If one were to make a tally of artists who have the longevity to work for more than half a century, it would be a short list. Dorothea Rockburne would be on it. She’d also be the first to say, “Who cares?” For Rockburne what matters is not how long you spend doing something, it’s what you do that counts. In 1970, Rockburne had her first one-person exhibition at the now legendary Bykert gallery. This year she opened a new exhibition with David Nolan’s gallery, which operates out of the same building that was once home to Bykert. An intersection, as Rockburne has told me before, generates energy. As she surveyed the work in the exhibition, which includes drawings and paintings that span her life as an artist, she would not become nostalgic. Instead, she wanted to talk about more difficult topics like what it means to work with intention, the importance of intuition, and how some gifts demand to be used.
Dorothea Rockburne: Talking about making art is difficult because it’s a non-verbal process.
Charles M. Schultz (Rail): How does it come through your body?
Rockburne: Well, I feel that our brain is not just in our brain. [Laughter] It’s not just in our head. I feel that my hands have brains, and my solar plexus has a brain, and when I go to work, there’s some voice that coordinates these very various brains, but it’s not in language, it’s in feelings.
Rail: Athletes talk about having muscle memory—
Rockburne: You bet!
Rail: Is that along the lines of what you’re thinking about?
Rockburne: No. I know because when I was an athlete, I had muscle memory. The muscle memory stayed in one place. I was a skier, and after a day of skiing, you go to sleep and you’re still skiing. You still feel the sensations in your muscles. This is different. This is more mysterious, and it’s very profound. The body has a lot of brains that nobody has noticed—small brains in component parts of your body that can think independently of the other parts. And they communicate in a language of feeling. When I work, I have a whole vocabulary of feelings that come into play and I don’t pull them in. They’re there and they begin to work.
Rail: How important is routine to your ability to work?
Rockburne: I have none. I have no routine.
Rail: So what structures your studio time?
Rockburne: Well, there’s a lot of history. In my studio I have a series of books which contain the whole history of Western architecture. And I studied those books. I really studied them, and they somehow went into the body of knowledge that I use when I work. But how? I don’t know, and I couldn’t begin to say. I would just go into the studio and it’s as though, as I said, there’s a brain in each wrist, and it gets to work. I feel I’ve been given a rare gift. Sometimes I stay up all night drawing and not realizing I’d stayed up all night. It could be four in the morning when I go to bed, and I didn’t realize that I was that involved. Because whatever this gift is, it was demanding to be used.
Rail: You still feel that impulse, that urgency?
Rockburne: Yes.
Rail: At ninety-six you continue to go into the studio and make work; it’s inspiring.
Rockburne: Well, I don’t need to do another goddamn thing in my life. [Laughter] And I say that to myself, that is neither here nor there. The fact is if you have a pebble and you’re in front of a still pond, you want to throw the pebble in the pond.
Rail: Every time. [Laughter] Do you experience the power of art differently now than you have in the past?
Rockburne: I don’t think so. Art seems to be a phenomenon of its own making. The best I can do is try to understand how to get into the middle of that making force and let it work on me, to create in that way.
Rail: Do you feel yourself a conduit or a vessel for this kind of creative spirit that we could call art, which manifests itself with the help of artists?
Rockburne: No, but you hit on another point: it’s a religious feeling—definitely.
Rail: By religious, do you mean the kind of thing that connects your being to the feeling of something greater, deeper, wider—
Rockburne: God. I don’t know how to say it any other way. Although I’ve admired it, and it amused me, Pop art never really interested me, whereas Giotto has never ceased to interest me. Whenever I feel like I don’t have any juice, I read my Giotto book.
Rail: Ever renewing.
Rockburne: It encompasses a lot of things. I mean, Giotto was using a form of perspective that was Persian. He was breaking away from the flat sort of Byzantine style. And the laws of linear perspective would not be invented until later. Have you been to the Scrovegni Chapel?
Rail: Yes, I’ve been once.
Rockburne: First of all, it’s just incredibly brilliant because it’s a point of origin, and origin points are loaded with feeling. I mean, who could ever forget the first time they had an orgasm?
