Matthew Collings

'Rudi Vrba on a curb in Prague with his daughters Zuza and Helena 1958'/
oil on canvas with frame from sections of stretcher bars/ 2020
courtesy of the artist

SOTP: Hi Matthew, it’s wonderful to have you visit Subjects and contribute to these on-going Covid lockdown interviews with painters.

Of course you are well known for your art criticism and broadcasting as much as your painting practice, so we’ll start there if that’s okay. You know my feelings about Peter Fuller, as this blog carries a recent essay of mine in which I perhaps look a little nostalgically back at a period of British art writing and criticism that was, for me, extremely inspiring, vibrant and vitally accessible.

You were part of that scene in a big way, and I can’t help feeling that the culture of intellectual oppositions that could be found in the pages of Artscribe International, of which you were an editor, and Modern Painters, say, was much more interesting and stimulating back then, compared to what we read in the pages of Artforum and October journal now for instance. In fact I would argue that Artscribe, and Fuller's Modern Painters, contributed to a period of art criticism that has never been bettered. There was certainly a lot of it being read by artists and art students back then, I think. And also talked about.

How do you feel about all of this -- do you think art writing and criticism has evolved in just as interesting a way as back then? And have you found any shifts in your own approaches to writing criticism over the years?

MC: Well I never thought Peter’s writing was anything other than an embarrassment in those days.  I was a student when I first encountered him.  He was always in Art Monthly writing this fogey stuff.  I got to know him personally in the early ’80s when I was about 28 and had begun editing Artscribe. I invited him to have a go at submitting some articles, which he was happy to do.  I accepted a couple and then said this is too boring, no more of that, thanks.  He said it was the first time in his life he’d been rejected as a writer.  He didn’t mind. I found him great as a person, very funny and human, much more so that most art people.  They’re all narcissists, but he was a narcissist while also seeing through himself and his ego and mocking himself. At least behind the scenes.  I was in therapy at the time and he’d had it for years because he’d been a gambling addict, and we bonded over that kind of thing. But that didn’t mean I took his art ideas seriously. He assumed I was shallow as an art operator, and I assumed he was an out of touch fantasist.  We were frank about our contempt for each other as well as liking each other’s jokes.

Over the years I became more tolerant of some of his themes.  Not his turn to political conservatism, however.  I agree with him that nature is meaningful, not just a construct, and visual traditions that evolved over hundreds of years are meaningful and not just ideology. I wrote a couple of funny diary pieces for the first issues of Modern Painters, but then he died, and anyway I was very busy in television, so I stopped.  After pressuring from the new editor of Modern Painters, Karen Wright, a very dedicated woman, I started doing it again.  They were stream of consciousness long chaotic things, where I said what I’d been doing, who I’d met, what ideas occurred to me about meaning and value, and so on, and how mortifying being in the artworld could be -- which the magazine just allowed unedited.  I was uninterested in the rest of the mag and took it to be strictly by, and for, old farts.  I even despised it more for having my stuff, which is an example of imposter syndrome with which I expect many creative people can identity.  But the fact is, that Diary slot for me was incredibly helpful for developing a personal voice.  I’m eternally grateful to Karen for it.

  Artscribe International, No.55, Dec/Jan 1985-86

First full-colour issue featuring pastel drawing made especially by George Condo, 

and interviewed by Collings at his Paris studio.

