I looked back on the photos from Ged Quinn's show at Stephen Friedman gallery because it was very relevant to what I was thinking about in terms of nature and romanticism and all, and from watching the video of the in-conversation (which I roughly transcribed below) I learnt a lot about how he works, how this body of work is quite a big transition for him (before he did mainly reproduction/appropriations/ from art historical contexts) and this was a much looser, freer body of work, bigger in scale as well. but they were still referencing directly to the watercolour landscapes by Dürer. he doesn't do predatory drawings or anything, he just paints. he kept emphasizing to trust yourself and accepting mistakes and to welcome them, because often those are interesting. it was also great to see how he combined all the different inspirations into these works...
watercolour landscapes by Albrecht Dürer:
this body of work was incredibly inspiring to see in person and I'm really glad I went to that painter's forum. It's making me rethink actively about illustrating nature in a certain way; perhaps in a way that is conscious of our 'perception' of nature... maybe that is romanticized. I suppose it would rely on our memories of seeing 'general' nature, depending on what I am thinking about, for example, the tree outside the Paula rego museum in lisbon was a very specific kind of tree that was etched in my memory, not exactly visually, but in emotion... I remember the atmosphere around it was strangely quiet even though we were talking, the even stranger colour of the museum building, this chalky orange was nothing I've seen before. It made me feel peculiar, like I am in between two shades of something, like I'm on the brink of making a grand decision but haven't quite leapt yet.. I want to experience more of these particular bits of nature, as human and selfish as that sounds. and I often photograph when I see something like that, and I feel it again when I look at that photograph, but it is more like a gentle aftershock than the first impact. the medium of photography neutralises a certain something through the process of shooting. it is unnatural. capturing nature, still, is unnatural (like dioramas). maybe that's why I'm so drawn to both photography and taxidermy/dioramas. they shouldn't be possible, yet they are, so previously brought to life for us, forever encased for our viewing pleasure. something bitter, something sweet and something ironic about it. it's something that can be thought about in a million directions, and it's important in the diminishing of the natural world today that I think that's why it is so important to focus on right now. and it's been intriguing me from childhood/teenage/to adulthood now. the passing of time, when I aged these photographs and dioramas aged too. though invisible to the eye. digital images don't age visually. dioramas have regular renovations, polishing, brushing away that layer of dust, repositioning its components. how do I want my paintings to age? what do I want my paintings to do, in time? am I also 'diorama'ing, photographing, time-capsuling a piece of my history? is that even relevant? and if I am documenting my dreams, with other images I've seen in the past, what does that mean? my dreams follow a different timeline, not even a timeline, a 'time' that means an entirely different thing in another subconscious universe. what does that mean when it is represented in the present, right here right now? I feel I should read more upon carl Jung, I know ged quinn was thinking about his 'memories, dreams, reflections' but I think I'm going to start off reading 'Man and his symbols' because I have not read his ideas before and this was written specifically for people not in the psychology field/already have prior knowledge... Jung believed dreams were very purposeful.. his writing in 'the interpretation of dreams' is interpreting dreams, after all... but I don't think I try to interpret my dreams. I just try to visualise them in a painting (from images) as an afterthought, inevitably manipulated, that gets turned into this new landscape where I've never been, certainly not even in my dream. I do want to continue to source from my vivid dreams, but I hope to have a clear focus on that nature/culture divide, or at least some direction that points towards me actively thinking about what nature really is and how that surrounds me, than just a 'fantstical, magical, surreal' world, the stuff of nightmares, etc, etc. I believe I have more to offer than that... after all, everything is grounded from reality to some extent. and right now, thinking upon nature is that reality...
from the gallery website:
Ged Quinn was born in 1963 in Liverpool, UK. He now lives and works in Cornwall.
Richly layered with meaning and symbolism, Quinn’s works combine complex histories and mythological references with the traditions of landscape, still-life and genre painting. Drawing on inspiration from art history, Quinn uses paintings by artists such as Claude Lorrain, Caspar David Friedrich and Jacob van Ruisdael as source material to form multi-layered narratives. Themes of religion, politics, literature and film permeate his works. Yet with decidedly Surrealist undertones, Quinn's dream-like paintings resist interpretation.
