Double Take: The Art of Elizabeth King

(somber music) (upbeat music) - There were some students here the other day, and they said, they were looking at some of the heads over there in the showcase, and one of them said, "Is that a print?"

And, I thought, "Wow."

If you told me, 30 years ago, that someone would ask me if my works were prints, I just would have been so amazed.

And naturally, I am a little worried about it, because it's quite easy to scan your head, reduce the size, and print it out, and this would be just the right size for the printer.

So then the question is, "Well, what do I get doing it this way?"

I think my tension, in effort, going into the object, the object absorbs it, the object comes to possess it.

You might not be able to say, well, here's where the tension is, and it isn't here on the print.

The net effect, I hope, and I will argue for this, will be that the print won't have the same kind of intelligence coming out of it that the sculpture will.

Everything that I do, whether it's a photograph, an animated film, an installation, a sculpture, always really starts with a traditional process of modeling, or carving, but really, modeling is what I start out with.

So initially, the process is one of getting larger masses where they belong, and they're set up so that they look like the same size to my eye.

So I rotate them, and then compare the profiles.

I'm fascinated with the departures from realism, of which there are many in my work, and the biggest one being that its scale is smaller than life size.

Its materiality is very up-front, so when you look at a piece, you're very aware that you're looking at something made of clay, carved of wood, jointed a machine with brass.

(upbeat music) This is a major piece for me.

It's a piece that I made between 1989 and 1991.

The reason that I'm here is to pose this piece.

It's borrowed for the show.

It's owned by the Hirshhorn, and the question is, it's not just a fixed object.

It's a movable object, so when it travels, someone has to pose it.

- I don't know if it's fair to call her a sculptor, in the sense of making busts of clay, and casting them in bronze.

That's just one aspect of her work.

She is much more boundary-breaking than that.

(upbeat music) Some art is like a chicken bone stuck in your throat.

It just doesn't go down easy, and in that, you have to kind of (coughs), you know, you have to kind of be with it to get it, and yet, it doesn't mean that at the same time, it also can't be beautiful, or engaging, or in her case, rapturous.

You know, there is a kind of joyous feeling when you see the, you know, it's fantastic.

She is kind of a wizard.

- There's a term called the uncanny valley, which has to do with that moment when things approach a degree of human believability, but don't quite get there.

I don't think that's what's going on with Elizabeth's work.

It's not like we make the mistake of thinking that her sculptures are actual people in the world, but they get to us.

We know there's a human intelligence there, and it's disorienting.

- In junior high and high school, I started making caricature figures out of wax, like a lady combing snarls out of her hair.

Those figures were the beginnings of an interest in capturing facial expressions.

When I went to art school, I actually went rather suddenly, and transferring from a liberal arts college, just hungry for art, and thinking painting.

But there were no openings in the painting department at the San Francisco Art Institute, only sculpture, and I said, "Okay.

I'll take sculpture."

At the time, I felt like I stuck out, because my of interest in the figure, and I was embarrassed by it, and sort of tried to hide it, by inventing various justifications and excuses for the figures.

So I took some of these little figures, and I sort of chopped them up, and put them in these absurd, kind of metaphorical environments.

There's a little bit of theater there.

(upbeat music) - Elizabeth was always an artist at heart.

We met at the San Francisco Art Institute.

We were both undergraduates, and it was a sculpture class.

From the first work of hers that I saw, it was obvious that it was a unique voice, so while everybody was making big, minimalist sculptures, Elizabeth was making really involved, small figures.

- This was in the early '70s, late '60s, early '70s, and there weren't a lot of models for young women who wanted to be sculptors.

The faculty was all male.

The rising stars were rough, and macho, and they were making big, minimalist sculptures.

This was really early, in the days where, out in California, but everywhere, there were these consciousness-raising group so women, so there was lots of conversation about opportunities, or the lack of opportunities, for women to do their work, and have that work get seen, and bought, and talked about.

So this is the crate for a piece that I made long ago, in the 1980s, called Articulated Figure.

Each vertebra is made out of a separate ball-and-socket joint, and can be, you know, you can, it's a pain in the neck, you know?

