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48 lumps on it and cut these holes in it so it looked like something that was exhumed from the wall, and there were marks on it that were like marking time. It's amazing that this work — a thread from your Houston chapter — is included in the upcoming international show. JS: I had returned to New York after college at the University of Houston, but when I came back to Houston, I worked on 19th Street, and that place was owned by Milton Wiesenthal and his brother Harold from Harold's menswear in the Heights. Milton was very nice to me. I guess they're not with us anymore. That was a while back, but he was very gentle and very sweet. I don't know if he had a notion of what I was doing in there. I entered that painting [ Jack the Bellboy] in a show in Fort Worth, where it was rejected, and then I brought it back to New York, and I repainted it. After I sold it, I asked the people that bought it, if I could take the paint off it and repaint it the way it was originally, which they let me do. They had it for many years. My son, Vito, has the painting now. Your La Coste show includes Jack the Bellboy, and our cover? JS: Yes, Jack the Bellboy is one of the paintings. There's also a self-portrait. That's the one that you picked for your cover — the cover will be in that show. And it's funny, because in the sense, they're both self-portraits. With your Plate Paintings nearing 50 years, your work is pulling through time. Are you beginning to think about that? JS: I've been making, basically, time maps. There's a painting called Cortes [1988]. It's pretty interesting. There was a big hole in the skylight in the studio which made this incredible stain on this old piece of tarp that had holes in it. The stain was amazing, so I took varnish and linseed oil, and I painted in the stain so it wouldn't go away. Then I glued a piece of baldacchino from the 17th century in the middle of it, and that was it. It looks like a map of the world with this piece of material from another time floating through it. I wouldn't want to over-describe what it is, but I'm thinking: How do you deal with time. How do you deal with simultaneity of time. How do you deal with other people's intentions and the commandeering of a set of variables for another set of variables. When people were designing the plates, for example — putting little flowers on them or whatever, they didn't know that somebody was going to smash them and then glue them onto a surface and paint over them. Or if somebody was writing 22 cents or 33 cents on them, because they were selling them in the Salvation Army, they had no idea that their handwriting would end up in the painting some years later — I wasn't necessarily going to wash all the plates and take the price tags off them. Is this notion of time the through line in your work? You painted Jack the Bellboy in the Heights in 1975, and it's being looked at this spring in France yet it simultaneously recalls that time when you were in that specific space in Texas. JS: It's not just me. Paintings bring you into their present. You see a Caravaggio painting today, and it brings you into its present. That's what paintings do. I was shocked, in a sense, when I stood there and looked at The Sea [1981] and looked at The Patients and the Doctors [1978] and Notre Dame [1979} in that room at Mnuchin — those three paintings. I thought: 'What the hell was I thinking?' I don't really think about it too self-consciously. I just decide what I need to do in order to accomplish the painting. I might see something that looks to me like it could be a painting, whether it be a piece of material that's covering a toy store in the jungle in Mexico, or something covering a fruit market there. And I think, 'Okay, that could be a good painting. I think I'll buy this and give them some money so they can get a new piece of material to cover the fruit market.' Or buy these sailors in Egypt new materials so I can have their used sails from the felucca boats. So I — as Max Hollein has written — see paintings everywhere. Brooklyn vs. Brownsville … and Mexico. JS: The thing about moving to Texas is that I had grown up in Brooklyn, which was very vertical and a more closed kind of community. Everywhere had a sort of sameness. An Italian, Jewish enclave. I went to Public School 238. There wasn't really any art in my life, other than my mother taking me to the Brooklyn Museum when I was a kid or taking me to see Aristotle with a Bust of Homer by Rembrandt at The Met. My father was busy working all the time or doing different things, so I spent more time with my mother. My brother and sister are a lot older than me, so they did not move to Texas when I moved down there with my parents. My father was in the ropa usada business, selling used clothes, so it was on the Mexican border. The proximity to Mexico was very important to me. The flatness and openness of the landscape gave me a different perspective on negative and positive spaces. Portrait of José Ramón Antero, 1997, at Château La Coste Jack the Bellboy / A Season in Hell, 1975, at Château La Coste © JULIAN SCHNABEL STUDIO. PHOTO BY JOSHUA WHITE © JULIAN SCHNABEL STUDIO. PHOTO BY KEN COHEN.