A conversation between Eamon O’Kane and Laura Gaiger on the 23.05.2023 at Kunstgarasjen, Bergen, part-way through the solo exhibition ‘Anthroscaping’. The conversation marked the launch of ‘Vitalistic Fantasies: Laura Gaiger’, the first in a series of mini monographs looking at the practice of contemporary painters and art school alumni in Norway.
Eamon: During the time Laura did her Masters’, she was working in the Painting subject area, facilitating workshops, assisting, and doing a whole range of different things. And then in a kind of overlap period after that, Laura has been working as a Vitenskapelig Assistent or a Research Assistant, connected to the Painting area and we’ve worked closely together on grant applications and other things.
During that time I came up with the idea that it would be really interesting to begin a series of publications, of which this is the first. It focusses on the practices of alumni from the programme. Of course we are starting off with alumni who are working in the area of painting, but it could become more wide-ranging than that. I hope that we can realise one per year, perhaps online as a PDF version or as printed matter. Eventually we’ll end up with a box set of these publications.
I guess it was before Christmas we finally managed to have a discussion in your studio in C. Sundts Gate and then very quickly put together a publication and printed it. It’s perfect timing to have a book launch as a part of your solo exhibition here, and extend the conversation as well. The other thing that has inspired this series of conversations is something that myself and Laura have been talking a lot about, which is this particular book here by Isabelle Graw, the Love of Painting. In this book she discusses an idea of the Vitalistic Fantasy. I was wondering if you could explain the idea of what a Vitalistic Fantasy is Laura?
Laura: Isabelle Graw has a thesis that she puts forward to try to explain the enduring fascination that we have with painting as people, or specifically as people interested in art. She theorises that what painting does that is unique, or that makes a good painting, or that keeps people coming back to painting, is that it has this ability to capture some kind of essence of its creator. She says that a painting offers a kind of vitalistic fantasy of the artist: it allows the person in possession of the painting to feel like they have a piece of the artist. Or perhaps the idea is that if you make a painting it is a part of you - a sort of extension of yourself. We’ve discussed this idea back and forth a little bit and I’ve sometimes been sceptical of it, but it’s an interesting one. Interesting to me because I think it’s a kind of bold thing to do, resurrecting this idea of a specific power of painting as a medium, because the idea of medium specificity is an old idea. I thought it was really trashed and thrown out several decades ago. It’s almost like Graw is trying to bring that back, which is surprising and interesting.
In the interview I ask you about the idea of the Vitalistic Fantasy and your reply to me was critiquing the idea of it being connected to the market. I wonder if you have any thoughts about it now after thinking about it more?
I still feel that way - this idea of the Vitalistic Fantasy of the artist only really works in a particular environment, and I feel like it’s much more relevant in the American environment where painting is very much a commodity. I think that here in Norway painting is almost no more of a commodity than any other medium of art-making. I said in the interview that when I make paintings the the last thing in my mind is selling the work, because there’s just not a big market for painting in Norway like there is in the US, at least not to the point where a recent graduate like me is necessarily thinking about that first and foremost.
Of course there’s a market here but it’s not something I think about that much, because it is not as tangible as the alternatives which exist here. There are other avenues of sustaining a practice financially, through exhibition support etcetera. It also depends on what kind of painting you make. I was actually just thinking about this today - I was reading something else Graw had written because she’s also written a lot about this idea of ‘network painting’. It’s an idea that David Joselit came up with in quite a famous essay in 2009, Painting Beside Itself. It’s a canonical art school text for painting students. The idea of network painting is the idea that paintings derive meaning from relations with other artworks, but also the artist’s relationship with other artists, and it’s tied in to a whole load of other theoretical ideas but it’s essentially this idea of the Actor-Network Theory which really emphasises the relations between things and people rather than interpreting artworks and people as isolated objects.
