The Universe of Keith Haring

- I was sort of in New York at exactly the right time

and exactly the right place.

Wherever you are is the center.

But I can be in more than one place at the same time.

Things seemed to really be happening fast.

- He was born face up instead of face down,

which the doctor called sunny side up.

I guess I should have known right then

that something was gonna be up, huh?

- I grew up in a really small town in Pennsylvania

called Kutztown, which is northeast of Philadelphia.

I grew up learning to draw from my father

from about the time when I was four years old,

and my father used to entertain me

by making small drawings for me.

And I think the biggest impression that it had

was that instead of teaching me to copy

other cartoon characters or comics,

he wanted me to invent my own characters.

- We had a game where we'd see how good we could do

drawing with your eyes closed.

Which is a good practice for getting the rhythm

of your hand and knowing where your hand is

and what it's doing

without watching, without seeing it.

The hand is very strong, very unique,

and it's like a musician

who has a particular musical signature

that even with a few bars you know it's somebody's voice,

you see just a few lines of Keith,

you know it's his hand.

Different kids I guess get together

to do different things.

When you think about it, I had friends that got together

with their peers to play basketball.

I had friends that got together to play cards.

We got together to draw.

- I was really obsessed with Walt Disney a lot.

I loved Walt Disney.

I watched cartoons all the time.

- I think we had a fascination with all kinds

of genre, if you will.

And we were taking it pretty seriously.

I mean, at that time, we were fully aware

of who Picasso and all these guys were.

We were aware of the work that they did.

We were aware of how many pieces Picasso

had created in his lifetime.

And I don't think we were 10 years old.

He was always drawing,

so it was kind of a continuous evolution.

So I always knew he was good at it.

I always knew he could draw

and do artwork as well as my dad,

and was always a little jealous of that fact,

because I couldn't.

- At about 12, I started delivering newspapers,

and I started a newspaper route

which I delivered everyday, including Sundays.

Everyday after school, and on a bicycle usually.

And this was also actually probably interesting

because it meant that from 12 until 16,

which is 1970 to 1974,

everyday I was reading the front page

of the newspaper.

And this was during the end of the Vietnam War,

and into Watergate.

And Sundays it was also

then maybe one of the first times when I became

or had another thing that made me close to my father

was because on Sundays the newspapers are very thick

because the comics and all these other sections.

So Sunday mornings I would deliver them

with my father every Sunday morning,

we were waking up at six or seven in the morning,

or how early we'd get up so that we could

- deliver the papers-- - Together.

- And get done in time to go to church

and come home and have breakfast and go to church.

- We grew up in a family that went to church every week,

and because we were quite active, Keith and I,

and my younger sister Karen, in the youth group,

that gave us an opportunity

to really figure out where religion

maybe had a meaning to us in our lives.

I went to church camp for many years,

and we'd encouraged Keith to go,

and then the girls all went too.

There was one of the first times

that he met people from the city.

Black people.

Mostly blacks, which we didn't have in Kutztown

at that time.

And he got to know people from Philadelphia,

which was this big city far away.

- There was a couple years towards the end of high school

that I just thought he was really sort of

running around with the wrong kids.

That was a tough time.

It wasn't until he was in about 11th grade

when he started hanging out with some,

hanging out, so to speak, with some guy in his class

that we really didn't like.

- I had three sisters that were younger than me,

and one of them was much younger,

and she was born when I was about 10.

So I would really spend a lot of time with her

when I was growing up,

and spent a lot of time drawing with her.

I had no judgment of him.

I was an infant.

There was no way that I was going to be

trying to categorize him as being

a good boy, or misbehaving in school.

So I had no opinions formed of him,

and he could make a connection with me

that was direct.

- I think at that time, he probably was smoking pot.

Kutztown was a really small town,

so because I was not,

I didn't really fit in

to what the rest of the normal kids were like,

but as I got a little bit older,

I always used to leave

and hitchhike, and by the time I was 18,

and was allowed to leave school and leave my parents,

the first thing I wanted to do was get out

of that little town.

And a time it could have been worse.

I think this one's a write-off,

and that one is not good.

What about this one?

That one's okay.

I didn't mind those little--

- Oh, that one's not the right color.

Oh it was?

Oh, I thought he'd done that as well.

No that was

from dripping it while the orange was still wet.

That one's all right.

Oh, don't throw that away though.

I really like it.

- In senior high school he had an art teacher

who was really good, and he devoted more time to art.

He got an honorable mention,

and he got $100.

And he was so proud of this.

It was his first money that he got

from anything, for any of his drawings.

And he said okay, I won $100,

and I'm gonna use that $100, and he paid his first

down payment to go to school in Pittsburgh.

- After high school, I went to a commercial art school

in Pittsburgh for six months,

because at that point, my parents were still

convincing me that I would never

make any money being an artist,

and if I really wanted to make a living,

I'd have to do commercial art.

So I went to this commercial art school,

on my own savings, really,

from being a paper boy, whatever,

and after six months realized that

no matter what, I didn't want to do that.

I was going to school in Kutztown,

and I was good friend with Kermit Oswald,

and Kermit and Keith were childhood friends.

Kermit bought a studio down by his house,

and we used to hang out there,

that was like the hang out.

And Keith would come and visit

from wherever he was,

traipsing around, following the Grateful Dead.

And Keith would stop in,

and that's when I first met him,

and he could always draw like a son of a gun.

When I started making film in school,

in like '78, '79, the Sony camcorder that I worked with

weighed 95 pounds, and it took 24 hours to charge it

to shoot 30 minutes of tape.

Reel to reel.

No cassettes.

This goddam thing was like a backpack.

You'd put it on your back,

you're like oh my god, where are we going?

Not far, I hope.

The thing weighs a ton.

- When I was 20, I had my first one man show in Pittsburgh.

While I was there, there had also been an exhibition

of Pierre Alechinsky in the museum,

which at that time had a really big influence on me

because it was the first time that I had seen

an older artist who had done an entire body of work

that in some ways was very similar

to the things that I was starting to do,

even though I was 20 years old,

there was something very common that I had

with his work, and it gave me the confidence

to think that maybe I was on the right track,

and I was doing something that was worth taking seriously.