(toy clacking) (wind whistling) (birds cawing) (gentle music) - [Cathy] Plug it in!

- [Harry] It's not plugged in now.

- There's a plug next to it with an extension cord.

- Oh, I see.

This maybe will do it.

Oh, yeah.

See, it's a copy of our bed from the other room.

It looks just like it.

- [Cathy] (indistinct) the drawings are on the other corner.

- [Harry] What did she say?

Oh, those are the drawings for it.

So the one on the left is the left pillow, and the one on the right is the right pillow.

- It doesn't, then you just put in the sugar and vinegar.

- [Harry] Oh, okay, sugar and vinegar.

- And then you stir in the wine and soy sauce.

- I don't see the sugar and vinegar.

- Well, sweetie, either you did the sugar and vinegar, or you didn't.

- I did.

Oh, but it's gone.

Tell me more about the sugar and vinegar.

And then spill that into there?

- [Cathy] Yeah, put that in with the shrimp and the hot peppers.

- Oh.

- [Cathy] The shrimp and the hot peppers, and then the sugar and vinegar.

- [Harry] Does the cheese go out now?

- [Cathy] It could, but it doesn't have to.

- [Harry] When would we have it?

- With the pears later on, if we feel like having a little nosh.

- [Harry] Oh, like dessert.

- Yeah, yes.

- Sparkling French lemonade.

(gentle music) - It's called "Cellar Light".

The nickname of it is, "In the name of the Kitchen, the Hallway and the Holy Ghost."

(gentle music) (gentle music continues) (gentle music continues) (gentle music continues) (gentle music continues) (water burbling) (Cathy humming) (cars whooshing) - All right, that's it.

Any questions?

(audience laughing) That's it.

(audience applauding) - The whole time when you were talking, I'm trying to figure out what other people are thinking.

And I went, "Stupid, brilliant, stupid, brilliant."

(Harry laughing) And then I said- - Being in other people's heads?

- Yeah, and then I said, "That's exactly what I fell in love with."

And it is!

This is exactly what I fell in love with.

When I realized that duality, that's when I realized that by stupid, I meant not stupid, but what can I say?

Like... - Dopey?

- No, it's not even that.

Well, innocent is the word I would say.

Innocent, brilliant, innocent, brilliant.

When we were freshmen, that summer, he sent me presents.

He sent me a doll that looked like me, and he sent me other presents.

And my whole family decided I was gonna marry him.

Anita Mazuka, my friend, decided I was gonna marry him.

And I kept on saying, "Don't be ridiculous, we're just friends."

But somebody knew.

I don't know what he was doing.

He swears he wasn't courting me.

- I didn't know what I was doing either.

As I say, it all changed when we danced together.

- It's true, it's true.

- Our whole relationship went electric.

- It's true.

- We were very good friends, but when we danced, it was like, whoa!

I could see why grown ups don't want children to dance together.

We bought it in '79 and moved in early '80.

We were so unhappy here the first year, so unhappy.

It was cold.

We had no insulation.

We had no storm windows.

We had no money.

And I think the best thing I did was I turned to Cathy one day and said, "If we can't stand it, we'll get in the car and drive away and pretend it never happened.

We didn't have anything before we bought this, and we just won't look back and whatever happens, happens."

It sort of felt freeing a little bit that we weren't trapped (chuckling).

It was very, very cheap, and we had a good $300 left when we bought it (chuckling).

- You know how you're married and you separate chores?

"You're gonna do this, I'm gonna do that.

It's not fair.

You did this and that."

And instantly we knew we weren't gonna base it on money.

We were only gonna base it on time.

The currency is not money.

The currency is time.

- Time is a commodity, and you spend it.

And it's worse than spending money, 'cause you can get more money sometimes.

You can't get more time.

And when I was younger, like most people, I thought time was endless.

Sometimes when I start a new project, Cathy says to me, "How much time do you think you have?"

Well, I act sometimes like it is endless, but I know it's not.

(gentle music) (gentle music continues) - You know, I'm a little baby realist.

There wasn't a realist, somebody attacking what realism was, that I didn't know about.

