This piece was going to be a conversation with H. Joe Waldrum, but if you have ever tried to interview the taciturn Waldrum, you might be able to comprehend the chore I had given myself. Here are some of the fragments and pronouncements gleaned from that effort.It all started sixteen years ago, this obsession with paper and how to make marks and images on it called art. Waldrum had said that he wanted to make his art more available. His paintings had advanced in price until some people could no longer afford them and Waldrum himself had collected inexpensive multiples when he had wanted the art of an artist priced beyond his means. His first etching had been made when he was a teacher in college. He had been sitting in the print department at Fort Hays Kansas State College when the print instructor handed him a prepared plate with a etching needle and said, "Make an etching, Waldrum." He quickly sketched a self-portrait with model, and thought no more about it.
Years later when he had moved from the "hill country" of Texas to Tesuque, New Mexico, he made a few intaglio etchings (dry points) and a couple of aquatints, based on his vaginal series of paintings. But none of these early oblique efforts would carry the weight of his obsession, the passion which he began in 1983, and which continues into the year two thousand.
What Waldrum began has never been seen before in aquatint etching. When one thinks of aquatint, one normally thinks of Francisco Goya in Spain, or Doel Reed in New Mexico, but their stuff looks like aquatint; they, in fact, set the standard for black and white aquatint. Color is where Waldrum departs from all others and establishes a different standard for aquatint etching. Earlier color aquatint etchings acquired their name because they looked like etchings colored with water color (aquarella). They are nothing like Waldrum's concept of aquatint.
You may have read his account of his vision that came from an early morning dream, how he was floating through multicolored sheers, looking at the secondary colors and tertiaries created by seeing through the sheers.
The one thing that sets artists apart from the everyday community is their insatiable desire to get things right, to not quit when the rest of us would say "good enough". Some call this obsession with detail, neurotic, but I think not. Without this obsession we would not have a Beethoven symphony, a Robert Frost poem, a Samuel Beckett play, or a Frank Gehry building.
While I cherish what artists make, I really don't find them interesting to talk to, especially H. Joe Waldrum. He's so damn glum, sometimes just moody, other times downright saturnine. But you do have to dialogue with them if you are going to write about them. I was chatting with him recently, trying to get him to say something about the art he makes. It was actually a day when in the words of Lillian Hellman, "He was a charming mixture of glum and glee." I had mentioned that the etchings always looked so damned done, that every line in them worked toward resolution of the piece when the glee part popped out and he said, "Look at this mark here and see how it yanks the other edge taut." "It's all taut," I replied, "in fact I seldom see anything tauter, unless it's one of those incredibly wonderful drawings of Steve Catron." That made him smile; he likes the work of Catron and is honored to be mentioned as comparable.
I've watched him move a line over and over until in his words, "All the lines are in sync and counterpoint," or "Take out the linchpin and your drawing collapses," or "Without counterpoint the elements meander." He so carefully makes sure that each line is where it belongs. That's where the quality that so many people miss becomes apparent; it's the part that causes the few who know how to read a work of art, to refer to the Oriental nature of his work.
It seems to us odd and even difficult to stand at a drawing table or easel and fuss with a few lines until they sing in tune, but that is what he does so well. I use the musical example because Waldrum trained first as a musician, was and is a very good conductor as well as arranger of music, and he tells me that no matter what he is doing (drawing, scoring music, or painting) he still thinks within the rules and vocabulary of music theory and counterpoint.
There's no way to know what drives Waldrum; perhaps we can listen to what Leonard Bernstein says when talking about Beethoven's struggles to get something right, to get it so right that one note follows another inevitably.
