His Work in Hawai‘i: Interview 3 with Jean Charlot, April 2, 1978, John Pierre Charlot

We’ve been talking about the influence of Hawaiian art forms on your own art.  In the Leeward Community College fresco, I really see a kind of use of Hawaiian artifacts—the poi pounders, the calabashes, and stuff—and the whole style of the fresco seems to be influenced by their simplifying of the forms.  Do you think that’s accurate?  Did the kind of simple, elegant forms of Hawaiian artifacts influence you?

Well, we are again, Johnny, on two completely distinct things, at least as to their origin, and that get unified, if you want, in me because I don’t have a unified schooling, we could say.  I have a French academic schooling that is most important even though it didn’t happen in school, but as I said, mostly at the Louvre.  And just looking at things like the large Giotto which is there, which is mural style, I found that things can be seen at a distance only if there is a simplicity.  I don’t say a simplification.  And in my murals before, of course, I contacted Hawaiian things, I was looking for that simplicity.  I say that it’s not simplification because many things in themselves have large and simple qualities.  In modern art we can take, if you want, Tony Smith1 as a good example of that simplicity which is not a simplification.  In the old days, I always come back to the same guys: Uccello and so on.   So that was in me very strongly before I came here.  In Mexico, I cannot speak of simplicity.  There is really a very complex thing there.  Much of the, well, Aztec art and much of the Mayan art, even though those things are made roughly in a way, are closer to baroque than to what people like to call primitive.  There’s an extreme complexity.  And of course, my own field, my own school, in archeology was the Mayans.  And the Mayans are the most sophisticated and complex guys in their visual arts.  So I combated, I battled, if you want, those things because of the reasons that a muralist has to learn or maybe has to begin with in himself.  And when I came here, of course, the beauty of, let’s say, a calabash, as you mention it, the beauty of a poi pounder blended together the love I have for, well, let’s call them artifacts, which are a suggestion of primitiveness, and refined, simple forms.  It’s not all a question of taste.  It’s most often a question of function.  The people that has noticed, let’s say, that the helmets of the Hawaiians have a beautiful form and must have been copied from the Greeks could have reasoned that they had that shape because people didn’t want to be socked on the head and their skulls split, so they needed a cushioning on top, and both people found the same solution.  It’s the same thing with pounding.  It takes something to pound with in Africa, something to pound with in Polynesia.  The form, the way that you have to handle the thing and put the weight at the bottom of the thing, all those things are function.  But I’m always glad when I can put together these jointed knowledges I have: one of them which is nearly optical and mathematical through those Western Old Masters; the other one which is acquired through long experience, centuries of experience, by the people who make the artifacts.  So I was very happy here that I could use and use rightfully in a Polynesian setting the poi pounder, the double poi board, and so on and so forth.  I think, for example, that the tapa board that the woman is using is a very beautiful example of something that is made this time not just for function, but for, we could say, sound.  Those women had a number of shorthands about sound so they could tell each other from village to village things through the sound.  And so they made sounding boards at the same time that they made boards.  The boards were, of course, to make the tapa on.  You had to have that thing.  But by caving in the under part of the board, they managed also to get a nice sound.  And as a result, I think the visual effect of the cut-into of the board is something extremely refined also.  So it’s not complicated in a way.  I just have two distinct experiences, we could say—I’m not saying in my brain, but in myself: one, what we like to call the Western Old Masters; the other one, the non-Western artifact makers, shall we say.  It’s interesting that both of them in the end rejoin each other and make a unity, at least in my work, I hope.

You once said that you thought there was a real affinity between French culture and Polynesian cultures.  Could you expand on that?

Well, I’ve been using it.  It’s a very trite thing to quote, but Pascal—“Le coeur a des raisons que la raison ne connaît pas”2—is the description of aloha and, more than that, a very good description of ‘imi loa,3 which is not science as the Western people understand it, but science guided by emotion, which is exactly what Pascal was talking about.

Isn’t that funny.  I would have picked up on things like elegance and simplicity of form and things like that as being a place where French culture and Hawaiian culture meet.