from the collection of Eric Bainbridge

To return to Artscribe, I worked on it all in all for eight years, beginning in 1979, when I was a year or so out of art school. For the first four years I did various things, from the subscriptions, to the advertising, to managing the office, to becoming editor in 1983.  Then after a couple more years, having got some backing from some Americans, I made it into a colour, glossy international mag dedicated to what was new in international art. At the same time, I tried to make it fun and dialectical, with other points of view besides just promotion of fashionable trendies.  As well as exciting passing ephemera, art by Schnabel and whoever, there were old-fashioned modernist aesthetes in the mag and Marxist intellectuals.  It was a very odd magazine.  For a long time, it had few staff.  The first designer for example was taken on after I left. A nice guy called Tony, who Neville Brody supplied, when I went to Neville to ask how a magazine should be designed and if he would do it.   Until then I laid-out and designed everything, myself -- incredibly inelegantly.   And I dictated the content; generating and editing all the articles.  A woman who’d escaped from Art Monthly and a young man from Oxford University eventually came in to help part-time.   The woman was always horrified by me and found me incredibly brutish, I think.  The guy from Oxford was given the job of getting reviews in, but I oversaw them and chucked out reviews I thought might confuse the tone of the mag -- which was a confusing subject because it was just in my head, whatever I thought was interesting moment to moment.  It drove Stuart Morgan nuts because he thought you had to speak several languages and have been to university to be an editor, whereas I thought you just had to work very hard and have a sort of massive headlines sense of hypnotically attractive content.  Stuart was the most workshy person I ever encountered, but he was genuinely thoughtful and educated.  He dithered around on the margins of the mag because it became quite powerful.  But he wasn’t really anything to do with it.  After a few years I was tipped off my perch, and he slipped in as editor, unable to believe his luck, but then was in fact overwhelmed by all the sheer work involved so he left, and it soon folded after some other editors had a go.  They were all perfectly nice, as he was.  With him, Artscribe instantly became the same as any other current art magazine, precisely because he wasn’t chaotic and running on mere enthusiasm; he actually had intellectual resources of a formal, disciplined kind, which I’ve always totally lacked. 

I went to work at the BBC and was grateful to be out of that other life. But it was only after leaving Artscribe that I started to really write at all myself, as I say with this disorganised streaming sort of voice, which I made up for myself.  And in one way or another I’ve always had writing jobs ever since, either TV scripts, books or reviewing.   Art magazines today are meaningless because it’s a totally money culture, so only the market decides anything.  The market is nothing to do with ideas, only what sells.  So, it’s a culturally arid time compared to 40 years ago when art was ruled by ideas.  You can find electrifying occasional articles or reviews in Artforum today.  Just as you can in the new trashy online art journals.  But it’s an accident now.  Not the expected thing.  Articles now are expected to be verbiage to support promotion and selling.  I read very interesting art books all the time, by Benjamin Buchloh and Isabelle Graw for example.  But they are refreshing precisely because they’re so unlike the usual run of art articles now.  Artforum became junk for wealthy idiots years ago. Pretentious poseurs supplying gibberish to the wealthy.  But then, in all that decadence, you’ll find serious thinking now and then.  It’s a matter of emphasis.  What was always expected from Artforum -- actual thought -- changed around 1980 to a lump of glitzy sludge every month, that allows in an occasional accidental sit-up-and-think moment.       

SOTP: You have also been working on a new book on contemporary painting to be published by Thames and Hudson. That’s exciting news, as it seems to me that Phaidon’s ‘Vitamin P’ books have run their course (although the first one was really fantastic, it increasingly looked like a tired format over volumes two and three). However, Tony Godfrey’s ‘Painting Today’, also by Phaidon, has stood the test of time well I think. Can you tell us anything about how you have approached your book, and what we can expect?

MC: It was commissioned 17 years ago by a guy at Thames & Hudson, who years later left to start his own publishing company, and so much time had gone by since my commission he once asked me to write a book for his company on contemporary painting, completely forgetting he’d already commissioned me to write one for Thames & Hudson. It was very hard for various reasons for me ever to get it going, or once going to stick with it and make any sense out of it.  The virus lockdown gave me a different perspective I could bring in, and I’m getting on well with it now.  It’s objective about ideas out there now, as to what painting is.  It examines them.  But it’s also subjective and autobiographical, and random.  I think it will be a great hit. 

Matthew Collings at the Byam Shaw in 1976, aged 21

SOTP:  And so to your own practice; first of all, your earlier years. You have always had a painting background as it were, certainly as an undergraduate at Byam Shaw School of Art (here there is a timely and awful connection to our Covid-19 pandemic, as its founder Byam Shaw had died in the 1918-19 Spanish Flu pandemic, having managed to survive World War I in the Artists Rifles.) 

