BKL: No sense in it. Let’s get to the point, discuss real issues. I’ll be dead in a decade or two, maybe three. I’m just catching fire. There is so much I want to do. That’s the beauty of accepting it all, letting go and being in the moment.

JLL: Let’s get to the art, then. Your painting, assemblages, drawings. How do you classify your work? What style, what movement?

BKL: I don’t know. If you know, classify me. I am just a creative force working alone and doing what feels right, what interests me. I am producing work right now in two categories I call UltraRealism and Cathartic Aestheticism.

JLL: Do you define those as styles, or what?

BKL: More like thrusts and discipline. Cathartic Aestheticism is an evolution of spontaneous Action Painting and honors the Action Painters of the ‘40s, ‘50s and ‘60s. You start with a blank canvas and you release into it. The releasing frees you and opens you up. It’s the purest form of artistic creativity there is. Just you, the support and the media. You never know what it is going to look like except that it will look like nothing else. That’s the important thing. You don’t try to make it not look like anything else, it just looks that way if you dig down deep or transcend it all. That’s the pure joy of it. And, if you love colors like I do, it is very rewarding.

JLL: Your work doesn’t look like the ABs (Abstract Expressionists). Maybe a little Pollock here and there. Your paintings are too colorful, almost Fauvist.

BKL: I’m nuts for color. I’m blind in one eye and half-blind in the other, so what I have left of my sight is turned on by colors. I love finding new ways to position colors among each other to create pure visual effects. That’s all I try to do. Let the colors flow and keep adding more color until it looks right. I am not trying to duplicate or copy those guys. I love a lot of the work of DeKooning, Pollock, Gorky, Rotho, Stella and some others. A lot of them went nuts. They were too unbalanced, too self-indulgent. If they had maintained families they could have had it all, lived a lot longer and produced stuff in their later years that would have been far different from the work that got them recognized. Mellower, simpler, more beautiful. A shame we never got to see that.

JLL: How can you make such a statement? It’s something that can never be proven.

BKL: Not phenomenologically, but I am free to intuit. Why not? Art is not science, though at their origins the patterns are very similar. Look at Picasso, Monet, Gauguin. You’re not a complete person until you have children. That also makes you understand your parents and feel extremely grateful to them forever. You can’t deny your humanity. Being a good parent makes everything else work, gives you a wider perspective you cannot achieve any other way. Procreating and having to deal with the exigencies of raising children is essential for maturation. The great side benefit is that you get to know yourself so much better.

JLL: Most artists don’t think that way. They say a wife and kids hamper them.

BKL: Those are the dilettantes, the selfish little boys and girls who need babying, the "art is a jealous mistress" types. Bullshit! You need a family to take you outside of yourself, to reinforce the meaning of existence. Picasso was the greatest artist who ever lived and he had several families. Fathered a child when he was eighty for crissakes. Pollock ran drunk off the road and killed himself and his pretty young passenger at age 44. Selfish asshole. You don’t do that if you have people depending on you. You are responsible. You take care of business. If you live just for yourself it’s pretty shallow, pretty empty.

JLL: Surely you identify with other artists.

BKL: I would rather be working and not looking back or comparing myself. I am what I am and that’s all I’ll ever be. I see a lot of paintings. I go to shows, read magazines, been in museums all over the States and Europe. I’ve studied art all my life. I relate, identify with other artists more through their work than through interacting with them in the flesh. What a guy puts on a canvas is really him with all the pretense stripped away. A painting is a concrete distillation that summarizes an entire history of a person up to the point where the painting was left alone. It is something real. Lots of artists are full of bullshit. They come up with a floating basketball or some cute display that makes a transitory "statement." An artist is someone who has to create to feel sane, not a pop opportunist.

JLL: Why do people paint?

BKL: Many reasons. There are casual painters who really like it but are not obsessed with it. There are obsessed painters with little talent who push ahead and do great work out of shear will. There are very talented painters who create decorations or get stuck in one style because they don’t have the sand to get down and dirty. There are people who paint who are afraid of painting and they don’t know why they are not making progress.

JLL: Why?

BKL: Because they are afraid that they may not be any good. Afraid they will be found out. Afraid to take a chance so that they really might get good. Afraid of something. Fear is a strong emotion that carries a lot of charge. Better to channel the fear into a painting. Use the act of painting as a catharsis, a cleansing, a furnace where you burn away the dross, forge a new identity. Being an artist is an extension of being yourself, just as a painting is an extension of you being an artist. At the core of your being is something immutable. An awareness. An awareness of an awareness. Keep going back until it all fades into a singular realization, a portal from which the life force flows. What you do with that life force, that great gift, is all that matters. You have to love it, cherish it, respect it, listen to it, believe in it. It doesn’t have to be complicated.

