Adult multimedia: Jay DeFeo

Jay DeFeo, The Jewel (AC1998.47.1)

§ [ON SCREEN: AUDIO-ONLY ANIMATION.]

[Music—spare chimes or other music with a “crystalline” effect.]

NARRATOR—
Is The Jewel a painting or a sculpture? * * Artist Jay DeFeo built up the symmetrical facets to around six inches in height. * The colors of the paint shift outward, from white with a red undercoat at the center, through sienna, crimson, and deeper hues of red, to almost black in the background.

§ [ON SCREEN: PHOTOGRAPH OF DEFEO AT HER EASEL WITH AN EARLY FORM OF THE JEWEL.]

[Music—West coast jazz, late 1950s.]

NARRATOR—
The screen shows DeFeo in 1958, with an early version of The Jewel. * She worked like a painter and a sculptor, gradually building up and tearing down the surface.

§ [ON SCREEN: ANOTHER VIEW OF DEFEO WORKING ON THE JEWEL. (CROP TO FOCUS ON IMAGE THROUGH THE WINDOW, THEN PULL BACK SLOWLY, IF POSSIBLE.)]

NARRATOR—
Some critics linked DeFeo with the Abstract Expressionists. But DeFeo herself never associated her art with any movement, and her work defies categorization.

§ [ON SCREEN: PHOTOGRAPH OF THE JEWEL, CENTER SCREEN. CROSS-FADE TO A PHOTOGRAPH OF THE ROSE.]

NARRATOR—
She made The Jewel as a pendant to another painting, The Rose, which she created through a similar process.

[Music out.]

JAY DEFEO—
[3:19] But when I started The Rose, I had no notion of the rose about it. The title came later. [3:25]

NARRATOR—
Jay DeFeo discussed The Rose with Paul Karlstrom in the mid-1970s.

JAY DEFEO—
[6:48] It was a very hard physical job as well as a difficult…

PAUL KARLSTROM—
How did you carve it?

JAY DEFEO—
Well, I just had to hack away at it, Paul. It was done with a combination of building up and tearing back during every stage of the game, and even once it was removed from the original canvas. People sometimes think that this was just gradually built up over a period of years, and so it was, but more than once the whole thing was scraped down to the canvas, and the whole thing had to commence from scratch. [7:18]

[1:31] See, all of my early work is kind of a building up of a vocabulary that kind of went into the conception of the thing. [1:38]

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