robert dukes at 50

Robert Dukes at 50

Interviewed by

Andrew Lambirth

Framing

AL: Obviously framing is important to you. I thought you made all the frames for your paintings.

RD: I did, partly because most contemporary frames are horrible. Good framers are few and far between and very expensive so I couldn’t afford them. It’s only recently that I’ve managed to find supplies – all over the place – of really beautiful frames.

AL: Do you know a lot about frames?

RD: I’ve studied frames in the National Gallery and I’ve read lots of books. Nick Penny, who’s just left as Director, made a big study of frames. He came in early every morning for a year or two before he started work just to study every single frame in the National Gallery. And then he wrote a little book that we sold in the shop [Dukes worked in the NG shop from 1991 to 2006] and that got me interested in frames.

AL: And you started collecting them?

RD: I never thought I could afford a decent painting to put on the wall but I could afford frames. I found out Bonhams used to sell frames (they don’t any more) and that was my hobby – going to Bonhams three times a year and bidding on frames. They were mainly French – Louis XIII or Louis XVI frames. A lot of the frames I’m using now are from 19th century Germany and Austria and have a simple undecorated moulding.

AL: Do they tend to have colour on them?

38. Lemon, 2015, oil on board, 5 x 6 ½ inches

RD: A lot of them are silver-leafed and oxidized, and they can look incredibly beautiful.

AL: Do you do anything to them?

RD: I chop them down to size sometimes.

AL: So a kind of distressed look is what you’re getting in a way.

RD: Yes, but it’s natural, it’s time distressed. Artificially distressed frames never look right.

AL: So this is a recent development – using old frames on your paintings?

RD: In my last show in 2011 I had three or four pictures framed like that. About 50% of the current show will be in old frames, the rest I’ve made. Sometimes it takes a long time to get it right. There’s a painting here that I made four different frames for myself, all of which looked terrible. Then I found an old frame and made a little slip to go in it and the picture finally looks good, after I spent a long time mixing the colours for the slip.

AL: But don’t you find that clients sometimes reframe your paintings in a way that pleases them, not necessarily you?

RD: My paintings are generally very small so if somebody else framed one of them it might impinge on the rectangle by half an inch and that would wreck the proportion of the picture and the space in it.

Landscape & Photography

AL: Now we’re looking at three different types of landscape. Can you tell me what they are?

RD: This one’s a landscape done in Normandy on a trip to Chateau Balleroy in 2008 with the Royal Drawing School, painted over three or four days looking across the stream at the back of the houses in Balleroy village (cat. no.2). The second one (cat. no.13) was done from a photograph. It’s in Cévennes in southern France looking across a lake at a block of houses. The last one is a transcription of a Balthus painting of the courtyard of the chateau where he lived in the 1950s (cat. no.31).

AL: Is the photographic one done from a single photograph?

RD: Yes. It was very hot weather and we went to this lake to swim almost every afternoon. The houses are a long way away, a quarter of a mile across the lake, and at a certain time of day the way the light hit them looked incredible. I thought it looked like something I’d like to paint but I didn’t have my paints with me. So I tried to draw it and made two or three very quick drawings,

but there was nowhere near enough information in the drawings to make a painting from them. So I thought I’d take photographs just in case, even though I never paint from photographs, and when I got back I made two paintings from the photograph, sitting with my easel in front of my computer. I was very surprised that I got anything out of it.

AL: Isn’t that what people say – how can you have enough information in a photograph to make a painting?

RD: Often the information in the photograph isn’t the information you want. The colours look wrong. Photographs aren’t like your experience of looking at things. I think one reason I could do this was because I was a long way away. Anything nearby in a photograph is incredibly distorted by a single camera lens. If you imagine you were standing at the side of the lake looking at this view, what’s in the painting would be one tiny part of your actual visual field.

AL: Surely the painting was informed by the experience of being there and swimming in the lake. You probably wouldn’t have been able to do it if someone had given you a photograph.

RD: That is exactly it. It was memory and the excitement of looking at it, of actually being there. Trying to memorize that, even though the photograph was hugely important.

AL: Did you use the drawings?

RD: Barely, but the drawing was important to get an idea of what the painting would be about.

AL: Tell me about the one you did from life, which curiously looks more abstract and a bit flatter.

RD: To get these dynamic gable shapes that bind the picture together across the rectangle, I was just trying to mix the right colours to stand for the forms. There would be no point in trying to fill in the gaps, it would be impossible to make up a colour to do that. It’s a painting and it has to run by its own rules.

