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

Jake Clark talks with Nick Nowicki in his Camberwell studio.

NN: Have you specifically referenced imagery to get a particular palette?

JC: I go to seaside towns in England, and take pictures. There are certain colours I’m after which are to do with being by the sea. They’re more faded because of the light and salts, and also slightly decayed and rusting. I bring the photos into the studio and then into the paintings. So I combine images from different sources, posts from Margate and a house from Cornwall.

NN: Do you ever do any painting in situ?

JC: Never, but sometimes the photographs I take don’t have the colours I want and I realized by painting the colours I want onto the photographs I can trick myself and make a painting from that. A drawing or painting from a place, wouldn’t be the same as the photograph. It’s got all the tone and the structure, the realism that I can then use. Painting photographs has been a big thing for me.

NN: You could still paint over a painting that you’d done on location.

JC: I think it’s to do with the fact a machine has made this thing and it's concrete – it's there. And you know the source material actually exists. And it’s the quality, the tonal thing. It’s always about the harsh light. The strong shadows make the light even more obvious. Edward Hopper often used a diagonal shadow moving across to suggest the idea of time passing, a clock moving round.

NN: Is the Lino usually around the edges and at the corners of your paintings?

JC: It goes to the painting edge, nearest the wall, so you become more aware of it, as well as relate it to domesticity. When I’m painting, the canvas is on the floor, so I’m aware the Lino is where it might have been originally. Lino has a history. People have walked on it for fifty years. It's been in a flat or kitchen and when it becomes part of a painting it gets thrown into a different scale. There’s an intense, domestic pattern and then a tiny figure next to it.

NN: What do you think is the result of that contrast of scale?

JC: Playing with scale is to do with confusion and fragmentation. If you’re hot and hung over and look up at a hotel and then down at your flip flops and up again, that jump of scale is to do with the way your eye and mind work in that sort of experience.

NN: Every subject in your work is bathed in sunlight.

JC: Harsh light, strong shadows, and with the figures I’m trying to get the idea of everything vibrating, everything shaking, with the denseness of people and the heat, all moving together.

NN: It’s not the colours doing that, because your palette is muted and grungy. You’re getting the sense of this more from how it’s been combined.

JC: Those juxtapositions are what I’m trying to do with the Lino, that idea of something ridiculous, that counters the setting, undermines whatever you’re representing and plays with and against that. Sometimes it can suggest architecture but it’ll always be a ridiculous pattern. The word ridiculous is important.

NN: Why’s that?

JC: I like ridiculousness as a thing in life, contradiction, counteracting something, laughing at something, revelling in melancholy. I find it positive. It’s not about celebrating the past. It’s about revelry in the misery of it. I like going to Southend because it’s miserable, but exciting as well. It’s charged and feels very much on the edge. You get the train to Great Yarmouth and it’s the last stop, and there’s all this flat land and it’s quite nondescript and then you get to this full-on resort on the edge of Norfolk and suddenly it’s really exciting. Someone asked me about Martin Parr – is he mocking the people that eat ice creams in New Brighton? But I like to hang out in those places. The sea erodes as well. All these bungalows have painted gables, but they’re faded by the sun and rusted by the sea salt. It speeds up the aging, an anti-polished, anti-newness. Shabbiness is interesting. Maybe paint is like that. It’s shabby. I’m interested in the shabbiness it can capture. The medium is quite dirty. This is my palette.

JC: That cup sums up why I want to paint these subjects and not just leave them as a photograph. After the Rubbernecking show at Transition, LondonPainting did a blog about it and someone asked, ‘Was gestural painting the right sort of language for this sort of subject matter?’ I was interested in that comment, because for me it is important that they are paintings, gestural, layered and visceral. I think they were saying that someone like David Rayson or George Shaw, paint houses blandly and it’s about emptiness and photographic stillness. I’m interested in the emotional impact and how the house has history and all this stuff has gone on in it. Although it might be empty now, the paint rejuvenates all that, and I thought why couldn’t my house be painterly? Why couldn’t something that’s meant to be quite bland, still, flat and static be rejuvenated? By painting a house like this, it's trying to access all that emotional memory of people that lived there in the past – or also the idea of the perception, as I’m running round with a camera on a hot day and it’s all shifting about - what it's like to be there.

