Drawing the Dance of the Unfinished Story

An Interview with June Leaf

June Leaf is the artful dodger, weaving in and out of the world, moving like a dancer, skirting fixed endings, always lifting and pointing toward the light. In the conversation which follows she talked about her always knowing she would be an artist, having achieved two particular things at the age of seven—a wonderful classroom drawing of the story of Joseph and his brothers and the recognition that while her life was full of light and wonderment, the world would not necessarily receive her in that way. Eager to share this favourite story of Joseph and its remarkable appearance on her drawing paper she raised her hand and moved to the front of the class where the teacher gave her permission to leave the room and use the toilet. June Leaf told us, “I stood there—I felt I was holding a light—and I looked at her and I looked at the drawing and I thought, ‘Oh that’s how it is.’ You see something and then you spend your life getting other people to see it. I wasn’t discouraged at all. I just saw how it works.”

June Leaf has made many fine small sculptures in tin and wire, some set on treadle sewing machines. They have a wonderful sense of play and implementation and a determination in their resolute occupation of space. These hand-operated mechanical sculptures are oddly coiled to action even when their activation results in nothing more aggressive than the issuing of a soap bubble or the rotation of a small, off-figured wheel. Like a Calder circus without the animals or Jean Tinguely’s fantastical, jerry-rigged and explosive machines, June Leaf’s small sculptures are themselves generatively explosive, without the immolation. Like plucked lyres, the tin and wire pieces virtually hum with energy. They are poignant metal devices set to capture and then break your heart. (In Mabou, Nova Scotia where she and her husband Robert Frank spend many months each year, she has constructed a large mended heart of 14 metal pieces which hangs by two hooks from an iron rod frame and swings and quietly sounds in the wind.)

There is a painting—a work in acrylic on paper on tinplate titled Woman Carrying Infant Upstairs, from 2011. At only 11 by 12.5 inches it is at the same time capacious enough to represent Leaf’s sustained topic of seeking an ascension toward the light. A figure mounts a staircase. She carries a loosely rendered baby, its arm falling limply behind it in the unguarded gesture of complete surrender exclusive to sleeping children. Consistent with Leaf’s open-ended narratives, the stairway is safe against a wall or out in open space but in either setting the palette is celestial: sky blue and golden light. The figures could be read as sepia, a pigment of iron oxide or Joseph Beuys’s hare’s blood. Whatever their metaphoric source, her colours are air and light. With infinite care and stealth the woman climbs the deep steps, placing her feet with the grace and precision of a dancer. The artist does describe herself so, saying she thinks like a dancer and that dancing and drawing are movements in space, both a choreography. When you look at the work Woman Carrying Infant you note the deep arch and high instep of the woman’s left foot and Leaf says, “That’s how it is to draw. Foot down, foot drop.”

Horses are a frequent subject in Leaf’s work—rendered in three dimensions or two because, she says, for a woman and the little girl who precedes her, the horse is “the prophecy of her power.” There is a sheet which the artist has identified as Studies for Rider and I think of 16th and 17th century Italian drawings by Carracci and Cantarini, for example, showing both the loose idea of gesture and form and the telling credible detail that gives conviction to a later, fully worked piece. It’s a quality of latency and immanence that June Leaf’s drawings also have.

The newest work, Woman Drawing Man, 2014, is sculpture, painting and drawing, as designated in the title. The slightly concave sheet of tinplate resting on a floor of the same material creates a stage set or a room or an enclosed world. It is sufficient. The man has been brought into being in acrylic—the brush marks at once gestural and deliberate. Both figures are naked. He stands with his arms lifted outward away from his body, looking down as the woman, a three-dimensional tin sculpture—a drawing in space— holds the pencil that is his maker. She kneels on the floor in front of him level with his thighs, her pencil lifted to the area of his groin. The work contains light. It’s there in his quiet containment and interest as he looks down at the figure in front of him. It’s in the transparency of the acrylic painted on the silvery tin surface; it’s there in her concentrated application to the task of artist creator. June Leaf has always been a storyteller. She says she waits for the time in a day when the hand and the heart work together. This is evident in Woman Drawing Man which is also a story—a love story telling the connectedness of these two figures who are here a unity and a globe.

The interview which follows was conducted, not inappropriately, on February 14, 2014 in June Leaf’s New York studio. We began the conversation with her recent work.

BORDER CROSSINGS: What is this new theme you’re talking about?

