“Pictures of Warmth and Survival"


A Benefit Exhibition by Shelli Renee Joye


2005 BAY GUARDIAN INTERVIEW

GUARDIAN: “Thank you for this opportunity to interview you this afternoon. This is quite a body of work you have here – and I understand that you are donating 100% of all proceeds to the Earthquake relief effort? Is there a reason you’ve chosen this cause?”

SHELLI JOYE: Thank you, yes. The October 8th (2005) earthquake in the Kashmir area of the Himalayas devastated some of the most remote mountainous regions of Pakistan, Kashmir and Afghanistan. During the years I lived in Saudi Arabia many of my co-workers were from Pakistan and I wanted to do something… I remember stories of the very cold winters there and the survivors are living among ruins in tents. We’ve been planning this show as a sequel to my one last year as a solo exhibition for months, and we were fortunate that we were set for January. It was fate that this coincided with the need for help for the Earthquake Refugees, and I wanted to do something somehow to help these kind and wonderful people through this harsh winter… I realized what better way to help than to use this show to not only raise funds for them, but draw awareness of their struggles to survive this disaster. It was then that I changed the name of my show to “Pictures of Warmth and Survival” and included the several recent photographs from the earthquake area you see on the walls along with my art.

GUARDIAN: “You mentioned your former show – could you tell us something about yourself – your past, your former shows, and how you got to where you are today?”

SHELLI JOYE: Yes, well I've always been attracted to colors and won a coloring contest when I was young and used to get in trouble in preschool with the finger paints. But I didn’t begin to paint canvases until after college in New York, in my mid twenties. I did paint one small canvas in 1965 in Texas, but didn't begin painting regularly until 1970 in New York, in a shared loft on the corner of West Broadway and Canal Street. My grandfather had been the youngest person to run a barge pulled by a team of horses along Canal Street, when it was a real canal that ran across the island, so I felt a comforting sense of “home” and belonging there, even though I had come there from San Antonio, Texas. Three of us shared a large one room loft on the second floor of the building. You could look out the window facing Canal Street and see the mouth of the Holland Tunnel just a block away. Early in 1970 I separated from my two partners and moved into another loft a few blocks closer to Chinatown which I liked. But I wasn't used to living alone, so I bought a sheep dog and named, he was very sweet. I named him Jude, and he was a good companion. I painted a few large canvases there and began to remodel the loft to turn it into a gallery – an idea that was still unique in this then-industrial part of the city. While I was going to showcase my own work there, I also had arrangements to show works from that of several friends from the Factory and Max's. Robert Mapplethorpe had offered to contribute some of his leather boy sculptures to the venture... Strange thing about Robert – while he is known for his photography today, back then I didn't even know he was a photographer, having never seen him with a camera, although I had been to his small loft several times socially, where I was able to see his various sculptures.

GUARDIAN: “So, what happened?”

SHELLI JOYE: Well, at the time I was also working full time for the Port Authority – my office was in the then-uncompleted North Tower of the World Trade Center – as a junior engineer, and trying to turn this huge industrial loft into a gallery, doing all the carpentry and even plumbing myself, sanding floors, and lighting, all the details to set up a gallery… AND painting on top of it… well, I really, really overextended myself and ran out of money, and energy, and time, and money, and (did I mention money?) sometime by late 1971. I was somewhere between complete exhaustion and a mental breakdown, and something had to give. so I returned to Texas to regroup and re-energize.

GUARDIAN:“From Texas to New York to Texas is a pretty stark change, especially in the early 1970’s. I am curious. One, how did a you end up with a job as an Engineer in New York in the late 1960’s, and Two, how did this nice girl engineer in her 20’s from, where did you say, San Antonio, get involved with the whole Warhol scene back then? Seems like an unusual fit.”

