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♪♪
Gaylen Hansen: I was born September 21,
1921, and
I am now 104
and a half.
(soft rustle of clothing)
I try to paint every morning because it's
important to have a continuity in painting.
(stapler click-clacks)
My dreams are what is called lucid
dreams, and, uh, I can make an
entire movie and provide all the
language that goes with it.
It's a very interesting but sometimes
very annoying part of my life. I get
dreams that won't quit. (laughter)
And it just, "And then," and,
"But," (laughs) and they can continue for
quite a while.
I had a dream sometimes, uh,
I get stuck underground and can't
find a way out, and those I don't like very much.
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I lived in the Palouse at least 60 years.
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It was very good and not so good.
It was contradictory.
The university wanted grades,
quantifiable grades, and art
is not always quantifiable.
But I had some very good students from all
over the country, and, I learned a
lot from them.
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The rolling hills of the
Palouse are quite beautiful and they're quite
paintable. I did a very
large painting of it that's a good painting.
Interviewer: So how do you know when it's good,
and how do you know when it's done?
Gaylen Hansen: You don't.
I often had to be told by my wife
to stop [laughs] or you'll ruin it,
and I took her advice and saved some
very good paintings.
♪♪
We were married 40 years, and we
happened to enjoy the
same things, and everything we did,
we did together. And of course, we
influenced each other in painting in a good
way, and very supportive.
♪♪
This was a favorite walk for my wife
and I, and, uh, there are some benches
down below, and we would sit in one
and just look in front of us
and not think about anything. Just look.
And various configuration
came into view and into our
consciousness that we would have missed had
we not done that.
She's always here, but it was a very
intense grief that I experienced.
But oh yeah, she will always be,
close.
(soft footsteps crunching through gravel)
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Well, I fortunately had a very
open-ended approach to painting
so that one thing could lead to
another and another. Sometimes I would
start with an idea that was very definite,
and I immediately had to erase it and start again.
I learned to form
a partnership with my painting, and
my painting could indicate what it needed.
It could indicate something that
didn't work. And, uh, lately
[laughs] I've had fun with paintings that
went belly up, and so I painted over them.
And if that didn't work, I painted over that.
And some of my most interesting
paintings I painted over maybe four, five,
six times until the paint film
became quite thick. And some of my
best paintings came out of failed paintings.
[laughs]
Interviewer: What would you tell people when
they're looking at your work, how would you
direct them to look at it?
Gaylen Hansen: Just stand and look at the painting.
Don't look for something,
but just look at it. If you're looking for
something, you're looking for something
you're familiar with. And if you don't find
it, you don't like what you're looking at.
And that's a huge, huge problem
with learning to like painting.
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Interviewer: What do artists provide of value
to the rest of us?
Gaylen Hansen: Oh, that's a big question.
[laughs] No, I, I think it
keeps us from getting stuck in our
conventions. This is the right way,
and that's the wrong way. We are us, and you
are them. This dichotomy that we get into
that stops really imagining
other solutions, other ways of dealing with
things, other ways of looking at things.
Interviewer: So one thing I'm noticing is
that you don't treat this as very precious.
Gaylen Hansen: Oh, no. [paint splats] Whoops!
[laughs] That's another way you can paint.
[paint splats] I have trouble now
because I can't hear so well, which makes
it a little more difficult to speak, and, uh,
my eyesight is not so good.
But I've made a positive thing out
of it. Having really sharp eyes
makes everything too clear in a way.
You don't see the main shapes.
I'm just gonna try to be
positive and, I'm going to try to
get going on some painting, and
that means just doing it.
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