ART&RESEARCH

RB: Did you have a specific of research context you were dealing with in relationship to colour theory or a particular moment in the history of artistic investigations in the use of colour. What were the touchstones here?

RS: Well, I mean, I’ve articulated the sort of strategic model of everything being the same, just laying different colour relationships, which is on top of all that, of course. I’m almost embarrassed to mention it in the same breath but or course Josef Albers’ ‘Homage to the Square’ series, which you know, is a lifetimes of work, and maybe I spent a year on this, but you know, in fairness, probably twenty years before that, thinking about it in the back of my mind, though perhaps not in this form. I don’t feel there’s a big rush. Of course I could have made it an extremely dry and technical sort of unpacking of that sort of theoretical perspective from a number of different angles but that’s not me really. And in a way I was more excited about some abstract concept of Reinhardt vs Ryman, black vs. white. I wanted to find out what it would mean to completely immerse myself in painting for a while, to try to make it feel like mine. Also a desire to go back to basics, to check the foundations of the most fundamental of desires to communicate. What really interested me was, actually using the paint, working with the paint and that was a bit of an unknown quantity, I didn’t really plan each one. What would happen when I kind of got the paints out and put them on? The whole structure was pre-determined, the preparation the under-painting with the particular colour with acrylic, the vinyl text being applied, then already for the top coat, and when the top coat of oil paint went on, I was quite intuitively, playing with the paint and seeing what happened when you pushed it around, and as the bigger ones are more than two metres square there’s a lot of paint to push around on those, so it’s quite a physical relationship to them when I’m working all this paint about on the surface, and how the image, if you like, such as it is, is sort of constructed within that.
So, I wanted to leave a certain ambiguity there, a certain openness, a certain feeling that could develop from how I just… how I intuited it really, at the time of the construction, within the framework. And, for example, I worked for a long time just on the computer, everything was done on the computer, so I’ve got a million and one prints of everything in absolutely pure, tonally flat, perfectly beautiful, one colour behind, you know, green, another shade on top, really beautiful empathetic relationships I built up with all those combinations of them, in the computer. But as soon as I started working with them, with paint, forget it - it became much more than that. You know, maybe that could be interesting for a series of prints, flat screen prints. or something, But its is a lot to do with the paint as well, the oil paint, the quality of it - it’s part of the equation for me and it’s so alive… I didn’t want to make that completely flat and I wanted there to be plenty of evidence of hand and evidence of the construction of them and the sort of humanness of them within the strictures of the template.

RB: So the next question is to discuss painting as a methodology. You mentioned that the method of composing the works on computer was different. It seems that in ‘Real Life Painting Show’ you can’t not use painting as a method – it would be perverse to just use the computer.

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