Questions by Alex Stelioes-Wills,  2003.

1. You did not begin as a plein-air landscape painter. How did you realize that painting spaces directly and within the environment was the most important work for you?

I spent most of my early career working with the figure, often representing the figure in a narrative setting, using still life objects as props to create allusions and relationships within these pictures. When I could not hire a model, I would work with these props in still life arrangements. I have never been a great fan of still life, it is a useful device to master the technical side of painting, but for me, it was only a step towards the real goal of painting and I needed to move on. Landscape seemed to hold so much more meaning for me. I could walk within a new location for weeks, absorbing the colour relationships and composition peculiar to that place. The evolution of the landscape, as agricultural and architectural changes have been imposed. My own feelings and opinions when meeting and talking with the local people. All these things would become part of the picture, and my understanding of a new place. The picture started to become more of a journey for me, a part of my life. I have always loved portraiture, but this is about understanding and representing another person. Landscape, for me, became a way of representing myself as part of the world.

2. How did you make the decision to leave teaching and to concentrate on painting as a professional and commercial career, and how did you decide to base that career here in Mississippi?

I think that the larger decisions in our life are generally imposed upon us. If your whole being demands change, then situations and environments will work synchronously to achieve that goal.

I have always tried to dedicate at least half my time to painting, but over the last few years was getting frustrated by my lack of opportunity to complete work or continue pushing forward a particular series. Like the effects of gravity, the greater desire to paint found a way to ground itself. Moving to Mississippi and leaving teaching work behind was a great release for me. My wife was originally from Columbus, and we had already spent the previous summer over here. Opportunities kept opening up for me in the United States and exactly the opposite was happening in Bristol, England. It seemed a natural decision to move here, and see how the painting went!

3. You have painted in numerous places all over the globe, do you spend much time thinking about the regional differences between landscapes or do you instead concentrate on the particular landscape and try to avoid thinking about generalizations.

I try to immerse myself in the particular location that I am working. Each series represents a chance to work in a different way, explore new ideas and develop my work. I cannot ignore previous experience from past series of paintings, but I do need to distance myself from bringing in too many associations from that past work.

Whenever anyone asks me which are my favorite paintings, it will always be the series I am currently working on. The older series become distant memories, except if you place me in front of a picture I painted, say ten years ago, then I am back painting that picture with all the associated experience of that place.

4. When you start at a new location, how much time do you spend searching for the right place and view?

This question relates closely to the previous question. I spend the first week or two dispelling ghosts. The natural inclination is to go with what’s easiest, to overlay the new location with ideas worked through on the last series. It has become very fashionable for painters to hit upon a style, one template on which to base all their subsequent paintings. The gallery circuit loves to have a predefined and consistent product to represent to the buying public. But this form of painting can only limit, and at best represent an egocentric view of the world. For me, landscape painting is about reaching beyond myself, making a real attempt to open up to fresh experience and translate that experience in a dynamic way. This is why the first couple of weeks in a new location are so important to me, I need to be very sure that I am not being lazy and am awake to the new possibilities before me.

5. How do you know when a particular view is going to work for you?

I have started a new series of paintings, and am maybe three pictures into that series. But there is a small voice in the background telling me that something is not working out! It is hard to throw away a weeks work, but you have to maintain a level of integrity. When a picture is going well, it lives, carrying you along with it. As if that picture already exists in some sort of Platonic idealistic state, waiting for the input from my direction to ground the image as a physical painting.

Compositional decisions can also be very intuitive for me. The Baja series decided itself. The first time I turned back towards the Punta Cerotito headland, I was instantly caught up in the next ten weeks of difficult painting.

6. When choosing a composition are you thinking about what you are trying to avoid, are you searching for specific things in the composition, or do you try to stay open to what you find?

This sort of conscious decision making process can often be very limiting, and can often be quite disruptive to a deeper more intuitive dialogue. I try not to form any hard and fast opinions, keeping the initial painting fluid and open. I will start on three or four pictures and just get a feeling for the landscape. I t often takes a few weeks into a painting series for me to attempt some sort of rational analysis of the picture surface, and this analysis will always be secondary to the intuitive feel of the work.

When I talk about the “feel” of a picture, I am not using this term lightly or without meaning. Throughout our lives, we build up complex strategies for dealing with the world. As a child we start by learning patterns of facial recognition and go on to learn ever subtler forms of social interaction. We cannot keep all this information on the surface, on a conscious level, but instead process this information below the surface in many complex and layered patterns. It is the same with painting, my evolution as a painter, all the technical information that I have learnt is at hand. The trigger, or recognition that this process is working is the feeling that the painted mark you make is right. This sounds all very elusive, but it is very exacting. A few more moments thought will recover the time that you learnt the lesson that is now applicable to the present painting or give you choices to develop and enhance your understanding of a colour relationship etc.

