John Mills talked to Alli Sharma at Weekend Gallery in Los Angeles

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

 JM: I have this thing for loopy, curvy shapes that reference things like language. I use a lot of signs, they could look like letters or numbers but then they can become pictures in themselves, like hieroglyphs. It’s a distillation or meditation on language, the language of forms in a way, but also the language of seeing in the world and making sense of how we, as humans, come to spoken and visual language. Writing is a visual experience and letters originally started out as these symbolic shapes but when you learn language you forget about that. You see words, but in reality they’re just pictures. I find that fascinating, how our brains function and how we perceive things in space. There are forms that coalesce, some more obvious than others. In these pictures we’re looking at now, that one has almost a distinctive head, which is uncharacteristic of my recent work.

AS: So if that starts to happen do you do something to stop it? I can see things are rubbed out and over.

Detail

JM: It’s a thin line. I like references. I like things that look like things. I like a shape that looks like a bird or whatever. To me, this is like a leaf. At one point I had this painting upside down and this looked like a bird sitting on a branch so there are these forms that happen, made by marks. I try to play it up but my goal is often to reference things but not have them explicitly defined, so that when you see it you don’t quite know what you’re looking at.

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

AS: We went to see the Calder exhibition together at LACMA and there were lines and forms and the idea of balancing things, was that something you could connect with?

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 21^st 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

Rosamund Felsen Gallery

www.futurepaint.com

Alli Sharma talked to Benjamin Bridges in December 2013 as he embarked upon some new techniques. He will be exhibiting at dalla Rosa Gallery, EC1 from 14 March 2014.

Pythagoras / Sandpit / Clingfilm and Foil, all 2013, oil on canvas, 51x41cm

AS: This looks like new work?

BB: These are a set of paintings where I found a new staining process. I’ve been making up canvases ready for paintings and I’m going to stain them in different ways. I cover the surface in paint and then I stand it on an easel with loads of tissue underneath and run stuff down.

AS: Is it oil paint?

BB: Yes, and because it’s white spirit and not turpentine, it splits like this. I have no idea what they’re about any more than what they are. 

U-Bend, 2013, oil on board, 29x20cm

AS: The borders are interesting.

BB: I have been doing that a lot. It seems to lift the space. When you make a painting you start with nothing and sometimes the underpainting is really beautiful and then it goes up and down in waves. You try to leave the painting at that point where it hits the crest of the wave before it drops and you have to make it into something else. It goes from a fresh painting into something laboured, but more beautiful. You have to go through that process. If you can get within say 20 percent of the top you just stop because you know you can get it closer but you let the work go. So with some of these paintings there is just the stain of the original canvas and sometimes there are marks that keep being worked. Those pieces are often simple in the end but there is so much underneath that makes it something new. I was trying to stop early every time and I started thinking that I could do all of them really light, but in a set of things only two or three might work, and the rest don’t, so you take those further.

The Lonely Chorister, 2013, oil on acrylic panel, 25x30cm

AS:  Have you moved away from the polyhedron-in-landscape paintings?

BB:  I reached a point where there was no energy to keep making the landscapes and they were becoming too similar. I like the idea that when I am 50 years old, I could paint whatever I want and so I decided to try it, as an experiment, and in a way it was damaging because when I started making these looser paintings, I couldn’t be bothered to make the polyhedron paintings any more because they are so laboured and these are so quick. I like the freshness of the newer works, but again, a similar thing started to happen. Because they were so quick and fresh and fast I would make lots but there was no investment. So they’re opposites.

Doughnut Head, 2013, oil on plywood, 20x15cm

AS: Completely different ways of making?

BB: The later paintings were all wet into wet, all one layer, very fast, rubbing bits out and painting them back. These first ones are very representational and I found this tedious. They might be a millimetre off on one side and then they just don’t work. What I discovered with the portraits, which I like, is that once you get the eyes, nostrils and mouth the right size, and the general position on the head, it just works and you can reduce and reduce and just have those pinpoints. So I trace the image on using those pinpoints and work from that. Because it has that structure and you can read faces so easily they just came together. In many ways it was about finding different ways of pushing the paint around, but having a structure to draw it all together.