People would think I was conservative.

I go, "I was doing the most radical thing I could think of doing."

I wanted to start from ground zero.

For me, it was radical.

I was gonna tear down this whole notion of affectation and a kind of male bravura.

You know I wanted to be a saint.

I was gonna empty myself out enough to arrive at universal objectivity.

I wouldn't have even shared that with my fellow realists because they would have thought, "I mean, you know, you?"

(Cathy laughing) (gentle music) During the 70's, when people started making representational painting, there was a lot of conversation about narrative painting and, what did we think of it?

Is it possible?

Can we make a painting that tells a story?

And there was a lot of argument about the reason it was so successful in the Renaissance is that there was a story that everybody agreed on, and everybody knew the iconography, and everybody could follow the story.

And so it wasn't possible any longer because our society was so mixed, and it would leave out parts of society.

And I said in my head, "Huh?"

I said, "We all drink from cups and sit on chairs.

And we all have an experience in the vernacular that we do share."

What dawned on me is that if I made paintings that were structured like Chardin's paintings, they would think they were looking at a painting.

"Gift Box", when I structured that, there was no figure, there was no ground.

The geometry and the minimalism of the composition allowed them to see that.

Whereupon if I had structured it like Chardin, they wouldn't have recognized it as something that they'd forgotten to value in their own lives.

I think I said that okay, "They forgot to value it in their own lives, but they recognize it when they see it.

(gentle music) - Then the work becomes about these other things, about certainly the material world.

A drawing like the plywood drawing on linen is really about the physical nature of the world as well.

And I like to make things that are rigid, fluid, and things that are fluid, rigid.

I'm a little bit drawn to this idea of the uncanny like that.

Maybe a soft surrealism.

Oh, how about that?

Again, I don't mind if you say, "Oh, that takes a long time or how do you do that?"

'Cause like that one, I did with a brush smaller than this brush.

So sometimes when I was drawing on this 4X8 piece of cloth with a zero-pointed brush, I would back up from myself and say, "You are insane."

But it's how it had to be to look a certain way.

I've always had a tendency to take the longer route, even if something could be done faster.

(gentle music) (gentle music continues) - So we lived on nothing, and we made a lot of sacrifices in our lives to not put burdens on ourselves that would make us not do our work.

So you make a lot of decisions.

You make a lot of decisions about what kind of a life you wanna live.

- She says to me, "We can have children, but they're yours."

- I wanted to get the contract out before.

- And I said, "I don't think so."

- I had a grandmother who abandoned her children.

I always thought that that could have been me because- - You mean if we had children?

- Yeah, I mean, I felt her need to escape, and to have a life, and not have these four boys on her head.

By watching every other woman I knew give up everything for whatever they thought they should do in this world, I decided, someplace from a very young age, really young, high school, I decided I'm gonna bet all this on me.

I'm gonna see what happens if I bet the whole lot on what I can do if I dedicate myself to this thing.

(gentle music) - But I considered myself a full-time artist as well as a full-time teacher like in a college.

But that's because I was very lucky to be blessed with stamina and stubbornness, and a desire to work.

School, really, except for the time it actually took it never slowed me up ever psychologically.

So I could get home at that point from a whole day of teaching, have dinner, and go right into my studio and work.

And the transition would be like two minutes.

I can't say how it fed me exactly.

But, everything feeds you.

My relationship with Cathy feeds me all the time.

And we talk about work all the time, and we have overlapping concerns.

- That's why teaching was so exciting, because all of a sudden, I had to know everything that was out there as best I could.

I didn't know everything that was out there.

And that's what I did.

For days on end, I would talk and talk and talk, and it wasn't just me talking, it was a real conversation.

And it's the only thing to miss about teaching.

- What it did for me is sharpen my brain and make me more articulate.

But eventually, the part where you're having a conversation with students and you don't know where it's going.

- Oh, I love that.

- And you're thinking on your feet, that became the very favorite part of teaching, because I wasn't afraid of not knowing something.

Whereas when you first start, the biggest fear is you'll be unmasked as not knowing so much.

