GINA BOLD
Mark D and Charles Thomson visit Gina Bold’s
show, Born to Be Bold, at the Arlington Gallery (since renamed
the Novas Gallery) in Camden, London, and discuss her work.
MD: Gina Bold is now the first associate artist of the Novas
Gallery. What does this mean and what is its significance for
her career?
CT: It’s an important step. I understand it’s an exclusive
arrangement, where they will be giving her special promotion and
providing studio space, so we can look forward to larger scale
works. The gallery is run by the Novas-Ouvertures Group Ltd,
which is an Industrial and Provident Society (basically a
charity) with a turnover in the region of £35 million, so they
have the resources to back the venture. They have another
gallery in London in a cultural centre and similarly in
Liverpool. Novas was founded in 1998, initially to provide
housing, but they’ve identified a need to provide cultural
outlets as a way of addressing social problems at source, so
they are now moving into galleries and similar ventures. Gina
has only been painting seriously for five years, and this is
significant recognition. I have always said I think she could be
very successful – I said that about Stella Vine also, when she
was unknown and I exhibited her work for the first time in 2001
with the Stuckists. She is now exhibited regularly
internationally.
MD: How did you first encounter Gina Bold?
CT: I’d just got the Stuckism International Gallery in
Shoreditch in April 2002, and a week later I went along to a
private view at the Circle of Attention Gallery round the corner
– it’s all happening in the East End of London! Gina was helping
out at the bar and she sold me a postcard by one of the
exhibiting artists for £1. It had a picture of the Queen on it,
in the style of a bank note, as if she was a dominatrix offering
“fully equipped dungeons” etc. I had some photos of my paintings
which I showed Gina. She was very enthusiastic about art and
said how much she admired artists. She wasn’t one herself at
all. We met up a few days later and got to know each other a lot
better.
MD: On an emotional level as well as an art one?
CT: Yes, we started a relationship – fairly quickly actually.
About six weeks after we met, she did what she said at the time
was her first painting, Charlie with Wine Glass (later
retitled Wine Glass), in my studio at the Stuckism
International Gallery. She told me she’d wanted to paint for
twenty years, but she was blocked and couldn’t do it, and asked
me, “Will you take me under your wing?” to teach her about
painting. I virtually had to force her to do that first
painting, as she was too scared to even pick up the brush. It
evoked incredibly powerful emotions for her. I had to put my
hand over hers and guide it to push the brush into the paint and
to start putting paint on the canvas.
MD: You painted that in one of your paintings, didn’t you?
CT: Two years later, I did a painting which showed that incident
with my hand on hers, helping her to do her first painting. I
reproduced her painting in my painting, which was an interesting
technical exercise. There’s a bit of artistic licence as by that
stage of her painting I wasn’t still holding her hand. I did
this work as a record after she excised that whole period of her
life with me and the Stuckists from her history.
MD: What was that period?
CT: For quite a while after we met – about 16 months – she still
had a great deal of difficulty with a lack of confidence about
painting, and continued to ask me for my support, which I gave
her, sometimes to the detriment of my own work, I might add. I
thought it was very important that she should be launched on
this new path that was opening up for her, whereas it wasn’t one
I had any problem with. I recognised that she had a lot of
innate talent. She quickly became a major exhibitor in Stuckist
shows, and was in twelve, I think, altogether, including her
first solo show which I staged, though that was without her
involvement, as we’d parted ways by then. Other artists I
respect and work closely with, like Paul Harvey and John Bourne,
also admired her work. In fact Paul thought she was the real
artist because she had a more spontaneous way of working, while
she thought he was, because of his high level of technique.
MD: So why is all of that now left out?
CT: You tell me! The simplest explanation is that she has an
extreme character – it’s all or nothing. She said she wasn’t
very good at relationships, and I think that’s because she finds
it difficult to accommodate other people’s views that differ
from her own, especially if they challenge hers. It all went
pear-shaped, when she got very angry about some photographs I
was going to take of a model and Stuckist supporter (now
Stuckist artist, as well as member of the band Client), Emily
Mann, which were to be used to promote The Real Turner Prize
Show 2003. Emily was wearing black PVC and holding a sign
about the Tate director, which read, “Serota needs a good
spanking”. Gina said it was an inappropriate image to promote
the show and that it misrepresented the values of Stuckism. She
wasn’t very pleased when no one else agreed with her.
