This image is formed by rubberstamping the words kiss and smooch over each other with dense center slit-like image suggestive of a woman's pubis. Fuck Paintings Interview by Christina Voss for the online magazine, F/lthyGorgeousTh/ngs (2011). Betty Tompkins paints gorgeous photorealistic works of art on a monumental scale, all explicit, detailed images of penetration, masturbation, and the female genitalia. Her first Fuck Painting was created back in 1969, and after a group show in the early 1970's, they were more or less left untouched by critics and dealers, seemingly due to their visual content. In 2003, the Centre Pompidou acquired Fuck Painting #1, and since then, there's been a new appreciation for the power, poignancy, and sheer beauty of her work. A note on their size: small works of art reproduce fairly well online, but there's no way to reproduce the impact of a monumental work of art here, so I'm going to ask you to imagine the size. Many of these canvases are larger than you are - think about that, then imagine standing in front of one. Betty tells us about those early years, her experience with sticky customs, censorship, fleeing visitors, critics, and the history and iterations of her work. We're thrilled to have her here, and we strongly encourage you to see her work for yourself. You were painting large-scale explicit images long before it was picked up as a theme in contemporary art. So I have to ask about those first paintings: what inspired you to paint them? And what was the response at the time? My first husband, Don Tompkins who was 12 years older than I was, had bought a collection of porn photos in the 1950's from either Singapore or Hong Kong. Unlike now, porn in this country was hard to come by. It was also illegal to transport it through the U.S. mail. Don had to rent a post box in Vancouver, BC. He drove across the border from Everett, WA., got them, tried his best to look like an all-American boy and drove back. So when we got married in 1966, these photos were just there. They were very small black and white pictures. After I finished grad school, I started to really study them. My background had been in Abstract Expressionism and I had only lately embraced the idea of imagery. I realized that if I cut off all the identifiers - heads, hands, feet, etc. - I could create these beautiful abstract images out of the part of the photograph that was most compelling which, of course, was the explicit sex part. My intent from the start was to have these two disparate elements "“ the abstract and the sexual content - coexist equally in the work. A lot of people think what I do is smut and a lot of people think I am courageous for dealing with controversial subject matter. It is fascinating to watch the reactions. The response to them was essentially negative. One dealer walked into my studio, ran out and then backed in. One wrote an encouraging note on my slide envelope. Most of the dealers I approached refused to come to my studio at all. Whether it was because I was a young artist or whether it was because I was a young woman artist or whether it was the subject matter or the subject matter being done by a young woman artist, I never knew. It was a very different time. I would beg Don to take the slides in as his own as he was so much older than me and he was a man but he refused. I managed to get in two group shows in NYC in 1973. I was invited to be in a show in Paris the same year. Unfortunately, the two paintings were seized by customs and were refused entry. It took me a year to get them back. It was a true nightmare. I got an opportunity to exhibit some of them in 1975 when Paul Schimmel (who had been a student of mine when he was in high school) curated them into a show in Houston. A critic there wrote that my paintings were "as interesting as a medical textbook." Eventually, I took them off the stretchers and rolled them up. In 1997, I had a small retrospective at Monmouth University. I stretched up one of the Fuck Paintings and one of the Cow/Cunts for that. Bill Arning wrote the catalog essay and was very enthusiastic. That is the full exhibition history of those paintings in the 20th century... You initially called them Joined Forms, which suggests abstraction, and given the sheer size of the canvases, they can easily become abstract shapes. Then you changed the title to Fuck Paintings. Why did you change the titles? When I did that first group of them from 1969 through 1976, it was a very heady, intellectual time in the art world. I called them Joined Forms because it seemed to me the appropriate title for them to be part of the critical discussion then going on. However, even though that was what I wrote on the back of the canvases, I never actually said it. They were always the Fuck Paintings. Always. So when I got the opportunity to show them in 2002 with Mitchell Algus who was brave enough to give them a chance, it was natural to call the paintings and the show "Fuck Paintings." It took over twenty years for the Fuck Paintings to get the recognition they deserved, when the first Fuck Painting was acquired by the Centre Pompidou. I can imagine censorship and a general resistance to graphic images played a role. What do you think changed? The sequence was the 2002 show with Mitchell with whom I still work (now also with his partner, Amy Greenspon). From that first show, Bob Nickas curated me into the 2003 Biennale de Lyon where Camille Morineau, then a brand new curator at Centre Pompidou, had the bold idea of presenting Fuck Painting #1 (one of the two that had been censored in 1973) to the Acquisition Committee as the very first painting she was recommending for purchase. I was so moved when she wrote me that she had been successful and the painting was now part of the permanent collection, I burst into tears. I was censored again in 2005 by the Japanese customs people with 3 drawings going to Galerie Sho in Tokyo. The gallery was able to eventually get them sprung from art jail. Elisabeth Lebovici wrote a great piece on it. So maybe things haven't changed all that much. I am lucky that my gallery, Algus Greenspon, is so supportive of me. My work is difficult to exhibit. It is not populist or for the faint of heart. Viewers are not neutral. Gradually, it is getting broader gallery exposure in this country by inclusion in different group shows. In Europe, there is more acceptance both by collectors and institutions. In a way, that period of critical silence might have been a bullet dodged, given the art censorship hysteria of the '80's. Did you continue to paint during that time? Did you consider approaching tamer subject