Thomas Nozkowski at Fisher Landau

Painter Thomas Nozkowski spoke to a crowd gathered at the Fisher Landau Center in Long Island City, Queens. The occasion was a small survey of his paintings there (until April 14). Pace Wildenstein also has a show up, of Nozkowski's most recent work (until May 3).

The show at Fisher Landau spans all of Nozkowski's mature period since the early 1970's, and includes 20 of his small-ish canvases.

Mr. Nozkowski, who arrived in his Suburu just as I got to Fisher Landau, is a pleasant and modest man with big ideas and an unassuming manner.

He talked about going to art school at Cooper Union in the early 60's, when the main concern was systemic painting -- creating canvases based on a set of rules. Like, what can I come up with if I confine myself to vertical dotted lines or just these colors, etc.?

Nozkowski recalled going to a gallery in Soho as a young painter and seeing a show with just one 40-foot long abstract canvas. He realized that something was off in the context of abstraction. "Our rhetoric was totally someplace else."

He said he thought these huge works were paintings designed for people downtown painters despised. He decided to reevaluate his assumptions -- and instead of creating gargantuan canvases, he started working on a small scale. He wanted to make paintings that would work in his friends' tenement apartments. He said almost half of the paintings at the Fisher Landau Center were done on canvas board out of a deliberate decision to work with a humble, everyday material.

He joked about how "sophisticated" his thinking was as a young painter in the '60s.

But today, in 2008, it's clear he's still engaged. "For any good work of art," he said, "it allows people to get out of the prison of their own consciousness."

Many of the paintings in his show at Fisher Landau are 16 x 20 inches. Nozkowski quoted Jean-Luc Godard in saying that ethical decisions wind up becomes aesthetic ones (and vice versa). He found the smaller scale was more manageable and it liberated him to try new things. Instead of working three days to prep a large canvas, he could make quicker decisions.

"I was taught by abstract expressionists," he said, "so I don't believe in tinkering."

In the '60s, when he was still working at these systemic paintings, his grandfather dies. He shared the experience of going to his studio and looking at his canvas and realizing he had no way to respond to this very personal event. The "system" just didn't allow for it.

So after that, his paintings all have a particular source. "Every painting I do comes from a source in the real world," he said.

"Now the whole paintings are memos" of real-life events.

When asked exactly how these abstract shapes relate to real life things, Nozkowski listed his inspirations as songs, newspaper stories, and family events. He even said perhaps this talk would inspire a painting. It's not about physical correlations -- he said the glint in someone's eye would not appear in one of this paintings -- but something else.

Asked why so many of his forms repeat, such as what he called a "squashed oval," Nozkoski said "There are limits to how many things you can do."

He used to take a subject for a painting and work it out on canvas until he ran out of ideas, then put the canvas aside and return to it later. Looking around the third floor gallery at the Fisher Landau Center, Nozkowski said "Some of these paintings are 10 years in gestation."

Now, he says, he just works straight through. At any given time, he can be working on multiple paintings. Right now he has six sticky paintings in his studio.

Untitled, 1984, 16 x 20 inches.

Most of his paintings feature a centralized abstract figure on a differently abstracted ground. He says he starts canvases with a kernel in the middle and sees where it wants to go. "I tried to make everything simple so I could see what I was doing," he said. "Composition is determined by the thing itself."

But he says he's "deeply skeptical about our power to read any paintings." He continued, saying "I don't really believe in a visual language." For Nozkowski, it's the relationships that have meaning.

He talked about old Chinese landscape artists who would go out into nature not with a pen and ink but just with their own perceptions. They would return to the studio and use their memories as their "filter."

In response to his advice for young painters, he said "You have to keep working. You have to keep going... We have the freedom to do anything we want to do. And if you're doing boring, crappy work: rethink it."

He summed up his lesson by saying the key to art is the same as the key to life: "Stay interested in things."

In response to a different question, he said "I like the idea of painting being in a complex, multidisciplinary world where it can be tested."

To people are talk about the death of painting, Mr. Nozkowski said "Painting will die when no one cares about it any more."

The Brooklyn Rail has a good interview with Thomas Nozkowski.