ARTICULATED ARTISTS

Miho Sato talks to Alli Sharma at her studio in Bow, London E3

2012-02-01T02:13:00.000-08:00

Russian Actress, 2012

AS: It’s interesting how little detail isneeded to recognize your Moomin. I guess that is the theme of the exhibition,Minimal Excess.

Moomin, 2005

MS: Yes, I have made three Moomins, alldifferent sizes. The first, in 2003, was bigger and on thick paper. For MinimalExcess I have a new painting, RussianActress, and a slightly older one, Complexityof Adulthood 3, 2009. I had the image for Russian Actress for quite a long time. The actress and actor are together in a romantic scene from an old film. I have never watched the film but I saw part of it and I wanted to use it. I just found the image again a few days ago. She has this covering, like a Muslim lady. The focus was on the actor, so maybe she was not so important, but I just picked that up. I often choose things with a covering. I like something hidden, or hooded. I tried many times to paint a nun. I have been interested in this image since I was a child, but it is most difficult, so I keep collecting the images.

Complexity of Adulthood 3, 2009

AS: Is Complexity of Adulthood 3 painted from a model you have made yourself?

MS: No, it is from a children’s Ladybird book. The book was about how to make a rabbit. It had lovely illustrations. I have used one before for a girl skipping. It doesn’t look like the actual illustration, but the colour is something I pick up. At the moment I use more green and grey, which is a lot of colour for me.

AS: It looks like you build up layers in the painting. I can see in there was something quite dark underneath?

MS: I always use a dark background then paint over.

AS: Is there something in particular that you look for in images? There is blankness in the paintings, and lack of detail.

MS: Oh, they had more detail. The rabbit in the book had eyes and a pocket so I reduced it to get it how I wanted.

AS: Are these ideas for paintings?

Troll

MS: I started this a while ago when I was astudent at the Royal Academy. It is called Troll.It was a fire that I picked up from a Magritte painting. There was a flame andI cut it and used it and changed it to the troll. Last year I wanted to look atit again. I’m interested in the image so I keep trying it out, like with theMoomins. It is not so successful yet so I will try to do something another way.

AS: The trolls, moomins and gonks link witha Western idea of Japanese artists looking at cute, cartoon types of imagery,like anime or kawaii. Do you see any connection?

Girl with White Dress, 2008

MS: I’m sure there is a connection but noton purpose. For my generation in the 1970s and 1980s everything wasAmericanised. I grew up in Japan with Tom and Jerry, Sesame Street and Americananimation programmes. When I was a child, the bank gave you a souvenir calendarevery year and I found a similar kitschy calendar in Slovakia recently. Thiskind of thing was given free in Japan and it gives me a nice feeling. I used tocollect them. I grew up with these images, yes images with big eyes. But Idon’t paint eyes. It’s not about that. It would become obvious, that is why Ireduce.

AS: I like these short-haired, flatbrushes, are they traditional Japanese brushes?

MS: Yes, they are for DIY, for stickingglue on Japanese paper doors. When I was a child almost all families had these,so they are very comfortable for me. I think it is natural brush. It works wellwith acrylic and water.

Paper Wristband, 2009

AS: Do you have a regular working pattern?

MS: I draw first. Sometimes I have imagesfor a long time that I can use, like the Russian actress. But sometimes, likethe Moomin, I know that I want to paint it so then I try to find the image.Normally I use images that already exist but last year I painted Paper Wristband, and it was an abstractimage that I took on my phone. When I go to the gym, they give you a paperwristband. I had seen Man Ray’s lampshade painting and I was interested in theshape. Also, in Slovakia, I showed a painting called Ceiling, which came from a photo of a lampshade in my flat and Holes is from my studio wall, so thatkind of thing.

Holes, 2012

AS: Shape is important?

MS: I don’t know what I’m interested inbecause each thing is different and something I want to do. I’m not interestedin figure. It’s more abstract, searching for what I want in paint. I thinkeverything is related in how I paint them. The lampshade was something Iwanted, so is it shape? Somehow, it is those things altogether. When I paint,there is something I want to make fit, but it doesn’t quite match, and I’m notsatisfied so then I have to do it again and again. Sometimes, when I concentrate,without thinking so much, it works. When I get more logical and think back, itsnot so satisfying. So it doesn’t come all the time. I struggle then I tryagain. Sometimes I spend a lot of time, then I do the same painting withanother board and it works.

AS: I wonder if it gets harder, to get intothat spontaneous position, because you know so much about how you work.

Aunt, 2008

MS: That is why, when I start working on apainting, the image is always more strange, because I don’t already know anythingmyself. I want to have that kind of fresh spirit. I work on one painting at atime, but sometimes I struggle so then I start another and come back later.This painting is called Aunt. It isfrom a magazine photograph of an Italian grandmother, but she looks like how Iimagine my grandmother.

AS: So there is a very personal connection,like the things you grew up with?

MS: Yes, definitely there is something. Itis always a personal thing but there are different elements as well, mixedtogether. My friend gave me this old fashioned Japanese cloth when I went toJapan. The pattern is probably 900 years old. It’s quite amazing, simple butgood. It is probably the most Japanese thing I’ve done but it doesn’t look veryJapanese does it?

Japanese Towel

Minimal Excess, OPEN Ealing, London W5, 3 – 24 Feb 2012, private view Fri 3 Feb

www.mihosato.co.uk

www.domobaal.com

Sigrid Holmwood talking to Alli Sharma at her studio, Streatham Hill, London

2011-06-23T04:04:00.000-07:00

'Figure Painting', 2010, caput mortuum, gofun, lead-tin yellow, ochre, azurite and slate in parchment clipping distemper on kozo paper with tengujo tissue on board. Courtesy the artist and Annely Juda Fine Art

AS: You spent your weekend at a Tudor Group re-enactment event?

SH: Yes, we were doing a banquet in Haddon Hall, Derbyshire. I was working in the art department of the kitchen. On Saturday we made a pie in the shape of a castle with turrets and different fillings, like pork, pink custard and a strange 16^th century pesto. Then on Sunday other members prepared a pig’s head by slicing off the face from the skull, sewing it back up, stuffing it and then boiling it for 3 hours. I then painted the head black with lard-bound charcoal and finished with marzipan tusks, eyes and a bristle brush comb so it looked like a wild boar.

AS: It must be amazing to have access to fantastic Tudor buildings.

SH: Yes, and we stay the night after the public have gone. So for breakfast this morning I had a lovely sour bread baked in a 16^th century oven, actually, I think it was a 15^th century oven.

AS: Are there lots of artists in the group?

SH: There are crafts people and photographers but then there are also accountants and IT people. And loads of kids because there are lots of families which is really great. People become expert in baking, leather work or ironmongery, all these things and, much like my approach to painting, they’re experimenting with materials, looking at what’s written at the time, but also by the act of doing, finding out what actually works.

AS: You make your own paints from pigments?

SH: I don’t make my all own pigments. I don’t make vermillion because it’s mercury sulphide. It can be synthesised but is also naturally occurring. You need a kiln to heat it, so in this period it would only be made industrially, not by artists themselves. That would be something they would go and buy. But yes, I make all the paints and all the pigments that artists would have made in the studio. Here I’ve got some madder, which is a pigment. I can pour that out so you can see it better. It’s made from madder roots.

AS: What is madder?

SH: It is an uninspiring looking plant but you grind up the roots and soak them in water. Heating it up turns it brown so I do it by soaking it in water with lye over a period of days works and you can see the dye coming out. These are birch leaves, they have their own smell. It smells tobacco-y. This is weld. It smells a bit pissy. My dress is dyed with weld so I like that the dyes used in the clothes are the same colours as one would use in some of the pigments. That’s fascinating. The world joins up.

AS: How authentic are your socks, did Tudors wear knitted socks?

SH: Yes, they wore knitted socks. There are all sorts of inventories. They also wore sewn fabric socks but I prefer knitted. You do find examples of things although socks don’t massively survive because they’re a bit throwaway. I didn’t knit these but knitting is one step too far for me. I sewed all my clothes.

AS: You hand stitched them?

SH: Yes, no machine stitching allowed.

AS: Who makes your shoes?

SH: In the world of re-enacting, you get people who make shoes, or pottery and they supply re-enactors from all periods.

AS: Do you need help putting on the corset? You’ve been trapped in there all weekend, was it uncomfortable?

SH: You get used to it but if you eat too much you suddenly want to get out. The key to wearing a corset is that you shouldn’t lean onto it. You should avoid it pressing onto you. I wouldn’t be surprised if it wasn’t always worn by working women. Trying to ascertain Tudor working clothes is a lot harder in Britain, than in the low countries, because there wasn’t the interest in painting them.

AS: You mean peasants?

SH: Peasants or even just working class. I’m not interested at all in the gentry with all their silks. I find that the least interesting.

AS: And well documented?

SH: Yes, they’re the ones we have paintings of in Britain. In this period in the low countries, there is an explosion of genre painting and it’s all linked-in with the birth of capitalism. The merchant classes and the stock exchanges began there and they were the new patrons of art. Before that, it was just aristocrats and the church interested in mythology, the bible and history painting. With the new middle class merchants, the new patrons of art, you get landscapes, peasants, still life, domestic scenes and artists specializing in different niches. It’s the predecessor of the art market we have today where artists have to specialize and find an original niche, which is their selling point and where art is about ourselves. So that’s part of my reason for painting these images. It’s actually the root of contemporary art. There’s a great irony, artists painting peasants only because of urbanization.

AS: You’ve just given yourself an extra bum bit.

SH: Yes, the bum roll, because in Tudor times, the question of ‘does my bum look big in this’ the answer you want is ‘yes’. You might have to give me a hand with tucking in my partlett. This was made of fine linen and used to fake being clean. You would have lots of linens but only one set of woollen clothes, and a Sunday best. These knives are my eating knives. You don’t have forks, that was a poncy Italian thing. So you cut and spear things and eat off your knife. They’re hand made by a guy in the group. So the final bit is my coif and then we’re done.

AS: Did you dye the fabric?

SH: I didn’t, that was a member of the Tudor Group. The thing about dying is that you need large facilities so that the wool can turn around and not get streaky so it requires a lot of space and drainage and some heat underneath it. However, someone in the group is setting up one in their garden in London so I’m hoping to go and dye some stuff so I can do it myself.

AS: Are you busy at the moment?

SH: Yes, I’m going to a gallery in China in August, I’m working with Vitamin Creative Space. They’ve planted Chinese indigo for me so hopefully when I get there that will have grown and I can harvest it to make some pigment. It’s in an urban farm in Beijing.

So, this is some gorgeous looking Madder. The crimson draperies in old paintings would be made with this.

AS: It’s a beautiful pink. It doesn’t look that colour in the tube?

SH: You get different shades. This was an experiment where I put in alum first, and then added potash. That means you get a warmer colour. I’ve made madders where I’ve made a cooler colour by putting in potash first and then added alum. They’re the two ingredients that you can play with when you’re making Lake pigments like this. Potash is alkali so it would be made with wood ash but it makes things cooler. If you think about litmus paper, the acid colours are red and yellow, and the alkali colours are blues and greens, purple so it works like that with these natural dyes.

AS: So what will you do to this madder now?

SH: I’m going to let it dry out completely and then I’m going to grind it up and wash it to take out any excess alum.

AS: You’ve also made your own paper from sheets?

SH: Yes, I have some here, with printed woodcuts. So the paper is made from my bed sheets. I burnished it but it still smells of my sheets.

AS: How do you go about making paper?

SH: First I cut up the sheets into one inch squares. You need a beating machine. In the 16^th century you would have had large water powered ones where a big wheel powered by water sets off a trip and a big log comes down and pounds rags to a pulp. 16th century paper was made from the rags and scraps from linen and hemp fabric. Much like the pigment made from scraps of wool, you make use of a left over material. Once you can’t repair the linens any more they might as well be made into paper. Rag pickers were making a living by collecting rags from people and selling them to the paper mills. They were worth quite a lot in the end. Since I don’t have a beating machine, I send my rags off to a workshop in Glasgow and where it is beaten for me and the pulp sent back. I’ve got vats and felts and a friend who is also making paper to collaborate and share materials. We’ve made a press out of an oak frame and a hydraulic car jack because you need to squish all the water out to get it as smooth as possible. Then dry it. Because I was doing woodcuts I needed a smooth surface so I burnished this particular paper with the back of a spoon. I do have a burnisher at home which is agate but just rubbing a smooth hard thing across the paper will give you a bit of a sheen.

AS: Are these drawings on paper of people in the Tudor Group?

SH: Actually this is my apprentice. I’ve been inundated with offers from interns, which I think is indicative of young students these days feeling pressured into doing internships. I didn’t think I needed an intern because I like doing everything myself but then I thought it might be quite a good idea to play with the idea of having an apprentice and that relationship could be a body of work.

AS: She looks pretty fed up in this one. I wonder how many students imagine interning would involve stirring a pot in 16^th century costume.

SH: I did explain! But yes, I think what has come out of the experience is a series of drawings that show the difficulty of the relationship. This is another student from the Ruskin and we did a painting circle, she grew up in Japan so she wore her kimono and we all painted each other. The idea is a women’s painting circle. The kimono is a lovely thing to draw. It’s more interesting to draw a kimono or Tudor clothes than jeans.

AS: It’s interesting, how artists choose to present themselves, as artists.

SH: It is, and the mystique of the studio.

AS: Most artists are open about their practices, but I can imagine some wouldn’t want us to know their secrets, and why should they?

SH: For me that’s quite important, I like to share recipes. It very much relates to movements such as relational aesthetics, where it’s about making work that deals with social exchanges that go on around art. Painters can seem isolated, stuck in their studios on their own and I think of my practice as fighting against that a bit, making it a more social practice. I also know other pigment freaks and we swap pigments... I’m not the only one!

Sigrid Holmwood's drawings can be seen at Mock Tudor, 60 Ravenscourt Road, London W6 0UG (open Fri-Sun, 12-6, or by appointment 07885 222409) until 10 July. She also features in the forthcoming issue of Garageland magazine, which will be launched at Mock Tudor on 17 July 2011.

Sigrid will be working in The Pavilion at Vitamin Creative Space, Beijing from 29 July - 27 September. For more information, follow The Astonishing Adventures of Lady Indigo. Resulting work will be exhibited at Annely Juda Fine Art next year.

Jeff McMillan talks to Alli Sharma at his studio in Shoreditch, E2

2011-05-23T14:39:00.000-07:00

AS: Where do you find your drawings and paintings?

JM: I go to car boot sales or sometimes to antique fairs, there are a few good ones in the south of England. Recently I was in Belgium and went to a couple of great flea markets there. I found a trove of one woman’s whole school career, which included her primary school drawings all the way through to her high school algebra. I think they’re from the 1950s and her name, Monique, is on everything. The drawings are a bit awkward, but in a good way, though her geometric drawings are very precise.

AS: Is that what you look for, an awkwardness?

JM: I’m just looking for potential. It’s hard to explain exactly what that means, but I make that assessment and decide whether it’s any good for my purposes. With this show in mind, I was specifically looking for works on paper to go with a number of drawings I’d already collected over the years. Certain things strike you as having real potential, whether it’s something in a figure’s eyes or a certain juxtaposition within a work, and I particularly like coming across works that are not really finished in the first place. Two of the Belgian schoolgirl’s drawings are of a woman, in one she has no right hand and there’s an ‘x’ marked on her shoulder where the teacher has ticked off that it has been drawn incorrectly. Most of the drawings have comments and grades in red ink over the top of them. In another the woman is in a position of lifting her arms in a way so that after I have immersed the paper in a container of ink, she looks like she’s floating or trying to escape.

AS: Or drowning.

JM: That’s the sort of potential I suppose I am looking for, as though the drawing is asking for an intervention to become complete. At times it feels like a collaboration.

AS: Do you know what the geometric drawings are?

JM: They’re old-school geometry, along with the pages and pages of equations and calculations to plot them out. I think a French curve and a ruler were used to make them so precise. They’re very technical but still beautiful drawings.

AS: And beautifully presented.

JM: Yes always drawn in with this double line border. I’m sure they’re all done by hand, and she always puts her name, written very neatly. There are some funny ones where she’s got bored and worked out who was dating who on the back of the drawings, some with love hearts. I was glad to see that, you can imagine it must have been pretty rigorous.

AS: The dipping line works well with the geometric look.

JM: I became most interested in what colour adds to them, particularly when the inks bleed into each other, they remind me of 1960s film strips or at times they become almost Rothko-like. The effect changes them from something dry and analytical to something with more of an emotional content. Just coincidentally the basic half-dozen ink colours are very similar to the colour scheme of a series of cardboard box paintings I made a few years back.

AS: Is it important to use hand-made works, you haven’t used prints or photographs?

JM: It always has been in the past, but I’ve worked with a few engravings for this show. Some are anatomical studies that have been cut out from a medical textbook from the 1800s.

AS: I wanted to ask you about using old things. You might be seen as destroying something but at the same time you have rescued them in the first place.

JM: I’m ambivalent about it, and I hope the work remains ambivalent too. It’s a fine line, I’m obviously the one making the decision about whether they stay as they are or become something else, but I like to think there are other anatomical prints like these out there but these are the only ones dragged into the contemporary world in this way.

AS: The Chapman brothers make a deliberate point in defacing old Goya prints, but that’s not your concern?

JM: No, but then their work is more about being provocative. In fact I tend towards the other end of the scale, I love coming across a painting that’s not got much going for it, that only costs a fiver but I know will be great for what I want to do. And actually I’m not that interested in appropriation either. What I do is probably closer to a form of recycling - I sometimes think all the painting techniques and brushstrokes have all been made before, all that is left now is how we re-configure them. Which is the idea of the re-mix I suppose, there really isn’t much new under the sun.

AS: Is there something in particular about working with drawings that differs from the paintings?

JM: One main difference is that with the canvases, I only ever work with oil paint. I think in my very first painting class I was taught that you couldn’t put acrylic over oil or it might crack, but you could put oil on top of anything. So I have always thought of oil as the final paint, the ultimate material. But by working on paper I was able to re-look at that and none of these works are done with oil paint. Some are made with acrylic paint and some with ink. Ink is a great medium because it has different properties like the fact that it’s so much thinner than oil or acrylic and also its not totally opaque.

AS: The transparency doesn’t obliterate the image, like in the paintings. Dipping paper seems to emphasize its fragility. Some look so delicate, like a thin leaf of paint.

JM: The ink has dripped off the bottom edge and become more intense in colour and slightly brittle where it has accumulated. Some of the engravings have been dipped two or three times in ink so you end up with this strange thing where two inks overlapping almost create a black, though a ghost of the original image can remain as well.

AS: I bet it’s great to watch the ink soak in.

JM: The old engraving papers are 150 years old and bone dry. They are so absorbent that the colour ends up being deeply saturated so they become darker than works on a thinner paper. I’ve also been working with a vinyl paint called flashe, which is actually a sign-writers paint. It looks like a pure pigment or something, so a sign writer would paint with it and the brushstrokes would disappear.

AS: It’s very flat, but you’ve still got some bubbles in it, where it’s been dipped.

JM: I like when a work reveals its natural physical properties. In fact, all the work is what it is, and it is quite simple to see how it is made.

AS: So what decisions were you making about colour choices for Untitled (Man with necktie), with the black and the vermillion red.

JM: It’s a strange mix of intention and intuition, I was interested because it’s a portrait of a black man, which is rare, and I wanted it to have some gravity so I used the black colour along the top. I was intrigued by his necktie and how it is not flush with his body, and it was just one of those things that is not easily explained. I think the brighter vermillion makes feel more exotic.

AS: It looks like a flag but I wouldn’t know what country.

JM: I don’t know either.

AS: So it’s not political.

JM: No, it’s not. Not for me. I think it has sinister overtones if you want to read that into it.

AS: Tell me about this one which looks like a blind boy with pointed ears, Untitled (Boy).

JM: If you saw the original image you would see it was just a portrait of a young boy but there was something about it once I started to take a piece of paper and obscure the lower part of it. There was this strange thing in that it wasn’t quite finished in the way the pupils had been drawn and then, for me, that was everything, an amazing point that makes it become something else.

Interview continued in Garageland magazine, Fake issue 12.

Jeff McMillan's drawings are at Consequences, four all saints, London W11, by appointment only, 25 May - 2 July 2011.

He is also exhibiting paintings at Mock Tudor, Transition Gallery Offsite, London W6, 18 June - 10 July 2011.

Claire Undy talking to Alli Sharma at her studio in Hackney Wick, London

2011-05-09T12:45:00.000-07:00

AS: This new work looks very different to what I’ve seen before.

CU: Yes, I’ve recently made quite a big change in my work. It’s been two years now since I finished studying at Wimbledon College of Art, and I felt I had reached an impasse with my practice - I was refining it rather than developing it.

AS: Did you feel that you’d exhausted your enquiry with the paintings with the gestural marks?

CU: I felt like I was polishing it, I’d got to the point where I was experimenting with something so tiny. I was using different pigments to catch the light in a certain way, and the only thing I could achieve would be to work out how to do it and get it right every time. All I was doing was increasing the success rate of making these same paintings.

The gestural mark represents the act of painting. I was trying to put drawing in the process at different points, as I don’t like the idea that a painting is simply the final top layer and that everything else is hidden workings-out. I wanted to acknowledge the process of making. I don’t like the idea that as the artist you choose what to reveal and what to conceal, when it is the act of painting that I’m interested in and the process of putting it together.

I started by stretching a canvas and then I used tape and paper to mask off the shape of a gestural mark. I built up a gesso ground over the entire surface so that when I took off the tape there was an area of un-primed canvas left in the gesso. When I pulled the paint across the whole surface, the colour changed on the different grounds. I was using transparent iron oxides, so that the bits that would soak into the fabric would be dark and the bits that were on the white ground would be really bright.

AS: When you say pull across, what did you use?

