Surfaces

A glossy poster of The Haywain 1821 by John Constable hung in the dining room of the house I lived in during my teens in Vancouver (fig.1). A doorless doorway in the dining room led to the kitchen, where our telephone was fixed to the wall. I’d chat on the phone for hours with my friends, twinning my call with a close inspection of the Constable poster. As the conversation progressed, my focus would slip from the countryside setting to the texture of canvas, scumbled and slaked with paint, to the smooth shiny surface of the poster, each layer determined by the photographic image of the painting.

The layering of the poster fascinated me. Different registers of visual information and affect simultaneously available, each layer independent yet bound together as a single entity. I wonder if that poster in some way shaped my delight in oil painting and the way that paint accumulates in layers across a canvas. Perhaps the seductively sheer photographic surface influenced my predilection for thin, even applications of paint rather than thick and chunky. Could it be that we are what we see as much as we are what we eat?

In looking at a painting, I take in the worked painted surface of the canvas as much as the imagery. Is the painted surface sheer and seamless, or thick and encrusted? If the underpainting – a record of the painter’s efforts over time – is visible, does it detract from the art, or is it part of the conceptual framework? In older paintings, how does the coat of varnish affect the painted surface? I think about growing up with a painting in a museum collection, looking at it for years in a certain state and then encountering the work after a museum conservator has cleaned its surface: devastating, or a thrill? I wonder about all my encounters with paintings as printed reproductions or images on a computer screen without experiencing their actual material presence and the effect of the mediation on my understanding of the work.

Owning the surface

Studying at Goldsmiths in the early 1980s, I found my way to still-life painting through a love of drawing and my burgeoning interest in the human relation to objects. My favourite drawing materials were compressed charcoal and white Fabriano paper. Fabriano welcomed a wide range of charcoal applications, from a deep dense covering to cloudy smudges or the merest whisper of shading. I could press hard or even jab with my charcoal stick and the paper could take it without tearing. I felt we worked well together.

The everyday objects that attracted me for drawing stirred a potent emotional response based on certain dual experiences: connection/disconnection, presence/absence, known/unknown (fig.2). In my imagination, the dense shadowy blackness of charcoal on Fabriano embodied its own duality that corresponded with those emotionally at play in my drawings – it combined the vivacious presence of an object in a drawing alongside a more disquieting sense of loss, things not here.

Finding my way from drawing to painting, my first attempts at oil on canvas were hugely disappointing. The paintings looked stodgy and old fashioned, the colour muddy, the paint tired. How could I achieve the same freshness with my depictions on canvas that I’d achieved on paper? I loved the feel and look of oil paint and knew that a swift delivery using the paint was vital, mirroring the quickness of drawing. I needed to deploy my paintbrush as deftly as I used a stick of charcoal. But the paint and paint handling weren’t the whole story – freshness also depended on the painting’s surface.

It seemed my problem lay in the canvas itself. In a bid to test my hunch, I put to the side my 12-ounce cotton duck and reverted to steadfast Fabriano. Paint on paper – how gratifying to see my new paintings jump to life! But then I grew dissatisfied by the look of the paint – the paper sucked away the oil’s sumptuous gloss and left behind colour as a dry scratchy brushmark. The only way forward was a return to canvas.

My issue with canvas was its bumpy weave. It turned a painting surface into a three-dimensional almost spatial terrain, which had the effect of slowing down the action of painting, taking it far away from the immediacy of drawing. Compounding the issue was the oil paint itself, with its own three-dimensional quality of pigment suspended in oil. When I made a drawing, the smooth surface of paper put up minimum resistance to a line drawn with charcoal so that thinking, feeling and action merged in a joyful instant. I seemed to forget about myself, completely caught up in the experience of drawing. When it came to painting, however, my engagement grew mired in the 3D spatial make-up of canvas and paint so that the nexus of thinking, feeling and acting fell apart, hampering me with debilitating self-consciousness. Too aware of the mechanics of painting, my imaginative capacity to engage grew stifled.

I eased my way back to 12-ounce cotton duck first by switching from Fabriano to muslin, chosen for its miniscule weave. Spurred on by the promise of a lusciously painted surface, I raised the stakes a few paintings later and upgraded from muslin to the more robust but still finely woven calico. Through continued experimentation and a growing familiarity with textile surfaces, slowly progressing from a smooth to a more textured ground, I gradually overcame my hyper-awareness of the canvas weave. At last, I felt confident to return to 12-ounce cotton duck, which has been my go-to canvas ever since (fig.3).

Discovering how to paint on canvas reminds me of learning to ride a bike. In my childhood, thinking about how to balance only caused me to topple off. I remember the moment when I somehow left thinking behind and felt the know-how of balancing shift to my bodily self. Suddenly, there I was, upright on my beautiful Schwinn, pedalling down the road. The conceptual idea of balancing had morphed into physical navigation.

