Barry Reigate
"As soon as the doodles/drawings are enlarged I kinda enter another territory of language, that of painting, space, form, depth, illusion..."
Could you tell us a bit about yourself. How long have you been a practising artist and where did you study?
I’ve always been interested in art, since I was a child. I was interested in illustrators like Chris Foss, Philip Castle, Sorayama & the skateboard graphics of Jim Phillips.
As a child I wanted to become a commercial artist. I wanted to airbrush album covers. As I studied a BTEC at Croydon College (London), it soon began to dawn on me that this industry was dying, changing…That’s when I started to take an interest in the fine arts & then applied for a joint honours degree at Camberwell College (London). I studied fine art & graphic design, the course was a kind of experiment because we were the first year to do this joint degree, because of that, it had an energy, which kinda fed my appetite to pursue making art. After that course I went to New York where I first walked into an installation by Paul McCarthy. I was blown away but I also found it incredibly funny & thought to myself. “Wow, you can get away with that?” That’s when I decided to commit to art. I just thought, what have I just experienced, I don’t get it, but I love it… After that I applied for a part time MA at Goldsmiths where I ended up writing my dissertation on stupidity & zombies…
Also, as very young child I used to draw pictures, so as to escape. We couldn’t afford the cinema back then, & I used to draw the scenes, imagined on A3 pieces of paper about films I never watched, like star wars etc. Drawing really was an exercise back then to escape into another reality & still is now… I got introduced into painting & drawing via my father who wanted to be a painter but never pursued it. Instead he used to get into trouble with the law & spent a lot of my younger years in Wandsworth prison & Wormwood Scrubs. My brother & I used to visit him at both places where my father used to draw to us & illustrate to me on how to draw cartoons. It was a way to fill up moments of time, especially in the visiting rooms, as they were both emotional & boring. Drawing distracted those feelings & became fun; it escaped the ‘real’ drama of the situation..
Your recent work is less figurative and more leaning towards the abstract, but at the same time keeping its playfulness. Could you tell us about this change in direction?
The recent work for me is more of a continuation of previous stuff I’ve done. In fact, I still make the other stuff in another studio. These new paintings come from a long process of taking out one of the elements from the other work & then expanding on it. I expanded a small part, a drawing, & started doodling from it. From there I started to make these doodles on paper. I decided to turn them into paintings, as I liked the energy in them & thought they would be good as large paintings. They also emitted a kind of playfulness, like taking the line for a walk. As soon as the doodles/drawings are enlarged I kinda enter another territory of language, that of painting, space, form, depth, illusion etc.
The new paintings are basically large doodles where I let different qualities of the airbrush & air gun come out. I start playing around with the shapes & spaces & seeing what works best. I use a lot of cut out paper during the process of spraying these works, so I can physically play around with the shapes. I also go back & do stuff on Photoshop but tend not to rely on this, but it can help to get that right mix between the drawing & that which looks like it was made on computer. I liked how the paintings have both these qualities, a digital aspect & also the drawing side of it. In a way I was having fun, doodling, not really thinking about the work but more escaping into some ‘thing’ else.
With these newer works I really enjoy the immediacy from doodling, coming up with something to paint without too much thinking (now I’m a zombie) & the enjoyment of totally encompassing the surface with paint, that is applied differently, than via touching the surface of the canvas with a brush, almost like printing… In a way, it gives the process a kind of freedom. Emancipation from history.
Installation view, Castor, 2017
I Don’t Wanna Be A Part Of Your Kerfuffle, Castor, 2017
Nuclear Epidemic, Castor, 2017
Your solo show at Castor was titled "Do Zombies Dance to Love in C Minor?" Could you tell us the meaning behind the title? Is it a message to the art world?
In a way, there is no meaning behind the title but there is a kind of story…
When I went to see the new space in Deptford (Castor), it reminded me of when I went to Goldsmiths and that essay I wrote on stupidity & zombies… I wanted a stupid title, or something with ‘love’ in it because nobody uses the word love in art anymore. I came across ‘love in C minor’ breezing through the Internet and wrote it down. I was going to keep it at that, but when we started to write the press release I knew I had to bring in ‘zombies’… It also linked that memory of my dissertation…
It’s not really a message & aimed at anyone but a play, on words. I don’t really like that term- ‘art world’. To me it implies distance. I’ve always been interested by art’s own fascination with it’s death i.e. ‘the death of painting’ etc. It’s like how the entertainment uses horror & death, i.e. zombie films, as a way to to escape banality & the everyday. In a way, I feel as though art is like the position of a zombie, neither dead or alive, but attracts a fascination towards itself, because we ‘don’t really understand it, it makes no sense.
