Graham Boyd: A Life In Colour | Documentary on Abstract Artist | GOLDMARK

[Music] [Music] during the civil war the roundheads and the cavaliers i was i was fascinated by oliver cromwell and i like the fact that the cromwellians were very strict and didn't dress in a fancy way like the cavaliers and uh had god on their side i was quite religious in those days so that that's calvinist side i have that in my nature but at the same time i have the opposite side some people classify it as the apollonian the more rational side of the human brain and the dionysian which is instinctive the wild side and sometimes i go one way sometimes the other it's all about opposites and in my work it's it can be opposites in terms of color in terms of tone in terms of texture in terms of scale working large working small almost like marathon running where you're doing a painting which takes months and months and then you throw it away in the end as opposed to something which you do in an afternoon both can happen and one has to be alert to the possibility of allowing them to happen without fear [Music] [Music] well my name's graham boyd i was born in bristol in 1928 just a couple of years after the death of claude money which sort of throws out a hook to art history and right between two world wars my father served in both of them first of all as a boy in the trenches of 18 and then again in the raf in the 1940s right through the war so i was lucky that the war was over i just had to do things like guard duty and i went to north africa for that to tripoli for a short while and then eventually back to art school where they wrench me out off you know prior to me being called up yeah well i was a i did book illustration as a student i always found i had a little bit of a flair for it i remember seeing a copy of oliver twist in the what the public library when i was about 13 i suppose and there were these illustrations by george crookshank every so often etchings they were originally and there was this picture of fagin in the condemned cell biting his nails and i just was fascinated i had to read whole chunks of dickens in order to get to an explanation of the illustration but i i loved crookshank and i tried to emulate him in my efforts as i've gotten older the the enormity of painting as an area of activity has grown and grown it's a way of knowing you're alive that you paint painting gives me that even now gives me that freedom people who survive the sort of age i am complaining they spend all their lives on some job or rather which they may or may not have wanted to do whereas i can do something on a blank canvas that no one's ever done before as a heck of a gift isn't it to be able to be in that position [Music] i realize what a big art form it is what how in all encompassing it is and i feel i don't always know what i'm doing in fact you know i say that there's quite a bit of that you you you find the reason afterwards i don't attempt to formulate an idea of what the painting's going to be or anything because i don't know you know any more than say when someone's writing a novel they know what the outcome's going to be particularly people like dickens they wrote in episodes didn't they you know once a month there'd be another mr pickwick life's like that isn't it you don't know what's going to happen tomorrow and you but if you did it you know if it was all laid out before you just think what that would be like it was very hard to get work as an illustrator after i graduated i did the rounds with my portfolio i met a girl after i was a student who was the tobacco farmer's daughter in what was then southern rhodesia so we became engaged and i worked up in the fence in a secondary school as an art teacher living in a little tiny room and found myself painting rather than illustrating and more and more having a painting on an easel in the bedroom where i slept to the breathing deeply turpentine fumes and white spirit fumes at night but waking up and seeing what i had on the easel far more exciting just having a piece of paper in a portfolio and it was that interesting structure that grew and grew with me i mean this was back in 1960 spent a couple of years in central africa in what was southern indiana though my work at the time didn't reflect anything more than just me as having trained as a book illustrator becoming a painter and looking at particularly french painting you know people like gauguin and van gogh and dagger and so on that was something that came through when i returned to england and i began to reflect on the african experience and thought of it far more as something that was made out of myriads of energy points you know like atoms electrons or or just particles you can see like flocks of birds termites you know mass movement of things and creatures and grains of sand even you know blake i think says something about a grain of sand the whole of eternity that escaped from england post-war period that drab period of the early 50s when everything was run down the people will run down and he went to place where the sun sean and where it was expensive and there wasn't an art community in rhodesia as it was out in rhodesia i started painting and i was doing a lot of paintings that were all based on landscape and i loved the artists i knew of at the time that people like paul nash and graham sutherland who you might say were kind of visual poets tracing right back to my love of william blake his poetry really caught my imagination and it was an art of the imagination which appealed to me rather than one based on strict observation that was to change with me discovering when i was out and rudy's in a book on impressionism the works of paul suzanne i was out there i met the the ceramicist um professor william state murray and he became a kind of mentor to me because he'd been a painter before he became a potter so that was something that stayed with me his influence and he's also his embrace of buddhism and that oriental idea of space being active so rather in the way we think of as an atomic theory and i particularly was drawn to the idea of chance as being a way of achieving breakthroughs of taking risks and i learned that you had to take risks you you couldn't just go on producing work in a single straight line from a chronology a kind of pedantic