The act of painting is a deep human necessity… man is neither ornament nor anecdote. – Robert Motherwell
Around the undergraduate studios, in the early 1980s, the greater number of paintings under way exceeded, on average, two or three square metres in area. Mine did also; not that the acreage was justified by what was accomplished within it. This was London and we used to visit galleries half an hour away – how much there was to see, and was provided for us, now seems extraordinary – to take in, among others, huge works by Anselm Kiefer, Ray Atkins, Hughie O’Donoghue or (also among the ‘neo-expressives’) Bruce McClean, then head back to the workshop to stretch, glue and prime our own enormous surfaces. If I were ever asked – and I must have been – why it was necessary to paint on such a scale, I would have said that the dimensions were commensurate with all the energy that was ready to be invested in it and could not be constrained in humble panels a foot or two in length. Yet by then I had seen Soutine’s Céret paintings which (like Van Gogh’s) were no bigger than this, but would ‘blow off the wall’ the Goliath of a Georg Baselitz or Julian Schnabel, if hung next to them. I saw this, but did not yet see what the actual potency consisted in. I also worked on smaller paintings which, then as now, turned out to be my best, and went on looking at works by other painters alive or dead, of a similar size, that held more power than many a canvas a hundred times larger. But I did not give up making the large ones for a long time, and then only because I no longer enjoyed the necessary facilities.
In those days it was possible not only to carry an easel into a gallery like the National or the Tate in order to work directly from the exhibits (highly worthwhile), but also any drawing or painting of one’s own, if it fitted under one arm, to lean against the wall beneath a Kandinsky or a Kitaj, or whatever it might be, and compare with the masterwork. This too was always instructive but the practice was later prohibited, unhelpfully and unaccountably. A few drawings I made from Greek or Roman sculptures, or a Titian or Rembrandt, were the best of the poor work I did over those years. I also made abundant use of life-drawing classes then run as a fixed and integral part of the BA programme. I don’t believe this time was wasted and certainly would do the same now, but in my final year a new Head of Painting was appointed for whom there was such a thing as ‘too much’ working from life – old curricula were being bravely overturned – and while some tutors considered me for a first class honours, her opinion was that, on this basis, I merited only an upper second. By contrast with the Korean University where, twenty-five years later, I would oversee the department of ‘Western Painting’ and alone was expected to determine each student’s grade, several tutors would confer on the assessment of our progress throughout the course, and of our final show. Nevertheless her view prevailed and I have come to agree with it, if not for quite the same reasons. Her tenure did not survive interventions by the government that upended several old London institutions, and fine art degrees, towards the end of that decade.
At my first degree exhibition I was approached by a Bond Street dealer in an expensive suit who liked my work enough to offer me a show. I edgily declined, with juvenile tactlessness, dismissing my own product as ‘not good enough’ to be seen in a commercial gallery. He closed his eyes for a second, opened them again and politely and kindly handed me his card, in case I changed my mind. That same week I received a further offer to exhibit at the Salisbury Arts Centre, which I also turned down. After graduation I took my work home and destroyed the paintings.
The painters Anthony Green and Carel Weight, visiting tutor and external examiner respectively when I arrived at the school (but whose own work appealed to me less and less, for all it accomplished) thought I had a talent for arranging things in the picture space. My idea was that continual practice in drawing from life would teach my paintings about form, and after that the full range of imaginative potential in the canvas would be harnessed. But I was easily seduced by the power of my lines and for a long time believed those drawings were far more disciplined than they actually were. I ignored, then foundered on, contradictions between imagery and form, the question of how and where ‘truth’ might be extracted and whether ‘expression’ was really my business in the first place.