Quinn’s third solo exhibition opened at Stephen Friedman Gallery in November 2019. Offering an emotional response to an imagined landscape, this new body of work represents an important shift in the artist’s practice and marks a departure from creating reproductions of paintings from art history.'
https://www.stephenfriedman.com/news/113-stephen-friedman-gallery-hosts-in-conversation-between-ged/
'This current solo exhibition of new paintings by Ged Quinn is the third show at the gallery for the Cornwall-based painter. The new body of work presents a monodrama and pairs large-scale romantic landscape paintings with smaller portraits and intimate pastoral scenes. Marking a significant development in the artist's practice, these wintry images are rendered in thinly applied layers of oil on linen and focus on the feelings of Quinn's protagonist, an isolated wanderer.
Quinn's new paintings are inspired by German lyric poet Wilhelm Müller, English Romantic poet William Wordsworth and Carl Jung's partially autobiographical book ‘Memories, Dreams, Reflections' (1962). They also relate to a rare series of watercolour landscapes by Albrecht Dürer. In this body of work we follow the wanderer through a majestic and ethereal landscape, a snowy village and a coal burner's hut. While making footprints in the snow, he moves in a hypnotic daze and dreams of spring in winter.']
Below is a rough transcript of the in-conversation that was fascinating, with ged Quinn and paul hobson...
https://www.stephenfriedman.com/video/9-ged-quinn-in-discussion-with-paul-hobson-director/ (video: in conversation)
three areas to talk about: Albrecht Dürer’s landscapes, romantic poets in particular Wilhelm Müller, the song cycle Schubert , carl Jung
-came across durers by chance, using art historical sources, painting could be cliché-ridden so to use this art historical framework seemed to shortcut the problems you might get when you want to share a view with somebody.
-got to this point where he wanted to rediscover what painting was, rather than academic, fairly conceptual exercise. wanted to explore and refine things he did years ago as a student, for instance he increased the scale, worked flat
-because he was looking at tiny watercolours, he thought he had to have this more fluid approach, let things dissolve and run,
P: for people who don’t know your work, you’re well-known and admired for your technical ability, but often appropriating stylistically coherent imagery, from artists…Claude Lorraine, almost direct reproduction and appropriation. To what extent here are these paintings directly drawing upon Durer’s landscapes?
-not as much, also the natural visual decay and degradation of the dyes became part of it, much much looser, more of an influence.
-the political thing, felt as an artist you either had to be engaged in an activist way, if you couldn’t feel comfortable doing that, you want to look at something else, an interior world that didn’t have to engage with a country you didn’t quite recognise anymore, so it became a landscape of mine more, and that brought in the idea of the ‘journey’, going off, where things had a symbolic value, because you have to live in that place, you couldn’t quite confront what you were really seeing/hearing/what’s happening, because it was unrecognisable in the landscape you thought you occupy.
P: so Ged and I just had our first Brexit conversation. Seemed to be this resignation that settled in after the election and I think it’s really interesting to hear that for you this is an immersion in another imaginary world, and certainly a romantic world, we can say it directly relates to wilhelm muller and your interest in his cycle of poetry. if you could talk a little bit about muller and your interest and also what the story is
-it’s quite embarrassing really, it’s so nakedly romantic, and one of the things I liked about muller is that he was very happily married, wasn’t broken hearted ever, it’s a very niche thing, this young, broken-hearted man going into the landscape, and then his journey not about his broken heart but something else entirely, a journey of discovery, and I always put in mind caspar david friedrich’s ‘wanderer above the sea of fog’, and how that translated into English poetry… so the notion of the wanderer got me into these places, matched an idea that I might be doing with my own work, that there was this immersion in material, that is equivalent to landscape, the things had a metaphorical, symbolic meaning rather than an academic structure, and there’s a more autobiographical, emotional momentum. Like how collage can be a hiding place for people who have no sense of composition, but it can also reveal a direction and a progress in momentum, and I think that’s what I was trying to pair down within that cycle of poetry because every evening there was always an experience, I mean its a very sweet thing but it somehow felt contemporary and significant at this point.
