Gorillas hum songs when they eat and if they eat their favorite food they sing even louder. Back in 2015, David Humphrey and Nicole Eisenman sat down in a restaurant adjacent to a Buddhist temple to talk about painting and life in the studio. Their conversation was initially published in Bomb. Comparing eating habits to their fuzzy ancestors is not possible in this account. No sound recordings were made while they consumed food. Instead, here we have more of their discussion nine years later. Two influential representational painters cover the psychology of figure/ground, the human condition, swapping themes and accessing flow state. This lost tape interview is as relevant now as it was then. Both artists have known each other for nearly thirty years.

the electric pencil, art 22, david humphrey, nicole eisenman, wells chandler — *David Humphrey, "Consoler" (2004) acrylic on canvas 72 x 60 inches*

Nicole Eisenman We're doing a Google search of David Humphrey and one of the first things that comes up is a picture of a person lying on a piece of toast, crying.

David Humphrey It's called Consoler.

NE There's an electronic keyboard in the foreground and something very suggestive happening with the fingers and a squid-like dog. I think the person is crying because it's a sad hard world and they're living in it and everything looks like shit. They're surrounded by poo, dog, and poo trees and poo bushes. Even their toast pillow looks like a slab of poo with butter on it. She's wearing a wrist watch. Like, she’s depressed but at least remembered to put her watch on this morning.

DH You’ve got to hang onto something, even if all else is going to hell, you’ve got to know what time it is.

NE God is in the details. What's amazing about your work David Humphrey, is that you have this magical way of joining figure and landscape almost seamlessly. The landscape isn't simply holding the figure, but becomes a character in the drama and is just as important.

DH It’s a vexed relation in which the figure is both part of and alienated from their habitat. This person in Consoler has no legs but maybe the two trees in the background are a detached supplement.

NE There's a lot of castration imagery happening in there.

DH In terms of pictures, if something is missing, you look for it displaced elsewhere.

NE You don't need to see everything to understand it's there. Like, we can misspell words and still read them and know what they mean.

DH How do we, as representational painters, parse the form? How much information is needed to make something recognizable? A glint on the eye? Three layers of modeling or just two? In your case, it seems like each figure has its own requirement; certain figures need a lot of detail while for other ones, a silhouette is enough.

NE Yeah. It's true. We're sitting in this weird little restaurant underneath a Buddhist temple right now surrounded by people. There are some people in this room that catch my attention and there are some people that really become part of the surrounding. It's like an emotional impressionism. You can paint the value somebody has in their emotional resonance to you. Some people can be highly fleshed out and others are a squiggle and it's all fine, they're all people.

DH Some people are all too real. Maybe even too real for themselves.

NE I'm too real for myself. We're all too real. Let's go to another image on google, shall we?

DH This one is called Embrace - it’s part of a series on inter-species relationships as a metaphor for interpersonal ones. In this case, the predator and the prey are locked in a combat or struggle that's exercised by paint gestures that link and scramble them.

NE There's a meta-narrative of two ways of painting that don't actually relate to each other either. The graphic element looks both modern and like something indigenous from the Pacific north-west faced off against the gestural abstraction.

DH I guess it's the landscape as psychedelic cultural artifact.

the electric pencil, art 22, david humphrey, nicole eisenman, wells chandler, the american museum of natural history — *Revitalized Northwest Coast Hall at American Museum of Natural History*

NE There's a nice connection, though, between the two bodies in the middle. It looks like a paw from one creature is reaching out and tapping the other one on the ear, as if to say “listen to me”.

DH “I'm here. I'm of you and in you”.

NE All of this is taking place on the edge of a precipice.

DH I’m playing with a crude binary having to do with protagonists and locations. It’s a figurative trope that is endlessly interesting because it has to do with context and agent that needs to be solved in every painting. You try to figure out what are all the attributes of the protagonist are and where are they?

NE I don't know what the location is. It just dissolves into the body of the painting, the body of the figures, or it's just not important. It's just about the figures.

DH Well, it could be an envelope. It could be a container that holds them. I’m thinking about the painting you're working on right now, Weeks on the Train, you’ve got the train itself as a space of collective solitudes, individuals in their own little worlds moving through space. Then there's the space outside that space, the passing world.