But if you loosen, let's see if there's one that's loose.

If you loosen these caps, which are made out of lamp parts.

Well look, this one's loose, then there's full motion across this lower section of the spine, and when you pose it, then you can tighten that.

So, all incredibly labor-intensive, but accurate.

So this shim, here, just adds enough friction in the joint.

This is a portrait of my grandmother.

So for this, I looked at photos of my grandmother.

I hadn't perfected, yet, an ability to make casts from life, which I did later with my mother.

I got really fascinate with how I could do a better job making a movable figure.

I wasn't really aware that it was like anything I had seen before, and then the puppet took a kind of central, foreground place, as I made it larger, and got better at machining the joints, and I learned how to weld and solder.

I didn't just want the prosaic motion of the puppet.

I wanted more subtle motions.

I wanted a puppet that could raise one shoulder, or I wanted a puppet that could tilt its head, and that started to really capture my attention, and I thought, I spent a lot of time, just on my own, really, just studying the anatomy, looking at skeletons, and looking at manuals of anatomy, and studying the way the joints were designed.

Always, it's a portrait.

I've used myself.

I've worked from my mother's face, my grandmother's face.

These three faces have reappeared in the work, across time.

A lot of robotic hands look claw-like, if you've seen them before, and I don't want to sacrifice that, so I'm always dancing between traditional sculptural form and interrupted by mechanical operations that allow for realistic motion.

In the case of this thumb here, once I've made this joint, then I carve the profile of that section of the finger, and I also drill another hole in another socket, so that the next knuckle can go in.

And then once that's done, then I cut away, so that it can assume all the poses that a thumb could do, and at the same time, look good, look thumb-like.

So each individual finger takes one, two, three, about a week, to make one finger, and I'm thinking about that now, because I have a deadline.

I'm thinking, "Do I have?

"Are there hours in the day to do this?"

(upbeat music) Here's a picture of my mother and father on their wedding.

- [Man] Her father is not just a nuclear physicist, but also an internationally-known materials experimenter.

He imbued her with a love of machinery, and of actual making things.

- Late one night, for some reason, I found myself speaking on the phone with one of his research partners, and they were solid state physicists.

They examined very minute molecular structure of target elements, the nature of elements, using the neutron beam.

My father's partner said that when John publishes his data, everybody knows it's rock solid.

I found myself thinking that I might be like this as a sculptor, you know?

That when the piece is shown, it would be rock solid.

It would be perfect.

All the mistakes would be hidden.

So, I coasted on this for years, and absorbed it as a kind of value.

And then, one day, I was speaking with my friend, and I said, "Do you sometimes have more "opportunities than are healthy for your studio life?"

And she said, "Well, Elizabeth, "I've just learned to make my mistakes in public," and I was blown away, and I thought, wow.

That's extraordinary.

Could I learn to do that, too?

So this is the big dilemma in the studio.

It's like do you stick with your original plan, and make something that's rock solid, or are you fickle, and find that you want to switch courses in a fundamental way, in the middle of a piece, and I think every artist feels this in the studio, and every writer, everybody doing anything creative.

- [Man] Well, you can tell from Elizabeth's expression that she realized her picture was being taken.

(laughing) - And I remember asking you to help me move my table saw into my shed, on the-- - But she hasn't told you about this beautifully-sited cabin on the crest of one of the banks of Mount Tam.

- There was a little gravel parking lot, and then you had to go down 60 steps, 60 moss-covered, slippery, old, creaking, and rotten wooden steps.

- Constantly wet in the fog.

- I had a job, and I bought my first table saw.

It was a big deal.

I remember, I bought it from Shasta Hardware, and this old guy who sold it to me said, "Now, "you count your fingers before you turn it on, "and then you count them again after you turn it off," and it was like a great moment, my first saw.

So of course, I wanted to bring it down and plug it in in the shed.

So I knew Carlton.

I said, "Carlton, you know," I knew he had a car, and so the real reason we've been together all these years, a man with a truck.

- Oh, I thought it was sentimental.

- And a willing, right.

So the two of us, like slowly, step by step-- - Step by slippery step.

- It was an all-day job, getting this thing.