What and who were the influences on your early work, and how did this shift or change when you attended Goldsmiths as a postgraduate?

MC: I wanted to fit in with conceptual art, as that was the thing in the ’70s.   As soon as I learned it existed, I wanted to do it.  But I didn’t have the bravery or stamina, or particular mind set -- I don’t know. In any case at the Byam Shaw I ended up doing what I’d always done, just painting.  It took various approaches, but all indebted to Pop.  The compartmentalising of space that Pop typically goes in for, and balancing of abstract visual mannerisms with depiction, and the depiction owing something to photos and the mass media.  I left the School in 1978 covered in glory for my final year exhibition, but failed to get myself into a postgraduate course, and just drifted around, going more and more neurotic.  I write about it in my painting book actually.  I went to Goldsmiths 12 years later, after a few years of being at the BBC.  The Goldsmiths MA is part-time, so I did it while flying around the world doing BBC films about Kippenberger and Jeff Koons etc.   I was desperate to not have my mind dominated by journalism.  I loved it at Goldsmiths, but I didn’t come up with anything much, there, in the way of art.  However, if I hadn’t gone, I wouldn’t have been able, a few years later, to see the possibilities for paintings in the mosaic work of Emma Biggs -- which I did see, as soon as I started asking her why she put any colour next to another one.  I was amazed that someone could have such a confidently assertive idea of colour that was completely practical: this will work, this will not.   Goldsmiths gave me an open mind, enough to see that this confidence could be the basis for paintings with no particular author and no particular artistic subjectivity, no individual expression.  The painting just will be itself.  

         

Left: Biggs & Collings/ 'The earth is full of violence'/ oil on canvas/ 2020

Right: Emma Biggs/ banner to indicate names of the first UK frontline care workers to die of Covid-19/

wool, towel, sheeting, tape/ in progress, 2020

courtesy of the artists

      

SOTP: There has been a very interesting tradition of painter-writers, which I think provides something very different and actually more interesting to painters who like to read that sort of stuff- I’m thinking of Patrick Heron for instance, and Mira Schor, who for me has written some of the best things over the years. I love her essay on Bonnard’s Ants, and her accusatory shots at David Salle for instance!

Who are your favourite writers on painting specifically, past or present?

MC: Patrick Heron, Alan Gouk, Clement Greenberg, David Rimanelli’s Instagram and Facebook posts, Isabelle Graw, Meyer Shapiro, Ruskin, Benjamin Buchloh, Merlin Carpenter, Donald Judd, Robert Hughes, Michael Baxendall, TJ Clark from the early ’80s, Rosalind Krauss, Carol Duncan, Carlo Ginzburg- off the top of my head.  If I saw something by Diedrich Diederichsen I’d always read it.   I have read books on painting by current painters like Carroll Dunham and David Salle, and they’re thrilling because they’re so knowing.  But they’re like actors talking about actors. The writing has very glaring gaps.  It is cut off from any real ideas and that makes it fatally limited ultimately.  But I would always read a review by those two if one pops up in a magazine.  The same with painter Amy Sillman who’s very quick witted and articulate. 

SOTP: Before I come onto the interesting shift that has happened in your painting practice in very recent times, I’d like to propose to you something that has always struck me about the collaborative paintings you make with Emma Biggs. It kind of brings me back to Fuller again, and his interest in the Romantic and spiritual tradition in British Art, but more importantly his deep interests in the social and political aesthetic of William Morris. I have always regarded the Biggs and Collings’ project as very much following in that Morris tradition -- not simply for the strong design quality you both bring to the paintings, but actually within the deep-seated technical processes you undertake, which seem to me to be really foregrounded in the principles of Morris’s commitment to ideas of the hand-made, and of craft.

How do you feel about this reading?

