Eclectic Avenue

Gardens with Green Garden Sculpture 1966–9 might be my favourite artwork by Colin Self. I’d never seen this drawing in real life until I walked around the current retrospective at Norwich Castle. It’s smaller than I had imagined, and so mysterious. When I look at it, I see a Japanese Zen garden and a 1970s sci-fi paperback cover. Then there’s the looming modernist architecture, which looks a bit like Preston Bus Station. This picture looks like a gaming board, and like a Nazi death machine. It’s just full of information.

Colin made a series of garden drawings from 1966 to 1973. Part-real and part-imaginary, they were inspired by visits to Waterloo Park in Norwich, where he has lived for over 50 years. Improb- ably, the ‘sculpture’ in the foreground of this picture is an extrapolation of the shape of a green glass ashtray he found in the garden of the house he moved into in March 1969.

I often see works like this by Colin: they feel like one-offs, but would have formed the basis of another artist’s entire career. He is a very inconsistent artist, but richer for it in a strange kind of way. The only gallerist that has ever represented him, Robert Fraser in the mid-1960s, told him that he shouldn’t be represented by anybody – that artists don’t need galleries; galleries need artists. This became a life-long mantra of sorts, setting Colin off down the road of being an independent artist.

Colin’s work ranges from early mutant-pop assemblages that tapped Cold War-era nuclear anxiety – such as Leopardskin Nuclear Bomber No. 2 1963, made exquisitely from trash, and which I thought was very cool on a GCSE art trip to Tate Britain – to his later neo-symbolist paintings, hazy and sublime landscape watercolours, and unclassifiable sculpture, collage and frottage. This disparate output is always linked by a deep and obsessive dedication to drawing. He is a very talented draughtsperson, sketching on receipts or hotel paper – whatever he has lying around. Collected in scrapbooks at his home, these drawings could be thought of as the diary in the background, tying his work together.

Colin has never owned or used a mobile phone or computer. While he has grappled with complex technologies throughout his career, these have always been anachronistic – from his singular printmaking in the 1960s and 1970s to his brief experi- ments with pottery, which can be extremely analogue and manual, even down to the way a kiln is loaded and fired. Perhaps this has all been a continuation of the techno- agnostic attitude that began with his per- ception of the animalistic nature of the post-war technological arms race.

I recently spent some time looking through decades’ worth of his scrapbooks ahead of his planned residency at my ceramic studio, Troy Town, this summer. Among drawings made in a similar style to his garden drawings were sketches for various unrealised ceramic sculptures, such as volcano bowls or a frog in a bowl. I’m looking forward to spending more time with him. I think we might end up making something really weird together.

^{Gardens with Green Garden Sculpture was presented by the artist in 1979 and is on loan to One Self: The Creative Life of Colin Self, Norwich Castle Museum and Art Gallery, until 21 September.}

^{Aaron Angell is an artist who lives in London. Colin Self will be in residence at Troy Town this summer.}