Major Mellon, 2013, oil on board, 22x15cm

AS: When you’re making a tight, specific painting, I imagine that you have a good idea how it will turn out. Was it a surprise to do something much freer?

BB: Definitely. In the polyhedron paintings, the composition was pre-determined by Photoshop with lots of layers, choosing even where the shadows would fall. The thing I enjoy so much about painting those is that the colour ranges would change so much and just become so different and that became a responsive element. But I started to feel that the way I applied the paint was quite stiff. It didn’t say anything about the way paint is.  When I started the portraits, I couldn’t tell where they were going. That was the beauty. There was room for that sort of experimentation, even with a structure and a guide. A lot of them are of my boy. He works really well for this because he was so tiny and the proportions of his face were huge. The paintings of adults are often much leaner so they become slightly quirky characters. Then, for example, for Major Melon, I started finding images online that had a particular feel to them.

Floatstickle, 2012, oil on acrylic panel, 25x30cm

AS: Were you looking for something quite specific in the images?

BB: Yes, but not something I could necessarily pin down. I have a very clear idea about what it is and why it interests me but there are a lot of things that I am painting at the moment. I look at something and it will seem really important. At University I had been reading books about the sublime and Edmund Burke, who was a contemporary of Kant, who wrote about the sublime being a dangerous immense presence that you’re able to be in awe of at a safe enough distance. At the same time, I discovered photos of volcanic islands forming near Tonga and I realised that when you see an explosion, it fits those criteria. If you think about how the world has changed over the last 20 years, particularly since 9/11, our worldview has changed and it’s down to those images. But I like the erupting volcano images because there is no malice in them. And there is a sense of them being an incredible force but it’s not about destruction, it is actually about creation. I have that kind of element when I’m working on those. I have that very clearly in my mind.  Some artists make the same thing, over and over, and there are subtle differences but they choose a narrow field. I know why people do it, it’s being specific and homing in on one thing but it seems so strange to me that that idea remains prevalent. It seems to be such a modernist idea of the artist genius that has one vision which has to be revealed, particularly when people are so varied with what they do and their interests.

She Waited for a Lifetime, 2013, oil on acrylic panel, 16x20cm

AS: As well as the varied subject matter, there is a mixture of painting styles with the softer gestural ground and the graphic, hard line.

BB: One of the things I wanted to do with the new polyhedron paintings is just use one brush mark, wiped off, and then the polyhedron goes on top. They’re super delicate. You can scratch them with your nail, and they don’t work bigger than on really quite a small scale because you have to apply the paint so thin or it could peel off because it’s on Perspex.  A lot of the finish on these is a super mat varnish. It makes a huge difference. It brings everything together, particularly the blacks which are very carbon and dry. I use lamp black rather than ivory because it’s more consistent. And I like the completely flat finish.

Aether, 2012, oil on acrylic panel, 25x20cm

AS: How do you get the surface so smooth?

BB: I just use very soft square brushes and build up the layers. That sky has got about 10 or 15 layers on it, which is why I was getting frustrated and ended up doing 20 minute portraits. I realised recently that I just need a mix. It really helps. I like making and sometimes if I’ve got the energy or drive to do it, I can work on something slower. This is one of the first ones that I did. A real sci-fi moment. I like this one because it is all imagined. None of it is from anything. I take a lot of photos when I’m away. My family think they’re not very interesting but that’s the point. I find a landscape where I think something is missing and I put my polyhedron where the thing is missing. That’s what I’m often looking for, that gap. This is Scafell Pike, that one is in the Alps.

Sca-mouch, 2012, oil on acrylic panel, 25x30cm

AS: Are you a walker?

BB: Yes, my parents used to drag me to the Alps when I was younger. At the time, I hated it and now I love it. I go all the time. I also lived in Austria for a bit, which is part of the mountain thing. I lived in a castle on top of a mountain. That was nice.