Monoprinting helped to enhance my natural feel for oil paint and further embrace its 3D make-up. I found my way to the Print Room in my first year at Goldsmiths and immediately took to the process. I liked the relative ease of the mono print technique and how it allowed for a spontaneous quick response for my depictions of everyday objects (fig.4). I enjoyed the stages of preparation: dampening thick sheets of Hahnemühle to ready the paper for the press, loosening up the printing ink with linseed oil, and binding the two together with a palette knife on a worktop surface. I loved the sticky wet swish as I pulled the roller across the worktop to coat it in ink, and rolling the ink in an even coat over an aluminium plate. Then for the fun of quickly inscribing my drawing onto the inked surface, wiping away the ink with my finger wrapped in scrim. Cranking the inked-up plate through the press, I peeled the print away from the plate, eager to discover the result. The press would inevitably flatten and squish the ink across the paper so that the depiction of an object was always a surprise – whatever control I’d had in making the drawing at the outset, the outcome was unpredictable.

My confidence grew in handling the viscous bulk of oil-based materials through my experiences in the print room. I also learned that art materials have life and energy all their own and can contribute to an artwork independently of any of my interventions.

My first lesson in priming a canvas also came at the start of art school. I presented a newly finished painting to a tutor, crushed by the pattern of spots that had mysteriously appeared across the surface and ruined my work. Flipping my canvas over, the tutor pointed to the corresponding spread of dots as paint seeped through from the front to the back. ‘You haven’t primed your canvas properly’, he observed. ‘You need to seal the canvas first so that the paint sits on top, and nothing leaks through to the reverse side. Painting is all about getting the paint to stick to a surface and stay put’. It was a new approach to painting, a technical rather than critical focus. A fellow student joined the discussion and shared a tip for sealing canvases: acrylic copolymer matt emulsion. After sealing my canvas with copolymer emulsion, I applied two coats of white acrylic primer for a smooth surface, or white gesso if I was after a toothier grip – products and procedures that I’ve used ever since.

I can’t remember how I actually learned to stretch a canvas; there were no formal painting workshops to attend when I was an art student. My knowledge of the craft of painting has grown out of trial and error and sharing practical methodologies with artists.

After I graduated from Goldsmiths in 1982, I bought my first pair of canvas pliers from the art shop Russell and Chapple on Monmouth Street in the West End of London, its location at the time. My canvas pliers felt like a badge of honour, marking my initiation into the painting profession, and I was proud to acquire a pair of my own. I obtained other tools of the trade based on those I’d come to rely on in the workshop at Goldsmiths: a staple gun and Stanley knife, saw, glue, hammer and assorted nails, spirit level, a hefty pair of scissors and a measuring tape.

I’ve always bought my canvas in 108-inch, 50-meter rolls and stretch my canvases without the help of a studio assistant. Canvas preparation for me is part of the painting process, undertaken alone. With its distinctive weight, smell and texture, alive and demanding, canvas is a textile I’ve come to respect.

I love the look of a just-stretched canvas, primed and ready for work, the taut white surface devoid of an image, or as a readymade image in itself, somehow deeply satisfying. However, if I decide to paint on a canvas stapled to my studio wall instead of to a stretcher, I need to pre-shrink the canvas with water so that the sealant, primer and paint can then be applied with the weave remaining stable and unaffected. Pre-shrinking is always a battle. Wet with water, the canvas writhes, bucks and puckers as it shrivels, pops out staples and pulls away from the wall as if it’s having a tantrum, unwilling to settle, or like a horse being saddled for the first time. I curse and go back in with my staple gun, re-wetting the canvas with water. What a relief when things finally calm and an accord is reached.

A roll of canvas can, however, demonstrate a gentler side. For instance, in the 1990s before I introduced a couch into my studio as part of the furniture, if I felt in need of an afternoon nap, I’d simply unfurl a swathe of canvas and wrap myself up in it for a kip on the floor. My head resting on the roll as a bolster pillow, the cloth snuggly enveloping me. The ritual of stretching a canvas, ever the same. It begins with an expression of appreciation as I spend the first few minutes paying homage to the cloth lying across the studio floor – an undulating field of promise. Then, placing my stretcher on top of the canvas, I start in the centre of each bar and staple the canvas to the wooden frame, inching my way around it to plug in the staples. Keeping the tension even, I pull the canvas tight with my canvas pliers and tuck the corners of the canvas along the top and bottom edges so that the sides of the stretcher are clear and detail-free. Canvas stretched, I lift the stretcher up, lean it against a wall and inspect the result before I move onto priming.