- And I was trying to learn as much as I was trying to explain, but it was like the best place I can be is unmasked.

- [Speaker 1] One reviewer said, "Harry Roseman has dissolved the boundary between madness and rationality."

(audience laughing) Harry, Congratulations on an immensely impactful career.

- Thank you.

(audience applauding) I will say that I've had what I think of as an extraordinarily lucky life, and I often tell students that they should work hard, care about what they do, be ready for when luck strikes, and sometimes it will and sometimes it won't.

And if it doesn't, just love what you're doing enough, 'cause that will have to be it.

So two of the things that have happened to me.

One is meeting Catherine Murphy at art school, and the other one is getting a job here.

And it has been a huge and kind of wonderful part of my life.

And my transition took this much time.

- I think if you've been teaching like I was- - I walked out the door, "Bye!"

39 years- - In one place, he taught before that.

- And then I taught a few years before that.

- (chuckling) Oh, no!

- Oh, no!

- Oh, no!

You have to bring something new to the table, that's your job.

I think that's everyone's job in the art world.

The world doesn't need more stuff.

It's got plenty of it.

And so, if you're gonna bring something, you've got to bring something.

It might not be the most original thing in the entire world, but it brings a new perspective on something.

I always compare it to my big Irish family would sit around the table and everybody was welcome.

They didn't say, "You kids leave the room."

Kids could stay.

Everybody could stay if you're not gonna be boring and you're gonna add something to the conversation, And if you're gonna be funny, you could really stay.

- It doesn't mean you're changing the subject.

- Yeah, it doesn't mean you're changing the subject.

- Except for Uncle Buzzy.

- Well, Uncle Buzzy would change the subject.

I also think, and I've had many arguments with students about this, I also think that if you find who you are and the core of who you are, you're gonna bring something new to the table.

Josephine, I was talking with Josephine.

I said, "Okay, Josephine, you work from life.

Sylvia works from life.

Rackstraw works from life.

I work from life."

I just mentioned the people she was talking about.

"None of our paintings resemble one another."

- [Harry] It is amazing.

- [Cathy] We take from one another, we learn from one another.

- [Harry] And you all look at the world.

- We're all looking at the world as clearly as we can.

In the history of people just looking at the world, none of them look like each other.

I'm like, "That's amazing!"

- [Harry] How's that possible?

- [Cathy] How is that possible?

You look a little like it.

That's a tree, that's a tree, that's a tree, that's a tree.

(gentle music) - I used to say nothing has influenced me.

- This is true, including me!

- And I have been full-born.

Now I've changed it to, "Everything I've seen or talked to.

And certainly Cathy has influenced me."

So I can't separate it.

I decided, it's all influenced me in some way, even if I can't pinpoint it.

Now, even back to growing up, what I looked at as a kid.

Aerial views, trains, being on an elevated train going to the Brooklyn Museum to the Egyptian collection.

- [Cathy] And he could go by himself.

- When I could cross the streets by myself, I could just go off there and spend hours, it was great.

- [Cathy] Which I am very jealous of.

- [Harry] It was wonderful - [Cathy] I always thought that's delicious.

- And that's mostly what I looked at.

All that's to do with appearances and perception.

It's like you have a drawing, which could talk about three-dimensionality.

You can have a sculpture that's three-dimensional, in the round, and then you can have anything in between.

So the shallow reliefs, even some of the deeper ones, are a decision about what I'm seeing.

But the three dimensional reliefs are actually me trying to understand how things appear.

(birds chirping) We used to go to dinner fairly regularly Bob Mangold, Sylvia Plimack Mangold, Tom and Joyce, Thomas Noskowski and Joyce Robins, and Gary and Suzanne, Gary Stephan and Suzanne Joelson, and Judy Linn.

For a few years, we would meet sporadically and go to dinner.

And that was and wasn't a group.

It was a group of friends.

But it wasn't like a salon.

- [Cathy] Oh, heavens no.

- And art would come up.

- It was surprising to me to find a group of friends with which I had such agreement, more than ever before in my life.

It might be age, I don't know.

- [Harry] And whose work you respected greatly.

