JS: I feel free from thought when I’m actually painting. Whether I’m looking at someone, and making a painting by looking at them. Or I’m looking at something that’s not an image of something and it’s just a mark that I’m making, or the way that the paint is gonna sit on a particular material. And when I’m making a film I’m working with people that can do something that I can’t do. But, I see what their potential is and what I could get from them. And it’s all based on trust. Because if you trust each other then they could go out into that area where they don’t know what they’re doing.

PB: Mhhm.

JS: And they’ll know where— they’ll know that they can be themselves or they can go outside of themselves and know that you’re gonna permit that to happen and not let them fall through the cracks. So they can be as free as possible, and I can be as intuitive as possible, or as free as possible in giving them my comments. Or what we call directing.

PB: Mhhhm.

JS: But, I think part of that is knowing when to get out of the way, and let these people, who you’ve selected and who can do something you can’t do, turn something that you did into something that’s much better than you could have even imagined.

PB: It’s kind of what Ingmar Bergman said, ‘I throw a spear into the darkness. That is intuition. Then I must send an army into the darkness to find the spear. That is intellect.’

PB: You know, most of us believe that a person is made by education, by language, and the language was not invented by one person but by many, by many others, previously. This belief is a prerequisite that resists any political or static dogma, you mentioned about, you know, Greenberg and dogma. It was a dogma, because it was his idea. Which can be in so many ways, you know, so nurturing when it’s shared with a larger and governing intellectual and artistic premise, right? We have friends who are poets and dancers, musicians, what not, they support each other in their collective struggle, you know? To be an artist or to be an intellectual means that you should be informed of each other’s field of discipline and to learn from each other. How can you describe what you consider was your community and how did that community feed you in your own work, Julian?

JS: Well, I think you started to touch on something about going back further than Greenberg.

PB: Yeah!

JS: Which was, there’s this history of language, history of image-making and and I think that, you know, for me the Cappella Degli Scrovegni in Padua, by Giotto, or the Paolo Veronese paintings in Venice, or Titian, for me were as – or Caravaggio! – actually, as contemporary for me, or more so, than the work that my so-called … that my peers were doing.

PB: Yeah.

JS: And they were just as contemporary. I mean, and so, what I was looking for— I mean Frank Stella once said there’s only two things: what to paint and how to paint it.

Excerpt from Middle Plane Issue No.11 (Autumn/Winter 2025). Read the full interview by ordering your copy here.

Photographer: Jeff Mermelstein