CU: A wide brush because I like the marks with the brush. They emphasise the act of applying the paint, rather than giving a perfectly uniform surface. Then I used a smaller brush on the top layer of wet paint to indicate another gestural mark, which slightly mis-registered the first.

AS: So it looks like there are two marks.

CU: Yes, but neither of them were painted, they were made by breaking the surface at different points. The gestural mark is blatantly a gestural mark because I didn’t want it to be a shape or to have any deceptive space to it. I wanted all the visual components to be about painting: brush marks; or the visible application of paint.

AS: So you’re getting new ideas out quite quickly?

CU: Yes, I’m aiming to make a lot of these new works, hopefully around 100 this scale. They’re all quite rough and different. They’re numbered; eg S1 (S stands for studio). So if S1 leads to others they become S1.1, S1.2 etc so they break up and then I can experiment further into an idea. It’s like research. I like this one. I’ve been moving the weave of the fabric to make the image.

AS: Breaking the surface again?

CU: Yes, drawing with the components of the painting, with the fabric. I went to Amsterdam recently and there was a market selling fabrics with really wide weave on them. With this one, I’ve pushed the weave of it and then set it with size. I’m just playing really with different ways of trying to show their making.

AS: It sounds investigative.

CU: I’m interested in finding a way of communicating that’s not via language. I think that this could be possible through making a painting, which doesn’t discuss things outside itself, and so talks very directly. A hole is a hole and a mark is a mark and they only attempt to communicate their hole-ness or mark-ness and not any other kind of coded message from the artist. I think the only thing the artist can communicate is the act of painting, so if I made a mark like that [gestures], you can sense that’s how it’s been made.

AS: You’re communicating the action.

CU: Yes, that’s one thing I can communicate truly. Quite a few people have said that you’re only talking to a painter in that respect, perhaps this is true - I hope not. As a painter, you see a gestural mark and you can really sense how it’s been made, I hope that non-painters can relate to that gesture too.

AS: Getting something across without reference to an illusion, or trying to convey something without describing it.

CU: I want to talk in a way that anyone can understand. I don’t want to use art historical, or other cultural references, as then you’re speaking in a certain language to a specific group of people. I feel like this is quite elitist. If that’s all we can do now, where can we go from here? Some people believe you can’t make a gesture now without referencing something else, you can’t make any paintings now without referencing what’s gone before. I don’t believe we can do that indefinitely. Eventually it will become a dated idea itself. There’s a lot of interesting work that references other ideas, other art, but it’s also a barrier to discovering anything new. I think that we need to look within the medium itself, not through a series of changing subject matters to find out what painting can be or do in the future.

AS: That sounds like a pure way of thinking about painting, like it’s coming from a very particular history?

CU: Most people would say it comes from a very old fashioned idea, from Modernism; wanting to be self referential with the meaning inherent within the work and not referring to anything. But equally I think, for me, there’s a lot of idealism to that which I don’t have. On the one hand I share the aspiration to make objective art, but equally I think my work is quite realistically aware of its futility and it doesn’t have grand ideas of being a pure or absolute idea. It’s about its materiality and what it physically actually is, rather than a bigger notion about painting.

There seems to be two ways you can approach painting today, which is either to ignore postmodernism and cynicism towards painting by going ahead and making geometric patterns, or gestural expressionist paintings or whatever, or you can be ironic, referencing the idea of painting itself as an ideology. I think I sit somewhere between the two in that I still have quite a lot of faith in painting and its possibilities but I think it has to be a realistic, grounded approach where you can talk about universal ideas and communication through the language of painting, but without having an unrealistic expectation that they are possible. I’m more interested in discussing the ideas rather than believing that they are true. I think that just because something has been proved to be impossible, it doesn’t mean the entire subject is worthless. Simply being an atheist does not mean that you can’t learn a great deal from religion.

AS: Are you keen on art history.

CU: It’s not something I’m particularly keen on. Making abstract work at College means that you have to be aware of it because the criticism is that making purely abstract painting is a naïve thing to do and you either don’t care about it or you don’t understand it. I think a lot of people wonder how you can do it without being ignorant, or how you can do this with conviction. I really feel that you can do it with conviction and understanding of what you’re doing. It’s hard. There have been over 60 years of history in this area I could spend a lifetime studying and I wouldn’t ever feel knowledgeable enough to make a genuine contribution to the discussion. But I do feel I have something that I want to add to the discussion of painting and I think it has to be possible to make abstract work today without having to answer every question of the last 60 years in every work.

AS: It’s weird when you start thinking like that, how difficult it is to continue, despite the desire to engage with something, like you have to keep one eye on the past and one on what your doing.

CU: This is what Fade Away touched on. I think this is why lots of people make work within that bracket between abstraction and figuration because there is still an interest in abstract painting but if you make a purely abstract painting you instantly take on this huge burden of history. However, if you make an abstract painting and work something vaguely figurative into it it’s suddenly free from so much theoretical baggage because it’s no longer aspiring to this pure idea. There’s less to answer, you’re not adhering to an old fashioned school of thought. There are an awful lot of abstract painters my age but it’s hard to relate to an older school of thought about abstract painting. It’s a hard discussion to be part of. You’re an outsider, and although the work looks visually similar, in your heart I think it comes from a very different place.

List of works: S5, S7.4, Trouble, S7.1, S7.5, S7.6, S9.2, S13.1. All 50x40cm.

'Trouble' 2010, by Claire Undy, can be seen at Fade Away, Gallery North, Newcastle Upon Tyne from 5 - 26 May 2011, with free symposium/publication launch 3-6pm on 26 May 2011 and reception afterwards.

Phoebe Unwin talking to Alli Sharma at her Hackney studio

2011-04-17T00:10:00.000-07:00

AS: You’ve been busy this year with a solo show at Wilkinson and the British Art Show 7. Do deadlines affect how you work?

PU: I find that it’s important to put deadlines out of my mind. I mean they’re there, but I don’t make work specifically for a show because I make what I make. But, as it gets nearer, you can’t help looking at what you have and what would go where and those kinds of decisions.

AS: I imagine the way you work can be unpredictable. You don’t use images. It’s all coming from your own experiences, from what’s in your mind, looking at things and seeing opportunities for paintings.

PU: That’s true, and because I don’t know what any of the paintings will look like when they’re finished, that’s part of it. I like that working process of being surprised by how something might look but that also means that it’s important to be comfortable with failure in the work in terms of making something, looking at it and then thinking it’s not quite right. It might be an interesting idea but the size is wrong or something, I really respond to how it looks in the studio.

AS: What do you do if you see something failing, do you try to make it work or do you scrap it and try something else?

PU: Sometimes I try to make it work. Sometimes I try for months, and then it’s scrapped. Or I try for months and it works. I might think at the time that it was a bad idea in the first place, so it’s never going to work. But then I find I might be drawn to the idea again and have another go at it a year later. There’s enough tension to get an image to work so if you’re getting too self-conscious and wound up, then that’s not helpful.

AS: The painting ends up looking too fraught or contrived?

PU: I think there’s an element of tension in all of them. They’re not completely relaxed paintings but if there’s too much tension then I think a painting can look nervous. And then it’s not doing the job of communicating something. I mean it might be interesting to make a painting about being nervous but then it has to communicate that well, rather than be apologetic of itself. That’s when they get scrapped; if I feel they’re like that.

AS: I’m looking at the girl figure in your earlier work, is it you or is that too obvious?

PU: It’s not meant to be, none of the people I paint are portraits. I think of them as being portraits for feelings rather than portraits of a particular person. But all of my paintings and subjects end up being things that I’ve experienced in some way. They’re not personal stories, but in order for me to explain what something might have felt like or a relationship to an object, in terms of space or colour or scale, then I need to have experienced it. There’s nothing fantastical about them.

AS: Are you losing the figure more, moving in an abstract direction?

PU: I can’t imagine ever being completely abstract because the aspect I’m most interested in is the relationship between a visual world that everyone experiences and how that is explored through materials and marks.

AS: You need something recognisable?

PU: In order to communicate this subject, yes. So the subject is actually really important. For me, it’s not a pure interest in paint and colour and painting. It’s also about these relationships. For me it’s a springboard into different atmospheres or moods or tensions.

AS: And they are invisible things.

PU: Yes, Self Consciousness is very much about painting a feeling. Or the subject of Brick Wall was the everyday but also the formal qualities of painting because it’s a flat painting about something flat. So I’m interested in these subjects that explore a visual everyday world but also the world of the painting and the object itself.

AS: How do you keep your ideas for paintings? Do you have a sketchbook?

PU: This is one book. It’s falling apart. When I work here I put in lots of different coloured papers and respond to marks and colours and so on in an intuitive way. I’m not working in the book from beginning to end. It’s developed as a whole. I have to feel excited or engaged with the page and if I don’t then I just move on. I’ve worked on these for a while and the only rule I have is that anything can go in them. It can be an insignificant thing like a note of a couple of colours that I like or it can be something about an actual place or an image that has been layered and built up. I describe this as somewhere to be really gentle with ideas so they don’t have to stand up for themselves yet. They might never be used for a painting. I like working with this size. I’ve tried working in smaller or larger books but this size is just right. I also like that they’re quite thick because they start to build up a rich body of images. This is where I begin with all the different types of materials. I use acrylic, graphite, pastel, ink, and printed papers. And using coloured papers gets away from that feeling of a white, empty, blank page.

AS: When it comes to a painting, is there a white blank canvas or do you have to mess it up first?

PU: I think I need to mess it up but I’m not intentionally messing it up. I’ll think I’m just starting a painting but at every stage I’m looking at that and responding to the scale and the way the colours are because they’re not planned. Whatever I feel the subject demands will change my approach. Brick Wall started in a relatively controlled way by making a background of bricks, almost like creating a space to work within and respond to. So I knew I was making a painting of a brick wall and I knew how I was going to begin, but I didn’t know what it would end up looking like or how it would feel working within that pattern or that scale or combination of colours. Something like Self-Consciousness was started by putting colours and textures together, especially the oil paint which was quite impasto, and seeing and feeling where the painting would go. So building up to the image, rather than beginning with an image and working within that. They each have different approaches.

AS: You’ve used patterned papers in your sketchbooks, like the chequerboard. What does pattern do for you in a painting?

PU: I used a lot of pattern in the last show. The printed chequerboard and brickwork papers in the sketchbook, is where I first thought of it for painting. The pattern I have been using recently is about exploring a certain sort of rhythm in the paintings. I describe it as a constant hum or drumbeat. It’s a space to work within, which then gets interrupted or, like in Three Bananas, it’s reversed because the background is stronger than the subject on it. The banana shapes are like stains, almost like something has been taken away. So the movement and the focus of the painting is the chequerboard which is also a hand made mark, it’s not really a neat chequerboard so that was important. And then with Brick Wall there are elements where I’ve masked off the pattern which is much more graphic and controlled but then that pattern is echoed and mimicked in handmade brick marks using the different reds. So sometimes its about interrupting something and also an echo or reverberation of a mark or colour.

AS: Do the same motifs crop up?

PU: They do but in the sketchbook they’re not judged too much, they just live there. Elements of them are used when I’m ready to use them but very rarely are they scaled up from here. There might be an element of a composition that I take from the book but usually it’s a material element.

AS: There doesn’t seem to be any hierarchy with the different materials.

PU: That’s really important. One of my main reasons for using different materials is colour, because I feel that a colour is different in say an oil paint, spray paint, acrylic or pastel because they have really different surfaces, qualities and connotations. An oil paint mark might seem more controlled than a spray paint mark. It’s got a different speed to it. A spray paint mark, especially with the fuzzy edge, records what it was like to make it, which is quite magical. You press the top of the can and you can just keep going. It’s fast and it covers everything in an opaque way. Whereas there is a very different relationship with making, in that sense, to then being with a brush and a more gentle type of mark making. So I like using both of those languages, and all different types of languages with marks. With this page, there are so many elements in it. I’ve got this table from above and the carpet. There might be just one element of this that becomes a painting. And different viewpoints are important in the work.

AS: I’m surprised you said that was a table, it’s looking down from above.

PU: That’s like Sponge Palette in a way, it’s a palette with the thumbhole, and so you’re looking at it from above. Again, there’s pattern, and the sort of echoing of that background pattern and also a combination of colours about painting itself. I called it Sponge Palette because one aspect is that colour and form, for me, are indistinguishable from the subject when they are worked up. That’s my aim in a painting, to achieve, if I feel that I can, the colours and forms to be just those ones necessary for the painting, not to have any that don’t need to be there. So in a sense, the subject of the painting is as inspired by the colour and form. I almost see a subject in a colour combination in a painting in the way that it almost feels like a sponge or something, that the painting becomes saturated with these feelings or atmospheres.

AS: It’s an interesting way to describe a painting, like a sponge, like it sucks in all this stuff, ideas and materials, and becomes visible.

PU: I’m making it sound quite mystical. There are definitely a lot of felt qualities that are really important to me. And it is that thing about a sponge of sucking things up, the subject becoming really imbedded and saturated in the painting itself and in the colours and shapes, but there’s another element. The rigorous editing and appraisal of the work is really important to me. There are real formal aspects that come into play, especially as the painting gets further on, where I’ll be really thinking is it working in terms of subject, is it working in terms of scale and in terms of the painting itself.

AS: It sounds like you’re very controlled about what goes in.

PU: I am but when you speak about paintings in retrospect, because you’re talking about all the ideas, you can’t help but make it sound like ‘when I got to this point I was thinking this …’. But, when I’m actually working on a painting, I wouldn’t necessarily be able to put into words why I chose to get rid of a whole section or decided a painting failed, because I’m working really close to it, and working very quickly, but also so close to instinct and response.

AS: Can you describe the process for making Sponge Palette?

PU: The ground of Sponge Palette is made with an acrylic medium called crackle paste so it’s breaking up the surface. It’s meant to and it makes the surface very spongy. It feels absorbent. Because of the little cracks, the paints run into each other. Different surfaces in paintings are as important as marks because it completely changes the marks on top. I find that quite fascinating. Again, the pattern was made first so I’m working on something that is already visually dense. This palette shape, almost like a picture frame, is translucent so that the pattern is visible almost all the way through it. There would have been, in this painting especially, a real interest in layering and communicating the kind of time and visual conversation that happened in the painting. Some of my other paintings are more sparse and economical in line so they don’t have that sense of layered time. They would be about some other atmospheres or moods or tensions that I’m interested in exploring.

Sponge Palette, 2010 can be seen at Fade Away, Gallery North, Newcastle, 5-24 May 2011

Images courtesy the artist and Wilkinson Gallery

Images:

Sponge Palette, 2010

Girl, 2009

studio photograph, 2011

Self Consciousness, 2010

Three Bananas, 2010

Brick Wall, 2011

studio photograph, 2011

Sponge Palette, 2010

David Wightman talking to Alli Sharma at his Hackney Wick studio

2011-01-17T07:11:00.000-08:00

DW: People hesitate to call them targets but that’s what they are. When I first started doing them a few years ago, it was an attempt to mock formalist geometric abstraction. So I took on different abstract motifs, like the target, square, and stripe.

AS: I don’t know much about geometric abstraction, who are you referencing?

DW: The most obvious would be Kenneth Noland. He was part of the formalist Greenberg school in America, which has now been utterly rubbished and no-one talks about those artists any more. The Last Stand of Modernism is how I like to think of it. I looked at different painters within the geometric abstract movement, going back to Albers and Mondrian where its all about colour and form and shape. You know, someone will spend their life painting targets or squares or all-black monochromes. A mix of purity and weirdness.

AS: Are there any contemporary painters you look at.

DW: There are people like Peter Halley. He makes abstract paintings but they’re symbolic as well. I like the idea of abstraction having all these kinds of concerns attached to them, like hard-line abstraction, geometric abstraction, post-painterly abstraction, colour-field painting, and the difference between them is whether someone is using masking tape or not, little things like that.

AS: So you started with an ironic intent.

DW: I suppose I used typical art school irony where you look at the past and make fun of it, but it slowly turned into more of a lament.

AS: Was there something in particular that changed your perception?

DW: I had an idea of what I wanted to do and what I was making fun of (or ‘critiquing’ is what I would have said at the time), but the more I looked into it, the more I began to feel sorry that that endeavour had ended and the pursuit of abstraction had come to an end.

AS: Do you mean the seriousness about what painting could be?

DW: Yeah, at first I found it overblown and pretentious and then I immersed myself in it and I wished I could carry it on. I wished it was still up and running and I could be part of that lineage of abstract painters. It wasn’t until I really looked at that kind of work that I realised something was missing. Something had been lost, maybe a sincerity or a seriousness or some kind of aspirational quality to that kind of work had been put aside or had been trumped in favour of irony or something like that.

AS: Did you come to that realisation at art school or later?

DW: Once I’d left art school and stopped explaining things to other people. Once I was in my own studio and I could have fun and things didn’t necessarily have to make as much sense, I started to think differently about my work. Justifying things endlessly at art school can close down what you want to pursue. Can I really explain this kind of weird pink? I mean there’s more to the work than that, but for me it’s rediscovering something that’s lost so that’s how it started and so I began to see it more as a lament; a lost idea of art. Maybe that's pompous or just a bit silly, or maybe I’ve got my own idea of what it is and it never really existed. It does seem that formalist abstract painting was the last time painting took itself seriously. After that everything was different – and a lot of it is fantastic - I’m not wanting to return to the past.

AS: I like this one, it makes me think of the Tudors.

DW: Yes, it has references to non-art historical points but you can see it as a weird take on Ad Reinhardt which was the intention but it became something else, especially with the texture, it changes everything.

AS: Tell me about the wallpaper.

DW: The wallpaper was chosen for being cheap, tacky, un-aesthetic, something disregarded. That’s how I felt about abstraction at the time and this was me thinking I was witty. So the paintings weren’t dissimilar to what they are now but the intent was profoundly different. I was painting with household emulsion, in magnolia and cream and those clichéd household décor colours so everything made sense and I could talk about them very well. The wallpaper was critiquing pattern and design and abstraction and the decorative nature of what it may become or what it may mean. But they were ugly paintings and there was no real sincerity to them. They made sense and my tutors thought they were interesting. But I didn’t enjoy painting them. I could say it was a critique of colour painting and formalism but it wasn’t really, it was just an empty shell of a bigger idea. And, like I say, they gradually became something else; I started to miss the intentions that I’d mocked. Then I started to explore colour, slowly and tentatively, but only after I left college. I felt I couldn’t justify it there.

AS: Really, because colour is vulgar, or tasteless?

DW: There was always the notion at art college that colour was seductive and therefore should be ignored or used sparingly.

AS: You mean an easy hook?

DW: Yeah, but I don’t really agree. I think that’s a narrow view of what colour can be. It seems to be such a shame that a massive aspect of painting, probably the most important, immediate aspect, would be so thoroughly disregarded. When I was at college everyone would make purposefully ugly paintings, and I did the same. So when I left, I felt amazingly free to start exploring colour and using acrylic and to look at art in a different way, without being as prejudiced. So the wallpaper stayed and colour came in and the wallpaper, like the abstract motif, was used mockingly. I hated it, in a sense, because it was so cheap and tacky but I gradually grew to love that and I became a connoisseur of wallpaper and started to think about what it meant to me. I started to think about the house I grew up in that was full of this wallpaper and what it was supposed to mean back in the late 1970s. I felt that I had been working with two things that were very similar; abstraction and some sense of aspiration. But ultimately they had both failed or gone awry or been prematurely ignored. I like the idea of failure being inherent in abstraction, at least in modernity and the same sense of failure embodied by wallpaper.

AS: You mean wallpaper in your home was aspirational?

DW: DIY became really big in the mid to late 1970s when my parents decorated their home. It was about trying to aspire to something else, either some strange mock stately home or a weird contemporaneous vision of design. A weird blend of different elements thrown together and ultimately it’s just paper on a wall, and you don’t live in a stately home, it’s a small house in Stockport. But that sense of aspiration is still there, even if it’s failed. When I was at the Royal College, Lord Snowdon, who was the Patron of the College, came to visit and he loved the wallpaper and he was saying how he had it in his home. I had to explain to him that the wallpaper he was commenting on was actually the imitation of what he has. This is the cheap alternative, this is what people, who can’t afford what he has, buy to try to signify something else.

AS: There is that familiarity about the wallpaper, so I wonder if they speak of a particular decade.

DW: To me, it does, of growing up in the 1980s. My house was out of date by a decade. People say the patterns and textures are 1970s, but we were just ten years out of date. So I have these two elements, the wallpaper and colour and a different way of how I was looking at abstraction, I had a technique as well, which was quite laborious: collaging pieces of wallpaper together.

AS: How are they made up?

DW: Every piece is separate and they’re all cut to fit like a jigsaw, almost like marquetry.

AS: How do you cut them?

DW: Just with a scalpel – a surgical knife.

AS: Although they look slick, they actually involve a very hand-made process.

DW: Yeah, you could say they’re too perfect, but they're as perfect as I can possibly make them. Every single piece is an individual piece of wallpaper. Nothing overlaps. The abstract pieces are simpler, but the landscapes become quite complicated and there could be hundreds of pieces so they are very hand-crafted which is something else I wanted to elaborate on, rather than being against something that is hand-made and beautiful and textured and all those things that you’re not really allowed to do now. I stretch a canvas, put the wallpaper on, so they look quite scrappy at first. It takes a lot of scrappy preparation to make them that perfect. Then they’re sanded and primed and then I start painting.

AS: So they’re painted afterwards.

DW: Yes, and I paint from light to dark. But with the abstract pieces I usually try to work out the colours with these small modelli on paper. It’s just a way of working out colour and form, some of them I don’t even use. It’s far more labour intensive than I think the end product suggests. It’s a shame in a way because everything looks so perfect; it's easy to think the process must be quite simple.

AS: So how do the landscapes fit with the targets?