2. Balleroy Village, 2008, oil on board, 17 ½ x 23 ½ inches 13. Across the Lake, Cévennes, 2013, oil on board, 18 x 22 inches

AL: Have you done any more paintings in front of the landscape recently?

RD: I did some very quick pictures in Devon which makes me want to do more landscape painting.

AL: Let’s talk about the Balthus. Why did you pick that painting?

RD: Because it’s beautiful. I’ve done lots of Balthus transcriptions in the last ten years but I wanted to do something a bit bigger and more ambitious. (I’ve done lots of heads from the early Balthus portraits of Thérèse, the young girl that was the daughter of his concierge when he lived in Paris in the 1930s.) Anyway, this painting is from his chateau and I’ve edited out the tree and the farmer who appeared in Balthus’ version. So it’s not a direct transcription, and in doing that you realise how important those elements are in the original. I just wanted to paint it like a stage set. And this is why in a nutshell I wanted to paint it and paint more landscapes. I paint still-lives normally and they’re lumps. They’re usually one or two lumps, like one or two apples, in a bare space. Landscape is the opposite of that. This was like trying to paint a stage set or a big space that goes right to the edge of the canvas, rather than paint a single object in the middle of a space.

In any painting, even if it’s a single object painting, the whole surface has to be animated and that’s one of the reasons it’s hard to do single object paintings because they can just dominate the whole space and not work as a flat shape. But in a landscape the whole rectangle is animated right from the start.

AL: But certain shapes in your Balthus transcription are nevertheless leaping out at me: those two wedges and the pale quadrilateral field at the top. Is that true to the original?

RD: The two triangles at the bottom are sunlight coming through and they are very prominent in the picture. The field in Balthus’ painting is obfuscated by the tree, and so it’s not so prominent. One reason for copying anybody, and especially someone as good as Balthus, is that you become

13. Across the Lake, Cévennes, 2013, oil on board, 18 x 22 inches

31. After Balthus, A Courtyard, 2015, oil on board, 14 ¼ x 17 ¾ inches

more and more in awe of how good they are. Everything in the original links up – it’s terrifying. What’s so amazing is that it seems like a game of analogy and rapport of forms and yet it seems very true to what it actually looks like.

AL: Do you learn different things from painting the landscape in these different ways?

RD: One thing I learnt about doing the lake at Cévennes: as long as my computer doesn’t die, or as long as I have that jpeg, in theory I could go on with that painting forever, or as long as I live. That’s bad, because there’s no urgency at all. It made me think of something I’d never thought before. I used to think that Luc Tuymans’ idea of just doing one picture a day was a sort of arbitrary, rather pretentious thing, but actually if you’re painting from photographs and you don’t impose some kind of time-scale on yourself, you can be in real trouble. And maybe that’s one reason why Tuymans’ pictures are good – because he knows he has to do them in a day.

AL: Of the three different kinds of landscape, would you say that painting one kind was more satisfying than the others?

RD: I would much rather paint from observation – that’s by far the most exciting. I like making transcriptions of things very much, but if I had to choose between the two, I’d always be painting from observation. Painting from a photograph was a novelty but it’s not something I’d want to do a lot of. There’s only one other painting in the show done from a photograph – the rhinoceros. It’s painted over a picture I’d done of a rhinoceros from Stubbs (which was in my last show), which I decided wasn’t good enough.

Still Life, Measuring and Electric Light

AL: Is that one of the reasons you’re drawn to still life, because of the state of emergency: the fruit is going to rot or the langoustine to stink?

RD: Not so much. Normally they last long enough to be painted, even though I take a long time. (Bananas don’t last.) No, it’s more to do with the fact that you couldn’t mistake an apple for a quince, and yet each one is unique. And that they’re beautiful things to look at. It seems like the colour goes right through them, they give off so much colour sense. A lemon especially.

AL: Tell me about this idea of painting forms from the middle out.

RD: There was a thing I picked up on even at Grimsby, which came from Camberwell, which was not to try and draw a contour or an outline and then fill it in, but try to paint across a form. Gowing talked about that when I first went to the Slade. I want my paintings to have more and more plastic force, to be more realized, to be more there. I paint from the middle out because I don’t want to rely on an outline to define the form. Somehow the colour mixtures define where the edge is rather than monocular measurement.

