Meetings with Remarkable Men:

William S. Burroughs, Roy Lichtenstein,

F. Hundertwasser, Nils-Udo and Leo Castelli

Text and photographs by John Grande

Art critic, writer, lecturer and interviewer, John Grande's reviews and feature articles have been published extensively in Artforum,Vice Versa, Sculpture, Art Papers, British Journal of Photo-graphy, Espace Sculpture, Public Art Review, Vie des Arts, Art On Paper, Circa & Canadian Forum. He is also the author of Balance: Art and Nature (a newly expanded edition by Black Rose Books in, 2004),Intertwining: Landscape, Technology, Issues, Artists (Black Rose Books, 1998), Jouer avec le feu: Armand Vaillancourt: Sculpteur engag?? (Lanctot, 2001), and his most recent book,Dialogues in Diversity: Marginal to Mainstream published in Italy in 2007 by Pari Publishing.

www.paripublishing.com.

Recent collaborations include Le Mouvement Intuitif: Patrick Dougherty & Adrian Maryniak(Atelier 340 Muzeum, Brussels, Belgium 2004) and Nature the End of Art: Alan Sonfist Landscapeswith Robert Rosenblum et al, 2004

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John Grande

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William S. Burroughs

William Burroughs is a legendary figure in literature but few know that he is also a visual artist. Bill came to Montreal to exhibit his Shotgun paintings, works that involve shooting paint out of a gun. I have no idea why Bill shot paint out of a gun, but the results are beautiful impact oriented accidents that involve momentum and paint. I caught him with his hat on in front of a print edition called Green Dream he made specially for that tour in 1989. Bill's advice to me as a budding young writer was simply "If you don't like what you have written, and are not sure, just throw it into the garbage and start again. Do not be afraid to let go of your work if you are not satisfied." That advice has stood me in good stead ever since.

New Interview:

shock and awe

in the art world

Friedensreich Hundertwasser

Being involved in art and ecology ever since I published Art & Environment with The Friendly Chameleon, a small edition printed on recycled paper and using vegetal inks, and even earlier with Friends of the Earth in England in the 1970s like so many, I knew of Friedensreich Hundertwasser's activism and visionary art. He was an artist to watch, and his architectural projects were a learning experience, even for architects, and down to the house he built later in life recycling wine bottles in New Zealand on the land he bought to plant trees and save forests. So when Hundertwasser came to Montreal, I interviewed him, wrote a piece for Artforum in New York. When it came to photographing this larger than life character in a red checkered lumberjack shirt, he insisted there be no artificial lighting. Hundertwasser, true to nature and ecology, wanted his paintings to be photographed only under natural light conditions, and so the merging of patterns, those in his shirt, in his paintings, form a decorative wreath around his face...