Well, I think the man lives in a body; I mean, as some people say that the body and the man are identical, but some others say that his habitation is his body.  And the French body and the Polynesian body are so different, the uses they are put to are so different that I think there is no affinity there that is natural.  I think I’m a sort of a monster trying to, not trying, but I think achieving the putting together of things that in themselves are separated.  The thing that saves me, I think, in my work is that it isn’t a conscious research.  That is, I can apply to my own works “Le coeur a des raisons” and so on of Pascal because that’s the way it is.  In fact, I tried a number of times to extricate myself from that double focus, that bifocal affair, and I haven’t been able to, so I stay in it because I have no choice.

Is this again that whole thing of being a classical artist where you are dealing with classical things like proportion and measure and the intellectual side, and then as an artist, you’re digging things up that really aren’t that rational?

Well, it’s a complicated thing, but the scientist, I mean, the mathematician, if you want, you take the old guys, like Luca Pacioli, for example, who just passed his life doing complicated geometry constructions and so on, those guys are not so far from, for example, the moment of illumination in the Zen training.  It seems that the Zen training and Western scientific training are two different things.  But if you ask a scientist, if you asked Einstein, for example, how it happened, he can’t explain it; he knows that there was a moment of illumination.  The Zen guy, if you ask him how he acquired his Zen wisdom, will tell you that he cannot explain it.  It’s very interesting that the moment is usually brought in by some nearly despicable little incident.  I think one of them was, of those Zen priests, was putting together a broom, and one of the bits of wood broke.  I don’t remember the thing.  Or perhaps he was using the broom in autumn with the leaves fallen on the ground.  The illumination came.  It is the same thing for guys like Pacioli.  Suddenly the thing happened, and they had the illumination.  It’s not a question of reason in either case.  In the artist, it’s admitted.  I mean it’s better known, that business of the muse that comes and tells the artist what to do or the dream of so and so, whatever the composer was, who saw in a dream the devil playing a violin to him something that he put on paper the next morning.  Those things are parables, if you want, but not far from the truth.  And I’m speaking as a reasonable guy.  That is, all the things I can’t put in words, I put in words for you, but there is still that moment of illumination which I think, not always in a spectacular or theatrical way, happened to the artist every time he does a piece of work that isn’t absolutely repetitious or purely commissioned, we could say.  And even though when it’s a commission, sometimes, there sneaks in it a little of that illumination.

Well, in Hawaiian culture, you know they have that sort of very strong and continuous awareness of all those unconscious and subconscious factors that go on in them.  But of course, it causes them some unease, some trouble, you know; sometimes the cortex, the reasonable part has problems keeping that all together.  And you know, from my study of your work and stuff, there seems to be a little bit of that element there, you know the little faces you see, the sometimes disturbing dreams.  At times, your subconscious or unconscious seems to be very, very close to the surface and to make you a little uneasy.

Well, I think you are right, but that is the duty, if you want to say so, of the painter.  Of course, I am not a composer of music and so on.  I don’t know those…that part of it, but the visual artist—as long as I make both sculpture and painting—must stop reasoning and let enter what is outside waiting to go in.  It’s exactly the old thing that the mystics were not afraid to say.  The ones I’ve read are, of course, Catholic mystics, but that question of emptying one’s self, otherwise, you cannot be filled up—it’s a very simple thing.  They compare it to a pail of water: if it’s full of water, nothing happens; if it’s empty, the water can fall in.

But, you know, I sense in you that sort of classical side, that iron will, if you want, that Cézanne had and that comes through classical thinking and classical art, that this has also been something that has helped you stabilize and use all of those possibly disruptive things that come up from the unconscious.

Well, I think, I think so too.  I think you are perfectly right there.  But in my own case, that stabilization is acquired by craft from the beginning, from the earliest things I wrote.  In fact, in my teens—you have seen the texts—I always compare the artist to the craftsman, for example, to the man who does penny-sheets and so on.  And the craft is stabilizing.  I think that’s why I do like prints.  The Way of the Cross I’ve been working on now in the new edition,4 for example, was a question of liking to cut with a knife bois de fil, that is, just like the most primitive of artists.  And that is a stabilization because the material has no fancy of its own.  It has its own rules, and you have to abide by the rules.