JLL: So, that’s your source of inspiration.

BKL: No, that’s how I can point conceptually toward something that cannot be understood with the intellect. Like the Zen koan: Do not mistake the finger pointing toward the moon for the moon. There are many metaphors in philosophy. You use the intellect to cross the ocean of Samsara then "there’s a boat on a reef with a broken back" as Elton John quipped.

JLL: Madman Across the Water.

BKL: Correct. Great album. Norma Jean, Indian Sunset, Levon, Tiny Dancer, his best stuff.

JLL: You’re from that era, aren’t you? Hippies, peace and love, Viet Nam…

BKL: Yes. If our parents were "The Greatest Generation" as Brokaw says, my generation was the fulcrum, the impetus for the quantum leap that put humanity, culture, on the next level. Think about it, our parents secured peace, gave us penicillin, took us to the moon, but civil rights, computers, the internet, mass acceptance of individuality, save the planet, cell phones and a host of other things that bumped a lot of us toward the top of Maslow’s need hierarchy, we did. But, we can’t deny the past and we hopefully will measure up to it. Galileo said: "If I can see far it’s only because I stand on the shoulders of giants." A poet wrote: "I was a soldier, so my son could be a farmer, so his son could be a poet." This is the dream of humanity from time immemorial. The first painters lived in caves and rendered bison and gazelle out of ocher clay and blood. I now have a cave of my own made out of Styrofoam and concrete, but use acrylic polymers and stainless steel. Same human drive, same propensity to survive, to prevail via the act of creation.

JLL: Welcome to human history 101.

BKL: These are not new ideas. Just the way I understand them and express them today. I could be wrong.

JLL: Sounds good to me, but we have to get back to painting. My editor wants me to keep it down to 5,000 words. Talk about your process. How do you create a painting?

BKL: You have to be intensely grappling with a painting to get you to a place you haven’t been before. It’s like you are so tired you can’t sleep, so lonely there is no hope, so broke all is lost. Then you are totally free to transcend yourself and find something new. You’ve got nothing to lose. If you are attached to a painting, afraid you might screw it up, you never will enter it. You never will make it any better.

JLL: Talk more about the entering process.

BKL: That’s the key to completing a painting. You rarely finish a painting in one session, though sometimes it happens. All of a sudden you are totally in to it, you step back and Wow! You just know it is done. Most paintings aren’t like that. You paint over them every time you work on them. Ten times. Twenty times. The way you do it is to find a weakness, an ugliness, something out of place. You find one thing you can improve and you change it. That, in turn, changes the whole painting. Changes the balance between the colors, the values, the design, the composition. You see one thing to change, you change it, then you find the next thing, change it, and so on. That’s how you work over a painting. You keep making the next right move. Make it more vibrant, more interesting.

JLL: Kind of like the scientific process.

BKL: Yes, tempered with an aesthetic eye, knowledge of materials, confidence in your technique and fearless resolve you can make it better.

JLL: You always make it better?

BKL: No. Sometimes I make it worse quickly, destroy it, lose it forever. Then I have to dig deep and bring it back. And, it can be a long way and it’s never the same. I have paintings I have destroyed half a dozen times and am still working on many years later. Sometimes I can’t seem to get a handle on a painting no matter how hard I try, how far I let go.

JLL: How do you know when a painting is finished?

BKL: A painting is never finished. You burn out on a painting. You reach a point where you decide to suspend work on it. All my paintings are works in progress, even the ones on the wall and the ones people have bought and have hanging in their buildings or homes. I have five or ten new canvases going all the time. At a certain point I hang them up. I have one painting (Red, White & Blue) I have been working on for eight years. It’s had five different titles. In some places the paint is an inch thick – oil, acrylics, polymers, urethanes, brushwork, palette knife, hands. It’s been a prolonged battle.

JLL: Are they all that tough?

BKL: If they were I only would have done twenty paintings in thirty years.

JLL: How many have you done?

BKL: Don’t know for sure. A lot of my early work is lost. I didn’t care for a long time about keeping records or getting the business side of my art together. I traveled around a lot. I gave a lot of paintings away in Venice and Miami. I wasn’t into attachments, keeping hold of possessions. I painted some pyramids one time and guy came over and was so flipped out by it I gave him the painting on the spot. It seemed like it belonged more to him than me. It freed me up to do another painting. And another…

JLL: You seem organized to me.