A coat of copolymer matt emulsion darkens the buff-coloured canvas to yellow ochre and stiffens the surface, upping its tautness further as the canvas shrinks around the stretcher. Dried and sealed, I tap the surface for the pleasure of hearing it softly boom. On goes the first coat of acrylic white primer. The second coat puts paid to the patchy white and raises the level of brightness, like turning a light up in a darkened room.

An evenly stretched taut surface is paramount. I can’t think properly if my canvas sags while I work, too distracting. A slack canvas also means that my paint brush will inevitably hit against the stretcher bars as I work – when it happens, I can almost hear the canvas cry out as if wounded. I then must deal with a bruised surface and the imprint of stretcher bars from where my paint brush crashed against them. It’s stressful, figuring out how to put the damage right. I’ll have to repaint areas of the painting I’m already happy with and lose that resolution. It’s a shock in a gallery or museum exhibition to come across a painting that has rippled corners due to uneven tension. The technical glitch undermines the experience of looking. How can it have gone unnoticed by a curator?

The death of a painting for me occurs when the canvas surface gets destroyed by a puncture, rip or tear. A visit to an art restorer and a costly repair job can put a canvas right, but the painting is forever changed, the damage a part of its story. Two of my canvases have needed such attention over the years. It was traumatising when a finished painting fell over in the studio and met a tear, the sense of irretrievability a deep disturbance in my soul. But it has fostered an intrigue in paintings where the artist uses perforation to give meaning to the work. In Niki de Saint Phalle’s gunshot paintings and Lucio Fontana’s sliced canvases, for instance, I love how the realness of holes and cuts as both destructive and creative acts are held in a marvellous pictorial totality across the painted canvas surface.

I confess to committing ‘painticide’ during the 1980s. In my struggle to get a painting to work, and no matter what I did the painting continued to fail, and blind with frustration and rage I’d snatch up my paintbrush, pointed end at the ready, and stab the canvas again and again, punching the surface with gouges. Sometimes I stabbed so hard I pierced right through to the other side. The painting dead, my frenzy subsided. I felt blissfully released from trying to make a success of a painting destined to fail.

Expanding the range

Over the years I have needed to find new surfaces to paint on as my painting language has developed. An artist residency in Japan in 1993 marked a period of fast painting with thin paint, a material response to the sheer excitement I felt from exploring Tokyo on my first visit to the city. As if on a wild shopping spree driven by the rush of acquiring more and more, I snapped hundreds of photos of street scenes, shops and museums in a bid to hold onto fleeting or quick-fire impressions of everything that caught my eye. Back in my studio, I used the photographs to embark on a new body of work: after a decade of depicting everyday objects against an off-white ground, I now wanted to paint objects in context of where I found them. This ambition generated another layer of excitement as I began to find my way, all of which streamed into my painting method so that I painted faster than ever, covering fleets of tiny canvases with object-driven cityscapes, not one painting a day but three or four. This prolific response was aided by a new painting surface.

At the art supply shop near my Tokyo studio, a roll of primed polyester snagged my attention among the range of painting surfaces on offer. A test with a paintbrush available in the shop and the paintbrush I used almost bounced off the polyester’s distinctive springy surface, the bounciness chiming with my own bouncy state of excitement. And so I bought a few metres. At work back in my studio, I discovered that a single application of oil paint landed with such vibrancy on the polyester that I could leave the first coat of paint as finished, unlike my habitual choice of 12-ounce cotton duck, which demanded a more layered, considered application. Primed polyester: the ideal surface for my new Tokyo-inspired still life painting language (figs.5 and 6).

Upon return to London, I continued to open up my approach to still life and exploring how a painting was delivered through adopting new motifs and new material methodologies. A new ambition was to shift from fast to slow painting as a mode of delivery. All such perspectives demanded that I re-examine the surface on which I painted, which had a knock-on effect on paint handling as well as my mental and emotional engagement.

Among my new motifs were a group of centuries-old Japanese tea bowls that I had encountered in Japanese museum collections (fig.7). The tea bowl presented a new painterly challenge: how to embrace in paint the multiple different surfaces that co-existed within the one object, which would also allow me to explore the slow rather than fast approach to painting I had embarked on. As I considered the complexity of a tea bowl’s layered surface, it sparked a memory of my perusal of the multiple layering in the Haywain poster of my adolescence.

Working from photographs in tandem with my memories of tea bowls on the weighty, slow surface of 12-ounce cotton duck, I had to cultivate a sense of slowness in myself to undertake the painting. I began with a sketch of the tea bowl in loose paint on the canvas. I then turned my attention to the areas of unglazed clay and fleshed in my sketch with colour. My focus next switched to the various glazes that lay on top of the unglazed clay and finally on the light that fell across the tea bowl, amplifying its volume. In my approach to painting slow, which seemed required to manifest the spirit of a tea bowl painting, I somehow expanded my capacity for patience and observation. It meant that when I scrutinised the photograph while channelling the feelings I held for the tea bowl in my memory, then transcribed each layer of intense visual information, I could do so without feeling overwhelmed. Matt, shiny, pitted and bumpy, even and smooth, shadowed or brightly lit, I calmly handled the wealth of detail, methodically transcribing it layer by layer from the photograph to the painting through the filter of my imagination. Painting became a meditative process.