It was a big, heavy table.

We still have it, you know?

- We still have it.

- It's been the table saw that we've used all these years, a good-- - But, what was cool about it is we got it down there, and we put it back together, and we went to turn-- - We plugged it in.

It never got up to speed.

There wasn't enough electricity.

So then what did we do?

- Then, my brain started working, and I thought like, "Well, she could put it on the Hate Street Studio, "and then she'd be there a lot," making cuts on your table saw.

- You did offer, that's true.

You offered to let me set it up in your studio.

That's right.

- And you did.

- Right then and there.

You know, I'm just realizing this for the very first time.

That was probably the real beginning of our relationship.

So it's been a good saw.

We've gotten a lot of good use out of this saw.

And here, unlike on Mountain Lane, we actually have the electricity to run it, and it will get up to speed, and it will run.

Want to turn it on?

- Mm-mm.

- Okay.

- But that's the saw.

- Carlton has been an extremely important part of her work.

He's making very interesting work, too, you know?

- He is my dream audience.

He's the first person that I show the work to.

He's the person that I bring my problems to.

He brainstorms with me.

He hears me try out plans.

He's my soulmate in the work.

I'm always flummoxed by the fact that, and I can't stop thinking about this, as animals, we're flesh and blood one minute, and personalities with intent and character the next, and that maybe this is what empathy is, is that you listen to someone speaking, maybe it's someone you don't like very much, and they're speaking.

You're listening to them, and you are imagining them digesting their lunch, and there's something incredibly human about that, and vulnerable about it.

Maybe the deeper empathy happens when those two things go together, but they usually don't.

Usually, the doctor, we complain about our doctors.

They have bad bedside manner.

That's because they're thinking about the state of our pancreas.

They're not thinking about our feelings about it, or our worry, or our anxiety.

They're totally focused on the pancreas, and a very great doctor can look you in the eye, and think about your pancreas at the same time, but it's really hard to do.

That's sort of how I think about my work as well, that you look at it as a thing one minute, and then the next, you look at it as a gesticulating figure, and you read the figure with all of your own body empathy, and the pieces, at those moments, the pieces step into the long tradition of sculpture, or dance.

(upbeat music) - Her dramaturgy is the body.

She's not tied to narrative in the same way that the puppet world tends to be.

Her narratives are all about anatomy, and the way the human body moves.

- I don't know anyone who's more almost obsessive about detail.

You can see it in her work, but it never loses its charm.

It never looks overworked.

She's a wonder, and she's brilliant.

There are very few artists of her intellectual caliber.

She's exceptional.

- The isolated body parts, the eyes, the limbs, does that come out of the animation to some extent, or does the animation come out of that?

- I worked for about 20 years, making articulated figures, before I did any animating, so the animating sort of hit me like a bolt, really.

I mean, that I had inadvertently been making these small, precisely-posable things, that were perfect for stop-frame animation.

So then that really opened a new chapter in my life.

- Her work has a free, strange, sometimes disturbing spirit to it, also ironic, also humorous, also lovely.

- We have only to look at the art market and the highest selling artists, and there are almost no women in those top brackets.

And while it may seem superficial, it is actually the way that the art world gauges who's important and who's not, and who makes it into collections, and whose legacy is solidified.

- I think once, I applied for a grant, and I bumped into a guy on the street who I barely knew, and he said, "I was on the panel for that grant."

He said, "I thought the work was great."

He said, "But those guys, they weren't going "to vote for that."

And I thought, you know, "Yeah right, you know?

Sweet young thing, she's putting dressed on the wall."

Like, Jonel Judd, are we going to vote for that?

I don't think so.

You know?

So!

I think some of her earlier work was more explicitly doll-like.

And, you know, that's like double jeopardy, you know?

It's like dolls, oy.

- There are women whose work is different from mine, and who are older than I am, but whose example has been a huge influence.

I always deeply admired Judy Pfaff, because I thought she was a real pioneer, and I thought she was gutsy, and I watched her not at first get the attention that I thought she deserved.

I thought there were male sculptors who were doing something like what she did, but not as good as what she did, that were getting more attention than she was, and this bothered me.