Isabelle Graw is talking about network painting and figurative painting, and she talks about how there’s a lot of women artists in particular using figurative painting as a way to separate or guard themselves against their work being interpreted as overly expressive. If your work is expressive and you’re a woman artist, historically - but maybe it’s also a fear today - there’s a risk that you can be categorised at that intersection. People will see your work being an expression of yourself and your emotions and it will be being categorised as feminine. There’s a history of the work of women artists being interpreted as being very much to do with themselves and their own psyche, and male artists’ work being interpreted as being about the world and philosophy and universal things. She is talking about women artists using figurative painting to guard against this really subjective interpretation. I thought that was a more interesting and compelling idea than the Vitalistic Fantasy, and I think that in a way she’s arguing against herself with these two theories. On one hand she’s saying that contemporary artists are using figuration to put a distance between themselves and their work, and on the other hand saying that the work is a sort of vessel for your own vitalism as an artist. When I’m making paintings I’m not really trying to put my psyche into my paintings, but I think I am perhaps doing the other thing. Trying to make something that doesn’t have to be all about me and my subjective experience, but instead about my interpretation of the world around me.
I think that’s very apparent particularly in this work, and I’d also like to explore its relationship to the history of the panorama. Before I do that I think it’s interesting to also touch a little bit on this ‘Anthroscaping’ title, which is a direct reference to the Anthroposcene, I guess? And that I think really connects in with – also in relation to what you were saying about network painting – it connects in with Timothy Morton’s Hyperobjects idea. That’s an idea that things like the climate crisis are not singular moments. There’s a kind of complex series of relationships between multiple objects, multiple systems, multiple things. Perhaps we could come back to that later in relation to the specific subject matter in the painting.
[image]
But first of all: I’m a bit of a panorama painting nerd - I’ve been visiting panoramas all over the world, ever since I was a BA student. My starting point was Claude Monet’s panoramas at the Orangerie in Paris. I drew your attention the other day to this text by Tim Barringer called ‘On The Viewing Platfrom: Between The Platform and the Screen’. For those who don’t know about the phenomenon of the Panorama, which I think Laura is directly drawing from here in this particular installation, the panorama was a mass medium which emerged in 1791. The term itself was coined to describe a series of very large-scale circular canvasses which were normally built within their own architectural construction.
The construction involved a central viewing platform which was accessed normally via a tunnel, and the audience would enter through the tunnel and come up into this central viewing platform and then view a painting which could be up to about 300 feet in circumference, 115 metres or something. In an optimal situation it would be about 4-5 metres tall and the viewing platform would have an umbrella on top of it. Here’s a photograph of Jeff Wall’s ‘Restoration’ which is in Switzerland.
This umbrella would screen off any of the infrastructure or the artifice that you could see behind the scenes in a way, giving you this 360 view of the painting. This was truly a mass medium, so it was seen in some ways as quite democratic. You could have travelling panoramas, which were a precursor to cinema and were basically killed off by cinema. They allowed people to travel without travelling. There’s a panorama at the MET in New York, of the gardens of Versailles. Another topic which was very much covered by the panorama were epic battles: there’s one of Waterloo, the BBB one is kind of an interesting one, and the topic of Jeff Wall’s panorama is quite interesting. I think it’s the first instance of the Red Cross, when Napoleon’s troops are defeated at the Swiss Border. A lot of them are these epic battles, and it’s really fascinating that you are taking this reference point and this medium in light of that.
I drew your attention to this text because what it is arguing or presenting is that there’s a relationship to the idea or the culture of imperialism within the panorama. It’s a kind of a precursor to this moment we are in of global capitalism and ideologies of empire, looking at colonisation and so on. I think there’s another aspect in the history, which perhaps becomes the foundations of what you’re dealing with: the Anthroposcene or anthroscaping. Maybe you could comment on that?
Funnily enough, the panorama as a historical format for painting was not something that I really thought about deliberately when I was planning this work. It’s a kind of coincidence that I ended up making a panoramic work and that it’s so closely tied to these historical works. I came to the form organically because I wanted to make bigger and bigger paintings and it’s easier to extend sideways. It’s quite mundane but that was how I first got here. You need a kind of whole different apparatus in space to start going upwards as well. Scaffolding, and so on.
We’ve talked about how one of the characteristics of the panorama is that, if it’s really a panorama, you can’t see the whole thing at once. There’s always a part of the work that you cant see. The way that I compose these images is from many many, many different motifs, and there’s usually more than one perspective point in a painting and often there’s a lot of things in the paintings which are not in proportion and don’t make sense.
