Questions from Virginia Rood Pates, June 2004.

What is the relationship between your paintings and abstraction?

Every thing we look at, as it is apart from us, is a purely abstract subject. Our conception of the world or a landscape painting represents a lifetime of learnt experience about how to look. The first thing that a painter has to accomplish is to unlearn the mass of experience and preconception, and look at pure tone and colour as unlabeled shifting fields of light. Next, the painter has to consider form and evolve a way of seeing and interpreting that information that is not too invasive. In my own painting, I try to be as economical with the information I provide, representing the necessary series of marks to interpret the subject painted. These marks represent a record of my experience, small points of perception that form a completed vision of the landscape. The mark or gesture has the utmost importance for me, but as a single mark it represents my process of understanding and would be abstract and meaningless to the casual observer. Many people look at my painting at a distance, and are drawn to what they see as incredible detail. Finding on closer inspection that the detail dissolves into splodges of paint. The splodges of paint are the emotional record of the experience of painting and have no part in a rational interpretation.

Is there a connection between the way you paint and the way you sculpt?

I have always been told that my drawings are sculptural. These works tend to focus on the quality of light as it plays across and between objects, especially the human figure. I feel guilty for not immediately expressing my love of form, but the play of light encircling an object would represent the negative form that gives us the ability to read the form in a certain way. I sculpt using quite a harsh light to study the subject and the sculpture. This gives me a way in, to test the underlying form.

Describe the Mississippi landscape to me in your own terms, but in words this time rather than paint.

Do you think your methods are Modern?

I have never cared for art movement terms because they limit your perspective and define a certain attitude towards your subject. These terms are used by historians to divide and articulate the past, and have no relevance to the present moment. As a student, I needed to understand the history of painting and had to make constant comparison between my own work and that of the artists I sought to emulate. I sought to aspire to a certain way of interpreting the world. After I had finished my training (and by this I mean I had learned the necessary skills to translate any subject confidently to canvas), I found that all the painters that I admired were getting in the way of my development. I was trying to use their skill base and perception of the subject to qualify my own work. I needed to trust in myself, and translate my own emotional perceptions with a practical hand that was my own.  It was about this time that I started painting cityscapes, as a new starting point to give me confidence to look at the world afresh. There are no shortcuts to producing work that has real content and meaning. A point is reached where the world must be looked at directly, and this is a small beginning to a lifetime of searching and understanding.  I think this is why schools of art, based around one strong artist, often dwindle and fail quickly. For the most part, the only form of work that follows from their teaching is derivative. The contemporary art market is dominated by school and fashion based art movements (especially at the moment where it seems that language has succeeded content). It is not possible to use a word or movement as a starting point for the creative process. The creative process must be drawn from a quiet eye and a direct relationship with the world.

Explain to me again about contemporary movements in music and how they relate to painting?

Most forms of artistic expression, literature, music, painting etc., are related and have a certain concordance in terms of their historical development within a single culture. All forms of expression seem to have developed through the modern era, taking on the various major trends of the time, for example, impressionism, expressionism, abstraction or minimalism. Works of literature have evolved, but with a solid language acting as a guiding rail to the most abstract of thoughts. The most abstract of musical scores are created by composers with a generally good musical training and performed by artists with rigorous musical training. The painter is lucky if he gets the technical training to properly mix and apply paint, and will probably never be instructed in a realist interpretative method. Instead a program of free expression and vague philosophy is taught. The English art schools of the late fifties and early sixties, were completely

deconstructed, the new generation of tutors throwing out the old plaster drawing casts, the modeling stands and any reminder of the past. The new generation of tutors were progressive and taught free expression anything goes attitude. The tutors of today are their students, and for the most part, are ignorant of many of the technical aspect of painting and have no training in figurative or traditional art. Instead relying on their wits and contemporary art historical awareness to get by. This is quite a stark vision of the state of contemporary painting, especially English painting, but the first point I wanted to make is this absence of rigorous training for the new students, at least since the time that I went to college.–

