Bailey Doogan is one of the people who reworked the Morton Salt logo back in the late ’60s. She was a graphic designer and artist before moving to Tucson in 1969. In her retrospective catalog, Bailey Doogan, Selected works, 1971 – 2005, Etherton Gallery writes:

Well-known for her mastery of many mediums, artist Bailey Doogan’s work does not embrace one style, one medium, or the repeated concerns of singular subject matter. Throughout her career, Doogan has addressed conventions of female beauty, issues of aging, and the mutable landscape of being. Speaking through the layers of the customary representations of the nude as an art form, Doogan continues to expand her repertoire of imagery so that beauty and the language of the body are synonymous at any age.

Drawing and painting make up the majority of Bailey Doogan’s body of work. She received a BFA in 1963 from Moore College of Art, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and an MA in Animated Film from UCLA in 1977. Her work is in public collections that include The Brooklyn Museum of Art, New York; Rutgers University, New Jersey; Tucson Museum of Art, University of Arizona Museum of Art, Mesa Contemporary Arts Center, Arizona; San Jose State University, California; and Pensacola College Visual Arts Gallery, Florida. Her drawings and paintings have been exhibited in solo and group venues including: The New Museum of Contemporary Art, Alternative Museum, and Brooklyn Museum, New York, New York; Hillwood Museum, Long Island, New York; Santa Barbara Contemporary Arts Forum and San Jose Institute of Contemporary Art, California; The San Antonio Museum, Texas; The Speed Museum, Kentucky;  Nelson Fine Arts Center, Arizona State University, The Phoenix Museum, The University of Arizona Museum of Art, and The Tucson Museum of Art, Arizona.

Her 1977 animated film, Screw: A Technical Love Poem, has won numerous awards and has been previewed in festivals nationally and internationally, including: The Cambridge Animation Festival, England; The International Festival of Women’s Films, Denmark; The Venice Biennale, Italy; The Ann Arbor Film Festival, Michigan; The American Film Festival, and Film Forum, New York, New York; The Brooklyn Museum, New York; and The Hirshhorn Museum, Washington, D.C.

Articles and reviews of her work have appeared in major publications, including Ms.,The Village Voice, and Harper’s Magazine, and art publications ArtNews, Art in America, New Art Examiner, Artspace, Art Journal, Visions, and The Women’s Art Journal. Doogan’s writing has been published in M/E/A/N/I/N/G, Art Journal, andThe Utne Reader.

Doogan has lectured at over thirty American Universities and Art Centers, and conducted workshops at various institutions, including Anderson Ranch Arts Center, Colorado. She was the Fall Semester Visiting Professor at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas in 1992 and 2004. She served on the Board of Directors of the College Art Association from 1997 through 2001 and is currently Professor Emerita of Painting and Drawing at the University of Arizona.

As we wrapped up the process of this interview — three months in the doing — she broke the fabulous news that she is a 2009 recipient of a Joan Mitchell Painters and Sculptorsgrant. Open to nominees only, the prize comes with a $25,000 cash award. Now, I consider Peggy (Bailey is her paternal family name) a dear friend, but this was the first time someone I interviewed bought me a meal, and I let her because…hey.

Jeanmarie Simpson: You don’t call your drawings reductive. What do you call it that you do — the process that you use?

Bailey Doogan: You could call it subtractive or reductive. It’s the process I use when I work with charcoal.  When I’m painting, the process is additive. I’m building up.

JS: You’ve been doing this for how long — with the gessoing and then the charcoal?

BD: I think the first piece, RIB (Angry Aging Bitch), was done in ‘88 or ‘89, so I’ve been doing it a long time.

JS: Let’s talk about Assman and Titman.