JUNE LEAF: It came from a drawing of a woman washing a man. That’s the origin of all this work. In this case she’s drawing him. It took me eight months to make that figure and once I did it, everything broke. She really goes with him. What I was waiting for was to know the character and then I could draw. It was so hard technically because I’m working with very resistant material. But I’m very happy because finally I was able to give life to her and then I was free to draw her story. That’s what it’s all about. I only made a few drawings. I just made her head yesterday. I don’t know if you can see the profile but she is like a seamstress making the man. You see the brush is like a dart; it shoots from the mind. In other words, I don’t entirely know yet what she is doing. She is either sending the dart out of her mind, or she is drawing, or she is washing. I like the little penis. It is beyond sex.

There’s also a child on the back of the centauress.

I had never made a child before and it was a big shock to make one.

The child came unbidden?

It was an immaculate conception. I had the man and the woman and all of a sudden there was a baby. It changed the whole view of what I’m doing because before that there was just the two of them and now with the baby, it’s the world. I’m very happy about that.

There is something you are able to get in the gesture that is unique.

It’s wonderment. It’s all about being alive.

I want to pick up for a minute on this question of working with material. Did you really study auto mechanics?

I took a course on how an engine works. I did it because I had to learn to fix my car in Mabou in case we were stuck. Robert had a job in California and they had a course in how to take care of a car, so I took it but I didn’t understand anything. It just made me love machinery more. Actually, that was when I was making the “Women Monument” series and I decided they were too big, so I made little ones. I decided I was going to do simple mechanics, one movement, either pushing or turning or pumping. Those are the three things I know how to do. It’s a very simple repertoire.

How do you make decisions about scale?

Well, the women were the size of buildings and I was going back to Mabou and I couldn’t see any reason to make them that big. It was a practical decision and not an aesthetic one. Unless I had an army of people to help me, I couldn’t make these women monument works. So I thought I would make them small because if they can work small, they can also work big.

Your small pieces punch way above their weight.

Because it is all about proportion. I understood that’s what Renaissance artists had; their proportions are exactly right. So no matter how big or small, the figure could fly; it could die; it could do anything. Regardless of the scale, the proportions will be the same from the navel to the eye. I went out of my area of expertise and decided to figure out what makes a good figure drawing. I spent two years on that, I gave up all the imagery, and it was very hard. This was when I got my Fulbright and lived in Paris. I copied Vermeer, I copied Goya, I did life drawing from a model. I spent all my time coming to terms with that. I just recently came across a trunk full of sketchbooks—I was looking for something that I had lost—and I could see how I improved in my study of the figure. When I first came to Paris I was amateurish but then after six months there was evidence of a kind of knowledge. You could have respect for that person. I remember I was copying a Goya in the Louvre and I was coming down with very bad bronchitis. I used to get pneumonia very easily. It was a cold place and I was copying this Goya and I had to get the eyes and all of a sudden, the eyes locked. There was a hair difference between that and the next stroke, but I could see it. I threw my brush on the ground and I heard this little voice, my voice, of course, saying, “Go home, go home. This is Goya’s dream. You’ll never get centuries to kneel before you the way you kneel before him.” I dropped the brush, went home and collapsed. It was a very hard period because I was alone and I thought, if I can get through this night, I can get through any night. It was in 1959. I waited for the dawn to come. I knew what the voice meant when it said “go home.” It was saying, “You’re just a girl from Chicago.” So I went back to my first inspiration, which was my mother and riding with her in a baby carriage, and I made these drawings. From that point on I reconstructed my shapes and my own images. I know that it sounds funny, but it felt like I was making radiators; that’s how opposite it was from my nature. I was someone who had wound herself so tight that I just unwound, but that took many months to happen. I made two drawings that were good. One was a drawing of a circus horse whose head explodes. That was what was happening to me.

Why has the horse been such a consistent subject for you?

I think women like horses because it is an intimation of the power in their stomach to make life. Women like horses because they equal that power in their capacity to make a human being. There is no being that has more force than a horse or a dragon. I mean, a little girl is not going to say herself, “I’m going make a baby.” She says, “I’m going to ride a horse.” It is the prophecy of her power.

And is the little girl in a crinoline skirt and black shoes riding the dragon a self-portrait?

I wouldn’t say that. But I love this painting because it is done in one shot. When they’re done in one shot, they are my best work.

Do you remember why it became a dragon?