It bothers me still.

I think she carved new ground in terms of generating a spectacle of sculptural form.

Ursula von Rydingsvard is another very, very big one for me.

Judith Shea is a big one for me.

- I am very aware of the kind of privilege that I have been afforded.

Any success that I have been able to experience is due, in great part, by having mentors like Elizabeth.

- Though I see many good success stories for women in the art world, now, I think that there's a generation, maybe even two generations of women, who have remained under-seen.

- We're just seeing Carmen Herrera's show opening at the Whitney Museum of American Art, and she's 101, and they're showing work, groundbreaking work, that she made in the 1950s.

Artistic integrity, and important work, and excellent work, cannot be erased.

It can be postponed, and it can be oppressed, and it can be ignored, and it can be made invisible for a long time, but it does sort of rise with enough time, and when it does, you know, there's this power to it, right?

That has to do with a kind of untouchable, untouchable eloquence and relevance that can't be taken away from it.

(somber music) - I remember Elizabeth as somewhat solitary.

She was the cheerleader I wanted to be.

I got into theater.

She was an athlete.

I think it was clear by the time Liz was in high school that there was going to be art in the future.

She was just enormously creative.

The family decided, one summer, to all go back to Crystal Lake, and my parents rented a larger cottage in which Liz and Carlton could stay, and then I and my family lived in another cottage.

We didn't all live under the same roof, but I remember that she set up a studio in one of the rooms of that cottage, because she didn't want to leave her work behind.

I think she shepherds her art in a way that is pure.

There's no deviation.

There's no quitting.

There's no leaving off a little.

It's exacting, and it's devoted, and it's religious.

- So each eye is held in with this little springy ring.

- So each eye is held in with this little springy ring.

There was a wonderful ocularist who practiced out of Newark, New Jersey.

Earl Schreiber was his name, and I met him many, many years ago, and he agreed to teach me how to make glass eyes.

I think it really needs to be done every day, and exclusively every day, and that a great glassblower, doing this every day, becomes a great ocularist.

If I'm just going to do it when I'm not doing porcelain, or I'm not doing woodcarving, let's just say it's an important failure.

The eyes that you see now, in the sculptures, are either eyes that Earl made when he was alive, or they're eyes that I've found from my ongoing collecting of eyes.

- The fact that she's able to isolate eyes, and have them stand for an entire person, I think speaks to something really important about her work.

I know she's spoken, or written, more than once about how do you know when someone is looking at you, or whether they've drifted inside and are actually, they look like they're looking at you, but they're having a completely internal experience?

- A few years ago, I gave a talk at RISD, called A Sculptor's History of the Eye.

It started with a few shots of irises, and a little discussion of the anatomy of the eye, distant and closeup vision, the lens, the retina, various, Then I began, I went back, looked at Greek eyes, and I thought, I could show how these little catch-lights, how important they are, and here, without them, it becomes more of a representation of a face.

With them, the face is animated into life.

(upbeat music) - So, I wanted to ask you about the title, Portrait of M.

- Portrait of M. Oh, that's a good question, actually, because for years, I felt that I wanted to just keep it to myself, that this was a portrait of my mother, so M stands for Mom.

- [Woman] Can you tell a little bit about the photograph you showed us that evening?

- Yes.

The photo was taken in the hospital, where she was quarantined in recovery from Polio, and she's in her new wheelchair, she's wearing her first braces, and she's full of hope, and her face is just beaming with optimism, and she's looking into the future.

To do the portrait, we had a lot of fun.

I took casts of her face, many photographs of her.

We laughed and howled, and then, I was living in another town, but I would come back with a portrait regularly, and work on it from life.

So that's another thing about my work, you know?

That my growing up years, from the age of three on, were years surrounded by her paralysis, all the mechanical devices in our house, for her, her early braces, the crutches, the knee-joint of the braces, how it locked and unlocked.

All of the devices that sort of corrected her failed movement were just normal for me.

Mm-hmm good.

I'm so impressed that you had it turned down this low.

I'm terrified that people will turn the light up too high.

That's nice.

God, it's amazing, to be able to look at it.

