Larry Poons:
Insights from the Mind of an Artist

The following interview with Larry Poons was conducted and transcribed by Kathleen Housley on August 25, 2025.

Housley: Emily Hall Tremaine liked to visit artists in their studios to see what they were working on. As she expressed it, she wanted “to see what was coming through the artist.” She was interested in the process of creation. Did she visit you in your studio?

Poons: I don’t think so. I think we first met at the Green Gallery through Dick Bellemy. We talked about Mondrian.

Housley: Did you see the Tremaine collection in Madison or Manhattan?

Poons: No, I never visited them. But on the question about what comes through the artist: we are picking up messages. We are part of an electrical system. So, from the very beginning in the womb, we’re picking up sounds. We don’t know it is a sound. We don’t know what it is. Our brain does not even function at that level at that time, but we still hear things. You’re not in dead silence from the moment you are born. Perhaps in a technical sense they’ll find out one day. Mozart wasn’t concentrating on what he heard, what he picked up. He couldn’t be aware in his mother’s womb. How could he be? His sensing apparatus, if you want to call it that, was picking up all of that and stored in a visual memory or an aural memory—all the possibilities that exist on which our systems are built.

Housley: People used to say Tremaine had a “real visual intelligence.” Does this relate to what you are saying?

Poons: I wouldn’t say so. We are aware of sound, of touch, of feel, and smell. They all go any way that a person’s imagination takes them. Someone coughing in a corner can trigger a complete novel—like eating the cookie, the Frenchman Proust got the whole inspiration by just a smell that attracted him. Everything did not happen all at once, but he was moved by the experience of a smell or a sound.

Poons: Mondrian, from the word go, was a gifted painter. I mean, his early paintings of flowers are gorgeous. They just simply were. When he would paint a painting, his hand was there. You know, it’s hard to put into words. It's like why Mozart is different from Beethoven, or why it's not the same. There was a period when Beethoven, Mozart and Haydn – you couldn’t tell whose piece you were listening to because they all sounded very much similar, not the same, but similar on a musical level. If you didn’t know the piece, you could say it’s one of the three. And that is God-organized. Beethoven didn’t become popular until the 20^th century. He was recognized but he was not as popular as many other people of that time. You can hear it for yourself. In the 20^th century that’s when his music really became popular. I don’t know why I’m saying that, but it’s just the way things work over time. We don’t live long enough to get an absolute reading on what is, or was, not so good until 200 years, but you won’t be alive to know it anyway, But that’s the way it is. Salieri was much more popular than the young Mozart. Hell, he was the court musician. We don’t live long enough to get an accurate reading on what, not who, is outstanding. It’s impossible. You can’t have a market without that being put in there. Why do you want to buy that picture?

Poons: But I think in the case of her liking Julie , at the moment that painting was painted, it was really chancy. It wasn’t like the previous dot pictures. That's all I can say. And she picked it out and that always impressed me, that at least so far as I was concerned, she picked out a difficult one. It might have been the only one available because there weren’t that many of those pictures back then. It could have gone either way, but it was a good choice for her. It was not the Enforcer-type of picture (Ed. note: Enforcer was the title of a painting by Poons). It was more like a regular painting. But they are all like regular paintings, I hope. But she might have got it because it was the only one available. But I think she actually liked it.

Housley: She did like it.

Poons: That’s what I mean. That you’ve picked up what other people have published. That she liked that picture of Poons – without a lot of words. When we talked, I can understand why she appreciated my carrying on about what the relationship was with Mondrian and the boogie-woogie paintings. Those things, they bounce around, they move, and the dot pictures move. They move too. Rembrandt moves. Anything that is good moves. There’s no such thing as static. Mondrian’s paintings in our time have been cracking because he had to paint in oil paint, so being the artist that he was, the painter that he was, the human being that he was, he couldn’t wait long enough to change the damn thing once he decided what it needed. As soon as he could get some more paint, or color or shape changed in a painting, he painted over it and he didn’t let it fully dry. So that’s why they cracked. He wanted to paint. He didn’t want to sit around and watch the grass grow. So he painted wet over damp, which you can’t do with oil paint because it will crack. So that’s the painterly urge that Mondrian had. His early paintings don’t stand still. He had to adjust them until they felt right just like a nude. You have to do it until it feels right and looks right. Looking right and feeling right is the same thing. I think Emily either initially really liked Julie. Maybe initially it was the only Poons available. I have no idea. Either way she grew to really like it, that’s what it sounds like, which speaks that she was sensitive to paint, or not. With that painting, she was, which is documented for us. She went a lot of places with this collection.

Housley: Mondrian was a bedrock to the entire collection.
She owned Victory Boogie-Woogie.

Poons: What’s important with any artist is how good their art is. And good is – define good – define what’s good in music, in literature, in poetry. For one reason or another, Emily picked out that painting Julie, which I think is going into a retrospective they're working on, which is going to be in the show that they put together. Which I was happy about. It finally resurfaced, I didn’t know she had the painting, but it moved around through many collectors. Until in my recent time, it was found. I’d given up on where it had gone or what had happened to it.

Housley: The Tremaines also acquired Tristan da Cugna. Do you remember about that?

Poons: The title came from Carl Andre or Hollis Fenten, my friends at the time. They used to name my paintings, gave them their titles. That was the mountains in Mexico. It’s a good one. She got another good one.

Housley: She donated it to the National Gallery of Art.

Poons: I’m indebted to her memory.