DW: I wanted to do what I was doing with abstraction and wallpaper but with something figurative or using a landscape. So I started to look at landscape imagery, especially clichéd mountain images you might find on a chocolate box. Images that seem familiar and beautiful but ultimately banal, which I think relates to the wallpaper. Something that is quite attractive but so commonplace it’s easy to overlook. I wanted to take another look at landscape painting and see if I could do something with that, reinvigorate it or see if I could use a similar technique to the abstract paintings to create an entire surface out of wallpaper.

AS: You limit the colour in the landscapes.

DW: I think the pink is brighter because the rest is greyscale. I like the idea of the greyscale standing in for a photograph. It’s quite documentary-like. The landscapes are a new thing. The first ones I painted using the original colours of the photographs, bright blue skies, green grass, white mountains. It quickly became tiresome and I missed the freedom of abstraction where you can use any colour combination you want. So it was an attempt to try to utilise that, especially with colourful skies and heavily floral wallpaper.

AS: They’re graphic, less about material.

DW: They’re graphic in the way Mondrian, Ad Reinhardt or Frank Stella are graphic. I’m making work about the geometric side of abstraction, it’s not expressionism or gestural mark-making. The squares are based on Josef Albers’ ‘Homage’ series but his are very placid, light yellows and cream or slightly greyish colours - subdued. I tried to do the opposite of that, bright and camp.

AS: You embrace the camp or kitschness of the work?

DW: I think it’s inevitable with the wallpaper; it’s impossible to avoid. Camp in the sense that it tries to be serious but it can’t take itself seriously, not just something that’s tacky or bright and brash, but something that has an intent and fails. It’s not that they fail because they’re bad paintings, they fail because abstraction, or this kind of painting, or even mountainscapes, don't seem to exist as a serious pursuit any more. It’s just me doing it on my own and the wallpaper is something you’re not supposed to use in serious art-making. So I’m making what I think are very serious paintings using two monumental things, mountainscapes and abstraction, out of wallpaper and bright colours. The subjects themselves are almost too big so they have to fail, or they have to have failure built in otherwise they’re pretentious and overblown.

AS: I try to get my head around kitsch but it’s a word that is bandied about but can’t be pinned down.

DW: People ask me about that. It’s not something I think about that much or purposefully try to take on, but I think it's implicit in the work. It’s not kitsch in a Jeff Koons sense. It’s not really celebratory kitsch, it’s more sad or melancholy kitsch. It’s the kitschness of a beautiful Alpine landscape on a cheap box of chocolates. Koons deals with a bigger, brasher, louder, funnier form of kitsch. I think if you try to incorporate kitsch in your work, it instantly stops being kitsch. Self-aware kitsch isn’t kitsch.

AS: I was thinking of a sad, sentimentality related to the wallpaper.

DW: There’s always that sense of nostalgia, which is different from sentimentality. I think for sentimentality, it has to be based around an object or thing. I think nostalgia is just a feeling, which is evoked by wallpaper or landscapes but you can’t clinch it, it’s not this object or this thing, it’s more these objects or these things. Perhaps that’s the difference between sentimentality and nostalgia. All those words are hard to talk about because we know what they mean but there’s something about these words (nostalgia, sentimentality, kitsch, aspiration) that when you try to define them; you lose the quality of what they represent.

David Wightman is currently a fellowship holder at the Berwick Gymnasium Arts Fellowship, Berwick-upon-Tweed, Northumberland until April 2011.

Laura Lancaster talking to Alli Sharma at Tyneside Cinema, Newcastle Upon Tyne, about her concurrent exhibitions at Workplace Gallery and the Laing

2010-11-08T02:53:00.000-08:00

AS: Your paintings and drawings work well in Workplace Gallery, particularly upstairs in the attic.

LL: It’s quite ghostly up there and suits the imagery. I work from photographs and slides of strangers that I find on ebay or at Tynemouth market. Sometimes I find batches of photographs or a whole album or one half of a photograph where the other half has been torn off and thrown away. It’s the idea of rescuing and putting them back in circulation again.

AS: Are you quite detached from them, as it’s not your own family?

LL: They’ve been taken for one reason but then thrown away so there’s a redundancy or failure about them, because they’re not with the right people any more. They remind you of something but you don’t really know who they are. I’ve done a series of about 200 drawings from one photo album. It’s one woman’s life from when she was 2 until she was 60. It’s a really odd photo album. I made the drawings on the blank pages from old books. So I was using two found things at the same time and just concentrating on that. I wanted to make a piece of work that took a long time to finish. My paintings are fast so I wanted to make something that took a long time and I spent more time looking at the images.

AS: How do you make choices about the images you work with?

LL: Sometimes I try to paint an image and it doesn’t work, then I’ll try a collage and it works. Particular imagery adds something. I think it must be to do with the colour or composition. Sometimes I get it wrong and think ‘that was a really good image, why did it not work’. I like the process of discovery rather than illustration. Francis Bacon talks about the nervous system. It’s more direct than the concept. The concept comes after. It tells you what the concept is. You can’t ignore more conceptual work, but it’s finding that space that is particular to painting. It’s reactive, you react to something and that tells you something, and you react to that and it’s like a big snowball. It’s an exciting way to work.

AS: The text paintings could have been the backs of photos?

LL: That’s where the images came from. It was the idea that you could view the images like that, just like a statement. What if you could just do a painting of the statement?

AS: You could have just written it out, but you’ve spent time going over it, crossing something out, going over the line on the bottom, smudging that, pushing the paint around and getting it right in paint.

LL: I think it’s quite intense, because lettering is a fine line and you need to be able to read it to some degree. I can strip it down but then I’ve got to get it to do this thing that looks like an ‘r’ but then it’s doing it’s own thing and you coax it round a lot more. An image can be more of a mass than a line. Also, there is more of the idea that the reader ought to be able to read it, whereas with an image its more guess work and it could be something else, more abstract, so there’s a different relationship there about precision. But then you’ve still got the same gloopy paint that you’re trying to get precision out of. It’s new territory, so they’re exciting to make, when you don’t really know how you’re going to do something, because there are no habits there. Like the pencil drawings, but then it’s also quite scary because it could look terrible.

AS: The painting of the bus reminds me of going on a trip to Blackpool. There seems to be a social history documented in the work.

LL: They do remind people of their own things. People respond saying ‘oh I had that jumper’ or ‘that’s like my dog’ that kind of thing. I thought it was interesting that a lady is standing by what looks like the Acropolis, a really old monument, with it’s own history, and then this person is making a claim on it by having their photo taken with it. It’s a really odd thing that people do. There’s also an odd sense of scale in those paintings, which I enjoy. The people are quite small.

AS: You’ve increased the scale of the paintings themselves quite a lot.

LL: I was aware that the space at the Laing is big and that my work might get lost in there, even though you need a certain amount of space around the work. And I had some funding towards it, which helped. The timescale was short so I worked quickly and didn’t have time to be precious about it at all. It can be difficult to know when you’re finished. Sometimes, you can do just a little bit more and it can make the painting feel a lot less fresh. The Laing paintings erred on the side of under-doing it. It took maybe two sessions for each one. I spent a long time mixing up paint in big pots, probably about 20 or 30 different colours. The actual painting was quick.

AS: Did you have a few things on the go at once?

LL: I did one at a time, because I needed so many brushes and pots. I have a big studio but they need to dry flat. I want it to feel like it’s all come out at once. It’s hard to describe. But almost like it’s made itself and you get all of those lovely accidents. Once it’s dried, you basically have to paint it again.

AS: The painting of the skier is a strange one, with the goggles.

LL: Yes, in the paintings downstairs at Workplace, the eyes of the subject look back at you. Usually, in my paintings, the subject is either looking away or is less defined. I’ve been drawn to images that are looking back. I don’t know why. The graphite pencil portraits are about that gaze. I don’t etch like that much. They’re different to my normal drawings. They look like they’re the opposite of what happens in the paintings.

AS: Your drawings are very precise and obsessive, whereas the paintings are fast and loose?

LL: Again, that idea, wanting to draw in that detailed way, cross hatching, it’s about using the same mark, it looks quite soft but it’s the grade of the pencil. Using cross hatching instead of thinking, ‘that’s hair I’ll use this kind of mark’. Chuck Close talks about painting being like knitting a sweater, where each mark is the same, making something with the same unit. It’s quite different to my painting. It’s like doing something opposite in order to see what the connection is. It opens the image out and makes it 3D again, like you’ve removed the photograph and gone into the image. And being life size, it’s weird when you’re drawing and you realize the drawing is looking back at you. I think they’re more about my experience of making the drawings, whereas the paintings are more in relation to the viewer.

AS: So your relationship to drawing is quite different to painting.

LL: The drawings are obviously more slavish to the source. The painting is more about the push and pull between the paint and the image and that classic thing of it being two things at once. I’ve been making the drawings for 2 years but I couldn’t work them out because you have an idea of what you’re doing as a painter, and then this throws you off course. Maybe it gives depth and in the long run it will come round and make sense.

AS: It’s interesting about time issues between the two ways of making. Once the painting is finished, there’s nothing more to do with it. It can be made in a few brushstrokes which can be incredibly satisfying and then nothing.

LL: Maybe the pencil portraits are a way of extending that. Then you’ve got a weird relationship to time because the photograph was taken in an instant and you’re spending hours trying to recreate that instant but it’s odd because the person is sitting still, so there is a lot of different time going on. It’s interesting when you do something and surprise yourself. It tells you to do it and it’s good to follow that. Sometimes you have to work your way through things.

AS: Do you apply that way of working to your music and song writing.

LL: I’ve only been writing songs in the last 8-10 months but I’ve been in instrumental bands for the last 10-12 years. MeandthetwinS are my sister, Rachel, Paul Smith and Narbi, the drummer. Paul has been working with his band, Maxïmo Park and doing his solo stuff, so the rest of us formed another band, Chippewa Falls. I’ve just started another band with my boyfriend and the fourth is Silver Fox. Each one fulfills a different side of my personality. It’s like collage, drawing and painting.

AS: Do you do different things in each band?

LL: I sing in Silver Fox and play guitar in the others but they’re all different styles. Silver Fox is new. It came out of a semi-drunk conversation about there being no bands that were all women. So we formed a band and did a fundraising gig for the Star and Shadow Cinema in Newcastle. We did cover versions and thought that we should write our own songs. It just sort of happened. It’s more collaborative than painting or drawing because you can take a little seed of an idea and give it to someone else and it changes, it seems to inform itself. You each chip in your ideas and it becomes a whole new thing.

AS: Your playing tonight? Is it local?

LL: Yeah, at The Head of Steam, opposite Central Station. That should be fun.

AS: You enjoy performing?

LL: I used to find playing guitar nerve-wracking but somehow singing is less so. You’re so busy doing it, you don’t have time to register people looking at you, whereas when you’re playing guitar you can look around. It’s scary but exciting. And the audience response is direct. You don’t often see people looking at your paintings.

AS: Does the title of your show ‘We are A Movement’ come from a song?

LL: It’s from a Young Marble Giants song called Constantly Changing. I was going to call the exhibition Constantly Changing but I thought We Are A Movement sounded stronger, yet more open.

AS: But you don’t title your paintings?

LL: Generally no, I want them to feel open, rather than vague, so I thought if I titled the whole thing then it’s more about the whole practice than the individual pieces of work, a kind of overview. There’s the idea of things being quite fleeting. I like a title that brings people in a bit.

AS: Is it important, to you, to make the work accessible?

LL: I want to invite some sort of reaction, but not necessarily the same ideas that I have. That’s where I get lots of ideas from, how people misread things. When I’m doing the songs with the band, I find it really easy to write lyrics. I don’t have to think about it, it comes quickly, but it’s different when titling the paintings. It feels like you need more reasoning behind it, whereas the music is more of a feel. I write lyrics on my phone all the time, and put it together to make songs. It could be interesting to bring the two approaches together, perhaps being a bit more instinctive.

See Laura Lancaster's new work at:

Laing Art Gallery, Newcastle Upon Tyne until 30 January 2011

Workplace Gallery until 13 November 2010

Jake Clark talks with Nick Nowicki in his Camberwell studio.

2010-10-14T14:52:00.000-07:00

NN: Have you specifically referenced imagery to get a particular palette?

JC: I go to seaside towns in England, and take pictures. There are certain colours I’m after which are to do with being by the sea. They’re more faded because of the light and salts, and also slightly decayed and rusting. I bring the photos into the studio and then into the paintings. So I combine images from different sources, posts from Margate and a house from Cornwall.

NN: Do you ever do any painting in situ?

JC: Never, but sometimes the photographs I take don’t have the colours I want and I realized by painting the colours I want onto the photographs I can trick myself and make a painting from that. A drawing or painting from a place, wouldn’t be the same as the photograph. It’s got all the tone and the structure, the realism that I can then use. Painting photographs has been a big thing for me.

NN: You could still paint over a painting that you’d done on location.

JC: I think it’s to do with the fact a machine has made this thing and it's concrete – it's there. And you know the source material actually exists. And it’s the quality, the tonal thing. It’s always about the harsh light. The strong shadows make the light even more obvious. Edward Hopper often used a diagonal shadow moving across to suggest the idea of time passing, a clock moving round.

NN: Is the Lino usually around the edges and at the corners of your paintings?

JC: It goes to the painting edge, nearest the wall, so you become more aware of it, as well as relate it to domesticity. When I’m painting, the canvas is on the floor, so I’m aware the Lino is where it might have been originally. Lino has a history. People have walked on it for fifty years. It's been in a flat or kitchen and when it becomes part of a painting it gets thrown into a different scale. There’s an intense, domestic pattern and then a tiny figure next to it.

NN: What do you think is the result of that contrast of scale?

JC: Playing with scale is to do with confusion and fragmentation. If you’re hot and hung over and look up at a hotel and then down at your flip flops and up again, that jump of scale is to do with the way your eye and mind work in that sort of experience.

NN: Every subject in your work is bathed in sunlight.

JC: Harsh light, strong shadows, and with the figures I’m trying to get the idea of everything vibrating, everything shaking, with the denseness of people and the heat, all moving together.

NN: It’s not the colours doing that, because your palette is muted and grungy. You’re getting the sense of this more from how it’s been combined.

JC: Those juxtapositions are what I’m trying to do with the Lino, that idea of something ridiculous, that counters the setting, undermines whatever you’re representing and plays with and against that. Sometimes it can suggest architecture but it’ll always be a ridiculous pattern. The word ridiculous is important.

NN: Why’s that?

JC: I like ridiculousness as a thing in life, contradiction, counteracting something, laughing at something, revelling in melancholy. I find it positive. It’s not about celebrating the past. It’s about revelry in the misery of it. I like going to Southend because it’s miserable, but exciting as well. It’s charged and feels very much on the edge. You get the train to Great Yarmouth and it’s the last stop, and there’s all this flat land and it’s quite nondescript and then you get to this full-on resort on the edge of Norfolk and suddenly it’s really exciting. Someone asked me about Martin Parr – is he mocking the people that eat ice creams in New Brighton? But I like to hang out in those places. The sea erodes as well. All these bungalows have painted gables, but they’re faded by the sun and rusted by the sea salt. It speeds up the aging, an anti-polished, anti-newness. Shabbiness is interesting. Maybe paint is like that. It’s shabby. I’m interested in the shabbiness it can capture. The medium is quite dirty. This is my palette.

JC: That cup sums up why I want to paint these subjects and not just leave them as a photograph. After the Rubbernecking show at Transition, LondonPainting did a blog about it and someone asked, ‘Was gestural painting the right sort of language for this sort of subject matter?’ I was interested in that comment, because for me it is important that they are paintings, gestural, layered and visceral. I think they were saying that someone like David Rayson or George Shaw, paint houses blandly and it’s about emptiness and photographic stillness. I’m interested in the emotional impact and how the house has history and all this stuff has gone on in it. Although it might be empty now, the paint rejuvenates all that, and I thought why couldn’t my house be painterly? Why couldn’t something that’s meant to be quite bland, still, flat and static be rejuvenated? By painting a house like this, it's trying to access all that emotional memory of people that lived there in the past – or also the idea of the perception, as I’m running round with a camera on a hot day and it’s all shifting about - what it's like to be there.

NN: A brushstroke seems like a simple thing, but it’s loaded with the humanity of doing it. But I can see what you mean about being in a suburban place and even if there’s no one about, it never feels completely still, because of the awareness there might be people inside going about their own private lives, and the sense of people that have been there in the past.

JC: Also you’re moving around it. A lot of these houses have been built for the car.

These suburban places can’t exist without the car. This is not a townhouse, it’s not a Georgian house in Islington, it’s an isolated house in a cul-de-sac where the car is how you get to it, and so most people see them from a car anyway.

NN: I wonder if there’s any other sort of ways in which the presence of an abstract pattern works that we haven’t got to yet.

JC: The punk thing of rejecting convention and wanting something annoying, disrupting the picture, something that shouldn’t be there, that most people think of as ugly, an ugly/beautiful thing. Most lino has a disgusting pattern. There’s been time enough for it to become aesthetic again, but at the time it would be seen as naff and a lot of people still see it as ugly. The painting shouldn’t work because often a quarter of it is a pattern, but for me the challenge is in trying to find the image that will fit with that domineering, nasty pattern. It might get buried slightly but its always going to be there, part of the painting. As the Lino is the first thing I glue down, it’s like an anchor to the painting that I’m always referring back to and fighting against, and it’s important to me to have that kind of tension, rather than just the white canvas. Most important is the atmosphere that comes through. The Lino starts that journey of suggesting the atmosphere I’m trying to get by being from those places, from that period of history. Also the Lino or the posts become part of that trippy perception of a place and how, if you look at the sun and then you look back at something, you get all these funny prismatic things going on, sort of flashing like a migraine. The patterns function that way too, like a vision thing.

NN: I’m fascinated by the multicoloured fence. Despite all the gestural colours that interweave, they’re still related to the colours you might expect the house to be, but not the fence.

JC: I see the fence as a cartoon language. The Lino is a cartoon language, too. It’s got an outline, bright and comical. I did a number of house paintings with these egg shapes and the fence is a continuation of that, cartoony and sharp. Again, something you wouldn’t normally want to be there, like the Lino, a funky kind of thing that breaks it up. This summer at Latitude festival I did an art installation of paintings. Because I had to hang paintings in a tree, I did something quite loud and different from what I’ve been doing.

NN: You’ve taken the golf-ball type things that you painted in the past and made them huge and they’re no longer tied to reality. The golf balls were quite explainable, but these are more like the buds of a tree, or every ball that’s ever been thrown and there’s been a time warp and they’ve all appeared at once.

JC: I like that. These are signs I painted pointing to things you couldn’t do, obviously, being a festival. You couldn’t actually go there.

NN: And this time you’ve painted a scaled up representation of the Lino?

JC: Yeah, these objects are quite big. If the Lino was stuck on that, it wouldn’t work, so I’ve blown it up. I imagined a campsite with pine trees, a resort no-one used anymore that I stumbled across, with derelict buildings, fences and funny bits of architecture which had been overgrown and left –a playground, a swing, a concrete picnic table, close ups of this fantasy setting triggered by seeing pictures of the wood and thinking what could have been there. The memories were from childhood – I was brought up in Majorca. I suppose it was a bit of a joke, because, going back to ridiculousness, I thought about festivals and music and camping and what people are there for, and I threw this concrete ugly resort in the middle of it all via painting just to annoy people.

I liked the idea of people going, ‘Oh god, this is a bit ugly.’ But for me, it’s not ugly. I was contradicting what was there. I wanted to have people take their pictures in front of it, as though it really was a resort sign. The paintings had to be quite loud to work in that environment, which was all very dark and woody. Kitsch ugliness - taking Majorca to Suffolk.

www.jake-clark.co.uk

David Blandy talks to Alli Sharma at his studio in Hackney, E8

2010-09-23T12:40:00.000-07:00

‘David Blandy’s work deals with his problematic relationship with popular culture, highlighting the slippage and tension between fantasy and reality in everyday life. Blandy is searching for his cultural position in the world. He often uses humour to ask the difficult question of just how much the self is formed by the mass-media of records, films and television, and whether he has an identity outside that.’ www.davidblandy.co.uk

Preview for "Child of the Atom" from David Blandy on Vimeo.

AS: How’s the show going at Seventeen Gallery?

DB: I think it’s going pretty well. I've had some interesting responses to it so far. I'm pleased with how the installation reflects parts of the film, it's something that I've tried to do before, but I think it has been a bit more successful this time. I've been working on it for about two years now. In fact, I had the first kernel of the idea for it when I was in Sweden at I.A.S.P.I.S. at the end of 2006.

AS: It took a long time to happen, did you organize funding too?

DB: I scavenged around for different bits of funding. The Daiwa Foundation, which supports Anglo-Japanese research, supported the travel part. I wanted to take Inko, who did some of the animation sections, but had to scale it back. Phoebe, my daughter, wasn’t necessarily going to be in the film until we got out there, and I realised she had to be in it. The more I thought about it, the more I liked the idea. But I was anxious, you know, putting your own children in your work. It can be exploitative. I consciously wanted all the camera shots of me to be from a distance, so that the location would become an important part of the film. It worked for keeping a bit removed from Phoebe too.

AS: She immediately brings in the next generation, the future, against your grandfather’s past and the present day trip.

DB: And somehow it made it more real to me, that kind of choice; would I choose my life instead of 100,000 people in Hiroshima? Yes, it’s only my life. But when it goes onto my daughter, I just couldn’t cope with the idea that she wouldn’t exist. It gave it another reality.

AS: How do you convey that sort of horror? Do you feel that because you have your own family story, it gives you some sort of ownership and you can tell it?

DB: I suppose I felt it lent legitimacy to my approaching it. The personal link was a significant part of growing up; an awareness of what happened to Pete, my grandfather, who was a Japanese prisoner of war. He was called David Piper but everyone called him Pete because it was a school nickname, Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled pepper. He wouldn’t eat rice or drive a Japanese car, yet he was generally a conscientious guy. He was a Director of the National Portrait Gallery and Ashmolean Museum, he wrote books like The English Face. So he was a learned academic and yet he still had a visceral reaction to things related to his time there, unable to deal with the history of that experience.

