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The Guardian
09-04-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
‘It's torture!' Turner-winning artist Richard Wright on obliterating his painstaking works
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
The Guardian
23-03-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Ian Hamilton Finlay review – the visionary Scottish poet-artist's mind in closeup
Star/Steer is a masterpiece from 1968 by the Scottish artist Ian Hamilton Finlay (1925-2006). What you see can be simply described. The word 'star' appears a dozen times, screenprinted in silver on deep grey. They graduate down the page in a swaying column. Right at the bottom is a 13th word, 'steer', as if tethering – or guided by – all these descending stars. Each star is like an instance of itself, glimmering out of a fog, and the winding pattern irresistibly evokes starlight on rippling water. You look up to the stars, and down to the invisible boat summoned by that noun-verb 'steer'. Which star to follow, how to navigate at sea, what the night skies can hold: the work is a visualisation, a poem and a prayer. Finlay achieves all these sublime effects purely through the subtle arrangement of two words against two colours. His is an art of distillation, juxtaposition, thrift and contemplation. A poet before he became a concrete poet, a sculptor who became an 'avant gardener', as he put it, of that fabled landscape known as Little Sparta in the Pentland Hills beyond Edinburgh, Finlay understood as few other artists the emotional power of letters cutting into form, shape and colour. You sense it over and again in this wonderful centenary commemoration at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art. It's there in the blue and white screenprint Evening Sail, which consists of the words 'Evening Will Come They Will Sew the Blue Sail' running in classical script down a long deep blue banner, as if to suggest both the sail and the mariners' shrouds sewn in antiquity from such sails at the end of the day. It's there in the scarlet invectives, so exquisitely lettered on his behalf by Nicholas Sloan, against the government quangos Finlay despised: Pereant Tyranni Nummari (Let Perish the Money Tyrants). And it runs through this show, as through his Pentlands garden, incised in all kinds of stone. A tank is delicately inserted into the pastoral relief Et in Arcadia Ego, embodying Virgil's ringing memento mori, carved in the marble below. A bird table for Finlay's garden doubles as a miniature aircraft carrier (imagine the birds landing and taking off), the letter E incised into its deck, a reference to the USS Enterprise, the longest nuclear-powered carrier in the world. One gallery is filled with haunting photographs of Finlay's artists' signatures at Little Sparta, including his tribute to Albrecht Dürer. Above a stand of tall grass resembling Dürer's own Great Piece of Turf, hangs his famous AD monogram incised in stone – as if Dürer had himself signed nature. Finlay selects the mot juste with a poet's precision. Take a work such as Wave Rock from 1966. The word 'wave' runs back and forth, horizontally, up against a vertical heap of the word 'rock'. The waves meet, depart, always unpredictable in their encounter with the rocks. Look closer, and the words 'wreak' and 'wreck' become discernible in the collision of letters. And all these words are etched on a sheet of sandblasted glass propped up in a bit of driftwood, like a letter in a rack. Everything flows, and connects. Finlay's art is so refined, philosophical, antic in its wit and elegance, that it scarcely seems to comply with an embattled personality at constant war with institutions, galleries and publishers. But his long-running conflicts were notorious. A vivid gallery of films and photographs recounts his 1980s campaign against Strathclyde council for trying to force him to pay business rates on an old byre that he had converted into a classical temple. Local farmers joined in, blocking the marauding tax officials with their tractors. I especially like the poster Shock Tropes for Little Sparta (Sparta, of course, was at war with Athens). 'Mors Concilio Artium' (Death to the Arts Council) is inscribed on blazing prints. When the Scottish Arts Council (SAC) accidentally returned some of Finlay's stone carvings, his revenge was classical. The names of council functionaries, along with other enemies – including well-known painters and poets such as Elizabeth Blackadder and Iain Crichton Smith – are now carved in perpetuity on the back, along with a rousing tribute to Robespierre. Not incidentally, the SAC eventually gave them to the nation. The French Revolution, battles on land and sea, historical warfare – all have enduring significance in Finlay's art. He joined up in the second world war and his own position is always ambiguous. Two curious stone boots, exquisitely carved by John Andrew, are in fact representations of the funnels of the Mikuma, a Japanese cruiser deployed during the war. Terrifying on a vast scale, they are reduced to what Finlay ironically called paperweights. But lest we forget, the Mikuma was sunk in 1942 by the US with most of its crew. It feels apt that such a show should take place in the neoclassical grandeur of the former Dean Orphanage in Edinburgh. One of the most immaculate works here – poised between antiquity and conceptualism – is the tiny Marble Paper Boat, in which an origami vessel crests the fluted waves of a stone finial that would not look out of place in the Georgian architecture of the city's New Town. If only this exhibition stretched from the ground floor to the upper galleries too. But Finlay is widely spread in his centenary year, with several other shows, including one at Victoria Miro, London (30 April-24 May), and an illustrated book of essays by writers including the late, lamented Tom Lubbock. What makes this particular exhibition so special, moreover, is its emphasis on the intimate: many small sculptures raised up to perfect viewing levels on plinths, the walls dense with exquisite screenprints. What you see is Finlay's mind in closeup – words and ideas forming into two- and three-dimensional works of unique and visionary art. Ian Hamilton Finlay is at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art (Modern Two), Edinburgh, until 26 May