She had a fall out with Paul Harvey over it, because he called
her a jealous girlfriend. She said it was not personal: it was a
matter of principles, and started coming out with feminist
arguments, which seemed to me to be beside the point, since the
idea was instigated by Emily in the first place. Paul did a
painting based on one of the photos, but by then Gina had had a
breakdown, which I think had been coming for some time. I was on
the verge of one and exhausted by all the trauma, so the show
ended up being cancelled anyway, and Paul’s painting wasn’t
used. He found the whole situation with Gina quite upsetting. My
relationship with Gina had been on-off for some time and it
finished altogether.
MD: How did that affect you?
CT: I accepted it. Life had been becoming intolerable with those
kind of pressures and I needed freedom to do my work.
Subsequently she found her own strength to create and became
very productive, so that’s a good thing. I’m glad that has
worked out for her. However, she’s become incredibly hostile to
me in particular and the Stuckists in general, and she omits all
mention of the shows and so on in her CV. In a recent interview
in the Camden New Journal, she said she was self-taught
and had started painting after her father’s death, when she had
the breakdown in 2003 (which was of course the time she left the
Stuckists, not the time she started painting).
MD: What’s your reaction to being left out in that way?
CT: It’s not a problem on the personal level, but it certainly
is on the artistic, professional, commercial and historical. It
was a similar situation with Tracey Emin who incorporated a lot
from her ex, Billy Childish’s, work in her own. He showed
someone something he’d done ten years before her, and they told
him that Tracey had already done it – because they’d seen her
work before they’d seen his. It was the same with Stella Vine. A
blogger said they saw Stella’s work at the Saatchi Gallery. Then
they saw the Stuckists’ work and thought we’d copied her, until
they realised she used to be part of the Stuckists and was
married to me. That disadvantages my and other Stuckists’
artistic reputation and commercial prospects. From a historical
point of view, which is also important to me, it distorts the
true story and hence an understanding of cultural development,
as well as a proper evaluation of everyone’s work.
MD: What happened to Paul’s painting of Emily?
CT: He later repainted the placard at the bottom of it with a
picture of the singer Anna Page for The Stuckists Punk
Victorian show at the Walker Art Gallery during the 2004
Liverpool Biennial, and it was used to promote that instead. He
got a lot of exposure that way. It was on the banner in front of
the museum and it was on the book cover and so on.
MD: Gina was also in that exhibition?
CT: No, she wasn’t actually. She was in a fringe show,
“Stigmata” or “Censorious”: The Stuckists Punk Victorian,
staged by Harold Werner Ruben at his Rivington Gallery in
Shoreditch with work barred from the Walker. I was working with
some of the other artists on ideas for curating the Liverpool
show. We wanted a section of ex-Stuckists – Gina Bold, Stella
Vine and Billy Childish (not necessarily in that order). Gina
and Stella made it plain to the Walker curator that they didn’t
want to be in the show, so the museum cancelled that section. We
were really pissed off, because these were paintings from
private collections, apart from Billy’s, as he was quite
agreeable. We felt it was wrong that an artist should sell a
collector something and then tell them that they couldn’t
exhibit it in a museum if they chose to, but that’s what
happened. Stella apparently said she was going to commit
suicide if she was in the show, which seems a bit extreme.
MD: Slightly so.
CT: What about your connection with Gina?
MD: I’ve never met her. I phoned her two years ago a couple of
times to try to buy a painting, Flying Goose, but because
I knew you and collected Stuckist art, she refused to sell
anything to me. I got the impression that even one of her
paintings being hung in the same room as a Stuckist painting
would have upset her. When someone gets so distressed about
something as banal as that you have to just walk away and leave
them to it. It’s not worth trying to argue when someone is
acting irrationally. She came across as a nice person, but
obviously in an emotional state at the time. I felt disappointed
on the one hand and a bit aggrieved on the other. At the end of
the day she lost out on a potential sale that could have led to
more in the future. I’ve got no desire to enter into any sort of
business relationship and purchase works from somebody that
doesn’t want me to buy their work. There’s plenty of other
artists out there who are happy to take my money.
CT: You didn’t even know me that well at the time anyway.
MD: I guess at that time I’d only met you three or four times in
person and had a few conversations. But you were very helpful in
helping me build up an art collection, so needless to say I
stayed in touch and we’ve become friends, and I’ve lost touch
with Gina!
CT: You still went to see her new show.
MD: I did go to see the show, because I think she’s a talented
artist, or else I wouldn’t have been interested in her work in
the first place.
CT: What works do you collect?
