Colin Drew: Recent work

I returned to the UK from Spain to do a two-year MA in Fine Art at Manchester Polytechnic in 1987. My main interest was to develop the language of Abstract Expressionism and somehow embrace or work against abstract painters working in the UK at that time. My main, or only, interest was painting and I wanted to learn or master the technique of making paintings which now seems to be completely out of step with the way things currently are in the so-called “art world” in the twenty-first century.

Untitled, 1989, oil on canvas

Prior to my move to Spain and subsequently Manchester I had studied Economics at a British university, and after that I pursued my personal interests in cinema, poetry, contemporary classical music, and the visual arts in particular. While studying painting in Barcelona in the early 1980’s I had encountered the trans-avant-garde and postmodernism, and I remember reading that seminal reader edited by Hal Foster, I think. However, I could not, and still cannot, summon an interest in the ironic or in areas such as ethnicity or national and sexual identity. For me they are a smoke-screen to disguise superficiality, a lack of artistic ability/sensibility, and an inability to confront existential or higher truths which cannot be described but only alluded to.

Concerning recent tendencies in the British art world, Will Self commented on the back cover on a recent edition of High Art Lite by Julian Stallabrass, “I cannot help but endorse his analysis of the high art lite tendency … its abject willingness to be f**ked up by the cult of celebrity; f**ked over by the 1990s boom in consumerism; f**ked sideways by its adoption of the styles and modes of popular culture; and f**ked to buggery by its co-option by a new Labourite idiotology.”

Untitled, 1990, oil on canvas

Untitled, 1990, oil on wood

Untitled, 1990, oil on canvas

Back in Spain after leaving Manchester, I continued to develop my own personal style of painting bearing in mind painters I admired such as Sean Scully, Brice Marden, and Gerhard Richter that I had discovered whilst at Manchester. However, earning a living in Spain was more difficult than before and there was a total lack of support for a painter like myself as there was no art scene existing as is the case of cities like Berlin, London or New York. I felt that Barcelona was a cultural backwater, and I was fed up with all the hype and Catalan nationalism. Nevertheless, I continued the struggle to continue painting in isolation while developing an interest in zen Buddhism.

Untitled, c 2005, 28 x 36 ins., oil on canvas

Untitled, c 2005, 18 x 34 ins., oil on canvas

Now, many years later back in the UK, I feel that I am starting again ab initio....painting from degree zero. It’s not exactly a good feeling...a bit scary! What do I really want to paint, and how do I want to paint? I’m sure that many painters know all about it. So here goes...!

Yes, I know that the stuff shown here isn't too good but it can only get better! I must just keep at it. I can only think of something Sean Scully once said in an interview:
"I think I'm a good person to have around in a shipwreck in the sense that culture has run aground. The ship of culture has hit a sandbank, or crashed. The stuff that is coming out of London, for example . . . I can put it very briefly - people who talk about the 'Brit Pack' always say the name should simply be changed to 'Shit Pack,' because it's a pack of shit. It is exploitive, superficial, opportunistic, hip, laconic, sarcastic, sardonic, everything I don't like; it's full of cynicism and opportunism. They work in a gang, which is another thing I don't like. So I am happy to stand against that as an individual without feeling outnumbered."
So it makes me feel a little better about my own work when I think of the so-called YBA's and other celebrity artists who seem to be supported nowadays by the major institutions and public media.

Untitled (work in progress), August 2012, acrylic on canvas, 102 x 106 cms

I've done lots like this. Am I getting any better? I ask myself.

Untitled, summer 2011, acrylic on paper, 28.5 x 41.5 cms

Untitled, autumn 2011, acrylic on card, 18 x 24 cms

This comment by Gerhard Richter has given me much food for thought:

"The much despised 'artistic scene of today' is quite harmless and friendly when we do not compare it with false claims: it has nothing to do with traditional values that we uphold (or which elevate us), it has virtually nothing at all to do with art. Thus the 'art scene' is not despicable, cynical or without spirit but as a temporarily blossoming, busily proliferating scene it is only a variation on a perpetual social game that fulfils needs for communication, in the same way as sport, stamp collecting or breeding cats. Art happens despite this, rarely and always unexpectedly, never because we make it happen."