It’s why I like the airbrush in relation to painting. It’s neither ‘painting’ (the act of painting itself) or ‘is’ a painting (easily located within paintings history).
Apart from all the above, I just like the idea of a load of zombies dancing to disco.
Tell us a bit about how you spend your day/studio routine? What is your studio like?
At the moment, I have two studios, not because I can afford it but because one of them in South London where I’ve just started to work on community projects is free. I work down there with Progress London, a social enterprise. This has only just started and at the moment we are working on a series of paintings based upon my previous work. The paintings are a collaboration with the local kids & separately, some young offenders.
I spend a few days there and then I spend time making the newer work at a studio in north London. I couldn’t really bring in the kids to work in north London because of post code issues & other artists in the studio in the complex. Studio in south London is also local to my brothers boxing gym, which incidentally does the same stuff with kids through boxing in the local community. This is the area where I grew up, so I know a lot of people in area & charities working down there.
So, my routine is split... I just get to the studio, & I start working, I treat it like a job really, which is the best way for me to make work. I usually start with a small thumbnail sketch, a doodle etc & then I either project it or freehand it straight onto the primed canvas. When I have a basic framework for the airbrushed paintings, I then start to sit around a lot & start staring at the work. Looking to see what works where, I suppose that’s where the ‘painting’ language starts to come in. It’s at that point that I don’t really know what is going to happen & I really start playing around with shapes & sprayed textures etc.
Installation view, Castor, 2017
Unlock Your Hips & Identify Your Weakness, Castor, 2017
(Detail) Unlock Your Hips & Identify Your Weakness, Castor, 2017
What artwork have you seen recently that has resonated with you?
Last summer, I was commissioned to do a large mural in New York and I popped into David Zwirmer gallery, to take a look at the Jordan Wolfson piece, ‘Colored Sculpture’… I was completely blown away, I know it may sound a bit cliché but it really was on another level… Also, I saw one of Sterling Ruby’s airbrushed ‘sunset’ paintings & seeing those in the flesh, the scale and size of them, I thought was quite spectacular, reproduction does no justice to them. I also really liked the James Ensor exhibition at RA last year. It was like coming up for air after being drowned by so much Ab-Ex below.
How do you go about naming your work?
I write things down all the time that catch my eye. I don’t really think about titles until I finish the work & then just play around to see what fits… I have thought about titles too much before & now I treat it more of an instinctual thing, like if something works or not.
What does the future hold for you as an artist? Is there anything new and exciting in the pipeline you would like to tell us about?
I have something planned for the end of year with some other artists, which is going to be big, but I can’t really say anymore than that. I’m pursuing the community work & see where that will lead the other works I am more known for.
At the moment, I’m just enjoying making these new paintings, I’m introducing more colour but finding it quite a wrestle, they seem to work better with a minimal palette…
I’m also looking into animation and going back to making some more lamps. The animation lets me bring in the cartoons again, in a medium, which suits, and is less brash, believe it or not. In a way, the new paintings have a lot of movement & look as though they are about to animate…
All images courtesy of Castor and Barry Reigate. Photography by thishappened
Published date: 5/4/17
Anthony Banks
"I see paint as both a means of encryption and description: camouflaging the identities of the subjects in my work, allowing them to hide in plain sight"
Could you tell us a bit about yourself. How long have you been a practicing artist and where did you study?
I was born and raised in the heart of rural Gloucestershire, which is a lovely place to grow up, plenty of space and beautiful countryside to explore. When I left school at 18 I decided to study an Art Foundation year at the local university in Cheltenham, as much as anything to give myself time and space to explore making work. At the end of the year I had to make a choice between going to study a degree in Geology (hence the title of the upcoming show) and Painting. I went for an interview for the Painting course down in Brighton, was accepted and never looked back.
I suppose that was when I started to consider myself an artist; though I’ve been drawing and painting since I could hold a pencil, that moment felt like a switch had been turned on and making work had new significance and importance.