What you’re asking me about is the mysterious process that me and my brush go through. How do I know? I only know that I am instructed by whatever it is, the muse or something, to learn certain things. So when that event comes, I can produce it. Other than that, I don’t know anything else.

You have said that you don’t invent things, but you discover the truth that is already there. So is it something you find, rather than what you make?

The more important thing is the aim. My job is to be a great archer. All the other stuff I have no control over. In a way, I’m not even interested in what the arrow is going to do and what the arrow wants to say. When I come into the studio my head is like anyone’s head; it is without any nonsense, or any fantasy. But I sit here with my brush or my pencil and wait for that moment when a door opens and all these kingdoms come. I found the first painting I ever made. I was 15 years old and I remember that is exactly what had happened. My grandmother had died and she lived in a room in the back of our house and I thought, today is the day that I would begin, because I knew I would live this life. No one would believe how young I was when I knew it. I remember this blue cloth that my mother gave me, a blue cloth with little white dots on it, like stars, and I took it and I wrapped it all over my body in tribute to her and to life, and I said, “I will make everything for her, for her.” So I made this thing when I was 15. But I postponed my time to be an artist because I wanted to have a childhood.

So from the age of 4 to 15 you put off becoming an artist?

Yes, I played with dolls. I was a real dumb kid. But when my grandmother died I went out and bought two little canvasses and a box of paint (everybody knew I would be an artist because I drew so well) and I came back and put the brush on the canvas and I heard this little sound—thunk—and out came the painting. I don’t know where it came from but it’s not so dissimilar to what I’m doing now. Actually, it’s very similar. You can’t explain these things. Thunk. It was waiting. I also remember my first work of art when I was seven. I was very quick in grade school. I learned to read way ahead of the class and the teacher let me go to the back of the room where I would draw, waiting for the class to catch up. All of a sudden out it came—it was the story of Joseph and his brothers. I love that story so much, how he greets his brothers and how good he is and the wonderment they have. So I took my pencil and I drew it and I was so excited. I raised my hand and I went up to the front of the class and my teacher said, “Okay, you can go to the bathroom.” I stood there—I felt I was holding a light—and I looked at her and I looked at the drawing and I thought, “Oh, that’s how it is. You see something and then you spend your life getting other people to see it.” I wasn’t discouraged at all. I just saw how it works.

So the death of your grandmother meant there was a space where you could make art?

Yes, but then I had to get through life: I had to get through human relations, boyfriends; I had to get through my mother, through school, sex. I had to get through all that. I had pneumonia all the time so they sent me to a school in Arizona where they boarded children who have asthma and things like that. I was 16 and I was doing drawings. I had fallen in love with my friend’s brother, he was probably 20, Marvin, and I thought about him all the time. At that age you’re senseless with longings, and he wasn’t interested in me at all but I didn’t care. So I showed him my drawings. He was like a god and he went to the Bauhaus School in Chicago, and he said, you’re a good artist and then he told me about that school. It was very hard to get in because it was after the war and they had the GI Bill and I was a token Chicago student. There were two other women and me. I was the youngest, and when I taught there later on I found my application in the files and it is a riot. It was written in pencil on bumpy airmail stationary. You couldn’t resist that application because it was completely childlike. So I got to that school through much tension between me and my mother, who saw me as this gorgeous potential debutante. She had married my sister off to a wealthy guy from Texas and she had bigger plans for me because I was choice cut. My mother wouldn’t give me the tuition, so I had to go for a term to the University of Illinois. But I did eventually get into the Bauhaus School and Marvin, who didn’t go to the school anymore but was visiting his girlfriend, took a chair in the aisle of the lecture hall I’m sitting in, and he stares at me and says, “It’s all your fault.” It didn’t take me long to figure out that he was nuts. He ended up being institutionalized. I remember thinking I must have funny taste in men. I have good taste but sometimes I have funny taste. I was an unusual girl and strange things always happened to me.

How did you finally persuade your mother to let you go to the Bauhaus School?

