Fried Fountain, 2013, oil and graphite on canvas, 36x36" |
AS: When I look
at your paintings I imagine some of the marks are made from felt tip pens, is
that something you use in your drawings?
JM: Most of my
paintings are based on prior ink drawings. For a long time I used black ink on
paper, then I discovered coloured markers and that opened up the process
because then I could start drawing with colour as a means to create composition
and think about how shapes and colours interact on the initial drawing surface.
It was a revelation, but I have been doing this now for a long time. So the
painted marks reference prior marks that I made in a drawing process. Sometimes
they’re mediated to appear almost precisely how they were originally in the
drawing and sometimes I allow the paint to be thicker or barely there at all. I
diverge from that script often by using the tactility of the paint, how paint
behaves differently to ink.
AS: Do the same
motifs crop up in the drawings?
Detail |
AS: So if that
starts to happen do you do something to stop it? I can see things are rubbed
out and over.
Detail |
AS: It seems to
me that there are two distinct things happening with these thin lines and then
bolder filled-in forms of things.
JM: I am trying
to create a balance between a plodding, thick approach to making sense of a
picture and then there are also lighter, sinewy lines that come in. It’s about
a nuanced, yet clumsy, way of depicting something. As an analogy to being a
person in the world, we’re imperfect and you can’t know the answers to
everything, so the imperfection of what I do is about that. It’s about trying
to be real in the sense that you accept your limitations as a conscious entity.
Calder |
JM: Absolutely,
but the imperfection I was talking about is the conceptual difference. When
Calder came to the fore in the 1930s and 1940s, it was proper modernism. People
were trying to make something beautiful and transcendent, and in his case, also
surreal. I guess I try to do the
same thing, however, I exist in the 21st Century where all these
systems and ideas about oneness, linear progression and the abstract
expressionist sublime got turned on their head with postmodernism. Things are
no longer so certain and I think that is the precariousness of our times, right
now, the climate, everything, its all a mixed up fragile jumble. So I really do
appreciate Calder’s simplicity in his constructions. There is freeness and a
wonderful focus on a level of form that is very beautiful and poetic. I try to
go for that but, in the end, I want to include the dirt of things. These
grounds are ruddy and if you look closer often I have been scrawling-in marks,
almost like graffiti, as if I am tagging my own work.
AS: Sounds like
sabotage?
JM: I like
layers, flat layers. You see a surface on a train and one person came along and
did this then another person came along and did something else but its all on a
flat plane and there’s all this overwriting happening. I really appreciate systems
that get overwritten, like modernism being overwritten by contemporary life and
all its dysfunctions. The result I think is an existential strangeness that can
feel alien or uncanny.
Gentle Land, 2013, oil and graphite on canvas, 36x36" |
AS: Like in your
work, you can see a layer of something that was there before.
JM: Up until a
couple of years ago all my grounds were gesso and so the marks would sit on top
of an empty plane. Then I started painting all the ground with white frenetic
brushstrokes prior to painting the coloured parts and that has become an
interesting process for me because preparing grounds has become a thing in
itself. So there is this surface that I modulate and it has become more and
more dirty. I paint this first and then I make these marks and what I’ve been
doing is taking pencils and carving into the wet paint (and sometimes later
when its dry). I do this part without the foreknowledge of the image that is
going on top. So I try to create systems that are overlapping and incongruent,
but they fit in the end. It’s a mash up.
Maidstoned, 2013, oil on canvas, 54x54" |
AS: You
deliberately mess up the blank canvas and start to build using your own rules?
JM: That’s
definitely part of it. What I like about my process is that I do these
drawings, small scale on paper and then I translate them into a larger scale in
a painting form with a brush. A line that maybe took a second to do with a pen
takes me a while to do in paint. I mess around with how I put things down and
so my process is a meditation or investigation of my own subconscious, because
the images start out as these freeform drawings, but then, when I paint them, I
am methodically trying to get inside my own head. Why did I make this?
AS: So you go
back to the drawings to try to understand them?
JM: Yes, in a way
it’s a mental analysis and I think of it as to do with the construction of
one’s identity, as a person, and what does it mean to be a conscious being. So,
looking at what I have done, this thing I have created, and trying to make
sense of it by translating it into a painting.
Just Like a Prayer, 2013, oil on canvas, 54x54" |
AS: Like a more
conscious way of doing it?
JM: It’s more
conscious but then I also try to step outside of the descriptive sense of
things. I’m saying ok, I’ve got this line here in my drawing and I try to do
that but then other times, when I paint this I might try to make it rougher or
different to how it was and try to subvert my own systems.
Shelter, 2013, oil on canvas, 78x78" |
AS: Once you’re
into the translating phase of making a painting do you come back with the white
again and cross things out? Do things start becoming more integrated?
JM: There is
definitely an integration process that happens at the end, like these little
subtle shaded smudgy areas. I include those a lot and maybe go back and draw
things so I try to get to this balance.
But for me, a balance may be what someone else may consider an
imbalance. I like this clumsy painting over a line where I paint white back on
top. And I put in this shading area. This painting wasn’t working until I went
back into it and did these things and I also put in these pencil marks and for
some reason that’s when it started to click for me. The space was too empty and
simple so I needed this complexity. A very different thing happens in a drawing
and in a painting. As a thing, a painting has depth, it has tactile surface,
paint, brushstrokes, subtle changes in colour, where this line is heavier here
and these are all little subtleties that make a painting a painting. A drawing
is a simple thing, that is beautiful, but when it becomes a painting then it
becomes much bigger than what it was originally.
AS: Do you have
favourite artists you come back to?
JM: I don’t
necessarily have particular people … well I do. There’s Matisse, with his
cutouts. They have a lot of the same elements, white ground with these colours
that were cut out and placed on the surface. Also Paul Klee, I’ve always liked
his work. I haven’t focused on it, and I try to do my own thing, but I really
respond to his work. I think it is similar in the sense that he was trying to
depict a psychological state and the strangeness of being alive.
John Mills will be exhibiting 7 June - 5 July 2014
at Rosamund Felsen Gallery, 2525 Michigan Avenue, Santa Monica CA90404