Artists Writing: Paul Winstanley

At the London Art Book Fair, Whitechapel Gallery, September 5th 2019

Paul Carey-Kent

Michael Craig-Martin is almost as famous for his collection of writings 'On Being An Artist' as he is for his impeccably flat yet crisply scultptural drawing style. At the London Art Book Fair (5-8 Sept at the Whitechapel Gallery) he relaunched it by speaking with Paul Winstanley, who should be better known, both for his precisely atmospheric paintings of interiors and landscapes and his book '59 Paintings'*. Winstanley 'considers the process of thinking about and making' 61 works (he aimed at 50 got to 59, and liked the number enough to kep it when a couple more of his 600-odd works to date inspired a self commentary). Craig-Martin contrasted their work neatly as follows: 'I make representations, but I'm not interested in representation, only in confrontations with the object, almost off the canvas into the viewer's space, wheras you drop back....I paint the foreground you paint the background'.

Winstanley's writing and painting make for a beguiling low-key combination. Here are four examples- typical, though representing only part of his range.

'Lounge 1', 1992 This institutional lounge is one of the 'less definable spaces', crossing between private and public, which interests Winstanley. Their purpose may not be clear, 'except that these are places in which time passes, either voluntarily or under duress. It is the passage of time which became the central motif of these paintings'.

'Nostalgia', 1999, looks out to present 'the unseen as much as the visible. The implication must be that the nostalgia of its title does not apply to the interior, to that which is visible to us, but to this 'unseen' with its potential for longing and yearning'. Nostalgia itself Winstanley describes as 'representing experience while simultaneously declaring its own process of fabrication'.

Winstanley bases his paintings, far from literally, on his own photographs, generally of well-used sites. 'Veiled Lobby' 2001, is of a non-pristine, indeed about-to-be-decommisioned, government building which still 'had its windows draped in bomb-resistant net curtains, protection from flying glass in the event of an IRA strike, not an uncommon threat during the 1970s and 1980s'.

'TV Room', 1991. Winstanley has painted a series of TV rooms, mostly empty, 'as a way of making 'looking at the painting' part of the subject of the painting being looked at and, rather than make an image of an image....I wanted to look out from art and find something with a wider recognition factor' - a TV turned off to 'offer for consideration a reflection of viewing' rather than that what is viewed. Such TV rooms are now rare, so as Winstanley observes, the painting has come to represent not a commonplace site of identification but 'a historical situation which might even reflect past social values' with their 'notions of community and the structures they created'.

* both published by Andrew Brown's Art/Books