Rail: You’re right, there’s something potent about the first time—for anything. When I visited Giotto’s chapel in Padua, it took over my whole week.
Rockburne: Yes, because it’s nonverbal. And to really experience something that’s nonverbal is a very unusual experience, even today. But also, there’s something to be said for beauty in art.
Rail: Tell me.
Rockburne: Well, I don’t know how to describe it, but I think there is a commonality of beauty that all of us experience. For example, you know it when you see a Fra Angelico. Even if you’ve never heard the name before, you know that you’re looking at something rather beautiful.
Rail: Yes.
Rockburne: And of course, all that language was formed when people had less access to written language, when their knowledge was coming from pictures.
Rail: That’s why it was important in churches to have the stained glass that told the stories of Christ. Most of the people coming in were illiterate, so in order to take in the stories of the savior they needed to be able to see this figure move through these different scenes. And those scenes had to be constructed in a way that was simultaneously economical, legible, but also beautiful. Because if the composition doesn’t also please the eye, you don’t want to look at it.
Rockburne: And the visual, pictorial devices that are used in fourteenth- and fifteenth-century painting are spectacular, from the decoration and elaborate robes to the actual curvature of faces.
Rail: Did your idea of beauty change? Or has it changed over time?
Rockburne: No, because it’s not a particular look. It’s what it does to me in my gut.
Rail: Can you describe that feeling? What it does in your gut?
Rockburne: Well, it’s a visual language. It’s the recognition of a visual language which has meaning, and the meaning is derived through the technique of the painting.
Rail: Do you feel it all at once, or does it come on gradually?
Rockburne: I feel it all at once.
Rail: You’ve spoken about the importance of Florence. You felt it there?
Rockburne: Oh yes, I remember being especially overcome in Florence. But it’s not just that the city is home to incredible painting; when I was there it was a very mercantile city, a real workaday place.
Rail: I think of the studio that way too. I mean, I appreciate that every artist who is making something is laboring.
Rockburne: I was with Mel Bochner then, and Mel was very smart and very brash. His native intelligence was amazing and fun.
Rail: How much do you feel your native intelligence versus the intelligence that you’ve gained from books and objects and people? Where do those two things come together when you’re in the studio?
Rockburne: Well, there is no separation. When I was a child, I was reading beyond my years. There was a period when I was taken out of school, but then I met this uptown group in Montreal and they enlarged my intellect by leaps and bounds. They were smart and sharp. For example, I didn’t know who Sigmund Freud was, and somebody loaned me a book on Freud. I was maybe fourteen. It’s a little depressing to realize that none of them met the challenge of who they were. They disappeared into mundaneness. But I don’t want to talk about them. What I really want to talk to you about—and this is the hardest thing in the world—is the magic of creativity. To stand before a clean sheet of paper or a canvas and begin.
Rail: Yes, there’s practical skills involved, but knowing you there’s also a great deal of intuition taking place.
Rockburne: It’s all intuition.
Rail: So your intuition guides your—
Rockburne: Like I said, I have brains in my hands.
Rail: And have you always trusted those brains?
Rockburne: Oh yeah. They are completely trustworthy, [laughter] and inventive! It’s interesting to be able to invent, to do something that’s never been done before.
Rail: You’ve had the opportunity to be making work for more than half a century. What’s it like to go through cycles of creativity? I’m thinking about Bob Dylan as an example of someone who is so prolific, but he went through a period where he mostly played other people’s songs. He felt that maybe he’d written all the songs he was going to write, which turned out to not be true—thankfully. My point is there are periods of fallowness and great productivity, like a yearly cycle where things die and are reborn. Has a similar kind of cycle happened in your life?
Rockburne: I mean it’s hard. I’ve always wanted to get up in the morning and go into the studio and work, but I haven’t felt that way for a while now, and I wondered about it. This is the first time that has ever happened to me. I’m sure I’ll go back into the studio one day and start working again.
Rail: You mentioned the other day feeling inspired to work on canvas. That’s something you haven’t done in quite a while.
Rockburne: I’m a little afraid, because I don’t have the muscularity.
Rail: But the feeling—what gives you a thrill when you’re in the studio? Do you feel fear in the studio?