It’s not as if I’m copying reality: the colours relate to the colours I’m seeing. There may be seven mixtures of colour across a quince in a painting. Obviously the gradation of tone across an actual quince in natural light is infinite, so you’re making equivalents. And you’re also trying to make something that will work as a flat shape. Ideally every single mark will have its own autonomy, have decorative quality, design quality as well as standing for volume or form. Sometimes you make a colour mixture and it feels completely like guesswork, yet it lands on the surface of the picture and it almost goes by itself, and that can somehow define the scale of the form...

Painting from the middle out, and not being in such a hurry to try and find the edges may seem to run counter to the idea of measurement. If you were measuring such a subject as two quinces, one of the first things you would measure would be where the furthest right-hand side is and how high is this quince to that quince, in other words the edges. In practice you utilize both methods, and you measure back into it. When you’re painting from the middle you often feel as though you’re modelling the forms and when you measure you feel like you’re carving back into the forms.

AL: Are you measuring less nowadays than you would have done once?

RD: Yes. Generally speaking, much less, but there are pictures when I still measure a lot. I liked what Patrick George said: he felt the measuring was becoming about measuring and not about what you were seeing. It can become like that. But I still use it, because I get stuck.

AL: And it’s a way out?

RD: Hopefully. Or it might be a way of completely re-configuring the whole picture.

26. Conker I, 2014, oil on board, 6 x 6 inches

AL: You always used to paint in electric light, and now you’re working more in natural light. Why?

RD: I painted in electric light from about 2000, when I started painting again after a hiatus. I was working full-time in the National Gallery shop, so if I had a day off to paint I wanted eight or ten hours to work. If it was winter or a dark day I might only get three or four hours of daylight. So I started painting by electric light because it was consistent. And that was one reason why I started painting still lifes a lot – because they were always there. And then I got used to it. People can be very odd about electric light and imply that it’s lesser in some way, but I don’t think it is. Of course there is more variety in natural light, which is more beautiful, but I don’t think people can even necessarily tell which of my pictures were done in natural or electric light. People think electric light pictures are going to be yellow!

Anyway, recently, just for a change, I’ve tried natural light. Maybe I just got tired of the same shadows off the same forms of fruit. It felt very strange – probably like painting in electric light feels to other painters. The colours looked really ugly on my palette, but now I’ve been painting more in natural light than electric light for about a year, the colours look normal. In the end, the transition between the two is very strange: it just depends what you’re used to.

AL: So one is not better than another?

RD: Ideally you would have a beautiful big naturally lit north-facing studio somewhere quiet (not on a council estate, like mine), but you make do with what you have. The main thing is that you make sure you paint, and don’t have excuses like “Oh the light’s gone”. It’s very hard, especially in London, to get anything done. You could always fill your day with answering emails and preparation for lectures and saying you didn’t have time to paint. You have to force time to paint and you have to be selfish.

AL: Why do you think that still life painting is currently unfashionable? You don’t see a lot of it about, by contemporary artists, do you?

RD: No, you don’t.

AL: Has it always been unfashionable?

RD: It used to be that in the hierarchy of art it was low down monetarily-wise, so you’d think that the lesser painters would do it. But a good example is Melendez, who wanted to be a fashionable royalty portrait painter, but both he and his dad fell out with the court, so he ended up an impoverished still life painter. You wouldn’t know that looking at his pictures – they’re amazing. Why is it unfashionable now? I think it’s a broader question of why serious painting from observation is unfashionable. It’s not seen as cool or ironical or knowing enough, it’s just what it is. But that’s the reason I do it. I’m painting about painting really, not making an ironical distanced statement. I want to be in the painting, I want the marks to be the thing that I’m painting, which is the opposite of the current trend in painting.

Drawing

AL: So what is a typical day?

RD: I get up about a quarter to eight and I draw from 9 o’clock to just after 10 o’clock, and if I don’t draw for at least an hour before I paint, I can’t do it. It’s like getting my eye in or doing scales. The first half-an-hour is absolute torture. It’s like anybody could draw better than that. It all goes in the bin. And maybe one morning out of 20, at the end of the session something comes out that is worth keeping.

The drawings are rarely related to what I’m painting that day, they’re usually copies from reproductions in books. Then I start painting just after 10 and try to keep going till 6 o’clock. I do very similar hours when I paint to the hours I worked in the National Gallery – in other words, office hours. I think it’s best to try and find a consistency, just as it’s important to have consistent sleep patterns. So it becomes natural – this is what you do.

When I was at Grimsby people would be very romantic and say ‘Ah, I stayed up all night painting, it was amazing’. That’s the sort of thing you do when you’re young, but unless you’re working long hours all the time, it doesn’t necessarily help.