We talked about that photograph that Sarah asked me about, and I said how optimistic she looked, and how full of hope for the future she looked.

But here, in this lighting, it's a more ambiguous expression.

Don't you see that the lines between her eyes, those two lines in the center of her forehead, give this a more complex gaze, a little more troubled, that this light shows, but that another light won't show.

Mind being filmed?

(mumbles) you walk in the door.

(laughing) - Hi!

What's going on?

- The estate was, well-- - Can I ask you, your uncommon capacity to scrutinize faces, do you think that evolved from your long care, and watching over your mom?

- I think, by being captured in a wheelchair, she responded to that with an incredible mobility of face, and she was very popular.

She had lots of friends.

People streamed in and out of that house, and she brought up three kids, and she did all this with her face, you know?

In essence, and had an extraordinarily beautiful face, but also a very responsive face, and I must have absorbed this, you know?

I must have watched this incredible face, and occupied it in a way, so that even the portraits of myself, in many ways, feel like portraits of her, too.

There was a very specific moment that I remember, and I was not young, you know?

I was 35 years old.

It was a time when I was making figures that were more like marionette puppets, that were strung figures rather than self-supporting figures, and I remember saying to a friend, looking at my work, I was saying, "I'd really like to make these things "stand up by themselves," and then it hit me.

It really hit me like a truck, you know?

And it hit me back at the time, that part of what I was doing, not all of what I was doing, but part of what I was doing was a kind of curious act of restitution, of correction, of repair.

You would look at her, and you would see the wheelchair, or the crutches, and you were constantly negotiating between those materials and her life.

So why would I not notice that I was doing something similar?

People asked me, "Well, wouldn't you like to do?

"Why don't you make them more lifelike?

"Why don't you use silicone instead of clay?

"Why don't you?

"Why aren't you doing animatronics?

"You could make it really walk?"

And, I've just no interest in that whatsoever.

I want to see those signs of life in spite of the materials, or over and against the materials.

(inspirational music) There was about a six-foot solid forest of blossoms here, that attracted incredible numbers of birds, some that I hadn't seen before in the garden.

It was tall enough so that I could see the tops of the flowers from my window across the street.

So I'd sit there with binoculars.

I'm sure, if anyone saw me, how creepy would this be, but I was looking out at the bird action in the garden, and it was fantastic to see, like cardinals feeding their young sunflowers from the sunflowers, and other birds just used it as perches.

The great thing about the garden is that the work is very, inside, I'm doing this very precise sort of exacting work, and then I can come out and fork manure in the garden, to sort of get it out of my system, you know?

It's a great place to solve problems.

If I'm having a problem, sometimes it's helpful to just come out, and there's always work to do in the garden.

You know, I had been teaching for 40 years, and I was ready to have a life that was defined outside of the institutional structure.

It's a very different life, now, and I worry.

Sometimes I worry that I'm not useful to anyone, because it seems like such a... After all these years, it just seems like such a luxury to be able to be in the studio all day, every day, and there's pressures.

There's deadlines.

There's sales that I feel tense about.

Sometimes I think I've just transferred all my hysteria and anxiety about school to the career of making work, and having some kind of role with the work in the world, but nonetheless, it's a very different kind of day.

And, if I want to take longer with something, I can, up to a point, and this is delicious, and it's been wonderful.

- [Man] I think both Elizabeth and I did a lot of caretaking growing up.

I mean, I think for the first 10 or 15 years of our marriage, Elizabeth went home every vacation, every summer, you know?

And I had a younger brother who was a Down Syndrome person, and was severely retarded.

You know, he was part of our family, and he required tremendous care.

- Both of us had complicated childhoods in which we emerged unable to conceive of having dependents that we could skillfully and properly care for, and I think we both had a really good idea of what that would be, and we were not ready for it, and not willing to do it.

I was teaching, and so I look back now and realize that a huge amount of my wish to be involved with children was met by teaching, and I always thought to myself that I was useful, and that the moment that young people left home, they came to me.

- She was a kind of legendary, charismatic teacher, and the students spoke of her as if, you know, I remember people saying like, "I'm one of Elizabeth's students," like, "I'm her student."