Rockburne: No.
Rail: Do you pass through emotional states like that in the studio?
Rockburne: No. I change personalities. In fact, I wrote about that somewhere, that there’s a space before I get into the studio where I actually change. I think about work before I enter the studio and afterwards. But when I’m making, I’m not thinking about it at all.
Rail: How do you feel the body’s intuition corresponds with the ego of the mind when it comes to making artwork or experiencing artwork? Do you feel that there’s a conflict or a tension in those two zones of a person’s being?
Rockburne: Ego is a pejorative term in our world, and I don’t think of having an ego in that way.
Rail: But when you see work that doesn’t make you feel anything, how do you chalk that up? I want to believe that every artist is doing the best that they can do at that moment in their path.
Rockburne: It’s not true, though. Intention is important. When your intention is just to make something that pleases people, you’re never going to make an impact.
Rail: I get that. Who do you admire? Who do you think is making paintings worth seeing?
Rockburne: Julian Schnabel I think is a very good painter. All the noise doesn’t make any difference.
Rail: The signal is still strong, no matter the noise around it.
Rockburne: It’s not just strong, it’s genuine. This is somebody who has to paint. He doesn’t have a choice. And it’s great to see it. I love seeing it. I think he’s an artist who made himself be talented. I don’t think he was so naturally talented, but he figured out how to be talented and made himself be talented. That takes real work and guts.
Rail: So on the one hand, talent and intelligence can be natural; on the other hand, they can be learned?
Rockburne: Yes, although learned isn’t quite the right word.
Rail: Evolved, perhaps?
Rockburne: That’s closer to it. Another artist worth talking about is Jackson Pollock, because nothing was handed to him. He just reached down into his guts and pulled it out. When I came to New York, everyone was painting on easels. I mean, Helen Frankenthaler—
Rail: Well, once you get to making stain paintings, there’s no other option. But that’s not the point of Pollock’s decision. It was—
Rockburne: It was the use of his body in the paint.
Rail: I think his paintings have to be at a certain scale in order to communicate that feeling—I mean, the sense of his body’s movement across the surface of the canvas. There’s also a sense of structure meeting improvisation that is very satisfying. Do you know what I mean?
Rockburne: I do, because when I work there’s a part of me that completely knows what to do, and yet the outcome is always a surprise. [Laughter] But in my opinion, there isn’t too much contemporary art that has the lifespan of older art, like Giotto, for example.
Rail: Well, I think about Marcel Duchamp. I think about Robert Rauschenberg. They both shifted the conversation of art enough to open up new channels of thinking. The choices they made still seem to affect contemporary artists. I mean, the idea that Duchamp takes a commercial urinal and by placing it in the context of an art object endows it with new energy—
Rockburne: That’s not how I see it.
Rail: How do you see it?
Rockburne: The needs that define a urinal made it beautiful. The bowl. It just made it a beautiful object, and Duchamp simply pointed that out. He didn’t make it. He just pointed that out—I mean, he was pissing all the time, right? [Laughter] So, you know, he noticed that it was beautiful. And there’s something particularly French about his noticing it, too. I grew up in a French culture and there’s a kind of defiant humor.
Rail: This gives us an opportunity to talk about your new work, like the “Brown Paperbag Drawings.”
Rockburne: It’s less of an idea and more of a feeling. I’ve been using paper bags all my life; what beautiful objects they are. I mean, that somebody could take plain brown paper, which was always used to wrap things and, instead of wrapping it, you change the concept into a container, that’s a rather beautiful thing to do.
Rail: The brown paper is industrially produced, and in that way, it corresponds with your work from the seventies, like 2, 4, 6, 8 (1969/70). Were you thinking about making that connection when you worked on these?
Rockburne: Well, as you know, I’ve been involved with paper for most of my life as an artist. Paper always seems so magical to me, but I don’t use nostalgia. That isn’t that part of my life.
Rail: Notably, these are called drawings. These are not assemblages or collages. Can you say a word about that distinction for you?
Rockburne: I don’t have to. It’s a feeling. It can’t be translated into words.
Rail: So when you were working on these pieces, how did you sense that the arrangements that you were coming to were the arrangements that you wanted to present?
