Courtesy David Zwirner, New York

James Welling, "#015" (2005). C-print mounted to Plexiglas, 34 x 27 in.

Courtesy David Zwirner, New York

James Welling, "Torso 9-6" (2005-08). C-print, 46 x 34 in.

James Welling Charles Burchfield Gandy Brodie Jean-Michel Basquiat Keith Haring Robert Mapplethorpe Cindy Sherman John Baldessari

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James Welling’s work has been creeping up on me. When I first came to New York, in the early ’90s, starting out as a lowly preparator at Annina Nosei Gallery, there was a lot of leftover in-your-face ’80s art vying for my attention: Mapplethorpe, Basquiat, Haring, Kruger, Halley, Salle, Sherman. Even then much of that work seemed pumped full of performance enhancers, strategically designed to eclipse everything else around it. Certainly to eclipse Welling, whose oddly impersonal train-track pictures of the time read like subtle postcards from another century, shot by vagabond ghosts and developed in prairie darkroom shacks back before the camera was even invented. Over the course of the past decade, Welling’s work has, show by show, methodically come to seem more in sync with its time and place. And I have come to understand its smoldering intensity, to respect its stubborn autonomy, even as I remain perpetually mystified as to exactly how he does it.

Jeremy Sigler: I discovered that we both worked at Annina Nosei Gallery as our first job in New York.

James Welling: That’s right. I was hired in 1979. Kim Gordon started right before I did. Kim did clerical things and I helped with installations and packing. After I started showing at Metro Pictures, just down the street, it got a little uncomfortable. The two galleries were in competition for some of the same artists. I was gently told that I might want to find another job.

JS: So much was happening around Annina’s then.

JW: She was the first to show Barbara Kruger’s image-text pieces, Troy Brauntuch, Jean-Michel Basquiat. She also showed Lynne Hirschmann and Mimmo Paladino. In the late ’70s, there was a very international scene in SoHo. Dan Graham was organizing clubs and shows with lots of European bands. My friend Paul McMahon took me to an amazing concert for Dutch TV: No Wave bands such as Ut, the Static, Theoretical Girls, the Raybeats, and performances by Remko Scha, Jill Kroesen, others I’ve forgotten. I remember the first time Iheard Glenn Branca [founder of the Static and Theoretical Girls]. I was interested in making images that went directly to an emotional place without any intervening subject matter, and Branca’s music seemed to do exactly that.

JS: So you were involved in the experimental music scene?

JW: Sure. When I was at CalArts in the early ’70s, Morton Subotnik came out from the University of Pittsburgh, which at the time had a serious electronic music program. Subotnik joined people like James Tenney, who was already at CalArts. That kind of exposure prepared me for what was happening in New York.

Even before that, though, when I was 18, John Cage and Merce Cunningham spent a week at Carnegie Mellon, where I was an undergrad, as artists-in-residence. In an impromptu concert one night, Cage found a chain in the dance studio and dragged it over piano strings — very inspiring to a kid from the suburbs. After seeing Cunningham perform, I started taking dance classes. I was the only male dancer in my class, and instantly they had me performing onstage. After a year I realized I wasn’t cut out to be a dancer. At the time, I was rebelling against painting. My first painting professor at Carnegie Mellon was Gandy Brodie, a charismatic second-generation Abstract Expressionist and a friend of Willem de Kooning who seemed to me very conservative. By the time I went to CalArts I was ready to give up painting.

JS: Can we go back even further into your past — into your childhood?

JW: My grandfather aspired to be an American Impressionist painter. He died before I was born, but his paintings and palette loomed large in my imagination as a kid. My father took up watercolors when I was about 5, and I vividly remember standing beside a rushing river while he painted. A few years later, I took his enamel watercolor palette and started using it myself. As a teenager, I was interested in the early sound-based paintings by Charles Burchfield. Burchfield interpreted moods and nature sounds — cicadas, frogs, wind — with certain shorthand markings, to actually create paintings of sound.