You know, they were very devoted to her, and she had this kind of charisma.

- The students get into your daily life, you thinking about them, amazed at what they've done.

And then you're trying to troubleshoot a given class that's not quite cooking, and what can you do for that group, and all the complexities of interacting with students would very much subtly push aside the more vulnerable and fugitive kinds of thinking that seemed to be so important for the artistic process.

I mean, I do worry.

When I look back and see how few pieces constitute my output across my lifetime, I do wonder where would I be?

Could I have made a few more pieces and gotten better?

It always felt like the Grand Canyon between the classroom, and my studio, and back again.

This felt like an arduous, long, complicated journey full of decompressions, and re-initiations, and joggings of memory, and all the thousand things you say to yourself to keep yourself going, and the little games that you play to keep the studio happening, and to talk yourself into thinking that it's worthwhile.

That all had to be done all over again.

(laughing) - I can't believe (mumbles) sick.

She's like, secretly famous, you know?

Everyone who sees her work does not forget it.

Elizabeth was my teacher in undergrad.

Since then, we've become friends, and she's a mentor and a hero.

The classes were intense, and exhilarating, and she makes you feel fascinating, you know?

That sense of, "You're fascinating," is a big deal to impose on a 19-year-old art student.

Then you're like, "I'm fascinating," you know?

"If Liz King thinks I'm fascinating."

And there were lots of Elizabeth King impersonations, you know?

Like, we would never do them in front of her, but lots of people had her Liz impressions down.

- At that time, in most universities across the country, and especially in art departments, most faculty were exclusively white men, so to connect with the only other woman, really, in a senior position, in a position of authority as a professor, was huge for me.

- She was kicking ass.

It didn't matter what her gender was, but now, I realize how significant it is that she was a woman kicking ass at that moment.

(upbeat music) - You talk about scale.

You talk about how the films become objects, and the objects become like film stills.

I said, "We can do that here.

We can present your work like it's never been "presented before."

- On the day that I unpacked it, I also unpacked that life cast of my mother's face, I just cried like a baby.

I mean, I had that cast in my studio all the time, but for some reason, seeing my mom, you know?

Like the one who would have really cared, right?

The only person who's ever handled my work, and made it look good, is Mike Belzer.

I really like that piece.

- This is great.

It's insane to think you'd do that, just that!

- For each joint, 15 joints.

And then the thing that-- - That's crazy.

- I'm really, really proud of, that I... This is the first hand, and you can see the top finger joint is a little crooked.

See how it sort of crooks in?

That top finger joint, in the index finger, crooks in.

And then there's another crooked joint in the ring finger.

- Is that by design?

- Yeah.

So, there's more crooked joints in the new hand.

So it's not so schematic, you know?

It's not just a stack of cylinders.

It's, like, a stack of crooked cylinders, just like your actual hand.

- Well, we're imperfect, right?

We're just-- - Right.

Amazing.

Beautiful.

- There was Mike, ready to take directions from me.

I had him for seven days.

The clock was ticking, and I did find myself thinking about magicians' hands, across the seven days of shooting, the miming of sleights, feints, motions of the hand.

But what are we going to hands do?

So, I went into my default mode, which is not much, you know?

That the hands would move automatically, or involuntarily.

That's been a theme all through the animation work that I've done, that the body has a mind of its own, and is constantly doing things that signal daydreaming, or thinking about the future, as well as focused motion of trying to do something.

So, each day, we would come up with something simple, and then Mike would take the full day to do it.

- We will actually do some live performance of animation, so people can actually watch paint dry, because it's about that exciting.

So you're out there, just moving it a little bit, you know?

It's not moving.

Oh, it's moving.

It's moving less than a 16th of an inch, and I'm checking things, and taking frames, and 24 pictures later, I have one second of film.

You know, if I could get a couple of seconds a day done.

- [Liz] So we're testing the ball and socket.

- Right.

Just hold it in.

- The other's tighter.

- Yeah.

If it stays like that, I can make a go at that.

- We can tighten it mid-shot.

The thumb's beautiful.

Oh my god, I love the way the thumb-- - Caresses at the end?

- Yeah.