BD:  Often, language is the initial idea – Assman, Legman, and Titman began with those words and what they mean. I remember being in my studio and writing down the three letters, A – S – S, and then underneath those the other letters, M – A – N. I knew I wanted to break it up that way.  When I was growing up, if a guy was an “Assman” or a “Legman,” it meant that he liked looking at women’s asses or legs. So I took the words and turned them on their asses. Many second -generation feminists questioned language because it was often patriarchal; it came from a male point of view. So Assmanbecame a man with a beautiful ass. I think language is subjective. We think of it as etched in stone, authoritative; we give it power, but I think it’s really just as arbitrary as anything else. Also, it was funny, and I knew I wanted to incorporate the text in the piece, but I didn’t want to actually put it in the drawing, so I ended up designing the frame. I have a background as a designer, and because I love typography, that was very interesting for me to do. The frame was all black — a matte black — so the letter forms are subtle and corporate, incorporated as bas-reliefs in the four corners and the center of the frame’s top and bottom. The top panel was A-S-S and the bottom was M-A-N.

JS: These are very large pieces.

BD: The drawings themselves are 72″ by 50″ or 52″, and with the frame 84″ by 62″ or 60″. So yes, they’re very large. What the viewer would see first is the drawing and the frame. The letters were the last thing you would see. The letter forms functioned as logos or trademarks for these figures. Mostly, I wanted the men’s bodies to look very beautiful. I wanted Assman’s ass to really be  beautiful and Legman to have great legs. The Assman pose is a yoga position — the plow position. I liked the idea of looking at the body from a different viewpoint.

JS: It’s something we just have to live with, to transcend rather than accept and embrace.

BD: In the Assman pose, the ass is the top of the body. He becomes a four-legged creature. The head is no longer the hierarchical top of the body. Someone wrote that the history of art was the history of naked women lying down and clothed men standing up. Assman is in a very vulnerable but also tender position. Legman’s pose is a standing, turning, arching his back, pushing-up- on-one-leg pose — a standard pose in advertising/fashion photography because it does what high heels do. It emphasizes the ass and the swell of the calf muscles. I worked in advertising from the mid-to-late ’60s in New York, so that over-the-shoulder pose was a standard — a come-hither sort of flirty pose.

JS: Your Legman is very soft and feminine and young.

BD: Yes, he was a younger model. The Assman model was in his 60s and he could still do that plow position. I exaggerated the tightness of that position — no one can pull themselves in that tight. And then Titman — my model was a colleague from the Art Department. He was a great model. Soon after, I had an exhibition as the featured artist of the faculty show, and I told him that his image was going to be in the show. Now I always do get permission from models beforehand. Many want to remain anonymous, and I promise to preserve that confidence. If they are too touchy, I won’t do the picture.  Usually people are fine about it. I always laugh and say, “Look, it’s not you. It’s a drawing.” The work is never about them, it’s about me. If anything, it reveals a lot about myself. I reassured him by saying, “Look, no one ever recognizes people in my work anyway.” The faculty show came and I said, “I will not tell anyone its you.  Don’t worry, your head is down. No one is going to figure out that it’s you.” The opening was crowded and busy. There was a lot going on. All of a sudden, over in the corner, I heard a voice saying, “I’m Titman! I’m Titman!” It was my colleague, very excited, telling everybody that it was him! The relationship between the model and the artist is a very interesting and very intimate relationship — sometimes difficult, usually not for the artist but often for the model. But it’s an exhilarating and freeing process. I think of him standing there saying, “I’m Titman!” He realized that he was the inspiration for this piece of art and that he was beautiful. Each one of the large drawings had what I call a shelf piece that accompanied it. The shelves were 60″ long and held six 10″ x 8″ scratchboard self-portraits. I rounded the corners of the small portraits to make them look like little slates. Each portrait is me sounding out a letter so that six in a row “sound out” A – S – S – M – A – N. The series of large drawings and shelf pieces, six pieces in all, was called Spell — the idea of spelling something out and being under the spell of word definition and interpretation. And then spelling out or sounding out each letter — A-S-S-M-A-N, L-E-G-M-A-N — what we do with our mouths when we’re sounding out these letters.. I worked from different photographs of my face sounding out the each letter. M is softly closed and humming, Mmm…

JS: The newest works that you’re showing are a series of self-portraits. Do you call them paintings?