Base Camp, 2013, oil on canvas over board, 20cm

Rowan Day, 2013, oil on canvas over board, 25cm



Benjamin Bridges' exhibition Pythagoras Adrift opens at dalla Rosa Gallery, 121 Clerkenwell Road, London EC1R 5BY on 14 March - 12 April 2014
Private View: Thursday, 13 March, 6.30-8.30pm

www.benjaminbridges.com
www.dallarosagallery.com

Mimei Thompson talks to Alli Sharma at Art First Projects, London W1

Dead Fly, 2013

Alli Sharma: We’re here at your exhibition, in front of the work. So what came first? I recognize some of the cave paintings?

Mimei Thompson: The two small caves came first, and this one of the fly. Most of the other works in the show are from the last six months. This larger cave is a new painting but the series has been ongoing for a couple of years. I was interested in the cave motif being connected to the unconscious, and the idea of it being a place where you could retreat to and come out changed. Or it could be the inside of a body.

AS: Tell me about your fascination with insects.

MT: I have a huge interest in insects. They’re easily overlooked, or looked at with disgust, but on the other hand, they’re incredible. One of my main fascinations with insects is their use of metamorphosis. I was thinking about the cocoon as being like a cave, a place of transformation. With some insect metamorphoses, the larva will liquefy within the cocoon, and reform from this liquid into the adult, and I think about this in relation to painting; there is potential in the substance of paint to become anything. So, in the works, there is this shifting, transformative matter that can morph into different forms and blur the boundaries between animal, vegetable and mineral.

AS: These marks here are literally swirling up to form a Green Man.

MT: I like these paintings together because you can see the suggestions of Green Man in Buddleia. I simplified the way I think about my practice recently. I identified a few things both conceptually, and to do with the technique, that have become fixed points. Working with a really smooth, white non-absorbent ground and working fast with mostly translucent paint. In painting, it can feel like there are so many possible things you can do. For a long time everything was very open, but in the last few years I feel like I have narrowed it down a bit.

Green Man, 2013

Buddleia, 2013

AS: I wanted to ask you about the surface because the paint looks iridescent, almost as if the support itself could be transparent.

MT: Getting the working surface right seems to be a lot of it. It must be non-absorbent. It’s a pre-primed, thin, fine grained cotton, primed a few times with layers of gesso, sanded and then I add a few layers of acrylic primer to stop the absorbency. I like the almost plastic feel. Then I use a lot of Liquin in the oil paint. It makes the shape hold. If I used oil it would spread. So it makes the oil function a bit more like acrylic.

Pavement Tree, 2013

AS: So that’s how you get that edge to the marks. The way you move the brush around to make organic shapes really suits the subject matter.

MT: I was interested in the natural shape brushmarks take, as if it they might have grown. There is a trace of something real in the world, like the surrealists used to do with their rubbings and different techniques, for instance, Max Ernst’s scraping technique he uses in his forests. My marks are then emphasized because I give them highlights and shadows, so the marks themselves, as well as being traces, might exist as objects within a represented space.

AS: Do you work on a painting all in one go?

MT: I work on it in one go and then go back, so there is one layer of working which is really fast and then I go back to it over a couple of months, working in a detailed way, and sometimes I knock it all back again, or sometimes it goes too far and I have to abandon the work. I want that fresh feeling, but then you can also see that its been worked into. So there is a contrast between something spontaneous and something studied and detailed. I like that contrast.

AS: I love your Asparagus, they always make me think of Manet.

MT: That was the starting point, and then I got the exhibition title Lunar Asparagus from the Max Ernst sculpture. I can’t remember if the title came before the paintings. Within the show, the asparagus paintings bring some calmness and simplicity to the hang, and they have a distilled version of the mark making.

Asparagus, 2013

AS: You seem to have also developed a signature palette. Does your use of transparent colours limit what you can use?

MT: I suppose the colours I am drawn to tend to be transparent; I really like Hookers Green and Paynes Grey. Then in the detailed working I do use opaque paint, too.

AS: Do you start with an image?

MT: I always start with an image, or collage of images. The weeds are from photos I’ve taken between my house and the studio. I was interested in looking at neglected corners, with the idea of finding something transformative in the everyday.

Weeds (Forecourt), 2013

AS: There is so much space generated in the paintings.

MT: The baroque marks need to have space around them and the very simple illusions of depth help.

AS: In contrast to say Andy Harper, who uses a similar technique but fills every inch of the canvas with marks.

