Five Minutes before Sunset

Joe Liles, standing next to the cupola on top of Watts Hall.

Five Minutes before Sunset

1979

After two years on the Boulevard Farm and working in the Danziger’s Chapel Hill Restaurants (The Ranch House, The Zoom Zoom, The Rathskeller, and the Villa Teo), I decided that if I put as much energy into my artwork as I did into the restaurants, I could surely become famous. Well, this ushered in a two-year “starving artist” period. I moved into Durham and had an apartment directly across from the mostly abandoned Watts Hospital. I was self employed. I painted signs, I did commercial art, I taught classes in screenprinting at the Art School in Carrboro, and at the Durham Arts Council. I did any kind of art that people would pay me for. I hardly ever took a day off. I had an old garage in my backyard on Ninth Street that I turned into a printmaking studio. I had a table for printing with my silkscreens. I used cords tied to the rafters of the garage to hang my prints to dry. “Five Minutes Before Sunset” was my first multicolor screenprint. I printed four colors, sequentially, one-at-a-time, on top of each other, letting the ink dry between colors. I took great care to use a registration system so that my colors all lined up with each other. This print was more typical of traditional screenprinting using simple, large fields of color to make up an image. This print set the stage for many more multi-color prints of increasing numbers of colors and complexity.