In the larger ‘freely-composed’ paintings displayed, in my graduating show, alongside the disdained life studies, I set out to neutralize or displace the ‘detention’ I speak of elsewhere; to realize in some compelling portrayal the emotional lability and fearful states of mind over which I seemed to have no control. But within a few years I ceased to ascribe to it anything cognate with the ‘creative’ disposition that had led me to art school. Painting was a job like any other; one just got on with it, the debility that affected me being a hindrance (a considerable one) rather than a creative furnace – or not in a practicable sense. In psychotherapy I was enjoined, for example, to paint out a visualization of ‘where I was at.’ But I could not co-operate because I did not share the therapist’s conception of painting as the deployment of archetypes. As a painter one has to be looking out at the world, at that ‘whereof one cannot speak.’ An idolum or a dream image, for all its declarative and decorticating narrative power in the mind, is neutralized when transferred to the canvas. A prescription of this sort insinuating itself into my painting always closes down possibilities and has to be removed. It is only out of the material constituents of the painting that I might actuate a force equivalent to something in nature – the force of a dream, for example – but I don’t want to proceed as though painting were a matter of assembling images, however good at it I might be. The unity that the painting arrives at must not be factitious but ‘unaware of itself,’† in ‘the creation of quality through which the created image becomes self-evident.’
I was in my thirties by the time I began to understand this, having found that I was uninterested in contriving a figure that ‘conveyed a sense of’ anything – despite some results that did not land very wide of the mark – because where the painting had any guts, this seemed to have to do with the handling, which, unlike the redundant functionaries in the picture space, was unconsidered (although I so far had little control over the transforming power of colour). Where consideration was given – to the idea that a feeling could be explained or described into visibility – whatever I produced seemed artificial, jejune, self-regarding and ineffectual.
Elsewhere, the commitment to drawing was being abandoned; painters who had never learned to do it were acclaimed and rewarded; the critic Robert Hughes delivered his Harold Rosenberg memorial lecture ‘Art and Money’ and the convergence of fine art, advertising and fashion was hastened and consummated by other artists of my generation. For much of the time since, I have satisfied myself with working directly from the motif – a physical subject, a mass of nature – rather than ‘making something up,’ having discovered that the depth of the connection to that externality which painting can sometimes establish involves the full function of the imagination as an active faculty. And yet I am not satisfied, either with the performance of the work on its own terms, or that what I have done comes anywhere near an adequate representation of what it is to live, and to have lived, in that world; not as a span of time (during which art itself seems to have been reduced to a fatuous game), but as a single extraordinary moment. I have long been interested in creating a space in which remembered sensation can be resurrected in paint – it is sense that memory preserves – without resorting to illusion, or self-aggrandizing sentiment. This problem has been documented and answered by other painters, but it is still there, waiting to be addressed again.
The last painting I completed in the UK was made in the garden of my home in Sussex and displayed in a small Brighton gallery, four years before my emigration to Korea. It is about 170cm square – or was; all that now remains of it are the maple stretchers (impossible to source out here). I carried both these and the rolled-up linen to Seoul where I reassembled the painting and eventually exhibited it again, before discarding it along with half a dozen equally large, or larger, paintings I had made in the meantime. I did this because I no longer saw any value in the works, no longer had space to store them (my home in Seoul being a tenth the size of the one I had left behind) and not least because the surfaces had been manufactured with an inferior acrylic ground that drew the oil from the paint. This was the third time, including the post-degree show frenzy, that I destroyed such a quantity of work, but there is nothing I regret not preserving. (The second occasion was on the point of my departing the UK, when I was obliged to select one painting to take with me and dispose of the rest. Like the destruction of their predecessors nearly twenty years previously, this was no great loss. A few photographs allow me to see and remember something of what, if anything, I learned in making them).