AS: And how it impacted on him.

DB: I had a Japanese pen pal when I was about six or seven. The family had to come over for business and they sent their son to my local primary. He seemed so cool because he could play rounders really well and draw accurately and played cool computer games. Even with that relationship, I think I remember my mum was anxious about telling Pete and what his reaction would be. Then I grew up falling in love with Japanese popular culture, Akira, anime and bits of manga.

Enter the Barefoot Lore Pilgrim:Origins, David Blandy from Seventeen Gallery on Vimeo.

AS: The TV series Kung Fu, or Shogun, would have been before your time?

DB: I remember watching Kung Fu with my dad. It must have been repeated because it was produced in 1971/72. I remember in the early days of video, when I was nine or ten years old, getting out Jackie Chan films and there was the video nasty, Shogun Assassin, a very bloodthirsty Samurai. And I grew up with Monkey, of course.

AS: Do you think using popular culture makes your work more accessible?

DB: One of the reasons I started incorporating the stuff into the work was because I didn’t want it to be closed and only accessible to people who had been exposed to that bit of popular culture. If you actually put the song, or clip that has become a part of my memory, a part of me, into the film, then I’m sharing that and making those links clear. I’m really interested in the idea of collective or shared memory. We all watch the same films or have these images going around in our heads. If you’re remembering a film, is it the same as remembering a dream?

AS: There’s a familiarity, even if it isn’t specific.

DB: I wanted Child of the Atom to incorporate sections that implied that they were part of an existing anime series. The anime parts are an amalgam of appropriated bits overlaid with drawings I made with Inko, a Japanese manga artist. The image of the atom bomb is from Barefoot Gen so it’s already an anime version of Hiroshima. That anime was based on an original manga, a survivor’s tale, slightly fictionalized, a day in the life during the war when the bomb happens.

AS: In cartoon form, that’s horrible.

DB: Yeah, it is horrible, but it’s in the same realm as Maus, the comic of the Holocaust, of Auschwitz, but it’s done from a personal viewpoint. It’s a survivor’s tale but, rather than writing it, you’re turning it into a comic book. I think it’s more foreign to us because manga is so pervasive in Japan. Millions of people read Shonen Jump every week and it’s a comic the size of a telephone book. They flick through and then get rid of it because if they kept them their tiny apartment would be full of comics. So if there’s a story they really like then they buy the collected edition when it comes out. The cartoon is quite a faithful recreation of the comic, so I took a few sections from that for the film because it just made sense as the bomb had already passed into popular culture. I also mixed in Fist of the North Star, which is based in a post-apocalyptic world, quite Conan-ish with some intense scenes of nuclear Armaggedon, and Akira is the third.

AS: So there are three different animations mixed into Child of the Atom.

DB: Yeah, and they’ve been altered so that the same character continues in each of them. I’ve overlaid different frames, animated frames, put glasses on one of the characters, little things, so that it’s the same character occurring and there’s a narrative. So there are two parallel narratives; the journey of me and Phoebe in Hiroshima and Miyajima, the little island shrine, and then the parallel narrative is the Child of the Atom falling to Hiroshima and witnessing, or creating the bomb, and then walking through the ashes and fire and then seeing the flowers of new life at the end. So those two coming together and that melodrama set against the banality of our tourist visit. But equally, I really like the quiet bit of me and Phoebe, sitting at the end of the pier, looking out through the temple gate.

Crossroads (2009) Excerpt from David Blandy on Vimeo.

AS: I heard someone ask you what you thought a moving image was and you said it’s like a series of still paintings. Your films do have a painterly quality. I was thinking of Crossroads. The camera holding on a particular moment for a long time, it’s very beautiful. I know Claire Barrett, your partner, does the camera work, so who makes those decisions?

DB: Claire does all the camera work and of course we talk about the feel for the film. I mean it’s a total collaboration in that sense.

AS: I was wondering about the painting comment, was that flippant or is there some influence?

DB: Well, I grew up with art because my dad’s an artist so I always thought I was going to be a painter until I got to my foundation course. I felt there was nothing new I could achieve. Then I realized the things I was really interested in were screen based, like computer games and videos and television, so if I wanted to talk about these things then wouldn’t it make sense to make them out of that media. Then it comes down to the editing process. Claire has some input but that’s my main job really, apart from messing around in front of the camera and organizing everything. But that’s where it becomes a piece, the rhythm of it, the choices, instead of just being a sequence of images. Crossroads is cut down from something like 12 hours of footage to 12 minutes. I knew that I wanted it to be a very still film so I made sure that Claire was hanging on for 15/20 seconds on every shot. So, it’s that thing of what is creative? Is it the editing? It’s artist-as-DJ, mixing the bits of existing materials. I like having Claire’s material like the found objects, the bits of pop culture that I then bring together and mix to mean something.

David Blandy is at:

Child of the Atom, Seventeen Gallery, London E2 until 2 Oct.
www.seventeengallery.com

Mixtapes: Popular Music in Contemporary Art, Glucksman Gallery, Cork, Ireland until 24 Oct.
www.glucksman.org

Paul Johnson talks with Nick Nowicki at his studio in Poplar, East London

2010-07-24T03:31:00.000-07:00

PJ: I grew up as an oil painter, graduated from Glasgow in a painting school, but I never really wanted to pick up a brush, or start mixing paint. I was always trying to work out how I could construct a painting; how I could handcraft it. I started to formulate glass-paint and spray it onto cut-out pieces of paper, which I used to build up collages. I don’t really know what I’m going to get until I start putting it together. There’s a slight uncertainty with spraying, because you don’t have complete control over spray. As your consciousness kicks in, colours change and shift with your mood, so if someone ends up with a green chin for some reason, I allow that to be part of the making, as opposed to ‘Oh no, that’s gone wrong.’ So, in a way, I do feel a bit like a painter at times.

NN: The drawing of the soldier looks like you’ve painted it with watercolour daubs.

PJ: Some artists go through a process of simplifying things as they work through their career. I’ve found what I’ve done is complicate things and added more and more. They’ve ended up becoming more layered and more ‘painterly’ through the making. This green bit is tracing paper that I’ve sprayed and then placed on top, and the rest is sprayed by sectioning parts off. If it’s not right, it’s sanded away. Glass-paint has a stiffness, but I use it so lightly it’s almost like a dusting. If this was a watercolour and you didn’t like a certain section, or if you wanted to shift it once you’d put the paint down, obviously you’d be adding water or you’d be using a sponge, but for me, I’ll be getting out the sandpaper. It has similar possibilities where I can eradicate or keep things in. Again, it’s like a constructed watercolour. Physicality always returns in the work at every stage.

NN: When I first saw your work in 2003, you were physically covering up your collages with red polypropylene.

PJ: At that time, I was trying to contain physical worlds, and it felt like the process needed to be contained as well. But I had backed myself into a corner. I thought, ‘What next? Do I just stay here, hermetically sealed, or do I try to navigate my way out?’ I remember an artist coming to my studio and he put me on the spot. He looked at my collages and said ‘Why would you want to cover them up?’ I think strangely that comment triggered something I was already thinking, but wasn’t yet prepared to do. Like any artist, you make dumb decisions sometimes, and I made a series of yellow ones, and a series of clear ones, and the collage was still all sealed in. But the polypropylene had become an effect, as opposed to an integral part of making an image. Then I made a piece called Girl that felt integral, all the components felt right, and it only had one bit of plastic on it. It had elements of the red polypropylene series but felt like a whole different beast. The discs, that had been sheeny and covered, suddenly allowed their physicality to be seen. There’s still an element of containment, but it’s about her visual containment. For me, this was the key piece to move on and bring in elements that I was interested in.

NN: Talking about the presence of the poly-propylene, that's a strong artistic presence. You were very present within that work, as the keeper at the gate. And you are still present once that's gone, because of the way that it's been visibly crafted. I think you are strongly involved in my perception of the work.

PJ: I think that’s definitely a point. I was interested in that sense of clarity; when you think of something and you have the sudden urge to physically make it. I love that intention and I think the handmadeness of what I do, and the level of labour, speaks of the obsessional. Potentially, there are so many easier ways to make an image, and I end up giving myself a hard time. My Dad joked, ‘It’s probably ‘cause you’re Catholic, Paul. It’s probably just your upbringing.’ That I feel I need to go through this cathartic kind of thing each time.

NN: Could you go into more detail about finding the images, and the compulsion to make a particular image into a portrait?

PJ: It’s normally about being switched on, and looking, but the trick is not being conscious of looking. So, throughout your day, you’re susceptible to seeing things, whether it’s a bit of newspaper on the floor, an image on the internet, television, or an image of someone I’ve seen and sneakily taken their portrait. I put the found image on the studio wall and it lingers for five or six months. I keep looking at it on a day-to-day basis, and normally it’s this funny process of there’s-something-about-you-which-I’m-unsure-about, which turns into a compulsion to make an image of that person. But if I forget that it’s there then I just leave it.

It’s a slow process, and maybe a head will come from somewhere, a uniform or costume might be sourced from somewhere else, and then I’ll start to piece them together using drawings and photocopying. Fictional things then happen, and it becomes this person whom I try to present as if they are real.

NN: Because you’ve spent so long lovingly crafting them, it feels to me like you love these people.

PJ: Wow!

NN: But in actual fact you don’t know them. They don’t even exist.

PJ: No. There is a distance. I found an image on a boat in India, and after I’d made it into a portrait, The Lookout, people were saying ‘Who is it?’ and they wanted me to describe him, as if he was someone I’d had some sort of contact with, but the strength of the work is that there’s, hopefully, a mystery. That is something I’m interested in. How much do you believe and how much don’t you believe, and the space between.

NN: Is it a literal translation of the photo?

PJ: The photo was black and white, quite an old photograph in a Victorian frame. I’m projecting colours onto him, as if to give him some sort of vibrancy - a lot of images I’ve used are black and white or drawn from a photocopy and I add colour - to make you think about him as someone potentially real, or to give him a feeling of something quite current. I don’t want him to feel like he’s a Victorian photograph, or he’s from another century. His hairstyle and beard seem to allow him to be in this current day. I picked up another few photographs, and the rest looked like they were from a particular period of time, whereas he seemed timeless, as if he could exist then and now. When they are stuck in an era that’s when I lose interest. If I can convert them into feeling present, rather than past, they become familiar, as if you could tap into what that person is feeling, or the thought-pattern behind the eyes.

I’m hoping some sort of fragility is communicated through the image. And also I have actually described them in the past as being a sort of family of people, not in a traditional sense, but in the sense of disparate people coming together, through some sort of shared belief.

NN: Like a cult?

PJ: Yeah, and the work went through a point where the cultish element started to creep in, but now I’m more interested in the work being ritualistic without the symbolism being directly placed upon it. Venus Passing The Sun might feel like a ritualistic object, but it’s not explicit. There’s an attempt to make it more suggestive.

NN: Are you using your imagination more?

PJ: I think so. I’m just allowing things to seep in. Maybe I’m going through another transition. You always evolve as an artist, you’re always sort of moving. For instance, with this most recent one, I had the title in my head for years. It’s quite a tragic title, Portrait of Someone Slowly Drowning, and I remember thinking how would you go about visualizing that title. At the same time, I was interested in how I could pattern the surface around a portrait, but without it simply being some sort of decorative device. Instead of the background being blank, I wanted to fill it, so it’s almost as intense as the actual person, almost as if it’s whirling or swirling round that person. And in a practical way, I literally made him in bits. His mouth and his chin I didn’t really like, and in a spontaneous way I put him on in a temporary way without the bottom half, and instantly thought the image was enough. It feels like this portrait is almost being sucked into some kind of mental schema that’s floating around him, whereas in my previous work, it’s always a symbol or something physical floating over, something that’s real and tangible, but not actually there. This feels much more fluid. It’s got this crazed pattern, but it’s uncertain, and it’s clear, and you think you’re looking at particular things. Someone described the lower half as being like some sort of water formation, or some kind of crustacean, and I like that it’s suggestive, but doesn’t become definite.

NN: The abstract part could be part of him, like a body under a sheet, or it could be seen as a nervous system.

PJ: Ah yeah, something biological. I think that’s where the collages are starting to head. There’s openness to interpretation as opposed to a definite kind of badge, or symbol, or object floating over the top of someone. All artists make a body of work, and then they just reach that point of ‘Mmmm, what’s that one about?’ It feels like a bit of a jolt, but that’s really exciting. This feels like another evolution, a personal evolution with making these collages, and it’s good to let them grow.

Paul Johnson is showing in 'Newspeak: British Art Now, Part Two' at the Saatchi Gallery, London, 27 Oct 2010 - 6 Jan 2011 and 'BigMinis' - fetishes of crisis at CAPC Museum of Contemporary Art, Bordeaux, 18 Nov 2010 – 27 Feb 2011.

Images courtesy of the artist and Ancient & Modern, London.

www.ancientandmodern.org

Michael Ajerman talks to Alli Sharma at his East London studio

2010-07-08T12:56:00.000-07:00

AS: Is the watercolour from life?

MA: Yeah, I’ve been doing these on and off for a while. I had an instructor in New York but I only really did it seriously in about 2002 at the Slade. Some people like the watercolours, others like the oils, but over the years, they’re beginning to become one.

AS: Is it that you can explore something about materiality in the watercolours?

MA: It’s the fluidity of the material and colour and not really having the ability to mess around. I don’t really know the history of watercolours very well. I mean I know there’s a huge history in Britain and I know what a Turner or Constable watercolour looks like. I like doing them. I find them incredibly special and I really have to focus because there’s so much going on at one time.

AS: Is the history of painting important to you?

MA: It is. I mean I know it. I had a weird neighbour when I was growing up in New Jersey who showed me old art documentaries. When I was 8, everyone else was doing Martin Luther King or Thomas Jefferson reports for school. I was doing Michelangelo, talking about him cutting up bodies to figure out how things work. I was a weird kid.

AS: Do you still make discoveries?

MA: I do, but I’ve also begun to notice that certain aspects of work by artists that I like has changed. Things seem different now and I don’t know why. Albums that I’ve listened to for a really long time also sound different. I still make discoveries in strange places. Recently, I’ve been more interested in just going out there and seeing what comes my way than a premeditated research on something, like it’s a sign. There was a really big Otto Dix show in New York where I saw these two great paintings of a woman and a child. The first one looked like a brown Mary Cassatt and the other like something painted by Charles Addams who did the Addams Family stuff. It was the same year, the same model, but I was blown away by the scope of the works.

AS: You mean the different styles?

MA: No, just completely different sensations. One seemed to have the parental empathy of Cassatt, but with the other one, you could almost hear the Addams Family theme tune. I had been thinking about doing something with a good friend of mine, Ivan, who’s just become a father. He lives in New York and now has a son, Jonah, so we met up I did some sketches. Just cause I usually draw Ivan when I see him, and this was an event, he’s now a ‘Dad.’ Then on my next trip to New York I went to Zwirner gallery and in the back office they had this Alice Neel painting of Neel’s husband and her first son. It’s a bizarre painting. The partner’s face was really heavily done with this one long mark for the eyebrows, the nose and then back up again. The child’s face almost scrubbed out, which is kind of like stuff you would see now. I thought, it’s a sign! I should do the paintings of Ivan and Jonah when I get back to London. So stuff like that.

AS: Making connections with things going on in your head? I was wondering about your subject matter. You paint the things that are going on around you in your life?

MA: I am aware of what I do here, but it got to the point where I was really not in the mood to go to the dark for a little while, I needed a break. I also want to keep it fresh. The heavy ones are mentally exhausting. I’m not saying that the ones of the father and son are not exhausting but it’s just different.

AS: Why are the heavy ones exhausting, because the subject matter is very close to you?

MA: Sometimes it is and sometimes not. I can put too much in, of my feelings and stuff, it’s been pointed out to me pretty clearly but I think it’s the same if someone is writing or doing an intense scene in a film or something like that. A tension starts building up.

AS: It’s an emotional relationship?

MA: It is, but at the same time, if it wasn’t fun, I wouldn’t do it. Well, like Upside Down in the Transition gallery show. There’s a woman dangling, you don’t see her legs and there’s a lot of ambiguity in that painting. People have said to me ‘I don’t like it’. I say ‘I don’t think you’re supposed to like it’, then other people do like it. I’m trying to make paintings with feeling and power, with a presence to hold up to everything else, like billboards, magazines, Piccadilly Circus and you know, everything else (makes hand gestures like scrolling through an iPhone).

AS: The way you handle the paint looks like a balancing act, it looks intense and concentrated. The paint could have been slapped on, but you know it hasn’t, you know it has been controlled and it’s slippery and difficult.

MA: I call it aggressive surface control. The marks can sometimes be aggressive. At the same time, I like what Corinna Spencer wrote on her blog, that some of the marks are pulled slow, to get certain effects. I don’t like the word ‘dragging’ but you’re gliding through.

AS: So it’s not necessarily a fast way of working.

MA: If it’s working wonderfully, it’s fast, then there are times when it creeps really slow. The conclusion of a piece is usually two or three marks interplaying, ricocheting onto each other, creating some kind of sensation, usually. The most important thing is trying to keep open to things, accepting things that don’t happen in the normal way and moving with that. There’s this idea that the mistake is not the mistake. The mistake is what comes after. So if something is done which is a little bit odd, it’s what is done to compliment or aggravate that afterwards to verify whether it was a mistake.

AS: The response?

MA: Yeah, the response is more important than the ‘oh god’ moment.

AS: So do you know when to leave something?

MA: Well that’s hard. There are times when I’ve run out of the studio. Because you get this moment when you really have to accept what you’ve done and it takes a while because you have this idea in your head of what you want to do and sometimes you get really close to it but sometimes the idea of accepting something is really hard.

AS: When you start a piece do you have a strong idea of what it’s going to look like?

MA: I have an idea, but even the drawings are never close and also things that are planned out too much always look really dead to me. I stopped doing that. That way of working is not interesting to me any more.

AS: If you’ve worked it out already, there’s no working out left to do.

MA: There are people who want and demand that control. For me, the most interesting ones I do are where everything is on an equal level, meaning that any part of the picture can be pushed, pulled or re-adjusted in a delicate or aggressive manner at any given time and not to be precious about a specific part and realise that it is the whole thing that is really important. I mean some of my marks are aggressive and some of my marks are calmer, there are definitely certain types of approaches that I’ve been working with for the past couple of years and that might expand or contract. But the thing is I mostly just think about the colour. The marks.

AS: You use a particular shade of dirty purple.

MA: I thought it was from watching Purple Rain too much. I found this purple and I really like it. It’s in jars over there. I make some slight adjustments to it. The colour range breathes in and out depending on the imagery. For a while there were reds, yellows and deep sienna brown to depict a late night electric light.

AS: They feel really close.

MA: I used to work night shift at bars and restaurants. Those times are great because when going home at night everything seems a lot easier to see. It’s tonal, not chromatic. I really responded to the red colour range. For a while it was clunky then I became more conscious of controlling it. I liked the red because it seemed easy to lose control of it and I liked that idea.

AS: Do you limit your palette?

MA: I remember at University in New York, you’re palette looked like a freight train. I think it’s that student idea that if you have five different reds and four different blues, it will make it better. God, what a mistake that was. Limitations are good. I’ll shift something or change the tone but it usually starts from a compressed amount, and a decent amount of it. Even in the small paintings, if you mix a tiny amount and you put it down then that’s it, the mileage of that colour is over. If you mix more of that colour you can make that same mark or ten more like it to do something else in the painting.

AS: It makes sense, so you can change things. You’re not fixed.

MA: It’s important for me to have the ability to move from one part of the surface to another very quickly. That can mean the colour range or making sure that there is an amount of pigment to physically do that and that’s only done by preparing, preparing preparing.

AS: Some of the paintings are on aluminium.

MA: Metal is pretty awesome.

AS: Because it slides?

MA: It’s like butter in a pan when it’s just going. It captures the marks much more differently than board, which is probably the closest.

AS: The pumpkin strikes me as a particularly American emblem, you don’t feel that about it?

MA: I don’t know if it’s a love poem for Americana but it is strange and comforting to see them around here in Oct/Nov. The pumpkin goes back to that colour range I was using, but they’re weird things; they’re meaty. I got a pumpkin and I grabbed my power drill and drilled holes in it. The cool thing was when I was working on it I had the candles inside the holes, so it has this vanitas feel to it. One of the candles went out.

AS: Yes, it’s just gone out, you can still smell it.

MA: It had gone out and I was really chasing it, it was a lucky couple of seconds.

AS: The portrait hung next to the other pumpkin. Is that an actual person.

MA: Yeah, that’s my friend Derek. We grew up together in New Jersey. He was coming through London. For a while it has been a nightmare working from direct observation in oils because I didn’t have the same type of control as working from non-direct observation. So I abandoned that approach. When Derek was here I thought I’d give it another shot. I remember how weird his jaw was and I never noticed it before. It was really bizarre.

AS: How long did it take?

MA: This was fast. The paintings take two hours to two years. There are people who don’t trust their working methods when it’s finished in a couple of hours. I want things to be as good as everybody else does but there are times when the first thought is the best thought.

AS: There is something very fresh about that way of working that seems to be undervalued.

MA: It’s weird because you get painters who talk about Eastern philosophy and Chinese Dynasty landscapes and they’re done like that. Yes, there’s a great deal of training and planning that goes into those types of things.

AS: I would imagine that when you’re working that fast, something must take over in the way that you are looking and working.

MA: I don’t think that kind of thing can be described verbally very well. You become so at one with the materials in a way that conventional human dialogue doesn’t really work. I think that can go for any type of creative impulse. It’s a weird thing because you are bombarded by someone who is sitting in front of you, someone that you have known for a long period of time so there’s a great deal going on cerebrally and optically, and now you’re at two very different places in your life, those days are gone but those parts of your brain are still flickering in a funny kind of way and I like working with all of that.