For me it felt natural to extend the painting into such a long format that it became almost impossible for it to make sense in terms of perspective, even if I tried. Having these multiple points of perspective and multiple vanishing points is just the way that it is when you make a painting this long. But it’s very interesting to me that the panorama format has ended up being so suitable for me, for the kind of painting that I wanted to make because the history of the panorama also shares a lot with the history of landscape painting. I’ve been very preoccupied with the history of landscape painting when planning and making this work.
The panorama comes about around the end of the 18th century, and landscape painting as we know it now - the European tradition - really only came about also in the 18th century, although a bit earlier than the panorama. I’ve been fascinated by that. I’ve based a lot of the ideas behind the painting on the history of the landscape in painting. Although when talking about the work we often come back to conversations about the environment, about climate change, and of course the Anthropocene being connected with these ideas, it’s more the cultural idea of the landscape, or the art historical image of the landscape that I want to interrogate in the work. I don’t want to make art about climate change or the environment. I want to make art about our cultural inventions around these things. That’s what I think is interesting and under-interrogated.
It’s something that has come about because of my own life really, and my own kind of background. It started when I was a student and was getting interested in ideas of the political image of rural England, which became very heightened and very potent during Brexit. At that time I became very aware of the cultural invention of the countryside, or the landscape itself. I felt I had a more critical perspective on it, considering that it is where I grew up and have had a direct physical connection to through my family’s farming and outdoor work. The politics of the landscape, of rural spaces in the UK, completely shaped my early life in ways I understand a lot better now. It went from there really, my interest in the landscape as a cultural invention.
The panorama is closely linked to these topics: propaganda, weaponizing history, and weaponizing the landscape for political gains, are things that come up as accusations towards the panorama, and also should come up with landscape painting, but often we think of landscape painting as quite neutral and harmless, as apolitical, when it is far from it.
I’d like to take you into the painting itself and some of the references we were talking about before everybody arrived. We were talking about this central panel which, as you told me, references the phrase ‘the rain follows the plough’. I thought I’d bring up a Henry David Thoreau quote, ‘we don’t ride on the railroad, the railroad rides on us’. He’s talking about the invention of the steam engine and railroad in America, and the economic aspect of the railroad in America. The cost to travel meant that working class people would have to spend so much time saving up money to travel on the railroad to holiday destinations – often to the national parks which were also constructed, like Yosemite and Yellowstone, as destinations for the railroad. What he was saying is that you end up not riding the railroad, you end up having to save up so much money that the railroad is riding on you. It becomes a particular imperative.
What I take from that quote now, in the context since the Industrial Revolution, is that we thought we were riding on the ‘railroad’ (and this is talked about in Hyperobjects too) but that we are really seeing the ‘railroad’ riding on us now. The consequences of everything we’ve done since the Industrial Revolution are coming back to haunt us. I’d like to ask you about your experience in the USA, in Nebraska, and if you could talk about this phrase ‘the rain follows the plough’.
Really interesting. I planned the whole work while I was in Nebraska last summer on a residency. I was really in the middle of nowhere, almost exactly in the centre of the USA, and it was a strange place. It really influenced my ideas about ‘what is landscape?’ Culturally speaking, what is this thing? At first it feels like one is sure of what it is, and the more you think about it the more unsure you can become.
I ended up with quite a few of the paintings making reference to Nebraska but also to what I was reading while I was there. I was reading ‘Savage Dreams’ by Rebecca Solnit, which talks about two landscapes: Yosemite National Park, and the government nuclear testing sites in Nevada. It’s about these two opposing landscapes in the US, one’s Eden and one’s Armageddon. She talks about the national parks of the US and how they are a complete cultural invention. There’s one landscape idea in the US that has been really influential, and that’s the idea of the wilderness. This has been written about by William Cronon, whose writings I really recommend. Both Solnit and Cronon talk about the invention of the idea of the wilderness in the US as an idea that has been extremely powerful, and has enabled the entire American landscape, and especially national parks, to be fashioned and shaped in a way that is more about creating and making real this idea of the wilderness than it is about actually preserving anything.