MD: I collect all sorts of art and have about 40 Stuckist
paintings, as well as works from other underground artists such
as Jimmy Cauty, Jamie Reid, David Shrigley, Quentin Blake,
Angela Edwards, etc. I’ve just discovered a great artist called
Julian Christophers from Cornwall who does humorous nudes and
evil-looking seagull paintings – very underground art in a
Sexton Ming kind of way. It’s a joint collection with my wife,
Tully, although our tastes vary on occasions. She loves the
Pre-Raphaelites, but due to financial constraints we don’t tend
to collect them! Favourites usually stay on the wall
indefinitely. Others get swapped around to keep things looking
fresh. I don’t like to keep works in storage really, as I think
they should be enjoyed. I put on a show of our Stuckist art
collection, alongside my own work, in Nottingham, so that the
public could see the them.
CT: You’re a collector and you do your own work..
MD: I started painting as a result of being fed up at being
refused works by first Stella Vine (who emailed me “Go fuck
yourself”), then Gina Bold. It seemed it would be easier and
cheaper to just paint myself. Maybe they would like to buy one
of my works one day, so that I can tell them where to get off!
I’ll put on record that without your encouragement, I could
easily have given up on doing my own work. As it is, I get
constructive feedback, positive and negative. Sometimes I agree
with it and I take it on board. Sometimes I disagree with it and
ignore it. But it does encourage me and push me forward, so I
can understand how important it was for Gina to begin with.
There’s dozens of different styles you can paint in, so it can’t
be coincidence that she often paints in a similar way to you
with black outlines and flat areas of colour. The Good
Shepherd is an example of that. I wouldn’t say she directly
copies anything. That would be unfair, but you can see the
influence. She’s painting from the heart in what she believes
in, but influences go in subconsciously, whether you like it or
not.
CT: She has said that she is influenced by everything in life
she encounters. There’s an incessant curiosity and a desire for
new experience. Stuckism is predominately the school her work
fits into, though some of it has moved into a bit of Britart.
She’s a magpie that goes round collecting everything and
transforming it. Some of it seems intentional, but probably, as
you say, a lot of the process is unconscious.
MD: Do you see your work in hers?
CT: I evolved my style of painting in 1978, during my last year
at college, and she’s found this way of painting useful as a
starting point for expressing some of her ideas, but since she
started painting seriously in 2002 she has always used a variety
of styles, some nothing at all to do with mine. We used to work
side by side on occasion, and there was sometimes a dialogue
that took place. In 2003 in A Long Way from Greece I
exaggerated the different sizes of the hands. Shortly after, she
did this even more in Save the Last Dance for Me. Then I
exaggerated more than that in Woman in Black Hat with a
Cigarette. This feature reappeared in The Good Shepherd
by her a year later, and it’s even more pronounced in
Woman Two Birds and a Cock, where a large hand dominates the
picture.
I
do see influences. Compare my Red Guitar with her A
Song for Sphinx. Her painting also has the guitarist with
closed eyes and similar spindly fingers with a bulging base to
the guitar (but much less so than mine). She’s also put a
rectangular shape in the corner containing a symbol of mystery
(mine was the moon, hers a sphinx) and some decorative round
shapes on the wall. She has also employed a dominant bright red
contrasting with the complementary green of the man’s top,
though hers is a much darker green. I did a painting of her,
based on something she said once, I Feel Bad When I Reject
Your Love (though I slightly misremembered the words). It’s
a small figure in a big black space. She did exactly the same
thing, painting a cupboard black in the Arlington gallery and
putting a small isolated figure of herself, virtually the same
size as mine, on the wall with the words, “I’m so small and
lost”.
In 2000 with Sir Nicholas Serota Makes an Acquisitions
Decision I took a real person and put words in his mouth.
Stella Vine knew that painting and did the same thing in Hi
Paul Can You Come Over, the painting which Saatchi bought in
2004 and made her famous. She’d certainly not done anything like
that with previous work. Gina is familiar with both those
paintings. She’s done a variant, Break Art Free, by
painting herself and putting her own words there. You can’t deny
there’s a connection between those works, but they are all also
works with a strong individual identity. You certainly wouldn’t
say it’s plagiarism, but they spring from the same underlying
idea.
MD: It’s like Matisse and Picasso who used to spar with each
other and feed off each other’s work, taking ideas and adapting
them.
CT: There’s the well-known quote attributed to Picasso: “Bad
artists copy. Great artists steal.” In 1922, T.S. Eliot wrote in
The Sacred Wood: Essays on Poetry and Criticism:
Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal; bad poets deface
what they take, and good poets make it into something better, or
at least something different. The good poet welds his theft into
a whole of feeling which is unique, utterly different from that
from which it was torn; the bad poet throws it into something
which has no cohesion.