I looked at her when she told me that she would only give me the tuition to go to Illinois, I said, “Okay, I’ll go and then you’ll never have anything to do with my life after that,” and that was the truth. She was sensitive and good enough to recognize that. She accepted that I was never going to be a dancer or a debutante. One of the things that influenced her was Leon Golub. I met him when I was 18 and he loved my work and wanted to meet me. He asked if there was anything he could do and I said, “There is, come with me to my mother and tell her about me.” So we went on the bus, 70 blocks to Sherwin Avenue at the end of Chicago, and he walked into the room, sat down and said to my mother, “Your daughter is a great artist,” and she believed him. Wasn’t that nice of him to do that? I only went to that school for three months before I went to Paris, where I had another extraordinary adventure. One of the other women at the school was going to Europe and she asked me if I wanted to go. By this time I had quit school and was working in a candy store. So I went home and told my mother that I wanted to go to Paris and I could see her eyes light up—I could read her so well. She thought, my daughter’s an artist; she’ll wear a little beret and I can tell all my friends about it. So she gave me $200 and I went to Paris. After leaving school my first images were what I saw on the sidewalk—cracks and things like that. I remember the day I looked at the sidewalk and I said, there is Paul Klee. It was like a language. I kept my head down until I got to Paris and I kept my head down in Paris. I made little cobblestones. What did I take with me? My watercolour pad and my bicycle. Can you imagine, I went on the boat to Paris and I took my bicycle. I was like a child. I had my bicycle and I didn’t have to fend off French men. Well, there was one. He was a thief and he would meet American girls, seduce them and then steal from them. I wasn’t interested in sex, but it seemed easier to go to bed with him than to have to deal with him. I remember after it was over he got out of bed and he looked at me and said, “You’re different from the other American women,” and he didn’t steal from me. He was very sweet. I never saw him again. But in this hotel where I was staying there was an art historian, an ex GI and an expatriate. I had gotten pneumonia again and the concierge and her husband took me from the sixth floor to the second floor, so they could bring me soup. She was a Canadian woman named Margie and she had a big room and she let me stay there. She saw my work and she asked me to put it up in her room. Then she invited an Indian woman, I had never seen a woman wearing a sari, who kept saying, “How do you do that, you’re so young, how do you do that?” I thought this didn’t have anything to do with being young, I had just started early. So the concierge told this art historian to bring me the soup. He came into the big room and my little watercolours were all around. He sat down next to me and said, “Tell me about your work,” and I remember repeating something that a poet from San Francisco that I had met, had said. She was a friend of Kenneth Rexroth and she talked about Jung and I thought she was wonderful. She would look at my work and say, “It’s very anal,” so when this art historian asked me about my work I said, “Well, it’s very anal.” I remember he looked at me and this little smile came on his face. He recognized that I didn’t know what I was talking about. But he liked me. His name was Ben. The next day he called me on the hotel phone and he said, “Could you please bring all your water-colours and your paintings to my room. I have some people here and I want them to see it.” I remember the darkness was in me. I knew that something was going to happen; that something was going to take away the blessing that I had. I used to cry when I worked, I remember thinking I’m blessed, I’m blessed. It was the most beautiful feeling that I’d ever had in my whole life. But then Ben came; he was a nice man but he represented the world, and I knew that. All my work fit into a suitcase, which I handed to them, and ran away. I had another obsession: those sandals that children wore. I have very big feet; I wear an 11 and a half. All I wanted was a pair of these shoes. I would buy the biggest children’s shoes you could buy but my feet would still hurt all the time. I would paint and walk in them and look at the sidewalk. I remember knowing that something was going to happen that will change everything, so I ran away for days. But Ben finally got me on the telephone and he said, “I want to take you to dinner; I have something to tell you.” And my feet hurt. You see, I was very simple. I didn’t have many things on my mind. I had my work and my shoes. I worked just as hard then as I do now. It was my birthday. So he took me to dinner and all the time I am thinking, something is going to happen. He takes a sip of wine and he says, “You’ve got it.” Now you would think I would be happy but I wasn’t. I felt like he was an invader. Then he said, “We’re going to help you. Would you like to study with Severini; would you like to study with Braque?” I remember thinking, he doesn’t understand, I’m not an art student. But I didn’t know how to talk then. So they gave me a gigantic studio, a very famous one, I found out. It used to be Picasso’s studio on Bis Rue Schoelcher across from a cemetery. They also gave me a little dog to take care of and they said, “It’s yours, do whatever you want. We’re going to help you.” So every other day they would come and see what I had done. I worked, but the darkness was there. What happened, actually, was I sat in the middle of the room and cried. I was so sad all the time because they took the blessing away. Then one day I went to the Musée de l’Homme by myself, and I saw these beautiful ivory tusks on which the Inuit had scratched images. I almost fainted and I knew that I had to find something white, something really white. I was ready to paint again. So I ran back to my atelier and I looked at the white bathtub and I said, “That’s it.” I took a big Chinese brush and dipped it in this real strong India ink and I drew a child in the bathtub. I had done graffiti things in my paintings and I thought, it has come back. I couldn’t wait for them to see it, and I took them into the bathroom and they saw what I had done and they went, “Ah, she’s crazy.” So I thought, “Good, now they’ll get rid of me.” I was so clear in my head what was right and what was wrong and, true enough, the neighbour said I was painting on her dishes and throwing them in the garbage. It was a sublet and they were very expensive dishes but I was a child. I was 18 but I was more like a child. So they sent me to a psychiatrist, a French woman, and I hated her. She didn’t speak English very well but I had started to understand French, and I remember going down the stairs hearing her say, “You don’t want to sleep with men, c’est vrai.” So I went to these people and said, “I’ll go to a psychiatrist but I want one who speaks English.” They sent me to this wonderful man who had been educated in England and I liked him so much. I finally had someone I could talk to, and out came all my observations about how pretentious my patrons were, how I wasn’t a genius, I wasn’t precocious, I just liked to paint, I see things I want to do, and they gave me this little dog and it pisses all over the atelier. He laughed and laughed and laughed and said, “There is nothing wrong with you. You should just go home.” I did go back home, but I never told anyone what happened because no one would believe the story. How could I explain it? They kicked me out and they made me pay for damages. So I got a job to pay them back because they wouldn’t give me my work until I paid, and I really grieved. I’ve never grieved the way I grieved that year.

