James Siena’s current show at PaceWildenstein's Chelsea location, New Paintings and Gouaches, is a well-deserved highpoint in a long career. Siena has been featured in over 60 solo and group shows since 1986, including his watershed exhibition at Pierogi2000 in the mid-1990s and the last Whitney Biennial.

The recipient of multiple honors and awards, the 48-year old artist has dedicated himself to a form of drawing and painting that, by its very nature, depicts tenacity and concentration. But he also has a singular sense of humor.

Artinfo caught up with Siena as he worked in his Canal Street Studio—and we mean worked.

Your current show at Pace fills the sprawling space with small and laborious works. The physical and mental commitment they entail makes me wonder how you make these things. I have an image of you fixed to a chair for hours, meticulously working….

I work standing up—I don’t like to sit down when I work because I use my whole body, even when I’m making a small mark. That doesn’t mean I’m a gestural maniac, but sometimes I have to just move my shoulders to make a curve or something. I also don’t get as tired standing up. I work flat—the work is sitting on a table with a kind of lazy Susan underneath it, so I can turn the painting to get from place to place. Over the painting I’m working on is a bridge, or a series of bridges, that allow me to rest my hand.

I was talking to my eye doctor about it. He saw the show and asked, “How do you do these things?” I said, “I lean on this bridge,” and he goes, “That‘s what I do when I do surgery!” It’s almost like having a third hand.

I walk around the studio, too—I’ll work a little bit and then I’ll walk around the room and work a little bit and so on. I’m kind of a restless person, a very physical person.

That’s sort of ironic….

A little bit, yeah, because of the monastic quality that people perceive in the work. The intricate shapes imply someone bent over a drawing board for hours on end, but I’m kind of a multitasker—that’s another myth-buster for you. I talk on the phone when I’m working, I’m punching in numbers. I’m not secretive about work either; people come in and out of the studio sometimes when I’m working.

Part of my multitasking nature comes from having raised a child—I would take my son to the park and take my work with me. If I have a half hour to work, I’ll do it. I won’t read the paper. While we’ve been talking, I’ve been hinging some artwork. But I take long lunches, and I have a house in the Berkshires, so when I’m up there, nothing is happening. I won’t talk to anybody for two days and work on a gouache. So there are times when I’m not just constantly running around the studio.

Are the paintings physically and mentally exhausting?

No, no, I don’t get tired from it, really.

That’s funny, because people look at the intricacy in the paintings and sometimes their eyes just give out—they have to look away.

That means the painting is working. (laughs)

Does it happen to you?

That’s one of the reasons I’ll walk away from a painting and come back. But they don’t really operate like that until they’re finished. I’m always concentrating on what’s not done, so I’m not really looking at the paintings.

Do you work on one painting at a time?

I work on several paintings at a time; that doesn’t mean one day I work on one, and the next I work on another. I get them to stages of completion; I finish a stage and then let it simmer for a while and think about what the next move is. A decision can have repercussions—especially with these weeks and weeks of carrying out the instructions that I decide to invoke.

These "instructions," the algorithms upon which you base the drawings, do you start with the instructions sketched out, or do you work more intuitively?

I don’t plan them in words—I don’t write out instructions. Some people think I write something down and then carry it out, but really it’s in my head as a series of procedures. Some are related morphologically, some are not. I think you can see in this show, I’m taking a few more liberties. There’s more distortion, more mapping of one system onto another. In earlier work, there were fairly defensible procedures, the kind a mathematician could have come up with. I think in the work I’m making now, that’s less central. I’m working in a freer way.

Your work is different from other rule-governed kinds of art in that way; it reveals the fallibility of having been made by a human hand—the slippages in the paintings, for instance, make them so interesting.

Slippage is a good word for it. But in some of the paintings, in order to carry out the procedure, things have to be at a certain level of precision. I have to do my measuring and completely lay it out with a pencil and a ruler; but then, of course, it’s painted by hand.

So it’s more methodical than meditative?

This meditative notion is kind of overrated as far as I’m concerned. I don’t think I’m meditating when I’m painting—I’m just painting. I meditate when I run in the morning.

But you’re working on a small scale and handling all this information without turning it into just visual noise. It’s not just working out a ratio—you’re not Sol Lewitt.

No, but I owe an enormous debt to him. I first saw his work in the 1970s when I was a student at Cornell. It was really remarkable. What interested me when I saw, for example, this small 7-by-5-inch ball point pen drawing called Two Thousand Diagonal Lines was that there was a humanity there. He made that drawing. He may have made it with a ruler, but the varying pressures of his hand, and getting so many lines into this rectangle—of course the result was this monochromatic field—gave it an enormous power and intensity. Maybe there was an existential lesson there. The sheer vastness of the notion and the compression in that picture were really influential for me. It took me a while to come back around to it. I made a lot of different things along the way.

When did you start using non-traditional materials, like enamel on metal?

I’ve always been into non-traditional ways of painting over the years. I took a class at Cornell called “Techniques and Materials of Painting,” taught by Peter Kahn. He was just so into do-it-your-own-way, but at the same time really traditional. He taught us how to make ink out of burn toast and spit, and how to beat egg whites for three days until you make this incredible glue. So I made my own paint for many years, and as I got wackier and more curious, I started to make it out of really odd things like hair and stuff you weren’t really suppose to make paint from.

How do you make paint out of hair?

You just mix it with some glue and smear it around on a surface. It doesn’t make very good paint, but it was sort of exploring possibilities. I painted on silk, on canvas, on linen, using my homemade paints. The reason I started using the enamel was because I started painting on metal—things I brought back from a scrap yard. I just loved the stuff. It solved a lot of issues for me. When they’re prepared, the panels are smoother than paper. The paint I’m using now is sign painter’s paint. It’s very bright and really pigmented.

How long does a painting take?

It’s varied—I’ve never actually punched the clock on a painting, you know, do my ‘billable’ hours as a lawyer might say. I would say anywhere between 50 hours at a minimum and a 100 at a maximum. I don’t really try to think about it too much, but I always get asked that. I think everybody works hard on their work, whether it’s on a large number of pieces, or on one piece. Maybe I’m just being naïve; I don’t think of what I do as particularly labor intensive.

You’re not just watching paint dry, like Larry Poons or something…

I worked that way, in that Poons way, for a while! I did a lot of watching paint dry. It’s good for smoking joints and cigarettes … It was joint, cigarette, watch the paint dry.

What I realized was that I could make this intricacy that you get out of creating painted topographies by making highly detailed, extreme abstractions that come out of very simple rules that govern growth and decay. That lead to much more cerebral stuff, like the paintings I’m doing now.

New Paintings and Gouaches is on view through Jan. 28, 2006 at PaceWildenstein's Chelsea location, at 534 W. 25th St. in Manhattan.