Big Eyes

by Scott Alexander

  INTERVIEWER: When you did some of your commissions, what was it like to paint someone like Natalie Wood?

  MARGARET: Natalie Wood was a perfect model. It was a challenge because she was so beautiful. I couldn’t in any way flatter her, because she was already so perfect. I’ve never had anyone sit so still. I commented on it, and she said she had been posing since she was five, so she knew how to sit just perfectly still. So while I was doing her, someone was doing her fingernails, someone was doing her toenails and someone else was doing her hair. But she was sitting there perfectly still while all these other things were going on. I think the first day she sat about six straight hours! That’s why I think it came out so good. And then later, I did Robert Wagner’s portrait.

  INTERVIEWER: And how was that?

  MARGARET: It was good, too, but hers was better. I like painting women better than men for some reason. I don’t know why—maybe I relate more to women. I don’t paint too many men. Once in a while I’ll do little boys. My painting that I did of Joan Crawford, she put on the cover of her book. She collected many of my paintings. She probably had twenty or more, and she loved them. When she found out the truth about who actually painted the paintings, she was just wonderful to me. She was a wonderful friend, and I don’t believe a word of what her daughter said about her.

  INTERVIEWER: She put your paintings in her film Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?

  MARGARET: Yeah, I painted her little dog, too. One summer, I spent about two months in Beverly Hills painting the Jerry Lewis family. I stayed at the Beverly Hills Hotel, and every day in the poolhouse I’d set up my easel. Their plan was to have the butler bring in one child at a time for about a thirty-minute session, then take that child away and bring another one in. In the beginning, they were reluctant. Five boys, four dogs, and three cats, but after the first hour or so they got intrigued with it and they didn’t wanna leave when their turn was up. So I ended up with all of them in the room, chasing cats and dogs and kids, just total bedlam. But it was fun.

  INTERVIEWER: Can you tell me about painting Liberace?

  MARGARET: I did his painting in the middle of the lobby at the Royal Hawaiian hotel in Honolulu. When he said he wanted me to do his painting, I thought he would want to be painted in his room. But he said, “No, I want it painted in the lobby.” So this just totally floored me. I had to sit there and paint him with about three hundred people standing around watching. And he was talking and laughing and moving around. It was a little difficult, so when I got ready to do his mouth, I asked him to please, just for a minute, close his lips and stop talking. He said, “If you have pretty teeth, you should show them.” So I put his pretty teeth in the painting.

  INTERVIEWER: What kind of paint do you use? Is it strictly oil, versus acrylic?

  MARGARET: I usually just paint with oil and nothing else, straight out of the tube. Sometimes I’ll put in an acrylic background, rarely. If I’m trying to do something fast and want it to dry fast, then I might paint acrylic first and then go over it with oil.

  INTERVIEWER: Do you ever just draw?

  MARGARET: Yes, I like to draw very much. My favorite medium is oil and pencil and colored pencils. And I do a lot of mixed mediums—mixing up pastel, pen, and ink. I’m a very fast painter. I probably shouldn’t tell you how fast I paint, but I can when I have to. Like in the court, when I did that painting, in front of the jury and the judge, big eyes, little nose, and a mouth. Just that much took one hour, but that’s the fastest I ever painted. Normally it would take me two or three, four hours to do that much.

  Margaret at the Keane Gallery, San Francisco, 1961–1962

  INTERVIEWER: Do you have certain influences, like Modigliani?

  MARGARET: Yes, I love Modigliani’s paintings and I really studied them and looked at them and copied them. Yeah, he has really influenced my work a lot.

  INTERVIEWER: How do you feel about contemporary artists adopting some of your eyes?

  MARGARET: Well, I’m flattered. It doesn’t really bother me too much. I’m glad they like my paintings enough to do it. It does disturb me when they’ll really try to copy it exactly and maybe even sign “Keane” on it.

  INTERVIEWER: What do you think about a lot of current pop stars collecting your work? Can you talk a little bit about that?

  MARGARET: I’m surprised. I’m happy when people like my work. I don’t quite know exactly why they like it, but I’m glad they do. Maybe they’re searching for answers and the paintings say something to them. I think they like the older ones better than the recent ones.

  INTERVIEWER: How do you feel about that?

  MARGARET: Well, when someone likes the older ones, I’m pretty sure that they have the same type of feelings that I had when I painted them. They’re wondering, Where is the world heading, what’s happening, and why am I here? And I guess that this generation is feeling the same things that we did in the sixties. Pop stars like Matthew Sweet and others seem to like my paintings, which is very flattering to me. I don’t exactly know why. I think the world situation today … Everything is so insecure and [there’s] so much injustice in the world that people are looking for something better. I think the hope for the world is God’s Kingdom, which will establish Paradise condition again, the way it was meant to be. I think young people today are searching for these things. And that must be why they like my paintings.

  INTERVIEWER: How does it make you feel, that people find answers in your paintings?

  MARGARET: That makes me feel very good, that I was able to paint something that they could relate to, and it might help them come to grips with their own feelings. And maybe they’ll find the same answers that I found in the Bible. That’s what I really hope. I think each person has to do their own searching. You know sometimes when people interview me, they don’t want me to talk about my spiritual beliefs. They’ll say, “You know what, Margaret, this is not a religious article.” But my religious beliefs are why I paint the way I paint … really tied in very closely. My deepest thoughts and feelings and my relationship with the Creator is the most important thing in my life and it comes out in my paintings.

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  Tyler Stallings was chief curator at the Laguna Art Museum in Laguna, California, for the Margaret Keane and Keanabilia exhibition. He is currently Sweeney Art Gallery director at the University of California, Riverside.