In Korea I accumulated a fresh set of pointlessly large paintings because, once I landed there, free to begin painting again, I was possessed by the idea that the work must be resumed on such a scale, straight away. In fact it would have been far more useful to start with a small sketchbook and a pencil; there was plenty of time to study the subject, develop a response and quietly recover my rhythm. Instead I sought out metre-long sheets of heavy watercolour paper, thick pieces of charcoal, two-metre long ready-primed canvases, three-inch brushes and quantities of student-grade oil paint, as if I had reverted to my undergraduate days. Back then, everything had worked; materials did not fail, once I had learned to obtain the correct strength of glue, not to start painting in thick layers, and so on. But the stretchers supplied in Seoul – where I have not had the means to make them myself – are coarsely made from poor quality timber and often ‘as round as a boat’ (as my woodworking master said of my first attempt, aged twelve, to plane a length of deal). Being determined, foolishly, to work large from the outset, I purchased the panels already prepared at a shop in Insa-Dong. Evidently it was the ground applied in that preparation – a synthetic gesso (likely) sprayed onto the linen – that proved so absorbent; within a few years I found the paint cleaving from it. A ground should be only very slightly absorbent and the paint should penetrate it very slightly. Despite the unhelpfully wild variations in humidity that occur here, the failure of the paint film seems to have been due to the over-absorbency of the ground rather than its inflexibility. At first I removed the upper layers with abrasive paper and tried working over with colours of lower oil content by volume, but the same problem would recur; nothing worked, so once again I threw everything out.
Typically, on attempting to dismantle a chassis pre-assembled in the market, the stretchers turn out to be not simply slotted, but glued and nailed together. But I was able to preserve them in the dismantling, ultimately donating them to Korean painter friends with working spaces sufficiently large to use them in.
But why those first paintings in Korea had to be so big now seems clear. For all my curiosity about this country and the astute mentorship provided by my wife and her remarkable friends, the personally harrowing episode that had just closed with my mother’s long invalidity and death, the simultaneous loss of my home in the UK and this acting out of the impulsive decision to emigrate had made for a protracted and emotionally turbulent transition. In an early dream I looked at two landscapes, one perpendicular to the other, as two converging planes on a vast automated printing press; the native English clay on which I still stood, crossed at the horizon by the alien peninsula, unrolling itself vertically, as though seen from a falling satellite. I believed that I would come to know the subject by drawing it. But for a long time I continued to view Korea through the lens of my personal confusion, grief and perplexity. Only when it is no longer unfamiliar can the strangeness of something be truly represented, when one has lived in and merged into the subject and the drawing moves beyond the description, or characterization, of strangeness – that is, beyond appearances. The initial large works, essentially introspective, were an expression of my collision with all this, rather than the yield of penetrative research, of knowledge, for which in my case it was too soon. ‘The only true voyage of discovery (is) not to visit other lands but to possess other eyes.’†
Meanwhile in another store I was fortunate to came across two kilos of rabbit-skin glue, a one-off French import that, it appeared, I alone in Seoul had any need for. Belgian linen was easily accessible and, once I had also found a supply of imported oil-based primer, I began working on smaller surfaces that I prepared myself. I heated the glue in a ‘double boiler’ (one saucepan placed inside another, in lieu of my beloved but now obsolete electric glue pot) at about forty grams to a litre of water, but relying as before on the ‘sticky finger’ test when judging its strength: too great, if the solution prevents the finger and thumb from being separated without force, and twinkles too brightly when the linen is dry. The oil primer I applied in three or four thin coats, at intervals of some days, to maximize its reflectiveness.
Because deficient stretchers are all that were available – sending or carrying decent ones from Europe is more trouble and expense than they’re worth – I prepared, as an alternative, about a dozen hard surfaces by fitting battening to a section of thick plywood and attaching (with wood glue) hardboard to the face, rubbing this over to give it ‘tooth,’ then gluing and priming as for linen. Owing to their weight these panels are limited in size, the largest being eighty by sixty centimetres. At least one, on which I made my first rooftop landscape in Seongbuk-Dong, was sold. The rest have been recycled over several years. This wasn’t my intention at the outset, but after completing, or rather abandoning, paintings that then hung around for a long time I would find my dissatisfaction and doubts about them grow to such a degree that it gave me no qualms – quite the contrary – to remove the surface, again with abrasive paper, re-prime and use the panel for a new work. This policy also was encouraged by restrictions of storage and wall space, but there are very few paintings I have ever made that I would be content to have staring at me day after day, indefinitely, or for anyone else to suffer the same.