In other words, the longer and more complicated the process of the craft, of the expression of the impulse, the more you’re able to control and stabilize that impulse?

Well, I was showing, I was explaining to those, that little group of three students—who are very bright, all three of them, incidentally—where to stop.  It’s rather interesting that especially on the black plate, where I had a lot of false lines, before we printed it, we cleared up, we cleaned up, if you want, some things that were really messy.  And they were pointing to all kind of what people would call defects.  For example, the back of the head of the woman has a very strong line at the back of the neck that goes right where it shouldn’t go into the tapa, whatever it is, on which she’s carrying the objects.  There are some false lines that I took off and some that I kept.  So they said, “Why do you keep them?”  And I said, “Well, you know cleanliness isn’t, or we can say, close to godliness; you have to be careful not to be too clean.”  That is, even at that moment where we were in the middle of the craft rather than the creation, you still have to leave a few wrong things, a few doors open, a few flutterings that are not connected with representation so that the unity of the whole things appears and that you don’t fool the people into seeing an old woman with a stick or walking under the banana leaves, or whatever it is.  That isn’t the point at all.  There’s something else to get out of the image.  And so the image have to have a certain sense of falseness.  Now, that falseness appears…I think it’s the nutshell of the inspiration.  The realization of what the subject matter is is one thing, but that subject must enclose something besides itself which is a little more important and deeper than the subject itself.

I’m really, I’m kind of struggling to understand exactly what you mean, and I’m not sure that I have quite understood it.  I understand that wanting to keep it a picture and wanting to keep, if you want, marks of the artist at work realizing the picture.  Am I right so far?  But would you say that ultimately in a picture, the most important thing is that very fact of the artist realizing the thing?

No.  I don’t think the artist realizes when he’s doing the thing.  Otherwise, it doesn’t come out.  It’s only at the second step, if you want, of the making of the thing.  Of course, in the print, it’s easy because it divides, in the case of this one, let us say, in four separate things that we put together.  But as you are the craftsman, that is, after you have, if you want, lost the inspiration that is the initial impulse, you must respect in you something that at the moment actually of, well, shall we say, printing isn’t there anymore.  That is, you know very well that you are not a superman, or, if you want, you are superman only one minute out of the whole day and you have to be careful not to louse it up with your good logic or even good craft because it’s something else again.  I can’t, I can’t explain it, and nobody has explained it very much, Johnny, but I think that relationship between the discovery by scientists, the discovery by Zen priests, and discovery by artists of the moment of illumination is something that either you have or you don’t have.  I think Martin, for example, had that with his submerged baptism.  He came out of it.  He was in a frenzy about the…the thing—there is no name for it—that happened to him.  Well, it doesn’t have to be that enormous, but there is a little bit of that in every work of art by an artist.

Well, in Hawaiian culture, so much of this is also, if you want, controlled and stabilized by a religion that, if you want, comes out of it and works with it.  In your religion, you know, you’re quite emphatic about your not being a mystic.  But you still do know a lot about mysticism.  But have you kind of chosen the…you call yourself a parochial Catholic, a Catholic of the parish.  Is that the kind of religion you need, if you want, to stabilize that other side of your life?

Well, it isn’t that complicated, Johnny.  I’m speaking to a doctor of theology.  I’m not going to try to—in theology—I’m not going to try to explain to you things.  But I have the humility to think, and in fact, I do believe, that a lot of good pious theologians through the centuries have found a formula that fits a human being.  Because I’m busy with other things that are parallel to what they were doing, if not identical, I can’t lose time, so to speak, about theological considerations.  I can only accept what they have found out, and it seems to work perfectly well.

Let me go on to a subject.  A place where I see the influence of Hawai‘i on your work is the particular quality of the air.  And that particular quality seems to be very well expressible in fresco technique.  What I’m saying is that fresco and watercolors too, like Choris’s5 watercolors, seem to be particularly good media for depicting the particular air of this place.  And is this one of the reasons maybe that your fresco has lightened up a lot, that you’ve been using less pigment, and that you’ve been using reserve ground more here than you have earlier?