MC:  We respect Morris for being a communitarian, that’s the kind of art meaning we are interested in ourselves with our paintings.  Plus, our side-line projects, and Emma’s mosaics -- which are in fact her main project.  But she does political banners, and various other things.   These are all under the sign of Morris.  We are a workshop of two and we respect his workshops of many workers creating objects that are about psychic health.   It’s not craft traditions that we identify with but art.  We think of him as a very great artist of patterns and nature.  We think of our own paintings as landscapes without the landscape.  The technical process of our paintings is partly to do with avoiding chaos because there’re two of us, and partly to do with getting the most out of colour. 

  

'Kensal Green 1 pound attic'/ oil on canvas/ 80 x 40cm/ 2020

courtesy of the artist

'Three Floors at Walham Grove'/ oil on canvas/ 72 x 36cm/ 2020

courtesy of the artist

  Detail of 'Three Floors at Walham Grove'

SOTP: So these recent paintings of yours are very different from the collaborative paintings, in that they are much more gestural and unstructured by comparison. I was watching that very nice film about the painting and ceramic mosaic installation that you both worked on at Yorkminster Cathedral, called ‘York Five Sisters’. Emma is talking about the attraction of the roundels and geometry in the windows, and we catch a brief glimpse of a collaged pastel design on paper, quite earthy in colour and using repeated circles, which struck me as having a strong connection to your own recent paintings that also use a repeated circular motif.

Is there a link between these new paintings of yours, and the designs and materials you both worked with for the Five Sisters’ work, or I have I just made a coincidental, unconnected leap of the imagination?

MC: Yes. Coincidental in a way.  It isn’t a connection I’ve ever had consciously in mind.  But I’m interested in structure so there is a connection, I didn’t think about it before. Thank you for making it.  I should say our joint paintings are not pre-planned, they’re spontaneous.  It’s just that they have a basis of a strict grid, drawn with a hard pencil and a ruler.  After that point though we make up everything as we go, working entirely on impulse.  The endpoint is when there’s nothing else we can correct.  All the relationships are finally supporting a visual theme of order, an order which has multiple, constantly shifting perspectives -- but is always an order.  We hope that’s what happens.

With my solo paintings I pile in and try and develop a visual reason for the painting to exist and then I’ll give it a title that refers to my early life, as a sort of reminder that the painting comes out of something I can’t help.  But I try and get to a point where there’s an objective visual structure of some kind, a broad rhythm.  I’m always over-painting.   

SOTP: Yes, so in your most recent solo paintings there is a sort of more narrative type of approach, sometimes involving figures, sometimes landscape, and generally moving in a more depictive (yet gestural) direction. Can you say tell us about the diversity within your current practice, or do you even consider it as diversity?

MC: I do!  A chaotic diversity.  Considering that some of the abstract paintings also include figurative imagery.  If I do enough more work, I will maybe be able to see how it all connects.  I like a naive kind of depiction, where rhythms come through without planning.  I think of both things, abstracts and landscapes etc, as abstract.   But the colour in the descriptive paintings is not daring or imaginative, it’s just naturalistic colour.  Whereas the colour in the paintings without depiction is free.  But I’m always working to organise in the end, so nothing’s free really.

'Babette Paul Emma painting in trees left to right'/ oil on canvas/ 40 x 70cm/ 2018

courtesy of the artist

Detail of 'Babette Paul Emma painting in trees left to right'

  

'Your mother the police and the army'/ oil on canvas/ 2020

courtesy of the artist

'Family group sculpture'/ oil on canvas/ 60 x 40cm/ 2020

courtesy of the artist

SOTP: And finally, how has the lockdown situation affected your day-to-day thinking about art, and also your own paintings? It is an unprecedented time and space to be living through for artists just now --it is for everyone -- but do you think it has made you reflect or act on things afresh, or differently?

Once we eventually get to the other side of lockdown, do you have a painting project or exhibition that you want to realise?

MC: No, just the usual: regular shows at Vigo.  The lockdown has not been much different for us because we live in an isolated part of the world anyway, no shops, nothing.  But we are cut-off from our children and their children, which pains us.  This period has been beneficial for my painting book however, and I talk a lot about the politics of the virus in the book, and relate them to current ideas in art. 

SOTP: Well it just leaves me to wish you well in all painting and writing, it’s been great to have you visit these lockdown interviews. I’ll be looking out for your next show, and the book!

