Peter Max, the court painter of the sixties, is still going strong.
When I mentioned to friends that Peter Max was the subject of my next interview the consensus was, "Peter Max the artist from the sixties?" Max's name may be synonymous with art from the sixties, but Peter Max is much more than an icon from the past. His career has spanned three decades and does not show any signs of fading. He has painted portraits of five presidents, the historic hand-shake between Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and PLO Chairman Yassir Arafat, and is also known for his commitment to environmental and animal rights issues. We decided to see for ourselves how this key player of the sixties is surviving in the nineties.
Q: It has been said that your work revolutionized the art of the 60's much like the Beatles influence on the music of the 60's. What was it like to work with the Beatles on Yellow Submarine? A: When the Beatles came to America I was very lucky. A lady by the name of Kim Hordan, who publishes a magazine called Inside here in San Francisco, was my assistant and her mother was a travel agent for brian Epstein. Epstien was the manager for of the Beatles. So, I said if that's true, do me a favor. I'm making these wonderful kaleidoscopic plaues, get them up there to the boys in the plane and see if you can welcome them to America with my plaques. And to make a long story short. I couldn't believe it, but that night she calls me up all excited and says, "Guess What?" I met the Beatles, and they all said hello! And that's how I met the Beatles. Q: Why do paint so much Americana? The Statue of Liberty, the American Flag, the presidents, is there an essence there that you are trying to capture? A: I love what is going on here, and having been raised in China, and [having] seen America from far away, and having lived in so many countries...First of all, America is the envy of every country. Whether they say so, or you only hear it politically, there is not a teenage kid from Zaire to Budapest, from Tel Aviv to Rome...that doesn't want to be in America wearing blue jeans.
A: I got real passion when creativity occurred. It wasn't the painting. I like painting. When I started and [my work] started looking...at the time...as an art student...that I painted a little bit like Velasquez, or John Singer Sargent...not that I was as good as those guys. Maybe in my later years...I prided myself on being very close. The realism, to make the satin look like satin, and to make wool look like wool, and the eyes to look like glass, and the lips [to be] a little moist, and [the skin] to have a glare on the chin, and a little more reddish up here [on the forehead]. And just to know all the techniques of paintings.
So when I got into creativity where ideas had meaning, where there was a conception, where ideas and colors and conceptions merged with the skill...You know like having this interesting face with great colors, but something else that is maybe out of a collage, something that no one ever taught me, where I was the soul inventor of it...I pioneered...when that started happening and it got printed--then I had created.
Creativity comes from within, and the more you do it, the more the channel opens up. The average person who is not very creative [on a daily basis], his creativity is like the thread of a spool, it is very thin. And a person who creates a little bit [his creativity] is like a thin straw. And the person who creates all day long, a person that is an advertiser guy or he is a writer, or a comedian, who strands up and innovates, well then [his creativity ] is like a tube, like a hose.
Sometimes, when I'm really in the middle of painting, I think creativity is so big that I'm inside a tunnel, it just gushes by me and it just gushes out and overwhelms me and my lifestyle is [all] about creativity...I eat because of creativity, I sleep because of creativity, my relationships are because of creativity, I would say that most of the things that I do are about keeping this creative channel open and undisturbed...uninterrupted. --Merit Lee |