MT: Yes, Harper uses a similar kind of mark making, but the work is about a different kind of sublime, I think. 

I’m often drawn to something a bit mundane. That’s why I like the fly. It undermines certain traditional notions of romance or nature. A sense of humour is also important to me, and I want my work to have a bit of air to breathe. It feels good at the moment, like a pause after many years of struggle and confusion.

AS: Maybe you just understand your own language and recognize that.

MT: I hope so, and I’m more relaxed about it. There are things I want to develop but I don’t feel the need to change everything. 


Mimei Thompson is exhibiting at Art First Projects, 21 Eastcastle St, London W1W 8DD
until 16 November 2013

Mimei Thompson website 

Kate Groobey talks with Nick Nowicki in her Southwark Studio, London

Bob’s Trajectory, oil on canvas, 150 x 120cm

NN: How much do you feel drawing is involved in your paintings?

KG: I don’t know at what point I consider myself to have moved from drawing to painting. I’ll start line drawings in a sketchbook, then I’ll add watercolour, and then I’ll chop them up and collage them. I also photocopy some of them and chop the photocopies up, muddle them around. Then I’ll draw back from the collages, so they all get churned up.

NN: What does the collage aspect help you with?

KG: It helps me to surprise myself. It becomes more an exploratory process where I’m searching out images. Drawing an image from scratch is not that interesting to me. When I start to chop the figure up it becomes more exciting and interesting. I’ll start off with a sketch of a naked character in a particular pose from pictures online, books, magazines or wherever. I remove the clothes and put some ears on, just to make it my character. When I was at college I found an old book of small, slightly pornographic cartoons I’d done in my early twenties. They were kind of a joke but two of the characters represented my boyfriend and me, and I started using those while I was at the Royal College. I’ve kept the cat ears, the naked figure, that weird naked cat character from back then, it’s me essentially, and that just engages me with the work.

NN: They’re always female. Chopping up a woman can be seen as psychotic. If it was a man doing it there would be immediate horror wouldn’t there?

KG: Which is why I turn it into my character and I put these cat ears on. It immediately makes it something other than human. They’re cartoonized because they’re a line drawing, which again removes them slightly. When you see a cartoon character cut in half or dropped from a great height it’s not that distressing is it? I think you can deal with icky horrible things when you’re doing it through cartoon and through humour and absurdity. After my operation last year to remove my appendix I got a bit freaked out about my health so I started going to the gym and you know I enjoy watching people bending and bulging and stretching their bodies. I’d never been in hospital before and when I was waiting to go into theatre and lying in bed I started thinking about really cutting the body open, and I did think about the fact I cut these bodies up as well. I guess it’s just echoing my interest in the human body.

NN: Has what you’ve been working on started to change since then?

KG: I think it’s to early to tell, as I’m still working on imagery I came up with prior to the operation, but it may be interesting to see, because autobiographical details that seep in can be traumatic ones and sometimes points of trauma are the impulse for the work.

NN: Is the cutting, collaging and drawing a way of building up to a painting?

KG: Yeah, it’s scaffolding towards a big painting. I tend to have it fairly worked out before I get to the painting stage, so at the painting stage it’s more copied. My palette is worked out by then. Because I paint so fluidly and loosely and quickly, if I’ve got the basics in place that frees me up rather than pins me down, and I can move through the painting faster.

NN: Is there a preferred time you like to work on a painting?

KG: I was thinking about that on the way here. One painting I’ve tried about seven or eight times on different canvases, but another painting worked first time. So some of them I give up, some of them I’ll keep trying and keep failing and keep trying again, possibly over a year or longer, it depends, but then even ones that I’ve given up on I’ll try again. I feel frustrated if I’ve got a good drawing I think should work as a painting, so it’s frustration that impels me to try again.

NN: Are they always on fresh canvas if you try again?

KG: No. I might try five, six, seven paintings on one canvas. So there’s another image that didn’t work under that painting.

NN: Is it all covered? Nothing’s showing through of it.

KG: No, under there you see the green and the mouth and that cloud up there. You can see the teeth and the feet and the dark blues coming through. I don’t think you’d know there was a different image underneath, but had I done that without the image underneath it wouldn’t have worked. The two have collided to kind of create that.