P: so these two poems that have been referred to for those of you who don’t know were written in the 1820s, one’s called Winter Journey and the other’s called lovely lady of the mill or something [Die schöne Müllerin, is a song cycle by Franz Schubert based on poems by Wilhelm Müller.] and they are romantic, romantic with a capital R, but they are also romantic in the, they tell the tale of this sole male protagonist who’s on a journey, he follows a brook (small river), and the brook takes him to this daughter of this miller, who of course treats him really badly, and he falls in love with her, and some big strapping hunter comes along and she falls in love with him and ditches him and then he’s left singing this lullaby by this brook, there’s a great ambiguity in the way it can be I think in German, this kind of tradition that leaves things very ambiguous, left within loss of natural symbolism as to what happened to that person, and its a similar story for Winter Journey, which tells the similar tale of this unrequited love, from a male protagonist.. and these paintings are referred to as monodramas, we’re the protagonists in a similar way which seems to be to be a radical shift in terms of the way that you structure even narratives in your work, very different.
-I think one thing about romanticism is where you place the viewer inside a painting, if you have a figure, a rearview of the figure, you’re placing the audience right there, turn of the road where they can’t see, and I was very aware in these works I wanted there to be spaces that you felt you could physically explore..
P: yeah they definitely feel like that, although they associate in a very intuitive emotional and dreamlike way, an interior landscape, like you described, but they also feel like a world you can go into, whereas the work which you became well-known for, was almost like an intervention of the surface of a side of art history. Even though its a landscape, like an Arcadian classical landscape, that manner, you felt very much like the wall of history was going to prevent you from walking around in that world and there’s a set of contemporary symbols that were then attached to that art historical surface in a way that prevented you from going into it but these are spaces that you feel you can walk around in, and one of your other references for this body of work is Carl Jung, is that part of that
-yeah its something I thought about, ‘Memories, Dreams, Reflections’ (1962), the memories of being young, memories became transformed in ways in how he understood his adult world, I’m not an expert about him but I remember reading that and sensing that world in wonder..
P: I feel this is connecting to a more personal story for you at the moment, which we didn’t get a chance to talk about, although you are getting married this year.. maybe you are feeling like this romantic protagonist … this interest in this dream-like space…
-I live in the very beautiful side of Cornwall, people always ask does this come into your work at all and it never did. I was in the studio, I did what I did, I worked from reproductions, the reserve.. I had a massive project planned, tens and thousands of trees creating woodlands, being in nature, trying to create another world that had been ploughed and taken away, so I did that and I was aware of the interesting trees .. for the first time I found myself making notes outside and sketching photographs of the landscape which Id never done before
P: and had those found a place in these landscapes?
-yeah.
P: so it does feel like its very autobiographical but given what you were saying earlier about it being your response to current social and political context a kind of retreat, and drawing on your local garden would you say that these feel very personal in a way that’s different from previous bodies of work?
-completely.
P: do you understand that shift?
-yes, I do, I became interested in the language of painting, /before it was a very restricted thing, as you said, the intervention of the surface, juxtaposed to make points, to create arguments and these are much more about deconstructing and being involved in the language of painting which is a long journey around. Before the only way you could make paintings was to use it as a postmodern prop, ideas and arguments until now, being involved in creating the language/ creating new paths.
P: so do you think there’s a new set of opportunities in painting that isn’t just one of, post modern..
-I don’t even know if it would even matter, I think its my generation that has it, once that’s been implanted into you, and you’re told that the thing you’re naturally good at, there as no audience for it or there’s no significance in it, or its cliché ridden then you try and find other ways, did lots of other things before, tough if you have a natural inclination to.. think its magical, been through everything analysing it, taking it inside out, there’s something magical about it, cause painting is an object too.
