Pretensia Quarterly Interview with Darwin Price Upcoming Issue - Fall/Winter 2004 This interview recorded earlier this year at Pretensia Quarterly's office in Berkeley Ca.

Interviewer: Terrance Riley

Darwin Price is a well-known artist in the San Francisco Bay Area art scene. Often present in his work is the reconciliation of such dichotomies as good/evil, anima/animus, orange and green. I had the chance to talk to Darwin Price about an upcoming show.

TR: Greetings Mr. Price, please have a seat. Can I call you Darwin?

DP: sure.

TR: Our readers have been very interested in your work and I've followed your career personally with great interest. Should we break right into the questions?

DP: Why not?

TR: All right. Well to begin with, many visual artists acknowledge an oscillatory process of delving into subliminal experience and imagery and integrating this with more conscious manipulation and methods of plastic construction, which then becomes a platform for interface with aspects of contemporary environment, e.g. images from the media, idiographic and nomothetic trends. Do you feel this kind of creative/evolutionary direction informs your approach to materials and ways of working?

DP: Not much.

TR: The prevailing aesthetic for many decades towards increasing integration of the psychic and personal realms in the creative process and its products have become tacit in the visual arts. How does your personal experience, destrudinous/libidinal motivations, oscillations in self feeling that you have alluded to at many points in your career, and genetic (in the psychoanalytic sense) matters contributed to your work?

DP: It has a negative capability.

TR: In reference to your early work you mention the constructive aspect, in which the skein of creative processes, and certain vogue elements must undergo a procrustean treatment/truncation to become manifest. Is this kind of melding/obliterating process one you feel you have control of, or one of which you feel yourself a passive spectator and integral part?

DP: The first one.

TR: You have said that you've felt that your dreams and other unconscious imagery were the waste products of the self. Does this affect how you work and does the flow of this psychic-fecal effluvium create a miasmatic aura, which colors your work and its atmosphere?

DP: Well...Now that you mentioned it.