Interview between Paul Winstanley and Helen Waters, January, 2024 Helen Waters |
HW Paul, these paintings and prints are part of a larger series based on photographs of historical paintings which you have subjected to a process that has degraded the image. Can I ask you about the process you used and why you are interested in distorting the original image in this way? PW The original paintings that form the basis of this work are all landscape paintings from the early nineteenth century. They are very much of their time in that they approach the grandeur of their subject in strictly pictorial ways. They illustrate this grandeur rather that attempt to embody it and the paintings are generally quite modestly sized. I got interested in these somewhat obscure paintings and painters because I felt there was something there for a contemporary painter to work with. These paintings were obviously contemporary once and would have had the implicit power to provoke and inspire, much as contemporary work does today. But much of this is now lost. We have different expectations and see these works through a gauze of history. I was interested to see if they could be re-invested with greater urgency and made contemporary again. The processes I used I had devised for some earlier work actually, where I took some images of historical paintings and degraded them. It was the kind of process I discovered almost by accident. I had been thinking about the early prints of Rauschenberg where he was using spirit to transfer images from newsprint and magazine covers onto sheets of paper to create monoprints. And I wondered if you could do that with an inkjet print – I found you couldn’t, because inkjet prints are water based. So then I thought maybe I could create a resist barrier between the ink and the paper and maybe print off that – off the wet ink on the paper in a direct way – and that didn’t work either – it just created a mess! But then I became intrigued by what was happening with the image on the paper with that resist applied. I was using different kinds of waxes and waterproofing agents, anything that would resist the water and the ink. When I discovered these early nineteenth- century paintings it occurred to me that, what we might see today as their abstract qualities, could be brought out through this process. And so I did a large number of variations. Each inkjet print with these resist layers is unpredictable and unrepeatable. It’s down to the how you apply the resist, the gesture, whether it’s sprayed on, painted or scraped on. The image is different each time but there is always a shadow of the original image. Details are lost to be replaced with the details of the process; the spots and specks of coagulated ink. The image is abraded, it disintegrates, all sorts of interesting incidents occur, though you can still see the shadows of trees, rocks, water, mountains, all the elements of the image. Then, having made these images (the prints were in black and white – I’d removed the colour), I then photographed them and created a digital file which meant I could then experiment with new colour. Those images then became the basis for the initial group of paintings which were all shown in New York in 2022. Since then the project has expanded and now includes the two new sets of photogravure and prints.
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HW You talk about coming across these obscure paintings. How did you choose your source material? They’re not particularly well-known artists, so how did that happen? PW Well the idea of the Alps as a subject matter has been in my head for a long time; I did some mountain paintings when I visited China in 2006. I’m not particularly familiar with the Alps – I have visited the area, but I’m not a skier or mountaineer or anything like that. So it’s not like I’m painting a subject that I’m familiar with and love in that sort of lived-in way. I came across a reproduction of a painting by Joseph Anton Koch in a British Museum magazine. They’d acquired the drawing for the painting, and they had illustrated the painting, and I was just really intrigued by it. I didn’t know this artist and I didn’t know the painting, so I found some other paintings by him. In this initial painting the dominant feature is the Alp, the mountain. Then there’s a cascade of water, there are trees – the mountain is covered in forest, the water tumbles over rocks into the foreground and there’s a certain amount of activity in the sky. It’s almost like a formula. The next painting I found by him was different, but had those similar features. Then I did more research and found paintings from that period by other artists that I’d never heard of – Joseph Jansen, Adalbert Waagen, Carl Miller – they are all German or Austrian painters from the early nineteenth century. Some of these paintings are in museums and some are not, and they followed a similar kind of formula in terms of the elements in the picture and how they were arranged, and I just really liked that repetition, the continuity. That was the starting point really, discovering these people and their paintings for the first time.
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HW Is it important to you that the original paintings were made in the studio rather than en plein air?
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HW So it’s more about constructing an image than representing what somebody might see at that time? PW It is seeing, but it’s undergone a process of variation. It’s about making sense of the experience of seeing.