The reality is that Yosemite was never a wilderness: most of the national parks had people living in them for a long time before white settlers from Europe arrived. Through reading and observing in Nebraska I kept being introduced to these ideas of the landscape being invented to follow an idea of what it is. It’s a kind of circular phenomenon, and I was trying to figure out the stages of this circular motion. I see it all the time now. It almost doesn’t matter where you begin, but you have for example a landscape being depicted, and the way it’s depicted starts to be admired, and then you start to see the landscape being changed to emulate how it’s been depicted, and then the landscape itself is admired, and then it’s depicted, and then we admire it again. We end up having effects on the real world which are derived from cultural inventions about what the world around us is supposed to look like.
The phrase ‘rain follows the plough’ is something the US government propagated and spread during the pioneer era, when migrants from Europe were spreading West across the US. The US government at the time was really promoting this concept because they wanted people to spread over North America, to get more control over the country. They told people that literally, rain follows the plough. Farming was miserable and it wasn’t working. People were really having a hard time, because they were bringing Northern European farming methods to an environment where there was much less rain, it was much much warmer, and it was a completely different landscape with a different ecosystem. It was a disaster, of course.
Nevertheless, they told people that if you just keep ploughing, the rain will come - rain follows the plough. Keep farming, keep acting like it’s Northern Europe, and it will turn into Northern Europe. Which of course is insane, and didn’t really work. But it did work in a way. They did keep going, and they did manage to domesticate or get some control over these landscapes and turn them into a kind of adapted semblance of European farming methods across the American West. But the lengths they had to go to in order to do that were extreme, which is evident today.
When I was in Nebraska it was very strange for me to be surrounded by all this farmland which was extremely monotonous. There was hardly any rain. All the water is spread with irrigation machinery, and it’s all drawn up from an aquifer under Nebraska, the Ogallalla aquifer, which is one of the biggest aquifers in the world. That was where I was coming from. I was fascinated by this blind optimism of thinking ‘we can go in and kind of mess with a place and it will – we can take things and it will be fine’. There seems to have been so little awareness of the consequences, or even that there would be any consequences.
I think it’s also really connected to a kind of of opposite thing that we do, which is that when we think that we love nature and the landscape we actually do the same thing – like the national parks. We think ‘oh, let’s protect and preserve’. But there’s not really any way to do that because nature is changing all the time. As soon as you try to turn something into a reserve and put in all these measures, you are also messing with it.
Could you talk us through each of the panels here?
Yes. I’ll try to be brief because there’s a lot to say. It’s a linear thing. It’s sort of historical. The first one and the last one are sort of like present-day. Present-day paintings. These are my ideas of the chaos and the calm of what could be now and in the future in terms of the human relationship to the landscape. They are very open, so maybe I don’t want to say too much about them and close down the meaning too much. And then the three, from the 2nd to 4th, are concerned with the historical, more direct and active relationships that humans have had with the land. These are categories of events that have shaped our image of the landscape. Finally, I wanted to kind of pick apart some tropes in the later paintings, from the 5th to 7th panels.
The second panel started with me thinking about the aquifer under Nebraska and starting to wonder how I could make a painting of an aquifer. You can’t even see an aquifer. It’s not like a big body of water underground. An aquifer is water distributed through rocks in a huge area. The fact that you can’t really imagine, visualise or see an aquifer, made me think it would be interesting to try to paint one. I was thinking about how when we can’t see things, they become less important to us, culturally, and that is true for everything that’s underground. There’s a huge amount of stuff underground that is interacting with everything above ground, but because we can’t see it we don’t think about it that much.
Unless it’s oil, which I think we think about quite a lot, but it’s still low in the sense of this moral order. There are all kinds of other things underground which are important, like water. The people at the top of the painting are digging for peat, a kind of precursor to coal, which has been a fuel source for thousands of years. A Danish friend immediately saw the Tolrud man underground in this painting, too – it’s a famous bog body, it goes with the peat above. But I also wanted to put in this reminder that there’s a lot of human history underground, bog bodies being at the kind of extreme end of the richness of that, in a way.