NN: A brushstroke seems like a simple thing, but it’s loaded with the humanity of doing it. But I can see what you mean about being in a suburban place and even if there’s no one about, it never feels completely still, because of the awareness there might be people inside going about their own private lives, and the sense of people that have been there in the past.

JC: Also you’re moving around it. A lot of these houses have been built for the car.

These suburban places can’t exist without the car. This is not a townhouse, it’s not a Georgian house in Islington, it’s an isolated house in a cul-de-sac where the car is how you get to it, and so most people see them from a car anyway.

NN: I wonder if there’s any other sort of ways in which the presence of an abstract pattern works that we haven’t got to yet.

JC: The punk thing of rejecting convention and wanting something annoying, disrupting the picture, something that shouldn’t be there, that most people think of as ugly, an ugly/beautiful thing. Most lino has a disgusting pattern. There’s been time enough for it to become aesthetic again, but at the time it would be seen as naff and a lot of people still see it as ugly. The painting shouldn’t work because often a quarter of it is a pattern, but for me the challenge is in trying to find the image that will fit with that domineering, nasty pattern. It might get buried slightly but its always going to be there, part of the painting. As the Lino is the first thing I glue down, it’s like an anchor to the painting that I’m always referring back to and fighting against, and it’s important to me to have that kind of tension, rather than just the white canvas. Most important is the atmosphere that comes through. The Lino starts that journey of suggesting the atmosphere I’m trying to get by being from those places, from that period of history. Also the Lino or the posts become part of that trippy perception of a place and how, if you look at the sun and then you look back at something, you get all these funny prismatic things going on, sort of flashing like a migraine. The patterns function that way too, like a vision thing.

NN: I’m fascinated by the multicoloured fence. Despite all the gestural colours that interweave, they’re still related to the colours you might expect the house to be, but not the fence.

JC: I see the fence as a cartoon language. The Lino is a cartoon language, too. It’s got an outline, bright and comical. I did a number of house paintings with these egg shapes and the fence is a continuation of that, cartoony and sharp. Again, something you wouldn’t normally want to be there, like the Lino, a funky kind of thing that breaks it up. This summer at Latitude festival I did an art installation of paintings. Because I had to hang paintings in a tree, I did something quite loud and different from what I’ve been doing.

NN: You’ve taken the golf-ball type things that you painted in the past and made them huge and they’re no longer tied to reality. The golf balls were quite explainable, but these are more like the buds of a tree, or every ball that’s ever been thrown and there’s been a time warp and they’ve all appeared at once.

JC: I like that. These are signs I painted pointing to things you couldn’t do, obviously, being a festival. You couldn’t actually go there.

NN: And this time you’ve painted a scaled up representation of the Lino?

JC: Yeah, these objects are quite big. If the Lino was stuck on that, it wouldn’t work, so I’ve blown it up. I imagined a campsite with pine trees, a resort no-one used anymore that I stumbled across, with derelict buildings, fences and funny bits of architecture which had been overgrown and left –a playground, a swing, a concrete picnic table, close ups of this fantasy setting triggered by seeing pictures of the wood and thinking what could have been there. The memories were from childhood – I was brought up in Majorca. I suppose it was a bit of a joke, because, going back to ridiculousness, I thought about festivals and music and camping and what people are there for, and I threw this concrete ugly resort in the middle of it all via painting just to annoy people.

I liked the idea of people going, ‘Oh god, this is a bit ugly.’ But for me, it’s not ugly. I was contradicting what was there. I wanted to have people take their pictures in front of it, as though it really was a resort sign. The paintings had to be quite loud to work in that environment, which was all very dark and woody. Kitsch ugliness - taking Majorca to Suffolk.

www.jake-clark.co.uk

David Harrison in conversation with Nick Nowicki at his studio in Angel, N1.

DH: This is the latest painting I’ve finished.

NN: Someone is peeping out of the trees, or something.

DH: It’s not made clear what it is. It’s the unknown watching. I’m thinking of calling it They’re Watching or They Watch or Do Property Developers Dream Of Electric Trees? I love the idea that we’re being watched all the time by nature. There are probably spiders and insects or mice sitting here now watching us. Man thinks it’s getting one over on nature, but in his darkest dreams nature can come back to get him.