BD: I call the paintings “paintings”; I call the drawings “drawings.” The black and white works are drawings. Many people call them paintings, I think, because they’re big, they’re substantial, they’re heavily worked — many think of drawing as work that is small, often done quickly, often more linear – a study for painting, sculpture, something more substantial. Drawing is all of the above, more or less.

JS: Who calls these paintings?

BD: I’ve had everyone call them paintings: artists, gallery people, regular people. The large drawings are done reductively. I guess my process is like a painting process because I take a large piece of 100% rag paper, a heavy paper. I cover the front with about four coats of gesso and apply one coat on the back for a counter-tension, which is what you would do if you were preparing a canvas. Then I cover the front surface with charcoal. Often I’ll step on it, spray water on it, sometimes even roll on it, activate the surface because I like to kind of create a world that the figure is going to live in. Then I draw reductively. First I draw the form in roughly. After that, the work is done with sandpaper pulling the white out of the dark.

JS: What I think is really interesting about this new series is I can look at the paintings and I can look at the drawings, and I can’t tell the difference. It doesn’t read immediately that they’re black and white and this is color. It’s only that you’re mentioning this now, that some are paintings and some are drawings. I think it’s the detail and the texture that strikes you. I can’t even imagine seeing all these works together in a gallery. Will they be?

BD: This series of paintings and drawings of my hand manipulating my face was at Etherton Gallery, my gallery and the only venue where the paintings and drawings were seen together — two drawings and five paintings. Before the Etherton show, there was a group exhibition in North Carolina that included the two large drawings, and an exhibit in Baltimore with the same two large drawings. The woman who organized and curated the Baltimore exhibit, Joan Weber, purchased both large drawings. Currently, both of the drawings are at the Tempe Arts Center on loan from Joan Weber. I’m now working on two new large drawings. I’m excited about them. There’s a point when I’m working on the drawing at the very beginning that is wonderful, ecstatic — everything is just flowing and it’s all coming together, and then it’s struggle, struggle, struggle, and then maybe another epiphany, but then struggle, struggle, struggle, and then some point where I know what I’m doing and it’s all just ecstatic. I’m obviously a two-dimensional gal, but it feels like I’m crawling over the surface of the form, and it feels like I’m modeling — there’s a kind of energy, the marks that define the face or the body.

JS: I can see how it would quickly feel like a sculpture because of the dimension of it. Your work is so dimensional. The painters you are compared with — the ones who are likened to you and you to them — Lucien Freud and Alice Neel and Francis Bacon…

BD: I admire all of them. I especially like Freud. He just piles it on. With him, there is something about depicting physicality that I relate to. I think he just keeps putting the paint on until it feels right.

JS: Do you do that?

BD: I do in painting, and drawing too. Some areas are heavily worked, especially with painting — thickness builds up. Many view this as a technique. I have trouble with the word technique. I guess it’s part of the process. I’m just putting it on until it feels right, but what happens is it becomes very physical.

JS: And the character. People call it character. It’s like an old person in the theater — they say they have character in their face, and all that means is lines. They have imperfections or whatever. How often do you really see a little perfect young face with character? The character has to be a lot more demonstrated on the part of a younger person where it’s apparent in elders.

BD: Well, that term laugh-lines literally does mean that you have lines from laughing or lines from frowning, and of course a lot of it is from gravity.

JS: I think this is so fascinating, the way you described your process, the feelings of your process, because I felt like you were describing my process, which is interesting because, with painters, it’s often so difficult for me to relate and I just can’t, whether it’s an original work of mine or a work that’s collaborative work, or I’m taking on Lady Macbeth. It starts out with this ecstasy of the material, which is so beautiful, and then you hit this wall and think, “What am I doing? I suck at this. I was wrong. I never should have taken on this project,” and then I go in and talk to the other people in the process and they say, “You’re out of your mind. Let’s just keep moving.”