Rockburne: That’s all intuitive. I don’t think when I work. Like I said, I think before and I think afterward. But while I’m working, it’s all intuitive.
Rail: A sense of geometry comes through, and of course the folds of the bag resonate with some of your most well-known works, like the Drawing Which Makes Itself (ca. 1973), or in the show, there are two pieces from the series on Egypt.
Rockburne: You know, the work just comes out of nowhere in a way, but the nowhere is, of course, me.
Rail: The bags have dates stamped on them, September 11, which of course—especially because we’re in New York—makes me think of the twin towers. Was that intentional?
Rockburne: It’s part of the identity of the paper bag, that’s all. My work is not about symbolism or narrative. It never has been. It’s about pure, raw feeling.
Rail: What is it like to have work from the seventies, like 2, 4, 6, 8, in the same gallery as your brand-new work?
Rockburne Well, it feels like my life. My work contains my emotional life. I like the title of the show, Time Measures Itself, because that really discusses what we’re saying philosophically from another level, and that’s really true.
Rail: Time being something we rely on as constant, but also something we know to feel malleable.
Rockburne: Yes. It’s so strange for me because almost no one from my peer group is alive. My generation is pretty much gone, and I feel alone. When you’re alone, time also moves differently. I think that’s part of the reason for the title. I didn’t spend a lot of time thinking about it, it just came into my mind, and I felt it was right.
Rail: And you have a new sculpture in the exhibition—
Rockburne: Yes, it’s called Infinity (2025/26).
Rail: That’s interesting. It certainly rubs against the concept of time measuring itself.
Rockburne: It was named before it was made. I mean, I have no idea how my creative process works, you know?
Rail: Its component parts include two tires, two sawhorses, and two oars. Six objects in total.
Rockburne: I knew that I had to get those oars, but where do you get oars in New York? [Laughter] I ordered them from Amazon, and they came painted the right color, with oar locks on them and everything. I was stunned. It’s a painter’s sculpture. Painters have a different concept of sculpture than sculptors.
Rail: I can’t help but make a connection to transportation. To me the oars correspond to movement over water, the tires to movement over land. The sawhorses, well, that’s a bit less direct.
Rockburne: I’ve been using sawhorses to hold up tables all through my life. They aren’t metaphorical or symbolic. I picked those out, specially. I love their red joints.
Rail: Yes, they do have an incredible pop. And I noticed there’s a brick in one of the tires.
Rockburne: Yes
Rail: It seems both stabilizing, but also—
Rockburne That’s what it’s for. But it’s also just damn beautiful, brick against rubber—that’s beautiful.
Rail: The colors in the piece—blue, white, and red—immediately connect to other works in the show. The color-pencil lines, for instance, in the vellum piece, Study for Discourse (1978). But also the blue oars are a similar shade of blue to the lines in your “Egyptian Paintings.”
Rockburne: Yes. I know what you mean, but I didn’t intend for that. These kinds of connections arise because my way of working hasn’t changed, even though I’ve gotten older. It’s a body of work, my life’s work, and the body talks to itself. [Laughter]
Rail: What about the tires? How did you decide they should be white?
Rockburne: First of all, I think tires are so beautiful. They’re a manufactured thing, and there’s something about the demands of what it means to be a tire that make it beautiful. As for why white, I just knew. It was something I just knew.
Rail: It changes the object—
Rockburne: Of course it changes it, and yet it makes it more itself.
Rail: Right. The tire is no longer defined by its utility. It becomes an aesthetic object, and so its formal aspects—it’s hollowness, it’s circularity—come to define it.
Rockburne: Yes, I love the black inside and the white outside. It took many coats of paint—more than you’d think! [Laughter] And it creates a contradiction, which gives the work a bit of tension, like when somebody fucks the wrong person.
Rail: How do you generate these titles?
Rockburne: I don’t know, but a lot of thought has gone into it, and a lot of living. This sculpture came about within the last two years, but I’ve been developing it for five years in various ways that I would then reject, and then I’d go back to it, and change something, and then change something else and go back to it, and so on.
Rail: Were you working on the sculpture and the brown paper bag drawings in tandem?
