50th Anniversary Artist Interview


Garo Antreasian
25 August 2004

As near as we can tell, Garo was the first.
In 1956, Garo Antreasian – artist in residence at Indiana University – was contacted by Henry Levison, the owner of the Permanent Pigments Company in Cincinnati, Ohio. Levison had been making oil color since 1933 and had built a solid reputation for his paints as well as his innovative approach to artists’ materials. In 1955, Levison had been the first to recognize the potential for using emulsified acrylic resins (water-based acrylics) for use with traditional painting materials and had launched an acrylic gesso using a name derived from the combination of two words: liquid texture. Or Liquitex.

Levison recognized that the only way to build acceptance for his new products was to push hard to get them into use. So, he immediately started knocking on doors at major universities and art schools around the Midwest. Which is how he ended up with Garo Antreasian.

After serving as a combat artist with the Coast Guard in World War II, Antreasian studied at the Art Students League in New York City and the Herron School of Art in Indiana. Later, he would go on to become one of the most important figures in 20th century printmaking, serving as Technical Lithography Workshop of the Tamarind Institute first in Los Angeles and later in Albuquerque as Tamarind became a world-class and world-renowned working atelier.

But, in 1956 -- before doing work that ended up in the permanent collections of institutions like the Guggenheim, the Museum of Modern Art (NYC), and the National Gallery in Washington DC -- he was working on a large-scale mural in what was then called the ‘Men’s Quad’ at Indiana University. Recognizing that here was an opportunity to explore how acrylic-emulsions would perform on a large scale, Henry Levison took an immediate interest in the project and offered to produce paint for Antreasian. The result was the first large scale and public use of water-based acrylics, the paint from Liquitex that, over the next decades, became the most widely used medium in the world.

Garo Antreasian is 82 and still living in Albuquerque. He’s still actively making art, and to honor the 50th anniversary of Liquitex and the introduction of water-based acrylics, we spent a day in Garo’s studio talking about his extraordinary career, his use of materials, his current work, and his historical use of the first water-based acrylic colors. Following are excerpts from that illuminating and fascinating interview.


Liquitex: Let’s start at the beginning. Your father left Turkey for America and ultimately to the Midwest, looking for a safe place for his family. How did that shape you?

Garo Antreasian: My father, a tailor (who was active in the Armenian revolutionary movement), came to the United States looking for a middle class city where those who were pursuing him wouldn’t know he existed. In Indianapolis, we were what you would call lower middle class. It was a mixed neighborhood of white-collar and blue-collar people. I couldn’t speak English until I went to grade school. At home, we were fully Armenian and we spoke Armenian. When I went to grade school, I loved it. I don’t remember about learning how to speak English and having to adapt; it was very easy. I never remember a hardship.

In my neighborhood, most of the kids were a little bit older. So I was always running a little bit behind. Which made me competitive just to stay up. So, from childhood I became a competitive guy. That’s true even to this day. I think that always stayed with me. I always wanted to be as good as the next guy -- whatever that means.

When I was in high school my first job was working in the main library downtown, so I would check out books on art and I taught myself art history. Literature stimulated my curiosity and imagination.

Liquitex: Today, we tend to think of art education in the public schools as largely a post-WW II development. But you seem to have had a remarkable high school education in art.

GA: My high school was extraordinary. It was called Arsenal Technical High School, called that because it was originally a Civil War arsenal. It had a 76-acre campus with maybe 20 separate buildings on that campus. My graduating student body was 1000 kids so it was more like a university than a high school. There were 12 faculty in the art department, all practicing artists. Many exhibiting in national and regional shows. They had a system for grooming promising kids for scholarships to be able to go to art school when they graduated. It was like a farm club. They would say this kid’s gonna go to Chicago Art Institute, this kid’s gonna go to Cleveland, this kids gonna go to so and so. I wanted to go to Rhode Island School of Design.

In the department, there was an old lithography press and a package of zinc plates that had been exposed to the air and oxidized -- but I didn’t know that. I had a close buddy and the teacher came to us one day and said, “I want you to find out what that press does and give a report on it.” So, we go to the library and they have the Encycopedia Brittanica and maybe one book on lithography. And it was out of date. Luckily, Indianapolis was one of the centers of lithographic commercial printing, and one of the companies there did calendars and posters. The owner of the company was an old German guy who had learned the stone trade as a kid in Europe. We wanted to buy a litho stone so we went down to talk to him. He sold us two stones each for something like $10.00 apiece. And every Saturday for a little while we would go back and listen to his stories, which were very romantic tales of his childhood and the trade and how he learned lithographic printing and brought it to America.

Liquitex: What a great way to be exposed to the mechanical process of making art along with some of the business that goes with it!

GA: We spent some weeks listening to this guy. We went back to school and taught ourselves to grind the stones in an old washtub. That was my introduction to lithography and probably why I became hooked. If someone had taught me, I would have been dirt bored.
Now we say, “we can teach your kid the fundamentals of lithography in a semester.” There’s no challenge to that.

Liquitex: So, what about RISD (Rhode Island School of Design)?

GA: The reason I wanted to go to RISD was because they had one of the few lithography programs going. But I wasn’t able to get a scholarship. I wasn’t good enough. I got a half scholarship to Herron (in Indianapolis) and my dad groaned, not only because I wanted to be an artist, but because he had to pay for half of my tuition.