Well, there is no doubt that the light is a very important element, and as you say, it is represented—it’s a very simple thing, but the light is represented by white, we could say.  And so, as in frescoes, the mortar itself has a very positive rather than neutral way, and the more…the less you do, the more light there is.  There is, of course, a moment where you have also to put in your own word, I mean your own little something, otherwise, it would be just a whitewashed wall.  But whitewashed walls in Hawai‘i have a very nice way of being full of light; I mean that’s the simplest thing.  Now, my business is to detail things and to suggest ways, if you want, for people to bathe into that atmosphere that is perhaps the subject with the notation that if you go—instead of going underground, as people say—if you go submarine, your light will disappear, will become very heavy, and will get in total darkness.  So I think it’s very nice to have in nature here—and we don’t have it everywhere—the ideal of pure light and the ideal of absolute darkness, physically represented in the islands: what’s over the skin of the sea, as the Hawaiian word has it, the skin of the sea, and what goes on underneath.  As images, and I’m not putting in theological meaning, we have sort of heaven and hell together, of course, with the volcanoes too.  It’s one of the largest and most complicated and full gamuts of physical presentation of things that I know anywhere.  I mean it may be like that in other places.  My own experience has been that enormous gamut from light to night that exists in the islands.  It’s quite true.

Well, I was interested that in your Syracuse murals and in the other ones, the frescoes you did on the mainland, except for maybe the Guadalupe in the crypt of Saint Benedict’s,6 you have used generally more pigment and less reserve areas than you have here in Hawai‘i, or am I wrong?

Well, you hang up on the objective sight, even if you don’t have to copy from the model, especially your landscapes.  But I’ve seen Mexico as a dark land.  I’ve seen Mexico as, you could say, the color of Indian skin.  And there is also there a, well, a certain barbaric quality which I’m not at all against.  In a plastic way, that gives strength to things, but that strength is accompanied by darkness.  So that my Mexican things are always so full, so fuller of color and darker in value, and when a pure white appears, like in those malinches, for example, it appears as a contrast to the average value of the picture.  And it is true that in the Hawaiian pictures, when—I mean a representation of Hawai‘i—white is the major thing.  And it goes into modulations of colors rather than contrast.

There seems also a, not a conflict, but two approaches you have to the light.  In Fiji, you really emphasized the atmospheric; a strong light kind of dazzles the eye.  And then you have to kind of shield your eye against that light and look deeper into the other colors.  You’ve done this a little bit, for instance, with your last big serigraph on the hala grove.7  But you seem to have either an ambient light in Hawai‘i, or every now and then you go into that sort of dazzle and obscurity.

Well, sure, that’s all right.  Fiji’s a very different thing.  I think what I found there that we didn’t have here with the same intensity, are the dark side of things, people, and the pantheon of gods that I had in Mexico.  Mexico isn’t a pleasant place in that sense that the poor missionaries who went there saw devils everywhere, and the Mexicans didn’t say no—they just let them have their own experiences, and they were, we could say, dark experiences.  In Fiji, it’s the same thing.  I think perhaps cannibalism and such things gave a certain darkness to the place at least for the Western visitor.  But I have very strongly that sense of quality in Fiji.  I smoothed it over in the church because Monsignor Wasner, well, suggested certain things, for example, the introduction of the Hindus, which are, of course, a totally different bunch of people.  I put them in because they were also part of his parish.  But now I’m left to myself, it’s only the Melanesian, and the fact that he has a black skin has something to do with the general pictorial quality.8  The fact also that the climate, at least where I was, was rougher and between the very heavy rains and the very heavy heat, there is an unease to the European body, certainly, in such a place.  I told you once before when I came here, I was a little annoyed because my first feeling was that nature was like a Victorian watercolor in Hawai‘i.  Pleasantness.  Some of that remains even though I know more about Hawai‘i.9