CHARLES THOMSON

 

OXANA

18" X 24", Oil and acrylic on canvas  2004

John LeKay: I I have read that your artistic influences derive from Japanese woodblock prints, Impressionism, Van Gogh and German Expressionism. I see all of these elements in your painting entitled Oxana.  Can you please tell me about this beautiful woman and this painting.

Charles Thomson:   Oxana (or Oksana, as she apparently spells it - but she didn't tell me that at the time) is an erratic friend of mine. She is Ukrainian and in her mid-twenties, and stunningly attractive, especially when she dolls herself up. What I like is that she is actually a whacky, friendly individual with a good sense of humour, although she never stops talking! She's got a young son, and has been living in London for a number of years. She's also got an MA in Japanese.

 

When I showed her the painting, at first she was a little taken aback and didn't want to see herself like that. She quickly grew to like the image, and admitted that's what she was like. I think it's her inside - actually quite young, thoughtful and not certain about life. I didn't consciously intend that, but it seems to happen when I paint - something comes through very strongly from an intuitive or unconscious level, despite what I think I am doing consciously.

 

My work has been compared to Lichtenstein, possibly because people are more familiar with him than Japanese woodblock prints and German Expressionism (Die Brucke), and don't realise that Van Gogh has painted pictures with the use black outlines and  relatively flat colours. It was an artistic trend at the time, called Cloissonism after the enameling technique. I have to acknowledge Lichtenstein obviously, but his work is superficial and mechanical - that is the whole point of it, but the opposite to what I want to achieve, which is something deeper, more emotional and more meditative.

 

A lot of my painting is determined by feeling, which many people identify in painting as rough brush marks. That's usually passion, disturbance or muscular exertion. Still feelings run deep.

 

I have tried painting in different styles, but I've found this way is the only one that gives me the expression I want.  This surprises me a bit. My explanation is that it enables a visual equivalent to a synthesis of life experienced at a material, emotional and spiritual level.

 

JEALOUSY AND RAGE
30" x 24", Oil and acrylic on canvas  2004
 

JL:  You want to achieve something deeper, more emotional and meditative which is the antithesis of American pop art and most other forms of art out there today. It's interesting that your work is quite minimalist in a sense by the way you use line, large blocks of primary color, but is emotionally charged through the content and subject matter.   Something in your painting Jealousy and rage brings to mind Otto Dix paintings and Toulouse Lautrec posters. Like Ambassadeurs: Aristide Bruant  1892; Lithograph in six colors. Maybe its her facial expression perhaps, and her body language and cigarette. Who is this woman and can you please talk about this painting and your use of colour?

CT:  I have a simple approach to art, which is that its validity is the fact that we are better off with it than without it. I was wondering a few years ago why I was doing it in the first place. One of my paintings was hanging on an otherwise blank wall in my home. I realized I much preferred the painting to be there than to have the blank wall. With some things that are put forward as art, I would rather have the blank wall. Art is only worth having if it is something that enhances our lives. There is no point having something that depletes our lives. After seeing the Sensation exhibition in 1997, I felt my appreciation of existence lessened. I would have been better off if I'd not gone there at all.

 

That's not to say that art should be all roses. It can deal with difficult and extreme circumstances and emotions, but it has to deal with them honestly and with knowledge, depth, meaning and humanity. Then it puts us in touch appropriately with those parts of ourself.

 

 

EDMUND AND SEBBY
18" x 24", Oil and acrylic on canvas 1997

 

There are wrong things in art. The type of pop art which takes something which it knows is superficial and bland, e.g. a soup can label, and then puts it in the art arena as a clever and provocative statement, supposedly about the state of society or the nature of visual communication or whatever, is doing a great disservice to art and, at best, doing something which belongs in the field of aesthetic theory or social studies. We already have the soup can: reproducing it does only literally that. It is a duplication of an existing experience with very little beyond that. The best art goes to a deeper appreciation of things. If an artist can't do that, they would be better off sticking honestly to being a graphic designer.

 

When something is called art, we are trusting it to make a significant statement. If all it does is then to state something superficial, it fails. It is not only the subject, but how it is treated that matters. Warhol draws a boot and it is devoid of meaning - that is his ironic and useless point. Van Gogh draws a boot,  and the way he does it transforms it into a symbol that embodies emotion; it both comments on the mundane and simultaneously reveals depth behind it.