- And that's the big thing, whose work I love.

And that's hard to come by.

I am surprised by how in agreement we all are about what we like in the art world.

or making your work is.

That's kind of pretty fundamental stuff.

- Yeah, and there is something that we almost all agree on.

There's one thing that I used to say and then Tom refined it.

I used to say, "All painting is abstract, all painting is narrative."

And Tom said, "Say it like this.

All painting is abstract and all painting tells a story."

And I said, "Yes, exactly right."

Now, a lot of people don't agree with that.

But I will say every single person in this group does agree with that.

And that's big.

Painting is a metaphor machine.

You cannot, no matter how hard you try, it can't not have a metaphor attached to it.

(gentle music) - It was this house, this barn and those coops.

And then when we bought that place, there was a falling down Dutch barn.

It was this late 18th century building that we couldn't bring ourselves to let fall down.

So we propped it up, and little by little, we got some money.

When it was all done, I moved in about five minutes, "Oh, wow!

I can put all kinds of stuff in here.

I can make all kinds of stuff in here."

So it became not a folly pretty fast.

(gentle music) - When you have a show, you feel like there's nothing in there.

Nothing will ever be there again.

And I'm sure I was tossing and turning in some painting rage when I had this dream.

And in my dream, I was just tracing my hand over and over again and doing it all over a canvas.

And I went, "That's not right, it's too small.

It won't be powerful enough."

I think it's at the core of why some people hate realism, because in fact, it isn't real.

And I keep on saying to them, "That's 'cause you're using the wrong word.

You're right, it isn't real."

One of my first shows, "The Harvard Crimson" gave me a review for a show I had in Boston and said, "If you want to see real trees, go to the Arboretum."

I went, "Yes!"

It's a painting!

We have this.

Why do we need this?

Because it's a painting.

All painting is abstract.

All painting is narrative.

(audience chattering) At my opening, he said something very interesting to me, and he asked me whether I made a perspectival mechanical of the bucket painting, and the kitchen door painting.

And I said, "No, I just do it wrong, then I do it wrong.

Then I do it wrong again, then I do it wrong again, until finally, it looks somewhat the way I think it should look."

And I always think that my job is to muscle out this rectangle.

That doesn't go back like a Piero della Francesca.

It doesn't go back like this.

It goes back like, ooh.

It goes flat, and then it goes deep to the top.

It doesn't go whoop like that.

And that only can happen 'cause my sweater is sticking in the bucket and that's the only way I can make that happen.

And it can also only happen if I don't do a mechanical perspective, if in fact, I'm finding those things so that in fact, it does that and not that.

I love the fact that these paintings elicit somebody to sit in front of it and dream dreams of their own making.

Paintings are alive.

Time will change this.

Every person who looks at this will change it.

I love that about paintings.

Paintings give you license to do that because nobody's talking at you.

Nobody's moving anything.

Everything's stock still.

You have nothing to do but dream in front of this painting.

- [Peter Freeman] This show is, for us, a pleasure 'cause it's four years of work And Catherine works meticulously and slowly and intensely, and we visit a few times a year, but never quite see enough.

So when we do a show like this, it is very special because it brings together four years of thinking, four years of energy, four years of conversations between ideas that she's been having.

When she does a show, it's revealing a lot of information, a lot of surprises, a lot of insights, and there's a real pleasure in that, which is gratifying for us, and we hope everyone who sees it.

(gentle music) - [Cathy] (indistinct) (gentle music continues) - Okay, when I did the subway commission, I decided that was it, I don't wanna do that any more.

They take too much time, and they're exhausting.

Also, by the time I was done with it, my head was somewhere else, so it makes it a discontinuum in your work.

(plank thudding) The Rockland County one seemed relatively small scale.

It was at a school in a residential area.

So I was thinking, "What would interest me?"

Most of the students came from where they lived.

And so there was home and school, which is kind of like a home.

That's why I made houses.

And then the different color bricks echo the colors of the buildings nearby.

They're not benches, but they're bench-like, and I hope people sit on them.

And when we were fixing them up, I took some pictures of some guy sitting on one, working on a computer.