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HW Can we talk about colour in your Alp paintings? You talked about how you photograph the prints that you’ve degraded and then you look at colour on the computer. Is that the process you use to decide which colour you’re going to use in the paintings? PW It narrows down the options. I have an idea about the colour already but it’s quite good to introduce the colour digitally because colour is complex and behaves unpredictably and you create a model this way that is useful. But choosing the colour and arriving at the colour is a very subjective process. However, as you work your way into it , it becomes surprisingly exacting. I create these colour profiles – either for the whole painting if it’s a monochrome, or a variety of these profiles for different parts of the image, which can increase in complexity or be kept simple, but all the time I’m thinking about the sense it might make. Light and space are very important and I am conscious of trying to conjure some sort of recognisable atmospheric condition that might be encountered in the mountains. A dawn, a dusk, a grey day, a mist. And so colour has two functions in that regard – the function of being itself a dynamic element and the function of a quasi-representation. One of the eight is subtitled Indian Yellow where the image is reduced to a very flat shadow of the original and I felt it needed to be a very pale colour, which led me towards yellow, which is naturally pale. But it’s not quite yellow, it’s been messed with, darkened with black, lightened again with some white, there’s a bit of ultramarine in there. It comes out this pistachio green which somehow is a yellow, but it’s not quite a yellow and the image becomes something you can’t really see very clearly but it’s radiating this colour off the white paper. So it’s doing a number of things. In other prints, where there is a lot of detail in the spits and spats and dots, I’ve gone for dark, emphatic colours like a rich blue. There’s a red one in there too but it’s a long way from pure red, it's a cool red, quite a cold colour. All the colours have a certain coolness – I mean that in terms of temperature. Each colour has to work in relation to the nature of the image, in relation to its own weight, but they also have to work across the series of eight. They all have to correspond with each other somehow. |
HW For the large Painted Alp series the process was slightly different as it involved you hand-painting the sheets before they were printed. There is an element of chance or surprise in this which seems to differ from your other prints and paintings which you construct quite carefully. Do you enjoy this chance element and the collaborative nature of printmaking? PW Oh yes absolutely. It’s great! The collaborative element is fantastic – you’ve got a team of people in the print studio – one person dedicated to you and then Pete Kosowicz is there also helping out. They are big prints so it required careful handling of sheets of paper and the plates. They were made by first of all painting a rectangle of colour on the paper, which corresponds with the image. There was a gradation of colour from light to dark, from one end to the other end of the paper. Then the plate is inked up with darker colours – also in a gradation. Then whilst the paper is wet and the paint is wet and the ink is wet on the plate – this is all squeezed through the press. Once you’ve got the colour sorted out, it’s very consistent from one print to the next, but you get incidental effects around the edge where the underlying paint can get squeezed out and you get interesting things happening around the perimeter of the print. It’s a very unpredictable process, each print took quite a lot of trial and error to get to a point where the colour was working. |
HW … and then you could be quite consistent? PW Yes, we developed a repeatable method. It’s a very enjoyable process – everyone pulling together to do that. It makes such a change from being in the studio painting when it’s just me. |
HW You have often focused on landscape in your practice – whether it’s forests, fields, mountains or the sea. What it is about landscape that appeals to you as a subject? PW Well I don’t think of myself as a landscape painter, in the way that someone who is a genre painter of landscapes is. I come to landscape quite often and use it because there is a kind of space that you can achieve in landscape. It’s a sense of space that is particular to painting. In the 1970s when I was an abstract painter, it was something that I focused on a lot and I made paintings that dealt with this space and expressed ideas about this space. But when I abandoned abstraction, I also lost the ability to do that directly, but through landscape painting you can approach it. It’s very difficult to say what this space is, but it’s something that is unique to painting, it doesn’t exist in photography or drawing or film for instance. It’s a space that’s both physical and metaphysical. And in landscape painting you can approach it and sense its outline, its shadow. You can’t really do it, but the ghost of it is always there. And that interests me more than when I was very young, making these abstract paintings and doing it directly. Doing it by inference interests me far more. And in a way that’s why I keep going back to landscape. |
HW And it’s not that you are drawn to a particular place that you return to. It’s a sense of place… PW Yes, it’s a sense of place but more importantly a sense of space. It’s the painting space that draws me. It exists in the prints too, particularly the large ones where the colour dissolves, the image dissolves, and the abstract qualities are drawn out. |
HW It’s like a field of colour. PW Yes, it is a field of colour, exactly. In my youth I made these monochrome, minimalist, all-over paintings. And in a way it’s an echo of that, but this is much more interesting to me. By inferring you involve the viewer. This is always important to me, that the viewer completes the picture and finds their own meaning there. |
HW The he exhibition includes a set of prints that explore this theme which are, in fact, called The Viewers. Could you talk more about these works? PW…These are a good example of the process of collage, manipulation and adjustment. They began as installation shots of recent solo shows of mine, so the paintings in the images are all examples of things I’ve been doing and include some Gallery paintings, paintings from the series After Saenredam, a Large Window painting that was on show in Los Angeles and a Large Alp painting from the New York show. I began them during lock-down and finished the final one last year. They look like photographs in that they use the language of photography including motion blur, contrasts of tone etc but the figures are all imported from other photographs taken in museums and galleries and some were modelled in the studio. And then they were digitally collaged into space. They achieve a simulacrum of reality except, some of the prints do start to appear a little anomalous, some are improbably complex, some are spatially a little strange, some are unbelievably perfect. The sensuousness of the blur and other qualities of the image is beguiling and yet, as I once wrote about them, ‘they teeter on the edge of falsehood’. I’ve talked about the role of the viewer in my work for years but these actually attempt to picture this, dismember it and reveal some sort of truth through the use of artifice and fiction. And this can also be said of the landscape prints and paintings. They are not quite, any of them, what they seem. |