process it had to sometimes be able to rise to impulse and to leaps of the imagination and so that that's something i still hold dears has become part of my attitude and part of the process but as time went by my paintings began to veer more towards the three third dimension everyone knows there are two sides to our brains and they call it the apollonian which is part of the brain which is conscious and logical and dionysium which is the wilder intuitive side of the brain and there's this battle goes on when you're painting between letting go and letting an accident come in letting the whole thing turn on its head and and taking a big risk and then the part of you that exercises a need for control and balance and order and these two sides have to sort of come to some sort of rapport if they can in the end a very wise tutor of mine said the only rule in our is not to have any well this is this is uh one painting now but it was it can be two separate paintings i mean i i painted them side by side rather like i was doing the cards on a big sheet of paper and you know they can if i hang them like that you get like a white stripe down the middle which changes them yet again but when they're touching they unify and produce a kind of landscape of color it gives me a lot of options you see i mean i can play around and bring different edges into contact with each other like there or i can just have them as an individual painting i paint these strips to try things out and some of it helps me advance my decision making you know for instance i had at one time sort of whether that would be better to have that diagonal more visible then i got rather fond of seeing this red that's underneath here and i my last thinking was that this makes that diagonal nearly invisible but there's a lovely resonance about that red against the crimson and uh i thought maybe it created a rest zone rather than just an easily anticipated accent and where you put a paint a color in a painting has an enormous it changes the color it's amazing practically any color you put at the top of a painting tries to recede no matter how bright it is so it's quite interesting to cope with that but the amazing thing is that color is capable of there have been times when i've been conscious that i've been repeating myself or getting into a a rut with my ideas being to prescribe my own doing very often but i've had to stay with it for the sake of wanting to do it if if it isn't something that has excites me that i see happening when i'm working i mean sometimes i just have to ignore the the penalties you pay for getting something wrong and what is wrong anyway you know i think it painting is is more than it's just producing a an object it's about it's about a way of life really if you're not true to it if you misrepresent what you're really feeling if you try and fake it it it leaves you feeling very dissatisfied you know you you it's it's not quite what you really feel you want to be about around the clock taking round the clock light is the thing i mean when you think about it painting you're working with colors you're trying to convey a sense of light and light is something that's according to newton is made of the colors of the spectrum you mix all the colors of the rainbow and you get white light you mix all the colors of the paint box and you get black that's called subtractive mixing and it's the paradox of painting the the painter tries to create light it's almost like the alchemist trying to make gold out of lead and so you're trying to make white light out of what am i called black light and that's one of the reasons why painting such a marvelous activity and then of course the other thing it isn't just about light it's about the psychological side of color so it's connected with light of course it is every day i i don't feel it's been a proper day until i've had a walk this lane from here to the entrance to the woods where we're going is about half a mile and there's a footpath we can take before we get to the bottom so i vary the route every day and it's something that gives me pleasure really it's a physical exercise but it also i noticed things i used to run but you notice more when you walk hello nadia no i haven't seen hello i haven't seen you for a while how are you i'm good you look good you're walking really fast well i'm that's because i'm being filmed what are you filming well we're going into the woods yeah you know sort of talking about the influence it has on my work i had a very checkered career in terms of my relationships my my rhodesian relationship the tobacco farmer's daughter that was a terrible disaster in the end and so i came back to england when i came back from edison i was still working figuratively for a year or two gradually i became more and more interested in not just that english tradition of poetic illustration artists like paul nash and graham sutherland i mean that that was the first thing because they were both quite graphic artists in their early days but to look at french painting to look at cezanne and dagar that tradition and then of course picasso and brock and matisse and so i began to look more at that rather than the the anglo-saxon tradition [Music] i was aware of one now but there wasn't much going on in london there weren't many galleries that would show modern art and it was pooh-poohed by none less than the president of the royal academy sir alfred munnings and winston churchill who's an amateur painter himself there was that establishment adversity the tate had very little purchases made in anything very modern so it was very parochial very parochial fear is another thing in england there was when i was growing up there was the fear of color i don't think it's it's like that now but for a long time because we live in a um well it was it's a foggier climate in the old days but with london fogs and so much i remember the pea soup fogs money came to london for the fogs it's it's that hesitancy about color about toning things down all the time which i wanted to break out of and i discovered the works of hans hoffman and he led a a revolt amongst the young generation against the the more nationalist american painters who wanted to paint folksy scenes of the american rural west was very much out of touch of what was had been happening