In this next one [third panel] I started thinking about our primitive relationship with images of the landscape. Our old relationship with the landscape in Europe didn’t even really involve making images of it, because it was only 3 or 400 years ago that people in Europe at least started thinking about the landscape as something worth having pictures of, on a broad scale, and not just as the backdrop to some kind of action. Before that the landscape was a utilitarian store of resources. It was dangerous, scary and hostile. You got what you needed but you didn’t romanticise it, that comes later. Uncultivated land was known as ‘waste’ and that’s also where the word ‘forest’ comes from – wild, unused land. These places were seen as somehow morally bad, in a reversal of the way ‘wilderness’ is viewed by many today. Maybe it’s Christianity, maybe it’s pragmatism, I don’t know the causes.
This painting is sort of the ‘landscape as an idea’ coming into being for me. There are shapes floating around, everything’s moving, it’s fractured, and it doesn’t make sense. But this painting was me trying to think about an image of the landscape starting to form. Images of the landscape – images which were really what you could call landscape painting - only started to be made or wanted when people had some distance from the land in their daily lives. So the first people who wanted images of the landscape were wealthy people who didn’t have to actually engage with the land, and of course these are also the people who can afford to buy art. And especially the people who owned the land wanted pictures that showed their wealth.
In England, when landscape painting started to become popular in the 18th century, the paintings were of peoples’ estates. The classic example being, of course, ‘Mr and Mrs Andrews’ by Gainsborough. At the same time this is happening, most peoples’ lives are diverging more and more away from having to deal with the land on a daily basis. You start to see more and more cultural depictions, poetry, romantic books, and paintings around the landscape as something aesthetic.
And then of course in this one [fourth painting] we have the optimism of scientific progress, the optimism of farming, and these leaps forward in how to utilise the land. It’s no longer about just getting stuff from it – it’s actually engineering the landscape to provide even more for us.
That’s a brief summary of those first four paintings, and there are a lot of smaller details and references within them which are kind of games for me, which spin off from these strands of thought into art historical references and so on.
The next three paintings [fifth, sixth, seventh paintings] are more about when the landscape becomes severed from us having an immediate relationship with it, and we have more of a relationship with the cultural idea of the landscape than with the real world out there. For me that begins – like the panorama – with the Industrial Revolution, and with people being removed from being out on the land, being forced to move into cities and work in factories, and that’s when you get Romantic poetry, gothic fiction, Romantic painters in Norway, Germany, the UK, making images and ideas of the landscape as this awesome sublime thing.
You also start to get a kind of culture of moral goodness of the landscape as well. There’s this really interesting thing that crops up all the time from that point onwards, which is the idea of nature being pure and good, and the humans and the city being kind of evil and nasty, and it’s in Wordsworth and Blake and all these people. The dark satanic mills. So that starts here [fifth painting] , and then we move on to the age of the explorer [sixth painting].
With the moral goodness and nobility of it, you start to get going out into the landscape or just for the sake of it, for more ordinary people and not just the upper class explorers. If you’d gone back 50 or 100 years before that would have been actually kind of a weird thing to do. There’s a bit of a temporal overlap with some of the previous themes, but you have people like Thoreau and these American writers really inventing this idea of going to the wilderness, the influence of which has never gone away.
This is really interesting to me because it’s culture – writing, visual art – creating people’s relationship with the world. And I think that’s how we now think of the landscape. It’s completely derived from this cultural idea of the landscape, it’s a simulacrum. The middle one there [sixth painting] is called ‘The Virgin Wilderness’. I feel like it’s kind of obvious, but I’m trying to refer to this idea of purity, the untrammelled, unconquered land which has so many parallels in historical writing with gendered ideas of purity and innocence – in art history as well, of course.
Nature is always depicted as a woman and I think that’s very interesting. It tells us a lot about some of the problematic parts of how we think about the landscape and nature and this very imperial, conquering attitude towards it.
Then we get to the second to last one here [seventh painting] which is kind of my social realist style painting I guess. I’m drawing from Soviet propaganda posters but also the Western front propaganda, which is exactly the same. It’s all images of strong healthy people working in the landscape, the images saying, you know, ‘dig for your country, fight for your country’. Social realism was kind of a universal thing in the first half of the twentieth century, on all sides of the world wars, even though it’s normally now associated with the USSR. And it all draws heavily upon this idea of Arcadia, which is an ancient idea, it’s kind of an idea of a lost Eden, a lost innocence, a lost purity of living, tied to the landscape, nature, countryside. It’s also a made-up idea, really present in art history and painting, which allows us to fantasise about a more authentic life. I’m trying to exaggerate and make fun of it in a way.
