Artist Response: Julian Schnabel

 Julian Schnabel

“We all jump in a hole and if you can crawl out then you get to go home.” --Schnabel

Julian Schnabel is a well-recognized artist.  This lecture was held at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts and was fairly crowed.  The lecture was designed to be a question and answer set up discussing and comparing Julian Schnabel’s work as well as Pablo Picasso’s.  As soon as Schnabel walked onto the stage in his pajamas I knew it was going to be an interesting lecture.  I enjoyed how I got to hear experts and artists talk about paintings from the Picasso exhibit because I learned things that I didn’t know before and it also encouraged me to revisit the Picasso exhibit.  For instance, Schnabel discussed Picasso’s painting “Women joined hands” and Schnabel explained how there are sketches on the sides of the drawing were Picasso was experimenting.  Schnabel also explained how you could tell that mostly likely no one was interested in buying this piece of work because of the creases in the painting that it was most likely rolled up and put away for quite some time.  Another thing that I learned from Schnabel’s lecture about Picasso is that in many of Picasso’s painting he left them unfinished because Picasso knew he could finish them he didn’t need to prove to us that he could because he had done it before.  

Schnabel’s also discussed his own work and compared many of them to Picasso’s work.  I had never seen Schnabel’s paintings before and really enjoyed what he said about them and how he got started of each one.  One statement I really enjoyed that Schnabel said was that he liked the subjectivity of paintings and how “people take away different things, people liked to be surprised.”   Another quote I enjoyed by Schnabel was

“We all jump in a hole and if you can crawl out then you get to go home.”  This quote related to Schnabel and how he works on projects, he mentioned that if he is filming and they get to the location and it flooded then he decides on the best angle to shoot from and doesn’t change locations because there is an issue.   I respect this dedication and trust he has for things working out to benefit his work. 

Julian Schnabel did not answer any of my questions however overall I feel that Schnabel creates work that interests him.  Overall I enjoyed the lecture I was disappointed that the Curator kept the lecture very structured I feel like it would have been more interesting if Schnabel was allowed to talk freely.  Schnabel seemed really laid back and appeared to be enjoying himself on stage.  I was glad that the curator brought up Schnabel’s films because I love and have seen them all (except for his newest film Miral).