Matthew Collings studied painting at undergraduate level at Byam Shaw School of Art, from 1974 to 1978, and took his MA at Goldsmiths between 1990 and 1992.

The collaborative paintings and projects with Emma Biggs, called Biggs & Collings, have been ongoing since 2001. They are represented by Vigo Gallery in London.

His books include ‘This Is Modern Art’ (2000), ‘Matt’s Old Masters: Titian, Rubens, Velázquez, Hogarth’ (2003) and ‘This Is Civilisation’ (2008).

Broadcasts include BBC’s ‘Omnibus- Willem de Kooning’ (1995), Channel 4’s ‘This Is Modern Art’ (1998) and ‘Impressionism: Revenge of the Nice’ (2004), and BBC4’s ‘The Rules of Abstraction’ (2014).

He was art critic for The London Evening Standard from 2015 to 2019.  He lives and works in Norfolk and France. 

Matthew Collings: https://www.instagram.com/matthew.collings/?hl=en
Biggs and Collings: http://emmabiggsandmatthewcollings.net/
Vigo Gallery: http://www.vigogallery.com/artists/7

David Auborn

Conditions To Rectify Lost Time/ oil on canvas/ 180 x 160cm/ 2019

courtesy of the artist

SOTP: Hi David, thanks for coming along to do number three in this new series of interviews. Well, of course we don’t know each other from Adam! But I like how in the painting community there is a very often this sense of common purpose and sharing of ideas, and I was prompted to contact you initially because I had come across your excellent ‘To The Studio’ podcast interviews. In fact it seems to me that for all its distractions, the internet is providing us with a real life-line of interesting art things in these difficult Covid-19 times. However, 'To The Studio' predates the lockdown- so can you tell us about how it all started, and how you have managed to keep it going through the lockdown?

DA: No problem- it's a pleasure, thank you for asking me to come on. Funnily enough, ‘To The Studio’ started out from feelings similar to those you've mentioned, in relation to common purpose and sharing of ideas and experiences. The reasons for starting the podcast were tenfold.

After I left art college a few years ago I was having a tough time emotionally, and feeling isolated and confused living in a small village in Kent. I'm sure it's an experience shared by a lot of art students daily just now! I deeply missed feeling a part of something, having everyday interactions and conversations with so many artists and thinkers that I admired, which in turn can lead to many breakthroughs and opportunities via that network, both individually and as a group. I thought it was possible that I wasn't the only one feeling those negative things, and that maybe something as simple as a conversation could help to break down those imaginary walls that can seem to build up around one as a creative, and in their place forge positivity and communities of support through generosity of honest conversations and a sharing of them.

I also wanted to get better at talking about art, and to continue doing something I've always loved doing-  learning about how other artists operate and also their own experiences. This was coupled with my acute awareness of the broad, rich and brilliant undercurrent of artists, musicians, curators etc., that make incredible work and that we don't hear or see enough of. I felt that somehow all of that needed to be acknowledged and celebrated much more than it is, and most importantly, that they deserved to be heard and shared.

So I've given you a long answer here, but all that was stirring around in my head, and as a lover of artists’ interviews anyway I thought a podcast seemed to tick all the boxes- despite my fears of being recorded! My hope was that the podcast might have the potential to help generate a community of artists and thinkers, not just in London but in a wider sphere too. And if I were to make myself vulnerable that might be something other people could relate to as well, so I gave it a go! I should also mention that one of the most important elements was that the podcasts are free and accessible to everyone, anywhere, at any time.

In terms of continuing through lockdown, my audio wizard producer Theo Byrd suggested a few ways I could record remotely without equipment and it didn't take us long to set it up and get going...

SOTP: One of the things I really like about your podcasts is that they can be very revealing about painters’ experiences of art education. Very rich and rewarding for most it seems, but sometimes throwing interesting light on what we might call the ‘struggles’ of the painting student to find a place within the contemporary art scene. We can all relate to that- it doesn’t really change much after art college either! So next question is, what were your own experiences of being a painting student- what drew you to that area of Fine Art, and was it easy to stick to your own paths of investigation during undergraduate and postgraduate study?