Light strikes the surface of an oil painting and travels down through layers of paint until it hits the primed ground, where it bounces back up to the top of the painting, each layer of paint sandwiching light. Given that oil painting is fundamentally defined by a series of layered surfaces, I came to appreciate my tea bowl paintings with their successive layers as a metaphor for painting itself. As paint builds up across the canvas through sequential coats, the spirit of the painting comes alive through change and transformation. Decision-making about what to keep and what to let go, what to invest in, what to alter, all happens through the crafting of each surface, applying fresh paint on top of dried paint or getting rid of the paint, wiping, rubbing or scratching it away to re-paint aspects of the image. Painting becomes a continual play of loss and gain.

By the mid-2000s I had expanded my range of painting surfaces to include wood and aluminium panels, sheets of glass, clay and plastered walls as well as adding linen, burlap, hessian and fabrics for sewing to my regular stock of 12-ounce cotton duck and polyester (figs.8–10). In exploring the potential of surfaces for painting, I have worked with powder, spray and house paint alongside oil, acrylic and other water-based paint and with various mediums, glazes and varnishes. I have learned the importance of not only critically assessing the evolution of the image while painting, but the finish of the surface: the imagery looks right, and the painting succeeds because of a perfectly rendered surface.

Surface love

Surfaces for painting have fostered in me a love of surfaces in general, grounded in my fascination with change and transformation. Around the house, I can tap into the pleasure of observing a surface change from one state to another. Instances of surface rapture include cutting the grass with a lawnmower and a different shade of green emerging; painting my fingernails with polish; my legs darkening to beige as I pull on a pair of nylon tights; the wipers swinging rhythmically across the windscreen of a car, each sweep momentarily clearing the glass of rain; cherry blossoms in spring coating city sidewalks pink; a cake baking in the oven, the batter solidifying, its surface turning from smooth pale yellow to granular yellow gold.

The flat surface of panel-based paintings has cultivated a particular appreciation for flat surfaces in everyday life. In its immediate, all-over availability, a flat surface seems allied to the present, where I can experience a miraculous escape from the passage of time and a reprieve from loss and uncertainty. 3D surfaces are more troubling. Navigating rounded or angled contours to explore an object in its entirety, I leave one view behind to head for the next, as though slipping into the past or journeying to the future. While certain aspects of a 3D surface are revealed, others become swallowed up, which can stir a sense of unease and feelings of loss, albeit offset by the excitement of discovery. For however much I’m on the side of change and transformation, which moves through time, I’m also drawn to a steady state and its co-relation to the present moment, in which I can feel a heightened, sharpened awareness of simply being alive. This steady state for me is allied to a flat surface.

The 3D surfaces that attract me most are of objects that present a duality through their internal and external configuration such as ceramics and lightbulbs, both of which feature as object categories in my painting repertoire. This may also be because their interplay of two conjoined surfaces mirror those of a painting – the painted crafted front surface of a canvas available to the viewer and the reverse side in all its rawness concealed from sight.

Shoes are among my favourite dual-surfaced objects as a motif for painting (fig.11, Tate T06532). The external surface of a shoe and its inner cavity have many contrasting qualities – shiny/matt, hard/soft, flamboyant/modest – all delectable to depict in paint, and which also speak to the domain of public and private. The inner surface of a beautiful shoe disappears when I slip my foot into it, the space becoming a secret delight, and one that I try to funnel into a painting. A covert pleasure: hidden under the table, slipping off my shoe to run my foot along my husband’s leg while dining in a restaurant, the shoe abandoned, empty like a hollow seashell on the restaurant floor.

Both objects to look at and objects to wear, shoes also embody the interconnected but distinct states of stillness and movement, a duality that speaks fundamentally of painting (fig.12). Painting as a verb is something to do, keying action and performance. As a noun, a painting is something I look at, and signals contemplation. This twinning of stillness and movement is echoed in the very term ‘still life’ (fig.13). With their dual surfaces and dual forms of engagement, shoes for me are a touchstone of painting.

Surface is everything

During my artist residency in Tokyo in the 1990s, the switch from cotton duck to polyester prompted a key insight, that the very start of a painting begins with the surface on which to paint. The choice of a surface for painting and how the paint lands on it evolves out of a poetically geared material response to the idea and feeling generated by a motif that stems from lived experience. The painting is complete when I’ve finished crafting the surface – the surface, the ultimate benchmark (fig.14).