After graduating I moved up to east London to study for a year at The Royal Drawing School and never left. I graduated from the Painting MA at The Royal College of Art in the summer, which was a great experience although I certainly feel happy to be out of education and making work in my own studio where nothing is seen unless I feel happy to show it or talk about it.
China Cup, 2013-16
Frigate (Rigging) 2014-2016
You have a show coming up titled: Geologies, curated by Kristian Day, could you tell us about the show?
Kris and myself have been in conversation for a while about putting something on together. The show brings together some small paintings that I’ve recently been working on, some of which are completely new and feel it, others I’ve worked into that have been in my studio for years in various states of development. So there’s a really interesting relationship between works that have gestated and weathered together.
As the title, Geologies, suggests, it’s about a physical layering of surfaces, inviting the viewer to explore beneath the top soil, to uncover buried histories within the paint, histories that are at once of the earth and human; histories referencing art historical narratives of style and genre. Even the subterranean space in which the work will be shown asks you to physically move beneath the ground to see it.
I see paint as both a means of encryption and description: camouflaging the identities of the subjects in my work, allowing them to hide in plain sight. Surface is where I start. Before playing with either composition or figuration I need to be excited by the surface I am working on. Façades become worn, imbued with a tangible history, a patina or geological layering of paint.
When starting to play with figuration on a canvas, images become reduced and distilled, developing a wrought existentiality somewhere between the visual and the imagined. Through the process of painting, centralised forms become increasingly obscured and removed, before being allowed to re-enter as a schema of the original archetype.
The show will be at Tripp Gallery, 59 Amwell Street, Clerkenwell, London EC1R 1UR. The private view is May 18th and runs until Saturday 27th May.
Some of your work is collage in appearance, a picture within a picture, almost like a painting hung on someone’s bedroom wall. Could you tell us a bit about this and your process?
Many of my recent paintings have employed the use of both internal and external framing devices. When a painting develops on a stretcher its dimensions or scale can feel wrong, its proportions unsuitable for the size of image or even marks on the surface in relation to the shape of the support. I often ‘crop’ areas down if the image requires intimacy or re-stretch the canvas onto a larger support if it needs to expand outwards. Scale and size are of course different things in paintings, but that’s another conversation.
My paintings, especially on a small scale, are very physical and built up over months and years of moving around my studio, a romantic notion that creates a perceived honesty or earnest quality about them. The frames are a method of undermining this, creating objectivity and demanding that all marks are viewed at once as decoration, abstraction and description. It creates a sort of tension between painting languages, highlighting the decisions and modes of depiction ingrained within the paint. The exterior ‘wallpaper’ allows a visual pause or rest, requiring a different level of enquiry and investigation.
Spotlit painting (landscape), 2014-16
Portrait of a power station (Didcot), 2015-16
Mill, 2015 - 17
Tell us a bit about how you spend your day/studio routine? What is your studio like?
I like to get in to the studio early. I make a huge cup of coffee, turn the radio on and pace around looking at my work from different angles, examining them each in turn to see if they have altered or resolved themselves during the night. After an hour or two I will finally mix a colour on my pallet in reaction to something that needs changing in a painting, pick up a muddy brush I was using the previous day and make a tentative mark, and so it starts. It’s a game of mixing tones and finding the correct brush and then the right action to create the right mark to both sit within the patina and pattern of the existing surface whilst moving the painting forward along a new path. I move in waves of frantic activity, painting on everything I can find, followed by hours of waiting and thinking about the next move. I will probably have a break in the middle of the day, have a walk or get some air in order to come back with fresh eyes. I then generally work quite late into the evening. I like the sensation of working at night; it feels solitary, silent, and important.
My studio is quite long and thin with a really high ceiling, a slightly strange shape. At any one time I will have 3 or 4 large works on the go and 30 or more smaller works. I don’t really put time constraints on the paintings - like I said before some take years to reach resolution. The space is always a real mess; I need to see every possibility available to me in order to make a decision. The studio has big windows looking out on to a courtyard which means it only has sun in the morning and gradually gets darker and darker throughout the day until in the evening you can barely see the tones you’re painting with. I quite like this, though. I’m sure it affects the pallet of the works I produce. I start the day using bright colour and it slowly gets more and more grey and muddy throughout the day.
What artwork have you seen recently that has resonated with you?