You were grieving because of your unreturned work?

Those works were really my babies. The grief was actually physical. But a year later my marvelous father came to my place and handed me my paintings. Everybody thought he was crazy, which he wasn’t; he was just a gambler who never earned a living. He had gone on a bus to New York, by that time they were in a warehouse in New York, and somehow he managed to get them. My sister told me that he took them around to galleries and said, “My daughter wants to be an artist, is she any good?” The only thing they told him was, it’s a hard life to be an artist. When he gave me back my paintings people said, “Why did you do that? Look at them, there’s nothing there.” He said, because if she cries like that, it must mean something.

Was it necessary for you to maintain some kind of innocence?

I’ll give it to you in one story. Katharine Kuh, the Chicago gallery owner and curator, believed in me. It was because of her that I got a Fulbright. When I came back from Paris she would visit me. I was married to a musician and she bought some pieces of mine. It was before I made the Vermeer Box and I was still struggling with how to show my interpretation of what I was getting from Vermeer. I remember Katharine said, “Oh my God, don’t touch it,” and I went, “I will.” And I thought, how am I ever going to get rid of that attitude I have? I’ve lost many wonderful things, and that’s why now when I make something fast, I put it away immediately and forget about it.

Because if you keep it around you’ll change it?

I learned to stop that. It took me years. There would be beautiful stages but I didn’t have the mastery, so I have to take a risk. I have to say, “No it’s not right, take it away, tear it apart.” While I’m doing that it’s like I’m a gambler. I say to myself, “Higher stakes. Higher stakes.”

You are half your father.

I am a gambler. All artists are. I got an honorary doctorate from DePaul University and one went to a scientist, one went to an educator and one went to an artist. They said, “You have to make a little speech,” so I got up there, I closed my eyes and I said, “To be an artist is to be a gambler and today we won.” I just whispered it.

That must have been what you meant when someone asked if your father was an artist and you said, “No but we’re working on it.”

When I went to Lippincott workshops and they had invited me to make whatever I wanted, and I would sit on the train and talk to my father. He was dead by then, and I’d say, “We’re going to the factory.” He was so simple. He would say to me, “Someday you’re going to be in The Smithsonian.” He didn’t know what it was but he believed in me. He would say, I used to talk to you when you were in your crib and you had a lot of brain cells. He was like that. He could be a bit of a menace for everybody, but he was the most marvelous man and one of my big regrets is that Robert didn’t meet him. He was so sorry he didn’t have a son. Robert would have been his dream come true. He would have loved Robert and it would have been mutual. Because my father was the epitome of Robert’s love of America and its eccentricity and madness. My father’s eyes were always sparkling and he was always in wonderment and he would say, “I have all the answers to all the world’s problems, and I’m going to make a movie and Bing Crosby is going to star in it.” Then he bought a wire recorder, this would have been in the late ’40s, and he brought it home and he said, “I’m going to start taping my thoughts.” I remember the next day all the wires got lost and it got all screwed up and the machine broke. I often think of it because I use wires a lot and I’m often caught in my wires.