 

The fact is that I don't use primary colour that much. Colour is emotion. Lichtenstein uses primary colour which is superficial emotion. Barnet Newman painted large squares of red, yellow and blue which might as well have been a display on a garage forecourt. My colours are clear, but mostly not primary. Often what looks like a primary colour has been mixed and modified, but, even if it's not, there are other mixed colours in juxtaposition which alter the mood.

 

I find the essence of the subject and also a spiritual perspective on my emotional response to it with clear colour - it becomes archetypal or universal. The more the local colour of an object is modified tonally and otherwise to depict light and three-dimensionality, the more it becomes limited in time and space to one object existing in one situation.  It depicts what exists outside us, but doesn't reveal how we experience that inside us. It emphasises the materiality of things. That is why people like sunshine: it makes things clearer and brighter and reduces the mere materiality of things.

 

The subject matter is obviously important, because it evokes associations. I deal mostly with subjects I have experienced in life, because the bottom line is that that is what we are faced with every day. Through depicting it the way I do, it helps me to experience it in an enhanced way.

 

One thing you didn't mention is the line in my work. It has an organic quality. A lot of pop art has a mechanical quality. This too is an important communication of values.

 

The woman in Jealousy and Rage might look more like Dix or Lautrec, but I think it actually is more like Van Gogh's Dr Gachet in its real subject of the inner person. I find Dix and Lautrec deal  with the social role of the individual.

 

In terms of colour, I think like Van Gogh, for whom the colours in his Night Cafe, for example, expressed "the dark power of a bar". The jealousy is the green mug which is small but central, and which one holds onto and whose contents one consumes. The rest of existence in such a state of mind is reduced to simple stark elements of a sky of black blindness and negation, and an earth of unremitting hot emotion.

 

There are two other elements in the painting - the person depicted and the person she is facing, i.e. the viewer. The obvious interpretation is that the person depicted is jealous and angry. This was the starting point for the painting in my own experience, but the painting isn't propaganda; it is a statement of something universal and, as often happens in my work, capable of differering and contradictory interpretations. It doesn't have one simple meaning. It is a catalyst for meaning  It could also be that that person is on the receiving end of the anger. Or that person is jealous and the viewer is angry. Or that, if jealousy is the mug, then maybe the viewer has given it to her in the first place. Or finally, that a situation of jealousy and rage  is shared by two people in the relationship.

 

It has something in common with Manet's  A Bar at the Folies-Bergere, where again the viewer of the painting is implicated as the participant in the conversation/transaction with the waitress (and the hint of possible sexual trade in that case).

 

The woman depicted in my painting is an ex girlfriend, but I think to say "it is this particular woman and these were our exact personal circumstances on such and such a date" is to miss the real point of the painting. Those things were undoubtedly a relevant personal motivation for creating it in the first place, but what I wanted to create was not something just personal. It is not just her; it is me; and it is you. That is why you respond to it.

 

However, you might want to check out www.ginabold.com

 

I FEEL BAD WHEN I REJECT YOUR LOVE
30" x 40", Oil and acrylic on canvas 2004

 

(close up)

 

JL: With "I feel bad when I reject your love", the right hand appears to be deformed and brings to mind the hands of Picasso's "Seven dancers" and other works.   

This work like the previous two also makes me think of psychologist's thematic apperception test cards in the sense that this work appears to be deliberately designed to trigger specific kinds of emotions in the viewer; sadness, humor, compassion, etc.   Do you work from photographs or from a model and can you please talk about your technique?

Also, when you set out to make a painting like this, do you usually have a vague or clear emotion (s) in mind that you would like to elicit from your viewer?

 

COMING CLOSER TO GOD
30" x 40", Oil and acrylic on canvas 2001

 

CT: Jealousy and Rage was painted immediately after this one, which was in my head for about six months before I painted it, because someone had given me a mental block about doing it. Then I did it anyway, and felt much better.