Vanessa Bell at Dulwich Picture Gallery really blew me away. Seeing the works en masse and getting an idea of their variation and versatility; the sketches for textiles are just stunning. Definitely worth a trip down. The permanent collection is worth a visit on its own, with a Rubens oil sketch that looks like it was produced yesterday.
I also recently checked out the Wolfgang Tillmans at Tate. I was always unsure of the sincerity and motives behind the work, but having seen the show I was proven completely wrong. The work is so much more subtle and poetic than I had expected. Leaving the show I felt like my eyes had been opened; I was looking at the world with a new scrutiny. There is such sensitivity in his photos.
Michael Andrews I think has been a fairly under-appreciated artist, left in the shadows of those huge artists making work at the same time. So it’s great to see Gagosian dedicating a show to his work. I’m not in to all of it; the Ayres Rock series don’t do much for me for example. At his best though the works are strange and beautifully subtle.
John Latham at The Serpentine is a beautifully paced show; the way he effortlessly moved between mediums with a lightness of touch was revelatory and inspiring. Everything has such sensitivity. The show has a really slow, meditative feel to it; it’s a great one to spend time with and let infect your state of mind.
King Coal, 2012 - 16
Anthony Banks at his studio
How do you go about naming your work?
I always find titling problematic. Having read a few of your previous interviews, this seems to be an issue that many artists share. I guess if you could say it you wouldn’t make work about it. However, I do think it’s important to open the work up for a viewer, leaving clues and sinews that can be traced into the painting. I’m certainly not one for ‘Untitled 1-5’.
I’m often fairly straight with my titles; it’s about opening up avenues for a viewer, not closing them down. If a painting feels overly ambiguous and fluffy, I will attempt to ground it with a solid title. If it’s quite easy to read then I will offer something more playful and ambiguous. It’s never my main concern though, always feeling slightly subsidiary, though necessary nonetheless.
Apart from the show with Kristian Day, Is there anything new and exciting in the pipeline you would like to tell us about?
There are a few things I'm currently negotiating, one of which is the opportunity to show work internationally. I am very interested to see how my work travels and is perceived by audiences without the accepted ‘British’ reference points to contextualise the work against.
One project I’m excited about is a show in the summer at the Burren Art College Gallery in Ireland. This will be a collaboration between painters Alex Gibbs, Woody Mellor and myself, in which we will play with ideas of romanticism, sincerity and a sort of genre exploitation in painting. Its an amazing gallery space in the middle of nowhere, a really idyllic spot, so is a perfect metaphor for the concept of the show.
All images courtesy of the artist
Pulished date: 5/4/17
Clare Price
"These shapes, drawn from modernist forms and digital tools ‘pin’ spilled wet vistas to create ambiguous spaces. Stains and poured goo onto raw canvas refer both to the body and to Abstract Expressionism."
Could you tell us a bit about yourself. How long have you been a practicing artist and where did you study?
It’s a long and complicated story. Here goes. I grew up in the North West of England and went to Mid Cheshire College for Foundation which was a heady mix of being 1989 near Manchester with all the dancing, music and haircuts involved in that, inspirational teachers, an insanely talented cohort and a lot of throwing buckets of paint at canvases to good effect. I moved to London and studied painting at Central Saint Martins from 1990-93 (with a year at the HdK in Berlin on an Erasmus exchange in the middle – good stories of showing paintings in squats with the Mutoid Waste Company alongside the rigorous German painting education system). Partly down to being young and pretty vulnerable really, painting, feeling kind of not ok combined with not having the strength or wisdom to stand up to that, I stopped making work shortly afterwards.
After a few years of being a secretary (one of the most useful things I ever did as an artist) and working at Marks and Spencer (in the shoe department), through the paintings I made shortly after college, I landed up working creatively in TV in motion graphics and directing. I had my son in 2000 – he is 17 now and the best thing in this whole story. After some heavy life events I returned to painting around 12 years ago. I have been painting obsessively ever since and returned to education to do the MFA at Goldsmiths for four life changing years as a part timer, graduating last July. This experience will probably take the rest of my life to unravel but essentially it stripped both myself and the work back to the core. It was painful but it was amazing. I met magical people who are a great support and inspiration to me and I feel incredibly privileged to have had that experience. I live in Peckham; I have a dog; I love where I live, I love my son and my beautiful friends and I still like dancing even though 1989 is a long time ago now.
left to right s.s.h., 2015; y.s.b. 2015, Install shot Goldsmiths Fine Art MFA Degree Show, 2016
Your work has an interesting balance between form and disorder, could you tell us about these paintings and the meaning behind them?