SHELLI JOYE: (Laughing) It didn’t seem unusual through my eyes back then, it was just where I seem to have been supposed to be. Let me tell you a little about my past. I entered Rice University on a scholarship in Physics, which I guess WAS unusual, but I felt really at home in the sciences. I had won the scholarship through winning a science fair competition in my senior year in High School in Northern Virginia – you see, my dad was a Colonel in the Air Force, stationed at the Pentagon, and he was always telling me to follow where my heart led. Anyway, the project was a "linear ion accelerator" - basically a clear Pyrex tube about six inches in diameter with a huge Van de Graff aluminum sphere on top that captured megavolts of static electricity from a moving rubber belt driven by an electric motor. I used a diffusion vacuum pump to draw down a very low vacuum inside the glass tube, but there was still obviously lots of gas, which is what glowed when the Van de Graff was charging. The whole apparatus didn't really accomplish much in the way of research but it created an amazing glowing plasma display in the vacuum inside the glass tube, like constrained Northern lights. That was my “ticket”, so after a year of physics I became a Math major, and then went on to study Electrical Engineering, eventually achieving my B.S. E.E. . I'm a double Gemini and perhaps that explains why I tended to study abstract invisible relationships, and ended up in electrical engineering, where, as in quantum mechanics, you can't see or touch what you are working with. During the last three years of school (by this time I had transferred to UT) I was married to a BFA painting student and all our friends were art department people (as you can imagine, I stretched a lot of canvas for my ex!) One of our best friends, a guy named Stephen Mueller, had spent a lot of time in New York on school breaks and had developed some close relationships with the crowd hanging out at Warhol’s Factory. My parents had given me $ 500 as a graduation present and we – My ex, our friend Stephen Mueller, and I - used that to move to New York. For the first month we lived with another friend named Stockhard, at her West Village apartment. She was getting involved in theater at the time; little did any of us realize where that would eventually lead her. Actually, her place was all of a block away from the melee between the gays at a local neighborhood bar and NYPD, which would later become famous as the Stonewall Riot. Interesting and exciting times, but like most other kids then, we were all broke and starving, but happy nonetheless. Running out of money and looking for jobs, it wasn't until almost a year later, encouraged by Andy, that I began to seriously paint.

GUARDIAN: “So tell me how you met Andy. What was he really like? And did you hang out at the Factory at all?”

SHELLI JOYE: It was probably during that first week we were in New York that I met Andy. That was June 1969 and I had just turned, wow, 23. The three of us went to the Factory, which was this big loft in a building overlooking the west side of Union Square, above a sporting goods store. We rode the elevator up to the sixth floor and were surprised to see a very unpretentious Andy sitting alone near the entrance to a small closet-office across from the elevator. He looked up at the three of us and just said "Hi!", and Stephen, who had brought us and already knew him, introduced us. He took our photo with his Polaroid camera (which he carried everywhere those days). Well of course we were young, and we were beautiful, and like most that were young and beautiful back then, we were also quite broke most of the time, and so spent a lot of time visiting people and hanging out. As it turned out, the Factory was within walking distance of Stockhard’s borrowed apartment in the West Village. Because we spent so much time there, we became pretty close to Pat and Andy and his “staff”. While Andy seemed to take a liking to us, he always was gregarious to everybody, which I suppose was part of the reason everyone liked being around him, and some of the “hang-arounds” – you know, the ones trying to get fame from hanging around someone famous – kept hanging around! (laughter) But after a couple of months he invited the three of us over to his uptown Brownstone where he lived with his Polish mother, whom we’d never met. I remember that an enormous merry-go-round horse startled us just inside the front door to his brownstone. I was also surprised when he mentioned that he and his mother attended Mass every morning. I doubt many people knew then, or even now, what a “good Catholic boy” he was! Of course, he had been shot by Valerie Solanas in the Factory just the year before, so perhaps that had made him more religious. No idea! I also became friends with Pat Hackitt (Andy’s secretary, who was always busy transcribing tapes of Andy’s conversations), although we weren’t part of the groupies per se – there was kind of a line between those who hung around to be “with” Andy, and those of us who were just, well, friends. Anyway, that 4th of July a whole bunch of us got in this van and went to Rockaway Beach and got in trouble with the locals because some of us decided to go topless. Jed and Jay drove the van, they were twins from California, one of them was living with Andy and we all made fun of him! It was a great summer, though the Vietnam thing was still big. Anyway we ended up becoming friends with Andy and Pat and a lot of the people who wandered in and out. He took a liking to our unlikely group whom he referred to as “the ménage from Texas”, and we found ourselves as part of their scene, hanging out in the backroom at Max’s Kansas City most nights, eating chick peas and “being” there – remember, this was 1969. It was a fun but exhausting time, lots of drug use, and a lot of the friends from then are now dead… Sweet Eric Emerson was found on the Eastside Highway years later, dead of an OD. I also remember going to these parties where often this very petite lady would perform sex with a Coke bottle. Being still somewhat of a puritanical sort (for that era, at least) this made me somewhat uncomfortable, but there I was. A few months into 1970 she apparently jumped out of a 20th floor penthouse garden in mid Manhattan. Sorry. Anyway , back to your question, we probably went over to the Factory several times a week, and became entwined in Andys energy. Pamela began working on a project for him which entailed sewing a set of sort of Lederhosen for six people who would be arranged against a wall at different heights and filmed. And when he found out I was a lighting engineer working for the Port Authority he asked me to help with various projects.