The cottage in the background is Marie Antoinette’s cottage at Versailles, which she had built so that she could dress up and pretend to be a peasant farmer girl or a shepherdess. This is the peak example of the Arcadia idea: the richest woman in France, whose idea of fun would be to pretend to be a shepherdess in a cottage. It’s an extreme example of something that maybe all of us do a little bit. I think about it as… Is that what camping is?
I’m critical of these ideas and I want to interrogate where these moralistic notions of nature and the landscape come from but at the same time I also do all this stuff. It’s present for me as well. I also want to go hiking, you know.
Before we started I pointed out Millais and the Ophelia painting which hangs in the National Gallery, but I think there’s also another Millet here, which is the Gleaners, so would you talk about those two?
It’s really true, both of them creep in. Millet, the French one, he was one of the first painters to begin with what became known as Realism in painting. Now that word could have many different meanings but at one time it had a very specific meaning in France.
It was cutting against the history painting, showing real life.
Exactly, yes. The idea was that instead of painting grand battles and mythological scenes, some painters, like Millet, wanted to paint ordinary people. Peasants, people in the countryside, and ordinary everyday activities. The gleaners are the poorest of the poor in France, picking the leftover grains in the field after the harvest. I guess Realism did what it claimed to do, but afterwards it’s maybe become just another kind of Romanticism, of this simple peasant life, since this does not show ‘everyday life’ to a modern society. And it’s so strange that we now romanticise these things.
It’s very problematic. The other Millais you mentioned as being a childhood inspiration, probably one of the first painters you encountered.
The English Millais is a Pre-Raphaelite painter from Southampton, which is where I was born. I guess I’d seen Millais paintings at Southampton Art Gallery as a kid, which was probably the only real gallery I got to go to before I was a teenager. I think they had a big impact on me, the few paintings I saw over and over again, but of course Millais’ most famous painting is Ophelia in the National Gallery in London. I mean, I love that painting. It’s an incredible painting.
I’m so spooked that I didn’t think about it at all, and when Eamon came in he looked at the last painting [painting 8] and said ‘Oh, a reference to Ophelia’, and I hadn’t realised it at all! The Pre-Raphaelites have another relationship to nature, again being tied to ideas about moral purity and Christianity and the fruits of God’s goodness or whatever. The Pre-Raphaelites were very moralistic and very Christian, in all their paintings. But I think also they were very Victorian, very decorative, very much just enjoying detail. That’s also what that painting is. I love a lot of detail, I love a lot of stuff in a painting, and I wonder if I got that from enjoying the Pre-Raphaelites when I was younger.
I know you’re a big fan of Caroline Walker’s work. Maybe you could introduce her work to the audience, for people who don’t know her?
Sure. She’s a British painter, who also studied at the Glasgow School of Art, many years before I did. I didn’t ever meet her in Glasgow. I think she still lives in Scotland. She makes figurative paintings, which take as their subjects ordinary people doing everyday activities. Very often women working. She’s done a series of her mother, working in her house. A series in nail salons, kitchens, of cleaners. She lends this air of solemnity and dignity to images of people doing things that people rarely stop and pay attention to. She puts them in this light of – well, I think of her paintings as paintings of dignified labour, as unseen labour. But also, they are just beautiful paintings. The way she paints light on surfaces and through windows is really, really great, and it kind of gives you this feeling of her respect and admiration for the subjects in her paintings because she paints them so, so beautifully.
I have taken a couple of questions from a couple of interviews with Caroline Walker which I wanted to ask you, particularly in light of what we talked about as a change in your process with this painting, this panorama. So the first question is: you use photography to aid with the composition of your scenes, but you also spend time with your subjects. How do you obtain this delicate balance between the objective and subjective in your work? I want to ask this in the context of inviting people in to your studio to paint from them and painting them objectively, but also knowing them, subjectively.