 

Most of the time I work from quick black wax crayon line drawings from life. Oxana, Jealousy and Rage, and this one were all based on photographs. My procedure is usually to select one out of hundreds of drawings to base the painting on. I transfer the lines of the drawing onto canvas (which means enlarging the drawing). I have effected this in different ways at different times. Once I just used to paint the line on the canvas freehand, or maybe draw it first freehand with a pencil or trace it from a photocopied enlargement and then paint it. Now I usually use an overhead projector to make the enlargement and paint the line on top of the projection.

 

I usually use acrylic for the line, so it dries quickly and I can get straight on with the colours, which are in (Old Holland) oil paint. I mostly have a very clear idea of what I want the colours to be, and this, if I'm lucky, lasts as far as the first colour. Then what's on the canvas starts telling me I can and can't do certain things. The more colours that are on there, the less choice I have. It's a journey into the unknown, and the unconscious has a lot to do with it. One painting (Couple) I wanted to make a statement of loss and negativity with corpse-like colours. It ended up as one of the brightest and most joyous paintings I'd ever done, and I couldn't quite understand that, but it made me feel better for it.

 

I Feel Bad When I Reject Your Love came out very close to what I had envisaged, but I was still surprised - this time by the meaning. I thought I was painting a negative picture of loss. I realised it was a positive picture of reconciliation. It is also ambiguous, because you can't be certain who is speaking - the person in the picture or the viewer. The first person who saw it said they felt like crying, which I thought was an amazing affirmation of the painting's success.

 

I am usually motivated by a particular emotion, but that can be transformed during the process of doing the painting. I am also motivated by an impulse to be creative and an aesthetic - quite often I have a need for certain colours, but I think that too derives from emotion. I paint the colour through feeling.

 

FATHER AND SON
18" x 24", Oil and acrylic on canvas 1997
 

I very rarely change a colour once it's on the canvas. It's not that easy to do with the way I paint. The colour you see is the first and only coat. That means I have to get it right, and it makes me focus. I can mix up a colour for an hour if necessary just for a small section. It also means I have to mix up enough of it to cover the relevant area, and I sometimes end up with twice as much as I need, which is a lot better I guess than the times when I run out with a few inches left to cover. Getting an overall appearance of evenness means brushing the paint carefully. I can see it's not even, but other people think it is. I'm quite fanatical in most of the paintings with the edge of the black line, and often use a 0000 fine sable brush to get right into a corner.

 

From time to time I try to work in a quicker and looser way, but I've not so far been satisfied with the results.

 

I do the paintings for myself, as I want to do them and as I have to do them. I paint the pictures I want to look at. But I am also aware that in due course others will look at them too. This can produce unexpected consequences. Sometimes I don't want to do a painting because I think people won't think much of it. I do it anyway, just for myself, because I want to do it regardless of its anticipated public failure, and it turns out to be one of the most popular ones.

 

WOMAN WITH A HAMMER
24" x 18", Oil and acrylic on canvas 1999

 

STUCKISM

JL:  Quite a  few segments in your manifesto on stuckism bring to mind a book I read in the early 90s entitled " Art & Fear: Observations on the Perils (and Rewards) of Artmaking by David Bayles & Ted Orland  1993.  The authors give reasons why they believe artists become stuck.. .....and more.

Do you think that the label,  "Stuckisim"  in itself can inadvertently perpetuate a form of stuckness or create another mental cage within a larger systematic cage, like most other labels eventually will do, such as Conceptualism, post modernism , YBAs etc?

Here are a few excerpts from the book I mentioned above.  Please comment on this.

This book is about making art. Ordinary art. Ordinary art means something like: all art not made by Mozart. After all, art is rarely made by Mozart-like people - essentially (statistically speaking) there aren't any people like that. But while geniuses may get made once-a-century or so, good art gets made all the time. Making art is a common and intimately human activity, filled with all the perils (and rewards) that accompany any worthwhile effort. The difficulties art makers face are not remote and heroic, but universal and familiar.

 

Art is made by ordinary people. Creatures having only virtues can hardly be imagined making art. It's difficult to picture the Virgin Mary painting landscapes. Or Batman throwing pots. The flawless creature wouldn't need to make art.

Making art and viewing art are different at their core. The sane human being is satisfied that the best he/she can do at any given moment is the best he/she can do at any given moment. That belief, if widely embraced, would make this book unnecessary, false, or both. Such sanity is, unfortunately, rare.