BKL: Yes. Valerie handles a lot of it and the web has gotten me out there and made me more productive. I am selling paintings. But, I am not a factory. Each painting is meaningful, a product of my best efforts. It is an experience frozen in space and time. They are like children in a way. Van Gogh painted just over 1,000 paintings during his last decade on earth. Near the end he’d sometimes paint one or two in a day. Imagine that. His Irises brought in $43 million. Dr. Cachet sixty or seventy million. Those paintings probably took more than a day, maybe a week if Vincent was wigged out on turpentine or absinthe or psychosis. Who knows. But, seventy million a week is pretty good wages. The bitter irony is he never got any of it. He was a martyr to society. Everyone knows his sad story. It’s a fable.

JLL: What are your paintings selling for?

BKL: Thousands. I ‘m not in the top markets yet, but prices for my work have been steadily rising. My collectors love my paintings. Art is a very personal thing. Someone has to strongly connect with a piece to want to own it. Buying a piece of fine art is an affirmation of intellect, spirituality, taste, or other quality. It is also a financial investment. Each painting I do is unique and special and if someone doesn’t feel that way about it, I won’t sell it to them. It is a piece of my soul.

JLL: Why Austin, Texas? Don’t you think you’d be more successful if you lived in New York?

BKL: Define "success"? I like it here. I want to raise my daughters here. I can’t afford New York. I’ve got a 5,000 square foot three-building compound with a pool and a great studio. I can work here. The air is clean, the people are friendly. Everything I need is close by. New York, Miami, Los Angeles, San Francisco are a three-hour plane ride. I’ve got the best of both worlds. I live in the navel of America.

JLL: Who do you think was the greatest artist who ever lived?

BKL: Did you ever see that film, The Mystery of Picasso?

JLL: No, not yet.

BKL: It was done by Renoir’s grandson, I think. Picasso paints a dozen paintings live on silk during the course of a day. Renoir shoots it through the reverse side so you see the mirror image as he works. Picasso creates a painting that looks perfectly okay, then he keeps going, messes it up, brings it back in a new way, destroys it, brings it back. He never gives up, stays with it. That guy could make art out of anything. He was the greatest artist of all time without question. A wide-open creative channel who was allowed to run at full throttle. He went through every style of painting and made it his own then created new styles. He created hundreds of thousands of individual pieces, a billion dollars worth. He’s the Paul McCartney of music, the Shakespeare of plays, the…

JLL: Michaelangelo was greater.

BKL: No. Better in some ways, but not greater. Michaelangelo was the best classical sculptor, muralist, painter of his day. He will never be equaled in marble. He did the Pieta when he was in his early twenties. But all in all, if I had a choice to own a piece myself, I’d take Van Gogh, a Gauguin, a Matisse, a Chagall, a Monet.

JLL: You like painters who are like the opposite of you.

BKL: Opposite? In what way?

JLL: They are representational. You’re abstract.

BKL: Some of my stuff is abstract. Some of it is Impressionistic, Expressionistic. Look at Garden Path, St. Thomas Market, Cancun Garden, Tahoe, any of my orchid paintings and many others. My UltraRealism is enhanced representationalism.

JLL: Is that a word?

BKL: It works. There are so many isms I’ve given up trying to keep track. I just do my work and don’t try to accommodate any else’s idea of what is good because it never works. I see great stuff in magazines like Art News that keeps me in touch. But, mainly I just stay here and work and communicate over the internet.

JLL: You sell your paintings over the internet?

BKL: It’s the best way for me to do it right now. A website is a constantly updateable, living, evolving catalogue of your work available to everybody in the world twenty-four hours a day. It’s the best way for people to see paintings I have ever seen. Listen, I need some water. I need to move around, do something. Why don’t you bring your tape over here while I do some painting?

JLL: Sure. Can I paint too?

BKL: I insist. Here’s a canvas. Set it on the easel over there. Help yourself to the paint, brushes, whatever. Just make yourself at home and I’ll do the same.

