Adam Moss
speaker
88 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Dec 2024
last heard Dec 2024
Adam Moss’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
I think of all of this as ways of talking to yourself, as ways of translating what your imagination produces.
Whatever lessons I might have gotten from my own magazine life that might apply to my painting life, I didn't.
When I thought I wanted to paint, I was up in Cape Cod, a place, and without any schooling whatsoever, didn't know how to do a thing. My schooling was really when I went to buy paints, I talked to the salesperson and asked them how this worked. I didn't understand what a medium was. I didn't understand any of it.
Nevertheless, I had this idea that I would do a painting a day, and that's what I did. One day I'd do a flower, and then the other day I'd do some crazy, stupid abstract, and then I would just make an effort at doing a person or something. The whole idea was that at the end of the day, painting would be finished and thrown away and started over. It was fun.
Came back, and I thought that was the end of it. I thought it was just a sort of fun little summer thing. And a friend of mine said, well, you really seem to have liked it. You really should get some training. She then connected me up with the head of painting, I think, at the Yale School of Art. I can hear many listeners' heads exploding. First teacher, head of painting, Yale School of Art.
Well, no, she wasn't my teacher. She had a student who had just graduated who she thought was really good. Her name was Maria De Los Angeles, and she's in the book. She is a beautiful artist, but also a really lovely person. She would just come over to my house. She taught me how to draw and she taught me how to paint at the beginning.
It wasn't a particularly structured learning process, but she was my friend, my painting friend. Was it built around ideas or mostly execution technique, etc. ? There was a certain amount of technique. There was a lot of just helping me find my confidence as a painter. And there was just a certain kindness that I found empowering and a sense that she had that I had something to make.
It may not be important to other people.
Certainly there is an expectation that this person can do better. And I guess that can be experienced in a lot of ways as being stern and forbidding and all of that kind of thing. And I've had mentor types like that. But I personally respond to kindness. I need to feel a little loved.
I think there has to be a bedrock of they have a belief in you and you have to feel it. Otherwise, the mentorship doesn't work. You have to believe that they are rooting for you.
I've always loved process because essentially I love narrative and the act of how something comes to be is just a perfect story. Starts with nothing and then ends up something. But there's a whole other part of this book that's trying to understand the personality attributes that make someone successful as an artist.
It's about half visual, and it works almost like a giant diagram where the text itself winds around the images. Commutic, but also magazine-ish. And it has all this footnote material, which is the me in the book for the most part. Although you're in the— I'm in the introductions.
But it was a new pursuit. It was new and yet I hope it had the benefit of a lifetime's experience as a magazine maker.
i had never written a book before and i was really scared of writing it's harder than it looks it's so hard unlike you i never wanted to be a writer i would never have left magazines for writing but i did leave magazines at a certain point because i just felt that i didn't want to be a boss anymore I started to write this book, and I was just a terrible, terrible, terrible writer, really.
And I had to teach myself. I had to use my editor head. At first, my editor head recognized that it was terrible but didn't have any solutions in mind. And then over time, I just began to strip it of its ridiculous ornamentation. Was that all by yourself, though, or did you go to people for it? No, I did that most of myself.
And then eventually, okay, I got to a place where I was happier as a writer, and also the work itself was better.
Well, okay, let me, I created the book in the way that I created the book in order to assemble a community. I wanted the group thing, which I always loved in magazines, and I wanted a sense of a lot of people doing something together. And so I kind of And that invention was a whole part one, which was to engage all these artists in my project.
Okay, Amy Sillman, show me how you made a painting, and we'll go from beginning to end. Okay, George Saunders, let's talk about how you wrote Lincoln and the Bardo, and David Mandel, how you wrote a joke, or Kara Walker, how you built this magnificent sculpture, or Stephen Sondheim, how you wrote a song.
And that process was essentially me recreating a context of group creation because I thought of them as my collaborators, not as my subjects. So that was part one. Part two was writing. I described already what a hell that was. And was it hell because the collaborator is no longer there? I'm just alone in the room again. It's the aloneness.
It's the dialogue in your head that was driving me completely crazy and why I never was a writer in the first place. I just found it unbearably lonely. And also, I didn't know how to act all the parts in my head where I could talk to myself and make myself better, which I didn't know how to do when it's different people, but I didn't know how to do in my own head.
Showing 41–60 of 88 · page 3 of 5
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