GUARDIAN: “So you were actually hired as a Consultant to Andy?

SHELLI JOYE: No, no, not hired, Andy didn't pay too many people; he was very tight with money! I don't think even Pat was paid during her first year of working as secretary for Andy, it was only when she told him she had to resign that Andy offered to pay her! While nobody else seemed to be concerned with money, he was always worrying about bills and payments, so I suppose that was good. But no, after a few months he sort of, um, “incorporated” me into a new project (he did this a lot); he had approached the television networks, as I remember it was both NBC and CBS, putting out feelers that he was interested in doing a television show for which he would provide film converted to television video format, which was where I came in. He had always been very concerned about the lighting for his films and, knowing I had an engineering degree AND worked as a lighting engineer for the Port Authority AND wasn’t one of the “groupies” began to ask me some basic questions on this problem. It was interesting – because I had begun doing more and more work in lighting, which none of the older male engineers really were interested in - they all wanted to do electrical power and controls and things – I really got into lighting theory and practice and we got into some very deep discussions on resolving the issues he had, artistically as well as practically. It also led to some interesting side conversations - One day while going over some sketches, he was asking me questions about my Polish ancestors (my mother's father came from Poland as a baby with his father, whose other children and wife died in the Great Flu Pandemic of 1918) and I found out that our grandfathers had come from the same small town in Poland! Small world I suppose! So yes I worked for about a year or as a "lighting consultant" to Andy but it really was not formal nor paid, like most of the jobs swirling around the Factory. But it was fun, and I have a lot of great memories working with this man.

GUARDIAN: “Who got you interested in painting, correct?”

