Paintings don't have meanings as such.
I don’t sit down with an idea and illustrate it – it’s the visual idea that occurs
at the very beginning, and then… my feelings are then transmitted into the image, and all
my experience as a person, as a human being – all the things I’ve read, seen, thought,
felt, all these things - they come through in the making of the work
and I would hope that the little images that I make within that – they’ll allude to
these things, and people will connect with them.
Paint is a very, really very interesting substance.
Also requires an ability to deal with frequent failures, as well -
You're trying to make this amorphous substance
congeal into something meaningful [laughs]! You know, you thing you’ve tamed it but
you’ve never tamed it – you know, it’s still got its own ideas about what it wants
to do.
Before I’d went to art school I’d gone to Paisley College of Technology, and the
environment there was intensely politicised. I mean, most of the professors there were
all Marxists and, you know, I got sucked into that and became very, very politically aware.
It was the first years of Margaret Thatcher’s government, which, as we all know, had a particular
impact on Scotland. Many of the industries that had defined Scotland, that were central, in a
way, to its identity – particularly Glasgow – like shipbuilding and steel, these were being
slowly dismantled. A lot of people lost their jobs and so on, so we felt very – this was
something that had to be militantly fought.
And so I found myself involved in artists who felt like they could use their work as a way of
of trying to communicate that change and offer possibilities for the future.
To come from a small town just on the outskirts of
of Glasgow, where, with no artistic background whatsoever, into Glasgow School of Art, this
sort of world opened up, it was quite a - it was fantastic actually.
The People's Palace painting came about because I'd had a relationship
with the curators of the People's Palace, they were kind of interested in my work
particularly the fact that I had been connecting with what was going on in Glasgow.
[Voice of Harry McShane] We are gathered at the People's Palace, Glasgow, to inaugurate
Ken Currie's magnificent pictorial ode to all rebels, martyrs, fugitives,
and to Capitalist sinners, and saints in Glasgow between 1778 and 1978.
The inauguration of this mural history of Glasgow
ranging over a period of 200 years, is a unique occasion for creative, artistic, and radical Scotland.
[Ken Currie] The struggle that they had been involved in themselves was actually up on the wall for
people to see, I think that was a really important experience for them, but the interesting thing
about that commission was that the - most of the criticism I got from it came from the
left itself. That was a deeply disillusioning experience for me - to have people that I
thought were on my side attacking the work. A lot of people on the left thought artists
should be facilitators - that they should be working with the public to help them realise their ideas
rather than them presenting their ideas to the public.
You know, I'm not preaching to people, it's not a classroom they're in, you know.
I want them to have a visual experience, so it's about the composition, it's about the colour;
it's about the energy of the thing.
You know, that's the way paintings should work- they should kind of haunt you
I mean, because I've spent my entire life being haunted
by paintings that have been made by other artists, you know, by great artists, and I've
had to go back and look at them and every time I go back the mystery deepens rather
than is solved, and I think that's the mark of a really great work of art.
You know, my work has always had that theatrical look about it
I have this great passion for film and for cinema, and I quite often work in sequences
or I make triptychs which are one scene, one scene, and another scene.
I'd been reading Kafka's Metamorphosis -
you know the idea of people - something changing from one thing recognisable into something which is
unrecognisable. Morphing - the idea of morphing into something which is slightly nightmarish.
These are the stuff of horror, and we've seen the horror genre, for example in cinema, uses that kind
of change thing all the time. And I'm fascinated by that.
One of the things that astonishes me about the response to my work is that I can make
this imagery which is quite difficult to look at, it's quite bloody sometimes, it's quite
gory, quite horrific, and people come in and they’ll look at the work and they say,
'oh I can't look at that - that's horrifying, that's horrendous. It's just too much'.
And then they'll go and watch a crime drama that night, and there's people having their heads chopped off
and strangled, and they'll sit and watch that with a cup of tea.
It never ceases to amaze me!
What is it about seeing blood on a static image, like a painting, that is so difficult -
that they - why is that unacceptable, whereas blood is acceptable in other forms?
I've never really been able to answer that myself, I really don't know.
So when you are direct in that way, you make your direct image which directly assaults the senses
in every way, with imagery which is difficult - it just seems to have a huge impact
compared to other mediums. I don't know why. Painting -
this old-fashioned medium still seems to have an ability to shock.
When I made the oncologists - the Three Oncologists painting
a lot of people saw them as spectral images, and ghostly images
and of course that immediately had some sort of supernatural associations with it.
But for me, it was actually - what I was trying to aim for was just a technical thing - I was trying
to paint these single figures, or forms, against a really black background, and I wanted them
to shimmer within that - to have some sort of movement within that, so it meant I had
to really soften the edges down.
Because people will bring their baggage with them to an image of three cancer specialists,
all you have to do is have a cancer specialist standing, looking at you, to make you quake
in your boots, and I suppose that's all that needed to happen in that painting.
It's interesting that people will bring to it all these different other feelings that
they have about it, and in a way that’s their business you know? Marcel Duchamp used to say that
the artist does 50% of the work and the viewer does the remaining 50% and I totally agree
with that.
Once the painting's completed my job is done, and then the rest of it is up to the viewer