.
Maybe there was something from the subconscious, I don’t know, but to think about painting was ridiculous.
RW: So how long have you been painting since you’ve been out of the University of Wisconsin?
TM: I gave away all my paints and brushes twice. I actually quit three times, but the third time I was smart enough to hang on to my materials. I knew painting was a precarious, ridiculous way to make a living.
I had really decided to be a potter and was okay with that, but what happened was that my friend came back and told me he’d give me a raise except I couldn’t make my own pots anymore. I had just consciously decided to be a potter, but when he said that I said, well, I can’t work with you any longer.
I moved to Minneapolis on a dime, and thought I’d give painting a shot for two years. If there was any kind of progression, I’d continue. If there was none, I was just going to get out and find something else. So it’s been seven years now of exclusively painting. I’ve been very persistent at it.
In painting, success is hard to measure but one of the things I’ve pushed for is to work 40 to 50 hour weeks, and I’ve been very persistent about putting in the time. My theory was that if I put in that kind of time, something was going to happen. It’s inevitable, and basically, it did. Something built up just like in athleticism. Fluidity came about.
I sketch, take down ideas, and do preparatory work. The sketching is always included in the painting, and hence the layers. Many layers come with that, layer upon layer.
I also felt that rather than hook up with any kind of movement or theory, the best approach would be to paint from direct experience— from the things that affect me, and in a way that I could do quickly so I wouldn’t lose the moment. So the paintings have an animated quality.
This one, for instance, came from a conversation where two friends were talking about painting wild-life art. One said to the other, "if you were painting duck-art, I picture you standing at the edge of the water with a loon by the neck in one hand and an easel in the other." It was funny. But a day or two went by and I thought, what a perfect analogy for man and nature! They look at nature in awe, on the one hand, but on the other, we stifle and strangle it.
TM: Oh yes, but it’s a combination of things. Nothing absolute. My own experience, my own observations on society and where I think we’re at in this day and age. I believe that what I experience is a little bit like what everyone else experiences. And dream imagery. It’s amazing the number of times, all of the sudden, the memory of some dream comes up. I can feel I had it several weeks ago, but all of the sudden, it comes up. That feels good, like being on the right track.
RW: It sounds like you have some concerns and thoughts about what is going on in our culture today.
TM: Yes. Absolutely, I do. And I don’t think I’m a radical. I think life is going so fast, the acceleration...I think about my grandparents not knowing about motorized vehicles, and before they died, they saw a rocket go to the moon! This awesome thing. The acceleration, the technology, the black box. We can not predict what the future will bring. Maybe the human race will wipe itself out, but the world will go on.
I think it’s worth being aware of that acceleration and having some compassion for it, I guess. I think that awareness is the first step. Nothing will happen overnight.
RW: That reminds me of your saying you’d changed from motorcycles to bicycles, and that bicycles were better.
TM: My friends thought I was crazy, but my feeling about it is that on the bicycle I can hear everything around me, smell everything, have more time to look left and right and it takes ten times longer to get there. It’s just an excellent high.
RW: Yes, I’d come to this also. I even think there’s a formula for it: the speed at which one travels is inversely proportional to the consciousness involved in the traveling.
TM: I like that, and maybe that could be applied to what is going on in a larger sense. Everyone is involved in so much stress and commitment. Life is going so quickly. All you can do is react, and that’s it.
RW: Now you grew up on a farm and you had to work very hard. I just wonder if— from your experience of the farm with its seasonal rhythms— if you have a particular rootedness in a relationship to a world that is slower?
TM: I think you’re right. My feet were in the soil. As a small child, first, second, third grade—we moved after that—but I remember being miles out in the woods by myself. I still have vivid memories of that—just knowing I had to turn this way and go that way to get back home. A slow pace. We lived at the end of a dead end road. Very few people around.
RW: You have a realistic way of looking at things, a practical way—that may come from your farming background, but you find yourself painting. You mentioned a phrase in talking about painting, that it’s—what’s the phrase?
TM: Precarious and unnerving.
RW: Would you mind saying something about that?
TM: Well, I’m completely in the hands of the Muse, or intuition. I don’t know what is going to happen next. I can let it happen. How to explain that? In jewelry or pottery, I know what’s going to happen. But a good piece of painting is completely out of my hands. The energy has to be there. Maybe just that. I cannot explain how it happens. I let go, and it leads me.
RW: Yet there’s something that makes decisions, right? This color okay, that one not so good, et cetera.
TM: Yes. The inner aesthetics. I love color and composition. I can feel it. But even if I think a painting is completed— one day I look at it and see that if I did this or did that, it would be stronger. That would nag me and I’d always go back into the painting rather than live with the nag. I’ve had this happen with work I’ve hung in shows. I had to go back and change it.
RW: There must be paintings that are finished that stay finished, right? A year later you look at them and they’re still finished.
TM: Yes. Still finished. But I don’t know that ahead of time. That’s one of the unnerving things. Weeks or months could go by and all of the sudden I look and see that I could do this or that. But there are paintings that resolve themselves very quickly and years go by and they stay resolved. It’s just that inner thing that makes suggestions and changes. It can be unnerving.
A friend told me that a good painting is the product of intellect, emotion and experience. The emotional part is where some of the unnerving part comes in. It’s still confusing, a question I think about. So much depends on faith and trust, on letting go, not knowing where it comes from.
I was in a show where the director told me someone had had a hard time believing I was Caucasian because of how the work came about. Well, there is a little native American blood in our family. I don’t know if that pertains to anything at all.
RW: Maybe I should ask if there is any sense in which you are aiming at a result, a kind of look?
TM: That would get back to that foundation, that unnerving, precarious thing of developing a foundation I could be very sure of, and could live with. Part of that would be of spiritual progression or life development. Could I direct what is going on within, and use painting as a tool? If my growth could continue, it would be a success even if no one ever bought a single painting.
Sometimes I’ll wake up in the morning knowing exactly what I have to do. To me, that’s golden. It seems to have something more to do with the inner state of sleep. There is more depth. When I get my day going I walk around and think, "I should do this, I should do that." Sometimes all that just gets in the way of whatever it is that’s deep down.
RW: Wouldn’t part of the precariousness of painting also relate to the fact that in our culture, the possibility of success, of making a living, is very, very limited?  Have you thought about that at all?
TM: I don’t think I could go there. People say "this is art and that isn’t art, that isn’t real." But I think whatever people do, it speaks some truth about them. It could be totally different than my own. I don’t even know— really, absolutely— what my own is. I really feel uncomfortable speaking what another person is doing or why they are doing it.
I don’t go see much of it. I told friends, before coming out here, that I’m probably supposed to go to museums and look around at work, and