BD: The agony or ecstasy!

JS: I don’t know how artists can not be like that. I don’t understand Bacon when he says he doesn’t feel anything when he paints. I don’t even believe him. When I look at your work — all of your work is beautiful — but I have to say the last 20 years of your work that’s really dealing with the aging body and the female form, and the agony and the beauty of character and the exposed beauty, the nude aging human, is to me like watching a magnificent opera or a symphony.

BD: Thank you. That makes me feel good to hear that.

JS: It’s dimensional, and not to, in any way, diminish Francis Bacon’s work or Alice Neel’s, but I don’t get that richness from them that I get from your work.

BD: Often we know artists’ work from reproductions, and some work reproduces better than others. Freud’s work is very physical. I have to tell you a Freud joke. I obviously love Freud’s work. I had some people at my studio…I don’t know when this was — maybe six or seven years ago. They were being effusive, very complementary — of course, that always feels good. They really liked that work, and at one point, one of the visitors made a comparison to Freud and said, “But your work is so much better because yours is so alive; I can feel the blood and the juices — it’s pulsing. In Freud’s work all the people look dead.” I said, “They’re not dead, they’re just British.” [Laughs]

JS: Exactly. That’s what it is.

BD: There’s a certain kind of light in London. It’s a beautiful light, almost watery — a limited, grayed-down value range.

JS: I really do think that your work does reflect that Catholic…

BD: Oh yeah, the Catholic stuff is there.

JS: I mean, our relationship — as women raised Catholic — to the Vatican, to the Sistine Chapel, to Da Vinci, to all of that magnificent idyllic…

BD: One thing about Catholicism, vis a vis body, is the corporeal, that Christ came down to Earth, and he suffered and died and all of that. Transubstantiation — that the word of God was made flesh, so it is all about flesh. The body is mortal but luminous, not just a receiver of light but a giver of light. I’m no longer a practicing Catholic, but I have all that culture. I’ve always liked the term “Practicing Catholic” — if you practice long enough, will you eventually get it right? I had a show at University of Texas at El Paso of many of the big paintings. Often when I have exhibitions, many people are outraged, shocked; some people love the work, but often not. The director at UTEP said they had more people come to that exhibition, and people kept coming back. Mexico is right there, and UTEP has the largest Mexican-American student population of any university in the country. They got it. It was what they saw growing up.

JS: And you really turn it on its head. That’s what is so beautiful about it — your Ex Cathedra piece, which they used on the front of your retrospective catalog…

BD: I selected it. I wanted to show the entire painting, but that was nixed. Ex Cathedra is a painting of a woman floating in a chair-like position. Ex Cathedra means “from the chair” in Latin. When the pope speaks infallibly on issues of dogma, he speaks Ex-Cathedra from his chair of authority. Cathedral comes from the same root.

JS: She looks as if she’s in agony.

BD: People have told that me she looked tortured. I thought she looked like she was in ecstasy.

JS: That’s a really good point. Ecstasy definitely looks painful sometimes.

BD: Things are ambiguous. The other thing I realized about my work is how often mouths are open. And again, that was nothing I ever consciously thought about. When models posed for me, I would say, now look this way and open your mouth. I’m getting to the point where I can’t give a reason for why I do something. What did I really intend? Who knows? I think it was something about trying to speak or speaking, but it just may be about being open. I don’t know. We have orifices. [Laugh]

JS: I think that a lot now too, and I wonder if that is an age thing, just to come to terms with that and become so comfortable with it — what goes in comes out. I don’t know what it is, but it’s wonderful to just be free about that stuff, having been raised Catholic — that the body is something icky and yucky. You got to this happier, more buoyant place with these newest portraits, these self-portraits.