My first choice in terms of art appreciation will always be music. When I look at painting, I am looking at the technical side of the work and stylistic approach. I tend to spend my time working. I can listen to a musical score with an openness that I find difficult to achieve with painting. I have a great respect for the generations of Soviet composers working over the last thirty years. Especially the works of Alfred Schnittke and Sofia Gubaidulina. These two composers (and many more from different parts of the world) grew up with an awareness of the differing forms of musical abstraction and their works are heavily influenced by each of these movements. My point is that over the last fifteen years, there has been a movement to reintroduce many older stylistic variations in music, bringing back the structure but with a deep awareness of the lessons learnt over the last hundred years. Each style of music is used, almost like the letters in an alphabet are used to create words, to create a rich layer of meaning. Within the new generations of painters there is a deep stagnation; painting has not followed this path of reintegration, but is stagnating within the abstract form. In music, we have had one or two note scores and whole scores composed of silence, but these are now lessons to build new work for the future. Within literature, we have had books composed from books and books composed purely of consonantal characters, but these have not become standard reading format, but are experiments and ways of enriching a vocabulary of stylistic choice. Why is painting so caught up in its past? I would simply say that there is not the skill base to achieve a reintegration of previous painterly forms. This explains the latest trend for photography and the nearly complete desertion from the fine arts to video art and conceptualism. I think painting will re-emerge from this very low point, but it will take many years to rebuild the skill base that is capable of delivering the training for such a renaissance.

Are you ready (far enough away) to talk about the first series of Mississippi paintings? How are they affecting your new series? Is it the same series?

I think that over the last ten years I have moved away completely from the various systems of thought and teachings that I picked up during my student years. I was very thirsty at that time to absorb

as much information on the history and practical theory of painting. My vision of the world has become more independent, with very little intellectual input from books or discussion with other artists, and with the real emphasis placed on how I feel about what I am painting. In the first Mississippi series, there is a start, or movement towards an atonal colour depiction. Compositionally the mark making process is loosening from an overly stern depiction of a given reality, with each mark existing as a statement on that particular moment in time. Painting should be beautiful, but disturbing at the same time. The scale of colour from the deepest broken red to the lightest sap green, should exist within a completely democratic palette. In practical terms, I want to build a painting on the reality that I see, and not within a set of rules–

and reference points sourced from a historical dialogue on painting. In the first Mississippi paintings, I had been trying to expand the range and complexity of the deeper broken colours and transparent use of glaze over these to give a much richer counterpoint within the overall composition. There is a barrier between a tonal and the newer colourist interpretation of the

world that needs to be broken down. The colourist method needs to be placed in, and expand into every corner of the tonal range.

What helps you to maintain the core of yourself when you are travelling, maybe away from home for years, and making yourself so vulnerable, so impressed by what you see? Is this related to your use of shadow? What is it that travels with you and comes out in all of your paintings?

The older I get, the less need I feel to change the environment or make it conform to my own personal vision. I think that this self sufficiency makes it easier to travel and avoid the loss that is associated with an attachment to a particular place. There is a kind of detachment that coexists with the act of painting the landscape. You need to have an emotional and intellectual independence in order to see clearly and interpret what you see. There must be a depth of understanding and experience that is self-sufficient and has the capacity to look and understand. The character of an individual is that quality that comes out in the painting, and means that life has scored you deeply enough to lend your personality points of reason that create a hold for further emotional development.  The shadow in my painting is the painful experience of a lifetime, a painting, in some sense must be painful. agony in a painting reifies the beauty; without one, the other is a–

meaningless concept.

You are such a naturally impatient, high strung person. How do you channel this when you are painting?

It’s difficult! It takes me quite a while to settle into a painting session, and for me to physically calm down.  I find the

act of painting extremely demanding, I tend to go into an a trancelike state when I am painting well, everything else has to be focused out.

© C W Pates/Virginia Rood Pates