Ideas get passed back and forth, transformed, retransmitted and
made stronger. This contributes to the identity of a school of
work. When Billy Childish, Sexton Ming, Bill Lewis and myself
(some of the original Stuckists in 1999) were in The Medway
Poets in 1979, we were always using each other’s ideas.
MD: So in Eliot’s definition, Gina steals rather than copies or
imitates.
CT: Yes, mostly. Pictorial ideas, visual solutions and stylistic
features of work that Gina saw frequently over a sustained
period in the Stuckism International Gallery (which was also my
home where she often stayed) have appeared in her work since
that time. Paul Harvey painted a picture in a rococo-type frame,
Senta Berger. Gina’s done the same thing in a very
similar frame on a broken mirror, Self on Mirror. It’s a
new work in itself but there is a dialogue with his existing
work. Hers is a bleak punk recreation of it. Whether that was
intended or not, I don’t know. Probably not. Charles Williams
often uses a chequer floor, but paints it without perspective
like a wall, as in Drying Up. Gina’s The Accordion
Player, which I think is a very appealing painting, uses the
same device in a more discreet way.
Sexton Ming makes stylised circular and zigzag limbs, as in
Joe Whitney. Compare that with the arms in Gina’s Ios
– without it being pointed out, you would never link the two
artists, but Sexton’s manner has been incorporated, along with
the fixated eyes. It’s a good steal! There’s a very obvious
connection with Joe Machine’s images of sexuality and naked
people on a black background. Because the psychology and
rendering in hers are different, it took a long time before the
comparison dawned on me. Joe Machine noticed it straight away.
He thought her Hug was a strong painting and said, “I
wish I’d painted that” (it was a pose he hadn’t thought of),
which is quite an accolade.
She has benefited hugely from Stuckism and it’s only right that
this should be acknowledged. Self-taught artists don’t get the
advantage of exposure to this range of invention. I don’t have a
problem myself acknowledging that I have got some good ideas
from other artists, including Gina. I used her idea of a
displaced eye in a couple of paintings. Joe Machine’s Diana
Dors with an Axe gave me the idea for Woman with a Hammer,
which led on to a woman with a rat. I did a cubist-type
background after looking at Eamon Everall’s work. Joe said he
got the idea for using black outlines from my work. Paul Harvey
has worked from some of my photos, as has Gina several times.
And so it goes on.
MD: The motif of birds in Gina’s work reminds me of the symbolic
animals in Bill Lewis’s paintings. He has a dog or fox in there
quite often.
CT: The animal is traditionally a guide through the darkness.
It’s fascinating to see how an animal recurs in a different
relationships with the person in different paintings, sometimes
as a helpful presence, sometimes deceptively or in a hostile
way. While we’re looking at precedents, don’t forget Elsa Dax,
whose work is exclusively a personal reinterpretation of Greek
myths. Gina has subsequently done this as well, in her own way.
MD: There’s a tribute to Stella Vine’s trademark drips, where
Gina has done several similar paintings of poppies in a jug, one
even titled Poppys for Stella. Gina has also painted
celebrities, but they’re not a patch on Stella’s.
CT: I’d agree over that, but there’s not many of those celebrity
paintings, and the poppy paintings are good. They are macabre,
threatening poppies, streaming with what looks like blood, which
is appropriate for a flower that stands for death in war. They
make a great series and it’s a shame she doesn’t display them
together.
MD: Those paintings link to Van Gogh’s sunflowers. It’s not a
copy, but you can see she’s been looking at them.
CT: We looked at Van Gogh a lot, including a National Gallery
visit, and I read out some of his letters. She was very moved by
his life. Her poppies are a simpler, dare one say bolder,
depiction – punk Van Gogh, as it were. Since her time with
Stuckism, she has also been exploring other influences, Stella,
as you said, being one. Tracey Emin is another, with neon signs
and found objects.
MD: They’re a one trick pony. They only work on one level.
Gina’s Plastic Couple Full of Shit is lacking in emotion.
Similarly her cock paintings are pretty shallow, compared to
the other end of the spectrum, where there’s obviously tons of
emotion going into something like The Wedding Photo after the
Divorce.
CT: The cock paintings are based on an Andy Warhol drawing. I
think they’re awful. They’re just superficial, throwaway, and
it’s a pity they weren’t thrown away. How they can be given
wall space, while a superb painting like A Little Bird Told
Me isn’t shown, is beyond me.
MD: She should stop painting celebrities and cocks – although
celebrities’ cocks could prove an entertaining show! There are
things which don’t work and some of the exhibition which is
outstanding.
