| How
do you structure your painting day? |
I
don't go out every day. I'm really doing alternate days now
- one day in the studio, one day out, but these are not hard-and-fast
rules. I get up at about quarter past five. Everything's pretty
much packed up the night before. In London I usually don't go
out until after nine o'clock because I want to avoid the children
going to school. I'm working by half past nine. |
| And
you work until the light changes? |
Sometimes
the painting has to change. Sometimes I keep up with nature
and change and change - a morning painting becomes an evening
one. At other times a particular painting will coalesce about
a certain time of day, sometimes quite early in the process.
It emerges because you've been able to put something particularly
magical down, and the painting becomes about that atmosphere. |
| How
long might a painting session in the open air be? |
A
minimum of four hours, but it can go on in the summer. Often
I have two or three pictures going of much the same subject,
say one large-ish and a couple of smaller things, which I'll
have with me. |
| How
fast do you actually apply the paint? |
With
extreme rapidity and desperation: trying to work as fast as
nature changes in terms of light. |
| Do
you take off or add more paint working outdoors? |
My
initial impulse is to put on, because it seems a more generous
act. Nature seems to me to be about addition as opposed to subtraction.
I take off only when it becomes impractical to put more on.
Sometimes a surface does become so overworked that you have
to scrape it right back, and work back in time. Very good things
can emerge from that, because it's a way of going back to the
original thought. You might remember a particular colour note
underneath something else and go back to it. The first application
of colour can often be the purest. |
I
know you don't do any underdrawing on the board, but do you
prepare the board in any special way?
|
I
prime it in quite a traditional way. At the moment it tends
to be white. Sometimes I enjoy quite a bright pink as something
to conquer. In the past I've also worked on warm greys and Indian
reds. I remember reading somewhere that Courbet worked from
dark grounds. |
| Do
you start in any particular place? |
To
a degree it's a Cezannesque procedure - one patch of colour
leading to another. I tend to start in the middle towards the
top, and work from what is the back of the picture to the front,
because I want to bring as much as possible forward into our
tangible space. |
| Would
you continue to paint in the studio on your return from a trip? |
Depends
on whether there's enough daylight. If there is I will attempt
to carry on as if I was still in front of the subject matter,
because the painting does tell you what to do. If there's anything
in it at all, it gives back nature to some degree. I used to
think that I could paint by artificial light, but I think I
deluded myself. I look at things in electric light, but I don't
work under it. |
| Where
do your lengthy titles come from? Are they simply descriptive? |
Usually.
My paintings to me seem so particular and precise about a place
and a range of times, season and weather, that they need particular
and precise titles. At the moment I'm trying to make them a
little more summary, as I'm trying to make the paintings. But
the titles would be much longer - each would be an essay! -
if I had my way about it. |
| How
long does an average painting take you to complete? |
There's
no such thing. It's literally from a day to a year. The longest,
which was some time ago, was eleven years. Now I would expect
to finish a painting within a year. But sometimes I do come
back to pictures and repaint them - such as paintings of crop
rotation which I'm repainting now quite drastically after three
years. They're often paintings that I've carried on, in the
studio, and have learnt from, but have simplified perhaps so
much that I've lost and have falsified. So I literally go back
to the same place, where the rape field or corn field is, in
one sense, back as it was. Then I quite quickly repaint the
whole thing over the top but with all the accretion of experience
underneath. Sometimes they can be quite bald statements which
people find harder to take. |
| How
do you select a motif that you want to paint? |
To
a degree, it selects me, it tells me. When I'm painting the
river, there are fewer and fewer places, so I paint from where
I can. I make it the right place to paint, by doing it. In the
countryside there are motifs which I feel I should be able to
paint, and it's a rare occurrence but sometimes I can't make
one work. So I just keep going back, perhaps over a period of
years, until I do make it work because I know there's something
there that's important. |
| Do
you always paint subjects which are long familiar to you? |
That
can't be true because there would never be a new subject! I
do dearly love to paint the same apparent subject, the same
skeleton, the same thing that the painting's hung on, over and
over again. But in one sense it's always a different subject,
even ten minutes later. |
| Do
you see your paintings as illustrating ideas? |
I
don't think so, they're about my literal experience of being
in a place. At times, ideas come out of the experience of painting,
ideas from other areas, perhaps something I've read, which become
part of the subject matter. |
| How
many pictures do you have on the go at once? |
I
always have a dozen or so at any time, which includes London
and Kent. It's often more than that in terms of the pictures
that have been put aside and left for a year. I find they do
feed into each other very much. I'm interested in finding connections
between apparently different things. |
Would
you say that the horizontal landscape format was your preferred
shape? Though I see that lately you've gone back to the vertical
rectangle, I haven't seen a tondo by you recently.
|
No,
you haven't! I don't know how these things arise, though often
the subject dictates. I tend to start off on a relatively small
area of a subject which in subsequent pictures extends and grows.