Nonetheless the paint film has continued not to cure properly, particularly when using blues straight from the tube, on both linen and board. Ultramarine blue seems most troublesome in this respect. Perhaps I have been breaking the old rule, and not laying ‘fat over lean.’ But ultramarine is generally towards the lower end of the scale for oil content by volume, and the problem occurs even when it is laid directly on the ground, or over titanium white. Some admixture of the white to the ultramarine can help. What seems to happen, though, is not so much a failure to adhere to the ground, as a disintegration of the binding medium. I long ago stopped adding thinners or oils – linseed, poppy, sunflower seed, drying or any other kind of oil (unless I wanted to apply a glaze, but I haven’t done this for years). If there is nothing wrong with the ground or the support, then something is wrong with the paint. Possibly I have kept the paint for too long, and the curing has been under way in the tubes before the paint reaches the surface. However, being obliged once again to scrape or rub away whichever area is failing to polymerize doesn’t worry me. I welcome being thus prompted to rethink completely how to proceed with the painting. Many painters reduce their palettes as their careers progress, and it is never harmful to find myself with fewer choices.
I have known few Korean painters who prepare their own supports and grounds, but one was a dear friend who sadly died of leukemia some years ago, and whose works are exhibited on the walls of the nearby hospital where his passing took place and where, by custom, his funeral followed.
It is a little disheartening to find myself recycling these cumbersome panels so many years after making them, with so few finished paintings that I haven’t wanted to erase. Single pieces of high-quality timber, simpler to handle and nicer to look at, are (again) difficult and expensive to obtain. When I turned back to hard surfaces I was thinking of the paintings of Gillian Ayres and especially Howard Hodgkin, with bold gestures and strong colour, that manage to evolve directly from memory without the basis of drawing, for which they seek (and find) an equivalent chromatically. The firmness of the material – the wooden panel together with its frame – makes a painting by Hodgkin more of a ‘thing.’ I am reminded of a metal steamer trunk restored by my father in the 1960s, whose clasps, handles, rivets and overlays he painted black, with red for the remainder. Ever since I observed, and smelt, those glistening coats of paint, there has been nothing as black as that black, nor as red as that red – though I once came across a door in Seoul that had been painted in so precisely the same red (not seen for many decades) that I was forced to pause before it for some time. As in Hodgkin, the power of the colour and the substantiality of the thing reinforce each other. It can’t be said that either a Hodgkin or Ayres constitutes nothing that can be called drawing (or a Jackson Pollock, for that matter), but I don’t think I am anywhere nearer my own solution to the problem of of colour and form, despite so many years of ‘experiments.’
Meanwhile I have long been aware of a pressure, or nudging, towards aqueous media like ink or gouache. I never persisted enough with watercolour to gain any mastery over it, though it may not be too late to try again. Of course it is Korea that nudges me; not only in respect of the non-availability of materials once freely at my disposal as a student and young painter in the UK, but through the continual encounters with works on paper – traditional, historical and contemporary – that one eventually finds one has absorbed, like the language and other elements in the culture, and from which arises an area of knowledge and possible practical resource. Not that I will ever wield ink and brush nearly as capably as the more serious devotees to the craft that are found here and there in my own generation (not so those that followed). It begins with calligraphy, and I can claim is that my Korean handwriting is at least passable. But it may not be too late, and would clearly be profitable, finally to follow the advice I received soon after coming to Korea: to apply myself more consistently to learning the craft. It is reassuring that, along with the stumbling progress in painting, the evidence of improvement in my drawing over these years is irrefutable, particularly since I scaled down from large charcoals to smaller works on paper, first with graphite, then fine pencils and biros. Some of my drawings in ink, which I apply either with a drawing pen or a wooden chopstick, also encourage me to persist. I no longer spend too long wondering where this or that road is likely to take me, or ponder whether or not it might be where I want to go. Thankfully, there are ever fewer roads left.
†Marcel Proust, La Prisonnière (Kilmartin’s 1982 translation)