BD: Yeah, I went through a hard time for almost three years. Even when you first interviewed me, it was still too close, I couldn’t talk about it. I think I worked so hard for the retrospective. I probably completely wore myself out. A physical and mental collapse is what I think happened. I had never been sick before in my life — always just been chugging along, able to do everything, and all of a sudden, everything came to a halt. One of the things that happens for most people when they’re depressed, and it certainly happened for me, is withdrawal. Not a good thing. I remember one day, I was already beginning to feel better but didn’t realize it. I went into the bathroom, looked in the mirror, made a face, and laughed, which was something because I had lost my sense of humor — the worst thing that can happen to you. Depressed people are often a pretty humorless lot. I was steeling myself to go out and I thought, “Okay, so I’ll smile. I’ll look interested.” And then it became a game, and I started using my hands to push my face around. I loved the smiles and grins. Who doesn’t? I talked to friends about the difference between a smile and a grin. What does a smile mean? What does a grin mean? So I started pushing my face around, and of course, as you get older, your face is more elastic. There is more stuff to grab. I was actually able to reach one arm over my head, stretch it to the opposite side of my face. In that position, I was able to stick a finger in my mouth and stretch it into a grin. I especially liked the idea of combining my hand and my face.

JS: So then you started doing these new paintings and drawings…

BD: I get very obsessive; I would make the gestures and then write a description of what I had done: left arm goes over and grabs, neck is in this position, finger comes up from chest to chin… I wrote it all down. I knew I wanted to have a photographer take head shots of me in those positions. I was in between photographers, and knew I had to hire someone new. A few years ago, a guy was recommended to me, so I called the guy. I didn’t know him; he didn’t know me. I introduced myself and made an appointment for him to come over and take photos. I think Jack (Jack Kulawik is his name) thought I wanted more traditional portraits. It took him a few minutes and then he completely got into it. I said, ”I picked this color for the background — a nice neutral pale grey-green,” and he said no and picked a bright kind of chrome yellow. He assured me that “It would be great,” and it was. He brought lights for the set-up. I said I always use natural light from two large industrial skylights in my studio, so we only have so much time for the light to be right. I had to set up a double mirror situation so I could reproduce the poses – to get the right expression. It got somewhat complicated because I didn’t want the mirrors showing and I didn’t want to cover the expressive parts of my face with my hand(s). Jack immediately began to come up with ideas of his own, so we fed each other. We had never worked together before; we had to do a fairly difficult thing in a very short amount of time. The light was fleeting. I would figure out a pose; I’d get it, and he’d say, “No, no, your hand is covering your face.” Or I would get a perfect position and then he would be futzing with his meter, the grease on my face and hands would start to loosen my grip and I would say, between clenched teeth, “Take the goddamn picture now, Jack!

JS: That process of just going through the motions — of making your face, putting on a face, going through the gestures — was part of bringing you out of your depression?

BD: I think so. They say if you just keep smiling, you’ll feel better.

JS: Yes, I’ve found that to be true.

BD: Like everything else, if you pull or push on one area, you affect another. Moving your nose around will change your eyes, etc. The painting where I’m pushing my chin up makes me look thoughtful.

JS: If you’re in an accident or get a scar or something, what that does and how people react to you because of it — it’s fascinating.

BD: People love the images where I’m smiling or look perky. Many people had difficulty with Five-Fingered Grin because it was too much of a grimace.

JS: There you go again!

BD: I never know, but I’m not exactly naïve.

JS: We share that. People always like the cute little fun characters I play. I just have to admit, for me, the characters who are on the brink of cutting their own throats are the most interesting, the ones I relate to for whatever reason. But I have a history of depression too, and I think for those of us who have been there, I think we’re as sick as our secrets. The more we turn it over and put it out there, the more we get people to look at it, the more comfortable we are with it, the less scary it is and the more we can examine what happened to us. I don’t like bouncing around with the happy-bubbles all the time. That feels like denial to me.

BD: Also, I think depression causes great discomfort in other people because, first of all, you’re not a barrel of laughs… I mean, I don’t think I was. And then people who love you don’t want to see you suffering. I have great sympathy for the people who had to put up with me during this time because, in a way, we were both mourning the loss of the person that we knew.