I love it! It’s really fun to paint people from life. Because there’s so much stuff in the paintings, and it’s hard to make a painting on a big scale, I have a process where I plan the painting in quite a step-by-step way in the beginning. All of the references in each section of the painting come from around 20-25 different images. In the beginning they’re always images that I’ve found: either online, often from news articles, or from art history and historical paintings I’ve taken figures from. I start off that way but often it gets to a certain point where the images I’m using are not enough.
Painting from photographs is useful because you can pick it up and put it down whenever. It doesn’t need anything, you can paint things which are moving, things that would be really hard to paint from life, but apart from that, a photograph is really, really limited. Even the best photographs are often quite limited in terms of light and colour, and they absolutely lack the kind of nuance you get when you look at a person, especially in real life. It’s something you notice so acutely when you compare painting from life with photographs.
With these paintings I really relied at the end of the process on inviting people into the studio so I could paint their faces or their hands or feet, from life, to complete the figures. For me that was great. I wish I could work like that all the time for all the figures. It takes time and planning and favours from friends, but it’s so much better. I find it quite easy to sit down and paint someone, and separate them from the person I know. I probably credit that to having gone to life drawing classes since I was 15. I knew it would be useful at the time, even thought it was hard, and it has been useful. Especially in the way of being in this very intimate situation where you’re drawing someone, and they know you are looking at them, and just to be able to not care about the awkwardness of it and just do it. It’s one of the only situations where I do feel comfortable having that bizarre, very intimate experience where I’m also the one in control in a way, something which could feel like a power imbalance. It’s very vulnerable for someone to just sit there and let me stare at them for two hours while I paint them. And I understand that, so I try to make it friendly, to chat with people and make it informal. I think of them as characters: the person in front of me is my friend, but the person appearing in the painting is a character, so in that moment they are like an actor playing a role. If you model for me, don’t be offended if I don’t flatter you. The model is more of a tool to help me get the figure in the painting. It differs from what Caroline Walker is doing, because she’s really painting that person. I’m asking my friends to play characters in a painting. So in this work I’ve got friends playing kind of preposterous roles, like a friend who’s this scientist here [fourth painting].
He looks a bit like Leonardo DiCaprio.
Yeah – weirdly he also looks a bit like my brother. This is another thing I do. Sometimes I’ll be painting from a random photograph I found online, but I’ll find myself subconsciously painting people I know. So that figure looks a bit like Leo DiCaprio, but also a bit like my brother, and I can never tell my brother that because then he’ll think he looks like Leo DiCaprio. My Mum often crops up in my paintings: the figure in the field with the notebook [fourth painting] ended up looking like my Mum. And this figure looking into the painting [third painting] is like me, when I’m older and my hair’s all white. So that happens. Family start to appear.
You’ve answered two questions about history and your process. The next two are a bit weird. Have you ever worked so late that you needed to sleep in your studio?
No.
What do you listen to while you’re working?
Radio programmes, history and science. If I’m tired and need some energy, some very energetic music to keep me going.
What’s your typical studio lunch?
Something shameful, usually. Whatever is there, whatever is in the studio.
So you kind of get lost in it and forget about lunch?
Yes. I can’t even remember my last lunch. I think my last lunch was some radishes and a banana and something else. Probably a chocolate bar.
That doesn’t sound too bad! What’s your most well-thumbed book in your studio?
Recently a catalogue from the Nicole Eisenmann exhibition in Oslo, at Astrup Fearnley, and also the Ralph Mayer Handbook of Materials and Techniques.
Which artistic tool could you least do without?
A scraping thing I bought it in the Poundland in Glasgow. It’s like an oven scraper thing. I bought it in the first year of my bachelor in Glasgow, for a pound, and it’s amazing. I clean my palette with it at the end of every day.
Weirdest object in your studio?
The only thing in my studio that’s not for painting is a yoga mat. Everything else is for painting.
So you practice yoga in the studio?
Yes, when I feel like I’m really tired and zoning out, I stop and do yoga for 20 minutes.
How messy is your studio?
It’s quite tidy. I need to have things tidy and know where stuff is, so I can get things done. Especially when I’m working on big paintings.