We get ready to paint. Banning lends me some paint clothes. I hadn’t painted since my sophomore year in college when I took oil painting as an elective. To loosen me up, Banning opens a bottle of wine, a Piesporter Michelsberg Auslese, he has in the cooler. The wine was cold, slightly sweet and refreshing. He switches on the XM satellite radio to channel 71, "Watercolors," and modern light jazz fills the room from four speakers mounted high in the corners. Banning’s studio is a 1,000 square foot room with high ceilings and three massive skylights. The west end of the studio is set up for writing and video editing. Cameras, racks of digital tapes, folders of projects in various stages of completion, cover the expansive work areas. At the corners are two high-speed computers: a loaded PC on cable for internet correspondence, research and writing and a souped-up G4 with twin processors he uses to edit his videos and documentaries. Various scanners and printers are networked in, including a large-format HP DesignJet that prints his digitally mastered drawings on heavy rag art paper and 42" wide canvas. One wall is covered with awards and the others with paintings of all sizes and styles. The other half of the room is the painting studio. A long easel runs along the back wall mostly occupied with a 9’ x 5’ acrylic work, "Still Life with Disproportionate Fruit." Banning sets up a video camera to tape himself painting another large canvas on the floor as I get set to work on a small easel off to the side by the loft bed. He dips a big brush in a bucket of black paint and starts in… (this video can be seen at www.banning.net). For the next hour (except several sessions of throwing knives into a well-worn wooden target) Banning attacks the canvas, applying paint from cans, jars, tubes using brushes, knives, his hands. The tape runs out, he takes a break, grabs a Dr. Pepper from the refrigerator and comes to look at my work.

BKL: How’s it going there?

JLL: Looks like a mess. It’s not as easy as you make it look.

BKL: You have to get acclimated. You need to look into the paint and see something you can develop… Become the paint.

He glances at the painting for a second, then swipes his hand across the face of my painting and, with a few quick strokes, establishes a kind of rough organization to the blobs of paint.

JLL: Some of your paintings have strange titles. Let’s go through some of them.

BKL: Sure. Go ahead.

JLL: Joyous Liberation of A Somber Personality.

BKL: Look at the painting. What would you call it?

JLL: I have no idea. I sense what you are getting at, the way the colors explode, the exciting areas, the control, the release.

BKL: That’s it. Close enough.

JLL: How do you come up with these titles?

BKL: I don’t plan a title, but I want to make it interesting. I think a title should add a dimension to a painting. To call a painting "Untitled" is stupid, a cop out. It means the artist is hiding. I keep working on the title while I am painting. Titles whirl by in my subconscious mind and every once in a while one pops out. If it fits, I keep it until a better title comes along. When you are down to final strokes, a title pretty well has settled in and influences the look of a piece. Once you get the title, the end is near. It all works together – the colors, composition, balance, texture, overall feel, title – until it reaches a kind of critical mass. Then it’s basically done.

JLL: You use some weighty words: "Superimpositions," "Exegesis," "Nexus," "Fecundity," "Sublimity." Where do you get these words?

BKL: After college I got a job as a lifeguard on Key Biscayne and spent nine months reading the dictionary and words I liked I wrote down in a notebook. I tried to encapsulate their meanings in a single sentence, kind of an abbreviated lexicography. These words are in my subconscious mind and pop out when I need them, like when I need to name a painting. But I confirm these subconscious suggestions with my rational mind.

JLL: So you are always examining yourself, like Socrates.

BKL: It’s an old habit. Helps keep me on track.

JLL: This assemblage, Ideals of Democracy Splitting the Iron Curtain, what’s it all about?

BKL: Look at it. You have the face of Lech Walesa, the leader of the Polish Solidarity Movement, on a wedge of native oak, splitting down through a piece of chain mail, an iron curtain. Surrounding the wedge like a halo are the ideals of democracy: Expression, Opportunity, Representation, Dignity, Equality, Liberty, Tolerance. Below the wedge is a wall of plaster covered with a facsimile of actual graffiti from the Berlin Wall. I did this painting a year before the wall fell.

JLL: Wow. It was prophetic.

BKL: It’s a museum piece. I sometimes am moved by world events to create a piece, like Kobe, I did after the earthquake in Kobe, Japan, or Mount Usu, I did after the volcanic eruption. It’s like I can feel the pain of the people affected through the ether. When Nelson Mandela was getting let out of prison, I picked up a brush and did a painting while I watched it on TV. Those kind of paintings are like poems and you must do them. That’s my serious side, I suppose.

JLL: How about this one: DeKooning Wins the Medici Grant.

BKL: Hah! That one’s a pun, a goof. It just came to me. I always have a canvas or two on the side I rub extra paint on. That way I waste very little and it builds up texture. At a certain point, I see something in these refuse paintings, put them on the easel and the painting takes off. You know DeKooning’s famous painting Woman, right?