NN: How do you approach composition when making paintings?

DH: I never really do. I just go for the picture and it seems to work its own composition out. I like to play with composition, take risks, put things where they shouldn’t be and make them work. I always like to put the dominant figure, like the owl, off-centre and uncomfortable. But after doing that I have to make it so your eye then travels round the painting to what the centre of focus is pushing you towards. So I painted the white zigzag in the foreground to lead your eye to where the owl is focused, which is on the running man and, in doing so, you see and feel the trees, the hare, the businessman, the watcher, the moon, and it all connects. So I think that’s how you work out composition.

NN: Is it on board?

DH: It’s on wood. Most of my paintings are on wood.

NN: How does the surface affect what you’re doing?

DH: I love the surface. I love the wood grain coming through. I love little holes. In fact, that’s how the yellow eyes in the trees came about, because there’s a puncture-hole from a nail. I have to prepare the wood, because it can warp badly, so I hammer in stretchers and cross bars to the back. Then I prime it with clear glue so bits of the wood come through, and then, when I’m painting, it guides me where I think, ‘that’s looking like part of the sky so I might leave that.’

NN: The people in your paintings seem to be imbued with magical properties.

DH: Nature is magical and we are part of nature so we’re part of that magic and we shouldn’t step out of that otherwise it’s working against what we are. No-one really knows what we are anyway. Things happen in nature that are unexplained and that’s magic. If people say magic doesn’t exist they should go into a meadow and sit there for an hour and see what happens. There’s always something else in the air. You can actually see atmosphere. Playing with perspective helps create that atmosphere in my work. There’s no such thing as a perfect perspective because everything moves, your eyes don’t just sit and look. We’re created with an eye that’s not a machine, it’s an organic moving object and we’re floating through space and time with nature.

NN: You’ve warped the perspective in this one. Is it new?

DH: It’s fairly new. I’m not quite sure if I’ve finished it. It’s called The Living and the Dead. It doesn’t tell you what’s the living and what’s the dead. You have to make your own mind up about it. This is an 18^th Century Macaroni. They were the fashionable young men of the day and dressed, like the Renaissance paintings they saw, in beautiful velvets and frills. They used to wear powdered wigs that were three feet high.

They had an attitude – they never wore watches because they could do what they wanted, they weren’t beholden to anyone and didn’t have to be anywhere. They were rich and just walked around in the latest fashions; and they shocked their parents apparently. The Macaroni could be a ghost, and the fox could be the go-between two worlds where nature sees all. Foxes are like ghosts around the street. You see them and then they disappear before your eyes. They sit and wait and look fantastic and then every time I get my camera out, they’re gone. How do they go? This is a street. Where have they gone? The foreground figure is the fashionable man of today, an image of threat. He’s almost a ghost. The green colour is mostly compositional. I wanted it to fight with the other colours. So he’s not got his true colours on. Is that an ectoplasm colour? Is he living or is he a ghost?

NN: I like the wobbly wall.

DH: I drew that in first. I’ve been doing sketches of walls. I like the way brick work moves and it still keeps its geometry but you can put an organic shape in as well. What I might do is quieten it all down by putting a wash over it. Victoria Miro came and said, ‘Don’t touch it; leave it as it is.’ Sometimes, I’m blinded by what I’m working on. This was a quiet picture and it became garish to me; I get confused by the two worlds and two states of mind. I worry about changing states of mind rapidly. I’ll take it down and leave it on its own and look at it by itself.

NN: Is hanging them in this arrangement informative?

DH: No it doesn’t help. I need to put them in my viewing space just by themselves.

Sometimes I might take a week to paint a picture, then leave it for a week, paint some more, work on something else while I leave it up there for six months, and in another few days finish it. I suppose the leaving time is part of the process of painting. I’m still painting that picture even if it’s on the wall for six months so therefore the mental process is part of the work. Some of them are put away for a couple of years and then I get them out again and finish them. I always try to make something of what’s there. I never like to write something off completely. It’s wasting too much time. The older you get the more aware you are of wasting time. You just feel you haven’t achieved, so you’ve got to make this kind of real statement about yourself.

