic, Paint Stick and Collage on Museum Board 26 1/4 x 20” 2 JA212 • The Gap Between - Study Watercolor with White over Graphite 21 1/8 x 14 3/4” that time was monotype. There was great inter- est in the technique sparked by a major show of Degas' work in the medium in the late 1960's. Roz's monotypes were included in a number of national shows, including the Smithsonian Exhibition, which traveled all over the world. DW: Both of you have rather formidable backgrounds in music. With music as such an important part of both your lives, how has it influenced your work as painters? RKA: I'm not sure it influenced our work as much as it reflects and confirms what we do. Not that we have identical tastes, but the music we admire and take most seriously has a certain apparent clarity and order to it. JA: I agree. It is tempting to connect music with painting and it is done all the time. The terms they share - color, rhythm, line, tone and texture for example - seem to indicate similar concerns and certainly there are some similari- ties. It may be that what we do as painters and what music does, especially the music that seems to be most important to us, run on parallel lines. Roz and I favor instrumental music that is most often abstract, although I am less single-minded about this than she is. Abstract music can evoke and convey all sorts and levels of experience, but only by implication. In a sense, this is the way we both have chosen to go in our work. We are both strongly influenced by early modernism and its faith in the expressive power of form and by the way form is manipulated in the work of are less concentrated. I attend to the look of many of the painters, composers, writers and things - a shadow cast on a table top or the high- architects who came out of that time. For both light on a bowl - even as I absorb these events of us it is this aspect of modernism that has into my pictorial thinking. However, I must shaped us - but in very different ways. admit that over the years I have become increas- ingly concerned with the emotional resonance the RKA: That's the point; our paintings put an objects, the tables, the drapery seem to suggest. emphasis on certain kinds of pictorial order, Roz, especially in her recent paintings, works even though when you look at Joe's work and with a kind of abstract metaphor that implies a you look at mine you don't necessarily see a variety of emotional states. At times there is relationship between them. something almost violent about the work, while at other times it is rather charming or witty and JA: We work with different kinds of often it is very tough. But her paintings never structure, different kinds of formalism. Roz has allude to a specific emotional dynamic beyond the freedom and the responsibility of working the picture itself. That being said, neither of us without overt subject matter. She sometimes deal with narrative, nor do we use symbols. implies description, but it is rarely obvious. On the other hand, I describe very specific DW: Are your working methods very different objects again and again in different contexts and from each other? different relationships and so my responsibilities 3 RKA: My methods are quite different from to start with and the rest is up to me. Recently, Joe's. He does many preparatory sketches. I I have been working with watercolor and instead begin working directly on the painting. I tend to of starting with the pre-determined rectangular improvise, so by the time I am entirely finished format of a canvas or sheet of paper; the more with a painting my original idea may have been free-wheeling watercolor technique suggests a completely put aside. Recently, I have been looser approach. As a result, I seem to begin working with a combination of acrylic paint, somewhere in the middle and work out so the water-soluble paint sticks and collage. The picture edges evolve in unexpected ways. collage elements - the decorative and painted The shape of the image takes on a fresh energy papers that I use - exist both in their own right for me. as pattern, texture and color units, but essentially they are only one part of the larger spatial and DW: To continue our conversation about surface organization of my paintings. Collage is the “how” of the artistic process - how do you wonderful to work with. One can move things confront obstacles or challenges in your work around directly and the acrylic, because it is when they arise? quick drying, is a material that encourages the same sort of flexible approach. A previously RKA: I go most often to my favorite painters. completed piece - or even an earlier monotype - I can count on them to give me some suggestions will often give me an idea for another picture. at least. Then too, Joe and I go to museums This often leads me to new and unexpected pic- and exhibitions. We generally go together torial events which I find very exciting. and discuss what we have seen. Although we may sometimes disagree, it can still be very JA: On the other hand, in my work I have stimulating. the objects in front of me and for the most part I don't organize them into a neatly arranged JA: I think Roz has a wonderful position in subject. I put them down, not quite at random, relation to past art. She works most immediately but not in any organized way and then I leave and consistently out of the early and later 20th them for a while and work on other canvases. century, while I wander around the past and I may do some drawings, but I don't begin to present with less focus. In this way we are quite paint from them until they seem to exist together different. As I mentioned earlier, the early years without my interference. They are never intend- of modernism, especially French modernism, is ed to be 'arrangements'. I have always disliked especially important to me, but I roam around a the idea of painting from a pre-arranged set up bit. For example, there was one period in my where the picture seems to have been finished work in which the problems I was dealing with before it is even started. Instead, I treat what is took me to Piero della Francesca and Fra there as if it were a found place - a kind of land- Angelico. This may sound pretentious - my pots scape.