So I like the fact that people sit on them.

It was nice to see that reaffirmed.

The airport one, when they invited me to be part of the competition, I said to myself, "If you were ever really gonna do another public commission, where might you like it to be?

New York City's major airport.

Okay."

But it was horrible to do in a lot of ways.

It took over four years.

Some months, I worked seven days a week, 12 hour days, and I taught in there.

It was almost debilitating.

So that was hard.

And that's a long time to work on one thing.

It's not like you make a fortune on them either.

Why are they good?

I like the idea of having work out in the world that isn't in a museum, or gallery, and that people just trip over.

Oh, there it is!

The arts consultant came over to see what I had done so far for the airport.

She said, "That's gonna be a very hard sell."

And I said, "I already have a job.

I don't need another job."

And she said, "You won't say that to the committee, will you?"

I said, "No, I'm not that stupid."

(birds cawing) (calm music) - [Cathy] I don't measure.

- [Harry] We don't.

- We don't measure artists based on their careers.

And anybody who does is a jerk.

- But do I complain about it?

Sure.

Do I whine about it?

Do I get cranky about it?

Yeah, but not when I'm working.

Only when I'm not working.

When I'm working, it doesn't matter at all.

- There's no way not to measure yourself in your dark moments against what is better.

Like, "Oh, why aren't I in that book?

Why aren't I in that show?"

That never stops.

And so it's just stupid.

So he sees me being miserable, he's miserable, we're both miserable.

- [Harry] It's funny, it's not why, but it's one reason you have to keep working to keep outrunning it.

- [Cathy] That's right, that's right, yeah.

You just have to work so you can get the voices out of your head.

- Do I wanna be appreciated to the level I think I deserve?

Yes, but that's how it goes.

- There's no level that's too high.

I have a friend who said, "You know, I'm ready for the talk shows.

I really am."

(all laughing) (gentle music) It's fun being here.

You're gonna scream.

And that's the table.

And that's the painting.

And you see the red coming through that's here and there.

The red will be quite... That's the drawing.

My guess is it will be life size 'cause I won't be able to make it bigger than that to get all those people in.

There's four people, one, two, three, four.

And these are napkins on their laps, white.

Everything else is a color.

There's no white in the painting except for...

So there's a red, and this is gonna be orange.

You know, most of my paintings start... the perspective enters from the bottom, but I love that the perspective comes from the top.

So it's gonna be good.

I don't know, it might be bad.

(gentle music) - And part of the other subject-content issues in these drawings is a relationship between chance and control.

The first ones, which were paint, I would drip paint or pour paint.

The best I could do as far as chance was like drip, drip, drip and not say, "I'm gonna put one here, I'm gonna put one there."

Not worry if some of the drips splattered more.

So that was the chance part.

This is somewhere along the way for the drips becoming pours.

And I even poured two colors.

And then I did do, I must have done this, so it went pfft.

And then the linear part becomes a goal of total control.

The idea is to have it perfectly identical.

If I'm working for a long time, sometimes, the brush flies out of my hand.

It'll go (spitting).

Then I change the trajectory of what I'm doing because I suck in the accident into the overall drawing.

But every time I have an accident, I'm furious and I say, "It's ruined.

I've ruined the drawing."

And then I go, "What can I do with this?"

And then usually, I'm pretty happy with what it makes me do.

(lively music) - Well, you know I love my floor.

So I was just drawing my floor and I was going, "Oh, this is a piece of...

I'm not gonna do this.

This is not real, it's not anything good."

And then I turned the light bulb on and I went, "Oh no, this is gonna be impossible!"

The only way to understand white on white, was I had to go over the whole drawing like I'd say, five times.

And it would be like I'd bring it up to a pitch, and then I'd go, "Not enough."

I'd bring it up to a pitch and I'd go, "Not enough."

The only real whiteness is that and that, and everything else is shades of gray, even though, in fact, they're all white spots.

Everything had to come up together.

They couldn't come up one place at a time because I couldn't even understand it unless I kept doing it.

And I kept on doing it, and I'd show Harry and I'd go, "Yeah, it's really good.

