A Dialogue
between Roy Oxlade and Marcus Reichert
November 2003
Roy Oxlade OSE
2002
oil on canvas, 40 x 48 inches
images courtesy Art Space Gallery, London
MR
There is of course always idle speculation on the state of painting
as it might relate to the cultural vacuum. One cannot dismiss the fact
that painting provides an entertainment for the masses, as do all the
other mutant forms of so-called fine art. But its popularity at any
given moment is certainly irrelevant. Would you agree that there are
essentially two kinds of painting: painting that responds to the world
and painstakingly embraces it, and painting that conjures up a world
of its own and reflectively embraces itself?
RO
I have no interest in the window-on-the-world kind of painting for much
the same reason that I’m bored by what you handily call the mutant
tendency. They both tell me dull things I already know.
MR
There is the idea, although now wisely dismissed by most theorists,
that the mutant forms - anything with a brash concept behind it - must
evolve, as was once thought of painting. Would you say that the mutant
forms are not evolving, and neither is painting? Was the idea of painting
evolving - what might once have been called the modernist approach -
bankrupt to begin with?
RO
Like poetry, painting’s got its own language of metaphor: I think
of van Gogh’s The Night Café, a bowl of flowers by Rousseau,
many Matisses: the aubergines still life in Grenoble, Music, the Red
Dessert. Matisse sometimes managed to achieve wonderfully direct drawing
within his painting like he does with the box of pencils in the Red
Studio. Aren’t these paintings modernism? A rich vein, you could
call it metaphorical modernism ; it makes the rest of painting, ancient
and modern, so much framed tedium. They’re a hundred years old,
but that’s not so long in the scale of things. Do they mark the
end of what’s possible? Spengler? Gombrich? We don’t need
them to remind us; it’s obvious that ‘we’ve lost faith
in the superiority of our own culture’. The rush to abstraction
was a diversion, the dismantling too fast; the dialogue dried up –
in abstraction there were no metaphors to make. Philip Guston made a
defiant counter-attack but just now the language of painting seems to
be foreign. But when cat-walk art has finally imploded perhaps there
can be a fresh and essentially evaluative look at metaphorical modernism.
That could initiate a continuation of representational painting.
Roy Oxlade Plums
2002
oil on canvas, 53 x 70 inches
MR
I was reminded recently by James Campbell’s excellent Paris Interzone
that liberation from “the tyranny of form” dominated the thinking
of artists in nearly all media following WWII. This obsession was still
very much in play when I began painting seriously in the 1960’s.
I’ve found my emancipation from the strictures of form paradoxically
in a very personal pursuit of representation. I sense this may be the
same for you.
RO
Obviously by form you don’t mean unarguable things like round being
distinct from flat – or those Neo-Plasticism type issues about
balance and ‘structure’. But form, I think is useful as an
expression in a more elusive sense. I would say that a painting has
form when it has achieved something of a life of its own – something
more compelling than a surface smearing of colours.
MR
A painting’s success or its failure now hinges, it seems to me,
entirely on the strengths and/or weaknesses of the subjective realisation
at work. For a century at least, objectivity has held no philosophical
imperative in painting. That is not to say that the world created -
in one’s painting - does not run parallel to the real world in
all its chaos and, with poetical acuity, penetrate and re-order that
chaos.
Roy Oxlade Small
White Figure 2002
oil on canvas, 40 x 48 inches
RO
The irony is that, as it evolved from post impressionism to abstract
expressionism, the technique of painting, as I have chosen to see it,
is essentially very straightforward. But this means that the language
of this kind of painting rests upon a balance of relationships which,
however apparently crude in application, depend upon finely judged decisions.
You could say that the skill of the painter derives from her/his seeming
not to have any. But decisions without a criterion are meaningless.
And how do you get to a criterion and one with informed consent? For
any number of reasons I think the public is for the most part blocked
off from getting to grips with this.
MR
I have been meaning to ask you if a sense of the absurd comes into play
in your painting. I often find a whimsical aspect to your drawing and
colour that, for me, strikes rather a melancholy note. If your pictures
are resoundingly joyous, and many are, that vibrancy does often seem
tempered by a profound sense of the absurd.
RO
So much painting, particularly during and since the High Renaissance,
has required formidable, painstaking and even awesome skill on the part
of the artist. But I can’t help thinking that the acres of painting
out there are not only mostly pretty boring, but for the most part,
preposterous. So perhaps now, the whole business of painting, and certainly
my own painting, in the absence of a direct symbolic function, is fundamentally
absurd. More positively, through an acceptance – even pursuit,
of the apparently absurd, there may be fresh criteria to be found.