DA: Firstly I would like to start by saying that I feel like I am in a very privileged position to be able to call my art practice a struggle, and that I'm grateful for that!

I had a very sheltered art education throughout school, nobody in my family was involved in the arts or had any invested interest in it, and I was the first of my family to go to university. I didn’t begin to make paintings until I found myself on the Fine Art Pathway on my Foundation course about 10 years ago - and haven’t looked back since (well, maybe I have once or twice).

For me my undergraduate was essentially a three year search- exploring who you might be as an artist, and mapping your path out of what you find. Hopefully at the end of that process you are at the point where you have built the architecture of a practice that you believe in, which allows you to walk down your path and out into the world with purpose. Whereas for my postgraduate I felt it was more of an excavation - I desperately wanted to break down all of those previously known conventions of making and thinking, rearrange the pieces, take some away, add some new ones, with a heightened level of critical rigour and hopefully have something interesting at the end of it all.

In that sense, sticking to my own path was fairly easy on my BA as that path wasn't built yet- I was experiencing everything for the first time and the enjoyment I found in exploring the new was incredibly exciting. My MA was a different matter, and a lot more difficult for many reasons, but possibly the main things that I learned can still threaten to steer me away from my own path, in comparing myself to others, taking on too many of others' opinions, and worrying about what happens outside of my practice. This is all part of one’s learning experience, but in the pace and intensity of the Royal College those traits seemed to adhere themselves to me, and left me flailing a fair few times, and still do on occasion.

Elysian/ oil pastel on watercolour paper/ 2020

courtesy of the artist

SOTP: To look at your own practice in more detail now, which as I’ve said I’m only getting to know a bit about recently- there are so many interesting things going on. Coming to it fresh and uninformed, the first thing that strikes me about your recent work is that it is very idiosyncratic. I like that in painting, when it doesn’t look like anything else that’s around just now.

However I see strong precedents (correct me if I’m wrong!) in Surrealism- I’m thinking of Miro here- also, something of Guston going on, and the more that I’ve looked at your work, also something of 1980's painting (here I do not mean to be derogatory!) I bring it up simply because I think so much painting of that era had no real or interesting relation to space- it often took painting into a flattened out and illustrative space (for instance Schnabel, or Clemente, or even Polke). However in your paintings there is much more engagement with, and feeling of, space- I’d draw a spacial comparison with, say, Terry Winters’ or Basil Beattie’s work and yours- paintings that you can wander into and around. 

Anything here that chimes with you, or that you disagree with?

DA:  No need to apologise! Similarities are impossible to escape, and I'm learning to become more accepting of them- it makes it a little easier when names like Terry Winters pop up! You've drawn many comparisons, so I will try to unpack some of my interests in painting which might in turn address the insights you've made…

The spatial element of painting is an interesting place to start, it's something in painting I have thought about a lot over the last few years, and wrote most of my dissertation on. In many ways the notion of ‘wandering around in space’ is a feeling I often feel within my daily reality. Paintings seem to have the greatest hold over me when they are anchored in a physical realm yet simultaneously take me out of my context, and speak intimately to me through carrying promises in their mystery, of ‘somewhere’ or ‘something other’. One of the ways painting can do this to me is through their gaps, space, breaks etc.- a kind of foothold, but also with an absence pregnant with promise.

We have become so used to instant rapid information, dissolved down into easily digestible, short sound bites, that the fertile ground of questioning the unknown and allowing it into our experience can be cast aside, forgotten, and at worst classified as an indulgence. Maybe painting for me is a reaction to all that, and where the element of space comes into play.

At the moment the work I make is a yearning for, and an inquiry and exploration of, an unknown space. A search through, and out of, my known physical realm into another of continual open-ended mystery. This is a choice as a painter, a commitment to openness and a belief in the immense life giving potential that lies within all manner of that uncertainty. Armed with faith that if we are to take painting as an ontological medium, painting can be used as a vehicle to open up information in our environments and bring us closer to potential truths or meanings.