P: will you talk a bit about your working process, creating these images?
-I do everything myself, I don’t do drawings, I just start. Have an idea of what I wanna do, I mean its pretty traditional really. With having historical sourced works you sort of have a helping hand of somebody who really knows what they’re doing. And you find that intellectual space that they’ve created that you can also work inside
P: and you’re working in a studio, you’re not working in digital or anything , no drawing or preparatory work, and has that always been the case even with your works that are so incredibly technical precise
-yes, I don’t know what that says…
P: It’s amazing, incredibly miraculous. That you can work in that way, and say this shift that seemed to offer you more loosening up, do you feel this is the direction of your future work?
-yes, it’s completely fascinating. This extraordinary window, was just looking at these colour things and I always buy the right colours for say Claude or../ they’re always the same, I was looking at these same manufacturer, but complete different things, and thinking wouldn’t it be exciting to use a different, blue, and really learnt something.
P: this is a process, a=shift that happened over some time, is that right?
-well ,yes it was over two years. I spent summer creating enormous abstract paintings, had an idea that used the colours that albarhc and kassauer used and I wrote to albarug and I found out that the paints manufactured in fifties and sixties are still going so I could use exactly the same colours you’d see in their painting, but they weren’t any good, they were just for releasing something that interested me.. presented lots of possibilities of ways of making images that I hadn’t considered. Within my reach.
P: can’t quite imagine what your work would look like if it was entirely abstract, although I remember an exhibition here that combined Arcadian landscapes and the aesthetics of this digital surface that were very abstract, but again had a similar agenda. When you try these abstract paintings, do you just leave them there, think about them, when they’re unresolved do you return to them
-I don’t know, I try to… after studios empty, took a sanding machine to them… space for an experiment and they failed… that’s the way it is..
P: can we talk a bit about the smaller works, you refer to them as portraits,
-a lot of them were sleeping heads , I like the ambivalence of being outside in the cold, sleeping or dead, so I made a series of those. and they were quite filmic I like the restfulness, inside these large paintings you can see these sleeping heads sketched in, reclining bodies, drawn in… they became protagonists,, in a way they were lightning conductors, cause I didn’t want these to be body/ground/figure paintings which presents masses of problems, so they were part of the pieces in studio, and portraits came in in that way, and relating to that poetry cycle , frozen faces, that give you white hair, desperately romantic that when it thaws his hair is dark again, you know
P: yeah that is a very romantic response to sleeping outside isn’t it. And because from your work you’re so specific in your signs motifs symbolism and they seem to carry with them these ideological historical content , super loaded, always imagine youre incredibly careful with the arrangements of those things. Was it with this source of material, was it accidental, you talked about it in a playful way, were you seeking for that or
-yeah, it was trust, ..you should just trust the first one, its okay, and there was no need to constantly edit and refine, you can trust your first feeling,
P: you told me earlier that you don’t remember the titles of specific paintings so I won’t ask you about titles but the titles are very ambiguous but specific at the same time..
-theyre like little bits of concrete poetry, I have lists of them, and they fit sometimes, fairly separate things, I don’t like the other title thing, there’s just something about me that I can’t remember things like that but they’re very important and considered and they take a long time, little snippets of concrete poetry
P: so you generate those in the process dependent on the work
-yeah and its always afterwards as well, much to the frustration of galleries
P: and do you gift the title to a work once its finished
-yeah
P: you seem to have a separate writing practice
-yes I do its collage, prose, it’s not great
P: looking to literary sources for inspiration, how does it connect beyond titling, does it also become visual
-yeah I think it feeds back. I think its important. The way I work if things are on the wall there’s always a row of books underneath images or words that are relevant. Once I had the silly idea of installing it like that but that was maybe to expose and to openly demystify about your sources.