Massive Bob, oil on canvas, 150 x 120cm

NN: They’ve been genetically spliced.

KG: I like that. Which is what happens at the drawing level, because you get that cutting and rejoining of two parts, and so it’s also happening at the painting level, which I think needs to happen for them not to just be copies – I mean they need to be as spontaneous and as exciting at this scale.

NN: So you get that spontaneous drawing moment feeling.

KG: But I’ve changed my working method recently. If they haven’t worked I give up on them more easily and move onto a different image. Before, I was getting bogged down trying to make one image and one canvas work, and what I’m trying to come to terms with at the moment is the things that work do so beyond your control. So as soon as you think ‘Ah that worked, I’ll just be able to do that again!’ it doesn’t work like that. You’re always in that really precarious place, having no control. So I’m trying to let go, which I find quite difficult but that’s the way it is I guess. It feels like I’m stabbing around in the dark a lot of the time. You just have to accept it’s a one in ten or one in twenty occurrence. I guess really it’s a war of attrition, my new method.

NN: What does that mean?

KG: Well, that most of them will fail. Rather than fiddling with one painting trying to make it work, the more that fail, I might have twenty goes and one might work. So it’s a numbers thing. I’ve always had the same problem. In Jujitsu the idea is when you’re fighting if you try something and it doesn’t work on your opponent there’s no point trying to make that one thing work. You’ve got to quickly switch and do something else to take them by surprise, because they’re not just going to stand there while you try and throw them on the floor in this one movement. You’ve got to change your tactics. So thinking like that in terms of painting, rather than labouring away at making one thing work I’m trying to switch more quickly. Every day I’m coming in and painting a different image.

NN: The scale has gone smaller, more intimate, hasn’t it?

KG: They’re not intimate paintings I suppose, because of the scale, but they’re coming from very small, intimate, quick hand to paper drawings, which I like. David Rayson said they’re big paintings but they look smaller than they are.

NN: What makes you want to do them large rather than stick with what is literally an intimate size?

KG: I guess it’s the physicality. I wouldn’t say I’m a sporty person - I’m going back to autobiography here - but I’ve always done quite a lot of sports. So I think physicality is quite important to me and it’s perhaps why I stick with the figure as the base for the work. At a large scale it allows me to bring that physicality into the work.

NN: How do you paint them?

KG: They’re painted on the floor so it’s quite a physical job to lean over and actually make the things.

NN: It makes it like drawing again if you’re on a horizontal surface.

KG: Yeah, and because I start with watercolour, in order to recreate in oil what happens with watercolour I make the paint quite turps-heavy and you can’t do that with it upright because it just drips. That process of translation from watercolour to oil only really works for me flat. For ages I was trying to do them upright and then suddenly I did them on the floor and it was like ‘Yes!’

NN: You’re actually in those contorted positions when making them. 

KG: Yeah, so there’s this weird echoing of the imagery in the making.

NN: I can’t help but link it back to the very beginning when they were the little drawings ...

KG: ... of the cat woman. I find those little connections pleasurable.

NN: The figures are almost like a decorative motif. They stop being a figure and they are a figure. They’re in-between.

KG: The figure dissolves into design and motif.

NN: It could be a tail or it could be a penis, that’s recurring quite a lot. Is that because of the collage process?

KG: Yeah. I tend to work in series. With my new studio I’ve got a bit more space so I can put them all out. I like the fact that you can see these motifs occurring, so the mouth there become the piano keys here. They all relate to each other because these motifs have been cut up and rearranged. I tend to think of these paintings together in my mind. This new studio’s quite good for being able to see them as a whole series.

NN: It just makes it so intense. You’re making a statement having them that way, that they are all interlinked.

KG: I’m spelling it out.

NN: It makes the being in the paintings more real to me. It becomes a physical thing because I can see the changes. It hasn’t just occurred in one piece of work and that’s it, it’s a real thing that’s changed. So it’s like seeing it in different seasons.

KG: I think it’s the same for me, like a story. I like that idea of bringing these characters to life.

NN: But they’re slippery. You still can’t really see them exactly or figure out what they are. They haven’t cheery faces or anything.