Attempting to demystify images I make seems futile, and undermines the generosity in their vulnerability (as well as highlighting the limits of our language). Often I attempt to explain content in painting and it fades away, disappearing out of my grasp, much like when you try to recount a dream. The images, sounds and sensations that were so vivid, once recounted, fade into nothing, and their once profound imprint on your psyche vanishes.

Although the work may contain echoes of the recognisable, at present specific objects or forms are never placed within the image. This is not a judgement on others' work by any means, but is currently intrinsic to my sensibility, and the use of specific objects and forms would risk the work vanishing purely into recognition, and any potency found in its questioning ends. To champion paintings' abilities to exist on the potent brink of potential between what we know, and what we don't, is perhaps where meaning for me lies. I’m learning to allow myself to be comfortable with images I cannot fully comprehend, to indulge in their oddities, impossibilities and nonsenses…and embrace them. Images that are not given to me to fully understand, are far more closely linked to my everyday reality than something fully recognisable, formulated and solid and I am thankful that is the case.

Settlement/ oil pastel on CP watercolour paper/ 2020

courtesy of the artist

Decision/ oil pastel on watercolour paper/ 2020

courtesy of the artist

SOTP: So how do you go about making your paintings? Do you have any special approaches to preparing your canvases, or the sorts of paints you use? And what are the lead-ins subject-wise, in the collecting of visual material you work with?

DA: Paintings can begin in an all manner of ways, often they begin out of a quality I have found in a drawing that excites me, with others I am filled with a need to make a mark and the painting intuitively begins from there. Others begin from a momentary vision I may have (which has been happening a lot more frequently recently).

I use drawing and painting to facilitate an instinctive investigation into making sense of what it is to be in this world. To be here on the Earth right now. Mapping my experience of the everyday primarily through drawing, I use both exterior stimuli and interior dialogues as influences. The drawings begin to open up into painting when there is something within them which, at one and the same time, is both mystifying to me, but also simultaneously holds a tangible energy which relates to lived experience.

Using this brink of potential as a starting point, the act of painting then works to unpack, deepen and enrich this quality found in the original drawings or experiences.

In terms of how I prepare my canvases, I wouldn't say I have any special techniques or methods. I don't spend too long preparing their surfaces as the paintings are built up/ down quite substantially over time and the surface undergoes rapid transformation. Usually a few coats of primer will do and I am away. As for paints, I use fairly high volumes of the stuff so unfortunately I am not in a position to be too picky. Apart from a few select Michael Harding’s here and there, most are purely based on what I can afford at the time.

Distant Encounter/ oil on canvas/ 35 x 30cm/ 2018

courtesy of the artist

Offerings to the Ultravista/ oil on canvas/ 280 x 712cm/ 2018

courtesy of the artist

SOTP: Could we talk here about two paintings in particular, one is very small and the other is gigantic! I’m thinking of ‘Distant Encounter’ (quite small) and ‘Offerings to the Ultravista’ (coming in at an immense 7 metres wide), both from 2018. Yet they both speak to the space thing you and I have been talking about. Also, I think there is a bit of a Gustonesque playfulness going on in the small piece, and the very large work in its dimensions has an immediate relationship to Picasso’s Guernica (albeit again with more spatial depth in yours). Can you tell us how you have moved around in your paintings scale-wise, what challenges this presents, and also the specifics about these two pieces? And what sort of studio set-up do you have? Are there any particular restrictions you are dealing with under lockdown?

DA: Both of these paintings you mention were made whilst I was studying at the Royal College two years ago, when I had the luxury of a much larger studio than I have now. I tend to be working on a lot of paintings at the same time of varying sizes, anything from 5-20 paintings simultaneously - I am frequently restless in the studio and my time in there is often intensive. I often have a physical need to be continually doing, and if I only have a few paintings on the go I am very guilty of over-egging it. Working on a lot at the same time removes the possibility of that happening (most of the time) and works against these instincts. I find this way of working allows the paintings to be made in spite of me, and the time involved in their gestations always throws up new possibilities and readings. ‘Distant Encounter’ was a painting that slowly grew out of that process.