 

TWO HAPPY ORANGE FISH
18" X 24", Oil and acrylic on canvas 2002

 

Making art provides uncomfortably accurate feedback about the gap that inevitably exists between what you intended to do, and what you did.

 

In fact, if artmaking did not tell you (the maker) so enormously much about yourself, then making art that matters to you would be impossible. To all viewers but yourself, what matters is the product; the finished artwork. To you, and you alone, what matters is the process: the experience of shaping that artwork. The viewers' concerns are not your concerns (although it's dangerously easy to adopt their attitudes.) Their job is whatever it is: to be moved by art, to be entertained by it, to make a killing off it, whatever. Your job is to learn to work on your work.

 

The function of the overwhelming majority of your artwork is simply to teach you how to make the small fraction of your artwork that soars. One of the basic and difficult lessons every artist must learn is that even the failed pieces are essential.

 

Artmaking has been around longer than the art establishment. Through most of history, the people who made art never thought of themselves as making art. In fact it's quite presumable that art was being made long before the rise of consciousness, long before the pronoun "I" was ever employed. The painters of caves, quite apart from not thinking of themselves as artists, probably never thought of themselves at all. What this suggests, among other things, is that the current view equating art with "self-expression" reveals more a contemporary bias in our thinking than an underlying trait of the medium. Even the separation of art from craft is largely a post-Renaissance concept, and more recent still is the notion that art transcends what you do, and represents what you are.

In the past few centuries Western art has moved from unsigned tableaus of orthodox religious scenes to one-person displays of personal cosmologies. "Artist" has gradually become a form of identity which (as every artist knows) often carries with it as many drawbacks as benefits. Consider that if artist equals self, then when (inevitably) you make flawed art, you are a flawed person, and when (worse yet) you make no art, you are no person at all! It seems far healthier to sidestep that vicious spiral by accepting many paths to successful artmaking - from reclusive to flamboyant, intuitive to intellectual, folk art to fine art. One of those paths is yours.

 

*Those who would make art might begin by reflecting on the fate of those who preceded them: most who began, quit. To survive as an artist requires confronting these troubles. Basically, those who continue to make art are those who have learned how to continue - or more precisely, have learned how to not quit.

 

The truth is that the piece of art which seems so profoundly right in its finished state may earlier have been only inches or seconds away from total collapse. Art is like beginning a sentence before you know its ending. The risks are obvious; you may never get to the end of the sentence at all - or having gotten there, you may not have said anything. This is probably not a good idea in public speaking, but it ís an excellent idea in making art.

Talent, in common parlance, is "what comes easily." So sooner or later, inevitably, you reach a point where the work doesn't come easily, and - Aha!, it's just as you feared! Wrong. By definition, whatever you have is exactly what you need to produce your best work. There is probably no clearer waste of psychic energy than worrying about how much talent you have -and probably no worry more common. This is true even among artists of considerable accomplishment.

A brief digression in which the authors attempt to answer (or deflect) an objection:

Q: Aren't you ignoring the fact that people differ radically in their abilities?
A: No.
Q: But if people differ, and each of them were to make their best work, would not the more gifted make better work, and the less gifted, less?
A: Yes. And wouldn't that be a nice planet to live on?

 

 

TWO WINE GLASSES WHO ARE JEALOUS
OF EACH OTHER
24" x 36", Oil and acrylic on canvas 2003

 

The ceramics teacher announced on opening day that he was dividing the class into two groups. All those on the left side of the studio, he said, would be graded solely on the quantity of work they produced, all those on the right solely on its quality. His procedure was simple: on the final day of class he would bring in his bathroom scales and weigh the work of the "quantity" group: fifty pound of pots rated an "A", forty pounds a "B", and so on. Those being graded on "quality", however, needed to produce only one pot -albeit a perfect one - to get an "A". Well, came grading time and a curious fact emerged: the works of highest quality were all produced by the group being graded for quantity. It seems that while the "quantity" group was busily churning out piles of work - and learning from their mistakes - the "quality" group had sat theorizing about perfection, and in the end had little more to show for their efforts than grandiose theories and a pile of dead clay.