That's lovely.

Oh my god.

- There's something to be said about the human interaction with stop motion.

There's something to be said about human interaction with sculpture, that people feel it.

(upbeat music) - "Dear Elizabeth, I fell in love with your little "sculpture, and I'm writing now to inquire whether the "work is part of an addition, and if it is, whether you would be willing to consider a trade "for a work of mine."

What a letter this was to get, maybe the best letter anybody ever wrote me in my whole life, just that he would want a piece.

Martin Puryear is a premier American sculptor.

He's become an international figure of really towering standing, with works all over the world.

After loving his work, and showing his work all the years of my teaching, it was very special to meet Martin.

I remember, we had dinner on the Upper West Side, at an Italian restaurant, and we spent the whole night talking about birds, and about falconry, and nobody talked about sculpture, so we made the arrangements, and set it up.

It was fantastic to send this head to him.

Then a box came to me.

"I remember your fascination with falconry when we met at "dinner a few years ago.

"I hope you like it.

"With warmest wishes, Martin."

So, it's been a lovely friendship.

Why is it that we want to stand in front of Girl with a Pearl Earring by Vermeer?

I mean, what is it about that image that we want to go back, we want to see it again and again, we want to look at it again, we can't take our eyes off of it?

You know, we don't work in a vacuum, and everyone takes their inspiration from different places, and unexpectedly for me, it comes from figurative traditions from other cultures and times in history, and these have continued to be of the deepest nourishment to me, not that I'm trying to do this, but just that it fascinates me to see how artists from other eras have captured the humanity and emotional presence in the figure.

Mostly, I just go back again and again to the set of the head on the torso, the set of the spine, the sense of the spine, and it has these great nipples, with little spiraling whirls, out to a set of, a little circle of tiny, little raised dots.

It's brilliantly, anatomically observed, and I just think it's one of the most sublime pieces I've ever seen.

I never get tired of looking at it.

- I came to realize after a number of years, that what I perceived as her worrying refinement over a piece, inevitably pulled it into something unique and special.

It was almost as if the accumulation of her focus and refinement is what caused a very subtle humanistic kind of power to emerge.

It had to take as long as it took, and it had to be whatever it was going to be, and no matter how much I questioned it, when it was done, there was no doubt that it was unusual and amazing.

- Probably the greatest influence she had on me was the kind of license to go as far as you can go.

Like, if you have to ask, "Should I keep going?"

the answer is yes, and it's so true in her work.

You know, you can look at this stuff with a magnifying glass and it just doesn't stop, and that's a distinction from the way we move through the world, and from how most things in life are manufactured, or interacted with, you know?

Like, out of necessity or affordability.

Things are done quickly, and cheaply, and Liz's work is this moment where no holds are barred, and she's gone as far as you can go.

- Sure, it's blood, sweat, and tears, and it's really hard work, and it's an amazing amount of commitment.

And maybe in some ways, it's absolutely absurd, that level of like every, single, tiny follicle, and, but not only is that what it's about, but that's called love.

I mean, it's love.

She loves it, and it is love that makes the thing, and it's love that glows from the thing, when you engage with that kind of intimate intensity, and that, I do think is one of her subjects.

- I'm working on... This is going to be right here, this little concavity, just to the left of this tendon in the wrist.

(somber music) Did you hear that hawk?

I think I see it.

I can't be sure.

It's way, way up.

It's so thrilling.

So we're gonna have a set of jointed armatures, that'll be off camera.

That's definitely a red-tailed hawk, isn't it?

Out hunting on this gorgeous day.

Look, some of the... It's right there!

Look at this!

Look at this!

I've never seen this before!

Oh my god, it's huge.

Look at the mockingbird.

It's flying away.

God, that was amazing!

You didn't get that on film, did you?

that was thrilling.

Right in the, and the mockingbird is really agitated.

Wow.

I thought that cry was way far away.

Did you see it?

Wow.

What was that?

Was it a red-tail.

It was too big for a Cooper's hawk.

It was definitely a big beauty, yeah.

Damn.

This is a good omen, here, right?

Wow.

I totally forgot what we were talking about.

(upbeat music)