57. Heads after Degas, Ingres etc, 2013, pencil on paper, 8 x 11 inches

AL: How important is drawing? Is it still central to what you do?

RD: It’s enormously important. I do think there are a lot of people who are serious figurative painters, who paint from observation, who don’t draw very much – and you can tell in the work. If I don’t draw a lot, the paintings don’t have what Robert Motherwell called ‘a precision of feeling’. When you’re painting, you have to feel where all these marks are going to land, and if you haven’t got your hand and eye co-ordination in from drawing, it’s going to look flabby.

AL: Can you believe you’re 50?

RD: No, I can’t, I still feel like a student in a lot of ways. That’s partly because I stopped painting for a long time after I left the Slade. I don’t know what it means now to be 50 – except that you are definitely past the half-way mark. The only thing that hinders me is the fact that your eyesight gets worse as you get older and that makes a really hard activity even more excruciatingly hard.

Training

AL: You were taught at the Slade by Euan Uglow, Patrick George and Lawrence Gowing. Were you ever taught by Jeffery Camp?

RD: Yes. Jeffery used to run a room at the Slade in the 1980s given over to drawing from the nude. I often found myself there. Jeffery was very funny: a benign, teasing presence.

AL: Do you agree with Auerbach that painting can’t really be taught? He said ‘all you can do is get people to where they jump in and swim’.

RD: Yes, but you can teach them certain things. I’ve been recently teaching painting for the Royal Drawing School, and there are aspects of it you can teach. What tone is, for instance. The worst question students ask – and they ask it all the time – is ‘how do I make a flesh tone?’ As though they only need one mixture to cover the face! They don’t understand it’s to do with all the other colours around it and the light conditions. That’s so fundamental. Tone is the hardest thing to teach, more than drawing or colour sense. You can also teach how to mix colours and keep a palette clean.

AL: Who do you think you got most from at College? Uglow or George or Gowing?

RD: No, it was definitely at Grimsby, not London, and it was Nev Tipper. And Jeff Clarkson who taught in the print room at Grimsby. In printmaking you’re always waiting for something to dry, there’s more craft and more time to talk. There were loads of books to look at, like this one on Giacometti’s drawings that it’s taken me 30 years to find again. Nev Tipper was the

one who encouraged me but didn’t push me. I went to art school at 16 thinking I wanted to do photographic illustrations of motorbikes, and it took me a year and a half to understand the point of painting. When I said I wanted to stop doing graphics and be a painter he said ‘I’m really glad you think that because I think that.’ But he never pushed me, and that’s important. It has to be your decision.

AL: You’re often referred to as a pupil of Uglow. Is that inaccurate?

RD: It’s not that inaccurate. It is a bit insensitive but the people who say such things are looking at the pictures, and some of the set-ups of the fruit and the compositions do look like little Uglow still lifes. But of course the facture and the sense of light and the drawing are nothing like his. However, people who don’t know Euan Uglow’s work see my still lifes and go ‘Oh, Morandi!’, as if I’m ripping off Morandi. That says it all. English people need to pigeonhole.

AL: Do you feel closer to anyone else? To Patrick George, for instance?

RD: More than Uglow I feel closer to William Coldstream. I think Uglow is trying to paint more about certainty, and Coldstream about doubt. And I do feel closer to Patrick George. David Shutt once said a fantastic thing when he did a slide show of Patrick’s pictures a long time ago. I said to him afterwards: ‘They’re not like Euan at all’. He said: ‘No – because of the sense of light.’

41. Apple, Knife, Plumbline, 2015, oil on board, 6 x 6 ½ inches

AL: I always wondered whether there was anything Gowing gave you particularly.

RD: Gowing seemed like the first great man that I ever met. He was fascinated by why so many Grimsby students got into London colleges, so he came to Grimsby in the 1980s when he was very interested in promoting figurative art and making sure it didn’t collapse as an activity. He gave a lecture on Cézanne’s self-portraits and he gave about six of us a quick crit on some of our paintings. So I met him very early on and when I went to my interview at the Slade he remembered me, and I remember talking to him when he retired from the Slade, after I’d been there two years. I liked him very much and I thought he was an amazing man, perhaps better as a writer on art than a painter. He’s one of the best writers on Cézanne, for instance.

AL: If people think of you in the light of Uglow, they don’t necessarily connect you with Frank Auerbach, and yet Auerbach has been important too.