 

Art is human; error is human; ergo, art is error. Inevitably, your work (like, uh, the preceding syllogism) will be flawed.

What you need to know about the next piece is contained in the last piece.

 

Filmmaker Lou Stouten tells the painfully unapocryphal story about hand-carrying his first film (produced while he was still a student) to the famed teacher and film theorist Slavko Vorkapitch. The teacher watched the entire film in silence, and as the viewing ended rose and left the room without uttering a word. Stouten, more than a bit shaken, ran out after him and asked, "But what did you think of my film?" Replied Vorkapitch, "What film?" ...............

 

The lesson here is simply that courting approval, even that of peers, puts a dangerous amount of power in the hands of the audience. Worse yet, the audience is seldom in a position to grant (or withhold) approval on the one issue that really counts - namely, whether or not you're making progress in your work. They're in a good position to comment on how they're moved (or challenged or entertained) by the finished product, but have little knowledge or interest in your process. Audience comes later. The only pure communication is between you and your work.   Art and Fear by David Bayles & Ted Orland  1993.

 

 

RAT HANGING

24" x 18", Oil and acrylic on canvas 1999

 

CT:   I find the extracts from the book well-written and clear-thinking with insight. It should be mandatory reading for all art students, and even more so for all art tutors.

Regarding Stuckism: every label has its advantages and disadvantages, the former usually there when something starts and the latter manifesting increasingly the longer it goes on. I certainly don't think of myself as 'a Stuckist'. I think of myself as a human being that does various things, including things within the Stuckists. I have heard someone remark about somebody else once that they weren't being a 'proper Stuckist' or something similar, and I was mildly horrified by it. That's not to say I don't have an idea of what Stuckist art is, and what the best examples of it are. I do, because I curate shows and make choices, but I always maintain that that is my take on it, and other people are free to make a different statement. That has always been the case. I will say that as far as I am concerned such and such a work is or isn't what I want to promote as Stuckism, but someone else has the right to choose differently. That way there is a dialogue rather than a dogma.

Stuckism is designed on an individualistic basis. All the groups are independent, but linked together on the model of independent sites on the web. When Billy Childish and I were writing the manifestos we had an non-committee approach to it. In committees there has to be consensus, so things get watered down to the lowest common acceptable denominator. Our principle was that if one of us really wanted something in, it would be included. That way you get the strongest and best from each person. Art has to function in that way, and so do artists/art groups. There's no formal democracy in Stuckism - there is a principle of individual initiative. However, if it's not in touch with the people involved, then they will stop participating in it. There has been a remarkably low drop-out rate, but then there's not much to drop out from, because there are minimal demands. Most people are simply doing what they were doing before, but now finding a label which describes it.

 

 

       

NINA VERSUS SEX
36" x 24", Oil and acrylic on canvas 2000

 

JL.  Would you consider your group to be a part of the mainstream, or something like the outsider artists in the states?

 

CT: Stuckism has always posited itself as the mainstream (not part of, but the - why do things by halves?). However, having said that, a few of the artists prefer to see themselves as part of an 'underground' movement, but none that I know of would want the role 'outsider'. There are marked differences between Stuckist and Outsider art.

 

JL:   "A woman in London is never more than 6 inches away from a rat" is an earlier work of yours, but has similarities with the other ones I have pointed out in several ways.

 

I can see that these paintings relate to your manifestos.  How important is humor in your other work, your writing and art critiques?

Also, do you think your pointed critiques of post modernism, conceptual based art and the London art system has made it much more difficult for you in terms of showing your own work?

 

 

A SINGLE WOMAN IN LONDON IS NEVER MORE
THAN SIX INCHES AWAY FROM THE NEAREST RAT
24" x 18", Oil and acrylic on canvas 1999

 

 

CT:  Thankfully you've got to one at last that I did in my 'normal' way, i.e. from a drawing from life. Actually it's called "A single woman in London is never more than six inches away from the nearest rat". The rat was suggested by my friend Natasha who posed for me (and for the painting Woman with a Hammer). The title came later, but it seemed appropriate. 

