22 THENEWYORKER, SEPTEMBER 2, 2019
She began laughing and jumping up
and down in sheer exuberance.
We drove back to Sag Harbor, where
Celmins cooked a substantial lunch of
fried local flounder, new potatoes, green
beans, and asparagus. Raymond kept
getting up on the kitchen counter.
Celmins would gather him in both arms
and drop him, from shoulder height, to
the floor. Two minutes later, he’d be
back. Raymond is a big cat, and being
dropped didn’t seem to bother him in
the least. (A week or so later, when
Celmins was preparing dinner in her
New York kitchen, the same pattern was
repeated. She finally got annoyed, and
dropped Raymond with considerable
force. “I could get another cat,” she
warned him. “Has that occurred to you?”)
After lunch, I noticed an elaborate
spiderweb under the seat of the five-
dollar chair, with a spider in residence.
It turned out that most of the chairs
and tables had webs under them, some
inhabited and others vacant. I thought
that maybe Celmins’s spiderweb draw-
ings in the nineties had come out of a
similar visitation, but no. “They came
from a little book I found, from the for-
ties, of the different kinds of webs spi-
ders make,” she explained. “I was going
through the book, and I realized that
the webs described the surface, which
was what I want to do.” (Celmins’s ex-
planations can be delphic. I think what
she means by “described the surface”—
the same phrase she used about her ocean
drawings—is that the image and its sup-
port, paper or canvas, are indistinguish-
able. But I may be wrong.) Her spider-
web drawings are done in charcoal, not
pencil, and the images are created by
erasing. “I put down a charcoal ground,
rub it in with my hands, and the rest is
done with erasers,” she said. “It’s just
dust, really. I even bought an electric
eraser. But I should have dropped this
image earlier, you know? It was getting
too relational, too active. Some people
feel they’re realistic, but the details were
just to get you to explore the surface.”
Celmins was returning to the city
that evening, and we went with her in
the Toyota. It was pitch-dark, and rain-
ing. Raymond rode in the front seat, in
a cat carrier that Celmins didn’t bother
to close, so he kept getting out. He vis-
ited us in the back, but he was more in-
terested in climbing up on the dash-out a major renovation of the Long Is-
land studio that she purchased five years
ago, a few miles from Sag Harbor. When
it’s finished, her plan is to live as well
as work there, but she’ll keep the house
in town. Celmins lives alone, with a
large, aggressively friendly cat named
Raymond. “Raymond is my husband,”
she said, when my wife and I visited her
in Sag Harbor last fall. “He is a master
at knocking things over.”
A stuffed Canada goose hangs by a
wire from the ceiling of her sunporch,
and a diorama of other avian species, in-
cluding an owl, occupies a large, glass-
fronted box on a table in the living room.
Celmins has been a bird-watcher since
the nineteen-seventies. Her furniture is
all secondhand, she said, most of it ac-
quired in local yard sales. (“This chair
was five dollars.”) When my wife aimed
her iPhone at the tiny guest room and
bath just off the living room, Celmins
said, “You’re taking pictures of my toi-
let?” Before we arrived, she had gone to
Loaves & Fishes, a high-end food store
in the nearby village of Sagaponack, and
brought back devilled eggs, croissants,
sweet buns, and other pastries, which
were of great interest to Raymond. “Stop!”
she ordered, loudly but ineffectually. “Go
away.” Celmins has two part-time stu-
dio assistants, Naho Taruishi and Jamisen
Ogg, both artists. In New York, where
Celmins’s studio is part of her loft, Ogg
used to mark temporary grids on her
canvases with lengths of string, as a guide,
but Raymond learned how to pull off
the strings, so now they are testing other
methods. Keeping Raymond out of the
studio is not an option.
Celmins took us, in her twelve-year-
old Toyota, to see the studio she is ren-
ovating. “It used to be a private house,”
she said. The studio part of it has been
extended, with high, vaulted ceilings
and a skylight. To the right are a com-
bined living and dining room, several
bedrooms, and a three-story tower that
was one of Celmins’s priorities in her
discussions with the architect. We
climbed the three flights and walked
out on a small deck that overlooks mead-
ows and farmland stretching to the At-
lantic Ocean. A few horses grazed near
a big, fenced-in rectangle of grass—in
the summer, Celmins explained, this is
a polo field. Being up here made her
very excited, like a child with a new toy.
board and walking around there, his tail
lashing back and forth between Celmins’s
face and the windshield.I
n 1973, lonely and depressed after her
divorce from Givler, Celmins started
spending time with some people who
lived in a commune near Oakland and
followed the teachings of George Gurd-
jieff, the Armenian spiritual guru. “They
were mostly professional people, unhappy
people,” she recalls. She fell deeply in
love with one of them, a mathematician
who taught at a college in Monterey.
They left the commune together after a
year or so—“It was just too much of ‘ev-
erybody is asleep and you are awake’ kind
of thing”—and went to live in Big Sur.
She and the mathematician broke up in
the late seventies. Devastated by this new
failure, Celmins returned to Los Ange-
les, and found that somebody else was
living in her studio; she had let another
artist use it, he had left without telling
her, and the landlady had rented it to a
new tenant. At this low point in her life,
Celmins stopped making ocean draw-
ings and became obsessed with a new
project. For some time, on trips to the
desert and to the country around Taos,
New Mexico, she had been picking up
stones and tossing them into the trunk
of her car. Her friend Happy Price, who
lived near Taos with her husband, the
ceramic artist Ken Price, used to go with
her on rock-gathering trips. “I’d fill my
pockets with stones I thought would be
perfect for her, and she’d say, ‘No, no,
you’ve got it all wrong,’ ” Price remem-
bers. At a certain point, Celmins selected
eleven stones, and set out to make an
exact copy of each one. “They seemed
so beautiful that I wanted to make them
myself,” she said, in an interview with
the artist Robert Gober. “I wanted to see
how close I could come. That’s how the
piece started.”
Her stones were of varying shapes
and sizes, none of them larger than a fist,
and she made a bronze cast of each one
and covered that with a base coat of au-
tomobile body paint. Jasper Johns’s fa-
mous sculpture of two Ballantine Ale
cans, cast in bronze and painted to match
the originals, was very much on her mind.
Celmins admired Johns, whom she met
first at Riko Mizuno’s gallery and then
saw again at the Gemini GEL print work-
shop, in Los Angeles, when she started