Jim Dine

Photo courtesy PaceWildenstein, New York

Jim Dine, "Self-Portrait in Cambridge (#4)" (1979)

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Over the last few months, New Yorkers have had the opportunity to consider that career from both ends, as he showed a set of drawings related to his 1960 happening Car Crash at Craig F. Starr; and a very recent series of large-scale botanical drawings at Wildenstein & Co.

Jim, looking back over your career, it occurs to me that drawing has always been one of your central concerns.

For me, drawing is everything—because it informs everything. It even informs my poetry. It’s the way I begin everything.

And I’m particularly struck by how you’ve kept coming back to self-portraits. That’s a discipline that means you have to face up to realities—realities of appearance, of course, but also the realities of your life.

Yes, and it’s more difficult to lie. It’s very difficult to lie—which is my wont, of course.

I used to think that the running thread in your work was your interest in objects—the tools, for example—whereas now it seems that the real running thread is your interest in translating those objects into pictures.

Yes, that’s the running thread—the alchemical aspect of it—turning shit into gold, hopefully. That’s always been my intention. I’ve never been a reporter. And if I have a romance with the objects that I’m drawing, it’s more important that I have a romance with the mark that I am making.

I’ve had a lifelong romance with plants. It’s about heavy-duty looking, but it’s also about heavy-duty inventing. Many of [the plant drawings] are done from five or six views in different circumstances, and then I bring all those views together to make a picture.

The new botanical drawings took me a very long time. I worked on them on and off for three years. I would go away for six months and then come back and work on them for another six. In the end I couldn’t make any more because I was exhausted. It was just such a big physical effort doing the drawings. I used so much muscle.

That’s another characteristic of your work: Your ability to find motifs—like the plants, or the heart shape, or the tools—and to make those motifs carry different meanings when you come back to them years later.

That’s because I try not to waste anything. I appropriate things and make them mine. I’m a different person when I come back to them 20 years later, but they’re still mine. The most obvious example is the bathrobes. They have changed so much over the years, but they’re still mine.

But this doesn’t seem to stop you from turning to new things, though.

No, and since about 1996, I’ve been very involved with something different, and that’s the story of Pinocchio. For the last few years I’ve been making these wooden sculptures of the boy, but also I’ve been working on a new version of the book. I’m about to go to Germany to see the printer to finish the book.

Tell me more about that.

It will be a commercial book published by Steidl this fall or winter. I’ve been using a straight English translation that’s in the public domain, and I’m reworking the book both typographically and image-wise.

When [Carlo] Collodi wrote the book in the 19th century, the way it was always laid out was that the chapter headings included chapter synopses. I’ve taken the chapter synopses in English and redone them—chewed them up, and spat them out in a different way.

There are 38 chapters, so there are 38 images in the book. They all come from lithographs that I’ve made in Paris. That’s what I’ve been doing for the last three years, working on the book.

I’m also going to have a show at Pace[Wildenstein] in April 2007 of paintings and sculptures of Pinocchio. I’ve been making the sculptures in wood for two or three years, cutting them in wood with a chainsaw.

I can see that you’re fascinated by the story.