in europe though a lot of young american painters were in the habit of going to paris to study and in the end thanks to people like hoffman and others there was a breakthrough largely during the war years of people like jackson pollock who worked with hoffman mark rothko barnett newman and others where something big and powerful started to happen in the work and then i began to become more aware i began to read mondrian's theories i mean there wasn't much around in what for public library i found this one little book on mondrian with his essays in it you know there weren't even illustrations and mongam did this classic shift from doing paintings of buildings where he looked more at the verticals and horizontals of of facades or looking at the branches in apple trees and the spaces between the branches and then each version he painted became more and more abstract the fact that one had to be quite radical in one's thinking you know he had to be a bit of a calvinist he wouldn't use a diagonal even he only believed in verticals and horizontals i kind of latched on to that and that became my legs but to begin with i was thinking not so much that i'm doing an abstract painting but i was painting skies but leaving out the land yeah so it does you know like clouds you've got things shifting around all the time and then i've noticed structures forming in the front room about the fireplace there's a painting from a memory in rhodesia of the way the clouds in the rain as the rains came in the autumn it'd be like tails coming down out of the clouds so so that that started to make me feel that you know i had these these ideas of everything being full like a muscle is made out of fibers or or a tree if you like it's got a plank grain and it's got an end grain so you cut it one way you've got lines you cut it the other way you've got dots once these things like round and flat and rough and smooth and cause and effect you know how trees fall and time passes and the drama of the actual event gets moved over that's that sort of thing's going on in painting all the triangle you put uh you introduce a color and it has an effect on the colors around it and the paint and so on decay is fascinating to see i mean look at this stump here have you got to remember that years ago they used to come logging down here and we'll be walking over the ruts that the carts had left and more recently children have been making trails with their bicycles making tracks in time nature will take over again and that sort of constant flux between the activity of man and the activity of nature will continue i suppose until they cut these woods down heaven forbid i'd hate that to happen that would break my heart everything is about complementaries i think everything's about contrast so when i'm painting i'm sort of thinking very much about you know things being in focus out of focus about things being sharp things being smooth quite apart from what colors do to each other which never ceases to amaze me i mean some people said it's a bit like when you uh if you're cold and you see a fire the heat of the fire is very welcome yeah but at the same time the fire can be threatened can't it like in australia i kandinsky gave his students who wanted to be in his tutorial group uh kind of test you know what what color goes with which emotion you know what's red yellow and blue and to get into the seminar you had to say that red was terrestrial that is solid that was uh it was the egyptian single symbol of a field as yellow was rapacious was aggressive but it's also the light of the sun yeah so all these colors have a duality blue gives you that feeling of heaven peace uh tranquility it also make you feel cold so it's that's the fascinating thing so just like apollonian and dionysian colors at their opposite poles and so i think that's why it's such a fascinating language really i mean even when you just use it as spoken language it evokes those feelings doesn't it to actually see it to see a certain red and green creating a harmony it's like you you certain chords in the blues or in music yeah it's like if you play the guitar and you've got these different strings you you make a call out of music putting four or five notes together well you do that with colors you know if red against green gives you a certain seniority and then you temper that with a bit of blue in between the red and the green or on one side the left side the right side i've been listening to the late quartets of beethoven a lot down here recently [Music] and it's just i'm not listening intently all the time but now and again i hear a chord which is just so amazingly deep and sonorous and effective [Music] when i came back from rhodesian i got the studio in bushy i i started painting because as soon as i got back i wanted to go on painting being in meadow studios was definitely a major factor because it gave me that sense of how important it was to have space not to try and work in a tiny cramped up way it gave gave a sense of when you walked into the space the light was magic you know it's like being in the cathedral with her irwin who was making a name for himself at that time and he was well connected with people like lawrence alloway and dick smith and all that generation of people at the royal college who suddenly merged in that pop-up era and they would come down to party in the meadow and get falling the fire and get drunk and have uh wild pretty wild parties it was so different from the life only um four or five miles away my parents were living in a semi-detached on the edge of casper park if i went down to stay with him i felt i was i would suffocate you know i it's i was out in a different world and we we'd have the fishmonger's arms a pub john rossa was a friend who shared the studio with me for a little while and we were given the job by the landlord of painting murals on the wall we were just locked in overnight with as much whiskey as we could drink and a dog and we had two nights of just painting painting painting and then it was all done a lot of my friends had certain amount of gallery success and they lived by their work and lived pretty well so i still know one or two like that who who support quite a uh enviable lifestyle on on their painting i hadn't gone to a london art school and so i was living about