AS: It’s not just anyone’s head you’re painting.

MA: I know people who don’t want to know the model, they want the distance but it’s never been like that for me. That kind of dislocation from the subject matter really seems a waste of time. I’m interested in the people I paint, but I’m also picky about the people that I paint. I think it’s trying to use a language to try to investigate something that is close to you and seeing where it can go.

AS: Can you tell me about the painting Christelle.

MA: I’m very happy with it as an image. It’s a memorandum piece and I’ve never done anything like that but I think it works well. It was something I really needed to do. We spoke before about how do you make a painting, I had previous watercolours that I had done and old photographic imagery and stuff and I really went for it. At Slade, Bruce McLean used to say, ‘when you know you’re hitting it, you’re hitting it.’ You have this ten minute groove, and it doesn’t happen all the time, but when you’re in it you’re in it and you just go. It was weird finishing this thing because I felt I was hitting it better than I’d ever done before but at the same time I really felt like I was losing my mojo with every hit. It was really bizarre like I was really in it but after each volley, my strength kept going down and then I don’t know if it ended because there was nothing left to me or nothing left to do in the painting, I just remember it stopped.

AS: So when you were talking about an intense period of working, this was what you were dealing with?

MA: I consider it intense. I come in here and I see where it all goes. I’m trying to stay open for things to shift and change but I don’t really know where it goes. I can try and will things and I do, but there’s really only so much, I’m not interested in choking it. That’s just boring.

Michael Ajerman can be seen at Transition Gallery until 11 July.

David Harrison in conversation with Nick Nowicki at his studio in Angel, N1.

2010-06-05T22:04:00.000-07:00

DH: This is the latest painting I’ve finished.

NN: Someone is peeping out of the trees, or something.

DH: It’s not made clear what it is. It’s the unknown watching. I’m thinking of calling it They’re Watching or They Watch or Do Property Developers Dream Of Electric Trees? I love the idea that we’re being watched all the time by nature. There are probably spiders and insects or mice sitting here now watching us. Man thinks it’s getting one over on nature, but in his darkest dreams nature can come back to get him.

NN: How do you approach composition when making paintings?

DH: I never really do. I just go for the picture and it seems to work its own composition out. I like to play with composition, take risks, put things where they shouldn’t be and make them work. I always like to put the dominant figure, like the owl, off-centre and uncomfortable. But after doing that I have to make it so your eye then travels round the painting to what the centre of focus is pushing you towards. So I painted the white zigzag in the foreground to lead your eye to where the owl is focused, which is on the running man and, in doing so, you see and feel the trees, the hare, the businessman, the watcher, the moon, and it all connects. So I think that’s how you work out composition.

NN: Is it on board?

DH: It’s on wood. Most of my paintings are on wood.

NN: How does the surface affect what you’re doing?

DH: I love the surface. I love the wood grain coming through. I love little holes. In fact, that’s how the yellow eyes in the trees came about, because there’s a puncture-hole from a nail. I have to prepare the wood, because it can warp badly, so I hammer in stretchers and cross bars to the back. Then I prime it with clear glue so bits of the wood come through, and then, when I’m painting, it guides me where I think, ‘that’s looking like part of the sky so I might leave that.’

NN: The people in your paintings seem to be imbued with magical properties.

DH: Nature is magical and we are part of nature so we’re part of that magic and we shouldn’t step out of that otherwise it’s working against what we are. No-one really knows what we are anyway. Things happen in nature that are unexplained and that’s magic. If people say magic doesn’t exist they should go into a meadow and sit there for an hour and see what happens. There’s always something else in the air. You can actually see atmosphere. Playing with perspective helps create that atmosphere in my work. There’s no such thing as a perfect perspective because everything moves, your eyes don’t just sit and look. We’re created with an eye that’s not a machine, it’s an organic moving object and we’re floating through space and time with nature.

NN: You’ve warped the perspective in this one. Is it new?

DH: It’s fairly new. I’m not quite sure if I’ve finished it. It’s called The Living and the Dead. It doesn’t tell you what’s the living and what’s the dead. You have to make your own mind up about it. This is an 18^th Century Macaroni. They were the fashionable young men of the day and dressed, like the Renaissance paintings they saw, in beautiful velvets and frills. They used to wear powdered wigs that were three feet high.

They had an attitude – they never wore watches because they could do what they wanted, they weren’t beholden to anyone and didn’t have to be anywhere. They were rich and just walked around in the latest fashions; and they shocked their parents apparently. The Macaroni could be a ghost, and the fox could be the go-between two worlds where nature sees all. Foxes are like ghosts around the street. You see them and then they disappear before your eyes. They sit and wait and look fantastic and then every time I get my camera out, they’re gone. How do they go? This is a street. Where have they gone? The foreground figure is the fashionable man of today, an image of threat. He’s almost a ghost. The green colour is mostly compositional. I wanted it to fight with the other colours. So he’s not got his true colours on. Is that an ectoplasm colour? Is he living or is he a ghost?

NN: I like the wobbly wall.

DH: I drew that in first. I’ve been doing sketches of walls. I like the way brick work moves and it still keeps its geometry but you can put an organic shape in as well. What I might do is quieten it all down by putting a wash over it. Victoria Miro came and said, ‘Don’t touch it; leave it as it is.’ Sometimes, I’m blinded by what I’m working on. This was a quiet picture and it became garish to me; I get confused by the two worlds and two states of mind. I worry about changing states of mind rapidly. I’ll take it down and leave it on its own and look at it by itself.

NN: Is hanging them in this arrangement informative?

DH: No it doesn’t help. I need to put them in my viewing space just by themselves.

Sometimes I might take a week to paint a picture, then leave it for a week, paint some more, work on something else while I leave it up there for six months, and in another few days finish it. I suppose the leaving time is part of the process of painting. I’m still painting that picture even if it’s on the wall for six months so therefore the mental process is part of the work. Some of them are put away for a couple of years and then I get them out again and finish them. I always try to make something of what’s there. I never like to write something off completely. It’s wasting too much time. The older you get the more aware you are of wasting time. You just feel you haven’t achieved, so you’ve got to make this kind of real statement about yourself.

The Gate is another one I don’t think I’ve finished; I was wondering whether to have the hares white. It’s a landscape painting of a real place, but how I think it should be. I took photos of the trees, copied from the photographs and then put them away and thought about how I felt when I saw the actual trees. Sometimes you look at the photograph and it doesn’t look like the tree you saw. It’s best to get the essence of a tree rather than the look of it, because everyone sees it differently. At first I thought the gate was standing on its own, but when I looked closely there was a fence of very thin wires, which didn’t come out in the snapshot so I didn’t put them in. The gate becomes this pointless object, but it looks beautiful. It’s the idea of no boundaries.

NN: Do you listen to music when you’re painting?

DH: Music is a strong influence because you go with the mood of it. When I was painting The Mystic Spiral I was playing Gong – a very old hippy band I’ve always followed since I first saw them in 1970 in concert. The painting is about when I was in a medieval village in Somerset. It was twilight and very creepy and it was Halloween. And I got lost. I’m walking down the street feeling spooky, but enjoying it immensely, and I pass a tower, which was known for devil worship, and then bam in the middle of the village is this blood red Jaguar. It looked so weirdly out of place, but in place. And the registration number is S666FUN. I was like, ‘I don’t believe this!’ I photographed it so people knew I wasn’t lying. I waited for someone to come – I wanted to know who owned this car – I wanted some tall, dark stranger to come out and say, ‘Get in, you’re going to be sacrificed!’ but nothing happened. That’s Mikhail Bulgakov sitting in the car. I got a picture of him from the internet – film star looks, very gaunt and pale. He wrote a novel called The Master and Margarita, which has been a big influence on my work. It’s a book about seeing the dark side - a comment on the politics in Russia in the 1930s. Stalin was killing people, only in the book it’s the devil making people disappear, but, because of communism, no one is allowed to believe in the supernatural.

And then, of course, I needed a focus of where the car’s going to go, so I put the hare in to balance the picture. The hare is a sign, when it runs down the middle of a road, which it never does usually, that disaster is going to happen. The cat formed in the paint washes and so I painted it in. Whether I was looking for it, or not, I don’t know. I wanted to put something in that didn’t make sense, so I started to do that colourful little display – Hollywood-looking ghosts as they appear – and I wrote 666 in a shadowy form so you couldn’t see it, and then as I was doing it I heard this mystic voice at the end of Gong’s new album saying ‘Welcome to the mystic spiral’ and I said, ‘Oh that’s perfect, thank you! That looks like a spiral, I’ll join them together’ and I made a spiral.

David Harrison will be showing in the forthcoming portrait show at the Victoria Miro Gallery, London N1, 22 June - 30 July 2010.

'David Harrison' by Alistair Robinson is published by Philip Wilson Publishers.

A limited edition print, 'City Gent', to accompany the book, is also available.

www.poodle666.com

Donald Urquhart in conversation with Nick Nowicki at his exhibition, 'Bi', Maureen Paley and Herald St, London, E2

2010-05-16T10:32:00.000-07:00

NN: Do you favour a particular type of sketchbook?

DU: I always use A3… is it Daler? There’s something really familiar about that brand because I remember using it at school. I always used black ink and brush; I haven’t really changed.

NN: Is it Chinese ink?

DU: It’s Indian ink. Chinese ink comes out matt. Indian ink has a shine that I like. The thing with using ink is it’s got to be flat. You can’t have it on a wall or it’ll all run down and I could only really go as far as my arm would reach. I find an A3 sketchbook on my lap the best way to draw.

NN: ‘Why Bother’ is acrylic on canvas.

DU: And basically I can bang nails into that and paint it flat on the wall. It could be stretched afterwards but I quite like these bolt-things, the grommets, so you can stretch it on the wall.

NN: You incorporate text with images, which can be difficult. How did you arrive at that?

DU: I don’t know. I used to write for magazines. I used to be a journalist so I find writing comes really naturally and then drawing the words that I write is just an extension of that.

NN: Does it look like your handwriting?

DU: It’s very similar. It’s a bit tidier than my handwriting.

NN: When an image is made bigger, it can look contrived. It’s not the easiest thing to do.

DU: People ask if my wall drawings are laser-cut transfer. But why draw a picture and get a laser-cut transfer of it when you can just go to the wall and draw it by hand? You’ve just got to concentrate. I use a tiny brush, 0 or 0/3, to get the outline really sharp and then fill it in with a larger brush. Usually I can’t be bothered getting off the ladder and I do it all with a little brush. I swear a lot when I’m doing it.

NN: You’ve put in some…they look like school images, I’m not sure.

DU: Oh the self portraits. I think when you look at old pictures of yourself it doesn’t actually look like you. You recognize yourself, but you’re remembering yourself, aren’t you? You’re not really seeing yourself. You wonder is it really a picture of you. Sometimes I see old pictures and I don’t see myself at all.

NN: So what made you think of using them this time round?

DU: I wanted to do portraits of people I know, like my family and friends and then I decided to start with myself, do a few self-portraits and see where that takes me. So I dug out old photos. I couldn’t face sitting in front of a mirror and actually doing a picture of me now. That one I’ll get round to one day.

NN: That’s you as a moody youth. That’s definitely not a school pic.

DU: No, that’s when I’d have been about 22, a moody, hung-over youth.

NN: You look like Elvis, or maybe even Morrissey.

DU: It is a bit Elvis-y that one. Someone else said that. The chin’s too pointy to be Morrissey.

NN: How do you come up with the titles for your drawings?

DU: The titles for all these Bette Davis ones are quotes from Thackeray’s Vanity Fair. I’ve just illustrated the whole book. There are, I think, 41 drawings and they all relate to specific lines. The book doesn’t really tell you her age at the end, but I thought to make the character, Becky Sharp, get more and more warped and wasted. I thought I would have her go from 16 right up to 70 years old.

NN: You’ve invented a world where Bette Davis is playing her?

DU: Yeah and ages accordingly.

NN: And where did you get all the images of Bette from?

DU: Oh my god. Well I pause-framed films and then I got books with loads of pictures of her and then I looked her up on the internet. But it was strange, I had to start with an image of Bette Davis, maybe in a fur coat holding a cigarette and then change her into a slightly period Becky Sharp. It’s meant to be set in the Napoleonic wars and I don’t think she smoked. It doesn’t mention smoking in the book. I altered them all and I made a motif of bows, on her hair and clothing.

NN: Have you mixed them up in the show and ignored the narrative aspect?

DU: Yes, I’m really just showing images. There are 52 images in the whole show, so I put them in two groups of 26. I wanted the show to look a bit like a schoolroom, with instructional diagrams, a really sick school. You couldn’t teach a child using a Joan Crawford alphabet. I thought I’d make it formal, with pictures of people from history, and you might get a poem up on the wall. That’s in my mind. What other people see - I don’t know if they’re going to get any of that

NN: What do you think is the difference between the photocopies and the hand-drawn pieces?

DU: I feel a bit of liberation seeing things blown up large and I’ve always used photocopies. I could have put these up as silk-screened prints in a frame but I think there’s something more relaxed about photocopies. I mean, I’m showing my drawings – it’s not like I’m having a sale of luxury goods. It’s nice to show the originals but I think a photocopy is quite unpretentious.

NN: With those jokes, not jokes exactly but, is it like making notes and it all comes together in that moment as you get the idea?

DU: If I come across a funny idea in my mind, something that I think’s quite witty and has humour, I write it down or make a text message on my phone so that I remember it and then, when it comes to doing drawings, I look at these ridiculous notions that I’ve had and pick the ones that…

NN: …still make you laugh?

DU: Still make me laugh or that I think are worth putting in an image. These are like something from a Ladybird book, a Learn-To-Read book. They’re bittersweet. You wouldn’t tell a child that ‘in autumn everything must die’. You’d have ‘in autumn we dance in the leaves’.

NN: And they’d be more colourful.

DU: Yeah, they wouldn’t be black, that’s for sure.

‘Bi’ is at Maureen Paley and Herald St, London E2 until 23 May 2010.

www.maureenpaley.com and www.heraldst.com

Donald Urquhart's work will be included in ‘Newspeak: British Art Now, Part I’ at The Saatchi Gallery, London SW3, 2 June - 17 October 2010.

The new edition of Thackeray’s ‘Vanity Fair' featuring Donald’s illustrations will be published by Four Corners Books in September.

Donald Urquhart will be showing at Galleria S.A.L.E.S., Rome, in the autumn.

www.galleriasales.it

Images courtesy of Maureen Paley, London, with thanks to Patrick Shier.

Emma Talbot talking to Alli Sharma at her studio, Walthamstow E17.

2010-04-25T05:58:00.000-07:00

ET: Drawing is really important. I have no fixed plan of what I’m going to do, so it’s a really open way of working. Something comes about which is a different mode of thinking. It’s like when you’re doing something and you might think of something else completely random and you don’t know why you’re thinking of that, but you are. It’s that kind of space and it gets interesting when I’m trying to articulate that kind of space.

AS: Is text a recent addition to your work?

ET: I think the first time I used text might have been in the Nieves zine. They’re either in bad capitals with a dot over the ‘i’ and things that you’re not supposed to do if you’re being very formal or they’re in a European font, from the 1930s, which was used for advertising or cinema posters; that type of information giving. It’s not my handwriting. It’s like painting words rather than writing.

AS: You’ve used both in ‘The Beautiful North’.

ET: I’ve been going to Sheffield a lot recently, because I’m going out with someone who lives there. A lot of my family is from the North. So we go to Sheffield and then get the train to Manchester, or Liverpool, and do things and it’s like falling in love with the North again after being in the South for such a long time. That painting includes the names of all the men from the North that I have loved, so there’s him and my brother, my dad, my uncle and my husband, who died and was also from the North.

AS: You lived in Jesmond, Newcastle?

ET: Yes. And at the top are images drawn from childhood memories. Every summer I used to go and stay with my grandparents in Wigan and I was remembering things like learning to make toast on the fire and my Grandad buying me my Olivetti typewriter and going round to relatives’ houses.

AS: And sitting very politely on the sofa.

ET: Yes, while a dog eats your biscuit and you’re too scared to tell it to get off. The bit in the middle is about a romantic weekend when I went to Newcastle, Sheffield and then Liverpool in one weekend.

AS: Is that a brooch in the centre?

ET: No, it’s like if you looked at the thing as a whole, it could be a mirror, or some mirrored thing or a pub window, something like that. It’s like a really decorative container that’s broken. I think cities in the North are like that, there is a lot of Victorian decoration, it’s very beautiful but it’s also a bit ugly and broken. The mirror is one of the motifs I use. They provide a duality between something glamorous (reflective mirror, cut glass, diamonds or lace that could be a keepsake or embellishment) and something vulnerable to breakage and damage (for instance, the smashed mirrors or cracked pavements that superstitions can be based on). Within them, there is the idea that things can be lasting and/or broken.

AS: The painted text here gives the look of an advertising hoarding.

ET: Well that one does in particular because it’s the idea of a promise, something that you wish for, that you have a desire for, and it’s offered to you. It’s about that kind of relationship between things. Someone saying that they’ll do something and you want to believe them or you wish this would happen. It’s the space of advertising, in a way.

AS: Is that a Smiths lyric in 'Your Words are Like Honey, My Promise is as Good as Gold'.

ET: Yes, and another from John Dowland, a 17th century poet and songwriter. All his songs are about sadness and death and they’re very beautiful. He says, ‘if only I could go to sleep then it would be like I could die,’ notions like that. I’ve used his words quite a lot. The music’s amazing but the words are just lovely. Romantic.

AS: Are you looking at any other particular artists?

ET: I took my boys to The Lowry last week. I was absolutely obsessed by it. The collection is amazing. There are paintings that you recognise with the figures and city scenes and there are others that are incredible. There’s a really funny one that was painted in the 1970s with two teenage girls standing over a teenage boy and he’s wearing an argyle sweater and the girls are really tall and they’ve got beatnik hair and really long legs and little white boots and it’s like they’re bullying him, or trying to impress him and he’s looking totally overshadowed. It’s just really economical and I thought ‘this is exactly what I want to look at right now’. It’s unfortunate that someone made that awful song about him because it detracts from his work, but I think he was always a bit outside.

AS: Is that because he was very popular?

ET: Very popular and his rudimentary drawing. I think people thought that was because he was self taught, rather than making a choice about language. There’s a painting called ‘The Spire’ and it’s just a triangle. It’s not quite black, more charcoal grey, and the sky is not quite white, you know, a really northern sky, where it’s like a piece of paper. It’s like looking at a church spire in the sky but it’s also like looking at an abstract form and it’s very modern. I could relate his early work to the social concerns of painters like George Grosz and later, the compositional structures seem to borrow from modernism, like early Mondrian, breaking up space. That’s how I see him understanding the context. He did have a gallery and it’s pretty obvious that he knew more or less what he was looking at. But he said things like, ‘I’m a simple man. I just use blue, black and yellow.’ But simplicity is somehow rather brilliant. That matchstick figure is the least interesting thing about his work, to me. He was quite bleak and existential. There are quotes of him asking, ‘what’s the purpose of life? What’s it all for?’ and all the kinds of things that you think, ‘yeah, that’s what everybody wants to know.’

AS: Who else are you looking at?

ET: I’ve been looking at him and Annette Messager quite a lot and I suppose someone like Louise Bourgeois. Her drawings are really interesting, the directness in things. And then there are people like Rosa Loy where I don’t really like the look of the work so much but I quite like what it represents in terms of a contemporary re-engagement with narrative painting and what it suggests painting might deal with or do with personal, psychological space. And I really like things like Tal R’s drawings, but I don’t like his paintings.

AS: I love the details, the tiny feet and cuffs and collars but you’ve left the faces blank so you don’t get involved in the detail of that.

ET: If they had faces then they might be expressive in an illustrative way and also, this telling of things, they’re in my mind or they’re memories or whatever, but they’re not unique. It’s not like this only happens to me. It happens to everybody all of the time. I like the idea that you might see something acted out by someone in a film and then you might see another version with a different actor but it’s the same role; it’s like that.

AS: You really allow yourself to do anything in these don’t you? Some of them are quite rude.

ET: Yes, I include really personal things all the time. But I should say that those two are not to do with my personal life. One is based on a Moravia novel and the other is called ‘Shades of Black, Everything Bad, Everything Wrong’. It’s a catalogue of things on TV screens that I haven’t experienced first hand; things I only know from TV or film so there’s film noir, where a woman murders a man; people are gambling for high stakes; two lovers are in a motel room, she leaves him and he kills himself; a biker gang kidnap a rocker and a woman buying guns. I suppose the thing that you could say about all of them is that they are about things I think about, so it doesn’t matter if I’m considering something that I’ve seen or if I’m thinking about what I did last night. They all come through this space, which is my mind. They could be anything. I don’t think ‘oh I’d be ashamed to put that in’. It’s exactly like writing a diary and you write whatever you want.

Emma Talbot is currently exhibiting 'Pictures From My Heart' at Transition Gallery, E8 until 16 May 2010, gallery open Fri-Sun, 12-6 pm.

Her new Tranzine 'Between the Shadow and the Soul' is available here for £3, limited edition of 100.

Images courtesy the artist and Transition Gallery.

Phillip Allen talking to Alli Sharma at his studio in Dalston, E8

2010-04-17T08:28:00.000-07:00

AS: You've just come back from The British School at Rome.

PA: I’ve been there since the start of this year. I made some paintings, which have gone to a show in Bologna, and I did piles of drawings.

AS: There are familiar shapes and objects that crop up in the drawings.

PA: Yes, sometimes things appear, sometimes I make something out of something I’ve made before. How these worked is that I was out and about in Rome with a small book. I hadn’t worked like that before.

AS: It looks like a comic book; the way you’ve framed them.