I think I can only grasp or understand a limited part of what
becomes literally a greater, wider vision in the end. Because
my work is about trying to grasp something physical I have to
work my way out. I think it mirrors the painting process of
starting from the middle and painting out, patch for patch.
If I start painting a "new" subject I feel almost
disorientated so I have to start with something simple and small
in the beginning and then feel my way out. I like to feel out
to peripheries. I'm not a fixed gaze painter at all. We have
an area of vision, and I become interested in what happens at
the edges of it as things go out of kilter. And I'm interested
in literally what happens at the edges of paintings. But I feel
you have to work out to that edge, you can't start at an edge
and work in. Because you don't know where the edge is, you have
to find it. |
| Do
you do much drawing now? |
Very
little. I'm so interested in colour and the physical material
of oil paint. It's become increasingly important and something
I don't want to escape from, but find my way into, more and
more. I don't know how far you can go. Acrylic just seems an
inert chemical to me. Oil is such an elastic material with endless
chances and endless opportunities. It seems like life, it seems
like flesh, it seems like light. Oil paint does seem like the
world to me. |
| Do
you use any geometry in organizing the rectangle of your pictures? |
No,
geometry emerges from the subject matter. Geometry does become
important in the paintings, but it's stumbled upon rather than
being imposed from outside and it's in the nature of the subject,
whatever it is. |
| Do
you research a prospective site or simply see it and colonize
it? Presumably if you're down in Kent you're tramping around
all the time and looking at things? |
I
now find so much in a few limited areas that there seems to
be more and more in less and less. I do walk for the pleasure
of walking, but I always have so much on the go that I'm in
danger of missing everything. So much passes me by because I
can't work quickly enough. |
| You
don't tend to have still-lifes and figure paintings on the go
as well as the landscapes, do you? |
Occasionally.
I do flowers for sentimental reasons, because they're associated
with a particular person. Also out of a sense of personal art
history - Euan Uglow's paintings of flowers, in fact. People
often affect you without you realizing what has happened. |
| You
once said that to be a painter 'love and faith' are what you
need. Do you still believe that? |
I
do, but perhaps there's more hope in it now - hope in a desperate
sense. I couldn't paint without love of existence, and faith
in those artists who have proved that something great can be
done. |
| Do
you think that your work has become less or more descriptive
over the years? |
Less
literally descriptive. I don't think it's become less about
things, but the things have broadened and become less literally
nameable. The things are more embedded in the act of painting.
I've tried not to make paint imitate things, but I think - in
a mad sort of way - things are becoming more like paint. |
| You
wouldn't say that you were pursuing any particular theory of
painting? |
Not
in the sense of any 'ism'. No, I'm just endlessly trying to
find a point of confluence between the material used and the
things I experience. And I feel further towards that than I
once was. |
| How
do you react now to being called an Expressionist? |
I
think there's still an element of that in what I do, but I don't
think in those terms any longer. I just think of something called
painting. I find words like 'Expressionist' so narrow and mean.
Painting is a much greater world than any verbal terms can encompass. |
| Do
you use photographs at all? |
No,
never. They become more and more alien to me, nothing like what
I feel actuality is. They're something else completely. |
| Have
you entirely stopped using brushes nowadays? |
Yes.
I don't know what will happen in the future but I feel no need
for them at all. I find the spatula, hands and fingers so much
more expressive. I find now a brush makes a mechanical mark
and I want a mark that is not imitative but is nature. I want
it to happen the way water happens, or wind happens, almost
in spite of you, through you and yet greater than your own machinations.
I think art has to be on the edge of control. |
| Do
you try to empty yourself before you begin a painting? |
No,
I don't have to. Nothing else intervenes in the process of
working. It's a ritual which leaves no room for anything else
because I'm living at a higher plane when I'm working than
at any other time. When I walk about and look at things they
don't seem real. Only when I engage with them do they seem
real. Otherwise you're a tourist or something. But when you're
painting you're acting with nature. In the act of painting
I think you do achieve a sort of innocence and perhaps are
the way you should be - more complete. All sensations are
much greater when you're engaged in this activity. It's like
a hole through a wall into the real world. So for me there's
a fear but also the greatest thrill about starting to paint,
because you don't know what will happen. It could be the most
marvellous thing that will ever happen.
|
GEORGE
ROWLETT