[from the private journal of Gerhard Richter, entries from which were reproduced in the exhibition catalog "Gerhard Richter", Tate Gallery, London 1992.]

Untitled, June 2012, acrylic on canvas, 65.5 x 61 cms

Untitled Study, August 2013, acrylic on cardboard, 23 x 27.25 cms

Oh well, this one isn't too bad. I'm looking back to earlier work, and using those strong colours. Mmmm! How to move on? I simply cannot just go back to where I was and expect to do interesting work. I'm reminded of Gerhard Richter making a "botched" copy of The Annunciation he saw in Italy. We're not working in the renaissance now! Our way of life and values etc are so different. Was it Frank Stella or Kenneth Noland who said he wanted to paint like earlier painters but couldn't, so started painting stripes? So I just have to keep at it...out of the work comes the work...isn't that the quote?

Kurt Schwitters said something I can really relate to: "Art is an archetype, as sublime as the godhead, as inexplicable as life, indefinable and without purpose." I shall bear this in mind.

Gerhard Richter is also a role model of mine. Here are three of his quotes:

“To talk about painting is not only difficult but pointless too. You can only express with words what words are capable of expressing...what language can communicate. Painting has nothing to do with that.”

"A painting can help us to think something that goes beyond this senseless existence. That’s something art can do."

"Painting is the making of an analogy for something non-visual and incomprehensible: giving it form and bringing it within reach."

I often feel that I cannot continue to make paintings as before. That lost ideal I was searching for continues to elude me. Does this entail destroying what has gone before or including an element of destruction in my work like Rauschenberg's Erased De Kooning? My recent efforts are a reflection on this:

Study Four for Oil Painting, October 2012

Study for Oil Painting, January 2013

I often wonder why I bother to make paintings, as it normally entails hard work and there's no instant gratification about it. So the comments of Sue Hubbard gave me pause for thought:

Sue Hubbard on Creativity

Blue-sky thinking, finding the inner you; if you look up ‘creativity’ on the internet you’ll be bombarded with sites to help you get in contact with your creative potential. I blame Joseph Beuys, that modern art guru of fat and felt, who claimed “everyone is an artist”. Now we all feel we have something to say. But do we? Of course Beuys didn’t mean everyone has the potential to be a Picasso. Motivated by utopian beliefs, culled from Romantic writers such as Novalis and the anthroposophy of Rudolf Steiner, he believed in the power of universal human creativity to bring about revolutionary change. The psychoanalysts had a slightly different take. Hanna Segal saw art as an expression of the depressive position and the task of the artist as the creation of the world. Great art could be defined by how well it created another reality. In this world the artist mourns for lost relationships and experiences that have given meaning to life. Segal cites Proust who, on meeting some long lost friends, saw how frivolous they’d become. Realizing that his former world no longer existed he set about re-creating that of the dying and the dead. Art, therefore, becomes a form of mourning, where loved ones are given up in the actual world and re-created in an inner one.

Melanie Klein took these ideas further. For her art was a form of reparation for destructive infantile rage against the abandoning mother. While for the psychiatrist Anthony Storr reflective solitude was an essential component. The cliché that genius is akin to madness is not so far off the mark. Artists, particularly poets, are known to suffer from a high rate of depressive illness. So no, creativity is not about ‘blue-sky thinking’ but about destruction and loss, transformed into art through the arduous creative process.

Untitled painting, acrylic on card, 23 x 24.5 cm, February 2015

These days I find it difficult to keep on working. The little work I do see by other people doesn't seem to inspire me at all and it's difficult to work in a vacuum. Even other abstract paintings I see seem to offer little. Oh dear! Anyway, I do make the effort from time to time and here are three examples of my effort: