Ian McKeever Interview: Mystery to the Viewer

I lived in a little village that was about 20 miles away from a fairly large city called Hull and then there they had a sort of municipal gallery there was one painting which was just of a very small painting of a bunch of onions and hanging up in a greenhouse and that was really my first question about art I couldn't figure out why someone painted a bunch of onions I could understand why they painted sailing ships and these big epic stories about travelling the world but I couldn't understand why someone would paint something as simple as a bunch of onions you know it's a little bit like when you when you're growing up and and you hear a you know quite difficult jazz or something for the first time like you first when you're 18 or so you listen to something like John Coltrane or something yeah and you hear it and you think what's that all about means nothing to you and yet at the same time it raises the level of curiosity and and you kind of get you start to get into it just because you don't understand it so the little painting was the same I didn't understand it so I try to understand it I think good paintings actually don't give you an answer I think paintings should block you off so I think you should be seduced into them they should take you into them but actually they shouldn't give you any answers I think they should push you back out again and I think one of the reasons we or people who are interested in painting keep going back to paintings is because they pull and push you all the time they pull you into them they seduce you in but then actually they hold you back they push you back out again and I think a good painting does that I think a painting that it tells you everything is as lost its revealed itself and it's gone whilst I think really good paintings have this ability to to draw you in but at the same time at some point to push back out again what you want to do every morning when you get up and you're go into the studio is you want to believe that actually the painting you're painting on you've never seen it before in your life and that it takes you by surprise so you fool yourself when you go into the studio in the morning into looking at the painting and thinking my god is that what it is as if to say I haven't seen that before and I've never painted on it before so you play this kind of game with yourself I'm always amazed when I get up in the morning you know you get out of bed and you flip over the side of the bed and I'm always amazed that the floor still there you know the walls are still there you know you stand in front of the mirror and you still have the same arms and legs and you still have the same face get all of these things and you kind of think it's not incredible that nothing's changed because actually everything is changing all the time you know if you try to repeat the same sentence immediately after you said it won't come out exactly the same it even if you use the same words it'll have a different inflection or it will feel different so on one level everything is changing all the time and yet on another level as human beings we have this quasi stability whereby we stay the same and I think paintings do the same thing they stay the same they stay the same but they're changing all the time and and you're looking for that surprise of change that somehow is implicit in the painting I'm not interested in starting a painting and seeing it all the way through in one go because it it it heats the painting up it speeds the painting up and and I think one of the critical things in painting is actually not to do everyone thinks the painting somehow about space but I think it's much more about time and it's actually about wedding time to the painting so that when you look at a painting you don't just feel a sense of space and a sense of physical presence but you actually feel a kind of latent time inside the painting and I'm interested in trying to slow that time down so so for instance I'm working on a painting and it's going very very well then I'll stop working on it even if it's going well and I put it aside and I might not come back to it for three or four months then I bring it out again and then I might sit with it for three or four days just looking at it thinking where does it go now and if in fact it can't go anywhere and I can't think what to do with it then painting may be finished but I've never at any point said the painting is finished it's like it's sort of finished itself in the process and all I've got to do is be aware to that moment when the Abstract American Abstract Expressionists were working there was a symposium with a group of them and someone posed the question how do you know when a painting is finished and Franz Kline said well actually the problem isn't to finish a painting the problem is to start a painting that's your difficult bit starting the painting and I think he's absolutely right I don't really think about finishing the paintings they just finished themselves I have no real interest in their figurative painting of course historically most painting was figurative and of course there are some wonderful historical paintings that are that of course are figurative that goes without saying but my own interest lies with painting which is more abstract and to do with trying to leave the painting whereby something has suggested something it's hinted at so when you look at the paintings it doesn't feel completely alien to you but at the same time you can't quite put your finger on what it is I think there are enough I think there are enough tables and chairs and people in the world already I don't see the reason why painters have to paint them as well not not anymore it seems it seems to me that with all of the other art media that are now our photography video and everything all of which also can make and can reproduce things it seems to me now the question for painting is to how to actually work with painting in such a way that you are making something which is very specific to painting that none of the other media can do so you're looking for a sense of something the making of something which can't be made in any other way so that it's authentic to painting and purely to painting the impetus for the twelve standing paintings is in simple terms is the human form a person standing you know it's like when you when you meet someone for the very first time and you know