PA: It was just a way of getting them down on a page. That framing has existed in the work one way or another; it’s an instinctive thing. Then, I quite literally work my way through these into felt tips. When you first move into your studio there’s that horrible thing about being in a white empty space. I didn’t do much work for the first three or four weeks. I thought I needed to fill the space up to feel a bit more at home and so this process evolved. I put things up and thought ok, this is mine, I can relax.

AS: Do you get a room to yourself.

PA: It’s an old place that looks like the British Museum. There’s a courtyard, then 8/9 artists are down one wing with your bed upstairs. Then there’s the library where the academics are. It felt like an open prison and a retirement home. You feel imprisoned, but you can go out and see Rome and do whatever and talk to the academics. That was fantastic. I spent a lot of time asking them things

AS: Did the trip have an impact on your practice?

PA: Maybe the things I did there had a superficial impact. I was out with my book because, in a sense, I had to; that’s what I was there for. Maybe the point is that there is no impact. I’m sure you’re affected by the experience but it wasn’t a hunt for something. It’s the people you meet which is the real thing; to meet others and to see what they’re up to and all of those things.

AS: Have you been productive since you got back?

PA: I’ve just started these prints. I came back and didn’t really want to paint. A few years ago I did some etchings and making prints has always been at the back of my mind. I was wondering what to do with the drawings and whether they were for printing or whether they were things for other ways of making work. So I’m in a real ‘I don’t know’ phase. But it’s nice to make and produce things and then, once you’ve got all the things in front of you, begin to think ‘right what am I doing’.

AS: The paintings you showed at Transition recently looked like something was being worked out on the canvas.

PA: They were made over a long period of time; that extra bit of whatever that I do alongside the main body of work.

AS: Do you go back and add or alter them over time?

PA: No, I make them in one go. I think once you begin to go back then it turns into something else. They’re things that can’t be re-done. They’re outside of the other bit of my practice. But then, once they’re seen, they get absorbed as part of your practice.

AS: Were you easy about showing them; if you put them to one side then is that because you don’t want people to see them.

PA: I think they were put to one side because I hadn’t worked out what they were. Jake Clark came round years ago and we were talking about them. Then I began to think about them. But it’s one of those things, as soon as you begin to think ‘I’m going to make one more’ then you can’t because, once you begin to conceptualise them as your work in that way, then all this other stuff comes in and it begins to turn into your work. In a way they were always detached or a different aspect. I began to think that I needed the main work, say The Approach show, to make sure that these other things exist in the way that they are surplus to the main body. But as soon as the surplus becomes the work then it alters. So I don’t know what I’ll do now. Once it turns into a work then it changes, it loses something at the same time.

AS: Your drawings; they’re something else too.

PA: For me, the drawings have to earn their keep. They’re things for me to use rather than making something. When I’m making paintings I know that I’m making something. The drawings are there to work for me; my nuts and bolts. Usually, this wall would be full of drawings. I think ‘this drawing works’ and then I make it into a painting. So you can look at the drawings and the paintings and say yes, that’s that one.

AS: That happened at your show at The Approach, you reached the end of the paintings and arrived at a wall of drawings. And you could match them up. So I was wondering about the process and I was a bit disappointed that the paintings had come directly from the drawings.

PA: Why?

AS: Because I wanted your approach to the paintings to be more like your approach to the drawings and not so planned and worked out.

PA: Why?

AS: I don’t know.

PA: I came into painting at art school doing that hard won image thing where you have a blank surface and then you’re painting and, through the process, something appears. I worked like that for a long time but I found it a frustrating process because nothing ever did happen. The mythological, hard won image never appeared. I was also questioning the whole notion of painting being this autonomous thing. And so the way I solved this problem was to know what to paint. The drawings came from that; from thinking that I needed to know what to do because, for my own personal state of mind, I can’t just approach a blank canvas. For a long time I felt that I didn’t want to show the drawings alongside the paintings, because once you show them you begin to demystify the whole process, and then I thought, well so what.

AS: I like that.

PA: Painting isn’t a mystery. It can be quite a pragmatic thing. You can still approach a painting in the same way, but it’s come from this; this is its real source. The paintings aren’t made in a kind of Jonathan Lasker way where I photocopy and blow it up. They’re drawn then painted. Other things happen, slight variations, but I need the drawing in front of me.

AS: Your combination of colours, with gold and silver can be quite, well, I love the word vulgar, but I’m hesitant about using it.

PA: I like the word; you won’t offend me. I guess they come from the felt tips. I’ve used a lot of silver. It’s enamel paint. I think I like it because it’s not oil paint.

AS: Did you see Paul Nash at Dulwich Picture Gallery?

PA: Yes, awesome. That last room. One of my favourite paintings he did when he was 29. That’s quite depressing.

AS: Which painting?

PA: ‘We are Making a New World’ (1918).

Studio images courtesy of the artist.

Images of paintings courtesy of Transition Gallery, London (photography by Damian Griffiths).

Rose Wylie at her studio in Newnham, Kent with Alli Sharma

2010-02-24T17:09:00.001-08:00

RW: I wanted to show you a horse. This one. Where shall I put it? On the floor? There’s something about its chest and the stupidity of it. I like the zebra beside it. It’s a take from de Chirico. I like his Metaphysical and early work.

AS: Is this your recent work?

RW: It’s very recent. The Jay isn’t quite as silly; it’s more charming. I work on thin, cheap paper and it wrinkles. Sometimes I slit along the bump of the wrinkle and put something underneath and stick it down.

AS: And what about the paper pieces stuck on top?

RW: Those are corrections or changes, which is why they keep getting thicker.

AS: Shall we go upstairs to your studio?

RW: Yes, it's in tip top condition because I'm not painting in there at the moment. This is a painting that didn’t make it into the current show at Union Gallery. I was sorry to leave it out. It’s Valeria Bruni Tedeschi, Carla Bruni’s sister, in the film ‘5x2 (2004)’. She’s being raped and rammed up against a pillow. She’s beautiful but her face looks terrible because she’s hugely distressed - a very nasty scene. It’s an extraordinary image of her and that is what I was trying to do. But I’m having enormous trouble with the painting. I thought it looked like her face has been scissored off. I tried a soft, curved face but that was awful. Then when you put the eyebrow on you can’t curl it round because it looks like the face is in space. But it isn’t in space; it’s pushed into a pillow. So the eyebrow has to go off the forehead and you can’t curve the forehead because it’s in the pillow. I’m not drawing a factual pillow; I don’t want to do that. I could have written ‘pillow’ and crossed it out. I thought it looked easy to do but it wasn’t, at all. I’ll probably repaint this side again. It is possibly a huge failure; I’m still working on it.

AS: Is that how it works for you; you see an image that catches you, which you picture in your mind, and then make the painting of how you remember it.

RW: Exactly, and there’s no research after that. I don’t look at stills. I started with ‘Sitting on a Bench with Border’. Then there was a gap. Then I did the big head, with arms ‘Battle in Heaven (Film Notes)’.

AS: She looks like she’s got her arms around something.

RW: She has; it’s oral sex and the man is standing in front of her. The film director, Reygadas, did this scene at the beginning of his film ‘Battle in Heaven (2005)’. It’s not all about oral sex. But at the end of the film he shows the same act from the front, or the side view, which is very explicit and it’s hard to take because it’s so focussed and direct.

AS: Is ‘Japon’ by the same director?

RW: Yes, he deals with huge subjects; salvation and guilt for instance. He’s very visual. I also made ‘Silent Light (Film Notes)’ with the two Mennonite houses from his film ‘Silent Light (2007). That was surreal; the two houses just floated into the shot. The Mennonites are a German religious sect and they moved to South America and Mexico and retained their puritanical, ordered life. They’ve all got to be identical; no individuality. These are not two beach huts. They’re two identical houses which are not grand; they’re austere and unpretentious, built by their owners. So that’s what those two houses are about.

AS: The green of those houses crops up a lot in your paintings.

RW: It’s a tricky colour because I don’t like bluey greens. I like yellow greens. There’s a lot of green in medieval stuff, which is yellowy. I think the Royal College of Art had a very blue-green time in the 1960s and all the RCA students I knew went in for that colour. I never liked it. Later I studied drawing at the Royal College, from 1979-81, and then moved onto paintings.

AS: In the recent show at Transition Gallery you had the canvases stapled to the wall. Do you prefer that?

RW: Yes, I like it. I have shown unstretched paintings quite a few times in various places but some people won’t have it.

AS: Perhaps if the work is for sale then people want to buy an object and they can’t see it otherwise.

RW: They can’t see it, unless it’s stretched. They don’t want to bother about transporting it but obviously you could staple it to any old wall. I sent some work into the Turner Contemporary Open in Margate last year. The curator was from the Baltic and Martin Clark, from Tate St Ives, was a judge. They said I could staple them to the wall and send them on transit stretchers because I’d put it in the application.

AS: You do stick them directly onto stretchers sometimes.

RW: I stick them onto a strip of canvas around the edges of the stretcher. Everything on the painting shows on the front. It’s quite difficult to do.

AS: Yes, they look imprecise.

RW: They stretch unevenly when you size them. And they stick out where you staple them up so when you measure them they’re not precise.

AS: This one looks more like your work on paper. Obviously because of the pencil and charcoal, but also the collage. A sort of hybrid.

RW: I like to see the flipped up edges of the collaged bits because they make small shadows. The frame around the Fat Controller used up a whole pencil. It doesn’t take, unless you use a good artist’s crayon. Cheap pencils evaporate. Because I use cheap paper in my drawings, people ask if I use cheap materials and the answer is no. They’re not cheap materials but they look as though they might be.

AS: Maybe that’s because of the attitude you have towards your materials. You’re not exactly precious with them.

RW: I don’t like to think of the cost of something. I prefer it to come from Woolworths or WHSmith but if you do that then after a few years it disappears. This one is part of four I was going to show together. The idea was that Blair was a fat controller. He tried to control fat by giving children no chips, do you remember, with Jamie Oliver? There was that business about England being the fattest country in Europe. It was gross. It was a pun on the children’s toy Fat Controller and the description of Blair, the fat controller. It’s about obesity and control. In this painting the Fat Controller doesn’t really look like the Fat Controller but I like those thick charcoal lines. I used to draw like that a lot. Now I work with thinner, hard pencils. I visited Patrick Heron in the West Country before he died. He was just about to have a big show at the Tate. He showed me and Roy a few things. The only thing I liked was a drawing of a boat he’d done when he was 12. I loved it. It was done with a hard pencil. And that clinched it for me. I loathe arty materials. That’s why I like cheap paper. I like cheap everything. I like accessibility. I’d like pictures to be cheap. But if you have cheap pictures nobody wants them. I think they should be available. Rothko wanted his work to be available and they became extremely expensive and unique and he didn’t want that.

AS: You think that’s beyond your control?

RW: It’s horrible. I don’t like it.

Rose Wylie is currently showing 'Film Notes' at Union Gallery, 94 Teesdale St, London E2 6PU until 13 March 2010.

www.union-gallery.com

She has also been selected for Women to Watch at the NMWA in Washington, DC in July 2010.

www.nmwa-uk.org

And will be showing at Thomas Erben Gallery, New York from 25 Feb - 3 April 2010.

http://www.thomaserben.com/index.php#biographyRoseWylie.html

www.transitiongallery.co.uk

Thanks Cathy Lomax for studio photographs and input.

Jo Wilmot talked to Alli Sharma at 'Detox', Hoxton Square, London N1

2010-01-20T13:40:00.000-08:00

AS: You have large and small-scale work in this exhibition; do you have a preference?

JW: It’s easier to get a good rhythm in larger paintings and there’s more control to make it balanced or unbalanced. You’ve got more freedom with the scale of the marks too, from really small to massive. You can’t mess so much with the smaller ones and it’s harder to get stuck in.

AS: So does your process differ according to size?

JW: I always start with a coloured ground and use quite a traditional process, working dark into light. But then I also work wet on wet so it messes it up a bit. Then different amounts of different medium, just to try and get some texture into the painting. And then the different approaches to applying the paint. It’s paint obsessed.

AS: I’ve heard you describe the way you work as letting everything go, getting into a bit of a mess and then having to bring it all back.

JW: There’s a certain point in every painting, especially bigger works, where I look at it and think what have I done? It looks a complete mess, but not in a good way. It hasn’t hung together and it’s almost like it could be sliding off the canvas and it’s just scary. It’s horrible and disheartening and you have to fight through that and then everything starts to slot into place and it starts working. You get to that point and it’s exciting. You come into the studio and it’s pretty much there and you just have some slightly tedious finishing off to get it completely done. The drive is waiting for that magic moment but sometimes you never find it.

AS: So does a lot of work get binned?

JW: There are a lot that don’t make it. I’ve just started on a new technique and the work isn’t ready to show yet because I haven’t worked out how to use the mark making technique.

AS: You’re masking parts off?

JW: Basically, it’s working in two ways. I’d been trying to work with interiors that function as landscapes, like ballrooms, coffee shops and architectural spaces. Then I did the cars and reached the point where I couldn’t do them any more. I needed to move on. Some of them became too composed. So I decided to revisit the landscape based stuff, but trying to do more with the mark making and mess it up. The expressive marks contrasted with the structured architectural spaces produce a nice tension. My paintings work best when they’re slightly ambiguous and slightly hard to read. They’re always representational, but not directly; they’re one step removed.

AS: Is this one based on a gym?

JW: Yes, with the machines. I got into the idea of the repetitive nature of gyms. Not only repetitive, like forced labour, but also the way that there are so many different machines and everyone is doing the same thing, like a cog in the wheel. I started with a bad painting, put down masking tape to fracture it and made another painting over the top then peeled off the tape. So there are two or three works in one. But I’m still working out how to use this technique.

AS: And will you work into it again after the tape comes off?

JW: Probably not. Some need work on the contrast. It was a nice painting with the masking tape on it but now it’s a bit destroyed.

AS: There seems to be a general element of destruction in what you do.

JW: Yeah, and it’s weird with a new body of work and you’re not sure where it’s going and you’re a little bit lost. I was working from photographs of a posh, glitzy gym but really they always look a bit like a dungeon.

AS: It sounds like you find glamorous images, which promise a fantasy and then destroy the gloss of it.

JW: It kind of unravels it. When you check out the website of a restaurant and look at the venue photos they’re always beautiful because it’s just after they’ve opened. But you go there and there are scuffmarks where the mop has been. That’s what my paintings are like. They’re like the scuffmarks, rather than the fantasy. It’s like a family photo when everyone is planning to get on really well and being happy and then 5 minutes later there’s a massive argument and people are crying.

AS: Like getting behind the façade.

JW: It’s the disappointment, failure and feeling like you’ve been slightly conned. I’ve spent too long fantasizing and getting really sucked into things. Perhaps it’s me coming to terms with it.

AS: Just processing what’s going on in your life around you generally?

JW: Yeah, we’re just living in this world of glitz and everything seems to be moving to virtual. Our computer screens are flat so everything looks better. Pictures have brighter colours, faces of people look better and then when you go out into the world it’s quite disappointing. Paintings are good because they’re the antithesis of the seduction of a flat screen. I mean they have a seduction of their own but it’s completely different to shininess.

AS: Some painters enjoy that gloss and slickness.

JW: I’m anti-slick. That’s what I like about paintings, they’re a bit grubby and hand made. Even Velasquez, when you get up close you see those big blobs of white are really crusty, or where he’s lazily cleaned his brush on the painting. But they’re such phenomenal paintings. The refreshing thing about painting is that you can see how it’s made, like when you see a live band, you can see how it’s done. But when you look at images in magazines or on the telly, you’re not brought into the process. Unless you really sit there thinking ok, that’s a photograph, big studio, make up, teams of people and airbrushes.

AS: You used a lot of drippy painting in the suburban garden paintings. There aren’t so many drips in this work.

JW: No, I was relying on those too much as a prop. It was like breaking up, playing with and fracturing the space, which is something that I’ve returned to, but it became like a prop and I knew how to do those paintings too well. They were instinctive and becoming like a parody. Those are the ones people always mention. They’re cheesy and glitzy.

AS: And the colours are bright and vulgar.

JW: They’re like footballers wives; really trashy. But then I got sick of green and I couldn’t use green any more. I needed to move away and challenge myself.

Jo Wilmot is currently showing work at ‘Detox’, 16 Hoxton Square, London N1, which she co-curated with Kristen Lovelock. The exhibition is open Thur-Fri 12-6 pm, Sat 10-6 pm until 6 February.

www.detoxme.org.uk

www.jowilmot.com

Laura Oldfield Ford in conversation with Alli Sharma after her talk at Tate Britain, London on 7 December 2009

2009-12-12T12:52:00.001-08:00

AS: When talking about your work in relation to John Martin’s ‘judgement pictures’, you touched upon the romanticism that exists within your own work but seemed a little reluctant to go there.

LOF: There’s a lot of political weight brought to bear when talking about historical movements like Romanticism, so in a way I’m trying to avoid taking that on. There’s a difference between the way that I romanticise my subject matter and the romantic idea in art history as contextualised in front of those paintings. Certainly, my work is shot through with some sort of desire or idealised portrayal of aspects of the city, which can be read as problematic. But I like to set that against the bleakness or melancholy aspects of the architecture that I describe.

AS: To me, that is romantic; the way you look at the architecture in it’s decaying state.

LOF: What I find interesting about architecture steeped in that patina of decay is to do with what happens to those spaces when they’ve been subverted? How do they change as people adapt them to their own needs? I’ve always found that interesting about large planned estates, garden cities or post-war new towns. Whether that’s people changing the appearance of their front doors or adding nomadic architecture, caravans and building sites to the edges of those places.

AS: You seem focussed on the architecture of a place and not particularly on the people. You said you were becoming more interested in individual stories.

LOF: It’s definitely there, most obviously in the writing for my zine, Savage Messiah. I try to coax out hidden narratives or stories so you get fragments coming from different characters. They’re loosely based on people I’ve met.

AS: How far does your research take you? I imagine that you take your camera on walks around the city. Do you talk to people too?

LOF: I take thousands of photos so editing takes up a lot of time in the process of making the work. I talk to people on estates where I’ve lived. At the moment, I teach a drawing class with old people in Kilburn and I talk to them about what Kilburn used to be like and listen to their experiences of living in that area and what it was like living in Paddington during the war. These kinds of conversations provide me with background material for the work.

AS: You’re a fan of Ballard; does literature play a part in your working process?

LOF: Ballard has been hugely influential to me. He’s like an installation artist in the way that he can set a scene so that you can really visualise it. I’m often less interested in the characters and plot; I read him more for the visual images that come from his work.

AS: I wanted to ask you about class because it seems strong in your work but I get the impression it's a taboo subject right now and invisible in contemporary art.

LOF: I think you're right in the sense that it has become unfashionable to talk about class. It’s something New Labour have distanced themselves from in their new branding process. We’re supposed to believe that there’s no working class and that we’re all middle class but the actual issues of class war, to me, in my lifetime, have never been more pertinent. The society we’re living in now is so polarised and divided.

AS: It’s not that class divisions have disappeared, but the focus seems to have moved to broader issues of globalisation.

LOF: I think people are prepared to talk about developing countries and the Global South and use terms like that and talk about how everybody in developed countries is in a privileged position. But obviously it’s not that simple. I think there’s a consensus that says it’s vulgar and unpleasant to talk about class; it’s bad form.

AS: You’re passionate about social injustice; how much did growing up in Halifax contribute to your political views?

LOF: I grew up in Yorkshire in the 1970s and 1980s when a particular moment of class conflict was being played out in a very dramatic manner, especially in 1984 when it came to the miners’ strike. It felt like a really important battle and it turned out to be so and that battle was lost. That was a pivotal moment and, in a sense, what I’m doing with the work, the aesthetic of the work and the ideas I’m talking about, is locating myself back in that moment as if to activate a certain current or sense of agency that was felt by many people then and who subsequently feel brow beaten and defeated, having lost it all in the 1990s.

AS: When I see the term YUPPIE in your work, it makes me want to snigger; it seems so dated.

LOF: Yeah, we don’t call them that any more. There are so many different words for them.

AS: So what is a YUPPIE to you?

LOF: Well, it’s the bankers that are getting paid massive bonuses but it’s also these hipsters around the East End. They move into areas, buy up houses, have absolutely no interest in the existing communities and are just interested in making money and exploiting a certain situation. I like the term YUPPIE because it speaks directly about a certain historical moment when there was a much stronger sense of class warfare and class hatred. But you’ve got to remember that there is an element of humour and satire that runs through the work as well. I do want people to find it funny because I get bored with really dry political tracts that are uninspiring and unimaginative.

AS: Most of your work is set in London; have you made work about Halifax?

LOF: Well, the thing is I want to and I have tentatively started to make work about Leeds. I’ve lived in London for 15 years so there are various places where different parts of my life have been played out. When you come to London you can adopt different personas. You can be anybody and you can act up. But when you’re in Yorkshire, when you’re at home, you’re vulnerable. It touches on something of your childhood and your adolescence and sometimes it’s too emotional. But that’s not to say I’m not going to do it.

AS: How do your activities as artist and activist combine or are they separate?

LOF: As an artist, the politics are inextricably tied to the way I engage with the world. And the things I’m interested in are influenced by my socioeconomic position in society. It’s an inescapable thing. It’s just having the desire to express the way that I see things and having the freedom to do that in the work that I make. On a personal level it feels like a really important thing for me to do. My ambition for the work is to be an artist who contributes to some sort of critical milieu - just being present and saying these things.

AS: Presumably, that requires visibility within the art world. Does showing work in galleries clash with your ideas and is that a problem for you?

LOF: For me, there’s not really a conflict. I have got ideas and I want people to see my work. I want to be able to communicate with people. That’s just what I do and this is the critical position I’m taking. Showing work in galleries, particularly Hales Gallery, which I respect, and contributing to events at Tate, I don’t find problematic. A lot of the people that have criticised me for showing work in those sorts of spaces have done so when they have been reviewing my shows in those spaces. The irony is that they didn’t write about me during the 10 years I spent showing work in occupied spaces, underground studios or shows in pubs. That just supports my argument that if I want people to be aware of what I’m doing then I need to show my work in many different spaces.