this distance from london i was always a bit on the out of fringes quicker erwin encouraged me to take my work to show other dealers i'd go up in the 60s you could go into garage with your work under your arm in those days and i i first of all admit leslie waddington's father victor who just settled in london after having a a gallery in dublin and got taken on by him but it was always a case of him keeping me in stock but never quite giving me a show and then when i started showing and i started to sell here and there but by and large i didn't have that determination that many who'd been to sarah like the royal college and so on to get a gallery and start a career as a painter i had to do other things i eventually was lucky to meet an amazingly beautiful young woman he was foolish enough to marry me and we had andrew and sophie my two children and we have grandchildren now and that it's terribly important to me i i name the painting after the painting has been done rather than well it's a bit uh yeah like some people name their children when they're still in the womb don't they but usually they wait for them to be born first i tried to be a good parent but i also had to do two other things i had to teach to earn money i had to keep my work going too many people who teach wait for the holidays i never did well i built this place i was down here at night sometimes for some exhibitions i've worked through the night but i'd come back from college uh where i was teaching i'd come do something down here when i could be with the children well you know i try to be a good dad and read to them and play with them it was really hard are you excited when you start a new new painting oh yes yeah i mean it is just a thrill after all this time you're still you're still excited oh yeah i know the first time i was on duty at the college i was teaching at one weekend i took andrew in with me he was about seven or eight months old or so i was on the kids powder color you know red yellow and blue i let him tip that onto a piece of paper and you know he went you know he just sort of beamed and gurgled with delight you know it is something that um is very fundamental i suppose it's the first step in something an adventure really but then we went to america as a family [Applause] i got the chance of a teaching exchange it turned out to be a huge adventure huge it was a challenge [Music] i was talking to students in america about drugs and they asked me if i'd ever done drugs and i said i hadn't i didn't need to because sometimes if you're a artist you you have a kind of heightened awareness of things and there's a tree on the edge of the wood where it was winter and i noticed the droplets all over the tree had little rainbows in them and there must be thousands and thousands and thousands of these rainbows and i thought my god that's just utterly amazing so who needs drugs when i was drawing these i didn't have a studio in new hampshire so i was just doing it on a spare table i did a others where i let because it looked almost complete at any stage in the drawing so i've got others where like there's this one where later on i started to tilt the lines so you you get almost like a moire effect and of course they develop gradually over a period of time you'd do a few lines each night and it would add up we moved from one place to another we we lived in american society which was tremendously friendly and generous and lovely there was just a nice happy-go-lucky relationship between the couples we knew around us and but i mean it was a long way from the art world it was the year of the energy crisis nixon's being kicked out and you you weren't allowed to drive at more than 55 miles an hour to save energy we had this little volkswagen and we decided we had these friends in colorado we decided to go out and see them and and we drove must be nearly 2 000 miles to the west to the grand canyon in this little volkswagen 56 miles an hour the the back seat down the kids lying horizontally in the back seat and chuntering along taking it in terms of the driving that was the other thing we were running low on gas we ran out of new tarmac highway and onto sort of less permanent looking rose and we ran into a tornado my wife was driving and unfortunately she fell asleep at the wheel [Applause] i mean you can't deliberately have an accident but you can let things happen and you can accept them or you can disguise them or get rid of them or dismiss them but very often they they're very valuable but very often an accident will take you to where you haven't been and a lot of my work you could is accident like because i'll use strips of colored paper as tryouts like collage later on in the painting and they'll i'll be able to do things there but i've never dreamt of doing at this stage you know where i'm trying to think what comes with this color what comes with that and what will go here so later on i can slow down and work um accordingly so i'm going to try starting lower down with this one and get a diagonal going we wound up going backwards into a ditch with water in it and the kids were fast asleep in the back and so i got out and pauline got the engine going again and i pushed with all my might we managed to get out of the ditch onto the road but very sobering thought so we drove on very slowly and then after a while we there was like like a vision of jesus in the air and it was a driving movie it's intermission time folks and that means it's time for a tasty snack suppose the climax was when we met our friends and went to the grand canyon there's certain big things that happened to me in my life which have sort of given me the basis for my work and uh my sensibility is dare i say it but it's to do with landscape in a sense i'm an abstract painter if there is such a thing what is abstraction anyway it's got to be about something and the things that move me more than anything are landscapes scale tackle it in terms of scale really going to big countries big horizons [Music] is to do a little bit of rock climbing yourselves have to go off balance a bit in order to make your move you have to take risks in in painting you have to risk losing a good painting in order to get somewhere you haven't been before to get out of your comfort zone well i went out to africa and then later