Claudia Steinberg When you left Maine and went to Yale, Alex Katz became your teacher. He was also a lifelong friend who helped you escape Abstract Expressionism, which [you have said] felt like a prison. You have also mentioned admiring Neil Welliver, Jane Freilicher and Fairfield Porter. What do you share with these artists?

Rackstraw Downes I’m interested in direct painting, painting from straightforward observation, not by learned processes but by internal processes and directly plunging in.

CS Did you have to unlearn things in order to see directly? You had started out as an Abstract Expressionist, working in that idiom – did you have to forget things in order to see what there is?

RD I probably did. In England I had art lessons in high school, and I was trained mainly on 19th century British watercolours, very beautiful – Turner and Constable and various people who are less well known. When I was 18, I did my last year of high school in a private prep school in New England. A teacher there was a student of Josef Albers, and he was so exciting after the British training. He was just amazing, and he helped me leave behind all the culture that is implied in British watercolours.

CS How interesting: Albers was a man of abstraction, and his student was able to show you something that was eye-opening or liberating.

RD That student was an incredibly energetic man, rebellious. He was a wonderful teacher. The only other art major was a guy who became a very distinguished architect in the Midwest. Having shed my interest in watercolours, I decided to go back to England to finish my literary degree and then return to the US to go to Yale where this energetic guy had studied under Albers. When I got there, I took a class with Alex Katz. He said, “You must have had extensive training”, and I explained that I had a little bit of training in England where I was still making British watercolours – that was considered the high point of civilisation, after all – but I actually came all this way to get away from it. Katz was a wonderful teacher.

CS In your book Nature and Art are Physical: Writings on Art, 1967-2008 you also write about cases of early degradations of the landscape, about the way Roman culture already injured nature. You went deeply into the history of how humans have treated or rather mistreated nature. At the time in Maine, did you also see negative consequences of human behaviour in nature or was Maine not treated so cruelly?

RD At that time human impact was still very slight, and then Maine got very popular. By now it has been more built up than when I lived there. They even built a nuclear power plant which has since been closed down by popular demand. Maine is now quite a progressive state, while it was super-conservative in FDR’s time. One winter up there a neighbour cut down much of his woods and brought the wood to the lumberyard. Things were happening in the woods, trees falling over each other, big stumps everywhere – signs that the woods had been brutalised – visually I liked it very much.

CS I grew up in a brutalised landscape myself – the forest behind my German suburb had been gravely altered by bombs which created all these craters. Nature in most, or perhaps in all, of your paintings is occupied by industry or heavily altered by humans in other ways. When did the bucolic element that you describe in your work disappear, or recede?

RD There was barely any farming where I was [in Maine], but the area became a suburb of Belfast, which had been a little town with three hardware stores and only one grocery store. It was for people who fixed their own houses. And so did I, I learned an awful lot. I also planted a garden with natural manure, and I had a great time. Gardening is very intriguing and time-consuming and thank God I eventually bought a little yard tractor. By that time, I was dividing my time between gardening and painting. And then one summer someone showed me around the town of Portland, Maine, and I loved it. I thought it would be a great change to paint there from being in the forest – it was almost all red brick. So, I made arrangements to spend a couple of summers there to paint, and I also raised a garden out there. Then one day my hand was moving along the horizon with my paintbrush, and I said to myself, I have done that so many times, I cannot do it anymore. And I moved to New York. I also needed money, so I sold my farm – it was about 130 acres, standard size – and my house, which I had bought when I was still in school. Sometime in the 1980s I was invited to give a lecture in Texas for a show of several artists who worked from observation. I looked at the Texas landscape and I found it absolutely terrific, all flat, I had never seen a landscape like that, very marshy, and with all these oil pump jacks going up and down.

CS Like the heads of very diligent animals. This encounter with the industrial world in Texas – shall we call it the beginning of a dirty romance?