MR
Would you say finding the image that will ultimately sustain itself
on the canvas is a kind of excavation, the missing bits to be filled
in at will, or is that image a mirage that drifts in the mind, finally
to be delineated and consequently fixed to the canvas?
RO
In my case the painting has to start with something, some drawing, some
colour, something speculative. Additions, subtractions and revisions
may then eventually turn out as something worth keeping.
MR
A few years back you referred to your painting as being of the French
variety, which I took to mean somehow un-English. What about the idea
that there was a School of London, best typified in its diversity by
Auerbach, Bacon, Freud, and Kitaj? This was the international perception.
But there was of course another school of London, which remains the
school of esoteric English painting. Ivon Hitchens, who might also be
considered un-English even though his pictures have everything to do
with the English landscape and interior, never became recognised internationally
while being altogether international in his approach.
RO
My reference to French painting must have been ironic. The problem with
French painting is that it all seems a bit Montmartre. Apart from Matisse,
the only French painting I really like is the early Cézanne –
especially his portrait of Achille Emperaire. As you would expect I
don’t have a lot of interest in the so-called School of London.
Particularly I dislike Bacon’s work. Before I went to art school
I did, oddly enough, rather like Ivon Hitchens but after working at
Bomberg’s class I found Hitchens too slack. English painting? Perhaps
we all have to struggle to avoid coming out like Vaughan Williams.
MR
I wonder why some painters, for some obscure reason, simply refuse to
develop the eccentricity (ie. push the envelope) of their style, therefore
leaving that most interesting aspect of the work - one’s psychology
and its relationship to the society in which we live - unexposed. I
find Howard Hodgkin’s efforts particularly unexposed and therefore
not very interesting. He won’t allow himself to make mistakes while
in pursuit of what he considers to be an aesthetically acceptable image.
His pictures therefore strike me as strangely saccharine - not at all
revealing of the human condition, although some would say they are quite
sophisticated in their intimate revelations.
RO
Any sincere attempt to paint must be a personal exposure. As I see it
every gesture in a painting is a demonstration of the painter’s
judgement.
MR
Evidently, many painters listen to music when working. I seldom do,
because I find it too greatly affects my emotional strata. My impression
is that you do. And I particularly like your picture with bach 48 inscribed
in the paint and the skeletal figure of yourself conducting. It brings
words into play in a completely natural way, and, as you know, I like
bringing words - or the shapes of words - into a picture. Yes, words
are musical. How profoundly do you find the music acts upon the painting?
RO
You mention my painting No.13 Book 1 with its reference to Bach and
the 48. In fact I’m not conducting the 48. The baton is accidental;
its misreading understandable – but regrettable. An orchestral
version would be unspeakable. I hate serious music as background to
eating or talking. You either listen or you don’t. So it’s
odd that I do ‘listen’ to music while painting. The two things
seem to live in a compatible ‘other world’, separate from
the day-to-day. Bach and Mozart especially offer a subliminal connection
to sheer positiveness, to an impossible standard of excellence. This
music is formative. It matters. I listen and not listen, mentally singing
along with Uchida or Glenn Gould. Alongside that what else can you do
but try.
MR
I often carry on a kind of discourse in my head when painting. It is
almost like a song. Conversations occur. I say things to people when
painting that I wouldn’t say otherwise. I probably can be heard
painting, at moments, like listening to a play being performed in the
next room.
RO
Painting is a funny business. It falls between the extremes of music
and literature – both of which can be done seriously in the head
in the way that painting can’t. Does this make painting a more
elusive art form than the other two? You can sing in your head classical
‘hits’ like My Heart Stood Still; the enchanting tunes wrapped
up in the bombast of Brahms’ Paganini Variations; the Prelude of
Bach’s first keyboard Partita. Popular or ‘classical’
classical share the same context and intuitive ground.
MR
Writing within the painting is another matter. I usually only scribble
notes on the canvas - exhortations, intimate musings, the picture’s
title as it occurs to me, etc. I rarely transcribe an entire poem onto
the canvas, although I have.
RO
Inscribing the painting with writing fixes a contextual background for
the work. One of Philip Guston’s finest paintings East Coker T.S.E.
registers his attachment to that poem and Eliot’s notion of tradition.
In a similar way, writing the word Bach in a painting becomes an acknowledgement,
a tribute, a talisman, a declaration of serious admiration. It risks
being read as pretension; but then so could any attempt at even painting
itself.
November 2003
This dialogue is
reproduced with kind permission of the participants and Art Space Gallery,
London, from the catalogue of the exhibition, ROY OXLADE : STANDARDS
at Art Space Gallery, London,
11 March - 10 April 2004