matter? I never thought about it that way. Interesting. During the heyday of Jesse Helms, I thought if I hadn't already done those Fuck Paintings, I would do them then in response to all the political nonsense even though I did not do them for political reasons originally. Yes, I continued to paint. It is what I do. I did my best to forget about the Fuck Paintings. As a matter of fact, when I was getting ready for my first show with Mitchell, I was entirely shocked and taken aback by these paintings. They are powerful! It was only when I put them on the wall to see what kind of shape they were in that it all came flooding back to me. What I had been trying to do had never left me at all. I had never given up on the idea of marrying the abstract with the image itself so that they have to duke it out on the canvas. I go for the stand off. When neither side actually takes over, the painting is a success. It was great to see the first things I had done with that. I was, and am, very respectful of those paintings. When I returned directly to this subject matter (I had been working my way toward it and dancing around it for some time. It was inevitable that I would return to it.), I didn't want to do it the same way I had in the 70's so I didn't even consider using an airbrush. Instead I had these rubber stamps made of words like FUCK, SCHTUP, BEANBAG, CUNT, TWAT, BOFF, BALL, etc. in 19 point type. It was a lot of fun deciding on those words. I made paint pads by cutting up Libman Heavy Duty Scrubbers and jamming them into small plastic containers and brushing the paint into them. Sometimes I would look at these tiny little stamps and then look at the 7x5' canvas and think this was an insane process. But I like slow art and one way or another have always embraced slow processes. These paintings gave a sense of language though very few words can actually be read. I worked with these stamps for about 4 years and then two things happened. The first was that I started to have dreams of working with an airbrush and what I thought I could do with it. Shortly after I started obsessing over the airbrush, I developed tendonitis in both forearms. It became clear to me that I could not continue working with either the stamps or my finger tips. So I switched to the airbrush. It felt like it had never left my hand. It is a very different process though as now I make chromatic blacks and the paint designed for use in airbrushes is very different than the paint of the "˜70's. What's fascinating to me is how your work's been received over the decades - it's like a cultural litmus test. Your work is as graphic now as it was then, but now you're receiving critical attention and praise. Has that affected your creative process at all? No it hasn't. While the validation and attention is nice and I do like it, I don't think about it or work for it. In this one very odd way, I am fortunate that I was in my 50's when all of this happened. I have had a chance to mature out of the public eye, Bill (Mutter) and I have been together 35 years. He is also an artist so he keeps me grounded and is my support system. I can depend on him for honest feedback. If I say something about my work that doesn't make sense, he will tell me I am talking bullshit. There just has been no chance to develop my inner brat. And I get great support from my gallery as well. I am extremely fortunate. Not all critical attention is positive so I think to do work for it would be a mistake. You just set yourself up emotionally. There have been negative comments and, given what I have chosen to paint, there is bound to be more. These paintings could be taken as a desire to shock, or maybe as a socio-political statement, though I don't really see that. I see something intimate made monumental - we see a visual we don't usually see in a medium we don't expect. They make you look, and think, and maybe view the world (and sex) a little differently. Did you, and do you, expect any particular reaction from the viewer? People react however they react. I make no effort to control that or influence that. While I cannot imagine making work that does not have to do with my own personal views, I have made a conscious decision to keep that private. To say anything at all would seriously limit how the audience can react. They would see the work within my definition of it instead of through their own knowledge and attitudes. My job is to make the paintings and drawings look as much like facts as I can so they can make decide independently what they thing of it. A lot of people think what I do is smut and a lot of people think I am courageous for dealing with controversial subject matter. It is fascinating to watch the reactions. They are often atypical of what you expect in a gallery. Dealers have gotten hate mail for showing it. A man ran screaming from one of my shows. I personally saw a woman come into the gallery with a toddler, park his stroller in front of a painting that was mostly a breast and say "Don't look." He must have been bottle-fed. A certain number of people will look more at the signage than the pieces. What are you working on now? What do you have planned for the future? I am doing what I love to do "“ paint or draw in my studio almost every day. There are always problems and challenges with these pieces. I remain very engaged and focused on what I am doing. New processes and materials are very exciting to me and I like nothing better than falling over one and seeing what happens. A few years ago, I had a desire to start a drawing from black and go to the lights rather than starting with the white paper and adding the darks. I did not like what I was getting by drawing the dark with pencil. Bill told me about ground graphite powder and offered to get me some. I was sitting at my drawing table at the time and as he was talking, I realized that I had ground graphite because I sharpen my woodless pencils into a cup. I had been wanting to do something with this stuff for years. It works perfectly for me and I have been developing a group of drawings called the Schmutz Grids from that. They are the drawing equivalent of the airbrush in that no marks are distinguishable. Drawing magic. Right now, I am in the elles exhibit at Centre Pompidou in Paris and the Lust and Vice exhibit at Kunst Museum Bern and Zentrum Paul Klee in Bern. I will have solo shows next season at Algus Greenspon gallery in New York and Galerie Andrea Caratsch in Zurich. In February, I will be in a group show at Jancar Gallery in Los Angeles. And thanks to your support and interest, I am in F/lthyGorgeousTh/ngs. -- Source of annotation: Marvin or Ruth Sackner.