RD: That’s one reason perhaps why I didn’t get on so well at the Slade, because when I went there, Auerbach was my absolute hero, my favourite contemporary painter by a very long way. I didn’t really understand Uglow’s work, I hadn’t seen any – apart from in reproduction – and I’d read Catherine Lampert’s interview with Auerbach [published in 1978 in the catalogue for Auerbach’s Hayward Gallery exhibition] and just absorbed the whole thing. And it still means a great deal to me, that interview. Although people say my pictures look like Uglow, my process is still like Auerbach – build it up, smash it, build it up, smash it.

AL: Do you repaint the entire thing?

RD: Pretty much.

AL: So they don’t accrue gradually?

RD: They accrue in that I don’t scrape them right back to the surface of the board, but most of the paint that you see in these pictures is done on that last day’s painting. And that is very different from the way Uglow painted. When I was 19, I took that Auerbach approach as the way you did it. At Grimsby we were painting one or two paintings a day. When I went to the Slade, they were painting one painting in ten weeks. I couldn’t do it and I didn’t want to do it. I thought it was ridiculous.

When I started painting again, round about 2000, I felt I didn’t have control over what I was doing, so I was painting with more limited means. I would paint monochromatic objects with a very limited palette, and it was only very gradually that I started painting coloured objects like fruit. All these coloured objects, until very recently, would be single colour objects: a lemon, or a green quince, or a banana. In other words, they were not multicoloured. It’s only in the last twelve months that I’ve been painting these apples which are all sorts of colours. And that’s a very big deal for me, because the colour doesn’t follow the form. That might sound like a small thing, but it’s a huge thing when something has a pattern on it that’s not a regulated pattern

(like a grid) and the colour can confuse the eye. Is that a change of tone or is it a change of patterning? Again, all these apples are unique, so they don’t have a set way of having colouring. They might have a sudden leap from red to orange, or they might have a gradation.

All sorts of people like Freud and Auerbach have things written on the walls of their studios to remind them or egg them on. George Rowlett has “WORTHY IS NOT GOOD ENOUGH” written on his studio wall. All I’ve got in big horrible letters is: ‘MIX THE COLOUR”. It’s what I teach my students at the Royal Drawing School. If you don’t get the right colour mixture, even if you draw as well as Leonardo da Vinci, it will not sit. But I’m a bit like that myself: I try and force it, or make it work with drawing. But if I get a colour and really believe in it, it sort of falls off the brush and lands in the right place. And if it’s the wrong colour it’s like magnets opposing each other: it tries not to sit on the canvas.

AL: This is a quote from Auerbach: ‘I’ve hardly ever drawn from a modern picture, I know how it’s made. When it is one by an Old Master I know they’re marvellous but I can’t see what is the secret that makes them so.’ That seems to be quite a good reason for making a transcription or a copy, but then he goes on about making drawings from the Old Masters and then drawing from his own drawings – as if they’d been made by these Old Masters. I don’t quite follow that.

RD: It’s to prove to himself and try to understand what it is he’s digested from the original Old Master. He’s no longer got the original in front of him so he can’t follow the superficial marks or lines or colours in it so he’s just got what he transcribed from it. It’s a good way of finding out whether there’s anything in your drawing. You could make a drawing that looks pretty or impressive to certain people, but there may be no real form in it, so if you draw from your own drawings you’ll soon find out how little is in them. What did I actually get?

Books & Transcriptions

AL: I know you like buying catalogues raisonnés and when I asked you once which artists you’d bought them on, some were more expected than others. I remember you saying you’d bought the catalogue raisonné of Miró prints, and I’m not sure that would be a subject people would automatically connect with you.

RD: No.

AL: So why do you like Miró?

RD: They seem alive and unpredictable and expressive and full of emotion and enormously varied and exciting. There are lots of artists I like. If you say – in a simplistic sense – that I paint in a way which is descended from the Euston Road tradition, and that I should only like a certain type of painting, then I think that’s very sad. Nearly all the painters I know that paint figuratively have a huge range of painters they admire. So I like Miró, I like Dubuffet and de Staël and all sorts of painters that have got nothing to do with that tradition or approach to painting.

AL: But would you ever make a transcription of a Miró?

RD: No.

AL: Why?

RD: With the Miró, it’s like everything is all out on the surface. That is the statement. Every mark, every shape is the statement. You would just be copying the marks, not what the marks said or the way the marks work on your nervous system. I copy a lot of Balthus, and he is a 20th century painter, but I don’t think of him like that. He’s like Piero della Francesca or Courbet. So there’s a kind of structure to it that isn’t to do with the superficial paint marks. That’s why Euan said he wouldn’t copy Cézanne – there’s nothing much to be gained from it. Obviously Cézanne’s a one-off and he’s my favourite painter, but I wouldn’t copy one of his paintings. There’s something about good 20th century painting: the emotion is so within the forms that you would just copy the marks and not the effect that those marks have on you.