JLL: Yes. Very abstract.

BKL: Yes, and not very flattering to women. When he did it, he got a lot of attention, especially from feminists who were insulted. Anyway, DeKooning Wins the Medici Grant was my flash perception that if Wilem had been alive in Florence when Leonardo was there and won a grant the Medicis had offered to paint the Mona Lisa, it would look like this. It’s a goof. If you don’t get it, I can’t explain it any more than that.

JLL: I get it. Clever.

BKL: Not everybody thinks so. One more thing about that painting. If you turn it upside down, it looks like Coco the monkey.

JLL: Outrageous! How about that one: Still Life with Disproportionate Fruit.

BKL: Pretty obvious. The scale is skewed.

JLL: Is this nonsense, though? Does this qualify as serious art?

BKL: I think so. Though this one is fun. I’m doing something unusual here. Find another painting anywhere that looks like this one. It’s unique, interesting, colorful. It’s painterly, though primitive, raw. It has a balanced composition. The colors are used expertly, complementing and contrasting primaries, secondaries, tertiaries, fourths and so on, interspersed with paint right out of the tube. That’s what painting is all about. It doesn’t have to be dark and depressing. It can be a release, yes, but at the end you have to have some joy attached to it, or why bother. Look at Matisse and Chagall. They painted things that were whimsical, colorful, fun. In their later years their paintings got simpler and more abstract. Matisse’s Goldfish paintings. That big pair of canvases Chagall has inside the Lincoln Center. These are great paintings by liberated souls who worked outside of constraints – social, mental, emotional, physical. They showed us how to see in a new way.

JLL: Right outside of their brains.

BKL: No, the brain is an organ of specialized tissue that operates the organism. What you mean is the mind. The mind itself is not in the realm of phenomena -- appearances in time and space that can be apprehended by the senses.

JLL: It’s your thoughts.

BKL: Thoughts are occurrences in the mind. The mind and the brain are related, but are not the same thing. You can see and touch your brain, but not your mind. Your mind is the result of the bioelectrochemical discharges of the brain, or thoughts. Think of the mind as a kind of ethereal cloud floating over the brain, but invisible and ubiquitous. But, there are several types of mind you can utilize to perform useful functions.

JLL: What are they?

BKL: The mind that everyone should utilize to make their lives easier is the rational mind, that part of their composite mind that organizes life’s routine business. It’s like a secretary, a vice president. It handles all the details efficiently to provide optimum time for you to do the real work.

JLL: What’s the real work?

BKL: Creating.

JLL: And, creativity originates in the mind.

BKL: Not exactly. The true source is further back, more remote. There are many name labels for "IT". You can take many paths to the base of the mountain, but you climb it alone.

JLL: What’s at the top?

BKL: A great view.

JLL: Hah! Give me some more about the mind.

BKL: The subconscious mind is also very useful. It works separate from your rational mind and works all the time whether you realize it or not. It’s like a computer that whirls data 24/7. You plug in a problem and it will find a solution or provide a clue. The subconscious mind is great for conceptual projects like writing, editing media, business plans, figuring out plots in stories.

Banning glances over at his work in progress, sees something, goes over and makes some adjustments, adds a few colors. What was a blank canvas several hours before is now a visual experience. He pulls the three throwing knives out of the target, walks across the room and flings them. All three tips find wood.

BKL: I don’t have to tell you why. Psychoanalysis just seems like the correct title. I can make up some bullshit if you want, how the act of painting is like a session on Freud’s couch, or how mind surgery is best self-administered to achieve lasting results. Or, maybe if you look into my painting you will become psychoanalyzed, will have a flash of Satori, become enlighten, realize your life’s purpose.

JLL: Wow! I did that and had a flash!

BKL: It’s the wine, Grasshopper. Time to clean up your brushes and go home. You’ve got more paint on you than on your canvas. Have you a title for your painting?

JLL: I don’t know. Have you got one?

BKL: FaGowWee seems appropriate.

JLL: What’s that mean?

BKL: I ain’t gonna tell ya. But, you can take your painting with you.

JLL: I will. Thank you. One more question: What’s your motto?

BKL: Don’t really have one. My view of things is always changing.

JLL: Come one. Give me something.

BKL: Okay. Try this. Always be willing to sacrifice what you are for what you might be. Good enough?

JLL: Yes, Great. Thanks.

BKL: Thanks for coming over. It’s been real.

##