00:00 I am 93.
00:02 93. And do you still hate?
00:05 Yes.
00:07 When I was a child, I was sick a lot.
00:10 And it was before the Second World War, and I was always dying.
00:16 Spent my childhood dying and surviving.
00:20 And so there were no antibiotics or anything, you know.
00:24 And there's something about that that made me appreciate every day that I'm alive.
00:30 My name is Dorothea Rockburn. I'm a painter and an artist.
00:35 It's simple to understand.
00:37 I was 13 years old or something, and I was in art class.
00:43 Painting a landscape on Mount Royal in Montreal.
00:48 And I painted it, and the teacher admired it, and so did the other students.
00:55 And I thought to myself, "Why does nature do it better?"
01:01 And I think I spent the rest of my life trying to find out.
01:06 I have a 70-year-old daughter.
01:09 I think in 1954 we moved to New York.
01:12 I wanted to be here because I wanted to be where painting was.
01:16 Well, I lived in a loft on Chambers Street, and there were no schools there.
01:23 So every day I took her up to Dalton's from Chambers to 89th Street, because there were no buses.
01:29 And then I went to a job.
01:31 I picked her up at 4 o'clock and brought her home and did homework with her,
01:36 and made dinner and read to her, and painted all night.
01:45 When was this taken?
01:47 Who knows? Probably in the '60s sometime.
01:52 I moved into this loft from Chambers Street in 1973 because I was being evicted from Chambers Street.
02:06 It had been a factory, and I came in and it was a raw space.
02:11 And I looked at it, and it was very bright, as you can see.
02:16 And it was very big. It's 6,200 square feet with 14-foot ceilings.
02:22 At that point I was 5'2", and I thought, "Well, better too big than too small."
02:27 And so I took it.
02:30 I hope to be an inspiration to other women.
02:36 I hope that my life will allow them to also be artists.
02:41 I want them to know that they can do it too.
02:45 Just stick to it.
02:47 When I work, I don't think.
02:50 I think before I work, and I think after I work.
02:53 While I'm working, I'm not thinking. I'm doing.
02:57 And there's a transformation that happens when I begin to work.
03:03 Usually most artists have rituals when they go into their studio, and I have mine.
03:08 I work on my diary, which is on my diary desk.
03:11 And then I assemble my working area, and then I begin to work.
03:18 It makes me feel that my life is a part of the universe.
03:26 I have to paint.
03:29 It's like breathing.
03:33 No paint, no life.
03:36 (laughing)
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