Yes, I was delighted with the news that it was going to happen! When I arrived and saw the paintings had been unwrapped and placed where I had requested, I was thrilled to bits with it all. The galleries are so beautiful, and it was emotionally powerful on different levels. Partly, it was exciting to see my earlier work out of storage, but on another level, just returning to the place where I studied all those years ago was a lovely experience.
I didn’t really decide. I think, as with a lot of creative work, you find yourself becoming very involved in a form or a language, which leads to exploring it more closely, and then the months turn into years. It’s a kind of development, a slow evolution. So, I never sat down and decided I was going to be an abstract artist.
When I came to London in the 1970s, I got to know quite a few artists who were abstract painters, and we had many interests in common. I suppose it was then that I began to acknowledge I was an abstract painter.
Well, a bit of both, really. I’m aware of a dynamic between what I’d call strategy and impulse, or improvisation. By improvisation, I mean allowing oneself to be impulsive, as opposed to being more carefully planned. The relationship between the two is very useful to me. I don’t wake up one day and plan to be impulsive; if I am improvising in a painting, it’s perhaps to try to rescue it from going wrong. In those situations, I have to try out things that I would never have planned.
I realised quite early on - it was a kind of revelation - that colour in painting can make what I call luminosity it is as if the light is coming from the painting and it becomes a light source in itself. It’s to do with physics but painters tend to trust their visual instinct. For me, colour is not meant to be cosmetic, to make something more attractive, I'm not interested in that. It's to structure this luminosity, this light and space. Colour relationships can do very complex things spatially and you can never subtract colour from the medium that’s holding it, its thinness, thickness, transparency, opacity and so on. This makes for a lot of visual activity that needs orchestrating. In a way, I could say it’s just instinctive, but there is a lot of experience involved; you learn about your language through experience.
It's changed enormously. When I left college, after studying for seven years, people my age didn’t really expect to have shows or sell work. I don’t know what we really thought we were doing; we just wanted to paint. All the people I knew had to have jobs to make this possible — to rent studios, buy materials, and to buy time. There was a lot more part-time teaching in those days, which is a big change. In terms of galleries, there were very, very few back then, which seems hard to believe now, when there are so many.
The culture has changed, but it was already shifting during the Thatcher years, with people doing things differently, young artists taking more initiative in showing their work. The main change now is that there are a lot more galleries, curators, dealers, many more artists, and there’s more freedom. It’s a more open culture. And, of course, the internet has changed everything.
There are too many to mention, but one example would be Helen Frankenthaler — she was very important to many people in the 1960s as a female abstract painter and i'm sure I was influenced by her from early on. On my recent trip to Italy, I saw a big show of hers in Florence which was fantastic. There were big, ambitious paintings I had never seen reproduced before, so it was a sort of renewal of my admiration for her.
Matisse teaches many of us painters a lot — you can keep learning from Matisse forever. I look at art from the past a great deal; my trip to Italy was really to see the old masters. But at the same time, I’m very interested in contemporary painting. I’m very open-minded in what I look at — I like figurative painting as much as I like abstraction. It's all pictorial language, and endlessly fascinating.
Well, I don’t teach anymore, but when I did, I’d always advise the students who were about to graduate to keep in contact with their peer group, keep in touch with people, because being in art school is like belonging to a family in a way. And find other artists whose work you’re interested in. These days, it’s much easier, partly because of the internet and especially Instagram. Trust your instinct in what you like the look or sound of. Education never stops — we never stop learning. And be prepared for the ups and downs, because the downs come just as much as the ups, in terms of making your own work and how it’s perceived. Just keep going. And good luck!