I think it's almost there."

And I'd go, "Yeah."

And then I'd turn it around and I'd go, "Oh ...it's not there.

I have to go back in."

(lively music) - [Speaker 2] I just am so excited to be in this room full of fans of Harry.

And if you're not a fan of Harry.

- [Cathy] Get out!

- [Speaker 2] No, you will be (audience laughing) in about an hour, I'm convinced.

(audience applauding) (floor creaking) - Hi, so in 1987, we went to China, and I took around 3,500 photos there.

And I thought maybe someday, I'd do something with it.

So 35 years later, I figured out what it was I was gonna do with it.

All the movement was from cutting the photos apart, and videoing them, and animating them.

- And I said, "I just don't understand."

And then he said, "Well, you know, all the time when I would look at photographs I would think, what's happening beyond that thing right there."

All the time, he said, "My whole life when I was a kid, what's happening on the other side of the bridge that I can't see."

And I went, "Ah, I get it."

And so that's the happiness.

The happiness is that he can make manifest this thing.

Even after a terrible day, he's still so glad that he did it.

- Well, sometimes I even get something solved.

- But the solving is like an eyelash.

(keyboard keys clacking) But when he began it, I went, "I don't know what he's doing.

"Why is he doing this?"

- I don't have a sense how the whole thing's gonna hold until I move along.

- [Cathy] You know what is really very lovely about that idea?

Is it's like traveling.

- [Harry] It is like traveling, cool.

Yeah, yeah, that's what I was thinking about.

(Cathy laughing) - But I said, "Oh, it sounds like the trip itself."

(bird chirping) - Here's my biggest thing about the China project.

I will die, and it won't be done, and that's almost a fact.

- Almost a fact?

- I'm on installment 11, and it's the third day of a trip that took a month.

And the installment I'm on now, which is only installment 12, I've been working on for over a year.

It's not looking good.

(rain pattering) (gentle music) - I was painting on Chase Avenue right after I graduated from college.

I'm standing underneath a pear tree, it's lovely.

I'm struggling away.

A wind moves the trees that are probably a half a mile away from me, but I can't feel the wind here, but I feel the wind inside me.

I almost fainted.

I knew that something had happened to me.

It doesn't always happen.

Bugs fly in your nose.

You think you're going to sweat to death, you're gonna freeze to death.

But when it does happen, and it happens regularly, I say, "How did we let them make us come inside?"

They start rough because you can't see anything in a painting until you cover the painting.

You really can't see what you're doing.

I mean, honestly, I've only worked on this painting for maybe 10, 12 hours.

And so it's very new, and it's really pretty ugly, but it'll get there.

All right, not bad, not bad.

It's this pressure.

When Fourcade first started selling my work, I was like, "Oh ... he sold all that work.

Now I've got to make a whole bunch of new work."

And I went slower and slower and slower.

I was really freaked out.

"Still Living" is its name (laughing).

This mother is gonna take me two more summers.

I just know it is.

- [Harry] I only did one drawing last year.

- [Cathy] This is the most ordinary thing and the most extraordinary thing I've ever painted.

It's like, "Oh, oh, it's just under a table.

I do that every day, don't I?"

That's the other painting I finished in 2022.

Just kill me.

(crickets chirping) (gentle music) (gentle music continues) The other day, I was talking about the differences.

- [Harry] Between us.

- Yeah, and you said you really love it that I can talk that way about my paintings because you don't have an overall idea.

And I said, "I disagree with you.

I think you have had one, and you've had one since I first met you.

- And you said what it was, but I forget.

(Cathy laughing) - [Cathy] I said, I said- - 'Cause I may need to know this.

- [Cathy] People think that Harry is being facetious.

and Harry is never being facetious.

In 2023, not to mention 1970, it was a very unusual thing to come at the world without irony, maybe the renaissance.

- But I didn't even know that was a stance of mine until you told me.

- Not knowing doesn't make it not there.

Because it's a constant.

It's gone underneath this since the beginning of being.

He's done other things where I went, "Ahhh, he's having a breakdown."

(Harry laughing) He started doing collages.