In truth the opportunity to paint ‘Offerings to the Ultravista’ happened out of several chance happenings, from being gifted that set of stretcher bars, to my studio mate leaving for Christmas vacation for 2 weeks. I had become bored and constricted by previous notions of making, and began to think about the size and shape of canvas as restrictions that could be made flexible, in order to open up new possible ways of working.  I also wanted to take what could be the only opportunity I might ever have to make a painting that size, and I tend to relish in challenges like that - throwing myself into them without a plan, involving intense periods of making…Will it work? Will I fall flat on my face? It makes me feel alive. I can't say if either happened, but I learned a hell of a lot in that period of making, and I hope I get the opportunity again with the experience I am armed with now.

I welcome any challenges, as within that experience of pushing myself to my known limits, lies the potential opportunity for change. Secondly, physically working on that size was a thrill, and allowed the physical joy of making it to sing through, and that element of painting has always communicated to me. I often worry about the whole ‘White, Male, British, Big Abstract Painting’ thing and if it was all alright to do? But sometimes you just have to say, ‘Fuck it, I’m gonna do it anyway’…and I’m glad I did.

In terms of my restrictions, I haven't been able to visit my studio since lockdown began. I've managed to build a workstation at home in my flat that allowed me to continue working, but recently I've only been able to work through some works on paper.

Blossom/ oil pastel on CP watercolour paper/ 2020

courtesy of the artist

SOTP: Finally, is it possible just now for you to talk about what lies ahead? It’s such a strange time for artists- for some of us there is a sense of constant, maybe even monotonous and unlimited (if restricted) time to make work, but perhaps without the light at the end of the tunnel of when or where it’s going to get shown. How are you dealing with things and what’s in store for your next exhibition outing do you hope?

DA: I'm not sure what lies ahead, but I hope things don't go back to the ‘normal’ we are all used to, and as a community of artists we can continue to shake-up and rethink those conventions that don't really serve us. There have been many initiatives that have responded to the tough situation creatives find themselves in, including Matthew Burrows’ formidable Artist Support Pledge https://www.instagram.com/artistsupportpledge/?hl=en and Art for Covid https://www.instagram.com/art.for.covid/?hl=en  exemplifying the kind of generosity that truly supports artists, makers and charities that are in serious need of help. These aren’t issues that should cease once lockdown ends.

I have personally found it quite tough to make work in lockdown. It feels quite complicated to unpick exactly why, but I think it probably has something to do with the close proximity of my work and living space - and the inability to distance the two. As I mentioned before, the process of making is always intense, and when things don't go too well there is no chance to escape it and run away for a bit. I need that processing time away from work. With that said I'm grateful that I've been forced away from making, and have been able to take the time to see the work a bit more objectively. I've been learning a lot about myself and my practice from the distance away from it, and most importantly have been allowing myself to enjoy spending time on so many other things that bring me joy, that I’ve neglected or forgotten about.

As for where the next exhibition outing will be I hope it's full of beautiful paintings, great friends and a never ending supply of ice cold beers.

SOTP: It’s a beautifully imagined scene! Let’s hope we are all out there doing that, sooner rather than later. Thanks so much for sharing your insights with us David.

David Auborn was born in Kent, England, and now lives and works in London.

He took his BA in Fine Art/ Painting at Brighton University between 2009 and 2013, and his MA Fine Art/ Painting at the Royal College of Art in London from 2016 to 2018.

His recent solo exhibitions have been 'The Thing That Moves' (2019) and 'Distant Matter' (2017), both at Pierre Pournet, Bordeaux, France.

Recent group exhibitions have included 'A Hand Stuffed Mattress' (2019) at Terrace Gallery, London and 'Nouvelles Acquisitions' (2019) at Maison Frugès - Le Corbusier, Pessac, France.

He is also the founder and editor of  'To The Studio' podcast interviews.

http://www.davidauborn.com/

https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/to-the-studio/id1482260942

https://www.instagram.com/davidauborn/?hl=en

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