RD Not quite. My first industrial painting was a lumberyard in Maine, a big lumberyard that was heated by their own scrap lumber. I painted it thinking, this is the centre of the economy here, the housebuilding, the heating. I thought, this must be in my painting. I was also interested in this dam on a river in Maine – for hundreds of years they would cut the wood in the spring and the logs would float down that river, to be ground up into pulp for making paper. Environmentalists passed a law to get those logs out of the river because they killed fish and other wildlife. They won the case, and the logs were taken out of the river, but as my neighbour said, now they’ll have to rebuild all the roads and the logs will have to be transported by trucks that create a lot of exhaust – it’s not simple. When I got to Portland, I became fascinated with the fantastic geodesic dome they had built over their water treatment plant. Previously the water had been filthy.

CS You greatly admire John Constable, and you have quoted him: “We see nothing until we understand it” – he understood the weather, the clouds. Understanding what you paint seems like a challenge considering your many different subjects, ranging from engineered and exploited landscapes to institutional buildings to powerplants to highways. Do you just need to understand them visually, or is it necessary to also understand them structurally and functionally?

RD That’s an interesting question because the experience is different every time. You find an area, or a place, and you inquire about it. You start drawing and someone comes by and says, “I used to own that barn,” and they tell you the history of the place. Constable’s paintings are very real. He was the son of a miller, and he owned several mills along the river, and knew about the weather. His notes on clouds are extremely precise – he understood what was going on there, and so do I. Early on in Maine I painted a huge pile of chicken shit – I said that in a lecture at Harvard once and someone in the audience called out, “You brought shit to Harvard?” – I put a huge rake used in the fields on top of the pile, and a local guy came by and said, “I would never set a rake over a pile of shit like this – it will rust in no time.” Little things like that happen to you every day, they grow in meaning. Breugel’s painting The Blind Leading the Blind depicts five types of blindness that a doctor can identify; that idea of that kind of knowledge has always interested me.

CS I wanted to bring up Breugel also: you have diagnosed in his work an “alert curiosity and relish for the whole observable world where the minute is not the enemy of the grand” – do you share that kind of curiosity?

RD I would say that I moved quite a long way from when I first went to Maine and painted cows in a field and the white houses. I became more and more interested in the life of Maine, like painting that lumberyard, there was an interest in the patterning and such things, but the information about the place should be there, too. When I paint in New York City, I look at configurations of buildings, their angles – because the street grid is both beautiful and functional but also monotonous. It is a great delight that Broadway runs in a diagonal – it was there first.

CS It feels like a triumph that the diagonal Lenape path was not erased for the benefit of an exclusively rectangular street grid. What does it take for a site to be so compelling that that you stand in front of it on the street for half a year to paint it?

RD Near the George Washington Bridge I painted some of the ramps. Fortunately they haven’t groomed the grounds and there are some trees encircled by these roads – it provides some room for the squirrels and the drug addicts and the homeless. These places often have their own life.

CS One of my favourite paintings is of towering air-conditioners squeezed into a narrow alley – it must have been a nightmare painting these noisy machines and standing in their hot dragon breath.

RD The site gave me the chance to make a very good painting – people like that painting! The noise was so intense, and yes, those machines were blowing hot air on me and it was already much too hot. But I was determined to get that painting.

CS In your book you say that, “The unexpectedness of the ordinary tapping otherwise inaccessible veins of feelings” – what kind of feelings?

RD There is a whole range of feelings. I’m thinking about the series of the racetrack I painted in the Chihuahuan desert. After I finished one painting, I was going up there when they had a horse race and the otherwise completely dead town was full of cars, people were coming from all over the place. It was a communal enterprise, a playground for the proletariat, people enjoying life, and I felt very justified documenting the scene.

CS Do people approach you when they see you painting something that they probably wouldn’t have given a second glance?

RD Yes, and I learned how to deal with it from a person I met at a party: I told her what I did and she said, “Well, I have a story that will amuse you: I was in Paris and one very early morning I took a walk in the park and coming toward me in that park was Samuel Beckett, one of my great heroes, and when we got close to each other and I was about to say something to him, he just put his finger to his lips to silence me.” When people say something like, “Oh, that looks interesting,” I just do the same thing, and they understand.

CS There is a quote from Nature and Art are Physical: “If the mystery of life is explained and the science of its functioning perfected, there would be no need for art.” Why not?