JS: Yeah, big time. And there’s really no going back, is there? Once you’ve been through it, you’ll never be who you were again. You may not be depressed anymore, but you’ve been deeply changed by it. One thing I have recently felt fascinated by, as an actor, and you can do this as a visual artist and I would love to be able to do it, but the expression in the eyes of someone deeply disturbed — an Alzheimer’s patient or someone with dementia — that innocent, whatever-that-is in the eyes; I desperately want to capture that, and so far I can’t. I haven’t been able to figure out how to do it. I’m looking and trying.

BD: I don’t know if I’ve ever been able to put that into my work.

JS: Have you tried?

BD: I don’t think I’ve tried because that was never in any…

JS: I’m sure you could. What would it be like for you to paint one of them?

BD: It would be pretty extraordinary.

JS: I’m interested — and this is just happening as we’re talking — do you think you’d feel like you’re betraying them?

BD: I wonder if I would feel that way. It’s interesting, I was listening to an interview with the director of that new film, Precious. The main character is a young, very overweight black woman who has been abused, is not very educated and ostensibly doesn’t have a lot going for her…except that she’s an exceptional person. The director said that before he found the woman who did play that part, he went around the country and auditioned a lot of young women. They were young, from poor backgrounds, abused, overweight. Finally it hit him, and he said, “I can’t do this to them. I feel like I’d be exploiting them.” I understood that.

JS: In Gilbert Grape, it’s so touching, and that incredibly beautiful and 500-pound woman… Johnny Depp, who played her son and had to say some really demeaning lines, turned to her and said, “I really hate saying these things to you,” and she just said, “It’s okay. It’s a good job.” She really wasn’t an actor before that, but the exposure gave her a whole new lease on life.

BD: You could take the position that you are exploiting a person, but you could also see it as honoring who that person is.

JS: I come back to your work again and again. I cannot look at one of your paintings without… I can’t glance at your work. I can’t. Your work is so rich and I say dimensional, but that’s not what I mean.

BD: I’ll take dimensional.

JS: It’s dimensional in the sense that you really feel like it’s three-dimensional, like you can touch it. It jumps out from the page. It doesn’t seem two-dimensional. It’s got so many layers of meaning, content. So much going on that it’s like revisiting a Shakespeare script as an artist. I’ve doneMidsummer Night’s Dream 17 times, and every time I’ve done it, I’ve learned something huge about it. I’ve approached each production uniquely because I’ve been in a different place each time.

BD: That’s a wonderful play. It’s funny and romantic and complex.

JS: And it always reveals itself in new ways, and your work does that too. I can’t glance at it because it grabs me and forces me to think about… Not think…I don’t want people to think, I just want them to experience. And that’s what happens to me with your work — the impact of the experience. Opening up your retrospective, I had a catharsis about my own work.

BD: That’s wonderful.

JS: If you knew you were going to die tomorrow, would you feel that you had to do something work-wise? Like, I have to do this. I have to stay up all night?

BD: I’d feel like I had to finish the two drawings I’m working on. It’s funny — this summer, I saw a friend of mine who I hadn’t seen in 20 years, Toni. She has two grandchildren, about 18 months old, who she adores. She said, “I’d love it if you would do portraits of them.” I thought, oh God, no. And then I went over to her daughter Koren’s house — her daughter lives next door. They all live on the Chesapeake Bay. It was a moonlit night and the light was beautiful. The two twin girls were luminous. One a little devilish and the other sweet and pleasing looking, so they’re very different and both so alive, constantly in motion. For the entire time, one of them, Josephine and Catherine — I think it was Josephine — was sticking her hand in her ear, in her mouth, pulling her hair out, gesturing. There was electricity between them — both 18 months old. I thought, you know, I could do this.

JS: I think if you wanted, you could dance your way to the moon. Thank you, Peggy Bailey Doogan.