The work is kind of driven by an idea that was spoken about by Mark Leckey at Goldsmiths which is in essence that “art comes through the body and the life experience”. I have in some ways been trying to make the same painting since I was 19 but of course all the life experience between then and now is channeled through the body into the work. This was a life changing idea, an idea of acceptance in some ways, it also allows for a kind of “feedback loop” where sometimes the work is telling you things you did not consciously tell it to say – and this is kind of the best when this happens.
The history of painting, of course, comes into the work. Touchstones like Blinky Palermo, Joan Mitchell, Helen Frankenthaler, Agnes Martin who have been ingested visually are always in there in some way, shape or form (literally). The paintings explore ideas around the bodily materiality of paint too. In the paintings voluptuous gestural elements are set against translucent geometric planes. These shapes, drawn from modernist forms and digital tools ‘pin’ spilled wet vistas to create ambiguous spaces. Stains and poured goo onto raw canvas refer both to the body and to Abstract Expressionism.
So the works investigate the sensuousness of making, the vitality of matter and the agency of “stuff” through paint. To me they have a bodily quality to the works: they are vulnerable, exposed, rent open. After all, De Kooning said “Flesh is the reason Oil paint was invented.” The paint itself freezes the hidden performance, the interaction between the body and materials in the studio. The traces and residues of moments are captured like photographic exposures. The edges of the stretcher contain and tether sensations, and through this containment the forces are heightened, to create deep spaces, harness the chaos of the studio, and ultimately generate a small universe within the frame.
In some of your older works you used an old computer program called 'Claris Works', making lines and shapes out of it, then in turn projecting it on to the canvas. Do you still use this method?
I don’t. I used it as a way to explore ideas about painting in the first years of returning to it. I learned a lot making those works and some of them are important to me but essentially that was a way of working that got shifted and broken down during my studies. I guess I am now able to let go of the “grid” and be freer with the spaces in the paintings now, more painterly, making more fragile, sensual spaces.
Tell us a bit about how you spend your day/studio routine? What is your studio like?
I walk my dog first in Nunhead Cemetery or Peckham Rye to get her tired enough to sleep for four or five hours while I paint. When I get there I feed the dog and get her settled, eat, drink coffee, smoke and work up the will to get into my painting clothes. Once these rituals are done I am immersed in the work sometimes in that kind of outer body way that us painters strive for. My studio is an Acme space in Deptford, it was an old propeller factory, it is deeply messy. It has large Victorian windows and scarred wooden floors from its industrial past (I have to be careful that the water from making the work does not seep through them and am often in trouble for this). It is a haven; the light is beautiful and I love it there. It contains and makes sense of everything for me, like the work.
Plume, 2013
y.s.b, 2015
c.m., 2015
t.h. 2016
t.h., 2016
t.h. 2016
What artwork have you seen recently that has resonated with you?
I was lucky enough to attend the participatory performance that my friend, Barbara Gamper, made with Sonia Boyce and Elaine Mitchener at the ICA, that became an installation by Sonia called “We move in her Way”. The generosity, physicality and surprising outcomes of this piece left a deep impression on me. The interaction between bodies and sound and the formal elements of the sculptures, all brought together with unexpected interactions and connections was moving and hopeful.
How do you go about naming your work?
The titles are encrypted, often autobiographical references that allude to the body, sex and sensuality, desire and containment. They are conjured up around the time the paintings are made so that the titles as well as the marks are kind of a trace of those moments.
What does the future hold for you as an artist? Is there anything new and exciting in the pipeline you would like to tell us about?
I am very excited to be a part of the project Must curated by Ingrid Berthon Moine for which I have been making some photographic work with painting and the body outside of the frame of the canvas. I will be showing with one of my very favourite painters Jacqueline Utley at Studio 1.1 in July and will be part of After Projects “Glossary” Show in the Autumn. Galeria Bacelos will be showing works of mine at their gallery in Vigo, Spain. I am also really pleased to be showing in a Women only painting show called “Women can’t Paint” at Turps Gallery with some people that I admire beyond words.
Banner image: Install shot, Goldsmiths Fine Art MFA Degree Show, 2016
All images courtesy of the artist, photography is by FXP London
Published date: 5/4/17