AL: You wouldn’t copy de Staël then.

RD: No.

AL: I loved that John Berger article you sent me about de Staël being a classical painter. I can imagine a lot of people thinking him much more of a romantic.

RD: You can be both. I found out very early on at the Slade that everyone has their own Cézanne, because he’s so multi-faceted that if you’re a Romantic painter you see the Romantic in him. Cézanne is classical and baroque and Modernist and reactionary all at the same time. And de Staël is too even though the painting might be made of three marks.

AL: How important are art books for you? Obviously they’re a prime source of reference.

RD: I have an inordinate amount of art books, the flat is full of them, but I never regretted buying an art book ever, even when I was very poor. That goes back to Grimsby School of Art, when there was an hour and a half lunch break between models. There’s nothing to do in Grimsby on your lunch hour, but the art school had a fantastic library. And very early on when I wanted to become a painter I became interested in the history of art, so I saw amazing works of art in reproduction and amazing books like Private View [text by Bryan Robertson & John Russell, photos by Lord Snowdon, a survey of the London art world in 1965] – that never went away. I get a huge amount out of books and I draw from the reproductions.

AL: Have your tastes changed?

RD: My tastes didn’t change much until I started painting a lot more ‘round about 2003. Then I noticed that they changed a lot quicker the more I painted – liking different painters I didn’t like before. I’m sure there’s a connection. The biggest one by a long mark, that I didn’t even like very

much, was Georges Braque. I thought he was weak, that the shapes were flabby, that he was a poor version of Picasso. I didn’t get it at all, and now he’s one of my absolute favourite painters. I saw a big Braque exhibition in Paris last October, and it was one of the best exhibitions I’ve ever seen. Mind-blowing.

AL: You did several paintings after Braque in your first show at Browse & Darby in 2005. Do you still do that?

RD: There’s one in this show.

AL: When you do something like that is it because you think it’s a beautiful painting or because you want to learn from it? What’s the primary impulse?

RD: Probably very similar to painting something that you find exciting to look at. Copying a Braque is an excuse to have the luxury of staring at this thing that you really love for a long time. That painting probably went on for weeks or months, I couldn’t just sit and stare at a reproduction for months – I couldn’t give up the time. Also the compositions in Braque are far more complicated than mine, so I tend to think of it maybe as a dress-rehearsal for painting a more complicated still life that I might set up myself.

AL: Do you find you have favourite artists that come and go or are they always with you?

RD: I go through big swings of one artist. I’ve had long periods when I’ve been absolutely obsessed with Matisse and hardly been able to look at anyone else; and de Staël. And when I’m like that, that’s when I tend to buy 10 books on that artist in a short period of time. That’s why I buy catalogues raisonnés if I can afford them because I want to see every picture that artist did, and see the development through the periods of their life. Not just one picture every 10 years – you want to see all of it. Cézanne is my favourite painter and I’ve always loved his work and that hasn’t changed at all, I just like him more and more. Now I have more than a hundred books on him, and about three more in the post.

19. After Braque, Still-life, 2014, oil on board, 5 x 8 inches

AL: So someone like Rembrandt isn’t as important?

RD: Oh, he’s an absolutely incredible artist and I’ve got a Rembrandt copy in this exhibition that I spent a lot of time on, of Susannah and the Elders (cat. No.25). He’s one of the inarguable greats – I don’t know an artist who doesn’t like Rembrandt. But it depends what you’re painting about. If you’re copying Braque it might be about colour and analogy of forms, but in Rembrandt it probably wouldn’t be about colour.

AL: What about Degas? Does he rate as highly as Cézanne?

RD: No. Degas was my first favourite painter, if that makes sense, when I was at Grimsby, and I tried to draw like him, for a short period. He’s still one of my favourite artists, but Cézanne is far more profound.

AL: It’s quite interesting to see Joan Eardley cropping up in your transcriptions.

RD: She’s a terribly underrated painter, except in Scotland, but even in Scotland I don’t understand why her pictures don’t sell for more compared to the so-called Scottish Colourists, who I find terrible. They’re not actually colourists, they’re just using really bright colours! That’s not the same thing as a colourist. Their drawing, their colour sense, their invention is pitiful compared to Joan Eardley. She’s probably the best Scottish painter after Ramsay. Her work is full of sentiment but it’s not sentimental. She’s a very great artist, and to have died so young while at full power is tragic. But she left an incredible body of work. Her draughtsmanship is incredible. I can’t rate her highly enough.