KG: No, but the fact that they’re slippery, perhaps that helps to bring them to life. In real life things are slippery I think.

NN: And then also there’s the background which could be representational of tiling and a laboratory space, or could be again an abstract formal thing of crosses. That recurs a lot in everything from the drawings onwards.

KG: That cropped up in my first series, The Cutting Mat series, and I kept it because it’s a useful device and...

NN: ... it’s an echo of the cutting mat as in collage. I’m sorry. That kind of limits it doesn’t it? If I start saying ‘That means that and that means that.’

KG: It doesn’t. It’s a continuation, as it all is. Elements of the figures have come from the drawings from The Cutting Mat, so there is a continuation with some of the motifs and imagery. I took one or two of those drawings and I kept collaging and added new elements, like Bobs Trajectory is the same with the arm bending over as one of my first series ones. And then that arm and those bulbous round things were carried over, so there’s quite a few things that have been taken forward, but that’s how I work, things get recycled.

Half Lord of the Fishes, oil on canvas, 150 x 130cm

NN: And new things pop in?

KG: Yeah, so this thing, well I don’t often say this …

NN: … the trumpety thing …

KG: ... it was a saxophone from when I went on a residency in Italy and I became friends with a saxophonist. I did a sketch of that, and then brought it in as a new element, but it’s not interesting to me to see a saxophone. That’s why it gets chopped up - the same as with the human body, not that interesting - but once you start to chop it all up and mix it around I stop thinking of it as a saxophone. I think of Bob’s Trajectory as being a mad chef in a kitchen and I think of that as being a knife, and that’s not a saxophone anymore, it’s a plate or something. I enjoy bending my imagination with them, but often there’s an autobiographical moment that’s a trigger for the work and then it moves on from there, but I think having that moment – that’s what engages me initially with the work and with the imagery.

NN: How important is it that the viewer picks up on the personal and autobiographical?

KG: Oh its not and I usually wouldn’t mention it. That’s a kind of insight.

Hopefully the work is convincing and the viewer is compelled or won over by it for reasons they can’t put their finger on. It’s as open for me as for a viewer. There’s no one interpretation that’s decisive. Everyone has their own take on it, me included, and often the artist’s opinion about their work is the dullest.

NN: The titles of the work also leave it open.

KG: Purposefully. Quite often the titles I’ve picked from books I’m reading. So they’re notes to self really. Kind of private thoughts I suppose on how I view the work.

NN: Yeah, I think that’s a nice way of putting it. It returns to the idea of looking in the sketchbook and being intimate and you come across a little note in a corner like Bob.

KG: Also Bob in Black Adder. They had that character and she was called Kate and they dressed her up as a boy and called her Bob. That’s a private joke to myself.

NN: You know, that’s funny, because I was thinking how your figures start off as women, but by the end they sort of look more like men.

KG: Sometimes men, sometimes animals. Maybe its because they’re standing with their legs far apart in unfeminine poses. The reclining nude, the demure female nude. They’re not that. Because they’re bending, stretching, they look more active. I think that’s why. Massive Bob reminds me of Elvis Presley in his later years in his white all-in-one outfit with the collar up ...

NN: ... and the sideburns.

KG: And had he got a bit overweight at that stage? I was a big Presley fan when I was young. But really Massive Bob and Bob’s Trajectory are connected to pendulums, the bob’s trajectory is the swing of the pendulum, and a massive bob is the weight that swings on a stick to make up a pendulum, maybe a clock pendulum, so in a grandfather clock it's the massive bob swinging to and fro that's making the thing tick tock. That whole series had time as a title theme. Sometimes I’ll google something and find titles that way.

NN: What made you google time?

KG: One of the images looked like a juggler and I googled juggler and one of the juggling moves was called Pendulum and at that point I looked up pendulum. So it was stumbled upon. Again my titles happen a bit like my collaging, they’re exploratory ...

NN: ... like a collage of perceptions or thought.

KG: I like that, and I think that’s how my brain works.

Kate Groobey is currently exhibiting at Creekside Open 2013 Part 1, selected by Paul Noble, APT Gallery, Deptford until 26 May 2013,  Thurs-Sun, 12 noon-5pm