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CT: I think we are in agreement on that. Her show ranges from
very run of the mill adult centre stuff to work touched with
genius, where she’s capable of mastering a psychological
complexity and distilling it into very clear simple symbols,
which are done in a very accomplished way aesthetically. She has
got a fine sense of colour, a developed ability with form, and
an inventive and unusual mind. When those, plus a strong
emotional input, all come together, the result is a masterpiece.
The one that stood out for me was Inner Dealer, which has
an archetypal image in the centre – a divided face of a male
and female sun and moon, with birds growing out of it and talons
sinking into a heart, which is dripping blood. There’s a
personal reality and a universal truth that we are divided and
the cause of our own pain.
MD: I thought one of the strongest ones in the show was It’s
Dark in Here Mary Jane, which had something haunting about
it. The title gives the painting an extra dimension. It’s not a
big painting. You look at the title, then you look at the
painting, then you look back at the title. Her work is at its
strongest, when it stops you in your tracks and you can’t
instantly work out what she’s trying to say, and it slowly comes
to you, as you keep looking. That’s what good art does: you can
interpret it in several different ways.
CT: The best of the work is a shamanic journey or a Jungian
odyssey through the unconscious, going down into the underworld.
In 2004, she wrote on her web site:
When I see my emotions in picture form I have better
understanding of my subconscious mind on a conscious level, it's
as if in trance I see an image which is part from my real world
and part from my mind which has gone into a state of free play.
It's a deeper communication than language for me. It's soul
searching, sometimes confusing and often painful.
That more or less encapsulates the essence of the first Stuckist
manifesto. A painting which I think is absolutely tremendous is
Woman Two Birds and a Cock, which, like a lot of her best
paintings, wasn’t in the show and isn’t even on her web site any
more. It’s a photograph of the soul. It’s a masterpiece of
consumed lust and disfunctional relationship, but with
uncompromising self-knowledge of the psychological distortion
created by that state, where you can see everything, but can’t
say anything – the mouth is an eye. The inclusion of the two
decorative birds is a brilliant touch, which sets a contrast
between emotional trauma and the simple pleasures of something
you might buy in a gift shop and hang in the kitchen window. The
birds are a foil visually to the rest of the painting, which is
certainly open to multiple interpretations.
MD: She works very well when she brings in mythology, as in
Ios, where she mutates a body and a bird. Those sorts of
paintings are incredibly strong images. They’re original –
nobody’s ever come out with anything quite like that. They’re
extremely well painted, which suggests that she spends quite a
bit of time doing them.
CT: It’s the Gina Bother test. If she can actually be bothered
to put a lot of attention and care into the way she’s doing
something, it works, and when it’s a throwaway thing, it doesn’t
work.
MD: I wouldn’t say it necessarily doesn’t work, but it doesn’t
work as well.
CT: You wanted to buy Flying Goose. What did you like
about it?
MD: It is a strong and powerful (and attractive) image and
involves romance and mystery. It works on several levels – both
as a striking image and on an emotional level. It makes you
think about why the artist painted it. Is it an escape? A flight
searching for something????
CT: She is an important artist, and she’s already established
her place in art, even if she doesn’t do any more paintings at
all. The best of her work is worth remembering, and should get
its place in history. Regardless of what she wants, that place
will undoubtedly be, as a West End gallery owner said to me
recently, in the context of Stuckism, because there’s no other
way that you can see her work. To him, with a couple of decades’
experience in the art world, it was glaringly obvious. Stuckism
is no longer just a group: it’s become a genre. It’s one your
work fits into, and you’re not even a formal member of the
Stuckists.
MD: Absolutely. There’s a “Stuckist style” there.
CT: There’s a Stuckist ethos, a Stuckist philosophy, behind the
work.
MD: What Stuckism is to me is more a mood, a feeling within the
work, which is why it’s so difficult to categorise. Gina Bold’s
work comes under that banner, so does Stella Vine’s work, which
cannot escape – or has not escaped – from Stuckism. Billy
Childish is always referred to in the same breath as Stuckism,
as he was there at the start and the catalyst for the word
Stuckism, even though he left after two years in 2001. Others
have come and gone, and they have their place in Stuckist
history. Hopefully I can make my own small mark in there as time
goes on.
CT: I think you already have, because your painting was used in
a demo outside the Turner Prize for a start.
MD: It helps to paint topically from time to time!
CT: Not a one trick pony I trust?
MD: What, me!
Links
Gina Bold
www.ginabold.com
Mark D
www.stuckism.com/MarkD
Charles Thomson
www.stuckism.com/thomson
Also see