NE I have three paintings I'm working on right now, one of which is just in drawing form, that are about trains: a subway station and a third one with a model train. I like the train as a metaphor for moving through life. I think these figures look really lonely, whether they're in a collective standing on the subway platform or alone on a train moving fast through space, everybody is in their own world. I think in my beer gardens that happens too. Like when everybody is painted differently, you get a sense of being alone together, which is something New Yorkers really understand. New York is such a walking city with life on the street. It's amazing how much it both matters and doesn't matter that we're surrounded by people all the time.

DH We're so accomplished at solitude, supplemented by electronic devices.

NE They help. They make it easier to isolate. Like the old saying goes, “You're born alone and you die alone.” I get that feeling that one of the big thematic struggles of life is dealing with solitude. We seek refuge in other people and it's not going to happen necessarily. The lonesome figure is a theme I come back to over and over in my work.

DH Me too, the lonesome figure, laboring under conditions of longing.

NE Well, this is really sad and depressing. I'm sorry.

DH Yes. I want to go home and make a train painting if you don't mind.

NE Not at all. I want to make a person crying on a piece of toast painting.

DH I like the idea of swapping themes because we're going to each fuck it up in our own way. I’m thinking of the ship of fools or strangers on a train setup. It’s a cinematic or theatrical idea of the microcosm, the mini-society.

NE Vessels that move around. It comes up a lot in my dreams. I will dream myself in a car that's moving too fast or in a car that's stuck with four flat tires.

DH I’m thinking of a painting you showed at the ICA in Philly called The Triumph of Poverty that included all kinds of individuals.

NE I painted that in 2009 maybe and it was at a moment when Bush had driven our economy into the ground and it was when the economy collapsed.

DH Was the “Triumph” in the title a wish or a lament?

NE No, it was a spoof on The Triumph of Wealth, which is a painting by Holbein. He painted two murals in public buildings. One was The Triumph of Wealth and the other was The Triumph of Poverty. The Triumph of Poverty was destroyed in a war. It doesn't exist except in sketches. I wanted to recreate the painting so I looked up the shittiest car ever manufactured and painted it. I think it was a Yugo. You go nowhere.

What is your creative process like? Does it come out in a steady stream or is it more of a roller coaster?

the electric pencil, art 22, david humphrey, nicole eisenman, wells chandler, hans holbein the younger, the triumph of wealth — *Hans Holbein the Younger, "The Triumph of Wealth" (1533) pen and wash, 119 x 44 cm*

DH I definitely have moments in which I have no idea what I want to do and I'll find myself thinking a potentially deadly thought, “What kind of a painting do I want to make now?”

NE The most beautiful, funniest, biggest, most wonderful.

DH I have a hard time doing one thing. I prefer having the whole studio worked into a lather, a bunch of drawings going, a painting in development, something I'm trying to finish. If all a painting needs to be finished is just a tiny detail, I still need have to have the whole studio going.

NE You need to be in a flow.

DH Flow state is the goal. Sometimes it can be generated out of something as simple as cleaning up the edges of a roughly painted form. All of a sudden my eyes and hands adjust and I'm in.

NE You've worked your way into the matrix.

DH That matrix requires a lot of things to be in development. But sometimes getting off the couch or off the computer into the mosh of it is really hard. What do you do?

NE I struggle a lot. I spend a lot of time not doing anything. Then I get to a point of frustrated frenzy where it's either I slit my wrist or make a move. At that point I get working. That's how it goes these days.

DH A point of desperation.

NE I feel like the pressure builds and builds and then I just go straight to the painting and spit it out. There's usually a technical drawing first, but I'm not building ideas at this point from drawing. It's like the ideas are getting stuck. The pipeline is shut down, so I'm not letting the drawings out. The pressure builds. Then when it comes out, it just comes out boom, as a painting.

DH Well, it sounds like that could make for more intense paintings, but maybe at the cost of your happiness.

NE It's a slightly tortured way of working, but it's okay. We have to just accept our process, however ridiculous it is. We have no choice. Burn it down. We'll fix it tomorrow. Burn it tonight, fix it tomorrow.

David Humphrey + Nicole Eisenman