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David Binkley: The first question is, what is the function of your drawing in the development of your painting? Is it a way to work out ideas and translate them into painting or is this a kind of separate creative activity that has a justification of its own?

Julie Mehretu: Both. I think that for me the paintings grew out of the drawing in the beginning. My initial impulse and investigation was to try and develop, through drawing, a language that could communicate different types of narratives and build a cityscape, each mark having a character, a modus operandi of social behavior. As they continued to grow and develop in the drawing I wanted to see them layered; to build a different kind of dimension of space and time into the narratives.

DB: Is layering a part of your drawing?

JM: Yes, layering is part of the drawing; it’s also part of the painting. And [it] shows how the drawing moves into the painting, which is the way I think about making this work. It’s really about developing a language and most of the activity of making it is very much about drawing and about the investigation that happens, but it is also a process itself, and painting is very different process-wise. It takes a lot more time.

KK: Do you find that you’re more spontaneous with one than the other?

JM: No. I’ve gotten to the point where I find I’m developing a way to draw on canvas, in the paintings, in the way that I want to draw on paper. I used to draw on paper a lot, and then I would do a painting that would incorporate a lot of the elements I had investigated in drawing. I would put it all into the painting by drawing it onto the canvas. But now, during this last year, I haven’t done any drawings on paper—all the work has been on canvas. It’s all been drawing directly on canvas and there’s been an immense amount of growth and change in the work. It’s all documented there. I can say I don’t like a painting and never show it to anyone, but generally all the work is there naked—in the painting— and for me it’s very much about bringing these two things together.

DB: Is there a difference in the structure in creating a drawing versus a painting? What I’m thinking of is that a drawing can be read as one dimension that might be quite complex, but a painting is layered. So you have not only depth, but you have overall surface to contend with… where here it seems, I guess you are creating depths because you have washes and all of that.

JM: But the process of approaching the work conceptually is completely different. The conceptual place of approach in a drawing is very investigatory…I don’t like to separate drawing and painting, because I draw in my paintings. But I do think of my paintings very much as paintings and not drawings, and drawings very much as drawings. The thing that separates these two is that this wall drawing is a five day process: the conceptual idea and investigation are immediate and fast. A drawing is created at a different pace. With the paintings, it’s about building spaces, about constructing something else. There are a lot of decisions I’ve made conceptually before I start to paint. I’ve done research about what is going to go into the painting in terms of architectural information, color, narrative, concept and other stuff and then there is the development of the drawing in the painting. Painting, the making of it, is just a much more complex process, whereas the process of making a drawing is a fresh take, it’s a very immediate thing.

DB: Is it maybe more of an opportunity for experimentation?

JM: Yes—experimentation, investigation, questioning. Not that that doesn’t happen in a painting but in the painting I am very much aware that’s it’s becoming a painting. I make an effort to bring those processes together more and more, but it’s difficult, because once you’ve spent four months working on a painting, it’s hard to just let go and draw in the same way that you can on a blank wall…Well, I really think of the drawing as growing, as behaving, as building, as acting. I don’t think of the drawing as being a static representation of something. The architectural drawing, or the painting, the colored painting aspect, is much more rigid. Painting is more of a representation of something else, a metaphor for something else. Of course it has agency in a certain sense, but it’s not an active agent in the same way that I think the drawing is. It is actually behaving within the superstructure. It really isn’t that, it’s only a drawing, but I think of it and make them that way.