I don't care whether the paintings relate to the manifestos or not, but then the ideas are coming from the same place, so I guess they would automatically. I care if the paintings work as paintings for me and then if they communicate to others. I don't like manifestos anyway - I prefer essays. Billy (Childish) is the declamatory manifesto man. I only co-wrote them because his initial draft was extreme rhetoric to the point of absurdity. We brought the best out in each other and I consider them to be very successful - I would go so far as to say classics - in the genre. But remember, the work came first and the manifestos came out of that, although both work and theory had evolved in an intertwining way with a group of people over a twenty year period. Some people say the work doesn't match up to the manifestos - in that case, they have not understood the manifestos properly (or else we haven't written them properly). 

I don't set out intending to be humorous. It just happens when you're doing something serious. I seem to gravitate to the incongruities, flaws and contradictions of things - and that's funny. Things are meant to be one way, but they're actually another way, and it makes you laugh.  I studied Kabbalah under a teacher called Warren Kenton, who said there was a lot of humour at the spiritual level, and I think that's true. There are so many absurdities in our thoughts and actions. Dada made a meal out of it. If you take things in isolation, you can believe them, but when you bring together things that are normally kept separate, the fusion releases energy - or creates humour, to put it another way.

One of the great tests for Billy and myself was laughter. We began to realise that when we were roaring our heads off with something we were writing for the manifesto, it was a sign of its strength and effectiveness. We were saying simple things, but coming across, as we did so, the taboos that were being violated. I'd say humour is a part of the whole and has its place.

The opposition to the dominant current artistic mores has certainly made me and thus my work non grata in a lot of places and with a lot of people, but then those are places and people I'm not particularly interested in anyway. The last time I was invited to a launch where a lot of art celebrities were going to be present, I had a bath instead. I don't fit in with that, and I don't want to fit in with it. There are plenty of other people prepared to recognise what I am doing - and what the Stuckists are doing - and a lot of support from individuals, small galleries and even a national museum, the Walker in Liverpool, which is a city with a tradition of independence and radicalism. I dare say as time goes on, more institutions will open up to Stuckist artists, because Stuckism is changing the art world (viz Charles Saatchi's reiteration of our philosophy).

 

    

STRIPPER
40" x 30", Oil and acrylic on canvas 2002

 

JL: Do you believe that the post modern movement may try to assimilate and plagiarize this kind of art work into a form of - "saatchiesque stuckism"

Also do you think that the authentic in art can be plagiarized?

CT:  Saatchi has already played to occupy the Stuckist position. When we started the group in 1999 it was to promote painting and oppose conceptual art (particularly as represented by Saatchi's Britartists).  It succeeded in arousing considerable interest, so much so that, though we were a small group with a shoestring budget, we got a great deal of media coverage both in this country and abroad. People did find it shocking that we were uncompromisingly not subscribing to the dominant conceptual ethos - particularly as we looked like the type of people who should be. We were obviously not conventional traditionalists.

Saatchi's shock ran out of shock value. Pickled animals and dirty beds had become the norm. The unexplored avenue was the shock of rejecting everything that he stood for - which he had seen us doing.  Then he started to do it himself. In 2004 he saw a glorious opportunity with a single-mother, ex-stripper,  painter of a raw, emotionally-violent painting of Princess Diana, and promoted it worldwide, proclaiming the artist, Stella Vine, as the next art star. What he was promoting was Stuckism, although he didn't know it at first. Stella Vine had been one of the Stuckists, who had first exhibited her work three years previously (and was briefly married to me). This got in the press and he hasn't shown her since.

Then he launched The Triumph of Painting shows. By this time, he had become a Stuckist, though not calling himself that. His press release in 2005 proclaimed painting as "the most relevant and vital way that artists' choose to communicate".  Our book The Stuckists in 2000 had called it  "the most vital artistic means of addressing contemporary issues". He could regurgitate the ideas, but he didn't have the content. The show was dire.

You can copy the authentic, but you can't attain it, by definition. Otherwise you would be authentic, which would be something different. Authenticity carries its own inner conviction and originality. Copying it, or assimilating it is just that - a copy or an assimilation. And if people think there's anything to be gained from doing that, then that is exactly what they will do. Some might do it for genuine reasons, in that it helps them towards expression, but you always have the pioneers and the followers.

See http://www.stuckism.com/Saatchi/