|
|
Documentation: interview
Michael: Could you tell me how you came to be interested in the Stations of the Cross in the first instance? Ghislaine: Right from my earliest years, The Stations of the Cross were things that I used to look at, the first images I really became aware of. I used to be taken to church on Sundays and even before I knew what was going on, there were these pictures on the wall of obviously important things happening, and gradually I began to understand the meanings behind them. And, the ones in my own particular church were very typical catholic images, very pious and without any real sense of drama in them. I remember beginning to wonder about this and thinking about these very terrible and dramatic things going on, and yet the images didn't really reflect this. As a student, I was always drawn towards very powerful and dramatic work, I used to look at the work of Titian, Michelangelo, Rembrandt, Rubens and Delacroix, about whom I had, and still have, a particular passion. Those great depositions and entombments and the fantastic power and humanity of these images... something I wanted to get into my own work generally, but it was a question of how to do it?... I remember seeing the Cézanne drawings exhibition in 1973 - the water-colours, especially one of a sturdy little diving figure plunging into the water, a little gouache - and I decided to paint using that motif, but based on something I'd read, D.H. Lawrence's Women in Love, where there is a drowning scene and my own memories of swimming in Ireland. It was very laboured, quite overworked, but definitely had something of what I was trying to get into my pictures. Michael: Wasn't it that image that, in retrospect at least, seems to foreshadow much of what you've done in the Stations? Ghislaine: Yes. it does. Certainly the big naked male figure, the musculature of the male figure and the female figure. She was based upon myself, and the sense of one's own self-knowledge, whether or not it is intended, the knowledge of one’'s own face, gestures and physical make-up usually creeps into my work, as in the Veronica figure in the present case. Michael: But these works, though long in gestation, have been painted relatively quickly... Ghislaine: Yes, it's been brilliant, working on this scale and having done some so much preparatory work, so many drawings and realising instinctively that all the work I've done up to now has been a preparation, if you like, for this: the pregnancy and maternity work, again based upon my own experience as much as the time I spent at Saint Mary's Maternity Unit. Paintings like Mother and Child which is actually myself embracing my son, Max, were important, all that knowledge and all that focusing in on the kind of things that move one - a couple embracing, a man helping his wife through labour, a woman with her new-born child, the intensity of the various relationships... all that experience and information has filtered through to these works, the prolonged period of rapid sketching, in charcoal and paint and then the final works which were painted again in a relatively short period of concentrated energy. Michael: So your own experience as a mother was significant? Ghislaine: Yes, an important human activity was actually happening to me, and like Degas, just being able to paint those great heroic dramatic paintings, but using not the conventions or clichés of the past, but the facts of your own time and your own life... that was what I was considering I'm sure, without necessarily realising it at the time, of course. Being pregnant, huge changes are continually taking place, one's whole life is changing, as surely as one's own shape, a shape that one was previously so sure of... but at the same time the awareness of becoming part of the human scheme, sharing a condition with one's parents, grandparents, other women, and the overwhelming sense of mortality... the sense of the future... and of course, it was just a fantastic thing to draw, this huge shape, this huge simple heavy laden containing shape and the drawings I did at that time began to assume a new simplicity and directness, and then the joy of realising the recognition that people were responding to what I was producing in a direct and spontaneous and emotionally charged way. Michael: Yes. and the recognition that people were responding to the actual gestures, familiar to them in real life as much as they may be familiar to us in art? And from those drawings developed a new and simpler style of painting? Ghislaine: Yes. That movement from experience, into drawing and then into paint gave me the freedom and knowledge to find an expressive way of painting, to make my work less specific, less anecdotal. Whilst I wanted my paintings to be about my own self, my own domestic life, I also wanted them to have a broader base, more generalised and approachable to a wide audience. Michael: So, without realising it you had almost established for yourself an agenda that would enable you to paint the pictures you had felt beyond your capabilities earlier? Ghislaine: Yes from an essentially private activity, I