"Working in the Zone"

An interview with the artist by Steven Naifeh, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Jackson Pollock and Van Gogh: The Life

Steve:  What really interests me in your work, isn’t so much the color and the composition and the brushwork – although those are astonishing – what interests me is the sheer creativity.  And the energy that comes out of that creativity.

Scott:  Yes, you’re starting with the blank canvas.  That’s what’s so exciting to me about abstract art – the fact that you are starting from scratch.  You have to make something out of nothing.

If I look at a painting, say, of a river running through a landscape, I know the artist probably went out to this river and set up his easel and started painting what he saw.  The brushwork can be great, and the composition can be daring, and all that, but it’s just not as exciting to me as it should be.

But when I look at a De Kooning, I immediately want to know everything about it.  Where did this come from?  Where did that come from?  I mean, I kind of know where the river came from.  There’s probably an actual river somewhere.  But with the De Kooning, where did he even start?  You look at the layers of paint and see what comes first and what comes next, and it’s very exciting to me.

Steve:  Can you figure it out?  Can you figure out the process from looking at the work?

Scott:  Not completely.  But I went from not being able to do it at all to kind of being able to do it, you know.  It didn’t just click one day.  I never had that “ah, I got it now” moment.  But maybe, after looking at so many works, maybe I did get it.  Not every brushstroke, not every decision – but the rhythm, the rhythm of the decision-making.

The key is not having a clear picture to begin with in my mind.  What works is just starting.  What works is just putting paint on a brush, and getting enough paint on the canvas, and seeing what I’ve got.  I just start to do something, and then, from there, everything is a response to what came before.

Steve:  After you make a series of marks, do you analyze why they worked or why they didn’t work?

Scott:  No, I really don’t.  Because I don’t really see the painting while I’m making it.

Steve:  You don’t see the overall painting?  You’re just seeing the interaction of that one stroke and the one after it? 

Scott:  Yes.

Steve:  If you’re only working on paintings in stages, how do they have the compositional coherence that they have?

Scott:  I’m just not aware of the eventual structure while I’m in the painting.  At the time, it’s just what’s going to be next.  And, then, the next thing, and the next, until the entire canvas is full.  I don’t see the stages of the painting while I’m making it.

That’s why I sometimes take photos of the painting in process.  In the photos, I can look at the canvas as if someone else painted it.  At that point, it’s like someone else’s work.  Then I can see what’s wrong with it or what needs to be done with it.  But when I’m actually in the painting, I’m not really conscious of what I’m doing when I’m doing it.  I mean, I’m in a zone. 

Steve:  Explain what you mean by that.

Scott:  Well, you know, I’ve heard Michael Jordan say that, in certain basketball games, he doesn’t even remember playing the game – because he was in a zone.  The reporters will ask him, How did you make that many threes, and blah blah blah, and he says, You know, the basket looked five times bigger than it normally does.  So it felt like I was throwing the ball in the ocean.  It wasn’t like I was making the normal three-pointer, or making all these shots – it was like throwing a basketball in the ocean, it was just that easy.  It’s like everything I threw up went in, and I knew it was going in before I even shot it.  There were games that he would finish and wouldn’t even remember playing, and he’d scored 63 points, or whatever. 

Steve:  Do other athletes talk about playing that way?

Scott:  Yes.  Yes, most of the good ones are trying to get into a zone.  They have all these sports psychologists now who teach them ways to get into a zone.  But that all happened since Michael Jordan.  I don’t think they had sports psychology back then.  Some nights, he said, he would just go out there on the court and it would just hit him.  He would say it’s almost as if he was possessed.  He would say it’s like my body’s possessed, it’s not me controlling my body.

Steve:  Do the best athletes always play in a zone? 

Scott:  No, I don’t think so.  I think a lot of times it only happens in the really big moments.  Like in a playoff game, a game seven, where it’s an everything’s-on-the-line kind of thing.  I think it happens to a lot of people only when it really counts.  It’s not in a regular season game, or whatever, it’s always in some big playoff game.

It could be stress that causes it.  You know how neuroscientists say there are parts of the brain that we don’t use.  Maybe the stress lets you access and utilize certain parts of the brain that you normally don’t.

Steve:  Can you force yourself into a zone?

Scott:  Not really.  I mean, sometimes, I can be trying out a new paint or a new brush and it just happens.  But most of the time I’m in the zone before I even get into the studio.  Being in a zone actually makes me come into the studio.  It happens a lot when I’m waking up or going to sleep.  I can just lie down on the couch, and try to take a nap.  But if I’m not sleepy enough to take that nap, I’m sitting there, thinking too long, and eventually three or four paintings will start flashing in my head.

Then I just have to get up and get started.  I instantly lose those images – and that drives me crazy – but I’m already in the zone and I stay in it.  I come into the studio, and I’m mixing the paint as fast as I can and I start painting.  But it’s almost like I’m not doing it myself.  It’s like I’m in this trance-zone-time thing.

Steve:  I think most of us drive that way – sometimes we’re fully alert when we drive but sometimes we’re thinking about something completely different from the road ahead of us.

Scott:  Yes.  There are times when I’ll drive for ten or fifteen minutes in a zone, and then come out of it, and pretty much say to myself, How did I get here?  I don’t remember the last ten or fifteen minutes.  Of course, I stopped at red lights, and stopped at stop signs, and passed cars, and stopped for cars, and did all these things – and don’t remember how I got there.

That’s why there’s no fear, you know?  There’s no fear when I drive that way.  And there’s no fear when you’re painting that way.

It’s not like, Well, okay, I’ve spent forty-five minutes on this, and it’s really good.  But I still have to do something in that other corner.  And now I’m afraid to do anything because I don’t want to mess up everything I’ve already done.  The zone takes that fear away.  You just feel like whatever comes next will be right.