Anyway, I went to Herron and worked my can off. And they had a lithography shop which used to be in a kitchen where they held socials. When I got there, they decided they couldn’t afford it anymore. So here was this modest equipment sitting and nobody to teach it. I asked the director if I could go down there and fiddle around with it. I had a little bit of lithography in high school and he remembered my portfolio and he said, “yes but you have to do it after your regular work is done.” So we would take classes from 8 to 5. And from 5 until 6 we would play poker and go out for a quick bite. And then at night I would hang out down there and fool around with it. They had stones. They had everything basic that one needed. But because I had to teach myself, and there wasn’t much literature to work with, I had to kind of make it up as I went along. So, my way of working was not very orthodox. Because of that, I was able get some results that other people couldn’t. Which became an advantage later on in life.

Liquitex: So, from the very beginning, you developed a strong mechanical sense for the materials. How has that affected your process as a painter?

GA: I learned that I could do things with the materials to coax them to do my bidding. I didn’t have to rely on – or be limited by -- whatever came off the shelf. I understood that I could adjust or compound the materials to get them to do what I needed.

Garo’s comments on this carry real weight. His current paintings are made using a variety of paint compounds, all of which have been adjusted to give him precisely the right feel and mechanical properties for building surface and structure in a unique way. Garo doesn’t seem to use anything straight off the shelf. All of which explains why he made the move to acrylics in the mid-1950s…

Liquitex: Let’s jump ahead a few decades. After the war, you studied more and then began teaching at the Herron School of Art. How did you end up working with Henry Levison and with his acrylics?

GA: Well, the war was pretty influential on me, too. I was part of the combat artist program in the Pacific, right at the time that the Japanese started using kamikaze attacks. As a Coast Guard combat artist, we had regular shipboard duties, just like every other sailor. But, when those were done, we were supposed to do paintings of stuff going on around us. So, I did many paintings, including some of kamikaze attacks that we saw around Iwo Jima. There was one painting I did of a plane going into a huge, white Red Cross ship. Incredible!

So, when we were done with these paintings and drawings, we’d send them in a packet to the office that was in charge of information about the war. When they received the packet of paintings about the kamikazes, the information officials decided that the subject of the kamikaze attacks was too inflammatory to be released. So, they destroyed the paintings. Then, a week later, they changed their minds about releasing the information and went ahead with stories to the public. But my paintings were gone.

Liquitex: Let’s come back to Henry Levison in a minute. Your experience in the Navy is just one example of how World War II completely changed the cultural and psychic landscape. And no question artists in the late 40’s and 50’s were trying to figure out how to articulate and express those kinds of cultural shifts. How did that affect you?

GA: Midwestern art was fairly limited. It was conservative and regionally oriented. In Indiana, we called them buckeye painters. They would go to Brown County and paint beech trees. I wasn’t very interested in that.

So, after the war, with the help of graduation award money, I ended up in New York City and, for a short time, at the Art Students League with artists like Will Barnet and Stanley William Hayter. And I got to see abstract works that weren’t in books. There was all this work being done by people exploring new and different materials. They excited me. By the time I got back to Indiana (as a teacher at Herron and as an artist in residence with Indiana University), I was working with stuff like PVA (polyvinyl acetate).

Liquitex: And that’s where you met Henry Levison.

GA: That’s right. We met first at Herron. By the late 1940’s, I wasn’t happy painting in oil paint.

Liquitex: Why not?

GA: Too slow in drying. I couldn’t get the effects I wanted.

Liquitex: So, you were working at Herron, and Levison contacted you at the school.

GA: I had already done one mural in Indianapolis for a TV station and I told him (Levison) I had this big project facing me at Indiana University where I had to do six 40-foot panels and I wanted to have somebody compound this paint for me. I wanted something that was liquid and that could be worked quickly. He told me that he was working on an inexpensive primer for canvas that was made with a synthetic resin, which was acrylic.

NOTE: The primer mentioned was the first acrylic gesso, first made in 1955 by Levison and Permanent Pigments in 1955. It was the first product launched under the name “Liquitex.”
He said, “Why don’t I make a batch of this stuff for you? Give me a couple of colors and you can try it out and see if it beats the other materials you were considering.” So I picked a couple of colors and he sent me three quarts of paint.

Liquitex: So at the time, he wasn’t producing color yet?

GA: No, as far as I know, all he was doing was doing what I asked him to do.
So, I tried the samples he sent, and it looked like it was going to work fine. I then gave him a complete palette of colors I wanted, and he made me many quarts of paint. That’s how that mural was painted.

Liquitex: And the rest, as they say, is history. So, if you could wave a magic wand and have paint that would do anything that you wanted, what would it do?

GA: It would do pretty much what I’m doing right now. The way I work means that I need paint that’s multi- purpose. Whether in lithography or painting, I learned from the very beginning that I could control the way the materials work. So, I want paint that I can make thinner or thicker. I can make it super thin, if I want. Or I can adjust it to get more drag, less drag. But it seems that, the older I get, the simpler and more direct my process becomes.


Antreasian’s mural at Indiana University is still in place, and can be seen in the Dining Hall of what is now the Wright Residence Center.