Is anything or anyone banned from your studio? When Caroline Walker was asked this she said her Dad is banned from her studio, because every time he goes in there he gets cadmium paint all over his coat.
There’s not really anyone in specific who is banned. Animals would be banned. If I’m at the beginning of the process of making paintings, everyone is banned. I don’t want anyone to come into my studio then. It’s very vulnerable and uncertain at the beginning, so I have periods of time where I decide it’s a secret place only for me. In general anyone who comes in has to be aware that it’s clean and tidy, but only of certain things. There is paint everywhere. You might get paint on you, and that’s on you.
I’m onto my last question. In 2017 I saw a piece at the Venice Biennale by an artist called Lisa Reihana. It was called ‘In Pursuit of Venus (Infected)’. It was a huge video installation, a moving animation panorama of imagery based on the Pacific voyages of James Cook. And in that work she kind of subverts the imperial aspect of the panorama that we were talking about earlier. The work is described thus: ‘Though potentially a terrain of terrible violence, the panoramic emergences in her visionary, redemptive work, as a space of exchange in which multiple voices can be heard and multiple worldviews accommodated. In this radical inversion of the panoramic form created more than 2 centuries after the panorama’s inception, Europeans are viewed as exotic, uncomprehending strangers while indigenous people occupy the viewing platform.’
I was just wondering about this in relation to your work, because there’s a subversive aspect of what she’s doing in that particular video animation/installation. I’m wondering if in your work there’s an aspect of subverting this idea of the one viewing point that the panorama was imposing, this kind of empirical, anthropocentric, one viewing point? This idea of interrogating an idea of ‘anthroscaping’ in your work – if you’re moving back toward that kind of plurality?
Yes. It’s definitely been a preoccupation for me when thinking about what kind of painting I want to make. What kind of painting do I want to see my work as being within. With the panorama history, and the history of History Painting – it’s a kind of painting that’s been used to tell the dominant story, to create history, I guess. The panorama has a sense of being a medium used in the past to impose an all-seeing viewer from one viewpoint. That holds a powerful implication that this is THE view. You can see the whole thing from this one point, and it’s fixed.
Her attitude to it, and I think also my attitude towards using a panorama format is that, because you can’t see the whole thing in one go, you end of with one viewpoint and perspective. That came naturally for me because there are 8 individual paintings with different perspectives and it’s always shifting, and I like how there’s an implication in there about how you can look at the world. You maybe can’t understand everything from one viewpoint.
I think that’s how we reason nowadays. We are in a pluralistic age. We are more receptive to the idea that there’s more than one way of understanding the same thing, more than one way to do things, and more than one truth. I think that is something that makes panorama painting - but also History Painting - seem very untenable. History Painting says ‘this is one grand image that permanently defines what happened, the truth of this historical event’. In that way it becomes very difficult to justify in an age when we are so often re-interrogating history, but I think it’s exciting to think about the opportunities to take these formats and use them in another way. You can deconstruct the past use of it and the authority it once had, by showing how it doesn’t work, by fracturing it, breaking it apart, literally sometimes in the image itself. You can use this grand sprawling format to open things up and say ‘what about alternative ways of looking at the past?’
One of the things we talked about in relation to the panorama was the panopticon, a way of imprisoning people with the least amount of security guards. The panopticon has a central viewing platform like the panorama, where you couldn’t possibly view all the cells at once but because of the possibility of being watched the prisoners feel trapped and observed. The present day issue is perhaps social media, with the plurality of opinions – everything you said is true, but also we end up in kind of slices of the panopticon on social media, in these kind of echo chambers. It’s imperative that we go back to forms of technology which can allow us to expose these glitches.
The tendency to keep bouncing back and forth the same ideas. Yes. I would say that idea, applied to social media, and even mass media, links to tendencies we have with images. Take for example landscape photography. We all go out and take images of the landscape, and the images we take are often attempts to reproduce images we’ve already seen. It’s actually hard for us to conceive of images we haven’t already seen. You see it clearly in people’s everyday photography. We go and take pictures of the same things repeatedly and we are very good at subconsciously mimicking what we’ve seen before. I think it’s important to keep that in mind when it comes to our images of the landscape. I think images of the landscape are very boring if they are not critical.