went on to do the Birth Show, A Shared Experience at Manchester City Art Gallery in 1993 and later through working in geriatric units, prisons etc. I felt that I was fulfilling my own ambition, an ambition to deal in my work with the span and content of human lives. Michael: But there was a danger there, that you were aware of, you didn't want to become a 'programmatic' artist... Ghislaine: No, that would have been awful, and I have purposely avoided that. Working in theatres, prisons, I suppose I am seeking out situations that possess a dramatic or pyschological intensity, and small communities where I can get to know people very well, and interact. But throughout all that there has been a sense of differences, ages, gestures, closeness and apartness, how people express through gesture and all the things that have contributed to the Stations of the Cross work. Michael: So there was almost a sense of relief when you found that your sense of kinship with artists of the past and present could be worked through your own direct involvement with life? Ghislaine: Yes, the overbearing sense of self-consciousness and insecurity began to disappear, because the subject matter was there, before me and all around me. I had found a modus operandi... something not to be underestimated. I didn't go into the hospital and think how am I going to make sense of this, how do I do something with what is before me, I found that there were certain things, certain juxtapositions of hands, bodies and the way people would gesture and support each other, that I focused in on automatically. Michael: And in doing so you were developing your own vocabulary? Ghislaine: Yes, I knew when things that worked for me pictorially and yet coincidentally or otherwise would have some of these great resonances with the paintings I admired Michael: So, the worry or anxiety began to disappear? Ghislaine: Well, not entirely, but it was a fantastic realisation that the great worry I had when younger - how do you do these things? has it all been done? is it still relevant? - became unimportant to me. Especially in the light of the response of people to my work, often people who had not been into art galleries before, or were not particularly conversant with painting. They seemed to respond on a very important and basic level to the paintings and for me that is absolutely necessary; to have that sense of immediacy, accessibility. Michael: The strong single image is still, whether in photography or painting, one of the most powerful means of communication. Ghislaine: Yes, but there is something else too, the sense of time being spent with somebody, that takes away, or at least minimises, the sense of intrusion... how can I put this? in the hospital or elsewhere, it would be very easy to fall into or encourage a sense of voyeurism, with a camera that can often happen, you click it and there you get your image immediately, in painting, at least, it is a more drawn out affair... it's taken time to do, it is obviously in some sense a considered response, and clearly for all its desired effectiveness, something artificial, something made. Michael: How do you consider the specific relationship between drawing and colour? Ghislaine: I think of myself as a painter rather than a draughtswoman - I would always describe myself as a painter -although drawings and the activity of drawing is central and important. Drawing is a particular experience, a direct response, there is nothing more direct than making a drawing, it is that hand-mind-eye experience that comes together in a drawing and in successful drawings it becomes completely fused... and the result is complete and precious in itself. My drawings always or usually have a sense of roughness, someone actually called it a 'passionate roughness'. I like that. I work and over work my drawings; my images are hard-won. Michael: ...and for the viewer? Ghislaine: The person who's looking needs to fulfil their part of the contract, so to speak, they have to work, and give back... you have to give in order to receive. Michael: You want people to feel.... Ghislaine: If they do feel something when they look at my paintings, a sense of shared humanity, a sense that we all, in different ways, feel pain, joy, kinship, the difficulties and pleasures of being alive, if they can come away with having recognised something of that through my work, to however small a degree, that we are all human, and therefore vulnerable, then I feel that what could otherwise be a very self-indulgent practice is worthwhile. Michael: But you don't consciously set out to preach.... Ghislaine: It's not like a mission to preach or convert. I want my work to be affecting and to perhaps give people a sense of empathy with what they are seeing, but what they do with it is their business. In the end I paint what I paint because I want to paint it, because it is important and necessary to me, and very often my work is about our family, my relationship with others, and the joy, as I think Klee said of Mozart, the sometimes dark joy of living. |
Ghislaine Howard Studio Gallery
|
interview The Empty Tomb |