The Gate is another one I don’t think I’ve finished; I was wondering whether to have the hares white. It’s a landscape painting of a real place, but how I think it should be. I took photos of the trees, copied from the photographs and then put them away and thought about how I felt when I saw the actual trees. Sometimes you look at the photograph and it doesn’t look like the tree you saw. It’s best to get the essence of a tree rather than the look of it, because everyone sees it differently. At first I thought the gate was standing on its own, but when I looked closely there was a fence of very thin wires, which didn’t come out in the snapshot so I didn’t put them in. The gate becomes this pointless object, but it looks beautiful. It’s the idea of no boundaries.

NN: Do you listen to music when you’re painting?

DH: Music is a strong influence because you go with the mood of it. When I was painting The Mystic Spiral I was playing Gong – a very old hippy band I’ve always followed since I first saw them in 1970 in concert. The painting is about when I was in a medieval village in Somerset. It was twilight and very creepy and it was Halloween. And I got lost. I’m walking down the street feeling spooky, but enjoying it immensely, and I pass a tower, which was known for devil worship, and then bam in the middle of the village is this blood red Jaguar. It looked so weirdly out of place, but in place. And the registration number is S666FUN. I was like, ‘I don’t believe this!’ I photographed it so people knew I wasn’t lying. I waited for someone to come – I wanted to know who owned this car – I wanted some tall, dark stranger to come out and say, ‘Get in, you’re going to be sacrificed!’ but nothing happened. That’s Mikhail Bulgakov sitting in the car. I got a picture of him from the internet – film star looks, very gaunt and pale. He wrote a novel called The Master and Margarita, which has been a big influence on my work. It’s a book about seeing the dark side - a comment on the politics in Russia in the 1930s. Stalin was killing people, only in the book it’s the devil making people disappear, but, because of communism, no one is allowed to believe in the supernatural.

And then, of course, I needed a focus of where the car’s going to go, so I put the hare in to balance the picture. The hare is a sign, when it runs down the middle of a road, which it never does usually, that disaster is going to happen. The cat formed in the paint washes and so I painted it in. Whether I was looking for it, or not, I don’t know. I wanted to put something in that didn’t make sense, so I started to do that colourful little display – Hollywood-looking ghosts as they appear – and I wrote 666 in a shadowy form so you couldn’t see it, and then as I was doing it I heard this mystic voice at the end of Gong’s new album saying ‘Welcome to the mystic spiral’ and I said, ‘Oh that’s perfect, thank you! That looks like a spiral, I’ll join them together’ and I made a spiral.

David Harrison will be showing in the forthcoming portrait show at the Victoria Miro Gallery, London N1, 22 June - 30 July 2010.

'David Harrison' by Alistair Robinson is published by Philip Wilson Publishers.

A limited edition print, 'City Gent', to accompany the book, is also available.

www.poodle666.com

Donald Urquhart in conversation with Nick Nowicki at his exhibition, 'Bi', Maureen Paley and Herald St, London, E2

NN: Do you favour a particular type of sketchbook?

DU: I always use A3… is it Daler? There’s something really familiar about that brand because I remember using it at school. I always used black ink and brush; I haven’t really changed.

NN: Is it Chinese ink?

DU: It’s Indian ink. Chinese ink comes out matt. Indian ink has a shine that I like. The thing with using ink is it’s got to be flat. You can’t have it on a wall or it’ll all run down and I could only really go as far as my arm would reach. I find an A3 sketchbook on my lap the best way to draw.

NN: ‘Why Bother’ is acrylic on canvas.

DU: And basically I can bang nails into that and paint it flat on the wall. It could be stretched afterwards but I quite like these bolt-things, the grommets, so you can stretch it on the wall.

NN: You incorporate text with images, which can be difficult. How did you arrive at that?

DU: I don’t know. I used to write for magazines. I used to be a journalist so I find writing comes really naturally and then drawing the words that I write is just an extension of that.

NN: Does it look like your handwriting?

DU: It’s very similar. It’s a bit tidier than my handwriting.

NN: When an image is made bigger, it can look contrived. It’s not the easiest thing to do.

DU: People ask if my wall drawings are laser-cut transfer. But why draw a picture and get a laser-cut transfer of it when you can just go to the wall and draw it by hand? You’ve just got to concentrate. I use a tiny brush, 0 or 0/3, to get the outline really sharp and then fill it in with a larger brush. Usually I can’t be bothered getting off the ladder and I do it all with a little brush. I swear a lot when I’m doing it.