7. Do you think that living in a place, even for just a few months, makes a difference in terms of finding he right place to paint? How important is having an outsider’s perspective?

When I’m in a new painting location for just a few months I can often derive a great deal of energy from the limitations this imposes. I can often get up to speed quicker, and create a much more coherent series of paintings. The longer series of works, like the new Motely Slough paintings, give me the luxury of working with a deeper level of emotion and push my limitations as a painter. With these latest paintings, I have found myself unable to make a painted mark, for hours at a time, just trying to find some way into the composition. Reminding me when I first started to paint and each compositional mark was laborious.

I think that the shorter painting trips of maybe two or three months give me a chance to be more explosive. I have to fill up and encompass that mental space between me and the landscape very quickly.

8. I have noticed that many of the Italian paintings have these terraced, vertical compositions where the space is flattened and somewhat abstract, and I was wondering whether you feel that the balance between space and a painting’s two dimensional strength is important in all of your work? How do you find that balance in spaces that are more regular and horizontal?

I will always choose a painting location that interests me compositionally. The Italian landscape series interested me because of the flattening caused by the steep side of the valley. The trick was to give the viewer that feeling of an almost aerial viewpoint in contradiction to the classic landscape format.

I will always try to be true to the particular scene I am painting, there are many interpretations open within the same picture and there is a surprising amount of leeway, without the use of purposeful abstraction.

Sometimes the composition can reach a level of complexity where you know that one small brushstroke will make or break the picture. I hold a mental picture of the alternative ways I can develop the composition, and this mental picture is being constantly modified by the progressive act of painting.

9.It seems to me that your paintings and compositions avoid the overly picturesque or contrived, without ever feeling unorganized or random by balancing a cool and dry sense of distance with the search for expressive, natural moments of painting. In your work, do you think that the search for strong composition can be separated from the process and act of painting?

I think a picture must hold together, it must have a certain grammar and punctuation to become a meaningful statement for the viewer to understand. The word, or series of painted mark, are receptacles for meaning. The contrived picture, uses a very static, conservative choice of mark making and meaning. A set of meanings laid down and accepted as historically proven, already part of the larger consciousness in terms of general understanding. To split words apart and re-evaluate the concepts underlying them, is the hardest thing in the world. This involves looking afresh and looking for the lie or ambiguity that may mask a deeper truth. My point is, that if you look with a fresh eye, then any decision you make in terms of composition or expressive quality of the mark making process, must be right.

We are at a point in history where a great deal of buncombe and nonsense has been presented as valid art. The great innovators from the turn of the last century did look afresh at the world, but the transition to popular understanding of their great advances has almost completely masked their achievements. You must always maintain a grammar and punctuation. This is the point of understanding between the viewer and the artist, but if these rules become too rigid then painting descends into dull academia. If the rules are too relaxed we are presented with so much wall candy and the confidence tricksters canny lie.

The secret is to develop a balance, to create a hierarchy of meaning that can speak on many different levels. An old language can become startlingly new if the concepts that underlay the word usage change. At the same time, the landscape is a fundamentally abstract set of associations that relies on our interpretation for

10. How do you think your surface has developed or changed since the landscapes of New York City? Does your surface have to change as you deal with new landscapes and spaces?

I have gained a lot more confidence in the range of possibilities available to me for interpretation of the landscape. The New York cityscapes were some of the first few ‘landscapes‘ I had painted, so they are very definite and more formal in comparison with my latest Mississippi  pictures. I discovered a golden rule a number of years ago, that at least applies to my own work. I decided to listen to myself, to follow my curiosity and paint what felt most compelling! I think that as a student, and even as a mature artist, it is so easy to get too caught up in

another artists style and their means of resolving issues in painting. Or get too involved with a set of rules that you

build for yourself and feel secure in following. For me now, the fundamental question is am I looking at the landscape and willing to interpret it in a way that is relevant for that particular moment? Even the question of change can be too compelling. Sometimes you have to work and evolve a

style over many series of paintings, but then a number of pictures break away from that trend and you have to reevaluate your way of working. I look back on the series of pictures that have been complete for a year or so with a tremendous curiosity! They have an independence and stability apart from me. Almost growing up and maturing with the weight of reflection of the viewing public that try to interpret, at whatever level, the work I have done.

© C W Pates/Alexander Stelioes-Wills  2003