October 30, 2011 |
Pigment swirls around in murky colours like grey, egg-shell blue, mauve or lilac, tricked out with inky dashes of black. Look long enough, though, and within these churning hues figures emerge, like phantoms in the fog: here, an 18th-century dandy dashing by in a frock coat; there, a flying ghoul in a billowing cape or dancers in theatrical masks with black, hollow eyes and grinning mouths. The effect is spooky and comic.
Your work frequently summons up ghosts from painting’s past. What is it you want to address with these pre-20th-century references?
“If I look at pre-20th-century images, I see them not as from the art history but as belonging to the present time. After the abstract art, it seems that there’s no need to produce more images, if you look at images in contemporary paintings, they seem borrowed or like a reminiscence of something already seen.”
The paintings conjure a nightmarish, fantastic atmosphere, often compacted by their titles.
“The ‘nightmare’ is only in making the painting, the image probably just reflects the way that it is made. How a painting will turn out and what sort of image it will disclose is unpredictable, and things that are unpredictable can look scary. But I see it mostly as funny, as a happy moment when the painting comes to its end.”
The swirling paint conveys a sense of a lush enjoyment of the medium that seems born out in your technique: pouring paint onto canvas before manipulating it with the brush. How did you come to develop this approach/technique?
“It allows me to experiment, to create an all-or-nothing situation all the time, which is exciting. The paintings are made as singular events; I start from blank and end with something that is new to me.”
Do you have a fixed idea of what you’re going to paint?
“I start with an idea, but I don’t try to produce what is in my mind. The painting can end up as something opposite – painting comes first, and image is only part of it. In the past, painters started with an idea that they developed into an image, which produces a painting. I start with covering the surface with paint, making a painting that will end with an image. Where old masters began, I end.”
by Skye Sherwin
