The Capitol Dome

find persuasive—or the ordinary lives of famous important people. WdG: Ok, this also alludes to something else you said very specifically [at that lecture]: as your starting point for deter- mining the look and the feel, the composition and mood of a history painting, you mentioned "first person voice—sto- ries—moments." So, how do you actually start to envision the composition? PW: I am at my best when other people want something— when they choose something or they know something they want—because that saves me having to think up what the sub- ject is. I'm not very good at guessing what people want, what the public wants, but I am very good at giving people what they want if they know what they want. Once I'm commis- sioned, that's what I am best at. Which is pretty unusual for artists. I like the constraints; I find them freeing. So, provided I have the subject . . . next, there is an impulse—an irresist- ible impulse to do a painting. And once I have that impulse, which I can feel in my body, it's visceral. Then if I'm lucky, I walk around with that feeling. It's a real pleasant feeling—this impulse, this urge. Kind of slightly blinding, like other over- whelming urges. Then I usually have what I can only describe as a visionary moment; it comes to me, what I'm going to do. Now, my dad studied philosophy by correspondence, and one of the things he learned— and I don't know which philosopher said it, but he believed this, he used to tell me this—is that we have the answers to all our questions in us. It's just a matter of getting access to them. And there does seem to be a certain truth to that. Suddenly, and when the answer comes, you rec- ognize it as though you are recognizing something familiar; it's not like some random crazy thing. Like, I'm working on this "bird's eye view"—this L'Enfant's "bird's eye view" [of early Washington, D.C.]—and I've been struggling . . . . But last night, it wasn't enough of what I thought of to make it compelling, because a painting doesn't just have to tell a story and everything else. It has to be a compelling painting. It has to succeed as a visual image, which is gripping to the public and memorable, so it will stick in people's minds. But then it came to me last night, how I was going to do it or how I might do it. It just came, and I immediately wrote it on the back on an envelope because sometimes those things are very ephemeral. I'm sure you as a historian, when you're writing something, say "Oh yes, of course, a connection" . . . and then the phone rings. WdG: How do you convey the "ring of truth" in the details of your paintings? PW: Oh, the "ring of truth." That is a very complicated thing, making things seem real and not false. There are a couple of things. I like all kinds of paintings; I have a very catholic taste in art. But the key, I feel, that makes a painting interesting or uninteresting is whether it was done sincerely, whether the artist was truly committed to what he was doing or whether it was just something he knocked out. I don't know, maybe he was a designer and thought he would become an artist. Perhaps actually being sincere about what you're doing gives authenticity. I try to be sincere. There is no irony in my work. It is not ironic. I have no interest in irony and I don't get it. WdG: What does that mean, irony in art? PW: You know, you try to take the piss out of whatever it is you're pretending to do. It's all ironic, nothing is sincere. You don't actually mean anything. I mean, I understand it in speech because I come from that English tradition of say- ing the opposite of what you mean. But in painting, I have no interest in that. I think the other thing that gives it authenticity is trying to think that I'm in the paint- ing. I'm immersed in the painting and every aspect of the period and whatever it is that I am painting. And I am also an art historian and I have worked as a copyist and I under- stand the way things work, that are represented in the period I am presenting. Often you will find history painting, in the 1850s or 1900s, 1950s, 70s, looks like paintings of those periods. Like, the terrific National Geographic illustrations from the 1950s and 60s, when they were doing historical books. Those illustrators were fantastic, but there's no way of showing the sense of the real period. I mean, LIBRARY FOR THE WHOLE AMERICAN PEOPLE (1821), 36" x 60" oil on canvas I am fascinated by how things are made, especially buildings when they were built by manpower alone. Fittingly, the means and crafts used to build the Library of Congress in the center block of the Capitol were largely unchanged from ancient Rome. 34 THE CAPITOL DOME

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