He was doing collages.

- But I had this idea to do collages, but when Cathy got worried was a year went by, and I was still sitting and cutting things out.

And I just loved cutting things out.

And I would walk around saying, "Nobody should ever say they're bored.

They could just cut things out.

It's totally satisfying."

Some of the moves you have to make in Photoshop and in Maya are the same thing.

I'm cutting objects from their backgrounds, I'm moving things around.

It was just like doing the collages.

And then other things are just like when I was doing reliefs.

So the thing about these videos, these animations that feels familiar and I like so much is it echoes things I did over the years in totally other forms.

(gentle music) You talk about the world in your paintings in a way that I think is a little different than how you sometimes talk about it, but which I think is spectacular is you talk about being a realist, and you're looking and putting down what you see, but really, you're making these worlds that reflect our world, but they don't duplicate it, and in a way, they are anchored in reality, but also are paintings that are unto themselves.

That's one of my favorite things about what you do.

- Thank you.

- And I don't think you can help doing it even though you don't talk about that's what you're doing.

And then the other thing, which is about color, is you or I look at something and that's yellow and that's burgundy, or whatever.

And Cathy's looking so hard that at first, I look at what she's doing and I go, "I don't see those colors at all."

But if you stare, you start to see them, and it's because I think you're looking so hard and you pull all this color out of stuff that's there, but at a glance, it's under the radar.

So I think that's one reason that color in your paintings is so spectacular.

- You've never said that before.

That's very helpful.

- [Harry] Oh, good.

- No, because I struggle with color a lot.

- [Harry] I know you do.

- And color is impossible.

Color is impossible.

- You're always saying it's not as beautiful, but that's not the point.

And it's not what you're doing.

- I'd like it to be as beautiful, different beautiful.

- Yeah, but it's different beautiful, and it is as beautiful if not more beautiful.

And it's a strange combination of fact and fiction.

And the fiction part is what transcends the observational part, and the everyday part.

And you do that so well.

- [Cathy] I know that, but I still struggle with color.

It's like ff, ff, ff butterflies, butterflies.

- How often do people have to say that to me?

- [Daniel] I think you've got.

- You have food here.

You have a little food here.

(Cathy and Daniel laughing) And the other thing, just as a partner, an artist partner, and I'm a disciplined person, but really, you're the most disciplined artist I know at least that I see up close, and that has really helped me focus.

- [Cathy] You would always have done work, but it probably helps you focus.

- But I would have gone off to, oh, okay.

But now, I'm more stringent.

- You were a little bit like a cat.

Whoa, that's moving!

(Cathy and Harry laughing) Creative people have to find each other.

Nobody wants you to spend time doing this.

They want you to do what they want you to do.

- They want you to go out to dinner, and go to a party, and go swimming or whatever.

- All of my assistants, you know, we've had assistants, I always just say to them, "Find somebody who does something.

Just find somebody else who does something, that's not gonna want you to go to their cousin's house for their bar mitzvah."

- The nice thing for me about the photography part is it all becomes my work.

- Yes!

- And I love that, that I'm always working which I guess, is that something a Buddhist would think is wrong?

(gentle music) - [Cathy] Art is really a good thing to do, but I also think that art is mankind's excuse for being the worst species in the entire world.

- [Harry] Excuse?

Justification, you mean.

- Justification, justification.

(footsteps rustling) I just hope the computers like my paintings.

- When there's only robots left?

- When there's only robots left.

(insect buzzing) Can we kiss?

Can we kiss?

That's not gonna work.

We made ooh-ing sounds.

- Shut up, did I?

You did.

- I did, it was me.

- Let's do it without the noise.

- Okay.

- [Marta] Okay, and no talking.

(Cathy laughing) (Cathy and Harry snorting and laughing) Okay, just look at me and be serious artistes for a moment, for Chrissake!

Harry jumps right to it.

- Wait a minute, wait a minute.

- [Marta] Ready for your close up, Ms. DeMille.

- Artists, serious artists.

- It doesn't help if you say serious artists.

- [Marta] Okay, you can do anything except talk.

(gentle music) (no audio)