SHELLI JOYE: Yes. I was living at the small Canal Street loft, the one with the view of the Holland Tunnel, and I began doing small watercolors in a way that just came to me. I would put the paper flat in our large industrial sink bottom and mix different things with the paint to change the viscosity, then I’d dry them in an oven with the door open. I did quite a few of these and on the spur of the moment one day I put them all in a big notebook and took them to the Factory and showed them to Andy for his opinion. He said “How great, can I have them?!” and I immediately said yes, hoping he might offer me one of his silk screens in trade. Unfortunately, he didn’t – I found out he was pretty tight with his art, spending a lot of time and energy at self-promotion where his assistants were the ones actually “making” the art he had conceived, hence I suppose the name Factory. During the year or two that I spent time at the Factory, it would usually be Gerard Malanga or Ronnie Cutrone doing or one of the Johnson twins (Jed or Jay) doing the actual physical art making. He also was working a lot on films (which I just spoke about); a lot of the others there were more involved in the films Andy was shooting: Viva, Taylor Mead, Eric Emerson, Jane Forth, Ultra Violet, that whole group. Anyway, this acceptance as a “real” painter by Andy immediately put an unexpected strain on my living situation – I guess it was jealousy, or, well, I don’t know, but the relationship between 3 of us – the “Menage from Texas” - started fell apart, coming to a crash as the result of one incident. We had gone to a photo shoot of Ruspoli Rodriquez, who at the time had a studio on one of the upper floors of Carnegie hall. While we were there, in walks Salvador Dali with his ocelot and two very attractive women speaking French. While half of the people grouped around Dali, being fairly shy I hung back, feeling pretty self conscious about being in the presence of the famous artist. After about ten minutes, though, one of the women came over to me and said “Dali would like you to join us for a luncheon tomorrow at noon at Trader Vic's, would you come?” Bewildered I of course accepted, and it turned out to be a wonderful afternoon – all of about ten people were there, with a table laden with gourmet food – a far cry from Chick peas! – and wine. I sat between Elsa Peretti, a jeweler, and a very handsome Helmut Berger, the star of a recent Luchino Visconti movie, “The Damned”, who were both amazingly gifted conversationalists. I was subsequently invited to join their “group” to attend some events later in the week, but 2 events put an end to this. First, Dali ended up returning earlier than expected to Europe (with his pet ocelot!). Also, unfortunately, the aftermath of this wonderful luncheon was I found my belongings outside the door of our loft. Forced to make a choice between a nomadic life with a group of European artists, which was, I admit, very tempting, and survival, I proceeded to find my own place – the loft at 32 Greene Street, a half a block north of Canal Street. It was here I began painting large canvases, developing my color flow techniques. I spent most of the next five years painting canvases there, hoping to interest the galleries there. Unfortunately, as I found out, the galleries weren’t interested in an artist with a BSEE – and without 20 years of showing in galleries already. So I decide it was time to relocate, get a fresh perspective on life, and art, and do something different.

GUARDIAN: “So you moved to San Francisco?”

SHELLI JOYE: Well, during the past 6 years in New York I had tried various things to influence my paintings. I had studied with Chongyam Trungpa, Alan Watts, Da Liu, and John Lily, who had done research in the ‘50s with interspecies communication, basically trying to communicate with dolphins in a dark swimming pool while on LSD. Decades after these experiments Lilly was travelling around teaching his ideas about the “Human Bio-Computer” and how to practice contemplation in an anechoic chamber, which is basically a soundproof, lightproof, sensory deprivation chamber. I built one of these chambers in my loft where I used to practice contemplation in preparation to paint. It was through this that I was drawn into exploring the realm of contemplative practices and magic – they became very interesting to me, which seemed ironic considering my techno/engineering background. Anyway, I had applied to and was admitted to the Masters program in Asian Studies at the California Institute of Asian Studies. I wanted to learn to read Sanskrit sufficiently well to study Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras in detail, feeling the Yoga Sutras were the best technical guide or map of the psycho-spiritual dimensions that one travels through during contemplative experiences. A year into this program, I took a course on Tibetan Thangka Painting from a neighbor of mine, a young Tibetan refugee named Wangyal, from the Cultural Integration Fellowship Ashram on Fulton Street, right across from Golden Gate Park. It was after that I began working on abstract flow paintings once more and actually painted what I think is one of my best works ever on the Bicentennial - July 4, 1976. The work is called “Solaris” (I had just recently seen a Russian movie called “Solaris” and had been very impressed by the visuals…), and still have among my personal collection. Having given up on the whole gallery scene from my disastrous New York experiences, I still sold a few canvases, but my llife was about to change again. I had met and fell in love with and married a fellow student at the Institute in 1977, and right after our second child in 1980 we packed up and moved to, of all places, Saudi Arabia.

GUARDIAN: What was THAT like? I imagine it was a culture shock?