NN: You’ve put in some…they look like school images, I’m not sure.

DU: Oh the self portraits. I think when you look at old pictures of yourself it doesn’t actually look like you. You recognize yourself, but you’re remembering yourself, aren’t you? You’re not really seeing yourself. You wonder is it really a picture of you. Sometimes I see old pictures and I don’t see myself at all.

NN: So what made you think of using them this time round?

DU: I wanted to do portraits of people I know, like my family and friends and then I decided to start with myself, do a few self-portraits and see where that takes me. So I dug out old photos. I couldn’t face sitting in front of a mirror and actually doing a picture of me now. That one I’ll get round to one day.

NN: That’s you as a moody youth. That’s definitely not a school pic.

DU: No, that’s when I’d have been about 22, a moody, hung-over youth.

NN: You look like Elvis, or maybe even Morrissey.

DU: It is a bit Elvis-y that one. Someone else said that. The chin’s too pointy to be Morrissey.

NN: How do you come up with the titles for your drawings?

DU: The titles for all these Bette Davis ones are quotes from Thackeray’s Vanity Fair. I’ve just illustrated the whole book. There are, I think, 41 drawings and they all relate to specific lines. The book doesn’t really tell you her age at the end, but I thought to make the character, Becky Sharp, get more and more warped and wasted. I thought I would have her go from 16 right up to 70 years old.

NN: You’ve invented a world where Bette Davis is playing her?

DU: Yeah and ages accordingly.

NN: And where did you get all the images of Bette from?

DU: Oh my god. Well I pause-framed films and then I got books with loads of pictures of her and then I looked her up on the internet. But it was strange, I had to start with an image of Bette Davis, maybe in a fur coat holding a cigarette and then change her into a slightly period Becky Sharp. It’s meant to be set in the Napoleonic wars and I don’t think she smoked. It doesn’t mention smoking in the book. I altered them all and I made a motif of bows, on her hair and clothing.

NN: Have you mixed them up in the show and ignored the narrative aspect?

DU: Yes, I’m really just showing images. There are 52 images in the whole show, so I put them in two groups of 26. I wanted the show to look a bit like a schoolroom, with instructional diagrams, a really sick school. You couldn’t teach a child using a Joan Crawford alphabet. I thought I’d make it formal, with pictures of people from history, and you might get a poem up on the wall. That’s in my mind. What other people see - I don’t know if they’re going to get any of that

NN: What do you think is the difference between the photocopies and the hand-drawn pieces?

DU: I feel a bit of liberation seeing things blown up large and I’ve always used photocopies. I could have put these up as silk-screened prints in a frame but I think there’s something more relaxed about photocopies. I mean, I’m showing my drawings – it’s not like I’m having a sale of luxury goods. It’s nice to show the originals but I think a photocopy is quite unpretentious.

NN: With those jokes, not jokes exactly but, is it like making notes and it all comes together in that moment as you get the idea?

DU: If I come across a funny idea in my mind, something that I think’s quite witty and has humour, I write it down or make a text message on my phone so that I remember it and then, when it comes to doing drawings, I look at these ridiculous notions that I’ve had and pick the ones that…

NN: …still make you laugh?

DU: Still make me laugh or that I think are worth putting in an image. These are like something from a Ladybird book, a Learn-To-Read book. They’re bittersweet. You wouldn’t tell a child that ‘in autumn everything must die’. You’d have ‘in autumn we dance in the leaves’.

NN: And they’d be more colourful.

DU: Yeah, they wouldn’t be black, that’s for sure.




‘Bi’ is at Maureen Paley and Herald St, London E2 until 23 May 2010.

www.maureenpaley.com and www.heraldst.com

Donald Urquhart's work will be included in ‘Newspeak: British Art Now, Part I’ at The Saatchi Gallery, London SW3, 2 June - 17 October 2010.

The new edition of Thackeray’s ‘Vanity Fair' featuring Donald’s illustrations will be published by Four Corners Books in September.

Donald Urquhart will be showing at Galleria S.A.L.E.S., Rome, in the autumn.

www.galleriasales.it

Images courtesy of Maureen Paley, London, with thanks to Patrick Shier.