Probably every painter has a long conversation
with their work
and the longer that you live of course,
the conversation just goes on, stretching far back,
so it's a reconnoiter for me.
I see my work differently as time goes by.
I've realised to my unbelievable delight
that it communicates, that my own dialogue with my work
is reflected in how other people actually look at it,
and of course this to me is the most wonderful thing
when I find that happening.
The exhibition covers almost seven decades of production,
and there's a large group of drawings and paintings
which were made when you were a student
at Cheltenham Ladies' College, at Goldsmiths, at
the Royal College of Art
and I think many people will be surprised
by the range of experimentation and the concentration
on drawing in these works.
Could you say something about maybe the importance
of drawing and technique for you as the basis for your work?
Yes.
Before I started to draw though, I started to look.
I actually didn't think about being an artist at all.
Well, I didn't think about art, either.
I thought, to find a context in which somehow I could
exercise something in me
which I didn't know what it was, but it was about looking,
and where to do that.
It just seemed that the only place I could go
was to an Art School.
You talked a little bit about the difference
between a traditional approach which
might start with a subject in nature
and then move gradually away from that
and you talked a little bit about how, in a sense,
your approach now is the reverse,
and that your starting point might be formal qualities
volume, shape, composition, rhythm
Yes
and I think you say you put those through their paces.
Pictorial elements are the agents
to which you can put these things through their paces.
You need something to do something with.
You can't explore without an agent.
My line, I think, actually is my agent,
or was for a very, very long time.
It could be a drawn line, as it was.
With drawn lines, I worked on making Movement in Squares,
and drawn lines through some of those big paintings,
many of the big paintings.
The Curve is a curved line.
It's a line which has been bent in what
I think is rather like the twists of a body.
It takes different angles, different positions.
Contrapposto.
Contrapposto, exactly.
But you need the pictorial elements are rightly
called that.
They are things that you need to build a picture with.
And you know an incredible amount
about the History of Art.
But which artists started to attract your attention
in the early years?
In the early years
well, Matisse always did, especially with drawing,
that he could draw a line, and for no clear reason,
it enclosed a volume,
and there was no logic in this, because it was not
the line did not seem to explain a skull,
but it was something else.
And so that was actually, I think now
of course, probably, it was a perception.
And Matisse made it all look so easy, the rascal.
Made it look so easy.
Yes, absolutely
but he never deceived me.
And then one of the earliest rooms in the exhibition
is called Looking at Seurat, the great 19th century
post-impressionist painter who many people will know
as the inventor of the pointillist technique
of painting in dots.
Yes, yes.
But this is an artist who has meant a great deal to you
at different moments in your career.
Yes, he has.
Could you tell us something about what
Seurat has meant to you?
I was struggling with this unwieldy thing called colour,
and I was applying it in little dabs
and these little dabs were not organised in any way.
They had no internal logic.
They had no raison d'etre
and The National Gallery had, for years,
Seurat's great painting The Bathers,
which you could see as you came up the stairs on the right hand side
through the window
and the light and the beauty of the colour
was something that I couldn't pass by.
I started to copy a small landscape, which
had a similar diagonal across the canvas which
separated the river bank from,
the river from the water.
I worked methodically as I thought he had
reworking this melange
and that was exactly what it was called.
It's a melange, a mixture.
An optical mixture.
And his findings were of such enormous help
to me, who's in exactly the same position down the line.
Would it be fair to say that Seurat gave you
a sense of structure and a sense of parallel to nature
Yes.
where you could see there was obviously a relationship
to the experienced world, but you were creating something
sensations alongside it?
A parallel universe.
I think I was.
It was that. It was the key into another world.
Yes.
You mentioned earlier that Seurat had a hard time,
in a sense, for being,
seeming almost to be too scientific.
Yes.
And at moments in your career, people
felt unfairly that your work is perhaps disciplined, cool, very
rigorous.
Yet, at the same time, of course,
there is a strong element of intuition
and really deeply felt emotion in what you do.
Yes.
I wondered if you felt some kinship in Seurat, who
was, in a sense, derided for
unfairly, without people realising the tension
that there is between these two.
Certainly.
At one point in my life, in rage,
strong feeling, to think that I would give this business up,
this hateful business of painting,
and I was bitterly disappointed in myself
and I painted, in fury, a black canvas
with what amounted to a sort of very expressionist handling
of black paint.
I came down the next morning and looked at it,
and I realised that it was quite inexpressive of what I felt.
It was just a lot of black paint.
It said nothing.
It conveyed nothing.
And I thought, now, what is wrong with it?
Why has it failed?
It hasn't had an opposition.
Nothing has opposed it.
It was let to run like a flood of feeling,
and it meant nothing.
But if it had been opposed, this would
so it was black, so it needed white
and just at the opposite of these marks
was a straight line.
So I drew a straight line.
The opposite of a straight line was a curved line
and that brought the thing together.
Huge emotion,
Yes.
huge passion,
Yes.
but now very much channeled and controlled,
and to become all the more powerful.
The need for objective distance
holding something at a distance so that you can see it better,
so that you can, in fact become closer, is a discipline
that I've welcomed,
need, and a tool.
And also some failures which I had,
I realised many years later that I suddenly could
find a way of dealing with it.
And that was true for Measure for Measure,
and that problem of the integral nature of a circle.
In fact, you can't really break it.
Measure for Measure paintings, the viewer
you, me when I'm working
I explore possible glances that you may have
you may pick up this diagonal, that diagonal, another one.
As you see one, another one comes up to replace it.
So like your own looking, it moves.
It doesn't move.
It's absolute still.
But you, by looking, you move it.
Putting yourself now into the position of a viewer,
as you look at the exhibition, were there
any surprises for you?
All of them appear slightly different, because
a) I haven't seen them for quite a long time,
many of them for many, many, many years.
and I am a different person
Yes.
now, and different experiences of looking,
different current preoccupations
and they are the same,
but then because I am looking at them, they are different also.
So this, which is the amazing thing of perception itself
in action.