AS: You’ve been making biro drawings recently, are you doing any painting?

LOF: Actually, I want to start painting again. I’ve really missed it. I’m involved in this project 2013, Drifting Through The Ruins and the ballpoint drawings work well to articulate ideas I have of ephemeral places. Ballpoint pen fades and the stains of acrylic paint gave it a sense of translucence and patina of slight decay. I’m doing a series of new drawings for The Armory in March. They’re related to the psycho-geographic engagement with the city but I’m going to be looking at Paddington and Kilburn. To make them as paintings would carry too much weight. But I actually love painting. Not in the way some people do, like they get obsessed with the physicality of making. I’m not a painterly painter but I enjoy constructing the images and taking time over them and working in that way. I’ve already got plans for a painting show - but I can’t talk about it.

Laura Oldfield Ford is currently exhibiting at:

Britannia: 2013-1981, Art and Design Gallery, Hatfield, 20 Nov 2009 – 30 Jan 2010 http://www.herts.ac.uk/events/Britannia-20131981-Laura-Oldfield-Ford.cfm

The Armory Show 2010, Pier 94, New York City, USA, 4-7 Mar 2010 www.halesgallery.com/news/_69/

www.lauraoldfieldford.com

Savage Messiah zine is available at:

http://savagemessiahzine.com/savstore.html

Jasper Joffe talks to Marianne Morild in his studio on 3 November

2009-11-08T15:05:00.000-08:00

I come to Jasper Joffe’s studio armed with a voice recorder that doesn’t work. The following is a reconstructed conversation, which Jasper agreed was ‘a good re-creation of the ideas'.

MM: Your paintings have changed quite a lot over ten years.

JJ: Yes. I’ve tried to make one body of work look the same as another, but somehow I can’t do it. I get bored. I get bored of going to the studio every day, mixing colours, painting pictures. I love painting, I just can’t do the protestant work ethic, although a lot of the artists that I admire work in that way, six hours in the studio every day, like going to the office. The 24 paintings in 24 hours was a way to demonstrate that it’s not the amount of labour that is lavished on a piece of work that determines how good it is. A painting that is done in an hour can be as good as something that has been painstakingly painted over a long period of time.

MM: Your practice includes curating as well as painting. Does that keep the boredom away?

JJ:I think so. It was another way of creating a whole world of art as I see it. I don’t always agree with the way that art is perceived or treated by critics or curators, and I wanted to create a world where the kind of art that I liked was included. Why would I stick to only making paintings when I could make a whole world? It’s just because I’m so full of myself.

MM: Do you think that when your work changes it is because you get bored with doing the same thing over and over?

JJ: I’m quite an argumentative person. If somebody says something, I take the opposite view, just for the sake of a good argument. Maybe it’s the rebel in me, that makes me want to do the opposite of what I’ve done before.

MM: You’re having an argument with yourself?

JJ: It’s like a thesis/anti-thesis, if you will.

MM: So really that amounts to quite a coherent philosophy then, if you decide that your working process is to constantly present yourself with the challenge of doing something different each time. At the same time you are quite hard on the paintings you have done before?

JJ: I’m very ambitious. People say ‘oh you're so down on your work’ but I’m just very ambitious, it’s difficult to be satisfied with what I’ve done. People always say I’m just a painter who makes repulsive paintings; I paint porn, Nazis, swearwords, tattoos and cancer. But really I do it because I think painting makes it beautiful.

MM: I wanted to ask you about your notion of beauty. In the porn paintings the way you paint the women alternates between lovingly applied paint, quite academic, and big furious brushstrokes in the backgrounds and sometimes on the women’s faces.

JJ: I wanted to give the women some humanity, see beyond the image that people masturbate to. And the expressive paintwork – I suppose I wanted to inject some of that energy into the painting, the effort to see them as human beings. But I’m not happy with those paintings. I think they failed. People couldn’t see beyond the sleaziness of it. They just thought I was another misogynist.

MM: The Himmler painting works on a similar level. I’ve seen the original photo, where the look in his eyes is one of vengeance and arrogance. You have painted him in a rather loving kind of way.

JJ: Yes, it’s funny, the Nazi paintings seem to have what the porn paintings didn’t. Maybe it’s easier to see the human in a Nazi; they’re vilified by everybody, nobody’s on their side. And besides, when you paint something, you get certain sympathy for what you’re working on. And you stop seeing it as an image, it becomes abstract, just colour next to another colour, you want to get the highlights right, the relationships between nose and eye etc.

MM: The bodies you painted in the Buck Naked series were very different in style. They have more of a comedy element to them than the porn-paintings, and less focus on emotional expression.

JJ: I painted those bodies from my head; they are the people I see around me. When you think about how you see people, there are always some things that are emphasized and take over. I was just fascinated by the people I see around me here in Dalston, on the bus, what people do to themselves, how they treat themselves, the way black women straighten their hair and so on. I drew them, and filled in with colour – I guess that’s what makes them so cartoony.

MM: There are a lot of orgies going on.

JJ: The orgies are also something that is everywhere. The way people talk, they swear, they talk about sex on the bus, they are rude. All those words that people get so upset about when I put them into the paintings, they’re around us all the time.

MM: They look a bit bored with the orgy, like they don’t really engage with what they are doing.

JJ: There is nothing that is holy anymore that they can really engage with. I suppose I really would like to be religious in a way, although I’m not at all. I like to believe in really big things, like big art or big love. But people don’t treat it that way. Not religion, not sex, nothing. Children perhaps, but I don’t really want to go there in my artwork. I don’t want to touch any of that stuff, children, paedophiles or terrorists. People are angry enough with me as it is.

MM: But I don’t see your work as being linked to fads in politics. There are some things that remain constant throughout.

JJ: Yes, that is true. It's always the same, women, Nazis, sex, death, mess. And beauty.

www.jasperjoffe.com

Paul Housley talks to Alli Sharma in his studio in West Norwood

2009-10-19T07:58:00.000-07:00

AS: The objects in your paintings have weight; they look heavy.

PH: I quite like things to have that feeling about them, for lots of reasons, psychologically, physically and something to do with the actual material of the paint. Most of these paintings have got about six paintings underneath. It’s a physical build up of completely different paintings. I find a white, canvas surface quite difficult and I like to have something to work against.

AS: Do you mean the whiteness can be intimidating?

PH: In some ways, especially canvas. It’s such a nice aesthetic thing in itself that you don’t want to mess it up. You have to break the seal as it were so it’s difficult in that sense. I find I have to make a few bad paintings to try and dig out a good one. It doesn’t always work. I’m trying to get to the point now where I make less bad paintings and make better decisions. I’m aiming to become a more minimal painter.

AS: By making fewer marks?

PH: Fewer marks, like the dolls head there, which is basically made of spots. Almost reducing something to a pattern. That’s the direction I’m going in. I want to lose the modelling, but my mind changes all the time and each painting is a bit of a compromise. You start off trying to make a certain type of painting and end up making a different one. I’ve always had a problem with backgrounds. I’m making paintings where I only paint the background and bring out an abstract quality.

AS: Is that a figure/ground problem; not wanting those things to be separate?

PH: The thing is that all of the painting has got to be interesting, not just one particular bit so when you paint an object you tend to concentrate on the object and it becomes the focus. I’m trying to play around with that a little bit so that the background becomes more important and gets diffused and integrated. I taught myself how to draw objects and how to make them believable and how to get depth and weight and I can do those things now so I want to be able to do something else. You’ve got to keep yourself interested.

AS: You use the same objects over and over again, as if you’re striving to get something else out of the same thing.

PH: I don’t think the number of objects is a problem. In a way that’s the challenge of it. An obvious comparison would be Morandi; the idea of having just a few objects and the amount and range that you can get out of those things. I like that challenge, to eek out interesting paintings with limited resources and small objects and so on.

AS: I saw a painting of yours done back in 2004 called ‘Big Daddy’. I think it could be of Cezanne. Your new paintings also reference other painters.

PH: I suppose that was the first one I did as a precursor to these new paintings. It was a one-off but I’ve come full circle. The recent Picasso show was a real influence; the way he was using old masters. I think the main thing for me is to get away from using photographs. That’s one of the reasons I started painting objects. And if I don’t then I’ll reference a painting rather than a photograph.

AS: I suppose a photograph flattens everything immediately so perhaps some of the work is already done for you.

PH: Well it can be seductive. I was using photographs from National Geographic and I was influenced by Luc Tuymans, but it’s limiting. You learn how to paint like Tuymans which is a limited style of painting to start with. So I’ve gone further back. The kind of paintings I’m looking at now are from the 17^th Century so, in order to read those paintings, I have to learn a bit about what those painters were doing. You can read paintings on several levels but to actually physically understand how it’s made is one of the more interesting levels if you’re a painter. The kind of stuff that I’m really interested in is indefinable. You can’t say why a particular Rembrandt is such an incredibly powerful piece of work. Even great painters don’t nail it all the time. Every now and then something is imbued with something beyond it’s own physical attributes. I’m in no way talking about anything spiritual. It’s just something else. I mean to some extent it’s an illusion but it’s a very powerful, convincing illusion and maybe that’s enough. Certain paintings just seem more alive than others, like Velasquez or Courbet. They don’t date or age. The paintings that I’m trying to make are my conversational response to those paintings. I want to be part of that conversation.

AS: You’ve literally put those painters into some of your recent paintings.

PH: Some of them are direct but I’ll often give the paintings titles, like I’ll call that cat Velasquez. I’ll always acknowledge what I’m using. It’s always genuine. Doing the Rembrandt thing, that’s an odd one because it’s almost pathetic. It’s not pathetic in the sense that it’s a pathetic judgment on a Rembrandt painting because I love Rembrandt. It’s about an acknowledgement of the ridiculousness of what I was trying to do. Even signing things can be a statement in itself or part of the composition. I put a fake Courbet signature on the Snoopy painting. That’s about as close as I get to conceptual art these days. Sometimes you get it right and sometimes you don’t.

AS: You’ve done a few residencies. What was that like?

PH: I did one in Berwick, which was very isolating. I did Newcastle then I ended up doing one in Durham. Fellowships are odd things. I’ve done a few and they all look great on paper but in reality it’s expecting a lot to just drop an artist somewhere and expect them to get on with it. It takes a long time to actually get used to where you’re working so quite often they’re not actually very good for your work. If you make any successful work at all, you’ve done well I think.

Images:

'Painters Boot'

'Plastic Face Can't Lie'

'Yellow Dog'

'Velazquez'

'Self Portrait as Picasso'

www.paulhousley.com

Clem Crosby talks to Alli Sharma in his East London studio - Part 1

2009-09-24T13:51:00.000-07:00

AS: I find it difficult to talk about abstract work and I was wondering why I’m a little bit scared of it.

CC: Well that’s interesting because a lot of the marks you make in your paintings are gestural and so they could be seen on their own as individual marks. They just happen to build up and indicate an image. I mean it’s not as though your paintings are realistic. My work is built up through a series of painting gestures and I think there are recognisable things in there. I suppose I see it as less abstract but more non-representational.

AS: I like that, being in-between. I suppose I mean the connection between your work and its historical relationship to Modernism which is something I don't really know much about. So, thinking about how to talk about the paintings, they seem excessive and yet at the same time, controlled.

CC: One of the frustrating things when I look at other painters today is how mean they are. They use paint in a very reprographic way so it looks second hand; it’s very flat. I think their vocabulary is narrow and I’ve worked out what they’re saying in two seconds. On the other hand, we’ve got this tradition in this country of these older generation artists like Frank Auerbach who grew up on Abstract Expressionism and they’re so worthy and hard won. It’s tedious. My starting point has always been the material itself. I think the beauty of paint is that you can really push it and you can use it to excess but you can also get some great subtlety with it. I mean it’s not formless. My work isn’t formless. There is a great deal of control. I think that’s what gives the paintings tension. I’ve gone back to drawing with paint so it’s allowed me a greater freedom. I don’t want to restrict myself to any one element, not the paint, the colour or the drawing but just all three things working together.

AS: Drawing is important in your work, are you talking about mark making, the line?

CC: Yes, essentially I’m thinking about the line, the gesture and also the form. In this painting called Fountain, this yellow form behind looks quite voluminous and shapely, then on top of that I’ve got a line here which is also a gesture so it’s like a tight-rope walk with those three things. In Butterfly, it’s equally a gesture and a line but I don’t want it to be figure and ground so I don’t want it to sit on top. Drawing is where I start, literally by moving the brush around as I would a pencil. I’m really stuck with this new painting. I don’t know what I’m doing. But this is where I get to, an impossible place, and then I just have to let go of all my ideas because they’re useless. And the paint won’t do what I want it to do. But then, at that point, when everything collapses, somehow I make this space where I let the work go and something happens. It’s really difficult to explain because it’s not a zen moment or anything like that. It’s just really tedious getting there.

AS: How do you recognise that something is working?

CC: Things just fall into place, it seems easy. I don’t really know how that happens. I’ve never met an artist who is able to explain that. It’s kind of an intuitive thing and an experience thing. Because I’ve been painting for years, I’ve built up this experience and it kind of just accrues and then eventually you’re able to recognise certain clues.

AS: Is it exciting when that happens? Is that the driving force that keeps you going?

CC: Yeah, it is. It’s almost like a chemical release in the brain. It’s just fantastic. I like to think that’s near the end of the painting and then I’m able to finish and usually I’m unable to stop looking at it, that’s an indication. All of the paintings in my San Francisco show are real ground breakers for me. I just couldn’t stop looking at them. I mean all I really know is that if I persevere then I’ll come up with a good painting. I’m not sure how that happens. I’ve thought about it and I’ve tried to write about it. Really it’s trial and error and looking and thinking.

AS: Tell me about your titles, ‘Garland Broken’ for instance.

CC: ‘Garland’ is a beautiful word. For me, it can mean something celebratory or melancholy as in a funereal sense. And the word ‘Broken’ next to it is quite clumsy. Heidegger said that ‘the world reveals itself when functional assignments fail or are disturbed’. You might be hammering a nail in a wall and maybe the hammer breaks and at that point you really understand the world. So I was thinking about things breaking down and the idea of broken. I was thinking about my work just hanging there. I wrote down everything just hanging, which is imminent, about to happen, coming into presence, forever delayed, the idea that there is that continual delay.

AS: I like that connection with these paintings because it looks as if the paint is going to collapse and fall, that sort of looping, and because it looks so fresh it might just break.

CC: As if gravity itself is going to pull it off. I don’t really know about the subject of my work. I wish I knew more about what the heck it was, apart from all those concerns I’ve been talking about which are very real and valid. What we should do here is have a chat until we’re both really bored and then start to record it, a bit like the painting I’m stuck on, because by repeating something and trying to get the essence of it, it’s submitted into boredom and then it becomes something real and interesting.

AS: Ok, let’s do it and see what comes up – we’ll call it Clem Crosby, Part 2.

Images: 'Butterfly', 2009; 'Fountain', 2009; 'Garland Broken', 2009, 35.5 x 24.4 in, oil on formica on aluminium

Clem Crosby is at George Lawson Gallery, room for painting, 49 Geary 2^nd Floor, San Francisco CA94108, USA until 3 October 2009

www.georgelawsongallery.com

Serena Korda talks to Rachel Potts at the Royal College of Art about her recent MA show, Building the Matterhorn

2009-08-15T06:26:00.000-07:00

RP: You wouldn’t necessarily think you were a printmaking student.

SK: I didn’t do printmaking before I came here, but I was drawn to the democratic nature of self-publishing. The book really brought the films in the show together, and there’s a lot of my family in it.

RP: It’s about where things come from isn’t it?

SK: Yes, history and autobiography are a big part of the work. The first film I made here was from footage of my father doing handstands in front of another woman; a crazy ‘how to flirt’ film. The up and down motif was there, and I became obsessed with this idea of digging a hole.

RP: Why?

SK: I was referring back to, and almost respectfully parodying, art from the 1970s; ‘men digging holes’, and the history of women digging holes. It was strange; I realised I was digging myself a hole, a self-burial, but at the same time creating a mountain. I also became interested in Speaker’s Corner, seeing people get up onto these crazy platforms and spout rubbish. There’s a conversation in the book between myself and one speaker talking about a David-Ike-reptile idea of survival and morality.

I was obsessing about digging a hole, so I dug one in my cousin’s back garden, and it became quite theatrical and Beckett-like. It had the potential to call people towards it, inverting the idea of being raised up on something; it was just as attention grabbing and absurd as getting up on a ladder.

I was also interested in female explorers of the 19th century, and the piece retells the history of the American mountaineer Annie Smith Peck. Her writing, among other female writing of the time, has a really interesting humility to it; an admittance of failure. She painted a moustache on her balaclava, and in my eyes she’s very feminist. She employed two men to help her climb a mountain in Peru in 1908. One of the men stalled her all the way and ruined any chance of her recording the trip, eventually unchaining himself and going to the summit before her. She admits all this, and although in terms of recording and proof, it was a failure, she obviously did it. That’s that interesting thing about recording, history, and authenticity.

RP: Is the voiceover on the film from her writing?

SK: Yes it’s her account of the climb edited. I also became really interested in the Matterhorn, which Peck had previously climbed. The peak is often the only part that gets completed in representation, and it’s the only goal. The imagery in the film comes from the building of the Disneyland Matterhorn in 1951 and I wanted to repossess that imagery. I like the idea of breaking down illusions and peeling back layers. Mountain climbing is inspired by a desire to conquer nature and replicating this in a theme park is a similar attempt or aspiration, and a ridiculous one too. The hole-digging has a more obvious kind of futility, but they reflect each other.

RP: The film also shows this really nerdy-boy exploit.

SK: Yes, I was very much playing on the amateurism of it, the hobbyist, railway-model-making nerd. It also references Close Encounters of the Third Kind and that obsession of a vision; Richard Dreyfuss repeatedly building a mountain in his room.

RP: The objects, like the cupboard for your earlier Library of Secrets and the TV cabinet in your degree show, are beautiful retro objects.

SK: I design them and make them all with a cabinet-maker, they’re not bought even though they look like it. I want that slippage with the work. It harks back to this idea of objects possessing a history or life, being imbued with time. They’re talismans.

That’s my next project. I went to Paris and discovered this old puppet theatre, preserved in time, which also acted as a metaphor for my desire to communicate through gesture on a very basic level, after doing my Art on the Underground project which was very cerebral. I became obsessed with the idea of seeing backstage and I want to do a series of live events based around puppetry and showing how it works.

RP: The educational side to the video in your MA show was interesting – it was almost like you were playing at being an educator.

SK: I was an arts educator for about 6 years before I did this MA and it’s inherent to me. Knowledge is power and I always want to be learning and then sharing that. But I was definitely playing on that in a funny way.

RP: I suppose the difference between the RCA show and your earlier work was that you weren’t there, the audience couldn’t give anything back.

SK: I sat there quite a lot and observed how people interacted with it. The live event element of my work is really important, but in coming here, I wanted to realise how it could exist on its own beyond that moment, without me being present.

RP: There is a very English humour in your work, do you think this puppet project will have a similar humour?

SK: They’ve definitely got a humorous side to them, but I really want to tap into their horrible, dark strangeness too. Humour is a useful tool for touching on the serious. Digging a hole is quite absurd and weird, as is the religious madness of the speakers in the book. And it is quite a dark place, Speaker’s Corner, although you’re laughing at people, there are racist comments being spouted. There’s something very political about many of the things I do although it’s not overt.

RP: Do you want to give the viewer a pleasurable experience?

SK: Yes, the Art on the Underground crossword project definitely was pure entertainment. But I hope people feel there’s a critical element as well as a playfulness. Aesthetics are important to me, I used 16mm because I wanted the film in my show to look like a children’s TV program. It’s about appropriating something in order to then tell a story, using aesthetics to lull you into a sense of comfort. Someone thought one of my films was from the 1940s. They didn’t realise it was me, which is like the cabinet looking like something I found, like being a time traveller.

RP: How much of that do you think is conscious - the style of your work? You seem to have an interest in style.

SK: It’s quite funny how I do dress, I have the look of a 1940s or 1950s person. It’s not really conscious. I have tried to look more contemporary. I find nostalgia a useful tool. It can be a really dangerous one and there’s always a tussle, but it’s inherent in my work. One criticism that’s been given to me is that I over-design things. Maybe they’ll get a bit messier. But I think there will still be that element of play and pleasure.

RP: And maybe there’s nothing wrong with that?

SK: It’s something I have to negotiate, nostalgia, creating a world, they’re all things I enjoy doing, but maybe I enjoy them too much.

RP: I think that’s interesting, perhaps you should enjoy making things.

SK: I think you should too. I go through fazes of having a really good answer for using nostalgia. One of them is autobiographical. My father is a holocaust survivor, and he’s 83. I’ve grown up with older things around me. That sense of my father’s very important story and passing that on to future generations relates to the educational and the nostalgic in what I’m doing. Reminding people about something they might forget is really pertinent to me.

RP: Are you looking affectionately at old ways of thinking, for example, the idea of mountains being mystical and unknown, something to ‘conquer’?

SK: I am really interested in abandoned histories. My sister’s a scientist and we’ve been having an argument about immortality, trying to cure aging and evolving into a species that wouldn’t need to reproduce. It seems so anti-human, like science-fiction and I think that’s so apocalyptic and frightening and would never happen. But people said that in the past, and it happened, so it’s important to realise how things change at a certain rate, and how we think we’ve got an amazing knowledge of the world, yet we can still be asked questions that challenge our perception of the future.

www.serenakorda.com

Serena Korda’s MA show is currently being exhibited as part of Start Point 2009 in the Czech Republic. gkk.cz/en/exhibitions/

The Library of Secrets will be at New Art Gallery, Walsall from 1 October - 29 November 2009. thelibraryofsecrets.blogspot.com

Serena will be doing a series of events at Museum 52 from 10 September 2009. www.museum52.com/london/index2.php

Anton Goldenstein talks to AA at Transition Gallery, London E8 on 11 July

2009-07-16T05:56:00.000-07:00

AA: You use many different animals in your work. For Heroes from History; The Rabbit Wars you’ve chosen a rabbit, why?