SHELLI JOYE: No, surprisingly, as we both worked for Aramco at the time (the whole reason for moving there), and lived on the various “American compounds” at their facilities. It was really more like living on a military base than living in the Middle East proper. Anyway, we had a large house, which gave me the ability to begin painting in earnest, developing a lot of the techniques I still use today, and did so for the next 19 years. This proved to be a boon – the Saudis liked my work because it was colorful and abstract - color is at a premium in the desert and of course Muslim art must be non-representational anyway. We eventually participated in a show in Al Khobar, “Eastern Desert Colors”, which finally was my “break” into the gallery scene, and was honestly surprised that out of the entire body of work shown, every one sold. It made a nice nest egg with which to move back to the states after our contracts finally ran out, and it became less and less safe to live there due to the political situation. Remember, this was just after the gulf war, and Americans had gone from benevolent protectors to suspicious outsiders. It was, by 1999, time to come home.

GUARDIAN: So, after nineteen years in the desert, was it difficult for you, the transition?

SHELLI JOYE: Not really. I mean, sure, living in the middle east is a lot different than living in the bay area, but having been around Americans, and maintaining my ties with my family and friends back here, it was surprisingly easy, although there were a few things that were surprising – the abundance of cellphones, the music, and the lack of restrictions. Remember, Saudi is a very tightly controlled society, even for us “American expats”, so not having the presence of the religious police watching you and the ,military keeping an eye on you and the censors reading everything you received and mailed (my daughter once got in trouble – I was literally scared to death - when coming back from a trip to visit my parents she had a “Sex Pistols” cassette tape in her suitcase and the Saudi customs agent threatened to arrest her – and all of us – for bringing this “banned western filth” into their country. Different cultures!). Anyway, the strain was far harder on my spouse, who had been more comfortable in the Middle East than I anyway, and we shortly separated, and I had a few smaller apartments and rentals until I ended up living at our present house in Oakland.

GUARDIAN: Where you are currently painting again?

SHELLI JOYE: Yes, of course. One of the main reasons we, my current partner, Susanne, and I, bought the house, other than its charm and nice location, was that it had belonged for 51 years to a rather amazing woman who was herself an artist, Cheary Marie Hirstel, and not only are there small bits of her amazing art hidden throughout the property, but there was a pretty big outdoor garden shed which she used as a studio herself, as well as a huge indoor space which was perfect as a new studio. The house is almost directly over the Hayward Fault (something we didn’t know until having lived there a couple years), and between Cheary Marie’s half century of making her magical art, the presence of the fault, and the subterranean stream literally running under the house, it became an inspirational and wonderful space to continue with my life’s work.

GUARDIAN: Wow – it sounds like you’ve had an amazing life so far, and I suspect you have even more planned. What comes after this?

SHELLI JOYE: Well, I do want to thank Alice here at Splitters for letting us hold this show here – they donated the space, and they help a lot of local artists out, so I just wanted to thank them. In the future, well, being able to exhibit in this space, with these huge brick walls and expanses, I’m forming a vision – I’m not quite sure the magnitude yet, but I want to combine my current techniques with 2 ideas that might work into each other - one, making smaller, more affordable artworks that people can enjoy and perhaps take home with them – kind of maybe a “Drink the beer, eat the pizza, and buy the art” sort of thing, give people a chance to have original art on their walls at home, that won’t break their bank. The other idea is, after looking at this huge expanse of a brick wall, of doing a large scale piece – maybe a mosaic of these smaller pieces – to cover this entire wall. It’s a lot of work, but something I can envision. I’ve also been surprised, in that my daughter, Alyssa, who currently lives in London with her new husband, Mark, and has a couple of my paintings at her flat, has commented that a number of their friends there have expressed an interest in my work, so perhaps, well, I don’t want to say too much, but the possibility of doing something in Europe is intriguing, but that would be some time off in the future, if at all. I’ve also found myself drawn to an absolutely different genre – Russian Iconography – and have even taken a workshop in this fascinating medium, using authentic and historical pigments and techniques from 4 to 8 hundred years ago. Right now, however, I just want to be able to help the Kashmiri People survive the winter – after that, then, maybe we’ll see.

GUARDIAN: Thank you very much for giving us this much time. You have a wonderful story, and I hope your show here does well.

SHELLI JOYE: You’re welcome, and thank you!

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