you just speak for two or three minutes and then they then they go and then you never meet them again and then somebody says to you what's the person like you probably can't remember the the color of their eyes or even if they had really blonde hair or it's slightly fair hair what have you you can't remember really specific things about them but what you do have is a really strong sense of that person's physical being of the energies that that person has and the feel of that person the kind of life force in them you can sort of feel it very very quickly and I'm interested in how you actually find an analogy to that in painting how you actually invest a painting with if you like with a life force with the personality so the twelve standing paintings which is their vertical format was very much about how do you the want of a better word how do you personify a painting in the way that you personify a person you know is it is it trying to get is it bigger than the canvas is it trying to get out is it being squeezed in by the canvas is it shrinking into the canvas then the way that some people shrink when they stand in the room you know or is it opening out and so that the paintings were about how do you how do you do that with a painting how do you make a painting have those same tribute how'd you make it look as if it's breathing out or as if it's breathing in how do you make it look as if it wants to come out into the world or if it wants to go back inside itself all these kind of human qualities I mean I often things kick me off I started on on this group of three paintings because I went to I went to Siena and and there's this fantastic central painted panel by do Chu of the mice nice my sister and you know with the Madonna and the child and then groups of angels going out to the side and for me it suggests a phenomenal painting absolutely phenomenal painting and so the notion of there being a central figure the Madonna and Child in that instance and then groups of angels on the outside was the impetus for the format for these paintings of wanting to have a central figure and then other forms on the outside to other forms on the outside so it does become it in simple terms there a traditional Trinity but I don't like to dwell on that too much because it pulls it back to the pictorial and I'm not really interested in the pictorial so the if you like the genesis of the work is there but actually I don't want to leave it there and I don't I certainly don't want to be making any kind of overt religious references but but of course they sit in the background somehow and I try to leave everything in the painting so every mark I've made or every gesture that I've made I try to leave it present in the painting so that it's not actually obscured or blotted out with something else I'd like that semi transparency so it's lots of very thin layers and when sometimes the paintings do get too heavy or they get too dense then usually I discard them I throw them away and I start the painting all over again and this can especially when I'm starting a new group the first three or four paintings that I paint in your group often will will be thrown away because I just haven't got the feel right and so it's important to me that the work has has this openness has this transparency that it hasn't got so dense that you actually can't see into it I'm not interested in painting for novelty so I'm not interested in saying oh what can I do with a painting to make it interesting or to make it different to what already exists in painting in the world I'm trying to just get back to the core of painting and actually that core is a very small area to do with to do with figuration to do with abstraction to do with how to actually make a painting autonomous unto itself so that it can't exist in any other form I'm trying to slow the viewer down I'm trying to I'm trying to take the heat out of looking I mean everything now is is you know especially in the digital world and everything everything is so fast-moving you know it things that come and go so quickly and I think painting can function in a different way so I'm trying to I'm trying to take all of that sense of speed out of the visual world of looking and actually place the person looking straight in front of the painting and that's it's a very interesting area I mean if you if you follow some young people around in museum they never look at a single thing as on the wall or at a piece of sculpture they look at every single thing through the viewfinder of the camera and it's a very nice metaphor for reality because when we when the normal person looks through a camera be it at a painting or at a landscape or anything else then at that moment they have actually stopped seeing the real thing they are only seeing what they see in a camera and I do think we're moving into a world of the surrogate in a sense whereby first-hand experience is being replaced by the by the digital world perhaps the desire to to have that primary experience of you know looking at the landscape of holding a rock in your hand or of actually just hugging a tree whatever it does it doesn't matter perhaps that's that's going in the same way that the experience of looking at a painting is going but but for me that it's still profoundly important that we hold on to this primary experience of actually experiencing something for us for what it really is all paintings irrespective of one of when they were painting still have this possibility for us to come to them and new to actually see it for the first time and I think that's what you're trying to do with someone you're trying to say but just look at this for the first time you know in a way when I when I paint these paintings I try to I try to leave them in a state whereby I've seen it for the first time it's still a mystery to me and I still don't understand it and so if I can bring that that mystery to the viewer and that sense of openness that they might come to the painting of think oh I see this for the first time then I think that's that's enough it seems to me that that's the only thing paintings can do now that's what paintings can do now you

Channel: Louisiana Channel

Views: 83,610

Rating: 4.9054651 out of 5

Keywords: Louisiana Channel, Louisiana Museum, art, painter, interview, artist, Ian McKeever, Painting (Visual Art Form), Fine Art (Industry)

Id: Hh6QbJNvWZE

Length: 14min 46sec (886 seconds)

Published: Thu Nov 20 2014