AG: I’ve been playing with rabbits for years. They’re always evil and menacing. I think I must have been inspired by Watership Down. At the time of making The Rabbit Wars I was reading a lot of novels about romance like The Time Travelers Wife and work by Murakami. I was thinking about the great romantic periods in history and that led me to the Trojan War. The Trojan Horse has crept up now and then in my work and the two things combined in a Trojan bunny with this idea of high romance and subterfuge.

AA: There seems to be humour as well as pathos in some of the more heroic representations, a sort of deflation?

AG: It’s not something I try to direct when making the work but afterwards you look at it and it might be a little bit funny or sad. Perhaps there is an inherent pathos in the way we look at things in society. I try to make uplifting artworks once in a while and to reappraise historical events with the idea that we can somehow change by learning from them.

AA: To what extent is your work self-portraiture?

AG: I think all art is self-portraiture. Art is personal experience, so it’s from the artists’ viewpoint. Even when you are looking at something outside yourself you still have to look at it from within the constraints of your own predispositions. All your internal dialogues come out through making, whether you direct it or not. I spend a lot of time reading about anthropology and biology and the human condition.

AA: Were you brought up around animals in South Africa?

AG: Just dogs and cats like everyone else. I’d see a monkey once in a while but that’s because I lived near an animal research lab in Johannesburg. But they dealt in skins where I learned to swim as a child and I would have to pass an array of African animal skins, piled high in rooms, to get to the pool.

AA: Do you find it problematic using animals in art and having an anthropocentric perspective?

AG: I used to make abstract objects, just things stuck together to make poetic forms in space and then I was sent two fox skins in the post and the next thing I know I had a crudely stuffed fox playing golf. That’s where the animals came in and to a large extent the anthropomorphic side did take over. Now I’m trying to pull that back and re-cast animals as animals but within the human environment. Animals are so popular now in art. That’s fine because it’s the zeitgeist and that’s what we are thinking about so it only makes sense that it’s coming to the surface.

AA: So are you interested in the animals as animals or are you using animals to do something else?

AG: It’s more to do with our familiarity with animals. We’re not surprised to see an anteater or an aardvark or anything any more. We have such a post-modern familiarity with things that are actually alien to us living here in England. In a way it’s anti that. The work re-presents animals in order to see them again. There’s something about the banality of it all. Our relationship with nature has become so banal.

AA: I was looking at urban British bats recently; they’re amazing creatures. As humans we have the desire to invent Radar and Sonar but we could never actually experience echolocation the way a bat does.

AG: There’s a compendium of all the writings about our relationships with animals since Plutarch and the Romans up until now called The Animals Reader. It talks about how birds mourn when they lose their partners to what elephants do with their dead. It’s a great book.

AA: Perhaps when we look at animals we’re also working out what it is to be human.

AG: I am very interested in the human as an animal, as a third type of chimpanzee and how we really need to face our animal background. That’s what is responsible for the state of society - our refusal to acknowledge that we are just monkeys. Imagine three monkeys sitting here, drinking tea and talking about art. No offence but that’s what we’ve got going on here.

AA: And you’re back to absurdity, recognising that and allowing it to be a helpful thing.

AG: I think that is quite important.

Anton Goldenstein is a multimedia artist based in Bristol. His work can be seen at:

‘Bad Animals’, Transition Gallery, London E8 from 18 July – 16 Aug 2009

Preview: Friday 17 July

www.transitiongallery.co.uk

Charlotte Bracegirdle in her studio in Stoke Newington on 13 June 2009

2009-06-29T08:09:00.000-07:00

AA: How did you start looking at prints of paintings and working on them?

CB: I used to search car boot sales for old frames to use with my drawings. Then I started looking at the pictures in the frames and found them quite interesting. Untitled (Falling Doll) was probably the first one where I started playing around and getting more surreal. Gradually I became braver about what I could delete and began altering the image and turning it into something else. They're all untitled. It's difficult to find titles, especially with the famous paintings like the Van Eyck, so I give them simple references.

AA: I like the way you use the word 'delete' to describe what you do. It sounds modern and technical.

CB: 'Paint out' is the term. I like the fact that I am deleting but also leaving something.

AA: And there's a presence created by making this absence. You're creating something by making things disappear.

CB: Yes, I also want to be able to start painting things in more, but I don't feel quite brave enough yet.

AA: Are you intimidated by the paintings you use?

CB: Yes, because whatever I put in has got to work. I don't want to do some Banksy type thing or something that really stands out and is kitsch. I want there to be some awkwardness and naturalness. For instance, I was nervous about using Raphael's The Entombment. The background was hard to paint. In the end I made up a background. I didn't even try to pretend what was there. There was more of me in that painting so I think I can put something back in that's a little bit awkward but it still fits.

AA: The paintings look uncanny and sinister. By looking at them from a certain angle you can see the light reflected on the new paint and the trace of what was there before, making them quite ghostly.

CB: Yes, there is a darkness but they can be quite humorous too. A lot of my work is about disappearance - one minute we are here and the next we are gone and the traces we leave behind. In a sense when you're gone everything else is the same. In the Van Eyck painting everything else in the picture is just as it was except the figures are not there any more. I suppose I have a fascination about what happens when we are gone.

AA: Do you mean just leaving the room, or dead?

CB: Both, for a lot of these painters that was what their work was about. Caravaggio - it's all about death, so it's a more contemporary way of looking at it.

AA: So how much you alter depends on the particular painting. For instance with Untitled (Van Eyck), you've erased quite a lot from the original print. You've taken out the figures and repainted quite a lot of the room.

CB: I chose that painting because of the reflection in the mirror. I wanted to leave something of the figures behind, like evidence. The shoe in Untitled (Swing) is also evidence. In others, it might be more about the shape of drapery and forms, so it's different every time.

AA: You're not looking in car boot sales any more for old paintings; how do you find your prints?

CB: I buy books or postcards. I sometimes get prints from the Royal Academy collection or the Tate, otherwise online. I've just come up with the idea that I want to work on Goya's The Third of May. I want to make three different versions of that painting because there are three different things I want to see and I think it would make an interesting triptyck. It is the first image I've found where I can do a few things to the same image. It isn't just deletion; it's the choice of what you leave in and what you take away.

AA: Is there a particular period you are interested in?

CB: Not really. At the moment it's mostly historical stuff. I have thought about working on more contemporary pieces but that's not there yet.

AA: What is your art history like? Do you know much about the paintings you use?

CB: Only when I decide to work on them. It's a natural passion I have for them. I have a vague idea but I don't know exactly what I'm going to get. It's exciting - deleting and seeing the image change right in front of you. The smaller scale seems to work better. It's a real challenge. With my older paintings I always felt that I was trying to be like the great painters and I couldn't do it. So moving onto prints suits me because I work with what is already a fantastic painting. I've always loved Fragonard's The Swing. It makes me laugh; the cheek of it, and then the beauty of the colours and everything; it's delicious. Perhaps if I knew too much about this period or the artists it might change how I work on them. There's something quite innocent about how I work. I don't ever see myself as being particularly clever in that sense. Some people might feel that they should know everything about the painting, but you know, because I alter it, you can just see it for what it is, or go away and remind yourself of the original image again. That's also part of it. It's all about history. I'm very old fashioned and part of it is taking people back to these paintings and back to when art was 'great'. So reminding people of the past but also bringing it forward again.

Charlotte's work can be seen in This Was Now: The Russell Herron Collection at Sartorial Gallery, 26 Argyle Square, London WC1H 8AP from 8-30 July 2009.

www.sartorialart.com

Charlotte also runs the art gallery Madame Lillies, 10 Cazenove Road, Stoke Newington, London N16 6BD which is available for hire.

www.madamelillies.org

www.charlottebracegirdle.co.uk

Eleanor Moreton talked to Articulated Artists at her East London studio on 21 May

2009-05-24T09:41:00.000-07:00

AA: I'm looking at your painting there on the wall; is it Franz Josef?

EM: Yes, he was the last Austro-Hungarian emperor, the last of the ruling Hapsburgs.

AA: You use the Hapsburg hat motif in your work and I was wondering what took you to the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

EM: That's not an easy question to answer. We had family interests in Austria when I was a child and my mother was interested in history, but sometimes it's just poetry. I remember crossing Charles V bridge in Prague when it was just opening up and there was this poetry in the name Charles V which I vaguely remembered from my mother talking.

AA: There is a kind of romance about that.

EM: I started exploring Charles V and then the Hapsburgs who followed and then it began consolidating around this particular period of history just prior to the First World War.

AA: You have an interest in fairy tales too, what came first?

EM: Well I think the fairy tales came first although it's always been at a distance. I don't immerse myself in romanticism or fairy tales. I'd feel uncomfortable with that. There's always this distance in the critical position I'm taking. I was initially attracted to the Northern European fairy tale tradition. The Brothers Grimm obviously represent the Germanic Teutonic position and I was interested in the purpose that fairy tales might serve. It's complex but there is something about that era, in the nineteenth century, where there was a renewed interest in fairy stories and a reconstructed nationality. It was manufactured, it wasn't genuine - if that is ever genuine. It was political, it was part of the romantic movement and there is something about Franz Josef which encapsulated that; he was a kind of woodcutter prince.

AA: Manufactured also in the way he looks; his uniform.

EM: Well he used to dress increasingly in folkish costume, what they call a loden jacket.

AA: He reminds me of the von Trapp father from The Sound of Music; and again in your painting Austrian Man.

EM: I painted Austrian Man at the same time. I'm curious about the stories that we construct about ourselves as a group. The creation of this jolly grandfather figure and his beautiful wife, Sissy, who died quite young. It is both patriarchal and matriarchal and quite oppressive for both of those things. It weaves this fiction over an era and a people, a fiction which we often choose to believe because it's easier. Weaving is a good word because it smothers, like cloth - a maternal crafty thing. I'm also interested in the stories the British have constructed about themselves.

AA: Are you thinking about the stories we make about ourselves in a psycho-analytical way?

EM: I would say yes, but in a more generic way. The way in which whole nations or groups can split off the unacceptable bits of themselves. The thing that intrigues me about this jolly gentleman, which you see represented all over Southern Germany and Austria with a feathered hat and a drink in his hand, is that he looks so anodyne, like he wouldn't hurt a fly. So there's the creation of that but there's the other side too. We know that people hurt each other and we know what people are capable of and there is a denial and a discomfort in bringing the two things together. Then there is a moment, like the First World War, when the fiction is blasted out. I'm not saying that modernity and the great war were truer than the fiction; they were just another fiction, but they represent something quite dark. That is what fairy tales do. They allow the bad things to seep into our world. To take that into painting, I think my own painting tries to find a way through quite cosy and comfortable scenes - to find a way to puncture my painting habits. I think that painting is the site of a personal struggle with patriarchy and matriarchy; it's not just in the subject matter.

AA: So when you have, for instance, this smiling image of Queen Elizabeth II, you're trying to get to the power of her in Fancy Queen with Orange Lips.

EM: That image comes from a photograph by Cecil Beaton where she is set up in a sort of Gainsborough way. I've done lots of queen paintings. They are also a site for a similar struggle where I want to break through. I want to make paintings of women where they are actually shouting. The queen paintings are not always queens, they are all sorts of women and making them break through and make some impact is hard; it doesn't go with my character to do that. I have a tendency to want to keep faces out of paintings and I used a modernist device, the mask, to do what masks are for, which is to make an impact, to speak. Perhaps we need a mask in order to speak out.

AA: When you talk about the women shouting, the red and purple that you use in Bet/h I helps. By comparison the stick princes with their funny hats in your paintings look weak.

EM: That is part of it. There is something quite mask-like about those paintings. I was thinking of Bette Davis as Elizabeth I.

AA: There's something about that hairline set right back, like a mask it doesn't look quite attached.

EM: Maybe power is always assumed or mostly assumed, worn rather than something that we naturally feel.

AA: Like the wizard of Oz with this big production then the person behind working the larger thing.

EM: The wizard of Oz is very male - that power. The stick princes are rather ludicrous. Maybe my project about the queens is doomed. Maybe power is always ludicrous. I don't know, there is an ongoing problem with the queens.

AA: What do you mean, problem?

EM: They're not coming easily. I did wonder whether they're too didactic and I suppose the idea behind them was very simple and I wanted them to be quite simple paintings. The woman finds her voice through joining with some kind of masculine element, which might be the mask, I don't know. The masculine element is phallic in a very loose use of the word. The phallic could be a voice, which penetrates through the sound.

AA: Like your painting Vita Sackville West and the cross dressing - an assumption of the masculine being a more powerful voice. What painters do you look at?

EM: I like loads of painters. I just like anything that I think is good painting. Merlin James, Paul Housley, Alex Katz, Armen Eloyan. I've just seen a terrific show by a young artist who won a prize at the John Moores, Grant Foster. I suppose with the interiors the person that is in my mind is Vuillard because I'm trying to get his sense of claustrophobia which is to do with patterns. The patterning is synonymous with the maternal. When I was in the show at East I painted the grandmothers' houses. All the houses were different, suggesting a generic thing which should take it into the realm of ideas and what we fantasise and what we fictionalise and then you start thinking what are the elements of that and why. But I think it was too easy to walk past and not ask questions and just see paintings of pretty houses.

AA: I like the idea of the house being a refuge but also smothering. That somehow the family is a safe thing but it is a place where there is power and different elements played out. The fairy tales and the empire stories have similar characters or structure.

EM: Like they both have princesses.

AA: Yes, or the grandfather figure, these overpowering figures but referring back to this idea of being smothered and too much decoration, too much cloth.

EM: There is this ambivalence all the time because I long for the homely and all those kind of things and at the same time struggle to be free. You see this all the time. My friend just had a baby and you can see the dilemma in the baby. You see it rigid with the desire to move and it can't yet and it's fascinating because it seems that the human being has two conflicting needs. I suppose that is what always has to be going on in my paintings.

AA: Do you work from images?

EM: I do quite a lot although sometimes I work from my head. Mostly I'm thinking about things and then I think I need to find an image like that. Because I enjoy painting I have a fairly loose relationship with images. I take images and adjust them to the point where I've got them where I want them. That works because I make an awful lot of work. Going back to the idea of something erupting and destroying the status quo, for me the image has the same kind of smothering quality. It is very hard for me to work against an image - it's chipping away at it and poking it and I think it is something to do with my own struggle to break away from these authoritarian things.

AA: To make your own thing from it. Do you keep at it until you have something or do you think 'no, that's not it' and start again?

EM: At the moment I'm trying to stick with things and hammer them out. It's always research - how would it be if I did it like this - I never seem to get on a roll.

AA: It sounds like you wouldn't be comfortable if you became too comfortable.

EM: So it leads to a very bumpy ride. Part of me longs to find the way of making paintings and of course there isn't one way. I feel like a swarm of bees in a general movement. I do have a lot on the go at the same time. There's always something I fancy having a go at. I decided that as I was going to be spending a lot of time in the studio it's got to be enjoyable - and it has become more and more pleasurable.

Austrian Man (FJ), 2008, oil on canvas, 45 x 35 cm

Bet/h I, I, 2009, oil on canvas, 30 x 24 cm

A Room for George Elliott, 2009, oil on canvas, 50 x 40 cm

Eleanor Moreton's work can be seen at:
Creekside Open 2009 until 24 May. http://www.creeksideopen.org/.
'Home Truths' at Harewood House until 5 July. http://www.harewood.org/
Ceri Hand Gallery in 2010. http://www.cerihand.co.uk/

http://www.eleanormoreton.co.uk/

Robert Rush in his studio, Guildford, on 29 April 2009 with Articulated Artists

2009-05-05T07:24:00.000-07:00

AA: You have some black ink drawings pinned to the wall, is that how you usually start, with the black?

RR: Those drawings are just getting my hand in. To make a body of work I have to paint for a couple of weeks before I get anything I like because you start with preconceptions of what you should paint and what you've painted before and those are always wrong. I paint myself out of that and get to the point where it becomes just like a job. Because I work on so many at a time, and because they're on paper, it doesn't really matter if they don't work out. I want them to have that freshness.

AA: There seems to be an economy in the marks you make. These works on the wall at the moment are quite busy. The finished pieces look emptier, like there's a value in simplicity over complexity.

RR: They start off quite congested. Less is more - I think it's a question of what you can get away with. If you can make something convincing but slight it seems to make it all the more convincing. I mean people like Matisse and Picasso are masters of that. Drawing in ink is fluid - I like the idea that a line can become a shadow and then a form and then a head and then a body. Making lots of work and having lots of other things on the go helps because you don't become too precious about ruining things but there is always an element of trying to take something to the limit of what it might be and with that there is always the risk of pushing things too far.

AA: You talk about sacrificing something in order to achieve a better proposition.

RR: If I'm just starting work, I'm too nervous. I might have, say, 50 paintings on the go at once so I can sacrifice that one or that one, or all of them. Eventually, after a lot of editing, maybe 5% comes out as finished work. I make oil paintings and sculptures too but often what I'll show is a drawing. It's like working in reverse. The sculpture is kind of a drawing for the drawing.

AA: Some of your paintings contain quite recognisable shapes, like say the speech bubbles in the piece you have at Jerwood.

RR: Obtuse speech bubbles that don't have anything in them - in fact they're not even bubbles; they just become blobs or holes. All those formal things about painting: form, colour, structure and composition are the things that make paintings work or not work. Something being an actual physical shape, like a hole, might be a space through into something else and the articulation of that is always interesting. There are various forms and motifs that work better for that and have a shifty quality.

AA: You mean could be one thing or another?

RR: There's nothing definitive about how I want the work to be seen really. I want it to be more mutable than that. Essentially, what I want from the work is for it to be as open as possible and that is why drawing is a key element of the practice as a finished product. Something that has the quality of drawing is so important.

AA: You used to make paintings on wood.

RR: I've been a fan of Abram Games for a while. That period of post-war British artists who were painters, designers, illustrators or worked in craft, like Eric Ravilious,

Keith Vaughan and Graham Sutherland. Abram Games' insignia for the Festival of Britain is something that I love. Those paintings on wood were a homage to that and to the kind of posters of that period, like the British Rail posters - that kind of graphic design.

AA: Do the colours in your paintings relate to that time?

RR: The thing about colour is that it tends to place things in certain periods. It can take you back to a certain time - it holds memory. I don't want to make vintage paintings but that idea of the memory of things past or of former hopes is interesting.

AA: Perhaps because of the colour and ease, they appear to be optimistic paintings.

RR: I don't know, I think that's for someone else to say. Optimism is compelling but there's a flip side. Games' work has great optimism to it but you are talking about things that have passed and so there's also a kind of poignancy to it. I'd like my work to be seen through a prism of now. The paintings that I make are diverse within a set process. I know how I make them but within that I want to be allowed to be surprised so some of them will end up being quite optimistic and some might not. I would hope that they don't all have a similar tone. I like to think that there is something else that we can do with painting. There is somewhere else emotionally where it can go. For me, work has to work on an emotional level. It has to feel like something but I don't set out for it to feel like anything in particular.

AA: It's a discovery on the way.

RR: And then they're done and they are what they are. There's also hysterical optimism - an optimism that clouds something else. If you look at American 1950s design, say pink Cadillacs or curtains with cowboys on them, they're playful and joyful, but at that time in the 50s there was the looming atomic war and this idea of not engaging with something much more frightening. It's seemingly optimistic and happy but it's also a front. Where can crisis lead you - that's interesting - that dynamic of something that on the one hand might seem jolly and upbeat but on the other hand is incredibly sad.

AA: Or it goes too far and is grotesque.

RR: That idea has been floating around with me for a while, about that point when things just bubble over into being too much. I usually have about three or four things going on together: painting, sculpture, collage and photomontage. I have quite a strong idea of what I want painting to be but I'm not as confident with the other formats - they're experiments. I don't know if they're quite there yet. It's easier to talk about the problems with things and why they don't work than pin down why or what makes them work. They aren't encumbered by the problems that other work might be - they just seem to be of themselves. They just are. Ad Reinhardt talks about his paintings saying they're not this, they're not that, and what they are is simply what they're not. I feel a certain kinship to that way of thinking. I never know what I want to do but I'm sure about what I don't want to do. I think if I knew what I wanted to do I wouldn't want to do it.

AA: Because you would know it already.

RR: Painting doesn't seem to be a very serious thing to do, but on the other hand, it seems to be the most serious thing to do. To make something that has some kind of emotional charge. I mean, a piece of music is essentially abstract but it operates, it has an affect and a sensibility; it feels authentic and can make you feel something. If you can have some sense of what a feeling is like in a painting, that's pretty cool and it makes you feel good when you see it. I wouldn't presume to say that's what my work does but I would say that's what I aim for as an artist and that's what I'd aim for art to do. I'm not interested in didacticism or setting out theoretical ideas. It's much harder to grasp than that. That idea of what it's like to have an idea, or what it feels like to have a feeling - I think those are messy things. Feelings are cumulative of other feelings, of other ideas and beliefs, needs and wants and there is always this pressure of a number of things making-up something which is then attached to another idea somewhere else and in conflict with that. For me, it is a way of working, things being overlapped, latticed, mutable, slippery and elusive but at the same time quite felt and meant and quite deliberate. Things are produced and they have definiteness to them but that is always open to change. There are parts of my practice that feel very definite and parts that don't and there is something quite important in that.

Robert Rush's paintings can be seen at the Jerwood Contemporary Painters 2009 exhibition at Jerwood Space, Union St, London SE1 until 31 May 2009