do that,” she explained. “I’d made a few
films, and they weren’t very good. What
I wanted was to pick an image that just
described a surface, and to document
that image—place it out there, without
any feeling. Of course, that’s impossible,
unless you’re Duchamp. I wanted to re-
move myself and leave something, a sen-
sibility.” At this point, graphite seemed
to offer greater precision and anonym-
ity than oil paint. She started small, on
fourteen-by-eighteen-inch sheets of
paper that she had primed with an acrylic
ground. Working from one of her pho-
tographs, she built the image slowly, be-
ginning at the bottom right corner and
moving up and across. Celmins used a
different black pencil for each drawing,
from very hard to very soft, achieving a
wide and subtle range of grays. She ex-
erted different degrees of pressure for
the darker wavelets and the lighter areas
between them. “Some people think that
I just sit down and copy the photograph,”
Celmins once told an interviewer. “It is
precisely that I reinvent it in other terms.”
She also made pencil drawings of
clouds, and of the surface of the moon,
based on NASA photographs she had
clipped from magazines, but, from 1968
to 1977, her primary subject was the
ocean. A single ocean drawing could
take her three weeks. (Celmins didn’t
think of them as drawings; in her mind
she was “re-describing the photograph.”)
She never used an eraser—if she made
a mistake, she’d throw the sheet away
and start over. The finished image filled
the paper from edge to edge, with no
horizon line and no center—a small
patch of ocean water that was in mo-
tion yet somehow very still. “I let the
graphite be part of the work,” she told
me. “I’m just the holder of the pencil...
with my hand moving across and get-
ting the pencil to give more than it was
willing to give.”
A very large gallery at SFMoMA was
devoted exclusively to the ocean pictures,
in different sizes and tonal gradations.
(“It’s too many,” she kept saying. “Why
do there have to be so many?”) What
struck me, seeing them together, was
their variety. Although in a sense they
were all the same—gray images of water,
never a real disturbance or a wave—
each had its own character, and held its
own in galleries with eighteen-foot-
high ceilings. I could sort of see what
Celmins had meant about the pencil
giving more than it was willing to give,
but it wasn’t just the pencil. What makes
her images so alive is the consummate
craftsmanship that goes into them—
the hand, which knows things that the
mind does not. There are no symbolic
or poetic references to the eternal sea.
Every mark fits with every other mark
in a seamless image that refers only to
itself. “I never said I loved the ocean,”
Celmins told me. But, in the battered
ledger-diary that she has kept through-
out her career, she wrote, in 2013, that
“the first look at a wave should (maybe)
(if only for a moment) be reminiscent
of being in love—a feeling of Oh—of
surprise, of senses waking up.”
Celmins showed her first graphite
oceans in 1969, at the Riko Mizuno
Gallery, on La Cienega Boulevard. She
didn’t tell David Stuart that she was
leaving his gallery, and she felt bad about
that. The artist James Turrell had in-
troduced her to Mizuno, who was beau-
tiful and charismatic. “Riko knew all
the artists of my generation, she loved
them, she was a great cook, and she had
tons of boyfriends,” Celmins said. “I
couldn’t resist.” Mizuno was largely re-
sponsible for Celmins’s fascination with
“all things Japanese,” as she put it, in-
cluding food, clothes (in subdued col-
ors), novels by Yukio Mishima, and,
some years later, a Shiba Inu dog named
Zīle (Latvian for “acorn”). Zīle suc-
ceeded Lācīte and lived with Celminsfor ten years, “the most intelligent and
independent dog I ever had.”
The show at Mizuno sold out, and
Celmins stayed with the gallery until- Museums were starting to discover
her. The Museum of Modern Art ac-
quired three works by Celmins in 1970—
an ocean drawing, a moon drawing, and
an ocean lithograph. Her first solo mu-
seum show was at the Whitney, in 1973—
twelve oceans, all untitled. By then, she
was also drawing galaxies, constellations,
and arid sections of desert earth. The
galaxies and constellations were based
on photographs she bought at the li-
brary of the California Institute of Tech-
nology, where she spent some time in
those years. (She is ashamed to say that,
on more than one occasion, she took a
book into the ladies’ room and sliced
a photograph out with a razor.) These
new images were as restricted in color
as the oceans. Celmins had become en-
raptured by the desert. She would drive,
with Lācīte, to deserts in California and
Nevada—Panamint Valley, Death Val-
ley, the Mojave—and take dozens of
photographs, some of which led to draw-
ings. “I was moving into other imag-
ery,” she said, “but trying not to make
things too interesting.”
A review of her San Francisco retro-
spective in the January, 2019, issue of
Artforum greatly annoyed Celmins by
referring to her as a workaholic. “I don’t
work all the time,” she groused. “I’m con-
stantly doing other stuff.” What she did
in the studio far outweighed everything
else in her life, though, and this put a
strain on her personal relationships. The
marriage to Peter Givler ended in 1973.
(“He ran off with another literature stu-
dent,” she said.) Celmins had a hard
time dealing with the breakup. “I was
beating myself up because I couldn’t hold
on to this guy,” she said. We were sit-
ting on a bench in one of the SFMoMA
galleries, while technicians and curato-
rial assistants passed through and sounds
of drilling and hammering came from
other galleries. She looked slightly sur-
prised, as though she were learning some-
thing new. “Then I had this other guy
whom I really loved, and that didn’t work
out, either,” she said. “It took me a long
time to figure out that maybe I was a
partner to these crimes. It seems like I
never learned how to communicate, or
how to give. I know now, a little. I’ve be-
come more like a human being.”C
elmins has a house in Sag Harbor,
on the eastern end of Long Island,
a two-bedroom cottage that she bought
in 1997 with money from a MacArthur
Fellowship. She drives out there nearly
every Thursday, from the modest Man-
hattan loft she owns in SoHo, and re-
turns on Sunday. Celmins could easily
afford grander living quarters. After a
highly successful show in 2017, she hired
an architect and a contractor to carryTHENEWYORKER, SEPTEMBER 2, 2019 21