‘It's torture!' Turner-winning artist Richard Wright on obliterating his painstaking works

The Guardian

09-04-2025

There's a kerfuffle in the Camden Art Centre. Painter Richard Wright's exhibition is opening soon and time is not on their side. Ten people are on the landing off which the galleries open. Huge, elaborate leaded glazed panels have just arrived, the metallic sections forming intricate geometric designs, and they need installing. It is a relatively new departure for Wright, teaming with artisans to work in glass. These panels need to be set precisely to hover just below the roof lanterns, so that light will flood through them and throw a dance of pattern and shape on the walls and floors.
Wright – intense, immensely tall, rapidly and quietly spoken – lets me know by his wry air of forbearance that he wishes they would just do it, and then the rest of the show can go up. In the galleries to either side are books laid on tables, some of them partially drawn or painted over, 'illuminated' as he says, borrowing the word used of medieval manuscripts. On the walls there are many drawings and paintings. Some are made by dipping an old-fashioned cartographer's pen in size (a kind of adhesive) before burnishing the whole surface with gold leaf: the gold sticks to the marks made by the pen, and the rest is shaken away so that a shimmering, fugitive drawing remains. In the main, vaulted gallery, scaffolding climbs up one wall and four people are arrayed on it in perfect symmetry, two below, two above, painting black stars, diamonds, triangles and other shapes into a great design up its back wall. The painters are Wright's daughter and brother and two longtime assistants. He himself has just clambered down to talk to me, his fingers dotted with disobedient black acrylic.
Since 2009, when he won the Turner prize, Wright has been chiefly known as the artist who makes incredibly labour-intensive wall paintings that are either painted over at the end of an exhibition or left to fade at their own pace. He has painted a ceiling at the Queen's House in Greenwich, a grand stairwell at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art in Edinburgh and a folly at Lismore Castle in Ireland. He has also, most remarkably, painted 47,000 stars on the ceiling of the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, a response to the building's architecture and its decorative motifs. Even allowing for the fact that he has assistants to help, I wonder how this extreme repetition must feel psychologically. 'Yes, it is torture,' he says. 'You ask yourself, 'Why are you doing this?' I suppose the answer would be, 'Because it's the only way that it can be done.''
Wright – who, until a fairly recent move to Norfolk, lived in Glasgow for many years – trained in Edinburgh in the late 1970s and early 80s. It was a weird time to be doing painting, and remained so for several decades: it was only about 10 years ago that painting stopped regularly being declared dead. 'Being someone who's pretty passionate about painting, it was hard,' he says. 'Hard to be like, 'Shit, I'm playing the banjo, but everyone else is playing the guitar.'' He moved to Amsterdam and spent several years making what he calls 'pretty awful painting'. And then, in 1988 he stopped, abandoned painting altogether. 'That sounds sort of dramatic,' he says. 'I mean, it was obstacles of life, really: relationship breakdown, studio loss, things that happened that made it very difficult to continue. And also, I suppose I became disheartened; disheartened by painting one bad painting on top of another.'
He decided to train as a sign writer. He also moved to Glasgow. Sign writing proved a turning point, a way of seeing everything differently. The kind of painting he had trained in was all about the artist's touch. But sign painting meant using paint 'in a deadpan way'. The idea was to deliver the paint 'almost the way it looks in the tin. To put one thing on top of another, that's it.' He stripped things back to basics. No more figuration. Painting became doing one thing – putting red paint on a canvas, say. In the early 1990s, in Glasgow, he also started wall painting. His scene back then included artists such as Douglas Gordon, and others who had come out of Glasgow School of Art's environmental sculpture programme, who were thinking about their art as a specific response to places and contexts. He was finding a groove.
Wright's conversation is peppered with references to art history. He thinks and reads deeply. There was a period between 2008 and 2011 when he painted 1,000 circles, one a day. Painting the letter O had been a big part of his sign-writing training. There is a story in Vasari's Lives of the Artists, that Wright talks about, in which the writer describes Giotto's brilliance by way of his ability to draw a perfect circle. 'This is enough and more than enough,' Giotto was supposed to have said. 'I like the idea of it because it is a fact,' Wright says. 'A circle is not a horse's head or a hand or an eye, something of which you could say it was well done but Michelangelo's was a bit better. All you can say is: this is a circle. It's a perfect circle. I like the idea of the painting having a kind of factualness, of being somewhere between being a sign and a thing.'
It is not just the fact of the circle, though, it is the fact of making the circle. 'I don't want to tell people how to live their lives,' he says, 'but I do think everyone should start their day by doing a drawing.' But not everyone has the confidence, or the facility, I say, thinking guiltily of my drawing-free life. 'But that's sort of a misunderstanding what drawing is,' he counters. 'All it is is looking.' He thinks, he says, of drawing as a kind of impulse, that might be as simple as your desire to move your pepperpot from one spot on the table to another. He tells a story that American artist John Baldessari told in an artwork. 'He describes driving around in LA with his pencil rolling backwards and forwards on his dashboard. One day, he decided to take the pencil out of his car and sharpen it. And he knew that that had something to do with art. And I think that's what I'm getting at. For some reason he needed to sharpen the pencil. It made the world feel close to him somehow. It made the world feel more complete.' I sharpened my pencils yesterday, I tell Wright. 'And did it feel good?' he asks. I say that it did, but I intended to use them for writing, not drawing. Though I would love to be the person who drew every morning. 'But it's not that, is it?' he says. 'It's a way of feeling about things.'
To try to make me understand, he tells me a story about where it all came from, his need to paint. 'That's where it started for me: when I saw a Piero della Francesca. And I wanted one. I wanted one like that: and I could go home and make one. I had the impulse and desire to feel that thing.' I think, I tell him, that is why he is a painter and I am not: being moved by a Piero does not involve, for me, the desire to make one. 'OK, that's true, and I agree with you,' he says. 'I suppose what I'm getting at is that when you say you're moved by a Piero della Francesca, you are experiencing the joy of the material somehow being transformed, the surface of reality somehow dispersing. And that you're somehow between heaven and Earth.' He laughs, perhaps to dispel the earnest intensity of the thought, but no, I am with him. We walk through to the large gallery where his colleagues are busy on the scaffold. He picks up a bottle of carbon black acrylic. His wall painting, he says, 'is also a certain quantity of this. Probably not even this much. There's enough paint in here for a lifetime of ideas.'
Richard Wright is at Camden Art Centre, London, from 16 April until 22 June