As I look at the cast of characters around the studio, I realize they all fit everywhere.

I know. I’m just beginning this new work and the whole thing is going to change. Where they are and who they’re with will change. I mean, who are they? I’m at a stage where I was able to make one character alive, so now I can breathe. Now I’m not interested in the darkness. I want to go to light and there’s no light here.

But it seems that drawing the man becomes the movement towards light.

Maybe. Now I have to make the setting. Where does this take place? It probably takes place where there is light. Wouldn’t it be a shame, such a lucky girl like me, that I shouldn’t show the light? It wouldn’t be right because I have a very lucky life and I’m healthy.

I’ve always assumed that these characters, the man and the woman, are you and Robert.

Well, it’s love.

So love is obviously the light and that has been implicit all along.

That’s good.

When you come in to the studio do you talk to yourself about what is happening?

Robert tells me I’m talking all the time but I don’t notice it.

I have a sense that because these are unfolding narratives, you don’t know where they’re going. You’re talking to your making as you do it.

No, they are talking. I often think that I’m more like a novelist. I absolutely understand that. It takes me so long because I have to make the novel and it’s a theme.

So the characters are telling the story?

Absolutely, and not only that, they are trying to help me live a better life. That’s really what I’m after. They’re talking to my soul, they’re trying to improve me. I need a lot of improvement. One of the things they tell me is, “Don’t draw so much, pay more attention to your husband.” They’re always telling me that. In fact, the first thing they tell me when I get down here is don’t forget what is important.

Let me stay inside your trope of love. My view is that the love of your husband and the love that is exemplified and embodied in paintings and drawings are not different worlds.

I like that phrase, where love is exemplified.

I’m trying to figure out the relationship between drawing, painting and sculpture. Are they all one thing? You have said your drawings are sculptures.

It’s all drawing. Because it is like music. It is the greatest visual art.

Do you have to find new stories? You used the word myth earlier when we were talking.

I just know that I’m very lucky and I try to keep up my practice. Each day I have to start all over again and I don’t rest on anything from the day before. So the first thing I did today was to put the tin behind that drawing so that I could attach the string. I’m running low on tin and I hope I don’t ruin this one. Sometimes I do not try to take too many risks. But I love this little person.

So you come in every day and you can rely on nothing you have done before. Is it that you don’t know anything from before? Isn’t that anxiety-provoking?

I can see that you’re being too literal about it. I have to put it differently. I can describe it in terms of a dancer. If you think of a dancer, you have your warm-up period. You have to make sure your body is in good enough shape to execute the ideas you have in your head. The best drawings are Chinese drawings. That is to say, they spend all their time training their hand to connect to their heart and there is a certain moment in the day when the heart and the hand work together. That’s what I look for. The drawing is my performance. Really good drawing is a performance and what it is a performance of, is a good question. In this case we don’t know what the woman is going to do: is she going to draw; is she going to wash him; is she going to send an arrow; is she going to kill him? I had to make the woman and that is all I know. I don’t know why it ended when it ended. Because it took seven or eight months. A poet understands that. You have something and it is ready to be born. You try this and you try that and all of a sudden it comes together and it is born. It almost doesn’t even have anything to do with you.

At some point it takes over and produces itself?

A good drawing, when it happens, is like a sigh. I know there are people who draw differently, but I prefer that the drawing not be laboured.

When you try to describe what a drawing is, you turn to dance and movement. It has been so critical to you.

Well, I could have been a dancer. I think like a dancer, and I’m obsessed with little details. It’s the body in space. It so happens that I like space, so my figure is in a space, which means she can move, because that is just one moment. So when I draw it, I am dancing. When I’m drawing I’m thinking, “Oh, the leg is this way; the shoulder this way; oh no, the stomach goes this way.” That’s how it is to draw. Foot down, foot drop.

When you draw are you remembering movement from inside your own body, or are you relying on what you’ve seen? Is what you’re rendering what your eyes tell you rather than what your body tells you from inside?

It’s just me dancing. It’s very simple. It’s a drama and I know when I have made the drama so that others can see it. That’s my job. I’m the choreographer and there’s no in between. And what is the drama? That’s why you write a whole novel to find out. I don’t know what the drama is. I’m still living it. ❚