Rockburne: The sculpture goes back further.
Rail: I see. How did you realize, after so many iterations, that you had found the right combination of materials and orientation?
Rockburne: It’s not easy. I changed the sawhorses several times. Ultimately it’s a feeling I get, which comes from the body’s intuition and knowledge.
Rail: Does that connect back to what you were saying earlier, about it being a religious feeling?
Rockburne: I believe in a higher power. I don’t believe that I have been in full control of my own life. I believe that there’s a higher power that both helps and leads me, and I have to listen to it. And it’s beautiful.
Rail: I imagine at some points in your life it’s easier to follow, and at some points it’s harder.
Rockburne: Yes, but it’s not even about easier or harder. It’s just there. It’s a part of me. There is some force that informs me somehow—I don’t quite understand it, and I don’t ask for it. When I begin to work, I have to clear the decks. I need to make sure I’m not interrupted. The knowledge comes through the beauty of materials. But it’s also like, God, am I blessed? You know, I started drawing when I was a kid and this thing would happen. It’s like I wasn’t in charge of what my hand was doing. It is amazing being an artist, because the knowledge that comes out of my hands is not something I’m familiar with until I do it. It’s quite an incredible experience.
Rail: How does your awareness and attention to a higher power correspond with your love and appreciation for mathematics?
Rockburne: You know, I just took it for granted that I was all of a piece. When I began to see that the world was put together in terms of mathematics, I was made both larger and smaller by that knowledge. I felt larger because it is a powerful insight to experience; smaller because I realized I had no control, you know? There was something bigger than me going on and I was a very small part of that bigger thing. It’s like seeing the first sunset or the birth of a child. Theoretically you can understand it, but at the same time, it is miraculous and if you let it, it can change you.
Rail: So in the studio, you need to balance a sort of material practicality, let’s say, with an allowance for intuition, which of course can’t be forced.
Rockburne: It’s demanding. Intuition is demanding. Words come second to me, intuition comes first, and I have to translate my intuition. It’s like I’m always speaking in two languages.
Rail: What about risk? How do you feel that taking risks connects with this feeling or sense of being guided?
Rockburne: It’s not about risk, it’s about know-how. What I feel is a sense of belief in my know-how.
Rail: Do you feel when you’re making work? Sometimes when you’re making a work and making decisions about—
Rockburne: I never make decisions when I work. I make decisions before and after, but never when I work.
Rail: Do you ever feel a sense of doubt about those decisions?
Rockburne: Never, no. It’s not that I know what I’m doing, and yet, on another hand, I know exactly what I’m doing. It’s hard to put it into language, but it’s the language of experience.
Rail: The language of experience. I mean one word that comes to my mind is trust, and that you trust the choices, and you trust your intuition and you don’t second guess them or question them.
Rockburne: I don’t trust it. I believe it’s something that’s guiding me. It’s not about my trust. It’s about belief; it’s something bigger than me. I don’t know what that is. It’s bigger than me. It tells me what to do. It’s extremely beautiful. It’s so elegant and so beautiful that that beauty hurts, and that’s why I could tell when it’s real.
Rail: How about the idea of bravery? Do you feel that that plays any part in your experience in the studio?
Rockburne: No. I know what bravery is, and when it comes to work, it’s not about bravery. It’s something else. It’s a gift. It’s just a great gift. But I do wish I had ten more years to work. I would be more daring.
Rail: How do you think about being more daring?
Rockburne: Sexual. I think Arshile Gorky was pretty sexual. I’d just like to state it in a way that it can’t be denied, because I think art really is about sexuality and we’ve lost that. To me, sexuality is identity, it’s feeling, it’s relationships—it’s the important thing.
Rail: There are those who’d say the only important topics for art and literature are sex and death.
Rockburne: I disagree. How about life? How about love? On the deepest level, I experience my own work as a form of love.
Rail: What kind of love? Sexual? Fraternal? Parental?
Rockburne: None of those. It’s more like a universal love. I feel that, and I’ve always felt it, even as a child, I had a sense of love that came from the universe.
Charles M. Schultz is Managing Editor of the Brooklyn Rail.