P: and so, coming back to title, in the press releases, there’s an idea of enchanted pollen. Carried through
-that was the last, one of the songs in winter journey and I think and// falling asleep in an enchanted dream cause the pollen was intoxicating, and when you do your research, you know in // they do the famous biscuits and dunks in the tea, well the biscuit was lidnt, tea, intrigued me because of its literary significance, and had to buy some. // village, apparently you can’t tell a lion from a lidntd tree I love the way it connected into folklore and that was also part of the movement in direction of work, and part of me having resistant to it, Ive accepted a lot of the folklore, they’re suggestions,
P: the surface seems to cackle with some sort of energy. The linden tree in fact, in mythology its a very important, all sorts of attributes.. but does it have a soporific effect..Ive never had it .. seems to be a real trip this male protagonist and the landscape and the emotional romantic journey, and dreams enormous interest to romantic writers, Coleridge, Blake, Wordsworth, were always writing about rilvaries, phantoms, this other worlds we can go to,
-thats right, and natural phenomena, willow-o’-the-wisp (ghostly light seen by travellers at night in swamps/marshes)
P: yes, there’s a willow-o’-the-wisp attitude here. And of course that takes us back to Jung again, cause dreams are really purposeful space, his psychotherapy was all about analysing dreams the idea that they had this compensatory, where you go to misbehave, and it takes us full circle in that sense. So, how do you want people to respond to this work, do you want it to be immersive, is it a place for people to go away from brexit?
-no, not necessarily, I don’t judge at all, well,
P: are you working on, thinking about new work or,,
-yeah, expanding on this,, winter journey.. spring soon.. really lovely winter and spring, natural effect..
P: any other questions? There’s a lot of painters in the audience.
~I’d like to know if you work on several at a time, how long they take you, you said two years you’ve been working
-no this is a year and this isn’t everything here, I work on all of them at a time, but that’s quite rare, there’s so many requirements you have to meet, you don’t always have a full studio so this is really lovely to do, first time in six years, space.
~its a journey/discovery for you, not like..
-yeah it was lovely.
~they seem amazingly sure-footed as well as well-imagined and immersive, wonder if you can say a bit about how, they’re clearly layered, interested in the detail , do you have a sense of background middle layer, put in detail, are you sure from beginning where things are laid out?
-not precisely, I think one of the things is being very open to accidents and a light touch, and not over worrying. And believing in your first, much more interesting.
~you said in the beginning of your career people said to you that painting was not something that anybody was interested in, and this was the eighties? In England, as a student? Did you look at other countries because that’s a lot of where paintings are picked up..
-that’s right, I mean I studied in queens academy dusseldorf in the late eighties, and although the new spirit of painting was young German painting, there was still a sense that it didn’t engage quite as serious political enough , what art should be doing, socially, my friend, said boy students used to throw paintings out the window.. but when you look at paintings in the museums, there’s nothing like it, I don’t see a rupture of, somewhere that made it not a wonderful thing even though its two dimensional, cause I still do see them as objects
~yeah definitely, there’s always somewhere that painting was still carrying on it was just a question of trends
-and I think it was just my generation, wouldn’t even care to them that there was an argument against its validity
~looking at these pictures in the light of your last set of work which were circling around the great tragedies of the twentieth century. __ and heidegger on other side, and I wonder if you’re circling around one of the unknown tragedies of the twenty first century, and romanticism with muller is fine but, yes you’re looking at durer, freidrich, but for me there’s also munch and __ and munch really invented expressionism, he was in Berlin in the beginning of the 1890s, and I regard you as a North European artist, you’re reappropriating romanticism and expressionism through an individual voice, here is getting back to a feeling, not monotone, but a layered one I guess this is where Jung comes in. For me these are quite unsettling pictures. I wonder how you feel about that..
-one of the things I liked about durer, maybe he didn’t complete them, dying trees, they seem to be, weather events , of water spouts, strange portents in the sky, I wanted to use the sky and space I wanted get into, although they’re beautiful there is a more urgent sense of Catholicism..
~I was interested in moment of transition you went through, how did it manifest itself, how much were the older works present in this work, was thinking to, so much information engagement in other works, and I feel it to in this work but I wonder how it feels to you
-you just work it out, you reach a problem and you try a few things, you trust yourself, trust where you come from..
