Alec Baldwin, Conversation with  Brendan O'Connell

Alec
Artists have painted trees, landscapes, portraits. I think there is, arguably, something inevitable about an artist taking on the environment of Walmart as a subject matter, what is it that initially inspired you?

Brendan
Well I had done a series of photo-based paintings in black and white. They were figures at home, watching television, or reading or getting dressed, just doing ordinary everyday things. An artist friend suggested that I follow a model throughout the day, doing ordinary everyday things out in the world.

Alec
And one of the most common everyday activities is, certainly, shopping…

Brendan
Exactly. I paid for a young actress' groceries and took a slew of photos of her walking around Walmart and shopping.

Alec
And you started painting them?

Brendan
Well, honestly, the photos sat on my desk for two years as I was doing abstract paintings and these black and white photo-based paintings. But I kept coming back to these photographs and thought about the reasons why I found them so compelling. Then I started to see that there was a way to marry the different kinds of paintings I was doing into a series.

Alec
When I first saw the Walmart paintings, there was this archetypal blond with her head turned away from you and you are waiting expectantly for her to turn toward you and show her face. This has been going on since the birth of capitalism: people going out into the town square or market place, to buy things AND to have their physical and spiritual needs of human interaction met.

Brendan
Most definitely, and that is where Walmart filled an interesting gap. Farmers or people in rural environments didn't really have the same opportunity that city people had for an endless variety of stuff and human interaction.

Alec
We all want to meet new people, to have new encounters.

Brendan
This goes to a larger idea. Whenever you go out into the physical world there is always the chance you might have an encounter. As you say, we all want to meet people, to exchange energy with them through a glance, a smile, a handshake. But when you live in a rural part of the country you step out into the world and the one thing you don't see is people. But you still need to step out to encounter other humans.

Alec
But because of the Internet, that isn't true anymore.

Brendan
That brings up two thoughts connected to this series of paintings. Between television and the Internet, your average person is inundated with images. He sees more fabricated imagery in a morning than the Medicis did in a decade. A thousand years ago the only place anyone saw an image was a painting or a stained glass window in church.

Alec
Then Guttenberg came along and gave the educated classes the printed word and the industrial revolution produced the shop window for everyone to walk by.

Brendan
Exactly, and the other thought is that people connect virtually through Facebook and Twitter. But one of the only places you can see large numbers of people interacting with their environment is while they're shopping. You can see many people at a sporting event, but they are mostly spectators. Or you can see them at an airport, but they are in transit. I would argue that Walmart is the most visited interior architecture on the planet, and it is quite possibly the most democratic.

Alec
Elaborate on that.

Brendan
Well, my mom was in our local Walmart in Torrington, Connecticut, and Meryl Streep was in line in front of her. And a lady in a moomoo was in line behind her. Where on earth are you going to come across that socio-economic class range? Not in Barney's on Fifth Avenue.

Alec
I know the Dutch painters were the first painters to portray commercial markets and the Vanitas still lifes of the bourgeoisie, then later the French Post-impressionists painted the commercial boulevards of Paris. Do you see any connection with the Walmart paintings?

Brendan
Walmart turned the boulevards of separate neighborhoods into aisles under one roof. And I am painting those aisles.

Alec
An American Pisarro! So , you came back from Europe and you start painting Walmarts?

Brendan
Well, there is a long tradition of American artists cutting their artistic teeth in Europe and coming back to paint America. I was in Europe for seven years during the Walmart expansion period, and when I got back Walmarts were spotting the American landscape.

Alec
Which American artists are you thinking of in particular?

Brendan
Marsden Hartley, Edward Hopper, Richard Deibenkorn.

Alec
When you think of a series of paintings like the Walmart series, isn't the obvious artist that people think of Andy Warhol?

Brendan
The concept of playing with brands as an art form goes back to Stuart Davis, but Warhol really made the brand the focal point as it is in advertising. The brand itself became the icon. Warhol really set the stage for everything that came after 1960 in American art. But I have to say there is something cold about the works themselves. I wanted to create something painterly and less conceptual, and I am also drawn to the repetitive patterns of brands on a shelf.

Alec
So it's really a populist idea of art that you are after?. Paintings that people can relate to in Ohio or New York?

Brendan
Painting that no longer really worries about bending to fit high or low art concepts. But this idea was with me from the beginning, I just didn't know it. Once I decided to "survive financially" by painting, I took to the streets in Paris and did portraits and caricatures to pay for my paints and brushes. There is nothing more touristic or commercial than that.

Alec
I met you in 95 when you were still in front of Notre Dame. What did you learn from that experience?

Brendan
In some ways that constitutes the foundation of my art education. I never went to art school, so spending ten hours a day trying to capture a likeness, or make people laugh or make a connection, and to do that by making marks on a piece of paper, was significant. You don't need a PhD in art history to laugh at a funny drawing of yourself or your spouse, but just because you might be sophisticated or an expert that doesn't necessarily stop you from connecting with something in the street.

Alec
Therefore, the idea of relating to the spectator or buyer is important to your art.

Brendan
It's a crucial component. That doesn't have to mean millions of people, or masses, because some art, because of its nature, is geared to a limited aesthetic. But I believe it should try to communicate something. The other thing I learned from the streets was economics. When you are on the bottom rung of the capitalist ladder, there is no shortage of people who want to kick you off of it.

Alec
Besides the artists you mentioned, what are your other influences?

Brendan
Well, there is a lot of French and American painting that comes through this series. The French post impressionists, even the 50s French abstractionists, but then I've always been inspired by the awkward beauty of Edward Hopper's figures. He really made people that looked like they were longing for a connection. And then Wayne Thiebaud's delicatessen paintings. The products or brand aspect of the Walmarts make me think of him.

Alec
Do you think of these various influences as explicit?

Brendan
Yes and no. There is a bit of every kind of painting I like in these, which sort of fits with the idea of Walmart. A lot of diversity under one roof. It's one painting series that allows for quite an eclectic mix of Americana.

Alec
How does Walmart feel about these paintings? You were originally thrown out, or "invited to leave" for taking photographs in the stores.

Brendan
Yeah, as a corporate policy a lot of retail environments do not allow you to take pictures. Evidently Sam Walton used to visit his competitors on the sly and take pictures and figure out what they did better than Walmart. I was going in on the sly trying to capture Wonderbread in all its glory. After the NPR interview where I said something to the effect that I had been invited to leave more Walmarts than most New Yorkers had ever been in, the Walmart people got in touch with me through one of my dealers.

Alec
What did they say?

Brendan
They said they love the paintings and that I could go in stores and photograph if I gave them some notice. It was pretty cool. They even gave me a forklift for panoramic shots…