Anneke de Jager

Larry Poons (born1937) is an important postwar American artist. An accomplished musician, he first attended the New England Conservatory of Music before transferring to the Museum of Fine Arts Boston to pursue painting. After graduation, he moved to New York where he gained immediate acclaim for his grid-based “dot paintings”. In 1963, he had his first solo exhibition at the Green Gallery and he was the youngest artist in The Responsive Eye, a survey of post-war American art at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, in 1965. But his art became more radical and although he continued to show his work in New York and it was still admired by critics, it proved less palatable for the market.

Larry Poons: Painting in itself is self-generating. It’s impossible to stay the same unless you’re catatonic. 

I’m a painter, so I don’t deal with the market. Before there was an art market, there were people painting in their caves. People just looked at the pictures and didn’t worry about what they meant or how much it cost.

There’s nothing wrong with business and there’s nothing wrong with art, but they’re two separate things. If you define success as being able to sell something to pay the rent, then that means you’re successful at paying your rent. It doesn’t mean that your art is any good or not.

In painting there is no wrong or right. Paint what you can paint. If you can’t paint figures but you can paint rocks, then paint rocks. If you keep working at it, you’re going to get better and better. As you go on, things that you could never do come about naturally. You’ll find that things just happen.