RD The imperfectness of life is somehow ameliorated by art, which is free from jobs – you could make a utopia, and this utopia would be a dystopia because there is no room in a utopia to do anything surprising or to try out – art doesn’t have to do anything, it just must be there and assert its own presence – or not: it should not be useful. Obviously, a Renaissance painting that was commissioned is useful, it conveys a message, but there is extra energy in it and that cannot be done by a hack, one wouldn’t have the feelings.

CS Your paintings evoke plenty of feelings – melancholy about our ravaged world, amazement over the dynamic shapes you perceive in the built environment, delight in all the detail of a site viewed only from a distance. Your paintings also provide information, they tell a story – like your panorama showing the World Trade Center and the ships on the water at its feet that translates into a visual epic about the construction of monumental towers and transportation of goods – a narrative that requires a wide-angle view.

RD Just as when I painted the dam with the logs floating down the river – I didn’t set out to make a long painting, I just wanted to paint the dam but then it seemed preposterous to stop so the painting got long: curiosity stretches your vision.

CS After decades spent painting the great outdoors, you are now painting the great indoors of your studio. I see that Thonet chair in one corner of a painting, and it is portrayed somewhere else in another painting. You paint a view of your studio, and then that painting itself shows up in another view of your studio a few weeks later – there are layers and layers of art and furniture portrayed in your loft – so many different aspects of the familiar.

RD It is nearly true in the sense that you cut out a little piece here and there, and they are all paintings, they could all be made into a painting. You just have to watch for it, how this shape comes around from there, it is because you have painted similar things before, and you know how to do it and your sense of a vocabulary grows a little bit – it never ends.

CS I’m also interested in the emotional aspect of it. These chairs have a lot of personality, and there is your walker, an intimate kind of object, and you use them every day and they are yours and they are part of your physicality and your environment. It all seems close to you – and so moving and interesting to me. These objects seem like they are your partners.

RD They are your partners, and they are all taped down so they can’t be moved around, they are all marked. You start on a project and then you have to go through with it and all the other things are beside the point. I should say that I’m aware that I could take any corner of this room here, if I were commissioned to do it, and paint that corner. As you look around you see things that are very exciting, like that flash of white paper there being hit by the sun. You develop a sense of yearning for things, and when you see it, you jump on it.

CS It reveals itself – it is impressive that a place can nourish you like that, with these flashes of discovery in the very familiar. You have said that artistic form comes from the resistance of the materials to the artist’s imagination, and the artist’s ingenuity is exploiting this. It seems like a struggle.

RD The root of my problems is that things curve and tilt and turn, there seems to be no logic to it somehow, I can’t work out a system, and some things happen over and over again, and in many of my paintings, everything tilts – there is a struggle because of the turning of the head. The painting is here, and the room is there, and I keep turning the head to capture it.

CS You learned to look at things not as good or bad but as “present” – the trash-scapes one encounters everywhere, for example – would you call it “complexity?”

RD Our culture needs a whole new relatedness to the physical world, and we need an art not of reference but of presence, of the phsycial thing itself and its integrity.

CS Why did you, as an environmentalist, choose to move to the US?

RD My shrink once asked me, “Did you move to America to get rid of your mother?” I said, “You just earned your fee.” It was a tremendous relief of the burden of family life when I came to this country. I was released from that and became myself.

CS You were only allowed into your father’s tailoring studio once – that shocked me! Such secrecy, such drastic exclusion. Was your mother softer?

RD My mother was confused. She wasn’t malevolent, but it was not considerate.

CS Did they understand who you are?

RD My mother said to me once – my sister lived in Toronto, and she came to visit her, because she had three children and my mother liked that, and, one day in a restaurant, my mother asked me – “Are you glad you came out here?” As if England was civilisation and America the wilderness. I said, “I would never have done what I have done had I not left.” And she answered, “No, you wouldn’t have, but you would have taught English literature at the local grammar school and you would have mowed my lawn.” She was sad about it. The one time that I went to my father’s workshop – these situations can throw a beam of light on where you are and what you are doing. I was here for 13 years before I went back to England, I wanted to come back with an exhibition, triumphantly. .