AL: Tell me about this picture here.

RD: That’s Iris Tree, taken from a detail of a portrait by Roger Fry (cat. No.33). It’s the first time I’ve copied a Roger Fry. Roger Fry copied Cézanne – there’s one in the Courtauld. I think this is probably his best painting, though some of his landscapes are also good. Besides being a great writer, he really could paint occasionally.

33. After Roger Fry, Iris Tree, 2015, oil on board, 4 ¾ x 6 inches

AL: You made a drawing after Sickert’s Ennui. Why did you decide to do that?

RD: I don’t know, I do hundreds of drawings. It’s probably the best drawing in the show.

AL: What does it teach you about the Sickert?

RD: It makes you respect it more and appreciate how it locks together as one shape, as a machine. You get involved with it formally: the quasi-abstract portrait on the wall behind them, the directions the heads are facing – you see analogies of form. How the intervals of space work, and how powerful it is as a composition.

AL: I know that some people think that if an artist makes a copy of another artist’s painting, in some way it’s not an original work of art – it’s almost cheating. How would you respond to that?

RD: In some ways they may be right. It’s very hard to compose a painting from scratch, but even when I’m painting a still-life from observation I’m not copying it, I’m making equivalents in paint for what I’m seeing. As Coldstream said, even the most realistic painting looks nothing like reality. In the same way, when you copy a painting, you are – to a lesser or greater degree – transcribing what you’re seeing, you’re not trying to copy it so that someone will be gulled into thinking it actually is a Braque. That would be a pathetic thing to do. Just as pathetic as those poor souls who try to paint photographic realist pictures that get into the National Portrait competition every year. It must be a living death to paint those pictures. You can’t tell anything about the person who painted them; all you can say is that they’ll probably last longer than a photographic print. They don’t have any analogy of form or structure or design or decoration or human content.

50. After Sickert, Ennui, 2012, pencil on paper, 11 x 8 inches

Subjects & Inspirations

AL: Do you have trouble finding subject matter, or are there stacks of subjects you want to paint?

RD: I often think I want to paint more complex still lifes and landscapes. I don’t paint landscapes because I’m in Hackney and I can’t bear to have people watching me paint, or throw stones or shout at me, which they do if you go drawing in the park here. It’s like that thing Rilke said that we never come to anything from scratch, we’re always in the middle of loads of stuff, so we never come to anything afresh. So for me for some reason it’s very hard to just set up a big still life. I tend to go with what I’m already doing, so it seems a tortuously slow process. But I plan to paint bigger and more challenging still lifes.

AL: What about narrative paintings?

RD: No, I couldn’t imagine doing that.

AL: And yet you’ll do a transcription of a narrative painting, like Susannah and the Elders.

RD: Yes but I don’t have the means to invent something like that from scratch.

AL: Are there any abstract artists you admire?

RD: The quick answer is that all artists are abstract. You mean non-figurative. I was thinking about that earlier. I think Pollock is an amazing artist. I really admire Robert Motherwell. I think if Robert Motherwell had been a drug addict who murdered his wife (and thank God he didn’t because she was a really good painter too [Helen Frankenthaler]), he would be more famous. He was too middle class. But he is a really exciting painter. I love Robert Motherwell’s work – all of it. But having said that I’m not sure I love it as much as I love Braque, who has the same decorative quality but is so much more profound because he ties that decorative effect to the real world.

AL: But can’t you have the same emotional content in an abstract painting?

RD: You can, but it may be that just as a lot of the best figurative work is in the past, I think a lot of the best abstract art is in the past. A lot of the best abstract artists did paint figuratively first, they were steeped in the great traditions of art and also they read a lot of great literature. They didn’t mess around on mobile phones or the internet, so their brains worked in different ways – which is a really serious point at the moment. The speed and changeability of contemporary life is the absolute enemy of really good painting, doing it as well as looking at it. So I don’t know if any more great abstract art will be made, in the same way as I don’t know whether any more great figurative art will be made.

AL: When you’re doing a painting from observation, it’s not just about the visual facts, is it?

RD: No. But the emotional thing is either there or it isn’t. You can’t turn on emotion, you can’t generate it, and you can’t fake it.

