Kristy Caldwell is an illustrator living in New York. Between 2020 and 2022, she worked with Castelli Gallery on an illustrated series of virtual ‘cartoon’ exhibitions for their website and social media. She has illustrated more than a dozen children’s books and is an Assistant Professor of Illustration at Queens College, CUNY.
In the summer of 2016, I traveled to upstate New York to visit Richard Pettibone and his wife, Nancy. At the time, I was working as Castelli Gallery’s archivist and publications manager, and Barbara Bertozzi Castelli had invited me to interview Richard for the catalogue of his upcoming exhibition, The Blind Man: Recent Paintings by Richard Pettibone.
I’d worked with Richard and Nancy before, helping to prepare the artist book Homer: The Oldest Cat in the World, 709 B.C.–1994, a facsimile of a handmade book they’d created about their cat, Homer, whom they described as a reincarnation of the epic poet. Afterward, Barbara commissioned me to make a drawing for Richard. I wanted to contribute something to the world of Homer, so I delivered a brush-and-ink drawing of Richard and his cat sitting side by side, each reading a book titled with the other’s name. When I arrived, Richard showed me where he’d hung it, above his own painting of Homer.
I admired how Richard and Nancy’s home, built in 1840, seemed organized around the independent creative work of both artists. They had removed the ceiling of the main room, allowing light from the upper windows to filter in. On the interior side of the second floor was a leftover door that opened directly into the two-story drop.
We set up in Richard’s studio. In the corner stood a tall wooden easel that had previously belonged to Richard Artschwager. Richard rebuilt it and inscribed the word “Dada” in his distinctive, uppercase lettering. Next to it was a custom, sculptural table topped with neat rows of upright brushes. As Nancy said, it wasn’t the kind of studio with paint all over the wall.
We spent most of the interview discussing Richard’s return to one of his earliest subjects, Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain. He was still adjusting after a temporary period of vision loss when he was asked to paint a Fountain as a commission. Although the commission didn’t work out, Richard emphasized he wouldn’t disown the work he’d made “just because I was blind when I made it.” What began as a commission became a technical challenge for himself, and then a series of forty paintings. The Blind Man paintings are twelve variations based on Alfred Stieglitz’s photograph of the original 1917 Fountain. Their title references both the magazine where the photo first appeared (1) and Richard’s experience at the time he painted them. Written on each are “The Blind Man” and “Self Portrait.” They remain some of my favorite works by Richard.
Richard and Nancy pulled out some of his work from the 1970s, when he was making photorealistic paintings: most memorably, a miniature version of Ingres’s La Grande Odalisque that was so finely painted I couldn’t see the brushstrokes. In stark contrast to Duchamp’s famous disinterest in beauty, Richard said he believed the look of visual art mattered tremendously: “It’s important to me.” He also shared portraits of himself and Nancy from that time, commenting that he looked like Willie Nelson.
The same attention to craftsmanship and detail was visible throughout the house: in his own woodworking and in the personal objects he lived with and collected. He showed me a red model Ferrari and talked about the precision of Formula One cars. We had scheduled the interview to start after that morning’s Austrian Grand Prix.
At the end of our visit, Richard ran one of his model trains. The layout he’d built incorporated miniature sculptures, including a Brancusi column. As the train moved slowly down the track, he referred to it as the “Slowness Is Beauty” Line, after a few lines of The Cantos he’d quoted earlier. (2)
At one point, I’d said it must be hard to let any of the Fountains go since he was painting things he loved. Richard said, “Yeah, but then I want to do Bicycle Wheels—where do I put them?”
That exchange reminds me of something he said in 2013, during an installation at Castelli Gallery’s 77th Street location. The exhibit, Richard Pettibone: Recent Work, included appropriations of works by some of his favorite artists: Constantin Brancusi, Marcel Duchamp, Jasper Johns, Piet Mondrian, Pablo Picasso, Francis Picabia, Frank Stella, and Andy Warhol. As he walked through the space, Richard noted that you wouldn’t normally get to see these artists exhibited together. But there they were.
(1) The Blind Man no. 2, New York, May 1917. Edited by Marcel Duchamp, Henri-Pierre Roché, and Beatrice Wood.
(2) Ezra Pound, The Cantos of Ezra Pound. Canto 87. Quoted from memory by Richard Pettibone; original edition unknown.