on when i was in america the idea of exploration is something that i think most of us have that kind of innate desire not to do the same old thing all the time pollock used the expression he says there has to be a give and take between you and the painting you have to listen to you can't impose i'm going to do it this way no i don't want a pain to be like that i'm going to make it like this but you you sometimes have to sort of look at the reality because very often those first marks have something special about them other times you've seen it all before so you or sometimes um you you get this idea that well in order to achieve something some have to break something so sometimes the painting is going too well but it's too familiar you know too much what the outcome is going to be and you you have to be prepared to destroy that in order to get to the next stage you know to to put yourself off balance somewhere i have a spray so [Music] i started working at the hertfordshire college of art and design about that and i heard about the triangle workshop which was had been running for one year and they've been set up by anthony caro it was an international workshop to be held in america with artists coming largely from the uk canada and the united states so i applied for it and i was accepted john hoyland was invited and larry poons and tony cairo was very friendly with clement greenberg he fixed it up and got the funding it was it was painters and sculptors and they would be there for two weeks so it was almost like being a student again we we each had a an eight foot by eight foot painting deck but there people were passing by giving opinions offering helpful advice it turned out everyone was very positive there was there's no kind of bitchiness or anything like that or jealousy everyone was trying to help everyone make good art it's almost like when the clown leaves the stage at the pantomime is he coming back out there i was doing maybe three biggest paintings a day because i was working fast so you you're turning on your instinct rather than your intellect and you you just went ahead and did it you know whatever prompted you so that was the big difference really it expanded my contacts but it also expanded my own way of working but there is a terrific energy in america there's no doubt about it after the workshop was over i had an opportunity to get to know anthony cara when we developed a strong relationship and his wife sheila who was um also an artist they were they were extremely generous people and after the workshop was over tony would form real friendships with not just me but many of the other artists he'd been here several times to visit not only did he come but he bought some of my work and was very encouraging and he said how i was coming into my stride and oh he said about me i had the least ego of any artist he knew i don't know it's a compliment or not really i think it's meant to be a compliment well he bought my work so i suppose that saying something about my work and he would come and visit students at saint auburn's where i was teaching and was very kind of complementary to the kind of course we were running there it was about generosity really here he was sharing himself in a way that major artists rarely do and i learned quite a lot from him this is the thing which amazes me really is that what the human psyche has been able to do i'm not religious in a sense but i was once but i have to admit that in the name of religion some wonderful things have been constructed you know the cathedrals the churches the temples they're amazing and where do they come from well people were living in mud huts that built them living in squalid cold uncomfortable houses but you know then there's poetry and then there's music you know and it's it's all come and so there's something in us call it creativity which is huge and it it goes beyond the arts it it's also you can find it in engineering you can find it in in philosophy in in science and so on which is precedes very much in terms of creativity the discoveries that are made are leaps of understanding because it's such a powerful thing and i i just i'm just amazed at it that we in the name of whether it's uh god or a divine spirit or just chance i mean where did it all start i'm going into areas i can't really speak about because they're beyond me really being a painter you are creating a little universe when i start a new painting i can put something on this sheet of paper that no one's ever done before and you can you've got a blank sheet of paper card wash and you can do something that's unique because i hadn't gone through the normal route of my art education a painter would have gone through i had to kind of invent myself in a way i was so excited by the history of art by what i've read about people like matisse and picasso and andrea moore these these it was something heroic and even back to william blake the life of william blake always inspired me you know this man lived at absolute poverty all his life he never betrayed his his beliefs himself and i think that that was the early inspiration and i i think the thing that i know some of my friends who got into galleries early in their career when they felt the need to shift their style they couldn't the galleries say that no you i want you to do collages you know this is what we can sell you know or if they did they would lose the gallery you know there was a problem because i had to donate a lot of my time to teaching there left time for the family and time for my art you know to be shared out but that at least meant i could do the sort of things you probably seen me doing without people saying thou shalt not this isn't art you know in fact you know i remember reading when pollock was doing his poor work he's saying to himself am i a phony is this art and i felt like that at times you know when i was doing those 1960 palette knife paintings i remember thinking this isn't what how people made paintings you know but when i look at them now they look incredibly i can look at them and look at them and look at them there's something going on something organic about them that i believe was true and honest [Music] you

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Length: 46min 24sec (2784 seconds)

Published: Fri Aug 13 2021