AL: When you do more than one painting of the same, or a similar, subject, is that essentially a variation, as in a series, or is each one independent and self-contained?

RD: No, they’re not part of a series. I never work in series. One of my pet hates at the moment is the expression ‘body of work’, which a lot of my students have been taught to say. It makes me want to cry. They’ve been taught that they must produce a ‘body of work’. Just produce one realised image and if you somehow manage that, then start another picture.

AL: Is there anywhere special you’d like to go to work?

RD: To paint landscapes would be a reason to go somewhere else. Anywhere in France, for instance. But the only difficulty, as I found in Devon a couple of weeks ago, is that it takes a really long time to get anything done. So it wouldn’t really make sense to go on a one or two week holiday, I’d have to go for six months. I’d very much like to do that.

AL: I notice there are some paintings in your show of your dachshund.

RD: Yes – Miss Marple.

AL: You will, of course, be confronted by people reminding you that David Hockney painted his dachshunds, Stanley and Boodgie, and no doubt suggesting that you’re just copying him.

RD: My girlfriend Sam wanted us to get a dog together, and I said yes partly on condition that we bought a dachshund, and it wasn’t because of Hockney it was because of Bonnard. Bonnard had a succession of Dachshunds. He had six in a row and they were all called Poucette. I think they’re a very beautiful dog and she is the joy of our lives, she’s two now. She’s incredibly hard to draw and paint because of her long shape, I suppose.

20. Marple asleep, 2014, oil on board, 5 x 7 inches

AL: But had you drawn a lot of dogs before her?

RD: Weirdly I had. I used to draw my Dad’s Springer spaniel in the evening, and it seemed relatively easy to draw. Yet Miss Marple is very hard to draw. She’s also hard to paint because she’s very dark haired and shiny. She knows that when I’m in the studio she won’t get any attention, so she curls up on a cushion. Often she looks nicer than what I’m painting, so I shift the easel around and paint her.

AL: Why do you paint on board, not on canvas?

RD: That’s what we did at Grimsby, and also because you can cut it down if you want to change the format of the picture. You can chop it with a Stanley knife very easily. Partly because it doesn’t cost anything, and partly as a reaction to the pretentiousness of people who harp on about cotton duck, three layers of rabbit skin glue and ten layers of gesso.

AL: But what about the fact that canvas gives when you paint on it?

RD: I don’t like that. I don’t like the way canvas moves, I don’t like the texture of it.

AL: Do you have ambitions to paint other subjects? Portraits, for example?

RD: The pictures that I’ve bought that I really like are landscapes and portraits by Patrick George and Euan Uglow. It’s not just that they’re much better painters than me, it’s that I don’t paint landscapes very often and I hardly ever paint portraits. I would like to paint more landscapes and I would like to paint heads. But I’m very neurotic and nervous and that’s why I started to do still lifes, because I didn’t have to wait for someone to turn up to sit.

AL: Do you ever abandon a painting or destroy it, or do you always keep re-working?

RD: I abandon things all the time, I destroy things all the time. What I usually do is paint over the top of a failed painting. So I use the board again and erase the monstrosity, and sometimes it’s quite nice to have the image to work against.

AL: Can you see what was there?

RD: You can to begin with, and it encourages you to make very bold marks to eradicate, and you have to make better marks than what’s underneath. So what’s underneath doesn’t win.

AL: So the painting changes a lot in its genesis?

RD: Enormously. It changes daily, normally. And I change the set-up all the time if it’s not working. I think, for instance, maybe it would work better if I put a gap between those two fruit. And just to have that completely different set of shapes can free you up to look at it afresh, because you can get bogged down very easily.

AL: Do you think as an artist you’re quite selective in what you see? That you can’t afford to let too much in, as it were?

RD: Absolutely. I do feel limited as a painter and I would like to paint something bigger and much more complex. I remember you interviewed Keith Coventry and he said something about having a kind of limited ambition because at least he could achieve that. I totally agree.

AL: Who do you want to reach, as an ideal audience?

RD: Renoir said that on a desert island, nobody is going to paint, meaning that you’re doing it for other people. However I don’t think about a literal audience, and I don’t think about who’s going to like or not like this, but I would like to paint something that lasts.

Most people just glance at pictures and don’t even begin to comprehend how much work went into them or how complex they are as machines. Because they’re not time-based like music or a novel, they only glance at them. They should look longer.

This interview was recorded at the artist’s studio in Hackney

on 2nd September 2015, and subsequently edited.

Browse & Darby19 Cork Street London W1S 3LP